Rather, most arms-control is based on the principle that weapons should attack the soldier, not the man, i.e., as soon as he has been disabled as a soldier, there is no military need to inflict further punishment on him, and humanitarian concerns can then be considered. Such considerations, by definition, do not substantively degrade military capability.
The problem being that this is all predicated on the assumption that you can win a war by killing the people, because the people are what is valuable.
That's Western thinking. What if we were to be in conflict with China?
The Chinese government's attitude toward their soldiers is basically "kill all you want, we'll make more". Obviously, any soldier is an expendable asset to some degree or other, but it's way beyond that to the Chinese.
Now, losing the use of their land? That gets their attention.
Instead of getting more environmentally-friendly weapons, which would be useful in defending Western Europe against the Soviet Union if they existed anymore, we should be taking all our vast quantities of chemicals we don't like (pesticides, etc.) and coating the bombs with 'em, in case we have to defend Taiwan or Russia against China, or South Korea against North Korea (and China).
I have two addresses for that reason and several you haven't named:
1) My family and friends don't have to learn a new address when I change jobs.
2) My office email system (Lotus Notes) has enhancements that make it excellent for our needs at work, but suck ass for personal use; whereas my home email system (mutt on Linux, with procmail thrown in) is perfect for my home needs, but would suck for my office (where we use a lot of Notes databases).
3) It is illegal for my company to snoop my home email in any way, even if I'm accessing it from the office. It is in fact a felony, since 1986's Electronic Communications Privacy Act. None of that applies to the company email system, however; it's perfectly legal for them to snoop that.
So, I have to stay in the company email system from 8 to 5, but after that I check my personal email at my leisure, and it NEVER has anything company-related in it. Work stays at work, where it belongs, and personal email doesn't detract from family time.
OTOH, they will have to pay the liability insurance no matter what.
Businesses don't think "oh, we have liability insurance, we can do whatever we want".
Liability insurance is in case you get sued for something you didn't think to mitigate. You still attempt to avoid the liability, for some of the same reasons you avoid traffic accidents even if you have insurance for that; your rates can go up, you can lose your coverage, etc.
A business that is constantly in court has costs that aren't going to be covered by the insurance.
And, liability insurance doesn't protect you against jailtime. Plus, will it cover you if the insurance company feels you should have know what you were doing was illegal?
Number one, it's a huge project, probably as difficult as writing an operating system. People who are willing to commit to something like that are rare, and mostly occupied with "sexier" pursuits.
Second, it won't do a damn bit of good, when all the teachers don't know how to use a computer.
Third, it'll require ongoing support and customization, and *THAT* is the reason hardly anybody has done it, because you need a staff or a contractor to continue to support it.
Private schools do this better than public, because they use their money so incredibly much more efficiently since it's not being handled by bureaucrats and career government workers.
How much space do the rest of the Usenet groups consume?
The other 90% of newsgroups use amount the same amount of space total as do 10% of the binaries groups.
That is much cheaper than I thought. Assuming $3000/month, a large ISP would not even blink an eye.
That's $36,000 a year to support 1% of their customers, and that's just the bandwidth costs.
The costs for the disk space, and the increased service costs of supporting twice as much data, and then the fact that in the current legal climate, they can be sued for the contents of the messages even if they didn't originate on their systems, amount to a hell of lot more.
Can you blame somebody for not risking millions of dollars in liabilities to support something that, again, is used by a tiny handful of customers?
Hell, maybe they should just take the 100,000 customers who use Usenet, and divide the costs among them. Another $100 a month should cover an insurance policy large enough to cover it.
Um maybe they should just stop providing access to the internet. It does not make a dime for them.
Gee, Forbes says it made 220 million dimes for them last quarter, and some guy on Slashdot who's afraid to attach his name to it says it didn't make a single one. Whom am I going to believe?
Who do you have to thank for for having time to sit by your computer and waste time on/.
Myself. I worked long and hard to get here, instead of taking the easy out of just accepting manual labor for the rest of my life. Anybody can do the garbage man's job. I could take over his job tomorrow.
I don't need to be greatful he does his job; he needs to be greatful I pay him to do it, instead of doing it myself.
No, there would be a stink all over town.
Bzzzt. Wrong answer, thanks for playing. I have lived places where we had to take our own garbage to the dump. They were cleaner than the places serviced by the city garbage collection, actually, because people with enough pride in themselves to go out and learn to better themselves do a better job of cleaning up after themselves than high-school dropouts do cleaning up after others for pocket change.
Maybe it would, but then you seem to prioritize economy over sanitary conditions.
The sanitary conditions we have today are caused by our growing economy, not the other way around.
A healthy economy can pay the taxes that result in the ability to pay for luxuries like paying someone to pick up after you.
But of course, I can't help but see how an unhealthy society we have here in the west, grown out of sour attitudes towards life and human values.
In which we have more trees than we had when there were just Indians here, and in which we don't go murder the neighboring tribe when we've completely depleted all the food in an area.
In which we live to be 75, instead of 40.
In which we have time to do things like read and write, instead of spending 16+ hours a day scratching out a meager existence.
Great; I'll have free access to this, too, from all the idiots who keep getting their domain name wrong when they sign up, sending their passwords to me.
For those of you who might have done this, your password has been changed to "asshole", your email address has been changed to "postmaster@mp3.com", and your preferences have been set to remove you from all mailings. Have a nice day.
You should be bitching at the legislature that created the DMCA and passed it, and the courts that are ruling that the ISP's can be sued for the copyright violations.
And even then, you're sucking wind, because the alt.binaries newsgroups alone require something like two T1s worth of bandwidth alone to provide, and don't make a *DIME* of income for the ISPs.
So which choice should they make:
1) Start charging for Usenet access.
2) Stop providing Usenet access at all.
3) Drop alt.binaries in whole or in part, so that the rest of Usenet can be kept for a reasonable retention period at a reasonable cost.
They're not blocking outbound access on port 119, they're just declining to devote 3Mb/S of bandwidth and (150GB * number of days retention) to providing a service that 99% of their users don't even use, and a large number of the remaining 1% don't get from them anyway.
What "we" (I presume I agree with the poster) want is for the average person to know as much about computers as he does about cars, and as much about electronic information as he does about pen, paper and books.
I've got news for you; the average person who owns a computer DOES know as much about them as the average person who owns a car knows about cars.
Most people don't know dick about their car; why else would there be places that change your oil for you? It's a simple procedure, easily performed by anyone over the age of 12 with no more than a few minutes of instruction, but the average person doesn't even know HOW to do it, much less do it.
Most people don't even remember all of the traffic laws they learned in Driver's Ed; why would you think they'd do any better with computers?
Please keep in mind that half the population, by definition, is of below-average intelligence.
and as much about electronic information as he does about pen, paper and books.
Again, they do. The average person knows how to read at what, an 8th-grade level? That's only counting the adults, of course; it's higher if you count the kids in high school, lower if you count everybody.
The average person who has never owned a book doesn't know how to read that well; the average person who has never owned a computer or an ebook doesn't know to use them, either. Sounds about right to me.
In a sense, the medical doctors have already succeeded in forcing a little of their knowledge on us: health class, or sexual education in high school.
Usually taught by an assistant football coach, so they can get around local laws against paying that many people just to coach. I submit that the average kid in school these days spends more time with computers than he does in these classes, already.
But the average person isn't going through school now; the average person today is 34 years old, and thus if he finished high school at all (17% of people 25 or older haven't) he did so in 1985, when the state of the art in PC technology was DOS running on a 286, and most schools didn't even have a single PC in the office, much less a "curriculum of basic computer knowledge".
I graduated in 1984, and my school's attitude toward the computer sciences was that they could just stick a few TRS-80s in the Physics classroom along one wall, and the physics teacher could teach them in his spare time. But the football team was winning the state championship 2/3 of the years, and that was all that was important. In order to have a real classroom, I had to commandeer one (threw the cheerleaders' supplies out of a small, windowless room with adequate power, and talked the principle into putting a lock on the door when the cheerleaders responded by putting our computers out in the hall), and TEACH THE DAMN CLASS MYSELF. The physics professor just graded the tests and gave me the lesson plans.
That high school was regarded, at the time, as being the cutting-edge in the county in computer education, and THAT'S what the average person faced when he was in school.
Today, the cutting-edge school in that county has Internet to every desk, because I installed it; but they still have 386 PCs running Windows 95, and the computer teachers are as follows:
High school: Physics teacher, with the computers stuck off in a small office room off her physics classroom.
Junior High: His last job was manager of an ISP, that failed. Before that, he ran a shale mining operation that failed.
You think those folks are teaching everybody in the school to learn computers, or just maybe acting as babysitter for the geeks while they learn it on their own, just like in 1985?
There's a reason why it can't be taught properly in any but a tiny handful of schools; the average teacher is a 34-year-old who graduated high school in 1985...
So what? It'd take an hour to train a new person to do it, and that person doesn't need even a high-school education. Any 14-year-old kid big enough to lift the bags could take over his job tomorrow.
Mine takes years of experience and training to do.
A sub-healthy economy should always be able to support garbage men, software programmers on the other hand are more of a luxury...
Well, first off, you guessed wrong; system administrator focussing on security, actually.
However, yes, it's true, a sub-healthy economy can support garbage men. But a HEALTHY economy at our population level and technology level can't occur without programmers, and system administrators.
And those system administrators have to be competent, or problems like this one will cause even more damage.
The importance of a job can partially be measured by how much damage is done if it's done wrong, and the incomptence of the programmers at one company and a small fraction of the system administrators in the US has resulted in that $10 billion estimated loss to our economy. Are we paying the garbage men $10 billion in total?
The bottom line is that if the government decreed tomorrow that we all have to take our garbage to the landfill, and the garbagemen couldn't help, there wouldn't be chaos, there'd just be grumbling and some traffic jams at the landfills.
If they decreed tomorrow that everybody had to write their own programs and administrate their own systems, and the programmers and sysadmins couldn't help, the economy would collapse.
Of course, such a kneejerk reaction just shows that you're trolling me, so I think I'll abstain from continuing a pointless discussion./I.
Funny, you didn't think it was pointless when you started it; only when you started losing.
Anybody who's paying attention to this knows that you represent an organization that's anti-technology and thinks we'd all be better off grubbing for insects in rotting logs than driving down to the grocery store in our SUVs, so why don't you and Ned Ludd wander off into the forest and let the folks who don't consider death of old age by 30 to be "the good old days" continue the discussion.
80% of the wealth is controled by 10% of the population.
And 80% of the skill is possessed by 10% of the hackers. Why is this a problem?
Most of the wealthiest people in the US are also on the list of the highest income EARNERS. The rest got their wealth mostly because somebody earned it, then left it to them in his will.
Is it a bad thing if some folks work hard and successfully? Is it a bad thing if a man leaves his possessions to his kids when he dies?
Welcome to the world created by mass-capitalism and the sellout of government to corporations - where the incentive is not to make a better, cheaper, more efficient product, but to produce the lowest-quality product you can, while still making it sell well. Where the incentive is not to properly educate the consumer, so they can make an informed decision, and buy your product on it's merits, but to confuse the customer, and keep them stupid by telling them that competitors products aren't "as easy to use", and that they "shouldn't be bothered" with things that aren't "easy".
I don't agree that it's bad that we don't teach the average person to know as much about computers as we geeks.
We got this way by spending a tremendous amount of time screwing with computers. The average person isn't a geek, and can't spend that kind of time on them.
Some people have to, and like to, spend their time building the cars, cooking the food, sweeping the floors, healing the sick, fighting the fires, etc.
I mean, would you rather your average doctor had spent his every waking moment learning to be a better doctor, or setting up a dual-boot configuration of Linux and FreeBSD?
Nevertheless, if the folks who aren't geeks are all on the Internet, it's good for me too, because I can go read medical advice written by doctors and med students, instead of written by geeks.
Ok, let me get this straight; the internet is democratic mass communication only if everybody picks the "right" web sites?
There's no chance at all that the reason 50% of people's time is spent on web sites belonging to four companies is because those four companies are providing a service that Americans feel is worth spending 50% of their time reading?
Freedom of choice means freedom to make bad choices, and freedom of the press includes freedom to print crap.
Nowhere did I say I disagreed with the Brazilian stance; I was merely commenting upon it's implications vis a vis the question of Microsoft's place after they pass their "Software Libre" law.
For the record, I think the founding fathers are doing 100,000 RPMs in their graves over the travesty that US patent, trademark, and copyright law have become.
It's probably moot, anyway; considering the Brazilian attitude toward American patents and copyrights (which isn't "ignore them" per se like China and Taiwan, but is more like "legislate them out of existence), Windows will probably be Free Software there by the time this is over.
Rio's murder rate is 61 per 100,000. That's ten times as high as the United States in general, and more than twice as high as Flint, Michigan, which is widely regarded as one of those places that normal human beings just don't voluntarily enter.
That rant being said, I want a cubicle size commensurate with my job load, if we can't backfill two people, so I have to work harder to make up for that, I want two cubicles.
Isn't that a bit like being pissed about being kicked in the nuts, and demanding TWO kicks in the nuts?:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Hm, maybe we need a user-created discussion about our downtime so there's someplace it won't be offtopic...
Maybe you need a real database that backs out transactions when they fuck up, instead of just hosing everything.
Oh, and a "sorry, database problem" banner to throw up instead of letting the site come half-ass up when it's being recovered.
Actually, you win a war by destroying your enemy's ability to wage war.
Usually not; most wars end with both sides still quite capable of making war.
Wars begin and end for political reasons, not military ones.
Also, a country's ability to make war in a sense doesn't end as long as there's one able-bodied citizen able to pick up a pointed stick.
Rather, most arms-control is based on the principle that weapons should attack the soldier, not the man, i.e., as soon as he has been disabled as a soldier, there is no military need to inflict further punishment on him, and humanitarian concerns can then be considered. Such considerations, by definition, do not substantively degrade military capability.
The problem being that this is all predicated on the assumption that you can win a war by killing the people, because the people are what is valuable.
That's Western thinking. What if we were to be in conflict with China?
The Chinese government's attitude toward their soldiers is basically "kill all you want, we'll make more". Obviously, any soldier is an expendable asset to some degree or other, but it's way beyond that to the Chinese.
Now, losing the use of their land? That gets their attention.
Instead of getting more environmentally-friendly weapons, which would be useful in defending Western Europe against the Soviet Union if they existed anymore, we should be taking all our vast quantities of chemicals we don't like (pesticides, etc.) and coating the bombs with 'em, in case we have to defend Taiwan or Russia against China, or South Korea against North Korea (and China).
...but you're still encrypting it anyway, right?
I access it via an encrypted tunnel (ssh) from work, yes. The company I work for "gets it" and encourages ssh use. Not bad for a Fortune 500 company.
Out of my entire address book, only one recipient has PGP capability, however, so I rarely send an encrypted email.
I have two addresses for that reason and several you haven't named:
1) My family and friends don't have to learn a new address when I change jobs.
2) My office email system (Lotus Notes) has enhancements that make it excellent for our needs at work, but suck ass for personal use; whereas my home email system (mutt on Linux, with procmail thrown in) is perfect for my home needs, but would suck for my office (where we use a lot of Notes databases).
3) It is illegal for my company to snoop my home email in any way, even if I'm accessing it from the office. It is in fact a felony, since 1986's Electronic Communications Privacy Act. None of that applies to the company email system, however; it's perfectly legal for them to snoop that.
So, I have to stay in the company email system from 8 to 5, but after that I check my personal email at my leisure, and it NEVER has anything company-related in it. Work stays at work, where it belongs, and personal email doesn't detract from family time.
OTOH, they will have to pay the liability insurance no matter what.
Businesses don't think "oh, we have liability insurance, we can do whatever we want".
Liability insurance is in case you get sued for something you didn't think to mitigate. You still attempt to avoid the liability, for some of the same reasons you avoid traffic accidents even if you have insurance for that; your rates can go up, you can lose your coverage, etc.
A business that is constantly in court has costs that aren't going to be covered by the insurance.
And, liability insurance doesn't protect you against jailtime. Plus, will it cover you if the insurance company feels you should have know what you were doing was illegal?
IBM is even running TV ads now for Linux on the S/390.
Here's my experience with it:
Installed the RPM under RedHat 7.1.
init 3 / init 5, to make sure everything was cleared out and reloaded.
The gnome panel crashes every time it tries to run. I was panel-less.
rpm -e gdkxft; init 3; init 5
Everything works again.
Number one, it's a huge project, probably as difficult as writing an operating system. People who are willing to commit to something like that are rare, and mostly occupied with "sexier" pursuits.
Second, it won't do a damn bit of good, when all the teachers don't know how to use a computer.
Third, it'll require ongoing support and customization, and *THAT* is the reason hardly anybody has done it, because you need a staff or a contractor to continue to support it.
Private schools do this better than public, because they use their money so incredibly much more efficiently since it's not being handled by bureaucrats and career government workers.
How much space do the rest of the Usenet groups consume?
The other 90% of newsgroups use amount the same amount of space total as do 10% of the binaries groups.
That is much cheaper than I thought. Assuming $3000/month, a large ISP would not even blink an eye.
That's $36,000 a year to support 1% of their customers, and that's just the bandwidth costs.
The costs for the disk space, and the increased service costs of supporting twice as much data, and then the fact that in the current legal climate, they can be sued for the contents of the messages even if they didn't originate on their systems, amount to a hell of lot more.
Can you blame somebody for not risking millions of dollars in liabilities to support something that, again, is used by a tiny handful of customers?
Hell, maybe they should just take the 100,000 customers who use Usenet, and divide the costs among them. Another $100 a month should cover an insurance policy large enough to cover it.
Um maybe they should just stop providing access to the internet. It does not make a dime for them.
Gee, Forbes says it made 220 million dimes for them last quarter, and some guy on Slashdot who's afraid to attach his name to it says it didn't make a single one. Whom am I going to believe?
Who do you have to thank for for having time to sit by your computer and waste time on /.
Myself. I worked long and hard to get here, instead of taking the easy out of just accepting manual labor for the rest of my life. Anybody can do the garbage man's job. I could take over his job tomorrow.
I don't need to be greatful he does his job; he needs to be greatful I pay him to do it, instead of doing it myself.
No, there would be a stink all over town.
Bzzzt. Wrong answer, thanks for playing. I have lived places where we had to take our own garbage to the dump. They were cleaner than the places serviced by the city garbage collection, actually, because people with enough pride in themselves to go out and learn to better themselves do a better job of cleaning up after themselves than high-school dropouts do cleaning up after others for pocket change.
Maybe it would, but then you seem to prioritize economy over sanitary conditions.
The sanitary conditions we have today are caused by our growing economy, not the other way around.
A healthy economy can pay the taxes that result in the ability to pay for luxuries like paying someone to pick up after you.
But of course, I can't help but see how an unhealthy society we have here in the west, grown out of sour attitudes towards life and human values.
In which we have more trees than we had when there were just Indians here, and in which we don't go murder the neighboring tribe when we've completely depleted all the food in an area.
In which we live to be 75, instead of 40.
In which we have time to do things like read and write, instead of spending 16+ hours a day scratching out a meager existence.
What a terrible thing we've built.
Great; I'll have free access to this, too, from all the idiots who keep getting their domain name wrong when they sign up, sending their passwords to me.
For those of you who might have done this, your password has been changed to "asshole", your email address has been changed to "postmaster@mp3.com", and your preferences have been set to remove you from all mailings. Have a nice day.
...they HAVE to do this, folks.
You should be bitching at the legislature that created the DMCA and passed it, and the courts that are ruling that the ISP's can be sued for the copyright violations.
And even then, you're sucking wind, because the alt.binaries newsgroups alone require something like two T1s worth of bandwidth alone to provide, and don't make a *DIME* of income for the ISPs.
So which choice should they make:
1) Start charging for Usenet access.
2) Stop providing Usenet access at all.
3) Drop alt.binaries in whole or in part, so that the rest of Usenet can be kept for a reasonable retention period at a reasonable cost.
They're not blocking outbound access on port 119, they're just declining to devote 3Mb/S of bandwidth and (150GB * number of days retention) to providing a service that 99% of their users don't even use, and a large number of the remaining 1% don't get from them anyway.
What "we" (I presume I agree with the poster) want is for the average person to know as much about computers as he does about cars, and as much about electronic information as he does about pen, paper and books.
I've got news for you; the average person who owns a computer DOES know as much about them as the average person who owns a car knows about cars.
Most people don't know dick about their car; why else would there be places that change your oil for you? It's a simple procedure, easily performed by anyone over the age of 12 with no more than a few minutes of instruction, but the average person doesn't even know HOW to do it, much less do it.
Most people don't even remember all of the traffic laws they learned in Driver's Ed; why would you think they'd do any better with computers?
Please keep in mind that half the population, by definition, is of below-average intelligence.
and as much about electronic information as he does about pen, paper and books.
Again, they do. The average person knows how to read at what, an 8th-grade level? That's only counting the adults, of course; it's higher if you count the kids in high school, lower if you count everybody.
The average person who has never owned a book doesn't know how to read that well; the average person who has never owned a computer or an ebook doesn't know to use them, either. Sounds about right to me.
In a sense, the medical doctors have already succeeded in forcing a little of their knowledge on us: health class, or sexual education in high school.
Usually taught by an assistant football coach, so they can get around local laws against paying that many people just to coach. I submit that the average kid in school these days spends more time with computers than he does in these classes, already.
But the average person isn't going through school now; the average person today is 34 years old, and thus if he finished high school at all (17% of people 25 or older haven't) he did so in 1985, when the state of the art in PC technology was DOS running on a 286, and most schools didn't even have a single PC in the office, much less a "curriculum of basic computer knowledge".
I graduated in 1984, and my school's attitude toward the computer sciences was that they could just stick a few TRS-80s in the Physics classroom along one wall, and the physics teacher could teach them in his spare time. But the football team was winning the state championship 2/3 of the years, and that was all that was important. In order to have a real classroom, I had to commandeer one (threw the cheerleaders' supplies out of a small, windowless room with adequate power, and talked the principle into putting a lock on the door when the cheerleaders responded by putting our computers out in the hall), and TEACH THE DAMN CLASS MYSELF. The physics professor just graded the tests and gave me the lesson plans.
That high school was regarded, at the time, as being the cutting-edge in the county in computer education, and THAT'S what the average person faced when he was in school.
Today, the cutting-edge school in that county has Internet to every desk, because I installed it; but they still have 386 PCs running Windows 95, and the computer teachers are as follows:
High school: Physics teacher, with the computers stuck off in a small office room off her physics classroom.
Junior High: His last job was manager of an ISP, that failed. Before that, he ran a shale mining operation that failed.
You think those folks are teaching everybody in the school to learn computers, or just maybe acting as babysitter for the geeks while they learn it on their own, just like in 1985?
There's a reason why it can't be taught properly in any but a tiny handful of schools; the average teacher is a 34-year-old who graduated high school in 1985...
But he's the one doing it.
So what? It'd take an hour to train a new person to do it, and that person doesn't need even a high-school education. Any 14-year-old kid big enough to lift the bags could take over his job tomorrow.
Mine takes years of experience and training to do.
A sub-healthy economy should always be able to support garbage men, software programmers on the other hand are more of a luxury...
Well, first off, you guessed wrong; system administrator focussing on security, actually.
However, yes, it's true, a sub-healthy economy can support garbage men. But a HEALTHY economy at our population level and technology level can't occur without programmers, and system administrators.
And those system administrators have to be competent, or problems like this one will cause even more damage.
The importance of a job can partially be measured by how much damage is done if it's done wrong, and the incomptence of the programmers at one company and a small fraction of the system administrators in the US has resulted in that $10 billion estimated loss to our economy. Are we paying the garbage men $10 billion in total?
The bottom line is that if the government decreed tomorrow that we all have to take our garbage to the landfill, and the garbagemen couldn't help, there wouldn't be chaos, there'd just be grumbling and some traffic jams at the landfills.
If they decreed tomorrow that everybody had to write their own programs and administrate their own systems, and the programmers and sysadmins couldn't help, the economy would collapse.
Of course, such a kneejerk reaction just shows that you're trolling me, so I think I'll abstain from continuing a pointless discussion./I.
Funny, you didn't think it was pointless when you started it; only when you started losing.
Anybody who's paying attention to this knows that you represent an organization that's anti-technology and thinks we'd all be better off grubbing for insects in rotting logs than driving down to the grocery store in our SUVs, so why don't you and Ned Ludd wander off into the forest and let the folks who don't consider death of old age by 30 to be "the good old days" continue the discussion.
Now who is doing the most important work. You, or the garbage man?
I am; the garbage man is doing something I could easily do for myself, for pocket change.
He couldn't come do my job. And if it weren't for people like me, the economy couldn't support paying him at all.
80% of the wealth is controled by 10% of the population.
And 80% of the skill is possessed by 10% of the hackers. Why is this a problem?
Most of the wealthiest people in the US are also on the list of the highest income EARNERS. The rest got their wealth mostly because somebody earned it, then left it to them in his will.
Is it a bad thing if some folks work hard and successfully? Is it a bad thing if a man leaves his possessions to his kids when he dies?
Welcome to the world created by mass-capitalism and the sellout of government to corporations - where the incentive is not to make a better, cheaper, more efficient product, but to produce the lowest-quality product you can, while still making it sell well. Where the incentive is not to properly educate the consumer, so they can make an informed decision, and buy your product on it's merits, but to confuse the customer, and keep them stupid by telling them that competitors products aren't "as easy to use", and that they "shouldn't be bothered" with things that aren't "easy".
I don't agree that it's bad that we don't teach the average person to know as much about computers as we geeks.
We got this way by spending a tremendous amount of time screwing with computers. The average person isn't a geek, and can't spend that kind of time on them.
Some people have to, and like to, spend their time building the cars, cooking the food, sweeping the floors, healing the sick, fighting the fires, etc.
I mean, would you rather your average doctor had spent his every waking moment learning to be a better doctor, or setting up a dual-boot configuration of Linux and FreeBSD?
Nevertheless, if the folks who aren't geeks are all on the Internet, it's good for me too, because I can go read medical advice written by doctors and med students, instead of written by geeks.
Ok, let me get this straight; the internet is democratic mass communication only if everybody picks the "right" web sites?
There's no chance at all that the reason 50% of people's time is spent on web sites belonging to four companies is because those four companies are providing a service that Americans feel is worth spending 50% of their time reading?
Freedom of choice means freedom to make bad choices, and freedom of the press includes freedom to print crap.
Nowhere did I say I disagreed with the Brazilian stance; I was merely commenting upon it's implications vis a vis the question of Microsoft's place after they pass their "Software Libre" law.
For the record, I think the founding fathers are doing 100,000 RPMs in their graves over the travesty that US patent, trademark, and copyright law have become.
Next time there is a story about something positive occurring in the US, I presume you will immediately warn all Japanese not to move there.
I'd expect a Japanese person to do that, and to quote the exact statistic you did, actually.
It's probably moot, anyway; considering the Brazilian attitude toward American patents and copyrights (which isn't "ignore them" per se like China and Taiwan, but is more like "legislate them out of existence), Windows will probably be Free Software there by the time this is over.
Maybe it's time to visit Rio?
Don't assume that better policy in one area necessarily translates into better policies in all other areas.
Rio's murder rate is 61 per 100,000. That's ten times as high as the United States in general, and more than twice as high as Flint, Michigan, which is widely regarded as one of those places that normal human beings just don't voluntarily enter.
That rant being said, I want a cubicle size commensurate with my job load, if we can't backfill two people, so I have to work harder to make up for that, I want two cubicles.
:-)
Isn't that a bit like being pissed about being kicked in the nuts, and demanding TWO kicks in the nuts?