That'd be more convincing if I could see a microkernel OS that didn't suck. The theory is great.. sort of like object oriented programming.. but doesn't always work out. The biggest problem seems to be that that extra layer of abstraction slows things down (which makes sense really).
Actually, the bigger problem with microkernel is debugging. When passing messages around inside an OS, there is a potential for lots of race states and the like. The trick to microkernel is getting the messages to run around as fast as possible without adding synchronization points. Every synchronization point slows the system a little, but makes the system a little more stable. Once you've optimized the system for performance, and small change to any module the kernel talks to can throw the whole thing out of balance, and you need to go back and debug the race states and retune the code.
In short, a kernel can be fast, flexible, or reliable. You can have two, but it is really difficult to have three. Macro-kernels are generally fast and reliable. Micro-kernels can be fast and flexible, flexible and reliable, but rarely are they fast and reliable.
Having read Richard Feynman's comments on the Shuttle report I am amazed they chose to use the Shuttle booster and the Shuttle main engine, both of which he specifically comments on.
snipped
So, how exactly does this make a safe, reliable launch system?
Others have responded and pointed out that real experience has proven the SRB and SSME components to be more reliable than Feynman predicted. However, even excluding that...
The new design allows for the fact that these components might fail, and provides for vehicle and crew safety in these cases. The Challenger accident was not caused by the SRB leaking hot gases from a poor seal between segments, it was caused because the design placed a huge tank of volatile fuel right next to the SRB. Had the leak occured on the opposite side of the booster, the shuttle would have made orbit normally and the public would never have noticed. Likewise the Columbia accident was caused because the design placed a large cryogenic tank above the delicate structures on the crew vehicle.
In short, many of the key individual components of the Shuttle system are are safe, well tested, and of high quality. The shuttle's problems have been with the overall arrangement of those components.
In the new configuration, an SRB that refuses to ignite is a non-issue. A leaking SRB is also a non-issue. An unsteerable SRB would cause the capsule to seperate via the escape tower, which could also return the crew safely is a bird strike damaged the crew vehicle during the first seconds of launch. Likewise a second stage SSME failure to ignite would also cause the capsule to return safely after a suborbital flight. Meanwhile the ablative heatshield surfaces are far less fragile than the tiles, and are protected during most of the flight. The crew vehicle is located above the rest of the vehicle, and cannot be struck by debris from the remainder of the vehicle.
There are only a few modes of failure that I can think of that would lead to loss of crew. First, a bird strike in the first moments of launch that damages both the crew vehicle and the escape tower. These forward areas of the capsule natuarally need to be strong enough to handle the aerodynamic stress that this is exceedingly unlikely. Second, a hydrogen/oxygen leak in the second stage leads to a major explosion during flight. At a low altitute the escape tower would get the capsule clear, but at the halfway point of the second stage burn this could lead to the capsule achieving orbit but not having the abilty to deorbit due to a damaged deorbit thruster. Third is a meteor strike that disables the crew vehicle. The space shuttle also experiences all these risks.
So in total, the new system completely eliminates the biggest risks and mitigates many of the smaller risks, all while not adding any new risks. That certainly makes the system much safer.
An incident like you describe would never be considered a war crime. Accidental targeting of civilians is not a war crime. In certain cases of "military neccessity" even intentioanl targeting of civilians is not a war crime.
War sucks. The unfortunate fact is that civilians in a war zone are sometimes victims. This is not always the result of an act of a criminal, but sometimes only the result of men doing their honest best in difficult circumstance.
The article reports that "the researchers made a database of 125 grammatical features in 15 Papuan languages. This included how word types, such as nouns and verbs, are ordered in a sentence, and whether nouns have a gender, as they do in languages such as German and French."
Unfortunately, these aren't reliable characteristics for determining language relatedness.
You don't mention whether you evaluated the research itself, or merely the report of the research. I get the sense from our post that you are commenting on the data that was presented by the journalist, and not the data that was presented by the researchers.
You demonstrate that the two features listed in the news article, when applied to English and German, don't demonstrate a relationship that we know is there. It is possible, however, that the remaining 123 features that the article did not list would correctly show the close relationship between Engish and German.
There is one, and only one, method for determining relatedness between languages which is generally accepted by specialists in the field: namely, by identifying a core of lexical and morphological items which show systematic correspondences in their sounds between languages (e.g. English father, fish, Latin pater, piscis), and which can't reasonably be attributed to borrowing or to chance.
The fact that there is "one, and only one" in the past does not mean that this must always be the case.
Approaches roughly similar to the one described here have been attempted repeatedly in recent years, and have been repeatedly answered in the literature.
A good reason to be skeptical. But I don't think that an academic such as yourself should be utterly dismissive without reading the actual literature and evaluating whether the researchers answered the criticisms of prior research.
This really isn't trolling. It may be off topic, but it isn't trolling.
Yeah, right.
Party above the individual: Republican's "No abortion" policy.
As opposed to the Democrats' "You can murder any child at any time up until the moment it slides through the birth canal." policy. Why is it that an extreme policy fully supported by only 20% or so of the right is a sign of fascism, but an extreme policy only supported by 20% or so of the left is somehow just?
State supreme: Pushing judges that want to expand the interstate commerce clause to regulate EVERYTHING, including california only medical marijuana.
Hmm. Why are policies and legal precedents established by Democrat Franklin D Roosevelt and his Democratic congress 60+ years ago blamed on Republican George W. Bush and his Republican congress?
More of "You're with us or against us". The whole "We have 55%, so we'll push our agenda into law for everyone".
Yes, you're right. When the left is in power they always build broad consensus for their agenda and everything passes nearly unanimously. HA!
I actually agree with some (not all) of your underlying views. However, equating current American society with Fascism only serves to diminish the impact of that word and lessen our sympathy its victims and oour commitment to oppose it.
If the government allows contractors to consistently screw subcontractors of their IP, why would anyone want to keep subcontracting? If subcontractors decide to stop volunteering, what will that do to your military capacity?
It is more subtle than that. If the subcontractor does not play ball, the government (or the government's agent, the main contractor) is entitled to hire someone else to provide the technology without regard to the IP. The government could even hire your own employees, and you wouldn't be able to enforce the NDAs.
I call "Shenanigans"! This could only work if the radiant transfer of heat out of the object to be cooled significantly outweighed the conductive transfer of heat into that object from the ambient environment. I don't buy it, except perhaps under very specific circumstances.
$240 per line? well when it takes a union worker an hour to screw back in one set of wires...
Massive flooding is unlikely to just pull some wires out from under a couple of screws. The wires themselves are the least of the problem. How much switching equipment was underwater long enough that it needs to be replaced? Probably tens of thorusands. How many poles are down? Probably millions. How many cables were severed and need to be spliced? Thousands.
The $240 a line number is probably an estimate of the entire effort. Some lines will cost only a dollar to restore and others will cost thousands.
This is all conjecture, of course. The phone companies may be doing exactly the right things for themselves and their future. But it looks like they're betting their future on the telegraph.
According to the article, "In areas with extreme damage where buildings will be replaced, BellSouth will bring fiber to the new structures, [Ken Smith, director of AT&T's disaster recovery team] said."
If that intention actually pans out, that probably means the gulf coast area will have one of the country's largest deployments of fiber in the last mile. That doesn't sound like the telegraph to me.
Big deal. The theoretical maximum efficiency of a heat engine running at similar temperatures is only 40%, so at a real world 20% you are doing well. And sure, we can use a smaller, lighter vehicle, although that very quickly becomes unreasonable from both convenience and safety issues.
A fuel cell, on the other hand, can be practically operated at 40%-70% efficiency. That helps a lot.
The problem is risk. Just because you've screened the candidates to find people who are least likely to be bothered by the small spaces, doesn't mean that they won't crack. Placing a crew under those conditions for three years or so (especially when the crew will get some tastes of freedom on Mars) is one heck of a gamble to take.
I'm more worried that they'll use some paint which has toxic gases that will cause the occupants to go paranoid, like on that nuclear missile submarine a few years ago.
You are not wrong about cost of living. My point, however, is that an electrician in NYC is making on average about as much as the median white collar worker, especially when you factor in medical and retirement benefits as well as job security. When you figure that an average lawyer is probably making about $130,000 and is working a 60 hr week to do it, delayed their entry into the job market for 7 years, and has 7 yrs of corresponding student loans, the difference becomes stark.
In some markets and for some tradesm a highly skilled blue collar worker can support a better quality of life than a professional.
'learn a trade, such as electrician or plumber'... It might not be... extrememly high-paying...
An 'A-rated journeyman' union electrician in NYC makes over $40/hr plus has an incredible benefits package. That is after a 4 year apprenticeship and 1 to 2 years as an M-rated Mechanic.
So when most of the people on/. are a year and a half out of college and still in their first job, that electrician is making $100,000/yr and doesn't have any student loans to pay off.
The problem with this is that it could potentially be used to enforse "group think". Whatever group of people get enough karma to get past some magic threshold first have the ability to block everyone else. For instance, if enough left wing American democratic party activists establish themsleves first, they can create pages of unflattering propaganda about republicans and use their votes to prevent republicans from gaining enough karma that they could remove the propaganda.
They will switch to Intel based hardware made by Apple for the first year or so. They will then announce a deal with the HP and/or Dell allowing them to sell OSX with their hardware.
Close, but no cigar.
Instead, Apple will maintain control of the hardware design but outsource the manufacture to HP/Dell/Gateway/whoever. Then Apple will charge a moderate premium over what an eqv. box would cost, and take that as profit. That way they get to profit from the hardware without actually havcing to get their hands dirty building it.
Value added is for project managers, not coders. If you aspire to be a project manager fine- but don't make me read through 200 lines of comments for every 150 lines of code. Only the code matters- the rest is just meatspace.
Even if I can understand the code, why should I wade through it when I don't have to? I want to understand the broad architecture quickly, then deep dive at a particular area of interest. In this kind of environment, too many comments is just as bad as too few.
The "correct" amount of commenting is a brief description at each major block of code, plus a detailed description at any "dangerous curves". For instance:
A brief description for a block of code might look like this... "Here we iterate through the set, discarding any elements that don't fit the criteria defined above."
A dangerous curve comment might look like this... "When the criteria is met, this evaluation caused an overflow condition, which automatically terminates the loop and transfer control back to the calling method."
Before there was a "requirement" to share lines, many ILECs (Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers) withheld valuable technology from the public...
A monopoly can only exist if a competitor can't offer the same product in the same market, and there is no effective substitute product either. Until very recently, there was no effective substitute for wireline telephone service. Therefore it was appropriate to regulate the industry.
The broadband market, however, is substantially different in that 70% or so of the homes in the United States have access to two different providers using two different technologies. In addition there at least 4 other technologies which may compete to deliver broadband to consumers (IP over Power Line, Satellite, Terrestrial Wireless such as WiMax, and High Speed Cell Phone). In this case there cannot be a monopoly, and regulation needs to be refocused on monitoring the marketplace for collusion.
And if you think it's just a reaction towards oppressors...we still have laws based on the Napoleonic code, we all have surnames and streetnames...so if something is good and makes sense, it gets used. If something is bad, we scrap it.
That's not true. You are still using the metric system.
But what would you do with 850 GB of pre-written data. What would you put on such a medium that makes sense as mass-product?
Software, perhaps. A large vendor could put lots of apps on a single disc. Then, when you decide you need a particular app, you call up and get a license key.
Or libraries of various sorts could share incredible amounts of data. Imagine extremely high quality images of every painting in NY's Metropolitan Museum of Art on a single disk, which could then be shipped to every library in the country. Or single disks which contain substantial portions of the library of congress.
Doesn't matter. Apple's registration for "Tiger" is there, and TigerDirect's registration for "Tiger" isn't. I'd say that they don't have a leg to stand on.:-)
Is there no Python fan with mod points? That deserves a +1 Funny.
I think you hit the nail right on the head. Quantity vs. Quality. If there were fewer channels the better innovators would be more highly concentrated there, and there would be no room left for the mediocre. As it is now, the mediocre and worse all have happy homes producing the awful lot of crap we have currently available.
When there are fewer channels, however, you also squeeze out niche programming. Much of the decent programming on cable is there because shows don't need to attract 20 million viewers. A few hundred thousand viewers can make a profitable basic cable show. Therefore, chennles like the Discovery Channel, History Channel, etc. can successfully serve these niches.
I absolutely agree with the carriers. Governments do not provide service; they take money from taxpayers and use it to pay for services that not all taxpayers want.
This isn't neccessarily a bad thing. Gov't has long been in the business of providing infrastructure. Gov't builds roads and highways, water and sewer systems, police and fire protection, eduational systems. Part of the reason for building these things is that, even if an individual resident doesn't use that particular resource they still benefit from its effect on the community.
For instance, NYC is currently involved in an effort to build a new football stadium for the NY Jets. I'm not going to argue the financials of this particular effort, but in general these kinds of projects will have benefits for the wider community. For instance, the new stadium will also provide a much larger convention space. This means more visitors to NYC, more hotel rooms booked, more restaraunt meals, more taxi trips. That all adds up to two things: more jobs and more tax revenue. How many Gov'ts build a road so that a factory will locate there and employ their citizens? How many Gov'ts improve their school district so as to improve the property values in their community?
The question is not whether to do these things, the question is whether the benefit is worth the expense. If the Jets stadium costs tax payers $500 million and results in $1 billion in additional revenue and benefits it is a great deal. If it costs tax payers $500 million and only results in $250 million in taxes and benefits then it is a boondoggle.
By the same token, will the municipality building a broadband system recoup the benefits? Some people will use inexpensive broadband as a reason to locate their home there. More small businesses will locate there. Etc.
But does the average desk jockey need a 3GHz processor, 160Gb hard drive and 19-inch LCD monitor to send email, run Excel and Word, and surf the web? No.
I do consulting for a major Wall Street firm. Their VPN/Remote Access solution includes the ability to use Citrix to access Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, etc. 80% of their workforce can access all the tools they need to do their day-to-day job from any half way decent internet connected pc.
On top of that, if someone needs to access a non-standard app, they can use Citrix to access their own desktop via Microsoft's Remote Desktop Connectivity.
Even working as a developer, the only time I've ever needed to actually go to the desktop is to insert a usb thumb drive. Citrix has solutions for this as well, however, allowing you to use local USB devices like thumbdrives and printers as if they were attached to the remote machine.
With this level of remote computing, it is very easy to "pull the PC's from the desktop" for most users. Just assuming for a moment that you want to continue with a Microsoft based environment, you'd probably do the following...
Put together a redundant farm of Windows Server 2003 boxes in a datacenter or two. You probably need one high end server for every 50 or so desktops wish to replace.
Reimage all the older machines, putting on them a very locked down OS. You might put a Citrix client or VNC client on each, or you may just use Windows RDC.
When the user log in to "their PC", a connection is instead made to a remote session on the server.
Only a few copies of software like Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office need to be installed, maintained, and patched.
Backups can be made in one place.
When more power is needed one server needs to be upgraded, not 50 desktops.
The desktops need far less maintenence and administration. They are appliances with no valuable data on them. They last longer, and when they do need to be replaced they can be replaced with a Wyse WinTerm.
If the news story is accurate, these workers are not the same as if you or I worked as an independent contractor. According to the story, these workers were employees of staffing companies. The staffing companies were the contractors. They are no more entitled to be HP employees than the guy who drives around the lawnmower for a landscaping company deserves to be the direct employee of the landscaper's customer.
There are laws intended to protect individual workers from being treated like contractors instead of employees. A company can't simply hire people on a 1099 basis instead of a W-2 and duck all sorts of taxes and liabilities. The law provides for a set of tests to distinguish a true independent contractor from these situations. But the plaintiffs in this suit appear to be getting a W-2 from their employers, the staffing companies.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the bigger problem with microkernel is debugging. When passing messages around inside an OS, there is a potential for lots of race states and the like. The trick to microkernel is getting the messages to run around as fast as possible without adding synchronization points. Every synchronization point slows the system a little, but makes the system a little more stable. Once you've optimized the system for performance, and small change to any module the kernel talks to can throw the whole thing out of balance, and you need to go back and debug the race states and retune the code.
In short, a kernel can be fast, flexible, or reliable. You can have two, but it is really difficult to have three. Macro-kernels are generally fast and reliable. Micro-kernels can be fast and flexible, flexible and reliable, but rarely are they fast and reliable.
Others have responded and pointed out that real experience has proven the SRB and SSME components to be more reliable than Feynman predicted. However, even excluding that...
The new design allows for the fact that these components might fail, and provides for vehicle and crew safety in these cases. The Challenger accident was not caused by the SRB leaking hot gases from a poor seal between segments, it was caused because the design placed a huge tank of volatile fuel right next to the SRB. Had the leak occured on the opposite side of the booster, the shuttle would have made orbit normally and the public would never have noticed. Likewise the Columbia accident was caused because the design placed a large cryogenic tank above the delicate structures on the crew vehicle.
In short, many of the key individual components of the Shuttle system are are safe, well tested, and of high quality. The shuttle's problems have been with the overall arrangement of those components.
In the new configuration, an SRB that refuses to ignite is a non-issue. A leaking SRB is also a non-issue. An unsteerable SRB would cause the capsule to seperate via the escape tower, which could also return the crew safely is a bird strike damaged the crew vehicle during the first seconds of launch. Likewise a second stage SSME failure to ignite would also cause the capsule to return safely after a suborbital flight. Meanwhile the ablative heatshield surfaces are far less fragile than the tiles, and are protected during most of the flight. The crew vehicle is located above the rest of the vehicle, and cannot be struck by debris from the remainder of the vehicle.
There are only a few modes of failure that I can think of that would lead to loss of crew. First, a bird strike in the first moments of launch that damages both the crew vehicle and the escape tower. These forward areas of the capsule natuarally need to be strong enough to handle the aerodynamic stress that this is exceedingly unlikely. Second, a hydrogen/oxygen leak in the second stage leads to a major explosion during flight. At a low altitute the escape tower would get the capsule clear, but at the halfway point of the second stage burn this could lead to the capsule achieving orbit but not having the abilty to deorbit due to a damaged deorbit thruster. Third is a meteor strike that disables the crew vehicle. The space shuttle also experiences all these risks.
So in total, the new system completely eliminates the biggest risks and mitigates many of the smaller risks, all while not adding any new risks. That certainly makes the system much safer.
War crime? What are you smoking?
An incident like you describe would never be considered a war crime. Accidental targeting of civilians is not a war crime. In certain cases of "military neccessity" even intentioanl targeting of civilians is not a war crime.
War sucks. The unfortunate fact is that civilians in a war zone are sometimes victims. This is not always the result of an act of a criminal, but sometimes only the result of men doing their honest best in difficult circumstance.
You don't mention whether you evaluated the research itself, or merely the report of the research. I get the sense from our post that you are commenting on the data that was presented by the journalist, and not the data that was presented by the researchers.
You demonstrate that the two features listed in the news article, when applied to English and German, don't demonstrate a relationship that we know is there. It is possible, however, that the remaining 123 features that the article did not list would correctly show the close relationship between Engish and German.
The fact that there is "one, and only one" in the past does not mean that this must always be the case.
A good reason to be skeptical. But I don't think that an academic such as yourself should be utterly dismissive without reading the actual literature and evaluating whether the researchers answered the criticisms of prior research.
Yeah, right.
As opposed to the Democrats' "You can murder any child at any time up until the moment it slides through the birth canal." policy. Why is it that an extreme policy fully supported by only 20% or so of the right is a sign of fascism, but an extreme policy only supported by 20% or so of the left is somehow just?
Hmm. Why are policies and legal precedents established by Democrat Franklin D Roosevelt and his Democratic congress 60+ years ago blamed on Republican George W. Bush and his Republican congress?
Yes, you're right. When the left is in power they always build broad consensus for their agenda and everything passes nearly unanimously. HA!
I actually agree with some (not all) of your underlying views. However, equating current American society with Fascism only serves to diminish the impact of that word and lessen our sympathy its victims and oour commitment to oppose it.
It is more subtle than that. If the subcontractor does not play ball, the government (or the government's agent, the main contractor) is entitled to hire someone else to provide the technology without regard to the IP. The government could even hire your own employees, and you wouldn't be able to enforce the NDAs.
I call "Shenanigans"! This could only work if the radiant transfer of heat out of the object to be cooled significantly outweighed the conductive transfer of heat into that object from the ambient environment. I don't buy it, except perhaps under very specific circumstances.
Massive flooding is unlikely to just pull some wires out from under a couple of screws. The wires themselves are the least of the problem. How much switching equipment was underwater long enough that it needs to be replaced? Probably tens of thorusands. How many poles are down? Probably millions. How many cables were severed and need to be spliced? Thousands.
The $240 a line number is probably an estimate of the entire effort. Some lines will cost only a dollar to restore and others will cost thousands.
According to the article, "In areas with extreme damage where buildings will be replaced, BellSouth will bring fiber to the new structures, [Ken Smith, director of AT&T's disaster recovery team] said."
If that intention actually pans out, that probably means the gulf coast area will have one of the country's largest deployments of fiber in the last mile. That doesn't sound like the telegraph to me.
Big deal. The theoretical maximum efficiency of a heat engine running at similar temperatures is only 40%, so at a real world 20% you are doing well. And sure, we can use a smaller, lighter vehicle, although that very quickly becomes unreasonable from both convenience and safety issues. A fuel cell, on the other hand, can be practically operated at 40%-70% efficiency. That helps a lot.
I'm more worried that they'll use some paint which has toxic gases that will cause the occupants to go paranoid, like on that nuclear missile submarine a few years ago.
You are not wrong about cost of living. My point, however, is that an electrician in NYC is making on average about as much as the median white collar worker, especially when you factor in medical and retirement benefits as well as job security. When you figure that an average lawyer is probably making about $130,000 and is working a 60 hr week to do it, delayed their entry into the job market for 7 years, and has 7 yrs of corresponding student loans, the difference becomes stark.
In some markets and for some tradesm a highly skilled blue collar worker can support a better quality of life than a professional.
An 'A-rated journeyman' union electrician in NYC makes over $40/hr plus has an incredible benefits package. That is after a 4 year apprenticeship and 1 to 2 years as an M-rated Mechanic.
So when most of the people on /. are a year and a half out of college and still in their first job, that electrician is making $100,000/yr and doesn't have any student loans to pay off.
The problem with this is that it could potentially be used to enforse "group think". Whatever group of people get enough karma to get past some magic threshold first have the ability to block everyone else. For instance, if enough left wing American democratic party activists establish themsleves first, they can create pages of unflattering propaganda about republicans and use their votes to prevent republicans from gaining enough karma that they could remove the propaganda.
Close, but no cigar.
Instead, Apple will maintain control of the hardware design but outsource the manufacture to HP/Dell/Gateway/whoever. Then Apple will charge a moderate premium over what an eqv. box would cost, and take that as profit. That way they get to profit from the hardware without actually havcing to get their hands dirty building it.
Even if I can understand the code, why should I wade through it when I don't have to? I want to understand the broad architecture quickly, then deep dive at a particular area of interest. In this kind of environment, too many comments is just as bad as too few.
The "correct" amount of commenting is a brief description at each major block of code, plus a detailed description at any "dangerous curves". For instance:
A brief description for a block of code might look like this... "Here we iterate through the set, discarding any elements that don't fit the criteria defined above."
A dangerous curve comment might look like this... "When the criteria is met, this evaluation caused an overflow condition, which automatically terminates the loop and transfer control back to the calling method."
A monopoly can only exist if a competitor can't offer the same product in the same market, and there is no effective substitute product either. Until very recently, there was no effective substitute for wireline telephone service. Therefore it was appropriate to regulate the industry.
The broadband market, however, is substantially different in that 70% or so of the homes in the United States have access to two different providers using two different technologies. In addition there at least 4 other technologies which may compete to deliver broadband to consumers (IP over Power Line, Satellite, Terrestrial Wireless such as WiMax, and High Speed Cell Phone). In this case there cannot be a monopoly, and regulation needs to be refocused on monitoring the marketplace for collusion.
That's not true. You are still using the metric system.
Software, perhaps. A large vendor could put lots of apps on a single disc. Then, when you decide you need a particular app, you call up and get a license key.
Or libraries of various sorts could share incredible amounts of data. Imagine extremely high quality images of every painting in NY's Metropolitan Museum of Art on a single disk, which could then be shipped to every library in the country. Or single disks which contain substantial portions of the library of congress.
Is there no Python fan with mod points? That deserves a +1 Funny.
When there are fewer channels, however, you also squeeze out niche programming. Much of the decent programming on cable is there because shows don't need to attract 20 million viewers. A few hundred thousand viewers can make a profitable basic cable show. Therefore, chennles like the Discovery Channel, History Channel, etc. can successfully serve these niches.
This isn't neccessarily a bad thing. Gov't has long been in the business of providing infrastructure. Gov't builds roads and highways, water and sewer systems, police and fire protection, eduational systems. Part of the reason for building these things is that, even if an individual resident doesn't use that particular resource they still benefit from its effect on the community.
For instance, NYC is currently involved in an effort to build a new football stadium for the NY Jets. I'm not going to argue the financials of this particular effort, but in general these kinds of projects will have benefits for the wider community. For instance, the new stadium will also provide a much larger convention space. This means more visitors to NYC, more hotel rooms booked, more restaraunt meals, more taxi trips. That all adds up to two things: more jobs and more tax revenue. How many Gov'ts build a road so that a factory will locate there and employ their citizens? How many Gov'ts improve their school district so as to improve the property values in their community?
The question is not whether to do these things, the question is whether the benefit is worth the expense. If the Jets stadium costs tax payers $500 million and results in $1 billion in additional revenue and benefits it is a great deal. If it costs tax payers $500 million and only results in $250 million in taxes and benefits then it is a boondoggle.
By the same token, will the municipality building a broadband system recoup the benefits? Some people will use inexpensive broadband as a reason to locate their home there. More small businesses will locate there. Etc.
One person posts a suggestion on a discussion list. No one has yet responded positively or negatively. Ten minutes later it is a story on Slashdot?
I'm going to post somewhere that I'm taking over IBM. Let's see if "RevMike to take over IBM" becomes a story in the next ten minutes!
I do consulting for a major Wall Street firm. Their VPN/Remote Access solution includes the ability to use Citrix to access Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, etc. 80% of their workforce can access all the tools they need to do their day-to-day job from any half way decent internet connected pc.
On top of that, if someone needs to access a non-standard app, they can use Citrix to access their own desktop via Microsoft's Remote Desktop Connectivity.
Even working as a developer, the only time I've ever needed to actually go to the desktop is to insert a usb thumb drive. Citrix has solutions for this as well, however, allowing you to use local USB devices like thumbdrives and printers as if they were attached to the remote machine.
With this level of remote computing, it is very easy to "pull the PC's from the desktop" for most users. Just assuming for a moment that you want to continue with a Microsoft based environment, you'd probably do the following...
If the news story is accurate, these workers are not the same as if you or I worked as an independent contractor. According to the story, these workers were employees of staffing companies. The staffing companies were the contractors. They are no more entitled to be HP employees than the guy who drives around the lawnmower for a landscaping company deserves to be the direct employee of the landscaper's customer.
There are laws intended to protect individual workers from being treated like contractors instead of employees. A company can't simply hire people on a 1099 basis instead of a W-2 and duck all sorts of taxes and liabilities. The law provides for a set of tests to distinguish a true independent contractor from these situations. But the plaintiffs in this suit appear to be getting a W-2 from their employers, the staffing companies.