"It is pomposity on a papal or imperial scale for Katz to arrogate to himself the authority to declare which cultures are legitimate (i.e. 'all of them')."
One line later, you say:
"A death-obsessed culture is ethically illegitimate."
If it is pompous and arrogant for Katz to make value judgements about different cultures, what gives you the right to do exactly the same thing?
You seem to assume that the particular selection of rights granted in the amendments to the U.S. constitution are some kind of holy writ, in spite of the fact that they are subject to change, have only existed for a few generations, and don't apply to something like 95% of the world population.
Why *not* make Internet access a right, if it turns out to be something essential for participation in civic life? Postal service and literacy are enforced as "rights" via government subsidy in every industrial nation I can think of; universal health care and telephone service are also common. If Internet access became as essential to civic life as mail and reading, *not* making it a right would be absurd.
While the idea that parents should have a strong influence on their children is popular, it is neither possible nor always desirable.
Last I heard, current psychological thought held that children "naturally" get most of their outlook on life from their peers. No matter how involved a parent gets and how carefully they try to pass on whatever moral principles they think are important, most of it just won't take.
Besides, I think it's a good thing that much of a parent's influence fails to stick to their kids. I've seen some *really* weird parents running around trying to teach their kids some awfully strange and self-destructive ideas. I'm very glad kids have the ability to filter out their parents' garbage and figure out the world for themselves.
I saw an earlier incarnation of this device at Macworld Expo in either Jan 98 or Jan 97. The version I saw did not have the head-tracking gadget; it was just the LCD panel.
The booth personnel were sales flacks, not able to explain how it worked in technical terms. I got the impression that it was a similar principle to those plastic 3-d images like the "Lost World" movie poster. They superimposed two 640x480 LCD screens somehow and used a plastic lens to divert images to the appropriate eye. (Maybe it had something to do with polarisation?) The effect seemed to work fine as long as you looked at it dead on, but it got disorienting if you moved out of the sweet spot.
I seem to recall this technology first being developed in a movie-theatre-sized application by some Japanese researchers five or six years ago. Wish I could remember the specifics.
Hackers write code because they enjoy doing so. Other factors: holes in the market, pecuniary rewards, respect-based gift culture - serve to channel the basic impulse to hack, but they do not create it.
The author's proposal for COSS is well considered from an economic point of view, but from a hacker's point of view, it's just another minor tweak on the way things already work. It doesn't give us anything more than we can already get. And the loss of freedom may imply that we lose a lot over truly free/open/whatever software.
Once you've got all the money you could ever possibly want, what do you do for an encore?
Kill off your competition, that's what.
It doesn't matter whether Eudora poses a threat to Microsoft's bottom line or not. Eudora poses a threat to Microsoft's "mindshare", and that's bad enough.
I have no idea whether MS is behind this or not; this is mere speculation based on somebody else's rumour.
Slashdot Mirror
On one line you say:
"It is pomposity on a papal or imperial scale for Katz to arrogate to himself the authority to declare which cultures are legitimate (i.e. 'all of them')."
One line later, you say:
"A death-obsessed culture is ethically illegitimate."
If it is pompous and arrogant for Katz to make value judgements about different cultures, what gives you the right to do exactly the same thing?
You seem to assume that the particular selection of rights granted in the amendments to the U.S. constitution are some kind of holy writ, in spite of the fact that they are subject to change, have only existed for a few generations, and don't apply to something like 95% of the world population.
Why *not* make Internet access a right, if it turns out to be something essential for participation in civic life? Postal service and literacy are enforced as "rights" via government subsidy in every industrial nation I can think of; universal health care and telephone service are also common. If Internet access became as essential to civic life as mail and reading, *not* making it a right would be absurd.
-Mars
While the idea that parents should have a strong influence on their children is popular, it is neither possible nor always desirable.
Last I heard, current psychological thought held that children "naturally" get most of their outlook on life from their peers. No matter how involved a parent gets and how carefully they try to pass on whatever moral principles they think are important, most of it just won't take.
Besides, I think it's a good thing that much of a parent's influence fails to stick to their kids. I've seen some *really* weird parents running around trying to teach their kids some awfully strange and self-destructive ideas. I'm very glad kids have the ability to filter out their parents' garbage and figure out the world for themselves.
-Mars
I saw an earlier incarnation of this device at Macworld Expo in either Jan 98 or Jan 97. The version I saw did not have the head-tracking gadget; it was just the LCD panel.
The booth personnel were sales flacks, not able to explain how it worked in technical terms. I got the impression that it was a similar principle to those plastic 3-d images like the "Lost World" movie poster. They superimposed two 640x480 LCD screens somehow and used a plastic lens to divert images to the appropriate eye. (Maybe it had something to do with polarisation?) The effect seemed to work fine as long as you looked at it dead on, but it got disorienting if you moved out of the sweet spot.
I seem to recall this technology first being developed in a movie-theatre-sized application by some Japanese researchers five or six years ago. Wish I could remember the specifics.
-Mars
Hackers write code because they enjoy doing so. Other factors: holes in the market, pecuniary rewards, respect-based gift culture - serve to channel the basic impulse to hack, but they do not create it.
The author's proposal for COSS is well considered from an economic point of view, but from a hacker's point of view, it's just another minor tweak on the way things already work. It doesn't give us anything more than we can already get. And the loss of freedom may imply that we lose a lot over truly free/open/whatever software.
-Mars
Once you've got all the money you could ever possibly want, what do you do for an encore?
Kill off your competition, that's what.
It doesn't matter whether Eudora poses a threat to Microsoft's bottom line or not. Eudora poses a threat to Microsoft's "mindshare", and that's bad enough.
I have no idea whether MS is behind this or not; this is mere speculation based on somebody else's rumour.
-Mars