Rebuilding those factories won't happen without capital to fund the rebuilding of them. If America's dollar depletes to near nothingness in value when the government decides to start printing money Argentinian style, then there will be no capital available to do anything.
When there is no useful currency for establishing value for the products and services the populace creates, then trade stops completely and you revert back to a bartering type economy.
People (as well as foreign investors) need to have faith in a currency for them to use it, and if the government can basically tax your money through inflation as it sees fit, then nobody will have any confidence in that currency.
The currency of the United States is basically a fiat currency (I say "basically" because our currency is really backed by oil and the resources we can collect from around the world courtesy of our military), so if people want to cash in their dollars for hard assets once the dollar starts tanking, they will soon realize they are just holding a bunch of useless pieces of paper (or virtual money in the form of bank accounts).
Or have you been missing the massive numbers of illegal immigrants (AKA undocumented workers for the politically correct crowd) who have come to America lately? America for the most part has been completely settled from coast to coast since the dawn of the 20th century and like any other nation on earth, has a limit to the amount of natural resources that the nation can provide. China quite aptly realized that their nation was at risk of imploding because of having more people than their environment can support, yet the United States is doing its best to hit half a billion people in a couple of decades by absorbing everyone on this planet who feels that squatting on the United States is their god-given right.
Yes, the elitists of the United States love outsourcing for the jobs which can be outsourced so as to keep labor costs artificially low, but for keeping labor costs low for anyone involved in jobs which cannot be outsourced, they use insourcing in the form of both legal and illegal immigration to drive down the wages of relatively low-skilled jobs like construction and of course being an electrician.
Elitist internationalists swear no loyalty or oath to any country and rarely have any cultural or religious feelings that underpin a greater moral understanding of how you should treat human beings. They don't believe that there is anything special about being American, Indian, Russian, or Iranian in terms of culture and they really loathe the ideals of any of the major world religions whether the religion be Christian, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, etc.
To the internationalists, people are just economical objects whose services can be bought and sold like slaves. The only redeeming quality of these people is they are equal opportunists in spreading their evil around the world. They don't care what country you come from, what color your skin is, or what faith you practice (though they usually are suspect of anyone with religious ideals); rather all they care about is money and power and to them you are nothing but labor to exploit. To them, you are no more significant than an ant under a magnifying glass in the sense that they feel entitled to "burn you out" on a whim.
When people all around the world finally pull the wool out from over their eyes and see what is happening to their own nation, culture, and religion by this evil international cult of money worship that is hellbent on pitting the people of the world against each other for their own amoral greed, then maybe there will be hope for the regular Joe's, the regular Mohammed's, and the regular Taj's to stop fighting for the scraps of food left to them by the Gates', the Murdoch's, and the Walton's of the world.
Beating Saddam Hussein and his government was a monumental military success in spite of the debate about whether the invasion was executed on false pretenses or not.
The execution of the post-war operation however is self-evident as our experiment in "nation building" has been a monumental failure. On top of that the real reasons for invading Iraq which most Americans cannot come to terms with is really a cover for establishing bases in the middle-east for the long-term future. The Dubai Ports fiasco is also related to this and it all has to do with oil and the very survival of the American economy.
The real reality is that for the last 30 years, administration after administration and Congress after Congress has turned the United States into a big fat empire that bullies that maintains its standard of living by bullying the rest of the world through financial tribute. We do this through the American petrodollar. The moment that oil producing nations feel it is OK to abandon the dollar and start trading oil in Euros or some other currency, is the moment that the American economy goes into a severe depression that will make the Great Depression seem like a cakewalk. The signs are already there that America is on the ropes as currency speculators are now betting against the dollar because they see America as a beaten empire that can no longer force the rest of the world to purchase worthless fiat American dollars. Saddam Hussein was about to start trading in Euros and if America let him get away with it, then Saudi Arabia, Iran and everyone else would be tempted to do the same. But as long as America can defend its interests militarily, then countries from Japan to the nations that make up OPEC, are effectively coerced into doing business with the American dollar indefinitely.
America's military in other words allows our nation to essentially run up unlimited debts that we have little intention of ever paying. We don't need to invade nations, slaughter them completely, and take all their gold like the Romans did, rather we just need to force them to do their international business in dollars and most importantly force the oil rich nations to do their business in dollars.
So now the way this will likely play out is that George Bush at some point will be forced to pull out of Iraq or go down trying. The alternative is for America's economy to have the bottom fall out from under it. Maybe the conspiracy theorists are actually right in that it was George Bush's plan all along through "globalization" to hollow out Americas manufacturing base and allowed our internal infrastructure to crumble so that America's political stability turns into another Iraq once the shit hits the fan. Who really knows. But what is pretty certain is that tough times lay ahead for America when the petrodollar party is over. China knows this, Iran knows this, Russia knows this, Europe has the wool pulled over their eyes, and the rest of the world knows this and every nation looking to be a player in the 21st century is just patiently biding their time until America implodes from within.
There is a hell of a lot more at stake in Iraq than just terrorism which is often used as a strawman argument for the larger issues that are scarier than most people can imagine as they are complex and largely financial in nature. All our military might today will mean literally nothing if our country can't pay its troops or buy equipment tomorrow. At that point Al-Qaeda could invade us with an army of camel jockeys and we would fall.
People keep saying that once the salary of high-tech jobs gets too high in India, then those jobs will then be moved to Vietnam or China, or some other place with a whole lot of poor uneducated people who are willing to work for a roof over their head and a bowl of rice a day.
That may be true for low-tech jobs, but certainly not for high-tech jobs like software engineering, because one good high-tech worker is worth an infinite number of mediocre high-tech workers. You either have the skills and desire to do a high-tech job competently, or else you are a liability. It is really that simple.
In modern militaries, the same trend is happening and is most evident in China's modernization where they are trying to scale down the manpower of their military, while increasing its numbers of elite troops and weaponry (in other words, make their armed forces more like the professional army of the United States). If you are in the special forces, you either have the ability to get the job done, or else you are a liability to your team. Most high-tech jobs, including software engineering (my personal profession) is the same way.
Now, a high-tech military machine or a high-tech business will inevitably have to pay a premium for labor and tools to do their job, so if your war plans or your business plan cannot adequately utilize that expensive high-tech labor and scale it to meet your objectives, then the problem is not with the high-tech soldiers or workers, but the problem is with your war plan or your business plan.
The cry by CEO's like Bill Gates that there is not enough high-tech talent out there is really just their myopic view of the business world in that being the fat, dumb, and happy titans of industry that they are, they lack the kind of entrepreneurial creativity necessary to exploit expensive high-tech talent to its full profit making potential. They treat their existing employees like trained monkeys and assume that they are smart enough to write code all day long, yet are not smart enough to demand fair compensation for their profitable work, and then wonder why they have problems attracting qualified candidates at half the going market rate for high-tech talent.
So really, the problem is not that there is not enough high-tech talent out there, rather it is the slow lumbering industry giants like Microsoft have business models that are simply not profitable for the kind of premium in salaries that smart motivated people in high-tech generally command.
you believe the current administration actively lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (more specifically nuclear weapons of mass destruction), or whether they made an honest mistake by trusting Iraqi defectors with an axe to grind for the vast majority of their intelligence.
Either way, in my mind whether it be malice or incompetence on the current administrations's part with regards to establishing the pretext for invading Iraq and deposing Saddam Hussein, it doesn't really matter because if there was ever any good precedent for "pre-emptive war", well the current administration pretty much ruined it in the eyes of the rest of the world. The unfortunate political reality now is that if a real Hitleresque world leader were to arise sometime in the near future and only the United States could stand up to his regime before it is too late, the United States has unfortunately lost so much credibility with Iraq that it would be extremely difficult to ever engage in a pre-emptive war anytime in the foreseeable future.
The credibility of our government both domestically and internationally has been damaged so bad that George Bush or any of his other subordinates could tell the whole world that the earth revolves around the sun, and few people would actually believe him. After all, you can only cry wolf so many times before people stop listening.
In fact, there would be a problem if the Defense Department (or any other government bureaucracy that disseminates news to the public) did not do something like this.
In the old days, respectable news outlets could be counted on to check their sources and accurately report the news coming out of the defense department. The number of organizations deliving news to the populace was few, so if inaccurate information was given to the public, all it took was a phone call from the defense department press liason to a news outlet to straighten out the facts so that the news outlet had the opportunity to report the defense department's official version of events.
Now with the internet and bloggers on all sides of the political spectrum from Matt Drudge to Arianna Huffington, the loudest and most obnoxious rumors based strictly on hearsay from "unnamed sources" often become "facts" in the minds of the populace at large, due to the fact that a lie told often enough, often becomes truth in the minds of the public.
And with respect to governments and other international organizations that are hostile to the interests of the United States, including terrorist organizations like Al-Qaeda or Hezbollah, they have no moral or ethical qualms about feeding their politicized version of events to unprofessional amateur journalists that are desperate for attention and website hits, also known as "Bloggers".
Now, does that mean that the defense department does not actively put out propaganda of its own which is of dubious nature when it comes to its "truthiness"? Of course not, and how much "truth" you believe comes out of the defense department mostly comes down to how much you trust the defense department in the first place. If you are a hardcore liberal, then you probably are more likely to believe Osama Bin Laden's propaganda than anything Donald Rumseld says, and if you are of the neo-con flavor, then anything Donald Rumsfeld or George Bush or any of the generals say is gospel to you.
Nevertheless, it is ridiculous to get all worked up about whether or not the defense department is working to counter the propaganda of political interests both domestically and abroad who are willing to lie incessantly about the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan because they feel that the worse America does in Iraq, the more political brownie points their favored party gets in the long run.
The sad thing is that the people on both ends of the political spectrum will pass second hand "facts" from dubious sources around so much between each other that eventually they begin to believe their own bullshit and then when the real facts and truth come to the surface, they are unwilling to accept them (sort of like how the 9/11 World Trade Center conspiracy theories have been debunked so many times, yet many people continue to believe they were controlled demolitions by the Israeli Mossad).
Get your news from multiple and diverse news outlets and any reasonably intelligent person can sort out the bullshit from the facts and get a general idea of what the real truth happens to be. Of course, that requires more effort than listening to just one news outlet or another that tends to report the news in a way that just reaffirms your existing world view, but at least you will be more likely to spot propaganda when you see it.
Yah and like that really took off in a big way. This article seemed interesting until he mentioned that the so-called "metaverse" is merely vaporware at the moment.
Also, he seems to ignore the fact that VR headsets have real usability issues that anyone with any common sense would immediately realize. For instance, are you going to go into your VW (Virtual World) while on a train or subway to work, or will you just use your laptop or cell phone to communicate.
Even more important, if the "Web 2.0" buzzword means anything, it is that users now want to be able to create their own content as they see fit, rather than merely selecting an avatar and running around to "chat". If you want a more realistic experience than simply chat with someone else on the internet, then you hookup a webcam. If you want to parade around in fantasy land, well then there are the MMORPG's.
In addition, if I had a nickel for every 3D chat program I have seen over the years (not including games like EQ, WoW, and the Sims Online), I would be a dot com billionaire by now. The virtual reality cyberworld is nothing new, and all of the VW's that I have seen over the years have the same thing in common in that people find it kind of cool to mess around with for a few hours, but then they quickly lose interest as running around with a 3D avatar doesn't really accomplish anything productive. Once the novelty wears off on users, the 3D platform of the month goes the way of the dodo bird.
Last but not least, 2D interfaces are fast to interact with while 3D interfaces (or every single one I have seen) are inherently slow. 3D interfaces have potential uses in the future with respect to surgical operations and any task that requires manual control of mechanically operated tools, but other than that users will automatically prefer a simple 2D interface to running their standard applications over 3D interface since navigating a 3D virtual interface is a lot more work than a lot of technology pundits realize.
All in all, this article read more like a Microsoft press release for some upcoming software product that has yet to even seriously get into the planning stages, than anything worth posting on Slashdot.
Then the human species will not split even if the frequency of breeding between the haves and the have nots decreases significantly. If his hypothesis were correct, then Africans and Asians and Caucasians would already be classified as different species, but low and behold, Thomas Jefferson had no problem fathering children with his house slave of African descent, and thousands, perhaps millions of caucasian men from North America and Europe have no problem in fathering illegitimate children with the mothers of prostitutes from south east asian countries like Thailand. And then there are the modern Latin American nations which are a mix in varying degrees of African, Native American, and Caucasian descent.
Divergence of the species will never happen unless:
(A) There is a major nuclear war, worldwide natural disaster, or other calamity that depopulates the planet so much that human civilization is split up into distinct areas of the world where people have no ability to migrate at all. This of course is unlikely since our big brains allow us to creatively come up with the idea of boats for the purpose of island hopping, as well as the fact that human beings can survive in just about any climate on earth, which all means that humanity has very little chance of being geographically isolated from each other for a long enough period of time for new species of humans to occur.
(B) Human beings start colonizing other planets where travel between those planets becomes more and more disconnected. Think Vulcans and Romulans in this context. If there is even a small amount of interbreeding between planetary people's, then a new species of humans will simply not occur.
(C) A new species of humans is created artificially. Highly unlikely for a variety of reasons, because even though we have the technology to tinker with genes, being able to program entire genes, chromosomes, and lifeforms is something that medical science is so far away from that I doubt it will happen anytime in the next 1000 years. The sheer amount of information encoded in human DNA is just so vast that I doubt any one human being could ever master it in a way to reliably play god. Perhaps some tinkering might go on in the meantime, but these new "upgraded" genes, will undoubtedly be passed onto the general population unless they mutate the DNA so much that the human being containing them will become infertile. Kinda like when you combine a lion and a tiger to create a liger, or combining a horse and a donkey to create a mule, except in this case you are not cross breeding different species to create totally new DNA, but rather you are manipulating the genes in a fundamental way which may cause infertility and therefore an evolutionary dead end for this newly created human species.
Also, it is important to point out that human social behaviour has safeguards against the Morlock and Eloi scenario that the author alludes to. In just about every culture on the planet, women marry up and men marry down. The more intelligent and more educated a woman happens to be, the less desirable she becomes to MOST MEN (certainly not true of myself). The opposite is true for men, where the more intelligent and more educated a man happens to be, the more attractive he is to MOST WOMEN. This means that if a man and woman have two children named Adam and Eve, then the odds are that Adam will end up marrying a woman less intelligent than himself and Eve will end up marrying a man more intelligent than herself if they marry at all. If Adam is a lout, then he probably won't make much money and probably won't be attractive to most women (of course there are exceptions to this rule in some subcultures of America were drug dealing thugs are the ideal mates to the women in those communities). If Eve is really smart and makes more money than all of the guys in her peer group, these men will likely shy away from bothering with her because most men do not feel comfortable with a woman being the dominant person in a relationship.
If smart men were pick
Women want to have it both ways
on
IT and Divorce?
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You are simply damned if you do and damned if you don't when it comes to being a husband these days. With most women, you just simply can't win anymore.
Either you put 110% into your career and as a consequence of your long working hours you neglect the inflated emotional needs of your wife, or else you work a regular 9-5 job where you can make enough money to support yourself, but certainly not enough to support a family with a middle class lifestyle.
Most women don't consider men who don't make well beyond the national income average (around 40K a year) as marriage material, especially if they don't already own property. Try buying a home on 40K a year in a state like California. Good Luck!
Plus most women these days come into a marriage with massive debt in the form of student loans and other expenses they racked up in their early 20's, so they NEED a guy who makes a lot of money just to rescue them from their financial nightmare which usually is the direct result of student loans for a degree in liberal arts or some other area of study which won't get you the kind of job you need to pay off massive student loans.
Now, to make the kind of income you need just to be considered "Marriage Material", in America you usually need to work your butt off unless of course you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth (which is a very small minority of men out there). Of course, if you work your butt off then you are probably not going to be coming home at 6:00 PM for dinner every night because your job/career demands that you get the job done because the reality is that if you don't get the job done, then you are going to have to find a job that does not pay enough to be considered "Marriage Material" by most women.
There was once a time in America's history when it was socially acceptable for men to work their butt off all day long and women would not complain, so long as their man brought home the bacon and he was not off spending his limited free time and resources on hookers or some subordinate such as a secretary. But now, men are expected to make enough money to support a middle-class lifestyle, while at the same time be home at a predictable time as if that is how the professional world (and especially the IT world) actually works. If a man doesn't seem to be earning enough money, or else he is working too much, then those are immediate grounds for divorce. In fact, in any state with no-fault divorce, a woman can divorce you at a whim, take most of the marital assets and then have you paying child support out the wazoo for kids you will be lucky to see for even more than a few times a month. And yes many women work these days , but shortly after they get married and pop out a few kids, few wives want to ever return to work full-time again and the statistics bear that out.
Hey, but look on the bright side, at least your are not in the military. Divorce among military families since the Afghanistan and Iraq war has been spiraling out of control as brave men and fathers are routinely rewarded for their hard service with Dear John letters from their soon to be ex-wives because they have been "neglecting their family". Even worse than that, their wives get uncontested permanent full custody of the children as well so when a father returns from his tour of duty, he finds he no longer can live in his own home, and that everything he truly fought for, deserted him while he was away defending the country.
Whatever you do, don't blame yourself and your own hard work for your wife leaving you. There may be other mitigating circumstances in why she filed for divorce, but if your only crime is working hard to support your family, well then she is the one with the problem and not you.
The firing of employees by email is just another way to automate away just another management function. If people find it acceptable to be fired by an email, rather than a face to face meeting with a manager, then this means we are just one more step to automating away most of management in company decision making. Anything that eliminates the jobs of useless corporate butt munchers who are adept at convincing their superiors they are valued exployees in the company with "people skills" is not just a good thing, but a great thing.
This means that eventually expert systems and other AI based systems will execute all firings in a fair and objective fashion. If you fail to meet your quotas, the "Virtual CEO 9000" will fire you with a nice little trite email. If you meet your quotas, then the "Virtual CEO 9000" may indeed give you a raise. No performance review will ever again be necessary where you have to interview for keeping your own job every year through kissing up to your former human manager, rather the "Virtual CEO 9000" will instead be constantly evaluating your usefulness to the corporation in real-time and compensate you objectively.
Just imagine what this would do for a company like Oracle that has about 10 maybe 11 engineers doing all the real work in the company with about 50,000 managers whose idea of work is schmoozing with other like-minded individuals on a golf course all day long. The "Virtual CEO 9000" could cut out so much bloat that profits would go so through the roof that Larry Ellison could pay down the entire United States national debt of 65 trillion dollars or whatever it happens to be right now.
Seriously, I have not figured out why the board of directors at our largest corporations has not already outsourced or automated away executive management yet, when they happen to be the least efficient and least accountable group of people in your typical corporation these days. The "Virtual CEO 9000" doesn't need stock options to the tune of 400 million dollars like one of Exxon's former CEO's, instead it just needs some electricity to make the kind of decisions that your typical corporate bean counter makes based solely upon some Microsoft Excel spreadsheet calculation where they say "AHHHHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAAAAAA THERE IS THE FAT WE NEED TO CUT. THAT DARNED IT DEPARTMENT IS NOT SELLING ANYTHING AND INSTEAD IS JUST COSTING US A LOT OF MONEY, LET'S FIRE SOME EXPLOYEES AND SLASH THEIR BUDGET!".
Oh wait, I forgot that modern corporations usually have a board of directors that also just happens to be personal friends of the executive management they are supposed to be directing. Nevertheless, my point still stands that being managed by a cold, unfeeling, computer application like the "Virtual CEO 9000" is still better than being managed by the sociopaths that typically run our public companies today.
They won't have any people to go to the moon in 2030. They might have robots, but people will be a thing of the past. The demographics are really scary for countries like Japan, South Korea, Germany, Russia, and a whole bunch of other "westernized" nations that have apparently forgotten how to repopulate themselves and face a birth dearth that is unprecedented in world history. I guess countries like Japan are too busy thinking with planning for moon bases to be bothered with having families and children anymore.
Yah, history shows that when the elites allow society to rot from the bottom up, that society becomes weaker over time as the productive people have to pick up more and more slack for all the unproductive people. Eventually that society becomes weak enough that it gets conquered internally through a revolution of the mob, or externally from a society which has its act together.
Parents should be held accountable for their children and the reason parents don't care as much anymore about raising their kids properly is our welfare state absolves them of the need to raise their children properlyas it is merely a crutch in shielding irresponsible parents from any responsibility or accountability in raising their children.
In the distant past before we had Social Security and Medicare, when you got old your children would take care of you ASSUMING YOU RAISED THEM CORRECTLY. If you didn't have any children, well then it was tough luck as an old maid or old miser since you should reap what you sow. If you did have children and you raised them to be a bunch of selfish pricks with no concept of loyalty to their family, community, and country, well then you got what you deserved in old age as a parent as well.
Nowadays, the baby boomers think they can run up the federal deficit, the trade debt, and force the younger generations to deal with tax rates that make their lives extremely uncomfortable, all the while big mommy government hands the old farts checks for social security and medicare when most of these old farts clearly do not deserve it. Instead of living the good life at the expense of their children, they should of invested in their children in the form of not just money, but time, values, and good parenting to raise the next generation of productive Americans. Instead, due to their bang-up job of parenting, their children tend to mostly have an identity that does not go much beyond "ME ME ME ME". Great job baby boomers in raising a bunch of spoiled brats who have no loyalty to you when you get older, especially when you all move to Florida to enjoy that "good life".
In older generations older people did retire, but yet they still kept contributing to their community in the form of charitable works, handing their institutional wisdom down through their family and community, and helping their children with parenting in the form of being good grandparents. Now, many old farts think it is OK to just pack their stuff, move south, and retire to the good life and not give a hoot about the future generations since half of them think the apolocalypse is coming soon anyways.
In addition, they let Congress and our presidents over the last 30 years turn the United States into a debtor nation that produces very little relative to what it actually consumes. Ships from around the world come to the United States to dump products at our ports that are destined for Wal-Mart and then head back home largely empty. Who is responsible for this insanity? Well as a generation you can blame it all on the baby boomers and their lack of personal responsibility for everything in the United States actually makes Soylent Green seem like a great idea.
Though many baby boomers will probably die and go off to the heavenly where they will be rejected by St. Peter for being selfish pricks who left future generations to deal with the aftermath of their decadence, they better hope they had their bodies cremated or else their descendants will likely make it a yearly ritual to dig up their corpses and violate them in anger of the country and world they have left behind.
So, how about we start holding parents accountable for how they raise their children, rather than just leave them all to the wolves for raising as we do now in our broken school systems, family court bureaucracy, and whatever mind-numbing socialization propaganda happens to be on television for any given day.
in the forms of very trace amounts of magnetite in brain tissue. Whether or not this magnetite is actually used at all in human beings or not, there is no clear concensus on, however, at the moment it is believed that this magnetite has no effect on human beings and if this magnetite was ever used for sensing magnetic fields, it was in an ancestor of the human species going back many millions of years.
Sometimes I think the libertarian/anarchy majority here in Slashdot thinks that the community has no rights to dictate moral standards.
When a guy sleeps with your wife, he is not only doing real emotional harm to you, but there is a good chance you might end up raising a child that is not your own. In the United States, anywhere from 10-30% of fathers unwittingly raise children that are not their own. In other words, the mothers were sleeping around, and very often you can't tell if a child belongs to a particular father, until much later on in life if the skin color of biological father and the cuckholded father are the same.
Many community moral codes are based on common sense in keeping society functioning for the long-term, and in the absense of local democratic governments to create enforcable community standards and adjudicate them as well, then the vigilante element is inevitably going to fill that void. Though, obviously many of these Chinese vigilantes are taking some things too far in the heat of the moment, in spirit they are just trying to protect their community from the evil of selfish people acting solely in their interests. Sleeping with another man's wife is a totally selfish act which can have devastating aspects for the community as a whole. Just look at African-American America right now where 70% of the children are born out of wedlock and then correlate that statistic to the statistics of crime and other leading social ills and anyone not taking the idea that "correlation does not equal causation" to the extreme can clearly see that broken down families from having kids out of wedlock is bad for the community, and therefore evil if you postulate that evil is any selfish act which does not benefit the community as a whole.
Every time a married woman goes behind the back of a married man (or vice versa), there is a risk of bastard children being raised if a pregnancy ensues. Furthermore, should a cuckholded man be expected to raise the offspring of another man? Should he be forced to pay child support for a kid that is not his? What is a guy to do in that situation other than to leave his cheating wife (assuming you don't live in a country where stoning is permitted)?
If China was a democracy and people could count on their government to uphold "community standards" as opposed to simply "communist standards", then these sort of vigilante witch hunts would rarely materialize. The United States (my nation) right now has the opposite problem of having a Jerry Springer "Who Are You To Judge Me" type mentality that is pervasive in our country and has absolved much of the public from any sense of personal responsibility or duty to their community. This is having disastrous effects that are slowly bubbling up in terms of worse education, family and therefore community stability, as well as a common cultural identity which doesn't matter much when economic times are good, but definitely matters when economic times are bad. If the people of a nation have common cultural values of shared sacrifice like you had during the Great Depression where families stuck together and pooled their resources, then the people can get through anything, but if everyone has a "every man for himself" type mentality, well then you get the kind of behaviour you found in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina.
This delusional libertarian/anarchist mindset that seems to be pervasive here on Slashdot has me wondering if some people need to get some more sunshine in their life and stop assuming that their introverted personality of avoidance realistically applies to the rest of humanity.
Is GE the only company out there who has to comply with SOX? What about the companies spending up to 10% of their revenue for 404 compliance. Just as Wal-Mart can have economies of scale when doing retail operations, any megacorp has an economy of scale in complying with SOX. Excessive government regulation has a crippling effect on small businesses and medium-sized businesses that you never hear about from the sensationalist news outlets out there. These companies and their owners are invisible as far as the masses are concerned.
All the masses care about is that guys like Kenneth Lay get stuck in a "Federal Pound You In The Ass Prison", while a lot of other companies are forced to waste scarce resources they could be using to hire more employees or else be forced into the dire choice of offshoring or inevitable bankruptcy.
It is ironic that a lot of Slashdotters seem to complain about being the victims of offshoring, but at the same time they defend laws which help to eliminate their jobs at the same time.
is in spite of the complaining by companies in the Fortune 500, the relative costs of SOX are low for mega-corporations like General Electric compared to a medium-sized business looking to try and compete with the big guys. Just as many well-intentioned business regulations are designed to keep the biggest and the baddest companies from screwing the public, the biggest unintended consequence of most business regulations is that these same regulations stifle up and coming competition whose resources might be scarce and the difference between spending 33 million dollars on SOX compliance is the difference between being a viable competitor in some market and being bankrupt.
Of course SOX doesn't affect small businesses, but if you ever want to become grow and become a big business, then you are taking an extra risk once you reach the threshold of employees that forces you to effectively making paper log files of every single form of correspondence in the company. For the Fortune 500 guys, not having to worry about competition from new competition is a big win for them, and for any aspiring entrepreneur a big loss that makes you wonder if you would be better off expatriating to another country and starting your business offshore where the success or failure of your business is not tied exclusively to how efficient you are at dealing with government regulations.
I mean, if you are going to let in guilds based on sexual orientation why not allow guilds for epople who just want to engage in a little farmplay?
Plus, beastiality friendly guilds would actually have more real world to WoW world value than gay guilds because several of the races are animal races to begin with.
I mean, just imagine a level male Dwarven Paladin mounting a female Tauren Shaman.
Just imagine if the average script kiddie could harness this technology with easily accessible tools to basically play god. Maybe that sounds cool to some people, but it sounds more like the potential death of mankind to me.
I mean, if you thought Spanish Fly and Roofies were a big deal on college campuses, just wait till you have people tailoring these substances to programmatically alter a woman's body chemistry in a way which makes the average Slashdot geek irresistable to all of the women on the planet.
would be this activity.
Though, I will admit I have met many interesting people in online gaming, some of whom ironically turned out to be business worthy people, for the most part online role playing gaming is an activity where the future heart attack and type 2 diabetes club of the world hang out and get fat with each other.
Golf used to be an activity where you got a decent workout because you actually had to walk all over the place to chase the ball you just hit, as well as carry your clubs, but now you have golf carts which basically have turned the sport into just another activity for rich out of shape fat people with no athletic talent to go pretend they are good at something other than foreclosing on the homes of middle-class and poor people so that they can build more golf courses.
I suppose the fact that online gaming doesn't take up any real estate is a good thing, but then again any activity promoting collective vegetation of the mind among likeminded people is a bad thing as well.
for having a small wang or else just a low sense of self-esteem. Real men don't need BMW's, McMansions, and other superficial crap to get laid and more importantly be happy. I see this all the time in my profession and the sad thing is these guys would be a lot more happy if they saved their money and didn't live beyond their means and invested that money in some weights to lift at home (geeks tend to be introverts which means they are gym averse), maybe a decent multivitamin, and some good healthy food.
A lot of geeks spend zero time on taking care of themselves and either look like Skeletor at one extreme or else Chris Farley at the other extreme, yet they parade their money around like women should be attracted to them like flies are to a dung heap. The sad thing is women are attracted to their money, and when they get suckered into marrying and find out a year or two later that their wife now has a bad boy boyfriend on the side, while the divorce papers are in the mail, they scratch their heads and wonder how it could happen to them.
Just because you are involved in technology, does not give you license to be a weakling because you think the size of your brain is the only thing that counts. In reality, it helps to cover all the bases which means not being lazy with your health or your social skills. Too many geeks spend zero time in their 20's improving their social skills with both men and women, and then when they finally get enough money, they wonder why everyone is still laughing at them.
Most of these "geeks" are good guys and they mistakenly follow the celebrity culture like many superficial women do and think that they need to be "ghetto fabulous" or "metrosexual" for people, and especially women to take interest in them or at the very least respect them. Maybe these "geeks" had shitty male role models when they were growing up, or maybe their dad was a helpless geek, but when I talk to a lot of my peers about how the world really works, they just seem dumbfounded and immune to change.
If god could take Chuck Norris and cut him up into little pieces and put a little piece of him in every geek guy out there, then the world would be a much better place. Until that happens, you are going to have geeks earning 100K a year and spending the money like they are millionaires, and then when their job gets outsourced and they are broke they will come here on Slashdot and whine about how bad their life sucks, when they should of just been a little more frugal and conservative with their money when the going was good.
The constitution originally said nothing about the right of the federal government to tax the income of its citizens, but if the government is going to tax citizens, the last thing people want is for their tax dollars to be given to support the non-citizen welfare state in this country due to illegal immigration.
Furthermore, if an illegal immigrant crashes into your car, or damages your property, or defames your character, how are you going to sue someone who cannot be tracked down to receive a summons and who has no real identity anyways since they are here illegally?
Of course, you could make the argument that you don't want your tax dollars being used to finance the rebuilding Iraq, but that is "foreign aid" which is another debate entirely.
The real ID act is a necessary evil to deal with the long-term problem of massive illegal immigration into the United States which you can thank lately almost exclusively to George Bush's non-enforcement and political appeasement to much of the hispanic community in the United States which supports open borders as well as key business industries which use "slave" errr I mean "illegal" labor to do their bidding. It sucks that things have gotten this bad, but that is the price citizens in this country have to face for allowing their leaders to get away with failing to do the most fundamental basic job of a national government and that is to protect its borders from invading forces.
If common criminals, gang members, and illegal aliens can just cross over into the United States whenever they want and can't be prosecuted for their illegal status thanks to sanctuary laws in many municipalities with correct governments, what on earth is next the Mexican military itself?
Slashdot Mirror
Rebuilding those factories won't happen without capital to fund the rebuilding of them. If America's dollar depletes to near nothingness in value when the government decides to start printing money Argentinian style, then there will be no capital available to do anything.
When there is no useful currency for establishing value for the products and services the populace creates, then trade stops completely and you revert back to a bartering type economy.
People (as well as foreign investors) need to have faith in a currency for them to use it, and if the government can basically tax your money through inflation as it sees fit, then nobody will have any confidence in that currency.
The currency of the United States is basically a fiat currency (I say "basically" because our currency is really backed by oil and the resources we can collect from around the world courtesy of our military), so if people want to cash in their dollars for hard assets once the dollar starts tanking, they will soon realize they are just holding a bunch of useless pieces of paper (or virtual money in the form of bank accounts).
Or have you been missing the massive numbers of illegal immigrants (AKA undocumented workers for the politically correct crowd) who have come to America lately? America for the most part has been completely settled from coast to coast since the dawn of the 20th century and like any other nation on earth, has a limit to the amount of natural resources that the nation can provide. China quite aptly realized that their nation was at risk of imploding because of having more people than their environment can support, yet the United States is doing its best to hit half a billion people in a couple of decades by absorbing everyone on this planet who feels that squatting on the United States is their god-given right.
Yes, the elitists of the United States love outsourcing for the jobs which can be outsourced so as to keep labor costs artificially low, but for keeping labor costs low for anyone involved in jobs which cannot be outsourced, they use insourcing in the form of both legal and illegal immigration to drive down the wages of relatively low-skilled jobs like construction and of course being an electrician.
Elitist internationalists swear no loyalty or oath to any country and rarely have any cultural or religious feelings that underpin a greater moral understanding of how you should treat human beings. They don't believe that there is anything special about being American, Indian, Russian, or Iranian in terms of culture and they really loathe the ideals of any of the major world religions whether the religion be Christian, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, etc.
To the internationalists, people are just economical objects whose services can be bought and sold like slaves. The only redeeming quality of these people is they are equal opportunists in spreading their evil around the world. They don't care what country you come from, what color your skin is, or what faith you practice (though they usually are suspect of anyone with religious ideals); rather all they care about is money and power and to them you are nothing but labor to exploit. To them, you are no more significant than an ant under a magnifying glass in the sense that they feel entitled to "burn you out" on a whim.
When people all around the world finally pull the wool out from over their eyes and see what is happening to their own nation, culture, and religion by this evil international cult of money worship that is hellbent on pitting the people of the world against each other for their own amoral greed, then maybe there will be hope for the regular Joe's, the regular Mohammed's, and the regular Taj's to stop fighting for the scraps of food left to them by the Gates', the Murdoch's, and the Walton's of the world.
Beating Saddam Hussein and his government was a monumental military success in spite of the debate about whether the invasion was executed on false pretenses or not.
The execution of the post-war operation however is self-evident as our experiment in "nation building" has been a monumental failure. On top of that the real reasons for invading Iraq which most Americans cannot come to terms with is really a cover for establishing bases in the middle-east for the long-term future. The Dubai Ports fiasco is also related to this and it all has to do with oil and the very survival of the American economy.
The real reality is that for the last 30 years, administration after administration and Congress after Congress has turned the United States into a big fat empire that bullies that maintains its standard of living by bullying the rest of the world through financial tribute. We do this through the American petrodollar. The moment that oil producing nations feel it is OK to abandon the dollar and start trading oil in Euros or some other currency, is the moment that the American economy goes into a severe depression that will make the Great Depression seem like a cakewalk. The signs are already there that America is on the ropes as currency speculators are now betting against the dollar because they see America as a beaten empire that can no longer force the rest of the world to purchase worthless fiat American dollars. Saddam Hussein was about to start trading in Euros and if America let him get away with it, then Saudi Arabia, Iran and everyone else would be tempted to do the same. But as long as America can defend its interests militarily, then countries from Japan to the nations that make up OPEC, are effectively coerced into doing business with the American dollar indefinitely.
America's military in other words allows our nation to essentially run up unlimited debts that we have little intention of ever paying. We don't need to invade nations, slaughter them completely, and take all their gold like the Romans did, rather we just need to force them to do their international business in dollars and most importantly force the oil rich nations to do their business in dollars.
So now the way this will likely play out is that George Bush at some point will be forced to pull out of Iraq or go down trying. The alternative is for America's economy to have the bottom fall out from under it. Maybe the conspiracy theorists are actually right in that it was George Bush's plan all along through "globalization" to hollow out Americas manufacturing base and allowed our internal infrastructure to crumble so that America's political stability turns into another Iraq once the shit hits the fan. Who really knows. But what is pretty certain is that tough times lay ahead for America when the petrodollar party is over. China knows this, Iran knows this, Russia knows this, Europe has the wool pulled over their eyes, and the rest of the world knows this and every nation looking to be a player in the 21st century is just patiently biding their time until America implodes from within.
There is a hell of a lot more at stake in Iraq than just terrorism which is often used as a strawman argument for the larger issues that are scarier than most people can imagine as they are complex and largely financial in nature. All our military might today will mean literally nothing if our country can't pay its troops or buy equipment tomorrow. At that point Al-Qaeda could invade us with an army of camel jockeys and we would fall.
People keep saying that once the salary of high-tech jobs gets too high in India, then those jobs will then be moved to Vietnam or China, or some other place with a whole lot of poor uneducated people who are willing to work for a roof over their head and a bowl of rice a day.
That may be true for low-tech jobs, but certainly not for high-tech jobs like software engineering, because one good high-tech worker is worth an infinite number of mediocre high-tech workers. You either have the skills and desire to do a high-tech job competently, or else you are a liability. It is really that simple.
In modern militaries, the same trend is happening and is most evident in China's modernization where they are trying to scale down the manpower of their military, while increasing its numbers of elite troops and weaponry (in other words, make their armed forces more like the professional army of the United States). If you are in the special forces, you either have the ability to get the job done, or else you are a liability to your team. Most high-tech jobs, including software engineering (my personal profession) is the same way.
Now, a high-tech military machine or a high-tech business will inevitably have to pay a premium for labor and tools to do their job, so if your war plans or your business plan cannot adequately utilize that expensive high-tech labor and scale it to meet your objectives, then the problem is not with the high-tech soldiers or workers, but the problem is with your war plan or your business plan.
The cry by CEO's like Bill Gates that there is not enough high-tech talent out there is really just their myopic view of the business world in that being the fat, dumb, and happy titans of industry that they are, they lack the kind of entrepreneurial creativity necessary to exploit expensive high-tech talent to its full profit making potential. They treat their existing employees like trained monkeys and assume that they are smart enough to write code all day long, yet are not smart enough to demand fair compensation for their profitable work, and then wonder why they have problems attracting qualified candidates at half the going market rate for high-tech talent.
So really, the problem is not that there is not enough high-tech talent out there, rather it is the slow lumbering industry giants like Microsoft have business models that are simply not profitable for the kind of premium in salaries that smart motivated people in high-tech generally command.
you believe the current administration actively lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (more specifically nuclear weapons of mass destruction), or whether they made an honest mistake by trusting Iraqi defectors with an axe to grind for the vast majority of their intelligence.
Either way, in my mind whether it be malice or incompetence on the current administrations's part with regards to establishing the pretext for invading Iraq and deposing Saddam Hussein, it doesn't really matter because if there was ever any good precedent for "pre-emptive war", well the current administration pretty much ruined it in the eyes of the rest of the world. The unfortunate political reality now is that if a real Hitleresque world leader were to arise sometime in the near future and only the United States could stand up to his regime before it is too late, the United States has unfortunately lost so much credibility with Iraq that it would be extremely difficult to ever engage in a pre-emptive war anytime in the foreseeable future.
The credibility of our government both domestically and internationally has been damaged so bad that George Bush or any of his other subordinates could tell the whole world that the earth revolves around the sun, and few people would actually believe him. After all, you can only cry wolf so many times before people stop listening.
In fact, there would be a problem if the Defense Department (or any other government bureaucracy that disseminates news to the public) did not do something like this.
In the old days, respectable news outlets could be counted on to check their sources and accurately report the news coming out of the defense department. The number of organizations deliving news to the populace was few, so if inaccurate information was given to the public, all it took was a phone call from the defense department press liason to a news outlet to straighten out the facts so that the news outlet had the opportunity to report the defense department's official version of events.
Now with the internet and bloggers on all sides of the political spectrum from Matt Drudge to Arianna Huffington, the loudest and most obnoxious rumors based strictly on hearsay from "unnamed sources" often become "facts" in the minds of the populace at large, due to the fact that a lie told often enough, often becomes truth in the minds of the public.
And with respect to governments and other international organizations that are hostile to the interests of the United States, including terrorist organizations like Al-Qaeda or Hezbollah, they have no moral or ethical qualms about feeding their politicized version of events to unprofessional amateur journalists that are desperate for attention and website hits, also known as "Bloggers".
Now, does that mean that the defense department does not actively put out propaganda of its own which is of dubious nature when it comes to its "truthiness"? Of course not, and how much "truth" you believe comes out of the defense department mostly comes down to how much you trust the defense department in the first place. If you are a hardcore liberal, then you probably are more likely to believe Osama Bin Laden's propaganda than anything Donald Rumseld says, and if you are of the neo-con flavor, then anything Donald Rumsfeld or George Bush or any of the generals say is gospel to you.
Nevertheless, it is ridiculous to get all worked up about whether or not the defense department is working to counter the propaganda of political interests both domestically and abroad who are willing to lie incessantly about the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan because they feel that the worse America does in Iraq, the more political brownie points their favored party gets in the long run.
The sad thing is that the people on both ends of the political spectrum will pass second hand "facts" from dubious sources around so much between each other that eventually they begin to believe their own bullshit and then when the real facts and truth come to the surface, they are unwilling to accept them (sort of like how the 9/11 World Trade Center conspiracy theories have been debunked so many times, yet many people continue to believe they were controlled demolitions by the Israeli Mossad).
Get your news from multiple and diverse news outlets and any reasonably intelligent person can sort out the bullshit from the facts and get a general idea of what the real truth happens to be. Of course, that requires more effort than listening to just one news outlet or another that tends to report the news in a way that just reaffirms your existing world view, but at least you will be more likely to spot propaganda when you see it.
Yah and like that really took off in a big way. This article seemed interesting until he mentioned that the so-called "metaverse" is merely vaporware at the moment.
Also, he seems to ignore the fact that VR headsets have real usability issues that anyone with any common sense would immediately realize. For instance, are you going to go into your VW (Virtual World) while on a train or subway to work, or will you just use your laptop or cell phone to communicate.
Even more important, if the "Web 2.0" buzzword means anything, it is that users now want to be able to create their own content as they see fit, rather than merely selecting an avatar and running around to "chat". If you want a more realistic experience than simply chat with someone else on the internet, then you hookup a webcam. If you want to parade around in fantasy land, well then there are the MMORPG's.
In addition, if I had a nickel for every 3D chat program I have seen over the years (not including games like EQ, WoW, and the Sims Online), I would be a dot com billionaire by now. The virtual reality cyberworld is nothing new, and all of the VW's that I have seen over the years have the same thing in common in that people find it kind of cool to mess around with for a few hours, but then they quickly lose interest as running around with a 3D avatar doesn't really accomplish anything productive. Once the novelty wears off on users, the 3D platform of the month goes the way of the dodo bird.
Last but not least, 2D interfaces are fast to interact with while 3D interfaces (or every single one I have seen) are inherently slow. 3D interfaces have potential uses in the future with respect to surgical operations and any task that requires manual control of mechanically operated tools, but other than that users will automatically prefer a simple 2D interface to running their standard applications over 3D interface since navigating a 3D virtual interface is a lot more work than a lot of technology pundits realize.
All in all, this article read more like a Microsoft press release for some upcoming software product that has yet to even seriously get into the planning stages, than anything worth posting on Slashdot.
Then the human species will not split even if the frequency of breeding between the haves and the have nots decreases significantly. If his hypothesis were correct, then Africans and Asians and Caucasians would already be classified as different species, but low and behold, Thomas Jefferson had no problem fathering children with his house slave of African descent, and thousands, perhaps millions of caucasian men from North America and Europe have no problem in fathering illegitimate children with the mothers of prostitutes from south east asian countries like Thailand. And then there are the modern Latin American nations which are a mix in varying degrees of African, Native American, and Caucasian descent.
Divergence of the species will never happen unless:
(A) There is a major nuclear war, worldwide natural disaster, or other calamity that depopulates the planet so much that human civilization is split up into distinct areas of the world where people have no ability to migrate at all. This of course is unlikely since our big brains allow us to creatively come up with the idea of boats for the purpose of island hopping, as well as the fact that human beings can survive in just about any climate on earth, which all means that humanity has very little chance of being geographically isolated from each other for a long enough period of time for new species of humans to occur.
(B) Human beings start colonizing other planets where travel between those planets becomes more and more disconnected. Think Vulcans and Romulans in this context. If there is even a small amount of interbreeding between planetary people's, then a new species of humans will simply not occur.
(C) A new species of humans is created artificially. Highly unlikely for a variety of reasons, because even though we have the technology to tinker with genes, being able to program entire genes, chromosomes, and lifeforms is something that medical science is so far away from that I doubt it will happen anytime in the next 1000 years. The sheer amount of information encoded in human DNA is just so vast that I doubt any one human being could ever master it in a way to reliably play god. Perhaps some tinkering might go on in the meantime, but these new "upgraded" genes, will undoubtedly be passed onto the general population unless they mutate the DNA so much that the human being containing them will become infertile. Kinda like when you combine a lion and a tiger to create a liger, or combining a horse and a donkey to create a mule, except in this case you are not cross breeding different species to create totally new DNA, but rather you are manipulating the genes in a fundamental way which may cause infertility and therefore an evolutionary dead end for this newly created human species.
Also, it is important to point out that human social behaviour has safeguards against the Morlock and Eloi scenario that the author alludes to. In just about every culture on the planet, women marry up and men marry down. The more intelligent and more educated a woman happens to be, the less desirable she becomes to MOST MEN (certainly not true of myself). The opposite is true for men, where the more intelligent and more educated a man happens to be, the more attractive he is to MOST WOMEN. This means that if a man and woman have two children named Adam and Eve, then the odds are that Adam will end up marrying a woman less intelligent than himself and Eve will end up marrying a man more intelligent than herself if they marry at all. If Adam is a lout, then he probably won't make much money and probably won't be attractive to most women (of course there are exceptions to this rule in some subcultures of America were drug dealing thugs are the ideal mates to the women in those communities). If Eve is really smart and makes more money than all of the guys in her peer group, these men will likely shy away from bothering with her because most men do not feel comfortable with a woman being the dominant person in a relationship.
If smart men were pick
You are simply damned if you do and damned if you don't when it comes to being a husband these days. With most women, you just simply can't win anymore.
Either you put 110% into your career and as a consequence of your long working hours you neglect the inflated emotional needs of your wife, or else you work a regular 9-5 job where you can make enough money to support yourself, but certainly not enough to support a family with a middle class lifestyle.
Most women don't consider men who don't make well beyond the national income average (around 40K a year) as marriage material, especially if they don't already own property. Try buying a home on 40K a year in a state like California. Good Luck!
Plus most women these days come into a marriage with massive debt in the form of student loans and other expenses they racked up in their early 20's, so they NEED a guy who makes a lot of money just to rescue them from their financial nightmare which usually is the direct result of student loans for a degree in liberal arts or some other area of study which won't get you the kind of job you need to pay off massive student loans.
Now, to make the kind of income you need just to be considered "Marriage Material", in America you usually need to work your butt off unless of course you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth (which is a very small minority of men out there). Of course, if you work your butt off then you are probably not going to be coming home at 6:00 PM for dinner every night because your job/career demands that you get the job done because the reality is that if you don't get the job done, then you are going to have to find a job that does not pay enough to be considered "Marriage Material" by most women.
There was once a time in America's history when it was socially acceptable for men to work their butt off all day long and women would not complain, so long as their man brought home the bacon and he was not off spending his limited free time and resources on hookers or some subordinate such as a secretary. But now, men are expected to make enough money to support a middle-class lifestyle, while at the same time be home at a predictable time as if that is how the professional world (and especially the IT world) actually works. If a man doesn't seem to be earning enough money, or else he is working too much, then those are immediate grounds for divorce. In fact, in any state with no-fault divorce, a woman can divorce you at a whim, take most of the marital assets and then have you paying child support out the wazoo for kids you will be lucky to see for even more than a few times a month. And yes many women work these days , but shortly after they get married and pop out a few kids, few wives want to ever return to work full-time again and the statistics bear that out.
Hey, but look on the bright side, at least your are not in the military. Divorce among military families since the Afghanistan and Iraq war has been spiraling out of control as brave men and fathers are routinely rewarded for their hard service with Dear John letters from their soon to be ex-wives because they have been "neglecting their family". Even worse than that, their wives get uncontested permanent full custody of the children as well so when a father returns from his tour of duty, he finds he no longer can live in his own home, and that everything he truly fought for, deserted him while he was away defending the country.
Whatever you do, don't blame yourself and your own hard work for your wife leaving you. There may be other mitigating circumstances in why she filed for divorce, but if your only crime is working hard to support your family, well then she is the one with the problem and not you.
The firing of employees by email is just another way to automate away just another management function. If people find it acceptable to be fired by an email, rather than a face to face meeting with a manager, then this means we are just one more step to automating away most of management in company decision making. Anything that eliminates the jobs of useless corporate butt munchers who are adept at convincing their superiors they are valued exployees in the company with "people skills" is not just a good thing, but a great thing.
This means that eventually expert systems and other AI based systems will execute all firings in a fair and objective fashion. If you fail to meet your quotas, the "Virtual CEO 9000" will fire you with a nice little trite email. If you meet your quotas, then the "Virtual CEO 9000" may indeed give you a raise. No performance review will ever again be necessary where you have to interview for keeping your own job every year through kissing up to your former human manager, rather the "Virtual CEO 9000" will instead be constantly evaluating your usefulness to the corporation in real-time and compensate you objectively.
Just imagine what this would do for a company like Oracle that has about 10 maybe 11 engineers doing all the real work in the company with about 50,000 managers whose idea of work is schmoozing with other like-minded individuals on a golf course all day long. The "Virtual CEO 9000" could cut out so much bloat that profits would go so through the roof that Larry Ellison could pay down the entire United States national debt of 65 trillion dollars or whatever it happens to be right now.
Seriously, I have not figured out why the board of directors at our largest corporations has not already outsourced or automated away executive management yet, when they happen to be the least efficient and least accountable group of people in your typical corporation these days. The "Virtual CEO 9000" doesn't need stock options to the tune of 400 million dollars like one of Exxon's former CEO's, instead it just needs some electricity to make the kind of decisions that your typical corporate bean counter makes based solely upon some Microsoft Excel spreadsheet calculation where they say "AHHHHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAAAAAA THERE IS THE FAT WE NEED TO CUT. THAT DARNED IT DEPARTMENT IS NOT SELLING ANYTHING AND INSTEAD IS JUST COSTING US A LOT OF MONEY, LET'S FIRE SOME EXPLOYEES AND SLASH THEIR BUDGET!".
Oh wait, I forgot that modern corporations usually have a board of directors that also just happens to be personal friends of the executive management they are supposed to be directing. Nevertheless, my point still stands that being managed by a cold, unfeeling, computer application like the "Virtual CEO 9000" is still better than being managed by the sociopaths that typically run our public companies today.
They won't have any people to go to the moon in 2030. They might have robots, but people will be a thing of the past. The demographics are really scary for countries like Japan, South Korea, Germany, Russia, and a whole bunch of other "westernized" nations that have apparently forgotten how to repopulate themselves and face a birth dearth that is unprecedented in world history. I guess countries like Japan are too busy thinking with planning for moon bases to be bothered with having families and children anymore.
Ahhhhhhhh, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Yah, history shows that when the elites allow society to rot from the bottom up, that society becomes weaker over time as the productive people have to pick up more and more slack for all the unproductive people. Eventually that society becomes weak enough that it gets conquered internally through a revolution of the mob, or externally from a society which has its act together.
Parents should be held accountable for their children and the reason parents don't care as much anymore about raising their kids properly is our welfare state absolves them of the need to raise their children properlyas it is merely a crutch in shielding irresponsible parents from any responsibility or accountability in raising their children.
In the distant past before we had Social Security and Medicare, when you got old your children would take care of you ASSUMING YOU RAISED THEM CORRECTLY. If you didn't have any children, well then it was tough luck as an old maid or old miser since you should reap what you sow. If you did have children and you raised them to be a bunch of selfish pricks with no concept of loyalty to their family, community, and country, well then you got what you deserved in old age as a parent as well.
Nowadays, the baby boomers think they can run up the federal deficit, the trade debt, and force the younger generations to deal with tax rates that make their lives extremely uncomfortable, all the while big mommy government hands the old farts checks for social security and medicare when most of these old farts clearly do not deserve it. Instead of living the good life at the expense of their children, they should of invested in their children in the form of not just money, but time, values, and good parenting to raise the next generation of productive Americans. Instead, due to their bang-up job of parenting, their children tend to mostly have an identity that does not go much beyond "ME ME ME ME". Great job baby boomers in raising a bunch of spoiled brats who have no loyalty to you when you get older, especially when you all move to Florida to enjoy that "good life".
In older generations older people did retire, but yet they still kept contributing to their community in the form of charitable works, handing their institutional wisdom down through their family and community, and helping their children with parenting in the form of being good grandparents. Now, many old farts think it is OK to just pack their stuff, move south, and retire to the good life and not give a hoot about the future generations since half of them think the apolocalypse is coming soon anyways.
In addition, they let Congress and our presidents over the last 30 years turn the United States into a debtor nation that produces very little relative to what it actually consumes. Ships from around the world come to the United States to dump products at our ports that are destined for Wal-Mart and then head back home largely empty. Who is responsible for this insanity? Well as a generation you can blame it all on the baby boomers and their lack of personal responsibility for everything in the United States actually makes Soylent Green seem like a great idea.
Though many baby boomers will probably die and go off to the heavenly where they will be rejected by St. Peter for being selfish pricks who left future generations to deal with the aftermath of their decadence, they better hope they had their bodies cremated or else their descendants will likely make it a yearly ritual to dig up their corpses and violate them in anger of the country and world they have left behind.
So, how about we start holding parents accountable for how they raise their children, rather than just leave them all to the wolves for raising as we do now in our broken school systems, family court bureaucracy, and whatever mind-numbing socialization propaganda happens to be on television for any given day.
in the forms of very trace amounts of magnetite in brain tissue. Whether or not this magnetite is actually used at all in human beings or not, there is no clear concensus on, however, at the moment it is believed that this magnetite has no effect on human beings and if this magnetite was ever used for sensing magnetic fields, it was in an ancestor of the human species going back many millions of years.
I believe the original source for my knowledge of this was some television program, but to save you some Googling, here is one of the first hits that came up.
Sometimes I think the libertarian/anarchy majority here in Slashdot thinks that the community has no rights to dictate moral standards.
When a guy sleeps with your wife, he is not only doing real emotional harm to you, but there is a good chance you might end up raising a child that is not your own. In the United States, anywhere from 10-30% of fathers unwittingly raise children that are not their own. In other words, the mothers were sleeping around, and very often you can't tell if a child belongs to a particular father, until much later on in life if the skin color of biological father and the cuckholded father are the same.
Many community moral codes are based on common sense in keeping society functioning for the long-term, and in the absense of local democratic governments to create enforcable community standards and adjudicate them as well, then the vigilante element is inevitably going to fill that void. Though, obviously many of these Chinese vigilantes are taking some things too far in the heat of the moment, in spirit they are just trying to protect their community from the evil of selfish people acting solely in their interests. Sleeping with another man's wife is a totally selfish act which can have devastating aspects for the community as a whole. Just look at African-American America right now where 70% of the children are born out of wedlock and then correlate that statistic to the statistics of crime and other leading social ills and anyone not taking the idea that "correlation does not equal causation" to the extreme can clearly see that broken down families from having kids out of wedlock is bad for the community, and therefore evil if you postulate that evil is any selfish act which does not benefit the community as a whole.
Every time a married woman goes behind the back of a married man (or vice versa), there is a risk of bastard children being raised if a pregnancy ensues. Furthermore, should a cuckholded man be expected to raise the offspring of another man? Should he be forced to pay child support for a kid that is not his? What is a guy to do in that situation other than to leave his cheating wife (assuming you don't live in a country where stoning is permitted)?
If China was a democracy and people could count on their government to uphold "community standards" as opposed to simply "communist standards", then these sort of vigilante witch hunts would rarely materialize. The United States (my nation) right now has the opposite problem of having a Jerry Springer "Who Are You To Judge Me" type mentality that is pervasive in our country and has absolved much of the public from any sense of personal responsibility or duty to their community. This is having disastrous effects that are slowly bubbling up in terms of worse education, family and therefore community stability, as well as a common cultural identity which doesn't matter much when economic times are good, but definitely matters when economic times are bad. If the people of a nation have common cultural values of shared sacrifice like you had during the Great Depression where families stuck together and pooled their resources, then the people can get through anything, but if everyone has a "every man for himself" type mentality, well then you get the kind of behaviour you found in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina.
This delusional libertarian/anarchist mindset that seems to be pervasive here on Slashdot has me wondering if some people need to get some more sunshine in their life and stop assuming that their introverted personality of avoidance realistically applies to the rest of humanity.
Is GE the only company out there who has to comply with SOX? What about the companies spending up to 10% of their revenue for 404 compliance. Just as Wal-Mart can have economies of scale when doing retail operations, any megacorp has an economy of scale in complying with SOX. Excessive government regulation has a crippling effect on small businesses and medium-sized businesses that you never hear about from the sensationalist news outlets out there. These companies and their owners are invisible as far as the masses are concerned.
All the masses care about is that guys like Kenneth Lay get stuck in a "Federal Pound You In The Ass Prison", while a lot of other companies are forced to waste scarce resources they could be using to hire more employees or else be forced into the dire choice of offshoring or inevitable bankruptcy.
It is ironic that a lot of Slashdotters seem to complain about being the victims of offshoring, but at the same time they defend laws which help to eliminate their jobs at the same time.
is in spite of the complaining by companies in the Fortune 500, the relative costs of SOX are low for mega-corporations like General Electric compared to a medium-sized business looking to try and compete with the big guys. Just as many well-intentioned business regulations are designed to keep the biggest and the baddest companies from screwing the public, the biggest unintended consequence of most business regulations is that these same regulations stifle up and coming competition whose resources might be scarce and the difference between spending 33 million dollars on SOX compliance is the difference between being a viable competitor in some market and being bankrupt.
Of course SOX doesn't affect small businesses, but if you ever want to become grow and become a big business, then you are taking an extra risk once you reach the threshold of employees that forces you to effectively making paper log files of every single form of correspondence in the company. For the Fortune 500 guys, not having to worry about competition from new competition is a big win for them, and for any aspiring entrepreneur a big loss that makes you wonder if you would be better off expatriating to another country and starting your business offshore where the success or failure of your business is not tied exclusively to how efficient you are at dealing with government regulations.
I mean, if you are going to let in guilds based on sexual orientation why not allow guilds for epople who just want to engage in a little farmplay?
Plus, beastiality friendly guilds would actually have more real world to WoW world value than gay guilds because several of the races are animal races to begin with.
I mean, just imagine a level male Dwarven Paladin mounting a female Tauren Shaman.
Can you say "MOO"?
Just imagine if the average script kiddie could harness this technology with easily accessible tools to basically play god. Maybe that sounds cool to some people, but it sounds more like the potential death of mankind to me.
I mean, if you thought Spanish Fly and Roofies were a big deal on college campuses, just wait till you have people tailoring these substances to programmatically alter a woman's body chemistry in a way which makes the average Slashdot geek irresistable to all of the women on the planet.
More crap their kids demand for Christmas. Will this be another "must have" accessory kids must have in order to be popular like all the other kids?
I wonder what his crackpot index would be?
would be this activity. Though, I will admit I have met many interesting people in online gaming, some of whom ironically turned out to be business worthy people, for the most part online role playing gaming is an activity where the future heart attack and type 2 diabetes club of the world hang out and get fat with each other. Golf used to be an activity where you got a decent workout because you actually had to walk all over the place to chase the ball you just hit, as well as carry your clubs, but now you have golf carts which basically have turned the sport into just another activity for rich out of shape fat people with no athletic talent to go pretend they are good at something other than foreclosing on the homes of middle-class and poor people so that they can build more golf courses. I suppose the fact that online gaming doesn't take up any real estate is a good thing, but then again any activity promoting collective vegetation of the mind among likeminded people is a bad thing as well.
Now us Americans won't have a good excuse to torture people in secret prisons overseas anymore.
for having a small wang or else just a low sense of self-esteem. Real men don't need BMW's, McMansions, and other superficial crap to get laid and more importantly be happy. I see this all the time in my profession and the sad thing is these guys would be a lot more happy if they saved their money and didn't live beyond their means and invested that money in some weights to lift at home (geeks tend to be introverts which means they are gym averse), maybe a decent multivitamin, and some good healthy food.
A lot of geeks spend zero time on taking care of themselves and either look like Skeletor at one extreme or else Chris Farley at the other extreme, yet they parade their money around like women should be attracted to them like flies are to a dung heap. The sad thing is women are attracted to their money, and when they get suckered into marrying and find out a year or two later that their wife now has a bad boy boyfriend on the side, while the divorce papers are in the mail, they scratch their heads and wonder how it could happen to them.
Just because you are involved in technology, does not give you license to be a weakling because you think the size of your brain is the only thing that counts. In reality, it helps to cover all the bases which means not being lazy with your health or your social skills. Too many geeks spend zero time in their 20's improving their social skills with both men and women, and then when they finally get enough money, they wonder why everyone is still laughing at them.
Most of these "geeks" are good guys and they mistakenly follow the celebrity culture like many superficial women do and think that they need to be "ghetto fabulous" or "metrosexual" for people, and especially women to take interest in them or at the very least respect them. Maybe these "geeks" had shitty male role models when they were growing up, or maybe their dad was a helpless geek, but when I talk to a lot of my peers about how the world really works, they just seem dumbfounded and immune to change.
If god could take Chuck Norris and cut him up into little pieces and put a little piece of him in every geek guy out there, then the world would be a much better place. Until that happens, you are going to have geeks earning 100K a year and spending the money like they are millionaires, and then when their job gets outsourced and they are broke they will come here on Slashdot and whine about how bad their life sucks, when they should of just been a little more frugal and conservative with their money when the going was good.
The constitution originally said nothing about the right of the federal government to tax the income of its citizens, but if the government is going to tax citizens, the last thing people want is for their tax dollars to be given to support the non-citizen welfare state in this country due to illegal immigration.
Furthermore, if an illegal immigrant crashes into your car, or damages your property, or defames your character, how are you going to sue someone who cannot be tracked down to receive a summons and who has no real identity anyways since they are here illegally?
Of course, you could make the argument that you don't want your tax dollars being used to finance the rebuilding Iraq, but that is "foreign aid" which is another debate entirely.
The real ID act is a necessary evil to deal with the long-term problem of massive illegal immigration into the United States which you can thank lately almost exclusively to George Bush's non-enforcement and political appeasement to much of the hispanic community in the United States which supports open borders as well as key business industries which use "slave" errr I mean "illegal" labor to do their bidding. It sucks that things have gotten this bad, but that is the price citizens in this country have to face for allowing their leaders to get away with failing to do the most fundamental basic job of a national government and that is to protect its borders from invading forces.
If common criminals, gang members, and illegal aliens can just cross over into the United States whenever they want and can't be prosecuted for their illegal status thanks to sanctuary laws in many municipalities with correct governments, what on earth is next the Mexican military itself?