But isn't this the definition of fraud? Why is nobody going to jail for this?
Because this is the US. In the US, only ordinary people go to jail, not members of the gilded master class. And certainly not corporations (because they're not legally people...except when it's to the corporation's advantage. The gilded master class doesn't want it any other way).
And I am not aware of any government mandate regarding last mile buildout. By policy the FCC encourages better access for everyone, but can you cite any Order that requires specific actions? I don't even recall a NPRM along those lines.
The real question is: when did you stop working in the telco regulatory environment? I'd say things have changed significantly with respect to the telcos in the last 5 to 10 years. It's only within that period of time, after all, that the telcos have become effective monopolies on a nationwide scale again.
As for your incredulity at the notion that corporations now own the government, do you really think the general population wants the telcos to be let off the hook with respect to the domestic spying issues? That's just one of many issues where the government's stance is sharply aligned with that of the corporations and against that of the general population. There's a reason the approval rating of the president is some 30% and the approval rating of congress is even lower than that: http://www.gallup.com/poll/101764/Congressional-Job-Approval-Public-Mood-Still-20-Range.aspx.
Governments which listen to their people don't have approval ratings that low.
You can keep your head in the sand as long as you like. Just don't be surprised to find yourself living in a fascist "paradise" when you pull your head out.
They require the winners to let consumers use any tested, safe and compatible device or application on its network. Entrepreneurs could sell handsets with capabilities that are unavailable -- or unavailable at affordable prices -- from current carriers.
Uh-huh. Sure. And if the winners don't do any such thing, then what?
If the big telcos are the winners then I can pretty much guarantee that the FCC isn't going to do a thing to enforce this. The telcos (like the other huge corporations) own the government, and the government knows who its masters are.
So in the end, "requirements" such as this one are just free publicity and a way to calm the masses down. They mean nothing.
Just look at how well the internet "last-mile" buildout is working out here in the U.S. if you don't believe me.
"Scientists at Tufts University are researching the use of light aimed at the forehead to measure the stress, work overload, or distraction a computer user may be feeling, as a way to adjust the UI to adapt to a user's emotional state.
Aha. I always wondered what HAL's light was for...
"Look Dave, I can see you're really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over."
If my computer "adjusts" its UI the way HAL did, I'm gonna kick it's ass...
Christ, the one time I don't use preview I have to screw up. I suck.
The parent should read thusly:
--- SNIP ---
Guilty?
It wasn't a criminal trial. What are you talking about?
As far as I'm concerned, that shouldn't matter. The standards used for civil cases should be the same as those used for criminal cases: beyond reasonable doubt.
Why? Because in both types of cases, the state is being asked to use its coercive power to damage the life, liberty, and/or property of the defendant. The only real differences are that the criminal case is initiated by the state while the civil case is initiated by a private party, and a criminal case has the potential outcome of incarcerating the defendant (but doesn't have to, even if the defendant is found guilty) while a civil case doesn't.
If the standards of proof for civil cases were the same as those used for criminal cases, a lot fewer frivolous lawsuits would be brought because the probability of winning would be significantly less.
It wasn't a criminal trial. What are you talking about?
As far as I'm concerned, that shouldn't matter. The standards used for civil cases should be the same as those used for criminal cases: beyond reasonable doubt.
Why? Because in both types of cases, the state is being asked to use its coercive power to damage the life, liberty, and/or property of the defendant. The only real differences are that the criminal case is initiated by the state while the civil case is initiated by a private party, and a criminal case has the potential outcome of incarcerating the defendant (but doesn't have to, even if the defendant is found guilty) while a civil case doesn't.
If the standards of proof for civil cases were the same as those used for criminal cases, a lot fewer frivolous lawsuits would be brought because the probability of winning would be significantly less.
Exploit code was wildly popular on milw0rm, indicating that this local exploit has lots of potential.
Yeah, but it's a local exploit.
For it to be an issue the attacker has to get onto the box first. I'm running Linux, and it's so secure that there's no way they can get in and#(*%^W(#^# NO CARRIER.
You're assuming google actually wants to acquire the spectrum, rather than make the carriers do a repeat of the dark fibre build-out.
get competing cell-phone carriers to overbid on spectrum
now that carrier has spectrum, they build out the infrastructure at great expense
oops - not enough revenue coming in - google buys out their infrastructure and license for cents on the dollar
Uh, your item number 2 is suspect. Who says the carriers are actually going to build out anything? And even if they do, what makes you think they'll do it at their expense rather than getting government "incentives" to do so (not that getting incentives has anything to do with actually building the infrastructure).
What's most likely, I think, is that one of the major carriers will acquire the spectrum and then they'll either sit on it or they'll gradually use it for their own purposes. What they won't do is any sort of massive, expensive build-out.
Oh, they're "contractually obligated" to build infrastructure around the auctioned spectrum? How naive. Such contracts are only as good as the enforcement, and trust me -- the government has no intention of enforcing such a contract on the telcos. The telcos pay them too well for that.
There is precedent for this: their handling of the internet infrastructure (particularly the last mile), where they got lots of government "incentives" and wound up doing...well, nothing.
In other words, you can expect the phone suckage to continue without end. It's in the telcos best interests, after all, and that's all that really matters, right? This is the US, where the individual customer is the least important entity in the "business" relationship.
I'm not out to get rich and you will never get anywhere by screwing people over.
Really?
Seems to work for Verizon, AT&T, Microsoft, Sony (and all of the big media corporations for that matter), pretty much every politician in office, etc., etc.
Screwing people over works amazingly well. In fact, it looks to me like it's really the only way to get filthy stinking rich and powerful, especially these days.
If that's the price one has to pay to get so wealthy and powerful, I'll pass, thanks.
And so I'm doomed to be something "less" than filthy rich and powerful, as is pretty much every person who has a similar ethical compass as mine. So be it.
And really, what did you expect? Those who are evil have an inherent advantage over those who are good because evil people follow no rules (except those that work to their advantage) while good people do. In a fight, the person who is least constrained is most likely to win. So is it really any surprise that those who are willing to screw everyone else over tend to be the ones who make it to the top, while those who aren't almost never do?
The universe favors evil ("evil" == "willing to cause others pain, suffering, and hardship for their own personal gain") because good is constrained by definition.
A quick search on the terms 'chroot+security' quickly reveals that many people have long thought (wrongly) that chroot's purpose was for improving security.
Not for improving security, huh?
OK, genius, then explain why chroot() requires root privileges (or chroot capability) to execute.
It's only in the context of security that such a restriction makes any sense at all.
The key difference is that China is a sovereign state - doesn't make much difference to the people being abused, but it makes a difference to how you deal with it.
Or not, as is the case with China and the U.S.
U.S.: "Hey, China, you're violating human rights! Umm...but that's okay, because I want to grow up to be just like you! Here, let me show you what I've been doing... (lists Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, etc.)... What do you think? Cool, huh?"
Very interesting, though neither China nor US are ideally competitive markets, neither the international trade is (at least not on the financial "level"). I can't also help thinking that you should specifically explain the military power balance (at least, if you discuss fuel at particular) in terms of labor and check if the approach still works.
Well, the use of the military to secure natural resources obviously adds to the cost (and what you're paying for in terms of the military is in the end all labor, too, just like everything else), but the problem there is that the military is paid for completely separately (and at gunpoint, at that), so the amount of additional cost it represents winds up being hidden from the end buyer, though he generally still winds up paying it one way or the other (that will depend on how much, if any, federal taxes he has to pay).
But all of that really detracts from the primary point, which is that money is a representation of human labor, and the human labor costs are what matter in the end, and that the total human labor costs of a slave are lower than for any other kind and therefore it's folly to attempt to compete against slave labor. If you attempt to compete against slave labor you will lose in the end one way or the other, so the only thing you can do is slap massive tariffs on anything that was produced with slave labor so that purchasers in your market will gravitate towards products that were made using labor that operates under the relatively strict labor laws that have made the middle class strong.
The total number of man-hours of work available to the economy on a per-person basis is roughly the same whether it's slave labor or not (slaves can be forced to give you more man-hours per day than non-slaves, so they win slightly in that respect, too, but it's not a massive win). The only difference is how much of a labor exchange (which is usually represented by money) the laborer gets in return for his labor. In all societies, the closer an individual is to the top of the "food chain", the greater the amount of labor (money or otherwise) he receives in exchange for the labor he gives. In a society with strong labor laws, the distribution of this wealth tends to be more even than in societies that lack such laws.
The U.S. is going in the wrong direction in this regard, with greater and greater wealth being concentrated towards the top. Improvements in technology (which have the effect of multiplying the effects of labor) would cause this to happen in almost all cases regardless, and have managed to at least allow those towards the bottom to more or less stay where they are if not improve their lot somewhat, but the improvement in the lot of those at the bottom is less than the improvement in technology. Worse, the size of the middle class in the U.S. is shrinking, with most of that shrinkage transferring people out of the middle class and into the poor. In short, the middle class is getting poorer, not richer, while the very rich get very much richer -- the rich are getting richer at a pace that outstrips the rate of technological improvement, and that can only happen if someone else is getting poorer in a real sense.
I think that situation is very strongly tied towards the general direction the country as a whole is going: towards fascism, and towards totalitarianism as well (though the resulting form of totalitarianism may wind up being something new).
The ultimate point to be taken from all this is simple: once you factor technological advancement out, economics is a zero-sum game on a per-person basis, because economics is ultimately about the exchange of human labor, and technology is the only thing that significantly increases the productive output that an individual can generate per unit time. That means that generally speaking, once you factor out technological improvement, for one person to get richer, someone else must get poorer.
Oil, gas and nuclear fuels have stored potential energy. Sure, they have to be mined and refined, but the number of people required to accomplish this for a particular unit of energy has fallen exponentially.
If the number of total man-hours per unit of extracted energy has fallen without a corresponding drop in the price, then there is some other market force at work which is artificially propping the price up.
No, the cost of labor to extract the materials is the cost of labor to extract the materials. The cost of transportation, on any large scale, is mainly dictated by the cost of fuel. Shipping jets are flown by a few people consuming thousands of gallons of jet fuel an hour. I don't think their salaries come close in comparison.
You're not getting my point.
The cost of fuel is the cost of the labor required to acquire the raw materials, process them into usable fuel, distribute that fuel to outlets, pay for administration, etc. The fuel itself isn't what you're paying for -- you're paying for all the labor that went into the production and distribution of that fuel, plus any market inefficiencies (which you get as a result of cartels and such).
If that were not so, then the price of a good in a competitive market would be independent of the amount of labor required to product that good -- in other words, it would be independent of the amount of automation used to produce that good. But instead, we see the opposite: the more automation is used to produce a good in a competitive market, the less expensive that good becomes.
If producing and providing a particular fuel required no labor at all (which means no equipment, no automation, or anything -- the fuel just magically appears at the customer's location at the customer's request), then the price of that fuel in a competitive market would be, basically, zero. Of course, there is no such thing -- there's always human labor involved, if only to handle the transaction between customer and provider. But the less human labor involved in providing a good or service in a competitive market, the less expensive said good or service will be in that competitive market.
So the cost of the fuel is the cost of the labor required to produce that fuel. The cost of transportation is the cost of the fuel plus the cost of the transportation equipment plus the labor required to perform the transportation. And the cost of the transportation equipment is the cost of the labor required to produce that equipment (which includes acquisition of raw materials, conversion into usable form, etc.).
Your mistake is to assume that goods and services have intrinsic value in a competitive market. But a competitive market makes that false by definition.
You assume that labor is the only cost involved in making a product. Most processes are highly automated these days, so once you account for the sunk cost of the plant, material, energy and transportation costs dominate.
You need to think this through.
Trace any transaction all the way back as far as it goes. What you'll find in the end is someone doing work. Human labor, in other words.
The cost of energy isn't in the materials, it's in the human labor required to extract those materials, convert them to a usable form, and convert that to energy. The same thing is true of the plant. The cost of the plant isn't the cost of the materials that comprise it, but the cost of the labor required to extract those materials, transform them into something you can build a plant out of, and to put the plant together.
The cost of transportation isn't the cost of the fuel, it's the cost of the labor to extract the raw materials, the cost of the labor to transform them to fuel, the cost of the labor necessary to build the plant that accomplishes that, and the cost of the labor to make use of it (to drive the vehicles, to manage them, etc.).
Every single transaction thread ultimately terminates in human labor.
So ultimately, labor is the only cost in producing a product. It's just that much of that labor is indirectly paid for. That is, you don't directly see the labor involved. But it's there.
And so, my statement about slave labor is much more relevant than you might otherwise think.
Oh, and the costs of automation? That's the human labor required to engineer, build, and manage that automation.
Automation is quite a different beast from cheap labor, by the way. Automation is a human labor multiplier, and is the only thing (aside, perhaps, from specialization) that significantly raises the average quality of life, and is by far the largest human labor multiplier we have. It's the biggest reason the average quality of life is so much higher for technologically advanced countries than for technologically backwards countries, and is almost solely responsible for the improvement in the quality of life over time.
Automation is one of the big reasons I favor a relatively large minimum wage. A large minimum wage increases the incentive to automate, which ultimately reduces the real cost (man-hours) of producing a good, and thus increases the average quality of life.
But Japan has a much, much smaller population relative to the rest of the world, so any trickle down effects would take much less time to occur. It also has had a democratic form of government during all that time, which means the average person has had some influence over the political process.
You can't draw conclusions about the development of a totalitarian state from the developmental results of a democratic state, because the amount of influence the average person has is generally vastly different between the two. That difference is crucial.
The problem with that reasoning is that you assume Chinese labor standards and living standards are static and will remain static. As more and more Chinese are getting rich from running export factories there is a trickledown effect and Chinese are becoming richer. Further they have a strict 1 child policy so their population will start falling soon and the shortage of labor will be at an exponential rate. So this phenomenon of cheap Chinese imports is a temporary one and soon there wont be any differences in cost of labor between US and China. This is good as then companies can compete based on innovation rather than exploiting cheap labor while at the same time a toilet cleaner in the US wont be getting paid more than a Phd Rocket Scientist in China (as it is now)
Well, "temporary" here likely means "not within our lifetime", thanks to the very sizable Chinese population, even assuming your analysis is correct. But I see little reason to believe your analysis is correct.
You place far too much faith in the trickledown effect. That effect exists, but it's not a strong effect. One can examine the history of the U.S. itself to see this. It wasn't until after fairly strong labor laws were passed in the U.S. that the middle class started to grow to the relatively large size it is now (and it's in decline even now). Prior to that, wealth was highly concentrated in the hands of very few people. Much like the direction we're going now, actually.
But China is a police state. There are no unions. Those in power control the country with a gloved iron hand, so there will never be unions, or strict labor laws, or anything of the sort that takes power away from those who already hold it. This is a marked difference from the historical situation in the U.S., where even the poor could still vote and could, at the time, exert influence over the political process. In China, the average person has no influence at all, and I see no reason at all for that to change.
That difference is crucial. If the average person cannot gain a voice in his daily lot in life, then the middle class cannot grow and any trickle down effect will be minimized, if not eliminated outright. This will keep labor costs to a minimum because as I've said before, you cannot get labor any cheaper than slave labor. This makes China as a country more competitive than other countries, which gives it more wealth and control over the world than it would otherwise have, so that situation is very much in the interests of those who hold power in China. In other words, there's every incentive to keep things that way and no incentive to change it.
This is what the U.S. (and the rest of the world's, for that matter) labor pool has to compete against, and there's no way for it to be anything other than a losing proposition in the end, even for those who own and run the big corporate conglomerates, because eventually they'll have few people to sell their goods to.
The existence of the middle class is crucial to the healthy functioning of the economy, because the middle class represents the proper balance between labor costs and standard of living. Remember that a person's standard of living is determined by the amount of resources he commands in excess of that barely necessary to survive. Slave labor by definition has a minimum standard of living, which is why it's cheaper than any other form of labor.
Those who hold power rarely share that power willingly. Similarly, those who hold wealth rarely share it willingly. But sharing wealth is exactly what drives economies, and is why a strong middle class is the most beneficial to the economy. Because of the reluctance to share power and wealth, a strong middle class cannot come into being on its own. It only happens as a result of the ability of the average person to affect the political process, which can only happen in relatively free countries. That means it cannot, and thus will not, happen in China.
Sure, until enterprising individuals build plants in the US to make the goods we were previously importing, but at a lower price. And those plants start hiring US workers.
The problem is: that won't happen until the US dollar falls so much that one man-hour of US labor costs less than one man-hour of Chinese labor. The cost of that one man-hour of Chinese labor is largely the result of the fact that said labor is largely (though not always, of course) slave labor. Slave labor is the cheapest labor possible because a slave's standard of living is, by force, barely subsistence level -- in other words just enough to enable said laborer to work and no more.
For US labor to compete with that, the dollar will have to drop so low that it compensates for that very real price difference. In short, it'll have to drop so far that an economic collapse of massive proportions occurs.
These days, the USPTO hands out patents like candy. That obviously must stop.
The only meaningful patent reform bill is one which makes it much harder to get a patent. A patent is a monopoly on an invention. Today, the term "invention" is used so loosely that it's almost devoid of meaning -- you can get a patent on pretty much anything these days.
But the nature of a patent is such that it should be hard to get. So what should be required to accomplish that?
I think the most important requirement should be that the patent itself be publicly peer-reviewed. Some will argue that the downside is that if the patent isn't granted, then suddenly the invention will be made known to the world -- the inventor won't have the opportunity to keep it secret. To that, I say good! If you want the monopoly that getting a patent gives you, you should be forced to risk the possibility of losing control over your invention. This alone would eliminate most of the patent applications, and rightly so.
Additionally, the patent itself must be a technical document, not a legal document as it is now. It must provide the average practitioner in the field in question with all the information he needs to implement the invention. The patent can be rejected by the peer reviewers on this basis alone.
Right now, neither of those is required, and the results are predictable: nonsensical and/or trivial "inventions" are routinely granted patent status, and we're all worse off for it.
A proper voter-verified paper ballot system is as good as it gets when it comes to a combination of accuracy, verifiability, and accountability.
It's real simple: the voter makes his selection using, say, a voting machine. Voting machine spits out paper ballot and shows it to voter. Voter examines ballot to make sure ballot is good. If ballot is good, voter tells machine to accept the ballot and machine drops ballot into sealed box. If not, voter tells machine to reject the ballot and machine allows user to re-select candidates.
At the end of the election, the total number of paper ballots are counted and compared with the total number of people who actually came in to vote. They should match, of course. It's also compared with the total number of votes the machines recorded. That, too, should match.
You can have the machines tabulate the voting results. You can then statistically test the results of the machines by pulling a random (but sufficiently large) set of ballots from the box and manually tabulating them. But you also have the option of doing a full manual count, which is of course what you do if the statistical count shows that the machines were off. And the closer any given race is, the larger the sample has to be to get the statistical error below that of the percentage difference between the closest candidates in the race.
No purely machine-based voting system is sufficiently trustworthy to be suitable for an election. Any machine can be compromised, by the manufacturer if nobody else. That's a risk that isn't worth taking when the freedom of the country is potentially at stake.
They can't do that. The auction already has a build-up clause... I believe if they fail to do so, they lose their ownership of the band, or at least heavy penalties until they build it out.
Yeah, as if that's going to deter the telcos from not breaking the agreement, just like they didn't build out the internet infrastructure the way they promised after getting a pile of tax breaks and other "incentives" from the government. What was the smackdown they got for that? Nothing? Yeah, that's what I thought.
You guys don't get it, do you? Big monopoly-sized business owns the government these days. The days where your "representatives" actually represented you are long, long gone. Government-imposed "rules" mean nothing to these guys. They're just another soundbite to quell the masses. The big businesses know this. The government knows this. Only the clueless masses don't.
Welcome to the new, kinder, gentler fascism. Enjoy your stay.
I'll bet a couple of people around here were wondering how they misspelled "loose".
Man, no kidding...
Hmm...let's try the New Slashdot Spelling on for size...
"It makes me loose confidence in the American education system when people have such lose spelling standards. When you can't even spell such simple words, you're hopelessly loost. Heaven help us when such people are losed upon the world."
Bah. I think I'll stick with my old, curmudgeonly way of spelling these words. Damn kids these days...:-D
The sooner we all write off Miguel and Novell the better off we will all be. Taking any code from that camp is just inviting a lawsuit. Sooner or later, BOOM!
In other words...
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. Always boom tomorrow...
Slashdot Mirror
Because this is the US. In the US, only ordinary people go to jail, not members of the gilded master class. And certainly not corporations (because they're not legally people...except when it's to the corporation's advantage. The gilded master class doesn't want it any other way).
If not tomorrow!
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070810_002683.html.
'Nuff said.
The real question is: when did you stop working in the telco regulatory environment? I'd say things have changed significantly with respect to the telcos in the last 5 to 10 years. It's only within that period of time, after all, that the telcos have become effective monopolies on a nationwide scale again.
As for your incredulity at the notion that corporations now own the government, do you really think the general population wants the telcos to be let off the hook with respect to the domestic spying issues? That's just one of many issues where the government's stance is sharply aligned with that of the corporations and against that of the general population. There's a reason the approval rating of the president is some 30% and the approval rating of congress is even lower than that: http://www.gallup.com/poll/101764/Congressional-Job-Approval-Public-Mood-Still-20-Range.aspx.
Governments which listen to their people don't have approval ratings that low.
You can keep your head in the sand as long as you like. Just don't be surprised to find yourself living in a fascist "paradise" when you pull your head out.
Uh-huh. Sure. And if the winners don't do any such thing, then what?
If the big telcos are the winners then I can pretty much guarantee that the FCC isn't going to do a thing to enforce this. The telcos (like the other huge corporations) own the government, and the government knows who its masters are.
So in the end, "requirements" such as this one are just free publicity and a way to calm the masses down. They mean nothing.
Just look at how well the internet "last-mile" buildout is working out here in the U.S. if you don't believe me.
There's non-frozen water to water ski on in Canada?
*Ducks*
And if I keep making stupid mistakes like saying "it's" when I meant "its", I'm gonna kick my ass...
Aha. I always wondered what HAL's light was for...
"Look Dave, I can see you're really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over."
If my computer "adjusts" its UI the way HAL did, I'm gonna kick it's ass...
Christ, the one time I don't use preview I have to screw up. I suck.
The parent should read thusly:
--- SNIP ---
As far as I'm concerned, that shouldn't matter. The standards used for civil cases should be the same as those used for criminal cases: beyond reasonable doubt.
Why? Because in both types of cases, the state is being asked to use its coercive power to damage the life, liberty, and/or property of the defendant. The only real differences are that the criminal case is initiated by the state while the civil case is initiated by a private party, and a criminal case has the potential outcome of incarcerating the defendant (but doesn't have to, even if the defendant is found guilty) while a civil case doesn't.
If the standards of proof for civil cases were the same as those used for criminal cases, a lot fewer frivolous lawsuits would be brought because the probability of winning would be significantly less.
Yeah, but it's a local exploit.
For it to be an issue the attacker has to get onto the box first. I'm running Linux, and it's so secure that there's no way they can get in and#(*%^W(#^# NO CARRIER.
Uh, your item number 2 is suspect. Who says the carriers are actually going to build out anything? And even if they do, what makes you think they'll do it at their expense rather than getting government "incentives" to do so (not that getting incentives has anything to do with actually building the infrastructure).
What's most likely, I think, is that one of the major carriers will acquire the spectrum and then they'll either sit on it or they'll gradually use it for their own purposes. What they won't do is any sort of massive, expensive build-out.
Oh, they're "contractually obligated" to build infrastructure around the auctioned spectrum? How naive. Such contracts are only as good as the enforcement, and trust me -- the government has no intention of enforcing such a contract on the telcos. The telcos pay them too well for that.
There is precedent for this: their handling of the internet infrastructure (particularly the last mile), where they got lots of government "incentives" and wound up doing...well, nothing.
In other words, you can expect the phone suckage to continue without end. It's in the telcos best interests, after all, and that's all that really matters, right? This is the US, where the individual customer is the least important entity in the "business" relationship.
Really?
Seems to work for Verizon, AT&T, Microsoft, Sony (and all of the big media corporations for that matter), pretty much every politician in office, etc., etc.
Screwing people over works amazingly well. In fact, it looks to me like it's really the only way to get filthy stinking rich and powerful, especially these days.
If that's the price one has to pay to get so wealthy and powerful, I'll pass, thanks.
And so I'm doomed to be something "less" than filthy rich and powerful, as is pretty much every person who has a similar ethical compass as mine. So be it.
And really, what did you expect? Those who are evil have an inherent advantage over those who are good because evil people follow no rules (except those that work to their advantage) while good people do. In a fight, the person who is least constrained is most likely to win. So is it really any surprise that those who are willing to screw everyone else over tend to be the ones who make it to the top, while those who aren't almost never do?
The universe favors evil ("evil" == "willing to cause others pain, suffering, and hardship for their own personal gain") because good is constrained by definition.
Not for improving security, huh?
OK, genius, then explain why chroot() requires root privileges (or chroot capability) to execute.
It's only in the context of security that such a restriction makes any sense at all.
Or not, as is the case with China and the U.S.
U.S.: "Hey, China, you're violating human rights! Umm...but that's okay, because I want to grow up to be just like you! Here, let me show you what I've been doing ... (lists Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, etc.) ... What do you think? Cool, huh?"
Well, the use of the military to secure natural resources obviously adds to the cost (and what you're paying for in terms of the military is in the end all labor, too, just like everything else), but the problem there is that the military is paid for completely separately (and at gunpoint, at that), so the amount of additional cost it represents winds up being hidden from the end buyer, though he generally still winds up paying it one way or the other (that will depend on how much, if any, federal taxes he has to pay).
But all of that really detracts from the primary point, which is that money is a representation of human labor, and the human labor costs are what matter in the end, and that the total human labor costs of a slave are lower than for any other kind and therefore it's folly to attempt to compete against slave labor. If you attempt to compete against slave labor you will lose in the end one way or the other, so the only thing you can do is slap massive tariffs on anything that was produced with slave labor so that purchasers in your market will gravitate towards products that were made using labor that operates under the relatively strict labor laws that have made the middle class strong.
The total number of man-hours of work available to the economy on a per-person basis is roughly the same whether it's slave labor or not (slaves can be forced to give you more man-hours per day than non-slaves, so they win slightly in that respect, too, but it's not a massive win). The only difference is how much of a labor exchange (which is usually represented by money) the laborer gets in return for his labor. In all societies, the closer an individual is to the top of the "food chain", the greater the amount of labor (money or otherwise) he receives in exchange for the labor he gives. In a society with strong labor laws, the distribution of this wealth tends to be more even than in societies that lack such laws.
The U.S. is going in the wrong direction in this regard, with greater and greater wealth being concentrated towards the top. Improvements in technology (which have the effect of multiplying the effects of labor) would cause this to happen in almost all cases regardless, and have managed to at least allow those towards the bottom to more or less stay where they are if not improve their lot somewhat, but the improvement in the lot of those at the bottom is less than the improvement in technology. Worse, the size of the middle class in the U.S. is shrinking, with most of that shrinkage transferring people out of the middle class and into the poor. In short, the middle class is getting poorer, not richer, while the very rich get very much richer -- the rich are getting richer at a pace that outstrips the rate of technological improvement, and that can only happen if someone else is getting poorer in a real sense.
I think that situation is very strongly tied towards the general direction the country as a whole is going: towards fascism, and towards totalitarianism as well (though the resulting form of totalitarianism may wind up being something new).
The ultimate point to be taken from all this is simple: once you factor technological advancement out, economics is a zero-sum game on a per-person basis, because economics is ultimately about the exchange of human labor, and technology is the only thing that significantly increases the productive output that an individual can generate per unit time. That means that generally speaking, once you factor out technological improvement, for one person to get richer, someone else must get poorer.
If the number of total man-hours per unit of extracted energy has fallen without a corresponding drop in the price, then there is some other market force at work which is artificially propping the price up.
You're not getting my point.
The cost of fuel is the cost of the labor required to acquire the raw materials, process them into usable fuel, distribute that fuel to outlets, pay for administration, etc. The fuel itself isn't what you're paying for -- you're paying for all the labor that went into the production and distribution of that fuel, plus any market inefficiencies (which you get as a result of cartels and such).
If that were not so, then the price of a good in a competitive market would be independent of the amount of labor required to product that good -- in other words, it would be independent of the amount of automation used to produce that good. But instead, we see the opposite: the more automation is used to produce a good in a competitive market, the less expensive that good becomes.
If producing and providing a particular fuel required no labor at all (which means no equipment, no automation, or anything -- the fuel just magically appears at the customer's location at the customer's request), then the price of that fuel in a competitive market would be, basically, zero. Of course, there is no such thing -- there's always human labor involved, if only to handle the transaction between customer and provider. But the less human labor involved in providing a good or service in a competitive market, the less expensive said good or service will be in that competitive market.
So the cost of the fuel is the cost of the labor required to produce that fuel. The cost of transportation is the cost of the fuel plus the cost of the transportation equipment plus the labor required to perform the transportation. And the cost of the transportation equipment is the cost of the labor required to produce that equipment (which includes acquisition of raw materials, conversion into usable form, etc.).
Your mistake is to assume that goods and services have intrinsic value in a competitive market. But a competitive market makes that false by definition.
You need to think this through.
Trace any transaction all the way back as far as it goes. What you'll find in the end is someone doing work. Human labor, in other words.
The cost of energy isn't in the materials, it's in the human labor required to extract those materials, convert them to a usable form, and convert that to energy. The same thing is true of the plant. The cost of the plant isn't the cost of the materials that comprise it, but the cost of the labor required to extract those materials, transform them into something you can build a plant out of, and to put the plant together.
The cost of transportation isn't the cost of the fuel, it's the cost of the labor to extract the raw materials, the cost of the labor to transform them to fuel, the cost of the labor necessary to build the plant that accomplishes that, and the cost of the labor to make use of it (to drive the vehicles, to manage them, etc.).
Every single transaction thread ultimately terminates in human labor.
So ultimately, labor is the only cost in producing a product. It's just that much of that labor is indirectly paid for. That is, you don't directly see the labor involved. But it's there.
And so, my statement about slave labor is much more relevant than you might otherwise think.
Oh, and the costs of automation? That's the human labor required to engineer, build, and manage that automation.
Automation is quite a different beast from cheap labor, by the way. Automation is a human labor multiplier, and is the only thing (aside, perhaps, from specialization) that significantly raises the average quality of life, and is by far the largest human labor multiplier we have. It's the biggest reason the average quality of life is so much higher for technologically advanced countries than for technologically backwards countries, and is almost solely responsible for the improvement in the quality of life over time.
Automation is one of the big reasons I favor a relatively large minimum wage. A large minimum wage increases the incentive to automate, which ultimately reduces the real cost (man-hours) of producing a good, and thus increases the average quality of life.
But Japan has a much, much smaller population relative to the rest of the world, so any trickle down effects would take much less time to occur. It also has had a democratic form of government during all that time, which means the average person has had some influence over the political process.
You can't draw conclusions about the development of a totalitarian state from the developmental results of a democratic state, because the amount of influence the average person has is generally vastly different between the two. That difference is crucial.
Well, "temporary" here likely means "not within our lifetime", thanks to the very sizable Chinese population, even assuming your analysis is correct. But I see little reason to believe your analysis is correct.
You place far too much faith in the trickledown effect. That effect exists, but it's not a strong effect. One can examine the history of the U.S. itself to see this. It wasn't until after fairly strong labor laws were passed in the U.S. that the middle class started to grow to the relatively large size it is now (and it's in decline even now). Prior to that, wealth was highly concentrated in the hands of very few people. Much like the direction we're going now, actually.
But China is a police state. There are no unions. Those in power control the country with a gloved iron hand, so there will never be unions, or strict labor laws, or anything of the sort that takes power away from those who already hold it. This is a marked difference from the historical situation in the U.S., where even the poor could still vote and could, at the time, exert influence over the political process. In China, the average person has no influence at all, and I see no reason at all for that to change.
That difference is crucial. If the average person cannot gain a voice in his daily lot in life, then the middle class cannot grow and any trickle down effect will be minimized, if not eliminated outright. This will keep labor costs to a minimum because as I've said before, you cannot get labor any cheaper than slave labor. This makes China as a country more competitive than other countries, which gives it more wealth and control over the world than it would otherwise have, so that situation is very much in the interests of those who hold power in China. In other words, there's every incentive to keep things that way and no incentive to change it.
This is what the U.S. (and the rest of the world's, for that matter) labor pool has to compete against, and there's no way for it to be anything other than a losing proposition in the end, even for those who own and run the big corporate conglomerates, because eventually they'll have few people to sell their goods to.
The existence of the middle class is crucial to the healthy functioning of the economy, because the middle class represents the proper balance between labor costs and standard of living. Remember that a person's standard of living is determined by the amount of resources he commands in excess of that barely necessary to survive. Slave labor by definition has a minimum standard of living, which is why it's cheaper than any other form of labor.
Those who hold power rarely share that power willingly. Similarly, those who hold wealth rarely share it willingly. But sharing wealth is exactly what drives economies, and is why a strong middle class is the most beneficial to the economy. Because of the reluctance to share power and wealth, a strong middle class cannot come into being on its own. It only happens as a result of the ability of the average person to affect the political process, which can only happen in relatively free countries. That means it cannot, and thus will not, happen in China.
The problem is: that won't happen until the US dollar falls so much that one man-hour of US labor costs less than one man-hour of Chinese labor. The cost of that one man-hour of Chinese labor is largely the result of the fact that said labor is largely (though not always, of course) slave labor. Slave labor is the cheapest labor possible because a slave's standard of living is, by force, barely subsistence level -- in other words just enough to enable said laborer to work and no more.
For US labor to compete with that, the dollar will have to drop so low that it compensates for that very real price difference. In short, it'll have to drop so far that an economic collapse of massive proportions occurs.
These days, the USPTO hands out patents like candy. That obviously must stop.
The only meaningful patent reform bill is one which makes it much harder to get a patent. A patent is a monopoly on an invention. Today, the term "invention" is used so loosely that it's almost devoid of meaning -- you can get a patent on pretty much anything these days.
But the nature of a patent is such that it should be hard to get. So what should be required to accomplish that?
I think the most important requirement should be that the patent itself be publicly peer-reviewed. Some will argue that the downside is that if the patent isn't granted, then suddenly the invention will be made known to the world -- the inventor won't have the opportunity to keep it secret. To that, I say good! If you want the monopoly that getting a patent gives you, you should be forced to risk the possibility of losing control over your invention. This alone would eliminate most of the patent applications, and rightly so.
Additionally, the patent itself must be a technical document, not a legal document as it is now. It must provide the average practitioner in the field in question with all the information he needs to implement the invention. The patent can be rejected by the peer reviewers on this basis alone.
Right now, neither of those is required, and the results are predictable: nonsensical and/or trivial "inventions" are routinely granted patent status, and we're all worse off for it.
A proper voter-verified paper ballot system is as good as it gets when it comes to a combination of accuracy, verifiability, and accountability.
It's real simple: the voter makes his selection using, say, a voting machine. Voting machine spits out paper ballot and shows it to voter. Voter examines ballot to make sure ballot is good. If ballot is good, voter tells machine to accept the ballot and machine drops ballot into sealed box. If not, voter tells machine to reject the ballot and machine allows user to re-select candidates.
At the end of the election, the total number of paper ballots are counted and compared with the total number of people who actually came in to vote. They should match, of course. It's also compared with the total number of votes the machines recorded. That, too, should match.
You can have the machines tabulate the voting results. You can then statistically test the results of the machines by pulling a random (but sufficiently large) set of ballots from the box and manually tabulating them. But you also have the option of doing a full manual count, which is of course what you do if the statistical count shows that the machines were off. And the closer any given race is, the larger the sample has to be to get the statistical error below that of the percentage difference between the closest candidates in the race.
No purely machine-based voting system is sufficiently trustworthy to be suitable for an election. Any machine can be compromised, by the manufacturer if nobody else. That's a risk that isn't worth taking when the freedom of the country is potentially at stake.
Yeah, as if that's going to deter the telcos from not breaking the agreement, just like they didn't build out the internet infrastructure the way they promised after getting a pile of tax breaks and other "incentives" from the government. What was the smackdown they got for that? Nothing? Yeah, that's what I thought.
You guys don't get it, do you? Big monopoly-sized business owns the government these days. The days where your "representatives" actually represented you are long, long gone. Government-imposed "rules" mean nothing to these guys. They're just another soundbite to quell the masses. The big businesses know this. The government knows this. Only the clueless masses don't.
Welcome to the new, kinder, gentler fascism. Enjoy your stay.
Man, no kidding...
Hmm...let's try the New Slashdot Spelling on for size...
"It makes me loose confidence in the American education system when people have such lose spelling standards. When you can't even spell such simple words, you're hopelessly loost. Heaven help us when such people are losed upon the world."
Bah. I think I'll stick with my old, curmudgeonly way of spelling these words. Damn kids these days... :-D
In other words...
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. Always boom tomorrow...