Why not? Does the United States have unreasonable working conditions because we work more hours per day than our European counterparts? Do we have terrible standards of living because we get fewer days off than those in the EU? Try working on a rice paddy in the jungles of Vietnam sometime and realize that your comfy 8 hour days are ridiculous and will get you no work done and starving. Try working on a potato ranch in Idaho sometime and realize it's not a whole lot different. Go to a nail salon owned and operated by asians (it'll most likely be Vietnamese) and ask them how much they work. Many of them will tell you 12+ hours a day, 6+ days a week, in an area where the smell alone us nauseating, and they are hunched over all day long working on the toenails of people too fat and lazy to bend over and do it themselves because they only work 8 hours a day then go home and sit on their fat rears, read sensationalist crap like this and get all elite about their living standards.
Is there a difference between how much we work and how much the Chinese work? Yes, but there is also a difference in work ethic as well. If Apple were to just give them all $20,000 a year then they would be royally screwing up their economy and fast. If they pull out completely they leave a lot of people out of work, dropping the demand of labor while increasing the supply, and allowing the wages to drop. But if they continue like this eventually the laborers will get more money, and higher standards of living, and do so at a pace that doesn't destroy them. Amazingly, the US did it, Europe did it, South Korea did it, Hong Kong did it, Russia is doing it, and so are dozens of other countries. Even India is starting to get rich enough that they are outsourcing. There will always be a cheaper place to get laborers, but how cheap will always rise.
Because they aren't slaves. Slaves have no choice. Slaves are sold. Slaves are somtimes beaten. These people have choice. The people are not sold. These people are not beaten.
Does it mean that the work of the people on the other side of the world is valued less?
Where did you come up with this? They don't live in your area. Their costs are not the same as yours. If they're being paid $50/month and half of that pays for food and rent then their area cannot be that costly. I live in the states and half of my income goes toward rent alone, not including food and other bills. Can I now turn your question around and say, "Does it mean that the work of the people on this side of the world is valued less than those making iPods in China?" Ridiculous.
Apple should pay the company which makes Apple's product enough money and enforce that any company they do business with pays their employees a living wage.
And do tell, what is a living wage in their region? Just because you need $50,000/year + to live in your area, doesn't mean that $50/month is not enough in their area. Does the article state what conditions are like there? Do they even try? No, it is sensationalist.
And before we go off and say it is all wrong, let's take a moment to consider that they need to slowly build up to a state of higher living conditions. If you suddenly threw in a bunch of money into their economy, you would royally screw it up with the end result being worse than now.
Very true. I am in college right now and the basic necessitites of life (food, rent, and enough clothes to keep me covered) are more than half of my income.
I was in Vietnam a year ago and found I could have taken one month of my earnings here and lived for nicely for quite a while there. A very filling nutritious meal at a restaurant was only the equivalant of $0.20. My wife and I bought a Viet drink for 17 people and still spent less than what one would cost us here in the states. I forgot to bring a pair of sandals to shower in so I just bought some for ~$0.50. I also purchased two shirts, a pair of pants and a pair of shorts for $1.45. I never asked how much homes cost exactly but my wifes parents sent her aunt $1000 and she used it to nearly triple the size of her home.
I realize that was out in the jungles of Vietnam, but I can't imagine China is much different. People throw out conditions and numbers like they mean anything on their own. There does come a point where context is irrelavant, such as when employees are beaten, or used as sex slaves, but that's not the case here and context means a lot.
If the cost of living is anything like what I saw in Vietnam, $50/month with half going to housing and food sounds just fine. Also 15 hours/day doesn't sound bad. My wife's family in Vietnam do that easily and they are some of the happiest people I know. Heck, my wife's mom does that here in the states and she's a very happy lady.
I for one love pointers. That is, I want to decide whether I do call by value/call by reference. I dislike Java's Call by value-result. If Java gave me the ability to play with memory and pointers, I'd still prefer c/c++ though.
We truly feel sorry for you then. Somebody ought to work on that. I hated it too when I was using Firefox 1.07 and then Firefox 1.5 came out and suddenly version 1.07 just died on me. There's got to be a better way to write software so that when new versions come out the old versions just don't give up the ghost. Truly a terrible dilemma.
So true. You know that, I know that, the problem is the legislators don't know that... and that is the immediate root of the problem.
The real immediate root of the problem is not that the legislators don't know that, because they do know that. They know a great deal in fact. The real problem is they don't care. Take a look at the last statement in the summary in that link. This will be in the news that the legislators saved the children and they will get more votes from the idiots. What won't be put in the news is the fact that later the ruling was overturned, that the tax money was wasted, that the courts were tied up with this garbage, that the legislators willfully tried to subvert the US Constitution, and that all along, they did it knowingly. That is the real problem.
there's little reason for a contributor to be as factually accurate as possible
Absolutely correct. That statement is right on the money. Of course these Wikipedia article writers have no reason to be accurate.
But then, some other writer who may have an interest just might want to be and will correct the wrong ones. And that is where you fail. Look up such controversial things as pornography. You will notice that neither the anti-porn nor the pro-porn people have done a good job of steering those articles into the likes of "The devil will eat your children if you view it" or "Viewing Porn cures cancer" respectively. It's a nice balance.
And when you get into more complicated but much less controversial things, like electrodynamics or something, then odds are against some random schmoe screwing that up without another physicist correcting it.
And then there are such things as the $Fictional_Universe. I've learned a lot about the Warcraft Universe from Wikipedia that would take me forever to learn otherwise. Same with Half-Life, etc.
And don't ever forget to peruse all the external links. Those are great places to learn more. I have found that Wikipedia is the best place to begin my research.
I think you are referring to inbreeding, as incest is a very bad thing. Not that I am giving inbreeding the green light, but they refer to two very different things, and incest is by far the worse.
They do fly to a lot of places, true. But to go from Long Beach to Seattle involves a flight to the east coast. To go from Portland to Seattle involves a flight to the east coast. There are relatively few flights that will get you from a city in the west to another city in the west without having to fly all the way to the east. That's what I think the poster is referring to.
It means the truck has 4 wheels and that all 4 of them are receiving power. Most cars and light trucks are 4x2. As opposed to 2x4 which is a piece of wood measuring 1.5x3.5 inches.
I've never installed Linux for desktop use that I didn't have to spend quite a bit of time making all the hardware work right.
Funny, I re-installed XP only 6 months ago and had to spend hours just getting the OS up and running with updates and drivers and such. Then another several hours putting on applications such as Visual Studio, OpenOffice, Firefox, etc, and I'm not including games. Just over the weekend I installed Fedora Core 5 and after an install that took less time than Windows I spent about 1 hour running the updates and had myself a usable workstation, with Anjuta, OpenOffice, Firefox (with plugins), etc. And no, this isn't new hardware. All my hardware was purchased before Windows XP was released, so the age of the OSs shouldn't be a problem when it comes to drivers.
But maybe you were counting customizing the look and feel. Because most distros don't come with Nerzhul as the destop wallpaper I had to do that, whereas for windows it's just the blank blue for me. So yeah, you have to spend a little time customizing Linux, but at least you can do it, whereas for Windows you get what they decide looks nice to the eyes.
In case anyone is wondering, Nerzhul goes on Linux because I can make everything blend in better with a dark wallpaper, whereas the simple blue on Windows blends in better with the blue-ish theme in XP.
You are so spot on. I wish people (politicians and their ignorant constituents alike) would learn this one simple truth; Laws don't stop crime. Why don't they just outlaw terrorism? Then the terrorists will just stop.
Legislature: Terrorism is now against the law.
Terrorist: Oh, sorry old chap, my chums and I will put a stop forthwith to our outrageousness, then.
It's not going to happen. Everytime we see a new law passed that covers already existing laws I get upset. Like when new bills against copyright infringement get passed. Why? Laws already exist. Same with hate-crime laws. What's the difference if someone is murdered out of hate or...whatever the trash reason would you have to murder someone? It's already against the law.
But this one takes the cake. Just like your analogy of outlawing guns.
Osama: Send the encrypted message to our hidden cell in Britain.
Peon: Yes sir. Just allow me first to fill out this form with the encryption key and... anybody know the address to UK law enforcement?
There really is a big difference in video games than other art forms. Video games are not passive. If you watch a movie and the director says, "We'll have them kill this guy over there," that's someone else, perhaps recreating events, such as Columbine or the Holocaust or Flight 93. But in a game you are saying, "I'm gonna kill that guy over there," and now the act has fallen on you. A movie like Roots may show slave labor and the brutalities that accompany that, but that is different than me playing a game where I beat slaves for fun.
Also, I don't personally know of any books or movies that glorified the Columbine events. They always recount the events. A game is not controlled by the author(s), it is ultimately controlled by the players. A book or movie can even be done from the perspective of the perpetrators, useful for giving insights into their minds. Games have not yet been able to do that, and I suspect the reason is because games are interactive and have too much of the minds of the player to be useful in gaining insight into the characters.
As an example, there are a million and one ideas of what Gordon Freeman is actually like. But he is fictional, and played by people the world over. What he is like is going to depend on what the player wants him to be like. But there is only Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. They are the way they are, and games don't allow us to see that. This game would only allow us to see what we are like in a given situation, a situation where there are presumably no real-life consequences.
In short, movies and books are passive, games are interactive, and thus while both are forms of entertainment, they are vastly different beasts.
Re:The odd number of babycoach wheels was because.
on
Creative Sues Apple
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· Score: 1
Wrong. Sony is selling the PS3 for a loss. They've done that for a while. All three of the big players do it, though Nintendo only does it for maybe a couple of months at launch and at price drops.
But let's pretend that is true. Who would care that the PS3 costs as much to make as a 360? It's what's cheapest to the consumer that matters.
MS is not going to do to consoles what it did to the web browser market. MS got lucky to be the OS provider for all IBM machines. That gave them dominance in the OS market. They then tied all sorts of things to their OS, like IE, which gave IE its dominance. But they can't build the 360 into Windows and sell it bundled with every Dell. Also, Atari used to be the big player, then Nintendo, then Sony. Things change. This is entertainment. Changing your entertainment options is easier than switching 200+ employees from one application to another.
The price might be right considering the cost of the hardware. But that is subtly different than what is being sold, which is a video game console. Most people will buy it for that sole function. Everything else are just added features.
To illustrate, there are two groups of people, those who want a video game system and those who want High-definition products. These two groups have an overlap. Those are the people who will buy the PS3. Those who want a game system now and would rather wait for HD (for lots of valid reasons) will probably want something cheaper, and those who want only HD will not buy something that doesn't look right with the rest of their components, i.e., not the PS3.
By the time developers can get the ad-hoc network to do Gran Turismo 5 multiplayer, Sony will have lost the console fight.
Lastly, I have a > 4 yr old pc that plays Half-Life 2 just fine. So I see you're one of those people who think that buying a gaming PC has to cost you lots of money. Also, while you are happy to think that all the features the PS3 has are worth it for a game console, you fail to realize that PCs have far more features than the PS3 could hope to have.
If it's in the contract then that is what they sell you. No duh. That is what I was saying. If they sell me something and don;t give it, that's bad. If they sell me something and complain I use it, that's still not my fault.
Someone else already said it, but I will repeat for emphasis. If they claim to sell you something in ads, and don't offer that product, then it's false advertising. Yes, not what I paid for as per the contract, but false advertising nonetheless, which is a whole different ball of wax than what is being discussed, though it is probably not offtopic to discuss here (I don't care how many footnotes you put at the end of a word, unlimited means without limit).
Therefore, if, like I said, they sell me a connection that has the ability to use 20% of their trunk for $19.95, and I use said ability, they have no right to complain.
Slashdot Mirror
Reports about hours worked should not.
Why not? Does the United States have unreasonable working conditions because we work more hours per day than our European counterparts? Do we have terrible standards of living because we get fewer days off than those in the EU? Try working on a rice paddy in the jungles of Vietnam sometime and realize that your comfy 8 hour days are ridiculous and will get you no work done and starving. Try working on a potato ranch in Idaho sometime and realize it's not a whole lot different. Go to a nail salon owned and operated by asians (it'll most likely be Vietnamese) and ask them how much they work. Many of them will tell you 12+ hours a day, 6+ days a week, in an area where the smell alone us nauseating, and they are hunched over all day long working on the toenails of people too fat and lazy to bend over and do it themselves because they only work 8 hours a day then go home and sit on their fat rears, read sensationalist crap like this and get all elite about their living standards.
Is there a difference between how much we work and how much the Chinese work? Yes, but there is also a difference in work ethic as well. If Apple were to just give them all $20,000 a year then they would be royally screwing up their economy and fast. If they pull out completely they leave a lot of people out of work, dropping the demand of labor while increasing the supply, and allowing the wages to drop. But if they continue like this eventually the laborers will get more money, and higher standards of living, and do so at a pace that doesn't destroy them. Amazingly, the US did it, Europe did it, South Korea did it, Hong Kong did it, Russia is doing it, and so are dozens of other countries. Even India is starting to get rich enough that they are outsourcing. There will always be a cheaper place to get laborers, but how cheap will always rise.
Because they aren't slaves. Slaves have no choice. Slaves are sold. Slaves are somtimes beaten. These people have choice. The people are not sold. These people are not beaten.
Does it mean that the work of the people on the other side of the world is valued less?
Where did you come up with this? They don't live in your area. Their costs are not the same as yours. If they're being paid $50/month and half of that pays for food and rent then their area cannot be that costly. I live in the states and half of my income goes toward rent alone, not including food and other bills. Can I now turn your question around and say, "Does it mean that the work of the people on this side of the world is valued less than those making iPods in China?" Ridiculous.
Apple should pay the company which makes Apple's product enough money and enforce that any company they do business with pays their employees a living wage.
And do tell, what is a living wage in their region? Just because you need $50,000/year + to live in your area, doesn't mean that $50/month is not enough in their area. Does the article state what conditions are like there? Do they even try? No, it is sensationalist.
And before we go off and say it is all wrong, let's take a moment to consider that they need to slowly build up to a state of higher living conditions. If you suddenly threw in a bunch of money into their economy, you would royally screw it up with the end result being worse than now.
I was in Vietnam a year ago and found I could have taken one month of my earnings here and lived for nicely for quite a while there. A very filling nutritious meal at a restaurant was only the equivalant of $0.20. My wife and I bought a Viet drink for 17 people and still spent less than what one would cost us here in the states. I forgot to bring a pair of sandals to shower in so I just bought some for ~$0.50. I also purchased two shirts, a pair of pants and a pair of shorts for $1.45. I never asked how much homes cost exactly but my wifes parents sent her aunt $1000 and she used it to nearly triple the size of her home.
I realize that was out in the jungles of Vietnam, but I can't imagine China is much different. People throw out conditions and numbers like they mean anything on their own. There does come a point where context is irrelavant, such as when employees are beaten, or used as sex slaves, but that's not the case here and context means a lot.
If the cost of living is anything like what I saw in Vietnam, $50/month with half going to housing and food sounds just fine. Also 15 hours/day doesn't sound bad. My wife's family in Vietnam do that easily and they are some of the happiest people I know. Heck, my wife's mom does that here in the states and she's a very happy lady.
This whole article rings hollow.
I for one love pointers. That is, I want to decide whether I do call by value/call by reference. I dislike Java's Call by value-result. If Java gave me the ability to play with memory and pointers, I'd still prefer c/c++ though.
We truly feel sorry for you then. Somebody ought to work on that. I hated it too when I was using Firefox 1.07 and then Firefox 1.5 came out and suddenly version 1.07 just died on me. There's got to be a better way to write software so that when new versions come out the old versions just don't give up the ghost. Truly a terrible dilemma.
The real immediate root of the problem is not that the legislators don't know that, because they do know that. They know a great deal in fact. The real problem is they don't care. Take a look at the last statement in the summary in that link. This will be in the news that the legislators saved the children and they will get more votes from the idiots. What won't be put in the news is the fact that later the ruling was overturned, that the tax money was wasted, that the courts were tied up with this garbage, that the legislators willfully tried to subvert the US Constitution, and that all along, they did it knowingly. That is the real problem.
Absolutely correct. That statement is right on the money. Of course these Wikipedia article writers have no reason to be accurate.
But then, some other writer who may have an interest just might want to be and will correct the wrong ones. And that is where you fail. Look up such controversial things as pornography. You will notice that neither the anti-porn nor the pro-porn people have done a good job of steering those articles into the likes of "The devil will eat your children if you view it" or "Viewing Porn cures cancer" respectively. It's a nice balance.
And when you get into more complicated but much less controversial things, like electrodynamics or something, then odds are against some random schmoe screwing that up without another physicist correcting it.
And then there are such things as the $Fictional_Universe. I've learned a lot about the Warcraft Universe from Wikipedia that would take me forever to learn otherwise. Same with Half-Life, etc.
And don't ever forget to peruse all the external links. Those are great places to learn more. I have found that Wikipedia is the best place to begin my research.
I think you are referring to inbreeding, as incest is a very bad thing. Not that I am giving inbreeding the green light, but they refer to two very different things, and incest is by far the worse.
They do fly to a lot of places, true. But to go from Long Beach to Seattle involves a flight to the east coast. To go from Portland to Seattle involves a flight to the east coast. There are relatively few flights that will get you from a city in the west to another city in the west without having to fly all the way to the east. That's what I think the poster is referring to.
Last time I checked I took the pot of gold. The leprechauns must have replaced it with the aliens.
10-4
Funny, I re-installed XP only 6 months ago and had to spend hours just getting the OS up and running with updates and drivers and such. Then another several hours putting on applications such as Visual Studio, OpenOffice, Firefox, etc, and I'm not including games. Just over the weekend I installed Fedora Core 5 and after an install that took less time than Windows I spent about 1 hour running the updates and had myself a usable workstation, with Anjuta, OpenOffice, Firefox (with plugins), etc. And no, this isn't new hardware. All my hardware was purchased before Windows XP was released, so the age of the OSs shouldn't be a problem when it comes to drivers.
But maybe you were counting customizing the look and feel. Because most distros don't come with Nerzhul as the destop wallpaper I had to do that, whereas for windows it's just the blank blue for me. So yeah, you have to spend a little time customizing Linux, but at least you can do it, whereas for Windows you get what they decide looks nice to the eyes.
In case anyone is wondering, Nerzhul goes on Linux because I can make everything blend in better with a dark wallpaper, whereas the simple blue on Windows blends in better with the blue-ish theme in XP.
So you're saying that "upgrading" to Vista is for looks?
Hey everybody, I got a new version of Linux!!
Wow, S&M. They really are after the hardcore.
(Reasons not buy PS3) = ((Cost of PS3) - (Cost of Wii) / (Cost of Wii games))
If it's ancient before I see it ...I think I need to sit down for this one
Funny, I thought the reason the media was picking up on this was because it was a press release and a slow news day.
Legislature: Terrorism is now against the law.
Terrorist: Oh, sorry old chap, my chums and I will put a stop forthwith to our outrageousness, then.
It's not going to happen. Everytime we see a new law passed that covers already existing laws I get upset. Like when new bills against copyright infringement get passed. Why? Laws already exist. Same with hate-crime laws. What's the difference if someone is murdered out of hate or...whatever the trash reason would you have to murder someone? It's already against the law.
But this one takes the cake. Just like your analogy of outlawing guns.
Osama: Send the encrypted message to our hidden cell in Britain. ... anybody know the address to UK law enforcement?
Peon: Yes sir. Just allow me first to fill out this form with the encryption key and
For a list of those who voted for the bill (which sadly is everyone present)
Also, I don't personally know of any books or movies that glorified the Columbine events. They always recount the events. A game is not controlled by the author(s), it is ultimately controlled by the players. A book or movie can even be done from the perspective of the perpetrators, useful for giving insights into their minds. Games have not yet been able to do that, and I suspect the reason is because games are interactive and have too much of the minds of the player to be useful in gaining insight into the characters.
As an example, there are a million and one ideas of what Gordon Freeman is actually like. But he is fictional, and played by people the world over. What he is like is going to depend on what the player wants him to be like. But there is only Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. They are the way they are, and games don't allow us to see that. This game would only allow us to see what we are like in a given situation, a situation where there are presumably no real-life consequences. In short, movies and books are passive, games are interactive, and thus while both are forms of entertainment, they are vastly different beasts.
Great! Cosby! Classic!
But let's pretend that is true. Who would care that the PS3 costs as much to make as a 360? It's what's cheapest to the consumer that matters.
MS is not going to do to consoles what it did to the web browser market. MS got lucky to be the OS provider for all IBM machines. That gave them dominance in the OS market. They then tied all sorts of things to their OS, like IE, which gave IE its dominance. But they can't build the 360 into Windows and sell it bundled with every Dell. Also, Atari used to be the big player, then Nintendo, then Sony. Things change. This is entertainment. Changing your entertainment options is easier than switching 200+ employees from one application to another.
The price might be right considering the cost of the hardware. But that is subtly different than what is being sold, which is a video game console. Most people will buy it for that sole function. Everything else are just added features.
To illustrate, there are two groups of people, those who want a video game system and those who want High-definition products. These two groups have an overlap. Those are the people who will buy the PS3. Those who want a game system now and would rather wait for HD (for lots of valid reasons) will probably want something cheaper, and those who want only HD will not buy something that doesn't look right with the rest of their components, i.e., not the PS3.
By the time developers can get the ad-hoc network to do Gran Turismo 5 multiplayer, Sony will have lost the console fight.
Lastly, I have a > 4 yr old pc that plays Half-Life 2 just fine. So I see you're one of those people who think that buying a gaming PC has to cost you lots of money. Also, while you are happy to think that all the features the PS3 has are worth it for a game console, you fail to realize that PCs have far more features than the PS3 could hope to have.
Yes, the MPAA and RIAA are currently lobbying congress to pass a law that would make it illegal to own a copyrighted work on an outdated format.
The really sad thing is that I wouldn't be surprised if they've had that thought. /shudders
Someone else already said it, but I will repeat for emphasis. If they claim to sell you something in ads, and don't offer that product, then it's false advertising. Yes, not what I paid for as per the contract, but false advertising nonetheless, which is a whole different ball of wax than what is being discussed, though it is probably not offtopic to discuss here (I don't care how many footnotes you put at the end of a word, unlimited means without limit).
Therefore, if, like I said, they sell me a connection that has the ability to use 20% of their trunk for $19.95, and I use said ability, they have no right to complain.