Automated cars/trucks etc. would not cause a singularity. They MIGHT lead to a human level AI which would, but I actually thing that an automated car wouldn't need to be much smarter than a dog. It might need a larger vocabulary, but that's not exactly intelligence.
That is, indeed, an uninformed hypothesis. Experimental test, however, have been made.
In the tests that I'm familiar with high temperatures and increased CO2 did, indeed, produce rapid plant growth. They also yielded plants that had weak stems and were deficient in protein. This is not a net gain. And if you raised the temperature a bit more the plants didn't even grow faster. Also, this is presuming that extra water was available. I'm sure there have been other tests with slightly different plants or conditions, but I'm not a specialist in that area, so I only know of a couple of experiments. (This was reported in the Scientific American within the last year or so.)
There's lots of scientific controversy. But just like with evolution, it's experts arguing about details that wouldn't mean much to a non-specialist. This doesn't mean that there isn't controversy, it just means that only a specialist could be expected to understand it. (For an example in evolution read Dawkins and Gould. They're both fairly accessible. I'll admit I don't understand the climate change scientific controversy...but it does exist.)
FWIW, I believe there's still some controversy about just how much of Antarctica melted the last time things got warm, but I haven't kept current.
Sorry, but you're wrong. It may not have been widely accepted, but it existed, and even got a few newspaper headlines.
For that matter, *I* have a global cooling theory. Of course, my theory doesn't call for the cooling to start until after the ice caps have melted...well, maybe not *all* of Antarctica. (If you really want the details, reply to this post.)
Not quite. I've never actually heard that Google sells your data. What it sells it access to YOU, as a market demographic.
That said, I don't think that Google should be trusted either. Their goals are too different from mine, and corporate management can change at any time.
You *are* aware that many anti-psychotic drugs are not statistically different in effect from a placebo outside of side effects aren't you? And they are still sold and prescribed. I'd say that it has a definite impact on profits.
Please note that frequently different studies will find different levels of effect. One result of this is that companies can choose which studies to report when asking that a drug be approved. (Is this still true? I'd heard that there was talk of changing that, but I never heard that it was done. In any case it wouldn't affect drugs already approved.)
You clearly don't know much about dogs, or you have a very wide scope of "similarly to a trained". It's also true that genetics is important to being human. I will grant that the genetic background changes so slowly that it will almost certainly be run roughshod over by artificial genetic manipulation, but this isn't to say it isn't important.
Yes, environment is crucially important. So is the genetic material you're working with. We don't even KNOW most of what's important, so this decade changing it would be a mistake...except in rare cases. OTOH, there are already too many people in the world. We are beyond the carrying capacity at any previously achieved cultural level, and are using resources unsustainably. So population control is a vital need. MAYBE after we build sustainable energy sources we could think about increasing the population again, but it would probably be a bad move.
You refer to "the consciousness and mind". When people are crowded together, struggling to make ends meed, the consciousness and mind are severely degraded. That's an environmental rather than a genetic effect, but it probably imposes epigenetic modification. (There's lots of evidence that this happens, but it would be unethical to do controlled studies.)
This rambled a bit, because I don't exactly understand your point. (I can't even tell if we disagree, outside of the nature of dogs. That bit got me a bit.)
Slashdot never fits on my screen. Generally this hasn't been a major pain, merely a constant annoyance, but if you're fixing things, fix that. Don't presume how wide the window is. HTML has perfectly reasonable ways to deal with this, so I *know* they must be available to you.
If you're going to have a wordlist that automatically gives a +1 to any comment using a word on the list, also have one that gives a -1,
Hell, merge the two, just have a list of words and score adjustments from -5 to +5, user selectable, thus: balls 0 fuck -1 gigo +1 serpentine +3 quantum -1 etc.
"Cap and trade" is largely a fraud. It's feasible that a system with that basic design could work, but it is designed to be easily corruptible. The more just and easily enforceable carbon tax didn't pass anywhere that I've heard of.
Also, I don't believe that "cap and trade" even handles sulfur dioxide. Every reference that I've encountered only discusses it in terms of controlling CO_2.
What you mean is, the people who saw them coming weren't listened to. Many forecasters saw the recent real estate bubble collapsing, e.g. It's true that nobody picked the exact hour, but that's rather irrelevant.
If you say nobody saw the previous disasters coming, I'll ask "How do you know?". I expect they did. (Well, not smallpox in the new world, that was largely germ warfare, and only foreseen by those practicing it.) As to why you don't hear about them, how often to you hear, even now, about those who foresaw the housing bubble? Then why would you expect to find it easy to find prior accurate "prophets of doom"? People don't like to hear bad news, and they also don't like to be reminded that they were wrong. This is a powerful force suppressing historical records of those who gave warnings previously, as well as recently.
P.S.: That the collapse of the Holland "Tulip mania" bubble was foreseen is denoted by the name given to the event in English. I suspect that you would find few references in Dutch that predicted it's collapse.
It all depends on just how bad the collapse is. If it's bad enough, you *can't* prepare for it, short of building a fall-out shelter in an uninhabited wilderness, and hoping that it (radiation, germ warfare, whatever) doesn't get too bad. If it's only moderate, then the central government will be hunting down those splinter groups and killing them. (That's already happened a few times.) If it's in-between, there may be rioting and martial law mass murders until the population is sufficiently reduced. (See Stalin's USSR.)
But you can count on it that the politically well connected will act to protect themselves as best they can. If that makes the private ownership of gold illegal, then that's what will happen. With an elaborate secret police to enforce the rules.
What you need to realize is that there AREN'T any frontiers that ordinary people can reach anymore, so you have nowhere to retreat to that they can't reach you. If there's a total collapse the short-term survivors will be mainly unattached young males with practice in using weapons that they can lay their hands on. These will fight viciously against each other over any surviving young females. Anyone who tries to farm will be signing his death warrant by making himself vulnerable, and the only game to hunt will be other people. After a century someone may still remember what writing was, but that person will almost certainly be illiterate...or, possibly, female. (About twenty years into this scenario women start to be protected as a valuable resource, and the population has been reduced enough that the game can start to come back. Cattle will probably be extinct, but some buffalo may survive, as a buffalo is a fearsome animal. Wolves may do well. Deer will be coming back from small remanent populations, as they will have been nearly killed off in the first couple of years.)
P.S.: A good bow is about as good a weapon as a working but not properly maintained rifle. And you won't be able to give your modern weapons proper maintenance for over a few years. The problem is it takes a long time to learn to use a bow, and the making of one, and of the associated arrows, is a nearly extinct skill. Compound bows suffer a greater maintenance problem than do rifles. I don't know how long a good resin bow would last exposed to the weather, but if well protected it could well last multiple decades. The same is not true of the bow strings, but decent bow strings are relatively easy to make. Arrows are the real problem, and making a decent arrow is a difficult skill. (Bow replacements will need to await the regrowth of good timber. But twenty or thirty years should solve that problem.)
N.B.: In the case of a total collapse, expect the cities to burn within a week of the time that electricity is cut off. Most cities depend on electricity to pump water. This will, of course, cause a mass exodus of surviving residents, which may be expected to disorganize and decimate the less affected suburbs surrounding them. Phone systems everywhere will fail without electricity, so more affected areas will not even be able to warn the less affected areas. Etc.
However, I don't expect that this scenario is likely. I think that a germ warfare based plague is much more likely. Realize that at this point even a fairly small country could create a quite serious agent, and in a few years that will have decreased to a moderately sized company. Add a touch of desperation, and... Well, if it's well designed it will kill off a large number of people, but not incapacitate very many. That might actually be the best approach of the ones that are at all likely. I don't really like it, as I am a likely casualty, but then I think that I'm a likely casualty under ANY of the likely scenarios.
We can, of course, hope for a deus ex machina, and maybe one will appear. But it would be a foolish thing to count on this.
Industrialization does, indeed, bring declines in the rate of population growth. But not in the generation that experiences the industrialization, but in the next generation.
OTOH, TV can yield a remarkably rapid reduction in the rate of population growth. Generally within the first couple of years, and increasing as the TVs become more commonly accessible. I haven't seen the figures on personal computers, but it wouldn't surprise me if they were equally effective.
The decline in population growth with industrialization is generally credited to increased accessibility of health care, so there is felt a less urgent need to have lots of children. TV probably acts much more directly.
Odd. That same sentence made me distrust the report because it implied that there could exist a way that allowed "unlimited economic growth". Admittedly, I haven't read the report, and am relying on secondary sources, but that one sentence made reading the report seem of dubious value. There is not, and cannot be, any approach that will allowed unlimited economic growth. Or, for that matter, unlimited growth of any other nature.
It's true that I don't think government policy can allow this, but I sure don't think lack of governmental policy can allow it either. It's among the things that aren't possible in this universe.
FWIW, the genetic advances at that point were to make plants resistant to pesticides. Weeds have almost caught up with that change. Nitrogen fixing corn still doesn't exist. Golden rice, while very useful, doesn't increase the number of calories available. Etc.
I think that string is about played out. Not that genetic modifications are played out, but Monsanto isn't about benefiting the end-users. So I don't think the current regulatory schemes will produce anything major.
OTOH, it's possible that lab-grown meat (tissue culture) will be economic. So far there's no particular reason to think it will, but also nothing saying it won't.
And maybe we'll be saved by a plague. Bird flu might do the job, with a couple of mutations. But nobody would be very happy about that approach. Still, it's a possible solution.
Actually, there have been several similar challenges, and others that might have been similar. The civilizations that faced them usually collapsed.
I'll admit that I'm including a bit of speculative work here, e.g. the Anasazi appear to have been wiped out, as a civilization, by recurrent droughts. But nobody really knows for certain, because they didn't leave much behind in the way of evidence.
Now, I'll admit that it partially depends on what you are willing to consider an analogous situation. To me this kind of thing appears analogous, but I can easily understand if *you* don't consider it analogous, as long as you accept that *I* do so consider it.
If you more tightly constrain what you consider analogous, then the civilizations that have faced analogous circumstances become much fewer, but before trying to be more rigorous I'd need to know what characteristics you feel an analogous circumstance should possess.
I really doubt that you can estimate the probability. But then I also doubt his evaluation function...and this without bothering to read the article.
Alpha-beta pruning (which he did) is quite reasonable, and as reliable as your evaluation function. But nobody knows the *correct* evaluation function for chess. So you can't be certain to any real degree that the estimates made in this "proof" are correct. And judging by the results I'm highly skeptical.
N.B.: I'm not a chess expert, much less a master, so I can't evaluate his claims on that basis. This (my) analysis is based on reports of what he said about how he programmed the "proof". If they are wrong, then my analysis doesn't apply. That won't, however, convince me that his claims are correct. That would require confirmation from sources that I have an independent reason to trust.
Well, that's reasonably close. Remember also that they're talking about per hour rather than per second. (You probably did, but I didn't for a second or so...and thought there must be some other mistake.)
I think it's an incredibly bad decision, but if you want to...well, your money.
FWIW, I won't even play games that use Steam, as I find it too restrictive. So my views are clearly in a minority here. I used to buy one or two games a year, but I haven't bought any for the last decade. Partly because I can't find anything that I find both acceptable and interesting.
That they were able to take that action shows that they designed the feature into they system.
I'll grant that, given that they had the capability, there were legal reasons why they should use it. But they shouldn't have had the capability. So I've refused to even consider purchasing a Kindle. (Every once in awhile I think about buying a Nook, but so far I haven't done so.)
The semicolon issue probably isn't any more significant than Python's indentation based syntax. Both can work, and both require adjusting to. And both are a nuisance. I refused to use Python until they officially allowed tab based indentation (as long as you were consistent about it). I.e., as long as Python3000 was going to disallow tab based indentation, I wasn't willing to bother learning it. When they changed that, I found it something I could adapt to. I still find it annoying, but every language has its annoyances.
That said, my beef with Go is that my preferred indentation style alligns open and close brackets. I find this makes it much easier for me to identify a block of code. And Go explicitly forbids this. So I'll need to be shown that it's worth bothering with. (It's got lots of other features that I find questionable, but no others that are so obviously arbitrary misfeatures that were just insisted upon.)
One datapoint. I despise Microsoft, but it's mainly due to their EULA. And when Apple changed their EULA to copy terms from those MS had used, I extended my disdain to them.
I don't disapprove of their making a profit, but I purely despise their attempts to control me.
I don't believe that mine is a minority opinion. And when people write Micro$oft, I interpret that as meaning that Microsoft is eager to shaft people if it earns them more money, not an inherent disdain for profits. But I could be wrong about that, in any particular case. (I don't recall ever seeing the term "$un" before.)
Slashdot Mirror
Automated cars/trucks etc. would not cause a singularity. They MIGHT lead to a human level AI which would, but I actually thing that an automated car wouldn't need to be much smarter than a dog. It might need a larger vocabulary, but that's not exactly intelligence.
That is, indeed, an uninformed hypothesis. Experimental test, however, have been made.
In the tests that I'm familiar with high temperatures and increased CO2 did, indeed, produce rapid plant growth. They also yielded plants that had weak stems and were deficient in protein. This is not a net gain. And if you raised the temperature a bit more the plants didn't even grow faster. Also, this is presuming that extra water was available. I'm sure there have been other tests with slightly different plants or conditions, but I'm not a specialist in that area, so I only know of a couple of experiments. (This was reported in the Scientific American within the last year or so.)
No he didn't. He's confusing weather with climate.
There's lots of scientific controversy. But just like with evolution, it's experts arguing about details that wouldn't mean much to a non-specialist. This doesn't mean that there isn't controversy, it just means that only a specialist could be expected to understand it. (For an example in evolution read Dawkins and Gould. They're both fairly accessible. I'll admit I don't understand the climate change scientific controversy...but it does exist.)
FWIW, I believe there's still some controversy about just how much of Antarctica melted the last time things got warm, but I haven't kept current.
Sorry, but you're wrong. It may not have been widely accepted, but it existed, and even got a few newspaper headlines.
For that matter, *I* have a global cooling theory. Of course, my theory doesn't call for the cooling to start until after the ice caps have melted...well, maybe not *all* of Antarctica. (If you really want the details, reply to this post.)
Not quite. I've never actually heard that Google sells your data. What it sells it access to YOU, as a market demographic.
That said, I don't think that Google should be trusted either. Their goals are too different from mine, and corporate management can change at any time.
Unhhh...
You *are* aware that many anti-psychotic drugs are not statistically different in effect from a placebo outside of side effects aren't you? And they are still sold and prescribed. I'd say that it has a definite impact on profits.
Please note that frequently different studies will find different levels of effect. One result of this is that companies can choose which studies to report when asking that a drug be approved. (Is this still true? I'd heard that there was talk of changing that, but I never heard that it was done. In any case it wouldn't affect drugs already approved.)
You clearly don't know much about dogs, or you have a very wide scope of "similarly to a trained". It's also true that genetics is important to being human. I will grant that the genetic background changes so slowly that it will almost certainly be run roughshod over by artificial genetic manipulation, but this isn't to say it isn't important.
Yes, environment is crucially important. So is the genetic material you're working with. We don't even KNOW most of what's important, so this decade changing it would be a mistake...except in rare cases. OTOH, there are already too many people in the world. We are beyond the carrying capacity at any previously achieved cultural level, and are using resources unsustainably. So population control is a vital need. MAYBE after we build sustainable energy sources we could think about increasing the population again, but it would probably be a bad move.
You refer to "the consciousness and mind". When people are crowded together, struggling to make ends meed, the consciousness and mind are severely degraded. That's an environmental rather than a genetic effect, but it probably imposes epigenetic modification. (There's lots of evidence that this happens, but it would be unethical to do controlled studies.)
This rambled a bit, because I don't exactly understand your point. (I can't even tell if we disagree, outside of the nature of dogs. That bit got me a bit.)
Slashdot never fits on my screen. Generally this hasn't been a major pain, merely a constant annoyance, but if you're fixing things, fix that. Don't presume how wide the window is. HTML has perfectly reasonable ways to deal with this, so I *know* they must be available to you.
If you're going to have a wordlist that automatically gives a +1 to any comment using a word on the list, also have one that gives a -1,
Hell, merge the two, just have a list of words and score adjustments from -5 to +5, user selectable, thus:
balls 0
fuck -1
gigo +1
serpentine +3
quantum -1
etc.
They had stepped off the moral high ground long before that. That was when they stopped even trying to pretend.
No, he's a Renaissance musician.
"Cap and trade" is largely a fraud. It's feasible that a system with that basic design could work, but it is designed to be easily corruptible. The more just and easily enforceable carbon tax didn't pass anywhere that I've heard of.
Also, I don't believe that "cap and trade" even handles sulfur dioxide. Every reference that I've encountered only discusses it in terms of controlling CO_2.
What you mean is, the people who saw them coming weren't listened to. Many forecasters saw the recent real estate bubble collapsing, e.g. It's true that nobody picked the exact hour, but that's rather irrelevant.
If you say nobody saw the previous disasters coming, I'll ask "How do you know?". I expect they did. (Well, not smallpox in the new world, that was largely germ warfare, and only foreseen by those practicing it.) As to why you don't hear about them, how often to you hear, even now, about those who foresaw the housing bubble? Then why would you expect to find it easy to find prior accurate "prophets of doom"? People don't like to hear bad news, and they also don't like to be reminded that they were wrong. This is a powerful force suppressing historical records of those who gave warnings previously, as well as recently.
P.S.: That the collapse of the Holland "Tulip mania" bubble was foreseen is denoted by the name given to the event in English. I suspect that you would find few references in Dutch that predicted it's collapse.
It all depends on just how bad the collapse is. If it's bad enough, you *can't* prepare for it, short of building a fall-out shelter in an uninhabited wilderness, and hoping that it (radiation, germ warfare, whatever) doesn't get too bad. If it's only moderate, then the central government will be hunting down those splinter groups and killing them. (That's already happened a few times.) If it's in-between, there may be rioting and martial law mass murders until the population is sufficiently reduced. (See Stalin's USSR.)
But you can count on it that the politically well connected will act to protect themselves as best they can. If that makes the private ownership of gold illegal, then that's what will happen. With an elaborate secret police to enforce the rules.
What you need to realize is that there AREN'T any frontiers that ordinary people can reach anymore, so you have nowhere to retreat to that they can't reach you. If there's a total collapse the short-term survivors will be mainly unattached young males with practice in using weapons that they can lay their hands on. These will fight viciously against each other over any surviving young females. Anyone who tries to farm will be signing his death warrant by making himself vulnerable, and the only game to hunt will be other people. After a century someone may still remember what writing was, but that person will almost certainly be illiterate...or, possibly, female. (About twenty years into this scenario women start to be protected as a valuable resource, and the population has been reduced enough that the game can start to come back. Cattle will probably be extinct, but some buffalo may survive, as a buffalo is a fearsome animal. Wolves may do well. Deer will be coming back from small remanent populations, as they will have been nearly killed off in the first couple of years.)
P.S.: A good bow is about as good a weapon as a working but not properly maintained rifle. And you won't be able to give your modern weapons proper maintenance for over a few years. The problem is it takes a long time to learn to use a bow, and the making of one, and of the associated arrows, is a nearly extinct skill. Compound bows suffer a greater maintenance problem than do rifles. I don't know how long a good resin bow would last exposed to the weather, but if well protected it could well last multiple decades. The same is not true of the bow strings, but decent bow strings are relatively easy to make. Arrows are the real problem, and making a decent arrow is a difficult skill. (Bow replacements will need to await the regrowth of good timber. But twenty or thirty years should solve that problem.)
N.B.: In the case of a total collapse, expect the cities to burn within a week of the time that electricity is cut off. Most cities depend on electricity to pump water. This will, of course, cause a mass exodus of surviving residents, which may be expected to disorganize and decimate the less affected suburbs surrounding them. Phone systems everywhere will fail without electricity, so more affected areas will not even be able to warn the less affected areas. Etc.
However, I don't expect that this scenario is likely. I think that a germ warfare based plague is much more likely. Realize that at this point even a fairly small country could create a quite serious agent, and in a few years that will have decreased to a moderately sized company. Add a touch of desperation, and ...
Well, if it's well designed it will kill off a large number of people, but not incapacitate very many. That might actually be the best approach of the ones that are at all likely. I don't really like it, as I am a likely casualty, but then I think that I'm a likely casualty under ANY of the likely scenarios.
We can, of course, hope for a deus ex machina, and maybe one will appear. But it would be a foolish thing to count on this.
Industrialization does, indeed, bring declines in the rate of population growth. But not in the generation that experiences the industrialization, but in the next generation.
OTOH, TV can yield a remarkably rapid reduction in the rate of population growth. Generally within the first couple of years, and increasing as the TVs become more commonly accessible. I haven't seen the figures on personal computers, but it wouldn't surprise me if they were equally effective.
The decline in population growth with industrialization is generally credited to increased accessibility of health care, so there is felt a less urgent need to have lots of children. TV probably acts much more directly.
Odd. That same sentence made me distrust the report because it implied that there could exist a way that allowed "unlimited economic growth". Admittedly, I haven't read the report, and am relying on secondary sources, but that one sentence made reading the report seem of dubious value. There is not, and cannot be, any approach that will allowed unlimited economic growth. Or, for that matter, unlimited growth of any other nature.
It's true that I don't think government policy can allow this, but I sure don't think lack of governmental policy can allow it either. It's among the things that aren't possible in this universe.
FWIW, the genetic advances at that point were to make plants resistant to pesticides. Weeds have almost caught up with that change. Nitrogen fixing corn still doesn't exist. Golden rice, while very useful, doesn't increase the number of calories available. Etc.
I think that string is about played out. Not that genetic modifications are played out, but Monsanto isn't about benefiting the end-users. So I don't think the current regulatory schemes will produce anything major.
OTOH, it's possible that lab-grown meat (tissue culture) will be economic. So far there's no particular reason to think it will, but also nothing saying it won't.
And maybe we'll be saved by a plague. Bird flu might do the job, with a couple of mutations. But nobody would be very happy about that approach. Still, it's a possible solution.
Actually, there have been several similar challenges, and others that might have been similar. The civilizations that faced them usually collapsed.
I'll admit that I'm including a bit of speculative work here, e.g. the Anasazi appear to have been wiped out, as a civilization, by recurrent droughts. But nobody really knows for certain, because they didn't leave much behind in the way of evidence.
Now, I'll admit that it partially depends on what you are willing to consider an analogous situation. To me this kind of thing appears analogous, but I can easily understand if *you* don't consider it analogous, as long as you accept that *I* do so consider it.
If you more tightly constrain what you consider analogous, then the civilizations that have faced analogous circumstances become much fewer, but before trying to be more rigorous I'd need to know what characteristics you feel an analogous circumstance should possess.
I really doubt that you can estimate the probability. But then I also doubt his evaluation function...and this without bothering to read the article.
Alpha-beta pruning (which he did) is quite reasonable, and as reliable as your evaluation function. But nobody knows the *correct* evaluation function for chess. So you can't be certain to any real degree that the estimates made in this "proof" are correct. And judging by the results I'm highly skeptical.
N.B.: I'm not a chess expert, much less a master, so I can't evaluate his claims on that basis. This (my) analysis is based on reports of what he said about how he programmed the "proof". If they are wrong, then my analysis doesn't apply. That won't, however, convince me that his claims are correct. That would require confirmation from sources that I have an independent reason to trust.
Well, that's reasonably close. Remember also that they're talking about per hour rather than per second. (You probably did, but I didn't for a second or so...and thought there must be some other mistake.)
Your money. Your choice.
I think it's an incredibly bad decision, but if you want to...well, your money.
FWIW, I won't even play games that use Steam, as I find it too restrictive. So my views are clearly in a minority here. I used to buy one or two games a year, but I haven't bought any for the last decade. Partly because I can't find anything that I find both acceptable and interesting.
That they were able to take that action shows that they designed the feature into they system.
I'll grant that, given that they had the capability, there were legal reasons why they should use it. But they shouldn't have had the capability. So I've refused to even consider purchasing a Kindle. (Every once in awhile I think about buying a Nook, but so far I haven't done so.)
The semicolon issue probably isn't any more significant than Python's indentation based syntax. Both can work, and both require adjusting to. And both are a nuisance. I refused to use Python until they officially allowed tab based indentation (as long as you were consistent about it). I.e., as long as Python3000 was going to disallow tab based indentation, I wasn't willing to bother learning it. When they changed that, I found it something I could adapt to. I still find it annoying, but every language has its annoyances.
That said, my beef with Go is that my preferred indentation style alligns open and close brackets. I find this makes it much easier for me to identify a block of code. And Go explicitly forbids this. So I'll need to be shown that it's worth bothering with. (It's got lots of other features that I find questionable, but no others that are so obviously arbitrary misfeatures that were just insisted upon.)
One datapoint. I despise Microsoft, but it's mainly due to their EULA. And when Apple changed their EULA to copy terms from those MS had used, I extended my disdain to them.
I don't disapprove of their making a profit, but I purely despise their attempts to control me.
I don't believe that mine is a minority opinion. And when people write Micro$oft, I interpret that as meaning that Microsoft is eager to shaft people if it earns them more money, not an inherent disdain for profits. But I could be wrong about that, in any particular case. (I don't recall ever seeing the term "$un" before.)