Ah, but the best part about it to me is that it's actually *not* a bright sunny day. Because the ad agency stuck with the standard formula for outdoor shots, it's taken during "magic hour". Notice the long shadows and warm color balance. Which means this ridiculous family is tromping off to the beach about 30 minutes before it gets dark.
And come on, what else are you gonna do at a dark beach with your kids besides cuddle up around the warming glow of the TV? Ok, don't answer that.
Now we can do our research and all the "pre-babies" that would have been destroyed in the process of creating stem cells can instead be thrown in the trash, just as God intended.
... and it appears that this law has had one significant effect:
the internet cafes are almost all gone.
Basically, compliance is enough of a burden that the small businesses who had internet access have decided to just get rid of it instead. I personally saw at least a dozen places that still had signs with "internet cafe" listed but no computers. And all of them had removed the machines within the last year.
So, I haven't read TFA, but I would be willing to lay money on this bill having been sponsored by legislators who are in the pockets of telcos. Just as likely, it may have even been written by lawyers from a telco pac, as so many bills these days are.
And of course it's phrased such that it's all about "security" when the real security impact is low to nil. The real purpose here is to make it difficult/illegal to share connections so that everyone has to buy their own. Admitting that motivation out in the open, however, would be the immediate death knell for this thing.
Almost every bill comes back to money; figure out who profits and you're one step closer to finding the real reason behind things. Sometimes it's corporations, sometimes it's increasing fundraising ability, but in the end it's all about cash. On the other hand, I'm just a jaded voter - maybe someone in washington really is totally altruistic and just wants the world to be a better place.
Isn't this something that Microsoft should have issues with? Sony isn't just installing its own software, they're overwriting part of the operating system, and in a sloppy manner such that it will prevent Microsoft from releasing patches to those drivers/services...
Although I'm sure they'd be noncommital in their official response, I'd love to hear what they think internally about this kind of thing. If "security" really is their #1 corporate focus as they've been so eager to tell us, this should have them screaming at the top of their lungs.
The chances of us slackers motivating our corporate-owned legislators to smack Sony is comically low, but if we could get a second big player in there on our behalf, there's a real chance to get this awful idea blackholed like it should be.
Anyone have any high-up connections within the Empire?
Re:Fool me once... Fool me twice...
on
419er Lost in Space
·
· Score: 4, Funny
"fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on... shame on...... won't get fooled again!"
... I graduated the spring before he got there, and I've got to say, *everything* he says about the field and the team is dead on. The fence really was made of this orange vinyl road fencing, the outfield was torn all to hell, and we had to literally chase people off our field multiple times at every home game. We had two old guys who would show up to every game, and aside from the occasional girlfriend in the stands, and that was it.
Better yet, there were no restrictions on who could play - anyone could make the team if they just showed up. My senior year, two guys on the team had *never* played before. Mix that in with a few good players and you have a really weird dynamic for the season. After being part of a really strong high school program, and garnering a decent amount of scouting attention, I absolutely know what he means by "playing down" to the level of your surroundings. It was sort of a letdown when I got there, but not really all that shocking - I didn't go there to make a career pitching.
I had a great time, but it definitely wasn't a place you go to nurture your athletic skills. I'm glad to see that someone stayed focused enough to make it though, if only so that I can live through him vicariously!
Well, I'm not sure how much bandwidth they have, but as an aside, I do remember they have an insane amount of IP space.
In fact when I was there in the early 90's, the student paper kept making jokes about how even the lightsockets in the hallways had their own IP addresses. the entire 18.x.x.x space is (or at least *was* at the time) MIT, giving them over 16 million IP addresses to assign to students.
Heh. I doubt they think they're command of the language is lacking.
In their business, I'm sure "creative" is a noun. Just like all the other words that are bastardized thanks to the innovative atmosphere that is biz school. Think "value-add" as a noun - as in "the synergies achieved through utilizing our patented, process-driven, methodology will show a quantum increase in the value-add of each of your resources".
Makes me cringe every time I hear someone spout crap like that and expect to be taken seriously. Lame-assed MBAs are ruining the english language and reveling in it. Even worse is that I've been around 'em long enough that I can actually uderstand what they are saying half the time.
kitten and tinfoil are a wash, given kitten's ability to eat foil and foil's ability to get lodged in kitten throats.
looks to me like microwave kicks all kinds of ass. Kinda like when us kids started adding things like the middle finger to the classic R,P,S and said it was "dynamite".
Actually, I made this in my high school chem lab 10 years ago. I had a 3rd year biology class that was basically independent study with three of my friends and the once-a-week supervision of an assistant prof from the local college (we were doing simple gene splicing on bacteria to learn about hands-on genetics).
Since they didn't have any space to set up lab equipment for us in a regular classroom, we ended up having our "classroom" in the chemical stockroom that adjoined two of the science classrooms. One of my friends got a hold of the anarchist cookbook, and we tried making all kinds of stuff from it, not realizing that a lot of the recipes in there were inaccurate. We made everything from simple gunpowder to nitroglycerine. At one point we had a little mishap where one of the bowls of gunpowder ingnited while both classrooms had students in them. Since we were all honor students, we got a slap on the wrist and continued on as if we never got caught.
Eventually, we progressed to reading old chemistry teaching manuals and looking for experiments that were discontinued. Many were discontinued because the components were carcinogenic, but some were because they were deemed too dangerous. Thermite was one of them, Triiodide was another. If I remember right, NI3 is amazingly simple to make, I think you just mix Potassium Nitrate with crystallized iodine in a water (or was it alcohol?) solution, then filter out the precitpitate. As you mention, it's incredibly sensitive when dry, but if I remember correctly, is a fairly low power explosive. It doesn't put off the huge vapor ratios of your more common bomb ingredients, so aside from the surprise of setting it off, it's mostly harmless in small quantities. It is fun when it pops though, as it gives off a little *crack* sound and a little cloud of purple smoke from the iodine (probably semi-poisonous iodine gas, but unless you're deliberately sniffing it, it dilutes itself quickly enough to not be a real problem).
Anyway, one day after playing around with it a couple times, we made a batch of this stuff after school had let out and while it was still wet smeared it in little patches all over the floor and chairs of the chem classroom that we had for our first period. The next day as people walked in the room, the were random cracks and pops as these tiny puffs of purple kept showing up on all around the classroom. Everyone was quite amused, but aside from the four of us, nobody knew what it was or where it came from. Eventually, at the end of the year right after we graduated we came back and told our chem teacher about all the crap we had done and explained the triiodide on the floors. He gave us a knowing little smirk and surprisingly didn't chastise us at all. 'Course he then proceeded to regale us with all his stories of college chemistry adventures...
All in all, it was a pretty unique confluence of circumstances and provided far more consequence-free fun than I ever would have expected a bio class could.
I think my tone was a little bit off from what I initially intended.
My point was that while there are probably solid reasons that some people buy into macs, a lot of them at least subconsciously take into consideration the aesthetics or the feeling that a mac would plug them into a "hip" demographic. Hell, that's hard to deny when it's the primary message in at least half of Apple's pre-"switch" advertising (iMac's colors, "Think Different", etc.). When the original poster asks what a TiBook can do that the machine currently on his desktop can't, that's the most reasonable answer that I can give.
Sure, given different users with different needs, one OS may be more appropriate than the other, but most modern computers can do pretty much anything you need them to do. I've used my wife's G3 powerbook plenty, and though I'm not a rabid fan, I could get by if needed (the games issue is still too big for me to ever permanently switch away from windows, though).
My anti-elitist-designer slant is probably a hangover from my previous job, where our acquisition of a couple of pretentious, self-important design firms basically ran our quite promising company straight into the ground. Sorry about that one, it's not directly related to this. I'd like to just ignore it, but I still can't mentally separate my image of them from my image of mac users as a whole. Maybe in a few more years.
In the end, you're absolutely right - it's just a choice. Good to see your happy with yours.
You know what it does? It looks cool. Even though I'm sure most here would deny it, since it goes against all of a geeks instincts, but for many people, style is a significant factor in their choice of computer.
You can argue the merits of one versus the other 'til the cows come home, but when people care about how fashionable their computer makes them look, they choose macs. It gives them an automatic in with the trendy designers and artists that they so badly want to emulate, and it makes them feel different and special for rebelling against Microsoft, without needing any of the geek skills to run linux.
Well, the EEG aspect of it may not work. But unless I was seriously misreading the article, that was only one component. They're also gathering data on eye and facial movement, heart rate, all kinds of junk other than EEG readings.
I'm not normally much of a conspiracy theorist, but maybe the EEG thing is thrown in there so that people can laugh off the "mind reading" aspect of it as being unfeasible and dismiss the whole thing while they get 90% of the program working without anyone noticing.
I'm still concerned about my privacy, and being falsely accused of being a terrorist jsut because I'm a bit high strung that day.
Please. Speculation, sure. But fairly well-founded speculation.
If the RIAA wins this, they have a legal precedent for blocking whatever the hell they want to under the guise of copyright infringement. Now, the second time around their case may not be as strong, and the backbone operators may stand a chance of winning if they challenge, but with precedent on the **AA's side, it is not in the financial interest of ISP to follow through on that challenge. Defending yourself against litigation is costly, and the lesser your chances of winning, the smaller your desire to pursue.
The problem with your scenario is that so far as I know, the ISPs aren't altruistic slashdot readers, they're businesses. And when backed into a corner by the legal system, businesses usually prefer to just pay the fee to the troll under the bridge rather than fight it for a chance to pass for free. It ends up costing them less in the long run.
It's true that caffeine is a diuretic, but the amount of caffeine in a soft drink is not large enough to make the whole thing a net negative to your body fluids.
It does mean that soda is not ideal for replenishing fluids, since you'll lose some portion of what you consume, but you won't get dehydrated just by drinking too much coke.
Sure, 44 oz. is huge. But 7-11 has done better than that for years. Their DoubleGulp measures in at a cool 64 oz. Yes, a half gallon!
The best thing about it is that it even comes in a paper carton-like "cup" that very closely resembles a half gallon carton of milk, but with a hole in the top for a straw.
'Course, the second coolest thing is the fact that you get anywhere from 700 to 900 calories from one, depending on what soda you put in it (assuming that, like most teenageers, you are not a big fan of diet sodas). Mmmmm half my daily calories in carbonated liquid form....
What are your thoughts on the educational background most ripe for AI research? Traditionally, it seems that AI research has been a domain almost exclusively owned by computer scientists by virtue of the hardware used to attempt the creation of these entities.
As the field develops, however, what kind of crossover skills do you see as being necessary to success? Is a solid cognitive science/psychology background a must? What about something more low-level like neurobiology? What kind of mix of skills do you look for in the people you choose to work with?
Ok, sorry, I guess I misunderstood you. I thought that what you were saying was that it was very frequently the case that whatever you were playing on winamp was the same song that was being played on the TV. I suppose I just misunderstood what you meant by "synced up".
I knew that it would be somewhat difficult to get my point across without sounding too arrogant, and that people would be pretty touchy, but I tried anyway. I really was not criticizing anyone's taste. In fact, I said a couple times that I wasn't and that I like plenty of stuff that's played on major commercial outlets.
My taste is my taste - no better or worse than anyone else's.
All I was trying to say (which is a relatively moot point now since I guess I misunderstood you in the first place), was that if the pool from which you choose your favorite songs is limited by what corporate radio and MTV present you, you are missing out on a lot of good stuff. I happen to like a lot of what they give me, but I like a lot of other stuff as well. Sorry if it came off wrong, but I meant it more as an encouragement to go look for cool stuff outside of what you hear on the radio and TV, and less as a condemnation of whatever it is you like now.
Because it's the teenagers who are the most easily persuaded into purchases by radio play, promos on MTV, and the like. They are the ones who will buy a CD, listen to it for 2 months until it becomes "old" and then move on the the next big thing. It's one of the record industry's strongest demographics.
My parents (a little over the 44 age mark, but not too much) didn't own a single CD until two or three years ago, and now only own a dozen or so that they listen to all the time. I, on the other hand, have bought a few hundred in my time.
I'm trying hard not to sound condescending, but you do realize the fact that your playlist often syncs up with what's on TV at the time means that your playlist is pretty limited, right? I haven't been a serious viewer of MTV or VH1 in quite a while, but I still occasionally flip through, and the one thing that always stikes me about it (aside from the lack of music on music television), is that just like mainstream mass radio, the playlists on MTV and VH1 are very, very small. Like on the order of 2 or 3 dozen songs available to be played, tops.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that all that music sucks, or that your taste is bad - I like plenty of music that is popular - I'm just saying that there's a much wider world out there to choose from as well. I really think if people sampled a little wider variety in addition to what they like in the mainstream, the overall quality of music available and promoted would be dramatically increased.
And for me, that's where the internet comes in. I've been exposed to so much more variety in the last 5 years than ever before, and my music collection reflects that.
I agree with most of your post, but the reference you make to war with Iraq/Saudi Arabia strikes me as a bit off for the following reason:
Our government lashed out at Afghanistan and "terrorists" after 9/11 in the name of protection of the country, yet subsequently has made a strong effort to convince the public (and rather sucessfully, given media reports) that the true source of terror is Iraq and Saddam Hussein - the old, not-quite-vanquished enemy of Bush's daddy. There is little evidence, if any that Al-Qeuda or any of the 9/11 terrorists come from Iraq (most are Saudis, I believe), or that Iraq has had any part in any terrorist activities against the US.
So, while it may not be with the same completeness as Oceana, there does seem to be an attempt to move as far in that direction as possible, and pursue war in a different area for unknown/unproven reasons.
but he's spot-on in saying something I and many others have said here in the past.
Open source software packages are great for end users, and overall save a huge amount of money for them, but there is no business model in producing software that can be freely duplicated and distributed.
Now whether or not you think there should be a business case for software is a slightly different argument, but I personally am a bit tired of hearing the mantra here that one can definitely make money writing and producing GPL'ed software. Supporting it, maybe. Pressing and selling disks and manuals, maybe. But the writing of the software itself is not something that's going to make money.
Microsoft, for all their pomp and swagger, has a good reason to fear the GPL. The majority of their revenues come from selling licenses to the software that that they produce. They are not the only ones either. Anyone who produces shrink-wrapped software is in the same boat.
Just ask anyone who has released a fully funtional version of a shareware package how often they get paid by people who download their package. The conversion rate is miniscule. How many of you just hit "I agree" on the winzip nag screen? The paying demand for their product will drop to almost zero should they release their product out to the world.
OSS is potentially great for the economy as a whole, and decreases costs of doing business in the general marketplace, but creating it is not a great way to make money.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, but the best part about it to me is that it's actually *not* a bright sunny day. Because the ad agency stuck with the standard formula for outdoor shots, it's taken during "magic hour". Notice the long shadows and warm color balance. Which means this ridiculous family is tromping off to the beach about 30 minutes before it gets dark.
And come on, what else are you gonna do at a dark beach with your kids besides cuddle up around the warming glow of the TV? Ok, don't answer that.
This is great news!
Now we can do our research and all the "pre-babies" that would have been destroyed in the process of creating stem cells can instead be thrown in the trash, just as God intended.
the internet cafes are almost all gone.
Basically, compliance is enough of a burden that the small businesses who had internet access have decided to just get rid of it instead. I personally saw at least a dozen places that still had signs with "internet cafe" listed but no computers. And all of them had removed the machines within the last year.
Hooray for unintended consequences!
And of course it's phrased such that it's all about "security" when the real security impact is low to nil. The real purpose here is to make it difficult/illegal to share connections so that everyone has to buy their own. Admitting that motivation out in the open, however, would be the immediate death knell for this thing.
Almost every bill comes back to money; figure out who profits and you're one step closer to finding the real reason behind things. Sometimes it's corporations, sometimes it's increasing fundraising ability, but in the end it's all about cash. On the other hand, I'm just a jaded voter - maybe someone in washington really is totally altruistic and just wants the world to be a better place.
Although I'm sure they'd be noncommital in their official response, I'd love to hear what they think internally about this kind of thing. If "security" really is their #1 corporate focus as they've been so eager to tell us, this should have them screaming at the top of their lungs.
The chances of us slackers motivating our corporate-owned legislators to smack Sony is comically low, but if we could get a second big player in there on our behalf, there's a real chance to get this awful idea blackholed like it should be.
Anyone have any high-up connections within the Empire?
our beloved president, George W Bush.
Better yet, there were no restrictions on who could play - anyone could make the team if they just showed up. My senior year, two guys on the team had *never* played before. Mix that in with a few good players and you have a really weird dynamic for the season. After being part of a really strong high school program, and garnering a decent amount of scouting attention, I absolutely know what he means by "playing down" to the level of your surroundings. It was sort of a letdown when I got there, but not really all that shocking - I didn't go there to make a career pitching.
I had a great time, but it definitely wasn't a place you go to nurture your athletic skills. I'm glad to see that someone stayed focused enough to make it though, if only so that I can live through him vicariously!
In fact when I was there in the early 90's, the student paper kept making jokes about how even the lightsockets in the hallways had their own IP addresses. the entire 18.x.x.x space is (or at least *was* at the time) MIT, giving them over 16 million IP addresses to assign to students.
Serves me right for going back and editing a sentence without proofreading it. Forgive me, gods of grammar!
In their business, I'm sure "creative" is a noun. Just like all the other words that are bastardized thanks to the innovative atmosphere that is biz school. Think "value-add" as a noun - as in "the synergies achieved through utilizing our patented, process-driven, methodology will show a quantum increase in the value-add of each of your resources".
Makes me cringe every time I hear someone spout crap like that and expect to be taken seriously. Lame-assed MBAs are ruining the english language and reveling in it. Even worse is that I've been around 'em long enough that I can actually uderstand what they are saying half the time.
microwave kills tinfoil.
microwave kills kitten.
kitten and tinfoil are a wash, given kitten's ability to eat foil and foil's ability to get lodged in kitten throats.
looks to me like microwave kicks all kinds of ass. Kinda like when us kids started adding things like the middle finger to the classic R,P,S and said it was "dynamite".
Wow, that sounds frighteningly like my chem and physics teachers too. You didn't happen to grow up in northern california, did you?
Since they didn't have any space to set up lab equipment for us in a regular classroom, we ended up having our "classroom" in the chemical stockroom that adjoined two of the science classrooms. One of my friends got a hold of the anarchist cookbook, and we tried making all kinds of stuff from it, not realizing that a lot of the recipes in there were inaccurate. We made everything from simple gunpowder to nitroglycerine. At one point we had a little mishap where one of the bowls of gunpowder ingnited while both classrooms had students in them. Since we were all honor students, we got a slap on the wrist and continued on as if we never got caught.
Eventually, we progressed to reading old chemistry teaching manuals and looking for experiments that were discontinued. Many were discontinued because the components were carcinogenic, but some were because they were deemed too dangerous. Thermite was one of them, Triiodide was another. If I remember right, NI3 is amazingly simple to make, I think you just mix Potassium Nitrate with crystallized iodine in a water (or was it alcohol?) solution, then filter out the precitpitate. As you mention, it's incredibly sensitive when dry, but if I remember correctly, is a fairly low power explosive. It doesn't put off the huge vapor ratios of your more common bomb ingredients, so aside from the surprise of setting it off, it's mostly harmless in small quantities. It is fun when it pops though, as it gives off a little *crack* sound and a little cloud of purple smoke from the iodine (probably semi-poisonous iodine gas, but unless you're deliberately sniffing it, it dilutes itself quickly enough to not be a real problem).
Anyway, one day after playing around with it a couple times, we made a batch of this stuff after school had let out and while it was still wet smeared it in little patches all over the floor and chairs of the chem classroom that we had for our first period. The next day as people walked in the room, the were random cracks and pops as these tiny puffs of purple kept showing up on all around the classroom. Everyone was quite amused, but aside from the four of us, nobody knew what it was or where it came from. Eventually, at the end of the year right after we graduated we came back and told our chem teacher about all the crap we had done and explained the triiodide on the floors. He gave us a knowing little smirk and surprisingly didn't chastise us at all. 'Course he then proceeded to regale us with all his stories of college chemistry adventures...
All in all, it was a pretty unique confluence of circumstances and provided far more consequence-free fun than I ever would have expected a bio class could.
My point was that while there are probably solid reasons that some people buy into macs, a lot of them at least subconsciously take into consideration the aesthetics or the feeling that a mac would plug them into a "hip" demographic. Hell, that's hard to deny when it's the primary message in at least half of Apple's pre-"switch" advertising (iMac's colors, "Think Different", etc.). When the original poster asks what a TiBook can do that the machine currently on his desktop can't, that's the most reasonable answer that I can give.
Sure, given different users with different needs, one OS may be more appropriate than the other, but most modern computers can do pretty much anything you need them to do. I've used my wife's G3 powerbook plenty, and though I'm not a rabid fan, I could get by if needed (the games issue is still too big for me to ever permanently switch away from windows, though).
My anti-elitist-designer slant is probably a hangover from my previous job, where our acquisition of a couple of pretentious, self-important design firms basically ran our quite promising company straight into the ground. Sorry about that one, it's not directly related to this. I'd like to just ignore it, but I still can't mentally separate my image of them from my image of mac users as a whole. Maybe in a few more years.
In the end, you're absolutely right - it's just a choice. Good to see your happy with yours.
You can argue the merits of one versus the other 'til the cows come home, but when people care about how fashionable their computer makes them look, they choose macs. It gives them an automatic in with the trendy designers and artists that they so badly want to emulate, and it makes them feel different and special for rebelling against Microsoft, without needing any of the geek skills to run linux.
I'm not normally much of a conspiracy theorist, but maybe the EEG thing is thrown in there so that people can laugh off the "mind reading" aspect of it as being unfeasible and dismiss the whole thing while they get 90% of the program working without anyone noticing.
I'm still concerned about my privacy, and being falsely accused of being a terrorist jsut because I'm a bit high strung that day.
If the RIAA wins this, they have a legal precedent for blocking whatever the hell they want to under the guise of copyright infringement. Now, the second time around their case may not be as strong, and the backbone operators may stand a chance of winning if they challenge, but with precedent on the **AA's side, it is not in the financial interest of ISP to follow through on that challenge. Defending yourself against litigation is costly, and the lesser your chances of winning, the smaller your desire to pursue.
The problem with your scenario is that so far as I know, the ISPs aren't altruistic slashdot readers, they're businesses. And when backed into a corner by the legal system, businesses usually prefer to just pay the fee to the troll under the bridge rather than fight it for a chance to pass for free. It ends up costing them less in the long run.
It does mean that soda is not ideal for replenishing fluids, since you'll lose some portion of what you consume, but you won't get dehydrated just by drinking too much coke.
The best thing about it is that it even comes in a paper carton-like "cup" that very closely resembles a half gallon carton of milk, but with a hole in the top for a straw.
'Course, the second coolest thing is the fact that you get anywhere from 700 to 900 calories from one, depending on what soda you put in it (assuming that, like most teenageers, you are not a big fan of diet sodas). Mmmmm half my daily calories in carbonated liquid form....
As the field develops, however, what kind of crossover skills do you see as being necessary to success? Is a solid cognitive science/psychology background a must? What about something more low-level like neurobiology? What kind of mix of skills do you look for in the people you choose to work with?
I knew that it would be somewhat difficult to get my point across without sounding too arrogant, and that people would be pretty touchy, but I tried anyway. I really was not criticizing anyone's taste. In fact, I said a couple times that I wasn't and that I like plenty of stuff that's played on major commercial outlets.
My taste is my taste - no better or worse than anyone else's.
All I was trying to say (which is a relatively moot point now since I guess I misunderstood you in the first place), was that if the pool from which you choose your favorite songs is limited by what corporate radio and MTV present you, you are missing out on a lot of good stuff. I happen to like a lot of what they give me, but I like a lot of other stuff as well. Sorry if it came off wrong, but I meant it more as an encouragement to go look for cool stuff outside of what you hear on the radio and TV, and less as a condemnation of whatever it is you like now.
My parents (a little over the 44 age mark, but not too much) didn't own a single CD until two or three years ago, and now only own a dozen or so that they listen to all the time. I, on the other hand, have bought a few hundred in my time.
I'm trying hard not to sound condescending, but you do realize the fact that your playlist often syncs up with what's on TV at the time means that your playlist is pretty limited, right? I haven't been a serious viewer of MTV or VH1 in quite a while, but I still occasionally flip through, and the one thing that always stikes me about it (aside from the lack of music on music television), is that just like mainstream mass radio, the playlists on MTV and VH1 are very, very small. Like on the order of 2 or 3 dozen songs available to be played, tops.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that all that music sucks, or that your taste is bad - I like plenty of music that is popular - I'm just saying that there's a much wider world out there to choose from as well. I really think if people sampled a little wider variety in addition to what they like in the mainstream, the overall quality of music available and promoted would be dramatically increased.
And for me, that's where the internet comes in. I've been exposed to so much more variety in the last 5 years than ever before, and my music collection reflects that.
Our government lashed out at Afghanistan and "terrorists" after 9/11 in the name of protection of the country, yet subsequently has made a strong effort to convince the public (and rather sucessfully, given media reports) that the true source of terror is Iraq and Saddam Hussein - the old, not-quite-vanquished enemy of Bush's daddy. There is little evidence, if any that Al-Qeuda or any of the 9/11 terrorists come from Iraq (most are Saudis, I believe), or that Iraq has had any part in any terrorist activities against the US.
So, while it may not be with the same completeness as Oceana, there does seem to be an attempt to move as far in that direction as possible, and pursue war in a different area for unknown/unproven reasons.
Open source software packages are great for end users, and overall save a huge amount of money for them, but there is no business model in producing software that can be freely duplicated and distributed.
Now whether or not you think there should be a business case for software is a slightly different argument, but I personally am a bit tired of hearing the mantra here that one can definitely make money writing and producing GPL'ed software. Supporting it, maybe. Pressing and selling disks and manuals, maybe. But the writing of the software itself is not something that's going to make money.
Microsoft, for all their pomp and swagger, has a good reason to fear the GPL. The majority of their revenues come from selling licenses to the software that that they produce. They are not the only ones either. Anyone who produces shrink-wrapped software is in the same boat.
Just ask anyone who has released a fully funtional version of a shareware package how often they get paid by people who download their package. The conversion rate is miniscule. How many of you just hit "I agree" on the winzip nag screen? The paying demand for their product will drop to almost zero should they release their product out to the world.
OSS is potentially great for the economy as a whole, and decreases costs of doing business in the general marketplace, but creating it is not a great way to make money.