Should all exclusivity agreements be banned, then?
If a company can sign an contract agreeing to use one specific supplier as their exclusive supplier of candlesticks, why can't it, instead, do the same in-house, and sign a contract agreeing to use people from one particular labor union as its exclusive supplier of candlestick-making employees?
There's a lot of horse-trading going on, yes, but they nonetheless succeed in maintaining relatively good worker protections and benefits. Consider how much better German car companies treat their unionized German workers vs. their nonunionized American workers.
The U.S. is an odd place in many ways, on all sides: how the unions operate, how employers operate, and how labor law operates (which in turn influences those things).
In Germany's export-manufacturing sector, automation hasn't really made unions irrelevant. Nor has it in Denmark's. But unions there are a bit different, as is the overall political climate. In particular, large employer confederations and large union confederations negotiate more frequently, and on a more consensus-oriented basis.
That's a bit of an inherent feature, isn't it? Unions only exist in workplaces where a union is successfully set up, therefore they are more likely to exist at workplaces where setting them up is easier to do.
Fairly U.S.-specific as well. In Scandinavia, most workers are covered by a union, because the legal environment for how they get set up is much different.
That's also a question, but I'm not sure that's "the real question". To me, why a giant corporation with business-critical e-commerce systems can't withstand a DDoS is a more puzzling question than why there exists, somewhere in the world, someone with stupid opinions.
Well, sure, if you're not using good techniques, or training them well. Gmail is an example of doing it right, and has a very low false-positive rate, while not resorting to blanket domain blacklists. Why can't Microsoft and Yahoo match Google's performance there?
I could maybe see their necessity 10 or 15 years ago, but statistical classification techniques are good enough these days that a blunt tool like a domain blacklist doesn't really make much sense. Heck, Paul Graham was arguing that seven years ago, and it hasn't gotten less true.
That's pretty interesting too; somehow I missed that one, since I guess I wasn't paying attention to Google Labs. The one I was thinking of was mid-2000s, though. There's a blog post from 2006 about it here. I believe it was on by default, but did anything on a minority of terms, and at some point was removed again.
I could've sworn that Google rolled something like this out, and then canned it (or at least removed it from the UI). If you searched for something ambiguous, like java, Google used to cluster the results, with one cluster being about Java-the-language, another about Java-the-island, and a third about java-the-coffee. So they clearly had some sort of ontology of terms and way of contextually attributing them.
What's curious is that the summary basically says as much in the same sentence: the attacks were intended to pressure the U.S. for the release of Omar Abdel-Rahman.
If I front some capital, can I become the next Shapeways? Do I just buy machines people can't afford, and then print things on those machines, selling them at a markup sufficient to recoup my costs? Or is there something else going on?
California has actually formalized it for half of a 4-year degree: the 4-year UC and Cal State schools are required to accept transfers in for the last two years from a community college. So you can pay the $2k/yr CC rate for the first two years, then transfer in to a $10k/yr UC, ending up with a UC degree but at effectively a ~40% discount.
Slightly more restricted than "every SNES game", it's actually every regular-release SNES game sold at retail in the US, Canada, and/or Mexico. He bought them to improve the emulation quality of his emulator, bsnes.
He says he'll use the proceeds of this sale to purchase other SNES games he doesn't have, such as assembling the complete collection of games released in Europe.
On the contrary, comrade, gamification is scientifically correct, as proven by Lenin and Stalin themselves! With its spirit roused by brotherly competition, there is no end to what the proletariat may joyfully achieve in its struggle to build socialism!
One advantage sometimes touted is that you can reuse code between server and client sides, or even move it between the two as changing needs dictate. For example, you could use the same syntax-highlighting code to syntax-highlight "offline" on the server side and "online" in a live client-side text field.
Reminds me of why Kevin Mitnick was put in solitary confinement:
Dubbed the "most dangerous hacker in the world," Mitnick was put in solitary confinement and prevented from using a phone after law enforcement officials convinced a judge that he had the ability to start a nuclear war by whistling into a pay phone.
He and his mother have described it as such. I guess it depends on your threshold. He was allowed to receive occasional family visitors, but was held in a cell by himself 23 hours/day, which is a typical solitary-confinement setup.
That's the main reason Debian is against applications shipping their own static versions of libraries instead of using the system library, because it requires everyone be on top of updating, especially for security issues. If everyone links with the Debian libfoo, then if there's a security issue they can just update it. But if some projects have their own local copy of libfoo in their git tree, then you're hoping the upstream maintainer is going to promptly re-sync it. Often that doesn't happen: projects sometimes ship ancient internal versions of libraries where they just did a cp -r into their own project tree years ago and never kept up with updates. So Debian expends considerable effort ripping out these local forks.
Slashdot Mirror
Should all exclusivity agreements be banned, then?
If a company can sign an contract agreeing to use one specific supplier as their exclusive supplier of candlesticks, why can't it, instead, do the same in-house, and sign a contract agreeing to use people from one particular labor union as its exclusive supplier of candlestick-making employees?
There's a lot of horse-trading going on, yes, but they nonetheless succeed in maintaining relatively good worker protections and benefits. Consider how much better German car companies treat their unionized German workers vs. their nonunionized American workers.
The U.S. is an odd place in many ways, on all sides: how the unions operate, how employers operate, and how labor law operates (which in turn influences those things).
In Germany's export-manufacturing sector, automation hasn't really made unions irrelevant. Nor has it in Denmark's. But unions there are a bit different, as is the overall political climate. In particular, large employer confederations and large union confederations negotiate more frequently, and on a more consensus-oriented basis.
That's a bit of an inherent feature, isn't it? Unions only exist in workplaces where a union is successfully set up, therefore they are more likely to exist at workplaces where setting them up is easier to do.
Fairly U.S.-specific as well. In Scandinavia, most workers are covered by a union, because the legal environment for how they get set up is much different.
That's also a question, but I'm not sure that's "the real question". To me, why a giant corporation with business-critical e-commerce systems can't withstand a DDoS is a more puzzling question than why there exists, somewhere in the world, someone with stupid opinions.
Well, sure, if you're not using good techniques, or training them well. Gmail is an example of doing it right, and has a very low false-positive rate, while not resorting to blanket domain blacklists. Why can't Microsoft and Yahoo match Google's performance there?
I could maybe see their necessity 10 or 15 years ago, but statistical classification techniques are good enough these days that a blunt tool like a domain blacklist doesn't really make much sense. Heck, Paul Graham was arguing that seven years ago, and it hasn't gotten less true.
That's pretty interesting too; somehow I missed that one, since I guess I wasn't paying attention to Google Labs. The one I was thinking of was mid-2000s, though. There's a blog post from 2006 about it here. I believe it was on by default, but did anything on a minority of terms, and at some point was removed again.
I could've sworn that Google rolled something like this out, and then canned it (or at least removed it from the UI). If you searched for something ambiguous, like java, Google used to cluster the results, with one cluster being about Java-the-language, another about Java-the-island, and a third about java-the-coffee. So they clearly had some sort of ontology of terms and way of contextually attributing them.
Schrage pointed out that that the whole experience illustrated the clear value of Facebook's notice and comment process.
It certainly succeeded in illustrating the value that process had, yes.
What's curious is that the summary basically says as much in the same sentence: the attacks were intended to pressure the U.S. for the release of Omar Abdel-Rahman.
He's a fan of AMD perhaps?
Postgres has a status page on that, fwiw.
If I front some capital, can I become the next Shapeways? Do I just buy machines people can't afford, and then print things on those machines, selling them at a markup sufficient to recoup my costs? Or is there something else going on?
California has actually formalized it for half of a 4-year degree: the 4-year UC and Cal State schools are required to accept transfers in for the last two years from a community college. So you can pay the $2k/yr CC rate for the first two years, then transfer in to a $10k/yr UC, ending up with a UC degree but at effectively a ~40% discount.
The Harvard version actually covers the full "cost of attendance", including the price of staying in the dorms and buying a meal plan.
Hell, Harvard is free too, if your family makes under $60k (about the 60th percentile). Well, assuming you can get into Harvard.
Slightly more restricted than "every SNES game", it's actually every regular-release SNES game sold at retail in the US, Canada, and/or Mexico. He bought them to improve the emulation quality of his emulator, bsnes.
He says he'll use the proceeds of this sale to purchase other SNES games he doesn't have, such as assembling the complete collection of games released in Europe.
Look, Hatta, we've already been over this: the pieces of flair aren't mandatory. They're self-expression. You want to express yourself, don't you?
On the contrary, comrade, gamification is scientifically correct, as proven by Lenin and Stalin themselves! With its spirit roused by brotherly competition, there is no end to what the proletariat may joyfully achieve in its struggle to build socialism!
One advantage sometimes touted is that you can reuse code between server and client sides, or even move it between the two as changing needs dictate. For example, you could use the same syntax-highlighting code to syntax-highlight "offline" on the server side and "online" in a live client-side text field.
Reminds me of why Kevin Mitnick was put in solitary confinement:
He and his mother have described it as such. I guess it depends on your threshold. He was allowed to receive occasional family visitors, but was held in a cell by himself 23 hours/day, which is a typical solitary-confinement setup.
I guess that's why we're in such dire straits.
That's the main reason Debian is against applications shipping their own static versions of libraries instead of using the system library, because it requires everyone be on top of updating, especially for security issues. If everyone links with the Debian libfoo, then if there's a security issue they can just update it. But if some projects have their own local copy of libfoo in their git tree, then you're hoping the upstream maintainer is going to promptly re-sync it. Often that doesn't happen: projects sometimes ship ancient internal versions of libraries where they just did a cp -r into their own project tree years ago and never kept up with updates. So Debian expends considerable effort ripping out these local forks.