Pussy. Not only are you a marketing manager, you're attempting to pretend that you're not one because you think that "marketing" will make you unpopular. In other words, you're marketing yourself at the anti-marketing market. How sad is that?
For God's sake, man, if you're that ashamed of the perfectly honourable profession of marketing, don't do it. If you're not ashamed of what you do, be proud of it. Bizarrely, despite what the thirteen-year-olds (literally and mentally) post about "oh yeah, engineers rock, dude, marketing people are droids and they suck", some of us realise that companies go bust if they don't sell things, and that people who know what sells are useful. Your current.sig is approximately ten times lamer than "geek and proud of it".
I have to say, dude, that I would not like to be a "Community Evangelist" during a 25% downsizing. You might want to change it to "Marketing Manager", which is effectively what you are, and which doesn't look so glaringly like a waste of money when the bankers take a look at the outgoings a/c.
The neo-Darwinists have shown (see Dennett's book, Darwin's Dangerous Idea) that this is not really different from mainstream evolution.
Which Gould never denied, and it was a disgusting lie of Dennett's to ever claim that he did. Gould's real argument was against the "one-gene, one characteristic" model which Dawkins and Dennett needed to assume for lots of their highfalutin' conclusions about human behaviour. On this matter, he has been proved cataclysmically right.
Well, given that this is the home of "Information wants to be free! Free Napster! Free books! Free everything!", you didn't actually expect them to come out and help the producers of that free stuff did you? Why, that would almost imply that all that rhetoric about "big music labels" was based on some kind of moral view rather than the desire to shovel Free Stuff into the gaping maw of a billion whining geeks!
Yeh. Right. For your friends. Strange, isn't it, that whenever you see someone loaded up with armfuls of Trekkie merchandising crap, it's for their "friends".
I suppose that the only reason you were at that Star Trek Convention was "to see how gay it was", too, huh timmy?
hrrrrm..... let me get this straight... some hack journalist, on the strength of one or two interviews and a bit of desk research, presumes to go out to Redmond and tell the creator of the operating system used on 90% of the world's computers, a guy who is a billionaire, and who is advised by geniuses, exactly where he screwed up and how he could have played it better.
If Unix people are uniquely non-idiotic, and if they're "the elite", then why have they made precisely no significant improvements to their operating system since 1978?
someone visiting your home did so, and you had 'auto-micropay' turned on, and now it looks like you did it?
On behalf of the government, CIA, Feds, Secret Service, New World Order and Trilateral Commission, could I just inform you that this is the lamest porn excuse we have ever heard?
The article is bullshit for the following reason, posed in the form of two questions:
1. How on earth can you have a market in a commodity, unless you have specified all of the ownership rights pertaining to that commodity?
2. Once you have specified all of the ownership rights relating to personal information, precisely what problem is there which remains to be solved?
The "market in privacy" is a non-solution to a non-problem. It requires as one of its preconditions, a solution to the only political problem of interest. But it's got the magic word "market" in it, which apparently makes a lot of otherwise intelligent people suspend all their critical faculties, for fear of being mistaken for a socialist.
However, some of us present stayed on for the advanced class, where they took back all of the simplistic, one-size-fits-all conclusions beloved of you "market" types. Allow me to explain, in irritating alternating bold and plain typefaces:
Why did California have price controls in the first place?
Because the electricity utilities were monopolists -- if prices hadn't been regulated, the suppliers would have acted like classic monopolists and reduced supply to jack up prices.
Why the hell did they allow monopoly suppliers of electricity? They must have been smoking crack!
No, it would have been crack-smoking to do it any other way. Electricity supply is a natural monopoly, because it's ludicrously inefficient to have two or three sets of competing power cables running everywhere. Quite apart from the obvious duplication of effort, city streets as they are currently designed could not bear this level of cabling.
So what's the real source of the problem?
Well, at privatisation, the existing, regulated utilities split themselves into a price-controlled supply company and a deregulated generation company. The generation company was meant to charge what the market would bear, while the supply company would supply to consumers, with a price ceiling.
What the hell was the idea of that?
Well, it was believed that, when freed of the dead hand of government, the supply company would make huge improvements in productivity. Everyone envisaged that these productivity improvements would be enough to allow them to reduce the cost to consumers, while competition among generators would keep prices down.
What actually happened?
The productivity improvements never happened. The supply companies were actually less efficient than the integrated utilities had been. They were never able to pay enough for electricity to make it worth the while for the power companies to invest in more capacity.
Wasn't it incredibly naive to expect that the simple act of deregulation would magically make everything more efficient?
Hey don't ask me, ask a libertarian.
So what happened then?
Power demand went through the roof, and there was no spare capacity. Oil prices rose, which didn't exactly help.
So, in a classic example of the market working to all our benefit, the power companies realised they had nothing to gain from driving their customers (the supply companies) out of business, and increased capacity, tiding over the supply companies?
None such luck. The generating companies correctly guessed that in a half-assed deregulatory system like this, losses are socialised while profits are privatised, and that it was time to make out like gang busters.
So whose fault was it?
Everybody's. The price regime was silly, because it didn't allow for incentives to increase generation capcity. But it would have been far sillier to deregulate prices to customers -- this would have simply shifted the excess profits from the generators to the suppliers, and entrenched the same problem forever.
The real lesson is that, despite what everyone tells us about that nasty, evil, incompetent government, it managed to keep the freaking lights on in California. A subsidiary lesson is that Californians use approximately five times as much electricity as would be reasonable. And finally, that we should always be suspicious of people pushing miracle solutions to economic problems which, as a first step, involve large resource transfers to themselves.
"I am a plutocratic doctor trying to make enough money to buy a fifth Lexus. Myself and a couple of other blood-sucking leeches had the idea of kitting out a practice with fancy-schmancy computerised bells and whistles so that we can jack up our already stratospheric fees into the ionosphere. We don't really have a clue about technology, so we thought we'd ask a bunch of geeks what they'd like, and more importantly, be prepared to pay for. Meanwhile, malnourished kids and the homeless? Fuck 'em."
Should we really be supporting this kind of behaviour? These guys don't want to talk about any real uses of technology in medicine, like for curing people. They just want to pad their fees in order to squeeze yet more $$$ out of the insurance industry, which will then have to cover its costs, so some poor schmuck gets his coverage cut. Everyone's down on lawyers, but we're freakin' little league parasites compared to this kind of doctor.
Yet by any even halfheartedly rigorous definition, very few of these works are truly SF.
Mark Twain anticipated a couple of narrative devices which were later used in science fiction. However, his writings lacked the intellectual flavor of science fiction, and can't be considered part of the genre. In any case, juxtaposing a modern person with an ancient setting and vice versa is far older device than Twain; it occurs at least once in Homer, and Swift made use of a similar device a hundred years earlier. I dare say that something similar happened in the bible, though it doesn't come to mind.
Borges also makes that point; Poe thought of himself as a poet rather than a prose stylist. Borges also correctly notes that it's a shame his poetry wasn't better. His prose is him in mannered, respectable style, while the poetry is the other side.
The better argument for EAP as the originator of science fiction is the one made by Jorge Luis Borges in an essay on the detective novel, where he points out that Poe was responsible for the idea of the novel as an intellectual creation rather than an emotional one. This makes him (proximately) the father of the detective novel and (somewhat more remotely) the grandfather of science fiction.
I don't believe this argument, however; it presumes that science fiction is fundamentally intellectual, which it isn't, or at least, not in the same way that detective stories are. Science fiction is not, in the main, an intellectual exercise for the author, except in those dreadful Asimov and Clarke outings where he tries to deduce sixty semi-amusing implications of one piece of speculative science.
A lot of science fiction is slap bang in the Mary Shelley tradition, and to pretend otherwise by saying that her "science" wasn't central enough is to completely ignore one of the main features of the genre -- its relationship to fantasy and thence to the gothic tradition. He certainly needs to come up with some explanation of the proximity of the fantasy and science fiction sections of most bookshops in order to defend this idea.
And anyone who can pretend that science fiction is essentially American ought to be introduced to HG Wells or his descendants. It has its roots in Whiggish extrapolation of modern technology, which started off as a British trait, and moved to America along with global technological hegemony, about the end of the First World War. American science fiction is essentially American; British science fiction isn't, or doesn't have to be.
Of course, the author also screws up by failing to note the most important thing to know about science fiction -- that as literature, most of it is abysmal.
And I said it second best, in the original draft of the "Karma Whore HOWTO":
"If you ever need an easy (though slightly shameful) point or two, just put in your post the words "
Security Through Obscurity Doesn't Work". I have no fucking idea why this always gets the +5, but it's never failed me yet.
Well, how about an instinctive, or instinct-level behavior produced in a species by selection pressure?
But now you seem to be asserting that there is an instinct toward social arrangements which allow women control over their sexual and reproductive habits; a proposition with no empirical evidence whatever for it. Furthermore, the distinction between such a rarified, state-dependent and complex instinct and a "social factor" would be completely uninteresting; certainly it is only pure religious attachment which would make anyone assert that sequences programming for any such characteristic could be found in chromosomes. Your position is not too terribly far from asserting that early drafts of the both the Communist Manifesto, Veritatis Splendor and the United States Constitution can be found in DNA sequences.
At this point it's pretty clear that your attachment to defining social reality as "biological" is based in something more than mere rationality.
Why are men generally "easier" and more promiscuous? Because sex isn't that much of an investment and propagates their genetic material.
Not if the women who would otherwise mate with them refuse to mate with promiscuous men, and are able to refuse to do so.
Of course, the question of whether the important factor in a society is men's ability to widely propogate their genes, or women's ability to ensure that their investment will be protected depends on the relations between men and women in that society which is.... a social relation. Score (-1, Overrated) for evolutionary psychology.
If you think that maintaining a database the size of Altavista's is "basically just the same thing as a long handwritten list", then 1) it is very difficult to see how you could believe that anything at all might ever be patented and 2) you are in for a world of pain if you ever have to deal with one.
I think that even the CIA might balk at deposing the government of Holland:)
Of course you are right; the USA, not France, is the country in the world with a reputation for attempting to enforce its laws extraterritorially, as a quick internet search on the phrase "Helms-Burton" will show.
Slashdot Mirror
Pussy. Not only are you a marketing manager, you're attempting to pretend that you're not one because you think that "marketing" will make you unpopular. In other words, you're marketing yourself at the anti-marketing market. How sad is that?
For God's sake, man, if you're that ashamed of the perfectly honourable profession of marketing, don't do it. If you're not ashamed of what you do, be proud of it. Bizarrely, despite what the thirteen-year-olds (literally and mentally) post about "oh yeah, engineers rock, dude, marketing people are droids and they suck", some of us realise that companies go bust if they don't sell things, and that people who know what sells are useful. Your current .sig is approximately ten times lamer than "geek and proud of it".
I have to say, dude, that I would not like to be a "Community Evangelist" during a 25% downsizing. You might want to change it to "Marketing Manager", which is effectively what you are, and which doesn't look so glaringly like a waste of money when the bankers take a look at the outgoings a/c.
Which Gould never denied, and it was a disgusting lie of Dennett's to ever claim that he did. Gould's real argument was against the "one-gene, one characteristic" model which Dawkins and Dennett needed to assume for lots of their highfalutin' conclusions about human behaviour. On this matter, he has been proved cataclysmically right.
Well, given that this is the home of "Information wants to be free! Free Napster! Free books! Free everything!", you didn't actually expect them to come out and help the producers of that free stuff did you? Why, that would almost imply that all that rhetoric about "big music labels" was based on some kind of moral view rather than the desire to shovel Free Stuff into the gaping maw of a billion whining geeks!
Yeh. Right. For your friends. Strange, isn't it, that whenever you see someone loaded up with armfuls of Trekkie merchandising crap, it's for their "friends".
I suppose that the only reason you were at that Star Trek Convention was "to see how gay it was", too, huh timmy?
Own up. You're fooling nobody.
wow, that was good. I don't think there was any way at all of not getting hit by that.
Sorry, who was the arrogant one here?
If Unix people are uniquely non-idiotic, and if they're "the elite", then why have they made precisely no significant improvements to their operating system since 1978?
On behalf of the government, CIA, Feds, Secret Service, New World Order and Trilateral Commission, could I just inform you that this is the lamest porn excuse we have ever heard?
Now off to the holding pens in Michigan with you.
1. How on earth can you have a market in a commodity, unless you have specified all of the ownership rights pertaining to that commodity?
2. Once you have specified all of the ownership rights relating to personal information, precisely what problem is there which remains to be solved?
The "market in privacy" is a non-solution to a non-problem. It requires as one of its preconditions, a solution to the only political problem of interest. But it's got the magic word "market" in it, which apparently makes a lot of otherwise intelligent people suspend all their critical faculties, for fear of being mistaken for a socialist.
Why did California have price controls in the first place?
Because the electricity utilities were monopolists -- if prices hadn't been regulated, the suppliers would have acted like classic monopolists and reduced supply to jack up prices.
Why the hell did they allow monopoly suppliers of electricity? They must have been smoking crack!
No, it would have been crack-smoking to do it any other way. Electricity supply is a natural monopoly, because it's ludicrously inefficient to have two or three sets of competing power cables running everywhere. Quite apart from the obvious duplication of effort, city streets as they are currently designed could not bear this level of cabling.
So what's the real source of the problem?
Well, at privatisation, the existing, regulated utilities split themselves into a price-controlled supply company and a deregulated generation company. The generation company was meant to charge what the market would bear, while the supply company would supply to consumers, with a price ceiling.
What the hell was the idea of that?
Well, it was believed that, when freed of the dead hand of government, the supply company would make huge improvements in productivity. Everyone envisaged that these productivity improvements would be enough to allow them to reduce the cost to consumers, while competition among generators would keep prices down.
What actually happened?
The productivity improvements never happened. The supply companies were actually less efficient than the integrated utilities had been. They were never able to pay enough for electricity to make it worth the while for the power companies to invest in more capacity.
Wasn't it incredibly naive to expect that the simple act of deregulation would magically make everything more efficient?
Hey don't ask me, ask a libertarian.
So what happened then?
Power demand went through the roof, and there was no spare capacity. Oil prices rose, which didn't exactly help.
So, in a classic example of the market working to all our benefit, the power companies realised they had nothing to gain from driving their customers (the supply companies) out of business, and increased capacity, tiding over the supply companies?
None such luck. The generating companies correctly guessed that in a half-assed deregulatory system like this, losses are socialised while profits are privatised, and that it was time to make out like gang busters.
So whose fault was it?
Everybody's. The price regime was silly, because it didn't allow for incentives to increase generation capcity. But it would have been far sillier to deregulate prices to customers -- this would have simply shifted the excess profits from the generators to the suppliers, and entrenched the same problem forever.
The real lesson is that, despite what everyone tells us about that nasty, evil, incompetent government, it managed to keep the freaking lights on in California. A subsidiary lesson is that Californians use approximately five times as much electricity as would be reasonable. And finally, that we should always be suspicious of people pushing miracle solutions to economic problems which, as a first step, involve large resource transfers to themselves.
thanks
Should we really be supporting this kind of behaviour? These guys don't want to talk about any real uses of technology in medicine, like for curing people. They just want to pad their fees in order to squeeze yet more $$$ out of the insurance industry, which will then have to cover its costs, so some poor schmuck gets his coverage cut. Everyone's down on lawyers, but we're freakin' little league parasites compared to this kind of doctor.
Calling a "typical geek" a cunt, however, is a duty, and one which I am happy to do.
Yet by any even halfheartedly rigorous definition, very few of these works are truly SF.
Mark Twain anticipated a couple of narrative devices which were later used in science fiction. However, his writings lacked the intellectual flavor of science fiction, and can't be considered part of the genre. In any case, juxtaposing a modern person with an ancient setting and vice versa is far older device than Twain; it occurs at least once in Homer, and Swift made use of a similar device a hundred years earlier. I dare say that something similar happened in the bible, though it doesn't come to mind.
Borges also makes that point; Poe thought of himself as a poet rather than a prose stylist. Borges also correctly notes that it's a shame his poetry wasn't better. His prose is him in mannered, respectable style, while the poetry is the other side.
I don't believe this argument, however; it presumes that science fiction is fundamentally intellectual, which it isn't, or at least, not in the same way that detective stories are. Science fiction is not, in the main, an intellectual exercise for the author, except in those dreadful Asimov and Clarke outings where he tries to deduce sixty semi-amusing implications of one piece of speculative science.
A lot of science fiction is slap bang in the Mary Shelley tradition, and to pretend otherwise by saying that her "science" wasn't central enough is to completely ignore one of the main features of the genre -- its relationship to fantasy and thence to the gothic tradition. He certainly needs to come up with some explanation of the proximity of the fantasy and science fiction sections of most bookshops in order to defend this idea.
And anyone who can pretend that science fiction is essentially American ought to be introduced to HG Wells or his descendants. It has its roots in Whiggish extrapolation of modern technology, which started off as a British trait, and moved to America along with global technological hegemony, about the end of the First World War. American science fiction is essentially American; British science fiction isn't, or doesn't have to be.
Of course, the author also screws up by failing to note the most important thing to know about science fiction -- that as literature, most of it is abysmal.
But now you seem to be asserting that there is an instinct toward social arrangements which allow women control over their sexual and reproductive habits; a proposition with no empirical evidence whatever for it. Furthermore, the distinction between such a rarified, state-dependent and complex instinct and a "social factor" would be completely uninteresting; certainly it is only pure religious attachment which would make anyone assert that sequences programming for any such characteristic could be found in chromosomes. Your position is not too terribly far from asserting that early drafts of the both the Communist Manifesto, Veritatis Splendor and the United States Constitution can be found in DNA sequences.
At this point it's pretty clear that your attachment to defining social reality as "biological" is based in something more than mere rationality.
I'm sorry; is this a biological fact?????
Not if the women who would otherwise mate with them refuse to mate with promiscuous men, and are able to refuse to do so.
Of course, the question of whether the important factor in a society is men's ability to widely propogate their genes, or women's ability to ensure that their investment will be protected depends on the relations between men and women in that society which is .... a social relation. Score (-1, Overrated) for evolutionary psychology.
You've never read one single word of Marx, have you? He in fact said the exact opposite about the Industrial Revolution.
If you think that maintaining a database the size of Altavista's is "basically just the same thing as a long handwritten list", then 1) it is very difficult to see how you could believe that anything at all might ever be patented and 2) you are in for a world of pain if you ever have to deal with one.
.... indeed, Kaplan's original judgement said so, at length. The point at issue is how much the 1st amendment actually protects.
that translation is incredibly confusing and unreliable, I'm afraid. The analysis in "Les Echos" dated January 02 is much better.
Of course you are right; the USA, not France, is the country in the world with a reputation for attempting to enforce its laws extraterritorially, as a quick internet search on the phrase "Helms-Burton" will show.