But in Jurassic Park- that "This is Unix, I know this" line, contrasting with a weird virtual reality scene? That was TurboGopher 3D on classic MacOS. You can't program or hack it at all, it's just Gopher in a bizarre VR shell:)
Are you fiscally conservative? Dean is WAY more conservative and responsible about spending than Bush is. Bush is an embarrassment to the right on that subject- he's spending way more than Clinton, he's out of control. Dean can run government on a budget and control spending better than most. Hell, in my state (Vermont) where he governed for years, we can afford free health insurance for all children- thing called Dr. Dynasaur. We got the money for it, thanks to Dean. We got the money for road maintenance, etc. Being fiscally conservative is a good thing...
We already know what Bush's crowd do. There have been articles on the security holes in closed-source black-box voting machines being forced out there.
Can you please not waste our time by implying that Bush could have done the same thing, when his crowd's whole motivation is totally, absolutely the opposite to the point of being a serious fscking threat?
"Oh, but if Bush had done it first" is disingenious and suggests he's not so different. Sorry, man- the record suggests Bush's people are far gone on the other extreme, and that is a legitimate complaint about them.
Freedom of speech, privacy rights: the guy's a Vermonter, we're strong on that stuff.
Abortion: I'm pretty sure he's not going to criminalize that, ever. Maybe that bugs you.
You forgot to mention right to bear arms. Dean is strongly in favor of right to bear arms. After seeing what the Bush crowd have got up to in a few short years, I am with him, never mind 'bowling for columbine'. Yeah, abuse of guns is a plague and it's tragic, but we will not need Islamic terrorists to get ourselves a police state if the citizenry is disarmed and subjugated and tracked and controlled.
You also forgot to mention budgeting: Dean is way more fiscally conservative than Bush, and he would cut spending, probably tax the rich some more, and get closer to a real budget even if it hurt him. Here in Vermont he ran our budget well for what, ten years? And we're still not hurtin' that bad even now. The country needs that.
The supporting of open-source software is icing on the cake and a guarantee that the guy has a clue about tech things. That's a bonus- he was already doing pretty good for a politician.
You can't trust articles like that- at some point you have to consider who actually can do the job in question.
BTW- that's one obnoxious, spazzy, popup-flinging site, and the FIRST SENTENCE is "The left has long sought to dumb down America understanding that the more ignorant America becomes the less resistance liberals will meet as they push their agenda."
Are you insane? You're actually using this guy as a resource for giving advice to the demos? I have little love for the Democrats but goddamn! I would do the opposite of what this guy says because he's probably trying to sabotage the Dems. He talks like a psychopath.
Dean's not as left as some people would like- try Kuschinch (sp) for that. Dean is fiscally conservative. He's handled my state's budget (Vermont) well enough that we're not anywhere near as hosed as, say, California, financially. He's pro-gun: ESR-ites out there might like that. And he's got a legitimate beef against the Bush crowd- I mean, come on. Read that 'insightful' (ha!) opinion piece, read it, don't just take 'Jack Comics' word for it: the author thinks we all should be lining up behind Bush for the flag salute! With advisors like that you don't need enemies.
I'll go out and vote for ANY dude against Bush. Period. I think Dean would do the best job of actually doing the work of patching up the country again, though. Clark would make a cool VP, I'm thinking. The traditional democrat candidates sitting around waffling and reading polls, I'd hold my nose and I'd watch out for them if they got power, because they're weasels. And so is CK Rairden, and so is 'Jack Comics'. Dean's not a weasel. He's not perfect, he's a politician, but he's not a weasel.
"However, power distribution business is apt to emergence of monopolies, so while blackouts are extremely disturbing, in the end free market is perhaps more important there than reliability of supply."
Hang on, I'm not sure that is really what you mean considering the rest of your post.
Do you mean LESS important?
There are some posters who do in fact mean 'free market is more important than reliability of supply'. For those: the electricity industry IS supply of electricity, no more and no less. If you're still arguing free market rhetoric, how is it that your apparently religious beliefs about markets are more important than the whole point of the exercise, i.e. distribution of power?
Undercutting the exploiters- that can be tricky at times, but absolutely right. That can be done by people like the open-source types: expending their efforts to kill the market for an exploiter. "Here, have this operating system. You get to own it and you can even develop and extend it if you want.
Buying off the whiners- oh, so true. So, so true. The audience left because the cookout started. Most people can be bought off with just a bit of immediate comfort or gratification. This is not THAT expensive. You can call it welfare, or insurance, or whatever you want, but it works. You only get revolution when the exploiters try to get that last 10 percent off the peasants, and make the peasants uncomfortable. "Let them eat cake, then" gets you killed. Give them bread- not even cake! and you're golden.
The challenge here is simply that the exploiters won't themselves buy off the whiners, and the whiners won't by themselves have the resources to undercut the exploiters. Some mechanism has to exist to kickstart the process. Actually, we can call that 'government', and the trick is to keep it between those two poles, keep it doing both things. Well, actually, it'll look like the government is the enemy of capitalism and business if it's doing its job properly, because it'll be buying off whiners and helping to undercut exploiters. It won't look 'fair', because it won't appear to be siding with Big Business half the time, if it's being done properly.
I guess you could say Big Capital doesn't really NEED help and support, because by definition it is already the concentration of power to rival government. It just doesn't have the insight to moderate itself- it can't, by definition, because any part of Big Capital that doesn't exploit as hard as it can will lose and stop being Big Capital anymore.
Hence, the need for something outside of the system that will do the job of undercutting and buying off.
I think we're reinventing communism as something that only makes sense as the flip side of pure capitalism. You can have communism as long as you also have functioning pure capitalism. You can have capitalism as long as you also have functioning communism. Bizarre.:D
...and does that $450 pay for a week and a half's rent, as it would in some parts of the USA, or would it pay for several years' worth of rent and all the food you'd eat during that time?
Heh. First I've heard of that. If supply-side means predominantly cutting taxes for poor and middle class, it would actually work. I thought the whole idea was to cut only the taxes on the rich, on the harebrained notion that they would invest or something.
I can do many things that a poor or middleclass person could happily invest in. I can't do anything the uber-wealthy would invest in, because they can do better in Taiwan or India or somewhere.
Interesting thoughts, I didn't know it could be interpreted in that way.
The poor eventually riot and KILL the few super-wealthy.
And then rot, because the society is really mostly composed of the poor, and there aren't any resources to speak of. Not much of an infrastructure.
People keep talking about the very wealthy as though they can't be rioted against and killed. This is pretty historically naive.
The founding fathers of the USA were very concerned with just this issue, because they knew their history... many of the rights they tried to claim as permanent citizen rights also double as insurance against pissing off the serfs too much. They're rights- but they're also "if you do this you'll be soooorry!" to those in power.
Works for me. I admit I don't like the merchantilist gouging at all, but if you can show me a way to make it not zero-sum I'll buy it.
One of your challenges is that capitalist gouging is more profitable if it IS zero-sum. It's like feeding the world- it has nothing to do with efficiencies, it's strictly politics. Capitalism is strictly politics on that level and you're going to have people MAKING it zero-sum on purpose so they can cash in better. Show me how you'll stop 'em doing that and I'll buy in.
By the same token, people who want heavy socialism will often feel that way from anger at the opposite side, and they WANT those guys punished. You will also have to chill out the socialist folk who don't want some fat cat bragging and acting all wealthy and superior.
So on the one hand, get those with power to stop heightening their power by exploiting it- on the other, get those without power to learn to tolerate other people being wealthier than them.
You up for that? Man, it would help, I'll say that much.
Reading Andy's article was a great surprise, for the following simple reason: I have never, in my life, seen anyone who used the term 'wealth creation' AND was seeing the real world.
I'm impressed. I'm not surprised that he doesn't have a bunch of pat answers- they don't exist within that context. But I'm impressed that he's asking the right questions, even if there aren't convenient answers.
There's no such thing as 'feed the world' under capitalism, or any social benefit from efficiency or technology: if you could generate a world-day of foodstuffs for 29 cents with a wonderful machine, capitalism is about seeing who gets to hoard as much money as possible from that situation, and politics is about controlling as many people as possible by exerting power over that cornucopia. The bounty won't feed anyone if you don't let them have it. If you have enough power to withhold that bounty, you can control the people you're depriving. That gives you more power, and you win.
This is not really very complicated or mysterious.
I guess it IS pretty cynical, but open your eyes.
The whole concept of making people better competers by giving them free software or whatever is within the context of raw capitalism- the idea is that they are then to beat up on the others who don't take advantage of these things. That's fine for the vicious and the tough and scrappy, but they would have won anyway with or without the tools- in capitalism it's not about the tools or even about the standard of living and least of all about 'wealth', it's about WHO you are as a personality. It's a structure decreeing certain social behavior. The idea is that it's less prone to being abused than a more nurturing social structure, because people will take advantage of anything nurturing. That may be true. People seem to take advantage of capitalism too, though. Pick your poison.
My own experience speaks to this whole situation. So you should make software to empower people? Andy, I've been doing that, in my field. I write CD mastering software- in some areas it is genuinely cutting-edge. I have a revolutionary approach to wordlength reduction and the redistribution of quantization error. I have various tone shaping adjustments that don't appear anywhere else. I've been GPLing this stuff for years now, for just the motivations you describe.
I'm starving and poor and have started dating a woman I cherish who has a 3-year-old kid and you know what, I'm sick of flushing my work. I'm sick of trying to be benevolent and being taken as useless because of my lack of greed. Nothing is going to make me a hardcore capitalist, but as far as this audio-domain program, I'm less and less motivated to help people have it for nothing. I'm not spending my own money to port it to more recent architectures, I'm not spending time and effort setting it up with a help system- by now I'm of a mind to still put it out, GPLed, make no fuss about that, but use this tool for ME and try to, basically, compete against anyone who might have picked it up but doesn't have the expertise with it. That, or not put it out at all- or put out only the source, maybe?
Capitalism means even I get beat down to the point where I can't stand trying to be benevolent or altruistic anymore. I'm unusually capable of being that, but it seems to be not even helping. The last time I talked with a GPLed audio project, they didn't even know what dither was or how it worked. We're sitting around trying to make tractors out of cabbage. It gets old.
I think as long as the context is free-market capitalism, society will be hopeless. There's no answer within the system. I'd prefer to ditch the raw capitalism. Something more like partly-cooked capitalism would suit me. Somehow manage some system where somebody does a reasonably okay job of finding people and projects that do benefit society and quality of life, and bankroll the buggers.
What's so wrong with that? That's just what happens right now, except it's Ken Lay of Enron who gets bankrolled and rew
Okay, so the message smart computer users propagate, AND the message Microsoft propagates, is "Patch everything! For God's sake, man! You're a hopeless loser who deserves everything you get if you don't PATCH all security holes! Why, that auto-run vulnerability is from two years ago, how can you not have PATCHED that by now? What's wrong with you man?!?"
*email* "Hi! I'm your new patch!"
Do you see why this has worked so well?
Do you see why this is an absolutely fatal flaw, on the social engineering side? You simply cannot browbeat people to patch patch patch blindly and without asking questions, and expect them to be properly skeptical when a virus comes along that's really well disguised as a patch. It's hopeless. From this point on, the biggest viruses are likely to do two things:
use all available vulns for those who do not patch
mimic as closely as possible the sources trusted by those who DO patch
Game over. That route is now useless, and it's counterproductive to harangue people to patch at this point- you're only setting them up to be exploited by a virus. The stronger their drive to patch, the more likely they are to slip up and try to do it in the wrong situation.
Look at Swen and what's happened. Call them idiots if that makes you feel better. Fine, you've called them a name. Now what?
Actually, I do have a solution, but I don't know if it's quite time for it- some people might object. On the bright side, it would work.
All mail transfer agents from now on are to auto-strip all, repeat all, attachments to email.
You wait- the time may come when the world does that. Practically, it would only require some backbones or maybe a quarter of the MTAs out there to be doing this to seriously clean up the state of affairs.
My ISP runs SpamAssassin and it still gets through. Why? Because viruses don't come from one killable source, and because SA isn't letting me set my threshold below 3. This gets maybe 80% of them. That's pitiful as I estimate I'm getting hundreds a day- to an email account with a 6M soft limit- over 56K dialup.
I've been telnetting in to my shell account for days, and deleting stuff in Pine. I've never been driven to do that before, and it just doesn't let up. Thank goodness I'm kinda comfortable on Unix shell:)
Why're they bothering me? I'm on MacOS 8.6 for crying out loud! Go pick on windows boxen.
Nobody whose motivation can be killed by refusing to let them inherit a million dollars... will EVER earn a million dollars.
Where's your reverence for competition now?
If they are going to be apathetic and depressed, let them rot! To hell with their trust-fund dreams, and to hell with them. Everybody has the same opportunity to pull up your socks and get to work, and they're no different.
You're really, really not making your case here. Is it that you want to encourage people to be lazy and shiftless by letting them have inherited money?
...yeah, because of course Ben & Jerry's, with their corporate salary caps and all, is so terribly uncompetitive against companies with more executive compensation. How inefficient, to not piss away all their money towards the wealth of the sanctified execs. Why, if they keep THAT up, you'll NEVER see their ice cream in pretty much every place ice cream gets sold, will you?
Smarten up. Income disparities are inefficiencies. When they get cherry-picked, other companies are pruning greed-wood out of Ben & Jerry's and taking only the least loyal execs- and spending money on compensating them. More money- same job as they did for Ben & Jerry's, but costing the other company more.
Good way to get your butt kicked by Ben & Jerry's, I'd have thought, but I guess some people are more attached to their notions of executive compensation than they are to the idea of actually competing ruthlessly.
Welcome to real capitalism. Golden parachutes are not a sign of success. They're a mark of inefficiency, a vulnerability.
"The Captain is personally responsible for the continued livelihoods of his crew. The Captain calls the shots, the captain takes the risks, the captain accepts the responsibility."
Um. Forgive me if I'm not following you- you are saying that to help this woman, government should abandon labor standards so that someone can legally pay her 2$ an hour?
Out of curiosity, do you work for 2$ an hour, or for minimum wage, or for example in a service industry?
Don't laugh too quick, that's not THAT stupid of an idea. Give me a chunk of Gates' dosh and I could build something you'd want to buy. It does no good to anyone rotting in his bank account. And anyone who NEEDS to have a billion dollars as an incentive is already the sort of person who would be kicking your ass in business anyhow- how do you think they got there in the first place? Do you really think it's the money that drives them? Unless you're crazy, a million dollars is enough. These guys are crazy.
It's here all right. I'm getting buried under it, my email account is getting flooded to unusability in under 12 hours. 56K modem downloading 6 megs of viruses every 12 hours ain't my idea of fun.
Absolutely, and this is a beautiful example of why open source is so important.
Proprietary software tends to get killed. It gets established, rakes in some money, gets lazy and then another proprietary software application comes around and attacks it viciously. They fight, sometimes refusing to interoperate or screwing with the file formats and injuring users in the fallout, and then the old software dies, and the company throws a fit and removes it from the market. No support, you can't get the code, if there's fancy copy-protect stuff involved the old software may be totally eradicated from the earth even if it was still working for you (by this I mean elaborate phone-home copy-protect stuff- I had a failed mp3 player do this, after some disk swaps it committed suicide rather than let me use it, and I demanded my money back from the company, who are now I think out of business and could not respond to the copy-protect routines even if they wanted to).
FCP will one day die too. It's up to Apple to determine what happens to it then- maybe they'll GPL it or something, like Carmack does with old Quake code. But it's true: FCP is impossible to compete with on the desktop, right now.
Proprietary software is inefficient because when it works, it _discourages_ competition. You only get competition when there isn't anything really good out there... or when something's gone really stale...
Slashdot Mirror
But in Jurassic Park- that "This is Unix, I know this" line, contrasting with a weird virtual reality scene? That was TurboGopher 3D on classic MacOS. You can't program or hack it at all, it's just Gopher in a bizarre VR shell :)
Are you fiscally conservative? Dean is WAY more conservative and responsible about spending than Bush is. Bush is an embarrassment to the right on that subject- he's spending way more than Clinton, he's out of control. Dean can run government on a budget and control spending better than most. Hell, in my state (Vermont) where he governed for years, we can afford free health insurance for all children- thing called Dr. Dynasaur. We got the money for it, thanks to Dean. We got the money for road maintenance, etc. Being fiscally conservative is a good thing...
We already know what Bush's crowd do. There have been articles on the security holes in closed-source black-box voting machines being forced out there.
Can you please not waste our time by implying that Bush could have done the same thing, when his crowd's whole motivation is totally, absolutely the opposite to the point of being a serious fscking threat?
"Oh, but if Bush had done it first" is disingenious and suggests he's not so different. Sorry, man- the record suggests Bush's people are far gone on the other extreme, and that is a legitimate complaint about them.
Diebold, my ass.
Abortion: I'm pretty sure he's not going to criminalize that, ever. Maybe that bugs you.
You forgot to mention right to bear arms. Dean is strongly in favor of right to bear arms. After seeing what the Bush crowd have got up to in a few short years, I am with him, never mind 'bowling for columbine'. Yeah, abuse of guns is a plague and it's tragic, but we will not need Islamic terrorists to get ourselves a police state if the citizenry is disarmed and subjugated and tracked and controlled.
You also forgot to mention budgeting: Dean is way more fiscally conservative than Bush, and he would cut spending, probably tax the rich some more, and get closer to a real budget even if it hurt him. Here in Vermont he ran our budget well for what, ten years? And we're still not hurtin' that bad even now. The country needs that.
The supporting of open-source software is icing on the cake and a guarantee that the guy has a clue about tech things. That's a bonus- he was already doing pretty good for a politician.
BTW- that's one obnoxious, spazzy, popup-flinging site, and the FIRST SENTENCE is "The left has long sought to dumb down America understanding that the more ignorant America becomes the less resistance liberals will meet as they push their agenda."
Are you insane? You're actually using this guy as a resource for giving advice to the demos? I have little love for the Democrats but goddamn! I would do the opposite of what this guy says because he's probably trying to sabotage the Dems. He talks like a psychopath.
Dean's not as left as some people would like- try Kuschinch (sp) for that. Dean is fiscally conservative. He's handled my state's budget (Vermont) well enough that we're not anywhere near as hosed as, say, California, financially. He's pro-gun: ESR-ites out there might like that. And he's got a legitimate beef against the Bush crowd- I mean, come on. Read that 'insightful' (ha!) opinion piece, read it, don't just take 'Jack Comics' word for it: the author thinks we all should be lining up behind Bush for the flag salute! With advisors like that you don't need enemies.
I'll go out and vote for ANY dude against Bush. Period. I think Dean would do the best job of actually doing the work of patching up the country again, though. Clark would make a cool VP, I'm thinking. The traditional democrat candidates sitting around waffling and reading polls, I'd hold my nose and I'd watch out for them if they got power, because they're weasels. And so is CK Rairden, and so is 'Jack Comics'. Dean's not a weasel. He's not perfect, he's a politician, but he's not a weasel.
Hang on, I'm not sure that is really what you mean considering the rest of your post.
Do you mean LESS important?
There are some posters who do in fact mean 'free market is more important than reliability of supply'. For those: the electricity industry IS supply of electricity, no more and no less. If you're still arguing free market rhetoric, how is it that your apparently religious beliefs about markets are more important than the whole point of the exercise, i.e. distribution of power?
Undercutting the exploiters- that can be tricky at times, but absolutely right. That can be done by people like the open-source types: expending their efforts to kill the market for an exploiter. "Here, have this operating system. You get to own it and you can even develop and extend it if you want.
Buying off the whiners- oh, so true. So, so true. The audience left because the cookout started. Most people can be bought off with just a bit of immediate comfort or gratification. This is not THAT expensive. You can call it welfare, or insurance, or whatever you want, but it works. You only get revolution when the exploiters try to get that last 10 percent off the peasants, and make the peasants uncomfortable. "Let them eat cake, then" gets you killed. Give them bread- not even cake! and you're golden.
The challenge here is simply that the exploiters won't themselves buy off the whiners, and the whiners won't by themselves have the resources to undercut the exploiters. Some mechanism has to exist to kickstart the process. Actually, we can call that 'government', and the trick is to keep it between those two poles, keep it doing both things. Well, actually, it'll look like the government is the enemy of capitalism and business if it's doing its job properly, because it'll be buying off whiners and helping to undercut exploiters. It won't look 'fair', because it won't appear to be siding with Big Business half the time, if it's being done properly.
I guess you could say Big Capital doesn't really NEED help and support, because by definition it is already the concentration of power to rival government. It just doesn't have the insight to moderate itself- it can't, by definition, because any part of Big Capital that doesn't exploit as hard as it can will lose and stop being Big Capital anymore.
Hence, the need for something outside of the system that will do the job of undercutting and buying off.
I think we're reinventing communism as something that only makes sense as the flip side of pure capitalism. You can have communism as long as you also have functioning pure capitalism. You can have capitalism as long as you also have functioning communism. Bizarre. :D
Try to learn. It would do you good.
I can do many things that a poor or middleclass person could happily invest in. I can't do anything the uber-wealthy would invest in, because they can do better in Taiwan or India or somewhere.
Interesting thoughts, I didn't know it could be interpreted in that way.
The poor eventually riot and KILL the few super-wealthy.
And then rot, because the society is really mostly composed of the poor, and there aren't any resources to speak of. Not much of an infrastructure.
People keep talking about the very wealthy as though they can't be rioted against and killed. This is pretty historically naive.
The founding fathers of the USA were very concerned with just this issue, because they knew their history... many of the rights they tried to claim as permanent citizen rights also double as insurance against pissing off the serfs too much. They're rights- but they're also "if you do this you'll be soooorry!" to those in power.
Works for me. I admit I don't like the merchantilist gouging at all, but if you can show me a way to make it not zero-sum I'll buy it.
One of your challenges is that capitalist gouging is more profitable if it IS zero-sum. It's like feeding the world- it has nothing to do with efficiencies, it's strictly politics. Capitalism is strictly politics on that level and you're going to have people MAKING it zero-sum on purpose so they can cash in better. Show me how you'll stop 'em doing that and I'll buy in.
By the same token, people who want heavy socialism will often feel that way from anger at the opposite side, and they WANT those guys punished. You will also have to chill out the socialist folk who don't want some fat cat bragging and acting all wealthy and superior.
So on the one hand, get those with power to stop heightening their power by exploiting it- on the other, get those without power to learn to tolerate other people being wealthier than them.
You up for that? Man, it would help, I'll say that much.
I'm impressed. I'm not surprised that he doesn't have a bunch of pat answers- they don't exist within that context. But I'm impressed that he's asking the right questions, even if there aren't convenient answers.
There's no such thing as 'feed the world' under capitalism, or any social benefit from efficiency or technology: if you could generate a world-day of foodstuffs for 29 cents with a wonderful machine, capitalism is about seeing who gets to hoard as much money as possible from that situation, and politics is about controlling as many people as possible by exerting power over that cornucopia. The bounty won't feed anyone if you don't let them have it. If you have enough power to withhold that bounty, you can control the people you're depriving. That gives you more power, and you win.
This is not really very complicated or mysterious.
I guess it IS pretty cynical, but open your eyes.
The whole concept of making people better competers by giving them free software or whatever is within the context of raw capitalism- the idea is that they are then to beat up on the others who don't take advantage of these things. That's fine for the vicious and the tough and scrappy, but they would have won anyway with or without the tools- in capitalism it's not about the tools or even about the standard of living and least of all about 'wealth', it's about WHO you are as a personality. It's a structure decreeing certain social behavior. The idea is that it's less prone to being abused than a more nurturing social structure, because people will take advantage of anything nurturing. That may be true. People seem to take advantage of capitalism too, though. Pick your poison.
My own experience speaks to this whole situation. So you should make software to empower people? Andy, I've been doing that, in my field. I write CD mastering software- in some areas it is genuinely cutting-edge. I have a revolutionary approach to wordlength reduction and the redistribution of quantization error. I have various tone shaping adjustments that don't appear anywhere else. I've been GPLing this stuff for years now, for just the motivations you describe.
I'm starving and poor and have started dating a woman I cherish who has a 3-year-old kid and you know what, I'm sick of flushing my work. I'm sick of trying to be benevolent and being taken as useless because of my lack of greed. Nothing is going to make me a hardcore capitalist, but as far as this audio-domain program, I'm less and less motivated to help people have it for nothing. I'm not spending my own money to port it to more recent architectures, I'm not spending time and effort setting it up with a help system- by now I'm of a mind to still put it out, GPLed, make no fuss about that, but use this tool for ME and try to, basically, compete against anyone who might have picked it up but doesn't have the expertise with it. That, or not put it out at all- or put out only the source, maybe?
Capitalism means even I get beat down to the point where I can't stand trying to be benevolent or altruistic anymore. I'm unusually capable of being that, but it seems to be not even helping. The last time I talked with a GPLed audio project, they didn't even know what dither was or how it worked. We're sitting around trying to make tractors out of cabbage. It gets old.
I think as long as the context is free-market capitalism, society will be hopeless. There's no answer within the system. I'd prefer to ditch the raw capitalism. Something more like partly-cooked capitalism would suit me. Somehow manage some system where somebody does a reasonably okay job of finding people and projects that do benefit society and quality of life, and bankroll the buggers.
What's so wrong with that? That's just what happens right now, except it's Ken Lay of Enron who gets bankrolled and rew
*email*
"Hi! I'm your new patch!"
Do you see why this has worked so well?
Do you see why this is an absolutely fatal flaw, on the social engineering side? You simply cannot browbeat people to patch patch patch blindly and without asking questions, and expect them to be properly skeptical when a virus comes along that's really well disguised as a patch. It's hopeless. From this point on, the biggest viruses are likely to do two things:
Game over. That route is now useless, and it's counterproductive to harangue people to patch at this point- you're only setting them up to be exploited by a virus. The stronger their drive to patch, the more likely they are to slip up and try to do it in the wrong situation.
Look at Swen and what's happened. Call them idiots if that makes you feel better. Fine, you've called them a name. Now what?
Actually, I do have a solution, but I don't know if it's quite time for it- some people might object. On the bright side, it would work.
All mail transfer agents from now on are to auto-strip all, repeat all, attachments to email.
You wait- the time may come when the world does that. Practically, it would only require some backbones or maybe a quarter of the MTAs out there to be doing this to seriously clean up the state of affairs.
I would like to see it happen tomorrow.
I've been telnetting in to my shell account for days, and deleting stuff in Pine. I've never been driven to do that before, and it just doesn't let up. Thank goodness I'm kinda comfortable on Unix shell :)
Why're they bothering me? I'm on MacOS 8.6 for crying out loud! Go pick on windows boxen.
Where's your reverence for competition now?
If they are going to be apathetic and depressed, let them rot! To hell with their trust-fund dreams, and to hell with them. Everybody has the same opportunity to pull up your socks and get to work, and they're no different.
You're really, really not making your case here. Is it that you want to encourage people to be lazy and shiftless by letting them have inherited money?
Smarten up. Income disparities are inefficiencies. When they get cherry-picked, other companies are pruning greed-wood out of Ben & Jerry's and taking only the least loyal execs- and spending money on compensating them. More money- same job as they did for Ben & Jerry's, but costing the other company more.
Good way to get your butt kicked by Ben & Jerry's, I'd have thought, but I guess some people are more attached to their notions of executive compensation than they are to the idea of actually competing ruthlessly.
Welcome to real capitalism. Golden parachutes are not a sign of success. They're a mark of inefficiency, a vulnerability.
What responsibility?
How's that for stopping 'em?
Out of curiosity, do you work for 2$ an hour, or for minimum wage, or for example in a service industry?
Nice trick if you can afford to do it...
Doesn't it seem a little weird?
Don't laugh too quick, that's not THAT stupid of an idea. Give me a chunk of Gates' dosh and I could build something you'd want to buy. It does no good to anyone rotting in his bank account. And anyone who NEEDS to have a billion dollars as an incentive is already the sort of person who would be kicking your ass in business anyhow- how do you think they got there in the first place? Do you really think it's the money that drives them? Unless you're crazy, a million dollars is enough. These guys are crazy.
It's here all right. I'm getting buried under it, my email account is getting flooded to unusability in under 12 hours. 56K modem downloading 6 megs of viruses every 12 hours ain't my idea of fun.
Do you use public libraries in your work?
Have you ever used a public library outside of work?
"and you'll like our Gimp much better than theirs! Right Zed?" :D
Proprietary software tends to get killed. It gets established, rakes in some money, gets lazy and then another proprietary software application comes around and attacks it viciously. They fight, sometimes refusing to interoperate or screwing with the file formats and injuring users in the fallout, and then the old software dies, and the company throws a fit and removes it from the market. No support, you can't get the code, if there's fancy copy-protect stuff involved the old software may be totally eradicated from the earth even if it was still working for you (by this I mean elaborate phone-home copy-protect stuff- I had a failed mp3 player do this, after some disk swaps it committed suicide rather than let me use it, and I demanded my money back from the company, who are now I think out of business and could not respond to the copy-protect routines even if they wanted to).
FCP will one day die too. It's up to Apple to determine what happens to it then- maybe they'll GPL it or something, like Carmack does with old Quake code. But it's true: FCP is impossible to compete with on the desktop, right now.
Proprietary software is inefficient because when it works, it _discourages_ competition. You only get competition when there isn't anything really good out there... or when something's gone really stale...