The problem, as it almost always is, is fear. This is why One-Person One-Vote First Past the Post voting, used for pretty much everything political in the US, is so flawed.
Your conscience might have you voting Green, or Libertarian, or Socialist, or whatever you agree with. But your fear of Obama or Romney will get you voting for the other evil because at least they have enough momentum to win the election. I would wager that very few people fully support either candidate, or even fully support either party's platforms, they're just afraid of the other guy.
The more successful an alternative party candidate is, the better it is for the farthest candidate from that position, because it will cause the "close enough" voters to split, clearing a path for the most feared enemy.
This in entirety. If you take out a loan in dollars that immediately requires payment of interest, and the money to pay that interest cannot be created except by taking out another loan, it's impossible to ever repay all the loans, and immediately devalues the very dollars that were loaned. Such is the terrifying power of fiat money, and the sheer irresponsibility of making reserve banking government policy.
Who said anything about lower pay? When I was hired it was because of the knowledge and capabilities that I have because of the effort I put in. I would be a good developer if I never studied or worked on personal projects outside of work, but I wouldn't be as good. And based on discussions I have had with friends in the field about their pay, I am well paid for the extra skillsets I bring to the table.
Employees should get paid less than me if all they do in their free time is go boating. They are less valuable (unless their natural skill is great enough that it trumps my extra work).
That doing extra outside of business hours works for you is great, but what makes you think someone who doesn't is less valuable, and that if they're as valuable then it represents natural skill?
There's a lot that can be learned from pretty much everything, hobby-level or not. I don't believe that efforts not directly related to one's work are useless.
For example, I like to play Magic: the Gathering. Done it for years. While not certified, people in general like playing around me because I'm very good at the rules and figuring out interaction problems. A lot of times* people bring up issues during play that I've never heard before. I'll think about it, use what I do know, and figure out how to resolve the rule dispute. When I would go back home, I would sometimes search for the same or similar issues and find the official rulings match. It's a fundamental understanding of the game and the rules which govern it.
I've got to think that this really helps me in requirements gathering. Looking over one of many requirements documents, interactions that don't seem to make sense just stick out in the same way that playing an ability in Magic incorrectly does. It's a fundamental understanding of technology and the rules which govern it. Not nature: practice.
Isolated case? Possibly. Anecdotal? Definitely. But, maybe that coworker going boating all the time brings something more to the table that software alone can't. It's probably easier to point at a lot of outside work at why you have an enhanced skillset, but inspiration and brain-tuning come in many different forms, some of which aren't that obvious.
* not really that often anymore, thanks to smartphones and being able to look at errata and Oracle rulings on the spot
When your competitor has OWNED the market for several years, you don't MATCH their price, you blow it away.
Who would be dumb enough to pay the same price as a 3rd generation device to guinea pig a 1st gen device from a company that is known to suck at first releases?
And then there's Google's tablet for a dainty $199/$249
Microsoft really does suck at new things.
I think part of it is product positioning. They want to have -- rather, need to have -- a top-tier product.
Microsoft has a pretty high overhead legacy to maintain. Decades of near-monopoly status allowed them to get fat and pass on the gravy to development and R&D. That stuff you heard about perks and benefits that Googlers get? Years before Microsoft people were also getting them. Well, making sure the cafeteria is well stocked with free V8 Spicy Hot has gotten more expensive compared to the good ol' days. And with Microsoft, being at the top, really had no place to go but down, getting their heels nipped at on the server side, on the desktop side, on the office side. They phoned it in on the portable media segment, continue to lose money on the gaming segment, and got caught with their pants down on the mobile and tablet markets.
In order to maintain that legacy and overhead, they can't fight on price. Google can do it because, all of a sudden, they've got huge profit centers thanks to the stuff they can change in front of so many many eyeballs. If they try to #define WIN32_LEAN_AND_MEAN and start cutting back, they're really not going to attract the talent that would be otherwise wooed to Apple and Google, and the downward spiral that must be happening internally will finally be revealed externally.
The big job ahead is convincing people in the market that are willing to pay Apple prices that they should instead pay those prices to Microsoft. I don't know if they can do it, but, if they can't, I don't see Microsoft sticking around for too much longer.
Even if he did, the debates would have found some other reason to exclude him. This isn't actually about money at all, or, at least, his campaign money.
Free Market isn't mutually exclusive with Regulation. There's a difference between requiring full truthful disclosure of what a product is made from and laws making illegal products made from ingredients.
In a free society, companies have a right to sell, consumers have a right to know, and, ultimately, consumers can decide for themselves if the cost savings are worth it.
It's all choreography, a dance and sing performance no different than "pro" wrestling. My tribe versus your tribe, grr grr, the other guy sucks cocks or whatever. Gotta have your guy and your villain to make it dramatic and keep you in suspense so you'll have some kind of satisfaction when the prescribed outcome is revealed.
In the end, they're in the same show. When the lights go out and the curtain drops, the ruling class goes home to their gilded towers and the general public hasn't a clue that real change, real solutions, and real honor was also on the ballot. But who pays attention to them when the two fighters are punching it out so well with smiles on their faces.
If Romney were elected you bet he WOULD carry forward the same policies without a ton of negative press, just like Obama. Bush Jr. got so much negative press because he was the first to do these awful things, but that cherry is popped now.
I think the negative lashing out was more about the press being convinced he stole the election, because we didn't spend the next year and a half auditing every hanging chad in the country.
Of course, with tools like these the framework is being put in place call any election for "the other guy" rigged.
The customer service fiasco that happened to me was very similar. They promised all preorders would be shipped by some date, which came and went without shipping. Emails were ignored, and it took phone calls to get answers. Of course, the answers were all lies. "Oh, it's shipping today." "Your tracking number will be sent overnight." Basically, the old game of say-anything-to-get-them-off-the-phone. When no tracking numbers and no shipping happened, calling back resulted in the same song and dance. This time, when I asked to cancel, they refused because, yep, "it's shipping today."
Fast forward three weeks after when the preorder was promised to ship, they finally did send it. No tracking number, of course, so I couldn't refuse the package in person and the delivery guy just left it on the doorstep. So to refuse delivery I would have to make a trip to the UPS depot.
If I knew Google was capable of such a Kafkaesque performance I would never have bothered.
As far as I can tell, these are all popular and published authors and books. Shouldn't a Humble eBook Bundle consist of new and unknown authors, in the same spirit of Humble Indie Bundle?
Except for one of those Humble Indie Bundles that included Psychonauts. Great game? Sure, but hardly Indie.
When the multimeter wave scanners were installed, it was a lot of "don't worry, only a subset of travelers will be subjected to it" and "you can choose to be sexually molested instead". Fast forward a few years and now they're replacing regular X-ray machines with them.
How soon before you have to pass through one to go into a government building? A grocery store? Outside your own home?
I would argue that successful marketing, by definition, is a scam. It's about tricking you into thinking things you wouldn't ordinarily think, want things you wouldn't ordinarily want, and dislike things you wouldn't ordinarily dislike.
On my Android phone I need to change some paramters in dhcp.conf. It is apparently owned by root.
To do so, I apparently need to identify a vulnerability in a binary which will lead to root privilege escalation.
What's locked-down now?
Why did you buy your phone from such a consumer-hostile company if you wanted to do such things? If you want Android, you have plenty to choose from, the complete continuum from locked down systems that brick or factory reset themselves after installing an unauthorized bootstrap all the way to ones where you just plug it in and do a few adb commands. That's part of the beauty: you have choice.
With Apple you have no choice, at least non-superficial choices. You can get the locked down iPhone 5 in black or the locked down iPhone 5 in white.
It's one thing to build an app for smartphones and tablets — but what if that app also needs to handle streams of data ported from a pair of tricked-out sunglasses or a wristwatch, or send information in a concise and timely way to a tiny screen an inch in front of someone's left eye?"
How is this "spiraling complexity" in any way? There are standards. There are APIs. If they don't exist today, they will, necessitated for such issues.
Its dead until the elections are over, then don't be surprised if it comes back.
Only if one party controls the legislative branch and the executive and it can get rubber stamped through.
Otherwise, there was enough negative publicity about the effort that I think either side would jump at the opportunity to claim that they are the true defenders of the internet by blocking bad legislation.
Signs of this are races that turn out to be very close within 1/2 percent as they stuff just enough to tip the result. Seen an excess of extreme close races lately? The probability of a high percentage of very close races is slim. Seeing many very close races under 1% spread is a statistical indication of rigged elections.
Funny, I take close races more like a sign that people are holding their nose and voting for the lesser of two evils. I mean, you can vote Republican for fiscal conservatism and denying civil rights, or you can vote Democratic for permissive society and economic ruin.
In the end, they're just promises anyway, both sides bring economic ruin and denial of rights, the details are who specifically won't be able to afford anything and which rights get trampled.
People are so scared that the "other side" can win that they can't bring themselves to vote for a 3rd party candidate they really like and who might actually do what they promise, hence the cycle perpetuates.
MakerBot took the open source RepRap 3D replicator project mainstream back in 2009 with the release of the Cup Cake CNC machine, then came the Thing-o-Matic and then a little bot called Replicator. With each iteration, improvements in process and technology are bringing better, more capable 3D printers to market, from MakerBot's new Replicator 2.
The Replicator 2 which is now closed source. That's one way to thank all the hard work of those who toiled and released open source hardware.
That's the thing with idealists, leaders, and revolutionaries. They're a tiny tiny fraction of the population as a whole. The true stubborn independent spirit, the willingness to fight and die for one's ideology, is actually a pretty rare thing.
You act as if the idealists are all-in-all better people. Would you call someone noble who let their child starve or not receive medical treatment to improve their life "noble"? That's a real choice people make every day when they decide whether or not it's worth standing up for themselves.
Call them noble? Maybe, it's definitely noble to sacrifice oneself for your child. But IMHO, it's more noble to sacrifice oneself in the fight to make life better for countless strangers they aren't related to and may never know.
What ever happened to "Give me liberty, or give me death"
People too often just go with the flow, allowing themselves to be trampled by corporations and government. No one willing to take a stand for what is right and just.
I applaud the decision. (To make it illegal)
I am appalled by the problem.
That's the thing with idealists, leaders, and revolutionaries. They're a tiny tiny fraction of the population as a whole. The true stubborn independent spirit, the willingness to fight and die for one's ideology, is actually a pretty rare thing.
Those constitutional amendments limit the power of the government, not private industry.
But either way, you're right, because the government routinely ignores them anyway.
When I see folks from other countries baffle at the madness going on here, I wish they could understand the US citizenry was tricked and had their country taken over by power-hungry demagogs for the last 100 years (well, 99 years this December), and that we're simply powerless to stop the machine at this point.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem, as it almost always is, is fear. This is why One-Person One-Vote First Past the Post voting, used for pretty much everything political in the US, is so flawed.
Your conscience might have you voting Green, or Libertarian, or Socialist, or whatever you agree with. But your fear of Obama or Romney will get you voting for the other evil because at least they have enough momentum to win the election. I would wager that very few people fully support either candidate, or even fully support either party's platforms, they're just afraid of the other guy.
The more successful an alternative party candidate is, the better it is for the farthest candidate from that position, because it will cause the "close enough" voters to split, clearing a path for the most feared enemy.
This in entirety. If you take out a loan in dollars that immediately requires payment of interest, and the money to pay that interest cannot be created except by taking out another loan, it's impossible to ever repay all the loans, and immediately devalues the very dollars that were loaned. Such is the terrifying power of fiat money, and the sheer irresponsibility of making reserve banking government policy.
Who said anything about lower pay? When I was hired it was because of the knowledge and capabilities that I have because of the effort I put in. I would be a good developer if I never studied or worked on personal projects outside of work, but I wouldn't be as good. And based on discussions I have had with friends in the field about their pay, I am well paid for the extra skillsets I bring to the table.
Employees should get paid less than me if all they do in their free time is go boating. They are less valuable (unless their natural skill is great enough that it trumps my extra work).
That doing extra outside of business hours works for you is great, but what makes you think someone who doesn't is less valuable, and that if they're as valuable then it represents natural skill?
There's a lot that can be learned from pretty much everything, hobby-level or not. I don't believe that efforts not directly related to one's work are useless.
For example, I like to play Magic: the Gathering. Done it for years. While not certified, people in general like playing around me because I'm very good at the rules and figuring out interaction problems. A lot of times* people bring up issues during play that I've never heard before. I'll think about it, use what I do know, and figure out how to resolve the rule dispute. When I would go back home, I would sometimes search for the same or similar issues and find the official rulings match. It's a fundamental understanding of the game and the rules which govern it.
I've got to think that this really helps me in requirements gathering. Looking over one of many requirements documents, interactions that don't seem to make sense just stick out in the same way that playing an ability in Magic incorrectly does. It's a fundamental understanding of technology and the rules which govern it. Not nature: practice.
Isolated case? Possibly. Anecdotal? Definitely. But, maybe that coworker going boating all the time brings something more to the table that software alone can't. It's probably easier to point at a lot of outside work at why you have an enhanced skillset, but inspiration and brain-tuning come in many different forms, some of which aren't that obvious.
* not really that often anymore, thanks to smartphones and being able to look at errata and Oracle rulings on the spot
When your competitor has OWNED the market for several years, you don't MATCH their price, you blow it away.
Who would be dumb enough to pay the same price as a 3rd generation device to guinea pig a 1st gen device from a company that is known to suck at first releases?
And then there's Google's tablet for a dainty $199/$249
Microsoft really does suck at new things.
I think part of it is product positioning. They want to have -- rather, need to have -- a top-tier product.
Microsoft has a pretty high overhead legacy to maintain. Decades of near-monopoly status allowed them to get fat and pass on the gravy to development and R&D. That stuff you heard about perks and benefits that Googlers get? Years before Microsoft people were also getting them. Well, making sure the cafeteria is well stocked with free V8 Spicy Hot has gotten more expensive compared to the good ol' days. And with Microsoft, being at the top, really had no place to go but down, getting their heels nipped at on the server side, on the desktop side, on the office side. They phoned it in on the portable media segment, continue to lose money on the gaming segment, and got caught with their pants down on the mobile and tablet markets.
In order to maintain that legacy and overhead, they can't fight on price. Google can do it because, all of a sudden, they've got huge profit centers thanks to the stuff they can change in front of so many many eyeballs. If they try to #define WIN32_LEAN_AND_MEAN and start cutting back, they're really not going to attract the talent that would be otherwise wooed to Apple and Google, and the downward spiral that must be happening internally will finally be revealed externally.
The big job ahead is convincing people in the market that are willing to pay Apple prices that they should instead pay those prices to Microsoft. I don't know if they can do it, but, if they can't, I don't see Microsoft sticking around for too much longer.
While you would come out ahead over years of use, when you live paycheck to paycheck, digging deeper for higher upfront costs is an impossibility.
See rent-to-own furniture versus buying outright.
Even if he did, the debates would have found some other reason to exclude him. This isn't actually about money at all, or, at least, his campaign money.
Free Market isn't mutually exclusive with Regulation. There's a difference between requiring full truthful disclosure of what a product is made from and laws making illegal products made from ingredients.
In a free society, companies have a right to sell, consumers have a right to know, and, ultimately, consumers can decide for themselves if the cost savings are worth it.
It's all choreography, a dance and sing performance no different than "pro" wrestling. My tribe versus your tribe, grr grr, the other guy sucks cocks or whatever. Gotta have your guy and your villain to make it dramatic and keep you in suspense so you'll have some kind of satisfaction when the prescribed outcome is revealed.
In the end, they're in the same show. When the lights go out and the curtain drops, the ruling class goes home to their gilded towers and the general public hasn't a clue that real change, real solutions, and real honor was also on the ballot. But who pays attention to them when the two fighters are punching it out so well with smiles on their faces.
If Romney were elected you bet he WOULD carry forward the same policies without a ton of negative press, just like Obama. Bush Jr. got so much negative press because he was the first to do these awful things, but that cherry is popped now.
I think the negative lashing out was more about the press being convinced he stole the election, because we didn't spend the next year and a half auditing every hanging chad in the country.
Of course, with tools like these the framework is being put in place call any election for "the other guy" rigged.
The customer service fiasco that happened to me was very similar. They promised all preorders would be shipped by some date, which came and went without shipping. Emails were ignored, and it took phone calls to get answers. Of course, the answers were all lies. "Oh, it's shipping today." "Your tracking number will be sent overnight." Basically, the old game of say-anything-to-get-them-off-the-phone. When no tracking numbers and no shipping happened, calling back resulted in the same song and dance. This time, when I asked to cancel, they refused because, yep, "it's shipping today."
Fast forward three weeks after when the preorder was promised to ship, they finally did send it. No tracking number, of course, so I couldn't refuse the package in person and the delivery guy just left it on the doorstep. So to refuse delivery I would have to make a trip to the UPS depot.
If I knew Google was capable of such a Kafkaesque performance I would never have bothered.
As far as I can tell, these are all popular and published authors and books. Shouldn't a Humble eBook Bundle consist of new and unknown authors, in the same spirit of Humble Indie Bundle?
Except for one of those Humble Indie Bundles that included Psychonauts. Great game? Sure, but hardly Indie.
How soon before you have to pass through one to go into a government building?
This is already required at some courthouses in the US, they were there before they were in airports IIRC.
I guess it's been that long since I've been to the courthouse... last I recall there were metal detectors but that's about it.
When the multimeter wave scanners were installed, it was a lot of "don't worry, only a subset of travelers will be subjected to it" and "you can choose to be sexually molested instead". Fast forward a few years and now they're replacing regular X-ray machines with them.
How soon before you have to pass through one to go into a government building? A grocery store? Outside your own home?
We're going through the Gilded Age and McCarthyism for the second time now, how many times does history have to repeat itself until we learn?
Fear is instinctual, so learning can't possibly win that fight.
Ideally, unexpected death would balance out the selfish that would have as many children as they'd like.
I would argue that successful marketing, by definition, is a scam. It's about tricking you into thinking things you wouldn't ordinarily think, want things you wouldn't ordinarily want, and dislike things you wouldn't ordinarily dislike.
[iOS is] locked-down proprietary garbage
On my Android phone I need to change some paramters in dhcp.conf. It is apparently owned by root.
To do so, I apparently need to identify a vulnerability in a binary which will lead to root privilege escalation.
What's locked-down now?
Why did you buy your phone from such a consumer-hostile company if you wanted to do such things? If you want Android, you have plenty to choose from, the complete continuum from locked down systems that brick or factory reset themselves after installing an unauthorized bootstrap all the way to ones where you just plug it in and do a few adb commands. That's part of the beauty: you have choice.
With Apple you have no choice, at least non-superficial choices. You can get the locked down iPhone 5 in black or the locked down iPhone 5 in white.
It's one thing to build an app for smartphones and tablets — but what if that app also needs to handle streams of data ported from a pair of tricked-out sunglasses or a wristwatch, or send information in a concise and timely way to a tiny screen an inch in front of someone's left eye?"
How is this "spiraling complexity" in any way? There are standards. There are APIs. If they don't exist today, they will, necessitated for such issues.
Its dead until the elections are over, then don't be surprised if it comes back.
Only if one party controls the legislative branch and the executive and it can get rubber stamped through.
Otherwise, there was enough negative publicity about the effort that I think either side would jump at the opportunity to claim that they are the true defenders of the internet by blocking bad legislation.
Doesn't fat float?
Signs of this are races that turn out to be very close within 1/2 percent as they stuff just enough to tip the result. Seen an excess of extreme close races lately? The probability of a high percentage of very close races is slim. Seeing many very close races under 1% spread is a statistical indication of rigged elections.
Funny, I take close races more like a sign that people are holding their nose and voting for the lesser of two evils. I mean, you can vote Republican for fiscal conservatism and denying civil rights, or you can vote Democratic for permissive society and economic ruin.
In the end, they're just promises anyway, both sides bring economic ruin and denial of rights, the details are who specifically won't be able to afford anything and which rights get trampled.
People are so scared that the "other side" can win that they can't bring themselves to vote for a 3rd party candidate they really like and who might actually do what they promise, hence the cycle perpetuates.
MakerBot took the open source RepRap 3D replicator project mainstream back in 2009 with the release of the Cup Cake CNC machine, then came the Thing-o-Matic and then a little bot called Replicator. With each iteration, improvements in process and technology are bringing better, more capable 3D printers to market, from MakerBot's new Replicator 2.
The Replicator 2 which is now closed source. That's one way to thank all the hard work of those who toiled and released open source hardware.
That's the thing with idealists, leaders, and revolutionaries. They're a tiny tiny fraction of the population as a whole. The true stubborn independent spirit, the willingness to fight and die for one's ideology, is actually a pretty rare thing.
You act as if the idealists are all-in-all better people. Would you call someone noble who let their child starve or not receive medical treatment to improve their life "noble"? That's a real choice people make every day when they decide whether or not it's worth standing up for themselves.
Call them noble? Maybe, it's definitely noble to sacrifice oneself for your child. But IMHO, it's more noble to sacrifice oneself in the fight to make life better for countless strangers they aren't related to and may never know.
What ever happened to "Give me liberty, or give me death"
People too often just go with the flow, allowing themselves to be trampled by corporations and government. No one willing to take a stand for what is right and just.
I applaud the decision. (To make it illegal)
I am appalled by the problem.
That's the thing with idealists, leaders, and revolutionaries. They're a tiny tiny fraction of the population as a whole. The true stubborn independent spirit, the willingness to fight and die for one's ideology, is actually a pretty rare thing.
Those constitutional amendments limit the power of the government, not private industry.
But either way, you're right, because the government routinely ignores them anyway.
When I see folks from other countries baffle at the madness going on here, I wish they could understand the US citizenry was tricked and had their country taken over by power-hungry demagogs for the last 100 years (well, 99 years this December), and that we're simply powerless to stop the machine at this point.