What I fear more than anything else in this whole "tiering" push is the following:
BS eventually implements a tiered QOS policy. Google responds by saying, "fine. You charge us for the pipes, we'll charge you for the content that makes them useful." Cue the lawyers, who huddle up, then spit out a cross-licensing agreement such that BS pays Google exactly what they charge Google for the pipes. Google goes away happy; nothing has effectively changed. BS goes away not particularly happy with Google, but in a position where they absolutely can demand a net positive cash flow from content providers with less market clout than Google.
Consider VOIP: there are enough players in the VOIP game, and it's a small enough market, that no one company has the market leverage to demand much from BS. At the same time, a fairly small change in BS' service (a little bit of lag here, a little bit of jitter introduced over there) will result in completely destroying the VOIP company's ability to serve customers.
It'll end up being the same thing as the way large companies wield their patent portfolios. It means everything goes on just fine for the big players, but the little guys get screwed in the process.
I'm just keeping my fingers crossed that Google doesn't cave on this, even if BS offers up a cross-licensing agreement. Here's hoping "don't be evil" covers this.
In the end, it's the same old tired argument about analog vs digital.
No, it actually isn't. I'm not making any claims that 35mm is better in any technical sense of the term. I have so far in this thread made two assertions:
1) I enjoy printing B&W photos in my darkroom, and this hobby is being marginalized by the direction the industry is heading.
2) The film format, possibly due to its inherent limitations, meant that much professional photography was limited to quality achievable by an amateur. This, from the amateur's point of view, looks like 35mm is more accessible to the amateur.
The first assertion has nothing to do with analog vs. digital whatsoever, it's simply a statement of fact (I do enjoy printing B&W photos), and an observation of apparent trends (digital is driving film out of the consumer space).
The second assertion is, in fact, the inverse of the "old tired argument," in that it is based upon the idea that digital is qualitatively superior to analog, allowing professionals to do things beyond the ability of the amateur.
Of course, to the typical slashdot digital camera idealogue, anyone saying anything that sounds vaguely complimentary of 35mm film is making the same old tired argument, even if all he's saying is that he has more fun in the darkroom than in Photoshop.
Having cashiered in a grocery store for a few years, yes - I've seen my share of determined women hauling two (occasionally three!) packed-to-the-rafters shopping carts around the store. And coming from a family of five, three of whom were strapping young men with appetites to match, I did my share of the cart corralling in that sort of situation.
So you're entirely right, it will add up to real savings for high-volume shoppers. But the tracking of your online behavior doesn't scale as well, I think, which is why I used my example. The mom pushing around the carts is actually generating data for her whole family; any individual being tracked on a PC is only generating data for him or herself. I suspect, then, that the "rewards" will be more in line with what I see on my grocery bill for myself and my fiancee than it is in line with my mom's grocery bill when I was a wee sprout.
I got my Maxxum 4, including a 20mm-80mm (IIRC) zoom lens (albeit a slow one, with its largest aperture running from 2.8-5.6...again, IIRC), NIB, for ~$300 out the door.
The ability to switch lenses is important to me, as is the ability to control shutter speed and depth of field (I like to do macro work). If there's anything in the digital camera market that comes close to that performance per price, I would really like to know about it.
The difference, though, is that 35mm was nigh unto ubiquitous all up and down the scale of photographers, stopping only as you approached the very high end (when medium- or large-format cameras were required to be taken seriously). Thye convenience of 35mm made it the professional's choice for almost all "candid" situations I'm aware of. Which means you could go to somebody's wedding and take pictures very much on par with the pro's pictures just using your mid-grade camera. You just couldn't take as many, and you often couldn't be as responsive (the pro was more likely to catch any given "precious moment" than the guy twiddling focusing rings and adjusting f-stops, trying to not need a flash).
One way to look at this is that film limited pros to what amateurs could do where digital does not - that is, bigger-format film is often unwieldy and impractical, while the equivalent change in digital is just a matter of cost. In that sense, the system as a whole is improved by the move to digital: consumer-grade dSLRs are getting to a point where you can get 35mm quality out of a similarly-priced camera setup, while pros can now spend money to do things they couldn't before.
From the point of view of the amateur, though, it feels like a loss. I can't even aspire to keep up with the pros anymore, because I just don't have the money to drop on it. Perhaps that's petty of me.
But it's sort of like when my company got bought. Prior to the sale, we earned a third week of vacation after three years' employment. I was about two months away from getting there. When we got bought, the new policy became everyone gets three weeks' vacation to start. I realize I didn't actually lose anything in the process...but I still couldn't help getting a bit pissed.
I want in on your grocery store loyalty program. If mine offered that kind of incentive, I'd actually be willing to trade my info for it. As it stands, my store indicates on every receipt how much I would have saved if I had their card. I haven't tracked it carefully, but I've never seen a total higher than $10 (and that was including a BOGO offer on a 1/2-gallon ice cream buy), and generally see in the vicinity of $2 (these numbers on ~$80/trip).
I'm sure I could arrange for more by trying to time purchases to when things were discounted...but I can't stand poring over weekly circulars to find out. I just go to check things off my grocery list.
I suspect a complete non-starter.
on
Myware and Spyware
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
What value is there in my personal data? How important is highly-specific tracking data on one person? The value of marketing data, in my understanding, is in being able to match marketing to potentially profitable demographics. As such, personal data is highly valuable in volume, but I doubt the value of any individual's information. My grocery store is willing to give me a couple bucks in discounts every couple weeks to track my purchasing habits. At a guess, I'd say it would amount to maybe ~$100/yr if I took them up on it.
But that's a long way from actually paying me money. And even if real cash were involved, how many people are going to trust the system enough and go to the effort of proactively doing this for the prospect of an extra $100/yr?
My guess is, not enough people to make the marketing data harvested worth the money or effort. And that's not even considering that companies are more than capable of getting most of this information already at no cost...
But I could be way off base, or missing something.
Because Fuji ISO-100 35mm film yields negatives of the same informational quality regardless of camera. The camera is just a tool the photographer uses to help frame and compose the image, then to help properly expose the film. The difference between a professional film camera and a amateur film camera is only the amount of work the photographer needs to do to get a given photograph. The amateur can buy (relatively inexpensive) quality film, and take up the camera's slack with elbow grease.
With digital cameras, however, no matter how much work the amateur is willing to do, he cannot make a 3 megapixel camera take 10 megapixel pictures. Other things being equal, a 10 megapixel picture is simply superior to a 3 megapixel picture.
To analogize: switching from a $200 film camera to a $2000 film camera is sort of like switching from DOS+Assembly to, say, Win2k+IIS+VBScript to generate active server pages. You can accomplish exactly the same goals either way, but one tool makes it easier on the developer. The switch from a $200 digital camera to a $2000 digital camera, however, is like switching from a 486 with 64MB of RAM on a 28.8kbps connection to a Dell Poweredge 6800 on a dedicated OC3 to serve your active server pages. No amount of work is going to make the 486 do as well at, say, streaming video as the 6800.
The baseline quality is now inherent to the expensive part (the device), rather than to the inexpensive part (the medium).
I've got two Minolta 35mm film SLR cameras, (an old 7-series, and a much newer Maxxum 4). They're not professional-grade cameras by any means, but I like them far more than any digital camera I can afford to buy. Minolta dropping out of the camera business entirely probably means that finding accessories for them is going to suddenly become difficult.
And I still need a good flash for the Maxxum, as well as various lenses for each.
Looks like I'm being left behind by the march of technology, and it's really too bad. I won't argue that digital isn't better than film in almost all respects, but I really enjoy making B&W prints in my little darkroom (and, honestly, I have yet to see a digital camera that can give you authentic-looking B&W. I don't know the technical reason, but I can always tell the difference between a picture that's just been desaturated, and an actual B&W). The more niche it becomes, the less I'm going to be able to afford it.
*shrug*
Call me a luddite, but losing the environment wherein you can buy a decent camera and expect your kids to use it after they grow up in favor of the fast-paced furor of modern electronics sort of depresses me. It used to be all about the photographer: a talented amateur with a fairly cheap 35mm camera could take pictures all but indistinguishable from those taken by an average pro if they just used quality film/paper. That is, the stuff that made all the technical difference on the print was the cheap stuff. Now, the stuff that makes all the technical difference on the print is the expensive stuff.
I'm not a serious artist, and I can't afford to spend serious artist money on just a fun thing I like to do. Looks like the market is squeezing my hobby out.
I'd say it's a matter of intent. A colon implies that the "what I think" clauses are intended to clarify the meaning of "article formatting" that's going to be addressed, while a semicolon implies that we're addressing both "article formatting" and "what I think matters."
It's a subtle enough distinction that I can't actually say which the original intent was, but I think either would be valid.
Well, it is a sentence fragment, so strictly speaking, you're right. But given that we allow a bit of stylistic license, it makes perfect sense in context. If you want it fully expanded into a proper sentence, it would be:
Today I address matters of article formatting; what I think matters before I click 'save', and what I don't think matters.
Really, in something written in a conversational tone, the choice of sentence break or semicolon there is up to the author. Similarly, leaving the last two words implied rather than spelled out is a matter of taste.
I'm of the opinion that MS (and an awful lot of other companies around the world, but MS is the focus of this article) should engage some business ethics, and elect to not do business with China.
I just am stunned at the hypocrisy of the US government maintaining MFN status with the PRC while simultaneously condemning a US corporation from doing business with them.
Or rather, I wish I were stunned. I think I'm really just more depressed about it than anything.
There is no difference between these activities and Microsoft, Yahoo, Google and all the rest (and I'm sure, at the end of the day, there must be dozens of Western companies bowing to the almighty tyrants of Beijing).
Agreed. The question is whether or not we should be cracking down on any of them. Insofar as we should be penalizing oil companies, then yes, we should also be penalizing Microsoft. No argument there. And if we should, then why should we at the same time maintain MFN status with the PRC?
I'm more interested, though, in the fundamental question of when we (and we can define "we," here as either "the US" or "the UN," at your discretion) get to impose our ethical system on other countries and when we don't. That is, is it right at all for us to demand that other nations change their natures to fit with our concept of the "proper" way to do things?
(And before anyone says anything, I recognize the strict difference between our forcing anyone to do anything, and our not letting corporations support them doing whatever it is. However, particularly in the modern world, they amount to much the same thing)
It's easy to justify intervention when we throw around terms like "human rights abuses." But, objectively, "human rights" are just something that we've decided we value enough to warrant intervention. A thousand years ago, it was easy to honestly believe that people who weren't Catholic were condemned to eternal punishment. This led to a lot of excuses for things we now view as atrocities, but conceptually, it's exactly the same thing as what we're doing now.
The argument "yeah, but this time we're right, honest" just doesn't hold water.
For example, there are plenty of people that consider all circumcision, male or female, to be abhorrent. Does this justify them slamming down injunctions against the US for human rights violations? What about countries that object to the death penalty? What about countries that object to abortion? What about countries that object to private firearm ownership? What about countries that object to free speech or religion?
*shrug*
It's all a matter of perspective, and once you decide that it's OK for you to determine for other nations what's OK for them to do and what's not, you're implicitly justifying an awful lot of historical abuses.
To do otherwise implies what's good for Americans is... flexible for others
Frankly, yes. That's exactly it. If that's not true, then the inverse must be:
"What's good for Americans is good for everyone."
Which is exactly the thinking that the sort of people who fly planes into buildings use to justify what they're doing.
Regardless, we should be consistent. If we're going to shoulder the white man's burden around the world and dictate terms to sovereign nations, then we should just do it. No more pussyfooting around, giving our stamp of approval to some dictators while coming down like the hammer of god on others. If we're going to say that US companies shouldn't support Chinese policies, then we should revoke China's MFN status.
Or, if we're going to respect all cultural differences and national sovereignty, then we should've laid off apartheid, and not granted educational access to Afghan women.
It's the hypocrisy of it all that galls me so much. Either our culture/moral code is inherently better than everyone else's, or it isn't.
We're going to censure MS for abiding by Chinese law, while simultaneously maintaining MFN status with them?
And what do you suppose we'd say if some company from another country set up shop here, and refused to abide by OSHA regs or US child labor laws?
This is just...asinine. I can even see an argument that MS should voluntarily choose to not do business in China for ethical reasons, but I just can't see our government mandating it.
The essence of geek has nothing to do with what you use, but with what you know about it; people break down into three groups:
Group A: people who know only what they need to know to get along. This is actually a fairly small group; most people have a beyond-necessary level of interest/knowledge regarding something.
Group B: people who have some (or quite a bit of) in-depth knowledge of one or two areas because they're interested, and are perfectly content with a "necessity" level of knowledge in everything else. This is most everyone.
Group C: people who are interested in having in-depth knowledge for its own sake, and will always (given the opportunity) choose to know more about any given subject.
"Geeks," as far as I can tell, are pretty much a subset of Group B, where the one or two areas of interest are math-, science-, or computer-related, and the level of knowledge is above some ill-defined, but relatively high, point. Linus is a geek. Da Vinci was not.
Easy. Just get yourself a basic box, connect it to the internet on a 100Mbps pipe, and get yourself a free 7TB of storage, with no risk of data loss due to your drives failing!
Yeah, that's certainly the cop out the fed.gov is using to sidestep the whole problem that they're trying to do something they have no legal authority to do...but you and I both know it amounts to a mandate. How many states have managed to stay off the fed.gov teat well enough to not have to cave to federal highway funding requirements?
Want to bet that federal highway funds will be tied to this if there's any indication that states are deliberately not complying?
Feh.
Regarding security versus liberty, I couldn't agree more. What's really depressing, though, is the Big Lie nature of the whole thing. It might not be so frustrating if we actually were getting security at the cost of liberty. But the real crime is we're not; we're pissing away our liberty at an ever-increasing rate, and we've got nothing to show for it (or at least, nothing even close to equivalent value).
Unfortunately, I'm as much a fan of the 2nd Amendment as I am the others, and Canada has slid further down the slope of restricting that right than we have.
Not that it won't necessarily come to a point where that's the lesser of two evils, of course.
1) The Constitution states in the "Bill of Rights" set of ammendments some things the government cannot do. Creating a national ID isn't prohibited. Sure, the Constitution doesn't order the government to create a national ID either, but by default what isn't prohibited is allowed.
I don't want to be rude, but if you actually believe this, you really need to read the Constitution, with a specific focus on the 9th and 10th Amendments. I'm absolutely serious. You are perfectly, exactly, and 100% wrong about this. The Consitution explicitly states that the only things the fed.gov is allowed to do are those things enumerated in the Constitution; anything else is reserved to the people, or the states. I'm sorry if I'm coming across as an asshole, here; I'm not trying to. But, assuming you live in the US, it's apalling to me that you can be so fundamentally wrong about how our government works.
2) A national ID may not be the perfect "silver bullet" that kills terrorism once and for all, but it certainly would impose one more difficulty on terrorists.
Since the 9/11 terrorists were, prior to the attack, completely indiscernible from other, non-terrorist citizens, this is clearly a difficulty they have already overcome.
3) Identity theft can be done in a great number of ways today. A national ID, if properly implemented, could make identity theft much more difficult. Think about it, if someone shows a fake driver's license from North Dakota with your name on it, what are the chances that the bank teller will be able to detect the fraud?
As it currently stands, when someone breaks into, say, a credit card database, they get information on a couple million people. This proposes to set up a database with all the identifying information on everybody. If it breaks, the criminal has information on every single American citizen with a driver's license.
4) Why would a national ID be contrary to any principles the USA was founded upon? Do you think Washington and Jefferson were afraid to be recognized as themselves? There may be moments and places when I prefer to be anonymous, but when I need to show who I am I prefer to have a clear and unambiguous way to prove it.
Because, if you read the Federalist papers, you'll realize that the federal government was intended to have essentially no contact with the lives of the citizens, only with state governments. The average citizen was supposed to be able to go his entire life without even knowing or caring what the fed.gov was doing.
Anyway, you very, very much need to read the Constitution.
Well, you're half right. It has nothing to do with terrorism. But I have no idea what makes you think this administration gives two shitake mushrooms about illegal immigration. This is the same administration, remember, that referred to the first effective effort to curb illegal immigration - a bunch of citizens sitting in the desert and calling the border patrol when they found an illegal - "vigilanteism," and then did everything possible to kiss up to Vicente Fox.
If I had to decide what this really had to do with, I'd go with any or all of:
a) the ever popular War On (some) Drugs b) consolidation of power for its own sake c) lining the pockets of government contractors
It's a depressing sign of just how far we've fallen when the objections to the Real ID act by the states all center around its feasibility, rather than all the reasons it's fundamentally flawed. You know, little things like "the federal government doesn't have the Consitutional authority to mandate a national ID," or "it won't actually do anything to combat terrorism," or "it's a single point source of failure in protection against identity theft," or "it runs completely contrary to the principles this country was founded upon."
This is the inverse of damning with faint praise. So, blessing with faint criticisms, or some such. It's analogous to arguing with a poster by critiquing his grammar or spelling. Just as that implicitly states you agree with the argument, this implicitly states Real ID is a good idea.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe you should have taken another second to realize a statement like that would "loose" some folks because it's apotheotically ignorant.
What I fear more than anything else in this whole "tiering" push is the following:
BS eventually implements a tiered QOS policy. Google responds by saying, "fine. You charge us for the pipes, we'll charge you for the content that makes them useful." Cue the lawyers, who huddle up, then spit out a cross-licensing agreement such that BS pays Google exactly what they charge Google for the pipes. Google goes away happy; nothing has effectively changed. BS goes away not particularly happy with Google, but in a position where they absolutely can demand a net positive cash flow from content providers with less market clout than Google.
Consider VOIP: there are enough players in the VOIP game, and it's a small enough market, that no one company has the market leverage to demand much from BS. At the same time, a fairly small change in BS' service (a little bit of lag here, a little bit of jitter introduced over there) will result in completely destroying the VOIP company's ability to serve customers.
It'll end up being the same thing as the way large companies wield their patent portfolios. It means everything goes on just fine for the big players, but the little guys get screwed in the process.
I'm just keeping my fingers crossed that Google doesn't cave on this, even if BS offers up a cross-licensing agreement. Here's hoping "don't be evil" covers this.
In the end, it's the same old tired argument about analog vs digital.
No, it actually isn't. I'm not making any claims that 35mm is better in any technical sense of the term. I have so far in this thread made two assertions:
1) I enjoy printing B&W photos in my darkroom, and this hobby is being marginalized by the direction the industry is heading.
2) The film format, possibly due to its inherent limitations, meant that much professional photography was limited to quality achievable by an amateur. This, from the amateur's point of view, looks like 35mm is more accessible to the amateur.
The first assertion has nothing to do with analog vs. digital whatsoever, it's simply a statement of fact (I do enjoy printing B&W photos), and an observation of apparent trends (digital is driving film out of the consumer space).
The second assertion is, in fact, the inverse of the "old tired argument," in that it is based upon the idea that digital is qualitatively superior to analog, allowing professionals to do things beyond the ability of the amateur.
Of course, to the typical slashdot digital camera idealogue, anyone saying anything that sounds vaguely complimentary of 35mm film is making the same old tired argument, even if all he's saying is that he has more fun in the darkroom than in Photoshop.
Having cashiered in a grocery store for a few years, yes - I've seen my share of determined women hauling two (occasionally three!) packed-to-the-rafters shopping carts around the store. And coming from a family of five, three of whom were strapping young men with appetites to match, I did my share of the cart corralling in that sort of situation.
So you're entirely right, it will add up to real savings for high-volume shoppers. But the tracking of your online behavior doesn't scale as well, I think, which is why I used my example. The mom pushing around the carts is actually generating data for her whole family; any individual being tracked on a PC is only generating data for him or herself. I suspect, then, that the "rewards" will be more in line with what I see on my grocery bill for myself and my fiancee than it is in line with my mom's grocery bill when I was a wee sprout.
Define "mid market digital."
I got my Maxxum 4, including a 20mm-80mm (IIRC) zoom lens (albeit a slow one, with its largest aperture running from 2.8-5.6...again, IIRC), NIB, for ~$300 out the door.
The ability to switch lenses is important to me, as is the ability to control shutter speed and depth of field (I like to do macro work). If there's anything in the digital camera market that comes close to that performance per price, I would really like to know about it.
Point taken.
The difference, though, is that 35mm was nigh unto ubiquitous all up and down the scale of photographers, stopping only as you approached the very high end (when medium- or large-format cameras were required to be taken seriously). Thye convenience of 35mm made it the professional's choice for almost all "candid" situations I'm aware of. Which means you could go to somebody's wedding and take pictures very much on par with the pro's pictures just using your mid-grade camera. You just couldn't take as many, and you often couldn't be as responsive (the pro was more likely to catch any given "precious moment" than the guy twiddling focusing rings and adjusting f-stops, trying to not need a flash).
One way to look at this is that film limited pros to what amateurs could do where digital does not - that is, bigger-format film is often unwieldy and impractical, while the equivalent change in digital is just a matter of cost. In that sense, the system as a whole is improved by the move to digital: consumer-grade dSLRs are getting to a point where you can get 35mm quality out of a similarly-priced camera setup, while pros can now spend money to do things they couldn't before.
From the point of view of the amateur, though, it feels like a loss. I can't even aspire to keep up with the pros anymore, because I just don't have the money to drop on it. Perhaps that's petty of me.
But it's sort of like when my company got bought. Prior to the sale, we earned a third week of vacation after three years' employment. I was about two months away from getting there. When we got bought, the new policy became everyone gets three weeks' vacation to start. I realize I didn't actually lose anything in the process...but I still couldn't help getting a bit pissed.
*shrug*
I guess I'm just small-minded.
Wow
I want in on your grocery store loyalty program. If mine offered that kind of incentive, I'd actually be willing to trade my info for it. As it stands, my store indicates on every receipt how much I would have saved if I had their card. I haven't tracked it carefully, but I've never seen a total higher than $10 (and that was including a BOGO offer on a 1/2-gallon ice cream buy), and generally see in the vicinity of $2 (these numbers on ~$80/trip).
I'm sure I could arrange for more by trying to time purchases to when things were discounted...but I can't stand poring over weekly circulars to find out. I just go to check things off my grocery list.
What value is there in my personal data? How important is highly-specific tracking data on one person? The value of marketing data, in my understanding, is in being able to match marketing to potentially profitable demographics. As such, personal data is highly valuable in volume, but I doubt the value of any individual's information. My grocery store is willing to give me a couple bucks in discounts every couple weeks to track my purchasing habits. At a guess, I'd say it would amount to maybe ~$100/yr if I took them up on it.
But that's a long way from actually paying me money. And even if real cash were involved, how many people are going to trust the system enough and go to the effort of proactively doing this for the prospect of an extra $100/yr?
My guess is, not enough people to make the marketing data harvested worth the money or effort. And that's not even considering that companies are more than capable of getting most of this information already at no cost...
But I could be way off base, or missing something.
Because Fuji ISO-100 35mm film yields negatives of the same informational quality regardless of camera. The camera is just a tool the photographer uses to help frame and compose the image, then to help properly expose the film. The difference between a professional film camera and a amateur film camera is only the amount of work the photographer needs to do to get a given photograph. The amateur can buy (relatively inexpensive) quality film, and take up the camera's slack with elbow grease.
With digital cameras, however, no matter how much work the amateur is willing to do, he cannot make a 3 megapixel camera take 10 megapixel pictures. Other things being equal, a 10 megapixel picture is simply superior to a 3 megapixel picture.
To analogize: switching from a $200 film camera to a $2000 film camera is sort of like switching from DOS+Assembly to, say, Win2k+IIS+VBScript to generate active server pages. You can accomplish exactly the same goals either way, but one tool makes it easier on the developer. The switch from a $200 digital camera to a $2000 digital camera, however, is like switching from a 486 with 64MB of RAM on a 28.8kbps connection to a Dell Poweredge 6800 on a dedicated OC3 to serve your active server pages. No amount of work is going to make the 486 do as well at, say, streaming video as the 6800.
The baseline quality is now inherent to the expensive part (the device), rather than to the inexpensive part (the medium).
*sigh*
And another one bites the dust.
I've got two Minolta 35mm film SLR cameras, (an old 7-series, and a much newer Maxxum 4). They're not professional-grade cameras by any means, but I like them far more than any digital camera I can afford to buy. Minolta dropping out of the camera business entirely probably means that finding accessories for them is going to suddenly become difficult.
And I still need a good flash for the Maxxum, as well as various lenses for each.
Looks like I'm being left behind by the march of technology, and it's really too bad. I won't argue that digital isn't better than film in almost all respects, but I really enjoy making B&W prints in my little darkroom (and, honestly, I have yet to see a digital camera that can give you authentic-looking B&W. I don't know the technical reason, but I can always tell the difference between a picture that's just been desaturated, and an actual B&W). The more niche it becomes, the less I'm going to be able to afford it.
*shrug*
Call me a luddite, but losing the environment wherein you can buy a decent camera and expect your kids to use it after they grow up in favor of the fast-paced furor of modern electronics sort of depresses me. It used to be all about the photographer: a talented amateur with a fairly cheap 35mm camera could take pictures all but indistinguishable from those taken by an average pro if they just used quality film/paper. That is, the stuff that made all the technical difference on the print was the cheap stuff. Now, the stuff that makes all the technical difference on the print is the expensive stuff.
I'm not a serious artist, and I can't afford to spend serious artist money on just a fun thing I like to do. Looks like the market is squeezing my hobby out.
*shrug*
I'd say it's a matter of intent. A colon implies that the "what I think" clauses are intended to clarify the meaning of "article formatting" that's going to be addressed, while a semicolon implies that we're addressing both "article formatting" and "what I think matters."
It's a subtle enough distinction that I can't actually say which the original intent was, but I think either would be valid.
CURSES!
They've beaten me to the protein-to-crystal technology that was to be the core of my patent-pending Doomsday Device!
I wonder what the DeathLegion's union rep will say when I announce 10,000 layoffs...
Well, it is a sentence fragment, so strictly speaking, you're right. But given that we allow a bit of stylistic license, it makes perfect sense in context. If you want it fully expanded into a proper sentence, it would be:
Today I address matters of article formatting; what I think matters before I click 'save', and what I don't think matters.
Really, in something written in a conversational tone, the choice of sentence break or semicolon there is up to the author. Similarly, leaving the last two words implied rather than spelled out is a matter of taste.
I'll agree with everything you just said.
I'm of the opinion that MS (and an awful lot of other companies around the world, but MS is the focus of this article) should engage some business ethics, and elect to not do business with China.
I just am stunned at the hypocrisy of the US government maintaining MFN status with the PRC while simultaneously condemning a US corporation from doing business with them.
Or rather, I wish I were stunned. I think I'm really just more depressed about it than anything.
There is no difference between these activities and Microsoft, Yahoo, Google and all the rest (and I'm sure, at the end of the day, there must be dozens of Western companies bowing to the almighty tyrants of Beijing).
Agreed. The question is whether or not we should be cracking down on any of them. Insofar as we should be penalizing oil companies, then yes, we should also be penalizing Microsoft. No argument there. And if we should, then why should we at the same time maintain MFN status with the PRC?
I'm more interested, though, in the fundamental question of when we (and we can define "we," here as either "the US" or "the UN," at your discretion) get to impose our ethical system on other countries and when we don't. That is, is it right at all for us to demand that other nations change their natures to fit with our concept of the "proper" way to do things?
(And before anyone says anything, I recognize the strict difference between our forcing anyone to do anything, and our not letting corporations support them doing whatever it is. However, particularly in the modern world, they amount to much the same thing)
It's easy to justify intervention when we throw around terms like "human rights abuses." But, objectively, "human rights" are just something that we've decided we value enough to warrant intervention. A thousand years ago, it was easy to honestly believe that people who weren't Catholic were condemned to eternal punishment. This led to a lot of excuses for things we now view as atrocities, but conceptually, it's exactly the same thing as what we're doing now.
The argument "yeah, but this time we're right, honest" just doesn't hold water.
For example, there are plenty of people that consider all circumcision, male or female, to be abhorrent. Does this justify them slamming down injunctions against the US for human rights violations? What about countries that object to the death penalty? What about countries that object to abortion? What about countries that object to private firearm ownership? What about countries that object to free speech or religion?
*shrug*
It's all a matter of perspective, and once you decide that it's OK for you to determine for other nations what's OK for them to do and what's not, you're implicitly justifying an awful lot of historical abuses.
The market doesn't cure all ills
... flexible for others
I agree 100%.
To do otherwise implies what's good for Americans is
Frankly, yes. That's exactly it. If that's not true, then the inverse must be:
"What's good for Americans is good for everyone."
Which is exactly the thinking that the sort of people who fly planes into buildings use to justify what they're doing.
Regardless, we should be consistent. If we're going to shoulder the white man's burden around the world and dictate terms to sovereign nations, then we should just do it. No more pussyfooting around, giving our stamp of approval to some dictators while coming down like the hammer of god on others. If we're going to say that US companies shouldn't support Chinese policies, then we should revoke China's MFN status.
Or, if we're going to respect all cultural differences and national sovereignty, then we should've laid off apartheid, and not granted educational access to Afghan women.
It's the hypocrisy of it all that galls me so much. Either our culture/moral code is inherently better than everyone else's, or it isn't.
Wow
We're going to censure MS for abiding by Chinese law, while simultaneously maintaining MFN status with them?
And what do you suppose we'd say if some company from another country set up shop here, and refused to abide by OSHA regs or US child labor laws?
This is just...asinine. I can even see an argument that MS should voluntarily choose to not do business in China for ethical reasons, but I just can't see our government mandating it.
The essence of geek has nothing to do with what you use, but with what you know about it; people break down into three groups:
Group A: people who know only what they need to know to get along. This is actually a fairly small group; most people have a beyond-necessary level of interest/knowledge regarding something.
Group B: people who have some (or quite a bit of) in-depth knowledge of one or two areas because they're interested, and are perfectly content with a "necessity" level of knowledge in everything else. This is most everyone.
Group C: people who are interested in having in-depth knowledge for its own sake, and will always (given the opportunity) choose to know more about any given subject.
"Geeks," as far as I can tell, are pretty much a subset of Group B, where the one or two areas of interest are math-, science-, or computer-related, and the level of knowledge is above some ill-defined, but relatively high, point. Linus is a geek. Da Vinci was not.
Easy. Just get yourself a basic box, connect it to the internet on a 100Mbps pipe, and get yourself a free 7TB of storage, with no risk of data loss due to your drives failing!
Yeah, that's certainly the cop out the fed.gov is using to sidestep the whole problem that they're trying to do something they have no legal authority to do...but you and I both know it amounts to a mandate. How many states have managed to stay off the fed.gov teat well enough to not have to cave to federal highway funding requirements?
Want to bet that federal highway funds will be tied to this if there's any indication that states are deliberately not complying?
Feh.
Regarding security versus liberty, I couldn't agree more. What's really depressing, though, is the Big Lie nature of the whole thing. It might not be so frustrating if we actually were getting security at the cost of liberty. But the real crime is we're not; we're pissing away our liberty at an ever-increasing rate, and we've got nothing to show for it (or at least, nothing even close to equivalent value).
Unfortunately, I'm as much a fan of the 2nd Amendment as I am the others, and Canada has slid further down the slope of restricting that right than we have.
Not that it won't necessarily come to a point where that's the lesser of two evils, of course.
1) The Constitution states in the "Bill of Rights" set of ammendments some things the government cannot do. Creating a national ID isn't prohibited. Sure, the Constitution doesn't order the government to create a national ID either, but by default what isn't prohibited is allowed.
I don't want to be rude, but if you actually believe this, you really need to read the Constitution, with a specific focus on the 9th and 10th Amendments. I'm absolutely serious. You are perfectly, exactly, and 100% wrong about this. The Consitution explicitly states that the only things the fed.gov is allowed to do are those things enumerated in the Constitution; anything else is reserved to the people, or the states. I'm sorry if I'm coming across as an asshole, here; I'm not trying to. But, assuming you live in the US, it's apalling to me that you can be so fundamentally wrong about how our government works.
2) A national ID may not be the perfect "silver bullet" that kills terrorism once and for all, but it certainly would impose one more difficulty on terrorists.
Since the 9/11 terrorists were, prior to the attack, completely indiscernible from other, non-terrorist citizens, this is clearly a difficulty they have already overcome.
3) Identity theft can be done in a great number of ways today. A national ID, if properly implemented, could make identity theft much more difficult. Think about it, if someone shows a fake driver's license from North Dakota with your name on it, what are the chances that the bank teller will be able to detect the fraud?
As it currently stands, when someone breaks into, say, a credit card database, they get information on a couple million people. This proposes to set up a database with all the identifying information on everybody. If it breaks, the criminal has information on every single American citizen with a driver's license.
4) Why would a national ID be contrary to any principles the USA was founded upon? Do you think Washington and Jefferson were afraid to be recognized as themselves? There may be moments and places when I prefer to be anonymous, but when I need to show who I am I prefer to have a clear and unambiguous way to prove it.
Because, if you read the Federalist papers, you'll realize that the federal government was intended to have essentially no contact with the lives of the citizens, only with state governments. The average citizen was supposed to be able to go his entire life without even knowing or caring what the fed.gov was doing.
Anyway, you very, very much need to read the Constitution.
Please don't confuse the issue with your "facts" and your "logic."
IF WE DON'T HAVE REAL IDs, THE TERRORISTS HAVE WONfnord
Well, you're half right. It has nothing to do with terrorism. But I have no idea what makes you think this administration gives two shitake mushrooms about illegal immigration. This is the same administration, remember, that referred to the first effective effort to curb illegal immigration - a bunch of citizens sitting in the desert and calling the border patrol when they found an illegal - "vigilanteism," and then did everything possible to kiss up to Vicente Fox.
If I had to decide what this really had to do with, I'd go with any or all of:
a) the ever popular War On (some) Drugs
b) consolidation of power for its own sake
c) lining the pockets of government contractors
It's a depressing sign of just how far we've fallen when the objections to the Real ID act by the states all center around its feasibility, rather than all the reasons it's fundamentally flawed. You know, little things like "the federal government doesn't have the Consitutional authority to mandate a national ID," or "it won't actually do anything to combat terrorism," or "it's a single point source of failure in protection against identity theft," or "it runs completely contrary to the principles this country was founded upon."
This is the inverse of damning with faint praise. So, blessing with faint criticisms, or some such. It's analogous to arguing with a poster by critiquing his grammar or spelling. Just as that implicitly states you agree with the argument, this implicitly states Real ID is a good idea.
Problem is, there's nowhere left to run.