See, I've got these two friends, Flippy and Hambone, and I'm sure one of them would know what to name this dolphin, but I'm just not sure who which one would do a better job...
Solstice, Christians, Pagans, and good music
on
Merry Christmas
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· Score: 5, Interesting
A couple of years ago I ran across this song by Dar Williams called "Christians and Pagans". It's hilarious (+1) and insightful (+1), and it's been my favorite "Christmas" song ever since (except, perhaps, for John McCutcheon's "Christmas in the Trenches").
So back in 1998 my brother and I started to throw "solstice" parties. We looked into various holiday and solstice traditions around the world. No real attempts at sorcery, bachannals, or blood, which I suppose some might expect. We wassail an apple tree, we make radish and butter carvings, we light and extinguish and light candles and talk about what we've done the last year and what we hope to do again. We have the "Urn of Fate" assign friends for the year. We sing "here comes the sun" and "christians and pagans". I'm sure any serious pagan would laugh at us, but it's our little chance to do things a little bit differently, remember there's other cultures and traditions in the world, and perhaps find magic/life/spirit in an unexpected place or two.
I'm still a reasonably solid Christian. OK, I occasionally go for bouts of rational agnosticism, but for the most part, I've found that Christianity as a spiritual practice seems to have something to it. So still I'm a little uncomfortable singing that line from Dar's song "sending hope for peace on earth to all their Gods and Goddesses". But I like this new tradition of looking at other traditions and fashioning new ones from it, and we're going to keep it up, as well as gathering on Christmas day and reading Luke 2 (stopping before we have to explain circumcision to the kids:). Plus, what's not to celebrate about the days getting longer.
You offer a really interesting point of view... the everyday person trying to do their job well within a big corp.
I hope I didn't give the impression that I thought individuals within corps are always out for profits. I know a number of people who take jobs at big corporations for the satisfaction of doing their job... research at Bell Labs or IBM can be a very rewarding thing. Coding the next turnkey e-commerce package can even be rewarding work.
I'll bet you and a number of other coders at Amazon derive utility from doing your job well. And it's obvious that you want to look out for customers... I don't think your apology email would have been a half bad idea. But the interesting thing about your example is the "policy" that prevented you from emailing the guy. Policy is usually set by people at the top, and those people are usually accountable to investors, who, as the absentee owners of the corp, often care for little else other than profits (and sometimes just short-term profits, at that). Thus, the rules you're asked to abide by will tend to reflect the values by which they're made (profit) and will only be congruent with the ideas of quality work and service to the extent that those values coincide with profit.
I've always thought most large organizations could probably do better by allowing subunits greater freedom within a sphere of independance. I've worked for a number of large corps, ones that compensated their employees fairly and gave great bonuses, but the employees were all frustrated because they couldn't do what they thought was the "right thing" without running affoul of umpteen middle managers, company wide policies, and a vice president or two....
I'm rambling now, but the point is that I definitely beleive there are a lot of employees within large corps who behave more ethically than the corps themselves.
all persons who own a business are motivated by pure profit
Everyone needs to turn a profit from business, but that doesn't mean they are in business only for the profit. Many people I've talked with personally (including a number of record shop owners) derive utility from the work they're doing. They do it because they derive satisfaction from doing the work or providing the service, and are content with making a living at it. Let me reiterate: they have a motive -- other than profit -- for doing what they do.
I have noticed that mom/pop/indie store owners tend to be more knowledgeable (breadth and depth) and passionate about music than their Media Play counterparts. Sure, they're there to sell something and keep the roof over their heads. But they're also there -- instead of getting their MCSE and getting paid double working in IT -- because they're doing work that's in line with their personal mission. In the process, they usually end up providing better service to customers.
I'm not saying that every small shop is that way. They seem to tend to be, though. And conversely, I'm not saying everyone who works at a large corp is evil...but, I feel like I get poorer service at Media Play and Sam Goody and the like. My theory is that once a corp becomes large and public, the obligation to the (often absentee) owners becomes almost purely that of investment. In our current system, most of the owners are simply looking for a good place to invest their money which will get a good return. They're abstracted away from the operations and mission of the company, and often don't have any interest in the product at all. Just return on investment. Those who make policy decisions high up in the company are thus only affected by financial pressures, and thus customer service and product quality only means something to them in terms of costs and returns.
My stock is not worth much, so when you damage the company your not hurting someone who owns a million or so shares of stock that they bought at 25 cents or less, your hurting people like me
First off, no one is trying to hurt amazon or the retailers, but....
Any action that people could take which would make an appreciable impact on stock prices in the way you describe would be noticed by the ceo, the board, and investors at large. Some of these people may have got in when the getting was cheap, but a lot of them didn't, and furthermore, they have large enough investments in the company that a fluctuation of a quarter can gain/lose them millions in some cases.
Anyway, back to the point. No one is trying to hurt the retailer, but rather punish the publisher. The large retailers have much more clout with the publishers. Returning lots of CDs to Amazon won't hurt them -- they have the clout and motivation to write it off to the manufacturer/publisher. Thus, returning lots of CDs to Amazon is much more likely to hurt universal than returning them to Crandall Records in Orem Utah.
Your argument is pure crap.
While I realize this is not an uncommon mode of discourse/rhetoric on slashdot, avoiding statements like this will actually give you more credibility and respect. Try actually refuting my arguments next time.
the speed jump from 10.0 to 10.1 is massive, even on what now amounts to "lower-end" machines.
I can confirm that; I'm running 10.1 on a Powerbook G3/333Mhz with 320 MB RAM, and I rarely notice slowness. I do notice that 9.x is much snappier, but I'm fine in 10. Even running classic.
I picked up this book just last night at Borders... flipped through it, and thought it was really interesting. I'm not particularly interested in programming games, but I am interested in doing simulations. Can anyone recommend any other books that would get one into this?
Any why do mom-and-pop shops deserve anything better than the major stores?
Two reasons:
I. On principle. Because generally, the mom-and-pop shops are owned by people who are motivated by something else than pure profit. They're mostly music fans who're trying to make a living working with something they love. Ever seen the movie "High Fidelity"?
It's a lot like Wendell Berry's description of old-school farmers vs agribusiness:
"Though my father had left the farm and become a lawyer, though he had become in a sense more than a farmer, there was also a sense in which he refused to become less. In addition to, and in spite of, all else that he had become, he remained a farmer. Alongside the knowledge and abilities by which he functioned in courthouses and offices... he kept the farmer's passion that sees beyond the market values into the intricacy and beauty of the lives of things.... to him, crops and animals were not only to be sold, but to be studied, understood, and admired for their own sakes..."
II. It will be more effective if you do it with a larger chain. They can absorb more loses, but they can also complain louder than mom and pop shops.
This isn't to say you shouldn't return a CD that you bought from a mom/pop shop if it IS defective or you can't use it how you'd like. You should. Just don't go INTENDING to the that. Save that for the Media Plays, the Wherehouses, the Sam Goodys, and yes, even Tower Records.
Egad! And the other terrorists used it....
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al Qaeda Hacks XP?
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· Score: 2
... to learn to fly those jets! This is the most subtle aspect of the conspiracy yet!
You may not get to find out what Tolkein would have thought about any film version of his works, but two good books for getting a feel of Tolkein are:
The Inklings
and
The Personal Letters of J.R.R. Tolkein
both by Humphrey Carpenter. I read Inklings this summer and found it fascinating (includes stuff about C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams, too). Letters is a bit harder to plow through, but good sampling reading.
Incidentally, anyone know when those animated "Hobbit" and LOTR films were made? (late 70's? Early 80's?) I'll bet people had some bad things to say about those. I remember orcs singing cheesy songs like "Where there's a whip ! There's a way !"
Yes. Well, not "just"... you need to be free of a certain kind of meddling, and local entrepreneurs need to be given control of Capital (whether it's loaned to you or you own it).
As for the capitalism's promise to better the Third World, no such promise existed. Capitalism promises that if you create a fair market, lower barriers to entry, and allow people to innovate and work hard, you'll prosper. The Third World's poverty is not because of capitalism but despite it. If the Third World would get on board, clean up their corrupt governments and change the culture of always wanting a handout, maybe capitalism would work for them.
Ummm... no.
The third world's poverty has an awful lot to do with colonial history and attitudes, and the United States government messing with their foreign affairs. I'm taking largely about central and south america, but other regions have their fair share of examples.
Guatemala in the 1950's is a decent example of a government that tried to enact reforms, create a fair market, and independantly (that is, independent of US investment and corporate control) follow the United States model of a free market. They ran afoul of the United Fruit company when they emminent domained away some of United Fruit's land assests -- which, by many accounts, weren't being used. They offered United Fruit compensation for the land. United Fruit went to our friends in the US government and whispered communism, and the CIA went in and overthrew them and installed a bloody regime that murdered a large number of citizens and Guatemala still hasn't recovered today. If you want a longer list, go read Noam Chomsky's "What Uncle Same Really Wants". If half of what Chomsky says is true, the United States has some serious owning up to do about the state of the third world. We tend to foster and nurture a fair bit of the corruption that exists abroad.
So what other problems exist, besides USA (and other colonial powers, make no mistake) throwing their weight around abroad? Well, there's still an existing colonial attitude in business settings. Capital is very rarely controlled by those with the interests of the third world at heart. I don't doubt that a lot of outside investment in third world countries *could* be beneficial, but a lot of the time, third world countries are the party with less information (and leverage) in a transaction, and so they can and do get screwed.
I agree with you in one way. We need to stop getting so involved in other countries as a government. NGOs are sometimes misguided, but they're rarely the servants of those who would perpetuate their own monetary and political power w/o consideration to what happens in the third world, so we can probably leave them in place. I think the Microcredit organizations (those that do small scall lending to small community based enterprises) have a lot of promise to raise economics. Capital is loaned to locals who know local needs, and they have control over it. It's working really well in some places.
Bottom line: we ARE responsible in a lot of ways for the state of the third world. Not so much in our lack of what we do, but in the intended/unintended consequences of our own arrogant economic and poltical philosophies.
A city 6000 years old would have put the city a fair ways before the cataclysmic events of 3 Nephi. Think "Jaredite" civilization (no cataclysms in that record) for the right time period... assuming that:
a) the figure 6000 years wasn't just pulled out of someones butt
b) the city in question was roughly contemporary with the cataclysm that sunk it
both those assumptions are somewhat weak, but there aren't cataclysmic events recorded in the Jaredite portion of the Book of Mormon (well, natural disasters).
I like the Book of Mormon. I think it's worthy of being approached as a valid spiritual text, I think it's interesting spiritually and anthropologically, but I also think that any link between it and this city is largely unclear. Other than the fact they occur in the same hemisphere.
Forget Binary -- Seconds Since Epoch!
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Binary Watch
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· Score: 2
None of this binary stuff for me -- too complicated. What I need is a watch that will give me the seconds since Jan 1, 1970!
1007771123
1007771124
1007771125
1007771126....
Maybe I can just get a watch that has a perl interpreter:
You're talking about the manifestation of a principle I think gets overlooked a lot: if you want a competetive market, you don't let any one player own or control the delivery network. Whether it's electricity over a grid, communications over wires or airwaves, or operating systems on an manufactured computers.
So what you're saying is absolutely true. If we're going to get to the point where markets are going to operate for the public as a whole, we're going to have to get this through to people who set policy.
Isn't using www.AndreasShell.de or www.FamilyShell.de a fair compromise between the two parties ?
Well... isn't www.ShellOil.de or
www.ShellEnergy.de something like that good enough
for the corp?
I don't know if I could side with a squatter:
I think I'd rather see a someone with a genuine
interest in the domain name get it. But still,
if you think that URLs aren't subject to trademark, don't you have to side with whoever bought it first (even for odious reasons)?
Hmmm. Overall, I think I agree that this isn't
a clearcut evil case.
... is a site with a interface paradigm really different from what you usually see in the web. There's be a box into which you typed your commands -- so you could type any command you wanted instead of having to search around the page
for something to click on. Instead of searching
on the page for a text field, you'd just type somethign like "grep -i product_I_seek amazon.com" or what have you. Instead of one-click shopping, we have one-line shopping: "buy --cust_id=415666 --pin=123456 --item=37002". We'd get things done a lot faster. Maybe this'd become a popular interface method, and we could open source this thing, and people could come up with their own versions. Yeah. Yeah. Also, no one would confuse
it with the oil company site.
(It's late friday night, I'm snowed in, I'm NOT in Costa Rica, I'm upset about it, and so I'm a little punchy)
As long as some people feel happy using Ruby, that's enough of a reason for another language for me.
A-men.
It works for a lot of other things, too. Pick
a language, or political party, or religion, or
operating system, or city of residence, or
economic system, or mathematical notation, etc...
Seriously, folks, adopt this attitude, and the
world will sleep MUCH easier at night.
I hate to be objective when it comes to Microsoft, but I'm afraid that they do not have good or evil motives. They simply want to turn a profit and they will attempt to alter circumstances in whatever ways allow them to produce the maximum profit.
One might say that the pursuing maximization of profit without regard for any other values is inherently evil (In fact, a guy named Paul once said pretty close to the exact same thing). It's obvious there are lots of ways to profit that tread on others. Objectivity in most circles does not mean giving up these kinds of judgements.
So I think your suspension of judgement regarding Microsoft's motives/behaviors/impacts is wrong. Especially in light of the fact that the courts have found microsoft guilty of treading on others in ways proscribed by law.
That said, your assesment of what their actual motives/behavior/impacts have been and will continue to be seems pretty good. The thing you left out is that they're not content with maximizing profit. They must also maximize control. It comes down to a similar thing in the end, but I think that their corporate culture even values control over profit. As long as there's an alternative to what they offer out there, Microsoft will try to destroy it in any way they can get away with. Which now appears to be just about anything short of physical attack.
Reminds me a lot of Andrew Carnegie. There were an awful lot of mistreated workers in his companies. He ruthlessly used individuals and destroyed competetors. He was a beleiver in social darwinism.
On the other hand, in his later years, he was a noted philanthropist. Or at least, he gave money to various causes he liked.
At its deepest level, this is a question about whether or not you're good if you're selective about which kinds of good you live up to. Carnegie could have gotten a good image by actually just treating his employees well. Microsoft could get a good image by just agreeing to only compete on the merits of their products (well....). But that wasn't their preference.
I wouldn't mitigate the fact that giving computers away or founding charitable organizations is a good thing. I just think that true goodness sometimes has to respond to demands outside its own interest.
And it's especially disenchanting, though, if the only good you choose to do is that which does you good, and you'd like to look noble for it.
only the Amish and Luddite freaks don't see the value of technology
On the surface, I agree with your comment: there's value present in the technology that is worth appreciating, no matter what your views are.
However, the implication that the Amish or others who choose not to adopt technology do not see the value or are freaks is offensive, dangerous, and probably flat out wrong.
It's my understanding that the Amish are not strictly against adopting technology. But they always check what adopting it will do to their economy, community, culture, and lifestyle. Then they make a decision.
Hence, you'll see community telephones/cellphones. It's really not all that unreasonable to note that technologies have benefits and secondary impacts (some of which are negative), and to choose acordingly. In reality, I think this is what a smart culture does.
You could, of course, argue that this makes them like the Taliban... screening new ideas and technologies to make sure nothing they don't like gets in. I think the difference is that the Amish don't use violence as a means of enforcing the conventions of their community, nor do they use force as a means of coercing people to stay. They are free to join another community with different standards if they want.
I'm sitting in on an Economics class at the local university right now, and I've brought up open source a time or two in class. The instructor, who really is a sharp guy, finds a lot of aspects of it baffling.
I think it's because the conventional economic thinking tends to divide human activity in to consumption and labor. Labor is, by and large, done to receive wages with which one consumes.
What I think they forget is that some work is actually done for the enjoyment of the work/accomplishment (economic speak: some people actually derive utility from some work).
So while some observers may look and see a slowdown in the open source world, my guess is that reality is a little different. There's probably a slowdown at open source companies -- just like there has been at many closed-source companies -- but those who've been coding to scratch an itch, or for the fun of it, I'm sure that hasn't stopped at all, unless things have gotten so bad that coders have had to start spending all their time foraging for food and shelter.
As long as hackers have spare time, open source will exist. As long as the protocols/comm infrastructure is reasonably open, open source will probably thrive.
Slashdot Mirror
See, I've got these two friends, Flippy and Hambone, and I'm sure one of them would know what to name this dolphin, but I'm just not sure who which one would do a better job...
A couple of years ago I ran across this song by Dar Williams called "Christians and Pagans". It's hilarious (+1) and insightful (+1), and it's been my favorite "Christmas" song ever since (except, perhaps, for John McCutcheon's "Christmas in the Trenches").
:). Plus, what's not to celebrate about the days getting longer.
So back in 1998 my brother and I started to throw "solstice" parties. We looked into various holiday and solstice traditions around the world. No real attempts at sorcery, bachannals, or blood, which I suppose some might expect. We wassail an apple tree, we make radish and butter carvings, we light and extinguish and light candles and talk about what we've done the last year and what we hope to do again. We have the "Urn of Fate" assign friends for the year. We sing "here comes the sun" and "christians and pagans". I'm sure any serious pagan would laugh at us, but it's our little chance to do things a little bit differently, remember there's other cultures and traditions in the world, and perhaps find magic/life/spirit in an unexpected place or two.
I'm still a reasonably solid Christian. OK, I occasionally go for bouts of rational agnosticism, but for the most part, I've found that Christianity as a spiritual practice seems to have something to it. So still I'm a little uncomfortable singing that line from Dar's song "sending hope for peace on earth to all their Gods and Goddesses". But I like this new tradition of looking at other traditions and fashioning new ones from it, and we're going to keep it up, as well as gathering on Christmas day and reading Luke 2 (stopping before we have to explain circumcision to the kids
Unless of course someone at your company wants to send a legitimate exe, vbs, etc.
Other people have mentioned WinZip. You could also gzip or stuffit.
But there's also other ways of transfering stuff. Send them a link to an ftp server or web page.
You offer a really interesting point of view... the everyday person trying to do their job well within a big corp.
I hope I didn't give the impression that I thought individuals within corps are always out for profits. I know a number of people who take jobs at big corporations for the satisfaction of doing their job... research at Bell Labs or IBM can be a very rewarding thing. Coding the next turnkey e-commerce package can even be rewarding work.
I'll bet you and a number of other coders at Amazon derive utility from doing your job well. And it's obvious that you want to look out for customers... I don't think your apology email would have been a half bad idea. But the interesting thing about your example is the "policy" that prevented you from emailing the guy. Policy is usually set by people at the top, and those people are usually accountable to investors, who, as the absentee owners of the corp, often care for little else other than profits (and sometimes just short-term profits, at that). Thus, the rules you're asked to abide by will tend to reflect the values by which they're made (profit) and will only be congruent with the ideas of quality work and service to the extent that those values coincide with profit.
I've always thought most large organizations could probably do better by allowing subunits greater freedom within a sphere of independance. I've worked for a number of large corps, ones that compensated their employees fairly and gave great bonuses, but the employees were all frustrated because they couldn't do what they thought was the "right thing" without running affoul of umpteen middle managers, company wide policies, and a vice president or two....
I'm rambling now, but the point is that I definitely beleive there are a lot of employees within large corps who behave more ethically than the corps themselves.
all persons who own a business are motivated by pure profit
Everyone needs to turn a profit from business, but that doesn't mean they are in business only for the profit. Many people I've talked with personally (including a number of record shop owners) derive utility from the work they're doing. They do it because they derive satisfaction from doing the work or providing the service, and are content with making a living at it. Let me reiterate: they have a motive -- other than profit -- for doing what they do.
I have noticed that mom/pop/indie store owners tend to be more knowledgeable (breadth and depth) and passionate about music than their Media Play counterparts. Sure, they're there to sell something and keep the roof over their heads. But they're also there -- instead of getting their MCSE and getting paid double working in IT -- because they're doing work that's in line with their personal mission. In the process, they usually end up providing better service to customers.
I'm not saying that every small shop is that way. They seem to tend to be, though. And conversely, I'm not saying everyone who works at a large corp is evil...but, I feel like I get poorer service at Media Play and Sam Goody and the like. My theory is that once a corp becomes large and public, the obligation to the (often absentee) owners becomes almost purely that of investment. In our current system, most of the owners are simply looking for a good place to invest their money which will get a good return. They're abstracted away from the operations and mission of the company, and often don't have any interest in the product at all. Just return on investment. Those who make policy decisions high up in the company are thus only affected by financial pressures, and thus customer service and product quality only means something to them in terms of costs and returns.
My stock is not worth much, so when you damage the company your not hurting someone who owns a million or so shares of stock that they bought at 25 cents or less, your hurting people like me
First off, no one is trying to hurt amazon or the retailers, but....
Any action that people could take which would make an appreciable impact on stock prices in the way you describe would be noticed by the ceo, the board, and investors at large. Some of these people may have got in when the getting was cheap, but a lot of them didn't, and furthermore, they have large enough investments in the company that a fluctuation of a quarter can gain/lose them millions in some cases.
Anyway, back to the point. No one is trying to hurt the retailer, but rather punish the publisher. The large retailers have much more clout with the publishers. Returning lots of CDs to Amazon won't hurt them -- they have the clout and motivation to write it off to the manufacturer/publisher. Thus, returning lots of CDs to Amazon is much more likely to hurt universal than returning them to Crandall Records in Orem Utah.
Your argument is pure crap.
While I realize this is not an uncommon mode of discourse/rhetoric on slashdot, avoiding statements like this will actually give you more credibility and respect. Try actually refuting my arguments next time.
the speed jump from 10.0 to 10.1 is massive, even on what now amounts to "lower-end" machines.
I can confirm that; I'm running 10.1 on a Powerbook G3/333Mhz with 320 MB RAM, and I rarely notice slowness. I do notice that 9.x is much snappier, but I'm fine in 10. Even running classic.
As it turns out, the book cites several gamasutra articles as references.
I picked up this book just last night at Borders... flipped through it, and thought it was really interesting. I'm not particularly interested in programming games, but I am interested in doing simulations. Can anyone recommend any other books that would get one into this?
Any why do mom-and-pop shops deserve anything better than the major stores?
Two reasons:
I. On principle. Because generally, the mom-and-pop shops are owned by people who are motivated by something else than pure profit. They're mostly music fans who're trying to make a living working with something they love. Ever seen the movie "High Fidelity"?
It's a lot like Wendell Berry's description of old-school farmers vs agribusiness:
"Though my father had left the farm and become a lawyer, though he had become in a sense more than a farmer, there was also a sense in which he refused to become less. In addition to, and in spite of, all else that he had become, he remained a farmer. Alongside the knowledge and abilities by which he functioned in courthouses and offices... he kept the farmer's passion that sees beyond the market values into the intricacy and beauty of the lives of things.... to him, crops and animals were not only to be sold, but to be studied, understood, and admired for their own sakes..."
II. It will be more effective if you do it with a larger chain. They can absorb more loses, but they can also complain louder than mom and pop shops.
This isn't to say you shouldn't return a CD that you bought from a mom/pop shop if it IS defective or you can't use it how you'd like. You should. Just don't go INTENDING to the that. Save that for the Media Plays, the Wherehouses, the Sam Goodys, and yes, even Tower Records.
... to learn to fly those jets! This is the most subtle aspect of the conspiracy yet!
My comment didn't make it to the top, but I'm hoping satch will notice it here:
Who else do you think should be on the committee?
You may not get to find out what Tolkein would have thought about any film version of his works, but two good books for getting a feel of Tolkein are:
The Inklings
and
The Personal Letters of J.R.R. Tolkein
both by Humphrey Carpenter. I read Inklings this summer and found it fascinating (includes stuff about C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams, too). Letters is a bit harder to plow through, but good sampling reading.
Incidentally, anyone know when those animated "Hobbit" and LOTR films were made? (late 70's? Early 80's?) I'll bet people had some bad things to say about those. I remember orcs singing cheesy songs like "Where there's a whip ! There's a way !"
Who else do you think should be on such a panel? Why?
You just have to have the culture to do it
Yes. Well, not "just"... you need to be free of a certain kind of meddling, and local entrepreneurs need to be given control of Capital (whether it's loaned to you or you own it).
As for the capitalism's promise to better the Third World, no such promise existed. Capitalism promises that if you create a fair market, lower barriers to entry, and allow people to innovate and work hard, you'll prosper. The Third World's poverty is not because of capitalism but despite it. If the Third World would get on board, clean up their corrupt governments and change the culture of always wanting a handout, maybe capitalism would work for them.
Ummm... no.
The third world's poverty has an awful lot to do with colonial history and attitudes, and the United States government messing with their foreign affairs. I'm taking largely about central and south america, but other regions have their fair share of examples.
Guatemala in the 1950's is a decent example of a government that tried to enact reforms, create a fair market, and independantly (that is, independent of US investment and corporate control) follow the United States model of a free market. They ran afoul of the United Fruit company when they emminent domained away some of United Fruit's land assests -- which, by many accounts, weren't being used. They offered United Fruit compensation for the land. United Fruit went to our friends in the US government and whispered communism, and the CIA went in and overthrew them and installed a bloody regime that murdered a large number of citizens and Guatemala still hasn't recovered today. If you want a longer list, go read Noam Chomsky's "What Uncle Same Really Wants". If half of what Chomsky says is true, the United States has some serious owning up to do about the state of the third world. We tend to foster and nurture a fair bit of the corruption that exists abroad.
So what other problems exist, besides USA (and other colonial powers, make no mistake) throwing their weight around abroad? Well, there's still an existing colonial attitude in business settings. Capital is very rarely controlled by those with the interests of the third world at heart. I don't doubt that a lot of outside investment in third world countries *could* be beneficial, but a lot of the time, third world countries are the party with less information (and leverage) in a transaction, and so they can and do get screwed.
I agree with you in one way. We need to stop getting so involved in other countries as a government. NGOs are sometimes misguided, but they're rarely the servants of those who would perpetuate their own monetary and political power w/o consideration to what happens in the third world, so we can probably leave them in place. I think the Microcredit organizations (those that do small scall lending to small community based enterprises) have a lot of promise to raise economics. Capital is loaned to locals who know local needs, and they have control over it. It's working really well in some places.
Bottom line: we ARE responsible in a lot of ways for the state of the third world. Not so much in our lack of what we do, but in the intended/unintended consequences of our own arrogant economic and poltical philosophies.
A city 6000 years old would have put the city a fair ways before the cataclysmic events of 3 Nephi. Think "Jaredite" civilization (no cataclysms in that record) for the right time period... assuming that:
a) the figure 6000 years wasn't just pulled out of someones butt
b) the city in question was roughly contemporary with the cataclysm that sunk it
both those assumptions are somewhat weak, but there aren't cataclysmic events recorded in the Jaredite portion of the Book of Mormon (well, natural disasters).
I like the Book of Mormon. I think it's worthy of being approached as a valid spiritual text, I think it's interesting spiritually and anthropologically, but I also think that any link between it and this city is largely unclear. Other than the fact they occur in the same hemisphere.
None of this binary stuff for me -- too complicated. What I need is a watch that will give me the seconds since Jan 1, 1970!
1007771123
1007771124
1007771125
1007771126....
Maybe I can just get a watch that has a perl interpreter:
perl -e "while() {print time; sleep(1);} "
A thought.
You're talking about the manifestation of a principle I think gets overlooked a lot: if you want a competetive market, you don't let any one player own or control the delivery network. Whether it's electricity over a grid, communications over wires or airwaves, or operating systems on an manufactured computers.
So what you're saying is absolutely true. If we're going to get to the point where markets are going to operate for the public as a whole, we're going to have to get this through to people who set policy.
most people who believe in "souls" don't think that sex is a prerequisite for creating one
Sure is a perquisit, tho'.
Geez. I want to conceive my kids the old fasioned way.
Isn't using www.AndreasShell.de or www.FamilyShell.de a fair compromise between the two parties ?
Well... isn't www.ShellOil.de or
www.ShellEnergy.de something like that good enough
for the corp?
I don't know if I could side with a squatter:
I think I'd rather see a someone with a genuine
interest in the domain name get it. But still,
if you think that URLs aren't subject to trademark, don't you have to side with whoever bought it first (even for odious reasons)?
Hmmm. Overall, I think I agree that this isn't
a clearcut evil case.
--Weston
... is a site with a interface paradigm really different from what you usually see in the web. There's be a box into which you typed
your commands -- so you could type any command you wanted instead of having to search around the page
for something to click on. Instead of searching
on the page for a text field, you'd just type somethign like "grep -i product_I_seek amazon.com" or what have you. Instead of one-click shopping, we have one-line shopping: "buy --cust_id=415666 --pin=123456 --item=37002". We'd get things done a lot faster. Maybe this'd become a popular interface method, and we could open source this thing, and people could come up with their own versions. Yeah. Yeah. Also, no one would confuse
it with the oil company site.
(It's late friday night, I'm snowed in, I'm NOT in Costa Rica, I'm upset about it, and so I'm a little punchy)
From the article:
As long as some people feel happy using Ruby, that's enough of a reason for another language for me.
A-men.
It works for a lot of other things, too. Pick
a language, or political party, or religion, or
operating system, or city of residence, or
economic system, or mathematical notation, etc...
Seriously, folks, adopt this attitude, and the
world will sleep MUCH easier at night.
I hate to be objective when it comes to Microsoft, but I'm afraid that they do not have good or evil motives. They simply want to turn a profit and they will attempt to alter circumstances in whatever ways allow them to produce the maximum profit.
One might say that the pursuing maximization of profit without regard for any other values is inherently evil (In fact, a guy named Paul once said pretty close to the exact same thing). It's obvious there are lots of ways to profit that tread on others. Objectivity in most circles does not mean giving up these kinds of judgements.
So I think your suspension of judgement regarding Microsoft's motives/behaviors/impacts is wrong. Especially in light of the fact that the courts have found microsoft guilty of treading on others in ways proscribed by law.
That said, your assesment of what their actual motives/behavior/impacts have been and will continue to be seems pretty good. The thing you left out is that they're not content with maximizing profit. They must also maximize control. It comes down to a similar thing in the end, but I think that their corporate culture even values control over profit. As long as there's an alternative to what they offer out there, Microsoft will try to destroy it in any way they can get away with. Which now appears to be just about anything short of physical attack.
Reminds me a lot of Andrew Carnegie. There were an awful lot of mistreated workers in his companies. He ruthlessly used individuals and destroyed competetors. He was a beleiver in social darwinism.
On the other hand, in his later years, he was a noted philanthropist. Or at least, he gave money to various causes he liked.
At its deepest level, this is a question about whether or not you're good if you're selective about which kinds of good you live up to. Carnegie could have gotten a good image by actually just treating his employees well. Microsoft could get a good image by just agreeing to only compete on the merits of their products (well....). But that wasn't their preference.
I wouldn't mitigate the fact that giving computers away or founding charitable organizations is a good thing. I just think that true goodness sometimes has to respond to demands outside its own interest.
And it's especially disenchanting, though, if the only good you choose to do is that which does you good, and you'd like to look noble for it.
only the Amish and Luddite freaks don't see the value of technology
On the surface, I agree with your comment: there's value present in the technology that is worth appreciating, no matter what your views are.
However, the implication that the Amish or others who choose not to adopt technology do not see the value or are freaks is offensive, dangerous, and probably flat out wrong.
It's my understanding that the Amish are not strictly against adopting technology. But they always check what adopting it will do to their economy, community, culture, and lifestyle. Then they make a decision.
Hence, you'll see community telephones/cellphones. It's really not all that unreasonable to note that technologies have benefits and secondary impacts (some of which are negative), and to choose acordingly. In reality, I think this is what a smart culture does.
You could, of course, argue that this makes them like the Taliban... screening new ideas and technologies to make sure nothing they don't like gets in. I think the difference is that the Amish don't use violence as a means of enforcing the conventions of their community, nor do they use force as a means of coercing people to stay. They are free to join another community with different standards if they want.
I'm sitting in on an Economics class at the local university right now, and I've brought up open source a time or two in class. The instructor, who really is a sharp guy, finds a lot of aspects of it baffling.
I think it's because the conventional economic thinking tends to divide human activity in to consumption and labor. Labor is, by and large, done to receive wages with which one consumes.
What I think they forget is that some work is actually done for the enjoyment of the work/accomplishment (economic speak: some people actually derive utility from some work).
So while some observers may look and see a slowdown in the open source world, my guess is that reality is a little different. There's probably a slowdown at open source companies -- just like there has been at many closed-source companies -- but those who've been coding to scratch an itch, or for the fun of it, I'm sure that hasn't stopped at all, unless things have gotten so bad that coders have had to start spending all their time foraging for food and shelter.
As long as hackers have spare time, open source will exist. As long as the protocols/comm infrastructure is reasonably open, open source will probably thrive.