You don't think the suits are salivating over the possibilitiy of the people they can get rid of once they send as much work as possible to "the cloud"? There is a repeating cycle in the business world. They start out with in-house. Then they want to cut costs, so they outsource, then outsourceing doesn't work very well because of either costing more than it was supposed to, or it doesn't work like it was supposed to, so they start hiring in house again(and remember, you are just another customer to your cloud supplier, so you don't get any special treatment - same as outsourcing) Then they run with in house for a while, then they want to cut costs.....

I've seen the cycle many times.

Don't worry, the cloud's basic purpose is to get rid of those IT guys.

I't also the silliest fucking thing I've ever heard. If I have the director and a couple higly placed people breathing down my neck at a phenomenal burn rate, I gotta say that if the dude from India cannot answer simple yes or no questions, The's the last of their computers that will ever enter the shipping dock.

They're giving support to Americans. This booboo feelings sensitivity BS is just one more reason the offshoring doesn't work. If I'm insulting the poor guy, I wont ever bother him or his company again.

Umm - have you tried rebooting the computer sir. Try that first.

The most bad-ass server I've ever had the pleasure of working with was a Digital VAX 11/750 generations ago. It was *built* to be reliable from the very first rivet.

Oh sure, my pocket phone has far more power, memory, and storage. Despite the ample square footage of my "McMansion" house, It would not have fit in my kitchen. It ate power like global warming really was a myth. But as a server, it was in its own class.

It would automatically detect memory that was failing and rebuild from memory (like ECC) but then would remap that address so it would no longer be used.

You could upgrade its CPUs one at a time without shutting it down.

It was like a hoover with data, versioning files was intrinsic to how the O/S worked.

One time, the A/C in the computer room went out. It mapped *everything* in RAM to disk as the temperature rose and the chips became unreliable. We literally pulled the plug on it because it was completely unresponsive, as all operations were working directly off HDD. When the A/C was fixed and it was powered up late that night, it spooled all of RAM out of the HDD swap, and everybody's workstation resumed exactly where they had left off that afternoon - we couldn't find any data loss at all.

I will forever bow in deference to the greatest server I have ever had the pleasure of working on. How HP managed to acquire such a legacy and turn its back... part of me cries inside.

I thought that even civil and defense lawyers are considered officers of the court.

I also think that even they are given certain powers not available to regular citizens, such as issuing subpoenas. I thought that was one of the reasons for requiring even them to be of good character.

In never heard about this. Can you give a little more info?

And I know a lot of other non-smokers who have a lot of problems also.

This isn't about defending smoking. In fact Using tobacco products in any form is the hallmark of an idiot. I quit in 1976. Haven't missed it a bit.

My point, if I have to hammer it in, is that we are all going to die, and no matter how much we think we are going to be immortal, smoking or not smoking is more in line with choosing the mode of our demise. There is more to this matter than concern for health.

The anti smoking zealots are the same as the mothers against drunk driving zealots, who both by the way, have been pretty successful in meeting their goals. The number of people that smke toady has fallen drastically, and there has been a real dent in dui. Those "random" stops are yielding less arrests now, and in my area (college football and student town) the "random" stops were a real cash cow for a while. Now they might stop a few hundred people and net one or two.

But now we see weird stuff like "third hand smoke" or "impairment starts with the first drink". There is outrage over vaping, which you would think the zealots would embrace, because now the evil tobacco users aren't using tobacco, and not inhaling all that nasty stuff into their lungs - just nicotine. But people trying to quit with nicotine patches is okay? And one drink will turn you into a careening drunken killer on the highway.

Yet nicotine is not carcinogenic, and ethanol in proper amounts keeps the CV system clean and healthy. Note that either in large amounts is nasty bad for you.

More like a lot of people just need a target to bestow their hatred upon. They need something to hate. And there is a weird streak of puritanism in the ultimate goals of both parties - prohibition take 2.

In the end, my story is we are all gonna die, and just because we do what the "smart" people say you should do, doesn't meant you are going to live any longer than the stupid people who don't do as the smart ones demand.

Actually, that should work just fine. But you did remember to use only quality Monster-brand cables, right?

Same thing for me. I'm naturally biased against paying exorbitant prices for papers that the publisher received for free. So for my PhD work I basically avoided using papers that were only available by paying ACM, IEEE, or Elsevier.

Fortunately, in the age of CiteSeer, Google Scholar, and authors who publish their own papers even if they've submitted them to journals, I was able to boycott those publishers and still get my PhD done. Also, having a good team of technical librarians goes a long way.

5-10 years ago though, I'm not sure I could have so easily avoided paying money to those publishers.

Yeah, same for me. The ACM journals IEEE Transactions were really useful reading while I was working on my Master's. By the time I got to my PhD work though, the combination of Google Scholar, CiteSeer, and papers being available over the internet (probably in contravention to author's agreements with the journals that published the paper) made ACM and IEEE irrelevant.

It seems to me that the only part of ACM's publication system that's still relevant is the selection and vetting of good papers for their journals. So maybe they should just continue that editorial process, and periodically publish those papers as PDF's on their website. Heck, I bet Google or Amazon or MIT would host that for free.

I think that would test whether or not ACM is focused more on advancing computing as a science vs. maintaining its own bureaucracy.

If we can't trust these applicants to take the test honestly, how can we trust them to act as officers of a court?

The question is -- why do you think Amazon needs to force these prices, then? If publishers are charging too much, people won't buy, and the publishers go out of business, making room for those with better pricing.

On the other hand, what if customers are willing to pay the extra $5 or $10 or $50 for a particular book? If the publisher is okay making money at the prices it selects, why do we need Amazon to intervene in the free market?

Suppose you were trying to find a new job as a programmer. You go to a headhunter. You say you want at least $50/hour. The headhunter says, "Sorry, you can only charge $10/hour. No programmer is worth more than that. We did surveys and discovered that companies would ship labor to India and pay $10/hour for random programmers there, rather than pay more."

You object, and say that you want the headhunter to look for jobs on your terms. You have 20 years of experience, managed large project teams, and are personally responsible for the core code in some popular mathematical analysis package. Also, you don't live in a small village in India, you live in the middle of Manhattan and need a higher salary to live. "Doesn't matter," comes the reply, "No programmer is worth more than $10/hour."

Now imagine that headhunter is responsible for finding most people in the world their jobs. It doesn't matter who you are... but you're not allowed to charge more than $10/hour. It doesn't matter if your training and education would require you to make at least $20/hour or $50/hour or whatever to recoup those costs over a lifetime... it doesn't matter if you're actually better and the companies might be willing to pay $75/hour for you, if they could only find you. All that matter is the headhunter with the database monopoly on candidates says you can't get a salary of more than $10/hour.

You really think that system would lead to better quality work or give incentive for high quality work? You really think we should let the headhunter decide how you're allowed to market yourself? If you ask too much, you simply won't get a job. For books, why not let publishers choose? If they overcharge, the market will fix it... I can't understand why people want to defend Amazon's greedy monopolistic bullying.

Do these NEED to be bundled? No. SHOULD they be? I don't know. That depends on the situation. What I can tell you is that I care about good editing, consistent formatting, good writing, and an overall decent job in making a book. There may be loads of qualified people out there who can do these things as freelancers, but how do I know if the book I'm looking at to buy was edited by these qualified people, or by the author himself, who did a crappy job, or something in between?

Today, if I purchase a book from any number of reputable presses, I know exactly what to expect for these standards. Further, I know that many of these presses only accept quality vetted monographs for publication in the first place. I also know that the vast majority of books I want to buy (mostly specialized "academic" books) require a higher standard of care and expertise than average... and they may only sell a few thousand or even a few hundred copies, so they'll never even get put together for publication at a price of $10.

You want to live in a world without all that stuff? Fine. Let your books be done the way you want. But why does that justify you in saying it's okay for Amazon to bully publishers so it's no longer possible for anyone to make the kind of books I want? Obviously in many cases publishers are skimming money off the top. In the case of books I buy, the publisher often are losing money even when they charge $50 or more per book. (And yes, I know some of the people who run the backend of academic presses, so I'm not making this up.)

Why shouldn't someone who produces a product be able to decide its price? If we really want the market to be free and resolve unnecessary inefficiencies, then let customers decide, not Amazon. If customers only buy the $10 crap books from no-name press and self-publications, the publishers will naturally go out of business. If, on the other hand, customers are willing to pay $15 or $20 or $50 for a book -- for whatever reason -- why should Amazon be able to say the publisher can't charge that?

The answers to all your questions are complicated, because to understand why we have this completely screwed up system, you need to understand the entire history of health insurance in the U.S. for the past hundred years. Very few people know that story, and I myself didn't until a few years ago. But the short answer is that the original system had good intentions, but problems arose, so they put a legal "band-aid" on the problem, which led to other issues, so they put another "band-aid" on, and so on for decades. And in the past couple decades, costs have gone up exponentially, while insurance plans have become increasingly complicated. Almost all of these ideas were originally implemented with good intentions, but it has resulted in a truly dysfunctional system now.