EITHER the truth is just not clear OR scientists can reasonably be chosen based on your already knowing what conclusion they'll reach. Can't have both. Patently false. With something like low-level environmental pollutants there will never be a clear answer because of the myriad range of ways people biopsychologically deal with the agents, and because the answers you get depend on the questions you ask and how you frame them.
Now, this: Let's face it folks, this administration is fundamentally oposed to public review of *any* issue. is wonderfully insightful, the key to the issue. The Bush administration is drawn almost exclusively from the set of CEO cowboys who see all issues as a hostile takeover - people do not and should not know what's going on inside the building until it comes out on a slick glossy brochure. I didn't realize that the Reaganites were equally ham-handed in squelching the opposition.
do you trust Bush government on defining Science ? Would you trust Nader ?
Your question is a good one, but a bit broad. I would trust Nader on finding and exposing dangerous practices of government and industry, and making baseline recommendations about how to fix them. As for planning and implementing a policy to get things changed, I'd steer very far clear of Nader, as he'd be likely to galvanize those opposed to his point of view so thoroughly that he might make things worse.
As for Bush, his administration is one of the most cynical, manipulative groups of people I've ever seen in office. Not even Newt Gingrich, whose politics I despise, did this kind of wholewhearted insistence that the sky is green and filled with flying fish, and wholesale replacement of those who don't agree.
In case Bush hasn't noticed, this is the beginning of the waning of American economic superpowerdom. The US will still be the biggest military around for a long time to come, but there will be three global sized economies within 20 years - US, China, Europe, and that means sooner or later the US has stop farting in everyone's face.
OK, you're right in theory - people shouldn't really be going in for overvalued things. The problem from a civic standpoint is that people do and will make a quick killing building an industry around a product that seems valuable now, but will be rendered much less valuable by some tech innovation. And as usual, those with less money suffer more when the economy makes wild swings. I.e., for all the drama of a billionaire to pauper story, it's much harder to endure getting fired when you live paycheck to paycheck.
Everyone (particularly the investment money part of everyone) wants their piece of the pie on the way up, so it's easy to see people doing this over and over. I'm am admittedly cynical about the ability of business insitutions to observe technological change in a long view and restrain from the quick industry-building. Doubly so if the technology that pulls the rug out from under the sector can just as easily come from some programmer's dusty attic or a no-name research lab (recall that investment bankers, for all their claims of loving the little guy, are essentially still only impressed by big money).
Interesting... nice to finally know the details of what so many have scoffed at. On a related note: My father was working for U of Md and NSF at the time, and I remember him talking about the transfer of the backbone from NSF. He was convinced it was going to destroy the universities' ability to use the internet, because (IIRC) the backbone providers were:
a)going to price universities out of the market
b) not be able to coordinate to enough an extent to actually keep the thing running. I'd love to represent my dad (who is very farsighted) as prescient on this, but when it comes to the backbone, he seems to have been wrong. But he was quite foresighted in seeing the Internet as a commons that could easily be render much less useful.
Seems to me the point here is that nobody really knows. The idea that a few months of subsidized work could undermine a huge sector of the economy is a pretty new one.
It'd be good to see some more formal economic thinking on this subject, like a couple PhD theses on the macroeconomic effect of technology-induced obsolescence. Frankly, I think it's almost imperative to study it, because it will very likely happen over and over again in the next 20 years - in biotech, in information management, in content production.
The specific question I'm thinking about is: What role should a government take when a rapid technological change dramatically undermines an industry? This would be a good start at learning from the missteps we've taken in the recording industry.
Re:If it were a Windows machine...
on
Crushing Experience
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Yeah, but entertainment doesn't have to be gratuitously wasteful (key word in bold). It's likewise entertaining to blow up your house, run your car off a cliff, or piss in your toaster to see what color the steam is.
Amazingly, it's also fun to read a book, write a program, or hell, write a book. Yeah it's a drag to _always_ avoid doing the stupid, wasteful shit that gives you the pleasure of being reckless, but it seems like people have lost the ability to make this a once-in-a-while pleasure rather than an every other day pleasure.
Re:Americans throw away freedom for capitalism
on
Want Freedom?
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· Score: 2
Capitalism != greed. Fair enough. It's perfectly legitimate for people to think hard about self-advancement and direct a lot of their efforts to that. On the other hand, the traditional definitions of greed have lots implications about wanting stuff to the detriment of those around you. A greedy person in parables is usually represented by taking when those around are wanting. I think that's a still a pretty good insight into a negative human quality - it is not good to close yourself off to the suffering others around you. And I think it's tremendously naive to think that you can help people by not helping them at all (though I agree that always helping people may encourage them to depend on you).
Each of us has specific material wants and needs, and those are infinite. If you think your material wants and needs are not infinite, you'd better think again.
I don't think my wants an needs are infinite in extent, but perhaps infinite in variety and subtlety. If you're making the point that each new situation prompts people to want something new, I think that's an insightful point. Of course there's something else I could want out of a situation, but it may well not be more of anything, but rather a slightly different kinds of various things.
You put limits on yourself based on your economic situation, but if you can have it, you will take it. If you could afford a nicer home, you'd have it. If you could eat filet mignon every night, you would.
I find it rather presumptuous for you to tell me what I want, or want I would want if I just had enough moola. I don't want a bigger house - it would make me feel and be tied down. I like my somewhat shabby apartment - it's home.
Typically economics has gotten around this kind of point by arguing that I'm maximizing some utility function. While that's a good way of expressing the idea that people apply effort to what makes sense to them, at some point, somebody always cuts bait and decides what makes sense for other people, which is to say, they tell other people they are wrong. I think that's necessary - human knowledge is finite, and people are sometimes wrong - but I deeply disagree with the terms on which it's done, which I think are both cynical and self-reinforcing (mainly that people are and should be out for themselves, in a sort of Hobbesian sense). People do lots of things for lots of reasons, and I think very few economists are very good scholars of human motivation. Yet they continue to dictate the terms by which we define, measure and predict how we move our resources around.
Not to mention how the hell do I make a backup? Maybe the companies should start to offer a low$$ copy service for licensed users.
You're on to something here.
As much as I dislike the legislative attempts to give content "owners" complete control over any work that they somehow managed to get a legal title to, I really this boondoggle about backup copies gives bad press to the anti-DRM crowd.
Here's a simple solution: What if you got two of the exact same CD in the package? With the same activation, etc....
If it's really what you want, perhaps some letters to companies are in order, to convince them that you really just want to reinstall. Cause as of now, the "I need to make a backup argument" smells like duplication to everyone but an ISO-burnin linux geek.
It's nice to see someone who's knowledgeable on this issue speak about it without ranting about either privacy or theft. Activists have great points, but their job is to yell and scream enough to convince or scare you, so you can't really turn to them for a balanced point. It's doubly nice that she represents a company that can do something to moderate the laws being discussed.
Whether or not you believe that Verizon will go to bat for consumers (to me it sounds like they'll go as far as they can cautiously go), they are taking a conciliatory rather than an accusatory stance, and that's sorely needed in this debate.
Given that an entire distro was founded by forking RedHat's product, they seem pretty committed to playing by the terms of the GPL.
Sure, you could imagine scenarios where RedHat added some proprietary extensions that closed their systems, but nothing they've done, from their sales pitches about open source and open standards to their kernel contributions indicates that they want to do that. I'm sure RedHat may capitalize on its opportunity to do dirty deeds somewhere along the line, but that doesn't equate to being a true bully.
You're probably right that no law prohibits the various acts of surveillance in public places, but I'd be surprised if you can use all that evidence without some concerns of due process popping up.
Think of it as a return to the beat cop era where the cop knew everyone in the neighborhood. This list isn't a deterrent in itself. It is simply a means to deduce where extra policing (in the full sense of the term) is needed.
Why not just add real beat cops instead of a SELECT statement?
A beat cop will know what's going on in living, human color - no database can possible wrap up. Subtle things like what the neighborhood is like, what the people who live there are all about, which ones are the really tough eggs, who's just a follower.
In short, you need to train someone to have exceptionally good judgement in a situation, support them, and give them a little trust. Some database is just going to increase people's tendencies to jump to conclusions.
Which leads back to my original position: Executives spend millions on advertising not necessarily because it will work as much as because they believe it will work.
And therefore millions of dollars move around hourly because of what people think will work. Which means they do work, in some fashion, or at least inasmuch as people like to think they're right. Crazy to think that we mostly live inside the head trip of a few executives politicians and other notables.
Interestingly, your assertion is true about most activities that people of all stripes undertake. The funny thing is that only this bizarre "rationalist" tradition tries to maintain that you don't have to resort to that leap of faith all the time, but rather can "reason" your way through.
But I think ads work most for products that are truly distinguishable, since such ads actually convey information. For products that are essentially fungible -- corn flakes, for example -- ads can't just provide the info that makes them superior, because there isn't any. Such ads perforce fall back on deceptive or meaningless content ("Eat GeneriFlakes -- they're cooool"). Those ads, precisely, are the ones that bug people.
Recall that a substantial portion of a company's released documents are not just trying to influence a particular sale, but trying to build brand identity. A strong brand keeps the customers who bought once coming back, or so the theory goes, and exists precisely to distinguish otherwise mostly indistinguishable products.
If we're going to get rid of this massive public space for brand creation, companies will want someplace else to engage in it, so it might be a good idea to ask that question instead:
Where can companies engage in branding and exhortation to sales in a way that's less obtrusive on other things we want to do?
Having recently been IN China, I'll play the learned-something-about-it card. The Chinese government is not dumb. Corrupt and authoritarian, probably. What they will do is set up their society (cause in the government has a lot of power to construct society to its liking) to capitalize on cheap labor like this and drive your precious employment offshore. And you ain't safe just by being a geek, either - the presence of people inhaling noxious fumes for $1.50 a day drives down the wages of those inhaling donuts in front of a computer. And when that's done, they'll set the terms of trade so that your razors cost $10.50. SO even if you're naive enough to persist in the it-ain't-my-fault tack, you might want to think about the consequences.
Allright, now to respond to your lamer responses in kind (to make sure I get modded down):
You're too tough to be moved, eh? Cause it's always someone else's fault, and they're always trying to stick the blame squarely on you pgrote. It's not enough for a guy just to want to eat Doritos and play XBox. I mean, what the hell do they want? And then they turn around and call good ol' pgrote cold hearted!
We got a word for you in American English: Pissant.
You're on to two good things here: but the truth is good bands break up because they get bored doing the same old shit, and they need fresh blood and fresh directions to keep making good music. Band breakups sometimes result in less good music, but I think the new (and different) bands that result are better for music quality on the whole.
Absolutely, but here's the $64 billion question: Do you want to bother dealing with the new bands' sounds? Recall that this means:
a) some of their albums will suck. Music is art, not craft or science, and that means like in baseball, if you bat above.300, you're pretty a prodigious artist. But as an out-in-front consumer it means that you have to acquire 3* as much music as you expect to keep.
b) you have to get accustomed to a new sound. This sounds lame and staid, but how often have you dismissed an album only to come back to it later and discover that you can really get into it? This is why pump the same songs over the radio works - often people's resistance to a song is grounded in not liking something new.
c) There seem to be a lot of people who don't care that much, they just want some kinda music for their days. And they've got it - music is more ubiquitous and commoditized than ever. The record companies may want every band to be a U2, but they'll probably settle for a Cypress Hill.
You also pointed out: But people keep buying their albums, as you just said yourself. The music industry, including the artists, realizes this: big name = more sales.
This is brand development, the lifeblood of any consumer-driven corporation (hell, just about any corporation). In a market of infinite choices, what do people want: a lot of them want a stable choice that they can trust - hence the brand relationship. The more stable and reliable the conneciton between the brand and the product, the more durable it will be. Anyone who's reading this knows exactly what a McDonalds hamburger tastes like - the taste is a brand. The much-loved Microsoft is probably one of the most brilliant branding engines of all times - you can recognize a Microsoft program from 50 miles away, and damn if they don't all work the same.
Recording mavens are businesspoeople, and they're just using the standard things they learned in business school. Problem for us and for them is, people are incredibly fickle when it comes to music, (for reasons I don't really understand, or articulate, but I surmise have a lot to do with how strongly popular music and identity are related in modern society) so building a brand is counterproductive. Until someone comes up with another way to describe building a stable place in a fickle market, these guys are gonna be hammering the square peg into the round hole. The question is, who's got the clout to do build a new way of doing thigs? Could actually be that the consumers refragment this market on their own - that'd be a damn good historical precedent. I ain't holdin my breath tho.
but the licence, being Bill Gates' wet dream, allows for this, right?
Well, the BSD license says that the license/attribution notice must stay with the code and its derivatives, but since you don't necessarily have a right to look at BSD-derived code, and there's nothing about using preprocessor directives to eliminate the comments from the binary, there's no way to know.
ISTR back when W2K was released there were
allegations that it used OpenBSD's TCP/IP
stack without attribution. I can't remember
how that ever turned out, though.
A friend and I were discussing this a while back - he recalls seeing some files working at MS that were BSD-licensed code, and IIRC the license notice wasn't actually stripped out, but it had been taken out of context and slapped down at the bottom of the file, in a not-likely-to-be-read place. He was of the opinion that it was a sleazy but legal move. No idea whether it was the OpenBSD TCP/IP stack.
Why do people think that? Wouldn't the alternative to thinking that mean a society with a ruling class and subjects?
That's a fair concern, but I still basically think that those who know less about a subject should shut and listen to those who know more about it. We can hash out who knows more about what in what case later, but I submit that people in office generally know more about making laws than people who are not in office, by the mere fact of doing it all day.
This is why I continue to think directly asking the public at large how things ought to be done is a recipe for disaster. It puts the actual process of making law into the hands of groups who are focused on a very narrow goal.
For example, in Washington state, where I live, voter initiatives have gutted the state's public transportation system at a time when traffic has never been worse. The initiative that did this passed only a few years after a voter initiative mandate that a certain chunk of tax money be spent to transportation! And you'd still be hard pressed to remind the voters that they voted in these two contradictory initiatives. Having some outside organization write procurement laws for California is asking for the same kind of fiasco.
In addition to entering government, interested members of public should always be able to ask hard question about what's going on and use them to effect chage. But having some group with a particular point of view draft a law and then submit it to voters in a flurry of excitement strikes me as an inconsistent way to make laws.
I appreciate the difficulties of getting access to enough bases of political support to be able to effect change, particularly rapid change. But initiatives that mandate a particular law are a bad way to solve this problem - they ignore the fallout from the legal changes they make. And who's to say that we really want a lot of rapid change?
The people have the right to know exactly what source code the government is using to protect them. We have the right to know what code protects our privacy in, for example, records which are ruled sealed.
I respectfully but forcefully disagree. These arguments of "we should be able to see the source" smack of micromanagement.
Governments should of course be transparent and responsive to their citizens, and release enough details of their work to demonstrate to their citizens that they are pursuing a course that's in the broad public interest (note that the current administration is failing miserable in both parts of this). On the other hand, you do not and should not have the right to constantly monitor every move that every part of government makes. Imagine if every shareholder of a massive company had the right to know and second guess every line item of the company's budget - the company wouldn't be able to do anything!
Frankly, I think these direct democracy arguments are presumptuous - why do people think that they, who've never tried to govern, are better equipped to do it than someone who has tried, with the help of a smart, devoted staff?
Yes, there are definitely times when branches of government get off on a course that needs checking, and I think many levels of government do need some prompting to really consider the idea that they don't have to use Microsoftware. But the answer is not to disempower the government by restricting its decisions.
Stupid sticky middle mouse button! This is precisely the blessing: they generally won't care about "newer and better" if what they do now works OK
and the curse: they won't care about better as long as what they do continues to work OK.
People waste a LOT of time in science because they haven't bothered with "newer and better" things like putting their datasets into these dangerously modern SQL databases where others can look at them.
There's a to recommend the manage-everything-yourself culture of science, but there's serious down sides, too.
This is precisely the blessing: they generally won't care about "newer and better" if what they do now works OK
and the curse: they won't care about better as long as what they do continuesthey generally won't care about "newer and better" if what they do now works OK to work OK.
People waste a LOT of time in science because they haven't bothered with "newer and better" things like putting their datasets into these dangerously modern SQL databases where others can look at them.
There's a to recommend the manage-everything-yourself culture of science, but there's serious down sides, too.
It has its ups and its downs. On the one hand, most research scientists are not money-motivated people at their core - they are interested in ideas and in the development of knowledge. If you relate to those goals, which it sounds like you do, you will relate well to the academic community. The scientific operations I've worked in are also less hierarchical than most business, and you get a strong team spirit from those you work with - you're working together on the same quest, rather than battling each other for approval.
Academic organizations, despite being filled with free-thinking people, are incredibly staid - both in terms of being set in their ways, and in terms of not making the wrong kinds of waves. It makes straightforward negotiating about things rather difficult. This is a nuisance when it comes to doing things like introducing new software or migrating a server. A professor in my dept (I'm a grad student) still writes C and PostScript to make plots, and nobody can or will convince him otherwise. Furthermore, many scientists fancy themselves quite the computer expert by virtue of having written a model in FORTRAN or some such.
Overall it's not a bad place to work, but the pace of things is very different from the corporate world.
It's not even 'takes money to make money', it gets to the basics of what makes a person go- our captains of industry are, in many cases, very intense, driven people and they do NOT NEED additional tax breaks in order to keep them interested.
You've got a very good point here, and this certainly something worth capitalizing on.
But it's like the adage, if you want to get something done, ask a busy person- if you want to finance a society, hit up the rich people, good and hard. They'll cope!
Here I'm a bit more cautious. If you hit too hard, or make feel nickeled and dimed or browbeaten, they'll reincorporate in Bermuda, and that's bad news all around. Capital flight is all over Latin America, and there's no reason why it couldn't happen in the States or Europe.
To me its about reinstilling that sense that people have to take care of their fellow man, cause the alternative is to live behind huge walls in a world where most people aren't taken care of - not much fun. That costs money it's going to be carried out by a government that will not always do things in the most sensible way because it's being nipped in the heels by barking chihuahuas.
So here's the $64 trillion question: how do you get people back on board?
Interesting: the model you originally proposed sounded to me like an excellent one, but what you propose above strikes me as much more prone to abuse. I'm all in favor of taxing people and corporations a level heavy enough to attain important civic goals (a level from which the US is rapidly slipping), but actively "tilting the playing field" is pretty heavy-handed. The important question that the anti-government nuts in this country raise is: if we're going to tilt, who decides the terms of tilting, and why do we believe that they're fit to tilt? Of course in the US we have elevated this valid doubt to dogma and as such traded in our sense of civics for political nihilism.
I couldn't agree more that the stability of a rich country like the US depends on keeping the losers from upsetting the applecart, but the problem is, if you make start making heavy-handed laws to this end, the winners will upset the applecart and rewrite the law to take the spoils, which is much worse. So you have the continuing balancing act of keep the winners happy enough to stay on their yachts while still providing enough bread for the losers to keep them happy.
The original poster responded by noting that a lot of current political economic climate in the US is a result of rampaging deregulation of industry by a generation of businessmen that has forgotten what industry run amok looks like from the outside. to remember what But the effect of Reagan's overderegulation may be yet be good - just as some Americans are starting to remember that you can't cut taxes forever and keep the services that keep contents from turning into malcontents.
Governance is like raising kids - a country, a market needs a light but firm touch. The light touch is hard enough when it's just two kids, let alone when there's millions of em, and they're restless, cranky, rich, and smart.
Arrrghh, this is exactly the kind of "you're not using the right tools" pooh-poohing that drives me nuts. Yes, there are tools that are very to easy to use for some tasks, but when they don't work, you're stuck with a lot of the details of why something went wrong. As someone correctly points out, when MS tools fail, you're stuck with no details and something wrong, but the difference between the two platforms is how far you can get from pure vanilla before things get wonky. Windows install procedures are just more robust.
Now you're on a roll. You subscribe to the OpenOffice channel. You click on the OpenOffice package and it installs. Wow. It works first time.
[Disclaimer: I LIKE OpenOffice, and I've stuck with its installer while it's come a long way. In fact I'm (or would be if I was working) using it right now. ]
I think you may be missing my point. Let me recap what I highlighted about the OO install for multiple users. Rather than double-clicking on an executable, and having all the users on the system be able to run OO, I have to pore through the README to find that -net flag (now is that --net, -server,/net, etc?), fire up a console and run the program with the command line option as root. Now as my regular user, I still can't use OO. I have yet to go back and fire up/usr/local/openoffice/setup. Even now, my roommate (a non-admining user) can't use OO yet either, she can't just click on an icon either, she too has to locate/usr/local/openoffice/setup, and run it to generate something called.sversionrc. That's NOT easy. By comparison, I reinstalled MS Office on my XP partition last night - I was already thoroughly irritated by XP repair dead ends and by Microsoft Activation, but I popped the CD in, the installer fired itself up, I answered a few questions, and then it installed itself. For everybody. No command line switches, no installation process for each user.
Add the cooker channel to the MandrakeUpdate list using MandrakeUpdates GUI. It whirrs off into the net and brings you a larger list of packages. In my limited-by-displeasure experience, MandrakeUpdate was bloated and difficult to understand. Specifically, it spent an awfully long time downloading and rebuilding each site's list of RPMs each time I ran it, meaning just getting the privilege of browsing through RPMs took 15 minutes over DSL. I found it more annoying that using the command line.
Look, your point that installing Linux software is moving out of the dark ages is well taken, but I'd say it's still at the very beginning of the Enlightenment, and has a lot of ground to tread. Linux is a particularly hard platform to do this for, because its openness means there's a lot of variations you have to cover, but some things just need to be screwed on tighter.
Anyone that successfully installs Linux and uses it for a short while will A. Not need to upgrade in a long time. B. Realize how to upgrade for free.
This is true for the server market, where the OS is still relatively detached from what's running on top of it, and there's a lot of incentive not to change that much.
In the desktop market, both of your premises are off base: a) people want new stuff: Microsoft sold tens of millions of copies of XP within a short time of releasing it. People regularly buy new cellphones for size, color, or something else they could probably get along without. b) at this stage upgrading is not easy at all. I upgrade KDE fairly regularly, and even though I use binary packages built specifically for my Mandrake distro (the supposedly user-friendly one), I still have to slog through the dependency swamp every time I install it. And God forbid you should try to build source....Even installing a new version of OpenOffice involves dealing.sversionrc, and figuring out how the hell to install it so everyone can use it.
Recall also that the three or so years that a decent number of people have been making a go at Linux-as-a-business is a very short time. Much of what will happen has yet to happen. So the "analysis" by IDC is basically speculation on what a very short history means for a long future.
Slashdot Mirror
EITHER the truth is just not clear OR scientists can reasonably be chosen based on your already knowing what conclusion they'll reach. Can't have both.
Patently false. With something like low-level environmental pollutants there will never be a clear answer because of the myriad range of ways people biopsychologically deal with the agents, and because the answers you get depend on the questions you ask and how you frame them.
Now, this:
Let's face it folks, this administration is fundamentally oposed to public review of *any* issue.
is wonderfully insightful, the key to the issue. The Bush administration is drawn almost exclusively from the set of CEO cowboys who see all issues as a hostile takeover - people do not and should not know what's going on inside the building until it comes out on a slick glossy brochure. I didn't realize that the Reaganites were equally ham-handed in squelching the opposition.
do you trust Bush government on defining Science ? Would you trust Nader ?
Your question is a good one, but a bit broad. I would trust Nader on finding and exposing dangerous practices of government and industry, and making baseline recommendations about how to fix them. As for planning and implementing a policy to get things changed, I'd steer very far clear of Nader, as he'd be likely to galvanize those opposed to his point of view so thoroughly that he might make things worse.
As for Bush, his administration is one of the most cynical, manipulative groups of people I've ever seen in office. Not even Newt Gingrich, whose politics I despise, did this kind of wholewhearted insistence that the sky is green and filled with flying fish, and wholesale replacement of those who don't agree.
In case Bush hasn't noticed, this is the beginning of the waning of American economic superpowerdom. The US will still be the biggest military around for a long time to come, but there will be three global sized economies within 20 years - US, China, Europe, and that means sooner or later the US has stop farting in everyone's face.
OK, you're right in theory - people shouldn't really be going in for overvalued things. The problem from a civic standpoint is that people do and will make a quick killing building an industry around a product that seems valuable now, but will be rendered much less valuable by some tech innovation. And as usual, those with less money suffer more when the economy makes wild swings. I.e., for all the drama of a billionaire to pauper story, it's much harder to endure getting fired when you live paycheck to paycheck.
Everyone (particularly the investment money part of everyone) wants their piece of the pie on the way up, so it's easy to see people doing this over and over. I'm am admittedly cynical about the ability of business insitutions to observe technological change in a long view and restrain from the quick industry-building. Doubly so if the technology that pulls the rug out from under the sector can just as easily come from some programmer's dusty attic or a no-name research lab (recall that investment bankers, for all their claims of loving the little guy, are essentially still only impressed by big money).
Interesting... nice to finally know the details of what so many have scoffed at.
On a related note:
My father was working for U of Md and NSF at the time, and I remember him talking about the transfer of the backbone from NSF. He was convinced it was going to destroy the universities' ability to use the internet, because (IIRC) the backbone providers were:
a)going to price universities out of the market
b) not be able to coordinate to enough an extent to actually keep the thing running.
I'd love to represent my dad (who is very farsighted) as prescient on this, but when it comes to the backbone, he seems to have been wrong. But he was quite foresighted in seeing the Internet as a commons that could easily be render much less useful.
Seems to me the point here is that nobody really knows. The idea that a few months of subsidized work could undermine a huge sector of the economy is a pretty new one.
It'd be good to see some more formal economic thinking on this subject, like a couple PhD theses on the macroeconomic effect of technology-induced obsolescence. Frankly, I think it's almost imperative to study it, because it will very likely happen over and over again in the next 20 years - in biotech, in information management, in content production.
The specific question I'm thinking about is: What role should a government take when a rapid technological change dramatically undermines an industry? This would be a good start at learning from the missteps we've taken in the recording industry.
Yeah, but entertainment doesn't have to be gratuitously wasteful (key word in bold). It's likewise entertaining to blow up your house, run your car off a cliff, or piss in your toaster to see what color the steam is.
Amazingly, it's also fun to read a book, write a program, or hell, write a book. Yeah it's a drag to _always_ avoid doing the stupid, wasteful shit that gives you the pleasure of being reckless, but it seems like people have lost the ability to make this a once-in-a-while pleasure rather than an every other day pleasure.
Capitalism != greed.
Fair enough. It's perfectly legitimate for people to think hard about self-advancement and direct a lot of their efforts to that. On the other hand, the traditional definitions of greed have lots implications about wanting stuff to the detriment of those around you. A greedy person in parables is usually represented by taking when those around are wanting. I think that's a still a pretty good insight into a negative human quality - it is not good to close yourself off to the suffering others around you. And I think it's tremendously naive to think that you can help people by not helping them at all (though I agree that always helping people may encourage them to depend on you).
Each of us has specific material wants and needs, and those are infinite. If you think your material wants and needs are not infinite, you'd better think again.
I don't think my wants an needs are infinite in extent, but perhaps infinite in variety and subtlety. If you're making the point that each new situation prompts people to want something new, I think that's an insightful point. Of course there's something else I could want out of a situation, but it may well not be more of anything, but rather a slightly different kinds of various things.
You put limits on yourself based on your economic situation, but if you can have it, you will take it. If you could afford a nicer home, you'd have it. If you could eat filet mignon every night, you would.
I find it rather presumptuous for you to tell me what I want, or want I would want if I just had enough moola. I don't want a bigger house - it would make me feel and be tied down. I like my somewhat shabby apartment - it's home.
Typically economics has gotten around this kind of point by arguing that I'm maximizing some utility function. While that's a good way of expressing the idea that people apply effort to what makes sense to them, at some point, somebody always cuts bait and decides what makes sense for other people, which is to say, they tell other people they are wrong. I think that's necessary - human knowledge is finite, and people are sometimes wrong - but I deeply disagree with the terms on which it's done, which I think are both cynical and self-reinforcing (mainly that people are and should be out for themselves, in a sort of Hobbesian sense). People do lots of things for lots of reasons, and I think very few economists are very good scholars of human motivation. Yet they continue to dictate the terms by which we define, measure and predict how we move our resources around.
How's that for a debate?
You're on to something here.
As much as I dislike the legislative attempts to give content "owners" complete control over any work that they somehow managed to get a legal title to, I really this boondoggle about backup
copies gives bad press to the anti-DRM crowd.
Here's a simple solution:
What if you got two of the exact same CD in the package? With the same activation, etc....
If it's really what you want, perhaps some letters to companies are in order, to convince them that you really just want to reinstall. Cause as of now, the "I need to make a backup argument" smells like duplication to everyone but an ISO-burnin linux geek.
It's nice to see someone who's knowledgeable on this issue speak about it without ranting about either privacy or theft. Activists have great points, but their job is to yell and scream enough to convince or scare you, so you can't really turn to them for a balanced point. It's doubly nice that she represents a company that can do something to moderate the laws being discussed.
Whether or not you believe that Verizon will go to bat for consumers (to me it sounds like they'll go as far as they can cautiously go), they are taking a conciliatory rather than an accusatory stance, and that's sorely needed in this debate.
Given that an entire distro was founded by forking RedHat's product, they seem pretty committed to playing by the terms of the GPL.
Sure, you could imagine scenarios where RedHat added some proprietary extensions that closed their systems, but nothing they've done, from their sales pitches about open source and open standards to their kernel contributions indicates that they want to do that. I'm sure RedHat may capitalize on its opportunity to do dirty deeds somewhere along the line, but that doesn't equate to being a true bully.
You're probably right that no law prohibits the various acts of surveillance in public places, but I'd be surprised if you can use all that evidence without some concerns of due process popping up.
Think of it as a return to the beat cop era where the cop knew everyone in the neighborhood. This list isn't a deterrent in itself. It is simply a means to deduce where extra policing (in the full sense of the term) is needed.
Why not just add real beat cops instead of a SELECT statement?
A beat cop will know what's going on in living, human color - no database can possible wrap up. Subtle things like what the neighborhood is like, what the people who live there are all about, which ones are the really tough eggs, who's just a follower.
In short, you need to train someone to have exceptionally good judgement in a situation, support them, and give them a little trust. Some database is just going to increase people's tendencies to jump to conclusions.
Which leads back to my original position: Executives spend millions on advertising not necessarily because it will work as much as because they believe it will work.
And therefore millions of dollars move around hourly because of what people think will work. Which means they do work, in some fashion, or at least inasmuch as people like to think they're right. Crazy to think that we mostly live inside the head trip of a few executives politicians and other notables.
Interestingly, your assertion is true about most activities that people of all stripes undertake. The funny thing is that only this bizarre "rationalist" tradition tries to maintain that you don't have to resort to that leap of faith all the time, but rather can "reason" your way through.
But I think ads work most for products that are truly distinguishable, since such ads actually convey information. For products that are essentially fungible -- corn flakes, for example -- ads can't just provide the info that makes them superior, because there isn't any. Such ads perforce fall back on deceptive or meaningless content ("Eat GeneriFlakes -- they're cooool"). Those ads, precisely, are the ones that bug people.
Recall that a substantial portion of a company's released documents are not just trying to influence a particular sale, but trying to build brand identity. A strong brand keeps the customers who bought once coming back, or so the theory goes, and exists precisely to distinguish otherwise mostly indistinguishable products.
If we're going to get rid of this massive public space for brand creation, companies will want someplace else to engage in it, so it might be a good idea to ask that question instead:
Where can companies engage in branding and exhortation to sales in a way that's less obtrusive on other things we want to do?
Having recently been IN China, I'll play the learned-something-about-it card. The Chinese government is not dumb. Corrupt and authoritarian, probably. What they will do is set up their society (cause in the government has a lot of power to construct society to its liking) to capitalize on cheap labor like this and drive your precious employment offshore. And you ain't safe just by being a geek, either - the presence of people inhaling noxious fumes for $1.50 a day drives down the wages of those inhaling donuts in front of a computer. And when that's done, they'll set the terms of trade so that your razors cost $10.50. SO even if you're naive enough to persist in the it-ain't-my-fault tack, you might want to think about the consequences.
Allright, now to respond to your lamer responses in kind (to make sure I get modded down):
You're too tough to be moved, eh? Cause it's always someone else's fault, and they're always trying to stick the blame squarely on you pgrote. It's not enough for a guy just to want to eat Doritos and play XBox. I mean, what the hell do they want? And then they turn around and call good ol' pgrote cold hearted!
We got a word for you in American English:
Pissant.
You're on to two good things here:
.300, you're pretty a prodigious artist. But as an out-in-front consumer it means that you have to acquire 3* as much music as you expect to keep.
but the truth is good bands break up because they get bored doing the same old shit, and they need fresh blood and fresh directions to keep making good music. Band breakups sometimes result in less good music, but I think the new (and different) bands that result are better for music quality on the whole.
Absolutely, but here's the $64 billion question:
Do you want to bother dealing with the new bands' sounds? Recall that this means:
a) some of their albums will suck. Music is art, not craft or science, and that means like in baseball, if you bat above
b) you have to get accustomed to a new sound. This sounds lame and staid, but how often have you dismissed an album only to come back to it later and discover that you can really get into it? This is why pump the same songs over the radio works - often people's resistance to a song is grounded in not liking something new.
c) There seem to be a lot of people who don't care that much, they just want some kinda music for their days. And they've got it - music is more ubiquitous and commoditized than ever. The record companies may want every band to be a U2, but they'll probably settle for a Cypress Hill.
You also pointed out:
But people keep buying their albums, as you just said yourself. The music industry, including the artists, realizes this: big name = more sales.
This is brand development, the lifeblood of any consumer-driven corporation (hell, just about any corporation). In a market of infinite choices, what do people want: a lot of them want a stable choice that they can trust - hence the brand relationship. The more stable and reliable the conneciton between the brand and the product, the more durable it will be. Anyone who's reading this knows exactly what a McDonalds hamburger tastes like - the taste is a brand. The much-loved Microsoft is probably one of the most brilliant branding engines of all times - you can recognize a Microsoft program from 50 miles away, and damn if they don't all work the same.
Recording mavens are businesspoeople, and they're just using the standard things they learned in business school. Problem for us and for them is, people are incredibly fickle when it comes to music, (for reasons I don't really understand, or articulate, but I surmise have a lot to do with how strongly popular music and identity are related in modern society) so building a brand is counterproductive. Until someone comes up with another way to describe building a stable place in a fickle market, these guys are gonna be hammering the square peg into the round hole. The question is, who's got the clout to do build a new way of doing thigs? Could actually be that the consumers refragment this market on their own - that'd be a damn good historical precedent. I ain't holdin my breath tho.
but the licence, being Bill Gates' wet dream, allows for this, right?
Well, the BSD license says that the license/attribution notice must stay with the code and its derivatives, but since you don't necessarily have a right to look at BSD-derived code, and there's nothing about using preprocessor directives to eliminate the comments from the binary, there's no way to know.
ISTR back when W2K was released there were
allegations that it used OpenBSD's TCP/IP
stack without attribution. I can't remember
how that ever turned out, though.
A friend and I were discussing this a while back - he recalls seeing some files working at MS that were BSD-licensed code, and IIRC the license notice wasn't actually stripped out, but it had been taken out of context and slapped down at the bottom of the file, in a not-likely-to-be-read place. He was of the opinion that it was a sleazy but legal move. No idea whether it was the OpenBSD TCP/IP stack.
Why do people think that? Wouldn't the alternative to thinking that mean a society with a ruling class and subjects?
That's a fair concern, but I still basically think that those who know less about a subject should shut and listen to those who know more about it. We can hash out who knows more about what in what case later, but I submit that people in office generally know more about making laws than people who are not in office, by the mere fact of doing it all day.
This is why I continue to think directly asking the public at large how things ought to be done is a recipe for disaster. It puts the actual process of making law into the hands of groups who are focused on a very narrow goal.
For example, in Washington state, where I live, voter initiatives have gutted the state's public transportation system at a time when traffic has never been worse. The initiative that did this passed only a few years after a voter initiative mandate that a certain chunk of tax money be spent to transportation! And you'd still be hard pressed to remind the voters that they voted in these two contradictory initiatives. Having some outside organization write procurement laws for California is asking for the same kind of fiasco.
In addition to entering government, interested members of public should always be able to ask hard question about what's going on and use them to effect chage. But having some group with a particular point of view draft a law and then submit it to voters in a flurry of excitement strikes me as an inconsistent way to make laws.
I appreciate the difficulties of getting access to enough bases of political support to be able to effect change, particularly rapid change. But initiatives that mandate a particular law are a bad way to solve this problem - they ignore the fallout from the legal changes they make. And who's to say that we really want a lot of rapid change?
The people have the right to know exactly what source code the government is using to protect them. We have the right to know what code protects our privacy in, for example, records which are ruled sealed.
I respectfully but forcefully disagree. These arguments of "we should be able to see the source" smack of micromanagement.
Governments should of course be transparent and responsive to their citizens, and release enough details of their work to demonstrate to their citizens that they are pursuing a course that's in the broad public interest (note that the current administration is failing miserable in both parts of this). On the other hand, you do not and should not have the right to constantly monitor every move that every part of government makes. Imagine if every shareholder of a massive company had the right to know and second guess every line item of the company's budget - the company wouldn't be able to do anything!
Frankly, I think these direct democracy arguments are presumptuous - why do people think that they, who've never tried to govern, are better equipped to do it than someone who has tried, with the help of a smart, devoted staff?
Yes, there are definitely times when branches of government get off on a course that needs checking, and I think many levels of government do need some prompting to really consider the idea that they don't have to use Microsoftware. But the answer is not to disempower the government by restricting its decisions.
Stupid sticky middle mouse button!
This is precisely the blessing:
they generally won't care about
"newer and better" if what they do now works OK
and the curse:
they won't care about better as long as what they do continues to work OK.
People waste a LOT of time in science because they haven't bothered with "newer and better" things like putting their datasets into these dangerously modern SQL databases where others can look at them.
There's a to recommend the manage-everything-yourself culture of science, but there's serious down sides, too.
This is precisely the blessing:
they generally won't care about
"newer and better" if what they do now works OK
and the curse:
they won't care about better as long as what they do continuesthey generally won't care about "newer and better" if what they do now works OK to work OK.
People waste a LOT of time in science because they haven't bothered with "newer and better" things like putting their datasets into these dangerously modern SQL databases where others can look at them.
There's a to recommend the manage-everything-yourself culture of science, but there's serious down sides, too.
It has its ups and its downs.
On the one hand, most research scientists are not money-motivated people at their core - they are interested in ideas and in the development of knowledge. If you relate to those goals, which it sounds like you do, you will relate well to the academic community. The scientific operations I've worked in are also less hierarchical than most business, and you get a strong team spirit from those you work with - you're working together on the same quest, rather than battling each other for approval.
Academic organizations, despite being filled with free-thinking people, are incredibly staid - both in terms of being set in their ways, and in terms of not making the wrong kinds of waves. It makes straightforward negotiating about things rather difficult. This is a nuisance when it comes to doing things like introducing new software or migrating a server. A professor in my dept (I'm a grad student) still writes C and PostScript to make plots, and nobody can or will convince him otherwise. Furthermore, many scientists fancy themselves quite the computer expert by virtue of having written a model in FORTRAN or some such.
Overall it's not a bad place to work, but the pace of things is very different from the corporate world.
It's not even 'takes money to make money', it gets to the basics of what makes a person go- our captains of industry are, in many cases, very intense, driven people and they do NOT NEED additional tax breaks in order to keep them interested.
You've got a very good point here, and this certainly something worth capitalizing on.
But it's like the adage, if you want to get something done, ask a busy person- if you want to finance a society, hit up the rich people, good and hard. They'll cope!
Here I'm a bit more cautious. If you hit too hard, or make feel nickeled and dimed or browbeaten, they'll reincorporate in Bermuda, and that's bad news all around. Capital flight is all over Latin America, and there's no reason why it couldn't happen in the States or Europe.
To me its about reinstilling that sense that people have to take care of their fellow man, cause the alternative is to live behind huge walls in a world where most people aren't taken care of - not much fun. That costs money it's going to be carried out by a government that will not always do things in the most sensible way because it's being nipped in the heels by barking chihuahuas.
So here's the $64 trillion question: how do you get people back on board?
Interesting: the model you originally proposed sounded to me like an excellent one, but what you propose above strikes me as much more prone to abuse. I'm all in favor of taxing people and corporations a level heavy enough to attain important civic goals (a level from which the US is rapidly slipping), but actively "tilting the playing field" is pretty heavy-handed. The important question that the anti-government nuts in this country raise is: if we're going to tilt, who decides the terms of tilting, and why do we believe that they're fit to tilt? Of course in the US we have elevated this valid doubt to dogma and as such traded in our sense of civics for political nihilism.
I couldn't agree more that the stability of a rich country like the US depends on keeping the losers from upsetting the applecart, but the problem is, if you make start making heavy-handed laws to this end, the winners will upset the applecart and rewrite the law to take the spoils, which is much worse. So you have the continuing balancing act of keep the winners happy enough to stay on their yachts while still providing enough bread for the losers to keep them happy.
The original poster responded by noting that a lot of current political economic climate in the US is a result of rampaging deregulation of industry by a generation of businessmen that has forgotten what industry run amok looks like from the outside. to remember what But the effect of Reagan's overderegulation may be yet be good - just as some Americans are starting to remember that you can't cut taxes forever and keep the services that keep contents from turning into malcontents.
Governance is like raising kids - a country, a market needs a light but firm touch. The light touch is hard enough when it's just two kids, let alone when there's millions of em, and they're restless, cranky, rich, and smart.
Arrrghh, this is exactly the kind of "you're not using the right tools" pooh-poohing that drives me nuts. Yes, there are tools that are very to easy to use for some tasks, but when they don't work, you're stuck with a lot of the details of why something went wrong. As someone correctly points out, when MS tools fail, you're stuck with no details and something wrong, but the difference between the two platforms is how far you can get from pure vanilla before things get wonky. Windows install procedures are just more robust.
/net, etc?), fire up a console and run the program with the command line option as root. Now as my regular user, I still can't use OO. I have yet to go back and fire up /usr/local/openoffice/setup. Even now, my roommate (a non-admining user) can't use OO yet either, she can't just click on an icon either, she too has to locate /usr/local/openoffice/setup, and run it to generate something called .sversionrc. That's NOT easy. By comparison, I reinstalled MS Office on my XP partition last night - I was already thoroughly irritated by XP repair dead ends and by Microsoft Activation, but I popped the CD in, the installer fired itself up, I answered a few questions, and then it installed itself. For everybody. No command line switches, no installation process for each user.
Now you're on a roll. You subscribe to the OpenOffice channel. You click on the OpenOffice package and it installs. Wow. It works first time.
[Disclaimer: I LIKE OpenOffice, and I've stuck with its installer while it's come a long way. In fact I'm (or would be if I was working) using it right now. ]
I think you may be missing my point. Let me recap what I highlighted about the OO install for multiple users. Rather than double-clicking on an executable, and having all the users on the system be able to run OO, I have to pore through the README to find that -net flag (now is that --net, -server,
Add the cooker channel to the MandrakeUpdate list using MandrakeUpdates GUI. It whirrs off into the net and brings you a larger list of packages.
In my limited-by-displeasure experience, MandrakeUpdate was bloated and difficult to understand. Specifically, it spent an awfully long time downloading and rebuilding each site's list of RPMs each time I ran it, meaning just getting the privilege of browsing through RPMs took 15 minutes over DSL. I found it more annoying that using the command line.
Look, your point that installing Linux software is moving out of the dark ages is well taken, but I'd say it's still at the very beginning of the Enlightenment, and has a lot of ground to tread. Linux is a particularly hard platform to do this for, because its openness means there's a lot of variations you have to cover, but some things just need to be screwed on tighter.
Anyone that successfully installs Linux and uses it for a short while will
A. Not need to upgrade in a long time.
B. Realize how to upgrade for free.
This is true for the server market, where the OS is still relatively detached from what's running on top of it, and there's a lot of incentive not to change that much.
In the desktop market, both of your premises are off base:
a) people want new stuff: Microsoft sold tens of millions of copies of XP within a short time of releasing it. People regularly buy new cellphones for size, color, or something else they could probably get along without.
b) at this stage upgrading is not easy at all. I upgrade KDE fairly regularly, and even though I use binary packages built specifically for my Mandrake distro (the supposedly user-friendly one), I still have to slog through the dependency swamp every time I install it. And God forbid you should try to build source....Even installing a new version of OpenOffice involves dealing
Recall also that the three or so years that a decent number of people have been making a go at Linux-as-a-business is a very short time. Much of what will happen has yet to happen. So the "analysis" by IDC is basically speculation on what a very short history means for a long future.