Look, buddy. This is a real concern. Do you understand how corporations work these days? They will do anything they can to save costs. IT, code-slinging as you call it, call-center work... those are not the only jobs that can be outsourced! If companies can save money by outsourcing the bottom-rung jobs, and they can save even more money by outsourcing the higher-level jobs too, and there's no law against it, what do you think they will do?
At this point in time, what possible incentive is there for a corporation not to outsource?
What the fuck do you think is going to happen when it's generally accepted that outsourcing is a good way to increase profits?
I guess what it all comes down to is this. Which would you rather have: absolute, libertarian freedom and poverty, or slightly less freedom (as in a appropriately regulated economy) and a comfortable living?
I, and many others, would choose the latter. I mean, do you believe that the economy should be completely unregulated? Even taxes are a restriction of people's freedoms. People go to jail if they don't pay them. That's not very free. Should there be no taxes at all? People just pay for things as they use them? It's a nice idea, as it punishes freeloaders, and I like that, but it also has the effect of all the wealth concentrating in the hands of the few. We know this. It's happened before. Most people would agree that it's not worth holding on to an ideal if it reduces you to poverty. There's nothing wrong with a minimal protection such as increasing taxes for corporations that outsource (and lowering them for those that don't) if you need to protect the well-being of the citizenry.
I simply can't understand why you don't see this. The only point I thought anyone would disagree with me about is whether or not we are on the road to poverty.
That is not a sense of entitlement - it's sheer pragmatism. There are 300 million people in the US. By and large, most of them need to be employed. Now, if employers are allowed to freely outsource all but service jobs to countries where the cost of living is so low that Americans CANNOT compete, then what the fuck are the workers going to do?
If the employers in the US want to take actions that would put everyone out of work, they HAVE to be stopped. That's all there is to it. The only point up for debate here is whether they really are going to destroy the middle class or not. And I think that that's far too likely to happen to just ignore it. Don't stick your head in the sand.
There's nothing "communist" about wanting to protect the way of life of the average American. It's in their own self-interest to do so! Capitalism is not a religion, although you seem to be treating it as such. Capitalism is just a means to an end, and if it isn't properly regulated, it doesn't work.
It doesn't matter if you believe that it's the only just way to run things. I even used to think so. But in the end, capitalism only works because all the people involved agree to abide by its rules. And when you have millions of actual useful people with no jobs to go to, living only on welfare (not that we do yet), then it doesn't matter what's right or not: it's clear that something has fucked up, and if it isn't fixed, the capitalists in charge will be replaced by those who do care about the people living in this country, whether through peaceful means or not.
I personally cannot wait for the day when we'll be able to punish the greedy.
I always thought it was just a vocal minority that used Mozilla
Evidently you don't understand the meaning of the term "vocal minority". More people voting for Mozilla than for IE is exactly in line with what a vocal minority would do.
Seriously, we need to do away with the lack of accountability of the "overrated" mod. The parent, an insightful and on-topic post, was modded overrated by some C-bigot moderator on crack. Too bad you can't get those on metamod...
Anyway, here's the thing. In computer science, we don't use SI units for storage. Never have. Because it's convenient to use powers of 2 for denoting storage arrays, it's become a de facto standard with years of tradition behind it. Everything was going along fine until the hard drive (and DVD) manufacturers decided that they'd break with the standard and lie* about their hard drive capacities to make them look bigger. The only reason they can get away with that lie is because of SI units.
Now, I realize that one possible way to resolve this is to switch to a different system of measurement, but the problem is, WE shouldn't have to switch. THEY are the ones who messed everything up, and instead of them forcing us to change, we should educate people, and let them know that the hard drive manufacturers are a bunch of lying assholes.
* The specs given by hard drive manufacters are indeed lies, since they changed from using the correct measurements to the metric measurements, knowing full well that the latter were never used to measure storage capacity. Their intent was to deceive.
MEGABYTES. You mean MEGABYTES. Don't use that revisionist MiB crap - 1024^2 is MEGA in computers and always has been. Don't let storage manufacturers redefine the language for their own gain!
I think Sweden's is a ridiculous limit, and should not be held as an example for anyone else. People with small amounts of blood alcohol are not the ones causing accidents and killing people, at least not any more than sober drivers. Drunk drivers are the ones who are the real threat. There is no need to punish people who aren't a danger just because they are similar in some way to those who are.
That is legislation based on stupidity, and it's wrong.
This is offtopic, but, I like your sig. At first glance, it looks like kind of a stupid question to ask, since the answer would "obviously" be "of course he could, he could do anything". But then one realizes if he could create something that limited what he could do, then he has limits... and if he can't, then he has limits. So any in case, there are limits to omnipotence.
What's fun, though, is there's a name for problem - the Omnipotence Paradox. And it's not just a silly logic problem - it can apply to real life things, too. See here for an interesting example. What I'm wondering is... were you thinking of any of this when you thought up your sig?
Save your anger. The Indians are in the position of being your competitor. But this does not make them your enemy. The real enemy here is the CEO who lays off productive American workers that they could afford to keep while the management and executives still earn top dollars. The enemy is the beancounter who cares only about cutting costs at any cost, as it were. The enemy is the shareholder who cares about short-term profits at the expense of long-term gain.
THESE people sold out the American workers. THESE people are your enemy. Save your anger for them. One day, we will rise up and mount their heads on pikes in front of their offices. One day, justice will be done. But you must focus it on the people who truly deserve it.
Glad you responded. Wish you used BR tags in your reply though... would have made it easier to read.
Anyway, the big problem as I see it here is one of numbers. The mere existence of immigrants is not itself a problem. The huge numbers of them in recent years is. You said it yourself - we're in a native population decline. This, combined with the massive influx, leads to an inevitable demographic shift. (I don't have the numbers handy - I could look them up if I felt like doing research, which I don't.)
Bad? Not for the immigrants. But for the rest of us? I don't know; how much does white Western culture mean to you? Perhaps not much, but to many others it means a lot. It's interesting that you say that our end is inevitable since there aren't enough of us white people around. It's interesting, because this wouldn't be the case if we could simply keep our own land. We have sufficient diversity in North America right now: there's no need to bring in any more. Close the doors, and start reproducing again, and we are assured of a home in our continent, instead of white people barely existing at all in 100 years... no more than the Native Indians who we displaced long ago.
It's not a bad thing for races to have their own land where they are not a minority.
Now, before you think of me as some ugly, racist person, know that I'm not. I don't think of Chinese or Indians as bad people. They aren't - in fact, I'd say they have more of a sense of unity and of family than we do right now. This holds them together. This keeps them reproducing. Unlike us... This keeps their way of life alive. I'm just worried about my own.
You sad, misguided person. Yes, the US population is growing slowly and will soon be in a decline. But immigration is not the answer. You let in enough immigrants to offset the native population decline and what you will have is the end of the US as you know it. The immigrant populations are not assimilated into the American way of life: they bring their own cultures, they reproduce faster, and soon will displace the native Americans by there simply being many more of them. Nations cannot survive that kind of massive demographic change.
Immigration. Good for the economy, bad for the culture. Call me a racist if you want - I fear not your labels. The American culture (and Canadian too - I should know) will die, and what is now the United States will soon be New China, New India, and et cetera. Count the days.
Suppose OpenOffice and Microsoft Office are of the same quality. The argument that U.S. companies should not be allowed to outsource because it takes jobs away from "deserving" Americans, is the same as saying using OpenOffice is wrong because the money you save would otherwise have gone to Microsoft. Same "argument" SCO used when attacking the GPL and claiming that Open Source software was a detriment to the economy.
Open source software has many things going for it, but being good for the economy is not one of them! If all software was open source, there would be far less money to be made in the software industry, as selling boxed software is a big part of it that would just disappear if it was all free. And don't talk about selling support: relying on that as a business model simply promotes the support of second-rate software, and futhermore, it can't make up for the volume of the lost sales.
Similarly, outsourcing is good for US companies, but bad for US workers. What difference does it make that executives and shareholders are making more money when the only jobs left are service jobs - the only kind that can't be outsourced? What we're seeing here is the beginning of the end of the middle class. Not good for our way of life. You should care about more than the economy as some aggregate number. The well-being of your country means more than that.
How is right-clicking and selecting "Rename" any better than just clicking the frickin' icon name and typing away?
Well, for one thing, it forces you to have a large, clickable icon for every file if you want to rename it this way. If you have a listing displayed with the name being the dominant property, it's not such a great idea anymore.
Another thing, and the author mentioned this in his article, was that the rename functionality was far more likely to be accidentally triggered than intentionally used. This makes sense to me. Renaming files is not something done all that often - why does it need to have a special shortcut for doing it?
If somebody tries to shoot you but then you shoot them first, it doesn't count as a 'violent crime.' But still, maybe it would have been better if nothing had happened at all.
What the hell do you mean by maybe? If it is indeed not a 'violent crime', then not only has no wrong been committed, but a violent criminal has been shot and hopefully killed! This is a good thing! Or would you rather that violent criminals remain alive?
It's definitely a good thing to know assembly language when doing programming in a high-level language. The reasons you have outlined here are good examples.
What everyone else seems to be talking about, though, is that there's a big difference between knowing assembly language and coding real projects in it. Writing in assembly is a slow and bug-filled process, and even worse, the big thing with software is that it changes frequently: the code you spent more time writing in assembly than you would have in some high-level language might just get tossed out with the next change of requirements.
We don't like OO programming because it's perfect. We like it because it's better than the alternatives. It gives us flexibility, and this makes software easy to change, which is the most important thing. People are expensive. Cycles are cheap. We know that OO programming tends to destroy locality of reference and doesn't map well onto CPUs. We don't care! It makes our lives easier. No one cares if it runs slowly: they just care that it runs when they want it as opposed to months or years later. And besides, the parts that do run slowly can be profiled and optimized, and if necessary... coded in assembly.
Everyone wins when software is well-designed and easy to change. Performance just usually isn't an issue these days, machine performance, anyway. Coder performance is key.
When you explain it that way, it does make more sense. Reading what you said, I thought that perhaps you were doing it for the sheer joy of causing trouble for others, but it seems that that isn't the case.
You did this because you're a psychopath, right? You have to be a psychopath... There's no reason to fuck up a recycling operation "just because". No gain. Clearly you're insane.
Thanks a million for that advice... I find that Explorer blocks way more than it needs to, and finally I can do something about it. You've helped me make Windows suck just a little less.
I think that the reason is actually because at those kind of high speeds, normal jet fuel doesn't burn fast enough for the engine to stay lit. The flame literally gets blown out. Hydrogen burns much faster and can maintain a flame front.
Course, the weight savings, if they have a light form of cryogenic storage, are certainly a benefit as well.
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Look, buddy. This is a real concern. Do you understand how corporations work these days? They will do anything they can to save costs. IT, code-slinging as you call it, call-center work... those are not the only jobs that can be outsourced! If companies can save money by outsourcing the bottom-rung jobs, and they can save even more money by outsourcing the higher-level jobs too, and there's no law against it, what do you think they will do?
At this point in time, what possible incentive is there for a corporation not to outsource?
What the fuck do you think is going to happen when it's generally accepted that outsourcing is a good way to increase profits?
I guess what it all comes down to is this. Which would you rather have: absolute, libertarian freedom and poverty, or slightly less freedom (as in a appropriately regulated economy) and a comfortable living?
I, and many others, would choose the latter. I mean, do you believe that the economy should be completely unregulated? Even taxes are a restriction of people's freedoms. People go to jail if they don't pay them. That's not very free. Should there be no taxes at all? People just pay for things as they use them? It's a nice idea, as it punishes freeloaders, and I like that, but it also has the effect of all the wealth concentrating in the hands of the few. We know this. It's happened before. Most people would agree that it's not worth holding on to an ideal if it reduces you to poverty. There's nothing wrong with a minimal protection such as increasing taxes for corporations that outsource (and lowering them for those that don't) if you need to protect the well-being of the citizenry.
I simply can't understand why you don't see this. The only point I thought anyone would disagree with me about is whether or not we are on the road to poverty.
That is not a sense of entitlement - it's sheer pragmatism. There are 300 million people in the US. By and large, most of them need to be employed. Now, if employers are allowed to freely outsource all but service jobs to countries where the cost of living is so low that Americans CANNOT compete, then what the fuck are the workers going to do?
If the employers in the US want to take actions that would put everyone out of work, they HAVE to be stopped. That's all there is to it. The only point up for debate here is whether they really are going to destroy the middle class or not. And I think that that's far too likely to happen to just ignore it. Don't stick your head in the sand.
There's nothing "communist" about wanting to protect the way of life of the average American. It's in their own self-interest to do so! Capitalism is not a religion, although you seem to be treating it as such. Capitalism is just a means to an end, and if it isn't properly regulated, it doesn't work.
It doesn't matter if you believe that it's the only just way to run things. I even used to think so. But in the end, capitalism only works because all the people involved agree to abide by its rules. And when you have millions of actual useful people with no jobs to go to, living only on welfare (not that we do yet), then it doesn't matter what's right or not: it's clear that something has fucked up, and if it isn't fixed, the capitalists in charge will be replaced by those who do care about the people living in this country, whether through peaceful means or not.
I personally cannot wait for the day when we'll be able to punish the greedy.
Overrated when it was scored at 1 to start with?
Seriously, we need to do away with the lack of accountability of the "overrated" mod. The parent, an insightful and on-topic post, was modded overrated by some C-bigot moderator on crack. Too bad you can't get those on metamod...
I just want to say: I admire you for standing up for what's right here. Welcome to my friends list.
Wow, a mod war on my comment!
Anyway, here's the thing. In computer science, we don't use SI units for storage. Never have. Because it's convenient to use powers of 2 for denoting storage arrays, it's become a de facto standard with years of tradition behind it. Everything was going along fine until the hard drive (and DVD) manufacturers decided that they'd break with the standard and lie* about their hard drive capacities to make them look bigger. The only reason they can get away with that lie is because of SI units.
Now, I realize that one possible way to resolve this is to switch to a different system of measurement, but the problem is, WE shouldn't have to switch. THEY are the ones who messed everything up, and instead of them forcing us to change, we should educate people, and let them know that the hard drive manufacturers are a bunch of lying assholes.
* The specs given by hard drive manufacters are indeed lies, since they changed from using the correct measurements to the metric measurements, knowing full well that the latter were never used to measure storage capacity. Their intent was to deceive.
MEGABYTES. You mean MEGABYTES. Don't use that revisionist MiB crap - 1024^2 is MEGA in computers and always has been. Don't let storage manufacturers redefine the language for their own gain!
I think Sweden's is a ridiculous limit, and should not be held as an example for anyone else. People with small amounts of blood alcohol are not the ones causing accidents and killing people, at least not any more than sober drivers. Drunk drivers are the ones who are the real threat. There is no need to punish people who aren't a danger just because they are similar in some way to those who are.
That is legislation based on stupidity, and it's wrong.
Minor nitpick: b doesn't approach Pi, it approaches e. Otherwise, that looks like the formula I've seen in an article on this subject.
This is offtopic, but, I like your sig. At first glance, it looks like kind of a stupid question to ask, since the answer would "obviously" be "of course he could, he could do anything". But then one realizes if he could create something that limited what he could do, then he has limits... and if he can't, then he has limits. So any in case, there are limits to omnipotence.
What's fun, though, is there's a name for problem - the Omnipotence Paradox. And it's not just a silly logic problem - it can apply to real life things, too. See here for an interesting example. What I'm wondering is... were you thinking of any of this when you thought up your sig?
My friend...
Save your anger. The Indians are in the position of being your competitor. But this does not make them your enemy. The real enemy here is the CEO who lays off productive American workers that they could afford to keep while the management and executives still earn top dollars. The enemy is the beancounter who cares only about cutting costs at any cost, as it were. The enemy is the shareholder who cares about short-term profits at the expense of long-term gain.
THESE people sold out the American workers. THESE people are your enemy. Save your anger for them. One day, we will rise up and mount their heads on pikes in front of their offices. One day, justice will be done. But you must focus it on the people who truly deserve it.
Glad you responded. Wish you used BR tags in your reply though... would have made it easier to read.
Anyway, the big problem as I see it here is one of numbers. The mere existence of immigrants is not itself a problem. The huge numbers of them in recent years is. You said it yourself - we're in a native population decline. This, combined with the massive influx, leads to an inevitable demographic shift. (I don't have the numbers handy - I could look them up if I felt like doing research, which I don't.)
Bad? Not for the immigrants. But for the rest of us? I don't know; how much does white Western culture mean to you? Perhaps not much, but to many others it means a lot. It's interesting that you say that our end is inevitable since there aren't enough of us white people around. It's interesting, because this wouldn't be the case if we could simply keep our own land. We have sufficient diversity in North America right now: there's no need to bring in any more. Close the doors, and start reproducing again, and we are assured of a home in our continent, instead of white people barely existing at all in 100 years... no more than the Native Indians who we displaced long ago.
It's not a bad thing for races to have their own land where they are not a minority.
Now, before you think of me as some ugly, racist person, know that I'm not. I don't think of Chinese or Indians as bad people. They aren't - in fact, I'd say they have more of a sense of unity and of family than we do right now. This holds them together. This keeps them reproducing. Unlike us... This keeps their way of life alive. I'm just worried about my own.
You sad, misguided person. Yes, the US population is growing slowly and will soon be in a decline. But immigration is not the answer. You let in enough immigrants to offset the native population decline and what you will have is the end of the US as you know it. The immigrant populations are not assimilated into the American way of life: they bring their own cultures, they reproduce faster, and soon will displace the native Americans by there simply being many more of them. Nations cannot survive that kind of massive demographic change.
Immigration. Good for the economy, bad for the culture. Call me a racist if you want - I fear not your labels. The American culture (and Canadian too - I should know) will die, and what is now the United States will soon be New China, New India, and et cetera. Count the days.
Open source software has many things going for it, but being good for the economy is not one of them! If all software was open source, there would be far less money to be made in the software industry, as selling boxed software is a big part of it that would just disappear if it was all free. And don't talk about selling support: relying on that as a business model simply promotes the support of second-rate software, and futhermore, it can't make up for the volume of the lost sales.
Similarly, outsourcing is good for US companies, but bad for US workers. What difference does it make that executives and shareholders are making more money when the only jobs left are service jobs - the only kind that can't be outsourced? What we're seeing here is the beginning of the end of the middle class. Not good for our way of life. You should care about more than the economy as some aggregate number. The well-being of your country means more than that.
Funny... I was about to suggest exactly the same thing.
Another thing, and the author mentioned this in his article, was that the rename functionality was far more likely to be accidentally triggered than intentionally used. This makes sense to me. Renaming files is not something done all that often - why does it need to have a special shortcut for doing it?
It's definitely a good thing to know assembly language when doing programming in a high-level language. The reasons you have outlined here are good examples.
What everyone else seems to be talking about, though, is that there's a big difference between knowing assembly language and coding real projects in it. Writing in assembly is a slow and bug-filled process, and even worse, the big thing with software is that it changes frequently: the code you spent more time writing in assembly than you would have in some high-level language might just get tossed out with the next change of requirements.
We don't like OO programming because it's perfect. We like it because it's better than the alternatives. It gives us flexibility, and this makes software easy to change, which is the most important thing. People are expensive. Cycles are cheap. We know that OO programming tends to destroy locality of reference and doesn't map well onto CPUs. We don't care! It makes our lives easier. No one cares if it runs slowly: they just care that it runs when they want it as opposed to months or years later. And besides, the parts that do run slowly can be profiled and optimized, and if necessary... coded in assembly.
Everyone wins when software is well-designed and easy to change. Performance just usually isn't an issue these days, machine performance, anyway. Coder performance is key.
When you explain it that way, it does make more sense. Reading what you said, I thought that perhaps you were doing it for the sheer joy of causing trouble for others, but it seems that that isn't the case.
My apologies for calling you a psychopath.
You did this because you're a psychopath, right? You have to be a psychopath... There's no reason to fuck up a recycling operation "just because". No gain. Clearly you're insane.
Thanks a million for that advice... I find that Explorer blocks way more than it needs to, and finally I can do something about it. You've helped me make Windows suck just a little less.
I think that the reason is actually because at those kind of high speeds, normal jet fuel doesn't burn fast enough for the engine to stay lit. The flame literally gets blown out. Hydrogen burns much faster and can maintain a flame front.
Course, the weight savings, if they have a light form of cryogenic storage, are certainly a benefit as well.
Benzapp:
I'd like to know more. About this, about multiculturalism, about... everything. About you. How do you know all this? How do you see all this?
Email me. Let's talk.