There may be others around, but no-one can touch these for reliability, scalability and vendor support - the three key factors for serious enterprise infrastructure. If you already have existing code written for IBM, Oracle or MS platforms, then so much the better, I believe AQ and MSMQ are pretty much bundled with the platform anyway. Still, IBM do dominate the market, their MQSeries is used by very serious people (banks, airlines, etc) and it's very mature.
If you think about it, the romans had everything they needed to build steam locomotives. They had advanced road building, knowledge of steam dynamics, the ability to forge pressure vessels and an unrivaled industrial base. What they lacked was vision and the will to do anything that might seem impractical.
There is a fascinating account of this sort of thing in Against The Gods. The problem was mainly cultural; ancient societies believed that the future was under the control of the gods, therefore there was little an individual could practically do to offset risk for their enterprise. If a merchant lost a single shipment, for example, that could be enough to ruin him, so risks taken were very small, and therefore progress was slow. No one would dare to invest in risky business ventures.
Along came barbarian Europeans, interested in probability theory and statistical analysis of historical data as a means to cheat at cards. From that, we got insurance, actuarial tables, financial derivatives, venture capital and a whole range of other mathematical constructs.
Even if the ancient Romans had had the math, they wouldn't have done much with it until their culture could have accepted the notion of risk in the modern sense. And the Greeks wouldn't either, for different cultural reasons; for them theoretical research was a pastime for the nobles, but practical research was frowned upon as being only fit for slaves, who didn't have the education to make anything of it.
If these two ancient cultures had been a little more pragmatic, the world would be radically different today.
RMS gets all his bills paid by MIT's AI lab. He doesn't make his living from open source in any way, shape or form.
Look at Redhat or any linux distro compony.
How many of those are GAAP profitable? How many aren't 0wned by their VCs?
Basicly, the more mission critical the software, the easier it is to make incomse based on consulting and support.
About the closest anyone's come to this was Cygnus and their commercial support of GCC for various embedded platforms. But even they aren't independent any more, remember? Unless you count contractors who administer sendmail for a living, that doesn't count either.
The only way to make money producing software unless you are providing shrinkwrapped packages is by doing bespoke development. The only people who pay for bespoke development are the ones who can get a competitive advantage from it, and they aren't going to want it to be available to their rivals.
Now, don't get me wrong, open source works for a bunch of stuff, but it's all commodity stuff. You can make a living as a sysadmin on a wholly open source OS, of course, but I don't think you can writing open source software. (Alan Cox doesn't count until Red Hat are sustainably GAAP profitable).
Compared to around £50 (c.$75) a week in the UK [dss.gov.uk] (with higher cost of living in London than in most US cities), this sounds great.
You say that, but in Virginia at least, you can't draw more unemployment than you've paid into the system. In the UK, even if you haven't contributed a penny in taxes, the taxpayer foots the bill for your dole - forever. There should be a law like this in the UK, or at least a maximum time that you can draw unemployment for before you get cut off. The system as it is is far too open to abuse - which is why the welfare state alone costs over 1/3 of the tax paid.
I thought SGI pretty much owned the UNIX workstation market.
SGI sell into a niche, which they own, and that's graphics, whether for entertainment or scientific visualization (they're big in pharma, for example). Sun dominate finance and engineering (CAD, FEA and so forth). Plus Sun are popular with embedded developers (firmware for laser printers, for example) which is a huge market.
The only times I've seen HP workstations is where they were being used specifically to develop software for HP servers.
The problem is that many of these students simply take their knowledge (often paid for by The State) and move to the US, Canada, Europe, etc. It can literally kill a country when you have 95% of your educated people trying to emmigrate to the US.
That's the problem, see. You can't have a well-rounded, liberal education and still want to live in a religious oligarchy like Pakistan. If they really do want an education, prosperous middle class, the first thing to do is to establish a secular democracy. Unfortunately, the instant you do that, the oligarchy will get voted back in by the huge swathes of the population who don't want a Western-style education, and bitterly resent anyone who does.
Ultimately, the West benefits from both the export of highly educated technical professionals and the export of mass-produced consumer commodities. Remember that cheap labor isn't exploitation, it's arbitrage, and the alternative is no real money going into their economies at all. So we take in the educated ones, let them steep in our culture for a while, and maybe someday they'll go back and make their homelands more like ours. And if they don't, well, it's not the Western way to coerce individuals if it can be avoided.
Before you give them anything, have them sign an agreement that they will destroy any material they receive from you in 45 days. If you find they are using your information after 45 days, you can take them to court and show the court their signatures. IANAL so I don't know if this would work very well or not, but it's an idea.
In banking, there is the concept of the "data room". Before M&A activity, the target would place all possibly relevant data to the merger (accounts, contracts, confirmations of regulatory compliance, etc) in a room. The bankers advising the buyer are allowed unlimited access to the room for a period of days (or weeks). You can look at anything, you can take notes, but you cannot photocopy and you cannot take anything outside the room.
If later on there is an issue, and it was documented in the data room, and the bankers didn't spot it, then any problems are for the buyer and the bank to resolve - the bank may well be in deep trouble for negligence. If the problem is detected in the data room, the bankers will advise the buyer to lower the price (for example, if there are regulatory risks, or liabilities).
If there is a problem, and it is not documented in the data room (or cannot be derived from data in the room) or public sources (say, newspaper reports) then the seller is in a whole world of trouble, as the buyer and the bank will be after their blood.
By the way, do "cappers" remove the commercials when they are digitizing it? I'm gonna have to check into this...
You could "check into this" by reading the article, which says it takes about 5 minutes to strip out the ads, and an hour to compress the file suitable for distribution.
Office Politics: Occurs when a portion of a company, be it a division, team, or single individual, competes actively against another portion of the same company instead of working for the good of the company.
You're assuming that there is concensus on what's best for the company, and that there are people actively and deliberately working against it. That's simply not true in the real world. Politics happens because some people believe - rightly or wrongly - that their ideas or techniques are better than the ideas and techniques presently being used. Oftentimes, the only way to find out for sure is to do it one way, and see what the result is in 6 months or 2 years or 5 years. Since companies can't do that (and expect to survive), people argue, and that's what politics is.
There is an attitude amongst self-proclaimed "geeks" than anyone who isn't a "geek" is automatically stupid. Let me give you a clue: one good manager is worth more to a company than 10 programmers that only know code and not business.
What I'd like to know is how easy it is to insert my own random data into that playlist before it goes off to Microsoft?
It doesn't go to Microsoft, it's just a cache of CDDB lookups you've done. AudioCatalyst does the same thing - but it's tracking not only what you play, but also what you rip to MP3. Surely, if you are looking for a conspiracy, that is where to look?
This cache is just a performance enhancement, like your web browser maintaining a cache of pages you've visited. If anything, it improves your privacy: it makes it much more difficult for CDDB to track how often you play a particular CD.
From the article:
When a CD is played, the player downloads the disc name and titles for each song from a Web site licensed by Microsoft. That information is stored on a small file on each computer in the latest version of the software.
Harem, because a man could impregnate his entire Harem in a single day since they all became fertile on the same day.
More likely because a harem would be an environment in which many women lived together without much contact with the outside world.
I mean, some of these sheiks were reputed to have dozens of women in their harems. No way he could impregate them all on the same day , at least not with the technology that existed at the time.
Nowadays, for that sort of thing, we have Cowboy Neal...
Hmm, if this ever gets off the ground, it might be VHS vs Betamax all over again. This one will be won or lost on backwards compatibility, but it's not as cut and dried as that. Availability is also important in capturing market share, but then again, I'd rather wait out DVHS because the random-access of a disc is inherently better than the serial access of a tape for most users.
I would like to go to the moon. That would be cool. Watching alien TV would be cool too.
It would have been somewhat cooler however if I hadn't lost 4 relatives under 50 to cancer in the last 5 years.
ET or Cancer... ET or Cancer... ET or Cancer... we have to ask???
Yes, we do have to ask. Let me give you an example, the laser. When lasers were first developed, it was called a solution in search of a problem. A cool toy, sure, but no use to anyone.
But today, lasers are in CD and DVD players, surveying equipment, surgical tools, weapons, communications devices and machine tools. I don't think there's anyone in the Western world who doesn't (whether they are aware of it or not) use a laser or a product or service depending on lasers every day.
People have been searching for a cure for cancer for a long time, without success. That suggests that the avenues of research that are being pursued don't lead to it. This is why basic research is so vital, because once a solution like a laser is found, whole new classes of problems can be solved.
Since I'm not given to futurology, I won't say that SETI research is in anyway relevent to cancer, but here's the thing: no-one knows yet.
The UltraSPARC for workstations has always kinda been a niche market. For the simple reason, that you can get an Intel box with far more hardware options and software support and for far less money.
I think you may be confusing "workstation" with "high end PC". Sun's equipment has always been popular with workstation users, in engineering, finance, oil and gas, scientific research, academia, etc.
WalMarts destroy local business via predatory pricing, aggressive marketing, and outright intimidation
That may be true, but you're missing something: no corporation can do anything without the market letting them - there simply would be no money in it. If you must blame someone, blame consumers for voting with their dollars for lower prices and homogenity over higher prices and variety. Given that this is what consumers prefer to pay for, Walmart would be fools not to sell that to them.
You can rant at Walmart all you wish, but if you want to do something about it, you will need to get the market behind you. Convince them that the benefits of "community" are worth a higher weekly grocery bill. I wish you luck.
Timex Ironman. Heavy-duty. It's cheap(~40USD). It's tough. It's waterproof. It tells time, has a timer, and the backlite rules.
I prefer the Suuntos. A bit more expensive, but mine has a heart rate monitor, a compass and a barometer. I use all these, training in the gym or outdoors. But the altimeter's not much use, you have to keep recalibrating it as air pressure changes. Plus it obviously tells the time, has a stopwatch, backlight, is waterproof, etc.
How bout not sending anything that could get you in trouble? Common sense should prevail here. But in the wake on Enron, I am sure they will do well.
There's a scene in Cryptonomicon in which Avi (I think) explains that important discussions have to take place between only two people at a time, so there is plausible deniability and nothing to subpoena.
This is why, even when email, videoconferencing and even faxes are widespread, nothing will ever replace face to face meetings for serious business.
Here's a point: the very things that make us "evil", such as greed, lust, territoriality, warlike tendency, aggresssion -- all of that -- are precisely the qualities that make a species dominant over others in the evolutionary sense.
How can these things be "evil" if they are what we became in order to survive. Nature is red in tooth and claw. The notion of evil presupposes a moral option, when survival of the species is in question, that option disappears.
If we go to the stars as Zen Buddhist monks, those colonists will be annihilated by the locals - even if the locals are bloody non-sapient crytals. Life is hungry and pitiless.
Evil alien overlords vs Shaolin Temple Kung Fu Dragon Clan? I know who my money's on...
The idea that there is a finite ulimate prize to human endeavor will concentrate human social toxins, and ultimately kill us all.
Now it's interesting you should say that, because I believe that a basically competitive, capitalist economic organization of a culture is necessarily so long as that culture is bounded by its access to resources, even if only for the simple reason that there must be a mechanism by which that culture decides how to allocate those resources. Communist societies fail because their resource-allocation algorithms are suboptimal.
A culture that has limitless resources has no need to work this way. There are still cultures in the world (Buddhism being one) that are structured so that they are not bounded by their access to resources. That's not to say that they don't want or need stuff, it is just that access to stuff is not what limits their development.
If a culture sets itself the goal of technological development, then it will initially at least, be bounded by access to resources. Once, assuming this is possible, a technological solution is found, giving that culture limitless (not infinite) access to energy, raw materials and manufacturing capacity, then capitalism will have served its purpose. But that's a long way off.
Defending access to resources - and denying resources to competitors - will always be necessary for survival, even for such a developed culture.
Really, this is just an example of the old stick-glasses-on-a-really-good-looking-guy routine, and then tell the audience that the guy is unpopular/sensitive/etc. When Michelle Pfeiffer plays dowdy characters, they stick glasses on her too, and the audience is supposed to believe that no one in the movie notices how beautiful she is.
It's true. For example, I wear glasses, but I'm really a hairy-bellied, testosterone-fuelled Neanderthal sadist.
Anyway, back on topic. I use to love SG1, but I knew it was all going downhill the moment they brought in the actor who plays Q to play some Pentagon conspirator. It was a real Fonz-jumping-the-shark moment. I just hope they don't go all Babylonn-5, spend half a series building up to a huge climax, then it's over in a single episode, the two major forces in the galaxy make up and go off together and Sheridan becomes President of the Universe. That would have been a natural close to the story, where do you go after that? But they had to keep milking the franchise. It's getting worse than Police Academy.
That is possibly the worst 1984/Brave New World NewSpeak I have ever heard. Your "right to education" includes the power to force others, at the point of a gun, to cough up cash to hire teachers, and here is the precious part your right includes the power of others to force you to partake of that education.
You are of course correct. I personally am very much anti-EU for these same reasons. But I was merely trying to illustrate the point that the Founding Fathers didn't include some rights that do seem self-evident today (even to a body as obtuse as the EU).
If the person wouldn't have bought the software, why does that person feel the need to posess a copy of it? Not that I don't understand mind you, but the argument holds no inherient value.
Well, take Photoshop for example. It's a powerful tool for professionals, and quite expensive. It's also very handing just for simple image editing, like cropping a resizing, and maybe a little amateur retouching. If that was all you did with it, it would be impossible to justify the price, but if you could get it for free, then it's a cool toy.
You could say the same for Excel, or Word or any of a number of products, they're nice to have, and it's convenient to use the same software at home that you might use at work, but you wouldn't buy it just for working out the exchange rate on your holiday money.
This sort of thing really doesn't cost the vendor much. The problem is people who would have bought copies not buying them, for example, if a company buys one copy of Excel and installs it on a dozen desktops, because those employees need it to do their work.
Slashdot Mirror
There may be others around, but no-one can touch these for reliability, scalability and vendor support - the three key factors for serious enterprise infrastructure. If you already have existing code written for IBM, Oracle or MS platforms, then so much the better, I believe AQ and MSMQ are pretty much bundled with the platform anyway. Still, IBM do dominate the market, their MQSeries is used by very serious people (banks, airlines, etc) and it's very mature.
If you think about it, the romans had everything they needed to build steam locomotives. They had advanced road building, knowledge of steam dynamics, the ability to forge pressure vessels and an unrivaled industrial base. What they lacked was vision and the will to do anything that might seem impractical.
There is a fascinating account of this sort of thing in Against The Gods. The problem was mainly cultural; ancient societies believed that the future was under the control of the gods, therefore there was little an individual could practically do to offset risk for their enterprise. If a merchant lost a single shipment, for example, that could be enough to ruin him, so risks taken were very small, and therefore progress was slow. No one would dare to invest in risky business ventures.
Along came barbarian Europeans, interested in probability theory and statistical analysis of historical data as a means to cheat at cards. From that, we got insurance, actuarial tables, financial derivatives, venture capital and a whole range of other mathematical constructs.
Even if the ancient Romans had had the math, they wouldn't have done much with it until their culture could have accepted the notion of risk in the modern sense. And the Greeks wouldn't either, for different cultural reasons; for them theoretical research was a pastime for the nobles, but practical research was frowned upon as being only fit for slaves, who didn't have the education to make anything of it.
If these two ancient cultures had been a little more pragmatic, the world would be radically different today.
Ask RMS who initally sold emacs for $100.
RMS gets all his bills paid by MIT's AI lab. He doesn't make his living from open source in any way, shape or form.
Look at Redhat or any linux distro compony.
How many of those are GAAP profitable? How many aren't 0wned by their VCs?
Basicly, the more mission critical the software, the easier it is to make incomse based on consulting and support.
About the closest anyone's come to this was Cygnus and their commercial support of GCC for various embedded platforms. But even they aren't independent any more, remember? Unless you count contractors who administer sendmail for a living, that doesn't count either.
The only way to make money producing software unless you are providing shrinkwrapped packages is by doing bespoke development. The only people who pay for bespoke development are the ones who can get a competitive advantage from it, and they aren't going to want it to be available to their rivals.
Now, don't get me wrong, open source works for a bunch of stuff, but it's all commodity stuff. You can make a living as a sysadmin on a wholly open source OS, of course, but I don't think you can writing open source software. (Alan Cox doesn't count until Red Hat are sustainably GAAP profitable).
Compared to around £50 (c.$75) a week in the UK [dss.gov.uk] (with higher cost of living in London than in most US cities), this sounds great.
You say that, but in Virginia at least, you can't draw more unemployment than you've paid into the system. In the UK, even if you haven't contributed a penny in taxes, the taxpayer foots the bill for your dole - forever. There should be a law like this in the UK, or at least a maximum time that you can draw unemployment for before you get cut off. The system as it is is far too open to abuse - which is why the welfare state alone costs over 1/3 of the tax paid.
California to impose new taxes and regulations.
Film at 11.
I thought SGI pretty much owned the UNIX workstation market.
SGI sell into a niche, which they own, and that's graphics, whether for entertainment or scientific visualization (they're big in pharma, for example). Sun dominate finance and engineering (CAD, FEA and so forth). Plus Sun are popular with embedded developers (firmware for laser printers, for example) which is a huge market.
The only times I've seen HP workstations is where they were being used specifically to develop software for HP servers.
The problem is that many of these students simply take their knowledge (often paid for by The State) and move to the US, Canada, Europe, etc. It can literally kill a country when you have 95% of your educated people trying to emmigrate to the US.
That's the problem, see. You can't have a well-rounded, liberal education and still want to live in a religious oligarchy like Pakistan. If they really do want an education, prosperous middle class, the first thing to do is to establish a secular democracy. Unfortunately, the instant you do that, the oligarchy will get voted back in by the huge swathes of the population who don't want a Western-style education, and bitterly resent anyone who does.
Ultimately, the West benefits from both the export of highly educated technical professionals and the export of mass-produced consumer commodities. Remember that cheap labor isn't exploitation, it's arbitrage, and the alternative is no real money going into their economies at all. So we take in the educated ones, let them steep in our culture for a while, and maybe someday they'll go back and make their homelands more like ours. And if they don't, well, it's not the Western way to coerce individuals if it can be avoided.
Before you give them anything, have them sign an agreement that they will destroy any material they receive from you in 45 days. If you find they are using your information after 45 days, you can take them to court and show the court their signatures. IANAL so I don't know if this would work very well or not, but it's an idea.
In banking, there is the concept of the "data room". Before M&A activity, the target would place all possibly relevant data to the merger (accounts, contracts, confirmations of regulatory compliance, etc) in a room. The bankers advising the buyer are allowed unlimited access to the room for a period of days (or weeks). You can look at anything, you can take notes, but you cannot photocopy and you cannot take anything outside the room.
If later on there is an issue, and it was documented in the data room, and the bankers didn't spot it, then any problems are for the buyer and the bank to resolve - the bank may well be in deep trouble for negligence. If the problem is detected in the data room, the bankers will advise the buyer to lower the price (for example, if there are regulatory risks, or liabilities).
If there is a problem, and it is not documented in the data room (or cannot be derived from data in the room) or public sources (say, newspaper reports) then the seller is in a whole world of trouble, as the buyer and the bank will be after their blood.
the Oracle died (dunno what they're doing about that...)
/nolog
This is what to do:
$ sqlplus
SQL> connect / as SYSDBA;
SQL> startup;
By the way, do "cappers" remove the commercials when they are digitizing it? I'm gonna have to check into this...
You could "check into this" by reading the article, which says it takes about 5 minutes to strip out the ads, and an hour to compress the file suitable for distribution.
It's like making an unauthorized copy of your wallet.
Like copying credit card numbers and magstripes, you mean?
Office Politics: Occurs when a portion of a company, be it a division, team, or single individual, competes actively against another portion of the same company instead of working for the good of the company.
You're assuming that there is concensus on what's best for the company, and that there are people actively and deliberately working against it. That's simply not true in the real world. Politics happens because some people believe - rightly or wrongly - that their ideas or techniques are better than the ideas and techniques presently being used. Oftentimes, the only way to find out for sure is to do it one way, and see what the result is in 6 months or 2 years or 5 years. Since companies can't do that (and expect to survive), people argue, and that's what politics is.
There is an attitude amongst self-proclaimed "geeks" than anyone who isn't a "geek" is automatically stupid. Let me give you a clue: one good manager is worth more to a company than 10 programmers that only know code and not business.
It doesn't go to Microsoft, it's just a cache of CDDB lookups you've done. AudioCatalyst does the same thing - but it's tracking not only what you play, but also what you rip to MP3. Surely, if you are looking for a conspiracy, that is where to look?
This cache is just a performance enhancement, like your web browser maintaining a cache of pages you've visited. If anything, it improves your privacy: it makes it much more difficult for CDDB to track how often you play a particular CD.
From the article:
Harem, because a man could impregnate his entire Harem in a single day since they all became fertile on the same day.
More likely because a harem would be an environment in which many women lived together without much contact with the outside world.
I mean, some of these sheiks were reputed to have dozens of women in their harems. No way he could impregate them all on the same day , at least not with the technology that existed at the time.
Nowadays, for that sort of thing, we have Cowboy Neal...
I seem to remember that the only computer system ever built on trinary (base-3) logic was produced in the Soviet Union.
See this earlier thread.
HDTV.
Hmm, if this ever gets off the ground, it might be VHS vs Betamax all over again. This one will be won or lost on backwards compatibility, but it's not as cut and dried as that. Availability is also important in capturing market share, but then again, I'd rather wait out DVHS because the random-access of a disc is inherently better than the serial access of a tape for most users.
I would like to go to the moon. That would be cool. Watching alien TV would be cool too.
It would have been somewhat cooler however if I hadn't lost 4 relatives under 50 to cancer in the last 5 years.
ET or Cancer... ET or Cancer... ET or Cancer... we have to ask???
Yes, we do have to ask. Let me give you an example, the laser. When lasers were first developed, it was called a solution in search of a problem. A cool toy, sure, but no use to anyone.
But today, lasers are in CD and DVD players, surveying equipment, surgical tools, weapons, communications devices and machine tools. I don't think there's anyone in the Western world who doesn't (whether they are aware of it or not) use a laser or a product or service depending on lasers every day.
People have been searching for a cure for cancer for a long time, without success. That suggests that the avenues of research that are being pursued don't lead to it. This is why basic research is so vital, because once a solution like a laser is found, whole new classes of problems can be solved.
Since I'm not given to futurology, I won't say that SETI research is in anyway relevent to cancer, but here's the thing: no-one knows yet.
The UltraSPARC for workstations has always kinda been a niche market. For the simple reason, that you can get an Intel box with far more hardware options and software support and for far less money.
I think you may be confusing "workstation" with "high end PC". Sun's equipment has always been popular with workstation users, in engineering, finance, oil and gas, scientific research, academia, etc.
WalMarts destroy local business via predatory pricing, aggressive marketing, and outright intimidation
That may be true, but you're missing something: no corporation can do anything without the market letting them - there simply would be no money in it. If you must blame someone, blame consumers for voting with their dollars for lower prices and homogenity over higher prices and variety. Given that this is what consumers prefer to pay for, Walmart would be fools not to sell that to them.
You can rant at Walmart all you wish, but if you want to do something about it, you will need to get the market behind you. Convince them that the benefits of "community" are worth a higher weekly grocery bill. I wish you luck.
Timex Ironman. Heavy-duty. It's cheap(~40USD). It's tough. It's waterproof. It tells time, has a timer, and the backlite rules.
I prefer the Suuntos. A bit more expensive, but mine has a heart rate monitor, a compass and a barometer. I use all these, training in the gym or outdoors. But the altimeter's not much use, you have to keep recalibrating it as air pressure changes. Plus it obviously tells the time, has a stopwatch, backlight, is waterproof, etc.
How bout not sending anything that could get you in trouble? Common sense should prevail here. But in the wake on Enron, I am sure they will do well.
There's a scene in Cryptonomicon in which Avi (I think) explains that important discussions have to take place between only two people at a time, so there is plausible deniability and nothing to subpoena.
This is why, even when email, videoconferencing and even faxes are widespread, nothing will ever replace face to face meetings for serious business.
Here's a point: the very things that make us "evil", such as greed, lust, territoriality, warlike tendency, aggresssion -- all of that -- are precisely the qualities that make a species dominant over others in the evolutionary sense.
How can these things be "evil" if they are what we became in order to survive. Nature is red in tooth and claw. The notion of evil presupposes a moral option, when survival of the species is in question, that option disappears.
If we go to the stars as Zen Buddhist monks, those colonists will be annihilated by the locals - even if the locals are bloody non-sapient crytals. Life is hungry and pitiless.
Evil alien overlords vs Shaolin Temple Kung Fu Dragon Clan? I know who my money's on...
The idea that there is a finite ulimate prize to human endeavor will concentrate human social toxins, and ultimately kill us all.
Now it's interesting you should say that, because I believe that a basically competitive, capitalist economic organization of a culture is necessarily so long as that culture is bounded by its access to resources, even if only for the simple reason that there must be a mechanism by which that culture decides how to allocate those resources. Communist societies fail because their resource-allocation algorithms are suboptimal.
A culture that has limitless resources has no need to work this way. There are still cultures in the world (Buddhism being one) that are structured so that they are not bounded by their access to resources. That's not to say that they don't want or need stuff, it is just that access to stuff is not what limits their development.
If a culture sets itself the goal of technological development, then it will initially at least, be bounded by access to resources. Once, assuming this is possible, a technological solution is found, giving that culture limitless (not infinite) access to energy, raw materials and manufacturing capacity, then capitalism will have served its purpose. But that's a long way off.
Defending access to resources - and denying resources to competitors - will always be necessary for survival, even for such a developed culture.
Really, this is just an example of the old stick-glasses-on-a-really-good-looking-guy routine, and then tell the audience that the guy is unpopular/sensitive/etc. When Michelle Pfeiffer plays dowdy characters, they stick glasses on her too, and the audience is supposed to believe that no one in the movie notices how beautiful she is.
It's true. For example, I wear glasses, but I'm really a hairy-bellied, testosterone-fuelled Neanderthal sadist.
Anyway, back on topic. I use to love SG1, but I knew it was all going downhill the moment they brought in the actor who plays Q to play some Pentagon conspirator. It was a real Fonz-jumping-the-shark moment. I just hope they don't go all Babylonn-5, spend half a series building up to a huge climax, then it's over in a single episode, the two major forces in the galaxy make up and go off together and Sheridan becomes President of the Universe. That would have been a natural close to the story, where do you go after that? But they had to keep milking the franchise. It's getting worse than Police Academy.
That is possibly the worst 1984/Brave New World NewSpeak I have ever heard. Your "right to education" includes the power to force others, at the point of a gun, to cough up cash to hire teachers, and here is the precious part your right includes the power of others to force you to partake of that education.
You are of course correct. I personally am very much anti-EU for these same reasons. But I was merely trying to illustrate the point that the Founding Fathers didn't include some rights that do seem self-evident today (even to a body as obtuse as the EU).
If the person wouldn't have bought the software, why does that person feel the need to posess a copy of it? Not that I don't understand mind you, but the argument holds no inherient value.
Well, take Photoshop for example. It's a powerful tool for professionals, and quite expensive. It's also very handing just for simple image editing, like cropping a resizing, and maybe a little amateur retouching. If that was all you did with it, it would be impossible to justify the price, but if you could get it for free, then it's a cool toy.
You could say the same for Excel, or Word or any of a number of products, they're nice to have, and it's convenient to use the same software at home that you might use at work, but you wouldn't buy it just for working out the exchange rate on your holiday money.
This sort of thing really doesn't cost the vendor much. The problem is people who would have bought copies not buying them, for example, if a company buys one copy of Excel and installs it on a dozen desktops, because those employees need it to do their work.