I remember once we sketched out a design for one at lunch. This was back in the Internet Startup Dayz and we figured that if ours failed we could always get into weapons. We didn't follow through, but I figure that with the advent of high level languages and faster processors, a lot of the problems in previously modern weapon systems are within the realm of the small team or even the solo programmer.
I mean, heck, maybe we poor American programmers should help our poor Pakistani friends. While we're unemployed, maybe we should be designing flight software for cruise missiles, nuclear simulations,....
they'd better find jobs quick for a million unemployed American geeks. There will be no limit to the trouble that we can cause.:-)
Since governments make things inefficient, and, free markets rule as you say, then, where is the stampede of corporations to eliminate copyrights and software patents. Instead of letting a machine innately good at copying information thrive to its fullest, why do corporations demand the government pass laws against people copying songs?
Governments can exist without corporations, but corporations cannot exist without government. If you truly do believe that big government is as intrusive and unnecessary as you say it is, then let us have government eliminate the patent office, the trademark office, the copywrite office, the various acts for the laws of the seas, the notion of a currency and currency exchange between nations, the laws that give corporations the right to enforce non-compete agreements, the laws that give corporations the right to investigate potential employees and the laws that protect trade secrets. If you want to have a free enterprise system and a reduced government, then, get rid of all of those things above, because your corporate welfare is no different than gov't cheese for rich people.
What's the difference between two small governments versus two giant corporations? Some of our largest firms are effectively governments in and of themselves. They, through contractual terms, patent portfolios, mineral rights, etc, have effective monopolies in their own right, so, what's the different between a company having a monopoly versus the government?
Free enterprise means no intellectual property rights. In fact, free enterprise might mean no property rights at all!
You know, we hear this argument over and over again. The government is less efficient innately because it does not compete the same way the private sector does. While off topic, I think refuting this argument on two levels will help keep the problem focused that NASA f-- up. Not, government is innately f--- up.
1. The government DOES compete and in a lot of way competes better than the private sector. Governments compete against the governments of other nations.
2. Most large businesses are risk averse and do not actually compete. The real thing that most businesses today do is sit on either real estate of intellectual property or real estate of land, both government protected monopolies, and milk them for all that it is worth. Most large firms do not actually innovate, and most large firms immediately close up shop for overseas as soon as someone "competes" with them.
If you ask me, the fact that NASA was able to fly the shuttle at all, as f--- as it is, is remarkable when you consider that for the same amount of money the private sector has given us such wonders as Ethyol (cancer drug that didn't work introduced anyway to pump up stock prices), The Power of Now (Enron's scheme...), the ill advised Daimler Chrysler merger, the destruction of American shipbuilding and steel, the movement of software overseas.
Really, if the private sector were so great, how come American companies are losing market share in everything across the board. If you ask me, the people that run these companies are all a bunch of dopes.
The future of this country is in small business and big government.
The one thing that really seems to define how well an operating system is how long the offerer keeps it in the market. OS/2 was not around really long enough, having given up the ghost around Windows95. And, neither was BeOS.
I still think that BeOS could have made it had Be not done the disasterous foray into Internet appliances and stuck with the pay for download the O/S model.
All they needed to do was stay the course, keep making the OS and improving it, and stay in business. But they did not, and so they failed.
MS won because they stuck with it. They throw something out there, and, if they judge it to be strategic, they stick with it. Look at how bad Windows 1.0 was, but they stuck with it. They stuck with it through Windows 2.0, through Windows/386, and finally, they got a product they could sell to OEMS in Windows 3.1 and even then, many businesses did not even move to Windows until Windows 95. That's nearly a 10 year stretch of staying in the market.
Make a new kind of thing that does what a web browser does, but isn't a web browser. MS could certainly push a new kind of content delivery engine, and create a "new web". Since the patent is for plugins into web browsers, they would no longer infringe.
Or, they could stuff all of C# into a web browser in such a way as the browser becomes a downloadable program selector.
Choice and flexibility are always a positive attributes for consumers, markers of the power for the end user.
Let's not forget that Windows has a lot of customizability and sells on that merit. For example, setting fonts, colors, everything with visual tools are a selling point of MS applications and the OS itself.
Linux should be marketed as an operating system that is more powerful than Windows and it should promote its data center roots. Web sites that offer Linux services and distributions should do well to look at how the differences between cheap tools and better tools are marketed.
Users can understand that with choice comes complexity, and, while you may not have the --whole-- market, you can grab the high end of it, grab the people that --care-- about software. They in turn will drive the lower end of the market.
Always target power users, make them happy, and you will not lose.
Consumers reward risk taking and intelligent behavior, but businesses do not. Any sane investment of capital carries with it a risk factor and that risk factor is weighed very heavily by people with lots of money to invest. So, they by and large will stick with larger players that can use governmental rules, market inertia, and legal means to increase their investment, and not necessarily new products or better services. For the most part, businesses exist to not have to change, and they avoid risk whenever possible. The guy that gets to be CEO is the guy that pushes a merger, advocates layoffs, lies the most to the board and to the shareholders, and in general does nothing with the company he or she runs.
Look at how well the vaunted American success stories of the 1990s are doing. Enron / Worldcom down the tubes. Ford in trouble. GE with no new products. Pharm companies with few new drugs. The energy sector in chaos. The tech sector with no growth. Boeing can't introduce a new aircraft...
Why not tax LANs in Florida? Probably the only two groups that have them are NASA and Disney. Isn't the rest of the state just topless broads, fast cars and slobbering old people.:-)
Breast cancer rates have shot through the roof, we all have Strontium 90 in our teeth, there's enough plutonium leaked from Hanford to equal Chernobyl and all the frogs have 3 legs. But hey, there's nothing wrong with this radiation stuff..:-)
I mean, what if 1 billion years ago, a NAZI culture arose on another planet, actually won their world wars, and, then focused on conquering the galaxy and exterminating all life not like them.
We have this bizarre faith that super intelligent races are not violent or conquering. But, what if they are?
With write priviledges only to their own sandbox, then, none of this would be happening. Instead, you've got IE and Outlook running as a user's account, so, despite the prevalance of a workable user based access control list based security system in Windows, Microsoft does not use it where it really counts. Dumb dumb dumb.
Everyone says ignorance of a law is not an excuse, but, with hundreds of thousands of pages of US law on the books, it seems unreasonable to have a life where you must check with a lawyer before you do anything.
If you broadcast whitenoise on all wavelengths on a short radius, you can effectively jam the thing, I would think. You should be able to carry a decent battery to overcome RFID transmissions with a good jamming.
When I am elected President, I will use the USA Patriot Act to indefinately hold McBride and the entire SCO legal team as terrorists.
dnssec, how about authenticated email reply-to?
on
DNSSEC: Good Enough?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Someone at 130.160.91.27 evidently is spamming people with my email address as the reply to. While they are working on dnssec, perhaps someone could modify SMTP / POP servers to validate the reply-to domain or disallow the mail.
Once upon a time, people used to have a thing that brains and brawn were of roughly equal value. Then, in the industrial era, smart people made machines to replace brawn. Now, smarter people are making machines to replace smart people, so, that brawny people won't need smart people any more.
At the end of the day, we'll all be like John Henry, maybe beating this year's steam shovel and dying for it, but, next year, they will make a better model.
It is a simple fact that Utilities in many states are no longer required to buy power back from indy producers. The requirement to buy power back came in the 1970s during Carter as a way to fund the development of alternative energy. In the 2000, because anyone can now build a generation unit and sell the power to the now independent grid operator / rto, it was no longer necessary to force the utility to pay for power.
transmission and generation are now unlinked. anyone can use the transmision system to sell power if they can produce it, and that is the essence of deregulation.
The previous author's post was just flat out wrong.
Correction, Utilities no longer required to buy...
on
One Worldwide Power Grid
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Utilities are no longer required to buy power from producers, since an act of congress in 1990s...
For the American economy to work, it is in the interests of society that everyone should have electricity. Therefor, availability that might otherwise be constrained by market forces - such as in rural areas, must be handled or at least guided by the government.
At the start of the 20th century, prior to regulation, there were in fact hundreds, if not thousands of electric companies. Anyone with sufficient capital can and did run wires. You could have homes with wires from five different systems! Accidents were common and thousands of linemen were killed each year. The government created the "natural" monopolies of phone and electric service to solve these problems. We have "one" set of wires because the government said it would be that way, and, in a completely unfettered free market, there would be wires everywhere..
If this guy had done the exact same thing for 10 billion dollars, lying about stocks on the exchange as he drove a company into the ground, he would be considered an investment guru would be free.
Let's see who damages the economy more:
Ken Lay, Robert Smith, Carl Icahn, Nassar, or this guy, and which of the above is going to jail?:-)
If the central office is telling contractors to do stupid things, how would that be different than the central office telling regulated employees to do stupid things?
The power outtage has nothing to do with politics.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember once we sketched out a design for one at lunch. This was back in the Internet Startup Dayz and we figured that if ours failed we could always get into weapons. We didn't follow through, but I figure that with the advent of high level languages and faster processors, a lot of the problems in previously modern weapon systems are within the realm of the small team or even the solo programmer.
If I can't get a job programming because my job went to India, can I get a job soldiering because the Army went to the Middle East?
I mean, heck, maybe we poor American programmers should help our poor Pakistani friends. While we're unemployed, maybe we should be designing flight software for cruise missiles, nuclear simulations,
they'd better find jobs quick for a million unemployed American geeks. There will be no limit to the trouble that we can cause.
Since governments make things inefficient, and, free markets rule as you say, then, where is the stampede of corporations to eliminate copyrights and software patents. Instead of letting a machine innately good at copying information thrive to its fullest, why do corporations demand the government pass laws against people copying songs?
Governments can exist without corporations, but corporations cannot exist without government. If you truly do believe that big government is as intrusive and unnecessary as you say it is, then let us have government eliminate the patent office, the trademark office, the copywrite office, the various acts for the laws of the seas, the notion of a currency and currency exchange between nations, the laws that give corporations the right to enforce non-compete agreements, the laws that give corporations the right to investigate potential employees and the laws that protect trade secrets. If you want to have a free enterprise system and a reduced government, then, get rid of all of those things above, because your corporate welfare is no different than gov't cheese for rich people.
What's the difference between two small governments versus two giant corporations? Some of our largest firms are effectively governments in and of themselves. They, through contractual terms, patent portfolios, mineral rights, etc, have effective monopolies in their own right, so, what's the different between a company having a monopoly versus the government?
Free enterprise means no intellectual property rights. In fact, free enterprise might mean no property rights at all!
You know, we hear this argument over and over again. The government is less efficient innately because it does not compete the same way the private sector does. While off topic, I think refuting this argument on two levels will help keep the problem focused that NASA f-- up. Not, government is innately f--- up.
1. The government DOES compete and in a lot of way competes better than the private sector. Governments compete against the governments of other nations.
2. Most large businesses are risk averse and do not actually compete. The real thing that most businesses today do is sit on either real estate of intellectual property or real estate of land, both government protected monopolies, and milk them for all that it is worth. Most large firms do not actually innovate, and most large firms immediately close up shop for overseas as soon as someone "competes" with them.
If you ask me, the fact that NASA was able to fly the shuttle at all, as f--- as it is, is remarkable when you consider that for the same amount of money the private sector has given us such wonders as Ethyol (cancer drug that didn't work introduced anyway to pump up stock prices), The Power of Now (Enron's scheme...), the ill advised Daimler Chrysler merger, the destruction of American shipbuilding and steel, the movement of software overseas.
Really, if the private sector were so great, how come American companies are losing market share in everything across the board. If you ask me, the people that run these companies are all a bunch of dopes.
The future of this country is in small business and big government.
The one thing that really seems to define how well an operating system is how long the offerer keeps it in the market. OS/2 was not around really long enough, having given up the ghost around Windows95. And, neither was BeOS.
I still think that BeOS could have made it had Be not done the disasterous foray into Internet appliances and stuck with the pay for download the O/S model.
All they needed to do was stay the course, keep making the OS and improving it, and stay in business. But they did not, and so they failed.
MS won because they stuck with it. They throw something out there, and, if they judge it to be strategic, they stick with it. Look at how bad Windows 1.0 was, but they stuck with it. They stuck with it through Windows 2.0, through Windows/386, and finally, they got a product they could sell to OEMS in Windows 3.1 and even then, many businesses did not even move to Windows until Windows 95. That's nearly a 10 year stretch of staying in the market.
Make a new kind of thing that does what a web browser does, but isn't a web browser. MS could certainly push a new kind of content delivery engine, and create a "new web". Since the patent is for plugins into web browsers, they would no longer infringe.
Or, they could stuff all of C# into a web browser in such a way as the browser becomes a downloadable program selector.
I'm surprised MS lost this case.
Choice and flexibility are always a positive attributes for consumers, markers of the power for the end user.
Let's not forget that Windows has a lot of customizability and sells on that merit. For example, setting fonts, colors, everything with visual tools are a selling point of MS applications and the OS itself.
Linux should be marketed as an operating system that is more powerful than Windows and it should promote its data center roots. Web sites that offer Linux services and distributions should do well to look at how the differences between cheap tools and better tools are marketed.
Users can understand that with choice comes complexity, and, while you may not have the --whole-- market, you can grab the high end of it, grab the people that --care-- about software. They in turn will drive the lower end of the market.
Always target power users, make them happy, and you will not lose.
Consumers reward risk taking and intelligent behavior, but businesses do not. Any sane investment of capital carries with it a risk factor and that risk factor is weighed very heavily by people with lots of money to invest. So, they by and large will stick with larger players that can use governmental rules, market inertia, and legal means to increase their investment, and not necessarily new products or better services. For the most part, businesses exist to not have to change, and they avoid risk whenever possible. The guy that gets to be CEO is the guy that pushes a merger, advocates layoffs, lies the most to the board and to the shareholders, and in general does nothing with the company he or she runs.
Look at how well the vaunted American success stories of the 1990s are doing. Enron / Worldcom down the tubes. Ford in trouble. GE with no new products. Pharm companies with few new drugs. The energy sector in chaos. The tech sector with no growth. Boeing can't introduce a new aircraft...
Why not tax LANs in Florida? Probably the only two groups that have them are NASA and Disney. Isn't the rest of the state just topless broads, fast cars and slobbering old people.
Breast cancer rates have shot through the roof, we all have Strontium 90 in our teeth, there's enough plutonium leaked from Hanford to equal Chernobyl and all the frogs have 3 legs. But hey, there's nothing wrong with this radiation stuff..
I mean, what if 1 billion years ago, a NAZI culture arose on another planet, actually won their world wars, and, then focused on conquering the galaxy and exterminating all life not like them.
We have this bizarre faith that super intelligent races are not violent or conquering. But, what if they are?
With write priviledges only to their own sandbox, then, none of this would be happening. Instead, you've got IE and Outlook running as a user's account, so, despite the prevalance of a workable user based access control list based security system in Windows, Microsoft does not use it where it really counts. Dumb dumb dumb.
A crazy software company called SCO is going down the tubes because Linux is better, so they are suing to try and steal it.
Everyone says ignorance of a law is not an excuse, but, with hundreds of thousands of pages of US law on the books, it seems unreasonable to have a life where you must check with a lawyer before you do anything.
So, ignorance of the law SHOULD BE an excuse.
If you broadcast whitenoise on all wavelengths on a short radius, you can effectively jam the thing, I would think. You should be able to carry a decent battery to overcome RFID transmissions with a good jamming.
When I am elected President, I will use the USA Patriot Act to indefinately hold McBride and the entire SCO legal team as terrorists.
Someone at 130.160.91.27 evidently is spamming people with my email address as the reply to. While they are working on dnssec, perhaps someone could modify SMTP / POP servers to validate the reply-to domain or disallow the mail.
Once upon a time, people used to have a thing that brains and brawn were of roughly equal value. Then, in the industrial era, smart people made machines to replace brawn. Now, smarter people are making machines to replace smart people, so, that brawny people won't need smart people any more.
At the end of the day, we'll all be like John Henry, maybe beating this year's steam shovel and dying for it, but, next year, they will make a better model.
It is a simple fact that Utilities in many states are no longer required to buy power back from indy producers. The requirement to buy power back came in the 1970s during Carter as a way to fund the development of alternative energy. In the 2000, because anyone can now build a generation unit and sell the power to the now independent grid operator / rto, it was no longer necessary to force the utility to pay for power.
transmission and generation are now unlinked. anyone can use the transmision system to sell power if they can produce it, and that is the essence of deregulation.
The previous author's post was just flat out wrong
Utilities are no longer required to buy power from producers, since an act of congress in 1990s...
For the American economy to work, it is in the interests of society that everyone should have electricity. Therefor, availability that might otherwise be constrained by market forces - such as in rural areas, must be handled or at least guided by the government.
At the start of the 20th century, prior to regulation, there were in fact hundreds, if not thousands of electric companies. Anyone with sufficient capital can and did run wires. You could have homes with wires from five different systems! Accidents were common and thousands of linemen were killed each year. The government created the "natural" monopolies of phone and electric service to solve these problems. We have "one" set of wires because the government said it would be that way, and, in a completely unfettered free market, there would be wires everywhere..
If this guy had done the exact same thing for 10 billion dollars, lying about stocks on the exchange as he drove a company into the ground, he would be considered an investment guru would be free.
Let's see who damages the economy more:
Ken Lay, Robert Smith, Carl Icahn, Nassar, or this guy, and which of the above is going to jail?
If the central office is telling contractors to do stupid things, how would that be different than the central office telling regulated employees to do stupid things?
The power outtage has nothing to do with politics.