The environmental debate comes down to competing conceptions of how mankind scales against natural forces. For almost all of mankind's existence, we've been very small indeed. Logging, burning, hunting, foraging, agriculture changed local climates (logging in North Africa many centuries ago is thought responsible for much of the current size of the Sahara) and ecologies (the loss of the Wooly Mammoth is one I regret) but nature was still essentially so much bigger than humanity that the Earth on the larger scale wasn't much perturbable.
Religions based much of their authority on the benevolence of the gods, as shown by the relative stability of the seasons. A big flood, for instance, would be taken as a sign that mankind had considerably fscked up in some god's eyes. The legacy of this is that many people still have a background belief that the constancy of nature and the weather is a gift from the supernatural, and that if we are virtuous it will all just work out.
But the problem is that mankind has achieved much greater scale vis-a-vis the Earth, so that we really can do stuff like double the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, or log off the rest of the rain forests - and in fact are well on the way to doing so. Papers like the one we're discussing seem to have the background belief that we can do all this stuff, and still some god will take care of us by controlling the weather, if we just remember to pray and avoid offenses like birth control and abortion.
But that's hardly a scientific view. Scientifically, large-scale changes in system variables are bound to create large-scale changes in system behavior. Mankind's actions control much larger-scale variables than ever before, and our capacity to create effects is increasing rapidly. While effects in complex systems can be hard to compute, it's only in a dream world that actions have no effects. If our science isn't up to predicting what large-scale effects will be caused by our ongoing large-scale changes, the conservative thing to do is to put the brakes on our changes until the science can catch up.
For those who believe that a god will assure the constancy of the weather and ecosystems no matter what we do, take away their gasoline and let the god power their cars. Surely a god omnipotent and good-willing enough towards them to do the first can do the latter with no trouble.
Meanwhile, let those who understand the premises of science be the ones trusted with technological processes.
Allow politicians to continue to say pretty much what they think will please us, but require that they set the "liar bit" for any communications they originate that contain lies. Have as penalty immediate removal from office for any lie told without the bit being set. Require all TV equipment to decode the bit and trigger an antique-style police-car light atop the set whenever the bit is on.
If a person was called and asked to be added to the list, the telemarketer had to add the person to that list and amek sure said person was never called again.
Yeah. AT&T has never honored that request. I got at least a call a week from them for several years at an old address, and demanded each time to be taken off the list. I will never do business with any branch of AT&T. May they go bankrupt.
What feature of the new systems (other than speed) do you see as opening support for new apps that answer some need of business?
Ask instead: What new features of business might be enabled by new apps (or new configurations of old apps) on current hardware?
As just one example, right now our economy is running with a contradiction on the centralization-decentralization axis. The advantage of capitalism over socialism seems to be based on the superior rationality of local control of operations, rather than having control as centralized as possible - in part because local human agents can respond to nuances which are simply invisible from the top of large pyramidal organizations. (This may be related to why, during the 90s boom, there were no net new jobs created by the Fortune 500 - the whole boom in terms of the job market was in smaller businesses.)
Still, it looks like the Wal-Mart model of the economy is winning over local businesses. How has Wal-Mart done that? Poor pay and benefits, sure, but K-Mart tried that too without the same results. The Wal-Mart difference is largely in its having long been aggressive in forcing its vendors to integrate their IT with its own.
If local businesses can be provided with IT capabilities to match Wal-Mart's, then with that part of the field level, they can compete based on their innate local advantage. There's a tremendous opportunity here - Wal-Mart's grabbed a huge share of the consumer-goods and grocery markets, much of which can be grabbed back with proper IT leverage... and those providing the levers should find good profits in it, as should local consultants to install and tune the tools.
What I want is a TV with no tuner at all - just a monitor - since the only tuners I use are in my DISH PVR and my VCR, and I put all the sound through the hi-fi.
So does the regulation outlaw the sale of TV-optimized monitors? Why would anyone with anything but a small portable TV want the box with the picture screen to also have a tuner in this day and age anyway, let alone tomorrow?
"If it has one or more tuners, at least one of those tuners has to be digital" is half-reasonable... as long as good monitors are available with no tuners at all. (And they better not be digital-rights-managed to the point were folks can't plug any input they want into them!)
Who will say, "I am an IBM lawyer. I have read the commands of the Open Source Community (provided through/.'s modern miracle) and will do as I have been told, instituting a scorched-earth policy which will insure that no 7th-generation descendant, even, of a current SCO officer will ever have food on the table or shoes in which to run from our hounds"?
Please, Ms. IBM Lawyer, assure us you are listening to our most-wise advice.
What's more, the brain activity of the subjects was now different. There was also activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain that scientists say governs high-level cognitive powers. Apparently, the subjects were meditating in a more sophisticated way on the taste of Coke, allowing memories and other impressions of the drink -- in a word, its brand -- to shape their preference.
Note the bias here in the interpretation of the results. The eliciting of a stronger response in more primitive areas of the brain - which Pepsi reportedly does when neither is named - is viewed as the more objective reality. While a response which involves higher areas of the brain which are concerned with the aesthetics of it is just a matter of "brand." Further, there's the implication that when the higher areas of aesthetic appreciation are active we're being more manipulated by brand, and missing the reality, as defined by the most primitive reaction, which could well be based on Pepsi having a sweeter taste.
In all likelihood a splotch of bright red will have a stronger reaction from primitive brain areas than will a fine landscape painting (we're strongly programmed to respond to red since it's often a sign of blood and danger). By the logic of this researcher (at least as reported by the Times) our considered preference for the landscape painting over the splotch of bright red is a sort of manipulation by the brand "landscape painting," or perhaps the brandname of the painter. While there's some small degree of truth to this, isn't it largely back asswards?
Open/free doesn't stratify so cleanly. At all levels people are sometimes creatively involved, and many of those involved are not programming specialists, but instead blend that with advanced uses of the aggregate product. And some aren't even specialists in those advanced uses so much as they are advanced users pushing the edges of science or commerce - people with very broad horizons and diverse sources of intellectual exercise.
Now, which group is going to be more brilliant, the one that's built of brigades of regimented specialists, or the one which by its form will be naturally be joined by any true renaissance persons out there?
In the future, we specialize the software so we can generalize the humans. Being narrow is really the proper place for a machine - whether it's repetition on the assembly line or... well, Microsoft is still essentially an early 20th Century assembly-line operations, organized according the the principles of Cheaper by the Dozen. Thank the gods for tomorrow.
Doesn't having an unauditable election trail violate the Voting Rights Act? If there's no way to prove your vote is fairly counted, shouldn't the presumption be that it hasn't been?
Can there be a reasonable federal lawsuit requesting that, since the last Georgia election can't be objectively substantiated, and because the voting machines were also otherwise in violation of legal requirements for certification of their software, the election be voided and a fresh election held?
priests who, throughout history, have a major goal of perpetuating the priesthood - some gee-whiz gadgetry to keep the general populace in awe and in bondage
There's a major difference between shamanic and priestly practices - check the anthropological literature. In all likelihood the Stonehenge builders were still a shamanic society. Shamanism is more about freedom than bondage. All cultural groups tend towards conformity - just as you are conforming with a certain image of what all spiritual practice is about in your statement. The role of the shaman has always been to see the world from outside the safe sphere of conventional points-of-view, to bravely go beyond, even at the expense of becoming exceedingly weird.
Priests, on the other hand, often seek to defend the conventional from the perceived threat of shamans, burning them as witches in our most stereotyped example. But the point is Northern Europe was largely shamanic, not priestly, until the Catholics came in roughly 1000 years back. And Northern Europe largely threw off the Catholics in favor of a more individual relation with whatever's real after not so many centuries of allowing those priests to officiate.
The British and American heritage of valuing individual freedom and conscience reflects the closeness of the shamanic past, and the undercurrents from it that still nourish our roots. So the very tradition from within which you're condemning the Stonehenge builders as "priests" owes quite a lot to those builders, and the shamans among them who quite likely encourage this cool architecture not to enslave, but to liberate.
Starbucks isn't just selling beverages. It's delivering a multisensory aesthetic experience, for which customers are willing to pay several times what coffee costs at a purely functional Formica-and-linoleum coffee shop.
- a statement by someone who has not experienced the superior aesthetics of the best of the old Formica-and-linoleum coffee shops, and of someone who has not experienced the superior aesthetics of a good espresso in the classic sort of Italian coffee shop that Starbucks is a pale immitation of. Starbucks to its credit usually has coffee that's worth more than what the diner this morning sold me for a dollar. Their beans are much better, and cost them twice as much, so of course the coffee they sell costs twice as much too - and the diner makes profit because it also expects most customers to buy food. But the experience of their shops is basically anti-aesthetic, or anaesthetic, numbing. There is no real design there, no real place, just a simulacrum. While they know enough to try to make a pomo virtue of this, it's lame. Still, when in a neighborhood without real Italian espresso, at least the coffee works.
Capitalism is good because it's better to have a number of small, local processes which are honed by those who need and know them best. The local business is the process. Having the course of local business dictated by a distant command structure - whether government or megacorporate - sacrifices the intelligence and agility that come from having it under local control. That's why an OS with a bunch of small daemons and utilities performs more intelligently, dependably and economically than a megalithic one like WinOS.
The "capital" part of capitalism is a structure to distribute working capital to local businesses. Without capital markets, money just associates with power, power just constitutes the state, and it all gets centralized, to the detriment of the overall level of wealth, well-being and intelligence. In prior centuries a privately-owned ship would go to the markets to gather investors for each voyage. This system produced some very smart captains, and excellent - on average - profits.
Capitalism remains true: free local enterprise is better than central control (whether central control is called "the government" or "the corporation") - and a necessary compliment to free individuals' pursuing their lives. Small, not large, companies create all the aggregate job growth in America (back a few years when the government didn't totally favor large corps and starve the small, back when jobs actually increased).
Since Verisign has become such a large corp that its stupidity is showing, they hope to increase the aggregate value by spinning of the public-facing side of domain name sales. This is to compete with the Tucows registry, where the public side is handled by a number of small entrepreneurs (e.g. Jumpdomain). This is actually an example of where trying to please the stockholders results in a move in the right direction.
FROM: Fearless Leader Penguini, Central Committee, USSR Government in Exile
SUBJECT: "the movement's usual public image of happy software proles linking arms and singing the "Internationale" while freely sharing the fruits of their code-writing labor"
It has come to our attention that most of you have not learned our theme song. Please go immediately here and memorize it in your native language. Regard this as a top priority directive. Also memorize it in the secondary language of your choice and be ready for foreign travel.
You speak of "the government." There's no reason electricity can't be largely locally generated and controlled by local public utilities. These work very well in, for instance, Los Angeles (which had no rate spike in the California debacle) and Seattle. They are responsible, and responsive, to local voters.
Decentralization can often be more successfully done in public (local government) hands than in private (corporate) hands. Corporations have a nearly irrestible tendency to conglomerate, homogenize, and steamroll over the true interests of the public. Public ownership of power resources, at the local level, is closer to the anarcho-syndicalist ideal than private ownership by corporations far removed from local consequences. (And the anarcho-syndicalist ideal is a large part of the emotional appeal of libertarianism - however falsely colored by right wing think tanks which have equated individual liberties with unfettered corporate dominance.)
Long distance transmission also wastes enormous amounts of power due to line loss. More localized generation and consumption can be much more efficient, and the cost savings from efficiency can benefit all energy users - even especially the corporate ones.
Let's say that I want my CD locked. I bought this splendid, rare music and value it like a diamond. That someone might sneak into my house (for instance, a PATRIOT FBI employee) and copy my treasure without my knowledge or consent really upsets me. So I'm very concerned if the folks selling me the CD haven't put the protection on it which I've paid for!
How can I be sure my CD is protected and safe unless there are objective measures of the strength of the lock? This threat to the security of my property causes me endless worry. Thankfully some academic institutions still promote objective assessment of the world. On this thin reed floats the hope that theft will not undergo exponential explosion! Boom!!
Dean and Clark. A thinker and an individual who gets things done.
Dean got a lot done as Vermont governor - went from deficit to surplus in the one state whose constitution doesn't mandate a balanced budget; provided health insurance for everyone under 18; and generally took middle-of-the road stances on hot-button issues like road building and development that infuriated Democrats in the Legislature. The guy's actually very conservative on many issues - he just does conservative right, fairly (what's fair about disallowing gay unions?) and compassionately.
Clark - degree in economics, Rhodes scholar and first in his West Point class... he's the 'thinker,' right? Dean says he has called Clark frequently, mostly for foreign policy advice. It's a fair be that if either comes in first, the other's on the ticket. They may be a tag team.
decrease the world's dependency on corporations, or even private companies (that later become corporations), by building cooperatives and collectives.
Precisely. Our current economic system is inefficient when it comes to the distribution of management intelligence. The shortage of management intelligence results in consolidation of enterprises into large entities under relatively small groups of capable managers. If the supply of capable managers was larger, it could be distributed over more, smaller enterprises. Smaller enterprises account for almost all of the job growth in America. Even during the '90s boom, the Fortune 500 firms as a group produced no net gain in jobs.
Lack of broadly distributed management intelligence also results in independent local firms being bested by franchises that leverage the management intelligence of the franchisers. There is no reason business methods, such as those currently sold in franchise operations, couldn't be subject to the same sort of open source development as we apply to software.
In a more perfect economic environment, the local business has distinct natural advantages owing to its local knowledge and accountability - aspects a distant corporate headquarters just cannot match. However, in our current society's distribution of skills and knowledge, there are very few with the capability to be good CEOs - thus the ridiculous bidup of CEO compensation. So what can we do to more broadly replicate CEO capabilities in the context of smaller, more local businesses? (Local businesses historically show more environmental sensitivity too, on the whole.)
If we can identify and replicate the conditions for successful top-management mindset and capability more broadly, there of course may be downsides. People capable of independent brilliance may be less amenable to taking jobs which require intelligence to be left behind at the workplace door, for instance, and similarly may prove less politically maleable.
Currently, best methods in executive practice are shared among the exclusive few through cross-appointments to each others' boards - where they also set each others' salaries, btw. Although a few management consultants try to distill and distribute top management wisdom more widely, this is rarely in a form applicable to running a small local business - the sort that creates the most new jobs. Can we help reverse-engineer what the most successful large firms are doing, and provide this in a form which small, local firms (including less-traditional co-ops and collectives - which make more sense when management ability is more widely distributed) can leverage along with their better local knowledge to reverse the trend towards domination by larger - and more politically dangerous - entities?
What sorts of software can subserve this? Can we build open-source, open-access knowledge bases for independent retailers, manufacturers and service providers, for example? Can we explore the ways in which the individual's psychology must shift in order to be a successful business leader, perhaps drawing from the metaphors of computer engineering to explore what changes in the configuration of consciousness may be beneficial to individual efficiency in this role?
But the distributive-justice approach is all but dead in Congress, at least in part because of the Republicans' deep antipathy for trial lawyers.
If we empowered individuals to sue spammers, then trial lawyers would make money, so it is bad. Ours is a system of laws, but setting up laws so that individuals can hire lawyers to protect their health, property or privacy is bad, because any lawyer who would profit by helping individuals in those causes is bad. Laws should only provide opportunities for corporations and corporate lawyers, never for individuals and the guns-for-hire they bring to the arena.
"Please open up. We have reason to believe someone inside is online without a license!"
The license can't just be a smartcard, or everyone will just leave theirs in the slot so family and friends have access - and likely put the whole crew and half the wireless neighborhood on NAT behind them. So we're going to have to build biometric security into every potentially Net-connected device.
That will surely get the Dept. Homeland Security Seal of Approval. Let's have Microsoft build it so it really works!
SCO claims anything that touches OS code they once sold licenses to is now owned by them; Microsoft claims that anything that touches OS code GPL licensed is now owned by the GPL. Note Microsoft's concocted nightmare of viral ownership is the same thing SCO's trying to pull off - not the GPL reality but Microsoft's cracked mirror of it.
The danger here is that SCO is not trying to make a claim contrary to the GPL model, but is trying to present a claim that is arguably isomorphic with part of the GPL's own claim, so that SCO either wins (not at all likely) or loses in a way that potentially weakens part of the GPL structure, providing that future courts look back on this case and see it as a precident against licensing giving an ownership right to derivative works.
Which would be exactly why Microsoft has put them up to this; and why it's far more than a pump-and-dump.
My ISP's mail server got overwhelmed by Sobig. No matter to me. I've run my own on a DSL line for years. MIMEDefang+SpamAssassin+Razor, a few adjustments to the scripts, and I'm not touched by the stuff. If I'd been depending on my ISP, I'd have had a serious interruption in mail delivery.
And there's the added advantage that if Ashcroft wants to see my mail logs, he has to subpoena me, not a corporate employee who might just calculate his loyalty or convenience lies closer to the Crisco-annointed than to my own dear-to-me head.
1st, Taiwan staged its largest-ever war games a few days back. It's trying to take an even-more-solid defensive posture because it knows that the US is too bogged down in Iraq to come fully to its defense if China invades soon.
2nd, when I worked in Taiwan in the late 80s, there was a single pipe into the country which the government heavily monitored. The pipe's much fatter now. Anyone know how heavy the monitoring is these days?
3rd, the mainland would be totally stupid not to try to break into Taiwanese databases. Any professional intelligence agency anywhere in the world has people assigned to breaking into friends' and neighbors' databases.
4th, the government on Taiwan is the only legitimate government of China. We may be making a terrible mistake not to back it, and not to demand the dissolution of the illegitimate government on the mainland. But hey, the mainland will sell us cheap goods made with slave and prison labor - good enough for us....
As someone who immediately liked Linux because it was so much like ZCPR (a CP/M replacement far better than DOS ever became) I can see the point of having Linux be familiar to Doze users. As someone who once accepted that there'd never be a future without 1-2-3 being the spreadsheet and WordPerfect writing the texts, I can tell you that present dominance is no guarantee of future success.
How did Word take over from WordPerfect? Word always assumed the user didn't want to learn so much. For command line users this was the wrong assumption - people who "talk" to their machines tend to enjoy learning. But it turned out to be just the right assumption once we went visual and pointing began to suffice for communication. Companies started firing their secretaries and having execs do their own typing, and the execs just wanted to get the job done the simplest way. Then they wanted to have the remaining secretaries' docs be compatible, so they forced stupidifying software on them too. In Word-land, document writes you.
Hello. Cheap, fast, free, doesn't catch viruses, doesn't crash... if Linux can add "and you don't have to hardly learn anything" plus the obvious advantage of being more compatible with your company geeks, it could take over within two years, the same as Win/Word/Excel did. And old farts like me can fire up jstar and pretend we're back on an old hotrodded WordStar ZCPR system.
As for our government being corrupt, should we be surprised that the prize of building a wireless phone system in Iraq goes to WorldCom?
I doubt we've had such a corrupt administration since Teapot Dome.
The FCC is being overruled by Congress on media ownership. Maybe this can be reveresed there too. True capitalist-favoring Congresscritters don't like monopoly. After all, if the business community isn't divided it competes with their own power, and monopoly businesses aren't so motivated to bid against each other for political support.
Ending up with a situation where some packets sent over IP are taxed - specifically in this case a subset of packets containing vocal audio - can only lead to a situation where every single packet needs to be audited simply in order to track and log the taxable ones. That's horrendous enough - and so expensive to implement that even aside from the privacy implications it would cost much more than any revenues raised.
But consider, what's the difference between a packet of "telephone" voice and a packet of "Internet radio" voice? What's the difference between an Internet radio monolog and a conference call in which one party is doing all the talking? If two people listen live to each others' Internet radio shows, and converse thereby, is it telephony for purposes of taxation? If so, then when is Net radio not a phone call?
The only sane conclusion is: Vocal conversation over the Net may look like a phone call, but it's really something else. It may also look like radio, but it's really something else. Making Internet "phone" companies license themselves as real phone companies do makes no more sense than requiring a broadcast license of Net radio stations.
Slashdot Mirror
The environmental debate comes down to competing conceptions of how mankind scales against natural forces. For almost all of mankind's existence, we've been very small indeed. Logging, burning, hunting, foraging, agriculture changed local climates (logging in North Africa many centuries ago is thought responsible for much of the current size of the Sahara) and ecologies (the loss of the Wooly Mammoth is one I regret) but nature was still essentially so much bigger than humanity that the Earth on the larger scale wasn't much perturbable.
Religions based much of their authority on the benevolence of the gods, as shown by the relative stability of the seasons. A big flood, for instance, would be taken as a sign that mankind had considerably fscked up in some god's eyes. The legacy of this is that many people still have a background belief that the constancy of nature and the weather is a gift from the supernatural, and that if we are virtuous it will all just work out.
But the problem is that mankind has achieved much greater scale vis-a-vis the Earth, so that we really can do stuff like double the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, or log off the rest of the rain forests - and in fact are well on the way to doing so. Papers like the one we're discussing seem to have the background belief that we can do all this stuff, and still some god will take care of us by controlling the weather, if we just remember to pray and avoid offenses like birth control and abortion.
But that's hardly a scientific view. Scientifically, large-scale changes in system variables are bound to create large-scale changes in system behavior. Mankind's actions control much larger-scale variables than ever before, and our capacity to create effects is increasing rapidly. While effects in complex systems can be hard to compute, it's only in a dream world that actions have no effects. If our science isn't up to predicting what large-scale effects will be caused by our ongoing large-scale changes, the conservative thing to do is to put the brakes on our changes until the science can catch up.
For those who believe that a god will assure the constancy of the weather and ecosystems no matter what we do, take away their gasoline and let the god power their cars. Surely a god omnipotent and good-willing enough towards them to do the first can do the latter with no trouble.
Meanwhile, let those who understand the premises of science be the ones trusted with technological processes.
Allow politicians to continue to say pretty much what they think will please us, but require that they set the "liar bit" for any communications they originate that contain lies. Have as penalty immediate removal from office for any lie told without the bit being set. Require all TV equipment to decode the bit and trigger an antique-style police-car light atop the set whenever the bit is on.
This is the "rights management" we really need!
If a person was called and asked to be added to the list, the telemarketer had to add the person to that list and amek sure said person was never called again.
Yeah. AT&T has never honored that request. I got at least a call a week from them for several years at an old address, and demanded each time to be taken off the list. I will never do business with any branch of AT&T. May they go bankrupt.
What feature of the new systems (other than speed) do you see as opening support for new apps that answer some need of business?
... and those providing the levers should find good profits in it, as should local consultants to install and tune the tools.
Ask instead: What new features of business might be enabled by new apps (or new configurations of old apps) on current hardware?
As just one example, right now our economy is running with a contradiction on the centralization-decentralization axis. The advantage of capitalism over socialism seems to be based on the superior rationality of local control of operations, rather than having control as centralized as possible - in part because local human agents can respond to nuances which are simply invisible from the top of large pyramidal organizations. (This may be related to why, during the 90s boom, there were no net new jobs created by the Fortune 500 - the whole boom in terms of the job market was in smaller businesses.)
Still, it looks like the Wal-Mart model of the economy is winning over local businesses. How has Wal-Mart done that? Poor pay and benefits, sure, but K-Mart tried that too without the same results. The Wal-Mart difference is largely in its having long been aggressive in forcing its vendors to integrate their IT with its own.
If local businesses can be provided with IT capabilities to match Wal-Mart's, then with that part of the field level, they can compete based on their innate local advantage. There's a tremendous opportunity here - Wal-Mart's grabbed a huge share of the consumer-goods and grocery markets, much of which can be grabbed back with proper IT leverage
What I want is a TV with no tuner at all - just a monitor - since the only tuners I use are in my DISH PVR and my VCR, and I put all the sound through the hi-fi.
... as long as good monitors are available with no tuners at all. (And they better not be digital-rights-managed to the point were folks can't plug any input they want into them!)
So does the regulation outlaw the sale of TV-optimized monitors? Why would anyone with anything but a small portable TV want the box with the picture screen to also have a tuner in this day and age anyway, let alone tomorrow?
"If it has one or more tuners, at least one of those tuners has to be digital" is half-reasonable
Who will say, "I am an IBM lawyer. I have read the commands of the Open Source Community (provided through /.'s modern miracle) and will do as I have been told, instituting a scorched-earth policy which will insure that no 7th-generation descendant, even, of a current SCO officer will ever have food on the table or shoes in which to run from our hounds"?
Please, Ms. IBM Lawyer, assure us you are listening to our most-wise advice.
What's more, the brain activity of the subjects was now different. There was also activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain that scientists say governs high-level cognitive powers. Apparently, the subjects were meditating in a more sophisticated way on the taste of Coke, allowing memories and other impressions of the drink -- in a word, its brand -- to shape their preference.
Note the bias here in the interpretation of the results. The eliciting of a stronger response in more primitive areas of the brain - which Pepsi reportedly does when neither is named - is viewed as the more objective reality. While a response which involves higher areas of the brain which are concerned with the aesthetics of it is just a matter of "brand." Further, there's the implication that when the higher areas of aesthetic appreciation are active we're being more manipulated by brand, and missing the reality, as defined by the most primitive reaction, which could well be based on Pepsi having a sweeter taste.
In all likelihood a splotch of bright red will have a stronger reaction from primitive brain areas than will a fine landscape painting (we're strongly programmed to respond to red since it's often a sign of blood and danger). By the logic of this researcher (at least as reported by the Times) our considered preference for the landscape painting over the splotch of bright red is a sort of manipulation by the brand "landscape painting," or perhaps the brandname of the painter. While there's some small degree of truth to this, isn't it largely back asswards?
employee-programmers (all specialists)
beta testers (varied)
consumers (mostly clueless)
... well, Microsoft is still essentially an early 20th Century assembly-line operations, organized according the the principles of Cheaper by the Dozen. Thank the gods for tomorrow.
Open/free doesn't stratify so cleanly. At all levels people are sometimes creatively involved, and many of those involved are not programming specialists, but instead blend that with advanced uses of the aggregate product. And some aren't even specialists in those advanced uses so much as they are advanced users pushing the edges of science or commerce - people with very broad horizons and diverse sources of intellectual exercise.
Now, which group is going to be more brilliant, the one that's built of brigades of regimented specialists, or the one which by its form will be naturally be joined by any true renaissance persons out there?
In the future, we specialize the software so we can generalize the humans. Being narrow is really the proper place for a machine - whether it's repetition on the assembly line or
Doesn't having an unauditable election trail violate the Voting Rights Act? If there's no way to prove your vote is fairly counted, shouldn't the presumption be that it hasn't been?
Can there be a reasonable federal lawsuit requesting that, since the last Georgia election can't be objectively substantiated, and because the voting machines were also otherwise in violation of legal requirements for certification of their software, the election be voided and a fresh election held?
priests who, throughout history, have a major goal of perpetuating the priesthood - some gee-whiz gadgetry to keep the general populace in awe and in bondage
There's a major difference between shamanic and priestly practices - check the anthropological literature. In all likelihood the Stonehenge builders were still a shamanic society. Shamanism is more about freedom than bondage. All cultural groups tend towards conformity - just as you are conforming with a certain image of what all spiritual practice is about in your statement. The role of the shaman has always been to see the world from outside the safe sphere of conventional points-of-view, to bravely go beyond, even at the expense of becoming exceedingly weird.
Priests, on the other hand, often seek to defend the conventional from the perceived threat of shamans, burning them as witches in our most stereotyped example. But the point is Northern Europe was largely shamanic, not priestly, until the Catholics came in roughly 1000 years back. And Northern Europe largely threw off the Catholics in favor of a more individual relation with whatever's real after not so many centuries of allowing those priests to officiate.
The British and American heritage of valuing individual freedom and conscience reflects the closeness of the shamanic past, and the undercurrents from it that still nourish our roots. So the very tradition from within which you're condemning the Stonehenge builders as "priests" owes quite a lot to those builders, and the shamans among them who quite likely encourage this cool architecture not to enslave, but to liberate.
Starbucks isn't just selling beverages. It's delivering a multisensory aesthetic experience, for which customers are willing to pay several times what coffee costs at a purely functional Formica-and-linoleum coffee shop.
- a statement by someone who has not experienced the superior aesthetics of the best of the old Formica-and-linoleum coffee shops, and of someone who has not experienced the superior aesthetics of a good espresso in the classic sort of Italian coffee shop that Starbucks is a pale immitation of. Starbucks to its credit usually has coffee that's worth more than what the diner this morning sold me for a dollar. Their beans are much better, and cost them twice as much, so of course the coffee they sell costs twice as much too - and the diner makes profit because it also expects most customers to buy food. But the experience of their shops is basically anti-aesthetic, or anaesthetic, numbing. There is no real design there, no real place, just a simulacrum. While they know enough to try to make a pomo virtue of this, it's lame. Still, when in a neighborhood without real Italian espresso, at least the coffee works.
Capitalism is good because it's better to have a number of small, local processes which are honed by those who need and know them best. The local business is the process. Having the course of local business dictated by a distant command structure - whether government or megacorporate - sacrifices the intelligence and agility that come from having it under local control. That's why an OS with a bunch of small daemons and utilities performs more intelligently, dependably and economically than a megalithic one like WinOS.
The "capital" part of capitalism is a structure to distribute working capital to local businesses. Without capital markets, money just associates with power, power just constitutes the state, and it all gets centralized, to the detriment of the overall level of wealth, well-being and intelligence. In prior centuries a privately-owned ship would go to the markets to gather investors for each voyage. This system produced some very smart captains, and excellent - on average - profits.
Capitalism remains true: free local enterprise is better than central control (whether central control is called "the government" or "the corporation") - and a necessary compliment to free individuals' pursuing their lives. Small, not large, companies create all the aggregate job growth in America (back a few years when the government didn't totally favor large corps and starve the small, back when jobs actually increased).
Since Verisign has become such a large corp that its stupidity is showing, they hope to increase the aggregate value by spinning of the public-facing side of domain name sales. This is to compete with the Tucows registry, where the public side is handled by a number of small entrepreneurs (e.g. Jumpdomain). This is actually an example of where trying to please the stockholders results in a move in the right direction.
TO: Free Software Communistic-unity
FROM: Fearless Leader Penguini, Central Committee, USSR Government in Exile
SUBJECT: "the movement's usual public image of happy software proles linking arms and singing the "Internationale" while freely sharing the fruits of their code-writing labor"
It has come to our attention that most of you have not learned our theme song. Please go immediately here and memorize it in your native language. Regard this as a top priority directive. Also memorize it in the secondary language of your choice and be ready for foreign travel.
The source is with us!
You speak of "the government." There's no reason electricity can't be largely locally generated and controlled by local public utilities. These work very well in, for instance, Los Angeles (which had no rate spike in the California debacle) and Seattle. They are responsible, and responsive, to local voters.
Decentralization can often be more successfully done in public (local government) hands than in private (corporate) hands. Corporations have a nearly irrestible tendency to conglomerate, homogenize, and steamroll over the true interests of the public. Public ownership of power resources, at the local level, is closer to the anarcho-syndicalist ideal than private ownership by corporations far removed from local consequences. (And the anarcho-syndicalist ideal is a large part of the emotional appeal of libertarianism - however falsely colored by right wing think tanks which have equated individual liberties with unfettered corporate dominance.)
Long distance transmission also wastes enormous amounts of power due to line loss. More localized generation and consumption can be much more efficient, and the cost savings from efficiency can benefit all energy users - even especially the corporate ones.
Let's say that I want my CD locked. I bought this splendid, rare music and value it like a diamond. That someone might sneak into my house (for instance, a PATRIOT FBI employee) and copy my treasure without my knowledge or consent really upsets me. So I'm very concerned if the folks selling me the CD haven't put the protection on it which I've paid for!
How can I be sure my CD is protected and safe unless there are objective measures of the strength of the lock? This threat to the security of my property causes me endless worry. Thankfully some academic institutions still promote objective assessment of the world. On this thin reed floats the hope that theft will not undergo exponential explosion! Boom!!
Dean and Clark. A thinker and an individual who gets things done.
... he's the 'thinker,' right? Dean says he has called Clark frequently, mostly for foreign policy advice. It's a fair be that if either comes in first, the other's on the ticket. They may be a tag team.
Dean got a lot done as Vermont governor - went from deficit to surplus in the one state whose constitution doesn't mandate a balanced budget; provided health insurance for everyone under 18; and generally took middle-of-the road stances on hot-button issues like road building and development that infuriated Democrats in the Legislature. The guy's actually very conservative on many issues - he just does conservative right, fairly (what's fair about disallowing gay unions?) and compassionately.
Clark - degree in economics, Rhodes scholar and first in his West Point class
decrease the world's dependency on corporations, or even private companies (that later become corporations), by building cooperatives and collectives.
Precisely. Our current economic system is inefficient when it comes to the distribution of management intelligence. The shortage of management intelligence results in consolidation of enterprises into large entities under relatively small groups of capable managers. If the supply of capable managers was larger, it could be distributed over more, smaller enterprises. Smaller enterprises account for almost all of the job growth in America. Even during the '90s boom, the Fortune 500 firms as a group produced no net gain in jobs.
Lack of broadly distributed management intelligence also results in independent local firms being bested by franchises that leverage the management intelligence of the franchisers. There is no reason business methods, such as those currently sold in franchise operations, couldn't be subject to the same sort of open source development as we apply to software.
In a more perfect economic environment, the local business has distinct natural advantages owing to its local knowledge and accountability - aspects a distant corporate headquarters just cannot match. However, in our current society's distribution of skills and knowledge, there are very few with the capability to be good CEOs - thus the ridiculous bidup of CEO compensation. So what can we do to more broadly replicate CEO capabilities in the context of smaller, more local businesses? (Local businesses historically show more environmental sensitivity too, on the whole.)
If we can identify and replicate the conditions for successful top-management mindset and capability more broadly, there of course may be downsides. People capable of independent brilliance may be less amenable to taking jobs which require intelligence to be left behind at the workplace door, for instance, and similarly may prove less politically maleable.
Currently, best methods in executive practice are shared among the exclusive few through cross-appointments to each others' boards - where they also set each others' salaries, btw. Although a few management consultants try to distill and distribute top management wisdom more widely, this is rarely in a form applicable to running a small local business - the sort that creates the most new jobs. Can we help reverse-engineer what the most successful large firms are doing, and provide this in a form which small, local firms (including less-traditional co-ops and collectives - which make more sense when management ability is more widely distributed) can leverage along with their better local knowledge to reverse the trend towards domination by larger - and more politically dangerous - entities?
What sorts of software can subserve this? Can we build open-source, open-access knowledge bases for independent retailers, manufacturers and service providers, for example? Can we explore the ways in which the individual's psychology must shift in order to be a successful business leader, perhaps drawing from the metaphors of computer engineering to explore what changes in the configuration of consciousness may be beneficial to individual efficiency in this role?
But the distributive-justice approach is all but dead in Congress, at least in part because of the Republicans' deep antipathy for trial lawyers.
... beloved of Libertarians ... why?
If we empowered individuals to sue spammers, then trial lawyers would make money, so it is bad. Ours is a system of laws, but setting up laws so that individuals can hire lawyers to protect their health, property or privacy is bad, because any lawyer who would profit by helping individuals in those causes is bad. Laws should only provide opportunities for corporations and corporate lawyers, never for individuals and the guns-for-hire they bring to the arena.
Republicans
Knock on the door.
"Please open up. We have reason to believe someone inside is online without a license!"
The license can't just be a smartcard, or everyone will just leave theirs in the slot so family and friends have access - and likely put the whole crew and half the wireless neighborhood on NAT behind them. So we're going to have to build biometric security into every potentially Net-connected device.
That will surely get the Dept. Homeland Security Seal of Approval. Let's have Microsoft build it so it really works!
SCO claims anything that touches OS code they once sold licenses to is now owned by them; Microsoft claims that anything that touches OS code GPL licensed is now owned by the GPL. Note Microsoft's concocted nightmare of viral ownership is the same thing SCO's trying to pull off - not the GPL reality but Microsoft's cracked mirror of it.
The danger here is that SCO is not trying to make a claim contrary to the GPL model, but is trying to present a claim that is arguably isomorphic with part of the GPL's own claim, so that SCO either wins (not at all likely) or loses in a way that potentially weakens part of the GPL structure, providing that future courts look back on this case and see it as a precident against licensing giving an ownership right to derivative works.
Which would be exactly why Microsoft has put them up to this; and why it's far more than a pump-and-dump.
My ISP's mail server got overwhelmed by Sobig. No matter to me. I've run my own on a DSL line for years. MIMEDefang+SpamAssassin+Razor, a few adjustments to the scripts, and I'm not touched by the stuff. If I'd been depending on my ISP, I'd have had a serious interruption in mail delivery.
And there's the added advantage that if Ashcroft wants to see my mail logs, he has to subpoena me, not a corporate employee who might just calculate his loyalty or convenience lies closer to the Crisco-annointed than to my own dear-to-me head.
1st, Taiwan staged its largest-ever war games a few days back. It's trying to take an even-more-solid defensive posture because it knows that the US is too bogged down in Iraq to come fully to its defense if China invades soon.
2nd, when I worked in Taiwan in the late 80s, there was a single pipe into the country which the government heavily monitored. The pipe's much fatter now. Anyone know how heavy the monitoring is these days?
3rd, the mainland would be totally stupid not to try to break into Taiwanese databases. Any professional intelligence agency anywhere in the world has people assigned to breaking into friends' and neighbors' databases.
4th, the government on Taiwan is the only legitimate government of China. We may be making a terrible mistake not to back it, and not to demand the dissolution of the illegitimate government on the mainland. But hey, the mainland will sell us cheap goods made with slave and prison labor - good enough for us....
As someone who immediately liked Linux because it was so much like ZCPR (a CP/M replacement far better than DOS ever became) I can see the point of having Linux be familiar to Doze users. As someone who once accepted that there'd never be a future without 1-2-3 being the spreadsheet and WordPerfect writing the texts, I can tell you that present dominance is no guarantee of future success.
... if Linux can add "and you don't have to hardly learn anything" plus the obvious advantage of being more compatible with your company geeks, it could take over within two years, the same as Win/Word/Excel did. And old farts like me can fire up jstar and pretend we're back on an old hotrodded WordStar ZCPR system.
How did Word take over from WordPerfect? Word always assumed the user didn't want to learn so much. For command line users this was the wrong assumption - people who "talk" to their machines tend to enjoy learning. But it turned out to be just the right assumption once we went visual and pointing began to suffice for communication. Companies started firing their secretaries and having execs do their own typing, and the execs just wanted to get the job done the simplest way. Then they wanted to have the remaining secretaries' docs be compatible, so they forced stupidifying software on them too. In Word-land, document writes you.
Hello. Cheap, fast, free, doesn't catch viruses, doesn't crash
As for our government being corrupt, should we be surprised that the prize of building a wireless phone system in Iraq goes to WorldCom?
I doubt we've had such a corrupt administration since Teapot Dome.
The FCC is being overruled by Congress on media ownership. Maybe this can be reveresed there too. True capitalist-favoring Congresscritters don't like monopoly. After all, if the business community isn't divided it competes with their own power, and monopoly businesses aren't so motivated to bid against each other for political support.
Ending up with a situation where some packets sent over IP are taxed - specifically in this case a subset of packets containing vocal audio - can only lead to a situation where every single packet needs to be audited simply in order to track and log the taxable ones. That's horrendous enough - and so expensive to implement that even aside from the privacy implications it would cost much more than any revenues raised.
But consider, what's the difference between a packet of "telephone" voice and a packet of "Internet radio" voice? What's the difference between an Internet radio monolog and a conference call in which one party is doing all the talking? If two people listen live to each others' Internet radio shows, and converse thereby, is it telephony for purposes of taxation? If so, then when is Net radio not a phone call?
The only sane conclusion is: Vocal conversation over the Net may look like a phone call, but it's really something else. It may also look like radio, but it's really something else. Making Internet "phone" companies license themselves as real phone companies do makes no more sense than requiring a broadcast license of Net radio stations.