That's the problem with trusting stuff to a corp, and why you can't ever expect a corporation to ever do anything 'nice' (unless it can get a tax break or better sales out of it). There are good places to work, and bad places to work, but in the end, if you want an organization that's motivated by something other than money, go start a not-for-profit. Duh.
Or help to get our culture's myopic head out of its collective ass and structure our economic, political, and social systems so that greed is not the sole motivator, and stockholders not the sole beneficiaries.
Ayn Rand and her libertarian acolytes have promoted capitalism and greed as a great panacea that can (and should) address all of a societies issues, and that is simply untrue. Indeed, history is repleat with examples of just how misguided that entire Capitalism As World Order notion really is. The last two decades aren't the first time its been tried, and this isn't the first time its fallen apart.
As we all know (from 19th century history if nothing else), but some idealogues will nevertheless remain in denial about, a free market with no regulation quickly devolves into a monopoly market, which ultimately is no market at all.
We have some limited, and ultimately insufficient, regulation in place to prevent this sort of thing (anti-trust regulations), but one thing no one seems willing to consider is how to restructure rules for incorporation, regulations of business practices and accounting procedures, and social law as a whole such that the motivation of greed can be supplimented with other motivations that are more conducive to creating a world fit for humans to inhabit. Examples of where and why this is necessary abound (Monsanto's poisoning of a small southern town in the United States in the 1990s is one example, Love Canal and other environmental abuses are another, all of the economic scandals of the 1980s, and now the naughties, are another example, and more abound).
No one would be foolish enough to try and build an edifice with just a saw and no other tools, why are we surprised when we try and build a society with just one tool, capitalism/greed, and the resulting structure trembles and threatens to fall apart after a scant two decades?[1]
[1]Prior to Reaganomics there was the notion of a plurality of balanced forces that included economics, government regulation, and even redistribution of wealth as needed to keep a society running smoothly. Indeed, the latter, most derided notion prevented a revolution during the great depression and built sufficient faith in the social and political order of the country to ride out the cold war and sustain a half a century of growth. It is only since Reagan that this notion of Capitalism Above All Else, including Above our Democratic institutions themselves, has gained such widespread, and misguided, support, and now we are beginning to reap the consiquences of that notion and the weakend regulation and oversight inherent in it.
There is one pretty well documented case of a man in England who lived to be 152 years old IIRC (he was even invited to an audience before the King of England because of his remarkable age). Records of his birth and death were as good as any in that day... meaning they were pretty decent, if not the computereized, dental and fingerprint coded records we have today.
All that having been said, there is no "human life span" as such, as the life span afforded any human organism under "ideal" conditions is different from person to person, as evidenced by the fact that we have had people die of old age while in their thirties (!!) and others appear young well into their nineties.
There is no proof that genetic manipulation will extend human life, but there is a lot of emperical evidence to suggest it is likely to work, including experiments on mice and rats where lifespans have been tweaked out to be quite a bit longer than the unmodified control group (several times longer, in fact), and there is no reason to expect such procedures wouldn't be effective on other mammilian creatures like ourselves.
There is also no way to predict what other medical issues may arise, once the genetic clock has been slowed (or stopped) which might impact quality of life. Five or six centuries of life, in which the last four centuries are spent in a nursing home or hospital to treat an escalating series of illnesses and medical conditions are not the desired result of something like that.
The only way to find out however is to try it and see, and I'm sure there would be plenty of volunteers for the experiment (myself included).
well this is BS, we can't pay with a credit card but we can happily finance F'n paypal. Sorry LWN guess you aren't getting a donation.I refuse to use paypal, after thye locked my account for 5 weeks because of a paperwork error and their side.
It is stories like yours (of which there are a vast number it seems) which is why I have never, and will never, use paypal.
Even when not doing so is damn inconvinient, or expensive.
When I made my $100.00 donation to the Free Blender Fund, I paid $20.00 to Western Union to wire the money to Holland rather an open a paypal account. At least I know Western Union won't "freeze" my account indefinitely the way Pay Pal is wont to do, and while I'm sure there are more effecient ways to wire money overseas, paypal will never be an option.
There's also no proof that humans will ever live much beyond 75 years old. That could be a very solid barrier that no amount of gene therapy and wishful pseudoreligious pride in technology can repair.
Wrong.
There is no proof that the sun will rise in the east tommorow, though I think most of us fully expect it to.
However, there is ample proof that humans can live well beyond 75 years. There have been humans that have lived as much as 150 years, twice the hard limit you suggest. Indeed, my own grandmother lived to 101, and lived fully independently until she was 98. My great grandmothers on both sides made it into their mid-nineties... a full twenty years (24%) longer than the hard limit you suggest. My family is hardly unique in that accomplishment.
Cryogenics may or may not pan out. I think it is far more likely that the energy, or money, will run out and the freezers will be shut down than that anyone will be revivied, but even if the probability is only one in one billion that a frozen human will ever be revived, that is infinitely greater than the probability of someone buried in the earth, or creamated, ever returning from the grave, Christian, Islamic, and other assorted mythologies notwithstanding.
Yes. Did you read my comments, or understand the context of his remarks?
You'd be surprised how well that works. Not to the benefit of the common people, of course.
His argument that we should allow corruption and injustice to continue to flourish so that another generation might have something worthwhile to rebel against, and that this would somehow be "good" for ours society, was and is inane. The harm corruption and widespread injustice does to a civil society is dramatic, profound, and often very difficult, sometimes impossible, to reverse. As strong as our constitutional government and division of powers is, with the creation of the our secret police forces in the 1920's (FBI), their expansion during the cold war (CIA, NSA), and their explosion in the so called war on drugs (now 50+ !! agencies competing for the spoils of goods stolen from suspected drug users and providors), the loss of the people's voice in government and replacement with corporate voice and soft-money, and the profound corruption that permeates the legislative and executive branches and now seems to be making itself felt in the judicial branch (remember Kaplan, anyone?), our system of governance is and has been operating well outside of its design parameters for a very long time, and the strain is beginning to show in a very big way.
No one is arguing that starting wars and diverting the publics attention to conflicts overseas isn't an effective means at keeping the population pacified, or that the US government hasn't been engaged in that tactic for quite some time. Indeed, the passivity of the populace, and the breakdown in our democracy it is resulting in, is one of the very things I have been decrying in this entire thread.
The argument is whether or not that sort of thing is good for a society. In my not at all humble opinion it isn't, and it never has been.
First of all there is no middle class, because there is no class. We do not live in an aristocracy where there are class distinctions, period.
You clearly do not live on the same planet as the rest of us, much less in the same country. Denying the existence of class doesn't make it magically go away simply because it doesn't fit your naive world view... go try to convince a poor man in east LA or the southside of Chicago that class doesn't exist, or for that matter just about anyone who hasn't completely divested themselves of intellect in some kind of Ayn Randian orgasm of Denial. Or for that matter, any number of wealthy individuals who will, most certainly and quite possibly rather condecendingly explain to you that there is class in America, and you are not a part of theirs.
As for blaming the victim for their losses, I think enough has been said to debunk that notion once and for all. The fact that someone had more than $20,000 in a bank account at a failed S&L, or owned stock options in liue of pay they could not divest themselves of for five years which became worthless after their CEO pilfered the company, does not in any way diminish the economic crimes committed against them, absolve the criminals (and their political buddies) in the least for their crimes, or in any way place any reasonable responsiblity or blame upon the victim.
Well, I'd love to take credit, but I didn't see the entire crash coming. I just saw the bad accounting practices wrt stock options and Microsoft, as a result of a story posted here on slashdot a couple of years ago, did a little further digging and found out a bunch of tech companies were doing the same (Cisco, etc.), then did a little more digging, saw that a lot of non-tech companies were doing the same, and bolted in fear.
My money went to much less sexy bonds and real estate, so I missed the last few weeks of the climb and the big drop thereafter.
Largely dumb luck... certainly not any financial wizardry or genius on my part.:-)
1) As you said, this JUST HAPPENED, and then you go on to lament that no reform or change has taken place.
No, it is just the latest iteration of something that has been going on sinced the mid-nineteen eighties. Remember Felton? Remember the savings and loan debacle? Many people who had a life savings exceeding the minimal amount insured by the government lost the difference, and many others had their money in accounts with no such protection at all.
This iteration is not the first time in the last couple of decades the rich have pilfered the savings of the middle class, it is merely the first time anyone has spoken of it in those terms aloud, in the mainstream media, where it can actually be heard.
3) Unless you haven't noticed, we have this minor little thing called A WAR going on. And maybe another one waiting in the wings. That is probably taking up more than a few resources.
The problem with that thinking is that there are lots more people out there without 401(k) accounts, and that didn't lose a single penny in the stock market, because they don't have any money to invest. They don't care about Microsoft, and they don't care about Enron, because neither of those companies have anything to do with them working two shifts and feeding their kids, or harvesting their crops. They're not calling for reform, because they haven't been wronged. What you call apathy is what they call ignoring things that are not important.
The number I heard (admittedly on a news broadcast, which isn't the best of sources given today's journalistic standards) was something like 60% of all Americans were invested in the stock market and suffered tremendous loss as a result of the corporate corruption (and the governmental corruption, or if you prefer giving the benefit of the doubt, negligence, which hardly gets a mention, but was necessary for the aforementioned corporate corruption to flourish as it did).
60%.
That is more than half of the entire population, and if you consider that those who are below the poverty line likely aren't invested or have 401(k)s, as you say, the percentage of the middle class who have seen their life savings pilfered is likely quite higher.
Pundits have thrown around numbers like 80% of the middle class being affected, though again, I wouldn't necessarilly trust those numbers given the source.
The point remains, though, that their is precious little outcry, and precious little being done to correct a systemic, fundamental problem that allows this sort of pilferage by the priveleged to take place. Hardly surprising given that our president, our vice president, and very like many members of congress have engaged in exactly this sort of activity, though on a smaller, less obvious scale.
Oh, by the way, I'm not playing victim. I'm one of the lucky ones who got out of the market when I read about Microsoft's option pyramiding scheme, did a little digging, and found out just how widespread the practice was. I'm one of the lucky few who enjoyed the ride up the bubble and missed out on its collapse, so I am not speaking from personal outrage, I am speaking from outrage at what is being done to my fellow man by a priveleged few, and the underlying corruption that is destroying my country in a very real, and very measurable, way.
Microsoft's despicable behavior and the government's effective dismissal of complaints against it, are just one symptom. As are the copyright cartel's efforts to circumvent and fence off the last remaining freedoms enshrined in the bill of rights regarding freedom of expression through extention of copyright law far beyond the bounds envisioned by the founding fathers. Are as any number of other ugly, destructive trends routinely discussed here on slashdot and elsewhere, all of which flourish because of the very corruption and ethical bankrupcy in our highest political offices, which in turn flourishes because of the conditioned apathy and subservience that has come to epitomize the American people, including most of those who do sit in those "ivory towers" you allude to.
Read the news. The Federal Government just made doing what the CEOs of Enron et al did a federal offense, meaning real jail time.
I do read the news, and the measures which have been taken are laughable and incomplete. Ralph Nader, the guy who finally got the automotive industry to belatedly incorporate basic safety designs into automobiles in the United States decades after they knew better, and chose not to for financial reasons, offers a detailed analysis of just how widely Congress dodged the entire issue, and how profoundly superficial and ineffective the law you cite really is.
In short, its a superficial measure designed to smooth the ruffled feathers of those few who dare, or rather bother, to speak aloud their outrage.
You'll have to forgive us if we slack off a bit; after outlasting communism and dealing with a world that alternatly hates us and wants us to be their best friend, we as a counry have earned a little corruption and selfishness.
Or, to put your argument in a more individual light:
"You'll have to forgive me if I slack off a bit; after outlasting my competing coworkers and dealing with an office that alternately hates me and wants to be my best friend, I as a person have earned a little cancer and self-destructiveness."
Corruption isn't some self-indulgence you earn as a result of hard work, it is a cancerous, destructive force that tears a society apart and undermines basic, civil society and the social contract that holds it together, so unless you are arguing that America has earned the destruction it is bringing down upon itself, your argument falls to pieces.
As for the notion of 'needing something to fight against' as a justification for injustice or corruption, so that the next generation has something to occupy their time, I think the absurdity of your words stand upon their own. Indeed, your rhetoric is a perfect example of the kind of conditioning our culture has been subjected to for the last several decades which has resulted in the apathy and submissiveness of our populace which is allowing these sorts of destructive behavior to flourish, virtually unapposed.
If you are considering a purchase of any kind of internet connectivity, wireless or otherwise, from Sprint, I have some advice for you.
Run. Run like the wind and don't look back.
I just had Sprint's 8 Mbit Down/ 1 Mbit up business ADSL installed a month ago. It worked beautifully, gave me 5 usable static IPs, and was a modest $160/month for a two year contract.
Within two weeks of having the service I got an email alluding to a "reorganization" of their DSL service.
Eight days later I got a snail mail telling me the service was being cancelled for "economic" reasons ("we would have held you to your two-year contract as a weak individual, but don't even think of trying to hold us to our end of the bargain, and here's a $400 refund on your $600 bill of shut-up money"). Oh, and we'll give you a service that is one sixth as fast (1.5 Mbit down, 384k up) for $130 month, installation waived, because we're such nice folks. Of course, I can buy the exact same service Sprint is reselling (Covad ADSL) directly from Covad for just $80/month ($50 less per month for the identical product!), so that great deal Sprint is offering isn't so great after all.
When I tried to get clarification by phone from Sprint representatives who apparently knew even less than I, I got as a response "look, half of us our losing their jobs, what do you want?"
I want the service I signed a two year contract to receive and am paying for, and I want to know what the hell is going on.
So, long story short: there is no way in hell I will buy any service, wireless or otherwise, from a company as flakey and unreliable as Sprint has proven themselves to be, and I would encourage anyone else considering any of their services to be extremely skeptical of Sprint's ability to deliver.
... and the life savings of the entire middle class, with hardly a peep of protest from those affected, this sort of anti-consumer protection, or better said, government wink-wink-nudge-nudge "don't get caught doing that again" tactics for allowing this sort of atrocious behavior to slide relatively unaffected and unchanged, again and again, is unlikely itself to change in any measurable way.
At least, not until things become so intolerable that the masses overcome their conditioned apathy and subservience, and actually rise up in anger and demand real accountability and real reform. Unfortunately, by then I suspect things will have gone so far the non-violent reform will be difficult, if not impossible, and I sure don't want to be anywhere near the United States when that time comes.
Every great power in history was brought to its knees, and ultimately destroyed, by its own internal, unchecked, and uncorrected corruption. It is extraordinarilly unlikely that the United States will be any different, or somehow immune to this kind of historical tide, and with every such expose it becomes ever more clear that we in the United States have nearly reached that threshhold already.
I mean, hell, the upper crust just got done pilfering the life savings and retirement of the entire middle class, and yet no signficant reform or change has taken place, and the very people so affected can't be bothered to protest or be caught dead carrying a plackard in a public place demanding change, much less actually get involved in the political process and work for peaceful change. Unless this changes, and soon, this trend will not be corrected until it is far too late.
This despicable behavior with regards to Microsoft is appalling and extreme, but it is only a symptom of a much greater, more fundamental, and much more deeply entrenched malaise that affects our entire political culture, and likely spells the beginning of the end of American society as we know it.
It isn't going to be any foreign enemy, or "terrorists" who bring down our country, it is going to be our own inaction in the face of ever wider, ever more flagrant, and ever more destructive corruption. It saddens me greatly to have lived to see such a day.
Let's say that I've got a fax-modem in my mail server. Does that count? Is it now a "Telephone Fax Machine?"
If you've got a printer connected to it to print out your faxes it probably qualifies. Almost certainly if it prints those faxes out automatically.
What gets interesting is if it treats a particular email as a fax account and prints said email automatically, especially if the account in question is named 'fax@mycompany.com'.:-)
First, fax machines are definately not a 'commons' in any sense of the word. By printing stuff on my fax machine, or sending spam to my server, they have committed a trespass.
Excellent point. In addition, you are paying the cost for their "speech." Clearly the constitution intended for speakers to provide their own soap box, not be required to be given one at someone else's direct, monetary expense.
Second, there is no possible way to rationally interpret the first amendment as granting the right of trespass. They can send junk email [sic?]; my mailbox belongs to the federal gov't. But my fax machine is mine. [emphesis added]
Was this a typo? Surely you meant the can send you junk postal mail. Your email box belongs to you. It is a file you own (literally, and in several senses of the word if you run UNIX or GNU/Linux), residing on your hard drive, with data that comes across the internet or telephone connection you pay for. It is not, in any way, owned by the government.
Email SPAMMERS are exactly like Fax spammers... they are using your equipment and your resources to advertise their products, at your expense. There is nothing whatsoever in the constitution that bars a well crafted law from banning such activity outright, or from providing harsh remedies for those who do violate such a law.
Postal mail, on the other hand, is another story, as you correctly point out.
Re:American Culture Not That Bad
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The Last Place
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And then there are those ignorant people who stereotype all pro-lifers as violent abortion clinic-bombers, evangelical churches as neo-nazi gay bashers, and white southerns as racists. Brian Ellenberger
And then there are the insightful Rest of Us who know that any group has diverse members, some good, some bad, but are also aware that none of the Pro Choice people are running around murdering others for their political views or the medicine they practice. While not all anti-abortionists are gun wielding radicals, clearly that group attracts enough such individuals that doctor shootings, bombing, and political websites lauding such atrocities are relatively commonplace, in stark contrast to the civil, non-violent activists on the other side of that particular issue.
Religion breeds intolerance not because of its belief in a God, however erroneous such a belief may be. It breeds intolerance by its very assertion that it has the "one true, straight and narrow way" to God, setting its people apart from the rest of the world. With that sort of foundation, is it really any wonder so many variations on that theme breed incredible levels of intolerance for the beliefs of others, or that those who are to some degree tolerant (at least until their core beliefs are challenged) tend to be moreso as a result of conscious choice, rather than as a natural extention of their belief system?
For NBC, ABC and fox generate revenue (and a hell of a lot of it) based on viewers... in your analogy, linux should be generating lots of revenue since a lot of people have it installed.
And it is. That revinue is distributed amongst its users (in savings, both time and monetary), amongst local independent contractors and consultants (I and severalf friends I know rake in very tidy sums of money, most (in two cases I know of, all) of it directly or indirectly resulting from free software in general and GNU/Linux in particular), as well as retailers of various GNU/Linux distros.
The difference is that those revinues are distributed amongst a large population. In other words thusands earning six figures instead of tens earning eight figures. Harder to track, harder to quantify, but ultimately much more important in generating economic activity and supporting the economy at large.
This is the traditional American concept, but it is not true in most European countries, where there is a legally recognized "moral right" that cannot be sold, but that always remains with the creator of the work.
This gets to the crux of the reform of so-called copyright law that I advocate.
Eliminate all copy monopolies granted by current copyright law. Scrap it, completely.
Replace it with a legal framework that encodes current academic citation and anti-plagerism standards
This means the original artist(s) always get credit for what they create
This also means any changes or edits by a third party must be clearly labelled as such, and clearly differentiated from the artits' original work
Give the creating artist a Right of Creation, which essentially amounts to an economic advantage they are granted by law. This is not a monopoly that can exclude others (no clearing the playing field of all other participatns), but an advantage, perhaps in the form of a tax credit, perhaps in the form of a tax on unauthorized copies sold, some or all of which is passed on to the original creator, or what have you (tilting the playing field in favor of the creator).
The important thing is that, while an artist could designate a publisher as their duly authorized publisher (who thereby shares the tax or other economic advantage granted the artist), they can never sell that right, anymore than they can "sell" the fact that they created the work. This means that if the artist is unsatisfied with their publisher they can find another, and the right to do so can never be sold away, contractually or otherwise.
The details of such approaches very, but the basic idea is sound: replace copyright as we know it with a regime designed to (1) benefit artists and (2) benefit society, by eliminating copy monopolies and replacing it with explicit artistic acknowledgement and economic support.
I don't care how expensive those old unix systems were (when they were new), replacing them with ANYTHING costs more than simply continuing to use the existing machines that are already owned.
You are ignoring the cost of a service contract, which anyone like Dresdner is going to have for a mission critical system. If Sun Microsystem's service contracts are any indication, the cost could well have exceeded $3,000/node, in which case the savings would have been immediate and very, very real. Replacing 1992 hardware with 1998 hardware and getting a 92x speedup would have been icing on the cake.
It never ceases to amaze me how an 11-year-old implementation of a 30-year-old design is called an "upstart".
For the same reason that a structure based on a 2000 year old design, using 50 year old construction techniques, materials developed anywhere from 10,000 years ago to 20 years ago, and architectural designs that are ten years old, is still called a "new building" when it is built.
For that matter, the hardware all our operating systems run on is based on a 70 year old material sciences, a basic transister design that is 60 years old, and semi-conductor technology that is at least 40 years old.
What if my religion or my spirtual beliefs say that we should share all information?
That isn't as far fetched as it sounds. Islam believes all knowledge comes from God, and apparently the most respected, leading islamic intellectuals believe that the entire concept of intellectual property is against islam and against God. Not the government appointed lackey in Saudi Arabia, mind you, who will echo whatever values and opinions the government tells him to, but the leadership to whom the rest of the population listens.
Personally, I'm an athiest and find religions of pretty much every bent (Buddhism perhaps excepted) obsolete in the extreme, but this goes to show you that politics can make for strange bedfellows, and that if freedom of speech AND freedom of religion truly are paramount, then Copy Restrictions and Intellectual Property must lose.
Unfortunately, I think the reality is quite different. We can pay lipservice to the constitution, to freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, etc.... just so long as it doesn't get in the way of the entrenched oligarchs collecting and hoarding even more of our hard earned dollars.
Hell, they just got done pilfering the life savings of the entire middle class of this country, and aside from a few sacrificial, symbolic arrests nothing fundamental is being changed or repaired. In any other country, where the populace isn't as well trained and conditioned into submission, this would be the stuff of revolutions. Not here in the US, though...gotta worry about them nasty terrorists instead (who have killed less than 1/10th as many people as common car accidents have within the last year).
As another noted, the JVM is already capable of running multiple processes on Mac OS X. Fix the JVMs for GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, and those obscure, mutually incompatible operating systems from Redmond:-), and let others fix (or replace) the language.
Concentrate on the JVM.
Already Python can be compiled into java bytecode, and if the capability doesn't already exist for Ruby, it will soon. Similar compilers could be created for any number of other languages (scheme, smalltalk, whatever).
Java isn't what is important, it is the write (bytecode) once, run (bytecode) anywhere that is important. Whether that bytecode is generated from Java, Python, Scheme, Ruby, or Joes New Language For His CS210 course, doesn't really matter.
I imagine that the previous poster was thinking of public web pages when he said that.
Of course your clients can control what browsers are used with what configurations in your case.
All of that is likely true.
However, he would be doing his clients a big favor if he avoided using popup() and, for that matter, any of the other features I mentioned in my original post as having been disabled. By doing so he would allow his clients to have all the snazzy features they've requested, but also allow them to have a much more pleasant web browsing experience when viewing public sites.
Since most people likely do both, that would be a huge plus. He could even sell it as a feature, with a little note to his clients: "Use Mozilla, change these settings, and not only will you find your customized website working perfectly, you'll get rid of all those annoying popup windows on other sites that have been driving you nuts."
Why? Because I use mozilla exclusively, and have turned off javascript's ability to
open unrequested windows
move or resize existing windows
raise or lower windows
hide the status bar
Any site I hit that says something asinine like "best viewed with Internet Explorer gets an email from me explaining why I will never bother to use their site, and (in the vast majority of cases, where I find a competitor that does adhere to standards), why I have gone to their competitor instead despite having found their page first.
I keep a template of the email handy, so that only a few seconds are required to make the complaint to both the webmaster AND two others who are as high up in the firm as I can discover in a quick web search.
These sites are few and far between... mozilla works for the vast, vast majority of sites I visit, use, and make purchases from, but for those few who don't the one or two minutes required to fire off a polite, accurate, and pointed complaint is well worth it... no one likes losing business, least of all smaller firms trying to get started and unwittingly losing 10-30% of their market (depending on whom you ask) because of Microsoft's deliberate incompatability games. Indeed, the number of heartfelt thank you's (and subsequently fixed sites, many of which have switched to some version of apache) I've received has been a very pleasant surprise.
In any event, there is absolutely no reason for one's web browsing experience to be the kind of popup hell described here... a small modicum of knowledge and willingness to stand out from the herd is all that is required.
Slashdot Mirror
That's the problem with trusting stuff to a corp, and why you can't ever expect a corporation to ever do anything 'nice' (unless it can get a tax break or better sales out of it). There are good places to work, and bad places to work, but in the end, if you want an organization that's motivated by something other than money, go start a not-for-profit. Duh.
Or help to get our culture's myopic head out of its collective ass and structure our economic, political, and social systems so that greed is not the sole motivator, and stockholders not the sole beneficiaries.
Ayn Rand and her libertarian acolytes have promoted capitalism and greed as a great panacea that can (and should) address all of a societies issues, and that is simply untrue. Indeed, history is repleat with examples of just how misguided that entire Capitalism As World Order notion really is. The last two decades aren't the first time its been tried, and this isn't the first time its fallen apart.
As we all know (from 19th century history if nothing else), but some idealogues will nevertheless remain in denial about, a free market with no regulation quickly devolves into a monopoly market, which ultimately is no market at all.
We have some limited, and ultimately insufficient, regulation in place to prevent this sort of thing (anti-trust regulations), but one thing no one seems willing to consider is how to restructure rules for incorporation, regulations of business practices and accounting procedures, and social law as a whole such that the motivation of greed can be supplimented with other motivations that are more conducive to creating a world fit for humans to inhabit. Examples of where and why this is necessary abound (Monsanto's poisoning of a small southern town in the United States in the 1990s is one example, Love Canal and other environmental abuses are another, all of the economic scandals of the 1980s, and now the naughties, are another example, and more abound).
No one would be foolish enough to try and build an edifice with just a saw and no other tools, why are we surprised when we try and build a society with just one tool, capitalism/greed, and the resulting structure trembles and threatens to fall apart after a scant two decades?[1]
[1]Prior to Reaganomics there was the notion of a plurality of balanced forces that included economics, government regulation, and even redistribution of wealth as needed to keep a society running smoothly. Indeed, the latter, most derided notion prevented a revolution during the great depression and built sufficient faith in the social and political order of the country to ride out the cold war and sustain a half a century of growth. It is only since Reagan that this notion of Capitalism Above All Else, including Above our Democratic institutions themselves, has gained such widespread, and misguided, support, and now we are beginning to reap the consiquences of that notion and the weakend regulation and oversight inherent in it.
There is one pretty well documented case of a man in England who lived to be 152 years old IIRC (he was even invited to an audience before the King of England because of his remarkable age). Records of his birth and death were as good as any in that day ... meaning they were pretty decent, if not the computereized, dental and fingerprint coded records we have today.
All that having been said, there is no "human life span" as such, as the life span afforded any human organism under "ideal" conditions is different from person to person, as evidenced by the fact that we have had people die of old age while in their thirties (!!) and others appear young well into their nineties.
There is no proof that genetic manipulation will extend human life, but there is a lot of emperical evidence to suggest it is likely to work, including experiments on mice and rats where lifespans have been tweaked out to be quite a bit longer than the unmodified control group (several times longer, in fact), and there is no reason to expect such procedures wouldn't be effective on other mammilian creatures like ourselves.
There is also no way to predict what other medical issues may arise, once the genetic clock has been slowed (or stopped) which might impact quality of life. Five or six centuries of life, in which the last four centuries are spent in a nursing home or hospital to treat an escalating series of illnesses and medical conditions are not the desired result of something like that.
The only way to find out however is to try it and see, and I'm sure there would be plenty of volunteers for the experiment (myself included).
well this is BS, we can't pay with a credit card but we can happily finance F'n paypal. Sorry LWN guess you aren't getting a donation.I refuse to use paypal, after thye locked my account for 5 weeks because of a paperwork error and their side.
It is stories like yours (of which there are a vast number it seems) which is why I have never, and will never, use paypal.
Even when not doing so is damn inconvinient, or expensive.
When I made my $100.00 donation to the Free Blender Fund, I paid $20.00 to Western Union to wire the money to Holland rather an open a paypal account. At least I know Western Union won't "freeze" my account indefinitely the way Pay Pal is wont to do, and while I'm sure there are more effecient ways to wire money overseas, paypal will never be an option.
There's also no proof that humans will ever live much beyond 75 years old. That could be a very solid barrier that no amount of gene therapy and wishful pseudoreligious pride in technology can repair.
... a full twenty years (24%) longer than the hard limit you suggest. My family is hardly unique in that accomplishment.
Wrong.
There is no proof that the sun will rise in the east tommorow, though I think most of us fully expect it to.
However, there is ample proof that humans can live well beyond 75 years. There have been humans that have lived as much as 150 years, twice the hard limit you suggest. Indeed, my own grandmother lived to 101, and lived fully independently until she was 98. My great grandmothers on both sides made it into their mid-nineties
Cryogenics may or may not pan out. I think it is far more likely that the energy, or money, will run out and the freezers will be shut down than that anyone will be revivied, but even if the probability is only one in one billion that a frozen human will ever be revived, that is infinitely greater than the probability of someone buried in the earth, or creamated, ever returning from the grave, Christian, Islamic, and other assorted mythologies notwithstanding.
Ever read 1984?
Yes. Did you read my comments, or understand the context of his remarks?
You'd be surprised how well that works. Not to the benefit of the common people, of course.
His argument that we should allow corruption and injustice to continue to flourish so that another generation might have something worthwhile to rebel against, and that this would somehow be "good" for ours society, was and is inane. The harm corruption and widespread injustice does to a civil society is dramatic, profound, and often very difficult, sometimes impossible, to reverse. As strong as our constitutional government and division of powers is, with the creation of the our secret police forces in the 1920's (FBI), their expansion during the cold war (CIA, NSA), and their explosion in the so called war on drugs (now 50+ !! agencies competing for the spoils of goods stolen from suspected drug users and providors), the loss of the people's voice in government and replacement with corporate voice and soft-money, and the profound corruption that permeates the legislative and executive branches and now seems to be making itself felt in the judicial branch (remember Kaplan, anyone?), our system of governance is and has been operating well outside of its design parameters for a very long time, and the strain is beginning to show in a very big way.
No one is arguing that starting wars and diverting the publics attention to conflicts overseas isn't an effective means at keeping the population pacified, or that the US government hasn't been engaged in that tactic for quite some time. Indeed, the passivity of the populace, and the breakdown in our democracy it is resulting in, is one of the very things I have been decrying in this entire thread.
The argument is whether or not that sort of thing is good for a society. In my not at all humble opinion it isn't, and it never has been.
First of all there is no middle class, because there is no class. We do not live in an aristocracy where there are class distinctions, period.
... go try to convince a poor man in east LA or the southside of Chicago that class doesn't exist, or for that matter just about anyone who hasn't completely divested themselves of intellect in some kind of Ayn Randian orgasm of Denial. Or for that matter, any number of wealthy individuals who will, most certainly and quite possibly rather condecendingly explain to you that there is class in America, and you are not a part of theirs.
You clearly do not live on the same planet as the rest of us, much less in the same country. Denying the existence of class doesn't make it magically go away simply because it doesn't fit your naive world view
As for blaming the victim for their losses, I think enough has been said to debunk that notion once and for all. The fact that someone had more than $20,000 in a bank account at a failed S&L, or owned stock options in liue of pay they could not divest themselves of for five years which became worthless after their CEO pilfered the company, does not in any way diminish the economic crimes committed against them, absolve the criminals (and their political buddies) in the least for their crimes, or in any way place any reasonable responsiblity or blame upon the victim.
P.S. kudos on your timing of the stock market.
... certainly not any financial wizardry or genius on my part. :-)
Well, I'd love to take credit, but I didn't see the entire crash coming. I just saw the bad accounting practices wrt stock options and Microsoft, as a result of a story posted here on slashdot a couple of years ago, did a little further digging and found out a bunch of tech companies were doing the same (Cisco, etc.), then did a little more digging, saw that a lot of non-tech companies were doing the same, and bolted in fear.
My money went to much less sexy bonds and real estate, so I missed the last few weeks of the climb and the big drop thereafter.
Largely dumb luck
1) As you said, this JUST HAPPENED, and then you go on to lament that no reform or change has taken place.
No, it is just the latest iteration of something that has been going on sinced the mid-nineteen eighties. Remember Felton? Remember the savings and loan debacle? Many people who had a life savings exceeding the minimal amount insured by the government lost the difference, and many others had their money in accounts with no such protection at all.
This iteration is not the first time in the last couple of decades the rich have pilfered the savings of the middle class, it is merely the first time anyone has spoken of it in those terms aloud, in the mainstream media, where it can actually be heard.
3) Unless you haven't noticed, we have this minor little thing called A WAR going on. And maybe another one waiting in the wings. That is probably taking up more than a few resources.
Who is it we're at war against this week?
Eurasia?
The problem with that thinking is that there are lots more people out there without 401(k) accounts, and that didn't lose a single penny in the stock market, because they don't have any money to invest. They don't care about Microsoft, and they don't care about Enron, because neither of those companies have anything to do with them working two shifts and feeding their kids, or harvesting their crops. They're not calling for reform, because they haven't been wronged. What you call apathy is what they call ignoring things that are not important.
The number I heard (admittedly on a news broadcast, which isn't the best of sources given today's journalistic standards) was something like 60% of all Americans were invested in the stock market and suffered tremendous loss as a result of the corporate corruption (and the governmental corruption, or if you prefer giving the benefit of the doubt, negligence, which hardly gets a mention, but was necessary for the aforementioned corporate corruption to flourish as it did).
60%.
That is more than half of the entire population, and if you consider that those who are below the poverty line likely aren't invested or have 401(k)s, as you say, the percentage of the middle class who have seen their life savings pilfered is likely quite higher.
Pundits have thrown around numbers like 80% of the middle class being affected, though again, I wouldn't necessarilly trust those numbers given the source.
The point remains, though, that their is precious little outcry, and precious little being done to correct a systemic, fundamental problem that allows this sort of pilferage by the priveleged to take place. Hardly surprising given that our president, our vice president, and very like many members of congress have engaged in exactly this sort of activity, though on a smaller, less obvious scale.
Oh, by the way, I'm not playing victim. I'm one of the lucky ones who got out of the market when I read about Microsoft's option pyramiding scheme, did a little digging, and found out just how widespread the practice was. I'm one of the lucky few who enjoyed the ride up the bubble and missed out on its collapse, so I am not speaking from personal outrage, I am speaking from outrage at what is being done to my fellow man by a priveleged few, and the underlying corruption that is destroying my country in a very real, and very measurable, way.
Microsoft's despicable behavior and the government's effective dismissal of complaints against it, are just one symptom. As are the copyright cartel's efforts to circumvent and fence off the last remaining freedoms enshrined in the bill of rights regarding freedom of expression through extention of copyright law far beyond the bounds envisioned by the founding fathers. Are as any number of other ugly, destructive trends routinely discussed here on slashdot and elsewhere, all of which flourish because of the very corruption and ethical bankrupcy in our highest political offices, which in turn flourishes because of the conditioned apathy and subservience that has come to epitomize the American people, including most of those who do sit in those "ivory towers" you allude to.
Read the news. The Federal Government just made doing what the CEOs of Enron et al did a federal offense, meaning real jail time.
1 101020805-332031,00.html
I do read the news, and the measures which have been taken are laughable and incomplete. Ralph Nader, the guy who finally got the automotive industry to belatedly incorporate basic safety designs into automobiles in the United States decades after they knew better, and chose not to for financial reasons, offers a detailed analysis of just how widely Congress dodged the entire issue, and how profoundly superficial and ineffective the law you cite really is.
In short, its a superficial measure designed to smooth the ruffled feathers of those few who dare, or rather bother, to speak aloud their outrage.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,
You'll have to forgive us if we slack off a bit; after outlasting communism and dealing with a world that alternatly hates us and wants us to be their best friend, we as a counry have earned a little corruption and selfishness.
Or, to put your argument in a more individual light:
"You'll have to forgive me if I slack off a bit; after outlasting my competing coworkers and dealing with an office that alternately hates me and wants to be my best friend, I as a person have earned a little cancer and self-destructiveness."
Corruption isn't some self-indulgence you earn as a result of hard work, it is a cancerous, destructive force that tears a society apart and undermines basic, civil society and the social contract that holds it together, so unless you are arguing that America has earned the destruction it is bringing down upon itself, your argument falls to pieces.
As for the notion of 'needing something to fight against' as a justification for injustice or corruption, so that the next generation has something to occupy their time, I think the absurdity of your words stand upon their own. Indeed, your rhetoric is a perfect example of the kind of conditioning our culture has been subjected to for the last several decades which has resulted in the apathy and submissiveness of our populace which is allowing these sorts of destructive behavior to flourish, virtually unapposed.
If you are considering a purchase of any kind of internet connectivity, wireless or otherwise, from Sprint, I have some advice for you.
Run. Run like the wind and don't look back.
I just had Sprint's 8 Mbit Down/ 1 Mbit up business ADSL installed a month ago. It worked beautifully, gave me 5 usable static IPs, and was a modest $160/month for a two year contract.
Within two weeks of having the service I got an email alluding to a "reorganization" of their DSL service.
Eight days later I got a snail mail telling me the service was being cancelled for "economic" reasons ("we would have held you to your two-year contract as a weak individual, but don't even think of trying to hold us to our end of the bargain, and here's a $400 refund on your $600 bill of shut-up money"). Oh, and we'll give you a service that is one sixth as fast (1.5 Mbit down, 384k up) for $130 month, installation waived, because we're such nice folks. Of course, I can buy the exact same service Sprint is reselling (Covad ADSL) directly from Covad for just $80/month ($50 less per month for the identical product!), so that great deal Sprint is offering isn't so great after all.
When I tried to get clarification by phone from Sprint representatives who apparently knew even less than I, I got as a response "look, half of us our losing their jobs, what do you want?"
I want the service I signed a two year contract to receive and am paying for, and I want to know what the hell is going on.
So, long story short: there is no way in hell I will buy any service, wireless or otherwise, from a company as flakey and unreliable as Sprint has proven themselves to be, and I would encourage anyone else considering any of their services to be extremely skeptical of Sprint's ability to deliver.
... and the life savings of the entire middle class, with hardly a peep of protest from those affected, this sort of anti-consumer protection, or better said, government wink-wink-nudge-nudge "don't get caught doing that again" tactics for allowing this sort of atrocious behavior to slide relatively unaffected and unchanged, again and again, is unlikely itself to change in any measurable way.
At least, not until things become so intolerable that the masses overcome their conditioned apathy and subservience, and actually rise up in anger and demand real accountability and real reform. Unfortunately, by then I suspect things will have gone so far the non-violent reform will be difficult, if not impossible, and I sure don't want to be anywhere near the United States when that time comes.
Every great power in history was brought to its knees, and ultimately destroyed, by its own internal, unchecked, and uncorrected corruption. It is extraordinarilly unlikely that the United States will be any different, or somehow immune to this kind of historical tide, and with every such expose it becomes ever more clear that we in the United States have nearly reached that threshhold already.
I mean, hell, the upper crust just got done pilfering the life savings and retirement of the entire middle class, and yet no signficant reform or change has taken place, and the very people so affected can't be bothered to protest or be caught dead carrying a plackard in a public place demanding change, much less actually get involved in the political process and work for peaceful change. Unless this changes, and soon, this trend will not be corrected until it is far too late.
This despicable behavior with regards to Microsoft is appalling and extreme, but it is only a symptom of a much greater, more fundamental, and much more deeply entrenched malaise that affects our entire political culture, and likely spells the beginning of the end of American society as we know it.
It isn't going to be any foreign enemy, or "terrorists" who bring down our country, it is going to be our own inaction in the face of ever wider, ever more flagrant, and ever more destructive corruption. It saddens me greatly to have lived to see such a day.
Let's say that I've got a fax-modem in my mail server. Does that count? Is it now a "Telephone Fax Machine?"
:-)
If you've got a printer connected to it to print out your faxes it probably qualifies. Almost certainly if it prints those faxes out automatically.
What gets interesting is if it treats a particular email as a fax account and prints said email automatically, especially if the account in question is named 'fax@mycompany.com'.
First, fax machines are definately not a 'commons' in any sense of the word. By printing stuff on my fax machine, or sending spam to my server, they have committed a trespass.
... they are using your equipment and your resources to advertise their products, at your expense. There is nothing whatsoever in the constitution that bars a well crafted law from banning such activity outright, or from providing harsh remedies for those who do violate such a law.
Excellent point. In addition, you are paying the cost for their "speech." Clearly the constitution intended for speakers to provide their own soap box, not be required to be given one at someone else's direct, monetary expense.
Second, there is no possible way to rationally interpret the first amendment as granting the right of trespass. They can send junk email [sic?]; my mailbox belongs to the federal gov't. But my fax machine is mine. [emphesis added]
Was this a typo? Surely you meant the can send you junk postal mail. Your email box belongs to you. It is a file you own (literally, and in several senses of the word if you run UNIX or GNU/Linux), residing on your hard drive, with data that comes across the internet or telephone connection you pay for. It is not, in any way, owned by the government.
Email SPAMMERS are exactly like Fax spammers
Postal mail, on the other hand, is another story, as you correctly point out.
And then there are those ignorant people who stereotype all pro-lifers as violent abortion clinic-bombers, evangelical churches as neo-nazi gay bashers, and white southerns as racists.
Brian Ellenberger
And then there are the insightful Rest of Us who know that any group has diverse members, some good, some bad, but are also aware that none of the Pro Choice people are running around murdering others for their political views or the medicine they practice. While not all anti-abortionists are gun wielding radicals, clearly that group attracts enough such individuals that doctor shootings, bombing, and political websites lauding such atrocities are relatively commonplace, in stark contrast to the civil, non-violent activists on the other side of that particular issue.
Religion breeds intolerance not because of its belief in a God, however erroneous such a belief may be. It breeds intolerance by its very assertion that it has the "one true, straight and narrow way" to God, setting its people apart from the rest of the world. With that sort of foundation, is it really any wonder so many variations on that theme breed incredible levels of intolerance for the beliefs of others, or that those who are to some degree tolerant (at least until their core beliefs are challenged) tend to be moreso as a result of conscious choice, rather than as a natural extention of their belief system?
For NBC, ABC and fox generate revenue (and a hell of a lot of it) based on viewers... in your analogy, linux should be generating lots of revenue since a lot of people have it installed.
And it is. That revinue is distributed amongst its users (in savings, both time and monetary), amongst local independent contractors and consultants (I and severalf friends I know rake in very tidy sums of money, most (in two cases I know of, all) of it directly or indirectly resulting from free software in general and GNU/Linux in particular), as well as retailers of various GNU/Linux distros.
The difference is that those revinues are distributed amongst a large population. In other words thusands earning six figures instead of tens earning eight figures. Harder to track, harder to quantify, but ultimately much more important in generating economic activity and supporting the economy at large.
This gets to the crux of the reform of so-called copyright law that I advocate.
- Eliminate all copy monopolies granted by current copyright law. Scrap it, completely.
- Replace it with a legal framework that encodes current academic citation and anti-plagerism standards
- This means the original artist(s) always get credit for what they create
- This also means any changes or edits by a third party must be clearly labelled as such, and clearly differentiated from the artits' original work
- Give the creating artist a Right of Creation, which essentially amounts to an economic advantage they are granted by law. This is not a monopoly that can exclude others (no clearing the playing field of all other participatns), but an advantage, perhaps in the form of a tax credit, perhaps in the form of a tax on unauthorized copies sold, some or all of which is passed on to the original creator, or what have you (tilting the playing field in favor of the creator).
- The important thing is that, while an artist could designate a publisher as their duly authorized publisher (who thereby shares the tax or other economic advantage granted the artist), they can never sell that right, anymore than they can "sell" the fact that they created the work. This means that if the artist is unsatisfied with their publisher they can find another, and the right to do so can never be sold away, contractually or otherwise.
The details of such approaches very, but the basic idea is sound: replace copyright as we know it with a regime designed to (1) benefit artists and (2) benefit society, by eliminating copy monopolies and replacing it with explicit artistic acknowledgement and economic support.Or perhaps he was simply more knowledgable about history than the average usenet poster/slashdot reader: Fascism wasn't limited to just Germany then, and though it is largely absent from Germany today, it is most definitely not absent from the world now.
I don't care how expensive those old unix systems were (when they were new), replacing them with ANYTHING costs more than simply continuing to use the existing machines that are already owned.
You are ignoring the cost of a service contract, which anyone like Dresdner is going to have for a mission critical system. If Sun Microsystem's service contracts are any indication, the cost could well have exceeded $3,000/node, in which case the savings would have been immediate and very, very real. Replacing 1992 hardware with 1998 hardware and getting a 92x speedup would have been icing on the cake.
It never ceases to amaze me how an 11-year-old implementation of a 30-year-old design is called an "upstart".
For the same reason that a structure based on a 2000 year old design, using 50 year old construction techniques, materials developed anywhere from 10,000 years ago to 20 years ago, and architectural designs that are ten years old, is still called a "new building" when it is built.
For that matter, the hardware all our operating systems run on is based on a 70 year old material sciences, a basic transister design that is 60 years old, and semi-conductor technology that is at least 40 years old.
What if my religion or my spirtual beliefs say that we should share all information?
... just so long as it doesn't get in the way of the entrenched oligarchs collecting and hoarding even more of our hard earned dollars.
That isn't as far fetched as it sounds. Islam believes all knowledge comes from God, and apparently the most respected, leading islamic intellectuals believe that the entire concept of intellectual property is against islam and against God. Not the government appointed lackey in Saudi Arabia, mind you, who will echo whatever values and opinions the government tells him to, but the leadership to whom the rest of the population listens.
Personally, I'm an athiest and find religions of pretty much every bent (Buddhism perhaps excepted) obsolete in the extreme, but this goes to show you that politics can make for strange bedfellows, and that if freedom of speech AND freedom of religion truly are paramount, then Copy Restrictions and Intellectual Property must lose.
Unfortunately, I think the reality is quite different. We can pay lipservice to the constitution, to freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, etc.
Hell, they just got done pilfering the life savings of the entire middle class of this country, and aside from a few sacrificial, symbolic arrests nothing fundamental is being changed or repaired. In any other country, where the populace isn't as well trained and conditioned into submission, this would be the stuff of revolutions. Not here in the US, though...gotta worry about them nasty terrorists instead (who have killed less than 1/10th as many people as common car accidents have within the last year).
As another noted, the JVM is already capable of running multiple processes on Mac OS X. Fix the JVMs for GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, and those obscure, mutually incompatible operating systems from Redmond :-), and let others fix (or replace) the language.
Concentrate on the JVM.
Already Python can be compiled into java bytecode, and if the capability doesn't already exist for Ruby, it will soon. Similar compilers could be created for any number of other languages (scheme, smalltalk, whatever).
Java isn't what is important, it is the write (bytecode) once, run (bytecode) anywhere that is important. Whether that bytecode is generated from Java, Python, Scheme, Ruby, or Joes New Language For His CS210 course, doesn't really matter.
I imagine that the previous poster was thinking of public web pages when he said that.
Of course your clients can control what browsers are used with what configurations in your case.
All of that is likely true.
However, he would be doing his clients a big favor if he avoided using popup() and, for that matter, any of the other features I mentioned in my original post as having been disabled. By doing so he would allow his clients to have all the snazzy features they've requested, but also allow them to have a much more pleasant web browsing experience when viewing public sites.
Since most people likely do both, that would be a huge plus. He could even sell it as a feature, with a little note to his clients: "Use Mozilla, change these settings, and not only will you find your customized website working perfectly, you'll get rid of all those annoying popup windows on other sites that have been driving you nuts."
Have you ever gotten a positive response?
(if any)
You didn't finish reading my comment, did you?
If you had, you would have realized that the answer to your question is a pleasantly surprising "yes."
Why? Because I use mozilla exclusively, and have turned off javascript's ability to
- open unrequested windows
- move or resize existing windows
- raise or lower windows
- hide the status bar
Any site I hit that says something asinine like "best viewed with Internet Explorer gets an email from me explaining why I will never bother to use their site, and (in the vast majority of cases, where I find a competitor that does adhere to standards), why I have gone to their competitor instead despite having found their page first.I keep a template of the email handy, so that only a few seconds are required to make the complaint to both the webmaster AND two others who are as high up in the firm as I can discover in a quick web search.
These sites are few and far between
In any event, there is absolutely no reason for one's web browsing experience to be the kind of popup hell described here