Offshoring is a good thing. The "lost jobs" in IT are creating a pool of capital (in the form of labor) that will allow the next great step forward to be taken.
Industrialization could only occur on the scale it did if, thanks to increased efficiency in agriculture, millions of family farms went under, sending their labor capital to the cities to work in the factories.
You are making a fatal mistake, by comparing two completely different things.
The loss of jobs in family farms and the increase of jobs in factories happened as a result of exactly the same thing: improvements in technology that allows a single man to produce more. That meant that fewer people were needed to produce the same amount of agricultural goods, which drives the real cost of agricultural goods lower, making them more affordable to everyone. That is a real increase in productivity and is something that ultimately benefits everyone, provided that the people in question had somewhere else to go. They did, thanks to the very same technological advancements.
Offshoring is a completely different thing. That it's happening has nothing to do with any increase in the ability of an individual to produce more. Unlike industrialization, the technological advancements that make offshoring possible do not provide new jobs.
Offshoring is, quite simply, the use by corporations of the differences between economies to drive labor costs to the lowest level possible. It has nothing to do with productivity, and everything to do with the cost of living. As soon as the cost of living in India rises enough, these corporations will shift their gaze elsewhere. When they do, India's economy will collapse enough that said corporations will be willing to shift their gaze back to India again.
So, ultimately, you have to ask yourself who can provide the cheapest labor. The answer is: someone who is paid a subsistence wage and who lives in squalor. Someone who pays as little as possible for infrastructure, and thus has as little as possible infrastructure to use. Even luxuries like electricity will add costs. Corporations only care how much in total they pay for the labor in question. The living conditions of that labor don't matter except in terms of how they affect the expense of the labor.
Such labor cannot afford to buy the products the corporations in question produce.
This is why offshoring is ultimately a race to the bottom. The shift from the U.S. to India is just one such shift. Others will happen whenever the standard of living differences between two economies are great enough.
For the U.S. to become an appealing source of labor again, its standard of living must fall to that of the third world. I don't see how that benefits anyone except the owners of these corporations.
There is NO WAY a corporation can ever force you to buy their music!
No, but they can force you to pay money to them even when you don't want to, e.g. through taxes on CD-Rs designed to "compensate" them for their "losses" (see Canada as an example of this in action, and the U.S. for an example of the same thing as applied to audio DAT). And they can force you to play your music/movies/etc only on certain equipment by making sure that any tools you might use to transfer it to a different form of media are illegal to distribute and thus impossible to get, e.g. via the DMCA.
They can do this because the government listens to them much more than it listens to you or any other individual citizen, because they can pay politicians much more than you can and, in some cases, can even influence what the media says about those politicians (indeed, sometimes they and the media are the same entity, so the amount of influence is even greater) and thus, ultimately, what the people in general think about those politicians.
Are you starting to get the picture yet, to understand the scope of the influence and control these corporations have over the government and, thus, over you? You're not nearly as free as you may think, and the amount of freedom you have is likely to shrink greatly over time, thanks to these corporations. They don't want you to be free: they want you to be captive, because a captive audience is a guaranteed source of income.
Sounds like you're attempting for the (Score: 5, inflammatory) rating. In the real world things aren't black and white like you're portraying them. It gets sticky when you get in the details.
It only gets "sticky" that way because our Supreme Court, in its infinite "wisdom" (they were fucking morons, in other words) decided that the phrase "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech" doesn't mean exactly what it says.
Look, it can be made real simple:
You can say whatever you want, whenever you want, with no restrictions at all. Nothing less can truly be considered "free speech".
You are responsible for the direct consequences of what you say.
With those two items in place, the "fire in a crowded theater" bit becomes a complete non-issue: if you yell "fire" in a crowded theater and people are injured or killed in the ensuing panic, you are responsible for those injuries/deaths. If you incite a riot, you are responsible for the damage. No, you're not solely responsible for the damage, but you do bear some of the responsibility all the same.
The purpose of the courts should be to determine the amount of responsibility and the conditions of responsibility, for those things surely vary with the situation. But under no circumstances should they ever have placed any limits on speech. To do so is to ultimately do the nation a grave disservice.
How about insurance companies viewing the information to see how you drive to determine whether they should jack up your insurance rates.
As far as I'm concerned, the only time the insurance companies should be adjusting your rates is when they adjust everyone's rates. As it is, this habit of the insurance companies of trying to categorize everyone as precisely as possible will eventually entirely eliminate the purpose of insurance to begin with.
Consider what would happen if the insurance company could completely predict how many accidents you'll have and how much damage those accidents will represent, and adjust your rate accordingly. In that event, the amount of money you'll be paying the insurance company will be exactly the amount of money you'd be paying if you didn't have insurance at all, plus the profit the insurance company is taking.
But the entire purpose of insurance is to spread the risk, to eliminate the chance that you'll lose it all in a low-probability event in exchange for everyone paying a slightly higher amount than most of them would, on average, if they didn't have insurance at all.
By increasing the specificity of the groupings, the insurance companies are eliminating the advantage of having insurance at all. Once the specificity is high enough, insurance no longer buys you anything because it doesn't spread the risk enough to make any real difference.
We're not quite there yet, but we're getting there slowly. The use of systems such as Onstar to gather data for the insurance companies only serves to get us there a little faster.
I overlooked the fact that Sony is in itself a large media company. But I still don't see why other media companies would choose this over anything else.
Because it'll have the backing of large consumer electronics companies (like Sony) that also happen to own media companies. Which means that there will be a large volume of devices that content which is protected with this DRM scheme will work on.
It's a chicken and egg problem, and the solution is to get both sides to use the same method at the same time.
While other media companies compete with Sony, you can expect them to cooperate with Sony on the DRM standard because they all stand to benefit (at their customers' expense, of course) from DRM. Once all the media companies are on the same page, then hardware manufacturers will have no choice but to offer equipment that conforms to the chosen DRM standard.
The law is never helpful from the perspective of someone who has lost a case. If MS/SCO/whoever wins and the opposition exhausts appeals, then I'm willing to let a particular case drop.
Except that, in the MS antitrust case, MS lost and yet we, the people, got screwed because the "justice" system refused to treat MS the same way it treats normal citizens, and MS as a result wasn't penalized in any meaningful way for its crime. And that's despite the callous disregard for the law and the "justice" system MS showed in the courtroom. No ordinary citizen would have survived that, much less be let off scott-free.
No, there is now far too much evidence, going all the way to the Supreme Court (there's no other reasonable explanation for their decision on the Copyright Term Extension Act) that the "justice" system has absolutely nothing to do with justice and everything to do with money and power to believe that it will ever yield a reasonable outcome except through sheer luck.
And in the case of SCO, we're in luck. If there's any computer company that has what it takes to take on MS (even if MS is using SCO as a proxy), it's IBM. If SCO had picked a smaller target we'd much more likely be screwed, given that SCO has backing from MS.
But earlier you seemed to be arguing that large mobs of angry workers weren't a problem because the government could just bomb or shoot them all with modern weaponry.
[...]
My counter-argument is that modern mass-killing devices (or "weapons of mass-destruction") are not actually a good solution to the "angry mob" problem.
Ah, I think I understand why you're having trouble interpreting my statements.
You're equating a large imbalance in firepower between the average worker and the average soldier to "weapons of mass destruction". While WMD certainly do contribute to that imbalance, they're not strictly required for the imbalance to be sufficient to make an angry mob of civilians effectively powerless.
No, modern conventional weapons in the hands of a government are sufficient for that. With such weapons, a government soldier has a firepower advantage of thousands to one against an average civilian, thanks to things like artillery, armor, and air support.
WMD just increases that to a millions to one advantage.
The firepower advantage manifests itself in two ways: the first is that the average soldier can take out a large number of civilians easily. The second is that the average soldier is very hard for the average civilian to take out. Ultimately, it means that in a fight between the military and civilians, the civilians will (on average) suffer thousands of deaths for every soldier killed.
This disparity in firepower is what enables the government in question to get away with killing civilians that get out of line without having to worry about the civilians forming a mob and getting out of hand. Any civilian with any brains knows that the government possesses a thousands to one advantage in firepower, and that therefore to revolt en mass without support from the military would be futile. Said civilian also knows that the government would rather kill the majority of the civilians than lose power, and therefore challenging the power of the government is a monumentally stupid thing to do.
The days of popular revolution against a well-armed government are over, which is why I believe the slide of the U.S. and other "free" countries towards corporate police statehood is inevitable and unstoppable.
Angry citizens are extremely relevant even (especially) in an age of highly efficient government killing machines. If your citizens are so angry about the sweatshop conditions that you have to kill them all, your economy is just as fucked as if they were so angry that they stopped work, rioted, and forcibly removed you from office--probably more fucked than that, now that I think about it.
True -- if you have to kill them all.
But you probably won't have to. Not even close. You just have to kill enough of them to make it clear to the rest that their choice is either work or death. Most people will choose to work.
And if you're really good at the police state thing, you'll identify troublemakers relatively early in the process and "disappear" them before they can make any real trouble.
The vast majority of people are sheep and will do whatever their masters tell them to do. That's why brutal dictatorships manage to stay in power despite their brutality.
The real innovation happens at companies populated with nineteen year olds. At nineteen years old, you don't have the kind of doubts you'd have at thirty. You don't have a hundred people in middle management telling you what you can't do.
While some may reply (and indeed some have) that most endeavors started by people at that age fail, such a reply in no way reduces the validity of your statement.
The bottom line is that while most such endeavors fail, there is always some chance of success, even spectacular success. When a force such as middle management stops something in its tracks, it basically reduces that chance to zero. There was a chance that the endeavor in question could succeed, but that chance was reduced to zero once it was decided to not even try.
otherwise the "winner" in the global economy is the country most willing to exploit its citizens, fuck its environment and provide substandard or unsafre products.
No, that would be the loser, because they would end up with angry citizens, poisoned resources, and a reputation for producing shoddy goods.
Angry citizens are irrelevant in the face of modern weaponry wielded by a military that is on the side of the government and not the people. And the cheapest laborer is one who is paid barely enough to survive and who lives in the cheapest possible conditions.
Oh, and shoddy goods are the ones that seem to sell best, not worst, as long as they're the cheapest -- because price is the thing that matters most. Otherwise you'll have to explain why the PC won over the Macintosh, why the Intel processors won over Motorola's, why winmodems got as popular as they did, etc. The history of computing is replete with examples of superior products failing because they weren't the cheapest (look at the DEC Alpha for just one example).
Spending the extra money now will keep others from trying it and save money in the long term.
A warning to the others is ample reason for IBM to grind them into the dust.
If IBM really wants to use this as a warning to others, then they shouldn't simply grind SCO into dust, they should also do the same to SCO's law firm (Boies and company), since that law firm is responsible for bringing this baseless suit to begin with.
A victory against the law firm would set a very good precedent: it would force other law firms to be truly diligent about getting their evidence lined up before filing suit, and should ultimately result in fewer frivolous suits.
Some would argue that law firms are simply the "messenger" and should be absolved of any responsibility for their clients' actions. But the reality is that law firms are partners in crime, as it were: they stand to benefit from a win at least as much as their client. That's why Boies and company are involved in this to begin with.
With AIDS, on the other hand, you have to actually share certain bodily fluids with someone who's infected. In other words, you can remain celibate and lead an otherwise normal life, and modulo infected blood or needles, you have no chance of contracting AIDS.
Yeah. For now. Until the thing mutates into a form that is airborne. And then the problem will get much, much worse.
And guess what? The overall probability of that mutation occurring depends greatly on how many spores of AIDS exist in the world, which is strongly related to how many people have it.
Which means it is in our best interests to get a handle on the AIDS problem, and fast.
Of course, it's possible for something like the common cold to mutate into a form much nastier, so it's really all about the odds. But we know that AIDS is already nasty, and that all that needs to change is its ability to survive airborne. That may (or may not -- someone much more in the know should be able to answer this) be a much smaller evolutionary step to take than turning the common cold into something nasty.
Its already happening. Indians are now viewed as expensive since they think they deserve up to 10k a year. But that nerve!
Exactly. And when the jobs move from India to some other location, India's economy will suffer until India's wages are lower than everyone else's, at which point India will get some of the jobs again (for a short while). Now repeat this process ad infinitum. Where do all the jobs end up going? Answer: to the lowest bidder.
But who is the lowest bidder? Answer: the person who gets paid just barely enough to live on. No running water, no health care services, etc., since those things cost money and ultimately drive up the total cost of an employee.
Contributing to this is the fact that as people lose their jobs they stop being able to pay for goods and services, so many companies will ultimately see their market dry up. What do they do when their market shrinks? Answer: they get rid of people and have even more incentive to hire the cheapest labor they can get their hands on -- subsistence workers, in other words.
Combine all these effects, and the end result is that almost everyone ends up living on a subsistence wage, and that's if they can even get that.
Please tell me what specific forces can/will counteract this. For those of you who think outsourcing ultimately ends up continuously improving economies elsewhere, tell me this: how does the economic state of the countries Nike uses to manufacture their shoes compare with the economic state of those countries immediately after Nike first started using them? My bet is that those economies have not improved at all in the past 20 years (or however long Nike's been there), and can therefore be used as evidence that globalization does not have all the beneficial effects many seem to think it does.
And no, armed revolution will not fix any of this because a successful armed revolution depends on the average revolutionary having roughly the same amount of firepower as the average government soldier, and that's no longer the case (unlike the late 1700's): the average government soldier has orders of magnitude more firepower than the average civilian today, and governments today respond only to those who have wealth: corporations.
The outcome of this proposal is directly related to everyone here who wants more regulation of business, more control of business, and more taxation of business. It has nothing to do with business but with the federal power that is granted to certain individual organizations -- and that can only be enforced at the point of a gun.
I agree. And as a start towards remedying this situation, I propose we do away with government regulation of "intellectual property", and let the free market take care of it.
What's that? You don't want to do away with copyright, patents, and trademarks? Not willing to let the free market take care of things like that? Then you damned well better think things all the way through before abolishing things like antitrust laws (which are also "regulation" of business), environment protection laws, etc.
Wake up. Pure capitalism is an extreme, just like pure communism is. Neither can work as in its "pure" form because neither can completely account for human nature.
I suspect you're right that there is too much regulation of business, but I would argue that there is much more regulation of individuals, and if you want to achieve the goal of maximizing individual freedom, you'd better deal with the regulation of individuals first, especially since corporations as entities have much more power than individuals and are therefore better able to fend for themselves, even in the face of the regulations that already exist.
It's still a labour-intensive task - for the dbms. While vacuuming you can't really do much else with the database.
That's true if you're doing a VACUUM FULL. But that is now something that generally needs to be done only rarely (this will depend greatly on how you use the database). The database will now re-use freed tuples (VACUUM FULL compacts the physical table, thus eliminating such free space entirely and causing new data to be appended to the end of the physical table), so all that's usually needed is to find such tuples and mark them as being free.
The autovacuum process invokes the standard VACUUM (without FULL) which does the "lightweight" VACUUM processing. It will also automatically update the statistics associated with the tables so that the planner will make better choices about things like whether to do a full-table scan or an index scan, the type of join to use, etc.
VACUUM is much easier on the database than it used to be. It still isn't optimal, but if you read the pgsql-hackers mailing list you'll find that the developers are discussing at length how best to minimize VACUUM's effect on the database performance.
If we got penalized for every little things that humans do wrong, the only jobs would be working at a prison, on either side of the bars!
Ah, but you haven't been reading the Evil Overlord manual.
The purpose of legislation such as this isn't to put everyone in prison, it's to make it possible to put anyone in prison -- whomever the government wishes, in other words. That way governments don't have to worry about pesky things like public dissent: they can just arrest the key players before they have a chance to make a mess of things.
Don't worry, the US won't let a bunch of Brits top us. They'll build a super-DMCA? We'll build a Super- DOOPER-DMCA!
People may laugh at this. They forget that it's exactly this sort of reasoning (modified to sound more palatable to the masses) that was used to justify the last copyright term extension act.
In other words, don't laugh. It's a lot more likely to happen than you might think.
The UK, after all, is the nation which decided to pass a law requiring you to hand over your encryption keys without due process when asked, upon penalty of jail when you fail to do so -- and it doesn't matter if you actually have the encryption keys or not.
It's also the nation that puts up monitoring cameras in many public areas.
Oh, and it's also the nation that supports the U.S. no matter what, especially when it comes to invading another country in pursuit of "weapons of mass destruction" (wink, wink, nudge, nudge, *cough*oil*cough*).
The U.K. seems about as close to an Orwellian society as any "enlightened" country on the planet.
No, the real question is whether or not most of the other members of the EU will pass the EUCD. I expect they will, because they're all in the pockets of large corporations these days. Because money and control, after all, are the only things that matter these days, and nobody gives a flying fuck about liberty, freedom, rights, or the general well-being of the population anymore.
Cherish what few freedoms you have left. You won't have them for long.
I am surprised that MS hasn't jumped on the bandwagon yet... but I know their strategy will be to buy out whoever wins the on-line music war... cause we all know MS can't innovate for poo-poo. (despite how much their marketing division deliberately overuse the word)
Be kinda hard for MS to buy out Wal-Mart, and if Wal-Mart gets into the online music war then I'd expect them to win it if only because of the kind of leverage they are likely to have against the RIAA -- much more than just about anyone else.
I don't think the EU is much less in the pockets of corporations than the U.S. government, considering how quickly they've done things like passing an even worse version of the DMCA than the DMCA itself is.
That being the case, how many here think the EU will actually bother to stand up to Microsoft in the end? My bet is that the EU will continue to make noise about Microsoft until Microsoft pays them off (quietly, behind the scenes, of course), at which point the EU will quietly decide not to "go forward" with any sort of real action against Microsoft. At most, the EU will probably give Microsoft a good wrist-slapping ("Stop, or I shall say 'stop' again!").
Only if a more powerful multinational corporation attempts to influence the EU against Microsoft will the EU really do anything.
SCO may claim they want "information" but I'll bet they want no such thing. And yet, I'll bet that's exactly what they're going to get: information that will, in the end, put a stake through the heart of their case.
This is the U.S. legal system we're dealing with, so any outcome (even the most absurd) is possible. But with any luck, an outcome favorable to SCO (and thus Microsoft) won't happen here.
You dont have to be a billionare to force the USPTO to reexamine a patent. Its called inter partes re-examination, ANYONE can file for it, and all you need to do is submit prior art (or even just an argument) that says the patent was granted in error.
You might not need to be a billionaire to file for a patent reexamination. But given the number of ludicrous patents out there that haven't been reexamined, I can only conclude that you have to be a billionaire to get a patent reexamination, especially one in your favor.
I mean, come on. It's completely obvious that the only reason the USPTO is willing to reexamine the patents in question is because of Microsoft's influence over the government (they were able to get the government to kill its own antitrust case -- that takes a LOT of influence).
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You are making a fatal mistake, by comparing two completely different things.
The loss of jobs in family farms and the increase of jobs in factories happened as a result of exactly the same thing: improvements in technology that allows a single man to produce more. That meant that fewer people were needed to produce the same amount of agricultural goods, which drives the real cost of agricultural goods lower, making them more affordable to everyone. That is a real increase in productivity and is something that ultimately benefits everyone, provided that the people in question had somewhere else to go. They did, thanks to the very same technological advancements.
Offshoring is a completely different thing. That it's happening has nothing to do with any increase in the ability of an individual to produce more. Unlike industrialization, the technological advancements that make offshoring possible do not provide new jobs.
Offshoring is, quite simply, the use by corporations of the differences between economies to drive labor costs to the lowest level possible. It has nothing to do with productivity, and everything to do with the cost of living. As soon as the cost of living in India rises enough, these corporations will shift their gaze elsewhere. When they do, India's economy will collapse enough that said corporations will be willing to shift their gaze back to India again.
So, ultimately, you have to ask yourself who can provide the cheapest labor. The answer is: someone who is paid a subsistence wage and who lives in squalor. Someone who pays as little as possible for infrastructure, and thus has as little as possible infrastructure to use. Even luxuries like electricity will add costs. Corporations only care how much in total they pay for the labor in question. The living conditions of that labor don't matter except in terms of how they affect the expense of the labor.
Such labor cannot afford to buy the products the corporations in question produce.
This is why offshoring is ultimately a race to the bottom. The shift from the U.S. to India is just one such shift. Others will happen whenever the standard of living differences between two economies are great enough.
For the U.S. to become an appealing source of labor again, its standard of living must fall to that of the third world. I don't see how that benefits anyone except the owners of these corporations.
No, but they can force you to pay money to them even when you don't want to, e.g. through taxes on CD-Rs designed to "compensate" them for their "losses" (see Canada as an example of this in action, and the U.S. for an example of the same thing as applied to audio DAT). And they can force you to play your music/movies/etc only on certain equipment by making sure that any tools you might use to transfer it to a different form of media are illegal to distribute and thus impossible to get, e.g. via the DMCA.
They can do this because the government listens to them much more than it listens to you or any other individual citizen, because they can pay politicians much more than you can and, in some cases, can even influence what the media says about those politicians (indeed, sometimes they and the media are the same entity, so the amount of influence is even greater) and thus, ultimately, what the people in general think about those politicians.
Are you starting to get the picture yet, to understand the scope of the influence and control these corporations have over the government and, thus, over you? You're not nearly as free as you may think, and the amount of freedom you have is likely to shrink greatly over time, thanks to these corporations. They don't want you to be free: they want you to be captive, because a captive audience is a guaranteed source of income.
It only gets "sticky" that way because our Supreme Court, in its infinite "wisdom" (they were fucking morons, in other words) decided that the phrase "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech" doesn't mean exactly what it says.
Look, it can be made real simple:
With those two items in place, the "fire in a crowded theater" bit becomes a complete non-issue: if you yell "fire" in a crowded theater and people are injured or killed in the ensuing panic, you are responsible for those injuries/deaths. If you incite a riot, you are responsible for the damage. No, you're not solely responsible for the damage, but you do bear some of the responsibility all the same.
The purpose of the courts should be to determine the amount of responsibility and the conditions of responsibility, for those things surely vary with the situation. But under no circumstances should they ever have placed any limits on speech. To do so is to ultimately do the nation a grave disservice.
As far as I'm concerned, the only time the insurance companies should be adjusting your rates is when they adjust everyone's rates. As it is, this habit of the insurance companies of trying to categorize everyone as precisely as possible will eventually entirely eliminate the purpose of insurance to begin with.
Consider what would happen if the insurance company could completely predict how many accidents you'll have and how much damage those accidents will represent, and adjust your rate accordingly. In that event, the amount of money you'll be paying the insurance company will be exactly the amount of money you'd be paying if you didn't have insurance at all, plus the profit the insurance company is taking.
But the entire purpose of insurance is to spread the risk, to eliminate the chance that you'll lose it all in a low-probability event in exchange for everyone paying a slightly higher amount than most of them would, on average, if they didn't have insurance at all.
By increasing the specificity of the groupings, the insurance companies are eliminating the advantage of having insurance at all. Once the specificity is high enough, insurance no longer buys you anything because it doesn't spread the risk enough to make any real difference.
We're not quite there yet, but we're getting there slowly. The use of systems such as Onstar to gather data for the insurance companies only serves to get us there a little faster.
Sigh...
Because it'll have the backing of large consumer electronics companies (like Sony) that also happen to own media companies. Which means that there will be a large volume of devices that content which is protected with this DRM scheme will work on.
It's a chicken and egg problem, and the solution is to get both sides to use the same method at the same time.
While other media companies compete with Sony, you can expect them to cooperate with Sony on the DRM standard because they all stand to benefit (at their customers' expense, of course) from DRM. Once all the media companies are on the same page, then hardware manufacturers will have no choice but to offer equipment that conforms to the chosen DRM standard.
Except that, in the MS antitrust case, MS lost and yet we, the people, got screwed because the "justice" system refused to treat MS the same way it treats normal citizens, and MS as a result wasn't penalized in any meaningful way for its crime. And that's despite the callous disregard for the law and the "justice" system MS showed in the courtroom. No ordinary citizen would have survived that, much less be let off scott-free.
No, there is now far too much evidence, going all the way to the Supreme Court (there's no other reasonable explanation for their decision on the Copyright Term Extension Act) that the "justice" system has absolutely nothing to do with justice and everything to do with money and power to believe that it will ever yield a reasonable outcome except through sheer luck.
And in the case of SCO, we're in luck. If there's any computer company that has what it takes to take on MS (even if MS is using SCO as a proxy), it's IBM. If SCO had picked a smaller target we'd much more likely be screwed, given that SCO has backing from MS.
Ah, I think I understand why you're having trouble interpreting my statements.
You're equating a large imbalance in firepower between the average worker and the average soldier to "weapons of mass destruction". While WMD certainly do contribute to that imbalance, they're not strictly required for the imbalance to be sufficient to make an angry mob of civilians effectively powerless.
No, modern conventional weapons in the hands of a government are sufficient for that. With such weapons, a government soldier has a firepower advantage of thousands to one against an average civilian, thanks to things like artillery, armor, and air support.
WMD just increases that to a millions to one advantage.
The firepower advantage manifests itself in two ways: the first is that the average soldier can take out a large number of civilians easily. The second is that the average soldier is very hard for the average civilian to take out. Ultimately, it means that in a fight between the military and civilians, the civilians will (on average) suffer thousands of deaths for every soldier killed.
This disparity in firepower is what enables the government in question to get away with killing civilians that get out of line without having to worry about the civilians forming a mob and getting out of hand. Any civilian with any brains knows that the government possesses a thousands to one advantage in firepower, and that therefore to revolt en mass without support from the military would be futile. Said civilian also knows that the government would rather kill the majority of the civilians than lose power, and therefore challenging the power of the government is a monumentally stupid thing to do.
The days of popular revolution against a well-armed government are over, which is why I believe the slide of the U.S. and other "free" countries towards corporate police statehood is inevitable and unstoppable.
True -- if you have to kill them all.
But you probably won't have to. Not even close. You just have to kill enough of them to make it clear to the rest that their choice is either work or death. Most people will choose to work.
And if you're really good at the police state thing, you'll identify troublemakers relatively early in the process and "disappear" them before they can make any real trouble.
The vast majority of people are sheep and will do whatever their masters tell them to do. That's why brutal dictatorships manage to stay in power despite their brutality.
While some may reply (and indeed some have) that most endeavors started by people at that age fail, such a reply in no way reduces the validity of your statement.
The bottom line is that while most such endeavors fail, there is always some chance of success, even spectacular success. When a force such as middle management stops something in its tracks, it basically reduces that chance to zero. There was a chance that the endeavor in question could succeed, but that chance was reduced to zero once it was decided to not even try.
Angry citizens are irrelevant in the face of modern weaponry wielded by a military that is on the side of the government and not the people. And the cheapest laborer is one who is paid barely enough to survive and who lives in the cheapest possible conditions.
Oh, and shoddy goods are the ones that seem to sell best, not worst, as long as they're the cheapest -- because price is the thing that matters most. Otherwise you'll have to explain why the PC won over the Macintosh, why the Intel processors won over Motorola's, why winmodems got as popular as they did, etc. The history of computing is replete with examples of superior products failing because they weren't the cheapest (look at the DEC Alpha for just one example).
If IBM really wants to use this as a warning to others, then they shouldn't simply grind SCO into dust, they should also do the same to SCO's law firm (Boies and company), since that law firm is responsible for bringing this baseless suit to begin with.
A victory against the law firm would set a very good precedent: it would force other law firms to be truly diligent about getting their evidence lined up before filing suit, and should ultimately result in fewer frivolous suits.
Some would argue that law firms are simply the "messenger" and should be absolved of any responsibility for their clients' actions. But the reality is that law firms are partners in crime, as it were: they stand to benefit from a win at least as much as their client. That's why Boies and company are involved in this to begin with.
Yeah. For now. Until the thing mutates into a form that is airborne. And then the problem will get much, much worse.
And guess what? The overall probability of that mutation occurring depends greatly on how many spores of AIDS exist in the world, which is strongly related to how many people have it.
Which means it is in our best interests to get a handle on the AIDS problem, and fast.
Of course, it's possible for something like the common cold to mutate into a form much nastier, so it's really all about the odds. But we know that AIDS is already nasty, and that all that needs to change is its ability to survive airborne. That may (or may not -- someone much more in the know should be able to answer this) be a much smaller evolutionary step to take than turning the common cold into something nasty.
Exactly. And when the jobs move from India to some other location, India's economy will suffer until India's wages are lower than everyone else's, at which point India will get some of the jobs again (for a short while). Now repeat this process ad infinitum. Where do all the jobs end up going? Answer: to the lowest bidder.
But who is the lowest bidder? Answer: the person who gets paid just barely enough to live on. No running water, no health care services, etc., since those things cost money and ultimately drive up the total cost of an employee.
Contributing to this is the fact that as people lose their jobs they stop being able to pay for goods and services, so many companies will ultimately see their market dry up. What do they do when their market shrinks? Answer: they get rid of people and have even more incentive to hire the cheapest labor they can get their hands on -- subsistence workers, in other words.
Combine all these effects, and the end result is that almost everyone ends up living on a subsistence wage, and that's if they can even get that.
Please tell me what specific forces can/will counteract this. For those of you who think outsourcing ultimately ends up continuously improving economies elsewhere, tell me this: how does the economic state of the countries Nike uses to manufacture their shoes compare with the economic state of those countries immediately after Nike first started using them? My bet is that those economies have not improved at all in the past 20 years (or however long Nike's been there), and can therefore be used as evidence that globalization does not have all the beneficial effects many seem to think it does.
And no, armed revolution will not fix any of this because a successful armed revolution depends on the average revolutionary having roughly the same amount of firepower as the average government soldier, and that's no longer the case (unlike the late 1700's): the average government soldier has orders of magnitude more firepower than the average civilian today, and governments today respond only to those who have wealth: corporations.
I agree. And as a start towards remedying this situation, I propose we do away with government regulation of "intellectual property", and let the free market take care of it.
What's that? You don't want to do away with copyright, patents, and trademarks? Not willing to let the free market take care of things like that? Then you damned well better think things all the way through before abolishing things like antitrust laws (which are also "regulation" of business), environment protection laws, etc.
Wake up. Pure capitalism is an extreme, just like pure communism is. Neither can work as in its "pure" form because neither can completely account for human nature.
I suspect you're right that there is too much regulation of business, but I would argue that there is much more regulation of individuals, and if you want to achieve the goal of maximizing individual freedom, you'd better deal with the regulation of individuals first, especially since corporations as entities have much more power than individuals and are therefore better able to fend for themselves, even in the face of the regulations that already exist.
Has it ever occurred to you that someone can be stupid and evil at the same time?
That's true if you're doing a VACUUM FULL. But that is now something that generally needs to be done only rarely (this will depend greatly on how you use the database). The database will now re-use freed tuples (VACUUM FULL compacts the physical table, thus eliminating such free space entirely and causing new data to be appended to the end of the physical table), so all that's usually needed is to find such tuples and mark them as being free.
The autovacuum process invokes the standard VACUUM (without FULL) which does the "lightweight" VACUUM processing. It will also automatically update the statistics associated with the tables so that the planner will make better choices about things like whether to do a full-table scan or an index scan, the type of join to use, etc.
VACUUM is much easier on the database than it used to be. It still isn't optimal, but if you read the pgsql-hackers mailing list you'll find that the developers are discussing at length how best to minimize VACUUM's effect on the database performance.
Ah, but you haven't been reading the Evil Overlord manual.
The purpose of legislation such as this isn't to put everyone in prison, it's to make it possible to put anyone in prison -- whomever the government wishes, in other words. That way governments don't have to worry about pesky things like public dissent: they can just arrest the key players before they have a chance to make a mess of things.
Classic police state stuff.
People may laugh at this. They forget that it's exactly this sort of reasoning (modified to sound more palatable to the masses) that was used to justify the last copyright term extension act.
In other words, don't laugh. It's a lot more likely to happen than you might think.
It's also the nation that puts up monitoring cameras in many public areas.
Oh, and it's also the nation that supports the U.S. no matter what, especially when it comes to invading another country in pursuit of "weapons of mass destruction" (wink, wink, nudge, nudge, *cough*oil*cough*).
The U.K. seems about as close to an Orwellian society as any "enlightened" country on the planet.
No, the real question is whether or not most of the other members of the EU will pass the EUCD. I expect they will, because they're all in the pockets of large corporations these days. Because money and control, after all, are the only things that matter these days, and nobody gives a flying fuck about liberty, freedom, rights, or the general well-being of the population anymore.
Cherish what few freedoms you have left. You won't have them for long.
Be kinda hard for MS to buy out Wal-Mart, and if Wal-Mart gets into the online music war then I'd expect them to win it if only because of the kind of leverage they are likely to have against the RIAA -- much more than just about anyone else.
Um, because how good a candidate's hair is has a really large influence on his ability to win the election?
Which, of course, means that a salon owner will have a lot of insight into how to win an election!
That being the case, how many here think the EU will actually bother to stand up to Microsoft in the end? My bet is that the EU will continue to make noise about Microsoft until Microsoft pays them off (quietly, behind the scenes, of course), at which point the EU will quietly decide not to "go forward" with any sort of real action against Microsoft. At most, the EU will probably give Microsoft a good wrist-slapping ("Stop, or I shall say 'stop' again!").
Only if a more powerful multinational corporation attempts to influence the EU against Microsoft will the EU really do anything.
This is the U.S. legal system we're dealing with, so any outcome (even the most absurd) is possible. But with any luck, an outcome favorable to SCO (and thus Microsoft) won't happen here.
You might not need to be a billionaire to file for a patent reexamination. But given the number of ludicrous patents out there that haven't been reexamined, I can only conclude that you have to be a billionaire to get a patent reexamination, especially one in your favor.
I mean, come on. It's completely obvious that the only reason the USPTO is willing to reexamine the patents in question is because of Microsoft's influence over the government (they were able to get the government to kill its own antitrust case -- that takes a LOT of influence).