No, assuming you mean "could open source shut down Facebook". But a really good open source application could. So could a really good closed source application.
See, outside a relatively small community of OSS fans, no one really cares whether their software is open source or not. What they want to know is, "Does this software do what I want, is it easy to use, and is it cheaper than the alternatives?" Note the order -- it's important. If if doesn't do what they want, ease of use doesn't matter. If it doesn't do what they want and something else is easier to use, cost doesn't matter. And nowhere on that list is "Does the coding style match my personal ideology regarding freedom and politics." People just don't care.
If you want to have open source software take over the computer world, make it better than closed source software, and make it easier to use. And when you go to advertise it, push those two aspects. Tell people how great it is, how fast it is, how simple it is, how powerful it is. Tell them you can sell it for 2/3 the price of the software they've been using. Tell them all their old files will translate across with no problems. They'll be thrilled. The minute you start talking about freedom, they're going to stop listening.
What everyone else has said is true: mismanagement was the main cause of Loki's failure.
But what no one wants to admit is that when you have a relatively small market, and a majority of that market refuses to pay (or at least to pay full price) for software, you're pretty much doomed from the start.
I was subscribed to a few LUG mailing lists while Loki still existed, and it was extremely common on both lists for a group of five or ten people to get together to buy one copy of the CD, then share the game. Ok, yes, they paid for a copy of the software, but if each five people buy one copy, Loki only gets 1/5 of the money they would have otherwise. With better management, they might have been able to survive that, but with the people they had in charge, they were doomed.
When Amazon started selling non-DRM music for about $1/track, or $10/album, I stopped illegally downloading music. I'm not willing to pay $17 for the one song I want on an album, or even $10 once it's in the bargain bin, but a buck? That's worth it.
I wish I could get the DVD sets of the shows I want for $40/season. The only thing I watch these days is MythBusters -- well, I occasionally watch home destruction shows on HGTV, but not enough to care about DVDs -- and the DVDs go for something like $30, with two or three episodes per disc.
People under 18 are still people. They're just people with limited rights. The original poster's point was that corporations are frequently protected under free speech laws because they're considered to be a legal entity with many of the same rights as a person.
I honestly can't tell... was this meant to disagree with me?
Regardless of that... I doubt that, as a company, Google really cares about Chinese politics as an abstract. What they care about, as a company, is making money. Part of that means maintaining an image, but mostly it means being able to do what they set out to do, which is provide some services in exchange for money. Where Google does care about Chinese politics is in the specific: if the Chinese government insists on having Google censor results, Google makes less money and has their image tarnished, which causes them to make less money.
Google didn't get to be the best search engine around because of ideology. They got to be the best because they wanted to make money. Well, OK... maybe that's an ideology too... but it wasn't some sort of "information wants to be free" kind of thing. It was a "there aren't any great search engines out there, and we can build one. Let's do it and get rich" kind of thing.
Of course Google is trying to impose "American Values" on China. As it stands, they can't gain enough power to control things there. If China becomes more like America, then Google (and other companies) will have a bigger say in the government, and will be able to make more money.
Is it a surprise to anyone that that's what they're trying to do?
You beat me to it. Most people don't give a damn about "free software", they just want to have their stuff work. That goes for social networks, too. People want their social network to do what it's supposed to do (whatever that is... I still haven't figured out the point, if there is one), and they don't really care what software it runs on.
Nah... it's where you can only landscape half the yard at a time. Logically, a xenoscaped yard will never be completed. (OK, that ought to be a Zenoscaped lawn, but they sound the same, and that's good enough.)
Well.... going by the article and the photo, they have an ugly yard covered with wood chips, and a fence with some low-water-consumption plants along the outside of it. It didn't look to me (from the photo) like 40 percent of their lawn was landscaped with plants.
Now, maybe the photo is misleading, or shows it before all their changes, but that's what it looks like to me.
What's the motive for him to lie? I'm trying, but I really don't see one.
He gets some publicity? Well, OK, but it's all going to fall apart when it comes out that he was lying.
He gets people mad at Citibank? Why bother trying to make people mad at your own bank?
So I guess, really, I see two motives, but neither of them is terribly compelling. Especially since he had no need to post anything anyway... he could have just dealt with the problem and said nothing. If people he does business with, rather than casual readers, wanted to know, he could have just said "there was a mix up with some paperwork, and our account was placed on hold for 24 hours. It's been resolved, and it won't happen again." So again... while I don't disagree that this makes a better story than "I screwed up," there's no need for a story there at all.
There are places where, mostly as a result of foolish policies, curbside recycling makes sense.
Where I live, the town is charged a fairly high fee for disposal of garbage, and paid a fairly low fee for recyclables. That's all based on what gets put on the truck, since the recycling plant and the landfill are in different places, and there's no sorting that I know of at the landfill end. So it makes a big difference how much you recycle... In an average week, my household produces about 2/3 non-recyclable (mostly things that are food contaminated, which we're not supposed to recycle) and 1/3 recyclable waste. If that holds for every household, that means the town is paying a third less to dispose of waste, which makes a big difference on my tax bill. Sure, it could be sorted out further down the line, but then the people at the landfill would have to install sorting machines, and we'd have to pay more for waste disposal for a while...
Without reading the article, I don't see how animals' moving around does not decrease meat production.
Meat is muscle. Moving promotes the production of muscle. It's not actually that complicated. More importantly, it's muscle that's been used, so it tastes better. (Well, ok, that bit is subjective, and dependent on a whole lot of things, but still.)
Read the article I posted. The point of the article was that they can intensively graze (meaning "force the cattle to graze the way bison do") and use the same amount of land that is used for raising corn for cattle. From the article:
"Churchill says that on properly recovered land, he can finish about two steers per acre. That is almost precisely the acreage it takes to grow the grain to finish those same steers in a feedlot. This whole system makes economic sense, acre by acre. More than half of our total grain crop goes to feed livestock, so it follows that we can convert half of the 150 million acres used to grow corn and soy to permanent pasture and lose not one ounce of meat production."
So, in fact, it does NOT take more land to raise grass-fed beef.
Next point: yes, they move around a lot. That's what builds the muscle that is the meat we eat. And the fact that they're moving around and eating more or less what they want is part of what makes the meat taste better.
Third point: The land the people in the article are using is former farmland that is no longer commercially viable. It's too exhausted from continuous high-fertilizer high-pesticide farming to support soy or corn anymore. But, with a few years of rest, it will support prairie grasses just fine, which is what the cattle eat. So no land is being used up that wouldn't otherwise be used. And as for transport costs... how do you think the corn that was raised on those farms before got to the meat factories? It was carried there on trucks. And seed, pesticide, and fertilizer were carried to those farms, and the meat was carried from the feed-lots to the packing plants and then to grocery stores on trucks. This doesn't reduce the amount of travel the meat has to do, but it cuts out everything involved in growing and moving the grain they were fed on. That, in itself, is a huge savings.
As an added bonus, the land he is using is being returned, as closely as he can manage, to the prairie ecology that was there before it was turned into corn and soy farms. Like I said... read the article. While their conclusions are, perhaps, somewhat overoptimistic, this isn't all pipe-dreams: they're doing it now, and making a living at it.
While you're right that the basic concepts have been there, there are a few differences.
Artillery in Civ: destroys defensive structures, or attacks. No defense against bombardment. Ships bombarding cities are safe unless there is a ship in the city. Artillery in AC: damages units. If there is an artillery unit on the bombarded square, it automatically fires back. Ships bombarding cities are at risk from ANY artillery in the city, since it will automatically fire back.
Modability. Python is powerful, yes. And it's not too hard to learn. But it's nothing like a plain english file that anyone can modify without having to learn a programming language.
You're right about the governors, though.
I'd love to see the option to create units from scratch... historically, different groups of people have concentrated on different things, so while one society focused on heavy cavalry, another focused on fast moving infantry. That's not really represented in the Civ games, but it would be possible to represent it if each tech advance gave a new type of armor, weapon, or ability, instead of just a new unit.
I've got to say, my favorite of the Civ combat systems is still in Call To Power ("The Civ Game that Never Was"). Actually, that was my favorite of the games in a lot of ways... I've never really understood why no one else liked it. Multi-unit combat, ranged units affecting what happened between the non-ranged units, and good use of flying units.
"Gee, maybe we shouldn't be eating so many animals, since they are an inefficient use of grain.
It takes several pounds of grain (I have seen figures from 4 - 16) to produce 1 pound of beef. Not to mention that cattle are a significant source of greenhouse gasses.
Reducing your meat consumption is a very simple way of reducing your carbon footprint.
It's healthy, too..."
Nothing about corn in there. Regardless, my point still stands. Grass fed beef doesn't require corn, and the article I pointed to was about raising grass fed beef on land that can no longer be economically used for producing corn or soy. If you think I should have been responding to something else... well, nothing I can do about that. I was just responding to what was there.
When the cost of fertilizer, pesticide, and transport of fodder is taken into account, along with the expense of antibiotics and growth hormones for animals, I suspect you're right on all counts.
When the beef is produced organically in free range pasture, I'm not so convinced. Grass-fed beef requires less medication, and the fodder doesn't have to be shipped anywhere. They (grass-fed cows) also produce less methane, assuming they're not from one of the breeds that have been bred to feed primarily on corn. The meat still needs to be moved, so it's certainly not a cure-all, and it might not be as efficient as growing vegetables, but then again, it requires fewer toxins, so maybe it's better.
Check out this article for some details. Some of it, as with everything in that magazine, is pie-in-the-sky dreaming, but some of it (the greenhouse gas issues, for instance) I was able to find confirmation of other places.
And free-range poultry can improve the soil, at least to a limited extent, while they graze, and produce just as many eggs, which are much healthier than those from factory-raised hens. The problem there is land... you need a lot more land for free range chickens than for factory farmed, and there's more human effort involved, so that's not quite so simple a trade as grass fed beef.
Actually, my experience in Europe (Italy and the UK) was that the people there were confused by and sometimes disliked our government and pitied our population. Which is not the same as hating us. I've got nothing on the health care and mental health issues, though.
Right now I live where I can take a bus to work, but I can't take it to buy groceries, or anywhere else. Because it doesn't GO anywhere else. It takes me 15 minutes to drive to or from work; on the bus, it's 30 minutes there, and an hour back. I lived for years in a town where the nearest bus stop was something like 5 miles away, all of it on a state highway with no shoulder, which wasn't even remotely safe to walk on. Why? Because it was a small town with a limited budget. If you wanted to get somewhere, you drove. Everyone would have been happy to take a bus, but the money just wasn't there, and it's hard to get the service started without any money to make the initial investment.
When I lived in Boston, I only drove when I left the city. I spent three years using public transportation for everything, from commuting to shopping. That just isn't possible most places. Sure, I could move back, and have public transportation, but the cost of living is so much higher that it wouldn't really save me much, if anything.
...so when someone breaks their contract with Apple, Apple will prevent them from using more Apple products?
Wow... that's almost as bad as police pulling people over for speeding, or ticketing illegally parked cars!
(Hmm... was there a little too much sarcasm in that? Oh well. Still... getting upset because a company stops doing business with you after you break a contract with them is pretty silly. If you didn't like the contract, you shouldn't have signed it in the first place.)
Regardless of legality, I have to wonder. Someone goes out and buys a device that they know is built by a notoriously paranoid company that refuses to work with others. They know that various apps have been rejected for no real reason. They know there's no way for them to legally add software without going through that companies store. And yet they're surprised, and offended, when it turns out they can't add whatever software they want and make major changes to the system.
So I have to wonder.... where can I get some of the magical unreasonable optimism drug they've been taking?
I did read his comments. And in my original post, that you're responding to, I said "...the things he's complaining about are issues with how he's using it, not with the phones." If your phone is just a phone, turning it off isn't a big deal. If your phone is also your computer, it's hard to turn it off and still get work done as a programmer.
He doesn't hate cell phones, or any kind of phones. He hates his unwillingness to just shut them off and stop worrying about them. He just doesn't realize that that's what he hates.
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No, assuming you mean "could open source shut down Facebook". But a really good open source application could. So could a really good closed source application.
See, outside a relatively small community of OSS fans, no one really cares whether their software is open source or not. What they want to know is, "Does this software do what I want, is it easy to use, and is it cheaper than the alternatives?" Note the order -- it's important. If if doesn't do what they want, ease of use doesn't matter. If it doesn't do what they want and something else is easier to use, cost doesn't matter. And nowhere on that list is "Does the coding style match my personal ideology regarding freedom and politics." People just don't care.
If you want to have open source software take over the computer world, make it better than closed source software, and make it easier to use. And when you go to advertise it, push those two aspects. Tell people how great it is, how fast it is, how simple it is, how powerful it is. Tell them you can sell it for 2/3 the price of the software they've been using. Tell them all their old files will translate across with no problems. They'll be thrilled. The minute you start talking about freedom, they're going to stop listening.
What everyone else has said is true: mismanagement was the main cause of Loki's failure.
But what no one wants to admit is that when you have a relatively small market, and a majority of that market refuses to pay (or at least to pay full price) for software, you're pretty much doomed from the start.
I was subscribed to a few LUG mailing lists while Loki still existed, and it was extremely common on both lists for a group of five or ten people to get together to buy one copy of the CD, then share the game. Ok, yes, they paid for a copy of the software, but if each five people buy one copy, Loki only gets 1/5 of the money they would have otherwise. With better management, they might have been able to survive that, but with the people they had in charge, they were doomed.
I think Zappa mostly appeals to people who appreciate weirdness for weirdness' sake, honestly. I like some of his stuff, the rest is just too strange.
When Amazon started selling non-DRM music for about $1/track, or $10/album, I stopped illegally downloading music. I'm not willing to pay $17 for the one song I want on an album, or even $10 once it's in the bargain bin, but a buck? That's worth it.
I wish I could get the DVD sets of the shows I want for $40/season. The only thing I watch these days is MythBusters -- well, I occasionally watch home destruction shows on HGTV, but not enough to care about DVDs -- and the DVDs go for something like $30, with two or three episodes per disc.
People under 18 are still people. They're just people with limited rights. The original poster's point was that corporations are frequently protected under free speech laws because they're considered to be a legal entity with many of the same rights as a person.
I honestly can't tell... was this meant to disagree with me?
Regardless of that... I doubt that, as a company, Google really cares about Chinese politics as an abstract. What they care about, as a company, is making money. Part of that means maintaining an image, but mostly it means being able to do what they set out to do, which is provide some services in exchange for money. Where Google does care about Chinese politics is in the specific: if the Chinese government insists on having Google censor results, Google makes less money and has their image tarnished, which causes them to make less money.
Google didn't get to be the best search engine around because of ideology. They got to be the best because they wanted to make money. Well, OK... maybe that's an ideology too... but it wasn't some sort of "information wants to be free" kind of thing. It was a "there aren't any great search engines out there, and we can build one. Let's do it and get rich" kind of thing.
Of course Google is trying to impose "American Values" on China. As it stands, they can't gain enough power to control things there. If China becomes more like America, then Google (and other companies) will have a bigger say in the government, and will be able to make more money.
Is it a surprise to anyone that that's what they're trying to do?
You beat me to it. Most people don't give a damn about "free software", they just want to have their stuff work. That goes for social networks, too. People want their social network to do what it's supposed to do (whatever that is... I still haven't figured out the point, if there is one), and they don't really care what software it runs on.
Nah... it's where you can only landscape half the yard at a time. Logically, a xenoscaped yard will never be completed. (OK, that ought to be a Zenoscaped lawn, but they sound the same, and that's good enough.)
Well.... going by the article and the photo, they have an ugly yard covered with wood chips, and a fence with some low-water-consumption plants along the outside of it. It didn't look to me (from the photo) like 40 percent of their lawn was landscaped with plants.
Now, maybe the photo is misleading, or shows it before all their changes, but that's what it looks like to me.
This sounds like turning government into a giant game of flux, which is great until someone plays the "pass all bills" card.
What's the motive for him to lie? I'm trying, but I really don't see one.
He gets some publicity? Well, OK, but it's all going to fall apart when it comes out that he was lying.
He gets people mad at Citibank? Why bother trying to make people mad at your own bank?
So I guess, really, I see two motives, but neither of them is terribly compelling. Especially since he had no need to post anything anyway... he could have just dealt with the problem and said nothing. If people he does business with, rather than casual readers, wanted to know, he could have just said "there was a mix up with some paperwork, and our account was placed on hold for 24 hours. It's been resolved, and it won't happen again." So again... while I don't disagree that this makes a better story than "I screwed up," there's no need for a story there at all.
There are places where, mostly as a result of foolish policies, curbside recycling makes sense.
Where I live, the town is charged a fairly high fee for disposal of garbage, and paid a fairly low fee for recyclables. That's all based on what gets put on the truck, since the recycling plant and the landfill are in different places, and there's no sorting that I know of at the landfill end. So it makes a big difference how much you recycle... In an average week, my household produces about 2/3 non-recyclable (mostly things that are food contaminated, which we're not supposed to recycle) and 1/3 recyclable waste. If that holds for every household, that means the town is paying a third less to dispose of waste, which makes a big difference on my tax bill. Sure, it could be sorted out further down the line, but then the people at the landfill would have to install sorting machines, and we'd have to pay more for waste disposal for a while...
Without reading the article, I don't see how animals' moving around does not decrease meat production.
Meat is muscle. Moving promotes the production of muscle. It's not actually that complicated. More importantly, it's muscle that's been used, so it tastes better. (Well, ok, that bit is subjective, and dependent on a whole lot of things, but still.)
Read the article I posted. The point of the article was that they can intensively graze (meaning "force the cattle to graze the way bison do") and use the same amount of land that is used for raising corn for cattle. From the article:
So, in fact, it does NOT take more land to raise grass-fed beef.
Next point: yes, they move around a lot. That's what builds the muscle that is the meat we eat. And the fact that they're moving around and eating more or less what they want is part of what makes the meat taste better.
Third point: The land the people in the article are using is former farmland that is no longer commercially viable. It's too exhausted from continuous high-fertilizer high-pesticide farming to support soy or corn anymore. But, with a few years of rest, it will support prairie grasses just fine, which is what the cattle eat. So no land is being used up that wouldn't otherwise be used. And as for transport costs... how do you think the corn that was raised on those farms before got to the meat factories? It was carried there on trucks. And seed, pesticide, and fertilizer were carried to those farms, and the meat was carried from the feed-lots to the packing plants and then to grocery stores on trucks. This doesn't reduce the amount of travel the meat has to do, but it cuts out everything involved in growing and moving the grain they were fed on. That, in itself, is a huge savings.
As an added bonus, the land he is using is being returned, as closely as he can manage, to the prairie ecology that was there before it was turned into corn and soy farms. Like I said... read the article. While their conclusions are, perhaps, somewhat overoptimistic, this isn't all pipe-dreams: they're doing it now, and making a living at it.
While you're right that the basic concepts have been there, there are a few differences.
Artillery in Civ: destroys defensive structures, or attacks. No defense against bombardment. Ships bombarding cities are safe unless there is a ship in the city.
Artillery in AC: damages units. If there is an artillery unit on the bombarded square, it automatically fires back. Ships bombarding cities are at risk from ANY artillery in the city, since it will automatically fire back.
Modability. Python is powerful, yes. And it's not too hard to learn. But it's nothing like a plain english file that anyone can modify without having to learn a programming language.
You're right about the governors, though.
I'd love to see the option to create units from scratch... historically, different groups of people have concentrated on different things, so while one society focused on heavy cavalry, another focused on fast moving infantry. That's not really represented in the Civ games, but it would be possible to represent it if each tech advance gave a new type of armor, weapon, or ability, instead of just a new unit.
I've got to say, my favorite of the Civ combat systems is still in Call To Power ("The Civ Game that Never Was"). Actually, that was my favorite of the games in a lot of ways... I've never really understood why no one else liked it. Multi-unit combat, ranged units affecting what happened between the non-ranged units, and good use of flying units.
My response was to this:
"Gee, maybe we shouldn't be eating so many animals, since they are an inefficient use of grain.
It takes several pounds of grain (I have seen figures from 4 - 16) to produce 1 pound of beef. Not to mention that cattle are a significant source of greenhouse gasses.
Reducing your meat consumption is a very simple way of reducing your carbon footprint.
It's healthy, too..."
Nothing about corn in there. Regardless, my point still stands. Grass fed beef doesn't require corn, and the article I pointed to was about raising grass fed beef on land that can no longer be economically used for producing corn or soy. If you think I should have been responding to something else... well, nothing I can do about that. I was just responding to what was there.
When the cost of fertilizer, pesticide, and transport of fodder is taken into account, along with the expense of antibiotics and growth hormones for animals, I suspect you're right on all counts.
When the beef is produced organically in free range pasture, I'm not so convinced. Grass-fed beef requires less medication, and the fodder doesn't have to be shipped anywhere. They (grass-fed cows) also produce less methane, assuming they're not from one of the breeds that have been bred to feed primarily on corn. The meat still needs to be moved, so it's certainly not a cure-all, and it might not be as efficient as growing vegetables, but then again, it requires fewer toxins, so maybe it's better.
Check out this article for some details. Some of it, as with everything in that magazine, is pie-in-the-sky dreaming, but some of it (the greenhouse gas issues, for instance) I was able to find confirmation of other places.
And free-range poultry can improve the soil, at least to a limited extent, while they graze, and produce just as many eggs, which are much healthier than those from factory-raised hens. The problem there is land... you need a lot more land for free range chickens than for factory farmed, and there's more human effort involved, so that's not quite so simple a trade as grass fed beef.
Actually, my experience in Europe (Italy and the UK) was that the people there were confused by and sometimes disliked our government and pitied our population. Which is not the same as hating us. I've got nothing on the health care and mental health issues, though.
Not necessarily.
Right now I live where I can take a bus to work, but I can't take it to buy groceries, or anywhere else. Because it doesn't GO anywhere else. It takes me 15 minutes to drive to or from work; on the bus, it's 30 minutes there, and an hour back. I lived for years in a town where the nearest bus stop was something like 5 miles away, all of it on a state highway with no shoulder, which wasn't even remotely safe to walk on. Why? Because it was a small town with a limited budget. If you wanted to get somewhere, you drove. Everyone would have been happy to take a bus, but the money just wasn't there, and it's hard to get the service started without any money to make the initial investment.
When I lived in Boston, I only drove when I left the city. I spent three years using public transportation for everything, from commuting to shopping. That just isn't possible most places. Sure, I could move back, and have public transportation, but the cost of living is so much higher that it wouldn't really save me much, if anything.
...so when someone breaks their contract with Apple, Apple will prevent them from using more Apple products?
Wow... that's almost as bad as police pulling people over for speeding, or ticketing illegally parked cars!
(Hmm... was there a little too much sarcasm in that? Oh well. Still... getting upset because a company stops doing business with you after you break a contract with them is pretty silly. If you didn't like the contract, you shouldn't have signed it in the first place.)
Regardless of legality, I have to wonder. Someone goes out and buys a device that they know is built by a notoriously paranoid company that refuses to work with others. They know that various apps have been rejected for no real reason. They know there's no way for them to legally add software without going through that companies store. And yet they're surprised, and offended, when it turns out they can't add whatever software they want and make major changes to the system.
So I have to wonder.... where can I get some of the magical unreasonable optimism drug they've been taking?
I did read his comments. And in my original post, that you're responding to, I said "...the things he's complaining about are issues with how he's using it, not with the phones." If your phone is just a phone, turning it off isn't a big deal. If your phone is also your computer, it's hard to turn it off and still get work done as a programmer.
He doesn't hate cell phones, or any kind of phones. He hates his unwillingness to just shut them off and stop worrying about them. He just doesn't realize that that's what he hates.