I agree -- an open source Acrobat replacement would be great.
I can't come up with any sort of burning hatred of PDF, as some people seem able to. Sure, back in the day, when I had a computer with 32 or 64MB of RAM, opening one by accident really sucked. Up until I figured out that there were better things than Adobe Acrobat Reader, it was still really annoying. But after Apple built PDF creation and reading into Mac OS, a lot of my dislike faded. I didn't hate the format, I just hated the reader.
So similarly, I wonder if there were better creation/editing/management tools other than Adobe's, if people would have less objections to it, and might not keep going down the blind alley of finding PDF alternatives?
After all, there is a PDF alternative, it's called DVI. In fact I think it predates PDF. But it's installed base is pretty close to zero (it's mostly only used by people who have LaTeX on Linux installed, and who for some reason aren't outputting directly to PDF). So it's not as though there aren't any alternatives. It's just that those alternatives don't really offer any compelling reasons to switch from PDF.
This Unipage business seems as though it's just a standardized web archive format, which makes me immediately wonder why they didn't just use one of the existing archive formats. (e.g., the Mac OS / Safari archive, or the Konqueror ".war" file.) Just on first glance it seems as though it's a reinvention of the wheel, although this time with the "ability" to encapsulate Flash, which is a malfeature in my opinion.
Anyway, PDF is here and it's here to stay -- it's been built into a lot of standalone devices (document scanners, fax systems) and I can't imagine that the format is really much of a moving target anymore, at least in its more basic implementations. But you're absolutely right: there is for some reason an odd shortage of FOSS manipulation tools for dealing with PDFs, at least that I've used so far.
This is patently untrue based on my understanding of the current situation. I cannot test it (not being located in China) but I believe that going to google.com from mainland china will now redirect you to google.cn, in the same way that going to google.com in the UK will take you to google.co.uk.
Perhaps there is some way to still get around this, I'm not sure, but people who were used to getting the regular google.com page are now getting the censored version, almost certainly.
Better than that, get a nondescript one and say that it's a power supply for your computer.
There are external HDs now that are smaller than the AC power supply that came with my first laptop, and they look about the same -- big fat cord goes into plug in wall, smaller cord connects into computer.
I'm sure an enterprising hardware hacker could actually put a hard drive inside the plastic shell from one of those old brick-type AC adaptors, too.
In other words, if you are paranoid about your employees taking an iPod into work, why on earth did you hire them for a sensitive position?
Absolutely.
You're never going to be able to keep up with the ever-decreasing size of data storage devices: it's going to be a losing battle. If somebody wants to sneak something in or out of your secure area, unless they're being watched at every moment by someone you trust, they're going to have the opportunity. Flash drives, SD/MMC cards, iPods, cellphones that can be mounted as Mass Storage Class USB devices... I could think of half a dozen ways that a motivated person could sneak data into or out of a "secure" area.
If your security depends on your employees not stealing because they're not allowed to bring portable devices in, you're in trouble. It's not going to work, and you're always going to be on the losing side of the battle as storage densities increase and components become further miniaturized and integrated into other otherwise-innocuous devices.
Good data security depends on restricting access to people who are trusted: people who aren't going to steal it, whether via an iPod or a USB stick or with a paper and pencil.
There are no code keys or authorizations or product activation in Mac OS X. It would be a drag to see that change.
To be perfectly frank, I would really appreciate it (although I know this will never happen) if the OSx86 people just packed it all in and found a different hobby. I say this, because I can quickly see the situation degenerating to the point where Apple starts installing some serious product activation stuff in their software, that links particular copies of the OS to particular machines' hardware and to particular purchased serial numbers.
OS X is one of the last really big pieces of software that I use which -- at least until recently -- didn't have any copy protection in it at all. If you had a retail disc, you could install it.
As someone who doesn't have a problem paying $129 for a well-built operating system (and doesn't have a problem paying $1999 for a well-built computer, either), I'm going to be rather annoyed if that goes becomes the first fatality in the oncoming war of Apple versus the cracker community.
The problem is that, by not bothering to follow standardized grammatical and spelling rules, a writer offloads the work of discerning the meaning of their statement onto the reader, instead of making it (relatively) clear and unambiguous.
It's laziness, pure and simple, on the part of the writer.
Spelling and grammar weren't standardized just for fun, or as part of some greater conspiracy by the Man to stifle your creativity, but because it makes text a lot easier to read than if everyone makes up their own rules. A reader shouldn't have to go over your writing more than once, trying to figure out what the hell you meant, and that's often what happens when you don't bother to even sort out which word to use.
The fact that a reader can understand you, doesn't mean that you're not being an arrogant and lazy writer, by making them work for what ought to be unambiguous and clear.
I agree completely. And having worked for a very short amount of time in tech support, I feel your pain.:)
What you'd have happen with MacOS is a situation not dissimilar to the image problems that Linux has. I know several people who have tried to install Linux and not had any luck -- for one reason or another, usually because they want it to work with some obscure piece of hardware or a WinModem or something -- and go around forever afterwards saying that "linux sucks and i hate it." You don't find these people on/., by and large, but you will find them on other discussion forums, and I think they're of the reasons Linux retains a reputation for being difficult.
Apple doesn't want to create any of those people, and their effect would be much more powerful, because the allure of the MacOS is principally "ease of use," while Linux's is not.
I'm not at all surprised about the OSx86 shutdown, and I think that if they didn't see this coming, they need a serious reality check. You can argue semantics all you want about whether what they're doing is really "piracy" or "facilitating piracy," but it's clearly a DMCA violation (circumventing Apple's hardware lock-in) and if they want to continue, they'd better move themselves to Russia or Sealand, or some other place out of range of Apple's lawyers.
I chose "gambling" because in the context of a site like Slashdot, "gaming" means something else entirely. Furthermore, I just think calling gambling 'gaming' is idiotic. I have no problem with gambling, but call it what it is.
Although, I'm sure that saying "Congress has introduced a bill to ban all online gaming" would probably have made for a far more interesting discussion here on/....
Wait a minute... you're saying President Bush pardoned I. Lewis (a.k.a. "Scooter") Libby?
I think you've gotta be misinformed on that one. Unless it was just totally ignored by every media outlet on the planet, and it's being blocked by Google... I don't think it's happened. Yet.
Actually $20k is not outrageously priced for an electric wheelchair. (The proper term these days is "power mobility system".)
Some of the more advanced designs -- regular chair type ones -- that have features like raising and lowering of the seat (so the user can use tables and vanities of different heights) are nearly that expensive. I knew someone who used one like that about 6 years ago, and I think they said it was about $12k. So certainly less than $20k, but not out of reach for a reasonably well-off person who suddenly became disabled.
That's assuming that you could get your insurance company to pony up the cost in cash of the next least-expensive power chair, which they may not be particularly willing to do. Although they may cover stair-climbing systems now, I'm not sure.
I think the idea of the Segway was that it would be a replacement for using a car in some applications, not as a replacement for your legs.
I can only imagine Kamen had visions of legions of urban commuters using it to get around; however as soon as it was banned from sidewalks that was pretty much the end of that idea. I don't know about you, but I don't really like the idea of going up against a car while standing on a Segway. As long as everyone else is going to be travelling in 2000 lbs of steel, I'll be doing the same.
I'm all about saving gas and helping the environment, but I'm not going to end up in a wheelchair because some idiot's foot slipped and rear-ended me while I was essentially just standing still in front of them (e.g. at a stoplight). That's my objection to the Segway. In concept, I like it though.
The equipment to liquefy hydrogen is not really something that you'd want to have banging around in the back of your car. At the very least it would add a lot of unnecessary weight to the vehicle, which would impact its efficiency. It requires at least a three-stage compressor, and produces an awful lot of heat. And it's probably intensive to maintain -- high-pressure cryogenic turbomachinery is no joke. And as people have even admitted elsewhere in this thread that they think getting their car's oil changed every 3000 miles is too much work, I'm not sure I want everybody to have one of those.
You would also be giving up an economy of scale by going for the 'self electrolysis' route: I have a feeling that they can probably do a lot more energy-efficient H20->H2+O conversion and liquefaction in a big facility than in a portable unit in your car.
That's not to say that at some point in the future, portable electrolysis and liquefaction units might not be available and have certain applications (places where it's not economically feasible to transport liquid H), but I'm not sure it would be appropriate to put them in every vehicle.
I had an idea like this at one point, why not just use a paper ballot made and a bingo marker.
Every decrepit old fart in the country knows how to use one of those, and you don't have to worry about erasure (since they're not erasable -- if you make a mistake, you restart, like the idiot you are) and they're very high contrast, so they could be scanned and read electronically if you designed the ballot right.
I have a feeling that you could get a lot of paper ballots and bingo markers, and one high-speed paper scanner per voting location, for the price of a room of Diebold machines.
But hey, it's only voting. We'll let the people with the vested interest in the outcome deal with it. Oh, wait...
I think everyone has been going down a blind path trying to make Linux run on every piece of cruddy hardware under the sun (although this may just be the way an organic, geek-user-run project goes); if I were a billionaire and had my own Linux distro, I'd concentrate on picking one set of easily available hardware, and making it run well on that.
People -- and this includes the people that make purchasing decisions at businesses and educational institutions -- want to be able to buy something and know that it's going to work. If you could set someone up with a Linux machine and say "if you want to buy hardware, order it from this site," and give them the Linux equivalent of the Apple Store, the situation would be a lot easier than it is now.
Mac users don't go into Best Buy and expect the latest piece of crap to work in their Apple box, but if you give someone Linux and don't have a really good HCL, they're going to. They see the same white-box PC as a Windows machine, they're going to assume the same hardware is going to work. The way to get rid of that perception -- and it's a very damaging one, because Linux isn't ever going to compete with Windows on the hardware-compatibility front in the near future with every crappy peripheral in existence -- is creating a "brand identity" that includes supported hardware.
Heck, this is all Sun does with its low-end workstations, and they arguably have less software available for them than most Linux distros. There's no reason why there couldn't be a "RedHat Computer" or a "Ubuntu Computer," or just a "Linux Computer," to compete with "Windows Computers." Sure it might be slightly misleading, but it would improve the reputation of Linux as a product.
"It just works" is more a matter of branding than anything else, and that's where the Linux community seems to fall a little short.
I think it's worth pointing out this petition over at OS2World.com (which is still accepting signatures), asking IBM to release the source of OS/2.
There are apparently some legal issues -- the most frequently cited one is that IBM might not hold copyright to all the code, since the project was originally done in collaboration with Microsoft and Corel -- but the request is that IBM open up all of the code that it has available and can legally release, and note what parts it can't, so that they could be re-implemented.
I'm not sure it's ever going to happen, but it sure would be nice if it did.
Just to clarify, I'm not a fan of centralized economic control: not by a long shot. Frankly it surprises me that anyone still thinks that communism or socialism are workable systems, whether prepended by "quasi-" or not. I'm not even nearly as anti-corporate as I think you think I am. In other places I've vociferously defended the place of corporations. Let me be very clear: although I think there are a lot of things that we could do better, I think free-market capitalism is the best economic system ever successfully tried, and that democracy is the best political system yet developed. Full stop.
What annoys me, and what I was trying to get at in my previous post, was that if you don't like what corporations are doing at any point in time, you have to look at your laws. Companies always will act according to a fairly predictable risk/benefit analysis within the framework of the incentives and punishments created by society. They're a barometer of what's allowable, and if we're uncomfortable with what they're doing and want them to change, what we ought to do is create additional disincentives to the behavior. There's no sense in moralizing at them if the immoral act remains profitable.
I also think that it's useless to haul out any company in particular -- disgusted as we may be with them at the moment (as I personally am with Google) -- for a "public shaming," and expect it to affect anyone's behavior. Corporations are not children that can be shamed or embarassed into acting differently, at least not for very long or very effectively.
Where you got off thinking that I was being superior I don't know, because I wasn't exempting myself from my generalizations about humanity. If my company decided to send me to China tomorrow to work on the Great Firewall, I'd be on the next plane over there. I'm no marytr; there are only about a million people who'd have no problem doing my job if I had a problem with it. And probably a few hundred other companies willing to do it, if (speaking hypothetically, this is neither my nor my company's area) my company refused. More to the point, I think it's rather stupid to fault Cisco for selling the Chinese routers, or IBM for selling the Nazis sorting machines, as long as there were other companies willing to step right in and fill the gap if they refused.
Corporations will always be amoral, and they will always act perversely, if the incentive structure exists. If, as a free society, we dislike what they're doing, then we are fully within our rights to modify that structure to produce outcomes that are more palatable. That's the right of a democratically-controlled free market, and I don't think it implies any love of centralized control or big government to say it. It's just a check-and-balance proposition.
Well, the other thing could be that most people perceive the Internet -- rather correctly, in my opinion -- not as some great gateway to free content, but to a lot of things which you need to haul out your credit card and pay for.
I'm not sure where all these great free research journals are on the 'net that you're talking about, but at least in the U.S., you won't be able to read crap without subscribing to a service, which is usually thousands of dollars a year. I went to a small university and we didn't even have access to some of the big-name medical journals because they were just too expensive to purchase full-text access to (we didn't have a medical school so they figured why bother, I guess). This was a while ago, but I don't imagine the situation is any different. I'll stop before I go off on a rant, but suffice it to say I think the whole research-journal industry is a big fat scam. Maybe in other countries, they're receving free or subsidized access to the databases, which is why the Internet is seen as a gateway to free content. But it's not that way here.
IMO, the biggest thing that drove home broadband adoption in the U.S. was MP3 music downloads. People went to college and had broadband, realized they could get music and stuff off of the Internet, and then when they graduated college or moved back home, didn't want to switch back to dialup. Now, it's widely perceived that the era of 'free stuff' on the 'net is over. If you want music or videos now (and aren't willing to pirate them -- which a lot of people are not, surprisingly, I think because of the lawsuits), you have to pay for them. I think the second biggest driver of broadband has just been impatience: web sites got more bloated, and people don't like to wait for them to load.
So I think maybe the 'free content' argument was behind broadband at one point, but it's not anymore. Hopefully there's still a perception of the internet being free in other places, but I think here's it's widely seen by people as basically an extension of the local shopping mall. Some free stuff, but most of the "good stuff" you have to pay for. I'm not saying that's correct or true, but it's the perception.
Invidivuals have morals, conscience, and shame, but unless a corporation is firmly controlled by a particular individual or very select group of individuals (as is the case with some privately held companies) who cannot be easily displaced, the organization itself will act amorally.
One of the main reasons for this is because, given that the ultimate driving motive is profit, there is a mechanism at practically every level, from the factory floor to the executive boardroom, which allows someone to be replaced if they're not willing to act to maximize profit because of moral issues.
E.g., if you're some guy in a shoe factory who doesn't like working with leather because you're an animal-rights activist, you'll be fired; if you're a CEO who doesn't want to move the production to South-east Asia and have the assembly work done by 14-year-olds, you can be voted out and replaced. There's always someone less moral than you willing to take your job. And in the larger view, there's always another company run by less-moral people willing to take your business.
Therefore, profit-driven enterprise will always sink to the lowest level allowed by law: the level at which you cannot fire or replace a person for refusing to do something (or where the disincentives for getting rid of them outweigh the profitability of doing so). I have no doubt that in a society where the disincentive to commit murder was lower, you would have corporations dealing in it all the time. It would not surprise me if there were places in the world where human life is cheap, where this is the case today.
Complying with China's demands may: cost some pro-democracy activists their lives Complying with the EU's demands may: cost some Microsoft shareholders some of their money
And the sad part is, some people are going to think that's just you being funny or ironic, but that's exactly how it works.
It's always easier to apologize later, once the bodies are buried and your pockets are full, than to do anything ahead of time and take heat from your shareholders for it.
But I have only a limited amount of blame for the corporations involved, or the people that run them. I fully expect, perhaps if I were an investor I'd even demand, that they go to the very bounds of legality in pursuing profit. That's what they do, it is their nature. Do the analysts on Wall Street give a damn whether some Chinese democracy advocate ended up in a re-education center? No; except insofar as it'll change the quarterly earnings. The people who matter don't care, and the people who care don't matter.
I'm not particularly happy with Google these days -- I'm rather disgusted for them for being hypocritical: I can take unethical/immoral behavior, but I prefer that people at least appreciate what they're doing when they do it -- but perhaps there is something to be said for the effect they're having. If you're a businessperson who doesn't really enjoy doing morally repugnant things in the name of money, but also doesn't want to get run out of business by someone with less moral hangups, perhaps the best course of action is to be as flagrantly immoral as possible, while still staying within the bounds of the law as written: the result might be that the laws get changed, forcing you (and everyone else) to play a cleaner game.
Of course, the problem is that it's sacrificing other people instead of yourself, in the name of getting the laws changed.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree -- an open source Acrobat replacement would be great.
I can't come up with any sort of burning hatred of PDF, as some people seem able to. Sure, back in the day, when I had a computer with 32 or 64MB of RAM, opening one by accident really sucked. Up until I figured out that there were better things than Adobe Acrobat Reader, it was still really annoying. But after Apple built PDF creation and reading into Mac OS, a lot of my dislike faded. I didn't hate the format, I just hated the reader.
So similarly, I wonder if there were better creation/editing/management tools other than Adobe's, if people would have less objections to it, and might not keep going down the blind alley of finding PDF alternatives?
After all, there is a PDF alternative, it's called DVI. In fact I think it predates PDF. But it's installed base is pretty close to zero (it's mostly only used by people who have LaTeX on Linux installed, and who for some reason aren't outputting directly to PDF). So it's not as though there aren't any alternatives. It's just that those alternatives don't really offer any compelling reasons to switch from PDF.
This Unipage business seems as though it's just a standardized web archive format, which makes me immediately wonder why they didn't just use one of the existing archive formats. (e.g., the Mac OS / Safari archive, or the Konqueror ".war" file.) Just on first glance it seems as though it's a reinvention of the wheel, although this time with the "ability" to encapsulate Flash, which is a malfeature in my opinion.
Anyway, PDF is here and it's here to stay -- it's been built into a lot of standalone devices (document scanners, fax systems) and I can't imagine that the format is really much of a moving target anymore, at least in its more basic implementations. But you're absolutely right: there is for some reason an odd shortage of FOSS manipulation tools for dealing with PDFs, at least that I've used so far.
like Marathon didn't?
I think you misspelled Pathways Into Darkness.
I remember playing that game late at night... it's amazing how scary you can get 640x480, 8-bit graphics.
This is patently untrue based on my understanding of the current situation. I cannot test it (not being located in China) but I believe that going to google.com from mainland china will now redirect you to google.cn, in the same way that going to google.com in the UK will take you to google.co.uk.
Perhaps there is some way to still get around this, I'm not sure, but people who were used to getting the regular google.com page are now getting the censored version, almost certainly.
Better than that, get a nondescript one and say that it's a power supply for your computer.
There are external HDs now that are smaller than the AC power supply that came with my first laptop, and they look about the same -- big fat cord goes into plug in wall, smaller cord connects into computer.
I'm sure an enterprising hardware hacker could actually put a hard drive inside the plastic shell from one of those old brick-type AC adaptors, too.
In other words, if you are paranoid about your employees taking an iPod into work, why on earth did you hire them for a sensitive position?
... I could think of half a dozen ways that a motivated person could sneak data into or out of a "secure" area.
Absolutely.
You're never going to be able to keep up with the ever-decreasing size of data storage devices: it's going to be a losing battle. If somebody wants to sneak something in or out of your secure area, unless they're being watched at every moment by someone you trust, they're going to have the opportunity. Flash drives, SD/MMC cards, iPods, cellphones that can be mounted as Mass Storage Class USB devices
If your security depends on your employees not stealing because they're not allowed to bring portable devices in, you're in trouble. It's not going to work, and you're always going to be on the losing side of the battle as storage densities increase and components become further miniaturized and integrated into other otherwise-innocuous devices.
Good data security depends on restricting access to people who are trusted: people who aren't going to steal it, whether via an iPod or a USB stick or with a paper and pencil.
Ahh... if I only had mod points. :)
There are no code keys or authorizations or product activation in Mac OS X. It would be a drag to see that change.
To be perfectly frank, I would really appreciate it (although I know this will never happen) if the OSx86 people just packed it all in and found a different hobby. I say this, because I can quickly see the situation degenerating to the point where Apple starts installing some serious product activation stuff in their software, that links particular copies of the OS to particular machines' hardware and to particular purchased serial numbers.
OS X is one of the last really big pieces of software that I use which -- at least until recently -- didn't have any copy protection in it at all. If you had a retail disc, you could install it.
As someone who doesn't have a problem paying $129 for a well-built operating system (and doesn't have a problem paying $1999 for a well-built computer, either), I'm going to be rather annoyed if that goes becomes the first fatality in the oncoming war of Apple versus the cracker community.
The problem is that, by not bothering to follow standardized grammatical and spelling rules, a writer offloads the work of discerning the meaning of their statement onto the reader, instead of making it (relatively) clear and unambiguous.
It's laziness, pure and simple, on the part of the writer.
Spelling and grammar weren't standardized just for fun, or as part of some greater conspiracy by the Man to stifle your creativity, but because it makes text a lot easier to read than if everyone makes up their own rules. A reader shouldn't have to go over your writing more than once, trying to figure out what the hell you meant, and that's often what happens when you don't bother to even sort out which word to use.
The fact that a reader can understand you, doesn't mean that you're not being an arrogant and lazy writer, by making them work for what ought to be unambiguous and clear.
Eye do knot know, butt my spiel checker past this thorough juts fine. To bawd eye steel sounds leek a retard.
I agree completely. And having worked for a very short amount of time in tech support, I feel your pain. :)
/., by and large, but you will find them on other discussion forums, and I think they're of the reasons Linux retains a reputation for being difficult.
What you'd have happen with MacOS is a situation not dissimilar to the image problems that Linux has. I know several people who have tried to install Linux and not had any luck -- for one reason or another, usually because they want it to work with some obscure piece of hardware or a WinModem or something -- and go around forever afterwards saying that "linux sucks and i hate it." You don't find these people on
Apple doesn't want to create any of those people, and their effect would be much more powerful, because the allure of the MacOS is principally "ease of use," while Linux's is not.
I'm not at all surprised about the OSx86 shutdown, and I think that if they didn't see this coming, they need a serious reality check. You can argue semantics all you want about whether what they're doing is really "piracy" or "facilitating piracy," but it's clearly a DMCA violation (circumventing Apple's hardware lock-in) and if they want to continue, they'd better move themselves to Russia or Sealand, or some other place out of range of Apple's lawyers.
I chose "gambling" because in the context of a site like Slashdot, "gaming" means something else entirely. Furthermore, I just think calling gambling 'gaming' is idiotic. I have no problem with gambling, but call it what it is.
/. ...
Although, I'm sure that saying "Congress has introduced a bill to ban all online gaming" would probably have made for a far more interesting discussion here on
Wait a minute ... you're saying President Bush pardoned I. Lewis (a.k.a. "Scooter") Libby?
I think you've gotta be misinformed on that one. Unless it was just totally ignored by every media outlet on the planet, and it's being blocked by Google... I don't think it's happened. Yet.
Actually $20k is not outrageously priced for an electric wheelchair. (The proper term these days is "power mobility system".)
Some of the more advanced designs -- regular chair type ones -- that have features like raising and lowering of the seat (so the user can use tables and vanities of different heights) are nearly that expensive. I knew someone who used one like that about 6 years ago, and I think they said it was about $12k. So certainly less than $20k, but not out of reach for a reasonably well-off person who suddenly became disabled.
That's assuming that you could get your insurance company to pony up the cost in cash of the next least-expensive power chair, which they may not be particularly willing to do. Although they may cover stair-climbing systems now, I'm not sure.
I think the idea of the Segway was that it would be a replacement for using a car in some applications, not as a replacement for your legs.
I can only imagine Kamen had visions of legions of urban commuters using it to get around; however as soon as it was banned from sidewalks that was pretty much the end of that idea. I don't know about you, but I don't really like the idea of going up against a car while standing on a Segway. As long as everyone else is going to be travelling in 2000 lbs of steel, I'll be doing the same.
I'm all about saving gas and helping the environment, but I'm not going to end up in a wheelchair because some idiot's foot slipped and rear-ended me while I was essentially just standing still in front of them (e.g. at a stoplight). That's my objection to the Segway. In concept, I like it though.
Excuse me, I have something I need to type in to Barrens General Chat right away...
The equipment to liquefy hydrogen is not really something that you'd want to have banging around in the back of your car. At the very least it would add a lot of unnecessary weight to the vehicle, which would impact its efficiency. It requires at least a three-stage compressor, and produces an awful lot of heat. And it's probably intensive to maintain -- high-pressure cryogenic turbomachinery is no joke. And as people have even admitted elsewhere in this thread that they think getting their car's oil changed every 3000 miles is too much work, I'm not sure I want everybody to have one of those.
You would also be giving up an economy of scale by going for the 'self electrolysis' route: I have a feeling that they can probably do a lot more energy-efficient H20->H2+O conversion and liquefaction in a big facility than in a portable unit in your car.
That's not to say that at some point in the future, portable electrolysis and liquefaction units might not be available and have certain applications (places where it's not economically feasible to transport liquid H), but I'm not sure it would be appropriate to put them in every vehicle.
I had an idea like this at one point, why not just use a paper ballot made and a bingo marker.
Every decrepit old fart in the country knows how to use one of those, and you don't have to worry about erasure (since they're not erasable -- if you make a mistake, you restart, like the idiot you are) and they're very high contrast, so they could be scanned and read electronically if you designed the ballot right.
I have a feeling that you could get a lot of paper ballots and bingo markers, and one high-speed paper scanner per voting location, for the price of a room of Diebold machines.
But hey, it's only voting. We'll let the people with the vested interest in the outcome deal with it. Oh, wait...
And less spiritual.
:)
That is only because you lack devotion, Infidel.
Though, I do know some people for whom that would be a quasi-religious experience.
I think this is exactly the route to take.
I think everyone has been going down a blind path trying to make Linux run on every piece of cruddy hardware under the sun (although this may just be the way an organic, geek-user-run project goes); if I were a billionaire and had my own Linux distro, I'd concentrate on picking one set of easily available hardware, and making it run well on that.
People -- and this includes the people that make purchasing decisions at businesses and educational institutions -- want to be able to buy something and know that it's going to work. If you could set someone up with a Linux machine and say "if you want to buy hardware, order it from this site," and give them the Linux equivalent of the Apple Store, the situation would be a lot easier than it is now.
Mac users don't go into Best Buy and expect the latest piece of crap to work in their Apple box, but if you give someone Linux and don't have a really good HCL, they're going to. They see the same white-box PC as a Windows machine, they're going to assume the same hardware is going to work. The way to get rid of that perception -- and it's a very damaging one, because Linux isn't ever going to compete with Windows on the hardware-compatibility front in the near future with every crappy peripheral in existence -- is creating a "brand identity" that includes supported hardware.
Heck, this is all Sun does with its low-end workstations, and they arguably have less software available for them than most Linux distros. There's no reason why there couldn't be a "RedHat Computer" or a "Ubuntu Computer," or just a "Linux Computer," to compete with "Windows Computers." Sure it might be slightly misleading, but it would improve the reputation of Linux as a product.
"It just works" is more a matter of branding than anything else, and that's where the Linux community seems to fall a little short.
I think it's worth pointing out this petition over at OS2World.com (which is still accepting signatures), asking IBM to release the source of OS/2.
There are apparently some legal issues -- the most frequently cited one is that IBM might not hold copyright to all the code, since the project was originally done in collaboration with Microsoft and Corel -- but the request is that IBM open up all of the code that it has available and can legally release, and note what parts it can't, so that they could be re-implemented.
I'm not sure it's ever going to happen, but it sure would be nice if it did.
Just to clarify, I'm not a fan of centralized economic control: not by a long shot. Frankly it surprises me that anyone still thinks that communism or socialism are workable systems, whether prepended by "quasi-" or not. I'm not even nearly as anti-corporate as I think you think I am. In other places I've vociferously defended the place of corporations. Let me be very clear: although I think there are a lot of things that we could do better, I think free-market capitalism is the best economic system ever successfully tried, and that democracy is the best political system yet developed. Full stop.
What annoys me, and what I was trying to get at in my previous post, was that if you don't like what corporations are doing at any point in time, you have to look at your laws. Companies always will act according to a fairly predictable risk/benefit analysis within the framework of the incentives and punishments created by society. They're a barometer of what's allowable, and if we're uncomfortable with what they're doing and want them to change, what we ought to do is create additional disincentives to the behavior. There's no sense in moralizing at them if the immoral act remains profitable.
I also think that it's useless to haul out any company in particular -- disgusted as we may be with them at the moment (as I personally am with Google) -- for a "public shaming," and expect it to affect anyone's behavior. Corporations are not children that can be shamed or embarassed into acting differently, at least not for very long or very effectively.
Where you got off thinking that I was being superior I don't know, because I wasn't exempting myself from my generalizations about humanity. If my company decided to send me to China tomorrow to work on the Great Firewall, I'd be on the next plane over there. I'm no marytr; there are only about a million people who'd have no problem doing my job if I had a problem with it. And probably a few hundred other companies willing to do it, if (speaking hypothetically, this is neither my nor my company's area) my company refused. More to the point, I think it's rather stupid to fault Cisco for selling the Chinese routers, or IBM for selling the Nazis sorting machines, as long as there were other companies willing to step right in and fill the gap if they refused.
Corporations will always be amoral, and they will always act perversely, if the incentive structure exists. If, as a free society, we dislike what they're doing, then we are fully within our rights to modify that structure to produce outcomes that are more palatable. That's the right of a democratically-controlled free market, and I don't think it implies any love of centralized control or big government to say it. It's just a check-and-balance proposition.
Well, the other thing could be that most people perceive the Internet -- rather correctly, in my opinion -- not as some great gateway to free content, but to a lot of things which you need to haul out your credit card and pay for.
I'm not sure where all these great free research journals are on the 'net that you're talking about, but at least in the U.S., you won't be able to read crap without subscribing to a service, which is usually thousands of dollars a year. I went to a small university and we didn't even have access to some of the big-name medical journals because they were just too expensive to purchase full-text access to (we didn't have a medical school so they figured why bother, I guess). This was a while ago, but I don't imagine the situation is any different. I'll stop before I go off on a rant, but suffice it to say I think the whole research-journal industry is a big fat scam. Maybe in other countries, they're receving free or subsidized access to the databases, which is why the Internet is seen as a gateway to free content. But it's not that way here.
IMO, the biggest thing that drove home broadband adoption in the U.S. was MP3 music downloads. People went to college and had broadband, realized they could get music and stuff off of the Internet, and then when they graduated college or moved back home, didn't want to switch back to dialup. Now, it's widely perceived that the era of 'free stuff' on the 'net is over. If you want music or videos now (and aren't willing to pirate them -- which a lot of people are not, surprisingly, I think because of the lawsuits), you have to pay for them. I think the second biggest driver of broadband has just been impatience: web sites got more bloated, and people don't like to wait for them to load.
So I think maybe the 'free content' argument was behind broadband at one point, but it's not anymore. Hopefully there's still a perception of the internet being free in other places, but I think here's it's widely seen by people as basically an extension of the local shopping mall. Some free stuff, but most of the "good stuff" you have to pay for. I'm not saying that's correct or true, but it's the perception.
Or was he waving a Little Red Book and exhorting you to learn from Lei Feng?
At a lot of U.S. universities, especially if it was in a humanities class, I'd expect nothing less.
I think you pretty much described the situation.
Invidivuals have morals, conscience, and shame, but unless a corporation is firmly controlled by a particular individual or very select group of individuals (as is the case with some privately held companies) who cannot be easily displaced, the organization itself will act amorally.
One of the main reasons for this is because, given that the ultimate driving motive is profit, there is a mechanism at practically every level, from the factory floor to the executive boardroom, which allows someone to be replaced if they're not willing to act to maximize profit because of moral issues.
E.g., if you're some guy in a shoe factory who doesn't like working with leather because you're an animal-rights activist, you'll be fired; if you're a CEO who doesn't want to move the production to South-east Asia and have the assembly work done by 14-year-olds, you can be voted out and replaced. There's always someone less moral than you willing to take your job. And in the larger view, there's always another company run by less-moral people willing to take your business.
Therefore, profit-driven enterprise will always sink to the lowest level allowed by law: the level at which you cannot fire or replace a person for refusing to do something (or where the disincentives for getting rid of them outweigh the profitability of doing so). I have no doubt that in a society where the disincentive to commit murder was lower, you would have corporations dealing in it all the time. It would not surprise me if there were places in the world where human life is cheap, where this is the case today.
Complying with China's demands may: cost some pro-democracy activists their lives
Complying with the EU's demands may: cost some Microsoft shareholders some of their money
And the sad part is, some people are going to think that's just you being funny or ironic, but that's exactly how it works.
It's always easier to apologize later, once the bodies are buried and your pockets are full, than to do anything ahead of time and take heat from your shareholders for it.
But I have only a limited amount of blame for the corporations involved, or the people that run them. I fully expect, perhaps if I were an investor I'd even demand, that they go to the very bounds of legality in pursuing profit. That's what they do, it is their nature. Do the analysts on Wall Street give a damn whether some Chinese democracy advocate ended up in a re-education center? No; except insofar as it'll change the quarterly earnings. The people who matter don't care, and the people who care don't matter.
I'm not particularly happy with Google these days -- I'm rather disgusted for them for being hypocritical: I can take unethical/immoral behavior, but I prefer that people at least appreciate what they're doing when they do it -- but perhaps there is something to be said for the effect they're having. If you're a businessperson who doesn't really enjoy doing morally repugnant things in the name of money, but also doesn't want to get run out of business by someone with less moral hangups, perhaps the best course of action is to be as flagrantly immoral as possible, while still staying within the bounds of the law as written: the result might be that the laws get changed, forcing you (and everyone else) to play a cleaner game.
Of course, the problem is that it's sacrificing other people instead of yourself, in the name of getting the laws changed.