Fear is instilled through intimidation and use of force, respect is earned.
Throwing the book at these kids is a very good way to instill fear in the hearts of their classmates, but it will never earn anyone's respect. If anything it will be yet another demonstration of why the distrust and animosity they feel towards their elders is well earned.
I'd really like to find out who it is that decided to push for felony charges....so I can go kick their sorry ass into the dirt.
So we should wait for someone else to develop them first, gaining both a tactical and strategic advantage in the process, and then try to play catch-up after the fact when we're already behind the eight ball?
The best time to develop a new weapon is BEFORE your enemies do.
By "jumping the gun" we would hasten and make worse a space weapons race...for our enemies! Not only do our enemies lack the technical skill to be able to compete, their economies are a sad sick joke compared to ours. This is a big part of what did in the Soviets, they couldn't keep up with our technology or our development budget. When they tried to, they bankrupted themselves. Thus the cold war was won with out a single shot being fired between the principal adversaries.
The best way to achieve peace is to ensure that you always have a clear and decisive military advantage over your enemies. Hatred and animosity between nations and cultures will never end. The only way to avoid near continuous open war is to ensure that there is never any doubt in the mind of your enemy that they will always lose any and all confrontations with you. Their fear of you will be greater than their hatred, ensuring that they'll never fuck with you. And should they lose their minds and actually give you shit, your overwhelming military superiority will allow you to exterminate them quickly and efficiently, providing a clear example to your other enemies of what happens to those that fuck with you.
"Good Guys" huh? Weakness is a vice, never a virtue.
Biological and chemical weapons are simply ineffective because they cannot be controlled. This is why we have all these treaties banning their development and use. If they were actually useful militarily then you can rest assured that those treaties never would have made it out of committee.
You do realize of course that we have biological and chemical weapons anyway, as do many other countries. We don't use them because they're not useful, but that doesn't mean we don't maintain our mastery of the technology behind them. If we didn't then our ability to defend against these weapons would be greatly reduced. Bio and chem weapons are of very little use in conventional warfare, but as weapons of terror they're extremely effective. Just think back to all the ninnies who were buying gas masks and duck taping up their houses a couple of years ago, all because some ragheads mailed a little anthrax. Imagine what the response would be if bio or chem weapons were to be widely deployed. Now imagine the subsequent response when the government had no effective countermeasures to offer.
The Clinton administration also sought increased police powers after they torched all those people down in Waco.
There are of course ideological differences between the Republican/right and the Democratic/left, but one thing that does not differ is the desire for those in power to expand their reach.
The mistake that is being made in this case is to treat terrorism as a criminal justice problem when it is in fact a military problem.
Think back to WW-II for a moment. At that time there were temporary laws and regulations passed as part of the war effort that did encroach upon our rights and freedoms. For the most part these were necessary in order to ensure the continued security of our own nation and the success of the war effort overseas. When the war was won and the threat neutralized these laws were repealed because they were both unnecessary and an affront to the core ideals this country was founded upon.
What I fear is that the left in this country is going to succeed in undermining our resolve to pursue and defeat our enemies, resulting in an ongoing conflict with no end in sight. This is exactly what happened during Vietnam. They were not the sole perpetrators of our defeat, but they did more than their fair share. The anti-war far left of the 60's and 70's has become the mainstream left of today (Howard Dean, John Kerry), much to the detriment of our nation as a whole. This is a big part of why the Republicans are so successful nowadays. It's not that everyone who votes Republican is "right wing," rather it's the fact that so many moderates and independents can't stomach voting Democrat anymore. If the Democratic party ceases to be a viable opposition, the far right contingents within the Republican party will be given a blank check to push their own brand of bullshit down everyone's throat.
In any case, if the left succeeds in undermining and thwarting our efforts overseas, if not outright offering aid and comfort to our enemies, then not only will this conflict persist, but these laws and regulations that threaten the well being of our society will persist as well. This threat is two fold. First, too much power is placed in the hands of government. Second, we run the risk that our society itself will be corrupted in such a way that these laws are seen as acceptable or even preferable. The longer such laws are on the books, the greater both threats grow.
So, if you don't like such laws and want to see those that are already with us go away, support our efforts to destroy our enemies. The sooner the islamofacists are dead and buried, the sooner laws like this will be put to rest as well.
The problem with ID isn't the idea itself, it is the track record of those who are promoting it.
The idea that evolution alone cannot account for the development of life on earth is not that crazy of an idea. The problem is that those who are espousing it would really much rather be promoting biblical creationism and attacking darwinian evolution.
The very existence of ID as something these guys are pushing to be taught is proof positive that they're losing the debate. They have to go with creationism-lite because they can't sell the full strength version to anyone who isn't drinking the same kool-aid that they are.
One of the real problems that this whole debate reveals is that utter ignorance that most people have about science. I'm not talking about your creationists either. I'm talking about atheists who try to use science to back up their own religious beliefs. Science is not an athiest philosophy or discipline. The most that science can say about the existance of God is that his/her/it's existance has not yet been disproven. Naturally there are various mythologies whose tenets can be disproven, but that is not the same thing as proving that there is no God.
At the end of the day, this entire debate is largely between athiests who think they have science on their side, and christian true believers who think they have the truth on their side.
Evolution is one of the cornerstones of modern biology. There is a mountain of evidence that supports it, and not a single speck of evidence that refutes it. But that does not mean it is the whole story. There are some questions about the development of life on earth that it has trouble providing adequate answers for. It is not unreasonable to suspect that some intelligence was involved and that it nudged things in one direction or another from time to time. This is not the ONLY idea that is worthy of consideration, but it is definitely one such idea. When the athiests attack this notion, they're no better than the bible thumpers who attack evolution.
If this whole debate were between intellectually honest individuals without ulterior motives, then there wouldn't be anything to talk about. There wouldn't be any slashdot articles about it. In fact it wouldn't even be newsworthy in any way.
But because the people involved on both sides are extremists with pet theories that they will not let go of and prejudices they'd like to see promoted, any approaching meaningful discourse goes right out the window. Instead we have two groups assembled who spend their time making rude intimidating noises at one another and throwing rocks.
This dispute, just like so many others, is little more than an arena where the loony left and the religious right duke it out. A lot of the emotions involved are due to issues outside of this debate but which nevertheless drive its intensity. When you see people getting emotional about this debate, you can rest assured that some other unspoken issue is the reason why. In fact, this entire debate is really just a proxy for theism vs athiesm. The arguments about creationism/ID vs evolution are really just a proxy for the debate about whether there is a God or not.
I personally have no patience with people who are full of shit, regardless of which brand and flavor that shit happens to be. Devout athiests are full of shit and so are the bible thumpers. Comparing them is not an exercise in separating the truth from non-truth. Rather it is a process of separating one non-truth from another non-truth that is equally untrue. What few kernels of truth there are left remaining can be accounted for by the broken clock rule, which states that even a broken clock is right twice a day.
Your analogy breaks down because software can be perfectly duplicated, a drill cannot. The software is not corrupted, lessened, or otherwise affected in any way by the copying. There is, from a technical standpoint, no difference between your copy which was created by a dishonest 3rd party, and a copy created by Microsoft itself. There are no additional technical hurdles or gotchas incurred when Microsoft provides updates to this illegal copy. If anything it helps them because that is one more system that is less likely to become a zombie, and security is one area where the company needs all the good PR it can get.
I personally think that Microsoft is shooting itself in the foot. They're losing money to piracy to be sure, but not nearly as much as they'll lose from making piracy more difficult. The reason is that there are alternatives to Windows out there. The vast majority of this piracy takes place in the 3rd world. By making things difficult for people in Bombay and Shanghai, Microsoft is simply encouraging the adoption and use of Linux, and the economic effects of this are far more severe for the company than losing some $$$ from a licensing fee.
This is an example of being penny-wise and pound foolish.
They should of course take steps to deter piracy, but this is not a valid means of doing so.
The development of atomic and nuclear weapons was inevitable. The only question was who would develop them first. I'm glad we did, when we did. A land invasion of Japan would have have resulted in horrific casualties on both sides. We're just lucky that Hitler was too much of a fool to understand the military and strategic value of the bomb. Instead he had people like Werner Heisenberg working on fission reactors to produce power. Things could have turned out very differently.
It is a sad truth that the Libertarian party is nuttier than the Democratic party. The Libertarian party is made up of those who think EVERYTHING should be privatized. They deny the existence of a public good. These are the cretins who want to do away with public roads (do you have enough change for the toll booth?), as well as public education. The left sees government as a sort of pancea, a good solution to any problem. Not only is this foolish, but it is foolishness on such a high level that it is easily confused with calculated malice. The Libertarian party represents the exact opposite. They don't see the government as a possible source of ANY solutions to ANY problems. This too is easily confused with calculated malic. The truth is that there are problems which are best solved through public efforts, and problems that are best solved through private enterprise. A few responds well to both. Which approach is better depends upon the problem at hand.
Education is a problem that responds well to both private and public efforts, with a mixture of the two providing the most ideal solution.
The problem with education in America is not that it is paid for with tax dollars. The problem is that education has fallen victim to leftist politics. This is a problem because leftist educators attempt to apply the same twisted interpretation of equality to education as their socio-political counterparts attempt to apply to financial wealth. They consider the best method of education to be that which creates the most uniform results. In other words, the one where all the student perform on the same level. The real world meaning of this is that all of the students perform on the level of the least capable students. Who would have thought that they would be able to extend the bitter fruits of socialism into the classroom.
This loony-tunes nonsense has got to go. Schools should be set up in such a way that our best and brightest are not being intellectually stunted by a curriculum designed for our average and not-too-bright. The truth of this is obvious, but like many other unpleasant truths, it is also "politically incorrect." The public has been conned into believing that providing a student with an education befitting their intellectual abiltiy is somehow unfair to other students whose ability differs. Well I ask you, who is being treated unfairly otherwise? The average students for whom the curriculum is challenging and whose intellectual development is nurtured and extended by it, or the bright students for whom the curriculum is a joke and whose intellectual development is hindered as a result? The only reason why this is even a subject of debate is because of a misapplication of one of our culture's most cherished ideals: equality.
When Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence and proclaimed it to be self evident that all men are created equal, he was referring to political and social equality, not equality of ability or nature. Some people are smarter than others. Some are taller, or shorter. Some are more attractive, others less. All of us are unique creatures with a unique compliment of abilities and characteristics. The term equality has many levels of meaning, not all of which apply to human beings. The interpretation of equality that our educational system attempts to enforce is not only contrary to reality but damaging to those it is applied to.
That is not to say that equality is not a high ideal that should be strived for in education, as in any other part of life. Equality in education means equality of opportunity to a good education, one that helps each and every student reach his or her potential. A bright student is not going to benefit equally from an education intended for the average student. He or she will be shortchanged.
What needs to happen is that multiple curriculums need to be designed to address the education needs of all the students. Politics need to be removed from the equation by removing the ability of politican
The unspoken assumption underlying all of this brouhaha is that there is something wrong with a game of this type, and especially that there is something wrong with kids and teenagers seeing it.
I've never been convinced that this assumption is in any way valid. I didn't believe it when I was a kid, and I don't believe it today. It isn't that I think any of this is particularly good for kids, or for anyone as far as that goes. The point is that it is not harmful either. If anything it is neutral, which means it just doesn't matter. It doesn't matter any more than anything else anyone sees. Sex is an ordinary part of life for all of us, not some deep dark secret that must be kept hidden at all costs. Attempting to hide things that are sexually explicit from someone because of their age is a monumental waste of time. Not only are you going to fail for the most part (unless you lock them in a closet), but there is nothing to be gained even if you were to succeed. Of all the things that are a danger to a young person, seeing naked bodies and sex portrayed on a computer screen isn't one of them.
When I was a kid I used to think that the sex-phobia exhibited by adults was a sham, a put on, a ruse, a pretention that served to obscure their underlying malice towards the young. I reached this conclusion based upon a simple assmption: no one could actually be as stupid as they were behaving.
I was 30 years old before I finally realized that yes, people really could be that stupid, and that stupidity can even infect an entire culture. Never understimate the destructive power of idiots in large groups.
There are two problems with attempting to relate population to innovation:
1) There are over 6 billion people on earth right now. In fact, most of the people who have EVER lived are alive right now.
2) Most of these people live in 3rd world ratholes where "innovation" is limited to finding ways of keeping a roof over your head and food in your belly. In some cases you can add finding ways of avoiding the local warlord's henchmen.
Measuring how much innovation there is per billion population is nonsensical because most of those people never have the opportunity to contribute anything. As far as innovation is concerned they don't even exist.
If he wants to attempt to model the relationship between population and innovation, he needs to limit the population in his model to that of developed nations with strong educational systems. If he ever gets around to doing this, I already know what his reaction is going to be:
Well I can give you reasons why you should use Linux instead of Solaris 10, and I can give you reasons why you should use Linux instead of FreeBSD, but I can't really say very much when it comes to Solaris vs FreeBSD.
Both OS's are certainly making progress, Solaris 10 in particular represents major progress over the previous versions, but neither is quite there yet and the weaknesses of one tend to be shared by the other.
The things I'm thinking of are related to the UI for both systems. Neither uses bash (or even tcsh) as the default shell. Neither uses gnu coreutils for things like ls, cp, rm, etc. These things may not matter to some, but they do matter to me. I'm sure the core OS of each is a very strong and capable system, but the same can be said of Linux and I don't have to fight with it to beat the UI into something usable.
The comment I was responding to was a response to one of my own comments and a conversation you were not a part of. If you're going to butt into other people's discussions, the least you could do is try to keep up.
The point you succeeded in pretending not to understand is that there are already alternatives to Linux out there, FreeBSD being the most notable example. If it has not been able to steal the thunder, or create comparable thunder of its own, then what chance does a newcomer have?
Linux is, for better or worse, where the attention is at. FreeBSD has users, OpenBSD has users, Darwin has users, hell even Hurd has somebody out there using it and singing its praises. Yet even if you add up all of the communities that are built up around each of these other systems, the sum is still dwarfed by the Linux community.
Now I'm not one of those "BSD is dying" dupes. It isn't dying, but it isn't growing as fast as Linux is and in many ways the effect is the same.
By the way, I LIKE FreeBSD, I just don't have any illusions about its place in the scheme of things.
Actually do we KNOW that Windows will run? Just because the systems have an intel processor in them doesn't mean they will be able to run windows.
Now if there have been statements made by apple, that their new systems WILL RUN WINDOWS, then I stand corrected. Otherwise I must operate off of the (not unreasonable considering the company's past behavior) assumption that the new macs will be crippled in some way to prevent windows from running.
Just because they're using x86 processors now does not mean that Apple has seen the light. If you want to run OS-X on an x86 based system then Apple is going to go to great lengths to ensure that you can only run it on one that they sell.
This is a long standing policy when it comes to Macs in general. It wasn't all that long ago that if you wanted to add or replace a hard drive or CDROM drive you were forced to buy one from Apple. The reason is that the hard drive partitioning software and the CDROM drivers both checked the firmware in their respective devices for an Apple tag. If this tag was not found then they would refuse to work. The mac cult made all sorts of outlandish and patently false excuses for this, including a rather large canard about inconsistencies in how different vendors implemented their SCSI interfaces.
In any case my main point is that because OS-X will only run on Apple hardware, its ability to meaninfully compete with Linux as a Windows desktop alternative is greatly reduced.
Macs have ALWAYS attempted to be an alternative to PC's. They've also always been marginal also-rans, largely because of Apple itself. Switching the chip that Apple uses in their systems does not represent any sort of a heartfelt change at Apple. The company will continue to behave in a short-sighted self-limiting manner and Macs will continue to claim a miniscule market share.
Now if Apple really wanted to compete with Windows (Linux isn't even a contender) then they'd license OS-X to PC manufacturers whose systems would have to comply to the technical specifications set by Apple. Microsoft would attempt to make this difficult by threatening (behind closed doors of course) vendors the same way they have been doing in response to Linux. I suspect they would be even more vicious and despicable than normal. But then OS-X is a viable replacement for Windows. All it would take would be a few vendors who didn't care about shipping Windows on their systems to tell MS to go fuck itself. The day that you can buy an OS-X based system from multiple vendors running on commodity hardware would be the day that OS-X gained legitimacy. That is something it lacks right now because no matter how nice the OS might or might not be, the plain fact remains that if you want to use it you're forced to buy funky hardware from a single source. Inexperienced first time home buyers might not care about this, but you can be VERY sure that this is one prime factor dissuading businesses from using OS-X. The other factor being that it won't run Windows apps.
If multiple vendors were selling commodity systems running OS-X then that would be a watershed moment. Ideally these systems would be configured to either dual-boot to windows, or run windows from within a vmware type environment. I suspect that Mickeysoft has clauses in their OEM licenses to prevent this, but even this is not a show-stopper. All Apple has to do is make it easy to configure a system to dual boot AFTER the fact. Include tools that would automatically resize and reconfigure the partitions on the system to make space for Windows, along with a boot loader that made it stupidly easy to choose which OS to run. The ability to run the second OS from its own native partition from within a VM would be the final touch that would make the whole thing work.
Apple could even begin marketing OS-X as Windows friendly if they wanted to. The long-time true believers in the mac community would howl about this I'm sure, but then so what. Pleasing and placating a bunch of nitwit ideologues is hardly a wise business plan.
The main problem with Apple is that it is in the business of trying to sell an ideology to consumers who just want to buy a computer. It is like Steve Jobs said to John Scully when he was trying to convince him to come to Apple from Pepsi, "Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world." Apple's approach is to try and convince the world that it
The more time goes by, the more I think that the term Department of Justice is Orwellian double-speak.
The sad thing is, it doesn't matter who is in the white house. The G-man goon squad constantly seeks to increase its powers while decreasing judicial oversight and public scrutiny. Presidents come and go, administrations come and go, but the bureauacracy that drives this never dies.
This just goes to show that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. The wolf is always at the door. There are other cliches I could envoke as well, but you get the idea.
Our society's continual fascination with "obscenity" is proof positive that 50% of the population is of below average intelligence. Some people have an almost superstitous attitude towards certain words. This isn't based upon the meaning of the words either since synonyms of these words are not treated with the same trepidation.
Whether something is a theat to Linux or not will only matter to those whose preference for it is based upon something other than the objective merits of the system.
If something better than Linux comes along and Linux takes the back seat, how is that a bad thing?
Now I'm not saying that OS-X is better, or that it is worse. I'm just saying that it doesn't matter.
I think that a lot of people are afraid that something will happen to Linux akin to the things that have happened to superior products in the past that were defeated by inferior alternatives.
Luckily the market segment in which Linux dominates is one where technical merit really does matter most. The only way that something can displace Linux is if it is truly better, and if that happens, how is it a bad thing?
I think you're right, but I also think that monopolies of this sort, or at least their competitive advantage, are always either broken or rendered irrelevant.
Creating a new market where one has a natural monopoly is one avenue to making lots of money. Attempting to maintain that monopoly is a good way of ensuring your own eventual demise or irrelevancy. Apple is a good example of this. The only reason the company is still alive is because the rules of the computer business have changed. There is so much demand for computers that even a marginal player is able to survive off the table scraps. Also the purpose of these computers is tied far more to the internet than it is to the ability to run application X,Y, or Z. Most users, especially the ones that Apple attempts to market to, only care about email and the ability to surf the web, and these are platform agnostic functions. In a way it is kind of funny how this has worked out. The PC rose to dominance not because of IBM or Microsoft, but because of Compaq, Dell, Gateway, and a whole string of companies now long dead. That isn't even mentioning the countless mom and pop shops building systems. The reason this happened is because the PC was an open standard and therefore a commodity. The reason why Macs are still being made today is because the functionality that customers buy them for, namely web browsing and email, are themselves commoditys as features. Platform agnosticism, aka compatability, is something that Apple traditionally worked to undermine and thwart, and yet it is what is keeping the company alive.
I'm not familiar with the Granny Smith system you mentioned, but I suspect that this was born some time during the whole CHRP/PREP debacle, or shortly there after. In other words, when it no longer mattered. It is a shame that IBM and Motorola brought Apple on board the PowerPC initiative. It spelled the doom of PowerPC as a viable alternative to the standard PC. Apple was brought in because IBM and Motorola were under the twin delusions that Apple had a decent OS (not to be confused with how pretty their GUI was) to offer and that the company itself was sane. Neither was true. IBM and Motorola wanted to create a new platform that would be sold by multiple vendors. They understood that commoditizing the hardware is what made the PC dominant, and that only a superior commodity platform would be able to compete with the PC. IBM and Motorola, as the vendors for the CPUs, would make money no matter whose name was on the box. What they didn't have was an operating system to run on these new systems. Back when IBM created the PC it contracted Microsoft to create the OS for it. When the PC became a commodity Microsoft simply rode the wave. So somebody got the bright idea of inviting Apple to the table. Apple's OS already had a presence in the marketplace. If the PPC took off, Apple stood to make a killing both in terms of money and market share. Unfortunately what IBM and Motorola didn't realize is that Apple was insane. Apple agreed to create the OS for the new platform, and then refused to do it, citing technical problems and making other excuses. Apple was under the delusion that they were viable as a hardware company and that protecting their hardware business was vital to the future of the company as a whole, even though they were brought on board for their software. Then some german hackers ported the MacOS to CHRP in under 2 weeks and demoed it at a trade convention. Apple's response was to froth at the mouth and threaten to sue. Apple is the reason why CHRP/PREP systems don't exist today. Apple didn't just bite the hand that fed it, it succeeded in chewing it off. This is why Apple is now switching to Intel. IBM has no reason to want to create faster chips for Apple. Much of the development that Apple has benefited from up to this point was done by IBM and Motorola for other reasons. Apple, through its own short sightedness, avarice and greed, has succeeded in putting itself right back in the same position it
Seven out of ten voices in my head say that acid is a very bad thing.
The other three speak Swahili, French, and some sub-dialect of Choctaw (or so I'm told), so I'm never sure what they say about anything, though they do seem quite conversant with one another.
"Do you really think superior product is sufficient for success? (You must be new here!) Anyway, the nature of modern technique is that any new product can be duplicated by a larger company that will be able to achieve a much higher scale of production, acquire capital, materials, labor, and publicity at a much cheaper price, and afford a far greater up-front loss. There are certainly areas in which a new business is possible, but it requires a lot of luck to find yourself in one."
If you look at companies like Apple and Dec, they were started by people who were trying to service a market that was either unknown to the big players, or was considered to be irrelevant. IBM didn't think there was a market for minicomputers, so Dec made a killing. None of the major computer companies thought there was a market for a personal computer (including Dec ironically), so Apple made a killing.
The key to a successful startup in an industry dominated by 800 pound gorillas is to go after market segments that they are either unaware of, or don't care about. But then this same approach can also lead to disaster because usually there is a good reason why the 800 pound gorillas are neglecting to service potential customers. It is only every so often that myopia sets in to such a degree that opportunity is created. There are companies being started every day that want to be the next Apple or Dec, or even the next Dell. Virtually all of them fail, some quite dramatically, to be replaced with yet more companies whose fate will almost certainly be the same. It is this continual, if unseen, flurry of activity that results in the aforementioned opportunities being taken advantage of. Now sometimes a true visionary will see something that no one else does, or at least no one else in a position to act. But most of the time it is a combination of guile and dumb luck that makes people like Jobs into Billionaires. Jobs and Wozniak wanted to make computers because they loved computers. They didn't see this huge untapped market of people yearning for a computer of their very own. The Apple I was a hack that Wozniak created to impress his friends at the homebrew computer club. Other companies like Processor Tech were making computers and selling them, so Woz and Jobs did also. It wasn't until the computers sold like hot-cakes that Jobs realized they could actually make good money doing it. It was at this point that that he, much to his credit, worked to create a real company with a professional product that had wider appeal than the S-100 systems that were the norm at the time. This was the reason why Apple survived while companies like Processor Tech (whose Sol was a best-of-breed S-100) did not.
There is most certainly still money to be made, markets that are either not being services, or are being under serviced. But virtually no one knows where the next break-out company is going to come from or what sort of technology that new market is going to be based upon. Many are the ones who attempt to figure out the answers to these questions. Almost as many are those who lose a lot of money in the process.
The problem with the ACLU is that it has become radicalized. It has always leaned towards the left, but then that was not always a bad thing. A left wing that is intellectually honest is a GOOD THING. No one has a monopoly on the truth. As long as the truth is the ultimate goal, and the seekers of truth are intellectually honest, then it doesn't matter what their philosophical preferences are. As time goes by and knowledge and information are accumulated, a truth that was once obscured and difficult to perceive will become obvious to most, if not all. This is the basis upon which democracy itself operates, that given enough eyes, all bugs become shallow.
The problem with the left in America today is that it is primarily made up of those who lack intellectual honesty. What has happened is that as time has gone by, the truth of certain ideas and conclusions that are referred to collectively as "conservative" has become more and more apparent. This is why the country as a whole is shifting to the "right." It is also the reason why you have so called "neo-cons," many of whom are old time lefties who have adopted conservative approaches to the problems that the left's own approaches failed to resolve, such as poverty, racial and gender equality, etc.
As more and more people of the left move to the right, the result is that the only people remaining on the left are the extremists, the radicals. This is why Howard Dean is the head of the DNC. It is also why once great and honorable institutions like the ACLU have become tools and weapons used by the radicals to interfere with our nation's steady progression to the right.
The reason that this is a problem is because they are desperate. They see their take on things becoming increasingly unpopular and even despised. Now if they were intellectually honest and capable of some degree of introspection, then they might respond by trying to understand why their ideas are no longer as popular as they once were, and whether they themselves might have bet on the wrong horse so to speak. Unfortunately this isn't in their nature. So instead they engage in increasingly bizarre behavior as their desperation grows. What we are seeing the ACLU do nowadays is engage in blatant attacks against the institutional strongholds of their ideological "opponents", namely mainstream religion. For the radicalized left, christianity is seen as the cornerstone of "bourgeoisie" society, the destruction of which is their ultimate goal. This has always been the goal of the far left, but only very recently has it become the goal of the left as a whole. The reason is that the far left essentially IS the left nowadays. Everyone else has drifted away from the left to a greater or lesser degree.
There are many problems with the things that modern radicalized left is doing. In the case of the ACLU, they are intentionally misconstruing freedom of religion to be freedom FROM religion, in practice if not in words. By doing so they are attempting to oppress those whose ideas are not their own. They are engaging in the very sort of behavior the ACLU was originally founded to fight against. They are engaging in similar shenanigans when it comes to freedom of speech.
Central in their efforts is the introduction of a pernicious concept into the public consciousness, the "right to not be offended." You see this idea being envoked every time that someone claims certain ideas are "offensive" to them and should therefore not be expressed. This is nothing more than censorship, which is itself a sure sign that an unpleasant truth or truths have come to light that threaten those with the power to suppress them.
When someone starts in with the the "I'm offended" routine, they're not lodging an honest complaint. They're not complaining about having to hear something they don't like. They're complaining because they don't want OTHERS to hear the things they don't like. This is especially obvious when someone complains about things that they can choose not to
This makes me wonder why the upgrade process is being run under the target installation in the first place. How about upgrading the system off-line through a live-cd of some sort?
This live-CD would be able to access the installation's filesystems and examine the configuration, particularly the database that APT keeps of the installed packages. The relevant updated packages could then be installed without worrying about clobbering libraries and/or other files that the update process is dependent upon.
At the very least this should be an option to fall back upon. The update process should examine what needs to be updated and then advise the user on whether or not it was safe to run the update from the installed system or whether the live-CD method should be used instead. If you're upgrading from one major release to the next, then you're almost certainly going to have to reboot anyway regardless of what upgrade method you use.
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Fear is instilled through intimidation and use of force, respect is earned.
Throwing the book at these kids is a very good way to instill fear in the hearts of their classmates, but it will never earn anyone's respect. If anything it will be yet another demonstration of why the distrust and animosity they feel towards their elders is well earned.
I'd really like to find out who it is that decided to push for felony charges....so I can go kick their sorry ass into the dirt.
What would Tony Soprano do?
Fahgetaboutit...
So we should wait for someone else to develop them first, gaining both a tactical and strategic advantage in the process, and then try to play catch-up after the fact when we're already behind the eight ball?
The best time to develop a new weapon is BEFORE your enemies do.
By "jumping the gun" we would hasten and make worse a space weapons race...for our enemies! Not only do our enemies lack the technical skill to be able to compete, their economies are a sad sick joke compared to ours. This is a big part of what did in the Soviets, they couldn't keep up with our technology or our development budget. When they tried to, they bankrupted themselves. Thus the cold war was won with out a single shot being fired between the principal adversaries.
The best way to achieve peace is to ensure that you always have a clear and decisive military advantage over your enemies. Hatred and animosity between nations and cultures will never end. The only way to avoid near continuous open war is to ensure that there is never any doubt in the mind of your enemy that they will always lose any and all confrontations with you. Their fear of you will be greater than their hatred, ensuring that they'll never fuck with you. And should they lose their minds and actually give you shit, your overwhelming military superiority will allow you to exterminate them quickly and efficiently, providing a clear example to your other enemies of what happens to those that fuck with you.
"Good Guys" huh? Weakness is a vice, never a virtue.
Biological and chemical weapons are simply ineffective because they cannot be controlled. This is why we have all these treaties banning their development and use. If they were actually useful militarily then you can rest assured that those treaties never would have made it out of committee.
You do realize of course that we have biological and chemical weapons anyway, as do many other countries. We don't use them because they're not useful, but that doesn't mean we don't maintain our mastery of the technology behind them. If we didn't then our ability to defend against these weapons would be greatly reduced. Bio and chem weapons are of very little use in conventional warfare, but as weapons of terror they're extremely effective. Just think back to all the ninnies who were buying gas masks and duck taping up their houses a couple of years ago, all because some ragheads mailed a little anthrax. Imagine what the response would be if bio or chem weapons were to be widely deployed. Now imagine the subsequent response when the government had no effective countermeasures to offer.
If creating space weapons is a sure fire way to launch an arms race, refraining from creating these weapons is a sure fire way to lose said race.
Lee
"Meet the new boss, same as the old boss."
The Clinton administration also sought increased police powers after they torched all those people down in Waco.
There are of course ideological differences between the Republican/right and the Democratic/left, but one thing that does not differ is the desire for those in power to expand their reach.
The mistake that is being made in this case is to treat terrorism as a criminal justice problem when it is in fact a military problem.
Think back to WW-II for a moment. At that time there were temporary laws and regulations passed as part of the war effort that did encroach upon our rights and freedoms. For the most part these were necessary in order to ensure the continued security of our own nation and the success of the war effort overseas. When the war was won and the threat neutralized these laws were repealed because they were both unnecessary and an affront to the core ideals this country was founded upon.
What I fear is that the left in this country is going to succeed in undermining our resolve to pursue and defeat our enemies, resulting in an ongoing conflict with no end in sight. This is exactly what happened during Vietnam. They were not the sole perpetrators of our defeat, but they did more than their fair share. The anti-war far left of the 60's and 70's has become the mainstream left of today (Howard Dean, John Kerry), much to the detriment of our nation as a whole. This is a big part of why the Republicans are so successful nowadays. It's not that everyone who votes Republican is "right wing," rather it's the fact that so many moderates and independents can't stomach voting Democrat anymore. If the Democratic party ceases to be a viable opposition, the far right contingents within the Republican party will be given a blank check to push their own brand of bullshit down everyone's throat.
In any case, if the left succeeds in undermining and thwarting our efforts overseas, if not outright offering aid and comfort to our enemies, then not only will this conflict persist, but these laws and regulations that threaten the well being of our society will persist as well. This threat is two fold. First, too much power is placed in the hands of government. Second, we run the risk that our society itself will be corrupted in such a way that these laws are seen as acceptable or even preferable. The longer such laws are on the books, the greater both threats grow.
So, if you don't like such laws and want to see those that are already with us go away, support our efforts to destroy our enemies. The sooner the islamofacists are dead and buried, the sooner laws like this will be put to rest as well.
Lee
The problem with ID isn't the idea itself, it is the track record of those who are promoting it.
The idea that evolution alone cannot account for the development of life on earth is not that crazy of an idea. The problem is that those who are espousing it would really much rather be promoting biblical creationism and attacking darwinian evolution.
The very existence of ID as something these guys are pushing to be taught is proof positive that they're losing the debate. They have to go with creationism-lite because they can't sell the full strength version to anyone who isn't drinking the same kool-aid that they are.
One of the real problems that this whole debate reveals is that utter ignorance that most people have about science. I'm not talking about your creationists either. I'm talking about atheists who try to use science to back up their own religious beliefs. Science is not an athiest philosophy or discipline. The most that science can say about the existance of God is that his/her/it's existance has not yet been disproven. Naturally there are various mythologies whose tenets can be disproven, but that is not the same thing as proving that there is no God.
At the end of the day, this entire debate is largely between athiests who think they have science on their side, and christian true believers who think they have the truth on their side.
Evolution is one of the cornerstones of modern biology. There is a mountain of evidence that supports it, and not a single speck of evidence that refutes it. But that does not mean it is the whole story. There are some questions about the development of life on earth that it has trouble providing adequate answers for. It is not unreasonable to suspect that some intelligence was involved and that it nudged things in one direction or another from time to time. This is not the ONLY idea that is worthy of consideration, but it is definitely one such idea. When the athiests attack this notion, they're no better than the bible thumpers who attack evolution.
If this whole debate were between intellectually honest individuals without ulterior motives, then there wouldn't be anything to talk about. There wouldn't be any slashdot articles about it. In fact it wouldn't even be newsworthy in any way.
But because the people involved on both sides are extremists with pet theories that they will not let go of and prejudices they'd like to see promoted, any approaching meaningful discourse goes right out the window. Instead we have two groups assembled who spend their time making rude intimidating noises at one another and throwing rocks.
This dispute, just like so many others, is little more than an arena where the loony left and the religious right duke it out. A lot of the emotions involved are due to issues outside of this debate but which nevertheless drive its intensity. When you see people getting emotional about this debate, you can rest assured that some other unspoken issue is the reason why. In fact, this entire debate is really just a proxy for theism vs athiesm. The arguments about creationism/ID vs evolution are really just a proxy for the debate about whether there is a God or not.
I personally have no patience with people who are full of shit, regardless of which brand and flavor that shit happens to be. Devout athiests are full of shit and so are the bible thumpers. Comparing them is not an exercise in separating the truth from non-truth. Rather it is a process of separating one non-truth from another non-truth that is equally untrue. What few kernels of truth there are left remaining can be accounted for by the broken clock rule, which states that even a broken clock is right twice a day.
Your analogy breaks down because software can be perfectly duplicated, a drill cannot. The software is not corrupted, lessened, or otherwise affected in any way by the copying. There is, from a technical standpoint, no difference between your copy which was created by a dishonest 3rd party, and a copy created by Microsoft itself. There are no additional technical hurdles or gotchas incurred when Microsoft provides updates to this illegal copy. If anything it helps them because that is one more system that is less likely to become a zombie, and security is one area where the company needs all the good PR it can get.
I personally think that Microsoft is shooting itself in the foot. They're losing money to piracy to be sure, but not nearly as much as they'll lose from making piracy more difficult. The reason is that there are alternatives to Windows out there. The vast majority of this piracy takes place in the 3rd world. By making things difficult for people in Bombay and Shanghai, Microsoft is simply encouraging the adoption and use of Linux, and the economic effects of this are far more severe for the company than losing some $$$ from a licensing fee.
This is an example of being penny-wise and pound foolish.
They should of course take steps to deter piracy, but this is not a valid means of doing so.
Lee
The development of atomic and nuclear weapons was inevitable. The only question was who would develop them first. I'm glad we did, when we did. A land invasion of Japan would have have resulted in horrific casualties on both sides. We're just lucky that Hitler was too much of a fool to understand the military and strategic value of the bomb. Instead he had people like Werner Heisenberg working on fission reactors to produce power. Things could have turned out very differently.
Lee
It is a sad truth that the Libertarian party is nuttier than the Democratic party. The Libertarian party is made up of those who think EVERYTHING should be privatized. They deny the existence of a public good. These are the cretins who want to do away with public roads (do you have enough change for the toll booth?), as well as public education. The left sees government as a sort of pancea, a good solution to any problem. Not only is this foolish, but it is foolishness on such a high level that it is easily confused with calculated malice. The Libertarian party represents the exact opposite. They don't see the government as a possible source of ANY solutions to ANY problems. This too is easily confused with calculated malic. The truth is that there are problems which are best solved through public efforts, and problems that are best solved through private enterprise. A few responds well to both. Which approach is better depends upon the problem at hand.
Education is a problem that responds well to both private and public efforts, with a mixture of the two providing the most ideal solution.
The problem with education in America is not that it is paid for with tax dollars. The problem is that education has fallen victim to leftist politics. This is a problem because leftist educators attempt to apply the same twisted interpretation of equality to education as their socio-political counterparts attempt to apply to financial wealth. They consider the best method of education to be that which creates the most uniform results. In other words, the one where all the student perform on the same level. The real world meaning of this is that all of the students perform on the level of the least capable students. Who would have thought that they would be able to extend the bitter fruits of socialism into the classroom.
This loony-tunes nonsense has got to go. Schools should be set up in such a way that our best and brightest are not being intellectually stunted by a curriculum designed for our average and not-too-bright. The truth of this is obvious, but like many other unpleasant truths, it is also "politically incorrect." The public has been conned into believing that providing a student with an education befitting their intellectual abiltiy is somehow unfair to other students whose ability differs. Well I ask you, who is being treated unfairly otherwise? The average students for whom the curriculum is challenging and whose intellectual development is nurtured and extended by it, or the bright students for whom the curriculum is a joke and whose intellectual development is hindered as a result? The only reason why this is even a subject of debate is because of a misapplication of one of our culture's most cherished ideals: equality.
When Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence and proclaimed it to be self evident that all men are created equal, he was referring to political and social equality, not equality of ability or nature. Some people are smarter than others. Some are taller, or shorter. Some are more attractive, others less. All of us are unique creatures with a unique compliment of abilities and characteristics. The term equality has many levels of meaning, not all of which apply to human beings. The interpretation of equality that our educational system attempts to enforce is not only contrary to reality but damaging to those it is applied to.
That is not to say that equality is not a high ideal that should be strived for in education, as in any other part of life. Equality in education means equality of opportunity to a good education, one that helps each and every student reach his or her potential. A bright student is not going to benefit equally from an education intended for the average student. He or she will be shortchanged.
What needs to happen is that multiple curriculums need to be designed to address the education needs of all the students. Politics need to be removed from the equation by removing the ability of politican
The unspoken assumption underlying all of this brouhaha is that there is something wrong with a game of this type, and especially that there is something wrong with kids and teenagers seeing it.
I've never been convinced that this assumption is in any way valid. I didn't believe it when I was a kid, and I don't believe it today. It isn't that I think any of this is particularly good for kids, or for anyone as far as that goes. The point is that it is not harmful either. If anything it is neutral, which means it just doesn't matter. It doesn't matter any more than anything else anyone sees. Sex is an ordinary part of life for all of us, not some deep dark secret that must be kept hidden at all costs. Attempting to hide things that are sexually explicit from someone because of their age is a monumental waste of time. Not only are you going to fail for the most part (unless you lock them in a closet), but there is nothing to be gained even if you were to succeed. Of all the things that are a danger to a young person, seeing naked bodies and sex portrayed on a computer screen isn't one of them.
When I was a kid I used to think that the sex-phobia exhibited by adults was a sham, a put on, a ruse, a pretention that served to obscure their underlying malice towards the young. I reached this conclusion based upon a simple assmption: no one could actually be as stupid as they were behaving.
I was 30 years old before I finally realized that yes, people really could be that stupid, and that stupidity can even infect an entire culture. Never understimate the destructive power of idiots in large groups.
Lee
There are two problems with attempting to relate population to innovation:
1) There are over 6 billion people on earth right now. In fact, most of the people who have EVER lived are alive right now.
2) Most of these people live in 3rd world ratholes where "innovation" is limited to finding ways of keeping a roof over your head and food in your belly. In some cases you can add finding ways of avoiding the local warlord's henchmen.
Measuring how much innovation there is per billion population is nonsensical because most of those people never have the opportunity to contribute anything. As far as innovation is concerned they don't even exist.
If he wants to attempt to model the relationship between population and innovation, he needs to limit the population in his model to that of developed nations with strong educational systems. If he ever gets around to doing this, I already know what his reaction is going to be:
"Doh!!!"
Lee
Well I can give you reasons why you should use Linux instead of Solaris 10, and I can give you reasons why you should use Linux instead of FreeBSD, but I can't really say very much when it comes to Solaris vs FreeBSD.
Both OS's are certainly making progress, Solaris 10 in particular represents major progress over the previous versions, but neither is quite there yet and the weaknesses of one tend to be shared by the other.
The things I'm thinking of are related to the UI for both systems. Neither uses bash (or even tcsh) as the default shell. Neither uses gnu coreutils for things like ls, cp, rm, etc. These things may not matter to some, but they do matter to me. I'm sure the core OS of each is a very strong and capable system, but the same can be said of Linux and I don't have to fight with it to beat the UI into something usable.
Lee
The comment I was responding to was a response to one of my own comments and a conversation you were not a part of. If you're going to butt into other people's discussions, the least you could do is try to keep up.
The point you succeeded in pretending not to understand is that there are already alternatives to Linux out there, FreeBSD being the most notable example. If it has not been able to steal the thunder, or create comparable thunder of its own, then what chance does a newcomer have?
Linux is, for better or worse, where the attention is at. FreeBSD has users, OpenBSD has users, Darwin has users, hell even Hurd has somebody out there using it and singing its praises. Yet even if you add up all of the communities that are built up around each of these other systems, the sum is still dwarfed by the Linux community.
Now I'm not one of those "BSD is dying" dupes. It isn't dying, but it isn't growing as fast as Linux is and in many ways the effect is the same.
By the way, I LIKE FreeBSD, I just don't have any illusions about its place in the scheme of things.
Lee
Actually do we KNOW that Windows will run? Just because the systems have an intel processor in them doesn't mean they will be able to run windows.
Now if there have been statements made by apple, that their new systems WILL RUN WINDOWS, then I stand corrected. Otherwise I must operate off of the (not unreasonable considering the company's past behavior) assumption that the new macs will be crippled in some way to prevent windows from running.
Lee
I have one word for you:
FreeBSD
I rest my case
Just because they're using x86 processors now does not mean that Apple has seen the light. If you want to run OS-X on an x86 based system then Apple is going to go to great lengths to ensure that you can only run it on one that they sell.
This is a long standing policy when it comes to Macs in general. It wasn't all that long ago that if you wanted to add or replace a hard drive or CDROM drive you were forced to buy one from Apple. The reason is that the hard drive partitioning software and the CDROM drivers both checked the firmware in their respective devices for an Apple tag. If this tag was not found then they would refuse to work. The mac cult made all sorts of outlandish and patently false excuses for this, including a rather large canard about inconsistencies in how different vendors implemented their SCSI interfaces.
In any case my main point is that because OS-X will only run on Apple hardware, its ability to meaninfully compete with Linux as a Windows desktop alternative is greatly reduced.
Macs have ALWAYS attempted to be an alternative to PC's. They've also always been marginal also-rans, largely because of Apple itself. Switching the chip that Apple uses in their systems does not represent any sort of a heartfelt change at Apple. The company will continue to behave in a short-sighted self-limiting manner and Macs will continue to claim a miniscule market share.
Now if Apple really wanted to compete with Windows (Linux isn't even a contender) then they'd license OS-X to PC manufacturers whose systems would have to comply to the technical specifications set by Apple. Microsoft would attempt to make this difficult by threatening (behind closed doors of course) vendors the same way they have been doing in response to Linux. I suspect they would be even more vicious and despicable than normal. But then OS-X is a viable replacement for Windows. All it would take would be a few vendors who didn't care about shipping Windows on their systems to tell MS to go fuck itself. The day that you can buy an OS-X based system from multiple vendors running on commodity hardware would be the day that OS-X gained legitimacy. That is something it lacks right now because no matter how nice the OS might or might not be, the plain fact remains that if you want to use it you're forced to buy funky hardware from a single source. Inexperienced first time home buyers might not care about this, but you can be VERY sure that this is one prime factor dissuading businesses from using OS-X. The other factor being that it won't run Windows apps.
If multiple vendors were selling commodity systems running OS-X then that would be a watershed moment. Ideally these systems would be configured to either dual-boot to windows, or run windows from within a vmware type environment. I suspect that Mickeysoft has clauses in their OEM licenses to prevent this, but even this is not a show-stopper. All Apple has to do is make it easy to configure a system to dual boot AFTER the fact. Include tools that would automatically resize and reconfigure the partitions on the system to make space for Windows, along with a boot loader that made it stupidly easy to choose which OS to run. The ability to run the second OS from its own native partition from within a VM would be the final touch that would make the whole thing work.
Apple could even begin marketing OS-X as Windows friendly if they wanted to. The long-time true believers in the mac community would howl about this I'm sure, but then so what. Pleasing and placating a bunch of nitwit ideologues is hardly a wise business plan.
The main problem with Apple is that it is in the business of trying to sell an ideology to consumers who just want to buy a computer. It is like Steve Jobs said to John Scully when he was trying to convince him to come to Apple from Pepsi, "Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world." Apple's approach is to try and convince the world that it
The more time goes by, the more I think that the term Department of Justice is Orwellian double-speak.
The sad thing is, it doesn't matter who is in the white house. The G-man goon squad constantly seeks to increase its powers while decreasing judicial oversight and public scrutiny. Presidents come and go, administrations come and go, but the bureauacracy that drives this never dies.
This just goes to show that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. The wolf is always at the door. There are other cliches I could envoke as well, but you get the idea.
Lee
Our society's continual fascination with "obscenity" is proof positive that 50% of the population is of below average intelligence. Some people have an almost superstitous attitude towards certain words. This isn't based upon the meaning of the words either since synonyms of these words are not treated with the same trepidation.
Whoever said human beings were rational, lied.
Lee
Whether something is a theat to Linux or not will only matter to those whose preference for it is based upon something other than the objective merits of the system.
If something better than Linux comes along and Linux takes the back seat, how is that a bad thing?
Now I'm not saying that OS-X is better, or that it is worse. I'm just saying that it doesn't matter.
I think that a lot of people are afraid that something will happen to Linux akin to the things that have happened to superior products in the past that were defeated by inferior alternatives.
Luckily the market segment in which Linux dominates is one where technical merit really does matter most. The only way that something can displace Linux is if it is truly better, and if that happens, how is it a bad thing?
Lee
I think you're right, but I also think that monopolies of this sort, or at least their competitive advantage, are always either broken or rendered irrelevant.
Creating a new market where one has a natural monopoly is one avenue to making lots of money. Attempting to maintain that monopoly is a good way of ensuring your own eventual demise or irrelevancy. Apple is a good example of this. The only reason the company is still alive is because the rules of the computer business have changed. There is so much demand for computers that even a marginal player is able to survive off the table scraps. Also the purpose of these computers is tied far more to the internet than it is to the ability to run application X,Y, or Z. Most users, especially the ones that Apple attempts to market to, only care about email and the ability to surf the web, and these are platform agnostic functions. In a way it is kind of funny how this has worked out. The PC rose to dominance not because of IBM or Microsoft, but because of Compaq, Dell, Gateway, and a whole string of companies now long dead. That isn't even mentioning the countless mom and pop shops building systems. The reason this happened is because the PC was an open standard and therefore a commodity. The reason why Macs are still being made today is because the functionality that customers buy them for, namely web browsing and email, are themselves commoditys as features. Platform agnosticism, aka compatability, is something that Apple traditionally worked to undermine and thwart, and yet it is what is keeping the company alive.
I'm not familiar with the Granny Smith system you mentioned, but I suspect that this was born some time during the whole CHRP/PREP debacle, or shortly there after. In other words, when it no longer mattered. It is a shame that IBM and Motorola brought Apple on board the PowerPC initiative. It spelled the doom of PowerPC as a viable alternative to the standard PC. Apple was brought in because IBM and Motorola were under the twin delusions that Apple had a decent OS (not to be confused with how pretty their GUI was) to offer and that the company itself was sane. Neither was true. IBM and Motorola wanted to create a new platform that would be sold by multiple vendors. They understood that commoditizing the hardware is what made the PC dominant, and that only a superior commodity platform would be able to compete with the PC. IBM and Motorola, as the vendors for the CPUs, would make money no matter whose name was on the box. What they didn't have was an operating system to run on these new systems. Back when IBM created the PC it contracted Microsoft to create the OS for it. When the PC became a commodity Microsoft simply rode the wave. So somebody got the bright idea of inviting Apple to the table. Apple's OS already had a presence in the marketplace. If the PPC took off, Apple stood to make a killing both in terms of money and market share. Unfortunately what IBM and Motorola didn't realize is that Apple was insane. Apple agreed to create the OS for the new platform, and then refused to do it, citing technical problems and making other excuses. Apple was under the delusion that they were viable as a hardware company and that protecting their hardware business was vital to the future of the company as a whole, even though they were brought on board for their software. Then some german hackers ported the MacOS to CHRP in under 2 weeks and demoed it at a trade convention. Apple's response was to froth at the mouth and threaten to sue. Apple is the reason why CHRP/PREP systems don't exist today. Apple didn't just bite the hand that fed it, it succeeded in chewing it off. This is why Apple is now switching to Intel. IBM has no reason to want to create faster chips for Apple. Much of the development that Apple has benefited from up to this point was done by IBM and Motorola for other reasons. Apple, through its own short sightedness, avarice and greed, has succeeded in putting itself right back in the same position it
Seven out of ten voices in my head say that acid is a very bad thing.
The other three speak Swahili, French, and some sub-dialect of Choctaw (or so I'm told), so I'm never sure what they say about anything, though they do seem quite conversant with one another.
"Do you really think superior product is sufficient for success? (You must be new here!) Anyway, the nature of modern technique is that any new product can be duplicated by a larger company that will be able to achieve a much higher scale of production, acquire capital, materials, labor, and publicity at a much cheaper price, and afford a far greater up-front loss. There are certainly areas in which a new business is possible, but it requires a lot of luck to find yourself in one."
If you look at companies like Apple and Dec, they were started by people who were trying to service a market that was either unknown to the big players, or was considered to be irrelevant. IBM didn't think there was a market for minicomputers, so Dec made a killing. None of the major computer companies thought there was a market for a personal computer (including Dec ironically), so Apple made a killing.
The key to a successful startup in an industry dominated by 800 pound gorillas is to go after market segments that they are either unaware of, or don't care about. But then this same approach can also lead to disaster because usually there is a good reason why the 800 pound gorillas are neglecting to service potential customers. It is only every so often that myopia sets in to such a degree that opportunity is created. There are companies being started every day that want to be the next Apple or Dec, or even the next Dell. Virtually all of them fail, some quite dramatically, to be replaced with yet more companies whose fate will almost certainly be the same. It is this continual, if unseen, flurry of activity that results in the aforementioned opportunities being taken advantage of. Now sometimes a true visionary will see something that no one else does, or at least no one else in a position to act. But most of the time it is a combination of guile and dumb luck that makes people like Jobs into Billionaires. Jobs and Wozniak wanted to make computers because they loved computers. They didn't see this huge untapped market of people yearning for a computer of their very own. The Apple I was a hack that Wozniak created to impress his friends at the homebrew computer club. Other companies like Processor Tech were making computers and selling them, so Woz and Jobs did also. It wasn't until the computers sold like hot-cakes that Jobs realized they could actually make good money doing it. It was at this point that that he, much to his credit, worked to create a real company with a professional product that had wider appeal than the S-100 systems that were the norm at the time. This was the reason why Apple survived while companies like Processor Tech (whose Sol was a best-of-breed S-100) did not.
There is most certainly still money to be made, markets that are either not being services, or are being under serviced. But virtually no one knows where the next break-out company is going to come from or what sort of technology that new market is going to be based upon. Many are the ones who attempt to figure out the answers to these questions. Almost as many are those who lose a lot of money in the process.
Lee
The problem with the ACLU is that it has become radicalized. It has always leaned towards the left, but then that was not always a bad thing. A left wing that is intellectually honest is a GOOD THING. No one has a monopoly on the truth. As long as the truth is the ultimate goal, and the seekers of truth are intellectually honest, then it doesn't matter what their philosophical preferences are. As time goes by and knowledge and information are accumulated, a truth that was once obscured and difficult to perceive will become obvious to most, if not all. This is the basis upon which democracy itself operates, that given enough eyes, all bugs become shallow.
The problem with the left in America today is that it is primarily made up of those who lack intellectual honesty. What has happened is that as time has gone by, the truth of certain ideas and conclusions that are referred to collectively as "conservative" has become more and more apparent. This is why the country as a whole is shifting to the "right." It is also the reason why you have so called "neo-cons," many of whom are old time lefties who have adopted conservative approaches to the problems that the left's own approaches failed to resolve, such as poverty, racial and gender equality, etc.
As more and more people of the left move to the right, the result is that the only people remaining on the left are the extremists, the radicals. This is why Howard Dean is the head of the DNC. It is also why once great and honorable institutions like the ACLU have become tools and weapons used by the radicals to interfere with our nation's steady progression to the right.
The reason that this is a problem is because they are desperate. They see their take on things becoming increasingly unpopular and even despised. Now if they were intellectually honest and capable of some degree of introspection, then they might respond by trying to understand why their ideas are no longer as popular as they once were, and whether they themselves might have bet on the wrong horse so to speak. Unfortunately this isn't in their nature. So instead they engage in increasingly bizarre behavior as their desperation grows. What we are seeing the ACLU do nowadays is engage in blatant attacks against the institutional strongholds of their ideological "opponents", namely mainstream religion. For the radicalized left, christianity is seen as the cornerstone of "bourgeoisie" society, the destruction of which is their ultimate goal. This has always been the goal of the far left, but only very recently has it become the goal of the left as a whole. The reason is that the far left essentially IS the left nowadays. Everyone else has drifted away from the left to a greater or lesser degree.
There are many problems with the things that modern radicalized left is doing. In the case of the ACLU, they are intentionally misconstruing freedom of religion to be freedom FROM religion, in practice if not in words. By doing so they are attempting to oppress those whose ideas are not their own. They are engaging in the very sort of behavior the ACLU was originally founded to fight against. They are engaging in similar shenanigans when it comes to freedom of speech.
Central in their efforts is the introduction of a pernicious concept into the public consciousness, the "right to not be offended." You see this idea being envoked every time that someone claims certain ideas are "offensive" to them and should therefore not be expressed. This is nothing more than censorship, which is itself a sure sign that an unpleasant truth or truths have come to light that threaten those with the power to suppress them.
When someone starts in with the the "I'm offended" routine, they're not lodging an honest complaint. They're not complaining about having to hear something they don't like. They're complaining because they don't want OTHERS to hear the things they don't like. This is especially obvious when someone complains about things that they can choose not to
This makes me wonder why the upgrade process is being run under the target installation in the first place. How about upgrading the system off-line through a live-cd of some sort?
This live-CD would be able to access the installation's filesystems and examine the configuration, particularly the database that APT keeps of the installed packages. The relevant updated packages could then be installed without worrying about clobbering libraries and/or other files that the update process is dependent upon.
At the very least this should be an option to fall back upon. The update process should examine what needs to be updated and then advise the user on whether or not it was safe to run the update from the installed system or whether the live-CD method should be used instead. If you're upgrading from one major release to the next, then you're almost certainly going to have to reboot anyway regardless of what upgrade method you use.
Lee