And you, sir, are not helping by demonizing those who think differently than you.
There wasn't any demonization in the original post. There's a difference between dismissal and demonization.
On the other side you have... those who ignore scientific evidence for financial gain.
...but that, on the other hand, comes close, in addition to being laughably irrational. People who are seriously interested in financial gain, if they go into the sciences at all, certainly aren't going to pick climatology as their cash cow. And once ensconced in climatology, there's no particular financial incentive to espouse any particular theory. "Hey, I really made a bundle off of my latest paper on upper-atmosphere particulates in the northern hemisphere mid-latitudes." Riiiiiiight.
As with religious fundamentalists who like to argue that science is a religion, absurd accusations of this sort usually say a great deal more about the accuser than the accused.
They could do two passes on places and use the double collected data in order remove people and other movable things. I think this is and practically theoretically feasible.
That would be harder than you think. The position of the camera could vary by several feet. If it's a windy day, you have foliage moving around. If the passes are not widely separated in time, many people would be in the same location -- cafe diners and sunbathers come to mind. If the passes are widely separated in time, then you have differences in the angle of the sun and changes in weather to take into account. It's much more difficult than taking a few pictures from a tripod over a couple of minutes and editing out pedestrians and cars.
Why is it IT people in general feel that they are somehow different than everyone else in the world? Are they really so ignorant and socially dysfunctional to not realize that they are no different than any other part of society in any way? Is this ignorance or a form a geek elitism, thinking that we geeks can't possibly be expected to suffer under the same working conditions of the rest of the pathetic planet of idiots?
Translation: I'm doing okay, so fuck the rest of you because you plainly suck.
There's at least one of these in every thread on employment issues. Why they get marked Insightful is a mystery to me.
In all seriousness, this is typical of the point of view that only large, publicly-owned companies matter and that consumers are just a resource to be harvested by investors in the stock market. Personally, I care a lot less about where the next near-monopoly comes from than where the next generation of quality software comes from. And since it's generally not coming from the existing large corporations, TFA is at least correct in saying that the disincentives to independent development are a bad thing. But this is primarily a bad thing for consumers; there are always plenty of opportunities for the investors, though any given industry -- such as software -- may not be a hot deal at any given time.
If a machine could write a Mozart sonata every bit as good as the originals, then what was so special about Mozart?
What was special about Mozart was that he could write music so good that it has taken nearly ten thousand years of human civilization and, in the past century, an unprecedented, billion-dollar industry backed by a huge number of brilliant scientists and engineers to begin to devise machines that write music good enough for someone to even ask the question.
If people are going to get upset every time one of our creations outdoes us, they had better plan on being upset a lot. Eventually, someone will write software that bitches about its unique place in nature better than we do, too.
As for art -- art is a mental stance on the part of the observer. It's how you look at (or listen to) something that makes it art. It doesn't matter whether that something was made by a human being, a lower animal, an extraterrestrial alien, or a machine, or even if it was the product of purely natural processes. There is nothing intrinsically artistic about any object. Art is a set of human mental processes.
I wondered when they'd get around to doing this. Frankly, I'm surprised they didn't try it sooner.
You can safely assume that if used clothing became fashionable amongst the moneyed classes, clothing manufacturers would try to force Goodwill and the Salvation Army out of business. Value is tied to scarcity, so trying to generate artificial scarcity is a pretty standard tactic. In a field like "intellectual property", where all scarcity is artificial, sharing is viewed as a sin.
Of course, the real irony here is that artificial scarcity itself is an attack on the capitalist free market. But the free market only appeals to the little guy. To established interests, the free market is a threat. Ergo, companies like Microsoft spend most of their time trying to suppress competition, which is almost guaranteed to work, as opposed to actually competing, which carries a much larger risk of failure.
You gonna pay extra for gas from a station that pays its clerks "living wage"?
Why not? We're already paying extra so oil company executives can enjoy salaries and bonuses in excess of what would be a living wage for some entire countries, which is itself small potatoes compared to the enormous sums of tax money that go towards using the military to run errands for them in the middle east.
I read it when you first published it, Bruce. It looks good on paper, but the failure of Open Source to do more than carve out some specialist professional niches -- its impact on the general consumer approaches zero -- strongly suggests an enormous gap between theory and practice.
Given the available resources, there is no reason Microsoft and Apple should even exist today. At least part of the blame for that, I believe, lies with the essentially self-serving and narcissistic worldview that has been at the heart of "Open Source" since its celebrated split with the Free Software camp (which has problems of its own), which has produced a lack of vision leading to fragmentation, infighting, and empty posturing. Had a FOSS faction emerged that oriented itself towards public service as its overriding consideration, it would -- and, I hope, could still -- have utterly changed the landscape, not only in computing, but in the wider society that is increasingly dependent upon it.
Instead, we have a bunch of silly games oriented around pretending to compete with large corporations, very little of which is real, much less significant in any way, and the few organizations that do have an initial modicum of success, like MySQL AB, stumble cluelessly into the maws of the established players because the game they think they are playing is not the game that is actually being played.
Every voluntary transaction introduces new wealth into an economy. It actually creates wealth.
In a certain metaphoric sense, yes, though not in any remotely concrete way, which would involve a violation of the Second Law.
The important detail that is being overlooked by such a simplistic account is the matter of who receives that wealth. In this case, a relatively small amount of wealth ended up in the hands of MySQL AB's shareholders, and a tremendous amount of wealth ended up in the hands of Oracle's shareholders. How? By effectively killing off one of their major competitors, a significant number of organizations will soon be obliged to pay Oracle for one of their products. In other words, the Oracle deal created costs for consumers who had previously been receiving a gift of wealth from MySQL AB. Far more people lose as a result of this deal than win.
That, too, is another predictable, essential feature of capitalism. Generosity is something that has to be rooted out and destroyed, because every time you behave altruistically, you are not just creating wealth for your beneficiaries, you are denying it to companies who want to sell what you are giving away. And it's worth noting that very few transactions are truly voluntary. For many businesses and organizations, an RDBMS is a need, just as food and shelter are needs for individuals. I may have a great deal of choice in where I buy dinner, but I am not free to forgo eating altogether. If there was adequate food growing in public parks for me to live on -- which is not a bad metaphor for FOSS -- then I would be genuinely free to choose. At the same time, vendors of food would almost certainly use their resources to lobby the local government to replace the fruit-bearing trees in the park with something inedible so they could more effectively create wealth.
Advocates of the free market like to argue that the market creates wealth, and again, this is partially true. But it is true to the extent that both parties, buyer and seller, are free to walk away from a transaction. The less freedom that either have, the more the transaction approaches a zero-sum game. The RDBMS market just took a large step in the direction of being a zero-sum game.
The corollary to this is that even if you are a much bigger fan of capitalism than I am, FOSS is to be applauded for making the market freer and more competitive. If consumers can choose a perfectly adequate free solution, commercial vendors are incentivized to make their products much better. That is actual wealth creation.
Companies don't make money by giving anything away, except in a very restricted set of circumstances where the gift is of no particular value and induces customers to spend actual money, or when there are substantial money-based strings attached. Why is this so hard for the FOSS world to grasp? A for-profit company, particularly a publicly-traded company, is always going to extract every last penny from its customers in exchange for the least value they will settle for. That's how capitalism works. Altruism is a pointless expense from the capitalist point-of-view, and companies that engage in much of it are going to lose their markets to companies that do not because those competitors are using their resources more efficiently.
I know this runs contrary to a lot of the wishful Adam Smith's invisible hand rainbows-and-unicorns thinking that is popular with a fairly large faction around here, but pixies don't make the flowers grow, either, and bitching about it isn't going to change anything. Capitalism works thus: you pay workers the least you can get away with in exchange for the most effort you can get out of them, to produce the least valuable products you can sell at the highest prices possible. Period. It does occasionally contribute to the common good, but because that contribution is itself an inefficiency in the system, there is a very strong incentive for all companies to reduce the amount of public good they do in order to cut costs and maximize profits.
Despite the window-dressing efforts of ESR and the "Open Source" faction, the underlying mechanism of FOSS (or whatever you want to call it) is altruistic charity. We make useful things and give them away. There's some money to be made on support, customization, dual-licensing, and systems integration, but it's negligible in terms of the oceans of cash flowing through the software industry. If a FOSS project significantly menaces any of the profit-streams of a large software company like Oracle or Microsoft, they are in a position to spend more money fighting it in an hour than you earn in a lifetime. Rarely, a FOSS project makes a significant dent in those profit streams: Apache, Firefox, Linux, and MySQL being the most successful.
If your overriding consideration is offering the best possible software package to the public as a gesture of personal generosity or some other personal commitment, and you happen to be both lucky and very, very good at what you do, you might well make a substantial dent. In some smaller markets, you might even become the dominant player. But that has to be your overriding consideration. If, as with MySQL AB, you are willing to sell your ownership in the software, you are back in the world of capitalism and no matter what bullshit assurances you receive from the army of salesmen and lawyers who will suddenly appear to offer them, all of the usual rules of the market apply, and you may rest assured that you are in no position to change how those rules work. You sold the goods, and from the point of view of the purchaser, you no longer exist.
If we are, as FOSS developers, committed to serving the public good, there's a lot we can do. If we're in it primarily for personal profit, 99% of us will get nowhere, and the remaining 1% will be bought out one by one. If you have something sufficiently valuable and you have a price, someone will eventually pay it. MySQL AB thought it could be an exception to the rule, and as a result, we are all a lot poorer.
Ok, so 5 units at 800,000 is 4 million. If they save 100,000/9 months, that's 133,333/year. So it'll only take them 30 years to repay the cost, assuming that money has no time value of course. Sounds like a poor investment to me.
If money is your only concern, then the only logical course of action is to exploit cheap, inefficient, non-renewable fuels as aggressively as possible. If the long-term survival of your species is taken into consideration, then things look a little different.
In any case, it is almost certainly unrealistic to expect that any future energy sources other than possibly fusion are going to be cost-competitive with the enormous free lunch we got by virtue of having evolved long after the Carboniferous era accumulated and concentrated tens of millions of years of energy in the form of oil, coal, and natural gas for us to burn through in a couple of centuries. As we spend the last of our inheritance, expect a bumpy ride as a planet full of spoiled trust fund kids have a hard time adjusting to working for a living.
But the entire "what exactly was the kid doing" tangent is really just an attempt to justify the school's bad behavior.
And that's the crux of the issue. The kid could have been running a meth lab for all that it matters. Public schools are not empowered to engage in warrantless video surveillance of private citizens in their own homes. A school can't even get a warrant. For that, they have to call the police, and the police have to go to a judge. And if there is anyone in the audience who wonders why schools aren't empowered to do this sort of thing, this case should answer that question.
But he cannot cowardly hide behind a disguise to kill. Maybe unfair to non-States, but those are the rules.
Had we followed those rules in the 1770's, we'd still be British subjects. The rules of war are devised by powerful state actors to magnify their strengths, prohibit the exploitation of their weaknesses, and minimize their losses. A small state actor -- or a sub-state entity -- which finds itself at war with a powerful state isn't cowardly for refusing to follow rules designed to ensure its defeat; it's intelligent. We leave aside the question of whether it was very smart for the Taliban to allow al Qaeda to provoke a war with the United States. But once engaged in a fight with the United States, the various Afghan factions have three options: fight according to the rules of war and guarantee their defeat, surrender immediately, or fight dirty. And given that option three worked against a Soviet invasion next to which the current American incursion is a pinprick, it's not surprising that they've decided to try it again.
Once you come to accept that, you will see that you post was, maybe unwillingly, a troll.
Once you come to accept that, you're just a chauvinistic cheerleader for whatever imperial power you've chosen to identify with to compensate for your lack of self-esteem, making empty legalistic excuses for modern warfare, and trying desperately to divert attention away from what modern warfare actually is: an exercise in which the overwhelming majority of casualties are not among the combatants of either side, but rather civilian bystanders in whatever third world shooting gallery the arms industry has found an opportunity to drive sales of their products.
This goes far beyond stupid school administrators, this is a blatant case of GOVERNMENT actors out of control, willfully violating the Constitution (and scores of other laws) and they need to be punished. Not just fired, everyone responsible for this need to spend some quality time in a "pound me in the ass" prison.
If I may be so bold as to interrupt your little robotic anti-government ideological dance, you might want to consider the inconsistency and irony involved in decrying the violation of constitutional protections against unlawful search and seizure while simultaneously clamoring for unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment. Or did they decide that anal rape was now okay at the last gathering of the local teabaggers?
It's also worth considering that private actors have vastly more leeway when it comes to invasion of privacy that the government. In many states, I can record telephone calls without the other party's knowledge, and in all of them, I can personally wear a hidden recording device on public or private property, and if I run a business that you patronize, there's hardly any limit to the information I can collect. The government requires warrants for that crap, and the failure of this particular local government agency to do so makes it possible for its victims to seek redress in the courts. If it had been a private business monitoring its employees, there'd be a lot less their victims could do about it.
But yeah, government is evil. So keep calling for the government to press criminal charges. And after driving them from government courts in government vehicles over government roads to a government prison, lock the government door and throw away the government key. I presume the ass-pounding will have to come from some imprisoned private entrepreneur, though.
The move to the Bay Area is chief exhibit #1 - why move an organization whose whole purpose, mission, and asset is a web page to one of the most expensive real estate locations on earth?
Easy -- close proximity and easy access to well-heeled donors.
If the French legislature -- or, for that matter, ours, the British, or the Australians -- were genuinely concerned about child pornography, there are any number of productive, real-world efforts they could pursue. On the technical side, they could fund research into automated image analysis, so computers could look for the stuff specifically instead of having uniformed thugs, er, gendarmes pawing through everyone's data manually. That, obviously, is not going to produce overnight results, so maybe the kiddie porn-obsessed countries of the world could take concrete action against the human trafficking that fuels so much of the child porn business. Of course, that would end up hurting business interests, whereas violating everyone's rights in a largely fruitless pursuit for evidence of crimes after the fact -- cast in the appropriate light, of course -- generates some free publicity prior to elections, without the unintended side effect of actually doing something to reduce a very valuable hot button issue.
We have the same kind of politics here with respect to abortion. Both sides fear a final resolution to the issue because it's such a huge source of votes. Consequently, the pro-life faction always stops just a little bit short of overturning Roe v. Wade, and the pro-choice faction never actually gets around to even discussing a constitutional amendment. The politicians (and professional pressure groups) involved want an unresolved controversy, lest the issue be reduced to driving as many people to the polls as the Runaway Slave Act does nowadays. The voters on both sides are quite sincere and feel strongly about their respective positions, but their elected representatives? Not so much.
Did you ever want to work a couple extra hours because you were really into what you were doing?
Seriously? No, never. I have a life. Part of which involves not ever telling my daughter that I prefer unpaid inner loop optimization to her company.
More often, I have the case of management that has mismanaged resources until they've backed the whole project into a corner, and they expect a lot of unpaid overtime from developers to code them out of that corner. And in the absence of a union, or even enforced labor laws, there's nothing you can do but suck it up and let your employer get something for nothing.
...but maybe the takeaway lesson from this whole affair is that it is impossible to remain ethical while knowingly doing business with an entity you know to be deeply corrupt. Sooner or later, you will find yourself faced with situations in which you directly or indirectly become party to unethical acts.
This is hardly limited to Google. We all help pay the salaries of the oppressive Chinese regime from the politburo on down to the prison camp guards every time we buy Chinese goods.
For relatively local trips, the difference amounts to a triviality
For relatively local trips, especially considering that you have to spend half the trip turned around and decelerating, there's going to be a point well before nine-tenths of C that the cost of further acceleration vastly outweighs the value of getting to the destination faster. Without knowing what the cost of energy is going to be if and when we can build propulsion systems capable of relativistic travel, I couldn't say where the point of diminishing returns would be, but for in-system travel, I'd be willing to bet it's not even an appreciable fraction of C.
Eventually people do tend to get promoted beyond programming positions.
Sometimes, though it's obviously a minority, or managers would soon outnumber their subordinates. I've turned down lots of management positions. The narcissism of non-technical managers is such that they think everyone wants to be like them, so they are quite sincere in their attempts to reward good programmers with management positions. The problem is that there is next to no overlap in the skillsets, and most often, what you get is a crappy manager in exchange for a good programmer. There are exceptions, but they are definitely the exceptions, not the rule. Some will accept the promotion with the idea that they'll run things better, but then they discover that the cluelessness of the non-technical manager they are replacing wasn't all or even most of the problem: there's the cluelessness of the next level of management behind it.
As it happens, I actually can do a decent job of managing people. The problem is that I'd rather flip burgers. Consequently, I've stuck to programming and kept my skills updated, but at 39, I'm looking at the reality of a career change in the mid-term future. I'm not terribly worried about it -- I'll have the kid through college in four more years, and after that, I can afford to live on a much, much smaller paycheck.
Should it be that way? No, of course not. But absent some kind of organized labor movement -- which programmers are notoriously, irrationally averse to -- it's not going to change, as the people making the hiring and firing decisions are getting by just fine with the current system. There is then little choice but to adapt, or at least emigrate.
Food is very cheap in comparison to the value of a person's labor. The number of capitalists that could feed, clothe, and house people well for the price of their labor in the absence of government interference is vast.
Ah yes, the old "we'd live in a capitalist utopia if it wasn't for those meddling governments" argument -- the same governments that make it possible for capitalists to have a market in the first place, literate workers to produce the goods, the transport systems to move them, and so on. Capitalism is a superb market system, but it doesn't do crap else. That's why we have governments. The usual counterargument, that free enterprise would perform the services currently performed by government, has also been long-discredited. We tried that. We ended up with debtors' prisons and company towns with workers paid in scrip in near-serfdom.
The cost of producing, processing, transporting, and distributing food is worth well more than the value of currently starving peoples' labor. How do I know? Easy -- if it weren't, then capitalists would be, at the very least, trading food for ultra-cheap labor. If that labor was significantly more valuable than food, capitalists would be using bribery and, when necessary, private military companies to topple oppressive governments and establish order. After all, they use private armies to keep order in more than a few oil producing regions in Africa.
I do have a moral obligation to prevent someone from stealing from me, a moral obligation to oppose a government that steals from me in the name of the poor, and a moral obligation to refute someone like you who attempts to persuade me that my life is the property of someone else.
Typical free-market extremist equivocation. Your "moral obligation", as you describe it, isn't a moral obligation at all; it's simply your desire to serve yourself to the exclusion of all else, a complete inversion of morality. What you probably don't realize is that by surrendering your moral obligations, you are effectively in breach of the social contract, which relieves anyone else of any moral obligation not to simply overcome you with superior -- and, if necessary, lethal -- force to seize your property. But I suspect that someone as ethically bankrupt and short-sighted as yourself is incapable of seeing that there are no "natural rights", and that all rights are the creation of human beings by common consent. Outside of that framework, which involves -- ironically enough -- the purchase of rights with the coin of moral obligation, you're just another resource to be harvested.
Are you sure you want to live in that kind of world? I only ask because I've never seen a loud-mouthed, scrawny Ayn Rand disciple who would last a full minute in an amoral world governed by absolute self-interest.
Better prices for biofuel stock might drive up prices short term, but will lead to greater investment and supply long term.
Ah yes, the inevitable claim that magic market pixies will fix everything.
The fact is that world food production -- never mind potential production -- is already more than adequate to feed everyone. Market economics alone, however, is inadequate to distribute the food. People aren't starving because there isn't enough food, they're starving because they can't afford to buy food. There's no profit to be had in giving food to people who can't pay for it, so they go without.
I wish free market ideologues would figure out that the market is very good at doing things that are profitable, but not everything worth doing is profitable. The market is amoral and devoid of compassion. That's not necessarily a bad thing by itself, but it becomes so when we surrender every ethical obligation to the test of profitability.
I pretty much have to agree there. I ride a little yellow 150cc Vespa, and it's an odd day when one of the young men on the crotch rockets even deigns to acknowledge my presence, but the guys on enormous Harleys -- including members of the patch clubs -- always wave as we pass, and more than a few have struck up conversations at stops. While I'm sure there are thugs out there, the scariest-looking hardcore bikers have generally turned out to be pretty nice guys. I wouldn't go out of my way to piss any of them off, of course, but I see no reason to worry when one of them rumbles up to where I am.
If you want scary, try clean-cut businessmen talking on their cell phones in enormous SUVs. Those guys are casual killers. The Hell's Angels, not so much.
Like many of the other posters here, I think that if Google disappeared tomorrow, it would be an inconvenience at worst. Granted, it could be a big inconvenience for some people, but no one would end up homeless, in the hospital, or in the morgue.
The real risk is that Google is a publicly-owned company, so all of the personal data they've collected on, well, all of us would suddenly become an asset to be sold off to the highest bidder to pay off the investors and creditors. You may safely assume that the highest bidder probably won't have "don't be evil" as a motto. In fact, of the handful of companies that would have the resources to be the highest bidder, all of them have CEOs I'd like to install as payloads on rockets to the sun with their boards of directors duct-taped to the outside of the nosecone to serve as heat shields.
So yes, while I could move my email in about ten minutes, and hopefully someone would save the old Usenet archive, the idea that many of the details of the last ten years of my online life would be accessible to anyone with deep enough pockets is more than a little disquieting.
Ultimately, what I think killed the Mac in the 80's business market was that it was cute. Period. Technically, it was ahead of the IBM PC (though, ironically, it started out considerably behind Apple's own Apple IIgs line). The price was a little high, but not prohibitively so, and the screen was a little small, though they addressed that issue fairly early on. But it was still cute. Adorable, even.
Executives like to be thought of in many ways, but cute is not one of them. From the boomer management class' point of view, the Macintosh was just unmanly. There's a reason the ThinkPad still has a huge following among the management class: it's not shiny or cute. Thin is good -- as with the size of the briefcase, the less you have to carry, the higher your perceived rank -- but cute is not.
Nowadays, the cuteness of the Mac is neither as pronounced, nor its undesirability as strong -- though there's probably still a lot of resistance. But personal computers have been commoditized. No one in a position to make purchasing decisions for a large company is going to look at Macs, with their higher prices and diminished compatibility with the very deeply entrenched Microsoft infrastructure, and think that switching is a good idea. And arguably, it's not. How much of a productivity gain is the company going to get from the switch? Can anyone even offer a plausible estimate? And even if so, would that gain even come close to the cost of retraining, replacing all of the company's existing software licenses, buying new hardware, and managing the transition? Almost certainly not.
Apple's problem is precisely that they aren't insanely great, because that's exactly what they'd have to be to displace the existing Windows-based infrastructure at most companies. Even if they came to dominate the home market, it's not like the enterprise market gives a shit what appliances their employees use at home, whether those appliances are coffeemakers or laptops.
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This got +5 Insightful?
And you, sir, are not helping by demonizing those who think differently than you.
There wasn't any demonization in the original post. There's a difference between dismissal and demonization.
On the other side you have... those who ignore scientific evidence for financial gain.
...but that, on the other hand, comes close, in addition to being laughably irrational. People who are seriously interested in financial gain, if they go into the sciences at all, certainly aren't going to pick climatology as their cash cow. And once ensconced in climatology, there's no particular financial incentive to espouse any particular theory. "Hey, I really made a bundle off of my latest paper on upper-atmosphere particulates in the northern hemisphere mid-latitudes." Riiiiiiight.
As with religious fundamentalists who like to argue that science is a religion, absurd accusations of this sort usually say a great deal more about the accuser than the accused.
They could do two passes on places and use the double collected data in order remove people and other movable things. I think this is and practically theoretically feasible.
That would be harder than you think. The position of the camera could vary by several feet. If it's a windy day, you have foliage moving around. If the passes are not widely separated in time, many people would be in the same location -- cafe diners and sunbathers come to mind. If the passes are widely separated in time, then you have differences in the angle of the sun and changes in weather to take into account. It's much more difficult than taking a few pictures from a tripod over a couple of minutes and editing out pedestrians and cars.
Why is it IT people in general feel that they are somehow different than everyone else in the world? Are they really so ignorant and socially dysfunctional to not realize that they are no different than any other part of society in any way? Is this ignorance or a form a geek elitism, thinking that we geeks can't possibly be expected to suffer under the same working conditions of the rest of the pathetic planet of idiots?
Translation: I'm doing okay, so fuck the rest of you because you plainly suck.
There's at least one of these in every thread on employment issues. Why they get marked Insightful is a mystery to me.
But where will the next Microsoft come from?
Nowhere, hopefully.
In all seriousness, this is typical of the point of view that only large, publicly-owned companies matter and that consumers are just a resource to be harvested by investors in the stock market. Personally, I care a lot less about where the next near-monopoly comes from than where the next generation of quality software comes from. And since it's generally not coming from the existing large corporations, TFA is at least correct in saying that the disincentives to independent development are a bad thing. But this is primarily a bad thing for consumers; there are always plenty of opportunities for the investors, though any given industry -- such as software -- may not be a hot deal at any given time.
If a machine could write a Mozart sonata every bit as good as the originals, then what was so special about Mozart?
What was special about Mozart was that he could write music so good that it has taken nearly ten thousand years of human civilization and, in the past century, an unprecedented, billion-dollar industry backed by a huge number of brilliant scientists and engineers to begin to devise machines that write music good enough for someone to even ask the question.
If people are going to get upset every time one of our creations outdoes us, they had better plan on being upset a lot. Eventually, someone will write software that bitches about its unique place in nature better than we do, too.
As for art -- art is a mental stance on the part of the observer. It's how you look at (or listen to) something that makes it art. It doesn't matter whether that something was made by a human being, a lower animal, an extraterrestrial alien, or a machine, or even if it was the product of purely natural processes. There is nothing intrinsically artistic about any object. Art is a set of human mental processes.
I wondered when they'd get around to doing this. Frankly, I'm surprised they didn't try it sooner.
You can safely assume that if used clothing became fashionable amongst the moneyed classes, clothing manufacturers would try to force Goodwill and the Salvation Army out of business. Value is tied to scarcity, so trying to generate artificial scarcity is a pretty standard tactic. In a field like "intellectual property", where all scarcity is artificial, sharing is viewed as a sin.
Of course, the real irony here is that artificial scarcity itself is an attack on the capitalist free market. But the free market only appeals to the little guy. To established interests, the free market is a threat. Ergo, companies like Microsoft spend most of their time trying to suppress competition, which is almost guaranteed to work, as opposed to actually competing, which carries a much larger risk of failure.
You gonna pay extra for gas from a station that pays its clerks "living wage"?
Why not? We're already paying extra so oil company executives can enjoy salaries and bonuses in excess of what would be a living wage for some entire countries, which is itself small potatoes compared to the enormous sums of tax money that go towards using the military to run errands for them in the middle east.
I read it when you first published it, Bruce. It looks good on paper, but the failure of Open Source to do more than carve out some specialist professional niches -- its impact on the general consumer approaches zero -- strongly suggests an enormous gap between theory and practice.
Given the available resources, there is no reason Microsoft and Apple should even exist today. At least part of the blame for that, I believe, lies with the essentially self-serving and narcissistic worldview that has been at the heart of "Open Source" since its celebrated split with the Free Software camp (which has problems of its own), which has produced a lack of vision leading to fragmentation, infighting, and empty posturing. Had a FOSS faction emerged that oriented itself towards public service as its overriding consideration, it would -- and, I hope, could still -- have utterly changed the landscape, not only in computing, but in the wider society that is increasingly dependent upon it.
Instead, we have a bunch of silly games oriented around pretending to compete with large corporations, very little of which is real, much less significant in any way, and the few organizations that do have an initial modicum of success, like MySQL AB, stumble cluelessly into the maws of the established players because the game they think they are playing is not the game that is actually being played.
Every voluntary transaction introduces new wealth into an economy. It actually creates wealth.
In a certain metaphoric sense, yes, though not in any remotely concrete way, which would involve a violation of the Second Law.
The important detail that is being overlooked by such a simplistic account is the matter of who receives that wealth. In this case, a relatively small amount of wealth ended up in the hands of MySQL AB's shareholders, and a tremendous amount of wealth ended up in the hands of Oracle's shareholders. How? By effectively killing off one of their major competitors, a significant number of organizations will soon be obliged to pay Oracle for one of their products. In other words, the Oracle deal created costs for consumers who had previously been receiving a gift of wealth from MySQL AB. Far more people lose as a result of this deal than win.
That, too, is another predictable, essential feature of capitalism. Generosity is something that has to be rooted out and destroyed, because every time you behave altruistically, you are not just creating wealth for your beneficiaries, you are denying it to companies who want to sell what you are giving away. And it's worth noting that very few transactions are truly voluntary. For many businesses and organizations, an RDBMS is a need, just as food and shelter are needs for individuals. I may have a great deal of choice in where I buy dinner, but I am not free to forgo eating altogether. If there was adequate food growing in public parks for me to live on -- which is not a bad metaphor for FOSS -- then I would be genuinely free to choose. At the same time, vendors of food would almost certainly use their resources to lobby the local government to replace the fruit-bearing trees in the park with something inedible so they could more effectively create wealth.
Advocates of the free market like to argue that the market creates wealth, and again, this is partially true. But it is true to the extent that both parties, buyer and seller, are free to walk away from a transaction. The less freedom that either have, the more the transaction approaches a zero-sum game. The RDBMS market just took a large step in the direction of being a zero-sum game.
The corollary to this is that even if you are a much bigger fan of capitalism than I am, FOSS is to be applauded for making the market freer and more competitive. If consumers can choose a perfectly adequate free solution, commercial vendors are incentivized to make their products much better. That is actual wealth creation.
Companies don't make money by giving anything away, except in a very restricted set of circumstances where the gift is of no particular value and induces customers to spend actual money, or when there are substantial money-based strings attached. Why is this so hard for the FOSS world to grasp? A for-profit company, particularly a publicly-traded company, is always going to extract every last penny from its customers in exchange for the least value they will settle for. That's how capitalism works. Altruism is a pointless expense from the capitalist point-of-view, and companies that engage in much of it are going to lose their markets to companies that do not because those competitors are using their resources more efficiently.
I know this runs contrary to a lot of the wishful Adam Smith's invisible hand rainbows-and-unicorns thinking that is popular with a fairly large faction around here, but pixies don't make the flowers grow, either, and bitching about it isn't going to change anything. Capitalism works thus: you pay workers the least you can get away with in exchange for the most effort you can get out of them, to produce the least valuable products you can sell at the highest prices possible. Period. It does occasionally contribute to the common good, but because that contribution is itself an inefficiency in the system, there is a very strong incentive for all companies to reduce the amount of public good they do in order to cut costs and maximize profits.
Despite the window-dressing efforts of ESR and the "Open Source" faction, the underlying mechanism of FOSS (or whatever you want to call it) is altruistic charity. We make useful things and give them away. There's some money to be made on support, customization, dual-licensing, and systems integration, but it's negligible in terms of the oceans of cash flowing through the software industry. If a FOSS project significantly menaces any of the profit-streams of a large software company like Oracle or Microsoft, they are in a position to spend more money fighting it in an hour than you earn in a lifetime. Rarely, a FOSS project makes a significant dent in those profit streams: Apache, Firefox, Linux, and MySQL being the most successful.
If your overriding consideration is offering the best possible software package to the public as a gesture of personal generosity or some other personal commitment, and you happen to be both lucky and very, very good at what you do, you might well make a substantial dent. In some smaller markets, you might even become the dominant player. But that has to be your overriding consideration. If, as with MySQL AB, you are willing to sell your ownership in the software, you are back in the world of capitalism and no matter what bullshit assurances you receive from the army of salesmen and lawyers who will suddenly appear to offer them, all of the usual rules of the market apply, and you may rest assured that you are in no position to change how those rules work. You sold the goods, and from the point of view of the purchaser, you no longer exist.
If we are, as FOSS developers, committed to serving the public good, there's a lot we can do. If we're in it primarily for personal profit, 99% of us will get nowhere, and the remaining 1% will be bought out one by one. If you have something sufficiently valuable and you have a price, someone will eventually pay it. MySQL AB thought it could be an exception to the rule, and as a result, we are all a lot poorer.
Ok, so 5 units at 800,000 is 4 million. If they save 100,000/9 months, that's 133,333/year. So it'll only take them 30 years to repay the cost, assuming that money has no time value of course. Sounds like a poor investment to me.
If money is your only concern, then the only logical course of action is to exploit cheap, inefficient, non-renewable fuels as aggressively as possible. If the long-term survival of your species is taken into consideration, then things look a little different.
In any case, it is almost certainly unrealistic to expect that any future energy sources other than possibly fusion are going to be cost-competitive with the enormous free lunch we got by virtue of having evolved long after the Carboniferous era accumulated and concentrated tens of millions of years of energy in the form of oil, coal, and natural gas for us to burn through in a couple of centuries. As we spend the last of our inheritance, expect a bumpy ride as a planet full of spoiled trust fund kids have a hard time adjusting to working for a living.
But the entire "what exactly was the kid doing" tangent is really just an attempt to justify the school's bad behavior.
And that's the crux of the issue. The kid could have been running a meth lab for all that it matters. Public schools are not empowered to engage in warrantless video surveillance of private citizens in their own homes. A school can't even get a warrant. For that, they have to call the police, and the police have to go to a judge. And if there is anyone in the audience who wonders why schools aren't empowered to do this sort of thing, this case should answer that question.
But he cannot cowardly hide behind a disguise to kill. Maybe unfair to non-States, but those are the rules.
Had we followed those rules in the 1770's, we'd still be British subjects. The rules of war are devised by powerful state actors to magnify their strengths, prohibit the exploitation of their weaknesses, and minimize their losses. A small state actor -- or a sub-state entity -- which finds itself at war with a powerful state isn't cowardly for refusing to follow rules designed to ensure its defeat; it's intelligent. We leave aside the question of whether it was very smart for the Taliban to allow al Qaeda to provoke a war with the United States. But once engaged in a fight with the United States, the various Afghan factions have three options: fight according to the rules of war and guarantee their defeat, surrender immediately, or fight dirty. And given that option three worked against a Soviet invasion next to which the current American incursion is a pinprick, it's not surprising that they've decided to try it again.
Once you come to accept that, you will see that you post was, maybe unwillingly, a troll.
Once you come to accept that, you're just a chauvinistic cheerleader for whatever imperial power you've chosen to identify with to compensate for your lack of self-esteem, making empty legalistic excuses for modern warfare, and trying desperately to divert attention away from what modern warfare actually is: an exercise in which the overwhelming majority of casualties are not among the combatants of either side, but rather civilian bystanders in whatever third world shooting gallery the arms industry has found an opportunity to drive sales of their products.
This goes far beyond stupid school administrators, this is a blatant case of GOVERNMENT actors out of control, willfully violating the Constitution (and scores of other laws) and they need to be punished. Not just fired, everyone responsible for this need to spend some quality time in a "pound me in the ass" prison.
If I may be so bold as to interrupt your little robotic anti-government ideological dance, you might want to consider the inconsistency and irony involved in decrying the violation of constitutional protections against unlawful search and seizure while simultaneously clamoring for unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment. Or did they decide that anal rape was now okay at the last gathering of the local teabaggers?
It's also worth considering that private actors have vastly more leeway when it comes to invasion of privacy that the government. In many states, I can record telephone calls without the other party's knowledge, and in all of them, I can personally wear a hidden recording device on public or private property, and if I run a business that you patronize, there's hardly any limit to the information I can collect. The government requires warrants for that crap, and the failure of this particular local government agency to do so makes it possible for its victims to seek redress in the courts. If it had been a private business monitoring its employees, there'd be a lot less their victims could do about it.
But yeah, government is evil. So keep calling for the government to press criminal charges. And after driving them from government courts in government vehicles over government roads to a government prison, lock the government door and throw away the government key. I presume the ass-pounding will have to come from some imprisoned private entrepreneur, though.
The move to the Bay Area is chief exhibit #1 - why move an organization whose whole purpose, mission, and asset is a web page to one of the most expensive real estate locations on earth?
Easy -- close proximity and easy access to well-heeled donors.
If the French legislature -- or, for that matter, ours, the British, or the Australians -- were genuinely concerned about child pornography, there are any number of productive, real-world efforts they could pursue. On the technical side, they could fund research into automated image analysis, so computers could look for the stuff specifically instead of having uniformed thugs, er, gendarmes pawing through everyone's data manually. That, obviously, is not going to produce overnight results, so maybe the kiddie porn-obsessed countries of the world could take concrete action against the human trafficking that fuels so much of the child porn business. Of course, that would end up hurting business interests, whereas violating everyone's rights in a largely fruitless pursuit for evidence of crimes after the fact -- cast in the appropriate light, of course -- generates some free publicity prior to elections, without the unintended side effect of actually doing something to reduce a very valuable hot button issue.
We have the same kind of politics here with respect to abortion. Both sides fear a final resolution to the issue because it's such a huge source of votes. Consequently, the pro-life faction always stops just a little bit short of overturning Roe v. Wade, and the pro-choice faction never actually gets around to even discussing a constitutional amendment. The politicians (and professional pressure groups) involved want an unresolved controversy, lest the issue be reduced to driving as many people to the polls as the Runaway Slave Act does nowadays. The voters on both sides are quite sincere and feel strongly about their respective positions, but their elected representatives? Not so much.
Did you ever want to work a couple extra hours because you were really into what you were doing?
Seriously? No, never. I have a life. Part of which involves not ever telling my daughter that I prefer unpaid inner loop optimization to her company.
More often, I have the case of management that has mismanaged resources until they've backed the whole project into a corner, and they expect a lot of unpaid overtime from developers to code them out of that corner. And in the absence of a union, or even enforced labor laws, there's nothing you can do but suck it up and let your employer get something for nothing.
...but maybe the takeaway lesson from this whole affair is that it is impossible to remain ethical while knowingly doing business with an entity you know to be deeply corrupt. Sooner or later, you will find yourself faced with situations in which you directly or indirectly become party to unethical acts.
This is hardly limited to Google. We all help pay the salaries of the oppressive Chinese regime from the politburo on down to the prison camp guards every time we buy Chinese goods.
For relatively local trips, the difference amounts to a triviality
For relatively local trips, especially considering that you have to spend half the trip turned around and decelerating, there's going to be a point well before nine-tenths of C that the cost of further acceleration vastly outweighs the value of getting to the destination faster. Without knowing what the cost of energy is going to be if and when we can build propulsion systems capable of relativistic travel, I couldn't say where the point of diminishing returns would be, but for in-system travel, I'd be willing to bet it's not even an appreciable fraction of C.
Besides, it's a long, hard slog to Vland.
Eventually people do tend to get promoted beyond programming positions.
Sometimes, though it's obviously a minority, or managers would soon outnumber their subordinates. I've turned down lots of management positions. The narcissism of non-technical managers is such that they think everyone wants to be like them, so they are quite sincere in their attempts to reward good programmers with management positions. The problem is that there is next to no overlap in the skillsets, and most often, what you get is a crappy manager in exchange for a good programmer. There are exceptions, but they are definitely the exceptions, not the rule. Some will accept the promotion with the idea that they'll run things better, but then they discover that the cluelessness of the non-technical manager they are replacing wasn't all or even most of the problem: there's the cluelessness of the next level of management behind it.
As it happens, I actually can do a decent job of managing people. The problem is that I'd rather flip burgers. Consequently, I've stuck to programming and kept my skills updated, but at 39, I'm looking at the reality of a career change in the mid-term future. I'm not terribly worried about it -- I'll have the kid through college in four more years, and after that, I can afford to live on a much, much smaller paycheck.
Should it be that way? No, of course not. But absent some kind of organized labor movement -- which programmers are notoriously, irrationally averse to -- it's not going to change, as the people making the hiring and firing decisions are getting by just fine with the current system. There is then little choice but to adapt, or at least emigrate.
Food is very cheap in comparison to the value of a person's labor. The number of capitalists that could feed, clothe, and house people well for the price of their labor in the absence of government interference is vast.
Ah yes, the old "we'd live in a capitalist utopia if it wasn't for those meddling governments" argument -- the same governments that make it possible for capitalists to have a market in the first place, literate workers to produce the goods, the transport systems to move them, and so on. Capitalism is a superb market system, but it doesn't do crap else. That's why we have governments. The usual counterargument, that free enterprise would perform the services currently performed by government, has also been long-discredited. We tried that. We ended up with debtors' prisons and company towns with workers paid in scrip in near-serfdom.
The cost of producing, processing, transporting, and distributing food is worth well more than the value of currently starving peoples' labor. How do I know? Easy -- if it weren't, then capitalists would be, at the very least, trading food for ultra-cheap labor. If that labor was significantly more valuable than food, capitalists would be using bribery and, when necessary, private military companies to topple oppressive governments and establish order. After all, they use private armies to keep order in more than a few oil producing regions in Africa.
I do have a moral obligation to prevent someone from stealing from me, a moral obligation to oppose a government that steals from me in the name of the poor, and a moral obligation to refute someone like you who attempts to persuade me that my life is the property of someone else.
Typical free-market extremist equivocation. Your "moral obligation", as you describe it, isn't a moral obligation at all; it's simply your desire to serve yourself to the exclusion of all else, a complete inversion of morality. What you probably don't realize is that by surrendering your moral obligations, you are effectively in breach of the social contract, which relieves anyone else of any moral obligation not to simply overcome you with superior -- and, if necessary, lethal -- force to seize your property. But I suspect that someone as ethically bankrupt and short-sighted as yourself is incapable of seeing that there are no "natural rights", and that all rights are the creation of human beings by common consent. Outside of that framework, which involves -- ironically enough -- the purchase of rights with the coin of moral obligation, you're just another resource to be harvested.
Are you sure you want to live in that kind of world? I only ask because I've never seen a loud-mouthed, scrawny Ayn Rand disciple who would last a full minute in an amoral world governed by absolute self-interest.
Better prices for biofuel stock might drive up prices short term, but will lead to greater investment and supply long term.
Ah yes, the inevitable claim that magic market pixies will fix everything.
The fact is that world food production -- never mind potential production -- is already more than adequate to feed everyone. Market economics alone, however, is inadequate to distribute the food. People aren't starving because there isn't enough food, they're starving because they can't afford to buy food. There's no profit to be had in giving food to people who can't pay for it, so they go without.
I wish free market ideologues would figure out that the market is very good at doing things that are profitable, but not everything worth doing is profitable. The market is amoral and devoid of compassion. That's not necessarily a bad thing by itself, but it becomes so when we surrender every ethical obligation to the test of profitability.
I pretty much have to agree there. I ride a little yellow 150cc Vespa, and it's an odd day when one of the young men on the crotch rockets even deigns to acknowledge my presence, but the guys on enormous Harleys -- including members of the patch clubs -- always wave as we pass, and more than a few have struck up conversations at stops. While I'm sure there are thugs out there, the scariest-looking hardcore bikers have generally turned out to be pretty nice guys. I wouldn't go out of my way to piss any of them off, of course, but I see no reason to worry when one of them rumbles up to where I am.
If you want scary, try clean-cut businessmen talking on their cell phones in enormous SUVs. Those guys are casual killers. The Hell's Angels, not so much.
Like many of the other posters here, I think that if Google disappeared tomorrow, it would be an inconvenience at worst. Granted, it could be a big inconvenience for some people, but no one would end up homeless, in the hospital, or in the morgue.
The real risk is that Google is a publicly-owned company, so all of the personal data they've collected on, well, all of us would suddenly become an asset to be sold off to the highest bidder to pay off the investors and creditors. You may safely assume that the highest bidder probably won't have "don't be evil" as a motto. In fact, of the handful of companies that would have the resources to be the highest bidder, all of them have CEOs I'd like to install as payloads on rockets to the sun with their boards of directors duct-taped to the outside of the nosecone to serve as heat shields.
So yes, while I could move my email in about ten minutes, and hopefully someone would save the old Usenet archive, the idea that many of the details of the last ten years of my online life would be accessible to anyone with deep enough pockets is more than a little disquieting.
Ultimately, what I think killed the Mac in the 80's business market was that it was cute. Period. Technically, it was ahead of the IBM PC (though, ironically, it started out considerably behind Apple's own Apple IIgs line). The price was a little high, but not prohibitively so, and the screen was a little small, though they addressed that issue fairly early on. But it was still cute. Adorable, even.
Executives like to be thought of in many ways, but cute is not one of them. From the boomer management class' point of view, the Macintosh was just unmanly. There's a reason the ThinkPad still has a huge following among the management class: it's not shiny or cute. Thin is good -- as with the size of the briefcase, the less you have to carry, the higher your perceived rank -- but cute is not.
Nowadays, the cuteness of the Mac is neither as pronounced, nor its undesirability as strong -- though there's probably still a lot of resistance. But personal computers have been commoditized. No one in a position to make purchasing decisions for a large company is going to look at Macs, with their higher prices and diminished compatibility with the very deeply entrenched Microsoft infrastructure, and think that switching is a good idea. And arguably, it's not. How much of a productivity gain is the company going to get from the switch? Can anyone even offer a plausible estimate? And even if so, would that gain even come close to the cost of retraining, replacing all of the company's existing software licenses, buying new hardware, and managing the transition? Almost certainly not.
Apple's problem is precisely that they aren't insanely great, because that's exactly what they'd have to be to displace the existing Windows-based infrastructure at most companies. Even if they came to dominate the home market, it's not like the enterprise market gives a shit what appliances their employees use at home, whether those appliances are coffeemakers or laptops.