Finally Disney has found a prime location to build a theme park. Unlike the failed DisneyAmerica project in Haymarket, Virginia, there isn't anybody there to object.
I wonder if it'll have a "Space Mountain". They could just throw you out of the airlock. A truly wild ride...
...an OS, general applications, and browser market are not in direct competition with each other, which defeats the purpose of splitting up a monopoly in the first place. Standard Oil was broken into many competing companies within the same market. Same for Ma Bell (got the ill communication).
Why not split M$ into two different OS companies, and two different application developers? Otherwise the three MS splits will just be the same company: collaborating on propietary code and keeping Windoze and MS Office in market dominance.
Everything is becoming more automated. By your logic, we should see ten times more people out of work today compared with the beginning of the 20th century. It doesn't happen, because people find things to do, and the economy picks up the slack
Umm, yes, unemployment is down, but the problem is not really robots replacing people, but rather removing the human element from a job and making humans do robotic things: *beep* *beep*: take the fries out of the vat. *beeeeep* *beeeeep*: the next batch of biscuits are done. *beep-beep-beep* : someone's at the drivethru window. And so on.
The employer for this job is getting the same work done for less money, and he can pass these savings on to his customers. Lower prices means higher profits, and his customers are happier too. Even if he keeps prices the same, he gets more money, which he then turns around and spends. Wages go up. Prices go down. Neat things happen.
The "employer" in this case is a manager who gets paid about two dollars more an hour. And he/she doesn't get the benefits of profits--the stockholders do. Do the stockholders care what pimply teenager is answering the call of the fry vat? Do they care if some kid got fired because he didn't clean the grease off of the robot burger-flipper? No. That's because the stockholders are only there for short periods of time until it gets traded off. They don't care as long as their portfolio increases. The business of the entire company is focused on increasing stock gains.
"Wages go up" yeah, right. If you've ever known anyone who's worked at McDonalds you'll know that's a myth. Wages go up 25 cents after the first 6 months. Work there another 10 years and you might see $1.50 more an hour. Don't be fooled by that idiotic commercial where they show McDonalds employees and flash subtitles: "Future NASA scientist". That's utter bullshit. A lot of fast-food joints in small-assed towns are the only real jobs available, since the closing of the local plant or mine or whatever.
Currently, we're experiencing the longest period of consistent growth, lack of unemployment, and lack of inflation in history. (This is in the US; the rest of the world seems to be doing not as well in some places, but it's still very, very good compared to history.) Why do you think this is?
I'll tell you why: Low unemplyment is a meaningless statistic. Everyone may have jobs, but that's because they can't afford not to, and 2 or 3 jobs at that. All these part time jobs don't add up to any kind of medical coverage at all, and you're working your ass off 50-75 hours a week.Lack of inflation: the Fed controls the inflation rate--this isn't an economic indicator--if anything, it means that the economy is overvalued and wages haven't caught up with the price of goods. Consistent growth: Growth is measured by the size of the richest people's wallets, because the other 80% of the population's income only adds up to 20% of the GDP so what happens to them doesn't matter much. It's a negative-sum game out there: for a few to win, many have to lose, and a lot at that. The only reason the economy survives is the ability of the economy to "create" (dig it up, mass produce it in sweatshops, make it up) valuable goods faster than they are consumed, devalued, or faster than the interest builds up.
It is my opinion that our current way of doing things is not sustainable and sooner or later things are going to come crashing down as capitalism burns up all the fuel on the planet.
Okay, perhaps "soul" is a religious term but I use it in a way that has no religious meaning, like, "to play the blues you gotta have soul," or, "Putney sez tha Borgman Six girl is gots ta have soul!" Anyway:
McDonalds is soulless food for soulless people. I can't think of anything more dehumanizing than answering a series of beeps, whistles, and codified, standardized commands issuign forth from customers' and managers' lips. That's what McDonalds is like right now. And the food is crap. I can't understand why people even eat that stuff or why they even desire it other than the fact that it's there and they're in a hurry. But if people want to eat, and don't want to pack a lunch or cook dinner, then go ahead and eat from the hands of a Dalek or his human slave. Hell, why don't they just make a delicious "Burger Paste" so we can go up to the counter, pop in our quarter and suck it out of Grimace's plastic ass.
What ever happened to the family-owned diner that was never more than half-full, where they know your name and what you like on a sandwich? Well, most of us ran out of time, working an average of 12 hours more a week than Europeans. We're stuck in our hideous tin cans on deserts of asphalt and concrete in the morning and again in the evening. Conversations are limited to established protocols of interaction -- buzzwords, snide remarks, thought-terminating cliche's...
You know what? Us "knowledge-workers" are being replaced, too. It's starting with the help-desk level people--automated trouble-ticket managing systems record different problems and how they are fixed, stores it in a database, and allows for any idiot off the street to walk in and do tech support. But before you say, "yeah but we won't lose our jobs since people will still be needed," realize that I'm not talking about replacing your positions, but your skills. Since we can externalize knowledge, it deprives you of any job security, thinking process, or anything else that makes you different from the average McDonalds employee.
So how long until decision-making is externalized and all the executives will be dehumanized and forced to answer the every whim of the Master Control Program?
I'm not sure what you meant by:"while at first there was a huge loss of jobs in these fields, with the exception of farming, these jobs were recouped."
Factory farming has all but replaced family-owned farms in the US. The family farms that do remain do so by consolidating and instituting factory-farming methods - huge broiler-houses, automatic irrigation, heavy chemical reliance, genetically-modified food, intensive low-grade livestock feed (such as feeding the chicken's rotting feathers back to them) and so forth. Not only is it destroying the environment, but accelerates the effect of capital flight, because the workers are no longer the ones who own the farms, but merely employees of some huge corporation. In essence they're landless farmers.
I may be exaggerating the situation a bit but this arrangement of affairs is much more aggaravated in Central and South America, where mutated descendents of the United Fruit Company (such as Chiquita) have pretty much taken over all the land and all the former peasant farmers are now landless, seasonal laborers.
What does this have to do with a burger-flipping robot? Well, how is it any different from the burger-conveyor belt at Burger King? Less efficient. What's the difference between 10 family farms and one corporate farm? They're less efficent. So what does tbat mean to you? You pay less for your burger while 5 families lose their means of livlihood. Mmm-mmm, taste that progress.
Installation: It's easier to install cats when you're living in a city, as dogs require more acclimation to the space constraints of an apartment. Across all platforms, Cats tend to be just "Plug-N-Chug" while Dogs seem to take some tweaking (*smack*).
Interface:While some users prefer the limited functionality of the Cat, the variety of commands available with Dogs is more suitable for the "hacker".
Applications:Most cats will retrieve all sorts of dead animals for you; Dogs can be used as NT Admins for your home network.
Internet:Though Fetch (for MacOS) and Lycos figure prominently on the Internet scene, neither of those compare to the fame of Persian Kitty (that's not an endorsement).
I'm sure the NSA, FBI, ATF, DEA, BIA, INS, CIA, DOD, DOJ, and the Freemasons are sinking lots of dough into quantum conmputing technology (so they can have it before it's publically available).
The value of encryption is finite. Come up with something better, people.
May I suggest secret decoder rings? (BE SURE TO DRINK YOUR OVALTINE)
Heh, when I returned the laptop I had out at my last job, my former boss spent a week just trying to figure out how to get rid of RH 5.1 that I had installed on it. "Fat12?! WTF!!?"
I read a statistic somewhere that something like 300 TONS of depleted uranium (used in ammunition) was dumped on Iraq. That's a lot of low-level radioactive dust, if you ask me. However, there are a lot of metals that are carcinogenic when vaporized. So any number of things that get blown up, vaporized, shredded, and kicked up in the wind could lead to nasty effects on humans.
The people of Vieques in Puerto Rico have known for years that just being around exploded munitions increases health risks in any population: repiratory problems, high rates of cancer, infant mortality rates and so forth are MUCH higher (according to gov't studies). And the Navy said that their bombing/naval bombardment practice range has nothing to do with it. "No conclusive linkage," I believe their words were to the Senate Committee on Armed Forces, back in November (okay I watch C-SPAN a lot). The only reason why the Governor, US Representative, and Legislative Minority Leader of Puerto Rico didn't get through to the Chairman (Sen. John Warner of Virginia) that *ALL* Puerto Ricans really wanted the range shut down is because John Warner is a belligerant, grumpy, senile uber-conservative pisshead. That's about as eloquent as I'll get about him.
Anyway, the Gulf War. Right. The "Gulf Turkey-Shoot" is more like it. The US violated no less than 19 Geneva conventions when involved with that little blood-for-oil feud. So I'm not surprised if a couple of internationally-banned chemical compounds (not used directly as weapons, of course) got into the lungs and bloodstreams of our own soldiers.
We need an open-source version of Flash. Or is that what XML is supposed to be?
Anyway, vector-based rendering seems most logical solution for the web but surely there is more efficient way to send the information over, rather than acii files? Perhaps browsers should allow for html.Z, shtml.Z or some sort of standardized compression format. Client processors are surely fast enough to handle unsipping files on the fly. This whole huge column of posts would zip very nicely, I'm sure.
I hope non-beta Opera for BeOS will come out soon. I'm sick of it crashing every two minutes but I love the functionality so I'm usually browsing with Netopia and bringing up Opera just to handle the fancy-schmancy pages.
Yeah, that's right. It's just that most people think so highly of their own intelligence that when they see the experiment they say, "Shit, this machine is stupid. It can't possibly be more intelligent than me!"
It all depends on what you define as intelligence. More neural interconnects? The ability to clearly connect ideas together? What if you can't communicate those ideas? What if you weren't even aware that you had those ideas? Is that intelligence or would that make you an idiot-savant?
I suppose this is more of a question for philosophers than computer scientists (but if you're in the AI field you're surely dosed with lots of metaphysics). However when we're talking about search engines we have to realize that their inaccuracy is due to the fact that that there's no way of them to understand the intent of the user, because all that is communicated though a very complex context we call "human life." It really takes the sum of all your human experiences to understand the sentences that you read from a page (and not some freaky formula as early works of Bertrand Russell / Wittgenstein would put it) and really
understand
.
Surely we can create a massively parallel, multiprocessor neural network computer ("Daaayyyy-sies, Daaaay-sies...") with enough power to surpass the computational abilities of tens of human brains, but the thing would still have a hard time understanding people. But make two of them, let them talk to each other, and suddenly the AI's develop identity politics and launch the nukes.
Chomsky has his own website, www.zmag.org with the same sort of like-minded people writing posts (you can sign up for an nntp logon for their discussion boards) to each other, devoted to ideological hairsplitting and engaged in the endless refinement of dogma.
Unfortunately, you're criticizing a corporate culture that is done with. The new, bold companies today are those very ones encoraging individualism and "radical guerilla marketing" strategies. They sell iconoclastic imagery, "revolution", "difference" and all those radical images and somehow it seems to satisfy. People are now consumers of counter-culture and dissent, just like they used to be consumers of conformity and Modernity. It's just a different package, but suddenly the X-generation (a term describing a consumer group that traditional advertising failed to capture) has been snared by the retro-hip Volvo commercials, self-cyncial Sprite commercials, and co-option of every conceivable punk/raver/hardcore/hiphop/hippie/indierocker/surf er angle. Hell, they even sell using NERD subculture!
There's a really giood book you should read, Jon, and everyone else, if you can find it. It talks about exactly what you're talking about, except that it's a collection of widely diverse essays by different people, published in a magazine called The Baffler. The book is called: Commodify Your Dissent : Salvos from the Baffler, by Thomas Frank (Editor), Matt Weiland (Editor). Amazon link: Cover of Book:
Sorry about the image but the sad thing is how small in circulation this incredibly witty collection of essays is. It's well worth the 15 dollars - even if you disagree with certain authors they all have good humor.
The point is that corporations are split into the "traditional" and "new school" camp, with varying shades in between. Sure the atmosphere is different and people have dyed hair and wear flip-flops to work (some places even allow dogs), but they're just as capitalist as ever.
it locks a change until another change makes it faster...
That's not quite how evolution works. There is such a thing as neutral drift that occurs when a change in a species does not affect it's survivability either way. However, later mutations that spring out of that neutral drift may greatly affect fecundity for the better.
For example, imagine if a couple yuppies started wearing black skintight vinyl pants and tried to look like rockstars. Suddenly I go around killing everyone wearing khakis and the more fit yuppies survive to evolve into sloth-like barflies.
...but the aim is to make the robots totally independent, much like the vengeful shape-shifter in Terminator 2.
Genetic algorithms are a cheap way of doing things. An intelligent mind can see forward to say, "in order to do this I need to first make so-and-so" wheras a genetic algorithm could wind up taking thousands of generations to get anywhere. However, if all those generations are first simulated on the computer (and very rapidly with a large population) then evolution can be achieved quickly.
If someone can figure out a way of doing this with distributed computing (ala SETI@home)...well the possibilities are great.
Software/Wetware is/are (a) very good read(s). He has another novel, The Hacker and the Ants which is less futuristic, though still pretty good.
I appreciated the idea that the robots (in Software/Wetware) were not truly sentient until they had broken their "Asimov" programming (Asimov's famous 3 Laws of Robotics), and that they had a highly developed philosophy about the nature of the universe (somewhat postmodernist).
Privitization is always the driving force behind rapid progress, economies of scale, and in general greater availability to the public. Privitization of state-run enterprises is usually one of the first IMF structural adjustment policies to be enforced on debtor nations and history has clearly shown that this leads to less availability to the public, as prices rise out of reach. "Rapid progress" - that is unproven, since just about all of the rapid technological progress in history has been fomented by political (war) pressure. "Economies of scale" - I agree, but only because those private companies can ruthlessly exploit 3rd world labor. Furthermore, how much of these new technologies are ever really available to anyone with an income lower than $35,000 a year? "I can't get no bread, but Whitey's on the moon..." - Gil Scott Heron
With today's announcement, the stage is set for a new era of discovery," said Greg Papadopoulos, Chief Technology Officer for Sun Microsystems, Inc. "What the Web browser is to the Internet, DoubleTwist.com is to the human genome. It makes this whole complex collection of information easy to use."
Sure, but most people don't look at web pages as a huge string of 1's and 0's.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if it'll have a "Space Mountain". They could just throw you out of the airlock. A truly wild ride...
Why not split M$ into two different OS companies, and two different application developers? Otherwise the three MS splits will just be the same company: collaborating on propietary code and keeping Windoze and MS Office in market dominance.
Umm, yes, unemployment is down, but the problem is not really robots replacing people, but rather removing the human element from a job and making humans do robotic things: *beep* *beep*: take the fries out of the vat. *beeeeep* *beeeeep*: the next batch of biscuits are done. *beep-beep-beep* : someone's at the drivethru window. And so on.
The employer for this job is getting the same work done for less money, and he can pass these savings on to his customers. Lower prices means higher profits, and his customers are happier too. Even if he keeps prices the same, he gets more money, which he then turns around and spends. Wages go up. Prices go down. Neat things happen.
The "employer" in this case is a manager who gets paid about two dollars more an hour. And he/she doesn't get the benefits of profits--the stockholders do. Do the stockholders care what pimply teenager is answering the call of the fry vat? Do they care if some kid got fired because he didn't clean the grease off of the robot burger-flipper? No. That's because the stockholders are only there for short periods of time until it gets traded off. They don't care as long as their portfolio increases. The business of the entire company is focused on increasing stock gains.
"Wages go up" yeah, right. If you've ever known anyone who's worked at McDonalds you'll know that's a myth. Wages go up 25 cents after the first 6 months. Work there another 10 years and you might see $1.50 more an hour. Don't be fooled by that idiotic commercial where they show McDonalds employees and flash subtitles: "Future NASA scientist". That's utter bullshit. A lot of fast-food joints in small-assed towns are the only real jobs available, since the closing of the local plant or mine or whatever.
Currently, we're experiencing the longest period of consistent growth, lack of unemployment, and lack of inflation in history. (This is in the US; the rest of the world seems to be doing not as well in some places, but it's still very, very good compared to history.) Why do you think this is?
I'll tell you why: Low unemplyment is a meaningless statistic. Everyone may have jobs, but that's because they can't afford not to, and 2 or 3 jobs at that. All these part time jobs don't add up to any kind of medical coverage at all, and you're working your ass off 50-75 hours a week.Lack of inflation: the Fed controls the inflation rate--this isn't an economic indicator--if anything, it means that the economy is overvalued and wages haven't caught up with the price of goods. Consistent growth: Growth is measured by the size of the richest people's wallets, because the other 80% of the population's income only adds up to 20% of the GDP so what happens to them doesn't matter much. It's a negative-sum game out there: for a few to win, many have to lose, and a lot at that. The only reason the economy survives is the ability of the economy to "create" (dig it up, mass produce it in sweatshops, make it up) valuable goods faster than they are consumed, devalued, or faster than the interest builds up.
It is my opinion that our current way of doing things is not sustainable and sooner or later things are going to come crashing down as capitalism burns up all the fuel on the planet.
McDonalds is soulless food for soulless people. I can't think of anything more dehumanizing than answering a series of beeps, whistles, and codified, standardized commands issuign forth from customers' and managers' lips. That's what McDonalds is like right now. And the food is crap. I can't understand why people even eat that stuff or why they even desire it other than the fact that it's there and they're in a hurry. But if people want to eat, and don't want to pack a lunch or cook dinner, then go ahead and eat from the hands of a Dalek or his human slave. Hell, why don't they just make a delicious "Burger Paste" so we can go up to the counter, pop in our quarter and suck it out of Grimace's plastic ass.
What ever happened to the family-owned diner that was never more than half-full, where they know your name and what you like on a sandwich? Well, most of us ran out of time, working an average of 12 hours more a week than Europeans. We're stuck in our hideous tin cans on deserts of asphalt and concrete in the morning and again in the evening. Conversations are limited to established protocols of interaction -- buzzwords, snide remarks, thought-terminating cliche's...
You know what? Us "knowledge-workers" are being replaced, too. It's starting with the help-desk level people--automated trouble-ticket managing systems record different problems and how they are fixed, stores it in a database, and allows for any idiot off the street to walk in and do tech support. But before you say, "yeah but we won't lose our jobs since people will still be needed," realize that I'm not talking about replacing your positions, but your skills. Since we can externalize knowledge, it deprives you of any job security, thinking process, or anything else that makes you different from the average McDonalds employee.
So how long until decision-making is externalized and all the executives will be dehumanized and forced to answer the every whim of the Master Control Program?
Factory farming has all but replaced family-owned farms in the US. The family farms that do remain do so by consolidating and instituting factory-farming methods - huge broiler-houses, automatic irrigation, heavy chemical reliance, genetically-modified food, intensive low-grade livestock feed (such as feeding the chicken's rotting feathers back to them) and so forth. Not only is it destroying the environment, but accelerates the effect of capital flight, because the workers are no longer the ones who own the farms, but merely employees of some huge corporation. In essence they're landless farmers.
I may be exaggerating the situation a bit but this arrangement of affairs is much more aggaravated in Central and South America, where mutated descendents of the United Fruit Company (such as Chiquita) have pretty much taken over all the land and all the former peasant farmers are now landless, seasonal laborers.
What does this have to do with a burger-flipping robot? Well, how is it any different from the burger-conveyor belt at Burger King? Less efficient. What's the difference between 10 family farms and one corporate farm? They're less efficent. So what does tbat mean to you? You pay less for your burger while 5 families lose their means of livlihood. Mmm-mmm, taste that progress.
Interface:While some users prefer the limited functionality of the Cat, the variety of commands available with Dogs is more suitable for the "hacker".
Applications:Most cats will retrieve all sorts of dead animals for you; Dogs can be used as NT Admins for your home network.
Internet:Though Fetch (for MacOS) and Lycos figure prominently on the Internet scene, neither of those compare to the fame of Persian Kitty (that's not an endorsement).
As for myself, I'm tired of living with animals.
Er, I mean, good thing they didn't.
I'm sure the NSA, FBI, ATF, DEA, BIA, INS, CIA, DOD, DOJ, and the Freemasons are sinking lots of dough into quantum conmputing technology (so they can have it before it's publically available).
The value of encryption is finite. Come up with something better, people.
May I suggest secret decoder rings? (BE SURE TO DRINK YOUR OVALTINE)
Heh, when I returned the laptop I had out at my last job, my former boss spent a week just trying to figure out how to get rid of RH 5.1 that I had installed on it. "Fat12?! WTF!!?"
The people of Vieques in Puerto Rico have known for years that just being around exploded munitions increases health risks in any population: repiratory problems, high rates of cancer, infant mortality rates and so forth are MUCH higher (according to gov't studies). And the Navy said that their bombing/naval bombardment practice range has nothing to do with it. "No conclusive linkage," I believe their words were to the Senate Committee on Armed Forces, back in November (okay I watch C-SPAN a lot). The only reason why the Governor, US Representative, and Legislative Minority Leader of Puerto Rico didn't get through to the Chairman (Sen. John Warner of Virginia) that *ALL* Puerto Ricans really wanted the range shut down is because John Warner is a belligerant, grumpy, senile uber-conservative pisshead. That's about as eloquent as I'll get about him.
Anyway, the Gulf War. Right. The "Gulf Turkey-Shoot" is more like it. The US violated no less than 19 Geneva conventions when involved with that little blood-for-oil feud. So I'm not surprised if a couple of internationally-banned chemical compounds (not used directly as weapons, of course) got into the lungs and bloodstreams of our own soldiers.
1)They already have too much money.
2)They suck.
Either you rock, or you suck. There is no "Oh, we're getting into a new sound so our old fans might not like us as much"
I pity the fool.
Anyway, vector-based rendering seems most logical solution for the web but surely there is more efficient way to send the information over, rather than acii files? Perhaps browsers should allow for html.Z, shtml.Z or some sort of standardized compression format. Client processors are surely fast enough to handle unsipping files on the fly. This whole huge column of posts would zip very nicely, I'm sure.
until I go anywhere with Javascript, Applets, Flash, etc.
*sigh*
I am developing a killer-game that intend to release Linux and BeOS only. Tell you about it in 2 years.
btw, anyone have any news on the GT2 PC port?
It all depends on what you define as intelligence. More neural interconnects? The ability to clearly connect ideas together? What if you can't communicate those ideas? What if you weren't even aware that you had those ideas? Is that intelligence or would that make you an idiot-savant?
I suppose this is more of a question for philosophers than computer scientists (but if you're in the AI field you're surely dosed with lots of metaphysics). However when we're talking about search engines we have to realize that their inaccuracy is due to the fact that that there's no way of them to understand the intent of the user, because all that is communicated though a very complex context we call "human life." It really takes the sum of all your human experiences to understand the sentences that you read from a page (and not some freaky formula as early works of Bertrand Russell / Wittgenstein would put it) and really
- understand
.Surely we can create a massively parallel, multiprocessor neural network computer ("Daaayyyy-sies, Daaaay-sies...") with enough power to surpass the computational abilities of tens of human brains, but the thing would still have a hard time understanding people. But make two of them, let them talk to each other, and suddenly the AI's develop identity politics and launch the nukes.
There's a really giood book you should read, Jon, and everyone else, if you can find it. It talks about exactly what you're talking about, except that it's a collection of widely diverse essays by different people, published in a magazine called The Baffler. The book is called: Commodify Your Dissent : Salvos from the Baffler, by Thomas Frank (Editor), Matt Weiland (Editor). Amazon link: Cover of Book:
Sorry about the image but the sad thing is how small in circulation this incredibly witty collection of essays is. It's well worth the 15 dollars - even if you disagree with certain authors they all have good humor.
The point is that corporations are split into the "traditional" and "new school" camp, with varying shades in between. Sure the atmosphere is different and people have dyed hair and wear flip-flops to work (some places even allow dogs), but they're just as capitalist as ever.
Perhaps attending a few protests may be in order, eh?
That's not quite how evolution works. There is such a thing as neutral drift that occurs when a change in a species does not affect it's survivability either way. However, later mutations that spring out of that neutral drift may greatly affect fecundity for the better.
For example, imagine if a couple yuppies started wearing black skintight vinyl pants and tried to look like rockstars. Suddenly I go around killing everyone wearing khakis and the more fit yuppies survive to evolve into sloth-like barflies.
Genetic algorithms are a cheap way of doing things. An intelligent mind can see forward to say, "in order to do this I need to first make so-and-so" wheras a genetic algorithm could wind up taking thousands of generations to get anywhere. However, if all those generations are first simulated on the computer (and very rapidly with a large population) then evolution can be achieved quickly.
If someone can figure out a way of doing this with distributed computing (ala SETI@home)...well the possibilities are great.
Software/Wetware is/are (a) very good read(s). He has another novel, The Hacker and the Ants which is less futuristic, though still pretty good.
I appreciated the idea that the robots (in Software/Wetware) were not truly sentient until they had broken their "Asimov" programming (Asimov's famous 3 Laws of Robotics), and that they had a highly developed philosophy about the nature of the universe (somewhat postmodernist).
Privitization is always the driving force behind rapid progress, economies of scale, and in general greater availability to the public. Privitization of state-run enterprises is usually one of the first IMF structural adjustment policies to be enforced on debtor nations and history has clearly shown that this leads to less availability to the public, as prices rise out of reach. "Rapid progress" - that is unproven, since just about all of the rapid technological progress in history has been fomented by political (war) pressure. "Economies of scale" - I agree, but only because those private companies can ruthlessly exploit 3rd world labor.
Furthermore, how much of these new technologies are ever really available to anyone with an income lower than $35,000 a year?
"I can't get no bread, but Whitey's on the moon..." - Gil Scott Heron