In a casino, legit or mob-run, you still have about a 45-49% chance at winning each individual hand. In the state-run lottery, it's tens of millions to one.
And the comment about the lottery being a "bad at math" tax is so true. Try persuading a lottery ticket buyer that they would be better off not buying a ticket, and you will hear the most vehement and irrational arguments you could imagine. These people are convinced that the small one or two matching number prizes more than pay back their investment, and that one fine day...
Of course it doesn't hurt when the state spends a big overhead of the proceeds to bombard these people with ads saying, "you can't win if you don't play," and, "it could happen to you." Someone should sue the state and spend their settlement dollars on a "the truth" series of ads comparing the odds of winning the lottery to equivalent likelihoods like, "being struck by lightning twice on the same day", "being killed by a meteorite" or, "catching AIDS from television".
There was an earlier article about this here. You will need an LCD controller card, as opposed to your typical graphics card, since most laptop LCDs run off a digital signal. Someone in the earlier thread mentioned that www.sageinc.com sells these cards, but I just checked that site and they only sell to OEMs.
It would be nice if there were a cheap solution. It seems like such a waste to not be able to reuse old active matrix laptop screens.
Future historians will no doubt be fascinated by the "ancient mystery" race of trolls. They developed their own hybrid latin/arabic based alphabet, but often reverted to more primitive picture-based communication. The figurehead of their religion was a deity named Natalie Portman, who they worshipped with sacramental rituals involving hot breakfast cereals. Who these people were, and how they really lived, will sadly remain a mystery.
I think you have a good point. I feel lucky to be have straddled the GUI and pre-GUI eras. ApplesoftBASIC and QBasic aren't very useful today, but they were great for learning. What are the equivalents today? Maybe Javascript is similar, and admittedly more useful, but young computer users today have to go out of their way to get past the GUI and learn how things work. Earlier systems required a higher level of understanding just to get things done.
Henry Ford is generally credited for the assembly line, but it was Eli Whitney who first popularized standard interchangeable parts, about 100 years before Ford. I think Ford's reasons for sticking with the Model T were that he wanted to produce a cheap car that everyone could afford, rather than a better car that only the rich could buy.
Why is the answer to the energy crisis always some pie in the sky technology?
Remember ten years ago when the "Solar Challenge" was held in Australia. What good did that do? California then passed a law requiring automakers to produce Zero Emissions Vehicles if they wanted to also sell regular cars. So the auto industry, and Congress threw a bunch of money at electric cars. I'm not against electric cars, but they just aren't practical until there are better batteries or fuel cells available, and everyone knows that is still years away.
Even if they could solve the technical problems, the energy crisis won't be solved by a handful of environmentalists driving around in ZEV's with about 50hp that cost $30,000.
But if the average standard family sedan with say, 150hp, could be built for $20,000 and powered with a hybrid engine that gets 70mpg, that would really make a difference. People might actually buy those. And from an engineering standpoint, it's a lot easier to accomplish. We could have done this by now if we hadn't been wasting time and money with electric cars.
But no, we've got to go to the f*cking moon to solve the energy crisis. And in the mean time, we're all driving SUV's.
That's assuming Ditzel and co. are willing to sell out. This is a guy who was already rich from his career at Sun. He left because of he believed he could build a better processor, and Sun didn't want to pursue it. So then he gets some of the hottest talent in the universe to sign on, mostly for stock options, and to keep their mouths shut for five years in the valley that loves to talk.
These things tell me that Transmeta is probably not for sale. I think we've only begun to see what can be done with these chips. What happens when Transmeta decides to re-write the code-morphing module to emulate other chipsets besides x86? What happens when Linus writes a kernel that runs natively on the VLIW Crusoe instruction set?
Transmeta's Crusoe is a disruptive technology. Selling out to Intel won't bring these innovations to market, and that seems to be what Ditzel cares about most.
This "grass roots campaign" will only galvanize some of the already-faithful. Microsoft doesn't realize that everyone who might possibly see things from their perspective already does, so the more they argue, the more supporters they stand to lose. If they were smart they would just ignore their legal troubles and continue with the usual marketing propaganda.
There are people with certain personality types who are very impressed with "expert" opinions and credentials, while there are others who won't believe anything said by anyone unless they can understand it intuitively. Most of us probably fit into one of these categories, and know some people (whom we may find annoying) who belong to the other. Any "sensemaking" system needs to recognize the difference.
That's not a fair comparison, because Apache is designed for flexibility much more than speed. IIS is comparatively much simpler. A better test would pit IIS against AOLServer on Linux. I was going to say phhttp, but that wouldn't be fair either.
Maybe if you'd installed Linux for her, instead of aiding and abetting the enemy, she'd never need to re-format or re-install again. As it stands, she'll probably need your assistance again in about six months.
Maybe Red Hat or Corel should launch a new campaign. Something like, "the next time you have to re-install Windows, try Linux"
Windows NT/2000 is better than 9x, but it's still unstable compared to Linux. It's also more expensive, which is a concern for budget-strapped schools. In order to implement an effective NT/2000 solution, they would need to have a few computers running NT/2000 server, which probably costs more than the computers that schools buy. Many schools can't afford to buy computers, so they get donated hardware, which means slower than Pentium-150, 32MB RAM or less. Even if Microsoft donated the software, most of the hardware wouldn't be up to the task.
I don't know for sure, but I'd guess the computers that Bill Gates famously donated for schools and libraries came with Win9x, not NT. Anyone out there know for sure?
Linux would be a far better solution, because it is more flexible, stable, secure, etc. than NT/2000. And it will run on that crappy old hardware that many schools are stuck with. It would really be a great thing to organize an install-fest for public schools.
On a related note, if anti-abortion activists can make the argument that they don't want their tax dollars to fund abortions, I would like to make the argument that I don't want my tax dollars to fund the purchasing of Microsoft software.
I try to explain linux to people using their understanding of DOS. An older non-technical person at work was aghast once when he saw me editing html using a text editor. "What is all that gobbledy-gook?", I think he said. I tried to explain that it's no more complicated than using Wordperfect 5.1, which I know he could use once. Needless to say, he was frightened, and that was just from looking at html.
I think with the improvement of graphics, people have gotten away from how computers work. I also think that it's numbed people's brains. I grew up with Atari, and the first computer I used was a TRS-80 at school, and a friend's Commodore 64. I was always curious about how things worked, and so I took an after-school class in BASIC programming for the TRS-80. I think I was maybe 11 or 12. Anyway, with minimal programming knowledge, I was actually able to hack some of the games like Math-blaster, or whatever it was called, when they crashed. My friend, who had more time to work with his Commodore, was able to program a simple game, which today I would see as trivial, but at the time it wasn't that far removed from the Atari games we played.
I guess my childhood exposure to computers was like the exposure to how cars work that some kids had in the 50's and 60's, when engines were simple enough that you could easily take them apart and fix or upgrade them. Today, you can't replace the carburetor (doesn't have one) or hack the ignition timing on your Toyota Camry. Likewise, you can't program a game that comes anywhere close to the ones you might buy, unless you're an experienced programmer. The result seems to be that kids just don't bother trying either endeavor, at least not as many as once did.
One of my heroes as a child was Matthew Broderick's character in WarGames. It would be cool if there were a movie like that today for this generation of kids.
The only good thing kids have today that I really wish I had (besides the web, I guess) is Lego Mindstorms.
I saw a documentary a few years ago on the rocket-plane projects that preceeded the space missions. Many of the engineers who worked on X-15 thought that it would have been a superior path to space, but that it would have taken a bit longer. It's funny that today we are talking about building a "space plane" because Shuttle missions are just too expensive, and the Shuttle is cheap compared to 60's-era rockets.
By making "the moon in ten years" our goal, rather than following scientific goals, we probably set back our progress towards having a space station that can truely act as a launching pad for more continuous and deeper exploration of space. I often wonder where we would be today if we had not killed the rocket plane projects. Would we have had a "space plane" twenty years ago, instead of the Shuttle? Would we have had a space station in orbit for a few years now? We may never know, but we sure beat those Russians to the moon, didn't we!
I agree. Katz is overboard on this one. Independence Day is about being free from tyranny, which means having a government where you can voice your opinions. The founding fathers would be rolling over in their graves if the sacrifices they made were compared with vandalism when they sacrificed everything to provide legal avenues for political dissent.
Katz may think that the government is corrupt, but you can still generally get the local government to listen, and a well organized grass-roots effort can have a strong effect on local government. The town I grew up in, being a snobby suburb of NYC, would not allow McDonalds, or any fast-food chain to put up a store. I hear they finally allowed a Dunkin Donuts, but they forced the company to abandon their familiar orange and pink color scheme in favor of a more traditional storefront painted hunter green, with "Dunkin Donuts" in large brass letters. I imagine it's the classiest Dunkin Donuts ever. The town has very strong zoning laws, and they don't budge for anyone because the citizens are behind it. This is just one example of how citizens can keep corporate tackiness under control.
It is obvious that Katz has lost whatever grasp he may have ever had about what democratic principles and ideals are about.
I think the really interesting thing about Napster is that it provides a system that allows people to break the law, and yet it is legal. I agree with Boies, and think it should be legal, otherwise we'd be banning a whole bunch of things just because they could be used for illegal purposes.
What makes this interesting, is the precedent it sets for digital cash in the future. When someone comes along with the 'Napster' bank, which allows people to pay eachother digitally with untraceable transactions, like cash, then the tax base begins to erode. The government, rather than being overthrown violently, is starved. Seriously, if people are willing to download illegal copies of music, just because it's almost impossible for them to get caught, would people opt out of paying their taxes for the same reason. They'd all start filing the 1040EZ saying they made $15K, while the rest of their income is hidden by anonymous digital cash transactions. Perhaps the government would have to go to a sales tax, but it would be interesting to see what something like that would do, and Napster sets the precedent. Napster tells us, it would be legal for the system to exist, and people would use it.
The emphasis seems to be on having a single passage of text translated into as many languages as possible. Does anyone here know or care what was written on the original Rosetta Stone? I think it was some Egyptian proclamation, but it really doesn't matter. The point is the languages.
As someone pointed out earlier, the Bible has already been translated, so why reinvent the wheel translating something else.
And what would you suggest anyway? Shakespeare? Back issues of Nature? Genesis, whether you think it's the word of God or not, is an excellent mixture of historical, descriptive, and abstract text, which makes it ideal to show the nuances of the various languages. This may be the only remnant of some languages some day, so it would be a pity if a language couldn't be fully understood because the text chosen was a politically-correct scientific diatribe.
4.0.1 is more significant than a "tiny release". 4.0 was a long-awaited release, but many users have not upgraded because of stability concerns. 4.0.1 is, for most people, more significant than 4.0 was, because it's finally ready for them to use. Once 4.x is stable, I'd agree with you that tiny releases aren't newsworthy.
Add 2001: A Space Odyssey to your list of realistic Sci-Fi films. I was just watching it again this past week. Breathtaking.
I would have started a new thread with this comment, but it's way too late:
Episode IV was great because of the concept and story, Episode VI was great for the story and effects, but it's the character development in Episode V that, IMHO, is the main reason this series has the following that it does. I've been a huge fan since I was three, but the importance of StarWars to me was galvanized in 1980. I believe the main reason ESB is so much better than the others is the director, Irvin Kershner. This man does not get enough credit, probably because most fans don't realize how much control he had over the character scenes, and how he took a much more character-driven approach than Lucas had originally intended.
I was wrong about DTD's. You're right that they only specify the structure. I was thinking of "the promise" including RDF, which is a something the W3C is working on as a document type for semantic data. The last chapter of Tim Berners-Lee's Weaving the Web is about his vision for how this would enable what I described.
I don't know about the technical details of how it will work, but the intent is that the combination of XML documents, XML schemas (which I believe are the equivalent of DTD's, written in XML rather than SGML), and RDF documents will allow the automation of semantic relationship matching without having a central hierarchy or data repository.
As far as the AI required, I'm only slightly informed. I never took an AI class, but my college roomate did. He explained to me how in his class they would feed a logic structure and data into an ai program, and they it could answer questions like true/false or list the set of data that fits this logic criteria. There's nothing very impressive about that, but I don't think it's a stretch for a similar program to make cost/benefit comparisons when you feed it pages which may contain cost and benefit data.
Wouldn't it be pretty simple to build a data structure to relate things like prices. First you need to list all the different words people use to mean price, like {cost, price, payment, value}. Ok, so the list is incomplete, so if a search engine could find a similar list with a set like {payment, price, remittance, fee, charge}, then th program can assume the combined set is all talking about the same thing. So it will look at (price:number) and (fee:number) in the same way. Then you do the same for all the various names and symbols for currency, so the program can get conversion multipliers off a known financial database or web site, and then convert all the currency values to make a comparison. Take it further...
I just don't think it's hollywood sci-fi for an AI program to sort (car costs $1000) below (automobile price 20000 DM), or to sort out (mileage: 100k miles) from (odometer reads 220km). It won't be perfect, but it would be more useful than current search engines which only match keywords.
We need to convince people of the importance of reducing our dependence on M$, just like reducing our dependence on foreign oil.
The way people seem to be concerned about Microsoft like it's a public entity serving humanity is ridiculous. I recently read some stuff on the normally libertarian Cato.org site, saying essentially that since MS "invented" windows so they should be able to leverage it however they want. If competitors don't like the "monopoly" they should just stop being lazy and "invent" their own OS.
Even Rush Limbaugh is defending M$, saying the government is trying to punish success, and that the DOJ should show some concern for how attacking M$ will "hurt the economy".
Sometimes I just can't believe the extent to which people have bought-in to Bill Gates' viewpoint. It's mindshare over matter.
I think the promise of XML is that there will some day be more intelligent programs that can read the "field descriptions", meta-data, or whatever you want to call it, from the DTD. It's a formal way to structure identifiers for data.
I agree that as it's used today (for data exchange, I'm not talking about XHTML and the more graphical applications) it's no better than an agreed-upon text or binary format. What XML would allow, if people used it properly, is for future programs to make sense of data without having an agreed-upon format. So, even if there are five or ten or a thousand different formats for "I've got something for sale, any takers?" intelligent agents can decipher all of them and give you meaningful search results to questions like, "show me the five (cheapest/closest-match/newest/closest-in-location ) items for sale that meet my criteria"
I'll rejoice when/if this happens, but in the mean time I'll have to search ebay, yahoo auctions, aol auctions, amazon auctions, the local classifies, etc, and manually compare them. (Sigh...)
I always thought the mechanism of evolution relied on the process of natural selection, and I see no evidence that natural selection for humans exists at all in civilized society. Sure, maybe a hundred years ago, but today those most able to compete seem to have the fewest offspring. Our gene pool is getting worse, not better.
Maybe you have a point about the engineering, though. It'll take genetic manipulation, like in the film Gattaca to improve the gene pool. But that ain't "natural".
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And the comment about the lottery being a "bad at math" tax is so true. Try persuading a lottery ticket buyer that they would be better off not buying a ticket, and you will hear the most vehement and irrational arguments you could imagine. These people are convinced that the small one or two matching number prizes more than pay back their investment, and that one fine day...
Of course it doesn't hurt when the state spends a big overhead of the proceeds to bombard these people with ads saying, "you can't win if you don't play," and, "it could happen to you." Someone should sue the state and spend their settlement dollars on a "the truth" series of ads comparing the odds of winning the lottery to equivalent likelihoods like, "being struck by lightning twice on the same day", "being killed by a meteorite" or, "catching AIDS from television".
It would be nice if there were a cheap solution. It seems like such a waste to not be able to reuse old active matrix laptop screens.
This brings to mind a quote from that film: "Next time keep your lashes on your lids where they belong!" Great film. Scary that it's truer every day.
Future historians will no doubt be fascinated by the "ancient mystery" race of trolls. They developed their own hybrid latin/arabic based alphabet, but often reverted to more primitive picture-based communication. The figurehead of their religion was a deity named Natalie Portman, who they worshipped with sacramental rituals involving hot breakfast cereals. Who these people were, and how they really lived, will sadly remain a mystery.
I think you have a good point. I feel lucky to be have straddled the GUI and pre-GUI eras. ApplesoftBASIC and QBasic aren't very useful today, but they were great for learning. What are the equivalents today? Maybe Javascript is similar, and admittedly more useful, but young computer users today have to go out of their way to get past the GUI and learn how things work. Earlier systems required a higher level of understanding just to get things done.
Henry Ford is generally credited for the assembly line, but it was Eli Whitney who first popularized standard interchangeable parts, about 100 years before Ford. I think Ford's reasons for sticking with the Model T were that he wanted to produce a cheap car that everyone could afford, rather than a better car that only the rich could buy.
Remember ten years ago when the "Solar Challenge" was held in Australia. What good did that do? California then passed a law requiring automakers to produce Zero Emissions Vehicles if they wanted to also sell regular cars. So the auto industry, and Congress threw a bunch of money at electric cars. I'm not against electric cars, but they just aren't practical until there are better batteries or fuel cells available, and everyone knows that is still years away.
Even if they could solve the technical problems, the energy crisis won't be solved by a handful of environmentalists driving around in ZEV's with about 50hp that cost $30,000.
But if the average standard family sedan with say, 150hp, could be built for $20,000 and powered with a hybrid engine that gets 70mpg, that would really make a difference. People might actually buy those. And from an engineering standpoint, it's a lot easier to accomplish. We could have done this by now if we hadn't been wasting time and money with electric cars.
But no, we've got to go to the f*cking moon to solve the energy crisis. And in the mean time, we're all driving SUV's.
These things tell me that Transmeta is probably not for sale. I think we've only begun to see what can be done with these chips. What happens when Transmeta decides to re-write the code-morphing module to emulate other chipsets besides x86? What happens when Linus writes a kernel that runs natively on the VLIW Crusoe instruction set?
Transmeta's Crusoe is a disruptive technology. Selling out to Intel won't bring these innovations to market, and that seems to be what Ditzel cares about most.
This "grass roots campaign" will only galvanize some of the already-faithful. Microsoft doesn't realize that everyone who might possibly see things from their perspective already does, so the more they argue, the more supporters they stand to lose. If they were smart they would just ignore their legal troubles and continue with the usual marketing propaganda.
There are people with certain personality types who are very impressed with "expert" opinions and credentials, while there are others who won't believe anything said by anyone unless they can understand it intuitively. Most of us probably fit into one of these categories, and know some people (whom we may find annoying) who belong to the other. Any "sensemaking" system needs to recognize the difference.
That's not a fair comparison, because Apache is designed for flexibility much more than speed. IIS is comparatively much simpler. A better test would pit IIS against AOLServer on Linux. I was going to say phhttp, but that wouldn't be fair either.
Maybe Red Hat or Corel should launch a new campaign. Something like, "the next time you have to re-install Windows, try Linux"
I don't know for sure, but I'd guess the computers that Bill Gates famously donated for schools and libraries came with Win9x, not NT. Anyone out there know for sure?
Linux would be a far better solution, because it is more flexible, stable, secure, etc. than NT/2000. And it will run on that crappy old hardware that many schools are stuck with. It would really be a great thing to organize an install-fest for public schools.
On a related note, if anti-abortion activists can make the argument that they don't want their tax dollars to fund abortions, I would like to make the argument that I don't want my tax dollars to fund the purchasing of Microsoft software.
I think with the improvement of graphics, people have gotten away from how computers work. I also think that it's numbed people's brains. I grew up with Atari, and the first computer I used was a TRS-80 at school, and a friend's Commodore 64. I was always curious about how things worked, and so I took an after-school class in BASIC programming for the TRS-80. I think I was maybe 11 or 12. Anyway, with minimal programming knowledge, I was actually able to hack some of the games like Math-blaster, or whatever it was called, when they crashed. My friend, who had more time to work with his Commodore, was able to program a simple game, which today I would see as trivial, but at the time it wasn't that far removed from the Atari games we played.
I guess my childhood exposure to computers was like the exposure to how cars work that some kids had in the 50's and 60's, when engines were simple enough that you could easily take them apart and fix or upgrade them. Today, you can't replace the carburetor (doesn't have one) or hack the ignition timing on your Toyota Camry. Likewise, you can't program a game that comes anywhere close to the ones you might buy, unless you're an experienced programmer. The result seems to be that kids just don't bother trying either endeavor, at least not as many as once did.
One of my heroes as a child was Matthew Broderick's character in WarGames. It would be cool if there were a movie like that today for this generation of kids.
The only good thing kids have today that I really wish I had (besides the web, I guess) is Lego Mindstorms.
By making "the moon in ten years" our goal, rather than following scientific goals, we probably set back our progress towards having a space station that can truely act as a launching pad for more continuous and deeper exploration of space. I often wonder where we would be today if we had not killed the rocket plane projects. Would we have had a "space plane" twenty years ago, instead of the Shuttle? Would we have had a space station in orbit for a few years now? We may never know, but we sure beat those Russians to the moon, didn't we!
Katz may think that the government is corrupt, but you can still generally get the local government to listen, and a well organized grass-roots effort can have a strong effect on local government. The town I grew up in, being a snobby suburb of NYC, would not allow McDonalds, or any fast-food chain to put up a store. I hear they finally allowed a Dunkin Donuts, but they forced the company to abandon their familiar orange and pink color scheme in favor of a more traditional storefront painted hunter green, with "Dunkin Donuts" in large brass letters. I imagine it's the classiest Dunkin Donuts ever. The town has very strong zoning laws, and they don't budge for anyone because the citizens are behind it. This is just one example of how citizens can keep corporate tackiness under control.
It is obvious that Katz has lost whatever grasp he may have ever had about what democratic principles and ideals are about.
What makes this interesting, is the precedent it sets for digital cash in the future. When someone comes along with the 'Napster' bank, which allows people to pay eachother digitally with untraceable transactions, like cash, then the tax base begins to erode. The government, rather than being overthrown violently, is starved. Seriously, if people are willing to download illegal copies of music, just because it's almost impossible for them to get caught, would people opt out of paying their taxes for the same reason. They'd all start filing the 1040EZ saying they made $15K, while the rest of their income is hidden by anonymous digital cash transactions. Perhaps the government would have to go to a sales tax, but it would be interesting to see what something like that would do, and Napster sets the precedent. Napster tells us, it would be legal for the system to exist, and people would use it.
As someone pointed out earlier, the Bible has already been translated, so why reinvent the wheel translating something else.
And what would you suggest anyway? Shakespeare? Back issues of Nature? Genesis, whether you think it's the word of God or not, is an excellent mixture of historical, descriptive, and abstract text, which makes it ideal to show the nuances of the various languages. This may be the only remnant of some languages some day, so it would be a pity if a language couldn't be fully understood because the text chosen was a politically-correct scientific diatribe.
echo $SUBJ It'll be anarchy!
4.0.1 is more significant than a "tiny release". 4.0 was a long-awaited release, but many users have not upgraded because of stability concerns. 4.0.1 is, for most people, more significant than 4.0 was, because it's finally ready for them to use. Once 4.x is stable, I'd agree with you that tiny releases aren't newsworthy.
I would have started a new thread with this comment, but it's way too late:
Episode IV was great because of the concept and story, Episode VI was great for the story and effects, but it's the character development in Episode V that, IMHO, is the main reason this series has the following that it does. I've been a huge fan since I was three, but the importance of StarWars to me was galvanized in 1980. I believe the main reason ESB is so much better than the others is the director, Irvin Kershner. This man does not get enough credit, probably because most fans don't realize how much control he had over the character scenes, and how he took a much more character-driven approach than Lucas had originally intended.
I don't know about the technical details of how it will work, but the intent is that the combination of XML documents, XML schemas (which I believe are the equivalent of DTD's, written in XML rather than SGML), and RDF documents will allow the automation of semantic relationship matching without having a central hierarchy or data repository.
As far as the AI required, I'm only slightly informed. I never took an AI class, but my college roomate did. He explained to me how in his class they would feed a logic structure and data into an ai program, and they it could answer questions like true/false or list the set of data that fits this logic criteria. There's nothing very impressive about that, but I don't think it's a stretch for a similar program to make cost/benefit comparisons when you feed it pages which may contain cost and benefit data.
Wouldn't it be pretty simple to build a data structure to relate things like prices. First you need to list all the different words people use to mean price, like {cost, price, payment, value}. Ok, so the list is incomplete, so if a search engine could find a similar list with a set like {payment, price, remittance, fee, charge}, then th program can assume the combined set is all talking about the same thing. So it will look at (price:number) and (fee:number) in the same way. Then you do the same for all the various names and symbols for currency, so the program can get conversion multipliers off a known financial database or web site, and then convert all the currency values to make a comparison. Take it further...
I just don't think it's hollywood sci-fi for an AI program to sort (car costs $1000) below (automobile price 20000 DM), or to sort out (mileage: 100k miles) from (odometer reads 220km). It won't be perfect, but it would be more useful than current search engines which only match keywords.
The way people seem to be concerned about Microsoft like it's a public entity serving humanity is ridiculous. I recently read some stuff on the normally libertarian Cato.org site, saying essentially that since MS "invented" windows so they should be able to leverage it however they want. If competitors don't like the "monopoly" they should just stop being lazy and "invent" their own OS.
Even Rush Limbaugh is defending M$, saying the government is trying to punish success, and that the DOJ should show some concern for how attacking M$ will "hurt the economy".
Sometimes I just can't believe the extent to which people have bought-in to Bill Gates' viewpoint. It's mindshare over matter.
I agree that as it's used today (for data exchange, I'm not talking about XHTML and the more graphical applications) it's no better than an agreed-upon text or binary format. What XML would allow, if people used it properly, is for future programs to make sense of data without having an agreed-upon format. So, even if there are five or ten or a thousand different formats for "I've got something for sale, any takers?" intelligent agents can decipher all of them and give you meaningful search results to questions like, "show me the five (cheapest/closest-match/newest/closest-in-location ) items for sale that meet my criteria"
I'll rejoice when/if this happens, but in the mean time I'll have to search ebay, yahoo auctions, aol auctions, amazon auctions, the local classifies, etc, and manually compare them. (Sigh...)
I always thought the mechanism of evolution relied on the process of natural selection, and I see no evidence that natural selection for humans exists at all in civilized society. Sure, maybe a hundred years ago, but today those most able to compete seem to have the fewest offspring. Our gene pool is getting worse, not better.
Maybe you have a point about the engineering, though. It'll take genetic manipulation, like in the film Gattaca to improve the gene pool. But that ain't "natural".