He was trying to buy his way out of hell because of all of the evil he did when building his empire.
You can not buy your way out of hell. The only way for God to take you in his bosom is for you to commit a selfless act, a true, bona-fide act of sacrifice. I'm not sure whether giving 30 billion USD to charity counts for that - I don't have that kind of wisdom to judge his action, as awe-inspiring as it might be.
On the other hand, if Warren Buffet gave both his kidneys or heart to save a life, some 30-40 years ago, for another person, who may not necessarily be related to him - that would be truly selfless and a direct stairway to Heaven.
Of course, this assumes you believe in the notion of heaven and hell. If not, then it probably means nothing to you.
or Warren Buffet - I would like it to be known that I will follow in the exact same footsteps as Mr. Warren Buffet. I'm just thinking whether I should contribute 85% or 95% of 40 billion to charitale causes because I'm definitely not going to leave it to my children so they can piss it away into nothingness or, worse, spend it for stupid selfish stuff they may think is appropriate for them.
What a selfless act... I want to work for this man. Fuck. I was in tears when I read it. Did he have any reason to do this (forget looking good - I think he's way past 'looking good')? No. He chose to do it. DAMN!!!!
Some stuff isn't for sale, e.g. your personal integrity (well, unless you plan on making money by defrauding others, in which case you're bound to either end up in jail or pushing up daisies).
Communes can function perfectly fine, as small, relatively isolated self-selected and enforced societies. Anything tried on a nationwide scale- we've seen the results of that time and time again, and it's not good.
Riggghhht - like communal marriage between two people in the United States where we have 4 million divorces each year (overall rate of > 50% of marriages break up in less than 7 years). Communism sure does work in small(er) settings:).
C is like assembly on steroids;). (sorta like VI on steroids = emacs - ok, well maybe not quite a good analogy, but you get the point). C is going to stick around for as long as we are going to write operating systems (IMHO).
So what would you do if you had Bill's fortune and were married to Melinda Gates? Piss it away on a night out in Vegas, gambling and/or buying sex? What exactly would you do regardless of who "made you do it"? No one can make you do anything you don't want to do short of using physical force, and coercion - both of which are illegal, but that's truly MAKING you do it. If women can control men by talking to them, then more power to them. Then men deserve it. The flipside is, she talks, he rejects her proposition, she does not control him, she doesn't get what she wants and leaves him - the basis of a divorce in the making. If you _never_ did as your wife suggested, or she never did as you suggested - then why get married at all?:) It's a game of compromise, economics, etc - with the only purpose of aiming for full acceptance of the other person, and a long happy life together.
Absolute control doesn't exist (unless you're a divine entity).
Yeah, but for God to take Bill Gates in his bosom, he'll have to committ a selfless act, a sacrifice for someone other than himself (and that doesn't include giving money away - that just makes you look good)... Perhaps it'll be Lu greeting him upon his death:).
whatever 'God' may be, the singularity, or what not... at least those or he or she or it, who created us gave us brain power to look for 'God'. So what's the problem with looking for God, even if you never find God? It's kind of like looking for your true calling, and never finding it, which is what 99.9% of people do - they end up doing something not because it's their true calling but because someone or some thing, indoctrinated them at an early age into thinking, OMG, this is the next 'big thing', e.g. software engineering, or nuclear physics or whatever....
Whoever said you have to find what you're looking for? (sorry if this sounds a bit cynical, but it is what it is)
Just tell your dad to not vote republican next time when election day comes if they raise the prices for your cable co.
I still do not understand by what reasoning does the bulk of non-coastal america feels that the republican party best represents their interest. I really dont. Someone please explain it to me:).
I'll be even more optimistic (or pessimistic, I suppose, depending on whose wallet will be affected the most) - with ever increasing number of household getting broadband, demand for higher bandwidth will increase to accomodate the increasing number of users. ISPs/cable co's will be forced to upgrade their infrastructure to provide higher bandwidth speeds. Most, if not all, cable channels will get off the 1-99 channel range, and become MPEG2 streams (a.k.a. digital). CableCard will become a reality. TiVo and the like will be obsolette in about 3-5 years, because CableCard will enable DIY HTPC building. Due to higher bandwidth, outfits like Netflix will eventually figure out (after a shitload of litigation over distribution rights, I'm sure) how to make the 3 movies for $19.99 over USPS a reality over the Internet, so it'll be 3 movies for $19.99 with DRM, over the Internet. I don't give a fuck how you slice it or optimize your supply chain - shipping optical media to BestBuy, Circuit City and the like is 10x more expensive than paying for bandwidth and distributing your content online. DVDs (whether HD-DVD or Blu-Ray) will become an obsolette medium for either music or movies. DRM + high-bandwidth internet connection will be 'the next big thing' (tm). They will be, at best, used for offline backup storage, or at worst, with the advent of perpendicular (and soon to become a commercial reality, holographic storage) magnetic storage, 1TB hard drives will become a commodity, and home-user NAS's will become more affordable/mainstream, so no need for DVD. Media center PCs will become the next big thing, because it will allow all the couch potatos to 1) play games, 2) listen to music, 3) do your PC work all without the need to leave the family room (and avoid getting bitched at by your SO for doing so).
This is why I'm not buying a new PC just yet. I'm still waiting for the dust to settle. Looks like 2006 is going to be an interesting year for these developments.
.. I do like Tanenbaum's (and Johnathan Shapiro's) argument about microkernel-based OS's. It almost seems to me that if Linus, 10 some years ago had tried harder to get a micro-kernel based Linux built, Andrew Tanenbaum, et. al., would have kept quiet now. Actually, if I could turn back time, and bring Andrew Tanenbaum, Linus Torvalds and the creators of QNX in the same room (and deflated Linus' ego a little bit so he'd follow the micro-kernel approach instead of a monolithic kernel approach), we may have had Linux running as the base of Mac OS X today, and Linux/Mac OS X would have probably enjoyed an even larger momentum than it does today toward displacing Windows on the desktop even. Linus' problem is that he does not want to admit the possibility that Linux could have been _just as good_ of an OS today, even if it was micro-kernel based. Well, that little self-gratification of having to be 'right' (or maybe he just didn't care) 10+ years ago, is now opening up markets for a shitload of other micro-kernel based OS's.
Do I think this is wrong or bad? No. I just think that Linux can (and should) evolve to a true micro-kernel based OS, if Linus or anyone else can help it. Re-write Linux from scratch, basically. They did it once, they can do it again. Then, it will be the penis-envy of all operating systems on earth, Mac OS X and QNX included.
Interesting observation - my granfather from my dad's side just died 2 weeks ago at age 81 1/2. He was a WW2 disable veteran, due to a lead schrapnel wound in the back of his skull, which fortunately stayed lodged in his body for 45-50 years before eventually small lead bits of the schrapnel fell out of his ear one day as he was waking up - they somehow travelled throughout his head over a number of years, and eventually found their way out. He never had any kind of lasting damage due to the wound. His body had sealed off the bits to prevent any further infection, and remained like that for decades.
The man also was a heavy alcoholic for 20-25 years in a row. Eventually, my dad and uncle had to carry him and drag him by his ankles and hands into a car and straight to the sanitarium, where he was therapeutically/systematically cured ('brainwashed') into believing alcohol is bad for him. The psychiatrists managed to somehow create a reflex in his subconscious which triggered nausea, and vommitting each time he would even smell alcohol, let alone drink it. This successfully got him off alcohol (as well as had him stop doing all the nasty things a habitual drunkard does to his family, which I won't list here). He stopped drinking around age 55.
His relationship with smoking probably lasted the longest, 40+ years, with him finally nearly suffocating to death one day from a serious cough attack. My dad immediately took him to the doctor, who was an army doctor (he didn't trust anyone who wasn't affiliated with the army back in the day:) - the doc told him that if he didn't quit immediately, his chances are that he would die within 2 weeks if he resumed smoking. He then stopped smoking right around age 65.
His diet consisted of anything and everything, without any particular regard to what he consumed. All types of meat - pork, beef, chicken, lamb, didn't matter. All types of fluids, coffee, soda, whatever (bar alcohol).
About the only ailment he ever had was some sort of an ulcer when he was young, where they had to surgically remove a part of his intestine. This contributed to him being stick thin all of his life. He could eat enormous amounts of food - his weight never shifted above what it was.
If there ever was a specimen that truly defied all healthy habits by neglecting food, working out, and extremely abused alcohol as well as tobacco - it was my grandfather. And even at old age, when nudity was shown all over TV, he'd still joke about it, or you can see he'd get a reaction out of it:).... I don't know if it was erotic at age 70+, but you can bet that he never had problems in that department (and neither do I).
Having said all this - the man died in an afternoon nap, right after a big lunch, in his sleep of entirely natural causes.
So much for "X" causes cancer, or "Y" causes this ailment or that ailment... I'm not saying go ahead, try this at home:). You may well die if you do. But imagine he hadn't been doing any of that - could he have pulled 90+? We'll never know. Mayve it was that stress on his body that made him resilient. That, and damn good 'genetics' (if that can ever be claimed).
So dissect people like that:) (not literally, but at least analyze them in any possible ways). They may hold SOME of the cure for cancer. No one ever had it on either side of my family, for the last 3 generations that I could dig up. Everyone died from 80+ to about 95.
somewhere I read - perfection is only achieved on the point of collapse. I suppose you can interpret that various ways - you become God, thus you're perfect.... or you become dead, meet God, and then you are 'perfect'?:) Looking for perfection can be a huge cockblocking activity actually... (in just about anything you do, including the pursuit of women;) ).
It is precisely the opposite of what you just said that is the truth - CS _are_ foundry workers, albeit not in the typical sense like a steel factory. You must have never held a position at some company like MS or AMZN or GOOG - which is why you do not see the 'foundry' treatment/aspect of software engineering.
You seem to have your roles reversed on which drives who - it isn't CS that drives business - it is the other way around. A CS job can be a 'creational' job so long as it meets the purposes of business, which is time to market, functionality, etc. Ever attempted setting up a software engineering company? When you do - reply here with your experience of how 'creational' the whole thing was, when your investment (or someone else's) in the company was burning a hole through your pocket and you are trying to get it off the ground.
Where most companies seem to fail at, as one of the people who replied to you, is picking the right people to manage IT staff, as well as not following a proven process when writing software, so that it can become as mechanical as possible to turn out good software... RUP, agile, SCRUM, etc are all beneficial to this effect, however, a very small percentage of companies truly follow the spirit of these methodologies. The problem is unless everyone's on board with these methodologies, they do not work.
I could go on and on about this issue... but it isn't as simple as you just pointed out.
and I don't pretend that it is only that - but it gravitates largely toward that. Capitalism seems perfect, unless you can 'reprogram' people to be something other than what they are - large mass/group, without basic understanding of economics, psychology/sociology, science, etc. It takes more than a nice rosy rant to show understanding of how all these interact. Anyone, and most everyone on slashdot it seems, can take a stovepiped view of these concepts.... then some other geek who views the world through his B.S. in C.S. or M.S. or Ph.D in some hardcore scientific discipline prysm, reinforces him by moding up... Then a whole avalanche of mindless drivel unleashes afterwards, most of it not rooted in the realities that we face today.... Thus, the concept of self-moderation has lost credibility since long time ago, unless you have domain experts moderating posts (which this is not). Which just brings me to the fact that in one year I can count the number of times I've posted on Slashdot on both hands.... etc etc.
Thank God someone with a clue.. Of course it's not pure capitalism. If it was pure capitalism, we'd still probably be running MS-DOS, because Microsoft could monopolize, using any tactics available at their disposal (corporate-ordered murder(s) included), to stay afloat and keep their monopoly.
However, the other part of your statement contained a very, extremely key word -/balance/, or equilibrium.... balance is imperative amongst all entites in the united states (or any other country) - between government, corporations and the people.... The U.S. has so far been achieving a wonderful balance, more wonderful than any other developed country even, Sweden included....
When someone comes up with a better balancing scheme, I think the US will be the first one to embrace it.
> If you truly consider that the most important right of all, above every other right, you're > pathologically materialistic and need an attitude adjustment.
And I think you are pathologically idealist (a.k.a. stupid, head-up-the-ass, etc), and don't understand economics one fucking bit.
Wow.. so much verbal masturbation, egotistical musings... self-love, the all natural opiate. You, Michael Albert, and perhaps Chomsky to close the deal, would probably have the most enlightening chat amongst you all... by the time you're done, one will suffocate from all the chest thumping, the other one just be bruised from it, or hey, maybe even possibly pissed all over each other with joy over who expressed higher intellectualism and 'forward looking' prophetic statements on why capitalism sucks, and socialism is better, or "ParEcon" (a veiled socialist/communist paradigm) is the next step...
I understand your drive for higher state of being, but what I think you don't understand is that everyone who ever tried it over the last umpteenth thousand years failed, and along the way slaughtered millions of people on the account of them "not understanding" the leader...
but why? And who is to say or can claim with any degree of certainty that these "gaffes" were bona fide, that is truly inadvertent? Yeah, let me think, a 100MM dollar company with 5000+ employees, committing public "gaffes"... well, they must be drinking gasoline at Google! Please... I'd treat it more as mooning than anything else.. they're trying to get attention. Maybe they're expecting a worse (downward) plateu than they were hoping for in their stock price.... All those paper millionaires would like to cash in too, ya know, if they can get a cold chance....
a) I can encrypt my data locally, prior to transferring it to GDrive b) I can decrypt my data locally, after transferring it from GDrive c) it all has to happen rather transparently
I suppose you could use AES for encryption, or public/private key encryption, not sure what either type of encryption would buy you. Come to think of it, PGP.com has a product that does this already, PGPdisk - if they can emulate that in some way, that would be swell...
None of this is going to work if they're hoping to "scan" the user data in any imaginable way (for whatever purpose, advertising or not). No one will go for that, I'm like 99% sure, except those without a stinkin' clue or those who truly do not care about privacy.
Perhaps.. but as far as out part goes, we should not be erecting barriers to information infiltration into China by legislating against it. I'd prefer we'd be silent on the issue, if nothing else. Transforming China into a democratic society is going to take a lot longer than it took for them to become an economic powerhouse... and if those sentiment changes do not follow, well you can take your economy and shove it, because your people are still going to be indentured slaves, working for shit wages, living in a poluted environment, and a dozens of other plaguing issues I can't seem to recall at this point in time....
China ain't the US, never was, and I doubt it will ever be.
Slashdot Mirror
He was trying to buy his way out of hell because of all of the evil he did when building his empire.
You can not buy your way out of hell. The only way for God to take you in his bosom is for you to commit a selfless act, a true, bona-fide act of sacrifice. I'm not sure whether giving 30 billion USD to charity counts for that - I don't have that kind of wisdom to judge his action, as awe-inspiring as it might be.
On the other hand, if Warren Buffet gave both his kidneys or heart to save a life, some 30-40 years ago, for another person, who may not necessarily be related to him - that would be truly selfless and a direct stairway to Heaven.
Of course, this assumes you believe in the notion of heaven and hell. If not, then it probably means nothing to you.
or Warren Buffet - I would like it to be known that I will follow in the exact same footsteps as Mr. Warren Buffet. I'm just thinking whether I should contribute 85% or 95% of 40 billion to charitale causes because I'm definitely not going to leave it to my children so they can piss it away into nothingness or, worse, spend it for stupid selfish stuff they may think is appropriate for them.
What a selfless act... I want to work for this man. Fuck. I was in tears when I read it. Did he have any reason to do this (forget looking good - I think he's way past 'looking good')? No. He chose to do it. DAMN!!!!
Some stuff isn't for sale, e.g. your personal integrity (well, unless you plan on making money by defrauding others, in which case you're bound to either end up in jail or pushing up daisies).
Riggghhht - like communal marriage between two people in the United States where we have 4 million divorces each year (overall rate of > 50% of marriages break up in less than 7 years). Communism sure does work in small(er) settings :).
C is like assembly on steroids ;). (sorta like VI on steroids = emacs - ok, well maybe not quite a good analogy, but you get the point). C is going to stick around for as long as we are going to write operating systems (IMHO).
So what would you do if you had Bill's fortune and were married to Melinda Gates? Piss it away on a night out in Vegas, gambling and/or buying sex? What exactly would you do regardless of who "made you do it"? No one can make you do anything you don't want to do short of using physical force, and coercion - both of which are illegal, but that's truly MAKING you do it. If women can control men by talking to them, then more power to them. Then men deserve it. The flipside is, she talks, he rejects her proposition, she does not control him, she doesn't get what she wants and leaves him - the basis of a divorce in the making. If you _never_ did as your wife suggested, or she never did as you suggested - then why get married at all? :) It's a game of compromise, economics, etc - with the only purpose of aiming for full acceptance of the other person, and a long happy life together.
Absolute control doesn't exist (unless you're a divine entity).
Yeah, but for God to take Bill Gates in his bosom, he'll have to committ a selfless act, a sacrifice for someone other than himself (and that doesn't include giving money away - that just makes you look good)... Perhaps it'll be Lu greeting him upon his death :).
whatever 'God' may be, the singularity, or what not... at least those or he or she or it, who created us gave us brain power to look for 'God'. So what's the problem with looking for God, even if you never find God? It's kind of like looking for your true calling, and never finding it, which is what 99.9% of people do - they end up doing something not because it's their true calling but because someone or some thing, indoctrinated them at an early age into thinking, OMG, this is the next 'big thing', e.g. software engineering, or nuclear physics or whatever....
Whoever said you have to find what you're looking for? (sorry if this sounds a bit cynical, but it is what it is)
Just tell your dad to not vote republican next time when election day comes if they raise the prices for your cable co.
:).
I still do not understand by what reasoning does the bulk of non-coastal america feels that the republican party best represents their interest. I really dont. Someone please explain it to me
I'll be even more optimistic (or pessimistic, I suppose, depending on whose wallet will be affected the most) - with ever increasing number of household getting broadband, demand for higher bandwidth will increase to accomodate the increasing number of users. ISPs/cable co's will be forced to upgrade their infrastructure to provide higher bandwidth speeds. Most, if not all, cable channels will get off the 1-99 channel range, and become MPEG2 streams (a.k.a. digital). CableCard will become a reality. TiVo and the like will be obsolette in about 3-5 years, because CableCard will enable DIY HTPC building. Due to higher bandwidth, outfits like Netflix will eventually figure out (after a shitload of litigation over distribution rights, I'm sure) how to make the 3 movies for $19.99 over USPS a reality over the Internet, so it'll be 3 movies for $19.99 with DRM, over the Internet. I don't give a fuck how you slice it or optimize your supply chain - shipping optical media to BestBuy, Circuit City and the like is 10x more expensive than paying for bandwidth and distributing your content online. DVDs (whether HD-DVD or Blu-Ray) will become an obsolette medium for either music or movies. DRM + high-bandwidth internet connection will be 'the next big thing' (tm). They will be, at best, used for offline backup storage, or at worst, with the advent of perpendicular (and soon to become a commercial reality, holographic storage) magnetic storage, 1TB hard drives will become a commodity, and home-user NAS's will become more affordable/mainstream, so no need for DVD. Media center PCs will become the next big thing, because it will allow all the couch potatos to 1) play games, 2) listen to music, 3) do your PC work all without the need to leave the family room (and avoid getting bitched at by your SO for doing so).
This is why I'm not buying a new PC just yet. I'm still waiting for the dust to settle. Looks like 2006 is going to be an interesting year for these developments.
.. I do like Tanenbaum's (and Johnathan Shapiro's) argument about microkernel-based OS's. It almost seems to me that if Linus, 10 some years ago had tried harder to get a micro-kernel based Linux built, Andrew Tanenbaum, et. al., would have kept quiet now. Actually, if I could turn back time, and bring Andrew Tanenbaum, Linus Torvalds and the creators of QNX in the same room (and deflated Linus' ego a little bit so he'd follow the micro-kernel approach instead of a monolithic kernel approach), we may have had Linux running as the base of Mac OS X today, and Linux/Mac OS X would have probably enjoyed an even larger momentum than it does today toward displacing Windows on the desktop even. Linus' problem is that he does not want to admit the possibility that Linux could have been _just as good_ of an OS today, even if it was micro-kernel based. Well, that little self-gratification of having to be 'right' (or maybe he just didn't care) 10+ years ago, is now opening up markets for a shitload of other micro-kernel based OS's.
Do I think this is wrong or bad? No. I just think that Linux can (and should) evolve to a true micro-kernel based OS, if Linus or anyone else can help it. Re-write Linux from scratch, basically. They did it once, they can do it again. Then, it will be the penis-envy of all operating systems on earth, Mac OS X and QNX included.
G'day Bruce!
Interesting observation - my granfather from my dad's side just died 2 weeks ago at age 81 1/2. He was a WW2 disable veteran, due to a lead schrapnel wound in the back of his skull, which fortunately stayed lodged in his body for 45-50 years before eventually small lead bits of the schrapnel fell out of his ear one day as he was waking up - they somehow travelled throughout his head over a number of years, and eventually found their way out. He never had any kind of lasting damage due to the wound. His body had sealed off the bits to prevent any further infection, and remained like that for decades.
:) - the doc told him that if he didn't quit immediately, his chances are that he would die within 2 weeks if he resumed smoking. He then stopped smoking right around age 65.
:).... I don't know if it was erotic at age 70+, but you can bet that he never had problems in that department (and neither do I).
:). You may well die if you do. But imagine he hadn't been doing any of that - could he have pulled 90+? We'll never know. Mayve it was that stress on his body that made him resilient. That, and damn good 'genetics' (if that can ever be claimed).
:) (not literally, but at least analyze them in any possible ways). They may hold SOME of the cure for cancer. No one ever had it on either side of my family, for the last 3 generations that I could dig up. Everyone died from 80+ to about 95.
The man also was a heavy alcoholic for 20-25 years in a row. Eventually, my dad and uncle had to carry him and drag him by his ankles and hands into a car and straight to the sanitarium, where he was therapeutically/systematically cured ('brainwashed') into believing alcohol is bad for him. The psychiatrists managed to somehow create a reflex in his subconscious which triggered nausea, and vommitting each time he would even smell alcohol, let alone drink it. This successfully got him off alcohol (as well as had him stop doing all the nasty things a habitual drunkard does to his family, which I won't list here). He stopped drinking around age 55.
His relationship with smoking probably lasted the longest, 40+ years, with him finally nearly suffocating to death one day from a serious cough attack. My dad immediately took him to the doctor, who was an army doctor (he didn't trust anyone who wasn't affiliated with the army back in the day
His diet consisted of anything and everything, without any particular regard to what he consumed. All types of meat - pork, beef, chicken, lamb, didn't matter. All types of fluids, coffee, soda, whatever (bar alcohol).
About the only ailment he ever had was some sort of an ulcer when he was young, where they had to surgically remove a part of his intestine. This contributed to him being stick thin all of his life. He could eat enormous amounts of food - his weight never shifted above what it was.
If there ever was a specimen that truly defied all healthy habits by neglecting food, working out, and extremely abused alcohol as well as tobacco - it was my grandfather. And even at old age, when nudity was shown all over TV, he'd still joke about it, or you can see he'd get a reaction out of it
Having said all this - the man died in an afternoon nap, right after a big lunch, in his sleep of entirely natural causes.
So much for "X" causes cancer, or "Y" causes this ailment or that ailment... I'm not saying go ahead, try this at home
So dissect people like that
somewhere I read - perfection is only achieved on the point of collapse. I suppose you can interpret that various ways - you become God, thus you're perfect.... or you become dead, meet God, and then you are 'perfect'? :) Looking for perfection can be a huge cockblocking activity actually... (in just about anything you do, including the pursuit of women ;) ).
You need to forward this comment directly to sun.com's forums, and possibly to Jonathan Schwartz or whoever handles his email. Mod him up to 5.
It is precisely the opposite of what you just said that is the truth - CS _are_ foundry workers, albeit not in the typical sense like a steel factory. You must have never held a position at some company like MS or AMZN or GOOG - which is why you do not see the 'foundry' treatment/aspect of software engineering.
You seem to have your roles reversed on which drives who - it isn't CS that drives business - it is the other way around. A CS job can be a 'creational' job so long as it meets the purposes of business, which is time to market, functionality, etc. Ever attempted setting up a software engineering company? When you do - reply here with your experience of how 'creational' the whole thing was, when your investment (or someone else's) in the company was burning a hole through your pocket and you are trying to get it off the ground.
Where most companies seem to fail at, as one of the people who replied to you, is picking the right people to manage IT staff, as well as not following a proven process when writing software, so that it can become as mechanical as possible to turn out good software... RUP, agile, SCRUM, etc are all beneficial to this effect, however, a very small percentage of companies truly follow the spirit of these methodologies. The problem is unless everyone's on board with these methodologies, they do not work.
I could go on and on about this issue... but it isn't as simple as you just pointed out.
Yeah, it's called Southern California. :)
I think someone with a bit of inspiration for art should change the Bill Gates/Borg topic icon to have his left eye appear black/bruised....
and I don't pretend that it is only that - but it gravitates largely toward that. Capitalism seems perfect, unless you can 'reprogram' people to be something other than what they are - large mass/group, without basic understanding of economics, psychology/sociology, science, etc. It takes more than a nice rosy rant to show understanding of how all these interact. Anyone, and most everyone on slashdot it seems, can take a stovepiped view of these concepts.... then some other geek who views the world through his B.S. in C.S. or M.S. or Ph.D in some hardcore scientific discipline prysm, reinforces him by moding up... Then a whole avalanche of mindless drivel unleashes afterwards, most of it not rooted in the realities that we face today .... Thus, the concept of self-moderation has lost credibility since long time ago, unless you have domain experts moderating posts (which this is not). Which just brings me to the fact that in one year I can count the number of times I've posted on Slashdot on both hands.... etc etc.
They'll include a bigass disclaimer to the effect of "Use at your own risk, no warranties/liabilities represented bla bla". That's how.
Thank God someone with a clue.. Of course it's not pure capitalism. If it was pure capitalism, we'd still probably be running MS-DOS, because Microsoft could monopolize, using any tactics available at their disposal (corporate-ordered murder(s) included), to stay afloat and keep their monopoly.
/balance/, or equilibrium.... balance is imperative amongst all entites in the united states (or any other country) - between government, corporations and the people.... The U.S. has so far been achieving a wonderful balance, more wonderful than any other developed country even, Sweden included....
However, the other part of your statement contained a very, extremely key word -
When someone comes up with a better balancing scheme, I think the US will be the first one to embrace it.
> If you truly consider that the most important right of all, above every other right, you're
> pathologically materialistic and need an attitude adjustment.
And I think you are pathologically idealist (a.k.a. stupid, head-up-the-ass, etc), and don't understand economics one fucking bit.
Wow.. so much verbal masturbation, egotistical musings... self-love, the all natural opiate. You, Michael Albert, and perhaps Chomsky to close the deal, would probably have the most enlightening chat amongst you all... by the time you're done, one will suffocate from all the chest thumping, the other one just be bruised from it, or hey, maybe even possibly pissed all over each other with joy over who expressed higher intellectualism and 'forward looking' prophetic statements on why capitalism sucks, and socialism is better, or "ParEcon" (a veiled socialist/communist paradigm) is the next step...
I understand your drive for higher state of being, but what I think you don't understand is that everyone who ever tried it over the last umpteenth thousand years failed, and along the way slaughtered millions of people on the account of them "not understanding" the leader...
but why? And who is to say or can claim with any degree of certainty that these "gaffes" were bona fide, that is truly inadvertent? Yeah, let me think, a 100MM dollar company with 5000+ employees, committing public "gaffes"... well, they must be drinking gasoline at Google! Please... I'd treat it more as mooning than anything else.. they're trying to get attention. Maybe they're expecting a worse (downward) plateu than they were hoping for in their stock price.... All those paper millionaires would like to cash in too, ya know, if they can get a cold chance....
IFF
a) I can encrypt my data locally, prior to transferring it to GDrive
b) I can decrypt my data locally, after transferring it from GDrive
c) it all has to happen rather transparently
I suppose you could use AES for encryption, or public/private key encryption, not sure what either type of encryption would buy you. Come to think of it, PGP.com has a product that does this already, PGPdisk - if they can emulate that in some way, that would be swell...
None of this is going to work if they're hoping to "scan" the user data in any imaginable way (for whatever purpose, advertising or not). No one will go for that, I'm like 99% sure, except those without a stinkin' clue or those who truly do not care about privacy.
Perhaps.. but as far as out part goes, we should not be erecting barriers to information infiltration into China by legislating against it. I'd prefer we'd be silent on the issue, if nothing else. Transforming China into a democratic society is going to take a lot longer than it took for them to become an economic powerhouse... and if those sentiment changes do not follow, well you can take your economy and shove it, because your people are still going to be indentured slaves, working for shit wages, living in a poluted environment, and a dozens of other plaguing issues I can't seem to recall at this point in time....
China ain't the US, never was, and I doubt it will ever be.