Okay, so it's slightly offtopic... but check out SiloHome! For a mere 2.3 million you can have 4,000 sq.ft. of house, 100 acres of forest, a runway, and a 20,000 sq.ft. empty missle silo!
I really wanted to see the answer to the questions about how you get more immortality from the foot bracelets than from the rings... too bad I had no moderator points.
When Microsoft can comfortably afford to return 1.3 trillion dollars to the US population (without having to create a distribution system or a list of US residents for that matter), when MS can build a new freely usable interstate across the entire country, when MS can negotiate treaties to protect US steelworkers, then this will be the Corporate Republic.
The DOJ can break up MS, contrary to what Katz believes. Whether they will prevail is a different question, one we might not be asking except for Judge Jackson's inability to shut the fuck up. Not to mention the fact that, should he want to, Bush might actually be able to nationalize the Windows OS and place it in the public domain. Talk about switching sides... MS would be arguing 'code is speech' in about 3 seconds.
The fraction of internet users is still very small, and Microsoft is, for all it's income, no match for the power of the Tennessee Valley Authority, or even the New York Times. Tech world, get over yourself! Microsoft's annual revenue is a drop in the bucket compared to the GNP of the United States.
First off, considering the coverage CNN (Time Warner) gave to the election, I doubt they'll get much sympathy from Bush... they weren't exactly kind to him.
Second, it's a HUGE jump from ads for alternative DSL providers to censoring political speech, and they ALREADY don't show you the news they don't like... it's the job of the news directors and editors at CNN.
Third, AOL has been, off and on, blocking access to competitor's websites since 1996 or so.
Fourth, an exercise: name the last President that was NOT a friend to big business.
A symbol in a work of art has to be well-known enough that it is generally understandable by the audience, otherwise it ceases to be an element of the art, and merely the idiosyncratic associations of one individual.
Your entire argument breaks down here. I'll refer you to anything by T.S.Elliot, most especially The Waste Land, but anything really, as a refutation. The fact that a 'potential' symbol is obscure does not exclude it from being a symbol.
Thanks for playing!
Re:Here's how you fix the problem of bad laws....
on
Killing Video Games
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· Score: 1
Hello, brilliance... the med privacy laws you're referring to were written during the Clinton administration.
Yeah, that's great... It reminds me of what Ira Magaziner (Clinton's net advisor) said about security on the net... paraphrasing, he said "You'd better self regulate, because god knows you don't want the government to do it. We screw up everything!"
It's a pretty large stretch for the Congress to regulate any movie at all. Regardless of what Lieberman thinks, regardless of how amoral the MPAA is, it's almost certainly unconstitutional to try and bully the industry into compliance with the threat of inevitably screwy regulation from the FCC.
The MPAA answers to consumers, and if people stop watching Disney movies that have the latest Clive Barker trailer preceeding them, the trailers will vanish. If they don't stop, then the legislature can just deal with it; legislating morailty is BS whether it comes from the left or the right. I'd rather see the MPAA or the video game companies stomp all over consumer attitudes of acceptability than see the legislature threaten to punish them with ignorance for not living up to the moral code of Lieberman or whatever Connecticut rep has a burr in her ass.
Besides, I'd rather play a game where I rip out the other guy's spine and pee on his dead body than just shoot at 'em with a faintly vibrating Uzi.
Seems to me, you've had no part in the actions of government because you've decided not to participate. The phrase should read: "we (who care enough to expend the effort) are the government".
It's perfectly just to lump you in with 'us'.
IBM Linux Ad in Mundie's reply
on
Mundie Responds
·
· Score: 1
Did anyone else get this ad? It's one of those big, square ads, from IBM, saying that "...nothing runs on Linux better than DB2.".
Assuming 'uninterest' was the solecism to which you were referring, it seems we are in agreement!
I don't think you could characterize the American Heritage Dictionary as a poor source or one lacking in integrity, and I certainly don't think you could demonstrate that 'uninterest' has any market penetration whatsoever. Furthermore, I believe you'll find that 'disinterest' is by far the more common synonym for 'indifference', and 'uninterest' is rarely heard except when spoken by a preschooler.
You're missing my point completely. Fine, we abolish money. Everyone has everything they need and no one wants for anything. We have a happy,. joyful, egalitarian society where no crime exists and no one has to work for what they get, they all work for the common good.
Now imagine that I (since I have all the free time and resources I need) think up a cool new widget. Everyone thinks it's really neat. In fact, so many people would like to have one, I can't keep up with the demand. Widgets become harder and harder to find, since I can only make about 10 a day and there are about 200 people a day who hear about it and would like to have it.
Suddenly, I have a commodity. People start offering me their televisions in exchange for a higher place on the widget waiting list. Maybe they offer to give me lots of strawberries (I like strawberries).
Now, I've got so many offers, I set up a list of things I'll take to bump you to the top of the widget list. Now I've got a price list, and we're bartering for services. My widget for your 3 bushels of strawberries. It's not paper money, but it's commerce.
Commerce is the destroyer of your money-free society; it's completely unavoidable, and that's a good thing! . Even if the government makes all commerce illegal, they'd have to jail me or shoot me to stop me from making widgets, and then they'd have to outlaw all the widgets, confiscate them, and jail (or shoot) anyone caught with one. Now we're back to North Korea or the old USSR.
People will always desire to be compensated fairly for their work. Some work is inherently more valuable than other work. What motivates a doctor to spend 10 brutal, abusive years learning medicine? Certainly not ONLY altruism, though that's probably a factor. We'd have a lot fewer doctors if they got paid what a teacher gets. Teaching is a noble profession, but teachers generally suck at what they do, because the best potential teachers become network admins or scientists or journalists or CEOs. The teacher's pay can't support their desires, and there's nothing wrong with having ambition. Who's to say a CEO would rather be teaching, but for the money?
Doctors are more valuable than checkers at Wal-Mart. They should not be compensated equally. You can either let the people negotiate for themselves and get paid what the market will support (capitalism) or you can dictate prices, nationalize industries, assign jobs in grade school, artifically depress prices, and coerce your population into accepting it (communism USSR style). There is no middle ground... society will always trend toward free markets and capitalism unless artificially prevented by an oppressive government.
People are also greedy! Some people won't sit back and take what you give them. If they can't get what they want in their lives, they will migrate toward the places where they can. See "Animal Farm" by George Orwell for the perfect example of how this works.
disinterest (ds-ntr-st, -ntrst) n.
1. Freedom from selfish bias or self-interest; impartiality.
2. Lack of interest; indifference.
Meanwhile, 'uninterest', while technically a word, is practically nonexistant and almost always considered a spelling error. In your example, uninterest would be the opposite of interest, but public interest is not the same as public fascination. In your example, 'lack of interest' would have been many times more correct than the awkward and unused 'uninterest'.
Either way, 'indifference' would have been better in your post and in the review.
Okay then. The reason you can't give away food, fuel, etc to every person on the planet is that it costs lots and lots of money. You have to own and maintain land, hire people, maintain equipment, buy seed, plant, grow, harvest, and distribute food. All of that requires people, people who should be compensated for their labor, not to mention the guy who owns all the food he grew. Same for fuel, except it's about a thousand times more dangerous to get oil out of the ground, and very very expensive to even find it. If the US were to federalize the oil industry with the intention of giving away free gas, the economy would disintegrate. There are a million people who'd be out of a job because it's not profitable to run the corner stop-n-go. Their families would all have to rely on the government for not just their food and gas, but their clothes, medical care, housing, etc.
Wait, the goal was to have everyone rely on the Govt. for all their food, gas, medical care, housing! Congratulations, you've just created North Korea.
The two reasons for not doing this: First, if you think corporations are bad, wait until you take all the power all the corps have and give it to the fed. Second, capitalistic greed flows from individual greed. Don't forget, corps are created by people. You can only make an idealistic socialist society work if the entire population is willing to not be greedy about anything. They must all be wiling to freely give away the fruits of their labor, they must be willing to do extremely dangerous jobs in exchange for government grants and standard housing. They must all be happy with whatever they're given and unwilling to strive for more.
Because as soon as someone starts to want a bigger house, they will start looking for a way to get it. Eventually someone will realize that there are lots of people looking for big houses, and he'll start offering them. Of course, he'd have no reason to do this unless they gave him something back... and then you go right back to big, evil, capitalism, or else you get hard-core oppression from the govt. aimed at preventing it.
Socialist societies only work in the minds of idealists. People are inherently too interested with self-preservation and achievement to take what they're given and while away the days contemplating their navels. That's why the only countries where it still goes on are ultra-oppressive 'communist' countries like China, N. Korea, and Cuba.
The real fact is, corporations are out to make money, and the capitalist pursuit of wealth often does stand in the way of the socialist version of 'true progress'. I'd take the USA, and the (I'm assuming) false progress we have here over the 'real' progress they have over in China.
Ohyeah, one more thing: Flamebait is a post worded such that it is not exactly offensive but will likely start a flamewar anyway. Trolls are posts designed to generate as much response as possible, by whatever means necessary.
Posts designed to get an argument started are rated 'Interesting'.
No, because you can't prevent redistribution of the source code and still be "open".
As far as a reasonable charge, your customers (the market) decide. If they really think that $1 million for access to your codebase is worth it, they'll pay it.
One interesting point that I think has been missed is that Microsoft isn't interested in making complex software and creating revenue from supporting it. Their stated goal has been to make software that anyone can use. All their development has been aimed at this target (with various degrees of success).
If they actually did create an OS so easy anyone could use it, they'd never sell any support!
The best OSS products are going to be complex tools that solve complex problems. Easy-to-use solutions to simple problems could never make any OSS company a dime. Could anyone sell support for an open source version of WinAmp? What if RealAudio's premium player was OSS? Could they make any money from supporting or customizing it?
I would argue that all programs are niche products. Name me some gemeral purpose software! Even some complex software would never fly as OSS. I work for a company that creates data modelling and profiling software. It's a complex task that we significantly simplify. In fact, we've streamlined the process so much and been thorough enough that we rarely ever get feature-related support calls or RFEs. We could never give this product away to our customers and sell support or customization.
Flexible code that can be used for multiple purposes, that's where OSS companies will shine. The Linux OS itself is a perfect example. OSS Groupware will be a viable product, but what can you do with a open source word processor that will generate revenue?
I don't understnad it really, especially considering the erport I heard today on Morning Edition. The PC game industry has grown 15% yearly since 1997, and stands to rival movie profits if it keeps on track.
Oddly, though, they lumped console games in with those numbers...
Slashdot Mirror
$20 says you had to look at the bottle before you typed acetylsalicylic acid.
very odd... they're talking about the same place! Even some of the same images are being used.
Okay, so it's slightly offtopic... but check out SiloHome! For a mere 2.3 million you can have 4,000 sq.ft. of house, 100 acres of forest, a runway, and a 20,000 sq.ft. empty missle silo!
I really wanted to see the answer to the questions about how you get more immortality from the foot bracelets than from the rings... too bad I had no moderator points.
Ohwell...
When Microsoft can comfortably afford to return 1.3 trillion dollars to the US population (without having to create a distribution system or a list of US residents for that matter), when MS can build a new freely usable interstate across the entire country, when MS can negotiate treaties to protect US steelworkers, then this will be the Corporate Republic.
The DOJ can break up MS, contrary to what Katz believes. Whether they will prevail is a different question, one we might not be asking except for Judge Jackson's inability to shut the fuck up. Not to mention the fact that, should he want to, Bush might actually be able to nationalize the Windows OS and place it in the public domain. Talk about switching sides... MS would be arguing 'code is speech' in about 3 seconds.
The fraction of internet users is still very small, and Microsoft is, for all it's income, no match for the power of the Tennessee Valley Authority, or even the New York Times. Tech world, get over yourself! Microsoft's annual revenue is a drop in the bucket compared to the GNP of the United States.
First off, considering the coverage CNN (Time Warner) gave to the election, I doubt they'll get much sympathy from Bush... they weren't exactly kind to him.
Second, it's a HUGE jump from ads for alternative DSL providers to censoring political speech, and they ALREADY don't show you the news they don't like... it's the job of the news directors and editors at CNN.
Third, AOL has been, off and on, blocking access to competitor's websites since 1996 or so.
Fourth, an exercise: name the last President that was NOT a friend to big business.
Can we apply some critical thought here? Please?
Typical from Katz... long on panic, short on content.
Sigh. This could have been an informative article.
HavenCo has a satellite link to the rest of the world... a Napster server there would hammer their connection to the point of uselessness.
Condensation can trash your PC if you're not careful. That's the downsode.
Talk about a badass... Linux + cancer = 800+ comments!
All you trolls should be taking lessons from Ballmer.
I always thought it referred to the popular interpretation of someone who is "bat shit", i.e. crazy.
Your entire argument breaks down here. I'll refer you to anything by T.S.Elliot, most especially The Waste Land, but anything really, as a refutation. The fact that a 'potential' symbol is obscure does not exclude it from being a symbol. Thanks for playing!
Hello, brilliance... the med privacy laws you're referring to were written during the Clinton administration.
Facts are kewl!
Yeah, that's great... It reminds me of what Ira Magaziner (Clinton's net advisor) said about security on the net... paraphrasing, he said "You'd better self regulate, because god knows you don't want the government to do it. We screw up everything!"
It's a pretty large stretch for the Congress to regulate any movie at all. Regardless of what Lieberman thinks, regardless of how amoral the MPAA is, it's almost certainly unconstitutional to try and bully the industry into compliance with the threat of inevitably screwy regulation from the FCC.
The MPAA answers to consumers, and if people stop watching Disney movies that have the latest Clive Barker trailer preceeding them, the trailers will vanish. If they don't stop, then the legislature can just deal with it; legislating morailty is BS whether it comes from the left or the right. I'd rather see the MPAA or the video game companies stomp all over consumer attitudes of acceptability than see the legislature threaten to punish them with ignorance for not living up to the moral code of Lieberman or whatever Connecticut rep has a burr in her ass.
Besides, I'd rather play a game where I rip out the other guy's spine and pee on his dead body than just shoot at 'em with a faintly vibrating Uzi.
Seems to me, you've had no part in the actions of government because you've decided not to participate. The phrase should read: "we (who care enough to expend the effort) are the government".
It's perfectly just to lump you in with 'us'.
Did anyone else get this ad? It's one of those big, square ads, from IBM, saying that "...nothing runs on Linux better than DB2.".
LOL!
Assuming 'uninterest' was the solecism to which you were referring, it seems we are in agreement!
I don't think you could characterize the American Heritage Dictionary as a poor source or one lacking in integrity, and I certainly don't think you could demonstrate that 'uninterest' has any market penetration whatsoever. Furthermore, I believe you'll find that 'disinterest' is by far the more common synonym for 'indifference', and 'uninterest' is rarely heard except when spoken by a preschooler.
You're missing my point completely. Fine, we abolish money. Everyone has everything they need and no one wants for anything. We have a happy,. joyful, egalitarian society where no crime exists and no one has to work for what they get, they all work for the common good.
Now imagine that I (since I have all the free time and resources I need) think up a cool new widget. Everyone thinks it's really neat. In fact, so many people would like to have one, I can't keep up with the demand. Widgets become harder and harder to find, since I can only make about 10 a day and there are about 200 people a day who hear about it and would like to have it.
Suddenly, I have a commodity. People start offering me their televisions in exchange for a higher place on the widget waiting list. Maybe they offer to give me lots of strawberries (I like strawberries).
Now, I've got so many offers, I set up a list of things I'll take to bump you to the top of the widget list. Now I've got a price list, and we're bartering for services. My widget for your 3 bushels of strawberries. It's not paper money, but it's commerce.
Commerce is the destroyer of your money-free society; it's completely unavoidable, and that's a good thing! . Even if the government makes all commerce illegal, they'd have to jail me or shoot me to stop me from making widgets, and then they'd have to outlaw all the widgets, confiscate them, and jail (or shoot) anyone caught with one. Now we're back to North Korea or the old USSR.
People will always desire to be compensated fairly for their work. Some work is inherently more valuable than other work. What motivates a doctor to spend 10 brutal, abusive years learning medicine? Certainly not ONLY altruism, though that's probably a factor. We'd have a lot fewer doctors if they got paid what a teacher gets. Teaching is a noble profession, but teachers generally suck at what they do, because the best potential teachers become network admins or scientists or journalists or CEOs. The teacher's pay can't support their desires, and there's nothing wrong with having ambition. Who's to say a CEO would rather be teaching, but for the money?
Doctors are more valuable than checkers at Wal-Mart. They should not be compensated equally. You can either let the people negotiate for themselves and get paid what the market will support (capitalism) or you can dictate prices, nationalize industries, assign jobs in grade school, artifically depress prices, and coerce your population into accepting it (communism USSR style). There is no middle ground... society will always trend toward free markets and capitalism unless artificially prevented by an oppressive government.
People are also greedy! Some people won't sit back and take what you give them. If they can't get what they want in their lives, they will migrate toward the places where they can. See "Animal Farm" by George Orwell for the perfect example of how this works.
Asked and answered!
I humbly submit.
Ahem. From the American Heratige Dictionary:
disinterest (ds-ntr-st, -ntrst) n.
1. Freedom from selfish bias or self-interest; impartiality.
2. Lack of interest; indifference.
Meanwhile, 'uninterest', while technically a word, is practically nonexistant and almost always considered a spelling error. In your example, uninterest would be the opposite of interest, but public interest is not the same as public fascination. In your example, 'lack of interest' would have been many times more correct than the awkward and unused 'uninterest'.
Either way, 'indifference' would have been better in your post and in the review.
Okay then. The reason you can't give away food, fuel, etc to every person on the planet is that it costs lots and lots of money. You have to own and maintain land, hire people, maintain equipment, buy seed, plant, grow, harvest, and distribute food. All of that requires people, people who should be compensated for their labor, not to mention the guy who owns all the food he grew. Same for fuel, except it's about a thousand times more dangerous to get oil out of the ground, and very very expensive to even find it. If the US were to federalize the oil industry with the intention of giving away free gas, the economy would disintegrate. There are a million people who'd be out of a job because it's not profitable to run the corner stop-n-go. Their families would all have to rely on the government for not just their food and gas, but their clothes, medical care, housing, etc.
Wait, the goal was to have everyone rely on the Govt. for all their food, gas, medical care, housing! Congratulations, you've just created North Korea.
The two reasons for not doing this: First, if you think corporations are bad, wait until you take all the power all the corps have and give it to the fed. Second, capitalistic greed flows from individual greed. Don't forget, corps are created by people. You can only make an idealistic socialist society work if the entire population is willing to not be greedy about anything. They must all be wiling to freely give away the fruits of their labor, they must be willing to do extremely dangerous jobs in exchange for government grants and standard housing. They must all be happy with whatever they're given and unwilling to strive for more.
Because as soon as someone starts to want a bigger house, they will start looking for a way to get it. Eventually someone will realize that there are lots of people looking for big houses, and he'll start offering them. Of course, he'd have no reason to do this unless they gave him something back... and then you go right back to big, evil, capitalism, or else you get hard-core oppression from the govt. aimed at preventing it.
Socialist societies only work in the minds of idealists. People are inherently too interested with self-preservation and achievement to take what they're given and while away the days contemplating their navels. That's why the only countries where it still goes on are ultra-oppressive 'communist' countries like China, N. Korea, and Cuba.
The real fact is, corporations are out to make money, and the capitalist pursuit of wealth often does stand in the way of the socialist version of 'true progress'. I'd take the USA, and the (I'm assuming) false progress we have here over the 'real' progress they have over in China.
Ohyeah, one more thing: Flamebait is a post worded such that it is not exactly offensive but will likely start a flamewar anyway. Trolls are posts designed to generate as much response as possible, by whatever means necessary.
Posts designed to get an argument started are rated 'Interesting'.
That was a pretty good troll until you threw in the petrochemical corporation thing...
No, because you can't prevent redistribution of the source code and still be "open".
As far as a reasonable charge, your customers (the market) decide. If they really think that $1 million for access to your codebase is worth it, they'll pay it.
If not, you won't get any customers.
One interesting point that I think has been missed is that Microsoft isn't interested in making complex software and creating revenue from supporting it. Their stated goal has been to make software that anyone can use. All their development has been aimed at this target (with various degrees of success).
If they actually did create an OS so easy anyone could use it, they'd never sell any support!
The best OSS products are going to be complex tools that solve complex problems. Easy-to-use solutions to simple problems could never make any OSS company a dime. Could anyone sell support for an open source version of WinAmp? What if RealAudio's premium player was OSS? Could they make any money from supporting or customizing it?
I would argue that all programs are niche products. Name me some gemeral purpose software! Even some complex software would never fly as OSS. I work for a company that creates data modelling and profiling software. It's a complex task that we significantly simplify. In fact, we've streamlined the process so much and been thorough enough that we rarely ever get feature-related support calls or RFEs. We could never give this product away to our customers and sell support or customization.
Flexible code that can be used for multiple purposes, that's where OSS companies will shine. The Linux OS itself is a perfect example. OSS Groupware will be a viable product, but what can you do with a open source word processor that will generate revenue?
I don't understnad it really, especially considering the erport I heard today on Morning Edition. The PC game industry has grown 15% yearly since 1997, and stands to rival movie profits if it keeps on track.
Oddly, though, they lumped console games in with those numbers...