I've done some of this freelancing myself when I got bored...but unfortunately, some of the not-yet-graduated-from-college dolts end up in "official" positions and think they actually know something.
I want to say a bit about "Universal Service" fees. Most of this money doesn't go to poor people to have phones, it goes to a government-administered company. A huge amount of it goes to E-Rate, which is a huge fiasco. Billions are lining pockets for work that was never done, hardware that was never ordered, and services never provided. The forms are so complicated and contradictory that there are entire companies organized just to fill out the forms for people. It has grown into a massive entitlement program for the few in the computer industry lucky enough to get their number drawn. I work in a school, and the amount we could have gotten from E-Rate was dwarfed by the time it was going to take to fill out the forms and jump through their flaming hoops. I consider it to be a "Computer Industry Support Tax."
The same thing could be said of electrical power, and water, and gas and sewer systems. I realize that most of these were (and sometimes are) public ulilities, but many of them are privately owned and operated and operate with decent profits. I also fully realize that lots of the rural electrical service is provided by a descendant of the Roosevelt-era Rural Electrification Agency, and that many have no water or sewer service. But I'm talking towns of 5,000-20,000 people and not three hicks, a lean-to, and a sheep.
SBC/Ameritech in Illinois recently was granted a huge rate increase by the State. This is on rates charged to other phone companies for their lines. Strangely enough they DID shortly thereafter announce new DSL service to some relatively rural areas...but then again, we have not gotten any closer to real competition yet.
There are PS2-connector keyboard loggers sold in various places on the internet...although they're a bit more conspicuous, how often do you check for the presence of one? In a public-access machine, they can be set to record only usernames and passwords...It's just something you have to accept...that someone is probably watching, somewhere.
I find it amazing that a graphics API update is 11mb...let alone the "runtime" which is 164237 KB...although I don't know how big OpenGL's program was....
Similar things went on a few years ago with the trend of "Flexible Manufacturing." After investing billions in multi-jointed robots, engineers found that humans, not robots, were the most flexible machines (flexible meaning able to do lots of tasks.) So they consigned robots to repetitive tasks like welding and assembly, and let humans do the more complicated tasks. But I do think that robots WILL get better, certainly past the point where they can do fast-food work, by 2050.
...LAWYERS...
"The new provision will also give the company another weapon to take on Linux." They are basically offering to shoulder legal burdens from challengers, unlike those insurgent bands of Linux developers. But we all know that Microsoft "legally" steals its code like its TCP/IP stack, and not "illegally" like SCO alleges. In any case though, if it and IBM's role were reversed, SCO would have been bought months ago.
All we need now is a sweeping anti-piracy bill that will make everyone from P2P downloaders to video time-shifters felons...oh wait! This nutso stuff from the RIAA/MPAA has got to stop somewhere...
Is it just me or is 2001:0700:0700:0003:0290:27ff:fea2:477b
much harder to remember than 209.174.99.125? I think that the IP crisis is best resolved by proxying and redirecting, not adding more numbers. But maybe it's just me...
Remember when the only search engines were archie and Altavista (the old altavista.digital.com, not the "new" one.) Well I certainly do. Google was a quantum-leap improvement over any of them; spidering had been tried with other search engines, but Google made it work. While it certainly has gotten LOTS more commercialized since I first used it, it's still better than anything else out there. I just hope they can stay off of the slippery slope to being clogged with ads.
Take them to court...har!...at which time you will be legally cornholed by a phalanx of suited rats, all spewing wads of legalese. That and of course the legendary greased palm of the judiciary system, and political "help." You don't stand a chance of defending yourself of buying a Smartcard reader than if you try to defend your legitimate use of P2P file sharing.
I tried both ways. I tried communicating with him first, and he responded by threatening me. I tried contacting his ISP...and nobody answered. I never got a reponse from them after many e-mails and phone messages. I thought it was pretty lame of him to threaten ME by saying "If you don't stop e-mailing me, I will tell your University Computer Support that you are harassing me!" I stopped because the University has a ban first/think later policy with things like this. I used to have some completely legitimate user-created Super Nintendo ROMs on my site, and of course Nintendo got mad. Not that they were copyrighted anything, but they saw "SNES ROM" and sent my University an e-mail. I was given 48 hours to remove the "infringing material" or be banned from the system. You can't fight City Hall!
Besides annoying the spammer in question, is there REALLY anything they can legally do to him? I doubt it. I have fought with spammers before, trying to get taken off of their lists, and they threatened ME with telling my ISP (a college at that time) that I was harassing HIM. I believe he would have done it, too. So I resigned myself to deleting hundreds of spams per week, and getting used to it.
I can't wait until they make RIAA-style computer-nuking legal...we can all just start a computerized World War III.
That was exactly my point...the "boom" was built upon speculation, which emptied the pockets of millions of people, turning them into "investors." That money multiplied through the economy, as BoomCo.Com bought Aeron chairs, Sun servers, Cisco switches, etc...it made the economy look great, and everybody's numbers were huge. But there was no real innovation in the 94-00 economy bubble, just lots of marketing people spewing their plans all over the place. I was there in the midst of some of it. Executive and "creative" types were obsessed with the image of someone shopping in their underwear at 3 AM. It became a race to see who could come up with the next dumb idea, ala WebVan, CueCat, Pets.Com, etc. What was new about shopping for things? They took the age-old catalog-selling style and adapted it to use a computer instead. While everyone was trumpeting the "New Economy", and the politicians were predicting 100 years of milk and money flowing through the streets, they were ignoring the fact that they were numbering themselves silly.
Not to go off on an anti-internet-shopping rant, but I get perturbed when people actually think the "boom years" were anything of the sort. They were a fantasy fabricated for and by the politicians and mega-rich celebrity CEO's.
That motorboat had better be a supertanker full of explosives...the Nimitz carriers were designed to take multiple hits from supersonic Russian cruise missiles with 1500-pound warheads...and continue fighting.
Okay, I'll bite.
The economic boom that was built on credit, empty promises, and vaporware? The economic boom that funneled trillions of dollars to super-rich CEO's while "allowing" the huddled working masses the hope that they might get a piece of the pie too? The economic boom that exploded in an instant, having a foundation of lies, deceit, and fabrications? Oh...THAT economic boom.
If the ultimate reason for lowering wages for Indian/Mexican/African/whoever workers was to lower the cost to the consumer, then I would understand. But all too often, the savings disappear into someone's pockets. I have first-hand knowledge of this...in my town a 100-year-old clothing operation employed almost 100 people for wages of $15 per hour or so. The jobs were moved to Guatemala at $.50 per hour. Did their pants suddenly drop precipitously in price because of this? No. I understand the economics of this, and that labor is only one factor in the cost of production. I am saying that these people are doing work that once commanded $15 per hour for only $.50 per hour, and their American managers know it. I think that it is immoral to so blatently undercut wages in this manner. Do I like to see American jobs go overseas? I will admit I do not. But my reasons are not selfish. If people overseas were getting paid what their job should be paying, then most of the jobs would probably stay here.
Don't call BS and accuse me of not caring. Do I look like a politician? No. I have no control over where the money goes in this world. I am one of those people that genuinely cares...but am NOT in a position to do anything about it. If someone does a job for $.50 per hour that was done for $18 per hour here...THAT is exploitation. Maybe the standard of living is lower...but to pay someone that little for doing what ends up being high-value work is exploitation.
Because we look at our job...making $18 per hour doing something. It's outsourced to some Indian or Mexican at $.50 per hour. We think that that human "replacement" is being exploited. I don't feel like robots are being exploited. But when a job goes to some other country at a fraction of the per-hour rate, with conditions that are sickening compared to those here, and worker's compensation and labor laws beyond laughable, I have a problem with that.
While I am for competition as much as the next guy, I think that the Sherman Antitrust act was used and enforced back in the railroad/steel/oil megacorporation days...but now it's not good for your political career to go against the corporate grain. My point is that the music distribution industry, through the RIAA, forms a monopoly. Nobody is even thinking about breaking them up. Slowly, media in general in this country is forming a giant polyopoly of cooperating firms, and nobody is thinking about breaking them up. There are lots of things that are monopolies and nobody is invoking the Sherman Act. Look at HP's balance sheet, and you can tell they have a virtual monopoly on ink sales...they are raking in billions on "consumables" sales. By the way, I also think that stomping ink-cartridge innovators with the DMCA is very, very bad for the country in general...but that's another thread.
Well there is competition between printer manufacturers, and I imagine that if ink was priced at the cost of production tomorrow (considering perfect competition) then their printer prices would go up. Sure it's expensive, but look at the printers...you can buy a printer that would have cost $1000 ten years ago for $80 now. Anyway, since when has the law cared anything about competition? I mean, if it did, then the lawsuits against file sharers would be tossed out instantly. File sharing is the only other means of distribution for most of these songs...
That's exactly where it's going. In my work in schools, I see the same thing happen all of the time. We were repeatedly billed at a 100% markup for items like servers, monitors, and even floppy drives. But my superior kept on doing it, knowing full well what those same parts could be bought for (less) somewhere else. Then, of course, he always did get a nice thick green Christmas card. Money appears and disappears all the time in government...it's just that nobody has an interest in exposing any of the trillions in fraud that go on every day in this country. I tried, and got nowhere. Just lay back and let the drugs do their work, turn your head the other way.
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I've done some of this freelancing myself when I got bored...but unfortunately, some of the not-yet-graduated-from-college dolts end up in "official" positions and think they actually know something.
I want to say a bit about "Universal Service" fees. Most of this money doesn't go to poor people to have phones, it goes to a government-administered company. A huge amount of it goes to E-Rate, which is a huge fiasco. Billions are lining pockets for work that was never done, hardware that was never ordered, and services never provided. The forms are so complicated and contradictory that there are entire companies organized just to fill out the forms for people. It has grown into a massive entitlement program for the few in the computer industry lucky enough to get their number drawn. I work in a school, and the amount we could have gotten from E-Rate was dwarfed by the time it was going to take to fill out the forms and jump through their flaming hoops. I consider it to be a "Computer Industry Support Tax."
The same thing could be said of electrical power, and water, and gas and sewer systems. I realize that most of these were (and sometimes are) public ulilities, but many of them are privately owned and operated and operate with decent profits. I also fully realize that lots of the rural electrical service is provided by a descendant of the Roosevelt-era Rural Electrification Agency, and that many have no water or sewer service. But I'm talking towns of 5,000-20,000 people and not three hicks, a lean-to, and a sheep.
SBC/Ameritech in Illinois recently was granted a huge rate increase by the State. This is on rates charged to other phone companies for their lines. Strangely enough they DID shortly thereafter announce new DSL service to some relatively rural areas...but then again, we have not gotten any closer to real competition yet.
There are PS2-connector keyboard loggers sold in various places on the internet...although they're a bit more conspicuous, how often do you check for the presence of one? In a public-access machine, they can be set to record only usernames and passwords...It's just something you have to accept...that someone is probably watching, somewhere.
I find it amazing that a graphics API update is 11mb...let alone the "runtime" which is 164237 KB...although I don't know how big OpenGL's program was....
Similar things went on a few years ago with the trend of "Flexible Manufacturing." After investing billions in multi-jointed robots, engineers found that humans, not robots, were the most flexible machines (flexible meaning able to do lots of tasks.) So they consigned robots to repetitive tasks like welding and assembly, and let humans do the more complicated tasks. But I do think that robots WILL get better, certainly past the point where they can do fast-food work, by 2050.
Seeing the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in Champaign, Illinois was kinda neat...the birthplace of the WWW and all...
...LAWYERS... "The new provision will also give the company another weapon to take on Linux." They are basically offering to shoulder legal burdens from challengers, unlike those insurgent bands of Linux developers. But we all know that Microsoft "legally" steals its code like its TCP/IP stack, and not "illegally" like SCO alleges. In any case though, if it and IBM's role were reversed, SCO would have been bought months ago.
All we need now is a sweeping anti-piracy bill that will make everyone from P2P downloaders to video time-shifters felons...oh wait! This nutso stuff from the RIAA/MPAA has got to stop somewhere...
Is it just me or is 2001:0700:0700:0003:0290:27ff:fea2:477b much harder to remember than 209.174.99.125? I think that the IP crisis is best resolved by proxying and redirecting, not adding more numbers. But maybe it's just me...
Remember when the only search engines were archie and Altavista (the old altavista.digital.com, not the "new" one.) Well I certainly do. Google was a quantum-leap improvement over any of them; spidering had been tried with other search engines, but Google made it work. While it certainly has gotten LOTS more commercialized since I first used it, it's still better than anything else out there. I just hope they can stay off of the slippery slope to being clogged with ads.
Take them to court...har!...at which time you will be legally cornholed by a phalanx of suited rats, all spewing wads of legalese. That and of course the legendary greased palm of the judiciary system, and political "help." You don't stand a chance of defending yourself of buying a Smartcard reader than if you try to defend your legitimate use of P2P file sharing.
I tried both ways. I tried communicating with him first, and he responded by threatening me. I tried contacting his ISP...and nobody answered. I never got a reponse from them after many e-mails and phone messages. I thought it was pretty lame of him to threaten ME by saying "If you don't stop e-mailing me, I will tell your University Computer Support that you are harassing me!" I stopped because the University has a ban first/think later policy with things like this. I used to have some completely legitimate user-created Super Nintendo ROMs on my site, and of course Nintendo got mad. Not that they were copyrighted anything, but they saw "SNES ROM" and sent my University an e-mail. I was given 48 hours to remove the "infringing material" or be banned from the system. You can't fight City Hall!
Besides annoying the spammer in question, is there REALLY anything they can legally do to him? I doubt it. I have fought with spammers before, trying to get taken off of their lists, and they threatened ME with telling my ISP (a college at that time) that I was harassing HIM. I believe he would have done it, too. So I resigned myself to deleting hundreds of spams per week, and getting used to it. I can't wait until they make RIAA-style computer-nuking legal...we can all just start a computerized World War III.
That was exactly my point...the "boom" was built upon speculation, which emptied the pockets of millions of people, turning them into "investors." That money multiplied through the economy, as BoomCo.Com bought Aeron chairs, Sun servers, Cisco switches, etc...it made the economy look great, and everybody's numbers were huge. But there was no real innovation in the 94-00 economy bubble, just lots of marketing people spewing their plans all over the place. I was there in the midst of some of it. Executive and "creative" types were obsessed with the image of someone shopping in their underwear at 3 AM. It became a race to see who could come up with the next dumb idea, ala WebVan, CueCat, Pets.Com, etc. What was new about shopping for things? They took the age-old catalog-selling style and adapted it to use a computer instead. While everyone was trumpeting the "New Economy", and the politicians were predicting 100 years of milk and money flowing through the streets, they were ignoring the fact that they were numbering themselves silly. Not to go off on an anti-internet-shopping rant, but I get perturbed when people actually think the "boom years" were anything of the sort. They were a fantasy fabricated for and by the politicians and mega-rich celebrity CEO's.
That motorboat had better be a supertanker full of explosives...the Nimitz carriers were designed to take multiple hits from supersonic Russian cruise missiles with 1500-pound warheads...and continue fighting.
Okay, I'll bite. The economic boom that was built on credit, empty promises, and vaporware? The economic boom that funneled trillions of dollars to super-rich CEO's while "allowing" the huddled working masses the hope that they might get a piece of the pie too? The economic boom that exploded in an instant, having a foundation of lies, deceit, and fabrications? Oh...THAT economic boom.
If the ultimate reason for lowering wages for Indian/Mexican/African/whoever workers was to lower the cost to the consumer, then I would understand. But all too often, the savings disappear into someone's pockets. I have first-hand knowledge of this...in my town a 100-year-old clothing operation employed almost 100 people for wages of $15 per hour or so. The jobs were moved to Guatemala at $.50 per hour. Did their pants suddenly drop precipitously in price because of this? No. I understand the economics of this, and that labor is only one factor in the cost of production. I am saying that these people are doing work that once commanded $15 per hour for only $.50 per hour, and their American managers know it. I think that it is immoral to so blatently undercut wages in this manner. Do I like to see American jobs go overseas? I will admit I do not. But my reasons are not selfish. If people overseas were getting paid what their job should be paying, then most of the jobs would probably stay here.
Don't call BS and accuse me of not caring. Do I look like a politician? No. I have no control over where the money goes in this world. I am one of those people that genuinely cares...but am NOT in a position to do anything about it. If someone does a job for $.50 per hour that was done for $18 per hour here...THAT is exploitation. Maybe the standard of living is lower...but to pay someone that little for doing what ends up being high-value work is exploitation.
Because we look at our job...making $18 per hour doing something. It's outsourced to some Indian or Mexican at $.50 per hour. We think that that human "replacement" is being exploited. I don't feel like robots are being exploited. But when a job goes to some other country at a fraction of the per-hour rate, with conditions that are sickening compared to those here, and worker's compensation and labor laws beyond laughable, I have a problem with that.
So how long until we start outsourcing jobs there?
While I am for competition as much as the next guy, I think that the Sherman Antitrust act was used and enforced back in the railroad/steel/oil megacorporation days...but now it's not good for your political career to go against the corporate grain. My point is that the music distribution industry, through the RIAA, forms a monopoly. Nobody is even thinking about breaking them up. Slowly, media in general in this country is forming a giant polyopoly of cooperating firms, and nobody is thinking about breaking them up. There are lots of things that are monopolies and nobody is invoking the Sherman Act. Look at HP's balance sheet, and you can tell they have a virtual monopoly on ink sales...they are raking in billions on "consumables" sales. By the way, I also think that stomping ink-cartridge innovators with the DMCA is very, very bad for the country in general...but that's another thread.
Well there is competition between printer manufacturers, and I imagine that if ink was priced at the cost of production tomorrow (considering perfect competition) then their printer prices would go up. Sure it's expensive, but look at the printers...you can buy a printer that would have cost $1000 ten years ago for $80 now. Anyway, since when has the law cared anything about competition? I mean, if it did, then the lawsuits against file sharers would be tossed out instantly. File sharing is the only other means of distribution for most of these songs...
That's exactly where it's going. In my work in schools, I see the same thing happen all of the time. We were repeatedly billed at a 100% markup for items like servers, monitors, and even floppy drives. But my superior kept on doing it, knowing full well what those same parts could be bought for (less) somewhere else. Then, of course, he always did get a nice thick green Christmas card. Money appears and disappears all the time in government...it's just that nobody has an interest in exposing any of the trillions in fraud that go on every day in this country. I tried, and got nowhere. Just lay back and let the drugs do their work, turn your head the other way.