I think this all started with Neutron Jack Welch. The thing about good ole Jack is that his purpose, basically was to eliminate American manufacturing jobs and turn his company into something else that didn't do manufacturing. In fact, he turned it, General Electric, into yet another useless financial company, while the jobs that generated the real national wealth shifted overseas. In the future, I think he'll be seen for what he was, a parasite who reduced America to third world status and made billions doing it.
The thing is, if you are essentially just cutting your losses and planning on eliminating business divisions completely, you have no reason to care about the years of experience walking out the door. He's considered a success because he "made money," but he didn't make G. E. competitive with the Japanese. Here's a quote from an article, "I came into a company that had at least an extra 100,000, maybe 150,000 extra people. It was the early '80s. We were making television sets in Syracuse, N.Y., and the Japanese were selling them at the mall cheaper than we were making them." Jack Welch: 'I Fell In Love' So, essentially, he made money from failure.
Well, we've had years of this as the U. S. transformed into a nation of middlemen, shady accountants, lawyers, and "would you like fries with that" type jobs. The U. S. is basically the B-Ark from Life, the Universe, and Everything, with all the thinkers and doers being in the Eastern part of the world now. Good for them, not so good for us.
Hmm... there's a mistake in the radar.oreilly article. It was pretty jarring to read it, it concerns Divx. The author has confused Divx Discs with Self-Destruct DVDs that rot when exposed to air. I mean they are both bad technologies, and arguably are intended to acheive the same goal, but they are still different.
Divx was a complicated technology that was designed to lock out Divx discs from playing in certain circumstances. For instance, you "buy" a Divx DVD for the cheapest price available, and then you are locked out of watching it again until you "buy" it again. Or you get the "Gold Divx" subscription (not available for all Divx Discs), and you can theoretically watch the disk an unlimited number of times... on the particular Divx player you had the Gold subscription for that particular Divx disk on.
As Penny Arcade thoughtfully pointed out, Divx disks were hewn cold from the bones of the stillborn. They were thought up by Satan, Disney, some entertainment industry lawyers, and Circuit City where service is state of the art. (Rot in Hell, Circuit City!)
The concept behind Divx hasn't gone away, but nowadays it's more likely to be applied to video games. This is because just as Divx was supposed to eliminate the very concept of first sale and used DVDs, you now hear video game companies whining about the used video game market. (They'll get a wakeup call soon though, their industry isn't as recession proof as they thought and the used video game market will soon be the least of their worries.)
It's not linguistic snobbery. For example, in the case of hacking versus cracking, the fact that hacking now equals malevolent programming means that people who want to refer to the old definition of hacking have to come up with yet another word, or qualifier to refer to it.
The other problem is that it makes other documents that refer to hacking in the archaic context seem confusing to the modern reader. Example, someone reads "RMS was a Unix Hacker," goes to a pointy-haired boss meeting and says, "Look, another reason why we shouldn't use Linux is that it encourages criminal behaviour, I just read an old story that said that one of the main programmers of Linux was a hacker!"
This is more of a problem with Open Source because the meaning creep is relatively recent. It would be very confusing for a company to tout a product as "Open Source," if what they mean is that it includes the ability for user created content.
No, the Comics Code Authority sucked. The reason why it sucked is not just because it censored adult content.
Put it this way, do you consider Mickey Mouse and Scooby Doo adult content? No? But they have ghosts, witches, werewolves, zombies and vampires in them. Uh-oh, they broke the comics code.
The comics code went completely overboard, specifically to put E. C. out of business. The code wasn't about censoring adult content (comics had been limited in what they could legally show before the code, although E. C. always pushed the limits of 50's censorship, they were censored even before the code) but about eliminating whole genres of comics. All you had left were superheroes and funny animals when they were done, and Archie's I guess (I've always thought Archie's were a bit weird).
Of course, by the time you were reading comics, the code had already been revised a bit. I've no doubt that although the damage had already been done, you were reading comics after they decided that it was OK to include ghosts and vampires again, unless you are very old. (Hey, E. C. had been reduced to one comic book, which they had to change to a magazine format, Mad Magazine. They had effectively been forced out of the comic market, so changing the code to allow Frankensteins was meaningless at that point.)
The thing to remember about the code is that they wanted to put comics completely out of business, and they more or less suceeded. Sure, the broken, ghettoized American comic model still manages to put out the occaisional good comic nowadays. Heck, some people might even read them that aren't already comic book fans. Maybe. (not bloody likely) Of course, it's mostly love in the wards even today, and they are getting creamed by manga.
How does a society that historically repressed individuality (aka "thinking for yourself") overcome these traditions and start to innovate (aka "thinking of NEW things")?
Yes, much like those repressed, authoritarian Germans, I don't think we'll ever have to worry about innovation coming from such societies.
At first, I thought prohibition was a good thing. People were drinking
more and having a lot more fun. Without beer, prohibition doesn't
work!
-- The Simpsons, "Homer vs. the Eighteenth Amendment"
You know, it occurs to me that we could replace much of/. with an electronic brain. A simple one should suffice.
It could just spit out random psuedo-Randian Republican-ish claptrap whenever an article about hard economic times comes out. Think of the time it would save.
Hmm, this would be an interesting Eliza variant, actually.... maybe it's worth doing.
They would not sell it if there were certain driver/automobile combinations that simply did not work (i.e. if the car just plain won't start if the an "incompatible" owner tries to drive it).
Actually, they do have something like this for cars:
"Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space." -- Douglas Adams
I'll include some explanation. We've been dealing with science fantasy (I'll define that here as fiction that uses scientific sounding explanations of things for purposes of adding credibility to fantasy stories but which isn't exploring actual science) for years. The best of it points out somehow that it has some cheat (like the spice Melange or the Heart of Gold) that changes the rules of interstellar travel.
Because currently, without finding a way to cheat, those rules are ironclad and depressing, and basically mean that the nearest star is out of reach as far as we know, let alone zipping around the entire universe at will. How would you even navigate in something that vast let alone actually travel it?
It makes the question of extra terrestrial intelligence a question along the lines of a Medieval Churchman speculating on the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin. A sort of interesting philisophical discussion but not much more than that.
For the record, I believe with metaphysical certainty that both extra terrestrial life and extra-terrestrial intelligence exist. I also believe with the same certainty that I'll never have any proof of that either way.
Fermi's paradox which boils down to "Where are they?" is living in fantasy-land. You want to know where they are? I'll tell you, "You can't get there from here."
I learned everything I know about the American War of Independence from a Bugs Bunny cartoon, "But Your Majesty, those are carpet tacks." "Well, they're tea tacks now harharhar"
Well, remember though, in the Chuck Alternate Universe, Atari is still a going concern which was up until recently run by a Japanese military satellite scientist and "has more PhDs than Microsoft."
When I see things like this, my brain just says, "Don't worry about it, here's some music. Yvonne will be back on soon. Oh, see, there she is in a skirt."
Besides, every so often they do something fun like, "Do we have any Rush CDs?" "No need my friend, I have them all on my Zune." "Really? You have a Zune." "Naah, just kidding, I'll get my iPod."
That makes it all worth it... not to mention doing an entire episode about Missile Command, sketchy history and current events aside....
Hey, I still like Tron... even though it hurts my brain to pretend any part of it is plausible it's worth it to watch David Warner chew scenery... end of line.
Hmm, incidentally, that guy who replied to you and pointed out you referenced Death Note is a racist. Death Note is one of the best stories ever produced, certainly up there with most American Literature (and I'm talking about the good stuff, not the middle-brow dross that we're supposed to think is good.).
I was really amazed at how well it showed the practical implications of absolute power in the real world.
Of course, Americans are racist against Japanese, that's why they justify dropping Fat Man and Little Boy on them, and justify rounding them up and putting them in concentration camps and all the rest of it. All the other stuff they say ("It saved Japanese lives," yeah, right) is just handwaving to hide this fact.
The Japanese needn't feel particularly bad though, all non-Americans are Untermenshen to Americans after all, just ask Mexican, Serbians, Vietnamese, Koreans.... The Nazis used a lot of American racial laws as their models, after all.
Blah-blah-blah. US seized the opportunity to create worldwide dependency on its currency while all major countries/regions' economies were in ruins. US milked all advantages of that up to this moment (and now it has credit crisis because it got accustomed to issuing debt/currency like crazy).
Slashdot Mirror
I think this all started with Neutron Jack Welch. The thing about good ole Jack is that his purpose, basically was to eliminate American manufacturing jobs and turn his company into something else that didn't do manufacturing. In fact, he turned it, General Electric, into yet another useless financial company, while the jobs that generated the real national wealth shifted overseas. In the future, I think he'll be seen for what he was, a parasite who reduced America to third world status and made billions doing it.
The thing is, if you are essentially just cutting your losses and planning on eliminating business divisions completely, you have no reason to care about the years of experience walking out the door. He's considered a success because he "made money," but he didn't make G. E. competitive with the Japanese. Here's a quote from an article, "I came into a company that had at least an extra 100,000, maybe 150,000 extra people. It was the early '80s. We were making television sets in Syracuse, N.Y., and the Japanese were selling them at the mall cheaper than we were making them." Jack Welch: 'I Fell In Love' So, essentially, he made money from failure.
Well, we've had years of this as the U. S. transformed into a nation of middlemen, shady accountants, lawyers, and "would you like fries with that" type jobs. The U. S. is basically the B-Ark from Life, the Universe, and Everything, with all the thinkers and doers being in the Eastern part of the world now. Good for them, not so good for us.
Hmm, is that like a 90 degree angle? Or some other kind of angle...
(You aren't very bright, are you?)
Yes, the truly enlightened know it was a veiled reference to R'Lyeh.
Plato was just protecting his audience from the inevitable madness that seethes from that name!
Hmmm, all Gamecube games are fully Wii compatible, with rare exceptions. It's hard to find them in games shops though, for any price.
Perhaps not, but I'm 39....
Hmm... there's a mistake in the radar.oreilly article. It was pretty jarring to read it, it concerns Divx. The author has confused Divx Discs with Self-Destruct DVDs that rot when exposed to air. I mean they are both bad technologies, and arguably are intended to acheive the same goal, but they are still different.
Divx was a complicated technology that was designed to lock out Divx discs from playing in certain circumstances. For instance, you "buy" a Divx DVD for the cheapest price available, and then you are locked out of watching it again until you "buy" it again. Or you get the "Gold Divx" subscription (not available for all Divx Discs), and you can theoretically watch the disk an unlimited number of times... on the particular Divx player you had the Gold subscription for that particular Divx disk on.
As Penny Arcade thoughtfully pointed out, Divx disks were hewn cold from the bones of the stillborn. They were thought up by Satan, Disney, some entertainment industry lawyers, and Circuit City where service is state of the art. (Rot in Hell, Circuit City!)
The concept behind Divx hasn't gone away, but nowadays it's more likely to be applied to video games. This is because just as Divx was supposed to eliminate the very concept of first sale and used DVDs, you now hear video game companies whining about the used video game market. (They'll get a wakeup call soon though, their industry isn't as recession proof as they thought and the used video game market will soon be the least of their worries.)
Hmm... it got modded off topic but it is clearly not off topic.... incidentally, that from 1997...
[The phone clicks. Frank puts the phone down. The gadget bleeps. Roedecker holds it
out for Frank to see. The readout notes, "Anonymous Caller."]
ROEDECKER: Well, obviously whoever called has blocked caller ID. The phone
company does it for a price.
[Frank snatches back the check out of Roedecker's hands.]
ROEDECKER: Whoa, whoa! All you need now is a device to undo their caller block.
[Roedecker hastily grabs a package from a nearby chair and takes off the lid. It's
another gadget, the LMU-83.]
ROEDECKER: The LMU 83 will override their override very nicely. It's a little more
James Bondian but we are living in a more Blofeldian world.
Welcome to 21st Century America... get ready for a bumpy ride!
It's not linguistic snobbery. For example, in the case of hacking versus cracking, the fact that hacking now equals malevolent programming means that people who want to refer to the old definition of hacking have to come up with yet another word, or qualifier to refer to it.
The other problem is that it makes other documents that refer to hacking in the archaic context seem confusing to the modern reader. Example, someone reads "RMS was a Unix Hacker," goes to a pointy-haired boss meeting and says, "Look, another reason why we shouldn't use Linux is that it encourages criminal behaviour, I just read an old story that said that one of the main programmers of Linux was a hacker!"
This is more of a problem with Open Source because the meaning creep is relatively recent. It would be very confusing for a company to tout a product as "Open Source," if what they mean is that it includes the ability for user created content.
Hmm, it sounds like someone doesn't believe in the Monroe Doctrine.
Pumpkin Segregation Forever!
No, the Comics Code Authority sucked. The reason why it sucked is not just because it censored adult content.
Put it this way, do you consider Mickey Mouse and Scooby Doo adult content? No? But they have ghosts, witches, werewolves, zombies and vampires in them. Uh-oh, they broke the comics code.
The comics code went completely overboard, specifically to put E. C. out of business. The code wasn't about censoring adult content (comics had been limited in what they could legally show before the code, although E. C. always pushed the limits of 50's censorship, they were censored even before the code) but about eliminating whole genres of comics. All you had left were superheroes and funny animals when they were done, and Archie's I guess (I've always thought Archie's were a bit weird).
Of course, by the time you were reading comics, the code had already been revised a bit. I've no doubt that although the damage had already been done, you were reading comics after they decided that it was OK to include ghosts and vampires again, unless you are very old. (Hey, E. C. had been reduced to one comic book, which they had to change to a magazine format, Mad Magazine. They had effectively been forced out of the comic market, so changing the code to allow Frankensteins was meaningless at that point.)
The thing to remember about the code is that they wanted to put comics completely out of business, and they more or less suceeded. Sure, the broken, ghettoized American comic model still manages to put out the occaisional good comic nowadays. Heck, some people might even read them that aren't already comic book fans. Maybe. (not bloody likely) Of course, it's mostly love in the wards even today, and they are getting creamed by manga.
Yes, but after we've stolen the innovations, and we send them back to Chinese factories to build our stolen Chinese designs, won't there be a problem?
Yes, much like those repressed, authoritarian Germans, I don't think we'll ever have to worry about innovation coming from such societies.
Don't forget the big race on the salt flats....
People still think we are going to have a Wii2, Playstation4, and Xbox720 in our post apocalyptic nightmare landscape? (Hey, I admire the optimism!)
Well, maybe Tenpenny will, since he always has the best of everything.
You know, it occurs to me that we could replace much of /. with an electronic brain. A simple one should suffice.
It could just spit out random psuedo-Randian Republican-ish claptrap whenever an article about hard economic times comes out. Think of the time it would save.
Hmm, this would be an interesting Eliza variant, actually.... maybe it's worth doing.
Actually, they do have something like this for cars:
Police in Malaysia are hunting for members of a violent gang who chopped off a car owner's finger to get round the vehicle's hi-tech security system.
"Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space." -- Douglas Adams
I'll include some explanation. We've been dealing with science fantasy (I'll define that here as fiction that uses scientific sounding explanations of things for purposes of adding credibility to fantasy stories but which isn't exploring actual science) for years. The best of it points out somehow that it has some cheat (like the spice Melange or the Heart of Gold) that changes the rules of interstellar travel.
Because currently, without finding a way to cheat, those rules are ironclad and depressing, and basically mean that the nearest star is out of reach as far as we know, let alone zipping around the entire universe at will. How would you even navigate in something that vast let alone actually travel it?
It makes the question of extra terrestrial intelligence a question along the lines of a Medieval Churchman speculating on the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin. A sort of interesting philisophical discussion but not much more than that.
For the record, I believe with metaphysical certainty that both extra terrestrial life and extra-terrestrial intelligence exist. I also believe with the same certainty that I'll never have any proof of that either way.
Fermi's paradox which boils down to "Where are they?" is living in fantasy-land. You want to know where they are? I'll tell you, "You can't get there from here."
Penny Arcades Windows (not the OS) cartoon
Well, what do I know?
I learned everything I know about the American War of Independence from a Bugs Bunny cartoon, "But Your Majesty, those are carpet tacks." "Well, they're tea tacks now harharhar"
Well, remember though, in the Chuck Alternate Universe, Atari is still a going concern which was up until recently run by a Japanese military satellite scientist and "has more PhDs than Microsoft."
When I see things like this, my brain just says, "Don't worry about it, here's some music. Yvonne will be back on soon. Oh, see, there she is in a skirt."
Besides, every so often they do something fun like, "Do we have any Rush CDs?" "No need my friend, I have them all on my Zune." "Really? You have a Zune." "Naah, just kidding, I'll get my iPod."
That makes it all worth it... not to mention doing an entire episode about Missile Command, sketchy history and current events aside....
Hey, I still like Tron... even though it hurts my brain to pretend any part of it is plausible it's worth it to watch David Warner chew scenery... end of line.
Hmm, incidentally, that guy who replied to you and pointed out you referenced Death Note is a racist. Death Note is one of the best stories ever produced, certainly up there with most American Literature (and I'm talking about the good stuff, not the middle-brow dross that we're supposed to think is good.).
I was really amazed at how well it showed the practical implications of absolute power in the real world.
Of course, Americans are racist against Japanese, that's why they justify dropping Fat Man and Little Boy on them, and justify rounding them up and putting them in concentration camps and all the rest of it. All the other stuff they say ("It saved Japanese lives," yeah, right) is just handwaving to hide this fact.
The Japanese needn't feel particularly bad though, all non-Americans are Untermenshen to Americans after all, just ask Mexican, Serbians, Vietnamese, Koreans.... The Nazis used a lot of American racial laws as their models, after all.
De Gaulle v. the Dollar, perhaps De Gaulle was on to something?