Even AMD realizes the jig is up; they dumped their fabs because they realized they didn't need them anymore. It's not about having the best damned process available anymore. It's about having the lowest power design, the smallest design, the widest/most-parallel design.
That'd be likelier to be because AMD's past history fabbing things is so miserable they couldn't get their hands on the $10s of Bs needed. Intel'd disagree with you - they keep their mastery and the process tech lead they've commanded through most of the microchip's existence. They've done so well because that's always been their first priority, and they put a ton of leading engineers into it, unlike other chip companies.
Fab investment and construction stay strong, just concentrated into fewer and changing actors, like every other industry. Chip density, which's what Moore's law predicts, rather than clock speed, still continues strong. Intel's new chip efforts are about using that density to put more and more stuff into the same chip, and about putting more cores per chip. And, it's about a bigger share of PC costs going to Intel instead of overall PCs getting more expensive.
Now, these multicore chips are a pain for getting gains from our traditional programming models, but neural simulations are the most trivially parallelizable thing out there.
I don't think Bill Gates is really responsible for the problems with Windows. In fact, I think it's probably one reason why he left when he did. The company just got too big for him to manage day-to-day - he wasn't the one making relatively minor decisions like where Windows Movie Maker sits on the Microsoft web site or how to install it, somebody else was making those decisions. And little decisions like that, all added up together, are 95% of what makes Windows as maddening to use as it is. And he was as annoyed by that stuff as everybody else.
Don't we wish. The fact about Windows is that MS OS' have always been bad. And it's not because knows no better - he's used Unix and other 'real' OS' plenty in his life. No, I'll leave you with a choice between "doesn't care because he's puts lots of successful effort into not having to" and "likes it that way." Clearly Ballmer DOOES like it that, because his watch shows aBD-style security system.
Life even as an Evil Imperial CEO does get old. You have all the power, which is great stuff, especially if you're like Gates, but it's also tons of work and especially stress. The stress gets too much for everybody, in fact, especially if you're in the same CEO slot long.
So, if you want to effectively vandalize somebody, file a lawsuit. It'll likely cost them more than just bashing up their car or shorting out their wiring, and it's legal. Sure, it's an abuse of the legal system, but that doesn't seem to matter all that much. As a wise person once said on Slashdot (ignoring the oxymoron potential in the first phrase), I can't just require you to write or commission a device driver for me, and take your house if I find a significant bug.
All so true - the court REGULARLY requires you to spend money on your lawyer doing device-driver-like long, technical labor, and for you or companies to be enslaved answering questions and helping that lawyer, whether you like it or can afford it or not.
And, as I explain at length in the article, with examples including the SCO case and Berkeley's Professor Ousterhout, IMHO that that's come to be as corrupt as the original slavery.
If discovery or deposition is required for a case you're in, be sure to ask for the cost recovery request that somehow few lawyers remember to tell you
OLPC was the product of the western media lab and the geek mind-set.
OLPC's market was the third world education minister - who was expected to sign the purchase order for 100,000 units --- but otherwise keep his big mouth shut.
HEY!! Negropontes' hardly a typical geek mindset. Not so many of us geeks think the right way to run a big research lab is to keep your goals largely to demos rather than that annoying and hard research stuff. Not so many media labs were run that way, either. His Wired column was just plain weird by geek standards. Most of are also less colonialistic, I think.
Plenty of geek startups have been better-run than OLPC, too.
No, this is just about Negroponte; please don't generalize beyond that.
...actually, it's not quite that simple. Although the change they
were trying for was disallowed, they did get one victory in by
confusion - they are allowed to
call into question common descent, Although, there'll be another
vote in another few months, at which point the board will have grown
much more skeptical of evolutionists' moves, and I expect even that's
likely to go away.
You know, even in Texas, to get a near-majority on a school board,
anti-evolutionists have to basically lie by omission when running for
office and not say anything about it. Very Christian, eh?
Even many Texans who don't believe in evolution themselves understand
that there are going to be bad consequences for their kids' educations
and the ability to attract biotech.
If the orders are technically legal but immoral, then it's up to the soldier's conscience as to whether to follow them or to respectfully refuse to. . . .
If it's any consolation, the officer or NCO will probably face court martial.)
...except, that didn't happen here, did it? NONE of the chain of command was held responsible except one scapegoat who tried to resist the torturing at least a little bit.
Trials were strictly for the little man under Bush. To give the military credit, we know from the many leaks that plenty didn't like it, but that was the way it was.
It's scary how effective a President can be when he aims for unaccountability, isn't it? Except, there's no unaccountability to history, Bushie boy.
There's an often-missed angle on public transit:
total transit time. has to go up with public transit,
including trains, That means you're asking everybody taking them to
spend possibly alot more time to go anywhere. My wife doesn't mind,
but I do.
Money quote: "In NYC, it seems to take roughly 50 minutes to get
anywhere by public transit, more like an hour by car, and the car
costs more. Thus, in NYC, it makes sense to take transit. In the
medium-size city where I live, it takes 20-30 minutes to drive
places. Even if we had NYC-level transit, it'd take a lot longer to go
that way."
I'm all in favor of public transit - I figured this stuff out by,
well, taking alot of every kind of public transit, and it served me
well within its limits. I just want to get one of those limits out in
public a bit.
Like Paladin, that's made me also feel like transit rail has some
realistic low-end density requirements to be of much help.
While I'm at it, notice that having 15-minute busses is alot
cheaper than rail, because you already have lanes in place. And it'd
prolly be easier to adapt Detroit to changing to. But you
still need
reasonable density or you just get lots of empty busses.
...you have failed to notice that no-one would be producing top
class games in that environment. The GPL and commercial reality are
fundamentally incompatible without some sort of mitigating factor, and
high qua6lity games are probably the single best example of this.
Yep, there's no money in Open Source. Red Hat and Canonical are
figments of the imagination, as are the over $100 I've sent each way
to support my Linux usage. So maybe it's a question of bizplan rather
than impracticality.
The reason you should pay attention is because it'll let your industry
have fun again.
We operating system geeks used to live in the shadow of operating
system vendor concentration as well, especially with respect to
Microsoft. and had to sign away our souls and belong to a big
institution to play with operating systems. It was getting harder and
harder to innovate or have fun. Then one day a man named Linux
Torvalds came along with a release of some interest. And FreeBSD was
released. And we were all free to have fun and innovate. Yeah, Open
Source work's less profitable because it's more efficient and more
competitive, but much more fun because billg can't call the tune on it
and we can start any new startup any time we choose.
You're where we were. Spore, a great innovation, will be terrible
when released because it's under the EA cloud. All the surviving
companies are getting bigger and more bureaucratic.
And it's not just OSs with serious free alternatives, but also
databases, web caches, languages, office software, and other serious
work apps. You have nothing to lose but your chains!;-)
Honestly, do YOU want to pay for the health care of someone who
lives an unhealthy lifestyle?
We don't even know if obesity IS unhealthy. So far all we have is
correlation, which isn't enough to me to take state
action. For example, an obesity tax will catch most athletes. How's
that right?
Martin Luther King apparently lived an unhealthy lifestyle, as he got
shot for his behavior. So's being President and being in the Armed
Forces. I'm happy to pay for all their healthcare.
Like state-provided education, the state has extra responsibilities to
support the freedom of its society.
The majority of the Jews killed during the war lived in Eastern Europe and were killed after the conquest by the German Army, which basically just marched in and carted everybody off. Not having an ID card didn't save a lot of lives.
...that's true, because in Eastern Europe, Hitler's plan was to kill the entire population.
In Western Europe, though, ID card records from formerly free govts WERE used to identify Jews and other minorities Hitler wanted gone. Hitler graciously allowed most Western Europeans to stay alive and serve the glorous German state as slaves. So grandparent has a real point, though he overstated it.
That decidedly slowed postwar ID card adoption in Western Europe.
People have agendas and I do not like the idea of people deciding what kind of body a person will have, their facial features, their eye color, etc.
... or deciding what genetic diseases they have (the most common application of human genetic modification to date). Do you dislike the idea of people having control over early nasty deaths for their kids?
Human cloning has a very concerning and unpleasant 1984ish feel to it,
Attack Of The Clones was a MOVIE.
How do you feel about identical twins? Because that's what they are. No carbon copies atall. Their personalities will be no more alike than twins' normally are.
If you insist on being scared and finding excuses to ignore facts on the ground, then go have fun without me. I'm not going to waste time arguing with somebody uninterested in tne facts.
I will warn you that people who pay attention to facts historically do better than people who don't.
Also note that the recent "revolutions" in places like Ukraine are all led by thinly disguised Western plants, complete with massive funding from sources unknown,
This is funny. They're all experienced politicians from each country, openly aided by pro-democratic NGOs. I guess you'll find some reason that couldn't possibly be true, though.
IgnoramusMaximus wrote: goings on in the USA demonstrate clearly to anyone who is paying attention that supposedly advanced democracies and reasonably free market systems are extremely fragile and more often then not all the "freedoms" are nothing but a thin veneer covering totalitarian forces,
Really? Then why are you still around to be allowed to post? Why is slashdot being allowed to exist? Why were the Democrats allowed to take control of Congress? Did Bush get sick of those Republican faces and want a change? Maybe we still have a right or two left, huh?
the chances of convincing people within the former Soviet sphere or in Iraq or Palestine to "tough it out" would have been much greater.
Now, you're right about Palestine, but the last Iraqi and Afghan opinion polls I saw said they still want this democracy thing. And, when did the mass coups in Eastern Europe happen?
IgnoramusMaximus wrote:
I do not blame them in the slightest that upon discovering that the
goods they have been sold with great fanfare come with a fine, fine
print saying "You the buyer, do not dare to expect results for 100
years after you are dead. We, the sellers, can expect the results
immediately. By the way if you are of an older generations, everything
you have worked for is now null and void. Have a nice day."
This is a good point - we don't point the hardships out nearly enough.
As Churchill said, democracy is terrible; we only do it because the
alternatives are even worse.
But the real time needed is actually 50 years. And democratizers often
don't see so much benefit beforehand - the new Indian democracy, for
example, had terrible relations with most old democracies for decades.
And the generations before that do see improvement as well. They see
serious improvements in their lifetimes compared to comparative stasis
beforehand. Despite Rumsfeld's inability to understand what the word
occupation means, Iraqis mostly have decidedly more freedom of
speech, and it doesn't take much Iraqi-blog-reading to see they love
it. Among other things, they use it to grumble about the many, many
problems Rumsfeld's disinterest in Iraqi ground security has caused.
But the real reason people tough it out, of course, is because they
know their kids'll have it much better, and their grandkids will have
it good.
... You could just as easily say that by tracking kids, we're
treating them like mature adults with significant responsibilites and
in whom we have placed great trust. How's that for a radical
concept?
Tell you what - why don't you try that line out on a teenager and
watch his face bob and veil with distrust.
And he'll be right, too. We call roll because we DISTRUST kids.
We track police because history's shown that police often abuse the
great powers given them. We track nuclear power employees because,
well, we don't trust them, as they're just human, and we need the tape
to understand and repair mistakes.
But, you know, RFID can never outperform a teacher. The older kids
are, the more careful and tasteful teachers tend to be about taking
roll, because those kids are of the age where they need to understand
that school's for their benefit and come on their own responsibility.
That won't happen if they're rebelling, which is alot likelier with
RFID, as there's no stage of trust.
I don't think you understand. A kid wearing a RFID tag that works
even 50% of the time means that he stands a 50% better chance of being
found than a kid with no tag at all. Why is that so hard to
understand?
Yes, it is hard to understand. The chance that said deadly fire or
other deadly emergency is utterly tiny. So that means there's half
that utterly tiny chance of it saving your kid.
Meanwhile, there's a 100% chance you're violating the kid's privacy
and trust.
Yeah, but it looks to me like most of the money goes to corruption in the civil trials where patent trials are tried. Most money goes to discovery and deposition.
Litigants are usually required by to court must spend large amounts of produce large amounts of evidence in response to discovery and deposition orders. At no time is any evidence of malfeasance required for these orders to be issued, and these phases are allowed to last years and years.
Isn't it slavery to require unpaid labor from litigants who haven't been found guilty? Almost as bad, because there's no time limit, civil trials often last well until after products are obolete (e.g., the Microsoft case). There is no constraint to keep big companies from milking cases to drive small, innovative companies out of business. In short, it's as corrupt as the original slavery.
I've read a defense that deposition and discovery can bring out facts of bad behavior we otherwise wouldn't see. But I'm at a loss to see how that's good when the trial ends a decade later. None of this helped Netscape. And it certainly does bring slavery and corruption.
Why do judges and lawyers let this happen? This would seem to be major moral failing of theirs. Certainly, they do make vastly more money.
> You could just play through rather than reloading. You know that right?
...er...that might depend on your tolerance for crashes and reboots wiping
out your game,
The PC gaming platform is not exactly what you call highly stable.
Early-release or EA games (looking at you, Sim City 4) can get you below 10min
between crashes.
Yeah, it's not an issue for nethack. On nethack, I only save between levels
to force a pause for thought.
I don't think it's true we ignore the USSR's sacrifices. Now, it it IS true that each side is more interested in its own old recollections, and thus that's what you see in the media, since their business is eyeballs.
The grunts on both sides of that war were pretty unlucky - both sides
appear to've been run by people who wanted to maximize death. If the
USSR had been a democracy, they would've had much better equipment,
and far, far fewer deaths for so many reasons I could go on for days.
Megadeaths were a feature of that front, not an inevitable decider of
wars. For example, Taiwan is the only non-completely-improbable
flashpoint, and, well, as people pointed out back in the 90s, for the
PLA to get to Taiwan will take, well, a Million Man Swim. Good luck
against the Taiwanese air and naval superiority, you'll need
it. Triply so when the USAF/USN got there.
Yes - it's doing very well in places where there's either no DSL or cable, or where there's just one and it's bad. It must cost too much to directly compete easily.
I went to a seminar about broadband rollout in rural Texas here in Austin awhile ago, and that's what I came away with.
> the government has to choose the lesser of the evils.
Why? Time was sure to provide real democratic alternatives. In fact, in Chile, there were democratic parties we could've made deals with instead. Why didn't we? No excuses there. Patience would surely have brought violent pro-democratic revolutionaries in Indonesia, E Timor, Chile, and Vietnam. And there WAS a democratic govt in Iran, before we toppled it. All WRONG choices.
Note: I have yet to read anything by Chomsky that seemed to to me to have persuasive evidence behind it; that includes two AI papers by him that I read.
It's been a joke of mine that it costs the phone companies more to bill you for a phone call than it does for them to provide the phone call
That might be literally true. Back when there was a long debate going
on about how Internet billing should go (early 90s), ISTR one
well-known network researcher, Jon Postel, guy said that phone
compenies really were mostly paying for billing services. Of course,
that was 15 years ago.
He, of cours, was a big advocate of the mostly-simple billing you see
today, and his email on the subject on an important mailing list is
probably why it is mostly like that. Simple Internet billing is slowly
slipping away, but I don't ever anticipate being sent a bill that
enumerates every data packet sent.
You're contradicting yourself. You say that the internet isn't a viable option because the artists can't make millions, but yet, the current system doesn't give the artist millions either? But that's bad.
I didn't write that. You did.
Maybe 'artists' should stop being so bloody concerned with getting rich and focus on the actual art involved. This way, if they don't make millions, they're still happy doing what they love, if they do, great, and either way, we get less pre-packaged, silicone injected Brittany-bombs shoved down our collective throats.
It's not about the imaginary $millions in your head. It's about being able to pay rent while only spending part-time doing non-music stuff. It's about not having to go into debt because you're an artist. So long as major music studios continue being stupid, there'll be no good ol' days back of good music from major studios. Get over it.
In fact, there's tons of great music out there. You just hafta look in different places than before. Adapt a bit, ol' boy.
So what's wrong with record companies taking such a big cut if they're making the artists millions that they wouldn't be able to get by themselves?
Well, it'd be one thing if that's what was happening. But, in fact, most new big-label contracts convey 99.9999% of the millions to the record company. Most artists get the privilege of paying recording expenses, and not much else.
Which is why more and artists are sticking with performance as their major source of income, and make their music available some other way (surprise, surprise). It's amazing when so much of an entire INDUSTRY gets stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
Even AMD realizes the jig is up; they dumped their fabs because they realized they didn't need them anymore. It's not about having the best damned process available anymore. It's about having the lowest power design, the smallest design, the widest/most-parallel design.
That'd be likelier to be because AMD's past history fabbing things is so miserable they couldn't get their hands on the $10s of Bs needed. Intel'd disagree with you - they keep their mastery and the process tech lead they've commanded through most of the microchip's existence. They've done so well because that's always been their first priority, and they put a ton of leading engineers into it, unlike other chip companies.
Fab investment and construction stay strong, just concentrated into fewer and changing actors, like every other industry. Chip density, which's what Moore's law predicts, rather than clock speed, still continues strong. Intel's new chip efforts are about using that density to put more and more stuff into the same chip, and about putting more cores per chip. And, it's about a bigger share of PC costs going to Intel instead of overall PCs getting more expensive.
Now, these multicore chips are a pain for getting gains from our traditional programming models, but neural simulations are the most trivially parallelizable thing out there.
I don't think Bill Gates is really responsible for the problems with Windows. In fact, I think it's probably one reason why he left when he did. The company just got too big for him to manage day-to-day - he wasn't the one making relatively minor decisions like where Windows Movie Maker sits on the Microsoft web site or how to install it, somebody else was making those decisions. And little decisions like that, all added up together, are 95% of what makes Windows as maddening to use as it is. And he was as annoyed by that stuff as everybody else.
Don't we wish. The fact about Windows is that MS OS' have always been bad. And it's not because knows no better - he's used Unix and other 'real' OS' plenty in his life. No, I'll leave you with a choice between "doesn't care because he's puts lots of successful effort into not having to" and "likes it that way." Clearly Ballmer DOOES like it that, because his watch shows aBD-style security system.
Life even as an Evil Imperial CEO does get old. You have all the power, which is great stuff, especially if you're like Gates, but it's also tons of work and especially stress. The stress gets too much for everybody, in fact, especially if you're in the same CEO slot long.
So, if you want to effectively vandalize somebody, file a lawsuit. It'll likely cost them more than just bashing up their car or shorting out their wiring, and it's legal. Sure, it's an abuse of the legal system, but that doesn't seem to matter all that much. As a wise person once said on Slashdot (ignoring the oxymoron potential in the first phrase), I can't just require you to write or commission a device driver for me, and take your house if I find a significant bug.
All so true - the court REGULARLY requires you to spend money on your lawyer doing device-driver-like long, technical labor, and for you or companies to be enslaved answering questions and helping that lawyer, whether you like it or can afford it or not.
And, as I explain at length in the article, with examples including the SCO case and Berkeley's Professor Ousterhout, IMHO that that's come to be as corrupt as the original slavery.
If discovery or deposition is required for a case you're in, be sure to ask for the cost recovery request that somehow few lawyers remember to tell you
OLPC was the product of the western media lab and the geek mind-set.
OLPC's market was the third world education minister - who was expected to sign the purchase order for 100,000 units --- but otherwise keep his big mouth shut.
HEY!! Negropontes' hardly a typical geek mindset. Not so many of us geeks think the right way to run a big research lab is to keep your goals largely to demos rather than that annoying and hard research stuff. Not so many media labs were run that way, either. His Wired column was just plain weird by geek standards. Most of are also less colonialistic, I think.
Plenty of geek startups have been better-run than OLPC, too.
No, this is just about Negroponte; please don't generalize beyond that.
You know, even in Texas, to get a near-majority on a school board, anti-evolutionists have to basically lie by omission when running for office and not say anything about it. Very Christian, eh?
Even many Texans who don't believe in evolution themselves understand that there are going to be bad consequences for their kids' educations and the ability to attract biotech.
If the orders are technically legal but immoral, then it's up to the soldier's conscience as to whether to follow them or to respectfully refuse to. . . . If it's any consolation, the officer or NCO will probably face court martial.)
Trials were strictly for the little man under Bush. To give the military credit, we know from the many leaks that plenty didn't like it, but that was the way it was.
It's scary how effective a President can be when he aims for unaccountability, isn't it? Except, there's no unaccountability to history, Bushie boy.
There's an often-missed angle on public transit: total transit time. has to go up with public transit, including trains, That means you're asking everybody taking them to spend possibly alot more time to go anywhere. My wife doesn't mind, but I do.
Money quote: "In NYC, it seems to take roughly 50 minutes to get anywhere by public transit, more like an hour by car, and the car costs more. Thus, in NYC, it makes sense to take transit. In the medium-size city where I live, it takes 20-30 minutes to drive places. Even if we had NYC-level transit, it'd take a lot longer to go that way."
I'm all in favor of public transit - I figured this stuff out by, well, taking alot of every kind of public transit, and it served me well within its limits. I just want to get one of those limits out in public a bit.
Like Paladin, that's made me also feel like transit rail has some realistic low-end density requirements to be of much help.
While I'm at it, notice that having 15-minute busses is alot cheaper than rail, because you already have lanes in place. And it'd prolly be easier to adapt Detroit to changing to. But you still need reasonable density or you just get lots of empty busses.
Yep, there's no money in Open Source. Red Hat and Canonical are figments of the imagination, as are the over $100 I've sent each way to support my Linux usage. So maybe it's a question of bizplan rather than impracticality.
The reason you should pay attention is because it'll let your industry have fun again.
We operating system geeks used to live in the shadow of operating system vendor concentration as well, especially with respect to Microsoft. and had to sign away our souls and belong to a big institution to play with operating systems. It was getting harder and harder to innovate or have fun. Then one day a man named Linux Torvalds came along with a release of some interest. And FreeBSD was released. And we were all free to have fun and innovate. Yeah, Open Source work's less profitable because it's more efficient and more competitive, but much more fun because billg can't call the tune on it and we can start any new startup any time we choose.
You're where we were. Spore, a great innovation, will be terrible when released because it's under the EA cloud. All the surviving companies are getting bigger and more bureaucratic.
And it's not just OSs with serious free alternatives, but also databases, web caches, languages, office software, and other serious work apps. You have nothing to lose but your chains! ;-)
Whoopsie - I missed that you're way ahead of me on the obesity law. Sorry. Maybe I'll learn to read one of these days. But it's so hard! ;-)
Honestly, do YOU want to pay for the health care of someone who lives an unhealthy lifestyle?
We don't even know if obesity IS unhealthy. So far all we have is correlation, which isn't enough to me to take state action. For example, an obesity tax will catch most athletes. How's that right?
Martin Luther King apparently lived an unhealthy lifestyle, as he got shot for his behavior. So's being President and being in the Armed Forces. I'm happy to pay for all their healthcare.
Like state-provided education, the state has extra responsibilities to support the freedom of its society.
The majority of the Jews killed during the war lived in Eastern Europe and were killed after the conquest by the German Army, which basically just marched in and carted everybody off. Not having an ID card didn't save a lot of lives.
In Western Europe, though, ID card records from formerly free govts WERE used to identify Jews and other minorities Hitler wanted gone. Hitler graciously allowed most Western Europeans to stay alive and serve the glorous German state as slaves. So grandparent has a real point, though he overstated it.
That decidedly slowed postwar ID card adoption in Western Europe.
People have agendas and I do not like the idea of people deciding what kind of body a person will have, their facial features, their eye color, etc.
Human cloning has a very concerning and unpleasant 1984ish feel to it,
Attack Of The Clones was a MOVIE.
How do you feel about identical twins? Because that's what they are. No carbon copies atall. Their personalities will be no more alike than twins' normally are.
If you insist on being scared and finding excuses to ignore facts on the ground, then go have fun without me. I'm not going to waste time arguing with somebody uninterested in tne facts.
I will warn you that people who pay attention to facts historically do better than people who don't.
Also note that the recent "revolutions" in places like Ukraine are all led by thinly disguised Western plants, complete with massive funding from sources unknown,
This is funny. They're all experienced politicians from each country, openly aided by pro-democratic NGOs. I guess you'll find some reason that couldn't possibly be true, though.
IgnoramusMaximus wrote:
goings on in the USA demonstrate clearly to anyone who is paying attention that supposedly advanced democracies and reasonably free market systems are extremely fragile and more often then not all the "freedoms" are nothing but a thin veneer covering totalitarian forces,
Really? Then why are you still around to be allowed to post? Why is slashdot being allowed to exist? Why were the Democrats allowed to take control of Congress? Did Bush get sick of those Republican faces and want a change? Maybe we still have a right or two left, huh?
the chances of convincing people within the former Soviet sphere or in Iraq or Palestine to "tough it out" would have been much greater.
Now, you're right about Palestine, but the last Iraqi and Afghan opinion polls I saw said they still want this democracy thing. And, when did the mass coups in Eastern Europe happen?
IgnoramusMaximus wrote:
I do not blame them in the slightest that upon discovering that the goods they have been sold with great fanfare come with a fine, fine print saying "You the buyer, do not dare to expect results for 100 years after you are dead. We, the sellers, can expect the results immediately. By the way if you are of an older generations, everything you have worked for is now null and void. Have a nice day."
This is a good point - we don't point the hardships out nearly enough. As Churchill said, democracy is terrible; we only do it because the alternatives are even worse.
But the real time needed is actually 50 years. And democratizers often don't see so much benefit beforehand - the new Indian democracy, for example, had terrible relations with most old democracies for decades.
And the generations before that do see improvement as well. They see serious improvements in their lifetimes compared to comparative stasis beforehand. Despite Rumsfeld's inability to understand what the word occupation means, Iraqis mostly have decidedly more freedom of speech, and it doesn't take much Iraqi-blog-reading to see they love it. Among other things, they use it to grumble about the many, many problems Rumsfeld's disinterest in Iraqi ground security has caused.
But the real reason people tough it out, of course, is because they know their kids'll have it much better, and their grandkids will have it good.
Tell you what - why don't you try that line out on a teenager and watch his face bob and veil with distrust.
And he'll be right, too. We call roll because we DISTRUST kids. We track police because history's shown that police often abuse the great powers given them. We track nuclear power employees because, well, we don't trust them, as they're just human, and we need the tape to understand and repair mistakes.
But, you know, RFID can never outperform a teacher. The older kids are, the more careful and tasteful teachers tend to be about taking roll, because those kids are of the age where they need to understand that school's for their benefit and come on their own responsibility. That won't happen if they're rebelling, which is alot likelier with RFID, as there's no stage of trust.
I don't think you understand. A kid wearing a RFID tag that works even 50% of the time means that he stands a 50% better chance of being found than a kid with no tag at all. Why is that so hard to understand?
Yes, it is hard to understand. The chance that said deadly fire or other deadly emergency is utterly tiny. So that means there's half that utterly tiny chance of it saving your kid.
Meanwhile, there's a 100% chance you're violating the kid's privacy and trust.
lawyers don't sue people, people sue people.
Yeah, but it looks to me like most of the money goes to corruption in the civil trials where patent trials are tried. Most money goes to discovery and deposition.
Litigants are usually required by to court must spend large amounts of produce large amounts of evidence in response to discovery and deposition orders. At no time is any evidence of malfeasance required for these orders to be issued, and these phases are allowed to last years and years.
Isn't it slavery to require unpaid labor from litigants who haven't been found guilty? Almost as bad, because there's no time limit, civil trials often last well until after products are obolete (e.g., the Microsoft case). There is no constraint to keep big companies from milking cases to drive small, innovative companies out of business. In short, it's as corrupt as the original slavery.
I've read a defense that deposition and discovery can bring out facts of bad behavior we otherwise wouldn't see. But I'm at a loss to see how that's good when the trial ends a decade later. None of this helped Netscape. And it certainly does bring slavery and corruption.
Why do judges and lawyers let this happen? This would seem to be major moral failing of theirs. Certainly, they do make vastly more money.
> You could just play through rather than reloading. You know that right?
The PC gaming platform is not exactly what you call highly stable. Early-release or EA games (looking at you, Sim City 4) can get you below 10min between crashes.
Yeah, it's not an issue for nethack. On nethack, I only save between levels to force a pause for thought.
I don't think it's true we ignore the USSR's sacrifices. Now, it it IS true that each side is more interested in its own old recollections, and thus that's what you see in the media, since their business is eyeballs.
The grunts on both sides of that war were pretty unlucky - both sides appear to've been run by people who wanted to maximize death. If the USSR had been a democracy, they would've had much better equipment, and far, far fewer deaths for so many reasons I could go on for days.
Megadeaths were a feature of that front, not an inevitable decider of wars. For example, Taiwan is the only non-completely-improbable flashpoint, and, well, as people pointed out back in the 90s, for the PLA to get to Taiwan will take, well, a Million Man Swim. Good luck against the Taiwanese air and naval superiority, you'll need it. Triply so when the USAF/USN got there.
> Is wi-fi actually succeeding anywhere?
Yes - it's doing very well in places where there's either no DSL or cable, or where there's just one and it's bad. It must cost too much to directly compete easily.
I went to a seminar about broadband rollout in rural Texas here in Austin awhile ago, and that's what I came away with.
> the government has to choose the lesser of the evils.
Why? Time was sure to provide real democratic alternatives. In fact, in Chile, there were democratic parties we could've made deals with instead. Why didn't we? No excuses there. Patience would surely have brought violent pro-democratic revolutionaries in Indonesia, E Timor, Chile, and Vietnam. And there WAS a democratic govt in Iran, before we toppled it. All WRONG choices.
Note: I have yet to read anything by Chomsky that seemed to to me to have persuasive evidence behind it; that includes two AI papers by him that I read.
It's been a joke of mine that it costs the phone companies more to bill you for a phone call than it does for them to provide the phone call
That might be literally true. Back when there was a long debate going on about how Internet billing should go (early 90s), ISTR one well-known network researcher, Jon Postel, guy said that phone compenies really were mostly paying for billing services. Of course, that was 15 years ago.
He, of cours, was a big advocate of the mostly-simple billing you see today, and his email on the subject on an important mailing list is probably why it is mostly like that. Simple Internet billing is slowly slipping away, but I don't ever anticipate being sent a bill that enumerates every data packet sent.
You're contradicting yourself. You say that the internet isn't a viable option because the artists can't make millions, but yet, the current system doesn't give the artist millions either? But that's bad.
I didn't write that. You did.
Maybe 'artists' should stop being so bloody concerned with getting rich and focus on the actual art involved. This way, if they don't make millions, they're still happy doing what they love, if they do, great, and either way, we get less pre-packaged, silicone injected Brittany-bombs shoved down our collective throats.
It's not about the imaginary $millions in your head. It's about being able to pay rent while only spending part-time doing non-music stuff. It's about not having to go into debt because you're an artist. So long as major music studios continue being stupid, there'll be no good ol' days back of good music from major studios. Get over it.
In fact, there's tons of great music out there. You just hafta look in different places than before. Adapt a bit, ol' boy.
So what's wrong with record companies taking such a big cut if they're making the artists millions that they wouldn't be able to get by themselves?
Well, it'd be one thing if that's what was happening. But, in fact, most new big-label contracts convey 99.9999% of the millions to the record company. Most artists get the privilege of paying recording expenses, and not much else.
Which is why more and artists are sticking with performance as their major source of income, and make their music available some other way (surprise, surprise). It's amazing when so much of an entire INDUSTRY gets stupid.