"Cause if there are people in China who are willing to work for cheaper than people in your country then you best make sure business and consumers can't benefit from that."
Yes, because hollowing out your locally-controlled manufacturing infrastructure and outsourcing their tasks to a foreign country not necessarily aligned with your ethics or interests, where work is carried out in social and environmental conditions your own nation's citizens consider unethical, is always beneficial to all concerned. And there'll always and forever be an extremely cheap oil-fuelled transport grid on a global scale, and never any possible spike in insurgency, piracy or other kinds of tensions that might make shipping more costly. Importing goods from distant places that could be manufactured locally incurs no energy efficiency costs, and the countries from which we import them will always wish to trade with us and never impose any kind of embargo for military or political reasons. We can fully trust every external organisation with which we deal, corporate or national, even if they are in outright competition with us, the only criterion being that they supply us right now with the absolute rock bottom prices available on the short-term market. Really, it's just common sense - when it all comes down to it, the only evaluation factor we ever need, as thinking humans, for trustworthiness, environmental sustainability or long-term future planning is one single figure: the end-user cash sale price.
Besides, employees are always just a cost factor, after all. It's not like they ever invest anything back in their local economy through purchases. Unlike hard-working executives, for whom every cent in income is a chance to sponsor yet another risky, farsighted, and rational venture that ennobles the human condition.
"Anonymity? You don't have that when driving a car on a public road - you've already got a license plate that the boys in blue can check on at any point. The technology would just automate the process. It's not more invasive - just more effective."
More effective *is* more invasive. There's a huge grey area in between what can theoretically be done with technology, and what becomes convenient / cost effective to do. A large part of people's current tolerance toward what are actually fairly invasive security measures is the feeling that "but relax, nobody's going to waste time monitoring YOUR mail/driveway/cellphone/computer. You're just not that important. Don't be paranoid."
This is only a sensible argument as long as the technology remains expensive to use. Once automation gets cheap, ubiquitious tracking is likely to become the default option because it's more expensive to pay a technician to turn it OFF than to just let everyone's daily lives spool into nsa.google.com and have the search algorithm sort it all out.
"It could even be responsible for the public's acceptance of no gold standard for the dollar. They're not demanding to know what the reference point of "one dollar" is."
I really don't understand this obsession with the Gold Standard. A gram of gold has no intrinsic value either, any more than one US dollar does. (Other than for making connectors on circuit boards). Its value, like the dollar, lies purely in what other people are willing to exchange for it - and like a paper currency, that 'value' can fluctuate wildly. Gold is simply a fiat currency on a global scale, and its arbitrarily assigned market value bears no relation to any true wealth. The same for every single other investment or speculation commodity, be it diamonds, yen, shares, futures, tulips or bets on horses down at the local track. If its value derives entirely or mostly from *other people's subjective valuation of it* then it's an illusion, a Ponzi scheme that just hasn't collapsed yet - but drop someone in a desert with the choice between a gold bar and a bottle of water, it will.
Gold's main value as a currency was because 1) it didn't corrode, 2) it wasn't useful for anything else, and 3) it was produced at a slow but mostly constant rate (but not at a rate usefully matching the actual growth of economies, leading to huge abberations like Spain's inflationary spiral after gaining South America's goldfields, and the gold rushes of the 1800s)
Basically gold was just a crude mechanical approximation of a cryptographic reputation protocol implemented in ore. Its failings as an estimator of personal and social worth are legendary. We can do a lot, lot better.
Now: if you pegged a currency to a basket of useful commodities or social indexes: water, food, housing, textiles, domesticated wildlife, access to healthcare - the things that a person or society can actually *use* as primary units of biological energy and production - then you'd have a currency with *real* intrinsic value, and you could start talking about having a philosophy behind your money.
"I've always been amused by the premise of this franchise. It comes from one a (supposedly) non-fiction book called The Stargate Conspiracy, which claims that a secret cabal is bringing back alien technology through a portal dug up in Egypt, and trading it for money and power."
Sorry, no. _Stargate_ the film was released in 1994. _The Stargate Conspiracy_ is a 2001 book. There is no way the book influenced the film unless the authors also invented time travel.
However, the general premise of aliens influencing ancient civilisations certainly did come at least indirectly from other speculative 'nonfiction' books in the astroarcheology genre. Erich von Daniken's _Chariots of the Gods_ (1968) and Zechariah Sitchin's _The 12th Planet_ (1976) and their numerous sequels and imitators. It's now a fertile subgenre with modern writers such as Graham Hancock. Whether there's any truth in it is another issue.
"And that means that when he has the choice of donating money to a software development group or spending it on one of the underfunded schools throughout the country, he must spend it on the kids... And they are best served by using the money elsewhere."
No, that's not at all clear to me. It's begging the question.
*If* it's a given that things other than software are more important to the education of NZ kids, then yes, of course they're best served by spending that money elsewhere.
But if it is in fact worth $X of educational value to equip schools with MS Office, and $X-Y donated to an open source project could get you the same amount of educational value... why not donate? Just because you *can* be cheap doesn't mean you're getting good educational value for money by doing so.
(Yes, I know the economics of collective projects and marginal returns for donations gets tricky, so it's not necessarily a one-to-one value proposition... and justifying a donation politically is harder than justifying even a usurious, monopoly rent... but still. NZ's Labour government has spent lots of money on social causes considered worthwhile, even commercial ones like building up NZ music... so why should *investing* in the development of free software with huge educational and business benefits be considered a waste? Probably the cost ought to be amortized between education and business/social development ministries. But it would have a national payoff, why not invest? Spending money on free software development is a bit like putting your rent dollars toward a mortgage instead. Might cost you a bit more but in the end you get freedom.)
Seems like broadband isn't much of a winning proposition for your customers, though, if you're throttling so harshly. Why would they want to pick it over dialup?
CD/DVD trays for bootable media which can only be opened when the system power is on are one of the worst misfeatures I've ever seen.
There you are with your powered-off server which you've just taken a backup of, or your image-ready Windows workstation you've just run SYSPREP on. You have to boot to removable media to do a maintenance function. The system is now in a delicate, fragile state: if you should accidentally boot off the hard drive, the OS will boot up and start auto-configuring itself or setting a security ID or trying to talk to the network or something equally dumb that will break the system state.
So you go to insert your boot CD and darn, you can't physically at the drive because it's powered! You can only insert the CD once you've turned the system on! For your comfort and convenience!
So you hit power, hit the CD tray eject button as the BIOS self-test runs, and now you're in a race against time as the CD takes its time to self-test before allowing you to eject, and the BIOS does its self-test, and you hope like heck that you can hit the magic BIOS interrupt key (whichever it is on this model) *at precisely the magic moment* to stop the boot cycle before it kicks into Windows and corrupts the hard drive - because if you have any keys, including the magic BIOS interrupt function key, held down as the self-test runs and not during that magic half-second of grace you'll get the 'Keyboard error press F1...' and then *maybe* you'll be allowed to get into the BIOS and pause the boot cycle...
And then for some reason the CD tray doesn't respond to your eject, so you press it again, but now you find out it's actually read your tray button push but queued it for after the self-test, so now it's registered two button pushes, so it ejects then immediately retracts, wasting critical seconds as the BIOS counts down to doomsday...
Meanwhile, on the ancient 1993 box next to it, that's still got a floppy, you just turn it off, slot your boot floppy in with the power off, turn the power on, and you've got a guaranteed secure non-hard-drive boot.
And let's not forget all those times you've turned off a machine, pulled out all the plugs, tucked it under your arm to take away then realised you left the CD in the drive and now you've got to go plug it in again to eject the media, and either futz around with the keyboard and video cable for five minutes or just plug the power in and take your chances booting blind without a keyboard to enter the magic BIOS override key and just do the race-against-time with the CD tray eject vs BIOS self-test thing. Or let it half-boot and then go down cold during startup and let the filesystem corrupt.
It's like a mini Russian Roulette, every day! Just to make your life more interesting.
"It's not as if the government(s) of the world are competent enough to deal with problems like these (tubes anyone)."
This smear is getting as tired as the old "Al Gore claimed to invent the Internet" one.
People working in an industry that routinely and without irony refers to "pipes", "sockets", "channels" and "flow" to describe data internetworking are in no position to laugh at people who (quite correctly) describe the Internet's structure as a "series of tubes".
Also, I seem to recall this little US Government agency called ARPA.
"The categories such as Mathematics and Science highlight what is best about Wikipedia. The categories such as History and Society highlight what is worst about Wikipedia. You do not really have big battles over articles like "Pythagorean theorem", and they usually do a good job of explaining what that is. On the other hand, if you look at the top of an article like "Palestine" you will see that it is semi-protected, meaning new users can not edit the article. You can also see eight pages of discussion which really doesn't get anywhere."
Only eight pages of discussion for a hugely divisive major world crisis with 2,000 years of backstory?
Yes, that sounds pretty much like the fault lines you'd find in a university faculty staffroom or the world headline section in a newspaper. Only without guns.
Seems like Wikipedia is doing a fine job of representing the real world's production of knowledge - or at least our shared articulation of the questions. Remember, some issues *don't have* neat, tidy, one-page, incontrovertible answers. That's why they're issues.
7 cents a minute seems insanely cheap to me - either that or New Zealand cellphone costs are insanely expensive. In NZ, voice costs around $1/minute on cellphone. (I pay $20 monthly with Vodafone for 20 GSM minutes; this is an entry-level plan but fairly standard). For a 1100 minute plan, I'd pay $370/month - $0.33/minute, rock-bottom mininum.
Meanwhile, texts begin at 20c each and for $10/month drop to 0.5c each.
So you require every search result to be recommended by at least two different remote systems, and you use a web of trust/reputation so that each system can grade the others by how correct its users find their results to be.
If I'm consistently getting bad results from www.spammers-r-us.com, I drop their weight to zero, and heavily downgrade all other systems that have a positive weighting for them too. Maybe I add a bit of forgiveness over time, in case a bad system improves its reputation.
"Yes, some of us are prepared to use the best tool for the job rather than blindly follow FOSS."
And for some of us, freedom *itself* is a tool, chosen for pragmatic, utilitarian reasons. Namely, that it is important to not be in a position where someone can unilaterally yank away the infrastructure you rely on.
It seems to be a sort of blind spot in many people's relationship to technology, that we wasily forget that any tool you use also forms *you*, and your relationships to other people. The output of any industrial process is not just the bits or atoms you get at one end, but also the subtler rearrangement of social... shape, for want of a better word. Power relationships, but not just power. Whether the use of a certain tool, or living within a certain architecture, brings people together, keeps them apart, fosters some kinds of interactions while preventing others... all these are results of our use-of-tools. And we would be smart to remember this and decide, at the point of designing or purchasing tools, just what kind of social outputs we want. If we don't even notice or care that we're getting social outputs, that makes it very very easy for unscrupulous people who *do* care to subtly design our tools in such a way to give them power over us.
Yes, I read the transcript Did you? It doesn't seem like you paid attention.
The show includes sound-bites from A Few Good Men because Greg Palast is saying that David Iglesias was the real-life lawyer in a real-life military trial on which the role of Tom Cruise in the story of A Few Good Men was based.
"Mr. Iglesias, 49, is a Navy Reserve commander whose role as a defense lawyer in a famous military hazing case was the basis for the Tom Cruise character in the movie A Few Good Men."
"A series of tubes" really does sum up what the Internet is. It was a perfectly appropriate and correct metaphor. It is, much like a reticulated water or gas or electrical or superhighway system, a data transport utility comprised of interconnected networks of networks, each with different
Look, we all use the term "pipe" already to mean "data connection" and we know exactly what we mean. Jumping on Stevens for his use of the term was really just a ridiculous display of snobbishness, combined with a deep-seated (and justified) unease about the future of Internet freedom in the face of corporate encroachment.
I think the reason for the ugly kneejerk reaction was that Stevens' argument hit a little close to home: we all know that bandwidth in various Internet subsystems *is* a limited resource, and that large numbers of users downloading mass quantities of rich media *does* put a stress on this resource, and in a sensibly managed internetwork we should act to conserve it. But because it's untrustworthy cable providers and vertically integrated data/media monopolies advancing the 'bandwidth conservation' pitch to cover their hatred of the Internet's openness and their desire to decommoditise it, we instinctively distrust everything they say. And we want to pretend that downloading 'huge quantities of material' DOESN'T 'clog the pipes', to take that argument away from them. And for that reason (and to make lawmakers look like a bunch of old men who Just Don't Get It), Stevens had to be discredited.
But laughing at a valid argument doesn't make it go away. What we *should* be saying is: Yes, data transfer costs money, it doesn't come for free. But freedom is also important. So bill data users honestly, by the gigabyte per month. Don't try to impose vertical integration monopolies because they distort the true cost of data transfer, don't try to double-dip and hold websites to hostage for bandwith both they and the home users have already paid for, don't filter traffic by data type, don't prevent users from copying and locally caching as much rich media as they can (because local caches save bandwidth) - and we'll all get along fine.
But no, it's so much easier just to laugh at funny stupid ol' Tube Guy who doesn't realise bandwidth is free like air.
Actually I've got an image of Wikipedia as of around 2005 on my Palm Tungsten E and I constantly refer to it. For a lot of applications, or just for general knowledge, partial and buggy and incomplete is a lot better than nothing. I think people - academics especially - underestimate just how much 'knowledge' in the world at any one time is fragmented, contradictory, and just plain wrong, and yet the human mind copes. We're not actually just brute logic engines that crash at the slightest GIGO.
"It's amazing how many people seem to think there's some sort of obligation on people to upgrade."
There's no obligation to upgrade to the latest version of Windows in much the same way that there's no obligation to pay any money to the nice gentleman visiting who would very much like your store to not accidentally burn down next weekend.
You can hold out from upgrading, and in return you can be guaranteed the following services: * your documents will slowly stop being able to be read by other people since you don't have a current MS Office * the software you use will slowly not be supported by the manufacturer since you don't have a current OS * your OS will stop getting security patches and thus will become infested by worms and trojans, possibly making you criminally liable * your hardware, when it fails and needs replacing (and the warranty probably only lasts for three years) quite possibly won't work on your current OS - and if it does, OEM licensing may make it illegal for you to continue to run your current OS
Yep, absolutely zero obligation.
Nice merchandise you have here, by the way. Shame if bit-rot were to set in, ain't it?
Every time I look at you I don't understand Why you let this trilogy get so out of hand You could have ruled the galaxy if you'd had a plan Now why'd you chat up Natalie with lines about sand?
When you first strode onto our screens you scared a whole nation Now you're just a whiny git with a Dark Side fixation
Don't get me wrong, now Just want to know, now
Anakin, Anakin What kind of film did you think you're in? Anakin, Superstar Are you the Dark Lord they say you are?
Tell me what you think about your friends in the sky Now who d'ya think besides yourself made the fans really cry? Yoda was he pretty fly with his Boba Fett clones? Or Qui-Gon Jin's midichlorians and Young C3PO? Did you mean to be a parody of everyone's trust or Did you know this Bantha poo would still be a blockbuster?... on second thoughts, let's not go to Coruscant, it is a silly planet.
I dunno, apart from changes to/etc config files not *necessarily* requiring a system reboot (though good luck making any change to X11 configuration without needing to restart your entire X session and all processes spawned by it... ie, everything currently running with a GUI... how is that less destructive for a desktop user than rebooting the kernel?), the Linux/etc,/proc,/etc/X11, ~/.gnome2, GConf maze seems to me to be about as much a 'giant convoluted collection of trivia' as Windows' registry - except that it's not always organised as coherently.
'Power Linux users' exist too - they're people who think that it's normal to have to recompile their kernel from source in order to make their webcam device driver work. In my opinion, the whole POSIX configuration infrastructure needs a serious reboot to make it simple and coherent. And of course, in true Open Source fashion, there's about a dozen competing projects all with different incompatible ideas on how to do this, none of them adopted by any major distro.
Still, I've found Googling for obscure Linux error messages just as useful as for Windows ones (or OSX ones), so there is help out there. It's just not nearly as good as IMO any 21st century OS *should* be.
Slashdot Mirror
"Cause if there are people in China who are willing to work for cheaper than people in your country then you best make sure business and consumers can't benefit from that."
Yes, because hollowing out your locally-controlled manufacturing infrastructure and outsourcing their tasks to a foreign country not necessarily aligned with your ethics or interests, where work is carried out in social and environmental conditions your own nation's citizens consider unethical, is always beneficial to all concerned. And there'll always and forever be an extremely cheap oil-fuelled transport grid on a global scale, and never any possible spike in insurgency, piracy or other kinds of tensions that might make shipping more costly. Importing goods from distant places that could be manufactured locally incurs no energy efficiency costs, and the countries from which we import them will always wish to trade with us and never impose any kind of embargo for military or political reasons. We can fully trust every external organisation with which we deal, corporate or national, even if they are in outright competition with us, the only criterion being that they supply us right now with the absolute rock bottom prices available on the short-term market. Really, it's just common sense - when it all comes down to it, the only evaluation factor we ever need, as thinking humans, for trustworthiness, environmental sustainability or long-term future planning is one single figure: the end-user cash sale price.
Besides, employees are always just a cost factor, after all. It's not like they ever invest anything back in their local economy through purchases. Unlike hard-working executives, for whom every cent in income is a chance to sponsor yet another risky, farsighted, and rational venture that ennobles the human condition.
"Anonymity? You don't have that when driving a car on a public road - you've already got a license plate that the boys in blue can check on at any point. The technology would just automate the process. It's not more invasive - just more effective."
More effective *is* more invasive. There's a huge grey area in between what can theoretically be done with technology, and what becomes convenient / cost effective to do. A large part of people's current tolerance toward what are actually fairly invasive security measures is the feeling that "but relax, nobody's going to waste time monitoring YOUR mail/driveway/cellphone/computer. You're just not that important. Don't be paranoid."
This is only a sensible argument as long as the technology remains expensive to use. Once automation gets cheap, ubiquitious tracking is likely to become the default option because it's more expensive to pay a technician to turn it OFF than to just let everyone's daily lives spool into nsa.google.com and have the search algorithm sort it all out.
"It could even be responsible for the public's acceptance of no gold standard for the dollar. They're not demanding to know what the reference point of "one dollar" is."
I really don't understand this obsession with the Gold Standard. A gram of gold has no intrinsic value either, any more than one US dollar does. (Other than for making connectors on circuit boards). Its value, like the dollar, lies purely in what other people are willing to exchange for it - and like a paper currency, that 'value' can fluctuate wildly. Gold is simply a fiat currency on a global scale, and its arbitrarily assigned market value bears no relation to any true wealth. The same for every single other investment or speculation commodity, be it diamonds, yen, shares, futures, tulips or bets on horses down at the local track. If its value derives entirely or mostly from *other people's subjective valuation of it* then it's an illusion, a Ponzi scheme that just hasn't collapsed yet - but drop someone in a desert with the choice between a gold bar and a bottle of water, it will.
Gold's main value as a currency was because 1) it didn't corrode, 2) it wasn't useful for anything else, and 3) it was produced at a slow but mostly constant rate (but not at a rate usefully matching the actual growth of economies, leading to huge abberations like Spain's inflationary spiral after gaining South America's goldfields, and the gold rushes of the 1800s)
Basically gold was just a crude mechanical approximation of a cryptographic reputation protocol implemented in ore. Its failings as an estimator of personal and social worth are legendary. We can do a lot, lot better.
Now: if you pegged a currency to a basket of useful commodities or social indexes: water, food, housing, textiles, domesticated wildlife, access to healthcare - the things that a person or society can actually *use* as primary units of biological energy and production - then you'd have a currency with *real* intrinsic value, and you could start talking about having a philosophy behind your money.
"Has society's attention span gotten so short that "
YES
Next!
The quote is "an afternoon of idle _fuzzing_". As in fuzz testing.
"I've always been amused by the premise of this franchise. It comes from one a (supposedly) non-fiction book called The Stargate Conspiracy, which claims that a secret cabal is bringing back alien technology through a portal dug up in Egypt, and trading it for money and power."
Sorry, no. _Stargate_ the film was released in 1994. _The Stargate Conspiracy_ is a 2001 book. There is no way the book influenced the film unless the authors also invented time travel.
However, the general premise of aliens influencing ancient civilisations certainly did come at least indirectly from other speculative 'nonfiction' books in the astroarcheology genre. Erich von Daniken's _Chariots of the Gods_ (1968) and Zechariah Sitchin's _The 12th Planet_ (1976) and their numerous sequels and imitators. It's now a fertile subgenre with modern writers such as Graham Hancock. Whether there's any truth in it is another issue.
"And that means that when he has the choice of donating money to a software development group or spending it on one of the underfunded schools throughout the country, he must spend it on the kids... And they are best served by using the money elsewhere."
No, that's not at all clear to me. It's begging the question.
*If* it's a given that things other than software are more important to the education of NZ kids, then yes, of course they're best served by spending that money elsewhere.
But if it is in fact worth $X of educational value to equip schools with MS Office, and $X-Y donated to an open source project could get you the same amount of educational value... why not donate? Just because you *can* be cheap doesn't mean you're getting good educational value for money by doing so.
(Yes, I know the economics of collective projects and marginal returns for donations gets tricky, so it's not necessarily a one-to-one value proposition... and justifying a donation politically is harder than justifying even a usurious, monopoly rent... but still. NZ's Labour government has spent lots of money on social causes considered worthwhile, even commercial ones like building up NZ music... so why should *investing* in the development of free software with huge educational and business benefits be considered a waste? Probably the cost ought to be amortized between education and business/social development ministries. But it would have a national payoff, why not invest? Spending money on free software development is a bit like putting your rent dollars toward a mortgage instead. Might cost you a bit more but in the end you get freedom.)
Per what? That seems, um, expensive.
Seems like broadband isn't much of a winning proposition for your customers, though, if you're throttling so harshly. Why would they want to pick it over dialup?
CD/DVD trays for bootable media which can only be opened when the system power is on are one of the worst misfeatures I've ever seen.
There you are with your powered-off server which you've just taken a backup of, or your image-ready Windows workstation you've just run SYSPREP on. You have to boot to removable media to do a maintenance function. The system is now in a delicate, fragile state: if you should accidentally boot off the hard drive, the OS will boot up and start auto-configuring itself or setting a security ID or trying to talk to the network or something equally dumb that will break the system state.
So you go to insert your boot CD and darn, you can't physically at the drive because it's powered! You can only insert the CD once you've turned the system on! For your comfort and convenience!
So you hit power, hit the CD tray eject button as the BIOS self-test runs, and now you're in a race against time as the CD takes its time to self-test before allowing you to eject, and the BIOS does its self-test, and you hope like heck that you can hit the magic BIOS interrupt key (whichever it is on this model) *at precisely the magic moment* to stop the boot cycle before it kicks into Windows and corrupts the hard drive - because if you have any keys, including the magic BIOS interrupt function key, held down as the self-test runs and not during that magic half-second of grace you'll get the 'Keyboard error press F1...' and then *maybe* you'll be allowed to get into the BIOS and pause the boot cycle...
And then for some reason the CD tray doesn't respond to your eject, so you press it again, but now you find out it's actually read your tray button push but queued it for after the self-test, so now it's registered two button pushes, so it ejects then immediately retracts, wasting critical seconds as the BIOS counts down to doomsday...
Meanwhile, on the ancient 1993 box next to it, that's still got a floppy, you just turn it off, slot your boot floppy in with the power off, turn the power on, and you've got a guaranteed secure non-hard-drive boot.
And let's not forget all those times you've turned off a machine, pulled out all the plugs, tucked it under your arm to take away then realised you left the CD in the drive and now you've got to go plug it in again to eject the media, and either futz around with the keyboard and video cable for five minutes or just plug the power in and take your chances booting blind without a keyboard to enter the magic BIOS override key and just do the race-against-time with the CD tray eject vs BIOS self-test thing. Or let it half-boot and then go down cold during startup and let the filesystem corrupt.
It's like a mini Russian Roulette, every day! Just to make your life more interesting.
"It's not as if the government(s) of the world are competent enough to deal with problems like these (tubes anyone)."
This smear is getting as tired as the old "Al Gore claimed to invent the Internet" one.
People working in an industry that routinely and without irony refers to "pipes", "sockets", "channels" and "flow" to describe data internetworking are in no position to laugh at people who (quite correctly) describe the Internet's structure as a "series of tubes".
Also, I seem to recall this little US Government agency called ARPA.
"The categories such as Mathematics and Science highlight what is best about Wikipedia. The categories such as History and Society highlight what is worst about Wikipedia. You do not really have big battles over articles like "Pythagorean theorem", and they usually do a good job of explaining what that is. On the other hand, if you look at the top of an article like "Palestine" you will see that it is semi-protected, meaning new users can not edit the article. You can also see eight pages of discussion which really doesn't get anywhere."
Only eight pages of discussion for a hugely divisive major world crisis with 2,000 years of backstory?
Yes, that sounds pretty much like the fault lines you'd find in a university faculty staffroom or the world headline section in a newspaper. Only without guns.
Seems like Wikipedia is doing a fine job of representing the real world's production of knowledge - or at least our shared articulation of the questions. Remember, some issues *don't have* neat, tidy, one-page, incontrovertible answers. That's why they're issues.
7 cents a minute seems insanely cheap to me - either that or New Zealand cellphone costs are insanely expensive. In NZ, voice costs around $1/minute on cellphone. (I pay $20 monthly with Vodafone for 20 GSM minutes; this is an entry-level plan but fairly standard). For a 1100 minute plan, I'd pay $370/month - $0.33/minute, rock-bottom mininum.
n s/you-choose/index.jsp
Meanwhile, texts begin at 20c each and for $10/month drop to 0.5c each.
http://vodafone.co.nz/personal/plans-services/pla
So you require every search result to be recommended by at least two different remote systems, and you use a web of trust/reputation so that each system can grade the others by how correct its users find their results to be.
If I'm consistently getting bad results from www.spammers-r-us.com, I drop their weight to zero, and heavily downgrade all other systems that have a positive weighting for them too. Maybe I add a bit of forgiveness over time, in case a bad system improves its reputation.
Where's the hard part?
"Yes, some of us are prepared to use the best tool for the job rather than blindly follow FOSS."
And for some of us, freedom *itself* is a tool, chosen for pragmatic, utilitarian reasons. Namely, that it is important to not be in a position where someone can unilaterally yank away the infrastructure you rely on.
It seems to be a sort of blind spot in many people's relationship to technology, that we wasily forget that any tool you use also forms *you*, and your relationships to other people. The output of any industrial process is not just the bits or atoms you get at one end, but also the subtler rearrangement of social... shape, for want of a better word. Power relationships, but not just power. Whether the use of a certain tool, or living within a certain architecture, brings people together, keeps them apart, fosters some kinds of interactions while preventing others... all these are results of our use-of-tools. And we would be smart to remember this and decide, at the point of designing or purchasing tools, just what kind of social outputs we want. If we don't even notice or care that we're getting social outputs, that makes it very very easy for unscrupulous people who *do* care to subtly design our tools in such a way to give them power over us.
Yes, I read the transcript Did you? It doesn't seem like you paid attention.
n ation/stories/030107dnnatattorney.398bb40.html
The show includes sound-bites from A Few Good Men because Greg Palast is saying that David Iglesias was the real-life lawyer in a real-life military trial on which the role of Tom Cruise in the story of A Few Good Men was based.
The Dallas Morning News (via Wikipedia) concurs:
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/
"Mr. Iglesias, 49, is a Navy Reserve commander whose role as a defense lawyer in a famous military hazing case was the basis for the Tom Cruise character in the movie A Few Good Men."
Would like to know more about that case...
"I can probably make Halo with an added-in gatling gun that fires ninja bees."
In other words, Half-Life 1.
"A series of tubes" really does sum up what the Internet is. It was a perfectly appropriate and correct metaphor. It is, much like a reticulated water or gas or electrical or superhighway system, a data transport utility comprised of interconnected networks of networks, each with different
Look, we all use the term "pipe" already to mean "data connection" and we know exactly what we mean. Jumping on Stevens for his use of the term was really just a ridiculous display of snobbishness, combined with a deep-seated (and justified) unease about the future of Internet freedom in the face of corporate encroachment.
I think the reason for the ugly kneejerk reaction was that Stevens' argument hit a little close to home: we all know that bandwidth in various Internet subsystems *is* a limited resource, and that large numbers of users downloading mass quantities of rich media *does* put a stress on this resource, and in a sensibly managed internetwork we should act to conserve it. But because it's untrustworthy cable providers and vertically integrated data/media monopolies advancing the 'bandwidth conservation' pitch to cover their hatred of the Internet's openness and their desire to decommoditise it, we instinctively distrust everything they say. And we want to pretend that downloading 'huge quantities of material' DOESN'T 'clog the pipes', to take that argument away from them. And for that reason (and to make lawmakers look like a bunch of old men who Just Don't Get It), Stevens had to be discredited.
But laughing at a valid argument doesn't make it go away. What we *should* be saying is: Yes, data transfer costs money, it doesn't come for free. But freedom is also important. So bill data users honestly, by the gigabyte per month. Don't try to impose vertical integration monopolies because they distort the true cost of data transfer, don't try to double-dip and hold websites to hostage for bandwith both they and the home users have already paid for, don't filter traffic by data type, don't prevent users from copying and locally caching as much rich media as they can (because local caches save bandwidth) - and we'll all get along fine.
But no, it's so much easier just to laugh at funny stupid ol' Tube Guy who doesn't realise bandwidth is free like air.
And that's why we still have spam, because SMTP thinks all computers are our friends.
"there is no controversy in making good decisions."
Actually, there often is.
Actually I've got an image of Wikipedia as of around 2005 on my Palm Tungsten E and I constantly refer to it. For a lot of applications, or just for general knowledge, partial and buggy and incomplete is a lot better than nothing. I think people - academics especially - underestimate just how much 'knowledge' in the world at any one time is fragmented, contradictory, and just plain wrong, and yet the human mind copes. We're not actually just brute logic engines that crash at the slightest GIGO.
"Whats Oceania? I thought it was a made-up supernation from Orwell's 1984."
Definitions vary but it's Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific, pretty much. Also often referred to as 'Australasia'.
"It's amazing how many people seem to think there's some sort of obligation on people to upgrade."
There's no obligation to upgrade to the latest version of Windows in much the same way that there's no obligation to pay any money to the nice gentleman visiting who would very much like your store to not accidentally burn down next weekend.
You can hold out from upgrading, and in return you can be guaranteed the following services:
* your documents will slowly stop being able to be read by other people since you don't have a current MS Office
* the software you use will slowly not be supported by the manufacturer since you don't have a current OS
* your OS will stop getting security patches and thus will become infested by worms and trojans, possibly making you criminally liable
* your hardware, when it fails and needs replacing (and the warranty probably only lasts for three years) quite possibly won't work on your current OS - and if it does, OEM licensing may make it illegal for you to continue to run your current OS
Yep, absolutely zero obligation.
Nice merchandise you have here, by the way. Shame if bit-rot were to set in, ain't it?
I knew there was a reason I read Slashdot.
Logged in today to find the "Rthdcpl.exe - Illegal System DLL Relocation" message, went wtf? and turned off the Realtek audio control panel.
My machine's set up to automatically install all current MS patches for testing, so it's the only one applied this so far.
Sigh.
(Voice of Jar-Jar)
... on second thoughts, let's not go to Coruscant, it is a silly planet.
Every time I look at you I don't understand
Why you let this trilogy get so out of hand
You could have ruled the galaxy if you'd had a plan
Now why'd you chat up Natalie with lines about sand?
When you first strode onto our screens you scared a whole nation
Now you're just a whiny git with a Dark Side fixation
Don't get me wrong, now
Just want to know, now
Anakin, Anakin
What kind of film did you think you're in?
Anakin, Superstar
Are you the Dark Lord they say you are?
Tell me what you think about your friends in the sky
Now who d'ya think besides yourself made the fans really cry?
Yoda was he pretty fly with his Boba Fett clones?
Or Qui-Gon Jin's midichlorians and Young C3PO?
Did you mean to be a parody of everyone's trust or
Did you know this Bantha poo would still be a blockbuster?
I dunno, apart from changes to /etc config files not *necessarily* requiring a system reboot (though good luck making any change to X11 configuration without needing to restart your entire X session and all processes spawned by it... ie, everything currently running with a GUI... how is that less destructive for a desktop user than rebooting the kernel?), the Linux /etc, /proc, /etc/X11, ~/.gnome2, GConf maze seems to me to be about as much a 'giant convoluted collection of trivia' as Windows' registry - except that it's not always organised as coherently.
'Power Linux users' exist too - they're people who think that it's normal to have to recompile their kernel from source in order to make their webcam device driver work. In my opinion, the whole POSIX configuration infrastructure needs a serious reboot to make it simple and coherent. And of course, in true Open Source fashion, there's about a dozen competing projects all with different incompatible ideas on how to do this, none of them adopted by any major distro.
Still, I've found Googling for obscure Linux error messages just as useful as for Windows ones (or OSX ones), so there is help out there. It's just not nearly as good as IMO any 21st century OS *should* be.