I'd like to remind the esteemed
Slashdot audience about such thing as freedom, and in particular, the freedom of contract. If there is no monopoly situation (and it doesn't seem like it) then why in the world should anybody be prevented from making a product (even if you believe it's bad) and trying to sell it?
Because such a product relies on a restriction of our freedom, namely the federal government enforcing EULAs and copyrights.
These guys have to compete with real textbooks which, among other things, have resale value.
No, they don't have to compete; they just have to make cozy deals with the colleges. NYU is going to grant them a monopoly:
Capitalism depends highly on a good education. If people don't have education, the economy will turn into a big monopoly.
And this is anti-capitalist how?
Capitalism is the concentration of the control of a nation's economic reasources into the hands of a few owners. Monopoly is the logical extension of that trend; 1800s robber barons called competition "inefficient".
No thanks, I don't want a doctor that needs to refer to his college text books to perform surgery!
Um, I hope all those books in my doctor's office are there for more than decoration...
I refer to my college copy of K&R all the time, as well as books I bought more recently, when programming. I certainly hope that physicians crack medical books from time to time.
There is a legal reason why books aren't shipped with a EULA. The real question is, why is software?
Because years ago, some software industry lawyer managed to convince a clueless judge that loading a program into memory constitutes making a copy.
I'm waiting for someone to retcon this to books - "Your honor, reading printed matter creates a copy of the information in the reader's neurons, clearly violating my client's copyright. Therefore we demand that readers abide by this EULA..."
The gas prices in Europe are artificially high! Their gas taxes are far higher than ours.
No. US gas prices are artifically low, because the oil industry is permitted to dump many of its costs onto the citizens.
US pump prices, for example, don't include environmental damages, or sending a few thousand troops over to Iraq to keep the oil flowing. Additionally, there are huge tax breaks and government subsidies for the energy industry.
Add it all up, and some have estimated that the true cost of a gallon of gasoline is around $5/gallon.
The market only produces efficient solutions when all costs are internalized. Make people pay the true costs at the pump, and see how long gasoline remains the fuel of choice, and fuel-inefficeint vehicles remain popular.
Another disadvantage is that the energy used to mine, process, assemble and otherwise create a solar panel is greater than what a solar panel will ever produce within its lifetime.
Dos couldn't handle anything more then 640k, actualy.
Well, there was the Lotus-Intel-Microsoft paging scheme, "expanded memory", where you could page parts of that 640k on to and off off an expansion card. Don't recall if DOS itself had anything to do with supporting it, though.
Yet no one person can say how it should be done. Hopefully in many years from now some great leader will unite the tribes of unix and make us whole
...thus it came to pass that many varieties of machine did arise upon the land.
And verily did the hackers become confused, for their servants now spoke dialects, numerous beyond counting, and what was said to one might not be understood by another, or might be misunderstood;
And the hackers cried out for relief, saying "Let there be but one and only one operating system on every machine, that our lives may be easy and carefree!"
And Eris Discordia heard their cries. And she did grin most wickedly. And she did whisper into the ear of Sir William of Gates, that he should steal the face of the golden Apples, and place it upon the body of the Devil's Operating System;
And thus was THE ABOMINATION, W*ND*WS, brought forth upon the earth.
And there was much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth amoung the hackers, who now realized that diversity, and even a certain amount of disorder, is healthy. And they fought mightily against the abomination.
And Eris relented on the poor suckers, and allowed there to be GNU, and Linux, and the brethern BSD, and Darwin, and all manner of software which each might change to his or her own liking, in a manner most eristic. Or not. And it was good.
I think you forget Sony's master vision. They want to replace pc's with net appliances.. these net appliances will be closed hardware. It is already illegal to reverse engineer them.
Read Stallman's The Right to Read. Not the most gripping fiction, but a frightenly possible future projection of the extension of so-called "intellectual property". And it sounds like Mr. Heckler's wet dream.
If you keep voting for the lesser of two evils, you'll always have two evils to choose from.
And if you don't vote, then someone else is going to choose for you, and they will probably choose the greater of the two evils.
Interesting how you seem to assume that not voting for either of the major candiates implies not voting at all. There are more than two entries on the ballot this time, and when there aren't there's always write-in. (Write-in can fun, it confused the bejezus out of the blue-haired ladies working the polls last time when I asked how I could write in my presidental vote.)
I would certainly agree that neither candidate is ideal, but almost certainly one of the candidates is closer to your
idea of perfection than the other.
Only to the extent that having my eyes put out by a hot poker is closer to my idea of a good time than the Death of a Thousand Cuts.
Special interest groups get what they want out of the system because they take the time to vote. It's quite simple
really.
Special interest groups get what they want out of the system because they take the money to buy politicians. It's really quite simple.
They will give up their scruffy clothes, and their organized acts of violence in the name of "protest" and they will instead simply walk down tho the local elementary school and cast their vote.
I have not yet given up my scruffy clothes, but I have gone to the polls in every election since 1988. But on several occasions I have declined to vote in a certain race because there was no real choice. Sort of like this years' major party presidental candidates.
What was it Bill Hicks said about Americian politics? "I think the puppet on the left represents my views. No, I think the puppet on the right it more to my liking." Meanwhile it's the same guy with his hand up both puppet's asses.
When you can't verify the data itself, you've only got the reputation of the source to go on.
Soon it may not be the video itself, but the digital signature on it, that carries veracity and inspires trust. Maybe tamper-proof (or at least tamper-evident) digital video cameras will each have a unique private key and will sign the video with the reputation of the manufacturer; maybe the operator will provide his key to the camera and sign the data himself.
Digital signatures don't guarantee truth; but they stake the reputation of the signer (whether named or psudononymous) on the contents. In a data-driver world, your reputation as a source of good bits becomes vital. (Look at how excited peoplke get about/. karma, only a pale and distorted reflection of reputation.)
Flickering is a lousy excuse : a good tube does not flicker because there is such thing call a "capacitor".
Well, it takes more than the tube to make fro flicker-free flourescents; you have to have electronic, rather than magnetic, ballasts - much more complicated than just a "capacitor". I'm pretty sensitive to flicker, and used to live an a basement appartment with bad flourescent lighting, so I know how bad it can be; but I love the CF bulbs - no flicker, good spectrum, fit in regular light fixtures, and save power over incandescents. You can find them in catalogs like Real Goods, if not at your local hardware megastore. (Real Goods also has hard-to-find dimmable and full-spectrum CFs.)
Sounds like you're a watermelon... Green on the outside, red on the inside.
Gee, I thought red-baiting went out in the '50s. Sorry to disappoint you, but I'm more of a Zenarchist or anarchist (or libertarian socialist, if you prefer) than a communist.
This is stuff we just don't know enough about...
Right. And when something is valuable - nay, irreplacable - and you don't know how it works, if you have half a brain you just don't fsck with it.
Or to put it another way:
ACHTUNG!
Das ecosystem is nicht fur gerfinger-poken und mittengrabben.
Oderwise is easy schnappen der icecaps, blowen ozonelayer, und makensturm mit spitzenacidrain.
Der ecosystem is nicht fur gemessen by das dummkopfen. So relaxen und watchen das growengras.
and
put the person scanning next to a window flooded with sunlight. Luckliy my immediate supervisor was an
old-skool programmer type who understood the necessity of closed doors and minimal light.
Still don't understand that one. (Well, for scanning, maybe, but...) Minimal light puts me to sleep. I want indirect sunlight, or bright point-source overhead light for cloudy days or nights. I work at home now, there's a nice window right behind the monitor and an overhead fixture with two flicker-free compact flourescent bulbs putting out the equivalent of 150 W of incandescent light. All positioned so glare is not a problem.
If I have to work somewhere else, give me my own office. Or divide up one large office with cube dividers into two or three spaces. Cube farms suck, open plans suck, give me my own space when I can revel in my cruft and have some peace and quiet.
2.Adjustable telephone ringer volume. The chapter about telephone ringers (section?) is probably worth the price of the whole book. Again, this goes to distraction and the cost of interrupted "flow".
Better yet - unplug the phone. Catch up with the times and send e-mail, dammit. If e-mail won't do, get your lazy butt up and come talk to me.
The only people I want to hear on the phone are family and friends, people whose voice (even filtered down) it pleases me to hear.
I don't understand why, in so many technical places I've been, the phone and voicemail are still more widely used than e-mail. Writing makes you collect your thoughts, and you
can store the reply for future reference.
My desk is clean because all my reference material, design-work, psuedo-code, correspondence, notes,
reference material -- everything -- is digital and on my computer(s).
How many monitors do you have? I could maybe cope with that if I had three, or one that was about five feet across.
Among those views, some have said that a greenhouse earth, with the proper atmospheric barriers so as not to
overheat us, could be a flourishing garden spot from pole to pole. It would have a cooler equatorial zone as well as
warmer poles.
Yeah, maybe so. It's also possible that a random mushroom I pick off my front lawn might lower my cholesterol and blood pressure and increase my sex drive. Or it might kill me. Pretty fsck stupid to take the risk, no?
but don't you think it is a bit arrogant of us as one of the many species that inhabit the planet Earth to believe that we alone can overtly destroy so much in mere decades that has survived for milleniums.
No, it's not. We're already responsible for the endangerment or exiction of numerous species that were around for millenia or longer.
Yes, species have always gone extinct, but never before has one speicies been the exterminator of so many others.
Corporations don't eat added costs (or added taxes, or...) - they pass them on.
Simple solution - destroy the corporation as we know it. The government should not have the power to create virtual citizens with all of the rights and none of the responsibilities of real people, and the single unwavering goal of creating economic inequality (i.e., profit).
So, granted that there's alot of evidence that could conceivably point to human's destruction of our global weather patterns.... however, THERE IS NO CONTROL GROUP TO COMPARE THIS TO! How do we know what the earth's normal weather cycles are in THE LONG TERM?!
Maybe we don't know for scientific certainty. But when someone points a gun at you, you don't demand certain proof that it's loaded before you act, you get your ass out of the line of fire.
The only way to get scientific certainty about global climate change is to keep fucking with the planet and see what happens. This is rather like testing a possibly poisionous mushroom by eating it - you'll get a sure answer, but you may not be able to do much with it.
Slashdot Mirror
Capitalism is the concentration of the control of a nation's economic reasources into the hands of a few owners. Monopoly is the logical extension of that trend; 1800s robber barons called competition "inefficient".
I refer to my college copy of K&R all the time, as well as books I bought more recently, when programming. I certainly hope that physicians crack medical books from time to time.
I'm waiting for someone to retcon this to books - "Your honor, reading printed matter creates a copy of the information in the reader's neurons, clearly violating my client's copyright. Therefore we demand that readers abide by this EULA..."
US pump prices, for example, don't include environmental damages, or sending a few thousand troops over to Iraq to keep the oil flowing. Additionally, there are huge tax breaks and government subsidies for the energy industry.
Add it all up, and some have estimated that the true cost of a gallon of gasoline is around $5/gallon.
The market only produces efficient solutions when all costs are internalized. Make people pay the true costs at the pump, and see how long gasoline remains the fuel of choice, and fuel-inefficeint vehicles remain popular.
(See also The Energy Required to Manufacture Renewable Energy Technologies.)
So can we please put this bit of anti-photovoltatic FUD to rest?
And verily did the hackers become confused, for their servants now spoke dialects, numerous beyond counting, and what was said to one might not be understood by another, or might be misunderstood;
And the hackers cried out for relief, saying "Let there be but one and only one operating system on every machine, that our lives may be easy and carefree!"
And Eris Discordia heard their cries. And she did grin most wickedly. And she did whisper into the ear of Sir William of Gates, that he should steal the face of the golden Apples, and place it upon the body of the Devil's Operating System;
And thus was THE ABOMINATION, W*ND*WS, brought forth upon the earth.
And there was much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth amoung the hackers, who now realized that diversity, and even a certain amount of disorder, is healthy. And they fought mightily against the abomination.
And Eris relented on the poor suckers, and allowed there to be GNU, and Linux, and the brethern BSD, and Darwin, and all manner of software which each might change to his or her own liking, in a manner most eristic. Or not. And it was good.
Fnord.
Interesting how you seem to assume that not voting for either of the major candiates implies not voting at all. There are more than two entries on the ballot this time, and when there aren't there's always write-in. (Write-in can fun, it confused the bejezus out of the blue-haired ladies working the polls last time when I asked how I could write in my presidental vote.)
Let me point out that link again: Billionaires For Bush (or Gore)'s Candidate Comparison Chart.
If you keep voting for the lesser of two evils, you'll always have two evils to choose from.
What was it Bill Hicks said about Americian politics? "I think the puppet on the left represents my views. No, I think the puppet on the right it more to my liking." Meanwhile it's the same guy with his hand up both puppet's asses.
(See also Bill's version of the new president's first day in office, as rendered by Garth Ennis.)
When you can't verify the data itself, you've only got the reputation of the source to go on.
Soon it may not be the video itself, but the digital signature on it, that carries veracity and inspires trust. Maybe tamper-proof (or at least tamper-evident) digital video cameras will each have a unique private key and will sign the video with the reputation of the manufacturer; maybe the operator will provide his key to the camera and sign the data himself.
Digital signatures don't guarantee truth; but they stake the reputation of the signer (whether named or psudononymous) on the contents. In a data-driver world, your reputation as a source of good bits becomes vital. (Look at how excited peoplke get about /. karma, only a pale and distorted reflection of reputation.)
Or to put it another way:
If I have to work somewhere else, give me my own office. Or divide up one large office with cube dividers into two or three spaces. Cube farms suck, open plans suck, give me my own space when I can revel in my cruft and have some peace and quiet.
The only people I want to hear on the phone are family and friends, people whose voice (even filtered down) it pleases me to hear.
I don't understand why, in so many technical places I've been, the phone and voicemail are still more widely used than e-mail. Writing makes you collect your thoughts, and you can store the reply for future reference.
Yes, electronic ballasts can remove the flicker. Compact-flourescent bulbs with electronic ballasts rock, I use them all over my house.
Yes, species have always gone extinct, but never before has one speicies been the exterminator of so many others.
The only way to get scientific certainty about global climate change is to keep fucking with the planet and see what happens. This is rather like testing a possibly poisionous mushroom by eating it - you'll get a sure answer, but you may not be able to do much with it.