You can protect yourself against hard drive mirroring by using strong encryption - even if they do mirror the hard drive, all they end up with is a lump of data that'd take them years to crack. However, the TSA ensures that nobody in their right mind will cross the border with encrypted data on the laptop. Thus you either need to transmit all the data via internet (which might not be entirely feasible if it's a lot of data and you don't have the time to wait for it to download) or mail it to the destination (meaning that you have much less control over it until it arrives).
Of course the TSA is making doing business in the States a hassle, so they might reduce the volume of data carried in by foreigners simply by reducing the volume of foreigners coming in. After all, we can also fly out Americans to Europe, which doesn't put our data at the mercy of an opaque agency with a less than stellar reputation.
Strong encryption is classified as a weapon. That's why, for example, South Korean online banking is dependant on ActiveX - because the USA only allowed the export of SSL technology that was limited to 40-bit keys South Korean banks rolled their own encryption format called SEED, which was usually implemented in ActiveX. Since the entire market uses ActiveX-SEED virtually every customer has Internet Explorer, thus there is no need to deploy a non-ActiveX version of SEED etc. etc.
If the USA considers strong encryption to be a weapon for purposes of export, they should consider it a weapon for purposes of the Second Amendment.
OTOH, there are laws stating that the Second Amendment doesn't cover certain kinds of weapon (like everything with a clip size > 10), so they might classify encryption as a weapon, then classify everything past 128-bit keylength as "military encryption technology" and randomly bust people who don't want the DHS to access their banking details. The "antiterrism" lobby certainly isn't above such scumbaggery.
It's a shame that we can't profit from the weak US Dollar but hey, Canada has a cheap currency as well. I think they're less aggressively paranoid at the borders, too. Okay, it's colder than in the States, but at least you don't have to expect that some customs officer steals your laptop.
Just make sure that your flight doesn't make a stop in the States.
This means that there is less risk involved when a Chinese officer enters your hotel room and makes a copy of your hard drive.
Damn that happens to me all the time. Hotels in Germany are already considering stopping to give out free skeleton keys to Chinese officers. It's that bad.
One could argue that traveling to the United States while being Muslim/Arabic does count as self-inflicted harm. I'm reminded of the movie Don't Be A Menace To South Central While Drinking Your Juice In The Hood* where the protagonists are arrested for being black on a Wednesday. Being possibly Muslim while crossing the US border is not desired. Of course, not being an Islam suspect still doesn't keep you from getting the full criminal treatment with mugshot and fingerprint. Y'know, because everyone abroad is an evil Commie Nazi terrorist hell-bent on committing crime in the USA.
Let's face it, foreigners aren't particularly welcome in the States, especially when they don't look Christian. At least as far as the borders are concerned. Once you're in people suddenly revert back to the friendly, extroverted, slightly obtrusive Americans everyone knows. When you try to leave the country, however, it's back to hoping you make it past the scary, armed, people-abducting special police.
It really ruins the whole experience to the point where I'm going to stay the hell away from the States for the time being. Going through the current paranoid customs process once was scary and degrading enough.
* Amazingly a Wayan Brothers movie that does contain some good jokes.
It's just for sake of comparison. US Americans are 1/3 less worth than Europeans while one Japanese is worth about 0.01 US American. At least if the humanitarian organisation ECB is to be trusted.
You're right, the iPhone does have a nice user interface; that is a selling point. Of course, I'm still with the "calling and maybe SMS are everything a phone needs" crowd so I don't really pay attention to interface design - the features I'm likely to use are usually already mapped to a button.
I guess that's an example of how preferences and perception can interact - because I don't need (or want) much functionality, I'm content with a very basic UI and don't immediately see the iPhone's polished UI as the advantage it is in a smartphone context.
By the way, as for UMTS: I'm happy without it, too, but that's because calling people is the only thing I do with my mobile and vanilla GSM already does that. 3G phones will become relevant to me when they start shutting down the 2G networks.
Depends on what you want from your phone. If you just want a phone, the iPhone is abysmal - a Nokia 1110i beats it on price, size and robustness while being equally good on features. Likewise, if you're in Europe and want to use the UMTS network, the iPhone is a non-competitor. The iPhone apeals exactly to those users who want a stylish smartphone tht doesn't need to do 3G. Of course, once you start dropping requirements like "stylish", the number of alternatives goes up.
Patent the process of "dividing two, common whole numbers for the purpose of usefully approximating the ratio between the diameter and the circumference of a circle".
That will get shot down immediately. You need to prefix it with "a computational device used for" and turn it into a software patent.
The code might be for an internal application. In that case, he wrote an app for internal use that is being superseded by a commercial app (for example because his app doesn't integrate with some other software) and since he thinks that his app could be useful to other people he wants to release it. The company doesn't lose anything because the new open source app would only compete with a product from one of their software vendors.
Yes, I pay money so that those worse off than me can live with something resembling dignity. A community where everyone lives for him/herself is useless - what's the value in having such a community? Protection from outside forces? Stop whining and buy a gun. Protection from inside forces? Ditto. A community only has any worth when being in it is an improvement over not being in it for the majority of its members. Yes, that means that the few rich have to suck it up and divert a small amount of their wealth to the poor. If they don't like it I refer them to "stop whining, get a gun and fend for yourself". There's plenty of small islands they can buy.
Besides, you said that a country is supposed to protect its citizens internally and externally. While you might not be aware of it, widespread poverty tends to breed crime and unrest. Depending on how severe the poverty is, the results can range from the police being overworked (and more expensive to maintain) to extreme parties gaining a foothold (I don't want to invoke Godwin, but poverty and unemployment were important factors in the NSDAP's rise to power) to full-blown riots (the most memorable example involving the destruction of the Bastille). Thus, it's certainly in the country's interest to do something about poverty. Of course catering to that makes you a slave to stability. It's entirely optional, but most people would agree that stability has its advantages.
There is no way not to be a slave to dozens of people, concepts and groups. We need to sustain ourself, so we are slaves to work, either for growing our own food or to making money to pay for it. It goes on from there. Stability, safety, sustenance, health... Not being a slave is impossible. Life sucks that way. You always need to fulfill some kind of obligation somewhere. Complete freedom is a nice concept of paper, but sadly completely incompatible with reality.
So yeah, I'm quite content giving up some of my illusionary freedom if in return I get a society where I don't have to see the poor hunger, where I don't have to see a sharp mind being wasted because education is too expensive, where I don't have to see people die unneccessarily because they can't pay for the treatment. And of course, where I'm reasonably safe from people doing bad things to me. That's what I call civilization. Having quality of life being entirely dependant of one's possessions is just a glorified version of the law of the jungle. Monkeys can do that.
Actually, I have. Which is why I came up with a joke that involves pretending to think that the factory-style way of having a whole bunch of peope do atomic operations is always more efficient than having one person do the job. Some people actually think that way and they tend to be highly paid.
You're contradicting yourself. First you say that it's an easily subvertible position, and in the same breath, you say that it's "decidely not."
I think I didn't express myself as clearly as I intended. I'll try to repeat myself more clearly: The position that aggression is justifiable if it's a response to other violence can be subverted into the position that any kind of violence is justifiable as long it's a reaction to someone else's violence. The fact that it's not justifiable to kill someone's family because that someone punched you is an example: It's not justifiable to use, but someone could subvert your position to mean that it is. This kind of subversion is not unheard of; it's commonly practiced by the kind of government that gets called a regime.
Justice is just an abstract concept. Abstract concepts can be bent. Whether or not you agree with moral relativism, it does apply to peoples.
As for the question how them taking money from me provide me with any value: Well, they do give money to me. Lots of it. Getting a degree in Germany is much cheaper than getting the same degree in the States (I've heard of degrees costing upwards of 100.000 Dollars, which is nothing short of breathtaking) and the quality of our academics is not much lesser. If the university wasn't state-funded I'd end up having a much higher debt after studying than the ~5.000 Euros I'll have now (and I can immediately pay because because I save up 50% of the money the give me whenerer possible). So yeah, I'm quite happy that the federal state of Bremen has an education budget, even though they keep slashing it.
As for the red tape: Yeah, it's tedious, but it does work. The forms are neccessary because the need to know how much money I have - the money is for those without much money, not for those who could study anyway. It could be better, but it's in no way worthless. I'm very grateful for the system because without it I'd have no way of getting a degree without part-time studying, which I don't quite believe in.
In short: I'm in favor of state-sponsoring because I'm not wealthy. I would have had the money to study, but then my father made the mistake of being over 45 and was let go during a "company rejuvenation". A charity won't help me because they're busy helping people who are far worse off than I am. I can't gather some people around me to force the university into educating me; that only works on employers. Either I'd plunge myself into debt (which would probably not work because I don't have any securities) or I'd settle into not attending a university because I can't afford it. Both options are undesirable: If I don't have money I can't pass it into the economy. If I don't study I can't achieve my full potential. Thus, state sponsoring helps me help everyone by making (more) money.
As for Ayn Rand: Maybe I'd agree with her if I had money and liked elitism. Seeing as I don't and I don't, I'm very happy that my country isn't run by Randians.
Which is why I avoid WYSIWYG text formatting if I can. Both Word and OO Writer seem to be specially designed to apply braindead autoformatting rules*, put basic functions as far away from the user as possible and generally do exactly what the untrained user expects least.
I fear the day when I enter the job market, because I doubt that the company where I'll work will allow me to use LaTeX instead of whatever tedious text formatter they use. At least TeX's behavior is deterministic.
* Example: I have a form with a field containing a fraction in the format "X/Y". I try to fill ut the field and enter "5/10". Writer turns it into "10.5.1990". You can tell from the format of the date string it generates that I'm not in a locale where using slashes to separate date components is usual. We also don't use M/D/Y but D.M.Y. And I didn't enter a year. So it's pretty far-fetched to interpret that as a date - and it's even more far fetched to interpret a date without a year component as being years ago. So I end up having a nonsensical date in a field where it doesn't belong.
Yeah, I know I can turn it off, but office text editors are full of workflow-destroying stupidities like that. Word's letter wizard, for example, takes your name and address and put them in a beautiful footer that you end up deleting because you don't want it - but is also puts a field saying "ENTER YOUR NAME AND ADDRESS HERE" at the top of the page. Really helpful.
It's the "getting 5 people to change a lightbulb" argument.
You obviously don't understand how modern production works. You break up tasks so everyone has to do just one atomar subtask:
- One worker sets up the ladder.
- One worker climbs up the ladder.
- One worker unscrews the old bulb.
- One worker puts away the old bulb.
- One worker picks up the new bulb.
- One worker screws in the new bulb.
- One worker climbs down the ladder.
- One worker puts away the ladder.
- One worker inspects the lamp to ensure it passes the QA standard.
- One worker signs off the QA result.
Using ten men to change the lightbulb, one can change lightbulbs more effectively. Lightbulb changing factories can easily outperform older lightbulb changing manufactures due to the specialization of every worker.
Of course, once you introduce industrial robots to change the lightbulbs, you can dramatically cut costs by going from a 10 worker arrangement to one involving just three robots and five workers.
(Because only the _initiation_ of force is morally wrong. The use of retaliatory force is always justified.)
Beware: Easily subvertable position. If you punch me in the face and I punch you back that might be considered justified; if you punch me in the face and I murder your whole family, it's decidedly not.
By the way, that money is taken from you for the same reason Microsoft Windows comes with a graphical user interface, even though an operating system is supposed to be just a layer of compatibility-providing services between the hardware and software: Adding value can get you further. For example, I'm a university student in Germany. Germany pays* me to study (for up to 12 semesters) and waives the 500 EUR/semester bullshit tuition** I'd normally have to pay. They do that because I don't have the money to study on my own but am smart enough to attend a university. Figuring that the better educated the people are, the more the country*** can profit off them, Germany pumps money into university students.
Everyone gains: Well-educated people develop technologies that bring money into the country via patents, sales etc. They also better fit today's work market, where specific skills at a high level are necessary. Sure, everyone pays for it, but in the end, the country as a whole profits. Likewise with medicare: By making sure that sick people are not unneccessarily long sick, overall productivity is boosted.
Sure, if one sees a government as a very minimal institution that only exists to ensire the safety of the citizens, then all that is unneccessary fluff, but then again - what's the difference between such a minimalist government and a well-paid mercenary army?
Of course, you could argue that it's not very profitable for a working citizen to provide funding for unemployment programs, homeless shelters etc. That's true. But compassion, while not profitable, is a rather good thing.
* Actually it's a loan, but you only have to pay back 50% - or less, if you finish in time with very good grades. It is, however, tied to lots of red tape, you have to tell them how much money you made two years ago as the basis of how much you get next semester... Still, it's much better than trying to work and study part-time.
** Tuitions were uncommon with German universities, as they are state-funded (even though much of the money usually comes from the industry). However, some time ago our glorious leaders decided that they'd improve the quality of our education by raising mandatory tuitions in all universities - and slashing university funding by approximately the same amount. There are still student protests about the whole thing and I haven't paid any tuition yet because the state of Bremen is currently trying to prove that its tuition model (which discriminates between residents and non-residents) is constitutional. It's a big mess.
*** "Country", not "government"! I'm talking about everyone in the country, not the handful of politicos trying to govern it.
Telling everyone to do it right in the same way, however, is useful. That's what's called a standard.
Why not just create human-readable ballots and count those by hand? The counting doesn't have to be centralized (local candidate-based counting with cross-check is efficient and tamper-resistant), but a standardized procedure and a standardized ballot layout (where applicable) would reduce opportunities to mess with the voting procedure in order to skew the result (cf. butterfly ballots). It's not hard to get those right and since the whole voting procedure consists of a few very simple steps it's trivial to detect someone messing with the system.
(But there is an exploitable adversarial relationship between the various candidates in an election: no candidate, nor any of their aides, trusts any of the other candidates or their aides. If the candidates themselves were hand-counting the ballot papers, they'd have no choice but to declare the true count.)
That's exactly why hand-counting is superior to machine counting: By making the parties sit down together and cross-check their results, one can make fraud very difficult.
> Well, you can. But remember that artificial arms start with a strength of 4 and already cost you one whole essence point. If you want to boost the strength past 7 you'll end up losing another 0.4 essence per strength point, not to mention the space high-level boosts take up.
If you ask me, you're much better off getting artificial muscles. They're one essnce per level, but the strength applies to your whole body and not to a single limb. Or, better yet, go with bioware and get your muscles enhanced. Sure, you're susceptible to stress-related issues, but you don't go blowing out essence points on chrome that won't help you anywhere but in arm wrestling competitions. Plus four points of strength via bioware cost 80.000 bucks, no more than the same in artificial muscles - the artificial arm comes at 110.000 vanilla and 50.000+ per strength upgrade. If you have a high base strength, you'd pay as much for an artificial arm that even matches your strength as for four levels of muscle enhancements and a pain editor. And the prothesis doesn't even help you deal with injuries
Oh, and stay the hell away from Aztech products. Worst drek on the market.
Peace out, chummer. > Jesus_666
Why not solve both problems at once and send them bananaphones? I mean, the bananaphone is just perfect fot those regions. It's the best, beats the rest... Cellular, modular, interactive-odular - you name it, it is it. It'd take some financial strain off them, as well, because they won't need quarters, won't need dimes to call a friend of them. If the people in those regions had bananaphones, they'd call for pizza, they'd call their cat; they'd call the White House, have a chat. It would be commonplace to even see them place calls around the world, asking the operator to give them Beijing-jing-jing-jing.
I really see the bananaphone as the only situation where they can have their phone and eat it too.
A minor character/object/psychopathic murderer from Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels. Effectively a living chest with dozens of small, pink feet. Very protective of its owner, to the point of eating anyone who threatens him. Wikipedia has a rather exhaustive article.
Slashdot Mirror
You can protect yourself against hard drive mirroring by using strong encryption - even if they do mirror the hard drive, all they end up with is a lump of data that'd take them years to crack. However, the TSA ensures that nobody in their right mind will cross the border with encrypted data on the laptop. Thus you either need to transmit all the data via internet (which might not be entirely feasible if it's a lot of data and you don't have the time to wait for it to download) or mail it to the destination (meaning that you have much less control over it until it arrives).
Of course the TSA is making doing business in the States a hassle, so they might reduce the volume of data carried in by foreigners simply by reducing the volume of foreigners coming in. After all, we can also fly out Americans to Europe, which doesn't put our data at the mercy of an opaque agency with a less than stellar reputation.
Strong encryption is classified as a weapon. That's why, for example, South Korean online banking is dependant on ActiveX - because the USA only allowed the export of SSL technology that was limited to 40-bit keys South Korean banks rolled their own encryption format called SEED, which was usually implemented in ActiveX. Since the entire market uses ActiveX-SEED virtually every customer has Internet Explorer, thus there is no need to deploy a non-ActiveX version of SEED etc. etc.
If the USA considers strong encryption to be a weapon for purposes of export, they should consider it a weapon for purposes of the Second Amendment.
OTOH, there are laws stating that the Second Amendment doesn't cover certain kinds of weapon (like everything with a clip size > 10), so they might classify encryption as a weapon, then classify everything past 128-bit keylength as "military encryption technology" and randomly bust people who don't want the DHS to access their banking details. The "antiterrism" lobby certainly isn't above such scumbaggery.
It's a shame that we can't profit from the weak US Dollar but hey, Canada has a cheap currency as well. I think they're less aggressively paranoid at the borders, too. Okay, it's colder than in the States, but at least you don't have to expect that some customs officer steals your laptop.
Just make sure that your flight doesn't make a stop in the States.
One could argue that traveling to the United States while being Muslim/Arabic does count as self-inflicted harm. I'm reminded of the movie Don't Be A Menace To South Central While Drinking Your Juice In The Hood* where the protagonists are arrested for being black on a Wednesday. Being possibly Muslim while crossing the US border is not desired. Of course, not being an Islam suspect still doesn't keep you from getting the full criminal treatment with mugshot and fingerprint. Y'know, because everyone abroad is an evil Commie Nazi terrorist hell-bent on committing crime in the USA.
Let's face it, foreigners aren't particularly welcome in the States, especially when they don't look Christian. At least as far as the borders are concerned. Once you're in people suddenly revert back to the friendly, extroverted, slightly obtrusive Americans everyone knows. When you try to leave the country, however, it's back to hoping you make it past the scary, armed, people-abducting special police.
It really ruins the whole experience to the point where I'm going to stay the hell away from the States for the time being. Going through the current paranoid customs process once was scary and degrading enough.
* Amazingly a Wayan Brothers movie that does contain some good jokes.
It's just for sake of comparison. US Americans are 1/3 less worth than Europeans while one Japanese is worth about 0.01 US American. At least if the humanitarian organisation ECB is to be trusted.
the Google cache has updated. Consider yourself flamed.
Sincerely,
Jesus_666
You're right, the iPhone does have a nice user interface; that is a selling point. Of course, I'm still with the "calling and maybe SMS are everything a phone needs" crowd so I don't really pay attention to interface design - the features I'm likely to use are usually already mapped to a button.
I guess that's an example of how preferences and perception can interact - because I don't need (or want) much functionality, I'm content with a very basic UI and don't immediately see the iPhone's polished UI as the advantage it is in a smartphone context.
By the way, as for UMTS: I'm happy without it, too, but that's because calling people is the only thing I do with my mobile and vanilla GSM already does that. 3G phones will become relevant to me when they start shutting down the 2G networks.
So it would be better to get a handgun permit and take that to the employer?
Depends on what you want from your phone. If you just want a phone, the iPhone is abysmal - a Nokia 1110i beats it on price, size and robustness while being equally good on features. Likewise, if you're in Europe and want to use the UMTS network, the iPhone is a non-competitor. The iPhone apeals exactly to those users who want a stylish smartphone tht doesn't need to do 3G. Of course, once you start dropping requirements like "stylish", the number of alternatives goes up.
The code might be for an internal application. In that case, he wrote an app for internal use that is being superseded by a commercial app (for example because his app doesn't integrate with some other software) and since he thinks that his app could be useful to other people he wants to release it. The company doesn't lose anything because the new open source app would only compete with a product from one of their software vendors.
Yes, I pay money so that those worse off than me can live with something resembling dignity. A community where everyone lives for him/herself is useless - what's the value in having such a community? Protection from outside forces? Stop whining and buy a gun. Protection from inside forces? Ditto. A community only has any worth when being in it is an improvement over not being in it for the majority of its members. Yes, that means that the few rich have to suck it up and divert a small amount of their wealth to the poor. If they don't like it I refer them to "stop whining, get a gun and fend for yourself". There's plenty of small islands they can buy.
Besides, you said that a country is supposed to protect its citizens internally and externally. While you might not be aware of it, widespread poverty tends to breed crime and unrest. Depending on how severe the poverty is, the results can range from the police being overworked (and more expensive to maintain) to extreme parties gaining a foothold (I don't want to invoke Godwin, but poverty and unemployment were important factors in the NSDAP's rise to power) to full-blown riots (the most memorable example involving the destruction of the Bastille). Thus, it's certainly in the country's interest to do something about poverty. Of course catering to that makes you a slave to stability. It's entirely optional, but most people would agree that stability has its advantages.
There is no way not to be a slave to dozens of people, concepts and groups. We need to sustain ourself, so we are slaves to work, either for growing our own food or to making money to pay for it. It goes on from there. Stability, safety, sustenance, health... Not being a slave is impossible. Life sucks that way. You always need to fulfill some kind of obligation somewhere. Complete freedom is a nice concept of paper, but sadly completely incompatible with reality.
So yeah, I'm quite content giving up some of my illusionary freedom if in return I get a society where I don't have to see the poor hunger, where I don't have to see a sharp mind being wasted because education is too expensive, where I don't have to see people die unneccessarily because they can't pay for the treatment. And of course, where I'm reasonably safe from people doing bad things to me. That's what I call civilization. Having quality of life being entirely dependant of one's possessions is just a glorified version of the law of the jungle. Monkeys can do that.
Actually, I have. Which is why I came up with a joke that involves pretending to think that the factory-style way of having a whole bunch of peope do atomic operations is always more efficient than having one person do the job. Some people actually think that way and they tend to be highly paid.
Justice is just an abstract concept. Abstract concepts can be bent. Whether or not you agree with moral relativism, it does apply to peoples.
As for the question how them taking money from me provide me with any value: Well, they do give money to me. Lots of it. Getting a degree in Germany is much cheaper than getting the same degree in the States (I've heard of degrees costing upwards of 100.000 Dollars, which is nothing short of breathtaking) and the quality of our academics is not much lesser. If the university wasn't state-funded I'd end up having a much higher debt after studying than the ~5.000 Euros I'll have now (and I can immediately pay because because I save up 50% of the money the give me whenerer possible). So yeah, I'm quite happy that the federal state of Bremen has an education budget, even though they keep slashing it.
As for the red tape: Yeah, it's tedious, but it does work. The forms are neccessary because the need to know how much money I have - the money is for those without much money, not for those who could study anyway. It could be better, but it's in no way worthless. I'm very grateful for the system because without it I'd have no way of getting a degree without part-time studying, which I don't quite believe in.
In short: I'm in favor of state-sponsoring because I'm not wealthy. I would have had the money to study, but then my father made the mistake of being over 45 and was let go during a "company rejuvenation". A charity won't help me because they're busy helping people who are far worse off than I am. I can't gather some people around me to force the university into educating me; that only works on employers. Either I'd plunge myself into debt (which would probably not work because I don't have any securities) or I'd settle into not attending a university because I can't afford it. Both options are undesirable: If I don't have money I can't pass it into the economy. If I don't study I can't achieve my full potential. Thus, state sponsoring helps me help everyone by making (more) money.
As for Ayn Rand: Maybe I'd agree with her if I had money and liked elitism. Seeing as I don't and I don't, I'm very happy that my country isn't run by Randians.
I fear the day when I enter the job market, because I doubt that the company where I'll work will allow me to use LaTeX instead of whatever tedious text formatter they use. At least TeX's behavior is deterministic.
* Example: I have a form with a field containing a fraction in the format "X/Y". I try to fill ut the field and enter "5/10". Writer turns it into "10.5.1990". You can tell from the format of the date string it generates that I'm not in a locale where using slashes to separate date components is usual. We also don't use M/D/Y but D.M.Y. And I didn't enter a year. So it's pretty far-fetched to interpret that as a date - and it's even more far fetched to interpret a date without a year component as being years ago. So I end up having a nonsensical date in a field where it doesn't belong.
Yeah, I know I can turn it off, but office text editors are full of workflow-destroying stupidities like that. Word's letter wizard, for example, takes your name and address and put them in a beautiful footer that you end up deleting because you don't want it - but is also puts a field saying "ENTER YOUR NAME AND ADDRESS HERE" at the top of the page. Really helpful.
- One worker sets up the ladder.
- One worker climbs up the ladder.
- One worker unscrews the old bulb.
- One worker puts away the old bulb.
- One worker picks up the new bulb.
- One worker screws in the new bulb.
- One worker climbs down the ladder.
- One worker puts away the ladder.
- One worker inspects the lamp to ensure it passes the QA standard.
- One worker signs off the QA result.
Using ten men to change the lightbulb, one can change lightbulbs more effectively. Lightbulb changing factories can easily outperform older lightbulb changing manufactures due to the specialization of every worker.
Of course, once you introduce industrial robots to change the lightbulbs, you can dramatically cut costs by going from a 10 worker arrangement to one involving just three robots and five workers.
By the way, that money is taken from you for the same reason Microsoft Windows comes with a graphical user interface, even though an operating system is supposed to be just a layer of compatibility-providing services between the hardware and software: Adding value can get you further. For example, I'm a university student in Germany. Germany pays* me to study (for up to 12 semesters) and waives the 500 EUR/semester bullshit tuition** I'd normally have to pay. They do that because I don't have the money to study on my own but am smart enough to attend a university. Figuring that the better educated the people are, the more the country*** can profit off them, Germany pumps money into university students.
Everyone gains: Well-educated people develop technologies that bring money into the country via patents, sales etc. They also better fit today's work market, where specific skills at a high level are necessary. Sure, everyone pays for it, but in the end, the country as a whole profits. Likewise with medicare: By making sure that sick people are not unneccessarily long sick, overall productivity is boosted.
Sure, if one sees a government as a very minimal institution that only exists to ensire the safety of the citizens, then all that is unneccessary fluff, but then again - what's the difference between such a minimalist government and a well-paid mercenary army?
Of course, you could argue that it's not very profitable for a working citizen to provide funding for unemployment programs, homeless shelters etc. That's true. But compassion, while not profitable, is a rather good thing.
* Actually it's a loan, but you only have to pay back 50% - or less, if you finish in time with very good grades. It is, however, tied to lots of red tape, you have to tell them how much money you made two years ago as the basis of how much you get next semester... Still, it's much better than trying to work and study part-time.
** Tuitions were uncommon with German universities, as they are state-funded (even though much of the money usually comes from the industry). However, some time ago our glorious leaders decided that they'd improve the quality of our education by raising mandatory tuitions in all universities - and slashing university funding by approximately the same amount. There are still student protests about the whole thing and I haven't paid any tuition yet because the state of Bremen is currently trying to prove that its tuition model (which discriminates between residents and non-residents) is constitutional. It's a big mess.
*** "Country", not "government"! I'm talking about everyone in the country, not the handful of politicos trying to govern it.
Telling everyone to do it right in the same way, however, is useful. That's what's called a standard.
Why not just create human-readable ballots and count those by hand? The counting doesn't have to be centralized (local candidate-based counting with cross-check is efficient and tamper-resistant), but a standardized procedure and a standardized ballot layout (where applicable) would reduce opportunities to mess with the voting procedure in order to skew the result (cf. butterfly ballots). It's not hard to get those right and since the whole voting procedure consists of a few very simple steps it's trivial to detect someone messing with the system.
> Well, you can. But remember that artificial arms start with a strength of 4 and already cost you one whole essence point. If you want to boost the strength past 7 you'll end up losing another 0.4 essence per strength point, not to mention the space high-level boosts take up.
If you ask me, you're much better off getting artificial muscles. They're one essnce per level, but the strength applies to your whole body and not to a single limb. Or, better yet, go with bioware and get your muscles enhanced. Sure, you're susceptible to stress-related issues, but you don't go blowing out essence points on chrome that won't help you anywhere but in arm wrestling competitions. Plus four points of strength via bioware cost 80.000 bucks, no more than the same in artificial muscles - the artificial arm comes at 110.000 vanilla and 50.000+ per strength upgrade. If you have a high base strength, you'd pay as much for an artificial arm that even matches your strength as for four levels of muscle enhancements and a pain editor. And the prothesis doesn't even help you deal with injuries
Oh, and stay the hell away from Aztech products. Worst drek on the market.
Peace out, chummer.
> Jesus_666
Why not solve both problems at once and send them bananaphones? I mean, the bananaphone is just perfect fot those regions. It's the best, beats the rest... Cellular, modular, interactive-odular - you name it, it is it. It'd take some financial strain off them, as well, because they won't need quarters, won't need dimes to call a friend of them. If the people in those regions had bananaphones, they'd call for pizza, they'd call their cat; they'd call the White House, have a chat. It would be commonplace to even see them place calls around the world, asking the operator to give them Beijing-jing-jing-jing.
I really see the bananaphone as the only situation where they can have their phone and eat it too.
A minor character/object/psychopathic murderer from Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels. Effectively a living chest with dozens of small, pink feet. Very protective of its owner, to the point of eating anyone who threatens him. Wikipedia has a rather exhaustive article.
Maybe evil Repli-Jesus.