Actually, in a way it isn't funny. I think there is something in each of us that *wants* to be a public icon, but if you look at their lives, they are way messed up. There's no balance.
Retrospectively speaking, a garbage collector may well have had a better life than most of these stars.
I rather suspect that Wynona Rider knows this, which is why she's been shoplifting [psychological problem, as opposed to poverty problem], but she just doesn't know the way through her life to a real life.
That said, there are a bunch of stars who have managed to get through to such a real life, including the Star Wars actor who played Luke Skywalker (got back into theatre, a relatively private career and hasn't left it) and possibly Princess Leah (went through some drug problems, if I remember correctly, but then got into writing, which is also relatively private). Harrison Ford, interestingly, seems to have found some kind of a balance with stardom, doing no more than one film a year, spending the rest of his life involved with his family (*gasp*), and not going to the extreme implosion that most stars go to -- but that's rare, and I could be wrong, too.
Yet others, simply attempt to live a real life later, but really have to struggle. I think you'd put Bobby Brown and Whitney Houston into that class; Madonna seems to have begun such an attempt, but not completely; there are others, too.
Quite simply, it looks to me like these guys are getting mega options; they're exercising them at something like $1 per share, and then selling the stock from those options. If that's the case, then they're not going to run out of stock.
Essentially, they're rather choosing to pay themselves millions in fractional million increments, from money that people are paying into SCO.
They are not doing this because P2P is an alternative distribution model that threatens their business. If that were all there were to it, they'd probably quickly change business models, and be done with it.
Rather, our system of law has set up a structure for their sales, and they were following it. Yes, the structure, known as copyright, is flawed, but it is the structure that they, as a legal business entity, have to deal with.
Now, P2P is not following the law. They are breaking the law. (rewind) Bzzewwwpt (Vol up)THEY ARE BREAKING THE LAW(Vol down). So the RIAA is going after them in the only way that they can.
Now, if you want to bring in a better business model, which is legal, then please go ahead and do so.
BTW, I've posted in my journal under "Public Domain", one idea on how to do just that. Since I did PD it, you can use it, without paying me anything.
On two counts, you can't judge that. Remember Milli Vanilli? They were lip syncing all the time. They had no real skill; they were made by the RIAA.
In such a case, the artist is the advertiser; it is the RIAA themselves. I'd contend the same is true for any of the RIAA artists. If you're going to listen to their trash, therefore, pay your money to them. Shoot, pay double!
If you want to send your money to the artist for their music, then find an artist with whom you can do that, which you like. There are tons of such artists around; if you want to see any such artists, I suggest you go to a few of the New Years' "First Night" events. One that I found, which I loved, was the musical group Trapezoid. Even better, their lead singer's wife was also a master storyteller.
Anyhow, if you want to give your money directly to the artists, please do. Just go find your own. But if you're dealing with RIAA songs, the RIAA *is* the artist. And yes, they do suck, which is why I don't listen to their songs, except when a radio has to be playing (and sometimes it doesn't).
These guys are not really dangerous. If you don't want to be nabbed, don't share their music. Shoot, don't listen to it. I don't, and I still have a sense of music.
The really dangerous guys are anyone who's involved in financial transfer, without a true, legal, product. Those people are essentially offering no service, and have to do something to keep their racket going. I don't care if it's insurance (such as Prudential, or Lloyd's), banking (BCCI), gambling (Las Vegas), or get-rich-quick spammers (Nigerian spam); those are the people you really want to worry about.
These people make it easy enough to stay out of their way. And if they make a mistake, you can let them know via the media, and they'll even apologize. They might be dangerous, but they're not really dangerous.
Has anyone considered the possibility that NYCfashiongirl may really not want to be found out? I mean, suppose NYCfashiongirl was really Madonna or Brittany Spears, or someone else with more to lose from file sharing than they could possibly gain......this could be really embarassing. Especially if it was Justin Timberlake.
... you then prepare a card catalog (or equivalent computer database), which cross-references the MD5 sums according to recipient/sender, date, and the various related topics.
Such a system is called a "numeric filing system", and is very useful for large corporations.
You don't have to sort according to MD5 hash, either. If you plan it correctly, you can create any regular sorting system you wish, including a tree-based sorting system. That is, some files are grouped according to date, because they are most useful that way. Those might be all your files for upcoming court dates. Others might be grouped according to purpose [everything IRS that is already archived], while others may be grouped according to the person with whom you deal [say, patient records. Maybe this is a doctor's office that deals with a large number of lawsuits.]
Of course, to do the multiple grouping, you're going to need a second level database, as well. That is, you first look up the topic, to get the MD5 hash. Then you go over to another card catalog, and look up the grouping for that document, and the location. Then you go and pull the document from the physical file.
When I was just graduating from college, and there were no aerospace engineering jobs to be had, I took a look at my biggest other skills (computers, typing), and decided that I had a pretty good shot a being a secretary, provided I got my filing skills in order. So I went to the library and learned about filing. The most useful form that they had was called "numeric filing".
That's what we use with our small business today. I suggest you learn it.
That said, I don't suggest that you learn it in order to be a secretary. At the time I took my test, I scored something like 55 words per minute, with a minimum of errors. Real secretaries that were taking the test were getting something like 20-25 wpm, 6-10 errors per minute. They also didn't understand all three major kinds of filing systems, but could use one filing system, sortof. So I figured I had it made. At the university where I had graduated, I applied for all the temp summer secretarial jobs around, figuring "I'll ride this dead period out, and then get an aerospace engineering job". No dice. I'm guessing that I didn't have the one job prerequisite that is *really* necessary, but each of the real secretaries did have, and which is not officially mentionable (specific physical attractiveness, to be generous). Suffice it to say, I wish jobs were handed out on merit, but most aren't.
I rather figure that people *won't* have a choice, because Microsoft will have special deals with computer manufacturers and with the government.
Therefore, the government will demand documents in Word proprietary format, therefore the companies will upgrade (charging to the government the bill). They, then, will demand their docs in Word proprietary format, and so on.
Microsoft has long known the value of having a capitive government, because governments have captive people, and Microsoft understands how lucrative a captive market can be.
Indeed, this has been their tactic in the past, and probably will be their tactic in the future.
That said, I've been moving our documents into Quark as much as possible. Word is lousy, and documents made in Word are not reusable.
... and then realize that you've sent your electric bill to Arlene McCarthy, and your letter to... oh no... Some of us can never get it right. Which is why we have software patents here in America.
Not entering the public domain is also not necessarily a bad thing. If you invent the world's best search engine, and keep it private, then as long as your service, minus its cost, is more valuable than the effort to do better, then you're managing the search engine for the public, responsibly.
Nothing says that the inventor has to starve to death, or even has to be desperately poor.
So it's not necessarily bad for trade secrets to exist. In fact, it is arguably better. Take Coca-Cola(TM), for example. Coca-Cola(TM) provides one standard by which other drinks can measure themselves. That is not to say that other drinks are inferior -- but Coca-Cola(TM) is something you can compare it against. Nor are other drinks damaged by the fact that Coca-Cola(TM) is in private hands.
That said, lots of competitors have sprung up, and some have made a superior drink (IBC root beer, for example). You may not get more development out of the intellectual dead-end that Coke represents, but in providing a standard, the public domain does get something out of it.
My next problem with your post is that you ask for benefits for free (no cost) and open source software, by pointing out that it is to society's benefit to get something without cost. However, that is not what Free Software is about. RedHat and Suse could be utterly destroyed by this: ultimately, the inventor has to eat, and if he is too worried about where his next meal is coming from [or where his kid's next meal is coming from], he isn't going to be inventing. To only give anti-patent, anti-big-company protection to cost-free software is therefore a way to ensure the demise of free and open source software. The special thing about free and open source software is not that it is provided without charge. It is that you can modify it and redistribute it without royalties or hassle.
Ultimately, patents are a bad thing for all involved except those who already have power, money, and the will to step on others. The difference between the hardware and software patent is that with software, it becomes really obvious. With hardware, it's easier to wear the blinders.
I wasn't thinking of getting Office X source; rather, I was thinking that the conversion package (like WINE) from OS-X to Debian might be a ton easier and more reliable. That being the case, one might be able to install a more reliable version of Office X than of Wine+Office ME/Office XP.
[on 3rd world countries; feudal societies] Sorry, that's probably true. In the case of the third world countries, where you have what is essentially apartheid, you'll probably see a double bell curve, not a single one. That is, one bell curve for the whites of South Africa, and another for the blacks. Same thing in the South American countries, different people.
In the case of a feudal society, your sample sizes were always small. A bell curve is never an exact thing, it is an entropic approximation of a median. So although you can't defeat it, you will never hit it exactly, either. If you will, there is entropic pressure to bring your distribution towards a bell curve; thus, efforts to actively push it away from that curve to a different specific curve are pretty much wasted efforts. The case of the double-bell of Apartheid doesn't violate the bell curve, though, because it is the same, single bell curve, refracted through two different prisms of two different economies/sets of laws/etc. But to take it back to feudalism, if you average the situation out over time, then I suspect that even for the smaller populations of feudal societies you would see a bell curve.
And sorry, I didn't describe the bell curve properly, when I looked at it before. The bell curve has a ton of people with just a little, and a few people with a ton. So that would match, for example, life under Charlemagne ("no land without a lord, no man with a master"), as well as the next three hundered years of fracturing and war.
[On boom bust cycles] I'm not sure that a functioning economy guarantees a good chance of boom-bust cycles. There have been arguments made that the boom-bust cycles are caused by the intervention of a "planned" style of government, which includes the American government's Federal Reserve and welfare/corporate welfare programs.
Well, I'm glad to hear that it will work with more RAM. Really. It still won't help me a ton, for a few reasons (abyssmal contracts don't pay squat; computer is a Packard Bell with their own proprietary RAM format, and Packard Bell is defunct) but I'm glad to hear that it really does work. Blah.
Nor is the Mac advice particularly great for me, though again it's great to hear: We have a PB3400cs (192 MB RAM max, 233 MHz), PB1400c(300 MHz; 16 MB), and PB190c(not PowerPC). We technically don't have our PB1400cs(400;64-16) any more because we transferred it to our partner company. But they have it. Anyhow, it's started coming up with errors on the onboard RAM, so our first program that we run is "Puzzle", set to 16MB to eat up the bad RAM. But on abyssmal contracts, you can't afford to buy real computers. Blah.
On another issue, since you seem to be a Mac guy, isn't there an OS-X version of Microsoft Office? Could it be easier to port that to Linux, than porting it through WINE?
Quite honestly, I've tried OpenOffice on my 800Mhz 64-MB PC, and it is so slooow, that I uninstalled it.
Koffice is faster, but crashes regularly. I understand, I'm using the older KDE (2.x), because I'm on Debian/Woody; but I had installed KDE 3.0 before, along with it's KOffice, and I was still getting crashes.
So there is no version of Office for Windows that I am aware of that works well. As long as that is the case, WINE is good for OSS, not bad. That is, if they can get Office working successfully. I tried WINE with Word98, and it sucked. But maybe WineX doesn't. If it doesn't, then I'm all in favor of WineX, closed source or not. After all, the Windows apps are also closed source; we're talking about migrating slowly, not jumping in with both feet.
Those who do well in the world don't seem to be reaching back to give others a hand. I suppose this is the way its always been.
No. There are two reasons to reach back: justice, and charity. Now, those two things have varied throughout history. Sometimes there's more of it, and sometimes there's less of it.
But let me postulate for you a couple of things:
(1) You are always going to have a bell curve distribution of wealth. You can't get around it. A few people will have almost nothing; a few people will have tons; the rest will be distributed in between. Further, if you try to eliminate that bell curve, say, by taxing everyone and raising the minimum up to (for example) $25000, in the end you're only going to adjust the scaling factor. You're not going to break the bell curve.
(2) That said, some societies have a wide bell curve -- that is, there is a large middle class. America in the 50's was like that. Other societies have a very tight bell curve; Brazil, or El Salvador come to mind.
(3) It is easy to slide a bit up and down the bell curve due to random chance. Where there is a very tight bell curve, though, then the effects of sliding up or down are huge, even orders of magnitude in terms of real wealth; and the people at the top are literally afraid to fall. Indeed, the "middle class" is terrified to fall. That makes charity and justice rare, and the society violent. That continues the cycle, tightening the bell curve further.
The answer to this, as far as I can tell, isn't to provide the basics for free or not... because as you go, you'll find that more things are considered basic and necessary, and in those things you'll find a tragedy of the commons anyhow.
The answer, rather, is a basic attitude of justice and charity for those you deal with, those you see. Get that right, and you'll find the most people with a truly decent standard of living. Get that wrong, and you're going to descend into a hell-on-earth.
Write the important data, including store name/location and date on the back in ink pen. Keep them all in a shoebox. When you get audited, provide the shoebox. Tell the auditor that the store uses cheap thermal paper which goes bad; but they should have the records that prove you right, and if he wants, he should audit *them*.
If you really want, check every so often to tell when it starts to get bad. Then grab a whole lot of them, tape them onto letter-sized paper, and photocopy them at once. Keep those as backups. If the auditor really says "well, I can't accept these", challenge it, and say "I have photocopies of some of these, that prove I'm not lying, but they're not originals." Then show those. If he still doesn't accept it, sue the store. You've gone far beyond due diligence; they have not.
What I see as the problem is not a mechanical problem, a political problem, or a social problem -- it is a moral problem. That is, in light of growing human misery, what is our response? It is to protect ourselves, even at cost to those who are in trouble, even at cost to justice itself. That is the wrong response, with its own parallel to the tragedy of the commons.
I do agree that what we're heading for is ominous. But I think that the book Hope's Edge gives an indication of what the successful response will be.
It isn't going to be communism, it isn't going to be fascism, and it isn't going to be revolution. None of those things bring any good with them.
It's going to by communityism. That is, people who have a farm, and *can* produce all their needs by themselves, are going to essentially hire those whom they can and whom they can support, and close their system to the outside world, as much as necessary to maintain their integrity.
Which means that side-by-side with factories churning out mindless automata for more factories and extreme poverty, you're going to see farms being run by horse-drawn plows, because the horses can eat what the farm produces. Tractors require fuel.
Now, at that point you're going to have the society itself having a choice. Some of the societies will raise property taxes through the roof. If that happens, understand that the overlords are not going to take a loss. If they do, they risk becoming "jobless" themselves, and finding themselves in the same dire straits that they put others. Therefore, prices will rise in hyperinflation, enough to keep the main majority of jobless people in extreme poverty. If need be, the overlords will turn to crime, and will have plenty of people who want money enough to work for them.
So raising taxes, or giving out $25k per person is *not* the way to go. All the moreso, because if taxes are raised, then these farms are bust, and then there is nothing for the society except escalating crime, a decreased value on human life, and a lack of further progress, because further progress will not pay.
Now, on the other hand, if the society instead encourages these farm enclaves by giving them more protection against their own defunct government, then these farm enclaves will grow in number, number of workers, and size. Those will then be able to maintain the workers and will help balance out the economy between robots and humans.
Not to address your main point -- but I noticed to wrong statements. First of all, Robert E. Lee took the job of the confederate forces, not because he liked that side better, but because he had family on that side, and his personal loyalties were there.
His feelings were that the South should have freed the slaves before the war. Technically, he was right. So he would have made a great Southern president.
But he made a lousy general. Tactician? Perhaps pretty good. Good at getting the troops emotionally involved? A genius. But he didn't value his men. For him, casualties were just casualties that had to be borne.
That's like a company not valuing money. Money is the lifeblood of companies: lose too much, and you die. Soldiers are the lifeblood of an army. Lose too many, and you have no maneuverability, no force, and so on.
So Robert E. Lee was a lousy general.
That said, his honor was one of the saving graces of the civil war. It allowed America to get past war, into something that, while not good, was a ton better than continuous war.
They were considering it, but when they ran the simulation, they found that the spider silken cables reflected infrared light, which somehow caused pilots to fly their airplanes into the thing, causing some of the worst tangles imaginable.
Well, we have prepublishing, and I'm pretty good at training our staff, and we got the last project done a month and a half ahead of time. I'm a "ghost in the machine" boss: I have no official standing, no job description, and it's my wife that owns a part of the company, but I do get things done. Which isn't to plug myself: I can't negotiate a contract worth didley-squat. In a way, that's my one job as a boss, and I'm lousy at it.
Oh, yeah... I'm slightly balding in front, too.
But anyhow, I spent all night at the office recently, and shipped the book the next day. Then they had a/. PHB article (not this one), and I commented on PHBs. Sure enough, when I looked in the mirror, my hair was sticking up, and from one angle I looked exactly like Dilbert's PHB.
Slashdot Mirror
Retrospectively speaking, a garbage collector may well have had a better life than most of these stars.
I rather suspect that Wynona Rider knows this, which is why she's been shoplifting [psychological problem, as opposed to poverty problem], but she just doesn't know the way through her life to a real life.
That said, there are a bunch of stars who have managed to get through to such a real life, including the Star Wars actor who played Luke Skywalker (got back into theatre, a relatively private career and hasn't left it) and possibly Princess Leah (went through some drug problems, if I remember correctly, but then got into writing, which is also relatively private). Harrison Ford, interestingly, seems to have found some kind of a balance with stardom, doing no more than one film a year, spending the rest of his life involved with his family (*gasp*), and not going to the extreme implosion that most stars go to -- but that's rare, and I could be wrong, too.
Yet others, simply attempt to live a real life later, but really have to struggle. I think you'd put Bobby Brown and Whitney Houston into that class; Madonna seems to have begun such an attempt, but not completely; there are others, too.
Go to the FBI homepage, and they have a section "Report corporate fraud"...
Quite simply, it looks to me like these guys are getting mega options; they're exercising them at something like $1 per share, and then selling the stock from those options. If that's the case, then they're not going to run out of stock.
Essentially, they're rather choosing to pay themselves millions in fractional million increments, from money that people are paying into SCO.
They are not doing this because P2P is an alternative distribution model that threatens their business. If that were all there were to it, they'd probably quickly change business models, and be done with it.
Rather, our system of law has set up a structure for their sales, and they were following it. Yes, the structure, known as copyright, is flawed, but it is the structure that they, as a legal business entity, have to deal with.
Now, P2P is not following the law. They are breaking the law. (rewind) Bzzewwwpt (Vol up) THEY ARE BREAKING THE LAW (Vol down). So the RIAA is going after them in the only way that they can.
Now, if you want to bring in a better business model, which is legal, then please go ahead and do so.
BTW, I've posted in my journal under "Public Domain", one idea on how to do just that. Since I did PD it, you can use it, without paying me anything.
On two counts, you can't judge that. Remember Milli Vanilli? They were lip syncing all the time. They had no real skill; they were made by the RIAA.
In such a case, the artist is the advertiser; it is the RIAA themselves. I'd contend the same is true for any of the RIAA artists. If you're going to listen to their trash, therefore, pay your money to them. Shoot, pay double!
If you want to send your money to the artist for their music, then find an artist with whom you can do that, which you like. There are tons of such artists around; if you want to see any such artists, I suggest you go to a few of the New Years' "First Night" events. One that I found, which I loved, was the musical group Trapezoid. Even better, their lead singer's wife was also a master storyteller.
Anyhow, if you want to give your money directly to the artists, please do. Just go find your own. But if you're dealing with RIAA songs, the RIAA *is* the artist. And yes, they do suck, which is why I don't listen to their songs, except when a radio has to be playing (and sometimes it doesn't).
These guys are not really dangerous. If you don't want to be nabbed, don't share their music. Shoot, don't listen to it. I don't, and I still have a sense of music.
The really dangerous guys are anyone who's involved in financial transfer, without a true, legal, product. Those people are essentially offering no service, and have to do something to keep their racket going. I don't care if it's insurance (such as Prudential, or Lloyd's), banking (BCCI), gambling (Las Vegas), or get-rich-quick spammers (Nigerian spam); those are the people you really want to worry about.
These people make it easy enough to stay out of their way. And if they make a mistake, you can let them know via the media, and they'll even apologize. They might be dangerous, but they're not really dangerous.
Has anyone considered the possibility that NYCfashiongirl may really not want to be found out? I mean, suppose NYCfashiongirl was really Madonna or Brittany Spears, or someone else with more to lose from file sharing than they could possibly gain... ...this could be really embarassing. Especially if it was Justin Timberlake.
... you then prepare a card catalog (or equivalent computer database), which cross-references the MD5 sums according to recipient/sender, date, and the various related topics.
Such a system is called a "numeric filing system", and is very useful for large corporations.
You don't have to sort according to MD5 hash, either. If you plan it correctly, you can create any regular sorting system you wish, including a tree-based sorting system. That is, some files are grouped according to date, because they are most useful that way. Those might be all your files for upcoming court dates. Others might be grouped according to purpose [everything IRS that is already archived], while others may be grouped according to the person with whom you deal [say, patient records. Maybe this is a doctor's office that deals with a large number of lawsuits.]
Of course, to do the multiple grouping, you're going to need a second level database, as well. That is, you first look up the topic, to get the MD5 hash. Then you go over to another card catalog, and look up the grouping for that document, and the location. Then you go and pull the document from the physical file.
When I was just graduating from college, and there were no aerospace engineering jobs to be had, I took a look at my biggest other skills (computers, typing), and decided that I had a pretty good shot a being a secretary, provided I got my filing skills in order. So I went to the library and learned about filing. The most useful form that they had was called "numeric filing".
That's what we use with our small business today. I suggest you learn it.
That said, I don't suggest that you learn it in order to be a secretary. At the time I took my test, I scored something like 55 words per minute, with a minimum of errors. Real secretaries that were taking the test were getting something like 20-25 wpm, 6-10 errors per minute. They also didn't understand all three major kinds of filing systems, but could use one filing system, sortof. So I figured I had it made. At the university where I had graduated, I applied for all the temp summer secretarial jobs around, figuring "I'll ride this dead period out, and then get an aerospace engineering job". No dice. I'm guessing that I didn't have the one job prerequisite that is *really* necessary, but each of the real secretaries did have, and which is not officially mentionable (specific physical attractiveness, to be generous). Suffice it to say, I wish jobs were handed out on merit, but most aren't.
I rather figure that people *won't* have a choice, because Microsoft will have special deals with computer manufacturers and with the government.
Therefore, the government will demand documents in Word proprietary format, therefore the companies will upgrade (charging to the government the bill). They, then, will demand their docs in Word proprietary format, and so on.
Microsoft has long known the value of having a capitive government, because governments have captive people, and Microsoft understands how lucrative a captive market can be.
Indeed, this has been their tactic in the past, and probably will be their tactic in the future.
That said, I've been moving our documents into Quark as much as possible. Word is lousy, and documents made in Word are not reusable.
... and then realize that you've sent your electric bill to Arlene McCarthy, and your letter to ... oh no... Some of us can never get it right. Which is why we have software patents here in America.
Not entering the public domain is also not necessarily a bad thing. If you invent the world's best search engine, and keep it private, then as long as your service, minus its cost, is more valuable than the effort to do better, then you're managing the search engine for the public, responsibly.
Nothing says that the inventor has to starve to death, or even has to be desperately poor.
So it's not necessarily bad for trade secrets to exist. In fact, it is arguably better. Take Coca-Cola(TM), for example. Coca-Cola(TM) provides one standard by which other drinks can measure themselves. That is not to say that other drinks are inferior -- but Coca-Cola(TM) is something you can compare it against. Nor are other drinks damaged by the fact that Coca-Cola(TM) is in private hands.
That said, lots of competitors have sprung up, and some have made a superior drink (IBC root beer, for example). You may not get more development out of the intellectual dead-end that Coke represents, but in providing a standard, the public domain does get something out of it.
My next problem with your post is that you ask for benefits for free (no cost) and open source software, by pointing out that it is to society's benefit to get something without cost. However, that is not what Free Software is about. RedHat and Suse could be utterly destroyed by this: ultimately, the inventor has to eat, and if he is too worried about where his next meal is coming from [or where his kid's next meal is coming from], he isn't going to be inventing. To only give anti-patent, anti-big-company protection to cost-free software is therefore a way to ensure the demise of free and open source software. The special thing about free and open source software is not that it is provided without charge. It is that you can modify it and redistribute it without royalties or hassle.
Ultimately, patents are a bad thing for all involved except those who already have power, money, and the will to step on others. The difference between the hardware and software patent is that with software, it becomes really obvious. With hardware, it's easier to wear the blinders.
I wasn't thinking of getting Office X source; rather, I was thinking that the conversion package (like WINE) from OS-X to Debian might be a ton easier and more reliable. That being the case, one might be able to install a more reliable version of Office X than of Wine+Office ME/Office XP.
I see. I didn't realize that it was that difficult. We need to tell them something like
"Vote no/non/ne/nicht/ne ne/nekas/...."
That way, they will see that we actually spent more resources on this than they did, and will see it as an effective counter to the proposal.
Thanks for the info. Okay guys, let's mobilize the troops!
[on 3rd world countries; feudal societies] Sorry, that's probably true. In the case of the third world countries, where you have what is essentially apartheid, you'll probably see a double bell curve, not a single one. That is, one bell curve for the whites of South Africa, and another for the blacks. Same thing in the South American countries, different people.
In the case of a feudal society, your sample sizes were always small. A bell curve is never an exact thing, it is an entropic approximation of a median. So although you can't defeat it, you will never hit it exactly, either. If you will, there is entropic pressure to bring your distribution towards a bell curve; thus, efforts to actively push it away from that curve to a different specific curve are pretty much wasted efforts. The case of the double-bell of Apartheid doesn't violate the bell curve, though, because it is the same, single bell curve, refracted through two different prisms of two different economies/sets of laws/etc. But to take it back to feudalism, if you average the situation out over time, then I suspect that even for the smaller populations of feudal societies you would see a bell curve.
And sorry, I didn't describe the bell curve properly, when I looked at it before. The bell curve has a ton of people with just a little, and a few people with a ton. So that would match, for example, life under Charlemagne ("no land without a lord, no man with a master"), as well as the next three hundered years of fracturing and war.
[On boom bust cycles] I'm not sure that a functioning economy guarantees a good chance of boom-bust cycles. There have been arguments made that the boom-bust cycles are caused by the intervention of a "planned" style of government, which includes the American government's Federal Reserve and welfare/corporate welfare programs.
Well, I'm glad to hear that it will work with more RAM. Really. It still won't help me a ton, for a few reasons (abyssmal contracts don't pay squat; computer is a Packard Bell with their own proprietary RAM format, and Packard Bell is defunct) but I'm glad to hear that it really does work. Blah.
Nor is the Mac advice particularly great for me, though again it's great to hear: We have a PB3400cs (192 MB RAM max, 233 MHz), PB1400c(300 MHz; 16 MB), and PB190c(not PowerPC). We technically don't have our PB1400cs(400;64-16) any more because we transferred it to our partner company. But they have it. Anyhow, it's started coming up with errors on the onboard RAM, so our first program that we run is "Puzzle", set to 16MB to eat up the bad RAM. But on abyssmal contracts, you can't afford to buy real computers. Blah.
On another issue, since you seem to be a Mac guy, isn't there an OS-X version of Microsoft Office? Could it be easier to port that to Linux, than porting it through WINE?
Quite honestly, I've tried OpenOffice on my 800Mhz 64-MB PC, and it is so slooow, that I uninstalled it.
Koffice is faster, but crashes regularly. I understand, I'm using the older KDE (2.x), because I'm on Debian/Woody; but I had installed KDE 3.0 before, along with it's KOffice, and I was still getting crashes.
So there is no version of Office for Windows that I am aware of that works well. As long as that is the case, WINE is good for OSS, not bad. That is, if they can get Office working successfully. I tried WINE with Word98, and it sucked. But maybe WineX doesn't. If it doesn't, then I'm all in favor of WineX, closed source or not. After all, the Windows apps are also closed source; we're talking about migrating slowly, not jumping in with both feet.
Those who do well in the world don't seem to be reaching back to give others a hand. I suppose this is the way its always been.
No. There are two reasons to reach back: justice, and charity. Now, those two things have varied throughout history. Sometimes there's more of it, and sometimes there's less of it.
But let me postulate for you a couple of things:
(1) You are always going to have a bell curve distribution of wealth. You can't get around it. A few people will have almost nothing; a few people will have tons; the rest will be distributed in between. Further, if you try to eliminate that bell curve, say, by taxing everyone and raising the minimum up to (for example) $25000, in the end you're only going to adjust the scaling factor. You're not going to break the bell curve.
(2) That said, some societies have a wide bell curve -- that is, there is a large middle class. America in the 50's was like that. Other societies have a very tight bell curve; Brazil, or El Salvador come to mind.
(3) It is easy to slide a bit up and down the bell curve due to random chance. Where there is a very tight bell curve, though, then the effects of sliding up or down are huge, even orders of magnitude in terms of real wealth; and the people at the top are literally afraid to fall. Indeed, the "middle class" is terrified to fall. That makes charity and justice rare, and the society violent. That continues the cycle, tightening the bell curve further.
The answer to this, as far as I can tell, isn't to provide the basics for free or not... because as you go, you'll find that more things are considered basic and necessary, and in those things you'll find a tragedy of the commons anyhow.
The answer, rather, is a basic attitude of justice and charity for those you deal with, those you see. Get that right, and you'll find the most people with a truly decent standard of living. Get that wrong, and you're going to descend into a hell-on-earth.
Here's another ornithopter.
And this one you can buy for less than $15.
Start with that, see how it works, then design your own, and you could start doing your own model designs, and work up from there.
Write the important data, including store name/location and date on the back in ink pen. Keep them all in a shoebox. When you get audited, provide the shoebox. Tell the auditor that the store uses cheap thermal paper which goes bad; but they should have the records that prove you right, and if he wants, he should audit *them*.
If you really want, check every so often to tell when it starts to get bad. Then grab a whole lot of them, tape them onto letter-sized paper, and photocopy them at once. Keep those as backups. If the auditor really says "well, I can't accept these", challenge it, and say "I have photocopies of some of these, that prove I'm not lying, but they're not originals." Then show those. If he still doesn't accept it, sue the store. You've gone far beyond due diligence; they have not.
What I see as the problem is not a mechanical problem, a political problem, or a social problem -- it is a moral problem. That is, in light of growing human misery, what is our response? It is to protect ourselves, even at cost to those who are in trouble, even at cost to justice itself. That is the wrong response, with its own parallel to the tragedy of the commons.
I do agree that what we're heading for is ominous. But I think that the book Hope's Edge gives an indication of what the successful response will be.
It isn't going to be communism, it isn't going to be fascism, and it isn't going to be revolution. None of those things bring any good with them.
It's going to by communityism. That is, people who have a farm, and *can* produce all their needs by themselves, are going to essentially hire those whom they can and whom they can support, and close their system to the outside world, as much as necessary to maintain their integrity.
Which means that side-by-side with factories churning out mindless automata for more factories and extreme poverty, you're going to see farms being run by horse-drawn plows, because the horses can eat what the farm produces. Tractors require fuel.
Now, at that point you're going to have the society itself having a choice. Some of the societies will raise property taxes through the roof. If that happens, understand that the overlords are not going to take a loss. If they do, they risk becoming "jobless" themselves, and finding themselves in the same dire straits that they put others. Therefore, prices will rise in hyperinflation, enough to keep the main majority of jobless people in extreme poverty. If need be, the overlords will turn to crime, and will have plenty of people who want money enough to work for them.
So raising taxes, or giving out $25k per person is *not* the way to go. All the moreso, because if taxes are raised, then these farms are bust, and then there is nothing for the society except escalating crime, a decreased value on human life, and a lack of further progress, because further progress will not pay.
Now, on the other hand, if the society instead encourages these farm enclaves by giving them more protection against their own defunct government, then these farm enclaves will grow in number, number of workers, and size. Those will then be able to maintain the workers and will help balance out the economy between robots and humans.
Not to address your main point -- but I noticed to wrong statements. First of all, Robert E. Lee took the job of the confederate forces, not because he liked that side better, but because he had family on that side, and his personal loyalties were there.
His feelings were that the South should have freed the slaves before the war. Technically, he was right. So he would have made a great Southern president.
But he made a lousy general. Tactician? Perhaps pretty good. Good at getting the troops emotionally involved? A genius. But he didn't value his men. For him, casualties were just casualties that had to be borne.
That's like a company not valuing money. Money is the lifeblood of companies: lose too much, and you die. Soldiers are the lifeblood of an army. Lose too many, and you have no maneuverability, no force, and so on.
So Robert E. Lee was a lousy general.
That said, his honor was one of the saving graces of the civil war. It allowed America to get past war, into something that, while not good, was a ton better than continuous war.
They were considering it, but when they ran the simulation, they found that the spider silken cables reflected infrared light, which somehow caused pilots to fly their airplanes into the thing, causing some of the worst tangles imaginable.
Aaaaaaaaawwwwwwww, man! I was going to patent it, too! I had it in the mail and everything, and then you go and spoil it.
Well, we have prepublishing, and I'm pretty good at training our staff, and we got the last project done a month and a half ahead of time. I'm a "ghost in the machine" boss: I have no official standing, no job description, and it's my wife that owns a part of the company, but I do get things done. Which isn't to plug myself: I can't negotiate a contract worth didley-squat. In a way, that's my one job as a boss, and I'm lousy at it.
/. PHB article (not this one), and I commented on PHBs. Sure enough, when I looked in the mirror, my hair was sticking up, and from one angle I looked exactly like Dilbert's PHB.
Oh, yeah... I'm slightly balding in front, too.
But anyhow, I spent all night at the office recently, and shipped the book the next day. Then they had a
Aaaaaaaargh. Bad hair day.