the world piracy rate increased, edging up to 37 percent in 2000
What a way to lose your competitive national advantage - by being the country that pays for software other folks are using for free. Unless we transition to a world where either (1) everyone everywhere pays for software or (2) everyone everywhere has good free software to use, the laws of economics are just going to reward the nations with the most crooks.
So the choices really come down to (1) an international police state to enforce the interests of corporate software merchants or (2) taking free software really seriously. As Adam Smith warned, "the government of an exclusive company of merchants is, perhaps, the worst of all governments for any country whatsoever."
Maybe if there's a next movie episode they could slip through a wormhole into an alternate universe where all spaceships don't fly "right side up" in space. Just think of the possibilities in a reality with an extra, third dimension!
Invent more better things for tech to do
on
Giant Sucking Noise
·
· Score: 1
There are other ways to undercut the corporations than trying to pass laws about where they can do their hiring. While there are economies of scale, there are very different ways projects of the same scale can be structured. The most obvious to everyone reading here is open versus pyramidal. Sure, there are great things IBM can do if you have them come in and set you up with Linux. And a high percentage of the people here could set you up just as well, and way cheaper. But there's not someone who can do that for you well remotely. Proximity is still everything in certain sorts of business. So do you fly in IBM consultants for temporary proximity, or use the Linux-head next door? Cheaper is efficiency. The Linux-head isn't paying any tax to IBM - even though Linux has some IBM-developed aspects slipping in now.
The economy consists in whatever people are willing to buy from each other. Large corporations are no longer so willing to buy your labor because they can go overseas. Fine, all job growth comes from small companies anyway. The Fortune 500 over time contributes just about nothing, by way of net new jobs. Yet they've gotten so big because smaller businesses haven't been smart enough to compete against, say, Wal-Mart. So find a way to enable your local small businesses to thrive. Do you really think Wal-Mart is so brilliant that their generic approach can't be beat in local markets with local knowledge? Most of their price advantage comes from advanced computer inventory and procurement programs. Are you really so incompetent that you can't put together an even smarter system for your local merchant? Computers, used right, can bring individuality back to American small businesses, and by covering their weaknesses, allow their natural strengths to come out against the larger, mostly stupid and blundering firms. Meanwhile those large firms can help develop the Third World by frantically exporting jobs to compete. That's not really a bad thing for them to do on the way out. And most of them, in the next 10-15 years, will end up where the big airlines are now. Computers make smaller-scale distribution of control just too much more efficient than top-down ever can be. But whining for guarantees of corporate jobs not only isn't the way to change things, but diverts talent that should be working to bring on the next wave of more open, more human-scaled businesses into work that supports the current corporate pyramids. Time to build to a new design. If we all take our business elsewhere... well, the economy is whatever game most people choose to play. Nothing less, nothing more.
A friend recently got a $90 plane fair to France. Business class. And got bumped up to First because it was oversold. There was a computer error, but the airline had to honor the offer. Much of that flight was sold at the $90 price.
Right now, if that error's there, and the sale goes through, you can in principle track it back to whose error it is. If it was in an agent's system rather than the airline's, for instance, the airline could recover from the agent. So in Jaron's tomorrow, when things are matched by patterns instead of precisely, and an error happens, is it the case that no one exactly is responsible? Would you want to do business with someone whose systems just approximately, sort of matched up with yours? If yours are running on rough approximation rather than exactitude too, can a determination ever be made of ownership of a particular error?
Maybe it will all balance out. Maybe large errors will become less frequent as Jaron claims. But small errors, in being tolerated, will become an overhead of corruption. Perhaps a predictable overhead, as he claims, but what's to keep it from inflating over time, as programming practices become laxer because nobody can really get blamed for the errors any more, because they'll be at best even more difficult to localize than now, and at worst totally impossible to pin down?
2. A simple cheatsheet listing the kernel options needed to support the hardware.
Then I'll boot it with a Knoppix CD, grab a Gentoo stage2 tar over the network, and do a chroot build of the rest of Gentoo (whose booth was consistently the most active in its sector of the floor yesterday).
So all I really want is hardware completely supported by standard kernel options, and a list of which options it depends on. And that's all any Linux user should want. If you aren't going to customize the OS, maybe Losedose really is better for you....
In China... there may not be an opportunity to refute such charges before an impartial court
An understatement. There's no impartial court, so no opportunity. Still, a friend's band is called "The Nail Nippers," with some samples on an mp3 site. They keep getting e-mails from China and elsewhere in Asia offering to supply them with nail nippers. These letters are written in good enough English, apparently by someone using data mining software to find every e-mail address on every Website that mentioned "nail nippers" - since if a human had read my friend's site it's just obvious it's the band's name.
So, is every factory in China staffed by people who write sophisticated data mining software? Or is there some quiet central government program that is helping facilitate spam in order to build China's export businesses? There's a certain likelihood that really doing this (replying to the spam with dangerous keywords) would really be tripping up the Chinese government, not some innocent little factory spam manager.
Of course, if you don't share my view that the legitimate government of China sits in Taiwan you may still consider this a bad thing. Those of us who favor armed insurrection on behalf of Tibet, Fulun Gong and freedom generally might even welcome it if the illegitimate government got more involved in chasing its own tail, rather than focusing effectively on suppressing and killing Tibetans and those with unauthorized spiritual faiths.
Sure, the innocent could suffer the worst fates; but the innocent already do. It's the sort of tough ethical dilemma where a choice may spare two innocent lives, but take another.
One of the few sci-fi books in the last few decades to do the old trick of imagining a radical technology and working through the social consequences. The detective diction is a bit hokey, and has been done better in sci-fi - for instance by Jonathan Lethem in Gun, with Occassional Music - but the working out of a radical technological premise hasn't been.
If the results are similar to running SMP with two processors (and they look roughly similar), isn't a system with 2 Athlon-MPs still cheaper for a given performance level?
But if that's the case, you can't use the system to track the RFID chips after the sale is complete. You don't want the scanners telling you about the pants the customer bought last week, just the stuff he's buying now.
Most retailers are very curious about what you've been buying from their competitors. This cuts both ways here - a retailer may want to deactivate the transponders so the competition won't learn so much, but on the other had a retailer will be very interested in reading every available tag on you to correlate the tags with your current purchase - think of Amazon's data mining system, this stuff is really big in retailing right now. So if I sell you a pair of jeans, I really do want to know what brand of underwear you like, because maybe it's a line I don't carry, and if most of my jeans customers are wearing that line, I probably should stock it. Then if I can correlate underwear preference by credit card billing address... you get the picture?
This is only a footnote to the current discussion, but
the way that AMD was able to basically clone the Intel cpu's
...was that Intel licensed the code to AMD so it would head off the likelihood of monopoly enforcement against it. That license expired a few years back, since when AMD has been doing its own development - but they started off doing Intel-sanctioned clones, and had to go to court to get Intel to back off on an attempt to keep them from applying what they'd learned from Intel's designs to their future chip development after the licensing agreement expired.
aside from the channels randomly going in and out, the ones that come through are most all thoroughly boring, unless your thing is sports... several channels of sports.
Jet Blue is so TV-identified that they have a bunch of large flatscreens above the checkin counters in their JFK terminal... showing a bunch of network TV with the aspect ratio wrong, since they've stretched it sideways to fill those screens. At least the sound's not on.
At least when we run out of oil we can park our jets and SUVs and watch TV. In Germany after midnight there's a channel with nothing but the view from the front of a car driving; another channel with the same from a train. Somebody better sign up the American rights.
The Mongol Hordes wore silk vs. the European's armor. Being lighter they could move much faster, and when an arrow struck it would penetrate the skin but take the silk with it, so by pulling on the silk they could pull the arrow out cleanly.
By the late 80s the business press was saying, "We've got all this investment in information technology, yet productivity is stagnant." Then we hit the 90s, where the business press (and the Fed) suddenly believed that IT efficiency was justifying the market valuations bubble... but that may be another story. The point for now is that it took about 10 years of having word processors and spreadsheets before business people learned to use them more efficiently than the typewriters and calculators they were already proficient with.
Computers in grade school only became a big thing in about 93-94, with the Net hype. It may just take a decade or so for new tools to supplant old. By comparison, under Elizabeth I her ministers declared that the musket would replace the crossbow. Never mind that the crossbow had won many wars for the English, shot more accurately, and reloaded much faster. Embracing what in principle is new, better technology is often in the short term a step back. Then the technology improves and, more importantly, the culture of use adapts to it.
So expect a bubble in apparent educational results in about two years.
In this conflict, J.R.R. Tolkien stood firmly for the past.
Calling the scientific worldview "soul-less," he joined... Henry James and many European-trained philosophers in spurning the modern emphasis on pragmatic experimentation, production, universal literacy,
Silly Brin, Henry's brother William defined pragmatism. They were both on the same page; both very much believed in the soul. Whether or not you do, it's not incompatible with pragmatism.
I used to work for the second largest ISP, and everything you connected all your connection attempts and other info was beening uploaded during the connection.
Wow! This could be a real reason to stay with AOL.... Who wouldn't take spam and popups over being tracked like that? (Can anyone confirm the poster's claim?)
Connection attempts beening uploaded? Are the saucers involved? Do they track us everywhere?
It would be just plain perverse if Gentoo or Debian(/Knoppix) embraced the United Linux plan; and I can't imagine Red Hat going that road is bloody likely either.
Okay, so anyone releasing software will have an rpm version for Red Hat that will with any luck also work on Mandrake. And if the software is free and good it will quickly be ported to Gentoo and slowly to Debian. You can see how UL would wish everything would fit their own scheme, but it ain't gonna happen. So what's the noise about?
All we're lacking for widespread desktop acceptance is KDE 3.1 and strong programs in a few areas like household/small business accounting and desktop publishing - and having a few different Linuxes to port those to when they appear isn't gonna be the stumbling block.
Back in the early 80s (when Marc was in what grade?) the business press ran articles about how software was getting so good that soon we wouldn't need programmers, because writing software would itself be handled by software.
I predict that we'll have software that can write major software at just the same time as we have software that can write convincing novels. In both cases you have the task of putting together language that respresents a broad swath of messy reality.
Now, systems administration may be more like writing a good technical manual than writing a good novel. Ever notice how many good tech handbooks there are out there? You haven't? Maybe it's because novels are easier. Good systems administration is about leveraging people strengths with machine strengths, and vice versa. Automation without the human element is as uncompetitive as, well, the human element without automation these days.
The jaywalking thing lasted for about a week. First off, it turned out the law only provided a $3 fine; second, the police felt ridiculous enforcing it. The citizens never stopped jaywalking, didn't even let up.
A firearm in the hands (or closet) of a lawful, responsible person is no threat to you, if you do not break into his home or otherwise attack him.
Just supposing that most anyone who knows me would rank me as lawful and responsible (some might complain that I'm too-much so), and supposing you don't break into my home or attack me, but supposing I'm lawfully drunk in one of those localities where someone with a concealed firearm can be drinking... am I really no threat to you? Or let's say you walk into the bar and you're the post office supervisor who I quite accurately know to have unfairly denied me a promotion over several years... it's like stock market analysis, "Past performance is no guarantee of future returns."
The whole point of owning a gun is the psychological charge of knowing you have the power to blow something away. The design of the gun is indicative of whether the power is focused on wild animals or wild human beings. The law in my city is I can't carry a gun. When I lived in another state where people could carry guns I got threatened by them several times. The threats I've had here have been limited to human force. Any human male who can't imagine certain circumstances where he'd gladly - gun being available - blow certain other people away doesn't know himself well at all, and shouldn't be trusted with a handgun. And those who know how tempting it is to use a gun when it's there will respect laws against them.
Most of the modded-up responses so far are disrespectful. Certainly some sites should try to be accessible to various sorts of people with different assortments of sensory function. We have here some generous advice on how to do that.
So what's the dissing about? Maybe it has to do with my own reaction to the general notion that all the Web should be accessible to the disabled. Should we ruin the design of a site for 99 visitors just to make it more appealing to 1? Should ski resorts have to provide wheelchair accessible slopes? With the majority of our media currently focused on services for the mentally disabled, how much farther should we go? Is the ideal to produce a world in which everyone is equally crippled - or may as well be?
Those question aren't at issue here. We should be discussing how to make sites which desire to be accessible work. Right?
AT&T Broadband was acquired by Comcast in what was essentially a hostile takeover. AT&T had been considering spinning of the Broadband division, but decided not to. Comcast put together an offer that the AT&T board, under pressure from shareholders, felt they could not afford to refuse. Comcast as a result become by far the largest cable co, with a near monopoly on the East Coast (aside from NYC). Much of AT&T Broadband's staff is about to be fired, btw. Comcast wanted the customers, not the employees. They have no reason to embrace AT&T's attitude towards PVR; they'll be happy to scuttle it.
He's been signed up for all that mail under false pretenses. It's mail fraud and a Federal Offense.
1. Mail fraud is when you use the mail to commit fraud. Does signing up someone via the Web or an 800 number constitute using the mail to commit fraud?
2. Many catalogs come to me that I never signed up for. Are each of these companies committing mail fraud? What about the people who sold them the lists that suggested I might be interested in their products?
3. If he's a millionaire, he is a prime candidate for a number of lists, and qualifies to receive a number of catalogs he may not presently be receiving. If it's not mail fraud for the catalog firms to buy lists of addresses of potential purchasers, is it fraud when people volunteer addresses of potential purchasers to them without asking for compensation?
4. Many catalog merchants ask for addresses of friends who might also like to receive their catalog. After receiving so much mail from this guy, can't we consider him our friend? Or do our friends commit mail fraud if they sign us up?
If you can more economically run a whitelist, have at it. In the kids.us case the domain registration comes with a centralized content-policing mechanism, paid for by the registration fees. (George Bush kids.us?) Anyway there's nothing to stop you from starting a value-added business to whitelist sites for children or people with, say, religious or political beliefs which are easily offended by reality - you've just got to come up with a revenue model. If you charge sites to be on your list, and then you de-list a site, be prepared for legal retaliation. So you probably want to charge the end users. Okay, how? Do you set up a large proxy server farm and give them a browser jimmied to run all its queries through that just as long as their dues are paid up? If this is the only browser installed for their kid's account on their system, this would probably work. And you'd also get valuable tracking data on where the kid went. But why are they going to pay you for this when you can just lock a browser to kids.us for free? The difference here is kids.us can avoid delisting lawsuits because the prez and federal law are behind them.
For those of use who might throw $200 at a utility box, can anyone recommend hardware (especially motherboard and power supply) that are of better proven quality than this WalMart dohingus, yet still come in with the same (incomplete) features for not more than $200? $250? Sure, we'd as soon screw the stuff together and install our fave distro... which ought to be worth the $20 of Asian labor they're probably using on this. But then again it's $20 of American stocking/shipping labor for an outfit to send out separate parts... so can we build this better ourselves @ this price point?
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What a way to lose your competitive national advantage - by being the country that pays for software other folks are using for free. Unless we transition to a world where either (1) everyone everywhere pays for software or (2) everyone everywhere has good free software to use, the laws of economics are just going to reward the nations with the most crooks.
So the choices really come down to (1) an international police state to enforce the interests of corporate software merchants or (2) taking free software really seriously. As Adam Smith warned, "the government of an exclusive company of merchants is, perhaps, the worst of all governments for any country whatsoever."
Maybe if there's a next movie episode they could slip through a wormhole into an alternate universe where all spaceships don't fly "right side up" in space. Just think of the possibilities in a reality with an extra, third dimension!
There are other ways to undercut the corporations than trying to pass laws about where they can do their hiring. While there are economies of scale, there are very different ways projects of the same scale can be structured. The most obvious to everyone reading here is open versus pyramidal. Sure, there are great things IBM can do if you have them come in and set you up with Linux. And a high percentage of the people here could set you up just as well, and way cheaper. But there's not someone who can do that for you well remotely. Proximity is still everything in certain sorts of business. So do you fly in IBM consultants for temporary proximity, or use the Linux-head next door? Cheaper is efficiency. The Linux-head isn't paying any tax to IBM - even though Linux has some IBM-developed aspects slipping in now.
... well, the economy is whatever game most people choose to play. Nothing less, nothing more.
The economy consists in whatever people are willing to buy from each other. Large corporations are no longer so willing to buy your labor because they can go overseas. Fine, all job growth comes from small companies anyway. The Fortune 500 over time contributes just about nothing, by way of net new jobs. Yet they've gotten so big because smaller businesses haven't been smart enough to compete against, say, Wal-Mart. So find a way to enable your local small businesses to thrive. Do you really think Wal-Mart is so brilliant that their generic approach can't be beat in local markets with local knowledge? Most of their price advantage comes from advanced computer inventory and procurement programs. Are you really so incompetent that you can't put together an even smarter system for your local merchant? Computers, used right, can bring individuality back to American small businesses, and by covering their weaknesses, allow their natural strengths to come out against the larger, mostly stupid and blundering firms. Meanwhile those large firms can help develop the Third World by frantically exporting jobs to compete. That's not really a bad thing for them to do on the way out. And most of them, in the next 10-15 years, will end up where the big airlines are now. Computers make smaller-scale distribution of control just too much more efficient than top-down ever can be. But whining for guarantees of corporate jobs not only isn't the way to change things, but diverts talent that should be working to bring on the next wave of more open, more human-scaled businesses into work that supports the current corporate pyramids. Time to build to a new design. If we all take our business elsewhere
A friend recently got a $90 plane fair to France. Business class. And got bumped up to First because it was oversold. There was a computer error, but the airline had to honor the offer. Much of that flight was sold at the $90 price.
Right now, if that error's there, and the sale goes through, you can in principle track it back to whose error it is. If it was in an agent's system rather than the airline's, for instance, the airline could recover from the agent. So in Jaron's tomorrow, when things are matched by patterns instead of precisely, and an error happens, is it the case that no one exactly is responsible? Would you want to do business with someone whose systems just approximately, sort of matched up with yours? If yours are running on rough approximation rather than exactitude too, can a determination ever be made of ownership of a particular error?
Maybe it will all balance out. Maybe large errors will become less frequent as Jaron claims. But small errors, in being tolerated, will become an overhead of corruption. Perhaps a predictable overhead, as he claims, but what's to keep it from inflating over time, as programming practices become laxer because nobody can really get blamed for the errors any more, because they'll be at best even more difficult to localize than now, and at worst totally impossible to pin down?
Is:
1. No Windows tax
2. A simple cheatsheet listing the kernel options needed to support the hardware.
Then I'll boot it with a Knoppix CD, grab a Gentoo stage2 tar over the network, and do a chroot build of the rest of Gentoo (whose booth was consistently the most active in its sector of the floor yesterday).
So all I really want is hardware completely supported by standard kernel options, and a list of which options it depends on. And that's all any Linux user should want. If you aren't going to customize the OS, maybe Losedose really is better for you....
An understatement. There's no impartial court, so no opportunity. Still, a friend's band is called "The Nail Nippers," with some samples on an mp3 site. They keep getting e-mails from China and elsewhere in Asia offering to supply them with nail nippers. These letters are written in good enough English, apparently by someone using data mining software to find every e-mail address on every Website that mentioned "nail nippers" - since if a human had read my friend's site it's just obvious it's the band's name.
So, is every factory in China staffed by people who write sophisticated data mining software? Or is there some quiet central government program that is helping facilitate spam in order to build China's export businesses? There's a certain likelihood that really doing this (replying to the spam with dangerous keywords) would really be tripping up the Chinese government, not some innocent little factory spam manager.
Of course, if you don't share my view that the legitimate government of China sits in Taiwan you may still consider this a bad thing. Those of us who favor armed insurrection on behalf of Tibet, Fulun Gong and freedom generally might even welcome it if the illegitimate government got more involved in chasing its own tail, rather than focusing effectively on suppressing and killing Tibetans and those with unauthorized spiritual faiths.
Sure, the innocent could suffer the worst fates; but the innocent already do. It's the sort of tough ethical dilemma where a choice may spare two innocent lives, but take another.
One of the few sci-fi books in the last few decades to do the old trick of imagining a radical technology and working through the social consequences. The detective diction is a bit hokey, and has been done better in sci-fi - for instance by Jonathan Lethem in Gun, with Occassional Music - but the working out of a radical technological premise hasn't been.
If the results are similar to running SMP with two processors (and they look roughly similar), isn't a system with 2 Athlon-MPs still cheaper for a given performance level?
Most retailers are very curious about what you've been buying from their competitors. This cuts both ways here - a retailer may want to deactivate the transponders so the competition won't learn so much, but on the other had a retailer will be very interested in reading every available tag on you to correlate the tags with your current purchase - think of Amazon's data mining system, this stuff is really big in retailing right now. So if I sell you a pair of jeans, I really do want to know what brand of underwear you like, because maybe it's a line I don't carry, and if most of my jeans customers are wearing that line, I probably should stock it. Then if I can correlate underwear preference by credit card billing address ... you get the picture?
the way that AMD was able to basically clone the Intel cpu's
...was that Intel licensed the code to AMD so it would head off the likelihood of monopoly enforcement against it. That license expired a few years back, since when AMD has been doing its own development - but they started off doing Intel-sanctioned clones, and had to go to court to get Intel to back off on an attempt to keep them from applying what they'd learned from Intel's designs to their future chip development after the licensing agreement expired.
aside from the channels randomly going in and out, the ones that come through are most all thoroughly boring, unless your thing is sports ... several channels of sports.
... showing a bunch of network TV with the aspect ratio wrong, since they've stretched it sideways to fill those screens. At least the sound's not on.
Jet Blue is so TV-identified that they have a bunch of large flatscreens above the checkin counters in their JFK terminal
At least when we run out of oil we can park our jets and SUVs and watch TV. In Germany after midnight there's a channel with nothing but the view from the front of a car driving; another channel with the same from a train. Somebody better sign up the American rights.
SetEnvIf User-Agent ".*MSIE.*" \
nokeepalive ssl-unclean-shutdown \
downgrade-1.0 force-response-1.0
... which pretty much takes care of it.
able to stop even small rifle bullets
The Mongol Hordes wore silk vs. the European's armor. Being lighter they could move much faster, and when an arrow struck it would penetrate the skin but take the silk with it, so by pulling on the silk they could pull the arrow out cleanly.
By the late 80s the business press was saying, "We've got all this investment in information technology, yet productivity is stagnant." Then we hit the 90s, where the business press (and the Fed) suddenly believed that IT efficiency was justifying the market valuations bubble ... but that may be another story. The point for now is that it took about 10 years of having word processors and spreadsheets before business people learned to use them more efficiently than the typewriters and calculators they were already proficient with.
Computers in grade school only became a big thing in about 93-94, with the Net hype. It may just take a decade or so for new tools to supplant old. By comparison, under Elizabeth I her ministers declared that the musket would replace the crossbow. Never mind that the crossbow had won many wars for the English, shot more accurately, and reloaded much faster. Embracing what in principle is new, better technology is often in the short term a step back. Then the technology improves and, more importantly, the culture of use adapts to it.
So expect a bubble in apparent educational results in about two years.
Calling the scientific worldview "soul-less," he joined ... Henry James and many European-trained philosophers in spurning the modern emphasis on pragmatic experimentation, production, universal literacy,
Silly Brin, Henry's brother William defined pragmatism. They were both on the same page; both very much believed in the soul. Whether or not you do, it's not incompatible with pragmatism.
Wow! This could be a real reason to stay with AOL.... Who wouldn't take spam and popups over being tracked like that? (Can anyone confirm the poster's claim?)
It would be just plain perverse if Gentoo or Debian(/Knoppix) embraced the United Linux plan; and I can't imagine Red Hat going that road is bloody likely either.
Okay, so anyone releasing software will have an rpm version for Red Hat that will with any luck also work on Mandrake. And if the software is free and good it will quickly be ported to Gentoo and slowly to Debian. You can see how UL would wish everything would fit their own scheme, but it ain't gonna happen. So what's the noise about?
All we're lacking for widespread desktop acceptance is KDE 3.1 and strong programs in a few areas like household/small business accounting and desktop publishing - and having a few different Linuxes to port those to when they appear isn't gonna be the stumbling block.
Back in the early 80s (when Marc was in what grade?) the business press ran articles about how software was getting so good that soon we wouldn't need programmers, because writing software would itself be handled by software.
I predict that we'll have software that can write major software at just the same time as we have software that can write convincing novels. In both cases you have the task of putting together language that respresents a broad swath of messy reality.
Now, systems administration may be more like writing a good technical manual than writing a good novel. Ever notice how many good tech handbooks there are out there? You haven't? Maybe it's because novels are easier. Good systems administration is about leveraging people strengths with machine strengths, and vice versa. Automation without the human element is as uncompetitive as, well, the human element without automation these days.
The jaywalking thing lasted for about a week. First off, it turned out the law only provided a $3 fine; second, the police felt ridiculous enforcing it. The citizens never stopped jaywalking, didn't even let up.
Just supposing that most anyone who knows me would rank me as lawful and responsible (some might complain that I'm too-much so), and supposing you don't break into my home or attack me, but supposing I'm lawfully drunk in one of those localities where someone with a concealed firearm can be drinking ... am I really no threat to you? Or let's say you walk into the bar and you're the post office supervisor who I quite accurately know to have unfairly denied me a promotion over several years ... it's like stock market analysis, "Past performance is no guarantee of future returns."
The whole point of owning a gun is the psychological charge of knowing you have the power to blow something away. The design of the gun is indicative of whether the power is focused on wild animals or wild human beings. The law in my city is I can't carry a gun. When I lived in another state where people could carry guns I got threatened by them several times. The threats I've had here have been limited to human force. Any human male who can't imagine certain circumstances where he'd gladly - gun being available - blow certain other people away doesn't know himself well at all, and shouldn't be trusted with a handgun. And those who know how tempting it is to use a gun when it's there will respect laws against them.
So what's the dissing about? Maybe it has to do with my own reaction to the general notion that all the Web should be accessible to the disabled. Should we ruin the design of a site for 99 visitors just to make it more appealing to 1? Should ski resorts have to provide wheelchair accessible slopes? With the majority of our media currently focused on services for the mentally disabled, how much farther should we go? Is the ideal to produce a world in which everyone is equally crippled - or may as well be?
Those question aren't at issue here. We should be discussing how to make sites which desire to be accessible work. Right?
AT&T Broadband was acquired by Comcast in what was essentially a hostile takeover. AT&T had been considering spinning of the Broadband division, but decided not to. Comcast put together an offer that the AT&T board, under pressure from shareholders, felt they could not afford to refuse. Comcast as a result become by far the largest cable co, with a near monopoly on the East Coast (aside from NYC). Much of AT&T Broadband's staff is about to be fired, btw. Comcast wanted the customers, not the employees. They have no reason to embrace AT&T's attitude towards PVR; they'll be happy to scuttle it.
1. Mail fraud is when you use the mail to commit fraud. Does signing up someone via the Web or an 800 number constitute using the mail to commit fraud?
2. Many catalogs come to me that I never signed up for. Are each of these companies committing mail fraud? What about the people who sold them the lists that suggested I might be interested in their products?
3. If he's a millionaire, he is a prime candidate for a number of lists, and qualifies to receive a number of catalogs he may not presently be receiving. If it's not mail fraud for the catalog firms to buy lists of addresses of potential purchasers, is it fraud when people volunteer addresses of potential purchasers to them without asking for compensation?
4. Many catalog merchants ask for addresses of friends who might also like to receive their catalog. After receiving so much mail from this guy, can't we consider him our friend? Or do our friends commit mail fraud if they sign us up?
If you can more economically run a whitelist, have at it. In the kids.us case the domain registration comes with a centralized content-policing mechanism, paid for by the registration fees. (George Bush kids.us?) Anyway there's nothing to stop you from starting a value-added business to whitelist sites for children or people with, say, religious or political beliefs which are easily offended by reality - you've just got to come up with a revenue model. If you charge sites to be on your list, and then you de-list a site, be prepared for legal retaliation. So you probably want to charge the end users. Okay, how? Do you set up a large proxy server farm and give them a browser jimmied to run all its queries through that just as long as their dues are paid up? If this is the only browser installed for their kid's account on their system, this would probably work. And you'd also get valuable tracking data on where the kid went. But why are they going to pay you for this when you can just lock a browser to kids.us for free? The difference here is kids.us can avoid delisting lawsuits because the prez and federal law are behind them.
This may be off topic, then again ...
... which ought to be worth the $20 of Asian labor they're probably using on this. But then again it's $20 of American stocking/shipping labor for an outfit to send out separate parts ... so can we build this better ourselves @ this price point?
For those of use who might throw $200 at a utility box, can anyone recommend hardware (especially motherboard and power supply) that are of better proven quality than this WalMart dohingus, yet still come in with the same (incomplete) features for not more than $200? $250? Sure, we'd as soon screw the stuff together and install our fave distro