It is funny because it is true. Disregard of ethical principles helps, especially if everyone else plays by the rules.
Worse than that... a lot of American corporations have been hiring foreign-born CEOs, presumably to eliminate any vestigial sense of patriotism or concern for ones fellow citizens. Pepsi Corporation is a good example.
Since when? As far as I know, he never developed anything, instead relying on others to do the work and then leveraging that work towards profitability (example: DOS).
This is not a troll, folks, it's a dead accurate description of Bill Gates' business method. Now, I'm not saying that's wrong, in principle... it's how money is made. Some of what he did was wrong, was criminal and a Federal Court said so. But that's another story.
But Bill Gates is not primarily an engineer, a scientist, or other creative type: he's a master dealmaker who built his empire on the backs of a lot of other smart people. That's how it's done: he just did it more successfully than his competition.
I mean, do you really expect ahmed the farmer in pakistan to learn how to use a condom ? or his wife to take the pill daily ?
Nor does it matter. Third-world agrarian cultures have a high rate of attrition: if you simply count babies born you'll likely get a skewed result, because many of those children won't live very long. They need those large families just to grow enough food to stay alive. That's the way it was here in the U.S. for a long time (we started out as a agricultural nation.) My fiancee is from Africa, and her grandmother had a total of 21 children who tilled the fields, and only about seven of them made it to adulthood.
There is an issue when that mindset is translated to a wealthier nation (e.g., immigration from Mexico to the U.S.) They still have those large families, but we hand out free medical care and keep those kids alive, and consequently the effect on the overall population is much greater. At the same time, affluent Americans are holding off having kids until they feel they're able to take care of them properly (or just decide not to have them at all.) America's population growth had levelled off until mass illegal immigration began.
Why don't you respond to some of the people who responded to you instead of looking up statistics that vaguely back up an argument from a tangential hypothesis.
One my friends moved to Germany over a decade ago, and he tells me that that country is indeed suffering a significant population decline. Personally, I think it's the fact that humanity invented condoms, followed by other more advanced methods of birth control. We can have children when we want to, and not just because we have sex. The more affluent sectors of a wealthy nation will often delay having families until "we're financially stable" or "can afford a big enough house". Often that means having no kids at all because time flies, and suddenly you're too old. That's what happened to me. My fiancee, fortunately, had four so she made up for my poor performance in that area.
Also, there's the issue of farming technology: here in the U.S., in particular, it's become so automated that a very small part of the population is required to grow it. That means that the traditional large farm families are no longer needed, and have not been for a long time. A society that is largely agrarian absolutely requires a lot of kids, especially if there is a corresponding poor level of health care (kids are needed to work the farms, and most of them don't make it to adulthood, so you need more kids.)
I seem to recall something like 2/3 of the Earth's land cannot currently be used for crops because of salt.
I can believe that, but it's not just salt. A goodly chunk of Africa, for example, is unarable because of some particularly nasty parasites. We have a long way to go before we can farm anywhere we want to.
Besides, we will probably come up with more efficient ways to feed ourselves than stuffing seeds into dirt. Soylent Green, anyone?
Since when? As far as I know, he never developed anything, instead relying on others to do the work and then leveraging that work towards profitability (example: DOS).
No kidding. He made the comment during the antitrust trial that "technological miracles cross my desk every day." Well, assuming that's true (and it ought to be, given the money the company spends on Microsoft Research) my only question was: well, then, well the hell are they?! Google, Apple and others are making those things happen: Microsoft just releases yet another version of Windows and Office every few years and calls that "innovation."
Plus which, it doesn't help that Ballmer is a flaming sociopath who should be on medication not running a multi-billion dollar corporation.
Don't blame the person who actually leaked it, blame the damned software!
Ahh...I love politics.
Trust me... that particular telecommuter is getting his share of blame. It just won't be public because he probably didn't do anything criminal. Of course, he's still an idiot.
does not give corporations any incentive to boost wages for science/tech jobs, which would be one way to retain the highest-performing students.
Indeed, which is why our banking system has been working so well lately.
Seriously, salary is definitely important, but that's not the only reason that students take up engineering and scientific careers. I didn't get into software engineering for the money... like my electronics engineer father before me, I got into it because it's something I love to do. That was thirty years ago, and I still love what I do for a living. If those at the outset of their careers are not choosing the technical option, it's probably because schools are utterly failing to inspire them.
It wasn't always that way. When I was a kid (back in the mid-sixties) the public schools went out of their way to interest young people in science and technology. I went on many field trips with my fellow schoolkids to very interesting places, visits that I know heavily influenced my career choice. I've spent the past three decades of my life developing industrial control and monitoring systems, and I remember clearly the school outings that pushed me in that direction. We got to see the inside of a hot dog manufacturing plant (the machines and electromechanical automation systems were awesome, but I couldn't eat a hot dog for years after that), a Frito Lay plant... that was cool. There was this enormous conveyor belt that was full of freshly-baked potato chips, and at the end of that belt was a waterfall of the things, dropping down to the floor below for packaging. We all ooohed! and ahhhed! The tour guide dipped a big bowl into the flow of falling chips and filled it up and passed it around. They were incredibly tasty: fresh from the ovens (which we also got to see, way cool.)
I have to wonder how many schools spend a penny trying to interest young people in technology any more. I mean, there's a whole world of applied science out there beyond what you see on your flat panel, yet schools seem to thing that as long as their students meet some arbitrary standard of "computer literacy", that that is sufficient. It's not.
The classical texts we do have were preserved by repeated copying, not through the durability of a particular physical copy.
True, and I made that point in my original post. What I'm trying to say is that if our technological base is lost, we'll need something that can be read without needing power or spare parts. Maybe not paper per se, but surely we can come up with a more durable form of printed matter.
I don't get the 'screen is too small' argument for existing iphone / ipod / treo/etc reading. I completely agree with you - when you get into the material you're reading, the format just 'goes away'. Why buy a big clunky device when you're existing one works fine?
On the other hand, if you're not into the material but simply have to read it whether you want to or not, or if you're just using the device for reference materials (like I do on my G1 all the time, I have it stuffed to the gills with PDFs on a variety of technical subjects) the display can and does become an issue. Not everyone is reading an edge-of-the-seat page-turner, you know.
Actually, yes. Well-preserved printed books can and do last for centuries. We have no idea if any of our current storage techniques will last anywhere near that long, manufacturers bombastic claims of extended lifetimes notwithstanding. What electronic storage (optical, magnetic, quantum, whatever) does do is allow for data to be more conveniently transferred to new media when the older stuff begins to wear out. But that requires a lot of maintenance and awareness... Google seems to be doing well at it, so far, but then again Google is a private corporation that may or may not be here in ten years, or twenty or a hundred. NASA, for example, is losing tons of data from the early years of the space program because they can't find enough old equipment to restore the information. They waited too long, and such data loss scenarios play out pretty regularly.
A typical hard drive, such as that used by every server farm in existence, will become unreadable long before a paper book will. Solid-state memories may have greater lifetime... or they may not. Flash memories self-discharge over time: plenty long enough for typical use but not for archival storage. Optical systems are probably the best bet to date, but they are also subject to degradation, and it doesn't take much to make a disc unreadable.
What it comes down to is that if we want to make sure critical information is kept around in case civilization crashes, we'd better keep the important stuff on paper. I always thought, heck, even if an apocalyptic Mad Max event occurs, there will plenty of knowledge stored in the world's libraries to help us rebuild. Knowledge that will help us skip the thousands of years it took our ancestors to go from playing with bits of stone to flying spacecraft. Nowadays... I don't know. The trend towards purely electronic storage is well under way, and libraries full of printed books will soon be considered obsolete. The day may come when we start dismantling them. Would that be wise?
Put it like this: if things go all to Hell (and technic civilization is more fragile than you think, just ask Charlton Heston) we'll be unable to retrieve squat from Google's servers. We will, however, be able to read books. If we fall so far that we can't even do that, well, I don't suppose it would matter very much.
If all TVs met state standards, California could avoid the $600-million cost of building a natural-gas-fired power plant, says Ken Rider, a commission staff engineer.
Absolutely, and if all electrical and electronic devices came equipped with a built-in Zero-Point Module, California could avoid building any power plants at all.
He didn't say they were isolationist. He said it was US policy to attempt to isolate the Soviet Union (ie stop them from conquering other countries).
Yes, he did: USSR have chosen to isolate itself from the very beginning of its existence (1922). I'd say that's pretty "isolationist".
The original poster was talking about U.S. policy.
The Ugly American appears. No wonder they're going home.
Screw you. Why is it that when an American says, "Hey, I love my country and I put it before all others" he's called "Ugly" but when an individual of any other nation says the same thing he's called a patriot? Again, screw you. You feel you're entitled to a share of everything we have... we say you're not. Deal with it.
Or we could just accept that growing the power of the US isn't the goal that we Americans should be seeking but, rather, that having two Silicon Valley's in the world would be better for everyone.
And why should we think that? Neither China nor India is operating along those lines. As an American, I'd rather see two Silicon Valleys here in the U.S., and any Chinese or Indian tech worker would feel the same about his country. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. There is something wrong with giving up without a fight, however. That's just shortsighted and stupid.
Water dispenser machines that automatically boil the water for you are very common in Chinese homes and elsewhere. Bottled water is also readily to hand across China.
Sure, but a. boiling temperatures don't kill ALL pathogens... Clostridium Botulinum, for one, is capable of surviving that and b. boiling will have little effect if your water is contaminated with some poisonous industrial compound leached into the local water table by badly-operated factories. That's the problem China is facing now. Also, bottled water is only as safe as the source it was bottled from. Unless China gets a handle on its manufacturing-related environmental problems, bottled water is no guarantee of safety.
Ironically though, China is the perfect lab for what would happen in an unregulated market that libertarians argue for when they want to eliminate the EPA, FDA, and every other regulatory industry [nytimes.com].
Yeah. People die. Argue about the efficacy of the current bureaucracies all you want, but there are areas where we need the institution of government. That is one of them. Those agencies came about because of private-sector abuses: unfortunately, corporate leadership is no more ethical now than it was when they were formed.
I don't drink milk, but if I did, as an American I don't have to worry much about drinking lethal industrial compounds along with it. Why is that? Because of regulation and enforcement. A century or so ago, dairies were putting chalk in their milk to whiten it. They can't get away with that now, but if they saw a profit in it, you can bet they would. Money talks, never forget that. In China... yeah, they probably could pull that off, so long as they don't kill a conspicuous number of people.
Incorrect. What's been happening in the United States is this: as the quality of formal education has fallen, employers are often forced to provide remedial training at their expense, in order to bring employees up to an adequate level of proficiency. That's unfortunate, and a waste of money all around.
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It is funny because it is true. Disregard of ethical principles helps, especially if everyone else plays by the rules.
Worse than that ... a lot of American corporations have been hiring foreign-born CEOs, presumably to eliminate any vestigial sense of patriotism or concern for ones fellow citizens. Pepsi Corporation is a good example.
Since when? As far as I know, he never developed anything, instead relying on others to do the work and then leveraging that work towards profitability (example: DOS).
This is not a troll, folks, it's a dead accurate description of Bill Gates' business method. Now, I'm not saying that's wrong, in principle ... it's how money is made. Some of what he did was wrong, was criminal and a Federal Court said so. But that's another story.
But Bill Gates is not primarily an engineer, a scientist, or other creative type: he's a master dealmaker who built his empire on the backs of a lot of other smart people. That's how it's done: he just did it more successfully than his competition.
I mean, do you really expect ahmed the farmer in pakistan to learn how to use a condom ? or his wife to take the pill daily ?
Nor does it matter. Third-world agrarian cultures have a high rate of attrition: if you simply count babies born you'll likely get a skewed result, because many of those children won't live very long. They need those large families just to grow enough food to stay alive. That's the way it was here in the U.S. for a long time (we started out as a agricultural nation.) My fiancee is from Africa, and her grandmother had a total of 21 children who tilled the fields, and only about seven of them made it to adulthood.
There is an issue when that mindset is translated to a wealthier nation (e.g., immigration from Mexico to the U.S.) They still have those large families, but we hand out free medical care and keep those kids alive, and consequently the effect on the overall population is much greater. At the same time, affluent Americans are holding off having kids until they feel they're able to take care of them properly (or just decide not to have them at all.) America's population growth had levelled off until mass illegal immigration began.
Why don't you respond to some of the people who responded to you instead of looking up statistics that vaguely back up an argument from a tangential hypothesis.
One my friends moved to Germany over a decade ago, and he tells me that that country is indeed suffering a significant population decline. Personally, I think it's the fact that humanity invented condoms, followed by other more advanced methods of birth control. We can have children when we want to, and not just because we have sex. The more affluent sectors of a wealthy nation will often delay having families until "we're financially stable" or "can afford a big enough house". Often that means having no kids at all because time flies, and suddenly you're too old. That's what happened to me. My fiancee, fortunately, had four so she made up for my poor performance in that area.
Also, there's the issue of farming technology: here in the U.S., in particular, it's become so automated that a very small part of the population is required to grow it. That means that the traditional large farm families are no longer needed, and have not been for a long time. A society that is largely agrarian absolutely requires a lot of kids, especially if there is a corresponding poor level of health care (kids are needed to work the farms, and most of them don't make it to adulthood, so you need more kids.)
I seem to recall something like 2/3 of the Earth's land cannot currently be used for crops because of salt.
I can believe that, but it's not just salt. A goodly chunk of Africa, for example, is unarable because of some particularly nasty parasites. We have a long way to go before we can farm anywhere we want to.
Besides, we will probably come up with more efficient ways to feed ourselves than stuffing seeds into dirt. Soylent Green, anyone?
Apple? Technological miracles? Care to name one?
Don't ask me ... ask Bill Gates.
Since when? As far as I know, he never developed anything, instead relying on others to do the work and then leveraging that work towards profitability (example: DOS).
No kidding. He made the comment during the antitrust trial that "technological miracles cross my desk every day." Well, assuming that's true (and it ought to be, given the money the company spends on Microsoft Research) my only question was: well, then, well the hell are they?! Google, Apple and others are making those things happen: Microsoft just releases yet another version of Windows and Office every few years and calls that "innovation."
Plus which, it doesn't help that Ballmer is a flaming sociopath who should be on medication not running a multi-billion dollar corporation.
Socrates gave a response beyond reproach. He said, "If I am the wisest man, it is because I alone know that I know nothing."
A self-deprecating remark that not only expressed his own humility, but simultaneously bitchslapped everyone else. Wish I could have been there.
Don't blame the person who actually leaked it, blame the damned software! Ahh...I love politics.
Trust me ... that particular telecommuter is getting his share of blame. It just won't be public because he probably didn't do anything criminal. Of course, he's still an idiot.
does not give corporations any incentive to boost wages for science/tech jobs, which would be one way to retain the highest-performing students.
Indeed, which is why our banking system has been working so well lately.
... like my electronics engineer father before me, I got into it because it's something I love to do. That was thirty years ago, and I still love what I do for a living. If those at the outset of their careers are not choosing the technical option, it's probably because schools are utterly failing to inspire them.
... that was cool. There was this enormous conveyor belt that was full of freshly-baked potato chips, and at the end of that belt was a waterfall of the things, dropping down to the floor below for packaging. We all ooohed! and ahhhed! The tour guide dipped a big bowl into the flow of falling chips and filled it up and passed it around. They were incredibly tasty: fresh from the ovens (which we also got to see, way cool.)
Seriously, salary is definitely important, but that's not the only reason that students take up engineering and scientific careers. I didn't get into software engineering for the money
It wasn't always that way. When I was a kid (back in the mid-sixties) the public schools went out of their way to interest young people in science and technology. I went on many field trips with my fellow schoolkids to very interesting places, visits that I know heavily influenced my career choice. I've spent the past three decades of my life developing industrial control and monitoring systems, and I remember clearly the school outings that pushed me in that direction. We got to see the inside of a hot dog manufacturing plant (the machines and electromechanical automation systems were awesome, but I couldn't eat a hot dog for years after that), a Frito Lay plant
I have to wonder how many schools spend a penny trying to interest young people in technology any more. I mean, there's a whole world of applied science out there beyond what you see on your flat panel, yet schools seem to thing that as long as their students meet some arbitrary standard of "computer literacy", that that is sufficient. It's not.
The classical texts we do have were preserved by repeated copying, not through the durability of a particular physical copy.
True, and I made that point in my original post. What I'm trying to say is that if our technological base is lost, we'll need something that can be read without needing power or spare parts. Maybe not paper per se, but surely we can come up with a more durable form of printed matter.
I don't get the 'screen is too small' argument for existing iphone / ipod / treo /etc reading. I completely agree with you - when you get into the material you're reading, the format just 'goes away'. Why buy a big clunky device when you're existing one works fine?
On the other hand, if you're not into the material but simply have to read it whether you want to or not, or if you're just using the device for reference materials (like I do on my G1 all the time, I have it stuffed to the gills with PDFs on a variety of technical subjects) the display can and does become an issue. Not everyone is reading an edge-of-the-seat page-turner, you know.
Or do you think books would last longer?
Actually, yes. Well-preserved printed books can and do last for centuries. We have no idea if any of our current storage techniques will last anywhere near that long, manufacturers bombastic claims of extended lifetimes notwithstanding. What electronic storage (optical, magnetic, quantum, whatever) does do is allow for data to be more conveniently transferred to new media when the older stuff begins to wear out. But that requires a lot of maintenance and awareness ... Google seems to be doing well at it, so far, but then again Google is a private corporation that may or may not be here in ten years, or twenty or a hundred. NASA, for example, is losing tons of data from the early years of the space program because they can't find enough old equipment to restore the information. They waited too long, and such data loss scenarios play out pretty regularly.
... or they may not. Flash memories self-discharge over time: plenty long enough for typical use but not for archival storage. Optical systems are probably the best bet to date, but they are also subject to degradation, and it doesn't take much to make a disc unreadable.
... I don't know. The trend towards purely electronic storage is well under way, and libraries full of printed books will soon be considered obsolete. The day may come when we start dismantling them. Would that be wise?
A typical hard drive, such as that used by every server farm in existence, will become unreadable long before a paper book will. Solid-state memories may have greater lifetime
What it comes down to is that if we want to make sure critical information is kept around in case civilization crashes, we'd better keep the important stuff on paper. I always thought, heck, even if an apocalyptic Mad Max event occurs, there will plenty of knowledge stored in the world's libraries to help us rebuild. Knowledge that will help us skip the thousands of years it took our ancestors to go from playing with bits of stone to flying spacecraft. Nowadays
Put it like this: if things go all to Hell (and technic civilization is more fragile than you think, just ask Charlton Heston) we'll be unable to retrieve squat from Google's servers. We will, however, be able to read books. If we fall so far that we can't even do that, well, I don't suppose it would matter very much.
The funny thing is publishers complained for years about the physical cost of books, and used it as a base for low writer royalties.
Hollywood accounting. If you believe the studio execs, no movie actually makes any money.
Thanks... I completely missed the 6 month vs. 1 week distinction.
Hey ... close enough for government work.
If all TVs met state standards, California could avoid the $600-million cost of building a natural-gas-fired power plant, says Ken Rider, a commission staff engineer.
Absolutely, and if all electrical and electronic devices came equipped with a built-in Zero-Point Module, California could avoid building any power plants at all.
He didn't say they were isolationist. He said it was US policy to attempt to isolate the Soviet Union (ie stop them from conquering other countries).
Yes, he did: USSR have chosen to isolate itself from the very beginning of its existence (1922). I'd say that's pretty "isolationist". The original poster was talking about U.S. policy.
The Ugly American appears. No wonder they're going home.
Screw you. Why is it that when an American says, "Hey, I love my country and I put it before all others" he's called "Ugly" but when an individual of any other nation says the same thing he's called a patriot? Again, screw you. You feel you're entitled to a share of everything we have ... we say you're not. Deal with it.
Or we could just accept that growing the power of the US isn't the goal that we Americans should be seeking but, rather, that having two Silicon Valley's in the world would be better for everyone.
And why should we think that? Neither China nor India is operating along those lines. As an American, I'd rather see two Silicon Valleys here in the U.S., and any Chinese or Indian tech worker would feel the same about his country. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. There is something wrong with giving up without a fight, however. That's just shortsighted and stupid.
That the media is free has nothing to do with it.
Just remember ... anything that is free is worth exactly what you paid for it.
I live in a basement, is that close enough?
Yes. You're homeless.
Water dispenser machines that automatically boil the water for you are very common in Chinese homes and elsewhere. Bottled water is also readily to hand across China.
Sure, but a. boiling temperatures don't kill ALL pathogens ... Clostridium Botulinum, for one, is capable of surviving that and b. boiling will have little effect if your water is contaminated with some poisonous industrial compound leached into the local water table by badly-operated factories. That's the problem China is facing now. Also, bottled water is only as safe as the source it was bottled from. Unless China gets a handle on its manufacturing-related environmental problems, bottled water is no guarantee of safety.
Just for your information, USSR have chosen to isolate itself from the very beginning of its existence (1922).
Uh ... you have heard of the Soviet Empire? Overrunning and occupying your neighbors is not isolationist.
Ironically though, China is the perfect lab for what would happen in an unregulated market that libertarians argue for when they want to eliminate the EPA, FDA, and every other regulatory industry [nytimes.com].
Yeah. People die. Argue about the efficacy of the current bureaucracies all you want, but there are areas where we need the institution of government. That is one of them. Those agencies came about because of private-sector abuses: unfortunately, corporate leadership is no more ethical now than it was when they were formed.
... yeah, they probably could pull that off, so long as they don't kill a conspicuous number of people.
I don't drink milk, but if I did, as an American I don't have to worry much about drinking lethal industrial compounds along with it. Why is that? Because of regulation and enforcement. A century or so ago, dairies were putting chalk in their milk to whiten it. They can't get away with that now, but if they saw a profit in it, you can bet they would. Money talks, never forget that. In China
Apparently yours doesn't.
Incorrect. What's been happening in the United States is this: as the quality of formal education has fallen, employers are often forced to provide remedial training at their expense, in order to bring employees up to an adequate level of proficiency. That's unfortunate, and a waste of money all around.