Although the OP is about a rather crude way to deal with conditions in Silicon Valley, it does indicate that SV has its discontents and they are probably due to the lopsided economic benefits of SV and the large number of other people being disadvantaged by SV. I am surprised that there has not been more attacks on SV, rather than less.
So, infrastructure is the Achilles Heel of the boom in SV, in the bostering plans of all the politicians and investment managers, of the VCs and the banks that back them. Those who are on the outs, and that percentage gets larger every day, know that, and if they could rain on SV's parade they would, although it seems that drying out SV is more the order of the day than raining on it.
Shutting down a freeway, or causing commute congestion, may be more effective and less of a crime, and nay be a natural consequence of things being so out of kilter, like they were in 1999 and 2000, when congestion cut into the workday, along with power outages, may have contributed to the dot gone crash of 2000-3.
Infrastructure is vulnerable on many levels in the Bay Area, a 7.2 quake on any number of faults in the South Bay could happen at any time and the effects would take several years to recover from. That could end the current boom overnight. Lots of greedy property owners would be out of luck. The drought is actually a direct threat to infrastructure for not only do we need water but the wildfire season is upon us and a major fire destroying parts of the grid could do par more damage than cutting fibre optic lines.
But of course, it is the politicians who would take the blame if the overheated economy they are constantly boosting fails because of infrastructure failures under their preview. It serves them right, and us, when the investors move on. I wish they would. We would be better off with far less Capitalism.
I agree with you. It is intl. investment and investment run by banks and institutions that is driven by speculation that is ruining the nation. We should take our country back by shutting down all kinds of investment; in real estate and in financials. We might be better off causing a depression if we shut our boarders to outsiders; even if the Chinese screw us with their holdings in Gold. We would be better off if we shut the door on global Capitalism and isolated outselves to reconstitute our economic relaations, even if it results in massive loss of wealth. Wealth is meaningless if it can't be spent and the Asians will spend all their Gold on war. Gold leads to war. Let them fight themselves to self destruction. We would actually do better with less Capitalism, rather than more.
So, in the resistance to Elon Musk or any other "visionary" dictating how you use technology, I offer as an example this very interface, the revised social media oriented version of the Slashdot interface which is even more glaring white than the original and without the horizontal rules that set one reply off from the text.
On the other hand I can see radical changes to the role of the automobile being possible when self-driving cars become the norm. I have a dog in this fight since I have never been able to operate a car due to poor vision, so, of course I could use a self-driving car. The idea raises many possibilities many of you who are used to individual transportation may not have thought of. One is to convoy together many cars headed for a common point on the interstate system and to move the whole at high speeds, 250 MPH until that point is reached. Another idea is to have a regional fleet of cars that can be used for public transportation that will operate entirely within an area. Buses and Bus stops will no longer be needed. Such a system could make it more desirable for most people to not own a car at all. An effect of self driving cars is that the roads and lanes in them could be made quite narrow. Much land would be reclaimed. The regional or urban car fleet could be stored in very high density garages and much of the land in cities devoted to parking and traffic could be reclaimed for other uses. Most people drive at most 25 miles one way to work and errands. Most of their needs could be met by a publicaly owned fleet. There would be very little need to own a car for most people who now live in cities
What is interesting here is the potential energy in such bodies. Even planets with a mass of Earth would still be hotter than their surroundings after several billion years of wandering through space that is near Absolute Zero. They might be habitable in a special way. Bodies that happen to orbit ejected failed stars might even bask in the heat of their parent body even while traveling the the depths of interstellar space. The infrared radiation from such bodies would be usable by space travelers to make higher energy sources and light that could be used to make them a waystation. These may be among the nearest type of body to the Solar System and we could "Island hop" from one to the next.
And you still haven't said why Th is a bad idea. Only about 1.5% of the U reserve is fissionable, whereas Th is much more abundant and it can be used in a liquid hexaflouride that can be drained away from the reaction camber if there is a shutdown. No need for a steam pressure reactor that can breech. The reactor can be quite small and portable and the reaction produces much less Pu. Right now Th is an annoying pollutant in available Rare Earth reserves. The Th could become an economic resource that can help this nation not be dependent on the Chinese reserves of Rare Earths, with which they can control the market in Rare Earths and nothing stops them from developing Th reactors and controlling access to that technology. The reason we use the reactor design we do is because Nixon was more interested in getting weapons grade products in 1972 than generating energy from less risky designs.
I am all for renewable and clean energy, but you tell me how those resources are going to be added to a grid controlled by carbon-fueled utilities? Not any time soon. I hope that fusion works, as I said in my original post, which fact you ignored, and you assert that Th is bad, without supporting facts. So, do you work for a carbon fuel interest? Do you want alternatives to carbon fuels, even nuclear alternatives? Do you want the grid built out to use renewables and can they meet the demand? I think that fusion is the best solution, but it hasn't been proven yet. If it is, its California good bye to te rest of the U.S. especially the carbon-fuel states of the Midwest and South.
I think the implications are far worse than you suggest. The problem begins with the revenue providing role of the Congress as given in the Constitution. Congress, the House, levies taxes. That includes a disconnect between law passed as PR but then not funded to be effective or unfunded in subsequent budgets out of public notice as special interests weigh in to degrade laws that have popular appeal. You may know that cabinet departments are not specified by the Constitution and that the Executive must negotiate with Congress to fund them in each budget. This sounds like a reasonable separation of powers until you factor in the power of large businesses and large business lobbying groups that did not exist when the Constitution was ratified. The result is that Congress nearly always under funds the mission of te departments, especially those that regulate segments of the economy. Futhermore, those departments are given a built-in conflict of interest to promote as well as regulate industries and political patronage often results that industry insiders get appointments to regulatory roles diluting them. In addition since the Congress deliberately underfunds regulators, the agencies, notably the FDA, depends on research not independenly verified from the drug companies it is supposed to regulate. If you look at drug recalls they are often due to biased studies that the FDA does not have the means to check. This is true of many other segments of the economy. It is the reason GM could sell cars for the past 15 years that are dangerous for consumers and that it far from an isolated incident.
If Congress rigged the ACA to subsidize insurance companies, whose business model is failing, and protects health care providers from justifying costs. It is part of the pattern of too much business influience in government and is very much the fault of the Constitution. There are enough splits in the country so that if one part of it can gain economic indepedence, it will not wait for Constitutional reform to repair the corruption. This is especially true if we have another financial meltdown caused by the failure of Congress to pass reasonable reforms to the financial systems. It is California and the West Coast that given the advent of nuclear fusion energy giving almost limitless energy resources and enough to desalinate sea water, could basically depreciate the States Rights stance of the Central and Southern U.S. and their carbon-based fuels, and succeed from the Union.
And you won't build it? What ideas do you have for the alternative? I have many, see my other posts in this thread. In a nutshell, I would use a less monolithic CMS, regionalize it, distribute it, cloud it. Secondly, I would allow for more conversation complexity. I would allow for Markdown format in replies with quoting of previous comments and allow for topic change. I would allow for users to define their own layout and themes. Facebook had to be extremely stingy with comment formats, ruthlessly squeezing out white space, not allowing for other formats than a Javascript Textarea, because of the economics of the backend. All this can be defeated, and the experience for users would be much more wholesome. FB sucks because of the business model and the implementation. It could be done for much cheaper on a smaller scale that would require less advertising. The abuse with FB begins with its design, and we aren't even considering the ethical abuses described by the OP, but the design already limits what people can say usefully and it is why people self-censor because using a blog design does not work for more than a couple of replies on FB.
That is easy, but if you want to keep track of family, for example, it is quite hard to ignore it. I use it with greater and greater caution, and I don't post much to it. I believe that FB is totally manipulative and that most of its features are annoying. I'd like to leave it, but what I would really like is competition with it. I'd like to see someone come along and destroy its business and drive it out of existence. I have thought about how I think it fails and why. I know that someone could do a much better job and not just from the point of view of its business model, which is corrupt, but as a service to people. Most of the ways FB fails its users are due to its design choices. We don't even have to delve into the many ethical problems FB has created. its very design is manipulative and exploitative of people. The blog format, without greater complexity, being able to quote from others' posts and change topic, imposes a great restraint on what people feel comfortable in saying. It is, by itself, a restriction on communication and people self-censor because of the reaction they get if they want to communicate in a more normal way. So, already, without considering the advertising, the grid layout, etc. people are being manipulated in the design, and most are unaware of how te design affects them. I know how to answer FB, now we need someone to do it, to raise the money to build the alternatives. We need to put Fuckerberg out of business.
Yes, and Fuck You Too! America is a business-powerful state, not a democracy, not even a decent representative republic, because business has TOO much power to influence law and taxation, the members of Congress are not bought by workers, but by billionaires and an increasingly powerful plutocracy who would destroy personal expression and political freedom if they could. Facebook is a good example of how one elitist, spoiled, rich kid, sociopathically manipulates people. The model is Harvard and the Face Book the social fraternities use to let pledges reveal incriminating facts about themselves. There is nothing liberating about Facebook. It is yet another example of American business exploitation. Mark Zuckerberg is building a fortress in San Francisco and making his neighbors angry, good, he needs to be afraid because he knows how evil he is.
It may be that Facebook's business strategy results in something other than what most people use it for, and it may be that the uses it is put to should drive its design more than its business strategy. That implies that somebody ought to bury Facebook, develop an alternative that undoes the wrongs in the design and that undercuts the economics of the design. It takes an analysis of the model Facebook uses and a means to undercut its viability and offer an alternative that gains traction by better supporting uses that the basic idea could be put to.
That Facebook's user base in naive and unaware of how its design shapes their behavior is clear, and that alone constitutes manipulation of its users against their will. That it is driven by a business model is no justification that that can be undercut by a simple reconsideration of the design.
The first issue is the scale of the monolithic backend that Facebook touts as a feature, that it can support a billion users at once. That might appeal to advertisers, but it is surely no matter to most if not all of its users who communicate with something under 100 friends. If Facebook's business strategy is driven by the scale of the backend CMS, then certaintly alternatives could be found. If the amount of revenue Facebook needs to raise to operate this backend drives the offerings it makes to advertisers and business partners, then alternatives can also be found to mitigate the bothersome effects of this business strategy.
The scale of the backend drives all of the other features of the design, including its failings. The blog design of conversations, the rigid three-fold grid design, the ruthless squeezing out of white space in comments. All of these lead to user dissatisfaction and to unfortunate outcomes in relationsips. Users that are unaware of the effect this format has on how they can communicate are going to be hurt by personal misunderstandings.
It is irrestable that Facebook users want to create discussion topics, but this is largely unsuccessful because of the rigidity of the blog format. Blog conversations can only be short and that the inflexibility this imposes on them makes people subject to attack for doing what is quite normal and acceptable in other forms of human communication. A suggestion to allow for context, quoting, and topic change, has been resisted at Facebook. It is clear that te design is intended to restrict discussion. It does citizenship in a free country a disservice and people self-censor because of the design. Facebook is disingenuous about this issue. It expressed interest in why people self-censor but did not examine its own design; or it did and decided that it wanted the control over conversations it gives them. Complexity in conversations for Facebook is an old topic that as been rebuffed again and again.
An alternative could operate on a much smaller scale, regionally, I suppose, and offer richer conversation and less spam. If Facebook's strategy is to go mobile in the third world, then fine. It it operate on three line cheap phones and leave the space for others to have decent communication on bigger devices.
So, this makes me wonder if having Facebook on your resume would be a plus or a minus? I am serious about this question, you could argue that an (over) capitalized company like Facebook would have enough status so that even if you were a janitor there it would be a plus. The issue would be the company mission and its poor reputation for ethical practices. It would be arguable that someone with an interesting technical specialty might not have to face these issues, but in terms of experience, it might not be that compelling, especially if your work is close to the design of Facebook. It is like saying that you wrote the regular expression engine for Facebook's CMS. To me that is like saying that you wrote PhP for a porn site:-)
I think that the U.S. Educational system was called a "factory" system because it was intended to crank out assembly line workers who would do as they are told by a managerial class, not to think creatively and independently. Americans can be very independent and that is one reason otherwise smart people leave the confines of the educational system. There is another flaw in the American character as concerns learning and thought. In a word it is Pragmatism, that ideal of John Dewy writing in a manufacturing English nation whose orientation was for getting assignments done. Knowing practical goals was perverbial, which is to say, indoctrinated. To deal with change, such as we are going through now, requires much more creative thinking than the business regime or the educational system tolerates. By the way, this orientation predates Dewey and it was seen as a preoccupation in America going back to the Federalist and "Democracy in America", a focus without a depth. Could it be that Mark Zuckerberg is but a reincarnation of this thinking of the payout before understanding the effect?
I am not addressing the need for diversity and more access for women and non-white people to tech. There are too many white male geeky engineers in tech, and it shows in product missions and designs. There is not enough humanity in tech, as yet. But this is not why I have something to say about this topic. It is that Facebook, of all companies, has the least justification to say anything about the quality of software, of product design, or of product engineering and its relationship to hiring diversity. I have a Facebook account and use the site to keep tabs on friends and family members and yet I am disgusted by most of what it is, and my objections have to do with business and engineering and if that means that fewer women work or want to work at Facebook, I would not be surprised. The OP cites that Facebook has about 7100 employees, in my view most of what those people do is misdirected and a waste if my freedom of expression is encumbered by manipulation and spam as a result of their business model and Mark Zuckerberg's philosophy. So, it hardly matters that Facebook has 31% women or more as long as the result of its design is so bad as to limit conversation and exchange between its users in a design that is designed to create problems for users. Facebook needs an alternative. Judging from reactions I've heard from women in my life, I'd say to them, go and bury Facebook in a service that is kinder to people and better designed for humane communication. Do away with the three-fold grid and the blog and allow for real exchanges. I sincerely hope that Facebook fails.
Religion is used to give arguments that have no firm basis support that protects them from being assailed. Proof of that is how fast the Mayan Temple System was abandoned in Central America when climate fluctuation destroyed the economy based on corn in the 13th century. Conversely, Abrahamic religions, Christianity, Islam, Judism, are scoundrel refuges for people who don't want their idea of moral authority and cultural centrism to be questioned. A scientific discovery which refutes special creation isn't going to deter this sort of thinking in people, whether it comes from Islamic extremists or Southern Baptists who embrace the Inerrant Word from Scripture. A better response is to base political and economic institutions on secular norms that reduce the influence of these reactionary forces. The challenge is that secular systems do not teach moral principal enough so that moral authoritarianism does not find appeal in those wronged by economic and political expediency. This is why we have movements like ISIS at the current time; not because they are theologically based. It is because academic and institutional sources for secular leadership do not base their training on sound ethics, even ethics that is based on universal human rights, let alone the sanctity of life wherever it exists.
This is more immediate than the questions which science will answer: How complexity beginning in inanimate physical systems can result in life without resorting to an intelligent designer. Such talking points have a hidden agenda to give moral authority to cultural beliefs. The question of how life arose is less important than how origins justifies the norms embraced by religion. How the physical universe stores information, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics is not violated by local stores of complex information, may be the answer to false dichotomies about life, and research may tell us that other places have solved this issue millions of times over, producing living systems that are unique from the one on Earth, or convergant with ours but where it is impossible for the similar systems to be genetically related; there being no panspermy possible. I think that some unique chemistry not like our own will be found to support life that would be fundementally alian to ours, That would surely put an end to Special creation. This finding could be a simple as finding trace fossils on Mars or other Solar System body revealing a biology basically different from what appeared on the Earth.
Of course the true Bigots will wiggle and change the terms of the argument and say that God changes the rules how ever he wants, small "h" deliberate.
If true secularists want to defeat religious bigotry and theocracy, they should start by embracing ethics and based more firmly on standards stronger than business expediancy, for example, or short-term profit, or survival of some organization. Every time some secular leader fails to do things either to live up to principal or based on some strong ethical system, this gives fuel to those who will act with authority based on ethnic pride, such as Putin and the Russians, or out of moral bigotry, such as ISIS and some of the religious people in America.
This is the oldest story in human existence, and one that needs to be retold over and over, that if a business man can create a captive market or a planned failure rate of a product and hide those facts, he will base his business model on added cost to his customers. This is based on axioms of economics that point to the use of non-transparency to selfish advantage. No only will business people serve to add inefficiency and cost to keep the margin up, but they will also fight very hard to defend the business model against creative destruction seeking complicity of government if needed.
The answer to these abuses has always been disclosure and the flow of information about the ruse, which the linkage of business interests and politics attempts to suppress.
The humble razor blade can be made to last much longer than it does in any commercial product. It is laziness, convenience, and flooding the market with cheap product and telling lies to consumers that allows this. It amazed me how fast electric cars have appeared on the market once the peak of Oil was passed, and that there was a largely forgotten history of electric cars a century ago, and this was one reason the alternative to the internal combustion engine was so quickly re-introduced, now if only we could make it possible to create electricity without breaking carbon bonds and store electricity in efficient batteries. That would make a big difference and it would undercut cartels in energy.
And blame the U.S. Constitution for that! YES, the venerated document that defines the structure of the government and the separation of powers. It has come to betray the intention of the Founders to divide up power so that no one branch can dictate to the rest. Sounds like a great idea until you invent large financial and business institutions whose wealth rivals that of whole nations. This is a change that the Founders could not have anticipated, or judging by Alexander Hamilton in the Federalist, was intentional, see, New York had the fix in even back in 1789. Business and Finance are the tools of the aristocracy that assured Hamilton.
The problem is that Congress, particularly the House, has power of the purse strings, and even if it gives tacit power to establish executive departments, it can underfund them at will, especially if the business interests who have gotten more and more access to members of Congress don't want enforcement funded. The oldest trick in the book is for Congress to pass a law that enacts a popular reform and to later defund it because the power brokers in the duopoly don't want it.
Of course passing amendments to the U.S. Constitution is a slow and drawn-out process. One can see the possibility that rapid change or a huge crisis; some have been warning that a failure to repair the systemic problems in banking, finance, and investment, that contributed to the Crash of 2008 have not been fixed and might lead to another meltdown and soon, will outstrip the process and lead to even more radical change in the nation than Constitutional processes will allow. The worst case is a total national disruption leading to a governmental crisis or oven a Civil War. The Congress would have to act very differently in the face of such a crisis than it has over the past 30-40 years. this has happened before, rescuing the Union several times. Another possibility is that technical and demographic change will lead to the Union becoming irrevelent and Constitutional reform taking the shape of several sections of the country separating from the rest.
First. the urban centers of the country are under represented by any current apportionment that recognizes States Rights and the current bicameral legislature. This divide is widening and is reflected in political debates about Gun Control and the power of other rural-centered issues from social issues to energy priorities. One thing that may tip the balance is energy independence of the urban coasts by the coming on-line of non-carbon based fuels, nuclear fusion, and alternative nuclear fuels like Thorium. Once free of the Carbon Lobby in the Conservative central states, and able to desalinate water cheaply from the oceans, the populations on the two coasts will see the center of the nation as a millstone and see the Constitution as the tool of keeping the rural states in power and they will demand succession.
This breakup does not have to take the form of the Civil War of 1861. The coasts do not need the center to be viable economically or to threive, especially the West Coast. Right now it is energy and water that limits what the economy of the Western U.S. can do, and that could change overnight if nuclear fusion is proven to be viable. The economic clout of the Gulf Coast and Midwest will simply evaporate or become much less important. They may ask to separate from the rest to protect their conservative social values, and we on the costs will say "Be Our Guest!", no Civil War results.
Desalination of seawater made affordable by nuclear fusion would result in one huge risk, the disruption of ocean circulation by the creation of dense brine especially if done in the eastern sides of ocean basins where the introduction of brine would disrupt nutrient-rich upwelling. We may have to farm the salty brine on the land to dispose of it and also to create high albeido regions to cool the overheated atmosphere caused by burning of carbon fuels. Maybe it would be just that either the Gulf Coast has to receive the salt or leave the Union.
The water molecules may come and go, but if most of the water now available to us was locked up as water ice and not exposed to solar neutron flux the isotope rations of hydrogen would be less than what is expected if all of the water were exposed to it through out the entire time of its presence in the solar nebula, that is, if the water arrived in the vicinity of the sun at the same time it was formed. I think that the argument is that isotope ratios indicate that according to a model of the expected isotope ratios that the water had to exist before the sun ignited. The starting of the solar neutron flux did not have time to produce the isotope rations expected from the model, therefore. So, it is a model, a prediction and a contradiction of the prediction, isotope ratios have to be less than expected because the water ice existed before the sun and the hydrogen in it was not subjected to solar neuron flux, or any nearby source of neutrons.
I am fighting with Ubuntu and debian and the hell of it is that I like recent stuff, like Ipython 2 and Emacs 24, and yet debian and Ubuntu are awful bloatware. Most of the debian packages, at least the ones I've seen through Ubuntu are crap, half written non-orthogonal code. And I am just amazed what I can do inside emacs. I am beginning to think that I ought to revert to the command line and make emacs my GUI and forget all the other crap, including the browsers, which are all huge. And what really gets me upset is the cache files that gets put on my home dir by Google and Mozilla and countless other applications that come off the debian tree. Some idiot came out with a tiling GUI file display manager, and I kept thinking that has all been done in emacs 30 years ago; some idiot trying to reinvent something old.
We should encourage the investment that leads to Silicon Valley and its elites. Tax the crap out of the investment until it goes away, like go the hell to Texas, let them deal with the side effects. I applauded when Ellon Musk picked Nevada for Tesla's Battery Factory. We don't want the risk of pollution that would create and that means 6500 people who don't live in California. In fact, I'd like to see people leave California, and discouraging investment and job growth is one way to do that. So, encourage lots of people who don't have roots here to leave. Make it a deeper reason than just some flash-in-the-pan job to be here. We could, as a state, choose to be a no-growth, no investment, place, and that fact is that a 200 year drought might just be the ticket for that!
So, how many of the 6 Million odd people who live in the San Francisco Bay Area could actually compete with you for a job? And if they could, are there enough positions to go around? The first answer is that very few of the people who live here could compete with you because for lots of reason YOU are a member of an elite. The second answer is that there really are FEWER positions available than the lying sacks of shit who run many of the companies here want to admit. The positions are so specialized because there are far more people pestering the HR departments of their companies for those few positions, AND, they are taking advantage of the law to hire off-shore "talent" whether or not those people are creative or productive. The demand exceeds the supply and for some segments of the industry hiring an idiot who does what he is told is cheaper than wading through all the supply to find a better match.
Where this matters is that more and more you work in an ivory tower with the great unwashed baying at the gate and resenting you more and more because you say smug things like we hear here that belie the reality out there. I have been on both sides of the divide. I know what it is like to work on the inside and I know what it is like to be "out" like I am now. The reason I am out has to do with external factors that make me uncompetative, such as mounting physical disability. I was excluded during the dot.gone "recovery" which really wasn't. There is a big lie that Silicon Valley was like it was before 2004 or that it is pulling its weight, that it deserves to be revered any more as a job creator, even if it is a wealth creator; the number of people employed by the best capitalized companies is really quite small in number. I would like to see SV discouraged and the companies move away, like to Texas, as its impact on this area has turned largely negative. Only 1-percent'ers are benefiting and the rest of us are having to pay in higher property values and rents, and we pay more taxes because of the property pressures. I'd like to see many of the companies move out. The Party's Over!
Go do your own research. Investigate the origins of PC-DOS and the BASIC interpeter and the relationship Gates had with people in the early days around 1977. You will see that he "borrowed" from people and did not invent major parts of what he later called his own.
But the biggest case against Gates is the misinformation he spread, that the design of Windows was an answer to the complexity of the UNIX shell and that his proprietory approach was just a business ploy to create a captive market and to deny consumers the knowledge that they could have used to get more powerful and reliable tools. Microsoft practiced monopolistic and preditory strategies on its customers, the OEM agreement with hardware vendors; it kept them in the dark deliberately so that they would believe that Windows was magical and mysterious, under Gates, when it was just inferior and lacking in use. Remember that Microsoft had Xenix, a UNIX for X86, and deliberately dumbed down MS-DOS so it could keep its users in the dark. It wasn't until Vista that Windows had decent logging so that a user could actually have a clue to diagnose problems. That was intended and the market for Windows was captive enough so that ignorant users would still go buy an inferior product, even today, The answer to Microsoft is not Linux it is OS X. If Apple wanted to kill Microsoft it would be to embrace Hackintosh and cut the cost of the hardware by half.
An additional thought on this topic. One thing that is interesting about knowledge in our era is that the rate at which it changes is so fast that by the time we reach middle age and beyond that what we learned in school has become significantly out of date. When I took Physics in college there was no Standard Model for QM and no unification of forces. There was still this bewildering zoo of resonances whose underlying unity was not understood yet. The Feynman Lectures in Physics are now available on line. They are clearly still relevant but they show well the state of particle physics as it was in 1961. Someone ought to write the addendum that brings that up to date. In astronomy the identity of quaesars was still a hot topic and no one had confirmed the existence of black holes, whereas today they may be the drivers of the evolution of the Universe, and Dark Matter and Dark Energy were not recognized at all and today they are universally accepted as major players.
I took my degrees in Geology and when I was an undergrad Plate Tectonics was just coming into acceptance. Its ramifications developed during the early years of my career. The high trophic activity of the dinosaurs was a concept that was developed after I completed my degrees, as was the affinities of birds with therapsids. One must keep reviewing after one has finished school even if one is not in a profession. Things you learned in school are bound to be changed.
The first programming language I learned was FORTRAN. My experience has carried me through procedural languages like FORTRAN and Pascal to C and to scripting languages like perl, but then to OO enhancements the result in Java and Python and finally to functional languages like lisp. Most of this I didn't know out of college but am still learning on my own, one has to do that and to be motivated to pursue new topics on your own. It is quite amusing to me how programming goes full circle and what is old becomes new again, the relevance of lisp to new trends in programming that are more functional and try to reduce side effects, like Haskell. But the ideas were developed before I existed in the 1930's and yet they are finding expression in new languages like Clojure.
Slashdot Mirror
Although the OP is about a rather crude way to deal with conditions in Silicon Valley, it does indicate that SV has its discontents and they are probably due to the lopsided economic benefits of SV and the large number of other people being disadvantaged by SV. I am surprised that there has not been more attacks on SV, rather than less.
So, infrastructure is the Achilles Heel of the boom in SV, in the bostering plans of all the politicians and investment managers, of the VCs and the banks that back them. Those who are on the outs, and that percentage gets larger every day, know that, and if they could rain on SV's parade they would, although it seems that drying out SV is more the order of the day than raining on it.
Shutting down a freeway, or causing commute congestion, may be more effective and less of a crime, and nay be a natural consequence of things being so out of kilter, like they were in 1999 and 2000, when congestion cut into the workday, along with power outages, may have contributed to the dot gone crash of 2000-3.
Infrastructure is vulnerable on many levels in the Bay Area, a 7.2 quake on any number of faults in the South Bay could happen at any time and the effects would take several years to recover from. That could end the current boom overnight. Lots of greedy property owners would be out of luck. The drought is actually a direct threat to infrastructure for not only do we need water but the wildfire season is upon us and a major fire destroying parts of the grid could do par more damage than cutting fibre optic lines.
But of course, it is the politicians who would take the blame if the overheated economy they are constantly boosting fails because of infrastructure failures under their preview. It serves them right, and us, when the investors move on. I wish they would. We would be better off with far less Capitalism.
I agree with you. It is intl. investment and investment run by banks and institutions that is driven by speculation that is ruining the nation. We should take our country back by shutting down all kinds of investment; in real estate and in financials. We might be better off causing a depression if we shut our boarders to outsiders; even if the Chinese screw us with their holdings in Gold. We would be better off if we shut the door on global Capitalism and isolated outselves to reconstitute our economic relaations, even if it results in massive loss of wealth. Wealth is meaningless if it can't be spent and the Asians will spend all their Gold on war. Gold leads to war. Let them fight themselves to self destruction. We would actually do better with less Capitalism, rather than more.
So, in the resistance to Elon Musk or any other "visionary" dictating how you use technology, I offer as an example this very interface, the revised social media oriented version of the Slashdot interface which is even more glaring white than the original and without the horizontal rules that set one reply off from the text.
On the other hand I can see radical changes to the role of the automobile being possible when self-driving cars become the norm. I have a dog in this fight since I have never been able to operate a car due to poor vision, so, of course I could use a self-driving car. The idea raises many possibilities many of you who are used to individual transportation may not have thought of. One is to convoy together many cars headed for a common point on the interstate system and to move the whole at high speeds, 250 MPH until that point is reached. Another idea is to have a regional fleet of cars that can be used for public transportation that will operate entirely within an area. Buses and Bus stops will no longer be needed. Such a system could make it more desirable for most people to not own a car at all. An effect of self driving cars is that the roads and lanes in them could be made quite narrow. Much land would be reclaimed. The regional or urban car fleet could be stored in very high density garages and much of the land in cities devoted to parking and traffic could be reclaimed for other uses. Most people drive at most 25 miles one way to work and errands. Most of their needs could be met by a publicaly owned fleet. There would be very little need to own a car for most people who now live in cities
Wouldn't it be possible for a planet to orbit the barycenter of a multiple star system, not just one of the components?
What is interesting here is the potential energy in such bodies. Even planets with a mass of Earth would still be hotter than their surroundings after several billion years of wandering through space that is near Absolute Zero. They might be habitable in a special way. Bodies that happen to orbit ejected failed stars might even bask in the heat of their parent body even while traveling the the depths of interstellar space. The infrared radiation from such bodies would be usable by space travelers to make higher energy sources and light that could be used to make them a waystation. These may be among the nearest type of body to the Solar System and we could "Island hop" from one to the next.
And you still haven't said why Th is a bad idea. Only about 1.5% of the U reserve is fissionable, whereas Th is much more abundant and it can be used in a liquid hexaflouride that can be drained away from the reaction camber if there is a shutdown. No need for a steam pressure reactor that can breech. The reactor can be quite small and portable and the reaction produces much less Pu. Right now Th is an annoying pollutant in available Rare Earth reserves. The Th could become an economic resource that can help this nation not be dependent on the Chinese reserves of Rare Earths, with which they can control the market in Rare Earths and nothing stops them from developing Th reactors and controlling access to that technology. The reason we use the reactor design we do is because Nixon was more interested in getting weapons grade products in 1972 than generating energy from less risky designs.
I am all for renewable and clean energy, but you tell me how those resources are going to be added to a grid controlled by carbon-fueled utilities? Not any time soon. I hope that fusion works, as I said in my original post, which fact you ignored, and you assert that Th is bad, without supporting facts. So, do you work for a carbon fuel interest? Do you want alternatives to carbon fuels, even nuclear alternatives? Do you want the grid built out to use renewables and can they meet the demand? I think that fusion is the best solution, but it hasn't been proven yet. If it is, its California good bye to te rest of the U.S. especially the carbon-fuel states of the Midwest and South.
I think the implications are far worse than you suggest. The problem begins with the revenue providing role of the Congress as given in the Constitution. Congress, the House, levies taxes. That includes a disconnect between law passed as PR but then not funded to be effective or unfunded in subsequent budgets out of public notice as special interests weigh in to degrade laws that have popular appeal. You may know that cabinet departments are not specified by the Constitution and that the Executive must negotiate with Congress to fund them in each budget. This sounds like a reasonable separation of powers until you factor in the power of large businesses and large business lobbying groups that did not exist when the Constitution was ratified. The result is that Congress nearly always under funds the mission of te departments, especially those that regulate segments of the economy. Futhermore, those departments are given a built-in conflict of interest to promote as well as regulate industries and political patronage often results that industry insiders get appointments to regulatory roles diluting them. In addition since the Congress deliberately underfunds regulators, the agencies, notably the FDA, depends on research not independenly verified from the drug companies it is supposed to regulate. If you look at drug recalls they are often due to biased studies that the FDA does not have the means to check. This is true of many other segments of the economy. It is the reason GM could sell cars for the past 15 years that are dangerous for consumers and that it far from an isolated incident.
If Congress rigged the ACA to subsidize insurance companies, whose business model is failing, and protects health care providers from justifying costs. It is part of the pattern of too much business influience in government and is very much the fault of the Constitution. There are enough splits in the country so that if one part of it can gain economic indepedence, it will not wait for Constitutional reform to repair the corruption. This is especially true if we have another financial meltdown caused by the failure of Congress to pass reasonable reforms to the financial systems. It is California and the West Coast that given the advent of nuclear fusion energy giving almost limitless energy resources and enough to desalinate sea water, could basically depreciate the States Rights stance of the Central and Southern U.S. and their carbon-based fuels, and succeed from the Union.
And you won't build it? What ideas do you have for the alternative? I have many, see my other posts in this thread. In a nutshell, I would use a less monolithic CMS, regionalize it, distribute it, cloud it. Secondly, I would allow for more conversation complexity. I would allow for Markdown format in replies with quoting of previous comments and allow for topic change. I would allow for users to define their own layout and themes. Facebook had to be extremely stingy with comment formats, ruthlessly squeezing out white space, not allowing for other formats than a Javascript Textarea, because of the economics of the backend. All this can be defeated, and the experience for users would be much more wholesome. FB sucks because of the business model and the implementation. It could be done for much cheaper on a smaller scale that would require less advertising. The abuse with FB begins with its design, and we aren't even considering the ethical abuses described by the OP, but the design already limits what people can say usefully and it is why people self-censor because using a blog design does not work for more than a couple of replies on FB.
That is easy, but if you want to keep track of family, for example, it is quite hard to ignore it. I use it with greater and greater caution, and I don't post much to it. I believe that FB is totally manipulative and that most of its features are annoying. I'd like to leave it, but what I would really like is competition with it. I'd like to see someone come along and destroy its business and drive it out of existence. I have thought about how I think it fails and why. I know that someone could do a much better job and not just from the point of view of its business model, which is corrupt, but as a service to people. Most of the ways FB fails its users are due to its design choices. We don't even have to delve into the many ethical problems FB has created. its very design is manipulative and exploitative of people. The blog format, without greater complexity, being able to quote from others' posts and change topic, imposes a great restraint on what people feel comfortable in saying. It is, by itself, a restriction on communication and people self-censor because of the reaction they get if they want to communicate in a more normal way. So, already, without considering the advertising, the grid layout, etc. people are being manipulated in the design, and most are unaware of how te design affects them. I know how to answer FB, now we need someone to do it, to raise the money to build the alternatives. We need to put Fuckerberg out of business.
Yes, and Fuck You Too! America is a business-powerful state, not a democracy, not even a decent representative republic, because business has TOO much power to influence law and taxation, the members of Congress are not bought by workers, but by billionaires and an increasingly powerful plutocracy who would destroy personal expression and political freedom if they could. Facebook is a good example of how one elitist, spoiled, rich kid, sociopathically manipulates people. The model is Harvard and the Face Book the social fraternities use to let pledges reveal incriminating facts about themselves. There is nothing liberating about Facebook. It is yet another example of American business exploitation. Mark Zuckerberg is building a fortress in San Francisco and making his neighbors angry, good, he needs to be afraid because he knows how evil he is.
It may be that Facebook's business strategy results in something other than what most people use it for, and it may be that the uses it is put to should drive its design more than its business strategy. That implies that somebody ought to bury Facebook, develop an alternative that undoes the wrongs in the design and that undercuts the economics of the design. It takes an analysis of the model Facebook uses and a means to undercut its viability and offer an alternative that gains traction by better supporting uses that the basic idea could be put to.
That Facebook's user base in naive and unaware of how its design shapes their behavior is clear, and that alone constitutes manipulation of its users against their will. That it is driven by a business model is no justification that that can be undercut by a simple reconsideration of the design.
The first issue is the scale of the monolithic backend that Facebook touts as a feature, that it can support a billion users at once. That might appeal to advertisers, but it is surely no matter to most if not all of its users who communicate with something under 100 friends. If Facebook's business strategy is driven by the scale of the backend CMS, then certaintly alternatives could be found. If the amount of revenue Facebook needs to raise to operate this backend drives the offerings it makes to advertisers and business partners, then alternatives can also be found to mitigate the bothersome effects of this business strategy.
The scale of the backend drives all of the other features of the design, including its failings. The blog design of conversations, the rigid three-fold grid design, the ruthless squeezing out of white space in comments. All of these lead to user dissatisfaction and to unfortunate outcomes in relationsips. Users that are unaware of the effect this format has on how they can communicate are going to be hurt by personal misunderstandings.
It is irrestable that Facebook users want to create discussion topics, but this is largely unsuccessful because of the rigidity of the blog format. Blog conversations can only be short and that the inflexibility this imposes on them makes people subject to attack for doing what is quite normal and acceptable in other forms of human communication. A suggestion to allow for context, quoting, and topic change, has been resisted at Facebook. It is clear that te design is intended to restrict discussion. It does citizenship in a free country a disservice and people self-censor because of the design. Facebook is disingenuous about this issue. It expressed interest in why people self-censor but did not examine its own design; or it did and decided that it wanted the control over conversations it gives them. Complexity in conversations for Facebook is an old topic that as been rebuffed again and again.
An alternative could operate on a much smaller scale, regionally, I suppose, and offer richer conversation and less spam. If Facebook's strategy is to go mobile in the third world, then fine. It it operate on three line cheap phones and leave the space for others to have decent communication on bigger devices.
So, this makes me wonder if having Facebook on your resume would be a plus or a minus? I am serious about this question, you could argue that an (over) capitalized company like Facebook would have enough status so that even if you were a janitor there it would be a plus. The issue would be the company mission and its poor reputation for ethical practices. It would be arguable that someone with an interesting technical specialty might not have to face these issues, but in terms of experience, it might not be that compelling, especially if your work is close to the design of Facebook. It is like saying that you wrote the regular expression engine for Facebook's CMS. To me that is like saying that you wrote PhP for a porn site :-)
Please support your assertions! "thorium is horse shit", why? Do you accept everything Musk says uncritically? That stinks ;-)
I think that the U.S. Educational system was called a "factory" system because it was intended to crank out assembly line workers who would do as they are told by a managerial class, not to think creatively and independently. Americans can be very independent and that is one reason otherwise smart people leave the confines of the educational system. There is another flaw in the American character as concerns learning and thought. In a word it is Pragmatism, that ideal of John Dewy writing in a manufacturing English nation whose orientation was for getting assignments done. Knowing practical goals was perverbial, which is to say, indoctrinated. To deal with change, such as we are going through now, requires much more creative thinking than the business regime or the educational system tolerates. By the way, this orientation predates Dewey and it was seen as a preoccupation in America going back to the Federalist and "Democracy in America", a focus without a depth. Could it be that Mark Zuckerberg is but a reincarnation of this thinking of the payout before understanding the effect?
I am not addressing the need for diversity and more access for women and non-white people to tech. There are too many white male geeky engineers in tech, and it shows in product missions and designs. There is not enough humanity in tech, as yet. But this is not why I have something to say about this topic. It is that Facebook, of all companies, has the least justification to say anything about the quality of software, of product design, or of product engineering and its relationship to hiring diversity. I have a Facebook account and use the site to keep tabs on friends and family members and yet I am disgusted by most of what it is, and my objections have to do with business and engineering and if that means that fewer women work or want to work at Facebook, I would not be surprised. The OP cites that Facebook has about 7100 employees, in my view most of what those people do is misdirected and a waste if my freedom of expression is encumbered by manipulation and spam as a result of their business model and Mark Zuckerberg's philosophy. So, it hardly matters that Facebook has 31% women or more as long as the result of its design is so bad as to limit conversation and exchange between its users in a design that is designed to create problems for users. Facebook needs an alternative. Judging from reactions I've heard from women in my life, I'd say to them, go and bury Facebook in a service that is kinder to people and better designed for humane communication. Do away with the three-fold grid and the blog and allow for real exchanges. I sincerely hope that Facebook fails.
Religion is used to give arguments that have no firm basis support that protects them from being assailed. Proof of that is how fast the Mayan Temple System was abandoned in Central America when climate fluctuation destroyed the economy based on corn in the 13th century. Conversely, Abrahamic religions, Christianity, Islam, Judism, are scoundrel refuges for people who don't want their idea of moral authority and cultural centrism to be questioned. A scientific discovery which refutes special creation isn't going to deter this sort of thinking in people, whether it comes from Islamic extremists or Southern Baptists who embrace the Inerrant Word from Scripture. A better response is to base political and economic institutions on secular norms that reduce the influence of these reactionary forces. The challenge is that secular systems do not teach moral principal enough so that moral authoritarianism does not find appeal in those wronged by economic and political expediency. This is why we have movements like ISIS at the current time; not because they are theologically based. It is because academic and institutional sources for secular leadership do not base their training on sound ethics, even ethics that is based on universal human rights, let alone the sanctity of life wherever it exists.
This is more immediate than the questions which science will answer: How complexity beginning in inanimate physical systems can result in life without resorting to an intelligent designer. Such talking points have a hidden agenda to give moral authority to cultural beliefs. The question of how life arose is less important than how origins justifies the norms embraced by religion. How the physical universe stores information, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics is not violated by local stores of complex information, may be the answer to false dichotomies about life, and research may tell us that other places have solved this issue millions of times over, producing living systems that are unique from the one on Earth, or convergant with ours but where it is impossible for the similar systems to be genetically related; there being no panspermy possible. I think that some unique chemistry not like our own will be found to support life that would be fundementally alian to ours, That would surely put an end to Special creation. This finding could be a simple as finding trace fossils on Mars or other Solar System body revealing a biology basically different from what appeared on the Earth.
Of course the true Bigots will wiggle and change the terms of the argument and say that God changes the rules how ever he wants, small "h" deliberate.
If true secularists want to defeat religious bigotry and theocracy, they should start by embracing ethics and based more firmly on standards stronger than business expediancy, for example, or short-term profit, or survival of some organization. Every time some secular leader fails to do things either to live up to principal or based on some strong ethical system, this gives fuel to those who will act with authority based on ethnic pride, such as Putin and the Russians, or out of moral bigotry, such as ISIS and some of the religious people in America.
Yeah, the Russians will have Astroglide for Putin it to the Ukranians, if we are not careful!
This is the oldest story in human existence, and one that needs to be retold over and over, that if a business man can create a captive market or a planned failure rate of a product and hide those facts, he will base his business model on added cost to his customers. This is based on axioms of economics that point to the use of non-transparency to selfish advantage. No only will business people serve to add inefficiency and cost to keep the margin up, but they will also fight very hard to defend the business model against creative destruction seeking complicity of government if needed.
The answer to these abuses has always been disclosure and the flow of information about the ruse, which the linkage of business interests and politics attempts to suppress.
The humble razor blade can be made to last much longer than it does in any commercial product. It is laziness, convenience, and flooding the market with cheap product and telling lies to consumers that allows this. It amazed me how fast electric cars have appeared on the market once the peak of Oil was passed, and that there was a largely forgotten history of electric cars a century ago, and this was one reason the alternative to the internal combustion engine was so quickly re-introduced, now if only we could make it possible to create electricity without breaking carbon bonds and store electricity in efficient batteries. That would make a big difference and it would undercut cartels in energy.
And blame the U.S. Constitution for that! YES, the venerated document that defines the structure of the government and the separation of powers. It has come to betray the intention of the Founders to divide up power so that no one branch can dictate to the rest. Sounds like a great idea until you invent large financial and business institutions whose wealth rivals that of whole nations. This is a change that the Founders could not have anticipated, or judging by Alexander Hamilton in the Federalist, was intentional, see, New York had the fix in even back in 1789. Business and Finance are the tools of the aristocracy that assured Hamilton.
The problem is that Congress, particularly the House, has power of the purse strings, and even if it gives tacit power to establish executive departments, it can underfund them at will, especially if the business interests who have gotten more and more access to members of Congress don't want enforcement funded. The oldest trick in the book is for Congress to pass a law that enacts a popular reform and to later defund it because the power brokers in the duopoly don't want it.
Of course passing amendments to the U.S. Constitution is a slow and drawn-out process. One can see the possibility that rapid change or a huge crisis; some have been warning that a failure to repair the systemic problems in banking, finance, and investment, that contributed to the Crash of 2008 have not been fixed and might lead to another meltdown and soon, will outstrip the process and lead to even more radical change in the nation than Constitutional processes will allow. The worst case is a total national disruption leading to a governmental crisis or oven a Civil War. The Congress would have to act very differently in the face of such a crisis than it has over the past 30-40 years. this has happened before, rescuing the Union several times. Another possibility is that technical and demographic change will lead to the Union becoming irrevelent and Constitutional reform taking the shape of several sections of the country separating from the rest.
First. the urban centers of the country are under represented by any current apportionment that recognizes States Rights and the current bicameral legislature. This divide is widening and is reflected in political debates about Gun Control and the power of other rural-centered issues from social issues to energy priorities. One thing that may tip the balance is energy independence of the urban coasts by the coming on-line of non-carbon based fuels, nuclear fusion, and alternative nuclear fuels like Thorium. Once free of the Carbon Lobby in the Conservative central states, and able to desalinate water cheaply from the oceans, the populations on the two coasts will see the center of the nation as a millstone and see the Constitution as the tool of keeping the rural states in power and they will demand succession.
This breakup does not have to take the form of the Civil War of 1861. The coasts do not need the center to be viable economically or to threive, especially the West Coast. Right now it is energy and water that limits what the economy of the Western U.S. can do, and that could change overnight if nuclear fusion is proven to be viable. The economic clout of the Gulf Coast and Midwest will simply evaporate or become much less important. They may ask to separate from the rest to protect their conservative social values, and we on the costs will say "Be Our Guest!", no Civil War results.
Desalination of seawater made affordable by nuclear fusion would result in one huge risk, the disruption of ocean circulation by the creation of dense brine especially if done in the eastern sides of ocean basins where the introduction of brine would disrupt nutrient-rich upwelling. We may have to farm the salty brine on the land to dispose of it and also to create high albeido regions to cool the overheated atmosphere caused by burning of carbon fuels. Maybe it would be just that either the Gulf Coast has to receive the salt or leave the Union.
The water molecules may come and go, but if most of the water now available to us was locked up as water ice and not exposed to solar neutron flux the isotope rations of hydrogen would be less than what is expected if all of the water were exposed to it through out the entire time of its presence in the solar nebula, that is, if the water arrived in the vicinity of the sun at the same time it was formed. I think that the argument is that isotope ratios indicate that according to a model of the expected isotope ratios that the water had to exist before the sun ignited. The starting of the solar neutron flux did not have time to produce the isotope rations expected from the model, therefore. So, it is a model, a prediction and a contradiction of the prediction, isotope ratios have to be less than expected because the water ice existed before the sun and the hydrogen in it was not subjected to solar neuron flux, or any nearby source of neutrons.
I am fighting with Ubuntu and debian and the hell of it is that I like recent stuff, like Ipython 2 and Emacs 24, and yet debian and Ubuntu are awful bloatware. Most of the debian packages, at least the ones I've seen through Ubuntu are crap, half written non-orthogonal code. And I am just amazed what I can do inside emacs. I am beginning to think that I ought to revert to the command line and make emacs my GUI and forget all the other crap, including the browsers, which are all huge. And what really gets me upset is the cache files that gets put on my home dir by Google and Mozilla and countless other applications that come off the debian tree. Some idiot came out with a tiling GUI file display manager, and I kept thinking that has all been done in emacs 30 years ago; some idiot trying to reinvent something old.
We should encourage the investment that leads to Silicon Valley and its elites. Tax the crap out of the investment until it goes away, like go the hell to Texas, let them deal with the side effects. I applauded when Ellon Musk picked Nevada for Tesla's Battery Factory. We don't want the risk of pollution that would create and that means 6500 people who don't live in California. In fact, I'd like to see people leave California, and discouraging investment and job growth is one way to do that. So, encourage lots of people who don't have roots here to leave. Make it a deeper reason than just some flash-in-the-pan job to be here. We could, as a state, choose to be a no-growth, no investment, place, and that fact is that a 200 year drought might just be the ticket for that!
So, how many of the 6 Million odd people who live in the San Francisco Bay Area could actually compete with you for a job? And if they could, are there enough positions to go around? The first answer is that very few of the people who live here could compete with you because for lots of reason YOU are a member of an elite. The second answer is that there really are FEWER positions available than the lying sacks of shit who run many of the companies here want to admit. The positions are so specialized because there are far more people pestering the HR departments of their companies for those few positions, AND, they are taking advantage of the law to hire off-shore "talent" whether or not those people are creative or productive. The demand exceeds the supply and for some segments of the industry hiring an idiot who does what he is told is cheaper than wading through all the supply to find a better match.
Where this matters is that more and more you work in an ivory tower with the great unwashed baying at the gate and resenting you more and more because you say smug things like we hear here that belie the reality out there. I have been on both sides of the divide. I know what it is like to work on the inside and I know what it is like to be "out" like I am now. The reason I am out has to do with external factors that make me uncompetative, such as mounting physical disability. I was excluded during the dot.gone "recovery" which really wasn't. There is a big lie that Silicon Valley was like it was before 2004 or that it is pulling its weight, that it deserves to be revered any more as a job creator, even if it is a wealth creator; the number of people employed by the best capitalized companies is really quite small in number. I would like to see SV discouraged and the companies move away, like to Texas, as its impact on this area has turned largely negative. Only 1-percent'ers are benefiting and the rest of us are having to pay in higher property values and rents, and we pay more taxes because of the property pressures. I'd like to see many of the companies move out. The Party's Over!
Go do your own research. Investigate the origins of PC-DOS and the BASIC interpeter and the relationship Gates had with people in the early days around 1977. You will see that he "borrowed" from people and did not invent major parts of what he later called his own.
But the biggest case against Gates is the misinformation he spread, that the design of Windows was an answer to the complexity of the UNIX shell and that his proprietory approach was just a business ploy to create a captive market and to deny consumers the knowledge that they could have used to get more powerful and reliable tools. Microsoft practiced monopolistic and preditory strategies on its customers, the OEM agreement with hardware vendors; it kept them in the dark deliberately so that they would believe that Windows was magical and mysterious, under Gates, when it was just inferior and lacking in use. Remember that Microsoft had Xenix, a UNIX for X86, and deliberately dumbed down MS-DOS so it could keep its users in the dark. It wasn't until Vista that Windows had decent logging so that a user could actually have a clue to diagnose problems. That was intended and the market for Windows was captive enough so that ignorant users would still go buy an inferior product, even today, The answer to Microsoft is not Linux it is OS X. If Apple wanted to kill Microsoft it would be to embrace Hackintosh and cut the cost of the hardware by half.
An additional thought on this topic. One thing that is interesting about knowledge in our era is that the rate at which it changes is so fast that by the time we reach middle age and beyond that what we learned in school has become significantly out of date. When I took Physics in college there was no Standard Model for QM and no unification of forces. There was still this bewildering zoo of resonances whose underlying unity was not understood yet. The Feynman Lectures in Physics are now available on line. They are clearly still relevant but they show well the state of particle physics as it was in 1961. Someone ought to write the addendum that brings that up to date. In astronomy the identity of quaesars was still a hot topic and no one had confirmed the existence of black holes, whereas today they may be the drivers of the evolution of the Universe, and Dark Matter and Dark Energy were not recognized at all and today they are universally accepted as major players.
I took my degrees in Geology and when I was an undergrad Plate Tectonics was just coming into acceptance. Its ramifications developed during the early years of my career. The high trophic activity of the dinosaurs was a concept that was developed after I completed my degrees, as was the affinities of birds with therapsids. One must keep reviewing after one has finished school even if one is not in a profession. Things you learned in school are bound to be changed.
The first programming language I learned was FORTRAN. My experience has carried me through procedural languages like FORTRAN and Pascal to C and to scripting languages like perl, but then to OO enhancements the result in Java and Python and finally to functional languages like lisp. Most of this I didn't know out of college but am still learning on my own, one has to do that and to be motivated to pursue new topics on your own. It is quite amusing to me how programming goes full circle and what is old becomes new again, the relevance of lisp to new trends in programming that are more functional and try to reduce side effects, like Haskell. But the ideas were developed before I existed in the 1930's and yet they are finding expression in new languages like Clojure.