Natural selection is alive and well, thank you very much. Not too many retarded or severely mentally ill people have children. The children of crack and heroin addicts do not usually do terribly well in life. Attractive successful men are still fathering children with the wives of less attractive, less successful men, etc., etc. All of this is not to mention the continuing evolutionary battle between people and bacteria, viruses, and other pathogens.
Natural selection is not just lions eating up the slower cavemen, you know.
The Capitalist era is just beginning. Marx personally abhorred Capitalism and advocated Socialism in his lifetime, but his theories lead inexorably to the conclusion that we're in for a thousand years or so of Capitalism before the conditions leading to Socialism will develop.
Marx was neither the first nor the last great thinker to come to conclusions that conflicted with his own personal beliefs; Pascal and Einstein come to mind.
It is only impossible to implement Socialism without force and restriction of rights because the conditions that would naturally and inevitably lead a society to demand Socialism have not had the time to develop.
You see Capitalism as intrinsic to human nature only because it is that organization of the means of production that is best-adapted for the conditions existing in your lifetime and in your society. I agree, Capitalism is the only natural state for modern, industrially-developed societies.
However, if Capitalism were truly intrinsic to human nature in all times and places, modern stone-age societies would be Capitalist in organization; they are not. These modern stone-age societies assimilate to Capitalism when they come in contact with Capitalist cultures because of the fitness of Capitalism for the conditions prevailing *in this period of history*.
No organization of the means of production can take root in a society that is not ready for it. Capitalism could never have come about in the Middle Ages in Europe. Without religious freedom, public education, and various other components of modern civil society, any attempt to force Capitalism on the "intrinsically" Feudal societies of the European Middle Ages would have collapsed and produced some form of Feudalism. In a similar way, Leninism and Maoism did not produce any kind of Socialism but instead resulted in (different) varieties of State Capitalism.
BTW - Capitalism <> Free Market Capitalism. Capitalism merely implies control of the means of production by those who have Capital, i.e., money. Capitalism can be as monopolistic and oppressive as any form of political organization. One very oppressive form of Capitalism is the State Capitalism found in China, and, formerly, the Soviet Union. Another oppressive form of Capitalism is the mob-run Capitalism currently prevalent in the former Soviet Union.
You're crazy if you think Free Market Capitalism can function properly in a non-Democratic society. Civil Liberties are the foundation of the Free Market; without the credible threat of removal of a corrupt government, the government will inevitably, over a long enough period of time, be co-opted by one or a number of vested interests who will use their control of the government to subvert the Free Market.
Right, and there were no negative consequences beyond being called in front of the Committee on Anti-American Activities. Noone's job was lost, noone's children went hungry, noone had to endure death threats merely because of a public statement or two in favor of the union movement.
The "intrinsic" oppression you describe is a natural consequence of trying to force Socialism (not Communism) on a society that had never experienced Capitalism. Marx was very clear in stating that there is a process by which Feudalism gives way to Capitalism, which gives way to Socialism, which gives way to Communism. Lenin and Mao got impatient and decided to skip Capitalism altogether. Marx would have told them, indeed did tell the world, that there is no way to skip a step. The result of Lenin's and Mao's impatience was a thing called by Marxian theorists "State Capitalism", that is, total control of the means of production by the State.
Socialism, according to Marx, will arise *naturally* and *inevitably* after a period of Capitalism, as a result of the material conditions produced by Capitalism. I will agree that oppression is intrinsic to Leninism and Maoism. However, it is intrinsic not to Socialism/Communism, but to the *forcing* of *any* organization of the means of production on a society that is not ready for it.
An example of the same concept can be seen in the result of forcing Democracy on societies that do not have the prerequisite social and educational structures required for a functioning Democracy. Uniformly, forcing Democracy on such a society results in rampant corruption in the form of vote-buying, bloc voting, ballot-box stuffing, etc., etc. Is corruption therefore "intrinsic" to Democracy?
What evidence do you have to support your assertion that the oppression of citizens is intrinsic to Communism? What about the oppression of moderately left-wing American citizens by the McCarthyites? Did that occur because oppression of citizens is intrinsic to Capitalism?
I was not referring to the movies made in China, but the stifling of forward technological progress in countries that outlaw broad-based research into encryption, operating system design, and hardware design. Making it illegal to build computers that do not contain support for a specific, static, technology will cut into our ability to compete with China technologically.
Unless, of course, the WIPO succeeds in forcing all of our allies into adopting similar policies. Then it will be the US, Europe, Japan, South Africa, the more-developed parts of Asia and Latin America, and possibly India pitted against China, the Arab world, Southeast Asia, and all other non-participants. One side will have a massive head start but next to no ability to progress, while the other side will have the freedom to innovate.
How long will it take the nations that don't adopt SSSCA-like laws to overtake those that legislate meaningful research in CS out of existence? If they are able to maintain the current pace of technological progress, it may not be long at all.
My advice: teach your children Mandarin or Cantonese if you want to ensure their future.
Your point seems to be that humans could never have developed encryption on their own. If the encryption gods handed us the algorithms on stone tablets that is a detail I never heard.
I remember a couple of years ago an Irish high-school student developed a new encryption algorithm and it made the news all over the world. I suppose you'll say she did it with help from... aliens, perhaps?
(They all surf the web, and they all crash, so I'll take the pretty one.)
For 50-100% more money? You must be lost in a timewarp, or perhaps you're having trouble seeing the real world over your tremendous pile of money. This is 2002, not 2000. The mental equation now runs more like this:
They all surf the web, and they all crash, so I'll take the cheaper one.
Now, if Apple can bring the price down, or if the Democrats make it back into office, or both, people might make decisions based on aesthetics. Until one of those things happens to bring Macs within reach of Joe Paycheck, economics will trump beauty nearly every time.
Margins being thin is exactly the reason you don't serve customers that are difficult to serve. It's not like the choice to not support non-IE browsers is made on a whim; it costs real money to support non-IE browsers. If you're barely breaking even already, why would you triple development costs to reach 5% more customers?
Your point about markets is well taken, though. Clearly, if I were RedHat (or Slashdot, or ThinkGeek), I would make damn sure my pages worked in Konqueror, Mozilla, Netscape, etc., as well as IE. However, if there's no reason to believe that the market for an Internet storefront uses non-IE browsers more than the general public, the decision to support only IE is easy to justify.
I have never in the last 5 years gotten any support from Microsoft worth having. Typically, the "support" rep knows less about the product than I do. If you want support for a Microsoft product, you're in the same boat with the OSS users; you must pay a consultant.
Maybe OSS should try this strategy:
Get an 800 number for "support".
Have the number randomly routed to any telephone in the world.
The chance that the person who answers will have a solution to the user's problem will still be better than the chance that anyone will get help from Microsoft.
I suspect that in addition to being a wanna-be-nudist, you must also be a major stockholder in a paper seat-cover company looking to expand its market. You can walk around naked all you want, as far as I'm concerned; it's when you sit down that I will have a problem with your nakedness.
I've always had a computer configured with Linux and 98SE for games.
Always?? I'm impressed! Either you are an incredibly precocious 3-year-old, or you have access to a time machine. Whichever it is, you should not be wasting your time on Slashdot; write a book and go on the talk show circuit! America needs inspiring stories like yours to cheer us up in these dark days.
You make the assumption that it costs the same to design for the 20th visitor as it does for each of the first nineteen. I can tell you, it probably costs more to design for the non-IE users than it does to design for all of the IE users put together. If the cost of reaching that last five percent of the market is so high that it eliminates any profits made by selling to them, it makes better sense just to leave them out.
Meat-space businesses do the same thing all the time by not requiring all customer service people to speak Spanish, Vietnamese, Hindi, etc. Not offering customer service in foreign languages may cost them a few sales, but the cost of hiring multi-lingual service reps is so high that it makes better sense to just say "Non-english speakers not welcome here".
Re:So, is this the mighty Palm-killer?
on
Pocket PC 2002
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
You are with true. People not uses MS Word because WordPerfect was there first, people not uses MS Excel because Lotus 1-2-3 was there first, people not uses MS Access because FoxPro was there first, people not uses MS Windows because Apple MacOS was there first. Things sure be look bad for PocketPC to me from bizarro world.
hThe argument that these discs are defective goes like this:
The CD-Digital Audio logo is put on the product package to indicate that the CD enclosed is encoded using the Red Book standard. Drives that carry this logo are capable of reading CDs encoded using the Red Book standard. Unless and until they remove the CD-Digital Audio logo from the disc's packaging, they are claiming that the disc was encoded using the Red Book standard and that the disc will play in *any* player that is capable of reading discs encoded using that standard. The CD-ROM drive on my computer carries the CD-DA logo. Which of the two products is lying about its compatibility with the Red Book standard?
By your logic, they could put *only* WMA on the disc, so that it would only play in a CD player that had the WMA codecs built-in. Then the record store buys one of these CD players, and tells the irate customers that they are out of luck unless they too buy one of these CD players.
The thing that's got people so upset is that the designation that implies adherence to a standard is now appearing on products that are do not adhere to the standard. If the record companies would remove the CD-DA logo from discs that cannot be played in *any* CD-DA capable player, most of the people in this forum would gladly leave those CDs on the shelf and not buy them. It's the duplicity of these companies and their cynical attempts to redefine an existing standard to fit their own needs and give unsuspecting customers the shaft that is enraging to most on this forum.
That's it, I've had enough. The fscking law is called the DMCA. Why does every other poster get it wrong? Type after me: DMCA DMCA DMCA DMCA DMCA DMCA DMCA.
Compiling lists of vulnerabilities will still be legal, provided your research process involves nothing more than a crystal ball. Publishing them, on the other hand...
Agreed, people who steal credit card numbers are bad and should be punished. But this law makes no distinction between cracking into a big ass server and stealing credit cards and cracking into a tiny ass server to write your name on the home page.
You wouldn't think it was fair to sentence someone who scrawled "Kilroy wuz here '01" on the bathroom wall of a pizza parlor to life in prison, would you? Because that's what this law states: Scrawl your name on any website without the author's permission and be punished as if you were Osama bin Laden's personal hackmeister.
I can tell you that the metric system will not take off in the USA until one of two things happen:
1. The average height of the American male reaches 6 ft. 4 in. (~1.92 meters).
2. The meter is changed to be equivalent to 2 ft. 9 in. (~890 centimeters).
Otherwise, those of us who are a bit over average in height will lose the important component of our self-esteem brought by being able to claim 6 feet of distance between the soles of our feet and the tops of our heads. I'm not joking; "1.82 meter-er" just doesn't have much of a ring to it. Until this issue is resolved, expect the US of A to stick with the English system, at least for the measuring of human height.
Slashdot Mirror
Natural selection is alive and well, thank you very much. Not too many retarded or severely mentally ill people have children. The children of crack and heroin addicts do not usually do terribly well in life. Attractive successful men are still fathering children with the wives of less attractive, less successful men, etc., etc. All of this is not to mention the continuing evolutionary battle between people and bacteria, viruses, and other pathogens.
Natural selection is not just lions eating up the slower cavemen, you know.
The Capitalist era is just beginning. Marx personally abhorred Capitalism and advocated Socialism in his lifetime, but his theories lead inexorably to the conclusion that we're in for a thousand years or so of Capitalism before the conditions leading to Socialism will develop.
Marx was neither the first nor the last great thinker to come to conclusions that conflicted with his own personal beliefs; Pascal and Einstein come to mind.
It is only impossible to implement Socialism without force and restriction of rights because the conditions that would naturally and inevitably lead a society to demand Socialism have not had the time to develop.
You see Capitalism as intrinsic to human nature only because it is that organization of the means of production that is best-adapted for the conditions existing in your lifetime and in your society. I agree, Capitalism is the only natural state for modern, industrially-developed societies.
However, if Capitalism were truly intrinsic to human nature in all times and places, modern stone-age societies would be Capitalist in organization; they are not. These modern stone-age societies assimilate to Capitalism when they come in contact with Capitalist cultures because of the fitness of Capitalism for the conditions prevailing *in this period of history*.
No organization of the means of production can take root in a society that is not ready for it. Capitalism could never have come about in the Middle Ages in Europe. Without religious freedom, public education, and various other components of modern civil society, any attempt to force Capitalism on the "intrinsically" Feudal societies of the European Middle Ages would have collapsed and produced some form of Feudalism. In a similar way, Leninism and Maoism did not produce any kind of Socialism but instead resulted in (different) varieties of State Capitalism.
BTW - Capitalism <> Free Market Capitalism. Capitalism merely implies control of the means of production by those who have Capital, i.e., money. Capitalism can be as monopolistic and oppressive as any form of political organization. One very oppressive form of Capitalism is the State Capitalism found in China, and, formerly, the Soviet Union. Another oppressive form of Capitalism is the mob-run Capitalism currently prevalent in the former Soviet Union.
You're crazy if you think Free Market Capitalism can function properly in a non-Democratic society. Civil Liberties are the foundation of the Free Market; without the credible threat of removal of a corrupt government, the government will inevitably, over a long enough period of time, be co-opted by one or a number of vested interests who will use their control of the government to subvert the Free Market.
Right, and there were no negative consequences beyond being called in front of the Committee on Anti-American Activities. Noone's job was lost, noone's children went hungry, noone had to endure death threats merely because of a public statement or two in favor of the union movement.
The "intrinsic" oppression you describe is a natural consequence of trying to force Socialism (not Communism) on a society that had never experienced Capitalism. Marx was very clear in stating that there is a process by which Feudalism gives way to Capitalism, which gives way to Socialism, which gives way to Communism. Lenin and Mao got impatient and decided to skip Capitalism altogether. Marx would have told them, indeed did tell the world, that there is no way to skip a step. The result of Lenin's and Mao's impatience was a thing called by Marxian theorists "State Capitalism", that is, total control of the means of production by the State.
Socialism, according to Marx, will arise *naturally* and *inevitably* after a period of Capitalism, as a result of the material conditions produced by Capitalism. I will agree that oppression is intrinsic to Leninism and Maoism. However, it is intrinsic not to Socialism/Communism, but to the *forcing* of *any* organization of the means of production on a society that is not ready for it.
An example of the same concept can be seen in the result of forcing Democracy on societies that do not have the prerequisite social and educational structures required for a functioning Democracy. Uniformly, forcing Democracy on such a society results in rampant corruption in the form of vote-buying, bloc voting, ballot-box stuffing, etc., etc. Is corruption therefore "intrinsic" to Democracy?
What evidence do you have to support your assertion that the oppression of citizens is intrinsic to Communism? What about the oppression of moderately left-wing American citizens by the McCarthyites? Did that occur because oppression of citizens is intrinsic to Capitalism?
I was not referring to the movies made in China, but the stifling of forward technological progress in countries that outlaw broad-based research into encryption, operating system design, and hardware design. Making it illegal to build computers that do not contain support for a specific, static, technology will cut into our ability to compete with China technologically.
Unless, of course, the WIPO succeeds in forcing all of our allies into adopting similar policies. Then it will be the US, Europe, Japan, South Africa, the more-developed parts of Asia and Latin America, and possibly India pitted against China, the Arab world, Southeast Asia, and all other non-participants. One side will have a massive head start but next to no ability to progress, while the other side will have the freedom to innovate.
How long will it take the nations that don't adopt SSSCA-like laws to overtake those that legislate meaningful research in CS out of existence? If they are able to maintain the current pace of technological progress, it may not be long at all.
My advice: teach your children Mandarin or Cantonese if you want to ensure their future.
Your point seems to be that humans could never have developed encryption on their own. If the encryption gods handed us the algorithms on stone tablets that is a detail I never heard.
I remember a couple of years ago an Irish high-school student developed a new encryption algorithm and it made the news all over the world. I suppose you'll say she did it with help from... aliens, perhaps?
For 50-100% more money? You must be lost in a timewarp, or perhaps you're having trouble seeing the real world over your tremendous pile of money. This is 2002, not 2000. The mental equation now runs more like this:
They all surf the web, and they all crash, so I'll take the cheaper one.
Now, if Apple can bring the price down, or if the Democrats make it back into office, or both, people might make decisions based on aesthetics. Until one of those things happens to bring Macs within reach of Joe Paycheck, economics will trump beauty nearly every time.
I for one find the phrase "automatically format" very frightening. Please try again.
I think your strategy may be a bit more effective if you link to kpmg.com and not kmpg.com.
Margins being thin is exactly the reason you don't serve customers that are difficult to serve. It's not like the choice to not support non-IE browsers is made on a whim; it costs real money to support non-IE browsers. If you're barely breaking even already, why would you triple development costs to reach 5% more customers?
Your point about markets is well taken, though. Clearly, if I were RedHat (or Slashdot, or ThinkGeek), I would make damn sure my pages worked in Konqueror, Mozilla, Netscape, etc., as well as IE. However, if there's no reason to believe that the market for an Internet storefront uses non-IE browsers more than the general public, the decision to support only IE is easy to justify.
Maybe OSS should try this strategy:
The chance that the person who answers will have a solution to the user's problem will still be better than the chance that anyone will get help from Microsoft.
I suspect that in addition to being a wanna-be-nudist, you must also be a major stockholder in a paper seat-cover company looking to expand its market. You can walk around naked all you want, as far as I'm concerned; it's when you sit down that I will have a problem with your nakedness.
You make the assumption that it costs the same to design for the 20th visitor as it does for each of the first nineteen. I can tell you, it probably costs more to design for the non-IE users than it does to design for all of the IE users put together. If the cost of reaching that last five percent of the market is so high that it eliminates any profits made by selling to them, it makes better sense just to leave them out.
Meat-space businesses do the same thing all the time by not requiring all customer service people to speak Spanish, Vietnamese, Hindi, etc. Not offering customer service in foreign languages may cost them a few sales, but the cost of hiring multi-lingual service reps is so high that it makes better sense to just say "Non-english speakers not welcome here".
You are with true. People not uses MS Word because WordPerfect was there first, people not uses MS Excel because Lotus 1-2-3 was there first, people not uses MS Access because FoxPro was there first, people not uses MS Windows because Apple MacOS was there first. Things sure be look bad for PocketPC to me from bizarro world.
hThe argument that these discs are defective goes like this:
The CD-Digital Audio logo is put on the product package to indicate that the CD enclosed is encoded using the Red Book standard. Drives that carry this logo are capable of reading CDs encoded using the Red Book standard. Unless and until they remove the CD-Digital Audio logo from the disc's packaging, they are claiming that the disc was encoded using the Red Book standard and that the disc will play in *any* player that is capable of reading discs encoded using that standard. The CD-ROM drive on my computer carries the CD-DA logo. Which of the two products is lying about its compatibility with the Red Book standard?
By your logic, they could put *only* WMA on the disc, so that it would only play in a CD player that had the WMA codecs built-in. Then the record store buys one of these CD players, and tells the irate customers that they are out of luck unless they too buy one of these CD players.
The thing that's got people so upset is that the designation that implies adherence to a standard is now appearing on products that are do not adhere to the standard. If the record companies would remove the CD-DA logo from discs that cannot be played in *any* CD-DA capable player, most of the people in this forum would gladly leave those CDs on the shelf and not buy them. It's the duplicity of these companies and their cynical attempts to redefine an existing standard to fit their own needs and give unsuspecting customers the shaft that is enraging to most on this forum.
That's it, I've had enough. The fscking law is called the DMCA. Why does every other poster get it wrong? Type after me: DMCA DMCA DMCA DMCA DMCA DMCA DMCA.
But jaywalking is against the law, and driving over the speed limit is against the law, and as long as they are, you MUST obey the law.
I bet you never jaywalk, or drive over the speed limit, or remove the tag from your mattress. Must be tough being you.
Compiling lists of vulnerabilities will still be legal, provided your research process involves nothing more than a crystal ball. Publishing them, on the other hand...
Agreed, people who steal credit card numbers are bad and should be punished. But this law makes no distinction between cracking into a big ass server and stealing credit cards and cracking into a tiny ass server to write your name on the home page.
You wouldn't think it was fair to sentence someone who scrawled "Kilroy wuz here '01" on the bathroom wall of a pizza parlor to life in prison, would you? Because that's what this law states: Scrawl your name on any website without the author's permission and be punished as if you were Osama bin Laden's personal hackmeister.
I can tell you that the metric system will not take off in the USA until one of two things happen:
1. The average height of the American male reaches 6 ft. 4 in. (~1.92 meters).
2. The meter is changed to be equivalent to 2 ft. 9 in. (~890 centimeters).
Otherwise, those of us who are a bit over average in height will lose the important component of our self-esteem brought by being able to claim 6 feet of distance between the soles of our feet and the tops of our heads. I'm not joking; "1.82 meter-er" just doesn't have much of a ring to it. Until this issue is resolved, expect the US of A to stick with the English system, at least for the measuring of human height.
And when they notice that lots and lots of their formerly cheerfully paying customers have been banned, what then?
Really, treating your customers like troublemakers generally comes around to bite you in the ass after long enough.