That drew me to reflect on Google's other practices. What was Google's line of reasoning that led it to release a non-open source desktop search utility?
Because Open Source isn't the end all, be all of the software industry perhaps?
If it's not open source, then you can't really know what it is doing when it roots through all the data on your computer can you?
It would only be a violation of the constitution if the government were forcing everybody to use DRM; but that is not what we're talking about here.
Time to ammend the constitution then.
Two hundred plus years ago, the obvious source of problems were the governments, corporations couldn't yet get that big and powerful. Now they have and most national, let alone multinational, corporations are powerful enough to walk all over local governments and citizens. Some of the more powerful ones can even thumb their noses at national governments. I'm sure you can think of a few without even straining.
Things change. But regardless of where the power sits, rights of citizens must be protected from infringment and abuse be it from a government, a corporation or whatever.
The escalators I was thinking of turned on with a motion sensor and then ran for a few minutes before shutting down if nothing else was moving. With the hall lights, I've seen businesses as well as apartment buildings where there is a luminescent switch by each door and you hit it to get 5 or 10 minutes of light, others have motion sensors for the trigger. Some places will have a few dim lights on all the time, others will be pitch dark except for the emergency exit signs.
I can think of a lot of ways the load on the reactors can be reduced this year. Some countries could save a lot by closing doors during the winter, using a modern amount of insulation, using modern glazing with modern windows, not leaving the lights on in closets and hallways 24/7, or running escalators and such when no one is on them. Those last two can be handled by on-command 5 or 10 minute timers. Furthermore, outdoor lighting tends to light up the sky as much as the ground which is not only unsightly, but an enormous waste of money.
Most of the electricity-using devices in the house are anachronisms and the discrepancy between what we actually use and what is practical will increase.
I'm wondering how long it will be before houses and other buildings will get re-tooled completely for energy efficient devices. A second set of wiring for 12 V DC or something similar would be one option, if done right. I'm seeing all kinds of power-eating wall warts that consume power as long as they're plugged in, regardless of whether the device they power is active or not.
Cargengie had no strings attached to his charity donations.
So to top him, Gates has to not only give out $ 7 billion, and give out $ 7 billion in real cash not software licenses, but also that $7 billion mustn't be set up to generate more wealth for him or to disadvantage his competitors.
Slamming any questioning of Chairman Bill's motives or methods is probably also part of the marketing effort masquerading as charity. MS has used shills before, is using shills now and will continue to use shills in the future. Web forums / blogs are just another component of the job.
That said, there are also a few people absolutely wed to the idea that the charity is for real, and like most people who don't operate in a world driven by logic, they are unaffected by data. This is nothing new.
Also not new is that people project their own values, motives and morals onto the actions of others. So unless they have the unusual ability to put themselves in someone else's shoes for a while, honest, generous people expect that everyone else is also honest and generous for the most part.
Also not new, is the practice of politicians in general to build up an image. The charity masquerade could be part of that. Creating some distance could be another part. He has been distancing himself from reporters often locking them out of his events. Magazines and newspapers run worshippful articles about the privilege of meeting Gates in person, creating an artificial air around an exceedingly wealthly but otherwise unnoteworthy arrogant, impatient and condecending nerd. The contest in India fits into that model.
Also not new is that Gates via MS took a healthy, wealthy, competitive market that was good for everybody and crushed it. With it went all the advertising accounts, leaving mostly just Microsoft's. At that point no one is willing to write anything that might anger or displease the omnibenevolent Chairman Gates. In the 80's and early 90's we saw productivity increase as computers, even MS ones, saved work and time. Now Gates' defective products and the minions of Bill in each little IT shop around the globe have been wreaking havoc which more than cancels out those gains in productivity. I'd expect that the losses in just MS-viruses alone for just one year cause more economic damage than Osama bin Laden has since 2000, but no one's allowed to look at that either, it might displease our esteemed, omnibenevolent Chairman Bill. That leaves people too busy to dig into the fact themselves and since the press won't say it, it goes unsaid.
Oops. look at the clock... gotta go... time to genuflect towards Redmond...
Along those lines, an old anthropology professor of mine, now deceased, got an announcement vaguely like that once when he was quite young. He had been living with a tribe in the Pacific rim for quite some time, happily ignorant of a specific question regarding his long term status, when a tribal elder shuffled into his hut one day and proclaimed that he could relax, the decision had been made: the tribe had formally decided not to eat him or his wife, neither now nor in the future.
Here you get several instances of technology changing culture.
First is the television, which spreads corporate US culture in which animal brains are not food. Though in the "old days" if it was food, you ate it even if it was stuff like haggis or brains or black pudding.
Second, due to the way corporate agriculture uses animal carcasses as an ingredient in livestock feed, you get an intentional feedback loop where prions can accumulate in livestock until they can cross species. Now it is simply unsafe to eat any part of the central nervous system. A case in point is, how many times have you seen oxtail soup on the menus since the mad cow problems started to be publicized?
Third, industrial pollutants build up in animal tissue especially fat. In these times, we (ok most of us, for a while longer) have a surplus and can afford to chuck contaminated tissue like organs and fat. As far as cannibalism goes, humans are just too far up the food chain to be safe to eat, not to mention disproportionaly difficult to hunt or harvest than other animals.
Anyway wasn't cannabilism more ritual then food source?
No.
Look at the ecology the regions in and around the Pacific. The areas are very poor in protein and all kinds of sources are used by people. Ritual may be added on after the fact for various reasons we can guess about, but at the end of the day there is need for protein.
Inuit folklore from before Westernization is heavy on the theme of cannibalism. That was during an era where survival in that harsh environment required generous helpings of skill, knowledge and luck. And I have yet to hear a thorough etymology of the dish Finn Biff which is from some of the harsher regions of a country with less than 3% arable land.
If you want more cut-n-dried examples (no pun intended) look to several Western countries near the end of WWII. There are some well documented cases of cannibalism in the 40's in each.
Not too long ago each ethnic group, not skin color but ethnic, considered the others to be so inferior that the could be killed like vermin. From there it is a small step to being dead to being meat.
All of his "charity" seems more like politics and investment. Sure chumps and good-hearted people who choose to close their eyes to what they see and project their goodness onto the actions will see it as charity, but that was the goal:
Bill Gates is not so much a philanthropist as he is a Virtual Philanthropist. Of the $73.2 million that Microsoft donated to charity in 1995, $62.1 million, or about 85 percent, was in the form of software licenses.
"the software tycoon's global philanthropy exercises carry a hidden agenda to persuade beneficiary governments to reverse policies promoting the use of open source software."
Furthermore, the focus on AIDS/HIV is purely for the benefit of US audiences where it is a high profile issue. Heart disease, car accidents, violent crime, even smoke from cooking fires all individually cause more deaths than AIDS/HIV. Plus most of Gates' "donations" don't deal with preventative measures, but instead rely on corrective measures and squeeze matching funds from local governments and charities to buy expensive pharmaceuticals produced by the large pharmas that Gates is heavily invested in.
I don't call any of that charity. I call it conflict of interest.
Besides, what about his heavy investments six and seven years ago in the "Military-Industrial Complex". Investments like that, especially some of the larger ones, don't give a good return unless protracted and/or large scale war can be instigated.
Even if Gates' "donations" were real and true charity, bad karma like that doesn't just go away over night.
Time apparently is for sale in more ways than one. And the New York Magazine is playing the fool for going along with it.
How does/will Opera deal with increasing pressure from the outside to change in directions which may be undesireable to Opera employees or users?
IIRC, Opera recently became publicly traded, which means shareholders ROI may make the company's planning more short sighted.
IIRC, Juha Christensen and Tod Nielsen, both from Microsoft, have recently infiltrated the board at Trolltech, the maker of Qt, upon which Opera is dependent, to possibly make Trolltech a publicly traded company. First off, that brings the problem that taint from their previous work environments will affect the work environment and, ultimately, the product at Trolltech. Second, you have again the risks of the Qt toolkit development map being written by shareholders. If it came down to it, Opera couldn't just fork off the QPL-ed Qt and use that in its current business model.
Capitalism has failed, too, though most/.-ers weren't around for it. However, the Great Depression of the 1930's should be familiar enough for even the youngest of the/. crowd. But we're talking ideology here, not science.
And doesn't it seem good and right that even poor people should have access to healthcare, shelter and education? Of course it does; only a heartless person wouldn't agree.
Or someone with no business sense: healthy workers are productive than sick ones, as happy are more productive than unhappy, etc.
Or someone with no political sense: happy, healthy, well-fed people with a secure future just don't go around blowing themselves or other poeple up.
The only model that seems to have worked well was the middle path between capitalism and socialism as used by the Nordic countries during the 20th century, go look up how well Sweden, for example, was doing during the years it pursued the middle path. Somethings do better in the free market other things do better with oversight, by taking a middle path, the best of both models can be used. All-or-nothing models rarely work and in the cases of pursuing a purely socialist model or a purely capitalist model, they fail big time as we have seen.
US presidential elections have never been postponed or canceled, even for the civil war. However, the current administration has floated trial balloons to check the response to delaying an election in response to "terrorism"
Bush himself is only a sock puppet and can be replaced, but if his handlers think they might lose power, then they might try to pull something like that. I guess it also depends on how deeply the voting machine scandal is exposed by the time the 2008 election gets underway next year.
A possible replacement might be Conan the Governator in California, though some very fundamental laws must change to allow a naturalized citizen to become president. Another might be out dear leadr Chairman Bill, but he would be harder to control and does have his own agenda. On the other hand, it is a narrow agenda and unlikely to conflict with Halliburton and co.'s. He has been running increasingly heavy concurrent PR campaigns to remake his public image and has been distancing himself from the press and the public, which could be a prelude to a more open role in politics.
Careful that's probably wrong. Acquiring or having a monopoly is not necessarily illegal.
However, abusing that monopoly as MS has done, and continues to do, to stifle competition and extend that monopoly into new markets is definitely illegal.
"Microsoft -- along with many other corporate givers -- has turned Carnegie's Gospel of Wealth into a strategic marketing tool.
...
... behind the scenes, Microsoft works hard to maximize the strategic impact of all of that love for their fellow man. Two years ago [1995], the company hired an outside consultant, Craig Smith, to devise a strategic plan to direct Microsoft's corporate giving in ways that guarantee the greatest return to the company.
...
Microsoft is also seizing a beachhead in the public libraries...
Unlike Carnegie, who didn't profit a dime from his support of libraries, Microsoft is expecting its investment to pay dividends in the future.
"
And when, coincidentally, did all that "charitable giving" start?
Igot a new laptop and it had MS works installed. I used Word until the trial period expired then when I could no longer open documents I downloaded OpenOffice. Lo and behold when I try to open an MS document now it does open using Word except it does ask me to license the product.
Which versions of McWerks/ McWerd / McWindoze? If what you have observed can be duplicated by others, there will be big news.
I use a Mac and love it, but I am concerned about this development, as there are few websites (including my bank) which don't work with Safari (and my bank's web pages don't load correctly on Firefox).
I haven't run across that problem for years, around 2000 to be exact, but I dealt with it by switching banks.
I did a little research into what the competitors offered and then visited the ones that weren't locked into MSIE, which even back then was most of them. I played up the defection and got better rates, lower service charges and even a few extra services thrown in for free.
My point is that if someone as bad at negotiating as I am can improve their situation by switching banks, then you almost certainly can, too. Use the MS problem as the introduction and then go from there.
A strong case can be made that Gates is the Internet's equivalent of Osama bin Laden.
I mean the lost productivity due to poor interoperability (even with other MS products), bit rot, incomplete products and difficult interfaces must be on the order of billions every quarter. That's along side the problem of security and having a system that's more or less designed to spread viruses, spyware, spam, Denial of Service attacks and worms. Each of those is estimated to individually cost many tens of billions of dollars per quarter. All are only made possible due to persistent design flaws and an architecture unsuited for any kind of networked environment. These flaws have been around long enoug that at this point they can be called intentional.
So that's the damage to any computer-using business.
On top of all that you have the damage that Gate's empire has done to the IT sector, especially in the US. He took a thriving, diverse, competitive, innovative industry and crushed it with give aways (illegal tying), strong arming (esp. OEMs), sabotage, false advertising, predatory and illegal business practices, overcharging and lobbying.
All that bleeds the country (pick one, any one) in way that bin Laden couldn't even begin to dream about.
But the good side is all the tax money the MS movement brings in right? Wrong. MS pays nothing and hides in foreign tax havens. So in return for all that damage, MS gives nothing. Ok maybe some feel-good advertising and nice lobbying budgets, but not much more.
Bulshit. Usama / Osama was a big name since way back in the 1980's. However, back then rather than being spun as a militant Islamic terrorist reigning over a guerilla army of donkey-fucking rag head terrorists, he was back then a freedom fighter using asymmetric warfare to fight on the side of righteousness to bring freedom to his people and escape oppression from the Soviets.
Enough time has passed that there are now some useful books about that era. One of the well written ones is
Charlie Wilson's War by George Crile.
Another thing that makes it stink of PR is the focus on HIV/AIDS which, compared to other problems like heart problems, smoke from cooking fires, etc, is not a major health problem. However, it is a high profile item for US audiences.
Yet another problem is that the solutions offered by Chairman Bill and his foundation focus on expensive pharmaceutical treatments, often draining significant matching funding coming from the target region. Most health issues are solved more effectively and cheapy with preventative measures not corrective measures, especially expensive ones. Cheaper is better, but it just so happens he's also heavily invested in the same pharmas, so maybe, jsut maybe there is a bit of conflict of interest.
Read the interview Time had earlier with Chairman Gates. He seriously couldn't seem less interested in the health and social aspects of the charity.
The definition I had previously heard for Good Samaritan involved an active interest in helping and helping in an altruistic manner, not with strings attached or with major conflicts of interest.
But in this case Napster is not the Napster you once read about on/. The name is the same but now it is owned by an RIAA-friendly Windows Media Format-only business. Hearing them complain about iPod is like hearing MS or RIAA whining.
The issue of a "paper trail" is a distraction away from the real issue which is auditability. You can have all the paper receipts in the world, but if no one spots anything fishy about the tallies, there will be no examination of the receipts.
Slashdot Mirror
Two hundred plus years ago, the obvious source of problems were the governments, corporations couldn't yet get that big and powerful. Now they have and most national, let alone multinational, corporations are powerful enough to walk all over local governments and citizens. Some of the more powerful ones can even thumb their noses at national governments. I'm sure you can think of a few without even straining.
Things change. But regardless of where the power sits, rights of citizens must be protected from infringment and abuse be it from a government, a corporation or whatever.
The escalators I was thinking of turned on with a motion sensor and then ran for a few minutes before shutting down if nothing else was moving. With the hall lights, I've seen businesses as well as apartment buildings where there is a luminescent switch by each door and you hit it to get 5 or 10 minutes of light, others have motion sensors for the trigger. Some places will have a few dim lights on all the time, others will be pitch dark except for the emergency exit signs.
Most of the electricity-using devices in the house are anachronisms and the discrepancy between what we actually use and what is practical will increase.
I'm wondering how long it will be before houses and other buildings will get re-tooled completely for energy efficient devices. A second set of wiring for 12 V DC or something similar would be one option, if done right. I'm seeing all kinds of power-eating wall warts that consume power as long as they're plugged in, regardless of whether the device they power is active or not.
So to top him, Gates has to not only give out $ 7 billion, and give out $ 7 billion in real cash not software licenses, but also that $7 billion mustn't be set up to generate more wealth for him or to disadvantage his competitors.
That said, there are also a few people absolutely wed to the idea that the charity is for real, and like most people who don't operate in a world driven by logic, they are unaffected by data. This is nothing new.
Also not new is that people project their own values, motives and morals onto the actions of others. So unless they have the unusual ability to put themselves in someone else's shoes for a while, honest, generous people expect that everyone else is also honest and generous for the most part.
Also not new, is the practice of politicians in general to build up an image. The charity masquerade could be part of that. Creating some distance could be another part. He has been distancing himself from reporters often locking them out of his events. Magazines and newspapers run worshippful articles about the privilege of meeting Gates in person, creating an artificial air around an exceedingly wealthly but otherwise unnoteworthy arrogant, impatient and condecending nerd. The contest in India fits into that model.
Also not new is that Gates via MS took a healthy, wealthy, competitive market that was good for everybody and crushed it. With it went all the advertising accounts, leaving mostly just Microsoft's. At that point no one is willing to write anything that might anger or displease the omnibenevolent Chairman Gates. In the 80's and early 90's we saw productivity increase as computers, even MS ones, saved work and time. Now Gates' defective products and the minions of Bill in each little IT shop around the globe have been wreaking havoc which more than cancels out those gains in productivity. I'd expect that the losses in just MS-viruses alone for just one year cause more economic damage than Osama bin Laden has since 2000, but no one's allowed to look at that either, it might displease our esteemed, omnibenevolent Chairman Bill. That leaves people too busy to dig into the fact themselves and since the press won't say it, it goes unsaid.
Oops. look at the clock... gotta go... time to genuflect towards Redmond...
Along those lines, an old anthropology professor of mine, now deceased, got an announcement vaguely like that once when he was quite young. He had been living with a tribe in the Pacific rim for quite some time, happily ignorant of a specific question regarding his long term status, when a tribal elder shuffled into his hut one day and proclaimed that he could relax, the decision had been made: the tribe had formally decided not to eat him or his wife, neither now nor in the future.
First is the television, which spreads corporate US culture in which animal brains are not food. Though in the "old days" if it was food, you ate it even if it was stuff like haggis or brains or black pudding.
Second, due to the way corporate agriculture uses animal carcasses as an ingredient in livestock feed, you get an intentional feedback loop where prions can accumulate in livestock until they can cross species. Now it is simply unsafe to eat any part of the central nervous system. A case in point is, how many times have you seen oxtail soup on the menus since the mad cow problems started to be publicized?
Third, industrial pollutants build up in animal tissue especially fat. In these times, we (ok most of us, for a while longer) have a surplus and can afford to chuck contaminated tissue like organs and fat. As far as cannibalism goes, humans are just too far up the food chain to be safe to eat, not to mention disproportionaly difficult to hunt or harvest than other animals.
Look at the ecology the regions in and around the Pacific. The areas are very poor in protein and all kinds of sources are used by people. Ritual may be added on after the fact for various reasons we can guess about, but at the end of the day there is need for protein.
Inuit folklore from before Westernization is heavy on the theme of cannibalism. That was during an era where survival in that harsh environment required generous helpings of skill, knowledge and luck. And I have yet to hear a thorough etymology of the dish Finn Biff which is from some of the harsher regions of a country with less than 3% arable land.
If you want more cut-n-dried examples (no pun intended) look to several Western countries near the end of WWII. There are some well documented cases of cannibalism in the 40's in each.
Not too long ago each ethnic group, not skin color but ethnic, considered the others to be so inferior that the could be killed like vermin. From there it is a small step to being dead to being meat.
Furthermore, the focus on AIDS/HIV is purely for the benefit of US audiences where it is a high profile issue. Heart disease, car accidents, violent crime, even smoke from cooking fires all individually cause more deaths than AIDS/HIV. Plus most of Gates' "donations" don't deal with preventative measures, but instead rely on corrective measures and squeeze matching funds from local governments and charities to buy expensive pharmaceuticals produced by the large pharmas that Gates is heavily invested in.
I don't call any of that charity. I call it conflict of interest. Besides, what about his heavy investments six and seven years ago in the "Military-Industrial Complex". Investments like that, especially some of the larger ones, don't give a good return unless protracted and/or large scale war can be instigated. Even if Gates' "donations" were real and true charity, bad karma like that doesn't just go away over night.
Time apparently is for sale in more ways than one. And the New York Magazine is playing the fool for going along with it.
Ballmer's not likely as he's not positioned to do enough harm. I was thinking it's either Dubya or Jeb, probably the latter.
It may still go without saying, but the problems are still to be found with one particular vendors defects at the epicenter.
IIRC, Opera recently became publicly traded, which means shareholders ROI may make the company's planning more short sighted.
IIRC, Juha Christensen and Tod Nielsen, both from Microsoft, have recently infiltrated the board at Trolltech, the maker of Qt, upon which Opera is dependent, to possibly make Trolltech a publicly traded company. First off, that brings the problem that taint from their previous work environments will affect the work environment and, ultimately, the product at Trolltech. Second, you have again the risks of the Qt toolkit development map being written by shareholders. If it came down to it, Opera couldn't just fork off the QPL-ed Qt and use that in its current business model.
Or someone with no political sense: happy, healthy, well-fed people with a secure future just don't go around blowing themselves or other poeple up.
The only model that seems to have worked well was the middle path between capitalism and socialism as used by the Nordic countries during the 20th century, go look up how well Sweden, for example, was doing during the years it pursued the middle path. Somethings do better in the free market other things do better with oversight, by taking a middle path, the best of both models can be used. All-or-nothing models rarely work and in the cases of pursuing a purely socialist model or a purely capitalist model, they fail big time as we have seen.
Bush himself is only a sock puppet and can be replaced, but if his handlers think they might lose power, then they might try to pull something like that. I guess it also depends on how deeply the voting machine scandal is exposed by the time the 2008 election gets underway next year.
A possible replacement might be Conan the Governator in California, though some very fundamental laws must change to allow a naturalized citizen to become president. Another might be out dear leadr Chairman Bill, but he would be harder to control and does have his own agenda. On the other hand, it is a narrow agenda and unlikely to conflict with Halliburton and co.'s. He has been running increasingly heavy concurrent PR campaigns to remake his public image and has been distancing himself from the press and the public, which could be a prelude to a more open role in politics.
However, abusing that monopoly as MS has done, and continues to do, to stifle competition and extend that monopoly into new markets is definitely illegal.
Which versions of McWerks/ McWerd / McWindoze? If what you have observed can be duplicated by others, there will be big news.
I did a little research into what the competitors offered and then visited the ones that weren't locked into MSIE, which even back then was most of them. I played up the defection and got better rates, lower service charges and even a few extra services thrown in for free.
My point is that if someone as bad at negotiating as I am can improve their situation by switching banks, then you almost certainly can, too. Use the MS problem as the introduction and then go from there.
I mean the lost productivity due to poor interoperability (even with other MS products), bit rot, incomplete products and difficult interfaces must be on the order of billions every quarter. That's along side the problem of security and having a system that's more or less designed to spread viruses, spyware, spam, Denial of Service attacks and worms. Each of those is estimated to individually cost many tens of billions of dollars per quarter. All are only made possible due to persistent design flaws and an architecture unsuited for any kind of networked environment. These flaws have been around long enoug that at this point they can be called intentional.
So that's the damage to any computer-using business.
On top of all that you have the damage that Gate's empire has done to the IT sector, especially in the US. He took a thriving, diverse, competitive, innovative industry and crushed it with give aways (illegal tying), strong arming (esp. OEMs), sabotage, false advertising, predatory and illegal business practices, overcharging and lobbying.
All that bleeds the country (pick one, any one) in way that bin Laden couldn't even begin to dream about.
But the good side is all the tax money the MS movement brings in right? Wrong. MS pays nothing and hides in foreign tax havens. So in return for all that damage, MS gives nothing. Ok maybe some feel-good advertising and nice lobbying budgets, but not much more.
Enough time has passed that there are now some useful books about that era. One of the well written ones is Charlie Wilson's War by George Crile.
I find it peculiar that these acts of "charity" tend to be timed to fight Linux and Open Source more than to fight disease. It's been the same pattern whether in Australia, India or many of the African nations: Gates gives $100m to fight HIV, $421m to fight Linux.
Another thing that makes it stink of PR is the focus on HIV/AIDS which, compared to other problems like heart problems, smoke from cooking fires, etc, is not a major health problem. However, it is a high profile item for US audiences.
Yet another problem is that the solutions offered by Chairman Bill and his foundation focus on expensive pharmaceutical treatments, often draining significant matching funding coming from the target region. Most health issues are solved more effectively and cheapy with preventative measures not corrective measures, especially expensive ones. Cheaper is better, but it just so happens he's also heavily invested in the same pharmas, so maybe, jsut maybe there is a bit of conflict of interest.
Read the interview Time had earlier with Chairman Gates. He seriously couldn't seem less interested in the health and social aspects of the charity. The definition I had previously heard for Good Samaritan involved an active interest in helping and helping in an altruistic manner, not with strings attached or with major conflicts of interest.
It's just sour grapes. Deal with it.
The issue of a "paper trail" is a distraction away from the real issue which is auditability. You can have all the paper receipts in the world, but if no one spots anything fishy about the tallies, there will be no examination of the receipts.