The relation university's have with there network is somewhat amusing in light of the network neutrality debate. American Universities have this massive government funded network with bandwidth up the wazoo that fills all of us in the private sector with envy.
The administrators of these networks share a single minded passion. They do not want commercial activities taking place on their precious little taxpayer funded socialized network heaven. Widespread use of Tor might make avenues where commericial traffic gets in sullies the university backbone with commercial traffic.
It is really funny because professors will come out and spit venom about the idea of a telephone company breaking net neutrality, but will turn a strange shade of blue if you were to suggest that university servers should be neutral and allow commerce on the internet meant exclusively for university traffic.
On my read of the article it sounds like the network admins were going to talk the to the professor about TOR, and were not out to bust the dude. The second thing to note in the article is that this Paul Cesarini seemed to realize that TOR would be a problem for the University admins if a large number of people started using it.
I can't tell if the admins in this article were the goons that many of the posts in this thread assume that they were. For example, it is completely apropriate for an administrator to ask someone to cease an activity until they have a policy in place. That is not a denial of academic freedom.
And those magical hundreds of thousands of miles of fiber are going to come from where, exactly? Sorry, but the whole "let the market fix the problem" idea just won't fly with anyone who does the math.
The free has proven itself time and time again as the most efficient method to get systems up and running.
I think that the one false assumption in your argument is that companies competing in the market have to have a full fiber network connecting every city. A much more interesting structure is one where there is a large number of companies in the market handle smaller sections of the data communications puzzle. In such a situation you may see a large number of players in competing for traffic between New York and Washington DC. Basically, where there is a bottleneck, different players would jump into the market with capacity to help relieve the bottleneck.
This really isn't quite as much of a pipe dream as it sounds. A decent ISP or a decent web host will have contracts with more than one carrier, and they will distribute their load through different carriers. Carriers often have multiple contracts with other service providers. If you do a tracert from distance, you will often find your packets going through switches and cables owned by different companies.
A vibrant market would have a whole mix of different types of companies. Some companies would own only switches. Some would own cable between on select demographic areas. The one thing I would want to avoid is a situation where one company owned the whole shebang.
IMHO, public libraries should be concentrating on building up resources within the community. Subscribing to an entertainment resource simply saps taxpayers dollars out of the communtiy and into the entertainment industry. I could see great value in public libraries building up large electronic data stores on an intranet. Subscribing to a movie download service simply puts the library in unfair competition with other local entertainment venues.
The whole "net neutrality" debate is built on the assumption that the communication system will continue to be a either a monopoly or cartel with a very small number of players in the market.
Personally, I think the best solution to the bandwidth puzzle would be to have a vibrant infrastructure with a large number of companies providing backbone services. If there are enough players in the market, the market will help minimize prices.
With net neutrality ruling the universe, you cut out the ability for smaller providers to sneak in a grab lucrative niches here and there.
and the fact that your actual job duties will entail far more than what your job description said.
I think the article was trying to say that the number of job duties foisted on engineers was increasing. You are right, if all the article said was that people do things outside their job requirement, then the article says nothing interesting. I believe the article is trying to say that people are doing more things outside their job duty. This second statement (the differential) would be something interesting. The differential would be worth studying.
Unfortunately, the article in question is based on a survey that sounds highly subjective to me. It doesn't sound like they have a substantial data set to substantiate the claim of increased work loads. I suspect many people feel like their work load increases with time; a survey based on feelings would not be sufficient to substantiate a claim of an increased work load.
Imagine what will happen when the majority of material goods achieve this same ease of distribution and duplication.
The price of material (such at petroleum) will soar in relation to everything else.
BTW, both the replies to my post were simply different restatements of Marx's material dialectics (not surprising since it is taught in school).
To Marx and the modern academia, people are souless material creatures in dull dreary lives where they mindlessly consume. To Marx, business was nothing more than a Machiavellian power play of dominance and submisstion.
In contrast to Marx, the orginal founders of the US saw people as spiritual creatures. The property rights debate was not simply driven by the desire to produce more stuff to consume. It was driven by the thought that the creation of property was part of the way that spiritual creatures interacted with the world.
If you accept the Free Market view then you would see that economic activity is more than just the speed of gratification (as it is defined by Marx) is it an exercise of our values in the world. The property rights issue is not simply about the friggin' speed of gratification. It is about the way free people interact in the world. Even if we have extremely rapid production cycles, those production cycles can and will be driven by human creativity and insight because the mind is the ultimate force that drives the economy.
I share your sentiments that pirating media is similar to stealing.
The thing that is difficult to get around in this debate is that there is something broken that is preventing the development of a dynamic price sensitive marketplace for media. Prices seem to be fixed by monopolists and consortiums. Even worse, there is not an open marketplace where we can go to find all of the old media that we might want to access.
In the absense of a working marketplace, Warner Brothers is now responding to price pressures from piracy. This is quite interesting
The fact that media monopolies have started responding to price pressures from piracy is interesting. Personally, I think it would be better to have a dynamic marketplace. I am angry that P2P-piracy destroyed early attempts to establish such markets based simply on trust.
The P2P-piracy advocates will never realize the damage that they did by undermining trust. Having destroyed the most fundamental element of an open marketplace (trust) I am not sure how or even if we can develop the open marketplace for media.
Choosing among priorities is good rational discourse. Flip Flopping occurs when you actually end up shifting the foundations of your system of discourse to support your chosen priority. For example, right now windmill farms are seen as politically correct. Using windpower releases one's inner butterfly spirit and is holistic.
One day, the group think will look at all of the roads made to windmill farms, the rusted out towers in need of repair and the changes to ecosystems caused by the towers. Group think will then declare windmills as the product of evil industrial pigs (spit on their graves).
The rational approach to windmill and solar panel farms is to proceed with caution. There is both good and bad points to this technology. Flip flopping occurs when you little tiny internal paradigm meter switches from windmills being good to windmills being bad.
I think you will find the Sierra Club supporting wind and solar up to the point that it starts touching heavily on their other concerns... the protection of public lands. I suspect that the windmill farms will soon start encroaching on areas that the Sierra Club wants to preserve. Then they will flip flop. Supporting a windmill farm requires a roads, mining for the material to build the windmills, etc..
Windmill farms require restricting access to public lands. As the windmill farms turn mainstream and the farms are used as an excuse to build roads into undeveloped lands and as they are used to close access to other lands, we will see the environmental community turn against the farms en masse. The first million windmills will be quaint statements for alternative energy. The next 10 million will be seen as evil.
I have no doubt that the Whitehouse suppresses information. The place is lousy with politicians. The message I responded to said that the robots.txt file on whitehouse.gov was proof of censorship.
Blocking something with Robots.txt is not censorship. I block large media files with robots.txt because I don't want to waste bandwidth on webcrawlers. Some people block their images file. BTW, a good design stategy for a web site is to put thumbnails in a different directory than the pictures. You then block the directories with the full size images. That way Google only picks up the thumbnails... It can save big bandwidth.
I also block pages that I don't want Google to use as a primary entry to the site.
The whitehouse.gov robots.txt file is awkward. Using robots.txt as a directive to search engines is not a form of censorship.
Undoubtedly, the White House suppresses information. They are not doing it with search engine directives.
Where is the US government blocking search results about Iraq that are unfavorable to it?... link to robots.txt
I can't believe it! A government web site is using directives in robots.txt to indicate what they want scanned by webcrawlers and what they don't!
I think you have uncovered a big conspiracy here. Looking at the robots.txt file, It appears that what BUSH and CHENEY have conspired to do is to disallow search engine from indexing of the text only versions of the pages on the site!!!!
By disallowing the text only pages, search engines will end up indexing only the propagandist versions of pages that include pictures! I did not know that the corruption in the whitehouse has gone this far. If only Kerry were president, then there would be no disallowing of duplicate content in robots.txt. People would be free, when searching in Google, to see both the content with pictures in it, and content without pictures in it!
You're right. Screenwriters would actually have more influence on product placement. They would be wanting to use computers marketed toward visual communications.
Of course, one would expect the accountants in the background to have the move influence... and they would use Windows.
One explanation is that Apple might simply be the computer used by movie editors. If I were making a movie; I would be inclined to use the computer equipment I use in my business life on screen. If I use an Apple computer to edit the films, I would be apt to place an Apple in the film.
Apple could get placement simply by making sure that people in the movie industry have Apples... either through gifting product and service or extremely low prices.
Marx was the single most influential economists of all times. He is the most widely read economist. His theories have penetrated just about all aspects of modern business.
The primary theme of Das Kapital was the various ways in which the market undermines itself. A large number of business books have picked up on this theme and essentially teach business leaders that their goal is to undermine the market (or bust). In the dotcom market, you saw a large number of dotbombs play this game. To dominate the market, they sold goods at below cost... then they went bankrupt.
I loved MP3.com. This company had a great product for distributing music from independent musicians. They were even starting to attract big time musicians. The wanks in charge of the company decided that they had to dominate the music industry or perish. MP3.com bet the company on an idiotic "beam up" program that clearly violated copyrights of other publishers. The company was given a choice between turning off the program, or paying a $200m fine.
Having been taught to dominate or die in business schools. MP3.com chose "to die".
The primary theme of Marx's writings is the various ways that business undermines itself. When adapted to business schools, these writings become a recipe book on ways to undermine the market. Marxist thinking leads immediately to a Machiavellian market where business leaders spend their days trying to find ways to undercut their competition, their customers and employees.
Das Kapital is not about they way that you structure a utopian society. The book is about the various ways businesses tend to undermine their market and their community.
I am not saying that business leaders are Marxists, but that Marx has had a negative influence on the way we view business.
"How do you tell a communist? Well, it's someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin."
The scary thing is the large number of people who fall for ideologies derived from Marx and Lenin and don't know the source of their radical ideals. Personally, I am surprised at the number of Progressives who are giddy with the idea that a continued massive influx of undocumented immigrants will progress society into a utopian state. The idea of intellectuals spurring on mass movements to transform society is Material Dialectics.
The terrorist philosophies that currently ripping the Middle East apart have roots in the Material Dialectic. Saddam Hussein was a Stalinist who had his SS trained by folk for East Germany. Allaytollah K studied revolutionary theory in France. The list goes on.
The really sad thing is the extent to which Marx has influenced business. A large number of business people have been seduced into seeing everything in terms of power relations and social movements. They build a world view where one must dominate or be dominated. Such business leaders tend to pull deceitful tricks to undermine their customer base so that they can dominate their customers, etc..
People who disagree with global warming are just blowing hot air. If we don't suppress them, this hot air is going to contribute to global warming.
I am 100% on the side of the global warming crowd. The way I see it, if global warming does happen, I will be able to score points by telling everyone "I told you so." If it doesn't happen, I can claim that I saved the planet.
My actual question is why, after decades of neglect, is our first big public attempt at re-invigorating moon exploration something as negative as slamming meteors into it? Yes, there are ways to belittle people who think we should approach scientific discovery with a little more finesse. Belitting critics will just turn people away from science.
Has anyone at NASA noticed that students are systematically rejecting science as a career path? When science is presented as something elegant and beautiful it draws in inquisitive minds. Today, when science is presented with such arrogance and hubris, students and the public at large turn away from science.
Yes, you have an argument that science is not necessarily elegant. Neither is it necessarily arrogant. Slamming celestial bodies into each other might be fun, but it will not result in the same public support as elegant science like the Mars rovers. We have the technology and public support to engage in elegant exploration. Why not chose that over exploring with hubris?
Anyway, have fun belittling all the people who disagree with you. I realize that I am in the minority who believe that both science and math are intrensically beautiful. I am quite certain that this thuggish approach will reinforce world opinion that American science is arrogant. Unlike the Mars Rover, it will turn public sentiment against science.
A campaign where NASA scientists belittle people opposed to the experiment will probably work in selling this project, but it will turn public sentiment against NASA and drain the pool of students thinking of science as a career.
That sounds pretty much like the same insults that were slung in my face umpteen years ago when I was trying to argue for using standardized formats for data in several projects.
Anyway, I find it sad that so few "programmers" actually bother learning anything about the history of what they are doing.
In "legacy programming" people pretty much saw data as separate from the program. In "legacy" programming you would generally go about a project in two steps. You would design the data format in one step and the program in another. In a project you would write and publish both documentation for the format and program.
The problem with this "legacy" design methodology was that you have to keep your published data formats in sync with all programs that access the data. Let's say I had a data store where the lastname was 24 characters. In release 1.17, I change the lastname to 32 characters. If someone else had written a program that was directly accessing and manipulating this data; we would have a crisis.
The bold statement of OO design was that the object owned the data. The object would have complete control of all data from start to finish. You would only publish the interface and not the data format (you would still write both documents, the latter would not be published). This ideal worked well in interface design, but fell flat when dealing with long lived objects saved to disk. Have you ever heard the phrase the "problem of persistence," or are you as ignorant as you are arrogant?
The problem of persistence was this horrible challenge for pure OO design. No matter how you went about it, data needs to be stored, replicated and transferred outside of the control of a single program. Anyway, many of the first OO programmers took the bold statement that the object owned the data to its logical conclusion. They ended up writing programs that saved data in terse, obfuscated, proprietary formats.
I know this happened because I was there with my little hexadecimal editor looking at the data.
OOP was never able to achieve the goal of a single object controlling long lived data. The OO world gradually dropped its bold statement. This is the way history works.
This long post is relevant to today's article because many OO languages still have objectStore methods that save the internal state of the object to disk. I suspect that any OO program using these object store methods are in violation of the MN law. Even though I dislike programs that store their data in bizarre formats, I don't like seeing them legislated out of existence.
Sun and other companies use XML for object persistence. These files are more readable, but still hard to work with.
Whether or not the lazy programmer actually documents the file format or not has nothing to do with whether or not he adheres to OO programming principles.
Please note that I was talking about publication. Publishing a document is different from writing a document. If you hold that the the data should only be accessed through the interface, then you would not publish the file format, now, would you?
The object-oriented paradigm is just a programming idea for how a program should be "broken down."
I laughed when I read that line. The first OO adopters generally saw themselves as architects. The idea of "breaking things down into procedures" was part of the old "legacy" way of thinking. The OO architects build things up from objects. A person doing OOP isn't a computer programmer. When you think in OOP you are architecting systems, not programming computers.
The really funny thing is that OOP is systematically becoming more like the traditional programming paradigms that it was supposed to transcend.
In the olden days, people concentrated quite heavily on open formats. Many programmers saw the data as separate from the program. In this environment, one would expect multiple programs to be dinking with the contents of a file. In such a world, maintaining and adhering to published open formats was the key to success.
One of the ideals of OO revolution was that object would own the data. Taken to extremes that means that one object should own the data through its entire existence. Early ideas on the problem of persistence was that OO would just save the internal state of the program to the disk, rather than going through the complex task of converting the data to an open format (risking the potential that other programs would be tempted to modify the data). It seems to me that OO ushered in proliferation of proprietary formats. It definitely provided an excuse for creating proprietary formats.
It seems to me that open data formats is contrary to the ideals of object oriented programming. However, when dealing with data that last longer than the computer, it seems naive that one object will be able to own the data.
There is nothing astounding here. If I were a porn lord, I would buy and develop.xxx domains because the.xxx TLD targets the market I am after. I assume that you and other porn lords would do the same.
Assuming that the addition of.xxx domains does not dramatically increase the money made from porn, what would happen?
The amount of money the porn lords make from the.com names would decrease. Being greedy, I would notice that the return from my dot com porn sites is no longer as high as it was in the pre.xxx days. So, I would end up dropping.coms from my portfolio.
The porn providers would switch to.xxx because it targets their audience. Porn seekers would probably welcome the.xxx because it simplifies the never ending quest for more graphic images. The amount of money made by.com porn sites would decrease because the new.TLD split the market.
I did not say porn was okay. I was actually thinking along these lines. Start with the premise that porn is bad. What then is the best way to counter something that we think is bad. The knee jerk reaction is to throw up obstacles. What most obstacles do is create a reaction to the obstacle. In the case of porn, the reaction is likely to be people spending to find ways around the obstacle. The artificial obstacles would feed more money into pornographer's hands.
If you wanted to undermine porn, you might consider doing the opposite... that is to let the porn market undermine and destroy itself.
Sociologically, it seems that the worst part of the porn market is that part of the porn market that is flush with cash and uses their economic power to coerce people into the industry. The porn industry seems to be do a lot of using up then casting young women aside. There is a growing number of people who were drawn into porn, but now live on the edge. My thought is that free porn might undermine this distructive part of the market.
Creating artificial obstacles creates a false economy where pornographers make more money. Hence, removing those obstacles would reduce the money made by pornographers.
BTW, the free market is not simply about everyone making more money. The free market really excels at balancing and optimizing things. Letting the market undermine the porn lords would probably be a good thing. The porn lords current fortunes are an imbalance. So, yes, destroying that income stream would be good.
Slashdot Mirror
The were several bullies at the school that I attended; So, I developed a face that bends.
To: RANDOM_TO_ADDR
... then transform them into an art form by adding large blocks of keywords.
...
From: RANDOM_FROM_ADDR
How dare you insult marketers.
They aren't clogging the net with spittle and spam.
Marketers take pages with boring content
RANDOM_AD
START KEYWORD BLOCK
viagra
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v1Agra
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The relation university's have with there network is somewhat amusing in light of the network neutrality debate. American Universities have this massive government funded network with bandwidth up the wazoo that fills all of us in the private sector with envy.
The administrators of these networks share a single minded passion. They do not want commercial activities taking place on their precious little taxpayer funded socialized network heaven. Widespread use of Tor might make avenues where commericial traffic gets in sullies the university backbone with commercial traffic.
It is really funny because professors will come out and spit venom about the idea of a telephone company breaking net neutrality, but will turn a strange shade of blue if you were to suggest that university servers should be neutral and allow commerce on the internet meant exclusively for university traffic.
On my read of the article it sounds like the network admins were going to talk the to the professor about TOR, and were not out to bust the dude. The second thing to note in the article is that this Paul Cesarini seemed to realize that TOR would be a problem for the University admins if a large number of people started using it.
I can't tell if the admins in this article were the goons that many of the posts in this thread assume that they were. For example, it is completely apropriate for an administrator to ask someone to cease an activity until they have a policy in place. That is not a denial of academic freedom.
The free has proven itself time and time again as the most efficient method to get systems up and running.
I think that the one false assumption in your argument is that companies competing in the market have to have a full fiber network connecting every city. A much more interesting structure is one where there is a large number of companies in the market handle smaller sections of the data communications puzzle. In such a situation you may see a large number of players in competing for traffic between New York and Washington DC. Basically, where there is a bottleneck, different players would jump into the market with capacity to help relieve the bottleneck.
This really isn't quite as much of a pipe dream as it sounds. A decent ISP or a decent web host will have contracts with more than one carrier, and they will distribute their load through different carriers. Carriers often have multiple contracts with other service providers. If you do a tracert from distance, you will often find your packets going through switches and cables owned by different companies.
A vibrant market would have a whole mix of different types of companies. Some companies would own only switches. Some would own cable between on select demographic areas. The one thing I would want to avoid is a situation where one company owned the whole shebang.
As a book lover, I concur.
IMHO, public libraries should be concentrating on building up resources within the community. Subscribing to an entertainment resource simply saps taxpayers dollars out of the communtiy and into the entertainment industry. I could see great value in public libraries building up large electronic data stores on an intranet. Subscribing to a movie download service simply puts the library in unfair competition with other local entertainment venues.
The ma bell comment is worth modding up.
The whole "net neutrality" debate is built on the assumption that the communication system will continue to be a either a monopoly or cartel with a very small number of players in the market.
Personally, I think the best solution to the bandwidth puzzle would be to have a vibrant infrastructure with a large number of companies providing backbone services. If there are enough players in the market, the market will help minimize prices.
With net neutrality ruling the universe, you cut out the ability for smaller providers to sneak in a grab lucrative niches here and there.
I think the article was trying to say that the number of job duties foisted on engineers was increasing. You are right, if all the article said was that people do things outside their job requirement, then the article says nothing interesting. I believe the article is trying to say that people are doing more things outside their job duty. This second statement (the differential) would be something interesting. The differential would be worth studying.
Unfortunately, the article in question is based on a survey that sounds highly subjective to me. It doesn't sound like they have a substantial data set to substantiate the claim of increased work loads. I suspect many people feel like their work load increases with time; a survey based on feelings would not be sufficient to substantiate a claim of an increased work load.
The price of material (such at petroleum) will soar in relation to everything else.
BTW, both the replies to my post were simply different restatements of Marx's material dialectics (not surprising since it is taught in school).
To Marx and the modern academia, people are souless material creatures in dull dreary lives where they mindlessly consume. To Marx, business was nothing more than a Machiavellian power play of dominance and submisstion.
In contrast to Marx, the orginal founders of the US saw people as spiritual creatures. The property rights debate was not simply driven by the desire to produce more stuff to consume. It was driven by the thought that the creation of property was part of the way that spiritual creatures interacted with the world.
If you accept the Free Market view then you would see that economic activity is more than just the speed of gratification (as it is defined by Marx) is it an exercise of our values in the world. The property rights issue is not simply about the friggin' speed of gratification. It is about the way free people interact in the world. Even if we have extremely rapid production cycles, those production cycles can and will be driven by human creativity and insight because the mind is the ultimate force that drives the economy.
I share your sentiments that pirating media is similar to stealing.
The thing that is difficult to get around in this debate is that there is something broken that is preventing the development of a dynamic price sensitive marketplace for media. Prices seem to be fixed by monopolists and consortiums. Even worse, there is not an open marketplace where we can go to find all of the old media that we might want to access.
In the absense of a working marketplace, Warner Brothers is now responding to price pressures from piracy. This is quite interesting
The fact that media monopolies have started responding to price pressures from piracy is interesting. Personally, I think it would be better to have a dynamic marketplace. I am angry that P2P-piracy destroyed early attempts to establish such markets based simply on trust.
The P2P-piracy advocates will never realize the damage that they did by undermining trust. Having destroyed the most fundamental element of an open marketplace (trust) I am not sure how or even if we can develop the open marketplace for media.
Choosing among priorities is good rational discourse. Flip Flopping occurs when you actually end up shifting the foundations of your system of discourse to support your chosen priority. For example, right now windmill farms are seen as politically correct. Using windpower releases one's inner butterfly spirit and is holistic.
One day, the group think will look at all of the roads made to windmill farms, the rusted out towers in need of repair and the changes to ecosystems caused by the towers. Group think will then declare windmills as the product of evil industrial pigs (spit on their graves).
The rational approach to windmill and solar panel farms is to proceed with caution. There is both good and bad points to this technology. Flip flopping occurs when you little tiny internal paradigm meter switches from windmills being good to windmills being bad.
I think you will find the Sierra Club supporting wind and solar up to the point that it starts touching heavily on their other concerns ... the protection of public lands. I suspect that the windmill farms will soon start encroaching on areas that the Sierra Club wants to preserve. Then they will flip flop. Supporting a windmill farm requires a roads, mining for the material to build the windmills, etc..
Windmill farms require restricting access to public lands. As the windmill farms turn mainstream and the farms are used as an excuse to build roads into undeveloped lands and as they are used to close access to other lands, we will see the environmental community turn against the farms en masse. The first million windmills will be quaint statements for alternative energy. The next 10 million will be seen as evil.
I have no doubt that the Whitehouse suppresses information. The place is lousy with politicians. The message I responded to said that the robots.txt file on whitehouse.gov was proof of censorship.
... It can save big bandwidth.
Blocking something with Robots.txt is not censorship. I block large media files with robots.txt because I don't want to waste bandwidth on webcrawlers. Some people block their images file. BTW, a good design stategy for a web site is to put thumbnails in a different directory than the pictures. You then block the directories with the full size images. That way Google only picks up the thumbnails
I also block pages that I don't want Google to use as a primary entry to the site.
The whitehouse.gov robots.txt file is awkward. Using robots.txt as a directive to search engines is not a form of censorship.
Undoubtedly, the White House suppresses information. They are not doing it with search engine directives.
I think you have uncovered a big conspiracy here. Looking at the robots.txt file, It appears that what BUSH and CHENEY have conspired to do is to disallow search engine from indexing of the text only versions of the pages on the site!!!!
By disallowing the text only pages, search engines will end up indexing only the propagandist versions of pages that include pictures! I did not know that the corruption in the whitehouse has gone this far. If only Kerry were president, then there would be no disallowing of duplicate content in robots.txt. People would be free, when searching in Google, to see both the content with pictures in it, and content without pictures in it!
You're right. Screenwriters would actually have more influence on product placement. They would be wanting to use computers marketed toward visual communications.
... and they would use Windows.
Of course, one would expect the accountants in the background to have the move influence
One explanation is that Apple might simply be the computer used by movie editors. If I were making a movie; I would be inclined to use the computer equipment I use in my business life on screen. If I use an Apple computer to edit the films, I would be apt to place an Apple in the film.
... either through gifting product and service or extremely low prices.
Apple could get placement simply by making sure that people in the movie industry have Apples
Marx was the single most influential economists of all times. He is the most widely read economist. His theories have penetrated just about all aspects of modern business.
... then they went bankrupt.
The primary theme of Das Kapital was the various ways in which the market undermines itself. A large number of business books have picked up on this theme and essentially teach business leaders that their goal is to undermine the market (or bust). In the dotcom market, you saw a large number of dotbombs play this game. To dominate the market, they sold goods at below cost
I loved MP3.com. This company had a great product for distributing music from independent musicians. They were even starting to attract big time musicians. The wanks in charge of the company decided that they had to dominate the music industry or perish. MP3.com bet the company on an idiotic "beam up" program that clearly violated copyrights of other publishers. The company was given a choice between turning off the program, or paying a $200m fine.
Having been taught to dominate or die in business schools. MP3.com chose "to die".
The primary theme of Marx's writings is the various ways that business undermines itself. When adapted to business schools, these writings become a recipe book on ways to undermine the market. Marxist thinking leads immediately to a Machiavellian market where business leaders spend their days trying to find ways to undercut their competition, their customers and employees.
Das Kapital is not about they way that you structure a utopian society. The book is about the various ways businesses tend to undermine their market and their community.
I am not saying that business leaders are Marxists, but that Marx has had a negative influence on the way we view business.
The scary thing is the large number of people who fall for ideologies derived from Marx and Lenin and don't know the source of their radical ideals. Personally, I am surprised at the number of Progressives who are giddy with the idea that a continued massive influx of undocumented immigrants will progress society into a utopian state. The idea of intellectuals spurring on mass movements to transform society is Material Dialectics.
The terrorist philosophies that currently ripping the Middle East apart have roots in the Material Dialectic. Saddam Hussein was a Stalinist who had his SS trained by folk for East Germany. Allaytollah K studied revolutionary theory in France. The list goes on.
The really sad thing is the extent to which Marx has influenced business. A large number of business people have been seduced into seeing everything in terms of power relations and social movements. They build a world view where one must dominate or be dominated. Such business leaders tend to pull deceitful tricks to undermine their customer base so that they can dominate their customers, etc..
People who disagree with global warming are just blowing hot air. If we don't suppress them, this hot air is going to contribute to global warming.
I am 100% on the side of the global warming crowd. The way I see it, if global warming does happen, I will be able to score points by telling everyone "I told you so." If it doesn't happen, I can claim that I saved the planet.
My actual question is why, after decades of neglect, is our first big public attempt at re-invigorating moon exploration something as negative as slamming meteors into it? Yes, there are ways to belittle people who think we should approach scientific discovery with a little more finesse. Belitting critics will just turn people away from science.
Has anyone at NASA noticed that students are systematically rejecting science as a career path? When science is presented as something elegant and beautiful it draws in inquisitive minds. Today, when science is presented with such arrogance and hubris, students and the public at large turn away from science.
Yes, you have an argument that science is not necessarily elegant. Neither is it necessarily arrogant. Slamming celestial bodies into each other might be fun, but it will not result in the same public support as elegant science like the Mars rovers. We have the technology and public support to engage in elegant exploration. Why not chose that over exploring with hubris?
Anyway, have fun belittling all the people who disagree with you. I realize that I am in the minority who believe that both science and math are intrensically beautiful. I am quite certain that this thuggish approach will reinforce world opinion that American science is arrogant. Unlike the Mars Rover, it will turn public sentiment against science.
A campaign where NASA scientists belittle people opposed to the experiment will probably work in selling this project, but it will turn public sentiment against NASA and drain the pool of students thinking of science as a career.
I think you will find that a mutation of the bird flu virus would be better for duck hunting.
That sounds pretty much like the same insults that were slung in my face umpteen years ago when I was trying to argue for using standardized formats for data in several projects.
Anyway, I find it sad that so few "programmers" actually bother learning anything about the history of what they are doing.
In "legacy programming" people pretty much saw data as separate from the program. In "legacy" programming you would generally go about a project in two steps. You would design the data format in one step and the program in another. In a project you would write and publish both documentation for the format and program.
The problem with this "legacy" design methodology was that you have to keep your published data formats in sync with all programs that access the data. Let's say I had a data store where the lastname was 24 characters. In release 1.17, I change the lastname to 32 characters. If someone else had written a program that was directly accessing and manipulating this data; we would have a crisis.
The bold statement of OO design was that the object owned the data. The object would have complete control of all data from start to finish. You would only publish the interface and not the data format (you would still write both documents, the latter would not be published). This ideal worked well in interface design, but fell flat when dealing with long lived objects saved to disk. Have you ever heard the phrase the "problem of persistence," or are you as ignorant as you are arrogant?
The problem of persistence was this horrible challenge for pure OO design. No matter how you went about it, data needs to be stored, replicated and transferred outside of the control of a single program. Anyway, many of the first OO programmers took the bold statement that the object owned the data to its logical conclusion. They ended up writing programs that saved data in terse, obfuscated, proprietary formats.
I know this happened because I was there with my little hexadecimal editor looking at the data.
OOP was never able to achieve the goal of a single object controlling long lived data. The OO world gradually dropped its bold statement. This is the way history works.
This long post is relevant to today's article because many OO languages still have objectStore methods that save the internal state of the object to disk. I suspect that any OO program using these object store methods are in violation of the MN law. Even though I dislike programs that store their data in bizarre formats, I don't like seeing them legislated out of existence.
Sun and other companies use XML for object persistence. These files are more readable, but still hard to work with.
Please note that I was talking about publication. Publishing a document is different from writing a document. If you hold that the the data should only be accessed through the interface, then you would not publish the file format, now, would you?
I laughed when I read that line. The first OO adopters generally saw themselves as architects. The idea of "breaking things down into procedures" was part of the old "legacy" way of thinking. The OO architects build things up from objects. A person doing OOP isn't a computer programmer. When you think in OOP you are architecting systems, not programming computers.
The really funny thing is that OOP is systematically becoming more like the traditional programming paradigms that it was supposed to transcend.
It is strange how our ideals affect information.
In the olden days, people concentrated quite heavily on open formats. Many programmers saw the data as separate from the program. In this environment, one would expect multiple programs to be dinking with the contents of a file. In such a world, maintaining and adhering to published open formats was the key to success.
One of the ideals of OO revolution was that object would own the data. Taken to extremes that means that one object should own the data through its entire existence. Early ideas on the problem of persistence was that OO would just save the internal state of the program to the disk, rather than going through the complex task of converting the data to an open format (risking the potential that other programs would be tempted to modify the data). It seems to me that OO ushered in proliferation of proprietary formats. It definitely provided an excuse for creating proprietary formats.
It seems to me that open data formats is contrary to the ideals of object oriented programming. However, when dealing with data that last longer than the computer, it seems naive that one object will be able to own the data.
There is nothing astounding here. If I were a porn lord, I would buy and develop .xxx domains because the .xxx TLD targets the market I am after. I assume that you and other porn lords would do the same.
.xxx domains does not dramatically increase the money made from porn, what would happen?
.com names would decrease. Being greedy, I would notice that the return from my dot com porn sites is no longer as high as it was in the pre .xxx days. So, I would end up dropping .coms from my portfolio.
.xxx because it targets their audience. Porn seekers would probably welcome the .xxx because it simplifies the never ending quest for more graphic images. The amount of money made by .com porn sites would decrease because the new .TLD split the market.
Assuming that the addition of
The amount of money the porn lords make from the
The porn providers would switch to
I did not say porn was okay. I was actually thinking along these lines. Start with the premise that porn is bad. What then is the best way to counter something that we think is bad. The knee jerk reaction is to throw up obstacles. What most obstacles do is create a reaction to the obstacle. In the case of porn, the reaction is likely to be people spending to find ways around the obstacle. The artificial obstacles would feed more money into pornographer's hands.
... that is to let the porn market undermine and destroy itself.
If you wanted to undermine porn, you might consider doing the opposite
Sociologically, it seems that the worst part of the porn market is that part of the porn market that is flush with cash and uses their economic power to coerce people into the industry. The porn industry seems to be do a lot of using up then casting young women aside. There is a growing number of people who were drawn into porn, but now live on the edge. My thought is that free porn might undermine this distructive part of the market.
Creating artificial obstacles creates a false economy where pornographers make more money. Hence, removing those obstacles would reduce the money made by pornographers.
BTW, the free market is not simply about everyone making more money. The free market really excels at balancing and optimizing things. Letting the market undermine the porn lords would probably be a good thing. The porn lords current fortunes are an imbalance. So, yes, destroying that income stream would be good.