No, a criminal decides the punishment when he commits the crime. Hammurabi's law, (ironically enough) lives on in our current US criminal code.
Fine for speeding,
Jail time for stealing,
Death for murder (depending on the jurisdiction).
I know that the harassment of innocent Arab Americans has already begun in earnest. That sucks.
But from the sound of things in the investigation so far, these guys didn't do a whole lot to cover their tracks. I think that the evidence will be pretty clear-cut when it all shakes out.
Don't paint the whole middle east with the same brush?
How about the same brush these "Martyrs" painted US with? The innocent civillians, women and children who died this morning? Did these people build houses in the West Bank? Did these people deny jobs to Palestinians in Israel?
If there's any misplaced rage or hatred directed at other peoples in the Middle East, if any innocent person is killed in the revenge process that will definately ensue from today's action - the responsibility for this falls squarly on the shoulders of:
The "Martyrs" who perpetrated this act. Now roasting in hell.
The others in their organizations that helped plan and prepare this.
The political leaders of the Middle East and their bloodthirsty rhetoric that encourage this.
The people we see on TV, cheering as footage of this event is played over and over.
The moslems in the United States and elsewhere who send money to FUND these groups and their activities.
The religious leaders of the Islamic religion, both in the Middle East, and in the US, and elsewhere, who preach hatred and intolerance of Amercans and Jews and anyone who is not a Moslem - don't tell me that I'm racist for saying this, I have moslem friends, and they tell me what they hear in the mosque.
These people could not have done their own cause a more gross disservice. They shall now reap what they have sown.
Re:Well, US intelligence is enamored of high tech
on
Our New Pearl Harbor
·
· Score: 2
Russia handled it's terrorists from Chechnya.
It wasn't pretty.
I suspect more non-prettiness will be the result of this.
A tragic bombing and murder of innocent people.
Spam still arriving in my inbox.
I'm at work, doing my thing, as are all the rest here in my office.
Babies being born.
John Katz still rambling like a madman to his pet cockroaches in a dark cell of a hospital for the criminally insane.
Neither of those options I spoke of were legitimate options, nor were they likely to happen, nor were they "My Recommended Courses of Action".
I merely said that they are the only two ways to break the cycle of violence.
I regret that the cycle of violence WILL be perpetuated. And I accept that there's nothing anybody can do about it. This is the first dark day, of MANY dark days to come.
Historically, when a city has been conquered by forces in the past, the civilians are raped, butchered, their belongings taken, the buildings burned. Standard Operating Procedure until only VERY recently in human history.
You have to wonder at HOW these terrorists got ahold of these planes.
Hijacking. How? How were they able to smuggle bombs or guns (most likely guns) aboard these planes? When every time I fly somewhere, I am photographed, poked, prodded, xrayed, and scanned?
Somebody was not doing their job.
We don't need MORE invasion of privacy and abridgement of civil liberties. We need to plug the gaps in the system that allowed this to happen. Our system SHOULD already have been good enough to prevent something like this. It was not. Apparently.
If you're talking about how they coordinated this attack? Well, isn't it obvious? Email? Computers? usenet? Encryption?
We've discussed this issue to death here on slashdot - and it always comes down to more control=less security.
I fear that those arguments will be lost in the near future as tempers flare. Say goodbye to your freedoms. It was nice while it lasted, wasn't it?
There are only two ways to break the cycle of violence.
1. Kill them all. Every last one of them. And anyone who ever cared about them. No one will be left to carry out revenge. No future generations will rise up.
OR
2. Forgive.
Apparently, neither of these are really an option, so we'll be pedalling this cycle for a good long while to come.
- - - -
But really, "Go W"? Do you have any idea how rediculous that sounds? We'll be lucky if that bastard doesn't round up any person who is a moslem in the US and put them in camps for orderly disposal.
I think that the US people have learned, and will soon have the lesson reinforced, what happens when you elect a president with WEAK foreign experience.
I'm all for rallying around the flag, but I refuse to support this charlatan of a leader.
Its main purpose was to strike fear into the hearts of Americans, and to cause our economy to collapse. If everyone is afraid, then the economy WILL collapse.
The emergency workers are busy. The military is obviously busy. Go to work and conduct your business as well as possible. Unless you are working in one of the obviously dangerous areas.
They only beat us if we let our fear win.
I'm not a soldier. I'm not a fireman or paramedic. I'm not a police man. But I'm going to work today, and I'm testing software, and I'm making sure that my little cog in the big machine keeps turning.
Now, we're going to see what kind of a leader dubbya is. I have very grave doubts about his ability to deal with this situation rationally - think martial law - think more raids in Iraq - think more raids in Afghanistan. Think Arab Americans being rounded up (I'm sorry, but you know this will happen). There isn't much we can do about those things other than keep a cool head, and do your job as best as you can.
Re:Beauty for beauty's sake makes crappy software
on
Software Aesthetics
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
basically, you're talking about the problem being that the product is being designed by people other than the engineer.
Marketroids designing projects and setting schedules will get you an end product that does not appear to be well engineered. Because the engineer didn't design it. The Marketroids did.
You want software that works? Put the engineers back in charge.
But then the company that does that will be out of business by the next development cycle. Because their product won't look nice on the comparison matrix.
Ease of use and word-of-mouth doesn't cut it anymore in this industry. You need the trade rags sucking up. And that takes marketroids.
In Biblical-Scholar terms, the language of "mark in their right hand or in their forheads" has a meaning which is a bit more than what you'd literally think.
The way it's generally interpreted is more like;
A mark on your right hand - typically referrs to an action - your "hand" is what you do. A mark on your forehead can be the way you think, or something that you say.
Thoughts and deeds.
(remember the movie PI where the rabbis had the scripture wrapped around his arm, and folded up in a box stuck on his forehead? same deal).
Not a literal physical mark like a tatoo on your hand, or something like that.
The mark of the beast on your right hand would mean - something that dictates how you act, and on your forehead would be something that controls how you think or what you say. (what you think to yourself and what you say out loud were generally thought of as carrying the same weight to the authors of the Bible - Jews and Christians are encouraged to control their thoughts). Having lustful thoughts about a woman is the same as committing adultery in your heart.
If you think about it, we already have identifying code numbers. SSN, credit card numbers, phone numbers, Ethernet addr., IP, I think this whole ID number thing as the number of the beast is a big crock.
For that matter, any person could be assigned a number being their timestamp at birth. (and simultaneous births could be serialized via some arbitrary method). All ideas and information can be encoded as a number - and that's ASCII, but it goes back much farther to Qaballa, and Numerology.
I've read other interpretations that say that the Beast was the Roman Empire (which has evolved in present-times to the US/UK/Australia alliance - according to some wackos).
So, we could already be long-gone, as far as the predictions in Revelation are concerned. Or, it may be something much less subtle that will be plainly understood. In any case, anyone wanting to implement the use of such a numbering system is going to have to "sell" it to the Christians to get them to go along with it.
This, by the way, is how the software companies play the tech journals.
If the magazine wants an early copy or Beta of some hot new upcoming product to do a review (and the handholding to get it running well enough for a demo) - they'll omit all the critical language in the article, and make the software look like the greatest thing in the world.
Now, you'd think it would be the other way around, that the software company's would be beholden to the trade rags for publicity and eyeballs. But without the perks from the software companies, they don't have a story. . .
But the media companies (well, AOL/TW, anyway) are making an end-run around the intenet. At the access point.
Your "garage band" will also need to spend what will probably end up being $1000/month for a T1 line to serve their content (music) to the internet. This is because OUTBOUND bandwidth is showing to be a lot more valuable than originally thought. This is why broadband is dead or dying. As Cringely says, it's no longer a viable industry.
Watch it fall under control of the most dominant media players, and watch them prevent anybody from serving "competing content" for any reasonable price. Sure, consumers will have DSL and Cable, but they'll strangle the outbound bandwidth either technologically, or using restrictive service agreements. And if you want to host a server, you'll be forced to go the T1 route. That alone raises the bar in terms of cost of doing business, for your average "garage band".
Then look at it from the enduser's point of view. The vast majority of people are going to be accessing the internet via large media company-owned ISP's. Namely AOL/TW, and others which will undoubtedly jump in in the next 5 years. Those internet users will be focussed and steered to corporate-dominated content - and will likely never be aware of the "free" side of the internet. The seamy underbelly of HaX0rz and conspiracy theorists, and open source communists. Most people will be fed all their news, and neat places to see on the internet by the big corporate teat that appears in their browser when they log on. So your "garage band" will have a serious marketing problem. The only way the majority of net users will ever hear about them is if they go crawling to AOL/TW begging for ad space. And they'll be offered a deal they can't refuse. Just as musicians are today.
The only problem with this theory, is - I can't for the life of me understand why in hell Sony and others have not jumped on to this already. I mean, the two biggest ISPs, AOL and MSN are media-dominated (TW and NBC/Disney) - but there's a lot of other media companies out there that are missing out, and it's got to be obvious to them that they're behind the curve by now - and if AOL/TW doesn't scare the shit out of them, MS sure as hell should, - unless they're all holding their breaths to see how DOJ/.NET/Hailstorm all shakes out. Unfortunately, I don't see MS coming out of this in too bad a shape. And the future of the net, as far as I can tell, seems pretty much a done deal to me.
The rest of us, will be a "cool" minority, gradually getting edged out by a corporate-brainwashed majority, and the technology they're fed. Will it be very much longer before web browsers themselves become obsolete, and we'll be showing our children how to use this awesome tool called "Netscape" just as today, the old gurus show us this neat tool called "gopher"?
And how will we access the net. I'm guessing that Linux will probably be the only OS choice in the future not overridden by corporate marketing influence and technological hobbles. Run on roll-your-own hardware. And I'm guessing that the only ISPs that remain in business that would offer access to Linux users will probably be dial-up only. Or T1. (or hopefully Wireless-parasite).
Sorry, I just see a very grim future ahead, and I'm going to go drink myself into oblivion now.
yup - you hit the nail on the head. Spending money is all about vanity.
If only the record companies could figure this out, they would know that they could give away the tracks for free, and still make zillions selling CD's.
just because Napster is dead does not mean that people aren't still sharing MP3s over more private networks.
The only saving grace for the media companies now is to buy-out all the broadband providers, and prevent people from running ftp servers - oh wait, they're already doing that. . .
Back in the day WAS 30 years ago, when Larry Lujack was the original "shock-jock" (only not resorting to as much vulgarity as they need to today) on WLS *AM* in Chicago - because most people didn't even have FM radios back then.
People think this shock-jock thing is something new. It is to laugh.
no-competition, antitrust, oligopoly; these are not new ideas. They're old.
My point is - this represents a contraction of the economy, a reduction of the much-vaunted American Higher Standard of Living (because Capitalism and NeoLiberalism are Good Things (TM)).
Am I a socialist? Not a chance, but I wasn't born yesterday. I know that for a fact because this whole thing smells like last week's diapers.
And if you want to know exactly how we got at this point, you only have the greatest and most popular president of the US of all-time to thank; Reagan's De-regulation, trickle-down, and what Bush Sr called "Voodoo Economics" back in 1980.
Take em to court. Go ahead. Look at how obviously guilty Microsoft is, and look at the success the DOJ has had a prosecuting that case. Timely justice done? The DOJ started all this in the early 90's, going after them for Windows95, and MS just laughed at the consent decree. And they bungled their way stupidly through the last trial, and they're still "innovating" more than ever.
It will probably take the inevitable economic collapse that is coming, to convince those in power that these were not smart moves, and that we should learn from the mistakes that were made in the 1980's.
The worst part about losing the "first sale" qualities of a product is that that product will likely be sold for about the same amount, but carries a much lower value for the consumer.
Basically, this is a HUGE gob of inflation in the ecomomy - but it's inflation that won't be measured or accounted for in "cost of living" calculations, and will slip under the radar. Life will be perceptibly more difficult for consumers, but nobody's going to make an adjustment for it for people who are on fixed incomes, etc.
I believe this is also the main aim of "market segmentation strategies". Lower the value of the product for the consumer so you can give the appearance of not raising prices. Rake in profits for "prosumer" and high-end market segments that can bear the cost, and can't bear the lower value of the product (usually through technical crippling or inconvenient feature-bundling) - though that product has the same manufacturing cost as the low-end version. In effect, you increase profits, and you're getting more money from the consumer per intangible, unmeasurable "units of quality", without being accused of price-gouging, or feeding the inflation demons.
Of course, this kind of strategy only works in the absence of competition. And it's working very well today, and I suspect it will be working extremely well in the future.
I think that there are significant numbers of people who are opposed to sports, the obscene amount of money that is spent on sports in the public education system, the way atheletic students are given preferential treatment in matters of discipline as well as academic measurement, and financial aid.
Sports has a number of very negative impacts on our society;
Programs our children for agression and destructive or counterproductive competition. Costs BILLIONS a year in lost productivity due to "old sports injuries" or worker absenteeism to watch sporting events, or dissolved marriages due to spousal obsession with watching sporting events or spending money on sports paraphenalia, or purchasing inferior or defective products endorsed by sports personalities.
Takes HUGE amounts of funding and manpower away from legitimate academic pursuits.
Riots by fans at British soccer games.
Why do Sports teams have to meet and practice on school property? Why can't sports enthusiasts spend their own money to secure funding for a separate stadium, locker room and showers? Why are students pulled away from their studies in their regular classes to attend brainwashing and propaganda ceremonies ("pep rallies")?
We all know that football is a neo-facsist crypto-symbol for nuclear war.
As soon as they decide that they can make more money off of IP monopolies than they can huckstering commodity hardware and supplies, (DUH!) they'll jump right onto the bandwagon.
Slashdot Mirror
No, a criminal decides the punishment when he commits the crime. Hammurabi's law, (ironically enough) lives on in our current US criminal code.
Fine for speeding,
Jail time for stealing,
Death for murder (depending on the jurisdiction).
I know that the harassment of innocent Arab Americans has already begun in earnest. That sucks.
But from the sound of things in the investigation so far, these guys didn't do a whole lot to cover their tracks. I think that the evidence will be pretty clear-cut when it all shakes out.
We are at war. In a state of war, the gloves are off, the rules change.
I think the current poll is inappropriate.
I think that it would be cool if slashdot would use the poll to see what people, in general, are feeling about todays events.
Don't paint the whole middle east with the same brush?
How about the same brush these "Martyrs" painted US with? The innocent civillians, women and children who died this morning? Did these people build houses in the West Bank? Did these people deny jobs to Palestinians in Israel?
If there's any misplaced rage or hatred directed at other peoples in the Middle East, if any innocent person is killed in the revenge process that will definately ensue from today's action - the responsibility for this falls squarly on the shoulders of:
The "Martyrs" who perpetrated this act. Now roasting in hell.
The others in their organizations that helped plan and prepare this.
The political leaders of the Middle East and their bloodthirsty rhetoric that encourage this.
The people we see on TV, cheering as footage of this event is played over and over.
The moslems in the United States and elsewhere who send money to FUND these groups and their activities.
The religious leaders of the Islamic religion, both in the Middle East, and in the US, and elsewhere, who preach hatred and intolerance of Amercans and Jews and anyone who is not a Moslem - don't tell me that I'm racist for saying this, I have moslem friends, and they tell me what they hear in the mosque.
These people could not have done their own cause a more gross disservice. They shall now reap what they have sown.
Russia handled it's terrorists from Chechnya.
It wasn't pretty.
I suspect more non-prettiness will be the result of this.
A tragic bombing and murder of innocent people.
Spam still arriving in my inbox.
I'm at work, doing my thing, as are all the rest here in my office.
Babies being born.
John Katz still rambling like a madman to his pet cockroaches in a dark cell of a hospital for the criminally insane.
wheee! maybe I can get a job reading your email for the US Govt! That sounds absolutely POSH!
You misread what I said.
Neither of those options I spoke of were legitimate options, nor were they likely to happen, nor were they "My Recommended Courses of Action".
I merely said that they are the only two ways to break the cycle of violence.
I regret that the cycle of violence WILL be perpetuated. And I accept that there's nothing anybody can do about it. This is the first dark day, of MANY dark days to come.
No this is war.
Historically, when a city has been conquered by forces in the past, the civilians are raped, butchered, their belongings taken, the buildings burned. Standard Operating Procedure until only VERY recently in human history.
You have to wonder at HOW these terrorists got ahold of these planes.
Hijacking. How? How were they able to smuggle bombs or guns (most likely guns) aboard these planes? When every time I fly somewhere, I am photographed, poked, prodded, xrayed, and scanned?
Somebody was not doing their job.
We don't need MORE invasion of privacy and abridgement of civil liberties. We need to plug the gaps in the system that allowed this to happen. Our system SHOULD already have been good enough to prevent something like this. It was not. Apparently.
If you're talking about how they coordinated this attack? Well, isn't it obvious? Email? Computers? usenet? Encryption?
We've discussed this issue to death here on slashdot - and it always comes down to more control=less security.
I fear that those arguments will be lost in the near future as tempers flare. Say goodbye to your freedoms. It was nice while it lasted, wasn't it?
There are only two ways to break the cycle of violence.
1. Kill them all. Every last one of them. And anyone who ever cared about them. No one will be left to carry out revenge. No future generations will rise up.
OR
2. Forgive.
Apparently, neither of these are really an option, so we'll be pedalling this cycle for a good long while to come.
- - - -
But really, "Go W"? Do you have any idea how rediculous that sounds? We'll be lucky if that bastard doesn't round up any person who is a moslem in the US and put them in camps for orderly disposal.
I think that the US people have learned, and will soon have the lesson reinforced, what happens when you elect a president with WEAK foreign experience.
I'm all for rallying around the flag, but I refuse to support this charlatan of a leader.
This is a terrorist attack.
Its main purpose was to strike fear into the hearts of Americans, and to cause our economy to collapse. If everyone is afraid, then the economy WILL collapse.
The emergency workers are busy. The military is obviously busy. Go to work and conduct your business as well as possible. Unless you are working in one of the obviously dangerous areas.
They only beat us if we let our fear win.
I'm not a soldier. I'm not a fireman or paramedic. I'm not a police man. But I'm going to work today, and I'm testing software, and I'm making sure that my little cog in the big machine keeps turning.
Now, we're going to see what kind of a leader dubbya is. I have very grave doubts about his ability to deal with this situation rationally - think martial law - think more raids in Iraq - think more raids in Afghanistan. Think Arab Americans being rounded up (I'm sorry, but you know this will happen). There isn't much we can do about those things other than keep a cool head, and do your job as best as you can.
basically, you're talking about the problem being that the product is being designed by people other than the engineer.
Marketroids designing projects and setting schedules will get you an end product that does not appear to be well engineered. Because the engineer didn't design it. The Marketroids did.
You want software that works? Put the engineers back in charge.
But then the company that does that will be out of business by the next development cycle. Because their product won't look nice on the comparison matrix.
Ease of use and word-of-mouth doesn't cut it anymore in this industry. You need the trade rags sucking up. And that takes marketroids.
In Biblical-Scholar terms, the language of "mark in their right hand or in their forheads" has a meaning which is a bit more than what you'd literally think.
The way it's generally interpreted is more like;
A mark on your right hand - typically referrs to an action - your "hand" is what you do. A mark on your forehead can be the way you think, or something that you say.
Thoughts and deeds.
(remember the movie PI where the rabbis had the scripture wrapped around his arm, and folded up in a box stuck on his forehead? same deal).
Not a literal physical mark like a tatoo on your hand, or something like that.
The mark of the beast on your right hand would mean - something that dictates how you act, and on your forehead would be something that controls how you think or what you say. (what you think to yourself and what you say out loud were generally thought of as carrying the same weight to the authors of the Bible - Jews and Christians are encouraged to control their thoughts). Having lustful thoughts about a woman is the same as committing adultery in your heart.
If you think about it, we already have identifying code numbers. SSN, credit card numbers, phone numbers, Ethernet addr., IP, I think this whole ID number thing as the number of the beast is a big crock.
For that matter, any person could be assigned a number being their timestamp at birth. (and simultaneous births could be serialized via some arbitrary method). All ideas and information can be encoded as a number - and that's ASCII, but it goes back much farther to Qaballa, and Numerology.
I've read other interpretations that say that the Beast was the Roman Empire (which has evolved in present-times to the US/UK/Australia alliance - according to some wackos).
So, we could already be long-gone, as far as the predictions in Revelation are concerned. Or, it may be something much less subtle that will be plainly understood. In any case, anyone wanting to implement the use of such a numbering system is going to have to "sell" it to the Christians to get them to go along with it.
This, by the way, is how the software companies play the tech journals.
If the magazine wants an early copy or Beta of some hot new upcoming product to do a review (and the handholding to get it running well enough for a demo) - they'll omit all the critical language in the article, and make the software look like the greatest thing in the world.
Now, you'd think it would be the other way around, that the software company's would be beholden to the trade rags for publicity and eyeballs. But without the perks from the software companies, they don't have a story. . .
But the media companies (well, AOL/TW, anyway) are making an end-run around the intenet. At the access point.
Your "garage band" will also need to spend what will probably end up being $1000/month for a T1 line to serve their content (music) to the internet. This is because OUTBOUND bandwidth is showing to be a lot more valuable than originally thought. This is why broadband is dead or dying. As Cringely says, it's no longer a viable industry.
Watch it fall under control of the most dominant media players, and watch them prevent anybody from serving "competing content" for any reasonable price. Sure, consumers will have DSL and Cable, but they'll strangle the outbound bandwidth either technologically, or using restrictive service agreements. And if you want to host a server, you'll be forced to go the T1 route. That alone raises the bar in terms of cost of doing business, for your average "garage band".
Then look at it from the enduser's point of view. The vast majority of people are going to be accessing the internet via large media company-owned ISP's. Namely AOL/TW, and others which will undoubtedly jump in in the next 5 years. Those internet users will be focussed and steered to corporate-dominated content - and will likely never be aware of the "free" side of the internet. The seamy underbelly of HaX0rz and conspiracy theorists, and open source communists. Most people will be fed all their news, and neat places to see on the internet by the big corporate teat that appears in their browser when they log on. So your "garage band" will have a serious marketing problem. The only way the majority of net users will ever hear about them is if they go crawling to AOL/TW begging for ad space. And they'll be offered a deal they can't refuse. Just as musicians are today.
The only problem with this theory, is - I can't for the life of me understand why in hell Sony and others have not jumped on to this already. I mean, the two biggest ISPs, AOL and MSN are media-dominated (TW and NBC/Disney) - but there's a lot of other media companies out there that are missing out, and it's got to be obvious to them that they're behind the curve by now - and if AOL/TW doesn't scare the shit out of them, MS sure as hell should, - unless they're all holding their breaths to see how DOJ/.NET/Hailstorm all shakes out. Unfortunately, I don't see MS coming out of this in too bad a shape. And the future of the net, as far as I can tell, seems pretty much a done deal to me.
The rest of us, will be a "cool" minority, gradually getting edged out by a corporate-brainwashed majority, and the technology they're fed. Will it be very much longer before web browsers themselves become obsolete, and we'll be showing our children how to use this awesome tool called "Netscape" just as today, the old gurus show us this neat tool called "gopher"?
And how will we access the net. I'm guessing that Linux will probably be the only OS choice in the future not overridden by corporate marketing influence and technological hobbles. Run on roll-your-own hardware. And I'm guessing that the only ISPs that remain in business that would offer access to Linux users will probably be dial-up only. Or T1. (or hopefully Wireless-parasite).
Sorry, I just see a very grim future ahead, and I'm going to go drink myself into oblivion now.
yup - you hit the nail on the head. Spending money is all about vanity.
If only the record companies could figure this out, they would know that they could give away the tracks for free, and still make zillions selling CD's.
just because Napster is dead does not mean that people aren't still sharing MP3s over more private networks.
The only saving grace for the media companies now is to buy-out all the broadband providers, and prevent people from running ftp servers - oh wait, they're already doing that. . .
Back in the day WAS 30 years ago, when Larry Lujack was the original "shock-jock" (only not resorting to as much vulgarity as they need to today) on WLS *AM* in Chicago - because most people didn't even have FM radios back then.
People think this shock-jock thing is something new. It is to laugh.
no-competition, antitrust, oligopoly; these are not new ideas. They're old.
My point is - this represents a contraction of the economy, a reduction of the much-vaunted American Higher Standard of Living (because Capitalism and NeoLiberalism are Good Things (TM)).
Am I a socialist? Not a chance, but I wasn't born yesterday. I know that for a fact because this whole thing smells like last week's diapers.
And if you want to know exactly how we got at this point, you only have the greatest and most popular president of the US of all-time to thank; Reagan's De-regulation, trickle-down, and what Bush Sr called "Voodoo Economics" back in 1980.
Take em to court. Go ahead. Look at how obviously guilty Microsoft is, and look at the success the DOJ has had a prosecuting that case. Timely justice done? The DOJ started all this in the early 90's, going after them for Windows95, and MS just laughed at the consent decree. And they bungled their way stupidly through the last trial, and they're still "innovating" more than ever.
It will probably take the inevitable economic collapse that is coming, to convince those in power that these were not smart moves, and that we should learn from the mistakes that were made in the 1980's.
hm . word for word, the same exact reply I got from her almost a year ago. . .
The worst part about losing the "first sale" qualities of a product is that that product will likely be sold for about the same amount, but carries a much lower value for the consumer.
Basically, this is a HUGE gob of inflation in the ecomomy - but it's inflation that won't be measured or accounted for in "cost of living" calculations, and will slip under the radar. Life will be perceptibly more difficult for consumers, but nobody's going to make an adjustment for it for people who are on fixed incomes, etc.
I believe this is also the main aim of "market segmentation strategies". Lower the value of the product for the consumer so you can give the appearance of not raising prices. Rake in profits for "prosumer" and high-end market segments that can bear the cost, and can't bear the lower value of the product (usually through technical crippling or inconvenient feature-bundling) - though that product has the same manufacturing cost as the low-end version. In effect, you increase profits, and you're getting more money from the consumer per intangible, unmeasurable "units of quality", without being accused of price-gouging, or feeding the inflation demons.
Of course, this kind of strategy only works in the absence of competition. And it's working very well today, and I suspect it will be working extremely well in the future.
I think that there are significant numbers of people who are opposed to sports, the obscene amount of money that is spent on sports in the public education system, the way atheletic students are given preferential treatment in matters of discipline as well as academic measurement, and financial aid.
Sports has a number of very negative impacts on our society;
Programs our children for agression and destructive or counterproductive competition. Costs BILLIONS a year in lost productivity due to "old sports injuries" or worker absenteeism to watch sporting events, or dissolved marriages due to spousal obsession with watching sporting events or spending money on sports paraphenalia, or purchasing inferior or defective products endorsed by sports personalities.
Takes HUGE amounts of funding and manpower away from legitimate academic pursuits.
Riots by fans at British soccer games.
Why do Sports teams have to meet and practice on school property? Why can't sports enthusiasts spend their own money to secure funding for a separate stadium, locker room and showers? Why are students pulled away from their studies in their regular classes to attend brainwashing and propaganda ceremonies ("pep rallies")?
We all know that football is a neo-facsist crypto-symbol for nuclear war.
Yeah, that just crushes all my fantasies about her in that slave girl outfit in Jedi. Now I have to fantasize about her as a nun.
maybe not Phillips, but Sony IS the RIAA.
As soon as they decide that they can make more money off of IP monopolies than they can huckstering commodity hardware and supplies, (DUH!) they'll jump right onto the bandwagon.