"I think you misuse the term fascism. I agree with what you say, but it is more material coersion (blackmail?) than strict authoritarian rule that corporations exersize."
Fascism is notorious for being backed by corprate interests. Germany's great Ruhr industrialists, especially the Thyssen family, helped put the Nazis in power because they thought it would be good for business and because they knew they could count on them break union, communism and get their work force in line. George W.'s dad Prescott was the U.S. banker for the Thyssen family during the time they were bankrolling the Nazi rise.
Fascism tends to be extremely anti labor, anti union, anti worker, anti Communism and pro business. Authoritarianism is often considered good for business because its a system that produces a work force that is subservient and productive for fear of the consequences if they aren't. Workers aren't likely to complain about wages or working conditions, or attempt to unionize in a Fascist sate. Taken to the extreme, which it has been, you put millions of undesirable people in to concentration camps and make them work for nothing and give them barely enough to eat to stay alive and companies profit on basically free labor, and lots of German companies did profit off concentration camp labor. There is a rising trend in the U.S. to use America's huge and growing prison population as cheap labor for big American companies. Microsoft uses cheap prison labor at Washington's Twin River Correction Center to package its products.
But Fascism is not really a free market kind of pro business government. Fascist governments intervene massively in the economy and pick a lot of winners and losers. Surprise, surprise they often pick the winners from among loyal party members and big financial supporters. Life as a businessmen in a Fascist state is extremely good if you stay in favor with the party. You can make money, with state help, without even trying. The only danger is the party and the state can as easily turn on you and destroy you. Fritz Thyssen had to flee from the Nazi's eventually.
The system in the U.S. is definitely exhibiting Fascist tendencies. There is an excessively close linkage between the political parties and corprate interests, and the government is exerting vastly more influence in the economy than it should if this were really a free market economy like the Republicans keep lying and trying to say it is.
Another Fascist tendency is extreme fondness for using military force to resolve international disputes. That is the U.S. in spades. Aggressive warfare, invasion of countries who haven't attacked or even really threatened you, like Grenada, Panama and Iraq is a really strong indicator of a Fascist regime. If you don't like some other country the Fascist solution is to invade them and change them to a friendly regime. Saddam was a Fascist in spades and that was his solution to Kuwait and Iran.
Is the U.S. a Fascist state at the level of Germany or Italy in the 30's, obviously not, but our government, whether it be Republican or Democrat controlled is trending more that direction, than any other direction, every day. We certainly aren't trending towards liberal, peace loving, democracy, and have turned in to a massively pro business society with little regard for the well being of working people. Workers are now a commodity to be outsourced to the cheapest labor market where possible, or when its not to fill the job with easily exploited and underpaid illegals. The only real growth industries left are in health care and government, especially for war making.
Second life is another good example though I haven't tried it and am not sure how many people are actually engaged with it. Its good in terms of its limited ability to allow users to upload their content, but I don't think it has the massive audience The Sims or WOW have. It sounds as though their economy, like most economies has some risks and issues.
"It is not only OK to help Chineese people find freedom and liberty, it is our duty as indivduals irrespective of US policy."
Dude....
The U.S. government is operating secretive prisons in Eastern Europe and not so secretively in Guantanamo where they are holding people without charge or trail, and apparently in many cases engaged in low grade or maybe even high grade torture.
The U.S. government has one of the largest per capita prison populations in the world. I think some place like Rwanda was number 1 in the wake of a genocidal war but the U.S. is like #2 or #3. A big percentage of those people are doing hard time for drug related antisocial behavior.
The U.S. government apparently is increasingly piping massive amounts of digital communication in to the NSA where they are largely able to spy on whatever they feel like since there is very little judicial oversight now since the Bush administration circumvented the FISA court.
There is a small army of FBI and local police monitoring chat rooms and Internet traffic looking for sexual predators or engaging in maybe just people engaging in inappropriately suggestive conversation. It is a nightly hot topic on the news that we have to crack down on MySpace to "SAVE THE CHILDREN". As nearly as I can tell if a 19 year old boy tries to strike up a romantic involvement with a 16 year old girl on the Internet there is a risk he will be arrested in an FBI sting or put on the TV in a sting by some TV news organization looking for some sensational reality TV.
All in all this is basically the same kind of repression, spying, censorship and social standards enforcement as that the Chinese are doing, the only thing that is different is the scope and the degree.
True, the Chinese are more rabid about supressing discussion of their one party state, Democracy or Freedom. In the U.S. they let you rant about it but there is very little you can do to change it. We have a two party state, both parties suck, both are massively corrupt, are nearly indistinguishable from each other now, and there is apparently nothing anyone can do about it since those two parties have effectively prevented any 3rd party from getting in to the game in a serious way. We have an illusion of choice in a two party state but our government really isn't better than a one party state anymore.
We have a lot of freedom in our constitution, and more than the Chinese have, but again the U.S. government is slowly stripping it away in the name of "The War on Terrorism", "The War on Drugs", "The War on Predators". In order to make us safe the U.S. government two is seeking to stamp out socially unacceptable behavior, just like the Chinese, and most Americans seem glad to surrender their freedoms in exchange for an illusion of safety and security.
One of the big knocks against China is they would seize people's property and give it to developer cronies of the party. Well recently the Supreme Court authorized seizing people homes to turn them over to a drug company to build a new office complex. So now the U.S. has the same precedent in place, that often is cited as one of China's most repressive policies, the U.S. just hasn't exercised it much or as heavy handedly yet.
All in all I wouldn't get all holier than thou about how bad the Chinese are and how good the U.S. is. Both the Chinese and the U.S., and while we are at it Signapore, Russia, Israel and host of other countries today are tilting towards Fascism, the only issue worth discussing is the pace, degree and scope of that tilt or if it will end before we end up with an entire planet dominated by Fascism because Fascism is good for business. What China is doing isn't Communism or a new Cultural revolution. It is just Fascism as they seek to impose an orderly social order to enhance their economic prosperity.
We do have a 3D web now so they were right, in fact we've had if for like 5 years with Everquest being one of the earliest incarnations:) It just isn't in the form of lame VRML objects on a web page you spin around.
It comes in the form of persistent worlds like World of Warcraft, EQ the Sims or not so persistent ones like Battlefield 2 and Halo. This is the infancy of the 3D web envisioned in works like Snowcrash with people adopting persistent online persona, avatars if you like. You couple it with ventrillo it is an ENORMOUSLY powerful tool for online communication and forming of long distance social and business relationships.
One thing that is missing is you have a very limited ability to introduce your own 3D content in to these worlds, being mostly confined to picking wardrobe and hair styles from a predefined set. If I recall the world in Snowcrash was a lot more dynamic, complex and interesting.
The big issue is what is the actual value in it other than the online socializing and entertaining diversion. The problem with online worlds like WOW is they are massive time sinks and produce nothing of real value, and eventually get old. Well.... except for the fact there are people who sells accounts for hundreds of dollars and a small army of, in particular Chinese, farmers who are selling WOW gold for real dollars or charging people for leveling services and making a living at it if you live in a country where the average annual salary is in the hundreds of dollars.
So in fact we have a 3D web with a real economy and making real money.
An inherent problem is what happens if we were all to disappear in to these online persona for large amounts of time. Can our world survive if we all move in to virtual worlds and forget to make things in the real world, or forget to eat or pay rent in meatspace? If you could take online worlds to a new level where you are exchanging real information of real value or produce real economic value you might have something. I just don't quite see how you do that though.
In the distant sci-fiesque world we might end up with robots doing most of the growing food and goods we need in meatspace and humans could disappear in to elaborate 3D worlds to escape the monotony of meatspace. The problem with 3D worlds now is they are extremely static and eventually boring. The only real dynamics and drama comes from interacting with other humans there. If you could get AI's to help generate more 3D contant and make it a more dynamic experience could you move in to a virtual world, have it stay fresh and interesting, especially operating without the constraints of our physical world. The appeal of roleplaying games are they are a great escape from the monotony of a 40 hour a week in week out job.
In some respects you already see buying and selling move entirely in to online worlds. Ebay is practically already there, its just a little boring of interface, while the auction house in WOW is a wonderful way to buy and sell goods at a furious pace. I imagine most commodity and stock traders are basically working in 2D online worlds full time now already.
"I would say that there would be a sizeable market for quality MIPS-workstations that run Linux"
Really.... why? MIPS CPU's still have a place in the embedded market, maybe, though I'm not sure I wouldn't pick ARM instead.
In the workstation market they are a doormat to Intel and AMD these days. SGI cratered in the workstation business years ago because they bet everything on MIPS and they simply didn't have the resources to keep MIPS competitive with better funded rivals. Oh and then they bet on Itanium which is for the most part completely useless in workstations too, being only good for some supercomputing application.
SGI machines, apart from the CPU had some nice architectural innovations, they were often ahead of their time during their glory days, but those innovations were EXPENSIVE and when coupled with a CPU that was frequently a poor performer they completely failed outside of niche markets. The end result is they were smoked in most large markets and were left clinging to niche's where their machines had specialized capabilities most hardware makers wouldn't serve, because the ROI was too low. Those niche markets unfortunately are small and getting smaller and not enough to sustain a company. Some of the stuff Discrete does still needs them, the video capabilities in the O2 are still cool, their Itanium supercomputers are good for some codes, but no one in their right mind would use SGI/MIPS workstations for CAD or animation anymore, or most other mainstream workstation markets. They are like putting a boat anchor around a workstation user's neck, which is why all the big animation studios abandoned them at great expense, and why no one in CAD would give them a second thought.
Really if you want a nice workstation to run Linux on you would be light years better off getting a nice Athlon or Core Duo and an ATI or Nvidia graphics card. You will save yourself a ton of money and it will smoke anything running a MIPS CPU.
The bottomline on SGI is they spent way too much time on R&D, redesigning every workstation from scratch, and in fact designing 3 different tiers from scratch each generation(high, mid and low end). They failed to notice when the business they were in commoditized. When IA32 processors and commodity graphic cards started making leaps in price and performance every 6 months or a year, and it took SGI 2+ years to make incremental advances you can do the math yourself and realize SGI was left in the dust.
If you want to spur innovation you need to offer the million dollar prizes Google offers to its employees who come up with winning ideas. People will go all out to innovate if there is a million dollars of FU money at the end of the rainbow.
If you just hire a small army of people working for five or low six figure salaries there is almost no assurance you will get anything innovative out of them at all. No one has an incentive to come up with something amazing and just turn it over to Gates and Balmer, to get richer off of, in exchange for their biweekly paycheck that they would get anyway.
A lot of innovation does come out of reseach labs of big companies where they give researchers good salaries and turn them loose to play for years, but I wager way more innovation comes a lot faster out of small startups and from individuals who have a chance at a big payoff for a big gamble.
Uh, all that really shows is they have an entrenched monopoly, or actually two entrenched monopolies, Windows and Office, and entrenched monopolies are inherently profitable for three reasons:
A. The have little or no competition so they can charge whatever they feel like for their product
B. Their product is preinstalled on most new computers sold on the planet and so they get a tax for every machine so shipped.
C. Developing software is expensive but manufacturing and shipping it costs next to nothing, especially when manufacturers preinstall it for you so once you factor out the development and support costs, everthing else is gravy and in the volumes they ship they get a lot of gravy.
Microsoft may be dead in the water as far as innovation goes but their entrenched monopoly will keep them rich for a long time so there really is no correlation between these two issues.
One has to wonder what kind of wonderful stuff an organization like PARC, Google or MIT labs could turn out if they had Microsoft's R&D budget. Microsoft does in fact innovate very little for the amount they spend so in a way that is a kind of dead in the water. My first impression of Microsoft Research is they churn out huge volumes of research papers, and dominate many conferences, but very little of it seems to make the jump in to products that change people's lives.
The issue isn't really whether the letter is a fake or not. The issue is whether George W. shirked his National Guard duty. The preponderance of circumstantial evidence is he did. He went to Alabama to work on a political campaign and as nearly as anyone can tell just just left, abandoning his Texas guard duty and the Texas National Guard approved the transfer to Alabama after the fact, not before he moved like ordinary guardsmen. In Alabama he was notorious for partying drugs and womanizing. He was trained as a fighter pilot at great expense and moved to an Alabama guard unit where he couldn't fly.
The circumstantial evidence is also that he shirked a flight physical which also grounded him rendering him useless as a pilot and probably also should have resulted in him being transfered to regular Army duty and Vietnam having not met his guard duty.
And finally he apparently shirked his guard service all together when he went to Harvard Business school before his tour was done.
There should be a paper trail a mile long showing all this dereliction of duty but it is mostly missing which frustrates a lot of people who want the Bush family held to account. That is the story. The Bush family concealed dereliction of duty by a black sheep of a son who went on to become President, though he was uniquely unqualified for the job, and who is now cavalierly sending today's young people to die in a war in Iraq likewise based on a web of lies, a war his dad was wise enough to avoid because he knew it would be an ethnic and religious quagmire.
The facts are its almost a certainty George W. shirked his guard responsibilities. He may well have refused a physical which lead to him being grounded which is a bad thing for a trained pilot, and he may have ducked it for fear his cocaine use would be detected.
Its also a fact that all the evidence to prove it has disappeared.
So what do you do in the case where someone who did wrong was successful in destroying all the evidence. He gets away with it. By your standard if Nixon and the plumbers had only been a little better at their coverup, or Woodward and Bernstein a little less persistent in their investigation, or if Deep Throat hadn't put his neck on the line, Nixon would have gotten away with subverting our government and it would have been OK.
George W.'s once exceptional political skill has been his ability to cover up his embarrassing past and getting away with it. The cocaine use (and probably arrest in Texas for it) that was expunged from his record thanks to his dad's power in Texas, his out of control alcoholism, and the fact that not only did he duck the war in Vietnam but he also shirked his National Guard service which was the condition for avoiding the draft. Again his family's connections secured him a spot in the Texas Air National country club though he did supremely bad on the testing and he was picked over people far more deserving.
There is just immense irony in a spoiled rich kid using the National Guard to duck his generations war, and not even fulfilling his limited obligations, while he is sending this generation's National Guard to die in Iraq wholesale.
"Now that's a reputable source!"
As a matter of fact she is, since she is one of the few people that was around when George W. ducked his guard service, who is still alive and still willing to talk.
"When Cronkite read the number of soldiers killed in Vietnam he was lionized for telling the truth"
In fact the country had already largely turned on the Vietnam war by the time he acted. It would have been a bit braver if he had exposed Vietnam as a failed policy a few years earlier. Cronkite did help take down LBJ but the war continued on for another 5 years before it was lost, so he didn't really make much of a difference.
In some respects it feels kind of like Iraq where the media didn't let out a whimper when the foundation was laid for the bloody and expensive disaster, they waited until it was obviously a bloody mistake and now they are piling on against it now that its too late to do anything about it (i.e. the two options now being stay the course or withdraw and watch Iraq explode in civil war).
"When Edward R. Murrow brought down McCarthy he was lionized."
On Murrow you are totally misrepresenting reality. Murrow, Friendly, "See it Now" and others at CBS paid a dear price for what they did.
Don Hollenbeck, was another CBS news anchor who lauded Murrow's attack on McCarthy on air. He was eviscerated by right wing editorials for the next 3 months and branded as a communist. He then committed suicide in a gas oven.
Murrow and Friendly continued attacking sacred cows in that 1954-1955 season, including an expose on a Texas land scandal that infuriated their main sponsor, Alcoa, which pulled their funding and put the nail in the coffin for "See it Now".
Many of the people involved in the McCarthy expose were laid off.
Walter Pally and CBS corporate felt Murrow and Friendly overstepped their bounds on McCarthy and throughout their controversial 1954-1955 season and that they were making news rather than reporting it. They pulled See It Now from their prime time slot and stuck them on Sunday afternoon in a form of putting them out to pasture as they ran out their contract.
Murrow eventually became completely disillusioned with TV news, precisely because of the pressures to make it entertaining, profitable, to avoid controversy and to avoid alienating corprate sponsors.
What Murrow and Friendly did was brave beyond belief but the retaliation that followed created a precedent that served to discourage journalists and networks from attacking the power that be, especially when it involved their sponsors.
In a more recent CBS precedent there is Dan Rather's recent attempt to expose George W's borderline criminal National Guard record. Unfortunately they relied on a forged letter to support their story which was wrong. But... it is likely the forged letter was essentially accurate, the commanding officers secretary said its content was quite plausible. Its just most of the incriminating evidence in his record was most probably purged by Bush operatives, something that was especiallay easy to do when Bush was governor of Texas and commander in chief of the Texas national guard. Rather was of course driven out of the CBS anchor chair and the producer was fired.
"they will hire some real reporters and we will receive some real news"
It would run completely counter to how news networks work today. They are competing for audience with 50 other TV channels, games, internet, etc. The only successful news shows are going to be the most sensationalist ones, pandering to what their audience wants to see, and most of their audience wants to see celebrity scandals. Most audience also have a massive case of cognitive dissonance, they want their news to reinforce their world view not disrupt it. Thats why Fox is the #1 cable network, lots of people watch Fox because Fox says what they want to hear, America #1 in particular.
Journalists can only attack Presidents when their poll numbers are in the toilet because then they know the majority of their audience wants them to attack the President then. When a President's poll numbers are riding high they generally dont touch them. Journalists are at the head of the like supportinh going to war as long as their is a patriotic fervor whipped up for it, and then journalists can turn against the war when it turns long, bloody and costly and the public has already started to turn on it, like Cronkite did.
Uh... the point you missed is that the Shake team has apparently been working on Aperture and was the team being...shaken.... up here, lol.
Just curious if these people have been working on both Shake and Aperture which might be an indicator of why they've had quality problems since having one team working on two major products must have led to some serious focus and burn out problems.
I'm wondering if Shake had been put on life support while their team was off fiddling with Aperture.
Just because Apple is still selling Shake doesn't mean its still being being actively developed versus minimal bug fixes by a skeleton team.
It is at times an exceedingly good series and certainly better than most but it did have some really gaping holes in the plot. The most distracting one being that it was so IMPOSSIBLE to distinguish Cylons from humans BUT they had glowing spines, data ports in their arms you could plug fiber optic networks in to, beyond human strength, and they tended to turn in to jelly in ion storms like the one around the munitions depot in the opening movie. Chances are a basic MRI or even an autopsy would be enough to show these basic physiology differences. So either Cylons were entirely based on human DNA and physiology, with only differently wired brains, or they only superficially resembled humans and would be relatively easy to detect (without the need for Plutonium). You can't have "identical to humans" but wildly different from humans at the same time. So much of the post 9/11 "paranoia" theme in the series is predicated on this inability to detect them but then at other times its predicated on all these "unique" abilities the Cylons had.
The series also pretty much lost me when they sent Starbuck to retrieve the cheesy, prop, golden arrow from Caprica.
Just curios what happened to the original Shake which was so popular for compositing pipelines at animation studios, on Linux in particular. Is it largely abandoned and did Apple expect them to migrate to Aperture on OSX.
As I said you can make a good living at it, chances are you are never going to get rich working for other people doing it, unless you write some truly amazing software and are skillful in business negotiations with your employer. If you can write software that amazing you would probably be better off doing it for your own company instead of someone else's.
One question you need to ask yourself is how does your compensation compare to the executives in the company you work for. You may be making $100,000 plus but they may well be making 10 to 100 times that much factoring in their stock, bonuses, perks and salary. If their isn't that disparity then you work for some great people and they are keepers. The reality is most execs take their companies, shareholders and workers to the cleaners with the collusion of their friends on the board. Executives in some companies I've worked for have received multimillion dollar packages just to walk in the door, more than most workers make in their lifetimes. Executives in many companies receive more in their golden parachutes for failing miserably and getting fired than most workers in the company will make for decades of hard work.
Another point is you are apparently also fairly young. Companies like young knowledgable workers, who are healthy (low insurance costs), and who have the energy and willingness to rack up lots of hours at the expense of friends, family and life. The question to ask yourself is where your career path goes 10 or 15 years in. Chances are you will be faced with either jumping to a management track, if you have the skills and character traits required, or you will be stuck in a technical track where your compensation will plateau, your career will stall and or you will price yourself out of a job. Someday the execs in your company may decide they can either replace your with a younger cheaper worker or transition all the technical aspects of your work off shore and just keep a technically astute salesman to interface with your customers. Offshoring frequently fails but there are companies like Mackenzie and Accenture who keep telling execs how much money they will save by doing it, and how great the workers in India and China are, and execs are suckers for bottomlines.
If you are going to jump to a business track 10-15 years in you need to ask yourself why be in the technical track in the first place if you have to transition out of it eventually anyway to not hit a dead end at middle age. It is a lot easier and more common for marketing and sales people to jump in to executive positions than it is programmers or admins.
All in all the decline in students entering CS and engineering is due to market forces at work. Most students who think hard about a 40 year career can rightly deduce that a 40 year career in business will likely turn out better than a 40 year career as a programmer or admin.
"The Chinese government is completely corrupt and ineffective."
True but they are, for example, going to great lengths to acquire long term contracts to secure critical mineral and fossil fuels reserves in the future because they have a MUCH longer view than America does. America's fatal flaw is incredible short sightedness. The U.S. also thinks market forces will solve all problems and they do in fact cause as many as the solve.
The Chinese also have a huge influx in U.S. dollars due to huge and exploding trade surpluses which gives them a lot of money to play with on the global stage. The U.S. by contrast is struggling to just borrow enough money just to keep its budget and trade deficit afloat. As that borrowing continues the interest needed to maintain it will slowly suck the economic life out of the U.S. It is almost never good to be a long term, habitual debtor.
Fascist governments suck in a lot of ways but they can be VERY good at propelling economic growth. One such government took Germany from destitution to global power in under a decade.
"They need to slash the minimum wage, make unions illegal except for a single 'state' union, slash environmental regulations, provide massive subsidies to corporations, and regularly confiscate land without any sort of due process and hand it over to corporations."
Uh the U.S. is slashing the minimum wage by never raising it even to adjust for inflation and worse by massive and governmentally condoned importation of easily exploited illegal aliens which are constantly driving down wages at the bottom end of the economy.
Environmental regulations are certainly damaging U.S. economic growth but the Bush administration has relaxed them and the Republicans will continue to relax them every time they can get away with it. There is a HUGE resurgence of the use of coal in this country, cleaner than it used to be, but still very damaging to the environment. This makes the U.S. a lot like China which is the biggest, dirtiest user of coal on the planet.
"provide massive subsidies to corporations" uh yea like the Medicare drug bill, massive farm subsidies, transportation bill to subsidize construction companies, energy bill to subsidize energy companies at a time they are posting record profits, Iraq reconstruction contracts that benefited a host of Republican friendly companies, massive defense and intelligence spending subsidizing defense contractors. The only big ticket subsidy missing is to redirect Social Security in to private accounts to buoy Wall Street.
"regularly confiscate land", the Supreme court just authorized this last year to seize private property for a drug companies new office complex. The ball just needs to get rolling to do it on a regular basis and the U.S. and China will be the same in this regard.
The U.S. and China really are a lot alike, both leaning heavily to Fascism, China is just a lot more brutal about it, but it is a difference in degree and not substance. China just has a huge advantage in that its cost of living is much lower and it has a huge surplus of workers so it can easily out compete the U.S. in a globalized world with cheap telecom and container shipping.
"What is that saying? It is something like "revolution is just three meals away"."
Maybe though its still a long ways out. There is still a lot of fat in the U.S. economy for Americans to live off of so people wont revolt until there is real hardship on a wide scale like there was in the early 20th century when the progressive movement reigned in the last gross imbalance in wealth distribution. Most of those progressive reforms, like the inheritance tax and progressive taxation, are being dismantled under Reagan and Bush. Those wealth distribution schemes tended to be very punitive on families with farms and medium size businesses, but they did have a role in preventive severe wealth concentration.
The progressive movement is a case study, in America, for people uniting against wealth imbalance and intolerable working conditions, long hours, low pay and bad conditions and effecting change without armed rebellion.
At the rate America is squandering its wealth in deficit government spending, trade deficits, outsourcing jobs, and squandering money on the military we will most probably see a time when Americans will experience real hardship again the likes of which they haven't seen since the great depression. Since America seems to be losing its edge in every industry except maybe banking, pharmaceuticals and most of all defense it will be interesting to see if America can find a place in the future world. I wager the current regime is planning to maintain its position through military intimidation and exploiting cheap labor in places like China and India. I wager China in particular is positioning itself to supplant the U.S. as the world's dominant power and may just pull it off especially since the U.S. is increasingly being run by complete morons, with no vision, in both government and business.
You are basically right. Unfortunately CS and engineering jobs have always been uncool, there was just an anomaly during the bubble where you could get rich at CS if you landed in the right place. You can still make an OK living at it and its better then roofing, or assembly line worker, but the fact is if you want money, power, and women you are going to go business, marketing and sales or you are going to start a business of your own. Starting your own business is hella hard though, and it requires skills and abilities many geeks don't have. You also have a high probability of complete failure. People who start and run successful businesses deserve a lot of compensation, though unfortunately a lot of top executives are just leeches that walk in to already established companies and get huge compenstation whether they contribute anything substantive to the success or not.
If you are a programmer chances are you are going to be blessed with long hours sitting in the same cube day after day, death marches everytime a delivery needs to happen, and chances are your management chain is going to forget you when they are handing out the party trips, options and bonuses, because they get theirs first and the less they give you the more there is for them. I think they will be of the opinion that you should just be glad that they let you keep your job for the next round.
This is just how the food chain works in capitalism. The nearer you are to the top the better off you are and this is trending worse with each passing year. The disparity in compensation for executive versus workers has exploded in this country and it will ultimate lead to some form of collapse or rebellion. The new trend where executives can threaten to, or actually will, offshore your job, gives them further leverage to drive down worker's compensation and increase their own. There will eventually be a tipping point where a few percent will be filthy rich, everyone else will be hovering around the poverty line and eventually that 90+% will realized they've been had and they outnumber the rich fat cats.
If you like programming and like sitting in front of a computer, you don't want to get rich at it, and you can find an employer that doesn't suck its probably an OK career choice for you. Most people realize that in fact its not a career path with a lot of future in it and that is why more and more college students are rejecting it as a career path.
The fact that China and India are turning out so many CS grads is in itself a reason to reject it as a career path since it means the globalized market is being flooded, they can work for a lot less than you can thanks to cost of living disparity, and that means wages and working conditions are probably going to get progressively worse, not better.
Its also quite possible his dad was working for the CIA when he was a "U.S. aid worker" in Guatemala and was aiding and abetting the right wing death squads the U.S. supported during Guatemala's long, ugly civil war and U.S. sponsored dictatorship. You never know but the CIA uses journalists and aid workers as fronts on a regular basis.
During that war and the many other proxy wars like it anything to stop the spread of communism was OK, including Fascism and death squads killing people trying to organize workers so they would have a life slightly better than abject poverty and bare minimum subsistence wages. Had to keep the labor costs down so the wealthy ruling elite and American corporations that ran those countries could improve their profit margins (a role now filled by China).
Now its a better than 50/50 chance his dad wasn't a CIA agent but its also quite possible.
Negroponte in his younger days was a key proponent and operator of right wing dictatorships, repression and death squads in Cental America, so maybe Negroponte and this guy's family are friends and cronyism is how you get jobs, in this administration especially.
Zonk, is it a slow news day so you felt compelled to post an article from a Microsoft fan boy (M$ftJack) just to start a pointless flame war in which probably nothing will be said that hasn't been said a million times before here?
For him to mention BSoD in his submission was just tired rhetoric. Yea I'm sure people are still running Windows 98 out there and seeing BSoD but that is what they deserve for running a crappy, ancient OS with no memory protection. Anyone running XP or NT isn't likely to see very many OS crashes any more unless they are hacked or infected. Windows security problems are a far more important talking point than BSoD. I'm guessing he put BSoD in his submission to distract some of the flamage in the wrong direction.
The fact is Windows isn't going away anytime soon whether they put out any exciting new products or not. Sure Apple is going to chip away at them from one end, for people who want cool computers and apps that just work and work together, and Linux may chip away at the other end, for the hard core who want control of their computers, but this slippage is among people that are technically literate. The fact is the vast majority of the unwashed masses, are going to have Windows sitting on their desk at work, and buy a computer for home with Windows pre-installed, and most wont even consider trying to run something else. Lots of people play games on their computers and unfortunately trying to run popular games on Linux or OSX is somewhere across the spectrum of painful, difficult or impossible.
That said the extent to which people's lives and computers are being made miserable by security exploits may well eventually create a tipping point of some kind though I'm not sure what it is. If OSX or Linux offered rock solid security and all the applications people want maybe people would jump over en masse but I'm afraid if OSX or Linux became the dominant OS they would become more of a target for exploits. I doubt they are as vulnerable a target as Windows but they are still vulnerable. The other possibility is Microsoft may have to try to really redesign their OS to be secure, and that could inflict things like Palladium on us. It may well be making Windows secure is an impossible task without throwing it out, starting over, and destroying backward compatibility which would probably eliminate Microsoft's death grip on computer user's throats.
" They are convicted of the crime, not alleged to have perpetrated the crime."
Yes people are convicted but that is really no indication that they actually did anything wrong. The governor of Illinois instituted a moratorium on executions in his state a while back. With the arrival of DNA testing it had become apparent that at least 13 people on death row were undeniably innocent. If I recall there were cases where zealous white prosecutors and cops were framing black people they didn't like for crimes they didn't commit in order to get them off the streets, to improve their prosecutorial record and probably just due to some outright racism.
I think if people adopted your attitude that because someone is convicted its case closed then a bunch more innocent people could be murdered by the state because no one was willing to seek out the truth and find wrong doing by the court system.
Its a sad fact in the U.S. system, and probably all court systems, that affluent guilty people with good lawyers get off, while poor and minorties with no lawyer or an incompetent public defender are routinely lynched.
And then of course there is the whole issue of a justice system that criminalizes victimless crimes, recreational drug use and prostition for example, and goes out of its way to destroy the lives of people for indulging their vices. Thanks largely to the "War on Drugs" the U.S. has the second largest per capita prison population in the world, 486 per 100,000, and its by a large margin over third place New Zealand. First place goes to Rwanda which is still reeling from the effects of a widespread genocidal campaign.
Timberland makes backpacks with a laptop pouch built in. Its not really heavily padded but I love it. If your laptop is sitting on your back that is about the safest place you are going to find to carry it and the weight is evenly distributed on your shoulders, not pulling to one side.
Yes a backpack isn't entirely going to discourage thieves but its about the best you are going to do for inconspicuous. A shoulder bag screams out expensive laptop and is going to invite a mugger or someone to try to snatch it at an airport.
Fact is it does have something valuable in it so you have to use common sense and keep it with you and keep it out of sight if you leave it in a car.
Sorry pal but you just have no grip on reality. If you've ever dealt with the concept of right of ways in the real world you would realize that you would have no chance of building a railroad or a pipeline more than a few miles before someone would say hell no. Sure people that need the railroad or the gas out of the pipeline would accept it. But some people along the route and getting no benefit from it are going to demand huge sums for the right of way because they can or others wont allow it at all because they don't want their pastoral country life destroyed by the rumble of trains going by once an hour.
You probably could build some country roads because everyone generally wants roads to get to around the neighborhood but they would be twisted, tortured things because every land owner would impose different demands on where they could and couldn't be.
Again maybe the world would be a better place without transportation systems, instead getting by with meandering dirt roads or maybe paths. But you probably should actually think about the real consequences of what you propose. But wait you are a Utopian, you can just throw out high sounding rhetoric and never face the reality they would bring because your ideal system will never achieve reality so you are completely safe blowing hot air and say "If only...".
You are operating in a complete utopia. Your pitch SOUNDS great, it just simply can't happen in the real world unless maybe you are living in a wilderness some place with no contact with other people, or limited contact only with very nice people.
Unfortunately the will to power is the most fundamental aspect of human nature. Whenever people interact some are going to attempt to exert control of others. You are under the delusion that if you got rid of government coercion we would all be suddenly free. The simple fact is someone else would just step in to the void and they would most probably be worse than the government we have.
A realistic approach is you have a limited government that acts as a check to prevent people from taking advantage of each other, and at the same time you have a system in place to insure that government doesn't abuse its power either.
"If everything is voluntary, then what kind of wrong could you possibly come up with?"
The obvious one already cited, you wouldn't be able to build roads, railroads or pipelines because land owners would inevitably refuse the right of ways or charge so much for them they would make the projects impractical.
Now there might be some real merits in not having these things, since we would have smaller, simpler less dehumanized societies that are back to earth. But you would give up most of the conveniences you take for granted today and cities would be goners. Everyone would be back to subsistence farming since that is probably the only way you could reliably survive without a functioning transportation system. Unfortunately I doubt you could go back to subsistence farming at this point without cataclysm since our population is so great now, and most people would have neither the land or the ability to feed themselves if they had to.
" I respect other human beings and recognize them as the unique, thinking individuals that they are"
The only problem is a lot of your fellow human beings are ruthless, greedy sons of bitches who would just as soon stick a knife in your back, take your billfold and spit on you.
You are being a little Utopian if you think you could let everyone be totally free, because some random people would instantly impose their will on and strip you of your freedom, unless you have the guts, power or weapons to stop them which most people don't.
We do need a social mechanism to both protect our freedoms and at the same time compell that government to refrain from stripping them from us in the process.
Our founding fathers did a pretty good job of designing such a system, the only problem is that in practice politicians and judges, and assorted others drunk on power and polluted by corruption, are routinely seeking to destroy that system and we the people are unwilling to fight to defend and preserve it.
Slashdot Mirror
"I think you misuse the term fascism. I agree with what you say, but it is more material coersion (blackmail?) than strict authoritarian rule that corporations exersize."
Fascism is notorious for being backed by corprate interests. Germany's great Ruhr industrialists, especially the Thyssen family, helped put the Nazis in power because they thought it would be good for business and because they knew they could count on them break union, communism and get their work force in line. George W.'s dad Prescott was the U.S. banker for the Thyssen family during the time they were bankrolling the Nazi rise.
Fascism tends to be extremely anti labor, anti union, anti worker, anti Communism and pro business. Authoritarianism is often considered good for business because its a system that produces a work force that is subservient and productive for fear of the consequences if they aren't. Workers aren't likely to complain about wages or working conditions, or attempt to unionize in a Fascist sate. Taken to the extreme, which it has been, you put millions of undesirable people in to concentration camps and make them work for nothing and give them barely enough to eat to stay alive and companies profit on basically free labor, and lots of German companies did profit off concentration camp labor. There is a rising trend in the U.S. to use America's huge and growing prison population as cheap labor for big American companies. Microsoft uses cheap prison labor at Washington's Twin River Correction Center to package its products.
But Fascism is not really a free market kind of pro business government. Fascist governments intervene massively in the economy and pick a lot of winners and losers. Surprise, surprise they often pick the winners from among loyal party members and big financial supporters. Life as a businessmen in a Fascist state is extremely good if you stay in favor with the party. You can make money, with state help, without even trying. The only danger is the party and the state can as easily turn on you and destroy you. Fritz Thyssen had to flee from the Nazi's eventually.
The system in the U.S. is definitely exhibiting Fascist tendencies. There is an excessively close linkage between the political parties and corprate interests, and the government is exerting vastly more influence in the economy than it should if this were really a free market economy like the Republicans keep lying and trying to say it is.
Another Fascist tendency is extreme fondness for using military force to resolve international disputes. That is the U.S. in spades. Aggressive warfare, invasion of countries who haven't attacked or even really threatened you, like Grenada, Panama and Iraq is a really strong indicator of a Fascist regime. If you don't like some other country the Fascist solution is to invade them and change them to a friendly regime. Saddam was a Fascist in spades and that was his solution to Kuwait and Iran.
Is the U.S. a Fascist state at the level of Germany or Italy in the 30's, obviously not, but our government, whether it be Republican or Democrat controlled is trending more that direction, than any other direction, every day. We certainly aren't trending towards liberal, peace loving, democracy, and have turned in to a massively pro business society with little regard for the well being of working people. Workers are now a commodity to be outsourced to the cheapest labor market where possible, or when its not to fill the job with easily exploited and underpaid illegals. The only real growth industries left are in health care and government, especially for war making.
Second life is another good example though I haven't tried it and am not sure how many people are actually engaged with it. Its good in terms of its limited ability to allow users to upload their content, but I don't think it has the massive audience The Sims or WOW have. It sounds as though their economy, like most economies has some risks and issues.
"It is not only OK to help Chineese people find freedom and liberty, it is our duty as indivduals irrespective of US policy."
Dude....
The U.S. government is operating secretive prisons in Eastern Europe and not so secretively in Guantanamo where they are holding people without charge or trail, and apparently in many cases engaged in low grade or maybe even high grade torture.
The U.S. government has one of the largest per capita prison populations in the world. I think some place like Rwanda was number 1 in the wake of a genocidal war but the U.S. is like #2 or #3. A big percentage of those people are doing hard time for drug related antisocial behavior.
The U.S. government apparently is increasingly piping massive amounts of digital communication in to the NSA where they are largely able to spy on whatever they feel like since there is very little judicial oversight now since the Bush administration circumvented the FISA court.
There is a small army of FBI and local police monitoring chat rooms and Internet traffic looking for sexual predators or engaging in maybe just people engaging in inappropriately suggestive conversation. It is a nightly hot topic on the news that we have to crack down on MySpace to "SAVE THE CHILDREN". As nearly as I can tell if a 19 year old boy tries to strike up a romantic involvement with a 16 year old girl on the Internet there is a risk he will be arrested in an FBI sting or put on the TV in a sting by some TV news organization looking for some sensational reality TV.
All in all this is basically the same kind of repression, spying, censorship and social standards enforcement as that the Chinese are doing, the only thing that is different is the scope and the degree.
True, the Chinese are more rabid about supressing discussion of their one party state, Democracy or Freedom. In the U.S. they let you rant about it but there is very little you can do to change it. We have a two party state, both parties suck, both are massively corrupt, are nearly indistinguishable from each other now, and there is apparently nothing anyone can do about it since those two parties have effectively prevented any 3rd party from getting in to the game in a serious way. We have an illusion of choice in a two party state but our government really isn't better than a one party state anymore.
We have a lot of freedom in our constitution, and more than the Chinese have, but again the U.S. government is slowly stripping it away in the name of "The War on Terrorism", "The War on Drugs", "The War on Predators". In order to make us safe the U.S. government two is seeking to stamp out socially unacceptable behavior, just like the Chinese, and most Americans seem glad to surrender their freedoms in exchange for an illusion of safety and security.
One of the big knocks against China is they would seize people's property and give it to developer cronies of the party. Well recently the Supreme Court authorized seizing people homes to turn them over to a drug company to build a new office complex. So now the U.S. has the same precedent in place, that often is cited as one of China's most repressive policies, the U.S. just hasn't exercised it much or as heavy handedly yet.
All in all I wouldn't get all holier than thou about how bad the Chinese are and how good the U.S. is. Both the Chinese and the U.S., and while we are at it Signapore, Russia, Israel and host of other countries today are tilting towards Fascism, the only issue worth discussing is the pace, degree and scope of that tilt or if it will end before we end up with an entire planet dominated by Fascism because Fascism is good for business. What China is doing isn't Communism or a new Cultural revolution. It is just Fascism as they seek to impose an orderly social order to enhance their economic prosperity.
We do have a 3D web now so they were right, in fact we've had if for like 5 years with Everquest being one of the earliest incarnations :) It just isn't in the form of lame VRML objects on a web page you spin around.
It comes in the form of persistent worlds like World of Warcraft, EQ the Sims or not so persistent ones like Battlefield 2 and Halo. This is the infancy of the 3D web envisioned in works like Snowcrash with people adopting persistent online persona, avatars if you like. You couple it with ventrillo it is an ENORMOUSLY powerful tool for online communication and forming of long distance social and business relationships.
One thing that is missing is you have a very limited ability to introduce your own 3D content in to these worlds, being mostly confined to picking wardrobe and hair styles from a predefined set. If I recall the world in Snowcrash was a lot more dynamic, complex and interesting.
The big issue is what is the actual value in it other than the online socializing and entertaining diversion. The problem with online worlds like WOW is they are massive time sinks and produce nothing of real value, and eventually get old. Well.... except for the fact there are people who sells accounts for hundreds of dollars and a small army of, in particular Chinese, farmers who are selling WOW gold for real dollars or charging people for leveling services and making a living at it if you live in a country where the average annual salary is in the hundreds of dollars.
So in fact we have a 3D web with a real economy and making real money.
An inherent problem is what happens if we were all to disappear in to these online persona for large amounts of time. Can our world survive if we all move in to virtual worlds and forget to make things in the real world, or forget to eat or pay rent in meatspace? If you could take online worlds to a new level where you are exchanging real information of real value or produce real economic value you might have something. I just don't quite see how you do that though.
In the distant sci-fiesque world we might end up with robots doing most of the growing food and goods we need in meatspace and humans could disappear in to elaborate 3D worlds to escape the monotony of meatspace. The problem with 3D worlds now is they are extremely static and eventually boring. The only real dynamics and drama comes from interacting with other humans there. If you could get AI's to help generate more 3D contant and make it a more dynamic experience could you move in to a virtual world, have it stay fresh and interesting, especially operating without the constraints of our physical world. The appeal of roleplaying games are they are a great escape from the monotony of a 40 hour a week in week out job.
In some respects you already see buying and selling move entirely in to online worlds. Ebay is practically already there, its just a little boring of interface, while the auction house in WOW is a wonderful way to buy and sell goods at a furious pace. I imagine most commodity and stock traders are basically working in 2D online worlds full time now already.
"I would say that there would be a sizeable market for quality MIPS-workstations that run Linux"
Really.... why? MIPS CPU's still have a place in the embedded market, maybe, though I'm not sure I wouldn't pick ARM instead.
In the workstation market they are a doormat to Intel and AMD these days. SGI cratered in the workstation business years ago because they bet everything on MIPS and they simply didn't have the resources to keep MIPS competitive with better funded rivals. Oh and then they bet on Itanium which is for the most part completely useless in workstations too, being only good for some supercomputing application.
SGI machines, apart from the CPU had some nice architectural innovations, they were often ahead of their time during their glory days, but those innovations were EXPENSIVE and when coupled with a CPU that was frequently a poor performer they completely failed outside of niche markets. The end result is they were smoked in most large markets and were left clinging to niche's where their machines had specialized capabilities most hardware makers wouldn't serve, because the ROI was too low. Those niche markets unfortunately are small and getting smaller and not enough to sustain a company. Some of the stuff Discrete does still needs them, the video capabilities in the O2 are still cool, their Itanium supercomputers are good for some codes, but no one in their right mind would use SGI/MIPS workstations for CAD or animation anymore, or most other mainstream workstation markets. They are like putting a boat anchor around a workstation user's neck, which is why all the big animation studios abandoned them at great expense, and why no one in CAD would give them a second thought.
Really if you want a nice workstation to run Linux on you would be light years better off getting a nice Athlon or Core Duo and an ATI or Nvidia graphics card. You will save yourself a ton of money and it will smoke anything running a MIPS CPU.
The bottomline on SGI is they spent way too much time on R&D, redesigning every workstation from scratch, and in fact designing 3 different tiers from scratch each generation(high, mid and low end). They failed to notice when the business they were in commoditized. When IA32 processors and commodity graphic cards started making leaps in price and performance every 6 months or a year, and it took SGI 2+ years to make incremental advances you can do the math yourself and realize SGI was left in the dust.
If you want to spur innovation you need to offer the million dollar prizes Google offers to its employees who come up with winning ideas. People will go all out to innovate if there is a million dollars of FU money at the end of the rainbow.
If you just hire a small army of people working for five or low six figure salaries there is almost no assurance you will get anything innovative out of them at all. No one has an incentive to come up with something amazing and just turn it over to Gates and Balmer, to get richer off of, in exchange for their biweekly paycheck that they would get anyway.
A lot of innovation does come out of reseach labs of big companies where they give researchers good salaries and turn them loose to play for years, but I wager way more innovation comes a lot faster out of small startups and from individuals who have a chance at a big payoff for a big gamble.
Uh, all that really shows is they have an entrenched monopoly, or actually two entrenched monopolies, Windows and Office, and entrenched monopolies are inherently profitable for three reasons:
A. The have little or no competition so they can charge whatever they feel like for their product
B. Their product is preinstalled on most new computers sold on the planet and so they get a tax for every machine so shipped.
C. Developing software is expensive but manufacturing and shipping it costs next to nothing, especially when manufacturers preinstall it for you so once you factor out the development and support costs, everthing else is gravy and in the volumes they ship they get a lot of gravy.
Microsoft may be dead in the water as far as innovation goes but their entrenched monopoly will keep them rich for a long time so there really is no correlation between these two issues.
One has to wonder what kind of wonderful stuff an organization like PARC, Google or MIT labs could turn out if they had Microsoft's R&D budget. Microsoft does in fact innovate very little for the amount they spend so in a way that is a kind of dead in the water. My first impression of Microsoft Research is they churn out huge volumes of research papers, and dominate many conferences, but very little of it seems to make the jump in to products that change people's lives.
The issue isn't really whether the letter is a fake or not. The issue is whether George W. shirked his National Guard duty. The preponderance of circumstantial evidence is he did. He went to Alabama to work on a political campaign and as nearly as anyone can tell just just left, abandoning his Texas guard duty and the Texas National Guard approved the transfer to Alabama after the fact, not before he moved like ordinary guardsmen. In Alabama he was notorious for partying drugs and womanizing. He was trained as a fighter pilot at great expense and moved to an Alabama guard unit where he couldn't fly.
The circumstantial evidence is also that he shirked a flight physical which also grounded him rendering him useless as a pilot and probably also should have resulted in him being transfered to regular Army duty and Vietnam having not met his guard duty.
And finally he apparently shirked his guard service all together when he went to Harvard Business school before his tour was done.
There should be a paper trail a mile long showing all this dereliction of duty but it is mostly missing which frustrates a lot of people who want the Bush family held to account. That is the story. The Bush family concealed dereliction of duty by a black sheep of a son who went on to become President, though he was uniquely unqualified for the job, and who is now cavalierly sending today's young people to die in a war in Iraq likewise based on a web of lies, a war his dad was wise enough to avoid because he knew it would be an ethnic and religious quagmire.
"We don't want guesses, we want facts."
The facts are its almost a certainty George W. shirked his guard responsibilities. He may well have refused a physical which lead to him being grounded which is a bad thing for a trained pilot, and he may have ducked it for fear his cocaine use would be detected.
Its also a fact that all the evidence to prove it has disappeared.
So what do you do in the case where someone who did wrong was successful in destroying all the evidence. He gets away with it. By your standard if Nixon and the plumbers had only been a little better at their coverup, or Woodward and Bernstein a little less persistent in their investigation, or if Deep Throat hadn't put his neck on the line, Nixon would have gotten away with subverting our government and it would have been OK.
George W.'s once exceptional political skill has been his ability to cover up his embarrassing past and getting away with it. The cocaine use (and probably arrest in Texas for it) that was expunged from his record thanks to his dad's power in Texas, his out of control alcoholism, and the fact that not only did he duck the war in Vietnam but he also shirked his National Guard service which was the condition for avoiding the draft. Again his family's connections secured him a spot in the Texas Air National country club though he did supremely bad on the testing and he was picked over people far more deserving.
There is just immense irony in a spoiled rich kid using the National Guard to duck his generations war, and not even fulfilling his limited obligations, while he is sending this generation's National Guard to die in Iraq wholesale.
"Now that's a reputable source!"
As a matter of fact she is, since she is one of the few people that was around when George W. ducked his guard service, who is still alive and still willing to talk.
"When Cronkite read the number of soldiers killed in Vietnam he was lionized for telling the truth"
... it is likely the forged letter was essentially accurate, the commanding officers secretary said its content was quite plausible. Its just most of the incriminating evidence in his record was most probably purged by Bush operatives, something that was especiallay easy to do when Bush was governor of Texas and commander in chief of the Texas national guard. Rather was of course driven out of the CBS anchor chair and the producer was fired.
In fact the country had already largely turned on the Vietnam war by the time he acted. It would have been a bit braver if he had exposed Vietnam as a failed policy a few years earlier. Cronkite did help take down LBJ but the war continued on for another 5 years before it was lost, so he didn't really make much of a difference.
In some respects it feels kind of like Iraq where the media didn't let out a whimper when the foundation was laid for the bloody and expensive disaster, they waited until it was obviously a bloody mistake and now they are piling on against it now that its too late to do anything about it (i.e. the two options now being stay the course or withdraw and watch Iraq explode in civil war).
"When Edward R. Murrow brought down McCarthy he was lionized."
On Murrow you are totally misrepresenting reality. Murrow, Friendly, "See it Now" and others at CBS paid a dear price for what they did.
Don Hollenbeck, was another CBS news anchor who lauded Murrow's attack on McCarthy on air. He was eviscerated by right wing editorials for the next 3 months and branded as a communist. He then committed suicide in a gas oven.
Murrow and Friendly continued attacking sacred cows in that 1954-1955 season, including an expose on a Texas land scandal that infuriated their main sponsor, Alcoa, which pulled their funding and put the nail in the coffin for "See it Now".
Many of the people involved in the McCarthy expose were laid off.
Walter Pally and CBS corporate felt Murrow and Friendly overstepped their bounds on McCarthy and throughout their controversial 1954-1955 season and that they were making news rather than reporting it. They pulled See It Now from their prime time slot and stuck them on Sunday afternoon in a form of putting them out to pasture as they ran out their contract.
Murrow eventually became completely disillusioned with TV news, precisely because of the pressures to make it entertaining, profitable, to avoid controversy and to avoid alienating corprate sponsors.
What Murrow and Friendly did was brave beyond belief but the retaliation that followed created a precedent that served to discourage journalists and networks from attacking the power that be, especially when it involved their sponsors.
In a more recent CBS precedent there is Dan Rather's recent attempt to expose George W's borderline criminal National Guard record. Unfortunately they relied on a forged letter to support their story which was wrong. But
"they will hire some real reporters and we will receive some real news"
It would run completely counter to how news networks work today. They are competing for audience with 50 other TV channels, games, internet, etc. The only successful news shows are going to be the most sensationalist ones, pandering to what their audience wants to see, and most of their audience wants to see celebrity scandals. Most audience also have a massive case of cognitive dissonance, they want their news to reinforce their world view not disrupt it. Thats why Fox is the #1 cable network, lots of people watch Fox because Fox says what they want to hear, America #1 in particular.
Journalists can only attack Presidents when their poll numbers are in the toilet because then they know the majority of their audience wants them to attack the President then. When a President's poll numbers are riding high they generally dont touch them. Journalists are at the head of the like supportinh going to war as long as their is a patriotic fervor whipped up for it, and then journalists can turn against the war when it turns long, bloody and costly and the public has already started to turn on it, like Cronkite did.
Uh ... the point you missed is that the Shake team has apparently been working on Aperture and was the team being ...shaken.... up here, lol.
Just curious if these people have been working on both Shake and Aperture which might be an indicator of why they've had quality problems since having one team working on two major products must have led to some serious focus and burn out problems.
I'm wondering if Shake had been put on life support while their team was off fiddling with Aperture.
Just because Apple is still selling Shake doesn't mean its still being being actively developed versus minimal bug fixes by a skeleton team.
Well......
It is at times an exceedingly good series and certainly better than most but it did have some really gaping holes in the plot. The most distracting one being that it was so IMPOSSIBLE to distinguish Cylons from humans BUT they had glowing spines, data ports in their arms you could plug fiber optic networks in to, beyond human strength, and they tended to turn in to jelly in ion storms like the one around the munitions depot in the opening movie. Chances are a basic MRI or even an autopsy would be enough to show these basic physiology differences. So either Cylons were entirely based on human DNA and physiology, with only differently wired brains, or they only superficially resembled humans and would be relatively easy to detect (without the need for Plutonium). You can't have "identical to humans" but wildly different from humans at the same time. So much of the post 9/11 "paranoia" theme in the series is predicated on this inability to detect them but then at other times its predicated on all these "unique" abilities the Cylons had.
The series also pretty much lost me when they sent Starbuck to retrieve the cheesy, prop, golden arrow from Caprica.
Just curios what happened to the original Shake which was so popular for compositing pipelines at animation studios, on Linux in particular. Is it largely abandoned and did Apple expect them to migrate to Aperture on OSX.
"then you'll be paid very well"
As I said you can make a good living at it, chances are you are never going to get rich working for other people doing it, unless you write some truly amazing software and are skillful in business negotiations with your employer. If you can write software that amazing you would probably be better off doing it for your own company instead of someone else's.
One question you need to ask yourself is how does your compensation compare to the executives in the company you work for. You may be making $100,000 plus but they may well be making 10 to 100 times that much factoring in their stock, bonuses, perks and salary. If their isn't that disparity then you work for some great people and they are keepers. The reality is most execs take their companies, shareholders and workers to the cleaners with the collusion of their friends on the board. Executives in some companies I've worked for have received multimillion dollar packages just to walk in the door, more than most workers make in their lifetimes. Executives in many companies receive more in their golden parachutes for failing miserably and getting fired than most workers in the company will make for decades of hard work.
Another point is you are apparently also fairly young. Companies like young knowledgable workers, who are healthy (low insurance costs), and who have the energy and willingness to rack up lots of hours at the expense of friends, family and life. The question to ask yourself is where your career path goes 10 or 15 years in. Chances are you will be faced with either jumping to a management track, if you have the skills and character traits required, or you will be stuck in a technical track where your compensation will plateau, your career will stall and or you will price yourself out of a job. Someday the execs in your company may decide they can either replace your with a younger cheaper worker or transition all the technical aspects of your work off shore and just keep a technically astute salesman to interface with your customers. Offshoring frequently fails but there are companies like Mackenzie and Accenture who keep telling execs how much money they will save by doing it, and how great the workers in India and China are, and execs are suckers for bottomlines.
If you are going to jump to a business track 10-15 years in you need to ask yourself why be in the technical track in the first place if you have to transition out of it eventually anyway to not hit a dead end at middle age. It is a lot easier and more common for marketing and sales people to jump in to executive positions than it is programmers or admins.
All in all the decline in students entering CS and engineering is due to market forces at work. Most students who think hard about a 40 year career can rightly deduce that a 40 year career in business will likely turn out better than a 40 year career as a programmer or admin.
"The Chinese government is completely corrupt and ineffective."
True but they are, for example, going to great lengths to acquire long term contracts to secure critical mineral and fossil fuels reserves in the future because they have a MUCH longer view than America does. America's fatal flaw is incredible short sightedness. The U.S. also thinks market forces will solve all problems and they do in fact cause as many as the solve.
The Chinese also have a huge influx in U.S. dollars due to huge and exploding trade surpluses which gives them a lot of money to play with on the global stage. The U.S. by contrast is struggling to just borrow enough money just to keep its budget and trade deficit afloat. As that borrowing continues the interest needed to maintain it will slowly suck the economic life out of the U.S. It is almost never good to be a long term, habitual debtor.
Fascist governments suck in a lot of ways but they can be VERY good at propelling economic growth. One such government took Germany from destitution to global power in under a decade.
"They need to slash the minimum wage, make unions illegal except for a single 'state' union, slash environmental regulations, provide massive subsidies to corporations, and regularly confiscate land without any sort of due process and hand it over to corporations."
Uh the U.S. is slashing the minimum wage by never raising it even to adjust for inflation and worse by massive and governmentally condoned importation of easily exploited illegal aliens which are constantly driving down wages at the bottom end of the economy.
Environmental regulations are certainly damaging U.S. economic growth but the Bush administration has relaxed them and the Republicans will continue to relax them every time they can get away with it. There is a HUGE resurgence of the use of coal in this country, cleaner than it used to be, but still very damaging to the environment. This makes the U.S. a lot like China which is the biggest, dirtiest user of coal on the planet.
"provide massive subsidies to corporations" uh yea like the Medicare drug bill, massive farm subsidies, transportation bill to subsidize construction companies, energy bill to subsidize energy companies at a time they are posting record profits, Iraq reconstruction contracts that benefited a host of Republican friendly companies, massive defense and intelligence spending subsidizing defense contractors. The only big ticket subsidy missing is to redirect Social Security in to private accounts to buoy Wall Street.
"regularly confiscate land", the Supreme court just authorized this last year to seize private property for a drug companies new office complex. The ball just needs to get rolling to do it on a regular basis and the U.S. and China will be the same in this regard.
The U.S. and China really are a lot alike, both leaning heavily to Fascism, China is just a lot more brutal about it, but it is a difference in degree and not substance. China just has a huge advantage in that its cost of living is much lower and it has a huge surplus of workers so it can easily out compete the U.S. in a globalized world with cheap telecom and container shipping.
"What is that saying? It is something like "revolution is just three meals away"."
Maybe though its still a long ways out. There is still a lot of fat in the U.S. economy for Americans to live off of so people wont revolt until there is real hardship on a wide scale like there was in the early 20th century when the progressive movement reigned in the last gross imbalance in wealth distribution. Most of those progressive reforms, like the inheritance tax and progressive taxation, are being dismantled under Reagan and Bush. Those wealth distribution schemes tended to be very punitive on families with farms and medium size businesses, but they did have a role in preventive severe wealth concentration.
The progressive movement is a case study, in America, for people uniting against wealth imbalance and intolerable working conditions, long hours, low pay and bad conditions and effecting change without armed rebellion.
At the rate America is squandering its wealth in deficit government spending, trade deficits, outsourcing jobs, and squandering money on the military we will most probably see a time when Americans will experience real hardship again the likes of which they haven't seen since the great depression. Since America seems to be losing its edge in every industry except maybe banking, pharmaceuticals and most of all defense it will be interesting to see if America can find a place in the future world. I wager the current regime is planning to maintain its position through military intimidation and exploiting cheap labor in places like China and India. I wager China in particular is positioning itself to supplant the U.S. as the world's dominant power and may just pull it off especially since the U.S. is increasingly being run by complete morons, with no vision, in both government and business.
You are basically right. Unfortunately CS and engineering jobs have always been uncool, there was just an anomaly during the bubble where you could get rich at CS if you landed in the right place. You can still make an OK living at it and its better then roofing, or assembly line worker, but the fact is if you want money, power, and women you are going to go business, marketing and sales or you are going to start a business of your own. Starting your own business is hella hard though, and it requires skills and abilities many geeks don't have. You also have a high probability of complete failure. People who start and run successful businesses deserve a lot of compensation, though unfortunately a lot of top executives are just leeches that walk in to already established companies and get huge compenstation whether they contribute anything substantive to the success or not.
If you are a programmer chances are you are going to be blessed with long hours sitting in the same cube day after day, death marches everytime a delivery needs to happen, and chances are your management chain is going to forget you when they are handing out the party trips, options and bonuses, because they get theirs first and the less they give you the more there is for them. I think they will be of the opinion that you should just be glad that they let you keep your job for the next round.
This is just how the food chain works in capitalism. The nearer you are to the top the better off you are and this is trending worse with each passing year. The disparity in compensation for executive versus workers has exploded in this country and it will ultimate lead to some form of collapse or rebellion. The new trend where executives can threaten to, or actually will, offshore your job, gives them further leverage to drive down worker's compensation and increase their own. There will eventually be a tipping point where a few percent will be filthy rich, everyone else will be hovering around the poverty line and eventually that 90+% will realized they've been had and they outnumber the rich fat cats.
If you like programming and like sitting in front of a computer, you don't want to get rich at it, and you can find an employer that doesn't suck its probably an OK career choice for you. Most people realize that in fact its not a career path with a lot of future in it and that is why more and more college students are rejecting it as a career path.
The fact that China and India are turning out so many CS grads is in itself a reason to reject it as a career path since it means the globalized market is being flooded, they can work for a lot less than you can thanks to cost of living disparity, and that means wages and working conditions are probably going to get progressively worse, not better.
-- Ed
Its also quite possible his dad was working for the CIA when he was a "U.S. aid worker" in Guatemala and was aiding and abetting the right wing death squads the U.S. supported during Guatemala's long, ugly civil war and U.S. sponsored dictatorship. You never know but the CIA uses journalists and aid workers as fronts on a regular basis.
During that war and the many other proxy wars like it anything to stop the spread of communism was OK, including Fascism and death squads killing people trying to organize workers so they would have a life slightly better than abject poverty and bare minimum subsistence wages. Had to keep the labor costs down so the wealthy ruling elite and American corporations that ran those countries could improve their profit margins (a role now filled by China).
Now its a better than 50/50 chance his dad wasn't a CIA agent but its also quite possible.
Negroponte in his younger days was a key proponent and operator of right wing dictatorships, repression and death squads in Cental America, so maybe Negroponte and this guy's family are friends and cronyism is how you get jobs, in this administration especially.
Zonk, is it a slow news day so you felt compelled to post an article from a Microsoft fan boy (M$ftJack) just to start a pointless flame war in which probably nothing will be said that hasn't been said a million times before here?
For him to mention BSoD in his submission was just tired rhetoric. Yea I'm sure people are still running Windows 98 out there and seeing BSoD but that is what they deserve for running a crappy, ancient OS with no memory protection. Anyone running XP or NT isn't likely to see very many OS crashes any more unless they are hacked or infected. Windows security problems are a far more important talking point than BSoD. I'm guessing he put BSoD in his submission to distract some of the flamage in the wrong direction.
The fact is Windows isn't going away anytime soon whether they put out any exciting new products or not. Sure Apple is going to chip away at them from one end, for people who want cool computers and apps that just work and work together, and Linux may chip away at the other end, for the hard core who want control of their computers, but this slippage is among people that are technically literate. The fact is the vast majority of the unwashed masses, are going to have Windows sitting on their desk at work, and buy a computer for home with Windows pre-installed, and most wont even consider trying to run something else. Lots of people play games on their computers and unfortunately trying to run popular games on Linux or OSX is somewhere across the spectrum of painful, difficult or impossible.
That said the extent to which people's lives and computers are being made miserable by security exploits may well eventually create a tipping point of some kind though I'm not sure what it is. If OSX or Linux offered rock solid security and all the applications people want maybe people would jump over en masse but I'm afraid if OSX or Linux became the dominant OS they would become more of a target for exploits. I doubt they are as vulnerable a target as Windows but they are still vulnerable. The other possibility is Microsoft may have to try to really redesign their OS to be secure, and that could inflict things like Palladium on us. It may well be making Windows secure is an impossible task without throwing it out, starting over, and destroying backward compatibility which would probably eliminate Microsoft's death grip on computer user's throats.
" They are convicted of the crime, not alleged to have perpetrated the crime."
Yes people are convicted but that is really no indication that they actually did anything wrong. The governor of Illinois instituted a moratorium on executions in his state a while back. With the arrival of DNA testing it had become apparent that at least 13 people on death row were undeniably innocent. If I recall there were cases where zealous white prosecutors and cops were framing black people they didn't like for crimes they didn't commit in order to get them off the streets, to improve their prosecutorial record and probably just due to some outright racism.
I think if people adopted your attitude that because someone is convicted its case closed then a bunch more innocent people could be murdered by the state because no one was willing to seek out the truth and find wrong doing by the court system.
Its a sad fact in the U.S. system, and probably all court systems, that affluent guilty people with good lawyers get off, while poor and minorties with no lawyer or an incompetent public defender are routinely lynched.
And then of course there is the whole issue of a justice system that criminalizes victimless crimes, recreational drug use and prostition for example, and goes out of its way to destroy the lives of people for indulging their vices. Thanks largely to the "War on Drugs" the U.S. has the second largest per capita prison population in the world, 486 per 100,000, and its by a large margin over third place New Zealand. First place goes to Rwanda which is still reeling from the effects of a widespread genocidal campaign.
Timberland makes backpacks with a laptop pouch built in. Its not really heavily padded but I love it. If your laptop is sitting on your back that is about the safest place you are going to find to carry it and the weight is evenly distributed on your shoulders, not pulling to one side.
Yes a backpack isn't entirely going to discourage thieves but its about the best you are going to do for inconspicuous. A shoulder bag screams out expensive laptop and is going to invite a mugger or someone to try to snatch it at an airport.
Fact is it does have something valuable in it so you have to use common sense and keep it with you and keep it out of sight if you leave it in a car.
Sorry pal but you just have no grip on reality. If you've ever dealt with the concept of right of ways in the real world you would realize that you would have no chance of building a railroad or a pipeline more than a few miles before someone would say hell no. Sure people that need the railroad or the gas out of the pipeline would accept it. But some people along the route and getting no benefit from it are going to demand huge sums for the right of way because they can or others wont allow it at all because they don't want their pastoral country life destroyed by the rumble of trains going by once an hour.
You probably could build some country roads because everyone generally wants roads to get to around the neighborhood but they would be twisted, tortured things because every land owner would impose different demands on where they could and couldn't be.
Again maybe the world would be a better place without transportation systems, instead getting by with meandering dirt roads or maybe paths. But you probably should actually think about the real consequences of what you propose. But wait you are a Utopian, you can just throw out high sounding rhetoric and never face the reality they would bring because your ideal system will never achieve reality so you are completely safe blowing hot air and say "If only...".
You are operating in a complete utopia. Your pitch SOUNDS great, it just simply can't happen in the real world unless maybe you are living in a wilderness some place with no contact with other people, or limited contact only with very nice people.
Unfortunately the will to power is the most fundamental aspect of human nature. Whenever people interact some are going to attempt to exert control of others. You are under the delusion that if you got rid of government coercion we would all be suddenly free. The simple fact is someone else would just step in to the void and they would most probably be worse than the government we have.
A realistic approach is you have a limited government that acts as a check to prevent people from taking advantage of each other, and at the same time you have a system in place to insure that government doesn't abuse its power either.
"If everything is voluntary, then what kind of wrong could you possibly come up with?"
The obvious one already cited, you wouldn't be able to build roads, railroads or pipelines because land owners would inevitably refuse the right of ways or charge so much for them they would make the projects impractical.
Now there might be some real merits in not having these things, since we would have smaller, simpler less dehumanized societies that are back to earth. But you would give up most of the conveniences you take for granted today and cities would be goners. Everyone would be back to subsistence farming since that is probably the only way you could reliably survive without a functioning transportation system. Unfortunately I doubt you could go back to subsistence farming at this point without cataclysm since our population is so great now, and most people would have neither the land or the ability to feed themselves if they had to.
" I respect other human beings and recognize them as the unique, thinking individuals that they are"
The only problem is a lot of your fellow human beings are ruthless, greedy sons of bitches who would just as soon stick a knife in your back, take your billfold and spit on you.
You are being a little Utopian if you think you could let everyone be totally free, because some random people would instantly impose their will on and strip you of your freedom, unless you have the guts, power or weapons to stop them which most people don't.
We do need a social mechanism to both protect our freedoms and at the same time compell that government to refrain from stripping them from us in the process.
Our founding fathers did a pretty good job of designing such a system, the only problem is that in practice politicians and judges, and assorted others drunk on power and polluted by corruption, are routinely seeking to destroy that system and we the people are unwilling to fight to defend and preserve it.