"Funny Apple is setting Snow Leopard to be nothing more than a new software stack, removing old features, and a general code clean up."
Yeah, but Apple is a special case. Face it, because of the Reality Distortion Field, Steve Jobs could take a dump in a box, tell Apple users that it's Insanely Great!, and millions would line up to order it. And I say that typing from an eMac. Jobs has the ability to get his customers to do ludicrous, expensive things. So Apple may not be the fairest example of "sell quality, and it'll sell". Apple could almost sell anything and it would sell.
And I really, truly hope it works out for them. I hate for it to go the wrong way... What if it does? What effect would that have on other companies considering opening up their code? Sun took a big gamble. They didn't GPL some lame side project... they surrendered their bread and butter. And the fiscal results thus far have been, shall we say, not encouraging.
I think they made a mistake. IBM doesn't open source everything. Unless I missed it, their mainframe OS and AIX are still closed source, and it hasn't hurt them. Face it, most really profitable IT products involving software have at least a degree of exclusivity. If you give away the store, what's left to sell? Thus far only Red Hat has managed to make significant money selling services, and even they accomplished that by introducing a level of exclusivity, namely by making it very very hard for the average user to get a whole copy of RHEL without paying for it; they make you go through a song and dance to get the code, and then you have to compile it all. So technically they're free, but not practically.
It's a shame too, because Sun's latest line of Sparc processors are simply outstanding. They don't have record breaking clock speed, but in work-per-clock-cycle, and in work-per-watt, the new Sparcs are really outstanding. They also had some really good product ideas in their emergency-mobile computing areas... putting instant server farms in truck containers, for instance.
While "giving away the store" has hurt them, I also think their current leadership has hurt them as well. Paying 1 billion dollars for MySQL? Are you kidding? When Jonathan Schwartz was bumped to the top office, it was said that there was a collective "what the???" at Sun. I think his performance since then has only reinforced that.
"I know Sun has the stigma of selling only overpriced iron"
They're considered overpriced now, but the reason Sun (and DEC as well) hit the big time in the first place was because their products were far cheaper, but just as reliable, as Big Iron products from IBM/Sperry/Burroughs/etc. It's not so much that Sun got greedy as X86, Windows Servers, and Linux came and changed the marketplace the same way SunOS and Sparc servers did.
"It is absolutely beautiful and pristine up there, but drilling would arguably have much less impact on human settlement than strip mining the Rockies or the Appalachians."
As far as ANWR being this pristine, Edenic paradise, has anyone actually seen the area where they want to do the actual drilling? It's a lousy marsh. When it isn't frozen, it resembles a muddy football field. People that argue against drilling on the basis of despoiling ANWR's "beauty" either have lousy tastes or are being disingenuous. The area where they want to drill is mainly occupied by mud, grasses, and flies.
"Perhaps you're instead referring to his "present" votes, of which he cast about 130 total. Of course, if you knew anything at all about the Illinois legislature you'd know that his use of the "present" vote is entirely normal."
It may be allowed, but the truth is, voting "present" is just a way for a politician to avoid taking a stand or going on record.
"Actually, it's the Bill of Rights and not the Constitution"
The Bill of Rights is nothing more than a name for the first ten amendments to the Constitution. And amendments are part of the Constitution, so you're quite firmly wrong on that.
"The Constitution and Bill of Rights don't grant rights to the people, they provide a list of rights that the government should be unable to take away from the people."
The Supreme Court long ago ruled that the Constitution does apply to all citizens, and does directly enumerate their rights, thank you Mr. Constitutional Scholar. You're using the same old lame argument that segregationists used, and it's no more valid when you write it than they.
" The actual text is, "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." "
You should read the actual text yourself. The first part lays out the reasoning for the right, but the second part guarantees the right. Even if the circumstances for giving the right have changed (the left-wing "but we have the National Guard now" argument), the right itself still isn't voided. The only way to strike a Constitutional right is the ammendment process. You can't simply have a judge go "oh well, times are different, this right isn't needed any longer". You simply cannot void a Constitutional right without actually changing the Constitutuion itself.
SCOTUS will likely rule on the individual right issue, and if experts are correct, is likely to put this foolishness about the 2nd being a "collective right" to bed forever. There are no collective rights. Rights are by their very definition for individuals.
... Facebook is "winning" because, among other things, it has a cleaner and more attractive interface. And I don't know about anyone else, but I don't get constantly barraged with model-wannabe friend requests on Facebook. The aspiring models and amateur porn stars have all but made MySpace unusable. MySpace's administration can't seem to filter them out fast enough.
"Just look at the Dan Rather incident, he wasn't even responsible for that content, and he got shit canned for it. Rather's job on the show was to read the news, whatever was given to him and do the show, shows like that never have the anchor do much beyond that and a few interviews."
That's a crock, sir. Dan Rather was not an innocent bystander in the reporting of that story. He wasn't a stiff mannequin that simply read what the teleprompter told him to say. He was deeply involved in the preparation of that story, and got fired because he refused to refute it, even when evidence proved the documents were faked with a word processor. And to this day, he still defends the writers and fact checkers of that story, all evidence that they screwed up to the contrary.
"* blending opinion with news and calling it objective
putting only one political view on the air and calling themselves "balanced"
reporting as factual news (and almost verbatim) the "talking points" released by the GOP"
I hate to tell you this, Anonymous Coward, but people have been blending opinion with News since people have been doing news. Humans aren't Vulcans, they aren't robots. They have opinions, and that's always going to color journalism to one extent or another. In your righteous anger, I don't see you condeming Keith Olbermann and MSNBC. I don't see you condemning Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert (yes, I know they have comedy shows, but face it, more twentysomethings get their news from those two than from CNN or FOX or the New York Times. Jon Stewart's protests aside, he is a major news source now).
You seem to be mainly pissed that an opinion you don't like is popular at one network. That's mighty greedy of you, considering that every other broadcast/cable news source is considered either centrist or left leaning. And before you start bitching about Talk Radio, it's audience isn't as big, and the fault of Air America's failure isn't due to any conspiracy; even liberal listeners think the network sucks. You guys fix it, and then get back to us on talk radio. Besides, you do have NPR, which is pretty popular.
Meantime, where conservatives once had a majority of popular Internet outlets, liberals have since caught up and surpassed them. Academia also tends to be more liberal, and academia is all about the spread of ideas. There are also as many liberal political magazines as their are conservative ones. And where conservatives once had more think-tanks than liberals, that gap has disappeared as well. MoveOn.org is arguably more influential than the AEI or the Heritage Foundation now. So it's not like liberal ideas can't get a fair shot in being heard. Liberal views and ideas are heard everywhere, arguably in more venues than conservative ones.
If you don't like Fox, don't watch it. It's one network. It's not like your choices are limited. And it seems like you're mainly pissed that they're allowed to have an audience at all.
I thought he was funny 20 years ago when he was topical. In his recent stuff, I just saw him as a bitter old hippy, taking cheap pot shots at the Republican establishment. I saw no humor or insight, just a bunch of cursing, whining, and hypocrisy. The early stuff, the routines that made his reputation, were outstandingly funny.
Pretty much. I almost memorized Occupation:Foole when I was a kid. But I haven't been about to watch anything of his in years now. He became kind of the leftist analogue to the old guy yelling for those damn kids to get off his lawn.
"...and then the greatest comedy legend of all time goes belly up!?
Look, the guy was a great one, but the greatest? I think you may be getting a little carried away there. Carlin wasn't even the greatest of his own generation... that honor would have to go to Richard Pryor, not to mention all the pioneers of previous generations. I'd have a hard time saying that, when all was said and done, Carlin was greater than Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, the Stooges, the Marx Brothers, and especially, Lucille Ball.
"The initial competitors were IBM and Apple, both are alive and well"
First off, IBM wasn't a Microsoft competitor until OS2. Up to that point, Microsoft was a business partner... IBM supplied hardware, Microsoft supplied software. It wasn't until MS screwed IBM that the relationship turned bad. Remember, OS2 was jointly developed by both (but more by MS than IBM), and the agreement was for OS2 to replace Windows. MS then took what work they'd done on the project, poured it into a project that would become Windows NT, and essentially stabbed IBM in the back. So while IBM was hugely profitable at the time because of their hugely rich mainframe business, their PC sector was poorly run, very much so. The PC Jr in particular was a fiasco. And that's why the cloners came and destroyed IBM in that market so quickly.
Second, while Apple was also profitable at this time, it was because of the Apple II cash cow, which provided the majority of Apple revenues until 1986. We think the Mac as legendary today because of what it could do at the time, but sales were initially dissapointing. And pick up any of several books about Apple during the period and you'll find out just how horrible Apple's leadership was. Woz was basically a geek that didn't want any management responsibility, Mike Markula was a VC guy that had good business sense, but didn't know anything about technology, and so Steve Jobs basically ran the place on the strength of his personality. And the problem is that back then, Steve Jobs was a lousy manager. He was great at motivating people, but he couldn't manage for sh*t. He consistently ran over budget, over schedule, overworked and terrorized a very talented team, and basically acted like a spoiled, imperious rich kid. People put up with it because of the reality distortion field, but he was just an all around awful guy. On trip to Japan to inspect a Sony floppy drive factory, he made such an ass of himself that Markula pulled him aside and threatened to fly back to the US without him. All told, he was so bad at what he did, Apple fired him, remember? Jobs is a great business leader now, but he really didn't learn how to manage until his failure at NeXT, where suddenly, it was his money he was burning through, not someone else's. Before NeXT, Jobs always got what Jobs wanted, usually with someone else's dollars. He was at times more concerned about the ambience of his facilities than he was of the actual product. He learned hard lessons about business priorities. Read about his period at NeXT. Jobs will never be a humble man, but his years at NeXT really wised him up. Failure really is the best teacher.
Bottom line... at the time period Bill Gates is talking about, IBM and Apple were badly run in the personal computer market, and Microsoft just took advantage of it.
"Nor did IBM's 'monopoly' of the PC market last long, as more than a few companies were quick off the mark to get their entries to market. So quickly and so successfully that IBM was all but knocked out of the ring within a couple of years."
Compaq, in particular, cannibalized much of the PC and PC Jr business very rapidly. Compaq is basically responsible for killing IBM and Packard Bell in the American home PC market.
Yes, and CP/M and p-system were more expensive, and thus DOS became the dominant system. They gained a monopoly through a bit of luck and a bit of business acumen. Then they exploited that monopoly.
So Microsoft offers the most desirable of three choices, based on multiple factors... cost among them... and they became, by customer choice, the overwhelming favorite. That makes them predatory at this point? And while MS was the favorite choice of PC users, PC's still weren't the goliath of the market yet.... until the mid-80's, the Apple II ruled the roost, and then the Macintosh arrived, and sold very respectably. The Amiga also provided a serious challenge. Microsoft had a technical monopoly of sorts, but it was on one platform... they had significant competition from other platforms all throughout the 80's. Microsoft didn't become truly dominant until the early 90's, when Windows 3.1 really began to popularize home computing, And they sealed it by knocking the ball out of the park with Windows 95. Then they started acting like a monopoly.
In the big money sector... business IT... Microsoft was still a bit player until the 90's, and they had to get their foot in the door by marketing Microsoft operating systems as "playing nice with others"... meaning, yes, you can run Windows as a workstation on your existing (and expensive) Unix and Novell servers.
Microsoft did become a monopoly, I grant you, but they were nowhere near one in the time frame you mention. They were, while profitable, still small fry in the early 80's, and made much of their money writing software for other platforms. Excel was a Macintosh product long before it was a Windows product.
"Gas prices dropping below $1.00 a gallon here during that time frame probably didn't help but I would at least think that GM would have liked to have sold those cars rather than destroy them if they did not have some other incentive not to."
GM destroyed them for a number of reasons... tax benefits as a write-off for one, and GM was advised that there were some extra liability issues because of the battery technology. Also, they were a nightmare to service. While GM could have required buyers to sign waivers of non-liability for safety and maintenance, it's likely that it wouldn't have stood up in court. When you take into account the fact that GM lost 2 billion dollars on the project, they just decided to cut their losses and scrap them.
There's a pretty good account of all the EV1's problems here. Apparently, working on the battery could be very dangerous, which explains the liability concerns.
"Yes, but cars *can* be powered by elecricity. So nuclear energy *does* have something to do with our dependence on gasoline."
Cars can be powered by electricity, but that doesn't make electric cars a viable alternative to gasoline cars, because the battery technology is completely insufficient to meet our needs in automobiles. There's a good reason the EV1 died, and it wasn't a conspiracy. The battery performance sucked. With careful, judicious use, you got two hours driving, max out of electric cars, and it took too long to recharge them to be of any real convenience. The best results you're going to get with an electric car is with a gasoline/electric hybrid. Simply put, there's nothing out there right now that gives us the performance we want without an internal combustion engine.
"They all have at least one good point though: what do we do with the waste?"
Reprocess most of it. Bury the rest of it.
There's no technical or economic reason to ban reprocessing. Up to 92 percent of spent fuel can be re-used if reprocessed. Current law bans the practice. That's a political decision, made by the Carter Administration, because reprocessing spent fuel rods creates small amounts of Plutonium as a byproduct, and the argument was "but terrorists might get the Plutonium!". Well, they wouldn't if you secured the Plutonium. It's a silly argument. If that's the reason, then a President could solve the problem with a stroke of a pen; simply mandate that the military takes charge of the Plutonium and is responsible for guarding it. For those of you that have served in the military, you know how fanatical security forces are about the nuclear weapons in their charge. Recent USAF screwups aside, try and approach a nuclear weapons storage facility and see what happens to you. The security argument against reprocessing is simply farcical. France supplies nearly all of their power with Nuclear, and they reprocess their fuel to minimize waste. To date, Al Qaeda or Islamic Jihad doesn't seem to have been able to steal the French plutonium.
As for what to do with the remaining waste, just store it. There's several ways to do it. The easiest thing to do is simply store it in a secure facility. Do you know what highly technical mechanism is required to store spent fuel rods? A pool of water, 3 feet deep. France stores all their remaining nuclear waste in one single building, in a pool of water.
If you prefer to bury it, just encase the rods in glass, and bury it in a place where there's no water table. For the people going "Gasp! Radioactive materials! Underground!"... where do you think we got the uranium from the the first place? We dug it up. Underground.
The utter hysteria over nuclear technologies far, far outweighs the actual risks of nuclear technologies.
" So I'd say it's good news that this can become a discussion, and a good sign that the "drill more oil" answer isn't going to cut it anymore."
Why should we have to pick a "one or the other" option? Why can't we build more nuclear plants and and drill for more oil? For that matter, why can't we do both of those and drill/dig for other plentiful hydrocarbon energy sources.... shale, tar sands, and the big one, coal. Do you realize that the United States has far more coal than any other nation, by far? We have 250 gigatonnes, nearly one quarter of the earth's coal supply, and if we used coal for every energy need, we'd never use up that supply in several lifetimes. And we can convert coal to gasoline; last time I checked, you can't fill up your car at the nuclear power plant.
People use polution and carbon as an excuse not to use hydrocarbon fuels, but face facts... we built the modern world on fossil fuels, and they're not going away for hundreds of years, probably. Even with nuclear, geothermal, solar, wind... that's just not enough to supply our energy needs. It's certainly not enough to supply the needs of a hungry, developing third world.
By all means, make gas engines more fuel efficient. By all means, continue to develop solar and wind technologies. But it's patently stupid to stand still on current energy supplies while we develop that stuff. If we're smart enough work on improving solar and wind, then we're damn well smart enough to work on fuel efficiency and cleaning/filtration technology for hydrocarbon energy sources. Don't just restrict us to "pick A or B. Pick everything that you need. Our "energy crisis" is largely self-imposed. We've got plentiful sources of energy. The US has enough energy sources to be an energy exporter if we so desired. We just have to make the decision that we're going to do it.
"This isn't like Wal-Mart dragging down the wages of an entire town"
Everywhere Wal Mart has gone, its had beneficial effects for the area as a whole. Mom and Pop dime store go out of business because of big bad Wal Mart? So what? Small food stores and delis go under because of chain grocery stores too. General stores and hardware stores went under when Sears and JC Penney were dominant.
Wherever a chain store like Wal Mart or Target or Costco opens, a whole ecosystem of small stores spring up around it. You not only get cheaper prices with chains, you also get a much better selection of goods. The tax base always... always increases in that area, not decreases. And last I checked, Wal Mart isn't the only chain that doesn't pay big bucks to their employees. Are you bitching about Best Buy, Circuit City, and Food Lion as well? Do you shop at those stores anyway, or do you voluntarily pay higher prices at places like Whole Foods? Do you seriously expect anyone to pay good money for slinging stock at a department store? Had Wal Mart never come to these small towns, how is it that you figure their income or the town's tax base would have increased otherwise?
You people act like Wal Mart conquers and forces entire populations to shopping enslavement. This is a market economy, and businesses succeed because they give customers what they want, or someone else comes and takes their business away. If there's money, there's going to be competition for it. Mom and Pop stores, cute and quaint Americana that they were, weren't getting it done. Someone else built a better mousetrap. For that matter, why don't you bemoan the loss of small bookstores, neighborhood gas stations, and Five and Dimes while you're at it? They've all been swept away too, and Wal Mart had nothing to do with their death.
While you're at it, would you like to curse the web? Amazon and their like are also doing what Wal Mart did, only on a wider scale, and you don't get the benefit of any local brick and mortar presence... or the tax funds they bring. But would you argue that Amazon has been a bad thing? If you feel that strongly about small businesses, you patronize them, by all means. But don't expect to be able to force myself and other customers to shop at such places when there's a better alternative.
The University of Alabama Crimson Tide, wearing a shade of red, has lost six years straight to their in state rivals, the Auburn University Tigers, wearing blue.
Hayden Fry (former U. of Iowa football coach) was a Psych major, and tried this kind of color-psychological warfare on opposing teams by painting the visiting locker rooms pink. Iowa was a good program under Fry, but they didn't beat big opponents any more than experts thought they would, so I guess the pink thing was a failure too.
Don't pick on France too much for this. This is indicative of a wider attitude among all EU governments, especially the EU beuracracy itself. Witness their threats against Ireland for daring to vote against the Lisbon Treaty. The previous EU constitution was shot down by French and Dutch voters, so this time, the EU simply decided it would bypass voters completely (hey, nice tactic) and rush it through European legislatures instead. The only problem is that Ireland's constitution forbids such a thing there. Big issues like that must be decided by national referendums. The EU is already talking about ways they can simply bypass Irish voters now. They've developed a troubling "we know best" attitude there, and Europeans won't be able to vote out the EU power structure the way they can vote out their own legislators. Rather than the exception, this kind of information micromanagement is likely to become the rule in Europe, with governments deciding what info is acceptable for public consumption, for the "public's own good".
" OLPC is NOT aimed at places with current food/water/shelter shortages"
You're making too much of a difference between "undeveloped" and "still developing" then, because the later still has those problems in abundance. OLPC may not have been intended for jungle tribes with no housing, but just because it was headed for places where roofs exist still doesn't mean that those places don't have hunger, water quality problems, and economic stagnation. The priority to get those things first still trumps getting a weird laptop to the kids there.
"I think the reason is that the OLPC was always a solution in search of a problem. It started out as "lets make a cheap laptop"."
And had that stayed the main focus, then perhaps the project would have been more successful. What the military calls "Mission Creep" ended up sinking an interesting, practical approach to making laptops more affordable.
I don't know why people are surprised. Failure is the norm for utopian pipe dreams, not the exception. Had any significant number of these machines made it to the third world, things would have been even worse. Graft, theft, and the blackmarket would rule the day.
Perhaps it's the cynic in me, but I always saw this project as a rather hare-brained attempt at making MIT significant again the way it had been in it's Project Athena glory years. It's not so much that Negroponte failed to delivery a solution for a given problem, as much as MIT developed a solution no one asked for or wanted.
Slashdot Mirror
"Funny Apple is setting Snow Leopard to be nothing more than a new software stack, removing old features, and a general code clean up."
Yeah, but Apple is a special case. Face it, because of the Reality Distortion Field, Steve Jobs could take a dump in a box, tell Apple users that it's Insanely Great!, and millions would line up to order it. And I say that typing from an eMac. Jobs has the ability to get his customers to do ludicrous, expensive things. So Apple may not be the fairest example of "sell quality, and it'll sell". Apple could almost sell anything and it would sell.
I think they made a mistake. IBM doesn't open source everything. Unless I missed it, their mainframe OS and AIX are still closed source, and it hasn't hurt them. Face it, most really profitable IT products involving software have at least a degree of exclusivity. If you give away the store, what's left to sell? Thus far only Red Hat has managed to make significant money selling services, and even they accomplished that by introducing a level of exclusivity, namely by making it very very hard for the average user to get a whole copy of RHEL without paying for it; they make you go through a song and dance to get the code, and then you have to compile it all. So technically they're free, but not practically.
It's a shame too, because Sun's latest line of Sparc processors are simply outstanding. They don't have record breaking clock speed, but in work-per-clock-cycle, and in work-per-watt, the new Sparcs are really outstanding. They also had some really good product ideas in their emergency-mobile computing areas... putting instant server farms in truck containers, for instance.
While "giving away the store" has hurt them, I also think their current leadership has hurt them as well. Paying 1 billion dollars for MySQL? Are you kidding? When Jonathan Schwartz was bumped to the top office, it was said that there was a collective "what the???" at Sun. I think his performance since then has only reinforced that.
"I know Sun has the stigma of selling only overpriced iron"
They're considered overpriced now, but the reason Sun (and DEC as well) hit the big time in the first place was because their products were far cheaper, but just as reliable, as Big Iron products from IBM/Sperry/Burroughs/etc. It's not so much that Sun got greedy as X86, Windows Servers, and Linux came and changed the marketplace the same way SunOS and Sparc servers did.
"It is absolutely beautiful and pristine up there, but drilling would arguably have much less impact on human settlement than strip mining the Rockies or the Appalachians."
As far as ANWR being this pristine, Edenic paradise, has anyone actually seen the area where they want to do the actual drilling? It's a lousy marsh. When it isn't frozen, it resembles a muddy football field. People that argue against drilling on the basis of despoiling ANWR's "beauty" either have lousy tastes or are being disingenuous. The area where they want to drill is mainly occupied by mud, grasses, and flies.
"Perhaps you're instead referring to his "present" votes, of which he cast about 130 total. Of course, if you knew anything at all about the Illinois legislature you'd know that his use of the "present" vote is entirely normal."
It may be allowed, but the truth is, voting "present" is just a way for a politician to avoid taking a stand or going on record.
"Actually, it's the Bill of Rights and not the Constitution"
The Bill of Rights is nothing more than a name for the first ten amendments to the Constitution. And amendments are part of the Constitution, so you're quite firmly wrong on that.
"The Constitution and Bill of Rights don't grant rights to the people, they provide a list of rights that the government should be unable to take away from the people."
The Supreme Court long ago ruled that the Constitution does apply to all citizens, and does directly enumerate their rights, thank you Mr. Constitutional Scholar. You're using the same old lame argument that segregationists used, and it's no more valid when you write it than they.
" The actual text is, "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." "
You should read the actual text yourself. The first part lays out the reasoning for the right, but the second part guarantees the right. Even if the circumstances for giving the right have changed (the left-wing "but we have the National Guard now" argument), the right itself still isn't voided. The only way to strike a Constitutional right is the ammendment process. You can't simply have a judge go "oh well, times are different, this right isn't needed any longer". You simply cannot void a Constitutional right without actually changing the Constitutuion itself.
SCOTUS will likely rule on the individual right issue, and if experts are correct, is likely to put this foolishness about the 2nd being a "collective right" to bed forever. There are no collective rights. Rights are by their very definition for individuals.
... Facebook is "winning" because, among other things, it has a cleaner and more attractive interface. And I don't know about anyone else, but I don't get constantly barraged with model-wannabe friend requests on Facebook. The aspiring models and amateur porn stars have all but made MySpace unusable. MySpace's administration can't seem to filter them out fast enough.
"Just look at the Dan Rather incident, he wasn't even responsible for that content, and he got shit canned for it. Rather's job on the show was to read the news, whatever was given to him and do the show, shows like that never have the anchor do much beyond that and a few interviews."
That's a crock, sir. Dan Rather was not an innocent bystander in the reporting of that story. He wasn't a stiff mannequin that simply read what the teleprompter told him to say. He was deeply involved in the preparation of that story, and got fired because he refused to refute it, even when evidence proved the documents were faked with a word processor. And to this day, he still defends the writers and fact checkers of that story, all evidence that they screwed up to the contrary.
"* blending opinion with news and calling it objective
putting only one political view on the air and calling themselves "balanced"
reporting as factual news (and almost verbatim) the "talking points" released by the GOP"
I hate to tell you this, Anonymous Coward, but people have been blending opinion with News since people have been doing news. Humans aren't Vulcans, they aren't robots. They have opinions, and that's always going to color journalism to one extent or another. In your righteous anger, I don't see you condeming Keith Olbermann and MSNBC. I don't see you condemning Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert (yes, I know they have comedy shows, but face it, more twentysomethings get their news from those two than from CNN or FOX or the New York Times. Jon Stewart's protests aside, he is a major news source now).
You seem to be mainly pissed that an opinion you don't like is popular at one network. That's mighty greedy of you, considering that every other broadcast/cable news source is considered either centrist or left leaning. And before you start bitching about Talk Radio, it's audience isn't as big, and the fault of Air America's failure isn't due to any conspiracy; even liberal listeners think the network sucks. You guys fix it, and then get back to us on talk radio. Besides, you do have NPR, which is pretty popular.
Meantime, where conservatives once had a majority of popular Internet outlets, liberals have since caught up and surpassed them. Academia also tends to be more liberal, and academia is all about the spread of ideas. There are also as many liberal political magazines as their are conservative ones. And where conservatives once had more think-tanks than liberals, that gap has disappeared as well. MoveOn.org is arguably more influential than the AEI or the Heritage Foundation now. So it's not like liberal ideas can't get a fair shot in being heard. Liberal views and ideas are heard everywhere, arguably in more venues than conservative ones.
If you don't like Fox, don't watch it. It's one network. It's not like your choices are limited. And it seems like you're mainly pissed that they're allowed to have an audience at all.
Pretty much. I almost memorized Occupation:Foole when I was a kid. But I haven't been about to watch anything of his in years now. He became kind of the leftist analogue to the old guy yelling for those damn kids to get off his lawn.I thought he was funny 20 years ago when he was topical. In his recent stuff, I just saw him as a bitter old hippy, taking cheap pot shots at the Republican establishment. I saw no humor or insight, just a bunch of cursing, whining, and hypocrisy. The early stuff, the routines that made his reputation, were outstandingly funny.
"...and then the greatest comedy legend of all time goes belly up!?
Look, the guy was a great one, but the greatest? I think you may be getting a little carried away there. Carlin wasn't even the greatest of his own generation... that honor would have to go to Richard Pryor, not to mention all the pioneers of previous generations. I'd have a hard time saying that, when all was said and done, Carlin was greater than Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, the Stooges, the Marx Brothers, and especially, Lucille Ball.
"The initial competitors were IBM and Apple, both are alive and well"
First off, IBM wasn't a Microsoft competitor until OS2. Up to that point, Microsoft was a business partner... IBM supplied hardware, Microsoft supplied software. It wasn't until MS screwed IBM that the relationship turned bad. Remember, OS2 was jointly developed by both (but more by MS than IBM), and the agreement was for OS2 to replace Windows. MS then took what work they'd done on the project, poured it into a project that would become Windows NT, and essentially stabbed IBM in the back. So while IBM was hugely profitable at the time because of their hugely rich mainframe business, their PC sector was poorly run, very much so. The PC Jr in particular was a fiasco. And that's why the cloners came and destroyed IBM in that market so quickly.
Second, while Apple was also profitable at this time, it was because of the Apple II cash cow, which provided the majority of Apple revenues until 1986. We think the Mac as legendary today because of what it could do at the time, but sales were initially dissapointing. And pick up any of several books about Apple during the period and you'll find out just how horrible Apple's leadership was. Woz was basically a geek that didn't want any management responsibility, Mike Markula was a VC guy that had good business sense, but didn't know anything about technology, and so Steve Jobs basically ran the place on the strength of his personality. And the problem is that back then, Steve Jobs was a lousy manager. He was great at motivating people, but he couldn't manage for sh*t. He consistently ran over budget, over schedule, overworked and terrorized a very talented team, and basically acted like a spoiled, imperious rich kid. People put up with it because of the reality distortion field, but he was just an all around awful guy. On trip to Japan to inspect a Sony floppy drive factory, he made such an ass of himself that Markula pulled him aside and threatened to fly back to the US without him. All told, he was so bad at what he did, Apple fired him, remember? Jobs is a great business leader now, but he really didn't learn how to manage until his failure at NeXT, where suddenly, it was his money he was burning through, not someone else's. Before NeXT, Jobs always got what Jobs wanted, usually with someone else's dollars. He was at times more concerned about the ambience of his facilities than he was of the actual product. He learned hard lessons about business priorities. Read about his period at NeXT. Jobs will never be a humble man, but his years at NeXT really wised him up. Failure really is the best teacher.
Bottom line... at the time period Bill Gates is talking about, IBM and Apple were badly run in the personal computer market, and Microsoft just took advantage of it.
"Nor did IBM's 'monopoly' of the PC market last long, as more than a few companies were quick off the mark to get their entries to market. So quickly and so successfully that IBM was all but knocked out of the ring within a couple of years."
Compaq, in particular, cannibalized much of the PC and PC Jr business very rapidly. Compaq is basically responsible for killing IBM and Packard Bell in the American home PC market.
Yes, and CP/M and p-system were more expensive, and thus DOS became the dominant system. They gained a monopoly through a bit of luck and a bit of business acumen. Then they exploited that monopoly.
So Microsoft offers the most desirable of three choices, based on multiple factors... cost among them... and they became, by customer choice, the overwhelming favorite. That makes them predatory at this point? And while MS was the favorite choice of PC users, PC's still weren't the goliath of the market yet.... until the mid-80's, the Apple II ruled the roost, and then the Macintosh arrived, and sold very respectably. The Amiga also provided a serious challenge. Microsoft had a technical monopoly of sorts, but it was on one platform... they had significant competition from other platforms all throughout the 80's. Microsoft didn't become truly dominant until the early 90's, when Windows 3.1 really began to popularize home computing, And they sealed it by knocking the ball out of the park with Windows 95. Then they started acting like a monopoly.In the big money sector... business IT... Microsoft was still a bit player until the 90's, and they had to get their foot in the door by marketing Microsoft operating systems as "playing nice with others"... meaning, yes, you can run Windows as a workstation on your existing (and expensive) Unix and Novell servers.
Microsoft did become a monopoly, I grant you, but they were nowhere near one in the time frame you mention. They were, while profitable, still small fry in the early 80's, and made much of their money writing software for other platforms. Excel was a Macintosh product long before it was a Windows product.
"Gas prices dropping below $1.00 a gallon here during that time frame probably didn't help but I would at least think that GM would have liked to have sold those cars rather than destroy them if they did not have some other incentive not to."
GM destroyed them for a number of reasons... tax benefits as a write-off for one, and GM was advised that there were some extra liability issues because of the battery technology. Also, they were a nightmare to service. While GM could have required buyers to sign waivers of non-liability for safety and maintenance, it's likely that it wouldn't have stood up in court. When you take into account the fact that GM lost 2 billion dollars on the project, they just decided to cut their losses and scrap them.
There's a pretty good account of all the EV1's problems here. Apparently, working on the battery could be very dangerous, which explains the liability concerns.
"Yes, but cars *can* be powered by elecricity. So nuclear energy *does* have something to do with our dependence on gasoline."
Cars can be powered by electricity, but that doesn't make electric cars a viable alternative to gasoline cars, because the battery technology is completely insufficient to meet our needs in automobiles. There's a good reason the EV1 died, and it wasn't a conspiracy. The battery performance sucked. With careful, judicious use, you got two hours driving, max out of electric cars, and it took too long to recharge them to be of any real convenience. The best results you're going to get with an electric car is with a gasoline/electric hybrid. Simply put, there's nothing out there right now that gives us the performance we want without an internal combustion engine.
"They all have at least one good point though: what do we do with the waste?"
Reprocess most of it. Bury the rest of it.
There's no technical or economic reason to ban reprocessing. Up to 92 percent of spent fuel can be re-used if reprocessed. Current law bans the practice. That's a political decision, made by the Carter Administration, because reprocessing spent fuel rods creates small amounts of Plutonium as a byproduct, and the argument was "but terrorists might get the Plutonium!". Well, they wouldn't if you secured the Plutonium. It's a silly argument. If that's the reason, then a President could solve the problem with a stroke of a pen; simply mandate that the military takes charge of the Plutonium and is responsible for guarding it. For those of you that have served in the military, you know how fanatical security forces are about the nuclear weapons in their charge. Recent USAF screwups aside, try and approach a nuclear weapons storage facility and see what happens to you. The security argument against reprocessing is simply farcical. France supplies nearly all of their power with Nuclear, and they reprocess their fuel to minimize waste. To date, Al Qaeda or Islamic Jihad doesn't seem to have been able to steal the French plutonium.
As for what to do with the remaining waste, just store it. There's several ways to do it. The easiest thing to do is simply store it in a secure facility. Do you know what highly technical mechanism is required to store spent fuel rods? A pool of water, 3 feet deep. France stores all their remaining nuclear waste in one single building, in a pool of water.
If you prefer to bury it, just encase the rods in glass, and bury it in a place where there's no water table. For the people going "Gasp! Radioactive materials! Underground!"... where do you think we got the uranium from the the first place? We dug it up. Underground.
The utter hysteria over nuclear technologies far, far outweighs the actual risks of nuclear technologies.
" So I'd say it's good news that this can become a discussion, and a good sign that the "drill more oil" answer isn't going to cut it anymore."
Why should we have to pick a "one or the other" option? Why can't we build more nuclear plants and and drill for more oil? For that matter, why can't we do both of those and drill/dig for other plentiful hydrocarbon energy sources.... shale, tar sands, and the big one, coal. Do you realize that the United States has far more coal than any other nation, by far? We have 250 gigatonnes, nearly one quarter of the earth's coal supply, and if we used coal for every energy need, we'd never use up that supply in several lifetimes. And we can convert coal to gasoline; last time I checked, you can't fill up your car at the nuclear power plant.
People use polution and carbon as an excuse not to use hydrocarbon fuels, but face facts... we built the modern world on fossil fuels, and they're not going away for hundreds of years, probably. Even with nuclear, geothermal, solar, wind... that's just not enough to supply our energy needs. It's certainly not enough to supply the needs of a hungry, developing third world.
By all means, make gas engines more fuel efficient. By all means, continue to develop solar and wind technologies. But it's patently stupid to stand still on current energy supplies while we develop that stuff. If we're smart enough work on improving solar and wind, then we're damn well smart enough to work on fuel efficiency and cleaning/filtration technology for hydrocarbon energy sources. Don't just restrict us to "pick A or B. Pick everything that you need. Our "energy crisis" is largely self-imposed. We've got plentiful sources of energy. The US has enough energy sources to be an energy exporter if we so desired. We just have to make the decision that we're going to do it.
"This isn't like Wal-Mart dragging down the wages of an entire town"
Everywhere Wal Mart has gone, its had beneficial effects for the area as a whole. Mom and Pop dime store go out of business because of big bad Wal Mart? So what? Small food stores and delis go under because of chain grocery stores too. General stores and hardware stores went under when Sears and JC Penney were dominant.
Wherever a chain store like Wal Mart or Target or Costco opens, a whole ecosystem of small stores spring up around it. You not only get cheaper prices with chains, you also get a much better selection of goods. The tax base always... always increases in that area, not decreases. And last I checked, Wal Mart isn't the only chain that doesn't pay big bucks to their employees. Are you bitching about Best Buy, Circuit City, and Food Lion as well? Do you shop at those stores anyway, or do you voluntarily pay higher prices at places like Whole Foods? Do you seriously expect anyone to pay good money for slinging stock at a department store? Had Wal Mart never come to these small towns, how is it that you figure their income or the town's tax base would have increased otherwise?
You people act like Wal Mart conquers and forces entire populations to shopping enslavement. This is a market economy, and businesses succeed because they give customers what they want, or someone else comes and takes their business away. If there's money, there's going to be competition for it. Mom and Pop stores, cute and quaint Americana that they were, weren't getting it done. Someone else built a better mousetrap. For that matter, why don't you bemoan the loss of small bookstores, neighborhood gas stations, and Five and Dimes while you're at it? They've all been swept away too, and Wal Mart had nothing to do with their death.
While you're at it, would you like to curse the web? Amazon and their like are also doing what Wal Mart did, only on a wider scale, and you don't get the benefit of any local brick and mortar presence... or the tax funds they bring. But would you argue that Amazon has been a bad thing? If you feel that strongly about small businesses, you patronize them, by all means. But don't expect to be able to force myself and other customers to shop at such places when there's a better alternative.
"How about "non-monetary benefits"?"
Like what? Basking in Steve Jobs' ethereal glow?
That's a pretty big chunk of change they're giving up to stay at Apple.
The University of Alabama Crimson Tide, wearing a shade of red, has lost six years straight to their in state rivals, the Auburn University Tigers, wearing blue.
Hayden Fry (former U. of Iowa football coach) was a Psych major, and tried this kind of color-psychological warfare on opposing teams by painting the visiting locker rooms pink. Iowa was a good program under Fry, but they didn't beat big opponents any more than experts thought they would, so I guess the pink thing was a failure too.
Don't pick on France too much for this. This is indicative of a wider attitude among all EU governments, especially the EU beuracracy itself. Witness their threats against Ireland for daring to vote against the Lisbon Treaty. The previous EU constitution was shot down by French and Dutch voters, so this time, the EU simply decided it would bypass voters completely (hey, nice tactic) and rush it through European legislatures instead. The only problem is that Ireland's constitution forbids such a thing there. Big issues like that must be decided by national referendums. The EU is already talking about ways they can simply bypass Irish voters now. They've developed a troubling "we know best" attitude there, and Europeans won't be able to vote out the EU power structure the way they can vote out their own legislators. Rather than the exception, this kind of information micromanagement is likely to become the rule in Europe, with governments deciding what info is acceptable for public consumption, for the "public's own good".
" OLPC is NOT aimed at places with current food/water/shelter shortages"
You're making too much of a difference between "undeveloped" and "still developing" then, because the later still has those problems in abundance. OLPC may not have been intended for jungle tribes with no housing, but just because it was headed for places where roofs exist still doesn't mean that those places don't have hunger, water quality problems, and economic stagnation. The priority to get those things first still trumps getting a weird laptop to the kids there.
"I think the reason is that the OLPC was always a solution in search of a problem. It started out as "lets make a cheap laptop"."
And had that stayed the main focus, then perhaps the project would have been more successful. What the military calls "Mission Creep" ended up sinking an interesting, practical approach to making laptops more affordable.
I don't know why people are surprised. Failure is the norm for utopian pipe dreams, not the exception. Had any significant number of these machines made it to the third world, things would have been even worse. Graft, theft, and the blackmarket would rule the day.
Perhaps it's the cynic in me, but I always saw this project as a rather hare-brained attempt at making MIT significant again the way it had been in it's Project Athena glory years. It's not so much that Negroponte failed to delivery a solution for a given problem, as much as MIT developed a solution no one asked for or wanted.