"One unpublished study of blood groups in a town in southeastern England indicated that 30 percent of the town's husbands could not have been the biological fathers of their children."
It would actually be better for those women to have some children with another smart guy if they are at all on the fence about deciding on such a career. There aren't many of them, and it's about time we stopped eating our seed grain.
"Stross' essay does describe rational reasons you shouldn't have children (In that they are basically a giant drain on you and your mate's financial and physical resources with little or no future ROI). The statements are all logically correct, but serve to illustrate that people do things which aren't rational all the time. And that these things are often for the better."
I know Stross gives reasons. And perhaps they are rational, but strictly within the confines of an economist's lecture hall. The economist models man (and all models are approximations), and then calls man irrational when his typical behavior deviates from the model. It makes as much sense as a scientist devoted to the wave theory of light calling light irrational when it acts like a particle in an experiment demonstrating the photoelectric effect.
Calling man irrational for his desire to see the continued existence of organisms related to himself (and taking what he can get - if not a son, a nephew, if not a nephew, a more distant relative or someone who reminds him of himself, etc etc) makes as much sense as calling a bacterium rational for spending its life cycle accruing its favorite sugary and amino acid rich environment without dividing once, burning hot in an orgy of consumption before it dies because "you can't take it with you".
When your model of man takes into account man as an instance of genetic code crafted through millions of years of natural selection, the desire for colonization of space makes perfect sense. And although feedback is desirable, the desire to get feedback in our lifetime or at all (something Stross makes a big fuss over in his essay) also becomes a want, not a need.
This is the same damn thing that occurs when an atheist debates a theist. Neither can know for sure. Neither can prove it. It doesn't stop them trying.
Both think that the more defensible position, agnosticism, is for fence sitters.
I'm agnostic on this one. Will we colonize? Will we not? I don't know, and I can't know. Until it's done, no one can. The computer revolution has not even slowed down yet. If anything will get us there, it won't happen without scientific/engineering progress.
As it is, the scientific capabilities of the human species relative to the carrying capacity of the globe are not close to being maxed out yet. The average IQ in the world is 90. The people capable of building the things that will get us closer are certainly IQ 130+. There aren't that many people at that level. Less than a hundred million, most probably.
Carrying population of the earth is conservatively estimated as at least 1 billion? If we can make the average IQ to be in the 130+ region (and technically, through selective breeding it IS possible), we'd have scientific discoveries at a rate of 10 times what we currently do. Add another order of magnitude if you think the current earth population of 6 billion is sustainable. And add more orders of magnitude if there aren't limits to eugenically increasing IQ beyond the IQ 130 region (and I don't see why not, such people exist, breed successfully, etc).
If scientific progress is viewed as a distributed computing effort, and humans are the computers, surely CPU/RAM/software upgrades from XTs to Opterons are going to get the problem solved quicker with the same number of computers. The analogy understates the situation however, in that you can have 100 special ed kids working on an algebra problem and never get a solution. Or 100 factory hands working on inventing calculus and not one Newton among them.
Then there is the interplay between brilliant people in solving a problem - often the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
So although I won't say colonizing other planets is certain, there is a lot of reason to be hopeful. And on the whole, it is an intrinsically noble project.
"The future extinction of the human species cannot affect you if you are already dead: strictly speaking, it should be of no personal concern."
A very quaint notion straight out of the 1960s. So why have children, or grandchildren? Why care about them? (Other than the bazillion years of natural selection forcing us to, that is.)
If Stross has children, perhaps he'd agree to rig up bombs to them that would be activated on the cessation of his heart. Since strictly speaking, whether they live or die should be of no personal concern. The survival of colonies of the entire human species is only an extension of that concept.
"Some will be far and away brilliant, and will easily get a career regardless; but the majority can't be differentiated from one another. So, how should it be decided who is a doctor and who isn't? By making a test that's so hard it amounts to a randomising function, and then selecting a subset of top scorers to pass. Passing doesn't mean one is inherently more qualified; it just means one guessed better on that day."
I think you are overestimating the degree to which the majority can't be differentiated from each other.
These sorts of tests are deliberately designed so that someone who is just passing the test will get maybe 50% of the questions right. Well, if it's a 4 choice multiple test, it's going to be a bit higher, because a monkey taking the test will get score 25%. So say, 62.5% will be the point where half should fail.
If the difficulty of the questions is variable enough, the test will actually judge who is smart enough + hard working enough to cram for the exam correctly.
Of course, of the people who fail you will always get your few smart-but-lazy people who need a week cramming for the test instead of a day, the rest being the try-hards for whom time cramming could approach infinity and they'd still never pass. The former tend to play down the importance of testing while being sure to name drop all the tests they had passed - they are too cool for that, and it has the potential to make them sound like an asshole if they do. Some even go to the extent of writing a blog entry about it. And the latter play tests down to save face.
And there is a little luck around the edges, but not that much because there are enough questions of difficulty at or near the cutoff to make it a good estimate of where you stand. It's like an olympic weightlifting competition - they give you three tries at each weight because it's not always the first attempt that will get green lighted. Or the second.
"Smaller companies decried the deals as being unfair because they were not producing enough oil to qualify for discounts. In 1872, Rockefeller joined the South Improvement Company which would have allowed him to receive rebates for shipping oil but also to receive drawbacks on oil his competitors shipped. When word got out of this arrangement, competitors convinced the Pennsylvania Legislature to revoke South Improvement's charter. No oil was ever shipped under this arrangement."
This is a minor modification of Standard Oil's drawback, except it works on your customers as opposed to a company supplying you a service. The basic idea is to use your monopoly power to force another business entity to give you money every time they do business with one of your competitors.
If enough people want to mod you up, they can. One page outlining a moderation policy is window dressing on that basic fact.
Mob rule, in other words.
And until some sort of clustering technology is employed to sort different racial, religious, political, ideological (and whatever else divides people) camps into individual echo chambers, thus it will always be.
The ruling power can then be ascertained by determining which faction is never criticized (except with straw men and sockpuppets of course).
I suspect such a system would decrease traffic because everyone would stop reading those things that piss themselves off, and feel compelled to indulge in flame wars. Not necessarily though. You could make it publicly readable so that the public just sees an average moderation score... or to increase the willingness to flame, just eliminate negative moderations so that the most controversial statements rise to the top.
"(unless you have the strength of will not to install it)"
I think you may have hit upon part of the cure. I knew I would get addicted to MMORPGs, so I took it upon myself to never, ever play one. Team-play FPS are bad enough, even though they are episodic, all your team mates cajole you until you play again. Just like an alcoholic's drinking buddies. It would be that much worse if it were never-ending but novel quests (in the sense that "Find the $ITEM of $ITEMNAME!" can be considered novel).
The nature of addiction is genetic. There are at least three effective solutions.
1. To never, ever addict yourself in the first place (Islam takes this approach, as do dry Indian reservations). China ejecting opium traders is another example.
2. To let natural selection take its course. Those individuals who are held in the thrall of the addiction reproduce less successfully than those who are resistant. (This is problematic in that if your entire people are enslaved through addiction, the remnant may not be strong enough to fend off further attack.)
3. To addict yourself to something else that is less harmful or actually beneficial. (e.g. AA meetings, work, etc)
As civilization has learned to simulate experience (books, radio, TV, video games, I suppose even card and board games can be considered to simulate trading or war), people have found the simulations to trigger the same receptors that the original experience used to trigger but in a more intense way. The only difference between an addiction to a simulation and the addiction to the drug is that the drug is closer to the pleasure centers.
e.g. Drug addiction: Drug -> Pleasure Center
Simulation addiction: Simulated activity -> Sensory Apparatus -> Interpretation Apparatus -> Chemical Signal -> Pleasure Center
The problem with the drug addicted individual is that his brain is wired to perceive the drug as being the same as the chemical which triggers pleasure in his brain. And the problem with the person addicted to the simulation is that his brain cannot determine the difference between a beneficial experience and the simulated beneficial experience.
Your analogy might fool someone somewhere, but not here. You got the GM part right, but Linux would be more like the streetcar system in LA, or the EV-1, which GM made refused to sell and only lease, then crushed every single one.
But actually no analogy really fits because the costs of reproduction of bits are near zero, whereas to build any actual good, the costs of materials are always significant.
And linux is way better than a kit car. It can and does perform mission critical server duties for many, many companies. For free.
"Theo, on the other hand, is willing to brow beat vendors until they give up specs so he can give people freedom. That kind of idealism is actually damaging."
Why? Binary blob drivers are a security risk, and any progress Theo makes in this area is a good thing as far as I'm concerned. And he has made progress, with Ralink and Realtek, probably others.
I'm not sure whether a completely secure and usable system is possible, but it is a desirable goal and growing more desirable every day.
It can only be achieved by a relentless search for remaining security holes and a refusal to accept more function if it means a compromise on security. Of course, more function while remaining as secure as possible is a good thing for its own sake, as well as increasing potential user (and hence developer) base. Theo has a small carrot and stick available to use, and makes the most of it. Good on him.
"By definition, market based transactions involve mutual benefit of both parties, else the transactions won't take place."
There is a huge amount of gray area in that definition, which works better as _perceived_ mutual benefit.
Legalized gambling, legalized prostitution, legalized drugs are all obvious cases where the "mutual benefit" isn't so mutual. Not to mention much of the cosmetics industry, most MLM schemes, quackery, lawyering, etc. All of which are legal, sustainable and selfish business models.
"It's only after they use free software, like Mozilla, that they can see that it is not only good enough, it's what they want and that's what free software is all about."
I agree with your point, I'm just not sure Mozilla is the best example to use. Their 90 million USD revenue is dependent on routing the default search through Google. 90 million pays for a great many developers hours. There are only so many applications that can depend on revenues (especially that degree) from advertising.
And somehow the good ol' US of A spends $60 billion dollars on intelligence services and none of that will buy enough competence, somewhere, to get three people together: a) Someone to come up with the scheme. b) Someone who is to give a presentation with supposed secret figures embedded in it made to look like an accident. c) Another person who is to either "discover" this information or leak it to someone else to "discover" it?
You'd have to be an Ayn Rand cultist whose only contact with anyone in government, anywhere, has been with clerical schlubs in the DMV to believe that of the millions of people in government service, every single one is incompetent simply by virtue of who is writing the checks. Or that there are so few competent and trustworthy individuals that they can't be assembled to make a competent team who will keep their mouths shut.
And for an actual example of successful US disinformation, ever heard of SDI?
How about the effort to kill Yamamoto in the Pacific? America used disinformation successfully to cover up the fact that they had broken the JN25 code used by the Japanese Navy.
Obviously you've never heard of Operation Mincemeat then. You know, the one where the Allies put fake landing plans on a dead guy left to wash up on a Spanish beach.
"Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger."
-- Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials
Of course, a Powerpoint presentation on WMD rarely goes astray.
The truth is there is an abundance of information and examples on how to create, read and modify Office 2007 OpenXml documents.
Oh REALLY? There may be an "abundance of information", but not sufficient information. Which is why there is no choice but to either be Microsoft or very good friends with Microsoft in order to implement things like:
"2.15.3.6 autoSpaceLikeWord95 (Emulate Word 95 Full-Width Character Spacing)"
"The fascinating thing about technologically advanced regions is that the reproductive rates are much lower than low tech areas."
There is no reason why this is, was, or will be the case always. Few people are Economic Man, the "rational and self-interested actor who desires wealth, avoids unnecessary labor, and has the ability to make judgments towards those ends", and makes the choice of how many children he has on the basis of a cost/benefit analysis.
The same naturally selected instincts that drive parents to think nothing of putting their lives on the line when harm threatens their children can also cause them to scrimp, save, have more children, and find workarounds for the many needlessly expensive things involved in city life.
We have had several harsh selection pressures recently, most noticeably the contraceptive pill, widespread and easily obtained abortions, and omnipresent advertising that tells us that unless we buy the overpriced crap they are hawking (intead of having and providing for our families), we won't be happy.
In response to harsh selection pressures, those who are selected against die off, and those who are selected for, reproduce. Exponential growth does the rest.
If I were to guess, it would be a similar tactic to the way JD Rockefeller consolidated the US oil industry. 1. Form a cartel of businesses owning OS patents. Pay more than market value if necessary, same way as Rockefeller did with the various competing refineries etc. 2. Everyone in the cartel agrees not to sue each other. 3. The cartel then sues any outside group infringing on one of their patents. 4. If the cartel loses in court, try with another patent. And because they have so many, they can keep on suing until the other party gives up. 5. Keep drawing profits on operating systems that pay the Microsoft cartel's tax.
The end result would hopefully be (for them) that free operating system development would be halted, kind of like how you can still obtain dvddecryptor.exe unofficially but there is no further development.
Although I'm not sure how that would work getting other companies that might not want to play ball, international IP laws, etc. It would certainly help to have other nation's companies on board, so that their politicians will only be bribed the one way. And there is no guarantee it would work, but does M$ really have another choice if they want to maintain their revenue stream?
"The smart money for long-term growth would be to invest in open source solution providers, sponsors of Linux distributions, and alternative choices such as Apple Computer, where they don't try to dominate the market, but to maintain gradual long term growth and foster customer retention by delivering a quality product that just works."
Are you for real? You honestly think that if for some reason Jobs was in Gates' shoes he would be kinder or gentler? He is still the same guy who ripped off Wozniak for $3000 when they were starting out.
Slashdot Mirror
"That they respond initially with a flat "no" is truly not saying much. All it really says is that they are not very evil (which we already knew)."
Either that or they want M$ to come back with a better offer. But so far so good.
Could you explain why IBM has this vested interest?
"One unpublished study of blood groups in a town in southeastern England indicated that 30 percent of the town's husbands could not have been the biological fathers of their children."
Fishing village, no doubt.
But they said they weren't going to be evil! And look at the minimalist interface!
It would actually be better for those women to have some children with another smart guy if they are at all on the fence about deciding on such a career. There aren't many of them, and it's about time we stopped eating our seed grain.
"Stross' essay does describe rational reasons you shouldn't have children (In that they are basically a giant drain on you and your mate's financial and physical resources with little or no future ROI). The statements are all logically correct, but serve to illustrate that people do things which aren't rational all the time. And that these things are often for the better."
I know Stross gives reasons. And perhaps they are rational, but strictly within the confines of an economist's lecture hall. The economist models man (and all models are approximations), and then calls man irrational when his typical behavior deviates from the model. It makes as much sense as a scientist devoted to the wave theory of light calling light irrational when it acts like a particle in an experiment demonstrating the photoelectric effect.
Calling man irrational for his desire to see the continued existence of organisms related to himself (and taking what he can get - if not a son, a nephew, if not a nephew, a more distant relative or someone who reminds him of himself, etc etc) makes as much sense as calling a bacterium rational for spending its life cycle accruing its favorite sugary and amino acid rich environment without dividing once, burning hot in an orgy of consumption before it dies because "you can't take it with you".
When your model of man takes into account man as an instance of genetic code crafted through millions of years of natural selection, the desire for colonization of space makes perfect sense. And although feedback is desirable, the desire to get feedback in our lifetime or at all (something Stross makes a big fuss over in his essay) also becomes a want, not a need.
This is the same damn thing that occurs when an atheist debates a theist. Neither can know for sure. Neither can prove it. It doesn't stop them trying.
Both think that the more defensible position, agnosticism, is for fence sitters.
I'm agnostic on this one. Will we colonize? Will we not? I don't know, and I can't know. Until it's done, no one can. The computer revolution has not even slowed down yet. If anything will get us there, it won't happen without scientific/engineering progress.
As it is, the scientific capabilities of the human species relative to the carrying capacity of the globe are not close to being maxed out yet. The average IQ in the world is 90. The people capable of building the things that will get us closer are certainly IQ 130+. There aren't that many people at that level. Less than a hundred million, most probably.
Carrying population of the earth is conservatively estimated as at least 1 billion? If we can make the average IQ to be in the 130+ region (and technically, through selective breeding it IS possible), we'd have scientific discoveries at a rate of 10 times what we currently do. Add another order of magnitude if you think the current earth population of 6 billion is sustainable. And add more orders of magnitude if there aren't limits to eugenically increasing IQ beyond the IQ 130 region (and I don't see why not, such people exist, breed successfully, etc).
If scientific progress is viewed as a distributed computing effort, and humans are the computers, surely CPU/RAM/software upgrades from XTs to Opterons are going to get the problem solved quicker with the same number of computers. The analogy understates the situation however, in that you can have 100 special ed kids working on an algebra problem and never get a solution. Or 100 factory hands working on inventing calculus and not one Newton among them.
Then there is the interplay between brilliant people in solving a problem - often the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
So although I won't say colonizing other planets is certain, there is a lot of reason to be hopeful. And on the whole, it is an intrinsically noble project.
"The future extinction of the human species cannot affect you if you are already dead: strictly speaking, it should be of no personal concern."
A very quaint notion straight out of the 1960s. So why have children, or grandchildren? Why care about them? (Other than the bazillion years of natural selection forcing us to, that is.)
If Stross has children, perhaps he'd agree to rig up bombs to them that would be activated on the cessation of his heart. Since strictly speaking, whether they live or die should be of no personal concern. The survival of colonies of the entire human species is only an extension of that concept.
"Some will be far and away brilliant, and will easily get a career regardless; but the majority can't be differentiated from one another. So, how should it be decided who is a doctor and who isn't? By making a test that's so hard it amounts to a randomising function, and then selecting a subset of top scorers to pass. Passing doesn't mean one is inherently more qualified; it just means one guessed better on that day."
I think you are overestimating the degree to which the majority can't be differentiated from each other.
These sorts of tests are deliberately designed so that someone who is just passing the test will get maybe 50% of the questions right. Well, if it's a 4 choice multiple test, it's going to be a bit higher, because a monkey taking the test will get score 25%. So say, 62.5% will be the point where half should fail.
If the difficulty of the questions is variable enough, the test will actually judge who is smart enough + hard working enough to cram for the exam correctly.
Of course, of the people who fail you will always get your few smart-but-lazy people who need a week cramming for the test instead of a day, the rest being the try-hards for whom time cramming could approach infinity and they'd still never pass. The former tend to play down the importance of testing while being sure to name drop all the tests they had passed - they are too cool for that, and it has the potential to make them sound like an asshole if they do. Some even go to the extent of writing a blog entry about it. And the latter play tests down to save face.
And there is a little luck around the edges, but not that much because there are enough questions of difficulty at or near the cutoff to make it a good estimate of where you stand. It's like an olympic weightlifting competition - they give you three tries at each weight because it's not always the first attempt that will get green lighted. Or the second.
Ever heard of the "South Improvement Company"?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Oil
"Smaller companies decried the deals as being unfair because they were not producing enough oil to qualify for discounts. In 1872, Rockefeller joined the South Improvement Company which would have allowed him to receive rebates for shipping oil but also to receive drawbacks on oil his competitors shipped. When word got out of this arrangement, competitors convinced the Pennsylvania Legislature to revoke South Improvement's charter. No oil was ever shipped under this arrangement."
This is a minor modification of Standard Oil's drawback, except it works on your customers as opposed to a company supplying you a service. The basic idea is to use your monopoly power to force another business entity to give you money every time they do business with one of your competitors.
Why? This is slashdot.
If enough people want to mod you up, they can. One page outlining a moderation policy is window dressing on that basic fact.
Mob rule, in other words.
And until some sort of clustering technology is employed to sort different racial, religious, political, ideological (and whatever else divides people) camps into individual echo chambers, thus it will always be.
The ruling power can then be ascertained by determining which faction is never criticized (except with straw men and sockpuppets of course).
I suspect such a system would decrease traffic because everyone would stop reading those things that piss themselves off, and feel compelled to indulge in flame wars. Not necessarily though. You could make it publicly readable so that the public just sees an average moderation score... or to increase the willingness to flame, just eliminate negative moderations so that the most controversial statements rise to the top.
"Many Poles? I certainly hadn't heard much about Polish bloggers before. I wonder why they're speaking out about Vista? :-)"
;)
http://polishlinux.org/
It's one of the major linux distro review sites, they linked to from distrowatch.org all the time.
"(unless you have the strength of will not to install it)"
I think you may have hit upon part of the cure. I knew I would get addicted to MMORPGs, so I took it upon myself to never, ever play one. Team-play FPS are bad enough, even though they are episodic, all your team mates cajole you until you play again. Just like an alcoholic's drinking buddies. It would be that much worse if it were never-ending but novel quests (in the sense that "Find the $ITEM of $ITEMNAME!" can be considered novel).
The nature of addiction is genetic. There are at least three effective solutions.
1. To never, ever addict yourself in the first place (Islam takes this approach, as do dry Indian reservations). China ejecting opium traders is another example.
2. To let natural selection take its course. Those individuals who are held in the thrall of the addiction reproduce less successfully than those who are resistant. (This is problematic in that if your entire people are enslaved through addiction, the remnant may not be strong enough to fend off further attack.)
3. To addict yourself to something else that is less harmful or actually beneficial. (e.g. AA meetings, work, etc)
As civilization has learned to simulate experience (books, radio, TV, video games, I suppose even card and board games can be considered to simulate trading or war), people have found the simulations to trigger the same receptors that the original experience used to trigger but in a more intense way. The only difference between an addiction to a simulation and the addiction to the drug is that the drug is closer to the pleasure centers.
e.g.
Drug addiction: Drug -> Pleasure Center
Simulation addiction: Simulated activity -> Sensory Apparatus -> Interpretation Apparatus -> Chemical Signal -> Pleasure Center
The problem with the drug addicted individual is that his brain is wired to perceive the drug as being the same as the chemical which triggers pleasure in his brain. And the problem with the person addicted to the simulation is that his brain cannot determine the difference between a beneficial experience and the simulated beneficial experience.
"MS = GM
*nix = Kit Car"
Your analogy might fool someone somewhere, but not here. You got the GM part right, but Linux would be more like the streetcar system in LA, or the EV-1, which GM made refused to sell and only lease, then crushed every single one.
But actually no analogy really fits because the costs of reproduction of bits are near zero, whereas to build any actual good, the costs of materials are always significant.
And linux is way better than a kit car. It can and does perform mission critical server duties for many, many companies. For free.
"Theo, on the other hand, is willing to brow beat vendors until they give up specs so he can give people freedom. That kind of idealism is actually damaging."
Why? Binary blob drivers are a security risk, and any progress Theo makes in this area is a good thing as far as I'm concerned. And he has made progress, with Ralink and Realtek, probably others.
I'm not sure whether a completely secure and usable system is possible, but it is a desirable goal and growing more desirable every day.
It can only be achieved by a relentless search for remaining security holes and a refusal to accept more function if it means a compromise on security. Of course, more function while remaining as secure as possible is a good thing for its own sake, as well as increasing potential user (and hence developer) base. Theo has a small carrot and stick available to use, and makes the most of it. Good on him.
"By definition, market based transactions involve mutual benefit of both parties, else the transactions won't take place."
There is a huge amount of gray area in that definition, which works better as _perceived_ mutual benefit.
Legalized gambling, legalized prostitution, legalized drugs are all obvious cases where the "mutual benefit" isn't so mutual. Not to mention much of the cosmetics industry, most MLM schemes, quackery, lawyering, etc. All of which are legal, sustainable and selfish business models.
"It's only after they use free software, like Mozilla, that they can see that it is not only good enough, it's what they want and that's what free software is all about."
I agree with your point, I'm just not sure Mozilla is the best example to use. Their 90 million USD revenue is dependent on routing the default search through Google. 90 million pays for a great many developers hours. There are only so many applications that can depend on revenues (especially that degree) from advertising.
And somehow the good ol' US of A spends $60 billion dollars on intelligence services and none of that will buy enough competence, somewhere, to get three people together:
p ies/spy.files/disinformation/starwars.html
a) Someone to come up with the scheme.
b) Someone who is to give a presentation with supposed secret figures embedded in it made to look like an accident.
c) Another person who is to either "discover" this information or leak it to someone else to "discover" it?
You'd have to be an Ayn Rand cultist whose only contact with anyone in government, anywhere, has been with clerical schlubs in the DMV to believe that of the millions of people in government service, every single one is incompetent simply by virtue of who is writing the checks. Or that there are so few competent and trustworthy individuals that they can't be assembled to make a competent team who will keep their mouths shut.
And for an actual example of successful US disinformation, ever heard of SDI?
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cold.war/experience/s
How about the effort to kill Yamamoto in the Pacific? America used disinformation successfully to cover up the fact that they had broken the JN25 code used by the Japanese Navy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isoroku_Yamamoto
"The world is not a James Bond movie..."
No, it's not. But there are segments of it that bear more than a passing similarity to "The Good Shepherd".
Obviously you've never heard of Operation Mincemeat then. You know, the one where the Allies put fake landing plans on a dead guy left to wash up on a Spanish beach.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mincemeat
If they can successfully go to those lengths, how hard is it to accidentally-on-purpose leave some bogus figures in a Powerpoint presentation?
"Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger."
-- Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials
Of course, a Powerpoint presentation on WMD rarely goes astray.
The truth is there is an abundance of information and examples on how to create, read and modify Office 2007 OpenXml documents. Oh REALLY? There may be an "abundance of information", but not sufficient information. Which is why there is no choice but to either be Microsoft or very good friends with Microsoft in order to implement things like: "2.15.3.6 autoSpaceLikeWord95 (Emulate Word 95 Full-Width Character Spacing)"
"The fascinating thing about technologically advanced regions is that the reproductive rates are much lower than low tech areas."
There is no reason why this is, was, or will be the case always. Few people are Economic Man, the "rational and self-interested actor who desires wealth, avoids unnecessary labor, and has the ability to make judgments towards those ends", and makes the choice of how many children he has on the basis of a cost/benefit analysis.
The same naturally selected instincts that drive parents to think nothing of putting their lives on the line when harm threatens their children can also cause them to scrimp, save, have more children, and find workarounds for the many needlessly expensive things involved in city life.
We have had several harsh selection pressures recently, most noticeably the contraceptive pill, widespread and easily obtained abortions, and omnipresent advertising that tells us that unless we buy the overpriced crap they are hawking (intead of having and providing for our families), we won't be happy.
In response to harsh selection pressures, those who are selected against die off, and those who are selected for, reproduce. Exponential growth does the rest.
If I were to guess, it would be a similar tactic to the way JD Rockefeller consolidated the US oil industry.
1. Form a cartel of businesses owning OS patents. Pay more than market value if necessary, same way as Rockefeller did with the various competing refineries etc.
2. Everyone in the cartel agrees not to sue each other.
3. The cartel then sues any outside group infringing on one of their patents.
4. If the cartel loses in court, try with another patent. And because they have so many, they can keep on suing until the other party gives up.
5. Keep drawing profits on operating systems that pay the Microsoft cartel's tax.
The end result would hopefully be (for them) that free operating system development would be halted, kind of like how you can still obtain dvddecryptor.exe unofficially but there is no further development.
Although I'm not sure how that would work getting other companies that might not want to play ball, international IP laws, etc. It would certainly help to have other nation's companies on board, so that their politicians will only be bribed the one way. And there is no guarantee it would work, but does M$ really have another choice if they want to maintain their revenue stream?
"The smart money for long-term growth would be to invest in open source solution providers, sponsors of Linux distributions, and alternative choices such as Apple Computer, where they don't try to dominate the market, but to maintain gradual long term growth and foster customer retention by delivering a quality product that just works."
Are you for real? You honestly think that if for some reason Jobs was in Gates' shoes he would be kinder or gentler? He is still the same guy who ripped off Wozniak for $3000 when they were starting out.