Now, look: Earlier there were posters complaining about Moore implying things he wanted you to believe so that he couldn't be held accountable for them.
What have you done? You've linked to some people claiming one or two factual errors in his previous movie inessential to the point and sort of suggested that that must mean everything in this current movie must be false.
Amusingly, this joke originated with Jack Kemp, about Bob Dole ("Bob Dole's library burned down..."). Years later Kemp was picked as Dole's running mate in the 1996 presidential election.
The trick to getting people into "hostile interview" segments is this little rhetorical gem:
Hi, can I interview you for ${PARENT_COMPANY} ?
How do you think the Daily Show gets all those people to talk to them? They say they're doing a segment for "Viacom" or "MTV", and technically it's true since those are both Comedy Central parent companies. Howard Stern's make-fun-of-people-on-the-street interviewers use "Can I interview you for WCBS radio?" and so on.
(Incidentally, the other trick is the "We want to help you get out your side of the story" which I'm sure TDS uses when they interview spammers and those Flat Earth Society people.)
Alright, so maybe I was a bit snippy just now, but I think I can describe how the value of a piece of software does increase if there are more people using it.
Example: I use Redhat because it's by far the most popular. As a result, there are many more channels of free support, any number of well-populated IRC chat rooms, a number free redhat manuals out there people have written. If I do a search on google for a problem I'm having, chances are google can find a forum post out there going over how to fix it.
People at work give give it respect because they've heard of it. We can buy support if we need it. If I mention it to our CEO, he'll babble to me for a while about how the RHAT stock is doing. I was able to move our file servers to Linux because people trusted the Redhat name.
Now that may not be the only determinant of value, and it may be that it differs from product to product (especially consumer apps versus ones written by and for developers) but I think that it's pretty plain to see that that value does increase with size of user base.
near-zero marginal costs, average cost declines to near-zero, and there are network externalities in several different areas.
Translation: the cost of copying software is ~0 per unit, if including the investment cost of developing it will slowly average down to ~0, and the value of a piece of software increases with how popular it is (amount of support available, interoperability with other kinds of software or hardware, having everyone know the same thing, being "the standard" everone is supposed to be familiar with, all of which feed back into each other).
If you take the position that software is a natural monopoly like the phone company used to be, then it only makes sense that it should be socialized rather than trying to regulate it into behaving (like they used to try to do with the phone company).
I recall a story (I don't know if it was actually true or not) about some old, poor women whose car was hit and fatally damaged by a meteorite. She thought she was ruined... of course, in a short manner of time someone wanted to pay a $impressive_sum_of_money for it, and, uh, she lived happily ever after or something like that.
That couch is quite an artifact, and he could probably get not a small amount for it.
I have a PDA. I keep in my pocket all the time. It's been tremendously convenient to keep it around. It's a little side-bound reporter's notebook I bought at CVS for $0.89. I keep a pen stuck in the spiral coil.
Advantages:
Costs 500-900 times less than a PDA
Unlimited battery power
Small, and actually flexible so it's more comfortable in your pocket
Much easier to write in and read out of than a PDA
Unique "page" system can contain any kind of information, stored in a particualr 3-dimensional space so you can easily remember where you wrote any particular thing.
Easily replaced at minimal cost
I am at pains to think of any way in which this rather pedestrian thing has any serious disadvantages over a real PDA. Anything of unlosable importance I copy into my personal wiki or addressbook.yahoo.com. Sure, I've thought about buying a real PDA! I settled on this because I didn't want to get some $300 device lost or stolen on a trip I was taking across Europe (that's what my iPod is for). Some people seem to have etched into their brains that (newer + more expensive + more "advanced") must always == better. Well, I'm here to tell you it's not always the case. Maybe having a PDA just encourages you to keep good habits, and you were drawn into it because you thought it was cool, but you could actually do the same thing more efficiently using something rather old and traditional and inexpensive.
I personally would much rather somebody came up with a longhand way to do real regexps. The current way (ie, just one string with some special characters) made sense until people started making much more complicated regexp parsers... now we have to re-use special characters, like the ? can mean 0 or 1 or it can mean non-greedy, or it can mean four other different things depending on where it's used...
I'd much rather have it written out for me in the code what a particular thing is doing, rather than trying to figure out which of the eight different meanings a particular ? could be, much less any of the other pantheon of single-character meaningful regexp modifiers. It's difficult to look up a single character somethingorother like that in a manual. On the other hand, a function name I can look up easily (in the case of php, just type in php.net/function_name and you've got complete documentation in two seconds).
The same finding holds for much of the perl language. The thought in mind for a lot of perl's syntax design is to omit as writing much as possible. The implicit $_, the unless rather than if not, abbreviated versions of everything, like q//, qq//, qx//, etc. The problem is you can't look up something that's been omitted because you don't know what to look for. When exactly can I use the $_ variable? When a program says "shift;", I can't just look up "shift" in the perl manual somewhere, I have to already know about how @_ works in order to understand what the program is doing. I mean, sure, if you already know perl backwards and forwards, and you're the only one that's ever going to see its internals, then I guess it makes sense for you, but for everything else it doesn't.
Don't forget that humans have terrific endurance... sure, a cheetah can burst up to 60 mph, but it can't keep that up for more than 20-30 seconds. In contrast, a human being can run 26 miles in 2.5 hours, and keep running all day.
No other land animal appears to be able to do this. The Tour de France lasts 22 days for a distance of 2,077 miles (info).
The only difference may be the conscious will to be able to make (much less train) ourselves to do it.
Why are we still so full of ourselves and continue to describe ourselves as the crown of evolution while we decimate other species and commit atrocities unknown to any other species on this planet
Because we can do it much better than any other species could ever dream!
I just reverted some pages on my watch list on Wikipedia that had been edited with a google spam bot to link all sorts of words back to its mother site.... lots of mistakes, looked like the script they were using hadn't been tested that well yet. (Would post an example, but wikipedia is completely fuxx0red at the moment).
This may become a big problem for sites like this. The only solution might be one of those annoying "write down the letters in this generated gif" humanity tests.
We've had the opportunity and the ability to deliver "rich client experience in the browser" for five years (Flash, Java, DHTML, ActiveX), and users/execs haven't demanded it yet.
I think the problem isn't that user's don't want it; it's that these technologies are totally unreliably and really don't work if you expect more than three different kinds of browsers visiting your site.
A couple years ago, sites like my.aol.com and my.yahoo.com tried to go into a heavily-laden DHTML interface... only to have to take it down a couple of weeks later because it simply did not work properly for a large proportion of their users.
I don't necessarily agree with what the DOJ is doing -- and I certainly don't trust a man like John Ashcroft who thinks that smoking, drinking and dancing are immoral as Attorney General of the United States, but I do disagree with the connection between the topic of this post -- bandwidth of porn -- and the DOJ investigating it. It's ridiculous.
Slashdot Mirror
What have you done? You've linked to some people claiming one or two factual errors in his previous movie inessential to the point and sort of suggested that that must mean everything in this current movie must be false.
Why can't they just use a bubble sort?
Amusingly, this joke originated with Jack Kemp, about Bob Dole ("Bob Dole's library burned down..."). Years later Kemp was picked as Dole's running mate in the 1996 presidential election.
Example: I use Redhat because it's by far the most popular. As a result, there are many more channels of free support, any number of well-populated IRC chat rooms, a number free redhat manuals out there people have written. If I do a search on google for a problem I'm having, chances are google can find a forum post out there going over how to fix it.
People at work give give it respect because they've heard of it. We can buy support if we need it. If I mention it to our CEO, he'll babble to me for a while about how the RHAT stock is doing. I was able to move our file servers to Linux because people trusted the Redhat name.
Now that may not be the only determinant of value, and it may be that it differs from product to product (especially consumer apps versus ones written by and for developers) but I think that it's pretty plain to see that that value does increase with size of user base.
Which is why I obviously meant market value, not the value to any given individual.
Translation: the cost of copying software is ~0 per unit, if including the investment cost of developing it will slowly average down to ~0, and the value of a piece of software increases with how popular it is (amount of support available, interoperability with other kinds of software or hardware, having everyone know the same thing, being "the standard" everone is supposed to be familiar with, all of which feed back into each other).
Problems like cell phones?
If you take the position that software is a natural monopoly like the phone company used to be, then it only makes sense that it should be socialized rather than trying to regulate it into behaving (like they used to try to do with the phone company).
That couch is quite an artifact, and he could probably get not a small amount for it.
- Advantages:
- Costs 500-900 times less than a PDA
- Unlimited battery power
- Small, and actually flexible so it's more comfortable in your pocket
- Much easier to write in and read out of than a PDA
- Unique "page" system can contain any kind of information, stored in a particualr 3-dimensional space so you can easily remember where you wrote any particular thing.
- Easily replaced at minimal cost
I am at pains to think of any way in which this rather pedestrian thing has any serious disadvantages over a real PDA. Anything of unlosable importance I copy into my personal wiki or addressbook.yahoo.com. Sure, I've thought about buying a real PDA! I settled on this because I didn't want to get some $300 device lost or stolen on a trip I was taking across Europe (that's what my iPod is for). Some people seem to have etched into their brains that (newer + more expensive + more "advanced") must always == better. Well, I'm here to tell you it's not always the case. Maybe having a PDA just encourages you to keep good habits, and you were drawn into it because you thought it was cool, but you could actually do the same thing more efficiently using something rather old and traditional and inexpensive.I'd much rather have it written out for me in the code what a particular thing is doing, rather than trying to figure out which of the eight different meanings a particular ? could be, much less any of the other pantheon of single-character meaningful regexp modifiers. It's difficult to look up a single character somethingorother like that in a manual. On the other hand, a function name I can look up easily (in the case of php, just type in php.net/function_name and you've got complete documentation in two seconds).
The same finding holds for much of the perl language. The thought in mind for a lot of perl's syntax design is to omit as writing much as possible. The implicit $_, the unless rather than if not, abbreviated versions of everything, like q//, qq//, qx//, etc. The problem is you can't look up something that's been omitted because you don't know what to look for. When exactly can I use the $_ variable? When a program says "shift;", I can't just look up "shift" in the perl manual somewhere, I have to already know about how @_ works in order to understand what the program is doing. I mean, sure, if you already know perl backwards and forwards, and you're the only one that's ever going to see its internals, then I guess it makes sense for you, but for everything else it doesn't.
Was Alexis de Tocqueville ever a hired goon?
No other land animal appears to be able to do this. The Tour de France lasts 22 days for a distance of 2,077 miles (info).
The only difference may be the conscious will to be able to make (much less train) ourselves to do it.
Because we can do it much better than any other species could ever dream!
Better do it in a non-swing state so you don't have a chance of actually affecting the national election.
If this happens, the temptation to filter or otherwise control use of access falls directly to political authorities. File this one under bad idea.
Start on the wiki here
Wouldn't that be equally abused?
This may become a big problem for sites like this. The only solution might be one of those annoying "write down the letters in this generated gif" humanity tests.
I think the problem isn't that user's don't want it; it's that these technologies are totally unreliably and really don't work if you expect more than three different kinds of browsers visiting your site.
A couple years ago, sites like my.aol.com and my.yahoo.com tried to go into a heavily-laden DHTML interface... only to have to take it down a couple of weeks later because it simply did not work properly for a large proportion of their users.
I don't necessarily agree with what the DOJ is doing -- and I certainly don't trust a man like John Ashcroft who thinks that smoking, drinking and dancing are immoral as Attorney General of the United States, but I do disagree with the connection between the topic of this post -- bandwidth of porn -- and the DOJ investigating it. It's ridiculous.
Yes, because one of the DOJ's stated goals is to make sure internet bandwidth isn't overloaded.
Microsoft
You may also be interested in the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution's Disinfopedia page