Norton AntiVirus used to rule the market by virtue of being the undisputed best. I haven't looked at MacAfee in a while, but it's tempting me, and I can see why MS would see an opportunity here.
It's like when MS announces that they intend to compete in a market that the current ruler gets covered in Stupid Juice. NAV has really gone down in quality in the past few versions. Whereas before it only prompted me when there was, you know, an actual virus to stop, Norton Internet Security is constantly pinging me for love and attention with status alerts and 'features' that aren't fully baked. It's annoying and has more bugs than I'm used to in a Symmantec product (still less than MS of course).
I saw the same thing happen to Netscape and RealAudio. Their marketing droids start demanding more "brand awareness" and more bullet points for the product slicks, and suddenly the product's main feature-- quiet competence -- is lost.
I'd avoid the parent's parent suggestion. Online businesses in general, like any mailorder business, need to be treated with skepticism no matter what the zip code.
Don't avoid NYC metro area businesses. Instead, do a little homework before doing business with them, and be ready to submit negative comments online if you use pricegrabber etc. When this happens to you (and it likely will if you buy from lots of small providers online) then immediately go to your credit card company, the better business bureau, and the local attorney general.
American Express, I have found, is very aggressive on its customers behalf.
They're throwing cash into this black pit because everyone says to, but how many companies are actually experiences increased sales from onling ads?
Honestly, I have no idea.
Advertising does have strategic benefits. When I was working at a mobile software platform company, we skipped ads altogether. Result: companies thought that we were either not viable or not a major player. When we started running ads, the concerns evaporated. So people weren't exactly persuaded to buy by the ads, but they did help give us some credibility. Having a winning image helps differentiate you from your competitors in established markets. In new markets, it helps educate your consumer-- so prospects that your salesmen pick up can be more quickly qualified (ie you don't have to do 4 flights worth of meetings to discover that your prospect has no need for your product, and to help customers realize opportunities to use your product that a cold-calling salesman might not realize).
What I like about Google's model is that they're gradually working towards a model where you pay not for views (like most ads) or for clicks (as things w/ google work today) but eventually for sales. Every step is getting us from the current "black hole money pit" model where marketing is overhead, to marketing as a cost of sale. In accounting terms it's great, but also it helps you finally get a sense of what really works out there.
For all the statistics and numbers, marketing is still pretty much voodoo. I'm just happy that we're finally getting closer to a point where you can really start seeing what works and what doesn't.
I take all these climatological disaster scenarios with a pretty big grain of salt. There are so many variables that are interdependant in poorly understood ways that it is hard to get a grasp on exactly what outcome you can expect from any given change. Small changes in baseline assumptions in the computer models lead to wildly different results.
That, of course, and the headline creep. I'll file this under "vast underground water deposits discovered on mars" until a body of evidence begins to firm up.
Personally, I think we don't need TLD's anymore. The idea that an independent system should be vetting the.org-ness of an institution (especially in places or countries where the divisions of non-profits, government, and corporate are either non-existent or irrelevant) is to me unnecessary. The internet isn't about "defending the people" or picking winners and losers, it's about an open, largely unregulated system for connecting networks. The moment you go down the road of choosing policies and standards based on protecting or fostering one group over another, you'll never stop.
Ultimately, I think that if I could alter the domain name system, I'd burn all TLD's. Most groups register the.com /.org /.net equivalents anyway. Is slashdot a.org or a.com? Just for example. Why not go to http://cocacola/ and be done with it?
However, I can see the logic of reserving 2 letter codes for countries. After all, they have the guns and decide the laws. I don't know what 1 letter domains could be used for, but I'd prefer that they not be allocated yet either (for future use, perhaps). Selling 26*n (where n == number of TLDs at any moment) domain names isn't really worth the headache of changing the rules, and they could come in handy later.
Of course, then the job of the registrar becomes much more administrative. So odds of ICANN actually doing this are slim --> none.
Remember, this is a hypothetical (in reality, probably impossible) universal virus that creates new virii. Admittedly, I doubt that this is possible-- specificity is a virus's primary weapon.
But if you make the jump that such a virus is possible, then it follows that finding it would be astoundingly easy. You don't have to know how it works or what it looks like. You just need to keep scanning data sources. When you come to the information, it infects you even if you don't recognize it. So keep the machine isolated and wait for it to die, then conduct a post-mortem to assemble the virus on the fly when you're ready to use it.
If there was more than one such data pattern, of course, you couldn't tell which one you'd gotten. But that's the problem: Stephenson postulated information so (literally) compelling that simply knowing it was dangerous.
Possible? No, I don't think so. So in any real case you're probably right. But if you accept the postulates that Stephenson starts with (which I did for the purposes of that reply), you don't actually need to have the string in advance to recognize it.
Too often, Linux suffers from great applications and features being available to those willing to spend 5 hours trawling every project hosting website then spend several hours getting the 101 dependancy issues sorted out and then go make dinner while the whole thing compiles....all to find out the software/feature is so immature or buggy even the most basic features requires a host of newly learnt commands and techniques.
YES.
This has been a continuing problem with Open Source software. I'm a big proponent of it, but this is a major issue. Apart from the top-drawer core applications like OpenOffice, Apache, etc, it is very hard to tell which projects are viable and which ones aren't without extensive googling and combing through forums on a variety of sites.
You can do all kinds of things, if you're willing to do the leg work of researching, working out dependencies and config files, and installing plug-ins. This is a problem with software in general, but open source software in particular is very hard to configure for everyday use unless you're "in the scene" and therefore can pickup the folklore on what you need and how to get it.
I have a very good friend who is very proud of his Linux expertise. He's a major figure on forums for answering linux questions, he has dozens of machines running different distros, etc etc. He's proud that he can get anything to work given time. Sometimes, you need to escalate to a guy like this to get something running. But if you're doing it for your 'bullet-point' features, or worse for core functionality, then you don't have a working product yet, you have a prototype.
I know everyone beats this drum, but good defaults and proper packaging is critical to making the software work. Just because something is possible in an academic sense doesn't mean that it is viable for home or business use.
They never really resolved that one in Snow Crash. Though they presented two possibilities:
1) That the metavirus was so virulent that eventually another civilization would inadvertently transmit it.
2) That if you listen to random binary long enough, that eventually you'll find the metavirus if you're searching long and thoroughly enough.
I didn't say it's plausible, just that the warning is similar to the backstory to Snow Crash. The second part (the lion's share) of my comment was about a potentially possible scenario whereby it would be in an alien civilization's interest to transmit not-entirely-altruistic plans to us.
Point being that you can't assume that they've reached the apex of what a 20th century human would consider morality just because they've invented lots of technology or by the accident of the age of their civilization.
Didn't L. Bob Rife use SETI to capture the metavirus, which was metaphorically floating around in space?
Eliminating rivals in space sounds like a flimsy motive-- though of course you're right to examine it as aliens need not have motives that are by our standards rational.
I don't think that outright trickery is likely, but what about this:
Assume FTL transportation.
Assume that said FTL tech requires a transmitter and receiver. Not necessarily teleportation, merely some kind of equipment required at both the origin and destination.
Assume some motive for interstellar trade (materials, information, art, some reasons that aliens would have something you want).
Therefore, there's a motive for the Hong Kong effect: simply being the nexus of trade provides a massive economic benefit.
At first you can grow your market yourself-- ie building and shipping the infrastructure using STL tech, then using it to establish FTL trade. This is the equivalent of shipping AOL disks to random addresses, hoping that whoever gets the disk is able to add enough revenue to be worth all the disks that were dumped.
That's expensive. And it only works on an acceptable time frame in a local area. If you're trading art or information, furthermore, you need to determine if a system is worth bridging to in the first place.
However, once you're up and running, there's an easier alternative. Broadcast blueprints for your network all over space, designed to obfuscate the underlying technology and only connect to your FTL net. By the time the aliens are sophisticated enough to create a competitor to your network, they will be too deeply bought in to want to do that. Plus, any network they establish will be far smaller than yours-- you can use exclusivity to lock your customer civilizations in.
If you set the system up in a star topology, everything has to go through your civilization to get anywhere else. You'll have the advantage in relationships, cultural knowledge, etc. If the variability of alien psychologies is high enough, this alone could be a massive advantage. By seeing so many cultures, you get an idea of how to pigeonhole new ones and get a relationship going faster.
Now you have a much more lucrative system. You have a network whose nodes are paid for by the endpoint civilizations using their industrial resources and so your only bottleneck is the range of your transmissions (so why not purchase repeaters at the edge of your network), and the ability for alien cultures to receive, digest and implement your blueprints.
If viable trading partner civilizations are rare enough, far enough apart, and hard enough to discover, this could be the only workable way to implement interstellar trade.
OK so there's one scenario right off the bat. You don't have to assume malevolent aliens, only self-interested ones. Sure, FTL might not exist at all, or may work completely differently. Who cares? When I get a random email with detailed instructions for me to make BIG PROFITS, I don't piece together how exactly it might be scamming me, I just recognize that I have to treat these things with healthy scepticism.
Much as I respect Carl Sagan, his aliens were a little too idealized for my tastes. Then again, I also don't see our system of describing mathematics as a universal. To paraphrase B5 creator JMS: the only universals in the universe are matter, energy and enlightened self-interest.
The age when we say that any advanced civilization must be peaceful, noble and altruistic is thankfully over. Instead, if/when we encounter aliens, let's be reasonable, respectful, and aware that our self interests may not perfectly aligned.
It's apparently a device that will spit out gibberish when you are talking on the phone.
Wait a sec, so you're saying that this magical device will spit meaningless gibberish completely free of intellectual content, designed to drown out anyone making any sense of what I'm actually saying?
What's the big advance? Isn't that what managers are for?
They include anti-war liberal Marc Cooper, pro-war liberal Roger L. Simon, and Michael Ledeen, a pro-war conservative. I'd hardly call them a conservative organization. I'm a regular reader of Roger L. Simon, and anyone with any familiarity with his work knows that he's an honest, bi-partisan type. He's got VERY strong opinions, but he's fairminded. He's not the type to pull a stunt, and I don't think he's HEARD of slashdot, let alone is courting its readership.
Bloggers on both sides see themselves as a reaction to and check on traditional corporate media. Certainly similar (though not the same) to RMS's view of free software as a reaction to corporate, profit-driven software.
Meanwhile, they also consider themselves to be a fact-checking organ. Certainly, bloggers drove the Rathergate scandal to public scrutiny-- I'm sure that will continue to happen, too. Many eyes make journalistic errors shallow, to paraphrase ESR. So there's a parallel to the Open Source model. Anyone who's read cooperative news blogs like Winds of Change can see the Open Source thinking that went into it.
So as a regular reader of some of the people behind Pajamas, I'm pretty confident that they're bipartisan, open-minded, and sincere of their imitation^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H flattery of the Open Source software movement. So no harm, no foul, and bonus points to them for changing their name back to protect your sensibilities.
I almost completely agree-- and I'm a conservative. I'd add that journalists are primarily concerned with communication and presentation. It takes artistry to produce a coherent report. They're not operational people by nature. Artists tend to be liberal.
In an ideal, black body radiation sort of way, it's impossible to find a reporter who is completely without bias. And you wouldn't want to read him if you found him. Ultimately, journalism is partly about reporting and partly about synthesizing and interpreting events. And events have many interpretations.
Good journalists are fair-minded. They're more concerned with what is true than who is right. They aren't in there to change your mind, just to let you in on what's happening in the world. They'll have a bias, but they know it, acknowledge it, and work extra hard to ensure that their coverage isn't tainted by it.
Bad journalists follow the creed of Cargo Cult Science. That is: "I already know what's true, now let me go prove it." They may be right sometimes, but their process is tainted and you won't know when they're right. And, really, they don't either. They're in journalism because they want to change the world, and protect people from evil bad guys who tell lies. There are bad conservative journalists, and bad liberal ones, but until the rise of Fox, most journalists were liberal, so most bad ones were too.
It's no accident that journalism scandals came up right as blogs were getting big. A rise of a massive citizen journalism, biased individually but usually not collectively, suddenly put the news empires on the spot. Liberals insist that blogs are primarily a liberal movement, and conservatives claim that it's mostly conservative. The truth is that you read the blogs you agree with, so you feel like your side is huge. We don't really know where the overall centroid is.
Incidentally, I think that programmers are both artists and engineers-- which I think is why programmers still don't fall easily into a political category, even though we are all definitely on the same wave lengths... even when we disagree.
Actually, I'd file this under "ha ha only serious". The thing is, if a chronic, life-disrupting level of game-playing is occurring, despite earnest effort on the player's part to stop, how is that not an addiction?
And if it's an addiction (and is officially and clinically recognized as such) then of course you qualify for disability, treatment, and etc etc. Now, most workplace addiction policies call out addiction as substance abuse. But insurance covering psychological conditions are an area I'm not certain of. Of course, that also means that if it's covered, then I'm covering you're gaming problem (or vice versa, since I've been hitting the warcrack a bit too much lately).
So while your point is funny, behind it is a nest of thorny social, economic and legal questions surrounding treatment for behavioral disorders. I'm not certain what the right answer is, but it's an interesting problem.
You can't just say "we're all thieves" and leave it at that.
Different levels of corruption. In the US, corruption is isolated and fairly low (sorry, it is outrageous to us when we find it but it's minor compared to our GDP). In most of the world, bribery isn't just a pandemic, it's part of the accepted way of doing business.
In US hands, the DNS system is largely not political. Domain names are not revoked or transferred for political reasons. Under UN control, the leverage of being the ultimate arbiter of whether you have a site or not gives them the lever they need to impose political and social controls on content and usage-- which is what Iran, China and Brazil are really after.
Basically, you're assuming that because things work one way in your corner of the world, that every other system will fundamentally resemble the one you're used to. Anyone who's worked with one of the land-line telecoms in Europe (for example) knows that that ain't necessarily so.
Another issue is this: in much of the world, it's POWER, not money, that is at stake. Dissidents and underclasses are suddenly (slowly) starting to embrace technology as a way to reach more of their countrymen than ever before. Dictatorships and theocracies are horrified. They haven't hesitated to kill to maintain control, and they won't shrink from trying to manipulate the internet's technical architecture. And those kinds of countries get more votes than free prosperous democracies.
Make no mistake, there were huge issues at stake here. Claiming that who has authority in the system is irrelevant is a case of cynical naivete. Cynical, because you're assuming that any system will be equally corrupt. Naive, because you underestimate how bad it can really get.
A heavy burden of regulation is just what we need to quash everyone but the big companies and governments that can afford to follow them. Of course, that's a good thing from most of these countries' point of view. Their biggest issue isn't that the US has control in some kind of abstract official sort of way. It's that they want to police the internet for crime.
In many of these nations' cases, "crime" means political or religious dissent. There's a reason that Iran and China have lobbied so hard on this issue.
As it stands now, you can get an IP address and a domain name regardless of your political leanings. That doesn't have to be the case. America officially "controls" the system, but that control mostly consists of preventing anyone else from doing anything to restrict free use of the net. All it takes for this online freedom to go away is for us to compromise a little. And then next year, a little more...
So if you think that this guy is going to save the internet, then I have news for you-- how nice or friendly or telegenic a person is has nothing to do with whether you should be supporting them.
Hell, yeah. People forget that Amelio really turned around Apple. Jobs does a fantastic ground and made Apple a leader again, but Amelio took them out of the intensive care unit.
Another point is that Amelio spent all his time comparing Be and NeXT because power comes from alternatives. A few months worth of travel and expense and some financial reporting was well worth it if it got him a much better price on NeXT.
Dell moved in the direction of building a commodity product-- that is, he wanted what economists call "perfect competition" where products are interchangable and people are cost-sensitive. Then his excellent supply chain let him undercut everyone on price and still make a tidy profit.
In a perfect competition game, low costs are EVERYTHING. You stick to open standards and off the shelf components. With high volume from having the best price, you get the volume you need to improve your costs even further through economies of scale. Not alot of profit per box, but LOTS of boxes.
Apple's strategy has been what economists call "monopolistic competition", where products are imperfect substitutes for one another, and buyers are willing to pay a premium to buy a product that better suits their needs. Apple's high quality, feature-rich, very fashionable product is a luxury item.
Apple's costs are high, but their prices are even higher-- giving them those very nice profit margins. In a luxury item game, your only challenge is when others try to imitate you at the top end of the market-- something that Apple's proprietary software helps protect them from. You don't need alot of market share to win at that game.
I'm a big fan of Gil Amelio-- his reforms helped get apple back on track, and I think Jobs took much of the credit because he was around when Amelio's reforms started to pay off. But Jobs and Jobs alone deserves credit for building the boutique business that took Apple from "no longer in danger of collapse" to "no longer in danger of mediocrity".
Patent law has been moving away from that for 20 years now.
Back in the Bad Old Days, judges would summarily throw out patent cases simply because they didn't want to hear them. Your patent gave you ZERO protection, and big companies would blatantly steal patented concepts and openly defy the law. And they'd laugh at you if you tried to sue them.
OK so now it's the opposite problem: patents are the Holy Grail, and so of course everyone is patenting everything they can find.
This is not just the executive branch here-- all three branches of government and both political parties have actively worked to make the system into the monster it is today. The courts do say that an invention must be "novel" and "non-obvious" but they've defined these terms out of existence because they're hard to quantify and inevitably the judges are not technical enough to understand the technology. The legislative branch has been extending the time limits, monkeying with DRM, and other intellectual property "reforms".
All this stuff, in moderation, back in the day would have been useful, important reforms. But taken all at once, they've over-nerfed fair use.
We DO need strong intellectual property laws. But when they become restrictive, that's when things get out of hand. Which they are.
I'm glad. I love it when the right thing (for him) is also the Right Thing (ethically).
The coverup is almost always worse than the crime in these kinds of things. Companies that aren't up-front and honest (trying to protect their reputation) end up trashing their reps. Cisco just created an anecdote for the next time a customer or regulator wants to take a deep, careful look at their security. We can't just take their word for it, and if I were buying routers right now, I'd be much more inclined to look at Juniper than Cisco, even though previously I wouldn't have even considered them.
It's not magic pixie dust, but making the effort to bring hard-core ethics onstaff is important to me.
You're right: it isn't anywhere near a monopoly. I use Firefox myself and love it.
What I'm referring to are people who set their servers and code pages that to try to break IE on purpose. Most of IE's problems stem from Microsoft's monopoly status. Anyone on the monopolist throne will start to exhibit these flaws.
So 'defeating' IE isn't the goal, creating multiple browsers that are all solid, established competitors and are all innovative and standards compliant is the goal. You advance Firefox by helping contribute to its features and functionality, and by educating people about its advantages. Not by breaking the other guy's browser, as a couple on this thread have suggested.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with you, but not without reservations.
Norton AntiVirus used to rule the market by virtue of being the undisputed best. I haven't looked at MacAfee in a while, but it's tempting me, and I can see why MS would see an opportunity here.
It's like when MS announces that they intend to compete in a market that the current ruler gets covered in Stupid Juice. NAV has really gone down in quality in the past few versions. Whereas before it only prompted me when there was, you know, an actual virus to stop, Norton Internet Security is constantly pinging me for love and attention with status alerts and 'features' that aren't fully baked. It's annoying and has more bugs than I'm used to in a Symmantec product (still less than MS of course).
I saw the same thing happen to Netscape and RealAudio. Their marketing droids start demanding more "brand awareness" and more bullet points for the product slicks, and suddenly the product's main feature-- quiet competence -- is lost.
J&R has a very good rep.
I'd avoid the parent's parent suggestion. Online businesses in general, like any mailorder business, need to be treated with skepticism no matter what the zip code.
Don't avoid NYC metro area businesses. Instead, do a little homework before doing business with them, and be ready to submit negative comments online if you use pricegrabber etc. When this happens to you (and it likely will if you buy from lots of small providers online) then immediately go to your credit card company, the better business bureau, and the local attorney general.
American Express, I have found, is very aggressive on its customers behalf.
They're throwing cash into this black pit because everyone says to, but how many companies are actually experiences increased sales from onling ads?
Honestly, I have no idea.
Advertising does have strategic benefits. When I was working at a mobile software platform company, we skipped ads altogether. Result: companies thought that we were either not viable or not a major player. When we started running ads, the concerns evaporated. So people weren't exactly persuaded to buy by the ads, but they did help give us some credibility. Having a winning image helps differentiate you from your competitors in established markets. In new markets, it helps educate your consumer-- so prospects that your salesmen pick up can be more quickly qualified (ie you don't have to do 4 flights worth of meetings to discover that your prospect has no need for your product, and to help customers realize opportunities to use your product that a cold-calling salesman might not realize).
What I like about Google's model is that they're gradually working towards a model where you pay not for views (like most ads) or for clicks (as things w/ google work today) but eventually for sales. Every step is getting us from the current "black hole money pit" model where marketing is overhead, to marketing as a cost of sale. In accounting terms it's great, but also it helps you finally get a sense of what really works out there.
For all the statistics and numbers, marketing is still pretty much voodoo. I'm just happy that we're finally getting closer to a point where you can really start seeing what works and what doesn't.
I take all these climatological disaster scenarios with a pretty big grain of salt. There are so many variables that are interdependant in poorly understood ways that it is hard to get a grasp on exactly what outcome you can expect from any given change. Small changes in baseline assumptions in the computer models lead to wildly different results.
That, of course, and the headline creep. I'll file this under "vast underground water deposits discovered on mars" until a body of evidence begins to firm up.
Looks like a job for Gil the ARM.
Use of John Tesh is against the Geneva Accords. I'd take Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings's work over his any day.
Blech!
.org-ness of an institution (especially in places or countries where the divisions of non-profits, government, and corporate are either non-existent or irrelevant) is to me unnecessary. The internet isn't about "defending the people" or picking winners and losers, it's about an open, largely unregulated system for connecting networks. The moment you go down the road of choosing policies and standards based on protecting or fostering one group over another, you'll never stop.
.com / .org / .net equivalents anyway. Is slashdot a .org or a .com? Just for example. Why not go to http://cocacola/ and be done with it?
Personally, I think we don't need TLD's anymore. The idea that an independent system should be vetting the
Ultimately, I think that if I could alter the domain name system, I'd burn all TLD's. Most groups register the
However, I can see the logic of reserving 2 letter codes for countries. After all, they have the guns and decide the laws. I don't know what 1 letter domains could be used for, but I'd prefer that they not be allocated yet either (for future use, perhaps). Selling 26*n (where n == number of TLDs at any moment) domain names isn't really worth the headache of changing the rules, and they could come in handy later.
Of course, then the job of the registrar becomes much more administrative. So odds of ICANN actually doing this are slim --> none.
Not in this case.
Remember, this is a hypothetical (in reality, probably impossible) universal virus that creates new virii. Admittedly, I doubt that this is possible-- specificity is a virus's primary weapon.
But if you make the jump that such a virus is possible, then it follows that finding it would be astoundingly easy. You don't have to know how it works or what it looks like. You just need to keep scanning data sources. When you come to the information, it infects you even if you don't recognize it. So keep the machine isolated and wait for it to die, then conduct a post-mortem to assemble the virus on the fly when you're ready to use it.
If there was more than one such data pattern, of course, you couldn't tell which one you'd gotten. But that's the problem: Stephenson postulated information so (literally) compelling that simply knowing it was dangerous.
Possible? No, I don't think so. So in any real case you're probably right. But if you accept the postulates that Stephenson starts with (which I did for the purposes of that reply), you don't actually need to have the string in advance to recognize it.
Too often, Linux suffers from great applications and features being available to those willing to spend 5 hours trawling every project hosting website then spend several hours getting the 101 dependancy issues sorted out and then go make dinner while the whole thing compiles. ...all to find out the software/feature is so immature or buggy even the most basic features requires a host of newly learnt commands and techniques.
YES.
This has been a continuing problem with Open Source software. I'm a big proponent of it, but this is a major issue. Apart from the top-drawer core applications like OpenOffice, Apache, etc, it is very hard to tell which projects are viable and which ones aren't without extensive googling and combing through forums on a variety of sites.
You can do all kinds of things, if you're willing to do the leg work of researching, working out dependencies and config files, and installing plug-ins. This is a problem with software in general, but open source software in particular is very hard to configure for everyday use unless you're "in the scene" and therefore can pickup the folklore on what you need and how to get it.
I have a very good friend who is very proud of his Linux expertise. He's a major figure on forums for answering linux questions, he has dozens of machines running different distros, etc etc. He's proud that he can get anything to work given time. Sometimes, you need to escalate to a guy like this to get something running. But if you're doing it for your 'bullet-point' features, or worse for core functionality, then you don't have a working product yet, you have a prototype.
I know everyone beats this drum, but good defaults and proper packaging is critical to making the software work. Just because something is possible in an academic sense doesn't mean that it is viable for home or business use.
They never really resolved that one in Snow Crash. Though they presented two possibilities:
1) That the metavirus was so virulent that eventually another civilization would inadvertently transmit it.
2) That if you listen to random binary long enough, that eventually you'll find the metavirus if you're searching long and thoroughly enough.
I didn't say it's plausible, just that the warning is similar to the backstory to Snow Crash. The second part (the lion's share) of my comment was about a potentially possible scenario whereby it would be in an alien civilization's interest to transmit not-entirely-altruistic plans to us.
Point being that you can't assume that they've reached the apex of what a 20th century human would consider morality just because they've invented lots of technology or by the accident of the age of their civilization.
Eliminating rivals in space sounds like a flimsy motive-- though of course you're right to examine it as aliens need not have motives that are by our standards rational.
I don't think that outright trickery is likely, but what about this:
OK so there's one scenario right off the bat. You don't have to assume malevolent aliens, only self-interested ones. Sure, FTL might not exist at all, or may work completely differently. Who cares? When I get a random email with detailed instructions for me to make BIG PROFITS, I don't piece together how exactly it might be scamming me, I just recognize that I have to treat these things with healthy scepticism.
Much as I respect Carl Sagan, his aliens were a little too idealized for my tastes. Then again, I also don't see our system of describing mathematics as a universal. To paraphrase B5 creator JMS: the only universals in the universe are matter, energy and enlightened self-interest.
The age when we say that any advanced civilization must be peaceful, noble and altruistic is thankfully over. Instead, if/when we encounter aliens, let's be reasonable, respectful, and aware that our self interests may not perfectly aligned.
It's apparently a device that will spit out gibberish when you are talking on the phone.
Wait a sec, so you're saying that this magical device will spit meaningless gibberish completely free of intellectual content, designed to drown out anyone making any sense of what I'm actually saying?
What's the big advance? Isn't that what managers are for?
They include anti-war liberal Marc Cooper, pro-war liberal Roger L. Simon, and Michael Ledeen, a pro-war conservative. I'd hardly call them a conservative organization. I'm a regular reader of Roger L. Simon, and anyone with any familiarity with his work knows that he's an honest, bi-partisan type. He's got VERY strong opinions, but he's fairminded. He's not the type to pull a stunt, and I don't think he's HEARD of slashdot, let alone is courting its readership.
Bloggers on both sides see themselves as a reaction to and check on traditional corporate media. Certainly similar (though not the same) to RMS's view of free software as a reaction to corporate, profit-driven software.
Meanwhile, they also consider themselves to be a fact-checking organ. Certainly, bloggers drove the Rathergate scandal to public scrutiny-- I'm sure that will continue to happen, too. Many eyes make journalistic errors shallow, to paraphrase ESR. So there's a parallel to the Open Source model. Anyone who's read cooperative news blogs like Winds of Change can see the Open Source thinking that went into it.
So as a regular reader of some of the people behind Pajamas, I'm pretty confident that they're bipartisan, open-minded, and sincere of their imitation^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H flattery of the Open Source software movement. So no harm, no foul, and bonus points to them for changing their name back to protect your sensibilities.
Personally, I was fine with the name.
I almost completely agree-- and I'm a conservative. I'd add that journalists are primarily concerned with communication and presentation. It takes artistry to produce a coherent report. They're not operational people by nature. Artists tend to be liberal.
In an ideal, black body radiation sort of way, it's impossible to find a reporter who is completely without bias. And you wouldn't want to read him if you found him. Ultimately, journalism is partly about reporting and partly about synthesizing and interpreting events. And events have many interpretations.
Good journalists are fair-minded. They're more concerned with what is true than who is right. They aren't in there to change your mind, just to let you in on what's happening in the world. They'll have a bias, but they know it, acknowledge it, and work extra hard to ensure that their coverage isn't tainted by it.
Bad journalists follow the creed of Cargo Cult Science. That is: "I already know what's true, now let me go prove it." They may be right sometimes, but their process is tainted and you won't know when they're right. And, really, they don't either. They're in journalism because they want to change the world, and protect people from evil bad guys who tell lies. There are bad conservative journalists, and bad liberal ones, but until the rise of Fox, most journalists were liberal, so most bad ones were too.
It's no accident that journalism scandals came up right as blogs were getting big. A rise of a massive citizen journalism, biased individually but usually not collectively, suddenly put the news empires on the spot. Liberals insist that blogs are primarily a liberal movement, and conservatives claim that it's mostly conservative. The truth is that you read the blogs you agree with, so you feel like your side is huge. We don't really know where the overall centroid is.
Incidentally, I think that programmers are both artists and engineers-- which I think is why programmers still don't fall easily into a political category, even though we are all definitely on the same wave lengths... even when we disagree.
Where do I sign up for 'disability' payments?
LOLWTF?!?
Actually, I'd file this under "ha ha only serious". The thing is, if a chronic, life-disrupting level of game-playing is occurring, despite earnest effort on the player's part to stop, how is that not an addiction?
And if it's an addiction (and is officially and clinically recognized as such) then of course you qualify for disability, treatment, and etc etc. Now, most workplace addiction policies call out addiction as substance abuse. But insurance covering psychological conditions are an area I'm not certain of. Of course, that also means that if it's covered, then I'm covering you're gaming problem (or vice versa, since I've been hitting the warcrack a bit too much lately).
So while your point is funny, behind it is a nest of thorny social, economic and legal questions surrounding treatment for behavioral disorders. I'm not certain what the right answer is, but it's an interesting problem.
Make no mistake, there were huge issues at stake here. Claiming that who has authority in the system is irrelevant is a case of cynical naivete. Cynical, because you're assuming that any system will be equally corrupt. Naive, because you underestimate how bad it can really get.
A heavy burden of regulation is just what we need to quash everyone but the big companies and governments that can afford to follow them. Of course, that's a good thing from most of these countries' point of view. Their biggest issue isn't that the US has control in some kind of abstract official sort of way. It's that they want to police the internet for crime.
In many of these nations' cases, "crime" means political or religious dissent. There's a reason that Iran and China have lobbied so hard on this issue.
As it stands now, you can get an IP address and a domain name regardless of your political leanings. That doesn't have to be the case. America officially "controls" the system, but that control mostly consists of preventing anyone else from doing anything to restrict free use of the net. All it takes for this online freedom to go away is for us to compromise a little. And then next year, a little more...
So if you think that this guy is going to save the internet, then I have news for you-- how nice or friendly or telegenic a person is has nothing to do with whether you should be supporting them.
Best.
Joke.
Ever.
Hell, yeah. People forget that Amelio really turned around Apple. Jobs does a fantastic ground and made Apple a leader again, but Amelio took them out of the intensive care unit.
Another point is that Amelio spent all his time comparing Be and NeXT because power comes from alternatives. A few months worth of travel and expense and some financial reporting was well worth it if it got him a much better price on NeXT.
Dell moved in the direction of building a commodity product-- that is, he wanted what economists call "perfect competition" where products are interchangable and people are cost-sensitive. Then his excellent supply chain let him undercut everyone on price and still make a tidy profit.
In a perfect competition game, low costs are EVERYTHING. You stick to open standards and off the shelf components. With high volume from having the best price, you get the volume you need to improve your costs even further through economies of scale. Not alot of profit per box, but LOTS of boxes.
Apple's strategy has been what economists call "monopolistic competition", where products are imperfect substitutes for one another, and buyers are willing to pay a premium to buy a product that better suits their needs. Apple's high quality, feature-rich, very fashionable product is a luxury item.
Apple's costs are high, but their prices are even higher-- giving them those very nice profit margins. In a luxury item game, your only challenge is when others try to imitate you at the top end of the market-- something that Apple's proprietary software helps protect them from. You don't need alot of market share to win at that game.
I'm a big fan of Gil Amelio-- his reforms helped get apple back on track, and I think Jobs took much of the credit because he was around when Amelio's reforms started to pay off. But Jobs and Jobs alone deserves credit for building the boutique business that took Apple from "no longer in danger of collapse" to "no longer in danger of mediocrity".
Patent law has been moving away from that for 20 years now.
Back in the Bad Old Days, judges would summarily throw out patent cases simply because they didn't want to hear them. Your patent gave you ZERO protection, and big companies would blatantly steal patented concepts and openly defy the law. And they'd laugh at you if you tried to sue them.
OK so now it's the opposite problem: patents are the Holy Grail, and so of course everyone is patenting everything they can find.
This is not just the executive branch here-- all three branches of government and both political parties have actively worked to make the system into the monster it is today. The courts do say that an invention must be "novel" and "non-obvious" but they've defined these terms out of existence because they're hard to quantify and inevitably the judges are not technical enough to understand the technology. The legislative branch has been extending the time limits, monkeying with DRM, and other intellectual property "reforms".
All this stuff, in moderation, back in the day would have been useful, important reforms. But taken all at once, they've over-nerfed fair use.
We DO need strong intellectual property laws. But when they become restrictive, that's when things get out of hand. Which they are.
While we're plugging the analog hole, can we plug their pie holes too?
I'm glad. I love it when the right thing (for him) is also the Right Thing (ethically).
The coverup is almost always worse than the crime in these kinds of things. Companies that aren't up-front and honest (trying to protect their reputation) end up trashing their reps. Cisco just created an anecdote for the next time a customer or regulator wants to take a deep, careful look at their security. We can't just take their word for it, and if I were buying routers right now, I'd be much more inclined to look at Juniper than Cisco, even though previously I wouldn't have even considered them.
It's not magic pixie dust, but making the effort to bring hard-core ethics onstaff is important to me.
LOL, I got "insightful" and "flamebait" modded.
You're right: it isn't anywhere near a monopoly. I use Firefox myself and love it.
What I'm referring to are people who set their servers and code pages that to try to break IE on purpose. Most of IE's problems stem from Microsoft's monopoly status. Anyone on the monopolist throne will start to exhibit these flaws.
So 'defeating' IE isn't the goal, creating multiple browsers that are all solid, established competitors and are all innovative and standards compliant is the goal. You advance Firefox by helping contribute to its features and functionality, and by educating people about its advantages. Not by breaking the other guy's browser, as a couple on this thread have suggested.
Good or bad depends on your point of view, of course.
Hilarious irony, however, appears to be a universal constant.