Interesting, and I agree completely that IP law is busted all to hell, but I've got questions:
Property taxes, capital gains taxes, inheritance taxes, windfall profits taxes: All of these are taxes on wealth accumulated, aren't they? Even if you say the last *3* are taxing the acquisition itself, isn't property tax entirely about taxing wealth (or at least one manifestation of it... real estate)?
Sales tax, excise taxes, fees, luxury taxes: these are other mostly unavoidable non-income taxes one hits just by existing in today's world. The fact that many of these hit poorer people at a higher percentage of wealth is why they're often called regressive taxes. Still, they're not income taxes. Is your proposal to eliminate them *all*?
A side note: calling patent fees an incredibly regressive tax seems a bit odd, compared to the deeper regressive impact of sales and excise taxes. Rich people don't spend 40% of their monthly income on items with roughly 6% sales tax. Many people living check to check do.
For a nation whose citizens are chronically underinvesting and already often seriously in debt, don't wealth taxes or any other disincentives to collect wealth seem like a bad idea? Put another way, given a choice between buying an item and paying annually for taxes on it or finding some other tax-free way to spend discretionary income, won't some folks stop buying (enough to impact the economy)?
Indirectly, everyone ponies up a bit extra to cover worker's comp for the kid flipping burgers, the licensing charges for many professions that one hires (hairdresser, building contractor's fees, real estate or investment or insurance agent, or a hundred others where I live). Is the goal to cut these programs, or will wealth taxes rise accordingly?
And your 'tax net assets except home and tools' just reopens the door to loopholes and complications: is a snowmobile I own for 'emergency winter farm use' (a necessary item for many northern farmers) a tool or a toy?
Can I shelter wealth out of country to avoid your taxes? If you thought outsourcing was bad, wait until companies start leaving the US completely to dodge wealth taxes: imagine Bill Gates takes all of Microsoft an hour north to avoid assets taxes against their whole Redmond shebang.
Well put! The real world example that immediately comes to mind is aviation test piloting and submarines diving beyond rated depths. The latter shows up repeatedly in war stories, and there are several well known examples of 'oopsie, TOO deep!'
Incidentally, bridges and elevators and a zillion other items get over- engineered.
OTOH, Consumer devices, I'm convinced, are a race toward creating something that has ZERO overengineering: the perfect device has all components fail ten seconds after the customer has gotten just enough value to not boycott the brand. But maybe I'm just jaded after seeing the crap that came into my house this christmas.
Wow. You're asking for a lot, considering the sorry-ol', busted-ass crap that people buy on ebay or ubid, which they'll gladly pay buy.com or newegg (new, with warranty) prices for.
With the drop in LCD prices over the last 60 days or so (IANAE, but that's been my impression), you're asking for a 15" for under $100. Two for $200. 4 for $400 and quadding them puppies up would give a computer geek who doesn't care about the screen borders getting in the way a 30" useable space (assuming I can find an OS willing to cheaply play nice with 'em). Compare that $400 to the $3000 price of the top Apple display... yummy.
A discount? Sure. But HALF off because of *ten* pixels? Can I get them to pay me if it has 30 dead pixels?! After all, that's a quality defect of nearly.003%
My high-end IBM laptop has 3 (that I've noticed and confirmed) and I've got to search to find 'em. And I worked for a week on a machine that lost 1" off the bottom of the screen, while waiting for a replacement.
For every barrier to entry a big company throws up, there are a dozen backdoors. Kwitcherbitchin' and use one.
Develop non FPS games. Develop machinema, since that'll teach you data formats and other engine-specific skills. Develop puzzles, strategy, online-adaptations, or some other unconventional p2p games. Develop for lower-profile markets (anything non-male-teen-to-twenty5). Grow by viral marketing (word of mouth, not SANTY-C!). Use Flash or shockwave. Go open-source. Develop for some older platform that's been cracked, and use that to get experience and street cred to carry with you when you go seeking investors willing to support you as a solo shop. Buy a game engine and use it to make your own stuff (and the price is damn short of prohibitive-- the last time I checked, good engines were available for about what a *hobbyist* videography geek spends on cameras and lenses. Call 'em tools of the trade and suck it up.
Complaining that the big game companies keep eating the smaller ones is like complaining that big movie companies have destroyed the indy/arts movie arena. Nope! Not yet, not ever!
It's just that distribution and marketing are difficult and complex enough that, even after you solve the 'perfect game' equation, you have to choose between 2 devils: MegaCorpBuyout or BecomeMarketingWonk. For a programmer, both have a tastes-like-ass aftertaste.
Or, you can stay small. And that's not so fun, either.
Oh, and EA and Vivendi look a lot like Cisco and CA and a few other computer industry monoliths... except the gaming industry gets less respect in the stock market. They're well-capitalized, they need growth to keep shareholders happy, and the best way to grow is still to acquire known value.
As with everything else in life, it really is a lot more complex than you want to make it.
I've got a friend whose mom uses her expertise as a psychiatrist to be pathologically abusive of him and his siblings and their families. He's almost 40, and it isn't some cliche like mommy's apron strings or the likes. He's moved across the country, calls her 'satan', has an unlisted number to hide from her, and has repeatedly had to get even *that* changed because well-wishing acquaintances or business contacts can't imagine that this nice little old lady could possibly deserve to be cut off. She's damn good at it, and she uses all sorts of tricks: claims a deaths in the family, immediate emergencies and her being unable to get home to where she has his number, etc. As far as he can tell, she's even once gotten the info out of the phone company itself. Repeatedly, she gets thru, because who'd believe that he'd really want to cut her out of his life so completely. But he does, just to spare his wife and kids from her phone harrassment and all the other grief they get from even a few moments of dealing with this soul-sucking fiend.
(Mom = Satan | Soul-sucking fiend?... His words, not mine.)
The odds are with you, but you so didn't do the right thing, papasui. Next time, at most you could archive/encrypt the data and offer to release them only after you see a court order. And lacking a compelling reason, most courts will reject any such application based on the expectation of privacy of the other people he'd have emailed.
Is it That time of year again? Already?! Damn damn damn... Pundits poppin' off about the future, looking back through a filter that'd make Nostradamus look blunt? Oh, ick ick ick. Flying cars, cancer/hiv cures, unlimited free energy, world peace, global war (ok, that's not so far-fetched this time), wearable computers, micromachine-based medicine, self-destructing dvd's being popular, disney releasing a hit...
I SO hate this aspect of each New Year. Unless it's Robin Williams saying, "In the future we'll travel at the speed of light. They will have to lose our luggage before hand."
I had this argument with a lit teacher in high school. And again with a college prof. 'Why can't a good story be just that and nothing more? How do we know Tolkein meant all this stuff, and didn't just tell a nice story?' Eventually, I've come around to their view.
Call the underlying stuff morals, call 'em themes. Whatever. But everything has underlying meanings or messages. Good artists sometimes hide the meaning just enough to evoke many interpretations. Some artists push the envelope until most people don't see anything coherent, let alone an underlying message. In fact, if you strip out all meaning, you're left with babble reminiscent of a 3-year-old trying to tell a story: chances are, your mind will reject it as not entertaining.
That also means that you and I are in agreement: I want to be entertained. I don't want the story to stop short, completely swerve into a bizarre realm (like Stephenson's novels, for example), or hand me something that lacks a message.
And no, that isn't a way for professors (I'm not one, btw) to sound highfalutin', seduce students or get tenure. Aesop had morals, jesus' parables had a message, O'Henry and Nietsche and Dickens and Stephen King and... (insert a litany)... and even Surviving Christmas, with it's 7-out-of-100 tomato-meter score, has a message.
OK, maybe I'm wrong about Surviving Christmas. Best I can tell, that's just a vehicle for Affleck to utterly submarine his movie career so people will leave him alone when he goes to poker tournaments. Applegate is maybe just thrilled to take J-Lo's place on-screen. And I've got no idea what Gandolfino is doing in it.
Hypocrisy isn't when you tell the truth about someone else and yourself. Torvalds didn't pretend that Linux was awesome at device drivers. He said Solarix x/86 sucked more than Linux. And by your reasoning, should we give Gates/Balmer a free ride any time they 'invade' another market? Hell, no!
Put another way, how on earth do you reason that a software firm with an $18 Billion market cap should get a 'newbie' free ride, especially when we're talking about a decade-old core software item (that they routinely charged a fair amount of $$$ for)?
Sun is not starting from scratch. No newbie bonus here, adiposity. They're giving up the market approach on a product that I'd say has not done well in the commercial market.
That said, Sun gets a lot of bonus points from me for going this route rather than sticking x/86 in a vault. The Solaris source is useful, Sun's involvement is even *more* useful (directly and for us to flog as 'a shining example of gaining goodwill by open-sourcing a marginally-valued product'). Another free OS will significantly alter the market for Windows over the long term, although not as much as if BeOS had caught the clue-train. I'd rank this in the somewhat-good news category, sorta like the Linspire laptop from walmart.
Oh, and my next computer is still gonna also be my first Mac.
But you have already found 10 bugs!!! Why take for granted that the number of bugs to be found was expressed in base-10? Why not base-2?
Cool! And when the prof shifts to binary too, that binary 100 you got will be worth... um... an 'F'.
I'd have dropped that class (or shifted to an Audit or whatever) ten seconds after I heard the grading scale. There were two rather-brilliant profs whose classes I went out of my way to avoid, simply because they were such quirky hard-asses about their grading.
You didn't mention Tax and personal finance software, or games/apps for my kids.
There's gnucash, gnumeric for home bookkeeping.
But *nobody* is writing tax apps for Linux, and everything that my kids see in stores is win-oriented, except for when I can find flash apps via websites.
this shows the distinct line between the two types
of open source advocates:
Free code is good for everybody camp
and the
we h473 M$ camp.
Um, I think free (FOSS) is good, and (like another reply) prefer FOSS *good* code to proprietary good code.
And I hate MS. Not capital-H hate, but 9/10 of my servers run silently and happy on linux/solaris/bsd, and 2/3 of my coding is in windoze. And 9/10 of my trouble each day is MS-related. When it's not MS, it's some 3rd party app that has hitched its half-assed wagon to the microsoft express and left me all sorts of buggy, ill-documented, no-source problems to deal with.
I can see lots of other ways people might not fit your either-or choice, so I'm inclined to think your dichotomy isn't so sound.
The issue here is subtle and complex. There are good arguments to be made for either decision (a coder really can't be dissed for saying 'don't let my code support an undesirable paradigm', and I feel cross-platform use breeds familiarity and that will attract new users).
Personally, my vote goes to the 'share to gain market share' side.
I feel that way because it's a central argument to my stance against the RIAA/MPAA. If they want to win hearts and minds, they need to do whatever they can to tear down the underlying motivators of (piracy | entrenched MS users). Same thing here...
Get 'em a good graphing calc, or some software that takes the pain out of visualizing math.
I see repeatedly how people are suggesting wetware (one's brain) and a pencil and graph paper.
While I don't disagree with the value, since there is a lot of value to understanding things well enough thru these methods, this reminds me of piano lessons:
99% of the world doesn't want music theory. They just want to be able to play along while folks sing.
99% of the world isn't going to keep any of the deeper mathematical education they get. Yeah, I know that is damn depressing, but I console myself with my fat paycheck and the bonuses I get when I can trivially solve my clients' problems because I actually *paid attention* and retained that technical/scientific knowledge.
I put a few years into learning the piano. Paid music teachers, etc. Net result: not much. Friends that learned thru other means (in a band, from someone with improv talent, etc) got what they needed (the ability to play recreationally) in less time and they all have more fun with that skill.
For anyone seeing a math-oriented career, software and calculators can prevent deeper learning. For everyone else, the most useful thing that one can get is a usable sense of these things. Graphing software is a crutch, but it can do a better job of letting a younger student explore: 1/x functions, trig, logarithms, asymptotes, limits, derivatives, integrals, transforms, special functions, etc. And since most folks don't plan to carry this wisdom very far, it's better that we lighten the hell up and stop trying to make everyone walk uphill both ways thru a meter of snow to get their education. I'm sick of hearing everyone say 'I never use any math in my life'.
As a student, I found a small PC app that would graph almost any equation I could put into it. Mathematica was just a few years old and prohibitively expensive, but this little freebie did simple graph work nicely. While I was using it to attempt to hand-fit polynomials to data I was collecting, it later did wonders for my comprehending various nastier things I was learning (grad physics E & M functions)
So, I say again:
Get a good graphing calculator. Or use any of the above software items others here have mentioned. Splurge on matlab or mathematica, or find a trial/warez/academic version you can use. Use that to get an innate sense of what each function *should* look like, and let that carry you along (a good goal is to understand the equation enough to recognize obviously-wrong results).
A side effect: several of those 99%'ers are going to be controlling the financial future of your world, as managers, policy wonks, or managing a fund you're applying to. Would you rather their view of tech is unpleasant memories of hand-graphing, or a healthy respect for the subject's underlying beauty and a respect for your work, when you submit that funding application?
Years ago, nobel physicist Leon Lederman spoke at our university, and he put a lot of time into talking about 'Physics for Poets': a U of Chicago course specifically aiming to give nonphysicists a working understanding, and deep appreciation for what we're doing. Insisting on everyone doing math by hand is, incidentally, the same as not seeing a need for improving the UI for linux or other apps, and a zillion other 'techie-vs-Them' friction points.
I just always imagine a room full of people talking to their computers. Some people aren't bothered by noise pollution, but it drives me crazy. The babble of people on the phone in a crowded space is bad enough. Add to that people talking to their computers constantly, and postal employees won't be the only people going off with AKs.
Without sounding too 'oh, yeah!?', explain to me how one keeps the screws down on 2.5 billion people with a Socialist government and an Americanized economy? Given the billion people that live in thoroughly un-chinese political structures peacefully due to a spectrum of balancing acts between capitalism and socialism, China's continued restrictiveness is the doomed plan, in my book.
Incidentally, my point is both that:
you can't go from asking me to prove something vague (lacking 2.5 billion Americans, any case I make comes from a weak position, since it is purely hypothetical) to declaring impossibility, declaring an unproven alternative is more valid, or the 'inevitability of any of it'; and
After 50 years of strict political and economic control, China has only recently tried to embrace capitalism without capitulating political control. Before I'd believe capitalism is unable to scale much more, I'd believe that China has grabbed a tiger by the tail. Capitalism's knack for inspiring the greedy and the innovative, not American politics, is the unstoppable force that I hope will conquer China.
Haven't RTFA'd, but my initial read was that IBM was getting out of desktop, not notebook sales.
I agree: if they stop making laptops, I'm gonna buy one last model before they do, then hold a wake in 3 yrs when the contract runs out. I've got an A31 that has put up with more s**t, and the few minor troubles I've had were all taken care off with the utmost profesionalism by IBM's support staff. For a workday device, nothing comes close.
(Unlike Joe The Peacock and his Dell problems.)
lol, hahaha, lol hahaha. You have a real set of balls to try to compare those toys with a pc of any vintage! lol! There is a reason why those things didn't last more than one generation. BECAUSE THEY SUCKED SO BAD DUDE! Get a life!!!
Did you just include the Amiga in a troll about 'toys' and suckage?
A suicidal troll. Fascinating.
When the angry torch-bearing mob surrounds you, I suggest you say you meant everything *else* on the list. That, or point up, shout 'Look, a Blimp!', and run like hell!
Another take: $100 on my first computer immersed me in computers just as well as the $3000 first-generation IBM-PC that a friend slaved away on 3 years of part-time to pay jobs for. Or better, since I had all sorts of free time he didn't, friends to share info, warez software, etc. The first 5 computers I *really* used all had one glaring weakness or another, but each weakness led to cool lessons (assembler, offset-indexing, lookup tables, binary math, hardware-interface timing, soldering, 7400-chip logic design, etc). But the Amiga: multitasking, custom chips, wicked sound/graphics, etc. Oh, and you overlook the obvious: pretty much everything from *then* sucks compared to now. And even the three market leaders for home computers today suck for their own reasons:
Win PC's: oh, where do I start? Flaky code, insecure OS, and product activation. Linux x86: drivers and config nightmares, insufficient software (tax and games, specifically) Mac: insufficient software and... uh... well, that's about it.
First pp: Um, thanks for that little whirlwind of mental self-abuse. Whatever.
There are things that can be done about propaganda. It's not even a new concept: bad ideas are best fought with intelligent discourse. Shouting them down and forcibly silencing them are weak alternatives (both are flawed, since even a good idea is silenced by brute methods).
So, if anyone trusts themselves, they can dive right in, and listen, question, hold forth, and reach a conclusion. You can't silence #2, but you can make it damn hard for disinterested bystanders to go thru life unaware that whatever propaganda they're spewing is fact. Discourse. Critical thinking. Oh, and avoid sophistry (debating with winning as your only goal, using tricks that hide rather than find the truth).
Nothing is ever the 'only thing you can do'. I've given one alternative above. Dozens more exist. The category 'activism' is all about doing more than remaining self-absorbed. But you're right: most folks are pretty self-absorbed, including the harpy I was originally talking about.
Bloggers link to original sources more than MSM. Count the links or direct quotes in a good blog, then compare them to any MSM news site. Shit, online news should be cross-indexed until it looks like a religion-student's bible (more red-lined/annotated words than not). They're not. Why? Because they wrongly believe that it's bad marketing to guide a user away from their site. Eyeballs, not truth, are their goal. They haven't figured out that their audience will use them *more* if their stories have that depth.
I read online news. But I also dig around on blogs, drilling down until I hit non-parallel (not necessarily contradictory, just *differently biased*) original content like an embed journalist in iraq, an aid-worker in Afghanistan, or some kid telephoning updates into the BBC.
Years ago, CSM had a 'world monitor' magazine that published stuff by non-US sources. Yeah, they each had their own biases, but the biases are *different* than what I get here. A swedish journalist's take on the mideast is *interesting*, as is an Arab's, a US soldier's, and an expat iraqi living in Canada. Looking for that balanced perspective has let me read:
A US general saying 'I am not aware of ANY civilian casualties', numerous Iraqi blogs that talk about stuff like 'I'm getting to where I can sleep through the smaller mortar blasts', 'I tried to leave town, but didn't get far; it's just too dangerous out there', 'The smell of dead bodies is getting awful', or 'What kind of attack leaves someone bleeding from the eyes?'.
(the answer to that last one may be concussion grenades, incidentally-- a less-lethal combat measure that, while superficially grim, is actually evidence that the US really is *trying* to minimize casualties)
Based on these findings, perhaps you'll agree: I'm not trying for an echo chamber. I'm trying to critically review (aka, question) the dominant story. Yeah, you can get an echo chamber effect. But you can also seek out contradictions and distrust MSM's own echo-chamber.
Anyone that defines blogs with a 'just' doesn't get 'em: DailyKos is not a stream of consciousness (it sees several *articles*, complete with fact-checks and references, daily). Slashdot isn't either (but it is closer). Blogs have a versatility that lets them be more or less.
If you think in terms of mathematical topology, a newspaper 'maps' onto a blog nicely, including the fact-checking effort (i.e., there's nothing to *stop* a blogger from fact-checking). But a blog won't 'map' to a newspaper, often. Blogs can also be: a vanity publication, a book-in-progress, groupthink, a torrent-of-multiple-opinions. They also can be a structure for community, a forum for opinion, for satire, or criticism or deconstruction of someone else's bias (PandasThumb, for example), a SIG or BOF gone virtual, or voyeurism.
Point is, that depth and flexibility, together with trackbacks and meta-blog toolkits and deep-linking that allows the readers to fact-check for themselves, is what will cause blogs to supercede methods used by MSM.
I mentioned pandasthumb: it's one I stumbled across recently. Like the jewish anti-defamation league, it's purpose seems to be a clearinghouse of articles that rebut objectionable material. But the name reminds me of why I think blogs are *revolutionary*: They're like newspapers, but with opposable thumbs. The advancements they offer *can* be integrated into newspapers and MSM. That'll be the future. And that is the revolution.
Oh, and AMC is still a twit, who repeatedly evidences she's unworthy of attention when seriously discussing these things. It's not that she doesn't serve a purpose, it's just that hers is that of being a one-voice People Magazine of political blogdom.
>> wonkette is hilarious... you seem to have an issue with leaving the house >> though.... but as you probably realize she was only making fun of you.
1, I'm not Dave Winer or any other blogger. I'm the audience. I'm someone that's abandoning tv news, trade weeklies and newspapers, and that uses blogs and news feeds and news.google to cherry-pick/research my own questions about the news. Oh, and by 'have an issue', I hope you meant that I made a good point, not that I'm agoraphobic.
2, satire can be funny, but not everything that is funny is satire. She's a gossipy, self-promoting, vapid tramp. A harpy.
... and in the morning, I shall be sober. --- W. Churchill
KURTZ: You are a "foul-mouthed, inaccurate, opinionated little vixen," so says "Washington Post" gossip columnist Richard Leiby. COX: He has a crush on me, doesn't he? KURTZ: But you put it on your Web site. COX: I'm flattered. Of course. KURTZ: You like when people say bad things about you? COX: Is that bad? KURTZ: Foul-mouthed, inaccurate? COX: I guess I always focus on the "vixen" part.
have you *watched* the news on TV lately? What about sunday morning interview shows? And *where* exactly do a zillion journalists get a sizeable number of quotes for their articles from?
*Journalism* is already less about facts than about opinions. Blogs just decentralize who gets to bloviate.
Heh... harpy. I'm going to use that. Just posted a fairly long-winded anti wonkette screed, and went out of my way to avoid even mentioning the v-word she's fond of being called. I resorted to 'twit', but I didn't put a lot of effort into it.
The more I read or hear from Anna Marie Cox (wonkette), the more I'm beginning to think she's a twit:
Who the hell needs to leave a house to have a revolution? That's the stupidest non-sequiter bit of reasoning I've ever read! Most revolutions start with a letter or a manifesto or a little red book, not gadflying about or whatever it is she means by that rebuttal. An idea, written large, creates a revolution. And blogs are pretty damn good at trafficking in ideas.
Her roots are in journalism, yet she's quick to admit she got fired from several journalism jobs. So, why do we care what she thinks? I'm not sure if I should declare her inexpert or (like many journalists) biased. Either way, thumbs down.
She assuredly is not helping the larger media problem of distracting attention from real, substantive discussions about issues. For her, it's not just gab about process, but also sex talk thrown in. Sex sells, but disingenuously marketing oneself as a political wonk and getting famous by resorting to gossip and sex... that's lame.
Right here she even makes a point of saying she's trying to be like The Daily Show, yet she wanders around in the political weeds unable to provide any depth or insight about much more than gossip or process. Neither matters, and until she changes neither should she.
She refuses to allow comments on her blog. This, by itself, isn't a bad thing, but it seems to be a self-indulgence that is found more with journalists refusing to relenquish control. It's careful packaging (cough cough--marketing!) ahead of rhetoric and intelligent discourse.
In short: she's either ET or People Magazine for blogdom. Fluff, not substance. Or, as I said: she's a twit. If you want to really talk politics, marginalize her and let's move on. She's demonstrably no expert on politics or revolutionary change.
Incidentally, she's not alone in misunderstanding blogs: Pandora's box is open, and sometimes experts of the prior paradigm are too close to see things with perspective. Yes, there'll be a revolution. To think otherwise is akin to thinking 'that HTTP stuff' won't matter much. Blogs already are shaking up the publishing industry, and we're nowhere near full public awareness or full potential.
heh, an insightful swerve into ea's sweatshop reputation.
As for not in usa, I don't doubt that there'll be some decrease in how many IT jobs are here. But I think that there remain so *many* difficult problems and so *few* (percentage-wise) members of the population willing to study/solve them, that I'll still have people with fun computer-ish puzzles for me to solve the day I die.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting, and I agree completely that IP law is busted all to hell, but I've got questions:
Property taxes, capital gains taxes, inheritance taxes, windfall profits taxes: All of these are taxes on wealth accumulated, aren't they? Even if you say the last *3* are taxing the acquisition itself, isn't property tax entirely about taxing wealth (or at least one manifestation of it... real estate)?
Sales tax, excise taxes, fees, luxury taxes: these are other mostly unavoidable non-income taxes one hits just by existing in today's world. The fact that many of these hit poorer people at a higher percentage of wealth is why they're often called regressive taxes. Still, they're not income taxes. Is your proposal to eliminate them *all*?
A side note: calling patent fees an incredibly regressive tax seems a bit odd, compared to the deeper regressive impact of sales and excise taxes. Rich people don't spend 40% of their monthly income on items with roughly 6% sales tax. Many people living check to check do.
For a nation whose citizens are chronically underinvesting and already often seriously in debt, don't wealth taxes or any other disincentives to collect wealth seem like a bad idea? Put another way, given a choice between buying an item and paying annually for taxes on it or finding some other tax-free way to spend discretionary income, won't some folks stop buying (enough to impact the economy)?
Indirectly, everyone ponies up a bit extra to cover worker's comp for the kid flipping burgers, the licensing charges for many professions that one hires (hairdresser, building contractor's fees, real estate or investment or insurance agent, or a hundred others where I live). Is the goal to cut these programs, or will wealth taxes rise accordingly?
And your 'tax net assets except home and tools' just reopens the door to loopholes and complications: is a snowmobile I own for 'emergency winter farm use' (a necessary item for many northern farmers) a tool or a toy?
Can I shelter wealth out of country to avoid your taxes? If you thought outsourcing was bad, wait until companies start leaving the US completely to dodge wealth taxes: imagine Bill Gates takes all of Microsoft an hour north to avoid assets taxes against their whole Redmond shebang.
Well put! The real world example that immediately comes to mind is
aviation test piloting and submarines diving beyond rated depths. The
latter shows up repeatedly in war stories, and there are several well
known examples of 'oopsie, TOO deep!'
Incidentally, bridges and elevators and a zillion other items get over-
engineered.
OTOH, Consumer devices, I'm convinced, are a race toward creating
something that has ZERO overengineering: the perfect device has all
components fail ten seconds after the customer has gotten just enough
value to not boycott the brand. But maybe I'm just jaded after seeing
the crap that came into my house this christmas.
Wow. You're asking for a lot, considering the sorry-ol', busted-ass crap that people buy on ebay or ubid, which they'll gladly pay buy.com or newegg (new, with warranty) prices for.
With the drop in LCD prices over the last 60 days or so (IANAE, but that's been my impression), you're asking for a 15" for under $100. Two for $200. 4 for $400 and quadding them puppies up would give a computer geek who doesn't care about the screen borders getting in the way a 30" useable space (assuming I can find an OS willing to cheaply play nice with 'em). Compare that $400 to the $3000 price of the top Apple display... yummy.
A discount? Sure. But HALF off because of *ten* pixels? Can I get them to pay me if it has 30 dead pixels?! After all, that's a quality defect of nearly .003%
My high-end IBM laptop has 3 (that I've noticed and confirmed) and I've got to search to find 'em. And I worked for a week on a machine that lost 1" off the bottom of the screen, while waiting for a replacement.
Develop non FPS games. Develop machinema, since that'll teach you data formats and other engine-specific skills. Develop puzzles, strategy, online-adaptations, or some other unconventional p2p games. Develop for lower-profile markets (anything non-male-teen-to-twenty5). Grow by viral marketing (word of mouth, not SANTY-C!). Use Flash or shockwave. Go open-source. Develop for some older platform that's been cracked, and use that to get experience and street cred to carry with you when you go seeking investors willing to support you as a solo shop. Buy a game engine and use it to make your own stuff (and the price is damn short of prohibitive-- the last time I checked, good engines were available for about what a *hobbyist* videography geek spends on cameras and lenses. Call 'em tools of the trade and suck it up.
Complaining that the big game companies keep eating the smaller ones is like complaining that big movie companies have destroyed the indy/arts movie arena. Nope! Not yet, not ever!
It's just that distribution and marketing are difficult and complex enough that, even after you solve the 'perfect game' equation, you have to choose between 2 devils: MegaCorpBuyout or BecomeMarketingWonk. For a programmer, both have a tastes-like-ass aftertaste.Or, you can stay small. And that's not so fun, either.
Oh, and EA and Vivendi look a lot like Cisco and CA and a few other computer industry monoliths... except the gaming industry gets less respect in the stock market. They're well-capitalized, they need growth to keep shareholders happy, and the best way to grow is still to acquire known value.
As with everything else in life, it really is a lot more complex than you want to make it.
(Mom = Satan | Soul-sucking fiend?... His words, not mine.)
The odds are with you, but you so didn't do the right thing, papasui. Next time, at most you could archive/encrypt the data and offer to release them only after you see a court order. And lacking a compelling reason, most courts will reject any such application based on the expectation of privacy of the other people he'd have emailed.
Is it That time of year again? Already?! Damn damn damn... Pundits poppin' off about the future, looking back through a filter that'd make Nostradamus look blunt? Oh, ick ick ick. Flying cars, cancer/hiv cures, unlimited free energy, world peace, global war (ok, that's not so far-fetched this time), wearable computers, micromachine-based medicine, self-destructing dvd's being popular, disney releasing a hit...
I SO hate this aspect of each New Year. Unless it's Robin Williams saying, "In the future we'll travel at the speed of light. They will have to lose our luggage before hand."
I had this argument with a lit teacher in high school. And again with a college prof. 'Why can't a good story be just that and nothing more? How do we know Tolkein meant all this stuff, and didn't just tell a nice story?' Eventually, I've come around to their view.
Call the underlying stuff morals, call 'em themes. Whatever. But everything has underlying meanings or messages. Good artists sometimes hide the meaning just enough to evoke many interpretations. Some artists push the envelope until most people don't see anything coherent, let alone an underlying message. In fact, if you strip out all meaning, you're left with babble reminiscent of a 3-year-old trying to tell a story: chances are, your mind will reject it as not entertaining.
That also means that you and I are in agreement: I want to be entertained. I don't want the story to stop short, completely swerve into a bizarre realm (like Stephenson's novels, for example), or hand me something that lacks a message.
And no, that isn't a way for professors (I'm not one, btw) to sound highfalutin', seduce students or get tenure. Aesop had morals, jesus' parables had a message, O'Henry and Nietsche and Dickens and Stephen King and... (insert a litany)... and even Surviving Christmas, with it's 7-out-of-100 tomato-meter score, has a message.
OK, maybe I'm wrong about Surviving Christmas. Best I can tell, that's just a vehicle for Affleck to utterly submarine his movie career so people will leave him alone when he goes to poker tournaments. Applegate is maybe just thrilled to take J-Lo's place on-screen. And I've got no idea what Gandolfino is doing in it.
Put another way, how on earth do you reason that a software firm with an $18 Billion market cap should get a 'newbie' free ride, especially when we're talking about a decade-old core software item (that they routinely charged a fair amount of $$$ for)?
Sun is not starting from scratch. No newbie bonus here, adiposity. They're giving up the market approach on a product that I'd say has not done well in the commercial market.
That said, Sun gets a lot of bonus points from me for going this route rather than sticking x/86 in a vault. The Solaris source is useful, Sun's involvement is even *more* useful (directly and for us to flog as 'a shining example of gaining goodwill by open-sourcing a marginally-valued product'). Another free OS will significantly alter the market for Windows over the long term, although not as much as if BeOS had caught the clue-train. I'd rank this in the somewhat-good news category, sorta like the Linspire laptop from walmart.
Oh, and my next computer is still gonna also be my first Mac.
I'd have dropped that class (or shifted to an Audit or whatever) ten seconds after I heard the grading scale. There were two rather-brilliant profs whose classes I went out of my way to avoid, simply because they were such quirky hard-asses about their grading.
You didn't mention Tax and personal finance software, or games/apps for my kids.
There's gnucash, gnumeric for home bookkeeping.
But *nobody* is writing tax apps for Linux, and everything that my
kids see in stores is win-oriented, except for when I can find flash
apps via websites.
And that's a deal-breaker for me.
And I hate MS. Not capital-H hate, but 9/10 of my servers run silently and happy on linux/solaris/bsd, and 2/3 of my coding is in windoze. And 9/10 of my trouble each day is MS-related. When it's not MS, it's some 3rd party app that has hitched its half-assed wagon to the microsoft express and left me all sorts of buggy, ill-documented, no-source problems to deal with.
I can see lots of other ways people might not fit your either-or choice, so I'm inclined to think your dichotomy isn't so sound.
The issue here is subtle and complex. There are good arguments to be made for either decision (a coder really can't be dissed for saying 'don't let my code support an undesirable paradigm', and I feel cross-platform use breeds familiarity and that will attract new users).
Personally, my vote goes to the 'share to gain market share' side.
I feel that way because it's a central argument to my stance against the RIAA/MPAA. If they want to win hearts and minds, they need to do whatever they can to tear down the underlying motivators of (piracy | entrenched MS users). Same thing here...
Get 'em a good graphing calc, or some software that takes the pain out of visualizing math.
I see repeatedly how people are suggesting wetware (one's brain) and a pencil and graph paper.
While I don't disagree with the value, since there is a lot of value to understanding things well enough thru these methods, this reminds me of piano lessons:
99% of the world doesn't want music theory. They just want to be able to play along while folks sing.
99% of the world isn't going to keep any of the deeper mathematical education they get. Yeah, I know that is damn depressing, but I console myself with my fat paycheck and the bonuses I get when I can trivially solve my clients' problems because I actually *paid attention* and retained that technical/scientific knowledge.
I put a few years into learning the piano. Paid music teachers, etc. Net result: not much. Friends that learned thru other means (in a band, from someone with improv talent, etc) got what they needed (the ability to play recreationally) in less time and they all have more fun with that skill.
For anyone seeing a math-oriented career, software and calculators can prevent deeper learning. For everyone else, the most useful thing that one can get is a usable sense of these things. Graphing software is a crutch, but it can do a better job of letting a younger student explore: 1/x functions, trig, logarithms, asymptotes, limits, derivatives, integrals, transforms, special functions, etc. And since most folks don't plan to carry this wisdom very far, it's better that we lighten the hell up and stop trying to make everyone walk uphill both ways thru a meter of snow to get their education. I'm sick of hearing everyone say 'I never use any math in my life'.
As a student, I found a small PC app that would graph almost any equation I could put into it. Mathematica was just a few years old and prohibitively expensive, but this little freebie did simple graph work nicely. While I was using it to attempt to hand-fit polynomials to data I was collecting, it later did wonders for my comprehending various nastier things I was learning (grad physics E & M functions)
So, I say again:
Get a good graphing calculator. Or use any of the above software items others here have mentioned. Splurge on matlab or mathematica, or find a trial/warez/academic version you can use. Use that to get an innate sense of what each function *should* look like, and let that carry you along (a good goal is to understand the equation enough to recognize obviously-wrong results).
A side effect: several of those 99%'ers are going to be controlling the financial future of your world, as managers, policy wonks, or managing a fund you're applying to. Would you rather their view of tech is unpleasant memories of hand-graphing, or a healthy respect for the subject's underlying beauty and a respect for your work, when you submit that funding application?
Years ago, nobel physicist Leon Lederman spoke at our university, and he put a lot of time into talking about 'Physics for Poets': a U of Chicago course specifically aiming to give nonphysicists a working understanding, and deep appreciation for what we're doing. Insisting on everyone doing math by hand is, incidentally, the same as not seeing a need for improving the UI for linux or other apps, and a zillion other 'techie-vs-Them' friction points.
Incidentally, my point is both that:
I agree: if they stop making laptops, I'm gonna buy one last model before they do, then hold a wake in 3 yrs when the contract runs out. I've got an A31 that has put up with more s**t, and the few minor troubles I've had were all taken care off with the utmost profesionalism by IBM's support staff. For a workday device, nothing comes close. (Unlike Joe The Peacock and his Dell problems.)
Did you just include the Amiga in a troll about 'toys' and suckage?
A suicidal troll. Fascinating.
When the angry torch-bearing mob surrounds you, I suggest you say you meant everything *else* on the list. That, or point up, shout 'Look, a Blimp!', and run like hell!
Another take: $100 on my first computer immersed me in computers just as well as the $3000 first-generation IBM-PC that a friend slaved away on 3 years of part-time to pay jobs for. Or better, since I had all sorts of free time he didn't, friends to share info, warez software, etc. The first 5 computers I *really* used all had one glaring weakness or another, but each weakness led to cool lessons (assembler, offset-indexing, lookup tables, binary math, hardware-interface timing, soldering, 7400-chip logic design, etc). But the Amiga: multitasking, custom chips, wicked sound/graphics, etc. Oh, and you overlook the obvious: pretty much everything from *then* sucks compared to now. And even the three market leaders for home computers today suck for their own reasons:
Win PC's: oh, where do I start? Flaky code, insecure OS, and product activation.
Linux x86: drivers and config nightmares, insufficient software (tax and games, specifically)
Mac: insufficient software and... uh... well, that's about it.
Note to self: Why, again, don't I own only Mac's?
First pp: Um, thanks for that little whirlwind of mental self-abuse. Whatever.
There are things that can be done about propaganda. It's not even a new concept: bad ideas are best fought with intelligent discourse. Shouting them down and forcibly silencing them are weak alternatives (both are flawed, since even a good idea is silenced by brute methods).
So, if anyone trusts themselves, they can dive right in, and listen, question, hold forth, and reach a conclusion. You can't silence #2, but you can make it damn hard for disinterested bystanders to go thru life unaware that whatever propaganda they're spewing is fact. Discourse. Critical thinking. Oh, and avoid sophistry (debating with winning as your only goal, using tricks that hide rather than find the truth).
Nothing is ever the 'only thing you can do'. I've given one alternative above. Dozens more exist. The category 'activism' is all about doing more than remaining self-absorbed. But you're right: most folks are pretty self-absorbed, including the harpy I was originally talking about.
Bloggers link to original sources more than MSM. Count the links or direct quotes in a good blog, then compare them to any MSM news site. Shit, online news should be cross-indexed until it looks like a religion-student's bible (more red-lined/annotated words than not). They're not. Why? Because they wrongly believe that it's bad marketing to guide a user away from their site. Eyeballs, not truth, are their goal. They haven't figured out that their audience will use them *more* if their stories have that depth.
I read online news. But I also dig around on blogs, drilling down until I hit non-parallel (not necessarily contradictory, just *differently biased*) original content like an embed journalist in iraq, an aid-worker in Afghanistan, or some kid telephoning updates into the BBC.
Years ago, CSM had a 'world monitor' magazine that published stuff by non-US sources. Yeah, they each had their own biases, but the biases are *different* than what I get here. A swedish journalist's take on the mideast is *interesting*, as is an Arab's, a US soldier's, and an expat iraqi living in Canada. Looking for that balanced perspective has let me read:
A US general saying 'I am not aware of ANY civilian casualties', numerous Iraqi blogs that talk about stuff like 'I'm getting to where I can sleep through the smaller mortar blasts', 'I tried to leave town, but didn't get far; it's just too dangerous out there', 'The smell of dead bodies is getting awful', or 'What kind of attack leaves someone bleeding from the eyes?'.
(the answer to that last one may be concussion grenades, incidentally-- a less-lethal combat measure that, while superficially grim, is actually evidence that the US really is *trying* to minimize casualties)
Based on these findings, perhaps you'll agree: I'm not trying for an echo chamber. I'm trying to critically review (aka, question) the dominant story. Yeah, you can get an echo chamber effect. But you can also seek out contradictions and distrust MSM's own echo-chamber.
Anyone that defines blogs with a 'just' doesn't get 'em: DailyKos is not a stream of consciousness (it sees several *articles*, complete with fact-checks and references, daily). Slashdot isn't either (but it is closer). Blogs have a versatility that lets them be more or less.
If you think in terms of mathematical topology, a newspaper 'maps' onto a blog nicely, including the fact-checking effort (i.e., there's nothing to *stop* a blogger from fact-checking). But a blog won't 'map' to a newspaper, often. Blogs can also be: a vanity publication, a book-in-progress, groupthink, a torrent-of-multiple-opinions. They also can be a structure for community, a forum for opinion, for satire, or criticism or deconstruction of someone else's bias (PandasThumb, for example), a SIG or BOF gone virtual, or voyeurism.
Point is, that depth and flexibility, together with trackbacks and meta-blog toolkits and deep-linking that allows the readers to fact-check for themselves, is what will cause blogs to supercede methods used by MSM.
I mentioned pandasthumb: it's one I stumbled across recently. Like the jewish anti-defamation league, it's purpose seems to be a clearinghouse of articles that rebut objectionable material. But the name reminds me of why I think blogs are *revolutionary*: They're like newspapers, but with opposable thumbs. The advancements they offer *can* be integrated into newspapers and MSM. That'll be the future. And that is the revolution.
Oh, and AMC is still a twit, who repeatedly evidences she's unworthy of attention when seriously discussing these things. It's not that she doesn't serve a purpose, it's just that hers is that of being a one-voice People Magazine of political blogdom.
>> though.
1, I'm not Dave Winer or any other blogger. I'm the audience. I'm someone that's abandoning tv news, trade weeklies and newspapers, and that uses blogs and news feeds and news.google to cherry-pick/research my own questions about the news. Oh, and by 'have an issue', I hope you meant that I made a good point, not that I'm agoraphobic.
2, satire can be funny, but not everything that is funny is satire. She's a gossipy, self-promoting, vapid tramp. A harpy.
No joke. Just a disdain for her selfaggrandizing urges. And I liked 'harpy' for it's overt negativity compared to:
0 .h tml
google: +wonkette +vixen: 1280 hits.
http://michellemalkin.com/archives/000164.htm
-or-
http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0405/02/rs.0
KURTZ: You are a "foul-mouthed, inaccurate, opinionated little vixen," so says "Washington Post" gossip columnist Richard Leiby.
COX: He has a crush on me, doesn't he?
KURTZ: But you put it on your Web site.
COX: I'm flattered. Of course.
KURTZ: You like when people say bad things about you?
COX: Is that bad?
KURTZ: Foul-mouthed, inaccurate?
COX: I guess I always focus on the "vixen" part.
have you *watched* the news on TV lately? What about sunday morning interview shows? And *where* exactly do a zillion journalists get a sizeable number of quotes for their articles from?
*Journalism* is already less about facts than about opinions. Blogs just decentralize who gets to bloviate.
Heh... harpy. I'm going to use that. Just posted a fairly long-winded anti wonkette screed, and went out of my way to avoid even mentioning the v-word she's fond of being called. I resorted to 'twit', but I didn't put a lot of effort into it.
Thanks!
The more I read or hear from Anna Marie Cox (wonkette), the more I'm beginning to think she's a twit:
Who the hell needs to leave a house to have a revolution? That's the stupidest non-sequiter bit of reasoning I've ever read! Most revolutions start with a letter or a manifesto or a little red book, not gadflying about or whatever it is she means by that rebuttal. An idea, written large, creates a revolution. And blogs are pretty damn good at trafficking in ideas.
Her roots are in journalism, yet she's quick to admit she got fired from several journalism jobs. So, why do we care what she thinks? I'm not sure if I should declare her inexpert or (like many journalists) biased. Either way, thumbs down.
She assuredly is not helping the larger media problem of distracting attention from real, substantive discussions about issues. For her, it's not just gab about process, but also sex talk thrown in. Sex sells, but disingenuously marketing oneself as a political wonk and getting famous by resorting to gossip and sex... that's lame.
Right here she even makes a point of saying she's trying to be like The Daily Show, yet she wanders around in the political weeds unable to provide any depth or insight about much more than gossip or process. Neither matters, and until she changes neither should she.
She refuses to allow comments on her blog. This, by itself, isn't a bad thing, but it seems to be a self-indulgence that is found more with journalists refusing to relenquish control. It's careful packaging (cough cough--marketing!) ahead of rhetoric and intelligent discourse.
In short: she's either ET or People Magazine for blogdom. Fluff, not substance. Or, as I said: she's a twit. If you want to really talk politics, marginalize her and let's move on. She's demonstrably no expert on politics or revolutionary change.
Incidentally, she's not alone in misunderstanding blogs: Pandora's box is open, and sometimes experts of the prior paradigm are too close to see things with perspective. Yes, there'll be a revolution. To think otherwise is akin to thinking 'that HTTP stuff' won't matter much. Blogs already are shaking up the publishing industry, and we're nowhere near full public awareness or full potential.
heh, an insightful swerve into ea's sweatshop reputation.
As for not in usa, I don't doubt that there'll be some decrease in how many IT jobs are here. But I think that there remain so *many* difficult problems and so *few* (percentage-wise) members of the population willing to study/solve them, that I'll still have people with fun computer-ish puzzles for me to solve the day I die.