Before MS came along, computers were unaffordable. Now we all reap the benefits of a computer in every home.
Thanks to Apple, who made the first affordable home computer, and Compaq, who reverse-engineered the IBM PC. If OS/2 had won the desktop war instead of Windows, computers would still be cheap. If neither had won, and each had 50% market share, computers would still be cheap. Microsoft deserves exactly no credit for this.
MS have consistently brought down prices - they cut prices in the spreadsheet market;
Kindly name 3 spreadsheet programs that cost more than Excel. Can't do it? Didn't think so.
they are producing software that is cheaper than what was their before.
I could flame your spelling of "there", but it seems like a very fitting malipropism this time.:)
And they're still doing it. MS Sql Server, which is at least on a par with Oracle,
Bzzt. People pay more for Oracle because it out-preforms MS SQL.
is much cheaper than it, and thus benefits consumers that way.
PostgreSQL is free, runs of free operating systems, and works great.
Believe it or not, Microsoft actually do produce good software. Certainly Windows 3.1 wasn't very stable, but in 1992 what competition was there?
There was the Apple Macintosh, which was a better GUI, more stable, far easier to learn, and even ran MS Office better than Windows 3.1 did at the time.
Certainly not Linux. And even given that, if you ask me if I want my secretary on the current state of the art Linux, or on Windows 3.1 and Word 2, I'll bet you a dollar to a hundred that she'll be more effective on Windows 3.1
I'll take that bet.
Microsoft have benefitted the US economy. It really has. Compared with the UK, for instance, the strength of the US IT industry is vast - and much of this strength is due to Microsoft.
Microsoft software is also used in the UK, so that statement is just silly. Or are you trying to imply that the economy would be weaker if we were buying most of our software from other US companies? That's even sillier.
Nearly all opposition to MS comes from jealous competitors. Netscape have been beaten fair-and-square by MS, for instance - just compare Netscape 6 with MSIE, for instance. But IE 5.5 beating Netscape 6 is not what happened. At the time when Netscape's business model was scuttled by MS's illegal practives, IE sucked! Had Netscape remained a strong company with lots of resources to command, the browser they would have developed by now may have been outstanding... but we will never know, thanks to MS and their illegal abuse of monopoly power.
This just backs up my point - Microsoft software is of exceptional quality.
Anybody who says that clearly has no experience working with exceptional software. It's like the old saying goes, "I used to think I never had a bad day, until one day I had a good one."
They hire the best programmers because they can afford to,
No, they hire green, mallable kids right out of college, and mold them into the One Microsoft Way.
and they release top software. Word beats anything else on the market, and as a usable OS,
Word is not an OS. It also is not the best word processor available. It's widely used because it's been bundled with "Business PC's" for a decade now, and people who don't know any better think that.doc is a standard.
so does Windows (and on stability, Windows 2000 ranks pretty highly to). Combine this with easy administration - the idiot in my office is in charge of DNS administration, which he can easily do using MS DNS manager, because it's just point, right click/properties. He'd have no chance with Bind. So, you are saying that Windows is the ideal server environment if you want your network to be run by idiots. That's pretty tough to argue with, I guess.:)
The fact is, for a small business with not many staff, Microsoft software allows them to compete with the big guys - they can offer ISP provision, because they don't need highly paid admins. This is great news for the economy and great news for them.
Small businesses would be much better off using free software and spending a couple hundred bucks on O'Reilly books. Not only would it be cheaper, but then they would be using a variation of UNIX, just like the big guys do!
The fact is, as I have stated, there is a lot of jealousy and resentment out there - whereas the truth is that Microsoft produce damn fine software, and their very low prices (believe me - just check the price of a spreadsheet 20 years ago), mean that although they have a monopoly, that has come through selling good software at low prices and therefore high volume. Damaging Microsoft would damage the consumer. What do you want people to use? Star Office?
Now you are just repeating yourself, because you ran out of arguments.
Well, of course the government had no idea what they're doing. That should come as a shock to nobody.
As long as I am getting on your case a little, I don't remember any members of the media or the press "uncritically" singing the praises of Windows98. Microsoft ads and press releases were everywhere, but the only media reaction that I remember seeing at the time was the infamous scene in the South Park movie, where Bill Gates is shot for trying to speak in defense of it and everybody cheers.
Even ZD-Net, as close to a MS mouthpiece as you will ever find, was advising Windows95 users to skip the upgrade unless they had a specific program or piece of hardware that needed it.
Once again, you are making broad overgeneralizations and bending facts to make your argument seem more persuasive than it really is. Please stop it.
There are a lot more costs involved in running an ISP or other tech service than just the service itself.
Administrative, marketing, legal, and other general office costs make much less of a price impact when serving 150,000 customers than it does for 1500 customers.
Does "economy of scale" matter as much for the service industry as it does for manufacturing? No. Does it matter? Yes. No question about it.
"You can hardly overstate the success of the PlayStation home game machines"
Then he shows us all how easy it is:
"...represents one of the most successful engineering, programming and marketing triumphs in business history."
One strong Chritmas season is hardly a marketing "triumph"... that's just barely enough to put it in the same class as the Cabbage Patch dolls (which were hot-ticket gift items for two years in a row).
It's a game console. It's just a game console; not even really that good of one. By this time next year, nobody on Earth will care about the PS2 anymore.
From the article: So if an ad bothers you, offends you, confuses you, entices you, anything about that ad, you can speak and be heard. Let's face it, many ad banners suck because nobody tells the ad agency that the creative needs improvement.
Sorry, but I don't think you can afford my consulting fee.
The ad agency will have to figure it out themselves. That's what they get paid for.
That said, a diet of refried beans and cheddar cheese in a tortilla wrap is not the best way to eat healthy. Better than McDonald's, yes, but that's not really saying much. If you really want to be healthy, introduce yourself to your neighborhood grocery store... and try to do a light workout a few times a week.
Congratulations on your weight loss, but if you are not getting proper nourishment (as opposed to filling your stomach with slightly less fatty junk food), your long-term chances of keeping the weight off is not so hot.
"Researchers at the Duke University Medical Center have successfully grown fat cells into cartilage"
Did anybody else read this as if it implied that the researchers at Duke ate a few too many burritos from Taco Bell?
Cartilage doesn't repair at all, and there aren't any good replacements for it
Actually, that's not true. Everybody who gambles in "fantasy football" leagues know that you can replace cartilage with... (drum roll)... cartilage. Several NFL wide receivers have had knee cartilage replacement (using cartilage from donor corpses), and have gone right back to sprinting past cornerbacks. So the best option to date has been cartilage from people who checked that "donor" box in their driver's licenses and then failed to wear a seatbelt.
Growing cartilage from fat cells is good news. It will probably make replacement parts cheaper and easier to get, so you won't need to be a millionaire athlete in order to afford getting your knee fixed.
I totally respect that restaurants
and other public places want to accomodate their non-smoking customers, but they can't ignore their smoking customers.
Actually, they can. They are a private restaurant, and have the right to ignore the desires of whoever they please.
I support a restaurant's right to allow smoking throughout, with no non-smoking sections. (I wouldn't eat there, but I would support their right.)
Likewise, I support the right of any restaurant to say "your cigarettes smell like shit to us. Smoke elsewhere." You probably would rather not eat there, but you should not be allowed to tell them they can't do it.
we should enact legislation that would require restaurants to physically seperate smoking sections from non-smoking sections. That should make everyone happy. Passing laws that force restaurants to build expensive partitions and fancy ventilation systems is a terrible idea. You are effectivly forcing a new cost on entrepreneurs who want to build restaurants, not to mention the fact that you would be introducing a new cost that could drive some existing restaurants out of business.
How about this for a policy? Let all bars and restaurants allow or disallow smoking any way they want. If you don't like it, you can go elsewhere... or even open your own restaurant, and do with it whatever you like. That really would make everybody happy... except for the control freaks of the world that want to force everybody else to live by their rules... but then again, there's no pleasing those people, is there?
You get used to the snow and the cold once you live here a few years.
The most difficult thing that people from out of state find about the Minnesota winter is the driving. Controlling a car on iced-over roads is enough of a challenge. At that to the fact that we are a state full of people who don't know how the hell to merge properly, and it becomes a real mess.
Sooner or later, you learn that your time from November to March is best divided between winter sports, staying indoors with the gf, and drinking.
Springtime in Minnesota is a magical thing. The moment the temperature gets up to 60F, the women start wearing all the revealing clothing that's been in the back of their closets all winter. The air becomes thick with a cathartic explosion of desires and emotions that have been building steam, under pressure, for several months. Close your eyes for a moment and you can't help but sense the Amore that surrounds you. Even the rocks and plants seem to be horny as hell. It's almost a kind of mass hysteria. It's the sort of thing that can really only be achieved by shutting everybody inside from the snow all winter long.
Seriously, live in Minnesota all the way through April, and you'll discover why some people actually like it around here.
If you can smoke where non-smokers wont' be affected, more power to you, but keep your smoke
out of the airspace of non-smokers who expect to be able to breath clear air.
Ah, but there is the problem with the no-smoking laws. If a group of smokers wants to build their own restaurant, call it "The Smoking Room", and have it as a place specifically for smokers to go and have cigarettes with their lunch... they are prohibited by law from doing so in the state of California, because the law requires that ALL bars and restaurants must accomodate non-smokers by banning all smoking.
I am not a smoker, and I prefer to eat in restaurants which do not have smoking sections, but I'll be damned if I'm ever going to vote for a law that forces businesses to ban smoking.
The restaurants that really want my business ban smoking already. If a restaurant decides that allowing smoking draws more customers than it drives away, then more power to them, I wish them all the best. The anti-smoking zealots can kiss my non-smoking ass if they think that I will ever be on their side on this issue.
Of course, what you're calling for is not speciation, but something else which will not happen on human timescales, so you may as well go away unsatisfied.
My point was that this might not be true. If severe environmental factors can cause rapid evolution of new species, it might be something that biologists can someday replicate in the lab, using creatures with fast breeding cycles. (Or, for that matter, we might have a global thermonuclear conflict and get to observe it happening in nature. India vs. Pakistan is the best bet to start something like that within this Century... at least that's where my money would be if somebody was running a pool on it.)
Right, so now the one piece of the puzzle that still remains is how that speciation happens.
We know for a fact that evolution within a species goes on all the time. We have observed that a group of orange butterflies can produce a sub-group of yellow butterflies, or that natural selection can eventually make bugs develop resistance to certain pesticides... but we have not seen butterflies producing someting like a dragonfly. They might evolve into different-looking butterflies, but that's as far as anything has gone in the short time we've been watching.
Until the phenomenon of speciation is observed, either in the lab or in the wild, the case for the Descent of Man is a difficult one to make with the kind of certainty that this scientist is insisting he has established.
Nice to hear from somebody capable of discussing this rationally, instead of trolling for creationist flames.
You are absolutely right that this is really only "evidence" of man's evolution to those who were already convinced of the theory's soundness. Critics of Darwinism have already dismissed much more compelling evidence than this, so I seriously doubt that this discovery will persuade them.
On the other hand, genetic similarities which do not correlate with traits like appearance do lend much more credibility to the theory that man shares common ancestors with other primates.
(It does not neccessarilly follow, from this evidence alone, that it happened slowly over a prolonged time. There is growing popularity around the theory that many of evolution's most radical mutations happened in quick bursts, with long periods of little or no change in between, rather than the steady march of slow and subtle changes.)
All that means is that they are charging you full price for both operating systems.:)
Re:Don't read this book - Write some code.
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I'm not saying that a programmer should never stop and reflect on things, I'm saying that it is very easy to spend so much time in reflection and contemplation, that you never get around to writing very much.
Re:Open Source will change our civilisation.
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There is not a single communist state in existence right now.
And, let's face it, there probably never will be.
In order to preserve a stable communist state, protecting it from both external threats and from all those uncooprative stubborn people who would rather be rich capitalists, you need to establish a military.
In order to establish a military, you need to either create incentive for people to become soldires (by offering wealth or special treatment), or else force people to become soldiers (by drafting them).
Either way, once you take the steps neccessary to establish your military, you no longer have a communist state, because (to lift from Orwell) "some people are more equal than others".
This is why communism has only been successfully demonstrated on Gilligan's Island reruns, and not in the real world.
Re:Don't read this book - Write some code.
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I think his point was that the people who Really Should know about Open Source will not read the book. Self-congratulating evangilists of the Open Source movement, like Mr. Katz, will read it, but if few others do then it is just a case of preaching to the choir, which goes on waaayy too much in the Linux world.
I'm not sure I agree with him on that point, though. Lots of people are very curious about exactly what all the Free Software stuff is about, and may grab this book off the shelf of their bookstore.
He is, however, on to something when he says that it is kind of silly for busy hackers, who were around to see all these events happen, to waste any time reading this book. If we all spent a little less time reading about the "history" of Open Source, and a little more time creating our own, Mozilla could get past the 0.x versions a little more quickly.
The part of Jon's review that caught my attention was this:
The author has a point: Open Source did turn out to be a revolution whose impact and implications went beyond the wildest dreams of its idealistic, obsessive creators and are ballooning beyond the software community and the Net.
Rebel code helped end the Microsoft era, is challenging the proprietary notions of commerce, intellectual property and censorship that have dominated business and information for a long time.
First of all, isn't it way too early to judge what the impact of the Open Source movement "was"?
Also, this is the second time in which Jon has written a review speaks of Microsoft as if died away recently, and as if we were all aware of this "fact". Is his FUD supposed to be a humorous effort to hoist Microsoft on their own pitard? Or did he perhaps ignore Nietzsche's warning about what happens when you fight with monsters?
The intent is not the problem. I will grant that it is most likely that this kid wanted to do a serious study.
The problem is the message that it sends to a minority, seeing this display through the eyes of the average 8-year-old child. The large banner over the display asked "Does Skin Color Matter", and it appears that the conclusion is "in terms of acceptance from your peers, yes. yes it does. don't even bother trying to fit in, because you can't."
I will say this one more time: even if the display seems perfectly valid through the lens we are currently looking at it, if it is something that school can loose a lawsuit over, the principal is right to yank it. It's not a violation of free speech, it's a decision not to provide a forum.
The kid can stand on a street corner shouting the "N" word at the top of her lungs, for all I care, but the school has the power (and the liability) over what gets displayed at an event which they sponsor.
"What everybody is missing here is that schools have a legal responsibility to create an atmosphere in which minorities feel welcome. Failure to do so can result in lawsuits. Sometimes meeting this obligations requires the regulation of expression in a school-sponsored forum."
Herbert Marcuse was wrong when he wrote this 30 years ago and you're wrong now. Fuck off and die.
Oh, so it's NOT a FACT that schools can get their asses sued off for this sort of thing?
And all these racial-descrimination lawsuits that schools have lost millions of dollars over are just my imagination?
Whew! That will come as quite a relief to guys like this Principal, who can now relax and let kids display whatever they want at the science fair without any fear of legal liabillity whatsoever!
Congress does not have the authority to pass unconstitutional laws.
The only way for something which contradicts what is already written into the Constitution to become part of the "law of the land" is by passing a Constitutional Amendment.
A good example is Clinton's recent paron of Rich. A lot of members of Congress (from both parties) would very much like to cancel that pardon, but the Constitution makes if very clear that Congress has no such power, and the members of Congress acknowledge that an Amendment to the Constitution would be required to abridge the President's power to pardon.
Therefore, the Bill of Rights takes prevedence over any treaty the Congress ratifies.
The core components of a gui (desktop, file manager, text editor and web browser) are all best represented in 2d (which includes the use of pseudo-3d for eye candy)
I think her point was that these components were designed to be represented best in 2D because that's all we had when they were designed. Also, we have been using 2D displays for most of human history, going back to the Babylonian clay tablets.
It's sort of like the way we like to count things in base 10, and break up keyboards into three rows, because we have 10 fingers. If we had 32 fingers, we would do things very differently.
Likewise, if we had the ability to use a 3rd axis on all system, we would probably thnk of new (and possibly better) ways to organize our thoughts.
In defense of your argument, we are only capable of looking at object from one direction at a time. (Well, two directions that are 4 inches apart, if you want to be pedantic about it), which means that we can really only clearly see two dimensions at once. To perceive a third dimension accurately, we need to either change our viewing anlge, or rotate what we are looking at.
Still, some things might be nice to have in three dimesnions. We won't really know what the best practical applications are until it has been around long enough for somebody to invent a new concept that relies on it.
What everybody is missing here is that schools have a legal responsibility to create an atmosphere in which minorities feel welcome. Failure to do so can result in lawsuits. Sometimes meeting this obligations requires the regulation of expression in a school-sponsored forum.
In this case, the principal saw something that looked like it could have created and unwelcoming environment, and had to make a judgement call.
If the study had been "a demonstration of the rapid oxidation of gasoline, cotton, and wood", and consisted of a burning cross, the judgement call would have been an easy one.
In this case, the line was a little more blurry. It's not helping the debate that we are only seeing one side of the debate here. We don't know what the display looked like, or what the reaction was like during the one hour that it was on display. For all we know, 8-year-old black girls were running out of the room crying, emotionally hurt by the display.
Without more actual facts (as opposed to the raving of one angry columnist), I am inclined to give the school the benifit of the doubt.
- The dresses chosen were very flattering to the white skin tone, and clashed badly with the black skin tone. - The girl chose the prettiest white doll available, and a really ugly black doll, which the adults tried to politely see beyond, but the children noticed. - Most the adults she talked to were modern progressive types, and most of the kids she talked to were rednecks who grew up being told to stay away from black people.
Regardless, this doesn't speak to the issue of appropriateness. Personally, if I were a teacher, I'd use this as a golden opportunity to discuss prejudice and the importance of treating people as individuals.
That's a very good sentiment. Such a discussion would almost certainly include a discussion of why this study was probably inappropriate for public display in the school's science fair.
If the girl had the fortitude to see her project nit-picked in class, a discussion of the flaws in this study would also be a good lesson for the science class.
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Thanks to Apple, who made the first affordable home computer, and Compaq, who reverse-engineered the IBM PC. If OS/2 had won the desktop war instead of Windows, computers would still be cheap. If neither had won, and each had 50% market share, computers would still be cheap. Microsoft deserves exactly no credit for this.
MS have consistently brought down prices - they cut prices in the spreadsheet market;
Kindly name 3 spreadsheet programs that cost more than Excel. Can't do it? Didn't think so.
they are producing software that is cheaper than what was their before.
I could flame your spelling of "there", but it seems like a very fitting malipropism this time. :)
And they're still doing it. MS Sql Server, which is at least on a par with Oracle,
Bzzt. People pay more for Oracle because it out-preforms MS SQL.
is much cheaper than it, and thus benefits consumers that way.
PostgreSQL is free, runs of free operating systems, and works great.
Believe it or not, Microsoft actually do produce good software. Certainly Windows 3.1 wasn't very stable, but in 1992 what competition was there?
There was the Apple Macintosh, which was a better GUI, more stable, far easier to learn, and even ran MS Office better than Windows 3.1 did at the time.
Certainly not Linux. And even given that, if you ask me if I want my secretary on the current state of the art Linux, or on Windows 3.1 and Word 2, I'll bet you a dollar to a hundred that she'll be more effective on Windows 3.1
I'll take that bet.
Microsoft have benefitted the US economy. It really has. Compared with the UK, for instance, the strength of the US IT industry is vast - and much of this strength is due to Microsoft.
Microsoft software is also used in the UK, so that statement is just silly. Or are you trying to imply that the economy would be weaker if we were buying most of our software from other US companies? That's even sillier.
Nearly all opposition to MS comes from jealous competitors. Netscape have been beaten fair-and-square by MS, for instance - just compare Netscape 6 with MSIE, for instance. But IE 5.5 beating Netscape 6 is not what happened. At the time when Netscape's business model was scuttled by MS's illegal practives, IE sucked! Had Netscape remained a strong company with lots of resources to command, the browser they would have developed by now may have been outstanding... but we will never know, thanks to MS and their illegal abuse of monopoly power.
This just backs up my point - Microsoft software is of exceptional quality.
Anybody who says that clearly has no experience working with exceptional software. It's like the old saying goes, "I used to think I never had a bad day, until one day I had a good one."
They hire the best programmers because they can afford to,
No, they hire green, mallable kids right out of college, and mold them into the One Microsoft Way.
and they release top software. Word beats anything else on the market, and as a usable OS,
Word is not an OS. It also is not the best word processor available. It's widely used because it's been bundled with "Business PC's" for a decade now, and people who don't know any better think that .doc is a standard.
so does Windows (and on stability, Windows 2000 ranks pretty highly to). Combine this with easy administration - the idiot in my office is in charge of DNS administration, which he can easily do using MS DNS manager, because it's just point, right click/properties. He'd have no chance with Bind. So, you are saying that Windows is the ideal server environment if you want your network to be run by idiots. That's pretty tough to argue with, I guess. :)
The fact is, for a small business with not many staff, Microsoft software allows them to compete with the big guys - they can offer ISP provision, because they don't need highly paid admins. This is great news for the economy and great news for them.
Small businesses would be much better off using free software and spending a couple hundred bucks on O'Reilly books. Not only would it be cheaper, but then they would be using a variation of UNIX, just like the big guys do!
The fact is, as I have stated, there is a lot of jealousy and resentment out there - whereas the truth is that Microsoft produce damn fine software, and their very low prices (believe me - just check the price of a spreadsheet 20 years ago), mean that although they have a monopoly, that has come through selling good software at low prices and therefore high volume. Damaging Microsoft would damage the consumer. What do you want people to use? Star Office?
Now you are just repeating yourself, because you ran out of arguments.
As long as I am getting on your case a little, I don't remember any members of the media or the press "uncritically" singing the praises of Windows98. Microsoft ads and press releases were everywhere, but the only media reaction that I remember seeing at the time was the infamous scene in the South Park movie, where Bill Gates is shot for trying to speak in defense of it and everybody cheers.
Even ZD-Net, as close to a MS mouthpiece as you will ever find, was advising Windows95 users to skip the upgrade unless they had a specific program or piece of hardware that needed it.
Once again, you are making broad overgeneralizations and bending facts to make your argument seem more persuasive than it really is. Please stop it.
Administrative, marketing, legal, and other general office costs make much less of a price impact when serving 150,000 customers than it does for 1500 customers.
Does "economy of scale" matter as much for the service industry as it does for manufacturing? No.
Does it matter? Yes. No question about it.
"You can hardly overstate the success of the PlayStation home game machines"
Then he shows us all how easy it is:
"...represents one of the most successful engineering, programming and marketing triumphs in business history."
One strong Chritmas season is hardly a marketing "triumph"... that's just barely enough to put it in the same class as the Cabbage Patch dolls (which were hot-ticket gift items for two years in a row).
It's a game console. It's just a game console; not even really that good of one. By this time next year, nobody on Earth will care about the PS2 anymore.
Sorry, but I don't think you can afford my consulting fee.
The ad agency will have to figure it out themselves. That's what they get paid for.
That said, a diet of refried beans and cheddar cheese in a tortilla wrap is not the best way to eat healthy. Better than McDonald's, yes, but that's not really saying much. If you really want to be healthy, introduce yourself to your neighborhood grocery store... and try to do a light workout a few times a week.
Congratulations on your weight loss, but if you are not getting proper nourishment (as opposed to filling your stomach with slightly less fatty junk food), your long-term chances of keeping the weight off is not so hot.
Did anybody else read this as if it implied that the researchers at Duke ate a few too many burritos from Taco Bell?
Cartilage doesn't repair at all, and there aren't any good replacements for it
Actually, that's not true. Everybody who gambles in "fantasy football" leagues know that you can replace cartilage with... (drum roll)... cartilage. Several NFL wide receivers have had knee cartilage replacement (using cartilage from donor corpses), and have gone right back to sprinting past cornerbacks. So the best option to date has been cartilage from people who checked that "donor" box in their driver's licenses and then failed to wear a seatbelt.
Growing cartilage from fat cells is good news. It will probably make replacement parts cheaper and easier to get, so you won't need to be a millionaire athlete in order to afford getting your knee fixed.
Actually, they can. They are a private restaurant, and have the right to ignore the desires of whoever they please.
I support a restaurant's right to allow smoking throughout, with no non-smoking sections. (I wouldn't eat there, but I would support their right.)
Likewise, I support the right of any restaurant to say "your cigarettes smell like shit to us. Smoke elsewhere." You probably would rather not eat there, but you should not be allowed to tell them they can't do it.
we should enact legislation that would require restaurants to physically seperate smoking sections from non-smoking sections. That should make everyone happy. Passing laws that force restaurants to build expensive partitions and fancy ventilation systems is a terrible idea. You are effectivly forcing a new cost on entrepreneurs who want to build restaurants, not to mention the fact that you would be introducing a new cost that could drive some existing restaurants out of business.
How about this for a policy? Let all bars and restaurants allow or disallow smoking any way they want. If you don't like it, you can go elsewhere... or even open your own restaurant, and do with it whatever you like. That really would make everybody happy... except for the control freaks of the world that want to force everybody else to live by their rules... but then again, there's no pleasing those people, is there?
The most difficult thing that people from out of state find about the Minnesota winter is the driving. Controlling a car on iced-over roads is enough of a challenge. At that to the fact that we are a state full of people who don't know how the hell to merge properly, and it becomes a real mess.
Sooner or later, you learn that your time from November to March is best divided between winter sports, staying indoors with the gf, and drinking.
Springtime in Minnesota is a magical thing. The moment the temperature gets up to 60F, the women start wearing all the revealing clothing that's been in the back of their closets all winter. The air becomes thick with a cathartic explosion of desires and emotions that have been building steam, under pressure, for several months. Close your eyes for a moment and you can't help but sense the Amore that surrounds you. Even the rocks and plants seem to be horny as hell. It's almost a kind of mass hysteria. It's the sort of thing that can really only be achieved by shutting everybody inside from the snow all winter long.
Seriously, live in Minnesota all the way through April, and you'll discover why some people actually like it around here.
Ah, but there is the problem with the no-smoking laws. If a group of smokers wants to build their own restaurant, call it "The Smoking Room", and have it as a place specifically for smokers to go and have cigarettes with their lunch... they are prohibited by law from doing so in the state of California, because the law requires that ALL bars and restaurants must accomodate non-smokers by banning all smoking.
I am not a smoker, and I prefer to eat in restaurants which do not have smoking sections, but I'll be damned if I'm ever going to vote for a law that forces businesses to ban smoking.
The restaurants that really want my business ban smoking already. If a restaurant decides that allowing smoking draws more customers than it drives away, then more power to them, I wish them all the best. The anti-smoking zealots can kiss my non-smoking ass if they think that I will ever be on their side on this issue.
That was me, Golias, posting that. For some reason, my browser lost track of the log-in cookie and my post went through as anonymous. Weird.
My point was that this might not be true. If severe environmental factors can cause rapid evolution of new species, it might be something that biologists can someday replicate in the lab, using creatures with fast breeding cycles. (Or, for that matter, we might have a global thermonuclear conflict and get to observe it happening in nature. India vs. Pakistan is the best bet to start something like that within this Century... at least that's where my money would be if somebody was running a pool on it.)
Try to absorb what you re reading before making knee-jerk reactions.
We know for a fact that evolution within a species goes on all the time. We have observed that a group of orange butterflies can produce a sub-group of yellow butterflies, or that natural selection can eventually make bugs develop resistance to certain pesticides... but we have not seen butterflies producing someting like a dragonfly. They might evolve into different-looking butterflies, but that's as far as anything has gone in the short time we've been watching.
Until the phenomenon of speciation is observed, either in the lab or in the wild, the case for the Descent of Man is a difficult one to make with the kind of certainty that this scientist is insisting he has established.
You are absolutely right that this is really only "evidence" of man's evolution to those who were already convinced of the theory's soundness. Critics of Darwinism have already dismissed much more compelling evidence than this, so I seriously doubt that this discovery will persuade them.
On the other hand, genetic similarities which do not correlate with traits like appearance do lend much more credibility to the theory that man shares common ancestors with other primates.
(It does not neccessarilly follow, from this evidence alone, that it happened slowly over a prolonged time. There is growing popularity around the theory that many of evolution's most radical mutations happened in quick bursts, with long periods of little or no change in between, rather than the steady march of slow and subtle changes.)
All that means is that they are charging you full price for both operating systems. :)
I'm not saying that a programmer should never stop and reflect on things, I'm saying that it is very easy to spend so much time in reflection and contemplation, that you never get around to writing very much.
And, let's face it, there probably never will be.
In order to preserve a stable communist state, protecting it from both external threats and from all those uncooprative stubborn people who would rather be rich capitalists, you need to establish a military.
In order to establish a military, you need to either create incentive for people to become soldires (by offering wealth or special treatment), or else force people to become soldiers (by drafting them).
Either way, once you take the steps neccessary to establish your military, you no longer have a communist state, because (to lift from Orwell) "some people are more equal than others".
This is why communism has only been successfully demonstrated on Gilligan's Island reruns, and not in the real world.
I'm not sure I agree with him on that point, though. Lots of people are very curious about exactly what all the Free Software stuff is about, and may grab this book off the shelf of their bookstore.
He is, however, on to something when he says that it is kind of silly for busy hackers, who were around to see all these events happen, to waste any time reading this book. If we all spent a little less time reading about the "history" of Open Source, and a little more time creating our own, Mozilla could get past the 0.x versions a little more quickly.
The part of Jon's review that caught my attention was this:
The author has a point: Open Source did turn out to be a revolution whose impact and implications went beyond the wildest dreams of its idealistic, obsessive creators and are ballooning beyond the software community and the Net.
Rebel code helped end the Microsoft era, is challenging the proprietary notions of commerce, intellectual property and censorship that have dominated business and information for a long time.
First of all, isn't it way too early to judge what the impact of the Open Source movement "was"?
Also, this is the second time in which Jon has written a review speaks of Microsoft as if died away recently, and as if we were all aware of this "fact". Is his FUD supposed to be a humorous effort to hoist Microsoft on their own pitard? Or did he perhaps ignore Nietzsche's warning about what happens when you fight with monsters?
The problem is the message that it sends to a minority, seeing this display through the eyes of the average 8-year-old child. The large banner over the display asked "Does Skin Color Matter", and it appears that the conclusion is "in terms of acceptance from your peers, yes. yes it does. don't even bother trying to fit in, because you can't."
I will say this one more time: even if the display seems perfectly valid through the lens we are currently looking at it, if it is something that school can loose a lawsuit over, the principal is right to yank it. It's not a violation of free speech, it's a decision not to provide a forum.
The kid can stand on a street corner shouting the "N" word at the top of her lungs, for all I care, but the school has the power (and the liability) over what gets displayed at an event which they sponsor.
Herbert Marcuse was wrong when he wrote this 30 years ago and you're wrong now. Fuck off and die.
Oh, so it's NOT a FACT that schools can get their asses sued off for this sort of thing?
And all these racial-descrimination lawsuits that schools have lost millions of dollars over are just my imagination?
Whew! That will come as quite a relief to guys like this Principal, who can now relax and let kids display whatever they want at the science fair without any fear of legal liabillity whatsoever!
Thank you for your valuable legal advice.
Sorry, but you are incorrect.
Congress does not have the authority to pass unconstitutional laws.
The only way for something which contradicts what is already written into the Constitution to become part of the "law of the land" is by passing a Constitutional Amendment.
A good example is Clinton's recent paron of Rich. A lot of members of Congress (from both parties) would very much like to cancel that pardon, but the Constitution makes if very clear that Congress has no such power, and the members of Congress acknowledge that an Amendment to the Constitution would be required to abridge the President's power to pardon.
Therefore, the Bill of Rights takes prevedence over any treaty the Congress ratifies.
I think her point was that these components were designed to be represented best in 2D because that's all we had when they were designed. Also, we have been using 2D displays for most of human history, going back to the Babylonian clay tablets.
It's sort of like the way we like to count things in base 10, and break up keyboards into three rows, because we have 10 fingers. If we had 32 fingers, we would do things very differently.
Likewise, if we had the ability to use a 3rd axis on all system, we would probably thnk of new (and possibly better) ways to organize our thoughts.
In defense of your argument, we are only capable of looking at object from one direction at a time. (Well, two directions that are 4 inches apart, if you want to be pedantic about it), which means that we can really only clearly see two dimensions at once. To perceive a third dimension accurately, we need to either change our viewing anlge, or rotate what we are looking at.
Still, some things might be nice to have in three dimesnions. We won't really know what the best practical applications are until it has been around long enough for somebody to invent a new concept that relies on it.
In this case, the principal saw something that looked like it could have created and unwelcoming environment, and had to make a judgement call.
If the study had been "a demonstration of the rapid oxidation of gasoline, cotton, and wood", and consisted of a burning cross, the judgement call would have been an easy one.
In this case, the line was a little more blurry. It's not helping the debate that we are only seeing one side of the debate here. We don't know what the display looked like, or what the reaction was like during the one hour that it was on display. For all we know, 8-year-old black girls were running out of the room crying, emotionally hurt by the display.
Without more actual facts (as opposed to the raving of one angry columnist), I am inclined to give the school the benifit of the doubt.
- The dresses chosen were very flattering to the white skin tone, and clashed badly with the black skin tone.
- The girl chose the prettiest white doll available, and a really ugly black doll, which the adults tried to politely see beyond, but the children noticed.
- Most the adults she talked to were modern progressive types, and most of the kids she talked to were rednecks who grew up being told to stay away from black people.
Regardless, this doesn't speak to the issue of appropriateness. Personally, if I were a teacher, I'd use this as a golden opportunity to discuss prejudice and the importance of treating people as individuals.
That's a very good sentiment. Such a discussion would almost certainly include a discussion of why this study was probably inappropriate for public display in the school's science fair.
If the girl had the fortitude to see her project nit-picked in class, a discussion of the flaws in this study would also be a good lesson for the science class.