The simple fact is that the Department of The Interior hates the BIA. They resent them like hell and are doing nothing to help them at all. Standards, routers, etc... have nothing to do with this.
It's high time that the BIA be moved from Interior to the Department of State anyway. The American-Indiands issue isn't a land issue, it's a deplomacy issue. But that's just more politics and not relevant to the story at hand.
While MS is overpriced and abusive today, historically they did lower the bar for entrance into the computer realm. Befor MS-DOS and Windows, every brand of computer used its own OS (if you want to consider ROM-BASIC an OS) and software had to be rewritten for each platform.
With MS having the forsight and balls to reserve the ownership of MS-DOS and grant IBM a license they opened the doot to one OS running on machines manufactured by multiple venders.
Consider that when your average PC cost $4,000.00 (US) (not the high-end systems, average desktop systems), MS-DOS was only around $120.00 - $150.00 a copy. Compaired to the multi-thousand dollar cost of even the cheapest Unix systems of the day DOS was a bargain! Sure, it lacked a lot of what makes Unix so great, but it had enough to let people run their entire businesses on their desktops.
Remember, before Linux came into being, Unix (and it's clones, dirivatives, etc...) was an expensive and very closed environment.
You are completely missing the point. The Chinese are not trying to make an Intell/AMD Killer. They are making a CPU with enough horsepower to run Linux and let people do office tasks - email, word processing, spreadsheets, etc... and other normal computing tasks. They are also making a CPU in-house, which means they don't need to worry about how Intel or AMD feels about them or even if the US government doesn't want them buying powerful chips.
This isan't about playing DOOM3 or Half-Life2. This is about China having an IT sector that is not subject to the whims of non-Chinese companies or governments.
I've used all kinds of rechargables, from cheap Radio Shacks and Mallorys, to expensive Sony units. They are all pretty cose to the same, save for newer lithium-ion batteries.
I keep enough batteries in the chargers to replace the batteries in every device at the same time. And it does save an amazing amount of money in the long run. Most of my rechargables last for five to seven years before they stop being able to hold a charge.
The only batteries I have not replaced with rechargables is AAA-size. At that size the rechargables don't hold enough charge to be worth it.
You seem to have forgotten that the entire point of having children is to pass on your genes. It is not egotism at all. It is hard-wired survival instints.
The basic problem is that a very vocal group of people (not all of them, of course) don't want a new business model. They want free music. They don't give a damn that in order for digital delivery of music to succeed there needs to be some way for owners of the music to minimize losses to to unauthorized redisitribution.
Think about this for a minute. What's to stop an MPEG4 or DivX file from being sent on to another computer or even to Kazaa? Nothing. Real and Windows Media Player 9 both have DRM built in.
DRM. You did notice that the files are available in RM and WMV formats only, right? I'm not positive abiout Real files, but I know that WMV files (especially Media Player 9, which I'm sure you will need) can phone home to get permission to actually play.
Well, seeing as they are likely to actually win most of those cases, and those they don;t win will most likely be settled out of court, I don't see their coffers drying up anytime soon.
I'm sure they've put a lot more thought into this that you have.
Re:In defense of "conservatives"...
on
Saving the Net
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The problem here is that you are equating "liberal" with "Democrat" and "conservative" with "Republican". While this may be true for the moment, it's not 100% accurate. There is a fairly large difference between liberals and conservatives. There is almost no difference between Democrats and Republicans, save whom exactly they are beholding to.
The Republican Party is geared towards saving people money.
Not exactly. The Republican Party is geared towards saving rich people's money. The poor need not apply.
This is the key issue for Republican politics, regardless of all the morality bullshit they spew.
Used to be that way. They've been heavily co-opted by the Religious Right in the last few decades.
If you're greedy, you vote Republican
If you're greedy and rich, you vote Republican...
Screw the Indian programmer! Let him/her start their own company! Hell, they can make Linux products and not put anyone here out of work! How is it even logical to give someone on the other side of the planet what amounts to slave wages and further erode the local economy? At what point do we starve to death by sending our jobs to someone who will work for wages no one here can afford to accept? At what point does the system simply fall apart?
The disparity between the wages of the common employee and the CEO of the company Joe Sixpack (or Joe Coder) works for is higher than anywhere else on Earth! So high that Japanese CEO's are appalled by it. And with outsourcing work that disparity grows ever wider.
Who cares if this gives a job to someone overseas if it puts your neighbor, or yourself out on the streets with no chance of finding a job in the market you are skilled in?
No, but I bet my cost of living is at least 30 times higher. The falacy of your argument is that it doesn't take into account the differences in cost of living. I could not survive, to hell with keeping my house, on the wages of the people they are outsourcing these jobs to.
And where are the saved costs going? Will the price of IBM software and services go down? Or will the CEO get a fat bonus and the stockholders get a nice dividend?
Assuming you can even find a tech sector that isn't being outsourced to another country.
Why should I suck it up and get reamed up the ass so some overpaid CEO can get another multi-million dollar bonus for cutting costs again and providing yet another stellar earnings statement for the latest quarter?
We're not talking about the local iceman losing his job because everyone moved to electric refridgerators or the guy running the local Singer shop going under because no one makes their own clothes anymore. We're talking about the loss of jobs in a GROWING ECONOMIC SECTOR.
That's what happens when corporations only care about the current quarter earnings statement and not about long-term viability. Which is one of the things that caused the 1929 crash. The people who remember how that crash came about ar all dead. They can no longer warn us about what we are doing to ourselves. And we don't like to listen at any rate.
I remain one of the very few who propose this on slashdot.
Probably because others have come to realize the unreasonable extremism of your stance. I concede that the current state of the copyright and patent systems is absurd and insane, but Ifind nothing wrong with reasonable copyrights and patents. A creator of a work, be it physical or intellectual, should be granted the exclusive rights to reap the rewards of their labor for a reasonable length of time. And while I think inventors should also be allowed a shoirt-term monopoly on their inventions, I do not think that it is reasonable in the least that someone can patent a sequence of genes that they found.
As for trademarks, I have no problem with trademarks at all. If I create a company I want customers to have a reasonable level of assurance that when they by Dogfart brand toothpaste, that they are buying my product and not some cheap knock-off.
The problem is not that intellectuial property is immoral. The problem is that the IP system in place in the USA right now is out of control and has been coopted by the interests of big business at everyone else's expence.
It would be like MS putting some little utility in Windows illegally, then having the company that made the utility win a court case where they get control of all of Windows. Not gonna happen.
That's really too bad. To think I could be running Stacker Windows 2000 right now...
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, like we want to see nerds in wet t-shirts! *SHUDDER*
It's not like anyone actually reads the articles or the posts before shooting their mouth off in this place.
The simple fact is that the Department of The Interior hates the BIA. They resent them like hell and are doing nothing to help them at all. Standards, routers, etc... have nothing to do with this.
It's high time that the BIA be moved from Interior to the Department of State anyway. The American-Indiands issue isn't a land issue, it's a deplomacy issue. But that's just more politics and not relevant to the story at hand.
While MS is overpriced and abusive today, historically they did lower the bar for entrance into the computer realm. Befor MS-DOS and Windows, every brand of computer used its own OS (if you want to consider ROM-BASIC an OS) and software had to be rewritten for each platform.
With MS having the forsight and balls to reserve the ownership of MS-DOS and grant IBM a license they opened the doot to one OS running on machines manufactured by multiple venders.
Consider that when your average PC cost $4,000.00 (US) (not the high-end systems, average desktop systems), MS-DOS was only around $120.00 - $150.00 a copy. Compaired to the multi-thousand dollar cost of even the cheapest Unix systems of the day DOS was a bargain! Sure, it lacked a lot of what makes Unix so great, but it had enough to let people run their entire businesses on their desktops.
Remember, before Linux came into being, Unix (and it's clones, dirivatives, etc...) was an expensive and very closed environment.
You are completely missing the point. The Chinese are not trying to make an Intell/AMD Killer. They are making a CPU with enough horsepower to run Linux and let people do office tasks - email, word processing, spreadsheets, etc... and other normal computing tasks. They are also making a CPU in-house, which means they don't need to worry about how Intel or AMD feels about them or even if the US government doesn't want them buying powerful chips.
This isan't about playing DOOM3 or Half-Life2. This is about China having an IT sector that is not subject to the whims of non-Chinese companies or governments.
It's funney how all these "little things" tend to build up into one huge mess.
I've used all kinds of rechargables, from cheap Radio Shacks and Mallorys, to expensive Sony units. They are all pretty cose to the same, save for newer lithium-ion batteries.
I keep enough batteries in the chargers to replace the batteries in every device at the same time. And it does save an amazing amount of money in the long run. Most of my rechargables last for five to seven years before they stop being able to hold a charge.
The only batteries I have not replaced with rechargables is AAA-size. At that size the rechargables don't hold enough charge to be worth it.
To: Mr. Bill Gates.
Fr: Increasingly Disgruntled Customer.
Mr. Gates,
You can kiss my hairy ass.
You seem to have forgotten that the entire point of having children is to pass on your genes. It is not egotism at all. It is hard-wired survival instints.
The basic problem is that a very vocal group of people (not all of them, of course) don't want a new business model. They want free music. They don't give a damn that in order for digital delivery of music to succeed there needs to be some way for owners of the music to minimize losses to to unauthorized redisitribution.
Think about this for a minute. What's to stop an MPEG4 or DivX file from being sent on to another computer or even to Kazaa? Nothing. Real and Windows Media Player 9 both have DRM built in.
DRM. You did notice that the files are available in RM and WMV formats only, right? I'm not positive abiout Real files, but I know that WMV files (especially Media Player 9, which I'm sure you will need) can phone home to get permission to actually play.
Well, seeing as they are likely to actually win most of those cases, and those they don;t win will most likely be settled out of court, I don't see their coffers drying up anytime soon.
I'm sure they've put a lot more thought into this that you have.
The problem here is that you are equating "liberal" with "Democrat" and "conservative" with "Republican". While this may be true for the moment, it's not 100% accurate. There is a fairly large difference between liberals and conservatives. There is almost no difference between Democrats and Republicans, save whom exactly they are beholding to.
Woo-hoo! I'll still be able to vote when tehe revolution comes!
Not exactly. The Republican Party is geared towards saving rich people's money. The poor need not apply.
Used to be that way. They've been heavily co-opted by the Religious Right in the last few decades.
If you're greedy and rich, you vote Republican...
And thus we see the difference between college idealism and reality.
Screw the Indian programmer! Let him/her start their own company! Hell, they can make Linux products and not put anyone here out of work! How is it even logical to give someone on the other side of the planet what amounts to slave wages and further erode the local economy? At what point do we starve to death by sending our jobs to someone who will work for wages no one here can afford to accept? At what point does the system simply fall apart?
The disparity between the wages of the common employee and the CEO of the company Joe Sixpack (or Joe Coder) works for is higher than anywhere else on Earth! So high that Japanese CEO's are appalled by it. And with outsourcing work that disparity grows ever wider.
Who cares if this gives a job to someone overseas if it puts your neighbor, or yourself out on the streets with no chance of finding a job in the market you are skilled in?
No, but I bet my cost of living is at least 30 times higher. The falacy of your argument is that it doesn't take into account the differences in cost of living. I could not survive, to hell with keeping my house, on the wages of the people they are outsourcing these jobs to.
And where are the saved costs going? Will the price of IBM software and services go down? Or will the CEO get a fat bonus and the stockholders get a nice dividend?
Assuming you can even find a tech sector that isn't being outsourced to another country.
Why should I suck it up and get reamed up the ass so some overpaid CEO can get another multi-million dollar bonus for cutting costs again and providing yet another stellar earnings statement for the latest quarter?
We're not talking about the local iceman losing his job because everyone moved to electric refridgerators or the guy running the local Singer shop going under because no one makes their own clothes anymore. We're talking about the loss of jobs in a GROWING ECONOMIC SECTOR.
I want to eat, damnit! Let them build their own economies.
That's what happens when corporations only care about the current quarter earnings statement and not about long-term viability. Which is one of the things that caused the 1929 crash. The people who remember how that crash came about ar all dead. They can no longer warn us about what we are doing to ourselves. And we don't like to listen at any rate.
Probably because others have come to realize the unreasonable extremism of your stance. I concede that the current state of the copyright and patent systems is absurd and insane, but Ifind nothing wrong with reasonable copyrights and patents. A creator of a work, be it physical or intellectual, should be granted the exclusive rights to reap the rewards of their labor for a reasonable length of time. And while I think inventors should also be allowed a shoirt-term monopoly on their inventions, I do not think that it is reasonable in the least that someone can patent a sequence of genes that they found.
As for trademarks, I have no problem with trademarks at all. If I create a company I want customers to have a reasonable level of assurance that when they by Dogfart brand toothpaste, that they are buying my product and not some cheap knock-off.
The problem is not that intellectuial property is immoral. The problem is that the IP system in place in the USA right now is out of control and has been coopted by the interests of big business at everyone else's expence.
That's really too bad. To think I could be running Stacker Windows 2000 right now...
Oh, my God! That's funny! Thanks!