That's not self-censorship. That's the ad network censoring the advertisers. And that's only because tools like Adblock were starting to come into play and the ad networks realized that they'd do better placing more subtle ads that people wouldn't just immediately kill than losing the eyeballs all together.
Of course, it helped that Google's advertising program came along around the same time period and was incredibly successful without resorting to being horrible, leading the way for other ad networks to follow suit.
I'm sure that's by no means a complete history of the move away from eye- and ear-destroying ads, but its the two most obvious factors, give or take a couple of years of settling and whatnot.
As a parent I am rather insistent that I am a better judge than my 7 year old of what he should see.
One would hope that's the case at least.
I would like a filter flag that allows me to ensure my kids are not exposed to gratuitous violence and/or pornography
So you're shirking the responsibility you just claimed. You're essentially making the claim that Wikipedia's filter is a better judge of what your child should see than either him or yourself.
I would like him to be able to access Wikipedia unsupervised
And there's the meat of it. You want to give your kid the internet, but you don't trust him (rightfully so) to judge content.. but you also can't be bothered to do it yourself. So you want everyone else on the internet to spend their time and resources essentially babysitting your kid for you.
If you want your kid to be safe on the internet, then monitor his usage, just as you would (hopefully) monitor him in any other public setting.
all without a single corporation as the driving force.
I said resources of, not initiative of. And I specifically mentioned that the government can fill this role, but there's downsides to that as well.
Mozart wrote his operas, Shakespeare wrote his plays
So? Great as they may be culturally, they're not exactly resource intensive on the same scale that building a 747 or implementing a nation-wide cell network is.
Nobunaga conquered Japan, Genghis Kahn ruled an empire, Rome took Europe, the Mings handled China
Now we're getting closer. There's no doubt that government bodies (generally in the form of empires or dictators) have managed to scrape together the resources needed to create amazing projects. Though I'd have gone with examples such as the pyramids or the great wall.
Ogg invented fire
And... we lost it again. Aside from the fact that humans didn't "invent" fire, Ogg figuring out how to control it is still a single person -- hardly resource-intensive, no matter how great the outcome.
without a single patent or copyright protection
Errr come again? What does patents and copyrights have to do with this argument? Patents and copyrights are a tool (a very abused tool these days to be sure, but just a tool nonetheless.) They have zero bearing on the fact that large projects need large amounts of resources and more importantly, a structure in place to organize those resources into a functional system capable of doing great things.
The problem with any of those is that they affect J.Random employee far more than they affect the people who actually caused the problems. Firing the entire executive staff? Well they'll have a temper tantrum over losing their huge bonus for the year, but chances are they've already got more banked than us average people earn in a lifetime so while they might not like it, it won't particularly harm them unless they've been totally stupid with their money.
On the other hand, a full corporate shakeup rarely bodes well for the folk in the trenches. The odd few lucky ones might get promotions, but for the vast majority of any decently large corporation, the best they can hope for is status quo. And more than likely they'll at least be reassigned if not outright laid off.
Same goes for slapping shareholders around. The big guys (the ones you really want to hurt) will just shrug it off and hide the loss behind a hedge fund. The people you'll actually hurt are the people with $10-20k in a retirement fund that they're trying to grow. The stock market is already pretty stacked against anyone who can't do sub-millisecond trading, there's no reason to add even more of a burden on those people. Stopping trading all together in particular would be a fairly horrible thing to do (the stock price would be tanking and they wouldn't even be able to bail on it.)
I could see fining shareholders as a little less painful -- especially if you limited it to only fining people with more than say, 5% (or even 1%) stock in the company. That would protect the little guys who are just trying their luck, while still applying some damages to the people who have enough say that they should at least be getting heard even if the board/CEO ignores them.
And for your extreme "death penalty" case. That's probably never going to fly. We already refuse to let corporations die of their own free will (see: $700b bailout and "too big to fail" actions) so the chance that we'd go out and kill them off ourselves is pretty damned small. And with good reason. Killing off a patent troll that has 3 employees and a small novel full of consulting lawyers probably won't hurt the world too much, but killing off a major industrial manufacturer can easily dispense with thousands or even tens of thousands of jobs. Again, its the little guy working the lines who gets really fucked, and they don't have any say in these matters -- they're just trying to provide for themselves and their family.
Penalizing corporations is, generally speaking, a pretty difficult thing to do. Even without the "corporations are people" concept, the fact of the matter is that the people who have enough power to make serious decisions are also the least likely people to be seriously injured (financially..) when the shit hits the fan.
I've got no idea how to deal with that. I can't even suggest some sort of utopia where corporations don't exist, because there are many aspects of the modern world that simply couldn't be done without the kind of resources that a Ford or a General Electric can bring to the table. The government could fill in somewhat, but rampant communism hasn't exactly proven itself to be a shining beacon of hope and prosperity.
corporations should not be able to do anything unless explicitly permitted
Errr, that's going a little too far. Innovation thrives on breaking the rules.
What's needed is some oversight applied when such innovation affects things like the global economy or national health (as in smoking or fast food.)
There's lots of people with the foresight to see these problems coming before they're unstoppable, and there's a good number of people with the power to do something about them. Unfortunately its fairly rare that both traits are embodied in the same person.
And with the past few decades, the US in particular has pushed harder and harder for less regulation and oversight. I even saw one/. poster a few days ago suggest that market failures are caused by oversight and that deregulating everything would somehow stop greedy people (/"people") from trying to fuck everyone over for a little short-term profit.
Not to suggest that there isn't plenty of bad regulations laying around, but blind faith in capitalism is just as stupid as blind faith in communism. Extremes of any type rarely hold up in our world, and that includes the realm of economic policy.
Abolishing government from regulating the market would heal the economy.
Yes, people would all be completely honest if it wasn't for that damned government getting in the way!
Regulations (at least good regulations, and I certainly won't claim there aren't bad ones) are there for a reason -- somebody at some point tried to game the system and had to be stopped lest they crush the entire damned thing for their own benefit. Many of the financial regulations were put in place after the great depression to prevent just this such a thing happening.
But half a century later, we've all forgotten the teachings of history and start wondering why we've got so many damned rules and why the government is sticking their nose in where it shouldn't be. And sure enough, huge economic booms result. For a while. Then reality comes and slaps us in the back of the head with 2008, which might have been forestalled in the US but is by no means cleared up yet. And guess what the end result will once we do finally get our globally collective shit back together? A bunch more regulations to prevent such things from happening in the future (and hopefully the world leaders in 2100 will pay more attention to their forefathers!)
IMO, organized workloads should be split into at least two categories, regulatorily speaking: Low and high barrier to entry.
Anything with a low barrier to entry -- let the free market do its thing. If existing systems don't work, somebody will just set up a new one.
Anything with a high barrier to entry -- regulate the fuck out of it. Hell, even make it a crown corporation (especially if its an essential service like water or power.)
The free market fails when the barrier to entry is too large for competition to realistically arise. Its about damned time people recognized that fact. If entering a market costs $100b before you've even started to advertise, then its damned well not going to be competitive. The only people/organizations who would be able to enter such a market are the same ones who have no desire to rock the boat, and any existing players are necessarily going to be in at least a loose collusion by the fact that there's so few of them -- an "everybody knows everybody" situation.
Raw capitalism is a great solution to a lot of business problems, but its not a silver bullet. There's a point beyond which it just doesn't scale terribly well.
And is there any actual reason for why you would not pay for Visual Studio?
Uhh the obvious one? $500 per seat is a fair chunk of money for a small business, never mind for an individual.
And if you live up here in Canada, they charge us like $700 for some bloody reason (at least, if the pricing remains consistent with VS2010) even though the dollar's relatively close to par and its a digital download. No idea how badly they screw other countries.
There's a major upside to current identification methods requiring time and effort -- it relegates their usage to only those people with the resources available to identify you.
With a chip system, even if the government by some miracle of fortune managed to keep their database secure (which is highly unlikely,) it wouldn't be long before someone realizes that the encrypted message itself is necessarily unique, and therefore could easily be used to start generated an (effectively unencrypted) database without even bothering to break the encryption.
Of course, there's always the "nothing to hide; nothing to fear" argument, but everybody has something they want to (or need to) hide from somebody.
The "nothing to hide.." argument stops being useful once you expand it beyond basic law enforcement duties (where you only would need to hide criminal behavior.) But unfortunately people get judged by more than the law in everyday life (bosses, significant others, family members, classmates, your pastor/rabbi/whatever if you're into that kind of thing, etc.) Expand that set far enough and you'll eventually hit somebody you'd rather not explain that drunken night from 15 years ago to.
It already is a problem with Linux in a sense. How many users do you think really go through the entire package list and ensure they only install the things they need?
At least Linux gives you the option, and most of the stuff wouldn't be classified as "crapware" in the same sense as those bloody 30 day Norton Virus trials, but it amounts to the same thing in the end for non-power users, which is the vast majority of all desktop users.
More like refunding Microsoft (part of) the difference between an OEM version and a retail version. Of course some portion of that $99 will be going to the tech monkey who has to run the de-crapping software (possibly a large portion if they go to the trouble of backing up your data, installing fresh, and attempting to restore everything properly).
And you probably don't get the cleaned install discs, so there's the added bonus that if you ever need to restore your laptop you'll have to pay them again.
Or you could just go Apple as the article suggests, and pay the $500 brand name tax up front.
- All VCs are stupid. Sure they're all greedy in the sense that they want to realize their ROI as soon as possible, but I'm assuming most of them do some research before jumping on the buzzword bandwagon. Otherwise they'd quickly run out of money to invest.
- Social media is an infinite market. Sure its large, but its not infinite. New players are already starting to struggle. Look at Google+ for an example. Even with all of the power and recognition (not to mention financing) of the Google brand behind it, there's report after report of how few people can be bothered keeping two social media sites up to date.
- Ignoring the "social" part of "social media." This somewhat ties in with the previous point, but essentially it amounts to the fact that social networks require a fairly large critical mass of users before they can really take off. Take a look at instant messengers for example. Almost every (localized) market is dominated by one of the four major IMs (MSN, ICQ, AIM, Yahoo). Not only is there not really any room for a new IM, the four big ones even have a hard time encroaching on each others' territory. Aided somewhat by multi-network clients such as Trillian, but still the large majority of IM users stick with what they've got and refuse to switch because its what all of their friends are using. Social media type sites are in the same situation.
- Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it makes the big assumption that money is the only motivator in Silicon Valley. I would seriously question that assumption. If nothing else, somebody's got to be building the machines that these sites on running on!
Not really. It would be more akin to removing the entire head of the penis rather than just the foreskin.
(Though of course any direct comparison is somewhat flawed because well, boys and girls are just different down there.)
As for the principle. Not even close. Circumcision has at least some benefit (though potentially some downsides too -- medical science is still fighting that one out.)
A girl having her clitoris removed on the other hand gets zero benefit to go along with losing much of their sexual pleasure.
The -only- purpose for female castration is to reduce their sexual pleasure to a low enough level that they won't feel the desire to have sex with men. (Of course they'd still sleep with their husband, but generally out of duty rather than sexual desire.)
I can't speak to how well it actually works (sex is about a lot more than physical intercourse, after all) but that's the general idea behind it. (Or original idea in any case.. social norms can keep atrocities like that hanging around long after their original purpose has been forgotten and I wouldn't hazard to guess at the current status of it in any particular country.)
Just my ramblin's, but off the top of my head I'd say its a combination of:
- Shiite and Sunni aren't considered separate countries, so a lot of international politics can ignore that (relatively internal) dispute. In particular, Isreal's close relations with the US enhances our notion of a political border dividing two distinct cultures.
- Most non-Muslims wouldn't know the distinction between Shiite and Sunni (never mind any of the smaller branches) so a lot of us just see "Muslim kills Muslim" rather than "Shiite kills Sunni" or "Sunni kills Shiite".
- And of course, just general bad reporting over here. Even "Muslim kills Muslim" is less likely to be seen than "Terrorist kills Innocent," based mostly on the geographic location of the incident and usually regardless of the intention or innocence of either party.
There's a big difference between blocking sites for copyright infringement (no matter how poorly thought out) and blocking sites for political reasons.
Nobody's seriously bashing China for blocking porn. They bash China for silencing websites that go against the government, especially when there's no hard and fast rules about exactly what's illegal, leading to a system where something that's been fine for years can suddenly get you jailed (or even dead) if somebody with a bit of power happens to take offense to it one day. And there's little legal recourse or oversight to protect citizens against these abuses.
Being able to bitch about your government without worrying for your personal safety is considered a pretty fundamental freedom in the west (particularly in the US, but most if not all of the developed world, and even a lot of the un/under-developed world agrees. Its that whole freedom of speech thing.)
Also, China is definitely not the only country we deride for lack of freedoms.. they just happen to be in the news a lot (and in the minds of political and corporate leaders a lot) due to their increasing economic power in the world, so we end up hearing about them a lot. Even the abuses in China are small compared to say, North Korea for example.
You could consider a people who think in terms of geometry to be sure: 1point, 2line, 3triangle, 4square, 5pentagon, etc.
The problem with any of these representations is that they don't scale. Its easy to tell a triangle from a square, but its not easy to tell a 999,999-sided object from a 999,998-sided object.
I've read (and it was years ago, so I certainly don't have a reference!) that pretty much all cultures started off where this article talks about -- separations by coarse grouping.. "one", "a few", "a lot". The rest of the integers generally fill in from small to large with the scale of trade over time (greedy people have always been greedy, and people have never liked being shorted on either side of the transaction.)
Fractions and groupings ("dozens") and much of the rest of basic arithmetic drop out pretty naturally once you've solidified your counting system.
Basic geometry comes from a different angle (heh heh) -- construction -- and is not really any less of a natural evolution than counting (even if the builders don't realize what they're doing.)
Much beyond that (even mixing counting and geometry to get standardized measures) requires some level of abstraction though.
I think you'd need to break this down a bit further.
I'm sure most people who grasp pixel coordinates in the physical screen will know that 3,3 corresponds to the third pixel down and the third pixel from the left.
There's definitely no shortage of places to introduce confusion though: - General programming. Never mind abstract representations of the screen. We need to get past the abstract representation of instructions and commands first. I assume though that if you're jumping into games, that your students have at least a bit of programming knowledge.
- The most basic. Computers count from zero, people count from one. Even experienced programmers screw this one up from time to time (leading to no shortage of one-off errors.) This could be considered vaguely cultural though as its not beyond reason to suggest that a child taught to start counting before placing the first marble down ("zero") would necessarily be worse or better than a child who starts counting after placing the first marble ("one"). We could probably be taught to count in hex instead of decimal too if we wanted, though algebra could be a bit frustrating if we don't make up new symbols for A-F!
- Rotations. This isn't so much because the concept is unintuitive as much as is it because sine and cosine are fairly complex functions (in comparison to basic arithmetic at least) and the transformations are not easily calculable in your head -- at least not using an X,Y,Z coordinate plane. Adding angles in a polar coordinate system is a lot easier for people (but then you've got the downside that translation is a lot harder to do intuitively.)
- Abstract spaces. This one still gets me often -- if you want to move the character "right", you have to move the space "left" is generally how things are setup (ie: your avatar is centered on the screen, and you're moving the world around behind it.) The nub on a basic scroll bar can be painful too for a similar reason -- the user drags the nub down, making the page scroll up. Even relatively simple abstract spaces like this can confuse people.
But if you stick to moving the avatar along cardinal directions in a static space, I think your students would pick it up a lot easier (of course, that's a pretty big restriction on the types of games you can create.)
You now have a very small (and very coarse) number line, but a number line nonetheless.
If you take that to a not terribly far-fetched example and say we have 50 apples, and by some fluke of nature the apples in your part of the world are all fairly consistent in size. Now you line up your 50 apples and mark the two ends with whatever marking you like.
You can now use those markings to measure a completely different set of apples. Say, if you were looking to purchase apples from various farmers around your village. You've just saved yourself a lot of counting time, and your simple number line has now gone one step further and become a measuring ruler.
(Ok so its a little far-fetched. Apples would more likely be measured in 3 dimensions in a crate, or by weight, but it could well be done linearly if you didn't know how to build crates or scales.)
It certainly is. Number lines don't always have to be marked only on full integers. A line over the range [0,1] marked in 0.1 unit increments is most definitely still a number line.
If you want to get terribly technical, the "number line" stretches from -inf to +inf, with an infinite number of equally-spaced increments between any two points, and every representation we can build in the physical world is necessarily just a segment of said line with coarse approximations for the increment marks.
Why is 50 more reasonable than 40? (aka: the legal standard.) Why is 60 less reasonable than 50? Just because you happen to be willing and able to put up with 50 but not 60? Hell some countries in Europe have 35 as the standard work week (or so I've heard..)
I don't particularly see people "turning away from their social contract" or "refocusing inward." Instead, they'll refocus towards a different social contract. Ie: they'll form new groups that closer suit their needs. Gangs in the offline world, guilds/etc online.
Of course this is nothing surprising or new. History has many many examples where populations have turned away from the powers that be and created their own new groups -- heck the USA was founded based on this sort of thing!
They shouldn't be looking at this as a social evolution, but as the potential vague stirrings of political revolution. Those in power are getting further and further out of step with the common people, and eventually things will have to change, one way or another.
(And "people are by themselves on computers" isn't a very good argument, and never has been. Most everyone who are on computers are having their own online social lives. Perhaps not as physically exerting as an offline social life but its no less real a connection for those involved. The relatively sudden popularity of social media shows just how easy the transition from offline to online can be. All it took for a significant portion of the population to realize this was a sufficiently intuitive UI.)
There is no carbon involved. It sucks in oxygen for the battery reaction, and charging re-releases the oxygen.
I'm sure it will have its environmental impacts just like everything else, but as with most batteries, the worst of it will be in production and/or disposal, not usage.
I am all for price discrimination; I just do not support the use of legalized force to enforce it! If you can make and sell the same product cheaper overseas, or to people with different genes, or whatever, more power to you.
The problem with monopolistic practices is that they tend to come in packs. I imagine B&N (for example) would be quite happy to buy all of their stock from India if they could, but are almost certainly being prevented from doing so by the publishers (aka: "if you do that, we'll enforce our copyright privileges to prevent you from distributing any of our products".. the same sort of thing Microsoft tried to pull with OEMs back when Linux-installed computers were starting to see some demand, except that there's enough publishers that they can claim to be "competitive.")
But if I buy your product, then I own your product, which gives me the right to sell your product under terms agreeable to me. To assert otherwise is to assert that I am your slave. Either I own myself and my property rights, or you do, and one of these scenarios is slavery.
Well to start with, you're always perfectly free to not buy my product in the first place. Slavery is just an irrelevant appeal to emotion. Introducing such things just makes you seem like you have no real points to argue. May as well just scream "think of the children" and be done with it.
As for owning your "property rights," there's still huge debate over whether copyright and IP in general fall into the same category as physical property. As I'm sure you're well aware.
So the solution is to engage in, as you put it, "price discrimination" or as I might call it distribution values based on localized income since they want to make these materials available but they want to also make a profit in first world countries.
Price discrimination is the technical term for this practice. GP even posted the Wikipedia link for it. Or you could you know, go buy an economics text book if you don't like trusting Wikipedia.
Its a monopolistic practice. In a free market, this practice would never stand up because people would do exactly that -- buy from the cheaper markets and undercut the expensive markets in an arbitrage scheme.
But copyright is most certainly NOT a free market (in fact, copyright explicitly grants a monopoly). Of course, a monopoly without oversight is pretty much guaranteed to lead to monopolistic practices -- if it didn't, we wouldn't worry monopolies in the first place! Locally we see price-fixing (ie: prices are printed on the covers and sellers are strongly discouraged from selling below MSRP.) Internationally we see things like price discrimination.
Not much to be done about it really. As long as we consider copyright to be a necessary evil, we're just going to have to live with the consequences that it brings to the table. And so far, our government bodies seem to agree with the publishers that copyright is necessary.
They'll often re-organize chapters and re-organize the sections within the chapters as well, so you have to essentially scan the ToC for a content match rather than just going to the chapter that everyone else in the class is going to.
Obviously its justified if they actually add new content.. but usually the forward states that its just been "reorganized for clarity." You might get away with that for the second or third editions, but by the 6th or 7th or 20th edition if you're still "reorganizing for clarity," you're either an extremely poor author (and we shouldn't be using your text book anyway!) or you're just being underhanded.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not self-censorship. That's the ad network censoring the advertisers. And that's only because tools like Adblock were starting to come into play and the ad networks realized that they'd do better placing more subtle ads that people wouldn't just immediately kill than losing the eyeballs all together.
Of course, it helped that Google's advertising program came along around the same time period and was incredibly successful without resorting to being horrible, leading the way for other ad networks to follow suit.
I'm sure that's by no means a complete history of the move away from eye- and ear-destroying ads, but its the two most obvious factors, give or take a couple of years of settling and whatnot.
As a parent I am rather insistent that I am a better judge than my 7 year old of what he should see.
One would hope that's the case at least.
I would like a filter flag that allows me to ensure my kids are not exposed to gratuitous violence and/or pornography
So you're shirking the responsibility you just claimed. You're essentially making the claim that Wikipedia's filter is a better judge of what your child should see than either him or yourself.
I would like him to be able to access Wikipedia unsupervised
And there's the meat of it. You want to give your kid the internet, but you don't trust him (rightfully so) to judge content.. but you also can't be bothered to do it yourself. So you want everyone else on the internet to spend their time and resources essentially babysitting your kid for you.
If you want your kid to be safe on the internet, then monitor his usage, just as you would (hopefully) monitor him in any other public setting.
all without a single corporation as the driving force.
I said resources of, not initiative of. And I specifically mentioned that the government can fill this role, but there's downsides to that as well.
Mozart wrote his operas, Shakespeare wrote his plays
So? Great as they may be culturally, they're not exactly resource intensive on the same scale that building a 747 or implementing a nation-wide cell network is.
Nobunaga conquered Japan, Genghis Kahn ruled an empire, Rome took Europe, the Mings handled China
Now we're getting closer. There's no doubt that government bodies (generally in the form of empires or dictators) have managed to scrape together the resources needed to create amazing projects. Though I'd have gone with examples such as the pyramids or the great wall.
Ogg invented fire
And... we lost it again. Aside from the fact that humans didn't "invent" fire, Ogg figuring out how to control it is still a single person -- hardly resource-intensive, no matter how great the outcome.
without a single patent or copyright protection
Errr come again? What does patents and copyrights have to do with this argument? Patents and copyrights are a tool (a very abused tool these days to be sure, but just a tool nonetheless.) They have zero bearing on the fact that large projects need large amounts of resources and more importantly, a structure in place to organize those resources into a functional system capable of doing great things.
The problem with any of those is that they affect J.Random employee far more than they affect the people who actually caused the problems. Firing the entire executive staff? Well they'll have a temper tantrum over losing their huge bonus for the year, but chances are they've already got more banked than us average people earn in a lifetime so while they might not like it, it won't particularly harm them unless they've been totally stupid with their money.
On the other hand, a full corporate shakeup rarely bodes well for the folk in the trenches. The odd few lucky ones might get promotions, but for the vast majority of any decently large corporation, the best they can hope for is status quo. And more than likely they'll at least be reassigned if not outright laid off.
Same goes for slapping shareholders around. The big guys (the ones you really want to hurt) will just shrug it off and hide the loss behind a hedge fund. The people you'll actually hurt are the people with $10-20k in a retirement fund that they're trying to grow. The stock market is already pretty stacked against anyone who can't do sub-millisecond trading, there's no reason to add even more of a burden on those people. Stopping trading all together in particular would be a fairly horrible thing to do (the stock price would be tanking and they wouldn't even be able to bail on it.)
I could see fining shareholders as a little less painful -- especially if you limited it to only fining people with more than say, 5% (or even 1%) stock in the company. That would protect the little guys who are just trying their luck, while still applying some damages to the people who have enough say that they should at least be getting heard even if the board/CEO ignores them.
And for your extreme "death penalty" case. That's probably never going to fly. We already refuse to let corporations die of their own free will (see: $700b bailout and "too big to fail" actions) so the chance that we'd go out and kill them off ourselves is pretty damned small. And with good reason. Killing off a patent troll that has 3 employees and a small novel full of consulting lawyers probably won't hurt the world too much, but killing off a major industrial manufacturer can easily dispense with thousands or even tens of thousands of jobs. Again, its the little guy working the lines who gets really fucked, and they don't have any say in these matters -- they're just trying to provide for themselves and their family.
Penalizing corporations is, generally speaking, a pretty difficult thing to do. Even without the "corporations are people" concept, the fact of the matter is that the people who have enough power to make serious decisions are also the least likely people to be seriously injured (financially..) when the shit hits the fan.
I've got no idea how to deal with that. I can't even suggest some sort of utopia where corporations don't exist, because there are many aspects of the modern world that simply couldn't be done without the kind of resources that a Ford or a General Electric can bring to the table. The government could fill in somewhat, but rampant communism hasn't exactly proven itself to be a shining beacon of hope and prosperity.
corporations should not be able to do anything unless explicitly permitted
Errr, that's going a little too far. Innovation thrives on breaking the rules.
What's needed is some oversight applied when such innovation affects things like the global economy or national health (as in smoking or fast food.)
There's lots of people with the foresight to see these problems coming before they're unstoppable, and there's a good number of people with the power to do something about them. Unfortunately its fairly rare that both traits are embodied in the same person.
And with the past few decades, the US in particular has pushed harder and harder for less regulation and oversight. I even saw one /. poster a few days ago suggest that market failures are caused by oversight and that deregulating everything would somehow stop greedy people (/"people") from trying to fuck everyone over for a little short-term profit.
Not to suggest that there isn't plenty of bad regulations laying around, but blind faith in capitalism is just as stupid as blind faith in communism. Extremes of any type rarely hold up in our world, and that includes the realm of economic policy.
Abolishing government from regulating the market would heal the economy.
Yes, people would all be completely honest if it wasn't for that damned government getting in the way!
Regulations (at least good regulations, and I certainly won't claim there aren't bad ones) are there for a reason -- somebody at some point tried to game the system and had to be stopped lest they crush the entire damned thing for their own benefit. Many of the financial regulations were put in place after the great depression to prevent just this such a thing happening.
But half a century later, we've all forgotten the teachings of history and start wondering why we've got so many damned rules and why the government is sticking their nose in where it shouldn't be. And sure enough, huge economic booms result. For a while. Then reality comes and slaps us in the back of the head with 2008, which might have been forestalled in the US but is by no means cleared up yet. And guess what the end result will once we do finally get our globally collective shit back together? A bunch more regulations to prevent such things from happening in the future (and hopefully the world leaders in 2100 will pay more attention to their forefathers!)
IMO, organized workloads should be split into at least two categories, regulatorily speaking: Low and high barrier to entry.
Anything with a low barrier to entry -- let the free market do its thing. If existing systems don't work, somebody will just set up a new one.
Anything with a high barrier to entry -- regulate the fuck out of it. Hell, even make it a crown corporation (especially if its an essential service like water or power.)
The free market fails when the barrier to entry is too large for competition to realistically arise. Its about damned time people recognized that fact. If entering a market costs $100b before you've even started to advertise, then its damned well not going to be competitive. The only people/organizations who would be able to enter such a market are the same ones who have no desire to rock the boat, and any existing players are necessarily going to be in at least a loose collusion by the fact that there's so few of them -- an "everybody knows everybody" situation.
Raw capitalism is a great solution to a lot of business problems, but its not a silver bullet. There's a point beyond which it just doesn't scale terribly well.
And is there any actual reason for why you would not pay for Visual Studio?
Uhh the obvious one? $500 per seat is a fair chunk of money for a small business, never mind for an individual.
And if you live up here in Canada, they charge us like $700 for some bloody reason (at least, if the pricing remains consistent with VS2010) even though the dollar's relatively close to par and its a digital download. No idea how badly they screw other countries.
There's a major upside to current identification methods requiring time and effort -- it relegates their usage to only those people with the resources available to identify you.
With a chip system, even if the government by some miracle of fortune managed to keep their database secure (which is highly unlikely,) it wouldn't be long before someone realizes that the encrypted message itself is necessarily unique, and therefore could easily be used to start generated an (effectively unencrypted) database without even bothering to break the encryption.
Of course, there's always the "nothing to hide; nothing to fear" argument, but everybody has something they want to (or need to) hide from somebody.
The "nothing to hide.." argument stops being useful once you expand it beyond basic law enforcement duties (where you only would need to hide criminal behavior.) But unfortunately people get judged by more than the law in everyday life (bosses, significant others, family members, classmates, your pastor/rabbi/whatever if you're into that kind of thing, etc.) Expand that set far enough and you'll eventually hit somebody you'd rather not explain that drunken night from 15 years ago to.
It already is a problem with Linux in a sense. How many users do you think really go through the entire package list and ensure they only install the things they need?
At least Linux gives you the option, and most of the stuff wouldn't be classified as "crapware" in the same sense as those bloody 30 day Norton Virus trials, but it amounts to the same thing in the end for non-power users, which is the vast majority of all desktop users.
More like refunding Microsoft (part of) the difference between an OEM version and a retail version. Of course some portion of that $99 will be going to the tech monkey who has to run the de-crapping software (possibly a large portion if they go to the trouble of backing up your data, installing fresh, and attempting to restore everything properly).
And you probably don't get the cleaned install discs, so there's the added bonus that if you ever need to restore your laptop you'll have to pay them again.
Or you could just go Apple as the article suggests, and pay the $500 brand name tax up front.
I see quite a few major assumptions here:
- All VCs are stupid. Sure they're all greedy in the sense that they want to realize their ROI as soon as possible, but I'm assuming most of them do some research before jumping on the buzzword bandwagon. Otherwise they'd quickly run out of money to invest.
- Social media is an infinite market. Sure its large, but its not infinite. New players are already starting to struggle. Look at Google+ for an example. Even with all of the power and recognition (not to mention financing) of the Google brand behind it, there's report after report of how few people can be bothered keeping two social media sites up to date.
- Ignoring the "social" part of "social media." This somewhat ties in with the previous point, but essentially it amounts to the fact that social networks require a fairly large critical mass of users before they can really take off. Take a look at instant messengers for example. Almost every (localized) market is dominated by one of the four major IMs (MSN, ICQ, AIM, Yahoo). Not only is there not really any room for a new IM, the four big ones even have a hard time encroaching on each others' territory. Aided somewhat by multi-network clients such as Trillian, but still the large majority of IM users stick with what they've got and refuse to switch because its what all of their friends are using. Social media type sites are in the same situation.
- Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it makes the big assumption that money is the only motivator in Silicon Valley. I would seriously question that assumption. If nothing else, somebody's got to be building the machines that these sites on running on!
Not really. It would be more akin to removing the entire head of the penis rather than just the foreskin.
(Though of course any direct comparison is somewhat flawed because well, boys and girls are just different down there.)
As for the principle. Not even close. Circumcision has at least some benefit (though potentially some downsides too -- medical science is still fighting that one out.)
A girl having her clitoris removed on the other hand gets zero benefit to go along with losing much of their sexual pleasure.
The -only- purpose for female castration is to reduce their sexual pleasure to a low enough level that they won't feel the desire to have sex with men. (Of course they'd still sleep with their husband, but generally out of duty rather than sexual desire.)
I can't speak to how well it actually works (sex is about a lot more than physical intercourse, after all) but that's the general idea behind it. (Or original idea in any case.. social norms can keep atrocities like that hanging around long after their original purpose has been forgotten and I wouldn't hazard to guess at the current status of it in any particular country.)
Just my ramblin's, but off the top of my head I'd say its a combination of:
- Shiite and Sunni aren't considered separate countries, so a lot of international politics can ignore that (relatively internal) dispute. In particular, Isreal's close relations with the US enhances our notion of a political border dividing two distinct cultures.
- Most non-Muslims wouldn't know the distinction between Shiite and Sunni (never mind any of the smaller branches) so a lot of us just see "Muslim kills Muslim" rather than "Shiite kills Sunni" or "Sunni kills Shiite".
- And of course, just general bad reporting over here. Even "Muslim kills Muslim" is less likely to be seen than "Terrorist kills Innocent," based mostly on the geographic location of the incident and usually regardless of the intention or innocence of either party.
There's a big difference between blocking sites for copyright infringement (no matter how poorly thought out) and blocking sites for political reasons.
Nobody's seriously bashing China for blocking porn. They bash China for silencing websites that go against the government, especially when there's no hard and fast rules about exactly what's illegal, leading to a system where something that's been fine for years can suddenly get you jailed (or even dead) if somebody with a bit of power happens to take offense to it one day. And there's little legal recourse or oversight to protect citizens against these abuses.
Being able to bitch about your government without worrying for your personal safety is considered a pretty fundamental freedom in the west (particularly in the US, but most if not all of the developed world, and even a lot of the un/under-developed world agrees. Its that whole freedom of speech thing.)
Also, China is definitely not the only country we deride for lack of freedoms.. they just happen to be in the news a lot (and in the minds of political and corporate leaders a lot) due to their increasing economic power in the world, so we end up hearing about them a lot. Even the abuses in China are small compared to say, North Korea for example.
You could consider a people who think in terms of geometry to be sure: 1point, 2line, 3triangle, 4square, 5pentagon, etc.
The problem with any of these representations is that they don't scale. Its easy to tell a triangle from a square, but its not easy to tell a 999,999-sided object from a 999,998-sided object.
I've read (and it was years ago, so I certainly don't have a reference!) that pretty much all cultures started off where this article talks about -- separations by coarse grouping.. "one", "a few", "a lot". The rest of the integers generally fill in from small to large with the scale of trade over time (greedy people have always been greedy, and people have never liked being shorted on either side of the transaction.)
Fractions and groupings ("dozens") and much of the rest of basic arithmetic drop out pretty naturally once you've solidified your counting system.
Basic geometry comes from a different angle (heh heh) -- construction -- and is not really any less of a natural evolution than counting (even if the builders don't realize what they're doing.)
Much beyond that (even mixing counting and geometry to get standardized measures) requires some level of abstraction though.
I think you'd need to break this down a bit further.
I'm sure most people who grasp pixel coordinates in the physical screen will know that 3,3 corresponds to the third pixel down and the third pixel from the left.
There's definitely no shortage of places to introduce confusion though:
- General programming. Never mind abstract representations of the screen. We need to get past the abstract representation of instructions and commands first. I assume though that if you're jumping into games, that your students have at least a bit of programming knowledge.
- The most basic. Computers count from zero, people count from one. Even experienced programmers screw this one up from time to time (leading to no shortage of one-off errors.) This could be considered vaguely cultural though as its not beyond reason to suggest that a child taught to start counting before placing the first marble down ("zero") would necessarily be worse or better than a child who starts counting after placing the first marble ("one"). We could probably be taught to count in hex instead of decimal too if we wanted, though algebra could be a bit frustrating if we don't make up new symbols for A-F!
- Rotations. This isn't so much because the concept is unintuitive as much as is it because sine and cosine are fairly complex functions (in comparison to basic arithmetic at least) and the transformations are not easily calculable in your head -- at least not using an X,Y,Z coordinate plane. Adding angles in a polar coordinate system is a lot easier for people (but then you've got the downside that translation is a lot harder to do intuitively.)
- Abstract spaces. This one still gets me often -- if you want to move the character "right", you have to move the space "left" is generally how things are setup (ie: your avatar is centered on the screen, and you're moving the world around behind it.) The nub on a basic scroll bar can be painful too for a similar reason -- the user drags the nub down, making the page scroll up. Even relatively simple abstract spaces like this can confuse people.
But if you stick to moving the avatar along cardinal directions in a static space, I think your students would pick it up a lot easier (of course, that's a pretty big restriction on the types of games you can create.)
Put those three apples side by side.
You now have a very small (and very coarse) number line, but a number line nonetheless.
If you take that to a not terribly far-fetched example and say we have 50 apples, and by some fluke of nature the apples in your part of the world are all fairly consistent in size. Now you line up your 50 apples and mark the two ends with whatever marking you like.
You can now use those markings to measure a completely different set of apples. Say, if you were looking to purchase apples from various farmers around your village. You've just saved yourself a lot of counting time, and your simple number line has now gone one step further and become a measuring ruler.
(Ok so its a little far-fetched. Apples would more likely be measured in 3 dimensions in a crate, or by weight, but it could well be done linearly if you didn't know how to build crates or scales.)
It certainly is. Number lines don't always have to be marked only on full integers. A line over the range [0,1] marked in 0.1 unit increments is most definitely still a number line.
If you want to get terribly technical, the "number line" stretches from -inf to +inf, with an infinite number of equally-spaced increments between any two points, and every representation we can build in the physical world is necessarily just a segment of said line with coarse approximations for the increment marks.
There's nothing illogical about imaginary numbers. Except their name. They're actually pretty hard to imagine except as an abstraction.
But I guess calling them "conceptually orthogonal numbers" would just be confusing.
Why is 50 more reasonable than 40? (aka: the legal standard.) Why is 60 less reasonable than 50? Just because you happen to be willing and able to put up with 50 but not 60? Hell some countries in Europe have 35 as the standard work week (or so I've heard..)
I don't particularly see people "turning away from their social contract" or "refocusing inward." Instead, they'll refocus towards a different social contract. Ie: they'll form new groups that closer suit their needs. Gangs in the offline world, guilds/etc online.
Of course this is nothing surprising or new. History has many many examples where populations have turned away from the powers that be and created their own new groups -- heck the USA was founded based on this sort of thing!
They shouldn't be looking at this as a social evolution, but as the potential vague stirrings of political revolution. Those in power are getting further and further out of step with the common people, and eventually things will have to change, one way or another.
(And "people are by themselves on computers" isn't a very good argument, and never has been. Most everyone who are on computers are having their own online social lives. Perhaps not as physically exerting as an offline social life but its no less real a connection for those involved. The relatively sudden popularity of social media shows just how easy the transition from offline to online can be. All it took for a significant portion of the population to realize this was a sufficiently intuitive UI.)
Oohh someone didn't RFTA.
There is no carbon involved. It sucks in oxygen for the battery reaction, and charging re-releases the oxygen.
I'm sure it will have its environmental impacts just like everything else, but as with most batteries, the worst of it will be in production and/or disposal, not usage.
I am all for price discrimination; I just do not support the use of legalized force to enforce it! If you can make and sell the same product cheaper overseas, or to people with different genes, or whatever, more power to you.
The problem with monopolistic practices is that they tend to come in packs. I imagine B&N (for example) would be quite happy to buy all of their stock from India if they could, but are almost certainly being prevented from doing so by the publishers (aka: "if you do that, we'll enforce our copyright privileges to prevent you from distributing any of our products".. the same sort of thing Microsoft tried to pull with OEMs back when Linux-installed computers were starting to see some demand, except that there's enough publishers that they can claim to be "competitive.")
But if I buy your product, then I own your product, which gives me the right to sell your product under terms agreeable to me. To assert otherwise is to assert that I am your slave. Either I own myself and my property rights, or you do, and one of these scenarios is slavery.
Well to start with, you're always perfectly free to not buy my product in the first place. Slavery is just an irrelevant appeal to emotion. Introducing such things just makes you seem like you have no real points to argue. May as well just scream "think of the children" and be done with it.
As for owning your "property rights," there's still huge debate over whether copyright and IP in general fall into the same category as physical property. As I'm sure you're well aware.
So the solution is to engage in, as you put it, "price discrimination" or as I might call it distribution values based on localized income since they want to make these materials available but they want to also make a profit in first world countries.
Price discrimination is the technical term for this practice. GP even posted the Wikipedia link for it. Or you could you know, go buy an economics text book if you don't like trusting Wikipedia.
Its a monopolistic practice. In a free market, this practice would never stand up because people would do exactly that -- buy from the cheaper markets and undercut the expensive markets in an arbitrage scheme.
But copyright is most certainly NOT a free market (in fact, copyright explicitly grants a monopoly). Of course, a monopoly without oversight is pretty much guaranteed to lead to monopolistic practices -- if it didn't, we wouldn't worry monopolies in the first place! Locally we see price-fixing (ie: prices are printed on the covers and sellers are strongly discouraged from selling below MSRP.) Internationally we see things like price discrimination.
Not much to be done about it really. As long as we consider copyright to be a necessary evil, we're just going to have to live with the consequences that it brings to the table. And so far, our government bodies seem to agree with the publishers that copyright is necessary.
They'll often re-organize chapters and re-organize the sections within the chapters as well, so you have to essentially scan the ToC for a content match rather than just going to the chapter that everyone else in the class is going to.
Obviously its justified if they actually add new content.. but usually the forward states that its just been "reorganized for clarity." You might get away with that for the second or third editions, but by the 6th or 7th or 20th edition if you're still "reorganizing for clarity," you're either an extremely poor author (and we shouldn't be using your text book anyway!) or you're just being underhanded.