15 years ago the "web" was tiny. A web locked-down by Microsoft in 1994 would have been unlocked promptly by Sun and IBM. There other browsers besides Netscape and huge empty markets to grow into. Maybe Sun would have released a cheap or gratis version of Solaris for x86, with HotJava bundled in, only to spite Microsoft:) and Linux would have remained an enthusiasts's project.
It's very difficult to lock a market without government support.
That is true: the biggest "owners" are the governments and their subsidiaries.
The article does not say (or I missed it) how much of the whole economy is owned by the 147 companies.
Besides, anybody who worked with a team knows how difficult it is to make people do what you want. It is very easy to humiliate them or make them wear blue while at work, but very difficult to make people execute your commands as you would execute them. Anybody imagining that the 147 companies and the corporations they control can mobilize 100% of their resources and work towards a common goal needs to get out more: in all large companies the departments spend more time undermining each other than working to get market share from the competition, and you need to get somebody both smart and charismatic (such as Steve Jobs:) ) to make them work together, and those both smart and charismatic are fortunately either hard to find or work in Engineering and can't be bothered to deal with the paperwork.
Saying that 147 companies control most of the world is the same as saying that 147 ant colonies can march in step.
Relax, it's just Slashdot slowly composting into a clone of TED. Let them eat cake, indeed.
It's not about "poor peasants", but about urban slums, who would not be able to grow food anyway for lack of space to plant the crops on.
From the fine article:
Once used, the bag can be knotted and buried, and a layer of urea crystals breaks down the waste into fertilizer, killing off disease-producing pathogens found in feces.
Urea would do wonders for the taste of the ground water, and the beautiful bags would make for spectacular "helicopter toilets" (term used in the very fine article).
But Therese Dooley, senior adviser on sanitation and hygiene for Unicef, said that inculcating sanitation habits was no easy task.
How about using some of the money spent on making sure poor stupid people don't do drugs, have sex before marriage or cross borders without permission, and build sewers ?
Reading this kind of neo-Victorian crap on Slashdot does make me feel old... in the days of yore there were flame wars about filesystems, *BSD vs. Linux or Perl vs. Python, while the poor peasants were perfectly able to compost their own feces without help from sanitation advocacy groups. Now the poor peasants are in need of shit bags, and this is news for nerds, stuff that really matters.
The web is nearly twenty years old, the internet as we know it thirty, Unix forty. How long does it have to be, exactly, before you realize that there are plenty of people out there who are experts (or reasonable facsimiles thereof) in its practical operation?
Experts in what ? The fundamentals maybe did not change much... maybe... but the actual software and hardware that's used does not look much like whatever was used on the "internet" thirty years ago... Medical practice was a controlled occupation even when blood-letting was considered high-tech, but at that time even to be a lumberjack or to serve drinks in a public house one had to pass exams and pay fees.
No, they will install monitoring software that authenticates you to the ISP when you connect to the network, sends reports to a central server and answers to queries from that central server. If you don't have proper protection software installed, you get cut off from all the internet except a few sites where you can acquire basic protection software to use in emergencies.
Of course, protection software will have to be tested and approved by an organization similar with the FDA: the Computers and Internet Administration. Testing would take a few month at first, but soon testing will take years, cost billions, and will not guarantee protection against all malware, so you will keep paying the Internet Protection Tax, but also you'll have optional and costly Internet Insurance Fees that will allow you install protection software against specific types of internet worms, computer viruses and firmware bacteria (new type of malware residing in firmware ROMs, which got there during manufacturing and which could not be removed without bricking the component involved: protection software targeting "computer bacteria" would only prevent them from infecting other computers or interfering with normal computer usage). Computer owner will be required to contract such insurance and install the software before being allowed to connect to networks other than those belonging to their "home" ISP or before being allowed to use phones.
Operating systems will have to get tested and approved by the Computers and Internet Administration, too.
Nice fine article... except they did not check their own sources... "It found that bear populations are indeed declining where the Arctic is warming.", while their source attributes the decline to hunting, and even uses "Potential maximum annual removals" that are almost double than "Historical annual removals (5 yr mean)" to predict population declines...
I stopped reading at that point... Newsweek editors must think their subscribers are morons if they publish something like that... good thing I am not a subscriber....
The set of restrictions in your country, and the set of restrictions in the country you want to move to, that makes two. If you care about labor mobility, that's an issue.
So, having to comply with two different sets of restrictions does not qualify as an additional burden ?
Personally, I could not care less about this, since I perform my services over the internet and I think (could be wrong, though) I am in the top 50% in my chosen occupation, so I won't starve any time soon, but the rest of the world has left the 1880s, you know, and Europe ain't no more the absolute pinnacle of innovation, knowledge and military might. We have to compete with the rest of the world from a position that does not give us the same advantage as it did 120 years ago, and all these restrictions and burdens and "for the sake of children" crap is sapping Europe's ability to compete.
You want to say that the four freedoms really exist ? No problem from me... I would even enjoy a song about that. The problem is Europe is marred by burdens to labor mobility and that there is no common services market, just a lot of national markets that are easier to enter than it was 30 years ago...
I'll go away from this debate now... call me back when EU will have yearly economic growth above 2%.
Yeah, the four freedoms are fine, except when you're a Polish carpet cleaner, who, you know, is an "authorized person", which is a "one man company".
There is no freedom of "service"... there was a debate about two years ago if to let companies provide services (as opposed to selling goods), but the stumbling block was the difference in taxes.
The freedom of establishment and the freedom to provide services are both central EU principles governing the single market for services. These principles entitle EU entrepreneurs to establish a business in the country where the services will be offered or to supply services across borders, to other EU countries, without setting up an establishment there - e.g. by phone, via the internet or direct marketing.
Which means if you want to provide services, either you set up a new company in the country you want to sell services to, or do it... over the internet. A bit limiting, I suppose.
Shall we start a debate about "freedom" in the agriculture business:D ?
As the freedom of "labor", that works for manual labor, otherwise you have to get certified in the country you move to. Until, I think, last year, Germany did not even recognize academic titles that were not issued by German universities... there was an American who got busted for recommending himself as PhD (he got off easy in the end):P. These rules get relaxed or tightened according to the perceived needs for labor. I think in UK a nurse would get accepted quite fast, while a MD from anywhere in EU would have to retake most of his exams. A MD, a lawyer, architect, school teacher (even for Algebra) would find it very hard to get into the "protected guilds" anywhere in Europe (I am not talking about EU15, EU25, EU27 or any other EU??). If you're from US, imagine having to go again through the last two years of medical school if you want to move from Arizona to Nevada.
Though, I have to admit, IT is safe from hassle. The demand for qualified labor willing to abandon home and dog and move (as often as needed) where there is need is so great that if you got the skills to pass the tests the company hiring you devised, you can be a dog, they would not care, and there are still no guilds to ask you jump through the hoops.
The situation is evolving towards freedom of labor etc., but it's not there yet: the web of entitlements, privileges and protection of... whatever need to be protected for "the sake of children", is so great I am afraid it might come crashing down on our heads before we get the four freedoms.
Those parents were forced to hire a certified teacher not for the sake of the children, but for the sake of the teacher.
so, if you have a one-man... garden cleaning company in France, can you go get contracts in Germany without any hassle and any paperwork ? Doubt that...
did Windows get virtual desktops ?... I mean, useful virtual desktops, so you can switch between them, each with its own task bar, you can send apps from one virtual desktop to another, you can see from a "window selector" which apps are running in the current desktop and the others etc....
EU citizens don't have complete freedom of movement even within EU. Of course, they can go visit anywhere they want, but one needs a residency permit/green card/labor permit if one wants to get a job. There are exceptions from this rule, but not that many.
how about the spammers using fragments from Gutenberg books ? Or fragments from blog posts ?... What is spam, after all ? I am trying hard to send David Horowitz the the spam bin, but then the guy manages to get out of it after a while... I have tried unsubscribing, tried "spam"-ing him, even tried to beg him to let my mailbox live peacefully... for me it's spam, for him it is enlightening the dumb masses and the work of his life...
t's entirely reasonable that Universal try to defend their copyright
You're mixing patent law with copyright law. You don't _have to defend_ your copyright unless somebody else claims it's his. You have it no matter what, until it expires. That was a crap lawsuit aimed at making an example out of an "infringer" and scaring the bejesus out housewifes with too much time on their hand who might have uploaded videos to Youtube.
Slashdot Mirror
15 years ago the "web" was tiny. A web locked-down by Microsoft in 1994 would have been unlocked promptly by Sun and IBM. There other browsers besides Netscape and huge empty markets to grow into. Maybe Sun would have released a cheap or gratis version of Solaris for x86, with HotJava bundled in, only to spite Microsoft :) and Linux would have remained an enthusiasts's project.
It's very difficult to lock a market without government support.
The chairs used in cars should and most probably are ...
so, philosophy no longer studied for a science diploma ?
where I live the government owns minority shares in almost all the large companies
where you live EADS or BAE might ring a bell :)
That is true: the biggest "owners" are the governments and their subsidiaries.
The article does not say (or I missed it) how much of the whole economy is owned by the 147 companies.
Besides, anybody who worked with a team knows how difficult it is to make people do what you want. It is very easy to humiliate them or make them wear blue while at work, but very difficult to make people execute your commands as you would execute them. Anybody imagining that the 147 companies and the corporations they control can mobilize 100% of their resources and work towards a common goal needs to get out more: in all large companies the departments spend more time undermining each other than working to get market share from the competition, and you need to get somebody both smart and charismatic (such as Steve Jobs :) ) to make them work together, and those both smart and charismatic are fortunately either hard to find or work in Engineering and can't be bothered to deal with the paperwork.
Saying that 147 companies control most of the world is the same as saying that 147 ant colonies can march in step.
Relax, it's just Slashdot slowly composting into a clone of TED. Let them eat cake, indeed.
It's not about "poor peasants", but about urban slums, who would not be able to grow food anyway for lack of space to plant the crops on.
From the fine article:
Once used, the bag can be knotted and buried, and a layer of urea crystals breaks down the waste into fertilizer, killing off disease-producing pathogens found in feces.
Urea would do wonders for the taste of the ground water, and the beautiful bags would make for spectacular "helicopter toilets" (term used in the very fine article).
But Therese Dooley, senior adviser on sanitation and hygiene for Unicef, said that inculcating sanitation habits was no easy task.
How about using some of the money spent on making sure poor stupid people don't do drugs, have sex before marriage or cross borders without permission, and build sewers ?
Reading this kind of neo-Victorian crap on Slashdot does make me feel old ... in the days of yore there were flame wars about filesystems, *BSD vs. Linux or Perl vs. Python, while the poor peasants were perfectly able to compost their own feces without help from sanitation advocacy groups. Now the poor peasants are in need of shit bags, and this is news for nerds, stuff that really matters.
The web is nearly twenty years old, the internet as we know it thirty, Unix forty. How long does it have to be, exactly, before you realize that there are plenty of people out there who are experts (or reasonable facsimiles thereof) in its practical operation?
Experts in what ? The fundamentals maybe did not change much ... maybe ... but the actual software and hardware that's used does not look much like whatever was used on the "internet" thirty years ago ... Medical practice was a controlled occupation even when blood-letting was considered high-tech, but at that time even to be a lumberjack or to serve drinks in a public house one had to pass exams and pay fees.
No, they will install monitoring software that authenticates you to the ISP when you connect to the network, sends reports to a central server and answers to queries from that central server. If you don't have proper protection software installed, you get cut off from all the internet except a few sites where you can acquire basic protection software to use in emergencies.
Of course, protection software will have to be tested and approved by an organization similar with the FDA: the Computers and Internet Administration. Testing would take a few month at first, but soon testing will take years, cost billions, and will not guarantee protection against all malware, so you will keep paying the Internet Protection Tax, but also you'll have optional and costly Internet Insurance Fees that will allow you install protection software against specific types of internet worms, computer viruses and firmware bacteria (new type of malware residing in firmware ROMs, which got there during manufacturing and which could not be removed without bricking the component involved: protection software targeting "computer bacteria" would only prevent them from infecting other computers or interfering with normal computer usage). Computer owner will be required to contract such insurance and install the software before being allowed to connect to networks other than those belonging to their "home" ISP or before being allowed to use phones.
Operating systems will have to get tested and approved by the Computers and Internet Administration, too.
Nice fine article ... except they did not check their own sources ... "It found that bear populations are indeed declining where the Arctic is warming.", while their source attributes the decline to hunting, and even uses "Potential maximum annual removals" that are almost double than "Historical annual removals (5 yr mean)" to predict population declines ...
I stopped reading at that point ... Newsweek editors must think their subscribers are morons if they publish something like that ... good thing I am not a subscriber ....
Google has a pile of money, and must do something with it ... next it will buy grocery stores ...
Imagine, scammers being scammed by other scammers ... where the world is going, I ask ? An ethics commission should be investigating this ...
The set of restrictions in your country, and the set of restrictions in the country you want to move to, that makes two. If you care about labor mobility, that's an issue.
So, having to comply with two different sets of restrictions does not qualify as an additional burden ?
Personally, I could not care less about this, since I perform my services over the internet and I think (could be wrong, though) I am in the top 50% in my chosen occupation, so I won't starve any time soon, but the rest of the world has left the 1880s, you know, and Europe ain't no more the absolute pinnacle of innovation, knowledge and military might. We have to compete with the rest of the world from a position that does not give us the same advantage as it did 120 years ago, and all these restrictions and burdens and "for the sake of children" crap is sapping Europe's ability to compete.
You want to say that the four freedoms really exist ? No problem from me ... I would even enjoy a song about that. The problem is Europe is marred by burdens to labor mobility and that there is no common services market, just a lot of national markets that are easier to enter than it was 30 years ago ...
I'll go away from this debate now ... call me back when EU will have yearly economic growth above 2%.
It's not that simple.
Yeah, the four freedoms are fine, except when you're a Polish carpet cleaner, who, you know, is an "authorized person", which is a "one man company".
There is no freedom of "service" ... there was a debate about two years ago if to let companies provide services (as opposed to selling goods), but the stumbling block was the difference in taxes.
check this here: http://ec.europa.eu/youreurope/business/profiting-from-eu-market/providing-services/index_en.htm
The freedom of establishment and the freedom to provide services are both central EU principles governing the single market for services. These principles entitle EU entrepreneurs to establish a business in the country where the services will be offered or to supply services across borders, to other EU countries, without setting up an establishment there - e.g. by phone, via the internet or direct marketing.
Which means if you want to provide services, either you set up a new company in the country you want to sell services to, or do it ... over the internet. A bit limiting, I suppose.
Or check it here (no, it's not wikipedia, which is great for IT, but not so great for law or pol/sci): http://eur-lex.europa.eu/en/treaties/dat/12002E/htm/C_2002325EN.003301.html, articles from 49 on.
Shall we start a debate about "freedom" in the agriculture business :D ?
As the freedom of "labor", that works for manual labor, otherwise you have to get certified in the country you move to. Until, I think, last year, Germany did not even recognize academic titles that were not issued by German universities ... there was an American who got busted for recommending himself as PhD (he got off easy in the end) :P. These rules get relaxed or tightened according to the perceived needs for labor. I think in UK a nurse would get accepted quite fast, while a MD from anywhere in EU would have to retake most of his exams. A MD, a lawyer, architect, school teacher (even for Algebra) would find it very hard to get into the "protected guilds" anywhere in Europe (I am not talking about EU15, EU25, EU27 or any other EU??). If you're from US, imagine having to go again through the last two years of medical school if you want to move from Arizona to Nevada.
Though, I have to admit, IT is safe from hassle. The demand for qualified labor willing to abandon home and dog and move (as often as needed) where there is need is so great that if you got the skills to pass the tests the company hiring you devised, you can be a dog, they would not care, and there are still no guilds to ask you jump through the hoops.
The situation is evolving towards freedom of labor etc., but it's not there yet: the web of entitlements, privileges and protection of ... whatever need to be protected for "the sake of children", is so great I am afraid it might come crashing down on our heads before we get the four freedoms.
Those parents were forced to hire a certified teacher not for the sake of the children, but for the sake of the teacher.
so, if you have a one-man ... garden cleaning company in France, can you go get contracts in Germany without any hassle and any paperwork ? Doubt that ...
maybe he does understand the issue, but forgot to mention "use windows and install cygwin".
did Windows get virtual desktops ? ... I mean, useful virtual desktops, so you can switch between them, each with its own task bar, you can send apps from one virtual desktop to another, you can see from a "window selector" which apps are running in the current desktop and the others etc. ...
Well, Spain and Italy are the exceptions. If you wanted to move to Germany, the story would have been different.
EU citizens don't have complete freedom of movement even within EU. Of course, they can go visit anywhere they want, but one needs a residency permit/green card/labor permit if one wants to get a job. There are exceptions from this rule, but not that many.
hmm ... I remember looking over job offers in NY a few years ago, and on that particular the smaller salary posted for a PHP guy was 65k ...
this is already being done ... just look into your google spam folder ...
how about the spammers using fragments from Gutenberg books ? Or fragments from blog posts ? ... What is spam, after all ? I am trying hard to send David Horowitz the the spam bin, but then the guy manages to get out of it after a while ... I have tried unsubscribing, tried "spam"-ing him, even tried to beg him to let my mailbox live peacefully ... for me it's spam, for him it is enlightening the dumb masses and the work of his life ...
you're right about that ...
t's entirely reasonable that Universal try to defend their copyright
You're mixing patent law with copyright law. You don't _have to defend_ your copyright unless somebody else claims it's his. You have it no matter what, until it expires. That was a crap lawsuit aimed at making an example out of an "infringer" and scaring the bejesus out housewifes with too much time on their hand who might have uploaded videos to Youtube.
outlaw older cars like the GP owns
"cash for clunkers"