Right now, the Asian tech industries excel at not innovation but copying and improving upon existing designs which typically originate elsewhere. This is not just a Chinese thing -- look at the Japanese auto industry or Korean flat panel fabs, for example. It's quite a jump to magically switch your entire economy's sweet spot to one that's based on innovation -- in five years, no less -- but I think the biggest thing that the Chinese are missing out on is the *reason* for that innovation. Here in the States, tech isn't government-mandated and government-controlled, we don't fix our currency rate, and, above all else, it's possible to become very, very, VERY rich if you're successful in tech. Let's be honest -- our tech industry takes advantage of human greed (for better and for worse), something that runs contrary to communism at its core. The negative is that we let failing companies fail, jobs are lost, etc., but the positive is that there's actually a real INCENTIVE to innovate.
If you had 100 million dollars, would you put it in Venesuela or North Korea right now?
Neither. I'm sick of seeing my tax dollars going to countries full of people who have been brainwashed into hating us. We have enough problems with poverty etc. right here in the US.
I was gonna mod you down, but I'll be constructive and reply instead.
Before anyone screams conspiracy or defends this person, RTFA. This guy and his two buddies made over $100,000 from advertisements displayed by their little botnet. His motivation was simple . . . money, which last time I checked is no different that that of the spammers that almost every single Slashdotter would like to see ruthlessly executed and buried in an unmarked grave somewhere. The fact that he attacked (probably because of the indiscriminate nature of his botnet) public infrastructure is somewhat irrelevant other than it means it's easier for them to nail him to the wall 'cuz he got too lazy to look after all of the domains he was targeting. I think if we started vigorously prosecuting MORE of these people, and punishing them with jail times such as these, (US-based) botnet attacks would dramatically decline (as would spam). GO AFTER THE MONEY.
Take ASCII versions of the tabs and embed them in the mp3 metadata, along with the lyrics. Once released in the wild via.torrent or your favorite p2p app, it's one-stop shopping for starving guitar players.
If the music biz was serious about embracing tech, they'd be selling these files on iTunes / whatever right now -- you could probably sell them for $1 more than the "regular" version of the.mp3. Instead, they bitch and moan about OLGA, shut it down (again) while giving some bullshit excuse (just say you want the publishing revenue already!), and we're exactly where we were ten years ago -- except now you can get.pdf rips of their "official recorded version" tab books that sell for $24.95 or more on eMule etc. for absolutely nothing.
Now imagine that every attempt your government has made to carve itself out a small piece of the world's ever-shrinking pie of resources and wealth, has failed miserably
Oh, come on. I call absolute bullshit on this. The Saudi Royal family doesn't give half a flying fuck about their countrymen, or double-digit unemployment, or anything else besides oil revenues. PERIOD. They're too busy renting entire casino floors in Vegas filled with Caymus and hot- and cold-running bitches.
As long as the sheiks and mullahs continue to use the West as a scapegoat for internal problems which they've by and large caused on their own, then perhaps regime change -- probably from within -- is indeed the only thing that will make a difference.
Not so sure about that. Here in Maryland, our (Republican) governor budgeted $20,000,000 to allow us to use paper ballots instead of the Diebold crap -- and he was shot down by our State Senate (democrat)and prinicpally by our State Administrator of Elections, who claimed that going back to old-style ballots would "stifle development."
I'm sure you can find the parties flip-flopped in other states. The point is that if a) people actually gave a shit and b) people really understood the issue instead of blindly assuming "computer = good, paper = bad," any cronyist jackass who supported Diebold would get booted stratight out of office next election -- assuming their evil scheme hadn't yet been implemented.;-)
Not trying to minimize what happened to these guys, but everyone needs to bear in mind that according to TFA this latest study was commissioned by one of the victims' lawyers:
Last week Modi received the results of Powell's medical tests, commissioned by his lawyers to establish the extent of the damage the drug has done to him. The assessment has left him in a state of shock.
Again, just another data point. I'm not saying that it isn't true in this case -- but remember that lawyers' first goal -- ALWAYS -- is to make money by successfully representing their clients. Period.
This is extremely debatable, especially if you factor in the percentage of illegal aliens working to build these new homes. Do you have any statistics to back up this claim?
At this point this activity is approaching immorality. I know of few other activities (besides lobbying) which actively make other people poorer for no reason.
Great, so let's try to legislate *your* opinion of what's morally right / wrong, huh? 'Cuz that's worked so well before (gay marriage ban, prohibition / drug war, abortion debate, etc.).
If someone comes up with a solution that doesn't involve taxing the living shit out of everyone or passing assanine laws which don't do anything but boost politicians' poll numbers, then perhaps great numbers of people will take it seriously. Until then . . . people will drive whatever they want until it's, well, too expensive.
I personally prefer the European lifestyle in large built-up cities.
Good for you. Have fun living on top of your neighbors, with constant noise, overcrowding, everything asphalted / concreted over, and paying $2000 / month for a 400 sq. foot apartment. Don't assume that everyone wants to live the way you do just because it your opinion it's "better."
These types of goods are commoditized to the point that no one -- not even Amazon -- will be able to gain significantly better economies of scale than are already present. The margins are just too thin. As others have mentioned, Amazon is already at a disadvantage because of the shipping.
Most of the traditional grocers gave up on trying to compete with Wal-Mart on price long ago and are looking for new ways to differentiate the customer's shopping experience instead. Been in a Wegmans, Whole Foods, or one of the new A & P "Fresh" format stores (A & P Fresh, Waldbaums Fresh etc.)? It's all about ultra-impressive super-clean 100K+ sq. ft. stores, organic foods, in-store cafes, etc. coupled with a progressive (for retailers anyway) use of technology. With many traditional low-end grocers going under, selling off large numbers of stores or re-orging (Winn-Dixie, Food Lion, etc.), the rest are content to let Wal-Mart have the low-income demographic and aim squarely at capturing upper-middle class and above shoppers' dollars. These shoppers have proven that they're willing to pay a bit more for a high-quality shopping experience. Amazon's approach will add some more content to their own store (the ultra-important "long tail") but will have little effect on the grocery biz.
Sorry, but the CAPTCHA plug-ins I've used with Word Press etc. are *highly* effective. Where people typically screw up in their implementation is to use the default dictionary word list which ships with them. The majority of CAPTCHA-defeating scripts out there today use a dictionary attack rather than successfully decyphering the CAPTCHA image. If one sets the CAPTCHA to generate a string of random letters rather than a word from the stock word list, the amount of comment spam posted drops dramatically.
Until someone comes up with a better alternative to defeating comment spam, I will continue to use CAPTCHAs, as will many, many others -- I just don't have time to sift through and delete hundreds / thousands of comments per day.
An interesting thought -- Slashdot seems to be highly resistant to comment spam, but I suspect this is due to a relatively high percentage of logged-in users and an aggressive subnet blacklist policy.
C'mon . . . lots of folks have an iPod and have never purchased a single song from the iTunes store. The reason iPod was so successful was that it was the first portable music player with mainstream appeal which let folks play non-DRM'd music on it. If we would have been forced to re-encode our stuff (a la Sony) people would have never touched it, and Apple knew this. (Sony probably knew that too, but their label / content arm wouldn't stand for DRM-free players) The other part of mainstream appeal is the iTunes software -- highly intuitive for non-geeks, extremely fast, no forced advertising / spyware, etc. It just works the way it's supposed to.
I went there and all of a sudden a I got big popup saying "YOUR PWNED LUSER MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!" and now my PC plays weird garage-band music whenever I restart it. Thanks!
Use it to pick up where Blue Security left off . . . use a grid-based app to blast "Pharmamaster" and all of the other spam-douche bags off the fucking planet . . . in a legal way compliant to CAN-SPAM, of course.;-)
Uhhhh . . . maybe I'm missing something here, but why would anyone use public transportation if you're going to start giving them free gas? I thought the whole point of the gas tax was to incent people to drive less, not more.
Why not? The govt already controls the prices of everything buy subsidising virtually every industry in the nation. Everything you eat has been subsidized, every piece of paper or scrap of wood, every mineral, everything. There is already a tax on gasoline too.
If these taxes had "worked" -- that is, been directed at the problem / issue they were originally implemented to address -- I'd probably be inclined to agree with you. But they haven't. That's why the toll over the Verazanno Narrows Bridge is $9. Obviously the bridge doesn't cost $9 per car to maintain -- but over the years NYC has become so dependent on using that tax revenue for other things that now they've got no choice but to continue to increase the toll. Do you think New Yorkers really like having to fork over $9 to cross the bridge? (And this is in a US city where public transportation asked actually been somewhat successful.) You cannot change the fact that everywhere, in every city, there will always be people who have to drive, for whatever reason -- even with as nightmarish an experience as traffic in NYC. The massive daily traffic jams on the aforementioned bridge attest to the fact that, even at $9 a car, people continue to use the bridge. I doubt you'd see much of a reduction even at twice the price. The difference is that after awhile, you're gouging a captive audience simply because you have the power to do so.
Government (from the Feds down to municipal) has shown us time and again how wasteful it is with our tax money. Just as we're asked to make due with less gas, the government should be forced to do more with less tax revenue. Necessity is the mother of invention.
Seven reasons boil down to these two. Nobody is brave enough, nobody is selfless enough.
That's certainly one way to interpret it. However, just because you don't like the reasons doesn't make them any less true. As a wise sandwich board once proclaimed, "Communism doesn't work 'cuz people want to own stuff."
A gradual raising of gas taxes until pump prices are around $7/gallon, with the money raised being pumped into (free) public transport would achieve precisely that.
Yeah, that's what we need -- more artificial controls by the government on commodities.
Your plan won't work for several reasons:
$7 a gallon gas will absolutely destroy the economic well-being of the lower and lower-middle class workers in our society, but upper-middle and upper class workers will continue to drive the same as they did before.
The US isn't Europe -- we're too spread out for public transportation to be a viable option for a significant portion of the population. Atlanta and LA are perfect examples of this.
You're assuming that the government will take the tax revenue from the gas tax and spend all of it on public transportation / alternative energy / whatever it was actually intended for. I guarantee such a new tax fund, much like social security and other well-meaning initiatives before it, will be raided to no end so that very little of our taxes actually end up going to the develpment of public transportation.
As much as they'd love the revenue, no elected official in their right mind would ever advocate such a tax. There's no faster way to commit political suicide.
Nope, this H-Prize approach is the best way, I think -- let our own greed be the catalyst for innovation. I think you'll only see true innovation in alternative energy when a) shortening supplies naturally cause current technology to no longer be a viable option and b) the economic carrot presented by a) becomes more attractive to big energy companies than their current oil business.
A physical security system such as The Club is the way to go, both standalone and as a complement to an electronic system. I've used it for years on both inexpensive and expensive vehicles. It's inexpensive and IT WORKS.
Re:Annoyance as a marketing technique?
on
Explorer Destroyer
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· Score: 3, Funny
For example, whenever I meet militant PETA people I really want to go kill baby bunnies, skin them, and wear their bloody firs as a coat... and I'm vegetarian!
My argument exactly . . . if we're not supposed to eat animals then why are they made of meat?;-)
The longest snipe was 2,430m by Master Corporal Arron Perry of the Canadian armed forces on a moving target (a moving target as well).
Note that, although that's an amazing feat in and of itself, it was Perry's second shot on the target. US Marine Gunnery Sergeant Carlos N. Hathcock's 2500 yard confirmed kill with a.50 caliber Browning rifle (the previous record holder) was made on the first shot.
Slashdot Mirror
Right now, the Asian tech industries excel at not innovation but copying and improving upon existing designs which typically originate elsewhere. This is not just a Chinese thing -- look at the Japanese auto industry or Korean flat panel fabs, for example. It's quite a jump to magically switch your entire economy's sweet spot to one that's based on innovation -- in five years, no less -- but I think the biggest thing that the Chinese are missing out on is the *reason* for that innovation. Here in the States, tech isn't government-mandated and government-controlled, we don't fix our currency rate, and, above all else, it's possible to become very, very, VERY rich if you're successful in tech. Let's be honest -- our tech industry takes advantage of human greed (for better and for worse), something that runs contrary to communism at its core. The negative is that we let failing companies fail, jobs are lost, etc., but the positive is that there's actually a real INCENTIVE to innovate.
Whereas a cheater's sort of like a leopard.
Correct. It's very similar to the other Southern Appalachian big cat, the lyin'.
If you had 100 million dollars, would you put it in Venesuela or North Korea right now?
Neither. I'm sick of seeing my tax dollars going to countries full of people who have been brainwashed into hating us. We have enough problems with poverty etc. right here in the US.
I was gonna mod you down, but I'll be constructive and reply instead.
Before anyone screams conspiracy or defends this person, RTFA. This guy and his two buddies made over $100,000 from advertisements displayed by their little botnet. His motivation was simple . . . money, which last time I checked is no different that that of the spammers that almost every single Slashdotter would like to see ruthlessly executed and buried in an unmarked grave somewhere. The fact that he attacked (probably because of the indiscriminate nature of his botnet) public infrastructure is somewhat irrelevant other than it means it's easier for them to nail him to the wall 'cuz he got too lazy to look after all of the domains he was targeting. I think if we started vigorously prosecuting MORE of these people, and punishing them with jail times such as these, (US-based) botnet attacks would dramatically decline (as would spam). GO AFTER THE MONEY.
He did, but Slashdot's AI compressed it for him.
:-D
Take ASCII versions of the tabs and embed them in the mp3 metadata, along with the lyrics. Once released in the wild via .torrent or your favorite p2p app, it's one-stop shopping for starving guitar players.
If the music biz was serious about embracing tech, they'd be selling these files on iTunes / whatever right now -- you could probably sell them for $1 more than the "regular" version of the .mp3. Instead, they bitch and moan about OLGA, shut it down (again) while giving some bullshit excuse (just say you want the publishing revenue already!), and we're exactly where we were ten years ago -- except now you can get .pdf rips of their "official recorded version" tab books that sell for $24.95 or more on eMule etc. for absolutely nothing.
Idiots.
Now imagine that every attempt your government has made to carve itself out a small piece of the world's ever-shrinking pie of resources and wealth, has failed miserably
Oh, come on. I call absolute bullshit on this. The Saudi Royal family doesn't give half a flying fuck about their countrymen, or double-digit unemployment, or anything else besides oil revenues. PERIOD. They're too busy renting entire casino floors in Vegas filled with Caymus and hot- and cold-running bitches.
As long as the sheiks and mullahs continue to use the West as a scapegoat for internal problems which they've by and large caused on their own, then perhaps regime change -- probably from within -- is indeed the only thing that will make a difference.
Not so sure about that. Here in Maryland, our (Republican) governor budgeted $20,000,000 to allow us to use paper ballots instead of the Diebold crap -- and he was shot down by our State Senate (democrat)and prinicpally by our State Administrator of Elections, who claimed that going back to old-style ballots would "stifle development."
I'm sure you can find the parties flip-flopped in other states. The point is that if a) people actually gave a shit and b) people really understood the issue instead of blindly assuming "computer = good, paper = bad," any cronyist jackass who supported Diebold would get booted stratight out of office next election -- assuming their evil scheme hadn't yet been implemented. ;-)
Not trying to minimize what happened to these guys, but everyone needs to bear in mind that according to TFA this latest study was commissioned by one of the victims' lawyers:
Last week Modi received the results of Powell's medical tests, commissioned by his lawyers to establish the extent of the damage the drug has done to him. The assessment has left him in a state of shock.
Again, just another data point. I'm not saying that it isn't true in this case -- but remember that lawyers' first goal -- ALWAYS -- is to make money by successfully representing their clients. Period.
This is extremely debatable, especially if you factor in the percentage of illegal aliens working to build these new homes. Do you have any statistics to back up this claim?
Yeah, too bad all of that "infrastructure" spending hasn't helped their 9.1% unemployment rate.
At this point this activity is approaching immorality. I know of few other activities (besides lobbying) which actively make other people poorer for no reason.
Great, so let's try to legislate *your* opinion of what's morally right / wrong, huh? 'Cuz that's worked so well before (gay marriage ban, prohibition / drug war, abortion debate, etc.).
If someone comes up with a solution that doesn't involve taxing the living shit out of everyone or passing assanine laws which don't do anything but boost politicians' poll numbers, then perhaps great numbers of people will take it seriously. Until then . . . people will drive whatever they want until it's, well, too expensive.
that sounds like a job for a client-side application
Yeah, my buddy turned me on to this great FREE program called Cool Web Search . . . it keeps track of all of my passwords too!
On another note -- does anyone know why my PC runs so slow now? I think there's something wrong with my Yahoo.
I personally prefer the European lifestyle in large built-up cities.
Good for you. Have fun living on top of your neighbors, with constant noise, overcrowding, everything asphalted / concreted over, and paying $2000 / month for a 400 sq. foot apartment. Don't assume that everyone wants to live the way you do just because it your opinion it's "better."
These types of goods are commoditized to the point that no one -- not even Amazon -- will be able to gain significantly better economies of scale than are already present. The margins are just too thin. As others have mentioned, Amazon is already at a disadvantage because of the shipping.
Most of the traditional grocers gave up on trying to compete with Wal-Mart on price long ago and are looking for new ways to differentiate the customer's shopping experience instead. Been in a Wegmans, Whole Foods, or one of the new A & P "Fresh" format stores (A & P Fresh, Waldbaums Fresh etc.)? It's all about ultra-impressive super-clean 100K+ sq. ft. stores, organic foods, in-store cafes, etc. coupled with a progressive (for retailers anyway) use of technology. With many traditional low-end grocers going under, selling off large numbers of stores or re-orging (Winn-Dixie, Food Lion, etc.), the rest are content to let Wal-Mart have the low-income demographic and aim squarely at capturing upper-middle class and above shoppers' dollars. These shoppers have proven that they're willing to pay a bit more for a high-quality shopping experience. Amazon's approach will add some more content to their own store (the ultra-important "long tail") but will have little effect on the grocery biz.
Disclaimer: I work for a retail software vendor.
Sorry, but the CAPTCHA plug-ins I've used with Word Press etc. are *highly* effective. Where people typically screw up in their implementation is to use the default dictionary word list which ships with them. The majority of CAPTCHA-defeating scripts out there today use a dictionary attack rather than successfully decyphering the CAPTCHA image. If one sets the CAPTCHA to generate a string of random letters rather than a word from the stock word list, the amount of comment spam posted drops dramatically.
Until someone comes up with a better alternative to defeating comment spam, I will continue to use CAPTCHAs, as will many, many others -- I just don't have time to sift through and delete hundreds / thousands of comments per day.
An interesting thought -- Slashdot seems to be highly resistant to comment spam, but I suspect this is due to a relatively high percentage of logged-in users and an aggressive subnet blacklist policy.
C'mon . . . lots of folks have an iPod and have never purchased a single song from the iTunes store. The reason iPod was so successful was that it was the first portable music player with mainstream appeal which let folks play non-DRM'd music on it. If we would have been forced to re-encode our stuff (a la Sony) people would have never touched it, and Apple knew this. (Sony probably knew that too, but their label / content arm wouldn't stand for DRM-free players) The other part of mainstream appeal is the iTunes software -- highly intuitive for non-geeks, extremely fast, no forced advertising / spyware, etc. It just works the way it's supposed to.
http://www.secureyourcomputer.org/
I went there and all of a sudden a I got big popup saying "YOUR PWNED LUSER MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!" and now my PC plays weird garage-band music whenever I restart it. Thanks!
Use it to pick up where Blue Security left off . . . use a grid-based app to blast "Pharmamaster" and all of the other spam-douche bags off the fucking planet . . . in a legal way compliant to CAN-SPAM, of course. ;-)
Uhhhh . . . maybe I'm missing something here, but why would anyone use public transportation if you're going to start giving them free gas? I thought the whole point of the gas tax was to incent people to drive less, not more.
Why not? The govt already controls the prices of everything buy subsidising virtually every industry in the nation. Everything you eat has been subsidized, every piece of paper or scrap of wood, every mineral, everything. There is already a tax on gasoline too.
If these taxes had "worked" -- that is, been directed at the problem / issue they were originally implemented to address -- I'd probably be inclined to agree with you. But they haven't. That's why the toll over the Verazanno Narrows Bridge is $9. Obviously the bridge doesn't cost $9 per car to maintain -- but over the years NYC has become so dependent on using that tax revenue for other things that now they've got no choice but to continue to increase the toll. Do you think New Yorkers really like having to fork over $9 to cross the bridge? (And this is in a US city where public transportation asked actually been somewhat successful.) You cannot change the fact that everywhere, in every city, there will always be people who have to drive, for whatever reason -- even with as nightmarish an experience as traffic in NYC. The massive daily traffic jams on the aforementioned bridge attest to the fact that, even at $9 a car, people continue to use the bridge. I doubt you'd see much of a reduction even at twice the price. The difference is that after awhile, you're gouging a captive audience simply because you have the power to do so.
Government (from the Feds down to municipal) has shown us time and again how wasteful it is with our tax money. Just as we're asked to make due with less gas, the government should be forced to do more with less tax revenue. Necessity is the mother of invention.
Seven reasons boil down to these two. Nobody is brave enough, nobody is selfless enough.
That's certainly one way to interpret it. However, just because you don't like the reasons doesn't make them any less true. As a wise sandwich board once proclaimed, "Communism doesn't work 'cuz people want to own stuff."
A gradual raising of gas taxes until pump prices are around $7/gallon, with the money raised being pumped into (free) public transport would achieve precisely that.
Yeah, that's what we need -- more artificial controls by the government on commodities.
Your plan won't work for several reasons:
Nope, this H-Prize approach is the best way, I think -- let our own greed be the catalyst for innovation. I think you'll only see true innovation in alternative energy when a) shortening supplies naturally cause current technology to no longer be a viable option and b) the economic carrot presented by a) becomes more attractive to big energy companies than their current oil business.
A physical security system such as The Club is the way to go, both standalone and as a complement to an electronic system. I've used it for years on both inexpensive and expensive vehicles. It's inexpensive and IT WORKS.
For example, whenever I meet militant PETA people I really want to go kill baby bunnies, skin them, and wear their bloody firs as a coat... and I'm vegetarian!
My argument exactly . . . if we're not supposed to eat animals then why are they made of meat? ;-)
The longest snipe was 2,430m by Master Corporal Arron Perry of the Canadian armed forces on a moving target (a moving target as well).
Note that, although that's an amazing feat in and of itself, it was Perry's second shot on the target. US Marine Gunnery Sergeant Carlos N. Hathcock's 2500 yard confirmed kill with a .50 caliber Browning rifle (the previous record holder) was made on the first shot.