By contrast, social systems are top-down and hierarchical, from which we draw the basic assumption that organization and order can only come from centralism.
That's a simplification.
Like nature, social systems can come in a variety of kinds, whether strictly hierarchal or peer-to-peer.
Sufficient organization and order to get the job done is demonstrated in swarms and flocks.
Likewise, in my own human body there are a variety of cells that interact in different degrees of hierarchy depending on the functionality. Brains and the central nervous system control muscles almost exclusively, but white cells go clean up anywhere they're needed.
Likewise, human societies ought to adapt the degree of central authority to the task at hand.
Doing otherwise limits our flexibility and increases the probability of non-optimal solutions.
[Some might suggest that local optimum solutions that are very good for a limited number of people in society are in evidence in many highly centralized social systems. An interesting medical commentary once suggested that the role of government in societal bodies is akin to the role of parasites in biological organisms. No value judgements, just looking at functionality...]
There are so many things that we keep doing in a wasteful and inelegant way just because
Cars and power supplies for computers.
There's often a trade-off in the initial cost (which includes the cost of the energy required to make the thing) vs the future cost.
People will tend toward picking the lower initial cost and not accurately assessing their total future cost of ownership.
Manufacturers of long-life lightbulbs can verify that customers will pick low initial cost; as will the hordes that flock to Walmart.
And there's the people with recently-purchased Hummer's getting whipsawed by gasoline prices, which are changing on a much faster timescale than the frequency with which they replace their vehicles.
I've noticed SUV and truck manufacturers flogging their wares pretty heavily of late; I'm suspecting that sales are down as people look at the price of filling up the tank.
The fundamental motivation was not the current prices, but strategic reasons.
It takes some courage for politicians to make a current cash commitment that will only pay off in the 10 year time frame.
Here in the USA, our politicians typically ignore large long-term problems and simply react in knee-jerk fashion to the crisis du jour.
But I'm sure a lot of places are looking at Munich's brave rollout with interest after being sold hard into subscription based licensing and not knowing for sure when new products (like Longhorn) will be delivered to them.
Another thing everyone will be interested in seeing compared is Desktop Support Costs: Before and After.
Server admins, too, will have a different work profile that will be interesting to see in a large installation. Less worrying about CALS, more worrying about whether user profiles in LDAP are updated, secure, and performing well enough...
Munich has limited resources to document their transition in more than a cursory fashion. Nevertheless, many people will be interested in those details.
As much as I am a Linux fan, there is an unavoidable conflict of interest involved in accepting versions of the Munich transition that are produced by the vendor (just as Microsoft's "Get the Facts" marketing campaign is rightly eyed suspiciously).
For that reason, it would be good if Munich's own assessment were made publicly avaiable.
Not that government officials are immune from bias in self-assessment of their decisions either...
A lot of 3D experiences are better with some mouse interactivity, which can be done locally just fine.
Unless the 3D application is designed intelligently to pre-fetch what is needed next and does the interactive stuff locally, it will be as painful as using audio over the net with time delays.
And if BW is enough, there's always the competition of rendering moving 3D objects on th server, earlier, and shoving a 2D animation to the browser.
IMHO, 3D won't take off big time until wrap-around displays become commonplace.
Some of these web-designers probably come from a print background, and as a result of their training, they are stuck with a lot of print-specific notions that are admittedly hard to discard.
Not hard to discard. A bit of aging and presbyopia will dispel those notions.
[From a Firefox user that frequently hits "Ctrl +" on web pages, and more than once for some teensy font pages. Command line windows are up to lucidatypewriter bold 14, and 18 point after a hard day...]
Unfortunately there isn't a program to stop the user being stupid.
True enough. But then it is easier to modify applications and their design than it is to modify human beings and their design (well, at least for now...)
Sometimes products are distributed that haven't been thought out well enough to consider the stupid user problem.
In this case, "convenient features" about Outlook running attachments is colliding with user stupidity, gullibility, etc. [It's like stories of "free baseball night" at the ballgame - "fans" started to throw their free gifts onto the field when play got boring. Somebody wasn't thinking far enough ahead.]
While Outlooks ubiquity might exacerbate the problems that Outlook users experience, other mail clients do not seem to have as many problems as Outlook does and certainly not as widespread an impact.
Careful product design can mitigate the unavoidable problems of "stupid users in a cruel world".
but the ability to build a plow that every farmer uses.
This attitude is really a hallmark of doing development for free and open source software.
Just as in openly-published science, there's a motivating fame that drives programmers to produce what they think is really the best and what they appreciate most is the acknowledgement of their capable peers.
Note to self and to world:
Don't hesitate to thank someone publicly for a good job they've done, particularly if they've done it for the public.
Public commendation for FOSS developers encourages talented developers to persevere. that is important if they aren't getting any money for what they do and because they will inevitably put up with that omnipresent segment of consumers that expects their every whim and expectation to be met with much bowing and scraping and solutions to be delivered on a silver platter.
If MS announced that they were releasing an update to XP this whole site would be full of posts like
...just like the ones you're getting here about Linux 2.6.7.
Namely, "are people here running their production servers with good uptime, various weird applications, exotic hardware, etc.?"
When XP SP 2 comes out, you can be damn sure people are going to ask the exact same questions about reliability, incompatibility, etc.. At MyCorp we've got staff that do nothing but stress test the latest Windows patches and releases for compatibility with our current environment. We do that because:
it's very important to our business that people aren't down.
past history suggests that blind upgrades are for fools rushing in...shit happens.
the long sought-after fortran 95 compiler replacing the fortran 77 compiler is certainly newsworthy.
Indeed, it is.
While much of the scientific community has moved to develop code in C and C++, there was substantial momentum and a great deal of previosuly-developed code in FORTRAN 77.
Though I took the C and C++ path and am grateful for the freely-available gcc, colleagues have written code in FORTRAN 90 that sorely needs a working free compiler.
But several years ago when MS was actually in competition with Netscape the improvements in IE were a lot more evident at the time and were a lot faster in being delivered to the customers.
Of course, that was then.
The competitive landscape has changed and with it has vanished the necessity for MS to produce a browser to compete with anything other than old versions of its own products.
Users looking for major improvements in Internet Explorer will find them if and only if they upgrade to Longhorn, when IE 7 will be released (2006?)
Basically, Internet Explorer has reached that same point in a typical Microsoft product development cycle that Word reached long ago.
There's no valid business case for putting resources into improving this product that already dominates over 90% of the browser market. Simply, at this point, the only valid business strategy for the next version of Internet Explorer is to leverage its dominant position to gain more business in different markets.
[Quoting from the article] In the coming markets of moving bits, who owns what? Will people buy their programming and machines? Or will they rent and subscribe?
This convergence of computers, communications and consumer electronics is going to bring some startling expectations to companies that aren't ready for continually and drastically dropping prices.
In the computer hardware arena we're accustomed to rapid obsolescence and geometric increases in power and capability over time (Moore's Law).
Likewise, with data network connectivity, we're accustomed to geometric increases in performance or comparable reductions in cost over time (Metcalf's Law).
As devices become more connected and people subscribe to services, they're going to expect similar economies in some fashion or another (say in terms of number of digital TV channels they have access to, increases in resolution and audio quality, etc) or decreasing prices for some particular piece of content.
Artificial barriers will be broken down. If, at some point in time, it really only costs a company US$0.15 to deliver a live football game to my cell phone video display while I'm in the middle of nowhere, then it's going to be hard for them to charge people $20 for this service for any great length of time.
In an era when value of content quickly drops to zero because it can be copied and retransmitted for next to nothing, it will be hard to sustain the current model of blockbuster movies and audio content.
It will be more like selling perishable groceries than classic durable goods like washing machines.
but Firefox 1.0 will surely leave you shaking on your already shaky foundations and standing in a small warm puddle'
Firefox is an excellent browser; I've been using it happily since 0.6.
But while IE can claim that it "came with My Computer" Firefox cannot overcome it but very slowly and only among those who appreciate its superiority and have enough patience to download and install it.
AOL was the last distributor of millions of CDs who were in a position to bundle Mozilla and deliver it to the majority audience that will just take what they get.
Re:Signal to noise ratio plan.
on
Meet Joe Blog
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
It's good that Blogs will get some kind of ranking.
Categories of blogs would be nice, too, so that we're not overwhelmed by Pop Culture, Sports, Movies, One Micron Deep Political Commentary, Etc. We might even divide these categories into groups, something like comp.os.linux.x and so on:)
Popularity might be a good measure of Blog site after it gets discovered and gets a bunch of hits and links to it.
The problem is that brute force popularity metrics will miss new, emerging Blogs that might have high quality writing, insightful analysis, but only a slowly-growing audience.
we will let newbies show and tell us what they need.
This is an excellent idea.
A lot of people in IT have a lot of experience with Microsoft, whose approach since they gained market dominance has been to more or less shove new products to their audience after some token sampling of the marketplace.
But FOSS is currently making a similar supply-side mistake, too: people that want to use Linux to do something in particular for their business have to "just accept" a distro and what's out there. Before you say "but they can write their own app", think - How many small business owners are capable of "writing their own app", modifying an Apache module, etc?
Sure, there's tons of free and open source software out there that people can use to build systems for their businesses, but many of those small business owners have little time or little expertise about how those pieces could be put together to help them. They need help with insight. Call it marketing, for lack of a better term.
Instead of just offering a supply, either as MS offers OurOneSizeFitsAll - take it or leave it; Linux offers an OceanOfFreePartsAnyExpertCanUse, drive a focus more onto customer demand that will help provide more people with Linux solutions that can really help them. And, if it helps them, it will help even more people as they can more easily see how it can be done.
ask them to duplicate that with Windows and IIS/MS SQL.
I can see you baiters in the audience, the ones with toothy grins when someone suggests they connect that nice new looking IIS/MS-SQL box to the Bad Old Dirty Virus-Ridden Internet....
Can you imagine pissing off the authors of an open source project so much that they specifically name you in their modified license?!?
This would be akin to a modified GPL version 4,
"whereas, be it known, that all of the aforementioned rights are completely and utterly revoked, in perpetuity for Darl McBride, business associates of Darl McBride, and all his descendents are likewised to be cursed and spat upon, even unto the fourth generation. He shall have no community rights whatsoever, neither shall his name be uttered in any sacred place, nor his handiwork to be exhibited with 100 feet of a sacred place, school nor voting booth....
Where program size counts in a scripting language is the time taken to write the program.
and in the time taken to grok the program 6 months from now.
As a language, Python does well here.
However, more than language, the author or programmer matters in creating decipherable elegant code that can be understood 6 months later by someone random.
The graft and corruption between the recording industry and radio stations would disappear if there were more radio stations.
Perhaps this harks back to a previous Slashdot topic about whether the FCC has outlived its usefulness, but if there were lower barriers to entry for people wanting to establish radio stations and more radio stations, then the market would fragment and compete to the point where station quality would improve. At least all the many different segments of the listening audience could be better served than by the One Ring to Rule Them congolmerate approach.
Even the few people that actually like the programming content on the most popular local radio station agree that quality could be improved, not least by reducing the quantity of commercials down from what seems like 35 minutes per hour if you count self-promotion jingles.
Jobs are going just going where the global economy allows them to go.
The obvious solution is to insist that all goods and services imported into the United States are created by workers with:
Rights to some minimum wage.
A safe and healthy workplace.
Rights to join a union of their choice if they choose.
At a minimum, this would help to cut out using prisoners for labor, etc.
As it stands currently, there are some workers in China that get shafted by their bosses in that paychecks are delayed by months, or else not given at all if the boss has a cozy relationship with a powerful government official and can escape consequences.
This is particularly ironic considering the Marxist ideology that supposedly is the foundation of the PRC. All unions except the official state-sponsored union are illegal. But the official union probably isn't going to go on strike against factory owners with relatives in the Red Army.
Don't get me wrong. It's not all bad, all exploitation. A lot of increased wealth and economic growth have occurred in China recently and a lot of people over there have benefitted. That's a good thing. It's just that more safeguards for workers' rights are needed offshore to prevent some of the abuses that currently occur, and implementation these safeguards for offshore workers will help to level the playing field somewhat in the labor market.
13 to 15 retired police officers or criminal justice college students will monitor images, said Elliot Schlanger, Baltimore's chief information officer.
The key to increasing confidence that government and law enforcement officials are doing the right thing is for them, too, to be monitored by the citizens.
Cameras and audio monitoring equipment should be placed around police stations, in cruisers, etc.
The standard objection is that sensitive investigations should not be made available to the general public because it could compromise the efforts of effective enforcement. Indeed, that can be true in certain cases. For those cases, there should be a time delay, and there should be a citizen's review panel to screen what is going on before it is released to the general public. But everything should be eventually released and much of it can be released in a short period of time.
It's been made more than clear that "secrecy is needed" is used much, much more than is necessary by the criteria of "sensitivity" and that a lot of improper procedures and incompetence can be masked and allowed to fester when authority is granted blanket exemption from being surveilled by the citizens.
In an ideal world, the resources that go into developing means to attack and to defend would not be necessary.
Likewise, computer security.
You can let others find security holes, but if you don't at least keep up on the technology then over time you end up in a position of greater vulnerability to disruption from attack.
The report claims that less than 3% of Q1 2004 jobs were lost to offshoring.
Explicit increases in the count of offshoring of manufacturing jobs doesn't show up, for example, when Walmart suddenly decides to buy from a supplier in China rather than the United States.
Until you have sat down, answered a call of a screaming customer, getting paid next to nothing and having to drown out shouting
Alas, another "custom" of years gone by bites the dust in the new commercial age.
My brother worked as a contractor for tech support for a large company and had to put up with rude customers that basically figured that if they had a bad experience that they may as well choke the next throat that comes their way.
My solution?
Since the free market has pretty well taken over culture 90% already anyway, we ought to have those "calls being recorded and monitored" be checked for courtesy on the parts of both the tech rep and the client calling in.
If the client is extra rude, they would get an extra bill for the privilege of cursing at another human being. And, in all fairness, the company ought to give most of that extra money to the rep that had to endure the emotional load of being dumped on.
Likewise, customers who have to endure a bad service rep that leaves them in/dev/null should get an extra discount, too.
I'm a little worked up about "your time doesn't mean shit to me" attitude because of enduring a lengthy medical appointment the other day.
Medical service is not an example of the free market in action:
Slashdot Mirror
By contrast, social systems are top-down and hierarchical, from which we draw the basic assumption that organization and order can only come from centralism.
That's a simplification.
Like nature, social systems can come in a variety of kinds, whether strictly hierarchal or peer-to-peer.
Sufficient organization and order to get the job done is demonstrated in swarms and flocks.
Likewise, in my own human body there are a variety of cells that interact in different degrees of hierarchy depending on the functionality. Brains and the central nervous system control muscles almost exclusively, but white cells go clean up anywhere they're needed.
Likewise, human societies ought to adapt the degree of central authority to the task at hand.
Doing otherwise limits our flexibility and increases the probability of non-optimal solutions.
[Some might suggest that local optimum solutions that are very good for a limited number of people in society are in evidence in many highly centralized social systems. An interesting medical commentary once suggested that the role of government in societal bodies is akin to the role of parasites in biological organisms. No value judgements, just looking at functionality...]
There are so many things that we keep doing in a wasteful and inelegant way just because
Cars and power supplies for computers.
There's often a trade-off in the initial cost (which includes the cost of the energy required to make the thing) vs the future cost.
People will tend toward picking the lower initial cost and not accurately assessing their total future cost of ownership.
Manufacturers of long-life lightbulbs can verify that customers will pick low initial cost; as will the hordes that flock to Walmart.
And there's the people with recently-purchased Hummer's getting whipsawed by gasoline prices, which are changing on a much faster timescale than the frequency with which they replace their vehicles.
I've noticed SUV and truck manufacturers flogging their wares pretty heavily of late; I'm suspecting that sales are down as people look at the price of filling up the tank.
The fundamental motivation was not the current prices, but strategic reasons.
It takes some courage for politicians to make a current cash commitment that will only pay off in the 10 year time frame.
Here in the USA, our politicians typically ignore large long-term problems and simply react in knee-jerk fashion to the crisis du jour.
But I'm sure a lot of places are looking at Munich's brave rollout with interest after being sold hard into subscription based licensing and not knowing for sure when new products (like Longhorn) will be delivered to them.
Another thing everyone will be interested in seeing compared is Desktop Support Costs: Before and After.
Server admins, too, will have a different work profile that will be interesting to see in a large installation. Less worrying about CALS, more worrying about whether user profiles in LDAP are updated, secure, and performing well enough...
Munich has limited resources to document their transition in more than a cursory fashion. Nevertheless, many people will be interested in those details.
As much as I am a Linux fan, there is an unavoidable conflict of interest involved in accepting versions of the Munich transition that are produced by the vendor (just as Microsoft's "Get the Facts" marketing campaign is rightly eyed suspiciously).
For that reason, it would be good if Munich's own assessment were made publicly avaiable.
Not that government officials are immune from bias in self-assessment of their decisions either...
Bandwidth probably isn't the problem,
I'm betting the main obstacle is latency.
A lot of 3D experiences are better with some mouse interactivity, which can be done locally just fine.
Unless the 3D application is designed intelligently to pre-fetch what is needed next and does the interactive stuff locally, it will be as painful as using audio over the net with time delays.
And if BW is enough, there's always the competition of rendering moving 3D objects on th server, earlier, and shoving a 2D animation to the browser.
IMHO, 3D won't take off big time until wrap-around displays become commonplace.
Some of these web-designers probably come from a print background, and as a result of their training, they are stuck with a lot of print-specific notions that are admittedly hard to discard.
Not hard to discard. A bit of aging and presbyopia will dispel those notions.
[From a Firefox user that frequently hits "Ctrl +" on web pages, and more than once for some teensy font pages. Command line windows are up to lucidatypewriter bold 14, and 18 point after a hard day...]
Unfortunately there isn't a program to stop the user being stupid.
True enough. But then it is easier to modify applications and their design than it is to modify human beings and their design (well, at least for now...)
Sometimes products are distributed that haven't been thought out well enough to consider the stupid user problem.
In this case, "convenient features" about Outlook running attachments is colliding with user stupidity, gullibility, etc. [It's like stories of "free baseball night" at the ballgame - "fans" started to throw their free gifts onto the field when play got boring. Somebody wasn't thinking far enough ahead.]
While Outlooks ubiquity might exacerbate the problems that Outlook users experience, other mail clients do not seem to have as many problems as Outlook does and certainly not as widespread an impact.
Careful product design can mitigate the unavoidable problems of "stupid users in a cruel world".
but the ability to build a plow that every farmer uses.
This attitude is really a hallmark of doing development for free and open source software.
Just as in openly-published science, there's a motivating fame that drives programmers to produce what they think is really the best and what they appreciate most is the acknowledgement of their capable peers.
Note to self and to world:
Public commendation for FOSS developers encourages talented developers to persevere. that is important if they aren't getting any money for what they do and because they will inevitably put up with that omnipresent segment of consumers that expects their every whim and expectation to be met with much bowing and scraping and solutions to be delivered on a silver platter.
If MS announced that they were releasing an update to XP this whole site would be full of posts like
...just like the ones you're getting here about Linux 2.6.7.
Namely, "are people here running their production servers with good uptime, various weird applications, exotic hardware, etc.?"
When XP SP 2 comes out, you can be damn sure people are going to ask the exact same questions about reliability, incompatibility, etc.. At MyCorp we've got staff that do nothing but stress test the latest Windows patches and releases for compatibility with our current environment. We do that because:
the long sought-after fortran 95 compiler replacing the fortran 77 compiler is certainly newsworthy.
Indeed, it is.
While much of the scientific community has moved to develop code in C and C++, there was substantial momentum and a great deal of previosuly-developed code in FORTRAN 77.
Though I took the C and C++ path and am grateful for the freely-available gcc, colleagues have written code in FORTRAN 90 that sorely needs a working free compiler.
The point is we know IE is crap,
Sure, now IE looks like crap.
But several years ago when MS was actually in competition with Netscape the improvements in IE were a lot more evident at the time and were a lot faster in being delivered to the customers.
Of course, that was then.
The competitive landscape has changed and with it has vanished the necessity for MS to produce a browser to compete with anything other than old versions of its own products.
Users looking for major improvements in Internet Explorer will find them if and only if they upgrade to Longhorn, when IE 7 will be released (2006?)
Basically, Internet Explorer has reached that same point in a typical Microsoft product development cycle that Word reached long ago. There's no valid business case for putting resources into improving this product that already dominates over 90% of the browser market. Simply, at this point, the only valid business strategy for the next version of Internet Explorer is to leverage its dominant position to gain more business in different markets.
[Quoting from the article]
In the coming markets of moving bits, who owns what? Will people buy their programming and machines? Or will they rent and subscribe?
This convergence of computers, communications and consumer electronics is going to bring some startling expectations to companies that aren't ready for continually and drastically dropping prices.
In the computer hardware arena we're accustomed to rapid obsolescence and geometric increases in power and capability over time (Moore's Law).
Likewise, with data network connectivity, we're accustomed to geometric increases in performance or comparable reductions in cost over time (Metcalf's Law).
As devices become more connected and people subscribe to services, they're going to expect similar economies in some fashion or another (say in terms of number of digital TV channels they have access to, increases in resolution and audio quality, etc) or decreasing prices for some particular piece of content.
Artificial barriers will be broken down. If, at some point in time, it really only costs a company US$0.15 to deliver a live football game to my cell phone video display while I'm in the middle of nowhere, then it's going to be hard for them to charge people $20 for this service for any great length of time.
In an era when value of content quickly drops to zero because it can be copied and retransmitted for next to nothing, it will be hard to sustain the current model of blockbuster movies and audio content.
It will be more like selling perishable groceries than classic durable goods like washing machines.
The online version is typically more up-to-date than the print version.
But the print version is at a higher dpi, larger screen area, and very portable.
Each form of media has its use.
but Firefox 1.0 will surely leave you shaking on your already shaky foundations and standing in a small warm puddle'
Firefox is an excellent browser; I've been using it happily since 0.6.
But while IE can claim that it "came with My Computer" Firefox cannot overcome it but very slowly and only among those who appreciate its superiority and have enough patience to download and install it.
AOL was the last distributor of millions of CDs who were in a position to bundle Mozilla and deliver it to the majority audience that will just take what they get.
It's good that Blogs will get some kind of ranking.
Categories of blogs would be nice, too, so that we're not overwhelmed by Pop Culture, Sports, Movies, One Micron Deep Political Commentary, Etc. We might even divide these categories into groups, something like comp.os.linux.x and so on:)
Popularity might be a good measure of Blog site after it gets discovered and gets a bunch of hits and links to it.
The problem is that brute force popularity metrics will miss new, emerging Blogs that might have high quality writing, insightful analysis, but only a slowly-growing audience.
we will let newbies show and tell us what they need.
This is an excellent idea.
A lot of people in IT have a lot of experience with Microsoft, whose approach since they gained market dominance has been to more or less shove new products to their audience after some token sampling of the marketplace.
But FOSS is currently making a similar supply-side mistake, too: people that want to use Linux to do something in particular for their business have to "just accept" a distro and what's out there. Before you say "but they can write their own app", think - How many small business owners are capable of "writing their own app", modifying an Apache module, etc?
Sure, there's tons of free and open source software out there that people can use to build systems for their businesses, but many of those small business owners have little time or little expertise about how those pieces could be put together to help them. They need help with insight. Call it marketing, for lack of a better term.
Instead of just offering a supply, either as MS offers OurOneSizeFitsAll - take it or leave it; Linux offers an OceanOfFreePartsAnyExpertCanUse, drive a focus more onto customer demand that will help provide more people with Linux solutions that can really help them. And, if it helps them, it will help even more people as they can more easily see how it can be done.
ask them to duplicate that with Windows and IIS/MS SQL.
I can see you baiters in the audience, the ones with toothy grins when someone suggests they connect that nice new looking IIS/MS-SQL box to the Bad Old Dirty Virus-Ridden Internet....
Let's see some of that e-commerce in action!
This isn't the first time Congress has fucked up royally.
Not at all.
Congress has been doing an admirable job of looking after the interests of their most important constituents.
You're just making the common mistake of thinking that every citizen is an equally important constituent.
Whoah!
Can you imagine pissing off the authors of an open source project so much that they specifically name you in their modified license?!?
This would be akin to a modified GPL version 4,
Where program size counts in a scripting language is the time taken to write the program.
and in the time taken to grok the program 6 months from now.
As a language, Python does well here.
However, more than language, the author or programmer matters in creating decipherable elegant code that can be understood 6 months later by someone random.
The graft and corruption between the recording industry and radio stations would disappear if there were more radio stations.
Perhaps this harks back to a previous Slashdot topic about whether the FCC has outlived its usefulness, but if there were lower barriers to entry for people wanting to establish radio stations and more radio stations, then the market would fragment and compete to the point where station quality would improve. At least all the many different segments of the listening audience could be better served than by the One Ring to Rule Them congolmerate approach.
Even the few people that actually like the programming content on the most popular local radio station agree that quality could be improved, not least by reducing the quantity of commercials down from what seems like 35 minutes per hour if you count self-promotion jingles.
will stop this offshoring nonsense!
Jobs are going just going where the global economy allows them to go.
The obvious solution is to insist that all goods and services imported into the United States are created by workers with:
- Rights to some minimum wage.
- A safe and healthy workplace.
- Rights to join a union of their choice if they choose.
At a minimum, this would help to cut out using prisoners for labor, etc.As it stands currently, there are some workers in China that get shafted by their bosses in that paychecks are delayed by months, or else not given at all if the boss has a cozy relationship with a powerful government official and can escape consequences.
This is particularly ironic considering the Marxist ideology that supposedly is the foundation of the PRC. All unions except the official state-sponsored union are illegal. But the official union probably isn't going to go on strike against factory owners with relatives in the Red Army.
Don't get me wrong. It's not all bad, all exploitation. A lot of increased wealth and economic growth have occurred in China recently and a lot of people over there have benefitted. That's a good thing. It's just that more safeguards for workers' rights are needed offshore to prevent some of the abuses that currently occur, and implementation these safeguards for offshore workers will help to level the playing field somewhat in the labor market.
13 to 15 retired police officers or criminal justice college students will monitor images, said Elliot Schlanger, Baltimore's chief information officer.
The key to increasing confidence that government and law enforcement officials are doing the right thing is for them, too, to be monitored by the citizens.
Cameras and audio monitoring equipment should be placed around police stations, in cruisers, etc.
The standard objection is that sensitive investigations should not be made available to the general public because it could compromise the efforts of effective enforcement. Indeed, that can be true in certain cases. For those cases, there should be a time delay, and there should be a citizen's review panel to screen what is going on before it is released to the general public. But everything should be eventually released and much of it can be released in a short period of time.
It's been made more than clear that "secrecy is needed" is used much, much more than is necessary by the criteria of "sensitivity" and that a lot of improper procedures and incompetence can be masked and allowed to fester when authority is granted blanket exemption from being surveilled by the citizens.
In an ideal world, the resources that go into developing means to attack and to defend would not be necessary.
Likewise, computer security.
You can let others find security holes, but if you don't at least keep up on the technology then over time you end up in a position of greater vulnerability to disruption from attack.
The report claims that less than 3% of Q1 2004 jobs were lost to offshoring.
Explicit increases in the count of offshoring of manufacturing jobs doesn't show up, for example, when Walmart suddenly decides to buy from a supplier in China rather than the United States.
Until you have sat down, answered a call of a screaming customer, getting paid next to nothing and having to drown out shouting
Alas, another "custom" of years gone by bites the dust in the new commercial age.
My brother worked as a contractor for tech support for a large company and had to put up with rude customers that basically figured that if they had a bad experience that they may as well choke the next throat that comes their way.
My solution?
Since the free market has pretty well taken over culture 90% already anyway, we ought to have those "calls being recorded and monitored" be checked for courtesy on the parts of both the tech rep and the client calling in.
If the client is extra rude, they would get an extra bill for the privilege of cursing at another human being. And, in all fairness, the company ought to give most of that extra money to the rep that had to endure the emotional load of being dumped on.
Likewise, customers who have to endure a bad service rep that leaves them in /dev/null should get an extra discount, too.
I'm a little worked up about "your time doesn't mean shit to me" attitude because of enduring a lengthy medical appointment the other day.
Medical service is not an example of the free market in action: