Yeah, the whole consumer thing is scarey. Seems like politicians more often voice their concerns for 'the consumer' than for 'the citizen.' And about the only concern they have for the latter is that (s)he be a 'productive citizen,' normally translated as playing a role in cranking out stuff for 'consumers.' It's as if our whole civilization is being reduced to an eating (consuming) disorder - except of course civilization is also having a problem (especially in the States) with its bowels.
If someone would keep track, I'd be happy to cast my future votes for whoever among politicians says 'the consumer' the least. Much as I like the physical world, 'the consumer' just translates to 'slave and addict to commercial output,' which doesn't quite equate to 'appreciator of what has real value in life.'
To bring this back to topic, the issue is enforcement of commercial value over real value in our stuff, which will further alienate commercial value from real value - which long term is not at all good for commercialism. The severe anti-material turn that produced the Middle (aka 'Dark') Ages was the longer-term reaction to the crassness of Roman commercial culture, towards the end of which citizenship was also devalued on the excuse of needing to strengthen the Emperor's hand to meet the threat from barbarian terror. ___
No new laws were made for railroads. 700 railroads went bankrupt in America in the last decades of the 1800's. No new laws were made for the Internet. How many dot.coms went bankrupt now?
How can we expect continued innovations in infrastructure if we don't right now commit ourselves that the next time an important advance comes around, we will immediately pass laws to be sure that those who invest their time and/or capital into building that infrastructure will all get their just share of the gains - and not end up impoverished while society happily rides the rails and surfs the Net? ___
Well, well. Just Wednesday put up a story on the Jazz Journalists Association 2002 Jazz Awards winners and linked from each of the winners to the best page I could Google for them. A few of those were on NPR. Those pages don't have any notice or request about not linking to them. So NPR expects, in making this empty "prohibited" claim, that someone like me would have even seen it? We are supposed to search sites we find a page to link to on to be sure that somewhere they haven't claimed links are "prohibited"? Fsck that! We sure won't do them the favor of any links in the future, but I'm not about to do additional work now to remove links that were made in the normal way and without any warning from them that they'd be offended.
___
How about we offer really slick freeware (or even better, 'shareware' that can easily not be paid for so folks think its of greater value) secretly set to go off on the Day of Reckoning?
Prior to that civilization-improving point of revelation let's also have a backdoor so we can get the inside scoop on the really nasty revelations. Free the truth!
___
Underneath all of this is a silly premise. Does anyone need instructions to figure out how to derail a train? Let's see, it runs on two rails which are attached to ties in a certain way. So you either move a rail, or undermine the roadbed, or foobar a track junction or switch, or put something on top of a rail that's big and strong enough to send the wheels off. If the German government is counting on keeping trains secure by not having instructions up on the Net, they must estimate that the people who'd derail them are unusually stupid - and yet they expect they'll know how to read?? Reminds me of an article in yesterday's NY Times about how the Germans are following around a guy they know financed Mohammed Atta, but won't arrest him because they have such a respect for individual rights there. Maybe Germans really are stupid enough to need a manual to figure out how to derail a train?? If you live in Germany, feel very secure. ___
Computergate usually has very low prices, but you need to know what you're getting. For instance for a brand name motherboard you'll do fine, and returns have never been a problem in my experience. They do have some no-brand cards and memory and cases that I've generally had good luck with - but not perfect luck.
When my dad retired from a job with a building materials manufacturer he bought a lot in Florida to have his dream house built. He hired a contractor with a good reputation who'd been building high-end homes in the coastal town for over a decade. Half-way into the project, he hears from subcontractors (who he talks to frequently because he's renting the house next to the site) that they haven't been paid. The contractor leaves town, is tracked to the Panhandle, but by that time has transferred all his wealth to his wife's name. My dad is out $100,000 that he'd given the contractor to pay the subcontractors. His lawyer informs him that Florida courts consider this a "contract dispute," a civil rather than criminal matter to steal $100,000 in this way. There's zero likelihood he'll ever collect if he brings a civil suit, since the contractor technically has no wealth, having passed the bag to his wife.
This was not the only project this contractor had going. He probably walked with similar sums from a half-dozen to a dozen other projects. So at least in Florida it looks like the cards are stacked so as to allow any contractor to at any point cash out with on the order of a million bucks without penalty. Thank the gods we don't have the kind of government which stifles initiative!
From the part you quoted, it looks like 32-bit *nix doesn't do anything much here but have a child (started for the request anyway) die - so the DOS potential is all that's there, and it's not there any more than from any other bogus request, right? Intel(AMD)/Linux folk just don't have a worry here?
Whew! That certainly takes care of all those freedom-of-the-press concerns. They only apply to press which is given away free!
and can be run in such a wide array of hardware and software environments
Now there you're onto something. The person who installs the software on the hardware effectively creates the warrantable device. Which, if this were the business model, would mean that/.'s parent could have gotten a fair premium selling those boxen, and no sane vendor would sell systems with MS OS installed.
___
It's time to merge the needs of the content industry with that of the containment industry - that is, of the RIAA members with the government. Towards that end, henceforth all playback equipment will record each time a content item is accessed, and a charge therefore will be presented on the accessor's next monthly federal return, to be split between the feds and the consumer-feeders. Then statistical correlations will be made between specific content ingestion and later anti-social acts, discounts given if those acts are of minimal actual impact but further the goals of the containment crew by creating the appearance of vast, looming criminal potential, and then apprehensions practiced first against those not credited with discounts (since government credibility is furthered among consumers by leaving live evil out there somewhere), followed by occassional samples from the propaganda-enhancing group drawn by lottery, so that "Progress is being made."
Studies show that most people listen to a new recording 12 times before putting it away. It's only fair that the recording they listen to 1200 times end up costing them 100 times as much, or else musicians will not have been rewarded in true proportion to their contribution to the consumer's consumptive life.
Why would you study at a place that's so stupid about using computers that they don't realize that having to grade code written on paper costs so much more in terms of faculty time that they should have sat you at computers. I mean, they could go to Wal-mart and buy those Lindows machines for 10 cents each, right? And they use paper??
Let's face it, new tech both pays off faster - if it's any good - and needs to be supplanted faster. So let's cut in half the patent term for computer-related patents with each Moore iteration. Boy will that be a spur to innovation! Get it out this year 'cause next year you won't own it for as long, if you don't file 'til then.
Walmart isn't really rooted in the technology industry
Walmart isn't identified with consumer technology, but in retailing they've long been known as the most aggressive embracers of tech. They were the first to force their suppliers to all install computer systems integrated with their own. It's a large part of how they've succeeded - the difference between Walmart and Kmart being that at Walmart what you went there for is in stock, because their computer connections with suppliers are really very effective and efficient.
So if they brought in any of their own tech people to decide whether to sell Lindows, they brought in folks quite capable of assessing it as technology.
On the other hand, Walmart will sell just about any cheap crap. When I lived in the mountains of North Carolina 20 years back, the Walmart there had a whole isle of bottles of different brands of "instant engine rebuilder" for your car. And this in an area where every teenage boy could really rebuild an engine. Who was buying this stuff then? The girls?
___
The point is that Bush's administration is much less friendly to free trade than Clinton's. This isn't a matter of exchanging favors for money or votes, but of principled belief in following the best course for the country economically. Bush, much more than Clinton, doesn't care about the country's long-term economic viability because no matter how bad it gets people of his class will have fine lives. That's why he does nothing about global warming - his friends can just buy new ranches in Canada. And that's why he can't be counted on not to sell out to MS - his friends consider Gates a sterling member of their private club.
___
It's not like all the possible extensions are used up. If an island with a few hundred people can have its own TLD, why not let South Africa be associated with two, the current.za for people who don't want to go through a corrupt government monopoly, and something appropriate for those who want to show pride in their government by using a domain it controls?
That said, if this dispute can be used to help destroy ICANN, that should be encouraged. ___
Under current conditions, anyone who can get a good SDSL connection (for instance, Covad/Speakeasy, available in all the major population centers) can, for a bit over $100 a month, run a medium traffic Web server, ftp, a listserv, dns.... You can't do that over cable, and you can't do that over telco ADSL.
Now, you can do that by renting space at a server farm somewhere, but then you'll also need broadband to administer that at all efficiently. On the low end you can match that $100 a month, but in the middle range - say you want to have lots of content available, multiple URLs, custom configurations of Apache and whatever, you're talking about something over $200 a month for a dedicated server, plus your own broadband - tripling the price. So you significantly raise the bar for citizen participation in Internet publication. Where's the public interest in this? It's like giving the dominant newspaper control of the price of paper and ink.
As a small note: cable isn't even in the picture if you don't have cable - and some of us out here have no interest in $35 a month for basic cable - the effective cost of cable broadband is that much higher if you don't want that crap. ___
Let's space shift and put the commercials in the bathroom. Just have a little flat screen and a speaker next to the toilet with a motion sensor, and then whatever commercials are associated with the programming you watch start scrolling when you enter the room. Put a pressure sensor on the toilet seat, and appropriately themed adverts could play as you sit down. Get one of those fancy Japanese toilets that perform instant stool analysis, feed that back to the sponsors to help them determine your medical and dietary needs and vices, and get hours of special bonus viewing! Install a proctoscope and get even more! ___
The posts modded at 3 and up just now make no mention of what for me is the central point here:
The purchase was made with the stolen identity of the reporter. Therefore the right to privacy to be protected is the reporter's own. Therefore he should have full rights to the details of the transaction. Period. Any party withholding those details is complicit in the theft of his identity, and aiding a criminal. They should go to jail, for a long time.
Ran into a similar situation with AOL a few months back. Someone stole a credit card number of a housemate to buy a bunch of porno and sign up for an AOL account. AOL absolutely refused to provide any information - it required redundant effort just to get them to cancel the account and stop trying to collect on it. Why should someone who has stolen your identity have any right to privacy in what they do with your identity? Is it your identity, or not? Why should any corporation have any right to withhold from you information on what's been done using your own identity? Shouldn't you have an absolute right to full disclosure of all information that can help you protect and defend your own good name? ___
pornography is defined not by the sexual content, but the manner in which the content is presented. This is what differentiates the Bible, which has a whole book devoted to romantic love and sex, from pornography
What, you mean the "Your breasts are like fawns" stuff? So if there's five minutes of romantic love in the middle of a snuff film that makes it just dandy? Because let's face it, the Bible is almost literally a snuff film - Abraham doesn't quite snuff Isaac, but YHWH wipes out a few entire cities (don't look back!), and we need to consider that this is the primary ancient religious source for al Queda, not to mention both the Israelis and the Palestinians, not to mention whoever the folks were who took out Dresden and Hiroshima.
Let's make a deal. I won't object to the Bible and Koran and other such truly obscene and dangerous influences being purchased and made available with public funds if you don't try to censor access through Internet terminals to content which doesn't cost the public a thing. Fair enough?
To: FBI Field Offices
From: John Ashcroft
Subject: Time to make new friends
As many of you are aware, our righteous pursuit of organized crime in Boston has led to unwarranted criticism since our agents had to become one with the Mob in order to fully develop our intelligence sources within it. We will henceforth improve our public relations posture by returning to the policy of J. Edgar 'There-Is-No-Mob-in-America' Hoover, and refocus on developing intelligence sources within the Islamic Fundamentalist, Catholic Pedophile, and Hippie Treehugging communities.
Pursuant to the new policies, deep cover may require our good agents to occassionally take part in IF and CP activities in order to go after the true heads of those nefarious movements. However, special care must be taken not to go too far.
Get busy! And remember, the sacrifices freedom requires may seem at time distasteful, but to guard the largest number of the American citizenry, we must sometimes prove our trustworthiness to our intelligence sources by aiding in the sacrifice of lesser numbers, such as those jailed and killed to protect our Boston associates. It is a small price to pay.
Remember to wipe the Crisco from your foreheads before undertaking undercover activities. We must not gloat that we are the annointed ones.
___
... different people have different tastes, and just because you don't like Britney doesn't rule out the fact that a lot of people do.
Taste isn't something that people just have, it's something that develops in relation to what they're exposed to. The British Invasion of the mid 60s happened because because the kids who made up its troops had been exposed not just to Elvis but to Chicago blues, and so developed their taste by working the stuff out on their own instruments and adding their local dance hall sensibility. Then - what almost never happens today - other people figured out how to promote and sell it. The white American audience, already with a taste for pop and rock, developed a taste for what the British kids were doing because there was something obviously stronger and more resonant to it - which turns out to have largely been their direct sourcing of the blues. The taste of the public and musicians moved upwards in linked spirals, with an associated spiral of marketing and promotion.
Taste is no excuse. Bad taste on the part of the public is a failure of marketing. Bad taste on the part of musicians is a failure of distribution of authentic influences. There are many different kinds of beauty, but ugliness is all the same. And there's more money, in the longer term, to be made by selling the quality product - even if you're always selling against the stupidity of the market, even if short-term pure exploitation and hype seem to be winning the game.
The real problem is that higher standards of taste aren't confined to the aesthetics of mass marketed art, but extend into standards for politics and stewardship of the Earth. That's why the music industry was reined in in the early 70s, and why children today are raised to the equivalent of the Monkees and the Partridges, exclusively.
Solaris 9 is getting great reviews. Between the strengths of the traditional open source community and IBM's resources, do you see a point in the next several years where you expect Linux to surpass Solaris in all of its core strengths? Or does Solaris have some unique values which will allow Sun to continue to position itself to advantage, at least for some applications? Please answer this as a technical rather than marketing question.
___
Maybe it's because I'm in NYC and the national press is headquartered here, but I was amazed at how much was being done not just by the national networks and newsmagazines, but even by the NY Times to puff up SM. The Times not only featured it on the front of every possible section of the paper over several weeks (including such tripe as a profile of the family currently living at SM's fictional address in Queens), but gave Stan Lee Op-Ed space to gloat about how cool he's always been right when the movie opened.
And the press has been cold to Lucas - which might be partly because all the movies since the first one up until now have sucked (the first understood the attractions of classic sci-fi, the rest haven't). Or could it be because Lucas has put out a movie that questions imperial pretensions?
Isn't the audience for SM essentially the same one as supports the boy bands - that other revolution in confectionary taste among the young? Is anyone claiming SM is more than cute, mindless escapism? Nothing wrong with it being that; but hardly anything to celebrate about either, all press to the contrary. ___
Slashdot Mirror
In Myanmar "General Ne Win helped speed his own downfall ... by suddenly declaring much of the Burmese currency worthless and replacing it with bank notes in denominations divisible by his lucky number, nine. Riots followed."
___
Can you imagine the off-road possibilities of Mars?
___
Yeah, the whole consumer thing is scarey. Seems like politicians more often voice their concerns for 'the consumer' than for 'the citizen.' And about the only concern they have for the latter is that (s)he be a 'productive citizen,' normally translated as playing a role in cranking out stuff for 'consumers.' It's as if our whole civilization is being reduced to an eating (consuming) disorder - except of course civilization is also having a problem (especially in the States) with its bowels.
If someone would keep track, I'd be happy to cast my future votes for whoever among politicians says 'the consumer' the least. Much as I like the physical world, 'the consumer' just translates to 'slave and addict to commercial output,' which doesn't quite equate to 'appreciator of what has real value in life.'
To bring this back to topic, the issue is enforcement of commercial value over real value in our stuff, which will further alienate commercial value from real value - which long term is not at all good for commercialism. The severe anti-material turn that produced the Middle (aka 'Dark') Ages was the longer-term reaction to the crassness of Roman commercial culture, towards the end of which citizenship was also devalued on the excuse of needing to strengthen the Emperor's hand to meet the threat from barbarian terror.
___
No new laws were made for railroads. 700 railroads went bankrupt in America in the last decades of the 1800's. No new laws were made for the Internet. How many dot.coms went bankrupt now?
How can we expect continued innovations in infrastructure if we don't right now commit ourselves that the next time an important advance comes around, we will immediately pass laws to be sure that those who invest their time and/or capital into building that infrastructure will all get their just share of the gains - and not end up impoverished while society happily rides the rails and surfs the Net?
___
Well, well. Just Wednesday put up a story on the Jazz Journalists Association 2002 Jazz Awards winners and linked from each of the winners to the best page I could Google for them. A few of those were on NPR. Those pages don't have any notice or request about not linking to them. So NPR expects, in making this empty "prohibited" claim, that someone like me would have even seen it? We are supposed to search sites we find a page to link to on to be sure that somewhere they haven't claimed links are "prohibited"? Fsck that! We sure won't do them the favor of any links in the future, but I'm not about to do additional work now to remove links that were made in the normal way and without any warning from them that they'd be offended.
___
Prior to that civilization-improving point of revelation let's also have a backdoor so we can get the inside scoop on the really nasty revelations. Free the truth!
___
Underneath all of this is a silly premise. Does anyone need instructions to figure out how to derail a train? Let's see, it runs on two rails which are attached to ties in a certain way. So you either move a rail, or undermine the roadbed, or foobar a track junction or switch, or put something on top of a rail that's big and strong enough to send the wheels off. If the German government is counting on keeping trains secure by not having instructions up on the Net, they must estimate that the people who'd derail them are unusually stupid - and yet they expect they'll know how to read?? Reminds me of an article in yesterday's NY Times about how the Germans are following around a guy they know financed Mohammed Atta, but won't arrest him because they have such a respect for individual rights there. Maybe Germans really are stupid enough to need a manual to figure out how to derail a train?? If you live in Germany, feel very secure.
___
Computergate usually has very low prices, but you need to know what you're getting. For instance for a brand name motherboard you'll do fine, and returns have never been a problem in my experience. They do have some no-brand cards and memory and cases that I've generally had good luck with - but not perfect luck.
When my dad retired from a job with a building materials manufacturer he bought a lot in Florida to have his dream house built. He hired a contractor with a good reputation who'd been building high-end homes in the coastal town for over a decade. Half-way into the project, he hears from subcontractors (who he talks to frequently because he's renting the house next to the site) that they haven't been paid. The contractor leaves town, is tracked to the Panhandle, but by that time has transferred all his wealth to his wife's name. My dad is out $100,000 that he'd given the contractor to pay the subcontractors. His lawyer informs him that Florida courts consider this a "contract dispute," a civil rather than criminal matter to steal $100,000 in this way. There's zero likelihood he'll ever collect if he brings a civil suit, since the contractor technically has no wealth, having passed the bag to his wife.
This was not the only project this contractor had going. He probably walked with similar sums from a half-dozen to a dozen other projects. So at least in Florida it looks like the cards are stacked so as to allow any contractor to at any point cash out with on the order of a million bucks without penalty. Thank the gods we don't have the kind of government which stifles initiative!
From the part you quoted, it looks like 32-bit *nix doesn't do anything much here but have a child (started for the request anyway) die - so the DOS potential is all that's there, and it's not there any more than from any other bogus request, right? Intel(AMD)/Linux folk just don't have a worry here?
Whew! That certainly takes care of all those freedom-of-the-press concerns. They only apply to press which is given away free!
and can be run in such a wide array of hardware and software environments
Now there you're onto something. The person who installs the software on the hardware effectively creates the warrantable device. Which, if this were the business model, would mean that /.'s parent could have gotten a fair premium selling those boxen, and no sane vendor would sell systems with MS OS installed.
___
It's time to merge the needs of the content industry with that of the containment industry - that is, of the RIAA members with the government. Towards that end, henceforth all playback equipment will record each time a content item is accessed, and a charge therefore will be presented on the accessor's next monthly federal return, to be split between the feds and the consumer-feeders. Then statistical correlations will be made between specific content ingestion and later anti-social acts, discounts given if those acts are of minimal actual impact but further the goals of the containment crew by creating the appearance of vast, looming criminal potential, and then apprehensions practiced first against those not credited with discounts (since government credibility is furthered among consumers by leaving live evil out there somewhere), followed by occassional samples from the propaganda-enhancing group drawn by lottery, so that "Progress is being made."
Studies show that most people listen to a new recording 12 times before putting it away. It's only fair that the recording they listen to 1200 times end up costing them 100 times as much, or else musicians will not have been rewarded in true proportion to their contribution to the consumer's consumptive life.
Why would you study at a place that's so stupid about using computers that they don't realize that having to grade code written on paper costs so much more in terms of faculty time that they should have sat you at computers. I mean, they could go to Wal-mart and buy those Lindows machines for 10 cents each, right? And they use paper??
Let's face it, new tech both pays off faster - if it's any good - and needs to be supplanted faster. So let's cut in half the patent term for computer-related patents with each Moore iteration. Boy will that be a spur to innovation! Get it out this year 'cause next year you won't own it for as long, if you don't file 'til then.
Walmart isn't identified with consumer technology, but in retailing they've long been known as the most aggressive embracers of tech. They were the first to force their suppliers to all install computer systems integrated with their own. It's a large part of how they've succeeded - the difference between Walmart and Kmart being that at Walmart what you went there for is in stock, because their computer connections with suppliers are really very effective and efficient.
So if they brought in any of their own tech people to decide whether to sell Lindows, they brought in folks quite capable of assessing it as technology.
On the other hand, Walmart will sell just about any cheap crap. When I lived in the mountains of North Carolina 20 years back, the Walmart there had a whole isle of bottles of different brands of "instant engine rebuilder" for your car. And this in an area where every teenage boy could really rebuild an engine. Who was buying this stuff then? The girls?
___
The point is that Bush's administration is much less friendly to free trade than Clinton's. This isn't a matter of exchanging favors for money or votes, but of principled belief in following the best course for the country economically. Bush, much more than Clinton, doesn't care about the country's long-term economic viability because no matter how bad it gets people of his class will have fine lives. That's why he does nothing about global warming - his friends can just buy new ranches in Canada. And that's why he can't be counted on not to sell out to MS - his friends consider Gates a sterling member of their private club.
___
It's not like all the possible extensions are used up. If an island with a few hundred people can have its own TLD, why not let South Africa be associated with two, the current .za for people who don't want to go through a corrupt government monopoly, and something appropriate for those who want to show pride in their government by using a domain it controls?
That said, if this dispute can be used to help destroy ICANN, that should be encouraged.
___
Under current conditions, anyone who can get a good SDSL connection (for instance, Covad/Speakeasy, available in all the major population centers) can, for a bit over $100 a month, run a medium traffic Web server, ftp, a listserv, dns.... You can't do that over cable, and you can't do that over telco ADSL.
Now, you can do that by renting space at a server farm somewhere, but then you'll also need broadband to administer that at all efficiently. On the low end you can match that $100 a month, but in the middle range - say you want to have lots of content available, multiple URLs, custom configurations of Apache and whatever, you're talking about something over $200 a month for a dedicated server, plus your own broadband - tripling the price. So you significantly raise the bar for citizen participation in Internet publication. Where's the public interest in this? It's like giving the dominant newspaper control of the price of paper and ink.
As a small note: cable isn't even in the picture if you don't have cable - and some of us out here have no interest in $35 a month for basic cable - the effective cost of cable broadband is that much higher if you don't want that crap.
___
Let's space shift and put the commercials in the bathroom. Just have a little flat screen and a speaker next to the toilet with a motion sensor, and then whatever commercials are associated with the programming you watch start scrolling when you enter the room. Put a pressure sensor on the toilet seat, and appropriately themed adverts could play as you sit down. Get one of those fancy Japanese toilets that perform instant stool analysis, feed that back to the sponsors to help them determine your medical and dietary needs and vices, and get hours of special bonus viewing! Install a proctoscope and get even more!
___
The posts modded at 3 and up just now make no mention of what for me is the central point here:
The purchase was made with the stolen identity of the reporter. Therefore the right to privacy to be protected is the reporter's own. Therefore he should have full rights to the details of the transaction. Period. Any party withholding those details is complicit in the theft of his identity, and aiding a criminal. They should go to jail, for a long time.
Ran into a similar situation with AOL a few months back. Someone stole a credit card number of a housemate to buy a bunch of porno and sign up for an AOL account. AOL absolutely refused to provide any information - it required redundant effort just to get them to cancel the account and stop trying to collect on it. Why should someone who has stolen your identity have any right to privacy in what they do with your identity? Is it your identity, or not? Why should any corporation have any right to withhold from you information on what's been done using your own identity? Shouldn't you have an absolute right to full disclosure of all information that can help you protect and defend your own good name?
___
What, you mean the "Your breasts are like fawns" stuff? So if there's five minutes of romantic love in the middle of a snuff film that makes it just dandy? Because let's face it, the Bible is almost literally a snuff film - Abraham doesn't quite snuff Isaac, but YHWH wipes out a few entire cities (don't look back!), and we need to consider that this is the primary ancient religious source for al Queda, not to mention both the Israelis and the Palestinians, not to mention whoever the folks were who took out Dresden and Hiroshima.
Let's make a deal. I won't object to the Bible and Koran and other such truly obscene and dangerous influences being purchased and made available with public funds if you don't try to censor access through Internet terminals to content which doesn't cost the public a thing. Fair enough?
From: John Ashcroft
Subject: Time to make new friends
As many of you are aware, our righteous pursuit of organized crime in Boston has led to unwarranted criticism since our agents had to become one with the Mob in order to fully develop our intelligence sources within it. We will henceforth improve our public relations posture by returning to the policy of J. Edgar 'There-Is-No-Mob-in-America' Hoover, and refocus on developing intelligence sources within the Islamic Fundamentalist, Catholic Pedophile, and Hippie Treehugging communities.
Pursuant to the new policies, deep cover may require our good agents to occassionally take part in IF and CP activities in order to go after the true heads of those nefarious movements. However, special care must be taken not to go too far.
Get busy! And remember, the sacrifices freedom requires may seem at time distasteful, but to guard the largest number of the American citizenry, we must sometimes prove our trustworthiness to our intelligence sources by aiding in the sacrifice of lesser numbers, such as those jailed and killed to protect our Boston associates. It is a small price to pay.
Remember to wipe the Crisco from your foreheads before undertaking undercover activities. We must not gloat that we are the annointed ones.
___
Taste isn't something that people just have, it's something that develops in relation to what they're exposed to. The British Invasion of the mid 60s happened because because the kids who made up its troops had been exposed not just to Elvis but to Chicago blues, and so developed their taste by working the stuff out on their own instruments and adding their local dance hall sensibility. Then - what almost never happens today - other people figured out how to promote and sell it. The white American audience, already with a taste for pop and rock, developed a taste for what the British kids were doing because there was something obviously stronger and more resonant to it - which turns out to have largely been their direct sourcing of the blues. The taste of the public and musicians moved upwards in linked spirals, with an associated spiral of marketing and promotion.
Taste is no excuse. Bad taste on the part of the public is a failure of marketing. Bad taste on the part of musicians is a failure of distribution of authentic influences. There are many different kinds of beauty, but ugliness is all the same. And there's more money, in the longer term, to be made by selling the quality product - even if you're always selling against the stupidity of the market, even if short-term pure exploitation and hype seem to be winning the game.
The real problem is that higher standards of taste aren't confined to the aesthetics of mass marketed art, but extend into standards for politics and stewardship of the Earth. That's why the music industry was reined in in the early 70s, and why children today are raised to the equivalent of the Monkees and the Partridges, exclusively.
Solaris 9 is getting great reviews. Between the strengths of the traditional open source community and IBM's resources, do you see a point in the next several years where you expect Linux to surpass Solaris in all of its core strengths? Or does Solaris have some unique values which will allow Sun to continue to position itself to advantage, at least for some applications? Please answer this as a technical rather than marketing question.
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Maybe it's because I'm in NYC and the national press is headquartered here, but I was amazed at how much was being done not just by the national networks and newsmagazines, but even by the NY Times to puff up SM. The Times not only featured it on the front of every possible section of the paper over several weeks (including such tripe as a profile of the family currently living at SM's fictional address in Queens), but gave Stan Lee Op-Ed space to gloat about how cool he's always been right when the movie opened.
And the press has been cold to Lucas - which might be partly because all the movies since the first one up until now have sucked (the first understood the attractions of classic sci-fi, the rest haven't). Or could it be because Lucas has put out a movie that questions imperial pretensions?
Isn't the audience for SM essentially the same one as supports the boy bands - that other revolution in confectionary taste among the young? Is anyone claiming SM is more than cute, mindless escapism? Nothing wrong with it being that; but hardly anything to celebrate about either, all press to the contrary.
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