It's not about what you can't buy with BTC. It's about what you can buy. Evidently, there are enough things that people can purchase with BTC that give it value. Whether any of those things are of interest to you, individually, doesn't matter. A Diners Club card isn't accepted everywhere that Mastercrd/VISA is, but it is accepted at enough establishments that people with one find value in it.
Are there even enough BTC exchanges out there to actually convert that much BTC into USD?
If there aren't, and the US government is persistent enough, wouldn't they be able to effectively "lock out" everyone else from getting money out of the system by basically draining the exchanges dry?
Like it or not, BTC is worthless unless you can exchange it for IRL bucks. It's a cute experiment and all, but at the end of the day your average shop keeper has to turn his BTC into something he can pay his rent with. If the US government is somehow able to effectively launch a "DoS" attack against all the exchanges, then what is going to happen to BTC?
What is interesting about this is that depending on what the US does, it can really help or hurt BTC. For instance, in an effort to unload them, the US could heavily discount them, driving down the value of all BTC. OTOH, they could hold firm and demand a high price, therefore inflating the BTC value. Regardless of how they do it, they inadvertently just validated BTC as a legitimate currency.
Seems our Western selfish capitalist system will continue until there are only lawyers and patent trolls left. That'll be the final point of decline.
Some consolation in the expectancy of seeing said patent trolls going down in flames. May they suffer harshly.
More likely the only jobs in the US will be in the industrial/military complex and Homeland Security. They still tend to not want to send those to China and SE Asia.
We had this discussion here lately about how technology changes our working world. OC a lots of BS has been thrown to feed flame-war like technology will replace 100% jobs and other nonsense but I think we have reached the stage of development where we no longer need so many highly educated people at least not in economical and technological sense. This combined with globalization make a difference. I can see this with my friends and family but also in statistics of labour market as well as wealth stratification in society. In the West at least there is a huge pressure to decrease wages and remove burden of huge workforce on companies. There are still some earning well or even more than they used to but this is in my view minority. OC we can always change our skill-set and become all nail painters as so many morons here proposed lately but I warn morons proposing exactly that, not to try to too hard to have their nails polished and painted any day soon after I am replaced by whatever system (automatic or offshored) - they will be sorry to ever have nails in the first place.
Evidently we still need just as many highly educated people in an economical and technological sense. These jobs didn't disappear, like buggy whip makers, they have gone overseas. The demand for the jobs is still there, it's just that corporate America is filling it overseas at a fraction of the cost. I'm pretty sure that if our EEs would work for $10,000/yr like in SE Asia, those jobs would stay.
not requiring becoming an EIT to graduate and eventually a PE to practice. Had they followed law and medicine it would be a lot harder to offshore work, and salaries would be higher due to fewer engineers. In addition, like law or medicine engineering schools would have to be accredited so there would be fewer new graduates which also would dive up salaries. Licensing is not about ensuring quality as much as limiting supply and erecting barriers to entry.
Law schools are struggling with decreasing enrollment because 1/3 of recent law school graduates can't get jobs in the legal profession (according to the WSJ). As for medicine, I'm not sure the skill set that makes a good EE makes a good doctor. Plus, most medical schools are at or near full capacity.
To lose one may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose 35,000 looks like carelessness.
It's not carelessness. It's also not personal. It's just business. I wonder what the US will do once all of the manufacturing jobs and all of the tech jobs go off shore? At least you can't offshore agriculture. Of course, many of those farms are now owned by offshore interests.
So much for STEM. Sure let's push STEM on our students so after expending all of the effort in school to get a degree, they can flip burgers? Why? Because no matter how qualified the graduates are, Asia pays 2/3 less. For a global economy to work, wages need to be standardized. That means raising up wages in poor countries or lowering them in wealthy countries. Big business, whose major shareholders are interested in their bottom line, will go for lower cost every time, thus lowering the standard of living in the US.
Sooner or later GG with prescription glasses will be common. People will claim GG is the only set of glasses they own and they are required to wear glasses while driving. One poster meant Google should use the accelerometer to switch off the glasses, when in a car and driving. This would probably not nice to fellow passengers. I think Google should add a feature, which allows cops the use a NFC or bluetooth device, which can detect, whether GG was active the last five minutes. Should be enough time to determine, whether the driver used GG or not. This way it might even be possible to distinguish between use cases. Using GPS is allowed, emailing, watching TV etc. is not.
That might be something a consumer wants, but probably not google as that would mean their GG is regulated by the FDA. That's not to say that somebody won't do it, but the cost to get a medical device approved is much higher than just a tech device.
Simply put, an economy based on not producing anything is not able to sustain itself in the long run.
See, this is the kind of stupid thing you say here. Imagine an economy that is so efficient, it is able to produce everything it needs with 1% of its workforce. What are the rest of the people going to do? Work in the service sector. That doesn't mean it produces nothing, it means it produces everything needed with little effort. Does that make sense to you, or are you too dense to understand that as well?
I am quite sure that I didn't misunderstand anything from the World Bank reports.
You're a retarded monkey who doesn't know your own blindspots, the places where you lack knowledge. Seriously, get an economics book, you will be glad you did.
I am confused as to how those who no longer need to work because everything is automated are going to have income to pay for the goods and services they get from those who own the resources? What you propose is that hundreds of millions of people (assuming you are referring to the US economy) won't have to work because all production will be automated. Most likely so will all service functions, too? And yet, they will still need to be able to procure food to eat, clothes to wear, energy to consume, etc.
Sure, on paper it sounds like it could work, but I can also prove that 2=1 on paper, if you ignore the fact that I'm dividing by zero in the process. How do you get from now to this utopian society? The reality is that you can't because there are numerous impossibilities along the way, unless the government takes over everything or people suddenly decide to invest capital with no ROI. The probabilities of those thing happen are so non-existent that like dividing by zero, the solution is invalid. In all complete economic models, you have to factor in the people and unless something really big happens, maybe the second coming or an invasion by alien forces, you can't get there from here, at least on a macro level (coops and communes work great on the small scale).
Very good point. Pure oxygen becomes toxic below 6 meters.
Also, looking at TFA and following the links, this looks like premium-class bullshit. No actual science, no pictures of the proposed device (just 3D renderings), this is just science-fiction.
While I don't know if the device exists, we've been researching similar techniques since the 60s to help cystic fibrosis patients. The major obstacle I would see is not can the dissolved oxygen in the water be extracted, we already know it can, but can it be extracted fast enough and in enough quantity to enable a person to use it in lieu of a scuba tank?
So if it actually separates the oxygen what about the hydrogen? That's fuel.
If this is real it's more than just a breathing device, it's a low cost way to separate water into 2 Hydrogen atoms and 1 Oxygen atom. That is a much more significant breakthrough... then again that's a big IF.
Evidence please.
It is separating the dissolved oxygen in the water, not splitting the water molecules, itself.
I am quite sure that I didn't misunderstand anything from the World Bank reports. I only simplified the lengthy examples given in the report. They aren't the only groups stating this, btw. Nor do they single out the US economy, other than to describe it's base. Simply put, an economy based on not producing anything is not able to sustain itself in the long run. It will need transform into something else. I'm not sure why that is so hard to understand, but it is obvious that this conversation is going nowhere, so have a good day.
Scientist always thought that choices made by animals could be modeled using simple algorithms such as if A is preferred over B and B is preferred over C, then if A and C is offered the animal would choose A. When the animal being observed didn't choose A they declared a transitivity violation. What they have discovered is that there model was flawed and what goes into making one choice better than another is more involved than first thought. As such, there is not transitivity violation and the animals still always make the best choice for the given circumstance.
lol what you have there is an idea of economics based on ideology, not science. Seriously, get yourself an economics book. You're babbling as if you were on Fox News or something.
As I said, it was oversimplified because volumes and volumes have been written about it. It is, however all based on the data released from the World Bank reports, so if you have a problem with it, take it up with their economists. As for Faux News, I'm pretty sure they would not be arguing against the current consumption model. It tends to benefit those at the top, which is, after all, their demographic.
That's according to the constitution. Obama doesn't let that stand in his way. He's got a pen and executive orders.
Executive Orders is not an Obama thing. They've been around for ages. So far, Obama has issued 165 EOs, George W. Bush issued 290 EOS, Clinton issued 365 EOs, George Bush 165 EOs and Ronald Regan 380 EOs. To date, for all presidents, there have bee 13,654 EOs issued. Obama is responsible for just 1.2% of them.
Center for Market Labor Studies, Northeastern University. The amounts vary by year, so the 35% figure was just an average of the rates for the last three years reported. The information from the study was also reported by the major US news outlets.
The Free Dictionary defines a freeloader as "a person who habitually depends on the charity of others for food, shelter, etc." While there are many users of open source software, are they actually freeloaders? Do they actually depend on the charity of the developers? The definition implies that the freeloader gets something for nothing. But, if you submit bug reports, are you still a freeloader? If you participate in online forums, are you still a freeloader? If you promote the software in question to others, are you still a freeloader?
Put differently, just because open source software can very often be had without monetary cost, doesn't being an active member of the community count for something? Surely we aren't saying that everybody who isn't an actual developer is a freeloader?
When one checks a book out from the public library, they are a called a patron, not a freeloader. Maybe we should call those who support open source projects the same thing.
Not usually. A lot of open source (licensed as BSD or variations thereof) is about creating software that will get used EVERYWHERE, and discouraging competing projects that do the same task. The devs don't want more devs involved (if they did they should be using the GPL instead), what they want is to make it so that their software is basically the one and only correct way to do something, ie their vision is it. So they give their code away without any requirement to give back from anybody, or any requirement to improve it, etc. The reasoning is basically that if it's available and anybody can take it and rebrand it and sell it etc, then companies will do the math and won't build their own. So the BSD software "wins".
It doesn't actually happen that way. The original project or code isn't used everywhere, just parts of it. It's not the BSD software that wins, it is the product that it is used in that wins. Apple's OS X is a prime example of this. FreeBSD and NetBSD didn't discourage competing projects by letting Apple use it, nor is everybody using the *BSDs (most OS X users don't even know about or care about the roots of their OS). Likewise, Linux being based on GPL doesn't seem to hamper Android being used everywhere.
In the end, there are many reasons why somebody might release under a particular type of license. Global domination, probably isn't the driving factor, though.
According to the World Bank, neither a consumption based economic system or a service based economic system are sustainable for the long run as they will both create trade deficits, force a devaluing of currency and ultimately lower the standard of living in that country.
OK, so what if it's a service based economy that doesn't have a trade deficit? That is possible, you know. Also, you still should read a basic book about economics.
A service based economy will always have a trade deficit because by definition, production is not the major component of the economy and goods have to come from somewhere. The only way for such an economy to function in the long term, without a deficity is with direct government intervention to control both the production and consumption of the goods that are being produced. Even then, the probability of it being sustainable is unlikely because there are outside factors that the government can't control such as weather and geo-political climate.
Think of a recession, the accepted way out of one is to increase spending, not because it improves retail, but because it stimulates manufacturing which leads to more jobs and more goods and services being required. There is a multiplier effect. However, if an economy isn't manufacturing based, it doesn't help. The wealth created by the increased spending leaves the economy and goes to other countries. As stated previously, increased spending on just services doesn't increase wealth - it does for the person performing the service, but decreases it for the one needing the service and they net out. There is no multiplier effect.
Service based economies are always pushed in third world and developing countries, not because they are sustainable, but because the cost of entry is extremely low. However, even there, there is no new wealth being created. That comes from the influx of funds from the World Bank or other countries. Since that influx is not going to continue indefinitely, the economy in question, once individual wealth has increased to the point where this is possible, will need to start to shift to a manufacturing based economy. It is the only way to sustain it. That doesn't mean it has to be 100% manufacturing based, that has it's own set of problems. The goal, however, is to be a mixed economy with both manufacturing and service fairly balanced (or slightly favoring manufacturing).
With regards to the US economy, manufacturing is relatively low and consumption industries are the major piece of the pie. The rise of Walmart is a good example of what happens in a consumption economy. Retail jobs, by their very nature, tend to be low wages. As more jobs shift to that market, living standards drop, requiring prices to drop to maintain sales. However, companies need to also maintain profits and to accomplish that, manufacturing jobs go offshore where there are even lower wages, thus pushing the economy further away from sustainability.
Initially, the shareholders benefit, but only for a short time. With decreased living standards, tax bases are eroded and ultimately taxes need to increase. This is the argument in the US right now. Because of shifts in the economy, even post recovery, wages are low, unemployment is high and there is increased need for government assistance. Who is going to pay for that? Only those at the top, who probably don't like that too much.
So we are told that people need to go out and work, but where? We have shifted away from manufacturing, and while it still exists, it can't supply enough jobs. People could start their own business, but even in good times most fail and besides, where are they going to get the capital to do that, they are unemployed, after all.
All of the above is very much oversimplified, but in a nutshell, when an economy is based on consumption, particularly of consumption of goods produced elsewhere, it is inevitable that the economy will not be sustainable. Likewise if it is based on service,
In a world where nobody works, nobody gets paid. In a world that nobody gets paid, people go hungry.
Neither of those conclusions are obvious, given the premise of the perfect robot labour force.
The likelihood of the perfect robot labor force is a mathematical impossibility. Real world problems require real world solutions, not theoretical ones.
Maybe there;'s a distinction to be made between the "website" devs and the "professional" devs in the type of systems they develop. I think its a shame the "website" style where everything is placed in the web server (bad security choice that) should be designed with 3 tiers from the start, and for these types of system, a C++ based service layer is not any more difficult than any other language to develop for..NET, its easy to develop for, which is why everyone seems to be using it. Its not nice when it goes wrong (like the bug I struggle with today - reading event log entries returns null on my colleague's box, for no F*** good reason.. damn you Microsoft) but even Microsoft knows its their RAD tool, not the one that should be used for performance or resource efficient systems. To put it another way,.NET is the new Visual Basic - where VB used to be used,.NET fills that gap. The trouble is, it also attempts to fill every other gap (but I guess VB devs back in the day used to do that anyway)
Java.. no need for that anywhere IMHO:-)
With regards to.Net, it provides a very good IDE, but overall, it occupies the same use case as Java, at least C# does. C# does do many things better than Java, but if one has to maintain legacy code or is involved with non-Windows platforms,.Net isn't an answer. Ultimately, I think that was Microsoft's purpose of.Net, not to build a better Java, but to lock people in to their products.
With Java or C/C++ or just about any other language, it is platform neutral (that doesn't mean what one develops is cross-platform, though). I can run those on anything from a pc to a cluster to a mainframe. That is not the case, at least not out of the box, with.Net applications. They are microsoft-centric.
Java is still really useful if your middle tier isn't on a Microsoft platform. Java is like COBOL. Everybody wants it to die, but there is a lot of legacy code out there that needs to be maintained and it will be around for a very long time.
35% of IT related graduates over the past three years have failed to find gainful employment in their field. It would seem difficult for a company to justify H1-B employees given that. The only logical conclusion is that H1-B visas are being used for some other purpose than a shortage of skilled workers. I would posit, as many others have, it is to keep costs low to maximize shareholder value.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not about what you can't buy with BTC. It's about what you can buy. Evidently, there are enough things that people can purchase with BTC that give it value. Whether any of those things are of interest to you, individually, doesn't matter. A Diners Club card isn't accepted everywhere that Mastercrd/VISA is, but it is accepted at enough establishments that people with one find value in it.
Are there even enough BTC exchanges out there to actually convert that much BTC into USD?
If there aren't, and the US government is persistent enough, wouldn't they be able to effectively "lock out" everyone else from getting money out of the system by basically draining the exchanges dry?
Like it or not, BTC is worthless unless you can exchange it for IRL bucks. It's a cute experiment and all, but at the end of the day your average shop keeper has to turn his BTC into something he can pay his rent with. If the US government is somehow able to effectively launch a "DoS" attack against all the exchanges, then what is going to happen to BTC?
What is interesting about this is that depending on what the US does, it can really help or hurt BTC. For instance, in an effort to unload them, the US could heavily discount them, driving down the value of all BTC. OTOH, they could hold firm and demand a high price, therefore inflating the BTC value. Regardless of how they do it, they inadvertently just validated BTC as a legitimate currency.
Seems our Western selfish capitalist system will continue until there are only lawyers and patent trolls left. That'll be the final point of decline.
Some consolation in the expectancy of seeing said patent trolls going down in flames. May they suffer harshly.
More likely the only jobs in the US will be in the industrial/military complex and Homeland Security. They still tend to not want to send those to China and SE Asia.
We had this discussion here lately about how technology changes our working world. OC a lots of BS has been thrown to feed flame-war like technology will replace 100% jobs and other nonsense but I think we have reached the stage of development where we no longer need so many highly educated people at least not in economical and technological sense. This combined with globalization make a difference. I can see this with my friends and family but also in statistics of labour market as well as wealth stratification in society. In the West at least there is a huge pressure to decrease wages and remove burden of huge workforce on companies. There are still some earning well or even more than they used to but this is in my view minority. OC we can always change our skill-set and become all nail painters as so many morons here proposed lately but I warn morons proposing exactly that, not to try to too hard to have their nails polished and painted any day soon after I am replaced by whatever system (automatic or offshored) - they will be sorry to ever have nails in the first place.
Evidently we still need just as many highly educated people in an economical and technological sense. These jobs didn't disappear, like buggy whip makers, they have gone overseas. The demand for the jobs is still there, it's just that corporate America is filling it overseas at a fraction of the cost. I'm pretty sure that if our EEs would work for $10,000/yr like in SE Asia, those jobs would stay.
not requiring becoming an EIT to graduate and eventually a PE to practice. Had they followed law and medicine it would be a lot harder to offshore work, and salaries would be higher due to fewer engineers. In addition, like law or medicine engineering schools would have to be accredited so there would be fewer new graduates which also would dive up salaries. Licensing is not about ensuring quality as much as limiting supply and erecting barriers to entry.
Law schools are struggling with decreasing enrollment because 1/3 of recent law school graduates can't get jobs in the legal profession (according to the WSJ). As for medicine, I'm not sure the skill set that makes a good EE makes a good doctor. Plus, most medical schools are at or near full capacity.
To lose one may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose 35,000 looks like carelessness.
It's not carelessness. It's also not personal. It's just business. I wonder what the US will do once all of the manufacturing jobs and all of the tech jobs go off shore? At least you can't offshore agriculture. Of course, many of those farms are now owned by offshore interests.
So much for STEM. Sure let's push STEM on our students so after expending all of the effort in school to get a degree, they can flip burgers? Why? Because no matter how qualified the graduates are, Asia pays 2/3 less. For a global economy to work, wages need to be standardized. That means raising up wages in poor countries or lowering them in wealthy countries. Big business, whose major shareholders are interested in their bottom line, will go for lower cost every time, thus lowering the standard of living in the US.
...since there were no proof that the device were in function.
Of course, the law in CA does not require that the device be on or functioning, but maybe the judge skipped that part.
Sooner or later GG with prescription glasses will be common. People will claim GG is the only set of glasses they own and they are required to wear glasses while driving. One poster meant Google should use the accelerometer to switch off the glasses, when in a car and driving. This would probably not nice to fellow passengers. I think Google should add a feature, which allows cops the use a NFC or bluetooth device, which can detect, whether GG was active the last five minutes. Should be enough time to determine, whether the driver used GG or not. This way it might even be possible to distinguish between use cases. Using GPS is allowed, emailing, watching TV etc. is not.
That might be something a consumer wants, but probably not google as that would mean their GG is regulated by the FDA. That's not to say that somebody won't do it, but the cost to get a medical device approved is much higher than just a tech device.
...ride a bike.
Isn't it illegal to secretly infiltrate a computer system and remove legal software from it?
Simply put, an economy based on not producing anything is not able to sustain itself in the long run.
See, this is the kind of stupid thing you say here. Imagine an economy that is so efficient, it is able to produce everything it needs with 1% of its workforce. What are the rest of the people going to do? Work in the service sector. That doesn't mean it produces nothing, it means it produces everything needed with little effort. Does that make sense to you, or are you too dense to understand that as well?
I am quite sure that I didn't misunderstand anything from the World Bank reports.
You're a retarded monkey who doesn't know your own blindspots, the places where you lack knowledge. Seriously, get an economics book, you will be glad you did.
I am confused as to how those who no longer need to work because everything is automated are going to have income to pay for the goods and services they get from those who own the resources? What you propose is that hundreds of millions of people (assuming you are referring to the US economy) won't have to work because all production will be automated. Most likely so will all service functions, too? And yet, they will still need to be able to procure food to eat, clothes to wear, energy to consume, etc.
Sure, on paper it sounds like it could work, but I can also prove that 2=1 on paper, if you ignore the fact that I'm dividing by zero in the process. How do you get from now to this utopian society? The reality is that you can't because there are numerous impossibilities along the way, unless the government takes over everything or people suddenly decide to invest capital with no ROI. The probabilities of those thing happen are so non-existent that like dividing by zero, the solution is invalid. In all complete economic models, you have to factor in the people and unless something really big happens, maybe the second coming or an invasion by alien forces, you can't get there from here, at least on a macro level (coops and communes work great on the small scale).
Very good point. Pure oxygen becomes toxic below 6 meters.
Also, looking at TFA and following the links, this looks like premium-class bullshit. No actual science, no pictures of the proposed device (just 3D renderings), this is just science-fiction.
While I don't know if the device exists, we've been researching similar techniques since the 60s to help cystic fibrosis patients. The major obstacle I would see is not can the dissolved oxygen in the water be extracted, we already know it can, but can it be extracted fast enough and in enough quantity to enable a person to use it in lieu of a scuba tank?
Too good to be true.
So if it actually separates the oxygen what about the hydrogen? That's fuel.
If this is real it's more than just a breathing device, it's a low cost way to separate water into 2 Hydrogen atoms and 1 Oxygen atom. That is a much more significant breakthrough... then again that's a big IF.
Evidence please.
It is separating the dissolved oxygen in the water, not splitting the water molecules, itself.
I am quite sure that I didn't misunderstand anything from the World Bank reports. I only simplified the lengthy examples given in the report. They aren't the only groups stating this, btw. Nor do they single out the US economy, other than to describe it's base. Simply put, an economy based on not producing anything is not able to sustain itself in the long run. It will need transform into something else. I'm not sure why that is so hard to understand, but it is obvious that this conversation is going nowhere, so have a good day.
Scientist always thought that choices made by animals could be modeled using simple algorithms such as if A is preferred over B and B is preferred over C, then if A and C is offered the animal would choose A. When the animal being observed didn't choose A they declared a transitivity violation. What they have discovered is that there model was flawed and what goes into making one choice better than another is more involved than first thought. As such, there is not transitivity violation and the animals still always make the best choice for the given circumstance.
lol what you have there is an idea of economics based on ideology, not science. Seriously, get yourself an economics book. You're babbling as if you were on Fox News or something.
As I said, it was oversimplified because volumes and volumes have been written about it. It is, however all based on the data released from the World Bank reports, so if you have a problem with it, take it up with their economists. As for Faux News, I'm pretty sure they would not be arguing against the current consumption model. It tends to benefit those at the top, which is, after all, their demographic.
That's according to the constitution. Obama doesn't let that stand in his way. He's got a pen and executive orders.
Executive Orders is not an Obama thing. They've been around for ages. So far, Obama has issued 165 EOs, George W. Bush issued 290 EOS, Clinton issued 365 EOs, George Bush 165 EOs and Ronald Regan 380 EOs. To date, for all presidents, there have bee 13,654 EOs issued. Obama is responsible for just 1.2% of them.
Citation here?
Center for Market Labor Studies, Northeastern University. The amounts vary by year, so the 35% figure was just an average of the rates for the last three years reported. The information from the study was also reported by the major US news outlets.
The Free Dictionary defines a freeloader as "a person who habitually depends on the charity of others for food, shelter, etc." While there are many users of open source software, are they actually freeloaders? Do they actually depend on the charity of the developers? The definition implies that the freeloader gets something for nothing. But, if you submit bug reports, are you still a freeloader? If you participate in online forums, are you still a freeloader? If you promote the software in question to others, are you still a freeloader?
Put differently, just because open source software can very often be had without monetary cost, doesn't being an active member of the community count for something? Surely we aren't saying that everybody who isn't an actual developer is a freeloader?
When one checks a book out from the public library, they are a called a patron, not a freeloader. Maybe we should call those who support open source projects the same thing.
Not usually. A lot of open source (licensed as BSD or variations thereof) is about creating software that will get used EVERYWHERE, and discouraging competing projects that do the same task. The devs don't want more devs involved (if they did they should be using the GPL instead), what they want is to make it so that their software is basically the one and only correct way to do something, ie their vision is it. So they give their code away without any requirement to give back from anybody, or any requirement to improve it, etc. The reasoning is basically that if it's available and anybody can take it and rebrand it and sell it etc, then companies will do the math and won't build their own. So the BSD software "wins".
It doesn't actually happen that way. The original project or code isn't used everywhere, just parts of it. It's not the BSD software that wins, it is the product that it is used in that wins. Apple's OS X is a prime example of this. FreeBSD and NetBSD didn't discourage competing projects by letting Apple use it, nor is everybody using the *BSDs (most OS X users don't even know about or care about the roots of their OS). Likewise, Linux being based on GPL doesn't seem to hamper Android being used everywhere.
In the end, there are many reasons why somebody might release under a particular type of license. Global domination, probably isn't the driving factor, though.
According to the World Bank, neither a consumption based economic system or a service based economic system are sustainable for the long run as they will both create trade deficits, force a devaluing of currency and ultimately lower the standard of living in that country.
OK, so what if it's a service based economy that doesn't have a trade deficit? That is possible, you know. Also, you still should read a basic book about economics.
A service based economy will always have a trade deficit because by definition, production is not the major component of the economy and goods have to come from somewhere. The only way for such an economy to function in the long term, without a deficity is with direct government intervention to control both the production and consumption of the goods that are being produced. Even then, the probability of it being sustainable is unlikely because there are outside factors that the government can't control such as weather and geo-political climate.
Think of a recession, the accepted way out of one is to increase spending, not because it improves retail, but because it stimulates manufacturing which leads to more jobs and more goods and services being required. There is a multiplier effect. However, if an economy isn't manufacturing based, it doesn't help. The wealth created by the increased spending leaves the economy and goes to other countries. As stated previously, increased spending on just services doesn't increase wealth - it does for the person performing the service, but decreases it for the one needing the service and they net out. There is no multiplier effect.
Service based economies are always pushed in third world and developing countries, not because they are sustainable, but because the cost of entry is extremely low. However, even there, there is no new wealth being created. That comes from the influx of funds from the World Bank or other countries. Since that influx is not going to continue indefinitely, the economy in question, once individual wealth has increased to the point where this is possible, will need to start to shift to a manufacturing based economy. It is the only way to sustain it. That doesn't mean it has to be 100% manufacturing based, that has it's own set of problems. The goal, however, is to be a mixed economy with both manufacturing and service fairly balanced (or slightly favoring manufacturing).
With regards to the US economy, manufacturing is relatively low and consumption industries are the major piece of the pie. The rise of Walmart is a good example of what happens in a consumption economy. Retail jobs, by their very nature, tend to be low wages. As more jobs shift to that market, living standards drop, requiring prices to drop to maintain sales. However, companies need to also maintain profits and to accomplish that, manufacturing jobs go offshore where there are even lower wages, thus pushing the economy further away from sustainability.
Initially, the shareholders benefit, but only for a short time. With decreased living standards, tax bases are eroded and ultimately taxes need to increase. This is the argument in the US right now. Because of shifts in the economy, even post recovery, wages are low, unemployment is high and there is increased need for government assistance. Who is going to pay for that? Only those at the top, who probably don't like that too much.
So we are told that people need to go out and work, but where? We have shifted away from manufacturing, and while it still exists, it can't supply enough jobs. People could start their own business, but even in good times most fail and besides, where are they going to get the capital to do that, they are unemployed, after all.
All of the above is very much oversimplified, but in a nutshell, when an economy is based on consumption, particularly of consumption of goods produced elsewhere, it is inevitable that the economy will not be sustainable. Likewise if it is based on service,
In a world where nobody works, nobody gets paid. In a world that nobody gets paid, people go hungry.
Neither of those conclusions are obvious, given the premise of the perfect robot labour force.
The likelihood of the perfect robot labor force is a mathematical impossibility. Real world problems require real world solutions, not theoretical ones.
Maybe there;'s a distinction to be made between the "website" devs and the "professional" devs in the type of systems they develop. I think its a shame the "website" style where everything is placed in the web server (bad security choice that) should be designed with 3 tiers from the start, and for these types of system, a C++ based service layer is not any more difficult than any other language to develop for. .NET, its easy to develop for, which is why everyone seems to be using it. Its not nice when it goes wrong (like the bug I struggle with today - reading event log entries returns null on my colleague's box, for no F*** good reason.. damn you Microsoft) but even Microsoft knows its their RAD tool, not the one that should be used for performance or resource efficient systems. To put it another way, .NET is the new Visual Basic - where VB used to be used, .NET fills that gap. The trouble is, it also attempts to fill every other gap (but I guess VB devs back in the day used to do that anyway)
Java.. no need for that anywhere IMHO :-)
With regards to .Net, it provides a very good IDE, but overall, it occupies the same use case as Java, at least C# does. C# does do many things better than Java, but if one has to maintain legacy code or is involved with non-Windows platforms, .Net isn't an answer. Ultimately, I think that was Microsoft's purpose of .Net, not to build a better Java, but to lock people in to their products.
With Java or C/C++ or just about any other language, it is platform neutral (that doesn't mean what one develops is cross-platform, though). I can run those on anything from a pc to a cluster to a mainframe. That is not the case, at least not out of the box, with .Net applications. They are microsoft-centric.
Java is still really useful if your middle tier isn't on a Microsoft platform. Java is like COBOL. Everybody wants it to die, but there is a lot of legacy code out there that needs to be maintained and it will be around for a very long time.
35% of IT related graduates over the past three years have failed to find gainful employment in their field. It would seem difficult for a company to justify H1-B employees given that. The only logical conclusion is that H1-B visas are being used for some other purpose than a shortage of skilled workers. I would posit, as many others have, it is to keep costs low to maximize shareholder value.