I’ve noticed the amount of ads for careers in network security have gone up, and in whatever ads I see it’s always for a government job. Especially since Anonymous started getting more popular.
It’s just a huge waste of resources, especially looking for something like terrorist regarded messages or information posted on some networking status update (with all the political shit and angst posted on FB I think it’s futile to filter out the commentary, discussion, and bitching with actual terrorist intent, and how much of that is actually being passed through a network that said terrorists would obviously know is being tapped). I think you’d have a better chance of figuring out a local crime through these networks than anything larger (I remember in high school it seems one of my friend’s had something put against him by the school in regards to something he had said in a Myspace comment/message - whatever it was confirmed their allegations against him, but it was so stupid I can’t even remember what the situation was, just enough that they were able to tap into his Myspace to find something out that they thought he did).
You bring up a really good point, Clayton. The IBMs are an extension of the pre-school to college schooling system, where pre-school is training elementary school, which is training for middle school, which is training high school, which is training for college, which is training for IBM, Exxon Mobil, Goldman Sachs, Ernst & Young, General Electric, AT&T, McKesson, Cargill, and government. I think the obviousness of the latter part are the corporate-university partnerships.
Also, all those PhDs in the tech industry are basically there to patent stuff to stiffle the start ups.
Abso-freakin-lutely. As I said, I work for one of the largest firms… patents are conscientiously sought by corporate (they pay out a fixed reward for any patent, doesn’t matter what it is) for defensive legal purposes (suits from other corporations) but there is no doubt that they would not hesitate to deploy their portfolio of patents against an upstart competitor if it started eating into their profit margins. And these patents basically cover everything that’s not nailed down.
You can’t get within 100 miles of an original idea not because all the good ideas were already thought up by PhDs employed by corporations but because all the big ideas that contain every possible good idea have been written out by PhDs and then patented. Go do patent searches on Google… you’ll see things like “Method and Apparatus for high-speed communication between a central processing unit and memory.” Really. So these guys have patented the very idea of high-speed communication between a CPU and memory as if all the other designs including CPU and memory had never thought of, perhaps, trying to make the communication channel between the CPU and memory… high-speed! There are a zillion such patents of varying levels of detail and scope.
I recently had an interesting idea I thought of submitting to the company for the patent payout but then I searched around the Internet and found that there are patented designs out there that are different (and inferior) to my idea but close enough and broadly worded enough that there’s little point in wasting the time having them run a patent search only to be told no, they won’t patent it. And that’s not to mention that there’s no point in someone like me with a meager BS from a small, affordable university without all the big, fancy name-recognition attempting to go toe-to-toe with the Stanford/Cornell/MIT/UC Berkeley PhDs that have already decided, in their infinite wisdom, to use a different design.
And that would be the key thing - if I had the “clout” to move the organization and persuade people that my approach is superior to the current design which is also good but not nearly as good as it could be, then they might fight for the patent and get prepared to defend against any counter-patent claims. But failing that, the status quo remains as it is and the wobbly opinions of a mundane, low-level engineer could never hope to challenge it.
IP is protectionism at its best because its advocates want to control ideas (i.e. theft of ideas), not merely actions (trade of goods), and the masses who grow up in the shooling system think it is necessary, otherwise we’d all be living in the stone age.
Actually sounds kind of cool on first brush. But when you think about it slightly more deeply, you realize that it’s a farce. The market economy is the open-source “village construction set.” Look at this 1930 John Deere Spoker D tractor:
It’s a work of art. It was built from the finest components available at the time. While you could not purchase one if you were a broke dirt-farmer, you didn’t have to be JP Morgan to afford… small, middle-class farmer-owners were the target market.
Now compare that to these “open-source” designs. They’re junk. They’re built from scrap components and they look ugly, unimaginative and barely usable.
I’m curious if there’s a connection with these guys and the Venus Project. How did he start doing this after he was broke? Notice his Stalin-esque fashion sense. Notice his faux-Zen gravitas manner of speaking like VP’s Jacques Fresco or Zeitgeist’s Peter Joseph.
It is true that starting a small farm from scratch is almost unaffordable. A very small, modest tractor with a PTO and hydraulics will cost you well over $20K today. Very few people who might be interested in starting and operating a farm could save up this much money. They can go into debt (yuck) but this just reduces the profitability of the farm. It could be the case that modern farming is just so much more efficient at large scales that small-scale farming no longer makes economic sense so there’s no genuine market demand for affordable, small-scale farm implements. But I doubt this is the case. Rather, I suspect our central bank’s steady devaluation of the dollar and the fake centralizing effects this has on all industries, including agriculture.
Rather than trying to reinvent society from the ground up, why not end the foolish and unjust laws that have given rise to central banking, intellectual property, corporatism, protectionism, and so on. Unleash the market and you won’t have to try to reinvent society with machines built from scrapyard junk, you will see affordable, practical devices that meet the demands of small-scale producers entering the market, devices whose engineering and design will make them a work of art in their own right, not the ugly and gangly imitations these GVCS people are building.
Signs of aging halted in the lab. Definitely an exciting time to be alive. The inciters of class envy are going to have a field day with these new medical technologies… just look at that new movie In Time.
We are on the verge of a technological revolution in medicine that will dwarf all the children of the Industrial Revolution to date - trains, textile machines, internal combustion engines, electricity, telegraphy, telephones, radio, television, satellites, and the Internet combined. Take a look:
Farm subsidies turned all the farm machine firms into state funded monsters. We all know what the state does to costs, right? I agree with you that “starting over” doesn’t make any sense, but when you decentralize, decentralization tends to occur! I imagine the “village” as a social unit will make a comeback in a more decentralized future.
That article is awesome. It is basically 40% ron paul quotes, but has a hot female neocon as headliner so people from the left and the right will read it.
b) it’s a year old, used to promote his krugman debate campaign, which he apparently doesn’t even care enough about to remove any of the forest of spam on the campaign page.
I don’t care what you say, Ron Paul is definitely more polished and definitely handling the “tough” questions much more adeptly than he did in 2008. He projects an air of confidence in himself and his ideas that he did not project as well in 2008. Note that there’s a difference between being confident and projecting confidence. I think the Establishment must be s***ting themselves at this point. Cain is a distraction. His job is to suck up all the oxygen until the last minute so Republicans will just assume it’s a “Perry vs. Romney” vote.
I really don’t understand why the news anchors keep trying to make him firmly disavow a 3rd-party run. What difference does it make? If he loses the Republican nomination and chooses to run 3rd-party, what are they going to do, accuse him of flip-flopping?? I really don’t think the voters will care that he said he wasn’t going to run 3rd party.
I find it quite interesting that Paul’s vote is so constant (around 9%ish). It seems like he simply has a core of supporters behind him which is unshakeable. If he is able to increase this by maybe 5%, he has a huge potential to win. I think Santorum, Hunstman, and Bachmann simply need to quit now.
