You know, this quote could have come straight from Yes Minister..
In fact, it did. At least a version thereof:
Bernard: May I just clarify the question? You are asking who would know what it is that I don't know and you don't know, but the Foreign Office know that they know, that they are keeping from you so that you don't know but they do know, and all we know is that there is something we don't know but we want to know but we don't know what because we don't know. Is that it?
You know, I love that show.. better than a poli-sci degree..
Enjoy your car, why not buy another which burns even more petrol? Theese are the last years of cheap oil.
> I remember when I was first told that. 1976, I > think it was. I recall they taught us in school > that it'd all be gone by 2000.
> My father laughed about hearing it last in > the '50s, when gas prices (adjusted for > inflation) were higher than they are now.
they laughed at Mr. Hubbert too, when he said that the production of oil would peak in the US in 1970..
they aren't laughing now...
oh, and btw, production of oil became supply - not demand - driven in 1999. And the world's total production of oil plateau'd in 2000. And china's demand for the stuff has grown by 8% a year.
we'll see how long it takes oil to reach $100 a barrel..
> And as for it being "too damned expensive," > it's funny that you mention that. The argument > of the majority of the eco-doomsayers that I > know is that oil will run out, and we'll have > no viable solutions in place. My
nuclear..
> Right now, hydrocarbon fuels are insanely > cheap -- cheaper than electricity generated by > any other fasion.
Actually, that's not quite true. The operating costs of a nuclear power plant are roughly equal to those of a large coal-burning plant. And nuclear power is still in its infancy.
Anybody who says that nuclear is unsafe, expensive, etc. is IMO like those people in the 1960's who said 'well computers are expensive. And big.'. By its very nature, we have quite a ways to go in making nuclear plants more efficient and safer - the energy density is 10 million times that of coal. We've got quite a few multiples to go before we reach the optimal 'lowest cost reactor'.
Coal on the other hand, is pretty much dead as far as R&D benefits are concerned.
"Also, the US has been, for a while, importing raw materials it could get at home. If the need arises, the US can plunder many reserved areas for resources. The US has an enormous amount of national parks which likely have useful minerals in them, but the US government prevents them from being accessed. In a case of necessity, we could rape our own country instead of the rest of the world."
not *entirely* accurate.
Ever heard of Hubbert's peak? Hubbert's main point was that at a certain point, when a resource is depleted, no matter what number of pumping/mining stations are put in place the rate of production will reach the point of diminishing returns and fall.
Its happening to oil, it'll happen to coal soon, and it'll happen to natural gas. Our only real hope is conservation combined with renewables and nuclear to power the recycling of waste into oil.
As for the 'using national parks' and 'raping our country to support us', well, no again. The square mileage of the US is approximately 3.5 million square miles. Of that, approximately 125 thousand miles are protected.
Don't worry, its a common trap to fall into. One of the great things about math - even simple math like division and multiplication - is that it gives people a sense of scale. What you suggest would cause untold environmental and aesthetic damage for minimal benefit.
In fact, Politicians should be issued calculators and be required to pass a math test before taking office. You'd think that having 3 kg of uranium powering a city for a year instead of millions and millions of tons of coal would be an eye opener for them - but then again, on paper it only looks like 7 extra zeros..;-)
> As for the Mars theory of life existing in > frozen climates, the funny thing is when the > fiery residents of the Sun, laugh and realize > we puny humans can exist on the frozen climate > of Earth! Their probes will be made of molton > sunspots that will sadly destroy much of our > ecosystem in efforts to understand it, or at > least that is the premise of a sci-fi book I > may write in the near future. My point is that > life is all a matter of perspective, not that I > truly believe there is life on the Sun > (although there must be).
too late... arthur c clarke wrote a short story like this in the past. In fact, he used almost the same plot point (forget the title though, will look it up).
ok, fine.. an obligatory KITH quote comes to mind:
"No, I don't think I should. I don't think I should question the leadership of our Great Leader"
"Oh, come on! I mean, we've been coming here for 50 years and performing anal probes and all that we have learned is that 1 in 10 doesn't really seem to mind."
"oh really? and you have a better plan in mind than our great leader?"
"yes. yes I do. My plan is to have no plan. That we don't travel 250,000 light years, we don't come here. And the best part is that we don't do any anal probes."
> I'm sure there are problems that a real package > maintainer would spot right away, but I think > this system is probably feasible to roll into a > full package management system. And, no, I > haven't tried all 1273 linux distros out there, > so somebody may actually be doing this already. > I'd love to hear about it.
> Damn -- I hope somebody thinks this is a cool > idea.:)
yeah, I built something like what you describe. Got a packaging management system that builds from code and does exactly what you mention. Works for solaris, os390, linux, aix, win32 (via cygwin) and builds into multiple prefixes that can be switched at will.
Programmable ( you define a build process via a subroutine that matches the project file name) handles patch management, version management, user configuration files (which are source controlled), package creation, user tweaks and interactive input, 'manual' editing of projects (just in case configure breaks down when creating Makefiles) and so forth.)
I'll release it someday; unfortunately right now its (loosely) tangled around some proprietary stuff, but I'll untangle it.
Oh yeah, its written in perl.. (of course). what's this newfangled ruby/python thing I'm hearing about nowadays?;-)
horos
(ps - forget about debian and gentoo doing this... in fact, I integrated debian into my process because the packages have lots of assumptions; man in/usr/local/man, etc)
in fact, its generally hell to do this. source control projects are not that careful with making their projects 'path independent'; they tend to hard code things, or have dependencies buried in config files. Sometimes I need to have my process 'hand' edit files that make generates as part of an intermediate step, sometimes autoconf gets things wrong, etc. etc. So its not a small task. For the time being you are better off doing what you do already. )
> Forget tomorrow; tomorrow is already a disaster. Think of your children and think of your grandchildren.... which is exactly why you don't want to vote green.
The green party is - if anything - against nuclear power more than the two frontrunners, and its going to take a hell of a lot of nuclear power to get us over the hubbert's peak that's coming up in a few years for oil supplies.
And before you say solar, just let me remind you that actually making solar/geothermal/what-have-you energy sources viable takes *far* more energy per unit than the established sources, especially nuclear, and if we don't do something soon in either supplementing or replacing our current energy infrastructure, we are going to run into a depression, my friend.
> I'm pretty sure he's on the record as a > supporter of Pol Pot in Cambodia, too.
yeah right. christ guys, back up your opinions with *citations*. As an example, here's one from chomsky himeslf, from "Genocide; the United States and Pol Pot"
Pol Pot was obviously a major mass murderer, but it's not clear that Pol Pot killed very many more people -- or even more people -- than the United States killed in Cambodia in the first half of the 1970s. We only talk about "genocide" when other people do the killing. [The U.S. bombed and invaded Cambodia beginning in 1969, and supported anti-Parliamentary right-wing forces in a civil war there which lasted until 1975; Pol Pot ruled the country between 1975 and '78.]
So unless you think that chomsky is praising pol pot for being a mass murderer, I'd take your head out of your ass if I was you.
I tend to turn my regular expressions into variables, ie:
my $doublestring = q$(?>\"(?>[^\\\"]+|\\\.)*\")$;
which is the only real way there is to make more complicated regular expressions, anyways. Oh yeah, and then test the hell out of them. The drawback is that you need to escape certain characters if you put them in doublequotes (to use regular expressions inside of larger regular expressions) but then again that's what quotemeta is for. Hence my regex look like
$perlcode =~ m"sub\s*$function\s*$brackets"sg;
Of course the above is one of the big reasons for perl6 - it just formalizes the building of larger regex via named rules. and gets rid of the annoyingly large number of \s* by making ' ' become a synonym for '\s*'.
> To all the people who are busy vaulting onto > their high horse, ready to scold the Slashdot > community for our apparent complicity in this, > don't bother. I get so sick of the holier-than- > thou attitudes that people cop when the "Linux > community" does something to "make Linux look > bad".
It isn't a matter of being on a high horse (although things like this piss me off to no end) its a matter of being *pragmatic*.
Suppose this causes some clueless judge to equate open source with terrorism or convices congress members that there *should* be restrictions on how people develop and share code and an extra provision in the DMCA shows up to deal with open source.
Are you going to be happy then? Things like this kick open source right in the nuts, give SCO ammo and just generally make me in awe of how damn stupid people can be.
Like it or not, you are making a public stance if you post on slashdot. If you chime in about how 'worthwhile' the virus is, etc. etc, you basically sympathize with the virus writer and basically tar *my* reputation by association
Well fuck you. The person who wrote this thing can go to hell, and all of you who are implicit in supporting this can follow shortly after. Even *if* it was a script kiddie who did this first, it doesn't matter if people support it after the fact. If you want to damage your own livelihood, do so on your own time. Don't damage mine. Idiots.
> First, the article uses references to Moore's > Law as though that's an accurate guage of how > quickly we should expect bio technology to > advance based on the comparison to advances in > computer technology.
> That premise is inherently flawed. Moore's Law > was applicable as an *observation* of the rate > at which computing technology advanced... not a > rule governing it. I don't think its > application is valid for other technologies.
and your point is...? If you had read the article, you would have seen that they graphed the number of nucleotides sequences, as seen over the *past 30 years*.
Seems like it is 'applicable as an *observation* of the rate at which biotech advanced'....
"The bad economic effects that you mentioned will be short-term effects. But that short-term "pain" is guaranteed to translate into long-term benefits. The benefit will be the permenent elimination of an inefficient and wasteful selling method."
But that's the point - telemarketing is by far the *most* successful selling method out there. That's why people do it!
Consumers don't have to go any place, the sales pitch lasts a few seconds, no store front (and hence no shop front) is necessary to sell a product and hence no overhead in starting new, riskier businesses.. etc. etc.
As for humans being infinitely malleable, that's so self-serving that I don't know where to begin. "Every one being better off" . What the hell are these people going to do? Meter maid? There are 4 million people - 4 million people - doing these jobs, and when telemarketing goes, their age and skillset does not license itself to easy retraining..
Worst of all, no studies have been done at either the Federal or the state level as to the impact of all of this. Something that one *might* consider doing before one puts 2 million people out on the street.
Overall, it goes along with the shift in IT - which I could buy more along the lines of an efficiency argument - there are only so many things a man/woman can do, and after these are outsourced or gone, the consuming side of capitalism goes out-of-konk.
In order for capitalism to work, each citizen has to be a good producer, and a good consumer. We are rapidly reaching the point where we can outsource *so* many jobs that americans will no longer be able to be good *consumers*. When this happens, watch out. A similar thing happened in the 1930's - with it depression, starvation, massive unemployment.
So. hmm. After the 1930's were we better off? Maybe - but that's small consolation to the millions upon millions of displaced citizens, the people who committed suicide, the 20% unemployment rate, and so on..
You really don't want to bend an economy too fast. It may just break.
I hate to say it, but this law is probably going to cause one hell of a recession. But America asked for it..
Figure, when the 50 million americans are gone from this list, and the telemarketers call the other 50 million who then don't like to be called twice a day, they will run to the registry.
And as the registry grows, the number of remaining people will shrink, and shrink fast. Soon, there will be no telemarketing industry left.
And when there is no telemarketing industry, 2 million jobs will be lost, pretty much forever. And the jobs dependent on those 2 million jobs will be lost, and so on, up the food chain.
So look forward to 9-10% unemployment, sagging output, and a nagging recession/depression.
I can't believe that people are so short-sighted on this. The reason why telemarketing is there is because it works - people buy products over the phone. And the jobs that are going to be lost aren't going to be easily transferrable to other places (lots of handicapped, elderly, and disadvantaged people have telemarketing jobs).
"But I don't want to be disturbed!!!". Fine, let the industry police itself; you can buy a device to redirect telemarketing calls so that you aren't disturbed (forget what its called, but it does exist). And let the industry evolve rather than involving it in a extinction level event..
God. If people can't see that economies are like ecologies; that you can't simply wipe out an entire class of industry and not have collateral damage, then I despair for this country. And no, I don't have any financial interest in telemarketing companies whatsoever. Just self-interest.
Shareholders are the absolute last people to get money when a company goes under. All debt is paid first, all lawyers and bankruptcy fees are paid, etc. Then if there are any leftovers, the shareholders get their scraps. In other words, they rarely get anything at all."
well, true, but in this case, Be will get approximately 70 cents per share. It has one employee, approximately 26 million dollars and 38.4 million shares.
So, its not 'nothing' but it still is a sellout IMO.
Be has to get the deal approved by Judge Frederick Motz.. so things are not as dire as they seem. He has no real love for Microsoft.
As for 'not being able to afford going to court', well Be hired Susman/Godfrey on a contingency basis. So it looks like they went for the easy paycheck.
> Though, technically, the mere fact of > infringement may be enough, under many laws and > precedents, "deliberate infringement" can be > very important - as a practical matter, it > certainly factors into the monetary judgment. I > was once party to a potentially important (as a > national legal precedent) verdict against a > major organization, which caused the offender > to draw up untterly revamped corporate > practices... until the award phase (which came > 4-5 months after the verdict). The court > granted a mere $1 in damages.
Which two companies were involved? I seem to remember this happening to microsoft...
> The work is going to be on our backs to locate > even older code that SCO's predecessors used to > write SYS V. I would raise the bar as well and > go so far as to attempt to show that SCO's code > was itself misappropriated.
yeah right. Sys I-VII are covered under a BSD-style license, as reported by lkml, bruce perens and others. Finding older code is irrelevant - if we can get there, we're fine.
The SEC is not interested in whether you own stock or not; its interested in unfair business tactics outright. Whether or not you own stock is irrelevant to any case that they would want to build against SCO. They want *facts*, the facts to form the basis of a suit.
And anyways, even if you don't own stock, if you use linux, contribute to linux, or are in IT in general, you are affected by SCO's illegal actions. They hurt your *stock in trade*; a black eye against linux lessens your chance of using it, or pursuing other business opportunities with it. If they are doing this in an illegal way they need to know.
Personally, I think that the SEC link should be posted weekly, so that pretty much everybody who has interest in seeing SCO getting what's coming to them should complain. Mention as many facts as you can get - I for one mentioned the german court and its reaction to SCO's 'claims'. They are so full of it, they desperately need to be taken down a notch or two.
one reason... CPAN.
The power that you bemoan, say gets in the way and you don't use a lot of *other* people use. You don't see it directly, you see it when you use modules that come from CPAN.
Without the 'hacks' you talk about CPAN would not be possible. I personally find the functionality quite useful.
Ed
> A dog will try to comfort his unhappy master as
> best he can. He may be dim, but he cares, and
> he loves you with all his heart. We're nothing
> special with regard to empathy. (cats are
> mostly selfish assholes, but that's a different
> matter)
You've obviously never had a cat.
Slashdot Mirror
As we know
[snipped]
We don't know
You know, this quote could have come straight from Yes Minister..
In fact, it did. At least a version thereof:
Bernard: May I just clarify the question? You are asking who would know what it is that I don't know and you don't know, but the Foreign Office know that they know, that they are keeping from you so that you don't know but they do know, and all we know is that there is something we don't know but we want to know but we don't know what because we don't know. Is that it?
You know, I love that show.. better than a poli-sci degree..
horos
Enjoy your car, why not buy another which burns even more petrol? Theese are the last years of cheap oil.
> I remember when I was first told that. 1976, I
> think it was. I recall they taught us in school
> that it'd all be gone by 2000.
> My father laughed about hearing it last in
> the '50s, when gas prices (adjusted for
> inflation) were higher than they are now.
they laughed at Mr. Hubbert too, when he said that the production of oil would peak in the US in 1970..
they aren't laughing now...
oh, and btw, production of oil became supply - not demand - driven in 1999. And the world's total production of oil plateau'd in 2000. And china's demand for the stuff has grown by 8% a year.
we'll see how long it takes oil to reach $100 a barrel..
horos
> And as for it being "too damned expensive,"
> it's funny that you mention that. The argument
> of the majority of the eco-doomsayers that I
> know is that oil will run out, and we'll have
> no viable solutions in place. My
nuclear..
> Right now, hydrocarbon fuels are insanely
> cheap -- cheaper than electricity generated by
> any other fasion.
Actually, that's not quite true. The operating costs of a nuclear power plant are roughly equal to those of a large coal-burning plant. And nuclear power is still in its infancy.
Anybody who says that nuclear is unsafe, expensive, etc. is IMO like those people in the 1960's who said 'well computers are expensive. And big.'. By its very nature, we have quite a ways to go in making nuclear plants more efficient and safer - the energy density is 10 million times that of coal. We've got quite a few multiples to go before we reach the optimal 'lowest cost reactor'.
Coal on the other hand, is pretty much dead as far as R&D benefits are concerned.
horos
"Also, the US has been, for a while, importing raw materials it could get at home. If the need arises, the US can plunder many reserved areas for resources. The US has an enormous amount of national parks which likely have useful minerals in them, but the US government prevents them from being accessed. In a case of necessity, we could rape our own country instead of the rest of the world."
;-)
not *entirely* accurate.
Ever heard of Hubbert's peak? Hubbert's main point was that at a certain point, when a resource is depleted, no matter what number of pumping/mining stations are put in place the rate of production will reach the point of diminishing returns and fall.
Its happening to oil, it'll happen to coal soon, and it'll happen to natural gas. Our only real hope is conservation combined with renewables and nuclear to power the recycling of waste into oil.
As for the 'using national parks' and 'raping our country to support us', well, no again. The square mileage of the US is approximately 3.5 million square miles. Of that, approximately 125 thousand miles are protected.
Don't worry, its a common trap to fall into. One of the great things about math - even simple math like division and multiplication - is that it gives people a sense of scale. What you suggest would cause untold environmental and aesthetic damage for minimal benefit.
In fact, Politicians should be issued calculators and be required to pass a math test before taking office. You'd think that having 3 kg of uranium powering a city for a year instead of millions and millions of tons of coal would be an eye opener for them - but then again, on paper it only looks like 7 extra zeros..
horos
> I thought those guys were a piece of annoyware. Go figure.
Methinks someone doesn't have a sense of humour. Go figure.
> As for the Mars theory of life existing in
> frozen climates, the funny thing is when the
> fiery residents of the Sun, laugh and realize
> we puny humans can exist on the frozen climate
> of Earth! Their probes will be made of molton
> sunspots that will sadly destroy much of our
> ecosystem in efforts to understand it, or at
> least that is the premise of a sci-fi book I
> may write in the near future. My point is that
> life is all a matter of perspective, not that I
> truly believe there is life on the Sun
> (although there must be).
too late... arthur c clarke wrote a short story like this in the past. In fact, he used almost the same plot point (forget the title though, will look it up).
ok, fine.. an obligatory KITH quote comes to mind:
"No, I don't think I should. I don't think I should question the leadership of our Great Leader"
"Oh, come on! I mean, we've been coming here for 50 years and performing anal probes and all that we have learned is that 1 in 10 doesn't really seem to mind."
"oh really? and you have a better plan in mind than our great leader?"
"yes. yes I do. My plan is to have no plan. That we don't travel 250,000 light years, we don't come here. And the best part is that we don't do any anal probes."
oops - s/source control projects/open source/g horos
> I'm sure there are problems that a real package
:)
;-)
/usr/local/man, etc)
> maintainer would spot right away, but I think
> this system is probably feasible to roll into a
> full package management system. And, no, I
> haven't tried all 1273 linux distros out there,
> so somebody may actually be doing this already.
> I'd love to hear about it.
> Damn -- I hope somebody thinks this is a cool
> idea.
yeah, I built something like what you describe. Got a packaging management system that builds from code and does exactly what you mention. Works for solaris, os390, linux, aix, win32 (via cygwin) and builds into multiple prefixes that can be switched at will.
Programmable ( you define a build process via a subroutine that matches the project file name) handles patch management, version management, user configuration files (which are source controlled), package creation, user tweaks and interactive input, 'manual' editing of projects (just in case configure breaks down when creating Makefiles) and so forth.)
I'll release it someday; unfortunately right now its (loosely) tangled around some proprietary stuff, but I'll untangle it.
Oh yeah, its written in perl.. (of course). what's this newfangled ruby/python thing I'm hearing about nowadays?
horos
(ps - forget about debian and gentoo doing this... in fact, I integrated debian into my process because the packages have lots of assumptions; man in
in fact, its generally hell to do this. source control projects are not that careful with making their projects 'path independent'; they tend to hard code things, or have dependencies buried in config files. Sometimes I need to have my process 'hand' edit files that make generates as part of an intermediate step, sometimes autoconf gets things wrong, etc. etc. So its not a small task. For the time being you are better off doing what you do already.
)
> Forget tomorrow; tomorrow is already a disaster. Think of your children and think of your grandchildren. ... which is exactly why you don't want to vote green.
The green party is - if anything - against nuclear power more than the two frontrunners, and its going to take a hell of a lot of nuclear power to get us over the hubbert's peak that's coming up in a few years for oil supplies.
And before you say solar, just let me remind you that actually making solar/geothermal/what-have-you energy sources viable takes *far* more energy per unit than the established sources, especially nuclear, and if we don't do something soon in either supplementing or replacing our current energy infrastructure, we are going to run into a depression, my friend.
> I'm pretty sure he's on the record as a
> supporter of Pol Pot in Cambodia, too.
yeah right. christ guys, back up your opinions with *citations*. As an example, here's one from chomsky himeslf, from "Genocide; the United States and Pol Pot"
Pol Pot was obviously a major mass murderer, but it's not clear that Pol Pot killed very many more people -- or even more people -- than the United States killed in Cambodia in the first half of the 1970s. We only talk about "genocide" when other people do the killing. [The U.S. bombed and invaded Cambodia beginning in 1969, and supported anti-Parliamentary right-wing forces in a civil war there which lasted until 1975; Pol Pot ruled the country between 1975 and '78.]
So unless you think that chomsky is praising pol pot for being a mass murderer, I'd take your head out of your ass if I was you.
Which is why you use comments like this:
s/(.*?\s+)\(.*?\)/$1/g # PC LOAD LETTER
I tend to turn my regular expressions into variables, ie:
my $doublestring = q$(?>\"(?>[^\\\"]+|\\\.)*\")$;
which is the only real way there is to make more complicated regular expressions, anyways. Oh yeah, and then test the hell out of them. The drawback is that you need to escape certain characters if you put them in doublequotes (to use regular expressions inside of larger regular expressions) but then again that's what quotemeta is for. Hence my regex look like
$perlcode =~ m"sub\s*$function\s*$brackets"sg;
Of course the above is one of the big reasons for perl6 - it just formalizes the building of larger regex via named rules. and gets rid of the annoyingly large number of \s* by making ' ' become a synonym for '\s*'.
> To all the people who are busy vaulting onto
> their high horse, ready to scold the Slashdot
> community for our apparent complicity in this,
> don't bother. I get so sick of the holier-than-
> thou attitudes that people cop when the "Linux
> community" does something to "make Linux look
> bad".
It isn't a matter of being on a high horse (although things like this piss me off to no end) its a matter of being *pragmatic*.
Suppose this causes some clueless judge to equate open source with terrorism or convices congress members that there *should* be restrictions on how people develop and share code and an extra provision in the DMCA shows up to deal with open source.
Are you going to be happy then? Things like this kick open source right in the nuts, give SCO ammo and just generally make me in awe of how damn stupid people can be.
Like it or not, you are making a public stance if you post on slashdot. If you chime in about how 'worthwhile' the virus is, etc. etc, you basically sympathize with the virus writer and basically tar *my* reputation by association
Well fuck you. The person who wrote this thing can go to hell, and all of you who are implicit in supporting this can follow shortly after. Even *if* it was a script kiddie who did this first, it doesn't matter if people support it after the fact. If you want to damage your own livelihood, do so on your own time. Don't damage mine. Idiots.
>> Gygax: Greetings! It's a...[rolls dice.]...pleasure to meet you!
Put those dice away before I take them away!
> First, the article uses references to Moore's
> Law as though that's an accurate guage of how
> quickly we should expect bio technology to
> advance based on the comparison to advances in
> computer technology.
> That premise is inherently flawed. Moore's Law
> was applicable as an *observation* of the rate
> at which computing technology advanced... not a
> rule governing it. I don't think its
> application is valid for other technologies.
and your point is...? If you had read the article, you would have seen that they graphed the number of nucleotides sequences, as seen over the *past 30 years*.
Seems like it is 'applicable as an *observation* of the rate at which biotech advanced'....
"The bad economic effects that you mentioned will be short-term effects. But that short-term "pain" is guaranteed to translate into long-term benefits. The benefit will be the permenent elimination of an inefficient and wasteful selling method."
But that's the point - telemarketing is by far the *most* successful selling method out there. That's why people do it!
Consumers don't have to go any place, the sales pitch lasts a few seconds, no store front (and hence no shop front) is necessary to sell a product and hence no overhead in starting new, riskier businesses.. etc. etc.
As for humans being infinitely malleable, that's so self-serving that I don't know where to begin. "Every one being better off" . What the hell are these people going to do? Meter maid? There are 4 million people - 4 million people - doing these jobs, and when telemarketing goes, their age and skillset does not license itself to easy retraining..
Worst of all, no studies have been done at either the Federal or the state level as to the impact of all of this. Something that one *might* consider doing before one puts 2 million people out on the street.
Overall, it goes along with the shift in IT - which I could buy more along the lines of an efficiency argument - there are only so many things a man/woman can do, and after these are outsourced or gone, the consuming side of capitalism goes out-of-konk.
In order for capitalism to work, each citizen has to be a good producer, and a good consumer. We are rapidly reaching the point where we can outsource *so* many jobs that americans will no longer be able to be good *consumers*. When this happens, watch out. A similar thing happened in the 1930's - with it depression, starvation, massive unemployment.
So. hmm. After the 1930's were we better off? Maybe - but that's small consolation to the millions upon millions of displaced citizens, the people who committed suicide, the 20% unemployment rate, and so on..
You really don't want to bend an economy too fast. It may just break.
I hate to say it, but this law is probably going to cause one hell of a recession. But America asked for it..
Figure, when the 50 million americans are gone from this list, and the telemarketers call the other 50 million who then don't like to be called twice a day, they will run to the registry.
And as the registry grows, the number of remaining people will shrink, and shrink fast. Soon, there will be no telemarketing industry left.
And when there is no telemarketing industry, 2 million jobs will be lost, pretty much forever. And the jobs dependent on those 2 million jobs will be lost, and so on, up the food chain.
So look forward to 9-10% unemployment, sagging output, and a nagging recession/depression.
I can't believe that people are so short-sighted on this. The reason why telemarketing is there is because it works - people buy products over the phone. And the jobs that are going to be lost aren't going to be easily transferrable to other places (lots of handicapped, elderly, and disadvantaged people have telemarketing jobs).
"But I don't want to be disturbed!!!". Fine, let the industry police itself; you can buy a device to redirect telemarketing calls so that you aren't disturbed (forget what its called, but it does exist). And let the industry evolve rather than involving it in a extinction level event..
God. If people can't see that economies are like ecologies; that you can't simply wipe out an entire class of industry and not have collateral damage, then I despair for this country. And no, I don't have any financial interest in telemarketing companies whatsoever. Just self-interest.
"Who said anything about shareholders?
Shareholders are the absolute last people to get money when a company goes under. All debt is paid first, all lawyers and bankruptcy fees are paid, etc. Then if there are any leftovers, the shareholders get their scraps. In other words, they rarely get anything at all."
well, true, but in this case, Be will get approximately 70 cents per share. It has one employee, approximately 26 million dollars and 38.4 million shares.
So, its not 'nothing' but it still is a sellout IMO.
Be has to get the deal approved by Judge Frederick Motz.. so things are not as dire as they seem. He has no real love for Microsoft.
As for 'not being able to afford going to court', well Be hired Susman/Godfrey on a contingency basis. So it looks like they went for the easy paycheck.
> Though, technically, the mere fact of
> infringement may be enough, under many laws and
> precedents, "deliberate infringement" can be
> very important - as a practical matter, it
> certainly factors into the monetary judgment. I
> was once party to a potentially important (as a
> national legal precedent) verdict against a
> major organization, which caused the offender
> to draw up untterly revamped corporate
> practices... until the award phase (which came
> 4-5 months after the verdict). The court
> granted a mere $1 in damages.
Which two companies were involved? I seem to remember this happening to microsoft...
hmm. You, Farley Mullet, are the type of guy that probably likes to go into Chaucer's Canterbury tales and point out all of the mispronunciations.
Its called 'dramatic effect', and 'style'. Just because his posting doesn't follow the most straightforward syntax doesn't mean that it is 'wrong'..
> The work is going to be on our backs to locate
> even older code that SCO's predecessors used to
> write SYS V. I would raise the bar as well and
> go so far as to attempt to show that SCO's code
> was itself misappropriated.
yeah right. Sys I-VII are covered under a BSD-style license, as reported by lkml, bruce perens and others. Finding older code is irrelevant - if we can get there, we're fine.
Now... what exactly do we need to prove?
And anyways, even if you don't own stock, if you use linux, contribute to linux, or are in IT in general, you are affected by SCO's illegal actions. They hurt your *stock in trade*; a black eye against linux lessens your chance of using it, or pursuing other business opportunities with it. If they are doing this in an illegal way they need to know.
Personally, I think that the SEC link should be posted weekly, so that pretty much everybody who has interest in seeing SCO getting what's coming to them should complain. Mention as many facts as you can get - I for one mentioned the german court and its reaction to SCO's 'claims'. They are so full of it, they desperately need to be taken down a notch or two.
one reason... CPAN. The power that you bemoan, say gets in the way and you don't use a lot of *other* people use. You don't see it directly, you see it when you use modules that come from CPAN. Without the 'hacks' you talk about CPAN would not be possible. I personally find the functionality quite useful. Ed
> A dog will try to comfort his unhappy master as > best he can. He may be dim, but he cares, and > he loves you with all his heart. We're nothing > special with regard to empathy. (cats are > mostly selfish assholes, but that's a different > matter) You've obviously never had a cat.