If soda pop leads to Parkinson's and cirrhosis, then smoking tobacco with your Sprite should ease the Parkinson's threat. Even better - switch from soft drinks to hard drinks - your liver is at risk either way, but now your Parkinson's risk is much lower.
Of course, if it's cancer risk you're concerned with, you might smoke pot instead. Those who smoke only pot have less lung cancer than those who never smoke anything (although not that much less), apparently because THC itself prevents cancer. Will genetic engineering give us a smoke in the future that's high in both THC and nicotine, while minimizing the cancer promoters in tobacco? Or would nicotine's blood-vessel-promoting nature, which helps cancers, overcome THC's protective effect and outweigh nicotine's many positive health effects?
In any case, isn't it nice to know that when people like something, there's a good, healthy reason for it - even if there can be unintended consequences. Our instincts, at root, are good. That's how we've gotten so far.
Okay, I'm not the target of most advertising money... but I am of some. And that money can find me because of Google's keyword-based ad system. It sure doesn't find me on/. or the blogs or news sites I visit regularly. On those sites, any advertising that's obtrusive enough to get in the way of what I'm after gets Adblocked - pretty much in direct proportion to how much time I spend on those sites, and thus how annoying the particular advertising becomes to me. On a Google search though, if it's about some project I'm in the middle of spending money on, I read every single ad, and follow through on a few. Better than a third of the time I find what I want through the advertising there rather than in the primary search results - although half the time I find it through those primary results, and the remainder I still do better browsing in physical stores.
Considering that I skip ads on TV 98 percent of the time, and view magazine advertising as visual candy at best with zero viable information content, it would be safe to say that Google ads are the only advertising reaching me - well, with some allowance for the local newspapers, where the ads can make good bathroom reading... but sell me something maybe twice a year. Google's ads are selling me stuff on a monthly basis. And because they're absent the intelligence-insulting eye candy of most culture-obliterating American advertising, I don't even resent them for it.
To achieve the aim of maximizing the quality of the culture transmitted by copyrighted works, the term of copyright should be shortened, and the rights of citizens to make certain types of copies even within that term should be expanded. Why? Because the larger portion of the crassness in our culture is there in service of commercial interest - commerce whose shape and nature is in part determined by the ecological niche allowed it by our extravagant copyrights and other legal structures which are designed to amplify the profits of our largest corporate players.
The proof of this? Compare the musical offerings of small, independent labels to that of the majors. There is proportionately far less lowest-denominator sexuality, gangsta worship, women-hatred - and there's far more actual aural art as compared to the cheap sonic wallpaper the big labels prefer to sell us. The same differences can be found between the offerings of the small presses and the big publishing houses. And when the small recording labels and presses do release something with sex or violence featured, it's usually of much greater artistic worth, and doesn't trivialize either the sex or the violence the way the big corporations prefer to.
Unfettered capitalism by smaller players is the cure to our cultural failings. But they will not prosper as long as government regulation tilts the field towards the largest corporate interests. Long copyright terms are one brick in the wall preventing the free flourishing of the arts. And it's the lack of better-done art which leaves the public hungry enough to accept the empty calories the large, government-favored firms want to sell. Those empty calories will inevitably be dressed up in sex and violence, because the higher, more mindful forms of expression require levels of art largely incompatible with corporate packaging, and in any case tend to contribute to unwelcome challenges to the dumbed-down public mentality which proves so pliable to our political and corporate masters.
You'd think a Conservative in Britain would realize that this current regime is playing mostly into the hands of New Labor, and that a return to the more conservative form of capitalism, where small players are encouraged to do their entrepreneurial best, and corporations towards the monopolistic end of the spectrum are restrained or even broken up by government, rather than treated as its special partners - which is the very neo-fascism that New Labor has led Britain into.
Scenario: The friend killed her. HR however destroyed evidence. Motive for the friend: his one "wolf mate for life" had left him. Motive for HR: if the friend were to testify in court about his kinky past with HR, HR feared he would surely (1) lose the children, and (2) appear to his son to have been "less than a man."
Another angle: The friend, through the wife, may have started running errands for the Russian mafia. (Yes Virginia, there really is a strong, nasty Russian mob presence in parts of the US today.) The kids now in Russia, HR fears for their lives if he implicates his friend.
Fully agree - but CD quality was never as good a vinyl through the right equipment. Bob Dylan had a lot to say about that a few months back. To his ears there just haven't been any CDs that have achieved what vinyl, with the right engineers handling the mix, used to.
There's a degree to which the psychoacoustic models that schemes like mp3 use actually clean up the noisy mess that all or most all CDs present. The way these schemes hollow out the back of the sound produces something clearer and more delicate - more like live music straight from the amps. Except it really sounds quite different from live music. Good vinyl, on the other hand, can be indistinguishable from live performance if your eyes are closed. CDs never had that. So it's easy to walk away from them. All the discussion of "lossless" misses the point that at the rates CDs are sampled there's already a high degree of loss. Music is inherently analog; digital has to get an order of magnitude better (at least) before it'll be so realistic that it's worth a premium.
Most of the modded-up comments so far are of the "Nothing new here" meme. These demonstrate the problem of even getting traction on a vocabularly to discuss class issues in America. People tune it out, perhaps think its always been as it is now so why even discuss it. But it hasn't always been this way. The last time such a high proportion of American wealth went to the top 1 percent of the population was just before the Great Depression. America used to have much greater social mobility - the likelihood that a kid from a poor background would become rich and socially respected - than anywhere else. Now America has slipped behind most of Western Europe in social mobility - behind even such more-obviously class-based societies as the British and the French, and way behind where America itself was in the mid-20th century.
This stratification shows up across the culture. But it has not always been here to the extent it is today. Economic historians claim that stratified societies - particularly those where children are locked in to the strata of their parents - are in the longer run neither so stable nor so successful as more egalitarian nations. America's own past success vis a vis Europe is cited as a prime example. If that's the case, we might want to take America back to a more egalitarian version. Back when America was more egalitarian there was a more unified cultural aesthetic - splitting more on generational than class fractures (which is to say, on direction of progress but still assuming that progress belonged to all). Now, if the fine article is accurate (I'm too old to know) there is a distinct split in aesthetic and sensibility, as demonstrated in the SNS's - one which favors acceptance of our new degree of social stratification. If we want to avoid developing a large permanent underclass, we should look at reversing that.
The article makes the useful point that social identification is not tightly linked to income. But the income equation is itself troubling for egalitarians: In the past 40 years the GDP per capita has doubled. Yet in that time the median income has stayed level. We're twice as rich, per person, as a nation. But those on the middle and lower parts of the income curve have seen none of the gain. This isn't to say that being median-income in the '60s was a bad life; nor that it's a bad life now. But it raises a very curious question of who has made off with all that gain in national wealth. And there's a corollary: How have our cultural institutions enabled them, wittingly or not?
the FBI is advising these universities on how they can protect themselves from those that would steal important research.
One positive side effect of the trend among university researchers to want to cash in big on their research is that the last thing they're going to do is let anybody "steal" it. A main effect of that is negative: the chilling of sharing on the frontiers of knowledge; but these people are protecting their precious IP even from colleagues who obviously aren't spies. We should feel sorry for the spies in this environment.
To the posters wondering how they can do it, look at l7-filter for iptables. Now, this is what you can do - fairly effectively people are reporting - to filter p2p with a Linux router. (There's also ipp2p for Linux, but that's judged only partially effective.) You can bet that what open source can do, AT&T's Ciscos can do too. Doing that level of inspection is going to add quite a computational load, on the one hand. On the other hand, blocking the p2p stuff will take a huge load off of the pipes.
Is the l7-filter's approach something that p2p software's next generation can get around? Maybe, but it won't be as simple as port hopping. There will always be ways to get a few files though, but the question is whether large-scale p2p operations will remain viable in a context of widespread packet filtering.
Part of how they do well is by not always matching what they know with what they say. The rich guy over there, you might seek his advice because you figure he's smart about getting rich. But here's the rub: Does he give you advice that leads to actions that make you richer, or does he give you advice that leads to actions that make him richer?
In making a public case for AMD divesting its fab business, Goldman Sachs is speaking to two audiences: the stock buying public, and AMD executives. And Goldman is hoping the reactions to this "news" will be actions on the part of one or both of those audiences that help Goldman make money to stuff its Sachs with. This most often means they're playing one or both audiences for suckers. What it surely does not mean is that we'd be smart to listed to their "expertise."
a machine is up for months at a time, then it clearly did not get critical security updates, which often are in the kernel. You should never have uptime that high.
Depends on what the machine's doing, my friend. If you have dozens of people you don't know on shell accounts, sure, you better keep the kernel current - scheduled downtimes to do that are fine, and the inevitable kernel panics because the latest kernel introduces a new bug for your particular hardware configuration - well, the users will understand.
On the other hand, if you have no shell accounts, but just are running one or a few public-facing daemons, if you keep those daemons current, and follow solid security practices in configuring and using them, and lock down your firewall - well, if the kernel's stable, and your business's customers expect you up 24x7, why the heck should you want to be on the front lines testing the latest kernel release? In 14 years of running public-facing systems I've taken both strategies. I've had systems I kept on the bleeding kernel edge - and filed at least one fundamental bug report to the kernel folk about a most inconvenient cause of random kernel panic that took them months for them to eradicate. And I've had systems where I let the kernel get a few years out-of-date - and never had a system owned. Have I been lucky? Sure. But if you've kept running bleeding-edge kernels without downtime, you've been lucky too.
There are times when in order to have an open exchange of ideas, you need to provide an off-the-record environment, which is what we did.
The session announcement:
Conversations and results are public.
So: the off-the-record environment will encourage conversations which will subsequently be made public. WTF? On complete analysis, this looks just as screwy as on first glance. People will say things on the understanding that the whole conversation is scheduled to be transcribed and published publicly, but wouldn't say those things with a reporter in the room? Why? The only difference a reporter might make is if the reporter manages to ask a revealing question from the floor. That would make sense: They didn't want any probing questions that didn't match their agenda.
However, instead of making an honest explanation of this, they made an excuse that either is a lie, or if the truth, shows their conference announcement was fraudulent.
Something like 70% of Americans do demand a change in government. A majority have favored impeachment for some many months now. When the new Congress came in it had broad support, but then failed to either end the war or impeach. Now its popularity rating has dropped below even Bush's.
The problem in America isn't the people. We get it. The problem is the politicians still listen more to television commentators than to the people. And the talking heads mostly don't get it at all; don't see how corruption matters if that corruption just amounts to their friends in business and government going about their business "as usual." Of course, the networks overwhelmingly favor commentators who are of the right or center. The corporations that own them know very well who their friends are. This is too bad, since other parts of corporate America are far to the left, socially, of General Electric, Disney and whoever-the-hell-owns NBC now. We won't mention Fox.
On June 6, she pleaded guilty to one felony count of using another person's identification fraudulently. She was sentenced by Superior Court Judge Harold Kahn to the 44 days she had already served in county jail and three years' probation.
Why not the death penalty? Seriously, what social use is there for anyone who'd commit identity theft? We've filled our jails with potheads - who hurt nobody and subtract nothing from society, indeed include many of our most artistically accomplished people - and yet the penalty for stealing tens of thousands through identity theft, and running the victims through months of hell - is probation? It should be at minimum 20 years in jail.
However, your filing will be rejected by ECFS if it contains macros, passwords, redlining, read-only formatting, a virus or automated links to source documents that is not included with your filing.
"documents that is"? Where did they outsource this to?
And if they don't want macro viruses, why are they accepting Word docs at all?
The passwords and redlining thing is a mystery to me. Is there some way to embed a password in a document so as to bring down the FCC? What could that magic word be?
If parallel universes exist (and mathematically it makes a lot more sense if they do)
It only makes more "sense" in the sense that this is a cheap way of solving the problem of why this particular universe exists, and why we have free will in it.
If there are parallel universes, then there are almost certainly an infinite number of them, one for every possibility
Then for each possibility that I choose among, I choose absolutely every single one of them. And the universe forks at every single choice-point - at least all the considered ones (probably even the unconsidered ones). Okay, positing that, then what the hell is all this effort of choosing about? And why do we hold people responsible for their choices, when at the same time they almost infinitely choose something(s) else? And wtf is the biological advantage of conscious choosing, such that creatures like us would embody it evolutionarily speaking?
The convenience of mathematicians be damned. It hasn't turned out to be an Euclidian universe, even thought that would have been much more convenient to mathematicians. Why should it now turn out to be an infinitely parallel, branching sort of multiverse? Euclid works really well up to a point. But it's false, and the world does not bow to it. Math has moved beyond Euclid. But by how much, on the scale of how far math still has to go? It's in its infancy. The universe has no obligation at this point to be convenient for those who merely grasp today's best mathematical concepts. Not at all.
I'm perfectly willing to carry my passport when boarding airplanes or visiting the White House. What I don't want is to have a driver's license that ends up all RFID'd (and you know they'll ask for that next if they aren't already), so that I can be easily spied on when I'm going about my business on the ground and outside the precincts of the Feds. My driver's license already is cross linked with all sorts of stuff - bank accounts, insurance policies, &c. - that my passport isn't (at least the firms only ask for driver's license # not passport). It works well enough as is for my purposes, and the purposes of those I do business with.
And if you can afford an airline ticket, you can certainly afford a passport - which is a lot better than making even people who never fly pay more for a passport-level driver's license. As a side benefit, holding a passport may even lead more people to get out and explore the wider world, and get beyond the parochial American point-of-view on a few things.
Death to everyone whose theological beliefs don't agree with your own.
What I see is a museum whose exhibits draw heavily on our advanced technologies to make their models and wall posters and so on. People who were limited to use of technologies which are consistent with these idiots' "theological" beliefs could not have built this museum. So why don't we put these "theologists" on reservations and limit their technology level to what's consonant with their beliefs?
By the way, I have no theological beliefs. I have some hypotheses about the psychological and social roles played by essentially fictional gods. And I have some current events-based beliefs that several subsets of god-believers have become so freaking dangerous that they need to be expedited. It's a matter of social evolution that those of us without god-beliefs need to steel ourselves to be more effectively dangerous to them than they are to us. Of course, the preferred means if they'll stay meek like they're supposed to when Christians, is to teach their children to laugh at their superstitious parents, so that we can resolve this by evolution rather than revolution against these dangerous theocrats.
What's the difference between Gateway and HP? They both slap together computers from cheap components. But Gateway's struggling to survive now while HP has pulled ahead of even Dell. So the difference? HP's stuff breaks as often as Gateway's or Dell's, but they're real solid about fixing or replacing it, while with Dell you're likely dealing with someone who nearly speaks English, and with Gateway - well I wouldn't know. Back in the early 90s I used to have my firm buy Gateways, and the warranty replacements were handled okay. Now it looks like you have to take them to court - and their business strategy is to forbid you to take them to court.
I predict they won't be in business for much longer.
The argument may be one of convergence. Would he have too much trouble digging up Microsoft marketing material heralding the convergence of computers and televisions? Interviews with top Microsoft execs about their plans for said convergence? If the two product categories in fact converge, how does trademark law accommodate that? If computers become in fact and function equivalent to televisions, then a trademark in the television realm could reasonable confuse customers if it's similar to a trademark in the computer realm - when the realms significantly overlap.
Oh yeah. And for small keyboards - the thing that's surprised me using a Zaurus clamshell for a few years is that even though I've long be a touch typist, going down to a keyboard so small I'm just using index fingers is much easier than I'd thought. So this keyboard is way larger than the Zaurus, while the whole thing weighs in at about a pound, and if it does come in at $300 it's cheaper. And Linux. When/where can I preorder?
In a few years, this could make all the folks with the big notebooks look old-tech.
The trading regime instituted in Europe has already caused stress to clean efficient plants trying to control their emissions because they face competitors in places like Morocco with no control regime who undersell them.
At present, it takes a typical US factory twice the energy input to produce equivalent goods to a typical German or French factory. Controlling emissions puts a high emphasis on efficient use of energy. It won't be long before the European factory is, say, using only 1/3 the energy of a US factory, or a Moroccan one. In the longer run, energy prices are sure to spike. So while the short-term advantage goes to Morocco - or China or even the US (especially as the dollar continues to drop against the euro), in the long run, when energy surpasses labor as the chief component of the wholesale cost of the finished good, the European factories will both the price leaders, and - in a way the Moroccans and Chinese are sure not to be anytime soon - the quality leaders.
When that happens, the Europeans will also start making significant euros selling their energy-efficient, low-emission tech to the rest of the world - if they want to. But many of those efficient processes will be treated as trade secrets and not shared. We may well be looking not at a new Chinese, let alone American century, but at the latter half of the 21st century being entirely dominated by a new European supremacy.
Right, so I've just taken over your connection to the coffeehouse access point, and your DNS lookup now shows that addons.mozilla.org is at 192.168.1.254. Alternately, I route its real IP (63.245.209.31) to the laptop I've done the takeover with, where I've got a copy of addons.mozilla.org's content - except with evil updates.
I've been carrying around Zaurus clamshells for several years, and while I wouldn't want to do word processing on them, I use them with text editor (joe) and outliner (hnb) daily. The Zaurus is also fine for using ssh to remote administer *nix systems and to remotely read mail over mutt from my desktop. It's also fine as a Web browser. There's quite a lot I've gotten written that I never would have without it, since it's just not practical to always carry a laptop, and ideas both don't show up on schedule, and more often come to me when I'm out in the world in the midst of other business. My typing's slowed down by the small keyboard, but it's still faster than my handwriting, and it's much more useful to end up with the results in a computer file than in a stack of small paper notebooks.
Now, it would be nice to have something sized between the Zaurus and a subnotebook - a little more screen and a little more keyboard would work better for editing. But the top size I'd want would equal a trade paperback, with not much more weight than that. I still want something that I can carry easily in my hand - perhaps along with a book or two - if it can't go in a pocket. And for sure I want it running Linux, like the Zaurus does, like all my systems do. ARM would do fine - I've no speed complaints about the Zaurus at all for my uses.
The natural question is how many people there are like me. Back in the early 80s, those Kaypros and Osbornes were largely bought by people wanting superior writing tools - and the degree of portability they had was important to this market. For writing, text editors are still better tools than word processors - which are really aimed squarely at churning out business letters. (Real layout is another thing, and best done on a workstation.) I don't thing there's even one example of a well-optimized writer's machine now - of the sort of thing a news reporter or trail-wandering poet would find truly ideal. But it's precisely in the space between pocket-fitting Zauruses and subnotebooks that such a machine someday has to arrive, and if it's done right succeed wildly.
If it's so "basic" to the brain then why is it the exception in human society and not the rule?
Look at it like gene expression. There's lots of stuff that genes, it turns out, are basically set up to do. But they only do them, when all's going well, at the right developmental time or in the right environmental circumstances.
If altruism is basic to the brain, that doesn't mean more than that the potential is there awaiting the right time and circumstance. Knowing it's there, we might decide to create more time and circumstance for it. Sexuality is basic to the brain too. But we don't, most of us, walk around with perpetual boners. There's a right time and circumstance for it; similarly though we might want to create more time and circumstance. Or not.
It may turn out that murderous assault is also basic to the brain. Our nation has gone to great expense in Iraq to create more time and circumstance for it. Culture is largely about creating time and circumstance; whether for war, or sex, or more altruistic love. Of course, then there's religion, which often ties the three all up together.
I set my wife up on her new Mac with OpenOffice in X11. She was always a Word on Windows person before. She's using it daily. There was one crash a while back, but not since updating to the latest Apple version of X11. It may be "ugly," but since she's coming from Windows, it's an ugly she's used to. She hasn't had to ask me a single question about how to use it, or had any problems exchanging.doc files various Word users (she's a freelance journalist). Maybe I should shift her to NeoOffice for the pure Mac experience, but OpenOffice ain't broke, so....
Slashdot Mirror
If soda pop leads to Parkinson's and cirrhosis, then smoking tobacco with your Sprite should ease the Parkinson's threat. Even better - switch from soft drinks to hard drinks - your liver is at risk either way, but now your Parkinson's risk is much lower.
Of course, if it's cancer risk you're concerned with, you might smoke pot instead. Those who smoke only pot have less lung cancer than those who never smoke anything (although not that much less), apparently because THC itself prevents cancer. Will genetic engineering give us a smoke in the future that's high in both THC and nicotine, while minimizing the cancer promoters in tobacco? Or would nicotine's blood-vessel-promoting nature, which helps cancers, overcome THC's protective effect and outweigh nicotine's many positive health effects?
In any case, isn't it nice to know that when people like something, there's a good, healthy reason for it - even if there can be unintended consequences. Our instincts, at root, are good. That's how we've gotten so far.
Okay, I'm not the target of most advertising money ... but I am of some. And that money can find me because of Google's keyword-based ad system. It sure doesn't find me on /. or the blogs or news sites I visit regularly. On those sites, any advertising that's obtrusive enough to get in the way of what I'm after gets Adblocked - pretty much in direct proportion to how much time I spend on those sites, and thus how annoying the particular advertising becomes to me. On a Google search though, if it's about some project I'm in the middle of spending money on, I read every single ad, and follow through on a few. Better than a third of the time I find what I want through the advertising there rather than in the primary search results - although half the time I find it through those primary results, and the remainder I still do better browsing in physical stores.
... but sell me something maybe twice a year. Google's ads are selling me stuff on a monthly basis. And because they're absent the intelligence-insulting eye candy of most culture-obliterating American advertising, I don't even resent them for it.
Considering that I skip ads on TV 98 percent of the time, and view magazine advertising as visual candy at best with zero viable information content, it would be safe to say that Google ads are the only advertising reaching me - well, with some allowance for the local newspapers, where the ads can make good bathroom reading
To achieve the aim of maximizing the quality of the culture transmitted by copyrighted works, the term of copyright should be shortened, and the rights of citizens to make certain types of copies even within that term should be expanded. Why? Because the larger portion of the crassness in our culture is there in service of commercial interest - commerce whose shape and nature is in part determined by the ecological niche allowed it by our extravagant copyrights and other legal structures which are designed to amplify the profits of our largest corporate players.
The proof of this? Compare the musical offerings of small, independent labels to that of the majors. There is proportionately far less lowest-denominator sexuality, gangsta worship, women-hatred - and there's far more actual aural art as compared to the cheap sonic wallpaper the big labels prefer to sell us. The same differences can be found between the offerings of the small presses and the big publishing houses. And when the small recording labels and presses do release something with sex or violence featured, it's usually of much greater artistic worth, and doesn't trivialize either the sex or the violence the way the big corporations prefer to.
Unfettered capitalism by smaller players is the cure to our cultural failings. But they will not prosper as long as government regulation tilts the field towards the largest corporate interests. Long copyright terms are one brick in the wall preventing the free flourishing of the arts. And it's the lack of better-done art which leaves the public hungry enough to accept the empty calories the large, government-favored firms want to sell. Those empty calories will inevitably be dressed up in sex and violence, because the higher, more mindful forms of expression require levels of art largely incompatible with corporate packaging, and in any case tend to contribute to unwelcome challenges to the dumbed-down public mentality which proves so pliable to our political and corporate masters.
You'd think a Conservative in Britain would realize that this current regime is playing mostly into the hands of New Labor, and that a return to the more conservative form of capitalism, where small players are encouraged to do their entrepreneurial best, and corporations towards the monopolistic end of the spectrum are restrained or even broken up by government, rather than treated as its special partners - which is the very neo-fascism that New Labor has led Britain into.
Scenario: The friend killed her. HR however destroyed evidence. Motive for the friend: his one "wolf mate for life" had left him. Motive for HR: if the friend were to testify in court about his kinky past with HR, HR feared he would surely (1) lose the children, and (2) appear to his son to have been "less than a man."
Another angle: The friend, through the wife, may have started running errands for the Russian mafia. (Yes Virginia, there really is a strong, nasty Russian mob presence in parts of the US today.) The kids now in Russia, HR fears for their lives if he implicates his friend.
Fully agree - but CD quality was never as good a vinyl through the right equipment. Bob Dylan had a lot to say about that a few months back. To his ears there just haven't been any CDs that have achieved what vinyl, with the right engineers handling the mix, used to.
There's a degree to which the psychoacoustic models that schemes like mp3 use actually clean up the noisy mess that all or most all CDs present. The way these schemes hollow out the back of the sound produces something clearer and more delicate - more like live music straight from the amps. Except it really sounds quite different from live music. Good vinyl, on the other hand, can be indistinguishable from live performance if your eyes are closed. CDs never had that. So it's easy to walk away from them. All the discussion of "lossless" misses the point that at the rates CDs are sampled there's already a high degree of loss. Music is inherently analog; digital has to get an order of magnitude better (at least) before it'll be so realistic that it's worth a premium.
Most of the modded-up comments so far are of the "Nothing new here" meme. These demonstrate the problem of even getting traction on a vocabularly to discuss class issues in America. People tune it out, perhaps think its always been as it is now so why even discuss it. But it hasn't always been this way. The last time such a high proportion of American wealth went to the top 1 percent of the population was just before the Great Depression. America used to have much greater social mobility - the likelihood that a kid from a poor background would become rich and socially respected - than anywhere else. Now America has slipped behind most of Western Europe in social mobility - behind even such more-obviously class-based societies as the British and the French, and way behind where America itself was in the mid-20th century.
This stratification shows up across the culture. But it has not always been here to the extent it is today. Economic historians claim that stratified societies - particularly those where children are locked in to the strata of their parents - are in the longer run neither so stable nor so successful as more egalitarian nations. America's own past success vis a vis Europe is cited as a prime example. If that's the case, we might want to take America back to a more egalitarian version. Back when America was more egalitarian there was a more unified cultural aesthetic - splitting more on generational than class fractures (which is to say, on direction of progress but still assuming that progress belonged to all). Now, if the fine article is accurate (I'm too old to know) there is a distinct split in aesthetic and sensibility, as demonstrated in the SNS's - one which favors acceptance of our new degree of social stratification. If we want to avoid developing a large permanent underclass, we should look at reversing that.
The article makes the useful point that social identification is not tightly linked to income. But the income equation is itself troubling for egalitarians: In the past 40 years the GDP per capita has doubled. Yet in that time the median income has stayed level. We're twice as rich, per person, as a nation. But those on the middle and lower parts of the income curve have seen none of the gain. This isn't to say that being median-income in the '60s was a bad life; nor that it's a bad life now. But it raises a very curious question of who has made off with all that gain in national wealth. And there's a corollary: How have our cultural institutions enabled them, wittingly or not?
One positive side effect of the trend among university researchers to want to cash in big on their research is that the last thing they're going to do is let anybody "steal" it. A main effect of that is negative: the chilling of sharing on the frontiers of knowledge; but these people are protecting their precious IP even from colleagues who obviously aren't spies. We should feel sorry for the spies in this environment.
To the posters wondering how they can do it, look at l7-filter for iptables. Now, this is what you can do - fairly effectively people are reporting - to filter p2p with a Linux router. (There's also ipp2p for Linux, but that's judged only partially effective.) You can bet that what open source can do, AT&T's Ciscos can do too. Doing that level of inspection is going to add quite a computational load, on the one hand. On the other hand, blocking the p2p stuff will take a huge load off of the pipes.
Is the l7-filter's approach something that p2p software's next generation can get around? Maybe, but it won't be as simple as port hopping. There will always be ways to get a few files though, but the question is whether large-scale p2p operations will remain viable in a context of widespread packet filtering.
Part of how they do well is by not always matching what they know with what they say. The rich guy over there, you might seek his advice because you figure he's smart about getting rich. But here's the rub: Does he give you advice that leads to actions that make you richer, or does he give you advice that leads to actions that make him richer?
In making a public case for AMD divesting its fab business, Goldman Sachs is speaking to two audiences: the stock buying public, and AMD executives. And Goldman is hoping the reactions to this "news" will be actions on the part of one or both of those audiences that help Goldman make money to stuff its Sachs with. This most often means they're playing one or both audiences for suckers. What it surely does not mean is that we'd be smart to listed to their "expertise."
Depends on what the machine's doing, my friend. If you have dozens of people you don't know on shell accounts, sure, you better keep the kernel current - scheduled downtimes to do that are fine, and the inevitable kernel panics because the latest kernel introduces a new bug for your particular hardware configuration - well, the users will understand.
On the other hand, if you have no shell accounts, but just are running one or a few public-facing daemons, if you keep those daemons current, and follow solid security practices in configuring and using them, and lock down your firewall - well, if the kernel's stable, and your business's customers expect you up 24x7, why the heck should you want to be on the front lines testing the latest kernel release? In 14 years of running public-facing systems I've taken both strategies. I've had systems I kept on the bleeding kernel edge - and filed at least one fundamental bug report to the kernel folk about a most inconvenient cause of random kernel panic that took them months for them to eradicate. And I've had systems where I let the kernel get a few years out-of-date - and never had a system owned. Have I been lucky? Sure. But if you've kept running bleeding-edge kernels without downtime, you've been lucky too.
The session announcement:
So: the off-the-record environment will encourage conversations which will subsequently be made public. WTF? On complete analysis, this looks just as screwy as on first glance. People will say things on the understanding that the whole conversation is scheduled to be transcribed and published publicly, but wouldn't say those things with a reporter in the room? Why? The only difference a reporter might make is if the reporter manages to ask a revealing question from the floor. That would make sense: They didn't want any probing questions that didn't match their agenda.
However, instead of making an honest explanation of this, they made an excuse that either is a lie, or if the truth, shows their conference announcement was fraudulent.
Something like 70% of Americans do demand a change in government. A majority have favored impeachment for some many months now. When the new Congress came in it had broad support, but then failed to either end the war or impeach. Now its popularity rating has dropped below even Bush's.
The problem in America isn't the people. We get it. The problem is the politicians still listen more to television commentators than to the people. And the talking heads mostly don't get it at all; don't see how corruption matters if that corruption just amounts to their friends in business and government going about their business "as usual." Of course, the networks overwhelmingly favor commentators who are of the right or center. The corporations that own them know very well who their friends are. This is too bad, since other parts of corporate America are far to the left, socially, of General Electric, Disney and whoever-the-hell-owns NBC now. We won't mention Fox.
Why not the death penalty? Seriously, what social use is there for anyone who'd commit identity theft? We've filled our jails with potheads - who hurt nobody and subtract nothing from society, indeed include many of our most artistically accomplished people - and yet the penalty for stealing tens of thousands through identity theft, and running the victims through months of hell - is probation? It should be at minimum 20 years in jail.
"documents that is"? Where did they outsource this to?
And if they don't want macro viruses, why are they accepting Word docs at all?
The passwords and redlining thing is a mystery to me. Is there some way to embed a password in a document so as to bring down the FCC? What could that magic word be?
If parallel universes exist (and mathematically it makes a lot more sense if they do)
It only makes more "sense" in the sense that this is a cheap way of solving the problem of why this particular universe exists, and why we have free will in it.
If there are parallel universes, then there are almost certainly an infinite number of them, one for every possibility
Then for each possibility that I choose among, I choose absolutely every single one of them. And the universe forks at every single choice-point - at least all the considered ones (probably even the unconsidered ones). Okay, positing that, then what the hell is all this effort of choosing about? And why do we hold people responsible for their choices, when at the same time they almost infinitely choose something(s) else? And wtf is the biological advantage of conscious choosing, such that creatures like us would embody it evolutionarily speaking?
The convenience of mathematicians be damned. It hasn't turned out to be an Euclidian universe, even thought that would have been much more convenient to mathematicians. Why should it now turn out to be an infinitely parallel, branching sort of multiverse? Euclid works really well up to a point. But it's false, and the world does not bow to it. Math has moved beyond Euclid. But by how much, on the scale of how far math still has to go? It's in its infancy. The universe has no obligation at this point to be convenient for those who merely grasp today's best mathematical concepts. Not at all.
I'm perfectly willing to carry my passport when boarding airplanes or visiting the White House. What I don't want is to have a driver's license that ends up all RFID'd (and you know they'll ask for that next if they aren't already), so that I can be easily spied on when I'm going about my business on the ground and outside the precincts of the Feds. My driver's license already is cross linked with all sorts of stuff - bank accounts, insurance policies, &c. - that my passport isn't (at least the firms only ask for driver's license # not passport). It works well enough as is for my purposes, and the purposes of those I do business with.
And if you can afford an airline ticket, you can certainly afford a passport - which is a lot better than making even people who never fly pay more for a passport-level driver's license. As a side benefit, holding a passport may even lead more people to get out and explore the wider world, and get beyond the parochial American point-of-view on a few things.
Death to everyone whose theological beliefs don't agree with your own.
What I see is a museum whose exhibits draw heavily on our advanced technologies to make their models and wall posters and so on. People who were limited to use of technologies which are consistent with these idiots' "theological" beliefs could not have built this museum. So why don't we put these "theologists" on reservations and limit their technology level to what's consonant with their beliefs?
By the way, I have no theological beliefs. I have some hypotheses about the psychological and social roles played by essentially fictional gods. And I have some current events-based beliefs that several subsets of god-believers have become so freaking dangerous that they need to be expedited. It's a matter of social evolution that those of us without god-beliefs need to steel ourselves to be more effectively dangerous to them than they are to us. Of course, the preferred means if they'll stay meek like they're supposed to when Christians, is to teach their children to laugh at their superstitious parents, so that we can resolve this by evolution rather than revolution against these dangerous theocrats.
What's the difference between Gateway and HP? They both slap together computers from cheap components. But Gateway's struggling to survive now while HP has pulled ahead of even Dell. So the difference? HP's stuff breaks as often as Gateway's or Dell's, but they're real solid about fixing or replacing it, while with Dell you're likely dealing with someone who nearly speaks English, and with Gateway - well I wouldn't know. Back in the early 90s I used to have my firm buy Gateways, and the warranty replacements were handled okay. Now it looks like you have to take them to court - and their business strategy is to forbid you to take them to court.
I predict they won't be in business for much longer.
The argument may be one of convergence. Would he have too much trouble digging up Microsoft marketing material heralding the convergence of computers and televisions? Interviews with top Microsoft execs about their plans for said convergence? If the two product categories in fact converge, how does trademark law accommodate that? If computers become in fact and function equivalent to televisions, then a trademark in the television realm could reasonable confuse customers if it's similar to a trademark in the computer realm - when the realms significantly overlap.
Oh yeah. And for small keyboards - the thing that's surprised me using a Zaurus clamshell for a few years is that even though I've long be a touch typist, going down to a keyboard so small I'm just using index fingers is much easier than I'd thought. So this keyboard is way larger than the Zaurus, while the whole thing weighs in at about a pound, and if it does come in at $300 it's cheaper. And Linux. When/where can I preorder?
In a few years, this could make all the folks with the big notebooks look old-tech.
The trading regime instituted in Europe has already caused stress to clean efficient plants trying to control their emissions because they face competitors in places like Morocco with no control regime who undersell them.
At present, it takes a typical US factory twice the energy input to produce equivalent goods to a typical German or French factory. Controlling emissions puts a high emphasis on efficient use of energy. It won't be long before the European factory is, say, using only 1/3 the energy of a US factory, or a Moroccan one. In the longer run, energy prices are sure to spike. So while the short-term advantage goes to Morocco - or China or even the US (especially as the dollar continues to drop against the euro), in the long run, when energy surpasses labor as the chief component of the wholesale cost of the finished good, the European factories will both the price leaders, and - in a way the Moroccans and Chinese are sure not to be anytime soon - the quality leaders.
When that happens, the Europeans will also start making significant euros selling their energy-efficient, low-emission tech to the rest of the world - if they want to. But many of those efficient processes will be treated as trade secrets and not shared. We may well be looking not at a new Chinese, let alone American century, but at the latter half of the 21st century being entirely dominated by a new European supremacy.
addons.mozilla.org and updates.mozilla.org
Right, so I've just taken over your connection to the coffeehouse access point, and your DNS lookup now shows that addons.mozilla.org is at 192.168.1.254. Alternately, I route its real IP (63.245.209.31) to the laptop I've done the takeover with, where I've got a copy of addons.mozilla.org's content - except with evil updates.
I've been carrying around Zaurus clamshells for several years, and while I wouldn't want to do word processing on them, I use them with text editor (joe) and outliner (hnb) daily. The Zaurus is also fine for using ssh to remote administer *nix systems and to remotely read mail over mutt from my desktop. It's also fine as a Web browser. There's quite a lot I've gotten written that I never would have without it, since it's just not practical to always carry a laptop, and ideas both don't show up on schedule, and more often come to me when I'm out in the world in the midst of other business. My typing's slowed down by the small keyboard, but it's still faster than my handwriting, and it's much more useful to end up with the results in a computer file than in a stack of small paper notebooks.
Now, it would be nice to have something sized between the Zaurus and a subnotebook - a little more screen and a little more keyboard would work better for editing. But the top size I'd want would equal a trade paperback, with not much more weight than that. I still want something that I can carry easily in my hand - perhaps along with a book or two - if it can't go in a pocket. And for sure I want it running Linux, like the Zaurus does, like all my systems do. ARM would do fine - I've no speed complaints about the Zaurus at all for my uses.
The natural question is how many people there are like me. Back in the early 80s, those Kaypros and Osbornes were largely bought by people wanting superior writing tools - and the degree of portability they had was important to this market. For writing, text editors are still better tools than word processors - which are really aimed squarely at churning out business letters. (Real layout is another thing, and best done on a workstation.) I don't thing there's even one example of a well-optimized writer's machine now - of the sort of thing a news reporter or trail-wandering poet would find truly ideal. But it's precisely in the space between pocket-fitting Zauruses and subnotebooks that such a machine someday has to arrive, and if it's done right succeed wildly.
If it's so "basic" to the brain then why is it the exception in human society and not the rule?
Look at it like gene expression. There's lots of stuff that genes, it turns out, are basically set up to do. But they only do them, when all's going well, at the right developmental time or in the right environmental circumstances.
If altruism is basic to the brain, that doesn't mean more than that the potential is there awaiting the right time and circumstance. Knowing it's there, we might decide to create more time and circumstance for it. Sexuality is basic to the brain too. But we don't, most of us, walk around with perpetual boners. There's a right time and circumstance for it; similarly though we might want to create more time and circumstance. Or not.
It may turn out that murderous assault is also basic to the brain. Our nation has gone to great expense in Iraq to create more time and circumstance for it. Culture is largely about creating time and circumstance; whether for war, or sex, or more altruistic love. Of course, then there's religion, which often ties the three all up together.
I set my wife up on her new Mac with OpenOffice in X11. She was always a Word on Windows person before. She's using it daily. There was one crash a while back, but not since updating to the latest Apple version of X11. It may be "ugly," but since she's coming from Windows, it's an ugly she's used to. She hasn't had to ask me a single question about how to use it, or had any problems exchanging .doc files various Word users (she's a freelance journalist). Maybe I should shift her to NeoOffice for the pure Mac experience, but OpenOffice ain't broke, so....