No.... Star Trek is certainly not real, yet it was science fiction designed to convey numerous important (and often complex or "deep") messages and concepts. If it was just another war movie staged in outer space, it would never have lasted more than a few seasons on TV.
If you think about it, the vast majority of us, today, spend many hours of each day employed doing some type of work we'd really rather not do. Why do we do it then? For the money! But why the interest in the money? Because it's the bartering tool of choice in our society to purchase what we need to survive (as well as what we want for entertainment and relaxation purposes).
Most people idolize the very wealthy not so much because of whatever great accomplishments they might have made which gave them their wealth, but out of envy of the improved lifestyle it lets them have.
If we can truly reach a stage where everything we need or want is possible to do with machines/robots, and humans no longer need to have "jobs" - there's no reason to assume that's a bad thing. In my mind, that Star Trek world without money is one very possible outcome.
Now, the issue that we'll surely have in the process would be due to the usual suspects, such as "greed". In the transition period of robot-ization, you're inevitably going to have to go through a stage where it's POSSIBLE to produce certain goods or provide certain services cheaply with them, but ONLY if you're already wealthy enough to invest in the technology. That means you're looking at even more "class division" between the rich and the poor, if this technology is only available to make the rich even richer.
I mean - even if such things as 3D printing advance to the point where you can produce really nice replicas of even the most complex items (and do so quickly), you've still got the need for the "ink" used, not to mention access to the data files containing the raw information to feed the printer. (Star Trek conveniently side-steps this dilemma with the fictional replicator that creates objects out of thin air, by assembling them almost instantaneously at the atomic level - using an energy source that's essentially free to tap into, as well.) Greed will ensure that at least some of the best data files for making 3D printables are held by only a select few......
Oh, I agree with you there. But Microsoft, IMO, lacked in the creativity department for a LONG time. I don't really look for a Microsoft solution if I'm expecting a creative, new way of accomplishing tasks. I consider MS stuff more of "staple items". About as exciting to use as a loaf of bread or carton of eggs is to buy at the store -- but just as popular and practical.
The problem they've had with products like Windows ME and Vista is an inability to deliver even on THAT. To keep with the loaf of bread analogy, it's like they discontinued their line of bread and replaced it with "New, improved!" versions which no longer came pre-sliced, had a bag that wouldn't re-seal properly, and some of the bread was stale as soon as the buyer got it home.
All I'm saying is, I think Windows 7 was honestly a good, solid OS. Sure, some people dislike it and that's fine... There are other options out there for them. But by and large, it did what it was supposed to do and didn't crash much. Windows 8 would be a worthy successor if it did nothing more than improved on performance and resource usage while adding support for some newer technologies. It was the MS attempt at "getting creative" which ruined it, a la Metro UI.
The truth of the matter is, beneath the surface, Windows 8 is a respectable improvement on Windows 7. Even as an outspoken hater of Windows 8, I have to admit this after having run both OS's side by side on a number of machines.
Windows 8 has a lot of optimization in it, so it performs better than 7 - especially on older/marginal hardware. (I suspect the effort was made in this area because Microsoft was concerned that Win 8 adoption would suffer if people decided their older machines weren't going to handle the upgrade very well.)
For example, I have an old Dell Latitude D420 here... one of the early attempts at an "Ultrabook". It only has 2GB of RAM in it, and its hard drive is a SLOW drive of the same type Apple used in the iPod Classics. It was designed for Windows XP. Interestingly, it runs Windows 8 pretty well. The slow hard drive means you have to wait a little while for it to do the initial boot -- especially if you just performed some Windows updates and it's grinding through the final stage of those during the subsequent boot. But other than that, you almost wouldn't realize you're not using it on a much newer, more capable machine.
The *real* reason most of us (myself included) can't stand using 8 is the Metro UI they insisted on bolting onto the front of it. Everyone I talk to who tries to defend Win 8 talks of the ways to patch it to boot to the Windows 7 style desktop and/or put back a START button. I'd say that's generally not a bad work-around, except the reorganization of configuration settings on the sliding side menus is really annoying too. I don't see how any of that improves the user experience. It only forces people to re-learn how to get to all the functions they've had years to get used to.
So all MS needs to do here, if they can admit they screwed up, is to back out all the Metro stuff. If they simply gave users the OPTION to run an update that allowed a "Windows 7 style" configuration for 8, or the new style -- that would be ideal, IMO. I'm sure some people do like the tiled interface and Metro apps, and there's no reason to throw out all of that code completely. Just let each user decide which way they prefer to set it up.
The secret to this is, slap together some nonsense game title in minutes and then download the pirated version of Game Dev Tycoon. Laugh as you earned a free game just for letting people download your non-working junk code!
the bottom line is, LEGALLY speaking, you can implement all the DRM you like on whatever digital content you wish to put out there. All the community (such as the Slashdot crowd here) can do is give you opinions on how ethical or smart such a thing is.
IMO, you're rarely going to find someone trying to make a living doing "creative" things who doesn't like the idea of "locking them down" in some fashion. Sometimes, it's not even the creator, but the purchaser who enforces it! For example, I work for a firm that puts together marketing and creative ad campaigns, plans shows and expos, etc. Even though everything we produce is original material our team came up with and saw through to completion, we're not even allowed to display any of our work on our corporate web site! Our clients practically always demand we sign a contract with them preventing us from sharing what was done.
But as someone who has dabbled on both sides of the fence (as a musician trying to produce material, and currently as a typical content consumer), I'm convinced DRM is a universally bad idea.
The original article's statement that, "In my eyes, when people stop getting paid for what they do, they'll stop doing it." is a big part of the problem. A true artist creates because he or she feels a basic need to do so. Most of the time, whether one is a musician, a sculptor, a painter or an author -- profit is FAR from a sure thing in the beginning. These people produce a lot of material at what's usually a net LOSS for them. (Why do you think you almost always hear musicians tell stories of the crappy jobs they had to work to pay the bills while they performed their music at night, for years?) A good friend of mine is an aspiring author, but he works both a day job for the government and teaches kids Karate on the side for income. His books are his passion, not his income source.
Now, I fully understand and agree that these people are all essentially gambling / hoping that all their time spent on their art will pay off in the long haul.... that it's all part of how the system works that you'll produce and produce without much or any pay, until you get noticed. But my question then is why does that whole mentality sudden;y change when profits eventually come? Why is the same artist suddenly "entitled" to getting paid for every single copy of his/her work that gets passed around?
The truth is, I think we have too many people in the arts who are doing it for the wrong reasons! That's why so much modern music is mediocre, and why so many video games are just rehashes of the same formula. If you're motivated by "getting paid", you need to go work in a job where you earn a guaranteed paycheck for every hour of time you spend working, or an annual salary paid out in bi-weekly installments.
It's just opinion, but I truly believe that the only "right" way to pursue an art (such as music) is to do it out of the pure need to create the best work you can possibly create, and share it with others who get enjoyment from it. If you're good enough at that, people start taking an interest in compensating you financially for it. Great... but don't let that change anything for you. Don't stop to "count your money" or you'll become a lesser quality artist for it.
When I moved into the townhouse our family is in now, I bought a lot of IKEA furniture (vs. trying to deal with dis-assembly and moving of existing stuff that wasn't worth the moving expenses to transport anyway).
As I started putting a number of items together, I realized they have a number of common methods of assembly. For example, a dresser, a nightstand or a bed with drawers underneath generally uses the exact same hardware and the same assembly concepts to build the drawers and attach the needed rails.
They tend to use a similar method for constructing a frame for a bookshelf or the "shell" of a dresser or nightstand too.
So once you've worked with a couple of these common items of theirs, you get pretty proficient with the bulk of assembly of other IKEA products using those concepts (the cogs go in all the larger circular holes, and the wood pegs go in all the medium sized holes that aren't drilled all the way through, while the metal pegs screw into the smaller, adjacent, partially-drilled through holes, etc. etc.)
That doesn't mean anyone complaining about putting IKEA together is an idiot who can barely work the microwave or clothes washer! I bought one of their queen size platform beds with a separate headboard with storage cubbies in it, and the thing was a relative beast to assemble. I easily spent the majority of my day on it. A Malm chest usually comes in one box and you can slap it together in 30 minutes. This was something like 5-6 big boxes worth of parts, and involved some assembly that was a real challenge to do by myself. (Sure, with 2 people, it would be easier -- but you don't always have that second person handy to stand around and hold parts for you throughout the afternoon, as needed.)
IMO, that's arguably the BEST part of the whole bitcoin thing! It's a working experiment in creating a new, world-wide currency free of any central banking controls.
Right now, we're seeing ALL of the quirks and roadblocks one could imagine, ranging from security hacks and issues to questions about when a currency truly becomes a currency versus an investment (like a stock purchase). For that matter, there are still some who propose the suggestion that the entire thing could even be a gigantic scam. (After all, nobody seems to know who really created the whole thing. It's a complex enough system that, I suppose, it's at least theoretically possible that there's a component of all of it we don't know about yet; some way for its creator to manipulate the currency flow in a way to benefit him financially when he decides the time is right to pull the trigger on it.)
Complaints about the environmental impact of CPU/GPIU time used to keep it going are very premature, IMO, since it's probably a great investment in running the experiment, so far. By the time bitcoin goes completely mainstream as a primary source of currency (if it even does?), we'll be generations ahead in computer power, as always happens with time. Perhaps as bitcoin demand rises, the whole mathematical model would even be adjusted to make mining new coins a little less processor intensive, to prevent massive deflation.
I don't think you're quite correct in the belief that Hawking thinks the human race has no purpose. If that were true, why would he have ever cared to become a scientist in the first place? I mean, why bother learning how things work if there's ultimately no advantage in knowing anyway?
We may indeed be here because of pure chance (as opposed to some concept of a supreme being which created all of us according to a plan). But that doesn't negate the fact that we're capable of rational thought, as well as having certain preservation instincts and a desire to learn.
It appears to me, at least, that in a largely randomly created universe, we're the one thing in it with the ability to create order out of the chaos.
When you state that "our contributions to the universe are no more important than that of an amoeba", I counter that such a view is irrelevant to the point. Yes, if you look at the entire universe and the effects the human race has had on the formation of new stars or the alignment of the planets -- then forces of nature like gravity are apparently FAR more significant contributors than we humans are. But why would we feel a need to contribute to the universe in the first place? (We're not even sure any other intelligent species exists which could research and comprehend what our race did after we were gone.)
I think we're driven to create, explore, research and document, and even care for other animals we find on Earth because it pleases us to do so. We have the ability to procreate, and therefore a measure of vested interest in trying to improve things for the next generation. We also have a desire to interact with other humans in mutually beneficial ways -- a desire which tends to amplify all of these individual wants or desires. (It pleases us to share a thing of beauty with other humans who express an appreciation for it, hence art and music.)
Ultimately, any of us could just commit suicide tomorrow, deciding "there's really no point in going on and using more of the planet's resources up" -- and some do. But it's a very small percentage of the overall human race, and we certainly create new babies at a rate greater than that of those who decide to "check out".
So IMO, Hawking is simply fulfilling his needs as almost all of us are trying to do. He publishes books to fulfill his need to share his knowledge and maybe even for the sake of gaining notoriety/fame. Why? Just as easy to ask "Why not?"
The more I get successful businesspeople to tell me the story of how they got started, the more I hear that common theme. Advertising and marketing is pretty much *useless* for the small business. It simply doesn't make any sense to divert funds to it that are so desperately needed at that stage just to tread water.
Word of mouth is by FAR the most successful thing the small business owner can use effectively to grow the company. PROVE you're valuable by pleasing someone who actually wants/needs what you're trying to offer. Ask them if they'd be kind enough to refer you to to the people they know. (A surprising number of happy customers will do your "advertising" work for you at no cost to you at all. People like to feel like experts about things, including having an answer when their cousin or buddy mentions he/she sure would like to find a good source for "fill in blank".)
For someone just starting out, I'd even say they should scrap ANY kind of advertising idea that costs them more than $50 or so at a time. Print up a bunch of cheap business cards, perhaps, or make your own flyers and strategically mail them out to locations that make sense. But otherwise, invest in things that make your business better at doing whatever it does. If it fails and you have inventory or computer hardware or furniture or whatever -- at least those items have some resale value or can be reused for another business plan. The money you poured into someone's 30 second radio spots or billboards or signs on benches at the bus stop? It's just spent and gone.
Sure, the Occupy movement folks were largely just clueless, angry people with a plethora of different reasons and beliefs. As long as you get a critical mass of people to complain about things under a common name, it will get media coverage and people will talk about it.
Much more important to me is the fact that yes, I *do* want to see big cuts in "social programs". There's absolutely no reason most of this can't be coved by private charities. (Look at how much money the typical charitable organization brings in right now, AFTER people are already taxed on their incomes -- and yet how small a percentage of what they bring in is even spent on the issues at hand! There's lots of room for more efficient charities, and evidence they'd have plenty of funding to get the job done if people could bring home more of the money they earn, instead of having a chunk taken from them before their checks even get cashed!)
I also want to see cuts in military spending and even public schools (because I'm sick and tired of the philosophy that simply throwing more money at a school will magically make it teach kids more effectively).
Umm.... can you cite any hard evidence this is really true?
You're absolutely right about the "optimization" of product lines that takes place. No argument there at all. But as far as I've been able to tell, 5400RPM drives are only around still because they're a little bit cheaper to build. Out of many hundreds of hard drives I've used over the years, I can't say I've ever felt like the 7200RPM models were less reliable?
Now, I do remember those Seagate Barracuda 10K and 15K RPM high performance SCSI drives having a lot of issues. (Bearing failures from overheating, usually.) But I doubt you're seeing a 5400RPM platter in these hybrid drives for reliability reasons. (Frankly, Seagate doesn't impress me anyway as a company that gives top concerns to reliability.... I've had more of their drives fail on me than any other brand, by a pretty big margin -- including multiple times they had firmware issues leading to premature failure in specific models.)
Ah.... Most of the news clips I've read about this today completely neglected to mention this fact. I falsely assumed that we were talking about larger aircraft.
I remember flying "Air Midwest" as a teenager. It was a small regional service my father and I had to take to get to part of Kansas from Missouri one time, to attend an uncle's funeral. (I think they wound up getting bought out by TWA at some point, or filed for bankruptcy and went away? Can't really remember anymore.)
And yes, back then, they weighed all the passengers -- and not only that, but I remember the stewardess picking out several of the larger passengers and requesting they take a seat on the opposite side of the plane, as the pilots attempted to balance the weight out as much as possible before takeoff.
IMO, flights on those smaller prop planes is extremely unpleasant to begin with.... VERY loud, for starters.
Seriously, I would have picked practically anything but a Microsoft branded solution for syncing the data between sites.
I sure don't claim to have all the best answers for I.T. backup, but I'm in charge of redesigning an aging backup system for the office I work in -- and I'm finding you really need to choose your backup tools carefully.
For example, the company purchased Symantec Backup Exec 2012 and wanted me to do the nightly backups with it, and a couple of LTO drives attached to one of the servers. I pretty quickly scrapped that plan, because among other things, I've never really been able to get that arrangement to keep running reliably without some babysitting. The software itself likes to crap out after 1-3 weeks or so of operation, reporting nonsense like "out of memory" errors during backups. Only a server reboot seems to get it working properly again. The tapes are, of course, also a source of some manual involvement. If nobody changes a tape when it's time for the next rotation, a backup gets missed. And as the existing drives were attached via 68-pin SCSI, it makes the hardware nearly obsolete. None of our newer servers had SCSI ports on them -- so I couldn't even move the backup software to a different physical machine if I wanted to.
What's making much more sense for me, so far, is using the Veeam software on a dedicated "backup server" with a lot of disk space in it. Use it to do nightly backups of the virtual machines running on a VMWare box. Then back up shared folders of important data from the file server using that copy of Backup Exec on the backup server, but have it back up to disk instead of tape. Don't try to do anything "fancy" like backups of a server's "system state" -- and the software isn't nearly as likely to bomb out.
THEN, use a freeware rsync utility to keep the backed-up data folders (from both Veeam and Backup Exec) synchronized with storage available at a remote site via a NAS, to serve as a secondary off-site backup.
On the workstation side, your mobile users who save a lot of data to their machine's C: drives and don't xfer it all that regularly to the corporate servers are served well with subscriptions to CrashPlan. After testing several competitors, it was by far the most reliable and fastest at restoring data we needed. Very highly recommended. Just make sure they know to leave their computers on overnight once in a while so all the data gets backed up to the cloud without interruption.
With our prisons so overcrowded and so expensive to maintain (comes out of all of our taxes), I think situations like these would be better handled with a stiff fine (payable in installments, since the guy is only 19).
Yeah, but the thing about Microsoft's solution is, you're never *really* sure how free "free" will wind up being?
Time after time after time, I've worked for companies who bought into a Microsoft technology (often because it offered a lot of bang for the buck, up-front), and we wound up getting locked into a costly upgrade path down the road, or were essentially herded by Microsoft to take the I.T. infrastructure whatever direction THEY wanted it to go, if we expected to keep using the technology you started with.
That's why where I work now, we decided on VMWare for our server virtualization needs. Up front, yes... it cost more than doing the same thing with Hyper-V. In fact, the consulting firm we occasionally work with recommended against it and fought us to reconsider. But as my boss and I both reasoned - VMWare is pretty much the initial player in the VM game. They've been offering enterprise grade solutions for this before Microsoft ever thought about coding such a thing. And when you look at all the juggling MS has done in recent years with the way their licensing works (largely to address deficiencies in how virtual machines would be legally licensed), you can tell they were scrambling to play catch-up. I'm sure Hyper-V is a perfectly good, solid product. (We used it on severs at my previous employer and it was completely reliable for them.) We're more worried about the antics MS might play, later on. With the VM tied into the OS itself, it gives Microsoft plenty of leverage to, for example, say "Oh... Windows Server 2014 is NOW going to require you pay a $50,000 per server fee for a "VM extensibility pack" add-on license, or else you're not in compliance!" If they did, what would you do as a business who was invested heavily in their server products?
Since VMWare doesn't make operating systems, they're always going to be forced to offer the best possible VM option they can make. They can't just make you accept whatever they give you, because it was bundled with the latest OS upgrade your company needed to do.
Portraying it as an "all or nothing" proposition does a great disservice to all the people out there fighting for a small/lean and responsible government.
Any Libertarian or Constitution party supporter who has a clue what their allegedly preferred political affiliation means would tell you it's important to never lose sight of the fact that government is inherently evil -- yet quite probably a necessary evil.
When you create any kind of central authority, you give those people power -- and power corrupts. The founders of the USA pretty clearly tried to place as many checks and balances on the system as possible, to help prevent or slow the natural growth of this power and with it, corruption.
So no, I don't like many things about our current police system -- but that doesn't mean I'm supposed to blindly accept it, since "the alternative is no police force at all, or a corrupt privatized security force". Maybe it means we need to question how many officers we need in each city, and make some cutbacks? Maybe it means we need to allow the general public to have more input, by way of voting police chiefs in or out of their position on a regular basis?
And no, I don't want a country with "no water system", but maybe I'm open to the idea of regular review of public utilities, to determine if we've reached a point where it's feasible for private businesses to step in? For example, not THAT long ago, it was believed we had to have a govt. regulated monopoly on our nation's telephone system, since it wouldn't be feasible to have competitors all running their own copper wire on poles to the same homes and businesses everywhere. Then cellular came along and changed a lot of assumptions.
Sure, you identified one of the problems (private business having a profit motive), and I agree with that. But as I said in the last line of my comment, govt. is often just as focused on making a profit for itself (despite not being in a situation where it promises that to its stockholders). That's a result of having TOO MUCH government, to the point where organization after organization has to try to justify its continued existence. If, say, a municipal police force can rake in lots of revenue on questionable traffic tickets, they can say, "Look at how much we've done! You surely can't think of eliminating us and using that police dept. owned by the municipality next door!"
To have a successful privatized police force, I think you'd have to have several things in place.
1. You'd ensure they're not paid based on tickets or revenue generated. I'd suggest they receive a flat contracted payment of $X per month, with the contract specifying they meet certain expectations - or else it's subject to termination. The expectations would include being held to a code of ethics/conduct -- so substantiated complaints of officer misbehavior would count against them, etc. Response time would have to meet certain standards as well.
2. The public would have an easily accessible method to file complaints or compliments, which govt. officials approving the contracts could review. The comments would be kept in public view as well, for easy searching and reading. (If the news media wants to look into something, this should be a free, accessible resource for doing so.)
3. The privatized police firm in use should be subject to a regular public "yes/no" type of vote, on top of everything else. If a contract is up for renewal, let the public decide if they're collectively ok with them continuing to "protect and serve" them, or not. If the firm is voted down, then govt. will have to find another vendor to use. (Heck, we do that with our judges already. They have to be re-elected or else they lose their position -- but most people voting on them really have little to no solid information to make that decision. At least voting on a privatized police force used in their community, they'd be more likely to have a personal opinion based on their experiences.)
First of all, I'm not sure there's really that much useful gained from such a project? An Internet Census for 2012 made with questionable code loaded onto all sorts of devices in unknown states without anyone's permission? How much validity can I put into those results? (How many devices didn't perform as intended while doing the port scans due to all sorts of possibilities outside the control of the people doing this research? Anything from people having firewalls blocking results from coming back on some of them to people realizing something was wrong when their bandwidth was consumed for no known reason and shutting the devices down would affect the information.....)
Beyond that, it's not even something all that original.... Plenty of people have attempted to estimate the number of IP addresses in use and who has which IP blocks, etc. Plenty more have looked at all of these studies, shrugged,and said "Who cares?" After all, the Internet is so dynamic, any tallies taken are but mere snapshots in time of a rapidly changing landscape. How many people will it really affect to know the approximate number of users/devices out there as long as they know it numbers in the "many millions" or more?
No... you're correct. Privatized law enforcement won't work in our current system, but that's really only because the rest of the legal infrastructure is governmental in nature.
EG. The judges and court system are NOT privatized, nor are the prisons, so you'd only be privatizing one component of a greater whole. Such a combo (as we're already witnessing with such projects as the red light and speed cameras, where a private company gets a cut of as much as 50% of the revenue of each ticket issued) just encourages more corruption. In these "partnerships", it's all too easy for each party to shirk their responsibilities by pointing fingers at the other party involved. Plus, with private industry essentially sapping part of the revenue stream of the operation that used to go completely to the govt. system, there's increased pressure to collect MORE revenue so both parties are satisfied with the outcome.
I'm not sure I agree that a fully privatized law enforcement system would automatically equate to fascism? I can see how it *might*, but there are a lot of "what if's" in such a proposal.
I think the key is understanding that law has to ultimately get handled at the governmental level, if one is advocating having a centralized body of government at all. (Proponents of agorism or anarchy would obviously have visions of alternate ways to run things.) Really, the only difference between a private business handling an aspect of the job of law enforcement and govt. handling it is the fact that private businesses have a primary focus or goal on profit-making. But as long as govt. retains control of actually making the laws and verifying they're enforced fairly/justly, it shouldn't matter if it's accomplished by "outsourcing" it to private contractors or doing it with govt. employees.
Right now, I'd argue that govt. often has a primary focus of money-making anyway, because we've built up such an expensive and elaborate system - they can't sustain it otherwise.
I used to live in the midwest where we rarely saw a CVS but had Walgreens on practically every corner, so I'm very familiar with them. Now I live in Maryland where it's all about CVS (with a random Rite-Aid store here or there), and Walgreens is practically non-existant.
I was never that fond of Walgreens, especially when they made the HUGE mistake of trying to play hardball with Anthem insurance and refused to accept their policies for prescriptions. I watched their stores look like they were on the set of old West ghost-towns right after that happened. They did eventually come around on that... but their prices were still always too high unless you used a coupon, and customer service was spotty at best.
But man --- I really can't say CVS is any better. I tried to use their fancy iOS app a few weeks ago to refill a prescription, and later that day, got a phone call from the local store. They were all confused because they received a partial fax page from corporate asking them to fill a prescription for me, but it was cut off so they didn't actually know what I needed. Seriously?? They offer a smartphone app to easily do a refill and all it does on the back end is FAX the thing over??
And CVS prices are WAY high, as in complete robbery, if you don't use their membership card. Even then, you only rarely get an actual "good buy" on something with it. And meanwhile, they get to track your buying habits and probably resell your info too.
Honestly, I've shopped at Wal-Mart for many years now, because I've always lived conveniently close to one, and it was open late at night when I had time to shop for things.
To a large extent, I think the chain is currently a victim of the "I'm too cool to set foot in there!" attitude. Web sites like "People of Wal-Mart" do their best to poke fun at the type of shoppers found there, while conveniently ignoring the fact that all those people don't just vanish into thin air as soon as they're done with their Wal-Mart shopping trips. I could do a "People of..." site for any of my local movie theaters, or the baseball stadium, or you name it, and find just as many overweight characters with poor taste in clothing or weird hairstyles.
One of the other reasons many people are down on Wal-Mart and their "business practices" is their well known hard-bargaining tactics with the companies they purchase inventory from. Essentially, they offer to buy a massive quantity of a product for what's a fair (even tempting) price per unit when they first want to carry something. In many cases, the manufacturer is ill-equipped to produce that large a quantity, but the owner(s) see dollar-signs and don't want to miss their chance to "hit it big" with a Wal-Mart deal. So they take out a big business loan to put more factories online, hire more employees to assemble the product, etc. and make the first year deal with Wal-Mart. Problem is, Wal-Mart comes back annually, demanding a little bit lower price for the product than they paid the year before. Before long, the company can't even break even selling at the top price Wal-Mart will pay, so they have to cancel their deal -- and now they're left with excess capacity and loans not paid off yet. It often makes them go under, soon afterwards.
IMO though, this really isn't Wal-Mart's problem. They're just being shrewd buyers. Businesses should be aware, by now, of this pitfall when dealing with Wal-Mart and take it into consideration before signing any deals with them. Heck -- if your product is really THAT good? You should be able to sell it elsewhere like Amazon and put the hurt on Wal-Mart because they can't get ahold of it from you to compete.
A lot of the other complaints I hear about unfair labor practices sound to me like issues with individual stores and store managers. Yes, a lot of it is unethical and plain wrong -- but it happens everywhere with big box retailers. It's not like a lot of that really has anything specific to do with Wal-Mart corporate. Bad management is all over the place, and especially prevalent in retail (or food service) - where you don't need lots of education to rise up the ranks to "manager".
Ok, but what do you make of the claims posted on one of the sites links to in the original article, where someone claims Veoh was horribly mismanaged from the start, and blowing through as much as $4 million a month while not having any business or contracts lined up to justify the expenditures?
I don't know enough about the company to say whether any of that is true... but unfortunately, it wouldn't surprise me a bit. One would think that if the company really had a great, profitable business model all put together, even these lawsuits wouldn't make them disappear -- as another investor would come along and revive Veoh, knowing the path was now clear with winning all of the court cases.
I've seen a number of start-ups which were clearly very fun, challenging and rewarding places to be employed... but in the big picture, they just didn't have something profitable enough to sustain them. Usually, they simply spent too much money trying to give off an image of success, rather than going through the much less pleasant (but far more workable) growth over time from very minimalist beginnings.
As one of my buddies used to say, a hired lawyer is a lot like an attack dog. You point it in the right direction and let it go do its thing. Your lawyer is NOT your friend, and has no qualms about indiscriminately attacking whoever is pointed at by the person paying the bill.
Truthfully, most situations people find themselves in where they really need a lawyer are situations created by the system itself. There really SHOULD be no reason a sane, somewhat intelligent individual couldn't just represent him/herself in a courtroom and be able to do a perfectly good job. Instead, we have a system designed by lawyers, for lawyers, where the procedural details of a trial, alone, are enough to scare many people off from attempting self-representation. That's not to even begin to mention the reality of things, where the VAST majority of cases get settled before a trial even begins, simply because the lawyers on both sides actually know each other on at least the level of "co-workers" and simply sit down to dinner and/or drinks, and hash out what they're going to tell their clients and how they'll actually settle things so both can pretend they "fought long and hard, and got the best possible outcome".
Come on.... Facebook is just a popular site for social networking, and obviously, the operators want to collect, collate and monetize the information people share - because they're not charging anything for using it.
If you don't get any value out of using it, great... don't use it. But the self-righteous. "Sure glad *I* don't use Facebook!" comments are already getting really old and stale.
Before the Internet was really in wide use by the masses, I grew up in the BBS era of the mid 1980's through early 90's. Back then, most BBS's were just run by individuals like myself, as a hobby interest, and we didn't even posses hardware powerful enough to crunch data we collected (if we wanted to, or had any inkling back then it might be of monetary value). But really, they were the original "social networking" tools, and people shared all kinds of stuff about their personal lives on the message forums! Heck, the guy who developed the "FidoNet" method of exchanging messages between BBS's throughout the world was gay, and plenty of us knew it. It didn't have to be culled out of some computer system observing what he "liked" as he looked at information online.
All I'm saying is, Facebook doesn't really have ANY info on people that wasn't put there WILLINGLY by participants. Yeah, you might have a valid complaint here and there if YOU don't want to share a certain photo or piece of info, but someone you know gets on there and shares it. But that's nothing new or Facebook specific! People have been showing other people photos of their friends and co-workers since photography began. And IMO, it really does serve purposes of being a good source of entertainment AND a good tool for locating or keeping up with old friends. I have several FB friends who were people I used to be good real life friends with from as far back as grade school, and who now live in other countries. Without FB, I would just remain completely out of touch with them. With it, I get to see a glimpse of what their lives are like in a part of the world I've never been able to visit myself, and I think that's an enriching experience.
Advertisers will ALWAYS try to leverage all the tools at their disposal to target market things to you, and Facebook is no exception. It'll probably be one of the testing grounds for the most cutting edge of these computer algorithms, since so much data is there in one place. But that really doesn't disturb me... If it surprises someone, I'd say they really should take their head out of the sand.
Do you know if it has any issues losing control of a PC when something's clicked on which needs administrator rights to run? I had problems before with some of the other free remote control programs out there where I'd click to run setup for something like an HP All-In-One printer the person needed installed, and I'd lose control of the keyboard and mouse as soon as it launched (since it was effectively running under the administrator's account instead of the one I was using).
If the other person was there, they could click through the dialog boxes for me as I talked them through it by phone until the setup completed, and then I'd get control back. But it wasn't ideal.
Slashdot Mirror
No.... Star Trek is certainly not real, yet it was science fiction designed to convey numerous important (and often complex or "deep") messages and concepts. If it was just another war movie staged in outer space, it would never have lasted more than a few seasons on TV.
If you think about it, the vast majority of us, today, spend many hours of each day employed doing some type of work we'd really rather not do. Why do we do it then? For the money! But why the interest in the money? Because it's the bartering tool of choice in our society to purchase what we need to survive (as well as what we want for entertainment and relaxation purposes).
Most people idolize the very wealthy not so much because of whatever great accomplishments they might have made which gave them their wealth, but out of envy of the improved lifestyle it lets them have.
If we can truly reach a stage where everything we need or want is possible to do with machines/robots, and humans no longer need to have "jobs" - there's no reason to assume that's a bad thing. In my mind, that Star Trek world without money is one very possible outcome.
Now, the issue that we'll surely have in the process would be due to the usual suspects, such as "greed". In the transition period of robot-ization, you're inevitably going to have to go through a stage where it's POSSIBLE to produce certain goods or provide certain services cheaply with them, but ONLY if you're already wealthy enough to invest in the technology. That means you're looking at even more "class division" between the rich and the poor, if this technology is only available to make the rich even richer.
I mean - even if such things as 3D printing advance to the point where you can produce really nice replicas of even the most complex items (and do so quickly), you've still got the need for the "ink" used, not to mention access to the data files containing the raw information to feed the printer. (Star Trek conveniently side-steps this dilemma with the fictional replicator that creates objects out of thin air, by assembling them almost instantaneously at the atomic level - using an energy source that's essentially free to tap into, as well.) Greed will ensure that at least some of the best data files for making 3D printables are held by only a select few......
Oh, I agree with you there. But Microsoft, IMO, lacked in the creativity department for a LONG time. I don't really look for a Microsoft solution if I'm expecting a creative, new way of accomplishing tasks. I consider MS stuff more of "staple items". About as exciting to use as a loaf of bread or carton of eggs is to buy at the store -- but just as popular and practical.
The problem they've had with products like Windows ME and Vista is an inability to deliver even on THAT. To keep with the loaf of bread analogy, it's like they discontinued their line of bread and replaced it with "New, improved!" versions which no longer came pre-sliced, had a bag that wouldn't re-seal properly, and some of the bread was stale as soon as the buyer got it home.
All I'm saying is, I think Windows 7 was honestly a good, solid OS. Sure, some people dislike it and that's fine... There are other options out there for them. But by and large, it did what it was supposed to do and didn't crash much. Windows 8 would be a worthy successor if it did nothing more than improved on performance and resource usage while adding support for some newer technologies. It was the MS attempt at "getting creative" which ruined it, a la Metro UI.
The truth of the matter is, beneath the surface, Windows 8 is a respectable improvement on Windows 7. Even as an outspoken hater of Windows 8, I have to admit this after having run both OS's side by side on a number of machines.
Windows 8 has a lot of optimization in it, so it performs better than 7 - especially on older/marginal hardware. (I suspect the effort was made in this area because Microsoft was concerned that Win 8 adoption would suffer if people decided their older machines weren't going to handle the upgrade very well.)
For example, I have an old Dell Latitude D420 here... one of the early attempts at an "Ultrabook". It only has 2GB of RAM in it, and its hard drive is a SLOW drive of the same type Apple used in the iPod Classics. It was designed for Windows XP. Interestingly, it runs Windows 8 pretty well. The slow hard drive means you have to wait a little while for it to do the initial boot -- especially if you just performed some Windows updates and it's grinding through the final stage of those during the subsequent boot. But other than that, you almost wouldn't realize you're not using it on a much newer, more capable machine.
The *real* reason most of us (myself included) can't stand using 8 is the Metro UI they insisted on bolting onto the front of it. Everyone I talk to who tries to defend Win 8 talks of the ways to patch it to boot to the Windows 7 style desktop and/or put back a START button. I'd say that's generally not a bad work-around, except the reorganization of configuration settings on the sliding side menus is really annoying too. I don't see how any of that improves the user experience. It only forces people to re-learn how to get to all the functions they've had years to get used to.
So all MS needs to do here, if they can admit they screwed up, is to back out all the Metro stuff. If they simply gave users the OPTION to run an update that allowed a "Windows 7 style" configuration for 8, or the new style -- that would be ideal, IMO. I'm sure some people do like the tiled interface and Metro apps, and there's no reason to throw out all of that code completely. Just let each user decide which way they prefer to set it up.
The secret to this is, slap together some nonsense game title in minutes and then download the pirated version of Game Dev Tycoon. Laugh as you earned a free game just for letting people download your non-working junk code!
the bottom line is, LEGALLY speaking, you can implement all the DRM you like on whatever digital content you wish to put out there. All the community (such as the Slashdot crowd here) can do is give you opinions on how ethical or smart such a thing is.
IMO, you're rarely going to find someone trying to make a living doing "creative" things who doesn't like the idea of "locking them down" in some fashion. Sometimes, it's not even the creator, but the purchaser who enforces it! For example, I work for a firm that puts together marketing and creative ad campaigns, plans shows and expos, etc. Even though everything we produce is original material our team came up with and saw through to completion, we're not even allowed to display any of our work on our corporate web site! Our clients practically always demand we sign a contract with them preventing us from sharing what was done.
But as someone who has dabbled on both sides of the fence (as a musician trying to produce material, and currently as a typical content consumer), I'm convinced DRM is a universally bad idea.
The original article's statement that, "In my eyes, when people stop getting paid for what they do, they'll stop doing it." is a big part of the problem. A true artist creates because he or she feels a basic need to do so. Most of the time, whether one is a musician, a sculptor, a painter or an author -- profit is FAR from a sure thing in the beginning. These people produce a lot of material at what's usually a net LOSS for them. (Why do you think you almost always hear musicians tell stories of the crappy jobs they had to work to pay the bills while they performed their music at night, for years?) A good friend of mine is an aspiring author, but he works both a day job for the government and teaches kids Karate on the side for income. His books are his passion, not his income source.
Now, I fully understand and agree that these people are all essentially gambling / hoping that all their time spent on their art will pay off in the long haul .... that it's all part of how the system works that you'll produce and produce without much or any pay, until you get noticed. But my question then is why does that whole mentality sudden;y change when profits eventually come? Why is the same artist suddenly "entitled" to getting paid for every single copy of his/her work that gets passed around?
The truth is, I think we have too many people in the arts who are doing it for the wrong reasons! That's why so much modern music is mediocre, and why so many video games are just rehashes of the same formula. If you're motivated by "getting paid", you need to go work in a job where you earn a guaranteed paycheck for every hour of time you spend working, or an annual salary paid out in bi-weekly installments.
It's just opinion, but I truly believe that the only "right" way to pursue an art (such as music) is to do it out of the pure need to create the best work you can possibly create, and share it with others who get enjoyment from it. If you're good enough at that, people start taking an interest in compensating you financially for it. Great... but don't let that change anything for you. Don't stop to "count your money" or you'll become a lesser quality artist for it.
To be fair, I have to disagree somewhat.
When I moved into the townhouse our family is in now, I bought a lot of IKEA furniture (vs. trying to deal with dis-assembly and moving of existing stuff that wasn't worth the moving expenses to transport anyway).
As I started putting a number of items together, I realized they have a number of common methods of assembly. For example, a dresser, a nightstand or a bed with drawers underneath generally uses the exact same hardware and the same assembly concepts to build the drawers and attach the needed rails.
They tend to use a similar method for constructing a frame for a bookshelf or the "shell" of a dresser or nightstand too.
So once you've worked with a couple of these common items of theirs, you get pretty proficient with the bulk of assembly of other IKEA products using those concepts (the cogs go in all the larger circular holes, and the wood pegs go in all the medium sized holes that aren't drilled all the way through, while the metal pegs screw into the smaller, adjacent, partially-drilled through holes, etc. etc.)
That doesn't mean anyone complaining about putting IKEA together is an idiot who can barely work the microwave or clothes washer! I bought one of their queen size platform beds with a separate headboard with storage cubbies in it, and the thing was a relative beast to assemble. I easily spent the majority of my day on it. A Malm chest usually comes in one box and you can slap it together in 30 minutes. This was something like 5-6 big boxes worth of parts, and involved some assembly that was a real challenge to do by myself. (Sure, with 2 people, it would be easier -- but you don't always have that second person handy to stand around and hold parts for you throughout the afternoon, as needed.)
IMO, that's arguably the BEST part of the whole bitcoin thing! It's a working experiment in creating a new, world-wide currency free of any central banking controls.
Right now, we're seeing ALL of the quirks and roadblocks one could imagine, ranging from security hacks and issues to questions about when a currency truly becomes a currency versus an investment (like a stock purchase). For that matter, there are still some who propose the suggestion that the entire thing could even be a gigantic scam. (After all, nobody seems to know who really created the whole thing. It's a complex enough system that, I suppose, it's at least theoretically possible that there's a component of all of it we don't know about yet; some way for its creator to manipulate the currency flow in a way to benefit him financially when he decides the time is right to pull the trigger on it.)
Complaints about the environmental impact of CPU/GPIU time used to keep it going are very premature, IMO, since it's probably a great investment in running the experiment, so far. By the time bitcoin goes completely mainstream as a primary source of currency (if it even does?), we'll be generations ahead in computer power, as always happens with time. Perhaps as bitcoin demand rises, the whole mathematical model would even be adjusted to make mining new coins a little less processor intensive, to prevent massive deflation.
I don't think you're quite correct in the belief that Hawking thinks the human race has no purpose. If that were true, why would he have ever cared to become a scientist in the first place? I mean, why bother learning how things work if there's ultimately no advantage in knowing anyway?
We may indeed be here because of pure chance (as opposed to some concept of a supreme being which created all of us according to a plan). But that doesn't negate the fact that we're capable of rational thought, as well as having certain preservation instincts and a desire to learn.
It appears to me, at least, that in a largely randomly created universe, we're the one thing in it with the ability to create order out of the chaos.
When you state that "our contributions to the universe are no more important than that of an amoeba", I counter that such a view is irrelevant to the point. Yes, if you look at the entire universe and the effects the human race has had on the formation of new stars or the alignment of the planets -- then forces of nature like gravity are apparently FAR more significant contributors than we humans are. But why would we feel a need to contribute to the universe in the first place? (We're not even sure any other intelligent species exists which could research and comprehend what our race did after we were gone.)
I think we're driven to create, explore, research and document, and even care for other animals we find on Earth because it pleases us to do so. We have the ability to procreate, and therefore a measure of vested interest in trying to improve things for the next generation. We also have a desire to interact with other humans in mutually beneficial ways -- a desire which tends to amplify all of these individual wants or desires. (It pleases us to share a thing of beauty with other humans who express an appreciation for it, hence art and music.)
Ultimately, any of us could just commit suicide tomorrow, deciding "there's really no point in going on and using more of the planet's resources up" -- and some do. But it's a very small percentage of the overall human race, and we certainly create new babies at a rate greater than that of those who decide to "check out".
So IMO, Hawking is simply fulfilling his needs as almost all of us are trying to do. He publishes books to fulfill his need to share his knowledge and maybe even for the sake of gaining notoriety/fame. Why? Just as easy to ask "Why not?"
The more I get successful businesspeople to tell me the story of how they got started, the more I hear that common theme. Advertising and marketing is pretty much *useless* for the small business. It simply doesn't make any sense to divert funds to it that are so desperately needed at that stage just to tread water.
Word of mouth is by FAR the most successful thing the small business owner can use effectively to grow the company. PROVE you're valuable by pleasing someone who actually wants/needs what you're trying to offer. Ask them if they'd be kind enough to refer you to to the people they know. (A surprising number of happy customers will do your "advertising" work for you at no cost to you at all. People like to feel like experts about things, including having an answer when their cousin or buddy mentions he/she sure would like to find a good source for "fill in blank".)
For someone just starting out, I'd even say they should scrap ANY kind of advertising idea that costs them more than $50 or so at a time. Print up a bunch of cheap business cards, perhaps, or make your own flyers and strategically mail them out to locations that make sense. But otherwise, invest in things that make your business better at doing whatever it does. If it fails and you have inventory or computer hardware or furniture or whatever -- at least those items have some resale value or can be reused for another business plan. The money you poured into someone's 30 second radio spots or billboards or signs on benches at the bus stop? It's just spent and gone.
Sure, the Occupy movement folks were largely just clueless, angry people with a plethora of different reasons and beliefs. As long as you get a critical mass of people to complain about things under a common name, it will get media coverage and people will talk about it.
Much more important to me is the fact that yes, I *do* want to see big cuts in "social programs". There's absolutely no reason most of this can't be coved by private charities. (Look at how much money the typical charitable organization brings in right now, AFTER people are already taxed on their incomes -- and yet how small a percentage of what they bring in is even spent on the issues at hand! There's lots of room for more efficient charities, and evidence they'd have plenty of funding to get the job done if people could bring home more of the money they earn, instead of having a chunk taken from them before their checks even get cashed!)
I also want to see cuts in military spending and even public schools (because I'm sick and tired of the philosophy that simply throwing more money at a school will magically make it teach kids more effectively).
Umm.... can you cite any hard evidence this is really true?
You're absolutely right about the "optimization" of product lines that takes place. No argument there at all. But as far as I've been able to tell, 5400RPM drives are only around still because they're a little bit cheaper to build. Out of many hundreds of hard drives I've used over the years, I can't say I've ever felt like the 7200RPM models were less reliable?
Now, I do remember those Seagate Barracuda 10K and 15K RPM high performance SCSI drives having a lot of issues. (Bearing failures from overheating, usually.) But I doubt you're seeing a 5400RPM platter in these hybrid drives for reliability reasons. (Frankly, Seagate doesn't impress me anyway as a company that gives top concerns to reliability.... I've had more of their drives fail on me than any other brand, by a pretty big margin -- including multiple times they had firmware issues leading to premature failure in specific models.)
Ah.... Most of the news clips I've read about this today completely neglected to mention this fact. I falsely assumed that we were talking about larger aircraft.
I remember flying "Air Midwest" as a teenager. It was a small regional service my father and I had to take to get to part of Kansas from Missouri one time, to attend an uncle's funeral. (I think they wound up getting bought out by TWA at some point, or filed for bankruptcy and went away? Can't really remember anymore.)
And yes, back then, they weighed all the passengers -- and not only that, but I remember the stewardess picking out several of the larger passengers and requesting they take a seat on the opposite side of the plane, as the pilots attempted to balance the weight out as much as possible before takeoff.
IMO, flights on those smaller prop planes is extremely unpleasant to begin with.... VERY loud, for starters.
Seriously, I would have picked practically anything but a Microsoft branded solution for syncing the data between sites.
I sure don't claim to have all the best answers for I.T. backup, but I'm in charge of redesigning an aging backup system for the office I work in -- and I'm finding you really need to choose your backup tools carefully.
For example, the company purchased Symantec Backup Exec 2012 and wanted me to do the nightly backups with it, and a couple of LTO drives attached to one of the servers. I pretty quickly scrapped that plan, because among other things, I've never really been able to get that arrangement to keep running reliably without some babysitting. The software itself likes to crap out after 1-3 weeks or so of operation, reporting nonsense like "out of memory" errors during backups. Only a server reboot seems to get it working properly again. The tapes are, of course, also a source of some manual involvement. If nobody changes a tape when it's time for the next rotation, a backup gets missed. And as the existing drives were attached via 68-pin SCSI, it makes the hardware nearly obsolete. None of our newer servers had SCSI ports on them -- so I couldn't even move the backup software to a different physical machine if I wanted to.
What's making much more sense for me, so far, is using the Veeam software on a dedicated "backup server" with a lot of disk space in it. Use it to do nightly backups of the virtual machines running on a VMWare box. Then back up shared folders of important data from the file server using that copy of Backup Exec on the backup server, but have it back up to disk instead of tape. Don't try to do anything "fancy" like backups of a server's "system state" -- and the software isn't nearly as likely to bomb out.
THEN, use a freeware rsync utility to keep the backed-up data folders (from both Veeam and Backup Exec) synchronized with storage available at a remote site via a NAS, to serve as a secondary off-site backup.
On the workstation side, your mobile users who save a lot of data to their machine's C: drives and don't xfer it all that regularly to the corporate servers are served well with subscriptions to CrashPlan. After testing several competitors, it was by far the most reliable and fastest at restoring data we needed. Very highly recommended. Just make sure they know to leave their computers on overnight once in a while so all the data gets backed up to the cloud without interruption.
With our prisons so overcrowded and so expensive to maintain (comes out of all of our taxes), I think situations like these would be better handled with a stiff fine (payable in installments, since the guy is only 19).
Yeah, but the thing about Microsoft's solution is, you're never *really* sure how free "free" will wind up being?
Time after time after time, I've worked for companies who bought into a Microsoft technology (often because it offered a lot of bang for the buck, up-front), and we wound up getting locked into a costly upgrade path down the road, or were essentially herded by Microsoft to take the I.T. infrastructure whatever direction THEY wanted it to go, if we expected to keep using the technology you started with.
That's why where I work now, we decided on VMWare for our server virtualization needs. Up front, yes ... it cost more than doing the same thing with Hyper-V. In fact, the consulting firm we occasionally work with recommended against it and fought us to reconsider. But as my boss and I both reasoned - VMWare is pretty much the initial player in the VM game. They've been offering enterprise grade solutions for this before Microsoft ever thought about coding such a thing. And when you look at all the juggling MS has done in recent years with the way their licensing works (largely to address deficiencies in how virtual machines would be legally licensed), you can tell they were scrambling to play catch-up. I'm sure Hyper-V is a perfectly good, solid product. (We used it on severs at my previous employer and it was completely reliable for them.) We're more worried about the antics MS might play, later on. With the VM tied into the OS itself, it gives Microsoft plenty of leverage to, for example, say "Oh... Windows Server 2014 is NOW going to require you pay a $50,000 per server fee for a "VM extensibility pack" add-on license, or else you're not in compliance!" If they did, what would you do as a business who was invested heavily in their server products?
Since VMWare doesn't make operating systems, they're always going to be forced to offer the best possible VM option they can make. They can't just make you accept whatever they give you, because it was bundled with the latest OS upgrade your company needed to do.
Portraying it as an "all or nothing" proposition does a great disservice to all the people out there fighting for a small/lean and responsible government.
Any Libertarian or Constitution party supporter who has a clue what their allegedly preferred political affiliation means would tell you it's important to never lose sight of the fact that government is inherently evil -- yet quite probably a necessary evil.
When you create any kind of central authority, you give those people power -- and power corrupts. The founders of the USA pretty clearly tried to place as many checks and balances on the system as possible, to help prevent or slow the natural growth of this power and with it, corruption.
So no, I don't like many things about our current police system -- but that doesn't mean I'm supposed to blindly accept it, since "the alternative is no police force at all, or a corrupt privatized security force". Maybe it means we need to question how many officers we need in each city, and make some cutbacks? Maybe it means we need to allow the general public to have more input, by way of voting police chiefs in or out of their position on a regular basis?
And no, I don't want a country with "no water system", but maybe I'm open to the idea of regular review of public utilities, to determine if we've reached a point where it's feasible for private businesses to step in? For example, not THAT long ago, it was believed we had to have a govt. regulated monopoly on our nation's telephone system, since it wouldn't be feasible to have competitors all running their own copper wire on poles to the same homes and businesses everywhere. Then cellular came along and changed a lot of assumptions.
Sure, you identified one of the problems (private business having a profit motive), and I agree with that. But as I said in the last line of my comment, govt. is often just as focused on making a profit for itself (despite not being in a situation where it promises that to its stockholders). That's a result of having TOO MUCH government, to the point where organization after organization has to try to justify its continued existence. If, say, a municipal police force can rake in lots of revenue on questionable traffic tickets, they can say, "Look at how much we've done! You surely can't think of eliminating us and using that police dept. owned by the municipality next door!"
To have a successful privatized police force, I think you'd have to have several things in place.
1. You'd ensure they're not paid based on tickets or revenue generated. I'd suggest they receive a flat contracted payment of $X per month, with the contract specifying they meet certain expectations - or else it's subject to termination. The expectations would include being held to a code of ethics/conduct -- so substantiated complaints of officer misbehavior would count against them, etc. Response time would have to meet certain standards as well.
2. The public would have an easily accessible method to file complaints or compliments, which govt. officials approving the contracts could review. The comments would be kept in public view as well, for easy searching and reading. (If the news media wants to look into something, this should be a free, accessible resource for doing so.)
3. The privatized police firm in use should be subject to a regular public "yes/no" type of vote, on top of everything else. If a contract is up for renewal, let the public decide if they're collectively ok with them continuing to "protect and serve" them, or not. If the firm is voted down, then govt. will have to find another vendor to use. (Heck, we do that with our judges already. They have to be re-elected or else they lose their position -- but most people voting on them really have little to no solid information to make that decision. At least voting on a privatized police force used in their community, they'd be more likely to have a personal opinion based on their experiences.)
I have to disagree with you on this....
First of all, I'm not sure there's really that much useful gained from such a project? An Internet Census for 2012 made with questionable code loaded onto all sorts of devices in unknown states without anyone's permission? How much validity can I put into those results? (How many devices didn't perform as intended while doing the port scans due to all sorts of possibilities outside the control of the people doing this research? Anything from people having firewalls blocking results from coming back on some of them to people realizing something was wrong when their bandwidth was consumed for no known reason and shutting the devices down would affect the information.....)
Beyond that, it's not even something all that original.... Plenty of people have attempted to estimate the number of IP addresses in use and who has which IP blocks, etc. Plenty more have looked at all of these studies, shrugged,and said "Who cares?" After all, the Internet is so dynamic, any tallies taken are but mere snapshots in time of a rapidly changing landscape. How many people will it really affect to know the approximate number of users/devices out there as long as they know it numbers in the "many millions" or more?
No... you're correct. Privatized law enforcement won't work in our current system, but that's really only because the rest of the legal infrastructure is governmental in nature.
EG. The judges and court system are NOT privatized, nor are the prisons, so you'd only be privatizing one component of a greater whole. Such a combo (as we're already witnessing with such projects as the red light and speed cameras, where a private company gets a cut of as much as 50% of the revenue of each ticket issued) just encourages more corruption. In these "partnerships", it's all too easy for each party to shirk their responsibilities by pointing fingers at the other party involved. Plus, with private industry essentially sapping part of the revenue stream of the operation that used to go completely to the govt. system, there's increased pressure to collect MORE revenue so both parties are satisfied with the outcome.
I'm not sure I agree that a fully privatized law enforcement system would automatically equate to fascism? I can see how it *might*, but there are a lot of "what if's" in such a proposal.
I think the key is understanding that law has to ultimately get handled at the governmental level, if one is advocating having a centralized body of government at all. (Proponents of agorism or anarchy would obviously have visions of alternate ways to run things.) Really, the only difference between a private business handling an aspect of the job of law enforcement and govt. handling it is the fact that private businesses have a primary focus or goal on profit-making. But as long as govt. retains control of actually making the laws and verifying they're enforced fairly/justly, it shouldn't matter if it's accomplished by "outsourcing" it to private contractors or doing it with govt. employees.
Right now, I'd argue that govt. often has a primary focus of money-making anyway, because we've built up such an expensive and elaborate system - they can't sustain it otherwise.
I used to live in the midwest where we rarely saw a CVS but had Walgreens on practically every corner, so I'm very familiar with them. Now I live in Maryland where it's all about CVS (with a random Rite-Aid store here or there), and Walgreens is practically non-existant.
I was never that fond of Walgreens, especially when they made the HUGE mistake of trying to play hardball with Anthem insurance and refused to accept their policies for prescriptions. I watched their stores look like they were on the set of old West ghost-towns right after that happened. They did eventually come around on that ... but their prices were still always too high unless you used a coupon, and customer service was spotty at best.
But man --- I really can't say CVS is any better. I tried to use their fancy iOS app a few weeks ago to refill a prescription, and later that day, got a phone call from the local store. They were all confused because they received a partial fax page from corporate asking them to fill a prescription for me, but it was cut off so they didn't actually know what I needed. Seriously?? They offer a smartphone app to easily do a refill and all it does on the back end is FAX the thing over??
And CVS prices are WAY high, as in complete robbery, if you don't use their membership card. Even then, you only rarely get an actual "good buy" on something with it. And meanwhile, they get to track your buying habits and probably resell your info too.
Honestly, I've shopped at Wal-Mart for many years now, because I've always lived conveniently close to one, and it was open late at night when I had time to shop for things.
To a large extent, I think the chain is currently a victim of the "I'm too cool to set foot in there!" attitude. Web sites like "People of Wal-Mart" do their best to poke fun at the type of shoppers found there, while conveniently ignoring the fact that all those people don't just vanish into thin air as soon as they're done with their Wal-Mart shopping trips. I could do a "People of..." site for any of my local movie theaters, or the baseball stadium, or you name it, and find just as many overweight characters with poor taste in clothing or weird hairstyles.
One of the other reasons many people are down on Wal-Mart and their "business practices" is their well known hard-bargaining tactics with the companies they purchase inventory from. Essentially, they offer to buy a massive quantity of a product for what's a fair (even tempting) price per unit when they first want to carry something. In many cases, the manufacturer is ill-equipped to produce that large a quantity, but the owner(s) see dollar-signs and don't want to miss their chance to "hit it big" with a Wal-Mart deal. So they take out a big business loan to put more factories online, hire more employees to assemble the product, etc. and make the first year deal with Wal-Mart. Problem is, Wal-Mart comes back annually, demanding a little bit lower price for the product than they paid the year before. Before long, the company can't even break even selling at the top price Wal-Mart will pay, so they have to cancel their deal -- and now they're left with excess capacity and loans not paid off yet. It often makes them go under, soon afterwards.
IMO though, this really isn't Wal-Mart's problem. They're just being shrewd buyers. Businesses should be aware, by now, of this pitfall when dealing with Wal-Mart and take it into consideration before signing any deals with them. Heck -- if your product is really THAT good? You should be able to sell it elsewhere like Amazon and put the hurt on Wal-Mart because they can't get ahold of it from you to compete.
A lot of the other complaints I hear about unfair labor practices sound to me like issues with individual stores and store managers. Yes, a lot of it is unethical and plain wrong -- but it happens everywhere with big box retailers. It's not like a lot of that really has anything specific to do with Wal-Mart corporate. Bad management is all over the place, and especially prevalent in retail (or food service) - where you don't need lots of education to rise up the ranks to "manager".
Ok, but what do you make of the claims posted on one of the sites links to in the original article, where someone claims Veoh was horribly mismanaged from the start, and blowing through as much as $4 million a month while not having any business or contracts lined up to justify the expenditures?
I don't know enough about the company to say whether any of that is true ... but unfortunately, it wouldn't surprise me a bit. One would think that if the company really had a great, profitable business model all put together, even these lawsuits wouldn't make them disappear -- as another investor would come along and revive Veoh, knowing the path was now clear with winning all of the court cases.
I've seen a number of start-ups which were clearly very fun, challenging and rewarding places to be employed ... but in the big picture, they just didn't have something profitable enough to sustain them. Usually, they simply spent too much money trying to give off an image of success, rather than going through the much less pleasant (but far more workable) growth over time from very minimalist beginnings.
As one of my buddies used to say, a hired lawyer is a lot like an attack dog. You point it in the right direction and let it go do its thing. Your lawyer is NOT your friend, and has no qualms about indiscriminately attacking whoever is pointed at by the person paying the bill.
Truthfully, most situations people find themselves in where they really need a lawyer are situations created by the system itself. There really SHOULD be no reason a sane, somewhat intelligent individual couldn't just represent him/herself in a courtroom and be able to do a perfectly good job. Instead, we have a system designed by lawyers, for lawyers, where the procedural details of a trial, alone, are enough to scare many people off from attempting self-representation. That's not to even begin to mention the reality of things, where the VAST majority of cases get settled before a trial even begins, simply because the lawyers on both sides actually know each other on at least the level of "co-workers" and simply sit down to dinner and/or drinks, and hash out what they're going to tell their clients and how they'll actually settle things so both can pretend they "fought long and hard, and got the best possible outcome".
Come on.... Facebook is just a popular site for social networking, and obviously, the operators want to collect, collate and monetize the information people share - because they're not charging anything for using it.
If you don't get any value out of using it, great... don't use it. But the self-righteous. "Sure glad *I* don't use Facebook!" comments are already getting really old and stale.
Before the Internet was really in wide use by the masses, I grew up in the BBS era of the mid 1980's through early 90's. Back then, most BBS's were just run by individuals like myself, as a hobby interest, and we didn't even posses hardware powerful enough to crunch data we collected (if we wanted to, or had any inkling back then it might be of monetary value). But really, they were the original "social networking" tools, and people shared all kinds of stuff about their personal lives on the message forums! Heck, the guy who developed the "FidoNet" method of exchanging messages between BBS's throughout the world was gay, and plenty of us knew it. It didn't have to be culled out of some computer system observing what he "liked" as he looked at information online.
All I'm saying is, Facebook doesn't really have ANY info on people that wasn't put there WILLINGLY by participants. Yeah, you might have a valid complaint here and there if YOU don't want to share a certain photo or piece of info, but someone you know gets on there and shares it. But that's nothing new or Facebook specific! People have been showing other people photos of their friends and co-workers since photography began. And IMO, it really does serve purposes of being a good source of entertainment AND a good tool for locating or keeping up with old friends. I have several FB friends who were people I used to be good real life friends with from as far back as grade school, and who now live in other countries. Without FB, I would just remain completely out of touch with them. With it, I get to see a glimpse of what their lives are like in a part of the world I've never been able to visit myself, and I think that's an enriching experience.
Advertisers will ALWAYS try to leverage all the tools at their disposal to target market things to you, and Facebook is no exception. It'll probably be one of the testing grounds for the most cutting edge of these computer algorithms, since so much data is there in one place. But that really doesn't disturb me... If it surprises someone, I'd say they really should take their head out of the sand.
I do have a question about TeamViewer though.....
Do you know if it has any issues losing control of a PC when something's clicked on which needs administrator rights to run?
I had problems before with some of the other free remote control programs out there where I'd click to run setup for something like an HP All-In-One printer the person needed installed, and I'd lose control of the keyboard and mouse as soon as it launched (since it was effectively running under the administrator's account instead of the one I was using).
If the other person was there, they could click through the dialog boxes for me as I talked them through it by phone until the setup completed, and then I'd get control back. But it wasn't ideal.