How do you think all those pork barrel projects are created? They don't call it "bringing home the bacon" for nothing. Constituents want this stuff--they just don't want other districts getting that money. It's why approval ratings for individual Congresspeople can remain high while overall Congressional approval edges closer to single digits.
People in Bumfuck, Kansas just don't want their tax dollars being spent in Liberaltown, New Hampshire. And vice versa. But, y'know, fuck 'em. That's how it works.
I've always been streaming-only and have yet to run out of things to watch. Just when I think I'm about to reach the end of my queue, they add more titles and I have a reason to stay for a few more months. If they can keep expanding their library, I will probably stick around for the long haul. I'll even tolerate a price hike. I think $15 is just about my limit, though. If they go above that I will probably drop the streaming service. As it is, Netflix streaming is a much better deal than cable or satellite. I can watch what I want, when I want, commercial-free, for $9 a month. That's an unbeatable value (unless you'd rather pirate, of course.)
We already have a problem in the US where older workers aren't retiring because the economy is so bad. This means fewer jobs being opened up for young workers fresh out of college. And given that the unemployment rate is high and the labor force participation rate has declined, I think we're looking at a future with fewer jobs per capita than we have now. Combine the effects of increased productivity gains, advances in automation, and the offshoring of both industrial and knowledge jobs, and you have a recipe for massive unemployment. Extend the human lifespan by several decades and you've made the problem worse, not better. We're talking about a massive oversupply of labor, which will drive wages down, harm living standards, and take a labor market that's already cutthroat competitive and make it even worse.
It's not that extending human lifespans is a bad goal--it could be a great thing, and for me it could mean that I still have 80% of my lifespan left! It's certainly staggering to think about. But without any kind of long-term plan to repair our economic situation, I don't see this being a boon to anyone except the wealthy who can both afford the treatment and have the financial resources to live comfortably for that long. So the average lifespan will increase dramatically but it will be distorted by those who can afford the longevity treatments. Life expectancy among the poor has remained stagnant for decades and even decreased among some minorities, I might add. This, at the same time some are talking about raising the retirement age. In effect, poor minorities would never be able to retire.
All this may seem tangential to the issue of greatly extended lifespans but we absolutely have to consider the wider socioeconomic implications of such advances. That isn't the job of science, per se, but it's definitely within the purview of sociologists, economists, and politicians. If we're about to have an even bigger retirement boom than expected (we've already got the Baby Boomers starting to retire), we should work to prepare for it now before it has consequences we haven't considered.
Chrome's reason for existing is to give Google a foothold in the browser market. How did they do this? By making a better browser. Don't confuse the ends with the means.
Google is also not a charity. They created G+ in order to get a foothold in the social networking market. How did they do this? By trying to make a better social networking platform. It's better than their previous attempts but it's still not a Facebook-killer. That Facebook has adopted various G+ features shows that they consider G+ a legitimate threat, though, which means Google has to keep up the pressure and continue to innovate G+.
I've noticed that this is a recurring problem with Google, though. They seem quite good at taking a particular concept and making a superior implementation of it, but once they do that they seem to have a really hard time improving on it. Google search hasn't changed that much in 10 years. GMail has evolved in very small increments since its inception, same with Google Docs. Chrome siphoned a lot of Firefox's userbase with its stability and performance, and it seems to be under constant development to improve it, but the changes are rarely obvious. Google+ came onto the scene with the innovative idea of "circles" along with very fine-grained sharing options. Now that Facebook has appropriated virtually all of that, though, what is Google's plan to keep improving G+ and get ahead of Facebook again? Google started an arms race here, and it doesn't seem like they were prepared for it.
I don't know what the GP has, but I have a Samsung Intercept with Sprint, carrier-provided Froyo (Cyanogenmod is not exactly ported to it), and it has extremely erratic behavior. Most of the time it works fine, then some days it's completely off its nut and freezes up for no apparent reason, to the point that I have to yank the battery. I very rarely have to reboot my Windows systems (one with XP, one with 7) and certainly have to reboot my phone a lot more often.
Life expectancy has gone up in the aggregate, but those gains have not been felt appreciably among the working class or those in poverty--in other words, those who would need Social Security the most aren't really living much longer, and often not long enough to get it in the first place. If you means-test it for everyone, you can avoid handing it out to people who don't need it. We can also remove the income cap that currently applies to the payroll deduction so all income is taxed.
Just those two changes would go a long way toward ensuring Social Security's long-term stability.
Yes, but credit default swaps were meant to hedge against such over-leveraging. That they weren't backed by anything at all is what made them so destructive. It's unlikely lenders would've gambled so much without the insurance of credit default swaps. But almost all kinds of insurance are heavily regulated and for good reason. AIG is what happens when you fashion a financial instrument that works like an insurance policy but has no regulation to guarantee the protection it promises.
Exactly. Most people's browsers send up enough information to every site you visit that you can be uniquely identified--or at least narrowed down to a very small sample. Even when you aren't logged in, Facebook can correlate that browser data with known profiles and figure out who you are without much trouble.
Yeah, the large gen-ed classes I took were always taught by seasoned professors, and they were quite good at it. In fact, I found my general studies courses to be better than the classes related to my major. I was in Computer Science, and the professors there often barely spoke English, were disinterested, and quite frequently didn't even teach the material the class was supposed to be about. For instance, I had a professor from Russia who'd never lectured in English before he got to us, and while the class was supposed to be about data structures, he instead taught algorithms. Just about all of us had to retake that class under a different professor because of that clown.
Meanwhile, I never had any issues with the way the general studies courses were run--except Philosophy 100, which was the very definition of "blow-off class." Showing up was extra credit, and most people slept. The prof wrote the book so as long as you read it, you were ready for the exams. He was basically the Pepperidge Farm guy. Great cure for insomnia. But he only stands out because he is the lone negative experience I had with a general studies course.
Yeah, college sports are "capitalistic" all right, except for the part where the "employees" who make reaping such profits possible--the students--don't get paid.
Facebook has become the Microsoft of social networking: rather than innovate anything themselves, they can let other companies do the R&D, then rip off whatever's successful. Win-win for Facebook, at least until no one else is willing to try to compete with them anymore.
I think it helps to understand why companies do this sort of thing so you can better protect yourself and give yourself the biggest advantage when looking for a job, so I agree with you. I don't think companies will be stopped from doing this, so your best bet is to keep everything locked down and only give access to people you trust. Even if it's made illegal to ask a prospective employee about their social networking accounts, it would be virtually impossible to enforce a prohibition on evaluating potential candidates based on their social networking information. Companies will just do it on the down-low to avoid problems, and if they see anything questionable in what they can find, you won't get a callback.
You should absolutely serve your own needs when looking for work, and if that means refusing to give out information regarding your Internet presence, so be it. Just be prepared to be passed over for some positions by particularly skittish employers.
Because your employer probably has a brand to protect, that's why it's their business.
I'll tell ya a little story. There was once a company that had an employee, and this employee was a mid-level manager. He was also the pastor at a local church that he owned and operated himself. Some accusations came up that he'd been diddling some of the young male members of his congregation, resulting in a lawsuit naming both him and the company as defendants. Now, even if the company hadn't been named as a defendant, newspaper articles still would've read "xxx, an employee at xxx," and now you've put the association out there that company xxx employs pedophiles, even if it's merely an accusation and even if the company knew nothing about it.
That is the sort of thing employers are trying to protect against: bad press resulting from the criminal actions of its employees both in the office and out. It may not be fair, but I can completely understand the logic behind it. Companies are risk-averse, by and large, and if they can find out what kind of person you are by vetting your Facebook profile, they would be failing to do their due diligence by passing up the opportunity.
I am pretty careful about what I post online since I'm either using my real name or a handle that can be traced back to my real identity without much effort. I also don't have anything posted that should give a potential employer pause, unless having a warped sense of humor is a dealbreaker. I rarely drink, I don't do drugs, I don't engage in risky behaviors, I don't post nasty things about friends and coworkers to Facebook or Twitter (or anywhere else), I don't put myself in situations where I'm doing something stupid and other people can take photos of it, upload them to Facebook, and tag 'em without my permission. It is really not that hard to avoid making an ass of yourself and keep from doing things that will screw you up down the road. And the government can pass all the privacy laws they want, but without locking down the technology to protect it, it will get out there. And I doubt Slashdotters would be in favor of going down that road, sacrificing the openness of the Internet with draconian measures to protect privacy.
Basically: don't be stupid. Don't do stupid things, don't let people take pictures of you doing stupid things, and don't post about doing stupid things on the Internet.
You don't own the rights to those games. They do. They get to set the price, and by asking for an exorbitant sum, it's just their way of telling you, "Fuck off, we're not interested."
They have no incentive to license an old game at a cheap price to a hobby product, when they're better served holding onto that property so it can be sold en masse for millions of dollars with a bunch of other properties. They're thinking big, you were thinking small.
Did they miss out on some money there? Probably, but I suspect not much. The harsh truth is that it would likely not have been worth the lawyer fees on their side to go through with it unless you were paying a handsome sum.
I don't know why you use China as an example, considering their strategy is to just make poor-quality knockoffs of everything and pay little or no attention to anyone's IP rights. Certainly that's a recipe for innovation and success.
So? The point was, the project couldn't go forward unless it at least broke even, and from the start it was destined to be a net loser because of licensing.
You wanted to profit off of other people's games and were then upset that they wouldn't let you--or rather, you were unhappy with the terms under which they would permit it. So, why not sell it without games or with some FOSS games instead?
I hope you hadn't invested much in developing it, considering you hinged its success entirely on what third parties would charge for the games you wanted to include.
Slashdot Mirror
Borders?? I take it you haven't been to one lately... they don't exist anymore. :)
I wholeheartedly concur. Geek girls are awesome.
How do you think all those pork barrel projects are created? They don't call it "bringing home the bacon" for nothing. Constituents want this stuff--they just don't want other districts getting that money. It's why approval ratings for individual Congresspeople can remain high while overall Congressional approval edges closer to single digits.
People in Bumfuck, Kansas just don't want their tax dollars being spent in Liberaltown, New Hampshire. And vice versa. But, y'know, fuck 'em. That's how it works.
I've always been streaming-only and have yet to run out of things to watch. Just when I think I'm about to reach the end of my queue, they add more titles and I have a reason to stay for a few more months. If they can keep expanding their library, I will probably stick around for the long haul. I'll even tolerate a price hike. I think $15 is just about my limit, though. If they go above that I will probably drop the streaming service. As it is, Netflix streaming is a much better deal than cable or satellite. I can watch what I want, when I want, commercial-free, for $9 a month. That's an unbeatable value (unless you'd rather pirate, of course.)
Ignore the American/British English spelling trolls.
But what would those people be doing?
We already have a problem in the US where older workers aren't retiring because the economy is so bad. This means fewer jobs being opened up for young workers fresh out of college. And given that the unemployment rate is high and the labor force participation rate has declined, I think we're looking at a future with fewer jobs per capita than we have now. Combine the effects of increased productivity gains, advances in automation, and the offshoring of both industrial and knowledge jobs, and you have a recipe for massive unemployment. Extend the human lifespan by several decades and you've made the problem worse, not better. We're talking about a massive oversupply of labor, which will drive wages down, harm living standards, and take a labor market that's already cutthroat competitive and make it even worse.
It's not that extending human lifespans is a bad goal--it could be a great thing, and for me it could mean that I still have 80% of my lifespan left! It's certainly staggering to think about. But without any kind of long-term plan to repair our economic situation, I don't see this being a boon to anyone except the wealthy who can both afford the treatment and have the financial resources to live comfortably for that long. So the average lifespan will increase dramatically but it will be distorted by those who can afford the longevity treatments. Life expectancy among the poor has remained stagnant for decades and even decreased among some minorities, I might add. This, at the same time some are talking about raising the retirement age. In effect, poor minorities would never be able to retire.
All this may seem tangential to the issue of greatly extended lifespans but we absolutely have to consider the wider socioeconomic implications of such advances. That isn't the job of science, per se, but it's definitely within the purview of sociologists, economists, and politicians. If we're about to have an even bigger retirement boom than expected (we've already got the Baby Boomers starting to retire), we should work to prepare for it now before it has consequences we haven't considered.
Chrome's reason for existing is to give Google a foothold in the browser market. How did they do this? By making a better browser. Don't confuse the ends with the means.
Google is also not a charity. They created G+ in order to get a foothold in the social networking market. How did they do this? By trying to make a better social networking platform. It's better than their previous attempts but it's still not a Facebook-killer. That Facebook has adopted various G+ features shows that they consider G+ a legitimate threat, though, which means Google has to keep up the pressure and continue to innovate G+.
I've noticed that this is a recurring problem with Google, though. They seem quite good at taking a particular concept and making a superior implementation of it, but once they do that they seem to have a really hard time improving on it. Google search hasn't changed that much in 10 years. GMail has evolved in very small increments since its inception, same with Google Docs. Chrome siphoned a lot of Firefox's userbase with its stability and performance, and it seems to be under constant development to improve it, but the changes are rarely obvious. Google+ came onto the scene with the innovative idea of "circles" along with very fine-grained sharing options. Now that Facebook has appropriated virtually all of that, though, what is Google's plan to keep improving G+ and get ahead of Facebook again? Google started an arms race here, and it doesn't seem like they were prepared for it.
It's a few extra words in the summary. Get over it. It sure isn't worth so much bitching.
I don't know what the GP has, but I have a Samsung Intercept with Sprint, carrier-provided Froyo (Cyanogenmod is not exactly ported to it), and it has extremely erratic behavior. Most of the time it works fine, then some days it's completely off its nut and freezes up for no apparent reason, to the point that I have to yank the battery. I very rarely have to reboot my Windows systems (one with XP, one with 7) and certainly have to reboot my phone a lot more often.
Heh, of course that would've happened to an IBM DeathStar... err... DeskStar.
Presumably, Google pays double-agent coders to commit bugs to the Firefox codebase and attract more users to Chrome. :-p
Life expectancy has gone up in the aggregate, but those gains have not been felt appreciably among the working class or those in poverty--in other words, those who would need Social Security the most aren't really living much longer, and often not long enough to get it in the first place. If you means-test it for everyone, you can avoid handing it out to people who don't need it. We can also remove the income cap that currently applies to the payroll deduction so all income is taxed.
Just those two changes would go a long way toward ensuring Social Security's long-term stability.
Yes, but credit default swaps were meant to hedge against such over-leveraging. That they weren't backed by anything at all is what made them so destructive. It's unlikely lenders would've gambled so much without the insurance of credit default swaps. But almost all kinds of insurance are heavily regulated and for good reason. AIG is what happens when you fashion a financial instrument that works like an insurance policy but has no regulation to guarantee the protection it promises.
Exactly. Most people's browsers send up enough information to every site you visit that you can be uniquely identified--or at least narrowed down to a very small sample. Even when you aren't logged in, Facebook can correlate that browser data with known profiles and figure out who you are without much trouble.
Indeed. This has "multi-billion-dollar boondoggle" written all over it.
US Eastern time is the only time zone that matters.
Yeah, the large gen-ed classes I took were always taught by seasoned professors, and they were quite good at it. In fact, I found my general studies courses to be better than the classes related to my major. I was in Computer Science, and the professors there often barely spoke English, were disinterested, and quite frequently didn't even teach the material the class was supposed to be about. For instance, I had a professor from Russia who'd never lectured in English before he got to us, and while the class was supposed to be about data structures, he instead taught algorithms. Just about all of us had to retake that class under a different professor because of that clown.
Meanwhile, I never had any issues with the way the general studies courses were run--except Philosophy 100, which was the very definition of "blow-off class." Showing up was extra credit, and most people slept. The prof wrote the book so as long as you read it, you were ready for the exams. He was basically the Pepperidge Farm guy. Great cure for insomnia. But he only stands out because he is the lone negative experience I had with a general studies course.
Yeah, college sports are "capitalistic" all right, except for the part where the "employees" who make reaping such profits possible--the students--don't get paid.
Facebook has become the Microsoft of social networking: rather than innovate anything themselves, they can let other companies do the R&D, then rip off whatever's successful. Win-win for Facebook, at least until no one else is willing to try to compete with them anymore.
I think it helps to understand why companies do this sort of thing so you can better protect yourself and give yourself the biggest advantage when looking for a job, so I agree with you. I don't think companies will be stopped from doing this, so your best bet is to keep everything locked down and only give access to people you trust. Even if it's made illegal to ask a prospective employee about their social networking accounts, it would be virtually impossible to enforce a prohibition on evaluating potential candidates based on their social networking information. Companies will just do it on the down-low to avoid problems, and if they see anything questionable in what they can find, you won't get a callback.
You should absolutely serve your own needs when looking for work, and if that means refusing to give out information regarding your Internet presence, so be it. Just be prepared to be passed over for some positions by particularly skittish employers.
Because your employer probably has a brand to protect, that's why it's their business.
I'll tell ya a little story. There was once a company that had an employee, and this employee was a mid-level manager. He was also the pastor at a local church that he owned and operated himself. Some accusations came up that he'd been diddling some of the young male members of his congregation, resulting in a lawsuit naming both him and the company as defendants. Now, even if the company hadn't been named as a defendant, newspaper articles still would've read "xxx, an employee at xxx," and now you've put the association out there that company xxx employs pedophiles, even if it's merely an accusation and even if the company knew nothing about it.
That is the sort of thing employers are trying to protect against: bad press resulting from the criminal actions of its employees both in the office and out. It may not be fair, but I can completely understand the logic behind it. Companies are risk-averse, by and large, and if they can find out what kind of person you are by vetting your Facebook profile, they would be failing to do their due diligence by passing up the opportunity.
I am pretty careful about what I post online since I'm either using my real name or a handle that can be traced back to my real identity without much effort. I also don't have anything posted that should give a potential employer pause, unless having a warped sense of humor is a dealbreaker. I rarely drink, I don't do drugs, I don't engage in risky behaviors, I don't post nasty things about friends and coworkers to Facebook or Twitter (or anywhere else), I don't put myself in situations where I'm doing something stupid and other people can take photos of it, upload them to Facebook, and tag 'em without my permission. It is really not that hard to avoid making an ass of yourself and keep from doing things that will screw you up down the road. And the government can pass all the privacy laws they want, but without locking down the technology to protect it, it will get out there. And I doubt Slashdotters would be in favor of going down that road, sacrificing the openness of the Internet with draconian measures to protect privacy.
Basically: don't be stupid. Don't do stupid things, don't let people take pictures of you doing stupid things, and don't post about doing stupid things on the Internet.
Indeed, it would only be "communism" if every worker owned a piece of this massive company. Then it would be both monopolistic and communist! Hooray!
I guess you didn't "get it," either. :)
You don't own the rights to those games. They do. They get to set the price, and by asking for an exorbitant sum, it's just their way of telling you, "Fuck off, we're not interested."
They have no incentive to license an old game at a cheap price to a hobby product, when they're better served holding onto that property so it can be sold en masse for millions of dollars with a bunch of other properties. They're thinking big, you were thinking small.
Did they miss out on some money there? Probably, but I suspect not much. The harsh truth is that it would likely not have been worth the lawyer fees on their side to go through with it unless you were paying a handsome sum.
I don't know why you use China as an example, considering their strategy is to just make poor-quality knockoffs of everything and pay little or no attention to anyone's IP rights. Certainly that's a recipe for innovation and success.
So? The point was, the project couldn't go forward unless it at least broke even, and from the start it was destined to be a net loser because of licensing.
You wanted to profit off of other people's games and were then upset that they wouldn't let you--or rather, you were unhappy with the terms under which they would permit it. So, why not sell it without games or with some FOSS games instead?
I hope you hadn't invested much in developing it, considering you hinged its success entirely on what third parties would charge for the games you wanted to include.