Why do people automatically assume Evolution is true just because they don't understand what other theories actually mean? There are no other theories.
Noam Chomsky said a number of years ago that since conservatives have been successful in rolling back virtually all of the New Deal (with Social Security the only thing left really), they were now working on rolling back the achievements of the Progressive Era. The prime example of that for me was the Exxon (aka Standard Oil of New Jersey) and Mobil (aka Standard Oil of New York) merger, putting back together an oil monopoly that had been broken up by the government in 1911. Now that the Progressive Era seems beginning to falter, it looks like they are taking an ax to an even older structure. Which would be the foundations of liberalism (classical or otherwise) and the Enlightenment - rationality and the scientific process. The neo-conservatives have always--like their twins, the radical Islamists--been opposed to modernity. Ironically, they accept that evolution is true, they just consider it too dangerous for you to know. You are supposed to believe in "god" to keep you in line. The (self-appointed) elite are the ones who are allowed to "know better".
The neo-conservatives buy into Strauss' concepts of "Grand Lies". Fictions meant to keep society orderly. IDers are liars. They know they are liars. They not only don't care, the lie is the point.
Disclaimer, I read a lot of Darwin/Dawkins/Gould so I'm pretty biased here... but I fear that the ostracized members of the scientific community will make the evolutionists look just as much like religious zealots trying to purge their ranks of people with open minds. Which is why I likened his trailer to the Spanish Inquisition.
I think that even though it's 'a waste of time,' it's bad to write these people off or fire them. I'm sure there's sound criticism against these papers and authors but Ben Stein isn't showing that in his movie if there is. That's all well and good if it weren't for this:
Newsflash: I had peanut butter allergies when I was a kid as well. I simply didn't eat peanut butter then either. Maybe you should stop coddling your kid and tell them the cold truth: "Hey, if you eat this....you're going to die."
Like I said, problem solved. And you--of course, unlike all other children, superior being you are, had the rational facilities of a full grown, experienced adult at the age of five.
Well, hey, when they die from thoughtlessly eating the stuff... that'll teach 'em!
you know, the "to hell with the blind let them fend for themselves" rhetoric is getting old. I mean really, the only arguments so far seem to be either along the lines of it's too expensive to introduce basic accessibility into web pages or that we shouldn't bother because you think it would be an inconvenience. that's... just... disgusting. Yeah, the "macho libertarian" bit so prevalent in the IT world is depressing. Here we have this amazing technology that reduces the cost of enabling accessibility dramatically (think about it, building ramps and such things are pricey, twiddling a web page is minor) but we get "I got mine, screw you" attitudes running amok.
If all this technology can't make life better for a broad spectrum of people, why are we bothering? What? YouTube Britney videos are the pinnacle of our achievement? Bezos claiming patents on "breathing air" and trying to take over the entire POD world is something to be proud of? Gates rolling naked in piles of cash is a worthy goal?
If that's it, if there's nothing more, I wasted my life and should have gone into some other field.
'Course, now, being I'm pushing fifty and have a quarter century of experience, I am going to have to move into some other field because my sub-sector of the IT world got swept out the back door to Banglore in one of the most perverse off-shoring events I've ever seen. As in, it doesn't work and never will work but the CEO got his bonus so mission accomplished and customers be damned.
See, I fell for the "macho libertarian", anti-union line when I was young in the IT field. Back before we even called it "IT". Then watched my entire generation dumped out the back door because experience is expensive and, besides, the Indians and you 20somethings don't argue with the marketing department when they come up with their latest stupid idea because you weren't around the last six times it blew up in everybody's faces.
I guess it's true "what goes around, comes around". Live with the attitude of "everybody for himself" and defy millions of years of human evolutionary development of strategies such as "altruism", you end being treated like a used tissue the CEO blew his nose in and discarded.
Stop being a drama queen. I have peanut butter allergies too. I just don't eat the shit. Problem solved. Yes but I assume you're an adult. The issue has to do with elementary schools. You know, very young children? The ones who do things without thinking? Who do very dumb things on a regular basis? You simply cannot expect elementary school children to exercise adult judgment. That is, quite frankly, irrational.
Peanut allergies can kill. And they can kill quickly. We're talking Jimmy the seven year old thoughtlessly takes a bite of Bobby's candy bar without checking what's in it and dies while the teacher is running, panicked as hell, across the playground to give him the epi injection (and they do keep them at schools these days).
Kids do dumb things. Should the penalty be death?
No, you can't create Nerf world at schools nor should you try. But you also shouldn't leave loaded guns lying around. Yes, it's only some small fraction that's allergic. Still, the ban isn't harming the non-allergic majority. PBJs are not exactly "necessities" you know.
Anyway, there's no analogy to be found here far as the subject to hand (i.e. the web and the blind). Usability of the web doesn't approach the level of a life and death issue.
Solar cannot replace Coal. It's completely unsuitable for supplying base-load power because it only works half the time (at best). Except that's missing the point.
We have vast areas of the country where solar is already viable as an energy source. Albeit pricey but prices are falling. And a massive infusion would bring them down further. Thin film, for example, could potentially reach parity with coal in mass production.
Given the huge difference between day time consumption and night time consumption, reductions in day time consumption are more significant than night time consumption. And will be unless we all became, heh, vampires or something like that.
Further, consider the population of the Southwestern US. While areas such as AZ and NM may be rather small, SoCal is greater in population than many nations on Earth. Even if you were talking about solar for, oh, a third of the US, you're covering a lot of people and, by the way, a lot of air conditioners.
There's another thing to consider.
I lived in LA during those lovely rolling blackouts. One thing I've noticed is that CFLs are much, much cheaper these days than when we in LA were changing out every bulb we could find. That many people buying CFLs en masse may well have boosted CFL production into that tipping point of mass manufacturing where prices start falling.
So the rest of the country benefited from the results of the "early adopters" being literally hundreds of thousands of frantic Angelinos trying to stop the blackouts.
Suppose we subsidize the crap out of a big push to get the Southwest to move to solar as much as possible. Creating a big market for solar would bring prices down. Getting heavily populated areas such as LA "off grid" even just sometimes, even just a few hours a day, reduces the pressure on the national grid. Which could, ironically enough, result in stabilizing prices for the rest of us who can't use solar.
And a big ramp up in solar could result in prices falling to the point where it would be worth installing even in other areas. Say areas where you'd only get, oh, a 25% cut in your bill. Nothing to do cartwheels over but I'd do it if the prices came down enough to make it viable for even just a quarter off my electric bill (which continues to climb... sigh).
Yeah, it's not a cure all. But it has the potential to make a serious and significant impact.
I don't care for nuclear at all but recognize we may have backed ourselves into a corner. Still, the more we can do with other sources, the fewer of those plants we'll need eh?
Oh yeah- I refuse to honor ANY copyright held by a corporation. Only a writer or painter or other artist should hold a copyright.
I'm with you on that one. Corporations should not be able to hold copyrights. Only the actual creators of the works. The frickin' point was to "encourage the useful arts and sciences". We should "encourage" the actual artists. Not the braindead CEOs and greedy boards.
As a past (and hopefully future) copyright holder, I am increasingly of the opinion that no copyright should last more than a generation. Say 20 to 25 years. Where do people think the next generation of artistic work is going to come from if the next generation of artists are denied access to what came before them? Any work of art of any kind builds on what came before. That's how it works.
Look at the old Star Trek. It's forty years old now. The creator is dead. We can't "encourage" new works from a dead guy. What we have now is a corporation that creates nothing but "owns" something that has become a cultural icon. No copyright should last so long. The result has been endless bad rehashings and dreck that make money for people who create nothing at all.
On the other hand, you have tons of "fan productions" going on now. Like Star Trek: The New Voyages (or Phase II or whatever they're calling it this week). The studio "allows" them to exist long as they make no money. Who the hell does the studio think they are? What do they create? Besides increasingly bad "spin offs"?
The old ST should have gone public domain years ago. With a, say, 25 year limit on copyright, it would have gone into the public domain in the 90s. The TNV folks (among others) could be selling their work instead of going into debt and struggling for the sheer love of it.
By the way, so much for the corporate argument that without money, artists won't produce. The TNV folk are barred from ever profiting from their work and, instead, have to shell out money to produce the work. Yet they keep going. Art predates money for frack's sake! Some of our greatest works of art in the entire Western world were created before "copyright" existed.
Artists create because that's what artists do. Copyright was supposed to be a social exchange in which we rewarded and encouraged creators to keep producing. Not sit on their "laurels" for decades. And definitely not to create "media empires" run by people who wouldn't know art if you beat them silly with it.
(Okay, okay, I'm not saying Star Trek is "great art". It's not. But it is "art" in the broadest sense of the word. And it's a perfect example of what's wrong with copyright today. It shouldn't be in the hands of some stupid corporation. It should belong to all of us. Who knows, some bright young folk could actually produce actual serious art with it. But instead of freeing them to at least try, we have a situation where a bunch of management idiots get bonuses and big salaries for sitting on a heap of copyrights, suing anybody that so much as glances at them.)
Further, our incentives are backwards. What kind of incentive is it to allow people to profit off one or a handful of works for decades? The incentive increasingly becomes "squeeze people for money if they create anything remotely like your work" instead of "create more".
I say the current system isn't good for artists even. There should be a definite end to copyright they can see coming. If you're not going to produce more, why should society continue to reward you? And what incentive is there to keep on going if you can sit back and milk a work for decades?
Nor do I think it's a good thing that heirs receive copyrights. I know a lot of people argue that they want their relatives to control the work after they are gone to maintain its "integrity". Yeah, well, nice in "theory" but have you seen what many heirs do with the works? Sell it off to any corporation that dangles a contract and it ends up being crap.
Why would a mosque need internet access? Isn't it suppose to be a place of worship, not an internet cafe? In poor areas, the church or mosque or what have you is often also the center of community life. They don't have all the options available to urban first worlders. You still often see this even in the US today in small, rural areas. It was even more common in our agrarian past when Sunday was your only day off and the one big chance to go into town just to socialize.
I suspect this is why mosques hold such sway in their communities. Far as a community "center", there isn't anything but the mosque. Your only social and community life revolves around that institution.
When I joined the military I took an oath to protect my country from enemies, foreign and DOMESTIC. Then you have an obligation to protect the country from people who trash its founding document--the Constitution--don't you?
You want we should be cowards? Yeah, you heard me, cowards. Risking the chance of death in a terrorist attack in order to remain free and true to our ideals is something you want we should be so terrified of we hike our skirts and run around shrieking for the government to rampage through the Constitution to save our craven selves?
Is it only noble if people in the military die so the country can remain free and true to its ideals? You want the rest of us to be sniveling, timid, terrorized cowards?
Do you want to defend a nation of cowards?
If that's what we've become, there's nothing left to defend.
Why stop at just broadcast and satellite radio? Why not talk about the "background entertainment and current events" market as a whole, of which XM and Sirius are an even smaller part competing against CDs, iTMS, Google News, etc.? Why stop there? You can always roll the window down and listen to the traffic!
See, you have choices. So never you mind that we're letting them all merge into One Corporate Voice, Inc.
At least so far as Time Machine goes, I haven't the slightest what he's talking about. I just restored all the deleted mails in one of my in boxes. So what does he mean "email boxes"? If he's talking about the email boxes you can create and have rules sort your email among them, yeah, those don't show up in Time Machine. Just the in boxes. But how hard is selecting "Apply Rules"?
And then comes this:
On one machine, this one here in New York, I have found a way to restore a single message or a multiple list of messages from wherever the Time Machine archive is. Um... what? He's mucking around on the Time Machine volume? Yeah, I can see if you know what you're doing, you could do a restore by nabbing files off the volume, I don't know why you'd want to. Particularly if you don't actually seem to know what's going on. Safer to stick to the GUIfied (and a bit over done) interface.
(Okay, so it's very pretty zooming through time and space like that, they just need to add the Dr. Who theme music to make it complete, but it's kind of a "show offs!" thing.)
I also don't see this "whole thread" at the Apple support forums. I don't know what he's talking about there either.
I begin to suspect a short between the keyboard and the chair.
Oh and Limbaugh isn't exactly poor. Why is yapping into his microphone instead of, oh, buying a support contract or something?
Patent the process of "dividing two, common whole numbers for the purpose of usefully approximating the ratio between the diameter and the circumference of a circle". That will get shot down immediately. You need to prefix it with "a computational device used for" and turn it into a software patent. Don't forget "On the Internet..." No, no, no. We don't do the Internet anymore. We do Web 3.14159 (more or less).
Then again, maybe I'll patent 22/7 as a good way to approximate pi. I heard that intellectual property is all the rage nowadays. Hm... no, you need a process. Those are what all the cool corporations do. Patent the process of "dividing two, common whole numbers for the purpose of usefully approximating the ratio between the diameter and the circumference of a circle". Then make sure the steps described take up at least three pages. Oh and use a lot of impressive sounding words for things. Never say something like "pencil", say "graphite based, portable diagrammatic device rated at two on the graphite integrity scale". Things like that. The USPTO seems really impressed when they haven't the slightest idea what you're talking about.
From TFTA:
Notwithstanding the promotional noise, even Radioheads honesty box principle showed that if not constrained, the customer will steal music. Ok, not to state the obvious here, but if they're offering it free, that means it wasn't stealing. Not to mention the presumption that we're all nothing but a bunch of criminals being barely restrained from looting the poor, innocent, defenseless... multibillion dollar industry.
You know, someday, somebody needs to ask one of these twits how it is, if that claim is true, that any business "model" can ever work? Simply put, it can't. Not ever. If all 300 million of us are criminals just waiting for our chance, how can even the law stop us?
For that matter, if we're all nothing but a pack of criminals, barely restrained, how does he know we're not going to lynch him and take all his money? Maybe we're all sneaking up behind him Right! Now!.
Well, not wanting to take the risk of doing something that would offend U2 and harm their "intellectual property", I think I'll continue not listening to anything they produce. Not online, not by download, not by radio, not by buying CDs. This way, I can be sure I am not doing anything to harm their precious property!
I mean, surely they wouldn't want the likes of criminal ol' me sullying their precioussssss...
His actual complaint is computer science is maturing. In all science and engineering fields the big, dramatic changes and gains are in the early days. When any science matures, you start seeing the incremental, not the revolutionary.
Is he also upset that other than cosmetics as new materials become available, bridge design hasn't changed much since the Romans? Is he upset that thousands of years later, the wheel is still round? Wonder if he's noticed we're almost all still stuck on the x86 archecture that's, what, a quarter century old or so?
I see the Wiki says he's a "pioneer" in "virtual reality". Oh, yeah, that's a hot field.
Part of this is caused by sheer, pointy head boss style stupidity.
Not long ago, I contracted at one those globe spanning, "more money than most countries" corporations who had a huge, honking block of IPs. And they were NAT'd behind a firewall.
Not a long term solution, no, but we should start prying some of those big blocks out of some dimwitted corporate hands...
What about the grand daddy of Free Software - Emacs? This fine program seem to defeat all you points regarding lean and mean FS vs slow feature creep of proprietary. Well, first, I did not say "lean and mean" which is a slippery matter of opinion. The intersection of the set of features I find useful and the set you find useful may not be very big. I may regard your features as "unnecessary clutter". You don't. You regard mine as such.
What I did say was "optimal". Imagine the ideal sets of features for all the users of some software. The software that describes the largest intersection of all those sets would be "optimal" in this little thought experiment. You can't include everything everybody wants but you can include the ones most people want and reach a point where, generally, people say, "Yeah, I can use that".
And, again, I said this is all abstract and ideal and reality can always go sour on you. Being FOSS doesn't gaurantee success.
Far as emacs, it must satisfy enough people that it's still around. Why, I don't know. I don't know why vi still exists. But it does. People are still using trn and slrn and such for Usenet. Hey, if they're happy... shrug.
But I stand by my point that proprietary software--despite claims to the contrary--is not actually driven by the needs of the user. It cannot be so.
Take creaky old Usenet for example. Everybody who uses it is more less satisfied with the way it is and there's no serious push to change things. Other than minor tweaking here and there, now and then, Usenet is pretty much at the "stick a fork in it, it's done" stage.
(I mean, look at the date on the RFCs covering Usenet. They're *old*. There's just no big push to do much at all with Usenet. Tweaking, yes. But major changes? No.)
What does a profit driven company do with that situation? Say, "Well, that's done. Anybody for lunch?"
No, they'll keep going back and beating on it and trying to convince people they "need" all these new "features" so they can charge for upgrades. Take a look at Quicken. Okay, don't, it's been known to cause nightmares. That was a great little program once. Now it's got bells and whistles and dancing bears and video and.... last time I remember trying to use it a couple of years back, I remember clicking something then feeling like I should take a coffee break. It was breathtakingly sluggish. Ended up yelling at the computer "ALL I WANT TO IS BALANCE MY CHECKBOOK NOT MANAGE THE FEDERAL DEFICIT!!!!!"
Personally, I don't see any way for the proprietary model to work. It seems to me that it must inevitably lead to unuseable software that has had tons of "features" nobody actually wanted piled on endlessly.
In the FOSS world, there's no incentive to keep cramming in things until your users despise you. I mean, you can do that but your project will end up forked and you'll be left in the cold. In the proprietary world, you deal with this issue by "lock in". You cage your users so while they may hate you, it would cost them more to leave than to stay.
Until it reaches the point where people despise you so much, you can't sell, you know, Vista...
Yes, Microsoft makes money on its software. I still fail to see why this is a bad thing. Does anyone believe Microsoft should gather several thousand software engineers together and then ask them to work for free?
So what, exactly, is the argument again? Everyone on this planet has a right to be payed for their hard work EXCEPT someone who spends 4 years at a university learning how to develop software? They should work for free, so that their hard work can then be given away for free? Sigh. Do we have to go over this again?
It's "free" as in "freedom". Not "free" as in "free beer".
Locking up and hiding code in the "proprietary" model is actually the one that fails. Every proprietary software program out there sprouts endless "features" to drive upgrades until you reach a point of utter unusability. The point of the proprietary model is money, not usability. And it never can be. Once a product is done, then what? You can't sell any more copies can you? So you beat on it senselessly until you have word processors doing spreadsheets and spreadsheets doing browsing and browsers doing email and email doing viruses.
In an open model, there may be many people who do not get "paid" per se. They may write code that does something useful for them then contribute it back. They do get benefit in that they end up with software that satisfies their needs. Others who have the same needs also benefit. How is that a loss?
There's no incentive for throwing everything and the kitchen sink into the software. If nobody needs "feature X", nobody bothers to write the code. Open software will, inexorably, move toward an optimal state. Only those "features" somebody finds useful enough to do something about (for her or his own benefit first) will enter the code base.
(Yes, that's the abstract ideal and reality sometimes goes wonky but I stand by the concept)
Further, one of the latest driving forces in the open/free software world are companies. They are paying their programmers. And they are obtaining benefit from the work of those programmers. But by opening up the code, they also obtain benefit from the work of others who contribute something which that person needs or sees usefulness in. Said programmer--regardless of who he or she works for and is or is not paid by--gains benefit in having useful software.
What's happening is the "shrink wrap" model--which is a recent phenomena in the field--is dying. And it's not even the bigger part of the field. Most programmers (I've seen figures as high as 95%) are doing "in house" software. They're not going to lose their jobs if, say, Quicken tanks and is replaced by some FOSS software. If all "shrink wrap" software tanks, if the whole sector disappears, the impact to the field would likely be less than the implosion of the "tech bubble".
It's a transient model that's dying out. Big whoopee.
Software is about getting things done. Not about driving upgrade money. That's why MS (and others) will ultimately fail. The need to drive upgrades corrupts software. Ultimately, it will fail to be useful. Software is a tool, not an end in itself. You make money by enabling people to get something useful done. MySQL does it. And they give their software away.
(For that matter, have you noticed the cell phone business? They're giving away handsets. Are they crazy? No, they're making huge profits. Think about it.)
Finally, and I think importantly, the FOSS world imitates the way we do science. Information is open and shared. That process has catapulted our civilization from horse draw carriages to me sitting here sending messages via satellite Internet and in only about two centuries. The system works.
Or hadn't you noticed the Internet? Open protocols. The people who created them were paid but the information is belched out freely all over the place for anybody and his dog to use. And it works.
If the website designer has to pay for bits each time you view their website without viewing their banner ads, are you engaged in theft? Is this right? Ignoring advertising is "theft"? What's next, refusing to buy a product is a felony? Where do people get this idea that profit is a right? You have the right to persue profit, you have no fundamental right to profit.
I've said it before, I'll say it again:
If your business model doesn't work, go do something else.
People whining they can't make money on the web remind me of the old joke, "Doctor, it hurts when I do this..."
As someone who's never used a slot machine, is it completely unheard of for a machine to convert money into "game points" or tokens or credits or something? If I played a slot machine and it said 10 every time I put a dollar in, I'd assume it was 10 plays for a dollar. The "denomination" of the machine determines the credits. That is, a quarter machine gives four points per dollar, a nickel machine 20 per dollar, a dollar machine is one to one, etc.
I spent a good three years as a slot technician in a casino and saw this kind of thing a couple of times. Truth is, there's plenty of blame to go around. The boards in a machine have to be set to a denomination by the techs. And no machine should be allowed to go live without its denomination being checked. The casino is in no way an innocent victim, they blew it and they know it.
Nor should a machine have been allowed to pay out that much money without having a basic check run on it. I did so many of those, I could do them in my sleep (and probably did when I worked graveyard). Part of the check was the denomination setting.
Since the management company I worked for had those controls in place, they caught--almost immediately--a tech in one of their other casinos who rigged the denomination on purpose then called his buddies to come play.
I'm not very sympathetic to the gaming industry. It's a kind of legal exploitation so they shouldn't be so surprised when people try to exploit them (back). They weren't careful and they should take their lumps on this one and learn from their mistakes.
How are they going to prove criminal intent anyway? From experience, I'd say that it's true the bulk of your customer base are people who play a lot and know how slot denominations work. So, probably, most of those players knew better.
Still, how do you sort those out from the people who didn't realize the machine wasn't supposed to work that way? They exist. You always saw some customers who'd never been in a casino before (everybody has to have a "first time" after all). After you work on a floor for a time, you get a "feel" for who's which. There were plenty of times I just "knew" somebody was trying to scam us. But that's not something you could take to court.
Bah, the gaming regulators should bounce on the casino's head over this one. Ask those uncomfortable questions about what's going on in their tech department.
It's time to stamp out the myth that "without copyright, nothing creative would ever be produced." It wasn't true in the past, it won't be true in the future. The only thing that won't be produced is fat-cat middlemen who think music isn't something to be ENJOYED, it's merely something to be bought and sold! Nail. Head. Hit.
It's not the artists being protected by the RIAA, it's the RIAA being protected by the RIAA. The RIAA companies screw the artists as bad as they screw the public.
I'm all for copyright as the Founders intended. That is, granting limited monopolies to encourage the arts and sciences. Not so corporations can build empires with draconian attacks on the very public who grants the copyrights.
The RIAA arguments are total hogwash. Their entire industry was built before all these maniacal copyright extensions and criminalizations began. There was no music before we adopted the Berne Convention in the 80s? None before the DMCA? It's nonsense.
Western Civilization was built without copyright. But the current copyright regime has brought us... Britney Spears and boy bands? A pox on all their houses.
(Oh great, now I'm gonna get sued by Shakespeare's descendants)
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The neo-conservatives buy into Strauss' concepts of "Grand Lies". Fictions meant to keep society orderly. IDers are liars. They know they are liars. They not only don't care, the lie is the point.
I think that even though it's 'a waste of time,' it's bad to write these people off or fire them. I'm sure there's sound criticism against these papers and authors but Ben Stein isn't showing that in his movie if there is. That's all well and good if it weren't for this:
http://www.expelledexposed.com/index.php/the-truth
Read through the stories of the allegedly "expelled". There's a word for what they're doing:
Lying.
Like I said, problem solved. And you--of course, unlike all other children, superior being you are, had the rational facilities of a full grown, experienced adult at the age of five.
Well, hey, when they die from thoughtlessly eating the stuff... that'll teach 'em!
If all this technology can't make life better for a broad spectrum of people, why are we bothering? What? YouTube Britney videos are the pinnacle of our achievement? Bezos claiming patents on "breathing air" and trying to take over the entire POD world is something to be proud of? Gates rolling naked in piles of cash is a worthy goal?
If that's it, if there's nothing more, I wasted my life and should have gone into some other field.
'Course, now, being I'm pushing fifty and have a quarter century of experience, I am going to have to move into some other field because my sub-sector of the IT world got swept out the back door to Banglore in one of the most perverse off-shoring events I've ever seen. As in, it doesn't work and never will work but the CEO got his bonus so mission accomplished and customers be damned.
See, I fell for the "macho libertarian", anti-union line when I was young in the IT field. Back before we even called it "IT". Then watched my entire generation dumped out the back door because experience is expensive and, besides, the Indians and you 20somethings don't argue with the marketing department when they come up with their latest stupid idea because you weren't around the last six times it blew up in everybody's faces.
I guess it's true "what goes around, comes around". Live with the attitude of "everybody for himself" and defy millions of years of human evolutionary development of strategies such as "altruism", you end being treated like a used tissue the CEO blew his nose in and discarded.
Peanut allergies can kill. And they can kill quickly. We're talking Jimmy the seven year old thoughtlessly takes a bite of Bobby's candy bar without checking what's in it and dies while the teacher is running, panicked as hell, across the playground to give him the epi injection (and they do keep them at schools these days).
Kids do dumb things. Should the penalty be death?
No, you can't create Nerf world at schools nor should you try. But you also shouldn't leave loaded guns lying around. Yes, it's only some small fraction that's allergic. Still, the ban isn't harming the non-allergic majority. PBJs are not exactly "necessities" you know.
Anyway, there's no analogy to be found here far as the subject to hand (i.e. the web and the blind). Usability of the web doesn't approach the level of a life and death issue.
We have vast areas of the country where solar is already viable as an energy source. Albeit pricey but prices are falling. And a massive infusion would bring them down further. Thin film, for example, could potentially reach parity with coal in mass production.
Given the huge difference between day time consumption and night time consumption, reductions in day time consumption are more significant than night time consumption. And will be unless we all became, heh, vampires or something like that.
Further, consider the population of the Southwestern US. While areas such as AZ and NM may be rather small, SoCal is greater in population than many nations on Earth. Even if you were talking about solar for, oh, a third of the US, you're covering a lot of people and, by the way, a lot of air conditioners.
There's another thing to consider.
I lived in LA during those lovely rolling blackouts. One thing I've noticed is that CFLs are much, much cheaper these days than when we in LA were changing out every bulb we could find. That many people buying CFLs en masse may well have boosted CFL production into that tipping point of mass manufacturing where prices start falling.
So the rest of the country benefited from the results of the "early adopters" being literally hundreds of thousands of frantic Angelinos trying to stop the blackouts.
Suppose we subsidize the crap out of a big push to get the Southwest to move to solar as much as possible. Creating a big market for solar would bring prices down. Getting heavily populated areas such as LA "off grid" even just sometimes, even just a few hours a day, reduces the pressure on the national grid. Which could, ironically enough, result in stabilizing prices for the rest of us who can't use solar.
And a big ramp up in solar could result in prices falling to the point where it would be worth installing even in other areas. Say areas where you'd only get, oh, a 25% cut in your bill. Nothing to do cartwheels over but I'd do it if the prices came down enough to make it viable for even just a quarter off my electric bill (which continues to climb... sigh).
Yeah, it's not a cure all. But it has the potential to make a serious and significant impact.
I don't care for nuclear at all but recognize we may have backed ourselves into a corner. Still, the more we can do with other sources, the fewer of those plants we'll need eh?
Oh yeah- I refuse to honor ANY copyright held by a corporation. Only a writer or painter or other artist should hold a copyright.
I'm with you on that one. Corporations should not be able to hold copyrights. Only the actual creators of the works. The frickin' point was to "encourage the useful arts and sciences". We should "encourage" the actual artists. Not the braindead CEOs and greedy boards.
As a past (and hopefully future) copyright holder, I am increasingly of the opinion that no copyright should last more than a generation. Say 20 to 25 years. Where do people think the next generation of artistic work is going to come from if the next generation of artists are denied access to what came before them? Any work of art of any kind builds on what came before. That's how it works.
Look at the old Star Trek. It's forty years old now. The creator is dead. We can't "encourage" new works from a dead guy. What we have now is a corporation that creates nothing but "owns" something that has become a cultural icon. No copyright should last so long. The result has been endless bad rehashings and dreck that make money for people who create nothing at all.
On the other hand, you have tons of "fan productions" going on now. Like Star Trek: The New Voyages (or Phase II or whatever they're calling it this week). The studio "allows" them to exist long as they make no money. Who the hell does the studio think they are? What do they create? Besides increasingly bad "spin offs"?
The old ST should have gone public domain years ago. With a, say, 25 year limit on copyright, it would have gone into the public domain in the 90s. The TNV folks (among others) could be selling their work instead of going into debt and struggling for the sheer love of it.
By the way, so much for the corporate argument that without money, artists won't produce. The TNV folk are barred from ever profiting from their work and, instead, have to shell out money to produce the work. Yet they keep going. Art predates money for frack's sake! Some of our greatest works of art in the entire Western world were created before "copyright" existed.
Artists create because that's what artists do. Copyright was supposed to be a social exchange in which we rewarded and encouraged creators to keep producing. Not sit on their "laurels" for decades. And definitely not to create "media empires" run by people who wouldn't know art if you beat them silly with it.
(Okay, okay, I'm not saying Star Trek is "great art". It's not. But it is "art" in the broadest sense of the word. And it's a perfect example of what's wrong with copyright today. It shouldn't be in the hands of some stupid corporation. It should belong to all of us. Who knows, some bright young folk could actually produce actual serious art with it. But instead of freeing them to at least try, we have a situation where a bunch of management idiots get bonuses and big salaries for sitting on a heap of copyrights, suing anybody that so much as glances at them.)
Further, our incentives are backwards. What kind of incentive is it to allow people to profit off one or a handful of works for decades? The incentive increasingly becomes "squeeze people for money if they create anything remotely like your work" instead of "create more".
I say the current system isn't good for artists even. There should be a definite end to copyright they can see coming. If you're not going to produce more, why should society continue to reward you? And what incentive is there to keep on going if you can sit back and milk a work for decades?
Nor do I think it's a good thing that heirs receive copyrights. I know a lot of people argue that they want their relatives to control the work after they are gone to maintain its "integrity". Yeah, well, nice in "theory" but have you seen what many heirs do with the works? Sell it off to any corporation that dangles a contract and it ends up being crap.
I've always thought that argument was s
I suspect this is why mosques hold such sway in their communities. Far as a community "center", there isn't anything but the mosque. Your only social and community life revolves around that institution.
You want we should be cowards? Yeah, you heard me, cowards. Risking the chance of death in a terrorist attack in order to remain free and true to our ideals is something you want we should be so terrified of we hike our skirts and run around shrieking for the government to rampage through the Constitution to save our craven selves?
Is it only noble if people in the military die so the country can remain free and true to its ideals? You want the rest of us to be sniveling, timid, terrorized cowards?
Do you want to defend a nation of cowards?
If that's what we've become, there's nothing left to defend.
Why aren't we having impeachment hearings?
I remember reading about the death of silicon in the 1970s...
(Okay, dating myself here, but still...)
See, you have choices. So never you mind that we're letting them all merge into One Corporate Voice, Inc.
And then comes this: On one machine, this one here in New York, I have found a way to restore a single message or a multiple list of messages from wherever the Time Machine archive is. Um... what? He's mucking around on the Time Machine volume? Yeah, I can see if you know what you're doing, you could do a restore by nabbing files off the volume, I don't know why you'd want to. Particularly if you don't actually seem to know what's going on. Safer to stick to the GUIfied (and a bit over done) interface.
(Okay, so it's very pretty zooming through time and space like that, they just need to add the Dr. Who theme music to make it complete, but it's kind of a "show offs!" thing.)
I also don't see this "whole thread" at the Apple support forums. I don't know what he's talking about there either.
I begin to suspect a short between the keyboard and the chair.
Oh and Limbaugh isn't exactly poor. Why is yapping into his microphone instead of, oh, buying a support contract or something?
You know, someday, somebody needs to ask one of these twits how it is, if that claim is true, that any business "model" can ever work? Simply put, it can't. Not ever. If all 300 million of us are criminals just waiting for our chance, how can even the law stop us?
For that matter, if we're all nothing but a pack of criminals, barely restrained, how does he know we're not going to lynch him and take all his money? Maybe we're all sneaking up behind him Right! Now!.
Well, not wanting to take the risk of doing something that would offend U2 and harm their "intellectual property", I think I'll continue not listening to anything they produce. Not online, not by download, not by radio, not by buying CDs. This way, I can be sure I am not doing anything to harm their precious property!
I mean, surely they wouldn't want the likes of criminal ol' me sullying their precioussssss...
His actual complaint is computer science is maturing. In all science and engineering fields the big, dramatic changes and gains are in the early days. When any science matures, you start seeing the incremental, not the revolutionary.
Is he also upset that other than cosmetics as new materials become available, bridge design hasn't changed much since the Romans? Is he upset that thousands of years later, the wheel is still round? Wonder if he's noticed we're almost all still stuck on the x86 archecture that's, what, a quarter century old or so?
I see the Wiki says he's a "pioneer" in "virtual reality". Oh, yeah, that's a hot field.
(not)
Part of this is caused by sheer, pointy head boss style stupidity.
Not long ago, I contracted at one those globe spanning, "more money than most countries" corporations who had a huge, honking block of IPs. And they were NAT'd behind a firewall.
Not a long term solution, no, but we should start prying some of those big blocks out of some dimwitted corporate hands...
What I did say was "optimal". Imagine the ideal sets of features for all the users of some software. The software that describes the largest intersection of all those sets would be "optimal" in this little thought experiment. You can't include everything everybody wants but you can include the ones most people want and reach a point where, generally, people say, "Yeah, I can use that".
And, again, I said this is all abstract and ideal and reality can always go sour on you. Being FOSS doesn't gaurantee success.
Far as emacs, it must satisfy enough people that it's still around. Why, I don't know. I don't know why vi still exists. But it does. People are still using trn and slrn and such for Usenet. Hey, if they're happy... shrug.
But I stand by my point that proprietary software--despite claims to the contrary--is not actually driven by the needs of the user. It cannot be so.
Take creaky old Usenet for example. Everybody who uses it is more less satisfied with the way it is and there's no serious push to change things. Other than minor tweaking here and there, now and then, Usenet is pretty much at the "stick a fork in it, it's done" stage.
(I mean, look at the date on the RFCs covering Usenet. They're *old*. There's just no big push to do much at all with Usenet. Tweaking, yes. But major changes? No.)
What does a profit driven company do with that situation? Say, "Well, that's done. Anybody for lunch?"
No, they'll keep going back and beating on it and trying to convince people they "need" all these new "features" so they can charge for upgrades. Take a look at Quicken. Okay, don't, it's been known to cause nightmares. That was a great little program once. Now it's got bells and whistles and dancing bears and video and.... last time I remember trying to use it a couple of years back, I remember clicking something then feeling like I should take a coffee break. It was breathtakingly sluggish. Ended up yelling at the computer "ALL I WANT TO IS BALANCE MY CHECKBOOK NOT MANAGE THE FEDERAL DEFICIT!!!!!"
Personally, I don't see any way for the proprietary model to work. It seems to me that it must inevitably lead to unuseable software that has had tons of "features" nobody actually wanted piled on endlessly.
In the FOSS world, there's no incentive to keep cramming in things until your users despise you. I mean, you can do that but your project will end up forked and you'll be left in the cold. In the proprietary world, you deal with this issue by "lock in". You cage your users so while they may hate you, it would cost them more to leave than to stay.
Until it reaches the point where people despise you so much, you can't sell, you know, Vista...
So what, exactly, is the argument again? Everyone on this planet has a right to be payed for their hard work EXCEPT someone who spends 4 years at a university learning how to develop software? They should work for free, so that their hard work can then be given away for free? Sigh. Do we have to go over this again?
It's "free" as in "freedom". Not "free" as in "free beer".
Locking up and hiding code in the "proprietary" model is actually the one that fails. Every proprietary software program out there sprouts endless "features" to drive upgrades until you reach a point of utter unusability. The point of the proprietary model is money, not usability. And it never can be. Once a product is done, then what? You can't sell any more copies can you? So you beat on it senselessly until you have word processors doing spreadsheets and spreadsheets doing browsing and browsers doing email and email doing viruses.
In an open model, there may be many people who do not get "paid" per se. They may write code that does something useful for them then contribute it back. They do get benefit in that they end up with software that satisfies their needs. Others who have the same needs also benefit. How is that a loss?
There's no incentive for throwing everything and the kitchen sink into the software. If nobody needs "feature X", nobody bothers to write the code. Open software will, inexorably, move toward an optimal state. Only those "features" somebody finds useful enough to do something about (for her or his own benefit first) will enter the code base.
(Yes, that's the abstract ideal and reality sometimes goes wonky but I stand by the concept)
Further, one of the latest driving forces in the open/free software world are companies. They are paying their programmers. And they are obtaining benefit from the work of those programmers. But by opening up the code, they also obtain benefit from the work of others who contribute something which that person needs or sees usefulness in. Said programmer--regardless of who he or she works for and is or is not paid by--gains benefit in having useful software.
What's happening is the "shrink wrap" model--which is a recent phenomena in the field--is dying. And it's not even the bigger part of the field. Most programmers (I've seen figures as high as 95%) are doing "in house" software. They're not going to lose their jobs if, say, Quicken tanks and is replaced by some FOSS software. If all "shrink wrap" software tanks, if the whole sector disappears, the impact to the field would likely be less than the implosion of the "tech bubble".
It's a transient model that's dying out. Big whoopee.
Software is about getting things done. Not about driving upgrade money. That's why MS (and others) will ultimately fail. The need to drive upgrades corrupts software. Ultimately, it will fail to be useful. Software is a tool, not an end in itself. You make money by enabling people to get something useful done. MySQL does it. And they give their software away.
(For that matter, have you noticed the cell phone business? They're giving away handsets. Are they crazy? No, they're making huge profits. Think about it.)
Finally, and I think importantly, the FOSS world imitates the way we do science. Information is open and shared. That process has catapulted our civilization from horse draw carriages to me sitting here sending messages via satellite Internet and in only about two centuries. The system works.
Or hadn't you noticed the Internet? Open protocols. The people who created them were paid but the information is belched out freely all over the place for anybody and his dog to use. And it works.
Funny that...
I've said it before, I'll say it again:
If your business model doesn't work, go do something else.
People whining they can't make money on the web remind me of the old joke, "Doctor, it hurts when I do this..."
I spent a good three years as a slot technician in a casino and saw this kind of thing a couple of times. Truth is, there's plenty of blame to go around. The boards in a machine have to be set to a denomination by the techs. And no machine should be allowed to go live without its denomination being checked. The casino is in no way an innocent victim, they blew it and they know it.
Nor should a machine have been allowed to pay out that much money without having a basic check run on it. I did so many of those, I could do them in my sleep (and probably did when I worked graveyard). Part of the check was the denomination setting.
Since the management company I worked for had those controls in place, they caught--almost immediately--a tech in one of their other casinos who rigged the denomination on purpose then called his buddies to come play.
I'm not very sympathetic to the gaming industry. It's a kind of legal exploitation so they shouldn't be so surprised when people try to exploit them (back). They weren't careful and they should take their lumps on this one and learn from their mistakes.
How are they going to prove criminal intent anyway? From experience, I'd say that it's true the bulk of your customer base are people who play a lot and know how slot denominations work. So, probably, most of those players knew better.
Still, how do you sort those out from the people who didn't realize the machine wasn't supposed to work that way? They exist. You always saw some customers who'd never been in a casino before (everybody has to have a "first time" after all). After you work on a floor for a time, you get a "feel" for who's which. There were plenty of times I just "knew" somebody was trying to scam us. But that's not something you could take to court.
Bah, the gaming regulators should bounce on the casino's head over this one. Ask those uncomfortable questions about what's going on in their tech department.
Rights?
It appears to be English but I don't understand...
It's not the artists being protected by the RIAA, it's the RIAA being protected by the RIAA. The RIAA companies screw the artists as bad as they screw the public.
I'm all for copyright as the Founders intended. That is, granting limited monopolies to encourage the arts and sciences. Not so corporations can build empires with draconian attacks on the very public who grants the copyrights.
The RIAA arguments are total hogwash. Their entire industry was built before all these maniacal copyright extensions and criminalizations began. There was no music before we adopted the Berne Convention in the 80s? None before the DMCA? It's nonsense.
Western Civilization was built without copyright. But the current copyright regime has brought us... Britney Spears and boy bands? A pox on all their houses.
(Oh great, now I'm gonna get sued by Shakespeare's descendants)