While I'm not sure whether this was the case or not, it pays to be aware that Tor, while OSS, was originally funded by the Naval Research Laboratory. So it is probably wise to use Tor with the assumption that the NSA can probably still see what it is you are getting up to.
I read the following on wikipedia, and it gels with what I remember from reading the Tor site many moons ago:
"Tor is not suitable for protection against observation when the observer has access to both ends of the communication, for example a government with access to a large number of Internet service providers."
Not that I think Tor is any worse than those private anonymity proxy servers, where in addition to letting the NSA read your stuff, you also let another questionable private entity read your stuff, and you can't see their source code or logs.
The main failure of National Socialism was that it came up against Stalin's Soviet Union, which had more people nearly four times as many tanks, and those. As a side note, the Germans were also too parochial to facilitate a strong, armed, nationalist but anti-Soviet movement in the conquered territories.
Of course, your alternative assumes a lack of protectionist policies in place to stop the outsourcing.
Companies dedicated to maximizing shareholder wealth + no protectionist policies = Either H1-B or outsourcing, take your pick
If the US govt had protectionist policies in place, MS might have lower profit margins but it would be forced to pay out higher salaries to get the people it wants. (Or some combination of less people or less qualified people.)
I can't really blame Gates for playing the game the way he's played it, there's a reason why he's at the top (and other companies, like Walmart). If we don't like the outcomes we have to change the rules.
Let's have a look at the top 10 gdp and gdp/capita, shall we?
GDP: -- European Union 13,502,800 1 United States 12,455,825 2 Japan 4,567,441 3 Germany 2,791,737 4 People's Republic of China 2,234,133 2 5 United Kingdom 2,229,472 6 France 2,126,719 7 Italy 1,765,537 8 Canada 1,132,436 9 Spain 1,126,565 10 Brazil 795,666
Per Capita: 1 Luxembourg 80,288 2 Norway 64,193 3 Iceland 52,764 4 Switzerland 50,532 5 Ireland 48,604 6 Denmark 47,984 7 Qatar 43,110 8 United States 42,000 9 Sweden 39,694 10 Netherlands 38,618
How many of those can plausibly claim to have gotten there through immigration? Many of them have been powerhouses for hundreds of years.
Far be it for me to suggest that a government actually puts the interests of its citizens ahead of random people from around the globe, or the fashion of not appearing "stagnant".
Surely if I was a former superpower, and still a very large and important country in my own right, my government would also be concerned about the security risk of using a closed source operating system. Who knows what backdoors are inserted in Windows at the behest of the US government?
A country like Russia would have the resources to do something about it.
An investment in OSS by such a large country has a much larger impact than trying to compete with MS with your own government funded closed source outfit. If you succeed in getting your country off the MS teat, you can create a positive feedback loop. Once you succeed, other countries will copy you. Firstly, the security advantage. Secondly, the cost. The desktop computer is largely a solved problem by now. There is no inherent need for a never-ending upgrade cycle; that need is Microsoft's. Planned obsolescence is much more difficult in a product that doesn't rust.
If you succeed, you will also likely destroy what ever advantage the US govt (if any) has in computers all over the world running Windows. (Of course, there is still the google monopoly to contend with. I suppose if you can send a schoolteacher to Siberia, it wouldn't be so hard to simply block google nationwide while you build your own competitor. But that's another story.)
It's heartening to see the skepticism that a growing number of people have for information from different sources, including both popular and official. That skepticism also seems to include an understanding of how different sources of information can be manipulated, which should allow for some future-proofing in the event that dissent is somehow clamped down on again, either through legal means and/or further centralization and narrowing of viewpoints shown through search engines etc.
That skepticism is ultimately good because finding truth _requires_ research and skepticism. A person shouldn't view _anything_ as a one stop shop for information, much less the New Yorker. We've come a long way from where a Walter Cronkite could be the most trusted man in America.
For something like this, there may actually be no real solution. Objectivity is a nice idea but probably impossible to achieve in practice. Different people have different axioms that make up their worldview, and what is true to one is not true to another. And most people will try and cry that their view is the balanced, objective one.
There would also be a likely clustering of viewpoints. Allowing say, a pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian page to be edited by each is a nice idea but still vulnerable to one side pretending to be the other in order to sway people looking at both sides in order to find a balanced viewpoint.
I don't think there is a solution that one site can provide. That's why the more controversial a subject, the more caution I have in relying on wikipedia. Best to do a bit of searching around yourself, and throw a healthy amount of distrust google's way as well.
It's about all those things. Another way of stating "future proof" is that these documents should be easily read by anyone in the future, for all time. Government is right to step in. I'm just surprised that it is happening somewhere in the USA so soon.
If I can't see the code myself, I am forced to trust that the vendor has refrained from inserting a backdoor in the code. As for third party audits, I trust them as much as I would trust Microsoft to hire an impartial third party to determine whether a new Office version actually increases productivity.
I don't care how many pictures of keys, keyholes, locks, policemen, security guards, castles, gates or agents in glasses the website hawking the product has, how high it ranks on cnet, how many recommendations it gets by editorial staff in magazines, or how many times superlatives ("military grade", "256 bit", "tinfoil hat", "for the ultra-paranoid"), are used in conjunction with the word "security" in a review or the product description. IF I CAN'T SEE THE CODE, I DON'T TRUST THE APPLICATION. PERIOD.
The next level above that is code that I can see - typically open source. At least then it is theoretically possible that someone could get caught inserting a backdoor, with resulting impact on their reputation. Compiling it yourself should be more secure than using something compiled by someone else. One should also consider who is writing it, and who has provided funds to write it. Should I trust them?
Above that is open source code that someone I trust has audited or written.
And above all is code that I have personally written.
Obviously there are trade-offs to be made (usually the only software available to me for my budget is either commercial or open source), but that's how I do the ranking.
It probably already is. The interns and job applicants see the blazing, "Don't Be Evil" signs on the walls. Only after they make management would they learn the real motto, the unwritten rule.
Exactly. Depending on what someone wants to do with their computer, there will be a cutoff based on a combination of IQ, age (ability to learn new skills), and motivation as to whether Linux is a good option or not. (And that applies with other OS' too.)
A factor that weighs very heavily is installation. Oftentimes someone who would be very capable just net surfing/ using email with a fairly user friendly distro like PCLinuxOS would have difficulty installing it, updating, getting codecs, etc. I think if you have the time to do it for them, it's worth it as it will save them money and probably save you hassle too because it will eliminate a malware infection and resultant calls (why is my computer slowing down with all those popups?).
Kids (especially bright ones) should be brought up on a Linux box from day 1. Kids tend to learn a lot of the arcana very quickly, I know I did with early DOS autoexec.bat and config.sys files. And these days it's so much easier to get help, what with google and forums. The IQ/money bar to learn linux is way lower than when I first tried it, exactly 10 years ago. You don't have to buy books to learn as there are probably at least 1-3 orders of magnitude more howto articles. The hardware support is great (just download the top 5 ISO files from Distrowatch.org, chances are at least one will work with your hardware). And now there are many quality games for free, such as Battle for Wesnoth (wesnoth.org).
The IQ barrier keeps dropping with linux. It has to; once written, the OSS software base never disappears, manages to stay relevant, and all the time there are talented coders who care about usability who are coding incremental improvements. It can only get better.
A lot will depend on the success of things like the Open Document Format. If an open standard becomes dominant (and it is in the interest of public and private bureaucracies everywhere to be able to create documents that will last forever and can be read for free), that will do a lot to crush MS dominance. It will enable average people to work from home with a free OS, on old hardware. That increased userbase will also bring gamers, and with the gamers will come the game companies.
As Linux gets better, there will come a time when a lot more people make the switch. Lowering the bar from IQ 110 to 105 will bring many more people than a drop from 130 to 125. There are just so many people in the middle of that bell curve.
+5 Insightful? You sound just like I did... when I was in college and Libertarian with the big L.
Exponential curves can run for a while, but often they hit limits. Some temporary, some not. Take mass air transport, for one. Cruising speed has been the same order of magnitude for approximately 60 years now (DC-3 cruising speed 180mph versus 777 of 560mph). Look at Moore's Law. I wonder if Kurzweil is going to stop using that as "proof" sometime soon now. Or as they say in mutual funds (very quickly) "past performance is no guarantee of future results".
You cite Israel as an example of an "agricultural powerhouse". Are you serious? As the biggest recipient of aid from a superpower (and for a while now, a monopower) for 30 years, you'd think they'd have grown a carrot or two by now.
And Africa's economic woes are caused by... bad government? Specifically, lack of democracy and lack of capitalism???
Democracy, how will that stop anyone starving? And do they even care? Democracy is the whole idea behind Blacks taking the land from the White farmers. You have something I want, I outnumber you, I take it. Democracy in action!
And capitalism is not some form of magic pixie dust. It will not confer the basic, amply demonstrated civilizational competencies of East Asians or Caucasians onto Black Africans. And what exactly do you mean by capitalism? Rule of law? Property rights? Trading of goods? How is any of that going to help?
But I'm with you on nukes. Specifically, fast breeder reactors and the ITER. And I don't think we are going to run out of food just yet.
Unfortunately, for me it's mainly the convenience. I used dejanews either around or before the time I started using google. Then google bought them out. Combine an image search, news, and language tools, and you have the perfect home page, loads quick, no clutter.
The social ranking thing, minimalist interface and deprioritization of ads got them there in the first place. The other stuff cemented their lead. (Although it seems now that clusty has got most of their features but without the usenet search.)
The desktop search was excellent, but very creepy in its implementation. Closed source, contacts the internet without my permission, no thanks. Google is already a one-stop shop for the NSA and that's without the desktop search.
It's been a while since I needed to do a usenet search. Maybe I'll switch to clusty.
This goes for selling too. For some reason ebay lists as one of the suggested options to start the bidding at $1 and hope that lots of interest is generated and the item is bid up over what you'd otherwise get.
I've gotten much better results by just listing the item at the higher of the minimum I'm willing to sell for and the minimum I think I should get.
It comes when people you know (clients, club members, friends) email you files that you want to be able to edit and send back and forth with a minimum of friction. A downloadable viewer will not enable this. The older your version is, the more hassle.
The backwards compatibility is expected. It is the lack of forwards compatibility that is one part of the problem and a cause for upgrade. The new version has everything the old one had in that it can read any previous MS document. Plus, it has a few heavily marketed "features" that an "independent" consulting firm has found increase productivity dramatically, and will "pay for itself". Of course, these new features always somehow require breaking compatibility with the old proprietary format.
Meanwhile, you know that sometime in the future MS will deprecate (no longer support or sell) your current version of Office. You want to put off the problem of having to install a new version, hence when you buy a new computer and have a choice between an older version of Office or a new version, you pick the new one. So when you unthinkingly send a customer or a vendor the new file format which it automatically defaults to, you also become part of their reason to upgrade.
The only reason MS are able to get away with this is because they have proprietary specifications for each document format in Office. If they were to work in the consumer's interest in being able to build powerful, flexible documents that will be easily read by all and stand the test of time, they'd be destroying their own monopoly.
To build something that will stand the test of time, you need to include a Rosetta stone with your document. If it's really that important, you bundle it with source code for a program that will be able to view that program. Unfortunately, if you do that today, you will either have to accept the limitations of plain text or html, OR you have to use a format that will decrease the chances of your document being read because hardly anyone can read it easily.
Trusting Redmond to always provide a way to look at your own documents is a bit like trusting Alexandria to keep all the important historical documents of the world. I mean, the library of Alexandria worked great for at least 300 years, didn't it?
No, I want a document format whose exact specifications are known to the world so that anyone can build a program to view/modify/create such documents. And bundle programs/source/specs with important historical documents - bits are cheap.
I would also like such a document format to be both powerful and in common usage, like html for example. Because of the actions of MS, they are not. If I want to create a document, I have two mutually exclusive choices: 1. Create flexible, powerful documents in a format that most everyone can read now easily 2. Create documents that I know will stand the test of time
Is it too much to ask that I have both? We've had the first since Office 97.
Computers may not be spoons but they are both tools. Tools are refined over time, and usually reach a point where further modification does little to improve the product. Even relatively complex tools like the assault rifle reach that point. Chances are good that in hundreds of years time, the AK-47 will still be widely manufactured. Why? It's easy to manufacture, cheap and does the job.
Ditto paper. If I want to produce a printed document that someone else can read in 100 years, I will use acid free paper. But you know what? Someone else can still unambiguously read the blasted thing.
This is from the company whose business model is built around proprietary document formats - the sole purpose of which is to lock users into a never-ending upgrade cycle.
http://www.insecta-inspecta.com/ants/army/index.ht ml
Some else beat me to it - the good old army ant. War requires a large centralized organization.
As long as the attributes that lead to wars starting are selected for, we will have them. People survive to have more children by either banding together to defend their territory or seizing the territory of another. In the first, defensive case, such people can be roused to go to war by their leadership contriving an external threat - through either putting so much pressure on the nation they want to go to war with or by a false flag operation on their own people.
Corporations have also LONG been starting wars. See Smedley Butler, "War is a Racket".
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisar acket.htm
A fence is actually pretty cheap on the scheme of things. It would be over 2 orders of magnitude cheaper than the current war in Iraq. I hear they work very well in Israel. They were cheap enough that the Chinese were able to build them in 7th century BC. They functioned well enough to keep out the various nomadic tribes.
Security, like many things, is about cost/benefit trade-offs. If you run a linux box, it is relatively cheap to come up with pseudorandom 16 character alphanumeric passwords, indeed, there are FOSS programs that will do that for you and help you remember them. It is cheap to set up a firewall. It is extremely cheap and easy to use ssh instead of telnet. It is probably a bit harder but not that hard to keep a policy of minimizing the use of the root account. It is quite a bit harder to figure out how to use PGP or GPG to secure your mail, go to signing parties etc. Less people would do that than lock their car door, for instance.
Meanwhile, someone with malicious intent also operates with cost/benefit tradeoffs in mind. Is he going to hack your linux system or concentrate on some windows machine out there?
I agree that the airplane laser idea is a non-problem as it currently stands (kind of like building a faraday cage around your home to prevent people from picking up RF signals from your keyboard or some such. Building a wall along the Mexican border and possibly the Canadian border, with US wealth, is the equivalent in price and effectiveness of putting a secure password on your linux box, and disabling remote root access. I mean, I just googled "billion dollars aid US" and apparently the US spends more than the cost of a Mexican border fence on aid to Israel, of all places. Like that's bought us a dime worth of security! If we can spend money on that, or a B2 bomber, why not a simple fence?
The ideal from what I have seen is to have been a tinkerer or had a part time job in the field as a child, then going to college. I was always envious of those people - if they were capable of learning theory they always turned out to be awesome engineers.
Not only that, you need a government and media committed to encouraging thinkers to have more kids, and sooner, than non-thinkers. This applies particularly to intelligent women. Sterilizing stupid people is not necessary.
Genetics determines the limits, environment determines where an individual lies between zero and his limit. It's called norm of reaction. If those limits keep lowering, no amount of government focus on polishing turds is going to make us a nation of thinkers.
Slashdot Mirror
While I'm not sure whether this was the case or not, it pays to be aware that Tor, while OSS, was originally funded by the Naval Research Laboratory. So it is probably wise to use Tor with the assumption that the NSA can probably still see what it is you are getting up to.
I read the following on wikipedia, and it gels with what I remember from reading the Tor site many moons ago:
"Tor is not suitable for protection against observation when the observer has access to both ends of the communication, for example a government with access to a large number of Internet service providers."
Not that I think Tor is any worse than those private anonymity proxy servers, where in addition to letting the NSA read your stuff, you also let another questionable private entity read your stuff, and you can't see their source code or logs.
The main failure of National Socialism was that it came up against Stalin's Soviet Union, which had more people nearly four times as many tanks, and those. As a side note, the Germans were also too parochial to facilitate a strong, armed, nationalist but anti-Soviet movement in the conquered territories.
Of course, your alternative assumes a lack of protectionist policies in place to stop the outsourcing.
Companies dedicated to maximizing shareholder wealth
+ no protectionist policies
= Either H1-B or outsourcing, take your pick
If the US govt had protectionist policies in place, MS might have lower profit margins but it would be forced to pay out higher salaries to get the people it wants. (Or some combination of less people or less qualified people.)
I can't really blame Gates for playing the game the way he's played it, there's a reason why he's at the top (and other companies, like Walmart). If we don't like the outcomes we have to change the rules.
Let's have a look at the top 10 gdp and gdp/capita, shall we?
_ GDP_(nominal)_ GDP_(nominal)_per_capita
GDP:
-- European Union 13,502,800
1 United States 12,455,825
2 Japan 4,567,441
3 Germany 2,791,737
4 People's Republic of China 2,234,133 2
5 United Kingdom 2,229,472
6 France 2,126,719
7 Italy 1,765,537
8 Canada 1,132,436
9 Spain 1,126,565
10 Brazil 795,666
Per Capita:
1 Luxembourg 80,288
2 Norway 64,193
3 Iceland 52,764
4 Switzerland 50,532
5 Ireland 48,604
6 Denmark 47,984
7 Qatar 43,110
8 United States 42,000
9 Sweden 39,694
10 Netherlands 38,618
How many of those can plausibly claim to have gotten there through immigration? Many of them have been powerhouses for hundreds of years.
Far be it for me to suggest that a government actually puts the interests of its citizens ahead of random people from around the globe, or the fashion of not appearing "stagnant".
Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by
Surely if I was a former superpower, and still a very large and important country in my own right, my government would also be concerned about the security risk of using a closed source operating system. Who knows what backdoors are inserted in Windows at the behest of the US government?
A country like Russia would have the resources to do something about it.
An investment in OSS by such a large country has a much larger impact than trying to compete with MS with your own government funded closed source outfit. If you succeed in getting your country off the MS teat, you can create a positive feedback loop. Once you succeed, other countries will copy you. Firstly, the security advantage. Secondly, the cost. The desktop computer is largely a solved problem by now. There is no inherent need for a never-ending upgrade cycle; that need is Microsoft's. Planned obsolescence is much more difficult in a product that doesn't rust.
If you succeed, you will also likely destroy what ever advantage the US govt (if any) has in computers all over the world running Windows. (Of course, there is still the google monopoly to contend with. I suppose if you can send a schoolteacher to Siberia, it wouldn't be so hard to simply block google nationwide while you build your own competitor. But that's another story.)
It's heartening to see the skepticism that a growing number of people have for information from different sources, including both popular and official. That skepticism also seems to include an understanding of how different sources of information can be manipulated, which should allow for some future-proofing in the event that dissent is somehow clamped down on again, either through legal means and/or further centralization and narrowing of viewpoints shown through search engines etc.
That skepticism is ultimately good because finding truth _requires_ research and skepticism. A person shouldn't view _anything_ as a one stop shop for information, much less the New Yorker. We've come a long way from where a Walter Cronkite could be the most trusted man in America.
Excellent comment.
For something like this, there may actually be no real solution. Objectivity is a nice idea but probably impossible to achieve in practice. Different people have different axioms that make up their worldview, and what is true to one is not true to another. And most people will try and cry that their view is the balanced, objective one.
There would also be a likely clustering of viewpoints. Allowing say, a pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian page to be edited by each is a nice idea but still vulnerable to one side pretending to be the other in order to sway people looking at both sides in order to find a balanced viewpoint.
I don't think there is a solution that one site can provide. That's why the more controversial a subject, the more caution I have in relying on wikipedia. Best to do a bit of searching around yourself, and throw a healthy amount of distrust google's way as well.
Thanks for pointing that out. Looks like I may have to get rid of skype, as useful as it may be sometimes.
It's about all those things. Another way of stating "future proof" is that these documents should be easily read by anyone in the future, for all time. Government is right to step in. I'm just surprised that it is happening somewhere in the USA so soon.
If I can't see the code myself, I am forced to trust that the vendor has refrained from inserting a backdoor in the code. As for third party audits, I trust them as much as I would trust Microsoft to hire an impartial third party to determine whether a new Office version actually increases productivity.
I don't care how many pictures of keys, keyholes, locks, policemen, security guards, castles, gates or agents in glasses the website hawking the product has, how high it ranks on cnet, how many recommendations it gets by editorial staff in magazines, or how many times superlatives ("military grade", "256 bit", "tinfoil hat", "for the ultra-paranoid"), are used in conjunction with the word "security" in a review or the product description. IF I CAN'T SEE THE CODE, I DON'T TRUST THE APPLICATION. PERIOD.
The next level above that is code that I can see - typically open source. At least then it is theoretically possible that someone could get caught inserting a backdoor, with resulting impact on their reputation. Compiling it yourself should be more secure than using something compiled by someone else. One should also consider who is writing it, and who has provided funds to write it. Should I trust them?
Above that is open source code that someone I trust has audited or written.
And above all is code that I have personally written.
Obviously there are trade-offs to be made (usually the only software available to me for my budget is either commercial or open source), but that's how I do the ranking.
Maybe it's time to re-read the classic "Reflections on Trusting Trust". http://www.acm.org/classics/sep95/
It probably already is. The interns and job applicants see the blazing, "Don't Be Evil" signs on the walls. Only after they make management would they learn the real motto, the unwritten rule.
Sounds like the ideal candidates would be computer science undergrads.
Yep. The sooner we have redundant, self-sufficient populations of humans in places other than earth, the better.
Certainly would be resources better spent than the $364 billion and counting being plowed into the experiment in Iraq.
Exactly. Depending on what someone wants to do with their computer, there will be a cutoff based on a combination of IQ, age (ability to learn new skills), and motivation as to whether Linux is a good option or not. (And that applies with other OS' too.)
A factor that weighs very heavily is installation. Oftentimes someone who would be very capable just net surfing/ using email with a fairly user friendly distro like PCLinuxOS would have difficulty installing it, updating, getting codecs, etc. I think if you have the time to do it for them, it's worth it as it will save them money and probably save you hassle too because it will eliminate a malware infection and resultant calls (why is my computer slowing down with all those popups?).
Kids (especially bright ones) should be brought up on a Linux box from day 1. Kids tend to learn a lot of the arcana very quickly, I know I did with early DOS autoexec.bat and config.sys files. And these days it's so much easier to get help, what with google and forums. The IQ/money bar to learn linux is way lower than when I first tried it, exactly 10 years ago. You don't have to buy books to learn as there are probably at least 1-3 orders of magnitude more howto articles. The hardware support is great (just download the top 5 ISO files from Distrowatch.org, chances are at least one will work with your hardware). And now there are many quality games for free, such as Battle for Wesnoth (wesnoth.org).
The IQ barrier keeps dropping with linux. It has to; once written, the OSS software base never disappears, manages to stay relevant, and all the time there are talented coders who care about usability who are coding incremental improvements. It can only get better.
A lot will depend on the success of things like the Open Document Format. If an open standard becomes dominant (and it is in the interest of public and private bureaucracies everywhere to be able to create documents that will last forever and can be read for free), that will do a lot to crush MS dominance. It will enable average people to work from home with a free OS, on old hardware. That increased userbase will also bring gamers, and with the gamers will come the game companies.
As Linux gets better, there will come a time when a lot more people make the switch. Lowering the bar from IQ 110 to 105 will bring many more people than a drop from 130 to 125. There are just so many people in the middle of that bell curve.
+5 Insightful? You sound just like I did... when I was in college and Libertarian with the big L.
Exponential curves can run for a while, but often they hit limits. Some temporary, some not. Take mass air transport, for one. Cruising speed has been the same order of magnitude for approximately 60 years now (DC-3 cruising speed 180mph versus 777 of 560mph). Look at Moore's Law. I wonder if Kurzweil is going to stop using that as "proof" sometime soon now. Or as they say in mutual funds (very quickly) "past performance is no guarantee of future results".
You cite Israel as an example of an "agricultural powerhouse". Are you serious? As the biggest recipient of aid from a superpower (and for a while now, a monopower) for 30 years, you'd think they'd have grown a carrot or two by now.
And Africa's economic woes are caused by... bad government? Specifically, lack of democracy and lack of capitalism???
Democracy, how will that stop anyone starving? And do they even care? Democracy is the whole idea behind Blacks taking the land from the White farmers. You have something I want, I outnumber you, I take it. Democracy in action!
And capitalism is not some form of magic pixie dust. It will not confer the basic, amply demonstrated civilizational competencies of East Asians or Caucasians onto Black Africans. And what exactly do you mean by capitalism? Rule of law? Property rights? Trading of goods? How is any of that going to help?
But I'm with you on nukes. Specifically, fast breeder reactors and the ITER. And I don't think we are going to run out of food just yet.
Unfortunately, for me it's mainly the convenience. I used dejanews either around or before the time I started using google. Then google bought them out. Combine an image search, news, and language tools, and you have the perfect home page, loads quick, no clutter.
The social ranking thing, minimalist interface and deprioritization of ads got them there in the first place. The other stuff cemented their lead. (Although it seems now that clusty has got most of their features but without the usenet search.)
The desktop search was excellent, but very creepy in its implementation. Closed source, contacts the internet without my permission, no thanks. Google is already a one-stop shop for the NSA and that's without the desktop search.
It's been a while since I needed to do a usenet search. Maybe I'll switch to clusty.
This goes for selling too. For some reason ebay lists as one of the suggested options to start the bidding at $1 and hope that lots of interest is generated and the item is bid up over what you'd otherwise get.
I've gotten much better results by just listing the item at the higher of the minimum I'm willing to sell for and the minimum I think I should get.
"Where exactly is the forced upgrade?"
a
It comes when people you know (clients, club members, friends) email you files that you want to be able to edit and send back and forth with a minimum of friction. A downloadable viewer will not enable this. The older your version is, the more hassle.
The backwards compatibility is expected. It is the lack of forwards compatibility that is one part of the problem and a cause for upgrade. The new version has everything the old one had in that it can read any previous MS document. Plus, it has a few heavily marketed "features" that an "independent" consulting firm has found increase productivity dramatically, and will "pay for itself". Of course, these new features always somehow require breaking compatibility with the old proprietary format.
Meanwhile, you know that sometime in the future MS will deprecate (no longer support or sell) your current version of Office. You want to put off the problem of having to install a new version, hence when you buy a new computer and have a choice between an older version of Office or a new version, you pick the new one. So when you unthinkingly send a customer or a vendor the new file format which it automatically defaults to, you also become part of their reason to upgrade.
The only reason MS are able to get away with this is because they have proprietary specifications for each document format in Office. If they were to work in the consumer's interest in being able to build powerful, flexible documents that will be easily read by all and stand the test of time, they'd be destroying their own monopoly.
To build something that will stand the test of time, you need to include a Rosetta stone with your document. If it's really that important, you bundle it with source code for a program that will be able to view that program. Unfortunately, if you do that today, you will either have to accept the limitations of plain text or html, OR you have to use a format that will decrease the chances of your document being read because hardly anyone can read it easily.
Trusting Redmond to always provide a way to look at your own documents is a bit like trusting Alexandria to keep all the important historical documents of the world. I mean, the library of Alexandria worked great for at least 300 years, didn't it?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandri
No, I want a document format whose exact specifications are known to the world so that anyone can build a program to view/modify/create such documents. And bundle programs/source/specs with important historical documents - bits are cheap.
I would also like such a document format to be both powerful and in common usage, like html for example. Because of the actions of MS, they are not. If I want to create a document, I have two mutually exclusive choices:
1. Create flexible, powerful documents in a format that most everyone can read now easily
2. Create documents that I know will stand the test of time
Is it too much to ask that I have both? We've had the first since Office 97.
Computers may not be spoons but they are both tools. Tools are refined over time, and usually reach a point where further modification does little to improve the product. Even relatively complex tools like the assault rifle reach that point. Chances are good that in hundreds of years time, the AK-47 will still be widely manufactured. Why? It's easy to manufacture, cheap and does the job.
Ditto paper. If I want to produce a printed document that someone else can read in 100 years, I will use acid free paper. But you know what? Someone else can still unambiguously read the blasted thing.
This is from the company whose business model is built around proprietary document formats - the sole purpose of which is to lock users into a never-ending upgrade cycle.
That's an interesting justification for the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, and the terrorism that was required to make it happen.
I wonder how much those deserts would be blooming without US aid?
http://www.insecta-inspecta.com/ants/army/index.ht ml
Some else beat me to it - the good old army ant. War requires a large centralized organization.
As long as the attributes that lead to wars starting are selected for, we will have them. People survive to have more children by either banding together to defend their territory or seizing the territory of another. In the first, defensive case, such people can be roused to go to war by their leadership contriving an external threat - through either putting so much pressure on the nation they want to go to war with or by a false flag operation on their own people.
Corporations have also LONG been starting wars. See Smedley Butler, "War is a Racket".
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisar acket.htm
A fence is actually pretty cheap on the scheme of things. It would be over 2 orders of magnitude cheaper than the current war in Iraq. I hear they work very well in Israel. They were cheap enough that the Chinese were able to build them in 7th century BC. They functioned well enough to keep out the various nomadic tribes.
Security, like many things, is about cost/benefit trade-offs. If you run a linux box, it is relatively cheap to come up with pseudorandom 16 character alphanumeric passwords, indeed, there are FOSS programs that will do that for you and help you remember them. It is cheap to set up a firewall. It is extremely cheap and easy to use ssh instead of telnet. It is probably a bit harder but not that hard to keep a policy of minimizing the use of the root account. It is quite a bit harder to figure out how to use PGP or GPG to secure your mail, go to signing parties etc. Less people would do that than lock their car door, for instance.
Meanwhile, someone with malicious intent also operates with cost/benefit tradeoffs in mind. Is he going to hack your linux system or concentrate on some windows machine out there?
I agree that the airplane laser idea is a non-problem as it currently stands (kind of like building a faraday cage around your home to prevent people from picking up RF signals from your keyboard or some such. Building a wall along the Mexican border and possibly the Canadian border, with US wealth, is the equivalent in price and effectiveness of putting a secure password on your linux box, and disabling remote root access. I mean, I just googled "billion dollars aid US" and apparently the US spends more than the cost of a Mexican border fence on aid to Israel, of all places. Like that's bought us a dime worth of security! If we can spend money on that, or a B2 bomber, why not a simple fence?
The ideal from what I have seen is to have been a tinkerer or had a part time job in the field as a child, then going to college. I was always envious of those people - if they were capable of learning theory they always turned out to be awesome engineers.
Not only that, you need a government and media committed to encouraging thinkers to have more kids, and sooner, than non-thinkers. This applies particularly to intelligent women. Sterilizing stupid people is not necessary.
Genetics determines the limits, environment determines where an individual lies between zero and his limit. It's called norm of reaction. If those limits keep lowering, no amount of government focus on polishing turds is going to make us a nation of thinkers.