Why not give the defense industry something to do, instead of dreaming up killer drones and cyber-armies, such as incorporating VTOL technology into civilian aircraft? If they played their cards right, it might be even more profitable than the stuff they usually sell.
And it's not like the military wouldn't mind a few aluminum clouds with vertical takeoff technology, and it probably wouldn't mind the positive press when they're called in to rescue some wayward people stuck out on a previously unreachable ledge.
But VTOL on a modified Boeing 747...would help with takeoffs and landings in crowded / busy airports that lack expansion options (no land to expand on, etc.). An entirely new market, that Airbus hasn't tapped into yet...wonder if Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman would be interested in that. From a diversity aspect (never all your eggs in one basket), tapping into the civilian market where that kind of expertise would possibly carry a premium...
Called it. All those ISPs who failed to fight for their 'common carrier' status in courts, who bent over for the content companies, who agreed to implement all sorts of filtering and copyright notification schemes, who gave out their client's names, are, no doubt, about to see the other side of the equation. Once a precedent is set in court for 'negligence to prevent copyright infringement,' the copyright holders will take that precedent, and being a massive shakedown on ISPs; because you know, as well as I do, that ISPs (*cough* Verizon *cough* Comcast *cough*) have deep pockets, and there isn't a lawyer alive who would pass up an opportunity to sue them for a few million, either from the copyright owner's side ("Your client infringed, you could have stopped it; Give us your wallet!") or from the end-user's side ("He / she was just a naive teenager doing what his / her friends were doing; But {ISP} had the duty to prevent that, and failed! Money, money, money!").
Check my old posts, I mentioned a similar setup months ago. The ISPs walked into this one, with the smarter ones protecting their clients. If they're smart, they'll wise up, band together, and fight any / all cases of a similar nature in the future.
You're missing out on the caricature. You need a secret decoder ring, so I'll lend you mine.
Big Oil / Business / Defense Industry -> Republicans Liberal Media / Hollywood / Pharmaceuticals -> Democrats
So, despite Lamar Smith running as a Republican, he is elected in an area with a greater percentage of Liberals (Democrats), whose interests are aligned, in this caricature, with Hollywood (MPAA, RIAA & friends); ergo, in representing his constituents, he represents their interests, which are those of Hollywood. You see this elsewhere with Blue Dog Democrats and so forth.
And remember, on Election Day, to vote for the Party of Purple: "It doesn't matter who you vote for when we control who is put on the ballot." ^_^
Sadly, treason may be the only charge that has enough oomph to be effective these days. The only problem is that immediately after it is used on one of them, they'll turn it around and begin using it on regular Americans.
Indeed. I vote we invite them all to a closed session to discuss the legislation, then quietly brick up the doorways. I like to think I am not a violent man, but they are really pushing for some aggressive action.
It's like dealing with certain family members. You tell them no to their belligerent attempts to slam something through, then they think you're negotiating. No means no.
SOPA, ACTA & friends are terribly written pieces of legislation, and this is coming from someone who has applied for a patent! The copyright people have gone completely nuts with the terms they intend to foist on society (come on Disney / Time Warner, quit resting on your laurels, and create something new!), and us patent folk are getting the third degree from Congress's botched attempt to sponge needed funds off of the USPTO for their constituent's pet projects ("Senator, we are bankrupt. We can't possibly fund the 'OMG, ponies for every American and nuclear welfare for estranged otters' program like you promised on the campaign trail!" "Wait, wait, I have an idea. The USPTO has a lot of money flowing through it, why don't we take that money, and give them a 'budget'?" "My word, that's an excellent idea!" "That's why it says Senator before my name" "I'll get right on it" "What could possibly go wrong?") - How I imagine the conversation went on the Hill. Sh*ts breaking loose, that almost guarantees a complete IP system collapse in the near future.
I am quietly entertaining the thought that a post-IP society might somehow be a good thing, but given the track record of the people involved, I am a little skeptical.
A true free market, not the nonsense that passes for them today in political realms, has no barriers to entry or exit a market. As such, someone can run you out of a market with lower prices, but they run the real risk of you running back in and undercutting them when they raise their prices.
Since the markets of today typically have high barriers to entering or exiting a market (thank your DC lobbyist for the legislation that creates this problem -> protectionist policies), someone can successfully bankrupt before you exit the market, or make it so that once you exit, you cannot afford to re-enter it.
Given the blood-thirsty nature of capitalists, when political lobbying / state-machine seizure is curtailed, they will actively maneuver to sap their competitors whenever a weakness is discovered. As such, prices are, theoretically, kept to the lowest possible level necessary to keep the company going while denying competitors market-share.
But once again, seizing the state-machine destroys the proper course of the market and its workings, creating widespread distortions when bailouts / tariffs / compliance regulations (of the unnecessary variety / bad faith variety are introduced; for example, someone working for Company A persuades the FDA to outlaw a chemical substance used by Company B using flimsy research by a subtly funded third-party, thus putting Company A at an immediate advantage while Company B contests the findings, and either complies, resulting in Company B idling its factories while it upgrades, or temporarily suspending factory output until the research is invalidated). Consider the debacle with incandescent bulbs, and the shuttering of American factories, when a move to mercury bulbs was mandated (which, even with their limited quantity of mercury, are still unsafe), as well as the sudden removal of that mandate. Had the state not interfered, those American factories would still be open.
No one said he had to learn what a design pattern (*shudder*) is; however, he does need to know how to use company resources appropriately. Relying solely on subordinates to relay pertinent information is a recipe for disaster.
Do you think that a General would be effective if he never set foot on the battlefield? Which is precisely the problem; programmers already know how to communicate with one another, as well as keeping a treasure trove of good ideas locked up in their heads. Balmer needs to lead, not drive them, and to do so, he needs them to believe in his vision, to agree with him on a logical and rational level that his next Big Thing is not only feasible, but is definitely worth doing in spite of the compensation they are receiving. It needs to satisfy whatever metric the vast majority of programmers are using at that point in time, so it has to hit multiple targets at once. You can demand loyalty, and you'll get it, but the company will sink like a lead balloon because star programmers will leave to work on better projects at other companies, or not so stellar programmers will leave for less demanding jobs. The roadmap, even if its internal, needs to be one of domination; not just offering another choice to customers, but offering the only choice, such that customers consider waiting for it to launch to be worthwhile. That's a tactic MS used to understand. Domination by offering the best possible product in that category, where the competition offers products that look like they were put together by people who never used a computer before, let alone took the time to interact with customers w/gathering their feedback.
The business school problem is one which is plaguing many companies out there. True, there are a number of bright graduates who figure out the lies they are taught, but at the same time, business schools are not known for having a particularly demanding regime. They're given a handful of equations, taught some basic statistics, learn some law and ethics, and are punted out. What happens when those equations are proven, at best, incomplete, as anyone who follows Finance has learned recently? It takes forever to update that bad information, and the whole of society suffers while that bad information is still in play. And do not get me wrong, I'm not biased against business graduates, I quite enjoyed the courses I took in college (fricking loved Finance, Accounting, and Contract Law (would take them again for fun); greatly enjoyed Micro-Economics (would take again if they revamped the online homework section)).
With Balmer, I am not targeting someone's boss whom you interact with daily; I'm talking about the boss at the top of the pyramid, who sets the tone for the rest of the organization. To that degree, I'm saying that the man is intelligent enough to work for the right company, move himself into the right position, and to handle the business side of the company well; however, people want him to do one of three things: 1.) Be another Bill Gates, 2.) Be better than Bill Gates, or 3.) Be smart enough to maintain things as they are, as it works. If he wants to do 1 or 2, he needs to dip his foot in the programming pool, and get that missing piece to his education. If he wants to number 3, he just needs to continue the course already plotted for the company. It's probably not what he wants to hear, especially at his age, and especially since his predecessor set the bar so high; but it needs to be said.
64-bit isn't just accessing a larger memory space, it also doubles the number of registers that the program can use, and (if appropriately written) can do more work in a cycle than 32-bit machines.
There in lies the problem. While one would like to believe that the military is always at the top of their game when it comes to disseminating illegal orders, in the case of a major event, would they still have the wherewithal to adequately consider the ramifications of their actions? Remember, authoritarians always seek to expand their power base during moments of conflict, and once achieved, they rarely give it up.
Which is the problem. Both parties are devout Statist parties, leaving people are not particularly as pro-State, or who are anti-State, out of representation. Basically, no matter who is elected, they will never represent us; ergo, taxation without representation.
And yes, while one candidate or another may rescind something here or there, on the whole, they're still coming out ahead. When you look at the political issues presented as decisive in today's press, don't you get the feeling that they're making mountains out of molehills? That the problems they should be focusing on they are in total agreement on the solution, and its one that none of the masses actually thinks is more than mirrors and smoke?
In general, Austrians take only one axiom (that humans act in attempts to better their lives), while other schools of economics take several.
Additionally, Austrians recognize the inability to run full-detailed simulations of the economy which give reliable results (The Calculation Problem). I feel if I elaborate any more on the matter, I will do injustice to the Austrian school (I am rude of tongue).
If you would like to learn more about the Calculation Problem with regards to Mises and his explanation of it, I'd recommend reading about it here. I will affix a warning to my previous sentence, that if you are of a delicate political or economic nature, such that you cringe, despair, or evince a developed opinion with regards to the usage of words like 'Socialism', as most Americans are either for or against, you may pass over, or otherwise read the linked text with colored vision; if you are the kind of person is easily inflamed or are prone to confirmation bias, you may save yourself some time and emotional distress by avoiding the reading of the linked text.
If all the courses are free, and they offer the ones I want, I'd pick up Mechanical Engineering + Physics + Chemistry degrees, then work my way through the liberal arts degrees. That Political Science degree will look nice mounted under my MCSE certificate.;-)
Indeed. While the printing press had not been invented (which is heralded as the major change that made the Bible cheap enough for the common man to own), I have reason to believe that the monks / scribes of old new how to use stencils. I spent some time recently reviewing illuminated manuscripts, and having reviewed the scans in a proper imaging programming with zoom functionality, I noticed an odd repeating error. The areas painted blue where offset from the outlines they were intending to fill, but in every case they were shifted upwards by, I'd guess, 4 mm. Every one of them. Examining it in more detail, I realized that while a printing press was out of the question, a stencil could easily have been made at the time, with a team of monks / scribes simply using a paintbrush / roller brush to achieve the same result. Given the nature of the error, the monks / scribes probably used multiple stencils per page, say one stencil for the writing, and one stencil for every layer of color. When the monk / scribe fitted the stencil to the page, he must have accidentally aligned it too far upwards (it was probably clamped, or held in place by some other means). Anyway, I figure the reason for the mistake escaping, was not due to the lack of the monks / scribes noticing it, but because the blue ink was expensive at the time, and was probably the second to last, if not the last layer to be applied. Since creating a new page would still take time (for all the layers to dry between the applications of the stencils), and since the monks / scribes probably didn't think anyone in the populace would notice, out it went. Since books went for so much at the time, the monks / scribes probably made out pretty well for themselves. They could make hundreds of books a month, using this process, and offload them to various sellers on their journeys into town / elsewhere, so no one caught on.
Think about it. Stencils are so trivial to make that school children make them for fun everyday. And it's not hard to find some paper, even at the time, that would be heavy enough to withstand repeated use. Why would anyone know? Because monasteries draw in certain kinds of people into their fold; people who can keep their mouths shut. What more, they are getting something out of it: a lot of money, for very little work. Why were the prices so high? Because people really thought that monks / scribes would spend months making a single book. Finally, the church, in all of its incarnations, and despite what it sells the common folk, loves science, loves to be the only person on the block with knowledge that no one else has. If you're a commoner, and you own a shop, they want a discount; if you're a commoner and you do not, they want free labor / money put in brass dishes. If you're a soldier / knight, they want you to fight for them in other lands. If you're a lord / noble, they want land. But if you're a scientist, they want you to keep your discoveries secret, tow the line, and give them first access to the good stuff. Shrewd businessmen, from what I can tell; I'd crack a joke about their leader being jewish, so that all makes sense, but someone might miss the joke, and call me anti-Semitic. Still, were it not for the fact that they treat their followers worse than many people treat their dogs, I'd almost have to applaud the amount of cunning / intelligence that lets them pull one over the common man; it's truly something extraordinary, and it's taken them millenia to perfect. The thought has occurred to me that joining their ranks, even in the present day, is a 'good deal' that many take, long after they realize (if they had not at the beginning) that their relationship with God / the people is a little...less holy than they thought it would be. I mean, think about it, you work for only 30 minutes to 2 hours, perhaps twice on Sundays, and twice on Saturdays, make a few appearances at various functions to remind people about their religion, then spend the week counseling people while hearing all sorts of profitable information. A catholic priest wil
Indeed, however, I might add that some "believers" go a little too far with 'spreading the Word,' and end up using duress / various borderline illegal methods to ensure others, including their own family, 'make it to the gatherings.' Methods of a nature that have more in common with the Spanish Inquisition than the happy believer filled with faith that 'it's all a part of God's plan.' Methods which Jesus would immediately distance himself from were he to suddenly return, and if he did not, people would see him as the ultimate form of evil.
Indeed. However, most churches will not let you be privy to certain other things unless you join, and either pay your dues, or volunteer your time. There are a number of things you do not learn until you reach the upper echelons. Like where the money is really going...
*Joke* In fact, you have to reach the level of Son of God before they reveal that resurrection trick to you. Or how to make perfect waffles. *Joke*
Really? I thought that only happened if someone were a first-born son. The other siblings could become knights, but they had to go looking for opportunities to acquire land / looking for work.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm. Terahertz-triggers for explosives.
So they're pro-censorship, got it. Will avoid.
Why not give the defense industry something to do, instead of dreaming up killer drones and cyber-armies, such as incorporating VTOL technology into civilian aircraft? If they played their cards right, it might be even more profitable than the stuff they usually sell.
And it's not like the military wouldn't mind a few aluminum clouds with vertical takeoff technology, and it probably wouldn't mind the positive press when they're called in to rescue some wayward people stuck out on a previously unreachable ledge.
But VTOL on a modified Boeing 747...would help with takeoffs and landings in crowded / busy airports that lack expansion options (no land to expand on, etc.). An entirely new market, that Airbus hasn't tapped into yet...wonder if Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman would be interested in that. From a diversity aspect (never all your eggs in one basket), tapping into the civilian market where that kind of expertise would possibly carry a premium...
But Kim ain't a girl! (Firefly)
Called it. All those ISPs who failed to fight for their 'common carrier' status in courts, who bent over for the content companies, who agreed to implement all sorts of filtering and copyright notification schemes, who gave out their client's names, are, no doubt, about to see the other side of the equation. Once a precedent is set in court for 'negligence to prevent copyright infringement,' the copyright holders will take that precedent, and being a massive shakedown on ISPs; because you know, as well as I do, that ISPs (*cough* Verizon *cough* Comcast *cough*) have deep pockets, and there isn't a lawyer alive who would pass up an opportunity to sue them for a few million, either from the copyright owner's side ("Your client infringed, you could have stopped it; Give us your wallet!") or from the end-user's side ("He / she was just a naive teenager doing what his / her friends were doing; But {ISP} had the duty to prevent that, and failed! Money, money, money!").
Check my old posts, I mentioned a similar setup months ago. The ISPs walked into this one, with the smarter ones protecting their clients. If they're smart, they'll wise up, band together, and fight any / all cases of a similar nature in the future.
You're missing out on the caricature. You need a secret decoder ring, so I'll lend you mine.
Big Oil / Business / Defense Industry -> Republicans
Liberal Media / Hollywood / Pharmaceuticals -> Democrats
So, despite Lamar Smith running as a Republican, he is elected in an area with a greater percentage of Liberals (Democrats), whose interests are aligned, in this caricature, with Hollywood (MPAA, RIAA & friends); ergo, in representing his constituents, he represents their interests, which are those of Hollywood. You see this elsewhere with Blue Dog Democrats and so forth.
And remember, on Election Day, to vote for the Party of Purple: "It doesn't matter who you vote for when we control who is put on the ballot." ^_^
Sadly, treason may be the only charge that has enough oomph to be effective these days. The only problem is that immediately after it is used on one of them, they'll turn it around and begin using it on regular Americans.
Indeed. I vote we invite them all to a closed session to discuss the legislation, then quietly brick up the doorways. I like to think I am not a violent man, but they are really pushing for some aggressive action.
It's like dealing with certain family members. You tell them no to their belligerent attempts to slam something through, then they think you're negotiating. No means no.
SOPA, ACTA & friends are terribly written pieces of legislation, and this is coming from someone who has applied for a patent! The copyright people have gone completely nuts with the terms they intend to foist on society (come on Disney / Time Warner, quit resting on your laurels, and create something new!), and us patent folk are getting the third degree from Congress's botched attempt to sponge needed funds off of the USPTO for their constituent's pet projects ("Senator, we are bankrupt. We can't possibly fund the 'OMG, ponies for every American and nuclear welfare for estranged otters' program like you promised on the campaign trail!" "Wait, wait, I have an idea. The USPTO has a lot of money flowing through it, why don't we take that money, and give them a 'budget'?" "My word, that's an excellent idea!" "That's why it says Senator before my name" "I'll get right on it" "What could possibly go wrong?") - How I imagine the conversation went on the Hill. Sh*ts breaking loose, that almost guarantees a complete IP system collapse in the near future.
I am quietly entertaining the thought that a post-IP society might somehow be a good thing, but given the track record of the people involved, I am a little skeptical.
A true free market, not the nonsense that passes for them today in political realms, has no barriers to entry or exit a market. As such, someone can run you out of a market with lower prices, but they run the real risk of you running back in and undercutting them when they raise their prices.
Since the markets of today typically have high barriers to entering or exiting a market (thank your DC lobbyist for the legislation that creates this problem -> protectionist policies), someone can successfully bankrupt before you exit the market, or make it so that once you exit, you cannot afford to re-enter it.
Given the blood-thirsty nature of capitalists, when political lobbying / state-machine seizure is curtailed, they will actively maneuver to sap their competitors whenever a weakness is discovered. As such, prices are, theoretically, kept to the lowest possible level necessary to keep the company going while denying competitors market-share.
But once again, seizing the state-machine destroys the proper course of the market and its workings, creating widespread distortions when bailouts / tariffs / compliance regulations (of the unnecessary variety / bad faith variety are introduced; for example, someone working for Company A persuades the FDA to outlaw a chemical substance used by Company B using flimsy research by a subtly funded third-party, thus putting Company A at an immediate advantage while Company B contests the findings, and either complies, resulting in Company B idling its factories while it upgrades, or temporarily suspending factory output until the research is invalidated). Consider the debacle with incandescent bulbs, and the shuttering of American factories, when a move to mercury bulbs was mandated (which, even with their limited quantity of mercury, are still unsafe), as well as the sudden removal of that mandate. Had the state not interfered, those American factories would still be open.
No one said he had to learn what a design pattern (*shudder*) is; however, he does need to know how to use company resources appropriately. Relying solely on subordinates to relay pertinent information is a recipe for disaster.
Do you think that a General would be effective if he never set foot on the battlefield? Which is precisely the problem; programmers already know how to communicate with one another, as well as keeping a treasure trove of good ideas locked up in their heads. Balmer needs to lead, not drive them, and to do so, he needs them to believe in his vision, to agree with him on a logical and rational level that his next Big Thing is not only feasible, but is definitely worth doing in spite of the compensation they are receiving. It needs to satisfy whatever metric the vast majority of programmers are using at that point in time, so it has to hit multiple targets at once. You can demand loyalty, and you'll get it, but the company will sink like a lead balloon because star programmers will leave to work on better projects at other companies, or not so stellar programmers will leave for less demanding jobs. The roadmap, even if its internal, needs to be one of domination; not just offering another choice to customers, but offering the only choice, such that customers consider waiting for it to launch to be worthwhile. That's a tactic MS used to understand. Domination by offering the best possible product in that category, where the competition offers products that look like they were put together by people who never used a computer before, let alone took the time to interact with customers w/gathering their feedback.
The business school problem is one which is plaguing many companies out there. True, there are a number of bright graduates who figure out the lies they are taught, but at the same time, business schools are not known for having a particularly demanding regime. They're given a handful of equations, taught some basic statistics, learn some law and ethics, and are punted out. What happens when those equations are proven, at best, incomplete, as anyone who follows Finance has learned recently? It takes forever to update that bad information, and the whole of society suffers while that bad information is still in play. And do not get me wrong, I'm not biased against business graduates, I quite enjoyed the courses I took in college (fricking loved Finance, Accounting, and Contract Law (would take them again for fun); greatly enjoyed Micro-Economics (would take again if they revamped the online homework section)).
With Balmer, I am not targeting someone's boss whom you interact with daily; I'm talking about the boss at the top of the pyramid, who sets the tone for the rest of the organization. To that degree, I'm saying that the man is intelligent enough to work for the right company, move himself into the right position, and to handle the business side of the company well; however, people want him to do one of three things: 1.) Be another Bill Gates, 2.) Be better than Bill Gates, or 3.) Be smart enough to maintain things as they are, as it works. If he wants to do 1 or 2, he needs to dip his foot in the programming pool, and get that missing piece to his education. If he wants to number 3, he just needs to continue the course already plotted for the company. It's probably not what he wants to hear, especially at his age, and especially since his predecessor set the bar so high; but it needs to be said.
Interesting that this potential deal never crossed my radar before.
Windows, and I like my precompiled binary installers. =^_^=
64-bit isn't just accessing a larger memory space, it also doubles the number of registers that the program can use, and (if appropriately written) can do more work in a cycle than 32-bit machines.
Indeed. I wouldn't mind completing the coursework online, and borrowing a lab / buying / borrowing the equipment and doing it in the basement.
Of course, knowing my luck, DHS agents will descend on me because of all the chemicals I'll be ordering to a residential address.
There in lies the problem. While one would like to believe that the military is always at the top of their game when it comes to disseminating illegal orders, in the case of a major event, would they still have the wherewithal to adequately consider the ramifications of their actions? Remember, authoritarians always seek to expand their power base during moments of conflict, and once achieved, they rarely give it up.
Which is the problem. Both parties are devout Statist parties, leaving people are not particularly as pro-State, or who are anti-State, out of representation. Basically, no matter who is elected, they will never represent us; ergo, taxation without representation.
And yes, while one candidate or another may rescind something here or there, on the whole, they're still coming out ahead. When you look at the political issues presented as decisive in today's press, don't you get the feeling that they're making mountains out of molehills? That the problems they should be focusing on they are in total agreement on the solution, and its one that none of the masses actually thinks is more than mirrors and smoke?
In general, Austrians take only one axiom (that humans act in attempts to better their lives), while other schools of economics take several.
Additionally, Austrians recognize the inability to run full-detailed simulations of the economy which give reliable results (The Calculation Problem). I feel if I elaborate any more on the matter, I will do injustice to the Austrian school (I am rude of tongue).
If you would like to learn more about the Calculation Problem with regards to Mises and his explanation of it, I'd recommend reading about it here. I will affix a warning to my previous sentence, that if you are of a delicate political or economic nature, such that you cringe, despair, or evince a developed opinion with regards to the usage of words like 'Socialism', as most Americans are either for or against, you may pass over, or otherwise read the linked text with colored vision; if you are the kind of person is easily inflamed or are prone to confirmation bias, you may save yourself some time and emotional distress by avoiding the reading of the linked text.
If all the courses are free, and they offer the ones I want, I'd pick up Mechanical Engineering + Physics + Chemistry degrees, then work my way through the liberal arts degrees. That Political Science degree will look nice mounted under my MCSE certificate. ;-)
Indeed. While the printing press had not been invented (which is heralded as the major change that made the Bible cheap enough for the common man to own), I have reason to believe that the monks / scribes of old new how to use stencils. I spent some time recently reviewing illuminated manuscripts, and having reviewed the scans in a proper imaging programming with zoom functionality, I noticed an odd repeating error. The areas painted blue where offset from the outlines they were intending to fill, but in every case they were shifted upwards by, I'd guess, 4 mm. Every one of them. Examining it in more detail, I realized that while a printing press was out of the question, a stencil could easily have been made at the time, with a team of monks / scribes simply using a paintbrush / roller brush to achieve the same result. Given the nature of the error, the monks / scribes probably used multiple stencils per page, say one stencil for the writing, and one stencil for every layer of color. When the monk / scribe fitted the stencil to the page, he must have accidentally aligned it too far upwards (it was probably clamped, or held in place by some other means). Anyway, I figure the reason for the mistake escaping, was not due to the lack of the monks / scribes noticing it, but because the blue ink was expensive at the time, and was probably the second to last, if not the last layer to be applied. Since creating a new page would still take time (for all the layers to dry between the applications of the stencils), and since the monks / scribes probably didn't think anyone in the populace would notice, out it went. Since books went for so much at the time, the monks / scribes probably made out pretty well for themselves. They could make hundreds of books a month, using this process, and offload them to various sellers on their journeys into town / elsewhere, so no one caught on.
Think about it. Stencils are so trivial to make that school children make them for fun everyday. And it's not hard to find some paper, even at the time, that would be heavy enough to withstand repeated use. Why would anyone know? Because monasteries draw in certain kinds of people into their fold; people who can keep their mouths shut. What more, they are getting something out of it: a lot of money, for very little work. Why were the prices so high? Because people really thought that monks / scribes would spend months making a single book. Finally, the church, in all of its incarnations, and despite what it sells the common folk, loves science, loves to be the only person on the block with knowledge that no one else has. If you're a commoner, and you own a shop, they want a discount; if you're a commoner and you do not, they want free labor / money put in brass dishes. If you're a soldier / knight, they want you to fight for them in other lands. If you're a lord / noble, they want land. But if you're a scientist, they want you to keep your discoveries secret, tow the line, and give them first access to the good stuff. Shrewd businessmen, from what I can tell; I'd crack a joke about their leader being jewish, so that all makes sense, but someone might miss the joke, and call me anti-Semitic. Still, were it not for the fact that they treat their followers worse than many people treat their dogs, I'd almost have to applaud the amount of cunning / intelligence that lets them pull one over the common man; it's truly something extraordinary, and it's taken them millenia to perfect. The thought has occurred to me that joining their ranks, even in the present day, is a 'good deal' that many take, long after they realize (if they had not at the beginning) that their relationship with God / the people is a little...less holy than they thought it would be. I mean, think about it, you work for only 30 minutes to 2 hours, perhaps twice on Sundays, and twice on Saturdays, make a few appearances at various functions to remind people about their religion, then spend the week counseling people while hearing all sorts of profitable information. A catholic priest wil
Hmm. I see it more as religion is about money, while cults are about power.
Indeed, however, I might add that some "believers" go a little too far with 'spreading the Word,' and end up using duress / various borderline illegal methods to ensure others, including their own family, 'make it to the gatherings.' Methods of a nature that have more in common with the Spanish Inquisition than the happy believer filled with faith that 'it's all a part of God's plan.' Methods which Jesus would immediately distance himself from were he to suddenly return, and if he did not, people would see him as the ultimate form of evil.
Indeed. However, most churches will not let you be privy to certain other things unless you join, and either pay your dues, or volunteer your time. There are a number of things you do not learn until you reach the upper echelons. Like where the money is really going...
*Joke* In fact, you have to reach the level of Son of God before they reveal that resurrection trick to you. Or how to make perfect waffles. *Joke*
How about working on the 64-bit version? Yes, I know about Waterfox, but come on guys, upgrade the main build!
And keep working on Thunderbird. Also, bring back Sunbird.
Seconded.
Really? I thought that only happened if someone were a first-born son. The other siblings could become knights, but they had to go looking for opportunities to acquire land / looking for work.