"Ill-informed" is a relative term. "Relative", meaning, "relative to the expected level of knowledge of your peers", or perhaps rather, "relative to your peers' expectation levels of you". "How do I turn on a computer" is an ill-informed question amongst a technically literate urban population, but not amongst, say, members of a remote Amazonian tribe (where, say, "what plants do I use to create my poison arrow tips" might be considered a very "ill-informed" question, even though the technically literate urban population wouldn't have a clue). civman's question would be "ill-informed" amongst people with an understanding of the physics of space elevators (which actually happens to be a pretty small percentage of people, so the comment smacks a little bit of elitism/ego-centricism in this case, although OTOH some people still expect the slashdot crowd to consist of many highly educated people in scientific and engineering disciplines, yet this ceased to be the case years ago).
If the general public (yeah I know, "ha ha", this is totally hypothetical) had a deep level of insight and knowledge into the situation with Iraq and into the mechanics of modern economies and social systems, then the Iraq question might not be considered "insightful" either.
I *already* don't use Yahoo... does that mean I have no recourse to criticise their unethical behaviour?
I think consumer boycotts must be almost the most useless protest method ever devised. But they are always advocated because consumers are, in fact, virtually powerless, and thus desperate for *some* sort of recourse.
Yout post smacks of someone who has limited experience on other systems and only a shallow knowledge of software design and the true *potential* of software. XP is hardly great, it's low quality. We have incredibly powerful machines and yet we watch XP boot up and slowly flicker and redraw and re-flicker and re-redraw a bunch of ugly mostly 16-bit icons on the desktop - yay - this is 2005, not 1985. It can't even do basic things like manage files in Windows Explorer without flickering like crazy with excessive and slow refreshes. XP is junky in so many ways I could go on for pages. Sure XP is great - if your expectations are still stuck on 1993 standards!
Get some perspective and learn about other systems for a while, and in particular computer history - not just Linux, not just Mac, learn about the older systems - from mid-80s Macs to early 90s NeXT systems, IRIX, Sun, BeOS etc.
(1) For some odd reason, nobody had every really put forth a major, viable, industry-backed and powerful open specification for Office formats...OpenDocument is pretty new. It will take some time for industry to wake up to this, and for support for it to ramp up towards "critical mass", but it will happen - industry *is* tired of being extorted exorbitant rates every few years to be able to continue reading their own files.
(2) Compatibility with existing documents. Most large corps have many existing documents stuck in.doc. This compels them to continue along the MS Office path even if there are open formats/software available. (Also short-term thinking is endemic in all human endeavours: The higher up-front migration cost is usually foregone in favour of lower short-term but higher long-term expenditure.)
(3) Document interchange: All businesses have to exchange documents with other businesses, organisations and/or individuals. This also compels everyone to continue along the MS Office path even if there are open formats/software available. Hence the crucial thing for OpenDocument is to gain *critical mass*... there is a kind of 'magic' point where enough people have adopted it and know about it that it becomes considered OK to send people documents in OpenDocument format. Massachusetts is an 'early adopter' (e.g. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Chasm).
So all this will take time, but it's exciting that it's finally happening --- the industry has been stagnating for so long, this is long overdue.
Don't be naive, this is nothing but a puffy feel-good marketing/PR release designed to make you think that the $$$ you'll be forking out for Vista is for more than just WinXP with a new look and feel and a tiny handful of new features. And to make you think that you're "on their right track" if you keep buying into Microsoft solutions. And to make investors think there is some sort of reform going on at MS. And clearly the marketing is working.
We heard the same lies when XP came out. Why do people have such short memories? Yet people really do think "new look and feel" = "rewrite". There is just no way MS will be rewriting any significant portion of it "from scratch".
Microsoft write quality code? I'll believe that when it's on my desktop and I'm using it and I can TELL that it's good. NOT two years before the time from reading one carefully crafted manipulative marketing press piece.
Ah yes, I can see why this truly is the OS for grandmothers everywhere. It's just so intuitive.
Yes, because grandmothers frequently want to take screenshots of their OS X desktops. It comes up all the time. Why just the other day my grandmother called me up asked me how to take screenshots, she needed them for the "how to install KDE on OS X" article she was writing. How I wish that such a commonly needed feature was more intuitively accessible, but alas, Steve Jobs has failed miserably on this one - the whole Mac is unusable, why, just totally unusable. Millions of grandmothers every day boot up their Macs and just stare at the screens not knowing what to do next - the touted usability, it seems, was all just marketing.
Forgive my ignorance of US law relating to freedom of speech, but why should you need a law that gives you what you already have (according to the constitution)?
We are not "struggling" to hold down a small resistance in Iraq, you fool. If the U.S. wanted to, we could completely obliterate the entire country, sterilizing it to the point that no human being could inhabit it again for 1,000 years. If we wanted to end the resistance tomorrow, we could bomb every house to rubble, kill every camel, torch every tree, and machine gun anything that moves.
Funny, I just knew someone was going to reply with this argument. And it may be true 'in theory', but guess what, it's a completely bogus argument. Because you can't do that. You can't. Technically, it may be possible, sure, but politically, it just isn't an option. Do you honestly think the US could do something like that and NOT be committing political suicide on the world stage? What do you think would happen? That the entire rest of the world would fall in line and cower in awe of the US, and either love the US forever or never commit another terrorist act against the US? Do you think that even the American public themselves would support doing something so insanely ridiculously savage and barbaric and unjust? GET REAL.
It doesn't help being militarily able to kill everyone on the planet if it's politically not an option. And I don't mean it's not an option because it would 'upset the doves", as you will predictably think I mean. Just think about it for a mome nt, honestly, what would happen to the global economy and political environment if the US decided to slaughter millions of innocent people?
Sorry, but "if we wanted to kill all of you we could but we're too nice" is a helluva stupid argument. It may be true in theory, but such it's an incredibly simplistic view because it totally fails to take into account anything of the "real world".
The whole "walk softly and carry a big stick" maxim only works if you're actually prepared to use the big stick. Otherwise, you're just making yourself a big, bluffing target.
The neocon (see Project for New American Century) idea that you can create a global environment of peace by being many times more powerful than any other nation, and using that power to influence global affairs, can only work when you really are that much more powerful than everyone else. The problem is, the US is not; inflated egos aside, let's look at this realistically: the USA is struggling to hold down a relatively small resistance in a tiny and weak and already-battered country like Iraq, do you honestly think the US would have a snowball's chance in hell of asserting a position of dominance/control if it had to go to war with, say, China? Of course China's military is much smaller than the US's, but that's besides the point, compare it to the strength of the insurgency in Iraq - it's a thousand Iraqs, and with even more nationalist sentiment that will perpetuate a never-ending (and ever-increasing) resistance to the US if this ever happened. You only really have two options then: Either you figure out a way to win a few billion "hearts and minds" in the near future to get Chinese nationalism out of their culture, or you just nuke every other country on the planet out of existence (and maybe that's just OK with you, I've certainly seen Americans advocate that on slashdot numerous times, but with attitudes like that don't scratch your head wondering why the world thinks the US is the biggest threat to world peace currently!) The US is not Rome, and can't pull of what Rome did.
None of the paths you advocate make any sense. The key to a peaceful, prosperous future on Earth lies in looking at what the US did when they literally "united the states" --- get everyone working on the 'same side'. Seems the US has forgotten this though, but that is how the US became so prosperous in the first place.
I would be inclined to believe that few Middle Eastern leaders would hesitate to use technology to exterminate as much of western culture as they could
I doubt it, that would be stupid, think about it for a moment, who would they sell oil to? They would be destroying their primary source of income, and their economies on the whole are not diversified enough to withstand the loss of half of their oil revenue (assuming China remains, although China in turn is also greatly dependent on exports to 'the West' at the moment, so in fact the entire world market for oil would crumble if "Western culture" was destroyed). I think you've been taken in a little by the propaganda. Use some common sense.
The irritating, endlessly whining "OMG slashdot is teh biased!1!!" crowd don't mind distorting the truth in order to try prove their invalid point.
I'm almost sick of reading slashdot because it's gotten so bad that in practically every thread there are a hundred posts trying really really really hard to "prove" the existence of this alleged bias. (Nobody has succeeded yet, because every "slashdot is biased" post seems to ironically get modded up to +5.)
I think it started with just astroturfers who deliberately come here and try to use pscyhology to control and manipulate posters into thinking twice before posting anything criticising Microsoft. And so far (predictably) it's worked pretty well, as a number of the more naive posters have picked this up and are now doing the astroturfers' work for them.
Giving away something for free which was previously charged for is typically what happens when the product is obsolete and uncompetitive.
I'm uninstalling my TCP/IP stack then, apparently it's obsolete.
(OK, seriously though: It's called "software commoditization". If you look at a price/demand elasticity curve, there are two main possible reasons why the price of a particular commodity may approach zero: (1) the demand side is approaching zero, or (2) the supply side is approaching infinity. You suggest (1) (as in, demand for a poor or redundant product drops to zero), but have missed (2): Since there is no natural scarcity in software, the supply side of any particular piece of software has no practical upper limit; supply also rises as more such products are created, and this eventually pushes prices close to zero. In other words, you reach a point where the supply will always match the demand, no matter what. This is not a reflection of lack of demand at all - on the contrary, the demand remains high, and in fact, the main factor driving software commodization IS HIGH DEMAND itself, meaning, the exact opposite of what you said is true: the things that people demand most tend to reach a point where they're given away for free (e.g. 'prestige projects', and so on - which is why it doesn't happen as much in vertical software markets). Everyone needs a Web browser, for example, and this high demand has resulted in numerous competing products, which is resulting in margins being slashed ever closer to zero. Web browsers are hardly obsolete, on the contrary, demand has never ever been higher.)
The Khoi-San bushmen live in a near desert and yet compared to modern Western societies, once you've factored out all the activities required for survival, they literally have more leisure time than we do. It is a myth (propagated by who?) that "primitive" societies have to "work their butts off just to survive". We are the ones working our butts off, just to survive and "keep up with the Joneses".
OK, granted, more primitive societies do not produce the kind of 'excess wealth' and R&D environments that allow us to create and afford things like hospital care, roads, modern medicine and cool gadgets. But nonetheless this still seems like a counter-intuitive result, and it should very well make you wonder why, for all our technology, we are working as hard or harder than ever before, and why our stress levels are higher than agrarian or hunter/gatherer societies.
This is not a technology problem, it's a cultural problem - somehow we are willingly enslaved by the "modern work ethic" ('wave slaves'), driven perhaps by the ruling class, who implement systems that result in massively uneven distribution of wealth. It is possible to create enough "stuff" to allow us all to work fewer hours, but something else is wrong with the system that prevents this from actually ever happening. We've been conditioned to think eight hours a day is normal and is not much, but really, think about it, who came up with this "eight hours" concept anyway? Eight hours a day is nearly your whole life, as most of the little remaining time goes to sleep or "administrative" tasks like grooming, eating, buying groceries, etc. What do you have left, maybe an hour or two a day on average?
I have all of those already on my year-old Mac system. What's that you say, I can get them from MS too next year? Thanks, but I think I'll skip that one.
So your argument then is, "the left uses global warming as a political issue, therefore global warming does not exist". That's real smart. Please keep politics out of it and stick to the science and facts, thanks. You appear to be unable to separate the two.
The other day I was going through some old boxes and found an article from a 1996 tech magazine titled "Internet Explorer 3 Debuts with Holes". It was meant to be an article about the new IE 3, but pretty much all they could do/say was elaborate on four or five critical security flaws in the brand new IE 3, and explain to users how to try protect themselves against the exploits.
In hindsight this was clearly a major harbinger of things to come, but for some bizarre reason the entire industry just looked the way and adopted IE on a massive scale, perhaps blindly trusting that MS would fix the problems real soon.
It's shocking that we've been putting up with this security hell from Microsoft now for almost TEN YEARS and yet STILL the industry keeps on with IE, and it's STILL nowhere near secure. Exactly how long does this have to continue before people wake up, realise it's not getting better, and ditch this rubbish? Twenty years? Forty years? 100 years?
But no, industry will stick with IE indefinitely, because our memories are incredibly short and all it takes is a few feel-good press releases from Microsoft and everyone's crowing about how wonderful the security of Vista/IE7 are going to be. Again we're blindly trusting that they'll fix things "real soon now". But with the release of Vista slated for 2006, that'll make it ten years of non-stop awful security. Praising MS for starting to deal with security only now is a bit like praising a thief for starting to steal from you less, or praising an abusive husband for starting to beat his wife less. This is not just not the sort of software company that is good for the industry/economy etc.
Wake me up when Firefox has also had ten years to sort out their security problems and we'll compare then, I know which one my money.
It's quite hypocritical, that people criticise Firefox so heavily for having a few security flaws so far, but well, the hundreds of security flaws in IE, with more being discovered still every month, that's just normal. Don't people see the irony in their behaviour when they say "ha look FF also has flaws, I'm going to keep using IE"?
You might pay more INITIALLY to train everyone on Linux, but once everyone is trained, you have a free system *forever*. You might pay a bit less in the short-term if you stick with Windows, but you'll pay that same amount over and over every few years, *forever*. It's the old "teach a man to fish" story.
They might be paying Sun now, but the actual "investment" is in Linux, not Sun. With their Linux skills base, they'll be free to choose from literally hundreds of different and highly competitive (hence, margins slashed) Linux vendors.
Not to to sound like I'm defending the idea of having two corporate jets, but keep in mind that the real value/purpose of a corporate jet is not to fly around your own executives - it's for your big clients! Do you really expect to get multi-million dollar contracts if you flying the client over coach?
Doesn't anyone here even know the term "lip service"? Some healthy cynicism is called for, no wonder Bush got voted in twice. These announcements are100% political feel-good support-us-we'll-do-great-things voter manipulation. It's not going to happen. The "13 years" was determined in answer to the question of "how long will it take people to forget I made this promise", not "how long will it take to get there".
Wrong, wrong, wrong. Repairing damage does not "contribute to the economy" at all - it's just a cost. Here's a mini-analogy - you smash every light bulb in your house with a baseball bat. Does it "stimulate growth" that you now have to then spend money to get it fixed? No, because spending that money only brings you right back where you started. If those light bulbs weren't smashed, you could have rather spent that money on installing something new in your house, that could have added value to your house and maybe helped you be more efficient, hence raising your productivity or improving your quality of life.
Basically repair costs like this are purely "maintenance costs". Maintenance expenditure doesn't contribute new wealth to society, because nothing new is created - it is a (usually necessary) expense that merely helps retain the status quo. But the efficiency of an economy is measured by how well it converts its existing wealth resources into NEW wealth, not by the total cash value of all transactions or the amount of money flowing.
That $200 billion could have been used to build new libraries, schools, hospitals, roads, public transport, wifi infrastructure, whatever. Now it will only be used to, effectively (figuratively) "repair a whole lot of smashed light bulbs". Sure there may be individuals who benefit relative to other individuals, but the economy as a whole only loses - the total amount of wealth i.e. "usefull stuff" in the economy available to everyone is less.
Slashdot Mirror
"Ill-informed" is a relative term. "Relative", meaning, "relative to the expected level of knowledge of your peers", or perhaps rather, "relative to your peers' expectation levels of you". "How do I turn on a computer" is an ill-informed question amongst a technically literate urban population, but not amongst, say, members of a remote Amazonian tribe (where, say, "what plants do I use to create my poison arrow tips" might be considered a very "ill-informed" question, even though the technically literate urban population wouldn't have a clue). civman's question would be "ill-informed" amongst people with an understanding of the physics of space elevators (which actually happens to be a pretty small percentage of people, so the comment smacks a little bit of elitism/ego-centricism in this case, although OTOH some people still expect the slashdot crowd to consist of many highly educated people in scientific and engineering disciplines, yet this ceased to be the case years ago).
If the general public (yeah I know, "ha ha", this is totally hypothetical) had a deep level of insight and knowledge into the situation with Iraq and into the mechanics of modern economies and social systems, then the Iraq question might not be considered "insightful" either.
Given that China's trade surplus with the US is a relatively significant percentage of their GDP, wouldn't anything that hurts the US hurt them too?
I *already* don't use Yahoo ... does that mean I have no recourse to criticise their unethical behaviour?
I think consumer boycotts must be almost the most useless protest method ever devised. But they are always advocated because consumers are, in fact, virtually powerless, and thus desperate for *some* sort of recourse.
Yout post smacks of someone who has limited experience on other systems and only a shallow knowledge of software design and the true *potential* of software. XP is hardly great, it's low quality. We have incredibly powerful machines and yet we watch XP boot up and slowly flicker and redraw and re-flicker and re-redraw a bunch of ugly mostly 16-bit icons on the desktop - yay - this is 2005, not 1985. It can't even do basic things like manage files in Windows Explorer without flickering like crazy with excessive and slow refreshes. XP is junky in so many ways I could go on for pages. Sure XP is great - if your expectations are still stuck on 1993 standards!
Get some perspective and learn about other systems for a while, and in particular computer history - not just Linux, not just Mac, learn about the older systems - from mid-80s Macs to early 90s NeXT systems, IRIX, Sun, BeOS etc.
A few reasons:
...OpenDocument is pretty new. It will take some time for industry to wake up to this, and for support for it to ramp up towards "critical mass", but it will happen - industry *is* tired of being extorted exorbitant rates every few years to be able to continue reading their own files.
.doc. This compels them to continue along the MS Office path even if there are open formats/software available. (Also short-term thinking is endemic in all human endeavours: The higher up-front migration cost is usually foregone in favour of lower short-term but higher long-term expenditure.)
... there is a kind of 'magic' point where enough people have adopted it and know about it that it becomes considered OK to send people documents in OpenDocument format. Massachusetts is an 'early adopter' (e.g. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Chasm).
(1) For some odd reason, nobody had every really put forth a major, viable, industry-backed and powerful open specification for Office formats
(2) Compatibility with existing documents. Most large corps have many existing documents stuck in
(3) Document interchange: All businesses have to exchange documents with other businesses, organisations and/or individuals. This also compels everyone to continue along the MS Office path even if there are open formats/software available. Hence the crucial thing for OpenDocument is to gain *critical mass*
So all this will take time, but it's exciting that it's finally happening --- the industry has been stagnating for so long, this is long overdue.
Don't be naive, this is nothing but a puffy feel-good marketing/PR release designed to make you think that the $$$ you'll be forking out for Vista is for more than just WinXP with a new look and feel and a tiny handful of new features. And to make you think that you're "on their right track" if you keep buying into Microsoft solutions. And to make investors think there is some sort of reform going on at MS. And clearly the marketing is working.
We heard the same lies when XP came out. Why do people have such short memories? Yet people really do think "new look and feel" = "rewrite". There is just no way MS will be rewriting any significant portion of it "from scratch".
Microsoft write quality code? I'll believe that when it's on my desktop and I'm using it and I can TELL that it's good. NOT two years before the time from reading one carefully crafted manipulative marketing press piece.
Ah yes, I can see why this truly is the OS for grandmothers everywhere. It's just so intuitive.
Yes, because grandmothers frequently want to take screenshots of their OS X desktops. It comes up all the time. Why just the other day my grandmother called me up asked me how to take screenshots, she needed them for the "how to install KDE on OS X" article she was writing. How I wish that such a commonly needed feature was more intuitively accessible, but alas, Steve Jobs has failed miserably on this one - the whole Mac is unusable, why, just totally unusable. Millions of grandmothers every day boot up their Macs and just stare at the screens not knowing what to do next - the touted usability, it seems, was all just marketing.
Etc. etc.
Forgive my ignorance of US law relating to freedom of speech, but why should you need a law that gives you what you already have (according to the constitution)?
We are not "struggling" to hold down a small resistance in Iraq, you fool. If the U.S. wanted to, we could completely obliterate the entire country, sterilizing it to the point that no human being could inhabit it again for 1,000 years. If we wanted to end the resistance tomorrow, we could bomb every house to rubble, kill every camel, torch every tree, and machine gun anything that moves.
Funny, I just knew someone was going to reply with this argument. And it may be true 'in theory', but guess what, it's a completely bogus argument. Because you can't do that. You can't. Technically, it may be possible, sure, but politically, it just isn't an option. Do you honestly think the US could do something like that and NOT be committing political suicide on the world stage? What do you think would happen? That the entire rest of the world would fall in line and cower in awe of the US, and either love the US forever or never commit another terrorist act against the US? Do you think that even the American public themselves would support doing something so insanely ridiculously savage and barbaric and unjust? GET REAL.
It doesn't help being militarily able to kill everyone on the planet if it's politically not an option. And I don't mean it's not an option because it would 'upset the doves", as you will predictably think I mean. Just think about it for a mome nt, honestly, what would happen to the global economy and political environment if the US decided to slaughter millions of innocent people?
Sorry, but "if we wanted to kill all of you we could but we're too nice" is a helluva stupid argument. It may be true in theory, but such it's an incredibly simplistic view because it totally fails to take into account anything of the "real world".
The whole "walk softly and carry a big stick" maxim only works if you're actually prepared to use the big stick. Otherwise, you're just making yourself a big, bluffing target.
The neocon (see Project for New American Century) idea that you can create a global environment of peace by being many times more powerful than any other nation, and using that power to influence global affairs, can only work when you really are that much more powerful than everyone else. The problem is, the US is not; inflated egos aside, let's look at this realistically: the USA is struggling to hold down a relatively small resistance in a tiny and weak and already-battered country like Iraq, do you honestly think the US would have a snowball's chance in hell of asserting a position of dominance/control if it had to go to war with, say, China? Of course China's military is much smaller than the US's, but that's besides the point, compare it to the strength of the insurgency in Iraq - it's a thousand Iraqs, and with even more nationalist sentiment that will perpetuate a never-ending (and ever-increasing) resistance to the US if this ever happened. You only really have two options then: Either you figure out a way to win a few billion "hearts and minds" in the near future to get Chinese nationalism out of their culture, or you just nuke every other country on the planet out of existence (and maybe that's just OK with you, I've certainly seen Americans advocate that on slashdot numerous times, but with attitudes like that don't scratch your head wondering why the world thinks the US is the biggest threat to world peace currently!) The US is not Rome, and can't pull of what Rome did.
None of the paths you advocate make any sense. The key to a peaceful, prosperous future on Earth lies in looking at what the US did when they literally "united the states" --- get everyone working on the 'same side'. Seems the US has forgotten this though, but that is how the US became so prosperous in the first place.
I would be inclined to believe that few Middle Eastern leaders would hesitate to use technology to exterminate as much of western culture as they could
I doubt it, that would be stupid, think about it for a moment, who would they sell oil to? They would be destroying their primary source of income, and their economies on the whole are not diversified enough to withstand the loss of half of their oil revenue (assuming China remains, although China in turn is also greatly dependent on exports to 'the West' at the moment, so in fact the entire world market for oil would crumble if "Western culture" was destroyed). I think you've been taken in a little by the propaganda. Use some common sense.
The irritating, endlessly whining "OMG slashdot is teh biased!1!!" crowd don't mind distorting the truth in order to try prove their invalid point.
I'm almost sick of reading slashdot because it's gotten so bad that in practically every thread there are a hundred posts trying really really really hard to "prove" the existence of this alleged bias. (Nobody has succeeded yet, because every "slashdot is biased" post seems to ironically get modded up to +5.)
I think it started with just astroturfers who deliberately come here and try to use pscyhology to control and manipulate posters into thinking twice before posting anything criticising Microsoft. And so far (predictably) it's worked pretty well, as a number of the more naive posters have picked this up and are now doing the astroturfers' work for them.
Giving away something for free which was previously charged for is typically what happens when the product is obsolete and uncompetitive.
I'm uninstalling my TCP/IP stack then, apparently it's obsolete.
(OK, seriously though: It's called "software commoditization". If you look at a price/demand elasticity curve, there are two main possible reasons why the price of a particular commodity may approach zero: (1) the demand side is approaching zero, or (2) the supply side is approaching infinity. You suggest (1) (as in, demand for a poor or redundant product drops to zero), but have missed (2): Since there is no natural scarcity in software, the supply side of any particular piece of software has no practical upper limit; supply also rises as more such products are created, and this eventually pushes prices close to zero. In other words, you reach a point where the supply will always match the demand, no matter what. This is not a reflection of lack of demand at all - on the contrary, the demand remains high, and in fact, the main factor driving software commodization IS HIGH DEMAND itself, meaning, the exact opposite of what you said is true: the things that people demand most tend to reach a point where they're given away for free (e.g. 'prestige projects', and so on - which is why it doesn't happen as much in vertical software markets). Everyone needs a Web browser, for example, and this high demand has resulted in numerous competing products, which is resulting in margins being slashed ever closer to zero. Web browsers are hardly obsolete, on the contrary, demand has never ever been higher.)
The Khoi-San bushmen live in a near desert and yet compared to modern Western societies, once you've factored out all the activities required for survival, they literally have more leisure time than we do. It is a myth (propagated by who?) that "primitive" societies have to "work their butts off just to survive". We are the ones working our butts off, just to survive and "keep up with the Joneses".
OK, granted, more primitive societies do not produce the kind of 'excess wealth' and R&D environments that allow us to create and afford things like hospital care, roads, modern medicine and cool gadgets. But nonetheless this still seems like a counter-intuitive result, and it should very well make you wonder why, for all our technology, we are working as hard or harder than ever before, and why our stress levels are higher than agrarian or hunter/gatherer societies.
This is not a technology problem, it's a cultural problem - somehow we are willingly enslaved by the "modern work ethic" ('wave slaves'), driven perhaps by the ruling class, who implement systems that result in massively uneven distribution of wealth. It is possible to create enough "stuff" to allow us all to work fewer hours, but something else is wrong with the system that prevents this from actually ever happening. We've been conditioned to think eight hours a day is normal and is not much, but really, think about it, who came up with this "eight hours" concept anyway? Eight hours a day is nearly your whole life, as most of the little remaining time goes to sleep or "administrative" tasks like grooming, eating, buying groceries, etc. What do you have left, maybe an hour or two a day on average?
I have all of those already on my year-old Mac system. What's that you say, I can get them from MS too next year? Thanks, but I think I'll skip that one.
So your argument then is, "the left uses global warming as a political issue, therefore global warming does not exist". That's real smart. Please keep politics out of it and stick to the science and facts, thanks. You appear to be unable to separate the two.
There will never be an open, honest, intellectual debate about anything on Slashdot. :)
So ... where can I find open, honest, intellectual debate on the Net? Please ...
please think twice before clicking through to TFA and steering ad revenue to zdnet.
Hmm ... thanks, a valid reason/excuse to not RTFA :)
The other day I was going through some old boxes and found an article from a 1996 tech magazine titled "Internet Explorer 3 Debuts with Holes". It was meant to be an article about the new IE 3, but pretty much all they could do/say was elaborate on four or five critical security flaws in the brand new IE 3, and explain to users how to try protect themselves against the exploits.
In hindsight this was clearly a major harbinger of things to come, but for some bizarre reason the entire industry just looked the way and adopted IE on a massive scale, perhaps blindly trusting that MS would fix the problems real soon.
It's shocking that we've been putting up with this security hell from Microsoft now for almost TEN YEARS and yet STILL the industry keeps on with IE, and it's STILL nowhere near secure. Exactly how long does this have to continue before people wake up, realise it's not getting better, and ditch this rubbish? Twenty years? Forty years? 100 years?
But no, industry will stick with IE indefinitely, because our memories are incredibly short and all it takes is a few feel-good press releases from Microsoft and everyone's crowing about how wonderful the security of Vista/IE7 are going to be. Again we're blindly trusting that they'll fix things "real soon now". But with the release of Vista slated for 2006, that'll make it ten years of non-stop awful security. Praising MS for starting to deal with security only now is a bit like praising a thief for starting to steal from you less, or praising an abusive husband for starting to beat his wife less. This is not just not the sort of software company that is good for the industry/economy etc.
Wake me up when Firefox has also had ten years to sort out their security problems and we'll compare then, I know which one my money.
It's quite hypocritical, that people criticise Firefox so heavily for having a few security flaws so far, but well, the hundreds of security flaws in IE, with more being discovered still every month, that's just normal. Don't people see the irony in their behaviour when they say "ha look FF also has flaws, I'm going to keep using IE"?
You might pay more INITIALLY to train everyone on Linux, but once everyone is trained, you have a free system *forever*. You might pay a bit less in the short-term if you stick with Windows, but you'll pay that same amount over and over every few years, *forever*. It's the old "teach a man to fish" story.
They might be paying Sun now, but the actual "investment" is in Linux, not Sun. With their Linux skills base, they'll be free to choose from literally hundreds of different and highly competitive (hence, margins slashed) Linux vendors.
Not to to sound like I'm defending the idea of having two corporate jets, but keep in mind that the real value/purpose of a corporate jet is not to fly around your own executives - it's for your big clients! Do you really expect to get multi-million dollar contracts if you flying the client over coach?
Doesn't anyone here even know the term "lip service"? Some healthy cynicism is called for, no wonder Bush got voted in twice. These announcements are100% political feel-good support-us-we'll-do-great-things voter manipulation. It's not going to happen. The "13 years" was determined in answer to the question of "how long will it take people to forget I made this promise", not "how long will it take to get there".
Oh G_d I just spelt "useful" with two l's ... sorry ... "but baby, that's never happened to me before!"
Wrong, wrong, wrong. Repairing damage does not "contribute to the economy" at all - it's just a cost. Here's a mini-analogy - you smash every light bulb in your house with a baseball bat. Does it "stimulate growth" that you now have to then spend money to get it fixed? No, because spending that money only brings you right back where you started. If those light bulbs weren't smashed, you could have rather spent that money on installing something new in your house, that could have added value to your house and maybe helped you be more efficient, hence raising your productivity or improving your quality of life.
Basically repair costs like this are purely "maintenance costs". Maintenance expenditure doesn't contribute new wealth to society, because nothing new is created - it is a (usually necessary) expense that merely helps retain the status quo. But the efficiency of an economy is measured by how well it converts its existing wealth resources into NEW wealth, not by the total cash value of all transactions or the amount of money flowing.
That $200 billion could have been used to build new libraries, schools, hospitals, roads, public transport, wifi infrastructure, whatever. Now it will only be used to, effectively (figuratively) "repair a whole lot of smashed light bulbs". Sure there may be individuals who benefit relative to other individuals, but the economy as a whole only loses - the total amount of wealth i.e. "usefull stuff" in the economy available to everyone is less.
You already have Ctrl-W, right mouse menu, or the correct control to close the tab, and you want a fourth way?
Ctrl+F4?