Have you read the rhetoric in your own country's press about unions lately? I agree that you're in a good position. Sadly, it's a declining good position - union membership and unionized jobs are both declining - and the corporate interests have successfully convinced *even the American working class* that unions are evil and damaging to them. It's a hell of a rhetorical trick. Be glad you have your union job, but do note the likelihood of many others having such jobs in future...
"The point of these questions is that everyone has career aspirations."
No, they don't. *I* don't, for a start.
It used to be perfectly common to pick a job - i.e. a function that would be useful to society - and keep doing it more or less indefinitely. I can't, for the life of me, see what the hell's wrong with that. But it's remarkably difficult to convince HR droids that I don't actually want to quit my job (which I rather enjoy) and start a new one every two years (in effect) just because the new one is allegedly 'ranked higher'.
Yeah, this is pretty much the problem. Performance evaluation should really be done by crazy, high-tech methods such as you and your peers and manager sitting down and discussing what you've achieved, but that kind of thing is way too hard to stick into an Excel macro, after all...
Another classic example: call centres which measure 'performance' mainly by the average call time metric. Which gives tech support workers all the incentive in the world to give out any piece of bogus advice that'll get the customer to hang up as fast as possible. Or just hang up on them, if the phone system isn't sophisticated enough to detect it.
Support doesn't just mean 'fixing bugs'. It also means 'helping you set things up right', 'helping you optimize your configuration', 'helping you figure out what tool you need for the job at hand', and so on.
Selling support does not require that the underlying product be broken.
Lots of people seem to be recommending rooting various arm-based tablets that come with Android stock; note that the questioner lists video playback as one of his major use cases. Does video playback actually work worth a damn on any of these hacked-up tablets? I didn't think there was a driver with accelerated video support for any of those systems.
Yeah. This. My first thought was 'don't even try. Go to your boss with a thorough list of all the problems and explain that they're going to need more people to fix it'.
Recognizing when a job is simply too much for you to power on through like a superhero is an important ability.
And even if management says 'nope, can't afford it' - your ass is now covered when you inevitably cannot manage to fix all the problems and something falls over in three months time.
It doesn't matter how much stuff you download, really. It only matters how much spending that downloading activity displaces.
Data is not a scarce resource: if I download every movie ever made it doesn't somehow stop everyone else from getting those movies. If I would have spent $200 on movies this year and instead I spend $0 because I downloaded "$200 worth" of movies, the economic impact of my activity on the entertainment industry is $200. If instead I downloaded "$10,000,000,000 worth" of movies, the net economic impact of my activity on the entertainment industry...is still $200. That 10 squillion dollars is an entirely notional value. I don't *have* ten squillion dollars. Even if piracy was utterly impossible, that ten squillion dollars I 'stole' would not magically appear out of nowhere and wind up in the entertainment industry's pockets. They would just get their $200, no more.
(note: I don't actually download movies illegally. The above is simply an illustration.)
I wasn't engaging with any kind of 'moral rights of creators' argument. That's an entirely separate question. The entertainment lobby likes to talk more about the _economic_ consequences of copyright infringement than the _ethical_ ones, and that's the question I was talking about. If you're just talking about pure economics - the flow of money - morality doesn't really come into it.
Let's say you spend 10% of your disposable income on music. Now Napster comes along and you download all your music for free, depriving record company executives - I'm sorry, starving artists - that 10% of your disposable income.
Now, the key question is: what do you do with the savings?
Your piracy is only ultimately 'costing' the overall economy anything if you then reduce your working hours and take a pay cut that exactly offsets the money you would otherwise have spent on music. If instead you do the same amount of work and take the money and do something else with it - anything else - then the overall world economy has lost precisely nothing. That money winds up going to someone, somewhere. It stays in the system. It isn't magically destroyed.
There's some interesting subsidiary questions, of course. Like 'what do you spend the money on instead'? At _this_ specific point the Swiss argument is on somewhat shaky ground; I'm not sure they sufficiently proved that the money would be spent on other entertainment products. It would seem more reasonable that maybe people would spend it on _other_ discretionary spending instead. Maybe clothes, put it towards a car, drinks - it doesn't really matter. The point is that if you take the saving and spend it on something else, you're now not just 'costing' the specific music artists in question money, you're 'costing' the entire entertainment industry money.
This is the key point: this is really what the entertainment industry is worried about. And to a degree it's a legitimate worry. Making it very easy to pirate stuff probably _does_ cost the entertainment industry some amount of money, overall, compared to what they could theoretically make if it wasn't possible. It's a complex argument, maybe it does, maybe it doesn't, but the point of view that it does can at least be sustained.
Now, the entertainment industry is of course entirely self-serving and therefore attempts to portray this specific loss of economic activity in their sector as if it is some sort of magic overall loss to the economy. It Costs X Billion Dollars, they say - though those X Billion Dollars are not, as we've already seen, magically destroyed. They just go somewhere else. It Costs X Hundred Thousand Jobs - again, it probably doesn't. The jobs just wind up in some other sector.
However, the entertainment lobby again has a legitimate argument - to some degree, in some jurisdictions. See, you can make the argument that there is an overall cost to an even bigger entity than 'the entertainment industry' - it can be reasonably sustained that there's some degree of overall concrete negative effect on the economies of specific countries. Particularly those countries which are dominant in the entertainment industry.
Now maybe it becomes a little more clear why America is always pushing for jackbooted copyright laws: America is at the forefront of the worldwide entertainment industry. Hollywood probably represents a huge net trade surplus to the American economy: lots of people who aren't Americans spend part of their disposable income on American movies, American music and so on. Maybe if you go spend that money on clothes instead, more of it winds up in China. Maybe if you go spend that money on a computer instead, more of it winds up in...er, China. Maybe if you go spend that money on a vacation to Beijing instead...hey, okay, I kid. But you see the point. While it's almost inarguably true that piracy does not have any overall impact on the global economy, it's certainly plausible to argue that, to some degree, it hurts America and benefits just about everyone who isn't America.
That degree is probably proportionally tiny. But you can bet it's a scare card the entertainment lobby plays as hard as it can to politicians.
The person to whom you're responding did not say "piracy is right" or "there is absolutely no situation in which copyright infringement can cause anyone any kind of problem". He said that it is not the same thing as theft.
why not just contribute to Meego / Mer / Tizen / whatever the hell it's called today? Yes it's niche and probably doomed, but then hey, so is Openmoko. And Meego/Mer/Tizen/MaryPoppins is somewhat more developed.
Or, heck, keep using your N900. It appears to be about as powerful as this 'new' Freerunner hardware...
I don't know much about it, really, but the posts up-thread suggest that there is some discretion for the publisher in the Amazon system about whether to apply DRM to the book or not.
simplest thing to do is get the first Vorkosigan book in sequence and then just keep reading, but The Warrior's Apprentice works fine as an alternate starting point (it's rather more action-packed and was released first anyway). And yeah, the CD of ebooks would absolutely be a great way to get into it.
I think Discworld is still a ways ahead of Vorkosigan, but yeah, it's getting quite long.
(It's worth noting that while I don't agree, I can kinda see the OP's point; if you wanted to be mean you could categorize a lot of Baen's output as libertarian/militarist political screeds thinly disguised as science fiction. But if that's anyone's issue with Baen, please don't let it put you off Bujold, who doesn't really fit the template.)
Weber's a skilful writer of page-turners (though a horrible, horrible, horrible writer of dialogue), whatever you think of his politics. Bujold is just flat out a great writer; I don't know why she gets so much love and so little respect, but by any reasonable measure she's one of the great writers of the last 50 years. And that's coming from someone who reads a hell of a wide range of fiction.
It's easy enough to get a raw file of the book out of the Kindle system - I dunno about a physical *Kindle* itself, I don't have one, but you can get one out of the PC Kindle software. If the book isn't DRMed, then it'll be in a pretty well-known format which third party readers will have no problem reading or converting.
the post you're replying to does not say 'taxation-funded infrastructure is a bad idea'. it says 'making taxation-funded infrastructure programs horribly inefficient on purpose in order to 'create more jobs' is a bad idea'. those are two rather different concepts.
"Repairing even the wilderness trails is too expensive in a society that prefers to pay the skill-less to sit idle and collect the dole"
Reading this written about *America* in a country which actually has a functioning social security system...you're hilarious. No. America really, really is not a country renowned for its generous, laziness-enabled social security system. It's just...not.
How is it a straw man, exactly? Or did you just read the phrase 'straw man' on the internet, latch on to the fact it's frequently used to rebut someone presenting an argument, and throw it at me with zero understanding of what it actually means?
Just read the two statements in the summary. Nothing else is necessary.
Republican: "Our Democratic friends were never able to do the entitlement reforms. They weren't going to do anything without raising taxes."
Democrat: "The wealthiest Americans who earn over a million a year have to share too. And that line in the sand, we haven't seen Republicans willing to cross yet."
I mean, one of those is clearly a bald-faced misrepresentation: this is made clear within the statement itself. In the first sentence he flatly claims that Democrats would not "do the entitlement reforms". In the very next sentence he makes it clear that this is simply a lie: Democrats were entirely ready to do entitlement reforms, but on the condition that they were accompanied by tax increases. You know, compromise. That thing two sides who don't agree are supposed to do for the greater good.
The Democrat, by contrast, simply states that the Republicans would not agree to anything that included tax rises - whatever entitlement cuts were involved.
I just don't see where's the room for interpretation or greyness there. From their own statements it's quite clear that the Republicans are a) fundamentally dishonest and b) utterly unwilling to compromise.
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Have you read the rhetoric in your own country's press about unions lately? I agree that you're in a good position. Sadly, it's a declining good position - union membership and unionized jobs are both declining - and the corporate interests have successfully convinced *even the American working class* that unions are evil and damaging to them. It's a hell of a rhetorical trick. Be glad you have your union job, but do note the likelihood of many others having such jobs in future...
"The point of these questions is that everyone has career aspirations."
No, they don't. *I* don't, for a start.
It used to be perfectly common to pick a job - i.e. a function that would be useful to society - and keep doing it more or less indefinitely. I can't, for the life of me, see what the hell's wrong with that. But it's remarkably difficult to convince HR droids that I don't actually want to quit my job (which I rather enjoy) and start a new one every two years (in effect) just because the new one is allegedly 'ranked higher'.
Yeah, this is pretty much the problem. Performance evaluation should really be done by crazy, high-tech methods such as you and your peers and manager sitting down and discussing what you've achieved, but that kind of thing is way too hard to stick into an Excel macro, after all...
Another classic example: call centres which measure 'performance' mainly by the average call time metric. Which gives tech support workers all the incentive in the world to give out any piece of bogus advice that'll get the customer to hang up as fast as possible. Or just hang up on them, if the phone system isn't sophisticated enough to detect it.
Support doesn't just mean 'fixing bugs'. It also means 'helping you set things up right', 'helping you optimize your configuration', 'helping you figure out what tool you need for the job at hand', and so on.
Selling support does not require that the underlying product be broken.
Lots of people seem to be recommending rooting various arm-based tablets that come with Android stock; note that the questioner lists video playback as one of his major use cases. Does video playback actually work worth a damn on any of these hacked-up tablets? I didn't think there was a driver with accelerated video support for any of those systems.
You've clearly never worked from home.
The test he took was the 10th grade one. The article says the example questions come from the 4th and 8th grade tests.
"It was hard to believe anyone would needed a calculator for 47 * 3"
The difficulty in the question is correctly parsing it out to 47*3.
Yeah. This. My first thought was 'don't even try. Go to your boss with a thorough list of all the problems and explain that they're going to need more people to fix it'.
Recognizing when a job is simply too much for you to power on through like a superhero is an important ability.
And even if management says 'nope, can't afford it' - your ass is now covered when you inevitably cannot manage to fix all the problems and something falls over in three months time.
yeah, I regretted that 'huge' about as soon as I hit submit. It really isn't a big number in context.
It doesn't matter how much stuff you download, really. It only matters how much spending that downloading activity displaces.
Data is not a scarce resource: if I download every movie ever made it doesn't somehow stop everyone else from getting those movies. If I would have spent $200 on movies this year and instead I spend $0 because I downloaded "$200 worth" of movies, the economic impact of my activity on the entertainment industry is $200. If instead I downloaded "$10,000,000,000 worth" of movies, the net economic impact of my activity on the entertainment industry...is still $200. That 10 squillion dollars is an entirely notional value. I don't *have* ten squillion dollars. Even if piracy was utterly impossible, that ten squillion dollars I 'stole' would not magically appear out of nowhere and wind up in the entertainment industry's pockets. They would just get their $200, no more.
(note: I don't actually download movies illegally. The above is simply an illustration.)
I wasn't engaging with any kind of 'moral rights of creators' argument. That's an entirely separate question. The entertainment lobby likes to talk more about the _economic_ consequences of copyright infringement than the _ethical_ ones, and that's the question I was talking about. If you're just talking about pure economics - the flow of money - morality doesn't really come into it.
It depends what you mean by 'costs'.
Fundamentally the Swiss argument is correct.
Let's say you spend 10% of your disposable income on music. Now Napster comes along and you download all your music for free, depriving record company executives - I'm sorry, starving artists - that 10% of your disposable income.
Now, the key question is: what do you do with the savings?
Your piracy is only ultimately 'costing' the overall economy anything if you then reduce your working hours and take a pay cut that exactly offsets the money you would otherwise have spent on music. If instead you do the same amount of work and take the money and do something else with it - anything else - then the overall world economy has lost precisely nothing. That money winds up going to someone, somewhere. It stays in the system. It isn't magically destroyed.
There's some interesting subsidiary questions, of course. Like 'what do you spend the money on instead'? At _this_ specific point the Swiss argument is on somewhat shaky ground; I'm not sure they sufficiently proved that the money would be spent on other entertainment products. It would seem more reasonable that maybe people would spend it on _other_ discretionary spending instead. Maybe clothes, put it towards a car, drinks - it doesn't really matter. The point is that if you take the saving and spend it on something else, you're now not just 'costing' the specific music artists in question money, you're 'costing' the entire entertainment industry money.
This is the key point: this is really what the entertainment industry is worried about. And to a degree it's a legitimate worry. Making it very easy to pirate stuff probably _does_ cost the entertainment industry some amount of money, overall, compared to what they could theoretically make if it wasn't possible. It's a complex argument, maybe it does, maybe it doesn't, but the point of view that it does can at least be sustained.
Now, the entertainment industry is of course entirely self-serving and therefore attempts to portray this specific loss of economic activity in their sector as if it is some sort of magic overall loss to the economy. It Costs X Billion Dollars, they say - though those X Billion Dollars are not, as we've already seen, magically destroyed. They just go somewhere else. It Costs X Hundred Thousand Jobs - again, it probably doesn't. The jobs just wind up in some other sector.
However, the entertainment lobby again has a legitimate argument - to some degree, in some jurisdictions. See, you can make the argument that there is an overall cost to an even bigger entity than 'the entertainment industry' - it can be reasonably sustained that there's some degree of overall concrete negative effect on the economies of specific countries. Particularly those countries which are dominant in the entertainment industry.
Now maybe it becomes a little more clear why America is always pushing for jackbooted copyright laws: America is at the forefront of the worldwide entertainment industry. Hollywood probably represents a huge net trade surplus to the American economy: lots of people who aren't Americans spend part of their disposable income on American movies, American music and so on. Maybe if you go spend that money on clothes instead, more of it winds up in China. Maybe if you go spend that money on a computer instead, more of it winds up in...er, China. Maybe if you go spend that money on a vacation to Beijing instead...hey, okay, I kid. But you see the point. While it's almost inarguably true that piracy does not have any overall impact on the global economy, it's certainly plausible to argue that, to some degree, it hurts America and benefits just about everyone who isn't America.
That degree is probably proportionally tiny. But you can bet it's a scare card the entertainment lobby plays as hard as it can to politicians.
The person to whom you're responding did not say "piracy is right" or "there is absolutely no situation in which copyright infringement can cause anyone any kind of problem". He said that it is not the same thing as theft.
why not just contribute to Meego / Mer / Tizen / whatever the hell it's called today? Yes it's niche and probably doomed, but then hey, so is Openmoko. And Meego/Mer/Tizen/MaryPoppins is somewhat more developed.
Or, heck, keep using your N900. It appears to be about as powerful as this 'new' Freerunner hardware...
I don't know much about it, really, but the posts up-thread suggest that there is some discretion for the publisher in the Amazon system about whether to apply DRM to the book or not.
"In China you just don't have that problem. [In America, t]he massive left wing agenda to redistribute the wealth has caused these problems."
Ladies and gentlemen, death93.
simplest thing to do is get the first Vorkosigan book in sequence and then just keep reading, but The Warrior's Apprentice works fine as an alternate starting point (it's rather more action-packed and was released first anyway). And yeah, the CD of ebooks would absolutely be a great way to get into it.
I think Discworld is still a ways ahead of Vorkosigan, but yeah, it's getting quite long.
(It's worth noting that while I don't agree, I can kinda see the OP's point; if you wanted to be mean you could categorize a lot of Baen's output as libertarian/militarist political screeds thinly disguised as science fiction. But if that's anyone's issue with Baen, please don't let it put you off Bujold, who doesn't really fit the template.)
Weber's a skilful writer of page-turners (though a horrible, horrible, horrible writer of dialogue), whatever you think of his politics. Bujold is just flat out a great writer; I don't know why she gets so much love and so little respect, but by any reasonable measure she's one of the great writers of the last 50 years. And that's coming from someone who reads a hell of a wide range of fiction.
It's easy enough to get a raw file of the book out of the Kindle system - I dunno about a physical *Kindle* itself, I don't have one, but you can get one out of the PC Kindle software. If the book isn't DRMed, then it'll be in a pretty well-known format which third party readers will have no problem reading or converting.
well, no, not really.
the post you're replying to does not say 'taxation-funded infrastructure is a bad idea'. it says 'making taxation-funded infrastructure programs horribly inefficient on purpose in order to 'create more jobs' is a bad idea'. those are two rather different concepts.
"Repairing even the wilderness trails is too expensive in a society that prefers to pay the skill-less to sit idle and collect the dole"
Reading this written about *America* in a country which actually has a functioning social security system...you're hilarious. No. America really, really is not a country renowned for its generous, laziness-enabled social security system. It's just...not.
yes, the news of someone's death is a perfect time for a mean-spirited, nitpicking personal evaluation of their bibliography. Great job.
How is it a straw man, exactly? Or did you just read the phrase 'straw man' on the internet, latch on to the fact it's frequently used to rebut someone presenting an argument, and throw it at me with zero understanding of what it actually means?
Just read the two statements in the summary. Nothing else is necessary.
Republican: "Our Democratic friends were never able to do the entitlement reforms. They weren't going to do anything without raising taxes."
Democrat: "The wealthiest Americans who earn over a million a year have to share too. And that line in the sand, we haven't seen Republicans willing to cross yet."
I mean, one of those is clearly a bald-faced misrepresentation: this is made clear within the statement itself. In the first sentence he flatly claims that Democrats would not "do the entitlement reforms". In the very next sentence he makes it clear that this is simply a lie: Democrats were entirely ready to do entitlement reforms, but on the condition that they were accompanied by tax increases. You know, compromise. That thing two sides who don't agree are supposed to do for the greater good.
The Democrat, by contrast, simply states that the Republicans would not agree to anything that included tax rises - whatever entitlement cuts were involved.
I just don't see where's the room for interpretation or greyness there. From their own statements it's quite clear that the Republicans are a) fundamentally dishonest and b) utterly unwilling to compromise.