Re:The teacher passes responsiblity to student
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Professors vs. WiFi
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· Score: 2
Well, the tone of the comment was rather racist (or nationalist, or something-ist) but yes, you're right. As academia becomes more international, this can be a real problem, and I do think it's vital for both professors and students to work hard on the language of whatever country they're working/studying in. We had real communication problems in a class I took last semester -- the professor is Polish, with a fairly heavy accent, and many of the students were Indian, with extremely heavy accents; I could generally understand both, but listening to the students and the professor trying to communicate in completely different accents was often pretty painful. Fairly often I or one of the other American students in the class would end up acting as a kind of interpreter -- "Well, Professor, I think what he's asking is..."
Well, yes, and that's the answer. Generations of students have zoned out in classes with boring teachers; it's just that now it's more obvious that they're zoning out because they're working on electronic devices instead of just daydreaming. A good professor, with an interesting speaking style, who adds a depth of understanding to the course material that students can't get by just reading the textbook, is a lot less likely to have problems with this. I'd be very interested to see student evaluation results on the professors who are kicking up the most fuss... Like the NYT article says, " The screens provide a silent commentary on the teacher's attention-grabbing skills."
Now, granted, there will inevitably be students who are too easily distracted -- "Oooh, shiny!" -- to pay attention even to good profs. You know what? Screw 'em? The rest of the class, both students and professor, will know who those people are, and work around them. In the rare cases where those people are geniuses who just get the material without paying attention in class, well, good for them. In the much more common case where they're goof-offs, well, their grades will show that at end of term.
I've never understand the point of pharmacists. Really. To reply to dangermouse, shouldn't the doctor be an information resource? Also, the doctor should be picking the right prescriptions in the first place. I don't want to upset the pharmacists here, but it's just something I've never understood. I say, bring on the robots!!
To put it very simply: it's the doctor's job to decide what medications you should take, it's the pharmacist's job to tell you how to take it, and just as importantly, how not to take it.
This is an oversimplification, of course. A good physician needs to be able to give a patient advice on using medications. But doctors are busy; very, very often the doc needs to shoo the patient out of the exam room to get to the next patient, and the (often very confused) patient goes down to the pharmacy to get everything straightened out. This is particularly important for older people who may be a bit confused anyway, and on a whole shitload of different medications.
The problem of patients on multiple meds brings up another valuable function of pharmacists, which is catching drug interactions. Ideally, every time you went to the doctor -- any doctor, in any specialty, at any hospital or clinic, for every problem -- that doctor would a) know everything about your medical history (pharmaceutical and otherwise) and b) know every possible drug interaction and contraindication. The real world, of course, doesn't live up to this ideal. The fact is that people are more consistent in their pharmacist than in their doctor; old people with multiple conditions very often go to see several different specialists, but get all their meds from the same place. When a patient has a list of meds that fills both sides of a sheet of paper (and believe me, I've seen it) it's nice to have that extra sanity check.
Finally, good clinics and hospitals are increasingly finding it useful to have at least one or two PharmD's on staff to advise the physicians before the prescription is issued. "Hey, I've got this guy who's on Alizadol and Corvabarin, but his liver enzymes are running kind of high; what do you think of giving him Zelarin instead of the Alizadol?" (Drug names are made up, of course -- hey, it's New Year's, and my own biochemistry is a little altered right now; you want me to think of real ones right off the bat?;) MD's know a great deal about the human body, but they very often find it impossible to keep up with the dizzying variety of chemicals designed to be put into the body.
When it's your body they're screwing with, it's good to have several sources of human judgement. Doctors can and do make mistakes, either because of a lack of specialized knowledge or (very often, especially in the case of interns) because of exahustion. Pharmacists very often keep those mistakes from killing people.
This is why I hate government interference in the economy.
Like, say, minting money, issuing articles of incorporation, insuring bank accounts, creating and enforcing laws against fraud...
All governments regulate the economy to some degree. The only question is how much. "Free market" vs. "government interference" is a false dichotomy, a Randoid fantasy.
Obviously that's not the norm and not what the minimum wage is intended for
Exactly. Minimum wage laws exist for a reason. Read some history and see what working conditions were like before we had minimum wage and other labor laws. You may disagree with exactly how those laws operate, but we need them or something very like them to prevent some truly horrible abuses.
but "unintended consequences" are what happen when the government screws with things
Been paying attention to the news lately? What happens when the government doesn't screw with things isn't so hot either. Private industry's track record in foreseeing unintended consequences is just as lousy as government's, perhaps more so.
Of course, let's not even get into how many poor people are locked out of any job at all because of minimum wage...
I've heard this before, and given how low minimum wage is (much, much lower in real dollars than when the law was first enacted) I have to say I'm skeptical. Evidence, please.
And clearly not same UK government that sponsored the greatest exploratory missions in history, for several centuries. One can only hope that the current short-sighted thinking is an aberration in the history of the British people.
Seriously, it does seem to be a bit silly to call something this small a moon, especially relative to Jupiter, which has several moons worthy of the name. IMO we should set (completely arbitrary, yes) lower limits on what we call both planets and moons:
1) If it freely orbits the Sun (or some other star, which is now becoming more than an academic distinction), and it's Pluto-size or larger, it's a planet. (To get rid of the "Pluto is not a planet" silliness.) Otherwise it's an asteroid, a comet, a Kuiper belt object, whatever.
2) If it orbits a planet orbiting the Sun (or some other star, etc.) and it's either a) larger than Phobos or Deimos (whichever is smaller, I forget) or b) larger relative to the planet it orbits than min(Phobos,Deimos) is relative to Mars, then it's a moon. Otherwise, it's a captured asteroid, or a microsatellite, or whatever. And yes, this means Earth only has one moon, and will for some time, until we build a space station larger than min(Phobos,Deimos) -- which will be a while, I gloomily suspect.
Like I said, this is completely arbitrary, but it has the advantages of both retaining historical classifications and satisfying the original version of Occam's razor. (Don't multiply entities unnecessarily.) There's a lot of stuff floating around the Solar System, and we're finding more all the time. How many damn planets and moons do we really need?;)
Good luck, A1C Tux. It's a hell of a military you've found yourself in -- yeah, yeah, I know, old soldiers bitch all the time (and I'm not that old; I was in from 1989 to 1997) but it really does seem like some things were going to hell right about the time I got out, and the whole Tricare thing is one of them. (My guess is that TriWest is a company formed specifically to handle Tricare contracts.) As a medic, I had to deal with all the harebrained ideas for patient administration that came down the pike, and I don't envy you. Sounds like it's just getting worse.
Business is not war, and war is not business, and outsourcing vital functions of our national security to private companies that don't give a shit about the welfare of people in uniform is not the way to keep our country safe. Actually, this is true of a whole bunch of governmental functions; the whole "run government like a business" bandwagon that Democrats and Republicans have jumped on with equal enthusiasm is a stupid idea. But that's a whole 'nother argument...
Okay, I'm an idiot -- kind of. I figured it out about thirty seconds after I posted, but the reason why still kind of puzzles me. Basically, it appears you have to build it with either the --disable-dynamic or --disable-static option. It just doesn't want to build both versions at the same time. I can kind of see why this is the case (I mean, that's why I guessed at it) but it does bother me a bit that it's not in the documentation anywhere. It may be OS X - specific, but even so, it's a pretty big problem.
You just couldn't resist taking a poke at the President, could you? Damn, what has happened to the world today? People are so incredibly disrespectful. When I was growing up, my parents taught me to be respectful of people in authority even when you disagree with them.
I don't know if you're joking or not. If you're serious, here's your answer: as ye sow, so shall ye reap. A little while back, someone was criticizing columnist Dan Savage for being so hard on Dubya Bush, and he fired back something like, "I promise to show all the respect for the President that Republicans showed during the Clinton years." Whatever respect was accorded to the holders of high office, regardless of who actually held the office, was destroyed by Republican politics while Clinton was in the White House. They have little to complain about if their boy suffers the same treatment.
All in all, I think this is a good thing. Americans, having disposed of royalty de jure, have a tendency to create it de facto, and a President can easily become a King in all but name. The President should get the same respect any human being gets, no more, no less -- and that means that when he does something stupid, we have every right to make use of that for both serious criticism and offhand jokes.
Re:A surgical resident?
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Complications
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· Score: 4, Interesting
The book was good, but was written by a surgical resident. It's akin to a graduate student writing a book deploring academia for what its worth. There's less credibility there.
A resident is the equivalent of a senior postdoc, not a grad student. One year of internship plus several years of residency for most fields -- even general surgery requires a four-year residency in most cases, IIRC. And I can almost guarantee he's not a first-year resident, because there's no way in hell he had time to write a book during internship. He's probably not a second-year either. If he's a third- or fourth-year, then he is eminently qualified to write such a book.
Back when I was in patient care, I really liked working with third- and fourth-year residents. They have a tremendous amount of knowledge but most of them haven't developed the arrogance and/or cynicism that a lot of docs get after a few years. I'd say an experience resident is in a better position to critique the medical field than just about anyone else, to tell the truth. The same is true in other biological fields (medicine is applied biology.) I'm in research these days, and let me tell you, it's the senior postdocs who really know what the hell is going on.
Yeah, and in those days Turbo [Whatever] was generally considered the best programming environment you could buy, and Borland was riding high. Now they're assholes, and they're also perpetually on the edge of financial disaster. Makes you wonder which is the chicken and which is the egg...
I've often thought there might be at least two types of this "emergent consciousness" on the Net. One is, as you say, collective consciousness on the part of a large number of people. This already happens, I think, in large groups (much smaller than the population of China) -- any group of people, be it a business, a government, a church, a social group, whatever, develops some characteristics of a conscious being, with its human members as the cells. This is why people do things in groups that they never would as individuals. Some of the muscle cells in your arm may be pacifists who would never harm a soul;) -- but when you decide to punch someone on the face, they pretty much have to go along with it. The analogies to the actions of the large groups I mentioned above should be obvious.
The other, potentially more interesting kind is purely machine-based. I think all those old science fiction stories about a single giant computer or worldwide network that one day "wakes up" (and invariably decides to elminate its human creators) are a little bit off. The Net isn't a being; it's an environment, an ecosystem. There's a lot of semi-autonomous logic running around right now -- everything from search engine bots to viruses -- and it's subject to tremendous selective pressure. Some of it may be smarter than we know...
No one's talking about taking away your ability to do things efficiently via the command line. I find myself dropping into Terminal pretty regularly on OS X, because you're right that there are lots of things you can do much more efficiently via the command line than via any GUI. (There is, BTW, a smaller but still substantial set of things you can do via GUI more efficiently than via command line; e.g., moving large numbers of files between deeply nested directories.) But when you are using a GUI, it should work as well as possible. If you choose to spend most of your time on the command line, that's your choice, and a perfectly valid one -- but the majority of users don't make that choice.
Efficiency != usability, but they're closely correlated.
Well, I think you're half-right. Yes, Microsoft doesn't consider their interface important enough for them to sue people who rip it off. That doesn't mean they "have their priorities straight" -- that just means that they don't consider interface design a priority. Which is one reason why their interfaces suck, and Linux developers are doing exactly the wrong thing in attempting to imitate them.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: if Linux interface developers are going to rip anyone off, it should be Apple. Not in the areas of colors and fonts, because a) although I like Aqua overall, it's a little cartoonish for my taste, and b) that's just begging for a look-and-feel lawsuit. Instead, they should be looking at the underlying reasons Mac interfaces (Classic and OS X) work so well. OS X / Aqua proves that it's possible to have a Unix desktop that Just Works. KDE and GNOME are both considerably better than they used to be, but they're Not There Yet in comparison to OS X -- and they never will be until the Linux world stops chasing a goal that's not worth reaching in the first place, the shitty Microsoft interface.
This doesn't just apply to window managers, BTW. I'm really deeply annoyed that just about all the open-source productivity software I've seen tries its damndest to look like Microsoft Office stuff -- all the word processors want to look like Word, all the spreadsheets want to look like Excel, etc. People, there are much better interfaces for this kind of software out there.
Re your first point: Macromedia's products are available for both Mac and PC. Microsoft might just keep it that way (remember, they already have a big Mac presence via Office and IE -- in fact, it's said that the M$MBU is the biggest Mac programming shop outside Apple itself) or they might kill off the Mac Macromedia line and start pushing it aggressively on PC. The graphic artists will kick and scream, but if the suits say, "You will do your work on a PC," a lot of them won't have a choice. It's happened to developers, to tech writers, to regular ol' office drones; it can happen to artists too.
Re your second point: see "start pushing it aggressively on PC," above. Right now, Adobe dominates on both platforms. Er, remember WordPerfect Corp.? Microsoft is incredibly patient, and they have the resources to challenge the market leader in just about any market segment.
I'm not saying I want this to happen, by any means. But it could.
... and disturbing, since Flash is finally becoming an interesting and useful way to deliver content over the Web instead of an annoying tool to do things that could better be done in plain HTML and maybe JavaScript.
But I don't think it's the whole story. If Microsoft acquires Macromedia, they also get their graphics tools, which, while much less widely used than Adobe's, are generally well-regarded. Ggraphic artists have been talking for years about how nice it is to work in an area not dominated by Microsoft (and yes, Adobe can be just as evil -- but let's be practical here; they just don't have the raw power Microsoft does.) This could be Microsoft's bid to swallow up the last major area of the desktop market they don't yet dominate.
Parent poster is correct, if rude. What grandparent poster said would have been true a few years ago. Things have changed since then, obviously.
Whenever one hears of a scientific discovery that runs counter to preconceived notions, it's a good idea to RTFA before saying "that's impossible." Science's notion of what is and isn't possible changes all the time; that is one of its two greatest strengths (the other being that it demands rigorous proof before changing) and pretty much what distinguishes it from those areas of human thought, such as religion, which rely solely on received wisdom.
"Even a stopped clock is right twice a day." Dvorak may mostly be a jerk, but he's right this time, although I'd suggest that the change he's calling for may be a bit much. I'm all for interface innovations, but IMO Linux's first step should be getting the current "WIMP" interface right. And the way to do that is stop chasing Microsoft and start chasing Apple. OS X has proven that it's possible to build a useful, feature-rich, and intuitive Unix desktop. Instead, KDE is drowning itself in pseudo-Microsoft minutiae, and GNOME is only a little better.
A lot of geeks, myself included, use OS X because it works so damn well. We're not immune to the arguments about Apple hardware being more proprietary, more expensive, etc. But I switched from PC to Mac for a reason -- I was willing to pay the extra money for a system that "just works," and moreover works beautifully. So far, Linux, as impressive as its achievements have been, hasn't given me a reason to go back -- and it hasn't given any obvious reason for Windows users to switch. (Speed, stability, versatility, and open-source-ness, as great as they all are, are unfortunately not "obvious" to Joe Average User.) I honestly believe that the open source community could equal and exceed the best desktop out there, OS X, in a couple of years if they put their minds to it. But so far, they haven't.
Well, yeah, and of course that's the association Daddy Bush was going for when he called Michael Dukakis a "card-carrying member of the ACLU." Dukakis missed a golden opportunity at that moment, because at that time (IIRC) ACLU membership cards had the Bill of Rights printed on the back. Dukakis could have pulled out his card, read the Bill of Rights, and then said, "Okay, George, which of these do you object to?" Unfortunately, Dukakis didn't have the showmanship for something like that.
Anyway... seems to me "card-carrying" FSF'ers could do something similar. If you really believe in the ideology of the FSF (I don't, exactly, though I'm in sympathy with it; I posted elsewhere in this topic about "useful fanatics") then get a card. If someone then uses "card-carrying member of the FSF" as an insult, give them the "free as in..." spiel and then ask, "What exactly do you object to?" If you're reasonably polite about it, and assuming you bathe more frequently than Stallman, you might even change someone's mind.
That's the nightmare scenario, sure. But I can see some good outcomes, too:
1) InterTrust wins, and wins big. Maybe they then get bought out by Sony and Philips, maybe not; either way, Microsoft has to pay some huge amount of money (and maybe continuous royalties) to someone else -- or scrap years of work on their products and start over. Bad for Microsoft == good for pretty much everyone else in the world. And Microsoft can't just buy InterTrust because they've spent so much damn money paying off the settlement, and/or Sony and Philips (which between them can probably outspend even Billy-boy) throw in their money to keep it from happening.
2) InterTrust loses, and loses hard enough to set a precedent against questionable patents. Although this would be good for Microsoft in the short term, it might be good for everyone in the long term by establishing the precedent that ideas aren't patentable, only implementations, which is the way it should be all along. Unfortunately the article doesn't go into enough detail to judge whether that's a possible outcome, but if it did happen, it would be a Good Thing.
3) The case stalemates (probably because, as in the anti-trust case, Microsoft is clearly guilty, but their money and name recognition keep the case in endless appeals) and Sony and Microsoft end up fighting a years-long war with Intertrust as the proxy. Meanwhile, Philips dissasociates itself from the case and starts working with more consumer-friendly companies... and eventually we end up with a world where content is available primarily on less restricted platforms. Alternately, Philips stays in the fight and the rest of the content world just kind of grows around the quagmire.
(2), which would probably be the most useful in the long term, is also IMO the least likely. But (1) and (3) seem like real possibilities.
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Well, the tone of the comment was rather racist (or nationalist, or something-ist) but yes, you're right. As academia becomes more international, this can be a real problem, and I do think it's vital for both professors and students to work hard on the language of whatever country they're working/studying in. We had real communication problems in a class I took last semester -- the professor is Polish, with a fairly heavy accent, and many of the students were Indian, with extremely heavy accents; I could generally understand both, but listening to the students and the professor trying to communicate in completely different accents was often pretty painful. Fairly often I or one of the other American students in the class would end up acting as a kind of interpreter -- "Well, Professor, I think what he's asking is ..."
Well, yes, and that's the answer. Generations of students have zoned out in classes with boring teachers; it's just that now it's more obvious that they're zoning out because they're working on electronic devices instead of just daydreaming. A good professor, with an interesting speaking style, who adds a depth of understanding to the course material that students can't get by just reading the textbook, is a lot less likely to have problems with this. I'd be very interested to see student evaluation results on the professors who are kicking up the most fuss ... Like the NYT article says, " The screens provide a silent commentary on the teacher's attention-grabbing skills."
Now, granted, there will inevitably be students who are too easily distracted -- "Oooh, shiny!" -- to pay attention even to good profs. You know what? Screw 'em? The rest of the class, both students and professor, will know who those people are, and work around them. In the rare cases where those people are geniuses who just get the material without paying attention in class, well, good for them. In the much more common case where they're goof-offs, well, their grades will show that at end of term.
This is an oversimplification, of course. A good physician needs to be able to give a patient advice on using medications. But doctors are busy; very, very often the doc needs to shoo the patient out of the exam room to get to the next patient, and the (often very confused) patient goes down to the pharmacy to get everything straightened out. This is particularly important for older people who may be a bit confused anyway, and on a whole shitload of different medications.
The problem of patients on multiple meds brings up another valuable function of pharmacists, which is catching drug interactions. Ideally, every time you went to the doctor -- any doctor, in any specialty, at any hospital or clinic, for every problem -- that doctor would a) know everything about your medical history (pharmaceutical and otherwise) and b) know every possible drug interaction and contraindication. The real world, of course, doesn't live up to this ideal. The fact is that people are more consistent in their pharmacist than in their doctor; old people with multiple conditions very often go to see several different specialists, but get all their meds from the same place. When a patient has a list of meds that fills both sides of a sheet of paper (and believe me, I've seen it) it's nice to have that extra sanity check.
Finally, good clinics and hospitals are increasingly finding it useful to have at least one or two PharmD's on staff to advise the physicians before the prescription is issued. "Hey, I've got this guy who's on Alizadol and Corvabarin, but his liver enzymes are running kind of high; what do you think of giving him Zelarin instead of the Alizadol?" (Drug names are made up, of course -- hey, it's New Year's, and my own biochemistry is a little altered right now; you want me to think of real ones right off the bat?
When it's your body they're screwing with, it's good to have several sources of human judgement. Doctors can and do make mistakes, either because of a lack of specialized knowledge or (very often, especially in the case of interns) because of exahustion. Pharmacists very often keep those mistakes from killing people.
All governments regulate the economy to some degree. The only question is how much. "Free market" vs. "government interference" is a false dichotomy, a Randoid fantasy.
Exactly. Minimum wage laws exist for a reason. Read some history and see what working conditions were like before we had minimum wage and other labor laws. You may disagree with exactly how those laws operate, but we need them or something very like them to prevent some truly horrible abuses.
Been paying attention to the news lately? What happens when the government doesn't screw with things isn't so hot either. Private industry's track record in foreseeing unintended consequences is just as lousy as government's, perhaps more so.
I've heard this before, and given how low minimum wage is (much, much lower in real dollars than when the law was first enacted) I have to say I'm skeptical. Evidence, please.
I think the point was that controlled fusion would pose an enormous threat to the power of Bush's oil industry buddies, and that is just Not Allowed.
And clearly not same UK government that sponsored the greatest exploratory missions in history, for several centuries. One can only hope that the current short-sighted thinking is an aberration in the history of the British people.
Seriously, it does seem to be a bit silly to call something this small a moon, especially relative to Jupiter, which has several moons worthy of the name. IMO we should set (completely arbitrary, yes) lower limits on what we call both planets and moons:
;)
1) If it freely orbits the Sun (or some other star, which is now becoming more than an academic distinction), and it's Pluto-size or larger, it's a planet. (To get rid of the "Pluto is not a planet" silliness.) Otherwise it's an asteroid, a comet, a Kuiper belt object, whatever.
2) If it orbits a planet orbiting the Sun (or some other star, etc.) and it's either a) larger than Phobos or Deimos (whichever is smaller, I forget) or b) larger relative to the planet it orbits than min(Phobos,Deimos) is relative to Mars, then it's a moon. Otherwise, it's a captured asteroid, or a microsatellite, or whatever. And yes, this means Earth only has one moon, and will for some time, until we build a space station larger than min(Phobos,Deimos) -- which will be a while, I gloomily suspect.
Like I said, this is completely arbitrary, but it has the advantages of both retaining historical classifications and satisfying the original version of Occam's razor. (Don't multiply entities unnecessarily.) There's a lot of stuff floating around the Solar System, and we're finding more all the time. How many damn planets and moons do we really need?
I think there are large Italian men who have ice conferences all the time. But this is something different. ;)
Good luck, A1C Tux. It's a hell of a military you've found yourself in -- yeah, yeah, I know, old soldiers bitch all the time (and I'm not that old; I was in from 1989 to 1997) but it really does seem like some things were going to hell right about the time I got out, and the whole Tricare thing is one of them. (My guess is that TriWest is a company formed specifically to handle Tricare contracts.) As a medic, I had to deal with all the harebrained ideas for patient administration that came down the pike, and I don't envy you. Sounds like it's just getting worse.
...
Business is not war, and war is not business, and outsourcing vital functions of our national security to private companies that don't give a shit about the welfare of people in uniform is not the way to keep our country safe. Actually, this is true of a whole bunch of governmental functions; the whole "run government like a business" bandwagon that Democrats and Republicans have jumped on with equal enthusiasm is a stupid idea. But that's a whole 'nother argument
Okay, I'm an idiot -- kind of. I figured it out about thirty seconds after I posted, but the reason why still kind of puzzles me. Basically, it appears you have to build it with either the --disable-dynamic or --disable-static option. It just doesn't want to build both versions at the same time. I can kind of see why this is the case (I mean, that's why I guessed at it) but it does bother me a bit that it's not in the documentation anywhere. It may be OS X - specific, but even so, it's a pretty big problem.
Anyone who's had luck building on this on OS X, could you help me out? I get a bunch of "undefined symbol" errors and the message:
make: *** [libs/libphp4.bundle] Error 1
at the end of the make process.
All in all, I think this is a good thing. Americans, having disposed of royalty de jure, have a tendency to create it de facto, and a President can easily become a King in all but name. The President should get the same respect any human being gets, no more, no less -- and that means that when he does something stupid, we have every right to make use of that for both serious criticism and offhand jokes.
Back when I was in patient care, I really liked working with third- and fourth-year residents. They have a tremendous amount of knowledge but most of them haven't developed the arrogance and/or cynicism that a lot of docs get after a few years. I'd say an experience resident is in a better position to critique the medical field than just about anyone else, to tell the truth. The same is true in other biological fields (medicine is applied biology.) I'm in research these days, and let me tell you, it's the senior postdocs who really know what the hell is going on.
Yeah, and in those days Turbo [Whatever] was generally considered the best programming environment you could buy, and Borland was riding high. Now they're assholes, and they're also perpetually on the edge of financial disaster. Makes you wonder which is the chicken and which is the egg ...
"Um, gee, kid, thanks
I've often thought there might be at least two types of this "emergent consciousness" on the Net. One is, as you say, collective consciousness on the part of a large number of people. This already happens, I think, in large groups (much smaller than the population of China) -- any group of people, be it a business, a government, a church, a social group, whatever, develops some characteristics of a conscious being, with its human members as the cells. This is why people do things in groups that they never would as individuals. Some of the muscle cells in your arm may be pacifists who would never harm a soul ;) -- but when you decide to punch someone on the face, they pretty much have to go along with it. The analogies to the actions of the large groups I mentioned above should be obvious.
...
The other, potentially more interesting kind is purely machine-based. I think all those old science fiction stories about a single giant computer or worldwide network that one day "wakes up" (and invariably decides to elminate its human creators) are a little bit off. The Net isn't a being; it's an environment, an ecosystem. There's a lot of semi-autonomous logic running around right now -- everything from search engine bots to viruses -- and it's subject to tremendous selective pressure. Some of it may be smarter than we know
No one's talking about taking away your ability to do things efficiently via the command line. I find myself dropping into Terminal pretty regularly on OS X, because you're right that there are lots of things you can do much more efficiently via the command line than via any GUI. (There is, BTW, a smaller but still substantial set of things you can do via GUI more efficiently than via command line; e.g., moving large numbers of files between deeply nested directories.) But when you are using a GUI, it should work as well as possible. If you choose to spend most of your time on the command line, that's your choice, and a perfectly valid one -- but the majority of users don't make that choice.
Efficiency != usability, but they're closely correlated.
Well, I think you're half-right. Yes, Microsoft doesn't consider their interface important enough for them to sue people who rip it off. That doesn't mean they "have their priorities straight" -- that just means that they don't consider interface design a priority. Which is one reason why their interfaces suck, and Linux developers are doing exactly the wrong thing in attempting to imitate them.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: if Linux interface developers are going to rip anyone off, it should be Apple. Not in the areas of colors and fonts, because a) although I like Aqua overall, it's a little cartoonish for my taste, and b) that's just begging for a look-and-feel lawsuit. Instead, they should be looking at the underlying reasons Mac interfaces (Classic and OS X) work so well. OS X / Aqua proves that it's possible to have a Unix desktop that Just Works. KDE and GNOME are both considerably better than they used to be, but they're Not There Yet in comparison to OS X -- and they never will be until the Linux world stops chasing a goal that's not worth reaching in the first place, the shitty Microsoft interface.
This doesn't just apply to window managers, BTW. I'm really deeply annoyed that just about all the open-source productivity software I've seen tries its damndest to look like Microsoft Office stuff -- all the word processors want to look like Word, all the spreadsheets want to look like Excel, etc. People, there are much better interfaces for this kind of software out there.
Re your first point: Macromedia's products are available for both Mac and PC. Microsoft might just keep it that way (remember, they already have a big Mac presence via Office and IE -- in fact, it's said that the M$MBU is the biggest Mac programming shop outside Apple itself) or they might kill off the Mac Macromedia line and start pushing it aggressively on PC. The graphic artists will kick and scream, but if the suits say, "You will do your work on a PC," a lot of them won't have a choice. It's happened to developers, to tech writers, to regular ol' office drones; it can happen to artists too.
Re your second point: see "start pushing it aggressively on PC," above. Right now, Adobe dominates on both platforms. Er, remember WordPerfect Corp.? Microsoft is incredibly patient, and they have the resources to challenge the market leader in just about any market segment.
I'm not saying I want this to happen, by any means. But it could.
... and disturbing, since Flash is finally becoming an interesting and useful way to deliver content over the Web instead of an annoying tool to do things that could better be done in plain HTML and maybe JavaScript.
But I don't think it's the whole story. If Microsoft acquires Macromedia, they also get their graphics tools, which, while much less widely used than Adobe's, are generally well-regarded. Ggraphic artists have been talking for years about how nice it is to work in an area not dominated by Microsoft (and yes, Adobe can be just as evil -- but let's be practical here; they just don't have the raw power Microsoft does.) This could be Microsoft's bid to swallow up the last major area of the desktop market they don't yet dominate.
Parent poster is correct, if rude. What grandparent poster said would have been true a few years ago. Things have changed since then, obviously.
Whenever one hears of a scientific discovery that runs counter to preconceived notions, it's a good idea to RTFA before saying "that's impossible." Science's notion of what is and isn't possible changes all the time; that is one of its two greatest strengths (the other being that it demands rigorous proof before changing) and pretty much what distinguishes it from those areas of human thought, such as religion, which rely solely on received wisdom.
Hah! I like that analogy.
"Even a stopped clock is right twice a day." Dvorak may mostly be a jerk, but he's right this time, although I'd suggest that the change he's calling for may be a bit much. I'm all for interface innovations, but IMO Linux's first step should be getting the current "WIMP" interface right. And the way to do that is stop chasing Microsoft and start chasing Apple. OS X has proven that it's possible to build a useful, feature-rich, and intuitive Unix desktop. Instead, KDE is drowning itself in pseudo-Microsoft minutiae, and GNOME is only a little better.
A lot of geeks, myself included, use OS X because it works so damn well. We're not immune to the arguments about Apple hardware being more proprietary, more expensive, etc. But I switched from PC to Mac for a reason -- I was willing to pay the extra money for a system that "just works," and moreover works beautifully. So far, Linux, as impressive as its achievements have been, hasn't given me a reason to go back -- and it hasn't given any obvious reason for Windows users to switch. (Speed, stability, versatility, and open-source-ness, as great as they all are, are unfortunately not "obvious" to Joe Average User.) I honestly believe that the open source community could equal and exceed the best desktop out there, OS X, in a couple of years if they put their minds to it. But so far, they haven't.
Well, yeah, and of course that's the association Daddy Bush was going for when he called Michael Dukakis a "card-carrying member of the ACLU." Dukakis missed a golden opportunity at that moment, because at that time (IIRC) ACLU membership cards had the Bill of Rights printed on the back. Dukakis could have pulled out his card, read the Bill of Rights, and then said, "Okay, George, which of these do you object to?" Unfortunately, Dukakis didn't have the showmanship for something like that.
... seems to me "card-carrying" FSF'ers could do something similar. If you really believe in the ideology of the FSF (I don't, exactly, though I'm in sympathy with it; I posted elsewhere in this topic about "useful fanatics") then get a card. If someone then uses "card-carrying member of the FSF" as an insult, give them the "free as in ..." spiel and then ask, "What exactly do you object to?" If you're reasonably polite about it, and assuming you bathe more frequently than Stallman, you might even change someone's mind.
Anyway
That's the nightmare scenario, sure. But I can see some good outcomes, too:
... and eventually we end up with a world where content is available primarily on less restricted platforms. Alternately, Philips stays in the fight and the rest of the content world just kind of grows around the quagmire.
1) InterTrust wins, and wins big. Maybe they then get bought out by Sony and Philips, maybe not; either way, Microsoft has to pay some huge amount of money (and maybe continuous royalties) to someone else -- or scrap years of work on their products and start over. Bad for Microsoft == good for pretty much everyone else in the world. And Microsoft can't just buy InterTrust because they've spent so much damn money paying off the settlement, and/or Sony and Philips (which between them can probably outspend even Billy-boy) throw in their money to keep it from happening.
2) InterTrust loses, and loses hard enough to set a precedent against questionable patents. Although this would be good for Microsoft in the short term, it might be good for everyone in the long term by establishing the precedent that ideas aren't patentable, only implementations, which is the way it should be all along. Unfortunately the article doesn't go into enough detail to judge whether that's a possible outcome, but if it did happen, it would be a Good Thing.
3) The case stalemates (probably because, as in the anti-trust case, Microsoft is clearly guilty, but their money and name recognition keep the case in endless appeals) and Sony and Microsoft end up fighting a years-long war with Intertrust as the proxy. Meanwhile, Philips dissasociates itself from the case and starts working with more consumer-friendly companies
(2), which would probably be the most useful in the long term, is also IMO the least likely. But (1) and (3) seem like real possibilities.