This whole thread is absurd, starting with the original story.
It's the usual crap: 'Patents are evil', 'money is evil', 'no, moron, the LOVE of money is the ROOT of all evil', 'bring back socialism now!', 'corporations are evil', 'anyone who has a different lifestyle or set of beliefs than the average slashdotter is evil!', et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseum.
One of these posts is basically correct:
At some point, when you have more ready cash than you need to sustain a comfortable way of life for 500 years, and your life is basically creating and growing a company that supports tens of thousands of other people and which provides services upon which millions of people have come to depend, the concept of a paycheck becomes ridiculous.
There are dumb millionaires and rich millionaires, but the Google guys are not dumb, and are basically smarter and more self aware than most of the posters to Slashdot. Give them credit for at least that.
I know that it's cheap fun to take out one's frustrations in life on scapegoats (the richer and therefore presumably more evil the better), but quite frankly, assuming you have the ability, making the effort will eventually pay off for you more than bitching about the other guy, right?
If you really feel a need to throw brickbats, there are PLENTY of nasty little tinpot dictators with torture chambers and legions of evil secret policement to obsess over.
And if you really want to help humanity, get the fuck off the computer and go start a company that cures cancer or alcoholism or offers cheap life insurance. Do something useful, anyway!
...with the wind in our face both ways, in blinding snow and tornadoes, trailed by rabid wolves, barefoot over broken glass, without even a Nintendo DS... (my kids love hearing about the good old days)
________________________
>>we hiked six miles through the trees and snow and mud to our mailbox, and we were grateful!
>This is standard mentality for pretty much >anyone but MS. They support and back-port things >for free quite regularly. Say what you will >about their other business practices or >security, but they are far and away the best in >the industry (of major OSes at least) at >updating things for free.
...which illustrates two things (to me, anyway)...
1. Microsoft is still a raging monopoly. Only a monopoly can afford to maintain and support a huge legacy code base for so many years. Remember the old telephone company that could track, fix and replace any of 'its' telephones, no matter how old? How much do you think those phones cost? How much do you think you paid for them in annual rental charges? Only a monopoly that can lock out competition can afford to do something like that.
2. "Innovation" is something that M$ pays lip service to because it has to. The dirty little truth is that neither M$, nor its large customers really want any innovation that is in any way costly or disruptive of existing processes and IT investment. Just like the telephone company, M$ will milk its product as long as it can with minimum investment. It is the early adopters, propeller heads and visionaries that love innovation, because they don't mind reformatting their drives and learning a new scripting language every weekend. Actually M$ has to be somewhat schizophrenic about innovation: they need to assure their customer base that they won't do anything wild and crazy with the existing platforms AND they have to make some kind of public display of embracing innovation, so they can claim that their competitors are threatening M$'s will to innovate. Thus, most changes are either cosmetic ("Clippy") or are of the 'forced migration' type anti-competitive kind ("Sure we said we'd maintain the code, but this won't hurt a bit, is really, really much better and you have to have it, and incidentally, forget about interoperability with anything from our upstart competition")
There's some truth to the saying "You think that you own things, but actually they end up owning you". Anyone with a cluttered garage, attic and garage will understand this.
The obvious rationale of not posting telecom outage is to deny helpful feedback to those trying to hack the US telecom system from afar. Duh. ___________________ "Isn't it scary that I thought the bit about terrorism was a joke? But no, I RTFA and sure enough, they really are putting this down to terrorism. Will future generations laugh at how easily the masses were seduced by this strawman? This is like the German Jews all over again..." _________________ This comment is an all-too-common trivialization of more than a decade of human tragedy.
Last week was the 63rd anniversary of the agony of city where nearly 40,000 Jews, mainly the elderly, women and children, were machine gunned in groups of ten by Einsatzgruppe C over two days, September 29th and 30th, 1941. Over that summer, more than 100,000 people, Jews, Ukrainians, Gypsies and resistance fighters were shot and their bodies thrown into a ravine. Two years later, the retreating Nazis frantically tried to dig up and burn the bodies to destroy the evidence.
You can still see the spot, it's about six subway stops from downtown Kiev and its name is Babi Yar. There were many thousands of similar massacres known and obscure during that period, big and small. Tens of millions of real people died, many of whom would be living today had it not been for the insane ambitions of the Nazis and the Communists.
This article gave me the (non-virtual) creeps. It's obvious that the world is getting more complex -- possibly more complex than a large segment of the population can handle.
A good part of the experience of touring is the conceit of believing that you are experiencing this view or this campsite or this stream in a unique way, that no one else has seen it the way you are seeing it. Moreover, the second conceit is that you are observing nature (or Nature, for those that like to objectify) unfiltered by human intervention.
All of this is nonsense, of course, there are few patches of uncultivated wilderness left on the planet.
However knowing that your view of a mountainside has been facilitated by a complex simulation for the purpose of allocating grazing funds so that cows eat the little trees that might have blocked your view...well, someone open a window, it's getting stuffy out there.
In all fairness, I have now installed SP2 on three boxes so far and the installations have gone without a hitch. Only one box had problems (user related, but easily fixed) and all three machines are now running noticeably better and faster than before the service patch. We'll see how well the patched boxes resist the bad stuff with experience, but the technical description of the changes seems to close most of the documented and obvious attacks. As far as my memory serves, this is the first major patch or service pack that has resulted in noticeable real world performance improvement.
Suggestion for patchers: Do a full virus and spyware scan, a disk check, and defrag and clean out your temp and garbage files before patching. If you're a real adrenaline junkie, update a mission critical box without a backup! It's thrilling!
"Consider this for a moment. Jane Boxwine buys a brand-new computer in 1999. It's a Pentium II 400 with 128MB RAM, 8MB HD, and Windows 98. She spends $2000 on it...So now you're telling her that she has to spend $100 on a Windows XP upgrade *and* install an OS that will be very noticeably slower on her machine? You're telling her that Microsoft made mistakes and now Jane has to pay for it?
So what's the solution for Jane Boxwine?" ________________________ Probably a honking big class action lawsuit against Microsoft for delivering an inherently defective product that cannot perform its intended function. Or maybe a collective reenaction of the mob scene in Frankenstein, only this time in Redmond.
Forget about the hapless IT guys -- at least they get paid to screw around with this stuff. What about the poor clueless home user. What about the promise of easy, useful home computing? What about the $1200 bucks he just dropped at Circuit City so that Jimmy would be able to use it and get into college? What happened to the damn "user experience"?
Service Pack 2 (STILL not out) addresses weaknesses in M$'s OS and browser design that everyone in the business has known about for years. M$ engineers should be walking around in Groucho Marx disguises. Their bosses should spend the rest of their lives in depositions, talking to lawyers. This post may be flamebait, but if we lose our collective capacity for outrage, we've been 0\/\/n3d for sure.
I've seen several broadband over powerline presentations, and the question of "what happens if the power goes out" was answered pretty definitively (and convincingly, IMHO) that BoPL is engineered and designed to work whether or not the lines are energized. Since BoPL will be used for the power companies own surveillance and control of the distribution system (including detection of faults and other problems) this makes obvious sense. Of course if there's a physical break in the line things might go out for downstream branches of the distribution system, but in that case, the telephone system is probably also knocked out, since telephone lines often reside on the same pole.
There's always trusty wireless cell phones and amateur radio (unless the FCC wipes out the Amateur Service and sells off its spectrum to the highest bidder, that is). Handwritten letters often arrive at their destination in a week or two.
Searching the website, you'll find that the "Executive Director" is a John Guagliardo in Hawaii. There is also a website for a website developer called Guagliardo Technologies at http://www.guagliardo.cc/Directory.html.
Looks like he's leveraging his web development skills.
The argument here is not over the "legal system", it's over a small part of it: the so-called 'American Rule' (which was one of the first departures from English law of the American legal system) that each side usually bears its own legal costs, unless a statute or court rule says otherwise. That is a departure from the English rule that the loser pays legal fees for both sides.
The 'American Rule' has persisted primarily because it works as advertised: small plaintiffs with good cases are not deterred from filing them by big defendants with deep pockets that run up the legal bills and threaten to ruin the plaintiff.
SCO is decidedly NOT the first company to use intellectual property law as an aggressive weapon of mass destruction. Businesses have been doing that practically forever. One of the major US patent battles of the 19th century was over the telephone, of the 20th century over (very) early aircraft design, and the 21st century...well it's not over yet, but I bet it's over something like hyperspeed warp drive, a 'dark matter' energy cycle or a process for making cheap synthetic diamond. IOW, we're concerned about this case, but this isn't the patent battle of the century.
It's a natural instinct to blame the rules when you're unhappy with the game, but players twist the rules and cheat regardless of what the rules are.
Why not let this play out before you start yelling that the system needs to be changed?
>Sure, you can still get those brands today, if >you want to pay collector prices. The toy >stores, at least here, abound with lousy >chinese produced stuff, that breaks when you >look too hard at it.
I suggest that it is very dangerous to be complacent about "lousy chinese produced stuff". The Chinese and (South Asian) Indians are following pretty much exactly the script of the Japanese in the post World War II years: they are feverishly improving and reinvesting in their technical and manufacturing base with the goal of becoming a (or THE) world class economic and technology leader in 25 years.
In the 1950s, "Made in Japan" labels were attached to junky mechanical toys with hilariously bad instructions and packaging. In the 1960s, the Japanese electronics manufacturers started wiping out the market for small, innovative consumer electronics. Today, Japanese manufacturers are outsourcing to China.
Chinese factories produce some junky stuff, but also some excellent stuff, and the average quality gets better every year.
Don't be too smug about "junky" Chinese quality. Our grandfathers were responsible for building most of what you see around you today; if we squander our economic and technological inheritance, our grandchildren could very well end up as offshore employees for companies producing things outsourced from China.
"Step away from the cruise missile, sir! Now, do you have any nuclear explosives in your pockets? I could get a search warrant, so you might as well tell me now. (Charlie, run a make on this guy...he's got a moustache and looks kinda Iraqi.)"
Actually, the free-market system depends on the AVAILABILITY of information.
Buying, selling and investing decisions can't be rationally made in a socialist economy because all decisions are subject to the whim or politics of the current government. Thus scarcity, environmental effects, consumer preferences, quality and other information are largely unavailable to consumers and end users at every level, there is no mechanism to encourage increases in efficiency or productivity. Free market societies have tons of information sources public and private.
In addition, there is no skilled management of anything, because doing a good job just gets you into political trouble, or your production quota gets jacked up.
The result: bad shoes, cheap suits, obsolete tractor factories and smoking slag pits everywhere.
I think you've hit the nail exactly on the head about the cluelessness of M$(except for the predictable and saddening attack on Barbie, who would be 7'4" tall if she were a real girl, how cool is that??)
I agree with you that M$ doesn't get it, but disagree that they can't position themselves as "cool". They can buy it. Cool is a technique and a concept that has become commoditized and is now controlled almost entirely by mass marketers and the advertising industry. It took them a long time to figure out how to stick it in a cage and let it out on a leash, but they have.
It seems unarguable that there have always been _people_ that were more socially adept, mobile and trend-setting, cooler, than average, but in societies in which 90% of the population was tied to agriculture with no mass media, this couldn't have been much of an advantage.
"Cool" in connection with PRODUCTS, seemingly started in the musical world and grew to become an underground "us against the establishment" concept that went mass market in the roaring '20s. It was interrupted by World War II (I guess survival seemed more interesting then), and revived itself in the late '40s with Frank Sinatra, scat, jazz, bebop, and then the so-called counterculture.
The consumer goods merchants, except for the music industry, largely ignored "coolness" until that point, figuring correctly that they didn't get it and couldn't control it. There was something of a sea change after that, however. With mass market and mass culture accelerating to swallow up nearly all traditional cultures, the incentive was huge to do so.
Let's be honest with ourselves: "coolness" is now primarily a marketing tool, there's no more underground anywhere. Anything that looks remotely like a nascent counterculture movement is now set upon by the marketers, bought, cut up and hauled away for use in selling sneakers, pizza, cell phones or software.
Any product or service can now position itself, with the help of marketers, as "cool". M$ need only fork over about a billion dollars/euros/yen (it hardly matters) and the funny ads will be filmed, the rock stars will be bought, the viral marketing teams will fan out, the product will be positioned, the T-shirts and mouse pads will be printed and passed out, the journalists will be bribed and the 'opinion leaders' and 'early adopters' will be drafted. Resistance is useless.
Sounds swell! Send me US$4827.99 so I can dedicate a laptop and a T1 line to your new site! I'll also need US$712 per month for the line and US$38.00 per day for corn chips, brownies and diet soda. Also CDN$55.50 for a case of Molson's Ale per week.
Something I've been thinking about for some time...
It's hard to believe that the NASA managers ALL were indifferent to or ignorant of the potential damage to the shuttle. If you're an engineer, you can run through the numbers in your head in about 5 seconds flat: mass x velocity x surface area= pressure per square inch.
If you know anything about the shuttle, you know that the tiles are fragile and subject to fracture on impact (in fact a major worry always has been what happens if the Shuttle hit a piece of space junk.)
And if you know anything about the shuttle project, you also know that the crew had limited ability to fix a lot of things that might go wrong after the shuttle lifts off the pad.
So what if you're a manager with the big view and the big leather chair and an engineer or several come to you with concerns about the impact on the wing?
And you do the math in your head and remember that there are no spare tiles on board and basically if the wing has been holed, the crew cannot be saved?
Choice 1: Raise the alarm, go through an agonizing several weeks of total public panic/crisis until the shuttle runs out of food, fuel and/or life support and watch the crew die in front of the world? or,
Choice 2: Put a lid on it and let the shuttle go through its mission, hoping that a miracle might happen and the damage is not serious enough to cause breakup on reentry?
So the question is, what do you do? ___________ In other words, what NASA management knew it had only two choices and chose #2? and if they did, was that the wrong choice?
Slashdot Mirror
It's the usual crap: 'Patents are evil', 'money is evil', 'no, moron, the LOVE of money is the ROOT of all evil', 'bring back socialism now!', 'corporations are evil', 'anyone who has a different lifestyle or set of beliefs than the average slashdotter is evil!', et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseum. One of these posts is basically correct: At some point, when you have more ready cash than you need to sustain a comfortable way of life for 500 years, and your life is basically creating and growing a company that supports tens of thousands of other people and which provides services upon which millions of people have come to depend, the concept of a paycheck becomes ridiculous. There are dumb millionaires and rich millionaires, but the Google guys are not dumb, and are basically smarter and more self aware than most of the posters to Slashdot. Give them credit for at least that.
I know that it's cheap fun to take out one's frustrations in life on scapegoats (the richer and therefore presumably more evil the better), but quite frankly, assuming you have the ability, making the effort will eventually pay off for you more than bitching about the other guy, right?
If you really feel a need to throw brickbats, there are PLENTY of nasty little tinpot dictators with torture chambers and legions of evil secret policement to obsess over.
And if you really want to help humanity, get the fuck off the computer and go start a company that cures cancer or alcoholism or offers cheap life insurance. Do something useful, anyway!
________________________
>>we hiked six miles through the trees and snow and mud to our mailbox, and we were grateful!
>You forgot: "uphill both ways"
>anyone but MS. They support and back-port things
>for free quite regularly. Say what you will
>about their other business practices or
>security, but they are far and away the best in
>the industry (of major OSes at least) at
>updating things for free.
...which illustrates two things (to me, anyway)...
1. Microsoft is still a raging monopoly. Only a monopoly can afford to maintain and support a huge legacy code base for so many years. Remember the old telephone company that could track, fix and replace any of 'its' telephones, no matter how old? How much do you think those phones cost? How much do you think you paid for them in annual rental charges? Only a monopoly that can lock out competition can afford to do something like that.
2. "Innovation" is something that M$ pays lip service to because it has to. The dirty little truth is that neither M$, nor its large customers really want any innovation that is in any way costly or disruptive of existing processes and IT investment. Just like the telephone company, M$ will milk its product as long as it can with minimum investment. It is the early adopters, propeller heads and visionaries that love innovation, because they don't mind reformatting their drives and learning a new scripting language every weekend. Actually M$ has to be somewhat schizophrenic about innovation: they need to assure their customer base that they won't do anything wild and crazy with the existing platforms AND they have to make some kind of public display of embracing innovation, so they can claim that their competitors are threatening M$'s will to innovate. Thus, most changes are either cosmetic ("Clippy") or are of the 'forced migration' type anti-competitive kind ("Sure we said we'd maintain the code, but this won't hurt a bit, is really, really much better and you have to have it, and incidentally, forget about interoperability with anything from our upstart competition")
But I repeat myself....
Yeah, dammit, you're a unique individual, just like the rest of us and we won't let you forget it!
There's some truth to the saying "You think that you own things, but actually they end up owning you". Anyone with a cluttered garage, attic and garage will understand this.
"Well..." (lacing fingers ponderously together in preparation for saying something ESPECIALLY profound)
"Ever notice how when John Kerry grins, he resembles a rabid raccoon in heat?"
-30-
(Full disclosure: The NY Times editorial board, Dan Rather and the CBS 60 minutes production staff had no input into this public service message)
The obvious rationale of not posting telecom outage is to deny helpful feedback to those trying to hack the US telecom system from afar. Duh.
___________________
"Isn't it scary that I thought the bit about terrorism was a joke? But no, I RTFA and sure enough, they really are putting this down to terrorism. Will future generations laugh at how easily the masses were seduced by this strawman? This is like the German Jews all over again..."
_________________
This comment is an all-too-common trivialization of more than a decade of human tragedy.
Last week was the 63rd anniversary of the agony of city where nearly 40,000 Jews, mainly the elderly, women and children, were machine gunned in groups of ten by Einsatzgruppe C over two days, September 29th and 30th, 1941. Over that summer, more than 100,000 people, Jews, Ukrainians, Gypsies and resistance fighters were shot and their bodies thrown into a ravine. Two years later, the retreating Nazis frantically tried to dig up and burn the bodies to destroy the evidence.
You can still see the spot, it's about six subway stops from downtown Kiev and its name is Babi Yar. There were many thousands of similar massacres known and obscure during that period, big and small. Tens of millions of real people died, many of whom would be living today had it not been for the insane ambitions of the Nazis and the Communists.
This article gave me the (non-virtual) creeps. It's obvious that the world is getting more complex -- possibly more complex than a large segment of the population can handle.
A good part of the experience of touring is the conceit of believing that you are experiencing this view or this campsite or this stream in a unique way, that no one else has seen it the way you are seeing it. Moreover, the second conceit is that you are observing nature (or Nature, for those that like to objectify) unfiltered by human intervention.
All of this is nonsense, of course, there are few patches of uncultivated wilderness left on the planet.
However knowing that your view of a mountainside has been facilitated by a complex simulation for the purpose of allocating grazing funds so that cows eat the little trees that might have blocked your view...well, someone open a window, it's getting stuffy out there.
In all fairness, I have now installed SP2 on three boxes so far and the installations have gone without a hitch. Only one box had problems (user related, but easily fixed) and all three machines are now running noticeably better and faster than before the service patch. We'll see how well the patched boxes resist the bad stuff with experience, but the technical description of the changes seems to close most of the documented and obvious attacks. As far as my memory serves, this is the first major patch or service pack that has resulted in noticeable real world performance improvement.
Suggestion for patchers: Do a full virus and spyware scan, a disk check, and defrag and clean out your temp and garbage files before patching. If you're a real adrenaline junkie, update a mission critical box without a backup! It's thrilling!
"Consider this for a moment. Jane Boxwine buys a brand-new computer in 1999. It's a Pentium II 400 with 128MB RAM, 8MB HD, and Windows 98. She spends $2000 on it...So now you're telling her that she has to spend $100 on a Windows XP upgrade *and* install an OS that will be very noticeably slower on her machine? You're telling her that Microsoft made mistakes and now Jane has to pay for it?
So what's the solution for Jane Boxwine?"
________________________
Probably a honking big class action lawsuit against Microsoft for delivering an inherently defective product that cannot perform its intended function. Or maybe a collective reenaction of the mob scene in Frankenstein, only this time in Redmond.
Forget about the hapless IT guys -- at least they get paid to screw around with this stuff. What about the poor clueless home user. What about the promise of easy, useful home computing? What about the $1200 bucks he just dropped at Circuit City so that Jimmy would be able to use it and get into college? What happened to the damn "user experience"?
Service Pack 2 (STILL not out) addresses weaknesses in M$'s OS and browser design that everyone in the business has known about for years. M$ engineers should be walking around in Groucho Marx disguises. Their bosses should spend the rest of their lives in depositions, talking to lawyers. This post may be flamebait, but if we lose our collective capacity for outrage, we've been 0\/\/n3d for sure.
I've seen several broadband over powerline presentations, and the question of "what happens if the power goes out" was answered pretty definitively (and convincingly, IMHO) that BoPL is engineered and designed to work whether or not the lines are energized. Since BoPL will be used for the power companies own surveillance and control of the distribution system (including detection of faults and other problems) this makes obvious sense. Of course if there's a physical break in the line things might go out for downstream branches of the distribution system, but in that case, the telephone system is probably also knocked out, since telephone lines often reside on the same pole.
There's always trusty wireless cell phones and amateur radio (unless the FCC wipes out the Amateur Service and sells off its spectrum to the highest bidder, that is). Handwritten letters often arrive at their destination in a week or two.
Hey, I'm a pathetic Tradewars 2000 addict (text based MMTG, www.eisonline.com). Wotthehell do I care about those fools??
Eat hot photons, sucka!! (hits 'A' key)
Searching the website, you'll find that the "Executive Director" is a John Guagliardo in Hawaii. There is also a website for a website developer called Guagliardo Technologies at http://www.guagliardo.cc/Directory.html.
Looks like he's leveraging his web development skills.
The argument here is not over the "legal system", it's over a small part of it: the so-called 'American Rule' (which was one of the first departures from English law of the American legal system) that each side usually bears its own legal costs, unless a statute or court rule says otherwise. That is a departure from the English rule that the loser pays legal fees for both sides.
The 'American Rule' has persisted primarily because it works as advertised: small plaintiffs with good cases are not deterred from filing them by big defendants with deep pockets that run up the legal bills and threaten to ruin the plaintiff.
SCO is decidedly NOT the first company to use intellectual property law as an aggressive weapon of mass destruction. Businesses have been doing that practically forever. One of the major US patent battles of the 19th century was over the telephone, of the 20th century over (very) early aircraft design, and the 21st century...well it's not over yet, but I bet it's over something like hyperspeed warp drive, a 'dark matter' energy cycle or a process for making cheap synthetic diamond. IOW, we're concerned about this case, but this isn't the patent battle of the century.
It's a natural instinct to blame the rules when you're unhappy with the game, but players twist the rules and cheat regardless of what the rules are.
Why not let this play out before you start yelling that the system needs to be changed?
>Sure, you can still get those brands today, if
>you want to pay collector prices. The toy
>stores, at least here, abound with lousy
>chinese produced stuff, that breaks when you
>look too hard at it.
I suggest that it is very dangerous to be complacent about "lousy chinese produced stuff". The Chinese and (South Asian) Indians are following pretty much exactly the script of the Japanese in the post World War II years: they are feverishly improving and reinvesting in their technical and manufacturing base with the goal of becoming a (or THE) world class economic and technology leader in 25 years.
In the 1950s, "Made in Japan" labels were attached to junky mechanical toys with hilariously bad instructions and packaging. In the 1960s, the Japanese electronics manufacturers started wiping out the market for small, innovative consumer electronics. Today, Japanese manufacturers are outsourcing to China.
Chinese factories produce some junky stuff, but also some excellent stuff, and the average quality gets better every year.
Don't be too smug about "junky" Chinese quality. Our grandfathers were responsible for building most of what you see around you today; if we squander our economic and technological inheritance, our grandchildren could very well end up as offshore employees for companies producing things outsourced from China.
"Step away from the cruise missile, sir! Now, do you have any nuclear explosives in your pockets? I could get a search warrant, so you might as well tell me now. (Charlie, run a make on this guy...he's got a moustache and looks kinda Iraqi.)"
Actually, the free-market system depends on the AVAILABILITY of information.
Buying, selling and investing decisions can't be rationally made in a socialist economy because all decisions are subject to the whim or politics of the current government. Thus scarcity, environmental effects, consumer preferences, quality and other information are largely unavailable to consumers and end users at every level, there is no mechanism to encourage increases in efficiency or productivity. Free market societies have tons of information sources public and private.
In addition, there is no skilled management of anything, because doing a good job just gets you into political trouble, or your production quota gets jacked up.
The result: bad shoes, cheap suits, obsolete tractor factories and smoking slag pits everywhere.
But at least the vodka is cheap.
Anyone know if 'Man In the High Castle' is going to be made?
IMHO, this was among the best of PKD's novels, or at least the one I think about most frequently (possibly not the same thing).
Aaugh! Some one set us up the bomb!
>
>When will SCO sue themselves?
>
__________________________
How would they collect on the judgment? You can't get blood out of a stone.
I'd advise them to settle with themselves right away for an admission of guilt and a public apology.
There's no evidence that Barbie causes any loss of self-esteem, and self-esteem is overrated anyway.
Kids don't care that Barbie looks funny. As my kids say patiently to me: "Dad. It's a toy."
I think you've hit the nail exactly on the head about the cluelessness of M$(except for the predictable and saddening attack on Barbie, who would be 7'4" tall if she were a real girl, how cool is that??)
I agree with you that M$ doesn't get it, but disagree that they can't position themselves as "cool". They can buy it. Cool is a technique and a concept that has become commoditized and is now controlled almost entirely by mass marketers and the advertising industry. It took them a long time to figure out how to stick it in a cage and let it out on a leash, but they have.
It seems unarguable that there have always been _people_ that were more socially adept, mobile and trend-setting, cooler, than average, but in societies in which 90% of the population was tied to agriculture with no mass media, this couldn't have been much of an advantage.
"Cool" in connection with PRODUCTS, seemingly started in the musical world and grew to become an underground "us against the establishment" concept that went mass market in the roaring '20s. It was interrupted by World War II (I guess survival seemed more interesting then), and revived itself in the late '40s with Frank Sinatra, scat, jazz, bebop, and then the so-called counterculture.
The consumer goods merchants, except for the music industry, largely ignored "coolness" until that point, figuring correctly that they didn't get it and couldn't control it. There was something of a sea change after that, however. With mass market and mass culture accelerating to swallow up nearly all traditional cultures, the incentive was huge to do so.
Let's be honest with ourselves: "coolness" is now primarily a marketing tool, there's no more underground anywhere. Anything that looks remotely like a nascent counterculture movement is now set upon by the marketers, bought, cut up and hauled away for use in selling sneakers, pizza, cell phones or software.
Any product or service can now position itself, with the help of marketers, as "cool". M$ need only fork over about a billion dollars/euros/yen (it hardly matters) and the funny ads will be filmed, the rock stars will be bought, the viral marketing teams will fan out, the product will be positioned, the T-shirts and mouse pads will be printed and passed out, the journalists will be bribed and the 'opinion leaders' and 'early adopters' will be drafted. Resistance is useless.
My translation is:
"All your base are belong to us...You have no chance to survive, make your time."
Where do I collect my $100?
Sounds swell! Send me US$4827.99 so I can dedicate a laptop and a T1 line to your new site! I'll also need US$712 per month for the line and US$38.00 per day for corn chips, brownies and diet soda. Also CDN$55.50 for a case of Molson's Ale per week.
I'll even hostname it after you!
Something I've been thinking about for some time...
It's hard to believe that the NASA managers ALL were indifferent to or ignorant of the potential damage to the shuttle. If you're an engineer, you can run through the numbers in your head in about 5 seconds flat: mass x velocity x surface area= pressure per square inch.
If you know anything about the shuttle, you know that the tiles are fragile and subject to fracture on impact (in fact a major worry always has been what happens if the Shuttle hit a piece of space junk.)
And if you know anything about the shuttle project, you also know that the crew had limited ability to fix a lot of things that might go wrong after the shuttle lifts off the pad.
So what if you're a manager with the big view and the big leather chair and an engineer or several come to you with concerns about the impact on the wing?
And you do the math in your head and remember that there are no spare tiles on board and basically if the wing has been holed, the crew cannot be saved?
Choice 1: Raise the alarm, go through an agonizing several weeks of total public panic/crisis until the shuttle runs out of food, fuel and/or life support and watch the crew die in front of the world? or,
Choice 2: Put a lid on it and let the shuttle go through its mission, hoping that a miracle might happen and the damage is not serious enough to cause breakup on reentry?
So the question is, what do you do?
___________
In other words, what NASA management knew it had only two choices and chose #2? and if they did, was that the wrong choice?