> Y'know, when I first read the questions for the interview (and the actual article about the lava cooking), I kept thinking, "Gee, cooking with molten lava is nifty and all, but titanium leaves just seems to be going a little overboard."
> > I suppose it'd get you that "extra-crispy" skin on your chicken...
D00d!
I 0vercl0x0r3d my 0v3n with l4v4, it gets 2000 d3gr33z! Check out my case mod! Pure t1t4n1um! Ti-m0dd3d ch1ck3n 0wnz 4ll j00r b4s3!:)
Please don't whine about how it's not nice to alias whatever.doubleclick.com to 127.0.0.1 in my hosts file. I know it's a kludge, but it's my hosts file. I don't want any traffic to go to those domains, whether it's from Mozilla or any other application.
Bug 28586 has been open for over two years and has 115 votes against it. (Moz team, please just swallow your pride and deal with the fact that your users just might not use their machines the way you do.)
(And the fact that hosts-based blocking is a kludge doesn't change the fact that modal dialogs for "document contains no data" or "ain't no host there" are just plain evil. The domain serving an image might be Slashdotted, for instance.)
Until I switch to Mozilla for everything, I still need my hosts-based blocking for the crap my proxy doesn't catch.
Of course, if I keep having to click on its goddamn modal dialogs instead of just seeing "X"s or broken image icons when a site's images are Slashdotted or blocked by my hosts file or firewall, I'll never use Mozilla as a web browser, let alone switch other parts of my life over to it. Pity. Apart from this bug, it looked pretty cool. But with this bug, it's unusable.
This has to go into the main builds.
(Disclaimer: if this made it into the 1.1 release, I confess I never bothered checking. Anyone knwo if it made it into 1.2? I can apply the patch and build the damn binaries myself if I have to, but most Joe Sixpack users can't.)
> How about Quaker? > > Either about a frog who crosses the road or a religious fellow who cannot in good conscience fight in the war...
...why not Kermit the Frog registering as a "Conscientious Objector" while a nice guy in a funny buckled-up hat tries to cross a highway full of them horseless carriages.
(Yeah, I know modern Quakers don't dress or drive like the Amish, but the image was too funny to pass up:)
> You know, the sad thing is that the two most effective things, armed pilots and seecure cockpit doors, would take very little time and/or money to implement. But that would require actual action, not a bunch of passive feel-good measures.
And they'd take very little time and more importantly, very little money to implement.
From a Congressman's point of view, those are bugs, not features.
> As an airport security worker, I feel as though my obligations have multiplied ten-fold. My responsibilities - especially morally have also greatly increased. > > The only upside to 9/11 for me has been that people now respect me for the job I try to do much more
For what it's worth, before 9/11, I didn't gripe when checked, because I did respect what you did. (Even if, IMNSHO, many of your co-workers did it pretty poorly.)
> previously people griped when being security checked but now very rarely does this occur.
If I have to fly again, I'll continue not griping, because I've read about what happened to the people who questioned some of your co-workers' judgement.
Don't mistake what was once respect for what is now simple fear.
> News Flash to Airlines: Security checks make *you* feel safer and make the rest of us feel like cattle.
(What, you didn't feel like cattle before 9/11? What airline were you flying?:-)
Actually, I don't think they even make the airlines feel safer. I think it's marketing/PR. Something so the cattle can feel safer without actually having to do the work of making it safer.
Consider that we've got all the hassles and expense of idiots (oops, those "idiots" are now federal employees, and therefore immune from getting fired even Abdul gets on with a handgun because the federal employee was too busy fingerfucking your grandmother) in the name of security, but most of the measures that would really improve security, such as the installation of certain types of equipment at certain locations, and/or the use of certain technologies to better identify people who might present risks to aircraft, still haven't been taken.
All the hassle. None of the security. And since you can't guess whether it'll take you 15 minutes or two hours to get from airport entrance to your flight, there's a significant chance that if your trip is 500 miles or less, it'll be faster to drive it than fly it.
> The cost and hassle and privacy violations required to fly make me glad I have a car that will go 300k+ miles in its lifetime.
Amen to that. My cutoff is 18-24 hours. I used to love flying, but now I'll gladly spend a day on the road to avoid it.
Fsck the airlines. I'll drive.
> Like everyone else, there's the delay... > >But, unlike most people, I use an insulin pump. Most security people aren't keen on seeing someone with a small mechanical device and tubes attached to their body. Also, the insulin, needles, lancet, etc all get a good look through. I get stopped and have my bags inspected pretty much every time I go through. It's made me use air travel as a last resort.
(Be thankful they don't make you drink the insulin the way they did with those women and their breast milk:)
How has the legislation affected me? Will, since those drooling $5/hour morons are now drooling $10/hour federal employees, and as a result of my poor ability to take shit from dumb fucks who think that Congressional Medals of Honor, 2-inch GI Joe guns, and bottles of breast milk somehow constitute security threats, but who, as federal employees, can now throw me in jail for saying "WTF?" and can also no longer be fired when they exercise poor judgement, I call on everyone who's had it with the bullshit to...
Take the car.
No security goons. No having to remain silent while Guido dildoes your girlfriend's crotch or copping a feel off your mom's bra. (Why yes, it was women in underwire bras who hijacked four aircraft and destroyed the WTC and damaged the Pentagon, how could I have thought otherwise?)
Plug that laptop with 20G of MP3z into the stereo system and hear your favorite music over the engine noise. (Delayed by a traffic jam? No matter, the music sounds better when you're not doing 80 MPH just to keep up with traffic!)
Every six hours, pop into a small town and eat a nice hot meal. Screw McDonald's - find a random greasy spoon and eat with the locals. Or surrender to your lusts and have a dozen fresh Krispy Kremes.
The roadways are still free. You can get there in the same amount of time, with a lot less hassle, and you can see all the things you can't see stuck in a metal tube through a six-inch perspex square.
See the American countryside in air-conditioned comfort or lower that ragtop and let the breeze blow your hair as you take that twisty 2-lane blacktop through the national park instead of the boring interstate.
Finally, remind yourself as you stop by each "scenic viewpoint" and snap a few pics with your digicam that there are things about America that are too big for 19 Islamic terrorists - or even a Hill full of idiotic Congressmen and a TSA full of unaccountable bureaucrats and their $10/hour lackeys - to destroy.
> DDT is bad stuff. When we bought our farm a few years back there was detectable DDT. The report said that the levels were consistent with a single light DDT application 35 years previously.
Measurable, yes. But does the fact that you can measure it (parts per billion? trillion?) mean that there's a (human or other wildlife) health hazard from it?
And if there is a hazard, is that risk outweighed by the (newly-increased) risk of West Nile to humans in North America, and the (massive, known, documented) number of deaths due to malaria in the Third World.
(Note: These are three different questions. For instance, mosquito bites are annoying, but harmless - the risk of encephalitis has always been pretty minimal, and DDT probably wasn't justified for mosquito control in the West until recently.
Before West Nile, DDT may not have been justifiable for mosquito control in the West. That risk/reward equation is changing now as West Nile spreads.
And finally, the risk/reward of applying DDT to our mosquito problems has nothing to do with the risk/reward of malaria in the Third World, which IMHO more than justifies the use of DDT there.)
> Anything that lurks in the soil that long can't be nice stuff.
Depending on the quantities still there, probably not. (And yes, I do agree that it's long-lived. On the other hand, you don't have to apply it every week like newer pesticides. Another risk/reward tradeoff.)
Meantime, do you have anything more substantive than that to back up the assertion that it's harmful?
Here's some contrary evidence that's come out since the 60s and 70s that refutes notion that it's anywhere near as dangerous to humans or wildlife as it was claimed to be.
(Of particular note - studies in 1999 are pretty consistent in demonstrating that there's no link between DDT and cancer in humans or primates. IMHO there never was.)
> > The system has a personal information sharing agent called "My Man." > >If they want hacker followers they should call the personal information sharing agent "My Women"
(*lol*, where do these marketing fucktards come up with this shit. Sounds more like "The Man" or "Company Man".)
My system has three "personal information sharing agents".
Yo, "My Man", meet my man "HOSTS", my man "Junkbuster", and my main man "harware firewall". Makes "My Man" my bitch.
(Sigh... remember the good old days when personal network security was about stopping crax0rz from breaking into your system from the outside?:-)
> What harm is caused by listening to the environmentalists?
The leading cause of death on the planet today is good ol' malaria. Mosquito control with DDT could solve that problem - and no, it wouldn't require spraying massive amounts of tens of millions of pounds on food crops, just a few hundred thousand pounds a year.
"B-b-b-ut DDT is bad! The enviros said so!" - really? The evidence for that is highly questionable.
DDT also help with another up-and-coming disease, too.
> In my opinion listening to the environmentalists causes no harm; but if they are right we're fucked. So whether or not I agree with them or with you - I'm going to modify my behaviour based on what they tell me. I'll buy a more efficient car, I'll steer clear of GM foods, and I'll try to avoid creating vast quantities of waste. And where I can I'll also support them in their efforts.
Dude - WTF kind of logic is that? Believing the earth is flat is also harmless. (And if the earth is flat, we're fucked because someday someone's gonna sail off the edge! ) So even if I don't agree with flat-earthers, I'll avoid cruise ships and support the flat-earthers in their efforts.
How about trying something revolutionary, like the idea that "the d00d who makes the statement has the burden of proof". If the enviros make a claim, it's up to them to prove their case to you.
If, after listening to their argument, you still agree with them, modify your behavior. But if you don't agree with them, don't modify your behavior.
Avoiding GM foods because there's no harm there? You mean, like rice that could provide folks with beta-carotene and vitamin A, preventing millions of cases of blindness and about two million deaths every year? Yeah, no harm there.
Now I dig that we might not need the carotene-advanced rice, and as such, we're quite free to stick with regular rice if we so choose. But to support the environmentalist agenda to deny everyone access to this technology is going too far. So I choose to support GM foods (and most genetic engineering in general), and I'll eat the GM foods if they taste good.
And sometimes the enviro arguments do make sense. F'rinstance, I choose efficient cars because, umm, well, they're more efficient. Unless I'm hauling freight (which I ain't), I'm interested in getting from "A" to "B" in a reasonable timeframe, preferably with a minimum of expense. Hmm, the econobox costs $10K and $0.10 per mile, and the SUV costs $30K and $0.20 per mile, and the hybrid $20K and $0.05 per mile.
If I expect to keep a car for 10 years and I drive 5000 miles a year, I buy the $10K car. (I could save $2500 by spending an extra $10000 for the hybrid, losing $7500 - almost enough to buy another car!) If I drive 20000 miles per year, I save $7500 out of $10000 and hybrid starts to look pretty good - assuming I can get 10 years out of the batteries.
The SUV sux azz and isn't in contention for me. But even though I think they're a poor choice, I wouldn't deny someone else the right to buy one. They may simply have different transportation needs than I do.
> And when the oil runs out and you're left with a rusting pile of useless metal on your drive remember to blame the government because "they should have done something".
Long before the oil runs out, it'll run low. Supply and demand will increase the price of oil. When it's $0.50 per mile for the shitbox, $2.00 per mile for the SUV, and still $0.05 per mile for the electric vehicle, everyone will have an incentive to switch. (...well, assuming we have nuclear power, which is the only way we'll be able to generate enough electricity to power all the cars when the internal combustion engine dies.
(Or would you prefer to burn more coal or natural gas - same amount of CO2 released - to get the electric current to recharge the batteries... or to electrolyze the water for the hydrogen in the fuel cells? Don't forget, you didn't mine the methane hydrates in the eco-sensitive offshore shallows, and you also helped the enviros ban genetic engineering, so you can't grow acres of sugar cane in the desert for ethanol, or genetically-engineer a batch of superbugs to crack water:-)
Buy both. CCD explains the backstory/metastory of Acts, albeit in a roundabout, artsy-fartsy way. (And I'm sure there are the kernels of at least two or three more AI-authored novels in CCD. *g*)
Does anyone know if Sundman (the author) will be at LinuxWorld in New York or the next one in the Bay Area? (I found out about him through a geek who loaned me a dead-tree copy he got from Sundman, who was selling copies at LinuxWorld SF.)
> BTW, this service absolutely sucks. Yeah, it has nice quality, but it doesn't have any of the songs I used Audiogalaxy for, because they're too obscure for the recording industry to know about. > > ("Transfusion", anyone? "Zoomin' down the highway, doing 79...")
Audiogalactic doin' 79,
Got sued by Rosen now I'm feelin' fine,
Hey man, dig that, was that a "ded kitty" sign?
..............*BOOM*
Transfusion, transfusion,
We're in desperate need of a cash infusion,
Never gonna download an MP3 again,
(Stream a tune to me, June...)
Send out a press release at a quarter to nine,
I gotta appease that VC of mine,
Draw down my credit line or pay the bonds on time?
............screeee*BOOMCRUNCHCRASH*
Transfusion, transfusion,
Maybe they won't notice the DRM intrusion,
Never let 'em burn a CD again,
(Slip the green to me, Gene...)
Oh, my revenue, it comes from two classes,
Spyware hogs and RIAA jackasses,
So remember to sub-scribe today!
(Hey, daddy-o, uh, make that check payable to Harry Fox, huh? 'attaboy...)
> Your comments also imply that they do not understand the medium. This is somewhat ironic given that these are the people who are a part of the media and are supposed to have the best formal training on what the media is. [emphasis mine, not the original poster's]
You hit the nail square on the... piece of wood about one millimiter away from the nail:-)
"Media" is the plural of "medium."
"The media" means "Radio, TV, magazine, and newspapers" - they're all one-to-many forms of communication. Broadcast. Centralized. Huge startup costs (buildings, printing presses) and infrastructure (an army of reporters, editors, typesetters, people to run the presses) costs. Advertiser-supported of necessity to deal with the startup/infrastructure.
These are the media for which the Time-Warner guys were trained to deal, and for which they'd come up with good business plans for 50+ years.
"The medium" means "The new medium of communication, based on the Internet" - a many-to-many mode of communication. Everyone's got a printing press, whether it be posting to Slashdot, emailing friends on mailing lists, or whatever. Narrowcast. Decentralized. Zero or near-zero startup costs (a $1000 PC and modem) and infrastructure costs (a $20/month subscription to an ISP, and the army of reporters is everyone like you).
Try to apply the old business model to a new technology with the same essential features, and it works. Silent films begat talkies. Radio begat television.
Try to apply the old business model to a new technology where all the implicit assumptions about what "medium" meant have gone away, and *boom*. AOL/TW begat a massive bloodletting of shareholder value, because they couldn't see the forest for the trees.
Perhaps best illustrated by way of analogy:
"When will you guys figure out that Banzai charges DON'T FUCKING WORK?!?"
- Shaftoe (U.S. soldier) to Dengo (Japanese soldier), in Neal Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon".
> Remember kids, donating money to charity makes you a Communist (insert scary noise that makes libertarians run for the exits)
Huh?
Donating your money to your pet charity makes you a philanthropist.
Donating my money to your pet charity makes you a thief or a Congressman or a Communist, depending on how much of it you steal and whether you're honest enough to admit you're a thief or whether you're lying about your motives while you loot my wealth.
If the shareholders of Ben and Jerry's didn't like the amount of money their board was donating to charity (instead of investing in the business for future growth, or distributing to the shareholders as dividends), they could have appointed a new slate of directors.
Rather - as some have pointed out - the trendiness of the "hippie" ethic at Ben and Jerry's was part of the marketing scheme. If you make 10% margin on every tub of ice cream you sell, and if donating $1M to charity gives you enough good PR that you sell an extra $15M worth of ice cream (profit = $1.5M), the money's well spent. You've increased shareholder value by $0.5M (to say nothing of the tax break you get for the $1M donation).
> Somebody, 'slowness' will come back in favour. The fast and loose world of the private sector can be personally fulfilling, but its all about risking (usually other people's) money.
> Am I the only person disturbed by the idea that people will go to the moon and strip mine with abandon, and destroy its beauty from the perspective of people on Earth?
Unfortunately, no.
> I think something will never be the same about our little neighborhood of space when people look up and see lights all over the moon at night and they've dug up the man in the moon's face...;)
I think something will never be the same about our little neighborhood of space when a wandering asteroid extinguishes the lights all over the Earth at night.
I worry about people like you - who would have the only creatures that can make lights like that imprisoned and vulnerable on Earth, rather than busily making more lights on the Moon, Mars, or on near-Earth asteroids.
If people like you carry the day, all of those lights will go out at the same time. And then, our little neighborhood of space won't be the same at all.
> Trailblazer is expected to launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan within the next nine to 12 months. " > >So, WTF does it have to do withthe US government?
A U.S. company plans to build high-tech toys, stuff them into a Russian rocket and launch it from Kasakhstan.
Even though the Cold War is over, the phrase "technology transfer" still applies.
(Word to the US Government: Want to reduce the risks of technology transfer? How about giving up the NASA monopoly and resulting prohibitive launch costs that have driven US companies to launch from Europe and former Soviet republics by opening up space to private developers in the United States?)
> Wealth 'creation' isn't a dream, its taking the bread off someone else's table. This isn't some kind of self renewing table, that 'wealth' comes from somewhere.
Really? I'm a richer man - in the sense that my computer does things it otherwise couldn't, and I have money in my pocket that would otherwise have gone to Bill Gates for a shoddier product - because of Linus, RMS, and the GPL.
From whose table did Stallman take "bread" that spins on my hard drives?
> You need to understand that this is in essence a closed system. No new resources, no new opportunities. Something does not come out of nothing, its TAKEN, its USED UP.
See that big ball of hydrogen 93 million miles away spewing photons everywhere? See all those self-organizing carbon-based replicator units that turn photons into more carbon-based replicators?
System don't look closed to me.
See the carbon-based replicator units that look like hairless apes? See the big cranium on their pink- or brown-skinned bodies?
See the hairy one called RMS and his cranium? That's where much of the wealth on my hard drive came from.
> its only one more example of how we need a new social contract, a new way in which those that create are recompensed, those that consume are not held hostage....and those that feast on the work of others do not prosper - but are instead destroyed like the parasites they are. > >
Face it, the 'dream' doesn't work. Wake up and greet the new dawn.
Face it, this is the new dawn -- we're living the first generation in history in which the workers truly do own the means of production -- their own brains.
Yet some still insist on preaching industrial-age Marxism - that the quantity of wealth in the world is fixed, despite all evidence to the contrary. (Yes, the third world lives in the same poverty it did 500 years ago, but 10-20% of the world's population now lives better than the kings of Europe at that time, and that population continues to increase. Most of you reading this today, have a higher standard of living than the top 1% of Americans did at the turn of the century.)
Wake up and greet the new dawn? It's already mid-afternoon, sleepyhead.
> But lets imagine a real time strategy in which you are one of three allies (USA, Britain, Russia), fighting a 6 hour battle simulating WWII. Now lets imagine you are the US, and I am Winston Churchill. I've been managing my armies for the last three hours when my partner tells me dinner is ready.
>
>Am I supposed to: >1.Tell her to fuck off? >2.Use my keyboard as a plate? >3.'Press pause' and tell the 5 (or 50) other players to wait for me to come back? > 4.Let the computer do what its good at?
1) Instead of "Fuck off", how about "Bring the food in here, serving-wench!"
2) If you're lucky, you'll get to use your keyboard as a plate. If you're unlucky, your lap will be the plate. And it'll be French Onion Soup.
3) You'll have to press pause anyway while you yank the keyboard out and run screaming around the room.
4) So yeah, you'll still need an AI.
> I'm not a hardcore player either; my mouse clogs up etc, and I hate micromanagement. This kind of stuff would work just fine - perhaps 24 hours a day (with me checking in daily for an hour to set budgets, initiate or even approve attack plans, etc.
Y'know, I'd like that in a slow-moving RTS like your imaginary WW2 sim. Imagine a [single-player] game that took over your PC and ran a world in the background, 24/7, for a period of weeks/months.
> Would it be absurd to imagine broadcast companies cushioning the blow of hdtv recording equip by inserting ads on the sides of the screen for 16:9 viewers on a 4:3 program?
1) Great disincentive for anyone to buy a 16:9 TV.
2) You think that once they started, they'd ever stop?
3) The slow adoption of 16:9 would even give them an excuse to continue broadcasting 4:3 with ads forever. "Well, we can't leave all those 4:3 folks in the dirt by broadcasting in 16:9 - better to broadcast in 4:3 for another 20 years and sell more sidebanner-ads!"
Creative idea, yes. Horrible and intruive for the conumer, yes. Probability of it happening: E_UNDEFINED.
(Media executives are unlikely to come up with creative solutions, but highly likely to come up with horrible intrusive ones. Probability is therefore, umm, divide-by-fish and carry the fnord?)
> Where the FBI really needs to improve, probably, is structurally -- recognize that researchers and experts shouldn't necessarily be inferior to agents and adjust to give them an appropriate amount of influence.
What you said. It's a cultural problem.
Why not allow researchers the time/flexibility to pursue leads with publicly available information, and then pass that information on to agents to do the takedown stuff?
I can think of lots of ways to monitor areas of the 'net for suspicious activity (illegal types of pr0n, spam for illegal types of pr0n, traffic analysis of PGP-encrypted messages, and I'm choosing to ignore software/music piracy) that, while not necessarily actionable in and of themselves, would be the missing pieces that would make open-and-shut cases.
"Agent X, here's a letter. It doesn't matter that you don't understand a word of it. Take this in front of a judge. He may not understand a word of it either, but he'll probably authorize the request. The ISP will understand every word, and will hand you all the evidence you need to take $BIGNUM bad guys down."
(Come to think of it, aside from the legal boilerplate, the subpoena to the ISP need only contain three words: "grep", a regexp, and a filename. The regexp and the filename will depend on what department Agent X works for, but the approach is the same.)
Before anyone says that's unreasonable search and seizure, the regexps I'm thinking of can be based on publicly-posted or freely-given information such as IP addresses, timestamps, and other data given out by the suspect him/herself.
Investigators (maybe "investigators" isn't the right word. "Oracle" sounds nice. As in, the Agent asks the Oracle where to get leads for such-and-such a kind of case, and an anonymous voice from within the Oracle says "Start looking here") could be given $$$ bonuses based on the number of successful takedowns Agents made, and Oracles who provide too many bum leads get fired. Agents could continue to get the fun stuff like like kicking down doors and shooting badasses.
> How many people can answer these questions with a response of No? > >1. Have you used marijuana at all within the last three years? > 2. Have you used marijuana more than a total of 15 times in your life? >3. Have you used any other illegal drug (including anabolic steroids after February 27, 1991) at all in the past 10 years? [... ]
Tack: "Yes sir! I can answer 'no' to all six questions sir!"
f3i: "...and can you say that truthfully, Mr. Tackhead?"
Tack: [embarassed] "Sir, I'm applying for the job of computer geek. I had no life in high school. Or college either. I have no life now. So yes, sir, I can truthfully answer 'no' to all six questions, but do you guys really have to keep rubbing it in?"
f3i: "Well, uh, no, we're not trying to embarass you into admitting you had no life, it's just on the form..."
Tack: "And besides, steroids? Does this body look like I've ever even exercised it since 1991, let alone tried to bulk it up artificially? Sir? Sir?":-)
Actually, I rather enjoy reading government forms as historical documents. Because there's no effective mechanisms for getting rid of dumb policies, only ways of adding them, every government form is a reflection of the past 10-20 years of legislative cruft for whatever government department has to deal with said cruft.
I mean, steroids haven't made headlines for... gee, about eleven years. I know it's been eleven years since steroids were news because of the date on the form, that indicates the passage of some "for the childrun" law on February 27, 1991, indicating that it was no doubt the issue-du-jour about a year or so earlier.
(If you think that's silly, try reading the cross-references and subforms on every line of your tax return. There's stuff in there - railroad pensions, etc - that goes back the 1930s.)
Prediction: A question saying "...had more than 30 MP3s or 3 DiVX ripz a collection of unlicensed music, shared more than 30 MP3s or 3 DiVX ripz with people not already licensed to listen to the music, burned more than 30 MP3s or 3 DiVX ripz to removable media, after [some date in 2004]" will eventually appear on FBI recruitment forms.
> you're suggesting that capitalism implies some sort of ethic -- that you're supposed to play by rules, under which you don't try to take over the market, make money, etc.
Yes, I am. But one of these things is not like the other. The rule is "satisfy consumer need at whatever price a consumer in a free market is willing to bear"
If, for instance, consumers would pay $1500 for a crippled PC because it came in a black case and looked more like a stereo component than a regular $500 whitebox, I'd have no problem -- so long as I, consumer, could also purchase a $500 whitebox, a Dremel tool, an ISO of Linux, and a can of paint.
(Were I more capitalistic, I might even go into the business of selling case mods:)
> there is a recognized benefit to conglomeration and annihilation, which falls off when you become a little too big.
Yes. And AOL/TW was the perfect example. And shareholders dumb enough to hold onto their shares instead of (a) voting them against the Board of Directors for such a mindbogglingly dumb idea, or (b) selling the shares as soon as the merger was announdced, have paid for it over the past two years. (To bring us at least marginally back on topic, I'd say the same for Compaq/HP - and that merger came within a hair's breadth of being voted down:)
> if you're going to claim it's not right for capitalists to ask for legislation that would ban competing products... you've not looked at laws recently. it's just one more way of getting an advantage.
I claim it's not right, I don't claim it doesn't happen:(
I believe that those who leverage lobbyist dollars in order to use the power of the State to maintain an antiquated business model against the wishes of consumers in a free market, aren't worthy of the name "capitalist". I'm not sure what to call 'em. (I can think of lots of things I'd like to call 'em, but nothing I'd want to put in print on a family-friendly website like Slashdot.:)
> capitalism is not about consumers. it's about market.
And whom is the market for, if not the customer?
When the market ceases to be a means for providing customers with things they want at prices they're willing to pay, (whether by Congressional fiat or RIAA/MPAA cartel-like behavior), it ceases to be a free market, and those who choose to base their business plans on such an unfree market, cease to be capitalists.
If it's any consolation to you, there are very few capitalists around these days. (Sadly, it's no consolation to me.)
Gee, it costs $1500 and doesn't do half of what a $500 PC does today! Where do I sign up?
The sad thing is that it's like the RIAA-sponsored music sites - a project designed to fail.
When HP and MSFT testify that "We tried to sell cripped PCs but nobody bought them" to Congress, Congress' solution will by to make it illegal to buy non- crippled PCs.
If you made boxen at $400 apiece, but can only sell them at $500, would you continue to do so, or would you rather collude with Hollywood to get Congress to make the $500 PCs illegal, so that you can sell the same hardware, crippled, at $1500?
If you're part of the crowd that wants to rant about how capitalism's destroying the world, I'd urge you to make sure you're really talking about capitalism before you rant.
A capitalist (one who believes in a market based in the exchange of goods or money between voluntary participants) would continue to sell non-crippled boxen at $500.
If HP and MSFT get in bed with Hollywood to get Congress to force consumers to buy $1500 crippled entertainment centers, (by banning the $500 non-crippled computers, which consumers seem to prefer), they cease to become capitalists.
Slashdot Mirror
>
> I suppose it'd get you that "extra-crispy" skin on your chicken...
D00d!
I 0vercl0x0r3d my 0v3n with l4v4, it gets 2000 d3gr33z! Check out my case mod! Pure t1t4n1um! Ti-m0dd3d ch1ck3n 0wnz 4ll j00r b4s3! :)
How about that goddamned modal dialog window that pops up when it can't load an unreachable embedded element.
Please don't whine about how it's not nice to alias whatever.doubleclick.com to 127.0.0.1 in my hosts file. I know it's a kludge, but it's my hosts file. I don't want any traffic to go to those domains, whether it's from Mozilla or any other application.
Bug 28586 has been open for over two years and has 115 votes against it. (Moz team, please just swallow your pride and deal with the fact that your users just might not use their machines the way you do.)
(And the fact that hosts-based blocking is a kludge doesn't change the fact that modal dialogs for "document contains no data" or "ain't no host there" are just plain evil. The domain serving an image might be Slashdotted, for instance.)
Until I switch to Mozilla for everything, I still need my hosts-based blocking for the crap my proxy doesn't catch.
Of course, if I keep having to click on its goddamn modal dialogs instead of just seeing "X"s or broken image icons when a site's images are Slashdotted or blocked by my hosts file or firewall, I'll never use Mozilla as a web browser, let alone switch other parts of my life over to it. Pity. Apart from this bug, it looked pretty cool. But with this bug, it's unusable.
This has to go into the main builds.
(Disclaimer: if this made it into the 1.1 release, I confess I never bothered checking. Anyone knwo if it made it into 1.2? I can apply the patch and build the damn binaries myself if I have to, but most Joe Sixpack users can't.)
>
> Either about a frog who crosses the road or a religious fellow who cannot in good conscience fight in the war...
(Yeah, I know modern Quakers don't dress or drive like the Amish, but the image was too funny to pass up :)
And they'd take very little time and more importantly, very little money to implement. From a Congressman's point of view, those are bugs, not features.
>
> The only upside to 9/11 for me has been that people now respect me for the job I try to do much more
For what it's worth, before 9/11, I didn't gripe when checked, because I did respect what you did. (Even if, IMNSHO, many of your co-workers did it pretty poorly.)
> previously people griped when being security checked but now very rarely does this occur.
If I have to fly again, I'll continue not griping, because I've read about what happened to the people who questioned some of your co-workers' judgement.
Don't mistake what was once respect for what is now simple fear.
(What, you didn't feel like cattle before 9/11? What airline were you flying? :-)
Actually, I don't think they even make the airlines feel safer. I think it's marketing/PR. Something so the cattle can feel safer without actually having to do the work of making it safer.
Consider that we've got all the hassles and expense of idiots (oops, those "idiots" are now federal employees, and therefore immune from getting fired even Abdul gets on with a handgun because the federal employee was too busy fingerfucking your grandmother) in the name of security, but most of the measures that would really improve security, such as the installation of certain types of equipment at certain locations, and/or the use of certain technologies to better identify people who might present risks to aircraft, still haven't been taken.
All the hassle. None of the security. And since you can't guess whether it'll take you 15 minutes or two hours to get from airport entrance to your flight, there's a significant chance that if your trip is 500 miles or less, it'll be faster to drive it than fly it.
> The cost and hassle and privacy violations required to fly make me glad I have a car that will go 300k+ miles in its lifetime.
Amen to that. My cutoff is 18-24 hours. I used to love flying, but now I'll gladly spend a day on the road to avoid it. Fsck the airlines. I'll drive.
>
>But, unlike most people, I use an insulin pump. Most security people aren't keen on seeing someone with a small mechanical device and tubes attached to their body. Also, the insulin, needles, lancet, etc all get a good look through. I get stopped and have my bags inspected pretty much every time I go through. It's made me use air travel as a last resort.
(Be thankful they don't make you drink the insulin the way they did with those women and their breast milk :)
How has the legislation affected me? Will, since those drooling $5/hour morons are now drooling $10/hour federal employees, and as a result of my poor ability to take shit from dumb fucks who think that Congressional Medals of Honor, 2-inch GI Joe guns, and bottles of breast milk somehow constitute security threats, but who, as federal employees, can now throw me in jail for saying "WTF?" and can also no longer be fired when they exercise poor judgement, I call on everyone who's had it with the bullshit to...
Take the car.
No security goons. No having to remain silent while Guido dildoes your girlfriend's crotch or copping a feel off your mom's bra. (Why yes, it was women in underwire bras who hijacked four aircraft and destroyed the WTC and damaged the Pentagon, how could I have thought otherwise?)
Plug that laptop with 20G of MP3z into the stereo system and hear your favorite music over the engine noise. (Delayed by a traffic jam? No matter, the music sounds better when you're not doing 80 MPH just to keep up with traffic!)
Every six hours, pop into a small town and eat a nice hot meal. Screw McDonald's - find a random greasy spoon and eat with the locals. Or surrender to your lusts and have a dozen fresh Krispy Kremes.
The roadways are still free. You can get there in the same amount of time, with a lot less hassle, and you can see all the things you can't see stuck in a metal tube through a six-inch perspex square.
See the American countryside in air-conditioned comfort or lower that ragtop and let the breeze blow your hair as you take that twisty 2-lane blacktop through the national park instead of the boring interstate.
Finally, remind yourself as you stop by each "scenic viewpoint" and snap a few pics with your digicam that there are things about America that are too big for 19 Islamic terrorists - or even a Hill full of idiotic Congressmen and a TSA full of unaccountable bureaucrats and their $10/hour lackeys - to destroy.
Measurable, yes. But does the fact that you can measure it (parts per billion? trillion?) mean that there's a (human or other wildlife) health hazard from it?
And if there is a hazard, is that risk outweighed by the (newly-increased) risk of West Nile to humans in North America, and the (massive, known, documented) number of deaths due to malaria in the Third World.
(Note: These are three different questions. For instance, mosquito bites are annoying, but harmless - the risk of encephalitis has always been pretty minimal, and DDT probably wasn't justified for mosquito control in the West until recently. Before West Nile, DDT may not have been justifiable for mosquito control in the West. That risk/reward equation is changing now as West Nile spreads. And finally, the risk/reward of applying DDT to our mosquito problems has nothing to do with the risk/reward of malaria in the Third World, which IMHO more than justifies the use of DDT there.)
> Anything that lurks in the soil that long can't be nice stuff.
Depending on the quantities still there, probably not. (And yes, I do agree that it's long-lived. On the other hand, you don't have to apply it every week like newer pesticides. Another risk/reward tradeoff.)
Meantime, do you have anything more substantive than that to back up the assertion that it's harmful? Here's some contrary evidence that's come out since the 60s and 70s that refutes notion that it's anywhere near as dangerous to humans or wildlife as it was claimed to be.
(Of particular note - studies in 1999 are pretty consistent in demonstrating that there's no link between DDT and cancer in humans or primates. IMHO there never was.)
>
>If they want hacker followers they should call the personal information sharing agent "My Women"
(*lol*, where do these marketing fucktards come up with this shit. Sounds more like "The Man" or "Company Man".)
My system has three "personal information sharing agents".
Yo, "My Man", meet my man "HOSTS", my man "Junkbuster", and my main man "harware firewall". Makes "My Man" my bitch.
(Sigh... remember the good old days when personal network security was about stopping crax0rz from breaking into your system from the outside? :-)
The leading cause of death on the planet today is good ol' malaria. Mosquito control with DDT could solve that problem - and no, it wouldn't require spraying massive amounts of tens of millions of pounds on food crops, just a few hundred thousand pounds a year.
"B-b-b-ut DDT is bad! The enviros said so!" - really? The evidence for that is highly questionable.
DDT also help with another up-and-coming disease, too.
> In my opinion listening to the environmentalists causes no harm; but if they are right we're fucked. So whether or not I agree with them or with you - I'm going to modify my behaviour based on what they tell me. I'll buy a more efficient car, I'll steer clear of GM foods, and I'll try to avoid creating vast quantities of waste. And where I can I'll also support them in their efforts.
Dude - WTF kind of logic is that? Believing the earth is flat is also harmless. (And if the earth is flat, we're fucked because someday someone's gonna sail off the edge! ) So even if I don't agree with flat-earthers, I'll avoid cruise ships and support the flat-earthers in their efforts.
How about trying something revolutionary, like the idea that "the d00d who makes the statement has the burden of proof". If the enviros make a claim, it's up to them to prove their case to you.
If, after listening to their argument, you still agree with them, modify your behavior. But if you don't agree with them, don't modify your behavior.
Avoiding GM foods because there's no harm there? You mean, like rice that could provide folks with beta-carotene and vitamin A, preventing millions of cases of blindness and about two million deaths every year? Yeah, no harm there.
Now I dig that we might not need the carotene-advanced rice, and as such, we're quite free to stick with regular rice if we so choose. But to support the environmentalist agenda to deny everyone access to this technology is going too far. So I choose to support GM foods (and most genetic engineering in general), and I'll eat the GM foods if they taste good.
And sometimes the enviro arguments do make sense. F'rinstance, I choose efficient cars because, umm, well, they're more efficient. Unless I'm hauling freight (which I ain't), I'm interested in getting from "A" to "B" in a reasonable timeframe, preferably with a minimum of expense. Hmm, the econobox costs $10K and $0.10 per mile, and the SUV costs $30K and $0.20 per mile, and the hybrid $20K and $0.05 per mile.
If I expect to keep a car for 10 years and I drive 5000 miles a year, I buy the $10K car. (I could save $2500 by spending an extra $10000 for the hybrid, losing $7500 - almost enough to buy another car!) If I drive 20000 miles per year, I save $7500 out of $10000 and hybrid starts to look pretty good - assuming I can get 10 years out of the batteries. The SUV sux azz and isn't in contention for me. But even though I think they're a poor choice, I wouldn't deny someone else the right to buy one. They may simply have different transportation needs than I do.
> And when the oil runs out and you're left with a rusting pile of useless metal on your drive remember to blame the government because "they should have done something".
Long before the oil runs out, it'll run low. Supply and demand will increase the price of oil. When it's $0.50 per mile for the shitbox, $2.00 per mile for the SUV, and still $0.05 per mile for the electric vehicle, everyone will have an incentive to switch. (...well, assuming we have nuclear power, which is the only way we'll be able to generate enough electricity to power all the cars when the internal combustion engine dies.
(Or would you prefer to burn more coal or natural gas - same amount of CO2 released - to get the electric current to recharge the batteries... or to electrolyze the water for the hydrogen in the fuel cells? Don't forget, you didn't mine the methane hydrates in the eco-sensitive offshore shallows, and you also helped the enviros ban genetic engineering, so you can't grow acres of sugar cane in the desert for ethanol, or genetically-engineer a batch of superbugs to crack water :-)
Both are good reading. Both are very different.
1) Read Acts of the Apostles first.
2) Read Cheap Complex Devices second.
Buy both. CCD explains the backstory/metastory of Acts, albeit in a roundabout, artsy-fartsy way. (And I'm sure there are the kernels of at least two or three more AI-authored novels in CCD. *g*)
Does anyone know if Sundman (the author) will be at LinuxWorld in New York or the next one in the Bay Area? (I found out about him through a geek who loaned me a dead-tree copy he got from Sundman, who was selling copies at LinuxWorld SF.)
>
> ("Transfusion", anyone? "Zoomin' down the highway, doing 79...")
Audiogalactic doin' 79,
Got sued by Rosen now I'm feelin' fine,
Hey man, dig that, was that a "ded kitty" sign?
Transfusion, transfusion,
We're in desperate need of a cash infusion,
Never gonna download an MP3 again,
(Stream a tune to me, June...)
Send out a press release at a quarter to nine,
I gotta appease that VC of mine,
Draw down my credit line or pay the bonds on time?
Transfusion, transfusion,
Maybe they won't notice the DRM intrusion,
Never let 'em burn a CD again,
(Slip the green to me, Gene...)
Oh, my revenue, it comes from two classes,
Spyware hogs and RIAA jackasses,
So remember to sub-scribe today!
(Hey, daddy-o, uh, make that check payable to Harry Fox, huh? 'attaboy...)
- With apologies to Nervous Norvus.
You hit the nail square on the... piece of wood about one millimiter away from the nail :-)
"Media" is the plural of "medium."
"The media" means "Radio, TV, magazine, and newspapers" - they're all one-to-many forms of communication. Broadcast. Centralized. Huge startup costs (buildings, printing presses) and infrastructure (an army of reporters, editors, typesetters, people to run the presses) costs. Advertiser-supported of necessity to deal with the startup/infrastructure.
These are the media for which the Time-Warner guys were trained to deal, and for which they'd come up with good business plans for 50+ years.
"The medium" means "The new medium of communication, based on the Internet" - a many-to-many mode of communication. Everyone's got a printing press, whether it be posting to Slashdot, emailing friends on mailing lists, or whatever. Narrowcast. Decentralized. Zero or near-zero startup costs (a $1000 PC and modem) and infrastructure costs (a $20/month subscription to an ISP, and the army of reporters is everyone like you).
Try to apply the old business model to a new technology with the same essential features, and it works. Silent films begat talkies. Radio begat television.
Try to apply the old business model to a new technology where all the implicit assumptions about what "medium" meant have gone away, and *boom*. AOL/TW begat a massive bloodletting of shareholder value, because they couldn't see the forest for the trees.
Perhaps best illustrated by way of analogy:
"When will you guys figure out that Banzai charges DON'T FUCKING WORK?!?"
- Shaftoe (U.S. soldier) to Dengo (Japanese soldier), in Neal Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon".
Huh?
Donating your money to your pet charity makes you a philanthropist.
Donating my money to your pet charity makes you a thief or a Congressman or a Communist, depending on how much of it you steal and whether you're honest enough to admit you're a thief or whether you're lying about your motives while you loot my wealth.
If the shareholders of Ben and Jerry's didn't like the amount of money their board was donating to charity (instead of investing in the business for future growth, or distributing to the shareholders as dividends), they could have appointed a new slate of directors.
Rather - as some have pointed out - the trendiness of the "hippie" ethic at Ben and Jerry's was part of the marketing scheme. If you make 10% margin on every tub of ice cream you sell, and if donating $1M to charity gives you enough good PR that you sell an extra $15M worth of ice cream (profit = $1.5M), the money's well spent. You've increased shareholder value by $0.5M (to say nothing of the tax break you get for the $1M donation).
As compared to the public sector?
Tell me, whose money does the Government risk?
Unfortunately, no.
> I think something will never be the same about our little neighborhood of space when people look up and see lights all over the moon at night and they've dug up the man in the moon's face... ;)
I think something will never be the same about our little neighborhood of space when a wandering asteroid extinguishes the lights all over the Earth at night.
I worry about people like you - who would have the only creatures that can make lights like that imprisoned and vulnerable on Earth, rather than busily making more lights on the Moon, Mars, or on near-Earth asteroids.
If people like you carry the day, all of those lights will go out at the same time. And then, our little neighborhood of space won't be the same at all.
>
>So, WTF does it have to do withthe US government?
A U.S. company plans to build high-tech toys, stuff them into a Russian rocket and launch it from Kasakhstan.
Even though the Cold War is over, the phrase "technology transfer" still applies.
(Word to the US Government: Want to reduce the risks of technology transfer? How about giving up the NASA monopoly and resulting prohibitive launch costs that have driven US companies to launch from Europe and former Soviet republics by opening up space to private developers in the United States?)
Really? I'm a richer man - in the sense that my computer does things it otherwise couldn't, and I have money in my pocket that would otherwise have gone to Bill Gates for a shoddier product - because of Linus, RMS, and the GPL.
From whose table did Stallman take "bread" that spins on my hard drives?
> You need to understand that this is in essence a closed system. No new resources, no new opportunities. Something does not come out of nothing, its TAKEN, its USED UP.
See that big ball of hydrogen 93 million miles away spewing photons everywhere? See all those self-organizing carbon-based replicator units that turn photons into more carbon-based replicators?
System don't look closed to me.
See the carbon-based replicator units that look like hairless apes? See the big cranium on their pink- or brown-skinned bodies?
See the hairy one called RMS and his cranium? That's where much of the wealth on my hard drive came from.
> its only one more example of how we need a new social contract, a new way in which those that create are recompensed, those that consume are not held hostage....and those that feast on the work of others do not prosper - but are instead destroyed like the parasites they are.
>
> Face it, the 'dream' doesn't work. Wake up and greet the new dawn.
Face it, this is the new dawn -- we're living the first generation in history in which the workers truly do own the means of production -- their own brains.
Yet some still insist on preaching industrial-age Marxism - that the quantity of wealth in the world is fixed, despite all evidence to the contrary. (Yes, the third world lives in the same poverty it did 500 years ago, but 10-20% of the world's population now lives better than the kings of Europe at that time, and that population continues to increase. Most of you reading this today, have a higher standard of living than the top 1% of Americans did at the turn of the century.)
Wake up and greet the new dawn? It's already mid-afternoon, sleepyhead.
Calling X86 assembly "baroque" is like calling the Grand Canyon a "ditch".
> Disclaimer: I learned x86 long before I learned 68K or Z8K.
Disclaimer: I'm an old 6502 and 6809 dog.
>
>Am I supposed to:
>1.Tell her to fuck off?
>2.Use my keyboard as a plate?
>3.'Press pause' and tell the 5 (or 50) other players to wait for me to come back?
> 4.Let the computer do what its good at?
1) Instead of "Fuck off", how about "Bring the food in here, serving-wench!"
2) If you're lucky, you'll get to use your keyboard as a plate. If you're unlucky, your lap will be the plate. And it'll be French Onion Soup.
3) You'll have to press pause anyway while you yank the keyboard out and run screaming around the room.
4) So yeah, you'll still need an AI.
> I'm not a hardcore player either; my mouse clogs up etc, and I hate micromanagement. This kind of stuff would work just fine - perhaps 24 hours a day (with me checking in daily for an hour to set budgets, initiate or even approve attack plans, etc.
Y'know, I'd like that in a slow-moving RTS like your imaginary WW2 sim. Imagine a [single-player] game that took over your PC and ran a world in the background, 24/7, for a period of weeks/months.
Churchill was a hero - but even he had to sleep.
1) Great disincentive for anyone to buy a 16:9 TV.
2) You think that once they started, they'd ever stop?
3) The slow adoption of 16:9 would even give them an excuse to continue broadcasting 4:3 with ads forever. "Well, we can't leave all those 4:3 folks in the dirt by broadcasting in 16:9 - better to broadcast in 4:3 for another 20 years and sell more sidebanner-ads!"
Creative idea, yes. Horrible and intruive for the conumer, yes. Probability of it happening: E_UNDEFINED.
(Media executives are unlikely to come up with creative solutions, but highly likely to come up with horrible intrusive ones. Probability is therefore, umm, divide-by-fish and carry the fnord?)
What you said. It's a cultural problem.
Why not allow researchers the time/flexibility to pursue leads with publicly available information, and then pass that information on to agents to do the takedown stuff?
I can think of lots of ways to monitor areas of the 'net for suspicious activity (illegal types of pr0n, spam for illegal types of pr0n, traffic analysis of PGP-encrypted messages, and I'm choosing to ignore software/music piracy) that, while not necessarily actionable in and of themselves, would be the missing pieces that would make open-and-shut cases.
"Agent X, here's a letter. It doesn't matter that you don't understand a word of it. Take this in front of a judge. He may not understand a word of it either, but he'll probably authorize the request. The ISP will understand every word, and will hand you all the evidence you need to take $BIGNUM bad guys down."
(Come to think of it, aside from the legal boilerplate, the subpoena to the ISP need only contain three words: "grep", a regexp, and a filename. The regexp and the filename will depend on what department Agent X works for, but the approach is the same.)
Before anyone says that's unreasonable search and seizure, the regexps I'm thinking of can be based on publicly-posted or freely-given information such as IP addresses, timestamps, and other data given out by the suspect him/herself.
Investigators (maybe "investigators" isn't the right word. "Oracle" sounds nice. As in, the Agent asks the Oracle where to get leads for such-and-such a kind of case, and an anonymous voice from within the Oracle says "Start looking here") could be given $$$ bonuses based on the number of successful takedowns Agents made, and Oracles who provide too many bum leads get fired. Agents could continue to get the fun stuff like like kicking down doors and shooting badasses.
>
>1. Have you used marijuana at all within the last three years?
> 2. Have you used marijuana more than a total of 15 times in your life?
>3. Have you used any other illegal drug (including anabolic steroids after February 27, 1991) at all in the past 10 years?
[
Tack: "Yes sir! I can answer 'no' to all six questions sir!"
f3i: "...and can you say that truthfully, Mr. Tackhead?"
Tack: [embarassed] "Sir, I'm applying for the job of computer geek. I had no life in high school. Or college either. I have no life now. So yes, sir, I can truthfully answer 'no' to all six questions, but do you guys really have to keep rubbing it in?"
f3i: "Well, uh, no, we're not trying to embarass you into admitting you had no life, it's just on the form..."
Tack: "And besides, steroids? Does this body look like I've ever even exercised it since 1991, let alone tried to bulk it up artificially? Sir? Sir?" :-)
Actually, I rather enjoy reading government forms as historical documents. Because there's no effective mechanisms for getting rid of dumb policies, only ways of adding them, every government form is a reflection of the past 10-20 years of legislative cruft for whatever government department has to deal with said cruft.
I mean, steroids haven't made headlines for... gee, about eleven years. I know it's been eleven years since steroids were news because of the date on the form, that indicates the passage of some "for the childrun" law on February 27, 1991, indicating that it was no doubt the issue-du-jour about a year or so earlier.
(If you think that's silly, try reading the cross-references and subforms on every line of your tax return. There's stuff in there - railroad pensions, etc - that goes back the 1930s.)
Prediction: A question saying "...had more than 30 MP3s or 3 DiVX ripz a collection of unlicensed music, shared more than 30 MP3s or 3 DiVX ripz with people not already licensed to listen to the music, burned more than 30 MP3s or 3 DiVX ripz to removable media, after [some date in 2004]" will eventually appear on FBI recruitment forms.
Yes, I am. But one of these things is not like the other. The rule is "satisfy consumer need at whatever price a consumer in a free market is willing to bear"
If, for instance, consumers would pay $1500 for a crippled PC because it came in a black case and looked more like a stereo component than a regular $500 whitebox, I'd have no problem -- so long as I, consumer, could also purchase a $500 whitebox, a Dremel tool, an ISO of Linux, and a can of paint.
(Were I more capitalistic, I might even go into the business of selling case mods :)
> there is a recognized benefit to conglomeration and annihilation, which falls off when you become a little too big.
Yes. And AOL/TW was the perfect example. And shareholders dumb enough to hold onto their shares instead of (a) voting them against the Board of Directors for such a mindbogglingly dumb idea, or (b) selling the shares as soon as the merger was announdced, have paid for it over the past two years. (To bring us at least marginally back on topic, I'd say the same for Compaq/HP - and that merger came within a hair's breadth of being voted down :)
> if you're going to claim it's not right for capitalists to ask for legislation that would ban competing products ... you've not looked at laws recently. it's just one more way of getting an advantage.
I claim it's not right, I don't claim it doesn't happen :(
I believe that those who leverage lobbyist dollars in order to use the power of the State to maintain an antiquated business model against the wishes of consumers in a free market, aren't worthy of the name "capitalist". I'm not sure what to call 'em. (I can think of lots of things I'd like to call 'em, but nothing I'd want to put in print on a family-friendly website like Slashdot. :)
> capitalism is not about consumers. it's about market.
And whom is the market for, if not the customer?
When the market ceases to be a means for providing customers with things they want at prices they're willing to pay, (whether by Congressional fiat or RIAA/MPAA cartel-like behavior), it ceases to be a free market, and those who choose to base their business plans on such an unfree market, cease to be capitalists.
If it's any consolation to you, there are very few capitalists around these days. (Sadly, it's no consolation to me.)
The sad thing is that it's like the RIAA-sponsored music sites - a project designed to fail.
When HP and MSFT testify that "We tried to sell cripped PCs but nobody bought them" to Congress, Congress' solution will by to make it illegal to buy non- crippled PCs.
If you made boxen at $400 apiece, but can only sell them at $500, would you continue to do so, or would you rather collude with Hollywood to get Congress to make the $500 PCs illegal, so that you can sell the same hardware, crippled, at $1500?
If you're part of the crowd that wants to rant about how capitalism's destroying the world, I'd urge you to make sure you're really talking about capitalism before you rant.
A capitalist (one who believes in a market based in the exchange of goods or money between voluntary participants) would continue to sell non-crippled boxen at $500.
If HP and MSFT get in bed with Hollywood to get Congress to force consumers to buy $1500 crippled entertainment centers, (by banning the $500 non-crippled computers, which consumers seem to prefer), they cease to become capitalists.