As Penn and Teller pointed out on their show Bullshit!, the border "wall" that conservatives keep on talking about building would be completely ineffective. A reasonably enterprising illegal immigrant could breach or bypass said wall in approximately 2 minutes (either climbing over, digging under, or busting a hole in the middle), and given that they've likely traveled for days just to get to the border, the extra 2 minutes aren't going to stop them. Heck, even the Berlin Wall didn't stop people trying to escape from East Berlin to West Berlin - people got past it with balloons, tunneling, and crashing border stations among other methods.
On the upside, I view those as proof that human ingenuity can beat oppression.
Actually, only complete morons were betting that the housing market never fell. The smart evil bastards that make up most of Wall Street knew the market would collapse, but were doing their best to ensure that when it did so they'd lose nothing.
For instance, Goldman Sachs would buy credit default swaps from AIG, which meant that they could never lose money on buying up a bad loan (because AIG was going to be left paying the piper if it did). Now, in order to get a good rate from AIG, Goldman also made those investments look much better than they were, so AIG was thinking "those suckers, we're never going to have to pay a claim on this". And of course Too Big To Fail meant that if the shit really hit the fan, they could be assured that Uncle Sam would be the one holding the bag.
And to compound the problem, the individuals at those companies knew that they were never going to be personally liable for any of it. So the manager at AIG was happy to sell credit default swaps and make big bonuses - the worst that could possibly happen is he would get fired after making big bucks.
Right, but when you type hunter2, we just see *******.
On another note, anybody who is not currently blocking access port 23, or even worse is running a telnet server, needs to hand in their sysadmin card right now.
Ken actually used his nifty hack of the C compiler and the login program to break into the computer that stored the committee's votes and flipped his and Steve Ballmer's vote.
Because some markets are natural monopolies in which the most economically efficient outcome is in fact a monopoly.
The supply curve you were probably taught in econ 101 is upward sloping, but that's actually a not-always true simplification. For instance, the supply curve of computer software is actually downward sloping, because higher numbers of customers = a lower cost to produce the software per customer. Most supply curves are actually an upward-sloping parabola, where the economies of scale create the downward sloping part and the diseconomies of scale create the upward sloping part. Most of the time, revenue is maximized on the upward sloping portion, so that's where econ 101 concentrates.
But in some cases, you can end up with a demand curve that intersects the supply curve on the downward sloping portion. For instance, if the economies of scale mean I can supply 20 billion cell phones before I reach the bottom of the supply curve, and the average person wants 4 cell phones per year, I'm not going to be able to sell enough phones to reach that minimum. But any competitor that tried to enter the same market would experience higher costs than me, which will force him to sell at a higher price, meaning that a competitor would make things even more sub-optimal. Similar stories occur when the entire demand for a product is satisfied by 2-5 competitors, except this time there's now game theory involved in what the prices actually are.
In short, it's more complicated than just "market competition solves your problem".
If you don't like your local end-user ISP franchises, please visit your local franchise board meeting next time.
Here's some of the problems with that: A. It isn't just my local franchise that could cause problems. It's everyone my local franchise connects to / through to get to the machine I'm trying to talk to. B. Telecoms and ISPs are now oligopolies, not competitive market, which means my local franchise board has about 3 equally bad choices. C. Adding new competitors in telecom is damn near impossible due to network effects. Case in point: After we broke up AT&T, the various baby Bells bought each other out until we're now down to only 2 left standing.
This is not one where localities or market forces can solve the problem.
See, you don't understand the rules right now. In the post-9/11 world, you have to remember that any attempt by the government to record you is justified until the crisis is over because it is needed to defend your freedom, and any attempt of you to record the government is serious espionage that will result in being locked up for months in solitary confinement without trial until you turn on somebody else that the government wants to prosecute but doesn't have any evidence on.
There are 3 targets for every government intrusion on civil liberties: 1. Terrorists 2. Child porn 3. Drugs
The law enforcement agencies have determined that those are the issues that can be used to push absolutely anything through. For instance, trying to catch terrorists allows them to grope everybody with absolutely no suspicion of wrongdoing. Drugs allow them to break down your door at 2 AM, guns drawn, without identifying themselves as the government, and in some cases killing people. And of course child porn and terrorism allows them to watch absolutely everything you do online. That these are plainly illegal doesn't matter, because anybody who disagrees with them must be a terrorist, child pornographer, or junkie.
That doesn't mean those threats don't exist, but if they were serious about addressing the real risks around us they'd be focused on more mundane issues like traffic violations.
Probably inspired by the uprising in Tunisia, they're calling for leader of their country (Hosni Mubarak) to resign, probably due to his perceived corruption, nepotism, and so forth.
Can't afford it? Join the military, get loans, scholarship or work three jobs while going to school.
This is what more liberal-minded folks like me don't like about your story - you are clearly bright and hardworking. You absolutely should be someone with a college degree. So why is it that you had to have multiple jobs, risk your life in the military, meet extremely high standards for scholarships, and take out loans that you're probably still paying for in order to get it, while rich kids with no academic chops and no ability to work hard get the same degree with far less work and no loans to worry about?
(And I write this as somebody who got my degree with far less work and no loans to worry about. Completely unfair, but I was dealt aces and knew it wouldn't help anyone to not cash them in.)
The key thing to realize about Facebook is that Facebook's customers are its advertisers and partners. Facebook users and their personal information are the product.
Not that there aren't other businesses out there doing much the same thing - Google, NBC, CNN, and Fox for starters.
I needed a job. This was the best I could get with no development experience before my starting capital ran out. Standing on principle is great, but it's much harder to do when you're going to be starving or homeless if you do so.
The basic rule in the industry in my area was that practically nobody got hired to a technology-related position with less than 3 years of experience. So I stuck with it, perhaps longer than I should have, for the express purpose of increasing my chances of getting hired for the next gig. It was incredibly difficult, but I can't say it was a bad choice.
The logic applied here amuses me greatly but more so the Glenn Beck-ish puzzlement about what this says about open source:
It clearly isn't the idealistic world it tries to present itself as.
Define 'clearly' because having tons of options sounds really really awesome to me.
One of the rules of writing that my mother (who teaches college-level writing) taught me: When an author precedes a conclusion with words like "clearly" or "obviously", expect bunk. If it were that clear and obvious, they wouldn't have to tell you.
It doesn't even have to be a company scooping up a project and destroying it. It could be a non-profit organization such as XFree86 that had allowed a system to stagnate.
The real advantage of easy forks is that it prevents organizational issues from standing in the way of technological progress. If the fork is significantly better than what it had forked, it will get developers and usage and become dominant. If it's not, it will die, the main trunk will live on, and many valuable lessons are learned. Either way, the users win.
This is an excellent point. It's not really the numerator of this ratio that's changing much (actually, if anything it's going down), it's the denominator that's been dropping steadily since 1980 or so.
Actually, it wasn't gaming work at all, just a project that needed 4 people to really pull it off properly when the company in question could only afford 2.
This is the Dilbert Equation in action: Money = Work / Knowledge. Also identified by Lawrence J Peter as what he called "percussive sublimation", a.k.a. being kicked upstairs.
As one of those Kids These Days: When I was in the "paying some dues" stage of my career, I didn't mind putting in a full day's work. I did mind putting in 14-18 hours a day 7 days a week for pay that amounted to about $7.50 an hour for months on end. Call me unreasonable if you like.
Didn't realize the checklist had been updated for non-email issues. In any event, I think you left out some obvious choices in the "philosophical objections" section:
(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical (X) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck ( ) Whitelists suck ( ) We should be able to visit Drudge, Slashdot and Democracy Now without seeing those Cash for Gold ads ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks ( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually ( ) Sending email should be free ( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatibility with open source or open source licenses (X) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want the government reading my email (X) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Slashdot Mirror
As Penn and Teller pointed out on their show Bullshit!, the border "wall" that conservatives keep on talking about building would be completely ineffective. A reasonably enterprising illegal immigrant could breach or bypass said wall in approximately 2 minutes (either climbing over, digging under, or busting a hole in the middle), and given that they've likely traveled for days just to get to the border, the extra 2 minutes aren't going to stop them. Heck, even the Berlin Wall didn't stop people trying to escape from East Berlin to West Berlin - people got past it with balloons, tunneling, and crashing border stations among other methods.
On the upside, I view those as proof that human ingenuity can beat oppression.
Actually, only complete morons were betting that the housing market never fell. The smart evil bastards that make up most of Wall Street knew the market would collapse, but were doing their best to ensure that when it did so they'd lose nothing.
For instance, Goldman Sachs would buy credit default swaps from AIG, which meant that they could never lose money on buying up a bad loan (because AIG was going to be left paying the piper if it did). Now, in order to get a good rate from AIG, Goldman also made those investments look much better than they were, so AIG was thinking "those suckers, we're never going to have to pay a claim on this". And of course Too Big To Fail meant that if the shit really hit the fan, they could be assured that Uncle Sam would be the one holding the bag.
And to compound the problem, the individuals at those companies knew that they were never going to be personally liable for any of it. So the manager at AIG was happy to sell credit default swaps and make big bonuses - the worst that could possibly happen is he would get fired after making big bucks.
Right, but when you type hunter2, we just see *******.
On another note, anybody who is not currently blocking access port 23, or even worse is running a telnet server, needs to hand in their sysadmin card right now.
Yeah, my searches on "nine-pounder", "pieces of eight", "scurvy dogs", and "Arrrrrrr" all totally failed.
Ken actually used his nifty hack of the C compiler and the login program to break into the computer that stored the committee's votes and flipped his and Steve Ballmer's vote.
That's the RIAA / MPAA / GNAA (ok, not the last one) invading your civil liberties, not law enforcement.
Because some markets are natural monopolies in which the most economically efficient outcome is in fact a monopoly.
The supply curve you were probably taught in econ 101 is upward sloping, but that's actually a not-always true simplification. For instance, the supply curve of computer software is actually downward sloping, because higher numbers of customers = a lower cost to produce the software per customer. Most supply curves are actually an upward-sloping parabola, where the economies of scale create the downward sloping part and the diseconomies of scale create the upward sloping part. Most of the time, revenue is maximized on the upward sloping portion, so that's where econ 101 concentrates.
But in some cases, you can end up with a demand curve that intersects the supply curve on the downward sloping portion. For instance, if the economies of scale mean I can supply 20 billion cell phones before I reach the bottom of the supply curve, and the average person wants 4 cell phones per year, I'm not going to be able to sell enough phones to reach that minimum. But any competitor that tried to enter the same market would experience higher costs than me, which will force him to sell at a higher price, meaning that a competitor would make things even more sub-optimal. Similar stories occur when the entire demand for a product is satisfied by 2-5 competitors, except this time there's now game theory involved in what the prices actually are.
In short, it's more complicated than just "market competition solves your problem".
If you don't like your local end-user ISP franchises, please visit your local franchise board meeting next time.
Here's some of the problems with that:
A. It isn't just my local franchise that could cause problems. It's everyone my local franchise connects to / through to get to the machine I'm trying to talk to.
B. Telecoms and ISPs are now oligopolies, not competitive market, which means my local franchise board has about 3 equally bad choices.
C. Adding new competitors in telecom is damn near impossible due to network effects. Case in point: After we broke up AT&T, the various baby Bells bought each other out until we're now down to only 2 left standing.
This is not one where localities or market forces can solve the problem.
See, you don't understand the rules right now. In the post-9/11 world, you have to remember that any attempt by the government to record you is justified until the crisis is over because it is needed to defend your freedom, and any attempt of you to record the government is serious espionage that will result in being locked up for months in solitary confinement without trial until you turn on somebody else that the government wants to prosecute but doesn't have any evidence on.
Now, please show us your papers.
especially online child pornography
There are 3 targets for every government intrusion on civil liberties:
1. Terrorists
2. Child porn
3. Drugs
The law enforcement agencies have determined that those are the issues that can be used to push absolutely anything through. For instance, trying to catch terrorists allows them to grope everybody with absolutely no suspicion of wrongdoing. Drugs allow them to break down your door at 2 AM, guns drawn, without identifying themselves as the government, and in some cases killing people. And of course child porn and terrorism allows them to watch absolutely everything you do online. That these are plainly illegal doesn't matter, because anybody who disagrees with them must be a terrorist, child pornographer, or junkie.
That doesn't mean those threats don't exist, but if they were serious about addressing the real risks around us they'd be focused on more mundane issues like traffic violations.
Of course, Ayn Rand falls into the second of those two categories.
Probably inspired by the uprising in Tunisia, they're calling for leader of their country (Hosni Mubarak) to resign, probably due to his perceived corruption, nepotism, and so forth.
Can't afford it? Join the military, get loans, scholarship or work three jobs while going to school.
This is what more liberal-minded folks like me don't like about your story - you are clearly bright and hardworking. You absolutely should be someone with a college degree. So why is it that you had to have multiple jobs, risk your life in the military, meet extremely high standards for scholarships, and take out loans that you're probably still paying for in order to get it, while rich kids with no academic chops and no ability to work hard get the same degree with far less work and no loans to worry about?
(And I write this as somebody who got my degree with far less work and no loans to worry about. Completely unfair, but I was dealt aces and knew it wouldn't help anyone to not cash them in.)
The key thing to realize about Facebook is that Facebook's customers are its advertisers and partners. Facebook users and their personal information are the product.
Not that there aren't other businesses out there doing much the same thing - Google, NBC, CNN, and Fox for starters.
That's a name that would effectively compete with Microsoft's Word.
I'm not sure, I think Tom Lehrer managed to top them with the Vatican Rag.
Don't give me the "Wah...I needed a job"
I needed a job. This was the best I could get with no development experience before my starting capital ran out. Standing on principle is great, but it's much harder to do when you're going to be starving or homeless if you do so.
The basic rule in the industry in my area was that practically nobody got hired to a technology-related position with less than 3 years of experience. So I stuck with it, perhaps longer than I should have, for the express purpose of increasing my chances of getting hired for the next gig. It was incredibly difficult, but I can't say it was a bad choice.
I'm not sure, I pity the FOO.
The logic applied here amuses me greatly but more so the Glenn Beck-ish puzzlement about what this says about open source:
It clearly isn't the idealistic world it tries to present itself as.
Define 'clearly' because having tons of options sounds really really awesome to me.
One of the rules of writing that my mother (who teaches college-level writing) taught me: When an author precedes a conclusion with words like "clearly" or "obviously", expect bunk. If it were that clear and obvious, they wouldn't have to tell you.
It doesn't even have to be a company scooping up a project and destroying it. It could be a non-profit organization such as XFree86 that had allowed a system to stagnate.
The real advantage of easy forks is that it prevents organizational issues from standing in the way of technological progress. If the fork is significantly better than what it had forked, it will get developers and usage and become dominant. If it's not, it will die, the main trunk will live on, and many valuable lessons are learned. Either way, the users win.
This is an excellent point. It's not really the numerator of this ratio that's changing much (actually, if anything it's going down), it's the denominator that's been dropping steadily since 1980 or so.
Actually, it wasn't gaming work at all, just a project that needed 4 people to really pull it off properly when the company in question could only afford 2.
This is the Dilbert Equation in action: Money = Work / Knowledge. Also identified by Lawrence J Peter as what he called "percussive sublimation", a.k.a. being kicked upstairs.
As one of those Kids These Days: When I was in the "paying some dues" stage of my career, I didn't mind putting in a full day's work. I did mind putting in 14-18 hours a day 7 days a week for pay that amounted to about $7.50 an hour for months on end. Call me unreasonable if you like.
Didn't realize the checklist had been updated for non-email issues. In any event, I think you left out some obvious choices in the "philosophical objections" section:
(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
(X) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to visit Drudge, Slashdot and Democracy Now without seeing those Cash for Gold ads
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatibility with open source or open source licenses
(X) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
(X) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough