Drivers are also probably included in the Linux total but not in the windows total as MS doesn't write many of the drivers people use. I skimmed the PDF but I didn't see mention of the fact that often (in Ubuntu at least) one vulnerability will trigger many updated packages. Ghostscript recently got a patch and I got like 8 updates out of it, all of them with the same vulnerability cited as the reason. I think this is done because it is better to make sure packages that depend on an updated package are updated as well, or because a patch forces an interface change that requires that packages that use that interface be modified as well. It would be good to know if the total includes all 8 of those.
I think a fair comparison would be to take a Dell computer that can be configured with either windows or linux and compare the vulnerabilities for a year. It would be interesting since he claims he is trying to compare what "most users" would do. Most users would leave a bunch of crap installed by Dell on their computers. That would require lots of work though as you would have to track dozens of software vendors (many of whom might not even release patches, but that is beside the point). One of the fatal flaws of a Linux distribution (from a PR standpoint) is that it always airs its dirty laundry and makes it very easy to find each and every vulnerability no matter how trivial.
My guess is the vostro in question, while still a great deal, comes with a Core 2 Duo at 1.4GHz. At least, that is what the one I bought last year came with. It was a pretty great promotion Dell was doing with free shipping and 2G of ram. Also, mine at least didn't have bluetooth or a webcam. Those things weren't important.
I think Lunar 2 did this correctly, at least on the Sega CD. You could save anywhere outside of combat but you spent magic points in order to do it. These points are what you used to level up certain spells, so by saving too often you made the game more difficult. Still, if you had to stop playing, you could sacrifice the points and just fight a couple of extra battles when you started playing again to even the score. It made the game less tiresome to play (you never felt like going into a dungeon meant you would be chained to your TV for the next half hour) but also made it less beneficial for you to save every five minutes. This only works in games in which you accumulate things like experience points or money. It would make it really annoying if you lost ammo or something in a shooter every time you saved.
My questions is, what happens if you don't install the IE plugin when you install Quicktime? Does IE then hand the file off to regular quicktime, thus allowing the attack to proceed? Does IE7 have some system in place to only allow filetype handlers that are plugins? Or does it also manage external programs that it executes? Just curious.
Odd, I love the dock. It is in fact the one part of Mac OS X I can't do without. When I'm in Linux (which I've been using since Slackware 96 came out), I find myself searching far and wide for a dock like panel replacement every few months. I hate that all the dock like programs out there just want to mimic the look and not the feel. Then again, up until recently, I was strictly a window maker kind of guy. I like then when I want to launch an app, I click on its icon. When I want to bring a running instance of an app into focus, I click on that same icon. It makes sense.
I think it only doesn't make sense if you want it to work like Windows. The taskbar in windows by the way is horrible. If you run more than 5 programs at a time, the information it displays is completely worthless. Give me the dock and expose anyday over that travesty.
The finder, I don't know, it works fine for me most of the time. I find most graphical file managers to be annoying. The best I've seen is rox, but even that has its drawbacks. I've never understood the complaints about the finder. I agree though, I like more power in my file managers. Still, if they got rid of the dock, I'd probably stop upgrading OS X.
I loved both the book and the movie. What was really impressive was that Scott was able to make a movie of the book, that didn't feel like it was following along just to be faithful to the source material, and yet still was able to tease out some meaning. I also find it interesting that it is one of the few films where TV censorship actually adds something to the film. When the replicants finally confront Tyrell and Batty says "More life Fucker!". In the television edit, they change it to "More life father!" Usually I hate the edited versions, but I think I like this more. It really brings thing back to the real point of the film, the human condition. Some how it also seems more angry. Here is this guy about to die, angrily confronting his father/God. He doesn't know what the point was and spent all his life as a slave, but in the end, he wants more. 4 years or 80 years, we're all here for a limited amount of time. Nobody knows when they'll die, and for many, it haunts them.
You're right that the western idea of "urban" is not what we're seeing here. Added to the prevelance of smaller towns, we also have to look at slums. Worldwide there are hundreds of cities with populations over one million. Slums are absorbing much of this shift. By 2015 there will be 550 cities with more than one million people. The UN estimates that over a billion people live in slums currently. Most of these urbanites worldwide will not be living in cities like New York or London, but they will be living in cities like Rio and Lagos. They will be camped out on eroding hillsides or huddled in shantytowns. Mike Davis wrote a great little book about this called Planet of Slums. What is so sad about this shift is that the new urbanization has little to do with industrialization. People are moving to the city to be a part of informal economies, because the rural lifestyles they're leaving behind aren't doing it for them. They aren't being lured to the city by opportunity, but instead being driven from the countryside by poverty.
From the New York Times article: "When he put the Hatto CD of the Liszt études into his computer, Mr. Inverne recounted, "his iTunes player identified the disc as, yes, the Liszts, but not a Hatto recording." Instead, it identified Mr. Simon as the performer." http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/17/arts/music/17hat t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
I don't know if any of the articles linked in the submission mentioned it or not (I guess they didn't). My guess is that the submitter read it in the news paper, then searched online and found an article that was very similar, then submitted it without actually reading the article they were submitting.
This isn't about speech. Nobody was saying that you can't make wacko right wing statements. All this law was trying to do was make it so that certain lobbying groups couldn't get around lobbying laws. This is all about finances, not speech. If you are being paid millions of dollars to do lobbying work, you shouldn't be shielded from the law just because you pretend that you are an independent, unpaid blow-hard, and not a professional blow-hard. These bloggers can do and say whatever they want, they just have to tell people that they are paid shills. These are paid for political ads we are talking about. Consider for a moment what the reaction would have been like if this law was in response to Democrats paying with New York Times reporters secretly on their campaign payrolls. You can bet that Republican bloggers would be all over it, screaming that their actions constituted political campaigning and should be reported. People keep mistaking this for censorship. Nobody would have been censored. The same statements would have continued. The astroturfing would go on, just as strong and annoying as always. Under this law, you can say whatever the hell you want. You just have to report the money that you are making by saying it, and register as a paid lobbying group. You know why? Because you are a paid lobbying group! If you are getting tens of thousands of dollars from a political campaign to smear another political campaign, you are part of a political campaign.
That part of the bill only applies to organizations that must register in the first place. If you qualify (if you are being paid to blog), then, every time you communicate to more than 500 people, you have to report the money that was involved with that communication. Amazing what happens when you read the entire bill.
Well, then you file a complaint with the fair housing authority if you think you were being discriminated. They open a file on the guy (or more realistically, they look at the file they already have) and if resources allow, they setup a sting operation. Over time they'll send a series of people with the exact same qualifications, some gay, some straight. If the guy consistently rents only to the straight people, they fine him.
except that they put their stamp of disapproval on it by adding the "these results have been censored" disclaimer. As far as I know, MSN and Yahoo! do no such thing.
The OED defines an anti-hero as: One who is the opposite or reverse of a hero; esp. a chief character in a poem, play, or story who is totally unlike a conventional hero.
The OED defines a hero as: 1. Antiq. A name given (as in Homer) to men of superhuman strength, courage, or ability, favoured by the gods; at a later time regarded as intermediate between gods and men, and immortal.
but also as: 2. A man distinguished by extraordinary valour and martial achievements; one who does brave or noble deeds; an illustrious warrior.
so, an anti-hero is the opposite of that. So, a man with subhuman strength, courage, or ability. Or, a man who is distinguished by below average valour and martial achievements. one who does cowardly or ignoble deeds.
I think you mistook my comments for an argument. I wasn't saying we should go after drug users, just that we tend to spend most of our drug fighting money on producers, whereas most of our gun fighting money goes to fighting the users of guns. I merely thought the comment on the DVD was interesting. I made no argument, so I can't possibly be contradicting it. And yes, generally, when we decide that cars are killing too many people, we go after the producers, hence forced recalls and laws requiring the installation of safety belts.
Yeah, cause in this country where we've had the right to bear arms, we didn't ever round up a group of people and imprison them for a few years, right? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manzanar
People in this country seem to forget about this chapter in our history, and how similar it was to a certain chapter in Germany's history. I'm not saying that the United States would ever systematically destroy a group of people like the Nazis did, but on the surface, our 'internment' camps look remarkably similar to Germany's 'concentration' camps. Having a gun only helps you resist tyranny when the people doing it tell you ahead of time.
On the DVD for "City of God", a Brazilian film about the gangs of Rio, the chief of police (I believe that is who he is, though it has been a while since I've seen it) makes some interesting comments about gun control. In America we have the drug problem, rather than work to stop people from using, we spend billions to stop other countries from producing. There is also this gigantic gun problem, yet what have we done to curb the production and import of guns? If we were serious about gun control, there would be some major regulations on Smith & Wesson. If you're going to make a law against something, at least make a law that has a chance of working. Go after the legit guys, the gun makers, instead of the guys who are already intending to break the law.
My wife just bought a PDA, and for her, software had nothing to do with her purchase. The simple fact is that the only palm device that had wifi built in was the ugly Palm Tungsten C that wastes space with the omnipresent physical keyboard. For the same price as a PalmOne device without wifi, a much better Windows based device could be had with wifi. Yes, Sony does make some PalmOS PDAs with wifi, but they are also rather underpowered, or way overpriced. It was very difficult to find a PalmOS powered device that had the right mixture of performance and features. Why PalmOne realeased the T5 without wifi or a voice recorder, I will enver understand. Maybe they couldn't fit them into the case with the massive amount of memory they shoved in there. Anyway, we went with a Dell Axim, $400 with the optional bluetooth keyboard, which is great for taking notes in class. We hated buying a Microsoft powered device, especially since my wife preferred the PalmOS environment. Oh well, maybe they'll get it right with the T6.
So, where would the food be shipped to? To every single home in the country side? Or should we all be producing our own food? There have to be distribution centers. There is that word again, center. Now, if the food for an entire 40,000 person area is coming from the same center, doesn't that pose the same risk as living in a city? Some terrorist cell takes over the food center and tampers with the food supply of an entire area. Or, we could have all food production and processing done in completely different areas of the country, at an enormous cost. And no, utilities have not been solved. They've been worked on, but not solved. That is why most states are currently working on Smart Growth initiatives to try to cut down on the cost of sprawl. Sprawl is expensive, very expensive. Roads, by the way, also need to be maintained. Railroad tracks are necessary for mass transit, unless of course we decide to just destroy our roads by having all 300,000,000 Americans travel them for every task they ever have. Is your vision of non-urban America workable? Of course it is. Is it desirable? No. You still run into major problems. For instance, if all of our activities were dictated by connectivity, then what happens if that connectivity is damaged? The network is vulnerable. It was designed to withstand physical destruction, not internal destruction. Worms cause havic, DDOS attacks can be very damaging. By relying on the network for our conectivity with others, we create a single point of failure. Old people can't get their food or medicine in the event of a majore takedown. Emergency services won't work as well. Especially if they travel on our gridlocked, broken roads.
I'll agree that for some purposes, geography is beginning to matter less, but in some other ways, it is mattering more. The simple fact is that it costs a lot of money to run sewers, roads, railroad tracks, power lines, phone lines, fiber optic lines, etc lines... It is also incredibly expensive to have to hop in your car to go to the grocery store or the dry cleaners. More and more people are wanting to get rid of that, to stop having to get in their car to do everything. Cities allow that. They are more effecient uses of resources than rural life, or even suburban life. Are they a risk? Of course they are, but does it really matter? If we keep spreading out there will be greater risks to contend with, like the continued stress that sprawl will put on our resources and infrastructure.
Also, those things weren't really invented outside of cities. That is, they weren't created in a vaccum, and none of them were all that useful until a whole bunch of people got on board. Ideas can happen anywhere, even basic implimentations, but to have something like that mature requires lots of people from many different fields, and lots of people from the same field. Will technology some day render physical proximity obsolete? Maybe, but it hasn't yet, and I don't think it will for a long time.
isolated incidents. We aren't talking about those. We're talking about movements. The airplane building industry didn't stay in the Wright Brother's bike shop. Now, it is in places like Los Angeles and Seattle. They moved the corporate headquarters of Boeing to Colorado or something like that, but they still build planes where the skilled labor is.
Cities are cheaper to maintain. They also allow for agglomerations and pools of skilled labor. There is a reason that airplanes are made where they are made. There is a reason that certain cities were at the center of the dot-com boom. Boston, Seattle, and San Francisco. MIT, University of Washington, and Stanford/Berkeley. What do they have in common? That's right, top of the line CS schools. Cities are the life blood of our economy. They are much cheaper to maintain than a huge network of rural homes and the physically bring people together, something that is very important to the creation of culture. Yes, great masses of people in single locations is a security risk, but then again, I seem to recall $2,000,000,000 being lost from tiny little programs running around our great decentralized network.
Exactly! Nothing new is in this article. The only thing that has changed is that we exchange ideas over the internet. The world is not drastically different than it was before, and we not inherently more important just because our generation found a new way to steal music. Most of the arguments made in this article could have been made in the 1970s, the 1960s, the 1920s, the 1840s, etc....
The exact opposite is true in the US. The death of many US cities occured between the 50s and the 80s. Look at Philadelphia, a city that lost 500,000 people between the late 1950s and today. Where did they go? New York? Baltimore? yes, some did, but most went to the suburbs. This is happening all over the US. Just as our cars and waist lines are expanding, so are our cities.
At the same time you have a competing effect known as suburbanization. Cities are becoming geographically bigger and therefore are being affected by the whims of the rural. The suburbs have changed the geography of this country at least in a very substantial way. Look at the LA area which is being pulled and stretched in all directions by the suburbs. There is something like 4 downtowns in LA. The global city argument doesn't really seem at all new. Paris and New York have always been linked. They are centers of culture and have always dealt in this currency. We are simply changing the way they do it. Instead of people going back and forth on boats, they do it over the internet.
Slashdot Mirror
Drivers are also probably included in the Linux total but not in the windows total as MS doesn't write many of the drivers people use. I skimmed the PDF but I didn't see mention of the fact that often (in Ubuntu at least) one vulnerability will trigger many updated packages. Ghostscript recently got a patch and I got like 8 updates out of it, all of them with the same vulnerability cited as the reason. I think this is done because it is better to make sure packages that depend on an updated package are updated as well, or because a patch forces an interface change that requires that packages that use that interface be modified as well. It would be good to know if the total includes all 8 of those.
I think a fair comparison would be to take a Dell computer that can be configured with either windows or linux and compare the vulnerabilities for a year. It would be interesting since he claims he is trying to compare what "most users" would do. Most users would leave a bunch of crap installed by Dell on their computers. That would require lots of work though as you would have to track dozens of software vendors (many of whom might not even release patches, but that is beside the point). One of the fatal flaws of a Linux distribution (from a PR standpoint) is that it always airs its dirty laundry and makes it very easy to find each and every vulnerability no matter how trivial.
My guess is the vostro in question, while still a great deal, comes with a Core 2 Duo at 1.4GHz. At least, that is what the one I bought last year came with. It was a pretty great promotion Dell was doing with free shipping and 2G of ram. Also, mine at least didn't have bluetooth or a webcam. Those things weren't important.
I think Lunar 2 did this correctly, at least on the Sega CD. You could save anywhere outside of combat but you spent magic points in order to do it. These points are what you used to level up certain spells, so by saving too often you made the game more difficult. Still, if you had to stop playing, you could sacrifice the points and just fight a couple of extra battles when you started playing again to even the score. It made the game less tiresome to play (you never felt like going into a dungeon meant you would be chained to your TV for the next half hour) but also made it less beneficial for you to save every five minutes. This only works in games in which you accumulate things like experience points or money. It would make it really annoying if you lost ammo or something in a shooter every time you saved.
My questions is, what happens if you don't install the IE plugin when you install Quicktime? Does IE then hand the file off to regular quicktime, thus allowing the attack to proceed? Does IE7 have some system in place to only allow filetype handlers that are plugins? Or does it also manage external programs that it executes? Just curious.
Odd, I love the dock. It is in fact the one part of Mac OS X I can't do without. When I'm in Linux (which I've been using since Slackware 96 came out), I find myself searching far and wide for a dock like panel replacement every few months. I hate that all the dock like programs out there just want to mimic the look and not the feel. Then again, up until recently, I was strictly a window maker kind of guy. I like then when I want to launch an app, I click on its icon. When I want to bring a running instance of an app into focus, I click on that same icon. It makes sense.
I think it only doesn't make sense if you want it to work like Windows. The taskbar in windows by the way is horrible. If you run more than 5 programs at a time, the information it displays is completely worthless. Give me the dock and expose anyday over that travesty.
The finder, I don't know, it works fine for me most of the time. I find most graphical file managers to be annoying. The best I've seen is rox, but even that has its drawbacks. I've never understood the complaints about the finder. I agree though, I like more power in my file managers. Still, if they got rid of the dock, I'd probably stop upgrading OS X.
I loved both the book and the movie. What was really impressive was that Scott was able to make a movie of the book, that didn't feel like it was following along just to be faithful to the source material, and yet still was able to tease out some meaning.
I also find it interesting that it is one of the few films where TV censorship actually adds something to the film. When the replicants finally confront Tyrell and Batty says "More life Fucker!". In the television edit, they change it to "More life father!"
Usually I hate the edited versions, but I think I like this more. It really brings thing back to the real point of the film, the human condition. Some how it also seems more angry. Here is this guy about to die, angrily confronting his father/God. He doesn't know what the point was and spent all his life as a slave, but in the end, he wants more. 4 years or 80 years, we're all here for a limited amount of time. Nobody knows when they'll die, and for many, it haunts them.
You're right that the western idea of "urban" is not what we're seeing here. Added to the prevelance of smaller towns, we also have to look at slums. Worldwide there are hundreds of cities with populations over one million. Slums are absorbing much of this shift. By 2015 there will be 550 cities with more than one million people. The UN estimates that over a billion people live in slums currently. Most of these urbanites worldwide will not be living in cities like New York or London, but they will be living in cities like Rio and Lagos. They will be camped out on eroding hillsides or huddled in shantytowns. Mike Davis wrote a great little book about this called Planet of Slums. What is so sad about this shift is that the new urbanization has little to do with industrialization. People are moving to the city to be a part of informal economies, because the rural lifestyles they're leaving behind aren't doing it for them. They aren't being lured to the city by opportunity, but instead being driven from the countryside by poverty.
From the New York Times article:t t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
"When he put the Hatto CD of the Liszt études into his computer, Mr. Inverne recounted, "his iTunes player identified the disc as, yes, the Liszts, but not a Hatto recording." Instead, it identified Mr. Simon as the performer."
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/17/arts/music/17ha
I don't know if any of the articles linked in the submission mentioned it or not (I guess they didn't). My guess is that the submitter read it in the news paper, then searched online and found an article that was very similar, then submitted it without actually reading the article they were submitting.
This isn't about speech. Nobody was saying that you can't make wacko right wing statements. All this law was trying to do was make it so that certain lobbying groups couldn't get around lobbying laws. This is all about finances, not speech. If you are being paid millions of dollars to do lobbying work, you shouldn't be shielded from the law just because you pretend that you are an independent, unpaid blow-hard, and not a professional blow-hard. These bloggers can do and say whatever they want, they just have to tell people that they are paid shills. These are paid for political ads we are talking about. Consider for a moment what the reaction would have been like if this law was in response to Democrats paying with New York Times reporters secretly on their campaign payrolls. You can bet that Republican bloggers would be all over it, screaming that their actions constituted political campaigning and should be reported.
People keep mistaking this for censorship. Nobody would have been censored. The same statements would have continued. The astroturfing would go on, just as strong and annoying as always. Under this law, you can say whatever the hell you want. You just have to report the money that you are making by saying it, and register as a paid lobbying group. You know why? Because you are a paid lobbying group! If you are getting tens of thousands of dollars from a political campaign to smear another political campaign, you are part of a political campaign.
That part of the bill only applies to organizations that must register in the first place. If you qualify (if you are being paid to blog), then, every time you communicate to more than 500 people, you have to report the money that was involved with that communication. Amazing what happens when you read the entire bill.
Well, then you file a complaint with the fair housing authority if you think you were being discriminated. They open a file on the guy (or more realistically, they look at the file they already have) and if resources allow, they setup a sting operation. Over time they'll send a series of people with the exact same qualifications, some gay, some straight. If the guy consistently rents only to the straight people, they fine him.
except that they put their stamp of disapproval on it by adding the "these results have been censored" disclaimer. As far as I know, MSN and Yahoo! do no such thing.
I feel I should point out that I was mostly poking fun at this whole thread. My interpretation of the OED definitions should be taken as sarcastic.
The OED defines an anti-hero as: One who is the opposite or reverse of a hero; esp. a chief character in a poem, play, or story who is totally unlike a conventional hero.
The OED defines a hero as: 1. Antiq. A name given (as in Homer) to men of superhuman strength, courage, or ability, favoured by the gods; at a later time regarded as intermediate between gods and men, and immortal.
but also as: 2. A man distinguished by extraordinary valour and martial achievements; one who does brave or noble deeds; an illustrious warrior.
so, an anti-hero is the opposite of that. So, a man with subhuman strength, courage, or ability. Or, a man who is distinguished by below average valour and martial achievements. one who does cowardly or ignoble deeds.
I think you mistook my comments for an argument. I wasn't saying we should go after drug users, just that we tend to spend most of our drug fighting money on producers, whereas most of our gun fighting money goes to fighting the users of guns. I merely thought the comment on the DVD was interesting. I made no argument, so I can't possibly be contradicting it. And yes, generally, when we decide that cars are killing too many people, we go after the producers, hence forced recalls and laws requiring the installation of safety belts.
Yeah, cause in this country where we've had the right to bear arms, we didn't ever round up a group of people and imprison them for a few years, right? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manzanar
People in this country seem to forget about this chapter in our history, and how similar it was to a certain chapter in Germany's history. I'm not saying that the United States would ever systematically destroy a group of people like the Nazis did, but on the surface, our 'internment' camps look remarkably similar to Germany's 'concentration' camps. Having a gun only helps you resist tyranny when the people doing it tell you ahead of time.
On the DVD for "City of God", a Brazilian film about the gangs of Rio, the chief of police (I believe that is who he is, though it has been a while since I've seen it) makes some interesting comments about gun control. In America we have the drug problem, rather than work to stop people from using, we spend billions to stop other countries from producing. There is also this gigantic gun problem, yet what have we done to curb the production and import of guns? If we were serious about gun control, there would be some major regulations on Smith & Wesson. If you're going to make a law against something, at least make a law that has a chance of working. Go after the legit guys, the gun makers, instead of the guys who are already intending to break the law.
My wife just bought a PDA, and for her, software had nothing to do with her purchase. The simple fact is that the only palm device that had wifi built in was the ugly Palm Tungsten C that wastes space with the omnipresent physical keyboard. For the same price as a PalmOne device without wifi, a much better Windows based device could be had with wifi. Yes, Sony does make some PalmOS PDAs with wifi, but they are also rather underpowered, or way overpriced. It was very difficult to find a PalmOS powered device that had the right mixture of performance and features.
Why PalmOne realeased the T5 without wifi or a voice recorder, I will enver understand. Maybe they couldn't fit them into the case with the massive amount of memory they shoved in there.
Anyway, we went with a Dell Axim, $400 with the optional bluetooth keyboard, which is great for taking notes in class. We hated buying a Microsoft powered device, especially since my wife preferred the PalmOS environment. Oh well, maybe they'll get it right with the T6.
So, where would the food be shipped to? To every single home in the country side? Or should we all be producing our own food? There have to be distribution centers. There is that word again, center. Now, if the food for an entire 40,000 person area is coming from the same center, doesn't that pose the same risk as living in a city? Some terrorist cell takes over the food center and tampers with the food supply of an entire area. Or, we could have all food production and processing done in completely different areas of the country, at an enormous cost.
And no, utilities have not been solved. They've been worked on, but not solved. That is why most states are currently working on Smart Growth initiatives to try to cut down on the cost of sprawl. Sprawl is expensive, very expensive. Roads, by the way, also need to be maintained. Railroad tracks are necessary for mass transit, unless of course we decide to just destroy our roads by having all 300,000,000 Americans travel them for every task they ever have.
Is your vision of non-urban America workable? Of course it is. Is it desirable? No. You still run into major problems. For instance, if all of our activities were dictated by connectivity, then what happens if that connectivity is damaged? The network is vulnerable. It was designed to withstand physical destruction, not internal destruction. Worms cause havic, DDOS attacks can be very damaging. By relying on the network for our conectivity with others, we create a single point of failure. Old people can't get their food or medicine in the event of a majore takedown. Emergency services won't work as well. Especially if they travel on our gridlocked, broken roads.
I'll agree that for some purposes, geography is beginning to matter less, but in some other ways, it is mattering more. The simple fact is that it costs a lot of money to run sewers, roads, railroad tracks, power lines, phone lines, fiber optic lines, etc lines... It is also incredibly expensive to have to hop in your car to go to the grocery store or the dry cleaners. More and more people are wanting to get rid of that, to stop having to get in their car to do everything. Cities allow that. They are more effecient uses of resources than rural life, or even suburban life. Are they a risk? Of course they are, but does it really matter? If we keep spreading out there will be greater risks to contend with, like the continued stress that sprawl will put on our resources and infrastructure.
Also, those things weren't really invented outside of cities. That is, they weren't created in a vaccum, and none of them were all that useful until a whole bunch of people got on board. Ideas can happen anywhere, even basic implimentations, but to have something like that mature requires lots of people from many different fields, and lots of people from the same field. Will technology some day render physical proximity obsolete? Maybe, but it hasn't yet, and I don't think it will for a long time.
isolated incidents. We aren't talking about those. We're talking about movements. The airplane building industry didn't stay in the Wright Brother's bike shop. Now, it is in places like Los Angeles and Seattle. They moved the corporate headquarters of Boeing to Colorado or something like that, but they still build planes where the skilled labor is.
Cities are cheaper to maintain. They also allow for agglomerations and pools of skilled labor. There is a reason that airplanes are made where they are made. There is a reason that certain cities were at the center of the dot-com boom. Boston, Seattle, and San Francisco. MIT, University of Washington, and Stanford/Berkeley. What do they have in common? That's right, top of the line CS schools. Cities are the life blood of our economy. They are much cheaper to maintain than a huge network of rural homes and the physically bring people together, something that is very important to the creation of culture. Yes, great masses of people in single locations is a security risk, but then again, I seem to recall $2,000,000,000 being lost from tiny little programs running around our great decentralized network.
Exactly! Nothing new is in this article. The only thing that has changed is that we exchange ideas over the internet. The world is not drastically different than it was before, and we not inherently more important just because our generation found a new way to steal music. Most of the arguments made in this article could have been made in the 1970s, the 1960s, the 1920s, the 1840s, etc....
The exact opposite is true in the US. The death of many US cities occured between the 50s and the 80s. Look at Philadelphia, a city that lost 500,000 people between the late 1950s and today. Where did they go? New York? Baltimore? yes, some did, but most went to the suburbs. This is happening all over the US. Just as our cars and waist lines are expanding, so are our cities.
At the same time you have a competing effect known as suburbanization. Cities are becoming geographically bigger and therefore are being affected by the whims of the rural. The suburbs have changed the geography of this country at least in a very substantial way. Look at the LA area which is being pulled and stretched in all directions by the suburbs. There is something like 4 downtowns in LA.
The global city argument doesn't really seem at all new. Paris and New York have always been linked. They are centers of culture and have always dealt in this currency. We are simply changing the way they do it. Instead of people going back and forth on boats, they do it over the internet.