Thanks for providing me with Exhibit A for my argument, Coward -- although in keeping with ukemike's observation, you're probably not one of the ones who's rational under normal circumstances.
Well, yeah, there are lots of those too. But I know a frightening number of people, whom I know to be quite intelligent and quite rational in most ways, who just turn into propaganda-spouting loons on this subject.
Why can't we all agree that shit is happening and we should investigate what to do about it?
Because it has become an article of nigh-religious faith among a large number of otherwise rational people to insist that it's not happening, or if it happening it's not our fault, or even if it is happening and it's our fault there's nothing we can do about it. Sometimes all three at once. As the saying goes, "You can't reason people out of a position they didn't reason themselves into."
"Fruit of the poisonous tree." The problem is that since police and prosecutors are hardly ever prosecuted for unreasonable search and seizure themselves, pretty much the only incentive for them to follow the Fourth Amendment is to see their evidence thrown out of court if it's illegally gathered. If they routinely went to jail for such violations, it might be a different story -- but they don't, and they never will, so this is what we're left with.
I agree with most of what you say in your post, but I'm not quite clear on why you're especially concerned with patents, trademarks, and copyrights held by Intel.
If after breakfast, you had suddenly developed feathers, a beak, and the uncontrollable urge to peck at the ground, the chicken might be feeling a certain sense of satisfaction from its coop in Chicken Heaven.
It could just be that criminals that have always been stealing stuff, have now found that stealing copper cables involves far less risk, and better rewards than stealing from people's houses.
It could be, sure. But seriously, which do you think is more likely?
Their advertising as single company, their search engine as single company and rest of their services as single or other companies. That way the individual companies can concentrate on what they do and aren't tied to each other. Just like was suggested in Microsoft's case.
The difference is that Windows, Office, etc. all make money on their own, while Google's advertising revenue pays for everything else they do. There'd basically be no way for Google to be Google (in the sense most people think of them, i.e. "Google it") under such a breakup scheme.
If they truly feared us they wouldn't do the crap they do.
So you don't think American soldiers are scared when they go into combat? Trust me, we are. What makes war possible is that people can overcome their fear to do what they have to do, for whatever reason -- and this is true no matter how good or evil their cause may be.
If they really though we would get seriously pissed off and go Add Coulter on their primitive asses and "Bomb their cities, kill their leaders and convert them to christianity."
So what would your reaction be if you really thought al-Qaeda and the Taliban had the potential to "bomb our cities, kill our leaders, and convert us to Islam?" I'm guessing you wouldn't just say, "Oh, well, that sounds really scary, guess we'd better do what they tell us." Or maybe you would, if you're the typical right-wing chickenhawk coward that your.sig makes you sound like, but fortunately, most of your fellow Americans are made of sterner stuff.
They did their best to make sure that we would not end up in a plutocracy, but we managed to end up there anyway.
Given that property qualifications for voting were the norm when the Constitution was enacted, and for some years afterward -- and really started to go away at about the same time that those who had been at the Constitutional Convention were dying off -- I think it's hard to argue that the FF's were particularly opposed to plutocracy. We, the people, managed to dismantle it once. We can do it again, if we have the will.
Most artists that I know are not particularly technical. Most of the programmers I know are not particularly artistic. Creative, yes, they're both creative activities. The theory of multiple intelligences holds, but the two paths rarely seem to cross.
And most people overall are neither particularly technical nor particularly artistic; thus you'd expect the combination to be quite rare just by chance. GPP said, "I'm pretty sure the groups of people who are extremely artistically deficient and who program are not correlated in any strong way" and that seems like a reasonable enough statement. There are a few people who can do good art, a few people who can do good programming, and a very few people who are good at both.
Well, I'll admit to being something of an interface Luddite -- most of my favorite web sites looked better, IMO, 10+ years ago. If we could have 20th-century interface simplicity with 21st-century connectivity, I'd be a happy camper. I have no idea if this is a majority opinion or not.
If the majority of users of a site I frequent prefer a new interface, as long as the content's good, I'll generally go along with it. What bugs me, like I said, is the combination of change-for-change's-sake with the patronizing way such changes are usually presented, including vague claims of "users love our new interface" when it's obvious that user preference runs strongly against it. Three of my favorite sites (Slashdot, Salon.com, and Weather Underground -- at least http://classic.wunderground.com/ is still available in the last instance) have done this fairly recently, so I'm kind of twitchy about it.
"If you compare the original Google home page to today's version, you will see that a makeover every so often can certainly be refreshing."
This is quite possibly the single stupidest meme in the long, sad history of stupid web design memes, and it's been the death of many a once-fine site. No, a makeover on a familiar (good) interface is not "refreshing." It's irritating, especially since it pretty much always means adding clutter to something that used to be clean and functional. It is usually pushed on users with a patronizing explanation, after a "beta" period in which people loudly and repeatedly point out its flaws, and the new interface eventually becomes the default (or only) choice with none of the problems found in "beta" addressed.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it. If there's something wrong, fine, fix that and leave the rest alone. And for God's sake, listen to the users.
You're probably young and healthy now. But I predict you're going to be the whiniest, most demanding, most self-entitled old geezer at the nursing home, and when you finally kick the bucket, the staff will throw a party.
What most users want is this: Open box. Turn on computer. Search for the app they want. Hit "Install". Use app. That's it. Get shit done, and do other shit when the desire strikes.
Yeah, as long as the app they want exists.
The Next Big Thing -- the next game-changer comparable to, say, HTTP and HTML -- won't come from Apple, or IBM, or Microsoft, or even Google. It will come from a university researcher who invents a tool to solve a specific problem and then realizes the tool has general applicablity, or from a programmer at a startup who can convince his boss to let him take a chance on something genuinely different from anything their competitors are doing, or from a teenager playing around in his parents' basement. And so will the Big Thing After That, and the Big Thing After That --
-- if, that is, they have the tools to do it with. If they're not locked in to a world where general-purpose computers are no longer general-purpose enough to allow such things to happen. If they're not prohibited by law from releasing their work to the public because it doesn't have the Holy Seal Of Big Corporate Intellectual Property.
The "I just want an app that does X" crowd make up the vast majority of computer users and probably always will, and that's fine. But they have to understand where those apps come from.
It used to be that "The Republicans are like the Tories, and the Democrats are also like the Tories." (Since then the Republicans have tried to move farther right, and Maggie Thatcher may not be badass enough for them.)
Yep. Now the most accurate analogy is "The Democrats are like the Tories, and the Republicans are like the BNP." We don't have any major party in the US that's equivalent to even the Lib Dems, to say nothing of Labour.
Slashdot Mirror
Right, I forgot about that one. "We'll all just move to Siberia and northern Canada!"
And here we have Exhibit B. Wow, you guys just keep it coming.
Thanks for providing me with Exhibit A for my argument, Coward -- although in keeping with ukemike's observation, you're probably not one of the ones who's rational under normal circumstances.
Well, yeah, there are lots of those too. But I know a frightening number of people, whom I know to be quite intelligent and quite rational in most ways, who just turn into propaganda-spouting loons on this subject.
Why can't we all agree that shit is happening and we should investigate what to do about it?
Because it has become an article of nigh-religious faith among a large number of otherwise rational people to insist that it's not happening, or if it happening it's not our fault, or even if it is happening and it's our fault there's nothing we can do about it. Sometimes all three at once. As the saying goes, "You can't reason people out of a position they didn't reason themselves into."
"Fruit of the poisonous tree." The problem is that since police and prosecutors are hardly ever prosecuted for unreasonable search and seizure themselves, pretty much the only incentive for them to follow the Fourth Amendment is to see their evidence thrown out of court if it's illegally gathered. If they routinely went to jail for such violations, it might be a different story -- but they don't, and they never will, so this is what we're left with.
"intelectual property"
I agree with most of what you say in your post, but I'm not quite clear on why you're especially concerned with patents, trademarks, and copyrights held by Intel.
If after breakfast, you had suddenly developed feathers, a beak, and the uncontrollable urge to peck at the ground, the chicken might be feeling a certain sense of satisfaction from its coop in Chicken Heaven.
in TRUE life-by-incremental-changes, every event is random, including which cells are selected out of the tube to prosper
Crawl back under your rock. In a few hundred million years, your descendants may develop something resembling rudimentary intelligence.
It could just be that criminals that have always been stealing stuff, have now found that stealing copper cables involves far less risk, and better rewards than stealing from people's houses.
It could be, sure. But seriously, which do you think is more likely?
Their advertising as single company, their search engine as single company and rest of their services as single or other companies. That way the individual companies can concentrate on what they do and aren't tied to each other. Just like was suggested in Microsoft's case.
The difference is that Windows, Office, etc. all make money on their own, while Google's advertising revenue pays for everything else they do. There'd basically be no way for Google to be Google (in the sense most people think of them, i.e. "Google it") under such a breakup scheme.
If they truly feared us they wouldn't do the crap they do.
So you don't think American soldiers are scared when they go into combat? Trust me, we are. What makes war possible is that people can overcome their fear to do what they have to do, for whatever reason -- and this is true no matter how good or evil their cause may be.
If they really though we would get seriously pissed off and go Add Coulter on their primitive asses and "Bomb their cities, kill their leaders and convert them to christianity."
So what would your reaction be if you really thought al-Qaeda and the Taliban had the potential to "bomb our cities, kill our leaders, and convert us to Islam?" I'm guessing you wouldn't just say, "Oh, well, that sounds really scary, guess we'd better do what they tell us." Or maybe you would, if you're the typical right-wing chickenhawk coward that your .sig makes you sound like, but fortunately, most of your fellow Americans are made of sterner stuff.
They did their best to make sure that we would not end up in a plutocracy, but we managed to end up there anyway.
Given that property qualifications for voting were the norm when the Constitution was enacted, and for some years afterward -- and really started to go away at about the same time that those who had been at the Constitutional Convention were dying off -- I think it's hard to argue that the FF's were particularly opposed to plutocracy. We, the people, managed to dismantle it once. We can do it again, if we have the will.
Everybody knows that democrats can do no wrong when it comes to civil rights. Only republicans are bad.
Who is claiming that, exactly?
It's truly impressive how much straw you managed to pack into such a short post there.
Most artists that I know are not particularly technical. Most of the programmers I know are not particularly artistic. Creative, yes, they're both creative activities. The theory of multiple intelligences holds, but the two paths rarely seem to cross.
And most people overall are neither particularly technical nor particularly artistic; thus you'd expect the combination to be quite rare just by chance. GPP said, "I'm pretty sure the groups of people who are extremely artistically deficient and who program are not correlated in any strong way" and that seems like a reasonable enough statement. There are a few people who can do good art, a few people who can do good programming, and a very few people who are good at both.
Fair enough. Okay, try applying to a residency program with your "Great Listener badge" and see how far you get.
... from someone who says, "I don't actually have an MD, but I do have a 'Great Listener' badge!"?
That really is a great article. Thanks for the link!
Well, I'll admit to being something of an interface Luddite -- most of my favorite web sites looked better, IMO, 10+ years ago. If we could have 20th-century interface simplicity with 21st-century connectivity, I'd be a happy camper. I have no idea if this is a majority opinion or not.
If the majority of users of a site I frequent prefer a new interface, as long as the content's good, I'll generally go along with it. What bugs me, like I said, is the combination of change-for-change's-sake with the patronizing way such changes are usually presented, including vague claims of "users love our new interface" when it's obvious that user preference runs strongly against it. Three of my favorite sites (Slashdot, Salon.com, and Weather Underground -- at least http://classic.wunderground.com/ is still available in the last instance) have done this fairly recently, so I'm kind of twitchy about it.
"If you compare the original Google home page to today's version, you will see that a makeover every so often can certainly be refreshing."
This is quite possibly the single stupidest meme in the long, sad history of stupid web design memes, and it's been the death of many a once-fine site. No, a makeover on a familiar (good) interface is not "refreshing." It's irritating, especially since it pretty much always means adding clutter to something that used to be clean and functional. It is usually pushed on users with a patronizing explanation, after a "beta" period in which people loudly and repeatedly point out its flaws, and the new interface eventually becomes the default (or only) choice with none of the problems found in "beta" addressed.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it. If there's something wrong, fine, fix that and leave the rest alone. And for God's sake, listen to the users.
a disease that some people think doesn't really exists and is all in the patients head
Yes, some people think that. There is a technical medical term for those people: "idiots".
You're probably young and healthy now. But I predict you're going to be the whiniest, most demanding, most self-entitled old geezer at the nursing home, and when you finally kick the bucket, the staff will throw a party.
Did you know there was a drop in employment of the handicapped after the ADA was signed into law?
[citation needed]
What most users want is this: Open box. Turn on computer. Search for the app they want. Hit "Install". Use app. That's it. Get shit done, and do other shit when the desire strikes.
Yeah, as long as the app they want exists.
The Next Big Thing -- the next game-changer comparable to, say, HTTP and HTML -- won't come from Apple, or IBM, or Microsoft, or even Google. It will come from a university researcher who invents a tool to solve a specific problem and then realizes the tool has general applicablity, or from a programmer at a startup who can convince his boss to let him take a chance on something genuinely different from anything their competitors are doing, or from a teenager playing around in his parents' basement. And so will the Big Thing After That, and the Big Thing After That --
-- if, that is, they have the tools to do it with. If they're not locked in to a world where general-purpose computers are no longer general-purpose enough to allow such things to happen. If they're not prohibited by law from releasing their work to the public because it doesn't have the Holy Seal Of Big Corporate Intellectual Property.
The "I just want an app that does X" crowd make up the vast majority of computer users and probably always will, and that's fine. But they have to understand where those apps come from.
It used to be that "The Republicans are like the Tories, and the Democrats are also like the Tories." (Since then the Republicans have tried to move farther right, and Maggie Thatcher may not be badass enough for them.)
Yep. Now the most accurate analogy is "The Democrats are like the Tories, and the Republicans are like the BNP." We don't have any major party in the US that's equivalent to even the Lib Dems, to say nothing of Labour.