This basically means that once a person is a renunciate, that's it, you don't bother what he was before his new life, the old self is dead.
Except that his skin color still determines how he will be treated. So the caste system still applies to him, especially if his skin is very dark.
This is oversimplified despite a kernel of truth. Some brahmins have fairly dark skin; other cues are used to indicate caste. India is a vast population with unbelievable variety. Please don't equate US and euro oppression with India's.
Hint: alt-tab then you can run the mouse over the icons
Or, you can just hold down command-tab and it very rapidly cycles through the open applications (same for cmd-` to cycle through windows). [on a mac, that is]
The purpose of prisons is to separate those who are a danger to society from society.
Nicely idealized, and a good goal. However, the purpose of the current USA prison system is largely to perpetuate the economics of the the prison system... it's a heartless, profitable, growing business. Not to mention putting away 1 million people who are a danger to no-one but potentially themselves--pot users, thus indicating that it's also a political and ideological tool, a way of enriching police departments, a tool of racist elites, the CIA's drug importation enterprise, etc etc.
it's rare someone with such an opinion (tempered and educated) appears on Slashdot with regards to business.
[grin] Well, the emperor has lacy undies. Corporations have the potential to ultimately become sentient (run by AI, cf. singularity alarmists), as we've designed them as entities (and allow this sleight of mind to persist). We have to set up proper ethical frameworks now, while we can. Thugs like MediaDefender need to be straightened out like a tyrant tot (or a gangrenous finger).
I have a long view on this since I'm not an avowed capitalist, but actually a Parecon oriented municipal libertarian of sorts, who's decided to work freelance within the given system. But my attitudes towards business in general are based on kindergarten ethics... since corporations are little more than toddlers, as pseudo-entities with the common-denominator collective emotions of its directors and chief executives.
While industrial capitalism makes the transition into post-industrialism, the late-cretaceous marginal creatures like "social venture-capitalists", worker-owned small enterprises, 'balanced job complex' worksites, and cooperatives are proliferating and filling new niches. Yay for real progress, however camouflaged and sluggish (at first) it may be!
Granted, businesses are there to make money, but unless they employ only robots, there is a human factor there as well. Oversimplifying this to the point that "money trumps everything else" is exactly how these companies get into such shitloads of trouble.
Yes, and more: Businesses are not there just to make money, I'm getting tired of this old trope. It's like saying Humans are there to make more Humans.
Enterprise means getting things done, making stuff, acheiving goals. Businesses are there to do things and compensate their investors and staff for their efforts or risk-taking. People start a business (or should) because they want to provide, create, or change something. Let them be judged by what they do and how they do it, not how much they've managed to skim off the top.
Let's not reduce capitalism to The Trough, it's nihilistic and will lead people further into market fundamentalism.
Much more likely it's simply because when you pull your fingers apart the system immediately knows WHERE you want to zoom in on -- namely, on whatever location your fingers were initially over.
Yeah that'/s also true; there are many reasons for using a pull as a zoom, such as having pixels morphing relative to two paths (not inverse), or keeping your destination visible during the zoom, etc.
Shouldn't the zoom go the other way, as if you're stretching or shrinking the image?
I was looking to mod the right answer, but didn't see it, so here:
The summary is misleading. Like other multitouch devices, this one zooms in when you pull your fingers apart, and vice versa.
Why do they do it this way? there are comments on this page that bringing your fingers together should zoom in. That is an abstract, thought-experiment approach that doesn't include an essential sense: proprioception.
When you pull your fingers apart, you are pulling. To trick your visual processing to work with your body, they should correllate (ever get motion sickness? That's why.). Simply, if you pull, the object should approach; push, and it should recede... even with both fingers on one hand. It's a muscular thing, a brainstem kind of thing, it isn't something abstract. Mess with it at your peril. There's more biology involved in a touch interface than simply a visual metaphor.
people do a disservice to society when they mock a belief system simply because they believe differently.
OK, fair enough. Can I mock a belief system that is founded on obvious falsehoods? Like the origins of the Bible itself, for instance: its authorship is acknowledged by scholars and the vatican to be dubious, mostly cobbled together by Constantine's staff from disparate groups as a power play to keep squabbling down in the empire. It's been revised and edited and mistranslated over the years. Yet those who are most adamant about its literal truth are willfully blind to its literary authority.
I'm all for the mystical, personal versions of biblical faith: knock yourself out, T. Merton. Jesus is a great story, if you go in for the transcendental. But fundamentalists? They trend towards the Phelps family. What would Jesus (the character) do? Probably move to India.
AppleWorks was a precursor to a revolutionary technology that was being developed at Apple that would eliminate the concept of "application-centric" workflows and replace it with "document-centric" workflows using a newly developed component technology whose name I can't remember right now (OpenDoc???). A few programs that fully practiced the new technology were developed by third parties as Apple made the APIs available; Apple themselves made the highly vaunted Cyberdog program. However, Apple's woes of the mid-1990s forced them to drop many of the cool technologies that they were working on, including this component technology.
Yes, it was called OpenDoc, and I really thought that document-centric computing was the way to go. Well, I still do, I've just given up hope.
The idea is simple: we want context-rich documents, with different kinds of information and presentation as necessary. So, work on the document until it's done, by opening a different software component for each kind of content. The document's always there, the software comes and goes. Compare that to how I work now, with production suites of huge complexity and vast feature sets, but awkward interoperability. In this software utopia, we would have only bought the features we would actually use, and it was all about integration, and not being distracted from the main thing: the document.
Unfortunately, it died before the bugs could be worked out (the few available components were nowhere near optimized yet, buggy and slow).
AppleWorks was a transition example of this: a monolithic program that was document-centric, so that you could kind of 'have it all' if your needs weren't too extreme. I suspect that in the big plan it might have had a place weaning us off of the application-centric software economy.
The third party action was really starting to heat up when Apple pulled the plug on the whole deal, apparently in an attempt to stay alive by cutting costs.
I wonder about that... [tinfoilhat mode] I'm sure some big money would have been lost if this paradigm had caught on... a blossoming of garage businesses to compete with, it would have been a major shift. I wonder if some horse trading went on to encourage them to "knife the baby". [/tinfoilhat]
In countries where satellites are used in such a fashion, growers have taken to mixing their 'crop' with other crops to avoid presenting a big obvious target.
Anecdote: I once met a farmer from Iowa whose primary income came from interplanting cannabis with corn, in order to mask the infrared and colour signature.
The point is, this was 20 years ago. The satellites weren't the issue then, flyovers were. The local technique (I live in a rural area famous for its alternative crop) is infrared-spotter helicopters supplied by the foreign-invaders 'DEA' and co-staffed by RCMP (that's 'mounties' to you 'murricans).
Well if we are talking about product names...
Longhorn is a codename.
Point of trivia: the Longhorn Saloon and Grill is the name of the bar that used to be (or still is, haven't worked there in 18 years) at the base of Whistler and Blackcomb. The bar is right between the two mountains, so it's a pretty good pun... though it implies that Vista was conceived and coded under the influence.
Anyway, give me goofy names like drupal or dabbledb over iNames like iWork, iLife, iLose, Pages, Numbers, etc. (non-troll disclaimer: iUse all of the above).
On an iMac the monitor is disposable (unless I am missing something).
Yah, you are missing the used computer market. Mac users who bother to upgrade sell their computers for a premium, the used prices are inflated so it works well to buy new, cheaper than upgrading components and you get the warranty.
Why? because macs obsolete a bit slower. I have a 7 year old iBook G3 that still gets used for capturing video and sorting clips in the field; the equivalent toshiba with its crappy case and expensive add-ons is already disposed of. A 4-year old machine will run OS X 10.4 fine.
What this means in practical terms to the discussion at hand is that I know quite a few freelance layout specialists who know damn little about their Macs but know their primary tools (Quark, InDesign, Illustrator, etc.) exactly as much as they feel they need to. This means that they haven't upgraded for years, software or hardware, since their setup is essentially a locked-down turnkey system: stable and adequately fast for the task. The biggest speed boost is in the wetware, anyway.
A couple of examples: 3 years ago I was talking to someone who specializes in complex books like naturalist and travel guides. His rig was a maxed out and optimized PowerMac 8500 running OS 8. He couldn't afford the downtime of upgrading, because he didn't want to distract himself from churning out quality books and raking in freelance $. Last weekend I met a government document specialist who is finally moving to OS X with considerable anxiety, and is even more anxious about moving away from that nasty Quark thing to a new set of keyboard commands and costly paradigms.
Nerds have trouble grasping this, because they see corporate shops where the graphic dept. has spanky new quads, or they're used to an upgrade frenzy every time nvidia drops a log. I straddle both worlds, so I can tell you that quite a few Mac users are stealthed out there on their antiques, while many windows users are snapping up $400 dells and lenovos. I think this factor skews the installed user base / market share equation, and I'm pretty sure Adobe knows about them (though they probably don't care much).
Oh, and I forgot... use simple (aka 'natural') products not just to 'save the friggin planet' but to avoid Johnson and Johnson and their evil twins... just because the label doesn't have their logo is no guarantee of not lining their pockets, they have 230 subsidiaries! They're everywhere, in most of the pharmacy, all over the supermarket shelves, in health food stores (!), ad nauseum.
A notary doesn't have that function anymore and in Holland hasn't had that function for over 300 years. I'm fine with going to one, as long was we don't have to call it marriage.
I'm fully sympathetic, C. While I'm not militant atheist (erm, ravenous agnostic?), I think that rituals are important for hard-wired hominid reasons. 13 years ago we decided no church/temple or State belonged in our relationship, so we eloped with a small ceremony and jumped a broom (pre-church euro tradition and US slave resistance tradition, thus a common ritual to us). We called it a 'unionizing' ceremony to the few invited, for good humour. We wear rings to keep the critics at bay. When we moved to a conservative (backward) part of the world, we had to settle for calling each other husband and wife, and claim marriage, because people were very confused by the word "partner."
Last week, however, we gave in. We have two children and want to travel. We have very different skin colour, and different names, and own property. So, we let the State in to our lives, and had a civil ceremony (only the children and witnesses and The State present).
10 years ago, I would have considered it a failure of principles, and it probably would have been. Now, it's just another detail in a busy life, trying to navigate overly complex and restrictive bureacracies and regimes. It's their marriage, not ours; it doesn't make us feel any better, but it will help get a hotel room or through customs, and make the kids a bit safer.
I think that marriage pre-dates nation states, imperial religions, etc., that its roots are tribal if not hominid-troupe. Monogamy had to be managed given how horny we are and how sparse and inter-related we were back then. So, being monogamous, I have no problems with the term, just its interpretation; it's a 'natural' human state (in all its many crazy variations), and can be made culturally and politically progressive through its practise.
Perhaps the problem is merely that you read only "run of the mill" or mediocre fiction and futurism, hmm?
Duuude! Chill out! You were reading too much and too little into my whinge. Why can't I be dissatisfied with the mediocre forms of the art?
No, you're right, I meant to write "BAD" SF. I wasn't being slippery, just lazy, no need to be so tetchy and presumptuous and even insulting. I tend to like the more socially visionary stuff (Delaney, Butler, Stephenson, Robinson, etc.), or the well-considered hard stuff. The first degree was in literature, with an emphasis on the history of fantastic lit, so my enjoyable reading's restricted to those who can write, or those who think, or rarely, both.
Studying Olaf Stapledon partly ruined my appreciation for pulp SF, since the vast majority of interesting SF plot premises I come across in that category were sketched by him in the '30s. Even Clarke was quite derivative of him, at times. Stapledon's history of the universe is founded on the presumption of FTL and selective communication (telepathy, essentially). Smith and his fellow space-operaticons had nothing on Stapledon for sheer volume of visionary tech ideas; they were all about action and cowboys in space, where Olaf was all about the vast scope of ideas (I think his style sucks, actually, but it doesn't matter).
The ultimate problem is not a lack of imagination -- many, many exotic notions of ET communication have been considered -- but rather that the exotic modes are not pragmatic.
Well, I kind of agree with you, but I'd suggest that often those 'exotic modes' are there more for plot device and a sense of originality in prose than derived from a striving for accurate futurism. Pragmatism is in the eye of the technology holder, I guess.
The paradox is that if they have a few thousand or hundred of thousand year ahead of us, then they should have at least by probe or similarly conquered or explored this galaxy, or send a lot of radio signal.
How about: we don't hear giant drums in the forest, so there's no one there? or: none of the smoke clouds we see are arranged into signals, so they are only forest fires?
One of the things that irks me about so many wannabe futurists, xenophiles, and run-of-the-mill SF is a failure of technological vision. Why would one assume that sending radio signals between the stars makes any sense whatsoever for an advanced civilization, unless we assume that our science has reached a galactic pinnacle?
Fermi's paradox, to me, ignores:
advancements in communications beyond radio
the probability that we don't understand what we ARE observing
the likelihood that we aren't observing even a significant fraction of what there is to observe
Average time a person spends on a resume, 12 seconds.
It better be short, it better list what they are looking for at the top, and your first sentence needs to make them want to read more.
A JoaT needs a long resume if they want to demonstrate the range and flexibility and variety of solutions they can bring to the company. The solution is the split resume: a summary with the major hit points, ideal for the 12-second scan, followed by the 2-3 page compendium that prepares the interested employer for the interview.
Maybe you haven't done any hiring, or work at unimaginative corporate hives, but that 12 seconds is generally used for sorting, and the short list candidates get the long treatment, where the laundry list resume is more than useful.
I've been hired as executive director of an organization that required me to build turnkey editing systems and assist with IT in the parent organization, do creative design and production, marketing and admin and business planning work, design curriculum, speak at conferences, and competently address social justice issues. Very, very few eligible candidates. Similarly, I've worked at startups where the JoaT position was a necessary evil at first, and the long resume clinched those jobs. YMMV.
I'm also not rich enough to just throw a monitor in the trash every time I get a new computer, buying Imacs. I just want a regular, maybe small tower with desktop parts, easily swapped RAM and maybe other parts. It should be at the same price as the Mini, but better, or equivalent to a Mini but cheaper.
I agree with your desire for a regular microtower format, but your "throw the monitor in the trash" quip is just garbage itself. Do you really throw out a 3 year old functional Mac, or do you sell it on craigslist for 3/5 of its original sticker price?
Complainers about limited upgradeability and sticker price never seem to take the inflated used Mac market into account.
I should add that some of the economic efficiency of the insurance industry goes in profits to the owners, who can then allocate that capital in other investments.
Hm, somehow I don't think that in the USA the large profits gleaned off one's auto insurance premiums is invested into road safety. Failure to do so, however, is a gross inefficiency at the societal scale.
Caveat emptor is more palatable than gov't program, IMHO. Gov't programs are monocultural, so they won't meet everyone's needs (someone in a similar position to yours might actually have it worse); and, from lack of competition, often very inefficient. If you don't like wading through contract fineprint, there are consumer rating and protection services like Consumer Reports.
Yes, I used to think so too. Now I believe that the nature of the transaction varies the nature of efficiency and providing for marginal cases. In the case of insurance, the market in Ontario is astonishingly monocultural despite hundreds of competitors. Competition and pseudo-variety can provide its own gross inefficiencies, as well. Like I stated previously, enduring transactions like licensing drivers, or insuring them, might be best served by a public agency. A hybrid, as in the BC system, seems to work better.
Sometimes it's important to know that someone's watching your back. I prefer competition in purchases. Mandatory long-term transactions that are highly complex and legalistic and data-heavy should be strongly regulated and made client-friendly, because the possibilities for misdirection etc. are considerable. I know brilliant people who can't, or shouldn't, be bothered with becoming expert shoppers for things like auto insurance.
As an investor, I don't mind insurance companies taking profits.
Fine, but we aren't all financial gamers. As a member of society as a whole, I resent gouging, and prefer profits from society-wide transactions invested in the general public good.
I don't know about Canada, but in the US, at least, you aren't paying for bad drivers -- insurers aren't obligated to take on bad drivers, and they can charge whatever they want. If you can't afford insurance because your are judged high-risk, that's what the SR-22 surety bond provision is for -- basically, self-insuring.
I rather think it is the responsibility of the car owner to control who drives the car. I agree that bad drivers should stop driving or pay the price, but I've experienced that this can be taken to ridiculous extremes, in a manner no better than nightmare bureaucracies. I think you trust the quasi-free market to serve the public good... too much in this respect, as consumers can't be well-informed enough, and the market can be too fractured. Think of it as another version of caveat emptor.
I guess I mean things like having to research whether a company has low premiums but high deductibles with abstruse rules, aggressive adjustors, changeable rules, unusual restrictions, fine-print-itis. Caveat Emptor is a time-consuming burden that is lessened with a public company (in theory).
* I move quite a bit, so I would like the freedom to choose among insurance companies based on their quality of service and differing rates in different areas (this is because actuarial assumptions vary).
Within the very large region of British Columbia ICBC employs actuarial variation; I pay less in this quiet rural area than when I lived in Vancouver with its crazy mishmash of global driving habits and narrow streets. Typically for a less-than-horrible monopoly, ICBC's service is decent, certainly better than most of the private companies I investigated in Ontario. The rates are currently are a bit less than I would pay for similar discount providers there (would vary depending on the risk bracket; I'm in the safe bracket, but I think I subsidize the riskier drivers, which doesn't make me happy). Competition is managed through franchised brokers where retail service can vary, but the ground rules are uniform.
* Insurance coverage can be transferred between providers, so there is no market failure involved. Public monopolies are used in situations where the product is excludable (people can be prevented from using it), but non-rival (competitors can subsist because of high startup costs or physical impossibility). The obvious examples are utilities, which are infrastructure-heavy and there is only so much room.
Well, my experience with the open market was a short gap in car ownership excluded me from most providers and shopping around was ironically kafkaesque. A year later, I had even worse experiences with an unusual insurance requirement (insuring a cube van for non-commercial use), a problem I didn't have in monopoly-land BC. When I called the association of insurance companies to ask for advice, the official response was to lie to obtain my insurance!!
OTOH, if BC's insurance plan runs at a profit, I'll be impressed. It might be convenient for you personally, but it might cost you (or your fellow taxpayers) in other ways.
In theory, ICBC uses the profits from optional insurance to subsidize basic insurance, and to promote road safety. Ontario doesn't benefit from the significant road safety program this results in, and it shows. I prefer cheaper basic insurance and the considerable public safety benefits to paying for ads, giving my personal info to US-based insurers, sifting through policies, inconvenience, and worrying about hucksterism. It's the lesser of the evils.
The problem is that running an insurance service involves many short term transactions, and the lack of competition in a gov't service breeds inefficiency (I hear magical things about how well the gov't works in BC, but I'll eat my hat if the same system worked in the United States). On the other hand, you raise a good point that if a gov't mandates a service, private providers can leave you high and dry, since they must mind their bottom lines.
I take the client's point of view, not the providers (look, insurance can easily be a racket, right?). Since most people live in one jurisdiction over time, and have licenses most of their lives, the series of utterly necessary short transactions involving various vehicles is one long commercial relationship that involves some invasion of privacy, and thus like a lifelong transaction, so I propose that a public monopoly can do a more convenient and accountable job in these long-term situations.
In the US, there is a provision called SR-22 to help fill the gap; moreover, there is no recognized right to operate a motor vehicle, even roads are paid with taxes (thus justifying licensing and insurance mandates). Finally, being uninsured during any stretch while owning a vehicle registered for normal operation is indeed a bad sign to prospective insurers.
Since any car on the road must be insured (here), it makes sense to tie the insurance to the registration, and thus in BC it is one 15-minute visit to a ubiquitous neighbourhood "Autoplan" franchise, where you get your plates, transfer of ownership, and insurance. It rocks! No need for multiple visits to multiple layers of bureaucracy or insurance attached to a person. Not only that, shopping is pointless (so no stress about the fine print or misrepresentation, or money wasted on advertising), and it's a decent rate compared to the national average.
As an added bonus, the public insurance corporation and its broker franchisees participate heavily in road safety programs, contributing in a realistic way to the public interest.
The situation I was referring to in Ontario, where I had no insurance for 8 months and thus couldn't easliy get service from private insurers once I purchase a car, was a carless period. It never occured to me that one might be able to operate a vehicle without insurance, but it's of course what you assumed. That's what I get for growing up in a nanny state--but in this case, with myriad fools operating 2 tons of steel at high velocity, I'm glad for the regulation.
BTW, don't believe what you hear about the BC provincial gov't--it's mind-bogglingly surreal at times. Yet some things do work well, despite (or maybe because of) the swings between socialism and free marketeering.
I'd rather have insurers compete for my business, rather than the gov't mandating what security-related features should or should not come with my vehicle.
Me too, but it doesn't work that way in practice. Moving from BC (public insurance: ICBC) to Ontario (private) was a nightmare. Despite over 2million KM of safe claim-free driving and being in the statistically safe demographic (40+ 2kids stn-wgn employed), it took me almost a week (4 hrs of shopping, 20 phone calls) to find an insurer willing to sell to me, because I had an 8 month uninsured period. WTF? When I did find an insurer, it involved a couple of hours and three trips, and some invasive disclosure. Returning to BC, it was a 20 minute transaction with no hassle or hesitation, and I no longer disparage ICBC.
The bottom line is that insurance, being a regulated requirement, should be a government service with accountability, because private industry doesn't serve the public interest very well. If I'm required to contract a industry they must be require to contract me.
Lifelong transactions requiring ethics from users like auto insurance, health, etc. should not be scattered over various databases and across various ethical frameworks. The inverse also applies: government should stay out of short term transactions and moral restrictions.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that his skin color still determines how he will be treated. So the caste system still applies to him, especially if his skin is very dark.
This is oversimplified despite a kernel of truth. Some brahmins have fairly dark skin; other cues are used to indicate caste. India is a vast population with unbelievable variety. Please don't equate US and euro oppression with India's.
Or, you can just hold down command-tab and it very rapidly cycles through the open applications (same for cmd-` to cycle through windows). [on a mac, that is]
Nicely idealized, and a good goal. However, the purpose of the current USA prison system is largely to perpetuate the economics of the the prison system... it's a heartless, profitable, growing business. Not to mention putting away 1 million people who are a danger to no-one but potentially themselves--pot users, thus indicating that it's also a political and ideological tool, a way of enriching police departments, a tool of racist elites, the CIA's drug importation enterprise, etc etc.
[grin] Well, the emperor has lacy undies. Corporations have the potential to ultimately become sentient (run by AI, cf. singularity alarmists), as we've designed them as entities (and allow this sleight of mind to persist). We have to set up proper ethical frameworks now, while we can. Thugs like MediaDefender need to be straightened out like a tyrant tot (or a gangrenous finger).
I have a long view on this since I'm not an avowed capitalist, but actually a Parecon oriented municipal libertarian of sorts, who's decided to work freelance within the given system. But my attitudes towards business in general are based on kindergarten ethics... since corporations are little more than toddlers, as pseudo-entities with the common-denominator collective emotions of its directors and chief executives.
While industrial capitalism makes the transition into post-industrialism, the late-cretaceous marginal creatures like "social venture-capitalists", worker-owned small enterprises, 'balanced job complex' worksites, and cooperatives are proliferating and filling new niches. Yay for real progress, however camouflaged and sluggish (at first) it may be!
Yes, and more: Businesses are not there just to make money, I'm getting tired of this old trope. It's like saying Humans are there to make more Humans.
Enterprise means getting things done, making stuff, acheiving goals. Businesses are there to do things and compensate their investors and staff for their efforts or risk-taking. People start a business (or should) because they want to provide, create, or change something. Let them be judged by what they do and how they do it, not how much they've managed to skim off the top.
Let's not reduce capitalism to The Trough, it's nihilistic and will lead people further into market fundamentalism.
Yeah that'/s also true; there are many reasons for using a pull as a zoom, such as having pixels morphing relative to two paths (not inverse), or keeping your destination visible during the zoom, etc.
I was looking to mod the right answer, but didn't see it, so here:
The summary is misleading. Like other multitouch devices, this one zooms in when you pull your fingers apart, and vice versa.
Why do they do it this way? there are comments on this page that bringing your fingers together should zoom in. That is an abstract, thought-experiment approach that doesn't include an essential sense: proprioception.
When you pull your fingers apart, you are pulling. To trick your visual processing to work with your body, they should correllate (ever get motion sickness? That's why.). Simply, if you pull, the object should approach; push, and it should recede... even with both fingers on one hand. It's a muscular thing, a brainstem kind of thing, it isn't something abstract. Mess with it at your peril. There's more biology involved in a touch interface than simply a visual metaphor.
OK, fair enough. Can I mock a belief system that is founded on obvious falsehoods? Like the origins of the Bible itself, for instance: its authorship is acknowledged by scholars and the vatican to be dubious, mostly cobbled together by Constantine's staff from disparate groups as a power play to keep squabbling down in the empire. It's been revised and edited and mistranslated over the years. Yet those who are most adamant about its literal truth are willfully blind to its literary authority.
I'm all for the mystical, personal versions of biblical faith: knock yourself out, T. Merton. Jesus is a great story, if you go in for the transcendental. But fundamentalists? They trend towards the Phelps family. What would Jesus (the character) do? Probably move to India.
Yes, it was called OpenDoc, and I really thought that document-centric computing was the way to go. Well, I still do, I've just given up hope.
The idea is simple: we want context-rich documents, with different kinds of information and presentation as necessary. So, work on the document until it's done, by opening a different software component for each kind of content. The document's always there, the software comes and goes. Compare that to how I work now, with production suites of huge complexity and vast feature sets, but awkward interoperability. In this software utopia, we would have only bought the features we would actually use, and it was all about integration, and not being distracted from the main thing: the document.
Unfortunately, it died before the bugs could be worked out (the few available components were nowhere near optimized yet, buggy and slow).
AppleWorks was a transition example of this: a monolithic program that was document-centric, so that you could kind of 'have it all' if your needs weren't too extreme. I suspect that in the big plan it might have had a place weaning us off of the application-centric software economy.
The third party action was really starting to heat up when Apple pulled the plug on the whole deal, apparently in an attempt to stay alive by cutting costs.I wonder about that... [tinfoilhat mode] I'm sure some big money would have been lost if this paradigm had caught on... a blossoming of garage businesses to compete with, it would have been a major shift. I wonder if some horse trading went on to encourage them to "knife the baby". [/tinfoilhat]
Anecdote: I once met a farmer from Iowa whose primary income came from interplanting cannabis with corn, in order to mask the infrared and colour signature.
The point is, this was 20 years ago. The satellites weren't the issue then, flyovers were. The local technique (I live in a rural area famous for its alternative crop) is infrared-spotter helicopters supplied by the foreign-invaders 'DEA' and co-staffed by RCMP (that's 'mounties' to you 'murricans).
Longhorn is a codename.
Point of trivia: the Longhorn Saloon and Grill is the name of the bar that used to be (or still is, haven't worked there in 18 years) at the base of Whistler and Blackcomb. The bar is right between the two mountains, so it's a pretty good pun... though it implies that Vista was conceived and coded under the influence.
Anyway, give me goofy names like drupal or dabbledb over iNames like iWork, iLife, iLose, Pages, Numbers, etc. (non-troll disclaimer: iUse all of the above).
Yah, you are missing the used computer market. Mac users who bother to upgrade sell their computers for a premium, the used prices are inflated so it works well to buy new, cheaper than upgrading components and you get the warranty.
Why? because macs obsolete a bit slower. I have a 7 year old iBook G3 that still gets used for capturing video and sorting clips in the field; the equivalent toshiba with its crappy case and expensive add-ons is already disposed of. A 4-year old machine will run OS X 10.4 fine.
What this means in practical terms to the discussion at hand is that I know quite a few freelance layout specialists who know damn little about their Macs but know their primary tools (Quark, InDesign, Illustrator, etc.) exactly as much as they feel they need to. This means that they haven't upgraded for years, software or hardware, since their setup is essentially a locked-down turnkey system: stable and adequately fast for the task. The biggest speed boost is in the wetware, anyway.
A couple of examples: 3 years ago I was talking to someone who specializes in complex books like naturalist and travel guides. His rig was a maxed out and optimized PowerMac 8500 running OS 8. He couldn't afford the downtime of upgrading, because he didn't want to distract himself from churning out quality books and raking in freelance $. Last weekend I met a government document specialist who is finally moving to OS X with considerable anxiety, and is even more anxious about moving away from that nasty Quark thing to a new set of keyboard commands and costly paradigms.
Nerds have trouble grasping this, because they see corporate shops where the graphic dept. has spanky new quads, or they're used to an upgrade frenzy every time nvidia drops a log. I straddle both worlds, so I can tell you that quite a few Mac users are stealthed out there on their antiques, while many windows users are snapping up $400 dells and lenovos. I think this factor skews the installed user base / market share equation, and I'm pretty sure Adobe knows about them (though they probably don't care much).
Oh, and I forgot... use simple (aka 'natural') products not just to 'save the friggin planet' but to avoid Johnson and Johnson and their evil twins... just because the label doesn't have their logo is no guarantee of not lining their pockets, they have 230 subsidiaries! They're everywhere, in most of the pharmacy, all over the supermarket shelves, in health food stores (!), ad nauseum.
The political economy of trans-mega-meta-corps like J+J is daunting.
As a west-coast greenie who knows actual hairy, offbeat-drumming, badly renamed, overly relaxed hippies, let me elaborate:
I'm fully sympathetic, C. While I'm not militant atheist (erm, ravenous agnostic?), I think that rituals are important for hard-wired hominid reasons. 13 years ago we decided no church/temple or State belonged in our relationship, so we eloped with a small ceremony and jumped a broom (pre-church euro tradition and US slave resistance tradition, thus a common ritual to us). We called it a 'unionizing' ceremony to the few invited, for good humour. We wear rings to keep the critics at bay. When we moved to a conservative (backward) part of the world, we had to settle for calling each other husband and wife, and claim marriage, because people were very confused by the word "partner."
Last week, however, we gave in. We have two children and want to travel. We have very different skin colour, and different names, and own property. So, we let the State in to our lives, and had a civil ceremony (only the children and witnesses and The State present).
10 years ago, I would have considered it a failure of principles, and it probably would have been. Now, it's just another detail in a busy life, trying to navigate overly complex and restrictive bureacracies and regimes. It's their marriage, not ours; it doesn't make us feel any better, but it will help get a hotel room or through customs, and make the kids a bit safer.
I think that marriage pre-dates nation states, imperial religions, etc., that its roots are tribal if not hominid-troupe. Monogamy had to be managed given how horny we are and how sparse and inter-related we were back then. So, being monogamous, I have no problems with the term, just its interpretation; it's a 'natural' human state (in all its many crazy variations), and can be made culturally and politically progressive through its practise.
A little story for you, for perspective.
Duuude! Chill out! You were reading too much and too little into my whinge. Why can't I be dissatisfied with the mediocre forms of the art?
No, you're right, I meant to write "BAD" SF. I wasn't being slippery, just lazy, no need to be so tetchy and presumptuous and even insulting. I tend to like the more socially visionary stuff (Delaney, Butler, Stephenson, Robinson, etc.), or the well-considered hard stuff. The first degree was in literature, with an emphasis on the history of fantastic lit, so my enjoyable reading's restricted to those who can write, or those who think, or rarely, both.
Studying Olaf Stapledon partly ruined my appreciation for pulp SF, since the vast majority of interesting SF plot premises I come across in that category were sketched by him in the '30s. Even Clarke was quite derivative of him, at times. Stapledon's history of the universe is founded on the presumption of FTL and selective communication (telepathy, essentially). Smith and his fellow space-operaticons had nothing on Stapledon for sheer volume of visionary tech ideas; they were all about action and cowboys in space, where Olaf was all about the vast scope of ideas (I think his style sucks, actually, but it doesn't matter).
The ultimate problem is not a lack of imagination -- many, many exotic notions of ET communication have been considered -- but rather that the exotic modes are not pragmatic.Well, I kind of agree with you, but I'd suggest that often those 'exotic modes' are there more for plot device and a sense of originality in prose than derived from a striving for accurate futurism. Pragmatism is in the eye of the technology holder, I guess.
How about: we don't hear giant drums in the forest, so there's no one there? or: none of the smoke clouds we see are arranged into signals, so they are only forest fires?
One of the things that irks me about so many wannabe futurists, xenophiles, and run-of-the-mill SF is a failure of technological vision. Why would one assume that sending radio signals between the stars makes any sense whatsoever for an advanced civilization, unless we assume that our science has reached a galactic pinnacle?
Fermi's paradox, to me, ignores:
Ah, beautiful Trail, BC, industrial jewel of the soot-and-arsenic laden mountains.
It better be short, it better list what they are looking for at the top, and your first sentence needs to make them want to read more.
A JoaT needs a long resume if they want to demonstrate the range and flexibility and variety of solutions they can bring to the company. The solution is the split resume: a summary with the major hit points, ideal for the 12-second scan, followed by the 2-3 page compendium that prepares the interested employer for the interview.
Maybe you haven't done any hiring, or work at unimaginative corporate hives, but that 12 seconds is generally used for sorting, and the short list candidates get the long treatment, where the laundry list resume is more than useful.
I've been hired as executive director of an organization that required me to build turnkey editing systems and assist with IT in the parent organization, do creative design and production, marketing and admin and business planning work, design curriculum, speak at conferences, and competently address social justice issues. Very, very few eligible candidates. Similarly, I've worked at startups where the JoaT position was a necessary evil at first, and the long resume clinched those jobs. YMMV.
I agree with your desire for a regular microtower format, but your "throw the monitor in the trash" quip is just garbage itself. Do you really throw out a 3 year old functional Mac, or do you sell it on craigslist for 3/5 of its original sticker price?
Complainers about limited upgradeability and sticker price never seem to take the inflated used Mac market into account.
Hm, somehow I don't think that in the USA the large profits gleaned off one's auto insurance premiums is invested into road safety. Failure to do so, however, is a gross inefficiency at the societal scale.
Yes, I used to think so too. Now I believe that the nature of the transaction varies the nature of efficiency and providing for marginal cases. In the case of insurance, the market in Ontario is astonishingly monocultural despite hundreds of competitors. Competition and pseudo-variety can provide its own gross inefficiencies, as well. Like I stated previously, enduring transactions like licensing drivers, or insuring them, might be best served by a public agency. A hybrid, as in the BC system, seems to work better.
Sometimes it's important to know that someone's watching your back. I prefer competition in purchases. Mandatory long-term transactions that are highly complex and legalistic and data-heavy should be strongly regulated and made client-friendly, because the possibilities for misdirection etc. are considerable. I know brilliant people who can't, or shouldn't, be bothered with becoming expert shoppers for things like auto insurance.
As an investor, I don't mind insurance companies taking profits.Fine, but we aren't all financial gamers. As a member of society as a whole, I resent gouging, and prefer profits from society-wide transactions invested in the general public good.
I don't know about Canada, but in the US, at least, you aren't paying for bad drivers -- insurers aren't obligated to take on bad drivers, and they can charge whatever they want. If you can't afford insurance because your are judged high-risk, that's what the SR-22 surety bond provision is for -- basically, self-insuring.I rather think it is the responsibility of the car owner to control who drives the car. I agree that bad drivers should stop driving or pay the price, but I've experienced that this can be taken to ridiculous extremes, in a manner no better than nightmare bureaucracies. I think you trust the quasi-free market to serve the public good... too much in this respect, as consumers can't be well-informed enough, and the market can be too fractured. Think of it as another version of caveat emptor.
I guess I mean things like having to research whether a company has low premiums but high deductibles with abstruse rules, aggressive adjustors, changeable rules, unusual restrictions, fine-print-itis. Caveat Emptor is a time-consuming burden that is lessened with a public company (in theory).
* I move quite a bit, so I would like the freedom to choose among insurance companies based on their quality of service and differing rates in different areas (this is because actuarial assumptions vary).Within the very large region of British Columbia ICBC employs actuarial variation; I pay less in this quiet rural area than when I lived in Vancouver with its crazy mishmash of global driving habits and narrow streets. Typically for a less-than-horrible monopoly, ICBC's service is decent, certainly better than most of the private companies I investigated in Ontario. The rates are currently are a bit less than I would pay for similar discount providers there (would vary depending on the risk bracket; I'm in the safe bracket, but I think I subsidize the riskier drivers, which doesn't make me happy). Competition is managed through franchised brokers where retail service can vary, but the ground rules are uniform.
* Insurance coverage can be transferred between providers, so there is no market failure involved. Public monopolies are used in situations where the product is excludable (people can be prevented from using it), but non-rival (competitors can subsist because of high startup costs or physical impossibility). The obvious examples are utilities, which are infrastructure-heavy and there is only so much room.Well, my experience with the open market was a short gap in car ownership excluded me from most providers and shopping around was ironically kafkaesque. A year later, I had even worse experiences with an unusual insurance requirement (insuring a cube van for non-commercial use), a problem I didn't have in monopoly-land BC. When I called the association of insurance companies to ask for advice, the official response was to lie to obtain my insurance!!
OTOH, if BC's insurance plan runs at a profit, I'll be impressed. It might be convenient for you personally, but it might cost you (or your fellow taxpayers) in other ways.In theory, ICBC uses the profits from optional insurance to subsidize basic insurance, and to promote road safety. Ontario doesn't benefit from the significant road safety program this results in, and it shows. I prefer cheaper basic insurance and the considerable public safety benefits to paying for ads, giving my personal info to US-based insurers, sifting through policies, inconvenience, and worrying about hucksterism. It's the lesser of the evils.
I take the client's point of view, not the providers (look, insurance can easily be a racket, right?). Since most people live in one jurisdiction over time, and have licenses most of their lives, the series of utterly necessary short transactions involving various vehicles is one long commercial relationship that involves some invasion of privacy, and thus like a lifelong transaction, so I propose that a public monopoly can do a more convenient and accountable job in these long-term situations.
In the US, there is a provision called SR-22 to help fill the gap; moreover, there is no recognized right to operate a motor vehicle, even roads are paid with taxes (thus justifying licensing and insurance mandates). Finally, being uninsured during any stretch while owning a vehicle registered for normal operation is indeed a bad sign to prospective insurers.Since any car on the road must be insured (here), it makes sense to tie the insurance to the registration, and thus in BC it is one 15-minute visit to a ubiquitous neighbourhood "Autoplan" franchise, where you get your plates, transfer of ownership, and insurance. It rocks! No need for multiple visits to multiple layers of bureaucracy or insurance attached to a person. Not only that, shopping is pointless (so no stress about the fine print or misrepresentation, or money wasted on advertising), and it's a decent rate compared to the national average.
As an added bonus, the public insurance corporation and its broker franchisees participate heavily in road safety programs, contributing in a realistic way to the public interest.
The situation I was referring to in Ontario, where I had no insurance for 8 months and thus couldn't easliy get service from private insurers once I purchase a car, was a carless period. It never occured to me that one might be able to operate a vehicle without insurance, but it's of course what you assumed. That's what I get for growing up in a nanny state--but in this case, with myriad fools operating 2 tons of steel at high velocity, I'm glad for the regulation.
BTW, don't believe what you hear about the BC provincial gov't--it's mind-bogglingly surreal at times. Yet some things do work well, despite (or maybe because of) the swings between socialism and free marketeering.
Me too, but it doesn't work that way in practice. Moving from BC (public insurance: ICBC) to Ontario (private) was a nightmare. Despite over 2million KM of safe claim-free driving and being in the statistically safe demographic (40+ 2kids stn-wgn employed), it took me almost a week (4 hrs of shopping, 20 phone calls) to find an insurer willing to sell to me, because I had an 8 month uninsured period. WTF? When I did find an insurer, it involved a couple of hours and three trips, and some invasive disclosure. Returning to BC, it was a 20 minute transaction with no hassle or hesitation, and I no longer disparage ICBC.
The bottom line is that insurance, being a regulated requirement, should be a government service with accountability, because private industry doesn't serve the public interest very well. If I'm required to contract a industry they must be require to contract me.
Lifelong transactions requiring ethics from users like auto insurance, health, etc. should not be scattered over various databases and across various ethical frameworks. The inverse also applies: government should stay out of short term transactions and moral restrictions.