I replied to him with facts and figures, gently reminding him that one of his main points -- there's no crime in Vermont -- had a big obvious reason, and that the lack of gun laws in Vermont wasn't related.
He responted by saying, almost verbatim, 'I don't believe facts and figures, I only believe the things I believe.' I mean, he actually said, and I quote, "I have personal anecdotal that trumps your academic theory, as opposed to my reality."
And when someone starts drawing out his PERCEPTIONS of the world (not just what has happened to them, which is bad enough, but what they THINK about it) as though they were universal truths, you can't talk to them any more. There's no basis for agreement. You show them facts, and they say, 'those aren't true.' The only exchange that can go on in that kind of situation is two people yelling at each other.
Here is a great example: lifted from www.123student.com/social_issues/126.shtml.
A study of the murder rate in Washington D.C. showed that within three years of the passage of a law prohibiting the sale of handguns in the city the murder rate dropped by 25% (Kruschke 22). The state of South Carolina and the city of Boston experienced similar results when stricter gun control laws were recently enforced. In Boston the homicide rate dropped by 39% and in South Carolina the murder rate dropped by 28% (Kruschke 23).
But watch... he'll deny that it has any relevance, if he reads it at all. Perhaps, now that all this has been pointed out to him, he'll be able to find some statistics to back up his case, but his first impulse was to say 'statistics don't matter, only what happened to me matters'.
I have personal anecdotal evidence of a whole lot of things. Unlike you, I don't assume that just because I've seen something, it must be universally true. Of course, if you assume that you are the center of the universe, then everything you experience must, ipso facto, be universally true.
But, of course, you aren't actually interested in facts and figures. You don't actually want to learn, you want to state your position over and over until everyone believes you. And, since you are the center of the universe, and all of your friends think like you do, you know you're right, and you know that eventually everyone else with either accept that or die.
By the way, are you a member of a well-regulated militia? Just curious.
Full Throttle, Sam & Max, the Infocom collections, Civilization II, Diablo I, Master of Orion 2, Heroes of Might and Magic 2, JauntTrooper (Mission Thunderbolt, c. 1991), and even The Fools Errand (c. 1987) all run just fine under MacOS X in Classic. This is all MacOS 7 era stuff, except for the bits that were designed for 6.
In fact, the VAST majority of Mac software that I have tested still works just fine, even the stuff from long ago. Basically, if it actually followed the rules in the Inside Mac books it still works fine, no matter when it was written. Even a lot of the stuff that was less obedient still does.
And the things that don't run (Afterlife, for example) tend to not run because of something astonishingly stupid that the developer did. For example, Afterlife checks the version of the CD ROM driver installed, and if it isn't higher than 5.? it refuses to run at all. This broke when Apple integrated the DVD driver and the version number went back to 1.?. If you go in and hack your version number, you can make it run.
> Inside the united states, there are 50 states. Of those, the state with the least restrictive laws, vermont, has the > lowest crime rate.
Why, yes. It also has a total poulation of 600,000, spread across the entire state. The area with the highest population density is 100 people per square mile. (To put this in perspective, the highest concentration of people in New Jersey is over 4500 people per square mile.) There are no major cities in Vermont, and not a single area that would be considered at 'high risk' for crime as defined by the federal government. (That takes into account population density, income distribution, and a whole slew of other things.) Even New Mexico and Idaho have larger population concentrations than Vermont.
But, of course, you're right, none of this actually matters. The only reason that Vermont has good crime statistics is that handguns are cheap and easily available, and there are no laws regarding them.
And if you're comparing countries, what's the murder rate in England? Why, lower than of Vermont! But I suppose you'd prefer that more people were murdered and fewer people were robbed? (Well, as long as YOU weren't the one murdered, right?)
> This overlooks the fact that the rich are a minority of those who benefit from the Bush tax cut.
This is absolutely true. Also completely, totally, nauseatingly misleading. The rich are only 5% of the country, according to Bush's definition. 1/3 of Americans benefit from his tax cut. Never mind that those who are in the lowest 20% of the income levels don't benefit at all, and that basically NOBODY with an income of less than the top 10% gains more than $300 per year. But the top 1% gains more by percentage of income and (astonishingly) by total amount of money than EVERYONE ELSE COMBINED.
We are at historically low tax levels for the super-rich. At the times when our country had the highest tax levels for these people, we were most productive AND most prosperous. All the figures are easy to find, and I encourage you to go look them up for yourself. A good place to start is your local library, because then you don't get numbers deliberately slanted by the left OR the right.
But you won't. Because you'd much rather not crawl out of your own preconceptions when it's so much more comfortable to live and die without opening your mind.
Wouldn't that be where the program runs in a main (infinite) loop that watches for events from outside the main thread (whether from an i/o device, another thread, or whatever) and processes them, does whatever is necessary, and then returns to the main loop?
First off, drop the 'fscking' thing, it makes you sound stupider than you really are.
Second, drop the attitude, because you're not smart enough to pull it off.
Getting a job in some mom & pop shop pulling $7000 a year and you die of malnutrition and exposure in most parts of the country. But even leaving that aside, PEOPLE DON'T WANT YOU IF YOU DON'T HAVE TEN YEARS OF PROGRAMMING EXPERIENCE NOW. It doesn't matter how you start, it doesn't matter where you go. And there will be that glut for years to come.
If you expect people to leave school with a computer science degree and $20,000 in student loans (if you're LUCKY!) and get a job that pays as much as flipping burgers, then maybe your reality has been affected by the dramatic amounts of glue that you've been sniffing lately.
And if you think that just because you were lucky (I'm going to be generous and assume you were describing your situation instead of pulling a Ronald Reagan and inventing one to suit your needs) that everyone can be, you're wronger than dead.
I have a BS/CS and 5 years of relevant (programming) experience, and a couple of patents to my name. I'm currently doing work for an investment firm handling calls for $15/hour. Don't you DARE talk to me about 'if you're good enough'.
And FYI, if you mentioned $85k as 'the top of your field' around here in the Bay area you'd be laughed out of the room. Even today.
> That being said, maybe we are artificially inflating what we need in the way of salary. Instead of taking advantage > of the utility of sharing with our family, we are competing with them.
Hmm. I see.
And perhaps the companies will feel sorry for me, because my parents and grandparents are all dead now, and just pay me more because they know I need it?
Or perhaps this would just be another transfer of wealth to the rich, from the skilled, and would completely screw those who were unable to combine their incomes with those of their parents in order to own housing.
I see your point about being frugal, but if you say that companies don't really need to pay us enough for food, roof, and clothing, then THEY WON'T.
Meanwhile, the average executive of United received a pay increase of 8% over that year.
Okay, you're welcome to hate unions, although frankly I fully believe that the 'experience' you refer to that you have with unions was either a) lots of wonderful secondhand stories from people indoctrinated by Ronald Reagan or b) firmly from the side of the management.
But MY secondhand experience was with a shop that hired an extremely expensive company to come in and destroy their bid for union membership (illegally) in infancy. The workers over the next four years received pay cut after pay cut, and the executive salaries went up. This was during a recession, so they couldn't get other jobs, and the second time around everyone who even started to talk about a union was summarily fired.
And you know what? The anti-union corps did their job so well at that company that even after the entire work force was thoroughly abused, lives were destroyed, and the executives raked in more and more salaries, several of my uncle's friends are still actively union-hostile. They're just dead-certain that things would have been much worse with the union in there.
One of the demands that didn't get a lot of airtime with the United negotiations was that the executives take the same pay cut and raise limitations and so forth that the unionized workers got. If they'd done that, the votes would have gone very differently. But they were MUCH more interested in keeping their money than they were in resolving the dispute.
...is that you can ALMOST sound like you know what you're talking about, so people will believe you.
Look at the reason trade unions first sprang up. Rampant abuse by employers.
If the longshoreman's union is saying what you think it is, it is because at core all CEOs believe that their best employee is one who is a slave. If they are slaves they can be paid just enough to keep them alive, they have no option to go elsewhere, and you can abuse them however you like. So when a union says that you actually have to pay your workers and treat them like human beings, CEOs are naturally aghast and go off to find somewhere where they can keep slaves in peace.
The union and the company take adversarial roles. What eventually comes about is supposed to be something in between what the union wants (a zillion dollars a year for all employees, no work, etc) and something that the CEO wants. (A slave.) Take away the unions, and, as in the so-called 'right to starve' (er, work) states, you get slaves.
Which is what makes capitalism great. All those peope laboring away, for the benefit of one percent of the population.
>> Maybe you like the idea of living in a world where a few owners of capital pay the rest of us just barely enough to >> justify going to work, but I don't."
>You get that under socialism, not capitalism.
You are ill-informed. The nordic states have a MUCH higher standard of living, much better health care (unless you happen to be really rich), and a much smaller income gap between the rich and the poor. They're much, much more socialist than the US is.
In the US, we have the RIGHT to be miserable. Well, except for the rich.
>If someone is willing to do it for less, then guess what, screw you. You're just like the RIAA. Someone else is >doing it for cheaper/free and you want to make them illegal so your life isn't screwed. Guess what, tough shit.
So you're basically saying, 'if capitalism makes 95% of the world miserable, then SCREW THEM!' Funny, I always thought that the idea was to maximize human contentment. Maybe it's really to make 1% of the population ludecrously wealthy? Or perhaps it's the MONEY that's supposed to be made happy?
So, basically what you're saying is, 'I'm not even willing to be sympathetic.'
See, there's a choice 4. There are ways to bring the standard of living in other countries up toward what the US now enjoys, without getting the entire US to give up everything it has. Wealth doesn't have to be a zero-sum game (as the dread Mr. Limbaugh is fond of saying), although the rich are dead set on keeping it one.
The problem is, this would be terribly counterproductive from the point of view of US companies, because the people offshore would start demanding salaries that are closer to those of the American worker. Much better if we can bring the standard of living in America slowly DOWNWARD until it's closer to those offshore.
(Not that I'm saying that there's a conspiracy to do this or anything. Doesn't need to be... shipping every possible non-executive job offshore to places where workers are paid pennies on the dollar for a long period of time will do it just fine without anybody PLANNING anything.)
There is not only enough food in the world to feed every single living human being, but DRAMATICALLY MORE THAN NECESSARY. And yet people starve. Because if everyone in the world had enough to eat and a place to live, they'd start thinking in terms of other things they could do besides slave away for almost enough to keep from starving. We have the capacity and the money to make basic (flavorless, nasty, unappealing) food free for every person in the world. We will never do it, because we need slave labor.
Or perhaps citing two states that sort of call themselves socialist but which didn't actually do the socialism thing very well, and which had all sorts of other problems including dictators and elites who ruled with iron fists, is just shorthand for saying 'capitalism is my god'.
Which is fine to say, but isn't a useful argument, in my opinion.
> Nobody pays programmers $1. You get what you pay > for, in case you failed to understand that concept.
Ah, interesting, someone arguing that Linux is worthless.
But anyway... I have heard that there are programmers that make less than $10,000 US a year in parts of the former USSR and India. Now, let's see... if we assume that those programmers work like the ones in the US do -- that is to say, 50 to 60 hours a week -- they are getting $10000/(50 * 52) = $3.20 - $3.84 per hour.
Ah, clearly nowhere NEAR $1/hour. Clearly his argument is completely specious.
Just because you worship the free market, don't expect everyone else to too. Adam Smith had some interesting quotes about how brutal unregulated markets are to actual human beings.
> Yes, because I'm sure slaves in Uganda will provide excellent tech support in the necessary major languages > of the world.
Well, first of all, that's simply a training issue. And considering the speed at which English is catching on as a new lingua franca, it's not liable to be an issue for all that much longer. You're ducking the question completely, because your answer to it is 'Yes, if they institute slavery there, then the US would need to institute slavery to keep up, or lose all of those jobs. And that's a good thing.'
Plus, bear in mind that you're talking about customer support. The number of companies left which actually care whether they provide adequate customer support can be counted on the fingers of my left foot. And no, I'm not a mutant.
> For a realistic example, lets look at Manila in the Philipines. They outsource huge amounts of tech support > here, both in the way of email and telephone support. Companies here save huge amounts of money, and the > Philipino economy gets a boost, thereby producing more consumers to purchase goods from American companies to > setup more call centers. Unfortunately due to the Philipines political issues, this is becoming less ideal for > American based companies and it's now moving into other countries.
And quality goes to hell. And the quality of life for employees goes to hell. And the rich get richer, and meanwhile the standard of living for everyone else plummets. Unfettered free-market capitalism is lowest-common-denominator capitalism: except for the rich, everyone else has to be treated as poorly as the worst place in the world is willing to treat people.
Which, in the end, is exactly what people like you want, as long as you get to be rich. Indeed, people like you seem to take it as a given that this is the way things are *supposed* to be... if the companies CAN force their workers to work harder for less money, that's a good thing... workers aren't supposed to have pleasant lives, they are supposed to provide 'human capital' to those people who really matter, the rich.
It's amazing how many people can get through life without any empathy at all. Personally I view these people as I would a triple amputee... some horror, some pity, and some amazment that they are capable of surviving that way at all.
>"Expert" users rarely make heavy use of menues - they use the keyboard.
This is absolutely true, as long as you define 'expert' users as people who rarely make heavy use of menus, but instead use the keyboard.
Or perhaps you mean to say that I'm not an expert user... after all, I've only been using computers for 20 years, and Macs for 14. And heck, I only started programming professionally 11 years ago, got my BS in Computer Science 6 years ago, and have only been professionally programming Macs full time for four years.
(I use command keys for quitting, saving, closing windows, opening new windows, occasionally for switching between programs. Almost everything else I use the menu bar, or contextual menus, for.)
Or, just possibly, what you really meant by the term "Expert" in your sentence was "users who still yearn for CLI"?
...I'm running my web server, mail server, FTP server, QuickTime Streaming Server, internet sharing, file sharing, and name server on MacOS X 10.2 on a beige G3. When I had my main machine out at a client's site, I used the beige G3 for all of my daily use for a couple of weeks. It worked fine.
I will admit that I've upgraded the memory to 320 megs or so. But even on a 300 mhz G3, running with a Rage Pro chip, things work surprisingly smoothly and well. I wouldn't do all my development on that machine if I had a choice, but for day-to-day usage it's perfectly fine.
Oh, PLEASE. I mean, yes, I *like* MacOS X, but it's kind of a hard sell, convincing me that there was nothing wrong with 10.2.3. And I'm not saying that just to be annoying... there are a bunch of things that annoy me about X, and I installed 10.2.4 hoping that some of them would be fixed. A couple of them were, neither of which were on the list.
(An example: there was an issue where a feature I requested a year ago, dragging files or folders into standard nav services dialog boxes would select that file (for open boxes) or the location of that file/folder (for save boxes). They implemented it as of either 10.2 or 10.2.1, but it didn't work in a number of cases, including mounted disk images. Now it does.)
It also, as has been pointed out before, included several security fixes.
The updates have lots of little fixes, and tend in the direction of making things work better. I like that tendancy, so I install them. You can ignore them if you like, but don't tell us that updating is dumb. This is not MS... for every one thing Apple breaks in an update, they tend to fix dozens.
I read the bill. IANAL, but I am reasonably well informed. Basically, here's what it looks like to me.
You have a DVD. Either you have a player (of some kind), or you don't have a player. If you don't have a player, you have the theoretical legal right to break the copy protection on that specific DVD in order to make an archival copy of it, since you don't have the necessary means to make a backup copy. However, good luck doing that without a DVD player of SOME kind. Personally, I think that's a little silly, and no judge would really sit still for it, but I can't think of too many ways it could be abused.
However, say you DO have a player of some kind, say a home DVD player hooked to your TV. (But no computer with a DVD drive.) You buy the DVD. If your home DVD player isn't capable of making copies, you have the right to break CSS on the DVD in order to make the copy. Including the right to buy a product that is designed solely to make such copies, with or without the permission of the copyright holder. If the copyright holder wishes to prosecute such companies, they would have to make publicly available the necessary means to copy their DVDs WITHOUT ADDITIONAL COST OR BURDEN to anyone who owns one.
If you have a computer with a DVD writable drive, then it's easier for them. They just have to make publicly available software that will allow you, with your computer setup, to copy their DVD. However, I don't own a copy of Windows, so if it were Windows-only software then it would cost me additional money to use the software, and therefore I can crack the DVD. If it ran on Linux, but didn't make acceptable copies, it would be a little murkier, but they'd really have to buy a judge to make it come out their way... fair use is designed to allow backup copies that can substitute for the original. If they can't, they're not copies. If it ran on Linux and really sucked from a UI standpoint, but ran relatively quickly and worked fine, then you're screwed... but then, of course, it would be exactly like every other Linux program, so...;-)
It doesn't require you to be able to make an identical copy, it requires you to be able to make a 'functionally identical' copy. Whatever that means, legally speaking.
But I still think that if you can't enjoy the music in the same way whether it's original or copy, then it's hardly 'functionally identical'.
Don't read what you want to see (government being a bunch of bastards) into this. Read it objectively and fairly.
First of all, if a company releases a product that allows you to copy their files, but that copy isn't of sufficient quality to use them under the fair use doctrine (which requires you to be able to make an IDENTICAL copy, actually) then they're not in compliance with this law.
>Alternately that clause can be interpreted as: > > "You must use a Sony CD-Player/PC to rip Sony CDs, since they provide such a player."
Yes indeed... if you buy a Sony brand CD, and they, without any action on your part (which would constitute a burden) sends you a free Sony CD-Player/PC, then you are indeed legally bound to use it to rip their CDs.
Of course, it might be more realistic to think that they might include really lousy software on the CD itself that allows you to rip their music. But if it's too lousy, then it's a burden, and you can do whatever you like again. And certainly, if it's Windows only and you have a Linux box, then it would be a burden to have to install Windows in order to do it. Let alone if you have a Mac.
Don't let your prejudices blind you: the government is in fact capible of performing actions which benefit you. Mind you, I don't expect this to pass... but it could, if enough people clamor for it.
Sadly, most people would rather snipe at it, or grouse about the way things are, then actually try to change things.
Slashdot Mirror
Try finding a 11AA.
Skiis.
-fred
I replied to him with facts and figures, gently reminding him that one of his main points -- there's no crime in Vermont -- had a big obvious reason, and that the lack of gun laws in Vermont wasn't related.
He responted by saying, almost verbatim, 'I don't believe facts and figures, I only believe the things I believe.' I mean, he actually said, and I quote, "I have personal anecdotal that trumps your academic theory, as opposed to my reality."
And when someone starts drawing out his PERCEPTIONS of the world (not just what has happened to them, which is bad enough, but what they THINK about it) as though they were universal truths, you can't talk to them any more. There's no basis for agreement. You show them facts, and they say, 'those aren't true.' The only exchange that can go on in that kind of situation is two people yelling at each other.
Here is a great example: lifted from www.123student.com/social_issues/126.shtml.
A study of the murder rate in Washington D.C. showed that within three years of the passage of a law prohibiting the sale of handguns in the city the murder rate dropped by 25% (Kruschke 22). The state of South Carolina and the city of Boston experienced similar results when stricter gun control laws were recently enforced. In Boston the homicide rate dropped by 39% and in South Carolina the murder rate dropped by 28% (Kruschke 23).
But watch... he'll deny that it has any relevance, if he reads it at all. Perhaps, now that all this has been pointed out to him, he'll be able to find some statistics to back up his case, but his first impulse was to say 'statistics don't matter, only what happened to me matters'.
-fred
I have personal anecdotal evidence of a whole lot of things. Unlike you, I don't assume that just because I've seen something, it must be universally true. Of course, if you assume that you are the center of the universe, then everything you experience must, ipso facto, be universally true.
But, of course, you aren't actually interested in facts and figures. You don't actually want to learn, you want to state your position over and over until everyone believes you. And, since you are the center of the universe, and all of your friends think like you do, you know you're right, and you know that eventually everyone else with either accept that or die.
By the way, are you a member of a well-regulated militia? Just curious.
-fred
Full Throttle, Sam & Max, the Infocom collections, Civilization II, Diablo I, Master of Orion 2, Heroes of Might and Magic 2, JauntTrooper (Mission Thunderbolt, c. 1991), and even The Fools Errand (c. 1987) all run just fine under MacOS X in Classic. This is all MacOS 7 era stuff, except for the bits that were designed for 6.
In fact, the VAST majority of Mac software that I have tested still works just fine, even the stuff from long ago. Basically, if it actually followed the rules in the Inside Mac books it still works fine, no matter when it was written. Even a lot of the stuff that was less obedient still does.
And the things that don't run (Afterlife, for example) tend to not run because of something astonishingly stupid that the developer did. For example, Afterlife checks the version of the CD ROM driver installed, and if it isn't higher than 5.? it refuses to run at all. This broke when Apple integrated the DVD driver and the version number went back to 1.?. If you go in and hack your version number, you can make it run.
-fred
> Inside the united states, there are 50 states. Of those, the state with the least restrictive laws, vermont, has the
h 4tb47/cph4tb47.htm ]
> lowest crime rate.
Why, yes. It also has a total poulation of 600,000, spread across the entire state. The area with the highest population density is 100 people per square mile. (To put this in perspective, the highest concentration of people in New Jersey is over 4500 people per square mile.) There are no major cities in Vermont, and not a single area that would be considered at 'high risk' for crime as defined by the federal government. (That takes into account population density, income distribution, and a whole slew of other things.) Even New Mexico and Idaho have larger population concentrations than Vermont.
[Source: http://www.census.gov/prod/1/90dec/cph4/tables/cp
But, of course, you're right, none of this actually matters. The only reason that Vermont has good crime statistics is that handguns are cheap and easily available, and there are no laws regarding them.
And if you're comparing countries, what's the murder rate in England? Why, lower than of Vermont! But I suppose you'd prefer that more people were murdered and fewer people were robbed? (Well, as long as YOU weren't the one murdered, right?)
-fred
>I wasn't posting for your amusement.
Well, I sure hope this post WAS for my amusement, because otherwise it sure had some serious unintended consequences.
-fred
> This overlooks the fact that the rich are a minority of those who benefit from the Bush tax cut.
This is absolutely true. Also completely, totally, nauseatingly misleading. The rich are only 5% of the country, according to Bush's definition. 1/3 of Americans benefit from his tax cut. Never mind that those who are in the lowest 20% of the income levels don't benefit at all, and that basically NOBODY with an income of less than the top 10% gains more than $300 per year. But the top 1% gains more by percentage of income and (astonishingly) by total amount of money than EVERYONE ELSE COMBINED.
We are at historically low tax levels for the super-rich. At the times when our country had the highest tax levels for these people, we were most productive AND most prosperous. All the figures are easy to find, and I encourage you to go look them up for yourself. A good place to start is your local library, because then you don't get numbers deliberately slanted by the left OR the right.
But you won't. Because you'd much rather not crawl out of your own preconceptions when it's so much more comfortable to live and die without opening your mind.
-fred
Let me see...
Are you seriously saying that if this fellow makes $50k/year, and you calculate out $26,280, that he should have $23,720 left over?
Do you just not pay taxes or something?
(Yes, yes, there are plenty of other places that you're being unrealistic and irrational, but that's definitely the lowest-hanging fruit.)
-fred
Wouldn't that be where the program runs in a main (infinite) loop that watches for events from outside the main thread (whether from an i/o device, another thread, or whatever) and processes them, does whatever is necessary, and then returns to the main loop?
-fred
First off, drop the 'fscking' thing, it makes you sound stupider than you really are.
Second, drop the attitude, because you're not smart enough to pull it off.
Getting a job in some mom & pop shop pulling $7000 a year and you die of malnutrition and exposure in most parts of the country. But even leaving that aside, PEOPLE DON'T WANT YOU IF YOU DON'T HAVE TEN YEARS OF PROGRAMMING EXPERIENCE NOW. It doesn't matter how you start, it doesn't matter where you go. And there will be that glut for years to come.
If you expect people to leave school with a computer science degree and $20,000 in student loans (if you're LUCKY!) and get a job that pays as much as flipping burgers, then maybe your reality has been affected by the dramatic amounts of glue that you've been sniffing lately.
And if you think that just because you were lucky (I'm going to be generous and assume you were describing your situation instead of pulling a Ronald Reagan and inventing one to suit your needs) that everyone can be, you're wronger than dead.
I have a BS/CS and 5 years of relevant (programming) experience, and a couple of patents to my name. I'm currently doing work for an investment firm handling calls for $15/hour. Don't you DARE talk to me about 'if you're good enough'.
And FYI, if you mentioned $85k as 'the top of your field' around here in the Bay area you'd be laughed out of the room. Even today.
-fred
> That being said, maybe we are artificially inflating what we need in the way of salary. Instead of taking advantage
> of the utility of sharing with our family, we are competing with them.
Hmm. I see.
And perhaps the companies will feel sorry for me, because my parents and grandparents are all dead now, and just pay me more because they know I need it?
Or perhaps this would just be another transfer of wealth to the rich, from the skilled, and would completely screw those who were unable to combine their incomes with those of their parents in order to own housing.
I see your point about being frugal, but if you say that companies don't really need to pay us enough for food, roof, and clothing, then THEY WON'T.
-fred
Meanwhile, the average executive of United received a pay increase of 8% over that year.
Okay, you're welcome to hate unions, although frankly I fully believe that the 'experience' you refer to that you have with unions was either a) lots of wonderful secondhand stories from people indoctrinated by Ronald Reagan or b) firmly from the side of the management.
But MY secondhand experience was with a shop that hired an extremely expensive company to come in and destroy their bid for union membership (illegally) in infancy. The workers over the next four years received pay cut after pay cut, and the executive salaries went up. This was during a recession, so they couldn't get other jobs, and the second time around everyone who even started to talk about a union was summarily fired.
And you know what? The anti-union corps did their job so well at that company that even after the entire work force was thoroughly abused, lives were destroyed, and the executives raked in more and more salaries, several of my uncle's friends are still actively union-hostile. They're just dead-certain that things would have been much worse with the union in there.
One of the demands that didn't get a lot of airtime with the United negotiations was that the executives take the same pay cut and raise limitations and so forth that the unionized workers got. If they'd done that, the votes would have gone very differently. But they were MUCH more interested in keeping their money than they were in resolving the dispute.
-fred
...is that you can ALMOST sound like you know what you're talking about, so people will believe you.
Look at the reason trade unions first sprang up. Rampant abuse by employers.
If the longshoreman's union is saying what you think it is, it is because at core all CEOs believe that their best employee is one who is a slave. If they are slaves they can be paid just enough to keep them alive, they have no option to go elsewhere, and you can abuse them however you like. So when a union says that you actually have to pay your workers and treat them like human beings, CEOs are naturally aghast and go off to find somewhere where they can keep slaves in peace.
The union and the company take adversarial roles. What eventually comes about is supposed to be something in between what the union wants (a zillion dollars a year for all employees, no work, etc) and something that the CEO wants. (A slave.) Take away the unions, and, as in the so-called 'right to starve' (er, work) states, you get slaves.
Which is what makes capitalism great. All those peope laboring away, for the benefit of one percent of the population.
>> Maybe you like the idea of living in a world where a few owners of capital pay the rest of us just barely enough to
>> justify going to work, but I don't."
>You get that under socialism, not capitalism.
You are ill-informed. The nordic states have a MUCH higher standard of living, much better health care (unless you happen to be really rich), and a much smaller income gap between the rich and the poor. They're much, much more socialist than the US is.
In the US, we have the RIGHT to be miserable. Well, except for the rich.
-fred
>If someone is willing to do it for less, then guess what, screw you. You're just like the RIAA. Someone else is
>doing it for cheaper/free and you want to make them illegal so your life isn't screwed. Guess what, tough shit.
So you're basically saying, 'if capitalism makes 95% of the world miserable, then SCREW THEM!' Funny, I always thought that the idea was to maximize human contentment. Maybe it's really to make 1% of the population ludecrously wealthy? Or perhaps it's the MONEY that's supposed to be made happy?
-fred
>>When your neighbor loses a job, it's a recession. When you lose a job, it's a depresion.
>The world does not revolve around you.
Um, yes. That was his point. But thank you for playing.
> In most of the US, barely more than 1 in 20 people are out of work, and that really is not bad.
This is a fallacy. Unemployment numbers are for people who are collecting (what?) unemployment.
I'm not eligible for unemployment. Therefore I'm not unemployed?
Get a clue. The US's unemployment numbers are better than they are in other places because they're WRONG.
-fred
So, basically what you're saying is, 'I'm not even willing to be sympathetic.'
See, there's a choice 4. There are ways to bring the standard of living in other countries up toward what the US now enjoys, without getting the entire US to give up everything it has. Wealth doesn't have to be a zero-sum game (as the dread Mr. Limbaugh is fond of saying), although the rich are dead set on keeping it one.
The problem is, this would be terribly counterproductive from the point of view of US companies, because the people offshore would start demanding salaries that are closer to those of the American worker. Much better if we can bring the standard of living in America slowly DOWNWARD until it's closer to those offshore.
(Not that I'm saying that there's a conspiracy to do this or anything. Doesn't need to be... shipping every possible non-executive job offshore to places where workers are paid pennies on the dollar for a long period of time will do it just fine without anybody PLANNING anything.)
There is not only enough food in the world to feed every single living human being, but DRAMATICALLY MORE THAN NECESSARY. And yet people starve. Because if everyone in the world had enough to eat and a place to live, they'd start thinking in terms of other things they could do besides slave away for almost enough to keep from starving. We have the capacity and the money to make basic (flavorless, nasty, unappealing) food free for every person in the world. We will never do it, because we need slave labor.
-fred
...how well capitalism is working for Russia now.
Boy, clearly capitalism is evil too.
Or perhaps citing two states that sort of call themselves socialist but which didn't actually do the socialism thing very well, and which had all sorts of other problems including dictators and elites who ruled with iron fists, is just shorthand for saying 'capitalism is my god'.
Which is fine to say, but isn't a useful argument, in my opinion.
-fred
> Nobody pays programmers $1. You get what you pay
> for, in case you failed to understand that concept.
Ah, interesting, someone arguing that Linux is worthless.
But anyway... I have heard that there are programmers that make less than $10,000 US a year in parts of the former USSR and India. Now, let's see... if we assume that those programmers work like the ones in the US do -- that is to say, 50 to 60 hours a week -- they are getting $10000/(50 * 52) = $3.20 - $3.84 per hour.
Ah, clearly nowhere NEAR $1/hour. Clearly his argument is completely specious.
Just because you worship the free market, don't expect everyone else to too. Adam Smith had some interesting quotes about how brutal unregulated markets are to actual human beings.
> Yes, because I'm sure slaves in Uganda will provide excellent tech support in the necessary major languages
> of the world.
Well, first of all, that's simply a training issue. And considering the speed at which English is catching on as a new lingua franca, it's not liable to be an issue for all that much longer. You're ducking the question completely, because your answer to it is 'Yes, if they institute slavery there, then the US would need to institute slavery to keep up, or lose all of those jobs. And that's a good thing.'
Plus, bear in mind that you're talking about customer support. The number of companies left which actually care whether they provide adequate customer support can be counted on the fingers of my left foot. And no, I'm not a mutant.
> For a realistic example, lets look at Manila in the Philipines. They outsource huge amounts of tech support > here, both in the way of email and telephone support. Companies here save huge amounts of money, and the
> Philipino economy gets a boost, thereby producing more consumers to purchase goods from American companies to
> setup more call centers. Unfortunately due to the Philipines political issues, this is becoming less ideal for
> American based companies and it's now moving into other countries.
And quality goes to hell. And the quality of life for employees goes to hell. And the rich get richer, and meanwhile the standard of living for everyone else plummets. Unfettered free-market capitalism is lowest-common-denominator capitalism: except for the rich, everyone else has to be treated as poorly as the worst place in the world is willing to treat people.
Which, in the end, is exactly what people like you want, as long as you get to be rich. Indeed, people like you seem to take it as a given that this is the way things are *supposed* to be... if the companies CAN force their workers to work harder for less money, that's a good thing... workers aren't supposed to have pleasant lives, they are supposed to provide 'human capital' to those people who really matter, the rich.
It's amazing how many people can get through life without any empathy at all. Personally I view these people as I would a triple amputee... some horror, some pity, and some amazment that they are capable of surviving that way at all.
-fred
>"Expert" users rarely make heavy use of menues - they use the keyboard.
This is absolutely true, as long as you define 'expert' users as people who rarely make heavy use of menus, but instead use the keyboard.
Or perhaps you mean to say that I'm not an expert user... after all, I've only been using computers for 20 years, and Macs for 14. And heck, I only started programming professionally 11 years ago, got my BS in Computer Science 6 years ago, and have only been professionally programming Macs full time for four years.
(I use command keys for quitting, saving, closing windows, opening new windows, occasionally for switching between programs. Almost everything else I use the menu bar, or contextual menus, for.)
Or, just possibly, what you really meant by the term "Expert" in your sentence was "users who still yearn for CLI"?
-fred
...I'm running my web server, mail server, FTP server, QuickTime Streaming Server, internet sharing, file sharing, and name server on MacOS X 10.2 on a beige G3. When I had my main machine out at a client's site, I used the beige G3 for all of my daily use for a couple of weeks. It worked fine.
I will admit that I've upgraded the memory to 320 megs or so. But even on a 300 mhz G3, running with a Rage Pro chip, things work surprisingly smoothly and well. I wouldn't do all my development on that machine if I had a choice, but for day-to-day usage it's perfectly fine.
-fred
With which there was nothing wrong?
Oh, PLEASE. I mean, yes, I *like* MacOS X, but it's kind of a hard sell, convincing me that there was nothing wrong with 10.2.3. And I'm not saying that just to be annoying... there are a bunch of things that annoy me about X, and I installed 10.2.4 hoping that some of them would be fixed. A couple of them were, neither of which were on the list.
(An example: there was an issue where a feature I requested a year ago, dragging files or folders into standard nav services dialog boxes would select that file (for open boxes) or the location of that file/folder (for save boxes). They implemented it as of either 10.2 or 10.2.1, but it didn't work in a number of cases, including mounted disk images. Now it does.)
It also, as has been pointed out before, included several security fixes.
The updates have lots of little fixes, and tend in the direction of making things work better. I like that tendancy, so I install them. You can ignore them if you like, but don't tell us that updating is dumb. This is not MS... for every one thing Apple breaks in an update, they tend to fix dozens.
-fred
I read the bill. IANAL, but I am reasonably well informed. Basically, here's what it looks like to me.
;-)
You have a DVD. Either you have a player (of some kind), or you don't have a player. If you don't have a player, you have the theoretical legal right to break the copy protection on that specific DVD in order to make an archival copy of it, since you don't have the necessary means to make a backup copy. However, good luck doing that without a DVD player of SOME kind. Personally, I think that's a little silly, and no judge would really sit still for it, but I can't think of too many ways it could be abused.
However, say you DO have a player of some kind, say a home DVD player hooked to your TV. (But no computer with a DVD drive.) You buy the DVD. If your home DVD player isn't capable of making copies, you have the right to break CSS on the DVD in order to make the copy. Including the right to buy a product that is designed solely to make such copies, with or without the permission of the copyright holder. If the copyright holder wishes to prosecute such companies, they would have to make publicly available the necessary means to copy their DVDs WITHOUT ADDITIONAL COST OR BURDEN to anyone who owns one.
If you have a computer with a DVD writable drive, then it's easier for them. They just have to make publicly available software that will allow you, with your computer setup, to copy their DVD. However, I don't own a copy of Windows, so if it were Windows-only software then it would cost me additional money to use the software, and therefore I can crack the DVD. If it ran on Linux, but didn't make acceptable copies, it would be a little murkier, but they'd really have to buy a judge to make it come out their way... fair use is designed to allow backup copies that can substitute for the original. If they can't, they're not copies. If it ran on Linux and really sucked from a UI standpoint, but ran relatively quickly and worked fine, then you're screwed... but then, of course, it would be exactly like every other Linux program, so...
Anyway, that's what I get from my reading.
-fred
It doesn't require you to be able to make an identical copy, it requires you to be able to make a 'functionally identical' copy. Whatever that means, legally speaking.
But I still think that if you can't enjoy the music in the same way whether it's original or copy, then it's hardly 'functionally identical'.
-fred
Don't read what you want to see (government being a bunch of bastards) into this. Read it objectively and fairly.
First of all, if a company releases a product that allows you to copy their files, but that copy isn't of sufficient quality to use them under the fair use doctrine (which requires you to be able to make an IDENTICAL copy, actually) then they're not in compliance with this law.
>Alternately that clause can be interpreted as:
>
> "You must use a Sony CD-Player/PC to rip Sony CDs, since they provide such a player."
Yes indeed... if you buy a Sony brand CD, and they, without any action on your part (which would constitute a burden) sends you a free Sony CD-Player/PC, then you are indeed legally bound to use it to rip their CDs.
Of course, it might be more realistic to think that they might include really lousy software on the CD itself that allows you to rip their music. But if it's too lousy, then it's a burden, and you can do whatever you like again. And certainly, if it's Windows only and you have a Linux box, then it would be a burden to have to install Windows in order to do it. Let alone if you have a Mac.
Don't let your prejudices blind you: the government is in fact capible of performing actions which benefit you. Mind you, I don't expect this to pass... but it could, if enough people clamor for it.
Sadly, most people would rather snipe at it, or grouse about the way things are, then actually try to change things.
-fred
...who thinks it's sort of sad whenever I hear someone admit that they don't even know who their elected officials for the FEDERAL government are?
-fred