over a hundred people lose their jobs as a result, and I'm not talking about high-paid actors, I'm talking about camera men, editors, janitors-- normal people. It's not fun losing a job, folks.
Not sure that's a good basis... as, well, theoretically, if they lost their jobs on enterprise, they'd then get jobs working for a new show that might be better...
I believe that Apple cares deeply when people copy their look and feel. However, they had that particular tentacle chopped off in the Look-n-feel suits, which they lost.
Specifically to the look-n-feel suits, which mostly involved a specific company that starts with an M, these suits were lost not because of grounds but because of legal blunders where they essentially gave away the usage to a specific company that starts with an M. For awhile it was sort of standard example in some schools on what can happen if your lawyers aren't careful.
I can understand the need for a good military, but to spend this much money for it. Personally I think it would be better spent if invested in medical research and to better the relationships with other countries (admit it, a whole big part of the world isn't a big fan of the US, putting it mildly
If it makes you feel any better, a ton of the technology produced from these things eventually makes it into civilian use via the private sector. Everything from pastes to fill in wounds on the field (i think this war has the highest maiming rate so far, simply because the soldiers actually make it back). Or even more indirectly, a lot of the stuff happening at DARPA, if successful, has very broad implications. Hell, it could even be argued that what the ARPAnet has grown into has had broad implications for all things medical.
I'm not advocating more spending or anything like that, but part of the problem with just saying "why can't we just spend that 100 billion on curing cancer" is that it often just doesn't work that way. A lot of our biggest achievements have been through basic research in whole different fields, then someone comes back from a conference after having coffee with someone else and goes "I wonder if I used this, plus this thing we're working on, with this...".
Heavily limited, IE, lots of people have 'family blogs' with different authors all swapping things. They'll have to pay between $100 to $200. But wait, there's more!
The personal edition only allows you to use it on one system with one processor. Wtf. Not like there aren't lots of dual-cpu systems being used to host sites. IE, from the personal license:
You may install the Software on only one (1) computer or server having a single CPU.
Hell, I can't even run it on my personal Mac from home as it has two CPUs.
Then again, I accidently trackback'ed them way too many times while they're getting slammed (seriously an accident- others did also, i just overachieved through stupidity) and my blog imported flawlessly into wordpress. Now all I have to do is change the tags to match the old CSS and I'm square.
There are a lot of things that are a little off in this, and I think you might making big generalizations based upon your views. Have a salt shaker ready, but most of this is unintentional Longhorn FUD, some of it prolly deserved and at least you didn't mention Copland.:) MS isn't the only one who is going to experience this, others already have (ie, Copland, or even OSX).
After watching OSs come and go over the years, I've basically come to the conclusion that a major Operating System project coming together when its supposed to is more of a happy accident than anything. This stuff comes up whenever every major OS is being developed. Writing the kinds of stuff MS is trying to do is hard, hard stuff. Just ask Apple... things might look all well and rosy over in their camp, but its not if you look closer. Same with Linux. And its only going to get harder as the demands increase, which is something any game developer understands.
Bill Gates coined it best when he said "Momentum begets momentum". The problem is that once you reach a certain point (call it what you will, market saturation, etc) you have to push harder and harder to keep that momentum. IE, once you've reach escape velocity, you're cruising from the outer atmosphere to the moon. But to get to mars in a reasonable time frame is a bitch and a half. To get out of the solar system is an exponentially bigger bitch, etc, etc.
That's ~95% of the problem MS is facing, which is the old adage of being a vicitim of your own success. Same thing is starting to happen with chip makers, as others have recently commented on... sure, speed can keep improving exponentially, but the cost to do so can become prohibitively expensive.
But of course MS is going to get there, even if each super-dooper feature they've promised won't be in it. Apple's feature list kinda had to be paired down drastically, and even then it still shipped years late and couldn't play DVDs, just to keep some perspective.:) I just don't really think there's some perfect storm going on here, and I don't think a lot of others do either.
I mentioned the momentum thing, which MS understands full well. When you're pushing that rock up the hill, the last 10% is often the highest. MS, like others, is simply going to try to raise the barrier to entry to a level where OSS competitors are having to play catch up to the next plateau. They're even doing it with Google: you better believe they're in the fight for their lives soon. Think Soviet Union vs USA: arms race, and whoever can outspend the other before one falls wins. Thats one aspect... the other is where a drug patent x expires, and the company combines x with y, and even though x+y may be nothing special they spend tens of millions of dollars advertising it to joe schmoe who, when they go to their doctor, only wants the purple pill.
People are happy with x, and Linux gets x. Fine, MS spends a huge amount making x+y, then marketing it, and everyone wants x+y, which Linux doesn't have. OpenOffice seem to have too good of a.doc format? Alright, change it, with a lil DRM for spice. This could be any number of things, including online media. In short, MS is in a long hard slog until they reach the next technical plateau. Then they can cruise awhile, then its more billions.
To specifically go through some of the problem points:
1) Lack of new products prevents sales and damages customer loyalty.
Debatable, but I'll give it to you. I don't think most people care about not having yearly OS updates, in fact if I had to wager i'd guess most consider it a feature. Knowing game x from 3 years ago still works is a big boon in joe sixpacks world. And mine, come to think of it. Now if 3rd party releases weren't hitting, yeah, obvious point. But since I don't know for sure, I'll give it to ya.
2) Severe worms damage customer loyalty, increase costs in maintenance and customer service.
Woah, you forgot marketing 101: never, ever make people feel stupid or as though they made a stupid decision.:) Not to say your other points aren't valid, but that's the big one.
Say its new and revolutionary, and that this is why it is this way now, and sure some people will be able to read between the lines... but that's fine. Let them save face. But when joe average has made a decision based on GHz, and you essentially call him stupid and bring his ignorance to light, you are not going to get the reaction you hoped for. Even if it makes you feel good.
It has seemed in the last few years that his assistants are mentioned more often in the columns, which leads me to wonder if he has scaled back his workload/reviewing/writing and just coasting on his name/column.
Pretty sure he had a heart attack in there, and was laid up for a good while.. still working, but at a much reduced pace. And it's only relatively recently that he's gone full bore back into it.
DBM has really hit a new low with this "article". It is almost painful to read through with the gaping holes in logic and diction that would make a SMS junkie teenager blush.
Well, considering you're talking about me... as I'm the author of that "article", mind filling me in on what my past lows were? I'd say that's only fair... You're saying a lot, but you don't seem to be backing it up with much. And we're not going to even go into diction.
I'd really encourage you to read the redux I've put up here, as I'm not sure you really absorbed much of what I was really saying, nor why.
I own the poor blog thats linked in the article... you might be interested in knowing there's a redux article here that should probably clear up a lot of these posts & questions.
Really interesting ideas, especially the first part... but how does it account for the (at least from what i've read) japanese game phenomenons like the starcraft clones?
Huh? As far as I can tell, the legitimacy of western democratic government is based on the concept of majority rule.
The legitimacy of western democratic government is based upon the the fact that the people elect their representatives, that the representatives are made up of the people, and that there is a peaceful transition of power.
The USA is actually a democratic republic, and is very much about protecting the minority from the majority. An example would be the electoral college, that every undergrad for some reason decides is outdated (it became a real issue after gore lost the election after winning more votes), which was/is one of the big problems we've faced with Iraq. A large # of the population wanted a direct vote, which would, you know, serve them well as their ethnicity was in the vast majority. The USA is basically saying "no, you are going to have an electoral college" specifically so that the minorities that live there aren't completely run over.
IE, when the country was being founded, there was a famous & influential theorist (dutch?) who essentially said "the usa will last up until the populace realizes they can vote themselves all the money in the treasury." Jefferson and the others took a lot of these issues to heart.
As for "textbook Jefferson stuff", could you elaborate? I don't live in the U.S.
It's ok, most americans don't get it either.:( But his writings are really worth a read. I've written about it on/. in the past, so i'm not going to write a book or anything.
But basically, Jefferson, and many others of the founding fathers, were extremely forward thinking when they designed our system. When they realized they had won, Jefferson immediately wrote home telling his wife to save every single correspondence/writing he'd ever done, pretty much realizing this was going to be a big deal. The system is designed to last, and while many of the issues of today aren't exactly the same as when the country was founded, they often parallel them. And to be quite honest, while some things weren't really possible at the time (ending slavery, etc), most believe that Jefferson and the others had a pretty good idea that the policies they were setting down would eventually cause them to be worked out.
IE, many now, when they think minority/majority think ethnicity. Going back to the idea of protecting the minority from the majority, protecting minority races from the majority wasn't the main problem of the time, but rather preserving cultural and religious (read up on some of this- ben franklin taking it upon himself to have a jewish temple built, and a mosque i believe) minorities from being trampled upon by the majority. But it really applies to all minority groups, and hence the same principle has served america well when it comes to minority civil rights being worked out. Even when it comes to women's suffrage, etc. It's STILL in progress (ie, many believe it would almost be illegal now to have a draft without drafting women, etc) and will always be. But these basic principles, the government being setup to protect the minority from the majority rule, are what allowed all the rest of the progress to really take place. This was a HUGE FEAR of Jeffersons', what he called the 'tyranny of mob rule'. We've had our rough patches, like the mcarthy era which basically showed why some of this is so dangerous, but by and large it gets worked out and we move forward.
Besides the 'tyranny of mob rule' example, another of his big fears was a government "of the cities, by the cities and for the cities". At the time, the shift from an agricultural-based society to one based on city life was one they were able to anticipate, often by looking throughout europe and elsewhere. The idea being that since cities were much more densely populated than rural areas, a purely democratic majority-rule based system would lead to politicians spending more and more of their time and effort supporting the cities, whil
t seems as though you're basing your beliefs on mistrust of others, rather than finding out for yourself. I suggest you actually read [wikipedia.org] the link I posted (and perhaps this one [electionmethods.org] too). The Condorcet winner of an election is a well-defined mathematical and logical concept that more accurately represents voter intent than any other system.
Nope, i've just heard it all before. People hear about these things, and go completely starry eyed and think they've found the one true answer to democracy. It's even worse than the "you might be an anti-spam kook if..." lists.
Extensions of majority rule are dangerous (which is what condorcet is, IE: if every voter prefers alternative a over b then b should not win, even if it has the most votes), there's a reason why we have the system we do. Checks and balances, it's textbook Jefferson stuff.
Something akin to a preferential voting system would have helped the repubs in some past elections, and pushed down the threat of Nader in this one for the dems. It pushes all the parties farther away from having to walk the line between the centers and the wings.
I really just wish the dem's would stop getting ready to brand Nader an evil-dooer and actually work on a message that gets through to people, not just being "not bush". You know, like sitting down and figuring out how to make people understand in concrete ways why the patriotic act is so dangerous.
Unfortunately it's very difficult to drum up support for what looks like a purely scientific venture when unemployment is rising and so many other projects urgently demand resources.
Part of the issue is that little science is being done by the 'scientific venture', at least as far as most people are concerned. Now if they snagged hubble and bolted it on, and sent back cool images from time to time...
*Most* people have the unfortunate idea (based in some reality) that the ISS is just an orbiting money pit that's not really doing anything, but no one knows what to do with it.
Overall, I believe the government needs a much larger area of transparency so that voters can make intelligent, informed decisions based upon their personal philosophies.
*shivers* the parties are so close now (when you look at just what Kerry disagrees on with Bush it's just not that severe), but I think you're going to hit a problem with what you're after... which is that it's already surprisingly transparent, it's just so f'scking big and convoluted, but emphasis on the big. Almost (if not a hair over) 300 million people, with a government that, even with Bush's 4% discretionary spending, is going to keep getting larger & larger. There's only so much reporters can cover, only so much free time for your average 80hr/week 3 kids dual-income family to spend digesting news, etc. Much easier to draw your battle lines and go with it until something really drastic happens.
We need the government to declare emininent domain and purchase google and create GoogleGov.com, with pre-defined searches for various topics and issues.:)
People who don't understand the issues shouldn't vote on them
That's absolutely beautiful! Who decides who really understands an issue? An IQ test would perhaps be one way, in which case you've just created another aristocracy.
But by and large, assuming you're in power, whomever happens to agree with you will be considered to have a real understanding of the issue. Have you never, evar sat in a meeting/situation where either:
Group A has been struggling with a problem a decent amount of time, and just isn't making any headway, even though they know the problem backwards and forwards. Person B comes in and, armed with only a fresh set of eyes and comparably little knowledge of the project, sees the obvious answer staring right back at them in no time flat.
Had someone give you an explanation, whose logic seemed to have some very deep flaws. When they're pressed to explain some of these further, you get a somewhat disdainful stare and a quip along the lines of "Leave it to us, you wouldn't understand."
Woa, damn. You've just proposed something that would prolly turn into a theocracy, in addition to your earlier proposition of an aristocracy. This is why precisely why we have checks and balances.
oting isn't going to solve the problem unless a fair voting system is used.
My problem with "altnernative voting systems" is that those that push them the hardest would seem to have the most to gain.
But in this significantly-less-than-perfect world, the public is kept in the dark, deprived of factual knowledge and fed whatever lies or spin people in power (governments, corporations) decide.
Um, I'm pretty sure that for someone to be deprived of something, they've have to want/seek it out in the first place and then be blocked from having it. IE, I'm not being deprived of syphillis.
You might really not like Bush/other party politician but... honestly, I think holding them responsible for not being able to forcefully beam your "message/idea of right" into the public's head is a bit of stretch, isn't it?
Why is this "belittling" spiel modded as insightful? Why? What is insightful about saying "it could always get worse".
Because... it's good advice? What he essentially said was that before he left, his current frame of reference made him think that he was in a terribly stessful situation. Once he was put in a vastly more stressful position, he's able to look at what he once thought was the end of the world and find it's... not so bad. In other words, try to step outside of yourself, and really change your perspective, as often when you are in the 'the moment' you think the piece of blue plaster falling from the ceiling means the sky is falling.
This is good advice. Perhaps it's due to being in my mid-20's, but I swear to god I've seen people who act as though it's time to put a gun to their head for reasons that would be... not quite the earth-enders they seem to think they are if they had the ability to get some perspective. Call it a broader frame of reference. Some of it comes with maturity, some of it comes encoded at birth, some of it comes with experience. It's just about not sitting down in the middle of the street and crying for hours because you realized you left your coffee on top of your car that morning and drove off, and you have coffee every morning so what are you going to do... or the difference between a hangnail and a heart problem. You see this all the damn time in life.
As a personal example, I used to get terribly worked up about work. Fairly demanding position, and it would really, really get to me physically and emotionally. The back breaking milestones and crunch times without a stop point were the worst, even though part of me really had a penchant for it and enjoyed the adrenaline. After taking some time and getting some perspective, it dawned on me that hey, you know, if work is able to get me this screwed up, it prolly meant that:
If my work was able to affect my life in such an all-encompassing way, I needed to sit down and try to figure out why that was able to happen, and take steps to keep it from happening.
I was able to realize that work was my #1 priority in life, and had to figure out what my other priorities were, and what a healthy ratio between them would be. Once I did, something that normally would have just killed me (like having to do another project whose reference platform was IE 5.0, or another project for the medical industry) just didn't have a habit of crushing my spirit anymore... and that by showing a little adaptability I was often able to *gasp, another cliche* make lemons into lemonade.
I still get worked up about work, but I've been able to keep it in check as I realize that it's just one of many priorities... and that I need to keep crunch times down to one week per 3 months and I'm good.
Then again, the fact that you just went off on a guy because he happened to mention the war... or bullets, or the fact that he was asking you to read into the complexities of what he was saying instead of spoon feeding you a condensed version with bullet points and your potential arguments... prolly means that while you're squarely in the target audience for picking up the advice, you're the least likely to be able to comprehend it yet. And that you're an undergrad, if your comment about the cliche's is any example.:)
Cliches aren't bad, although original ways of expressing an idea should be strived for. Something becomes a cliche because, you know, it happens to come up from time to time. It's a cliche that a man/woman's mindset completely changes once they have a child... but guess what, it often does. Cliche's are around for a reason, and your casual dismissal both of them, and the original post for the hypothetical use of one does yourself yourself a disservice.
I can't believe you've been modd'ed up... the first half of your post is blathering about not understanding the intent of what you're replying to, and the second half is a strawman argument. Distressing.;)
Personally, I far prefer Snow Crash over Cryptonomicon. It's also the only Neal Stephenson book I've read that doesn't seem to much suffer from a rushed ending
I read snow crash after crypto, and I had this really eerie feeling that I was reading a screen play and not a novel. It was really getting to me throughout the book, and I'd swear (unless he specifically told me otherwise) that he wrote that book with a screenplay in mind.
I mean, everything from the pacing and how the book was separated out just seemed geared towards the film, but it really started hitting me when the punk kid is riding out of the fed building on her skateboard. I swear, every single shot was described from the pressing of an individual button, to the pan down to the wheels, etc, etc, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
over a hundred people lose their jobs as a result, and I'm not talking about high-paid actors, I'm talking about camera men, editors, janitors-- normal people. It's not fun losing a job, folks.
Not sure that's a good basis... as, well, theoretically, if they lost their jobs on enterprise, they'd then get jobs working for a new show that might be better...
I guess my problem is that I really like stuff, and I don't mind working for it, and it doesn't make me feel empty.
I believe that Apple cares deeply when people copy their look and feel. However, they had that particular tentacle chopped off in the Look-n-feel suits, which they lost.
Specifically to the look-n-feel suits, which mostly involved a specific company that starts with an M, these suits were lost not because of grounds but because of legal blunders where they essentially gave away the usage to a specific company that starts with an M. For awhile it was sort of standard example in some schools on what can happen if your lawyers aren't careful.
I can understand the need for a good military, but to spend this much money for it. Personally I think it would be better spent if invested in medical research and to better the relationships with other countries (admit it, a whole big part of the world isn't a big fan of the US, putting it mildly
If it makes you feel any better, a ton of the technology produced from these things eventually makes it into civilian use via the private sector. Everything from pastes to fill in wounds on the field (i think this war has the highest maiming rate so far, simply because the soldiers actually make it back). Or even more indirectly, a lot of the stuff happening at DARPA, if successful, has very broad implications. Hell, it could even be argued that what the ARPAnet has grown into has had broad implications for all things medical.
I'm not advocating more spending or anything like that, but part of the problem with just saying "why can't we just spend that 100 billion on curing cancer" is that it often just doesn't work that way. A lot of our biggest achievements have been through basic research in whole different fields, then someone comes back from a conference after having coffee with someone else and goes "I wonder if I used this, plus this thing we're working on, with this...".
Heavily limited, IE, lots of people have 'family blogs' with different authors all swapping things. They'll have to pay between $100 to $200. But wait, there's more!
The personal edition only allows you to use it on one system with one processor. Wtf. Not like there aren't lots of dual-cpu systems being used to host sites. IE, from the personal license:
You may install the Software on only one (1) computer or server having a single CPU.
Hell, I can't even run it on my personal Mac from home as it has two CPUs.
Then again, I accidently trackback'ed them way too many times while they're getting slammed (seriously an accident- others did also, i just overachieved through stupidity) and my blog imported flawlessly into wordpress. Now all I have to do is change the tags to match the old CSS and I'm square.
There are a lot of things that are a little off in this, and I think you might making big generalizations based upon your views. Have a salt shaker ready, but most of this is unintentional Longhorn FUD, some of it prolly deserved and at least you didn't mention Copland. :) MS isn't the only one who is going to experience this, others already have (ie, Copland, or even OSX).
:) I just don't really think there's some perfect storm going on here, and I don't think a lot of others do either.
.doc format? Alright, change it, with a lil DRM for spice. This could be any number of things, including online media. In short, MS is in a long hard slog until they reach the next technical plateau. Then they can cruise awhile, then its more billions.
After watching OSs come and go over the years, I've basically come to the conclusion that a major Operating System project coming together when its supposed to is more of a happy accident than anything. This stuff comes up whenever every major OS is being developed. Writing the kinds of stuff MS is trying to do is hard, hard stuff. Just ask Apple... things might look all well and rosy over in their camp, but its not if you look closer. Same with Linux. And its only going to get harder as the demands increase, which is something any game developer understands.
Bill Gates coined it best when he said "Momentum begets momentum". The problem is that once you reach a certain point (call it what you will, market saturation, etc) you have to push harder and harder to keep that momentum. IE, once you've reach escape velocity, you're cruising from the outer atmosphere to the moon. But to get to mars in a reasonable time frame is a bitch and a half. To get out of the solar system is an exponentially bigger bitch, etc, etc.
That's ~95% of the problem MS is facing, which is the old adage of being a vicitim of your own success. Same thing is starting to happen with chip makers, as others have recently commented on... sure, speed can keep improving exponentially, but the cost to do so can become prohibitively expensive.
But of course MS is going to get there, even if each super-dooper feature they've promised won't be in it. Apple's feature list kinda had to be paired down drastically, and even then it still shipped years late and couldn't play DVDs, just to keep some perspective.
I mentioned the momentum thing, which MS understands full well. When you're pushing that rock up the hill, the last 10% is often the highest. MS, like others, is simply going to try to raise the barrier to entry to a level where OSS competitors are having to play catch up to the next plateau. They're even doing it with Google: you better believe they're in the fight for their lives soon. Think Soviet Union vs USA: arms race, and whoever can outspend the other before one falls wins. Thats one aspect... the other is where a drug patent x expires, and the company combines x with y, and even though x+y may be nothing special they spend tens of millions of dollars advertising it to joe schmoe who, when they go to their doctor, only wants the purple pill.
People are happy with x, and Linux gets x. Fine, MS spends a huge amount making x+y, then marketing it, and everyone wants x+y, which Linux doesn't have. OpenOffice seem to have too good of a
To specifically go through some of the problem points:
1) Lack of new products prevents sales and damages customer loyalty.
Debatable, but I'll give it to you. I don't think most people care about not having yearly OS updates, in fact if I had to wager i'd guess most consider it a feature. Knowing game x from 3 years ago still works is a big boon in joe sixpacks world. And mine, come to think of it. Now if 3rd party releases weren't hitting, yeah, obvious point. But since I don't know for sure, I'll give it to ya.
2) Severe worms damage customer loyalty, increase costs in maintenance and customer service.
In a perfect world, absolutely.
Yeah. A GUI front-end for the comand-line order program. That would rule!
I wouldn't knock it, that's worth $19+ to some of the mac shareware authors...
Woah, you forgot marketing 101: never, ever make people feel stupid or as though they made a stupid decision. :) Not to say your other points aren't valid, but that's the big one.
Say its new and revolutionary, and that this is why it is this way now, and sure some people will be able to read between the lines... but that's fine. Let them save face. But when joe average has made a decision based on GHz, and you essentially call him stupid and bring his ignorance to light, you are not going to get the reaction you hoped for. Even if it makes you feel good.
It has seemed in the last few years that his assistants are mentioned more often in the columns, which leads me to wonder if he has scaled back his workload/reviewing/writing and just coasting on his name/column.
Pretty sure he had a heart attack in there, and was laid up for a good while.. still working, but at a much reduced pace. And it's only relatively recently that he's gone full bore back into it.
DBM has really hit a new low with this "article". It is almost painful to read through with the gaping holes in logic and diction that would make a SMS junkie teenager blush.
Well, considering you're talking about me... as I'm the author of that "article", mind filling me in on what my past lows were? I'd say that's only fair... You're saying a lot, but you don't seem to be backing it up with much. And we're not going to even go into diction.
I'd really encourage you to read the redux I've put up here, as I'm not sure you really absorbed much of what I was really saying, nor why.
I own the poor blog thats linked in the article... you might be interested in knowing there's a redux article here that should probably clear up a lot of these posts & questions.
Really interesting ideas, especially the first part... but how does it account for the (at least from what i've read) japanese game phenomenons like the starcraft clones?
Yeah, I have, in the first reply.
Huh? As far as I can tell, the legitimacy of western democratic government is based on the concept of majority rule.
:( But his writings are really worth a read. I've written about it on /. in the past, so i'm not going to write a book or anything.
The legitimacy of western democratic government is based upon the the fact that the people elect their representatives, that the representatives are made up of the people, and that there is a peaceful transition of power.
The USA is actually a democratic republic, and is very much about protecting the minority from the majority. An example would be the electoral college, that every undergrad for some reason decides is outdated (it became a real issue after gore lost the election after winning more votes), which was/is one of the big problems we've faced with Iraq. A large # of the population wanted a direct vote, which would, you know, serve them well as their ethnicity was in the vast majority. The USA is basically saying "no, you are going to have an electoral college" specifically so that the minorities that live there aren't completely run over.
IE, when the country was being founded, there was a famous & influential theorist (dutch?) who essentially said "the usa will last up until the populace realizes they can vote themselves all the money in the treasury." Jefferson and the others took a lot of these issues to heart.
As for "textbook Jefferson stuff", could you elaborate? I don't live in the U.S.
It's ok, most americans don't get it either.
But basically, Jefferson, and many others of the founding fathers, were extremely forward thinking when they designed our system. When they realized they had won, Jefferson immediately wrote home telling his wife to save every single correspondence/writing he'd ever done, pretty much realizing this was going to be a big deal. The system is designed to last, and while many of the issues of today aren't exactly the same as when the country was founded, they often parallel them. And to be quite honest, while some things weren't really possible at the time (ending slavery, etc), most believe that Jefferson and the others had a pretty good idea that the policies they were setting down would eventually cause them to be worked out.
IE, many now, when they think minority/majority think ethnicity. Going back to the idea of protecting the minority from the majority, protecting minority races from the majority wasn't the main problem of the time, but rather preserving cultural and religious (read up on some of this- ben franklin taking it upon himself to have a jewish temple built, and a mosque i believe) minorities from being trampled upon by the majority. But it really applies to all minority groups, and hence the same principle has served america well when it comes to minority civil rights being worked out. Even when it comes to women's suffrage, etc. It's STILL in progress (ie, many believe it would almost be illegal now to have a draft without drafting women, etc) and will always be. But these basic principles, the government being setup to protect the minority from the majority rule, are what allowed all the rest of the progress to really take place. This was a HUGE FEAR of Jeffersons', what he called the 'tyranny of mob rule'. We've had our rough patches, like the mcarthy era which basically showed why some of this is so dangerous, but by and large it gets worked out and we move forward.
Besides the 'tyranny of mob rule' example, another of his big fears was a government "of the cities, by the cities and for the cities". At the time, the shift from an agricultural-based society to one based on city life was one they were able to anticipate, often by looking throughout europe and elsewhere. The idea being that since cities were much more densely populated than rural areas, a purely democratic majority-rule based system would lead to politicians spending more and more of their time and effort supporting the cities, whil
t seems as though you're basing your beliefs on mistrust of others, rather than finding out for yourself. I suggest you actually read [wikipedia.org] the link I posted (and perhaps this one [electionmethods.org] too). The Condorcet winner of an election is a well-defined mathematical and logical concept that more accurately represents voter intent than any other system.
Nope, i've just heard it all before. People hear about these things, and go completely starry eyed and think they've found the one true answer to democracy. It's even worse than the "you might be an anti-spam kook if..." lists.
Extensions of majority rule are dangerous (which is what condorcet is, IE: if every voter prefers alternative a over b then b should not win, even if it has the most votes), there's a reason why we have the system we do. Checks and balances, it's textbook Jefferson stuff.
Something akin to a preferential voting system would have helped the repubs in some past elections, and pushed down the threat of Nader in this one for the dems. It pushes all the parties farther away from having to walk the line between the centers and the wings.
I really just wish the dem's would stop getting ready to brand Nader an evil-dooer and actually work on a message that gets through to people, not just being "not bush". You know, like sitting down and figuring out how to make people understand in concrete ways why the patriotic act is so dangerous.
Unfortunately it's very difficult to drum up support for what looks like a purely scientific venture when unemployment is rising and so many other projects urgently demand resources.
Part of the issue is that little science is being done by the 'scientific venture', at least as far as most people are concerned. Now if they snagged hubble and bolted it on, and sent back cool images from time to time...
*Most* people have the unfortunate idea (based in some reality) that the ISS is just an orbiting money pit that's not really doing anything, but no one knows what to do with it.
Overall, I believe the government needs a much larger area of transparency so that voters can make intelligent, informed decisions based upon their personal philosophies.
:)
*shivers* the parties are so close now (when you look at just what Kerry disagrees on with Bush it's just not that severe), but I think you're going to hit a problem with what you're after... which is that it's already surprisingly transparent, it's just so f'scking big and convoluted, but emphasis on the big. Almost (if not a hair over) 300 million people, with a government that, even with Bush's 4% discretionary spending, is going to keep getting larger & larger. There's only so much reporters can cover, only so much free time for your average 80hr/week 3 kids dual-income family to spend digesting news, etc. Much easier to draw your battle lines and go with it until something really drastic happens.
We need the government to declare emininent domain and purchase google and create GoogleGov.com, with pre-defined searches for various topics and issues.
That's absolutely beautiful! Who decides who really understands an issue? An IQ test would perhaps be one way, in which case you've just created another aristocracy.
But by and large, assuming you're in power, whomever happens to agree with you will be considered to have a real understanding of the issue. Have you never, evar sat in a meeting/situation where either:
Woa, damn. You've just proposed something that would prolly turn into a theocracy, in addition to your earlier proposition of an aristocracy. This is why precisely why we have checks and balances.
oting isn't going to solve the problem unless a fair voting system is used.
My problem with "altnernative voting systems" is that those that push them the hardest would seem to have the most to gain.
But in this significantly-less-than-perfect world, the public is kept in the dark, deprived of factual knowledge and fed whatever lies or spin people in power (governments, corporations) decide.
Um, I'm pretty sure that for someone to be deprived of something, they've have to want/seek it out in the first place and then be blocked from having it. IE, I'm not being deprived of syphillis.
You might really not like Bush/other party politician but... honestly, I think holding them responsible for not being able to forcefully beam your "message/idea of right" into the public's head is a bit of stretch, isn't it?
Because... it's good advice? What he essentially said was that before he left, his current frame of reference made him think that he was in a terribly stessful situation. Once he was put in a vastly more stressful position, he's able to look at what he once thought was the end of the world and find it's... not so bad. In other words, try to step outside of yourself, and really change your perspective, as often when you are in the 'the moment' you think the piece of blue plaster falling from the ceiling means the sky is falling.
This is good advice. Perhaps it's due to being in my mid-20's, but I swear to god I've seen people who act as though it's time to put a gun to their head for reasons that would be... not quite the earth-enders they seem to think they are if they had the ability to get some perspective. Call it a broader frame of reference. Some of it comes with maturity, some of it comes encoded at birth, some of it comes with experience. It's just about not sitting down in the middle of the street and crying for hours because you realized you left your coffee on top of your car that morning and drove off, and you have coffee every morning so what are you going to do... or the difference between a hangnail and a heart problem. You see this all the damn time in life.
As a personal example, I used to get terribly worked up about work. Fairly demanding position, and it would really, really get to me physically and emotionally. The back breaking milestones and crunch times without a stop point were the worst, even though part of me really had a penchant for it and enjoyed the adrenaline. After taking some time and getting some perspective, it dawned on me that hey, you know, if work is able to get me this screwed up, it prolly meant that:
Then again, the fact that you just went off on a guy because he happened to mention the war... or bullets, or the fact that he was asking you to read into the complexities of what he was saying instead of spoon feeding you a condensed version with bullet points and your potential arguments... prolly means that while you're squarely in the target audience for picking up the advice, you're the least likely to be able to comprehend it yet. And that you're an undergrad, if your comment about the cliche's is any example.
Cliches aren't bad, although original ways of expressing an idea should be strived for. Something becomes a cliche because, you know, it happens to come up from time to time. It's a cliche that a man/woman's mindset completely changes once they have a child... but guess what, it often does. Cliche's are around for a reason, and your casual dismissal both of them, and the original post for the hypothetical use of one does yourself yourself a disservice.
I can't believe you've been modd'ed up... the first half of your post is blathering about not understanding the intent of what you're replying to, and the second half is a strawman argument. Distressing.
Dude, that's good to know I'm not crazy in what I was picking up on. Thanks.
Personally, I far prefer Snow Crash over Cryptonomicon. It's also the only Neal Stephenson book I've read that doesn't seem to much suffer from a rushed ending
I read snow crash after crypto, and I had this really eerie feeling that I was reading a screen play and not a novel. It was really getting to me throughout the book, and I'd swear (unless he specifically told me otherwise) that he wrote that book with a screenplay in mind.
I mean, everything from the pacing and how the book was separated out just seemed geared towards the film, but it really started hitting me when the punk kid is riding out of the fed building on her skateboard. I swear, every single shot was described from the pressing of an individual button, to the pan down to the wheels, etc, etc, etc.
Yeah, cus there were so many other governments who believed he didn't have WMD...
Here is a mirror to the movies & screenshots... HIH
It's a cool project, but the poor guy's server is getting killed. :(
Here is a mirror to the movies & screenshots.