There is a question of "the ability to do something" and "the will to do something"
I don't want to sound pro-Microsoft (I'm not) but the reality is that as a near monopolist in several areas of software, the second largest employer in Washington State, and (need I mention) a generous campaign contributor, the Fed will walk on eggs when coming up with any remedies to control Our Friends In Redmond.
Once you get past the breathless hype of the New Economy, Amazon is expendable. Jeff Bezos could be swatted out of existence, and the loss of every single job at Amazon would result in a small change in the unemplyment rate of Greater Seattle, and a zero change in any meaningful national economic statistics related to employment, GDP, the value of the NASDAQ, or any other indicator you care to fish up.
Who knows, without an Amazon.com to surf to, office productivity might even rise a few ticks.
Attachmate (a privately-held middish-to-big Seattle software firm you've probably never heard of) puts more money into the economy than Amazon.
The FTCs lack of action does not indicate the goverment does not have the means. They certainly do. They just don't have the desire.
A point germaine to this discussion was brought up by my boss the other day (I'm blessed to have a fairly smart boss, instead of a PHB).
Officers of public corporations, such as the members of the {MP,RI}AA, have a responsibility to maximize value for their shareholders. Put into plain language, they are required to do everything in their power to bring in as much money as they can without breaking the law. In many cases, breaking the law is considered the equivalent of starting a fight in a hockey game. Will you gain more advantage by pounding your opponent than you will lose by spending five minutes in the penalty box?
Failure to do this will result in shareholder lawsuits. Not only can the company be sued, the responsible officers can be sued personally under the clause of "fiduciary responsibility" (i.e. your job as an officer of the corporation is to protect and enhance the value of said corporation).
To normal human beings, one looks at M$, the RIAA, etc. with the view of "stupid greedheads. Don't they have enough already?" When viewed through the lens of risking lawsuits simply for being insufficently greedy, it at least allows one to understand the driving force behind their actions.
What do I think about this system? Well... Morally it offends me. On the other hand, it is a system which rewards me personally very well.
If the greed of MS and the {MP,RI}AA really bugs you, plan on working very hard to stop them. Rest assured, they will not stop until they can get a dime every time you put a disc into your CD player. The fund managers will see to it!
This has been repeated many times, but there have been enough ill-informed comments here that it bears repeating. The People's Republic of China is a hard-core dictatorship. Taiwan is a democracy. Not a perfect democracy, but not bad. Freedom of speech and freedom of expression through public protest are legal and practiced frequently by the residents of the island. Other than both places being populated by ethnic Chinese, and a few commonalities between their respective legal codes, their respective governments views on the rights of individuals and the nature of law in general are poles apart.
First, as has been mentioned by another poster, the government of Taiwan is under unbelievable pressure from the United States to enforce intellectual property rights laws. Somewhere around 30% of Taiwan's economy is based on the export of goods to the United States. Threatening trade relations is a remarkably effective stick to beat the government with.
In 1993, Taiwan passed a law protecting intellectual property rights. Here is a link to the English translation of the law if you are curious. The general understanding is that the text of this law was delivered from the American Institute in Taipei (the official unofficial embassy since the United States does not maintain formal relations with Taiwan), with instructions to pass it, as written, without ammendments or modifications, or suffer punitive tarrifs under Section 301 of the United States Trade Act of 1974.
Eight years ago, the issue was bootleg microchips. Now it's bootlegged MP3s. Little else in the basic dynamic has changed.
To condense a very deep topic into a paragraph, Chinese law enforcement is based the principle of "Sha Yi Jing Bai" -- kill one to warn a hundred. Rather than trying to consistiently enforce laws, the police excercise a crackdown mentality where a number of people are run in on the crime of the week, extremely harsh sentences are metted out to the few unlucky folks who have been caught, and then the usual state of barely controlled anarchy which makes up Chinese society resumes.
This promotes a lot more flaunting of the law than respect for it in my mind, but how can a gawailo like me comment on a legal system which has been using this technique for the last thousand years?
A final aspect of the legal system in Taiwan (and China to a great degree) is that you can apologize your way out of a lot of things. I suspect that very few of the students arrested will actually see any jail time for their sins. Most of them will act very contrite, and will be set free to go forth and sin no more.
The version of EWS in your cineplexes was not the version Kubrick originally delivered to Warner Brothers. That's exactly the point -- it had to be bowdlerized to meet the terms of Warner's contract with Kubrick, which required an R-rated film.
... and Warner's made that restriction because large cinema chains have "no NC-17" policies. The chains have this policy because upright prigs stage boycotts and do pickets when NC-17 movies come to their towns.
I think the original poster got the point exactly. The problem is not the Evil Corporations (who really just want to sell stuff people will buy). The problem is the people (i.e. middle Americans) they're trying to sell stuff to.
There's an argument that corporate consolidation has made this problem worse, because a few theater chains become the arbiter of which movies do and don't get shown as is simply because they contol so many screens. Unfortunately, short of really agressive meddling in who does and does not get to merge, I don't know how this can be addressed.
I should give a disclaimer before I start. I spent 7 years kicking around China (including some time as a technical writer for a mainboard manufacturer in Taiwan). I hold well-meaning missionaries with fat bellies going in to "fix" developing countries in utter, complete disdain.
Most of the assembly for PC components is highly automated. I have seen people hand-solder SMT components... These were exploited senior engineers in the Taipei design center. These poor souls were so tired after working 10 hours a day that they could barely drag themselves to their new Toyotas and Nissans to go off to their houses in the suburbs of Taipei.
The rest is all done using SMT machinery. There's a tech monitoring the line for trouble, and there are people doing QC and stuffing boxes at the end of the line. It's pretty boring, but it's light work. Remember as well that the quality demands for electronics are considerably higher than for clothing. You can't train someone just off the farm to run an SMT line.
Making silicon chips is generally a pretty nasty business. You get exposed to lots of fun chemicals, many of which are known carcinogens. The silicon fabs have largely moved overseas for a reason. They're bad neighbors, and bad PR.
On the issue of sweatshops in general, I am largely in agreement with another poster. Labor unions, education, and time solve all problems. If any of you have grandparents old enough to remember when the world's largest developing economy was the United States, ask them about pay and working conditions.
In a complex, cross-dependent society, a lot of hands make everything you touch. Some of them are well-paid, skilled laborers, some have jobs you wouldn't want in a million years. If this bugs your conscience, do the right thing. Sell your gas-guzzling automobile, get out of San Francisco, or New York, or Seattle, or wherever you are now, move to Montana, and unplug. Create your own sustainable economy and be guilt-free.
Where in asia did you live? Japan? I know the Cost of living there is huge compared to the US, but I would imagine that in places like Taiwan or Mainland China would be pretty cheap.
Taiwan is NOT cheap. Taipei is (in bits and pieces) a first world city, and has first world prices to match. This week's issue of the Economist puts Taipei's cost of living as being slightly above NYC.
This has been alluded to in other messages, but a big problem in calculating living expenses is tied up in "quality of life" issues. Taiwanese live in nasty concrete boxes with no oven, substandard plumbing, no heat (it's as far south as Miami, this is not as big a deal as you might think), and no a/c except for what you bring in yourself. If you are willing to live in a place like this (or fix it up to your standards on your own dime) rent is reasonable (meaning $1/sq. ft or so). If you demand the same sort of apartment that you would get in LA, San Jose, or Boston, watch your price per square foot triple!
Likewise, food and entertainment is stretchy like candy. Local food is cheap (and tasty). Want to get a steak that would be pronounced fit to eat in Chicago? Suck it up, it starts at $40/plate (before wine and appetizers).
I could keep checking down the list. This is not intended to kick on Taiwan. I enjoyed my stay there immensely (never having lived in expat digs, and avoiding the steakhouses like the plauge). However, you will find this over and over any time you go overseas. The less you like livin' local, the more you can expect to pay.
Before I start on this, I would like to note that I am not currently in a union noe have I ever been in a union. However, I have worked in a "union shop" More on this later.
Most intelegent programmers laugh at the thought of a "tech union"... demand is so high that for most of us we could easily walk and get another job.
Quite right. This is not so much an issue for programmers, project managers, sysadmins and other members of the technical elite. Remember however that amazon.com (for instance) employs a number of less-than-technical people in warehouse jobs, editing positions, tech support, etc. These jobs are not well compensated, and especially when you're down at the bottom of the food chain, the mobility level between companies as not as high as it is for techies.
Now, something which you may not know about unions. When a union comes into an organization, it does not (in most cases) force every single non-management person in the company to join the union. I worked as a design engineer in a marine electrical company at one time. The workplace floor was what we call a "closed shop". If you don't have your union card, you don't pull wire.
The front office had no such restrictions. None of the engineers were unionized, nor were the accountants, sales people, etc. (some of them used to be shop guys, but I don't think they kept their cards up to date. Could be wrong about this).
Having said all of this, working in a unionized shop was not one of the more fun jobs I've had. A nine-to-five attitude permeated the place, and the managers figured that the workers were all out to hump the company. On the other hand, having friends who work at Amazon, some shops really deserve to have a union forced on them. If Jeff Bezos doesn't figure out how to reward employees with something other than 50 hour-weeks, forced overtime near Christmas, and now not-so-valuable stock options, that may be the situation he will face.
1) Allows me, a Sino-geek with a strong background in Hanzi [or Kanji to those on the islands] but little knowledge of Japanese to communicate ideas in characters to people on Japanese machines. Ditto for Korean. Ditto for
2) Broad support for Chinese/Japanese/Korean entry systems. IMEs work across character sets, as the set permits. (see point 1)
3) Works for browsing under almost all Windows apps (Microsoft Asian Language packs seem to be confined to OLE-enabled apps).
Why NJStar sucks:
1) No TrueType font support.
2) CJK rendering is sometimes a bit crufty.
For "thinking of cool stuff" I'll give it four-and-a-half out of five. For implementation, I'll give it three out of five.
_FLAME ON_
Since this is Slashdot, and since I really hate MS on this point, let's kick them around a bit: I have had a hard-on for MS's implementation of CJK ever since I was working on East Asian Win95 testing in the Hive back in 1994. While implementation of the Language packs in Win 98 have fixed some of these issues, MS is (IMHO) taking an easy problem (rendering CJK characters, which share a lot more commonality between the various languages than differences, once you see past the details of which numeric value is assigned to which character), and making it hard. There are still FOUR seperate language packs, which do not work together with each other at all. When I read Guo2 Biao4 (PRC character encoding standard) content from Mainland China, Microsoft forces me to read it in simplified characters. Grrrr. If I am writing in Big-5 (Taiwan character encoding standard), I can't write in Pinyin. GRRRRRR!
_FLAME OFF_
Gawsh, doesn't MS's implementation of CJK look purty?
Perhaps someone with some familiarity with hard drive engineering can help out with this:
As I understand it, a hard drive is magnetic media on glass, plus support circuitry to translate "high-level" digital signals (i.e. write this block of 1024 bytes to cylinder 27, track 855, sector 27), to "low-level" analog signals (i.e. spin drive, toggle head 5 stepper motors, toggle write head on, now off, etc.)
A fab to make magnetic media in the Foul Year of Our Lord 2001 is a major project in terms of cost and technical expertise required, probably comparable in size and scope to a silicon fab. How hard is it to make the support circuitry though? I suspect it's a little more than an undergraduate EE project, but certainly within the realm of a garage in Hsinchu (or Santa Clara for that matter).
Actually, I'd say that going to a web site run by a union-busting company is a Good Thing. You are using their resources while not contributing a thing back to them.
If ya click on one of their banner ads though, you're gonna burn in Hell.
When arguing minutae like this, some prattishness is required, I don't mind a'tall.
I'll try to look up the case law to defend my point. I am not a lawyer by training, so it may take a while. You have brought up some good arguments. While the case law seems to be on your side, I have a common-sense question: in a country where people sue for everything, why are libel suits so uncommon?
Anyhow, I'll look at the case law and get back to you.
You're bringing up case law from 1932 and 1964 respectively. This is the same era where people of mixed races were not allowed to marry, US citizens who were born overseas were not allowed to buy land, "literacy tests" determined who was and was not eligible to vote, and cohabitation laws made it illegal for unmarried couples to live together.
Can you please provide a viable libel case from some time past 1980 to demonstrate that your case law is at least trying to live in the same century as the rest of us?
It's been pointed out before, but that's really not fair. Taiwan is DENSE. When you see 388 people/km^2, you're not seeing that 2/3 of the island's land mass is completely unpopulated. Taipei city and environs is 6,000,000 people in (roughly) a 20km circle. Kaohsiung is smaller but similar. Hit those two cities plus Taoyuan and Hsinchu and you've provided infrastructure for 90% of the population.
In the U.S. you're not allow to publish libel and slender, among others.
The devil is in the details. There are libel and slander laws in the U.S., but the bar for libel is extrordinarily high, and the number of cases filed are few and far between (the number 1,500 a year is sticking in my brain, but I haven't found any collaborating evidence for that number. Perhaps I hallucinated it).
The bland state of American TV is actually easy to explain. There's NO LAW that says you can't show orgies and bestiality during the kids' cartoon hour.
However, your local TV station has it's license renewed at the pleasure of an every-5-years review of whether or not it has been functioning in the "community interest". If during the review process, the FCC finds, based on petitions by "concerned citizens" (usually a group fronted by someone else who wants your broadcast license), that you are not acting in the community interest, your license may be revoked, i.e. transferred for a five-year period to another party who will serve the community interest.
Take a wild guess as to what a broadcast license is worth in a major market. Now guess how much risk the bean-counters at the station will take if it threatens their ability to renew that license?
Has a FOX affiliate ever faced a "community interest" hearing over the sheer quantity of gore, carjackings, and other worthless stuff they run? Probably not. I don't know if I want to bring this up though. If we didn't have Cops and RealTV to watch, we'd probably be stuck with endless runs of public TV and Entertainment Tonight.
(BTW, if you think this rant is a little paranoid, let me tell you a story from Seattle about 10-12 years back when a group of fana//// devoted X-tians decided they really wanted a community radio station in Seattle, and served notice that they were looking to snag the license from KCMU on these grounds. They failed, but due in no small part to a very concerted effort by the station and their friends to hold on to the license).
I'd like to create a parallel-world where the law said that CGI images do not meet the legal definition of kiddie porn.
In this hypothetical world, a citizen has just been arrested for having lots of sexually-oriented pictures of very young children (obviously under-18) on said citizen's computer.
The legal defense: All the pictures are CGI images. No real underage children were used in the creation of these images.
Under the common-law system in use in most of the United States, the burden of proof now falls on the prosecution to prove that the images are NOT CGI.
It's pretty easy to show that an image is a CGI, but how do you prove that something is not one? Especially something which is not a dead-tree image but a jpeg?
Would this make it difficult (if not impossible) to prosecute child pornography at the current state of the art in CGI?
Being over the age of 25, and therefore demonstrably senile, I don't want to vouch for the reliability of my wetware, but when the "e-mail" was originally posted, there was no mention of it being satire. I'm pretty sure the note at the bottom was added later when too many people either completely missed the joke or (like yer humor-challenged author) treated it as a hoax message being passed off as a genuine treatise from His Billness.
I'd like to do a Letterman top 10, but the egg timer is running and I'm not going to have time to come up with 10 reasons. Let's do four.
4) MS got raked over the coals for e-mails from top executives (including billg) in the anti-trust trial. I suspect that any information of this nature would be disseminated in subpoena-resistant format (i.e. conference call).
3) Lots of comments tweaking the nose of open-source proponents. Would this be done in a document intended to remain internal? What's the point?
2) "Relax. Do nothing. Let them enjoy their 5.5%" I have never met Bill, but I have met people who have met Bill. I haven't heard anything indicating Bill is a relaxed type of guy.
And (drum roll) the number one reason why this is a hoax.
his comment on how rich people are rich because they've rigged the system shows that he doesn't know much about how the economy works" I'm sure this comment is misworded. Ralph himself is a self-made millionaire, albeit he lives on $25,000 a year and gives away almost all of his income.
Given his position, that ain't a lot of money. Nader is, what, 50-odd years old? I suspect many (if not most) of the readers of Slashdot have high-tech jobs. Assuming you make 70K/year, bank 20K of it someplace reasonable, and step and repeat until you're 50-odd, you'll be worth several million dollars as well. If your stock options ever become worth anything, you may do much better. We can only hope.
It gave GeekNews (Yet Another Tech News Site Running Slashcode) a chance to appear on the cover of Slashdot.
It's a little early as I write this (3:00 a.m. Pacific time), but by 10:00 today, their server will have enough hits to give them delusions of adequacy.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a question of "the ability to do something" and "the will to do something"
I don't want to sound pro-Microsoft (I'm not) but the reality is that as a near monopolist in several areas of software, the second largest employer in Washington State, and (need I mention) a generous campaign contributor, the Fed will walk on eggs when coming up with any remedies to control Our Friends In Redmond.
Once you get past the breathless hype of the New Economy, Amazon is expendable. Jeff Bezos could be swatted out of existence, and the loss of every single job at Amazon would result in a small change in the unemplyment rate of Greater Seattle, and a zero change in any meaningful national economic statistics related to employment, GDP, the value of the NASDAQ, or any other indicator you care to fish up.
Who knows, without an Amazon.com to surf to, office productivity might even rise a few ticks.
Attachmate (a privately-held middish-to-big Seattle software firm you've probably never heard of) puts more money into the economy than Amazon.
The FTCs lack of action does not indicate the goverment does not have the means. They certainly do. They just don't have the desire.
cynically yrs,
j.
A point germaine to this discussion was brought up by my boss the other day (I'm blessed to have a fairly smart boss, instead of a PHB).
Officers of public corporations, such as the members of the {MP,RI}AA, have a responsibility to maximize value for their shareholders. Put into plain language, they are required to do everything in their power to bring in as much money as they can without breaking the law. In many cases, breaking the law is considered the equivalent of starting a fight in a hockey game. Will you gain more advantage by pounding your opponent than you will lose by spending five minutes in the penalty box?
Failure to do this will result in shareholder lawsuits. Not only can the company be sued, the responsible officers can be sued personally under the clause of "fiduciary responsibility" (i.e. your job as an officer of the corporation is to protect and enhance the value of said corporation).
To normal human beings, one looks at M$, the RIAA, etc. with the view of "stupid greedheads. Don't they have enough already?" When viewed through the lens of risking lawsuits simply for being insufficently greedy, it at least allows one to understand the driving force behind their actions.
What do I think about this system? Well... Morally it offends me. On the other hand, it is a system which rewards me personally very well.
If the greed of MS and the {MP,RI}AA really bugs you, plan on working very hard to stop them. Rest assured, they will not stop until they can get a dime every time you put a disc into your CD player. The fund managers will see to it!
j.
[in PDF format]
http://babbage.sissa.it/pdf/quant-ph/0012026
First, as has been mentioned by another poster, the government of Taiwan is under unbelievable pressure from the United States to enforce intellectual property rights laws. Somewhere around 30% of Taiwan's economy is based on the export of goods to the United States. Threatening trade relations is a remarkably effective stick to beat the government with.
In 1993, Taiwan passed a law protecting intellectual property rights. Here is a link to the English translation of the law if you are curious. The general understanding is that the text of this law was delivered from the American Institute in Taipei (the official unofficial embassy since the United States does not maintain formal relations with Taiwan), with instructions to pass it, as written, without ammendments or modifications, or suffer punitive tarrifs under Section 301 of the United States Trade Act of 1974.
Eight years ago, the issue was bootleg microchips. Now it's bootlegged MP3s. Little else in the basic dynamic has changed.
To condense a very deep topic into a paragraph, Chinese law enforcement is based the principle of "Sha Yi Jing Bai" -- kill one to warn a hundred. Rather than trying to consistiently enforce laws, the police excercise a crackdown mentality where a number of people are run in on the crime of the week, extremely harsh sentences are metted out to the few unlucky folks who have been caught, and then the usual state of barely controlled anarchy which makes up Chinese society resumes.
This promotes a lot more flaunting of the law than respect for it in my mind, but how can a gawailo like me comment on a legal system which has been using this technique for the last thousand years?
A final aspect of the legal system in Taiwan (and China to a great degree) is that you can apologize your way out of a lot of things. I suspect that very few of the students arrested will actually see any jail time for their sins. Most of them will act very contrite, and will be set free to go forth and sin no more.
Cheers!
j.
The version of EWS in your cineplexes was not the version Kubrick originally delivered to Warner Brothers. That's exactly the point -- it had to be bowdlerized to meet the terms of Warner's contract with Kubrick, which required an R-rated film.
... and Warner's made that restriction because large cinema chains have "no NC-17" policies. The chains have this policy because upright prigs stage boycotts and do pickets when NC-17 movies come to their towns.
I think the original poster got the point exactly. The problem is not the Evil Corporations (who really just want to sell stuff people will buy). The problem is the people (i.e. middle Americans) they're trying to sell stuff to.
There's an argument that corporate consolidation has made this problem worse, because a few theater chains become the arbiter of which movies do and don't get shown as is simply because they contol so many screens. Unfortunately, short of really agressive meddling in who does and does not get to merge, I don't know how this can be addressed.
j.
I should give a disclaimer before I start. I spent 7 years kicking around China (including some time as a technical writer for a mainboard manufacturer in Taiwan). I hold well-meaning missionaries with fat bellies going in to "fix" developing countries in utter, complete disdain.
Most of the assembly for PC components is highly automated. I have seen people hand-solder SMT components... These were exploited senior engineers in the Taipei design center. These poor souls were so tired after working 10 hours a day that they could barely drag themselves to their new Toyotas and Nissans to go off to their houses in the suburbs of Taipei.
The rest is all done using SMT machinery. There's a tech monitoring the line for trouble, and there are people doing QC and stuffing boxes at the end of the line. It's pretty boring, but it's light work. Remember as well that the quality demands for electronics are considerably higher than for clothing. You can't train someone just off the farm to run an SMT line.
Making silicon chips is generally a pretty nasty business. You get exposed to lots of fun chemicals, many of which are known carcinogens. The silicon fabs have largely moved overseas for a reason. They're bad neighbors, and bad PR.
On the issue of sweatshops in general, I am largely in agreement with another poster. Labor unions, education, and time solve all problems. If any of you have grandparents old enough to remember when the world's largest developing economy was the United States, ask them about pay and working conditions.
In a complex, cross-dependent society, a lot of hands make everything you touch. Some of them are well-paid, skilled laborers, some have jobs you wouldn't want in a million years. If this bugs your conscience, do the right thing. Sell your gas-guzzling automobile, get out of San Francisco, or New York, or Seattle, or wherever you are now, move to Montana, and unplug. Create your own sustainable economy and be guilt-free.
I love your explanation of wild and wonderful Taipei.
It's easy to make money in Taipei. Start a company, find a niche. The boss and gu2 dong1 (shareholders) are well rewarded. The employees are not.
This is why I returned to Seattle. Being a boss involved doing stuff that I didn't like, and I'd never get ahead being "just an engineer".
Happy to hear you're loving every minute of it. I did too.
p.s. Would I have ever met you around town?
j.
Where in asia did you live? Japan? I know the Cost of living there is huge compared to the US, but I would imagine that in places like Taiwan or Mainland China would be pretty cheap.
Taiwan is NOT cheap. Taipei is (in bits and pieces) a first world city, and has first world prices to match. This week's issue of the Economist puts Taipei's cost of living as being slightly above NYC.
This has been alluded to in other messages, but a big problem in calculating living expenses is tied up in "quality of life" issues. Taiwanese live in nasty concrete boxes with no oven, substandard plumbing, no heat (it's as far south as Miami, this is not as big a deal as you might think), and no a/c except for what you bring in yourself. If you are willing to live in a place like this (or fix it up to your standards on your own dime) rent is reasonable (meaning $1/sq. ft or so). If you demand the same sort of apartment that you would get in LA, San Jose, or Boston, watch your price per square foot triple!
Likewise, food and entertainment is stretchy like candy. Local food is cheap (and tasty). Want to get a steak that would be pronounced fit to eat in Chicago? Suck it up, it starts at $40/plate (before wine and appetizers).
I could keep checking down the list. This is not intended to kick on Taiwan. I enjoyed my stay there immensely (never having lived in expat digs, and avoiding the steakhouses like the plauge). However, you will find this over and over any time you go overseas. The less you like livin' local, the more you can expect to pay.
j.
Before I start on this, I would like to note that I am not currently in a union noe have I ever been in a union. However, I have worked in a "union shop" More on this later.
Most intelegent programmers laugh at the thought of a "tech union"... demand is so high that for most of us we could easily walk and get another job.
Quite right. This is not so much an issue for programmers, project managers, sysadmins and other members of the technical elite. Remember however that amazon.com (for instance) employs a number of less-than-technical people in warehouse jobs, editing positions, tech support, etc. These jobs are not well compensated, and especially when you're down at the bottom of the food chain, the mobility level between companies as not as high as it is for techies.
Now, something which you may not know about unions. When a union comes into an organization, it does not (in most cases) force every single non-management person in the company to join the union. I worked as a design engineer in a marine electrical company at one time. The workplace floor was what we call a "closed shop". If you don't have your union card, you don't pull wire.
The front office had no such restrictions. None of the engineers were unionized, nor were the accountants, sales people, etc. (some of them used to be shop guys, but I don't think they kept their cards up to date. Could be wrong about this).
Having said all of this, working in a unionized shop was not one of the more fun jobs I've had. A nine-to-five attitude permeated the place, and the managers figured that the workers were all out to hump the company. On the other hand, having friends who work at Amazon, some shops really deserve to have a union forced on them. If Jeff Bezos doesn't figure out how to reward employees with something other than 50 hour-weeks, forced overtime near Christmas, and now not-so-valuable stock options, that may be the situation he will face.
Why NJStar is cool:
1) Allows me, a Sino-geek with a strong background in Hanzi [or Kanji to those on the islands] but little knowledge of Japanese to communicate ideas in characters to people on Japanese machines. Ditto for Korean. Ditto for
2) Broad support for Chinese/Japanese/Korean entry systems. IMEs work across character sets, as the set permits. (see point 1)
3) Works for browsing under almost all Windows apps (Microsoft Asian Language packs seem to be confined to OLE-enabled apps).
Why NJStar sucks:
1) No TrueType font support.
2) CJK rendering is sometimes a bit crufty.
For "thinking of cool stuff" I'll give it four-and-a-half out of five. For implementation, I'll give it three out of five.
_FLAME ON_
Since this is Slashdot, and since I really hate MS on this point, let's kick them around a bit: I have had a hard-on for MS's implementation of CJK ever since I was working on East Asian Win95 testing in the Hive back in 1994. While implementation of the Language packs in Win 98 have fixed some of these issues, MS is (IMHO) taking an easy problem (rendering CJK characters, which share a lot more commonality between the various languages than differences, once you see past the details of which numeric value is assigned to which character), and making it hard. There are still FOUR seperate language packs, which do not work together with each other at all. When I read Guo2 Biao4 (PRC character encoding standard) content from Mainland China, Microsoft forces me to read it in simplified characters. Grrrr. If I am writing in Big-5 (Taiwan character encoding standard), I can't write in Pinyin. GRRRRRR!
_FLAME OFF_
Gawsh, doesn't MS's implementation of CJK look purty?
Perhaps someone with some familiarity with hard drive engineering can help out with this:
As I understand it, a hard drive is magnetic media on glass, plus support circuitry to translate "high-level" digital signals (i.e. write this block of 1024 bytes to cylinder 27, track 855, sector 27), to "low-level" analog signals (i.e. spin drive, toggle head 5 stepper motors, toggle write head on, now off, etc.)
A fab to make magnetic media in the Foul Year of Our Lord 2001 is a major project in terms of cost and technical expertise required, probably comparable in size and scope to a silicon fab. How hard is it to make the support circuitry though? I suspect it's a little more than an undergraduate EE project, but certainly within the realm of a garage in Hsinchu (or Santa Clara for that matter).
Retrofitted copy-protection-free drives anyone?
j.
Actually, I'd say that going to a web site run by a union-busting company is a Good Thing. You are using their resources while not contributing a thing back to them.
If ya click on one of their banner ads though, you're gonna burn in Hell.
j.
ps. sorry to be such a pratt
When arguing minutae like this, some prattishness is required, I don't mind a'tall.
I'll try to look up the case law to defend my point. I am not a lawyer by training, so it may take a while. You have brought up some good arguments. While the case law seems to be on your side, I have a common-sense question: in a country where people sue for everything, why are libel suits so uncommon?
Anyhow, I'll look at the case law and get back to you.
thx
j.
You're bringing up case law from 1932 and 1964 respectively. This is the same era where people of mixed races were not allowed to marry, US citizens who were born overseas were not allowed to buy land, "literacy tests" determined who was and was not eligible to vote, and cohabitation laws made it illegal for unmarried couples to live together.
Can you please provide a viable libel case from some time past 1980 to demonstrate that your case law is at least trying to live in the same century as the rest of us?
It's been pointed out before, but that's really not fair. Taiwan is DENSE. When you see 388 people/km^2, you're not seeing that 2/3 of the island's land mass is completely unpopulated. Taipei city and environs is 6,000,000 people in (roughly) a 20km circle. Kaohsiung is smaller but similar. Hit those two cities plus Taoyuan and Hsinchu and you've provided infrastructure for 90% of the population.
In the U.S. you're not allow to publish libel and slender, among others.
The devil is in the details. There are libel and slander laws in the U.S., but the bar for libel is extrordinarily high, and the number of cases filed are few and far between (the number 1,500 a year is sticking in my brain, but I haven't found any collaborating evidence for that number. Perhaps I hallucinated it).
The bland state of American TV is actually easy to explain. There's NO LAW that says you can't show orgies and bestiality during the kids' cartoon hour.
However, your local TV station has it's license renewed at the pleasure of an every-5-years review of whether or not it has been functioning in the "community interest". If during the review process, the FCC finds, based on petitions by "concerned citizens" (usually a group fronted by someone else who wants your broadcast license), that you are not acting in the community interest, your license may be revoked, i.e. transferred for a five-year period to another party who will serve the community interest.
Take a wild guess as to what a broadcast license is worth in a major market. Now guess how much risk the bean-counters at the station will take if it threatens their ability to renew that license?
Has a FOX affiliate ever faced a "community interest" hearing over the sheer quantity of gore, carjackings, and other worthless stuff they run? Probably not. I don't know if I want to bring this up though. If we didn't have Cops and RealTV to watch, we'd probably be stuck with endless runs of public TV and Entertainment Tonight.
(BTW, if you think this rant is a little paranoid, let me tell you a story from Seattle about 10-12 years back when a group of fana//// devoted X-tians decided they really wanted a community radio station in Seattle, and served notice that they were looking to snag the license from KCMU on these grounds. They failed, but due in no small part to a very concerted effort by the station and their friends to hold on to the license).
Shucks.
I should curse you out for posting this five times in the last week...
But it's so damn inspired I can't bring myself to do it. Good work!
j.
#include
I'd like to create a parallel-world where the law said that CGI images do not meet the legal definition of kiddie porn.
In this hypothetical world, a citizen has just been arrested for having lots of sexually-oriented pictures of very young children (obviously under-18) on said citizen's computer.
The legal defense: All the pictures are CGI images. No real underage children were used in the creation of these images.
Under the common-law system in use in most of the United States, the burden of proof now falls on the prosecution to prove that the images are NOT CGI.
It's pretty easy to show that an image is a CGI, but how do you prove that something is not one? Especially something which is not a dead-tree image but a jpeg?
Would this make it difficult (if not impossible) to prosecute child pornography at the current state of the art in CGI?
j.
It might also help to study the history of the 1990s. Clarence Thomas was nominated by Bush, not Clinton.
Being over the age of 25, and therefore demonstrably senile, I don't want to vouch for the reliability of my wetware, but when the "e-mail" was originally posted, there was no mention of it being satire. I'm pretty sure the note at the bottom was added later when too many people either completely missed the joke or (like yer humor-challenged author) treated it as a hoax message being passed off as a genuine treatise from His Billness.
j.
I'd like to do a Letterman top 10, but the egg timer is running and I'm not going to have time to come up with 10 reasons. Let's do four.
4) MS got raked over the coals for e-mails from top executives (including billg) in the anti-trust trial. I suspect that any information of this nature would be disseminated in subpoena-resistant format (i.e. conference call).
3) Lots of comments tweaking the nose of open-source proponents. Would this be done in a document intended to remain internal? What's the point?
2) "Relax. Do nothing. Let them enjoy their 5.5%" I have never met Bill, but I have met people who have met Bill. I haven't heard anything indicating Bill is a relaxed type of guy.
And (drum roll) the number one reason why this is a hoax.
1) "Don't leak this memo this time!"
his comment on how rich people are rich because they've rigged the system shows that he doesn't know much about how the economy works" I'm sure this comment is misworded. Ralph himself is a self-made millionaire, albeit he lives on $25,000 a year and gives away almost all of his income.
Given his position, that ain't a lot of money. Nader is, what, 50-odd years old? I suspect many (if not most) of the readers of Slashdot have high-tech jobs. Assuming you make 70K/year, bank 20K of it someplace reasonable, and step and repeat until you're 50-odd, you'll be worth several million dollars as well. If your stock options ever become worth anything, you may do much better. We can only hope.
j.
It gave GeekNews (Yet Another Tech News Site Running Slashcode) a chance to appear on the cover of Slashdot.
It's a little early as I write this (3:00 a.m. Pacific time), but by 10:00 today, their server will have enough hits to give them delusions of adequacy.
I agree with your points. Alas, posting cheng2 yu3 will not get you very many responses from the people you are "addressing" it to.
Dang1 Libertarian Shu3 Yao4 Man2 Jing Di4 Zhi1 Wa1. Dui4 Wai4 Mian4 Shi2 Jie1, bu4 neng2 shi4 Libertarian.
(No, I won't translate this. It's incipient on the intended audience to prove me wrong by translating it themselves! )
I actually like politicians being in Washington. If they were in industry, they could cause real damage.
j.