I wish I could believe that. C#, which is MS's Java killer, will have a lot of adherents because it's C++ made nicer. Far less overhead than Java; which is still klunky and hard to learn and use, worse than learning MFC. XP will be broadly adopted and used. Sure, we laugh now, but we laughed at Windows 1.0. IIS is being used because of its perceived ease of use.
The XBox will probably win out because Microsoft wants to win badly, and Sony's the company that lost the Beta/VHS war. Microsoft wants to license the hardware to anyone to make an XBox; Sony is still proprietary up the kazoo. The one hope is Microsoft will have failed to learn a lesson from Nintendo and Sony (unlikely): both N & S learned that quality control is exceptionally important on game consoles. They strictly control what games can be produced, and they independently test those games to make sure they run as bug-free as possible. Yes, there are some crashes here and there, but far rarer than your average MS release.
They've been dealing with hydrates for decades. They know how to drill it, how to pipe it, etc. The environmental impacts could be studied from the Siberian fields. One of the more interesting issues with hydrates is their instability. They can flash over into a gas pretty easily. In water, this causes your boat/rig to sink under the water. On land, I'd imagine it could be a bit more explosive.
For the person who asked about using the microbes directly: we already do. If you live in a big city, your city already has a private company sucking up methane from those same microbes working away in our landfills.
We can all thank Trudeau for a worthless constitution which allows for such nonsense.
Ironically, no. Trudeau wanted a Charter of Rights & Freedoms without exceptions. He was dead-set against the "not-withstanding" clause (for our American cousins: it allows Provinces to ignore the Charter anytime they don't want to).
He didn't really say anything other than "I wanted to start a debate, and see we're getting one." The rest of his response was mealy-mouthed babbling trying to refute Linus and Open Source's argument that innovation stems from sharing. IMHO, he failed to counter it.
You know, I hate using paper and pencil. It's so modal. If I want to erase something, I have to either turn my pencil upside down, or drop the pencil and grab an eraser. Oh, and painting is even worse! I constantly have to change modes by changing instruments. Why can't my palette knife do everything?
The lesson here is don't give users everything they think they want. In my experience, users don't even really know what they want. For applications, etc., focus on use cases: how people want to use the system. Design the interface to make those cases easy to do. Basically, goal oriented interfaces (which is what that VB guy who wrote Inmates Running the Asylum is a big fan of). Unfortunately, Microsoft took his ideas and created "wizards" which are the most useless goal-oriented interfaces I've ever had to use.
Even for hardware, like VCR's, focusing on how users want to use the system would make more effecient interfaces. Users really just want to say, "Record 'Manimal' at 8 o'clock on NBC" and have their VCR know what the heck they are talking about. They don't want to go into their TV Guide and type in numbers to a VCR+. Another option is the way I think TiVO does it where you can have an on-line list of programs, you select the program you want and indicate you want to record it. It's better than working through an on-screen interface to try to tell the VCR what time to start and stop recording.
Another example of goal-oriented interface is the Wacom Intuos digitizing tablets. You can get three extra pens, each withs it own unique digital id, and an airbrush pen (which looks and feels like an airbrush). Each pen can then be assigned a unique function in Photoshop (or other app). This way, the mode becomes obvious as picking up a different pen or picking up the airbrush tool. The tablet knows you've chosen the airbrush tool, so it automatically changes to airbrushing. You take the first pen, and it knows you want to draw. You change your mind, turn the pen around to the "eraser" on the end, and voila you're erasing. This is an intuitive mode change that I think is far more useful than trying to make a modeless interface.
The point here is the interfaces must be engineered towards what people want to do with it, and that you behave in a consistent way. For example, if you have modes, then make sure that there is a standard way in each mode to get out of it (like the ESCAPE key). Users can learn arbitrary interfaces, as long as they are consistent and geared to helping them do what they want to do.
You should remember a few things. For starters, it's really hard to get a patent in Japan, especially if you're a foreigner. The best advice has always been to hire a local Japanese patent lawyer to shepard your claim through the process. Also, that period of public comment has been notoriously used against foreign companies extending their patent protection to Japan. The foreign company would make their patent claim, then during the 18 month inspection period, Japanese companies would dissect the idea and come up with their own non-infringing version of the same technology. By the time you got the patent, you've suddenly got competition.
Now, with all that, believe it or not, I'm still in favor of us adopting a similar system in North America. Jeff Bezos' idea for reform is the best version I've heard yet.
If the people involved were well trained enough to handle HTML or Flash, then he wouldn't be asking this question. From experience, your average office user's attitude is "If it ain't Office, I ain't interested."
With the exception of Flash (which is a personal dislike, not a rational one), I think the whole idea of office documentation going to XML (not HTML) is a good idea. It provides reasonable forward compatibility, it enables a company to enforce formatting guidelines across all documents (via CSS or XSTL), and if they decide to change things, you can even make your old documents look up to date.
Now, we just need Office apps that can be configured to do this properly.
Being in the process of reading Kim Stanley Robinson's MARS trilogy, I found his solution rather interesting. First off, get yourself a nice carbonaceous asteroid. Park it in a Clark orbit over the equator. Then sic auotmation on it that eats the asteroid from the inside out and weaves the nanotube structure from it. Let the structure dangle above the surface of the Earth. Use station-keeping rockets to keep your hollowed out asteroid in place.
I loved the comments about gray, "mature" people writing quality code, getting things done on time and budget, etc. The only time I've worked with people like that are at companies where their IT is so fossilised and badly managed that they wonder why they're being driven into the ground. These "mature" IT people watch the clock and go home precisely at 5 regardless of whether their work was well done or even done. These are people who so dislike their jobs that they count the days till retirement.
At other companies I've worked at with "geeks with toys" culture, they were extremely professional with excellent work ethics. They produced quality code on time and on budget.
I think people have confused two separate types of people: those who do what they love and get paid for it, which was de Jager's point; and those who do what they love, but it isn't what they're supposed to be doing.
On a note of balance: Peter de Jager was one of those Y2K Chicken Little's.
Those people only got a share of the action thanks to Wozniak being a warm, decent human being. Steve Jobs ran his company into the ground.
Woz's version of that story differs from yours rather dramatically.
One thing I've learned over the years is no one at Apple has the same story for events.
You can stop right there. Nobody is interested in what an economist has to say. You might as well have said "as an astrologer once told me..."
Spoken like a true Apple-drone. "The laws of physics don't apply to us!"
Luck alone is not enough to keep a company like Apple going as long as they have. You just call it luck because you can't explain their successes any other way without altering your world-view.
That's interesting. A zealot calling me a zealot because he doesn't want to alter his world view. I can easily explain Apple's successes to date: a lot of really gullible people continuously overpaying for underachieving hardware and getting slapped upside the head by the same company to boot, but they keep coming back for more. It is luck that Apple has managed to keep the faithful no matter how badly they've treated them. Apple could have owned the marketplace for desktops, but blew their chances each and every time.
There's a book out there called "Steve Jobs and the Next Big Thing" by Randall E. Stross. Read it and learn.
That's some mighty strong strawman arguments if I ever saw one.
Microsoft clobbered Apple -- and the rest of the industry -- with openness. They were always open to developers writing for their platforms, and they always relied on open commodity hardware, in sharp contrast to Apple's obsession with closed proprietary hardware.
That's because they are two very different companies. Apple is a hardware company; Microsoft is pure software. Apple saw what happened to IBM when the PC hardware was comoditized, and they were too afraid to let that happen to them.
Microsoft's software is not a commodity. No one can produce a WinAPI clone without Redmond unleashing their hounds of lawyers. Can you produce a Microsoft Office clone that can read and write proprietary Office formats perfectly? With the DMCA, you can't even reverse engineer the file formats anymore.
So Microsoft has created a proprietary software model built upon a commoditized hardware. The hardware situation was largely out of Bill Gates's hands; he just took advantage of it because his company only made software. Apple is, and always was, a hardware company. There were Apple clones out there, but Apple pursued them and hounded them out of business. Why? Because Apple made money on hardware; software was a loss-leader.
Now true, Microsoft has always encouraged lots of people to adopt their technology, while Apple seems to have been beating people with a stick to stay out of their yard, but that's like saying Hitler's Facsism still allowed private businesses while Stalin's Fascism made it all state owned. They're just two similar monsters grinning at each other from Redmond and Cuppertino.
Personal computer hardware would have existed with or without Bill. It's a simple fact. True, Microsoft has ensured there's a common box in every home to run their proprietary software. They've encouraged people to develop software for this box as long as Microsoft doesn't want to cash in on the market. When they do, they bludgeon the competition out of the way and take over that market. It's not as open and competitive as you think. It's a vaguely benign mobster waiting until you develop a market then they move in on you.
The "open-source" community's affection for Apple is indicative of its real motives and underlying beliefs.
I've always imagined it was like America's relationship with the Soviet Union during WWII. The enemy of your enemy kind of thing.
If they really cared about freedom -- real freedom, the freedom to do as one chooses with one's own property -- they'd have been supporting Microsoft all along
How do you figure Microsoft gives you the freedom to do what you want? You do realise Microsoft doesn't allow you to reverse engineer, tinker with or modify their OS, right? (read the EULA for Windows sometime) In theory, you don't actually own the Windows software installed on your computer.
They have been "about to go out of business soon" for nearly 20 years now.
Yes, and each time they were on death's door, a miracle would walk in and save them. If they were that good, they wouldn't need so many damned saviors!
They have probably posted more profitable quarters than any failing company in history.
Nope. Many, many failed companies have posted spectacularly profitable quarters before they ran out of steam or their luck runs out. Apple has always rested on a hard-core following of people who, no matter how badly you abuse them, keep coming back for more. At some point, the abused wakes up and goes someplace else.
I wish I had started a company that's obviously doomed the way Apple is. It would be awesome to experience the kind of poverty that Steve Jobs lives in.
Steve Jobs bilked a lot of people who put their blood, sweat and tears into Apple out of their share of the profits. Those people only got a share of the action thanks to Wozniak being a warm, decent human being. Steve Jobs ran his company into the ground. Apple could have owned the desktop market, but Mr. Jobs didn't have the brains to figure it out. As an economist once told me, "I tell my students that Steve Jobs is the greatest destroyer of wealth in history."
If Apple were a person, I'd think of them as a creative individual with schizophrenic tendancies marked with delusions of grandeur and persecution and a possible self-destructive urge.
This is a desperate act made out of fear by a company that knows they have no reason to still be in business. Apple pissed away it's technological lead, it's customers' good will, the good will of developers and any advantages they had over Windoze. Except for a few "tricks", Apple has nothing left to offer the market.
I'm sorry guys, but it looks like the Macintosh is going to be following the same road the Amiga took. A technologically good product with great potential driven into the ground by clueless, incompetent and maliciously arrogant management.
That's a rather famous poem by John G. Magee called High Flight that's been posted in every American airforce bay from here to Cape Canavaral.
From the referenced page:
In December 1941, Pilot Officer John G. Magee, a 19-year-old American serving with the Royal Canadian Air Force in England, was killed when his Spitfire collided with another airplane inside a cloud. Several months before his death, he composed his immortal sonnet High Flight a copy of which he fortunately mailed to his parents in the U.S.A.
Most of these services are talking about storing the data on their servers! The big question is: can you get your data back out when the company goes under?
With all this discussion about the control of top-level domains, I notice it is still based on the monopoly model where one company will "own" a domain. Surely we can do better these days?
Why not a search system based on Google's engine so you can chose whatever arbitrary name you want and serve the IP address back quickly? For example, http://i.want.chocolate. It's just a string to look up. Each top level DNS company has the same database of namesIPaddress mappings. New ones are bulletins that are circulated to all the top-level companies.
The point I'm trying to make here is we've spent so many years building this intricate DNS infrastructure based on nearly 20 year old assumptions about computing hardware and network bandwidth, but has anyone stopped to ask, "Isn't there a better way by now?"
Insanity is doing the exact same things over and over again, but each time expecting a different result.
That, as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously.
I think Richard Stallman should consider using this as the motto of the Free Software Foundation. Heck, any open source endeavor!
My idea is you completely get rid of local & state taxes on Internet commerce and replace it with a single Universal tax.
Also, I don't see how your math works. I said the UT will be distributed per population, so Alaska will receive a precentage of the income equal to their precentage of the population. This is regardless of the number of Internet users in the state or how much they spend. It ain't perfect, but it's better than 7000 taxing jurisdictions.
On the other hand, why they are taxing is a very good point, but if you read the original article: they're going to do it with or without your support.
So you buy a case of your favorite BBQ sauce from Wyoming to be delivered to your home in Massachusetts. Your Wyoming webtailer charges you Wyoming sales tax and Massachusetts sales tax. Cheaper to go the Safeway, isn't it?
That's going to happen unless you deal with the fundamental issues at the bottom of this:
Local & State governments practically have no other source of income.
The Internet blows away jurisdictional elements and creates the equivalent of a tarrif between states (illegal under the U.S. Constitution)
OK, so how can you get local & state governments their income without having a jurisdictional nightmare?
A Universal sales tax. Everything ordered out of state is exempt from local & state taxes, but must pay a Federal sales tax. This includes mail order, telephone ordering, Internet, etc.
How to you distribute it? By population to all 50 states. The Universal sales tax will be aportioned to the states depending on their populations. It is then the responsibility of the state government to distribute it to their local governments.
I'm sure this will be a touch controversial, but it's sure as heck better than dealing with 7000 taxing jurisdictions.
P.S. I place this idea under the GPL. Take it, use it, extend it, print it out and use it for toilet paper. Hopefully this way, no one will patent it as a "business process.:-)
In The Day the Universe Changed, James Burke trots out his favorite theme about the spread of literacy: it killed the phenomenal memory of medieval Europe. People used to store vasts amount of knowledge in their heads because they had no other way of keeping it. Through continouous usage and practice, your average medieval peasant could remember a heck of a lot of things without writing any of it down (he couldn't!).
Medieval scholars had even better memories by using mnemonics (the term even comes down to us from them) and a Cathedral of the Mind. A Cathedral of the Mind is almost the same memory trick they sell in infomercials: imagine a Cathedral and all it's rooms, cloisters and features. Associate a mental image (the more bizarre the better) relevant to the topic you want to remember with one of those features. Now, you want to remember somthing, just go for a walk in the Cathedral in your mind and you'll remember all your mnemonic tricks associated with them.
The spread of writing and cheap paper pretty much killed these memories. Why remember something when you can write it down? Now this is not neccessarily a bad thing. For starters, you are far less likely to have memory corruptions over time. Knowledge now automatically survives the originator (before, you had to brain dump onto someone else or all you knowledge would die with you). But we haven't lost our memory; we just chose to remember different things. With the information overload of today, we don't remember the trivial things because we have too many important things we have to take in and use in our daily lives. Reading Slashdot and the memories generated by it are far more useful in my head than remembering my social insurance number which I carry on a plastic card anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
I wish I could believe that. C#, which is MS's Java killer, will have a lot of adherents because it's C++ made nicer. Far less overhead than Java; which is still klunky and hard to learn and use, worse than learning MFC. XP will be broadly adopted and used. Sure, we laugh now, but we laughed at Windows 1.0. IIS is being used because of its perceived ease of use.
The XBox will probably win out because Microsoft wants to win badly, and Sony's the company that lost the Beta/VHS war. Microsoft wants to license the hardware to anyone to make an XBox; Sony is still proprietary up the kazoo. The one hope is Microsoft will have failed to learn a lesson from Nintendo and Sony (unlikely): both N & S learned that quality control is exceptionally important on game consoles. They strictly control what games can be produced, and they independently test those games to make sure they run as bug-free as possible. Yes, there are some crashes here and there, but far rarer than your average MS release.
They've been dealing with hydrates for decades. They know how to drill it, how to pipe it, etc. The environmental impacts could be studied from the Siberian fields. One of the more interesting issues with hydrates is their instability. They can flash over into a gas pretty easily. In water, this causes your boat/rig to sink under the water. On land, I'd imagine it could be a bit more explosive.
For the person who asked about using the microbes directly: we already do. If you live in a big city, your city already has a private company sucking up methane from those same microbes working away in our landfills.
We can all thank Trudeau for a worthless constitution which allows for such nonsense.
Ironically, no. Trudeau wanted a Charter of Rights & Freedoms without exceptions. He was dead-set against the "not-withstanding" clause (for our American cousins: it allows Provinces to ignore the Charter anytime they don't want to).
So who talked him into it?
Jean Chretien
He didn't really say anything other than "I wanted to start a debate, and see we're getting one." The rest of his response was mealy-mouthed babbling trying to refute Linus and Open Source's argument that innovation stems from sharing. IMHO, he failed to counter it.
You know, I hate using paper and pencil. It's so modal. If I want to erase something, I have to either turn my pencil upside down, or drop the pencil and grab an eraser. Oh, and painting is even worse! I constantly have to change modes by changing instruments. Why can't my palette knife do everything?
The lesson here is don't give users everything they think they want. In my experience, users don't even really know what they want. For applications, etc., focus on use cases: how people want to use the system. Design the interface to make those cases easy to do. Basically, goal oriented interfaces (which is what that VB guy who wrote Inmates Running the Asylum is a big fan of). Unfortunately, Microsoft took his ideas and created "wizards" which are the most useless goal-oriented interfaces I've ever had to use.
Even for hardware, like VCR's, focusing on how users want to use the system would make more effecient interfaces. Users really just want to say, "Record 'Manimal' at 8 o'clock on NBC" and have their VCR know what the heck they are talking about. They don't want to go into their TV Guide and type in numbers to a VCR+. Another option is the way I think TiVO does it where you can have an on-line list of programs, you select the program you want and indicate you want to record it. It's better than working through an on-screen interface to try to tell the VCR what time to start and stop recording.
Another example of goal-oriented interface is the Wacom Intuos digitizing tablets. You can get three extra pens, each withs it own unique digital id, and an airbrush pen (which looks and feels like an airbrush). Each pen can then be assigned a unique function in Photoshop (or other app). This way, the mode becomes obvious as picking up a different pen or picking up the airbrush tool. The tablet knows you've chosen the airbrush tool, so it automatically changes to airbrushing. You take the first pen, and it knows you want to draw. You change your mind, turn the pen around to the "eraser" on the end, and voila you're erasing. This is an intuitive mode change that I think is far more useful than trying to make a modeless interface.
The point here is the interfaces must be engineered towards what people want to do with it, and that you behave in a consistent way. For example, if you have modes, then make sure that there is a standard way in each mode to get out of it (like the ESCAPE key). Users can learn arbitrary interfaces, as long as they are consistent and geared to helping them do what they want to do.
You should remember a few things. For starters, it's really hard to get a patent in Japan, especially if you're a foreigner. The best advice has always been to hire a local Japanese patent lawyer to shepard your claim through the process. Also, that period of public comment has been notoriously used against foreign companies extending their patent protection to Japan. The foreign company would make their patent claim, then during the 18 month inspection period, Japanese companies would dissect the idea and come up with their own non-infringing version of the same technology. By the time you got the patent, you've suddenly got competition.
Now, with all that, believe it or not, I'm still in favor of us adopting a similar system in North America. Jeff Bezos' idea for reform is the best version I've heard yet.
If the people involved were well trained enough to handle HTML or Flash, then he wouldn't be asking this question. From experience, your average office user's attitude is "If it ain't Office, I ain't interested."
With the exception of Flash (which is a personal dislike, not a rational one), I think the whole idea of office documentation going to XML (not HTML) is a good idea. It provides reasonable forward compatibility, it enables a company to enforce formatting guidelines across all documents (via CSS or XSTL), and if they decide to change things, you can even make your old documents look up to date.
Now, we just need Office apps that can be configured to do this properly.
I don't suppose you happened to notice who was the author of that page you used? Clue: Check who Anderson's co-author was. :-)
Reminds me of my University prof's who objected to anyone bringining in programmable calculators.
Being in the process of reading Kim Stanley Robinson's MARS trilogy, I found his solution rather interesting. First off, get yourself a nice carbonaceous asteroid. Park it in a Clark orbit over the equator. Then sic auotmation on it that eats the asteroid from the inside out and weaves the nanotube structure from it. Let the structure dangle above the surface of the Earth. Use station-keeping rockets to keep your hollowed out asteroid in place.
He convinces me that it can be done. :-)
I loved the comments about gray, "mature" people writing quality code, getting things done on time and budget, etc. The only time I've worked with people like that are at companies where their IT is so fossilised and badly managed that they wonder why they're being driven into the ground. These "mature" IT people watch the clock and go home precisely at 5 regardless of whether their work was well done or even done. These are people who so dislike their jobs that they count the days till retirement.
At other companies I've worked at with "geeks with toys" culture, they were extremely professional with excellent work ethics. They produced quality code on time and on budget.
I think people have confused two separate types of people: those who do what they love and get paid for it, which was de Jager's point; and those who do what they love, but it isn't what they're supposed to be doing.
On a note of balance: Peter de Jager was one of those Y2K Chicken Little's.
Sounds like an ideal civil rights case to me.
One thing I've learned over the years is no one at Apple has the same story for events.
Spoken like a true Apple-drone. "The laws of physics don't apply to us!"
That's interesting. A zealot calling me a zealot because he doesn't want to alter his world view. I can easily explain Apple's successes to date: a lot of really gullible people continuously overpaying for underachieving hardware and getting slapped upside the head by the same company to boot, but they keep coming back for more. It is luck that Apple has managed to keep the faithful no matter how badly they've treated them. Apple could have owned the marketplace for desktops, but blew their chances each and every time.
There's a book out there called "Steve Jobs and the Next Big Thing" by Randall E. Stross. Read it and learn.
That's some mighty strong strawman arguments if I ever saw one.
That's because they are two very different companies. Apple is a hardware company; Microsoft is pure software. Apple saw what happened to IBM when the PC hardware was comoditized, and they were too afraid to let that happen to them.
Microsoft's software is not a commodity. No one can produce a WinAPI clone without Redmond unleashing their hounds of lawyers. Can you produce a Microsoft Office clone that can read and write proprietary Office formats perfectly? With the DMCA, you can't even reverse engineer the file formats anymore.
So Microsoft has created a proprietary software model built upon a commoditized hardware. The hardware situation was largely out of Bill Gates's hands; he just took advantage of it because his company only made software. Apple is, and always was, a hardware company. There were Apple clones out there, but Apple pursued them and hounded them out of business. Why? Because Apple made money on hardware; software was a loss-leader.
Now true, Microsoft has always encouraged lots of people to adopt their technology, while Apple seems to have been beating people with a stick to stay out of their yard, but that's like saying Hitler's Facsism still allowed private businesses while Stalin's Fascism made it all state owned. They're just two similar monsters grinning at each other from Redmond and Cuppertino.
Personal computer hardware would have existed with or without Bill. It's a simple fact. True, Microsoft has ensured there's a common box in every home to run their proprietary software. They've encouraged people to develop software for this box as long as Microsoft doesn't want to cash in on the market. When they do, they bludgeon the competition out of the way and take over that market. It's not as open and competitive as you think. It's a vaguely benign mobster waiting until you develop a market then they move in on you.
I've always imagined it was like America's relationship with the Soviet Union during WWII. The enemy of your enemy kind of thing.
How do you figure Microsoft gives you the freedom to do what you want? You do realise Microsoft doesn't allow you to reverse engineer, tinker with or modify their OS, right? (read the EULA for Windows sometime) In theory, you don't actually own the Windows software installed on your computer.
It's called luck. It won't last forever.
Yes, and each time they were on death's door, a miracle would walk in and save them. If they were that good, they wouldn't need so many damned saviors!
Nope. Many, many failed companies have posted spectacularly profitable quarters before they ran out of steam or their luck runs out. Apple has always rested on a hard-core following of people who, no matter how badly you abuse them, keep coming back for more. At some point, the abused wakes up and goes someplace else.
Steve Jobs bilked a lot of people who put their blood, sweat and tears into Apple out of their share of the profits. Those people only got a share of the action thanks to Wozniak being a warm, decent human being. Steve Jobs ran his company into the ground. Apple could have owned the desktop market, but Mr. Jobs didn't have the brains to figure it out. As an economist once told me, "I tell my students that Steve Jobs is the greatest destroyer of wealth in history."
If Apple were a person, I'd think of them as a creative individual with schizophrenic tendancies marked with delusions of grandeur and persecution and a possible self-destructive urge.
In other words, Steve Jobs.
This is a desperate act made out of fear by a company that knows they have no reason to still be in business. Apple pissed away it's technological lead, it's customers' good will, the good will of developers and any advantages they had over Windoze. Except for a few "tricks", Apple has nothing left to offer the market.
I'm sorry guys, but it looks like the Macintosh is going to be following the same road the Amiga took. A technologically good product with great potential driven into the ground by clueless, incompetent and maliciously arrogant management.
Boy, are some people ignorant.
That's a rather famous poem by John G. Magee called High Flight that's been posted in every American airforce bay from here to Cape Canavaral.
From the referenced page:
Most of these services are talking about storing the data on their servers! The big question is: can you get your data back out when the company goes under?
With all this discussion about the control of top-level domains, I notice it is still based on the monopoly model where one company will "own" a domain. Surely we can do better these days?
Why not a search system based on Google's engine so you can chose whatever arbitrary name you want and serve the IP address back quickly? For example, http://i.want.chocolate. It's just a string to look up. Each top level DNS company has the same database of namesIPaddress mappings. New ones are bulletins that are circulated to all the top-level companies.
The point I'm trying to make here is we've spent so many years building this intricate DNS infrastructure based on nearly 20 year old assumptions about computing hardware and network bandwidth, but has anyone stopped to ask, "Isn't there a better way by now?"
I think Richard Stallman should consider using this as the motto of the Free Software Foundation. Heck, any open source endeavor!
You read, but you do not understand.
My idea is you completely get rid of local & state taxes on Internet commerce and replace it with a single Universal tax.
Also, I don't see how your math works. I said the UT will be distributed per population, so Alaska will receive a precentage of the income equal to their precentage of the population. This is regardless of the number of Internet users in the state or how much they spend. It ain't perfect, but it's better than 7000 taxing jurisdictions.
On the other hand, why they are taxing is a very good point, but if you read the original article: they're going to do it with or without your support.
So you buy a case of your favorite BBQ sauce from Wyoming to be delivered to your home in Massachusetts. Your Wyoming webtailer charges you Wyoming sales tax and Massachusetts sales tax. Cheaper to go the Safeway, isn't it?
That's going to happen unless you deal with the fundamental issues at the bottom of this:
Local & State governments practically have no other source of income.
The Internet blows away jurisdictional elements and creates the equivalent of a tarrif between states (illegal under the U.S. Constitution)
OK, so how can you get local & state governments their income without having a jurisdictional nightmare?
A Universal sales tax. Everything ordered out of state is exempt from local & state taxes, but must pay a Federal sales tax. This includes mail order, telephone ordering, Internet, etc.
How to you distribute it? By population to all 50 states. The Universal sales tax will be aportioned to the states depending on their populations. It is then the responsibility of the state government to distribute it to their local governments.
I'm sure this will be a touch controversial, but it's sure as heck better than dealing with 7000 taxing jurisdictions.
P.S. I place this idea under the GPL. Take it, use it, extend it, print it out and use it for toilet paper. Hopefully this way, no one will patent it as a "business process. :-)
You said it, Buzz. I think it's time for the Linux community to remember their unofficial marketing slogan:
In The Day the Universe Changed, James Burke trots out his favorite theme about the spread of literacy: it killed the phenomenal memory of medieval Europe. People used to store vasts amount of knowledge in their heads because they had no other way of keeping it. Through continouous usage and practice, your average medieval peasant could remember a heck of a lot of things without writing any of it down (he couldn't!).
Medieval scholars had even better memories by using mnemonics (the term even comes down to us from them) and a Cathedral of the Mind. A Cathedral of the Mind is almost the same memory trick they sell in infomercials: imagine a Cathedral and all it's rooms, cloisters and features. Associate a mental image (the more bizarre the better) relevant to the topic you want to remember with one of those features. Now, you want to remember somthing, just go for a walk in the Cathedral in your mind and you'll remember all your mnemonic tricks associated with them.
The spread of writing and cheap paper pretty much killed these memories. Why remember something when you can write it down? Now this is not neccessarily a bad thing. For starters, you are far less likely to have memory corruptions over time. Knowledge now automatically survives the originator (before, you had to brain dump onto someone else or all you knowledge would die with you). But we haven't lost our memory; we just chose to remember different things. With the information overload of today, we don't remember the trivial things because we have too many important things we have to take in and use in our daily lives. Reading Slashdot and the memories generated by it are far more useful in my head than remembering my social insurance number which I carry on a plastic card anyway.