John Keegan wrote an excellent book on generalship. Alexander the Great led from the front in small-scale battles and provided his men with morale by doing so; his risk demanded that they also risk. Wellington led within gunshot range of the front lines, but spent his time observing and giving instructions. Grant habitually avoided battle lines. By the time you get to the era of nukes and bombers and communications systems, generals direct from bunkers. There's a difference between field leadership and running a war.
You don't want your project manager to roll up his sleeves and start coding when he should be running interference and requisitioning hardware and budget. So yes, the ultimate manager is the hindmost. Your lead dev leads, your dev team follows, and your manager gets the hell out of the way.
Hackers was emphatically not a cyberpunk story. Cyberpunk is futuristic and dystopian. Hackers was a coming-of-age flick with computers used as flavour text. The slang of a Gibson story feels right because it's in an alien context- orbiting arcologies, ad-hoc urban engineering, blurring the boundaries of the self. Yes, the jargon in both Hackers and, say, Neuromancer, are about equally accurate- but Neuromancer was not set in Grade 12 circa 1995.
I don't know that I'd call it a "cult classic," but my friends will watch it every couple of years in order to MST3K it mercilessly. It works really well as an absurdist satire of, yaknow, Computer Movies. We'll spend weeks afterwards muttering "Hack the planet!" to each other and sniggering.
Humans are allergic to boredom. Instead of using our tremendous productivity to reduce a 40 hour workweek to 5 hours and living like Ward and June Cleaver, we use the productivity, work a 40 hour week, and have homes with 52" flatscreens, Netflix, XBOX 360s, cell phones, and automatic sprinklers. If we wanted to live like Ward and June- washing by hand, mowing by hand, 10" black and white radio reception TV, no computer or internet- then yes, we could get away with a 5 hour work week.
Personally, I like my internets and summer vacations in other countries too much to cut back on my work week like that.
The US constitution doesn't permit warrantless seizure of property, either, but the DHS can do it within 100 miles of the border. Maybe your faith in the constitution shouldn't extend to the politicians responsible for maintaining it.
I hate to tell you this, but being evil doesn't make people stupid or inefficient. The Nazis managed to build ingenious radar targeting systems for bombers, they developed their own jet fighters, and they did horrific but informative medical experiments on innocent people. "Thugs in jack boots" are perfectly capable of using or creating technologies to use for evil.
Good clothes are not uncomfortable. Ties are a pain in the ass, maybe, but if the clothes pinch or sag they're not good. You want to dress like an engineer and be "true to yourself?" Fine and dandy- but you don't get to complain that women "care about surface level things." You don't gaze with unrestrained lust on bag ladies, hot babes don't fawn all over your pocket protector, that's the deal. Personally, I'm into women with massive brains, but I'll pick the one with massive brains and hot legs before I pick the one with massive brains and a dumpy outfit- why expect them to choose differently?
Wearing nice clothes changes who I am precisely as much as TCP headers change the contents of a packet.
Personally, I agree with you; women who pay attention only to how many collars a guy has popped are brainless whores and deserve disdain, not attention. On the other hand, there's a difference between "holy shit bling" and "looking good" and "looking homeless," and I think we both know that nerds left to their own devices tend toward the "homeless" end of the scale. I know nerd dudes who wear fanny packs, T-shirts, and sweat pants to go to the mall. I know a lot of nerd dudes whose "good outfit" is 2-year-old khakis, a worn golf shirt, and running shoes without duct tape.
I'm not saying there's anything wrong with wearing that. I am saying that women are interested in dudes who are going to be able to take them out every so often, and nerd outfits don't scream "I'm a reasonable bet on income levels and personal hygiene." If a nerd wants to attract women, and he's on a dating site, where the other dudes are showing off ripped abs and sweet tans, he may want to move from "homeless" to "I can dress myself and not embarass you when you're seen with me at the movies." Maybe $600 outfits is a bit wonky for most nerds, but the dude said he was loaded. If he wants to communicate that he's loaded and thinks it'll improve his chances, he needs to _look_ like he's got money to spend, or the broke dudes who spent their last paycheck on looking richer than he does are going to land dates, and he won't. Sure, the ladies will be disappointed with the slick-looking guys...
But there's a difference between "I'm okay with dating guys that don't look like the Fonz/Vin Diesel" and "I'm okay with guys that look like they live in a van." And I *don't* think ladies are unreasonable in disregarding guys that dress like crap.
True- no homosexuals have kicked in church doors and demanded to be married by the fainting priest. However, there has been a progression of arguments made, and there *is* a current legal issue in western Canada whether or not Christian ministers, who are also licensed to manage legal weddings, are permitted to turn down gay couples who seek legal marriage. Here's a blog entry from a friend of mine on the issue. Religious educational institutions have, in Canada in the last ten years, been required to retain the services of educators who explicitly break the school's code of conduct and dogma.
Obviously these aren't the door-kicking apocalyptic visions the louder talking heads have been having- but they _are_ sufficiently intrusive on religious freedom to give rise to disquiet among folks who don't have disquiet about homosexual public service. The issues are caused more because of that intersection of public and private; the religious educational institutions accept government funding, the ministers who perform marriage are _also_ licensed civil servants... it's messy. Point is, there is enough substance to the issue that- in Canada at least- "gay rights" sometimes also means "conflicts with otherwise uninterested religious organizations." And, of course, there's plenty of folks who conflate the entirety of "gay rights" with "they'll burn the churches down," thanks to those talking heads, and clarification in those cases is edification, I think.
Go to a goddam stylist, get a very pretty and fashionable female friend (or well dressed gay dude friend, or whatever) to help you pick out a good wardrobe. Seriously. Stylish chicks love a makeover project. It makes them feel like they're the Helpful Pretty Friend in an ugly duckling movie. I've seen a total skid theater tech transformed into a fairly dapper fellow. Unless you already wear outfits worth over $500, you will benefit greatly from a friend making you over. If you are like every other geekass bastard out there, you're wearing comfortable clothes that make you look like you rolled out of a cardboard box this morning. Get style, get ladies. Money will get ladies, but you have to show the ladies that you have it. That means you wear flash clothes, maybe drive a flash car, and you waste money to look good.
Specifically, there's a link in the article to Marcus Frind's blog, in which he claims in the same paragraph that "This was an incredibly well planned and sophisticated attack" and that "It took Chris Russo 2 days to break in; he didn’t even try to hide behind a proxy, signed up under his real name and executed the attacks while logged in as himself." Fortunately, Frind then "closed the breach if indeed there was one."
Now, it's entirely possible- since both of them obviously want to sound as cool as possible- that Chris Russo was hoping to land a security gig with POF, and said some things to suggest urgency and encourage Frind to hire him. But, frankly, Frind, on his own blog, sounds like a disjointed paranoid, talking about how damn clever he is for foiling this wily hacker. Who discovered the plaintext password storage the site uses. If they're both wankers, I'd still give credit to Russo rather than Frind. I use POF myself (with the requisite sense of shame), and the site's asking for password resets because "an argentinian hacker accessed the site." Oh, and here's the brilliant method of getting new passwords; first you enter your email (which an exploiter would already know), then you enter your current password (which the exploiter would know), and your new password. So I guess all the users are pretty much safe!:D
Well, fair enough. I can't say Iran's a hotbed of gay rights these days.
Greater specificity would improve the signal:noise ratio, though. Identify, say, Westboro, Iran, most of the Southern Baptist churches, and a half dozen others, and I would nod and sigh sympathetically. Paint North American Conference Baptists, Anglicans, and Unitarians with that same brush, though, and anyone has cause to object.
You might want to be specific about "homosexual rights," too, in a North American context. There's groups that agree with, say, "there's no problem with homosexuals serving in public office" and "there's no reason for the state not to recognize legal marriage between any two consenting adults" but on the other hand take exception to "church leaders should be required by state powers to perform religious ceremonies for non-members of their faith despite moral objections," and all three have been described as "gay rights," typically by talking heads on the news, and typically with very little explanation.
That's kinda like saying Monarchy is a very liberal form of government because most modern democracies were monarchies.
Man, at no point did I say the church was a super brilliant thing that was totally awesome and you should join it. I said that saying "(position), honesty, intelligence, pick two" is a bad idea. It's a bad idea if (position) is atheism, religion, Republican, Democrat, etc. *You* disagree with a position. Deciding that people could only disagree with you because they are stupid or dishonest is the hallmark of a dogmatic, not a rationalist.
Why is it that so many great men, whose writings and ideas about science, didn't leave any worthy commentary on religion?
I suspect it's for the same reason that there are few particle physicists who are also archaeologists. Any great field of study takes a lot of time to absorb, and there are not a lot of people who can master two fields deeply enough to comment historically on both. However, if one would satisfy you, I recommend Pascal, who wrote Pensées as well as Traité du triangle arithmétique. You are free to respond that very few great scientists continued to contribute to science after they began contributing to theology, or that there were, rather than none, merely not _many_ scientists who also contributed to theology- but don't expect me to respond to that any more than I have to your complaint that modern scientists are not religious.
Not an idea I disagree with, and voluntary positive eugenics are certainly more morally palatable than involuntary negative eugenics (to say nothing of my evident obligation to totally get it on), but there's some pretty strong indications that intelligence is determined, or fostered almost determinatively, by childhood environment. It has (almost) nothing to do with smart/dumb parents, large/small families, but nutrition, stimulation, affection, emotional stability, etc.
And, honestly, I've known too many dudes with way higher IQs than mine who ended up working labour jobs to believe that humanity's interests are best and only served by folks being smart. We ought to find a persistence gene and breed for that.
Having studied the theology of the crusades, I'd like to add that the 1095 call for the First Crusade was;
In response to a political letter from the Emperor at Constantinople to the Pope asking for mercenary recruits,
addressed to military professionals,
conceived of as an organized, multinational military aid expedition
to assist an allied nation,
under the strategic leadership of the church.
The total clusterfuck it rapidly turned into is indefensible, and was probably inevitable, but the documentation that survives is pretty clear that the Pope was hoping for rapprochement with allies and free passage for unarmed pilgrims to Jerusalem, a sort of medieval United Nations/NATO effort, not a four-century religious war that broke the church in Europe.
I wonder how far into science education are those Daoists and Indian Yogis and what their IQs are. I mean seriously it would be an interesting thing to know, I could of course be completely wrong.
Gregor Mendel was an Augustinian monk.
Rene Descartes published a well-known book of religious thought.
Algebra came from (or through) Muslim Arabia, heavily influenced by Indian books on mathematics.
Louis Pasteur, according to his son-in-law, had "absolute faith in God."
Leibniz was a strong proponent of the ecumenical movement seeking to rejoin the Lutheran and Roman Catholic churches.
I could go on, but I think you get my point.
Perhaps religion does not breed ignorance. Perhaps great scientists' faith in the supernatural is not a curious exception to a universal faith-reason dichotomy. Perhaps religious people are by nature neither stupid, nor ignorant, nor conformist, nor uneducated. Perhaps you have encountered people who were both religious and stupid/ignorant/conformist, and interpreted the correlations incorrectly. Perhaps you have an unexamined bias in your assumptions that distances you from reality. I urge you to consider whether your evidence is sufficient, whether it leads inexorably to your conclusions, and whether you care more about being right or feeling justified in your position.
Signed, someone who thought similarly about atheists before he pulled his head out of his ass.
Speaking as a "the religious," I'd be deliriously happy if my boss, coworkers, and democratic representative were capable, rational, and happened to be gay. The doctor I hit up for asthma prescriptions is gay, and I don't care. Maybe a "the religious" person isn't a fungible unit of monotheistic oppression, just like a "the gay" person isn't a fungible unit of public sex acts with youth.
I just want to emphasize this, because Europeans in my experience often just do not get the scale involved. When Canadians or Americans come to Europe, driving from the south of France to the Netherlands and back is a weekend trip, while Europeans I've met consider the distance a phenomenal one reserved for long vacations. Our major cities are days of driving away from each other, our states or provinces the size of whole European nations. What the Netherlands considers "rural," most Canadians, at least, would consider "a short drive out of the city." So I think possibly you''ve missed the "vast size" part of the GP's statement.
Mind you, that said, the cost of laying fiber is not that great, between 5 and 50 cents a mile, depending on the method used. While not free, and crippling cost for a start-up, it fits within most provincial budgets. In Canada, at least, our net speeds, comparable to post-soviet states, is due more to the predatory nature of ISPs and the carte blanche the "regulatory" agency gives them for pricing models, etc. One of the major ISPs just switched from "unlimited" to "cap and overage" pricing; they made a lot of noise to consumers about how it was necessary to pay for the build-outs, but in their stockholder reports it's listed as profit generation, not maintenance. Our problem is amoral scum, not scale.
Funny story; people are willing to pay for physical objects, such as figures, models, official posters, etc. If I had the money and time, I'd make a small budget film, release it for free, and get some vinyl toys cast up for sale. If it costs $30G to make, and I can sell 3000 toys for $15 with a $10 profit, I'll just about break even. It's not a question of culture not making money, it's a question of giving the fans something they can express their appreciation on/with. Nobody's going to donate; loads of fans will buy toys and lunchboxes.
This is precisely the same argument that I use to advocate triumphant humanism. As population and technology increase, we solve problems faster and faster because we're generating more people to solve it and giving them the tools to do so. If Beethoven or Feynman or Tesla were one in 6,000,000, we ought to get ten of them for every 60,000,000.
Slashdot Mirror
John Keegan wrote an excellent book on generalship. Alexander the Great led from the front in small-scale battles and provided his men with morale by doing so; his risk demanded that they also risk. Wellington led within gunshot range of the front lines, but spent his time observing and giving instructions. Grant habitually avoided battle lines. By the time you get to the era of nukes and bombers and communications systems, generals direct from bunkers. There's a difference between field leadership and running a war.
You don't want your project manager to roll up his sleeves and start coding when he should be running interference and requisitioning hardware and budget. So yes, the ultimate manager is the hindmost. Your lead dev leads, your dev team follows, and your manager gets the hell out of the way.
Hackers was emphatically not a cyberpunk story. Cyberpunk is futuristic and dystopian. Hackers was a coming-of-age flick with computers used as flavour text. The slang of a Gibson story feels right because it's in an alien context- orbiting arcologies, ad-hoc urban engineering, blurring the boundaries of the self. Yes, the jargon in both Hackers and, say, Neuromancer, are about equally accurate- but Neuromancer was not set in Grade 12 circa 1995.
I don't know that I'd call it a "cult classic," but my friends will watch it every couple of years in order to MST3K it mercilessly. It works really well as an absurdist satire of, yaknow, Computer Movies. We'll spend weeks afterwards muttering "Hack the planet!" to each other and sniggering.
Humans are allergic to boredom. Instead of using our tremendous productivity to reduce a 40 hour workweek to 5 hours and living like Ward and June Cleaver, we use the productivity, work a 40 hour week, and have homes with 52" flatscreens, Netflix, XBOX 360s, cell phones, and automatic sprinklers. If we wanted to live like Ward and June- washing by hand, mowing by hand, 10" black and white radio reception TV, no computer or internet- then yes, we could get away with a 5 hour work week.
Personally, I like my internets and summer vacations in other countries too much to cut back on my work week like that.
Maybe so, but I think he did more for moving the Arab World towards Democracy than the US ever did.
Governments hate competition.
The US constitution doesn't permit warrantless seizure of property, either, but the DHS can do it within 100 miles of the border. Maybe your faith in the constitution shouldn't extend to the politicians responsible for maintaining it.
especially for a bunch of thugs in jack boots.
I hate to tell you this, but being evil doesn't make people stupid or inefficient. The Nazis managed to build ingenious radar targeting systems for bombers, they developed their own jet fighters, and they did horrific but informative medical experiments on innocent people. "Thugs in jack boots" are perfectly capable of using or creating technologies to use for evil.
I wish I could post and mod. I'll have to be satisfied with a post and nod; I've got a $250 pair of leather shoes I use when I want to inspire lust. ;3
Good clothes are not uncomfortable. Ties are a pain in the ass, maybe, but if the clothes pinch or sag they're not good. You want to dress like an engineer and be "true to yourself?" Fine and dandy- but you don't get to complain that women "care about surface level things." You don't gaze with unrestrained lust on bag ladies, hot babes don't fawn all over your pocket protector, that's the deal. Personally, I'm into women with massive brains, but I'll pick the one with massive brains and hot legs before I pick the one with massive brains and a dumpy outfit- why expect them to choose differently?
Wearing nice clothes changes who I am precisely as much as TCP headers change the contents of a packet.
A flash car is a great way to attract men, not women.
HAH! XD +1 Insightful, my friend.
Personally, I agree with you; women who pay attention only to how many collars a guy has popped are brainless whores and deserve disdain, not attention. On the other hand, there's a difference between "holy shit bling" and "looking good" and "looking homeless," and I think we both know that nerds left to their own devices tend toward the "homeless" end of the scale. I know nerd dudes who wear fanny packs, T-shirts, and sweat pants to go to the mall. I know a lot of nerd dudes whose "good outfit" is 2-year-old khakis, a worn golf shirt, and running shoes without duct tape.
I'm not saying there's anything wrong with wearing that. I am saying that women are interested in dudes who are going to be able to take them out every so often, and nerd outfits don't scream "I'm a reasonable bet on income levels and personal hygiene." If a nerd wants to attract women, and he's on a dating site, where the other dudes are showing off ripped abs and sweet tans, he may want to move from "homeless" to "I can dress myself and not embarass you when you're seen with me at the movies." Maybe $600 outfits is a bit wonky for most nerds, but the dude said he was loaded. If he wants to communicate that he's loaded and thinks it'll improve his chances, he needs to _look_ like he's got money to spend, or the broke dudes who spent their last paycheck on looking richer than he does are going to land dates, and he won't. Sure, the ladies will be disappointed with the slick-looking guys...
But there's a difference between "I'm okay with dating guys that don't look like the Fonz/Vin Diesel" and "I'm okay with guys that look like they live in a van." And I *don't* think ladies are unreasonable in disregarding guys that dress like crap.
True- no homosexuals have kicked in church doors and demanded to be married by the fainting priest. However, there has been a progression of arguments made, and there *is* a current legal issue in western Canada whether or not Christian ministers, who are also licensed to manage legal weddings, are permitted to turn down gay couples who seek legal marriage. Here's a blog entry from a friend of mine on the issue. Religious educational institutions have, in Canada in the last ten years, been required to retain the services of educators who explicitly break the school's code of conduct and dogma.
Obviously these aren't the door-kicking apocalyptic visions the louder talking heads have been having- but they _are_ sufficiently intrusive on religious freedom to give rise to disquiet among folks who don't have disquiet about homosexual public service. The issues are caused more because of that intersection of public and private; the religious educational institutions accept government funding, the ministers who perform marriage are _also_ licensed civil servants... it's messy. Point is, there is enough substance to the issue that- in Canada at least- "gay rights" sometimes also means "conflicts with otherwise uninterested religious organizations." And, of course, there's plenty of folks who conflate the entirety of "gay rights" with "they'll burn the churches down," thanks to those talking heads, and clarification in those cases is edification, I think.
Go to a goddam stylist, get a very pretty and fashionable female friend (or well dressed gay dude friend, or whatever) to help you pick out a good wardrobe. Seriously. Stylish chicks love a makeover project. It makes them feel like they're the Helpful Pretty Friend in an ugly duckling movie. I've seen a total skid theater tech transformed into a fairly dapper fellow. Unless you already wear outfits worth over $500, you will benefit greatly from a friend making you over. If you are like every other geekass bastard out there, you're wearing comfortable clothes that make you look like you rolled out of a cardboard box this morning. Get style, get ladies. Money will get ladies, but you have to show the ladies that you have it. That means you wear flash clothes, maybe drive a flash car, and you waste money to look good.
Specifically, there's a link in the article to Marcus Frind's blog, in which he claims in the same paragraph that "This was an incredibly well planned and sophisticated attack" and that "It took Chris Russo 2 days to break in; he didn’t even try to hide behind a proxy, signed up under his real name and executed the attacks while logged in as himself." Fortunately, Frind then "closed the breach if indeed there was one."
Now, it's entirely possible- since both of them obviously want to sound as cool as possible- that Chris Russo was hoping to land a security gig with POF, and said some things to suggest urgency and encourage Frind to hire him. But, frankly, Frind, on his own blog, sounds like a disjointed paranoid, talking about how damn clever he is for foiling this wily hacker. Who discovered the plaintext password storage the site uses. If they're both wankers, I'd still give credit to Russo rather than Frind. I use POF myself (with the requisite sense of shame), and the site's asking for password resets because "an argentinian hacker accessed the site." Oh, and here's the brilliant method of getting new passwords; first you enter your email (which an exploiter would already know), then you enter your current password (which the exploiter would know), and your new password. So I guess all the users are pretty much safe! :D
Well, fair enough. I can't say Iran's a hotbed of gay rights these days.
Greater specificity would improve the signal:noise ratio, though. Identify, say, Westboro, Iran, most of the Southern Baptist churches, and a half dozen others, and I would nod and sigh sympathetically. Paint North American Conference Baptists, Anglicans, and Unitarians with that same brush, though, and anyone has cause to object.
You might want to be specific about "homosexual rights," too, in a North American context. There's groups that agree with, say, "there's no problem with homosexuals serving in public office" and "there's no reason for the state not to recognize legal marriage between any two consenting adults" but on the other hand take exception to "church leaders should be required by state powers to perform religious ceremonies for non-members of their faith despite moral objections," and all three have been described as "gay rights," typically by talking heads on the news, and typically with very little explanation.
That's kinda like saying Monarchy is a very liberal form of government because most modern democracies were monarchies.
Man, at no point did I say the church was a super brilliant thing that was totally awesome and you should join it. I said that saying "(position), honesty, intelligence, pick two" is a bad idea. It's a bad idea if (position) is atheism, religion, Republican, Democrat, etc. *You* disagree with a position. Deciding that people could only disagree with you because they are stupid or dishonest is the hallmark of a dogmatic, not a rationalist.
Why is it that so many great men, whose writings and ideas about science, didn't leave any worthy commentary on religion?
I suspect it's for the same reason that there are few particle physicists who are also archaeologists. Any great field of study takes a lot of time to absorb, and there are not a lot of people who can master two fields deeply enough to comment historically on both. However, if one would satisfy you, I recommend Pascal, who wrote Pensées as well as Traité du triangle arithmétique. You are free to respond that very few great scientists continued to contribute to science after they began contributing to theology, or that there were, rather than none, merely not _many_ scientists who also contributed to theology- but don't expect me to respond to that any more than I have to your complaint that modern scientists are not religious.
Not an idea I disagree with, and voluntary positive eugenics are certainly more morally palatable than involuntary negative eugenics (to say nothing of my evident obligation to totally get it on), but there's some pretty strong indications that intelligence is determined, or fostered almost determinatively, by childhood environment. It has (almost) nothing to do with smart/dumb parents, large/small families, but nutrition, stimulation, affection, emotional stability, etc.
And, honestly, I've known too many dudes with way higher IQs than mine who ended up working labour jobs to believe that humanity's interests are best and only served by folks being smart. We ought to find a persistence gene and breed for that.
Having studied the theology of the crusades, I'd like to add that the 1095 call for the First Crusade was;
In response to a political letter from the Emperor at Constantinople to the Pope asking for mercenary recruits,
addressed to military professionals,
conceived of as an organized, multinational military aid expedition
to assist an allied nation,
under the strategic leadership of the church.
The total clusterfuck it rapidly turned into is indefensible, and was probably inevitable, but the documentation that survives is pretty clear that the Pope was hoping for rapprochement with allies and free passage for unarmed pilgrims to Jerusalem, a sort of medieval United Nations/NATO effort, not a four-century religious war that broke the church in Europe.
I wonder how far into science education are those Daoists and Indian Yogis and what their IQs are. I mean seriously it would be an interesting thing to know, I could of course be completely wrong.
Gregor Mendel was an Augustinian monk.
Rene Descartes published a well-known book of religious thought.
Algebra came from (or through) Muslim Arabia, heavily influenced by Indian books on mathematics.
Louis Pasteur, according to his son-in-law, had "absolute faith in God."
Leibniz was a strong proponent of the ecumenical movement seeking to rejoin the Lutheran and Roman Catholic churches.
I could go on, but I think you get my point.
Perhaps religion does not breed ignorance. Perhaps great scientists' faith in the supernatural is not a curious exception to a universal faith-reason dichotomy. Perhaps religious people are by nature neither stupid, nor ignorant, nor conformist, nor uneducated. Perhaps you have encountered people who were both religious and stupid/ignorant/conformist, and interpreted the correlations incorrectly. Perhaps you have an unexamined bias in your assumptions that distances you from reality. I urge you to consider whether your evidence is sufficient, whether it leads inexorably to your conclusions, and whether you care more about being right or feeling justified in your position.
Signed, someone who thought similarly about atheists before he pulled his head out of his ass.
Speaking as a "the religious," I'd be deliriously happy if my boss, coworkers, and democratic representative were capable, rational, and happened to be gay. The doctor I hit up for asthma prescriptions is gay, and I don't care. Maybe a "the religious" person isn't a fungible unit of monotheistic oppression, just like a "the gay" person isn't a fungible unit of public sex acts with youth.
640k ought to be enough for anybody.
I just want to emphasize this, because Europeans in my experience often just do not get the scale involved. When Canadians or Americans come to Europe, driving from the south of France to the Netherlands and back is a weekend trip, while Europeans I've met consider the distance a phenomenal one reserved for long vacations. Our major cities are days of driving away from each other, our states or provinces the size of whole European nations. What the Netherlands considers "rural," most Canadians, at least, would consider "a short drive out of the city." So I think possibly you''ve missed the "vast size" part of the GP's statement.
Mind you, that said, the cost of laying fiber is not that great, between 5 and 50 cents a mile, depending on the method used. While not free, and crippling cost for a start-up, it fits within most provincial budgets. In Canada, at least, our net speeds, comparable to post-soviet states, is due more to the predatory nature of ISPs and the carte blanche the "regulatory" agency gives them for pricing models, etc. One of the major ISPs just switched from "unlimited" to "cap and overage" pricing; they made a lot of noise to consumers about how it was necessary to pay for the build-outs, but in their stockholder reports it's listed as profit generation, not maintenance. Our problem is amoral scum, not scale.
I think you mean May 26, 2009.
Funny story; people are willing to pay for physical objects, such as figures, models, official posters, etc. If I had the money and time, I'd make a small budget film, release it for free, and get some vinyl toys cast up for sale. If it costs $30G to make, and I can sell 3000 toys for $15 with a $10 profit, I'll just about break even. It's not a question of culture not making money, it's a question of giving the fans something they can express their appreciation on/with. Nobody's going to donate; loads of fans will buy toys and lunchboxes.
This is precisely the same argument that I use to advocate triumphant humanism. As population and technology increase, we solve problems faster and faster because we're generating more people to solve it and giving them the tools to do so. If Beethoven or Feynman or Tesla were one in 6,000,000, we ought to get ten of them for every 60,000,000.