IBM had revenues of 7 to 8 billion dollars in 1970.
In 1970, IBM had 258,662 employees (more than IBM and IBM India combined does today).
It's just bad for the market and society to lay off 30,000 jobs and take huge increases in pay as the CEOs of IBM (and many similar corporations) have done. The benefit to America of having IBM declines almost on a daily basis. Which is good, since it is effectively transferring itself to India.
And the idea of getting it so you can be hired easier is not really the point.
Sure- you can make money and that's nice-- much better than starving.
But engaging in a serious way for your college education leads to a personal transformation on par with basic training by the military. The person who comes out isn't the person that went in.
Getting a degree differs from a college education. It does show companies that you can engage in a 4+ year project, deal with people of many cultures, learn material quickly, and you finish what you start. That's important when they are setting up a 7 million dollar project. They don't want to put money on someone who leaves or breaks under pressure.
That's great for the company. But a well rounded college education is great for you as a person. Companies have managed to corrupt the college process- but that is your big chance to expand your mind- to think in depth- to learn about history- to learn to communicate- to make interesting friends.
It's not illegal to have a copy of a song. Pretty trivial to have made a legal copy in a variety of ways including recording off the radio or your personal CD.
The down-modding on the parent comment is incorrect. It's a valid comment. I hate mismodding like this on Slashdot which silences legitimate dissent.
However, people on slashdot are not universally pro-pirate. * Many are for more reasonable copyright laws (14/28 years). * Many don't view it as a lost sale if the person couldn't afford to purchase the product in the first place. (Yes it is piracy- but with no real damage to the creator. Less damage than libraries (which are legal) in fact. * Many (I) am opposed to the corporate abuse of copyright law ( Seriously-- Happy Birthday, To You-- STILL UNDER COPYRIGHT???)
With regard to this article, they are generally against hypocrites who infringe the work of others who donated free materials to the community and then try to claim copyright protection on the infringed copyrighted works.
If a commercial business wants- it can right its own router code. Oh wait- that's REAL expensive. So comply with the GPL terms- sell your hardware and be happy.
Wow... J.K. Rowling and Disney, most writers, painters, poets, and songwriters might have a bit of a problem with that as would hundreds of years of law controlling the Right to Copy work published by someone else.
Copyright is a special right created by society to encourage people to create stories, songs, write plays, paint paintings, write plays, and yes... programs with the expectation that these works will eventually enter the public domain.
Copyright has been abused all to hell and should probably be reverted back to a period less than 30 years. (and require ongoing significant and increasing payments to keep it out of the public domain).
But the outcome of your version is - a greatly diminished number of works. If you can't make money on your books, songs, programs then only enthusiasts could create them in their spare time while they otherwise worked at "real" jobs that paid money. Often the money is the difference between a finished, polished product and an amateurish "90% done" work because it takes almost as much time and money to get that last 10% done as it did to get the first 90% done.
My typical house viewing... 1) watch the setup. fast forward through the credits. 2) watch the crew- see which character lines i'm interested in. 3) fast forward through the first bad diagnosis and the characters I'm not interesting in following. 4) fast foward through the second failed diagnosis. 5) Watch the "diagnosis moment". 6) Skip to the end.
I still like House. I LIKED Masters, the honest ethical redhead. Especially because she wasn't a glamour queen and also because her struggles were "real". Do you lie to save a patient, etc. I get the impression they had her on for one season while Olivia went off to make movies.
Olivia (and this is wierd) looks like she has had plastic surgery. Something is wrong with her face now. Botox?
Foreman is okay.
Great season ending. Unless they patch it all up to make nice. Could have been an okay series ending too.
I liked the relationship and I thought Cuddy was a dick to drop him for taking drugs to be there with her. It was a step in the right direction. She's too smart for her own damn good- I had an ex girlfriend like that. Could figure anything out to make herself unhappy.
I've always liked Wilson. I still enjoy watching the show whenever he is on the screen. Like the redhead, he seems real.
It's not retiring the buggy whip maker who now has to learn to repair automobiles. It's replacing the buggy whip maker and there is no new technology to replace it.
Well designed robots are modular. No repair bill. The number of robotics design jobs is a fraction of the number of jobs robots will replace. Automation has an equal impact (i.e. no receptionists any more at large companies- 1,000 receptionists (probalby more) replaced by 5 receptionist software and support resources).
I think we'll need something dramatic like reduced work hours or there will be social disorder once the republicans cut off social benefits and people start starving. I just hope they take it to the wealthy instead of burning down their own neighborhoods and robbing their friends.
Yea... I can see Vietnam absorbing China's manufacturing.
Let's see... 87,279,754 Vietnamese. 1,331,460,000 Chinese (in 2009).
There may be a SLIGHT difficulty here. Same for eastern european countries.
Now.. Africa has 1 billion people... so far so good. But it's 54 countries with 54 legal systems.
The rule of law doesn't really hold in many of those countries.
I'd say China will draw jobs from the US for another 4-6 years. Then the bigger threat is automation and robotics. Already businesses are buying hundreds of these things to replace humans and the annual operation costs are about $15,000. They can work 2 shifts for that.
As I recall, the estimate was 3/4 of a million japanese civilians lives saved by dropping the bombs.
It's easy to quarterback from safely on the bench. If the japanese hadn't fought so fiercely on the island chains, perhaps the military wouldn't have been as willing to use the bombs.
However- as the article above points out- conventional warfare kills huge numbers of people too. I don't get the reason 200,000 killed by a nuclear bomb is worse and 750,000 killed by conventional firebombs and bullets is better.
Some of this is also a product of fixed bid contracts.
We'll build you a ship for 350 million dollars.
Okay, done.
Well it doesn't really matter how it goes on the paper work until suddenly one day someone looks at the 350 million bill and breaks it down and finds some expensive hammers. Not because they were expensive but just because a share of the total bid got assigned to them. Quite likely the $50k portholes may have been underpriced at $43k. But we don't go AHA on those.
I do not believe it will be 99.9% reliable in field conditions. Every time we have a raid, we lose at last one multi-million dollar helicopter. The failure rate on these things are classified so we can't really no. But if we lose one jet a year, we are not running a 99.9% reliability and we already lost a jet this year too.
I do not disagree that we have some impressive weaponly. I'm quite impressed with the Apache helicopters-- effective 2 mile range, day or night for a 1' target. And with our tanks- firing with similar accuracy while driving 60mph over desert terrain at moving hostile targets.
Libyan Rebels cost for a robotic gun. About $500 after a few weeks of tinkering. Probably fails 10% of the time.
US cost for a robotic gun. 5 million per unit which don't work when first deployed after a 300 million dollar development program taking 4 years to complete. Eventually 90% reliable in the field.
While I agree society can (and frequently does) punish you for exercising your rights- I don't think they can override your rights..
For example- you have free speech, but if you say the wrong thing, then after the fact they can put you in jail. If you pursue happiness in a way society doesn't like, they can put you in jail.
Even tho they don't put other people in jail for doing the same thing. Even tho they may not have put people in jail in the past or future for what you did (for example, there are still a few poor souls serving really draconian sentences for tiny drug charges back in the 70's and 80's which would merit a fine today and which was legal in the 1900's.)
Similarly, society recognizes your natural right to kill someone trying to kill you and to kill someone trying to kill others. It punishes you for other forms of killing. You have a right to life.. but society has various situation where it says it is okay to kill you. As punishment for example.
I think the concept of god as the source for rights only works when people don't look to closely at what the heavily overloaded concept of "god" means or when everyone mostly shares the same definition for "god".
This was a nice chat - for any board, much less Slashdot. Thank you.
I view the rights in the constitution as being a mixture of natural rights and rights asserted to be natural rights which are really rights granted by the social contract.
So which part gives you the most problem with a natural right to hit someone? inalienable: incapable of being repudiated or transferred to another (incapable of being alienated, surrendered, or transferred).
self-evident: Requiring no proof or explanation.
Hitting someone can be a "good" or "evil" or "neutral" act depending on the situation. I agree it's off with legal theory but the founding fathers logic was a bit tortured and rationalizing plus based on religious concepts. I admire them greatly. They were smarter than I am. I think the term "right" has been abused when we start talking about right to health care or right to internet service.
Further than hitting, there is a natural right to kill. And that is also sometimes good, evil, or neutral.
But we can't transfer our right to hit to others. We just have it. Move your arm with someone in the path and there you go- seems self evident to me.
The fact that some hitting (say without consent or to defend oneself) may be evil makes people not want to look at it bluntly.
You have the natural right to walk from your capability to walk. You have the natural right to hit someone from your capability to hit someone. You have the natural right to pursue happiness from your capability to pursue happiness.
There is no hidden Ayn Rand in these statements. There is no moral judgement of whether your natural rights are "good" or "bad". That's dependent on your society and situation.
Slashdot Mirror
Balls.
IBM had revenues of 7 to 8 billion dollars in 1970.
In 1970, IBM had 258,662 employees (more than IBM and IBM India combined does today).
It's just bad for the market and society to lay off 30,000 jobs and take huge increases in pay as the CEOs of IBM (and many similar corporations) have done. The benefit to America of having IBM declines almost on a daily basis. Which is good, since it is effectively transferring itself to India.
You are off by a few decades.
40 years ago they averaged 52 times as much.
Today they average 450 to 540 times as much.
The statement shows vast ignorance and perhaps arrogance.
Regular users use Firefox to browse business sites.
If business sites don't support Firefox, then they must use another browser.
Sigh...
And the idea of getting it so you can be hired easier is not really the point.
Sure- you can make money and that's nice-- much better than starving.
But engaging in a serious way for your college education leads to a personal transformation on par with basic training by the military. The person who comes out isn't the person that went in.
Getting a degree differs from a college education. It does show companies that you can engage in a 4+ year project, deal with people of many cultures, learn material quickly, and you finish what you start. That's important when they are setting up a 7 million dollar project. They don't want to put money on someone who leaves or breaks under pressure.
That's great for the company. But a well rounded college education is great for you as a person. Companies have managed to corrupt the college process- but that is your big chance to expand your mind- to think in depth- to learn about history- to learn to communicate- to make interesting friends.
People who do that are ignorant of the value of college.
Getting a degree for money is almost like wasting your life.
You get a degree because of the type of person it makes you.
If all you want are current technical skills then just go to a trade skill.
Looks like you picked the wrong day to quit using amphetamines.
Can you mount it on a sea bass?
It's not illegal to have a copy of a song.
Pretty trivial to have made a legal copy in a variety of ways including recording off the radio or your personal CD.
It is illegal to distribute songs.
If they break adblock and noscript- I'm moving to another browser.
I'm sure there are critical addons for other people.
I also must have a portable app version.
I went to FF4 on one browser at home and it BROKE my F5 plugin required for work.
No update yet.
Yup. thought you were serious.
The down-modding on the parent comment is incorrect. It's a valid comment. I hate mismodding like this on Slashdot which silences legitimate dissent.
However, people on slashdot are not universally pro-pirate.
* Many are for more reasonable copyright laws (14/28 years).
* Many don't view it as a lost sale if the person couldn't afford to purchase the product in the first place. (Yes it is piracy- but with no real damage to the creator. Less damage than libraries (which are legal) in fact.
* Many (I) am opposed to the corporate abuse of copyright law ( Seriously-- Happy Birthday, To You-- STILL UNDER COPYRIGHT???)
With regard to this article, they are generally against hypocrites who infringe the work of others who donated free materials to the community and then try to claim copyright protection on the infringed copyrighted works.
If a commercial business wants- it can right its own router code. Oh wait- that's REAL expensive. So comply with the GPL terms- sell your hardware and be happy.
Wow... J.K. Rowling and Disney, most writers, painters, poets, and songwriters might have a bit of a problem with that as would hundreds of years of law controlling the Right to Copy work published by someone else.
Copyright is a special right created by society to encourage people to create stories, songs, write plays, paint paintings, write plays, and yes... programs with the expectation that these works will eventually enter the public domain.
Copyright has been abused all to hell and should probably be reverted back to a period less than 30 years. (and require ongoing significant and increasing payments to keep it out of the public domain).
But the outcome of your version is - a greatly diminished number of works. If you can't make money on your books, songs, programs then only enthusiasts could create them in their spare time while they otherwise worked at "real" jobs that paid money. Often the money is the difference between a finished, polished product and an amateurish "90% done" work because it takes almost as much time and money to get that last 10% done as it did to get the first 90% done.
My typical house viewing...
1) watch the setup.
fast forward through the credits.
2) watch the crew- see which character lines i'm interested in.
3) fast forward through the first bad diagnosis and the characters I'm not interesting in following.
4) fast foward through the second failed diagnosis.
5) Watch the "diagnosis moment".
6) Skip to the end.
I still like House. I LIKED Masters, the honest ethical redhead. Especially because she wasn't a glamour queen and also because her struggles were "real". Do you lie to save a patient, etc. I get the impression they had her on for one season while Olivia went off to make movies.
Olivia (and this is wierd) looks like she has had plastic surgery. Something is wrong with her face now. Botox?
Foreman is okay.
Great season ending. Unless they patch it all up to make nice. Could have been an okay series ending too.
I liked the relationship and I thought Cuddy was a dick to drop him for taking drugs to be there with her. It was a step in the right direction. She's too smart for her own damn good- I had an ex girlfriend like that. Could figure anything out to make herself unhappy.
I've always liked Wilson. I still enjoy watching the show whenever he is on the screen. Like the redhead, he seems real.
Robotics is fundamentally different.
It's not retiring the buggy whip maker who now has to learn to repair automobiles.
It's replacing the buggy whip maker and there is no new technology to replace it.
Well designed robots are modular. No repair bill.
The number of robotics design jobs is a fraction of the number of jobs robots will replace.
Automation has an equal impact (i.e. no receptionists any more at large companies- 1,000 receptionists (probalby more) replaced by 5 receptionist software and support resources).
I think we'll need something dramatic like reduced work hours or there will be social disorder once the republicans cut off social benefits and people start starving. I just hope they take it to the wealthy instead of burning down their own neighborhoods and robbing their friends.
Yea... I can see Vietnam absorbing China's manufacturing.
Let's see...
87,279,754 Vietnamese.
1,331,460,000 Chinese (in 2009).
There may be a SLIGHT difficulty here.
Same for eastern european countries.
Now.. Africa has 1 billion people... so far so good.
But it's 54 countries with 54 legal systems.
The rule of law doesn't really hold in many of those countries.
I'd say China will draw jobs from the US for another 4-6 years. Then the bigger threat is automation and robotics. Already businesses are buying hundreds of these things to replace humans and the annual operation costs are about $15,000. They can work 2 shifts for that.
As I recall, the estimate was 3/4 of a million japanese civilians lives saved by dropping the bombs.
It's easy to quarterback from safely on the bench. If the japanese hadn't fought so fiercely on the island chains, perhaps the military wouldn't have been as willing to use the bombs.
However- as the article above points out- conventional warfare kills huge numbers of people too. I don't get the reason 200,000 killed by a nuclear bomb is worse and 750,000 killed by conventional firebombs and bullets is better.
I don't normally consider people 35 kilometers away my neighbors.
But Fukishima was a very sharing neighbor.
Some of this is also a product of fixed bid contracts.
We'll build you a ship for 350 million dollars.
Okay, done.
Well it doesn't really matter how it goes on the paper work until suddenly one day someone looks at the 350 million bill and breaks it down and finds some expensive hammers. Not because they were expensive but just because a share of the total bid got assigned to them. Quite likely the $50k portholes may have been underpriced at $43k.
But we don't go AHA on those.
I do not believe it will be 99.9% reliable in field conditions.
Every time we have a raid, we lose at last one multi-million dollar helicopter.
The failure rate on these things are classified so we can't really no. But if we lose one jet a year, we are not running a 99.9% reliability and we already lost a jet this year too.
I do not disagree that we have some impressive weaponly. I'm quite impressed with the Apache helicopters-- effective 2 mile range, day or night for a 1' target. And with our tanks- firing with similar accuracy while driving 60mph over desert terrain at moving hostile targets.
Libyan Rebels cost for a robotic gun. About $500 after a few weeks of tinkering.
Probably fails 10% of the time.
US cost for a robotic gun. 5 million per unit which don't work when first deployed after a 300 million dollar development program taking 4 years to complete. Eventually 90% reliable in the field.
While I agree society can (and frequently does) punish you for exercising your rights- I don't think they can override your rights..
For example- you have free speech, but if you say the wrong thing, then after the fact they can put you in jail. If you pursue happiness in a way society doesn't like, they can put you in jail.
Even tho they don't put other people in jail for doing the same thing. Even tho they may not have put people in jail in the past or future for what you did (for example, there are still a few poor souls serving really draconian sentences for tiny drug charges back in the 70's and 80's which would merit a fine today and which was legal in the 1900's.)
Similarly, society recognizes your natural right to kill someone trying to kill you and to kill someone trying to kill others. It punishes you for other forms of killing. You have a right to life.. but society has various situation where it says it is okay to kill you. As punishment for example.
I think the concept of god as the source for rights only works when people don't look to closely at what the heavily overloaded concept of "god" means or when everyone mostly shares the same definition for "god".
This was a nice chat - for any board, much less Slashdot.
Thank you.
I view the rights in the constitution as being a mixture of natural rights and rights asserted to be natural rights which are really rights granted by the social contract.
So which part gives you the most problem with a natural right to hit someone?
inalienable: incapable of being repudiated or transferred to another (incapable of being alienated, surrendered, or transferred).
self-evident: Requiring no proof or explanation.
Hitting someone can be a "good" or "evil" or "neutral" act depending on the situation.
I agree it's off with legal theory but the founding fathers logic was a bit tortured and rationalizing plus based on religious concepts. I admire them greatly. They were smarter than I am. I think the term "right" has been abused when we start talking about right to health care or right to internet service.
Further than hitting, there is a natural right to kill. And that is also sometimes good, evil, or neutral.
But we can't transfer our right to hit to others. We just have it. Move your arm with someone in the path and there you go- seems self evident to me.
The fact that some hitting (say without consent or to defend oneself) may be evil makes people not want to look at it bluntly.
I'm not saying "ought."
I'm saying "capable".
You have the natural right to walk from your capability to walk.
You have the natural right to hit someone from your capability to hit someone.
You have the natural right to pursue happiness from your capability to pursue happiness.
There is no hidden Ayn Rand in these statements.
There is no moral judgement of whether your natural rights are "good" or "bad".
That's dependent on your society and situation.