If Mac's are 5% of the total internet computer market, and it is uneconomical to support 5% of the market, then why do ISP's support macs? Macs have had 5% of the market for a while and games, and good software are still developed. ISP's still support macs.
And all this balderdash about development costs is really a piss poor excuse for not being serious about the satellite internet business. Seems to me that if these guys really wanted to provide the service they would come up with a simple, and economical solution.
Cost of Development: how much did Warcraft and Diablo cost to develop and support? What about Photoshop? Norton Untilities? Quicken? They are all out for the mac. 5% of the market isn't economical? I'm sure that the market penetration on the mac for these titles isn't really that much different than for the PC (though I'm only speculating).
I was getting fed up with the down time on my cable internet and was looking into DSL (Very Expensive out here) or satellite. I use Linux and Macs at home and Windows at work. The attitude that I got from talking to the Satellite ISPS wasn't comforting. This didn't appear to be their business. The attitude appeared to me to be one of "Let's put our toe in this market and if it really takes off, then we'll be ready." These guys are into satelite communcations by large corporations and governements or providing TV. The internet is not part of their core business, but a hedge against future developments that might infringe on their current business model.
I've not seen the opinion of the average consumer in any of this stuff. I've got digital cable and no plans to buy a new TV. I know a lot of folks who are completely happy with their current set and don't care to change. IF the gov't thinks that they can force consumers to buy something, then they've seriously messed up.
This isn't a tax. This is trying to get the consumer to purchase something they don't necessarily want or need. And the digital crap is too expensive to replace the old sets. No matter what the gubberment might want; or Hollywood wants, or the cable companies. Unless its forced as a tax; no way in hell they're gonna get me to buy anything that I don't want. The only thing that the gov't can do in this situation is require the manufacture of things that aren't wanted. The Soviets did this and look how well they turned out.
I see a lot of ruined businesses and unsold inventory.
'Course, I could be wrong.
As to the digital stuff being all DRM'd so that I can't change the channel during a program. How many phone calls about defective sets and remotes would have to be financed before the IDIOTS that fosted this stuff would change it back? Channel surfing is a WAY of LIFE. (Imagine the million couch potatoe march!) Joe Average Consumer may not have cared or understood when the law was passed, but that don't mean he won't "get it" when ya screw around with how he watches his TV.
It's hard to get a good grip on the diet of humans before the dawn of recorded history. Not very much information survives the ravages of time, and food debris is very attractive to most of the other living organisms on the planet.
As to the start of agriculture leading to a decrease in height, I like to see the citation. Never heard of that one...I've read a lot of other anthropological articles that indicate that the rise of agriculture brought many benefits to man, including better health. I'm not sure that good nutrition is directly linked to height. (Hey I am not overweight and not in poor health and do not have a bad diet and I am SHORT)
I don't think that with the rise of maize production in the Americas that the natives got smaller. They did develop a vast civilization and were more or less the same height as every one else.
We do know from studies of indigenous people that poor nutrition and starvation will lead to smaller people over generations. It has been suggested that humans have the ability to reduce their final body mass (or size) based upon the intake of food during the growing years, and that consistent lack of food will lead to a population of smaller people. People of food - poor areas tend to be smaller that those of food - rich areas. However, once the food poverty is eliminated, the formerly diminutive people produce children who grow taller. As I recall, this is not a case of feed the kids and they grow tall, but a gradual thing spread out over several generations. It was used as an example of human evolutionary response to a particular geography.
I've never read the Atkins diet and have always been suspicious of the whole health industry. It seems to me that common sense was tossed out the window long ago and a series of fads was fosted upon people to benefit certain political groups, and certain industries. After all of the arguments about whose right and whose wrong about which diet, the bottom line is this: If you all weren't fat or scared of being fat, billions of dollars wouldn't be spent on health products. Funny how after running like gerbils on speed at the gym and following the nutritionists most folks are dangerously overweight. Who's got no clothes on?
Forgive grammer and spelling, my coffee isn't done yet.
Gaping hole: The libraries I patronize, at major universities, do not check on the patron's reading habits.
SO a terrorist goes to a library and reads all about murder/death/kill and related techniques, and then copies the relevant sections of the book on a coin operated copy machine. The FBI could search all the library records and never have a sniff that the terrorist had been reading that book.
Or: steal the book. Or: Steal a library card and check the book out and never return it. Thus blaming someone else who has to both pay for it and explain it to the FBI.
Only a stupid terrorist would actually borrow the book with an honestly obtained library card. This is dumb crook news, and from what I've heard about how good the security was on the 9.11.01 attack, these were not stupid terrorists.
This law is for other purposes--mostly to harrass legitimate and honest citizens and visitors.
They can and they do.
I drive a lot (>100K mi/yr) and I've been doing the speed limit (cruise control), with no defects on my car (like a tail light being out), nothing expired (inspection sticker, liscence plate), and have been stopped, questioned, and let go. Various reasons for pulling me over (I usually ask.) Most of them lame, like: "You were driving to straight." what ever that meant.
And yeah a few times I WAS speeding, but those are nicely documented with tickets, fines, court dates, etc. I've no idea what the cops did with the answers to all of the questions they asked when the just let me go after a 20 minute break on the side of the road.
Not 8000 years ago, more like a few hundred, if that.
The prevailent view of nutrition was not based in reality or even on good science, but on poor science. That's why we've got a huge number of fat people with and horrific increase in adult onset diabetes.
In defense of the idiots that came up with "fat is bad" as a nutritional and public policy, there was little knowlege 40 years ago or more about how the human body actually processes food and what it really needs to be healthy. What knowlege that existed was ignored.
First, Copyright is a GRANTED monopoly. That monopoly is a grant from the people to the creator of the work. The creator of the work is entitled to profit from that monopoly for a finite length of time in any way he deems fit, so long as he stays with in the terms of the copyright.
So who owns the copyright? We do. It is ours to give and take away. This reasoning is why most people don't have a problem copying music they bought from one medium to another. We gave creators a monopoly so that we could enjoy the creation (music, literature, art, movies, etc)in any fashion we choose.
Napster was a clear signal of the people's desires with regards to enjoyment of music. We want it on our computers at our demand. We will pay for a convienent service for this, but not too much.
Copyright is not bad and not good. We must come up with a fair compromise between having unfettered digital copies and totalitarian copyright DRM system. Neither system works well for us.
The RIAA has created an adversarial relationship with their customer base by claiming that fair use= theft. Should a totalitarian DRM be enacted, the backlash will be horrendous. Verylikely the copyright holders could be stripped of their monopolies. As long as the people are generally satisfied, things are quiet, but should this become unfair, the people will rise up and change things.
"In my opinion listening to the environmentalists causes no harm; but if they are right we're fucked."
No, We're not fucked. We will adapt. Things will be different, but there is nothing in the models, even the worst case scenarious, that destroys our civilization. We will have to move as the coast lines alter. We will have wars over shifitng agricultural lands, people and animals will move in vast numbers to other parts of the globe, but ultimately we and most of the life on the planet will survive and thrive.
What is threatened is the current geo-political structure of the world. What would be the ramifications of the Sahara desert becomming fertile land again while the US and Europe are covered in Ice? Furthermore, rising global temperatures have been followed by an ICE AGE almost every time. (National Geographic, forget which issue) We are not talking about a rock falling from the sky and wiping life out down to the microbes. We're talking about burying Canada and the northern US in ICE and making other parts of the world have different coast lines. Some winners some losers, but to ASSUME that we can do much about it is to ASSUME that the world weather wasn't going to heat up anyway. We've not deviated from the range of previously measured global temperatures, yet. (IF we all suddenly quit poluting today, would the rising temperature continue? For CErtain? How about statistically certain, 95% sure? I've not gotten consistent odds out of the global weather folks.)
There must be a rational risk assessment here; not conjecture and conflicting models. What we have now are warnings from scientist who want funding to continue arguably valuable research. But to make lasting and lingering decisions based upon incomplete models is risky. The only thing that is clear in the conflict is that WE really DON'T know what is going to happen to the climate in the future. We've asked at lot of the guys doing the research--long term climate modeling is hard, and we've not got measuring devices in all of the needed spots, the currents in the oceans are not all well understood. The climate is a large, non-linear, poorly understood system, so if you're off a little, the results can be drastically different. Therefore, making policy decisions one way or the other is not much better than rolling dice.
"...listening to the environmentalists causes no harm..."
Which environmentalists do you listen to? Many different groups each with their own subset of extremists. Each has a different and often conflicting demands. Can't satisfy them all, so who's right?
Stear clear of GM foods? Not much biology in your background is there? Humans have been modifying animals and plants for agricultural reasons for centuries. It was originally call breeding. Now we use better and more reliable techniques. Fear Uncertainty and Doubt. You don't trust the scientists who've produced the GM foods and the piles of technology that you use EVERY day, but you will trust the other scientists who tell you that it's all bad for you? HAve you been immunized? You've had GM modifications to microbes that have been directly injected into your body. Know any diabetics taking insulin shots? GM technology. Scared of the pesticides on food? Read about what nasty surprises mother natures has given plants; where do you think most of our poisons have come from? Humans are at BEST poor imitators of mother nature's chemical works. GM modifications that arrise naturally can be terrifying (AIDS?). But at least in human made GM we have a good idea of the very structure of the molecules and are in a much better position to do something if GM begins to cause harm. Unlike nature's surprises which take decades to understand, if we every understands them.
So lets ask the really important question: Can we have our high technology and a clean, functioning environment? Sure. But we've got to be reasonable about it. And remember, that most of the environmental organizations have a POLITCAL agenda...which sometimes gets in the way of solving the polution problems that we have.
The blanket statement that environmentalist cause no harm is untrue. In the city where I live, there was an outcry about a chemical plant expansion from several environmental groups. Bad. Bad. But, looking at the actual documents the company filed with the regulators, they were asking for permission to increase the production of a far safer and more enviromentally friendly process while reducing their polution output overall. Net effect of expansion was a reduction in total polutants and a reduction in some of the worst cases. Yet, the Evirolobby fought this tooth and nail. Listening to the environmental people without looking at both sides of the issue and decide for yourself is stupid.
It is possible to have a completely self contained system that recycles everything but energy. Look at our planetary environment. We've got a lot to learn.
I don't like this because it will be a pain in the ass to use. My experience, limited though it is, with smart cards hasn't made me very comfortable with the technology. I rant and rave about the stupid serial numbers that I have to type in to reinstall software upon the occasion that I have to. This seems to be more inconvienent.
Now each time you run the program, say OFFICE, you will have to "Authenticate" with the installation CD (If it runs without the 'Smart CD' where's the security?). And what happens when the smart card goes bad? Buy a new version for full price? I make copies of CD and use the copies to avoid buying new copies each time the CD gets damaged. This 'Smart CD' would preclude that.
Yep sounds like I'll be avoiding this product like the plague that it is.
Funny thing about security is that it cannot be convienent. Security makes things harder to do, not easier. And if entertainment has a lot of security, then it isn't very entertaining. Therefore the value of the product drops. This seems to be obvious to most consumers, but not to many marketing trolls.
Perhaps we should be contrarian: Enact really tough and inconvienent copy protection laws and mandate that they be used on all non-GPL'd stuff.(A special class of non copyrighted materials like home movies, music etc.) Then the market will get to choose from GPL (or something like that) and strictly copyrighted material. If we do it right, the copy protection will drive most folks nuts and the entertainment industry as we know it will die...Like a woman alone with the Boston Strangler.
Fear of the law, as was pointed out, is the main objection to the DMCA. Fear of this law is an unfair burden on the citizens of the world. Why should Dimitri be arrested for something he did not do in the USA? That action by the US gov't regardless of whether is ultimately defeated in court several years and many many thousands of dollars from now is irrelevent. The relevant message is this: we WILL arrest you if we THINK that you have violated this law. Arguably, Dimitri is not in violation of the LAW. But he COULD BE found guilty...and that is the fear.
Fighting a lawsuit is a slow process even when it is a slam dunk. The starting retainer for most of the lawyers that I've hired is $1000. That's not chump change. And then the cost of the case will run higher than that even if you settle the case within a year.
Then there is the time involved. Meeting with the Lawyer. Showing up for court. Putting your life and your family's lives on hold while you grind through the legal entanglement. Everything begins to revolve around the legal case; and if you are imprisoned, then it is very difficult to continue your career. How long do you have to stay in jail before you fall far behind the bleeding edge of technology? What are the costs of being publically arrested?
The media has certainly showed the arrests and then the convictions, but how many times does the acquital make the news? If it did how many folks would be able to link the person acquited to the original arrest?
The DMCA is a power grab, and I think it is very unfair and probably unconstitutional. But its power to motivate people lies in the uncertainty of the application of the law. There are too many grey areas for any sort of comfort,a nd so it will be left to the battle fields of the courst system to determine the right and wrong of the DMCA.
As the article pointed out, many of these fears may be unfounded or exaggerated, but how much of your life are you willing to bet on it?
Yes, but this is NEW ORLEANS...which is a part of the rather unusual state of Louisiana. And in Louisiana, there is a long tradition of Graft, corruption, and financial games that seem to put yet and another expensive item in the hands of the local/state/national politician. If MS wants to get involved in New Orleans and the rest of LA politics...well it'll make interesting reading. I figure that MS will get reamed really good before this deal is over.
Apparently you've not STUDIED just how bad things were in the late sixities. I have. The levels of polution in the water and air were much worse than the are today. This mess that we live in was cause by our industrialization, and it took a few hundred years to get very bad. It will take even longer to clean it up. So you have to take the Long Boom approach and be satisfied to do your best everyday to make the world a little bit cleaner and a little bit better. (Here's an example: Making the mess was a simple matter of turning a valve and waiting for a large tank of off-spec pesticide or other chemical to drain out into a ditch. Cleaning up the mess involves digging up cubic miles of ground and hauling in to an incinerator where the ground is converted into sterile sand which is then placed back into the hole so that the whole process can be repeated a few times until the levels of waste chemicals drop below a legal limit, then the area is sealed off as a toxic waste bunker forever)
Otter may indeed be more up-to-date on a certain area of polution, but that is the nature of the size of the problem. No one person can be up-to-date on the overall picture. Too much information to consume.
How are we solving the polution problems? One innovation at a time. In the past couple hundred years the focus of innovation was on making human lives easier. There was simply no understanding amoung scientists or other people that industrialization was going to harm our environment. Humans believed that we "apart from nature" and somehow what we did would not harm our world. In the latter half of the 1900's humans began to see the horrible consequences of their actions and took steps to clean up the mess. (Hey we got the EPA didn't we? OVer the objections of big industries, too)
The current set of thirty-somethings (I'm 35) are very concerned about their environment. They just don't often put this into practice. After all, when recycled goods are lower in quality and higher in price they don't get bought for a very simple economic reason. When we learn to product recylced good that meet or exceed the cost & Quality of unrecycled goods, then we will have brought a tremendous advantage to our fight to clean up our environment.
I'm really not that worried about our freedoms, as we have so many voices and eyes watching them. We are ever vigilant, but not always sucessful. And sure, there are things that are done differently now than in the past. Maybe we actually have less freedom, maybe not. But there have been times in US history when the the US government acted much like the tin-pot dictators from some bad Latin American politcial nightmare. (Examples: Treatment of Indians, the politics of Reconstruction, the invasion and conquest of Mexico)
We'll keep writing to our politicians, commenting on slashdot, and trying to clean up this mess one little bit at a time until we've got both our advanced civilization and our clean environment. IT is scientifically possible to have a system that recylces everything it produces: Look at nature.
Just remember that one of the most important things that you can do to help clean up this planet is to teach these values to your children.
As for the asthma...I've got two kids and a spouse with Asthma. If you think serevent is expensive try beklavent, accolate, and/or singular for three folks. And the air was worse in the late seventies and early eighties, but you might not have been as affected back then. (I did a long report on acid rain and air polution back in highschool, in the early 1980's)
Some of the biggest users of Microsoft are other corporations who are VERy paranoid about their IP. Microsoft will lose its Office market overnight if they think that SUN, IBM, HP, DOW, Exxon, and the like are going to have their IP and communications stored in a server that is controlled by someone else's EULA.
The AC is obviously not a parent otherwise he'd realize that ALL parents are fascists by the aforementioned definition. Some fascists are more lenient than others, but the parents are certainly required to be in absolute control of their children. This requirement decreases as the child grows into adulthood.
The "this is war" comment is right on the money. The RIAA wants the electronic equivalent to comming over to my house and causing 50 bucks or less worth of damage while looking for alleged missappropriated property.
Imagine if this is your neighbor: "Hey my kid's bike is missing so I searched your house, but its okay because I only caused $49.99 dollars in physical damage." (Who cares if it takes hours to clean up the mess.)
I know far too many citizens who would shoot the SOB on site (and on sight) and let the cops sort the mess out. Any law that allows one group to trespass on the property rights of another with out due process of law in a search of illicit goods is asking for a free for all. (This is why due process of law is SO VERY Important to our civilization.) The RIAA holds a lot of copyrights, but so do millions of other citizens. It could be very ugly.
Sure they can. Ever lose a job opportunity because the Email was down? Figure it this way: you get offered a summer job via email but you must reply before a certain date. BUT the email is down and the job goes to another person. Harm? Sure: lost salary. Can happen and it does happen.
A hundred and fifty years ago, you could go anywhere in the United States without producing one shred of documentation that you were who you said you were.
Then we got technology and soon after the freedom to go anywhere without the permission of the government, in the form of a driver's liscence, began to vanish. I would challenge you to go from one end of the country to another in a reasonable time without the use of a government identification system. You can't hold a job in the US without a Social Security Number...(which is NOT supposed to be an ID number). You are not to operate a motor vehicle without the permission of the governments of the various states. This was not how it was.
I am worked up over the use of the driver's liscence to screen the travel of every person. If a terrorist can use a plane, then he can use a car. Timmothy McVey for example. Why don't we apply the logic of searching every plane passenger to the searching of every truck, bus, train, and finally, automobile?
Let's make this convienent for the citizen. We will apply tracking software and hardware to every single piece of mobile equipment and require that you login to your car, bus, plane, etc. Swipe the little magnetic strip on your liscence. The car KNOWS you now and how many points are on your liscence, and so on and so forth. Then we can check to make sure that you're the person on the liscence by simple thumb print reader.
Satellites will track your every move. A database will be established that allows law enforcement to know every where that you went.
Now, all of that information is going to be used by other people. These other people may or may not be honest. US history provides a clue to our government servant's honesty. J. Edgar Hoover: the FBI tracked anyone the government didn't like. McCArthy destroyed how many careers by black listing people BECAUSE of alleged political affiliations with "an enemy of the US," otherwise known as communism? The Radical Republicans attempted to gain absolute control over the US government at the end of the Civil War, resulting in many years of rascism and unrest int he southern states. Japanese American were unconstitutionally imprisoned because the looked japanses. Note that the GERMANS living in nebraska were not imprisoned in a similar fashion.
The honesty and vigilance that US politicians have demonstrated over the history of the US does not make us better than most two-bit dictatorships; it has been the constant vigilance of the citizens who complain loudly and sometime in secret, that they are being harmed by illegal laws and policies.
Secret laws, lists, and policies scare the shit out of me. I do not object to searching bags and people for contraband going onto a mode of public transport. That is in the interest of all of us traveling. If you are not carrying anything illegal or potentially harmful, other than yourself, why does the government have a need to know you credit history? Your social security number? How much money you make? That your name is the same as a serial killer serving life in california? Why you are going on this trip?
Abuse and fuckups. The credit reports are mostly wrong. Identies are stolen. Names are not unique personal identifiers of companies or people. Why should I pay for the incompetence of information collection agencies and government agents with my precious time? In the few years that I've dealt with insurance companies over medial payments, I've seen bills from doctors we've never seen, procedures charged to the wrong people, benefits applied incorrectly. I can't expect that the government collection, maintenance and processing of information will be any better or secure than it is now. (Research the issues of government agency computer data security and weep.)
I don't trust these people with my life. I trust the pilot and the engineers who built the plane. Lets build a safe plane and check everyone who boards for bombs and weapons, not ID.
Yeah, and I bet you've got a really powerful racing car that sits in a garage in various stages of repair, too. Oh my PC is SOOO Powerful!! Who the Fsck cares if the new pentium can scroll through a Text file faster than the human eye can see? I work on Linux, Mac OS 8.5, 8.6, 9.1 and X and Win 98, NT4.0 SP5, and 2000. I get a lot more Work done on my MAC than I do on the oh so complicated and SOOO powerful Wintels. If its a WINTEL its a hobby, not a productivity tool.
Sheese. Yep. Been there done that. Got a few scars to prove it.
Still, I gotta say, quite sincerely that you shouldn't give up--because the nice guys do get the girls. It just takes a while for the girls to grow up and realize that they'd rather have a nice guy that treats them well instead of the aforementioned Boys of Questionable Worth.
I've said and observed these things that you're saying years ago. I've warned many of the young women in my life about the dangers of the types of "men" they were suddenly attracted to. They wouldn't see the truth and didn't value my opinion enough to heed the warnings. They got hurt...some got pregnant, or maybe an STD. Sometimes they got used very thoroughly and left in the dumpster.
Here's the best advice I can give you on your rant. It's free to you, but I paid rather dearly for it: Never compromise your standards for another person. If you want to be treated well by the girl your dating, then insist on it or dump her. If she gets hurt, so be it. Maybe she'll learn form the pain and not treat the next guy like crap. Don't change being who you are just to get laid. And when some lusty wench tosses you off the deep end and sprays your heart and soul all over the pavement, get up and get a broom because its your mess to clean up. Nobody else is going to put you back together.
The pain will fade and the scars will remain, but in all of that, if you are intelligent, then you will learn wisdom.
Yep. Life is pain. As long as it hurts you know your still alive.
First we have SB ordered to spy on the activities of "innocent" people. With that precedent, what is to stop the court from ordering the phone company to monitor every single call? What's the difference between SB and the phone? Or a digital phone? All of these are devices that can be used to commit a crime. Should we not have the phone company monitor calls to prevent crime?
From my limited understanding of law, it seems that the information gathered by spying on third parties should be beyond the discovery process. The SB subscribers should be sued individually or as a class by the copyright holder(s). If I were a SB subscriber, I'd get me a lawyer and fight. My argument would be simple: I'm not named in the lawsuit so why should I be spied upon?
If the information is supposed to be general, why does anyone need individual identification numbers that could be linked later to individuals. ARe they going to use this to catch people violating the copyright law? The implication that you TV will be used to spy on you is so literally Big Brother.
Slashdot Mirror
Caution, Economic Genius at work.
If Mac's are 5% of the total internet computer market, and it is uneconomical to support 5% of the market, then why do ISP's support macs? Macs have had 5% of the market for a while and games, and good software are still developed. ISP's still support macs.
And all this balderdash about development costs is really a piss poor excuse for not being serious about the satellite internet business. Seems to me that if these guys really wanted to provide the service they would come up with a simple, and economical solution.
Cost of Development: how much did Warcraft and Diablo cost to develop and support? What about Photoshop? Norton Untilities? Quicken? They are all out for the mac. 5% of the market isn't economical? I'm sure that the market penetration on the mac for these titles isn't really that much different than for the PC (though I'm only speculating).
I was getting fed up with the down time on my cable internet and was looking into DSL (Very Expensive out here) or satellite. I use Linux and Macs at home and Windows at work. The attitude that I got from talking to the Satellite ISPS wasn't comforting. This didn't appear to be their business. The attitude appeared to me to be one of "Let's put our toe in this market and if it really takes off, then we'll be ready." These guys are into satelite communcations by large corporations and governements or providing TV. The internet is not part of their core business, but a hedge against future developments that might infringe on their current business model.
I've not seen the opinion of the average consumer in any of this stuff. I've got digital cable and no plans to buy a new TV. I know a lot of folks who are completely happy with their current set and don't care to change. IF the gov't thinks that they can force consumers to buy something, then they've seriously messed up.
This isn't a tax. This is trying to get the consumer to purchase something they don't necessarily want or need. And the digital crap is too expensive to replace the old sets. No matter what the gubberment might want; or Hollywood wants, or the cable companies. Unless its forced as a tax; no way in hell they're gonna get me to buy anything that I don't want. The only thing that the gov't can do in this situation is require the manufacture of things that aren't wanted. The Soviets did this and look how well they turned out.
I see a lot of ruined businesses and unsold inventory.
'Course, I could be wrong.
As to the digital stuff being all DRM'd so that I can't change the channel during a program. How many phone calls about defective sets and remotes would have to be financed before the IDIOTS that fosted this stuff would change it back? Channel surfing is a WAY of LIFE. (Imagine the million couch potatoe march!) Joe Average Consumer may not have cared or understood when the law was passed, but that don't mean he won't "get it" when ya screw around with how he watches his TV.
Don't buy. Teach som
It's hard to get a good grip on the diet of humans before the dawn of recorded history. Not very much information survives the ravages of time, and food debris is very attractive to most of the other living organisms on the planet.
As to the start of agriculture leading to a decrease in height, I like to see the citation. Never heard of that one...I've read a lot of other anthropological articles that indicate that the rise of agriculture brought many benefits to man, including better health. I'm not sure that good nutrition is directly linked to height. (Hey I am not overweight and not in poor health and do not have a bad diet and I am SHORT)
I don't think that with the rise of maize production in the Americas that the natives got smaller. They did develop a vast civilization and were more or less the same height as every one else.
We do know from studies of indigenous people that poor nutrition and starvation will lead to smaller people over generations. It has been suggested that humans have the ability to reduce their final body mass (or size) based upon the intake of food during the growing years, and that consistent lack of food will lead to a population of smaller people. People of food - poor areas tend to be smaller that those of food - rich areas. However, once the food poverty is eliminated, the formerly diminutive people produce children who grow taller. As I recall, this is not a case of feed the kids and they grow tall, but a gradual thing spread out over several generations. It was used as an example of human evolutionary response to a particular geography.
I've never read the Atkins diet and have always been suspicious of the whole health industry. It seems to me that common sense was tossed out the window long ago and a series of fads was fosted upon people to benefit certain political groups, and certain industries. After all of the arguments about whose right and whose wrong about which diet, the bottom line is this: If you all weren't fat or scared of being fat, billions of dollars wouldn't be spent on health products. Funny how after running like gerbils on speed at the gym and following the nutritionists most folks are dangerously overweight. Who's got no clothes on?
Forgive grammer and spelling, my coffee isn't done yet.
Gaping hole: The libraries I patronize, at major universities, do not check on the patron's reading habits.
SO a terrorist goes to a library and reads all about murder/death/kill and related techniques, and then copies the relevant sections of the book on a coin operated copy machine. The FBI could search all the library records and never have a sniff that the terrorist had been reading that book.
Or: steal the book.
Or: Steal a library card and check the book out and never return it. Thus blaming someone else who has to both pay for it and explain it to the FBI.
Only a stupid terrorist would actually borrow the book with an honestly obtained library card. This is dumb crook news, and from what I've heard about how good the security was on the 9.11.01 attack, these were not stupid terrorists.
This law is for other purposes--mostly to harrass legitimate and honest citizens and visitors.
They can and they do. I drive a lot (>100K mi/yr) and I've been doing the speed limit (cruise control), with no defects on my car (like a tail light being out), nothing expired (inspection sticker, liscence plate), and have been stopped, questioned, and let go. Various reasons for pulling me over (I usually ask.) Most of them lame, like: "You were driving to straight." what ever that meant. And yeah a few times I WAS speeding, but those are nicely documented with tickets, fines, court dates, etc. I've no idea what the cops did with the answers to all of the questions they asked when the just let me go after a 20 minute break on the side of the road.
Not 8000 years ago, more like a few hundred, if that.
The prevailent view of nutrition was not based in reality or even on good science, but on poor science. That's why we've got a huge number of fat people with and horrific increase in adult onset diabetes.
In defense of the idiots that came up with "fat is bad" as a nutritional and public policy, there was little knowlege 40 years ago or more about how the human body actually processes food and what it really needs to be healthy. What knowlege that existed was ignored.
First, Copyright is a GRANTED monopoly. That monopoly is a grant from the people to the creator of the work. The creator of the work is entitled to profit from that monopoly for a finite length of time in any way he deems fit, so long as he stays with in the terms of the copyright.
So who owns the copyright? We do. It is ours to give and take away. This reasoning is why most people don't have a problem copying music they bought from one medium to another. We gave creators a monopoly so that we could enjoy the creation (music, literature, art, movies, etc)in any fashion we choose.
Napster was a clear signal of the people's desires with regards to enjoyment of music. We want it on our computers at our demand. We will pay for a convienent service for this, but not too much.
Copyright is not bad and not good. We must come up with a fair compromise between having unfettered digital copies and totalitarian copyright DRM system. Neither system works well for us.
The RIAA has created an adversarial relationship with their customer base by claiming that fair use= theft. Should a totalitarian DRM be enacted, the backlash will be horrendous. Verylikely the copyright holders could be stripped of their monopolies. As long as the people are generally satisfied, things are quiet, but should this become unfair, the people will rise up and change things.
"In my opinion listening to the environmentalists causes no harm; but if they are right we're fucked."
No, We're not fucked. We will adapt. Things will be different, but there is nothing in the models, even the worst case scenarious, that destroys our civilization. We will have to move as the coast lines alter. We will have wars over shifitng agricultural lands, people and animals will move in vast numbers to other parts of the globe, but ultimately we and most of the life on the planet will survive and thrive.
What is threatened is the current geo-political structure of the world. What would be the ramifications of the Sahara desert becomming fertile land again while the US and Europe are covered in Ice? Furthermore, rising global temperatures have been followed by an ICE AGE almost every time. (National Geographic, forget which issue) We are not talking about a rock falling from the sky and wiping life out down to the microbes. We're talking about burying Canada and the northern US in ICE and making other parts of the world have different coast lines. Some winners some losers, but to ASSUME that we can do much about it is to ASSUME that the world weather wasn't going to heat up anyway. We've not deviated from the range of previously measured global temperatures, yet. (IF we all suddenly quit poluting today, would the rising temperature continue? For CErtain? How about statistically certain, 95% sure? I've not gotten consistent odds out of the global weather folks.)
There must be a rational risk assessment here; not conjecture and conflicting models. What we have now are warnings from scientist who want funding to continue arguably valuable research. But to make lasting and lingering decisions based upon incomplete models is risky. The only thing that is clear in the conflict is that WE really DON'T know what is going to happen to the climate in the future. We've asked at lot of the guys doing the research--long term climate modeling is hard, and we've not got measuring devices in all of the needed spots, the currents in the oceans are not all well understood. The climate is a large, non-linear, poorly understood system, so if you're off a little, the results can be drastically different. Therefore, making policy decisions one way or the other is not much better than rolling dice.
"...listening to the environmentalists causes no harm..."
Which environmentalists do you listen to? Many different groups each with their own subset of extremists. Each has a different and often conflicting demands. Can't satisfy them all, so who's right?
Stear clear of GM foods? Not much biology in your background is there? Humans have been modifying animals and plants for agricultural reasons for centuries. It was originally call breeding. Now we use better and more reliable techniques. Fear Uncertainty and Doubt. You don't trust the scientists who've produced the GM foods and the piles of technology that you use EVERY day, but you will trust the other scientists who tell you that it's all bad for you? HAve you been immunized? You've had GM modifications to microbes that have been directly injected into your body. Know any diabetics taking insulin shots? GM technology. Scared of the pesticides on food? Read about what nasty surprises mother natures has given plants; where do you think most of our poisons have come from? Humans are at BEST poor imitators of mother nature's chemical works. GM modifications that arrise naturally can be terrifying (AIDS?). But at least in human made GM we have a good idea of the very structure of the molecules and are in a much better position to do something if GM begins to cause harm. Unlike nature's surprises which take decades to understand, if we every understands them.
So lets ask the really important question: Can we have our high technology and a clean, functioning environment? Sure. But we've got to be reasonable about it. And remember, that most of the environmental organizations have a POLITCAL agenda...which sometimes gets in the way of solving the polution problems that we have.
The blanket statement that environmentalist cause no harm is untrue. In the city where I live, there was an outcry about a chemical plant expansion from several environmental groups. Bad. Bad. But, looking at the actual documents the company filed with the regulators, they were asking for permission to increase the production of a far safer and more enviromentally friendly process while reducing their polution output overall. Net effect of expansion was a reduction in total polutants and a reduction in some of the worst cases. Yet, the Evirolobby fought this tooth and nail. Listening to the environmental people without looking at both sides of the issue and decide for yourself is stupid.
It is possible to have a completely self contained system that recycles everything but energy. Look at our planetary environment. We've got a lot to learn.
Maried, w/kids. Whole Family watches buffy. Got Buffy on DVD.
I don't like this because it will be a pain in the ass to use. My experience, limited though it is, with smart cards hasn't made me very comfortable with the technology. I rant and rave about the stupid serial numbers that I have to type in to reinstall software upon the occasion that I have to. This seems to be more inconvienent.
Now each time you run the program, say OFFICE, you will have to "Authenticate" with the installation CD (If it runs without the 'Smart CD' where's the security?). And what happens when the smart card goes bad? Buy a new version for full price? I make copies of CD and use the copies to avoid buying new copies each time the CD gets damaged. This 'Smart CD' would preclude that.
Yep sounds like I'll be avoiding this product like the plague that it is.
Funny thing about security is that it cannot be convienent. Security makes things harder to do, not easier. And if entertainment has a lot of security, then it isn't very entertaining. Therefore the value of the product drops. This seems to be obvious to most consumers, but not to many marketing trolls.
Perhaps we should be contrarian: Enact really tough and inconvienent copy protection laws and mandate that they be used on all non-GPL'd stuff.(A special class of non copyrighted materials like home movies, music etc.) Then the market will get to choose from GPL (or something like that) and strictly copyrighted material. If we do it right, the copy protection will drive most folks nuts and the entertainment industry as we know it will die...Like a woman alone with the Boston Strangler.
Fear of the law, as was pointed out, is the main objection to the DMCA. Fear of this law is an unfair burden on the citizens of the world. Why should Dimitri be arrested for something he did not do in the USA? That action by the US gov't regardless of whether is ultimately defeated in court several years and many many thousands of dollars from now is irrelevent. The relevant message is this: we WILL arrest you if we THINK that you have violated this law. Arguably, Dimitri is not in violation of the LAW. But he COULD BE found guilty...and that is the fear.
Fighting a lawsuit is a slow process even when it is a slam dunk. The starting retainer for most of the lawyers that I've hired is $1000. That's not chump change. And then the cost of the case will run higher than that even if you settle the case within a year.
Then there is the time involved. Meeting with the Lawyer. Showing up for court. Putting your life and your family's lives on hold while you grind through the legal entanglement. Everything begins to revolve around the legal case; and if you are imprisoned, then it is very difficult to continue your career. How long do you have to stay in jail before you fall far behind the bleeding edge of technology? What are the costs of being publically arrested?
The media has certainly showed the arrests and then the convictions, but how many times does the acquital make the news? If it did how many folks would be able to link the person acquited to the original arrest?
The DMCA is a power grab, and I think it is very unfair and probably unconstitutional. But its power to motivate people lies in the uncertainty of the application of the law. There are too many grey areas for any sort of comfort,a nd so it will be left to the battle fields of the courst system to determine the right and wrong of the DMCA.
As the article pointed out, many of these fears may be unfounded or exaggerated, but how much of your life are you willing to bet on it?
Yes, but this is NEW ORLEANS...which is a part of the rather unusual state of Louisiana. And in Louisiana, there is a long tradition of Graft, corruption, and financial games that seem to put yet and another expensive item in the hands of the local/state/national politician. If MS wants to get involved in New Orleans and the rest of LA politics...well it'll make interesting reading. I figure that MS will get reamed really good before this deal is over.
Chris,
Apparently you've not STUDIED just how bad things were in the late sixities. I have. The levels of polution in the water and air were much worse than the are today. This mess that we live in was cause by our industrialization, and it took a few hundred years to get very bad. It will take even longer to clean it up. So you have to take the Long Boom approach and be satisfied to do your best everyday to make the world a little bit cleaner and a little bit better. (Here's an example: Making the mess was a simple matter of turning a valve and waiting for a large tank of off-spec pesticide or other chemical to drain out into a ditch. Cleaning up the mess involves digging up cubic miles of ground and hauling in to an incinerator where the ground is converted into sterile sand which is then placed back into the hole so that the whole process can be repeated a few times until the levels of waste chemicals drop below a legal limit, then the area is sealed off as a toxic waste bunker forever)
Otter may indeed be more up-to-date on a certain area of polution, but that is the nature of the size of the problem. No one person can be up-to-date on the overall picture. Too much information to consume.
How are we solving the polution problems? One innovation at a time. In the past couple hundred years the focus of innovation was on making human lives easier. There was simply no understanding amoung scientists or other people that industrialization was going to harm our environment. Humans believed that we "apart from nature" and somehow what we did would not harm our world. In the latter half of the 1900's humans began to see the horrible consequences of their actions and took steps to clean up the mess. (Hey we got the EPA didn't we? OVer the objections of big industries, too)
The current set of thirty-somethings (I'm 35) are very concerned about their environment. They just don't often put this into practice. After all, when recycled goods are lower in quality and higher in price they don't get bought for a very simple economic reason. When we learn to product recylced good that meet or exceed the cost & Quality of unrecycled goods, then we will have brought a tremendous advantage to our fight to clean up our environment.
I'm really not that worried about our freedoms, as we have so many voices and eyes watching them. We are ever vigilant, but not always sucessful. And sure, there are things that are done differently now than in the past. Maybe we actually have less freedom, maybe not. But there have been times in US history when the the US government acted much like the tin-pot dictators from some bad Latin American politcial nightmare. (Examples: Treatment of Indians, the politics of Reconstruction, the invasion and conquest of Mexico)
We'll keep writing to our politicians, commenting on slashdot, and trying to clean up this mess one little bit at a time until we've got both our advanced civilization and our clean environment. IT is scientifically possible to have a system that recylces everything it produces: Look at nature.
Just remember that one of the most important things that you can do to help clean up this planet is to teach these values to your children.
As for the asthma...I've got two kids and a spouse with Asthma. If you think serevent is expensive try beklavent, accolate, and/or singular for three folks. And the air was worse in the late seventies and early eighties, but you might not have been as affected back then. (I did a long report on acid rain and air polution back in highschool, in the early 1980's)
Some of the biggest users of Microsoft are other corporations who are VERy paranoid about their IP. Microsoft will lose its Office market overnight if they think that SUN, IBM, HP, DOW, Exxon, and the like are going to have their IP and communications stored in a server that is controlled by someone else's EULA.
The AC is obviously not a parent otherwise he'd realize that ALL parents are fascists by the aforementioned definition. Some fascists are more lenient than others, but the parents are certainly required to be in absolute control of their children. This requirement decreases as the child grows into adulthood.
The "this is war" comment is right on the money. The RIAA wants the electronic equivalent to comming over to my house and causing 50 bucks or less worth of damage while looking for alleged missappropriated property.
Imagine if this is your neighbor: "Hey my kid's bike is missing so I searched your house, but its okay because I only caused $49.99 dollars in physical damage." (Who cares if it takes hours to clean up the mess.)
I know far too many citizens who would shoot the SOB on site (and on sight) and let the cops sort the mess out. Any law that allows one group to trespass on the property rights of another with out due process of law in a search of illicit goods is asking for a free for all. (This is why due process of law is SO VERY Important to our civilization.) The RIAA holds a lot of copyrights, but so do millions of other citizens. It could be very ugly.
"Bits can't physically hurt of kill people."
Sure they can. Ever lose a job opportunity because the Email was down? Figure it this way: you get offered a summer job via email but you must reply before a certain date. BUT the email is down and the job goes to another person. Harm? Sure: lost salary. Can happen and it does happen.
A hundred and fifty years ago, you could go anywhere in the United States without producing one shred of documentation that you were who you said you were. Then we got technology and soon after the freedom to go anywhere without the permission of the government, in the form of a driver's liscence, began to vanish. I would challenge you to go from one end of the country to another in a reasonable time without the use of a government identification system. You can't hold a job in the US without a Social Security Number...(which is NOT supposed to be an ID number). You are not to operate a motor vehicle without the permission of the governments of the various states. This was not how it was. I am worked up over the use of the driver's liscence to screen the travel of every person. If a terrorist can use a plane, then he can use a car. Timmothy McVey for example. Why don't we apply the logic of searching every plane passenger to the searching of every truck, bus, train, and finally, automobile? Let's make this convienent for the citizen. We will apply tracking software and hardware to every single piece of mobile equipment and require that you login to your car, bus, plane, etc. Swipe the little magnetic strip on your liscence. The car KNOWS you now and how many points are on your liscence, and so on and so forth. Then we can check to make sure that you're the person on the liscence by simple thumb print reader. Satellites will track your every move. A database will be established that allows law enforcement to know every where that you went. Now, all of that information is going to be used by other people. These other people may or may not be honest. US history provides a clue to our government servant's honesty. J. Edgar Hoover: the FBI tracked anyone the government didn't like. McCArthy destroyed how many careers by black listing people BECAUSE of alleged political affiliations with "an enemy of the US," otherwise known as communism? The Radical Republicans attempted to gain absolute control over the US government at the end of the Civil War, resulting in many years of rascism and unrest int he southern states. Japanese American were unconstitutionally imprisoned because the looked japanses. Note that the GERMANS living in nebraska were not imprisoned in a similar fashion. The honesty and vigilance that US politicians have demonstrated over the history of the US does not make us better than most two-bit dictatorships; it has been the constant vigilance of the citizens who complain loudly and sometime in secret, that they are being harmed by illegal laws and policies. Secret laws, lists, and policies scare the shit out of me. I do not object to searching bags and people for contraband going onto a mode of public transport. That is in the interest of all of us traveling. If you are not carrying anything illegal or potentially harmful, other than yourself, why does the government have a need to know you credit history? Your social security number? How much money you make? That your name is the same as a serial killer serving life in california? Why you are going on this trip? Abuse and fuckups. The credit reports are mostly wrong. Identies are stolen. Names are not unique personal identifiers of companies or people. Why should I pay for the incompetence of information collection agencies and government agents with my precious time? In the few years that I've dealt with insurance companies over medial payments, I've seen bills from doctors we've never seen, procedures charged to the wrong people, benefits applied incorrectly. I can't expect that the government collection, maintenance and processing of information will be any better or secure than it is now. (Research the issues of government agency computer data security and weep.) I don't trust these people with my life. I trust the pilot and the engineers who built the plane. Lets build a safe plane and check everyone who boards for bombs and weapons, not ID.
Yeah, and I bet you've got a really powerful racing car that sits in a garage in various stages of repair, too. Oh my PC is SOOO Powerful!! Who the Fsck cares if the new pentium can scroll through a Text file faster than the human eye can see? I work on Linux, Mac OS 8.5, 8.6, 9.1 and X and Win 98, NT4.0 SP5, and 2000. I get a lot more Work done on my MAC than I do on the oh so complicated and SOOO powerful Wintels. If its a WINTEL its a hobby, not a productivity tool.
Sheese. Yep. Been there done that. Got a few scars to prove it.
Still, I gotta say, quite sincerely that you shouldn't give up--because the nice guys do get the girls. It just takes a while for the girls to grow up and realize that they'd rather have a nice guy that treats them well instead of the aforementioned Boys of Questionable Worth.
I've said and observed these things that you're saying years ago. I've warned many of the young women in my life about the dangers of the types of "men" they were suddenly attracted to. They wouldn't see the truth and didn't value my opinion enough to heed the warnings. They got hurt...some got pregnant, or maybe an STD. Sometimes they got used very thoroughly and left in the dumpster.
Here's the best advice I can give you on your rant. It's free to you, but I paid rather dearly for it: Never compromise your standards for another person. If you want to be treated well by the girl your dating, then insist on it or dump her. If she gets hurt, so be it. Maybe she'll learn form the pain and not treat the next guy like crap. Don't change being who you are just to get laid. And when some lusty wench tosses you off the deep end and sprays your heart and soul all over the pavement, get up and get a broom because its your mess to clean up. Nobody else is going to put you back together.
The pain will fade and the scars will remain, but in all of that, if you are intelligent, then you will learn wisdom.
Yep. Life is pain. As long as it hurts you know your still alive.
First we have SB ordered to spy on the activities of "innocent" people. With that precedent, what is to stop the court from ordering the phone company to monitor every single call? What's the difference between SB and the phone? Or a digital phone? All of these are devices that can be used to commit a crime. Should we not have the phone company monitor calls to prevent crime?
From my limited understanding of law, it seems that the information gathered by spying on third parties should be beyond the discovery process. The SB subscribers should be sued individually or as a class by the copyright holder(s). If I were a SB subscriber, I'd get me a lawyer and fight. My argument would be simple: I'm not named in the lawsuit so why should I be spied upon?
If the information is supposed to be general, why does anyone need individual identification numbers that could be linked later to individuals. ARe they going to use this to catch people violating the copyright law? The implication that you TV will be used to spy on you is so literally Big Brother.