I've heard this several times from conservatives. "It's just one point of view pitted against another." It's not that simple!
One side has a point of view that is open to different ways of thinking, and strives to avoid actively repressing alternative approaches to life. The other has a single, traditional point of view what constitutes Right(TM), and voraciously combats any interfering approach.
The answer is taking the responsibility for defining culture away from the government. What right does a government have to decide what marriage means? Marriage licenses should be registered at churches, and it should be up to the individual as to whether a, for instance, Episcopal marriage license means anything.
But rather than fixing the system to avoid conflict, the Christian conservative takes an aggressive approach, and feels totally within their right to do so, as if any other approach to the problem were incidental or something they would "settle for."
Let me offer you a reasonable way of thinking about this.
The election system is flawed. Even Afghanistan has a better election system. A simple plurality vote allows the presence of "spoiler" candidates.
Thought problem: 60% of people want a candidate with position A and 40% of people want a candidate with position B.
Unfortunately, there are 2 candidates with position A. With the votes split between them, the single candidate with position B will win. This is a serious and dramatic flaw of the electoral system. People who say otherwise are deceiving themselves.
In a runoff election, successive pairs of candidates are voted for until a solid majority is obtained. That makes spoilers impossible.
But unfortunately, with the current system, spoilers are possible.
In order to not break the system, you have to pretend that this is the last phase of a run-off election. You have to choose between the pair of candidates most likely to win. In reality, nothing has been lost. You need to recognize that even in a real run-off election, Kerry and Bush would probably have been the two run-off finalists.
And so, under this point of view, you are morally obligated to vote for the one of the two run-off candidates that you would most like in office.
Pick your battles! Call for election reform this coming year. Gain recognition by voting third party candidates into lesser offices; Libertarians, for instance, hold a number of offices nation wide.
There are a lot of subtleties in voting. Here are a couple of helpfullinks.
The reason the DMCA didn't apply here is that, while the checksum chip permitted the printer engine program to run, it didn't permit *access* to the program. Therefore, there was no access being circumvented.
With DVD region encoding, there actually is a system in place to prevent access to the DVD's content.
Make it affordable and desireable for me to buy, and I will. Overprice it, and only give me a small part of what I want and I will laugh in your face while walking away... (and with digital goods, walking away with a copy!)
But that's not a reasonable and consistent system!
Capitalism is a question of: Would you be happier with the product and without your money than you would be with your money and without the product? If you create that self-serving third option of keeping your money and the product, you break the market model. You're talking about a donation-only system.
Piracy actually discourages independent labels by causing their reasonable prices to be a less tempting alternative to present consumers of mainstream music. That's just one repercussion among many of breaking the market model.
The thesis is simple: As a democracy, we created copyright so we could have a market model for works.
Now, I agree that fair use provisions should be extended, that copyright terms should be greatly reduced, and that monopolistic behaviors need to be curtailed. The fact that the system is broken doesn't justify putting extra goodies in your pocket, nor does piracy do anything to help the situation.
There's nothing more irksome to me in this world than philosophies of convenience. There are so many ways to think about things -- why do people choose the one that benefits themselves most?
So... you're arguing for the death of copyright (because you can't have it both ways). Let me give you some context for what copyright is.
Thought experiment:
You're a factory owner. There's an inelastic labor pool that will, for the foreseeable future, always be willing to work for peanuts. You'd like to keep the factory warm in the winter, but your competitor can outcompete you if you do.
So you get together with all your competitors, and they all feel the same way. So you sign an agreement to keep your factories warm in the winter.
Then another competitor enters the market, doesn't heat the factories, and outcompetes all of you.
A democracy let's us fix the game theory by setting some enlightened ground rules. "You must heat your factories in the winter." Believe it or not, this makes most factory owners happy.
Imagine a world that never had copyright.
There are a few authors. Many of these authors make their money by scheduling verbal readings in auditoriums, frisking people for tape recorders at the entrance. Others submit a set of 5-10 copies to a well-guarded local reading hall. By these methods, they can use the market model instead of the donation-only model, and preserve their work from distortion.
The authors aren't as happy as they could be. The readers/listeners aren't happy as they could be. The books aren't as well-read as the potential interest in them would dictate.
So using democracy, authors and readers collude to generate the notion of copyright.
Don't you see that copyright is in the public interest? If so, are your ethics genuinely capable of reconciling double-standards? If so, would you please give me leave to hate you? Thanks.
That's not true. Surely you must agree that anyone who reads mail is doing so consciously. Your only defense is in saying that the ruling is unenforceable, given that just about any employee could peruse the plaintext database.
I think it's very enforceable. Server software could easily make it difficult for casual employees to view customer mail, and ISPs could be compelled to have such software under due diligence of the law.
So are you going to argue that the fact that a few select administrators or an employee with a packet sniffer can read your e-mail makes the ruling unenforceable? Hell, then we might as well toss out half the SEC regulations.
Nobody's saying that automated processes can't analyze the plaintext, Theobon.
Then you're not selling software, are you? Given that anyone can repackage it and give it away for free if they wish, the genuine market value of your software qua software is decided by fanboyism.
The support model has its applications, but it should be plainly evident that it's not enough for everything. You know you're hitting the corners of a flawed philosophical system when doing something like writing intentionally mediocre documentation can be a (admittedly short-term) profit incentive.
People use BSD-style lincensing to allow people to see and use their code. People use the GPL to allow other people to see and use their code and not let commercial packages make use of them.
"If someone uses my code in a commercial product, then they're making money off my work!"
Well, if you really think about it, since they have access to your unmodified free code, they're only really paying for the extra features offered by the commercial code. What's so bad about that?
E-Paper is a technology currently under development by several firms. It's essentially magnetic paper particles floating in ink, encapsulated in hundreds of little pixel-bubbles per inch, driven by transparent thin film transistors.
They're still trying to get the technology down, but I would guess they'd be on the shelves within the next 5 years. In principle, it should be as natural to read as paper, except it can be driven by a ROM cartridge. Pick up Flash installments of the globe at your local kiosk.
Color E-Paper is a real problem though. One approach is to have opaque layers of color, with different voltage frequencies forcing the medium to coagulate in strange patterns to make a controllable percentage of the "bubble" transparent.
Yeah, right. Do you know how big a pain in the butt it was to find a copy of QTFairUse.tar.gz after it got pulled off the NanoCrew site? I don't know the circumstances under which nanocrew removed the code, but it took me a long time to dig it up. I don't think the average user would go through that much trouble.
Huh, interesting. NanoCrew came back up. It says to use VLC, which claims to support the MP4 format. Can anyone confirm that this software package plays encrypted AAC and perhaps even lets you save it as unencrypted AAC?
Sandeep will only spend his disposable income on US goods. For everything else, he will enjoy his low cost of living by sustaining himself with cheap domestic goods.
As the Indian economy develops, they'll be able to get a better variety of products domestically. I predict that the demand for American goods will not rise in proportion to the number of off-shored jobs, but may actually fall.
Your capital argument seems insufficient. There's enough capital. But with a world market it's smarter to use that capital to create high-demand Indian jobs than to create unprofitable American jobs.
The economy operates on satisfying the demands of others, and in turn getting your own demands satisfied.
Jim makes red beads for 6 demand units, 2 of which he spends on glass, 3 of which he spends on red dye. Joe makes red dye for 3 demand units. John makes cotton candy for 2 demand units.
Jim and Joe use their demand units to buy John's cotton candy.
Indian Sandeep enters the market and produces red dye for 2 demand units. Jim buys his red dye from Sandeep instead of Joe.
Jim now buys his red dye from Sandeep and has one additional demand unit to buy cotton candy from John.
If Sandeep bought cotton candy from John, then the market would have two new demand units for cotton candy. Joe could get a job as a cotton candy maker.
But Sandeep doesn't buy goods from the US, so Joe is screwed.
Do you see? Off-shoring is acceptable for the US if the off-shored workers create a market for US goods.
The free market is in transition. When the free market stabilizes, Indian IT workers will have the same demands as American IT workers, and the system will stop screwing over US workers. But while the market is in transition, Indian IT workers will be less demanding, due to the rapidly growing pool of educated Indian workers.
And it's going to get worse. The improved Indian economy will result in more money for education which will result in an expanding educated labor pool, which will result in sophisticated jobs moving to India until the free market corrects itself.
A lot of people are saying, "We'll just have to move people in the US to higher skilled jobs." Not good enough! Indian workers will eventually get all the education they need to be competitive even in the financial markets.
It's not India's fault. You need to have a global free market from the get-go in order to avoid problems like this. The free-market is self-correcting, but the self-correction will prove painful to US workers. We're talking about 1 billion people the market needs to correct for, for Christ sake.
I don't know what the answer is, but it may very well be a measured amount of protectionism. Protectionism is only good if it still permits the free market correction to occur, but just makes it gentler. An obvious and effective example is unemployment pay. Maybe we need to slow off-shoring by requiring a restricted reverse Visa... and perhaps some not-too-harsh tariffs on buying goods and services from India.
Perhaps the only effective argument against the use of water, besides the possibility of contaminating it with pollutants, is thermal pollution. The unexpected changes in water temperature do a surprising number on the ecology of surrounding bodies of water, particularly in terms of algae and bacteria. It can even extend the fishing season.
It's a considerable issue because half of the total water drawn in the US goes to cooling power plants.
Environmentalists consider it to be a problem, but nothing on the order of global warming. Thermal pollution is just a necessary biproduct of energy conversion. *shrug*
Yeah, there was a legal case not too long ago involving a woman who required a blood transfusion for her surgery. She told the doctor that she didn't want blood from anyone but an immediate relative. The doctor laughed her off and used conventional blood, and the woman got infected with HIV.
Patients have the right to limit the scope of their consent, so the woman won her case against the doctor. But no hospital would have placed the burden of blood identification on the immediate family because of related privacy issues. The ruling was that the woman should have had an the blood drawn from herself in advance of the surgery.
I thought that was a very insightful case. Hospitals are probably the last institution that really serve to protect your privacy. They're hardline ideologues on all kinds of things. Hell, the local hospital isn't even allowed to put up any images of Santa because it's a "religious icon." No star-topped Christmas trees either.
This article, if it's the one I think it is, talks about US interrogation methods. They don't involve physical torture, so much as disorienting tactics such as screwing with the lighting to give prisoners a distorted sense of time, playing loud noises at various intervals, and making every possible choice of sitting/reclining hopelessly uncomfortable (presumably setting the mind to solving an unsolvable problem).
I think the two-monitor productivity phenomenon can be generalized.
Recently, I was working on an awesome, hasn't-hit-consumers-yet product called e-paper. Basically, you have thin-film transistors covering a sheet full of a huge ton of bubbles. In each of these bubbles are reflective particles (like lots of tiny paper particles) and charged black particles (like toner). This creates the equivalent of a thin, flexible LCD display that doesn't emit light. Your eyes will thank you. It's essentially configurable paper.
Probably the best thing about two monitors is engaging in comparative coding.
Have you ever wanted to use three different articles at once while writing that code? Messing with the bookmarking/favorites feature in either web browsers or the MSDN browser can be painful. Sometimes I find myself oscillating back and forth between three articles, trying to keep all the details in my head while piecing together a complete thought.
Having two monitors allows two pertinent pieces of information without making your mental context skip a beat. Stacks of stick-up-able paper extends that benefit to any amount of information. Unlike bookmarking, ruffling through sheets of paper is a brainless exercise, so you don't lose track of your thoughts. Ask any user-interface expert worth his salt.
Compiling? Put the starcraft e-paper display on top and monitor that compile-job without switching contexts.
Oh, and make no mistake, there will be color e-paper. There's a cool trick that involves using various frequencies to make the toner particles coagulate in patterns of varying dispersions.
Once you've compiled a nice document or some cool business figures, just store the data into the e-paper ROM, disconnect the e-paper form your computer, and stick it in your briefcase.
If everyone has one, it can replace newspapers. Just insert 25 cents, put your e-paper EPROM base-unit against the Boston Globe programmer, and walk away with your daily news in hypertext. Remember that scene from back to the future?
What's really awesome is that these things (at least the bubbly e-paper base) is cheap to make.
Sometimes I get the impression that people are far too hung up on the term "password." Any system worth its salt will allow the use of long passwords, permitting the use of full sentences.
Sentences are easy to remember, and as long as you don't choose a common phrase, you're not terribly susceptible to attack. "Faraday likes to eat scones on Tuesday." Capitals, lower case, special character. Fits most password schemes.
The only problem is that some applications don't accept long passwords. The locking program for X that's running on our WPI's DEC UNIX systems, for instance, stops accepting characters after reaching a certain quantity, effectively preventing me from unlocking my #@$*(& console. *ahem* Sorry.
Oh, and anybody who uses, "My voice is my passport. Verify me." deserves to be shot, and often, by someone who knows how.
He's not talking about non-deterministic computing. He's talking about ways to salvage the chip if one or more subcircuits don't function correctly. The article isn't very technical, but this probably alludes to having redundant circuits, possibly even taking the answer that the most redundant circuits produce.
I'm not a smart enough man to know whether or not this is feasible. Keep in mind that introducing these redundancy checks actually increases the "length" of the circuit, increasing propogation delays. If this system works at all, you can be certain that it will be very rigidly subjected to the law of diminishing returns.
The question is whether the mainstream market is adequately interested in genuine role-playing to make for a worthwhile MMORPG. MMORPGs are not a fad. I believe that the longer they are around, the more diversity we'll see, and the more room there will be for experimentation on the part of the developers.
One problem with role-play focused MMORPGs is that they would be very high-maintainence, most likely requiring more staff than conventional MMORPGs to regulate player behavior and to keep the game interesting.
There are large, persistent, thematic worlds of genuine role-play that exist presently. They're labors of love, and entirely textbased, which is the only thing that makes them affordable. These are termed "RPI"s or Role-Play Intensives.
In these games, there are no experience points. Everything tends to be purely social (although there is a skill element). "But Roxton, what's the fun if there's no room for advancement?" You've been playing conventional RPGs too long, Kemo-Sabe.
The worlds of RPIs are incredibly rich, complete with backstory and detail to rival the best of sourcebooks. Like real life, position and power are not conferred by some universe-implied system. They are conferred by people in positions of power, or by others willing to support you. There are existing power structures in conflict, with checks, balances, and the genuine possibility of one overwhelming another.
There's no formula to it. Perhaps you can sell your skills and become a hired hand. Maybe your heritage entitles you to noble privileges, if the setting is medieval. As a merchant, you'll be involved in city politics and be in a position of influence. Or perhaps you could be deeply involved in one of the world's many variously flavored churches in matters both internal and external.
When you start these games, you spend a lot of time developing a character, complete with backstory set in the rich world upon which the game is based. These games have role-play administrators who are responsible for verifying the quality of these applications, helping new players, and generally policing the in-character nature. While most of the play tends to be wonderfully player-driven, the role-play administrators support the players and also create a few well-made plots of their own, often including a large over-arching story.
In these MUDs, the playerbase drifts away from the immature segment you find on hack n'slash games. You'll find mostly college-aged students and middle-aged history buffs (often SCA types), as well as some bright and responsible younger folk.
One of the ones I've enjoyed is Harshlands set in the Harn role-playing universe.
A more popular RPI, though slightly more combat-oriented, is Armageddon, which you can learn about here.
Seriously, if text-based gaming is not a serious turn-off for you [And considering the number of CLI-fans in the Linux community, I wouldn't be surprised if that was a great many of you], give it a try. While someday the market will turn its tastes to more sophisticated multiplayer gaming, you can keep on the bleeding edge in the low-tech, non-profit worlds of RPIs.
The trick to diplomacy is to either play an on-line game with strangers, or find gamers who are socially mature and aloof enough to separate role-play from personal ambitions. I've seen people get incredibly pissed over broken promises and bad faith in this game.
It's a lot worse in long, drawn out games. When you're finishing it in a matter of hours at a game table, it's not quite as bad, though I have seen good and friendly people leave in a huff after losing or prematurely resign, leaving dead pieces on the board.
But don't let that put you off. It's a fantastic game, in my opinion far superior to Risk on many levels. The game theory used here-in is far, far more complex and interesting.
To give the uninitiated an idea, basically everybody moves simultaneously. All moves are written secretly on a piece of paper. Whether your moves succeed or not depends on what other people's moves were. There's an open round of discussion, debate, and, well, diplomacy before each move writing. Nobody can win without help.
Seriously, give it a try. But if you play it in person, make sure someone in your troupe has the charisma to keep good feelings all around.
Yeah, a friend of mine figured she'd rent a movie she'd already seen so we could play cards during the movie. Not too bright since the damned thing was subtitled.
It's the worst movie I've ever seen! You should watch it, if only to say that you've seen a movie worse than Manos: Hands of Fate. It has to be some over-my-head Chinese culture parody for it to have been a box office hit.
I'm told they're going to dub it and release it in the US.
I would say the reverse is strictly true. Over the past 20 years, NPR has gone from being a governmentally funded entity to receiving the vast majority of its funding from private pledges and underwriters.
Slashdot Mirror
I've heard this several times from conservatives. "It's just one point of view pitted against another." It's not that simple!
One side has a point of view that is open to different ways of thinking, and strives to avoid actively repressing alternative approaches to life. The other has a single, traditional point of view what constitutes Right(TM), and voraciously combats any interfering approach.
The answer is taking the responsibility for defining culture away from the government. What right does a government have to decide what marriage means? Marriage licenses should be registered at churches, and it should be up to the individual as to whether a, for instance, Episcopal marriage license means anything.
But rather than fixing the system to avoid conflict, the Christian conservative takes an aggressive approach, and feels totally within their right to do so, as if any other approach to the problem were incidental or something they would "settle for."
*grumble*
Let me offer you a reasonable way of thinking about this.
The election system is flawed. Even Afghanistan has a better election system. A simple plurality vote allows the presence of "spoiler" candidates.
Thought problem: 60% of people want a candidate with position A and 40% of people want a candidate with position B.
Unfortunately, there are 2 candidates with position A. With the votes split between them, the single candidate with position B will win. This is a serious and dramatic flaw of the electoral system. People who say otherwise are deceiving themselves.
In a runoff election, successive pairs of candidates are voted for until a solid majority is obtained. That makes spoilers impossible.
But unfortunately, with the current system, spoilers are possible.
In order to not break the system, you have to pretend that this is the last phase of a run-off election. You have to choose between the pair of candidates most likely to win. In reality, nothing has been lost. You need to recognize that even in a real run-off election, Kerry and Bush would probably have been the two run-off finalists.
And so, under this point of view, you are morally obligated to vote for the one of the two run-off candidates that you would most like in office.
Pick your battles! Call for election reform this coming year. Gain recognition by voting third party candidates into lesser offices; Libertarians, for instance, hold a number of offices nation wide.
There are a lot of subtleties in voting. Here are a couple of helpful links.
Nice thought, but no cigar.
The reason the DMCA didn't apply here is that, while the checksum chip permitted the printer engine program to run, it didn't permit *access* to the program. Therefore, there was no access being circumvented.
With DVD region encoding, there actually is a system in place to prevent access to the DVD's content.
Make it affordable and desireable for me to buy, and I will. Overprice it, and only give me a small part of what I want and I will laugh in your face while walking away... (and with digital goods, walking away with a copy!)
But that's not a reasonable and consistent system!
Capitalism is a question of: Would you be happier with the product and without your money than you would be with your money and without the product? If you create that self-serving third option of keeping your money and the product, you break the market model. You're talking about a donation-only system.
Piracy actually discourages independent labels by causing their reasonable prices to be a less tempting alternative to present consumers of mainstream music. That's just one repercussion among many of breaking the market model.
The thesis is simple: As a democracy, we created copyright so we could have a market model for works.
Now, I agree that fair use provisions should be extended, that copyright terms should be greatly reduced, and that monopolistic behaviors need to be curtailed. The fact that the system is broken doesn't justify putting extra goodies in your pocket, nor does piracy do anything to help the situation.
There's nothing more irksome to me in this world than philosophies of convenience. There are so many ways to think about things -- why do people choose the one that benefits themselves most?
So... you're arguing for the death of copyright (because you can't have it both ways). Let me give you some context for what copyright is.
Thought experiment:
You're a factory owner. There's an inelastic labor pool that will, for the foreseeable future, always be willing to work for peanuts. You'd like to keep the factory warm in the winter, but your competitor can outcompete you if you do.
So you get together with all your competitors, and they all feel the same way. So you sign an agreement to keep your factories warm in the winter.
Then another competitor enters the market, doesn't heat the factories, and outcompetes all of you.
A democracy let's us fix the game theory by setting some enlightened ground rules. "You must heat your factories in the winter." Believe it or not, this makes most factory owners happy.
Imagine a world that never had copyright.
There are a few authors. Many of these authors make their money by scheduling verbal readings in auditoriums, frisking people for tape recorders at the entrance. Others submit a set of 5-10 copies to a well-guarded local reading hall. By these methods, they can use the market model instead of the donation-only model, and preserve their work from distortion.
The authors aren't as happy as they could be. The readers/listeners aren't happy as they could be. The books aren't as well-read as the potential interest in them would dictate.
So using democracy, authors and readers collude to generate the notion of copyright.
Don't you see that copyright is in the public interest? If so, are your ethics genuinely capable of reconciling double-standards? If so, would you please give me leave to hate you? Thanks.
That's not true. Surely you must agree that anyone who reads mail is doing so consciously. Your only defense is in saying that the ruling is unenforceable, given that just about any employee could peruse the plaintext database.
I think it's very enforceable. Server software could easily make it difficult for casual employees to view customer mail, and ISPs could be compelled to have such software under due diligence of the law.
So are you going to argue that the fact that a few select administrators or an employee with a packet sniffer can read your e-mail makes the ruling unenforceable? Hell, then we might as well toss out half the SEC regulations.
Nobody's saying that automated processes can't analyze the plaintext, Theobon.
The moderate irony here is that a run-off system has been implemented in Afghanistan's elections.
How backwards does that make us?
*eyeroll*
Then you're not selling software, are you? Given that anyone can repackage it and give it away for free if they wish, the genuine market value of your software qua software is decided by fanboyism.
The support model has its applications, but it should be plainly evident that it's not enough for everything. You know you're hitting the corners of a flawed philosophical system when doing something like writing intentionally mediocre documentation can be a (admittedly short-term) profit incentive.
People use BSD-style lincensing to allow people to see and use their code. People use the GPL to allow other people to see and use their code and not let commercial packages make use of them.
"If someone uses my code in a commercial product, then they're making money off my work!"
Well, if you really think about it, since they have access to your unmodified free code, they're only really paying for the extra features offered by the commercial code. What's so bad about that?
E-Paper is a technology currently under development by several firms. It's essentially magnetic paper particles floating in ink, encapsulated in hundreds of little pixel-bubbles per inch, driven by transparent thin film transistors.
They're still trying to get the technology down, but I would guess they'd be on the shelves within the next 5 years. In principle, it should be as natural to read as paper, except it can be driven by a ROM cartridge. Pick up Flash installments of the globe at your local kiosk.
Color E-Paper is a real problem though. One approach is to have opaque layers of color, with different voltage frequencies forcing the medium to coagulate in strange patterns to make a controllable percentage of the "bubble" transparent.
Silly Roxton. Hit the preview button.
http://www.nanocrew.net/blog/apple/qtfairuse.html
Yeah, right. Do you know how big a pain in the butt it was to find a copy of QTFairUse.tar.gz after it got pulled off the NanoCrew site? I don't know the circumstances under which nanocrew removed the code, but it took me a long time to dig it up. I don't think the average user would go through that much trouble.
e .html">http://www.nanocrew.net/blog/apple/qtfairus e.html</a>
Huh, interesting. NanoCrew came back up. It says to use VLC, which claims to support the MP4 format. Can anyone confirm that this software package plays encrypted AAC and perhaps even lets you save it as unencrypted AAC?
<a href="http://www.nanocrew.net/blog/apple/qtfairus
Cygwin-dependent? Cygwin is GPL'd (though it should, in my opinion, be LGPL'd.)
If you're right, that means they can never release a compiled binary without putting their package under the GPL...
Sandeep will only spend his disposable income on US goods. For everything else, he will enjoy his low cost of living by sustaining himself with cheap domestic goods.
As the Indian economy develops, they'll be able to get a better variety of products domestically. I predict that the demand for American goods will not rise in proportion to the number of off-shored jobs, but may actually fall.
Your capital argument seems insufficient. There's enough capital. But with a world market it's smarter to use that capital to create high-demand Indian jobs than to create unprofitable American jobs.
-Adam
Simplistic model.
The economy operates on satisfying the demands of others, and in turn getting your own demands satisfied.
Jim makes red beads for 6 demand units, 2 of which he spends on glass, 3 of which he spends on red dye.
Joe makes red dye for 3 demand units.
John makes cotton candy for 2 demand units.
Jim and Joe use their demand units to buy John's cotton candy.
Indian Sandeep enters the market and produces red dye for 2 demand units. Jim buys his red dye from Sandeep instead of Joe.
Jim now buys his red dye from Sandeep and has one additional demand unit to buy cotton candy from John.
If Sandeep bought cotton candy from John, then the market would have two new demand units for cotton candy. Joe could get a job as a cotton candy maker.
But Sandeep doesn't buy goods from the US, so Joe is screwed.
Do you see? Off-shoring is acceptable for the US if the off-shored workers create a market for US goods.
The free market is in transition. When the free market stabilizes, Indian IT workers will have the same demands as American IT workers, and the system will stop screwing over US workers. But while the market is in transition, Indian IT workers will be less demanding, due to the rapidly growing pool of educated Indian workers.
And it's going to get worse. The improved Indian economy will result in more money for education which will result in an expanding educated labor pool, which will result in sophisticated jobs moving to India until the free market corrects itself.
A lot of people are saying, "We'll just have to move people in the US to higher skilled jobs." Not good enough! Indian workers will eventually get all the education they need to be competitive even in the financial markets.
It's not India's fault. You need to have a global free market from the get-go in order to avoid problems like this. The free-market is self-correcting, but the self-correction will prove painful to US workers. We're talking about 1 billion people the market needs to correct for, for Christ sake.
I don't know what the answer is, but it may very well be a measured amount of protectionism. Protectionism is only good if it still permits the free market correction to occur, but just makes it gentler. An obvious and effective example is unemployment pay. Maybe we need to slow off-shoring by requiring a restricted reverse Visa... and perhaps some not-too-harsh tariffs on buying goods and services from India.
Comments?
Perhaps the only effective argument against the use of water, besides the possibility of contaminating it with pollutants, is thermal pollution. The unexpected changes in water temperature do a surprising number on the ecology of surrounding bodies of water, particularly in terms of algae and bacteria. It can even extend the fishing season.
It's a considerable issue because half of the total water drawn in the US goes to cooling power plants.
Environmentalists consider it to be a problem, but nothing on the order of global warming. Thermal pollution is just a necessary biproduct of energy conversion. *shrug*
Yeah, there was a legal case not too long ago involving a woman who required a blood transfusion for her surgery. She told the doctor that she didn't want blood from anyone but an immediate relative. The doctor laughed her off and used conventional blood, and the woman got infected with HIV.
Patients have the right to limit the scope of their consent, so the woman won her case against the doctor. But no hospital would have placed the burden of blood identification on the immediate family because of related privacy issues. The ruling was that the woman should have had an the blood drawn from herself in advance of the surgery.
I thought that was a very insightful case. Hospitals are probably the last institution that really serve to protect your privacy. They're hardline ideologues on all kinds of things. Hell, the local hospital isn't even allowed to put up any images of Santa because it's a "religious icon." No star-topped Christmas trees either.
NPR has a series of informative programs on the Guantanamo Bay situation.
Treatment of Guantanamo Detainees Questioned
This article, if it's the one I think it is, talks about US interrogation methods. They don't involve physical torture, so much as disorienting tactics such as screwing with the lighting to give prisoners a distorted sense of time, playing loud noises at various intervals, and making every possible choice of sitting/reclining hopelessly uncomfortable (presumably setting the mind to solving an unsolvable problem).
You can find other stories on the situation here
-Roxton
I think the two-monitor productivity phenomenon can be generalized.
Recently, I was working on an awesome, hasn't-hit-consumers-yet product called e-paper. Basically, you have thin-film transistors covering a sheet full of a huge ton of bubbles. In each of these bubbles are reflective particles (like lots of tiny paper particles) and charged black particles (like toner). This creates the equivalent of a thin, flexible LCD display that doesn't emit light. Your eyes will thank you. It's essentially configurable paper.
Probably the best thing about two monitors is engaging in comparative coding.
Have you ever wanted to use three different articles at once while writing that code? Messing with the bookmarking/favorites feature in either web browsers or the MSDN browser can be painful. Sometimes I find myself oscillating back and forth between three articles, trying to keep all the details in my head while piecing together a complete thought.
Having two monitors allows two pertinent pieces of information without making your mental context skip a beat. Stacks of stick-up-able paper extends that benefit to any amount of information. Unlike bookmarking, ruffling through sheets of paper is a brainless exercise, so you don't lose track of your thoughts. Ask any user-interface expert worth his salt.
Compiling? Put the starcraft e-paper display on top and monitor that compile-job without switching contexts.
Oh, and make no mistake, there will be color e-paper. There's a cool trick that involves using various frequencies to make the toner particles coagulate in patterns of varying dispersions.
Once you've compiled a nice document or some cool business figures, just store the data into the e-paper ROM, disconnect the e-paper form your computer, and stick it in your briefcase.
If everyone has one, it can replace newspapers. Just insert 25 cents, put your e-paper EPROM base-unit against the Boston Globe programmer, and walk away with your daily news in hypertext. Remember that scene from back to the future?
What's really awesome is that these things (at least the bubbly e-paper base) is cheap to make.
Keep a look out. You heard it here first!
-Adam
Sometimes I get the impression that people are far too hung up on the term "password." Any system worth its salt will allow the use of long passwords, permitting the use of full sentences.
Sentences are easy to remember, and as long as you don't choose a common phrase, you're not terribly susceptible to attack. "Faraday likes to eat scones on Tuesday." Capitals, lower case, special character. Fits most password schemes.
The only problem is that some applications don't accept long passwords. The locking program for X that's running on our WPI's DEC UNIX systems, for instance, stops accepting characters after reaching a certain quantity, effectively preventing me from unlocking my #@$*(& console. *ahem* Sorry.
Oh, and anybody who uses, "My voice is my passport. Verify me." deserves to be shot, and often, by someone who knows how.
-Adam
He's not talking about non-deterministic computing. He's talking about ways to salvage the chip if one or more subcircuits don't function correctly. The article isn't very technical, but this probably alludes to having redundant circuits, possibly even taking the answer that the most redundant circuits produce.
I'm not a smart enough man to know whether or not this is feasible. Keep in mind that introducing these redundancy checks actually increases the "length" of the circuit, increasing propogation delays. If this system works at all, you can be certain that it will be very rigidly subjected to the law of diminishing returns.
-Roxton
The question is whether the mainstream market is adequately interested in genuine role-playing to make for a worthwhile MMORPG. MMORPGs are not a fad. I believe that the longer they are around, the more diversity we'll see, and the more room there will be for experimentation on the part of the developers.
One problem with role-play focused MMORPGs is that they would be very high-maintainence, most likely requiring more staff than conventional MMORPGs to regulate player behavior and to keep the game interesting.
There are large, persistent, thematic worlds of genuine role-play that exist presently. They're labors of love, and entirely textbased, which is the only thing that makes them affordable. These are termed "RPI"s or Role-Play Intensives.
In these games, there are no experience points. Everything tends to be purely social (although there is a skill element). "But Roxton, what's the fun if there's no room for advancement?" You've been playing conventional RPGs too long, Kemo-Sabe.
The worlds of RPIs are incredibly rich, complete with backstory and detail to rival the best of sourcebooks. Like real life, position and power are not conferred by some universe-implied system. They are conferred by people in positions of power, or by others willing to support you. There are existing power structures in conflict, with checks, balances, and the genuine possibility of one overwhelming another.
There's no formula to it. Perhaps you can sell your skills and become a hired hand. Maybe your heritage entitles you to noble privileges, if the setting is medieval. As a merchant, you'll be involved in city politics and be in a position of influence. Or perhaps you could be deeply involved in one of the world's many variously flavored churches in matters both internal and external.
When you start these games, you spend a lot of time developing a character, complete with backstory set in the rich world upon which the game is based. These games have role-play administrators who are responsible for verifying the quality of these applications, helping new players, and generally policing the in-character nature. While most of the play tends to be wonderfully player-driven, the role-play administrators support the players and also create a few well-made plots of their own, often including a large over-arching story.
In these MUDs, the playerbase drifts away from the immature segment you find on hack n'slash games. You'll find mostly college-aged students and middle-aged history buffs (often SCA types), as well as some bright and responsible younger folk.
One of the ones I've enjoyed is Harshlands set in the Harn role-playing universe.
A more popular RPI, though slightly more combat-oriented, is Armageddon, which you can learn about here.
Seriously, if text-based gaming is not a serious turn-off for you [And considering the number of CLI-fans in the Linux community, I wouldn't be surprised if that was a great many of you], give it a try. While someday the market will turn its tastes to more sophisticated multiplayer gaming, you can keep on the bleeding edge in the low-tech, non-profit worlds of RPIs.
Igh...
The trick to diplomacy is to either play an on-line game with strangers, or find gamers who are socially mature and aloof enough to separate role-play from personal ambitions. I've seen people get incredibly pissed over broken promises and bad faith in this game.
It's a lot worse in long, drawn out games. When you're finishing it in a matter of hours at a game table, it's not quite as bad, though I have seen good and friendly people leave in a huff after losing or prematurely resign, leaving dead pieces on the board.
But don't let that put you off. It's a fantastic game, in my opinion far superior to Risk on many levels. The game theory used here-in is far, far more complex and interesting.
To give the uninitiated an idea, basically everybody moves simultaneously. All moves are written secretly on a piece of paper. Whether your moves succeed or not depends on what other people's moves were. There's an open round of discussion, debate, and, well, diplomacy before each move writing. Nobody can win without help.
Seriously, give it a try. But if you play it in person, make sure someone in your troupe has the charisma to keep good feelings all around.
Yeah, a friend of mine figured she'd rent a movie she'd already seen so we could play cards during the movie. Not too bright since the damned thing was subtitled.
It's the worst movie I've ever seen! You should watch it, if only to say that you've seen a movie worse than Manos: Hands of Fate. It has to be some over-my-head Chinese culture parody for it to have been a box office hit.
I'm told they're going to dub it and release it in the US.
I would say the reverse is strictly true. Over the past 20 years, NPR has gone from being a governmentally funded entity to receiving the vast majority of its funding from private pledges and underwriters.