Philosophy covers a huge range of ideas. The idea that you can sum up "what philosophers think" is, well, funny. There are famous philosophers that will strongly disagree with every sentence you attributed to philosophers.
The idea of language having subjective meaning is not exactly exclusive to your "Cultural Studies" field. Philosophers do not have their heads entirely up their asses, you know?
people wonder why the younger generation gets stupider and stupider.
I dunno. "Dumber" is a tough thing to measure.
Different skill and knowledge set, certainly.
I can't work a slide rule or calculate a square root by hand. I can't repair much more than very simple problems with a car. In my parents' day, this wasn't the case. On the other hand, in my parents' day, people were griping about a tenancy to ignore authority, and (a bit later) drug use. In my *grandparents' day*, I suspect that people were griping about falling literacy due to the spread of television. I suspect that my great-grandparents caught flak for not knowing how to deal with horses properly any more due to the popularity of cars.
Each generation diverges somewhat from the previous generation, and lacks some kinds of skills that the previous one had (though gains others). I'd be very surprised if there *hasn't* been a generation that complained about "the new generation going to shit", and yet humanity still seems to function reasonably well.
Screw my karma: someone please explain why the iPod is so revolutionary? We have a device that holds thousands of mp3s.... and? Any other reason why there's a iPod story on slashdot at least 3 times a week? Sony's MD players held hundreds of songs for years, but they almost never appeared in the news. And now they're claiming there's a "social impact" from iPods? Please.
Two easy steps:
* People like Apple, or at least want Microsoft to have competition. Macs were big in journalism and publishing for a long time, and I suspect that there are a lot of Mac folks in the press with fond memories. So Apple tends to get a favorable slant.
* Apple hasn't done a whole lot of good, successful stuff in the last few years except for the iPod. (OS X is in there as well, but it has a limited market, since you have to commit to going Mac if you use it.)
Put the two together...and the iPod gets lots of good press. It's an expensive device that you can carry around and show off to your friends. Not a lot of products like that, and easy for that sort of thing to have a certain "I want one" element.
I dunno if I'd give the French many points on the "don't make fun of the French" meter for agreeing to that.
the Statue of Liberty,
Tidbit -- *after* they had built it and given it to us they couldn't get us to pay to *ship* it over to the US. It took Hearst and some other major business folks to try to rally together to raise the money. The Statue of Liberty is actually a bit of a US black eye when it comes to US history.
existentialist philosophy
One could argue that much of the social impetus for this derives from losing badly in World War II, though.
You clearly know your military history. Can you recommend any good military history websites?
First, Mr. Davis' design wastes a good chunk of my web browser's viewable area -- the whole thing is letterboxed.
Next, I have to wait for this little animation to go by when I start looking at the page.
I have my browser font sizes jacked up to be easily readable when sitting back from my monitor, as I am now. Works in all the sites I use -- but Mr. Davis' site has near-unreadable narrow-piped fonts with similar, dark colors all antialiased and stuck in a static small size.
One of his panes has a scrollbar. I figured it out because I use xterm, and have seen arrowless scrollbars before. Except Mr. Davis didn't even outline his scrollbar, or do anything to indicate that the thing *was* a scrollbar. There's just this big rectangle of gray that you can grab and drag.
Mr. Davis uses rollover highlighting. I think my opinion of rollover highlighting can be nicely summed up by analysis of an HCI person a ways back -- you use rollover highlighting when your interface is so unintutive that users aren't sure what to click on, and must wave the mouse over the interface to be enlightened. Rollovers became popular shortly after imagemaps did, when people had artsy but highly unusable designs containing a big image where it was unclear what was a link.
I cannot select and copy and paste text on Mr. Davis' site.
Mr. Davis chooses to force me to use visual transitions. When I click on anything on his site, I frequently have to wade for a fade transition to complete before I can read the next page. Fade transitions are no longer novel or interesting to users, and slow down anyone trying to navigate the site.
I see few things on praystation.com that could not have been done much better with a more conventional webpage.
Now, I will admit that many of the flaws in praystation.com are endemic among Flash designers, and indulged in by many others. However, that doesn't change the fact that I really don't like interacting with the praystation.com site, and I really *do* like using Google.
Please feel free to give an example of a practical day-to-day use where you would use "a googol" and need to mean the precise numerical value.
I personally think that the artist understood what he was saying pretty well. Two two are different, but the common use of the term infinity means "a lot", just like the common (if rare) use of "a googol".
Wired's stated goal is to cover culture's interaction with technology. That *is* what they are doing. It isn't really a technical magazine.
True, they tend to take a more human-oriented pop-culture approach that I'd like, but philosophical discussion of the Internet and sociology has a much smaller, less lucrative audience.
I like Wired (though I don't subscribe) because it's generally at least somewhat interesting, because there's a lot of content in each issue, and because it's mainstream enough that a lot of people have it sitting around. If I'm at a dentist's office, I have something interesting to read instead of Parenting or Life.
No he didn't. He put an ellipsis at the end to indicate that there was something following, and expected readers to infer the text themselves.
Secondly, jokes tend to be funnier if one gives only the minimal amount of information for most people to get the joke. Driving one home *after* someone's got a joke weakens the punchline.
Furthermore, the Konami code has a number of variations, some of which do *not* end with "B A Start". The approach of the original user, whether intentional or not, let readers who had encountered different variations of the code than you have also appreciate the joke.
I understand why the Google folks want very much to do an IPO. They made something great, and they want to enjoy wealth for it now. And I certainly won't argue that they should be expected to do something different.
However, I do think that the Google IPO will be the beginning of the end for Google -- that within a few years, Google will start to suck.
First, Google will IPO for a lot of money. The management will be expected to drive up company value even *more*. It will be a hard task, and I suspect that they will begin to attempt the same desperate moves that all the other.coms did post-IPO -- add an ad banner here, another there, partner with some companies to get higher rankings, log every click and sell usage data...decreasing the value of their product to increase short term profit.
Capitalism can, I think, drive companies to expand too quickly, especially in this age of entreprenurship and Internet companies.
Second, I suspect that once Google has a lot of money, they will begin bringing in more and more high-priced executives. Companies that do this start imposing deadwood and start their own decline. Those executives have friends that they want to bring in, and like to politick (after all, they're ambitious, and had to be to get this job). They must demonstrate their worth by coming up with a couple of initiatives and demonstrating that they make money. Adding something to the Google pages is a good short term way to come up with an initiative that produces results.
Then Google starts acquiring layers and layers of more management. These all consume money quickly, and more profits are required to keep feeding them. More pressure is placed on top management to increase profits to match increasing costs. After a while, it becomes apparent that it's easier to play dirty tricks and backstab to produce "results" than to actually move the company ahead. Play games with the accounting books (take a huge "one-time hit from reorganization" one year, and demonstrate unexpected profits the next year -- and this can even be done legally, thanks to accounting rules providing enough flexibility and loopholes). Say that a previous CEO screwed up -- fire him with a golden parachute, and hire someone else on, saying that the new guy will make tons of money.
I claim that publically traded companies are not efficient. They do not operate well. Their main benefit is that they tend to throw public assets back into capital goods, which theoretically improves the economy. I tend to think that the failings of large publically-traded companies outweigh the benefits...but heck, who knows.
I certainly can't dispute that the Google founders have done a good job and would like a piece of that IPO pie. I'm just sad that it will probably hurt the Web for the rest of us.
Google is intended to be something that you look at day in and day out. Novelty just doesn't last long in such an environment.
The problem is that the graphic design industry has a long tradition of working on product design. Product design has one purpose -- sell the product. Get a potential customer seeing a product in a store or in use by someone else to be overwhelmed and make an impulse buy. Novelty is *everything* in such a situation. Making someone say "cool" is vital.
Websites don't work like that at all. With a website, one has to keep convincing people to use the website, every hour, every day. Novelty has little value. Eliminating irritations has much *more* value -- that page that takes just a titch too long to download and render, or that extra click that has to be made are irritations that build up over time.
Now, I'm quite sure that there are competent graphic designers working on web sites. However, the attempt to just drop a bunch of graphic designers on a website and assume that talent in traditional graphic design translates to immediate talent in website design is just silly.
Google doesn't need to try to play off of visual novelty, because they've taken an approach of trying to produce the best product possible.
You know what *is* cool -- the features that they add constantly. They don't make any fuss about them, don't add a new little badge to indicate that you can do reverse phone lookups on the main page, or anything. They just let it work, and let you be pleased and surprised when you try searching and things Just Work.
I hope that whoever is responsible for the rabidly spartan design at Google never retires or otherwise leaves. He's done an incredible amount to help the company.
Besides...your worry is a distinct visual look? I know many web sites loaded down with Flash, tons of faux-3d bitmaps, and rollover menus with more fake 3d stuff. I can't think of any other major site that looks like Google. Simplicity is Google's trademark.
Graphic designers are not even remotely the same as HCI people.
Google has done a splendid job on their interface. They simply made their pages as usable and functional as possible -- small, fast, minimalistic. They don't *need* to brand their pages all over the place with images and whatnot, because they rely on having a tremendously good product. Google use spread like wildfire because it's *so* *good*.
I would hope very much that Google does not redesign their interface. There's no need to worry about it getting old. I think software vendors (or web page designers, who look at their web pages constantly and want to try new things) too frequently ignore the fact that users tend to like consistency. When I've supported Joe Users, most want nothing more than a reliable system that stays the way it is and keeps working. They don't *want* the UI changing around on them when they upgrade, they don't *want* menu options moving, etc. The less time you spend with the software/web site, the more annoying changes are, since it takes longer to learn the new interface.
I hope that five years from now, Google still has roughly the same interface (well, perhaps they could tweak their logo a bit, but that's it). It's become a screwdriver, a hammer, an indispensable tool in many people's toolkit. It changing under people's feet is not something that I see as being very popular.
Bandwidth costs money. If students want to use more bandwidth, fine. However, it's hardly fair to force other students (your random art student that sends emails and browses the Web) to subsidize his usage. Provide a couple of options, where students pay fair rates for the bandwidth they're using. If you're using a VPN setup or similar, it's pretty reasonable to do this securely -- most universities provide a "software pack" anyway for students.
Also, I don't think that packet shaping to block P2P is a useful idea. People *will* find a way around it, and tell/help friends to do the same thing. You *cannot* block P2P services effectively, though you might manage to shift uesrs from one P2P service to another that does better about slipping around restrictions.
Packet shaping to reduce bandwidth seems more sane (you can transfer N bytes in T time units until your rate drops significantly). N and T would have to be reviewed yearly to deal with current situations.
QoS is quite reasonable as well. If people want to do masses of low-priority data transfer, great. However, your router should be dropping those Kazaa packets well before it starts dropping ssh packets.
Any or all of these possibilities could be used in tandem.
Universities probably would not accept students setting up their own public website / FTP site and hosting that on the University connection - so why should file sharing be any different?
Why on earth not? If I couldn't do so, I'd have been royally pissed off at my university.
Now, *commercial* sites are a different matter, and almost all educational instutions have rules against them, since some of their federal subsidies depend upon not hosting commercial sites.
And I don't even think that file sharing should be encouraged *within* the university network. When I was at uni a few years back, the internal network slowed to an absolute crawl at peak times - it was nearly impossible to use the network to get work done because so many people were copying files they didn't need.
What objections would you have to a competent netadmin prioritizing non-filesharing traffic over filesharing traffic?
GANDI's French, but I spent a long time with a friend going over user policies and prices. GANDI has some of the strongest protections for the user (it's hard for GANDI to do things for your domain and easy for you to transfer it), and is still one of the cheaper ones -- though I think godaddy is still the cheapest.
* Constant logging of everywhere you go and travel through your life to within 100 feet.
* Rembember the FBI getting the ability to grab library reading records, and mkaing it illegal for librarians to disclose that information? It'd be easy to do the same thing with private citizens ("Okay, you're the closest person to the area we want to monitor. Now look to the right. Is there a blond man possibly exchanging a bag with a woman wearing a red skirt? Yes? Thank you for your time. Remember that disclosing that we have asked for this information is a felony under federal law." It's just too easy to abuse.
I don't think Microsoft introduces (most) bugs on purpose. I really think that, given current evidence, thinking so is being irrationally paranoid.
There are a couple of things that could really have been intentionally done, like breaking Netscape's server. However, bugs *do* happen in the software world, and barring very strong evidence to the contrary, Microsoft should, I think, get the benefit of the doubt.
On the other hand, Microsoft *does* put people in a position where they definitely are not going to be able to produce a high-quality piece of code. They may simply not have enough time to develop something. Microsoft isn't going to give them more resources, because a flawless implementation doesn't benefit Microsoft any, and *does* help them.
Do I think that Microsoft would fix the flaws in IE if they had competition with more market share? You bet. But that's different from saying that they deliberately introduced bugs. I'm sure some variations from standards were intentional -- heck, Linus deviates from standards that he thinks are severely technically flawed -- but I don't think that it's a matter of course or intended as a business advantage.
Frankly, I'm quite frusterated by people that use IE. A large chunk of the problems I get from people are from them using IE. I can't understand how they can stand using the Web with ad banners, popunders, and all kinds of adware aimed at them. IE users *suffer*, and it's irritating to see them having to deal with such bad software. Plus, it cripples adoption of certain things like PNG (or *any* images with alpha channels, really) that would be beneficial to the Web-using community at large.
Identifying gaps in cybersecurity research and development Encuraging government research to do R&D for them.
This is the only one of your points that I don't agree with. I think it's better read as "Encouraging the government to provide them with research funding."
Slashdot Mirror
Philosophy covers a huge range of ideas. The idea that you can sum up "what philosophers think" is, well, funny. There are famous philosophers that will strongly disagree with every sentence you attributed to philosophers.
The idea of language having subjective meaning is not exactly exclusive to your "Cultural Studies" field. Philosophers do not have their heads entirely up their asses, you know?
I think the point is that if you're going to listen to a CD or two of music at once, there are much cheaper Flash-based players available.
people wonder why the younger generation gets stupider and stupider.
I dunno. "Dumber" is a tough thing to measure.
Different skill and knowledge set, certainly.
I can't work a slide rule or calculate a square root by hand. I can't repair much more than very simple problems with a car. In my parents' day, this wasn't the case. On the other hand, in my parents' day, people were griping about a tenancy to ignore authority, and (a bit later) drug use. In my *grandparents' day*, I suspect that people were griping about falling literacy due to the spread of television. I suspect that my great-grandparents caught flak for not knowing how to deal with horses properly any more due to the popularity of cars.
Each generation diverges somewhat from the previous generation, and lacks some kinds of skills that the previous one had (though gains others). I'd be very surprised if there *hasn't* been a generation that complained about "the new generation going to shit", and yet humanity still seems to function reasonably well.
What's the rough financial status of the place your school is located, though? At least upper-middle-class?
Frankly, I'd say that walking around with a $400 device was definitely not par for the course when I was in high school...
Screw my karma: someone please explain why the iPod is so revolutionary? We have a device that holds thousands of mp3s.... and? Any other reason why there's a iPod story on slashdot at least 3 times a week? Sony's MD players held hundreds of songs for years, but they almost never appeared in the news. And now they're claiming there's a "social impact" from iPods? Please.
Two easy steps:
* People like Apple, or at least want Microsoft to have competition. Macs were big in journalism and publishing for a long time, and I suspect that there are a lot of Mac folks in the press with fond memories. So Apple tends to get a favorable slant.
* Apple hasn't done a whole lot of good, successful stuff in the last few years except for the iPod. (OS X is in there as well, but it has a limited market, since you have to commit to going Mac if you use it.)
Put the two together...and the iPod gets lots of good press. It's an expensive device that you can carry around and show off to your friends. Not a lot of products like that, and easy for that sort of thing to have a certain "I want one" element.
Louisiana Purchase
I dunno if I'd give the French many points on the "don't make fun of the French" meter for agreeing to that.
the Statue of Liberty,
Tidbit -- *after* they had built it and given it to us they couldn't get us to pay to *ship* it over to the US. It took Hearst and some other major business folks to try to rally together to raise the money. The Statue of Liberty is actually a bit of a US black eye when it comes to US history.
existentialist philosophy
One could argue that much of the social impetus for this derives from losing badly in World War II, though.
You clearly know your military history. Can you recommend any good military history websites?
As a follow-up, I just dropped by your site (well, the one you have in your user info) and found it significantly more usable than Mr. Davis'.
I just went to praystation.com and took a look.
First, Mr. Davis' design wastes a good chunk of my web browser's viewable area -- the whole thing is letterboxed.
Next, I have to wait for this little animation to go by when I start looking at the page.
I have my browser font sizes jacked up to be easily readable when sitting back from my monitor, as I am now. Works in all the sites I use -- but Mr. Davis' site has near-unreadable narrow-piped fonts with similar, dark colors all antialiased and stuck in a static small size.
One of his panes has a scrollbar. I figured it out because I use xterm, and have seen arrowless scrollbars before. Except Mr. Davis didn't even outline his scrollbar, or do anything to indicate that the thing *was* a scrollbar. There's just this big rectangle of gray that you can grab and drag.
Mr. Davis uses rollover highlighting. I think my opinion of rollover highlighting can be nicely summed up by analysis of an HCI person a ways back -- you use rollover highlighting when your interface is so unintutive that users aren't sure what to click on, and must wave the mouse over the interface to be enlightened. Rollovers became popular shortly after imagemaps did, when people had artsy but highly unusable designs containing a big image where it was unclear what was a link.
I cannot select and copy and paste text on Mr. Davis' site.
Mr. Davis chooses to force me to use visual transitions. When I click on anything on his site, I frequently have to wade for a fade transition to complete before I can read the next page. Fade transitions are no longer novel or interesting to users, and slow down anyone trying to navigate the site.
I see few things on praystation.com that could not have been done much better with a more conventional webpage.
Now, I will admit that many of the flaws in praystation.com are endemic among Flash designers, and indulged in by many others. However, that doesn't change the fact that I really don't like interacting with the praystation.com site, and I really *do* like using Google.
Please feel free to give an example of a practical day-to-day use where you would use "a googol" and need to mean the precise numerical value.
I personally think that the artist understood what he was saying pretty well. Two two are different, but the common use of the term infinity means "a lot", just like the common (if rare) use of "a googol".
Wired's stated goal is to cover culture's interaction with technology. That *is* what they are doing. It isn't really a technical magazine.
True, they tend to take a more human-oriented pop-culture approach that I'd like, but philosophical discussion of the Internet and sociology has a much smaller, less lucrative audience.
I like Wired (though I don't subscribe) because it's generally at least somewhat interesting, because there's a lot of content in each issue, and because it's mainstream enough that a lot of people have it sitting around. If I'm at a dentist's office, I have something interesting to read instead of Parenting or Life.
No he didn't. He put an ellipsis at the end to indicate that there was something following, and expected readers to infer the text themselves.
Secondly, jokes tend to be funnier if one gives only the minimal amount of information for most people to get the joke. Driving one home *after* someone's got a joke weakens the punchline.
Furthermore, the Konami code has a number of variations, some of which do *not* end with "B A Start". The approach of the original user, whether intentional or not, let readers who had encountered different variations of the code than you have also appreciate the joke.
I understand why the Google folks want very much to do an IPO. They made something great, and they want to enjoy wealth for it now. And I certainly won't argue that they should be expected to do something different.
.coms did post-IPO -- add an ad banner here, another there, partner with some companies to get higher rankings, log every click and sell usage data...decreasing the value of their product to increase short term profit.
However, I do think that the Google IPO will be the beginning of the end for Google -- that within a few years, Google will start to suck.
First, Google will IPO for a lot of money. The management will be expected to drive up company value even *more*. It will be a hard task, and I suspect that they will begin to attempt the same desperate moves that all the other
Capitalism can, I think, drive companies to expand too quickly, especially in this age of entreprenurship and Internet companies.
Second, I suspect that once Google has a lot of money, they will begin bringing in more and more high-priced executives. Companies that do this start imposing deadwood and start their own decline. Those executives have friends that they want to bring in, and like to politick (after all, they're ambitious, and had to be to get this job). They must demonstrate their worth by coming up with a couple of initiatives and demonstrating that they make money. Adding something to the Google pages is a good short term way to come up with an initiative that produces results.
Then Google starts acquiring layers and layers of more management. These all consume money quickly, and more profits are required to keep feeding them. More pressure is placed on top management to increase profits to match increasing costs. After a while, it becomes apparent that it's easier to play dirty tricks and backstab to produce "results" than to actually move the company ahead. Play games with the accounting books (take a huge "one-time hit from reorganization" one year, and demonstrate unexpected profits the next year -- and this can even be done legally, thanks to accounting rules providing enough flexibility and loopholes). Say that a previous CEO screwed up -- fire him with a golden parachute, and hire someone else on, saying that the new guy will make tons of money.
I claim that publically traded companies are not efficient. They do not operate well. Their main benefit is that they tend to throw public assets back into capital goods, which theoretically improves the economy. I tend to think that the failings of large publically-traded companies outweigh the benefits...but heck, who knows.
I certainly can't dispute that the Google founders have done a good job and would like a piece of that IPO pie. I'm just sad that it will probably hurt the Web for the rest of us.
I'm sure a lot of people if questioned would look at Google right now and think "anybody could design that."
And yet, how few websites have caught on to the simplicity motif and designed their site around it?
Yes, but how long does the appeal last?
Google is intended to be something that you look at day in and day out. Novelty just doesn't last long in such an environment.
The problem is that the graphic design industry has a long tradition of working on product design. Product design has one purpose -- sell the product. Get a potential customer seeing a product in a store or in use by someone else to be overwhelmed and make an impulse buy. Novelty is *everything* in such a situation. Making someone say "cool" is vital.
Websites don't work like that at all. With a website, one has to keep convincing people to use the website, every hour, every day. Novelty has little value. Eliminating irritations has much *more* value -- that page that takes just a titch too long to download and render, or that extra click that has to be made are irritations that build up over time.
Now, I'm quite sure that there are competent graphic designers working on web sites. However, the attempt to just drop a bunch of graphic designers on a website and assume that talent in traditional graphic design translates to immediate talent in website design is just silly.
Why be "cool"?
Google doesn't need to try to play off of visual novelty, because they've taken an approach of trying to produce the best product possible.
You know what *is* cool -- the features that they add constantly. They don't make any fuss about them, don't add a new little badge to indicate that you can do reverse phone lookups on the main page, or anything. They just let it work, and let you be pleased and surprised when you try searching and things Just Work.
I hope that whoever is responsible for the rabidly spartan design at Google never retires or otherwise leaves. He's done an incredible amount to help the company.
Besides...your worry is a distinct visual look? I know many web sites loaded down with Flash, tons of faux-3d bitmaps, and rollover menus with more fake 3d stuff. I can't think of any other major site that looks like Google. Simplicity is Google's trademark.
Graphic designers are not even remotely the same as HCI people.
Google has done a splendid job on their interface. They simply made their pages as usable and functional as possible -- small, fast, minimalistic. They don't *need* to brand their pages all over the place with images and whatnot, because they rely on having a tremendously good product. Google use spread like wildfire because it's *so* *good*.
I would hope very much that Google does not redesign their interface. There's no need to worry about it getting old. I think software vendors (or web page designers, who look at their web pages constantly and want to try new things) too frequently ignore the fact that users tend to like consistency. When I've supported Joe Users, most want nothing more than a reliable system that stays the way it is and keeps working. They don't *want* the UI changing around on them when they upgrade, they don't *want* menu options moving, etc. The less time you spend with the software/web site, the more annoying changes are, since it takes longer to learn the new interface.
I hope that five years from now, Google still has roughly the same interface (well, perhaps they could tweak their logo a bit, but that's it). It's become a screwdriver, a hammer, an indispensable tool in many people's toolkit. It changing under people's feet is not something that I see as being very popular.
I can't understand what the point of having gradients is, aside from making the page render more slowly and download more slowly.
Bandwidth costs money. If students want to use more bandwidth, fine. However, it's hardly fair to force other students (your random art student that sends emails and browses the Web) to subsidize his usage. Provide a couple of options, where students pay fair rates for the bandwidth they're using. If you're using a VPN setup or similar, it's pretty reasonable to do this securely -- most universities provide a "software pack" anyway for students.
Also, I don't think that packet shaping to block P2P is a useful idea. People *will* find a way around it, and tell/help friends to do the same thing. You *cannot* block P2P services effectively, though you might manage to shift uesrs from one P2P service to another that does better about slipping around restrictions.
Packet shaping to reduce bandwidth seems more sane (you can transfer N bytes in T time units until your rate drops significantly). N and T would have to be reviewed yearly to deal with current situations.
QoS is quite reasonable as well. If people want to do masses of low-priority data transfer, great. However, your router should be dropping those Kazaa packets well before it starts dropping ssh packets.
Any or all of these possibilities could be used in tandem.
Universities probably would not accept students setting up their own public website / FTP site and hosting that on the University connection - so why should file sharing be any different?
Why on earth not? If I couldn't do so, I'd have been royally pissed off at my university.
Now, *commercial* sites are a different matter, and almost all educational instutions have rules against them, since some of their federal subsidies depend upon not hosting commercial sites.
And I don't even think that file sharing should be encouraged *within* the university network. When I was at uni a few years back, the internal network slowed to an absolute crawl at peak times - it was nearly impossible to use the network to get work done because so many people were copying files they didn't need.
What objections would you have to a competent netadmin prioritizing non-filesharing traffic over filesharing traffic?
GANDI's French, but I spent a long time with a friend going over user policies and prices. GANDI has some of the strongest protections for the user (it's hard for GANDI to do things for your domain and easy for you to transfer it), and is still one of the cheaper ones -- though I think godaddy is still the cheapest.
Whatever you do, avoid Verisign like the plague.
E911 is scary. Among other things:
* Tracking where you make your calls from.
* Constant logging of everywhere you go and travel through your life to within 100 feet.
* Rembember the FBI getting the ability to grab library reading records, and mkaing it illegal for librarians to disclose that information? It'd be easy to do the same thing with private citizens ("Okay, you're the closest person to the area we want to monitor. Now look to the right. Is there a blond man possibly exchanging a bag with a woman wearing a red skirt? Yes? Thank you for your time. Remember that disclosing that we have asked for this information is a felony under federal law." It's just too easy to abuse.
I don't think Microsoft introduces (most) bugs on purpose. I really think that, given current evidence, thinking so is being irrationally paranoid.
There are a couple of things that could really have been intentionally done, like breaking Netscape's server. However, bugs *do* happen in the software world, and barring very strong evidence to the contrary, Microsoft should, I think, get the benefit of the doubt.
On the other hand, Microsoft *does* put people in a position where they definitely are not going to be able to produce a high-quality piece of code. They may simply not have enough time to develop something. Microsoft isn't going to give them more resources, because a flawless implementation doesn't benefit Microsoft any, and *does* help them.
Do I think that Microsoft would fix the flaws in IE if they had competition with more market share? You bet. But that's different from saying that they deliberately introduced bugs. I'm sure some variations from standards were intentional -- heck, Linus deviates from standards that he thinks are severely technically flawed -- but I don't think that it's a matter of course or intended as a business advantage.
Frankly, I'm quite frusterated by people that use IE. A large chunk of the problems I get from people are from them using IE. I can't understand how they can stand using the Web with ad banners, popunders, and all kinds of adware aimed at them. IE users *suffer*, and it's irritating to see them having to deal with such bad software. Plus, it cripples adoption of certain things like PNG (or *any* images with alpha channels, really) that would be beneficial to the Web-using community at large.
Sorry, that should be "...than they've done to us." Doesn't make much sense the other way, eh?
I'd say more was done to Japan by Perry than we've done to it.
Identifying gaps in cybersecurity research and development
Encuraging government research to do R&D for them.
This is the only one of your points that I don't agree with. I think it's better read as "Encouraging the government to provide them with research funding."