Lest you suffer from oversensitivity and think this an ad hominem attack, let me stipulate that I know nothing about you and therefore my remarks pertain only to your argument.
First, you evaluate Saddam by his actions, and I agree with you, except for the spelling:
"Saddam Hussein on a regular basis commits acts that are considered Attrocities."
On the other hand, you evaluate anti-war protesters by, I don't know... telepathy?
"They don't give a damn about the truly poor and downtroden."
Unless you can produce a poll by a respected polling organization, in which 51% of anti-war protesters admit that they don't care about the poor and downtrodden, I'm forced to conclude that you pulled this portion of your argument out of thin air, or perhaps some darker recess.
Furthermore, you apparently can't tell the difference between Hitler and Saddam, a flaw that does not enhance your credibility as a commentator on military history.
Finally, when you say, "attacking Iraq is certainly something Americans can be proud of," you seem to be assuming that "freeing Iraq" is the actual purpose of our adventure there. It's probably a mistake to take what politicians say at face value. I wonder if you believed that "freeing Kuwait" was the purpose of the first Gulf War. Certain inconvenient details intrude on that belief, namely that Kuwait wasn't a free country before Saddam's invasion, nor was it free after the Iraqis were driven out. Kuwait still belongs to the Kuwaiti First Family, and there are no plans to hold meaningful elections.
Your position reminds me tragically of those who believed Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon regarding the purposes of the Vietnam war. I spent a year in Vietnam, and my experience leads me to believe that almost everything the politicians told Americans about that war was a lie. It was certainly a lie that we were defending freedom, because what we were in fact defending was a series of corrupt puppet governments so inept and so despised by the Vietnamese people that they threw down their arms and surrendered to the North practically the instant we left.
If we were really interested in the freedom of Iraqis, we'd have shipped 'em enough guns so they could kill Saddam, and enjoy the benefits of having freed themselves. This would have been a perfectly moral act for the United States. Too late now.
Don't get me wrong. Dubya put us into the fire, right or wrong, and there's no longer any point in protesting the war. We've screwed the pooch, and now the only thing we can do is get on with it and hope the unforeseen consequences don't nail us.
Here's hoping Saddam gets blown to bits early and we win swiftly, with as few casualties as possible.
Yeah, it does. And I'm somewhat reassured to discover that I haven't fallen into the rabbit hole all by myself. From what you say, software patents are just another manifestation of the madness of crowds, and have no basis in rationality.
Good enough for me. I'll just try not to think about it. I'm confused enough as it is.
GIFs aren't patented. A compression algorithm used in GIFs is (the LZW algorithm).
I appreciate the clarification, but this is exactly what I'm wondering about. How do you patent an algorithm and then attach it to a process that could be performed by another algorithm just as capably? I understand the logistics problems here-- if your browser attempts to open an image compressed by an unknown algorithm, it can't. And I think I understand why the royalty-free patent standard is being proposed-- as a defensive measure against stuff being admitted to the standard and then used to extort fees from programmers who use the stuff.
I just don't understand the logical basis for software patents.
I guess I'm just stuck in the last century, because I don't really understand the whole thing. I didn't have the patience to read the draft, but I read the press release, and I'm scratching my head over the whole idea of software patents. It's been a long time since I did any coding (anyone working with the 6502 any more?) but I seem to remember that there were always an infinite number of ways to accomplish any programming task. How do you patent one way, and then claim that no one's allowed to use another way to do the same thing? Or am I completely confused here? (I admit that this is almost a certainty.)
As a writer, I can't help but make comparisons with copyright law, another form of abstract intellectual property protection. If you're a writer, you can't copyright ideas. If I want to write a book about a great white whale, I can. I can even call it Moby Dick, and not just because Melville's copyright has expired. Titles cannot be copyrighted. So how come, for example, the.gif standard can be patented?
Of course, I may have completely misunderstood all of this. In which case, never mind.
1) Most materials in libraries are not "donated." They're purchased with money taken from taxpayers-- all of us. They still belong to us, even if they're under the temporary control of the librarians.
2)You may have to return the items you borrow from the library, but you can always get them again. You may not have "immediate access" to these materials, but you do have permanent access, any time you feel like going to the library.
What's the point of playing games that aren't interesting enough to "start bleeding into real life?" Any game worth playing is worth taking seriously.
Do you think that chess players never think about their games when they're doing other stuff? Do football players never watch a game on TV?
You want to know when you might need counseling? It's when you display excessive concern about the mental health of folks whose hobbies you don't understand. I personally don't play computer games much, but it's not my business to criticize the mental stability of those who do. We'd all be better off if we gave a lot more attention to our own business and a lot less to other people's.
The main factor in the longevity of buildings is not the quality or type of construction, given reasonable competence on the part of the builders. It's whether or not the people who live in the houses are happy with their dwellings. If they are, they will maintain them lovingly and they will last. If not, they will rapidly decay. For an example of the latter, taken to an extreme, see public housing like the infamous Cabrini Green. Using exactly the same construction techniques could have yielded buildings that would have been considered wonderful places to live.
To that end, I can recommend a terrific book called A Pattern Language. In short, this book is a collection of "rules" for making communities and buildings as livable as possible. The rules are distilled from centuries of vernacular architecture-- in other words, homes built by those who would live in them, rather than by architects working to somewhat theoretical design parameters. To a large extent, these rules were developed based on the kinds of buildings that have survived many generations.
It may seem unscientific to base a home design on these simple rules, rather than by some organized system of thought (like Bauhaus, to give a really dreadful example of design detached from the requirements of real people.) But once you read some of these rules, their validity seems unimpeachable. Just as one example, see if you don't agree that this rule is a very good one: a room should have natural light coming from at least two directions. Think about the submarine rooms you've been in that have only one set of windows at one end of the room. Compare this to rooms that have windows in at least two of the walls. Which room would be more pleasant to live in?
Houses that are well-loved endure. All else decays rapidly.
It doesn't mean anything - inkjets can get away with their lock-in model since a cheap and easy substitute isn't widely available.
I agree that this is true, but the interesting question is why. Why hasn't at least one manufacturer (maybe one that isn't doing as well as HP or Epson) decided to go for the enormous marketing advantage that cheap cartridges would give its products? This was the thrust of the parent post-- that as soon as one fuel cell manufacturer broke ranks with the industry and made refueling cheap and low-tech, the others would be forced to follow.
Of course, maybe it's not possible to manufacture these cartridges more cheaply, for some technical reason that I don't understand.
Hey, maybe those right-wingers aren't such fascists after all?
I've never been able to understand why so many self-proclaimed conservatives support the drug war. It's always seemed to me to be the ultimate example of a goofy liberal social-engineering boondoggle. Think about it. We've been fighting the war for decades, spent zillions of tax dollars on it, and all it's done is make matters a thousand times worse than they were before there were any drug laws. It's hideously expensive, doesn't work, and has had horrendous unforeseen consequences, including the enrichment of vicious criminals, destabilization of foreign governments, funding terrorists and changing the U.S. from the land of the free into the land of the prison. Like other liberal policies, it's ostensibly based on concern for the poor and downtrodden, or in this case the drug addict, who might die if we don't put him in jail. But it ignores the welfare of everyone else, who must pay the cost of this boondoggle in tax dollars, in public safety, in liberty, and institutional corruption at all levels.
The drug war has actually damaged law-abiding people in many ways which should be close to the hearts of true conservatives. Take gun rights, as an example. The drug war has given many new weapons to liberals who think private gun ownership should be outlawed. During the Clinton administration, RICO laws developed to prosecute drug criminals were used against gun shop owners. Those who committed minor drug offenses in their youth, like many of our political leaders, but who had the misfortune to be caught, were thereby deprived of their rights to keep and bear arms, and are therefore less likely to resist attempts to outlaw private ownership of guns. And so on.
When social conservatives support the drug war, they are betraying both their country and their own beliefs.
This is the only crime where such an action is permitted, and it is wrong.
Unfortunately, the drug war forfeiture abuses have spread to other crimes. Quite a few years back a woman's home was seized because she stole a UPS package off a neighbor's porch. I don't like thieves, but it was pretty tough on her husband and children, who lost their home through no fault of their own.
A week or so back, I submitted a story about this hijacking-the-domains of evil drug paraphernalia pashas. At the time, Ashcroft was talking about redirecting these domains to DEA servers, where those who had tried to visit the paraphernalia sites would be served an "explanation" for why the sites were no longer available. I couldn't see any reason the DEA wouldn't like to identify the visitor. Grist for the Total Information Awareness mill. After all, drug users have a weakness that might be exploited by America's enemies. We have to remember, all's fair in war.
It also requires the person to agree to have the check run and will e-mail them every time their ID is requested,...
Great... yet another clever way of increasing the volume of unsolicited email, which of course is something we all desire fervently. Think of how many emails this will add to the daily load, as identity verification becomes more common.
Laws that apply to everyone but you are very handy.
Exactly. I just can't help pointing out that in a discussion a couple weeks back, the absolutists among us felt that the whole spam problem could be solved by simply shoving a bill through Congress.
When folks like me said that it wasn't going to be quite that simple, we were met with scorn. I actually said that any national antispam measure would, by the time it became law, be riddled with exceptions, made for the benefit of powerful corporations like MS.
I won't comment on the literary value of Crichton's novel, because I haven't read it. But less than a month ago,/. ran a story on Freeman Dyson's take on the science in the novel, which according to Dyson, was BAD.
While I agreed with Dyson that the nanotechnology-run-amuck theme of Prey, as he described it, was pretty silly, I wasn't reassured as to the essential harmlessness of nanotechnology. The swarming gray goo was probably designed to look fearsome in the inevitable movie, but there are subtler and scarier aspects to be considered.
On the other hand, the positive possibilities are off the imaginative chart too. What else is new?
Point being, how many schools even have a full-time, dedicated admin?
Here's a sad little story. A few years ago, when my daughter was in grade school, she decided to run for student council president. She asked me to help with her campaign. I noticed that her opponents, while usually well-financed, had failed to come up with any campaign issues. So I suggested that if she won, I would come to her school and give lessons on HTML, so the various classes could have their own web pages.
She incorporated this into her campaign posters, and won, to my surprise and horror. So, in order not to make my daughter a liar, I was forced to go to the school and meet with the principle and the "media person," a woman who knew almost nothing about computers, but who was fiercely protective of her turf. After much reluctance, I persuaded the principle to allow me to teach a class on simple web-building. Two students from each classroom would be allowed to attend a class lasting 20 minutes, once a week, for the remainder of the semester. As you might imagine, this was not enough time to teach anything of any significance to 5th and 4th graders.
It was a depressing and frustrating experience, which I stuck out only for my daughter's sake. Everything had to be approved through several layers of bureaucracy, even the installation of simple freeware HTML editors on a few of the school's machines. And we never got so far as getting approval to host the class pages on the school district's servers.
So, at least at this otherwise fairly good school, even free instruction wasn't cost-effective enough for the administration to accept. I expect this sort of proud ignorance is widespread in American schools, which now seem obsessively consumed by the desire to do well in comparative testing. Actually teaching kids stuff they can use is of secondary importance.
Yeah.. I think that anyone who has learned Japanese will have a better understanding of how to speak French, anyway.;)
This isn't a very good metaphor, because neither the French nor the Japanese dictionaries are locked up in Redmond.
Don't you think it likely that programmers-in-training who have access to all the guts of an operating system are going to be more knowledgeable about programming than specialists who only get a peek at the guts on a need-to-know basis? And remember, we're talking about high school students here, who are notoriously hostile to authority, especially when authority says NO.
Here's another metaphor for you. Who's more likely to learn, the student who gets access to all the books in the library, or the one who only gets access to a shelf of dumbed-down Nancy Drew mysteries?
Sorry I've allways thought that the Celeron 500 was slow.
This seems a bit of an overgeneralization. As a counterexample, my kids are using a box I fished out of a Dumpster. The drives and memory had been stripped but it still had a motherboard and a Celeron 366. I put in a 128 MB stick and drives from an even older box. I did replace the video card with a cheap GeForce 2 from Circuit City, but all in all the system cost me under $80 to revive.
It's set up to dualboot Win98 (the kids like to play games and they're perfectly happy playing such over-the-hill stuff as Quake II and Tombraider) and Mandrake 9.0. I have to say that while I've always used Redhat for my serious stuff, I'm impressed with Mandrake 9.0
X runs pretty snappy, so far as I can tell. I can't tell any difference in the GUI's apparent speediness between the kid box and my much newer work machine. Anyway, my point is that unless you're doing heavy development, editing video or doing a lot of graphic work, a machine like the kid box would be good enough for many if not most users. One of the things I really like about Linux is that most of the distros run just fine on old machines that wouldn't work very well with, say, XP.
"Fascist" is just the ad homineum attack that simpleton liberals use when they are losing an argument with a conservative.;)
You may be right, but I think I can tell you where the confusion arises. So many of our fascists these days prefer to call themselves conservatives; it's no wonder people make that mistake. But true conservatives have no one but themselves to blame. They seem to be afraid to point to someone who styles himself a "conservative" and identify him as what he actually is.
None of us should be surprised by this lack of bravery among conservatives, especially among the young ones. Few young conservatives have seen any military service, and many have the faces of men who as boys were afraid to play tetherball.
The democrats are weak now, and I think they're a bunch of knock-kneed weasels, but at least they still believe in all of the constitution...
I wish that were true, but not a lot of Democrats support the 2nd Amendment. Many Democrats are as rabid on the War of Drugs as any Republican, and the WoD is probably the greatest threat to the Constitution in the last 100 years or so. It's completely destroyed the 4th Amendment, and it's making inroads on several other important elements of the Bill of Rights.
The sad fact is that neither the Republicans or the Democrats have any great respect for the Constitution. Both parties seem to view the Constitution as an inconvenient obstacle to whatever goofy social agenda their constituents like at the moment.
Truth-in-labelling is really a libertarian idea. In other words, buy copy-protected music if you like, but you should at least be allowed to know what you're buying. No force, no fraud, the holy duality.
(Disclaimer) I'm not a doctrinaire libertarian-- for example, I don't think we should sell the National Parks to Disney. But the major parties need to start being just a little more concerned with liberty, or pretty soon there won't be any left.
...in theory, I'd rather see Bad Guys stopped at the border, before they get in, than have the Feds looking for them once they are in.
In theory, I agree. Unfortunately, I fear this is a false dichotomy. We won't be given this choice. The Feds would be looking for them under everyone's beds even if they could somehow be sure they'd caught all the Bad Guys before they got past the border. Because, you know, the Enemies of the State (TM) are everywhere.
There's another big advantage to this sort of just-in-time manufacturing. There was a Supreme Court decision in 1979 that changed the publishing industry, known as Thor Power Tools. In brief, it makes it more expensive (taxwise) for publishers to keep books (or CDs) in a warehouse. So they are motivated to pulp them much sooner than was the case before Thor.
So print-on-demand schemes like this are probably the future of publishing, and it'll likely happen quicker with music than with books, because the traditional CD is a less-entrenched cultural artifact than the traditional book.
Also, other economies are possible. It would be much cheaper to send the files out to music stores and burn the CDs at the store. Much more efficient shipping model.
The other point is the question of when/if the Web will become something that can transform opinions...
I think it's already happened. The best example I know is the Media Awareness Project. This is a web site that posts news stories and other media pieces related to the war on drugs-- pro or con. They have a network of folks who find such stories and post them to the site, and other folks who write letters to the editor whenever they see a story they disagree with. Odd things happen. It's interesting, for example, to see the reaction of small podunk newspapers who suddenly receive a few dozen irate letters in response to what they thought was a perfectly acceptable and innocuous editorial. Say, something everyone in the community can get behind, like "All Drug Users Must Be Shot On Sight!" It's funny, because for a few days the editors go around preening themselves in the mistaken belief that their writing was so powerful that it attracted international attention. They're invariably crestfallen and embarassed when they find out that it was just a web site that brought them their brief notoriety.
I suppose the moral here is that the web has to connect to some real-world media structures to affect those who don't rely on the web for their news.
Then I guess it's not completely evil for me to hope that, by some strange science fiction manifestation of karma, you find yourself fleeing across the desert, dodging angry Iraqui bullets.
Here's my story. See if you can figure out why I find it annoying that people who have never sacrificed anything for their "beliefs" can judge the motivations of others in so shallow a manner.
When I was a young man, the "peaceniks" tried to talk me out of going to Vietnam. I went anyway. A year in that sunny clime convinced me that while some wars might be morally justified, that one sure as hell wasn't. With less than a year to go on my hitch, I was ordered back to SE Asia with my squadron. I refused to go. There was great puzzlement among my squadron officers, since I had been ordered to Bangkok, Thailand, which at that time was the land of milk and honeys, the favored destination for GIs leaving Vietnam for R&R. There didn't appear to be any explanation for my bizarre behavior, other than a genuine belief that dropping bombs on the Vietnamese was immoral. However, as was their duty, my officers busted me out with a bad discharge, I lost my various GI entitlements, and here I am, just a few years short of my retirement move to a cardboard box.
Now, strangely enough, I'm not bitter. I knew what I was doing and what I would lose, and I know I was lucky not to spend time in Leavenworth for my beliefs. But it does piss me off to hear shallow real-politik arguments bereft of any moral component used against people who are doing what they think is right. Hey, maybe if I hadn't refused to go hang bombs on F-111s in Bangkok, maybe we'd have "won" the war in Vietnam. You think? Naw, probably not. It was late 1972, the war was lost, and the F-111s were broke most of time they were over there. I think it's a shame that I and the other "peaceniks" didn't quit fighting a few years earlier. Might have saved a few hundred thousand lives, American and Vietnamese.
The point is that the "peaceniks" are making a moral choice. Even if you don't agree with their choice, they deserve more admiration and consideration than a gaggle of grasping pinhead politicians who are making the decision for purely utilitarian purposes.
Finally, a little quote from a speech last fall by Sen. Byrd: "Representative Abraham Lincoln, in a letter to William H. Herndon, stated: 'Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose - - and you allow him to make war at pleasure.'"
I fail to see how this will help. If I'm a terrorist who wants to unleash an ebola epedemic, and I don't already know how to culture the virus (easiest way that occurs to me would be to kidnap a hundred hookers, infect them, and then turn them loose) I'd just capture a "legitimate researcher" and wire his nads to a field telephone. He'd tell me all about it.
I'm deeply suspicious of censorship, even self-censorship, even when the motivations appear at first glance to be admirable. At second glance, the consequences are often unforeseen. For example, in the example given by the poster above, you have restricted knowledge to those who are approved by the government. As I pointed out, it won't keep a dedicated and clever terrorist from getting the information. However, it will prevent some folks from having the information who might do good things with it-- perhaps the researcher who might have used the knowledge to come up with a new way of interrupting a disease vector, if only she'd had ready access to the data. But maybe she's a Muslim, and she criticized the administration, and so she didn't make the approved list. Laws that restrict information, whether medical data or porn, only keep the law-abiding from getting that information. And you're kidding yourself if you think self-censorship by the journals would not rapidly evolve into iron-clad and draconian censorship laws the first time something goes wrong and people get hurt by misused information.
Open source believers take note: which is the more efficient software development model-- an open-ended framework where anyone can contribute code, or a closed model where only a select few are allowed to contribute code? And how much more inefficient would the latter approach be if such difficult-to-quantify concepts as patriotism, jingoism, and wartime secrecy were mixed in?
Consider, finally, the stupidities that ensued when the government classified PGP as "munitions," and prohibited its distribution to foreigners. Censorship is futile, stupid, and destructive.
Sometimes I think there are no more Einar Skinnarlands, at least not in America. On my cynical days, I think that if another Hitler came to power, no one would even attempt to stop him.
Let's examine the evidence. Since Vietnam, our inconclusive proxy war with World Communism, we haven't exactly made a habit of fighting Good Wars. Take the last Gulf War, for example. We mobilized the troops to throw Saddam out of our Kuwaiti friends' oil fields. Bush Sr. liked to call it a battle for freedom and democracy, somehow failing to mention that Kuwaiti was the personal property of a few aristocratic Arabs and that there was no more democracy in Kuwait than in, say, General Motors. Sure Saddam is a monster, but he's a small-time monster. Mao was a bigtime monster, and his regime is still in power. They have weapons of mass destruction and it's doubtful they'd hesitate to use them if pressed. Why aren't we worried about the "Chinese threat," and their various crimes against humanity?
Other actions during this time? Panama, Grenada, Haiti? Not serious. There are still thousands of drug-corrupted generals in Central and South America, there's still no democracy in Haiti, and Grenada is a bad joke. And consider Somalia, Bush Sr.'s lovely parting gift to Clinton. There we had a clearcut (if pointless) humanitarian mission, but when we took a few casualties it was Sayonara Somalia.
Bosnia really wasn't our finest hour. We did bomb the Chinese, something we've never dared to do to them in China.
What really disturbs me are the true horrors we neglected during the dying days of the Soviet. There were genocides in Uganda and Rwanda, and we didn't do anything. Millions died. It was far worse than anything Saddam has ever done.
So I don't know. If The Ashcrofts and Poindexters have their way and we end up living in a nation where the trains run on time, will there be any Skinnermans or Schindlers among us? Or are those days, and those kinds of men gone forever?
Slashdot Mirror
Lest you suffer from oversensitivity and think this an ad hominem attack, let me stipulate that I know nothing about you and therefore my remarks pertain only to your argument.
First, you evaluate Saddam by his actions, and I agree with you, except for the spelling:
"Saddam Hussein on a regular basis commits acts that are considered Attrocities."
On the other hand, you evaluate anti-war protesters by, I don't know... telepathy?
"They don't give a damn about the truly poor and downtroden."
Unless you can produce a poll by a respected polling organization, in which 51% of anti-war protesters admit that they don't care about the poor and downtrodden, I'm forced to conclude that you pulled this portion of your argument out of thin air, or perhaps some darker recess.
Furthermore, you apparently can't tell the difference between Hitler and Saddam, a flaw that does not enhance your credibility as a commentator on military history.
Finally, when you say, "attacking Iraq is certainly something Americans can be proud of," you seem to be assuming that "freeing Iraq" is the actual purpose of our adventure there. It's probably a mistake to take what politicians say at face value. I wonder if you believed that "freeing Kuwait" was the purpose of the first Gulf War. Certain inconvenient details intrude on that belief, namely that Kuwait wasn't a free country before Saddam's invasion, nor was it free after the Iraqis were driven out. Kuwait still belongs to the Kuwaiti First Family, and there are no plans to hold meaningful elections.
Your position reminds me tragically of those who believed Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon regarding the purposes of the Vietnam war. I spent a year in Vietnam, and my experience leads me to believe that almost everything the politicians told Americans about that war was a lie. It was certainly a lie that we were defending freedom, because what we were in fact defending was a series of corrupt puppet governments so inept and so despised by the Vietnamese people that they threw down their arms and surrendered to the North practically the instant we left.
If we were really interested in the freedom of Iraqis, we'd have shipped 'em enough guns so they could kill Saddam, and enjoy the benefits of having freed themselves. This would have been a perfectly moral act for the United States. Too late now.
Don't get me wrong. Dubya put us into the fire, right or wrong, and there's no longer any point in protesting the war. We've screwed the pooch, and now the only thing we can do is get on with it and hope the unforeseen consequences don't nail us.
Here's hoping Saddam gets blown to bits early and we win swiftly, with as few casualties as possible.
Yeah, it does. And I'm somewhat reassured to discover that I haven't fallen into the rabbit hole all by myself. From what you say, software patents are just another manifestation of the madness of crowds, and have no basis in rationality.
Good enough for me. I'll just try not to think about it. I'm confused enough as it is.
I appreciate the clarification, but this is exactly what I'm wondering about. How do you patent an algorithm and then attach it to a process that could be performed by another algorithm just as capably? I understand the logistics problems here-- if your browser attempts to open an image compressed by an unknown algorithm, it can't. And I think I understand why the royalty-free patent standard is being proposed-- as a defensive measure against stuff being admitted to the standard and then used to extort fees from programmers who use the stuff.
I just don't understand the logical basis for software patents.
I guess I'm just stuck in the last century, because I don't really understand the whole thing. I didn't have the patience to read the draft, but I read the press release, and I'm scratching my head over the whole idea of software patents. It's been a long time since I did any coding (anyone working with the 6502 any more?) but I seem to remember that there were always an infinite number of ways to accomplish any programming task. How do you patent one way, and then claim that no one's allowed to use another way to do the same thing? Or am I completely confused here? (I admit that this is almost a certainty.)
As a writer, I can't help but make comparisons with copyright law, another form of abstract intellectual property protection. If you're a writer, you can't copyright ideas. If I want to write a book about a great white whale, I can. I can even call it Moby Dick, and not just because Melville's copyright has expired. Titles cannot be copyrighted. So how come, for example, the .gif standard can be patented?
Of course, I may have completely misunderstood all of this. In which case, never mind.
1) Most materials in libraries are not "donated." They're purchased with money taken from taxpayers-- all of us. They still belong to us, even if they're under the temporary control of the librarians.
2)You may have to return the items you borrow from the library, but you can always get them again. You may not have "immediate access" to these materials, but you do have permanent access, any time you feel like going to the library.
What's the point of playing games that aren't interesting enough to "start bleeding into real life?" Any game worth playing is worth taking seriously.
Do you think that chess players never think about their games when they're doing other stuff? Do football players never watch a game on TV?
You want to know when you might need counseling? It's when you display excessive concern about the mental health of folks whose hobbies you don't understand. I personally don't play computer games much, but it's not my business to criticize the mental stability of those who do. We'd all be better off if we gave a lot more attention to our own business and a lot less to other people's.
The main factor in the longevity of buildings is not the quality or type of construction, given reasonable competence on the part of the builders. It's whether or not the people who live in the houses are happy with their dwellings. If they are, they will maintain them lovingly and they will last. If not, they will rapidly decay. For an example of the latter, taken to an extreme, see public housing like the infamous Cabrini Green. Using exactly the same construction techniques could have yielded buildings that would have been considered wonderful places to live.
To that end, I can recommend a terrific book called A Pattern Language. In short, this book is a collection of "rules" for making communities and buildings as livable as possible. The rules are distilled from centuries of vernacular architecture-- in other words, homes built by those who would live in them, rather than by architects working to somewhat theoretical design parameters. To a large extent, these rules were developed based on the kinds of buildings that have survived many generations.
It may seem unscientific to base a home design on these simple rules, rather than by some organized system of thought (like Bauhaus, to give a really dreadful example of design detached from the requirements of real people.) But once you read some of these rules, their validity seems unimpeachable. Just as one example, see if you don't agree that this rule is a very good one: a room should have natural light coming from at least two directions. Think about the submarine rooms you've been in that have only one set of windows at one end of the room. Compare this to rooms that have windows in at least two of the walls. Which room would be more pleasant to live in?
Houses that are well-loved endure. All else decays rapidly.
I agree that this is true, but the interesting question is why. Why hasn't at least one manufacturer (maybe one that isn't doing as well as HP or Epson) decided to go for the enormous marketing advantage that cheap cartridges would give its products? This was the thrust of the parent post-- that as soon as one fuel cell manufacturer broke ranks with the industry and made refueling cheap and low-tech, the others would be forced to follow.
Of course, maybe it's not possible to manufacture these cartridges more cheaply, for some technical reason that I don't understand.
Once one manufacturer doesn't go the inkjet (gouge on the ink) route, the others will have to follow or get left behind.
Has that happened yet with inkjets? I must have missed it, I'm still buying expensive HP cartridges.
If it hasn't happened to inkjets, what does that mean? Incredibly effective price-fixing strategies in the inkjet industry?
Of course, the applications for fuel cells would be far more general than for ink, so maybe there would be more competitive pressure.
I've never been able to understand why so many self-proclaimed conservatives support the drug war. It's always seemed to me to be the ultimate example of a goofy liberal social-engineering boondoggle. Think about it. We've been fighting the war for decades, spent zillions of tax dollars on it, and all it's done is make matters a thousand times worse than they were before there were any drug laws. It's hideously expensive, doesn't work, and has had horrendous unforeseen consequences, including the enrichment of vicious criminals, destabilization of foreign governments, funding terrorists and changing the U.S. from the land of the free into the land of the prison. Like other liberal policies, it's ostensibly based on concern for the poor and downtrodden, or in this case the drug addict, who might die if we don't put him in jail. But it ignores the welfare of everyone else, who must pay the cost of this boondoggle in tax dollars, in public safety, in liberty, and institutional corruption at all levels.
The drug war has actually damaged law-abiding people in many ways which should be close to the hearts of true conservatives. Take gun rights, as an example. The drug war has given many new weapons to liberals who think private gun ownership should be outlawed. During the Clinton administration, RICO laws developed to prosecute drug criminals were used against gun shop owners. Those who committed minor drug offenses in their youth, like many of our political leaders, but who had the misfortune to be caught, were thereby deprived of their rights to keep and bear arms, and are therefore less likely to resist attempts to outlaw private ownership of guns. And so on.
When social conservatives support the drug war, they are betraying both their country and their own beliefs.
Unfortunately, the drug war forfeiture abuses have spread to other crimes. Quite a few years back a woman's home was seized because she stole a UPS package off a neighbor's porch. I don't like thieves, but it was pretty tough on her husband and children, who lost their home through no fault of their own.
A week or so back, I submitted a story about this hijacking-the-domains of evil drug paraphernalia pashas. At the time, Ashcroft was talking about redirecting these domains to DEA servers, where those who had tried to visit the paraphernalia sites would be served an "explanation" for why the sites were no longer available. I couldn't see any reason the DEA wouldn't like to identify the visitor. Grist for the Total Information Awareness mill. After all, drug users have a weakness that might be exploited by America's enemies. We have to remember, all's fair in war.
Is it just me, or is it starting to get ugly?
Great... yet another clever way of increasing the volume of unsolicited email, which of course is something we all desire fervently. Think of how many emails this will add to the daily load, as identity verification becomes more common.
Exactly. I just can't help pointing out that in a discussion a couple weeks back, the absolutists among us felt that the whole spam problem could be solved by simply shoving a bill through Congress.
When folks like me said that it wasn't going to be quite that simple, we were met with scorn. I actually said that any national antispam measure would, by the time it became law, be riddled with exceptions, made for the benefit of powerful corporations like MS.
Am I a prophet or what?
I won't comment on the literary value of Crichton's novel, because I haven't read it. But less than a month ago, /. ran a story on Freeman Dyson's take on the science in the novel, which according to Dyson, was BAD.
While I agreed with Dyson that the nanotechnology-run-amuck theme of Prey, as he described it, was pretty silly, I wasn't reassured as to the essential harmlessness of nanotechnology. The swarming gray goo was probably designed to look fearsome in the inevitable movie, but there are subtler and scarier aspects to be considered.
On the other hand, the positive possibilities are off the imaginative chart too. What else is new?
Here's a sad little story. A few years ago, when my daughter was in grade school, she decided to run for student council president. She asked me to help with her campaign. I noticed that her opponents, while usually well-financed, had failed to come up with any campaign issues. So I suggested that if she won, I would come to her school and give lessons on HTML, so the various classes could have their own web pages.
She incorporated this into her campaign posters, and won, to my surprise and horror. So, in order not to make my daughter a liar, I was forced to go to the school and meet with the principle and the "media person," a woman who knew almost nothing about computers, but who was fiercely protective of her turf. After much reluctance, I persuaded the principle to allow me to teach a class on simple web-building. Two students from each classroom would be allowed to attend a class lasting 20 minutes, once a week, for the remainder of the semester. As you might imagine, this was not enough time to teach anything of any significance to 5th and 4th graders.
It was a depressing and frustrating experience, which I stuck out only for my daughter's sake. Everything had to be approved through several layers of bureaucracy, even the installation of simple freeware HTML editors on a few of the school's machines. And we never got so far as getting approval to host the class pages on the school district's servers.
So, at least at this otherwise fairly good school, even free instruction wasn't cost-effective enough for the administration to accept. I expect this sort of proud ignorance is widespread in American schools, which now seem obsessively consumed by the desire to do well in comparative testing. Actually teaching kids stuff they can use is of secondary importance.
Yeah.. I think that anyone who has learned Japanese will have a better understanding of how to speak French, anyway. ;)
This isn't a very good metaphor, because neither the French nor the Japanese dictionaries are locked up in Redmond.
Don't you think it likely that programmers-in-training who have access to all the guts of an operating system are going to be more knowledgeable about programming than specialists who only get a peek at the guts on a need-to-know basis? And remember, we're talking about high school students here, who are notoriously hostile to authority, especially when authority says NO.
Here's another metaphor for you. Who's more likely to learn, the student who gets access to all the books in the library, or the one who only gets access to a shelf of dumbed-down Nancy Drew mysteries?
This seems a bit of an overgeneralization. As a counterexample, my kids are using a box I fished out of a Dumpster. The drives and memory had been stripped but it still had a motherboard and a Celeron 366. I put in a 128 MB stick and drives from an even older box. I did replace the video card with a cheap GeForce 2 from Circuit City, but all in all the system cost me under $80 to revive.
It's set up to dualboot Win98 (the kids like to play games and they're perfectly happy playing such over-the-hill stuff as Quake II and Tombraider) and Mandrake 9.0. I have to say that while I've always used Redhat for my serious stuff, I'm impressed with Mandrake 9.0
X runs pretty snappy, so far as I can tell. I can't tell any difference in the GUI's apparent speediness between the kid box and my much newer work machine. Anyway, my point is that unless you're doing heavy development, editing video or doing a lot of graphic work, a machine like the kid box would be good enough for many if not most users. One of the things I really like about Linux is that most of the distros run just fine on old machines that wouldn't work very well with, say, XP.
Or maybe I'm completely wrong.
You may be right, but I think I can tell you where the confusion arises. So many of our fascists these days prefer to call themselves conservatives; it's no wonder people make that mistake. But true conservatives have no one but themselves to blame. They seem to be afraid to point to someone who styles himself a "conservative" and identify him as what he actually is.
None of us should be surprised by this lack of bravery among conservatives, especially among the young ones. Few young conservatives have seen any military service, and many have the faces of men who as boys were afraid to play tetherball.
I wish that were true, but not a lot of Democrats support the 2nd Amendment. Many Democrats are as rabid on the War of Drugs as any Republican, and the WoD is probably the greatest threat to the Constitution in the last 100 years or so. It's completely destroyed the 4th Amendment, and it's making inroads on several other important elements of the Bill of Rights.
The sad fact is that neither the Republicans or the Democrats have any great respect for the Constitution. Both parties seem to view the Constitution as an inconvenient obstacle to whatever goofy social agenda their constituents like at the moment.
Truth-in-labelling is really a libertarian idea. In other words, buy copy-protected music if you like, but you should at least be allowed to know what you're buying. No force, no fraud, the holy duality.
(Disclaimer) I'm not a doctrinaire libertarian-- for example, I don't think we should sell the National Parks to Disney. But the major parties need to start being just a little more concerned with liberty, or pretty soon there won't be any left.
In theory, I agree. Unfortunately, I fear this is a false dichotomy. We won't be given this choice. The Feds would be looking for them under everyone's beds even if they could somehow be sure they'd caught all the Bad Guys before they got past the border. Because, you know, the Enemies of the State (TM) are everywhere.
There's another big advantage to this sort of just-in-time manufacturing. There was a Supreme Court decision in 1979 that changed the publishing industry, known as Thor Power Tools. In brief, it makes it more expensive (taxwise) for publishers to keep books (or CDs) in a warehouse. So they are motivated to pulp them much sooner than was the case before Thor.
So print-on-demand schemes like this are probably the future of publishing, and it'll likely happen quicker with music than with books, because the traditional CD is a less-entrenched cultural artifact than the traditional book.
Also, other economies are possible. It would be much cheaper to send the files out to music stores and burn the CDs at the store. Much more efficient shipping model.
I think it's already happened. The best example I know is the Media Awareness Project. This is a web site that posts news stories and other media pieces related to the war on drugs-- pro or con. They have a network of folks who find such stories and post them to the site, and other folks who write letters to the editor whenever they see a story they disagree with. Odd things happen. It's interesting, for example, to see the reaction of small podunk newspapers who suddenly receive a few dozen irate letters in response to what they thought was a perfectly acceptable and innocuous editorial. Say, something everyone in the community can get behind, like "All Drug Users Must Be Shot On Sight!" It's funny, because for a few days the editors go around preening themselves in the mistaken belief that their writing was so powerful that it attracted international attention. They're invariably crestfallen and embarassed when they find out that it was just a web site that brought them their brief notoriety.
I suppose the moral here is that the web has to connect to some real-world media structures to affect those who don't rely on the web for their news.
I'm not pro-war. But I'm 100% anti-peaceniks.
Then I guess it's not completely evil for me to hope that, by some strange science fiction manifestation of karma, you find yourself fleeing across the desert, dodging angry Iraqui bullets.
Here's my story. See if you can figure out why I find it annoying that people who have never sacrificed anything for their "beliefs" can judge the motivations of others in so shallow a manner.
When I was a young man, the "peaceniks" tried to talk me out of going to Vietnam. I went anyway. A year in that sunny clime convinced me that while some wars might be morally justified, that one sure as hell wasn't. With less than a year to go on my hitch, I was ordered back to SE Asia with my squadron. I refused to go. There was great puzzlement among my squadron officers, since I had been ordered to Bangkok, Thailand, which at that time was the land of milk and honeys, the favored destination for GIs leaving Vietnam for R&R. There didn't appear to be any explanation for my bizarre behavior, other than a genuine belief that dropping bombs on the Vietnamese was immoral. However, as was their duty, my officers busted me out with a bad discharge, I lost my various GI entitlements, and here I am, just a few years short of my retirement move to a cardboard box.
Now, strangely enough, I'm not bitter. I knew what I was doing and what I would lose, and I know I was lucky not to spend time in Leavenworth for my beliefs. But it does piss me off to hear shallow real-politik arguments bereft of any moral component used against people who are doing what they think is right. Hey, maybe if I hadn't refused to go hang bombs on F-111s in Bangkok, maybe we'd have "won" the war in Vietnam. You think? Naw, probably not. It was late 1972, the war was lost, and the F-111s were broke most of time they were over there. I think it's a shame that I and the other "peaceniks" didn't quit fighting a few years earlier. Might have saved a few hundred thousand lives, American and Vietnamese.
The point is that the "peaceniks" are making a moral choice. Even if you don't agree with their choice, they deserve more admiration and consideration than a gaggle of grasping pinhead politicians who are making the decision for purely utilitarian purposes.
Finally, a little quote from a speech last fall by Sen. Byrd: "Representative Abraham Lincoln, in a letter to William H. Herndon, stated: 'Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose - - and you allow him to make war at pleasure.'"
Don't answer me. Answer Abraham.
I fail to see how this will help. If I'm a terrorist who wants to unleash an ebola epedemic, and I don't already know how to culture the virus (easiest way that occurs to me would be to kidnap a hundred hookers, infect them, and then turn them loose) I'd just capture a "legitimate researcher" and wire his nads to a field telephone. He'd tell me all about it.
I'm deeply suspicious of censorship, even self-censorship, even when the motivations appear at first glance to be admirable. At second glance, the consequences are often unforeseen. For example, in the example given by the poster above, you have restricted knowledge to those who are approved by the government. As I pointed out, it won't keep a dedicated and clever terrorist from getting the information. However, it will prevent some folks from having the information who might do good things with it-- perhaps the researcher who might have used the knowledge to come up with a new way of interrupting a disease vector, if only she'd had ready access to the data. But maybe she's a Muslim, and she criticized the administration, and so she didn't make the approved list. Laws that restrict information, whether medical data or porn, only keep the law-abiding from getting that information. And you're kidding yourself if you think self-censorship by the journals would not rapidly evolve into iron-clad and draconian censorship laws the first time something goes wrong and people get hurt by misused information.
Open source believers take note: which is the more efficient software development model-- an open-ended framework where anyone can contribute code, or a closed model where only a select few are allowed to contribute code? And how much more inefficient would the latter approach be if such difficult-to-quantify concepts as patriotism, jingoism, and wartime secrecy were mixed in?
Consider, finally, the stupidities that ensued when the government classified PGP as "munitions," and prohibited its distribution to foreigners. Censorship is futile, stupid, and destructive.
Sometimes I think there are no more Einar Skinnarlands, at least not in America. On my cynical days, I think that if another Hitler came to power, no one would even attempt to stop him.
Let's examine the evidence. Since Vietnam, our inconclusive proxy war with World Communism, we haven't exactly made a habit of fighting Good Wars. Take the last Gulf War, for example. We mobilized the troops to throw Saddam out of our Kuwaiti friends' oil fields. Bush Sr. liked to call it a battle for freedom and democracy, somehow failing to mention that Kuwaiti was the personal property of a few aristocratic Arabs and that there was no more democracy in Kuwait than in, say, General Motors. Sure Saddam is a monster, but he's a small-time monster. Mao was a bigtime monster, and his regime is still in power. They have weapons of mass destruction and it's doubtful they'd hesitate to use them if pressed. Why aren't we worried about the "Chinese threat," and their various crimes against humanity?
Other actions during this time? Panama, Grenada, Haiti? Not serious. There are still thousands of drug-corrupted generals in Central and South America, there's still no democracy in Haiti, and Grenada is a bad joke. And consider Somalia, Bush Sr.'s lovely parting gift to Clinton. There we had a clearcut (if pointless) humanitarian mission, but when we took a few casualties it was Sayonara Somalia.
Bosnia really wasn't our finest hour. We did bomb the Chinese, something we've never dared to do to them in China.
What really disturbs me are the true horrors we neglected during the dying days of the Soviet. There were genocides in Uganda and Rwanda, and we didn't do anything. Millions died. It was far worse than anything Saddam has ever done.
So I don't know. If The Ashcrofts and Poindexters have their way and we end up living in a nation where the trains run on time, will there be any Skinnermans or Schindlers among us? Or are those days, and those kinds of men gone forever?