Here's a hypothetical scenario and honest question for you.
Say some development group is offering their open-source product for free download, both the source and compiled binaries, but the two as separate downloads (i.e. one zip file full of source files, one zip with just a binary in it).
Say you download just the binary, and put that together in some zip file with some other files for free download on your site. Say the program is a game engine and you made some data files to run in that engine, a mod, and you don't want your users to have to download the engine separate from your data files, for their convenience. You haven't touched, seen or even downloaded the source.
Can you then redistribute that package, and if anybody asks for the source, point them to the developers' site? Or must you also host/distribute the source? Also, what of superficial modifications to the binary, like changing the name of the executable to the name of your mod project, or changing the icon to match the icons of all your data files? Not claiming the engine as your own or anything; you leave in all the original credits, just change the appearance of the executable file in the user's Finder/Explorer window.
Basically, how far can a content creator who's never seen a line of code in his life use the binary from an open source project in a free (as in beer and as in speech) project of his own, without violating the GPL?
She seems to be using "worries" as a noun, the plural of a single "worry"; specifically, the kind of worry which is regarding electronic voting. In other words, 'Politicians think [that] worries-about-electronic-voting are...'
Similar sentences: I think troubles with understanding each other are the root of all miscommunication. I think fears about terrorism are largely unfounded in modern day America. I think acts of nature are causing much larger problems.
"Worry", "trouble", "fear", and "act" can all be verbs ('that worries him', 'this troubles me', 'she fears that', 'they act out') or nouns ('He has many worries', 'I have many troubles', 'Her fears are unfounded', 'Their acts were irrational').
The end and rebirth of the world is not a matter of failure or victory, it's just what happens. Every Long Count (52,000 years), the world is "reborn" - this one comes to an end and another one begins. This date range is actually based on stellar movement, although as I recall there are a lot of amazing "coincidences" about such stellar movement too - the Mayans based it off of planetary positions, as everything in the solar system should be in the same place at two dates exactly 52,000 years apart, but also the Milankovitch (sp?) cycle, the wobble of the Earth's axis, lasts 26,000 years, so two of them is a single Long Count, and IIRC either 26,000 or 52,000 years is also something like the amount of time it takes for the galaxy to rotate once or some such. It's been a while since I researched it but it's all just stellar movement, nothing mystical about it.
The date is December 21, 2012, by the way. We've got two months and two days until the End Times begin. (Yes yes, I'm crossing mythologies now, so sue me, it's an old hobby).
Here's my take on this whole "last mile" problem: I liken wires to roads, or train lines. They're all just kinds of networks.
Possibility one, you could leave it up to a free market and individual private entities to buy land and run wires/roads how and where they feel like it (i.e. wherever it will profit them). They then have the right to use these wires/road that they built for whatever reason they please and charge whatever they feel like, which, if this is really a profitable venture they are going in to, will be whatever the market will bare, i.e. just enough to undercut the competition. This will keep prices as low as feasible wherever the wires/roads are run, but has the down side that anybody using the network has to pay for use, and it's not going to be profitable for the road/wire-runners to run them out to the boondocks - and of course almost nobody in the boondocks can afford to pay for a wire or road to be run out to them especially.
Possibility two, you could have we the people, the public, acting through the government, demand that the roads/wires be run everywhere equally, and pony up the tax money to buy the land and resources and labor needed to do so. This network now belongs to the public and is thus "free" to use, its creation and maintenance paid for in taxes, and thus the wealthy and those in (what would in a free market be called) more profitable areas are subsidizing the poor and the people who live out in the middle of nowhere, but everybody's got equal access to the network now and apparently enough people wanted that that they were willing to pay for it. (Presuming that your democracy here actually works as advertised).
Possibility three, We The People pay up front for the installation of the network, run out to the last mile so that everyone's got equal access, and then charge for wire access to the private entities who wish to provide some sort of service over this network (someone wants to run trains along our tracks, someone wants to broadcast TV over our cables, etc). These private entities then charge their customers for their service plus what they had to pay for network access, which should just be the cost the govt pays for maintenance of the lines, so in essence the customer pays the service price plus a network maintenance fee. So the network is publicly owned but what runs on the network is privately owned.
This last possibility raises an interesting question now in my mind - what service exactly are the telecom companies providing? As I understand it the installation of the lines has been largely funded by taxpayer dollars, so what have they to charge us for? Maintenance? If the government paid for the lines, shouldn't the government OWN the lines and pay the telcos for the service of maintaining them, the same as the government often pays construction companies for road maintenance contracts? In other words, shouldn't we the people be paying a network maintenance tax, and have free access to the lines, instead of paying government-granted telecom monopolies for use of lines we paid for? (Which really amounts to about the same thing, I guess).
My mind isn't so clear right now, but it's seeming more and more to me that this third option doesn't actually exist. If the lines of a network (of any sort) are privately run and funded, then those who ran them have the right to charge or do with them whatever they please. If they were publicly run and funded, they they should be free for everyone (libre and gratis) and paid for via taxes. Service providers operating over the network are paying to use the network and charging their customers as appropriate - if I'm running a shipping business across the highway network, then I'm paying gas tax (which covers road maintenance) the same as anyone else, and passing that cost on to my customers. And I'm running an e-business server on the Internet, I'm paying for network access the same as anyone else and passing that cost on to my customers too.
But if we the people paid for the network in taxes, and t
I've heard a different version of this same hypothesis. I don't recall where from, it was years ago, but whoever put it forth intended it seriously, not as fiction.
The notion that I heard was more closely related to the Big Splash you mention and less related to Mars. It held that another planetoid, not Mars, once held a highly eccentric orbit which crossed those of both Earth and Mars. It was this planetoid which collided with Earth and formed the moon, and the remnants of the broken planetoid eventually settled into orbits out past Mars to become the asteroid belt.
No idea how scientifically feasible this is, but that's the hypothesis as I heard it.
A browser plugin should be a single file that goes in a plugins folder. An application should be a self-contained package that can live anywhere on the system. You shouldn't have to RUN a program to ADD a program to your system - why can the installer program live and run self-contained wherever it is, but other programs have to be 'installed'? Nothing you're installing besides security updates and other OS patches should need to stick files all over the place and modify settings everywhere.
Get rid of the notion of installers, and you get rid of installers putting malicious stuff on your system. Give the user the program. Let them stick it wherever they want. You've still got a possibility for trojan horses, I suppose, but with proper security they shouldn't be able to write to anything outside of userland without at least a password prompt.
I guess the point I'm trying to make is, the system should be transparent and simple. When you've got a complex, tangled mess of invisible (files / dependencies / tasks / settings / etc), all hidden behind an "easy" face that's just plastered over the mess, then you're going to hit problems because the "easy" interface isn't really what's going on on the system. Things are hidden and so the user isn't really in control of their system - how can we expect users to be aware of what's going on with their computers when we try so hard to hide it from them? And if you're about to say that the real workings are too complex, users could never understand them - THERE'S YOUR PROBLEM.
Make the system simple, modular, transparent. Like protected memory - every app runs in its own sandbox and can't write over all the others. Maybe we need some buzzword to make clueless users and equally clueless developers aware of the importance of having "protected file structures" - every app (by which I mean userland things like Word and Photoshop) is its own self-contained package and isn't spewing its shit all over the system. No hidden files, no hidden processes, let users see what's going on, and make what's going on simple enough for them to grok.
Then and only then can we expect users to be able to avoid social engineering.
You want a good example of an OS going strongly in this direction, take a look at OS X. And this 'everything-is-self-contained-and-doesn't-spew-shi t-everywhere' concept is a traditional thing in the Mac world. This isn't something new, just something that the mainstream hasn't done. I think it's time, as Mac and Windows have caught up to Unix in the world of protected memory and real multitasking, that Windows and Unix catch up to the Mac in the world of sane and modular file organization structures. (And yes, I'm aware that OSX, being unix-based, shares some of the same messy tangles as unixes, just with a pretty face slapped over it. And yes, that bothers me).
How about open and frank discussions about sex so that 14 year old boys are able to categorize crazy porn right up there with Buggs bunny in terms of unrealistic vrs realistic and so that 14 year old girls don't get the idea that wanting sex is something they are not supposed to ever admit lest every one think they are a skanky slut.
Your wish is this book's command. To quote from the page itself:
"How To Be The Best Lover - A Guide for Teenage Boys' is the first book that dares to tell teenage boys the deep truth about lovemaking and teenage sexuality. For young men who are coming of age, 'How To Be The Best Lover' is an important threshold in their rites of passage. Going beyond the sex talk, 'Best Lover' fills in the gulf between what I call the birds and the bees or 'Sex 101' books and the adult technique manuals. 'Best Lover' introduces teenagers to the heart of relationships - not shying away from telling them about oral sex or making love while at the same time introducing them to the complexities and responsibilities involved when you open yourself up to another person on this level. Best Lover has been hailed as a breakthrough in sex education by some of the leaders in the parenting field. 'Best Lover' explores the territory of relationships, danger zones, passion, responsibility, teenage sex and the commitment that comes from opening up your heart on this level with another person. "
Re:If, so this would be a huge boon for slashdot..
on
Has Google Peaked?
·
· Score: 1
...a once-romantic company like Google making the transition from dewey-cheeked lass to, well, a grown-up company...
It's not so much the fun we'll have watching certain G-accolytes feeling betrayed....
I find it humorously appropriate that as I read through this post of yours, my iTunes random playlist switched to one of the sadder, more tragic tracks from the "Revenge of the Sith" soundtrack.:-)
Imagine if I popped these pills before studying for organic chemistry in college. Now I'd be having flashbacks of acid/base interactions and other useless trivia while I try to go about my daily job.
So if you'd had access to better drugs in college, you might be having acid flashbacks today?
he only credit I give to Microsoft is for recognizing the importance of shared data and capitalizing on it....and then doing everything in their power to make sure that advantage didn't exist for anybody else.
Seriously? Microsoft, shared *anything*? Microsoft hasn't made anything shared or open in their entire history. They took advantage of a (forcibly) opened platform, or rather were lucky the platform they ran on top of was forcibly opened and thus grew rapidly, and then did everything they could to make sure that everything running on top of that platform was all theirs.
The IBM-PC hardware platform was open(ed), which benefited MS. The Windows software platform has never been, which also benefits MS.
I think the line here is drawn between public and private information. That's not to say that certain bits of information are, by their content, inherently classifiable as public or private; rather, I mean the state of information having been either published or unpublished (in the broadest sense of the word).
If I have some bit of information, and I choose not to share it with anybody, that is PRIVATE INFORMATION. Like private property, my inalienable right to security means that if anybody tries to take my private information (or my private property), which I have decided not to share, then they are in the wrong.
On the other hand, if I have published some information, that is now PUBLIC INFORMATION. Like public property, it is free to be used by everybody. I have no right to order another person to leave a public park, and I have no right to tell another person that they cannot distribute some information that I have published. Their right to liberty allows them to be there in the public park, or to use public information, however they choose.
In the case of things like credit cards / SSNs, I think that equates pretty nicely to chattel. Chattel is private property which is in the public, and yet still considered private property. E.g. if I leave my car parked with the keys under the seat, and you climb in, drive it around, and bring it back with a full tank of gas, that's still wrong because the car is still my property and I did not give you permission to use it. So, just because my credit card number is in some company's insecure database and you can get in and nab it, does not give you the right to use that information, because though it was "lying in public", it was not PUBLISHED (i.e. released to the public), thus it is still private information, and unauthorized use of it is wrong.
Maybe the good guys should just move to a new swimming pool?
That's the idea. All that good has to do to defeat evil is keep the hell away from it and let it die on its own.
The catch here, though, is there are those who are not evil, but just tired - people unable to support themselves, because they've been swimming a long time, or have been dragged down by evil folk, or just got caught in a rip tide. They've done nothing wrong, and if the good are strong enough to save them as well, shouldn't they? So the difficulty comes in separating the tired from the evil. I'd say, don't bother... if you can't support those pulling you down, just get away from them. If you can, whether they're evil or just plain tired, you should. Maybe the evil ones can learn to swim. They're really just afraid of drowning, in the end.
One other problem lately, is we've only got one pool we can get to, it's getting rather crowded, and there's hardly an empty corner to escape from the evil people in. In that case the only hope is for the good to be stronger and smarter; be able to stay afloat despite those pulling them down, and teach others to swim on their own to lessen the load on everyone.
And, in the end, when the bad guys stand triumphant, will you be satisfied when you look in the mirror and say to yourself, "Well, at least I went about it 'the right way'"?
Would you rather stand triumphant over the bloodied corpses of your enemies, and those of all the bystanders who stood in your way, look your corrupted bad-guy self in the mirror and say, "Well, at least I won"?
Being good and failing is no good.
Being evil and winning is no good either.
Thankfully the two are not mutually exclusive, and it is possible to be good and win. In the end, it's inevitable that, if anybody wins, it will be the good guys. Any victory for evil must be short-lived, as evil thrives by exploiting the good. Once good has lost completely, evil's fall can't be far behind.
I like to think of it as a swimming analogy. We're all trying to stay afloat. The good guys are the ones who can tread water and keep themselves up. Maybe some really strong good people can keep others up too. The evil ones are those who can only stay afloat by pushing down on others. So long as there are good folks around, the evil ones can put weight on them to keep themselves afloat - and if the good are strong enough, they can tolerate that and we have no problem.
But if too many or too heavy evil people drag all the good people down, and all you've got left are the evil ones, then pretty soon everybody's going to drown. Nobody's swimming anymore; they all just thrash about, trying to be the last person with their head above water before everybody dies.
Sure, we'll all get tired and be unable to swim anymore after a while. But maybe we can teach someone else to swim before then, and they can teach someone else, and so long as there are new people, someone will always stay afloat; and if enough people are good swimmers, the tired and evil of the pool will hardly make a difference. But if nobody swims anymore, and everyone just relies on being able to put their weight on some good swimming... well, now there are none, and we're all done for.
In the end, being good is the only winning option. Isn't that kind of the definition of "good"?
Nobody really has the option to not participate in society anymore - they will find you and make you do things their way. People go out deep into the national forests, what is supposed to be protected wilderness free from civilization, and try to do low-impact tribal living for a few weeks, just to get away from it all... the locals of the nearest small towns love 'em cause they've got to buy their supplies somewhere... but the feds will come in and say you're not allowed to use public land without a group use permit, and try to kick them out.
The entire planet is now "civilized". Even the wilderness isn't safe anymore.
The reason I've always understood is that the only theoretical model for (backward) time travel thus far involves temporally dialating (which is in itself, forward time manipulation) one end of a wormhole by sending it around a big circle at near-c. You then step back through the wormhole, back in time across the temporally dialated wormhole, and come out... a few feet away, where you then walk over to the same end you walked through last time and step back across time again. But at some point the point in time you step back across will be when the other end of the wormhole is still on it's journey through space and thus you CAN'T just walk over to the stationary end and do it again. Thus, you can never travel back before the time machine was built, because there needs to be the temporally dialated wormholes (the time machine) to come out of. It's not temporal teleportation.
Of course, even that model may be incorrect, and timetravel may be utterly impossible (unless by some other strange means).
Personally, after that thread I just linked, I'm leaning in favor of impossible. If it were possible though, I definitely go with the many-worlds interpretation. (Hell, I already go with the many-worlds intrepretation just of quantum physics. Wave collapse my ass).
Now, there were a variety of reasons for that failure, some technical, some not. At least part of the reason OpenDoc didn't succeed is that it was too disruptive to the traditional business model of applications vendors.
I never quite got why a document-centric, component-oriented computing model has to break down the traditional application vendors' business model. Sure, if say Microsoft Office and Adobe Creative Suite were reforged into doc-centric packages, you could use Word as your text editor component in the middle of, say, an InDesign page, and (back on topic) stick a Numbers spreadsheet graph in there along with it... but how does that stop Microsoft or Adobe from selling their bundle of editors together in one package like they always have?
Document-centric models allow for interoperability of "applications", and allow users to mix-and-match parts of different applications as they please, but there's nothing to stop the application vendors from still selling all their parts together in one suite. If I buy Creative Suite and ONLY USE PHOTOSHOP, does Adobe care? They still got my money. Maybe those vendors worried that the doc-centric model would allow other, smaller editors sold individually to undercut them - but if that's the case, once OpenDoc etc were available, that should have happened whether or not Adobe and MS got on the bandwagon.
But that didn't happen, so it doesn't seem likely that it would: people still want Photoshop and people still want Word, even if just for a few certain features of them, and if people could buy Word for the features they want and then swap out those parts they don't like for other parts they do... how is that bad at all? Unless these companies are thinking in some sort of exclusive, zero-sum game mentality, where if anybody else wins at all then they must be losing by definition - which, I must add, certainly isn't true. So what do these companies have to lose at all?
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a hypothetical scenario and honest question for you.
Say some development group is offering their open-source product for free download, both the source and compiled binaries, but the two as separate downloads (i.e. one zip file full of source files, one zip with just a binary in it).
Say you download just the binary, and put that together in some zip file with some other files for free download on your site. Say the program is a game engine and you made some data files to run in that engine, a mod, and you don't want your users to have to download the engine separate from your data files, for their convenience. You haven't touched, seen or even downloaded the source.
Can you then redistribute that package, and if anybody asks for the source, point them to the developers' site? Or must you also host/distribute the source? Also, what of superficial modifications to the binary, like changing the name of the executable to the name of your mod project, or changing the icon to match the icons of all your data files? Not claiming the engine as your own or anything; you leave in all the original credits, just change the appearance of the executable file in the user's Finder/Explorer window.
Basically, how far can a content creator who's never seen a line of code in his life use the binary from an open source project in a free (as in beer and as in speech) project of his own, without violating the GPL?
Oh come now, that was highly uncalled for. Puns are for children, not groan adults.
(Note to mods: that's not a spelling error).
Depends, are they alive or dead? Or haven't you observed them yet?
She seems to be using "worries" as a noun, the plural of a single "worry"; specifically, the kind of worry which is regarding electronic voting. In other words, 'Politicians think [that] worries-about-electronic-voting are...'
Similar sentences:
I think troubles with understanding each other are the root of all miscommunication.
I think fears about terrorism are largely unfounded in modern day America.
I think acts of nature are causing much larger problems.
"Worry", "trouble", "fear", and "act" can all be verbs ('that worries him', 'this troubles me', 'she fears that', 'they act out') or nouns ('He has many worries', 'I have many troubles', 'Her fears are unfounded', 'Their acts were irrational').
The Maya believe that time is circular.
The end and rebirth of the world is not a matter of failure or victory, it's just what happens. Every Long Count (52,000 years), the world is "reborn" - this one comes to an end and another one begins. This date range is actually based on stellar movement, although as I recall there are a lot of amazing "coincidences" about such stellar movement too - the Mayans based it off of planetary positions, as everything in the solar system should be in the same place at two dates exactly 52,000 years apart, but also the Milankovitch (sp?) cycle, the wobble of the Earth's axis, lasts 26,000 years, so two of them is a single Long Count, and IIRC either 26,000 or 52,000 years is also something like the amount of time it takes for the galaxy to rotate once or some such. It's been a while since I researched it but it's all just stellar movement, nothing mystical about it.
The date is December 21, 2012, by the way. We've got two months and two days until the End Times begin. (Yes yes, I'm crossing mythologies now, so sue me, it's an old hobby).
Here's my take on this whole "last mile" problem: I liken wires to roads, or train lines. They're all just kinds of networks.
Possibility one, you could leave it up to a free market and individual private entities to buy land and run wires/roads how and where they feel like it (i.e. wherever it will profit them). They then have the right to use these wires/road that they built for whatever reason they please and charge whatever they feel like, which, if this is really a profitable venture they are going in to, will be whatever the market will bare, i.e. just enough to undercut the competition. This will keep prices as low as feasible wherever the wires/roads are run, but has the down side that anybody using the network has to pay for use, and it's not going to be profitable for the road/wire-runners to run them out to the boondocks - and of course almost nobody in the boondocks can afford to pay for a wire or road to be run out to them especially.
Possibility two, you could have we the people, the public, acting through the government, demand that the roads/wires be run everywhere equally, and pony up the tax money to buy the land and resources and labor needed to do so. This network now belongs to the public and is thus "free" to use, its creation and maintenance paid for in taxes, and thus the wealthy and those in (what would in a free market be called) more profitable areas are subsidizing the poor and the people who live out in the middle of nowhere, but everybody's got equal access to the network now and apparently enough people wanted that that they were willing to pay for it. (Presuming that your democracy here actually works as advertised).
Possibility three, We The People pay up front for the installation of the network, run out to the last mile so that everyone's got equal access, and then charge for wire access to the private entities who wish to provide some sort of service over this network (someone wants to run trains along our tracks, someone wants to broadcast TV over our cables, etc). These private entities then charge their customers for their service plus what they had to pay for network access, which should just be the cost the govt pays for maintenance of the lines, so in essence the customer pays the service price plus a network maintenance fee. So the network is publicly owned but what runs on the network is privately owned.
This last possibility raises an interesting question now in my mind - what service exactly are the telecom companies providing? As I understand it the installation of the lines has been largely funded by taxpayer dollars, so what have they to charge us for? Maintenance? If the government paid for the lines, shouldn't the government OWN the lines and pay the telcos for the service of maintaining them, the same as the government often pays construction companies for road maintenance contracts? In other words, shouldn't we the people be paying a network maintenance tax, and have free access to the lines, instead of paying government-granted telecom monopolies for use of lines we paid for? (Which really amounts to about the same thing, I guess).
My mind isn't so clear right now, but it's seeming more and more to me that this third option doesn't actually exist. If the lines of a network (of any sort) are privately run and funded, then those who ran them have the right to charge or do with them whatever they please. If they were publicly run and funded, they they should be free for everyone (libre and gratis) and paid for via taxes. Service providers operating over the network are paying to use the network and charging their customers as appropriate - if I'm running a shipping business across the highway network, then I'm paying gas tax (which covers road maintenance) the same as anyone else, and passing that cost on to my customers. And I'm running an e-business server on the Internet, I'm paying for network access the same as anyone else and passing that cost on to my customers too.
But if we the people paid for the network in taxes, and t
I've heard a different version of this same hypothesis. I don't recall where from, it was years ago, but whoever put it forth intended it seriously, not as fiction.
The notion that I heard was more closely related to the Big Splash you mention and less related to Mars. It held that another planetoid, not Mars, once held a highly eccentric orbit which crossed those of both Earth and Mars. It was this planetoid which collided with Earth and formed the moon, and the remnants of the broken planetoid eventually settled into orbits out past Mars to become the asteroid belt.
No idea how scientifically feasible this is, but that's the hypothesis as I heard it.
Get rid of the notion of "installers" altogether.
i t-everywhere' concept is a traditional thing in the Mac world. This isn't something new, just something that the mainstream hasn't done. I think it's time, as Mac and Windows have caught up to Unix in the world of protected memory and real multitasking, that Windows and Unix catch up to the Mac in the world of sane and modular file organization structures. (And yes, I'm aware that OSX, being unix-based, shares some of the same messy tangles as unixes, just with a pretty face slapped over it. And yes, that bothers me).
A browser plugin should be a single file that goes in a plugins folder. An application should be a self-contained package that can live anywhere on the system. You shouldn't have to RUN a program to ADD a program to your system - why can the installer program live and run self-contained wherever it is, but other programs have to be 'installed'? Nothing you're installing besides security updates and other OS patches should need to stick files all over the place and modify settings everywhere.
Get rid of the notion of installers, and you get rid of installers putting malicious stuff on your system. Give the user the program. Let them stick it wherever they want. You've still got a possibility for trojan horses, I suppose, but with proper security they shouldn't be able to write to anything outside of userland without at least a password prompt.
I guess the point I'm trying to make is, the system should be transparent and simple. When you've got a complex, tangled mess of invisible (files / dependencies / tasks / settings / etc), all hidden behind an "easy" face that's just plastered over the mess, then you're going to hit problems because the "easy" interface isn't really what's going on on the system. Things are hidden and so the user isn't really in control of their system - how can we expect users to be aware of what's going on with their computers when we try so hard to hide it from them? And if you're about to say that the real workings are too complex, users could never understand them - THERE'S YOUR PROBLEM.
Make the system simple, modular, transparent. Like protected memory - every app runs in its own sandbox and can't write over all the others. Maybe we need some buzzword to make clueless users and equally clueless developers aware of the importance of having "protected file structures" - every app (by which I mean userland things like Word and Photoshop) is its own self-contained package and isn't spewing its shit all over the system. No hidden files, no hidden processes, let users see what's going on, and make what's going on simple enough for them to grok.
Then and only then can we expect users to be able to avoid social engineering.
You want a good example of an OS going strongly in this direction, take a look at OS X. And this 'everything-is-self-contained-and-doesn't-spew-sh
tell ya, those were the days, when men were men, gurus meditated, and virus writers were... but I digress.
When men were men, women were too, and little girls were FBI agents?
Oh wait no, that was the golden age of the Internet. Sorry...
How about open and frank discussions about sex so that 14 year old boys are able to categorize crazy porn right up there with Buggs bunny in terms of unrealistic vrs realistic and so that 14 year old girls don't get the idea that wanting sex is something they are not supposed to ever admit lest every one think they are a skanky slut.
Your wish is this book's command. To quote from the page itself:
"How To Be The Best Lover - A Guide for Teenage Boys' is the first book that dares to tell teenage boys the deep truth about lovemaking and teenage sexuality. For young men who are coming of age, 'How To Be The Best Lover' is an important threshold in their rites of passage. Going beyond the sex talk, 'Best Lover' fills in the gulf between what I call the birds and the bees or 'Sex 101' books and the adult technique manuals. 'Best Lover' introduces teenagers to the heart of relationships - not shying away from telling them about oral sex or making love while at the same time introducing them to the complexities and responsibilities involved when you open yourself up to another person on this level. Best Lover has been hailed as a breakthrough in sex education by some of the leaders in the parenting field. 'Best Lover' explores the territory of relationships, danger zones, passion, responsibility, teenage sex and the commitment that comes from opening up your heart on this level with another person. "
...a once-romantic company like Google making the transition from dewey-cheeked lass to, well, a grown-up company...
:-)
It's not so much the fun we'll have watching certain G-accolytes feeling betrayed....
I find it humorously appropriate that as I read through this post of yours, my iTunes random playlist switched to one of the sadder, more tragic tracks from the "Revenge of the Sith" soundtrack.
Imagine if I popped these pills before studying for organic chemistry in college. Now I'd be having flashbacks of acid/base interactions and other useless trivia while I try to go about my daily job.
So if you'd had access to better drugs in college, you might be having acid flashbacks today?
Hey, there's a building visible from the 101 Freeway near LA that just says "Asian American Ass.". I'd buy some of whatever they're selling...
...the mentality that the only careers worth having are those of criminal/thug, celebrity/whore, or lawyer/lobbyist/politician.
;-)
So you're saying there's basically just one commonly desirable job in today's market?
... sometimes one miss those old days when your mail were mail ...
Ah yes, the golden era of the internet. When men were men, women were too, and little girls were FBI agents.
he only credit I give to Microsoft is for recognizing the importance of shared data and capitalizing on it. ...and then doing everything in their power to make sure that advantage didn't exist for anybody else.
Seriously? Microsoft, shared *anything*? Microsoft hasn't made anything shared or open in their entire history. They took advantage of a (forcibly) opened platform, or rather were lucky the platform they ran on top of was forcibly opened and thus grew rapidly, and then did everything they could to make sure that everything running on top of that platform was all theirs.
The IBM-PC hardware platform was open(ed), which benefited MS. The Windows software platform has never been, which also benefits MS.
Kang & Kodos: "Abortions for everybody!"
Crowd: "Boo!"
Kang & Kodos: "Er, abortions for nobody!"
Crowd: "Booo!"
Kang & Kodos: "Uh, abortions for some... tiny American flags for others!"
Crowd: "Yaaaaaay!"
I think the line here is drawn between public and private information. That's not to say that certain bits of information are, by their content, inherently classifiable as public or private; rather, I mean the state of information having been either published or unpublished (in the broadest sense of the word).
If I have some bit of information, and I choose not to share it with anybody, that is PRIVATE INFORMATION. Like private property, my inalienable right to security means that if anybody tries to take my private information (or my private property), which I have decided not to share, then they are in the wrong.
On the other hand, if I have published some information, that is now PUBLIC INFORMATION. Like public property, it is free to be used by everybody. I have no right to order another person to leave a public park, and I have no right to tell another person that they cannot distribute some information that I have published. Their right to liberty allows them to be there in the public park, or to use public information, however they choose.
In the case of things like credit cards / SSNs, I think that equates pretty nicely to chattel. Chattel is private property which is in the public, and yet still considered private property. E.g. if I leave my car parked with the keys under the seat, and you climb in, drive it around, and bring it back with a full tank of gas, that's still wrong because the car is still my property and I did not give you permission to use it. So, just because my credit card number is in some company's insecure database and you can get in and nab it, does not give you the right to use that information, because though it was "lying in public", it was not PUBLISHED (i.e. released to the public), thus it is still private information, and unauthorized use of it is wrong.
So the more interesting question is, given the real world, and given that stupidity exists, what is the next-best solution that might actualyl work?
1) Educated and responsible people, band together.
2) Become and remain independent of the uneducated and irresponsible.
3) Educate others to be responsible and invite them to join you.
4) Wait for those who remain uneducated and irresponsible groups to self-destruct, once you're no longer there to save them.
5) Hope they don't take you out with them. (See step 2).
6) Profit!
7) Repeat.
Maybe the good guys should just move to a new swimming pool?
That's the idea. All that good has to do to defeat evil is keep the hell away from it and let it die on its own.
The catch here, though, is there are those who are not evil, but just tired - people unable to support themselves, because they've been swimming a long time, or have been dragged down by evil folk, or just got caught in a rip tide. They've done nothing wrong, and if the good are strong enough to save them as well, shouldn't they? So the difficulty comes in separating the tired from the evil. I'd say, don't bother... if you can't support those pulling you down, just get away from them. If you can, whether they're evil or just plain tired, you should. Maybe the evil ones can learn to swim. They're really just afraid of drowning, in the end.
One other problem lately, is we've only got one pool we can get to, it's getting rather crowded, and there's hardly an empty corner to escape from the evil people in. In that case the only hope is for the good to be stronger and smarter; be able to stay afloat despite those pulling them down, and teach others to swim on their own to lessen the load on everyone.
Who is John Galt, anyway?
I don't know, who mentioned him?
Peepehl haav traheed. Noh wuhn wahnts tuu ahdahpt thuh neeuu uuehee uhf spehleeng theengs. Huumahns ahr kreetuurs uhf haabiht aand ahr vehree seht ihn theheer uuehees.
And, in the end, when the bad guys stand triumphant, will you be satisfied when you look in the mirror and say to yourself, "Well, at least I went about it 'the right way'"?
Would you rather stand triumphant over the bloodied corpses of your enemies, and those of all the bystanders who stood in your way, look your corrupted bad-guy self in the mirror and say, "Well, at least I won"?
Being good and failing is no good.
Being evil and winning is no good either.
Thankfully the two are not mutually exclusive, and it is possible to be good and win. In the end, it's inevitable that, if anybody wins, it will be the good guys. Any victory for evil must be short-lived, as evil thrives by exploiting the good. Once good has lost completely, evil's fall can't be far behind.
I like to think of it as a swimming analogy. We're all trying to stay afloat. The good guys are the ones who can tread water and keep themselves up. Maybe some really strong good people can keep others up too. The evil ones are those who can only stay afloat by pushing down on others. So long as there are good folks around, the evil ones can put weight on them to keep themselves afloat - and if the good are strong enough, they can tolerate that and we have no problem.
But if too many or too heavy evil people drag all the good people down, and all you've got left are the evil ones, then pretty soon everybody's going to drown. Nobody's swimming anymore; they all just thrash about, trying to be the last person with their head above water before everybody dies.
Sure, we'll all get tired and be unable to swim anymore after a while. But maybe we can teach someone else to swim before then, and they can teach someone else, and so long as there are new people, someone will always stay afloat; and if enough people are good swimmers, the tired and evil of the pool will hardly make a difference. But if nobody swims anymore, and everyone just relies on being able to put their weight on some good swimming... well, now there are none, and we're all done for.
In the end, being good is the only winning option. Isn't that kind of the definition of "good"?
Even homeless people don't get left alone.
Nobody really has the option to not participate in society anymore - they will find you and make you do things their way. People go out deep into the national forests, what is supposed to be protected wilderness free from civilization, and try to do low-impact tribal living for a few weeks, just to get away from it all... the locals of the nearest small towns love 'em cause they've got to buy their supplies somewhere... but the feds will come in and say you're not allowed to use public land without a group use permit, and try to kick them out.
The entire planet is now "civilized". Even the wilderness isn't safe anymore.
The reason I've always understood is that the only theoretical model for (backward) time travel thus far involves temporally dialating (which is in itself, forward time manipulation) one end of a wormhole by sending it around a big circle at near-c. You then step back through the wormhole, back in time across the temporally dialated wormhole, and come out... a few feet away, where you then walk over to the same end you walked through last time and step back across time again. But at some point the point in time you step back across will be when the other end of the wormhole is still on it's journey through space and thus you CAN'T just walk over to the stationary end and do it again. Thus, you can never travel back before the time machine was built, because there needs to be the temporally dialated wormholes (the time machine) to come out of. It's not temporal teleportation.
Of course, even that model may be incorrect, and timetravel may be utterly impossible (unless by some other strange means).
Personally, after that thread I just linked, I'm leaning in favor of impossible. If it were possible though, I definitely go with the many-worlds interpretation. (Hell, I already go with the many-worlds intrepretation just of quantum physics. Wave collapse my ass).
Now, there were a variety of reasons for that failure, some technical, some not. At least part of the reason OpenDoc didn't succeed is that it was too disruptive to the traditional business model of applications vendors.
I never quite got why a document-centric, component-oriented computing model has to break down the traditional application vendors' business model. Sure, if say Microsoft Office and Adobe Creative Suite were reforged into doc-centric packages, you could use Word as your text editor component in the middle of, say, an InDesign page, and (back on topic) stick a Numbers spreadsheet graph in there along with it... but how does that stop Microsoft or Adobe from selling their bundle of editors together in one package like they always have?
Document-centric models allow for interoperability of "applications", and allow users to mix-and-match parts of different applications as they please, but there's nothing to stop the application vendors from still selling all their parts together in one suite. If I buy Creative Suite and ONLY USE PHOTOSHOP, does Adobe care? They still got my money. Maybe those vendors worried that the doc-centric model would allow other, smaller editors sold individually to undercut them - but if that's the case, once OpenDoc etc were available, that should have happened whether or not Adobe and MS got on the bandwagon.
But that didn't happen, so it doesn't seem likely that it would: people still want Photoshop and people still want Word, even if just for a few certain features of them, and if people could buy Word for the features they want and then swap out those parts they don't like for other parts they do... how is that bad at all? Unless these companies are thinking in some sort of exclusive, zero-sum game mentality, where if anybody else wins at all then they must be losing by definition - which, I must add, certainly isn't true. So what do these companies have to lose at all?