I've always heard "yippie-ki-yay, kemosabe" in the censored version of Die Hard. It's Die Hard 3 I've heard "melon farmer" in. Needless to say, it's become one of my favorite insults.
That's NOT Occam's razor. The way it's usually stated is a fantastically bad translation. Occam's razor is really:
Don't make unneccesary assumptions.
They seem similar at first glance, but the more common translation makes no distinction between assumptions and known/observable facts. That distinction is at the core of the razor's meaning. The loss of that distinction can in some cases lead the real razor and its bad translation to opposite conclusions.
Take, for example, the question "How does electricity work?" The two most common proposed answers (and I would argue, the two categories under which all possible answers can be collected) are "Particle physics" and "God did it." Now, particle physics is very complicated. It takes years of study to understand, and one of the main points of the article under discussion is that there's still a lot we don't yet understand about it. "God did it" is a much simpler explanation. The bad translator's razor explicitly favors God. But particle physics is complicated because it is an enormous mess of known, observed, incontrovertible facts. Where facts are not known, physics actively avoids making any assumptions at all Theology's entire point (the overwhelming majority of respected theologians agree with me on this) is that it rests on faith--making assumptions about formally undecidable propositions like the existence of God. So the true Occam's razor favors particle physics, quite the opposite of the bad translation's conclusion.
In regards to your specific use of the razor, the bad translation has again led you to the wrong conclusion. The assumption that we are alone is a much simpler solution than the assumption that we are not, but it is not necessary, now or ever, to assume either. Until we find alien life or a compelling reason to believe there is none, simply keep your mind open about it.
Don't blame him for sucking in Eps. 2 and 3. Or Jake Lloyd for sucking in Ep. 1. Liam Neeson, Ewan McGregor, Natalie Portman, Sam Jackson, Ian McDermid, and Christopher Lee are all talented, respected actors, many of them Academy Award nominees and winners. And in all three movies, the only non-embarassing performance from any of them was McGregor's in Ep. 3. The problem with the acting in the Star Wars movies is that George Lucas can't write dialogue or direct actors. Now, I am of the opinion that Lucas is a fantastic idea man, and the greatest hands-on producer in cinematic history. But as a writer, he gets bogged down in details and forgets the big picture, and he completely lacks the harder-than-it-sounds skill of writing real-sounding dialogue. And as a director, he cares more about special effects and his odd ideas of what qualifies as cinematography than he does about what the actors are doing. That's why the acting in all his movies sucks (yeah, all of them--watch 4-6 again, they're good because the story is told visually, not because the acting's any better).
Christensen's a more extreme case, I'll readily grant, but within his range, he's a perfectly good actor. The fact that he was cast for a role, Darth Vader, outside his range, is still not his fault. If you're an up-and-coming actor offered a leading role in a couple of movies that are guaranteed to make half a billion dollars each, are you going to turn it down because you don't think you're the best choice for the role? I wouldn't, you wouldn't, and Christensen didn't. It's the fault of whoever made the casting decision--and guess who that was.
Edit that... Drinking large quantities of cheap wine that you convince everyone is better than the expensive wine. I had one buddy who went crazy over Chilean wines. He kept claiming their $8 dollar a bottle reds were better than most $30 dollar a bottle reds here in the states.
While better wine tends to be more expensive, and more expensive wine tends to be better, it's only a tendency. Take a specific $30 bottle and a specific $8 bottle, and it's anyone's guess which one is better. If you plot a regression curve with price on the x axis and quality on the y axis, there's a strong upward trend, but most bottles won't actually lie exactly on the curve. As pertains to your Chile vs. US example, Chilean wines tend to be above the curve to the tune of being "worth" 50-75% more than they're priced, and California wines tend to be below the curve by the same amount. Not saying there aren't some excellent Cali wines, they're just generally priced at least moderately higher than excellent Chilean/Italian/etc. wines.
And by the way, it's really not surprising when computer geeks get off on finding things that are both better and cheaper--Linux vs. Windows, you know.
Meet the Feebles, one of Peter Jackson's early movies (his second, iirc), is the worst movie I've ever seen. Dead Alive was a riot, but Meet the Feebles makes such masterpieces as Plan 9 and Gigli look like, well, masterpieces. The second worst is Coven, pronounced coe-ven, which was the movie produced (or rather excreted) by the stars of the documentary American Movie (a wonderful, hilarous, truth-is-stranger-than-fiction film). The third worst is The Double-D Avenger, about a superheroine whose powers come from certain parts of her anatomy, as suggested by the title. It is not a porno, but has all the plot and acting of one. Coven is better than American Movie leads you to expect, and The Double-D Avenger is at least amusingly bad, but Meet the Feebles is simply irredeemable.
The sorts of people who reject the Axiom of Choice (disclaimer: I'm still undecided on the matter) insist on a "constructive" set theory--meaning you can't pull examples of sets that "ought to exist" out of thin air, you have to build them out of the Zermelo-Fraenkel Axioms (minus the Axiom of Choice, of course).
They have a distinction between truth and provability. A statement is true if no counterexample exists (can be constructed), and a statement is provable if there exists a proof of it using the ZF axioms. Using the words "truth" and "provability" in that way, it's clear that the unprovability of the continuum hypothesis is itself proof of its truth. If a counterexample could be constructed (a set with cardinality greater than that of the integers and less than that of the reals), the hypotheis would be provably false. But since it's known to be unprovable, it must be impossible to construct such a set. And the nonexistence of a counterexample is the definition of truth.
It may not actually be inconsistent to use a version of set theory that includes the negation of the continuum hypothesis as an axiom (I'll call it the NCH axiom for Negation-Continuum-Hypothesis), but very few mathematicians (even those who accept the axiom of choice) would accept such a system. Informally, axioms are supposed to be self-evident truths. Even the Axiom of Choice merely extends a statement that is provably true in the finite case to the infinite case, but the NCH axiom asserts, for no self-evident reason, the existence of an exotic set with properties that aren't even trivial to define. The Continuum Hypothesis is technically unprovable, but unless you're actually doing formal mathematics you can safely think of it as true.
I did my senior thesis on (topics strongly related to) the Goldbach Conjecture, and I would be VERY surprised if it isn't proved in my lifetime. A lot of weaker conjectures have been proven--every integer is the sum of at most six primes, every odd integer over 3^(3^15) is the sum of three primes, and every sufficiently large (I forget the known lower limit for this one) even integer is the sum of a prime and a number that is either prime or the product of two primes.
Electroshock therapy is sometimes used for clinical depression. It is said that the depression is relieved because patients "forget what they were depressed about."
Even that situation, there's no actual memory erasure of any kind done. It's just training the mind to choose not to access the depressing memories. The memories are still there, and willpower is all it takes to load them.
They assume that HR people are stupid, and don't know their job...
It's true that criticizing HR people has become a knee-jerk reaction whether or not it's based in fact in any specific instance, but there are some fundamental flaws with the profession as a whole. And within the realm of science, mathematics, and technology, those flaws are serious. If you major in Human Resource Management, you are not required to take any courses that teach you what skill sets are associated with common college majors. So the vast majority of HR people simply lack the capacity to evaluate the potential of applicants without directly related experience.
And since everyone starts out with no experience, that's a big problem. It's why we see so many job postings requiring bizzarely specific types of experience (5 years with Windows 2000 SP1 and so forth) or, for entry-level jobs, specific college degrees. Excepting only very specialized fields like medicine, research science, engineering, and the like, no entry-level job actually needs a specific degree. A math major (like me) or an econ major can do entry-level AP/AR as well as an accounting or finance major. A psych major can be as good of a management trainee as a business major. But job postings ALWAYS blindly ask for the degree whose name most closely matches the job title, and even if you call and explain that you have the necessary skill sets, listing them by name, but your degree is in a tangentially related field, you will not even be considered a candidate worth interviewing.
That's why HR people get so much criticism. Their training prepares them to evaluate very well whether an applicant has the right attitude to be a good employee, but not how skilled they are likely to be at actually performing the job functions, except in the trivial case where the applicant has already performed the same functions. And criticism of that is completely legitimate.
If the rules state that you can not directly observe the cat, then you indirectly observe the cat.
The distinction between "direct" and "indirect" observation is meaningless in this context. Observation is observation. Whenever ANYTHING requires the cat's waveform to collapse, it will collapse.
RTFA. Card wrote about copyright law and simply used filesharing as his main example. Copyright law is the topic of discussion and if anything, filesharing is the nonsequitor.
You've got a good point about the corporate ownership of copyright though. A massively collaborative work like a big-budget movie is fundamentally different from a small group of friends (like a band) creating something together. I'm not sure it's an unsolvable problem, but I can't immediately think of a solution.
The reason Chris Columbus is being replaced is the same reason he was chosen for Sorcerer's Stone and Chamber of Secrets in the first place: he has consistently done well directing child actors. The main characters are 11 to 12 years old in the first two books/films, but teenagers thereafter. Columbus's talent as a director is making movies about and for kids. Which the first two movies are, and the rest won't be.
Linear is not the word you want. If math were linear, after learning one concept, there'd be only one direction to go, only one choice for the next concept. Nothing could be further from the truth. The correct word for the concept you're using is cumulative, meaning you have to understand the last concept before you can understand the next. Cumulativity and linearity, in this context, are sort of chronological reverses of one another: linearity dictates the next concept, cumulativity dictates the previous.
Whether or not it actually does exist is a rather moot point...
That was precicely the point of my parenthetical. My argument was based on the assumption of free will, because it's a necessary assumption. The reasons for that, which you stated, are obvious and at best tangentially related to my topic. So instead of making my post longer and more rambling, I made a quick reference to them and moved on.
Because you started with "Not really," I assume you thought you were disagreeing with me. You weren't, you just misinterpreted me. If I didn't state my point clearly, I'm sorry, but I'm pretty sure I did.
If someone has this gene, and got into trouble, are they responsible for their own actions?
Of course they are. Assuming free will exists at all (and if not, intent ceases to be a legal issue anyway), genetics can only create a tendency to behave in a certain way. Any specific action is purely the result of choice. If the perpetrator was capable of understanding the consequences of their actions, they're guilty. Remember, rapists have a genetic predisposition towards having sex with women.
When I was a student we had these great things called girls who let you have sex with them.
You're forgetting, this is CWRU. Men outnumber women 2:1. Supposedly, that situation has given rise to a saying among Case girls: "The odds are good, but the goods are odd."
Re:How do you know "how fast" a clockless system i
on
Clockless Computing
·
· Score: 1
Well, FLOPS stands for FLoating-point Operations Per Second. It has nothing to do with the system clock, it's an empirical measurement of how many aritmetical operations a processor can do in a second. You can measure the performance of a clockless system just as easily as a clocked system. On the other hand, processor temperature would have a much bigger effect on performance with an asynchronous system, so there'd have to be some standard for what temperature you do your benchmarking at.
In general, I'm pro-advertising. I'm not saying I actually like ads or commercials (excepting the Super Bowl of course), but they pay for content so I don't have to. Television comes into my home for just the cost of the necessary bandwidth, and I get shows that networks spent millions of dollars per hour of programming on. I get internet access for, again, just the cost of bandwidth, and things like Slashdot and Sluggy Freelance, things that take lots of work to maintain, at no additional charge.
I'm glad advertisers are paying for all that for me. I know that it comes back in the price of products, but I'm poor and don't buy as much as most people. So I pay less than my "fair share." If I had more money and bought more products, I'd still be happy to pay more than my share, just for the convenience of not having to subscribe to every single TV show I watch and every website I visit individually.
So I'm glad ads exist. I want the existing system of paying for content production to continue, so I faithfully watch commercials and click on banner ads. But I have a major problem with advertising that interferes with content or worse, fails to provide content at all. That defeats the purpose. I have Mozilla set to block all popups. I click "stop" when Yahoo starts loading one of its clickthrough ad pages. I refuse to do business with spammers, telemarketers, or junk mailers. And if I have to, I will refuse to watch any television station that uses this type of advertising, and write a letter to the station notifying them and explaining my reasons.
I've always compared user interface designs to automobile transmissions. Linux and other free *n?x are like a stick shift. The user has a lot of control over what's going on, but it requires a little more expertice to know what to do. Windows and Mac are automatics. Easier to learn and requiring less continuous attention, but less flexible.
In the 50's and 60's, when the automatic transmission was a new invention, it had a (well-deserved) bad reputation among gearheads for not working very well. The idea hadn't been perfected yet, and it usually caused more problems than it solved. Windows and Mac are in the same situation. They try too hard to keep the user from knowing what's going on behind the scenes.
I think, though, that Mac is changing this. I haven't had the chance to use OS X a whole lot, but from what little I've seen, it seems to be a much more mature, modern automatic. Windows, on the other hand, seems to be moving in the other direction, trying to provide not an automatic transmission, but rather permanent training wheels.
Email is pretty much standardized on one app, and look how great that's been!
There's an enormous difference between standardization of applications and standardization of protocol. Nobody (without a financial stake in the matter) wants a single IM client to dominate, for exactly the reasons you state.
But it would be great if there were a standardized protocol. Imagine if there were several competing, proprietary protocols implementing the basic functions of http, ftp, or smtp. Imagine if IE could only get web pages served by IIS, and Mozilla could only get web pages served by Apache. If Outlook users couldn't exchange email with Pine users or Eudora users. It'd be a disaster.
Interoperability and protocol standardization are weapons against monocultures. The competition between closed protocols have led directly to what is quickly becoming an AIM monoculture.
Slashdot Mirror
I've always heard "yippie-ki-yay, kemosabe" in the censored version of Die Hard. It's Die Hard 3 I've heard "melon farmer" in. Needless to say, it's become one of my favorite insults.
The simplest solution is usually the best.
That's NOT Occam's razor. The way it's usually stated is a fantastically bad translation. Occam's razor is really:
Don't make unneccesary assumptions.
They seem similar at first glance, but the more common translation makes no distinction between assumptions and known/observable facts. That distinction is at the core of the razor's meaning. The loss of that distinction can in some cases lead the real razor and its bad translation to opposite conclusions.
Take, for example, the question "How does electricity work?" The two most common proposed answers (and I would argue, the two categories under which all possible answers can be collected) are "Particle physics" and "God did it." Now, particle physics is very complicated. It takes years of study to understand, and one of the main points of the article under discussion is that there's still a lot we don't yet understand about it. "God did it" is a much simpler explanation. The bad translator's razor explicitly favors God. But particle physics is complicated because it is an enormous mess of known, observed, incontrovertible facts. Where facts are not known, physics actively avoids making any assumptions at all Theology's entire point (the overwhelming majority of respected theologians agree with me on this) is that it rests on faith--making assumptions about formally undecidable propositions like the existence of God. So the true Occam's razor favors particle physics, quite the opposite of the bad translation's conclusion.
In regards to your specific use of the razor, the bad translation has again led you to the wrong conclusion. The assumption that we are alone is a much simpler solution than the assumption that we are not, but it is not necessary, now or ever, to assume either. Until we find alien life or a compelling reason to believe there is none, simply keep your mind open about it.
But Christensen can't ACT.
Don't blame him for sucking in Eps. 2 and 3. Or Jake Lloyd for sucking in Ep. 1. Liam Neeson, Ewan McGregor, Natalie Portman, Sam Jackson, Ian McDermid, and Christopher Lee are all talented, respected actors, many of them Academy Award nominees and winners. And in all three movies, the only non-embarassing performance from any of them was McGregor's in Ep. 3. The problem with the acting in the Star Wars movies is that George Lucas can't write dialogue or direct actors. Now, I am of the opinion that Lucas is a fantastic idea man, and the greatest hands-on producer in cinematic history. But as a writer, he gets bogged down in details and forgets the big picture, and he completely lacks the harder-than-it-sounds skill of writing real-sounding dialogue. And as a director, he cares more about special effects and his odd ideas of what qualifies as cinematography than he does about what the actors are doing. That's why the acting in all his movies sucks (yeah, all of them--watch 4-6 again, they're good because the story is told visually, not because the acting's any better).
Christensen's a more extreme case, I'll readily grant, but within his range, he's a perfectly good actor. The fact that he was cast for a role, Darth Vader, outside his range, is still not his fault. If you're an up-and-coming actor offered a leading role in a couple of movies that are guaranteed to make half a billion dollars each, are you going to turn it down because you don't think you're the best choice for the role? I wouldn't, you wouldn't, and Christensen didn't. It's the fault of whoever made the casting decision--and guess who that was.
Edit that... Drinking large quantities of cheap wine that you convince everyone is better than the expensive wine. I had one buddy who went crazy over Chilean wines. He kept claiming their $8 dollar a bottle reds were better than most $30 dollar a bottle reds here in the states.
While better wine tends to be more expensive, and more expensive wine tends to be better, it's only a tendency. Take a specific $30 bottle and a specific $8 bottle, and it's anyone's guess which one is better. If you plot a regression curve with price on the x axis and quality on the y axis, there's a strong upward trend, but most bottles won't actually lie exactly on the curve. As pertains to your Chile vs. US example, Chilean wines tend to be above the curve to the tune of being "worth" 50-75% more than they're priced, and California wines tend to be below the curve by the same amount. Not saying there aren't some excellent Cali wines, they're just generally priced at least moderately higher than excellent Chilean/Italian/etc. wines.
And by the way, it's really not surprising when computer geeks get off on finding things that are both better and cheaper--Linux vs. Windows, you know.
Meet the Feebles, one of Peter Jackson's early movies (his second, iirc), is the worst movie I've ever seen. Dead Alive was a riot, but Meet the Feebles makes such masterpieces as Plan 9 and Gigli look like, well, masterpieces. The second worst is Coven, pronounced coe-ven, which was the movie produced (or rather excreted) by the stars of the documentary American Movie (a wonderful, hilarous, truth-is-stranger-than-fiction film). The third worst is The Double-D Avenger, about a superheroine whose powers come from certain parts of her anatomy, as suggested by the title. It is not a porno, but has all the plot and acting of one. Coven is better than American Movie leads you to expect, and The Double-D Avenger is at least amusingly bad, but Meet the Feebles is simply irredeemable.
The sorts of people who reject the Axiom of Choice (disclaimer: I'm still undecided on the matter) insist on a "constructive" set theory--meaning you can't pull examples of sets that "ought to exist" out of thin air, you have to build them out of the Zermelo-Fraenkel Axioms (minus the Axiom of Choice, of course).
They have a distinction between truth and provability. A statement is true if no counterexample exists (can be constructed), and a statement is provable if there exists a proof of it using the ZF axioms. Using the words "truth" and "provability" in that way, it's clear that the unprovability of the continuum hypothesis is itself proof of its truth. If a counterexample could be constructed (a set with cardinality greater than that of the integers and less than that of the reals), the hypotheis would be provably false. But since it's known to be unprovable, it must be impossible to construct such a set. And the nonexistence of a counterexample is the definition of truth.
It may not actually be inconsistent to use a version of set theory that includes the negation of the continuum hypothesis as an axiom (I'll call it the NCH axiom for Negation-Continuum-Hypothesis), but very few mathematicians (even those who accept the axiom of choice) would accept such a system. Informally, axioms are supposed to be self-evident truths. Even the Axiom of Choice merely extends a statement that is provably true in the finite case to the infinite case, but the NCH axiom asserts, for no self-evident reason, the existence of an exotic set with properties that aren't even trivial to define. The Continuum Hypothesis is technically unprovable, but unless you're actually doing formal mathematics you can safely think of it as true.
I did my senior thesis on (topics strongly related to) the Goldbach Conjecture, and I would be VERY surprised if it isn't proved in my lifetime. A lot of weaker conjectures have been proven--every integer is the sum of at most six primes, every odd integer over 3^(3^15) is the sum of three primes, and every sufficiently large (I forget the known lower limit for this one) even integer is the sum of a prime and a number that is either prime or the product of two primes.
Electroshock therapy is sometimes used for clinical depression. It is said that the depression is relieved because patients "forget what they were depressed about."
Even that situation, there's no actual memory erasure of any kind done. It's just training the mind to choose not to access the depressing memories. The memories are still there, and willpower is all it takes to load them.
They assume that HR people are stupid, and don't know their job...
It's true that criticizing HR people has become a knee-jerk reaction whether or not it's based in fact in any specific instance, but there are some fundamental flaws with the profession as a whole. And within the realm of science, mathematics, and technology, those flaws are serious. If you major in Human Resource Management, you are not required to take any courses that teach you what skill sets are associated with common college majors. So the vast majority of HR people simply lack the capacity to evaluate the potential of applicants without directly related experience.
And since everyone starts out with no experience, that's a big problem. It's why we see so many job postings requiring bizzarely specific types of experience (5 years with Windows 2000 SP1 and so forth) or, for entry-level jobs, specific college degrees. Excepting only very specialized fields like medicine, research science, engineering, and the like, no entry-level job actually needs a specific degree. A math major (like me) or an econ major can do entry-level AP/AR as well as an accounting or finance major. A psych major can be as good of a management trainee as a business major. But job postings ALWAYS blindly ask for the degree whose name most closely matches the job title, and even if you call and explain that you have the necessary skill sets, listing them by name, but your degree is in a tangentially related field, you will not even be considered a candidate worth interviewing.
That's why HR people get so much criticism. Their training prepares them to evaluate very well whether an applicant has the right attitude to be a good employee, but not how skilled they are likely to be at actually performing the job functions, except in the trivial case where the applicant has already performed the same functions. And criticism of that is completely legitimate.
Is there any legal precedent here?
Yes there is.
If the rules state that you can not directly observe the cat, then you indirectly observe the cat.
The distinction between "direct" and "indirect" observation is meaningless in this context. Observation is observation. Whenever ANYTHING requires the cat's waveform to collapse, it will collapse.
RTFA. Card wrote about copyright law and simply used filesharing as his main example. Copyright law is the topic of discussion and if anything, filesharing is the nonsequitor.
You've got a good point about the corporate ownership of copyright though. A massively collaborative work like a big-budget movie is fundamentally different from a small group of friends (like a band) creating something together. I'm not sure it's an unsolvable problem, but I can't immediately think of a solution.
"becomes"???
The reason Chris Columbus is being replaced is the same reason he was chosen for Sorcerer's Stone and Chamber of Secrets in the first place: he has consistently done well directing child actors. The main characters are 11 to 12 years old in the first two books/films, but teenagers thereafter. Columbus's talent as a director is making movies about and for kids. Which the first two movies are, and the rest won't be.
Posted a month ago: Linux Beer Hike Goes to Ireland.
Linear is not the word you want. If math were linear, after learning one concept, there'd be only one direction to go, only one choice for the next concept. Nothing could be further from the truth. The correct word for the concept you're using is cumulative, meaning you have to understand the last concept before you can understand the next. Cumulativity and linearity, in this context, are sort of chronological reverses of one another: linearity dictates the next concept, cumulativity dictates the previous.
It's the Illudium Q-36 explosive space modulator, silly.
Whether or not it actually does exist is a rather moot point...
That was precicely the point of my parenthetical. My argument was based on the assumption of free will, because it's a necessary assumption. The reasons for that, which you stated, are obvious and at best tangentially related to my topic. So instead of making my post longer and more rambling, I made a quick reference to them and moved on.
Because you started with "Not really," I assume you thought you were disagreeing with me. You weren't, you just misinterpreted me. If I didn't state my point clearly, I'm sorry, but I'm pretty sure I did.
If someone has this gene, and got into trouble, are they responsible for their own actions?
Of course they are. Assuming free will exists at all (and if not, intent ceases to be a legal issue anyway), genetics can only create a tendency to behave in a certain way. Any specific action is purely the result of choice. If the perpetrator was capable of understanding the consequences of their actions, they're guilty. Remember, rapists have a genetic predisposition towards having sex with women.
When I was a student we had these great things called girls who let you have sex with them.
You're forgetting, this is CWRU. Men outnumber women 2:1. Supposedly, that situation has given rise to a saying among Case girls: "The odds are good, but the goods are odd."
Well, FLOPS stands for FLoating-point Operations Per Second. It has nothing to do with the system clock, it's an empirical measurement of how many aritmetical operations a processor can do in a second. You can measure the performance of a clockless system just as easily as a clocked system. On the other hand, processor temperature would have a much bigger effect on performance with an asynchronous system, so there'd have to be some standard for what temperature you do your benchmarking at.
In general, I'm pro-advertising. I'm not saying I actually like ads or commercials (excepting the Super Bowl of course), but they pay for content so I don't have to. Television comes into my home for just the cost of the necessary bandwidth, and I get shows that networks spent millions of dollars per hour of programming on. I get internet access for, again, just the cost of bandwidth, and things like Slashdot and Sluggy Freelance, things that take lots of work to maintain, at no additional charge.
I'm glad advertisers are paying for all that for me. I know that it comes back in the price of products, but I'm poor and don't buy as much as most people. So I pay less than my "fair share." If I had more money and bought more products, I'd still be happy to pay more than my share, just for the convenience of not having to subscribe to every single TV show I watch and every website I visit individually.
So I'm glad ads exist. I want the existing system of paying for content production to continue, so I faithfully watch commercials and click on banner ads. But I have a major problem with advertising that interferes with content or worse, fails to provide content at all. That defeats the purpose. I have Mozilla set to block all popups. I click "stop" when Yahoo starts loading one of its clickthrough ad pages. I refuse to do business with spammers, telemarketers, or junk mailers. And if I have to, I will refuse to watch any television station that uses this type of advertising, and write a letter to the station notifying them and explaining my reasons.
I've always compared user interface designs to automobile transmissions. Linux and other free *n?x are like a stick shift. The user has a lot of control over what's going on, but it requires a little more expertice to know what to do. Windows and Mac are automatics. Easier to learn and requiring less continuous attention, but less flexible.
In the 50's and 60's, when the automatic transmission was a new invention, it had a (well-deserved) bad reputation among gearheads for not working very well. The idea hadn't been perfected yet, and it usually caused more problems than it solved. Windows and Mac are in the same situation. They try too hard to keep the user from knowing what's going on behind the scenes.
I think, though, that Mac is changing this. I haven't had the chance to use OS X a whole lot, but from what little I've seen, it seems to be a much more mature, modern automatic. Windows, on the other hand, seems to be moving in the other direction, trying to provide not an automatic transmission, but rather permanent training wheels.
Email is pretty much standardized on one app, and look how great that's been!
There's an enormous difference between standardization of applications and standardization of protocol. Nobody (without a financial stake in the matter) wants a single IM client to dominate, for exactly the reasons you state.
But it would be great if there were a standardized protocol. Imagine if there were several competing, proprietary protocols implementing the basic functions of http, ftp, or smtp. Imagine if IE could only get web pages served by IIS, and Mozilla could only get web pages served by Apache. If Outlook users couldn't exchange email with Pine users or Eudora users. It'd be a disaster.
Interoperability and protocol standardization are weapons against monocultures. The competition between closed protocols have led directly to what is quickly becoming an AIM monoculture.
But when Mr. Smith went to Washington, and was surrounded by all the professional politicians, he was the fish out of water!