The problem with journalism is that journalists tend to report on so many different topics, they often don't really understand them. It's like if a programmer was given a totally different assignment every day. Even the best one couldn't do a good job because it would take weeks for them to understand how things work and all the terminology.
Ideally, instead of relatively few full time journalists, they should have many part time journalists who work full time in the industry they report on. The quality of the writing might suffer a bit, but it would be far more accurate.
Fortunately, we are seeing the rise of blogs where there are many people who know what they are talking about.
It is probably not the result of piracy but the result of the rising Canadian dollar (or the falling US dollar), meaning that the Canadian dollar is nearly at par with the US dollar, so people expect the prices to be nearly the same.
I wasn't trying to refute his claim, I was trying to point out the irony that he seems to be boasting that it took two Republican presidents to clean up the mess, when the only reason there where two Republican presidents during that period was because of the Republican's own huge mess.
They're doing the same thing with Holmes on Homes, on HGTV. Personally, I can't stand it, but I'm one of those guys who always waits for the extended edition of a film to be released before buying it.
Are you sure you wheren't watching reruns of the first couple seasons of Holmes on Homes when the show was only half an hour long?
more needed to be done by the web community in general to encourage people to use the internet to 'solve problems' rather than simply abuse politicians or make 'incommensurate' demands on them.
I had a few ideas about that. I put together a few ideas for Internet based direct democracy. It is a system I call DDD. Hopefully in the next few months I'll be able to get started on creating a prototype.
"In a world that is in chaos politically, socially and environmentally, how can the human race sustain another 100 years?"
The world is not in chaos politically, socially or environmentally. All those areas have been improving in the last 100 years. It may seem that it is in chaos because the media has been getting better at reporting the chaos that is still around.
Politically, before World War II, there was a major war every generation. The Iraq war or Vietnam doesn't count as a major war.
Socially, democracy has expanded dramatically as education has improved.
Environmentally, acid rain and the hole in the ozone layer has been dealt with. Polluted land is being cleaned up (I live on land that was once a industrial site). Species are recovering. The same will be applied to 3rd world counties in the next 100 years. I'm sure that CO2 emissions will be reduced once we start running out and technology catches up, just as home heating moved from coal to oil to natural gas.
We are pretty much set until everyone has enough education that they stop reproducing enough. Hopefully we will achieve immortality by then, so it won't matter.
"And if the major Linux players go ahead and support DRM? Then other Linux distributors will come along with their DRM-less versions and scoop up market sahre, and users will see the movies and listen to the music they want to anyway using pirated versions of stuff. Let's not forget, what a coder creates, another coder can hack. No amount of DRM is going to keep enterprising coders from breaking it and freeing the content. The DRM camp is, as usual, kidding themselves."
A DRM-less version will have no advantage over a DRM version of Linux, or Windows for that matter. Having DRM doesn't prevent you from doing anything you could have done before. It just means that DRMed movies and music will be supported that won't be on a DRM-less OS. Both will continue to play non-DRM content, including content which has been cracked.
Final Fantasy XI for the PlayStation 2 runs entirely off the hard drive. You don't even need the game DVD inserted to play. Patches are downloaded from the Internet.
That's capitalism for you. There is no financial incentive to make drugs for people with no money, and it more profitable to treat symptoms then cure diseases.
Try Final Fantasy XI. The whole game is designed around cooperation, and there is very little you can do solo.
I've read that people tend to be on average less selfish in FFXI then in WOW. It has a good selections of classes and the freedom to switch between them.
While not a smash hit like WOW, it has been quite successful and will be around for a long time.
You say, "software they use". The question is are the users the web site administrator or the web site visitors. I think the argument could be made the users are the web site visitors, so they should have access to the code. They are operating the program, just that they are using a longer wire then your keyboard wire.
The problem with making this change it that it would change the GPL from a copyright licence, to an End-User Lincence which may have serious problems with enforcement.
It might be worth doing anyway, because even if it fails as an End-User Lincence, we won't be any worse off then we where before.
For applications that you are only going to uses a few times a month or less, like applications for home use, having a mouse based interface is okay.
For applications, like these bank teller application, where the uses will be using it as thier full time job, keyboard shortcuts are a must. They even make keyboard with extra keys design for heavy use.
The application developers who created it and the people at the bank who approved it should be fired.
I think we should be more opimistic about the singularity. An importing thing to consider is that after the singularity humans will become a lot less valuable. This means it wouldn't be worse the effort required to control them, because they wouldn't be needed. It wouldn't even be worth the effort to keep them from getting too powerful, because with near unlimited resources, letting them become powerful would do little to limit your power.
In the capitalist society, you can't "take" labor from someone. You buy it. In the socialist society, however, labor IS taken from people at the end of a gun barrel, forcing the more productive to work for the less productive.
While technically true, the fact is almost everyone is forced, on pain of poverty, to give their labour to a capitalist in exchange for survival. In essence labour must be given by the more productive to the less productive (the less productive being the investors who fritter away their time trying to get more money and power)
You're also very mixed up about that whole "most efficient manner" deal. Taking from the productive to hand out to the unproductive is very inefficient. Oh, and respect doesn't put food on the table.
There is nothing inherently inefficient about "taking from the productive to hand out to the unproductive". The problem is the lack of motivation for the productive ones. Respect can go a long way to motivate people to produce food. There are lots of ways to modivate people without taking things away from others.
I believe that we have the technology so that we could maintain a comfortable standard of living using only the people who are willing to work, if it where not for the wasted effort lost to competition, consumerism, finances, marketing, business law, recessions, commuting, etc... that capitalism requires.
Capitalism = Corrupt individuals use the corporate power of capital to take labour from the hard-working to bribe those who keep them in power Socialism = Individuals acting together to serve the needs of the community at large in the most effecient manner, and the greatest contributors to society reap the greatest rewards (ie respect).
You're just swapping one set of problems for another. If you are growing food in the lab, you now have to deal with contamination, you have to use aseptic procedures, disposable equipment, chemical sterlization agents etc. Unless what you really want to sell is a huge E. Coli or S. aureus or fungal colony...but anyone can do THAT...who wants to eat it tho? Ewww.
Dealing with the waste that would be generated by the lab would be a problem, but since it is contained it is more easily delt with, rather then having the waste plopping out on a field.
Seeing as they are already growing meat they have a handle on the E. Coli, even without the animal's immune system. In convential farming the biggest problem is the feces contaminating the meat, which would not be a factor in the lab.
The mere fact that humans exist contaminates the environment, no matter what we do. Our bodies are highly organized at the expense of our environment. It's the law of entropy, really - the creation of order has to be balanced somewhere in a universe whose nature tends to disorder over time.
Actually farms are would be far more ordered then the natural environment it replaces.
There are substantial environment benefits to making meat and other foods in the lab. Farming causes more environment distruction then any other industry. While some industries pollute the land, the damage can be reduced with better technology.
Farming converts vast tracts onto a monoculture completely replacing the natural environment. North America used to have vast amounts of grasslands and millions of Bison. Now the whole area is covered with farms and people are only dimly aware that there was ever anything else there before.
Most species are made extinct by habitat distruction and most habitat distruction is mostly caused by farming.
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I'm admitted that we would sacrifice writing quality somewhat. As long as it is readable, it should be fine.
However, a lot less research and thinking would be required if the journalist already understood what they where talking about.
The problem with journalism is that journalists tend to report on so many different topics, they often don't really understand them. It's like if a programmer was given a totally different assignment every day. Even the best one couldn't do a good job because it would take weeks for them to understand how things work and all the terminology.
Ideally, instead of relatively few full time journalists, they should have many part time journalists who work full time in the industry they report on. The quality of the writing might suffer a bit, but it would be far more accurate.
Fortunately, we are seeing the rise of blogs where there are many people who know what they are talking about.
Which side of the Atlantic would that be?
It is probably not the result of piracy but the result of the rising Canadian dollar (or the falling US dollar), meaning that the Canadian dollar is nearly at par with the US dollar, so people expect the prices to be nearly the same.
I wasn't trying to refute his claim, I was trying to point out the irony that he seems to be boasting that it took two Republican presidents to clean up the mess, when the only reason there where two Republican presidents during that period was because of the Republican's own huge mess.
"it took two Republican presidents: Nixon and Ford, to clean up the decades-old mess started and maintained by the democrats."
You talk as if Nixon resigned because from the exhaustion of cleaning up the Democrat's mess.
They're doing the same thing with Holmes on Homes, on HGTV. Personally, I can't stand it, but I'm one of those guys who always waits for the extended edition of a film to be released before buying it.
Are you sure you wheren't watching reruns of the first couple seasons of Holmes on Homes when the show was only half an hour long?
more needed to be done by the web community in general to encourage people to use the internet to 'solve problems' rather than simply abuse politicians or make 'incommensurate' demands on them.
I had a few ideas about that. I put together a few ideas for Internet based direct democracy. It is a system I call DDD. Hopefully in the next few months I'll be able to get started on creating a prototype.
You got the fact right, but missed the meaning. If they can make that much money without Vista, why bother spending all the money to develop it?
"In a world that is in chaos politically, socially and environmentally, how can the human race sustain another 100 years?"
The world is not in chaos politically, socially or environmentally. All those areas have been improving in the last 100 years. It may seem that it is in chaos because the media has been getting better at reporting the chaos that is still around.
Politically, before World War II, there was a major war every generation. The Iraq war or Vietnam doesn't count as a major war.
Socially, democracy has expanded dramatically as education has improved.
Environmentally, acid rain and the hole in the ozone layer has been dealt with. Polluted land is being cleaned up (I live on land that was once a industrial site). Species are recovering. The same will be applied to 3rd world counties in the next 100 years. I'm sure that CO2 emissions will be reduced once we start running out and technology catches up, just as home heating moved from coal to oil to natural gas.
We are pretty much set until everyone has enough education that they stop reproducing enough. Hopefully we will achieve immortality by then, so it won't matter.
How many of those top thousand sites consist of user created content, like groups.yahoo.com and www.blogger.com
Maybe the governement is forcing them to say that.
Or, more likely, they knew it was illegal and the government couldn't force them to do it, but they did it anyway.
"And if the major Linux players go ahead and support DRM? Then other Linux distributors will come along with their DRM-less versions and scoop up market sahre, and users will see the movies and listen to the music they want to anyway using pirated versions of stuff. Let's not forget, what a coder creates, another coder can hack. No amount of DRM is going to keep enterprising coders from breaking it and freeing the content. The DRM camp is, as usual, kidding themselves."
A DRM-less version will have no advantage over a DRM version of Linux, or Windows for that matter. Having DRM doesn't prevent you from doing anything you could have done before. It just means that DRMed movies and music will be supported that won't be on a DRM-less OS. Both will continue to play non-DRM content, including content which has been cracked.
Final Fantasy XI for the PlayStation 2 runs entirely off the hard drive. You don't even need the game DVD inserted to play. Patches are downloaded from the Internet.
The 360 version will likely work the same way.
That's capitalism for you. There is no financial incentive to make drugs for people with no money, and it more profitable to treat symptoms then cure diseases.
The whole industry needs to be notionalized.
The real question is, could it run OS/2 Warp, PowerPC Edition?
Try Final Fantasy XI. The whole game is designed around cooperation, and there is very little you can do solo.
I've read that people tend to be on average less selfish in FFXI then in WOW. It has a good selections of classes and the freedom to switch between them.
While not a smash hit like WOW, it has been quite successful and will be around for a long time.
You say, "software they use". The question is are the users the web site administrator or the web site visitors. I think the argument could be made the users are the web site visitors, so they should have access to the code. They are operating the program, just that they are using a longer wire then your keyboard wire.
The problem with making this change it that it would change the GPL from a copyright licence, to an End-User Lincence which may have serious problems with enforcement.
It might be worth doing anyway, because even if it fails as an End-User Lincence, we won't be any worse off then we where before.
For applications that you are only going to uses a few times a month or less, like applications for home use, having a mouse based interface is okay.
For applications, like these bank teller application, where the uses will be using it as thier full time job, keyboard shortcuts are a must. They even make keyboard with extra keys design for heavy use.
The application developers who created it and the people at the bank who approved it should be fired.
I think we should be more opimistic about the singularity. An importing thing to consider is that after the singularity humans will become a lot less valuable. This means it wouldn't be worse the effort required to control them, because they wouldn't be needed. It wouldn't even be worth the effort to keep them from getting too powerful, because with near unlimited resources, letting them become powerful would do little to limit your power.
In the capitalist society, you can't "take" labor from someone. You buy it. In the socialist society, however, labor IS taken from people at the end of a gun barrel, forcing the more productive to work for the less productive.
While technically true, the fact is almost everyone is forced, on pain of poverty, to give their labour to a capitalist in exchange for survival. In essence labour must be given by the more productive to the less productive (the less productive being the investors who fritter away their time trying to get more money and power)
You're also very mixed up about that whole "most efficient manner" deal. Taking from the productive to hand out to the unproductive is very inefficient. Oh, and respect doesn't put food on the table.
There is nothing inherently inefficient about "taking from the productive to hand out to the unproductive". The problem is the lack of motivation for the productive ones. Respect can go a long way to motivate people to produce food. There are lots of ways to modivate people without taking things away from others.
I believe that we have the technology so that we could maintain a comfortable standard of living using only the people who are willing to work, if it where not for the wasted effort lost to competition, consumerism, finances, marketing, business law, recessions, commuting, etc... that capitalism requires.
I think you got it mixed up
Capitalism = Corrupt individuals use the corporate power of capital to take labour from the hard-working to bribe those who keep them in power
Socialism = Individuals acting together to serve the needs of the community at large in the most effecient manner, and the greatest contributors to society reap the greatest rewards (ie respect).
You're just swapping one set of problems for another. If you are growing food in the lab, you now have to deal with contamination, you have to use aseptic procedures, disposable equipment, chemical sterlization agents etc. Unless what you really want to sell is a huge E. Coli or S. aureus or fungal colony...but anyone can do THAT...who wants to eat it tho? Ewww.
Dealing with the waste that would be generated by the lab would be a problem, but since it is contained it is more easily delt with, rather then having the waste plopping out on a field.
Seeing as they are already growing meat they have a handle on the E. Coli, even without the animal's immune system. In convential farming the biggest problem is the feces contaminating the meat, which would not be a factor in the lab.
The mere fact that humans exist contaminates the environment, no matter what we do. Our bodies are highly organized at the expense of our environment. It's the law of entropy, really - the creation of order has to be balanced somewhere in a universe whose nature tends to disorder over time.
Actually farms are would be far more ordered then the natural environment it replaces.
There are substantial environment benefits to making meat and other foods in the lab. Farming causes more environment distruction then any other industry. While some industries pollute the land, the damage can be reduced with better technology.
Farming converts vast tracts onto a monoculture completely replacing the natural environment. North America used to have vast amounts of grasslands and millions of Bison. Now the whole area is covered with farms and people are only dimly aware that there was ever anything else there before.
Most species are made extinct by habitat distruction and most habitat distruction is mostly caused by farming.
You now have a screensaver which doesn't exit on mouse movements or key presses :-) (You can exit Drivey by pressing ESC).
Not only is it a cool screen saver, it's secure too.