A business can invest money to generate some positive cash flow and then maybe even some revenue, gov't does not and shouldn't be expected to.
Er. Isn't that exactly what public spending on health, education, policing and infrastructure is? Investment in a nation's productive capacity, which will lead to exports and tax revenue? "You have to spend a buck to make a buck", if true, applies equally well to nation-states as to organisations.
You can either have an impoverished, ignorant, sick, criminal citizenry who spend their days breaking stuff, or a smart, healthy, productive citizenry who make and do useful things for others. Investing so you get the latter and not the former is exactly a government's job.
I wonder if these same people are going to dismiss this fact as junk science while blindly accepting computer models of weather forecasts for the next 100 years all because they prefer one flavor of politics over another.
What does belief in anthropogenic global warming have to do with politics? Whether you prefer left-wing or right-wing economics as a solution to a global crisis, politics should define your response to a problem, not the problem itself.
But if your preferred political-economic model can't cope with a particular crisis scenario, and has to resort to denying that that crisis could ever occur... then perhaps that model isn't as robust as its supporters would like to think?
Not the people who gave him those orders, which are, ultimately, the people of the United States?
Bingo.
This is why the US public has a "need to know" the leaked Iraq and Afghanistan documentation.
Because you guys ultimately give the orders to your military - through the electoral process - and you take the ultimate responsibility for what they do. If you don't fully understand and agree with what they're doing in your name, then you don't actually have a democracy, you have a rogue out-of-control military-dictatorship superpower.
But there is an immediacy of consequence when the impolite turn violent. When ordinary citizens are armed, there is a built-in limit as to how far a violent criminal act can go unchecked.
Or not. My brother lives in Brazil - it is amazing just how much blue-on-blue gun crime there is between police officers, as coffee-fueled arguments escalate into gunfights - let alone the heavy weaponry like rocket launchers that the drug gangs, who are so pervasive as to practically be the lower-class government, have.
tl;dr: guns don't make an impolite society polite. They make a walk down the street to the shopping mall into an exciting bullet-dodging adventure.
You can't be gentle when somebody decides to wage war
Actually, you not only can be gentle in war, you have to in order to win, if by "being gentle" you mean "not pissing off civilians who would otherwise support you or at least stay out of the way, but if you go tromping all over them in army boots they become resistance fighters and your worst nightmare."
The point of war isn't just to get a high score in body count, it's to achieve some political objective. Being gentle gets you a lot of political victory points with potential allies; if you decide to go all genocidal, you might solve your immediate problem (local resistance fighters taking out your guys) but create a bigger multi-front war, which eventually can escalate into a "your country's righteous crusade against the entire rest of the world".
A lesson to draw from both WW2 and the Soviet Union's downfall is that if you get to that point of you-against-everyone, you're toast no matter how efficient and ruthless your army might be.
The slice of each piece of pie does not grow smaller as its divided. Rather, the pie itself grows in size.
Or shrinks, in the case of oil, coal, copper, uiranium, forests, tigers, fish, and in fact everything else which is physical and which we deplete by mining and harvesting faster than it regrows.
We can play pretend money number games as long as we like, but in the end there's only so much stuff.
That Wikileaks dumped them all out says to me that it was more of an ego stoke "Look how badass we are," kind of thing more than a "Wow this is really important and the public really needs to know this," kind of thing.
Interesting.
Why would your gut reaction to an NGO transparently presenting facts, instead of selectively filtering and editorialising, be "an ego stroke"? For me, it's the exact opposite. I see ego stroking in media organisations to the extent which they don't reveal their raw data and instead try to present me a filtered, massaged, sexed-up commentary.
But then, perhaps you're assuming that the United States military has some kind of ethical high ground by default? Me, I look at the world since 2003 with the awareness that the US President began a major war of choice, which is a war crime, by point-blank lying to the United Nations - and the people responsible for this disaster have never been prosecuted. So my assumption is that the United States military has lost all its credible need for secrecy and the people need to know the full extent of their crimes so even if it's too late for justice to be done, at least awareness of the awfulness of what was done in our name won't be buried forever.
That argument was used to not nuking Japan in WWII.
Agreed. The non-dropping of the unatomic bomb was one of the key nonevents of WWII. We all don't have Groves and Oppenheimer to thank that the Manhattan Nonproject never did happen.
Because it's difficult to come up with a cogent legal counterargument to a person who has your iPhone's Google coordinates and can put a couple of Predator drones through your corner office window.
"Yes, we used your geospatial mapping software to run our killbots. It works really well. Well, with a few meters of error, but we compensated by putting a bigger warhead on it. Would you like a demonstration, or would you like to be purchased by IBM? No pressure."
Strictly speaking yes. But it was a sequel that was heavily influenced by both Dark Forces and Jedi Knight in both level design and story, importing elements from both to the point of nearly 'remaking' them both. That's why it started you out without a lightsaber so you could do DF-style Imperial base runs and mine crawls, and then gave you a lightsaber later. Story-wise, it had the Valley of the Jedi mythos and a renegade Jedi mixed with a Dark Trooper-style Imperial mass production project. It really did capture the spirit of both games. Even the textures were beautifully evocative of both earlier games.
If Lucasfilm were to remake both Dark Forces and Jedi Knight, it would probably be a 'reimagining' rather than a literal polygon-for-polygon remake, and I don't know how they'd do that better than what Raven already did.
There are of course fan attempts at reimaginings/remakes of Dark Forces and Jedi Knight on the Jedi Academy engine, but at least the Dark Forces one is very different from the original and really doesn't capture the fun of it for me.
I know 2002 was a long time ago for those who are only entering high school in 2010, but seriously, an eight year old game is not that old, and it's a classic for the ages.
But gold can be always exchanged directly for food.
Always?
Wonderful, then I have a great solution to the problem of how to colonise the moon. Instead of going to all the trouble of figuring out how to transport oxygen and water and food there, let's just shoot Shuttle-loads of gold bullion there. Then when the astronauts arrive, all they have to do is exchange the gold for anything they want! The magic of the market will provide it all, automatically!
Everybody would be better off if the gov't let go of economy altogether and let the people decide what value is
You live in a democracy. The "government" is the people deciding what value is. We call those collective decisions about value "laws", and they're created by aggregating lots of individual decisions called "votes".
If you somehow want to "let the people decide" but then don't want to abide by the decisions all of the rest of the people made - I don't know how to help you live in human society. You could try to set up a republic of one person, perhaps?
"Since all money poofs into existence from loans, the debt gets bigger and bigger. There isn't enough money in the money supply at any one time to satisfy the debt."
Unless you print more money. Don't forget, that the total quantity of circulating money is not constant.
Depends what you mean by "print" and "money". Literally speaking, the only form of money which is actually printed is currency - cash - which is a component of M0 money. But M0 is only a tiny part of the actual 'money' in the system when you count M1 and M2, which is all debt.
If I understand roughly how the whole creaky Heath Robinson contraption works, it's not the government which creates M1 and M2, it's private banks - though that process can be regulated by the central bank's prime interest rate, and/or the issuing of government bonds.
Even from a total layman's perspective, debt as such isn't entirely the problem - completely decentralised barter systems like LETS create all money as debt too. And even compounding interest makes sense when money is describing biological resources such as cows or corn which do grow over time (given unlimited external ecological resources which is not always the case).
The problem that I see is that there is no inherent mechanism in our money system to make sure that money really does describe the real resources it claims to - labour, knowledge, durable goods, human and ecological wellbeing and energy. Instead, it seems to fluctuate wildly and become delinked from reality. The fact that real estate prices keep rising, for instance. The actual value of a piece of ground in absolute energy or biology terms surely doesn't change that much over time. If the value of an acre of ground doubles, it doesn't necessarily mean you can grow twice as many ears of corn on it, or house twice as many people with the same quality of life. But that's what our society expects money to mean - that something of absolute value has increased, and therefore that if the money number ticks upwards, 'value has been created'. But it might not have - value might actually have been destroyed by that rise in price (if, for instance, that house or farm is now unaffordable by someone, so they've got nowhere to live, drop below the poverty line, get sick or turn to crime or drugs and their skills are now removed from society's labour pool).
The upshot in my mind is that money is a measure of what we've decided is easy to measure, but that measure really has little to do with the really valuable things that need to be measured. So one should take money's valuations with a very large grain of salt, and avoid making big societal decisions on the grounds of money. Because it will very often recommend bizarre and irrational things to do, and following its valuations strictly will probably destroy your society.
Windows didn't win over OS/2 and BE because it was better or supported more hardware, it won because it was already the defacto standard
The 'it' which was a de facto standard at the time Windows 3.11 (the first successful Windows) launched was MS-DOS.
What made Windows 3.11 so successful was that although it wasn't much of a windowing OS, it 1) did just enough to make Word and Excel run (solving the printer font and driver nightmare on PCs by shipping Arial and Times New Roman Truetype fonts for free), and 2) it got out of the way and let you shell to MS-DOS to run all your existing apps. So it was sort of a 'super-DOS'.
IIRC, the other 'technically superior' alternatives at the time either didn't provide full bare-metal MS-DOS compatibility (like OS/2) or were mere application shells and didn't do quite enough to make word processing and printing pleasant. So, they weren't actually superior since you couldn't do as much with them.
And then Windows 95 did everything that Win3.11 did, looked and felt like a Mac, and still let you run all your old DOS games and apps on your existing PC hardware. That was the trifecta that made it the ultimate no-brainer upgrade of the 90s, and was where Microsoft really won big. Meanwhile NT was churning along starting to provide credibility in the server space, and eventually by 2002's XP, absorbed all Win95's application ecosystem.
Without Word and Excel, Win3.11 wouldn't really have been much. But all the other competitors were worse. Remember WordPerfect 5? That was the non-Microsoft market leader on DOS-era PCs as late as 1996. I've blocked most of that nightmarish experience from my memory, but for those of us who were there: the online help was so bad, you had to have pre-printed function key templates to explain what each of several dozen command keys did.
Given that, anything from Microsoft in the mid-90s was actually a step *up* in quality. Yes, things really were that bad back then.
If the PC had died, so too would have DOS and windows
DOS and Windows 3.11 perhaps, with their x86 ecosystem. And certainly Microsoft got a huge boost from the success of DOS. But they also had experience in multiple platforms, developing Word for MacOS and the whole OS/2 debacle. Come 1993 and the decision to split from IBM, Windows NT hedged its bets and shipped on multiple hardware platforms: x86, MIPS, Alpha and PowerPC, and with support for multiple OS subsystems concept including a rudimentary POSIX. If DOS, Win3.11's Win16 and Win95's Win32 APIs had all failed, Microsoft was still positioned to fight directly against UNIX and whatever alternative object-oriented replacement might have arisen on other architectures (like NextStep and Taligent).
As it turned out, Taligent and OS/2 both failed, DOS did deploy a huge ecosystem of games and bespoke business apps, the Office bundle on Win3.11 was a breakthrough bestseller and Win95 was just good enough and cheap enough and supported all those existing DOS machines to displace a stumbling mid-90s Apple. So Windows and Intel won (creating the Web security nightmare as an unintended side effect because of its embrace of DOS-era backward compatibility). And by the 2000s, they retired support for most other chip architectures.
But none of those were givens, and I doubt Microsoft would have just stopped and rolled over had their DOS->Win16-Win32 upgrade path failed. I'm sure they would have fought, and fought hard, on whatever hardware platform presented itself.
The real reason why people want phones with no features is the terrible, absolutely terrible, user interface design of all mobile phones (and that includes smartphones).
It also includes cordless phones for the home.
I bought a cheap cordless a while back when my existing one broke. The thing has a completely unpenetrable UI, by which I mean: * It has a numeric keypad, okay so far * It has a one-line LCD with a display for the typed number (ok so far) and a number of indicator icons (potentially good or bad) * It has the standard send/end/power keys * It also has a key with an icon of a clockface and an unrecognisable squiggle, which I don't know what it does. As far as I can tell, it doesn't do anything related to displaying or setting the time. * It has three blank context-sensitive function keys underneath the LCD, leaving me completely dependant on the icons to describe their functions * Typical LCD icons are: 'Half-circular arrow pointing counterclockwise', 'Rectangular grid of dots', 'Venn diagram of wo overlapping circles, one full, one empty'
I discovered by trial and error that 'Venn diagram' icon seems to do a 'redial last number', and that 'rectangular grid' brings up a system configuration menu. However, 'counterclockwise arrow' doesn't seem to mean 'go back one level' like on every other phone. To get any further, I think I'll need to dig out the paper manual, which is somewhere in the garage along with 1,583 other empty boxes and manuals, most of which I've never needed to refer to.
It's all just... very depressing. How hard can UI design really be?
Very hard apparently, and icons don't make it easier.
The problem is, that when governments get an ability to do something, they have a bad habit of misusing that power.
s/governments/humans
A government is just an organisation of humans with a common purpose, after all, in the same way as a corporation or a club.
Except the charter of most corporations is 'corner the market, eliminate our competition, and make money for our shareholders at any cost' while the charter of democratic governments is 'provide a fair environment for all our citizens'. A democratic government might certainly *fail* in its purpose - but if a corporation *achieves* its purpose, that's potentially even worse.
he kept flooding the world with news about ACTA, and I was getting tired of hearing about it because it was the same old thing, bad bad bad.
I don't understand this sentiment. If an important fact is repeated long enough, it becomes unimportant? Does bad news cease to be bad once it's no longer novel? Does a truth go 'out of date' and cease to be true once people are bored of hearing about it? Must activists trying to alert the world to imminent danger keep constantly reframing their message in new terms or risk being ignored because they're, like, such a buzz-kill, man?
There's an important insight here I think into how the 24-hour must-have-shiny news cycle is trivialising public awareness of the world, but my 30-second clip is up. We cross now to a live feed of a kitten up a tree. Kitteh!
If the relation to China goes sour, it won't be like the Cold War. Then it was US industry versus Soviet industry. It'll be Chinese industry versus no industry. IP agreements depend on enforced contracts, the day China says here are the letters F and U they'll still have all the means to produce, while the US will have nothing.
I doubt China will try matching the US or Russia on nukes, they have some but that's not so essential. But what if they develop a proper rocket shield? Suddenly you're back to way more conventional warfare, with a billion soldiers and heavy industry now making ammunition and tanks.
So this.
Even if it comes to conventional war, and even given the USA's military supremacy, it'll still be dicey.
Slashdot Mirror
A business can invest money to generate some positive cash flow and then maybe even some revenue, gov't does not and shouldn't be expected to.
Er. Isn't that exactly what public spending on health, education, policing and infrastructure is? Investment in a nation's productive capacity, which will lead to exports and tax revenue? "You have to spend a buck to make a buck", if true, applies equally well to nation-states as to organisations.
You can either have an impoverished, ignorant, sick, criminal citizenry who spend their days breaking stuff, or a smart, healthy, productive citizenry who make and do useful things for others. Investing so you get the latter and not the former is exactly a government's job.
I wonder if these same people are going to dismiss this fact as junk science while blindly accepting computer models of weather forecasts for the next 100 years all because they prefer one flavor of politics over another.
What does belief in anthropogenic global warming have to do with politics? Whether you prefer left-wing or right-wing economics as a solution to a global crisis, politics should define your response to a problem, not the problem itself.
But if your preferred political-economic model can't cope with a particular crisis scenario, and has to resort to denying that that crisis could ever occur... then perhaps that model isn't as robust as its supporters would like to think?
"the land of the free and the home of the brave"
Former home of the brave. Nitpicking I know, but didn't the loss of American freedom start about 500 years ago with the Indian wars?
Not the people who gave him those orders, which are, ultimately, the people of the United States?
Bingo.
This is why the US public has a "need to know" the leaked Iraq and Afghanistan documentation.
Because you guys ultimately give the orders to your military - through the electoral process - and you take the ultimate responsibility for what they do. If you don't fully understand and agree with what they're doing in your name, then you don't actually have a democracy, you have a rogue out-of-control military-dictatorship superpower.
But there is an immediacy of consequence when the impolite turn violent. When ordinary citizens are armed, there is a built-in limit as to how far a violent criminal act can go unchecked.
Or not. My brother lives in Brazil - it is amazing just how much blue-on-blue gun crime there is between police officers, as coffee-fueled arguments escalate into gunfights - let alone the heavy weaponry like rocket launchers that the drug gangs, who are so pervasive as to practically be the lower-class government, have.
tl;dr: guns don't make an impolite society polite. They make a walk down the street to the shopping mall into an exciting bullet-dodging adventure.
You can't be gentle when somebody decides to wage war
Actually, you not only can be gentle in war, you have to in order to win, if by "being gentle" you mean "not pissing off civilians who would otherwise support you or at least stay out of the way, but if you go tromping all over them in army boots they become resistance fighters and your worst nightmare."
The point of war isn't just to get a high score in body count, it's to achieve some political objective. Being gentle gets you a lot of political victory points with potential allies; if you decide to go all genocidal, you might solve your immediate problem (local resistance fighters taking out your guys) but create a bigger multi-front war, which eventually can escalate into a "your country's righteous crusade against the entire rest of the world".
A lesson to draw from both WW2 and the Soviet Union's downfall is that if you get to that point of you-against-everyone, you're toast no matter how efficient and ruthless your army might be.
So don't do that.
But you get enhanced pat-downs for free.
The slice of each piece of pie does not grow smaller as its divided. Rather, the pie itself grows in size.
Or shrinks, in the case of oil, coal, copper, uiranium, forests, tigers, fish, and in fact everything else which is physical and which we deplete by mining and harvesting faster than it regrows.
We can play pretend money number games as long as we like, but in the end there's only so much stuff.
Finite planet, finite pie.
That Wikileaks dumped them all out says to me that it was more of an ego stoke "Look how badass we are," kind of thing more than a "Wow this is really important and the public really needs to know this," kind of thing.
Interesting.
Why would your gut reaction to an NGO transparently presenting facts, instead of selectively filtering and editorialising, be "an ego stroke"? For me, it's the exact opposite. I see ego stroking in media organisations to the extent which they don't reveal their raw data and instead try to present me a filtered, massaged, sexed-up commentary.
But then, perhaps you're assuming that the United States military has some kind of ethical high ground by default? Me, I look at the world since 2003 with the awareness that the US President began a major war of choice, which is a war crime, by point-blank lying to the United Nations - and the people responsible for this disaster have never been prosecuted. So my assumption is that the United States military has lost all its credible need for secrecy and the people need to know the full extent of their crimes so even if it's too late for justice to be done, at least awareness of the awfulness of what was done in our name won't be buried forever.
That argument was used to not nuking Japan in WWII.
Agreed. The non-dropping of the unatomic bomb was one of the key nonevents of WWII. We all don't have Groves and Oppenheimer to thank that the Manhattan Nonproject never did happen.
Because it's difficult to come up with a cogent legal counterargument to a person who has your iPhone's Google coordinates and can put a couple of Predator drones through your corner office window.
"Yes, we used your geospatial mapping software to run our killbots. It works really well. Well, with a few meters of error, but we compensated by putting a bigger warhead on it. Would you like a demonstration, or would you like to be purchased by IBM? No pressure."
and there are whole dwarf galaxies orbiting ours...
Slaves to Armok III: Dwarf Galaxy?
Now *that* would be a sandbox game.
Strictly speaking yes. But it was a sequel that was heavily influenced by both Dark Forces and Jedi Knight in both level design and story, importing elements from both to the point of nearly 'remaking' them both. That's why it started you out without a lightsaber so you could do DF-style Imperial base runs and mine crawls, and then gave you a lightsaber later. Story-wise, it had the Valley of the Jedi mythos and a renegade Jedi mixed with a Dark Trooper-style Imperial mass production project. It really did capture the spirit of both games. Even the textures were beautifully evocative of both earlier games.
If Lucasfilm were to remake both Dark Forces and Jedi Knight, it would probably be a 'reimagining' rather than a literal polygon-for-polygon remake, and I don't know how they'd do that better than what Raven already did.
There are of course fan attempts at reimaginings/remakes of Dark Forces and Jedi Knight on the Jedi Academy engine, but at least the Dark Forces one is very different from the original and really doesn't capture the fun of it for me.
Would that perhaps be some kind of Jedi Outcast?
I know 2002 was a long time ago for those who are only entering high school in 2010, but seriously, an eight year old game is not that old, and it's a classic for the ages.
But gold can be always exchanged directly for food.
Always?
Wonderful, then I have a great solution to the problem of how to colonise the moon. Instead of going to all the trouble of figuring out how to transport oxygen and water and food there, let's just shoot Shuttle-loads of gold bullion there. Then when the astronauts arrive, all they have to do is exchange the gold for anything they want! The magic of the market will provide it all, automatically!
Sometimes gold is simply not useful.
Everybody would be better off if the gov't let go of economy altogether and let the people decide what value is
You live in a democracy. The "government" is the people deciding what value is. We call those collective decisions about value "laws", and they're created by aggregating lots of individual decisions called "votes".
If you somehow want to "let the people decide" but then don't want to abide by the decisions all of the rest of the people made - I don't know how to help you live in human society. You could try to set up a republic of one person, perhaps?
"Since all money poofs into existence from loans, the debt gets bigger and bigger. There isn't enough money in the money supply at any one time to satisfy the debt."
Unless you print more money. Don't forget, that the total quantity of circulating money is not constant.
Depends what you mean by "print" and "money". Literally speaking, the only form of money which is actually printed is currency - cash - which is a component of M0 money. But M0 is only a tiny part of the actual 'money' in the system when you count M1 and M2, which is all debt.
If I understand roughly how the whole creaky Heath Robinson contraption works, it's not the government which creates M1 and M2, it's private banks - though that process can be regulated by the central bank's prime interest rate, and/or the issuing of government bonds.
Even from a total layman's perspective, debt as such isn't entirely the problem - completely decentralised barter systems like LETS create all money as debt too. And even compounding interest makes sense when money is describing biological resources such as cows or corn which do grow over time (given unlimited external ecological resources which is not always the case).
The problem that I see is that there is no inherent mechanism in our money system to make sure that money really does describe the real resources it claims to - labour, knowledge, durable goods, human and ecological wellbeing and energy. Instead, it seems to fluctuate wildly and become delinked from reality. The fact that real estate prices keep rising, for instance. The actual value of a piece of ground in absolute energy or biology terms surely doesn't change that much over time. If the value of an acre of ground doubles, it doesn't necessarily mean you can grow twice as many ears of corn on it, or house twice as many people with the same quality of life. But that's what our society expects money to mean - that something of absolute value has increased, and therefore that if the money number ticks upwards, 'value has been created'. But it might not have - value might actually have been destroyed by that rise in price (if, for instance, that house or farm is now unaffordable by someone, so they've got nowhere to live, drop below the poverty line, get sick or turn to crime or drugs and their skills are now removed from society's labour pool).
The upshot in my mind is that money is a measure of what we've decided is easy to measure, but that measure really has little to do with the really valuable things that need to be measured. So one should take money's valuations with a very large grain of salt, and avoid making big societal decisions on the grounds of money. Because it will very often recommend bizarre and irrational things to do, and following its valuations strictly will probably destroy your society.
Windows didn't win over OS/2 and BE because it was better or supported more hardware, it won because it was already the defacto standard
The 'it' which was a de facto standard at the time Windows 3.11 (the first successful Windows) launched was MS-DOS.
What made Windows 3.11 so successful was that although it wasn't much of a windowing OS, it 1) did just enough to make Word and Excel run (solving the printer font and driver nightmare on PCs by shipping Arial and Times New Roman Truetype fonts for free), and 2) it got out of the way and let you shell to MS-DOS to run all your existing apps. So it was sort of a 'super-DOS'.
IIRC, the other 'technically superior' alternatives at the time either didn't provide full bare-metal MS-DOS compatibility (like OS/2) or were mere application shells and didn't do quite enough to make word processing and printing pleasant. So, they weren't actually superior since you couldn't do as much with them.
And then Windows 95 did everything that Win3.11 did, looked and felt like a Mac, and still let you run all your old DOS games and apps on your existing PC hardware. That was the trifecta that made it the ultimate no-brainer upgrade of the 90s, and was where Microsoft really won big. Meanwhile NT was churning along starting to provide credibility in the server space, and eventually by 2002's XP, absorbed all Win95's application ecosystem.
Without Word and Excel, Win3.11 wouldn't really have been much. But all the other competitors were worse. Remember WordPerfect 5? That was the non-Microsoft market leader on DOS-era PCs as late as 1996. I've blocked most of that nightmarish experience from my memory, but for those of us who were there: the online help was so bad, you had to have pre-printed function key templates to explain what each of several dozen command keys did.
Given that, anything from Microsoft in the mid-90s was actually a step *up* in quality. Yes, things really were that bad back then.
If the PC had died, so too would have DOS and windows
DOS and Windows 3.11 perhaps, with their x86 ecosystem. And certainly Microsoft got a huge boost from the success of DOS. But they also had experience in multiple platforms, developing Word for MacOS and the whole OS/2 debacle. Come 1993 and the decision to split from IBM, Windows NT hedged its bets and shipped on multiple hardware platforms: x86, MIPS, Alpha and PowerPC, and with support for multiple OS subsystems concept including a rudimentary POSIX. If DOS, Win3.11's Win16 and Win95's Win32 APIs had all failed, Microsoft was still positioned to fight directly against UNIX and whatever alternative object-oriented replacement might have arisen on other architectures (like NextStep and Taligent).
As it turned out, Taligent and OS/2 both failed, DOS did deploy a huge ecosystem of games and bespoke business apps, the Office bundle on Win3.11 was a breakthrough bestseller and Win95 was just good enough and cheap enough and supported all those existing DOS machines to displace a stumbling mid-90s Apple. So Windows and Intel won (creating the Web security nightmare as an unintended side effect because of its embrace of DOS-era backward compatibility). And by the 2000s, they retired support for most other chip architectures.
But none of those were givens, and I doubt Microsoft would have just stopped and rolled over had their DOS->Win16-Win32 upgrade path failed. I'm sure they would have fought, and fought hard, on whatever hardware platform presented itself.
The real reason why people want phones with no features is the terrible, absolutely terrible, user interface design of all mobile phones (and that includes smartphones).
It also includes cordless phones for the home.
I bought a cheap cordless a while back when my existing one broke. The thing has a completely unpenetrable UI, by which I mean:
* It has a numeric keypad, okay so far
* It has a one-line LCD with a display for the typed number (ok so far) and a number of indicator icons (potentially good or bad)
* It has the standard send/end/power keys
* It also has a key with an icon of a clockface and an unrecognisable squiggle, which I don't know what it does. As far as I can tell, it doesn't do anything related to displaying or setting the time.
* It has three blank context-sensitive function keys underneath the LCD, leaving me completely dependant on the icons to describe their functions
* Typical LCD icons are: 'Half-circular arrow pointing counterclockwise', 'Rectangular grid of dots', 'Venn diagram of wo overlapping circles, one full, one empty'
I discovered by trial and error that 'Venn diagram' icon seems to do a 'redial last number', and that 'rectangular grid' brings up a system configuration menu. However, 'counterclockwise arrow' doesn't seem to mean 'go back one level' like on every other phone. To get any further, I think I'll need to dig out the paper manual, which is somewhere in the garage along with 1,583 other empty boxes and manuals, most of which I've never needed to refer to.
It's all just... very depressing. How hard can UI design really be?
Very hard apparently, and icons don't make it easier.
One cosmic ray and the gene is replaced by another one that says," invade humans and turn them into statues."
Don't blink. Don't even blink.
Blink and you're dead.
But it's probably quantum.
The problem is, that when governments get an ability to do something, they have a bad habit of misusing that power.
s/governments/humans
A government is just an organisation of humans with a common purpose, after all, in the same way as a corporation or a club.
Except the charter of most corporations is 'corner the market, eliminate our competition, and make money for our shareholders at any cost' while the charter of democratic governments is 'provide a fair environment for all our citizens'. A democratic government might certainly *fail* in its purpose - but if a corporation *achieves* its purpose, that's potentially even worse.
he kept flooding the world with news about ACTA, and I was getting tired of hearing about it because it was the same old thing, bad bad bad.
I don't understand this sentiment. If an important fact is repeated long enough, it becomes unimportant? Does bad news cease to be bad once it's no longer novel? Does a truth go 'out of date' and cease to be true once people are bored of hearing about it? Must activists trying to alert the world to imminent danger keep constantly reframing their message in new terms or risk being ignored because they're, like, such a buzz-kill, man?
There's an important insight here I think into how the 24-hour must-have-shiny news cycle is trivialising public awareness of the world, but my 30-second clip is up. We cross now to a live feed of a kitten up a tree. Kitteh!
If the relation to China goes sour, it won't be like the Cold War. Then it was US industry versus Soviet industry. It'll be Chinese industry versus no industry. IP agreements depend on enforced contracts, the day China says here are the letters F and U they'll still have all the means to produce, while the US will have nothing.
I doubt China will try matching the US or Russia on nukes, they have some but that's not so essential. But what if they develop a proper rocket shield? Suddenly you're back to way more conventional warfare, with a billion soldiers and heavy industry now making ammunition and tanks.
So this.
Even if it comes to conventional war, and even given the USA's military supremacy, it'll still be dicey.
If you have a trade war with the only place in the world that makes your pants, even if you bring out the nukes, you now have a choice between no pants or radioactive pants.
Either scenario is not optimal.