That's funny, because that's amazingly close to the last thing I had my genetic algorithms trying to solve.
I wanted them to use assembly instructions to move dudes around a grid with a sword and shank each other. But I was having a hard time getting them to do anything more advanced than "move forward, if I hit anything, turn right". Or "move east while spinning around". Hell, since it was competitive co-evolution, they couldn't even stay on local maxima for more than a few thousand generations. That was a bit disappointing. Made me realize you can't just unleash GA upon a problem and expect it to get to a solution eventually.
So I stepped back and had them solve how to visit all the planets in a solar system. That they could solve quite easily. Well, pft, I dunno if they had optimal solutions, but they certainly learned and got better. Never got around to limiting fuel expenditure or making it something I could demo. It was a cute distraction I guess. hmmm, never posted that to sourceforge...
I'd say it's not shocking at all that this is a problem that computers can do a better than humans. But I'm always surprised at how little other people know about AI, it's strengths, it's weaknesses. It's honestly depressing how much they get influenced by sci-fi. And it's not even good sci-fi like Clarke. It's Terminator and that ilk where ultra-advanced AI is really just sort of a stoic human with wikipedia and a calculator on hand.
I feel the definitions of basic words have been bent to to the point of breaking and are now meaningless.
See: Treason Aiding Enemy Terrorism Militant combatant Mass destruction, and weapons thereof War
Remember that crazy fucker who shot up the senator in Arizona? There was an open floor at some point prior where he asked the senator: "What is government if words have no meaning?" It's a ludicrous thing to ask a senator in that sort of format, more of a philosophical starter over diner with friends, and he's balls-to-the-walls crazy, but that fucker had a point. The government is run on laws. The rule of law is written down. With words. But if you can twist those words to mean whatever you want them to mean... that's the same thing as not having any laws.
Don't get me wrong, there are still terrorists out there, and we've got a big-ol stockpile of WMDs. But any time an official figure, or news media, or crackpot starts talking about these things I have to question whether they're talking about actual terrorism terrorists, or just someone they dislike. Whether they mean actual nukes, or pressure cookers. Whether they're talking about treason treason or just someone that's trying to catch the bad guy while violating some laws that the boss assures them are being complied with.
We can fix the NSA. We don't have to disband it entirely. We don't have to charge all of it's employees with treason. We can make sure it's operations are only legal ones. Really, all it would take is Obama saying: "NSA, what you're doing is too close to violating the 4th admendment. Stop it". To suggest that we lynch them all is such an overreaction as to be suspicious. Seriously, are you some sort of NSA agent provocateur just trying to make us look like bloodthirsty barbarians?
That's because everyone's phone is a "music player". Actual dedicated music players are $5-$10 impulse buys you can get at Menards. They're trivial. It's not that they're not useful, it's that they're not profitable. They're boring, they're old, they won't make the company a buck. From a customer's prospective it's fantastic. I want a seperate player just for my car/jukebox/flyingpropogandabot, no problem, just slide one in. They're modular, not tied to a function or purpose, and I can use it for whatever I want. Dedicated music players are in the realm of cheap boring commodity. Which is fantastic for consumers who want to play some music.
But that's now. The ipod came out about a decade ago. I was in that market. I had a 32MB mp3 player from god-knows-who. It had a bad proprietary card and reader and software, but it was digital, and I liked it. I could "burn a new CD" every day. I even had a weird mp3 player that would fit in a caset deck... Anyway Apple managed to make the ipod cool. As far as a player goes, it brought the revolutionary idea of slapping an actual hard-drive onto the player. That solved a MAJOR issue of limited space that players had. The scroll wheel thing was ok. Buttons worked just as fine, but whatever. I never got one as I couldn't stomach the ludicrous price. But no. Apple made the ipod cool. And THAT is what made them a buck. Before the ipod, everyone could listen to their music on CD players. They weren't any more bulky than the first ipod. No, it was a fancy STYLISH gift you could give someone. It's cultural. Rich people's toys.
And then flash memory got better and they switched to that and dropped the price. And for a REALLY long time in there they dominated the portable music player market.
Now though? pft, please. The fad has moved on and rational players have taken over again. There is no monopoly. And everything and your toaster can play music.
Right, right, you can spend your money however you want.
But that doesn't stop me from calling you an idiot. Or from telling my son that you're an idiot and that he shouldn't act anything like you. Or from using your expenditure as an example of why 1) you should be paid less, 2) you should be taxed more, 3) these products should be taxed more. All of these things are generally considered "politics".
Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to be a fascist jack-boot thug, demanding you toe the line. But if buying expensive cars became as bad as, say, smoking, gambling, or beanie-babys, you know, activities that are detrimental to society if they become widespread, then it's reasonable that we would collectively try to get our shit in order. And we'd do that by lambasting the fools, taxing them, and generally being dicks against that industry.
Follow the law, pay your taxes. Boy oh boy, can THAT get out of hand.
Either way I'd quite like $5000 for work I did last year.
Well, me and the wife have about $150K in the bank, stocks, retirement, etc. On average I'd say they're getting about 3%. Truth be told I haven't really looked in a while. Probably should.
But yeah, that's... about $5000 we're earning a year. For doing nothing other than having worked last year (and years past)(and not spending it all).
On one hand it costs them to let you download the song straight from them. An oh-so-small amount. But on the other hand, it let's them know if their model is working or not and gives them metrics about how many people just won't pay for their shit.
If it feels EXTRA WRONG to steal the very bread from the starving artists mouth... that just means you're a good person. And the more they can rub that feeling of wrongness into the fanbase, the more will pay for their tunes.
Wow, it's like you're telling me that there isn't one giant universal value upon which my entire worth hinges on. That there might be two or more aspects of the mind, which probably go up and down depending on how much I've slept, drank, stared at manuals.
Still, take all those values and average them out into a generic "how functional are you?" value, and the downs syndrome kids aren't going to fair so well.
And gauging kids as "same intelligence level" is one of those rough eyeball measurements which doesn't make for good science.
Well, actually, if this sort of thing existed during the inception of combines, I imagine they'd simply have the three tasks be performed by three vehicles that are not combined into one. And it'd make a lot of farming tasks take an extra hand. Kinda unnecessarily.
But let's say that it wasn't something like a combine. Let's say that this cost applied to all harvesting. Since some people NEED to harvest, they'd be forced to pay and they'd pass the cost along to their consumers. Others would simply do without and have a bunch of piecemeal farms making vegetables on the side or whatever.
Kinda like how 3D printing was in the last few decades. You know that's why we have this 3D printing craze right? The patents are expiring. Where it was once the special niche market of serious manufacturing, now it's available to the public, and getting a lot more attention. 3D printing is a prime example of how IP laws have hindered the advancement of society. Some companies made a living. Which is good. Yay economy. But how would you feel if the invention of the PC was pushed back a decade or two because the owners of mainframe IP could shut down anyone trying to make a PC? Take your first experience with a computer (usually a PC, except for you greybeards). Push it a decade into the future. How does that make you feel?
Uhhhhhh... You've pretty much made the argument that the "free software" movement has made against the "open software" side. Open vs free. BSD vs Linux. "Free as in beer" vs "free as in freedom".
By and far the worries that you've stated apply to open software. And they've come to pass. See: OSX. They took open (but not free) software, made it their own, and sold it. And that was a massive amount of effort and work that Apple didn't have to do and they picked it up and took it somewhere... arguably... nice. And now OSX is a product that people buy. That's great. For them. Now you have to ask yourself, which is doing better, Free Linux, or Open BSD?
But all that's moot if imaginary property goes away. If you took OSX (by whatever means), tweaked it, and used it open and publicly for profit or no, then it wouldn't matter, because Apple couldn't do anything. You are ultimately free to do whatever the heck you want. The END GOAL OF THE FREE SOFTWARE MOVEMENT HAS BEEN ACHIEVED. Yes, some companies would most definitely take popular open source software, make their own tweaks, and try to sell it for profit. And they'd try to lock away the software as much as they could. No source would be available, no documentation, and that would suck. But as soon as one of those things became popular, say, Adobe's co-opted version of Blender became more popular than the original version, that would be worth the effort of dissecting it and incorporating the changes into the original. The free software movement would be less about "what's worth making" and would add an element of "what's worth taking". And proprietary software companies would put a lot more effort into obfuscating their binaries, locking down hardware, and other counter-productive activities.
until people seriously start collaborating on writing a consistent platform
This was supposed to be Ubuntu until they decided to drive off a cliff. The joy of open source though is that they can't take us with them screaming uncontrollably. I mean, they took a lot of people over that ridge with them. And it might be fine out in Unity land, but I don't have to worry about that, I jumped ship to another distro.
I think this is why I hate sharepoint the most. It seems to be a comprehensive and massively developed tool for funneling money to consultants.
While I consider myself a decent developer, I will under no circumstances develop for Sharepoint again. If the boss wants something done in Sharepoint, he can contract someone to do that. Because I'm not going back. You can't make me.
Well... unusable for pretty much anything other than primary industries (farming, mining, logging)... yeah, kinda. I mean, we're already in that process. The urbanization is well on it's way. It's been going on since... I dunno... pre-Renaissance?
The best advice I can give to a smart kid growing up in a rural bumblefuck back-water two-bit hamlet out in the boonies is to get his ass to a city. And by and far that's that society has been doing. Rural towns have been shrinking. Slowly. And slow is good. Some things you don't particularly want to rush too fast. So "suddenly cutting off large swaths" from a connection with the rest of the USA is probably a really bad idea. Shrug, maybe satellite communication would suffice. I haven't looked into it.
Farms need a certain amount of industry to keep them going. Grain elevators, mechanics, all that farming supply stuff. And everything a family needs: Schools, retail, banks. As the farms consolidate and you get bigger machines needing less actual farmers to cover more land, the needed economic support falls off. Eventually I see bots harvesting crops remotely or autonomously.
Of course, with the Internet, there's no real reason I need to work in a city. So give me a cheap home somewhere long that broad-band trunk line and I'm good to go.
Yeah, at the center of cities is the inner-city ghetto. Downtown living has been out of fashion for a while and nobody really needs to be that close to each other. Except those who can't afford not to. There's generally some level of "gentrification" going on. In Omaha there's the old-market and hipsters buying lofts. And they bulldozed the horrid riverfront and put conAgra there decades ago. It looks like a sweetheart deal now, but back then it was a major improvement. Chicago's downtown strives to be trendy. Most of New York's Manhattan island is "trendy" in that there's serious business, but hardly anyone actually lives there.
City planners don't want rot. And they have money to try and attract money. They do a lot of weird things.
Outside of "downtown" you've got a wide shmorgas-board of different neighborhoods. From south-side Chicago to gated communities. Any sweeping generalizations are bound to be false. Some places probably do have rings of differing classes of neighborhoods, but all the cities I've been familiar with are fairly patchy. Some have smaller patches than other with mcMansions just a few blocks from trailer homes. Other places have a clear "wrong side of the tracks".
As cities get smaller and more rural the populace typically gets poorer on average. They're also generally cheaper to live in. They also generally have less facilities/shops/opportunity. And that applies more or less as a sliding scale from big-ass cities like Omaha to dinky towns like, say StateCenter, IA. And yeah, even the po-dunk town of 1500 isn't considered actual rural living yet.
Once you get into ACTUAL rural living, you know, like on a farm, where walking to the neighbors takes an hour, things are different. The vast majority of rural Iowa can of course travel to a nearby city for most of their needs: Shopping, schooling, and various entertainment. Even if that entertainment is one of the two restaurants in town. I can't comment too much on rural living. While I have family out on the farm, I haven't lived there myself.
I know that a lot of those "eccentric millionaires" are actually just retired farmers. Farming is big business. They're a rarity as farms have been consolidating for generations and if you are one of the few remaining, you own a lot of property.
HA! Like MS can keep their shit together and keep the same naming scheme long enough to get to Windows 9.
The marketers have their talons in DEEP into MS culture. Win95 -> Win98 ->Win2000 WinMe -> WinXp Vista Win7 -> Win8
They do an epically bad job of keeping a naming scheme.
But you're absolutely right in that every other version of Windows is shit. They have a pattern of introducing universally hated changes in one version, making everyone suffer, and then 3 years later the next version comes out. It still has the same things but this time comes with more lube. Or people have just gotten used to it by then.
And since the last version was universally hated, they do their damned best to distance themselves from the monstrosity and they get a new name.
I have no idea how they're going to lube up the metro interface in the WinBALMERSSTILLHERESUCKERS release.
I'm sure that throughout the decades there were perfectly normal and nice people that participated in the KKK. I imagine in some regions it was more of a BBQ-club than a hate-mongering organization. That people joined simply due to the social stigma of not joining, they liked their neighbors, and oh yeah, ra ra white power.
But that doesn't matter, because the leadership of that organization is bat-shit anti-social insane. And by being in that group the members gave legitimacy to those leaders and provided them power. A nutter with just his cats to talk isn't a political threat. It's not a voting bloc. It's not an establishment that people in power care about. The nutter can still be dangerous all by himself, but not the sort of social force that the KKK represented. The leaders of the KKK aren't a big threat if they don't have anyone to lead.
I don't particularly blame people working in federal positions for the atrocities of the federal government across the board. The postal worker in town didn't torture prisoners in Abu Ghraib. The US general in Iraq didn't illegally spy on US citizens. But they do share some of the blame just for being in the same group. The same way that I share some of the blame by being a US citizen. (Because we run this town, right? Right!?)
But I 100% completely blame the NSA workers associated with this spying project for being complacent about it's violation of the US constitution. I've worked places where the broad governing rules were paid lip service, and everyone generally agreed that we should be following them, but specifically disagreed about how we were blatantly violating them because of excuse excuse excuse, it's-special-in-this-case. If the hammer came down, EVERYONE in that company deserved to be hit. I know, I know, you wants to keep your job, you don't want to rock the boat, and you think you're doing some good in the world. So pass the buck. Send an email. Ask the boss in a very traceable and and blunt way. Do that and now it's HIS problem. Give him some time to decide if he wants to double-down on doing something illegal or if he wants to fix it. If he doesn't fix it, GO OVER HIS HEAD. Because it's good for the company/government/society to fix these problems. In the long run.
And if you can't trust the official channels, fuck it, blow that whistle.
1) Chinese carriers (they just commissioned one last year) cruising along our coast, in international waters would be viewed with suspicion, fear, and nationalism. Just like when we do it. Doing the same thing INSIDE our coastal waters would get them sunk if they didn't have permission. We'd probably give them a warning or two.
2) Mexico flying drones over our airspace out of the blue would be shot down. But they could probably work out a deal to help fight the drug cartels. Hell, we'd give them drones to do so. As for shooting drug runners on US soil, it'd be a non-event, but some people would get their panties in a twist, and ultimately we'd tell Mexico to knock it off.
3) Most US citizens are ignorant of the forces stationed in foreign embassies. So... yeah. Not much would happen. Now, if someplace had happened to conquor us a few generations back, then it would be a different story.
And all of that makes an exception for anyone watching FoxNews. For them there would be utter outrage. But, of course, that's their response to most everything.
Ok ok, lemme try this: Business and markets are not infinitely liquid and divisible. It takes time and a critical sum of money to make a go of it and enter a market and start competing.
Companies who are already in markets can, temporarily, raise prices and screw over customers. Customers will, of course, call bullshit demand better service, and others will step up and try to serve them. The controlling company can then drop prices and undercut said competition. This is why monopolies are bad. But, of course, customers aren't fickle idiots. (not all of them [not all the time]). If they were truly pissed then they wouldn't go back to the abusive company for any price.
It's like a circuit. Not everything has perfect conductance. It takes time for capacitors and inductors to discharge. You drop voltage across resistors. Likewise, a old and busted company can maintain operation for a LONG time before they go broke. And the overhead of starting up a company can make it impossible to effectively compete in a markets. Voltage is cash, resistance is cost, caps are savings, inductors are... what... brand loyalty? I dunno this analogy is falling apart worse then my last 555.
In new markets, ones created by technological revolutions, the first to market of course has a monopoly. That's generally viewed as acceptable, and any price they set is ok. As soon as competition shows up, certain behaviors are illegal as they're anti-competitive. And without competition, the whole system rots and falls apart. And e-books are in not a new market BY FAR.
The reason that everyone is slinging names at you is that this is pretty bloody obvious to anyone who has paid attention to history, economics, politics, or the news.
ok. So you're trying to apply logic. That's a good first step.
I like to see the nutters try and grow so I'll spell it out for you. Apple "worked with" the publishers to raise prices. Both parties want prices to be raised (the customers, a third party, don't). What the publishers didn't want is to raise the prices evenly. They wanted to control which books sold and which books didn't. That let's them bully authors and get better deals on the supply side. Apple wanted the prices to rise across the board for a variety of reasons.
Apple "forced" publishers to raise prices across the board, against their best interest. Apple did this, most probably, through the force of business. IE, do it or we won't play along and prices will stay low and you lose a buck. It's an every so slight bit of hyperbole. Akin to how a company forces people to pay high prices when they gouge after a disaster and everyone NEEDS basic commodities. When no paying isn't an option, it's considered "forced". If they wanted the collusion to go through, the publishers were forced to concede the control of individual prices.
Holy Cow, are you really this dense? Have you not actually participated in business? You can't be that young with that ID that low. You are BALLS TO THE WALLS into crazy libertarian land here. Oh, but wait, lemme guess: Are you the sort that feels they're "forced" to pay taxes? Is it akin to jackboot thugs curb-stomping you every time you look at your paycheck?
Card's freedom of expression doesn't force me to go see his movie. Your freedom of speech doesn't keep me from calling you an asshole. If you consider that the same thing as "suppression of alternative opinions", then you're advocating a worse sort of thought-police nanny-state than any Democrat.
Also, how is being a bigot for a long time more respectable than being a bigot for a short time?
Slashdot Mirror
That's funny, because that's amazingly close to the last thing I had my genetic algorithms trying to solve.
I wanted them to use assembly instructions to move dudes around a grid with a sword and shank each other. But I was having a hard time getting them to do anything more advanced than "move forward, if I hit anything, turn right". Or "move east while spinning around". Hell, since it was competitive co-evolution, they couldn't even stay on local maxima for more than a few thousand generations. That was a bit disappointing. Made me realize you can't just unleash GA upon a problem and expect it to get to a solution eventually.
So I stepped back and had them solve how to visit all the planets in a solar system. That they could solve quite easily. Well, pft, I dunno if they had optimal solutions, but they certainly learned and got better. Never got around to limiting fuel expenditure or making it something I could demo. It was a cute distraction I guess. hmmm, never posted that to sourceforge...
I'd say it's not shocking at all that this is a problem that computers can do a better than humans. But I'm always surprised at how little other people know about AI, it's strengths, it's weaknesses. It's honestly depressing how much they get influenced by sci-fi. And it's not even good sci-fi like Clarke. It's Terminator and that ilk where ultra-advanced AI is really just sort of a stoic human with wikipedia and a calculator on hand.
I feel the definitions of basic words have been bent to to the point of breaking and are now meaningless.
See:
Treason
Aiding
Enemy
Terrorism
Militant combatant
Mass destruction, and weapons thereof
War
Remember that crazy fucker who shot up the senator in Arizona? There was an open floor at some point prior where he asked the senator:
"What is government if words have no meaning?"
It's a ludicrous thing to ask a senator in that sort of format, more of a philosophical starter over diner with friends, and he's balls-to-the-walls crazy, but that fucker had a point. The government is run on laws. The rule of law is written down. With words. But if you can twist those words to mean whatever you want them to mean... that's the same thing as not having any laws.
Don't get me wrong, there are still terrorists out there, and we've got a big-ol stockpile of WMDs. But any time an official figure, or news media, or crackpot starts talking about these things I have to question whether they're talking about actual terrorism terrorists, or just someone they dislike. Whether they mean actual nukes, or pressure cookers. Whether they're talking about treason treason or just someone that's trying to catch the bad guy while violating some laws that the boss assures them are being complied with.
We can fix the NSA. We don't have to disband it entirely. We don't have to charge all of it's employees with treason. We can make sure it's operations are only legal ones. Really, all it would take is Obama saying: "NSA, what you're doing is too close to violating the 4th admendment. Stop it". To suggest that we lynch them all is such an overreaction as to be suspicious. Seriously, are you some sort of NSA agent provocateur just trying to make us look like bloodthirsty barbarians?
Yes, they specifically been found to be lying to congress. That's one of the reasons that Snowden blew that whistle. It became so obvious that they chose someone to be the fall guy.
Now let's take that sacrificial goat and continue to dismantle the illegal program until they are no longer doing illegal activities.
And no, he doesn't know what treason is.
That's because everyone's phone is a "music player". Actual dedicated music players are $5-$10 impulse buys you can get at Menards. They're trivial. It's not that they're not useful, it's that they're not profitable. They're boring, they're old, they won't make the company a buck. From a customer's prospective it's fantastic. I want a seperate player just for my car/jukebox/flyingpropogandabot, no problem, just slide one in. They're modular, not tied to a function or purpose, and I can use it for whatever I want. Dedicated music players are in the realm of cheap boring commodity. Which is fantastic for consumers who want to play some music.
But that's now. The ipod came out about a decade ago. I was in that market. I had a 32MB mp3 player from god-knows-who. It had a bad proprietary card and reader and software, but it was digital, and I liked it. I could "burn a new CD" every day. I even had a weird mp3 player that would fit in a caset deck... Anyway Apple managed to make the ipod cool. As far as a player goes, it brought the revolutionary idea of slapping an actual hard-drive onto the player. That solved a MAJOR issue of limited space that players had. The scroll wheel thing was ok. Buttons worked just as fine, but whatever. I never got one as I couldn't stomach the ludicrous price. But no. Apple made the ipod cool. And THAT is what made them a buck. Before the ipod, everyone could listen to their music on CD players. They weren't any more bulky than the first ipod. No, it was a fancy STYLISH gift you could give someone. It's cultural. Rich people's toys.
And then flash memory got better and they switched to that and dropped the price. And for a REALLY long time in there they dominated the portable music player market.
Now though? pft, please. The fad has moved on and rational players have taken over again. There is no monopoly. And everything and your toaster can play music.
Right, right, you can spend your money however you want.
But that doesn't stop me from calling you an idiot. Or from telling my son that you're an idiot and that he shouldn't act anything like you. Or from using your expenditure as an example of why 1) you should be paid less, 2) you should be taxed more, 3) these products should be taxed more. All of these things are generally considered "politics".
Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to be a fascist jack-boot thug, demanding you toe the line. But if buying expensive cars became as bad as, say, smoking, gambling, or beanie-babys, you know, activities that are detrimental to society if they become widespread, then it's reasonable that we would collectively try to get our shit in order. And we'd do that by lambasting the fools, taxing them, and generally being dicks against that industry.
Follow the law, pay your taxes. Boy oh boy, can THAT get out of hand.
Either way I'd quite like $5000 for work I did last year.
Well, me and the wife have about $150K in the bank, stocks, retirement, etc. On average I'd say they're getting about 3%. Truth be told I haven't really looked in a while. Probably should.
But yeah, that's... about $5000 we're earning a year. For doing nothing other than having worked last year (and years past)(and not spending it all).
GOD DAMNIT MAN!
Where are my mod points when I need them!?
On one hand it costs them to let you download the song straight from them. An oh-so-small amount.
But on the other hand, it let's them know if their model is working or not and gives them metrics about how many people just won't pay for their shit.
If it feels EXTRA WRONG to steal the very bread from the starving artists mouth... that just means you're a good person. And the more they can rub that feeling of wrongness into the fanbase, the more will pay for their tunes.
Wow, it's like you're telling me that there isn't one giant universal value upon which my entire worth hinges on. That there might be two or more aspects of the mind, which probably go up and down depending on how much I've slept, drank, stared at manuals.
Still, take all those values and average them out into a generic "how functional are you?" value, and the downs syndrome kids aren't going to fair so well.
And gauging kids as "same intelligence level" is one of those rough eyeball measurements which doesn't make for good science.
Alright people, we've got the tortillas and the onions, all we need are some bell peppers and some meat and we've got ourselves a fajita.
Well, actually, if this sort of thing existed during the inception of combines, I imagine they'd simply have the three tasks be performed by three vehicles that are not combined into one. And it'd make a lot of farming tasks take an extra hand. Kinda unnecessarily.
But let's say that it wasn't something like a combine. Let's say that this cost applied to all harvesting. Since some people NEED to harvest, they'd be forced to pay and they'd pass the cost along to their consumers. Others would simply do without and have a bunch of piecemeal farms making vegetables on the side or whatever.
Kinda like how 3D printing was in the last few decades. You know that's why we have this 3D printing craze right? The patents are expiring. Where it was once the special niche market of serious manufacturing, now it's available to the public, and getting a lot more attention. 3D printing is a prime example of how IP laws have hindered the advancement of society. Some companies made a living. Which is good. Yay economy. But how would you feel if the invention of the PC was pushed back a decade or two because the owners of mainframe IP could shut down anyone trying to make a PC? Take your first experience with a computer (usually a PC, except for you greybeards). Push it a decade into the future. How does that make you feel?
Uhhhhhh... You've pretty much made the argument that the "free software" movement has made against the "open software" side. Open vs free. BSD vs Linux. "Free as in beer" vs "free as in freedom".
By and far the worries that you've stated apply to open software. And they've come to pass. See: OSX. They took open (but not free) software, made it their own, and sold it. And that was a massive amount of effort and work that Apple didn't have to do and they picked it up and took it somewhere... arguably... nice. And now OSX is a product that people buy. That's great. For them. Now you have to ask yourself, which is doing better, Free Linux, or Open BSD?
But all that's moot if imaginary property goes away. If you took OSX (by whatever means), tweaked it, and used it open and publicly for profit or no, then it wouldn't matter, because Apple couldn't do anything. You are ultimately free to do whatever the heck you want. The END GOAL OF THE FREE SOFTWARE MOVEMENT HAS BEEN ACHIEVED. Yes, some companies would most definitely take popular open source software, make their own tweaks, and try to sell it for profit. And they'd try to lock away the software as much as they could. No source would be available, no documentation, and that would suck. But as soon as one of those things became popular, say, Adobe's co-opted version of Blender became more popular than the original version, that would be worth the effort of dissecting it and incorporating the changes into the original. The free software movement would be less about "what's worth making" and would add an element of "what's worth taking". And proprietary software companies would put a lot more effort into obfuscating their binaries, locking down hardware, and other counter-productive activities.
Yeah, I'm too young for the dos lineage.
Were the early NT products really consumer-grade? I thought that was more or less server-class.
until people seriously start collaborating on writing a consistent platform
This was supposed to be Ubuntu until they decided to drive off a cliff. The joy of open source though is that they can't take us with them screaming uncontrollably. I mean, they took a lot of people over that ridge with them. And it might be fine out in Unity land, but I don't have to worry about that, I jumped ship to another distro.
I think this is why I hate sharepoint the most. It seems to be a comprehensive and massively developed tool for funneling money to consultants.
While I consider myself a decent developer, I will under no circumstances develop for Sharepoint again. If the boss wants something done in Sharepoint, he can contract someone to do that. Because I'm not going back. You can't make me.
Well... unusable for pretty much anything other than primary industries (farming, mining, logging)... yeah, kinda. I mean, we're already in that process. The urbanization is well on it's way. It's been going on since... I dunno... pre-Renaissance?
The best advice I can give to a smart kid growing up in a rural bumblefuck back-water two-bit hamlet out in the boonies is to get his ass to a city. And by and far that's that society has been doing. Rural towns have been shrinking. Slowly. And slow is good. Some things you don't particularly want to rush too fast. So "suddenly cutting off large swaths" from a connection with the rest of the USA is probably a really bad idea. Shrug, maybe satellite communication would suffice. I haven't looked into it.
Farms need a certain amount of industry to keep them going. Grain elevators, mechanics, all that farming supply stuff. And everything a family needs: Schools, retail, banks. As the farms consolidate and you get bigger machines needing less actual farmers to cover more land, the needed economic support falls off. Eventually I see bots harvesting crops remotely or autonomously.
Of course, with the Internet, there's no real reason I need to work in a city. So give me a cheap home somewhere long that broad-band trunk line and I'm good to go.
Really? Because I grew up in Omaha.
Yeah, at the center of cities is the inner-city ghetto. Downtown living has been out of fashion for a while and nobody really needs to be that close to each other. Except those who can't afford not to. There's generally some level of "gentrification" going on. In Omaha there's the old-market and hipsters buying lofts. And they bulldozed the horrid riverfront and put conAgra there decades ago. It looks like a sweetheart deal now, but back then it was a major improvement. Chicago's downtown strives to be trendy. Most of New York's Manhattan island is "trendy" in that there's serious business, but hardly anyone actually lives there.
City planners don't want rot. And they have money to try and attract money. They do a lot of weird things.
Outside of "downtown" you've got a wide shmorgas-board of different neighborhoods. From south-side Chicago to gated communities. Any sweeping generalizations are bound to be false. Some places probably do have rings of differing classes of neighborhoods, but all the cities I've been familiar with are fairly patchy. Some have smaller patches than other with mcMansions just a few blocks from trailer homes. Other places have a clear "wrong side of the tracks".
As cities get smaller and more rural the populace typically gets poorer on average. They're also generally cheaper to live in. They also generally have less facilities/shops/opportunity. And that applies more or less as a sliding scale from big-ass cities like Omaha to dinky towns like, say StateCenter, IA. And yeah, even the po-dunk town of 1500 isn't considered actual rural living yet.
Once you get into ACTUAL rural living, you know, like on a farm, where walking to the neighbors takes an hour, things are different. The vast majority of rural Iowa can of course travel to a nearby city for most of their needs: Shopping, schooling, and various entertainment. Even if that entertainment is one of the two restaurants in town. I can't comment too much on rural living. While I have family out on the farm, I haven't lived there myself.
I know that a lot of those "eccentric millionaires" are actually just retired farmers. Farming is big business. They're a rarity as farms have been consolidating for generations and if you are one of the few remaining, you own a lot of property.
HA! Like MS can keep their shit together and keep the same naming scheme long enough to get to Windows 9.
The marketers have their talons in DEEP into MS culture.
Win95 -> Win98 ->Win2000
WinMe -> WinXp
Vista
Win7 -> Win8
They do an epically bad job of keeping a naming scheme.
But you're absolutely right in that every other version of Windows is shit. They have a pattern of introducing universally hated changes in one version, making everyone suffer, and then 3 years later the next version comes out. It still has the same things but this time comes with more lube. Or people have just gotten used to it by then.
And since the last version was universally hated, they do their damned best to distance themselves from the monstrosity and they get a new name.
I have no idea how they're going to lube up the metro interface in the WinBALMERSSTILLHERESUCKERS release.
Yeah, this.
I'm sure that throughout the decades there were perfectly normal and nice people that participated in the KKK. I imagine in some regions it was more of a BBQ-club than a hate-mongering organization. That people joined simply due to the social stigma of not joining, they liked their neighbors, and oh yeah, ra ra white power.
But that doesn't matter, because the leadership of that organization is bat-shit anti-social insane. And by being in that group the members gave legitimacy to those leaders and provided them power. A nutter with just his cats to talk isn't a political threat. It's not a voting bloc. It's not an establishment that people in power care about. The nutter can still be dangerous all by himself, but not the sort of social force that the KKK represented. The leaders of the KKK aren't a big threat if they don't have anyone to lead.
I don't particularly blame people working in federal positions for the atrocities of the federal government across the board. The postal worker in town didn't torture prisoners in Abu Ghraib. The US general in Iraq didn't illegally spy on US citizens. But they do share some of the blame just for being in the same group. The same way that I share some of the blame by being a US citizen. (Because we run this town, right? Right!?)
But I 100% completely blame the NSA workers associated with this spying project for being complacent about it's violation of the US constitution. I've worked places where the broad governing rules were paid lip service, and everyone generally agreed that we should be following them, but specifically disagreed about how we were blatantly violating them because of excuse excuse excuse, it's-special-in-this-case. If the hammer came down, EVERYONE in that company deserved to be hit. I know, I know, you wants to keep your job, you don't want to rock the boat, and you think you're doing some good in the world. So pass the buck. Send an email. Ask the boss in a very traceable and and blunt way. Do that and now it's HIS problem. Give him some time to decide if he wants to double-down on doing something illegal or if he wants to fix it. If he doesn't fix it, GO OVER HIS HEAD. Because it's good for the company/government/society to fix these problems. In the long run.
And if you can't trust the official channels, fuck it, blow that whistle.
Gosh Mr Trolly McTrollerkins, that's a funny way to say "I agree with you".
Because if you look at the part where we disagree, it's not there!
Ugh, don't be an ass bonehead.
1) Chinese carriers (they just commissioned one last year) cruising along our coast, in international waters would be viewed with suspicion, fear, and nationalism. Just like when we do it. Doing the same thing INSIDE our coastal waters would get them sunk if they didn't have permission. We'd probably give them a warning or two.
2) Mexico flying drones over our airspace out of the blue would be shot down. But they could probably work out a deal to help fight the drug cartels. Hell, we'd give them drones to do so. As for shooting drug runners on US soil, it'd be a non-event, but some people would get their panties in a twist, and ultimately we'd tell Mexico to knock it off.
3) Most US citizens are ignorant of the forces stationed in foreign embassies. So... yeah. Not much would happen. Now, if someplace had happened to conquor us a few generations back, then it would be a different story.
And all of that makes an exception for anyone watching FoxNews. For them there would be utter outrage. But, of course, that's their response to most everything.
Ok ok, lemme try this:
Business and markets are not infinitely liquid and divisible. It takes time and a critical sum of money to make a go of it and enter a market and start competing.
Companies who are already in markets can, temporarily, raise prices and screw over customers. Customers will, of course, call bullshit demand better service, and others will step up and try to serve them. The controlling company can then drop prices and undercut said competition. This is why monopolies are bad. But, of course, customers aren't fickle idiots. (not all of them [not all the time]). If they were truly pissed then they wouldn't go back to the abusive company for any price.
It's like a circuit. Not everything has perfect conductance. It takes time for capacitors and inductors to discharge. You drop voltage across resistors. Likewise, a old and busted company can maintain operation for a LONG time before they go broke. And the overhead of starting up a company can make it impossible to effectively compete in a markets. Voltage is cash, resistance is cost, caps are savings, inductors are... what... brand loyalty? I dunno this analogy is falling apart worse then my last 555.
In new markets, ones created by technological revolutions, the first to market of course has a monopoly. That's generally viewed as acceptable, and any price they set is ok. As soon as competition shows up, certain behaviors are illegal as they're anti-competitive. And without competition, the whole system rots and falls apart. And e-books are in not a new market BY FAR.
The reason that everyone is slinging names at you is that this is pretty bloody obvious to anyone who has paid attention to history, economics, politics, or the news.
ok. So you're trying to apply logic. That's a good first step.
I like to see the nutters try and grow so I'll spell it out for you. Apple "worked with" the publishers to raise prices. Both parties want prices to be raised (the customers, a third party, don't). What the publishers didn't want is to raise the prices evenly. They wanted to control which books sold and which books didn't. That let's them bully authors and get better deals on the supply side. Apple wanted the prices to rise across the board for a variety of reasons.
Apple "forced" publishers to raise prices across the board, against their best interest. Apple did this, most probably, through the force of business. IE, do it or we won't play along and prices will stay low and you lose a buck. It's an every so slight bit of hyperbole. Akin to how a company forces people to pay high prices when they gouge after a disaster and everyone NEEDS basic commodities. When no paying isn't an option, it's considered "forced". If they wanted the collusion to go through, the publishers were forced to concede the control of individual prices.
Holy Cow, are you really this dense? Have you not actually participated in business? You can't be that young with that ID that low. You are BALLS TO THE WALLS into crazy libertarian land here. Oh, but wait, lemme guess: Are you the sort that feels they're "forced" to pay taxes? Is it akin to jackboot thugs curb-stomping you every time you look at your paycheck?
Card's freedom of expression doesn't force me to go see his movie.
Your freedom of speech doesn't keep me from calling you an asshole.
If you consider that the same thing as "suppression of alternative opinions", then you're advocating a worse sort of thought-police nanny-state than any Democrat.
Also, how is being a bigot for a long time more respectable than being a bigot for a short time?
Yeah, that's right, SPIN IT BABY! Shake it for the money!