Wesley Crusher gets a 5-second guest appearance in Fist of the North Star!
Unfortunately, if it were an anime crossover, the more likely result would be half a dozen alien women falling in love with Wesley and fighting and scheming over him: the aggressive Klingon girl who can't cook, the cool logical Vulcan girl and her jealous would-be suitor from back home who now wants Wesley out of the way, the sultry Orion slave girl constantly trying to seduce Wesley, the cute daughter of one of Dr. Crusher's friends whom Beverly has engaged to Wesley against their wills and who mallets him whenever she thinks he's staring at Counselor Troi, the bubbleheaded young female Q who can't fully control her powers yet and causes random space/time anomolies whenever Wesley's lack of response upsets her, etc., etc...
That, or it turns out that Wesley is the only person who can pilot the Enterprise, and every episode involves him fighting a new alien invader while whining constantly.
Re:Union. Ech. Professional Org., Hmmmmm...
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That being said, there are times when I've wanted to speak with many voices (which is one of the reasons for my Slashdot account), and have no real recourse. I think that a real, legally sanctioned _professional_ organization would go a long way to help some of my problems (like being here since 3:00am this morning). Something like what the denstists or doctors have - not really a Union that has barganing units and such, but an org that can sanction shops that don't treat their IT workers properly.
What about the ACM or the IEEE? I don't believe they sanction employers per se, but letting one's fellow computer professionals know about employers who suck seems well within the spirit of both organizations' codes of ethics to me. All there needs to be (if there isn't one already) is some mechanism to go beyond word of mouth to an official "the ACM or IEEE says you suck" declaration.
So far, there are a lot of "if you aren't doing anything illegal, you have nothing to worry about" posts. That line of thought is completely invalid when discussing the War on (Some) Drugs. The DEA and other police agencies typically sieze the cash upon any suspicion of drug activity. If the person is arrested and acquitted, or not arrested at all, the DEA/pigs get to keep the cash. There are many documented instances available online (no link--I'm lazy), even through the rightist Cato Institute.
While I agree with you, it shouldn't surprise you that an organization like Cato should be against the drug war. It's not a left/right issue anymore; the Democrats have embraced the drug war just as heartily as the Republicans have. When was the last time you heard Gore or Gephardt or Daschle calling for legalization?
There are quite a number of Republican or conservative figures calling for an end to the drug war -- William F. Buckley, Governor Gary Johnson of New Mexico, Rep. Tom Cambell of California (who ran against Diane Feinstein last fall), Walter Williams (who subs on Rush Limbaugh's show fairly frequently), former Sec of State George Schultz, Milton Friedman, and others. Any conservative who claims to be in favor of capitalism -- the unrestricted exchange of goods and services between consenting persons -- but is in favor of the drug war, is a hypocrite. Many are, but a sizeable number are not.
Actually, I think that the politicians to end the drug war may be more likely to be Republicans, strictly on Nixon-to-China grounds. A liberal wanting to end the drug war, risks being tarred as a "pot-smoking sixties hippie"; a conservative runs no such risk.
And as far as asset forfeiture goes, that's another case where there are Republicans on the right side of things. Asset forfeiture is, after all, a gross violation of property rights, and for that reason you do see those Republicans who have and stand by principles acting against the forfeiture laws -- such as Rep. Henry Hyde, chairman of the House Judiciary committee (not exactly small fry) pushing through the 1999 forfeiture reform bill.
Mind you, I'm not saying that the Republicans are angels on this matter. They're not. But this is not a left/right issue anymore, although this article in the New Republic makes a good case that it's becoming an east/west issue.
I know it's not about Nazis, but about whether a country should block access to certain materials based on their laws. However, it's nonsensical for the same reason. If you try to shelter someone from a hot topic through ignorance, you only end up hurting those you try to protect. If we talked to our kids more about adult stuff on the web, they'd be more protected from it.
Exactly. The censorship approach is basically the cultural equivalent of "security through obscurity." Preventing the next Hitler or Stalin or Pol Pot isn't just a matter of pointing to the genocides they carried out once they were given power, because that doesn't define them early enough in their development to stop them from doing harm. By the time you can say "Look, he's rounding up people and sending them to death camps, he's another Hitler!", it's too late. You need to be able to point to the similarity of their underlying ideas, early on. You need to be able to say, "Look, he's saying just what Hitler said in 'Mein Kampf.'" How are you supposed to be able to do that, when you or the rest of the population aren't familiar with it?
"With enough eyes, all bugs are shallow", that's the phrase, right? These writings should have everyone's eyes on them, for precisely that reason.
TV's and VCR's already have this feature. DVD Players have different control measures. There are all kinds of little chips already built into your electronics to stop you from using what you own. Why should this be any different?
Because it's not stopping me from using what I own, it lets me stop my (hypothetical) kids from using what I own.
Feel free to protest this, but remember to also protest Macrovision, Region coding, Censorship, and parents who don't want to take responsibility for their children.
Macrovision and region coding aren't intended to be gotten around by the end-user. This feature is. It's not censorship, any more than my locking the game disc in a cupboard so the kid couldn't get at it would be censorship.
At the time that Windows 3.0 was released, Wordperfect was the dominant PC word processor. I remember reading comments by the president of WordPerfect corp. saying how reluctant they were to make a version of WP for Windows.
Probably because they were simultaneously burning R&D resources on a freakin' DOS graphics version of WordPerfect. Talk about a waste of time.
When a windows version was finally released, they refused to use the standard Windows printer drivers and instead used their DOS based drivers.
Yep. WordPerfect lost its position not due to any nefarious plot in Redmond, but because they dragged their feet on the transition from DOS.
You mean the four Windows developers using Delphi to produce shrinkwrapped software?
What's "shrinkwrapped" got to do with it? Just because it doesn't come in a box on the shelf at CompUSA, doesn't mean there isn't money to be made selling it or writing it.
Most Delphi apps tend to be either internal corporate/government apps (especially front ends for databases, since that's one of Delphi's main strengths), or vertical market apps that cater to various niches. The place where I work now is probably typical: about 20 Delphi programmers working on a dozen more different Windows apps. Some of those apps are things we sell. Others are internal utilities or support tools. None of them are sold shrink-wrap, but we make a fair chunk of moolah on them. And from the conversations I've had with the other programmers, their previous Delphi projects were similar.
The moment Kylix is available, we're buying it, primarily because our apps need to run on memory-starved systems like these that will be much happier running Linux instead of Win2K, but we like programming in Delphi and don't want to have to give it up in order to write Linux apps.
You are making artificial distinctions where none are warrented. There is really only one privacy problem: There exists data about me. Who is allowed to know it and what can they do with it?
Neither of those is the proper question. The thing to ask, is: how did someone get the information about you? Unless I get that data in a way that violates your rights (fx. I'm your health insurance company and I break into your house to rummage through your refrigerator looking for fatty foods), or unless I have some agreement with you regarding the data, then it's knowledge in my brain and you cannot rightfully demand that I deliberately act in ignorance of it.
That's the underlying false premise that Katz's essay and all other arguments of its ilk are based on. He repeatedly says things like "In the U.S., we may never be able to control our own data again." But data that I have about you isn't your data, it's my data because it exists in my mind. Unless I've agreed otherwise for some reason, I have the right to make my decisions based on all the knowledge I possess. You do not have the right to force me to effectively undergo a partial lobotomy to excise data from my brain just because that data is about you.
That holds true as well for exchanging of that data. If I see you at the bookstore buying yourself a copy of "Visual BASIC for Dummies", I'm free to post that fact on Slashdot to paint you as a Gates-adoring Microsoft toadie. I'd be a jerk, sure, but I don't think you could argue that you had some right to prevent me from reporting what I know or what my knowledge leads me to conclude. I would still have that right if I was the owner of the bookstore. And I would still have that right if it was an online bookstore and the whole deal took place electronically.
Or to put the matter differently: you buy a book from Barnes&Noble. You can tell anyone you want to that Barnes&Noble sold you the book. Why shouldn't Barnes&Noble be able to tell anyone they want to that you bought it?
Odds are Microsoft would beat me over the head in court with a large and massive legal defensive team, and my mail carrier would hate me for all the threatening letters he has to delivery. So in the end, they would win. Once again goes to show it isn't rather the laws is on your side, but instead how deep your pockets are.
And that's one reason why the US needs to move towards some sort of loser-pays system (with suitable safeguards). That way, if it's obvious that the law is on your side, you'll be able to afford a decent legal defense, because your lawyers will know that when they win the case, they can take their fees out of Microsoft's hide.
1. Yahoo, INC. has set up a subsidiary in France. They have likely spent a few dozen million dollars to do this. If they've done it they certainly have a good reason.
Alright, you have a point.
Send them from Germany to avoid anti hate speech laws... now that's a sound advice. Duh.
Send them from Germany to avoid France's censorship laws. Whether Germany would try to do as France has done, is another question. Given the Compuserve case a few years ago, yeah, they probably would now that I think of it. However, that still leaves open the question of whether other countries would also do so.
And I believe Belgium and Luxembourg to have the same kind of laws.
See above. It's not a matter of whether those countries have those laws, it's whether they'd enforce French laws, or whether they'd try to push their own laws onto a site hosted outside their country, as France has.
Look, you don't make sense. Yes, you *can* sell stuff from abroad. You can. Is it the best? Certainly, undoubtedly NOT. Specifically in the kind of business Yahoo is in.
Again, I'll agree that there are limitations and that volume of business is an issue, but why would "the kind of business Yahoo is in" be particularly unsuited? I would expect that selling something intangible like advertising would be less hindered by not having an office in the country in question.
The extra cost of doing business may not be worth it for Yahoo in the single case of France, but in the long term this is going to set a bad precedent. What are they going to do when every country starts following France's example and insisting that the things they don't like have to be removed from Yahoo? There are about 20 million people in Saudi Arabia, can they force Yahoo to remove pictures of all non-veiled women? Can China force Yahoo to remove all pro-democracy news from its news feeds? This opens up a huge can of worms, and Yahoo is going to regret not putting their foot down before the ball got rolling.
. . . there is in some foreign country an auction site that sells cocaine, heroin, LSD and other such stuff to U.S. citizens with guaranteed anonymous delivery?
I'd call it one giant leap for laisse-faire, and way too long in coming.
So far the closest anyone has come is the not-yet-operating http://itoke.co.uk/ but the more the envelope is pushed, the better.
How many milliseconds will this be online before the U.S. government tries to stop this?
Far too few, unfortunately. And they'd be just as wrong to do so, as France is wrong in the Yahoo case.
And if the government of that country refuses to take actions, how long will it be there before the CIA replaces it with a more U.S. friendly government?
Again unfortunately, probably not nearly long enough.
And they're going to do business with French advertisers, how exactly?
Since when is it only possible to transact with someone if they have an office in your country? I've done business with companies in Japan, Australia, Canada, and the UK, all of those companies being regular stores with online presences, and way too small to have offices in the US. Yet I was able to deal with them just fine.
They're going to send their sales persons... how exactly?
Funny, my company was able to send sales people to sell software to folks in France (and various companies in Europe) long before we were big enough to afford offices there.
Send them from Belgium, or Luxembourg, or Germany, or wherever.
There's 60 million consumers in France... Now how many nazi memorabilia aficionados are they gonna piss off with this decision? A couple hundreds. So you want them to ditch a couple dozen million dollars (if not more) investment just to please a few right wing nuts?
Did you read my entire post? It doesn't sound like it.
I said:
"Re-host their French-language site as fr.yahoo.com or yahoo.fr.com or something like that with the servers in the US, leaving no legal entity within French jurisdiction."
All those 60 million consumers can still get to Yahoo's site just fine. All that changes is the URL. Yahoo still owns its servers and whatever other equipment it can transport out of France. What percent of their couple dozen million dollar investment would they have to forfeit?
One finds parallels in medicine as well. Things have slowed down since the discovery basic sanitation, anesthesia and understanding of human anatomy. While medical knowledge continues to expand, it won't have the broad, far-reaching implications for everyone that thoroughly cleaning surgical equipment did.
That depends on how you measure the impact. While it might be true that (to use your example) no single medical innovation benefited as many people as cleaning surgical equipment did, what has happened is that innovation has become more specialized. On the one hand, operating-room sanitation benefits everyone who has surgery. On the other hand, mammography benefits only those women who have breast cancer. AZT benefits only those who have AIDS. Photorefractive keratectomy benefits only those who have certain vision problems. In vitro fertilization only benefits women otherwise unable to conceive. Etc. Etc. Add up the impact of all the niche innovations, and it'll be a fairer comparison.
Corporate America does nearly everything better than the federal government;...
In addition to being laughable on its face...
One experience I had a couple years ago pretty much sums this issue up for me.
At the time, I had two cars: one that I drove, and the other non-running that I hadn't gotten rid of yet. I went down to the DMV to take care of the registration for the non-running car, and got the usual slow, surly, USSR-style "service" that the DMV is rightly famous for.
A few days later, I was at my local AAA office getting some insurance matters on the new car taken care of, and was surprised to see that they had a DMV window, staffed by a AAA employee. Judging by how fast the line in front of her window moved, that single employee was handling the paperwork faster than all eight DMV clerks combined had been handling it at their office, not to mention being courteous, something you'd never see at the DMV.
Since then, that's been my standard reference for comparison of dealing with the government vs. dealing with a private company. An identical service -- not merely similar or equivalent, but exactly the same -- being provided via government and via the market, and the difference was like night and day.
1: to instruct especially in fundamentals or rudiments : TEACH
then, of course, I agree. However, when you say indoctrination, most people think of:
2: to imbue with a usually partisan or sectarian opinion, point of view, or principle
and that is a perjorative view that I do not accept.
Accept it or not, it jibes perfectly with my own experiences when I was in high school. In the classes prone to revealing the teacher's ideology (English and history, basically) every single teacher I had was a liberal. To their credit, some made clear where the course material ended and their opinions began. Others very definitely did not -- in my senior of HS, my Civics teacher was telling the students who were old enough to vote how they should vote on the ballot propositions. Listening to him while the class was watching the morning news was like listening to a left-wing political version of Mystery Science Theatre. And when my brother had the same instructor a couple years later, he told me that the students were offered extra credit for writing letters to their legislators in support of the then-pending assault weapons ban, but when those students who opposed it asked if they'd get the same credit for writing letters against it, the teacher refused. Talking to friends of mine who had other instructors for Civics yielded similar stories, some of them even worse.
You'd expect the teachers at a Baptist or Catholic school to be biased with regards to their churchs' teachings. How can you expect teachers in government schools not to be biased, with regards to government? Certainly my history teachers talked about Wilson and FDR as if they were saints. And if you react "but the schools are controlled by the local government, not the Federal government", well, so far as I know most Catholic schools don't answer directly to the Vatican, either, yet you still wouldn't consider them unbiased when it comes to Catholic doctrine.
...the government compells them at gunpoint to place them in schools...
Not true, else home schooling would be illegal.
The government compells them to be in school, unless you can afford an alternative, which most people can't. Home schooling costs whatever income is lost by virtue of the parent teaching instead of holding a job.
You can argue it, but it has been ruled by the courts that society has a compelling interest in seeing that each generation is educated.
"Then the court is an ass." Whether someone is educated or not, is none of "society's" damn business.
Besides which, "educated" and "schooled" are entirely-different things. I learned far more science on my own initiative before high school than I learned during it. Same goes for math -- learned all my algebra and trig in the process of writing games, years before I had that stuff in school. Likewise for literature, unless you think it critical that I be forced to endure (blech) Sarte and (double blech) Camus when I'd rather be reading Verne or Wells or Tolkien. Same for history. Overall, I'm very sure that I'd have been better off if I'd never gone at all and been left to do whatever interested me.
Unfortunately, the off-screen world already has plenty of heedless bio-tech companies, hard at work on profiting from gene mapping, promising to eliminate cancer, aging, heart disease -- perhaps one day, even death itself.
Cure diseases and extend human lifepsans? Those bastards! How dare they! They won't get away with it, not if Jon Katz has anything to say about it!
History ought to have taught us to be wary of this Frankenstein-style hubris,
History ought to have taught us to beware fearmongers and those who attempt to constrain the pursuit of knowledge and enjoying the fruits thereof.
1. Read one of Katz's luddite screeds.
2. Read the Unabomber Manifesto, to see Katz's ideals taken to their "logical" conclusion and acted upon.
3. Read an account of the evacuation of Phnom Phen, wherein anyone educated or even wearing glasses was marked for execution, to see those ideals put to work on a mass scale.
JonKatz, Ted Kazynski, Pol Pot -- three colinear points.
Oh, and history also ought to have taught you that you'll be laughed at if you use trite cliches like that "Frankenstein" bit, but apparently it hasn't.
but we live in a time when the inventors and purveyors of technology bristle with arrogance
Indeed, how dare they have brains and presume to use them. The utter gall, huh?
and greed
The nerve of some people! Once they cure cancer and heart disease, they actually expect personal gain out of it?
Katz desperately needs some serious slapping around by the Invisible Hand.
as well as well as creativity and enterprise.
Yeah, I supppose we can put up with that creativity and enterprise stuff, if we really have to, but if we let them get away with it, they'd better damn well remember to stay poor and humble!
Were you really at the head of the line to light the fires when they burned the library at Alexandria, Mr. Katz, or do you just write like you were?
Now here's the thing - all the posts I read make some comment along the line of "I could've written a better script". Well then, why are there so few decent fantasy movies out there?
Mostly because the folks in Hollywood seem to think that "fantasy" just means "action movie with swords." There are exceptions, but odds are any fantasy script that gets accepted will still get horribly mutated in the process of being made.
For the most part, if I want to watch fantasy that caters to what fantasy readers and gamers want to see, I'll watch anime. "Lodoss War", "Slayers", "Bastard", and "Arislan" are all examples of what a good D&D movie could have been like, depending on what kind of campaign atmosphere you wanted to reproduce.
Every fantasy nut (I'm one myself) seems to think that every fantasy that comes out is nearly garbage, and that it would be terribly easy to make a better film. Will somebody please do it then? The guy who directed this got it made out of sheer will (first time director - just pushed until he got the deal). I wish to god that some of these genius scriptwriters/directors at Slashdot would put the effort in - half so that there would be a better film, and half so that they would shut up for a while.
While you have a point, one doesn't have to be a gourmet chef to know when something tastes like garbage.
When Boies cross-examined Allchin, Boies went step-by-step through Allchin's direct testimony and asked him if those exact same benefits couldn't be obtained by downloading IE 4.0 as a separate product and installing it on Win95/B.
On every single claim, Allchin was forced to admit that "correct, the integration offers no advantage in this case".
Then MS picked a poor witness, because the point isn't that IE+Win95 has different capabilities or performance depending on whether IE comes with the OS or is installed later. The benefit is that you can count on IE being there without any extra effort. The user doesn't have to go download it, and developers can write to the IE+Win95 combination instead of just to Win95.
On the developer side of things, I'll cite two examples from personal experience. In one of the products I write, we wanted HTML viewing/browsing capability directly in the app. Since we can depend on IE being there, I can just imbed the browser as a COM control and that's that. (This is also what the Scour and CuteMX clients do, BTW). I don't have to check to see if it's there, then tell them to install it if it's not, yada yada yada. (You couldn't (so far as I could find out) do this at all with Netscape 4.x, which was all that was out at the time I did this, but that's tangental to the pre-installed/installed-later aspect).
Second example: some of my co-workers' teams needed to parse XML for various purposes. Rather than having to write an XML parser or license a 3rd-party library, they just used IE's XML parser, and they could do that because (again) they could count on IE being installed.
I can just imagine how annoying things would be, if all of the high-level OS services in Windows were handled the way the anti-MS crowd thinks IE should be handled. Can't have the app assume that OLE is available, no, that's gotta be installed separately because they might want to use OpenDoc instead. Can't casually use TrueType fonts, because TT has to be explicitly installed by the user and they might have preferred Adobe Type Manager. Etc. Etc. Etc. I like being able to depend on a fairly-high "lowest common denominator", instead of having to find out if the user has installed anything beyond the ability to spin the drives.
Re:GM food is not a good idea yet
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Golden Rice
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Companies today like Pioneer have entire fields devoted to this same practice of aggressively cross-breeding various staples in efforts to yield more disease-resistant, larger, tastier foods. Why, oh why, do people not get just as worked up over aggressive cross-breeding as they do over laboratory-based genetic engineering? Is it our obsession with the whole natural = right, artificial = wrong? If so, just keep reminding yourself that glasses are extremely unnatural, whereas the Bubonic Plague is 100% pure Mother Earth.
I agree wholemindedly, and yet I'd put it a different way: there is no such thing as "unnatural." Eyeglasses, skyscrapers, computers, and genetically-engineered crops are every bit as "natural" as beaver dams or bee hives or bird nests. The only difference is which species created them. When the Luddites say something is evil because it's "unnatural", what they're really saying is that it's evil because it's the deliberate result of human thought.
So far as genetic engineering goes, any species that reproduces sexually and is capable of chosing between mates is conducting a crude form of GE. Whether the animal is aware of it or not, its choice of mate is based on the desireability of certain of that mate's genes.
Even the press release - bless it - gives the game away. They speak of "at a lower initial cost" which begs the thought that the lifetime cost will be greater.
That really depends on what the pricing model looks like. If my employer could rent MS Word on a per-use basis, it would probably save them quite a bit of money when it comes to me and the rest of the programmers, since we rarely use it. Whether that savings balances out with the (presumably higher) cost for usage by the clerical and documentation staff, I couldn't say.
We don't think MS is stupid. We know they are very clever indeed - especially at the business of business models. And the subscription business model is clearly more attractive than the "I'm happy with my Office 2000 and don't feel inclined ever again up pay to upgrade".
But if these folks don't feel the need to buy an upgrade to Office 2000, why would they feel the need to rent an upgrade?
The robots' mission is to fly into a disaster area complete with fire, water and smoke hazards, to locate and avoid threats to itself, to find bodies, distinguish from survivors and the dead, identify hazardous materials containers, determine if the container contents are radioactive, biohazardous, or explosive (by reading the labels), generate a detailed map of the disaster area, photograph the area, and return safely back to base...
"...Weapons: 2 concussion missile launchers. Heavily armored for explosives deployment deep within the mines. Threat Level: High"
"Perhaps" we should let the executives at Firestone ("carnage on the freeways") Inc.
What you're conveniently forgetting is that it wasn't a government agency or some Naderesque "consumer advocate group" (read: "bloodsucking lawyers") that found out about the problem. It was State Farm Insurance, presumably run by the same sort of "greedheads" that you despise. In fact, they informed the NHTSA two years ago.
or Union Carbide ("the dead of Bhopal") Inc. make these kinds of moral and ethical decisions for us.
And what you're also (again quite conveniently) omitting here, is that what happened in Bhopal in 1984 was not the result of any decisions made by "greedy" Union Carbide executives, but was caused by one of the workers sabotaging equipment at the plant. What's the glowing term you leftists use for that? "Direct industrial action", I believe?
WHO DECIDES? Certainly we don't want the greedheads making those decisions, unless you are someone like Dragoness here, who serves as sycophant to the rich.
I'll trust a businessman greedy for money rather than a politician greedy for the power to run other peoples' lives, any day. No contest.
How about we have a little test. You total up all the people rounded up and shot/gassed/etc. by businesses during the past century, and I'll add up the number of similar folks treated thusly by governments, and we'll see who has a higher total. Better hurry: Hitler, Stalin, and Mao put the governments' "score" at around 60 million right off the bat.
Or instead, how about this: call up Bill Gates and tell him you use Linux. Then call up Janet Reno and tell her you use heroin. Let us know which call results in armed men kicking down your door.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe even some anime crossovers, for the truly geeky. Xellos and Q collaborating together! The Enterprise encounters the SDF-1!
Gunbuster vs. Enterprise is here.
Wesley Crusher gets a 5-second guest appearance in Fist of the North Star!
Unfortunately, if it were an anime crossover, the more likely result would be half a dozen alien women falling in love with Wesley and fighting and scheming over him: the aggressive Klingon girl who can't cook, the cool logical Vulcan girl and her jealous would-be suitor from back home who now wants Wesley out of the way, the sultry Orion slave girl constantly trying to seduce Wesley, the cute daughter of one of Dr. Crusher's friends whom Beverly has engaged to Wesley against their wills and who mallets him whenever she thinks he's staring at Counselor Troi, the bubbleheaded young female Q who can't fully control her powers yet and causes random space/time anomolies whenever Wesley's lack of response upsets her, etc., etc...
That, or it turns out that Wesley is the only person who can pilot the Enterprise, and every episode involves him fighting a new alien invader while whining constantly.
That being said, there are times when I've wanted to speak with many voices (which is one of the reasons for my Slashdot account), and have no real recourse. I think that a real, legally sanctioned _professional_ organization would go a long way to help some of my problems (like being here since 3:00am this morning). Something like what the denstists or doctors have - not really a Union that has barganing units and such, but an org that can sanction shops that don't treat their IT workers properly.
What about the ACM or the IEEE? I don't believe they sanction employers per se, but letting one's fellow computer professionals know about employers who suck seems well within the spirit of both organizations' codes of ethics to me. All there needs to be (if there isn't one already) is some mechanism to go beyond word of mouth to an official "the ACM or IEEE says you suck" declaration.
So far, there are a lot of "if you aren't doing anything illegal, you have nothing to worry about" posts. That line of thought is completely invalid when discussing the War on (Some) Drugs. The DEA and other police agencies typically sieze the cash upon any suspicion of drug activity. If the person is arrested and acquitted, or not arrested at all, the DEA/pigs get to keep the cash. There are many documented instances available online (no link--I'm lazy), even through the rightist Cato Institute.
While I agree with you, it shouldn't surprise you that an organization like Cato should be against the drug war. It's not a left/right issue anymore; the Democrats have embraced the drug war just as heartily as the Republicans have. When was the last time you heard Gore or Gephardt or Daschle calling for legalization?
There are quite a number of Republican or conservative figures calling for an end to the drug war -- William F. Buckley, Governor Gary Johnson of New Mexico, Rep. Tom Cambell of California (who ran against Diane Feinstein last fall), Walter Williams (who subs on Rush Limbaugh's show fairly frequently), former Sec of State George Schultz, Milton Friedman, and others. Any conservative who claims to be in favor of capitalism -- the unrestricted exchange of goods and services between consenting persons -- but is in favor of the drug war, is a hypocrite. Many are, but a sizeable number are not.
Actually, I think that the politicians to end the drug war may be more likely to be Republicans, strictly on Nixon-to-China grounds. A liberal wanting to end the drug war, risks being tarred as a "pot-smoking sixties hippie"; a conservative runs no such risk.
And as far as asset forfeiture goes, that's another case where there are Republicans on the right side of things. Asset forfeiture is, after all, a gross violation of property rights, and for that reason you do see those Republicans who have and stand by principles acting against the forfeiture laws -- such as Rep. Henry Hyde, chairman of the House Judiciary committee (not exactly small fry) pushing through the 1999 forfeiture reform bill.
Mind you, I'm not saying that the Republicans are angels on this matter. They're not. But this is not a left/right issue anymore, although this article in the New Republic makes a good case that it's becoming an east/west issue.
I know it's not about Nazis, but about whether a country should block access to certain materials based on their laws. However, it's nonsensical for the same reason. If you try to shelter someone from a hot topic through ignorance, you only end up hurting those you try to protect. If we talked to our kids more about adult stuff on the web, they'd be more protected from it.
Exactly. The censorship approach is basically the cultural equivalent of "security through obscurity." Preventing the next Hitler or Stalin or Pol Pot isn't just a matter of pointing to the genocides they carried out once they were given power, because that doesn't define them early enough in their development to stop them from doing harm. By the time you can say "Look, he's rounding up people and sending them to death camps, he's another Hitler!", it's too late. You need to be able to point to the similarity of their underlying ideas, early on. You need to be able to say, "Look, he's saying just what Hitler said in 'Mein Kampf.'" How are you supposed to be able to do that, when you or the rest of the population aren't familiar with it?
"With enough eyes, all bugs are shallow", that's the phrase, right? These writings should have everyone's eyes on them, for precisely that reason.
TV's and VCR's already have this feature. DVD Players have different control measures. There are all kinds of little chips already built into your electronics to stop you from using what you own. Why should this be any different?
Because it's not stopping me from using what I own, it lets me stop my (hypothetical) kids from using what I own.
Feel free to protest this, but remember to also protest Macrovision, Region coding, Censorship, and parents who don't want to take responsibility for their children.
Macrovision and region coding aren't intended to be gotten around by the end-user. This feature is. It's not censorship, any more than my locking the game disc in a cupboard so the kid couldn't get at it would be censorship.
At the time that Windows 3.0 was released, Wordperfect was the dominant PC word processor. I remember reading comments by the president of WordPerfect corp. saying how reluctant they were to make a version of WP for Windows.
Probably because they were simultaneously burning R&D resources on a freakin' DOS graphics version of WordPerfect. Talk about a waste of time.
When a windows version was finally released, they refused to use the standard Windows printer drivers and instead used their DOS based drivers.
Yep. WordPerfect lost its position not due to any nefarious plot in Redmond, but because they dragged their feet on the transition from DOS.
You mean the four Windows developers using Delphi to produce shrinkwrapped software?
What's "shrinkwrapped" got to do with it? Just because it doesn't come in a box on the shelf at CompUSA, doesn't mean there isn't money to be made selling it or writing it.
Most Delphi apps tend to be either internal corporate/government apps (especially front ends for databases, since that's one of Delphi's main strengths), or vertical market apps that cater to various niches. The place where I work now is probably typical: about 20 Delphi programmers working on a dozen more different Windows apps. Some of those apps are things we sell. Others are internal utilities or support tools. None of them are sold shrink-wrap, but we make a fair chunk of moolah on them. And from the conversations I've had with the other programmers, their previous Delphi projects were similar.
The moment Kylix is available, we're buying it, primarily because our apps need to run on memory-starved systems like these that will be much happier running Linux instead of Win2K, but we like programming in Delphi and don't want to have to give it up in order to write Linux apps.
You are making artificial distinctions where none are warrented. There is really only one privacy problem: There exists data about me. Who is allowed to know it and what can they do with it?
Neither of those is the proper question. The thing to ask, is: how did someone get the information about you? Unless I get that data in a way that violates your rights (fx. I'm your health insurance company and I break into your house to rummage through your refrigerator looking for fatty foods), or unless I have some agreement with you regarding the data, then it's knowledge in my brain and you cannot rightfully demand that I deliberately act in ignorance of it.
That's the underlying false premise that Katz's essay and all other arguments of its ilk are based on. He repeatedly says things like "In the U.S., we may never be able to control our own data again." But data that I have about you isn't your data, it's my data because it exists in my mind. Unless I've agreed otherwise for some reason, I have the right to make my decisions based on all the knowledge I possess. You do not have the right to force me to effectively undergo a partial lobotomy to excise data from my brain just because that data is about you.
That holds true as well for exchanging of that data. If I see you at the bookstore buying yourself a copy of "Visual BASIC for Dummies", I'm free to post that fact on Slashdot to paint you as a Gates-adoring Microsoft toadie. I'd be a jerk, sure, but I don't think you could argue that you had some right to prevent me from reporting what I know or what my knowledge leads me to conclude. I would still have that right if I was the owner of the bookstore. And I would still have that right if it was an online bookstore and the whole deal took place electronically.
Or to put the matter differently: you buy a book from Barnes&Noble. You can tell anyone you want to that Barnes&Noble sold you the book. Why shouldn't Barnes&Noble be able to tell anyone they want to that you bought it?
Odds are Microsoft would beat me over the head in court with a large and massive legal defensive team, and my mail carrier would hate me for all the threatening letters he has to delivery. So in the end, they would win. Once again goes to show it isn't rather the laws is on your side, but instead how deep your pockets are.
And that's one reason why the US needs to move towards some sort of loser-pays system (with suitable safeguards). That way, if it's obvious that the law is on your side, you'll be able to afford a decent legal defense, because your lawyers will know that when they win the case, they can take their fees out of Microsoft's hide.
1. Yahoo, INC. has set up a subsidiary in France. They have likely spent a few dozen million dollars to do this. If they've done it they certainly have a good reason.
... now that's a sound advice. Duh.
Alright, you have a point.
Send them from Germany to avoid anti hate speech laws
Send them from Germany to avoid France's censorship laws. Whether Germany would try to do as France has done, is another question. Given the Compuserve case a few years ago, yeah, they probably would now that I think of it. However, that still leaves open the question of whether other countries would also do so.
And I believe Belgium and Luxembourg to have the same kind of laws.
See above. It's not a matter of whether those countries have those laws, it's whether they'd enforce French laws, or whether they'd try to push their own laws onto a site hosted outside their country, as France has.
Look, you don't make sense. Yes, you *can* sell stuff from abroad. You can. Is it the best? Certainly, undoubtedly NOT. Specifically in the kind of business Yahoo is in.
Again, I'll agree that there are limitations and that volume of business is an issue, but why would "the kind of business Yahoo is in" be particularly unsuited? I would expect that selling something intangible like advertising would be less hindered by not having an office in the country in question.
The extra cost of doing business may not be worth it for Yahoo in the single case of France, but in the long term this is going to set a bad precedent. What are they going to do when every country starts following France's example and insisting that the things they don't like have to be removed from Yahoo? There are about 20 million people in Saudi Arabia, can they force Yahoo to remove pictures of all non-veiled women? Can China force Yahoo to remove all pro-democracy news from its news feeds? This opens up a huge can of worms, and Yahoo is going to regret not putting their foot down before the ball got rolling.
. . . there is in some foreign country an auction site that sells cocaine, heroin, LSD and other such stuff to U.S. citizens with guaranteed anonymous delivery?
I'd call it one giant leap for laisse-faire, and way too long in coming.
So far the closest anyone has come is the not-yet-operating http://itoke.co.uk/ but the more the envelope is pushed, the better.
How many milliseconds will this be online before the U.S. government tries to stop this?
Far too few, unfortunately. And they'd be just as wrong to do so, as France is wrong in the Yahoo case.
And if the government of that country refuses to take actions, how long will it be there before the CIA replaces it with a more U.S. friendly government?
Again unfortunately, probably not nearly long enough.
And they're going to do business with French advertisers, how exactly?
... how exactly?
Since when is it only possible to transact with someone if they have an office in your country? I've done business with companies in Japan, Australia, Canada, and the UK, all of those companies being regular stores with online presences, and way too small to have offices in the US. Yet I was able to deal with them just fine.
They're going to send their sales persons
Funny, my company was able to send sales people to sell software to folks in France (and various companies in Europe) long before we were big enough to afford offices there.
Send them from Belgium, or Luxembourg, or Germany, or wherever.
What a bunch of silly fucks out there.
... Now how many nazi memorabilia aficionados are they gonna piss off with this decision? A couple hundreds. So you want them to ditch a couple dozen million dollars (if not more) investment just to please a few right wing nuts?
There's 60 million consumers in France
Did you read my entire post? It doesn't sound like it.
I said:
"Re-host their French-language site as fr.yahoo.com or yahoo.fr.com or something like that with the servers in the US, leaving no legal entity within French jurisdiction."
All those 60 million consumers can still get to Yahoo's site just fine. All that changes is the URL. Yahoo still owns its servers and whatever other equipment it can transport out of France. What percent of their couple dozen million dollar investment would they have to forfeit?
One finds parallels in medicine as well. Things have slowed down since the discovery basic sanitation, anesthesia and understanding of human anatomy. While medical knowledge continues to expand, it won't have the broad, far-reaching implications for everyone that thoroughly cleaning surgical equipment did.
That depends on how you measure the impact. While it might be true that (to use your example) no single medical innovation benefited as many people as cleaning surgical equipment did, what has happened is that innovation has become more specialized. On the one hand, operating-room sanitation benefits everyone who has surgery. On the other hand, mammography benefits only those women who have breast cancer. AZT benefits only those who have AIDS. Photorefractive keratectomy benefits only those who have certain vision problems. In vitro fertilization only benefits women otherwise unable to conceive. Etc. Etc. Add up the impact of all the niche innovations, and it'll be a fairer comparison.
Corporate America does nearly everything better than the federal government;...
In addition to being laughable on its face...
One experience I had a couple years ago pretty much sums this issue up for me.
At the time, I had two cars: one that I drove, and the other non-running that I hadn't gotten rid of yet. I went down to the DMV to take care of the registration for the non-running car, and got the usual slow, surly, USSR-style "service" that the DMV is rightly famous for.
A few days later, I was at my local AAA office getting some insurance matters on the new car taken care of, and was surprised to see that they had a DMV window, staffed by a AAA employee. Judging by how fast the line in front of her window moved, that single employee was handling the paperwork faster than all eight DMV clerks combined had been handling it at their office, not to mention being courteous, something you'd never see at the DMV.
Since then, that's been my standard reference for comparison of dealing with the government vs. dealing with a private company. An identical service -- not merely similar or equivalent, but exactly the same -- being provided via government and via the market, and the difference was like night and day.
Education is, by and large, indoctrination...
...the government compells them at gunpoint to place them in schools...
If by indoctrination, you mean:
1: to instruct especially in fundamentals or rudiments : TEACH
then, of course, I agree. However, when you say indoctrination, most people think of:
2: to imbue with a usually partisan or sectarian opinion, point of view, or principle
and that is a perjorative view that I do not accept.
Accept it or not, it jibes perfectly with my own experiences when I was in high school. In the classes prone to revealing the teacher's ideology (English and history, basically) every single teacher I had was a liberal. To their credit, some made clear where the course material ended and their opinions began. Others very definitely did not -- in my senior of HS, my Civics teacher was telling the students who were old enough to vote how they should vote on the ballot propositions. Listening to him while the class was watching the morning news was like listening to a left-wing political version of Mystery Science Theatre. And when my brother had the same instructor a couple years later, he told me that the students were offered extra credit for writing letters to their legislators in support of the then-pending assault weapons ban, but when those students who opposed it asked if they'd get the same credit for writing letters against it, the teacher refused. Talking to friends of mine who had other instructors for Civics yielded similar stories, some of them even worse.
You'd expect the teachers at a Baptist or Catholic school to be biased with regards to their churchs' teachings. How can you expect teachers in government schools not to be biased, with regards to government? Certainly my history teachers talked about Wilson and FDR as if they were saints. And if you react "but the schools are controlled by the local government, not the Federal government", well, so far as I know most Catholic schools don't answer directly to the Vatican, either, yet you still wouldn't consider them unbiased when it comes to Catholic doctrine.
Not true, else home schooling would be illegal.
The government compells them to be in school, unless you can afford an alternative, which most people can't. Home schooling costs whatever income is lost by virtue of the parent teaching instead of holding a job.
You can argue it, but it has been ruled by the courts that society has a compelling interest in seeing that each generation is educated.
"Then the court is an ass." Whether someone is educated or not, is none of "society's" damn business.
Besides which, "educated" and "schooled" are entirely-different things. I learned far more science on my own initiative before high school than I learned during it. Same goes for math -- learned all my algebra and trig in the process of writing games, years before I had that stuff in school. Likewise for literature, unless you think it critical that I be forced to endure (blech) Sarte and (double blech) Camus when I'd rather be reading Verne or Wells or Tolkien. Same for history. Overall, I'm very sure that I'd have been better off if I'd never gone at all and been left to do whatever interested me.
"Email" = "Electronic mail"
How does electronic mail exchanged between users of a single machine disqualify it from being email?
Because mail is delivered to the recipient. No delivery involved here.
It's still electronic mail!
An "electronic Post-It note" would be more accurate.
Unfortunately, the off-screen world already has plenty of heedless bio-tech companies, hard at work on profiting from gene mapping, promising to eliminate cancer, aging, heart disease -- perhaps one day, even death itself.
Cure diseases and extend human lifepsans? Those bastards! How dare they! They won't get away with it, not if Jon Katz has anything to say about it!
History ought to have taught us to be wary of this Frankenstein-style hubris,
History ought to have taught us to beware fearmongers and those who attempt to constrain the pursuit of knowledge and enjoying the fruits thereof.
1. Read one of Katz's luddite screeds.
2. Read the Unabomber Manifesto, to see Katz's ideals taken to their "logical" conclusion and acted upon.
3. Read an account of the evacuation of Phnom Phen, wherein anyone educated or even wearing glasses was marked for execution, to see those ideals put to work on a mass scale.
JonKatz, Ted Kazynski, Pol Pot -- three colinear points.
Oh, and history also ought to have taught you that you'll be laughed at if you use trite cliches like that "Frankenstein" bit, but apparently it hasn't.
but we live in a time when the inventors and purveyors of technology bristle with arrogance
Indeed, how dare they have brains and presume to use them. The utter gall, huh?
and greed
The nerve of some people! Once they cure cancer and heart disease, they actually expect personal gain out of it?
Katz desperately needs some serious slapping around by the Invisible Hand.
as well as well as creativity and enterprise.
Yeah, I supppose we can put up with that creativity and enterprise stuff, if we really have to, but if we let them get away with it, they'd better damn well remember to stay poor and humble!
Were you really at the head of the line to light the fires when they burned the library at Alexandria, Mr. Katz, or do you just write like you were?
Now here's the thing - all the posts I read make some comment along the line of "I could've written a better script". Well then, why are there so few decent fantasy movies out there?
Mostly because the folks in Hollywood seem to think that "fantasy" just means "action movie with swords." There are exceptions, but odds are any fantasy script that gets accepted will still get horribly mutated in the process of being made.
For the most part, if I want to watch fantasy that caters to what fantasy readers and gamers want to see, I'll watch anime. "Lodoss War", "Slayers", "Bastard", and "Arislan" are all examples of what a good D&D movie could have been like, depending on what kind of campaign atmosphere you wanted to reproduce.
Every fantasy nut (I'm one myself) seems to think that every fantasy that comes out is nearly garbage, and that it would be terribly easy to make a better film. Will somebody please do it then? The guy who directed this got it made out of sheer will (first time director - just pushed until he got the deal). I wish to god that some of these genius scriptwriters/directors at Slashdot would put the effort in - half so that there would be a better film, and half so that they would shut up for a while.
While you have a point, one doesn't have to be a gourmet chef to know when something tastes like garbage.
When Boies cross-examined Allchin, Boies went step-by-step through Allchin's direct testimony and asked him if those exact same benefits couldn't be obtained by downloading IE 4.0 as a separate product and installing it on Win95/B.
On every single claim, Allchin was forced to admit that "correct, the integration offers no advantage in this case".
Then MS picked a poor witness, because the point isn't that IE+Win95 has different capabilities or performance depending on whether IE comes with the OS or is installed later. The benefit is that you can count on IE being there without any extra effort. The user doesn't have to go download it, and developers can write to the IE+Win95 combination instead of just to Win95.
On the developer side of things, I'll cite two examples from personal experience. In one of the products I write, we wanted HTML viewing/browsing capability directly in the app. Since we can depend on IE being there, I can just imbed the browser as a COM control and that's that. (This is also what the Scour and CuteMX clients do, BTW). I don't have to check to see if it's there, then tell them to install it if it's not, yada yada yada. (You couldn't (so far as I could find out) do this at all with Netscape 4.x, which was all that was out at the time I did this, but that's tangental to the pre-installed/installed-later aspect).
Second example: some of my co-workers' teams needed to parse XML for various purposes. Rather than having to write an XML parser or license a 3rd-party library, they just used IE's XML parser, and they could do that because (again) they could count on IE being installed.
I can just imagine how annoying things would be, if all of the high-level OS services in Windows were handled the way the anti-MS crowd thinks IE should be handled. Can't have the app assume that OLE is available, no, that's gotta be installed separately because they might want to use OpenDoc instead. Can't casually use TrueType fonts, because TT has to be explicitly installed by the user and they might have preferred Adobe Type Manager. Etc. Etc. Etc. I like being able to depend on a fairly-high "lowest common denominator", instead of having to find out if the user has installed anything beyond the ability to spin the drives.
Companies today like Pioneer have entire fields devoted to this same practice of aggressively cross-breeding various staples in efforts to yield more disease-resistant, larger, tastier foods. Why, oh why, do people not get just as worked up over aggressive cross-breeding as they do over laboratory-based genetic engineering? Is it our obsession with the whole natural = right, artificial = wrong? If so, just keep reminding yourself that glasses are extremely unnatural, whereas the Bubonic Plague is 100% pure Mother Earth.
I agree wholemindedly, and yet I'd put it a different way: there is no such thing as "unnatural." Eyeglasses, skyscrapers, computers, and genetically-engineered crops are every bit as "natural" as beaver dams or bee hives or bird nests. The only difference is which species created them. When the Luddites say something is evil because it's "unnatural", what they're really saying is that it's evil because it's the deliberate result of human thought.
So far as genetic engineering goes, any species that reproduces sexually and is capable of chosing between mates is conducting a crude form of GE. Whether the animal is aware of it or not, its choice of mate is based on the desireability of certain of that mate's genes.
> Someone out there probably knows when triticale :-).
> was first created; I don't remember my high
> school agriculture classes that well
<Chekov> Of course! Triticale is a Russian inwention. </Chekov>
Even the press release - bless it - gives the game away. They speak of "at a lower initial cost" which begs the thought that the lifetime cost will be greater.
That really depends on what the pricing model looks like. If my employer could rent MS Word on a per-use basis, it would probably save them quite a bit of money when it comes to me and the rest of the programmers, since we rarely use it. Whether that savings balances out with the (presumably higher) cost for usage by the clerical and documentation staff, I couldn't say.
We don't think MS is stupid. We know they are very clever indeed - especially at the business of business models. And the subscription business model is clearly more attractive than the "I'm happy with my Office 2000 and don't feel inclined ever again up pay to upgrade".
But if these folks don't feel the need to buy an upgrade to Office 2000, why would they feel the need to rent an upgrade?
The robots' mission is to fly into a disaster area complete with fire, water and smoke hazards, to locate and avoid threats to itself, to find bodies, distinguish from survivors and the dead, identify hazardous materials containers, determine if the container contents are radioactive, biohazardous, or explosive (by reading the labels), generate a detailed map of the disaster area, photograph the area, and return safely back to base...
"...Weapons: 2 concussion missile launchers. Heavily armored for explosives deployment deep within the mines. Threat Level: High"
Oh right. Ayn Rand as guardian of our ethics.
Certainly beats you.
"Perhaps" we should let the executives at Firestone ("carnage on the freeways") Inc.
What you're conveniently forgetting is that it wasn't a government agency or some Naderesque "consumer advocate group" (read: "bloodsucking lawyers") that found out about the problem. It was State Farm Insurance, presumably run by the same sort of "greedheads" that you despise. In fact, they informed the NHTSA two years ago.
or Union Carbide ("the dead of Bhopal") Inc. make these kinds of moral and ethical decisions for us.
And what you're also (again quite conveniently) omitting here, is that what happened in Bhopal in 1984 was not the result of any decisions made by "greedy" Union Carbide executives, but was caused by one of the workers sabotaging equipment at the plant. What's the glowing term you leftists use for that? "Direct industrial action", I believe?
WHO DECIDES? Certainly we don't want the greedheads making those decisions, unless you are someone like Dragoness here, who serves as sycophant to the rich.
I'll trust a businessman greedy for money rather than a politician greedy for the power to run other peoples' lives, any day. No contest.
How about we have a little test. You total up all the people rounded up and shot/gassed/etc. by businesses during the past century, and I'll add up the number of similar folks treated thusly by governments, and we'll see who has a higher total. Better hurry: Hitler, Stalin, and Mao put the governments' "score" at around 60 million right off the bat.
Or instead, how about this: call up Bill Gates and tell him you use Linux. Then call up Janet Reno and tell her you use heroin. Let us know which call results in armed men kicking down your door.