not so much on the functionality than on the data interface. What I am saying is, it is more important that a standard interface using a standard way of communicating data from server to client and vice versa, such as an XML application, is vastly more important to me than how it looks and what it can do, at least at first.
Once you establish, for example, how your client can query a calendar of scheduled appointments and events given some criteria (or not), a calendar server, at least as far as I'm concerned, merely need to serve up the data. Let some other third party (another website, let's say, or some kind of java frontend, perhaps a WAP device of some sort - anything at all is possible) handle displaying the information and presenting it to the user.
In this way, the calendar server is only responsible for serving up the data, and you wouldn't care about the capabilities of the client, because after all the client will determine its own capabilities and process and display the data according to what it can do.
Re:Moderate this up! (was -- Re:Netfuture issue #1
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Golden Rice
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· Score: 3
And I'd say that you didn't read the whole article, otherwise you wouldn't only focus on the dietary deficiency and caloric deficiency. Only, I'd mod you up so people understand what it means to not consider a more wholistic approach to things. Western philosophy has historically been in the "silver bullet" mode. I've never seen anyone try to do a more complete analysis than this particular piece did.
It's time you read such articles not only more critically, but also past the first couple of paragraphs. It might also do some good to think that even with all the great intentions that the good doctor had in developing the Golden Rice, it may not be the best thing in the world. Read the ENTIRE article and then look back at your own statements and see the foolishness.
But that's exactly it. If commercial exploitation of kids is inevitable, why bother pretending that it's anything else by having a.kids site? If it is truly for the benefit of children, it will fall under.org or.edu. A categorization of.kids is just completely redundant..xxx doesn't work any better. Just stop using TLD for content categorization.
Please, we don't need.kids domains so that big corporations like Disney can further masquerade the thinly veiled commercial brainwashing, merchandising and exploitation foist upon kids today. These categorization TLDs are rightly rejected. Leave the TLDs the way they are, generically categorizing the legal status of the entities. Though I wouldn't mind one for personal pages, I think it's more amusing for people to try to categorize their representation as.com,.org, or.net, just so you kind of know where they stand.
Well, sure. That's why Microsoft must use it's dominant market positions to be a monopoly - so that it can claim portability! Write once, run anywhere if Windows was everywhere.
Seriously though, the one thing that Microsoft have always seemed dedicated to, though not perfectly so, is legacy-support. They sacrifice technical excellence/security for legacy support, something many people are not willing to do, much less even think about. Microsoft does SOME forward thinking and always want to be sure that they can support legacy stuff. This is one of the reasons they have such dominance - if you came out with new versions of OSes that breaks legacy support, where would you be? Microsoft understands their market only all too well.
Remember Win16? Win32s? I'm sure there would be some problems transitioning to Win64, but I'm sure it would work out, it's just a matter of relevance of PC platforms from here on.
If they find out if this stuff can eat away plastic, then maybe we can figure out a way to contain them and put them to use to eat away non-decomposable plastic items in landfills - heck, just let them decompose landfills completely.
Space laboratory for fungus-based pharmaceutical research should also be interesting - after all, with the conditions being really good for mutations, they may discover new drugs created by bacteria sooner.
The only downsides are that if these mutated bacteria/fungi turn out to be deadly and highly contagious and gets back to earth, it could spell doom for humanity. You could just see Hollywood jump on this kind of story to make the next doom-gloom movie, Armageddon and its ilk.
The value of unity and efficiency is merely in making the society more efficient and stronger. From a nationalistic point of view (just beginning to be eroded toward obsoletion in today's Internet globalization), unity and efficiency is very important. More so in the U.S., because it is composed of people from such disparate backgrounds and nationalities. Other than that, I guess you're right.
I think you assume that if something is called education, then it is good, and more is better. But there are many ways to educate. Using behaviour modification is a bad way to educate.
I guess this depends on our definitions of education. By education, I mean anything that would enable learning - be it skills, knowledge, or anything else. Behavior modification? yeah, more or less, our behaviors DO get modified in education. But our behaviors are modified by everything around us. Our environment, our friends and family, TV, school, they are all powerful influences. The only way to make sure that education's behavior modification doesn't dominate is to dominate with something else - family. If you don't want any behavioral modification from a government backed system, you can. You'd just have to more or less isolate your children from other children and educate them yourself at home.
I think children naturally integrate into society. I don't think they need to be isolated, segregated, organized, and punished/rewarded into it.
This one, I have to disagree with. Children don't naturally integrate into society unless they learn the common basis of knowledge that systematic education provides. If they don't, then they will definitely be isolated, segregated, etc., because they will be "different". Not that it's ok anyway. But on this one, maybe it's again more of our lack of agreement on terminology.
By the way, I personally think that the "real" education starts at college. That is, I still hold firm to the belief that the twelve years of pre-college education is intended to homogenize, to teach us some skills, but mostly, how to communicate effectively and become a useful part of society. The government, acting as an extension of the people's will (albeit bias towards people with money) wants the people it governs to be cohesive. After all, the government depends on the people, and if the people are not united and cohesive, the society falls apart and the government topples, good or bad. I believe that it is in college that "differentiation" occurs. It is in college that we are truly taught to think critically. Do I agree with it? Not necessarily, I just think that it happens that way. Although I think very often, some children are treated to this at an earlier stage. The high school I went to was certainly like this (though I'm not saying it was successful in my case). A lot of the kids were very, very mature and independent, very purposeful, very bright. They made up their minds and are not at all afraid of being different or outspoken.
We must also realize that whether we like it or not, our society, through its educational system acting as a sieve, segregates children based on their abilities and achievements. We (the society) unconsciously (or consciously) believe that this is necessary so that we can fill the roles in our society with "suitable" candidates. That's why in education and academia, we govern by meritocracy. When this shows great disparities and people screams about lack of fairness, we perform educational welfare and promote mediocrity.
So the question is this: what's more important? The individual or the society? Both are important, but when thinking about ourselves, the individuals are more important. When thinking of others, society is more important. Behavioral modification is great when it keeps the society running smoothly but not when it comes to ourselves. Then it becomes dangerous and unreasonable.
Gee, I wish I made more sense above, but I hope you get what I'm trying to get at. Basically, the education system is the way it is because we (as a group, not as individuals) want it and need it that way. Like it or not, educational system aims at homogenization. Like it or not, the results (high school graduation) of the educational system is purposefully used to segregate the children as they are inducted into society. Like it or not, college is where we truly begin to learn how to "think", as I believe.
I think that state budget for education probably figures on income from Lottery, meaning, they rely on lottery as part of the state income when figuring out the budget. So in that sense, that money that was supposed to have gone to education is going to education, and it's coming from the lottery. I can't vouch for the actual numbers nor for any other states either, though.
The government, especially the U.S. is more or less an extension of the collective subconscious of the American people, though Corporatism/Capitalism is a very large dominant force in its shaping. If the government shapes us and our children, then, it is more or less driven to do so because of those factors.
I don't think the government pretends that education is anything more than what it is: teaching the children a common basis of knowledge so that they can communicate effectively and become intergral parts of society. Education imparts information and knowledge, but at the same time implicitly enforces conformity. Is conformity good? To a large extent, yes. It means that the society is more efficient, is more united and less likely to segregate into subgroups, and therefore less likely to have social problems. Is conformity dangerous? Absolutely. Too much conformity leads to a general apathetic social attitude.
In the U.S. the issue of conformity and "fitting" in has always been a problem. Race issues are the most prominent manisfestation of this.
It is important to realize that public/government sponsored education is neither good nor evil (though to the society, it is good because it trains future conformants). Its chief goal is about integration. Whether it's good or bad is your own interpretation. For the most part I think people will agree more education is better than less education in our society, because it means a more skilled population that is able to communicate more effectively. It means greater efficiency because there is less energy wasted trying to translate and interpret people's communications.
We are subject to a few very large influences in our lives, aside from our friends and families. We are subject to education, religion, and corporate marketing. I think of those three, education is the most innocuous, and marketing the most dangerous. Imagine that marketing is telling us how to spend our money and how to live our lifestyles according to what these corporate interests want us to believe is the right way to lead our lives. If there's anything you should focus your tirade on, it's corporatism, not education. Corporations are becoming increasingly large in scale and powerful. Many corporations have more power (read: money) than many countries.
You think the government "socially engineering" kids is bad? How about the likes of Disney and other companies "market engineer" (I can't think of a better word for the moment) your kids into believing the they want to watch this movie and buy that toy and dress like so and so and drink and eat this and that? It happens all the time through TV. Which is the larger problem?
It's the American mentality. The puritanic side vs. the sinful side. America is full of very sharp contrasts, and it is why America is interesting, why America is always constantly moving, why it gets ahead, why its people have fun, etc. America creates its own socio-cultural-economic weather systems. There must always be debates. If everything just went one way, as in, if gambling was just banned, there wouldn't be any fun in it at all.
You know the idea, you don't appreciate something until it's gone. You don't know sweetness until you've tasted the bitter. American enjoy gambling that much more because throughout most of the country, it is illegal. Isn't it great?
My grandparents spent $1 per week. They are not gambling people, they just figure that 1 chance in hundreds of millions is better than none, and no harm done. Hey, that's their peculiarity. Besides, they were hoping to win the lotto for their children and grandchildren. I know there are better ways, but this is just their way of "gambling"
Gambling is just one of those things that people like to get away with. Technically, if the government really wanted to have accountability in gambling, it can have a pretty good enforceable way of doing it, I'm sure. But the government also knows that people don't want it that way. So the government kind of turns a blind eye to a lot of stuff with regards to gambling, I believe. The government (unconsciously) understands that people need to be able to gamble - win or lose - and keep quiet about it.
As far as religion, I would say I don't think religion has anything to do with gambling. If your religion prohibits you from gambling, that's great for you, but that doesn't affect me. The government will never pass laws against gambling because of religion, because that's unconstitutional. The only way your religion can get laws passed to outlaw religion is through the machinery of democracy and the persistence of your religion - meaning, if your religion became the dominant religion in the country, and everyone in your religion votes to outlaw gambling. I'd be willing to accept that, but to directly say that because gambling is against your religion and therefore it offends you, I say, so what? What I do is my business. If I offend you, tough. As long as I don't break any laws, I don't see it as a problem.
I believe the NY Lottery, when I checked at one point not too long ago, gave a pretty good percentage pie chart of the proceeds of the lottery drawings - I think either 40% or 60% of all proceeds (including the winner's take) went to education. The rest went to things like overhead such as marketing, etc.
I think that people buy lottery tickets in pretty good conscience because it's going for a good cause, it's legal, and there's a tiny little itty-bitty chance that they may get rich. Considering all that, it's not all that bad after all. If they promote it as a way to get rich, it's because they are catering to a very basic human nature: greed. You could always count on people to be greedy. This is one thing that I think may never change. After all, isn't that the foundation of Capitalism?
Well, state sanctioned lottery has a couple of things going for it: it's (easily) taxable, and it is usually toward a good cause (education, usually, but could be for other things).
speaking of tax, lottery is more like a voluntary tax for specific purposes like education for those who are more inclined to ignore mathematical probability in pursue of a dream (I don't like to think lottery as a tax for the mathematically disinclined, as one joke goes, because my own grandparents enjoyed purchasing lottery tickets and they kind of do it just for fun)
I guess more than anything, gambling is usually illegal because of two things: Cheating and scams that swindles people out of a lot of money, and taxable gambling income. How many people actually honestly report gambling income? The government would want a piece of that action, I'm sure. With Internet-based gambling, the cheating and swindling would be on a larger scale, more easily perpetrated, and harder to trace (in some cases). Where would the taxes be collected?
If the government can figure out a way to easily account for and tax gambling nicome and losses, then the government will legalize it all, IMHO.
In an effort to associate everything with Gnutella/Napster (much like the Beowulf Cluster trend), I'd like to point out that I've seen tons of PDFs on Gnutella of books that are currently on the bookshelves, like all the Teach Yourself xx in xx days books, etc. All copyrighted material, all in either PDS, HTML, or txt format. So obviously, people are able to scan books and convert them into PDFs that are completely searchable and with the graphics intact. Adobe's Acrobat does all of that, including OCR, and if it cannot confidently recognize words, it would retain the bitmap of the text in question, just so you can see and possibly edit.
What was the file? Do they have special naming conventions? I'd like to see one of these too. Although, $9.95?!?! I'd rather go see it in the movies - it's cheaper, and in the summer, it's cooler.
The reason why I ask is, I think if you take the entire population (of the world) and work out two variables, x number of people willing to spend y amount of dollars, you'll see that as y goes down, x goes up. The amount of money made by film producers (or distributors, or whatever) would be roughly x times y. Over time, however, x becomes more important. x is actually more along the lines of number of viewings rather than number of people willing to pay. But my point is, if you make y low enough such that an acceptable percentage of people are willing to pay, then they wouldn't have to worry about piracy.
Let me borrow, as an example, currency. The reason why printed currency works and why the government goes through all the anti-counterfeit stuff is because would-be counterfeiters would have to spend a lot more money than the value of the currency that they are trying to counterfeit. The government has the economy of scales on their side. They spend less than 10 cents printing each bill, but it would be much more expensive (though not impossible) for counterfeiters to produce counterfeits that can fool people. That's why counterfeit money is usually higher is denomination, because the lower denomination just wouldn't pay off. That's perhaps why the U.S. has, as it's highest denomination, the one hundred dollar bill.
Back to the encrypted movies. If they priced it so that it would not be worth anyone's time to pirate the movies, even though inevitably, a small percentage of the population will anyway, they can reduce the effects of piracy and actually make enough money (it's never enough, I suppose, and they want to get the money while they can), and the consumers will not complain about how expensive it is to watch a movie. Imagine if pay-per-view was only 10 cents? Take an average long-ish 2 hour movie, if you watched movies non-stop for a month, you'll average about $30, less than most utility bills and DSL fees. Would you do it?
So basically, they'll encrypt it with something like CSS and if someone can crack the encryption, then it'll be like DeCSS again, no?
Maybe there wouldn't be a stupid licensee mistake, but inevitably, all encryption can be cracked...
At least these guys have the right idea about one thing: it's impossible to stop the copying of digital content, unlike the DVD guys and the RIAA, who believe that they can control the distribution of all content forever, rip-off artists and consumers, and make tons of money to pay lawyers and lobby congressman to pass laws like DMCA to allow them to keep making tons of money. What a cycle.
The assumption is that a license for viewing is one time only, or that if you have a license, it is linked to an account, so that you keep paying. In any case, I'm not sure anyone would want to do that. Besides, it doesn't have to be in a file. Even if it is, it could be setup so that it don't work on other machines. There are many ways to make sure that the license will not be distributed.
This is off-topic, but, I noticed for quite a while now that Darwinism, more and more, refers to acts of stupidity, implying that if you are stupid enough to do (fill in the blank) then you don't deserve to live long enough to pass on your genes. I wonder if Oxford English Dictionary has this usage listed?
I further wonder by posting this (off-topic as it is), am I suffering the same fate in terms of my Karma?
There's nothing wrong with what they are doing, after all, Excite@Home is just saying that if you want our high speed, you pay for it.
Besides, it appeared that the companies signing up (well, at least one that I am aware of, Akamai) distribute content, rather than provide it. They don't create or provide the content. They get paid by companies that want to have the ability to distribute their own high-bandwidth streaming media content. The content distributors have various mechanisms to achieve this, and one of the tools they need is, naturally, high bandwidth. What this means, is that companies that wish to pay more to get their own content out there will be able to do so because of this. If you cannot or don't want to pay to get the bandwidth for distribution, why should you have it?
I've used Gnutella and looked around for things, just typing them in, I was actually looking for the script of an animation film, and happened upon one of these files with the.vbs extension. Guessing that it must be some kind of VBScript virus, I downloaded it and renamed it to a.txt file and just looked at it using notepad (not that I really needed to rename it, but it was just to be safe, in case I accidentally double-click). It looked interesting enough, but I guess a lot of people do fall for it, even though the extension is not exactly hidden on it.
There was something more interesting, though, that I discovered. Somewhere, someone figure out a way to take the search words that get sent out, and automatically create an HTML file from it. If you download it (as I have, a couple of times), thinking maybe it's an HTML file linking to some place that may have what you want, you'll find it's something else totally unrelated - somewhat akin to getting the xxx sites when searching for completely innocuous topics because they manipulated the search engines. Nonetheless, an unscrupulous (relatively speaking, given the nature of Gnutella, and because after all, who would complain?) could link to a site full of banner advertising or some such to get hits.
Not having been up on the topic, I just never thought that integrated circuit logic was an alternative. And I'm still trying to figure out why asynchronous smaller bandwidth (number of lines) buses are faster than synchronous parallel (more data lines). But I guess the speed has at least something to do with the noise tolerance. Anyway, I'm reading from one of the links followed from the site that seems to be a pretty good explanation/history of the asynchronous logic.
While I agree with most of what you say later, I disagree with your assessment that what I said was "it's not a bug, it's a feature". Neither is it a design flaw.
1. It's certainly not a bug. I think we can agree with that.
2. It's was not a feature to allow the creation of the virus.
3. Design flaw? That depends on your original design requirements.
Why does MS allow VBScripting? Why does Unix allow shell scripting? Why do we have compilers that can be used to write virus programs? Why do we have networking and the Internet if it means that our data and computer systems can be compromised? Why have a computer at all that would make it easy for other to copy our data and eavesdrop on what we do?
I think it's because we do want more features and abilities so that we can do more. Unfortunately, it also opens up many more opportunities for problems.
I agree that MS could have done a lot better to make it not so easy to let something like this virus to have occurred. It is a design flaw if you intended to design a piece of software that would be secure and safe.
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Very true, XML is not good for data storage (at least not a lot of it) but excellent for transmitting pieces of data.
Once you establish, for example, how your client can query a calendar of scheduled appointments and events given some criteria (or not), a calendar server, at least as far as I'm concerned, merely need to serve up the data. Let some other third party (another website, let's say, or some kind of java frontend, perhaps a WAP device of some sort - anything at all is possible) handle displaying the information and presenting it to the user.
In this way, the calendar server is only responsible for serving up the data, and you wouldn't care about the capabilities of the client, because after all the client will determine its own capabilities and process and display the data according to what it can do.
It's time you read such articles not only more critically, but also past the first couple of paragraphs. It might also do some good to think that even with all the great intentions that the good doctor had in developing the Golden Rice, it may not be the best thing in the world. Read the ENTIRE article and then look back at your own statements and see the foolishness.
But that's exactly it. If commercial exploitation of kids is inevitable, why bother pretending that it's anything else by having a .kids site? If it is truly for the benefit of children, it will fall under .org or .edu. A categorization of .kids is just completely redundant. .xxx doesn't work any better. Just stop using TLD for content categorization.
Please, we don't need .kids domains so that big corporations like Disney can further masquerade the thinly veiled commercial brainwashing, merchandising and exploitation foist upon kids today. These categorization TLDs are rightly rejected. Leave the TLDs the way they are, generically categorizing the legal status of the entities. Though I wouldn't mind one for personal pages, I think it's more amusing for people to try to categorize their representation as .com, .org, or .net, just so you kind of know where they stand.
Seriously though, the one thing that Microsoft have always seemed dedicated to, though not perfectly so, is legacy-support. They sacrifice technical excellence/security for legacy support, something many people are not willing to do, much less even think about. Microsoft does SOME forward thinking and always want to be sure that they can support legacy stuff. This is one of the reasons they have such dominance - if you came out with new versions of OSes that breaks legacy support, where would you be? Microsoft understands their market only all too well.
Remember Win16? Win32s? I'm sure there would be some problems transitioning to Win64, but I'm sure it would work out, it's just a matter of relevance of PC platforms from here on.
Space laboratory for fungus-based pharmaceutical research should also be interesting - after all, with the conditions being really good for mutations, they may discover new drugs created by bacteria sooner.
The only downsides are that if these mutated bacteria/fungi turn out to be deadly and highly contagious and gets back to earth, it could spell doom for humanity. You could just see Hollywood jump on this kind of story to make the next doom-gloom movie, Armageddon and its ilk.
The value of unity and efficiency is merely in making the society more efficient and stronger. From a nationalistic point of view (just beginning to be eroded toward obsoletion in today's Internet globalization), unity and efficiency is very important. More so in the U.S., because it is composed of people from such disparate backgrounds and nationalities. Other than that, I guess you're right.
I think you assume that if something is called education, then it is good, and more is better. But there are many ways to educate. Using behaviour modification is a bad way to educate.
I guess this depends on our definitions of education. By education, I mean anything that would enable learning - be it skills, knowledge, or anything else. Behavior modification? yeah, more or less, our behaviors DO get modified in education. But our behaviors are modified by everything around us. Our environment, our friends and family, TV, school, they are all powerful influences. The only way to make sure that education's behavior modification doesn't dominate is to dominate with something else - family. If you don't want any behavioral modification from a government backed system, you can. You'd just have to more or less isolate your children from other children and educate them yourself at home.
I think children naturally integrate into society. I don't think they need to be isolated, segregated, organized, and punished/rewarded into it.
This one, I have to disagree with. Children don't naturally integrate into society unless they learn the common basis of knowledge that systematic education provides. If they don't, then they will definitely be isolated, segregated, etc., because they will be "different". Not that it's ok anyway. But on this one, maybe it's again more of our lack of agreement on terminology.
By the way, I personally think that the "real" education starts at college. That is, I still hold firm to the belief that the twelve years of pre-college education is intended to homogenize, to teach us some skills, but mostly, how to communicate effectively and become a useful part of society. The government, acting as an extension of the people's will (albeit bias towards people with money) wants the people it governs to be cohesive. After all, the government depends on the people, and if the people are not united and cohesive, the society falls apart and the government topples, good or bad. I believe that it is in college that "differentiation" occurs. It is in college that we are truly taught to think critically. Do I agree with it? Not necessarily, I just think that it happens that way. Although I think very often, some children are treated to this at an earlier stage. The high school I went to was certainly like this (though I'm not saying it was successful in my case). A lot of the kids were very, very mature and independent, very purposeful, very bright. They made up their minds and are not at all afraid of being different or outspoken.
We must also realize that whether we like it or not, our society, through its educational system acting as a sieve, segregates children based on their abilities and achievements. We (the society) unconsciously (or consciously) believe that this is necessary so that we can fill the roles in our society with "suitable" candidates. That's why in education and academia, we govern by meritocracy. When this shows great disparities and people screams about lack of fairness, we perform educational welfare and promote mediocrity.
So the question is this: what's more important? The individual or the society? Both are important, but when thinking about ourselves, the individuals are more important. When thinking of others, society is more important. Behavioral modification is great when it keeps the society running smoothly but not when it comes to ourselves. Then it becomes dangerous and unreasonable.
Gee, I wish I made more sense above, but I hope you get what I'm trying to get at. Basically, the education system is the way it is because we (as a group, not as individuals) want it and need it that way. Like it or not, educational system aims at homogenization. Like it or not, the results (high school graduation) of the educational system is purposefully used to segregate the children as they are inducted into society. Like it or not, college is where we truly begin to learn how to "think", as I believe.
I think that state budget for education probably figures on income from Lottery, meaning, they rely on lottery as part of the state income when figuring out the budget. So in that sense, that money that was supposed to have gone to education is going to education, and it's coming from the lottery. I can't vouch for the actual numbers nor for any other states either, though.
I don't think the government pretends that education is anything more than what it is: teaching the children a common basis of knowledge so that they can communicate effectively and become intergral parts of society. Education imparts information and knowledge, but at the same time implicitly enforces conformity. Is conformity good? To a large extent, yes. It means that the society is more efficient, is more united and less likely to segregate into subgroups, and therefore less likely to have social problems. Is conformity dangerous? Absolutely. Too much conformity leads to a general apathetic social attitude.
In the U.S. the issue of conformity and "fitting" in has always been a problem. Race issues are the most prominent manisfestation of this.
It is important to realize that public/government sponsored education is neither good nor evil (though to the society, it is good because it trains future conformants). Its chief goal is about integration. Whether it's good or bad is your own interpretation. For the most part I think people will agree more education is better than less education in our society, because it means a more skilled population that is able to communicate more effectively. It means greater efficiency because there is less energy wasted trying to translate and interpret people's communications.
We are subject to a few very large influences in our lives, aside from our friends and families. We are subject to education, religion, and corporate marketing. I think of those three, education is the most innocuous, and marketing the most dangerous. Imagine that marketing is telling us how to spend our money and how to live our lifestyles according to what these corporate interests want us to believe is the right way to lead our lives. If there's anything you should focus your tirade on, it's corporatism, not education. Corporations are becoming increasingly large in scale and powerful. Many corporations have more power (read: money) than many countries.
You think the government "socially engineering" kids is bad? How about the likes of Disney and other companies "market engineer" (I can't think of a better word for the moment) your kids into believing the they want to watch this movie and buy that toy and dress like so and so and drink and eat this and that? It happens all the time through TV. Which is the larger problem?
You know the idea, you don't appreciate something until it's gone. You don't know sweetness until you've tasted the bitter. American enjoy gambling that much more because throughout most of the country, it is illegal. Isn't it great?
My grandparents spent $1 per week. They are not gambling people, they just figure that 1 chance in hundreds of millions is better than none, and no harm done. Hey, that's their peculiarity. Besides, they were hoping to win the lotto for their children and grandchildren. I know there are better ways, but this is just their way of "gambling"
As far as religion, I would say I don't think religion has anything to do with gambling. If your religion prohibits you from gambling, that's great for you, but that doesn't affect me. The government will never pass laws against gambling because of religion, because that's unconstitutional. The only way your religion can get laws passed to outlaw religion is through the machinery of democracy and the persistence of your religion - meaning, if your religion became the dominant religion in the country, and everyone in your religion votes to outlaw gambling. I'd be willing to accept that, but to directly say that because gambling is against your religion and therefore it offends you, I say, so what? What I do is my business. If I offend you, tough. As long as I don't break any laws, I don't see it as a problem.
I think that people buy lottery tickets in pretty good conscience because it's going for a good cause, it's legal, and there's a tiny little itty-bitty chance that they may get rich. Considering all that, it's not all that bad after all. If they promote it as a way to get rich, it's because they are catering to a very basic human nature: greed. You could always count on people to be greedy. This is one thing that I think may never change. After all, isn't that the foundation of Capitalism?
speaking of tax, lottery is more like a voluntary tax for specific purposes like education for those who are more inclined to ignore mathematical probability in pursue of a dream (I don't like to think lottery as a tax for the mathematically disinclined, as one joke goes, because my own grandparents enjoyed purchasing lottery tickets and they kind of do it just for fun)
I guess more than anything, gambling is usually illegal because of two things: Cheating and scams that swindles people out of a lot of money, and taxable gambling income. How many people actually honestly report gambling income? The government would want a piece of that action, I'm sure. With Internet-based gambling, the cheating and swindling would be on a larger scale, more easily perpetrated, and harder to trace (in some cases). Where would the taxes be collected?
If the government can figure out a way to easily account for and tax gambling nicome and losses, then the government will legalize it all, IMHO.
In an effort to associate everything with Gnutella/Napster (much like the Beowulf Cluster trend), I'd like to point out that I've seen tons of PDFs on Gnutella of books that are currently on the bookshelves, like all the Teach Yourself xx in xx days books, etc. All copyrighted material, all in either PDS, HTML, or txt format. So obviously, people are able to scan books and convert them into PDFs that are completely searchable and with the graphics intact. Adobe's Acrobat does all of that, including OCR, and if it cannot confidently recognize words, it would retain the bitmap of the text in question, just so you can see and possibly edit.
What was the file? Do they have special naming conventions? I'd like to see one of these too. Although, $9.95?!?! I'd rather go see it in the movies - it's cheaper, and in the summer, it's cooler.
The reason why I ask is, I think if you take the entire population (of the world) and work out two variables, x number of people willing to spend y amount of dollars, you'll see that as y goes down, x goes up. The amount of money made by film producers (or distributors, or whatever) would be roughly x times y. Over time, however, x becomes more important. x is actually more along the lines of number of viewings rather than number of people willing to pay. But my point is, if you make y low enough such that an acceptable percentage of people are willing to pay, then they wouldn't have to worry about piracy.
Let me borrow, as an example, currency. The reason why printed currency works and why the government goes through all the anti-counterfeit stuff is because would-be counterfeiters would have to spend a lot more money than the value of the currency that they are trying to counterfeit. The government has the economy of scales on their side. They spend less than 10 cents printing each bill, but it would be much more expensive (though not impossible) for counterfeiters to produce counterfeits that can fool people. That's why counterfeit money is usually higher is denomination, because the lower denomination just wouldn't pay off. That's perhaps why the U.S. has, as it's highest denomination, the one hundred dollar bill.
Back to the encrypted movies. If they priced it so that it would not be worth anyone's time to pirate the movies, even though inevitably, a small percentage of the population will anyway, they can reduce the effects of piracy and actually make enough money (it's never enough, I suppose, and they want to get the money while they can), and the consumers will not complain about how expensive it is to watch a movie. Imagine if pay-per-view was only 10 cents? Take an average long-ish 2 hour movie, if you watched movies non-stop for a month, you'll average about $30, less than most utility bills and DSL fees. Would you do it?
Maybe there wouldn't be a stupid licensee mistake, but inevitably, all encryption can be cracked...
At least these guys have the right idea about one thing: it's impossible to stop the copying of digital content, unlike the DVD guys and the RIAA, who believe that they can control the distribution of all content forever, rip-off artists and consumers, and make tons of money to pay lawyers and lobby congressman to pass laws like DMCA to allow them to keep making tons of money. What a cycle.
The assumption is that a license for viewing is one time only, or that if you have a license, it is linked to an account, so that you keep paying. In any case, I'm not sure anyone would want to do that. Besides, it doesn't have to be in a file. Even if it is, it could be setup so that it don't work on other machines. There are many ways to make sure that the license will not be distributed.
I further wonder by posting this (off-topic as it is), am I suffering the same fate in terms of my Karma?
Besides, it appeared that the companies signing up (well, at least one that I am aware of, Akamai) distribute content, rather than provide it. They don't create or provide the content. They get paid by companies that want to have the ability to distribute their own high-bandwidth streaming media content. The content distributors have various mechanisms to achieve this, and one of the tools they need is, naturally, high bandwidth. What this means, is that companies that wish to pay more to get their own content out there will be able to do so because of this. If you cannot or don't want to pay to get the bandwidth for distribution, why should you have it?
There was something more interesting, though, that I discovered. Somewhere, someone figure out a way to take the search words that get sent out, and automatically create an HTML file from it. If you download it (as I have, a couple of times), thinking maybe it's an HTML file linking to some place that may have what you want, you'll find it's something else totally unrelated - somewhat akin to getting the xxx sites when searching for completely innocuous topics because they manipulated the search engines. Nonetheless, an unscrupulous (relatively speaking, given the nature of Gnutella, and because after all, who would complain?) could link to a site full of banner advertising or some such to get hits.
Not having been up on the topic, I just never thought that integrated circuit logic was an alternative. And I'm still trying to figure out why asynchronous smaller bandwidth (number of lines) buses are faster than synchronous parallel (more data lines). But I guess the speed has at least something to do with the noise tolerance. Anyway, I'm reading from one of the links followed from the site that seems to be a pretty good explanation/history of the asynchronous logic.
1. It's certainly not a bug. I think we can agree with that.
2. It's was not a feature to allow the creation of the virus.
3. Design flaw? That depends on your original design requirements.
Why does MS allow VBScripting? Why does Unix allow shell scripting? Why do we have compilers that can be used to write virus programs? Why do we have networking and the Internet if it means that our data and computer systems can be compromised? Why have a computer at all that would make it easy for other to copy our data and eavesdrop on what we do?
I think it's because we do want more features and abilities so that we can do more. Unfortunately, it also opens up many more opportunities for problems.
I agree that MS could have done a lot better to make it not so easy to let something like this virus to have occurred. It is a design flaw if you intended to design a piece of software that would be secure and safe.