How wonderfully true! So get a wife, make some friends, save up for a house of your own and quit whining and trying to turn our country into a socio-feminist nanny-state like Canada.
Well, at least you're willing to how central nepotism has become to America. I mean, we could just say to all the people on the Soviet Gulag "So join the Party, kiss up to Politiburo members, and quit whining about democracy and freedom!"
Talking about "socio-feminist Canada" makes it clear to everyone around you that you have got some serious sexuality issues manifesting as mysogyny. Every political issue can only be viewed in terms of threats to your masculinity. Should've just come out of whatever closet you're hiding in and accepted who you really were instead.
I would like to apologize to the person I was posting to earlier, since you are way crazier than he was.
Look, dude, there are more than two options in this world than just Statist Communism and Crony Capitalism. This comes to mind. I oppose all parts of the Unholy Trinity equally--Big Government, Big Business, Big Labor. I want to reign in capitalism of large corporations and ultra-rich billionaires because I support the ancient, forgotten dream of capitalism for individuals.
I'm not saying we need to eliminate Capitalism, just that our present form of Capitalism is full of government interventions that benefit the rich and hurt the lower classes. For example, extremely regressive social security taxes are used to offset shortfalls in more progressive income taxes.
If I recall correctly, there hasn't been any companies of even remotely Microsoft's scope started in Europe in the past several decades, or if not, very few.
America used to be a place that prided itself on it's small businesses, on the independence of it's craftsmen. It's interesting to see how far some of my more insane countrymen have come around to the very opposite of Jefferson's point of view, rejoicing in the fact that we need a vast monopolistic corporate oligarchy to get anything done in this country. So Europe doesn't have keiretsu--they still manage to make better cell phones and cars than America.
In addition, the progressive (to the point of confiscatory) taxes you'll find all over Europe have made things more equal, but their equality is below our median & mean income and lifestyle levels.
Measured in terms of per capita GDP, that may be technically true (though difficult to verify, because every country has different econometic standards--like how they measure unemployment or the cost of a market basket...) But a European or Canadian is still guaranteed health care, and I suspect most of the poor would trade away their allegedly higher income if they could get that.
There's only so much taxation & wealth redistribution an economic system can bear before it stops growing, and perhaps even starts to collapse.
As Keynes showed us, in some situations an economy can collapse because it doesn't have ENOUGH wealth redistribution and government spending. A good example might be our current economic policy--a roaring stock market in the late nineties produced a vast amount of industrial capacity, but there was a shortage of demand to consume that capacity. Bush cut capital gains to encourage building MORE capacity, no surprise, no additional capacity has been built. Only now, after so many years of budget deficits and extremely loose monetary policy is the economy starting to trickle back to life--but that might all be for naught if the price of oil doesn't skyrocket (funny how all the dollars we sent Asia's way for the past few years are trickling into Saudia Arabia's hands rather than back into ours.)
People like the parent poster want to pull us ever closer to that perilous edge, and I feel they need to be fought.
People are usually only anxious for a fight when they feel they have nothing to lose. Is your heart really as content with crony capitalism as your words are? It is our current course that will veer off a perilous edge--an America that has no opportunity for Americans, a World that has no opportunity for Laborers. I used to be a rabid capitalist, but I saw the handwriting on the wall--that most of the people I knew and cared about would eventually be completely unneeded by the small clique of people who currently own this country and it's economy--and neither of us are in that clique.
Do you really think you can keep everyone believing that lie until the election? That's hardly the only headline like that, and the Kerry campaign has to comeup with some awfully convaluted metrics to portray otherwise.
That article admits that payroll figures have still fallen--and that fact is surely in far more headlines than your lies. Fewer people are working (payroll), more people have been born. No one disputes these two facts. Is that too convoluted for you? That an apparently illiterate fellow like you is apparently making such great money is a sign that something is amiss. So there is a shortage of one particular category of worker in the labor force--workers who have already been trained in the specific machinery mentioned in your article. Not a big deal--and indeed, why should workers retrain to operate it, when if past history is any guide their jobs will be sent overseas as soon as they graduate from their technical school?
And how will it help a damn thing to redistribute income in this country, at least anymore than it already has? I don't know about other people, but I work hard so I'm rewarded.
Umm...if you don't know about other people, let me fill you in. Other people have spent a whole lot of money on their own education, only to be earning nearly nothing as their jobs were shipped overseas. Other people have been working damn hard their entire lives only to die with nothing. (You were asking where Bill Gates's and your money came from? That's where the fuck you stole it from, you fucking leech.). Other people are either working three jobs without health insurance or lost their job because the company moved to Canada where businesses don't have to pay for their worker's health insurance.
If I don't get the fruits of my labor, why should I work hard at all? If the government took more and more of my money as my paycheck increased, that would greatly lessen my motivation to increase it. Work twice as hard for only 1/4 more pay after your wealth redistribution scheme takes the rest?
Why not? Plenty of people work twice as hard for only 1/4 your pay. Of course, taxes were raised under Clinton, and plenty of people found incentive to work then--because there were actually jobs for people to work at.
Incentives for labor is what I'm all about. That's why I'd like to see capital gains taxes raised, and taxes for the working poor eliminated--how can you expect them to work themselves out of poverty if you insist on stealing the bread from their mouths?
Their socialized health care systems are swirling down the drains of decay since they implemented the system you think is so wonderful. When you seperate the decision to pay for services so far from the decision to seek services, you raise demand while restricting supply, and everything goes to shit. Really, look into it. Socialized health care is an abject failure.
Are you even a fucking American, or are you some sort of Frenchman conspiring to destroy our economy? How am I supposed to believe that you've ever actually worked in America, when you appear to be completely ignorant of the fact that health care costs are rising at double-digit rates, and the fact that tge decision to pay for services has been seperated from the decision to seek services ever since the Great Depression, when health insurance became linked to employment? Your complaint says more about our system then theirs--our health-care system is like a strange bizzarro-socialism, neither egalitarian nor utilitarian.
Have you ever stopped to consider how even those who rate as 'poor' in the united states typically have a TV, plenty to eat (obesity is the number one health problem of the poor), and a car?
Obesity and malnutrition sometimes mix. So the poor have plenty of subsidized sugared processed grains, cheap imported consumer goods, and a powerful military that guarantees they can fill their ancient clunkers with cheap gas. They still can't afford fruits and veget
At the moment, the jobs are going away from the US. Before, they've been going to the US. Give it a few more years, and the jobs will be coming back.
If by "before", you're talking about the 1960s or something, then yes, you would be correct, but America has been running trade deficits for an extremely long time--jobs have, for my entire lifetime, always flowed out of the United States. The countries they flow to change, the direction does not. There is no ebb, there is only flow.
How someone can defend themselves and their friends being paid vastly overblown salaries (and yes, US salaries are high, even when compared to cost of living) when people in these countries are just as able (which they are - India has schools too, yet Indian society places more emphasis on the importance of studies than American society - which favors athletic prowess), and more needing of the salary. It's being selfish.
I don't defend the level of my salary--I defend the fact that I have a job at all. After all, the problem isn't that wages are falling, the problem is that people are losing jobs. Being unemployed in America doesn't suck much less than being unemployed in India. Not being able to afford food or medical bills sucks wherever you are.
I don't mind so much if U.S. wages fall if it means otherwise starving countries like India will actually have food. What makes me angry is that the profits of outsourcing aren't going to just Indians--they're going to the super-rich Americans at the top of the economic ladder--the people who no longer have to work for a living, if they ever did. The free-traders chant how selfish we Americans are and how we should sacrifice for poorer workers abroad--yet they say nothing about the people in America who benefit from outsourcing. In other words, the particular Americans who are richest and sacrificing the most, end up being the ones who sacrifice nothing!
If we are going to have fiscal and monetary policies that force the worst-off Americans to sacrifice to help the rest of the world, then we need redistribute incomes in this country. Otherwise, your complaints about the selfishness of American workers are very deceitful.
Want to get jobs back to the US? Lower the wages.
Or subsidize health care and education like Europe and Canada. Or eliminate regressive Social Security taxes. Or make regular income taxes more progressive. Or have the government stop borrowing so much money from Asia. Basically, have the goverment stop doing everything it possibly can to make sure Americans don't have jobs.
Get special knowledge. Make yourself irreplacable. If you just sit at your desk all day, hammering out code anyone could do, you are replacable. It's not just IT this principle works for.
Who's just talking about IT? How do you expect 250 million people to find "special knowledge"? If you want to make sure there's no place in society for unskilled American labor, fine, just don't complain when unemployed factory workers start mugging you--it's the only job left them, now.
Please folks, I can understand exactly where you're coming from on this one, but no-one moaned when this same phenomenon was working the other way round, and it's just plain immature (and selfish) to complain now.
I wasn't alive to moan when the phenomenon was working the other direction. Were you? The only selfishness I see are those at the top of the American pyramid stealing the last few scraps of bread from those at the bottom.
What most linux aficionados don't realize is that vi and emacs are the best anti-linux vaccines. The moment you tell a non-technical person that he or she would have to use from now on the usability nightmares that vi and emacs are, you can't be sure that they not only will they run away from linux, but they'd also tell everybody to do the same.
That sounds intuitive, but I've never, ever heard of an instance of this. First of all, why would you tell someone they have to use emacs or vi to edit text files in linux? Secondly, anyone who considers editing plain text files a vital part of their job is probably already using vi, emacs, or some other decent text editor--you wouldn't tell someone on Windows they have to use Notepad or Wordpad, would you?
Think about it--how often do you see non-technical users editing plain text files?
What most linux aficionados don't realize is that vi and emacs are the best anti-linux vaccines. The moment you tell a non-technical person that he or she would have to use from now on the usability nightmares that vi and emacs are, you can't be sure that they not only will they run away from linux, but they'd also tell everybody to do the same.
That sounds intuitive, but I've never, ever heard of an instance of this. First of all, why would you tell someone they have to use emacs or vi to edit text files in linux? Secondly, anyone who considers editing plain text files a vital part of their job is probably already using vi, emacs, or some other decent text editor--you wouldn't tell someone on Windows they have to use Notepad or Wordpad, would you?
Think about it--how often do you see non-technical users editing plain text files?
Why? Sure, technology now exists for any government or business to find out any detail of my life that they want to. But CAN doesn't mean SHOULD. Governments and Businesses shouldn't be allowed to use every possible technology available--they are legal entities, and they can be forced to adhere to whatever legal definition of privacy we want.
Discussing whether the current bandplan is sensible in the age of WiFi and other emerging technologies is a different debate, one I would love to get into; however there isn't much point of trying that in this thread:
Right, because idiots like you are sticking their fingers in their ears and yelling "la la la, I'm not listening!" It's rather appropriate that your side would have a reception problem. The cartoon is about regulating radio waves like regulating speech. There are lots of regulations on sonic noise pollution, that are infinitely more sensible than our current radio wave regulation.
1. This cartoon is a bunch of propaganda from some corporate consortium wanting to SELL lots of small RF devices who managed to tool some leftist think tank to make their arguments for them in terms of anti-corporatism. Kinda silly if you think about it. But with that sort of red meat hanging, the "down with authority" crowd is going to be out in force on this article.
Anti-corporatism isn't anti-capitalism. It's anti-cronycapitalism. Perhaps one should compare the size and influence of the involved corporations, or that one set of corporations is appealing to the public while the other is only lobbying the government?
2. This is slashdot, where the average poster is marginally qualified to discuss complex computer issues, I really doubt any sort of serious discussion would be possible on a subject so outside the average user's area of expertise. (Since the more ignorant the poster the greater the urge to post.)
Perhaps this is somewhat like applying pesticide to a field of weeds--a good chunk of the spammers will respect the unsubscribe (as if opt-out makes you a legitimate business, but whatever...), but any spammers that "survives" this request are going to be the of the nastiest sort, and you'll never get rid of them.
I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone here make the explicit connection to Freenet--which an unsecured wireless connection is just a poorman's version of. Both work on plausible deniability--I had no idea was stealing this mp3--or sending your freenet client encrypted child porn.
Many of the arguments people are applying to this guy could also apply to freenet--that running an unsecured wireless point or a freenet node could both be construed as facilitating a crime. In both cases, it's letting someone else use your bandwidth resources.
Ian Bogost pointed out that science/engineering tends to be "predictably useful" where arts/humanities tend to be "unpredictably useful".
Then perhaps the real problem is not that science/engineering dominates, it's that business people are the ones choosing where the emphasis of today's games lies. An executive can choose to hire more programmers or more English Department types. The programmers are reliably useful, the academics either incredibly useful for detrimental. If you're spending a billion dollars to make this game, the choice becomes clear--hire more programmers and avoid as much risk as possible.
The only way we'll see more creative, less technical, and riskier games, is if it becomes possible to make games at a drastically reduced cost.
The real question is, why is it important at all that Jimmy know anything about WWII if he doesn't want to? It's not like there's any shortage of people who desire knowledge about WWII--the History Channel's sole audience seems to be people who are obsessed with WWII. About the only thing forcing Jimmy to learn about WWII accomplishes is crushing any love of history out of most students.
Re:Please.. Mr Blunket/Random authority.. Get a cl
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Cry To Beat Iris Scanners
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Here in the US, my brother tried to replace his driver's license (the de facto US identity card) because his old one was damaged. He tried to use cash to pay the fee for this (probably something like $20), but then he discovered the driver's license center would only accept a money order because the employees of the center weren't trusted to handle cash. Seriously! Our government over here doesn't even trust the people who hand out ID cards with twenty dollars of cash!
RPG, yes, there SHOULD be lots of tweaking there, but it's been a long time since I've felt I've played a well-tweaked one...
In any event, that was actually my point--today's gaming experiences are rarely quite as fluid and precise as they were in the past, just because the problem of making games is so fantastically more complex.
I don't deny that they may be more efficient (I DO deny that they're less buggy, especially on the console.) But I still claim the ratio is only going up just because companies are becoming more risk-averse--and therefore the ratio I care about--the great/ordinary ratio--is taking a nose dive. Making a game is now more about corporate politics than programming.
It's not that people working on games today aren't as smart as their 80s counterparts--but they're prohibited from taking the same kinds of risks because so many more dollars are on the line.
But on the other hand, today's 3D games have exponentially more stuff to be tweaked. Nor am I convinced they actually spend more time tweaking gameplay than in the past--the precise timing of a characters jump doesn't show up well on box art. Console games today are certainly buggy than they were in the 80s/early 90s (Enter the Matrix comes to mind as an infamous one...)
Still, the real question is: why should gamers give a crap about the ratio of good to bad games? All I care about is the raw number of good games--in fact, all I REALLY care about is the raw number of GREAT games, since those are the only ones I'm actually going to plunk down dollars for and start wasting time on.
I can see why a games producer cares about the ratio--a producer who turns out consistently good games will get yelled at a whole lot less than a producer who produces both GREAT games and fair games. The Bell Curve of gaming is much narrower than it used to be--and for those of us who only have time to play the outliers (which is probably most people who play games) this is not a good thing.
The jokes are still legit--I mean, go here: http://www.3drealms.com/games.html
It's at the top of the page! They're still working on that crap! Amazing!
It's not quite that cut and dry--the site I linked to seemed to be based on poll figures--or at least defines itself as trying to answer the question 'what religions do people claim to be following when asked in a poll?' Not that such a poll has been taken--for example, they just have to take North Korea's word that they adhere to Juche. It offers a lot interesting discussion of this problem--the results you'd get in a poll are very different from attendance or other registration figures one can collect from the religious organisations themselves, even if the organisations are telling the truth. Presumably there are a lot of agnostics who are baptized as Christians, for example. So perhaps by some other metric Hinduism would score a lot higher. India is known as being one of the world's most relgious places, so it's conceivable that Hindus are on average more Hindu than a Christian is Christian. Or something.
Still, if you look at the growth rates, Mohammed might be better than Jesus any day now, popularity wise. (Now, money wise, on the other hand...)
These folk say Hinduism is third best, while worshiping Kim Jong Il is tenth best--better than Judaism, Sikhism, Jainism, and even the Grand Daddy of Monotheism--Zoroastrianism. Let us hope their Juche principle serves them well in their current misfortune.
Um, the poster your replying to compared the warez people to American revolutionaries, who dressed up as Indians to throw British tea into the sea. Anonymity and secrecy are perfectly valid means of rebellion--and that's what our forefathers died to protect.
Actually, that whoever was making the comparison didn't think it was a big deal is kinda the point--it speaks volumes about how open their standard will be. Hey, sometimes a person's words say more than was intended to be said--deal with it. Ideally, EVERYONE would make a big deal about this, otherwise the lack of open standards is going to serious burn everyone not allied to one major corporation or another.
(as someone pointed out, they only got about 10% of the radio market).
As someone else pointed out, 10% of stations isn't 10% of the market, since the stations are all have different powers and market sizes.
After all, local radio and TV stations have to pay fees and licenses to transmit locally, so why shouldn't satellite based radios have to-do the same if they want to have local content?
Surely you can see a difference between taking up space in local airwaves and transmitting your own content tailored to local needs nationally?
DirecTV and Dish both provide local content, but they are very strict on the fact that you can only get your own local channels due to these rules.
Those are completely unrelated rules for rebroadcasting someone else's content--not for broadcasting your own content customized to various localities. I mean, if you go to a website that tells you the local weather do you expect it to fall under these regulations because it's giving you local information? If you post information about local events on a blog, do you expect to get a nasty call from the FCC?
So, you're talking about three totally different things--using up limited local airwave space like the radio does (that takes FCC permission), rebroadcasting someone else's television station like DirecTV/Dish (that takes FCC permission), and adding original traffic and weather reports to your broadcast (that's probably protected by the First Amendment.)
Indeed, if broadcasting content tailored too closely to local markets were the problem, CC would almost be in the clear--the whole reason for bitterness at Clear Channel is their de-localization of radio, their making every place in America sound exactly the same.
How about all of the people around you that are now being "photographed" on a regular basis.
Unless your wife is some kind of Montana rancher--like, she has a job, or she goes shopping, or does anything whatsoever involving stepping onto the property of some corporation, she's probably being already being photographed on a regular basis by surveillance cameras without even knowing it. The only difference is that now everyone can do it, not just businesses. IMHO, that's a very good thing.
I've gotta join the chorus here--the old NES Dragon Warriors are awesome, though I confess to never playing any Super Famicom DQs. But Dragon Warrior VII on PS1 is, well, bad. The story, the dialogue, the action--all of it is really mind numbingly boring.
The graphics are bland but sufficient--but you can't look beyond the graphics to see a good game, because they forgot to make a good game.
It amazes me that it was the best selling psone game in Japan--surely they were as disappointed with the title as I was when I got home?
Ayn Rand got it wrong -- in our world, unlike Atlas Shrugged, the men of the mind can't go on strike, because they're already extinct.
Ayn Rand got it wrong all right--but it's not because skilled people are dead. It's because Ayn Rand despised social capital and only admired value created by work. A capitalist she was, yes, but emotionally if not logically this was because capital is the result of work--of successful attempts by rational men to manipulate the objective world, rather than fuzzy meaningless feelings of people higher than you in the social hierarchy.
But Ricardo's Iron of Wages applies to intellectual as well as physical labor. In our economy as it currently sits, there are simply too many people with great skill and too little demand for their skills for skill alone to be of great value--more and more, our value to society is determined by how well those in power like us, rather than what we can contribute. Perhaps if some government would do something to radically increase aggregate demand in our economy--but Ayn Rand would have none of that. Perhaps as long as we're all trapped on the same Earth, as long as their is no attainable but undeveloped frontier, social capital and the useless third are going to win over people wanting to get something done every time.
You are trying to treat the users of obscure software as being distributed uniformly at random throughout society, which isn't true. The reality is much closer to the chem class example than you seem to be willing to acknowledge.
If we're talking about obscure games, then I would indeed believe it's distributed in sufficiently uniform manner. If I manage to steal some obscure simulation game, chances are I'm only going to be able to find one or two friends who would also want to play it, and probably none who were thinking of buying it.
If we're talking about programs for creative or productive use, than most of those users who would have any possibility of purchasing the software are probably corporate, and, in America at least, businesses have far more incentives to purchase software legitimately than ordinary mortals--if you get caught making money from something you stole, you're in big trouble. Students and hobbyiests love to steal this stuff, but they probably wouldn't buy it anyway even if piracy weren't an option.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, at least you're willing to how central nepotism has become to America. I mean, we could just say to all the people on the Soviet Gulag "So join the Party, kiss up to Politiburo members, and quit whining about democracy and freedom!"
Talking about "socio-feminist Canada" makes it clear to everyone around you that you have got some serious sexuality issues manifesting as mysogyny. Every political issue can only be viewed in terms of threats to your masculinity. Should've just come out of whatever closet you're hiding in and accepted who you really were instead.
I would like to apologize to the person I was posting to earlier, since you are way crazier than he was.
I'm not saying we need to eliminate Capitalism, just that our present form of Capitalism is full of government interventions that benefit the rich and hurt the lower classes. For example, extremely regressive social security taxes are used to offset shortfalls in more progressive income taxes.
If I recall correctly, there hasn't been any companies of even remotely Microsoft's scope started in Europe in the past several decades, or if not, very few.
America used to be a place that prided itself on it's small businesses, on the independence of it's craftsmen. It's interesting to see how far some of my more insane countrymen have come around to the very opposite of Jefferson's point of view, rejoicing in the fact that we need a vast monopolistic corporate oligarchy to get anything done in this country. So Europe doesn't have keiretsu--they still manage to make better cell phones and cars than America.
In addition, the progressive (to the point of confiscatory) taxes you'll find all over Europe have made things more equal, but their equality is below our median & mean income and lifestyle levels.
Measured in terms of per capita GDP, that may be technically true (though difficult to verify, because every country has different econometic standards--like how they measure unemployment or the cost of a market basket...) But a European or Canadian is still guaranteed health care, and I suspect most of the poor would trade away their allegedly higher income if they could get that.
There's only so much taxation & wealth redistribution an economic system can bear before it stops growing, and perhaps even starts to collapse.
As Keynes showed us, in some situations an economy can collapse because it doesn't have ENOUGH wealth redistribution and government spending. A good example might be our current economic policy--a roaring stock market in the late nineties produced a vast amount of industrial capacity, but there was a shortage of demand to consume that capacity. Bush cut capital gains to encourage building MORE capacity, no surprise, no additional capacity has been built. Only now, after so many years of budget deficits and extremely loose monetary policy is the economy starting to trickle back to life--but that might all be for naught if the price of oil doesn't skyrocket (funny how all the dollars we sent Asia's way for the past few years are trickling into Saudia Arabia's hands rather than back into ours.)
People like the parent poster want to pull us ever closer to that perilous edge, and I feel they need to be fought.
People are usually only anxious for a fight when they feel they have nothing to lose. Is your heart really as content with crony capitalism as your words are? It is our current course that will veer off a perilous edge--an America that has no opportunity for Americans, a World that has no opportunity for Laborers. I used to be a rabid capitalist, but I saw the handwriting on the wall--that most of the people I knew and cared about would eventually be completely unneeded by the small clique of people who currently own this country and it's economy--and neither of us are in that clique.
That article admits that payroll figures have still fallen--and that fact is surely in far more headlines than your lies. Fewer people are working (payroll), more people have been born. No one disputes these two facts. Is that too convoluted for you? That an apparently illiterate fellow like you is apparently making such great money is a sign that something is amiss. So there is a shortage of one particular category of worker in the labor force--workers who have already been trained in the specific machinery mentioned in your article. Not a big deal--and indeed, why should workers retrain to operate it, when if past history is any guide their jobs will be sent overseas as soon as they graduate from their technical school?
And how will it help a damn thing to redistribute income in this country, at least anymore than it already has? I don't know about other people, but I work hard so I'm rewarded.
Umm...if you don't know about other people, let me fill you in. Other people have spent a whole lot of money on their own education, only to be earning nearly nothing as their jobs were shipped overseas. Other people have been working damn hard their entire lives only to die with nothing. (You were asking where Bill Gates's and your money came from? That's where the fuck you stole it from, you fucking leech.). Other people are either working three jobs without health insurance or lost their job because the company moved to Canada where businesses don't have to pay for their worker's health insurance.
If I don't get the fruits of my labor, why should I work hard at all? If the government took more and more of my money as my paycheck increased, that would greatly lessen my motivation to increase it. Work twice as hard for only 1/4 more pay after your wealth redistribution scheme takes the rest?
Why not? Plenty of people work twice as hard for only 1/4 your pay. Of course, taxes were raised under Clinton, and plenty of people found incentive to work then--because there were actually jobs for people to work at.
Incentives for labor is what I'm all about. That's why I'd like to see capital gains taxes raised, and taxes for the working poor eliminated--how can you expect them to work themselves out of poverty if you insist on stealing the bread from their mouths?
Their socialized health care systems are swirling down the drains of decay since they implemented the system you think is so wonderful. When you seperate the decision to pay for services so far from the decision to seek services, you raise demand while restricting supply, and everything goes to shit. Really, look into it. Socialized health care is an abject failure.
Are you even a fucking American, or are you some sort of Frenchman conspiring to destroy our economy? How am I supposed to believe that you've ever actually worked in America, when you appear to be completely ignorant of the fact that health care costs are rising at double-digit rates, and the fact that tge decision to pay for services has been seperated from the decision to seek services ever since the Great Depression, when health insurance became linked to employment? Your complaint says more about our system then theirs--our health-care system is like a strange bizzarro-socialism, neither egalitarian nor utilitarian.
Have you ever stopped to consider how even those who rate as 'poor' in the united states typically have a TV, plenty to eat (obesity is the number one health problem of the poor), and a car?
Obesity and malnutrition sometimes mix. So the poor have plenty of subsidized sugared processed grains, cheap imported consumer goods, and a powerful military that guarantees they can fill their ancient clunkers with cheap gas. They still can't afford fruits and veget
If by "before", you're talking about the 1960s or something, then yes, you would be correct, but America has been running trade deficits for an extremely long time--jobs have, for my entire lifetime, always flowed out of the United States. The countries they flow to change, the direction does not. There is no ebb, there is only flow.
How someone can defend themselves and their friends being paid vastly overblown salaries (and yes, US salaries are high, even when compared to cost of living) when people in these countries are just as able (which they are - India has schools too, yet Indian society places more emphasis on the importance of studies than American society - which favors athletic prowess), and more needing of the salary. It's being selfish.
I don't defend the level of my salary--I defend the fact that I have a job at all. After all, the problem isn't that wages are falling, the problem is that people are losing jobs. Being unemployed in America doesn't suck much less than being unemployed in India. Not being able to afford food or medical bills sucks wherever you are.
I don't mind so much if U.S. wages fall if it means otherwise starving countries like India will actually have food. What makes me angry is that the profits of outsourcing aren't going to just Indians--they're going to the super-rich Americans at the top of the economic ladder--the people who no longer have to work for a living, if they ever did. The free-traders chant how selfish we Americans are and how we should sacrifice for poorer workers abroad--yet they say nothing about the people in America who benefit from outsourcing. In other words, the particular Americans who are richest and sacrificing the most, end up being the ones who sacrifice nothing!
If we are going to have fiscal and monetary policies that force the worst-off Americans to sacrifice to help the rest of the world, then we need redistribute incomes in this country. Otherwise, your complaints about the selfishness of American workers are very deceitful.
Want to get jobs back to the US? Lower the wages.
Or subsidize health care and education like Europe and Canada. Or eliminate regressive Social Security taxes. Or make regular income taxes more progressive. Or have the government stop borrowing so much money from Asia. Basically, have the goverment stop doing everything it possibly can to make sure Americans don't have jobs.
Get special knowledge. Make yourself irreplacable. If you just sit at your desk all day, hammering out code anyone could do, you are replacable. It's not just IT this principle works for.
Who's just talking about IT? How do you expect 250 million people to find "special knowledge"? If you want to make sure there's no place in society for unskilled American labor, fine, just don't complain when unemployed factory workers start mugging you--it's the only job left them, now.
Please folks, I can understand exactly where you're coming from on this one, but no-one moaned when this same phenomenon was working the other way round, and it's just plain immature (and selfish) to complain now.
I wasn't alive to moan when the phenomenon was working the other direction. Were you? The only selfishness I see are those at the top of the American pyramid stealing the last few scraps of bread from those at the bottom.
That sounds intuitive, but I've never, ever heard of an instance of this. First of all, why would you tell someone they have to use emacs or vi to edit text files in linux? Secondly, anyone who considers editing plain text files a vital part of their job is probably already using vi, emacs, or some other decent text editor--you wouldn't tell someone on Windows they have to use Notepad or Wordpad, would you?
Think about it--how often do you see non-technical users editing plain text files?
That sounds intuitive, but I've never, ever heard of an instance of this. First of all, why would you tell someone they have to use emacs or vi to edit text files in linux? Secondly, anyone who considers editing plain text files a vital part of their job is probably already using vi, emacs, or some other decent text editor--you wouldn't tell someone on Windows they have to use Notepad or Wordpad, would you?
Think about it--how often do you see non-technical users editing plain text files?
Why? Sure, technology now exists for any government or business to find out any detail of my life that they want to. But CAN doesn't mean SHOULD. Governments and Businesses shouldn't be allowed to use every possible technology available--they are legal entities, and they can be forced to adhere to whatever legal definition of privacy we want.
Right, because idiots like you are sticking their fingers in their ears and yelling "la la la, I'm not listening!" It's rather appropriate that your side would have a reception problem. The cartoon is about regulating radio waves like regulating speech. There are lots of regulations on sonic noise pollution, that are infinitely more sensible than our current radio wave regulation.
1. This cartoon is a bunch of propaganda from some corporate consortium wanting to SELL lots of small RF devices who managed to tool some leftist think tank to make their arguments for them in terms of anti-corporatism. Kinda silly if you think about it. But with that sort of red meat hanging, the "down with authority" crowd is going to be out in force on this article.
Anti-corporatism isn't anti-capitalism. It's anti-cronycapitalism. Perhaps one should compare the size and influence of the involved corporations, or that one set of corporations is appealing to the public while the other is only lobbying the government?
2. This is slashdot, where the average poster is marginally qualified to discuss complex computer issues, I really doubt any sort of serious discussion would be possible on a subject so outside the average user's area of expertise. (Since the more ignorant the poster the greater the urge to post.)
Hey, you posted too.
Perhaps this is somewhat like applying pesticide to a field of weeds--a good chunk of the spammers will respect the unsubscribe (as if opt-out makes you a legitimate business, but whatever...), but any spammers that "survives" this request are going to be the of the nastiest sort, and you'll never get rid of them.
Many of the arguments people are applying to this guy could also apply to freenet--that running an unsecured wireless point or a freenet node could both be construed as facilitating a crime. In both cases, it's letting someone else use your bandwidth resources.
Ian Bogost pointed out that science/engineering tends to be "predictably useful" where arts/humanities tend to be "unpredictably useful".
Then perhaps the real problem is not that science/engineering dominates, it's that business people are the ones choosing where the emphasis of today's games lies. An executive can choose to hire more programmers or more English Department types. The programmers are reliably useful, the academics either incredibly useful for detrimental. If you're spending a billion dollars to make this game, the choice becomes clear--hire more programmers and avoid as much risk as possible.
The only way we'll see more creative, less technical, and riskier games, is if it becomes possible to make games at a drastically reduced cost.
The real question is, why is it important at all that Jimmy know anything about WWII if he doesn't want to? It's not like there's any shortage of people who desire knowledge about WWII--the History Channel's sole audience seems to be people who are obsessed with WWII. About the only thing forcing Jimmy to learn about WWII accomplishes is crushing any love of history out of most students.
Here in the US, my brother tried to replace his driver's license (the de facto US identity card) because his old one was damaged. He tried to use cash to pay the fee for this (probably something like $20), but then he discovered the driver's license center would only accept a money order because the employees of the center weren't trusted to handle cash. Seriously! Our government over here doesn't even trust the people who hand out ID cards with twenty dollars of cash!
RPG, yes, there SHOULD be lots of tweaking there, but it's been a long time since I've felt I've played a well-tweaked one...
In any event, that was actually my point--today's gaming experiences are rarely quite as fluid and precise as they were in the past, just because the problem of making games is so fantastically more complex.
I don't deny that they may be more efficient (I DO deny that they're less buggy, especially on the console.) But I still claim the ratio is only going up just because companies are becoming more risk-averse--and therefore the ratio I care about--the great/ordinary ratio--is taking a nose dive. Making a game is now more about corporate politics than programming.
It's not that people working on games today aren't as smart as their 80s counterparts--but they're prohibited from taking the same kinds of risks because so many more dollars are on the line.
But on the other hand, today's 3D games have exponentially more stuff to be tweaked. Nor am I convinced they actually spend more time tweaking gameplay than in the past--the precise timing of a characters jump doesn't show up well on box art. Console games today are certainly buggy than they were in the 80s/early 90s (Enter the Matrix comes to mind as an infamous one...) Still, the real question is: why should gamers give a crap about the ratio of good to bad games? All I care about is the raw number of good games--in fact, all I REALLY care about is the raw number of GREAT games, since those are the only ones I'm actually going to plunk down dollars for and start wasting time on. I can see why a games producer cares about the ratio--a producer who turns out consistently good games will get yelled at a whole lot less than a producer who produces both GREAT games and fair games. The Bell Curve of gaming is much narrower than it used to be--and for those of us who only have time to play the outliers (which is probably most people who play games) this is not a good thing.
The jokes are still legit--I mean, go here: http://www.3drealms.com/games.html It's at the top of the page! They're still working on that crap! Amazing!
It's not quite that cut and dry--the site I linked to seemed to be based on poll figures--or at least defines itself as trying to answer the question 'what religions do people claim to be following when asked in a poll?' Not that such a poll has been taken--for example, they just have to take North Korea's word that they adhere to Juche. It offers a lot interesting discussion of this problem--the results you'd get in a poll are very different from attendance or other registration figures one can collect from the religious organisations themselves, even if the organisations are telling the truth. Presumably there are a lot of agnostics who are baptized as Christians, for example. So perhaps by some other metric Hinduism would score a lot higher. India is known as being one of the world's most relgious places, so it's conceivable that Hindus are on average more Hindu than a Christian is Christian. Or something. Still, if you look at the growth rates, Mohammed might be better than Jesus any day now, popularity wise. (Now, money wise, on the other hand...)
These folk say Hinduism is third best, while worshiping Kim Jong Il is tenth best--better than Judaism, Sikhism, Jainism, and even the Grand Daddy of Monotheism--Zoroastrianism. Let us hope their Juche principle serves them well in their current misfortune.
Um, the poster your replying to compared the warez people to American revolutionaries, who dressed up as Indians to throw British tea into the sea. Anonymity and secrecy are perfectly valid means of rebellion--and that's what our forefathers died to protect.
Actually, that whoever was making the comparison didn't think it was a big deal is kinda the point--it speaks volumes about how open their standard will be. Hey, sometimes a person's words say more than was intended to be said--deal with it. Ideally, EVERYONE would make a big deal about this, otherwise the lack of open standards is going to serious burn everyone not allied to one major corporation or another.
As someone else pointed out, 10% of stations isn't 10% of the market, since the stations are all have different powers and market sizes.
After all, local radio and TV stations have to pay fees and licenses to transmit locally, so why shouldn't satellite based radios have to-do the same if they want to have local content?
Surely you can see a difference between taking up space in local airwaves and transmitting your own content tailored to local needs nationally?
DirecTV and Dish both provide local content, but they are very strict on the fact that you can only get your own local channels due to these rules.
Those are completely unrelated rules for rebroadcasting someone else's content--not for broadcasting your own content customized to various localities. I mean, if you go to a website that tells you the local weather do you expect it to fall under these regulations because it's giving you local information? If you post information about local events on a blog, do you expect to get a nasty call from the FCC?
So, you're talking about three totally different things--using up limited local airwave space like the radio does (that takes FCC permission), rebroadcasting someone else's television station like DirecTV/Dish (that takes FCC permission), and adding original traffic and weather reports to your broadcast (that's probably protected by the First Amendment.)
Indeed, if broadcasting content tailored too closely to local markets were the problem, CC would almost be in the clear--the whole reason for bitterness at Clear Channel is their de-localization of radio, their making every place in America sound exactly the same.
Unless your wife is some kind of Montana rancher--like, she has a job, or she goes shopping, or does anything whatsoever involving stepping onto the property of some corporation, she's probably being already being photographed on a regular basis by surveillance cameras without even knowing it. The only difference is that now everyone can do it, not just businesses. IMHO, that's a very good thing.
The graphics are bland but sufficient--but you can't look beyond the graphics to see a good game, because they forgot to make a good game.
It amazes me that it was the best selling psone game in Japan--surely they were as disappointed with the title as I was when I got home?
Ayn Rand got it wrong -- in our world, unlike Atlas Shrugged, the men of the mind can't go on strike, because they're already extinct. Ayn Rand got it wrong all right--but it's not because skilled people are dead. It's because Ayn Rand despised social capital and only admired value created by work. A capitalist she was, yes, but emotionally if not logically this was because capital is the result of work--of successful attempts by rational men to manipulate the objective world, rather than fuzzy meaningless feelings of people higher than you in the social hierarchy. But Ricardo's Iron of Wages applies to intellectual as well as physical labor. In our economy as it currently sits, there are simply too many people with great skill and too little demand for their skills for skill alone to be of great value--more and more, our value to society is determined by how well those in power like us, rather than what we can contribute. Perhaps if some government would do something to radically increase aggregate demand in our economy--but Ayn Rand would have none of that. Perhaps as long as we're all trapped on the same Earth, as long as their is no attainable but undeveloped frontier, social capital and the useless third are going to win over people wanting to get something done every time.
If we're talking about obscure games, then I would indeed believe it's distributed in sufficiently uniform manner. If I manage to steal some obscure simulation game, chances are I'm only going to be able to find one or two friends who would also want to play it, and probably none who were thinking of buying it.
If we're talking about programs for creative or productive use, than most of those users who would have any possibility of purchasing the software are probably corporate, and, in America at least, businesses have far more incentives to purchase software legitimately than ordinary mortals--if you get caught making money from something you stole, you're in big trouble. Students and hobbyiests love to steal this stuff, but they probably wouldn't buy it anyway even if piracy weren't an option.