The depression of wages is pretty damn obvious if you look at it. Of course nobody is stepping up to do the jobs the illegals have - as an employer I would always hire the cheaper illegal rather than paying somebody legal at twice the wages. Why wouldn't I? They are trying like crazy to dismantle the verification that Arizona put in place to try to make it difficult to hire illegals - but it isn't working out all that well.
Mostly because the penalties and enforcement are a joke. They have to prove you knowingly hire illegals. That is pretty hard to do, which is why you haven't heard of any businesses being shut down in Arizona because of the law.
So what would I do if someone legal came looking for a job? Well, the first thing might be to ask them if they would take half of minimum wage. When Matt says "No way" and Jose says "Si" (reluctangly maybe) Jose gets the job and Matt takes a hike. There is no enforcement, there are no meaningful laws to prevent this and the folks running things right now want to insure they stay in power. Simplest way is to make voters out of the current illegals and make sure they know who got them the right to stay.
You are quite right - shoulder-launched, man-portable missles today have a range of about five miles. You can't hit a jet at 30,000 feet.
Where these missles are a threat is outside the airport. Especially considering what they would do - knock off an engine. Losing an engine at takeoff is real bad sometimes. I refer you to flight 191 where the loss of the engine and hydraulic lines caused a crash.
At 30,000 feet the loss of an engine would be fairly minor and almost certainly survivable. The way planes are designed today with the engines hanging below the wings I would think it highly unlikely the wing would be damaged. These missles have a rather small explosive - just enough to really screw up an engine.
I believe it would take no more than five Stinger missles to shut down the entire US airline industry for weeks.
You could have 20 people each with a big grey pipe in a pickup truck and five people with real missles. Shoot down five planes and let the other 20 people get caught with pipes and there would be no more air travel that month. Maybe not for the rest of the year. And most of the airlines would be bankrupt.
You see, people have a real aversion towards on a plane that might crash and this little event with no more than five real missles would convince everyone that air travel in the US was no longer safe. That would pretty much put the finishing touches on the "economic crisis", don't you think?
Why hasn't this happened? I don't really know. It would pretty much collapse the US and give the Islamic folks everything they want in about 24 hours. It would require the sacrifice of the people with the missles (and the pipes, if they added that touch), but if you are firmly focused on the afterlife why would that matter?
I do not believe for one second that the US currently could keep Stinger missles out of the hands of these people, nor could they block their being launched. Heck, I would assume some Army dudes would quite willingly sell the missles right here in the US.
Android on a phone is useless without paying the relatively huge licensing fee to Google for the Google applications and access to the Google application store.
So there is a large license fee being paid for every copy of Android. Sure, you can go without the apps and the store but then it isn't really Android, now is it?
Look, the whole point of piracy is to destroy the revenue model that is media today. And encourage a revenue-free model for everything else as well.
We all know we want to live in the Star Trek world where there is no more money. This is the avenue that some folks have chosen to get there. So go out and destroy some revenue today!
Some of these nice little software products have actual IRL thugs backing them up.
So, by pirating their software you might get a in-person meeting with someone with a lot more in common with pirates of yor. And you might get a chance to reenact a bit of history yourself by walking the plank.
Or getting your legs broken.
Be happy that the BSA does not employ such tactics.
The founders in an incredible amount of foresight and wisdom knew that an "efficient" goverment is a dictatorship - one man making decisions and implementing them immediately. This is the best it could get to be as there would be no need for endless debating, no filibusters, no gridlock.
The only problem is, how well can you choose your dictator? Experience and history shows that a really good choice of dictator is rare and doesn't last very long even if you get a good one. So this idea of an efficient government was discarded.
There is another problem with an efficient government. We have somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 million laws - probably not an exaggeration. A new law takes days at a minimum regardless of it being a municipal, state or federal law. Some take months or even years to enact. Can you imagine a process that made passing laws "efficient" so it only took minutes? What would we be saddled with?
Sure, the US government has grown to the point where the Congresscritters are unable to keep up and are relying on external help. Can you just imagine what it would be like if there was no gridlock, no filibustering and things got done in an efficient manner? We might have to double the size of Congress just to be able to process stuff and keep things flowing. That would be the goal, right? To keep things flowing and passing more and more bills, laws, regulations and requirements.
The US government was designed to be horribly inefficient and to have so much momentum that it was virtually impossible to pass anything unless a lot of people really, really believed it was necessary to do so. And still we have millions of laws and more all the time. I'd say it is working as designed.
The path to a "natural" solution is to put the planet back on the track it was 40,000 years ago or so. Trees growing where it is reasonable for trees to grow and no humans getting in the way of that.
We could go back to that with small groups of people living on subsistance farms. No electricity. No fossil fuels. Eating what the grow with little or no trade between groups because of limited transportation (no fuels) and no manufacturing. Earth would likely recover nicely in a few hundred years.
The problem is, how do we get there? Can we convince rural farmers in India that their way and they way they have lived for thousands of years is good enough? Can we convince everyone in Japan that their lives are unsustainable and they have to go?
My guess is probably not. Perhaps a violently radical enough group could grab power and force war big enough to kill 90% of the people with the sole aim being to restore the planet to a pristine state, but I don't know of any such groups yet. Maybe we should start one?
The problem you are missing is that continuing debt only works as long as there is growth. We have pretty much ended the period of growth. Your children will not have a higher standard of living, that much should be obvious.
Currently, the US is trading with China on the basis of we buy their stuff and they buy our debt. This will work for a while, but at some point China is going to want something besides meaningless paper, which is all we have to give them now. There isn't any gold, there aren't any manufactured goods and there are no natural resources they want. Most importantly, we have lots of crops that they especially do not want.
When China decides they aren't financing the US any longer they will either own the entire country or the US will repudiate the debt. In either case, things are going to get really messy for anyone still living in the US - we either get to start learning Chinese to communicate with our new masters or we have a war. Current leadership looks very much like we should all get out the paintbrushes for making ideographs because a war would be unpopular.
Another way to the bottom is cap and trade. Instead of pushing externalities off onto the future - another way of borrowing - we put them right there in the current price tag, even if they don't actually cost anything for decades. This pushes everything made in the US to be unaffordable and leaves everything made in China at much lower prices. This just makes the problem worse faster. And it has the side effect of ensuring that instead of 20 or 30 percent real unemployement it is more like 50 percent. No problem, the government can just keep borrowing to support these people as well, at least for a short while.
I suggest reviewing the end of the movie Rollover to see what the future looks like when China or other creditors decide enough is enough.
Your thinking might work if the debt was something that could be paid off and wasn't growing. The debt explosion in the US government is like a college student with 10 credit cards and they are all maxed out. Nobody knows where the money went and nobody has any idea if it could be paid back. The US economy isn't growing, it is shrinking. And this isn't a problem that anyone expects to change in the next 20-30 years.
Unfortunately, most of the people that are being laid off aren't masterful engineers but simple laborers. It takes a lot of labor to assemble huge things out of carefully crafted metal, and these were the folks that were doing it.
We do not build large things in the US much anymore. There might be a few aircraft plants left where they have 100 people swarming over the body of an airliner gluing and riveting things together. There are a couple of shipbuilders left as well. But for the most part all of these things are being done cheaper with more workers somewhere else where labor is cheap.
Expensive labor countries simply cannot afford to employ people to make things - the people are too expensive. We are going to be providing unemployment benefits to these people for the rest of their lives, along with most of the other people that were employed in manufacturing. There are no jobs for them. The can operate laundromats or be greeters at Walmart, but the days of high-wage high-tech manufacturing in the US are over.
There might be a few engineers that could transfer their skills and knowledge to somewhere else - but for the most part they aren't needed. Nobody is doing basic research anymore as everything that is needed to be known for consumer electronics is pretty well known. You need an antenna for a cell phone and you pick it from a book or a catalog. If you try to design something fancy you find out the hard way that the unknowns are going to bite you in the ass, as Apple found out. They either looked in the wrong catalog or tried to do something fancy, untried and without adequate testing. Another rule today is "adequate testing" simply is too expensive in the consumer space - you better use the known parts and not try to go outside of that.
I absolutely believe that my company will be unable to afford to provide health insurance in 2014. Along with most other small businesses, all the people will be dumped into the "Exchanges" where the government will be forced to subsidize health care for the masses.
This isn't a "public option" but is simply subsidizing health funds that we have today. It isn't insurance because insurance is risk management. They have regulated the risk management out, so it is just a fund where you pay in and maybe (just maybe) you get your health care paid for.
Anyone that actually believed the lies about not having to switch to the new government approved health plans was deluded. Anyone that believed this would cost less was equally deluded. Your plan in 2014 will certainly cover every possible alternative. You will wonder why a 40 year old man has maternity coverage. You will wonder why someone 25 has coverage for nursing home care. But you will be paying for all of this care either directly or indirectly through taxes.
The only way this gets to be affordable at all is to make sure the current situation where most of the spending is in the last year of life changes to match how it is in most other countries. They have long wondered in Europe why our health care spending was so skewed like that when theirs was not. We are about to find out.
I got an email yesterday that purported to be a warning about a security exposure in Windows. All of the links in the email went to "xxxx.microsoftemail.com". OK, so who is the wiseass that allowed a domain to be registered with the name "microsoftemail.com"? At the very least they should have required proof of association with Microsoft as this could easily be construed as a trademark violation.
Ahh, but that would make sense and cut into the regstrar's profits.
Sure, microsoftemail.com is probably down today after causing the infection of hundreds of computers. Next week we can look forward to irsgov.com or ebaypayments.com.
This is all pretty simple stuff, but the registrars are creating half the problem by allowing people to register obviously similar domains with the intent to cause confusion. They do, or this practice would have stopped in 1999.
If the registrars aren't going to fix this problem then someone else is going to. And we may not like what else they fix while they are at it.
The star the Earth is orbiting is a 2nd generation star and is 10-20 billion years younger than 1st generation stars.
If life is common, then we are going to probably run across the remains of a civilization from a 1st generation star. They would be hundreds of millions of years older than humans on Earth. Hopefully we do not encounter them too early as a 1st generation civilization would have very little in common with us now.
We are stuck if we don't decide that we shouldn't be. If we are stuck, we need to think about what "sustainable" really means, and it means that the planet can comfortably support about 250 million people forever. Or, it can support 10 billion people for 100 years and then there is nothing left.
So, we have maybe 100 years to figure out how to get unstuck. After that, nobody is going to have a long happy life but a lot of people will have short, uncomfortable lives on a barren rock.
Pre-Facebook you would interview a candidate and, based on some very subjective feelings about them, decide whether or not interviewing would proceed. If you were the hiring manager, you got some input from 2-3 people and make (again) a very subjective decision.
The problem has always been that there is finite time to interview people and infinite (or nearly so) candidates. Most of them are hopelessly unqualified, a few are qualified but hopelessly out of touch with working in the environment. Things like people having worked on lots of unpaid volunteer open source stuff but never, ever actually worked with another person. Or having lots of experience with MS Visual Studio but no experience with xdb when the job requires Unix and not Windows.
So finally you get down to a few candidates and some of them just "feel" better than others.
Wouldn't it be better to sort this list based on something a little more objective, especially when this is information the candidates themselves have chosen to make public?
I really wonder when this madness can come to an end.
Every journey starts with a first step. In this case, you can be the first step. Go in to your employer and tell HR that you like it there so much that you want them to stop paying you. This will enable whatever that company does to move closer and closer to being free.
When enough people like you in the media creation business do likewise, all this stuff we are paying for today will be free and DRM will be completely unnecessary.
Simple. You just need to take the first step. Because until that becomes popular, companies are going to need to pay employees and they are going to have to have someone pay for their products. I can assure you that without DRM making things more difficult nobody with an ounce of brains would pay for anything anymore.
Think about it. If it wasn't for the cameras and security guards wouldn't you be stealing from stores? Well, even with this there are plenty of people that do - it works out to about 10% of the customers. So in the privacy of their homes and no cameras or guards why do you think anyone would pay if they didn't have to?
If it is anything like Blackberry permissions, then of course the app can only do what it is authorized to do.
Except of course that there are 37 screenfulls of permissions each one with 12 different possible values. So exactly how do you answer the question "Allow access to LBS+" with the settings Yes, No, Auto, Enable, Prompt, and Sometimes? Where do you look up LBS+ or some similar acronym?
Sorry to break it to you, but there is no guarantee that you are going to get paid in the software business.
Didn't you hear? Kids are pretty much being trained in school that it should all be free today. They see the teacher pirating software and figure it must be OK. Didn't you watch Star Trek?
The days of actually getting paid are probably numbered. I think it is pretty funny that people actually believe they should behave as if we were all living in the Star Trek universe, except when it comes to paying rent.
Yes, but the case is often that you want to read more about something and do a search on Google. The top five hits are for pirate sites to download it for free.
Now why would anyone pay? The pirates are advertising their services more effectively than the publisher. And Google is showing ads on the pirate pages and gettng paid for it as well. The pirate is getting paid by Google for the ads. Everyone is getting paid except for the developer.
iTunes sells songs to people that can't, won't or don't know how to download music.
iTunes has maybe 1% of the total music downloads today. Yes, that is billions and billions of individual songs. Should be a good clue on what people are doing with their Internet connections. I don't know anyone that would actually pay for music that is under 30.
iTunes exists because without it the whole "iPod is a pirate tool" would be obvious. If the only way to fill up a 60GB iPod was piracy they would have been back in court faster than you would believe. Now Apple can point to the iTunes store and say this is how people are buying music today. Understand as well that the iTunes store operates at no more than break-even for the most part. It costs them just about every penny they make on a sale. They do it because without the store it would be obvious to all that people aren't spending $60,000 to fill their iPod with music.
Everyone knows that Hizbollah is pure, true and good and it is only Israel that is evil.
If it where any other way we would hear about it on CNN.
See, it is clear that there is no point to trying to expose any wrongdoings of Hizbollah. Just as it is clear that there is plenty of wrongdoing to find in anything the US does. What possible good could a country do that has created McDonald's?
You seem to have a rather interesting misapprehension of how campaign finance works.
The campaign contributions are not personal income and cannot be used as such but only for campaign purposes. For the most part, personal money is also excluded from being used for campaign purposes although every once in a while some self-funded candidate comes along and a lot of news is about how they are doing. Self-funded folks rarely win.
I would have cheered any decision that eliminated the possibility of cable TV companies taking OTA signals and charging for them as was done in the 1970s and 1980s. The concept of engaging munipalities in a "franchise contract" that enforced a monopoly position of the cable company is also a somewhat silly idea.
We are now in a situation because of this where after the digital TV conversion it is impossible to receive decent signals in many rural and semi-rural places in the US. Your only choices are satellite and the local cable monopoly. They have a pretty solid lock on Internet access as well.
Slashdot Mirror
The depression of wages is pretty damn obvious if you look at it. Of course nobody is stepping up to do the jobs the illegals have - as an employer I would always hire the cheaper illegal rather than paying somebody legal at twice the wages. Why wouldn't I? They are trying like crazy to dismantle the verification that Arizona put in place to try to make it difficult to hire illegals - but it isn't working out all that well.
Mostly because the penalties and enforcement are a joke. They have to prove you knowingly hire illegals. That is pretty hard to do, which is why you haven't heard of any businesses being shut down in Arizona because of the law.
So what would I do if someone legal came looking for a job? Well, the first thing might be to ask them if they would take half of minimum wage. When Matt says "No way" and Jose says "Si" (reluctangly maybe) Jose gets the job and Matt takes a hike. There is no enforcement, there are no meaningful laws to prevent this and the folks running things right now want to insure they stay in power. Simplest way is to make voters out of the current illegals and make sure they know who got them the right to stay.
You are quite right - shoulder-launched, man-portable missles today have a range of about five miles. You can't hit a jet at 30,000 feet.
Where these missles are a threat is outside the airport. Especially considering what they would do - knock off an engine. Losing an engine at takeoff is real bad sometimes. I refer you to flight 191 where the loss of the engine and hydraulic lines caused a crash.
At 30,000 feet the loss of an engine would be fairly minor and almost certainly survivable. The way planes are designed today with the engines hanging below the wings I would think it highly unlikely the wing would be damaged. These missles have a rather small explosive - just enough to really screw up an engine.
I believe it would take no more than five Stinger missles to shut down the entire US airline industry for weeks.
You could have 20 people each with a big grey pipe in a pickup truck and five people with real missles. Shoot down five planes and let the other 20 people get caught with pipes and there would be no more air travel that month. Maybe not for the rest of the year. And most of the airlines would be bankrupt.
You see, people have a real aversion towards on a plane that might crash and this little event with no more than five real missles would convince everyone that air travel in the US was no longer safe. That would pretty much put the finishing touches on the "economic crisis", don't you think?
Why hasn't this happened? I don't really know. It would pretty much collapse the US and give the Islamic folks everything they want in about 24 hours. It would require the sacrifice of the people with the missles (and the pipes, if they added that touch), but if you are firmly focused on the afterlife why would that matter?
I do not believe for one second that the US currently could keep Stinger missles out of the hands of these people, nor could they block their being launched. Heck, I would assume some Army dudes would quite willingly sell the missles right here in the US.
Android on a phone is useless without paying the relatively huge licensing fee to Google for the Google applications and access to the Google application store.
So there is a large license fee being paid for every copy of Android. Sure, you can go without the apps and the store but then it isn't really Android, now is it?
Look, the whole point of piracy is to destroy the revenue model that is media today. And encourage a revenue-free model for everything else as well.
We all know we want to live in the Star Trek world where there is no more money. This is the avenue that some folks have chosen to get there. So go out and destroy some revenue today!
Some of these nice little software products have actual IRL thugs backing them up.
So, by pirating their software you might get a in-person meeting with someone with a lot more in common with pirates of yor. And you might get a chance to reenact a bit of history yourself by walking the plank.
Or getting your legs broken.
Be happy that the BSA does not employ such tactics.
The founders in an incredible amount of foresight and wisdom knew that an "efficient" goverment is a dictatorship - one man making decisions and implementing them immediately. This is the best it could get to be as there would be no need for endless debating, no filibusters, no gridlock.
The only problem is, how well can you choose your dictator? Experience and history shows that a really good choice of dictator is rare and doesn't last very long even if you get a good one. So this idea of an efficient government was discarded.
There is another problem with an efficient government. We have somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 million laws - probably not an exaggeration. A new law takes days at a minimum regardless of it being a municipal, state or federal law. Some take months or even years to enact. Can you imagine a process that made passing laws "efficient" so it only took minutes? What would we be saddled with?
Sure, the US government has grown to the point where the Congresscritters are unable to keep up and are relying on external help. Can you just imagine what it would be like if there was no gridlock, no filibustering and things got done in an efficient manner? We might have to double the size of Congress just to be able to process stuff and keep things flowing. That would be the goal, right? To keep things flowing and passing more and more bills, laws, regulations and requirements.
The US government was designed to be horribly inefficient and to have so much momentum that it was virtually impossible to pass anything unless a lot of people really, really believed it was necessary to do so. And still we have millions of laws and more all the time. I'd say it is working as designed.
The path to a "natural" solution is to put the planet back on the track it was 40,000 years ago or so. Trees growing where it is reasonable for trees to grow and no humans getting in the way of that.
We could go back to that with small groups of people living on subsistance farms. No electricity. No fossil fuels. Eating what the grow with little or no trade between groups because of limited transportation (no fuels) and no manufacturing. Earth would likely recover nicely in a few hundred years.
The problem is, how do we get there? Can we convince rural farmers in India that their way and they way they have lived for thousands of years is good enough? Can we convince everyone in Japan that their lives are unsustainable and they have to go?
My guess is probably not. Perhaps a violently radical enough group could grab power and force war big enough to kill 90% of the people with the sole aim being to restore the planet to a pristine state, but I don't know of any such groups yet. Maybe we should start one?
Except for the YouTube video of them being stoned. As in people tossing large rocks to hit them in the head, vs. some enjoyable afternoon activity.
The problem you are missing is that continuing debt only works as long as there is growth. We have pretty much ended the period of growth. Your children will not have a higher standard of living, that much should be obvious.
Currently, the US is trading with China on the basis of we buy their stuff and they buy our debt. This will work for a while, but at some point China is going to want something besides meaningless paper, which is all we have to give them now. There isn't any gold, there aren't any manufactured goods and there are no natural resources they want. Most importantly, we have lots of crops that they especially do not want.
When China decides they aren't financing the US any longer they will either own the entire country or the US will repudiate the debt. In either case, things are going to get really messy for anyone still living in the US - we either get to start learning Chinese to communicate with our new masters or we have a war. Current leadership looks very much like we should all get out the paintbrushes for making ideographs because a war would be unpopular.
Another way to the bottom is cap and trade. Instead of pushing externalities off onto the future - another way of borrowing - we put them right there in the current price tag, even if they don't actually cost anything for decades. This pushes everything made in the US to be unaffordable and leaves everything made in China at much lower prices. This just makes the problem worse faster. And it has the side effect of ensuring that instead of 20 or 30 percent real unemployement it is more like 50 percent. No problem, the government can just keep borrowing to support these people as well, at least for a short while.
I suggest reviewing the end of the movie Rollover to see what the future looks like when China or other creditors decide enough is enough.
Your thinking might work if the debt was something that could be paid off and wasn't growing. The debt explosion in the US government is like a college student with 10 credit cards and they are all maxed out. Nobody knows where the money went and nobody has any idea if it could be paid back. The US economy isn't growing, it is shrinking. And this isn't a problem that anyone expects to change in the next 20-30 years.
Unfortunately, most of the people that are being laid off aren't masterful engineers but simple laborers. It takes a lot of labor to assemble huge things out of carefully crafted metal, and these were the folks that were doing it.
We do not build large things in the US much anymore. There might be a few aircraft plants left where they have 100 people swarming over the body of an airliner gluing and riveting things together. There are a couple of shipbuilders left as well. But for the most part all of these things are being done cheaper with more workers somewhere else where labor is cheap.
Expensive labor countries simply cannot afford to employ people to make things - the people are too expensive. We are going to be providing unemployment benefits to these people for the rest of their lives, along with most of the other people that were employed in manufacturing. There are no jobs for them. The can operate laundromats or be greeters at Walmart, but the days of high-wage high-tech manufacturing in the US are over.
There might be a few engineers that could transfer their skills and knowledge to somewhere else - but for the most part they aren't needed. Nobody is doing basic research anymore as everything that is needed to be known for consumer electronics is pretty well known. You need an antenna for a cell phone and you pick it from a book or a catalog. If you try to design something fancy you find out the hard way that the unknowns are going to bite you in the ass, as Apple found out. They either looked in the wrong catalog or tried to do something fancy, untried and without adequate testing. Another rule today is "adequate testing" simply is too expensive in the consumer space - you better use the known parts and not try to go outside of that.
I absolutely believe that my company will be unable to afford to provide health insurance in 2014. Along with most other small businesses, all the people will be dumped into the "Exchanges" where the government will be forced to subsidize health care for the masses.
This isn't a "public option" but is simply subsidizing health funds that we have today. It isn't insurance because insurance is risk management. They have regulated the risk management out, so it is just a fund where you pay in and maybe (just maybe) you get your health care paid for.
Anyone that actually believed the lies about not having to switch to the new government approved health plans was deluded. Anyone that believed this would cost less was equally deluded. Your plan in 2014 will certainly cover every possible alternative. You will wonder why a 40 year old man has maternity coverage. You will wonder why someone 25 has coverage for nursing home care. But you will be paying for all of this care either directly or indirectly through taxes.
The only way this gets to be affordable at all is to make sure the current situation where most of the spending is in the last year of life changes to match how it is in most other countries. They have long wondered in Europe why our health care spending was so skewed like that when theirs was not. We are about to find out.
I got an email yesterday that purported to be a warning about a security exposure in Windows. All of the links in the email went to "xxxx.microsoftemail.com". OK, so who is the wiseass that allowed a domain to be registered with the name "microsoftemail.com"? At the very least they should have required proof of association with Microsoft as this could easily be construed as a trademark violation.
Ahh, but that would make sense and cut into the regstrar's profits.
Sure, microsoftemail.com is probably down today after causing the infection of hundreds of computers. Next week we can look forward to irsgov.com or ebaypayments.com.
This is all pretty simple stuff, but the registrars are creating half the problem by allowing people to register obviously similar domains with the intent to cause confusion. They do, or this practice would have stopped in 1999.
If the registrars aren't going to fix this problem then someone else is going to. And we may not like what else they fix while they are at it.
The star the Earth is orbiting is a 2nd generation star and is 10-20 billion years younger than 1st generation stars.
If life is common, then we are going to probably run across the remains of a civilization from a 1st generation star. They would be hundreds of millions of years older than humans on Earth. Hopefully we do not encounter them too early as a 1st generation civilization would have very little in common with us now.
We are stuck if we don't decide that we shouldn't be. If we are stuck, we need to think about what "sustainable" really means, and it means that the planet can comfortably support about 250 million people forever. Or, it can support 10 billion people for 100 years and then there is nothing left.
So, we have maybe 100 years to figure out how to get unstuck. After that, nobody is going to have a long happy life but a lot of people will have short, uncomfortable lives on a barren rock.
Step one of "fixing" this planet is decreasing the population by about 90%. Maybe 95%. Then we can talk about what step 2 is.
Step 1 is a pretty big roadblock and not a very popular way to start anything.
So, about that colonization program... an FTL drive is sounding easier and easier all the time.
Pre-Facebook you would interview a candidate and, based on some very subjective feelings about them, decide whether or not interviewing would proceed. If you were the hiring manager, you got some input from 2-3 people and make (again) a very subjective decision.
The problem has always been that there is finite time to interview people and infinite (or nearly so) candidates. Most of them are hopelessly unqualified, a few are qualified but hopelessly out of touch with working in the environment. Things like people having worked on lots of unpaid volunteer open source stuff but never, ever actually worked with another person. Or having lots of experience with MS Visual Studio but no experience with xdb when the job requires Unix and not Windows.
So finally you get down to a few candidates and some of them just "feel" better than others.
Wouldn't it be better to sort this list based on something a little more objective, especially when this is information the candidates themselves have chosen to make public?
I really wonder when this madness can come to an end.
Every journey starts with a first step. In this case, you can be the first step. Go in to your employer and tell HR that you like it there so much that you want them to stop paying you. This will enable whatever that company does to move closer and closer to being free.
When enough people like you in the media creation business do likewise, all this stuff we are paying for today will be free and DRM will be completely unnecessary.
Simple. You just need to take the first step. Because until that becomes popular, companies are going to need to pay employees and they are going to have to have someone pay for their products. I can assure you that without DRM making things more difficult nobody with an ounce of brains would pay for anything anymore.
Think about it. If it wasn't for the cameras and security guards wouldn't you be stealing from stores? Well, even with this there are plenty of people that do - it works out to about 10% of the customers. So in the privacy of their homes and no cameras or guards why do you think anyone would pay if they didn't have to?
If it is anything like Blackberry permissions, then of course the app can only do what it is authorized to do.
Except of course that there are 37 screenfulls of permissions each one with 12 different possible values. So exactly how do you answer the question "Allow access to LBS+" with the settings Yes, No, Auto, Enable, Prompt, and Sometimes? Where do you look up LBS+ or some similar acronym?
Sorry to break it to you, but there is no guarantee that you are going to get paid in the software business.
Didn't you hear? Kids are pretty much being trained in school that it should all be free today. They see the teacher pirating software and figure it must be OK. Didn't you watch Star Trek?
The days of actually getting paid are probably numbered. I think it is pretty funny that people actually believe they should behave as if we were all living in the Star Trek universe, except when it comes to paying rent.
Yes, but the case is often that you want to read more about something and do a search on Google. The top five hits are for pirate sites to download it for free.
Now why would anyone pay? The pirates are advertising their services more effectively than the publisher. And Google is showing ads on the pirate pages and gettng paid for it as well. The pirate is getting paid by Google for the ads. Everyone is getting paid except for the developer.
iTunes sells songs to people that can't, won't or don't know how to download music.
iTunes has maybe 1% of the total music downloads today. Yes, that is billions and billions of individual songs. Should be a good clue on what people are doing with their Internet connections. I don't know anyone that would actually pay for music that is under 30.
iTunes exists because without it the whole "iPod is a pirate tool" would be obvious. If the only way to fill up a 60GB iPod was piracy they would have been back in court faster than you would believe. Now Apple can point to the iTunes store and say this is how people are buying music today. Understand as well that the iTunes store operates at no more than break-even for the most part. It costs them just about every penny they make on a sale. They do it because without the store it would be obvious to all that people aren't spending $60,000 to fill their iPod with music.
Everyone knows that Hizbollah is pure, true and good and it is only Israel that is evil.
If it where any other way we would hear about it on CNN.
See, it is clear that there is no point to trying to expose any wrongdoings of Hizbollah. Just as it is clear that there is plenty of wrongdoing to find in anything the US does. What possible good could a country do that has created McDonald's?
You seem to have a rather interesting misapprehension of how campaign finance works.
The campaign contributions are not personal income and cannot be used as such but only for campaign purposes. For the most part, personal money is also excluded from being used for campaign purposes although every once in a while some self-funded candidate comes along and a lot of news is about how they are doing. Self-funded folks rarely win.
I would have cheered any decision that eliminated the possibility of cable TV companies taking OTA signals and charging for them as was done in the 1970s and 1980s. The concept of engaging munipalities in a "franchise contract" that enforced a monopoly position of the cable company is also a somewhat silly idea.
We are now in a situation because of this where after the digital TV conversion it is impossible to receive decent signals in many rural and semi-rural places in the US. Your only choices are satellite and the local cable monopoly. They have a pretty solid lock on Internet access as well.