I'm well aware that this provides companies with comparative advantage(though in the end everyone outsources and you lose it). Lower production costs nearly always do.
I'm also totally in agreement with the fact that the currencies will eventually reach equilibrium.
The problem is that having the US dollar and the Indian rupee reach equilibrium would essentially increase the buying power of the average Indian and decrease the buying power of the average American, that's changes in the value of currency do, and it's what outsourcing does. It also causes an increase in the standard of living for the Indian and a decrease in the standard of living for the American. That's pretty basic economics. Pour money out of one country and into another country and the destination country gets richer and the source country gets poorer. This is especially the case when you have a massive trade deficit like the US.
Now that's not necessarily a fundamentally bad thing, it's certainly not a bad thing if you're an Indian. It is however when combined with no net decrease in the price you sell things for unsustainable. You cannot continue to sell high to Americans and buy cheap from the third world because eventually when you outsource enough jobs for a long enough time, the economic prosperity in your country collapses and people can't afford to pay the prices you were selling at. You then end up basically on the same margins you were at before only all your staff ar in another country.
As I said it's not necessarily a bad thing for this to happen. A few billion people in India would be quite happy with this sort of situation. The problem is that it's not necessarily in your long term best interest. Everyone outsourced to China and now China is probably the worlds strongest economy and the US economy is still going down the toilet. Add to that the fact that since the Chinese are making everything anyway they've started selling their own brands which come out of the same factories, and you reach a situation where the original outsourcing company has created their own competition which since they still have to pay their management fat western salaries they can't compete with.
That's not to say there aren't plenty of people with fluff degrees(any country which requires a university degree to manage a McDonald's is basically going to guarantee that) or to devalue the contribution of people who actually make things, but COMMUNICATION IS IMPORTANT.
If you can't tell people you have a product, you can't sell it. If you don't have managers you can't keep things going. A lot of different kinds of people are necessary to make any endeavor work, not just the guy who makes things. I know this, even though I'm one of the folks who makes things.
It doesn't take an awful lot of money to set up a burger joint on the side of the road. You need a bit of land, some bricks and a stove.
Building roads(not just providing services on them) is a lot more expensive and a lot more complicated. You cannot build an efficient network of roads through market forces. It just doesn't work. 50 people can't build roads in a way which makes any damned sense. We're not talking about using them, we're talking about putting them in in the first place. The same goes for an awful lot of things. Certain types of infrastructure are just too complicated and expensive for multiple entities to maintain. That basically leaves you with the government or some giant mega corp(or consortium of smaller corporations).
Well there's a couple of things to refute there. First of all, the Bush years were fairly untypical, the left came up with some bloody awful candidates and so the fairly inoffensive Bush got into power. Normally that wouldn't be too bad, or to atypical, like every country we've had caretaker leaders before and we will have them again. The problem was that some of his advisers were not idiots and were in fact somewhat blatantly evil(Dick Cheney for instance). I confess I'm not that old, but I've certainly never seen a leadership worse than Bush/Cheney in the US.
The government is indeed a disaster, but in large part it is the political and legal history of the country which has made it so, not some farce.
I'm not going to get into an argument with you about freedoms because quite obviously you're a libertarian and we'll never agree that anything but total freedom is any good. I'm not saying that the US hasn't gone a bit backward, but we're not going to agree.
The point I will argue with is that somehow because of this, the people who paid the taxes that helped pay for your school when you were too young to work. Who paid the taxes which almost certainly helped fund the university you most likely attended. The people who worked hard, paid their taxes and did their part. Aren't entitled to the same consideration from you when you can work and they can't. Whatever mistakes the general populace have made over the last 50 years, however much you may disagree with them, that doesn't change the fact that they did their part so that you could have what you have today, and that it's not too much to expect a bit of dignity in their old age.
FFS I'm tired of every country giving this argument.
Yes, in the grand scheme of things, no country on its own can make a difference to global emissions, but if every country does their part, that will make a massive difference.
How about in exchange for a lifetime of paying taxes and contributing to the economic productivity of their employer, their country, and the human population in general?
People aren't generally worthless incapacitated and elderly all that long. Even the best of modern medicine doesn't keep people for very long once they've reached that point, they stop keeping themselves alive. Increased lifespan also, at least to some extent keeps people fit enough to work longer, and most of them do.
I'm not suggesting that we should maintain life in people who are for all intents and purposes dead, but I don't think it's too much to ask for people who have worked their whole lives, paid taxes, and contributed to society to expect that society to show them some degree of care and dignity when they are no longer able to continue to do so. We live in an age of abundance, we don't need to stick our elderly out on an ice flow for the good of the tribe, we can afford to feed them and us.
If the libertarians ever got their way we'd just end up with government by another name. Pretty much the cornerstone of economics is that you can do a lot more with a little bit of from everyone than you can with a lot from a few people. The world would still need roads and those roads would have to be built either by some private enterprise or by groups of citizens. Either way you've got a department of transportation. It's either selected by the people, or it's selected by the some private company. It doesn't really make any difference. Anarchy doesn't work and government isn't going away. If your privatized it it wouldn't all of a sudden magically work better. This is why the only major libertarian candidate in the last election wanted to go back to the gold standard which would have somehow required either finding an awful lot more gold or getting rid of the vast majority of the money in the US economy somehow.
Like most conservatives(social, economic, environmental), libertarians want to go back in time, and like most social conservatives the time they want to go back to never really existed. I'm certainly no proponent of progress for the sake of progress or change for the sake of change, but we can't go back in time, it just isn't possible. We can't go back to all growing our own food in our backyards or going without electricity, because a lot of people would end up starving and starving humans in large numbers tend not to fade away quietly, we can't go back to social norms of the 1950's because they didn't even work then, we can't go back to the Jeffersonian ideal because even Jefferson didn't actually live it.
We've been standing on the brink of a new future for a long time trying to legislate our way back into the past, and it's just not working. I don't know what's out there, it might be good, it might be bad, but it's almost certainly going to be better than what we have now. I'd rather a new world order as terrible as that sounds than the old world order doing all the things we're afraid of but doing them to try and move us backward.
A lot of techies are for all intents and purposes illiterate, at least when it comes to any form of communication which the general populace can understand.
That's not to say that style over substance isn't a bad idea, but I've met very very few techies over the years who would make even remotely good managers, let alone high level executives in any company which wasn't 100% technically based.
It's not necessarily important for engineers to be in executive level positions. A lot of them would make a complete hash of it the same way that having a lot of people who are currently executives wouldn't work either. What is important is for executives to hear and to value the opinions and knowledge of engineers, programmers, etc where it is applicable to the health of the overall business. The problem is that by the time any technical advice has passed through half a dozen middle managers to finally reach someone who can actually do anything with it, it's become so garbled that it doesn't make any sense, even if they were going to listen to it.
That said, it's not just management's fault either. I know a lot of tech people who think they know how a business should be run, who haven't any sort of clue whatsoever. I've seen a lot of people who think that IT should drive the direction of the business as opposed to the business driving the direction of IT. IT is, for the most part, a service industry, and we all forget that more often than we should.
You're right in the fact that in a certain sense it is a good idea, and outsourcing to quality people(and as much as I've wished in the past it wasn't so, there are some damned good and highly qualified IT folks in India) isn't necessarily a bad thing.
The problem with the American version of outsourcing is that it's very short sighted, like a lot of US policy government or otherwise.
Outsourcing is immensely profitable because you can buy goods at foreign prices and sell them to Americans at American prices. The problem with this is that as you lower employment in the US and move money overseas, there is less of it in the US to support US prices. Eventually the standard of living in the countries you outsourced to will rise increasing your outsourced costs, and the standard of living in the US will lower decreasing your revenues.
There's certainly something to be said for the idea that averaging out the world standard of living, but it's not a particularly great long term strategy for the US market. Particularly not luxury markets which may be cut out entirely if standard of living drops sufficiently.
That said, the United States economy is probably irrevocably fucked anyway at this point. The national debt skyrocketed out of control under Bush(even worse than it was under Reagan), and though I believe that most of the changes are necessary there's really no money left for any of Obama's plans to fix anything(isn't it funny that Reagan and the Dubya who are supposed to be from the party of small government are responsible for the vast majority of US debt?). The dollar is no longer considered safe and will likely continue dropping against nearly all major foreign currencies(possibly excluding the GBP which is also screwed). Most importantly, the US has done almost nothing to change any of the factors which got it into the position it is currently in. There has been no change in attitude towards sustainable economic policies(and I'm talking finance not environment here), or towards any of the economic stabilizers like workers rights and protection from unfair termination(you'd be amazed what having the vast majority of your population fairly confident they're not going to be randomly fired can to for keeping your economy a bit more stable). The US has been digging a hole under itself for a long time now, and it is about to fall in. It's going to be a long fall, and it may not be possible anymore to prevent it.
Personally this doesn't particularly please me for all that I live in another country now. I see a lot of people who want to see the US get its comeuppance, but I'm not sure how thrilled I am with the prospect of a world in which the primary super power is China. The US has made and continues to make an awful lot of mistakes, and it may be that the only way for us to learn from those mistakes is to face the consequences, but at the same time a large proportion of the western world depends on the US for military security. Even without that, while US foreign policy is often short sighted and misguided, it is largely well intentioned and I still hope that it isn't too late to prevent the coming fall.
It's true that almost everyone has muscle memory, but it doesn't really work the way you seem to be saying.
Yes if you wrote out your notes a hundred thousand times you could probably rewrite them and then read them, but muscle memory isn't going to help you remember what they said, and writing them out once isn't going to give you muscle memory.
A pianist who practices a piece over and over and over again can quite often play it back from muscle memory. That doesn't necessarily mean that they could tell you what any particular note actually was. The practice involved in acquiring that muscle memory might very well give them that knowledge, but it's not from the muscle memory.
When you have a shallow learning curve, your requirement for additional knowledge increases gradually over time. This means that while it might take you a lot longer to actually become an expert, you can get going with the concept almost immediately.
A steep learning curve is essentially the opposite. You'll have to become an expert to actually use the concept. Generally speaking this means you'll get to be an expert one hell of a lot faster, but it's going to be a lot harder to get there and you might not actually make it.
Metaphorically it's a bit like walking up a ramp as compared with climbing a wall. If you climb the wall you'll be at the top a lot faster, but it'll take a lot more work and people who aren't really that good at climbing walls might not make it.
For most people, becoming an expert over a long period of time is better, both because it's easier on them and because they'll actually be able to do some work a lot quicker.
That is entirely dependent on the individual and their learning style.
Some people do learn that way, some people do not, some people learn better by reading, or speaking or listening, or teaching others. Back in high school I used to program my calculator to do the problems on the homework and while I couldn't use those programs in class, explaining how to do something to the calculator generally gave me a pretty good understanding of it myself.
you will see that this does not state that e-mail is unprotected by the 4th or that the government or anyone else has the right to view it.
What it states is that the phrase "____ will release this information to comply with search warrants" constitutes adequate notification that they will release the information to comply with search warrants and that the e-mail user does not have to be notified that the information has been released to comply with a search warrant.
The search warrant is still required, you are still given privacy of your e-mail, and the search warrant must still be reasonable and legal. The only thing this does is say that if your ISP has warned you they will release this information to the authorities under a search warrant, they don't have to tell you that you've been searched.
I know that on slashdot we don't(including me) generally RTFA, but it would be nice if the person posting it would RTFA, or if the no name blogger who wrote it would RTF Opinion(which he acknowledges later he did not adequately do.
Personally I think that ISPs probably should notify you, and I would certainly switch providers if I found out mine had not, but if you're going to disagree with this opinion, at least disagree with it as opposed to random FUD.
Email encryption never hit mainstream because it doesn't work.
Encryption works, public keys work, private keys work, however acquiring and distributing those keys is a dogs breakfast, which means that setting it up and configuring it just doesn't work.
For PKI to work it actually requires a trusted third party to at the very least hold a directory of everyone's public keys, and most likely handle all the generation and distribution of both the private key and public key, if not the backup and archiving of the private key.
The problem with this is of course that there's no such thing as a trusted third party for something like that. The government is the only even remotely sane choice, and that's who most people using encrypted e-mail want to hide from.
The Microsoft anti-trust case evaporated because there wasn't any real solution.
Splitting up Microsoft wasn't going to work, and it never would work. They're not a telco with a retail and wholesale branch, they're a software company, and most importantly they got their monopoly at least partially through having a much better idea of what they're customers wanted and having by some measures a superior product(at least at the time).
If they'd split out Office, it wouldn't have made Office any more likely to run on Linux because of the same business reasons half the development world doesn't make Linux versions. The Mac version might be a bit better, but there wouldn't be much change. The same is true of running other Office suites on Windows.
I remember when I was younger and more passionate about ideology getting fired up about the Microsoft anti-trust case just like you, and lord knows I never liked George W Bush(hated him with an undying passion). That said I could never understand how any of their proposed solutions were going to actually solve the problem they were supposed to be solving.
There are essentially two ways for Linux to beat Windows. Either Linux and the software available on it have to be measurably better value for the customers than Windows and the software available on it, or there needs to be a standard API for operating systems which all software developers can write to(a bit like a newer and more specific version of POSIX), and Linux itself has to be measurably better value for the customer. If either of these things isn't true, the sheer volume of best of breed software products which are available on Windows and not on Linux will be enough to maintain their market dominance, even if Linux was a thousand times better than it currently is for normal people.
Splitting Microsoft up wasn't going to deliver either of these things. It wasn't going to create a more competitive environment for operating systems, or office suites, or anything else. It might have allowed Netscape to survive(which they didn't deserve to do) since any IE division would have to fund itself somehow and browsers wouldn't be free, but then we'd have expensive browsers and no Mozilla, which for me would be a loss.
It would be nice if Operating systems could have a standard set of features and interfaces and they could compete on the quality and performance of their implementation, but that's just never going to happen, and so long as this is true, Linux is going to have to compete with the whole Windows ecosystem which at the moment it just cannot do.
and it's a genre that's been alive in the literary world for far longer than computers or for that matter electricity have existed.
I know it's hard to imagine something has been done before computers, but setting a fictional account in a realistic historical setting is as old as the hills(with the Illiad being a likely example dating from as I recall about three thousand years ago in it's written form and probably substantially moreso in oral tradition).
As to the whole Army of 2, six days in fallujah thing. Army of 2 was a creepy and tasteless romp into mental illness with psychopaths wearing face masks high fiving in pools of blood, folks didn't like it for that more than for anything else, and making a game about a war which isn't over and which involves complex diplomatic issues(like the Iraq war where they hate us and we want them to like us) isn't exactly a great idea.
They're losing serious ground in the server market.
They rather desperately farmed off their chip fabrication plants(along with most of their debt) to a separate company.
They haven't had anything to compete with Intel on the top end for at least two years.
They're in this position because they were too incompetent to know what to do with the lead they gained against Intel when Intel released Itanium
The US is going through a major recession.
ATI is not necessarily dieing, and AMD may or may not actually die, however they are definitely in rather dire straights, and the open sourcing of ATI was part of a number of rather desperate attempts to fix that.
Well, the problem with that is that and the reason for copyright is that one of your statements isn't true.
Everyone can trade a movie. Everyone can copy a movie. Everyone can distribute a movie to basically anywhere that has electricity. The problem is that while everyone can make a movie, not everyone can make a movie that is worth watching. Creative works are still scarce, even if their distributions, once created, aren't. Skilled writers, directors, artists, actors, etc are rare and so their work is valuable. The result of that work, once created, and how to translate some of the value of the creation onto it's copies is the problem that copyright tries to solve.
This isn't a new problem, ideas have always been infinitely copyable while their creators are not it's just gotten worse.
Most people understand this, and are willing to pay a fair rate for them. The debate in the real world is mostly what that fair rate should be and how it will all get worked out.
Disney's problem is that the vault isn't going to work anymore, and their largest asset is still and probably always will be their back catalog of classics. In the old days they kept the value of these things up by taking them off the market, they're still trying this, but it's probably not going to work anymore. I've got a 4 week old, and I would like to share some of the memories of my childhood with him including the classic Disney movies. Most parents feel the same way. While I am by no means rich, I am perfectly happy to pay a reasonable rate to purchase legitimate copies of these movies. It costs me money, but I don't really pirate movies anymore, and buying the old classics is pretty good value for money IMO. On the other hand, if I'm not given the option to pay someone money for a product I want, and I can acquire that product by another means, I don't feel too bad about it.
Disney are starting to wake up to this fact and to realize they can't completely control distribution, but they also don't really want a glut of back catalog stock sitting in stores all over the world slowly dropping in price and value. By creating a digital distribution scheme, Disney can, in theory, provide access to the movies that people want to buy whenever they want to buy them without drastically reducing their value and sale price through oversupply.
Personally I'm reserving judgment until I see more details and read some reviews. Pay once use anywhere, if it works, is actually a pretty cool service and one which is worth paying for. It's content as a license but with all the benefits of a license instead of the usual deal which is content as a license, but sold to you like a physical product, all the restrictions, none of the flexibility. That's a major pet peeve of mine, if I'm paying for a license I should be able to exercise that license in anyway I see fit, at any time, and to get a new copy of the product I've licensed whenever I want, if I've bought a physical product I can do whatever I want with it, you can't have it both ways.
Disney haven't been too unethical over they years, they've extended or modified the DVD spec a few times, and that's certainly caused some issues, but I haven't heard of them suing anyone, or being particularly evil. I'm not a huge fan of the Disney vault, but it's good business sense and within their legal and ethical rights.
That doesn't mean this will work properly, or that their won't be risks involved(early adopters always take risks, if you bought an HD-DVD you've got movies that won't play on anything when your player dies and that's physical media), but it's not a fundamentally bad idea or fundamentally evil.
Well aside from the fact that AMD is slowly dieing anyway, and was rather desperate when they open sourced the drivers, they have a vastly different architecture.
They don't use a shared driver model the way that NVIDIA does, and from my experiences their drivers aren't anywhere near as optimized either. Also unlike NVIDIA's linux drivers, theirs were a steaming pile of crap which should never have been released.
The point is that NVIDIA has fully supported Linux for quite a number of years in a way that no other graphics card manufacturer and very few other hardware manufacturers have. They've created stable quality drivers with good performance. They've updated them frequently to deal with changing kernel APIs and included the same upgrades they've done in their Windows architecture into the shared code in their Linux driver. They've done all this with their own resources. This simple fact is constantly over looked because they haven't open sourced the drivers.
Open Source is good, being able to modify your code is always better than not being able to. However, not having to is better than either, especially when you're talking about really complex and specialized code that the vast majority, even of developers, couldn't actually do that modification. Nvidia's drivers work, they're frequently updated and fully supported. My Nvidia video cards have always "just worked". Which is a lot more than I can say for my ATI cards, or my wireless network card, or my sound card, or half a dozen other pieces of hardware from vendors who decided they couldn't be bothered supporting Linux or who threw the source code of a piece of crap driver out into the community and said "you deal with it".
They might very well do that, but in order to do it, they have to actually buy it first. Sun can't afford to give away anything at the moment because they're financially screwed and their stock holders would burn them alive.
They probably don't care that much about MySQL, that isn't why they bought Sun(or why IBM tried to buy Sun earlier). To be honest, I don't think they ever thought that the whole MySQL thing would cause them the dramas it has, especially not during the whole global recession when everyone was approving everything.
Now of course, they probably think that going ahead as is will take them less time than backing out and trying to sell off the MySQL component of Sun, getting that sale approved, and then trying to run the acquisition through again. Sun doesn't really have all that much longer to live, and if Oracle were interested in trying to grab up Sun assets at the bankruptcy fire sale, they'd have just waited for Sun to collapse on its own. If the EC ordered them to sell off MySQL as soon as possible as part of the deal, they'd probably still go through with it. They just don't care that much about MySQL.
3dfx died because they got cocky. They presumed that 16 bit and 10% faster could beat 32 bit and they were wrong. They presumed that glide(I think that's what it was called) could beat OpenGL and Direct3d, they were wrong.
There was a Voodoo 5, but no one bought it, and by the time NVIDIA bought them there was no product line to bother discontinuing and they got the company for a song, grabbed what they could use and threw the rest away like the worthless pile of crap it was.
I don't know what role 3dfx had in Linux because I never owned one(chose 32 bit and slightly slower like everyone else) and wasn't using Linux that far back, but NVIDIA have been pretty supportive, and 3dfx was dead before the Xbox was even in development.
Especially since they're only competitors in the broadest of senses. MySQL isn't in anyway appropriate for seriously large data sets, and Oracle isn't in anyway appropriate for small ones. There's probably a very small market niche where they overlap, but within that niche, you'd probably be better of with MS SQL anyway, which seems to be the middle level product for that market.
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I'm well aware that this provides companies with comparative advantage(though in the end everyone outsources and you lose it). Lower production costs nearly always do.
I'm also totally in agreement with the fact that the currencies will eventually reach equilibrium.
The problem is that having the US dollar and the Indian rupee reach equilibrium would essentially increase the buying power of the average Indian and decrease the buying power of the average American, that's changes in the value of currency do, and it's what outsourcing does. It also causes an increase in the standard of living for the Indian and a decrease in the standard of living for the American. That's pretty basic economics. Pour money out of one country and into another country and the destination country gets richer and the source country gets poorer. This is especially the case when you have a massive trade deficit like the US.
Now that's not necessarily a fundamentally bad thing, it's certainly not a bad thing if you're an Indian. It is however when combined with no net decrease in the price you sell things for unsustainable. You cannot continue to sell high to Americans and buy cheap from the third world because eventually when you outsource enough jobs for a long enough time, the economic prosperity in your country collapses and people can't afford to pay the prices you were selling at. You then end up basically on the same margins you were at before only all your staff ar in another country.
As I said it's not necessarily a bad thing for this to happen. A few billion people in India would be quite happy with this sort of situation. The problem is that it's not necessarily in your long term best interest. Everyone outsourced to China and now China is probably the worlds strongest economy and the US economy is still going down the toilet. Add to that the fact that since the Chinese are making everything anyway they've started selling their own brands which come out of the same factories, and you reach a situation where the original outsourcing company has created their own competition which since they still have to pay their management fat western salaries they can't compete with.
Communication is important.
Communication is important
COMMUNICATION IS IMPORTANT
That's not to say there aren't plenty of people with fluff degrees(any country which requires a university degree to manage a McDonald's is basically going to guarantee that) or to devalue the contribution of people who actually make things, but COMMUNICATION IS IMPORTANT.
If you can't tell people you have a product, you can't sell it. If you don't have managers you can't keep things going. A lot of different kinds of people are necessary to make any endeavor work, not just the guy who makes things. I know this, even though I'm one of the folks who makes things.
It doesn't take an awful lot of money to set up a burger joint on the side of the road. You need a bit of land, some bricks and a stove.
Building roads(not just providing services on them) is a lot more expensive and a lot more complicated. You cannot build an efficient network of roads through market forces. It just doesn't work. 50 people can't build roads in a way which makes any damned sense. We're not talking about using them, we're talking about putting them in in the first place. The same goes for an awful lot of things. Certain types of infrastructure are just too complicated and expensive for multiple entities to maintain. That basically leaves you with the government or some giant mega corp(or consortium of smaller corporations).
Well there's a couple of things to refute there. First of all, the Bush years were fairly untypical, the left came up with some bloody awful candidates and so the fairly inoffensive Bush got into power. Normally that wouldn't be too bad, or to atypical, like every country we've had caretaker leaders before and we will have them again. The problem was that some of his advisers were not idiots and were in fact somewhat blatantly evil(Dick Cheney for instance). I confess I'm not that old, but I've certainly never seen a leadership worse than Bush/Cheney in the US.
The government is indeed a disaster, but in large part it is the political and legal history of the country which has made it so, not some farce.
I'm not going to get into an argument with you about freedoms because quite obviously you're a libertarian and we'll never agree that anything but total freedom is any good. I'm not saying that the US hasn't gone a bit backward, but we're not going to agree.
The point I will argue with is that somehow because of this, the people who paid the taxes that helped pay for your school when you were too young to work. Who paid the taxes which almost certainly helped fund the university you most likely attended. The people who worked hard, paid their taxes and did their part. Aren't entitled to the same consideration from you when you can work and they can't. Whatever mistakes the general populace have made over the last 50 years, however much you may disagree with them, that doesn't change the fact that they did their part so that you could have what you have today, and that it's not too much to expect a bit of dignity in their old age.
FFS I'm tired of every country giving this argument.
Yes, in the grand scheme of things, no country on its own can make a difference to global emissions, but if every country does their part, that will make a massive difference.
How about in exchange for a lifetime of paying taxes and contributing to the economic productivity of their employer, their country, and the human population in general?
People aren't generally worthless incapacitated and elderly all that long. Even the best of modern medicine doesn't keep people for very long once they've reached that point, they stop keeping themselves alive. Increased lifespan also, at least to some extent keeps people fit enough to work longer, and most of them do.
I'm not suggesting that we should maintain life in people who are for all intents and purposes dead, but I don't think it's too much to ask for people who have worked their whole lives, paid taxes, and contributed to society to expect that society to show them some degree of care and dignity when they are no longer able to continue to do so. We live in an age of abundance, we don't need to stick our elderly out on an ice flow for the good of the tribe, we can afford to feed them and us.
If the libertarians ever got their way we'd just end up with government by another name. Pretty much the cornerstone of economics is that you can do a lot more with a little bit of from everyone than you can with a lot from a few people. The world would still need roads and those roads would have to be built either by some private enterprise or by groups of citizens. Either way you've got a department of transportation. It's either selected by the people, or it's selected by the some private company. It doesn't really make any difference. Anarchy doesn't work and government isn't going away. If your privatized it it wouldn't all of a sudden magically work better. This is why the only major libertarian candidate in the last election wanted to go back to the gold standard which would have somehow required either finding an awful lot more gold or getting rid of the vast majority of the money in the US economy somehow.
Like most conservatives(social, economic, environmental), libertarians want to go back in time, and like most social conservatives the time they want to go back to never really existed. I'm certainly no proponent of progress for the sake of progress or change for the sake of change, but we can't go back in time, it just isn't possible. We can't go back to all growing our own food in our backyards or going without electricity, because a lot of people would end up starving and starving humans in large numbers tend not to fade away quietly, we can't go back to social norms of the 1950's because they didn't even work then, we can't go back to the Jeffersonian ideal because even Jefferson didn't actually live it.
We've been standing on the brink of a new future for a long time trying to legislate our way back into the past, and it's just not working. I don't know what's out there, it might be good, it might be bad, but it's almost certainly going to be better than what we have now. I'd rather a new world order as terrible as that sounds than the old world order doing all the things we're afraid of but doing them to try and move us backward.
A lot of techies are for all intents and purposes illiterate, at least when it comes to any form of communication which the general populace can understand.
That's not to say that style over substance isn't a bad idea, but I've met very very few techies over the years who would make even remotely good managers, let alone high level executives in any company which wasn't 100% technically based.
It's not necessarily important for engineers to be in executive level positions. A lot of them would make a complete hash of it the same way that having a lot of people who are currently executives wouldn't work either. What is important is for executives to hear and to value the opinions and knowledge of engineers, programmers, etc where it is applicable to the health of the overall business. The problem is that by the time any technical advice has passed through half a dozen middle managers to finally reach someone who can actually do anything with it, it's become so garbled that it doesn't make any sense, even if they were going to listen to it.
That said, it's not just management's fault either. I know a lot of tech people who think they know how a business should be run, who haven't any sort of clue whatsoever. I've seen a lot of people who think that IT should drive the direction of the business as opposed to the business driving the direction of IT. IT is, for the most part, a service industry, and we all forget that more often than we should.
You're right in the fact that in a certain sense it is a good idea, and outsourcing to quality people(and as much as I've wished in the past it wasn't so, there are some damned good and highly qualified IT folks in India) isn't necessarily a bad thing.
The problem with the American version of outsourcing is that it's very short sighted, like a lot of US policy government or otherwise.
Outsourcing is immensely profitable because you can buy goods at foreign prices and sell them to Americans at American prices. The problem with this is that as you lower employment in the US and move money overseas, there is less of it in the US to support US prices. Eventually the standard of living in the countries you outsourced to will rise increasing your outsourced costs, and the standard of living in the US will lower decreasing your revenues.
There's certainly something to be said for the idea that averaging out the world standard of living, but it's not a particularly great long term strategy for the US market. Particularly not luxury markets which may be cut out entirely if standard of living drops sufficiently.
That said, the United States economy is probably irrevocably fucked anyway at this point. The national debt skyrocketed out of control under Bush(even worse than it was under Reagan), and though I believe that most of the changes are necessary there's really no money left for any of Obama's plans to fix anything(isn't it funny that Reagan and the Dubya who are supposed to be from the party of small government are responsible for the vast majority of US debt?). The dollar is no longer considered safe and will likely continue dropping against nearly all major foreign currencies(possibly excluding the GBP which is also screwed). Most importantly, the US has done almost nothing to change any of the factors which got it into the position it is currently in. There has been no change in attitude towards sustainable economic policies(and I'm talking finance not environment here), or towards any of the economic stabilizers like workers rights and protection from unfair termination(you'd be amazed what having the vast majority of your population fairly confident they're not going to be randomly fired can to for keeping your economy a bit more stable). The US has been digging a hole under itself for a long time now, and it is about to fall in. It's going to be a long fall, and it may not be possible anymore to prevent it.
Personally this doesn't particularly please me for all that I live in another country now. I see a lot of people who want to see the US get its comeuppance, but I'm not sure how thrilled I am with the prospect of a world in which the primary super power is China. The US has made and continues to make an awful lot of mistakes, and it may be that the only way for us to learn from those mistakes is to face the consequences, but at the same time a large proportion of the western world depends on the US for military security. Even without that, while US foreign policy is often short sighted and misguided, it is largely well intentioned and I still hope that it isn't too late to prevent the coming fall.
It's true that almost everyone has muscle memory, but it doesn't really work the way you seem to be saying.
Yes if you wrote out your notes a hundred thousand times you could probably rewrite them and then read them, but muscle memory isn't going to help you remember what they said, and writing them out once isn't going to give you muscle memory.
A pianist who practices a piece over and over and over again can quite often play it back from muscle memory. That doesn't necessarily mean that they could tell you what any particular note actually was. The practice involved in acquiring that muscle memory might very well give them that knowledge, but it's not from the muscle memory.
It's actually both.
When you have a shallow learning curve, your requirement for additional knowledge increases gradually over time. This means that while it might take you a lot longer to actually become an expert, you can get going with the concept almost immediately.
A steep learning curve is essentially the opposite. You'll have to become an expert to actually use the concept. Generally speaking this means you'll get to be an expert one hell of a lot faster, but it's going to be a lot harder to get there and you might not actually make it.
Metaphorically it's a bit like walking up a ramp as compared with climbing a wall. If you climb the wall you'll be at the top a lot faster, but it'll take a lot more work and people who aren't really that good at climbing walls might not make it.
For most people, becoming an expert over a long period of time is better, both because it's easier on them and because they'll actually be able to do some work a lot quicker.
That is entirely dependent on the individual and their learning style.
Some people do learn that way, some people do not, some people learn better by reading, or speaking or listening, or teaching others. Back in high school I used to program my calculator to do the problems on the homework and while I couldn't use those programs in class, explaining how to do something to the calculator generally gave me a pretty good understanding of it myself.
What it states is that the phrase "____ will release this information to comply with search warrants" constitutes adequate notification that they will release the information to comply with search warrants and that the e-mail user does not have to be notified that the information has been released to comply with a search warrant.
The search warrant is still required, you are still given privacy of your e-mail, and the search warrant must still be reasonable and legal. The only thing this does is say that if your ISP has warned you they will release this information to the authorities under a search warrant, they don't have to tell you that you've been searched.
I know that on slashdot we don't(including me) generally RTFA, but it would be nice if the person posting it would RTFA, or if the no name blogger who wrote it would RTF Opinion(which he acknowledges later he did not adequately do.
Personally I think that ISPs probably should notify you, and I would certainly switch providers if I found out mine had not, but if you're going to disagree with this opinion, at least disagree with it as opposed to random FUD.
Email encryption never hit mainstream because it doesn't work.
Encryption works, public keys work, private keys work, however acquiring and distributing those keys is a dogs breakfast, which means that setting it up and configuring it just doesn't work.
For PKI to work it actually requires a trusted third party to at the very least hold a directory of everyone's public keys, and most likely handle all the generation and distribution of both the private key and public key, if not the backup and archiving of the private key.
The problem with this is of course that there's no such thing as a trusted third party for something like that. The government is the only even remotely sane choice, and that's who most people using encrypted e-mail want to hide from.
The Microsoft anti-trust case evaporated because there wasn't any real solution.
Splitting up Microsoft wasn't going to work, and it never would work. They're not a telco with a retail and wholesale branch, they're a software company, and most importantly they got their monopoly at least partially through having a much better idea of what they're customers wanted and having by some measures a superior product(at least at the time).
If they'd split out Office, it wouldn't have made Office any more likely to run on Linux because of the same business reasons half the development world doesn't make Linux versions. The Mac version might be a bit better, but there wouldn't be much change. The same is true of running other Office suites on Windows.
I remember when I was younger and more passionate about ideology getting fired up about the Microsoft anti-trust case just like you, and lord knows I never liked George W Bush(hated him with an undying passion). That said I could never understand how any of their proposed solutions were going to actually solve the problem they were supposed to be solving.
There are essentially two ways for Linux to beat Windows. Either Linux and the software available on it have to be measurably better value for the customers than Windows and the software available on it, or there needs to be a standard API for operating systems which all software developers can write to(a bit like a newer and more specific version of POSIX), and Linux itself has to be measurably better value for the customer. If either of these things isn't true, the sheer volume of best of breed software products which are available on Windows and not on Linux will be enough to maintain their market dominance, even if Linux was a thousand times better than it currently is for normal people.
Splitting Microsoft up wasn't going to deliver either of these things. It wasn't going to create a more competitive environment for operating systems, or office suites, or anything else. It might have allowed Netscape to survive(which they didn't deserve to do) since any IE division would have to fund itself somehow and browsers wouldn't be free, but then we'd have expensive browsers and no Mozilla, which for me would be a loss.
It would be nice if Operating systems could have a standard set of features and interfaces and they could compete on the quality and performance of their implementation, but that's just never going to happen, and so long as this is true, Linux is going to have to compete with the whole Windows ecosystem which at the moment it just cannot do.
I know it's hard to imagine something has been done before computers, but setting a fictional account in a realistic historical setting is as old as the hills(with the Illiad being a likely example dating from as I recall about three thousand years ago in it's written form and probably substantially moreso in oral tradition).
As to the whole Army of 2, six days in fallujah thing. Army of 2 was a creepy and tasteless romp into mental illness with psychopaths wearing face masks high fiving in pools of blood, folks didn't like it for that more than for anything else, and making a game about a war which isn't over and which involves complex diplomatic issues(like the Iraq war where they hate us and we want them to like us) isn't exactly a great idea.
ATI is not necessarily dieing, and AMD may or may not actually die, however they are definitely in rather dire straights, and the open sourcing of ATI was part of a number of rather desperate attempts to fix that.
Well, the problem with that is that and the reason for copyright is that one of your statements isn't true.
Everyone can trade a movie. Everyone can copy a movie. Everyone can distribute a movie to basically anywhere that has electricity. The problem is that while everyone can make a movie, not everyone can make a movie that is worth watching. Creative works are still scarce, even if their distributions, once created, aren't. Skilled writers, directors, artists, actors, etc are rare and so their work is valuable. The result of that work, once created, and how to translate some of the value of the creation onto it's copies is the problem that copyright tries to solve.
This isn't a new problem, ideas have always been infinitely copyable while their creators are not it's just gotten worse.
Most people understand this, and are willing to pay a fair rate for them. The debate in the real world is mostly what that fair rate should be and how it will all get worked out.
Which might be why Disney is looking at a new distribution model, just a thought.
Well, I'd disagree there.
Disney's problem is that the vault isn't going to work anymore, and their largest asset is still and probably always will be their back catalog of classics. In the old days they kept the value of these things up by taking them off the market, they're still trying this, but it's probably not going to work anymore. I've got a 4 week old, and I would like to share some of the memories of my childhood with him including the classic Disney movies. Most parents feel the same way. While I am by no means rich, I am perfectly happy to pay a reasonable rate to purchase legitimate copies of these movies. It costs me money, but I don't really pirate movies anymore, and buying the old classics is pretty good value for money IMO. On the other hand, if I'm not given the option to pay someone money for a product I want, and I can acquire that product by another means, I don't feel too bad about it.
Disney are starting to wake up to this fact and to realize they can't completely control distribution, but they also don't really want a glut of back catalog stock sitting in stores all over the world slowly dropping in price and value. By creating a digital distribution scheme, Disney can, in theory, provide access to the movies that people want to buy whenever they want to buy them without drastically reducing their value and sale price through oversupply.
Personally I'm reserving judgment until I see more details and read some reviews. Pay once use anywhere, if it works, is actually a pretty cool service and one which is worth paying for. It's content as a license but with all the benefits of a license instead of the usual deal which is content as a license, but sold to you like a physical product, all the restrictions, none of the flexibility. That's a major pet peeve of mine, if I'm paying for a license I should be able to exercise that license in anyway I see fit, at any time, and to get a new copy of the product I've licensed whenever I want, if I've bought a physical product I can do whatever I want with it, you can't have it both ways.
Disney haven't been too unethical over they years, they've extended or modified the DVD spec a few times, and that's certainly caused some issues, but I haven't heard of them suing anyone, or being particularly evil. I'm not a huge fan of the Disney vault, but it's good business sense and within their legal and ethical rights.
That doesn't mean this will work properly, or that their won't be risks involved(early adopters always take risks, if you bought an HD-DVD you've got movies that won't play on anything when your player dies and that's physical media), but it's not a fundamentally bad idea or fundamentally evil.
Well aside from the fact that AMD is slowly dieing anyway, and was rather desperate when they open sourced the drivers, they have a vastly different architecture.
They don't use a shared driver model the way that NVIDIA does, and from my experiences their drivers aren't anywhere near as optimized either. Also unlike NVIDIA's linux drivers, theirs were a steaming pile of crap which should never have been released.
The point is that NVIDIA has fully supported Linux for quite a number of years in a way that no other graphics card manufacturer and very few other hardware manufacturers have. They've created stable quality drivers with good performance. They've updated them frequently to deal with changing kernel APIs and included the same upgrades they've done in their Windows architecture into the shared code in their Linux driver. They've done all this with their own resources. This simple fact is constantly over looked because they haven't open sourced the drivers.
Open Source is good, being able to modify your code is always better than not being able to. However, not having to is better than either, especially when you're talking about really complex and specialized code that the vast majority, even of developers, couldn't actually do that modification. Nvidia's drivers work, they're frequently updated and fully supported. My Nvidia video cards have always "just worked". Which is a lot more than I can say for my ATI cards, or my wireless network card, or my sound card, or half a dozen other pieces of hardware from vendors who decided they couldn't be bothered supporting Linux or who threw the source code of a piece of crap driver out into the community and said "you deal with it".
They might very well do that, but in order to do it, they have to actually buy it first. Sun can't afford to give away anything at the moment because they're financially screwed and their stock holders would burn them alive.
They probably don't care that much about MySQL, that isn't why they bought Sun(or why IBM tried to buy Sun earlier). To be honest, I don't think they ever thought that the whole MySQL thing would cause them the dramas it has, especially not during the whole global recession when everyone was approving everything.
Now of course, they probably think that going ahead as is will take them less time than backing out and trying to sell off the MySQL component of Sun, getting that sale approved, and then trying to run the acquisition through again. Sun doesn't really have all that much longer to live, and if Oracle were interested in trying to grab up Sun assets at the bankruptcy fire sale, they'd have just waited for Sun to collapse on its own. If the EC ordered them to sell off MySQL as soon as possible as part of the deal, they'd probably still go through with it. They just don't care that much about MySQL.
3dfx died because they got cocky. They presumed that 16 bit and 10% faster could beat 32 bit and they were wrong. They presumed that glide(I think that's what it was called) could beat OpenGL and Direct3d, they were wrong.
There was a Voodoo 5, but no one bought it, and by the time NVIDIA bought them there was no product line to bother discontinuing and they got the company for a song, grabbed what they could use and threw the rest away like the worthless pile of crap it was.
I don't know what role 3dfx had in Linux because I never owned one(chose 32 bit and slightly slower like everyone else) and wasn't using Linux that far back, but NVIDIA have been pretty supportive, and 3dfx was dead before the Xbox was even in development.
Especially since they're only competitors in the broadest of senses. MySQL isn't in anyway appropriate for seriously large data sets, and Oracle isn't in anyway appropriate for small ones. There's probably a very small market niche where they overlap, but within that niche, you'd probably be better of with MS SQL anyway, which seems to be the middle level product for that market.