This is only Step 1. Don't think they're just going after SuSE. Once they've made all the other distros illegal by virtue of copyright/IP-infringement claims, you won't have a whole lot of choice in the matter.
From T.F. summary: "If they make other choices, they have all of the compliance and intellectual property issues that are associated with that."
Rarely have I ever seen such perfect examples of FUD. This has it all; it's an unspoken threat, dropped only in order to create feelings of uncertainty in the marketplace.
I had thought for a while that Microsoft was just ignoring Linux, but now it seems they're opening up a new front, one where they're going to engage in overt psychological warfare in order to discourage adoption of competing products.
In a sick way, you have to appreciate watching Microsoft work. It's not as though this hasn't happened a dozen times before, just in the IT market, and yet it still always seems to do the trick. At a certain point, you either have to laugh or cry. I haven't decided which way to go yet.
Yeah because that would really ensure loads of money going to future drug research.
Way to shoot the messenger there.
Maybe instead we should look at the drug market and see why it's producing outcomes that we're unhappy with, and figure out how to modify the incentive structure in order to produce outcomes that we'd prefer.
Here's a thought: rather than blaming lawyers for accepting money for litigating cases - which is, after all, how they make a living - how about you exhort litigants, aka "regular folks," to stop suing people?
That'll be the day. When exactly has the system provided a means by which a person can legally extort money out of some other person, and that means hasn't been taken advantage of?
If you allow it, people will do it. They'll do it because first, someone without any morals will do it for the straight fiscal advantage, and then other people will follow in their tracks because they perceive it as being either acceptable, or required in order to 'not fall behind.'
As a general rule, people will lie, steal, cheat, and defraud other people that they don't know personally, to the maximum extent possible, until they run into prohibitions on doing it that change the risk/reward ratio.
Agreed, although I think that the primary system probably isn't the worst part of it.
When you register to vote, you can declare a party affiliation. In most states, it's basically "Republican," or "Democrat," or you just stay "unaffiliated" (aka Independent). In some states you can choose one of the minor parties as a formal affiliation (Libertarian, Green, Socialist, etc.), though I've never seen this personally. If you choose a party, then it usually gets reported to that party, and you get on their mailing list, etc. (Although most of the time if you're unaffiliated, you just get both parties' junk mail anyway.) You don't have to register with a party to vote in the general elections. Of course, this often means you get the choice of picking between two equally unattractive-but-electable major-party candidates (or in many states, one electable candidate from that state's major party), and a plurality of unelectable third-party protest candidates.
So what get for being registered, is the ability to vote in that party's primary elections. In most states, a party's primaries are open only to people who are registered as being affiliated with that party. So if you want to vote in the Democratic primary and help choose the Democratic candidate for the general election, you have to be registered as a Democrat. The primaries take place several months before the general elections and are totally separate -- your vote or participation in the primary is unrelated to your vote in the general election. So I could have, using the last Presidential election as an example, been registered as a Democrat, voted for Howard Dean in the primary, but then voted for George Bush in the general election. But someone registered as a Republican wouldn't be able to vote in the Democratic primary; they would only vote in the general election.
I've switched my party affiliation back and forth in order to vote in primaries several times. In my mind, it's silly to refuse to be registered for a party just because you don't support what they stand for. It's only (in most states) by registering that you have any say in the party's choice of candidates, which can be as important as the general election in some cases. In my mind, registering for a party is a sign of involvement, but not a sign of support per se.
But you're very right in that there is a whole lot that's screwed up about the U.S. electoral system in general, and parties and primaries are only the very beginning. Opportunities for unscrupulous behavior abound (and are quite frequently taken advantage of, IMO); not to mention the obviously undemocratic parts of the process (Electoral College, I'm looking at you), or systemic disenfranchisement of third parties (difficulty of getting on ballots, lack of proportional representation, "winner take all" national elections). The system, quite frankly, is pretty close to fucked.
However, given how messed up the system is, if you're a citizen and want to get the most 'say' that you can, then you need to play the party-affiliation game, get involved in the primaries, and help make sure that candidates that you support make it to the general elections. That way, you can still cast your third-party/spoiled-ballot/etc. protest vote in the general election, but you're not giving up more say in the political process than you have to. If you don't attempt to influence the system through whatever means you have available, at every possible opportunity, then you're not protesting, you're just bending over and taking it in the rear.
But I finally got to REALLY looking around, and humans even LOOK different than we did 50 years ago. The average IQ has increased. And in general, evolution continues.
Sorry, but this is not evolution. The changes you're seeing are simply the result of better nutrition and a less hostile environment overall, allowing people to grow taller and live longer than they might have previously. There aren't any (significant) genetic changes going on in the timescales you're talking about.
If you took a zygote from someone living in 1750, and brought it up today, he or she wouldn't look any different from a child born today. He'd be just as tall and have the same bone density and probably about the same life expectancy. Or alternately, if you took a zygote from a person today, and implanted it into someone in 1750, the resulting child would probably end up looking just like anyone else in 1750: relatively short, plagued with health problems, and likely as not to live to be 50 years old.
I suspect that you would have to go back thousands of years, maybe more, to find any significant genetic differences in the human species, and even then the differences you'd see would be well within the range of what we today consider "normal" differences between previously-isolated populations (aka "racial" differences). The very minor differences between a light-skinned European and a dark-skinned African person took a very long time of living in reproductive isolation from each other in radically different environments to crop up.
This is a very interesting point, and one that I don't thing gets mentioned often, because it's un-PC and opens up the speaker to allegations of racism.
However, I'd argue that if you look at gay (male) culture today, versus say in the late 1970s, you'll see some fairly drastic changes as a result of the AIDS epidemic. There's a lesson in there somewhere, and it's not that we all have to turn into Evangelical Christian prudes to escape God's wrath; gay people didn't disappear from the planet as a result of HIV, but some of the practices that resulted in widespread infections had to change.
But do the cocktails prevent an infected person from spreading the virus to other people?
As others have pointed out, if they can still infect others, by giving them the cocktail, you are effectively just enabling them to spread the disease more easily; unless you have a way to guarantee that an HIV-positive person won't use their lack of symptoms as a way to disguise their infection and start having sex, you could easily be damning many innocent people to death by prolonging an infected person's life.
Without education, simply distributing life-prolonging and symptom-reducing drugs is madness if the asymptomatic people are still infectious.
Imagine if there was a drug that combated leperosy in the same way; it got rid of your symptoms but still allowed you to pass it on. It probably wouldn't seem like such a hot idea to load people up on it and let them walk out of the hospital -- but that's in large part what AIDS drug cocktails do, when they're distributed in an uncontrolled manner or without stringent guidelines and education.
I find it impossible to not believe that one of the key selling points of DRM, is that it forces a consumer to re-purchase the same content over and over and over.
You want to listen to a track on your portable player? Sure, $1. Want to listen to it on your cell phone? $2.50. Want to burn it to a CD, maybe another $0.50. Want to stream it over the internet, so you can hear it from your office/friend's computer/wherever? You're S.O.L.
You say it's to prevent "illegal distribution" but I'd argue that it could just as easily be to prevent format and space-shifting, since the 'loss' due to format shifting (if you consider the income that they wouldn't receive as a result of space and format-shifting a 'loss') is probably equal if not greater than the losses due to interpersonal sharing. With 'ideal' DRM, you could charge consumers per-track, per-listen, and then charge for every format and every possible way to enjoy the content. The revenue possibilities are unimaginable. Only the shortsighted see it as just a method to prevent seventh-graders from swapping discs.
At the end of the day it's academic whether the intent is to prevent "piracy" and it also prevents format-shifting, or whether it's intended to do both from the vary beginning. In most implementations, it does do both.
In my mind, regardless of what effect it might have on piracy, if it curtails established consumer rights or Fair Use, then it ought to be unacceptable. My ability to listen to the same piece of legitimately purchased music in various locations and in various formats is not an 'acceptable loss' in some epic battle between the valiant protectors of Intellectual Property and the American Way and the Evil Pirates.
Unless you're in a state that has completely open primaries, it's unfortunate that you're not registered with a party, because you're effectively disenfranchising yourself, at least from voting in the primaries.
If your state does allow anyone to vote in either primary, then there's really no reason to register with a party, and your stance is understandable. However, I know a lot of people who have never registered because they don't feel an affiliation to either party, and unfortunately under our current system, this means that they often end up choosing between two equally unappealing candidates.
By voting in the primaries, you can at least have some say -- perhaps even a subversive one -- in the party of your choice. And you can do that, even while being involved in promoting (and voting for in the general election, if you choose) a third-party candidate.
I think honestly, that the primaries are really where the big political decisions of our country are being made. By the time you get to the big national elections, you usually have six of one, half a dozen of another.
I'm going to guess that you've never lived in an area with really bad traffic. In areas where the roads are really overloaded, it affects your travel in the same way that the weather does. If traffic conditions change, you need to change your route, or you risk being stuck in a jam for hours.
You don't want a traffic monitoring system to measure usual rush-hour traffic, since as you point out, it's reasonably predictable, but what you need to know is when something happens -- usually, an accident -- that would cause people to want to change their route.
On some heavily overloaded roads in Northern Virginia, all it takes is a minor fender-bender, fog, sun glare, or interesting distraction, and a 60 minute commute can turn into 90 or 120 minutes. If you had real-time traffic information in advance, you'd probably take a different route. Without that information, you'd just go piling into the back end of the jam.
Collectively, the more people that have better information, the more intelligent decisions they can make, and the better they can choose routes and balance the traffic load across varying roads and changing conditions.
Most countries (including the US) already have a "music tax"; you pay it on blank media.
You want to elucidate? I'm pretty sure that I didn't pay any music or copyright tax on the spindle of generic CD-RWs sitting next to my computer. The only formats that ever included a 'copyright tax' were the short-lived "Music" formats, that went into standalone home recorders. I've never actually met anyone who owned a machine that used them; the licensing and cost of the media basically doomed them to irrelevance, particularly when computer recorders came out that used untaxed 'data' discs.
Not to mention that a tax on physical media is silly, since it's only going to become less and less relevant: burning CDs might have been the mainstream distribution for home-copied music a few years ago, but with larger computer hard drives and iPods, it's now virtually unnecessary. People can share, listen, and copy music without ever using a piece of blank physical media.
Actually, it might make sense to take the caching functions out of the web browser, maybe even out of client machines entirely, in favor of network appliances. That would allow you to have very secure, locked-down browsers, while still doing caching.
I've always been surprised that Linksys or one of the other network-box companies hasn't put together an easy to use "web accellerator" caching proxy. I suppose it's because it would be too hard to explain to a lot of people (the kind of people who don't grok the difference between a web browser and "the Internet" to begin with) and require setup on the client machines that would incur too many support questions.
But if you look at the setup of most people's home networks, you have a relatively slow backhaul, usually only a few megabits, with a very fast and barely utilized internal network (generally at least 10-11 Mb/s, often faster).
It would make a certain amount of sense to do all the caching in a single location, at the router, and then have all the clients pull from that. Then you could access the internet from lightweight devices that didn't have any onboard storage. Plus you could probably set up some way to save the browser state between devices (like Google Browser Sync), but without transmitting any information out of the house.
By separating out the functions that require write access to a file system from the browser, you could run the browser without any privileges, but still get caching. The cache device would just save files based on when and how frequently they were accessed, without looking at them, so it would also be secure. No process would be both executing instructions in the content, and have write access to a filesystem.
Now, for a solution that makes noone happy, but might actually work. Let the anti-abortionites sign up for an "I'm willing to adopt list". If a woman goes for an abortion, and there's a name on that list, then she carriest he baby to term and the name on the list gets the kid and is taken off. If there isn't a name on that list, then, well, the public obviously doesn't care enough, and the abortion is allowed to happen.
Er, no. While I'm all for making the pro-lifers put their 'money where their mouth is,' that solution completely ignores the fundamental reason why many people are pro-choice (myself included): a child should never, ever be a punishment. Pregnancy should never be a punishment.
The responsibility of raising a child, even just being pregnant with one and carrying it to term, is far too great to be foisted off on someone who doesn't want it. If someone doesn't want to be pregnant, they shouldn't be; end of discussion. Nobody can make that decision other than them, and they should never be forced or coerced into it.
I am sickened by the attitude of many "pro-life" supporters, particularly in the Christian Right, who seem to relish the thought of punishing women who have a momentary indiscretion, with a lifetime of caring for a child they don't want. Wrapped up in their jealous veils of moral superiority, they castigate pro-lifers for not respecting the dignity and sanctity of life, but have no problem using that same life as a weapon, a fitting albatross to hang around the necks of the sinful, the fornicatory, sinfully irresponsible.
Well most times when a giant high-rise is on fire, these guys with fire hoses and other equipment show up to put the fire out. In the case of WTC 7, the NYFD made a decision fairly early on to pull back from the building and not attempt to control the fire. As a result, the fire burned out of control, ignited the generator fuel storage tanks (of which there were several, on multiple floors; I can't remember the exact placement but it's discussed in the reports, there were smaller tanks near the generators with a few thousand gallons that act as reservoirs to keep things running while the pumps move fuel up from the main tanks; plus the pumps may have continued to run during the fire and pumped fuel up into the burning building from the underground tanks), the rest is history. Once you get enough heat the structural steel starts to deform; once it deforms the geometry of the building is lost, and it collapses. (And the collapse doesn't have to be at the base of the structure to take the whole thing down: if you collapse one floor in the middle of a building, effectively "dropping" the top half 10 or 15 feet onto the bottom half of the building, that's probably going to crush the bottom and result in a complete collapse. Buildings are built with safety factors, but they're not that big.)
What's most interesting about WTC 7 is that it's an experiment that we don't get to do very often: "what happens to a high-rise building if the fire department doesn't show up?"
Now, most high-rises don't contain as much diesel fuel as that one did, so maybe it wouldn't happen exactly the same way in some other situation, but WTC 7 should really serve as a case study in the instability of the urban environment during times of complete infrastructure breakdown. If you don't have water pressure to run the fire-suppression systems (once the rooftop tanks run out), and you don't have firefighters working to contain the blaze, a modern steel structure may not be as stable as people think they are.
This again confirms his theory though. Destabilizing a stable ecosystem leads to spurs of evolution and new species. During the hardest times on Earth, biggest leaps of development happened. Death of dinosaurs led to mammals taking over.
Your point being what, exactly? That we shouldn't bother to change our fishing regulations, because "life will go on"?
I'm not sure that's exactly a comforting thought, if the human species isn't involved in the 'life' that's going to 'go on.'
To certain species -- rats and cockroaches, probably -- a nuclear war or biowar catastrophe would be just terrific. Even a nuclear winter wouldn't wipe out all life; doubtless something would survive to repopulate the planet. It just probably wouldn't be homo sapiens sapiens, and that's kind of the sticking point.
Whether or not life will continue if it doesn't involve us, is a bit of an academic point. I'd much rather err on the safe side; the one that guarantees that we don't wipe ourself out, or make life more difficult than it needs to be, because of momentary thick-headedness.
On second thought, my first sentence isn't as obvious in its meaning as it should have been. Please allow me to clarify:
If al Qaeda (or anyone else) is capable of stealing enough enriched Uranium or Plutonium to achieve theoretical supercriticality, then their ability to build a bomb out of it ought to be basically assumed.
I.e., in designing our security precautions, we should err on the side of always assuming that the terrorists will know how to build a bomb, once they have the minimum set of physical objects necessary to do so.
If al Qaeda (or anyone else) is capable of stealing enough enriched Uranium or Plutonium to build a bomb, then their ability to do so ought to be basically assumed.
The physics behind it aren't all that hard; if you can steal a nuclear weapon, I'm sure you can find some out-of-work nuclear engineer to help you draw up the plans. It's not as if the U.S. or even the West has a complete lock on that knowledge. There are probably thousands -- maybe more -- of people who would be capable of designing a nuclear weapon given the raw materials and a blank piece of paper. Probably any bright graduate from a school of Nuclear Engineering could, and I don't think we register or otherwise track people in those programs.
If we want to stop nuclear weapons from falling into the hands of terrorists, we need to work on security in the physical, material plane; trying to secure and stop the spread of information -- particularly information that's 70 years old and well understood -- is a losing game. It's not security, it's a charade; and worse than that, it's a false sense of security and a diversion of resources that would be better spent rounding up and securing fissionable materials.
Information, by its nature (being nonconservative) is far more difficult than matter to stop from spreading. It can be slowed down, for a time, and for great expense, but trying to keep a lid on certain ideas forever is a fool's errand.
I respectfully disagree. Or rather, I might agree with you, but I'm not sure that it matters, or that it's really a criticism of Wikipedia per se.
Compare a Wikipedia page to the more conventionally understood "cultural windows." The number of people whose contributions are represented in any WP page is far greater than the number who really have creative control over a film, book, or scholarly article. Yet we have no problem using books -- written by a single person, in many cases -- as links to our cultural history. A Wikipedia page has to be superior to that, particularly since even if it is only made by a few hundred people, the (alleged) aim of those people is consensus.
So while Wikipedia may not be great, because it's still only representative of a very small fraction of the population at a given time, it's probably one of the best things we have. I wouldn't want some future researcher to be doing all their research by looking at WP's edit histories, but there are a lot worse places they could be looking.
If you've ever studied the history of Ancient Greece, you quickly come to discover that much of our knowledge of that era is filtered through the minds and perspectives of a very few individuals; the ones who wrote the only extant histories. Herodotus, Pausanias, Diodorus, Jerome (probably a bunch more that I'm forgetting); you can practically count your 'reliable' source material on the fingers of your hands. And in some cases the authors don't really even make any promises of reliability or attempts at unbiased reporting. Although having primary sources that represent one person's opinion is valuable as a single datapoint, our understanding would be far greater if we had something like an Ancient Greek Wikipedia to work with, showing us how public opinion (even if it only represented the opinion of an elite) changed over time. Can you imagine reading the edit history of an article on Darius I of Persia? It would be fascinating, to say the least.
Would something like Wikipedia be the best possible way to understand a long-distant culture? No; but would it be a good way, quite possibly better than many of the ways we use to understand past cultures today? Certainly.
I like the Windows key, but it was still designed as a marketing tool (copied from Apple.) That's why it has a Windows logo rather than something generic.
I've had this question for a while (mostly because it's taken that long to find anyone who would straight-up admit to actually liking the Windows key): what the hell is it good for?
I mean, the Apple key has a purpose. It's an extra function key. A modifier; so that in addition to the usual Ctrl-[key] and Alt/Option-[key] and Shift-[key] combos, you can have one more. (Not to mention all the combos, e.g. [Opt]-[Apple]-[key].) So in that respect, it's basically functional.
But the Windows key... all it does is open the menu. Is that really worth having a special key for? How often to people actually dig around in that Start menu? How often do you need to get to applications that aren't in your quicklaunch bar?
I use a Windows machine at work, and if I go into the start menu once a day it's rare, other than to turn the machine off. And in order to select anything in the menu, you have to get the mouse down to that corner of the screen anyway, so does it really save any time to pop the menu open?
It just seems like its biggest function is being there to get hit at random times and knock focus away from whatever application I'm really using.
It seems like the Windows key would be a whole lot more useful if it acted as an additional modifier key, like the Apple (aka Command) key does. But it seems like Windows intercepts all presses of the key, and just uses it to open the Start menu. Waste of a key, if you ask me.
And if it wasn't for the fact that IBM is an absolutely massive organization, and had cash and asset reserves sufficient to survive while they totally reinvented themselves, they would never have made it through Microsoft's betrayal in the OS/2 days.
Is Novell big enough to withstand a blow like that and keep on ticking? I doubt it.
Maybe Novell should take a hard look at OS/2. There are probably one or two people left at IBM who know what it is well enough to fill them in on the details.
Getting in bed with Microsoft is like crawling into an iron maiden.
This reminds me of the desktop on new PCs and laptops, pre-loaded with trial software that repeatedly asks you to buy a license after some sort of trial period. I wonder how long this pre-loaded "content" goes before you have to pay or erase.
Does that mean we can call Microsoft's pre-loaded music "shoveltunes?"
That would definitely work, but at that point, why even use a machine to make the initial mark at all?
You could just use a piece of paper and mark it with a bingo blotter (a really big, heavy magic marker) that was reflective or absorptive of UV light or something, and then scan that.
Having a touch screen is just unnecessary and wasteful in the first place. A fill-in-the-bubble sheet with REALLY BIG BUBBLES (so that all the retards in Florida could figure it out) would work just as well, and probably be less confusing to many people.
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Thanks MS for not currupting a good distro.
1. Embrace
2. Extend
3. Extinguish
This is only Step 1. Don't think they're just going after SuSE. Once they've made all the other distros illegal by virtue of copyright/IP-infringement claims, you won't have a whole lot of choice in the matter.
From T.F. summary: "If they make other choices, they have all of the compliance and intellectual property issues that are associated with that."
Rarely have I ever seen such perfect examples of FUD. This has it all; it's an unspoken threat, dropped only in order to create feelings of uncertainty in the marketplace.
I had thought for a while that Microsoft was just ignoring Linux, but now it seems they're opening up a new front, one where they're going to engage in overt psychological warfare in order to discourage adoption of competing products.
In a sick way, you have to appreciate watching Microsoft work. It's not as though this hasn't happened a dozen times before, just in the IT market, and yet it still always seems to do the trick. At a certain point, you either have to laugh or cry. I haven't decided which way to go yet.
Yeah because that would really ensure loads of money going to future drug research.
Way to shoot the messenger there.
Maybe instead we should look at the drug market and see why it's producing outcomes that we're unhappy with, and figure out how to modify the incentive structure in order to produce outcomes that we'd prefer.
Here's a thought: rather than blaming lawyers for accepting money for litigating cases - which is, after all, how they make a living - how about you exhort litigants, aka "regular folks," to stop suing people?
That'll be the day. When exactly has the system provided a means by which a person can legally extort money out of some other person, and that means hasn't been taken advantage of?
If you allow it, people will do it. They'll do it because first, someone without any morals will do it for the straight fiscal advantage, and then other people will follow in their tracks because they perceive it as being either acceptable, or required in order to 'not fall behind.'
As a general rule, people will lie, steal, cheat, and defraud other people that they don't know personally, to the maximum extent possible, until they run into prohibitions on doing it that change the risk/reward ratio.
Agreed, although I think that the primary system probably isn't the worst part of it.
When you register to vote, you can declare a party affiliation. In most states, it's basically "Republican," or "Democrat," or you just stay "unaffiliated" (aka Independent). In some states you can choose one of the minor parties as a formal affiliation (Libertarian, Green, Socialist, etc.), though I've never seen this personally. If you choose a party, then it usually gets reported to that party, and you get on their mailing list, etc. (Although most of the time if you're unaffiliated, you just get both parties' junk mail anyway.) You don't have to register with a party to vote in the general elections. Of course, this often means you get the choice of picking between two equally unattractive-but-electable major-party candidates (or in many states, one electable candidate from that state's major party), and a plurality of unelectable third-party protest candidates.
So what get for being registered, is the ability to vote in that party's primary elections. In most states, a party's primaries are open only to people who are registered as being affiliated with that party. So if you want to vote in the Democratic primary and help choose the Democratic candidate for the general election, you have to be registered as a Democrat. The primaries take place several months before the general elections and are totally separate -- your vote or participation in the primary is unrelated to your vote in the general election. So I could have, using the last Presidential election as an example, been registered as a Democrat, voted for Howard Dean in the primary, but then voted for George Bush in the general election. But someone registered as a Republican wouldn't be able to vote in the Democratic primary; they would only vote in the general election.
I've switched my party affiliation back and forth in order to vote in primaries several times. In my mind, it's silly to refuse to be registered for a party just because you don't support what they stand for. It's only (in most states) by registering that you have any say in the party's choice of candidates, which can be as important as the general election in some cases. In my mind, registering for a party is a sign of involvement, but not a sign of support per se.
But you're very right in that there is a whole lot that's screwed up about the U.S. electoral system in general, and parties and primaries are only the very beginning. Opportunities for unscrupulous behavior abound (and are quite frequently taken advantage of, IMO); not to mention the obviously undemocratic parts of the process (Electoral College, I'm looking at you), or systemic disenfranchisement of third parties (difficulty of getting on ballots, lack of proportional representation, "winner take all" national elections). The system, quite frankly, is pretty close to fucked.
However, given how messed up the system is, if you're a citizen and want to get the most 'say' that you can, then you need to play the party-affiliation game, get involved in the primaries, and help make sure that candidates that you support make it to the general elections. That way, you can still cast your third-party/spoiled-ballot/etc. protest vote in the general election, but you're not giving up more say in the political process than you have to. If you don't attempt to influence the system through whatever means you have available, at every possible opportunity, then you're not protesting, you're just bending over and taking it in the rear.
But I finally got to REALLY looking around, and humans even LOOK different than we did 50 years ago. The average IQ has increased. And in general, evolution continues.
Sorry, but this is not evolution. The changes you're seeing are simply the result of better nutrition and a less hostile environment overall, allowing people to grow taller and live longer than they might have previously. There aren't any (significant) genetic changes going on in the timescales you're talking about.
If you took a zygote from someone living in 1750, and brought it up today, he or she wouldn't look any different from a child born today. He'd be just as tall and have the same bone density and probably about the same life expectancy. Or alternately, if you took a zygote from a person today, and implanted it into someone in 1750, the resulting child would probably end up looking just like anyone else in 1750: relatively short, plagued with health problems, and likely as not to live to be 50 years old.
I suspect that you would have to go back thousands of years, maybe more, to find any significant genetic differences in the human species, and even then the differences you'd see would be well within the range of what we today consider "normal" differences between previously-isolated populations (aka "racial" differences). The very minor differences between a light-skinned European and a dark-skinned African person took a very long time of living in reproductive isolation from each other in radically different environments to crop up.
This is a very interesting point, and one that I don't thing gets mentioned often, because it's un-PC and opens up the speaker to allegations of racism.
However, I'd argue that if you look at gay (male) culture today, versus say in the late 1970s, you'll see some fairly drastic changes as a result of the AIDS epidemic. There's a lesson in there somewhere, and it's not that we all have to turn into Evangelical Christian prudes to escape God's wrath; gay people didn't disappear from the planet as a result of HIV, but some of the practices that resulted in widespread infections had to change.
But do the cocktails prevent an infected person from spreading the virus to other people?
As others have pointed out, if they can still infect others, by giving them the cocktail, you are effectively just enabling them to spread the disease more easily; unless you have a way to guarantee that an HIV-positive person won't use their lack of symptoms as a way to disguise their infection and start having sex, you could easily be damning many innocent people to death by prolonging an infected person's life.
Without education, simply distributing life-prolonging and symptom-reducing drugs is madness if the asymptomatic people are still infectious.
Imagine if there was a drug that combated leperosy in the same way; it got rid of your symptoms but still allowed you to pass it on. It probably wouldn't seem like such a hot idea to load people up on it and let them walk out of the hospital -- but that's in large part what AIDS drug cocktails do, when they're distributed in an uncontrolled manner or without stringent guidelines and education.
All depends on whose Kool-Aid you're drinking.
I find it impossible to not believe that one of the key selling points of DRM, is that it forces a consumer to re-purchase the same content over and over and over.
You want to listen to a track on your portable player? Sure, $1.
Want to listen to it on your cell phone? $2.50.
Want to burn it to a CD, maybe another $0.50.
Want to stream it over the internet, so you can hear it from your office/friend's computer/wherever? You're S.O.L.
You say it's to prevent "illegal distribution" but I'd argue that it could just as easily be to prevent format and space-shifting, since the 'loss' due to format shifting (if you consider the income that they wouldn't receive as a result of space and format-shifting a 'loss') is probably equal if not greater than the losses due to interpersonal sharing. With 'ideal' DRM, you could charge consumers per-track, per-listen, and then charge for every format and every possible way to enjoy the content. The revenue possibilities are unimaginable. Only the shortsighted see it as just a method to prevent seventh-graders from swapping discs.
At the end of the day it's academic whether the intent is to prevent "piracy" and it also prevents format-shifting, or whether it's intended to do both from the vary beginning. In most implementations, it does do both.
In my mind, regardless of what effect it might have on piracy, if it curtails established consumer rights or Fair Use, then it ought to be unacceptable. My ability to listen to the same piece of legitimately purchased music in various locations and in various formats is not an 'acceptable loss' in some epic battle between the valiant protectors of Intellectual Property and the American Way and the Evil Pirates.
Unless you're in a state that has completely open primaries, it's unfortunate that you're not registered with a party, because you're effectively disenfranchising yourself, at least from voting in the primaries.
If your state does allow anyone to vote in either primary, then there's really no reason to register with a party, and your stance is understandable. However, I know a lot of people who have never registered because they don't feel an affiliation to either party, and unfortunately under our current system, this means that they often end up choosing between two equally unappealing candidates.
By voting in the primaries, you can at least have some say -- perhaps even a subversive one -- in the party of your choice. And you can do that, even while being involved in promoting (and voting for in the general election, if you choose) a third-party candidate.
I think honestly, that the primaries are really where the big political decisions of our country are being made. By the time you get to the big national elections, you usually have six of one, half a dozen of another.
I'm going to guess that you've never lived in an area with really bad traffic. In areas where the roads are really overloaded, it affects your travel in the same way that the weather does. If traffic conditions change, you need to change your route, or you risk being stuck in a jam for hours.
You don't want a traffic monitoring system to measure usual rush-hour traffic, since as you point out, it's reasonably predictable, but what you need to know is when something happens -- usually, an accident -- that would cause people to want to change their route.
On some heavily overloaded roads in Northern Virginia, all it takes is a minor fender-bender, fog, sun glare, or interesting distraction, and a 60 minute commute can turn into 90 or 120 minutes. If you had real-time traffic information in advance, you'd probably take a different route. Without that information, you'd just go piling into the back end of the jam.
Collectively, the more people that have better information, the more intelligent decisions they can make, and the better they can choose routes and balance the traffic load across varying roads and changing conditions.
Where I come from, they call that "identity theft."
Most countries (including the US) already have a "music tax"; you pay it on blank media.
You want to elucidate? I'm pretty sure that I didn't pay any music or copyright tax on the spindle of generic CD-RWs sitting next to my computer. The only formats that ever included a 'copyright tax' were the short-lived "Music" formats, that went into standalone home recorders. I've never actually met anyone who owned a machine that used them; the licensing and cost of the media basically doomed them to irrelevance, particularly when computer recorders came out that used untaxed 'data' discs.
Not to mention that a tax on physical media is silly, since it's only going to become less and less relevant: burning CDs might have been the mainstream distribution for home-copied music a few years ago, but with larger computer hard drives and iPods, it's now virtually unnecessary. People can share, listen, and copy music without ever using a piece of blank physical media.
Actually, it might make sense to take the caching functions out of the web browser, maybe even out of client machines entirely, in favor of network appliances. That would allow you to have very secure, locked-down browsers, while still doing caching.
I've always been surprised that Linksys or one of the other network-box companies hasn't put together an easy to use "web accellerator" caching proxy. I suppose it's because it would be too hard to explain to a lot of people (the kind of people who don't grok the difference between a web browser and "the Internet" to begin with) and require setup on the client machines that would incur too many support questions.
But if you look at the setup of most people's home networks, you have a relatively slow backhaul, usually only a few megabits, with a very fast and barely utilized internal network (generally at least 10-11 Mb/s, often faster).
It would make a certain amount of sense to do all the caching in a single location, at the router, and then have all the clients pull from that. Then you could access the internet from lightweight devices that didn't have any onboard storage. Plus you could probably set up some way to save the browser state between devices (like Google Browser Sync), but without transmitting any information out of the house.
By separating out the functions that require write access to a file system from the browser, you could run the browser without any privileges, but still get caching. The cache device would just save files based on when and how frequently they were accessed, without looking at them, so it would also be secure. No process would be both executing instructions in the content, and have write access to a filesystem.
Now, for a solution that makes noone happy, but might actually work. Let the anti-abortionites sign up for an "I'm willing to adopt list". If a woman goes for an abortion, and there's a name on that list, then she carriest he baby to term and the name on the list gets the kid and is taken off. If there isn't a name on that list, then, well, the public obviously doesn't care enough, and the abortion is allowed to happen.
Er, no. While I'm all for making the pro-lifers put their 'money where their mouth is,' that solution completely ignores the fundamental reason why many people are pro-choice (myself included): a child should never, ever be a punishment. Pregnancy should never be a punishment.
The responsibility of raising a child, even just being pregnant with one and carrying it to term, is far too great to be foisted off on someone who doesn't want it. If someone doesn't want to be pregnant, they shouldn't be; end of discussion. Nobody can make that decision other than them, and they should never be forced or coerced into it.
I am sickened by the attitude of many "pro-life" supporters, particularly in the Christian Right, who seem to relish the thought of punishing women who have a momentary indiscretion, with a lifetime of caring for a child they don't want. Wrapped up in their jealous veils of moral superiority, they castigate pro-lifers for not respecting the dignity and sanctity of life, but have no problem using that same life as a weapon, a fitting albatross to hang around the necks of the sinful, the fornicatory, sinfully irresponsible.
Well most times when a giant high-rise is on fire, these guys with fire hoses and other equipment show up to put the fire out. In the case of WTC 7, the NYFD made a decision fairly early on to pull back from the building and not attempt to control the fire. As a result, the fire burned out of control, ignited the generator fuel storage tanks (of which there were several, on multiple floors; I can't remember the exact placement but it's discussed in the reports, there were smaller tanks near the generators with a few thousand gallons that act as reservoirs to keep things running while the pumps move fuel up from the main tanks; plus the pumps may have continued to run during the fire and pumped fuel up into the burning building from the underground tanks), the rest is history. Once you get enough heat the structural steel starts to deform; once it deforms the geometry of the building is lost, and it collapses. (And the collapse doesn't have to be at the base of the structure to take the whole thing down: if you collapse one floor in the middle of a building, effectively "dropping" the top half 10 or 15 feet onto the bottom half of the building, that's probably going to crush the bottom and result in a complete collapse. Buildings are built with safety factors, but they're not that big.)
What's most interesting about WTC 7 is that it's an experiment that we don't get to do very often: "what happens to a high-rise building if the fire department doesn't show up?"
Now, most high-rises don't contain as much diesel fuel as that one did, so maybe it wouldn't happen exactly the same way in some other situation, but WTC 7 should really serve as a case study in the instability of the urban environment during times of complete infrastructure breakdown. If you don't have water pressure to run the fire-suppression systems (once the rooftop tanks run out), and you don't have firefighters working to contain the blaze, a modern steel structure may not be as stable as people think they are.
This again confirms his theory though. Destabilizing a stable ecosystem leads to spurs of evolution and new species. During the hardest times on Earth, biggest leaps of development happened. Death of dinosaurs led to mammals taking over.
Your point being what, exactly? That we shouldn't bother to change our fishing regulations, because "life will go on"?
I'm not sure that's exactly a comforting thought, if the human species isn't involved in the 'life' that's going to 'go on.'
To certain species -- rats and cockroaches, probably -- a nuclear war or biowar catastrophe would be just terrific. Even a nuclear winter wouldn't wipe out all life; doubtless something would survive to repopulate the planet. It just probably wouldn't be homo sapiens sapiens, and that's kind of the sticking point.
Whether or not life will continue if it doesn't involve us, is a bit of an academic point. I'd much rather err on the safe side; the one that guarantees that we don't wipe ourself out, or make life more difficult than it needs to be, because of momentary thick-headedness.
On second thought, my first sentence isn't as obvious in its meaning as it should have been. Please allow me to clarify:
If al Qaeda (or anyone else) is capable of stealing enough enriched Uranium or Plutonium to achieve theoretical supercriticality, then their ability to build a bomb out of it ought to be basically assumed.
I.e., in designing our security precautions, we should err on the side of always assuming that the terrorists will know how to build a bomb, once they have the minimum set of physical objects necessary to do so.
If al Qaeda (or anyone else) is capable of stealing enough enriched Uranium or Plutonium to build a bomb, then their ability to do so ought to be basically assumed.
The physics behind it aren't all that hard; if you can steal a nuclear weapon, I'm sure you can find some out-of-work nuclear engineer to help you draw up the plans. It's not as if the U.S. or even the West has a complete lock on that knowledge. There are probably thousands -- maybe more -- of people who would be capable of designing a nuclear weapon given the raw materials and a blank piece of paper. Probably any bright graduate from a school of Nuclear Engineering could, and I don't think we register or otherwise track people in those programs.
If we want to stop nuclear weapons from falling into the hands of terrorists, we need to work on security in the physical, material plane; trying to secure and stop the spread of information -- particularly information that's 70 years old and well understood -- is a losing game. It's not security, it's a charade; and worse than that, it's a false sense of security and a diversion of resources that would be better spent rounding up and securing fissionable materials.
Information, by its nature (being nonconservative) is far more difficult than matter to stop from spreading. It can be slowed down, for a time, and for great expense, but trying to keep a lid on certain ideas forever is a fool's errand.
I respectfully disagree. Or rather, I might agree with you, but I'm not sure that it matters, or that it's really a criticism of Wikipedia per se.
Compare a Wikipedia page to the more conventionally understood "cultural windows." The number of people whose contributions are represented in any WP page is far greater than the number who really have creative control over a film, book, or scholarly article. Yet we have no problem using books -- written by a single person, in many cases -- as links to our cultural history. A Wikipedia page has to be superior to that, particularly since even if it is only made by a few hundred people, the (alleged) aim of those people is consensus.
So while Wikipedia may not be great, because it's still only representative of a very small fraction of the population at a given time, it's probably one of the best things we have. I wouldn't want some future researcher to be doing all their research by looking at WP's edit histories, but there are a lot worse places they could be looking.
If you've ever studied the history of Ancient Greece, you quickly come to discover that much of our knowledge of that era is filtered through the minds and perspectives of a very few individuals; the ones who wrote the only extant histories. Herodotus, Pausanias, Diodorus, Jerome (probably a bunch more that I'm forgetting); you can practically count your 'reliable' source material on the fingers of your hands. And in some cases the authors don't really even make any promises of reliability or attempts at unbiased reporting. Although having primary sources that represent one person's opinion is valuable as a single datapoint, our understanding would be far greater if we had something like an Ancient Greek Wikipedia to work with, showing us how public opinion (even if it only represented the opinion of an elite) changed over time. Can you imagine reading the edit history of an article on Darius I of Persia? It would be fascinating, to say the least.
Would something like Wikipedia be the best possible way to understand a long-distant culture? No; but would it be a good way, quite possibly better than many of the ways we use to understand past cultures today? Certainly.
What makes you think you're going to get a better government?
If there's one waiting in the wings, I fail to see it.
I like the Windows key, but it was still designed as a marketing tool (copied from Apple.) That's why it has a Windows logo rather than something generic.
... all it does is open the menu. Is that really worth having a special key for? How often to people actually dig around in that Start menu? How often do you need to get to applications that aren't in your quicklaunch bar?
I've had this question for a while (mostly because it's taken that long to find anyone who would straight-up admit to actually liking the Windows key): what the hell is it good for?
I mean, the Apple key has a purpose. It's an extra function key. A modifier; so that in addition to the usual Ctrl-[key] and Alt/Option-[key] and Shift-[key] combos, you can have one more. (Not to mention all the combos, e.g. [Opt]-[Apple]-[key].) So in that respect, it's basically functional.
But the Windows key
I use a Windows machine at work, and if I go into the start menu once a day it's rare, other than to turn the machine off. And in order to select anything in the menu, you have to get the mouse down to that corner of the screen anyway, so does it really save any time to pop the menu open?
It just seems like its biggest function is being there to get hit at random times and knock focus away from whatever application I'm really using.
It seems like the Windows key would be a whole lot more useful if it acted as an additional modifier key, like the Apple (aka Command) key does. But it seems like Windows intercepts all presses of the key, and just uses it to open the Start menu. Waste of a key, if you ask me.
And if it wasn't for the fact that IBM is an absolutely massive organization, and had cash and asset reserves sufficient to survive while they totally reinvented themselves, they would never have made it through Microsoft's betrayal in the OS/2 days.
Is Novell big enough to withstand a blow like that and keep on ticking? I doubt it.
Maybe Novell should take a hard look at OS/2. There are probably one or two people left at IBM who know what it is well enough to fill them in on the details.
Getting in bed with Microsoft is like crawling into an iron maiden.
This reminds me of the desktop on new PCs and laptops, pre-loaded with trial software that repeatedly asks you to buy a license after some sort of trial period. I wonder how long this pre-loaded "content" goes before you have to pay or erase.
Does that mean we can call Microsoft's pre-loaded music "shoveltunes?"
That would definitely work, but at that point, why even use a machine to make the initial mark at all?
You could just use a piece of paper and mark it with a bingo blotter (a really big, heavy magic marker) that was reflective or absorptive of UV light or something, and then scan that.
Having a touch screen is just unnecessary and wasteful in the first place. A fill-in-the-bubble sheet with REALLY BIG BUBBLES (so that all the retards in Florida could figure it out) would work just as well, and probably be less confusing to many people.