Those who believe that rights are arbitrary are usually those who believe that human beings have no particular nature but are in all important ways products of their culture. Generally these folks also believe that rights are an arbitary gift of a culture/society. There is no understanding of rights growing out the nature of human beings and what that nature requires to function well and happily. So to these folks the right to speak and communicate ones ideas and opinions is a mere cultural artifact, and inexplicable gift of society, that one cannot demand if one was so unfortunate as to be born in a society without such. At leeast one cannot demand it as a "right".
Similarly, no one can fight against the absence of rights they consider the norm because rights have no basis and no universality among human beings. So these folks consider seeking to guarantee the rights of others in other culture as "cultural imperialism". To be consistent, if rights are the gifts of society, then the society may take away what it gives.
I can only hope that if we lose some of our rights in the US that some "cultural imperialists" rise to our aid! Rights are derived from the nature of human beings. They are not free arbitrary gifts of the state to be granted or withheld by its whim. Persons who do not have certain inalienable rights are living under some greater or lesser degree of tyranny against their own nature as human beings. Any who wish to help them gain and keep their rights should be applauded rather than being sneered at as "imposing their culture".
The man who has brought us unending war (and got cheered for it!), has pushed through $250 billion boondoggle of a unnecessary embroilment in Iraq, wants to amend the Constitution to ban gays from some normal rights forever, gave a huge tax break to all his buds while driving the deficit out of sight, wants to name American citizens enemy combatants without trial or counsel is not capable of tagging the homeless? Exactly what would he have to do that *would* convince you he is capable of this and much worse?
When it happens it will not be just the homeless though. Beep, BEEP!
Except for a very few jobs in scientific establishments and some types of research departments, most working software engineers are not required to know a lot of science in their working career. Mathematics, at least in some of its forms and in general mathematical aptitude is more useful. But how many of us make use of 2-4 semesters of calculus as programmers? How many of us even get to use our linear algebra? How many of us even get to write frameworks or libraries? There is a growing assumption that frameworks and libraries only come out of standards bodies or big and/or successful companies. If it is "a standard" it is blessed regardless of whether it is worth a damn or not.
The reason the jobs are leaving is that: a) business has no idea what good software is about or how to depdendably produce it; b) neither do almost all computer science departments, foreign and domestic; c) whatever it is can be done or not done as well for less $$$ in the long term; d) no one outside academia and all too few research departments is willing or interested in pushing the envelope; e) bread and butter programming as it has always been done can be done most anywhere.
I am writing this on my recently acquired PowerBook G4. This is the first non-linux running beastie I have owned and loved in many a year. Yeah, I know I could put linux on it. The point is I love this computer as is so much that I have no desire to. For me that is a HUGE statement. This is quite honestly the most fun to work and play with computer I have ever owned. And I have owned and still own a LOT of computers.
So, I have a hard time believing that a company with great products and a really solid (of late anyway) platform needs to keep afloat based mostly on selling tunes and boxes for tunes. My gut is boren out by the large jump in Apple profits reported fairly recently. I don't know what the game is with this article but I am more than a little tired of reading tripe, especially here where we are supposedly getting "Stuff that matters".
I do or have done distributed, persistent middleware with tons of threads, caching, dynamic persistence, multiple-databases, multiple-languages and so on middleware for enterprises or those who wish to sell to them many times in the last couple of decades. It didn't occur to me that most of the same talents are essential to games and various virtual spaces.
How many people that use VOIP that you know don't also have cell phones and/or landlines? I see no reason to believe that if VOIP doesn't have 911 service that users would not have 911 access redundantly. Now if we *finally* get to everything over the same wireless then maybe I might think we have a problem that needs addressing.
If we do need 911 access then why not unbundle the services sufficiently that any all providers connect to it with little/no costs since these are emergency services already covered by some of our tax dollars.
When it comes to the auto-location feature I am not sure any of the nefarious things the State and others can do with knowing precisely where I am most all of the time is worth the small chance that someday I would want them to be able to find me instantly.
Assembly language for one course is great for understanding the low-level aspects of computer software. However, I have employed that level of understanding in my 23 year career less than a dozen times. Only one of those was mission critical. I would much rather see students equipped with VHLL (hint: Java ain't one) than assembler given a choice. A really good survey of languages course and a compiler course is more useful than assembler by far.
The technology itself is quite neutral. It is human beings who will decide to what extent it is used for good or ill. The positive possibilities inherent in nanotechnology are wondrouus indeed - healing all bodily diseases and injuries nearly instantaneously, reversing the degradation of the environment, relatively limitiless energy, ubiquitous highly parallel computation everywhere, replicator technology, manufactured goods of all kinds orders of magnitude more accurate, miniturized and cheap to produce. With full MNT there is no reason we cannot feed, clothe, shelter, educate and maximize the potential of every single human being on earth and more easily leave earth for space. It is a technology more potentially disruptive by far than computerization. It could well end physical scarcity on earth.
Of course the technology can also be used for many negative things. Of course there are also dangers. But the human race would be asleep and given so much by fear that its very survival is doubtful if it did not pursue a technology of such promise. With payoffs like these in the wings there is no way, short of the mass destruction of much of our civilization, that the technology will not be developed somewhere.
Foresight Institute has been studying the promises and pitfalls of nanotechnology for much longer than it has been on the radar screen of more than a handful of people. They have designed many useful guidelines for nanotechnological R & D. We need to exercise due caution but we cannot and must not rob ourselves and our children by letting our fear keep us from a truly wondrous future.
I only tried a Mac (Powerbook) less than a week ago. I used to own one of the early macs in the mid 80s that I loved but I felt frustrated by proprietary cuteness. I find Mac today has even more of the wonderful aesthetic appeal and is *much* more open thanks to the unix basis and the work of many. So I consider it the best of all worlds for my laptop needs. I love Linux and have owned several linux desktops and laptops. But the Powerbook is the first computer that has put a big grin on my face every time I use it in many a year. Guilt? Over happy computing?
Tell it to the Israelis that have oppressed and terrorized the Palestenian people for over half a century! The point being that cherry picking an incident here or there to claim that some people are not people to support horrid actions or attitudes to said non-people is a mug's game leading to nothing but pain.
What do you mean by "foreigners taking their jobs away"? First, it is our company management folks hiring non-domestic people. Those hired are not "taking" they are being offered employment. Second, in what since is it "their jobs"? On what basis are the jobs owned by domestic workers? Being at one time hired in such a capacity does not mean that similar jobs belong to you.
What is actually going on is a function of opening up markets worldwide (globalization), the way the corporate world bottom-line-centered view plays out, that over time fewer and fewer jobs remain to be done by humans, and most of all that there is no plan at all to have all human benefit by advancing technology and abilities regardless of whether they have normal "jobs" or not. The world has changed and will changed further from the contexts where the old formulas, platitudes and practices formed and made sense. Unfortunately we will cling to the old and apply a more and more haphazard set of patches and assignations of blame the worst it gets.
If changing the original (but preserving the purported API) causes potential massive breakage then a re-write is required as there are obviously untoward side-effects involved and/or indecent coupling from other code bodies. The breakage is a clue on what was broken all along. That it worked under some constraints sort of well enough does not mean it was healthy or wise to leave in its original state.
The code being untested is surely no huge obstacle as it is quite able to be well tested. IPV6 will indeed make peer-peer systems more possible than they are today with many users externally inaccessible directly behind limited NATs. But peer-peer ability does not equate to copyright violation and that anyone from MIT would imply that it does is gross political manuevering. Peer-peer abilities mean that the internet is many-many in rather than strongly slanted to few-many. All nodes become potential producers and shares of information and bandwidth. This was the original shape of the internet and its original promise. It is high time we got back to it.
It is not a case of greed amoung tech workers in the US driving their jobs away. The cost of living differential between most parts of the US and say, most parts of India, is HUGE. An Indian worker can afford to work at a salary that is impossible for an American worker to live on, much less maintain competency and a decent lifestyle. There is something really screwy about massive layoffs of the very American techies who create/enabled/sustained much of the technology at the heart of their former companies. These workers get rewarded by not being able to work or contribute further to their fields and not being able to afford the very technology they helped create in the first place. This is a waste of people, of minds and reaping ashes for all the time and energy invested.
So, is the pattern that some bright and dedicated people create new technology, companies form to exploit the technology commercially, the companies find cheaper workers elsewhere to maintain/extend the tecnology thus driving their costs down, the original people all lose their jobs? Somehow, I am not sure exactly how, I think we should be able to come up with a much more sane and livable model than this.
If you signed up for unlimited use of a such and such speed bandwidth then that is precisely what you should get. It is also what the law should upbold. Anything else is a breach of contract on the part of the ISP. Courts look askance at one of the parties to a contract rewriting set contract unilaterally.
What a worthless, long-winded piece of fluff! There isn't a bit of real meat having to do with the purported subject category of "your rights online". I am amazed that such a cool and brilliant nerd wrote such puffery.
By continuing to work for a patently dishonest company you have already elegantly failed on of the above criteria. I would have no problem hiring an ex-SCO person who left in disgust, even now. But those that stay on pushing this fraud to the bitter end deserve bitters ends indeed.
Anyone who has continued with SCO through this chicanery effectively has no morals or at least none that will be acted on. Such people are not people I would want to chat with much less work with or for. There actions are elegant proof they are not trustworthy.
Every country that dares consider itself developed should provide free and ubiquitous wireless "last mile" access throughout its territory. Some day soon any country that wants to remain competitive will. In the US we need to get over the now defunct partitioning of spectrum for huge dollars. Otherwise we will be nickle and dimed into technological oblivion as the big players try to piecemeal recoup their huge spectrum licenising outlays.
If this lineup comes up with a computer language, intermediate or not, that is based on a hiearchical mark-up language for data only then I will probably decide there is no intelligent life on earth. Poor XML has a difficult enough time handling simple data that is non-hierachical. I could just see the stripped down mess an XML rendition of a HL would be.
What I do worry about is being lumped together with other supposed peers who would take seriously a prediction 12 years out in a field as volatile as ours.
You must be kidding. Iraq is the cradle of civilization. It has a long and rich history and many different and complex cultural/religious/ethnic/political strains going. It is not ripe for the uploading of whatever we might wish to see there. It is not ours to mold however we please. Most of all we should not assume that it is in large part pliable and able to be molded.
As much as I would like to see OS spread far and wide comments like the above are VERY presumptious and ugly American.
Slashdot Mirror
Those who believe that rights are arbitrary are usually those who believe that human beings have no particular nature but are in all important ways products of their culture. Generally these folks also believe that rights are an arbitary gift of a culture/society. There is no understanding of rights growing out the nature of human beings and what that nature requires to function well and happily. So to these folks the right to speak and communicate ones ideas and opinions is a mere cultural artifact, and inexplicable gift of society, that one cannot demand if one was so unfortunate as to be born in a society without such. At leeast one cannot demand it as a "right".
Similarly, no one can fight against the absence of rights they consider the norm because rights have no basis and no universality among human beings. So these folks consider seeking to guarantee the rights of others in other culture as "cultural imperialism". To be consistent, if rights are the gifts of society, then the society may take away what it gives.
I can only hope that if we lose some of our rights in the US that some "cultural imperialists" rise to our aid! Rights are derived from the nature of human beings. They are not free arbitrary gifts of the state to be granted or withheld by its whim. Persons who do not have certain inalienable rights are living under some greater or lesser degree of tyranny against their own nature as human beings. Any who wish to help them gain and keep their rights should be applauded rather than being sneered at as "imposing their culture".
The man who has brought us unending war (and got cheered for it!), has pushed through $250 billion boondoggle of a unnecessary embroilment in Iraq, wants to amend the Constitution to ban gays from some normal rights forever, gave a huge tax break to all his buds while driving the deficit out of sight, wants to name American citizens enemy combatants without trial or counsel is not capable of tagging the homeless? Exactly what would he have to do that *would* convince you he is capable of this and much worse?
When it happens it will not be just the homeless though. Beep, BEEP!
Then don't add to the noise by reporting them here. This is supposed to be stuff that matters not random FUD.
Except for a very few jobs in scientific establishments and some types of research departments, most working software engineers are not required to know a lot of science in their working career. Mathematics, at least in some of its forms and in general mathematical aptitude is more useful. But how many of us make use of 2-4 semesters of calculus as programmers? How many of us even get to use our linear algebra? How many of us even get to write frameworks or libraries? There is a growing assumption that frameworks and libraries only come out of standards bodies or big and/or successful companies. If it is "a standard" it is blessed regardless of whether it is worth a damn or not.
The reason the jobs are leaving is that:
a) business has no idea what good software is about or how to depdendably produce it;
b) neither do almost all computer science departments, foreign and domestic;
c) whatever it is can be done or not done as well for less $$$ in the long term;
d) no one outside academia and all too few research departments is willing or interested in pushing the envelope;
e) bread and butter programming as it has always been done can be done most anywhere.
I am writing this on my recently acquired PowerBook G4. This is the first non-linux running beastie I have owned and loved in many a year. Yeah, I know I could put linux on it. The point is I love this computer as is so much that I have no desire to. For me that is a HUGE statement. This is quite honestly the most fun to work and play with computer I have ever owned. And I have owned and still own a LOT of computers.
So, I have a hard time believing that a company with great products and a really solid (of late anyway) platform needs to keep afloat based mostly on selling tunes and boxes for tunes. My gut is boren out by the large jump in Apple profits reported fairly recently. I don't know what the game is with this article but I am more than a little tired of reading tripe, especially here where we are supposedly getting "Stuff that matters".
I do or have done distributed, persistent middleware with tons of threads, caching, dynamic persistence, multiple-databases, multiple-languages and so on middleware for enterprises or those who wish to sell to them many times in the last couple of decades. It didn't occur to me that most of the same talents are essential to games and various virtual spaces.
:-)
Thanks!
How many people that use VOIP that you know don't also have cell phones and/or landlines? I see no reason to believe that if VOIP doesn't have 911 service that users would not have 911 access redundantly. Now if we *finally* get to everything over the same wireless then maybe I might think we have a problem that needs addressing.
If we do need 911 access then why not unbundle the services sufficiently that any all providers connect to it with little/no costs since these are emergency services already covered by some of our tax dollars.
When it comes to the auto-location feature I am not sure any of the nefarious things the State and others can do with knowing precisely where I am most all of the time is worth the small chance that someday I would want them to be able to find me instantly.
hmmm. MAC address? It isn't all that difficult.
Assembly language for one course is great for understanding the low-level aspects of computer software. However, I have employed that level of understanding in my 23 year career less than a dozen times. Only one of those was mission critical. I would much rather see students equipped with VHLL (hint: Java ain't one) than assembler given a choice. A really good survey of languages course and a compiler course is more useful than assembler by far.
The technology itself is quite neutral. It is human beings who will decide to what extent it is used for good or ill. The positive possibilities inherent in nanotechnology are wondrouus indeed - healing all bodily diseases and injuries nearly instantaneously, reversing the degradation of the environment, relatively limitiless energy, ubiquitous highly parallel computation everywhere, replicator technology, manufactured goods of all kinds orders of magnitude more accurate, miniturized and cheap to produce. With full MNT there is no reason we cannot feed, clothe, shelter, educate and maximize the potential of every single human being on earth and more easily leave earth for space. It is a technology more potentially disruptive by far than computerization. It could well end physical scarcity on earth.
Of course the technology can also be used for many negative things. Of course there are also dangers. But the human race would be asleep and given so much by fear that its very survival is doubtful if it did not pursue a technology of such promise. With payoffs like these in the wings there is no way, short of the mass destruction of much of our civilization, that the technology will not be developed somewhere.
Foresight Institute has been studying the promises and pitfalls of nanotechnology for much longer than it has been on the radar screen of more than a handful of people. They have designed many useful guidelines for nanotechnological R & D. We need to exercise due caution but we cannot and must not rob ourselves and our children by letting our fear keep us from a truly wondrous future.
I only tried a Mac (Powerbook) less than a week ago. I used to own one of the early macs in the mid 80s that I loved but I felt frustrated by proprietary cuteness. I find Mac today has even more of the wonderful aesthetic appeal and is *much* more open thanks to the unix basis and the work of many. So I consider it the best of all worlds for my laptop needs. I love Linux and have owned several linux desktops and laptops. But the Powerbook is the first computer that has put a big grin on my face every time I use it in many a year. Guilt? Over happy computing?
Tell it to the Israelis that have oppressed and terrorized the Palestenian people for over half a century! The point being that cherry picking an incident here or there to claim that some people are not people to support horrid actions or attitudes to said non-people is a mug's game leading to nothing but pain.
What do you mean by "foreigners taking their jobs away"? First, it is our company management folks hiring non-domestic people. Those hired are not "taking" they are being offered employment. Second, in what since is it "their jobs"? On what basis are the jobs owned by domestic workers? Being at one time hired in such a capacity does not mean that similar jobs belong to you.
What is actually going on is a function of opening up markets worldwide (globalization), the way the corporate world bottom-line-centered view plays out, that over time fewer and fewer jobs remain to be done by humans, and most of all that there is no plan at all to have all human benefit by advancing technology and abilities regardless of whether they have normal "jobs" or not. The world has changed and will changed further from the contexts where the old formulas, platitudes and practices formed and made sense. Unfortunately we will cling to the old and apply a more and more haphazard set of patches and assignations of blame the worst it gets.
If changing the original (but preserving the purported API) causes potential massive breakage then a re-write is required as there are obviously untoward side-effects involved and/or indecent coupling from other code bodies. The breakage is a clue on what was broken all along. That it worked under some constraints sort of well enough does not mean it was healthy or wise to leave in its original state.
The code being untested is surely no huge obstacle as it is quite able to be well tested. IPV6 will indeed make peer-peer systems more possible than they are today with many users externally inaccessible directly behind limited NATs. But peer-peer ability does not equate to copyright violation and that anyone from MIT would imply that it does is gross political manuevering. Peer-peer abilities mean that the internet is many-many in rather than strongly slanted to few-many. All nodes become potential producers and shares of information and bandwidth. This was the original shape of the internet and its original promise. It is high time we got back to it.
It is not a case of greed amoung tech workers in the US driving their jobs away. The cost of living differential between most parts of the US and say, most parts of India, is HUGE. An Indian worker can afford to work at a salary that is impossible for an American worker to live on, much less maintain competency and a decent lifestyle. There is something really screwy about massive layoffs of the very American techies who create/enabled/sustained much of the technology at the heart of their former companies. These workers get rewarded by not being able to work or contribute further to their fields and not being able to afford the very technology they helped create in the first place. This is a waste of people, of minds and reaping ashes for all the time and energy invested.
So, is the pattern that some bright and dedicated people create new technology, companies form to exploit the technology commercially, the companies find cheaper workers elsewhere to maintain/extend the tecnology thus driving their costs down, the original people all lose their jobs? Somehow, I am not sure exactly how, I think we should be able to come up with a much more sane and livable model than this.
If you signed up for unlimited use of a such and such speed bandwidth then that is precisely what you should get. It is also what the law should upbold. Anything else is a breach of contract on the part of the ISP. Courts look askance at one of the parties to a contract rewriting set contract unilaterally.
What a worthless, long-winded piece of fluff! There isn't a bit of real meat having to do with the purported subject category of "your rights online". I am amazed that such a cool and brilliant nerd wrote such puffery.
By continuing to work for a patently dishonest company you have already elegantly failed on of the above criteria. I would have no problem hiring an ex-SCO person who left in disgust, even now. But those that stay on pushing this fraud to the bitter end deserve bitters ends indeed.
Anyone who has continued with SCO through this chicanery effectively has no morals or at least none that will be acted on. Such people are not people I would want to chat with much less work with or for. There actions are elegant proof they are not trustworthy.
Every country that dares consider itself developed should provide free and ubiquitous wireless "last mile" access throughout its territory. Some day soon any country that wants to remain competitive will. In the US we need to get over the now defunct partitioning of spectrum for huge dollars. Otherwise we will be nickle and dimed into technological oblivion as the big players try to piecemeal recoup their huge spectrum licenising outlays.
Please leave the Orwellian double-speak to MS, the IRS, Homeland [In]Security and the rest of the opposition. It has no place in Open Source.
If this lineup comes up with a computer language, intermediate or not, that is based on a hiearchical mark-up language for data only then I will probably decide there is no intelligent life on earth. Poor XML has a difficult enough time handling simple data that is non-hierachical. I could just see the stripped down mess an XML rendition of a HL would be.
What I do worry about is being lumped together with other supposed peers who would take seriously a prediction 12 years out in a field as volatile as ours.
You must be kidding. Iraq is the cradle of civilization. It has a long and rich history and many different and complex cultural/religious/ethnic/political strains going. It is not ripe for the uploading of whatever we might wish to see there. It is not ours to mold however we please. Most of all we should not assume that it is in large part pliable and able to be molded.
As much as I would like to see OS spread far and wide comments like the above are VERY presumptious and ugly American.