Yup, not only that but, even if they aren't stolen. small tools are easy to leave somewhere, drop, thoughtlessly pocket. I bet you at least one or two of them end up in in a pile on someones dresser, and about once a week he sees it, and says "shit I need to bring that back"... for a year or two...and another couple end up left in random spots under the raised floor.
How about this scenario: "I can put in trades for any amount with this terminal" "Any amount? What happens if you put in a negative trade?" "It should kick out an error like this watch... I will place negative 6." "Hey it took it! Lol I bet you just bought 6 shares!" "Lets see it looks like it just....oh shit".
actually, not just that biut.... the web is a transitory place.
How many times have you hunted for half an hour for an article that you know you read, begun to think maybe you were crazy, only to finally found a link to where it used to be.... its in fact been gone for a long time... and armed with this one remaining link, you now have to hope the wayback machine has it.
If you read all web pages offline, through an email box, then you have an implicit archive of everything that you don't delete.
I don't want to go all the way to this...but at the same time... I do occasionally ponder if there isn't some good and semi-automated way I could maintain such an archive for my own purposes.
Since then I remembered what the conversation was about, and he was trying to really nail you down on how authors and other content producers would get paid in a post-copyright world. As i remember, by the time I came to the show, you guys were seriously in the weeds with details of how a micropayment system could work to allow people to "tip" the producers of content that they like, in real time as they use it.
That was probably close to a decade ago.... I am curious as to where those debates are going for you now that time and technology have evolved? Is that still a hypothetical rat hole that you go down, or has something else, either implemented or imagined, caught your eye?
Hmmm but, currently, there seem to be a number of parties that consider them claiming they are not building nuclear weapons as being "tantamount to admitting that they are building nuclear weapons".
Clearly what the article is saying is the lesson learned from 9/11 was that killing people with planes and terrorisizng populations of people makes you a hero. We learned that one pretty good, because we have been making a lot of heros.
And in no way was the lesson that sometimes people locally actually suffer the consequences of a small group of their neighbors insistance on using violence and clansdestine action as matters of normal policy in other people's local communities.
> It a mostly wrong headed attempt to solve a serious problem, which is that a huge number of users > aren't paying for your product, and could be setting themselves up for a lifetime of going to > thepiratebay rather than the local retail shop.
Even the problem is wrongheaded, because its based on the assumption that the choice is between pirating game X and buying game X in the store.
While this may be true for some subset of what pirates pirate, its demonstrably not true for the majority. Both studies and every bit of anecdotal evidence I have seen says that the divide between pirates and non-pirates is money. People who can't afford to be aquiring media in the first place are the ones who pirate it.
Honestly, the most prolific pirates I have known, are the same people that, if they told me they were going to buy a couple of DVDs, I would probably chastise them for wasting money they need to feed their kids.... or are kids themselves. They also seem to consume a lot more media than people who pay for it.... and also seem to have a lot of free time with which to watch movies, play games etc, often on account of not having steady employment or being disabled, or again, being a kid.
So.... stop piracy, maybe sales go up a LITTLE. However, the choice for pirates is typically not "have it all free or buy it all". Its "have it all free or buy a small fraction of it". My estimate is, stop piracy entirely, you can expect MAYBE a few percent increase in overall sales.... and most of those will be bargain bin purchases or used product purchases.
Sharing code and designs predates computers by many years, hell, in many ways, it goes back to the begining of recorded history.
However the term "Open Source" was, by all sources I can find, coined in the late 90s... and was rather inetionally setup as a way to break away from the more radical elements of free software philosophy.
Free Software, and Open Source both come from much older and less well defined traditions, but, they each brought their own perspectives to the table in much more explicit ways than before them.
Yes but, there is more than one philosophy at work. Remember that Open Source came after the Free Software movement. They both have very different aims, even if they look the same in overall direction and strategy.
Free Software (which, as a term and philosophy, predates Open Source by decade), proponents of which drafted the GPL itself, does, indeed espouse that all software should be "Free Software" (which is the same as open source except this philosophical difference) and the GPL is seen as a viral way to hack copyright to use it to support such an environment.
"The safest SUV, the Suburban, has at least a 40 percent higher combined risk than the three safest midsize and large cars, the Avalon, Camry, and Accord,"
Thank you, I was looking for a good example. Copyright would be another one. Without agreement as to whats moral (which I don't see any signs of being around the corner) this is little more than a masturbatory (speaking of unaligned morality....) exercise.
Is it moral to kill? Some say no, never. Others say only in response to a clear and present danger. Still others have exceptions for if a person has done something heinous, or whenever their government (however they define that) declares a war.
Is it moral to kill the known animals other than humans? We certainly don't agree there either. Is it moral to kill a cat? How about a fly?
The thing is, they are not "customers" until they use support. They are absolutely free, under any open source license that I have seen, to contract anyone else for support. In this case, the customers are simply not the community members, but whatever subset of community members needs support.
They can still post on forums like anyone else. They can still run test systems and do load tests and test deployments, etc, run multiple versions, hire their own programers to modify it.
It probably is a communications issue but, as presented, I have no issue with the business model of offering premier support for software that you released for free. Its not like they are cut off from any of the normal ways that the community of open and free software users normally get support... they are just being offered an explicit extra option from the original source experts.... but fundamentally a service that anyone could offer.
I can think of a few experiences I had where I was looking through forums, and found some irate tirade against a vendor, followed by calm responses by that vendor, either explaining their side of the issue firmly but politely, or offering to take care of the issue immediately, and appologizing (sometimes both on different threads by the same vendor).... it always gives me respect for them and makes me check them out. A couple have essentially gotten my business that way.
This is exactly the right answer, because it turns the troll into an opportunity to show that they are professionals. Be thankful for the opportunity to be appologetic, and explain how it works for anyone in the future....and point them at the forums.
I would add, maybe the thing to ask is, is there a better way to portray this information so that it is obvious.
I would also mention, there are a few times when I explained to someone how an open source company offering a product and support was doing it, and several people had the exact same reaction... to assume the reasonable price was just a ploy to raise prices once you are locked in. People come with different mindsets, and what is clear to one is not always clear to another.
> They pay people so little in China, they artificially deflate their currency, have little regard for environmental and > occupational regulations to the point where it costs less to make it *and* ship it all the way across the Pacific > Ocean than it does to have American workers make it at home and simply have it trucked a few hundred miles. > People want to pay less for what they buy, and then wonder why they don't get paid more.
At the same time though, conditions in China do seem on a path to improvement. I have seen articles where members of labor unions (illegal in china) interviewed, and they have even had strikes at plants. Should we really expect that we can fight tooth and nail for higher wages and living standards here, and just...export that around the world without struggle?
There can be no labor movement without labor, and no labor without economic activity.
In the end though, this is not even related to the issue. How many of those knock off goods from first world companies were themselves being produced in chineese plants under the same conditions as the knock offs?
Not knocking the operation though, as meh as I am on the issue in general, claiming something is something that it isn't is dishonest, and fraud, so on that level, I do applaud it.
Though by the same token, when I was in Paris I bought a couple of knock off jackets from a street vendor. They were fine jackets for the price (which, knowing they were knock offs, I felt no shame offering him a fraction of what he was asking.... and he took it). I could say he was trying to defraud me but.... I highly doubt anyone is actually fooled by these guys. (seriously, he told me it was a promotion and he needed money for gas back to Italy lol... he was the second guy that day to pull over in a car and tell me the exact same story)
> so, you are ok with one group of people wishing for the absolute death of all others who are not like them.
Never said that. What I said was that the current policy is keeping those people in power, Isreal, through its actions, is helping to keep those people in power.
> friends with moslem countries are only temporary
Maybe its just me, but every Iranian I meet tells me how much better it would have been if their country was still Zoarastrian. Frankly, the place has a LONG history of tolerance for many religions (of course, they have a long enough history to have a long history of many things, including intolarance too). There is no such thing as "moslem countries". There are countries with moslem majorities (which will, eventually, include Isreal btw), there are countries which claim to run under some manner of Islamic law, however, I doubt there is any place that if you actually were able to survey people's private thoughts, you would find so much uniformity on religion. There are closet atheists, doubters, and believers in other faiths everywhere....banning them just drives them under ground.
Iran, being a rather well educated country (relatively anyway), I suspect you will find far more atheists there than anyone can admit.
> but as a fox news viewer, I bet you didn't really understand this complex issue at all.
Fox news viewer? Well no wonder you think muslims are all one big happy family that hates everyone else. Try upgrading to NPR and RT, much better news sources.
Yup. Unless a CPU dies within like 1-2 years, I am probably not going to replace it.... just because its silly, when for a couple of hundred $ i can have a new MB/CPU/RAM all upgraded to the latest (or a few steps below the latest, I tend to look for that point on the curve just before the price starts expanding at a faster rate than the speed or cores)
I used to repurpose old hardware, until I realized that power costs money, and even though the old machines used less power, the newer ones delivered so much more per watt that it wasn't even worth turning the old systems on... why repurpose a machine when I have so much spare capacity on the ones I have in operation that I can spin up a VM to provide any new service that I need?
In theory I agree with the last part about prefering solder, in truth I don't care. Inserting a CPU is easy and its not like they are NES cartidges that get swapped out often and have connector problems. In truth though, I am, the vast majority of the time, specing out and buying CPU and MB together....so they may as well be soldered.
Of all the components, these are the two I least care about being fused together.
Why? Simple, the most common (internal) components for me to swap out on a system, either for repair or upgrade, are video card, memory and disk, in that approximate order. (CPU heat sinks might make the list, but thats only because I tend to be foolish enough to think that THIS TIME, the included heat sink will be sized appropriately for the CPU)
Generally, by the time I am thinking I need more base CPU, it makes more sense to move to a newer generation of CPU with a new socket and thus, new motherboard. I would almost say the same about RAM, on average I upgrade the amount of memory in a system once, and have had to swap out many more sticks of memory than CPUs.
All in all, the CPU/mb is about the only set of components that I neither carry on to the next machine, nor upgrade in the same machine, nor find unreliable enough to need replacement.
Well of course, I have no problem with the MBA itself, I wasn't actually commenting on the program. Hell, I have nothing against history degrees either.
What bothers me, is talking to people who don't have degrees, or have rather unemployable ones like History etc... people without real technical skills of any sort, but who may be (or are in process of being) educated; even highly educated. Often they don't know what they want to do (or have an unrealistic idea of it), and their default falls to "I should get an MBA" under the idea that this is what you do....if you want to work for businesses, you study business.... kind of like if you want money you rob banks, because thats where the money is.
Its not that MBAs are bad, or we don't need people with finance degrees. Certainly we need people educated in these areas. Nothing wrong with having some telephone sanitizers on staff either, those phones need to be clean afterall....just look at what happened to the golgafrinchans.
Thats the thing, its not engineers who get MBAs that are the problem, its the fact that not enough people want the engineering or science education to begin with thats the problem.
> I am not familiar with this "third ship" thing you mention. I am assuming from context it means being > one of the elite.
Actually its was a Hitchhikers Guide reference, that along with the listing of "telephone sanitizer". If I had remembered it properly, I would have called them the "B ARK"... but basically, the joke comes from this text: http://www.geoffwilkins.net/fragments/Adams.htm
Its kind of the opposite, the "B Ark", was loaded up with the useless people and middle men, then "sent off first", being told it was because they were so important....
"Oh yes," said the Captain, "Millions of them. Hairdressers, tired TV producers, insurance salesmen, personnel officers, security guards, public relations executives, management consultants, you name them. We're going to colonize another planet."
Good programs can always be rebuilt, if not by us, then by someone else. At least the fiscal cliff will cut military programs...and cutting them is far more important to me than any science program. Other countries can have science programs and educate their people....we need to stop being such warmongers first.
I mostly feelthe same way...its just that, I don't have much faith in the current system brining any quality, so I argue for smaller government....because I don't see quality, nor how more is going to increase quality.
I don't doubt that what you are saying might be true. While there are many of us who may cheer at the actions of hacktivists, it does take something different to actually.... and I don't doubt that there are those who hide juvenile or even self serving motives behind a veneer of idealism.
That said...if its true, I must say... maybe my enemies enemy isn't my friend, but, it still doesn't mean that there is a downside from my view when they battle, because they both lose something....and as for the stratfor hack....wow could that have not happened to a more deserving group?
I read some of the articles that came from that. If the US government wants so much credibility, they should prosecute every single crime revealed in those email leaks with every bit as much enthusiasm as they do this guy. (and remember, things like corperate bribery are crimes. In fact, any exchange of value to induce someone to do something they shouldn't do (give up secrets, allow access, whatever) is bribry.
In fact, I have seen people at one of my previous employers get fired and prosecuted over it. One of them went to jail.
Surely their criminal conspiracy of a company is a bigger threat than some guy who published the contents of some email boxes.
> So hacking into a Corporation will now get you labelled as a Terrorist > and could land you life in prison. Seems that being a plain ol' > armed robber and/or murderer would net you far less severe a > punishment.
Good thing he isn't black and wasn't smoking a joint when they caught him, or else he would have some of the worst debuffs the american justice game has to offer.
> Those workers aren't employed because there aren't enough businesses with unfilled jobs to employ them.
or.....
Those workers aren't employed because there aren't enough businesses with unfilled jobs, that they are qualified to be employed in.
There might, in fact, be plenty of jobs for people willing to learn how to work with steel and copper, but, in case you haven't noticed, picking up those skills isn't exactly high on most people's todo list.
Or as I said to someone the other day.... a college degree is great, but, a high tech manufacturing sector isn't going to keep its machines running, much less set them up and use them, on what you learned getting your MBA or history degree.
While its true, we need generic businessmen, and accountants, historians, and even telephone sanitizers; can we possibly admit that we have too many people aspiring to be on the "third ship" so to speak.
Recently, we were dealing with my grandmother on the first floor. She would call saying she smelled gas, so she would open the windows then call us upstairs, of course, we couldn't smell it.... after a few times we called. They came and said our pipes were old, put some wax sealant on and suggested we fix them soon.
I didn't doubt their diagnosis, the house has had gas longer than electricity....
Then a few days later she smelled it again... this time we ended up with a whole crew down,....not in our house... but going up and down the street. Apparently it wasn't our pipes...there was a leak under the road across the street!
Slashdot Mirror
Yup, not only that but, even if they aren't stolen. small tools are easy to leave somewhere, drop, thoughtlessly pocket. I bet you at least one or two of them end up in in a pile on someones dresser, and about once a week he sees it, and says "shit I need to bring that back"... for a year or two...and another couple end up left in random spots under the raised floor.
How about this scenario:
"I can put in trades for any amount with this terminal"
"Any amount? What happens if you put in a negative trade?"
"It should kick out an error like this watch... I will place negative 6."
"Hey it took it! Lol I bet you just bought 6 shares!"
"Lets see it looks like it just....oh shit".
actually, not just that biut.... the web is a transitory place.
How many times have you hunted for half an hour for an article that you know you read, begun to think maybe you were crazy, only to finally found a link to where it used to be.... its in fact been gone for a long time... and armed with this one remaining link, you now have to hope the wayback machine has it.
If you read all web pages offline, through an email box, then you have an implicit archive of everything that you don't delete.
I don't want to go all the way to this...but at the same time... I do occasionally ponder if there isn't some good and semi-automated way I could maintain such an archive for my own purposes.
Recently I was telling part of the story of my first Arisia, where I ran into you debating a bookseller (I believe it was the guy who runs Pandemonium but, I am not sure on that) http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3240153&cid=41927547
Since then I remembered what the conversation was about, and he was trying to really nail you down on how authors and other content producers would get paid in a post-copyright world. As i remember, by the time I came to the show, you guys were seriously in the weeds with details of how a micropayment system could work to allow people to "tip" the producers of content that they like, in real time as they use it.
That was probably close to a decade ago.... I am curious as to where those debates are going for you now that time and technology have evolved? Is that still a hypothetical rat hole that you go down, or has something else, either implemented or imagined, caught your eye?
Hmmm but, currently, there seem to be a number of parties that consider them claiming they are not building nuclear weapons as being "tantamount to admitting that they are building nuclear weapons".
Clearly what the article is saying is the lesson learned from 9/11 was that killing people with planes and terrorisizng populations of people makes you a hero. We learned that one pretty good, because we have been making a lot of heros.
And in no way was the lesson that sometimes people locally actually suffer the consequences of a small group of their neighbors insistance on using violence and clansdestine action as matters of normal policy in other people's local communities.
> It a mostly wrong headed attempt to solve a serious problem, which is that a huge number of users
> aren't paying for your product, and could be setting themselves up for a lifetime of going to
> thepiratebay rather than the local retail shop.
Even the problem is wrongheaded, because its based on the assumption that the choice is between pirating game X and buying game X in the store.
While this may be true for some subset of what pirates pirate, its demonstrably not true for the majority. Both studies and every bit of anecdotal evidence I have seen says that the divide between pirates and non-pirates is money. People who can't afford to be aquiring media in the first place are the ones who pirate it.
Honestly, the most prolific pirates I have known, are the same people that, if they told me they were going to buy a couple of DVDs, I would probably chastise them for wasting money they need to feed their kids.... or are kids themselves. They also seem to consume a lot more media than people who pay for it.... and also seem to have a lot of free time with which to watch movies, play games etc, often on account of not having steady employment or being disabled, or again, being a kid.
So.... stop piracy, maybe sales go up a LITTLE. However, the choice for pirates is typically not "have it all free or buy it all". Its "have it all free or buy a small fraction of it". My estimate is, stop piracy entirely, you can expect MAYBE a few percent increase in overall sales.... and most of those will be bargain bin purchases or used product purchases.
Sharing code and designs predates computers by many years, hell, in many ways, it goes back to the begining of recorded history.
However the term "Open Source" was, by all sources I can find, coined in the late 90s... and was rather inetionally setup as a way to break away from the more radical elements of free software philosophy.
Free Software, and Open Source both come from much older and less well defined traditions, but, they each brought their own perspectives to the table in much more explicit ways than before them.
Yes but, there is more than one philosophy at work. Remember that Open Source came after the Free Software movement. They both have very different aims, even if they look the same in overall direction and strategy.
Free Software (which, as a term and philosophy, predates Open Source by decade), proponents of which drafted the GPL itself, does, indeed espouse that all software should be "Free Software" (which is the same as open source except this philosophical difference) and the GPL is seen as a viral way to hack copyright to use it to support such an environment.
For more, check some of this out: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/
Your analogy doesn't really hold much water. A suburban is much closer to a car than a BUS, and does not actually benefit in safety from its size like a bus does:
http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/EETD-SUV-Safety.html
Thank you, I was looking for a good example. Copyright would be another one. Without agreement as to whats moral (which I don't see any signs of being around the corner) this is little more than a masturbatory (speaking of unaligned morality....) exercise.
Is it moral to kill? Some say no, never. Others say only in response to a clear and present danger. Still others have exceptions for if a person has done something heinous, or whenever their government (however they define that) declares a war.
Is it moral to kill the known animals other than humans? We certainly don't agree there either. Is it moral to kill a cat? How about a fly?
The thing is, they are not "customers" until they use support. They are absolutely free, under any open source license that I have seen, to contract anyone else for support. In this case, the customers are simply not the community members, but whatever subset of community members needs support.
They can still post on forums like anyone else. They can still run test systems and do load tests and test deployments, etc, run multiple versions, hire their own programers to modify it.
It probably is a communications issue but, as presented, I have no issue with the business model of offering premier support for software that you released for free. Its not like they are cut off from any of the normal ways that the community of open and free software users normally get support... they are just being offered an explicit extra option from the original source experts.... but fundamentally a service that anyone could offer.
I can think of a few experiences I had where I was looking through forums, and found some irate tirade against a vendor, followed by calm responses by that vendor, either explaining their side of the issue firmly but politely, or offering to take care of the issue immediately, and appologizing (sometimes both on different threads by the same vendor).... it always gives me respect for them and makes me check them out. A couple have essentially gotten my business that way.
This is exactly the right answer, because it turns the troll into an opportunity to show that they are professionals. Be thankful for the opportunity to be appologetic, and explain how it works for anyone in the future....and point them at the forums.
I would add, maybe the thing to ask is, is there a better way to portray this information so that it is obvious.
I would also mention, there are a few times when I explained to someone how an open source company offering a product and support was doing it, and several people had the exact same reaction... to assume the reasonable price was just a ploy to raise prices once you are locked in. People come with different mindsets, and what is clear to one is not always clear to another.
> They pay people so little in China, they artificially deflate their currency, have little regard for environmental and
> occupational regulations to the point where it costs less to make it *and* ship it all the way across the Pacific
> Ocean than it does to have American workers make it at home and simply have it trucked a few hundred miles.
> People want to pay less for what they buy, and then wonder why they don't get paid more.
At the same time though, conditions in China do seem on a path to improvement. I have seen articles where members of labor unions (illegal in china) interviewed, and they have even had strikes at plants. Should we really expect that we can fight tooth and nail for higher wages and living standards here, and just...export that around the world without struggle?
There can be no labor movement without labor, and no labor without economic activity.
In the end though, this is not even related to the issue. How many of those knock off goods from first world companies were themselves being produced in chineese plants under the same conditions as the knock offs?
Not knocking the operation though, as meh as I am on the issue in general, claiming something is something that it isn't is dishonest, and fraud, so on that level, I do applaud it.
Though by the same token, when I was in Paris I bought a couple of knock off jackets from a street vendor. They were fine jackets for the price (which, knowing they were knock offs, I felt no shame offering him a fraction of what he was asking.... and he took it). I could say he was trying to defraud me but.... I highly doubt anyone is actually fooled by these guys. (seriously, he told me it was a promotion and he needed money for gas back to Italy lol... he was the second guy that day to pull over in a car and tell me the exact same story)
> so, you are ok with one group of people wishing for the absolute death of all others who are not like them.
Never said that. What I said was that the current policy is keeping those people in power, Isreal, through its actions, is helping to keep those people in power.
> friends with moslem countries are only temporary
Maybe its just me, but every Iranian I meet tells me how much better it would have been if their country was still Zoarastrian. Frankly, the place has a LONG history of tolerance for many religions (of course, they have a long enough history to have a long history of many things, including intolarance too). There is no such thing as "moslem countries". There are countries with moslem majorities (which will, eventually, include Isreal btw), there are countries which claim to run under some manner of Islamic law, however, I doubt there is any place that if you actually were able to survey people's private thoughts, you would find so much uniformity on religion. There are closet atheists, doubters, and believers in other faiths everywhere....banning them just drives them under ground.
Iran, being a rather well educated country (relatively anyway), I suspect you will find far more atheists there than anyone can admit.
> but as a fox news viewer, I bet you didn't really understand this complex issue at all.
Fox news viewer? Well no wonder you think muslims are all one big happy family that hates everyone else. Try upgrading to NPR and RT, much better news sources.
Yup. Unless a CPU dies within like 1-2 years, I am probably not going to replace it.... just because its silly, when for a couple of hundred $ i can have a new MB/CPU/RAM all upgraded to the latest (or a few steps below the latest, I tend to look for that point on the curve just before the price starts expanding at a faster rate than the speed or cores)
I used to repurpose old hardware, until I realized that power costs money, and even though the old machines used less power, the newer ones delivered so much more per watt that it wasn't even worth turning the old systems on... why repurpose a machine when I have so much spare capacity on the ones I have in operation that I can spin up a VM to provide any new service that I need?
In theory I agree with the last part about prefering solder, in truth I don't care. Inserting a CPU is easy and its not like they are NES cartidges that get swapped out often and have connector problems. In truth though, I am, the vast majority of the time, specing out and buying CPU and MB together....so they may as well be soldered.
Of all the components, these are the two I least care about being fused together.
Why? Simple, the most common (internal) components for me to swap out on a system, either for repair or upgrade, are video card, memory and disk, in that approximate order. (CPU heat sinks might make the list, but thats only because I tend to be foolish enough to think that THIS TIME, the included heat sink will be sized appropriately for the CPU)
Generally, by the time I am thinking I need more base CPU, it makes more sense to move to a newer generation of CPU with a new socket and thus, new motherboard. I would almost say the same about RAM, on average I upgrade the amount of memory in a system once, and have had to swap out many more sticks of memory than CPUs.
All in all, the CPU/mb is about the only set of components that I neither carry on to the next machine, nor upgrade in the same machine, nor find unreliable enough to need replacement.
Well of course, I have no problem with the MBA itself, I wasn't actually commenting on the program. Hell, I have nothing against history degrees either.
What bothers me, is talking to people who don't have degrees, or have rather unemployable ones like History etc... people without real technical skills of any sort, but who may be (or are in process of being) educated; even highly educated. Often they don't know what they want to do (or have an unrealistic idea of it), and their default falls to "I should get an MBA" under the idea that this is what you do....if you want to work for businesses, you study business.... kind of like if you want money you rob banks, because thats where the money is.
Its not that MBAs are bad, or we don't need people with finance degrees. Certainly we need people educated in these areas. Nothing wrong with having some telephone sanitizers on staff either, those phones need to be clean afterall....just look at what happened to the golgafrinchans.
Thats the thing, its not engineers who get MBAs that are the problem, its the fact that not enough people want the engineering or science education to begin with thats the problem.
> I am not familiar with this "third ship" thing you mention. I am assuming from context it means being
> one of the elite.
Actually its was a Hitchhikers Guide reference, that along with the listing of "telephone sanitizer". If I had remembered it properly, I would have called them the "B ARK"... but basically, the joke comes from this text: http://www.geoffwilkins.net/fragments/Adams.htm
Its kind of the opposite, the "B Ark", was loaded up with the useless people and middle men, then "sent off first", being told it was because they were so important....
Good programs can always be rebuilt, if not by us, then by someone else. At least the fiscal cliff will cut military programs...and cutting them is far more important to me than any science program. Other countries can have science programs and educate their people....we need to stop being such warmongers first.
I mostly feelthe same way...its just that, I don't have much faith in the current system brining any quality, so I argue for smaller government....because I don't see quality, nor how more is going to increase quality.
I don't doubt that what you are saying might be true. While there are many of us who may cheer at the actions of hacktivists, it does take something different to actually.... and I don't doubt that there are those who hide juvenile or even self serving motives behind a veneer of idealism.
That said...if its true, I must say... maybe my enemies enemy isn't my friend, but, it still doesn't mean that there is a downside from my view when they battle, because they both lose something....and as for the stratfor hack....wow could that have not happened to a more deserving group?
I read some of the articles that came from that. If the US government wants so much credibility, they should prosecute every single crime revealed in those email leaks with every bit as much enthusiasm as they do this guy.
(and remember, things like corperate bribery are crimes. In fact, any exchange of value to induce someone to do something they shouldn't do (give up secrets, allow access, whatever) is bribry.
In fact, I have seen people at one of my previous employers get fired and prosecuted over it. One of them went to jail.
Surely their criminal conspiracy of a company is a bigger threat than some guy who published the contents of some email boxes.
> So hacking into a Corporation will now get you labelled as a Terrorist
> and could land you life in prison. Seems that being a plain ol'
> armed robber and/or murderer would net you far less severe a
> punishment.
Good thing he isn't black and wasn't smoking a joint when they caught him, or else he would have some of the worst debuffs the american justice game has to offer.
> Those workers aren't employed because there aren't enough businesses with unfilled jobs to employ them.
or.....
Those workers aren't employed because there aren't enough businesses with unfilled jobs, that they are qualified to be employed in.
There might, in fact, be plenty of jobs for people willing to learn how to work with steel and copper, but, in case you haven't noticed, picking up those skills isn't exactly high on most people's todo list.
Or as I said to someone the other day.... a college degree is great, but, a high tech manufacturing sector isn't going to keep its machines running, much less set them up and use them, on what you learned getting your MBA or history degree.
While its true, we need generic businessmen, and accountants, historians, and even telephone sanitizers; can we possibly admit that we have too many people aspiring to be on the "third ship" so to speak.
Some of our infrastructure is OLD. A lot of it.
Recently, we were dealing with my grandmother on the first floor. She would call saying she smelled gas, so she would open the windows then call us upstairs, of course, we couldn't smell it.... after a few times we called. They came and said our pipes were old, put some wax sealant on and suggested we fix them soon.
I didn't doubt their diagnosis, the house has had gas longer than electricity....
Then a few days later she smelled it again... this time we ended up with a whole crew down,....not in our house... but going up and down the street. Apparently it wasn't our pipes...there was a leak under the road across the street!