"Nobody in the organization is qualified to touch the machines, and many of the windows system admins who have taken over don't even know they exist.
The windows admins occasionally screw up the network...and then we immediately hire an expensive external admin to solve the problem."
In other words, you have obsolete machines running critical processes that no one knows how to maintain, so you have to hire external people to solve it.
This is what will happen to Windows or Linux or any other OS if you let "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" rule for too long. (Of course, Windows won't last that long anyway, but that's another issue.)
Just because something works doesn't mean it's not obsolescent. I don't care what it's doing, a fifteen-year-old machine is obsolete NOW.
In other words, it's incompetent management that is the problem, not the OS.
I said Bruce says the document says what it in fact does say.
Whether any company follows it is another matter - as I indicated.
The fact that Microsoft is stalling on accepting the best practices recommended in the document indicates that it does not want to follow those practices.
So you are correct in that respect - i.e., Microsoft.
You should note that the document is produced by a consortium that includes many other players besides Microsoft, including IBM. Whether any of them will apply the best practices may be open to question, but IBM has a stake in Linux and I doubt IBM will allow DRM to kill Linux. Many of the other players in the consortium have a stake in Linux as well, to some degree or another. Microsoft is the main one that clearly does not.
In any event, Bruce's point was that the document was good IF in fact the players follow the recommended practices.
The FreeBSD Foundation acquires the FreeBSD Trademark
The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce the acquisition of
the FreeBSD trademark.
In October of last year, Wind River Inc. agreed to assign the
FreeBSD trademark to the FreeBSD Foundation. As with most things
involving paperwork and government entities, progress has been
slow, but transfer is now complete in both the U.S. and Germany.
Transfer requests for the United Kingdom and Japan are expected
to complete shortly.
The Foundation would like to thank Wind River for their assistance
with the Trademark transfer, and Murray Stokely for his diligence
and hard work in shepherding the process.
As originally registered by Walnut Creek CDROM, the FreeBSD
trademark applies to "CD ROMs featuring an archive of computer
programs which may be accessed for use archived on a CDROM." With
the trademark transfer complete in two jurisdictions, the Foundation
is now turning its attention to updating the trademark to reflect
its current usage by the FreeBSD project. The new trademark
filing should be submitted to all four jurisdictions in January.
As I recall, virtually every climatologist and atmospheric physicist in the world dismissed it as pseudo-science.
Not to mention that if you read the scenarios it was based on, the scenarios were entirely unrealistic vis-a-vis the way a nuclear war would actually be conducted.
It was like the oft-stated notion that there are enough nuclear weapons to destroy all life on the planet - yeah, if you space them evenly around the globe, which would never happen in any real war. In a real war, ninety percent of the nukes in the world would be toasted in the first hour.
Carl Sagan was a self-promoter and (promoter of science - which wasn't bad) who never really did much actual science himself except early in his career.
US, we'll stop caring about your (and Israel's) nuclear weapons when your government stops pledging to "make Israel safe by killing all Muslims." Mmm'kay?
Bruce makes it clear that the document is fairly good in that it comes down on the side of YOU - the owner of the PC (unless we're talking corporate PC here which is inapplicable since corps do what they want with a worker's PC anyway) - having control of the DRM and being able to disable any part of it that you deem necessary to do what you want.
Microsoft obviously is stalling this because Bill Gates wants to control what you do on behalf of his big customers like the music and movie industry.
The point is that the original TCM specifications said nothing about who would control all this. This document is laying out best practices and specifying that TCM SHOULD be under the control of the owner, not the designers and manufacturers.
This is good - if in fact it ends up being applied by said designers and manufacturers.
Microsoft obviously doesn't want it to apply to Vista because their agenda is NOT to apply the recommended best practices.
North Korea is never going to sell a nuke to Islamic militants, regardless of any other technology sales they may have engaged or will engage in.
No dictator has ever sold nukes to anyone and never will. It's far too risky.
If a nuke comes into the US, it will be an Israeli nuke that some militant stole - or an Israeli nuke brought in by the Mossad to convince people that North Korea sold a nuke to Iran, so the US should nuke both of them.
That was a total red herring in Iraq's case (more so because they never had nukes and probably never would), and it's a total red herring for North Korea as well.
As for the PRC, we have plenty of asshole generals who spout off in this country, too. In fact, we have an asshole named Dick Cheney who has just ordered the Pentagon to draw up plans to use nukes on Iran in the event of another 9/11 incident.
It's totally meaningless as long as they have less than a couple hundred nukes and we have thousands.
And seizing control of the Panama Canal isn't going to happen either while the US has a Navy.
As for Asian hegemony, who cares? Right now, the South Koreans do more business with China than the US and I expect if Japan doesn't now, they soon will. If the Chinese can dominate Asia, so what? If the US has the right to dominate North and South America, why don't the Chinese have the right to dominate Asia? This doesn't make them an enemy of the US except to the degree that US politicians want to make it so for their own ends.
Get a clue. The world changes. Two hundred years ago, the US didn't exist as a significant entity. A hundred years from now, it won't exist as a significant entity. (Personally I believe humans won't exist, but that's another issue.)
Oh, I agree that establishing an oil bourse denominated in Euros would do damage to the US dollar.
And in fact, Iran is proceeding to do the same thing - which is undoubtedly (along with Israel's desire to see Iran destroyed) the reason Bush is planning to attack Iran as soon as some "terrorist incident" excuse can be laid at the Iranian's door, correctly or otherwise - just like Iraq.
Nonetheless, Iraq still had no conflict with the US. The US had a conflict with Iraq. Not the same thing. The bottom line and my point is that the US - like most states - will create any conflict it needs to justify actions taken to benefit it and keep everyone else in line.
Eventually the world will have had enough of this - and the US empire will be destroyed like every other in history. I would put this as inevitable within the next twenty to thirty years, maybe longer. I really doubt the US will survive in its present form to see a third Centennial. Physically, of course, it will survive, but as an economic and military superpower, the US days are numbered.
And after that, the Transhumans will ensure that NO human superpower exists. For that matter, no human state power at all.
In other words, for us to get rich and stay rich, everybody else has to be poor.
That's the attitude of the rich, not the poor.
And it's incorrect in fact, based on available planetary and solar resources and technology.
But it is a standard primate reaction.
In this case, however, I really doubt the rest of the world is going to stand idly by while the US kills a billion people (or even a few score million and wrecks the Chinese economy) just to maintain McDonald's fast food dominance over the globe. More likely, the world will say, "Thank you, we've had quite enough of the US now" - and fry this country.
And it doesn't matter how much military power this country has, it couldn't begin to stand up to the rest of the world. We can't even handle Iraq and Afghanistan at the same time. A few backpack nukes in critical places in the US and the rest of the nations driving our military bases out of their respective territories and the US will cease to be a factor in geopolitics for a while at least.
Should happen within two or three more decades, if not sooner. The US has quite worn out its welcome - if it ever had one outside of France and Britain for our part in WWII.
And you only need to compromise one person with access to those networks to penetrate those networks.
And I'm sure the Chinese have already done that, or are working on it in the unlikely event they haven't.
The Russians and Israelis undoubtedly did it years ago. Hell, the Israelis run the FBI's entire wiretapping operation! And you think they don't have agents in place in that operation?
The notion that NO ONE has EVER compromised a US secret network is so ridiculous I can't even conceive of anyone being stupid enough to believe it.
If security was that good, every big corporation would be using it and they aren't.
Last I heard, back in the nineties, a group of computer and telecommo execs were given clearance and shown the facilities at the NSA for review.
Their conclusion: The US will be deaf, dumb and blind in ten years, the equipment was so outdated.
And everybody has heard how fucked up the FBI is.
And we're supposed to believe the US military - the POSTER BOY FOR FUCKING INCOMPETENCE - is so tightly secure that NO ONE has EVER penetrated their secret computer networks?
Oh fucking please.
The US military simply is NOT in the lead in security except for the ability to give ORDERS to people directly and to jail them if they fuck up.
This is not a secure situation, no matter how much it seems like it.
By definition, if you're not GOOD at your job, you wouldn't.
And since you're a government contractor working on the "highest REAL cost bid wins" basis (as usual with the government, despite it supposedly being the opposite), you probably don't.
Just because you work in the field doesn't mean squat. Depending on your clearance and your need to know, you wouldn't necessarily even KNOW that some classified operation got busted at some point.
As for the "air gap", yeah, right. Tell me the US IT operation doesn't fuck up constantly and have dozens of unknown Net connections that a hacker can use. Nor would Chinese hackers need them - they'd have people in place to GET them connections if necessary.
Just the fact that everything is labeled "secret" when it isn't shows how idiotic the government security is.
Dick Marcinko used to waltz his Red Cell SEAL team into government secure operations constantly, until the Navy fired his ass and put him in jail on a trumped up charge to prevent any more embarassment of senior Navy officers.
Military security is a joke and an oxymoron for morons.
Actually nothing you've said indicates that China is an "enemy" of the US.
Everything you've said is related to China increasing its economic development and exerting influence over its historical area of influence to assist that development and the large Chinese populations in those areas.
The problem with your concept is that the US believes it and it ALONE can hold ANY influence ANYWHERE in the world. This was EXPLICITLY stated in the PNAC documents that formed the foreign policy of the neocons and Bush. It is a pure implementation of imperialism.
Therefore it stimulates conflict with states attempting to build their own influence. Iraq, for example, had NO conflict with the US in its sphere of influence. It DID, however, have a conflict with ISRAEL, which used its control over US foreign policy to force a war with Iraq which could cost the US up a trillion dollars.
The bottom line: the state is the problem, not the populations of those states. The Chinese have no quarrel with Americans, and vice versa. It's our "glorious leaders" and their rich backers who have the problem.
"Given such assurances, Carpenter was surprised when, in March 2005, his FBI handlers stopped communicating with him altogether. Now the federal law-enforcement source tells TIME that the bureau was actually investigating Carpenter while it was working with him."
I'm not surprised at all.
The policy of the state is always to create new enemies to justify its existence.
The US ALLOWED the Chinese to steal nuclear secrets some years ago because they want the Chinese to be a credible threat in ten or twenty or thirty years when China becomes an ECONOMIC threat to the US, thus justifying war against China.
The same thing is happening in this case: Some lower level FBI guys supported this guy, until the higher ups and the politicians got involved.
Then they pulled the rug on him because they WANT the Chinese to steal lower-level secrets.
Some moron on/. writes: "Robert X. Cringely's latest column explores just how inane and idiotic he can be. I would like to play the baseless speculation game. What can I THINK some moron is doing based on my limited knowledge? He concludes that it's likely he has peaked as a/. moron: 'What if he is mainly wrong? What if/. is my moron apex. Most morons would not be content with that, but I'm not like most morons. But so what if I'm not?' His conclusion is that 'My clearest threat still comes from people with brains, though not the way most people expect.' It's a boring read."
Uhm, most of this is the same.
Some moron on/. gets the ego thrill of insulting Cringe - while Cringe gets money writing the stuff that/. morons get nothing for criticizing. And Cringe probably doesn't even read/. Linus has already indicated he doesn't.
I, at least, get no money for criticizing/. morons. But I do get the same ego thrill as they do - well, as much thrill as you can get stepping on cockroaches or spraying ants.
So Cringe had a slow news day, so what?/. has a slow news day EVERY day - unless some morons decide that some open source guy has made an ass out of himself by saying something stupid, so there's another tempest in a teapot.
Cringe makes me thing about the overall state of things. He's probably wrong more often than he's right, but so what? His job is to provoke thought. He does it reasonably well - better than the female namesake at InfoWorld who just writes comedic and ironic news bits about the pitiful state of IT companies.
He comes up with - or at least publicizes - interesting ideas and concepts. Whereas/. morons do nothing but react to something somebody else did - and usually the reaction brings nothing to the table.
I mean, was "first post" REALLY all that important?
Far as I know, there's nothing in the law that says the trademark can be owned by a "community", for one, let alone a Web site. It has to be owned by SOMEONE, which in law means an organization or an individual.
Second, there is no "community" that can own a trademark or anything else. Any such has to be represented by somebody, either an organization or an individual.
The LMI is that, acting for Linus who is the owner.
It sounds like your only complaint is that LMI sends out letters requesting payment, whereas in your scenario, everybody supporting the trademark would pay "voluntarily".
Basically, that's what's happening now. As Linus has said, you don't want to pay, don't pay. But you get no protection under the law either from the LMI or anybody who wants to steal YOUR trademark.
The point is, your scenario is not recognized under the law. You want to change the law, lobby Congress (lol). Until then, Linus and the LMI are the only way to do it.
Where did I say one observation points establishes the fact?
I used my account as an explanation of WHY it's happening. THAT it's happening is a known fact. Read the trade press.
I also said nothing about the US not still producing more code (and in fact, most technology) than anywhere else.
Today is not tommorrow.
I said the FUTURE is not the US's, if present trends continue - and there is no evidence I see that it won't.
As for Europe, I have read that more scientific literature is now produced there than in the US. This indicates that more scientific research is being done there than in the US. That is a fundamental shift which is likely to have consequences.
You, on the other hand, are assuming that what was true a hundred years ago for the US will remain true forever.
A true provincial.
As for music, my point was that the US was supposed to be a hotbed of music - yet, as Norman Spinrad once observed in one of his stories, if the British and psychedelics hadn't come in back in the Sixties, rock would still be just "ass-kicking music for greasers."
Today, many of the influences of pop rock are coming from abroad. Yet the insular US music business and tight control of the radio market limit the success of groups such as the Corrs who are megastars everywhere else. The Internet will eventually sort this out, as people find music via the Net and acts start cutting out the label middleman and directly marketing live broadcasts and cheap downloads over the Net, but for now the music industry as an industry appears to be moribund. The recent payola issue rearing its head again makes that clear - they have to bribe the radio people to play anything that wasn't released ten years ago.
If you can't market three hot babes and five hot guys, all of whom are excellent musicians playing lush pop rock and toe-tapping instrumentals as well, to the US market, get the fuck out of the business.
Correct, but nobody said we weren't "good" at it - it's just that we cost more doing it than other people.
And for most idiots, cheap is better than good. Especially if you can't afford good.
As a poor guy myself, I pay more in the long run so I can pay less in the short run - not by choice, but because I can't afford to do otherwise right now.
Of course, that doesn't apply to the US corporations who are outsourcing - it only applies to the other countries supplying the talent.
But as I said, that WILL level off eventually as the offshore people realize they can hold up the US corporations for even more money.
Greed is universal. The free market depends on competition to set prices, not edicts.
In the meantime, I see an opportunity to do development and support work here in the US using open source for less money than others here are doing it, but more than I can make doing anything else. The only problem I have is coming up with enough marketing smarts and energy to get the initial clients.
He IS close to his customers. His DEVELOPERS will not be close. He's keeping his support organization here.
Oh, I don't doubt he's going to run into problems running an offshore operation from here. If he's smart, he won't rely on email for communication - he'll spend the money for some sort of direct IRC/whatever connection so he can micro-manage the guys over there. And have some sort of alter-ego guy he can work with over there that he can trust to see things his way and take action when he can't. That's the only way something like that can work.
This teacher is a smart guy. He's worked for all the major outfits here in the US (he's Iranian born himself), like Oracle, Wells Fargo, etc., and he's taught at City College for the last sixteen years at the same time, staying up until the wee hours of the morning to grade papers while still running his company. He once joked that the college doesn't pay him enough for one semester to pay for the jacket he was wearing that night.
He's the contract UNIX guru here at City College and he knows his stuff about just about everything - UNIX, networking, security, programming in a dozen languages, Oracle database administration, the lot.
Plus, he's not running that big an operation (although his company doesn't take on contracts less than $500k or so), so his problems will be smaller than, say, outsourcing a 100-person call center.
He might pull it off.
Others probably won't, but that won't stop them from trying.
He's moving his development team to India where he can get class programmers for $1200-1500/month.
This is a "high wage"?
So this means companies want to outsource to Uganda where they can get programmers for $200/month?
What's wrong with this picture?
When are they going to outsource to Ethiopia where they could probably get programmers for $10/month?
I've no objection to the concept of internationalizing to save money, but it seems to me there comes a point where the "employee" becomes a slave, not an employee. When the boss is making $250,000 a year, and the employee in another country is making $100/year, something is wrong.
Not that it will last. People in other countries aren't stupid. The reason these corporate morons are looking to move from India is because the Indians figured out they are worth more than they were initially charging.
That will happen in Ethiopia, too, and damn soon.
The free market works both ways, corporate assholes.
Movies are down because people don't have as much disposable income as they used to, and there are more and cheaper choices to spend it on then movies.
It's that simple.
Same with music CDs.
The cost of entertainment is not the only cost that has risen. Everybody knows the economy sucks (except Bush) and has sucked for years. Most people were not involved in the dot.com boom, either. And those who were were working sixty hours a week, so they didn't see any movies either. Entertainment is not recession-proof either.
As for other factors, I do see a lot of movies when I have money. I've never noticed much cellphone use (every theater has a promo telling you to turn yours off). I go later at night when there are fewer kids. I don't go to theaters frequented by, shall we say, the lower classes (i.e, don't go see a movie in a black neighborhood, duh - and I used to do this a lot when San Francisco's Market Street had six theaters on it, back in the seventies.)
As for quality of movies, this is entirely subjective. I just saw "Four Brothers" and it got a round of applause from the audience at the end. It was good. Not great, maybe, but good. People need to stop expecting every movie to be the "Best Movie" winner at the Academy Awards. Ninety percent of everything is crap, and movies are no exception.
The best movie I ever saw was a tiny little film with people in it I never heard of (except Ellen Burstyn) called "Spitfire Grill". This thing should have swept the Oscars. It was brilliant. It has since been turned into a musical on Broadway. Everybody in it was perfect, including the female lead whom I never heard of and has never done anything since AFAIK (actually according to IMDB, she has done quite a bit, but nothing you'd remember, except being in Nicole Kidman's "Birth" last year.) There were no special effects, no big stars, no promotion. If I hadn't been in prison and had nothing else to do, I wouldn't have seen it.
Everybody knows that in the movie business, out of every four movies made, two lose money, one breaks even, and hopefully one makes enough to make up for the other three. So don't expect three out of four movies you see to be great. They won't be. Start adding "suspension of greatness" to "suspension of disbelief" when you go to a movie.
It's ENTERTAINMENT, NOT great art. You want great art, go to the opera.
Again, the issue is always management. Keep the asshole producers and studio execs out of the movie, and movies would get better. Just this week, there are articles about Terry Gilliam fighting the Weinberg brothers on his new film.
And none of this is going to change any time soon.
Slashdot Mirror
Or one could look at this as a problem:
"Nobody in the organization is qualified to touch the machines, and many of the windows system admins who have taken over don't even know they exist.
The windows admins occasionally screw up the network...and then we immediately hire an expensive external admin to solve the problem."
In other words, you have obsolete machines running critical processes that no one knows how to maintain, so you have to hire external people to solve it.
This is what will happen to Windows or Linux or any other OS if you let "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" rule for too long. (Of course, Windows won't last that long anyway, but that's another issue.)
Just because something works doesn't mean it's not obsolescent. I don't care what it's doing, a fifteen-year-old machine is obsolete NOW.
In other words, it's incompetent management that is the problem, not the OS.
Is that his name or his mental condition?
Look, morons, if you can't find an editor that can see a dupe from the previous day, get the fuck out of the business.
Aside from offering me the chance to insult morons,
I said Bruce says the document says what it in fact does say.
Whether any company follows it is another matter - as I indicated.
The fact that Microsoft is stalling on accepting the best practices recommended in the document indicates that it does not want to follow those practices.
So you are correct in that respect - i.e., Microsoft.
You should note that the document is produced by a consortium that includes many other players besides Microsoft, including IBM. Whether any of them will apply the best practices may be open to question, but IBM has a stake in Linux and I doubt IBM will allow DRM to kill Linux. Many of the other players in the consortium have a stake in Linux as well, to some degree or another. Microsoft is the main one that clearly does not.
In any event, Bruce's point was that the document was good IF in fact the players follow the recommended practices.
Like most of the rest of the comments in this vein, you really obviously have no clue about the discussions that have preceded this.
/. discussions and the discussion on Groklaw.
Do a Google. Read previous
Get a clue.
Start with this:
The FreeBSD Foundation acquires the FreeBSD Trademark
The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce the acquisition of
the FreeBSD trademark.
In October of last year, Wind River Inc. agreed to assign the
FreeBSD trademark to the FreeBSD Foundation. As with most things
involving paperwork and government entities, progress has been
slow, but transfer is now complete in both the U.S. and Germany.
Transfer requests for the United Kingdom and Japan are expected
to complete shortly.
The Foundation would like to thank Wind River for their assistance
with the Trademark transfer, and Murray Stokely for his diligence
and hard work in shepherding the process.
As originally registered by Walnut Creek CDROM, the FreeBSD
trademark applies to "CD ROMs featuring an archive of computer
programs which may be accessed for use archived on a CDROM." With
the trademark transfer complete in two jurisdictions, the Foundation
is now turning its attention to updating the trademark to reflect
its current usage by the FreeBSD project. The new trademark
filing should be submitted to all four jurisdictions in January.
As I recall, virtually every climatologist and atmospheric physicist in the world dismissed it as pseudo-science.
Not to mention that if you read the scenarios it was based on, the scenarios were entirely unrealistic vis-a-vis the way a nuclear war would actually be conducted.
It was like the oft-stated notion that there are enough nuclear weapons to destroy all life on the planet - yeah, if you space them evenly around the globe, which would never happen in any real war. In a real war, ninety percent of the nukes in the world would be toasted in the first hour.
Carl Sagan was a self-promoter and (promoter of science - which wasn't bad) who never really did much actual science himself except early in his career.
Or to Bill Gates in general.
Or anybody else at Microsoft that speaks for Microsoft publicly.
Paid liars, the lot.
US, we'll stop caring about your (and Israel's) nuclear weapons when your government stops pledging to "make Israel safe by killing all Muslims." Mmm'kay?
Read the article again - in English.
Bruce makes it clear that the document is fairly good in that it comes down on the side of YOU - the owner of the PC (unless we're talking corporate PC here which is inapplicable since corps do what they want with a worker's PC anyway) - having control of the DRM and being able to disable any part of it that you deem necessary to do what you want.
Microsoft obviously is stalling this because Bill Gates wants to control what you do on behalf of his big customers like the music and movie industry.
The point is that the original TCM specifications said nothing about who would control all this. This document is laying out best practices and specifying that TCM SHOULD be under the control of the owner, not the designers and manufacturers.
This is good - if in fact it ends up being applied by said designers and manufacturers.
Microsoft obviously doesn't want it to apply to Vista because their agenda is NOT to apply the recommended best practices.
Bwahahahahahah!!!
I get first post and the Microsoft shills moderate me down to flamebait!
Bwahahahahaha!!! Losers! Your retaliation is lame!
Give it up! Give...it...up! Is that all you got, huh? Are you nuts? Come at me!
North Korea is never going to sell a nuke to Islamic militants, regardless of any other technology sales they may have engaged or will engage in.
No dictator has ever sold nukes to anyone and never will. It's far too risky.
If a nuke comes into the US, it will be an Israeli nuke that some militant stole - or an Israeli nuke brought in by the Mossad to convince people that North Korea sold a nuke to Iran, so the US should nuke both of them.
That was a total red herring in Iraq's case (more so because they never had nukes and probably never would), and it's a total red herring for North Korea as well.
As for the PRC, we have plenty of asshole generals who spout off in this country, too. In fact, we have an asshole named Dick Cheney who has just ordered the Pentagon to draw up plans to use nukes on Iran in the event of another 9/11 incident.
It's totally meaningless as long as they have less than a couple hundred nukes and we have thousands.
And seizing control of the Panama Canal isn't going to happen either while the US has a Navy.
As for Asian hegemony, who cares? Right now, the South Koreans do more business with China than the US and I expect if Japan doesn't now, they soon will. If the Chinese can dominate Asia, so what? If the US has the right to dominate North and South America, why don't the Chinese have the right to dominate Asia? This doesn't make them an enemy of the US except to the degree that US politicians want to make it so for their own ends.
Get a clue. The world changes. Two hundred years ago, the US didn't exist as a significant entity. A hundred years from now, it won't exist as a significant entity. (Personally I believe humans won't exist, but that's another issue.)
Deal with it. We Transhumans will.
The OSDL and OSS in general could not possibly benefit from what is obviously an attempt by Microsoft to co-opt support for its lies.
Microsoft's Taylor is a liar - like everyone else at Microsoft authorized to speak to the press.
We just need to tell them to go take a flying fuck into a lake every time they open their mouths to spout some PR bullshit.
Oh, I agree that establishing an oil bourse denominated in Euros would do damage to the US dollar.
And in fact, Iran is proceeding to do the same thing - which is undoubtedly (along with Israel's desire to see Iran destroyed) the reason Bush is planning to attack Iran as soon as some "terrorist incident" excuse can be laid at the Iranian's door, correctly or otherwise - just like Iraq.
Nonetheless, Iraq still had no conflict with the US. The US had a conflict with Iraq. Not the same thing. The bottom line and my point is that the US - like most states - will create any conflict it needs to justify actions taken to benefit it and keep everyone else in line.
Eventually the world will have had enough of this - and the US empire will be destroyed like every other in history. I would put this as inevitable within the next twenty to thirty years, maybe longer. I really doubt the US will survive in its present form to see a third Centennial. Physically, of course, it will survive, but as an economic and military superpower, the US days are numbered.
And after that, the Transhumans will ensure that NO human superpower exists. For that matter, no human state power at all.
In other words, for us to get rich and stay rich, everybody else has to be poor.
That's the attitude of the rich, not the poor.
And it's incorrect in fact, based on available planetary and solar resources and technology.
But it is a standard primate reaction.
In this case, however, I really doubt the rest of the world is going to stand idly by while the US kills a billion people (or even a few score million and wrecks the Chinese economy) just to maintain McDonald's fast food dominance over the globe. More likely, the world will say, "Thank you, we've had quite enough of the US now" - and fry this country.
And it doesn't matter how much military power this country has, it couldn't begin to stand up to the rest of the world. We can't even handle Iraq and Afghanistan at the same time. A few backpack nukes in critical places in the US and the rest of the nations driving our military bases out of their respective territories and the US will cease to be a factor in geopolitics for a while at least.
Should happen within two or three more decades, if not sooner. The US has quite worn out its welcome - if it ever had one outside of France and Britain for our part in WWII.
And you only need to compromise one person with access to those networks to penetrate those networks.
And I'm sure the Chinese have already done that, or are working on it in the unlikely event they haven't.
The Russians and Israelis undoubtedly did it years ago. Hell, the Israelis run the FBI's entire wiretapping operation! And you think they don't have agents in place in that operation?
The notion that NO ONE has EVER compromised a US secret network is so ridiculous I can't even conceive of anyone being stupid enough to believe it.
If security was that good, every big corporation would be using it and they aren't.
Last I heard, back in the nineties, a group of computer and telecommo execs were given clearance and shown the facilities at the NSA for review.
Their conclusion: The US will be deaf, dumb and blind in ten years, the equipment was so outdated.
And everybody has heard how fucked up the FBI is.
And we're supposed to believe the US military - the POSTER BOY FOR FUCKING INCOMPETENCE - is so tightly secure that NO ONE has EVER penetrated their secret computer networks?
Oh fucking please.
The US military simply is NOT in the lead in security except for the ability to give ORDERS to people directly and to jail them if they fuck up.
This is not a secure situation, no matter how much it seems like it.
Yeah: how would you know?
By definition, if you're not GOOD at your job, you wouldn't.
And since you're a government contractor working on the "highest REAL cost bid wins" basis (as usual with the government, despite it supposedly being the opposite), you probably don't.
Just because you work in the field doesn't mean squat. Depending on your clearance and your need to know, you wouldn't necessarily even KNOW that some classified operation got busted at some point.
As for the "air gap", yeah, right. Tell me the US IT operation doesn't fuck up constantly and have dozens of unknown Net connections that a hacker can use. Nor would Chinese hackers need them - they'd have people in place to GET them connections if necessary.
Just the fact that everything is labeled "secret" when it isn't shows how idiotic the government security is.
Dick Marcinko used to waltz his Red Cell SEAL team into government secure operations constantly, until the Navy fired his ass and put him in jail on a trumped up charge to prevent any more embarassment of senior Navy officers.
Military security is a joke and an oxymoron for morons.
Actually nothing you've said indicates that China is an "enemy" of the US.
Everything you've said is related to China increasing its economic development and exerting influence over its historical area of influence to assist that development and the large Chinese populations in those areas.
The problem with your concept is that the US believes it and it ALONE can hold ANY influence ANYWHERE in the world. This was EXPLICITLY stated in the PNAC documents that formed the foreign policy of the neocons and Bush. It is a pure implementation of imperialism.
Therefore it stimulates conflict with states attempting to build their own influence. Iraq, for example, had NO conflict with the US in its sphere of influence. It DID, however, have a conflict with ISRAEL, which used its control over US foreign policy to force a war with Iraq which could cost the US up a trillion dollars.
The bottom line: the state is the problem, not the populations of those states. The Chinese have no quarrel with Americans, and vice versa. It's our "glorious leaders" and their rich backers who have the problem.
You want to stop war, get rid of the state.
"Given such assurances, Carpenter was surprised when, in March 2005, his FBI handlers stopped communicating with him altogether. Now the federal law-enforcement source tells TIME that the bureau was actually investigating Carpenter while it was working with him."
I'm not surprised at all.
The policy of the state is always to create new enemies to justify its existence.
The US ALLOWED the Chinese to steal nuclear secrets some years ago because they want the Chinese to be a credible threat in ten or twenty or thirty years when China becomes an ECONOMIC threat to the US, thus justifying war against China.
The same thing is happening in this case: Some lower level FBI guys supported this guy, until the higher ups and the politicians got involved.
Then they pulled the rug on him because they WANT the Chinese to steal lower-level secrets.
This is so obvious it's pathetic.
Some moron on /. writes: "Robert X. Cringely's latest column explores just how inane and idiotic he can be. I would like to play the baseless speculation game. What can I THINK some moron is doing based on my limited knowledge? He concludes that it's likely he has peaked as a /. moron: 'What if he is mainly wrong? What if /. is my moron apex. Most morons would not be content with that, but I'm not like most morons. But so what if I'm not?' His conclusion is that 'My clearest threat still comes from people with brains, though not the way most people expect.' It's a boring read."
/. gets the ego thrill of insulting Cringe - while Cringe gets money writing the stuff that /. morons get nothing for criticizing. And Cringe probably doesn't even read /. Linus has already indicated he doesn't.
/. morons. But I do get the same ego thrill as they do - well, as much thrill as you can get stepping on cockroaches or spraying ants.
/. has a slow news day EVERY day - unless some morons decide that some open source guy has made an ass out of himself by saying something stupid, so there's another tempest in a teapot.
/. morons do nothing but react to something somebody else did - and usually the reaction brings nothing to the table.
Uhm, most of this is the same.
Some moron on
I, at least, get no money for criticizing
So Cringe had a slow news day, so what?
Cringe makes me thing about the overall state of things. He's probably wrong more often than he's right, but so what? His job is to provoke thought. He does it reasonably well - better than the female namesake at InfoWorld who just writes comedic and ironic news bits about the pitiful state of IT companies.
He comes up with - or at least publicizes - interesting ideas and concepts. Whereas
I mean, was "first post" REALLY all that important?
Far as I know, there's nothing in the law that says the trademark can be owned by a "community", for one, let alone a Web site. It has to be owned by SOMEONE, which in law means an organization or an individual.
Second, there is no "community" that can own a trademark or anything else. Any such has to be represented by somebody, either an organization or an individual.
The LMI is that, acting for Linus who is the owner.
It sounds like your only complaint is that LMI sends out letters requesting payment, whereas in your scenario, everybody supporting the trademark would pay "voluntarily".
Basically, that's what's happening now. As Linus has said, you don't want to pay, don't pay. But you get no protection under the law either from the LMI or anybody who wants to steal YOUR trademark.
The point is, your scenario is not recognized under the law. You want to change the law, lobby Congress (lol). Until then, Linus and the LMI are the only way to do it.
Where did I say one observation points establishes the fact?
I used my account as an explanation of WHY it's happening. THAT it's happening is a known fact. Read the trade press.
I also said nothing about the US not still producing more code (and in fact, most technology) than anywhere else.
Today is not tommorrow.
I said the FUTURE is not the US's, if present trends continue - and there is no evidence I see that it won't.
As for Europe, I have read that more scientific literature is now produced there than in the US. This indicates that more scientific research is being done there than in the US. That is a fundamental shift which is likely to have consequences.
You, on the other hand, are assuming that what was true a hundred years ago for the US will remain true forever.
A true provincial.
As for music, my point was that the US was supposed to be a hotbed of music - yet, as Norman Spinrad once observed in one of his stories, if the British and psychedelics hadn't come in back in the Sixties, rock would still be just "ass-kicking music for greasers."
Today, many of the influences of pop rock are coming from abroad. Yet the insular US music business and tight control of the radio market limit the success of groups such as the Corrs who are megastars everywhere else. The Internet will eventually sort this out, as people find music via the Net and acts start cutting out the label middleman and directly marketing live broadcasts and cheap downloads over the Net, but for now the music industry as an industry appears to be moribund. The recent payola issue rearing its head again makes that clear - they have to bribe the radio people to play anything that wasn't released ten years ago.
If you can't market three hot babes and five hot guys, all of whom are excellent musicians playing lush pop rock and toe-tapping instrumentals as well, to the US market, get the fuck out of the business.
Correct, but nobody said we weren't "good" at it - it's just that we cost more doing it than other people.
And for most idiots, cheap is better than good. Especially if you can't afford good.
As a poor guy myself, I pay more in the long run so I can pay less in the short run - not by choice, but because I can't afford to do otherwise right now.
Of course, that doesn't apply to the US corporations who are outsourcing - it only applies to the other countries supplying the talent.
But as I said, that WILL level off eventually as the offshore people realize they can hold up the US corporations for even more money.
Greed is universal. The free market depends on competition to set prices, not edicts.
In the meantime, I see an opportunity to do development and support work here in the US using open source for less money than others here are doing it, but more than I can make doing anything else. The only problem I have is coming up with enough marketing smarts and energy to get the initial clients.
You missed the point.
He IS close to his customers. His DEVELOPERS will not be close. He's keeping his support organization here.
Oh, I don't doubt he's going to run into problems running an offshore operation from here. If he's smart, he won't rely on email for communication - he'll spend the money for some sort of direct IRC/whatever connection so he can micro-manage the guys over there. And have some sort of alter-ego guy he can work with over there that he can trust to see things his way and take action when he can't. That's the only way something like that can work.
This teacher is a smart guy. He's worked for all the major outfits here in the US (he's Iranian born himself), like Oracle, Wells Fargo, etc., and he's taught at City College for the last sixteen years at the same time, staying up until the wee hours of the morning to grade papers while still running his company. He once joked that the college doesn't pay him enough for one semester to pay for the jacket he was wearing that night.
He's the contract UNIX guru here at City College and he knows his stuff about just about everything - UNIX, networking, security, programming in a dozen languages, Oracle database administration, the lot.
Plus, he's not running that big an operation (although his company doesn't take on contracts less than $500k or so), so his problems will be smaller than, say, outsourcing a 100-person call center.
He might pull it off.
Others probably won't, but that won't stop them from trying.
deleted that "She's Soooooooo Blonde" joke piece I downloaded this morning! Oh, wait! Here it is!
He's moving his development team to India where he can get class programmers for $1200-1500/month.
This is a "high wage"?
So this means companies want to outsource to Uganda where they can get programmers for $200/month?
What's wrong with this picture?
When are they going to outsource to Ethiopia where they could probably get programmers for $10/month?
I've no objection to the concept of internationalizing to save money, but it seems to me there comes a point where the "employee" becomes a slave, not an employee. When the boss is making $250,000 a year, and the employee in another country is making $100/year, something is wrong.
Not that it will last. People in other countries aren't stupid. The reason these corporate morons are looking to move from India is because the Indians figured out they are worth more than they were initially charging.
That will happen in Ethiopia, too, and damn soon.
The free market works both ways, corporate assholes.
When I don't, which is often, I don't.
Movies are down because people don't have as much disposable income as they used to, and there are more and cheaper choices to spend it on then movies.
It's that simple.
Same with music CDs.
The cost of entertainment is not the only cost that has risen. Everybody knows the economy sucks (except Bush) and has sucked for years. Most people were not involved in the dot.com boom, either. And those who were were working sixty hours a week, so they didn't see any movies either. Entertainment is not recession-proof either.
As for other factors, I do see a lot of movies when I have money. I've never noticed much cellphone use (every theater has a promo telling you to turn yours off). I go later at night when there are fewer kids. I don't go to theaters frequented by, shall we say, the lower classes (i.e, don't go see a movie in a black neighborhood, duh - and I used to do this a lot when San Francisco's Market Street had six theaters on it, back in the seventies.)
As for quality of movies, this is entirely subjective. I just saw "Four Brothers" and it got a round of applause from the audience at the end. It was good. Not great, maybe, but good. People need to stop expecting every movie to be the "Best Movie" winner at the Academy Awards. Ninety percent of everything is crap, and movies are no exception.
The best movie I ever saw was a tiny little film with people in it I never heard of (except Ellen Burstyn) called "Spitfire Grill". This thing should have swept the Oscars. It was brilliant. It has since been turned into a musical on Broadway. Everybody in it was perfect, including the female lead whom I never heard of and has never done anything since AFAIK (actually according to IMDB, she has done quite a bit, but nothing you'd remember, except being in Nicole Kidman's "Birth" last year.) There were no special effects, no big stars, no promotion. If I hadn't been in prison and had nothing else to do, I wouldn't have seen it.
Everybody knows that in the movie business, out of every four movies made, two lose money, one breaks even, and hopefully one makes enough to make up for the other three. So don't expect three out of four movies you see to be great. They won't be. Start adding "suspension of greatness" to "suspension of disbelief" when you go to a movie.
It's ENTERTAINMENT, NOT great art. You want great art, go to the opera.
Again, the issue is always management. Keep the asshole producers and studio execs out of the movie, and movies would get better. Just this week, there are articles about Terry Gilliam fighting the Weinberg brothers on his new film.
And none of this is going to change any time soon.