Ha. I specifically looked at the comments for this article to find out how many "they must be doing agile wrong" joke posts there would be. But I only found one, and it was serious! Sigh...
what I do know is IT workers, training their Indian and Asian replacements in the US WOULD NOT BE HAPPENING if unions where present. One of the biggest reasons its cheaper for companies to move to a new country has everything to do with willing Tech idiots training these people who will do their current job for LESS.
I don't think this stands up to scrutiny AT ALL. Globalization is the real issue here; in the current model it makes American labor very expensive compared to world prices. Unionized or not, there is a strong incentive for companies to send work offshore and move the means of production out of the USA. The endgame for this is obvious; a deflationary spiral as the "real economy" in the USA becomes a shadow of its former self. In my opinion, this is what is happening now. The USA is seeing what happens when you try to run a consumption based economy when you don't produce anything.
In summary, unions will not stop globalization. If anything, they will prevent their companies from making the changes needed to attain a cost structure comparable to their non-unionized competitors.
The $64 million dollar question is thus: How does unionization make American labor more competitive? Answer: it doesn't.
I don't understand, why are people concerned with this?
Well, presuming Oswald was not the killer, it means the killer(s) is still at large and probably responsible for other subsequent crimes. If you accept that the killer was an organization, it means it is especially likely it continues to commit crimes to this day. If one can get away with killing a US president, what sort of crime is out of reach?
I think Eyes on the Prize would be a great way to motivate the role of IP in our society. It is a historically vital documentary describing the US Civil Rights movement and extensively uses archival footage from television broadcasts of the 1950s and 1960s. It won Emmy awards and yet is in legal limbo because of copyright issues with the archival footage it contains. The Wikipedia article suggests that some of these rights issues have been solved - it would be interesting to find out how and at what cost.
The bigger picture here is that much of our contemporary history is documented by TV, music and other media productions which are covered under laws like the Mickey Mouse Protection Act. This law suggests that copyright holders may lobby for indefinite copyright extensions and essentially defeat the purpose of the public domain. Using these media sources for historic purposes requires obtaining rights essentially indefinitely - and documentary producers typically don't have the funds for to do this (potentially in the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars). Of course there are situations where the rights holders are unclear or cannot be reached - should this material be off limits?
Another issue appears with "abandoned" copyrighted material - such as out-of-print music albums or vintage movies. Fans often have interest in this material and distribute it amongst themselves - this is illegal but is often the only way the material is kept "alive". In the case of vintage movies, the source reels have often deteriorated and the only known copies of movies are those possessed by fans. Because of simple economics, many of these items will never be commercially released again - yet who knows when they will enter the public domain.
I'm rambling, but this seems like a topic that would be easy to fill a number of hours discussing - especially if you start citing court cases and the arguments presented therein.
There is a company called VG Sports that specializes in training (mostly e-books and newsletters) for the Madden NFL video games. Since the games have quite a learning curve, it always struck me as a promising business model.
They seem to be doing OK - I guess the next step is the army of consultants?
Americans treat driving as a more of a right/chore rather than a privilege/responsibility.
Considering how much of the USA *requires* an automobile to access, I can't blame them. Useful public transit is a rare treat in the USA - I understand it is much more common in Germany..
Well, I guess I'm not so jaded yet that I think the US military would actually run over a single unarmed man after all the craziness had mostly died down.
Well the Israelis were more than willing to run over an American who stood in front of one of their bulldozers..
A more optimistic term for this would be the 'lottery number'. That is, how many lottery winners could a development team lose before the project fails.
If memory serves me right, gcc requires a basic C compiler (minimal features assumed) to bootstrap itself. This basic C compiler is used to build an intermediate version of gcc that is used to compile the final gcc binary.
So it is a hybrid approach of sorts - using another tool for minimal bootstrapping and doing the rest for itself so that gcc is used to build gcc.
You obviously don't understand the American voting system. The entire purpose of electronic voting machines is to eliminate the need for "obvious" vote fraud like physical violence.
You say an "insignificant portion" of ballots were affected. Of course you can't actually say this - there is no provision for verifying the totals are correct!
I just love our new American republic. Just push a button and trust your national Republican/Diebold/corporate axis to do all the vote tabulation and counting. Also make sure the corporate media ensures there are plenty of tools like yourself who defend it!
Garbage like this really cracks me up. Unless you assume oil in the ground is infinite (which it obviously is not) it is patent nonsense. Conventional economics does assume resources are infinite and that more demand will always create more supply. While this is usually true at the margin for any good, do you really believe this models the big picture of natural resources (particularly non-renewable resources) extracted from the environment? If we slaughter the last elephant one day, does it matter that the price for ivory becomes sky high? In short, economics tends to confuse money with resources.
Further, oil is special because it is an energy resource - energy that makes other economic activity possible. Energy grows your food, powers your computers, and powers your transportation systems. A non-renewable energy resource becoming scarce will thus affect the viability of everything using that form of energy - which for oil is almost everything either directly or indirectly.
At some point (some believe soon) demand for oil at the margin will exceed supply. This will increase the price of oil and therefore the cost of everything that uses it. This will also mean that developing substitutes to oil will become more difficult due to higher cost. Naively you might assume that oil exploration and discovery would increase, but a look at the data reveals that oil discovery peaked in 1964 and any large future discoveries are not very likely.
How economical will it be to switch over to wind turbines or fission plants when it is impractical to drive to work or food is being rationed due to lack of energy in the agricultural system? Oil depletion is serious business and assuming 'the market will fix everything' suggests an incomplete understanding of what assumptions really underlie 'the market'.
People like to talk about how clean and safe nuclear power is. However, in many ways it is amazing that a functioning nuclear reactor has not yet been targeted as an act of war. In my opinion it will happen eventually, especially if/when nuclear power spreads is the less stable parts of the world.
Bombing a functioning nuclear reactor makes sense from a war standpoint - when the USA invades a sovereign country it makes sure to bomb the power plants first. Of course the radiation risks from this can be high (possibly depending on reactor design) - and if we power civilization with nuclear energy it almost becomes certain it will happen. This is a very significant long-term risk to consider, in my opinion.
But Hydroelectric can change things significantly. For one, dams prevent downstream areas from flooding and replenishing the soil adjacent to the river. The farmlands near the Nile or the Colorado through the Grand Canyon are in peril for this reason.
Dams also prevent fish from moving upstream - many western salmon runs have been reduced or wiped out. Hydroprojects can even alter the weather, as Lake Nasser has done in Egypt.
Hydro does have a number of advantages but is not without costs! Also, most of the best spots for dams have already been used.
The problem here is that you assume natural resources (like oil) are provided by markets, when in reality they are provided by the environment. It's a common mistake of an economist.
Higher prices for a commodity may increase supply at the margin, but you're certainly not increasing the overall resource base. It should also be mentioned that in the case of oil, higher prices meaning higher exploration and drilling costs as well.
The point is that our current extraction of resources is unsustainable. When something is unsustainable, you either stop doing it or get forced to. At some point our fossil fuel addiction will have to come to an end - hopefully not in a scenario of economic collapse.
The same can be said of other resources like iron ore, uranium, etc. One day these will be substantially depleted - what then? Face it - if you are using resources much faster than they are created, you are engaging in a form of environmental rape.
Slashdot Mirror
Ha. I specifically looked at the comments for this article to find out how many "they must be doing agile wrong" joke posts there would be. But I only found one, and it was serious! Sigh...
BP bought Gulf Oil, so calling it the "Gulf spill" is perfectly reasonable...
what I do know is IT workers, training their Indian and Asian replacements in the US WOULD NOT BE HAPPENING if unions where present. One of the biggest reasons its cheaper for companies to move to a new country has everything to do with willing Tech idiots training these people who will do their current job for LESS.
I don't think this stands up to scrutiny AT ALL. Globalization is the real issue here; in the current model it makes American labor very expensive compared to world prices. Unionized or not, there is a strong incentive for companies to send work offshore and move the means of production out of the USA. The endgame for this is obvious; a deflationary spiral as the "real economy" in the USA becomes a shadow of its former self. In my opinion, this is what is happening now. The USA is seeing what happens when you try to run a consumption based economy when you don't produce anything.
In summary, unions will not stop globalization. If anything, they will prevent their companies from making the changes needed to attain a cost structure comparable to their non-unionized competitors.
The $64 million dollar question is thus: How does unionization make American labor more competitive? Answer: it doesn't.
I don't understand, why are people concerned with this?
Well, presuming Oswald was not the killer, it means the killer(s) is still at large and probably responsible for other subsequent crimes. If you accept that the killer was an organization, it means it is especially likely it continues to commit crimes to this day. If one can get away with killing a US president, what sort of crime is out of reach?
I think Eyes on the Prize would be a great way to motivate the role of IP in our society. It is a historically vital documentary describing the US Civil Rights movement and extensively uses archival footage from television broadcasts of the 1950s and 1960s. It won Emmy awards and yet is in legal limbo because of copyright issues with the archival footage it contains. The Wikipedia article suggests that some of these rights issues have been solved - it would be interesting to find out how and at what cost.
The bigger picture here is that much of our contemporary history is documented by TV, music and other media productions which are covered under laws like the Mickey Mouse Protection Act. This law suggests that copyright holders may lobby for indefinite copyright extensions and essentially defeat the purpose of the public domain. Using these media sources for historic purposes requires obtaining rights essentially indefinitely - and documentary producers typically don't have the funds for to do this (potentially in the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars). Of course there are situations where the rights holders are unclear or cannot be reached - should this material be off limits?
Another issue appears with "abandoned" copyrighted material - such as out-of-print music albums or vintage movies. Fans often have interest in this material and distribute it amongst themselves - this is illegal but is often the only way the material is kept "alive". In the case of vintage movies, the source reels have often deteriorated and the only known copies of movies are those possessed by fans. Because of simple economics, many of these items will never be commercially released again - yet who knows when they will enter the public domain.
I'm rambling, but this seems like a topic that would be easy to fill a number of hours discussing - especially if you start citing court cases and the arguments presented therein.
I understand one of the features of ReiserFS is that fscks are shorter and less frequent..
There is a company called VG Sports that specializes in training (mostly e-books and newsletters) for the Madden NFL video games. Since the games have quite a learning curve, it always struck me as a promising business model.
They seem to be doing OK - I guess the next step is the army of consultants?
Americans treat driving as a more of a right/chore rather than a privilege/responsibility.
Considering how much of the USA *requires* an automobile to access, I can't blame them. Useful public transit is a rare treat in the USA - I understand it is much more common in Germany..
We at the government find your ideas intriguing. Somebody will be by to assist you shortly.
Well, I guess I'm not so jaded yet that I think the US military would actually run over a single unarmed man after all the craziness had mostly died down.
Well the Israelis were more than willing to run over an American who stood in front of one of their bulldozers..
A more optimistic term for this would be the 'lottery number'. That is, how many lottery winners could a development team lose before the project fails.
I distinctly remember crashing Windows 2000 with a single printf statement, IIRC the code was something like:
printf("Hello\t\b\b\b\b\b\b\b");
The problem was some system DLL and transcended Windows versions...
If memory serves me right, gcc requires a basic C compiler (minimal features assumed) to bootstrap itself. This basic C compiler is used to build an intermediate version of gcc that is used to compile the final gcc binary.
So it is a hybrid approach of sorts - using another tool for minimal bootstrapping and doing the rest for itself so that gcc is used to build gcc.
JFCCNW would technically be considered an initialism, not an acronym...
Another band to check out is Game Over. They released a demo called 'Nintendo Metal' which is kind of cool.
Check em out at their home page!
You obviously don't understand the American voting system. The entire purpose of electronic voting machines is to eliminate the need for "obvious" vote fraud like physical violence.
You say an "insignificant portion" of ballots were affected. Of course you can't actually say this - there is no provision for verifying the totals are correct!
I just love our new American republic. Just push a button and trust your national Republican/Diebold/corporate axis to do all the vote tabulation and counting. Also make sure the corporate media ensures there are plenty of tools like yourself who defend it!
We will NEVER EVER run out of oil. Never. Ever.
Garbage like this really cracks me up. Unless you assume oil in the ground is infinite (which it obviously is not) it is patent nonsense. Conventional economics does assume resources are infinite and that more demand will always create more supply. While this is usually true at the margin for any good, do you really believe this models the big picture of natural resources (particularly non-renewable resources) extracted from the environment? If we slaughter the last elephant one day, does it matter that the price for ivory becomes sky high? In short, economics tends to confuse money with resources.
Further, oil is special because it is an energy resource - energy that makes other economic activity possible. Energy grows your food, powers your computers, and powers your transportation systems. A non-renewable energy resource becoming scarce will thus affect the viability of everything using that form of energy - which for oil is almost everything either directly or indirectly.
At some point (some believe soon) demand for oil at the margin will exceed supply. This will increase the price of oil and therefore the cost of everything that uses it. This will also mean that developing substitutes to oil will become more difficult due to higher cost. Naively you might assume that oil exploration and discovery would increase, but a look at the data reveals that oil discovery peaked in 1964 and any large future discoveries are not very likely.
How economical will it be to switch over to wind turbines or fission plants when it is impractical to drive to work or food is being rationed due to lack of energy in the agricultural system? Oil depletion is serious business and assuming 'the market will fix everything' suggests an incomplete understanding of what assumptions really underlie 'the market'.
People like to talk about how clean and safe nuclear power is. However, in many ways it is amazing that a functioning nuclear reactor has not yet been targeted as an act of war. In my opinion it will happen eventually, especially if/when nuclear power spreads is the less stable parts of the world.
Bombing a functioning nuclear reactor makes sense from a war standpoint - when the USA invades a sovereign country it makes sure to bomb the power plants first. Of course the radiation risks from this can be high (possibly depending on reactor design) - and if we power civilization with nuclear energy it almost becomes certain it will happen. This is a very significant long-term risk to consider, in my opinion.
But Hydroelectric can change things significantly. For one, dams prevent downstream areas from flooding and replenishing the soil adjacent to the river. The farmlands near the Nile or the Colorado through the Grand Canyon are in peril for this reason.
Dams also prevent fish from moving upstream - many western salmon runs have been reduced or wiped out. Hydroprojects can even alter the weather, as Lake Nasser has done in Egypt.
Hydro does have a number of advantages but is not without costs! Also, most of the best spots for dams have already been used.
The problem here is that you assume natural resources (like oil) are provided by markets, when in reality they are provided by the environment. It's a common mistake of an economist.
Higher prices for a commodity may increase supply at the margin, but you're certainly not increasing the overall resource base. It should also be mentioned that in the case of oil, higher prices meaning higher exploration and drilling costs as well.
The point is that our current extraction of resources is unsustainable. When something is unsustainable, you either stop doing it or get forced to. At some point our fossil fuel addiction will have to come to an end - hopefully not in a scenario of economic collapse.
The same can be said of other resources like iron ore, uranium, etc. One day these will be substantially depleted - what then? Face it - if you are using resources much faster than they are created, you are engaging in a form of environmental rape.
I wouldn't pay you anything. I would send you an email and ask for you to implement this feature I've really been looking for..