Gates has, indeed, restructured many parts of the military along more sensible lines, but he cancelled the wrong fighter jet. The JSF is soaking up resources (including an obvious pork-barrel contract for a second and entirely redundant engine) and will, like every other multi-service-designed aircraft before it, prove to be remarkably mediocre and much more expensive than planned. The F-22 was already airworthy and proven and superior in every way to any air superiority fighter in the world, and as soon as the program began to reach a point where economies of scale payed off, it was cancelled in favor of a plane with half the capability whose unit cost is already higher than the plane it was intended to be a low-cost alternative to.
Anyone who thinks air superiority fighters are unneeded is encouraged to try and locate an intact Stuka anywhere in the world. I'll save you the time...there are exactly three. The rest are in the bottom of the English Channel or rusting in some Russian farmer's field, because the best bomb truck in the world isn't worth crap if you can't keep control of the air.
It always amazes me when people are looking for ethical or exotic behavioral explanation behind buisness decisions.
It saddens me that so many people think that by enshrining a human activity as 'business' automatically excuses unethical behavior. Business is a human activity, and no human activity should be exempt from human virtue. If morality is optional, then it is largely meaningless, and I might as well shoot you and take your money.
My son is autistic. An ipad with this software would probably have been very useful for him when he was younger, and possibly even now...but only if it was built with mll-spec indestructibility. Special needs kids tend to have severe behavioral problems, and violent tantrums are not unusual. They need to be either tougher or cheaper.
And despite what many people seem to think, five hundred bucks for a gadget, and another 200 bucks for software, is not a trivial amount of money for a family with special needs kids. Having a special needs child almost automatically consigns many families to a single earner lifestyle, assuming their marriages even survive the experience. It always angered me that the 'poster families' the media chooses for its talk shows about special needs cases are almost always photogenic white collar folks whose biggest sacrifice is the extra money they have to spend to let specialists raise their children. If you visit a local meeting of whatever autism or other handicap support organization is in your community, I guarantee this is NOT what you will see. You will meet families struggling to keep their homes and their sanity in the face of impossible demands on their time, health and budget.
This idea is a step in the right direction, but the cottage industry that churns out all these developmental aids need to wake up to the true economics of their prospective customers.
This statement is completely inaccurate. Print professionals work in CMYK because working in RGB and then expecting someone to magically fix the inevitable color shifts in prepress is costly and likely to produce inferior results. True graphic professionals understand the print process and not only respect the boundaries of the color gamut they work in, they use them to their advantage. Professional work provides predictable results and requires very little, if any, tweaking in prepress.
It is also imperative that professionals be able to work with OTHER professionals in the field using industry standard tools, and I have yet to see a design or art job ad requesting knowledge of GIMP.
These technologies have NOT been contained. Some of them were not even developed here. Stealth tech was inspired by a Russian science paper written decades ago. Russia has developed a fifth generation fighter that is every bit as capable as the Raptor, with no help from us.
Ideas cannot be contained as long as people can communicate at all. Technology is built around ideas. What prevents smaller countries or terrorist groups from building high-tech weapons is a lack of resources. All of the items you mention are very expensive to produce, requiring considerable industrial infrastructure, highly-skilled labor and exotic materials. A shoe-string extremist group or banana republic cannot muster the resources to create them. Hell, we can barely afford them ourselves.
Just because the genie is out of the bottle doesn't mean he's going to grant wishes to everybody.
Worst case scenario: If you are a middle-aged man who spends all of your leisure time loafing, your chances of dying increase by half. That sounds awful, but the fact is that the average American 40-year-old male has about two or three-tenths of one percent chance of dying within the next year from any cause. So your chances of dying this year if you have been laying around a lot would increase to nearly half of one percent, or about 200 to 1.
You are equally as likely to roll an honest 18 using 3d6.
If you've played D&D, you know how many rolls that can take.
By the time you hit your eighties, though, I'd recommend wearing out that walker...could be the difference between snake eyes and a coin flip.
Under current copyright law, educational use of copyrighted material is already protected under fair use. At least, it should be, but that determination is generally made by a judge, and he doesn't get to make the call unless someone is brave enough (and rich enough) to stand up to a herd of corporate lawyers.
Trademark law has no fair use provision, and is more likely to be enforced. It was not always as zealously enforced as it is now, because corporations did not have eyes and ears everywhere like they do now.
The proliferation of IP laws, and the necessity of legal counsel to sort them all out in the event of possible infringement, coupled with the pervasive nature of modern communications is turning this country's free market of ideas into a bunch of corporate fiefdoms defended by lawyers.
You have overlooked one large difference: I can scare up a used piano on Craigslist for nothing, and still make it sound great with lots of training and a bit of tuning. (Seriously, a remarkable number of pianos are given away all the time). Acquiring all of these painstakingly recorded samples, the software to compose with them, and the hardware to translate them into actual music costs a great deal of money.
It is the same in the digital art world. I have a fifteen dollar sable hair brush that I have owned for over twenty years, and it still works great. Alternatively, I can create similar brush strokes, and more, using a copy of Adobe CS5 that cost me fifty times that, plus a PC to run it on, and a 300 dollar Wacom tablet to imitate the properties of my brush, all of which will probably last me less than five years.
The biggest advantage to the modern tech is that it requires far less labor and arguably less skill to achieve similar results. It does, however, cost a lot more money.
Art is rapidly becoming more about using your credit card than using your hands. At the same time, the compensation for those with the ability to create it keeps shrinking, because of the ease with which the results can be duplicated and distributed.
I, for one, do NOT welcome our great geek overlords.
I think you make a good point: the careers that suffer most from crowdsourcing are ones where no material investment is required to produce the work. You won't find traditional artists doing this, because art supplies are too expensive. Every piece of artwork they produce costs them something out of pocket.
The reason professionals resent crowdsourcing is that they, as working designers, have considerable investment in hardware and software that depreciates rapidly, so time is very literally money. Not so the hobbyist, for whom their machine serves other needs and their software was most likely pirated. Add to this the obvious presence of overseas participants (likewise often using warez and willing to work for peanuts), and you have a disastrous invasion of the market by competitors whose shortcomings are rarely obvious to the client except in retrospect.
I've seen similar statistics to this. As a unanticipated result of a psychological profile done for a study in game theory, researchers discovered that between 1 and 4 percent of people were what they called "bastards"...that is people who operated purely from self-interest, and other wise fit the accepted definition of sociopath. (Men were more likely to meet this definition than women)
The best definition of evil I have ever heard was from a professional profiler. He defined it as the absence of empathy.
The interesting thing about people (and animals), is that empathy is not an either/or quality: empathy is possessed in varying amounts, and can often be bludgeoned into silent consent. A cat has no more remorse for a mouse than I do for a hamburger. But I would not enjoy my steak so much if I had to kill the cow with my own hands. A professional hunter or rancher might have less problem with the act, or even enjoy it. I would not describe them as evil, but their prey might. IF the cat turned on its own species, though, we would consider it sick. Likewise, if a hunter turned his knife towards his fellow bipeds for any motive other than self-defense, we would consider him evil.
There are (fortunately rare) individuals who are completely incapable of experiencing the slightest bit of empathy for ANY living thing, even members of their own species, and are capable of doing great harm to others for the slightest of motives. Some even take pleasure in the suffering of fellow human beings. These people are undeniably evil, and as a culture we work hard to weed them out of the gene pool. We are never completely successful at it, though...I suspect because the shadowy presence of the predator in our midst is somehow advantageous for the genetic health of the community as a whole. We cannot, after all, extinguish the predator inside us completely, lest a more bloodthirsty species overtake us in the great game of life.
Why is it so hard to entertain the thought that human beings can have an impact on the climate? There would not even be any oxygen here at all were it were not for creatures far smaller than ourselves.
We have deforested entire regions and farmed once fertile soil into deserts. We could trigger a new ice age overnight if some yo-yo was crazy enough to push the button.
I don't know if we have created global climate change or not, but we most certainly could.
I have spent some significant stretches of my life without a phone or a car or antibiotics, and found that my time without them was much less stressful than my time with them. I wouldn't want to live in a world completely without modern 'conveniences', but I think it might be nice if they were used a lot less.
Slashdot Mirror
Gates has, indeed, restructured many parts of the military along more sensible lines, but he cancelled the wrong fighter jet. The JSF is soaking up resources (including an obvious pork-barrel contract for a second and entirely redundant engine) and will, like every other multi-service-designed aircraft before it, prove to be remarkably mediocre and much more expensive than planned. The F-22 was already airworthy and proven and superior in every way to any air superiority fighter in the world, and as soon as the program began to reach a point where economies of scale payed off, it was cancelled in favor of a plane with half the capability whose unit cost is already higher than the plane it was intended to be a low-cost alternative to.
Anyone who thinks air superiority fighters are unneeded is encouraged to try and locate an intact Stuka anywhere in the world. I'll save you the time...there are exactly three. The rest are in the bottom of the English Channel or rusting in some Russian farmer's field, because the best bomb truck in the world isn't worth crap if you can't keep control of the air.
It always amazes me when people are looking for ethical or exotic behavioral explanation behind buisness decisions.
It saddens me that so many people think that by enshrining a human activity as 'business' automatically excuses unethical behavior. Business is a human activity, and no human activity should be exempt from human virtue. If morality is optional, then it is largely meaningless, and I might as well shoot you and take your money.
My son is autistic. An ipad with this software would probably have been very useful for him when he was younger, and possibly even now...but only if it was built with mll-spec indestructibility. Special needs kids tend to have severe behavioral problems, and violent tantrums are not unusual. They need to be either tougher or cheaper.
And despite what many people seem to think, five hundred bucks for a gadget, and another 200 bucks for software, is not a trivial amount of money for a family with special needs kids. Having a special needs child almost automatically consigns many families to a single earner lifestyle, assuming their marriages even survive the experience. It always angered me that the 'poster families' the media chooses for its talk shows about special needs cases are almost always photogenic white collar folks whose biggest sacrifice is the extra money they have to spend to let specialists raise their children. If you visit a local meeting of whatever autism or other handicap support organization is in your community, I guarantee this is NOT what you will see. You will meet families struggling to keep their homes and their sanity in the face of impossible demands on their time, health and budget.
This idea is a step in the right direction, but the cottage industry that churns out all these developmental aids need to wake up to the true economics of their prospective customers.
Unfortunately, the essence of the free market is a society where everyone thinks 'fuck you'.
Old news, really. You can even buy your own Inflatable Army on the interweb:
http://www.military-decoy.com/military.php
This statement is completely inaccurate. Print professionals work in CMYK because working in RGB and then expecting someone to magically fix the inevitable color shifts in prepress is costly and likely to produce inferior results. True graphic professionals understand the print process and not only respect the boundaries of the color gamut they work in, they use them to their advantage. Professional work provides predictable results and requires very little, if any, tweaking in prepress.
It is also imperative that professionals be able to work with OTHER professionals in the field using industry standard tools, and I have yet to see a design or art job ad requesting knowledge of GIMP.
These technologies have NOT been contained. Some of them were not even developed here. Stealth tech was inspired by a Russian science paper written decades ago. Russia has developed a fifth generation fighter that is every bit as capable as the Raptor, with no help from us.
Ideas cannot be contained as long as people can communicate at all. Technology is built around ideas. What prevents smaller countries or terrorist groups from building high-tech weapons is a lack of resources. All of the items you mention are very expensive to produce, requiring considerable industrial infrastructure, highly-skilled labor and exotic materials. A shoe-string extremist group or banana republic cannot muster the resources to create them. Hell, we can barely afford them ourselves.
Just because the genie is out of the bottle doesn't mean he's going to grant wishes to everybody.
The big one already passed by harmlessly. The little one will likely do so in a few hours.
Nothing to see here, move along.
I wasn't familiar with the work of John Muir until I was inspired to Google him by your quote. Thank you!
Worst case scenario: If you are a middle-aged man who spends all of your leisure time loafing, your chances of dying increase by half. That sounds awful, but the fact is that the average American 40-year-old male has about two or three-tenths of one percent chance of dying within the next year from any cause. So your chances of dying this year if you have been laying around a lot would increase to nearly half of one percent, or about 200 to 1.
You are equally as likely to roll an honest 18 using 3d6.
If you've played D&D, you know how many rolls that can take.
By the time you hit your eighties, though, I'd recommend wearing out that walker...could be the difference between snake eyes and a coin flip.
The infringing book appears to have been pulled.
Under current copyright law, educational use of copyrighted material is already protected under fair use. At least, it should be, but that determination is generally made by a judge, and he doesn't get to make the call unless someone is brave enough (and rich enough) to stand up to a herd of corporate lawyers.
Trademark law has no fair use provision, and is more likely to be enforced. It was not always as zealously enforced as it is now, because corporations did not have eyes and ears everywhere like they do now.
The proliferation of IP laws, and the necessity of legal counsel to sort them all out in the event of possible infringement, coupled with the pervasive nature of modern communications is turning this country's free market of ideas into a bunch of corporate fiefdoms defended by lawyers.
You have overlooked one large difference: I can scare up a used piano on Craigslist for nothing, and still make it sound great with lots of training and a bit of tuning. (Seriously, a remarkable number of pianos are given away all the time). Acquiring all of these painstakingly recorded samples, the software to compose with them, and the hardware to translate them into actual music costs a great deal of money.
It is the same in the digital art world. I have a fifteen dollar sable hair brush that I have owned for over twenty years, and it still works great. Alternatively, I can create similar brush strokes, and more, using a copy of Adobe CS5 that cost me fifty times that, plus a PC to run it on, and a 300 dollar Wacom tablet to imitate the properties of my brush, all of which will probably last me less than five years.
The biggest advantage to the modern tech is that it requires far less labor and arguably less skill to achieve similar results. It does, however, cost a lot more money.
Art is rapidly becoming more about using your credit card than using your hands. At the same time, the compensation for those with the ability to create it keeps shrinking, because of the ease with which the results can be duplicated and distributed.
I, for one, do NOT welcome our great geek overlords.
Sell it on Craigslist. You'd be amazed at what people are still paying for those hunks of junk.
Automation, globalization and overpopulation devalue human labor. Film at eleven.
You mean the dream the software and computer engineers sold us was a lie?
I think you make a good point: the careers that suffer most from crowdsourcing are ones where no material investment is required to produce the work. You won't find traditional artists doing this, because art supplies are too expensive. Every piece of artwork they produce costs them something out of pocket.
The reason professionals resent crowdsourcing is that they, as working designers, have considerable investment in hardware and software that depreciates rapidly, so time is very literally money. Not so the hobbyist, for whom their machine serves other needs and their software was most likely pirated. Add to this the obvious presence of overseas participants (likewise often using warez and willing to work for peanuts), and you have a disastrous invasion of the market by competitors whose shortcomings are rarely obvious to the client except in retrospect.
I've seen similar statistics to this. As a unanticipated result of a psychological profile done for a study in game theory, researchers discovered that between 1 and 4 percent of people were what they called "bastards"...that is people who operated purely from self-interest, and other wise fit the accepted definition of sociopath. (Men were more likely to meet this definition than women)
The best definition of evil I have ever heard was from a professional profiler. He defined it as the absence of empathy.
The interesting thing about people (and animals), is that empathy is not an either/or quality: empathy is possessed in varying amounts, and can often be bludgeoned into silent consent. A cat has no more remorse for a mouse than I do for a hamburger. But I would not enjoy my steak so much if I had to kill the cow with my own hands. A professional hunter or rancher might have less problem with the act, or even enjoy it. I would not describe them as evil, but their prey might. IF the cat turned on its own species, though, we would consider it sick. Likewise, if a hunter turned his knife towards his fellow bipeds for any motive other than self-defense, we would consider him evil.
There are (fortunately rare) individuals who are completely incapable of experiencing the slightest bit of empathy for ANY living thing, even members of their own species, and are capable of doing great harm to others for the slightest of motives. Some even take pleasure in the suffering of fellow human beings. These people are undeniably evil, and as a culture we work hard to weed them out of the gene pool. We are never completely successful at it, though...I suspect because the shadowy presence of the predator in our midst is somehow advantageous for the genetic health of the community as a whole. We cannot, after all, extinguish the predator inside us completely, lest a more bloodthirsty species overtake us in the great game of life.
Why is it so hard to entertain the thought that human beings can have an impact on the climate? There would not even be any oxygen here at all were it were not for creatures far smaller than ourselves.
We have deforested entire regions and farmed once fertile soil into deserts. We could trigger a new ice age overnight if some yo-yo was crazy enough to push the button.
I don't know if we have created global climate change or not, but we most certainly could.
I have yet to figure out how to use mod points, or even if I have any...but if I did, I would mod this up. Well-spoken.
Welcome to Battle.net! Please enter your REAL name:
JOHN SMITH
I'm sorry, that name is already in use. Please enter your REAL name:
SIGH
I have spent some significant stretches of my life without a phone or a car or antibiotics, and found that my time without them was much less stressful than my time with them. I wouldn't want to live in a world completely without modern 'conveniences', but I think it might be nice if they were used a lot less.
He was still an American when he was CEO of Intel. Shouldn't his duty to his country take priority over his duty to his employer?
Did anyone else read the OTHER article in the same paper that totally debunks the theory?
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/technology/iandouglas/100005223/mobile-phones-and-bees-shoddy-research-helps-no-one/