CEO: "We're tech company that everybody loves, with a stock price 6 times higher than is rational, and so now we have cash hanging out our collective asses. What can we do to make ourselves stand out and look cool?"
Tech: "Offer something free to the public."
CEO: "Great idea!"
Actually, even then stuff was sponsored by advertising revenues. Remember all those "get paid to surf the web" programs, like AllAdvantage.com? (and the apps that would pretend to surf for you while you were away from your PC?:P )
Google can't just give away a broadband service and expect to remain profitable, unless they limit it such that it costs them less than they are making off other revenues, e.g. AdSense and their corporate-aimed search appliance...
More social control from a supposedly "free as in freedom" license, I see.
*dons flame-retardant suit*
Apparently you can't have a free people and get them to do what is "good for the community" without forcing them to do so. [1]
Remember, freedom is slavery kids...
[1] Not that this comes as a surprise to anybody who has studied socialism and/or communism. It's the same problem of "freedom and community good vs. social control to enforce the goals of the community" all over again, but rather than occurring in international politics, it is occurring in the virtual politics of end-user license agreements.
Eh, I'd argue that we don't hear about it so often because nobody really investigates the federal govn't... Unlike the states, which are investigated by the feds, nobody investigates the feds because nobody has the authority to do so. Some projects and even entire agencies have little, if any Congressional oversight.
Federal corruption charges are not overly numerous, and the effects of cronyism are limited and temporary. It is not as if we have no problem with this, but again, not to the level of fascism.
Read up on the current Mayor Daley of Chicago sometime. He's as corrupt and cronyist as people get, and the FBI's current probe digs ever-deeper into the rabbit hole, more bugs keep running out away from the drill...
At last count, IIRC, some 20 out of 28 people under Daley had plead guilty to some form of corruption and/or cronyism. The remaining 8 are optimists, I suppose (or well-connected)...
I hope the/. editors checked, re-checked, then checked again to make sure that that is Gates' quote on CNET, b/c otherwise, a quote like that is a libel suit waiting to happen...
The situation is bound by international sovereignty. The laws of Ethiopia, Niger, Australia, Brazil, etc. do not apply to us, do they? No they do not. Nor do the laws of the UK, Germany, Canada, Japan, or anywhere else. Thankfully, the laws of North Korea and China do not apply here (otherwise, our freedom of speech would be destroyed, among many other freedoms!).
In the U.S., if somebody took a Britney Spears album and remixed some songs without permission, they might be liable for infringing copyright law.
But if the same person lived in Sweden and did the same thing -- or heck, if they outright *pirate* the music -- the U.S. government can't do a damn thing about it even if it *is* a crime, because our laws do not apply to Sweden. The RIAA's lawyers could certainly send the Swedish person a nastygram, but as long as the Swede does not enter the U.S., they have no reason to be concerned.
A real-life example: people who flee to live in Switzerland on a variety of charges (murder, torture, etc.) are not extradited, because Swiss law doesn't do that. People have fled the U.S. on murder charges to live with relatives in Switzerland and there isn't a damn thing the murderer's victims in the U.S. can do about the murderer, criminally or civilly.
So again, I ask the question: WTF can the Brits do if a non-U.K. person remixes their music?
Ultimately, it is a matter of contract law. But in order for the contract to be enforceable, the laws of the nation in which the contract is agreed-to must support its enforcement...
Unfortunately, the license the content is released under requires that you are a UK resident to use it."
Uh, so what? If a remixer in the U.S. takes BBC content and uses it, WTF can the U.K. do? Their laws don't apply here any more than our laws apply to them, so I guess the proper phrasing would go something like "those BBC wankers can bloody well bugger off!"
That isn't to say the U.S. wouldn't extradite somebody to the U.K. for prosecution, but assuming it's some other country from which the offender won't be extradited, I don't see how the BBC thinks it can seriously enforce this license. But then, IANAL, and I'm not familiar with WIPO's powers (if they have any worth speaking of to begin with)...
Despite being only 24, I'm old enough to remember the days of NES carts priced at $60 each. Today, some games on DVD still cost $60 (when very popular and just-released).
What's changed in those 15 years or so? Our wages/salaries: in nominal terms (not adjusted for inflation), these have risen on average.
But game prices have not.
So, the *real* (inflation-adjusted) price of buying a game has actually decreased since the old days. That is, what might've been a $30,000 salary 15 years ago is, after adjusting for inflation, equivalent to (let's say; this isn't based on actual inflation, this is only an example) $60,000.
Since your salary has doubled in pure numerical value, but game prices have remained constant, you (obviously) can afford 2 new $60 games today as easily as you could afford only 1 game 15 years ago -- even though today's games are *VASTLY* more complex, in every feature category imaginable...
Factory jobs are no longer 'the norm', WalMart is.
Thanks for reminding me of this sad state of affairs.
What, exactly, is so "sad" about this state of affairs?
Would you prefer that people work in factories? Would you prefer that the majority of people work in a dirty, possibly non-air-conditioned building where repetitive-motion injuries are common due to the performance of the same motions -- day-in, day-out, for years or even decades?
Is that really a "better" world? Surely you jest.
Billions of people around the world would *gladly* work in a non-rugged service job because they are no longer physically worked like animals so much as mentally worked as only humans are capable.
I suspect you are taking the "sad" service economy we live in for granted...
Fine. Go to work for a Fortune 500 financial firm, then show up the next day naked (except for a tie tied around your cock), wearing a red-dyed mohawk, 30 iron earrings and nipple rings, and reading pr0n.
I guarantee they will sic security on you and have you escorted promptly to the edge of their property, if not hauled away in a police car.
Your clothes, your attitude, and other such bullshit *do* matter, and only a goddamn retard who has no job and has never been out in the sunlight of the real world could possibly think otherwise. If you are lucky, you will find a place to work that lets you wear jeans, a T-shirt, and sandals to work every day, as they did in the late 1990s. Most places require "business casual" (khakis and a button-up shirt, possibly a tie), and depending on the job function, possibly "professional" (suit + tie).
Then again, this is Slashdot, where the clueless post louder and more often than the clueful...
So in essence, we are dealing with 2 forms of indentured servitude:
1) Employee continues to retain secrets for his former employer, at no continued compensation to the employee for doing so. This is the present system.
2) Employer continues to pay the employee to keep secrets, at no continued work (besides keeping secrets) performed for the employer. This is the system the grandparent suggests.
#1 is a clear case of zero pay for continued work. #2 is a clear case of slight work (maintaining the discipline not to speak certain issues) for full pay.
Thus, the ratio of pay/work is 0 in #1, but non-zero in #2, for non-zero values of pay. #2 involves an exchange of pay for work; #1 does not.
Hence, then, #2 -- for all its abundant flaws (whose size depend on the level of pay and the value to other companies of the secrets retained) -- is at least a marginally-fairer system than #1.
I have little sympathy for the idea that anybody or anything -- whether a person or a legal fiction we call a "corporation" -- should be permitted to restrict one's freedom of speech, unless the person willfully agrees to the restriction and is compensated for it *not* prior to the period over which the secret is held after leaving the "official" work, but during that period *after* termination.
It should be a smaller value than the pay the employee received regularly while employed, because no other work is being performed in addition to this secret-keeping (as was the case while employed), but it should likewise be a non-zero value.
However, if the pay for keeping those secrets is intended to be factored into the period during which actual work is performed, and not *after* termination (as I just described), then there is another solution:
Like our income taxes (Social Security, Medicare, etc.), IMO the dollar amount of our specific job functions ought to be broken-down and specified individually, line-by-line on the employment contract. That way, employees know the value of the specific jobs they are performing for their company. What, exactly, such a broad spectrum of listed factors should be, is another question entirely, e.g. do we specify the value of a sysadmin's work spent checking his pager at home for failing servers? Do we specify the value of an employee's work spent checking his email inbox?, etc.. This is a deliberately-broad improvement to our contracts which would require more discussion.
One of the lines I would suggest, if the company desires to retain trade secrets, should be the rate at which the employee will be paid while he is actually working for the job of keeping secrets after his actual work is complete. That is, the value of the now-former employee's ability to keep his mouth shut and not use the trade secrets of his prior employer for a specified amount of time, and/or for as long as the employer wants those secrets kept (and thus is willing to pay for that continued pseudo-employment).
That way, we have concrete proof that such a factor is truly being included in an employer's salary, rather than the present state, in which we guess at it. Such guessing can and does lead to arguments from the left that such pay is not included in the regular salary (which may or may not be true), and claims from the right and from libertarians that it is included (which may or may not be true), when the truth is, nobody really knows for certain *what* is factored into an employee's salary, in hard dollar amounts, whether that is the case. And certainly if anybody is doing it presently, it would depend heavily on just exactly *which* business we are talking about.
The financial dept. of some companies might have a term in their "employee salary equation" that includes "value of trade secrets protection after termination" as a factor, but frankly, I greatly doubt that is the truth in all but the largest, most IP-heavy firms (MSFT, various financial firms, etc.), and even then, I wouldn't be surprised if that is not explicitly a factor.
(Disclaimer: to be fair, this is a strawman argument. I work in a heavily mainframe-dependent company and industry, and I have no doubt that the mainframe *could* have been programmed properly to handle the load. The real problem in this case were ones of mechanical engineering and bad design/system engineering... Things like bags being eaten by the machines and getting mis-routed and lost don't bode well for such a system. But there's nothing inherent in the project's concept that makes it necessarily impossible to implement.)
Real Actual Scientific Studies(TM) have shown that greater income does not mean greater happiness.
And where, exactly, *did* I say that? My post's singular point was that people who chase their passions, more often than not, will wind up starving. There are always exceptions to any rule, but for this particular question -- that of wondering if "passion = money" -- that is the rule. And I can speak as witness to some anecdotal examples of this rule...
Basically, once you get above the poverty line, how you spend your time plays a much greater role in your happiness than how you spend your money. i.e. You really can't buy happiness.
Perhaps not (though if I thought it were worthwhile, I'd argue this point too), but in Nevada and Amsterdam, you can certainly rent it for a few hours!:P
Strangely enough, some people have become incredibly wealthy doing this. A lot more have become ecstatically happy.
And a lot more go broke, trying to get that music gig off the ground they never had the talent, connections, or money for to begin with. Or trying to get a job with their favorite ideological think-tank or magazine. Or trying to write open-source software and profit from it. And so on.
Many of them have great passion, but few have the passion + intelligence + hard work + time + startup funding (and by that, I mean the ability to pay for oneself while working towards that goal) to make it.
And it's awfully hard to be happy when you can't afford healthcare, a relatively-recent car, or even decent food (in the worse cases)... I don't think I've ever met a happy homeless man in Chicago.
So what do you say to the History major, whose only job prospects, for the most part, are as either a museum guide or a History teacher?
Or the Art History student, whose job prospects... are near zero?
Same goes for the English major, the Music major, and so forth. All the "bullshit" majors us applied math/science/engineering majors made fun of in college because, quite frankly, they aren't worth much in the job market. And they still aren't.
"But they're passionate about those degrees!" you might exclaim. Yeah, so what? Where's the money to follow those passions?
The truth is the cold, hard economic reality that only a few small percentage of the population will make fat cash off of their passions; the rest do not produce goods/services which are deemed by society ("the market") to be worth enough to make those producers rich. That, and the market is flooded with the produce of people filled with such passion. How many unemployed music or art majors are there again?
I think he believes he needed to lead with that to build the credibility to do Social Security reform.
Perhaps. But then we're just trading one monstrous socialist plan for another. And considering Medicare's growth rate in spending over the next several decades, Bush has only added fuel to a flaming spending phenomenon that will eventually outpace the spending of SS.
From the standpoint of spending growth, we would be better off keeping SS and abolishing Medicare...
As for the initial Social Security reform being highly unoptimized, it is just like code. Get a prototype up then refine it. The big fight is about the IDEA not the implementation.
I'll buy that. It's certainly a more moderate form of the system libertarians have favored for the last 30 years.
But it's also more limited in the degree of freedom that investors have. Permitting people to invest in only a small number of government-approved funds effectively amounts to a a government handout to mutual fund firms. That makes the very notion of private investment look like nothing more than a case of tightening government-business cooperation, at the expense of individuals' freedoms. That will make the idea of private investment of retirement funds look *VERY* bad.
It's bad enough that the average number of investment opportunities one has in their 401k is 7 (or around 30, if like me, you work at a large financial firm). Let's not impose such limits on a portion of retirement that affects everybody...
(In truth, SS reform is basically dead in the water. At this point, even the R's in Congress aren't keen on the idea because their constituency is worried that they'll be "thrown to the wolves". I personally don't expect to see any changes in SS; at least, nothing worth speaking of (I could possibly see a retirement-age increase, which if we are to keep SS at all is exactly what needs to happen, but that's about all I think can realistically be expected.)...)
I call bullshit here and request you go read some history. Gunboat diplomancy was a staple of the great classically liberal powers, including the US of A. The classical 17th - 19th century liberals were NOT Randite libertarians; They believed unreservedly in nation states and War as the ultimate diplomacy.
You are quite right that the classical liberals of old were not Randian libertarians. They were more reasonable and sane than Rand ever was, IMO.
But the idea that the classical liberals believed that going around killing people unprovoked was the best way to ensure national stability is nonsense. Read some John Locke (a classical liberal if ever there were one):
Men living together according to reason, without a common superior on earth, with authority to judge between them, is properly the state of nature. But force, or a declared design of force, upon the person of another, where there is no common superior on earth to appeal to for relief, is the state of war: and it is the want of such an appeal gives a man the right of war even against an aggressor, tho' he be in society and a fellow subject. Thus a thief, whom I cannot harm, but by appeal to the law, for having stolen all that I am worth, I may kill, when he sets on me to rob me but of my horse or coat; because the law, which was made for my preservation, where it cannot interpose to secure my life from present force, which, if lost, is capable of no reparation, permits me my own defence, and the right of war, a liberty to kill the aggressor, because the aggressor allows not time to appeal to our common judge, nor the decision of the law, for remedy in a case where the mischief may be irreparable.
And The Gulf War was still in a state of truce, no final peace had been signed. Blither all you want about "Iraq had no WMD, Bush Lied, Kids Died."
It's this kind of technological advancement that suddenly seems to turn slashdot into anti-technology luddites.
Just because a particular technology is invented, does that mean it should be used?
Should the atom bomb really have been dropped on Japanese civilians after all?
Technology is neither good nor bad; it just *is*. The problem lies in how we use it. And there, it is a far more problematic question:
* Guns can justifiably be used to save people from dangerous animals and dangerous people. They can also be used to unjustifiably murder people.
* Cars can be used to transport people from one place to another. They can also be used to willfully commit manslaughter, deliver suicide bombs, and so forth.
* Computers can be used to perform all kinds of calculations, process more information in 1 second than an army of people could in a year, and so on. Improperly secured (due to human incompetence), they can also be used to shut down key components of our modern infrastructural institutions (electricity, etc.), to publish words damaging to somebody which may not be true, and so on.
And on and on in endless combination. Blind faith in technology -- like yours -- is an idiotic position to take.
But what would people who write and use software for a living (like the majority of Slashdotters) know about technology anyway?...
Thompson, now a director of Applied Digital Solutions, the company that makes the chips, intends to publish the proposal in the next 50 days, by which time he plans to have had a VeriChip inserted in his arm.
No, it's not a proposal -- YET. But it will be soon.
- Even in some kind of alternate universe where compulsory, mandatory implants for all residents of the United States were a rider on ANY bill, no matter WHAT the bill, it would NEVER pass.
100 years ago, people said the same thing about a national ID.
Those of us in our 20s will be required by the U.S. federal government to be chipped by the time we are dead. Mark my words.
Even for those people who think (wildly erroneously, I might add) that the US is a totalitarian police state and one step away from 1984 (or already there).
Compared to other nations, we are not a totalitarian police state, true. But we are without a doubt traveling along a trendline in that direction.
Slashdot Mirror
CEO: "We're tech company that everybody loves, with a stock price 6 times higher than is rational, and so now we have cash hanging out our collective asses. What can we do to make ourselves stand out and look cool?"
:P )
Tech: "Offer something free to the public."
CEO: "Great idea!"
Actually, even then stuff was sponsored by advertising revenues. Remember all those "get paid to surf the web" programs, like AllAdvantage.com? (and the apps that would pretend to surf for you while you were away from your PC?
Google can't just give away a broadband service and expect to remain profitable, unless they limit it such that it costs them less than they are making off other revenues, e.g. AdSense and their corporate-aimed search appliance...
Oh, I agree that current EULAs are about as Nazi-ish as a EULA can be.
I just wish RMS and the community that likes the GPL so much would not wish to emulate commercial EULA Nazism...
More social control from a supposedly "free as in freedom" license, I see.
*dons flame-retardant suit*
Apparently you can't have a free people and get them to do what is "good for the community" without forcing them to do so. [1]
Remember, freedom is slavery kids...
[1] Not that this comes as a surprise to anybody who has studied socialism and/or communism. It's the same problem of "freedom and community good vs. social control to enforce the goals of the community" all over again, but rather than occurring in international politics, it is occurring in the virtual politics of end-user license agreements.
(As long as I'm at it: go BSDL!)
So go ahead and make *your* information worthless. Just send me your name, address, and SSN and I'll be happy to help!
Eh, I'd argue that we don't hear about it so often because nobody really investigates the federal govn't... Unlike the states, which are investigated by the feds, nobody investigates the feds because nobody has the authority to do so. Some projects and even entire agencies have little, if any Congressional oversight.
Read up on the current Mayor Daley of Chicago sometime. He's as corrupt and cronyist as people get, and the FBI's current probe digs ever-deeper into the rabbit hole, more bugs keep running out away from the drill...
At last count, IIRC, some 20 out of 28 people under Daley had plead guilty to some form of corruption and/or cronyism. The remaining 8 are optimists, I suppose (or well-connected)...
I hope the /. editors checked, re-checked, then checked again to make sure that that is Gates' quote on CNET, b/c otherwise, a quote like that is a libel suit waiting to happen...
But at least they're honest in admitting the representation of the loss of freedom that they believe is required.
Here in the U.S., we would call rights-deprivatation "increasing liberty" or something ridiculous and pseudo-"patriotic" like that...
No, I don't...
The situation is bound by international sovereignty. The laws of Ethiopia, Niger, Australia, Brazil, etc. do not apply to us, do they? No they do not. Nor do the laws of the UK, Germany, Canada, Japan, or anywhere else. Thankfully, the laws of North Korea and China do not apply here (otherwise, our freedom of speech would be destroyed, among many other freedoms!).
In the U.S., if somebody took a Britney Spears album and remixed some songs without permission, they might be liable for infringing copyright law.
But if the same person lived in Sweden and did the same thing -- or heck, if they outright *pirate* the music -- the U.S. government can't do a damn thing about it even if it *is* a crime, because our laws do not apply to Sweden. The RIAA's lawyers could certainly send the Swedish person a nastygram, but as long as the Swede does not enter the U.S., they have no reason to be concerned.
A real-life example: people who flee to live in Switzerland on a variety of charges (murder, torture, etc.) are not extradited, because Swiss law doesn't do that. People have fled the U.S. on murder charges to live with relatives in Switzerland and there isn't a damn thing the murderer's victims in the U.S. can do about the murderer, criminally or civilly.
So again, I ask the question: WTF can the Brits do if a non-U.K. person remixes their music?
Ultimately, it is a matter of contract law. But in order for the contract to be enforceable, the laws of the nation in which the contract is agreed-to must support its enforcement...
Uh, so what? If a remixer in the U.S. takes BBC content and uses it, WTF can the U.K. do? Their laws don't apply here any more than our laws apply to them, so I guess the proper phrasing would go something like "those BBC wankers can bloody well bugger off!"
That isn't to say the U.S. wouldn't extradite somebody to the U.K. for prosecution, but assuming it's some other country from which the offender won't be extradited, I don't see how the BBC thinks it can seriously enforce this license. But then, IANAL, and I'm not familiar with WIPO's powers (if they have any worth speaking of to begin with)...
Despite being only 24, I'm old enough to remember the days of NES carts priced at $60 each. Today, some games on DVD still cost $60 (when very popular and just-released).
What's changed in those 15 years or so? Our wages/salaries: in nominal terms (not adjusted for inflation), these have risen on average.
But game prices have not.
So, the *real* (inflation-adjusted) price of buying a game has actually decreased since the old days. That is, what might've been a $30,000 salary 15 years ago is, after adjusting for inflation, equivalent to (let's say; this isn't based on actual inflation, this is only an example) $60,000.
Since your salary has doubled in pure numerical value, but game prices have remained constant, you (obviously) can afford 2 new $60 games today as easily as you could afford only 1 game 15 years ago -- even though today's games are *VASTLY* more complex, in every feature category imaginable...
What, exactly, is so "sad" about this state of affairs?
Would you prefer that people work in factories? Would you prefer that the majority of people work in a dirty, possibly non-air-conditioned building where repetitive-motion injuries are common due to the performance of the same motions -- day-in, day-out, for years or even decades?
Is that really a "better" world? Surely you jest.
Billions of people around the world would *gladly* work in a non-rugged service job because they are no longer physically worked like animals so much as mentally worked as only humans are capable.
I suspect you are taking the "sad" service economy we live in for granted...
Quiet you! We don't like being told of our logical fallacies and Econ101-level mistakes!
Fine. Go to work for a Fortune 500 financial firm, then show up the next day naked (except for a tie tied around your cock), wearing a red-dyed mohawk, 30 iron earrings and nipple rings, and reading pr0n.
I guarantee they will sic security on you and have you escorted promptly to the edge of their property, if not hauled away in a police car.
Your clothes, your attitude, and other such bullshit *do* matter, and only a goddamn retard who has no job and has never been out in the sunlight of the real world could possibly think otherwise. If you are lucky, you will find a place to work that lets you wear jeans, a T-shirt, and sandals to work every day, as they did in the late 1990s. Most places require "business casual" (khakis and a button-up shirt, possibly a tie), and depending on the job function, possibly "professional" (suit + tie).
Then again, this is Slashdot, where the clueless post louder and more often than the clueful...
'sokay, it's just a flesh wound...
So in essence, we are dealing with 2 forms of indentured servitude:
1) Employee continues to retain secrets for his former employer, at no continued compensation to the employee for doing so. This is the present system.
2) Employer continues to pay the employee to keep secrets, at no continued work (besides keeping secrets) performed for the employer. This is the system the grandparent suggests.
#1 is a clear case of zero pay for continued work. #2 is a clear case of slight work (maintaining the discipline not to speak certain issues) for full pay.
Thus, the ratio of pay/work is 0 in #1, but non-zero in #2, for non-zero values of pay. #2 involves an exchange of pay for work; #1 does not.
Hence, then, #2 -- for all its abundant flaws (whose size depend on the level of pay and the value to other companies of the secrets retained) -- is at least a marginally-fairer system than #1.
I have little sympathy for the idea that anybody or anything -- whether a person or a legal fiction we call a "corporation" -- should be permitted to restrict one's freedom of speech, unless the person willfully agrees to the restriction and is compensated for it *not* prior to the period over which the secret is held after leaving the "official" work, but during that period *after* termination.
It should be a smaller value than the pay the employee received regularly while employed, because no other work is being performed in addition to this secret-keeping (as was the case while employed), but it should likewise be a non-zero value.
However, if the pay for keeping those secrets is intended to be factored into the period during which actual work is performed, and not *after* termination (as I just described), then there is another solution:
Like our income taxes (Social Security, Medicare, etc.), IMO the dollar amount of our specific job functions ought to be broken-down and specified individually, line-by-line on the employment contract. That way, employees know the value of the specific jobs they are performing for their company. What, exactly, such a broad spectrum of listed factors should be, is another question entirely, e.g. do we specify the value of a sysadmin's work spent checking his pager at home for failing servers? Do we specify the value of an employee's work spent checking his email inbox?, etc.. This is a deliberately-broad improvement to our contracts which would require more discussion.
One of the lines I would suggest, if the company desires to retain trade secrets, should be the rate at which the employee will be paid while he is actually working for the job of keeping secrets after his actual work is complete. That is, the value of the now-former employee's ability to keep his mouth shut and not use the trade secrets of his prior employer for a specified amount of time, and/or for as long as the employer wants those secrets kept (and thus is willing to pay for that continued pseudo-employment).
That way, we have concrete proof that such a factor is truly being included in an employer's salary, rather than the present state, in which we guess at it. Such guessing can and does lead to arguments from the left that such pay is not included in the regular salary (which may or may not be true), and claims from the right and from libertarians that it is included (which may or may not be true), when the truth is, nobody really knows for certain *what* is factored into an employee's salary, in hard dollar amounts, whether that is the case. And certainly if anybody is doing it presently, it would depend heavily on just exactly *which* business we are talking about.
The financial dept. of some companies might have a term in their "employee salary equation" that includes "value of trade secrets protection after termination" as a factor, but frankly, I greatly doubt that is the truth in all but the largest, most IP-heavy firms (MSFT, various financial firms, etc.), and even then, I wouldn't be surprised if that is not explicitly a factor.
Pity too, because it should be.
But... but... I thought mainframes rocked our socks and needed more fresh blood to replace the greybeards? What's this with a mainframe not doing the job sufficiently???
(Disclaimer: to be fair, this is a strawman argument. I work in a heavily mainframe-dependent company and industry, and I have no doubt that the mainframe *could* have been programmed properly to handle the load. The real problem in this case were ones of mechanical engineering and bad design/system engineering... Things like bags being eaten by the machines and getting mis-routed and lost don't bode well for such a system. But there's nothing inherent in the project's concept that makes it necessarily impossible to implement.)
"The End of Management?"
"Market Experiments Inside Companies"
Yahoo's prediction market
Prediction market
You too can bet in prediction markets!
Darn those neoliberal economists for bringing prosperity to undeveloped and semi-developed nations! Darn them all to hell!
</sarcasm>
And where, exactly, *did* I say that? My post's singular point was that people who chase their passions, more often than not, will wind up starving. There are always exceptions to any rule, but for this particular question -- that of wondering if "passion = money" -- that is the rule. And I can speak as witness to some anecdotal examples of this rule...
Nevertheless, one of those "Real Actual Scientific Studies" suggests that you're wrong, at least to a certain degree. Arguably not totally wrong, but somewhat off.
Perhaps not (though if I thought it were worthwhile, I'd argue this point too), but in Nevada and Amsterdam, you can certainly rent it for a few hours!
And a lot more go broke, trying to get that music gig off the ground they never had the talent, connections, or money for to begin with. Or trying to get a job with their favorite ideological think-tank or magazine. Or trying to write open-source software and profit from it. And so on.
Many of them have great passion, but few have the passion + intelligence + hard work + time + startup funding (and by that, I mean the ability to pay for oneself while working towards that goal) to make it.
And it's awfully hard to be happy when you can't afford healthcare, a relatively-recent car, or even decent food (in the worse cases)... I don't think I've ever met a happy homeless man in Chicago.
And this differs from previous (and some would claim "greater") generations how, exactly?
So what do you say to the History major, whose only job prospects, for the most part, are as either a museum guide or a History teacher?
Or the Art History student, whose job prospects... are near zero?
Same goes for the English major, the Music major, and so forth. All the "bullshit" majors us applied math/science/engineering majors made fun of in college because, quite frankly, they aren't worth much in the job market. And they still aren't.
"But they're passionate about those degrees!" you might exclaim. Yeah, so what? Where's the money to follow those passions?
The truth is the cold, hard economic reality that only a few small percentage of the population will make fat cash off of their passions; the rest do not produce goods/services which are deemed by society ("the market") to be worth enough to make those producers rich. That, and the market is flooded with the produce of people filled with such passion. How many unemployed music or art majors are there again?
Perhaps. But then we're just trading one monstrous socialist plan for another. And considering Medicare's growth rate in spending over the next several decades, Bush has only added fuel to a flaming spending phenomenon that will eventually outpace the spending of SS.
From the standpoint of spending growth, we would be better off keeping SS and abolishing Medicare...
I'll buy that. It's certainly a more moderate form of the system libertarians have favored for the last 30 years.
But it's also more limited in the degree of freedom that investors have. Permitting people to invest in only a small number of government-approved funds effectively amounts to a a government handout to mutual fund firms. That makes the very notion of private investment look like nothing more than a case of tightening government-business cooperation, at the expense of individuals' freedoms. That will make the idea of private investment of retirement funds look *VERY* bad.
It's bad enough that the average number of investment opportunities one has in their 401k is 7 (or around 30, if like me, you work at a large financial firm). Let's not impose such limits on a portion of retirement that affects everybody...
(In truth, SS reform is basically dead in the water. At this point, even the R's in Congress aren't keen on the idea because their constituency is worried that they'll be "thrown to the wolves". I personally don't expect to see any changes in SS; at least, nothing worth speaking of (I could possibly see a retirement-age increase, which if we are to keep SS at all is exactly what needs to happen, but that's about all I think can realistically be expected.)...)
You are quite right that the classical liberals of old were not Randian libertarians. They were more reasonable and sane than Rand ever was, IMO.
But the idea that the classical liberals believed that going around killing people unprovoked was the best way to ensure national stability is nonsense. Read some John Locke (a classical liberal if ever there were one):
Nevermind that
Just because a particular technology is invented, does that mean it should be used?
Should the atom bomb really have been dropped on Japanese civilians after all?
Technology is neither good nor bad; it just *is*. The problem lies in how we use it. And there, it is a far more problematic question:
* Guns can justifiably be used to save people from dangerous animals and dangerous people. They can also be used to unjustifiably murder people.
* Cars can be used to transport people from one place to another. They can also be used to willfully commit manslaughter, deliver suicide bombs, and so forth.
* Computers can be used to perform all kinds of calculations, process more information in 1 second than an army of people could in a year, and so on. Improperly secured (due to human incompetence), they can also be used to shut down key components of our modern infrastructural institutions (electricity, etc.), to publish words damaging to somebody which may not be true, and so on.
And on and on in endless combination. Blind faith in technology -- like yours -- is an idiotic position to take.
But what would people who write and use software for a living (like the majority of Slashdotters) know about technology anyway?...
From TFA:
No, it's not a proposal -- YET. But it will be soon.
100 years ago, people said the same thing about a national ID.
Now we have Social Security Numbers. And national ID cards are almost here., having been approved by the REAL ID Act of 2005
Those of us in our 20s will be required by the U.S. federal government to be chipped by the time we are dead. Mark my words.
Compared to other nations, we are not a totalitarian police state, true. But we are without a doubt traveling along a trendline in that direction.