I work for a contractor (stateside) - and we've lost two employees so far. One in a bombing in Afghanistan, and one, in a fucking beheading snuff video - the guy was evidently abducted in Saudi Arabia.
There is no amount of money you could pay me to go there.
If you're so sad about the newsmedia responding to market demand with regard to which types of stories they cover, then maybe you should direct your IRE to the 1982 congressional republicans, with the support of Republican Hero President Ron Reagan, who gutted the Fairness Doctrine, and FCC limits on corporate media consolidation.
That "Free Market" cuts both ways. Am I sad that the Anarcho Capitalists are now getting bitchslapped by the Invisible Hand?
The torturers got into exactly zero crap. The few token scapegoat sexual deviants got busted to draw attention away from the torturers.
The torturers did as they were ordered by their leaders. All the way up the military chain to the civilians, John Yoo, Alberto Gonzales, Don Rumsfeld, etc.
The fact is - it is well documented that torture is not an effective method of extracting actionable intelligence.
The one thing that torture excels at (as a technique) - is terrorizing people, and whipping up popular support at home.
I'm sure that one could find at least a few cases where torture yielded good intelligence. And for each one of those cases, you'll find a hundred others where the subject lied to get the torture to stop. The biggest problem anyone should have with torture, is that it amounts to punishing innocents; people who have not had their day in court, who have not been found guilty by a jury of their peers through the preponderance of evidence. This is one of the primary reasons our forefathers rebelled from mother England, and King George III. And I find it deeply disturbing that in this day and age, so many of my countrymen are so ignorant to the basic core concepts of what it means to be an American.
You say this is a War on Terror? Then why are we funding terrorist organizations, and why do we use terrorist tactics like torture? You can't defend freedom, by destroying it.
In this case, it's why KBR (Durban) is going broke, and Halliburton (JHB) is moving to Dubai.
Bonus Question: Who pays the cost of a war, when a "used car salesman" convinces folks that one is needed, whether or not it actually is needed? Answer: 3000 US troops, the taxpayers, and hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
WHY on Earth would you connect two nations, both of which have many viable ports, with a massive tunnel to their least populated and most distant parts?
Global warming will make these parts way more well populated in the next 100 years. And settling these areas will bring some real-estate price-relief for the rest of the nation, which is becoming overcrowded (unless some new cities are built soon).
In any case, I'm sure it's a boondoggle, and the tunnel-builders are just hoping to scam someone into paying for it, so they can get a good start, make some money, then bail with their golden parachutes when it ends up costing 10 times more than they bid.
It's the American way. (we learned it from the Russians, apparently)
I dont' know how likely this is; (actually, not likely at all - but not impossible) - if we were to "invent" an energy generation process that was so cheap and efficient that we'd have a surplus, we could start building plants to extract carbon from the atmosphere. It's an energy-intensive reaction. But assume the output is graphite. That, we could just bury. CO2 + gobs of energy => O2 + C.
That said - if we had the choice between; investing that abundant energy on economic (=population) growth, or investing that abundant energy on fixing our broken ecosphere, I am certain that we will have the same exact problem (root cause) that got us into this mess in the first place.
People will not control or limit their consumption.
You can get some people to do it. But a whole planet's worth of people, from thousands of different cultures, speaking hundreds of different languages, worshipping dozens of Gods who are commanding them to be fruitful and multiply.
This is a very difficult problem - and the only solution I see is either some kind of orbital mind-control laser (ie. we're functionally no longer "free" humans) - or lots and lots of killing/dying.
It would be great if we could just tell people that limiting their consumption is in their own best interest, and they'd listen, and do it. And then we could invent this magic infinite energy technology. But what's the likelihood of these two things happening?
In the whole of human history, not even an all-powerful God (real or imagined) has been able to pull off that stunt. He still has to send a bunch of us straight to hell for failing to modify our behaviors.
How are a few egghead scientists going to pull that off? It won't happen. The best we can do is prepare for the worst, and hope for the best.
The value of the pedantry and trollery notwithstanding, I would argue that the time I spend on slashdot is TIME WELL SPENT.
I'm not about to quantify that - I have neither the expertise, nor the time to produce hard numbers supporting this idea. But if you read Stephen Covey's "7 habits of highly successful people" - you read about a habit called "sharpening the saw". 30 minutes to an hour a day, SURFING THE WEB, has exposed me to ideas and information I would never have been exposed to any other way. Every day I deal with "engineers" who are completely clueless to entire areas of knowledge - anything outside their little niche of expertise, may as well not exist.
Of course, you have to be judicious about where you spend your time. 30 minutes a day on the boss's clock, looking at porn and webcomics is not likely to make you a better, or more innovative worker. But sites like Groklaw, Slashdot, Sourceforge, Wikipedia, etc. can really broaden your horizons.
As a tech lead, I encourage my workers to do a little bit of online saw-sharpening. But I have not been caught by my boss yet.:)
Yea, beacause we all know that roads and highways are 100% funded by private inves... erm, never mind...
hm. Not to mention that the law enforcement, signage, training and licensing of drivers, massive subsidies to car manufacturers (like Chrysler in the 1980's, and bankruptcy-protection for the others), and military expeditions to secure sources of oil.
Automotive transport is one of the most socialist activities in the history of humanity.
Chernobyl would probably still be running and providing power if they had not shut off all kinds of safety mechanisms at the same time like a bunch of fucking idiots.
Yes.
Nuclear power is quite safe.
As long as you don't let fucking idiots run your plants.
So - how do you propose we address this glaringly obvious problem? What can we do differently in the future, that won't repeat the problems of the past? And why didn't people realize this in the past, and put it into practice?
"... To summarize, the people who want to lead the government, are, by virtue of wanting to lead, the least qualified to do so. To summarize the summary: people are a problem."
I think there's a bigger problem with people wanting to lead in bad faith.
People who don't want to lead - will likely be bad leaders. Effective leading takes a lot of self-confidence, and drive.
The real problem is people who want to lead as a means to an end (that end being power).
Back in the late 90's when the mafIAA were suing Napster, the web-folk were complaining about free speech and "infringing uses" - and they were saying that the people who are infringing (ie. actually sharing the music) were the ones that should be sued, not the company, not the technology, and not the tools. (I bet Shawn Fanning is spinning in his grave - or his hot tub, whatever). Now the record companies are doing it - and people are still complaining. There's no equivalence between buying a CD, and letting your brother borrow it, or ripping it and sharing the files with 250,000 of your "closest friends".
Frankly - I think that there's a "scary" direction this could all take. (as if senators saying that the mafIAA should have the right to "destroy" your computer isn't scary enough) - if Apple goes DRM free, and EMI buys into it, then other services, and labels, will have to as well. If they don't, Apple wins, and gets a monopoly. My guess is that not every record company is ready to do this, and we'll see some labels leave Apple. OR - maybe all the labels will feel pressure to offer DRM-less recordings, on all services. (I don't think this is going to cut into sales - I really don't - especially if the mafIAA keeps suing sharers). If that happens, then labels will probably try to differentiate themselves via exclusivity with services. The choice won't be "DRM or DRM-free" - the choice will be "Artist X (from service Y) or Artist Z (from service W)" - this model cuts out the services as the distinguishing factor. It takes the service providers out of the equation (why choose iTMS over Zune, or any other service - other than specific Artist availability?) A service provider is a player, a web site, and a server-farm. Not much latitude for a product to distinguish itself. We may even see a "race to the bottom" as far as "cheap" service goes. Apple may maintain its status as a boutique brand, wrt its music player (iPod) features, and style. But there's no longer a real economic incentive for a person to stick with iTMS as a service provider - other than Artist availability - which is controlled very tightly by the label.
This means; the Record Labels could very well have the last laugh here - for FINALLY doing what fans have been clamoring for since 1996. Chuck DRM under the bus.
...at this very moment chairs are being lifted into orbit from Redmond.
I think you're actually understating it.
When you look at the effort Microsoft has gone to put hooks in, at the kernel level - even at the HARDWARE level, to support DRM, and then contemplate the possibility that if DRM *does* get flushed out, on the Video side, as well as the Audio side, you're looking at a HUGE wasted investment by Microsoft, that Microsoft's competitors did not have to make.
Whether the chair-tosser realizes this, or whether he's steeped in denial about it, is a point of debate. Neither APPL nor MSFT are moving significantly today - so maybe the market has not realized this yet either.
It will be interesting (to say the least) to see how this plays out.
What happened was not just the creation of the CD.
It was the transition from Analog to Digital.
In this transition, the music industry has reaped enormous benefits and efficiencies - from the recording, to the production, to the manufacturing, and even in the transition of consumer audio equipment (going from analog turntables to digital CD players was a HUGE boon to the electronics industry, with regard to the level of audio quality per dollar spent).
The music industry wanted to get all the benefits of going digital - without suffering one of the trade-offs: what was easier (cheaper) for them to mass-duplicate, was also cheaper for pirates, and consumers, to mass-duplicate. (this actually didn't start happening for consumers for about 10 years, because there were no consumer-level CD burners until about 1990-ish).
Like any other business, they wanted to have their cake, and eat it too.
To ignore the utility and innovation in the original Napster (which was more than just a P2P download service; it was P2P downloading, bundled with social networking, and a grassroots ratings service).
Red is the color of action, of anger, blue, of depression, passivity.
As far as marketing campaigns go; Red was a no-brainer. Who made that choice, anyway? (Rupert Murdoch?).
Red was chosen as a "brand icon" in the early communist movement, to get the people riled up for communism. Sure, there was all the symbolic "blood of the people" talk. But basically, it was a political propaganda PR stunt. As such - the recent "Red state/Blue state" movement in American politics was a populist movement. Republicanism and Conservativism has been framed in populist terms: fight the Coastal Liberal Elites, who are in bed with big-business, and the academics, and anti-religious science movement, and the UN and foreign forces who want to destroy the American way of life, and our Christian (okay; "Judeo-Christian") culture. Get down with the down-home American heartland in "flyover country".
Have to laugh at what castro is saying. There is plenty of food for the world. The issue is one of distribution. Correct that, and we could cut back on crops.
Especially ironic coming from a self-proclaimed "communist".
Slashdot Mirror
I work for a contractor (stateside) - and we've lost two employees so far. One in a bombing in Afghanistan, and one, in a fucking beheading snuff video - the guy was evidently abducted in Saudi Arabia.
There is no amount of money you could pay me to go there.
If you're so sad about the newsmedia responding to market demand with regard to which types of stories they cover, then maybe you should direct your IRE to the 1982 congressional republicans, with the support of Republican Hero President Ron Reagan, who gutted the Fairness Doctrine, and FCC limits on corporate media consolidation.
That "Free Market" cuts both ways. Am I sad that the Anarcho Capitalists are now getting bitchslapped by the Invisible Hand?
Not one bit.
The torturers got into exactly zero crap.
The few token scapegoat sexual deviants got busted to draw attention away from the torturers.
The torturers did as they were ordered by their leaders. All the way up the military chain to the civilians, John Yoo, Alberto Gonzales, Don Rumsfeld, etc.
The fact is - it is well documented that torture is not an effective method of extracting actionable intelligence.
The one thing that torture excels at (as a technique) - is terrorizing people, and whipping up popular support at home.
I'm sure that one could find at least a few cases where torture yielded good intelligence. And for each one of those cases, you'll find a hundred others where the subject lied to get the torture to stop. The biggest problem anyone should have with torture, is that it amounts to punishing innocents; people who have not had their day in court, who have not been found guilty by a jury of their peers through the preponderance of evidence. This is one of the primary reasons our forefathers rebelled from mother England, and King George III. And I find it deeply disturbing that in this day and age, so many of my countrymen are so ignorant to the basic core concepts of what it means to be an American.
You say this is a War on Terror?
Then why are we funding terrorist organizations, and why do we use terrorist tactics like torture? You can't defend freedom, by destroying it.
Unfortunately, thats no joke.
All too real.
In this case, it's why KBR (Durban) is going broke, and Halliburton (JHB) is moving to Dubai.
Bonus Question: Who pays the cost of a war, when a "used car salesman" convinces folks that one is needed, whether or not it actually is needed?
Answer: 3000 US troops, the taxpayers, and hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Find a good knife-maker.
You have no idea how much people (SCA-nerds) are willing to pay for a good hand-forged blade made from meteorite iron. SERIOUSLY.
How can you tell a few thousand of people not to open word document attachment?
Write a memo in MS Word, and send it out as an attachment to an Outlook email! What, were you born last-century or something?
WHY on Earth would you connect two nations, both of which have many viable ports, with a massive tunnel to their least populated and most distant parts?
Global warming will make these parts way more well populated in the next 100 years.
And settling these areas will bring some real-estate price-relief for the rest of the nation, which is becoming overcrowded (unless some new cities are built soon).
In any case, I'm sure it's a boondoggle, and the tunnel-builders are just hoping to scam someone into paying for it, so they can get a good start, make some money, then bail with their golden parachutes when it ends up costing 10 times more than they bid.
It's the American way.
(we learned it from the Russians, apparently)
Having a goal of zero vulnerabilities is such complex software as an office suite is strikes as feasible only to an ideologist nerd.
Ever work in Aerospace?
Plenty of ideological nerds there.
And REAL money.
The source-code argument is a valid one. Maybe not for most people. But for some people, it's an absolute must-have.
This is really the "soft button" vs "hard button" debate that the AV geeks have over universal remotes.
Either model has its benefits in certain instances.
Engineering has trade-offs. Who wudda thunk it?
I dont' know how likely this is; (actually, not likely at all - but not impossible) - if we were to "invent" an energy generation process that was so cheap and efficient that we'd have a surplus, we could start building plants to extract carbon from the atmosphere. It's an energy-intensive reaction. But assume the output is graphite. That, we could just bury. CO2 + gobs of energy => O2 + C.
That said - if we had the choice between; investing that abundant energy on economic (=population) growth, or investing that abundant energy on fixing our broken ecosphere, I am certain that we will have the same exact problem (root cause) that got us into this mess in the first place.
People will not control or limit their consumption.
You can get some people to do it. But a whole planet's worth of people, from thousands of different cultures, speaking hundreds of different languages, worshipping dozens of Gods who are commanding them to be fruitful and multiply.
This is a very difficult problem - and the only solution I see is either some kind of orbital mind-control laser (ie. we're functionally no longer "free" humans) - or lots and lots of killing/dying.
It would be great if we could just tell people that limiting their consumption is in their own best interest, and they'd listen, and do it. And then we could invent this magic infinite energy technology. But what's the likelihood of these two things happening?
In the whole of human history, not even an all-powerful God (real or imagined) has been able to pull off that stunt. He still has to send a bunch of us straight to hell for failing to modify our behaviors.
How are a few egghead scientists going to pull that off?
It won't happen.
The best we can do is prepare for the worst, and hope for the best.
The value of the pedantry and trollery notwithstanding, I would argue that the time I spend on slashdot is TIME WELL SPENT.
:)
I'm not about to quantify that - I have neither the expertise, nor the time to produce hard numbers supporting this idea. But if you read Stephen Covey's "7 habits of highly successful people" - you read about a habit called "sharpening the saw". 30 minutes to an hour a day, SURFING THE WEB, has exposed me to ideas and information I would never have been exposed to any other way. Every day I deal with "engineers" who are completely clueless to entire areas of knowledge - anything outside their little niche of expertise, may as well not exist.
Of course, you have to be judicious about where you spend your time. 30 minutes a day on the boss's clock, looking at porn and webcomics is not likely to make you a better, or more innovative worker. But sites like Groklaw, Slashdot, Sourceforge, Wikipedia, etc. can really broaden your horizons.
As a tech lead, I encourage my workers to do a little bit of online saw-sharpening.
But I have not been caught by my boss yet.
It's called being "Penny-wise and Pound-foolish".
We've all worked for "those" people at some point.
Yea, beacause we all know that roads and highways are 100% funded by private inves... erm, never mind...
hm. Not to mention that the law enforcement, signage, training and licensing of drivers, massive subsidies to car manufacturers (like Chrysler in the 1980's, and bankruptcy-protection for the others), and military expeditions to secure sources of oil.
Automotive transport is one of the most socialist activities in the history of humanity.
More practical than a plane, and more comfortable than a bus, and hella safer than dealing with the nutters on I-15.
Yeah, but the 15 is part and parcel of the whole "Las Vegas Experience" - especially if you're a nutter.
Chernobyl would probably still be running and providing power if they had not shut off all kinds of safety mechanisms at the same time like a bunch of fucking idiots.
Yes.
Nuclear power is quite safe.
As long as you don't let fucking idiots run your plants.
So - how do you propose we address this glaringly obvious problem? What can we do differently in the future, that won't repeat the problems of the past? And why didn't people realize this in the past, and put it into practice?
"... To summarize, the people who want to lead the government, are, by virtue of wanting to lead, the least qualified to do so. To summarize the summary: people are a problem."
I think there's a bigger problem with people wanting to lead in bad faith.
People who don't want to lead - will likely be bad leaders.
Effective leading takes a lot of self-confidence, and drive.
The real problem is people who want to lead as a means to an end (that end being power).
Even kids who have grown up with Harry Potter can appreciate the Hitchhiker novels.
Yes.
And I read both aloud to my kids.
Give it another decade or two I guess, and someone will try that I'm sure.
Starring Wil Smith as an updated "HAL". (sheesh)
2001? (Jos Whedon is NO Kubrick!) Godzilla (original Japanese rubber-suit)? Creature From the Black Lagoon? Soylent Green? Tron? Matrix?
Holy mother of fuck!
Serenity was fun and all, but, she's a girl I'd go on maybe two dates with, and fool around a bit maybe. I sure as hell wouldn't marry her.
Clearly, this decision was the result of willfully narrow vision.
Back in the late 90's when the mafIAA were suing Napster, the web-folk were complaining about free speech and "infringing uses" - and they were saying that the people who are infringing (ie. actually sharing the music) were the ones that should be sued, not the company, not the technology, and not the tools. (I bet Shawn Fanning is spinning in his grave - or his hot tub, whatever). Now the record companies are doing it - and people are still complaining. There's no equivalence between buying a CD, and letting your brother borrow it, or ripping it and sharing the files with 250,000 of your "closest friends".
Frankly - I think that there's a "scary" direction this could all take. (as if senators saying that the mafIAA should have the right to "destroy" your computer isn't scary enough) - if Apple goes DRM free, and EMI buys into it, then other services, and labels, will have to as well. If they don't, Apple wins, and gets a monopoly. My guess is that not every record company is ready to do this, and we'll see some labels leave Apple. OR - maybe all the labels will feel pressure to offer DRM-less recordings, on all services. (I don't think this is going to cut into sales - I really don't - especially if the mafIAA keeps suing sharers). If that happens, then labels will probably try to differentiate themselves via exclusivity with services. The choice won't be "DRM or DRM-free" - the choice will be "Artist X (from service Y) or Artist Z (from service W)" - this model cuts out the services as the distinguishing factor. It takes the service providers out of the equation (why choose iTMS over Zune, or any other service - other than specific Artist availability?) A service provider is a player, a web site, and a server-farm. Not much latitude for a product to distinguish itself. We may even see a "race to the bottom" as far as "cheap" service goes. Apple may maintain its status as a boutique brand, wrt its music player (iPod) features, and style. But there's no longer a real economic incentive for a person to stick with iTMS as a service provider - other than Artist availability - which is controlled very tightly by the label.
This means; the Record Labels could very well have the last laugh here - for FINALLY doing what fans have been clamoring for since 1996. Chuck DRM under the bus.
...at this very moment chairs are being lifted into orbit from Redmond.
I think you're actually understating it.
When you look at the effort Microsoft has gone to put hooks in, at the kernel level - even at the HARDWARE level, to support DRM, and then contemplate the possibility that if DRM *does* get flushed out, on the Video side, as well as the Audio side, you're looking at a HUGE wasted investment by Microsoft, that Microsoft's competitors did not have to make.
Whether the chair-tosser realizes this, or whether he's steeped in denial about it, is a point of debate. Neither APPL nor MSFT are moving significantly today - so maybe the market has not realized this yet either.
It will be interesting (to say the least) to see how this plays out.
What happened was not just the creation of the CD.
It was the transition from Analog to Digital.
In this transition, the music industry has reaped enormous benefits and efficiencies - from the recording, to the production, to the manufacturing, and even in the transition of consumer audio equipment (going from analog turntables to digital CD players was a HUGE boon to the electronics industry, with regard to the level of audio quality per dollar spent).
The music industry wanted to get all the benefits of going digital - without suffering one of the trade-offs: what was easier (cheaper) for them to mass-duplicate, was also cheaper for pirates, and consumers, to mass-duplicate. (this actually didn't start happening for consumers for about 10 years, because there were no consumer-level CD burners until about 1990-ish).
Like any other business, they wanted to have their cake, and eat it too.
To ignore the utility and innovation in the original Napster (which was more than just a P2P download service; it was P2P downloading, bundled with social networking, and a grassroots ratings service).
Everything else has been downhill since.
...how did Republicans become red?...
Red is the color of action, of anger, blue, of depression, passivity.
As far as marketing campaigns go; Red was a no-brainer.
Who made that choice, anyway? (Rupert Murdoch?).
Red was chosen as a "brand icon" in the early communist movement, to get the people riled up for communism. Sure, there was all the symbolic "blood of the people" talk. But basically, it was a political propaganda PR stunt. As such - the recent "Red state/Blue state" movement in American politics was a populist movement. Republicanism and Conservativism has been framed in populist terms: fight the Coastal Liberal Elites, who are in bed with big-business, and the academics, and anti-religious science movement, and the UN and foreign forces who want to destroy the American way of life, and our Christian (okay; "Judeo-Christian") culture. Get down with the down-home American heartland in "flyover country".
Have to laugh at what castro is saying. There is plenty of food for the world. The issue is one of distribution. Correct that, and we could cut back on crops.
Especially ironic coming from a self-proclaimed "communist".