I don't know where you come from, but where I come from, teenage girls are sharp and clever, and have a tendency to win debate tournaments, math olympiads, and generally get better grades in school.
It's a bit offtopic, but IIRC when I went to school, girls did nothing of the sort (didn't win debate tournaments and especially not math olympiads)... they did tend to get better grades but mostly because they worked harder:) . I'm not trying to be sexist, and I actually do believe they are better at lots of things, but those two examples in particular (math and debate) were always dominated by men in my limited experience (of course the plural of anecdote isn't data as people here like to point out:) )
(and trying to say one sex isn't better than another at some tasks is denying reality, that doesn't mean any sex is "worse". Please add all standard disclaimers and make do as if I posted them here:) )
LOL.. but it's true. I'm looking at an email from someone called Jorge, and it shows ads for San Jorge Island holiday accomodations, and some brazilian video website.
For an eBay message, I get offers for Grain Silos (wtf???), Used Plastic Machinery, Supermagnet Spheres (guess they come in handy:P ), Paulo Coelho, and coin collecting supplies (which is the one that makes more sense as I'm a collector... of Magic: The Gathering cards).
Well actually Nintendo has always had better than average multiplayer games... we had lots of fun with the Mario Party series (N64 and Gamecube) and 4-player Smash Brothers Melee.
But yeah, I remember a bunch of us trying to solve the Monkey Island puzzles and yelling at the guy who had the control... not really multiplayer but still fun:)
International Superstar Soccer was also a great multiplayer game... for playing 4-player games we had to buy a multitap for the PS2 and even then it's mostly used for sports game.
Happens everywhere... I live in Uruguay, and the police are very busy implementing the governments new "car belts in the rear seats" policy (which most older cars didn't even have) which is a sure way to boost income (for a few months at least) and a new semi "Prohibition" on alcohol (cigarettes were the first to go a couple years ago thanks to our president being an Oncologist)...
Meanwhile crime is on the rise and they attribute it to "public perception"
(actually the local term is "Sensación Termica" which translates to the "feels like" info on the weather reports or wind chill factor (tough phrase to translate:) ).
Jacob Nielsen stayed WAY behind the times. It's good that he emphasized usability, but he did not adapt. Just for fun, some guys did some comparison on search, and Jacob's page came dead last - using some very interesting methods which seem to be standard on usability testing (Eyetracking):
I found this webpage more useful than Nielsen's when I was designing a form that has to be filled 30.000 times every day (and this guy Luke Wroblewski seems to know what he's doing, even though his seminars are way too expensive):
Is there any serious doubt that Scrabulous infringes on Hasbro's intellectual property?
And what intellectual property would that be? The trademark is pretty much the only claim they can make, but I think that most reasonable adults would read "Scrabulous" as meaning "Scrabble(TM)-like, but not Scrabble(TM)".
Even if a "reasonable adult" realizes that "Scrabulous" is not "Scrabble", but they DO associate it with "Scrabble", "Scrabulous" is using the trademark built by Hasbro for their own benefit. I definitely agree with Hasbro on this one.
OTOH, patents and other IP are being abused way beyond what was probably originally intended, against the publics' best interest (like the patent on trading card games, even though I'm an avid Magic the Gathering player !!!).
There was a time when Arabian science was leading the world of its time (eight to sixteenth century approx).
I'd say it was in spite of the Coran/Quran/whatever, not thanks to it - same as science in the West progressed in spite of the Bible and the Church - see Galileo, Giordano Bruno et al.
For most westerners, and indeed for many Arabs, the spectacular achievements of Arabic-language science from the eighth through the 16th centuries come as a startling discovery, as if an unknown continent had suddenly appeared on the horizon. In mathematics, astronomy, medicine, optics, cartography, evolutionary theory, physics and chemistry, medieval Arab and Muslim scientists, scholars, doctors and mapmakers were centuries ahead of Europe
I usually buy very small-value items (MTG Cards), and shipping fees are twice to three times the value of the actual item, and vary between sellers (some charge as much as U$ 3 per item, for a basically weightless item !).
"You have a very curious version of exploitation."
Let me expand upon his version - they're exploiting the cheaper labor and taking jobs away from those of us in this country THAT NEED THOSE JOBS and they're giving it to OTHER PEOPLE ACROSS THE PLANET INSTEAD OF THEIR OWN COUNTRYMEN.
That should nicely trash the rest of your post, logic be damned. Corporations need to be DESTROYED, as all they're doing is helping themselves and hurting the country. What's the term for an entity that causes harm to its own country, WILLINGLY?
TREASON. Punishable by death - which I expect NOTHING LESS.
On one hand, I think some kind of level playing field is needed across the globe - which would probably include stuff that limits India and China's abilities to under-bid for US or European jobs.
On the other hand, the above post sounds EXTREMELY BACKWARDS. Why do you think us people in the Third World are any less than your people? Why would it be treason to give a job to me instead of to you? I'm a huge fan of some kind of effective world government, erasing all these backward localisms (you can keep them for sports as an escape vent if you want to). Corporations have to be held accountable (and I still haven't figured out how), but in no way destroyed. Just changed.
May I know what are the ways these companies exploit their workers? For all I know, they pay their workers well, and people are happy to work in these companies.
To you, these companies may look as if they are paying their workers low wages, but the wages converted into Indian Rupee is a lot of money for someone in India. Somebody earning $1000 a month in India can maintain a standard of living above someone in US earning $4k-5k a month. So no, these companies are not exploiting anybody.
I live in Uruguay (another of the countries Tata outsources to), I work as a subcontractor for a very large US firm, and I earn less than U$ 1000 a month, so I'm VERY qualified to answer that:P.
Yes, U$ 1000 is a lot of money for someone in India (or Uruguay), but the "standard of living" stuff is relative. I can have food and housing that is probably equivalent or better than someone in the US making $4k, and I have a cook twice a week (!!!) but there are other costs that are international: I can't afford a car or gas or air travel, computers are costly and I can't afford a Laptop, forget about electronics or that LCD TV.. Plus, most of the imported stuff is taxed to death..
To be honest, most of what we can't afford is part of the "consumer culture" the US promotes, I can live happily without all of that, the one that stings the most is the car.
What I expect will eventually happen/what should happen should the "free market" be left to its own devices, is that the world's playing field will level off, and a professional will expect to earn about the same (adjusted for local cost of living) anywhere in the world. This serves neither the US (which will lose a lot of the buying power that enabled the "consumer culture") nor China (which would lose most of its competitive advantage of lower wages and would have to compete on quality and other intangibles - it will still probably be a little cheaper due to scale, but not massively so as it is now).
Of course, the market is not actually free, so the US will continue to hold back other countries with their one-sided trade agreements and patent and copyright monopolies, and China will continue to use their non-democratic government to hold back their people (I agree that no regulation would probably be a calamity if all the Chinese people had free reign to spend like they imagine US people do).
Oh, and I agree that those companies are not directly "exploiting" anybody in the sense that everybody entered into their agreements willingly, but they are using the loopholes created by their respective governments to bend market forces which would make these shenanigans impossible. (I think I came across as too strongly pro-market, I still think Government is needed unlike some extremists, but I think everybody can agree that governments are too big and often meddle too much where the best thing would have been to leave things alone - it seems all of this wouldn't have happened the same way had not the Floridan government given tax breaks to Nielsen)
For many of us, air travel is beyond our means, or a luxury we can archieve a couple times in our lifetime - I can't find exact statistics but I'm pretty certain that more than half the population in the world has never flown, or moved outside their country. I'd be willing to bet it's actually something like 4/5ths of the world population (I didn't find the actual stats but I found one that says only 7% of the world's population has ever owned a car).
If you offered air travel that took more time but costs, say, half or one-third the cost of an airplane ticket, I'm pretty certain A LOT more people would travel (since their time isn't that expensive relative to the cost of a ticket... a plane ticket to the US from my country costs 200 billable hours of my time for example, which would be more than one month and a half of work excluding stuff like eating or actually living:P )
Too bad I don't see this being competitive unless they clear those major hurdles (and Helium prices and all that stuff). Also, someone mentioned you can probably transport a lot more people in the same period in an airplane, so maybe it's not more economical as a passenger carrier (unless mixing it with cargo is feasible and works to offset the longer time between cycles).
DOCTOR: You've got to stop drinking, smoking, and chasing women.
PATIENT: If I do that, will I live to be 100?
DOCTOR: Naw, but it'll sure feel like it.
Bonus - Woody Allen's quote: "You can live to be a hundred if you give up all the things that make
you want to live to be a hundred."
(yes, I had to Google it out, found it here: http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=765059 . So sue me:)
cars, to a large portion of the population, are freedom.
The people will never give up their cars. Don't bother trying to make us- we won't. We'll use every last drop of gasoline first. Find a better way to power them instead, they will never go away.
Thanks for rubbing it in bud:P - I don't own a car, never have, I hope someday I will (really looking forward to that Tata Nano) - yes, I'm from the Third World (Uruguay, specifically).
About the second part... how many sacrifices are you willing to make for your car? I'm betting economics WILL make people give up their gas-powered cars (the masses at least).
If I translated my cost of living to yours (if your sallary had the same buying power as mine), my situation is equivalent to a new car being 200.000 of your dollars, and gas being 60 dollars/gallon... are you REALLY SURE you wouldn't give up your car in that case?
If I bought a used car (or a new car on a thousand installments) basically I would have to work for the car for YEARS (For comparsion: a new car costs about half as much as a decent apartment. No, I'm not joking).
I've decided it's not worth it (for now). Not everything is bleak: If I didn't live alone (couples share costs), or I advance on my career, I'll probably be able to afford a car down the line:) .
A lot of people have suggested Spanish - just remember that if you plan to use it in the US then it's Latin American Spanish, there's enough of a difference between the American and European versions that it's better to learn from the one you'd use.
Miami is often mentioned as the unofficial "Latin American Capital City".. if you live in the south of the US, it's probably a no-brainer to study Spanish, that would further enable you to do business with Latin America (and yes, there is money to be made that way).
Yeah, probably, considering that the proper sentence in the title would be "Yo hablo, tu hablas, nosotros hablamos" Most people say that Spanish is quite hard, so it's understandable (being a native speaker, I can't say whether it really is that hard)
I wanted to take up Chinese or especially Japanese while I was doing my degree, but I was pretty scared that they would be very difficult - and the announcement for every language course in my university said: "basic level - 1 year" except for Chinese and Japanese, which said: "rudiments - 1 year", and I saw students doing basic school stuff like writing down a thousand times each kanji character.
I'm starting German on Saturday:) but I'll probably do French or Japanese after that (or Chinese now that you say it's not THAT hard).
Unfortunately a friend of mine became convinced of one of those scams, and will add water to his gas or something of the sort. I told him he'll ruin his engine but...
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I don't know where you come from, but where I come from, teenage girls are sharp and clever, and have a tendency to win debate tournaments, math olympiads, and generally get better grades in school.
It's a bit offtopic, but IIRC when I went to school, girls did nothing of the sort (didn't win debate tournaments and especially not math olympiads)... they did tend to get better grades but mostly because they worked harder :) . I'm not trying to be sexist, and I actually do believe they are better at lots of things, but those two examples in particular (math and debate) were always dominated by men in my limited experience (of course the plural of anecdote isn't data as people here like to point out :) )
:) )
(and trying to say one sex isn't better than another at some tasks is denying reality, that doesn't mean any sex is "worse". Please add all standard disclaimers and make do as if I posted them here
LOL.. but it's true. I'm looking at an email from someone called Jorge, and it shows ads for San Jorge Island holiday accomodations, and some brazilian video website.
:P ), Paulo Coelho, and coin collecting supplies (which is the one that makes more sense as I'm a collector... of Magic: The Gathering cards).
For an eBay message, I get offers for Grain Silos (wtf???), Used Plastic Machinery, Supermagnet Spheres (guess they come in handy
You need to start using habits like the Jews had to use in WWII Germany.. take your drive and hide it well
That really set me on a scary train of thought... I had visions of storing the USB drive where Papillon stored his stuff :P ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papillon_(autobiography) )
I'll buy any number of working laptops for U$ 50. (capable of running Linux and have a higher screen resolution)
:)
Why? I live in Uruguay.
See, its not that simple
Well actually Nintendo has always had better than average multiplayer games... we had lots of fun with the Mario Party series (N64 and Gamecube) and 4-player Smash Brothers Melee .
:)
But yeah, I remember a bunch of us trying to solve the Monkey Island puzzles and yelling at the guy who had the control... not really multiplayer but still fun
International Superstar Soccer was also a great multiplayer game... for playing 4-player games we had to buy a multitap for the PS2 and even then it's mostly used for sports game.
Sadly, that's pretty insightful there... Japan started with cheap copies... so did Korea...
Happens everywhere... I live in Uruguay, and the police are very busy implementing the governments new "car belts in the rear seats" policy (which most older cars didn't even have) which is a sure way to boost income (for a few months at least) and a new semi "Prohibition" on alcohol (cigarettes were the first to go a couple years ago thanks to our president being an Oncologist)...
:) ).
Meanwhile crime is on the rise and they attribute it to "public perception"
(actually the local term is "Sensación Termica" which translates to the "feels like" info on the weather reports or wind chill factor (tough phrase to translate
There are enough of us old-time Adventure players that there is a niche for this :) as long as they market it right...
:P
Retro Gaming is huge for some people... last Saturday night a friend of mine popped his Nintendo and we played some Contra
That's thanks to inmigration bringing some third-world birth rates to your country.
Same happens in many other developed countries (Turks in Germany and Austria, Ecuatorians in Spain, Bolivians over here, etc).
I'm pretty certain that if you clamped on inmigration you'd see negative birth rates (not that I'm advocating it).
Jacob Nielsen stayed WAY behind the times. It's good that he emphasized usability, but he did not adapt. Just for fun, some guys did some comparison on search, and Jacob's page came dead last - using some very interesting methods which seem to be standard on usability testing (Eyetracking):
http://www.uxmatters.com/MT/archives/000068.php
I found this webpage more useful than Nielsen's when I was designing a form that has to be filled 30.000 times every day (and this guy Luke Wroblewski seems to know what he's doing, even though his seminars are way too expensive):
http://www.uie.com/
And what intellectual property would that be? The trademark is pretty much the only claim they can make, but I think that most reasonable adults would read "Scrabulous" as meaning "Scrabble(TM)-like, but not Scrabble(TM)".
Even if a "reasonable adult" realizes that "Scrabulous" is not "Scrabble", but they DO associate it with "Scrabble", "Scrabulous" is using the trademark built by Hasbro for their own benefit. I definitely agree with Hasbro on this one.
OTOH, patents and other IP are being abused way beyond what was probably originally intended, against the publics' best interest (like the patent on trading card games, even though I'm an avid Magic the Gathering player !!!).
I'd say it was in spite of the Coran/Quran/whatever, not thanks to it - same as science in the West progressed in spite of the Bible and the Church - see Galileo, Giordano Bruno et al.
A quick googling of the subject will lead you to:
http://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/200703/rediscovering.arabic.science.htm
For most westerners, and indeed for many Arabs, the spectacular achievements of Arabic-language science from the eighth through the 16th centuries come as a startling discovery, as if an unknown continent had suddenly appeared on the horizon. In mathematics, astronomy, medicine, optics, cartography, evolutionary theory, physics and chemistry, medieval Arab and Muslim scientists, scholars, doctors and mapmakers were centuries ahead of Europe
Why not take a page from all those sci-fi books and put it in a Lagrange Point?
(according to Wikipedia, several missions are planned there already)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point
I usually buy very small-value items (MTG Cards), and shipping fees are twice to three times the value of the actual item, and vary between sellers (some charge as much as U$ 3 per item, for a basically weightless item !).
"You have a very curious version of exploitation."
Let me expand upon his version - they're exploiting the cheaper labor and taking jobs away from those of us in this country THAT NEED THOSE JOBS and they're giving it to OTHER PEOPLE ACROSS THE PLANET INSTEAD OF THEIR OWN COUNTRYMEN.
That should nicely trash the rest of your post, logic be damned. Corporations need to be DESTROYED, as all they're doing is helping themselves and hurting the country. What's the term for an entity that causes harm to its own country, WILLINGLY?
TREASON. Punishable by death - which I expect NOTHING LESS.
On one hand, I think some kind of level playing field is needed across the globe - which would probably include stuff that limits India and China's abilities to under-bid for US or European jobs.
On the other hand, the above post sounds EXTREMELY BACKWARDS. Why do you think us people in the Third World are any less than your people? Why would it be treason to give a job to me instead of to you? I'm a huge fan of some kind of effective world government, erasing all these backward localisms (you can keep them for sports as an escape vent if you want to). Corporations have to be held accountable (and I still haven't figured out how), but in no way destroyed. Just changed.
May I know what are the ways these companies exploit their workers? For all I know, they pay their workers well, and people are happy to work in these companies.
To you, these companies may look as if they are paying their workers low wages, but the wages converted into Indian Rupee is a lot of money for someone in India. Somebody earning $1000 a month in India can maintain a standard of living above someone in US earning $4k-5k a month. So no, these companies are not exploiting anybody.
I live in Uruguay (another of the countries Tata outsources to), I work as a subcontractor for a very large US firm, and I earn less than U$ 1000 a month, so I'm VERY qualified to answer that :P .
Yes, U$ 1000 is a lot of money for someone in India (or Uruguay), but the "standard of living" stuff is relative. I can have food and housing that is probably equivalent or better than someone in the US making $4k, and I have a cook twice a week (!!!) but there are other costs that are international: I can't afford a car or gas or air travel, computers are costly and I can't afford a Laptop, forget about electronics or that LCD TV.. Plus, most of the imported stuff is taxed to death..
To be honest, most of what we can't afford is part of the "consumer culture" the US promotes, I can live happily without all of that, the one that stings the most is the car.
What I expect will eventually happen/what should happen should the "free market" be left to its own devices, is that the world's playing field will level off, and a professional will expect to earn about the same (adjusted for local cost of living) anywhere in the world. This serves neither the US (which will lose a lot of the buying power that enabled the "consumer culture") nor China (which would lose most of its competitive advantage of lower wages and would have to compete on quality and other intangibles - it will still probably be a little cheaper due to scale, but not massively so as it is now).
Of course, the market is not actually free, so the US will continue to hold back other countries with their one-sided trade agreements and patent and copyright monopolies, and China will continue to use their non-democratic government to hold back their people (I agree that no regulation would probably be a calamity if all the Chinese people had free reign to spend like they imagine US people do).
Oh, and I agree that those companies are not directly "exploiting" anybody in the sense that everybody entered into their agreements willingly, but they are using the loopholes created by their respective governments to bend market forces which would make these shenanigans impossible. (I think I came across as too strongly pro-market, I still think Government is needed unlike some extremists, but I think everybody can agree that governments are too big and often meddle too much where the best thing would have been to leave things alone - it seems all of this wouldn't have happened the same way had not the Floridan government given tax breaks to Nielsen)
Remember the Concorde, price is a factor.
:P )
For many of us, air travel is beyond our means, or a luxury we can archieve a couple times in our lifetime - I can't find exact statistics but I'm pretty certain that more than half the population in the world has never flown, or moved outside their country. I'd be willing to bet it's actually something like 4/5ths of the world population (I didn't find the actual stats but I found one that says only 7% of the world's population has ever owned a car).
If you offered air travel that took more time but costs, say, half or one-third the cost of an airplane ticket, I'm pretty certain A LOT more people would travel (since their time isn't that expensive relative to the cost of a ticket... a plane ticket to the US from my country costs 200 billable hours of my time for example, which would be more than one month and a half of work excluding stuff like eating or actually living
Too bad I don't see this being competitive unless they clear those major hurdles (and Helium prices and all that stuff). Also, someone mentioned you can probably transport a lot more people in the same period in an airplane, so maybe it's not more economical as a passenger carrier (unless mixing it with cargo is feasible and works to offset the longer time between cycles).
So what your saying is they wanted a technology elite guru, but to pay him/her slave wages.
Fuck you, I make $10.50 an hour.
I make U$ 5 an hour. Do I win? :P (yeah, yeah, third world, wages go a long way etc.)
You reminded me of the old joke:
:)
DOCTOR: You've got to stop drinking, smoking, and chasing women.
PATIENT: If I do that, will I live to be 100?
DOCTOR: Naw, but it'll sure feel like it.
Bonus - Woody Allen's quote: "You can live to be a hundred if you give up all the things that make you want to live to be a hundred."
(yes, I had to Google it out, found it here: http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=765059 . So sue me
cars, to a large portion of the population, are freedom.
The people will never give up their cars. Don't bother trying to make us- we won't. We'll use every last drop of gasoline first. Find a better way to power them instead, they will never go away.
Thanks for rubbing it in bud :P - I don't own a car, never have, I hope someday I will (really looking forward to that Tata Nano) - yes, I'm from the Third World (Uruguay, specifically).
:) .
About the second part... how many sacrifices are you willing to make for your car? I'm betting economics WILL make people give up their gas-powered cars (the masses at least).
If I translated my cost of living to yours (if your sallary had the same buying power as mine), my situation is equivalent to a new car being 200.000 of your dollars, and gas being 60 dollars/gallon... are you REALLY SURE you wouldn't give up your car in that case?
If I bought a used car (or a new car on a thousand installments) basically I would have to work for the car for YEARS (For comparsion: a new car costs about half as much as a decent apartment. No, I'm not joking).
I've decided it's not worth it (for now). Not everything is bleak: If I didn't live alone (couples share costs), or I advance on my career, I'll probably be able to afford a car down the line
Don't just learn the language, study abroad
Totally agree here, I would have loved to do that while I was studying.
A lot of people have suggested Spanish - just remember that if you plan to use it in the US then it's Latin American Spanish, there's enough of a difference between the American and European versions that it's better to learn from the one you'd use.
Miami is often mentioned as the unofficial "Latin American Capital City".. if you live in the south of the US, it's probably a no-brainer to study Spanish, that would further enable you to do business with Latin America (and yes, there is money to be made that way).
Yeah, probably, considering that the proper sentence in the title would be "Yo hablo, tu hablas, nosotros hablamos" Most people say that Spanish is quite hard, so it's understandable (being a native speaker, I can't say whether it really is that hard)
:) but I'll probably do French or Japanese after that (or Chinese now that you say it's not THAT hard).
I wanted to take up Chinese or especially Japanese while I was doing my degree, but I was pretty scared that they would be very difficult - and the announcement for every language course in my university said: "basic level - 1 year" except for Chinese and Japanese, which said: "rudiments - 1 year", and I saw students doing basic school stuff like writing down a thousand times each kanji character.
I'm starting German on Saturday
How about +1 Wrong? (or Interesting/Wrong, Interesting but Wrong, Insightful but Wrong, etc..) :)
Unfortunately a friend of mine became convinced of one of those scams, and will add water to his gas or something of the sort. I told him he'll ruin his engine but...