I think looking at history is not really a good predication, in the beginning you had primary industry which was mainly agriculture. Then you had the industrial revolution and people moved to the manufacturing industry. Through mass production and automation we transitioned to the service industry. But what happens when computer systems take over providing services, is there something past services? Or do we think services is a never-ending well of services we'll need as others are automated? Or that they won't need less and less maintenance? If I'm thinking 50 years in the future, remember this is as far back as 1963 was in the past, then there's a lot of jobs I think would be gone and not really many new ones to add.

Did anyone see the Tesla battery swap in 90 seconds? Imagine that + 50 years and I'm thinking you drive your car on top of a repair pod and it'll give your car a full overhaul and replace anything worn and damaged from a storage of spare parts, goodbye auto mechanic. Do you need any other services? No, those jobs are just gone vanished in a puff of smoke. And on your way home you can pick up a fast food meal from an automated burger joint. Unless you're taking one of the automated driverless taxis, that is. You could of course assume that we'll invent all sorts of frivolous and luxurious services to replace those jobs, but I don't think the paychecks will be getting that much bigger and the automation will only undercut the employees, not make it free.

Of course we're not running out of jobs, we'll still need lots of people to run these systems and there's lots of personal services that don't really translate well to a machine but we might be running seriously short on jobs. Don't assume that the market economy is interested in fixing this, if there's not any profit in adding more workers they don't care how many people are unemployed. At which point you might say supply and demand, lower wages and you'll get more jobs but mainly what's happening is that you're taking jobs from other places. It doesn't work if there's a global shortage of jobs compared to people that need a job, unless you're trying to undercut the computer to take jobs back. But those costs are dropping fast and it's not a race to the bottom we can win.

Launch HL3 with a small exclusivity period - I think a week will do - and they'll get plenty Steambox publicity.

Competition is great where you can run multiple choices in parallel, it's not so great when you can only pick one. I don't know who the heck considers the ALSA/OSS/aRts/PulseAudio/JACK FUBAR a benefit of open source, I see that more as a bad case of not invented here, reinventing the wheel and lack of cooperation, my gold standard for things like that is Linux the kernel which has kept it all together and still makes great progress. The display server is another one of those mutually exclusive choices, it's not like apps that you can run side by side. Progress is fine, but I think everyone here has tasted the bitterness when choices are taken away. The "old" way, the way you wanted to work, the way you actually liked much better than the new way? Gone. No configurability, no classic interface, can't fix, won't fix, not supported, in short suck it up and like it.

It's a great fallacy to think that people want competition on things that are largely invisible when they do work and a huge PITA when they don't work. When I plug in my speakers or headphones I want sound, when I turn on my Bluetooth keyboard I want it to work, when I turn on wifi I want it to connect and so on and it is not a matter of preference such as with GUIs, it's largely obvious what is meant with working and broken, stable and unstable. I need one stack with a dilligent management that keeps the quality high and integrates the work the community does, warring factions doesn't benefit anyone unless it's a revolt and reformation under new management like xfree86/x.org. I'm glad there's one dominant X implementation and not many.

Well, I just hit the front page of Ars Technica and I'm able to see nine headlines. One "Top Post", one big Review, three "In-depth reports", three "On the radar" and two "Feature Stories". On slashdot beta in standard mode I see all of two headlines and a poll. I'd pick Ars Technica over this any day of the week, if they're going to columnize the site site then at least make several columns and put something interesting in them.

Well that's true but a newspaper can either have one ultra-wide column or two narrow ones, either way the same amount of text fits in the same vertical space. With the new layout I felt the information density dropped to half, I have to do at least twice as much scrolling to glance through the comments. Compared to that I very much the current compact format instead of the long and narrow.

God, that is so naive it's almost sweet. Just about the first thing any MBA learns about "perfect competition" is that there's no profit in it, which is really bad for a profit-seeking company. Nobody wants to compete that way, all companies want to find profitable markets and if there aren't barriers to competition and entry you build them. Fortunately there's lots of ways to do that, if you're confusing "perfect competition" with free competition you're not even in the right ball park. Granted, you can't have perfect competition in a monopoly but just because technically, theoretically it's a free market it can still be in a company's death grip.

Here's some of the requirements for "perfect competition", depending on whose definition you use there might be more:
* No returns to scale
* Homogeneous products
* Perfect information
* Perfect mobility, no transaction costs
* No barriers to entry or exit
* Profit maximization with no game theory

Roughly all of them are false for any real market and none of them involve the government in any way. The first one is probably the most violated one, if there are returns to scale then big companies will produce at lower costs than small companies, either taking it out as profit or by undercutting smaller competitors. Some ways of throwing your weight around might be illegal like anti-trust but others aren't, if you're a big customer you get discounts. The next one is homogeneous products, if you're buying two cans of Coca-Cola from different stores they're perfect substitutes but if you're considering McDonalds or Burger King then it's two different tastes and brands. People have preferences and they're willing to pay for that, they won't instantly switch like perfect competition assumes.

The third is perfect information, consumers aren't instantly aware of all products on the market, all relevant information about them and all offers and campaign. Those who can get in touch with their market will sell better than those who might have a great product nobody's heard about or know the advantages of. Anything that creates customer loyalty like bonus cards, frequent flyer miles and so on try to counteract mobility so you won't go to a competitor when they're cheaper because of the overall benefits. This is particularly effective at squishing small competitors that only try to compete with one small part of your business.

Having barriers to entry or exit basically means you can threaten to lower prices when and if you're facing competition, perfect competition assume you can "hit and run" any imperfection in the market but in reality you need people, equipment, systems and once you're set up to offer say a competing air line, the ticket prices are set way down and your "opportunity" vanishes in a puff of smoke. Finally, perfect competition assumes business owners are stupid. Two competitors in a duopoly are going to undercut each other cent by cent until they both make no profit at all, does that sound realistic to anyone? Hell no, we'll use price signalling to "negotiate" a good margin for both of us, if you lower prices, I'll lower prices and we both lose. Why don't we both rise prices and make money?

I have a big book with hundreds of pages that explains this and much, much more in detail, don't get me wrong it's not all about tripping up the competition but it is pretty much all about how to find profit and it is found everywhere else but in this "intense competition" of which you speak. If you have a big cash cow you'd be surprised how much business sense it makes to build a moat around it, even if it doesn't bring you any money or is even a direct loss. The more unrealistic you know it is they'll go to the competition, the higher margins you can take. Even in a supposedly free market, there's a surprising number of ways of creating a captive audience. Government regulation is just one of many tools in the toolbox.

Well we're mixing apples and oranges here, there is a civilian signal and a military signal and what this article is talking about is removing some software limitations on where and when a civilian GPS unit will work, in short if you tried to use one aboard an airplane it'd blank out, not because it couldn't get signal but because the reciever is too high and going too fast for what is permitted. They still can't decrypt the military signal which gives them higher accuracy and timing signals to make precision strikes with high speed missiles.

Another good argument is how many symmetric crypto algorithms have been broken at all, at least known to the public? For example you can take GOST, developed by the Soviet Union as a Top Secret algorithm in the 70s, then later downclassified and eventually made public in 1994. It has a theoretical attack strength of 2^256 that researchers have gotten down to 2^101 but if you have a 1 GHz computer testing 1 key/cycle for 1 year that's still only 2^55. A million such computers running a million years is 2^95. I think you can be quite certain the NSA didn't cooperate with the Soviet Union in the 70s, so the only way it could be cracked is if the NSA did it through cryptanalysis. The rest of the world hardly seem able to crack a single cipher yet the NSA would have the magic to crack everything in a reasonable time? In the land of unicorns...

Same with RSA and public crypto, it's not from the Soviet Union but it's from the 70s and 35 years of public research has come up with nothing to break it. Really, do we think that the NSA is sitting on a completely new math in which every hard problem is now easy? I don't buy it, I'm quite sure there are things such as secure crypto no matter how much money and manpower you throw at it simply because they are as much chasing ghosts as we are, they may be looking for a solution that doesn't exist. Of course they're absolutely not going to tell you about that, but I find it far more likely they're now exploiting flaws and compromising systems rather than with pure math.

So what are you going to do, drop by a few days each year for reserve training and if you're ever called into action you'll be issued your standard script kiddie pack? Hand a bunch of guys semi-automatic rifles and they'll be a decent fighting force but I don't see "cyberwarriors" functioning the same way...

Well, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics 40% of all jobs are never offered to the public, 30% are filled with a person already known to the employer and only 30% are filled by total strangers. However, the often quoted number that 70% of all jobs happen through networking is dubious at best. Managers, past and present coworkers and anyone else you come in contact with through your work will have some opinion of your skill and work performance even if you've made no effort to network at all, simply by performing your job duties. If you restrict networking to only mean actively seeking contact with other professionals above or outside your work duties I'm sure the number would be much, much lower.

I mean, even if you live in a fairly large town I'm sure the people who work with the same things end up knowing each other and are probably rotating around among a relatively narrow set of companies. That said, I have seen networks being used as icebreakers. If you get a recommendation from a friend that works in the same company you're applying to that means more to them than if a random reference of your choosing recommends you. After all a misleading reference would reflect poorly on that employee, while for anyone else it'd be of little consequence.

Without any disrespect to the people trying, I feel they are small obscure stuff that I've rarely seen mentioned outside slashdot and are very far from competing with the applications they hope to replace. The latter is particularly a problem when you're talking about applications I can't use on my own, there's no point in having a Diaspora account when nobody I know has one or wants to create one. But I will take another look at what owncloud has to offer....

That's a little simplistic. The government uses cost-plus contracts to develop new technology and craft that is being designed as they go, you can't buy an F35 off the shelf and it'd be a crazy risk for a private company to promise delivery of specific features and performance on a specific schedule at a specific price. Nobody would agree to that, so instead the government says here's a running tab to cover costs and a reasonable profit margin - if you fail to show good progress we might have to abort but the risk is all on us, you get your money anyway. Of course as a company that's a dream project, it can't fail and the normal rules of business doesn't apply so they're more like a heavily protected semi-government agency.

SpaceX shows delivering payloads to orbit is no longer the kind of exotic experiment it was in the 60s, the technology and risks are sufficiently known that you can do it on normal commercial terms where NASA pays a fixed price for a service and SpaceX delivers, taking the risk of profit or loss. It's nice that we get there, but it's very hard to get there without these "bloated contracts" to pave the way. The alternative would be for NASA to do all the bleeding edge projects in-house, which would probably get just as many complaints of public inefficiency and become a monopolist without any choice. True there aren't many candidates for such government contracts either, but you can at least pick your poison.

While proprietary software won't always do things the way you want them for normal applications you could always restrict their permissions, firewall their network and most importantly unless you had a very serious leak built in the data stayed on your own computer, it might be locked up in a proprietary format with software that has forced obsolescence but I always felt the hyperbole was a bit thick. If you buy a CD you buy the mix the artist wanted you to have, you don't get the raw tracks to remix it the way you wanted it to be. Likewise when you buy a closed source game you get the game experience they wanted you to have, not all the source and assets to remake it the way you wanted it to be. All other things being equal it'd of course be desirable, but it's doesn't make it worthless or immoral to buy it without that possibility.

With "Service as a Software Substitution" as RMS calls it or as web services and the cloud as I'd call it you've got no control at all of neither the software nor the data. You can't even do the slightest change in how it works. When they want it to change, it changes and there's nothing you can do to stay on an old version the only thing you could do is to go nuclear and stop using it at all. Getting the data out and over to a competing service is often far worse and more locked up than a proprietary format. And again, they control your data. I'd be far more concerned about all my documents being on a Google Docs server somewhere than in a MS Office document on my disk under my control.

The worst part is really the way you're tied not technically to their service though, but legally. When the iTunes app store tells me they've updated their Terms of Service and asks me to answer yes or no, it's basically "Would you like to continue using your phone as normal or totally cripple all access to new software and updates?" I don't even bother reading it, it's accepting at gunpoint anyway. And I really don't feel it'd be much different with Android and the Play store. It didn't concern me much when it was primarily so I'd have a phone to play Angry Birds on (see above) because I totally don't care where my scores go, but as you start wanting to use it for more serious things it matters but there's really no opting out.

The stupid thing is that I really do like advantages of cloud syncing, I'd just like it to be against my own private server or at least in a local colo of my choice. I don't want to route it through Apple or Google or Facebook or any of the other big megacorporations. But what we need is a solid alternative, not the wailing song of RMS. He could have complained about the lack of a free kernel forever but as long as HURD wasn't an alternative it just didn't matter much until Linux came along and became usable. Give us a real alternative, based perhaps on AOSP or Ubuntu Touch (ugh) and maybe we can turn the tide. P.S. There was a poll here, 90% wouldn't change their online habits one bit after the Snowden revelations - don't assume the general public is with you.

If you think that's hilarious, you should read his posting history. He wants to "win" evolution, women should go back to being stay-at-home child breeders pumping out as many babies as they can and everyone else are worthless evolutionary dead ends. I think this one tops my list:

Of course, he's in a way right as evolution is a game of numbers. If he's busy producing as many offspring as possible while I life my life childless and without a care in the world, he'll win evolution but I'll settle for winning life. He's thinks everyone else is working for his offspring, but that's not how it works. He's working for the future of mankind (his idea of it anyway) but I'm working for nobody but myself. He talks of young to take care of the old, but I'll be paying his young to take care of my old. He's working for me, not the other way around and he doesn't even realize it.

Sorry, but just because the NSA has been listening in on everyone's phone calls doesn't make it a good idea to let everyone listen to everyone else's phone calls. The right choice is to make the NSA stop, even if the technology as such exists. It doesn't mean we have to embrace it, we already have many ways of planting stealth microphones and none of them have much legitimate use. I don't see how this one is very different.