Nader wasn't allowed in the debates because he was TALLER than the other candidates:D
I'm convinced of this.
PR handlers are quite well aware of all such seemingly unimportant issues, and the statistics that most elections with televised debates have gone to the TALLEST candidate, possibly because they appear physically imposing and 'statesmanlike', more powerful.
Nader's unusually tall- if he ever DOES get into a televised debate, I suggest that he try to produce a situation where he persuades the Democrat and Republican candidate to 'all stand together' as a symbol of the freedom and good will in our wonderful political process.
That way we can test the height theory- with plenty of pictures of him looming over the hapless party politicians with a stern but benevolent look, we can find out if that statistical quirk is enough to influence people;)
Start practicing your stern but benevolent look, Ralph!
Well, I have been voting for Greens and Progressives. And in a broader sense, historically what happens when a populace is disenfranchised and those in power stop bothering even to keep up the appearance of a fair system, is a bloody revolution taking advantage of widespread resentment and distrust against those in power.
The bloody revolution doesn't necessarily result in something better, it just punishes the aristocracy for their arrogance. It takes a lot of cleverness and dedication to rise above this process even for a short time (like 200 years, hint hint)
*g* looks like I yanked some objectivist-mod's chain real hard with that post. Good. "society about the social and cooperation more beneficial than competition" a troll, my ass;)
Socialist concepts work just as good as capitalist ones- no better and no worse. It's all in how you implement them, and in what types of problems arise when you take 'em too far.
And I'm not sure what the point is of deciding things like "for something to be a right, it has to be both universal and simultaneous, and impose no burden or cost onto others." According to who? Is this some sort of axiom that you're supposed to accept unquestioningly?
Just to annoy, how about this slight alteration: "because burden is inevitable and natural, it should be both universal and simultaneous, therefore the functioning of society should impose roughly the same burden upon everyone, relative to their ability to bear it, and the same cost on everyone relative to their ability to pay it. So, the more power you have in society, the more burden you should bear- and the more wealth you have, the more you should pay."
It all depends on how you define freedom. If by that you only mean 'how can I beat everybody else' that is very capitalistic but it's difficult to see what good it is giving you specifically lots of freedom while allowing you to hurt others and fight them. If freedom means providing the most nurturing environment for all hackers to grow in, it's very possible that some courses of action won't be allowed to you even if you're the best candidate to do them- for instance, cornering the market on something- it might be more important to have other people working the same area as you even if they're not better than you.
If you can consider them 'neighbors' rather than 'competitors' you'll really be getting the point.
Competition generally seems to lead to people breaking each other's kneecaps, also to one person cornering the market and making it unfree. Maybe you consider it overwhelmingly important to have the liberty to be able to carry out such hypercompetitive practices (if you don't they'll be done to you, under capitalism) but they convey no social benefit- they're worse than 'socialism' in the long run, at least the type of 'socialism' the USA has often practiced.
You simply cannot play society as an elitist power game- it doesn't work. Society is about the social- funny how the very words lead you to 'social-ist'! It's like taking care of the environment by limiting the 'freedom' of that chemical plant over there to dump PCBs into the ground-water and kill everyone over a very long term. It is always the case that individuals have options that harm society far more than they benefit the individual. It is those 'freedoms' that have to be denied.
Everybody will have different opinions on which options those are, mind you- but consider murder, robbery, copyright (just kidding! Or am I?;) ) etc.
You can eat food, get very sick for TOTALLY UNRELATED reasons, and end up with a permanent revulsion for that totally innocent food. I forget the name of that syndrome, maybe another slashdotter knows it.
I could see great interest by advertisers in using this phenomenon to poison people's interest in competing products. Eventually everyone would sit around being disgusted at everything. Bonus- obesity would decline:)
It's all very fun playing the elitist card 'all those drones out there are sheep but _I_ am a Real Man!', and as someone with some familiarity with advertising techniques, EXTRA points for the insinuation ('And you know what?' as an aside, apparently between equals, but delivering a message of 'THEY are mindless droids')
This of course 'loads' the statement emotionally, making it more appealing to agree to it rather than repudiate the intimate terms- if you disagree with the statement you are also risking being assigned to the 'mindless droid' camp, and not everybody has the subconscious security to be willing to contest the point.
That's how cults like Objectivists persuade people to their views, by drawing lines in the sand and inviting people to categorize the world as 'superior beings and mindless droids': if you accept the premise, it is very unlikely that you will assign yourself the status of 'mindless droid'. But by the same process, if you instinctively reject being classified mindless droid, it's loading the dice strongly in favor of siding with the person stating the premise, for emotional, subconscious reasons having to do with personal insecurity. This is neuromarketing old school style: rig the game so the person accepts your premise and then let them rationalize WHY, using terms you've supplied them.
But then you know all this, being such a not-mindless-droid, right?;)
Scott Adams, the 'Dilbert' cartoonist, is a trained hypnotist. In his books he has stated in all seriousness that his experience as a hypnotist has given him a deep and wary distrust of ANYONE's 'free will'. Basically, your free will is a hoax- if you are hypnotized and made to get up and twirl and sit down again, and then as a posthypnotic suggestion you're 'triggered' and do this, you will make up all sorts of silly rationalization for why you 'wanted' to do that. If the action isn't totally silly, you may even be irate at any suggestion your will isn't totally free. And yet, what's happening is you're being prompted on a level BENEATH will, and explaining to yourself why you act the way you do.
This is perfectly common and normal and just the way the mind works. Get used to it- normally your pre-will impulses, like recoiling from a hot stove, are healthy and useful, or anyhow driven by harmless biases.
Seeing as you have already been prompted to defend a concept of 'the will above all' against any challenges, possibly because of the threat of being considered a 'mindless droid' if you DON'T claim your will overcomes all outside manipulation, I really can't expect that you have much resistance at all to such manipulation. It seems like you protest too much, and are willing to lump most of humanity into an 'inferior will' category just to defend your concept of will in the face of evidence that challenges it.
But that is no concern of mine:)
I'm sure I'm vulnerable to many forms of manipulation. It just happens that objectivist-cultist-us-superiors-against-all-those -retards rhetoric is not a form that works very well on me. Dunno why, it just isn't persuasive.
Cheers, and watch out for the mindless droids:)
And when I want to sell YOU something, I now know what approach to take. Except I've totally ruined it with this disrespectful little comment post. Oops:) well, someone ELSE can profit from presenting you with IdiotsAren'tSmartEnoughToBuyThis/YouLookSmart type of pitches:)
The question you need to ask is, what's the licensing look like, and do they get 'self-help' provisions?
Use all the free copies of Windows Everything that you want, and enjoy the VERBAL!! promises that you'll get it forever. Got it on paper?
A year from now, maybe, they throw a switch and you either pay up or you're hosed and they shut you down, remotely. Look at the power situation, not at what the upfront costs are. Do you have control? Maybe you think you do- got it in WRITING?
"If Microsoft gets their long-dreamed-of 100% market share and no piracy, do you really thnk that they'll keep their price at $100?"
Absolutely, because they want to have 100% market share over all consumer electronics- and all telephones- and all electronic voting systems- and everything that goes into your car, and fighter planes, and the video cameras that watch you in the street, etc etc etc.
They'd be a lot easier to deal with if they just wanted money, believe me.
You are talking only about the 20th century USA view of antitrust law, as if it was some higher moral standard.
In other countries, antitrust law means the government can actually attempt to PUT BACK TOGETHER the broken free market, and get damaged companies and competitors back on their feet as if they hadn't had their kneecaps broken.
I think the article was a plant. You don't know about 'anti-Apple Halloween Documents' because you Linux guys aren't interested in them, but this is the sort of thing Microsoft does. The important features of the article in that respect were the repeated references to Mac users being masochistic BDSM heads hungry for punishment and abuse by their cult leader- THAT was the point of the article, to put that stuff out there one more tiresome time.
Funny, it seems to me that generally I am NOT tortured by my aging Macintosh- and amazingly enough, if Apple does something that seems unreasonable, I DON'T BUY that thing! Astonishing as it may seem, Mac users don't HAVE to go spend more money on Mac crap. It's possible to keep using the older stuff year after year- it doesn't break, it crashes some, generally there are no hooks for automated scripting etc. to produce the kind of security problems old WINDOWS stuff produces.
Lovely spin- claiming that Mac people are masochistic cult followers and puppets of Jobs for using computers that DON'T require an upgrade cycle treadmill. Like I said, that article must be a plant. Brought to you by the people who brought you Licensing 6.0...
Hmm. You mention textile workers. Do you consider it desirable, or ethically unimportant, for companies to outsource textile work to sweatshops in the Far East with conditions that obliterate human rights? If you continue this way of thinking, do you advocate seeking out the biggest baddest sweatshop, for instance if there was one where people were locked in a room and made to sew at gunpoint until they starved to death, and then chopped up and fed to the security guards to save on expenses?
I am almost totally sure that is so exaggerated it doesn't exist in the world anywhere today. Almost.
But even so, your argument does not make the points you think it does. What you're basically saying is that, due to the cost of guaranteeing a standard of living to workers with collective bargaining, companies (according to you, most or ALL companies) simply turn around and have the work done in Far East sweatshops and FIND someplace in the world where they can have people treated like cattle or slaves, and then they give all their business to the place with no human rights, rewarding them and giving them power while punishing the place that does demand basic human rights.
Why do you behave like this is good, like it should be taken for granted?
That is an anti-union? Hey, if the worst injustice you can think of is the system that forces you to pump GARBAGE software into the world, and if you see this as even worse than your being personally deprived of money, food etc, then it makes perfect sense to try to get collective leverage to force your employers to allow you to do decent work (hopefully benefiting the world thereby).
That would be a union, it would just be a union that demands high quality of work output (even if it took longer) rather than lots of money. If that's really where your priorities are, and there are other people who feel the same, go for it!
okay... step AWAY from that copy of 'Atlas Shrugged'... that's good...;)
I have one word for you: 'community'. You may have heard of it- it's that situation that develops when humans, or really ANY social animals, cooperate, interact with each other, take care of each other when things are tough, and as a result are ultimately TOGETHER.
Try telling a wolf in a pack that it's ultimately alone! You might be able to fight and beat ONE, but the pack will take you down if it needs to.
Maybe you need to be less shocked when people respond to conditions that isolate and neutralize them by trying to join together in forms of community, for mutual well-being and protection.
Be imaginative. Years ago I 'gave up' and decided to just make what I could out of Macs and old school MacOS.
Oddly enough I had what MS are proposing here, for FREE- with OpenDoc, which Apple developed. I still think MS pressured them to have it killed- I kept using it for quite a while after all support was abandoned, until I went back to netscape/eudoralite/fetch etc.
Rather than financially support horrible people trying to conquer the world, the sacrifices I make (STILL running MacOS 8.6 now, though OSX is eventually going to enter my life) are more about being unable to view MSified websites, not having many games handy, not having online banking software available at my bank etc. But I still get by, and actually do lots of computer-related things anyhow, with little or no time wasted 'upgrading' and dicking around with the computer.
If you want to be HAPPY and powerless, don't 'fall in line'... drop out! You would be surprised how much you can get done with an old clunker computer that runs something you're very familiar with. If you don't like old MacOS, run some form of Linux! But DROP OUT, put together something that fills your REAL needs and go 'nyah' to anyone who tries to 'sell' you on keeping up with the latest MS world stuff. They say 'you can't use this unless', and you say 'so what? Fine'.:)
Like hell it hasn't been done- you're describing OpenDoc. Apple and IBM did it years ago, and basically smothered it in the cradle (possibly under pressure from MS which wanted to protect its Office franchise). It ran on MacOS 8, and if I remember correctly it was also available on OS/2.
I used it. If you weren't supporting the people who were _bringing_ you this kind of stuff back then, don't bitch- and if you were giving money to the company that killed off OS/2 and told Apple 'yes we mean that you should knife the baby' over Quicktime, it's your fault. Looks like there were other 'babies'. Namely, OpenDoc.
Microsoft domination DOES matter. Among other things, they get to have the leverage to strangle anything at birth that might threaten things like Office, and you as a Windows user will never know what they're talking about in back rooms or what competition they shut off. We're talking about a huge freaking computing project involving Apple AND IBM, that SHIPPED and that people used for years even after support was dropped, and to you 'this hasn't been done'- to MOST slashdotters this seems like a new and unheard of thing. That should tell you something about what monopoly power actually does in practice. OpenDoc became an orwellian 'un-project'. It threatened Office, so of course it never existed, right? Open who?
Please don't take that personally- I guess my real annoyance is about how Microsoft now feels free to rip off the idea in some non-interoperable way and make believe they're the first to think of it. Pity you can't jail a company for being treacherous lying scumbags...
Re:Two Specific Points To Be Made...
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Also, Apple was doing that many years ago with OpenDoc (assisted by IBM). OpenDoc was just that: document centric, in the sense that you'd have one program and it'd load modules from entirely separate developers if necessary in order to include the functionality in the document. So, you'd have drawing or painting dragged into your word processing document, very fancy charting, live web content, fancy charting DRIVEN by web content, live telnet windows to chat in- whatever!
I can vouch that this was very slow- on a 33 mhz 68040. It was also slow on a 200 mhz 604e. Around this time the project was mysteriously killed at the same time that Jobs was seeking additional support and investment from Microsoft, so it never went any farther, and it was always so technically arcane that very few people could handle developing for OpenDoc.
Anyhow, if this is what Microsoft want now, they are not inventing: only stealing from what Apple and IBM were doing AND SHIPPING years ago, and possibly from what they may have had a role in killing for everybody else. If OpenDoc had a market to operate in, by now it might have been something very amazing- I can vouch that using it led to some striking results you wouldn't expect, convenience issues that helped things happen that otherwise wouldn't. Of course, at the time it was a blow to the very concept of Office- and at the time Microsoft did not want to deprecate their cash cow, much less for some Apple/IBM product.
Microsoft are not done expanding yet. Everything they do is based on the need for their business to be ten times bigger than it is, years from now- hundreds of times bigger, decades from now, etc.
They're not gonna start cashing in on stuff that they can still use to leverage their past successes. Hell, they're mostly not gonna cash in AT ALL for the simple reason that expansion is the policy, not maximum income.
It's valid to wonder what the HELL Microsoft could possibly be doing in twenty years that would warrant their being ten or a hundred times as big as they are- since they already own computing, and are moving in on media in several ways, possibly they will need to obtain monopoly control over ALL worldwide communications, placing them on very much the level of a first world country as far as geopolitical power.
It is NOT as valid to expect that since they have not tried to cash in on their existing monopolies, therefore they're safe to have around.
...might as well back Amnesty International in their attempts to play watchdog for collaboration by Microsoft in technology to set up a total surveillance state in China and control what the ordinary Chinese person can see and read...
...considering that they are actively trying to establish the same situation in the USA as well.
Once Microsoft are in control of implementing technological homeland security operations, run the lists and control what information mysteriously 'disappears' from 'the Internet' it will be too late to bitch.
Or, more accurately: bitch all you want. It's not like anybody will notice!
Might as well turn up the heat while they're still working on pilot programs in China...
Wow- that is the best Astroturf parody I've ever seen in my life. Do you even own a game console at all or do you really work in a PR agency? If you showed us a picture of you would it be clip-art?:D
So you're saying that now rather than getting only most of their money back from the purchase of an XBox they've made, now they get more money than they even spent and are turning a profit?
Great. I'm sure they'll find something to do with it. They'll spend it in Washington DC and will get to run IT for the office of homeland security, and the next thing you know nice men from the government will take away your computer if it isn't running a Microsoft Palladium OS, for reasons of national cyber security.
note for the clueless- that was IRONY, largely because it's beyond what the public would ever accept. But, Microsoft will happily TRY to do this and see how far they get. So for Christ's sake quit giving them fscking money already!
By the same token, if there is no morality and ethics but only what one can get away with, how about we kill him? There are plenty of people seriously upset with him.
I'm not saying Slashdot people ARE so completely amoral and unethical as to murder this character- I'm just saying, if you accept his perspective on the obligations of a person to society and those around them (balancing self-gratification) then it's a no-brainer: kill him. Considering that he has a right not to be murdered would be the same as accepting an obligation to society and choosing to be true to that obligation.
I'm glad as hell I'm not him, because by his very existence he proves that people can exist with no such sense of obligation- and, therefore, he is at high risk of being murdered by another person who is equally unethical- but is mad at HIM.
Only the social contract protects us from such acts of brutality- and even then it's more a goal to be sought after, rather than taken for granted. I can't feel very sorry for the guy even if he does get murdered, because he sabotages that social contract and tries to persuade other people to abandon it as well.
He doesn't hear the tiniest thing from ME, even if a spam gets to me and I open it (social engineering can work on anybody, I've had subject lines that happened to correlate with stuff I was doing)- because I use an old version of Eudora Light which is a dumb program that knows nothing of HTML or making use of web bugs etc. By the same token, it won't understand requests to open whatever html activeX window etc. because I'm also on a Mac.
I'm sure there are lots of people who are vulnerable, though. People do still use Windows, you know;)
Slashdot Mirror
I'm convinced of this.
PR handlers are quite well aware of all such seemingly unimportant issues, and the statistics that most elections with televised debates have gone to the TALLEST candidate, possibly because they appear physically imposing and 'statesmanlike', more powerful.
Nader's unusually tall- if he ever DOES get into a televised debate, I suggest that he try to produce a situation where he persuades the Democrat and Republican candidate to 'all stand together' as a symbol of the freedom and good will in our wonderful political process.
That way we can test the height theory- with plenty of pictures of him looming over the hapless party politicians with a stern but benevolent look, we can find out if that statistical quirk is enough to influence people ;)
Start practicing your stern but benevolent look, Ralph!
The bloody revolution doesn't necessarily result in something better, it just punishes the aristocracy for their arrogance. It takes a lot of cleverness and dedication to rise above this process even for a short time (like 200 years, hint hint)
"I think I speak for all sober and right-thinking people everywhere when I say: WAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA"
*g* looks like I yanked some objectivist-mod's chain real hard with that post. Good. "society about the social and cooperation more beneficial than competition" a troll, my ass ;)
Socialist concepts work just as good as capitalist ones- no better and no worse. It's all in how you implement them, and in what types of problems arise when you take 'em too far.
And I'm not sure what the point is of deciding things like "for something to be a right, it has to be both universal and simultaneous, and impose no burden or cost onto others." According to who? Is this some sort of axiom that you're supposed to accept unquestioningly?
Just to annoy, how about this slight alteration: "because burden is inevitable and natural, it should be both universal and simultaneous, therefore the functioning of society should impose roughly the same burden upon everyone, relative to their ability to bear it, and the same cost on everyone relative to their ability to pay it. So, the more power you have in society, the more burden you should bear- and the more wealth you have, the more you should pay."
How's that grab ya? ;)
If you can consider them 'neighbors' rather than 'competitors' you'll really be getting the point.
Competition generally seems to lead to people breaking each other's kneecaps, also to one person cornering the market and making it unfree. Maybe you consider it overwhelmingly important to have the liberty to be able to carry out such hypercompetitive practices (if you don't they'll be done to you, under capitalism) but they convey no social benefit- they're worse than 'socialism' in the long run, at least the type of 'socialism' the USA has often practiced.
You simply cannot play society as an elitist power game- it doesn't work. Society is about the social- funny how the very words lead you to 'social-ist'! It's like taking care of the environment by limiting the 'freedom' of that chemical plant over there to dump PCBs into the ground-water and kill everyone over a very long term. It is always the case that individuals have options that harm society far more than they benefit the individual. It is those 'freedoms' that have to be denied.
Everybody will have different opinions on which options those are, mind you- but consider murder, robbery, copyright (just kidding! Or am I? ;) ) etc.
Next time, ask Leonard Nimoy! ;)
I could see great interest by advertisers in using this phenomenon to poison people's interest in competing products. Eventually everyone would sit around being disgusted at everything. Bonus- obesity would decline :)
I don't watch TV or listen to the radio. I read books. I guess I'm lucky I'm not under arrest yet ;)
This of course 'loads' the statement emotionally, making it more appealing to agree to it rather than repudiate the intimate terms- if you disagree with the statement you are also risking being assigned to the 'mindless droid' camp, and not everybody has the subconscious security to be willing to contest the point.
That's how cults like Objectivists persuade people to their views, by drawing lines in the sand and inviting people to categorize the world as 'superior beings and mindless droids': if you accept the premise, it is very unlikely that you will assign yourself the status of 'mindless droid'. But by the same process, if you instinctively reject being classified mindless droid, it's loading the dice strongly in favor of siding with the person stating the premise, for emotional, subconscious reasons having to do with personal insecurity. This is neuromarketing old school style: rig the game so the person accepts your premise and then let them rationalize WHY, using terms you've supplied them.
But then you know all this, being such a not-mindless-droid, right? ;)
Scott Adams, the 'Dilbert' cartoonist, is a trained hypnotist. In his books he has stated in all seriousness that his experience as a hypnotist has given him a deep and wary distrust of ANYONE's 'free will'. Basically, your free will is a hoax- if you are hypnotized and made to get up and twirl and sit down again, and then as a posthypnotic suggestion you're 'triggered' and do this, you will make up all sorts of silly rationalization for why you 'wanted' to do that. If the action isn't totally silly, you may even be irate at any suggestion your will isn't totally free. And yet, what's happening is you're being prompted on a level BENEATH will, and explaining to yourself why you act the way you do.
This is perfectly common and normal and just the way the mind works. Get used to it- normally your pre-will impulses, like recoiling from a hot stove, are healthy and useful, or anyhow driven by harmless biases.
Seeing as you have already been prompted to defend a concept of 'the will above all' against any challenges, possibly because of the threat of being considered a 'mindless droid' if you DON'T claim your will overcomes all outside manipulation, I really can't expect that you have much resistance at all to such manipulation. It seems like you protest too much, and are willing to lump most of humanity into an 'inferior will' category just to defend your concept of will in the face of evidence that challenges it.
But that is no concern of mine :)
I'm sure I'm vulnerable to many forms of manipulation. It just happens that objectivist-cultist-us-superiors-against-all-those -retards rhetoric is not a form that works very well on me. Dunno why, it just isn't persuasive.
Cheers, and watch out for the mindless droids :)
And when I want to sell YOU something, I now know what approach to take. Except I've totally ruined it with this disrespectful little comment post. Oops :) well, someone ELSE can profit from presenting you with IdiotsAren'tSmartEnoughToBuyThis/YouLookSmart type of pitches :)
Use all the free copies of Windows Everything that you want, and enjoy the VERBAL!! promises that you'll get it forever. Got it on paper?
A year from now, maybe, they throw a switch and you either pay up or you're hosed and they shut you down, remotely. Look at the power situation, not at what the upfront costs are. Do you have control? Maybe you think you do- got it in WRITING?
Absolutely, because they want to have 100% market share over all consumer electronics- and all telephones- and all electronic voting systems- and everything that goes into your car, and fighter planes, and the video cameras that watch you in the street, etc etc etc.
They'd be a lot easier to deal with if they just wanted money, believe me.
In other countries, antitrust law means the government can actually attempt to PUT BACK TOGETHER the broken free market, and get damaged companies and competitors back on their feet as if they hadn't had their kneecaps broken.
And that's not unreasonable. Deal with it.
Funny, it seems to me that generally I am NOT tortured by my aging Macintosh- and amazingly enough, if Apple does something that seems unreasonable, I DON'T BUY that thing! Astonishing as it may seem, Mac users don't HAVE to go spend more money on Mac crap. It's possible to keep using the older stuff year after year- it doesn't break, it crashes some, generally there are no hooks for automated scripting etc. to produce the kind of security problems old WINDOWS stuff produces.
Lovely spin- claiming that Mac people are masochistic cult followers and puppets of Jobs for using computers that DON'T require an upgrade cycle treadmill. Like I said, that article must be a plant. Brought to you by the people who brought you Licensing 6.0...
I am almost totally sure that is so exaggerated it doesn't exist in the world anywhere today. Almost.
But even so, your argument does not make the points you think it does. What you're basically saying is that, due to the cost of guaranteeing a standard of living to workers with collective bargaining, companies (according to you, most or ALL companies) simply turn around and have the work done in Far East sweatshops and FIND someplace in the world where they can have people treated like cattle or slaves, and then they give all their business to the place with no human rights, rewarding them and giving them power while punishing the place that does demand basic human rights.
Why do you behave like this is good, like it should be taken for granted?
That would be a union, it would just be a union that demands high quality of work output (even if it took longer) rather than lots of money. If that's really where your priorities are, and there are other people who feel the same, go for it!
I have one word for you: 'community'. You may have heard of it- it's that situation that develops when humans, or really ANY social animals, cooperate, interact with each other, take care of each other when things are tough, and as a result are ultimately TOGETHER.
Try telling a wolf in a pack that it's ultimately alone! You might be able to fight and beat ONE, but the pack will take you down if it needs to.
Maybe you need to be less shocked when people respond to conditions that isolate and neutralize them by trying to join together in forms of community, for mutual well-being and protection.
Oddly enough I had what MS are proposing here, for FREE- with OpenDoc, which Apple developed. I still think MS pressured them to have it killed- I kept using it for quite a while after all support was abandoned, until I went back to netscape/eudoralite/fetch etc. Rather than financially support horrible people trying to conquer the world, the sacrifices I make (STILL running MacOS 8.6 now, though OSX is eventually going to enter my life) are more about being unable to view MSified websites, not having many games handy, not having online banking software available at my bank etc. But I still get by, and actually do lots of computer-related things anyhow, with little or no time wasted 'upgrading' and dicking around with the computer.
If you want to be HAPPY and powerless, don't 'fall in line'... drop out! You would be surprised how much you can get done with an old clunker computer that runs something you're very familiar with. If you don't like old MacOS, run some form of Linux! But DROP OUT, put together something that fills your REAL needs and go 'nyah' to anyone who tries to 'sell' you on keeping up with the latest MS world stuff. They say 'you can't use this unless', and you say 'so what? Fine'. :)
I used it. If you weren't supporting the people who were _bringing_ you this kind of stuff back then, don't bitch- and if you were giving money to the company that killed off OS/2 and told Apple 'yes we mean that you should knife the baby' over Quicktime, it's your fault. Looks like there were other 'babies'. Namely, OpenDoc. Microsoft domination DOES matter. Among other things, they get to have the leverage to strangle anything at birth that might threaten things like Office, and you as a Windows user will never know what they're talking about in back rooms or what competition they shut off. We're talking about a huge freaking computing project involving Apple AND IBM, that SHIPPED and that people used for years even after support was dropped, and to you 'this hasn't been done'- to MOST slashdotters this seems like a new and unheard of thing. That should tell you something about what monopoly power actually does in practice. OpenDoc became an orwellian 'un-project'. It threatened Office, so of course it never existed, right? Open who?
Please don't take that personally- I guess my real annoyance is about how Microsoft now feels free to rip off the idea in some non-interoperable way and make believe they're the first to think of it. Pity you can't jail a company for being treacherous lying scumbags...
I can vouch that this was very slow- on a 33 mhz 68040. It was also slow on a 200 mhz 604e. Around this time the project was mysteriously killed at the same time that Jobs was seeking additional support and investment from Microsoft, so it never went any farther, and it was always so technically arcane that very few people could handle developing for OpenDoc.
Anyhow, if this is what Microsoft want now, they are not inventing: only stealing from what Apple and IBM were doing AND SHIPPING years ago, and possibly from what they may have had a role in killing for everybody else. If OpenDoc had a market to operate in, by now it might have been something very amazing- I can vouch that using it led to some striking results you wouldn't expect, convenience issues that helped things happen that otherwise wouldn't. Of course, at the time it was a blow to the very concept of Office- and at the time Microsoft did not want to deprecate their cash cow, much less for some Apple/IBM product.
Microsoft are not done expanding yet. Everything they do is based on the need for their business to be ten times bigger than it is, years from now- hundreds of times bigger, decades from now, etc.
They're not gonna start cashing in on stuff that they can still use to leverage their past successes. Hell, they're mostly not gonna cash in AT ALL for the simple reason that expansion is the policy, not maximum income.
It's valid to wonder what the HELL Microsoft could possibly be doing in twenty years that would warrant their being ten or a hundred times as big as they are- since they already own computing, and are moving in on media in several ways, possibly they will need to obtain monopoly control over ALL worldwide communications, placing them on very much the level of a first world country as far as geopolitical power.
It is NOT as valid to expect that since they have not tried to cash in on their existing monopolies, therefore they're safe to have around.
Once Microsoft are in control of implementing technological homeland security operations, run the lists and control what information mysteriously 'disappears' from 'the Internet' it will be too late to bitch.
Or, more accurately: bitch all you want. It's not like anybody will notice!
Might as well turn up the heat while they're still working on pilot programs in China...
Wow- that is the best Astroturf parody I've ever seen in my life. Do you even own a game console at all or do you really work in a PR agency? If you showed us a picture of you would it be clip-art? :D
Great. I'm sure they'll find something to do with it. They'll spend it in Washington DC and will get to run IT for the office of homeland security, and the next thing you know nice men from the government will take away your computer if it isn't running a Microsoft Palladium OS, for reasons of national cyber security.
note for the clueless- that was IRONY, largely because it's beyond what the public would ever accept. But, Microsoft will happily TRY to do this and see how far they get. So for Christ's sake quit giving them fscking money already!
I'm not saying Slashdot people ARE so completely amoral and unethical as to murder this character- I'm just saying, if you accept his perspective on the obligations of a person to society and those around them (balancing self-gratification) then it's a no-brainer: kill him. Considering that he has a right not to be murdered would be the same as accepting an obligation to society and choosing to be true to that obligation.
I'm glad as hell I'm not him, because by his very existence he proves that people can exist with no such sense of obligation- and, therefore, he is at high risk of being murdered by another person who is equally unethical- but is mad at HIM.
Only the social contract protects us from such acts of brutality- and even then it's more a goal to be sought after, rather than taken for granted. I can't feel very sorry for the guy even if he does get murdered, because he sabotages that social contract and tries to persuade other people to abandon it as well.
He doesn't hear the tiniest thing from ME, even if a spam gets to me and I open it (social engineering can work on anybody, I've had subject lines that happened to correlate with stuff I was doing)- because I use an old version of Eudora Light which is a dumb program that knows nothing of HTML or making use of web bugs etc. By the same token, it won't understand requests to open whatever html activeX window etc. because I'm also on a Mac.
I'm sure there are lots of people who are vulnerable, though. People do still use Windows, you know ;)