US manufacturing output is at a record high (PDF). It's true that fewer Americans are employed in the manufacturing sector, because efficiency has increased so much.
I'm sorry, but I don't buy it. If what you say were true, then we'd still see a lot of consumer goods with "Made in USA" on them.
But we don't. Everything I've seen is manufactured elsewhere (China in particular), with the exception of some automobiles.
The bullshit claims of a paper are no match for real world experience.
Editors, for these stories, please include a link to the patent, not just the news release and a general description.
The "editors" don't appear to do anything else at all (except perhaps issue a pithy comment or two in the story description), so why would they do this?
"Orders of magnitude faster to install (a matter of hours) compared to loading the 'dump' into MySQL -- which, if you want to enable keyword searching, takes days."
"The only way to test the models is to test against random multi-decade historical records and check what the models (plural) predict"
Eh, you know, that's not a valid method for testing models. If you do that you only end up with models that perfectly predict historical data. Such tests say nothing about the accuracy of future predictions, especially, and in particular if they attempt to predict changes outside previously gathered data (which, by definition, due to a whole host of changes in everything from industrial particulate matter releases to ecosystem changes means pretty much any dataset apart from the one you've fitted the models against).
It's not a valid method for proving the validity of any given model, but it's a litmus test that any valid model must pass for it to be considered valid.
So...do the current climate models properly predict the entirety of the past climate performance? If not, then they are all invalid.
I understand the whole "slashdot geeks have no girlfriends" joke but really, why wouldn't a geek have a geeky girlfriend?
Because the ratio of geeky guys to geeky girls in the population seems to be about 10:1?
If you're a geeky guy, the chances are very good that you either have no girlfriend at all or that your girlfriend is not a geek herself, thanks to that high male:female geek ratio.
That's based on observation, of course, so it's subject to change without notice.:-)
First of all "extremely improbable" when talking about something the size of the universe means that even if life in a given star system had a 1 in 1 million chance of ever developing (I'd call that "extremely improbable"), that's still 5,000 systems in our galaxy alone that will develop life someday, or already have.
The GP said he thinks we're alone in the galaxy, not the universe.
If the chance of life developing in a given solar system is one in a million, then 5,000 systems in our galaxy will develop (or have developed) life. How likely is it that a tool-using, intelligent species will develop where life has developed and make it past the problems that could result in their own desmise?
We could easily be the only intelligent life in our galaxy, because in galactic terms, a one in a million chance is large. Everything hinges on what conditions are really needed to support self-replicating organisms, and it could easily be that such conditions are very hard to find. The universe as a whole is generally an incredibly hostile place, and it would be wise to not forget that.
Finally, remember that the problem of travelling between the stars is nothing compared with the problem of travelling between galaxies. If you think the distance between stars is large, you haven't seen anything yet. Travel between galaxies is, to a starfaring civilization, roughly like travelling between the stars is to us (a civilization that's capable, with effort, of travelling between planets in the solar system).
I know that by saying this, I'm playing into the hands of those who would see freedom of speech curtailed. But I feel that the modern media really is a "feral beast", whos cons are now beginning to outweigh its pros, and which is becoming more of an enemy than an ally to democracy. I'd like the media to be something better than it is, I really would. But it isn't and sooner or later we are going to have to face up to that fact. Truth be told, I'm more afraid of the media than confident in it.
The media is the way it is because it is the mouthpiece for those who own and/or run large corporations. It's not the media itself that has power, so much as those who own it. It is those who own it who crave power and wealth.
The media in the US today, like the telephone company in the US, is an effective monopoly, with its only real competition being the multitude of internet sites where individuals can express themselves freely (more or less). The connection between corporate campaign "finance" and the influence of the media is the people who own and operate the media corporations.
The media no longer needs or wants journalistic integrity because the media doesn't really compete with anything to speak of. Its corporate owners also completely own the medium over which the media plays: television and newsprint. As a result it can, and does, speak with one voice: that of its masters. This is the fundamental reason democracy in the US is entirely broken, and why it cannot be fixed.
The only way to eliminate the influence of the media today is to simply ignore it (the real remedy, to break up ownership of the media into a bunch of tiny independent pieces, cannot happen in the current environment, just as a breakup of Microsoft proved impossible). But most people don't, and will never, know to do that.
So the corporate ownership of the US government will continue unchallenged, and eventually malevolent fascism will blanket the US. It's just a matter of time now. If you don't want to be here when that happens, get out now, while you still can.
With the initial money, these companies might go for around 2-3 years or so before the money ran out. This puts us right at the 1999 or so timeframe. What happens when you have dozens of companies, each one having gotten several millions of dollars each running out of venture money at the same time without any positive income? Suddenly the venture capitalists realized their mistakes, and they put the breaks on funding these go-nowhere fluff companies that were based on an idea but without the skills or products to allow for a payoff.
Boom, the stock market took it hard, and the.com bubble burst. At that point, you really had two big classifications of tech companies, those with products that could make money, and the companies that were founded based on hype and not much else.
Yeah, but if it were just a problem with the way the VCs were funding things, the entire stock market wouldn't have tanked, because venture capital funds are generally regarded as relatively high-risk anyway and, in any case, a company that goes off the radar before going public has little effect on the stock market. No, there's another connection here that you didn't mention.
When a venture capitalist funds a company, it will often put its own executive management into place in order to ensure that the goals of the VC are met. The question then is: what are the goals of the VC?
Well, to make money, of course. Thanks to the internet hype during the dot-com boom, internet companies were able to go public and get some crazy money for the initial stock offering. VCs typically own the bulk of said stock, and thus VCs were able to make a lot of money off of that. Initially, the companies in question generally offered something of value, but when the VCs caught on to how easily IPOs made money for them, they started to fund pretty much any internet startup, even those without any solid business plan or any real product. Their goal was to make money as quickly as possible.
They would do this by manipulating the appearance of the company to outsiders, by forcing (via the executive management they put into place) the company itself to grow rapidly regardless of need. In those days, company growth was seen as an indicator of future success, and the VCs took advantage of that. In fact, they did so at the expense of the long-term prospects of the company, since they wanted to make their money as quickly as possible. The companies would go IPO and the VCs would make a pile of money on it.
Why did the market crash, then? Because investors eventually wised up. The companies in question went public via IPO but because they often had no real product and no real business plan they were unsustainable. Even companies that had good products and a good business plan ended up failing because their long-term financial outlook was severely compromised by their unneeded growth. And their post-IPO stock performance eventually reflected that.
Stock investors eventually caught onto the scam, and stopped buying into IPOs. IPOs as a result started failing out of the gate, and VCs started losing money as a result as well. But most importantly, the whole thing destroyed the confidence of investors in the stock market. And the market naturally crashed as a result, with all the fallout that comes of such a thing (which you described nicely).
The bottom line is that VCs are, from what I can see, primarily responsible for the dot-com crash. Some of it was the result of stupidity, but most of it was the result of willful greed.
Patent trolls aren't at any risk for infringement simply because they typically do NOT produce, sell, or use any of the technologies that they patent.
You're kidding, right?
Patent trolls use computers. They use software. If any software vendor is in violation of a patent, their customers are also in violation by proxy.
Nobody really goes after end users for patent violations, but there's nothing that I know of that says they can't.
My point being that while patent trolls aren't as vulnerable to patent infringement litigation as companies which actually produce something, they are still vulnerable.
Unless I'm missing something fundamental that hasn't been mentioned yet...
This only works if this company suing Sony has any business activities in this field. Even if they did, the company can stop it and Sony's claim for damage is small one.
I don't understand why/how this is true.
Patent law explicitly says that you cannot even legally use a patented invention without the consent of the patent holder.
So it seems to me that any patent holder that wishes to squash a patent troll need only know what the patent troll uses to conduct its business, and can countersue the patent troll for patent violation on that basis.
Since patents can be selectively enforced in terms of both the target and the time of enforcement, I don't see why patent trolls are at much less risk than anyone else of infringement, and thus a patent lawsuit.
It is depressing to me that the media spins him [Ron Paul] as some psycho conspiracy nut and even more that people believe it.
I keep telling you people that the media corporations exert primary control over who gets elected (because the media controls the message), but many keep acting as if there's no connection. There is, and it's a very strong one.
The media spins Ron Paul that way because the media corporations don't want him to be elected. It's as simple as that. If the media corporations liked Ron Paul, the media would be singing his praises continuously.
Given that, it frankly amazes me that he somehow got into the running at all.
This is why it seems to me that the Constitution (or whatever is considered the "supreme law of the land") should require that laws state their intent up front, and that the statement of intent be used by the courts to determine whether or not the particular law applies to the defendant.
In other words, it's not enough that someone has broken the letter of the law, they must also be the intended target of the law in order for a guilty verdict to be justly given.
Oh, and violation of the intent of the law on the part of law enforcement should be a punishable offense.
If Microsoft fails this time, the future for Windows looks very dark.
That sounds like wishful thinking to me, but if you're right, then as far as I'm concerned it can't happen soon enough. Good riddance, I say.
Microsoft is single-handedly responsible for causing users to expect computers to be unreliable pieces of junk. Thanks to Microsoft, users expect the computer (not just the application, mind you, but the whole computer) to crash. They expect it to get stupid on them and to have to reboot. They expect to have to reinstall the operating system from time to time.
I've used a large swath of operating systems: MVS, VMS, CP/M, DOS, AmigaOS, various flavors of Unix, MacOS, Linux, and probably others I can't remember right now. Of all those operating systems, Windows is the only one that would eventually "eat" itself or otherwise get stupid for no good reason. It's gotten better about that, yes, but the damage was done long, long ago.
And no, it has nothing to do with viruses or trojans, either, though the ease with which those things can command the system is a factor. No, even without those things, Windows was junk. It has always been at least an order of magnitude less stable than anything else. Back when the best Windows could manage was to stay up for a couple of weeks without a reboot or power cycle, anything else could stay up for months on the same hardware. Now that Windows has finally gotten to the point that it can stay up for months, other operating systems have already gotten to the point where they can stay up for years on the same hardware.
Once computers based on the Intel 386 came out, there was no excuse at all for an operating system to not be protectively isolated from user programs, and no excuse at all for those programs to not be protectively isolated from each other. Various flavors of Unix have been doing that ever since memory management hardware became available. The techniques were well known long before Windows 95 came onto the scene and, in fact, long before the Intel 386 came out.
Microsoft has been producing crap ever since they got involved with the IBM PC. That, combined with their monopolistic position in the industry, has retarded progress in the general purpose computing industry by many years. I dare say they are responsible for trillions of dollars of waste as a result of the sheer unreliability of their operating systems and other software. So if they fall on their face and stay down, I for one will not shed a single tear.
That scenario is a silly fantasy, perpetuated by people who have no idea how to run a business. If you buy a competitor just to make it go away, you realize no benefit from the purchase.
If you buy a competitor just to make it go away, then you remove some of the downward price pressure in the market and therefore make yourself more competitive in that market than you would be otherwise. The closer to a monopoly situation you can get, the more control you have over the market prices. And that is a very real benefit, because it means more profits for you.
Whether the move ends up being worth it or not depends on how much you paid to remove the competitor versus how much money you can make as a result of the increased prices (or lack of decreased prices) you can charge afterwards. If a competitor looks to be on the verge of becoming very successful (and thus wielding a lot more market clout), then it's obviously better to buy them out earlier (before they get really successful) than afterwards because it's cheaper and it heads off the changes to market expectations that a successful, scrappy player can bring.
No, I'm afraid the possibility that Grumman bought out Scaled Composites for this reason is very real. Scaled Composites is probably close to the point where they look like they can make a very real change to the expectations of the market, and that would put the traditional players like Grumman in a very bad position.
Think of it as the equivalent of IBM buying Apple right before Apple made the mass-produced personal computer a reality. Doing so probably would have given IBM another few years, at least, of dominance of the computer market with their mainframes, but it would have taken a lot of insight and foresight on the part of IBM to know to make that move. That said, it was a lot cheaper to become a successful small computer manufacturer back then (Apple got started in a garage, and started shipping product while still in the garage phase) than it is to become a successful aerospace company today, so the buyout strategy would be more expensive for the big players in the case of computers because there would be more targets they'd have to buy out.
The dot-com bust happened because VCs rigged the companies as a get-rich-quick scheme, not because building with an eye towards the long term is a bad thing.
More precisely, the bust happened because stock investors eventually caught onto the scam and stopped buying into IPOs. They also started to regard startups (those that had already gone public) with a great deal of skepticism. That caused the stock prices to tank, which triggered a panic selloff, which lowered the overall performance of the market itself relative to its soaring performance beforehand, and thus triggered the bust.
Once the game was up, VCs more or less stopped investing in startups for a while.
A small handful of people made a big pile of money at the expense of a whole lot of other people as a result.
If anything shows that growth for its own sake is utter stupidity, the dot-com bust should. But most "business" people in the U.S. appear to be too stupid to understand that. I suspect that nothing less than a depression on the scale of the Great Depression will teach these people that lesson, and even that might not be enough.
As opposed to the DotCom era where spectacular losses made the stock rise because companies were building for the future.
No, the companies claimed to be building for the future, but in most cases it was just a ruse by the VCs to make the company look good for an IPO so the VCs could cash out quick before the company tanked as a result of their mismanagement.
The dot-com bust happened because VCs rigged the companies as a get-rich-quick scheme, not because building with an eye towards the long term is a bad thing. The VCs had no intention of building the companies with an eye towards long-term profitability, because they intended to cash out long before then.
Why go through the trouble when you've Voting Machines that don't keep a paper record of the votes castAnybody here work with computer or software? You don't think a software or hardware vendor would do anything crooked, do you?
Because the voting machines will help to keep your party in power, but not the specific players, as a result of the 2-term limitation.
Like I said, I consider it a possibility only. I don't think it's all that likely or anything, but this is the first time I've ever thought this was even remotely possible.
The fact that the Secretary of Homeland Security's "gut" is telling him that we're going to get hit by a terrorist attack larger than 9/11 does concern me. I have to wonder about people whose hold on power is predicated on there being a continuing threat of terrorism. People do like to keep power, after all.
Most people aren't willing to follow this to its logical conclusion.
I am.
These people appear to be willing to do whatever it takes to remain in power. I mean whatever it takes.
So follow that to its logical conclusion. The logical conclusion is that intentionally allowing or even orchestrating a terrorist attack on American soil is not beyond these people. I suspect this has already happened (9/11), but cannot prove it and thus only consider it a possibility (though a not entirely unreasonable one). There appears to be some circumstantial physical evidence supporting that, at least, but it's by no means conclusive.
And I suspect that the timing of the next one, if it happens, will be such that it will "force" the postponement (and eventual outright cancellation) of the next presidential election. How convenient.
Those are only suspicions, of course. I can't prove them. But I have history on my side. This has happened before.
You think I'm paranoid? Well, you thought those of us who predicted all the shit that's coming to light now were paranoid, too. But it was you who were wrong. Because you underestimated the very people who are in power right now. I suggest you don't repeat that mistake.
This CFS strikes me as a system which will have a much higher level of complexity and context awareness, which sounds like some processes will get more than others. The intention is to make it fair in the real world but not necessarily balanced, since not all processes are alike in their needs or expectations of task switching.
Well, if you want "fair and balanced", then you want...
I haven't seen RMS' will, but I'm certain that he's made arrangements for his estate to be passed on to someone else who believes just as strongly in Free Software as he does.
The man is far from stupid, and he consistently demonstrates amazing foresight.
Cambridge, Mass. -- Richard Stallman was killed earlier today when a city bus swerved to avoid a collision with a car. Mr. Stallman was walking back to the MIT campus from lunch at the time. In one last demonstration of amazing foresight, he apparently wrote in his will, "I'm writing this in case I get hit by a bus". Family members were not available for comment.
OK, so it wasn't that funny. Ow. Hey, no need to throw tomatoes at me Oww.. oh c'mon it wasn't that bad was it? Ow!!
And don't forget that Unisys still maintains and sells descendants of both the old Sperry UNIVAC 1100-series mainframe line and the Burroughs MCP-based A-series mainframe boxes
Ah. I was wondering where the MCP had got off to...
Better be careful when you hook up one of those Burroughs mainframes, then!
The problem is, despite everything else, most people are comfortable. It takes a lot of uncomfortable people to get a good revolution. Downtrodden, completely depressed people. And it takes an organized, and charasmatic leader.
That's the thing, though: any government that has gotten that far out of control is almost certainly the kind where the people in it will do whatever it takes to remain in power.. If nuking a city or two is what it takes, that's what they'll do, as long as they really have the power to do it.
What, do you think third-world countries have a monopoly on power-hungry madmen? The amount of lust for power in each sitting president has more or less continuously grown over time, because as wealth continues to be concentrated into the hands of the few, it becomes easier over time for power-hungry spoiled rich boys to gain political power. Such people think of themselves as royalty, not as common people, and the real world is a sadistic enough place that it rewards such people with ever increasing money and power.
Not that i'm encouraging such a thing, but should such an event occur, unless the US were willing to nuke it's own people, it could very well succeed.
Yeah...a leader who can somehow manage to avoid getting himself killed despite all the crazy surveillance capabilities and other advantages the government he's attempting to oust has over him.
The Iraqis have two huge advantages over U.S. civilians:
They're a completely different culture and a completely different country, so it's much harder for the U.S. to infiltrate and destroy from within any "enemy" organization there.
The U.S. is attempting to (though not succeeding too much) look like the "good guy" while doing what it can to set up a puppet government. The U.S. has already achieved its goal there: to control the oil in that region. Not necessarily to the degree necessary to use it, but at least to the degree necessary to prevent others from using it. Our troops are there in order to make sure we don't lose that level of control.
If the U.S. government were as determined to exert its power as it would be if it were faced with its own demise at the hands of its people, I guarantee it wouldn't hesitate to smack its own population down hard.
Of course, that's assuming things got that far out of hand to begin with. It almost certainly wouldn't. Not because the population would be content, but because the population would be afraid of going up against a gargantuan enemy such as its government. This is how Hitler and his pals managed to keep Germany under their control during the entire time they reigned -- it took enormous effort on the part of the rest of the world to take care of that problem. How much success do you think they'll have against a country with 3 times the population and a huge arsenal of nukes? And there was comparatively little effort in Germany to do so from within, regardless of any desire to do so.
No, if there's anything that history has shown, it's that freedom is a fleeting thing, and the normal state of human affairs is for most of the population to be under the boot of a power hungry dictator, and that breaking out from under such power hungry madmen is an enormously difficult and unlikely thing, while finding oneself underneath that boot is an extremely easy thing. This is why despotic dictatorships massively dominate the landscape of recorded human history.
And I hope they keep pushing. Because I'm begining to believe that the time for the ballor box is nearing it's end and all we'll be left with is teh ammo box for casting our votes. The people will only be able to abide by so many offenses. If this blatent lawlessness continues to prevail, the people will sooner or later stand up, and some of those people will be Generals and Admirals within our military.
Really? Like the way they did in Russia? Or China? Or Cuba? Or, dare I say, Nazi Germany?
People are sheep. They like to be commanded. They like to be told what to do, even if they disagree with it. They especially like to see others being told what to do.
I don't think you understand human nature here. Humanity has been governed by totalitarian regimes for almost its entire recorded existence. The longest living form of government is the despotic totalitarian regime. Said form was used in Egypt for thousands of years.
And you think that the people will suddenly get to the point where they've had too much and will revolt?
The American Revolution was unique event. It was the almost certainly the inspiration for other revolutions like it (e.g., the French Revolution). It happened as a result of a congruence of factors:
The firepower of the average civilian was on rough parity with the firepower of the average soldier, so a military force stood a reasonable chance of being defeated by an equally large civilian force.
The leaders of the revolutionaries actually cared about personal freedom, as opposed to blatantly craving power for themselves (the two are diametrically opposed), and were sufficiently powerful to repel individuals who did crave power.
The revolutionaries were geographically isolated and difficult to reach by the ruling power.
There are undoubtedly other important factors that made it possible, but those are the ones I can think of off the top of my head.
None of those factors is true today, except maybe for the second one, and that's questionable at best. Today's politicians make it clear that it's nearly impossible to tell the difference between a power-hungry two-faced liar and a freedom-loving leader. Both will say the same thing under the same circumstances. What differs is the reason, and that reason is truly known only to the individual in question.
The end result is that no revolution is likely to happen, and any revolution that does happen is almost certain to fail -- it'll require support of the very organization that has pledged itself to support the government: the military. And if you don't believe me, ask yourself how many such revolutions have succeeded against a modern government with a well-armed, modern, high-tech military (one that has aircraft, artillery, tanks, etc. at its disposal) without massive support from that same military. None? Yeah, that's what I thought.
And no, Iraq isn't any kind of example to the contrary for one simple reason: we're still there, and we're restraining our hand.
This ain't the 1700's, and wishing it were won't get you anywhere.
Slashdot Mirror
The "editors" don't appear to do anything else at all (except perhaps issue a pithy comment or two in the story description), so why would they do this?
I wish I weren't being serious. :-(
But....but....I thought MySQL was fast!
It's not a valid method for proving the validity of any given model, but it's a litmus test that any valid model must pass for it to be considered valid.
So...do the current climate models properly predict the entirety of the past climate performance? If not, then they are all invalid.
Because the ratio of geeky guys to geeky girls in the population seems to be about 10:1?
If you're a geeky guy, the chances are very good that you either have no girlfriend at all or that your girlfriend is not a geek herself, thanks to that high male:female geek ratio.
That's based on observation, of course, so it's subject to change without notice. :-)
The GP said he thinks we're alone in the galaxy, not the universe.
If the chance of life developing in a given solar system is one in a million, then 5,000 systems in our galaxy will develop (or have developed) life. How likely is it that a tool-using, intelligent species will develop where life has developed and make it past the problems that could result in their own desmise?
We could easily be the only intelligent life in our galaxy, because in galactic terms, a one in a million chance is large. Everything hinges on what conditions are really needed to support self-replicating organisms, and it could easily be that such conditions are very hard to find. The universe as a whole is generally an incredibly hostile place, and it would be wise to not forget that.
Finally, remember that the problem of travelling between the stars is nothing compared with the problem of travelling between galaxies. If you think the distance between stars is large, you haven't seen anything yet. Travel between galaxies is, to a starfaring civilization, roughly like travelling between the stars is to us (a civilization that's capable, with effort, of travelling between planets in the solar system).
The media is the way it is because it is the mouthpiece for those who own and/or run large corporations. It's not the media itself that has power, so much as those who own it. It is those who own it who crave power and wealth.
The media in the US today, like the telephone company in the US, is an effective monopoly, with its only real competition being the multitude of internet sites where individuals can express themselves freely (more or less). The connection between corporate campaign "finance" and the influence of the media is the people who own and operate the media corporations.
The media no longer needs or wants journalistic integrity because the media doesn't really compete with anything to speak of. Its corporate owners also completely own the medium over which the media plays: television and newsprint. As a result it can, and does, speak with one voice: that of its masters. This is the fundamental reason democracy in the US is entirely broken, and why it cannot be fixed.
The only way to eliminate the influence of the media today is to simply ignore it (the real remedy, to break up ownership of the media into a bunch of tiny independent pieces, cannot happen in the current environment, just as a breakup of Microsoft proved impossible). But most people don't, and will never, know to do that.
So the corporate ownership of the US government will continue unchallenged, and eventually malevolent fascism will blanket the US. It's just a matter of time now. If you don't want to be here when that happens, get out now, while you still can.
Yeah, but if it were just a problem with the way the VCs were funding things, the entire stock market wouldn't have tanked, because venture capital funds are generally regarded as relatively high-risk anyway and, in any case, a company that goes off the radar before going public has little effect on the stock market. No, there's another connection here that you didn't mention.
When a venture capitalist funds a company, it will often put its own executive management into place in order to ensure that the goals of the VC are met. The question then is: what are the goals of the VC?
Well, to make money, of course. Thanks to the internet hype during the dot-com boom, internet companies were able to go public and get some crazy money for the initial stock offering. VCs typically own the bulk of said stock, and thus VCs were able to make a lot of money off of that. Initially, the companies in question generally offered something of value, but when the VCs caught on to how easily IPOs made money for them, they started to fund pretty much any internet startup, even those without any solid business plan or any real product. Their goal was to make money as quickly as possible.
They would do this by manipulating the appearance of the company to outsiders, by forcing (via the executive management they put into place) the company itself to grow rapidly regardless of need. In those days, company growth was seen as an indicator of future success, and the VCs took advantage of that. In fact, they did so at the expense of the long-term prospects of the company, since they wanted to make their money as quickly as possible. The companies would go IPO and the VCs would make a pile of money on it.
Why did the market crash, then? Because investors eventually wised up. The companies in question went public via IPO but because they often had no real product and no real business plan they were unsustainable. Even companies that had good products and a good business plan ended up failing because their long-term financial outlook was severely compromised by their unneeded growth. And their post-IPO stock performance eventually reflected that.
Stock investors eventually caught onto the scam, and stopped buying into IPOs. IPOs as a result started failing out of the gate, and VCs started losing money as a result as well. But most importantly, the whole thing destroyed the confidence of investors in the stock market. And the market naturally crashed as a result, with all the fallout that comes of such a thing (which you described nicely).
The bottom line is that VCs are, from what I can see, primarily responsible for the dot-com crash. Some of it was the result of stupidity, but most of it was the result of willful greed.
You're kidding, right?
Patent trolls use computers. They use software. If any software vendor is in violation of a patent, their customers are also in violation by proxy.
Nobody really goes after end users for patent violations, but there's nothing that I know of that says they can't.
My point being that while patent trolls aren't as vulnerable to patent infringement litigation as companies which actually produce something, they are still vulnerable.
Unless I'm missing something fundamental that hasn't been mentioned yet...
I don't understand why/how this is true.
Patent law explicitly says that you cannot even legally use a patented invention without the consent of the patent holder.
So it seems to me that any patent holder that wishes to squash a patent troll need only know what the patent troll uses to conduct its business, and can countersue the patent troll for patent violation on that basis.
Since patents can be selectively enforced in terms of both the target and the time of enforcement, I don't see why patent trolls are at much less risk than anyone else of infringement, and thus a patent lawsuit.
I keep telling you people that the media corporations exert primary control over who gets elected (because the media controls the message), but many keep acting as if there's no connection. There is, and it's a very strong one.
The media spins Ron Paul that way because the media corporations don't want him to be elected. It's as simple as that. If the media corporations liked Ron Paul, the media would be singing his praises continuously.
Given that, it frankly amazes me that he somehow got into the running at all.
This is why it seems to me that the Constitution (or whatever is considered the "supreme law of the land") should require that laws state their intent up front, and that the statement of intent be used by the courts to determine whether or not the particular law applies to the defendant.
In other words, it's not enough that someone has broken the letter of the law, they must also be the intended target of the law in order for a guilty verdict to be justly given.
Oh, and violation of the intent of the law on the part of law enforcement should be a punishable offense.
That sounds like wishful thinking to me, but if you're right, then as far as I'm concerned it can't happen soon enough. Good riddance, I say.
Microsoft is single-handedly responsible for causing users to expect computers to be unreliable pieces of junk. Thanks to Microsoft, users expect the computer (not just the application, mind you, but the whole computer) to crash. They expect it to get stupid on them and to have to reboot. They expect to have to reinstall the operating system from time to time.
I've used a large swath of operating systems: MVS, VMS, CP/M, DOS, AmigaOS, various flavors of Unix, MacOS, Linux, and probably others I can't remember right now. Of all those operating systems, Windows is the only one that would eventually "eat" itself or otherwise get stupid for no good reason. It's gotten better about that, yes, but the damage was done long, long ago.
And no, it has nothing to do with viruses or trojans, either, though the ease with which those things can command the system is a factor. No, even without those things, Windows was junk. It has always been at least an order of magnitude less stable than anything else. Back when the best Windows could manage was to stay up for a couple of weeks without a reboot or power cycle, anything else could stay up for months on the same hardware. Now that Windows has finally gotten to the point that it can stay up for months, other operating systems have already gotten to the point where they can stay up for years on the same hardware.
Once computers based on the Intel 386 came out, there was no excuse at all for an operating system to not be protectively isolated from user programs, and no excuse at all for those programs to not be protectively isolated from each other. Various flavors of Unix have been doing that ever since memory management hardware became available. The techniques were well known long before Windows 95 came onto the scene and, in fact, long before the Intel 386 came out.
Microsoft has been producing crap ever since they got involved with the IBM PC. That, combined with their monopolistic position in the industry, has retarded progress in the general purpose computing industry by many years. I dare say they are responsible for trillions of dollars of waste as a result of the sheer unreliability of their operating systems and other software. So if they fall on their face and stay down, I for one will not shed a single tear.
If you buy a competitor just to make it go away, then you remove some of the downward price pressure in the market and therefore make yourself more competitive in that market than you would be otherwise. The closer to a monopoly situation you can get, the more control you have over the market prices. And that is a very real benefit, because it means more profits for you.
Whether the move ends up being worth it or not depends on how much you paid to remove the competitor versus how much money you can make as a result of the increased prices (or lack of decreased prices) you can charge afterwards. If a competitor looks to be on the verge of becoming very successful (and thus wielding a lot more market clout), then it's obviously better to buy them out earlier (before they get really successful) than afterwards because it's cheaper and it heads off the changes to market expectations that a successful, scrappy player can bring.
No, I'm afraid the possibility that Grumman bought out Scaled Composites for this reason is very real. Scaled Composites is probably close to the point where they look like they can make a very real change to the expectations of the market, and that would put the traditional players like Grumman in a very bad position.
Think of it as the equivalent of IBM buying Apple right before Apple made the mass-produced personal computer a reality. Doing so probably would have given IBM another few years, at least, of dominance of the computer market with their mainframes, but it would have taken a lot of insight and foresight on the part of IBM to know to make that move. That said, it was a lot cheaper to become a successful small computer manufacturer back then (Apple got started in a garage, and started shipping product while still in the garage phase) than it is to become a successful aerospace company today, so the buyout strategy would be more expensive for the big players in the case of computers because there would be more targets they'd have to buy out.
More precisely, the bust happened because stock investors eventually caught onto the scam and stopped buying into IPOs. They also started to regard startups (those that had already gone public) with a great deal of skepticism. That caused the stock prices to tank, which triggered a panic selloff, which lowered the overall performance of the market itself relative to its soaring performance beforehand, and thus triggered the bust.
Once the game was up, VCs more or less stopped investing in startups for a while.
A small handful of people made a big pile of money at the expense of a whole lot of other people as a result.
If anything shows that growth for its own sake is utter stupidity, the dot-com bust should. But most "business" people in the U.S. appear to be too stupid to understand that. I suspect that nothing less than a depression on the scale of the Great Depression will teach these people that lesson, and even that might not be enough.
No, the companies claimed to be building for the future, but in most cases it was just a ruse by the VCs to make the company look good for an IPO so the VCs could cash out quick before the company tanked as a result of their mismanagement.
The dot-com bust happened because VCs rigged the companies as a get-rich-quick scheme, not because building with an eye towards the long term is a bad thing. The VCs had no intention of building the companies with an eye towards long-term profitability, because they intended to cash out long before then.
The whole thing was just a big stock market scam.
Argh. I read that as "Programming languages like Haskell and Erlang has very little problems with using a massive amounts of CPU".
Which might still be true. :-)
Because the voting machines will help to keep your party in power, but not the specific players, as a result of the 2-term limitation.
Like I said, I consider it a possibility only. I don't think it's all that likely or anything, but this is the first time I've ever thought this was even remotely possible.
Most people aren't willing to follow this to its logical conclusion.
I am.
These people appear to be willing to do whatever it takes to remain in power. I mean whatever it takes.
So follow that to its logical conclusion. The logical conclusion is that intentionally allowing or even orchestrating a terrorist attack on American soil is not beyond these people. I suspect this has already happened (9/11), but cannot prove it and thus only consider it a possibility (though a not entirely unreasonable one). There appears to be some circumstantial physical evidence supporting that, at least, but it's by no means conclusive.
And I suspect that the timing of the next one, if it happens, will be such that it will "force" the postponement (and eventual outright cancellation) of the next presidential election. How convenient.
Those are only suspicions, of course. I can't prove them. But I have history on my side. This has happened before.
You think I'm paranoid? Well, you thought those of us who predicted all the shit that's coming to light now were paranoid, too. But it was you who were wrong. Because you underestimated the very people who are in power right now. I suggest you don't repeat that mistake.
They do in Soviet Russia!
Well, if you want "fair and balanced", then you want...
Windows! The "Fox News" of operating systems!
Cambridge, Mass. -- Richard Stallman was killed earlier today when a city bus swerved to avoid a collision with a car. Mr. Stallman was walking back to the MIT campus from lunch at the time. In one last demonstration of amazing foresight, he apparently wrote in his will, "I'm writing this in case I get hit by a bus". Family members were not available for comment.
OK, so it wasn't that funny. Ow. Hey, no need to throw tomatoes at me Oww .. oh c'mon it wasn't that bad was it? Ow!!
Ah. I was wondering where the MCP had got off to...
Better be careful when you hook up one of those Burroughs mainframes, then!
That's the thing, though: any government that has gotten that far out of control is almost certainly the kind where the people in it will do whatever it takes to remain in power.. If nuking a city or two is what it takes, that's what they'll do, as long as they really have the power to do it.
What, do you think third-world countries have a monopoly on power-hungry madmen? The amount of lust for power in each sitting president has more or less continuously grown over time, because as wealth continues to be concentrated into the hands of the few, it becomes easier over time for power-hungry spoiled rich boys to gain political power. Such people think of themselves as royalty, not as common people, and the real world is a sadistic enough place that it rewards such people with ever increasing money and power.
Yeah...a leader who can somehow manage to avoid getting himself killed despite all the crazy surveillance capabilities and other advantages the government he's attempting to oust has over him.
The Iraqis have two huge advantages over U.S. civilians:
If the U.S. government were as determined to exert its power as it would be if it were faced with its own demise at the hands of its people, I guarantee it wouldn't hesitate to smack its own population down hard.
Of course, that's assuming things got that far out of hand to begin with. It almost certainly wouldn't. Not because the population would be content, but because the population would be afraid of going up against a gargantuan enemy such as its government. This is how Hitler and his pals managed to keep Germany under their control during the entire time they reigned -- it took enormous effort on the part of the rest of the world to take care of that problem. How much success do you think they'll have against a country with 3 times the population and a huge arsenal of nukes? And there was comparatively little effort in Germany to do so from within, regardless of any desire to do so.
No, if there's anything that history has shown, it's that freedom is a fleeting thing, and the normal state of human affairs is for most of the population to be under the boot of a power hungry dictator, and that breaking out from under such power hungry madmen is an enormously difficult and unlikely thing, while finding oneself underneath that boot is an extremely easy thing. This is why despotic dictatorships massively dominate the landscape of recorded human history.
Really? Like the way they did in Russia? Or China? Or Cuba? Or, dare I say, Nazi Germany?
People are sheep. They like to be commanded. They like to be told what to do, even if they disagree with it. They especially like to see others being told what to do.
I don't think you understand human nature here. Humanity has been governed by totalitarian regimes for almost its entire recorded existence. The longest living form of government is the despotic totalitarian regime. Said form was used in Egypt for thousands of years.
And you think that the people will suddenly get to the point where they've had too much and will revolt?
The American Revolution was unique event. It was the almost certainly the inspiration for other revolutions like it (e.g., the French Revolution). It happened as a result of a congruence of factors:
There are undoubtedly other important factors that made it possible, but those are the ones I can think of off the top of my head.
None of those factors is true today, except maybe for the second one, and that's questionable at best. Today's politicians make it clear that it's nearly impossible to tell the difference between a power-hungry two-faced liar and a freedom-loving leader. Both will say the same thing under the same circumstances. What differs is the reason, and that reason is truly known only to the individual in question.
The end result is that no revolution is likely to happen, and any revolution that does happen is almost certain to fail -- it'll require support of the very organization that has pledged itself to support the government: the military. And if you don't believe me, ask yourself how many such revolutions have succeeded against a modern government with a well-armed, modern, high-tech military (one that has aircraft, artillery, tanks, etc. at its disposal) without massive support from that same military. None? Yeah, that's what I thought.
And no, Iraq isn't any kind of example to the contrary for one simple reason: we're still there, and we're restraining our hand.
This ain't the 1700's, and wishing it were won't get you anywhere.