'If we don't do it right now,... then we'll never do it, because we'll be overpopulated and the strain on the natural resources will be the number one priority.
O'Neill was right. The world population recently passed 7 billion people and its growth does not seem to be slowing down. As I see it, if we don't come to grips with this and learn to regulate our own numbers, mother nature will eventually do it for us, but then through war, famine and disease, in which case space colonies will be a lot less likely.
And it's not like space colonies can ever be an answer to overpopulation. Think about it: if we could manage to build an orbital habitat large enough to house a million people, a thousand of these would be needed for a billion people... after which there would still be billions of people left on the planet. In my view this strategy would only be feasible if 1.) we had hordes of robots and nanobots that could quickly build the colonies for us using only asteroids as raw material, and 2.) we had multiple space elevators to transport all those people up into orbit. None of that technology is available yet, while overpopulation is already a problem.
Finally, even if we did manage to build one or more successful, self-sustaining colonies in orbit, on the Moon or on Mars, overpopulation would probably still be an issue for them, so we might as well learn to deal with it now, here on Earth, before we start working on grandiose schemes to populate the rest of solar system.
Take a look at Hurricane Electric, they offer free tunnel, dns hosting, etc.
Oh, and an awesome IPv6 training program for which you can get a t-shirt if you finish it!;)
You can be up and running on an IPv6 tunnel from anywhere in 30 seconds!
You misunderstand: the only native IP addresses he has are IPv6. For IPv4 he only has one or more RFC1918 addresses (private range addresses behind a carrier-grade NAT). AFAIK Hurricane Electric only offers IPv6 addresses tunneled over IPv4. What he wants is the opposite: a public IPv4 address tunneled over IPv6. If there are not currently any services available that offer this, I'm sure there will be soon, but I doubt they will come free of charge.
... as you continue to grow older you will eventually reach a point at which your distant past will once again become crystal clear -- like it was just yesterday!
If it hits, I hope the Curiosity and Opportunity rovers are not damaged. Opportunity has been there since 2004, but Curiosity has been there less than a year and still has most of its life before it. On the other hand, I'm sure scientists around the world would learn plenty from the impact and its aftermath, even if the rest of humanity would not be interested for long ("A defense system? Oh, that's too expensive, and it can't happen here anyway").
Of course SPF filtering is not perfect; no one filter method ever is, thanks to all the badly configured mail servers out there. So, try not to build mail servers that reject incoming mail based on any one test, like one for SPF, or else you'll probably end up maintaining a lengthy whilelist, which will not only make you unpopular with the users, but is also a waste of time.
Instead, I built a mail system, using Exim (an extremely flexible MTA), that keeps track of a total number of 'strikes', as I call them, for positive scores for a number of filter categories, e.g. broken reverse lookup, bad HELO response, bad sender domain, blacklisted domain, no callout response, etc. Most of my filters are applied during the recipient phase of the delivery, before the MTA agrees to receive the message body (the data phase). If a message gets at least a certain number of strikes (in my case 3), it's rejected. If only 1 or 2, it ends up in the spambox of the intended recipient. These filter tests are separate from the ClamAV and spamassassin tests, both of which can still lead to an outright rejection.
In my experience, this method of counting strikes and using spamboxes to route messages to if they have only failed one or two filter categories has proved to be highly reliable and virtually maintenance free.
Did I misunderstand? It's possible, since I didn't read TFA.:-) Nevertheless, I think it's high time America did something to properly educate larger numbers of it's own people -- and not just the ones with rich parents. I'm sure there are some Americans who would like to see poverty among their fellow citizens increase to the point that it would be profitable to move manufacturing jobs from China back to the US, but I think it would be smarter to drop that idea and instead attempt to make the shift to a more service-based economy (they would not be the first). But, of course, that will require the average American to have a much better education.
"... That is how you give new industries to our competitors. That is why we need comprehensive immigration reform."
IIRC this kind of immigration reform was recently tried in the UK (although I'm not sure if it was actually implemented). The idea was that the government wanted to stem the tide of immigrants, but couldn't really hope to achieve that aim, because most of them were entering legally from other European countries. So, they sought to restrict the number of foreign students in the UK. But, then the universities became angry, because this measure meant that they would lose much of their income. The students were angry too, because many of them felt they might not be able to complete the studies for which they were paying. This simple exchange of knowledge (education) for money has been a part of our western economies for quite some time now and many would be rightly upset if one country or another were suddenly to impose such artificial restrictions for political reasons.
If Mr. Obama wants to do something about education in the United States, restricting the influx of foreign students with parents willing to pay those ridiculous tuition fees is not going to help. The only thing that would make a difference is if higher education were to be made more affordable for larger numbers of American students.
How the hell does slashdot.org not support IPV6,...
In a way, it does seem hypocritical: Slashdotters regularly complaining about IPv6 not being adopted quickly enough, while the Slashdot site itself is still not available via IPv6 despite carrying such reports for over a decade.
However, the problem may have at least as much to do with their hosting provider, Savvis, which AFAIK still does not offer their customers native IPv6 support. Of course, Slashdot could decide to set up an IPv6-over-IPv4 tunnel instead, but the traffic involved would probably be substantial and lead to complications and expenses that they and their corporate masters would rather avoid.
I suspect that Savvis and other US providers will only start to improve their support for IPv6 after ARIN's pool of IPv4 addresses has been depleted, an event that currently looks set to take place in the first half of 2014.
... If you dangle somebody from a crane, hundreds of feet above the ground and all those teeny little figures walking about, does that person's heart rate, blood pressure, adrenaline levels, and similar fear responses have any useful correlation to their knowledge of the tensile strength of the steel cable they are attached to?
That's what this kind of information encourages, but only among those who do not understand statistics. However, magical thinking has already been around for so long (just think of all the world's religions) that I doubt YouTube can make things any worse.
Following the floods in Bangkok, HD production got going again, but the prices for these devices have not continued to fall as before. However, as this article points out, that is not the case with SSDs. The result? I suspect that sooner rather than later, significant numbers of people will start buying SSDs instead, realize the advantages over those old spinning platters of rust and then never look back. When the very few HD manufacturers that are now left finally realize the consequences of their greed and lack of willingness to compete against each other, it'll be too late and their profits will only continue to shrink.
... Give me a good reason why someone shouldn't be using DNS instead of direct IP address, other than lazy programmers.
From a management perspective it's a solid advantage for me to give fixed IPv6 addresses (via DHCPv6) to all of my (Linux) workstations, just as I did before and still do with IPv4. IPv6 not only allows me to access them directly via the Internet without using SSH tunnels, but fixed IP addresses in general (with both forward and reverse DNS entries) are also essential for the Kerberos authentication system that we use.
As for whether IPv6 addresses are a pain to work with, it would seem that way if only the kind of addresses that result from stateless autoconfiguration are considered. However, when using fixed IPv6 addresses it's unnecessary to make the host portion of the address so complicated. For example, with stateful autoconfiguration (using DHCPv6) we can choose to give workstations much shorter addresses, like 2001:888:abcd:25::21.
For years I've been using Asus motherboards and have never had any major problems. Perhaps some of the reasons for this are that I never go for the flagship models and/or the latest chipsets, never expect everything to work and am always willing to compromise. By the latter I mean in particular that I often end up adding things like sound cards when the Linux kernel I'm using (usually not the latest version) doesn't include support for the one on the motherboard. Graphics cards? Never expect too much or buy separately.
For business solutions that I will be purchasing in bulk, always test first: you may be surprised how well it works, and if not at least you'll learn what to avoid. Just don't take too long testing, because products often disappear from the market before you know it (especially the cheaper boards).
Reviews? I usually don't bother, but I don't think that makes me lazy, since I figure there's usually not a lot to choose from anyway. If I was always to limit myself only to those motherboards that were 100% compatible, that would probably limit my choice too much. It's worth more to me to be able to select what I want based on the hardware specifications alone (the most important ones; not all the bells and whistles).
That was my first impression. It's probably all pretty well organized, but necessarily compact. As a very temporary resident, I think it would be impossible for someone (like myself) to ever know everything about the ISS -- it's so incredibly complex. Think of all the different components needed to make life possible on the station, keeping track of all the consumables and trash, the ship to ground communications, the space suits, the myriad science experiments, needing to know everything in both Russian and English. The crew will depend heavily on manuals for everything and on almost continuous support from knowledgeable staff on the ground.
Thanks very much to ISS commanders Sunita Williams and Kevin Ford for making a great video!
For starters, the story mixes two things up: it speaks of the new rover, Curiosity, exploring a site on the western rim of Endurance Crater that was discovered by the Opportunity rover. It even quotes Steve Squyres as saying, "We wouldn't have gotten to Matijevic Hill, eight-and-a-half years after Curiosity's landing, without Jake Matijevic." He would never have said that: Squyers is principal investigator of the Mars Exploration Rover Mission (MER) -- Spirit and Opportunity -- not Curiosity, and Curiosity has only been on Mars since the 5th of August this year.
... When was the last time you upgraded a CPU and didn't get a new motherboard? Never?...
Admittedly it's been a while, but when I buy the stuff at least I get to choose the combinations I want.
... If a soldered on chip allows the bus to run faster, I for one am enthusiastic.
If things do play out like TFA suggests, then what we will be left with is less choice for higher prices. Historically, consumers have never been very enthusiastic about this kind of development.
First of all, here in the Netherlands the roll-out of fiber to the home seems to be moving at a snail's pace. My impression is that our local telco giant, KPN, who work together with Reggefiber to install fiber optic cabling, is only interested in doing this for new neighborhoods. I once asked what it might take to change their minds and was told that, if I was to survey my neighborhood (around 1,000 homes) and gather signatures from at least 40% who would be interested in such a connection, then they would consider it (but not guarantee). Therefore, none of this wonderful news about cutting-edge optical network technology is going to do me any good anyway, even if the cost of the particular technology itself is zero.
Second, even if we all had the option to use a fiber optic connection at home, why on Earth would a telco suddenly decide to give all of its clients a 200,000% speed upgrade? From a business point of view, that makes no sense. First of all, since making any changes to a big network costs lots of money, a telco would never do that unless it was forced to increase its speeds due to the competition. Also, the end users would probably start to use more of that bandwidth -- something that the ISPs have to pay for. So, unless the international carriers start to offer significantly higher speeds for lower prices as well, I don't see this happening.
Third, there's DPI and government spying equipment to consider. The equipment necessary to do that at the speeds we have today is likely quite expensive already, and higher speeds may make it a real bottleneck. Therefore, we may see our average network speeds grow only as quickly as our ISPs are willing to increase the speed of these wretched machines.
Personally, unless I move to a different neighborhood I expect that my own bandwidth will take at least 10 years to get to 100/100Mbps and perhaps 25 before I have a 1/1 Gbps connection at my disposal.
The problem in Silicon Valley is the same as everywhere else: unregulated capitalism coupled with political corruption that leads to further deregulation and further corruption. We seem to be stuck in a downwards spiral. All of the negative aspects mentioned -- erosion of privacy, of consumer rights, etc. -- may seem to result from new technologies, but the latter has been a double-edged sword throughout history. The only reason our rights are currently being trampled on is because those new technologies and businesses are not being regulated properly.
The problem is that, contrary to what corporations and many politicians would have us believe, corporations are by definition incapable of regulating themselves, because their only legal responsibility is to make a profit for their shareholders. If they have any responsibility to do otherwise, it is because of the laws applied to them by the state. The state, however, must always remain vigilant, for just as psychopaths cannot be taught that there is an intrinsic value in treating other people with respect, corporations are always seeking to find and/or create loopholes and do away with any and all regulations that would stand between them and their profits.
How to fix the problem? Start by getting money out of politics. Eventually, though, I think an end to publicly owned companies should be considered. The problem is that when corporations break the law and get caught, rarely is anyone held responsible and sent to prison; the organization just ends up paying a fine. But, if the fine is only a fraction of what it was worth for them to break the law in the first place, it does not act as a deterrent. They continue to operate as though many laws do not apply to them and let their legal departments take care of the details. Obviously, society cannot tolerate this situation indefinitely. If nothing is done, the way things are going now we will eventually be left with no freedoms, no rights, no justice, no democracy -- only a police state in which the masses are required to toil and consume for the benefit of a plutocratic elite... perhaps lead by someone like Mittroford Romnifeld the Great.
Of course it isn't! For instance, with so many blatantly anti-scientific types preventing the biology articles from being organized and developed properly, why would that accusation sound surprising to anyone? For this reason, biologists avoid Wikipedia, but without them it will never become a descent source of information about life on this planet.
I strongly disagree.... I honestly pity you if you've never had that experience...
Actually, your experience sounds a lot like mine. Sure, I have read many books that I found much better than others -- some that I've even re-red three times with many years in between. My favorite ones are very well written and are either highly entertaining and/or make me stop and think the most. But, it's not like any one book literally changed my life.
Perhaps our differing views regarding the original question stem from the way we interpret the phrase "had a significant impact on your life." That sounded too strong for me, so I was taking it more literally, for example Paul Ryan being overly-enthusiastic about Ayn Rand's books, or even a fundamentalist raving about a religious tome. I don't think any book will ever have that kind of impact on me.
My impression is that only people who have read very few books are likely to say that any one book has had a "significant impact on their lives." No one book has all the answers, but people who read enough of them do tend to become wiser. Anyway, if you're looking for a good book, first find a good author.
The mercenary culture is a direct result of companies not sufficiently increasing wages for existing employees....
Not completely. I'd say it's also the result of companies no longer training their own personnel, preferring instead to let others make the investment after which they lure them away with higher wage offers. Of course, that money is only offered to people with experience: those who don't have any are started off on much lower pay. So, no wonder the employees think it's normal to hop from one job to the next -- it's the easiest way to gain a salary increase.
Ultimately, this is the result of a bad management culture. With employers treating their employees more like resources to be bought and disposed of depending only on whatever trendy skills they may require for this month's project, employees have little reason to stay loyal to them.
Slashdot Mirror
'If we don't do it right now, ... then we'll never do it, because we'll be overpopulated and the strain on the natural resources will be the number one priority.
O'Neill was right. The world population recently passed 7 billion people and its growth does not seem to be slowing down. As I see it, if we don't come to grips with this and learn to regulate our own numbers, mother nature will eventually do it for us, but then through war, famine and disease, in which case space colonies will be a lot less likely.
And it's not like space colonies can ever be an answer to overpopulation. Think about it: if we could manage to build an orbital habitat large enough to house a million people, a thousand of these would be needed for a billion people... after which there would still be billions of people left on the planet. In my view this strategy would only be feasible if 1.) we had hordes of robots and nanobots that could quickly build the colonies for us using only asteroids as raw material, and 2.) we had multiple space elevators to transport all those people up into orbit. None of that technology is available yet, while overpopulation is already a problem.
Finally, even if we did manage to build one or more successful, self-sustaining colonies in orbit, on the Moon or on Mars, overpopulation would probably still be an issue for them, so we might as well learn to deal with it now, here on Earth, before we start working on grandiose schemes to populate the rest of solar system.
Take a look at Hurricane Electric, they offer free tunnel, dns hosting, etc. Oh, and an awesome IPv6 training program for which you can get a t-shirt if you finish it! ;)
You can be up and running on an IPv6 tunnel from anywhere in 30 seconds!
You misunderstand: the only native IP addresses he has are IPv6. For IPv4 he only has one or more RFC1918 addresses (private range addresses behind a carrier-grade NAT). AFAIK Hurricane Electric only offers IPv6 addresses tunneled over IPv4. What he wants is the opposite: a public IPv4 address tunneled over IPv6. If there are not currently any services available that offer this, I'm sure there will be soon, but I doubt they will come free of charge.
... as you continue to grow older you will eventually reach a point at which your distant past will once again become crystal clear -- like it was just yesterday!
If it hits, I hope the Curiosity and Opportunity rovers are not damaged. Opportunity has been there since 2004, but Curiosity has been there less than a year and still has most of its life before it. On the other hand, I'm sure scientists around the world would learn plenty from the impact and its aftermath, even if the rest of humanity would not be interested for long ("A defense system? Oh, that's too expensive, and it can't happen here anyway").
Of course SPF filtering is not perfect; no one filter method ever is, thanks to all the badly configured mail servers out there. So, try not to build mail servers that reject incoming mail based on any one test, like one for SPF, or else you'll probably end up maintaining a lengthy whilelist, which will not only make you unpopular with the users, but is also a waste of time.
Instead, I built a mail system, using Exim (an extremely flexible MTA), that keeps track of a total number of 'strikes', as I call them, for positive scores for a number of filter categories, e.g. broken reverse lookup, bad HELO response, bad sender domain, blacklisted domain, no callout response, etc. Most of my filters are applied during the recipient phase of the delivery, before the MTA agrees to receive the message body (the data phase). If a message gets at least a certain number of strikes (in my case 3), it's rejected. If only 1 or 2, it ends up in the spambox of the intended recipient. These filter tests are separate from the ClamAV and spamassassin tests, both of which can still lead to an outright rejection.
In my experience, this method of counting strikes and using spamboxes to route messages to if they have only failed one or two filter categories has proved to be highly reliable and virtually maintenance free.
Did I misunderstand? It's possible, since I didn't read TFA. :-) Nevertheless, I think it's high time America did something to properly educate larger numbers of it's own people -- and not just the ones with rich parents. I'm sure there are some Americans who would like to see poverty among their fellow citizens increase to the point that it would be profitable to move manufacturing jobs from China back to the US, but I think it would be smarter to drop that idea and instead attempt to make the shift to a more service-based economy (they would not be the first). But, of course, that will require the average American to have a much better education.
"... That is how you give new industries to our competitors. That is why we need comprehensive immigration reform."
IIRC this kind of immigration reform was recently tried in the UK (although I'm not sure if it was actually implemented). The idea was that the government wanted to stem the tide of immigrants, but couldn't really hope to achieve that aim, because most of them were entering legally from other European countries. So, they sought to restrict the number of foreign students in the UK. But, then the universities became angry, because this measure meant that they would lose much of their income. The students were angry too, because many of them felt they might not be able to complete the studies for which they were paying. This simple exchange of knowledge (education) for money has been a part of our western economies for quite some time now and many would be rightly upset if one country or another were suddenly to impose such artificial restrictions for political reasons.
If Mr. Obama wants to do something about education in the United States, restricting the influx of foreign students with parents willing to pay those ridiculous tuition fees is not going to help. The only thing that would make a difference is if higher education were to be made more affordable for larger numbers of American students.
To put it another way, How many gallons of this fuel will it take to produce one gallon of this fuel?
How the hell does slashdot.org not support IPV6, ...
In a way, it does seem hypocritical: Slashdotters regularly complaining about IPv6 not being adopted quickly enough, while the Slashdot site itself is still not available via IPv6 despite carrying such reports for over a decade.
However, the problem may have at least as much to do with their hosting provider, Savvis, which AFAIK still does not offer their customers native IPv6 support. Of course, Slashdot could decide to set up an IPv6-over-IPv4 tunnel instead, but the traffic involved would probably be substantial and lead to complications and expenses that they and their corporate masters would rather avoid.
I suspect that Savvis and other US providers will only start to improve their support for IPv6 after ARIN's pool of IPv4 addresses has been depleted, an event that currently looks set to take place in the first half of 2014.
... You can't just cut off people from the IPv4 internet, you'd leave them with a pretty much useless internet connection.
Luckily, IPv6-only connections are becoming less useless every day.
... If you dangle somebody from a crane, hundreds of feet above the ground and all those teeny little figures walking about, does that person's heart rate, blood pressure, adrenaline levels, and similar fear responses have any useful correlation to their knowledge of the tensile strength of the steel cable they are attached to?
That would depend on how neurotic they are.
That's what this kind of information encourages, but only among those who do not understand statistics. However, magical thinking has already been around for so long (just think of all the world's religions) that I doubt YouTube can make things any worse.
Following the floods in Bangkok, HD production got going again, but the prices for these devices have not continued to fall as before. However, as this article points out, that is not the case with SSDs. The result? I suspect that sooner rather than later, significant numbers of people will start buying SSDs instead, realize the advantages over those old spinning platters of rust and then never look back. When the very few HD manufacturers that are now left finally realize the consequences of their greed and lack of willingness to compete against each other, it'll be too late and their profits will only continue to shrink.
From a management perspective it's a solid advantage for me to give fixed IPv6 addresses (via DHCPv6) to all of my (Linux) workstations, just as I did before and still do with IPv4. IPv6 not only allows me to access them directly via the Internet without using SSH tunnels, but fixed IP addresses in general (with both forward and reverse DNS entries) are also essential for the Kerberos authentication system that we use.
As for whether IPv6 addresses are a pain to work with, it would seem that way if only the kind of addresses that result from stateless autoconfiguration are considered. However, when using fixed IPv6 addresses it's unnecessary to make the host portion of the address so complicated. For example, with stateful autoconfiguration (using DHCPv6) we can choose to give workstations much shorter addresses, like 2001:888:abcd:25::21.
For years I've been using Asus motherboards and have never had any major problems. Perhaps some of the reasons for this are that I never go for the flagship models and/or the latest chipsets, never expect everything to work and am always willing to compromise. By the latter I mean in particular that I often end up adding things like sound cards when the Linux kernel I'm using (usually not the latest version) doesn't include support for the one on the motherboard. Graphics cards? Never expect too much or buy separately.
For business solutions that I will be purchasing in bulk, always test first: you may be surprised how well it works, and if not at least you'll learn what to avoid. Just don't take too long testing, because products often disappear from the market before you know it (especially the cheaper boards).
Reviews? I usually don't bother, but I don't think that makes me lazy, since I figure there's usually not a lot to choose from anyway. If I was always to limit myself only to those motherboards that were 100% compatible, that would probably limit my choice too much. It's worth more to me to be able to select what I want based on the hardware specifications alone (the most important ones; not all the bells and whistles).
That was my first impression. It's probably all pretty well organized, but necessarily compact. As a very temporary resident, I think it would be impossible for someone (like myself) to ever know everything about the ISS -- it's so incredibly complex. Think of all the different components needed to make life possible on the station, keeping track of all the consumables and trash, the ship to ground communications, the space suits, the myriad science experiments, needing to know everything in both Russian and English. The crew will depend heavily on manuals for everything and on almost continuous support from knowledgeable staff on the ground.
Thanks very much to ISS commanders Sunita Williams and Kevin Ford for making a great video!
Darling of the telecom industry, one of the most expensive telecommunication methods ever devised.
For starters, the story mixes two things up: it speaks of the new rover, Curiosity, exploring a site on the western rim of Endurance Crater that was discovered by the Opportunity rover. It even quotes Steve Squyres as saying, "We wouldn't have gotten to Matijevic Hill, eight-and-a-half years after Curiosity's landing, without Jake Matijevic." He would never have said that: Squyers is principal investigator of the Mars Exploration Rover Mission (MER) -- Spirit and Opportunity -- not Curiosity, and Curiosity has only been on Mars since the 5th of August this year.
Admittedly it's been a while, but when I buy the stuff at least I get to choose the combinations I want.
If things do play out like TFA suggests, then what we will be left with is less choice for higher prices. Historically, consumers have never been very enthusiastic about this kind of development.
First of all, here in the Netherlands the roll-out of fiber to the home seems to be moving at a snail's pace. My impression is that our local telco giant, KPN, who work together with Reggefiber to install fiber optic cabling, is only interested in doing this for new neighborhoods. I once asked what it might take to change their minds and was told that, if I was to survey my neighborhood (around 1,000 homes) and gather signatures from at least 40% who would be interested in such a connection, then they would consider it (but not guarantee). Therefore, none of this wonderful news about cutting-edge optical network technology is going to do me any good anyway, even if the cost of the particular technology itself is zero.
Second, even if we all had the option to use a fiber optic connection at home, why on Earth would a telco suddenly decide to give all of its clients a 200,000% speed upgrade? From a business point of view, that makes no sense. First of all, since making any changes to a big network costs lots of money, a telco would never do that unless it was forced to increase its speeds due to the competition. Also, the end users would probably start to use more of that bandwidth -- something that the ISPs have to pay for. So, unless the international carriers start to offer significantly higher speeds for lower prices as well, I don't see this happening.
Third, there's DPI and government spying equipment to consider. The equipment necessary to do that at the speeds we have today is likely quite expensive already, and higher speeds may make it a real bottleneck. Therefore, we may see our average network speeds grow only as quickly as our ISPs are willing to increase the speed of these wretched machines.
Personally, unless I move to a different neighborhood I expect that my own bandwidth will take at least 10 years to get to 100/100Mbps and perhaps 25 before I have a 1/1 Gbps connection at my disposal.
The problem in Silicon Valley is the same as everywhere else: unregulated capitalism coupled with political corruption that leads to further deregulation and further corruption. We seem to be stuck in a downwards spiral. All of the negative aspects mentioned -- erosion of privacy, of consumer rights, etc. -- may seem to result from new technologies, but the latter has been a double-edged sword throughout history. The only reason our rights are currently being trampled on is because those new technologies and businesses are not being regulated properly.
The problem is that, contrary to what corporations and many politicians would have us believe, corporations are by definition incapable of regulating themselves, because their only legal responsibility is to make a profit for their shareholders. If they have any responsibility to do otherwise, it is because of the laws applied to them by the state. The state, however, must always remain vigilant, for just as psychopaths cannot be taught that there is an intrinsic value in treating other people with respect, corporations are always seeking to find and/or create loopholes and do away with any and all regulations that would stand between them and their profits.
How to fix the problem? Start by getting money out of politics. Eventually, though, I think an end to publicly owned companies should be considered. The problem is that when corporations break the law and get caught, rarely is anyone held responsible and sent to prison; the organization just ends up paying a fine. But, if the fine is only a fraction of what it was worth for them to break the law in the first place, it does not act as a deterrent. They continue to operate as though many laws do not apply to them and let their legal departments take care of the details. Obviously, society cannot tolerate this situation indefinitely. If nothing is done, the way things are going now we will eventually be left with no freedoms, no rights, no justice, no democracy -- only a police state in which the masses are required to toil and consume for the benefit of a plutocratic elite... perhaps lead by someone like Mittroford Romnifeld the Great.
Of course it isn't! For instance, with so many blatantly anti-scientific types preventing the biology articles from being organized and developed properly, why would that accusation sound surprising to anyone? For this reason, biologists avoid Wikipedia, but without them it will never become a descent source of information about life on this planet.
I strongly disagree. ... I honestly pity you if you've never had that experience ...
Actually, your experience sounds a lot like mine. Sure, I have read many books that I found much better than others -- some that I've even re-red three times with many years in between. My favorite ones are very well written and are either highly entertaining and/or make me stop and think the most. But, it's not like any one book literally changed my life.
Perhaps our differing views regarding the original question stem from the way we interpret the phrase "had a significant impact on your life." That sounded too strong for me, so I was taking it more literally, for example Paul Ryan being overly-enthusiastic about Ayn Rand's books, or even a fundamentalist raving about a religious tome. I don't think any book will ever have that kind of impact on me.
My impression is that only people who have read very few books are likely to say that any one book has had a "significant impact on their lives." No one book has all the answers, but people who read enough of them do tend to become wiser. Anyway, if you're looking for a good book, first find a good author.
The mercenary culture is a direct result of companies not sufficiently increasing wages for existing employees. ...
Not completely. I'd say it's also the result of companies no longer training their own personnel, preferring instead to let others make the investment after which they lure them away with higher wage offers. Of course, that money is only offered to people with experience: those who don't have any are started off on much lower pay. So, no wonder the employees think it's normal to hop from one job to the next -- it's the easiest way to gain a salary increase.
Ultimately, this is the result of a bad management culture. With employers treating their employees more like resources to be bought and disposed of depending only on whatever trendy skills they may require for this month's project, employees have little reason to stay loyal to them.