The source was chosen by our poster, and the editors just didn't change it.
Slashdot's put up items that linked across to Al Jazeera, too, for another example of a source some people would object to. (I think that link was to do with a space exploration story, and the Al Jazeera article was basically a re-cast Space.com page.)
The story does have the huge flaws you mention, and it's probably motivated by the "culture wars" mindset, okay. I'm with you on the nature of Fox's News division. They're somewhere between the old strictly-propaganda Pravda and the modern, tabloid version. But slashdot's just not that choosy.
And Iraqi insurgents don't observe the Geneva conventions, so I guess we're under no obligation to do so either. ('Saddam's torture at Abu Graib was nastier than ours -- I bet those prisoners thank God every day that he's not in charge of the place...')
Somehow so many right-wing arguments, in foreign, domestic, economic, and social policy, wind up comparing the US with the worst company. I wonder why that is.
Personally I'd rather aspire to try to find and follow the right course. I have reservations about Kyoto too, but in my world there's middle ground, and not every question of policy comes down to finding a corner that we can back ourselves into. Moral courage, when it comes to something like global warming, isn't about walking away from the table because China's not playing fair.
After all, there's no evidence that people want to read text by anyone other than paid hacks who are motivated by a paycheck rather than actual inquiry.
Or not in his world, anyway. Not that he's run a controlled experiment or anything...
Exactly. This news item amounts to one minor step in this evolutionary arms race. In the natural world this'd be something like a butterfly becoming slightly more toxic in order to resist being eaten by birds...
Except i this case, given that it's Macrovision, the moment's advantage would be more like orange coloration that implies toxicity -- like butterflies that don't get eaten because they just look like they'd taste bad.
Who wants to place bets on this evolutionary race? Will it be the ponderous industry that still hasn't gotten its head around the whole point-to-point (as opposed to broadcast) distribution model? The one that's still occasionally claiming, for form's sake, that VCRs were bad for their business? Or will it be the nasty piratical p2p types who've proven so much, much more flexible in the past? Which one of these is going to take advantage of a faster rate of mutation?
Anything this particular source suggests comes with a salt shaker full of salt for me.
Dvorak's doing much the same thing for the tech industry that your paper's sports columnists do for the local teams. His role isn't "provide a balanced picture of such-and-so," it's more like "provoke a reaction by pushing every subject to distorted extremes."
Every sports section has at least one writer like that. Their job is to generate traffic, or responses, by staking out polemical opinions. Usually the one writer who pulls this duty paints a bleak picture of the local teams' moves, so as to get the loyalists to write in. It helps circulation. The same people work extra shifts on call-in shows, pretty often.
In this case, our sage has consistently been on the wrong side of basically every technology he's commented on in my book. He's a sort of gadfly to all things Apple, for example. (His reaction to the idea of the mouse was as spectacularly wrong as anything ever written on computers.)
The charge of extremism is maybe not one you want to be tossing around lightly. Those walls around you are made of glass, and the pin is clearly not in your grenade.
I've voted across party lines for my entire life, based on which candidate I thought was the most responsible potential leader. I voted for W. Bush's dad. In this last election, I voted for a Republican for my state Senate and a Green for Secretary of State and a Dem for President. If your ideology requires that you marginalize me and this poster as "pinkos," the problem isn't with us.
You're every bit the craven, blinded partisan that the butt-kissing cronies of Brezhnev's Kremlin were. (And your boy W. has displayed every bit the same proccupation with loyalty over truth as Leonid's old inner circle, but that's another story.)
It's not always a question of who wins an overall victory; it's also a question of whether individual market niches can get carved out and held by a given company. Nintendo is facing off against a planned onslaught of portable products, but they've had a big edge there to this point.
Kids are another obvious example of Nintendo's existing niche. I'm a single parent of two 11-year-olds. Nintendo has a huge advantage with pre-teen kids and their parents. You talk about "killer games," and Nintendo has several killer franchises -- Zelda for one -- that work for a family audience. XBox has exactly zero such games or franchises, unless you want to count sports titles which the PS2 is very comparable in anyway. For my money, the limited range of GC sports titles are more than enough to keep Nintendo on the list of choices, for us. PS2 would be second. XBox's selling points actually make me recoil. (Don't get me wrong, I thought Bungie was the best game company out there period before the MS buyout -- but Halo bores me asleep. One more of those? XBox, from my point of view, is pitching itself to a far nastier audience than I ever want to become part of.)
Their Xbox niche is 25+ year old people, which is a growth market. But even if they win that, and even if it gives them an overall win in the console market, that doesn't mean they've taken Nintendo's audience.
Full of venom, hate, and far to the left... (I think Zell Miller would have been a great choice but I know how well THAT suggestion would have gone over;).
Let's see -- you think Howie Dean was "full of venom and hate" but you're a supporter of Zell Miller's. How do you ever live with that sort of cognitive dissonance?
Zell Miller gave a speech at the convention this year in which he contrasted unamerican "agitators" -- pronounced with glowering eyes, foaming mouth, and around 18 syllables -- with our shining clean-cut soldiers, saying in so many words that our nation is about our proud military and not about inconsequential stuff like, oh, freedom of speech. Watching that speech I was taken aback by how openly the Republicans have declared ruthless war on not just those who dissent with them, but on the actual idea of dissent within our political system.
Zell Miller's the dying gasp of the "Dixiecrats." The Republican party's so-called "southern strategy" since Nixon has been to alienate Southern voters from the Dems, who in the 1960s actually came to terms with race (God forbid) and have been dealing with the issue with a measure of moral courage since. The strategy has played very well to the fears of my Oklahoma relations, who are frankly scared to death of anyone who doesn't look like them. All the old "Solid South" political figures, like Miller, have slowly turned from one party to the other.
Personally I don't think this country's going to avoid a truly evil course unless the south somehow, miraculously, comes to terms with the actual history of the Civil War. Politicians like Miller represent the determined derangement of that history, an ongoing denial of it.
It was political terrorism that ended reconstruction, and since then Lincoln's party has steadily forsaken everything he stood for. At the end of that chain, you get crossover figures like Miller -- stepping from a past evil into a present one, with eyes glaring up from lowered brows like a Stanley Kubrick character's. And you think this is moral courage, or something like. Because he rants about "agitators."
I know plenty of people who will just click OK without even looking at what they're agreeing to.
Which should tell us there's a bigger problem here than whether Verisign is, in the fashion of the AKC, turning a blind eye to puppymillers who'll pay for registration papers.
If users have been conditioned to routinely say "yes" or "OK" to anything they see, it's partly because the APIs they deal with all day long encourage the writing of bad, unintelligible dialogs. Anyone who's ever waded through the "Yes No Help" dialog box when saving to a.csv file from Excel knows this problem. That one's unreal: they give us a bulleted list in the dialog that basically translates the buttons.
It's no accident that tons of the spyware pop-ups out there look like Windows dialog boxes. People are so used to clicking through horribly-written dialogs that they don't pay any attention. A better set of API default dialog types would nudge everyone, programmers and users, in the direction of actually readable dialogs that mean something.
The White House has several hilarious excerpts from his current Social Security tour, if you want to laugh and cry at the same time. Hey, W., how will your program help to make Social Security fiscally sound, again?
"Because the -- all which is on the table begins to address the big cost drivers. For example, how benefits are calculate, for example, is on the table; whether or not benefits rise based upon wage increases or price increases. There's a series of parts of the formula that are being considered. And when you couple that, those different cost drivers, affecting those -- changing those with personal accounts, the idea is to get what has been promised more likely to be -- or closer delivered to what has been promised.
"Does that make any sense to you? It's kind of muddled. Look, there's a series of things that cause the -- like, for example, benefits are calculated based upon the increase of wages, as opposed to the increase of prices. Some have suggested that we calculate -- the benefits will rise based upon inflation, as opposed to wage increases. There is a reform that would help solve the red if that were put into effect. In other words, how fast benefits grow, how fast the promised benefits grow, if those -- if that growth is affected, it will help on the red.
Iraq and the Bay of Pigs: both cases in which a President, supposedly trying to forestall the threat of WMDs being used against us, bought the spoon-fed intelligence of exile organizations that really had no idea what was going on back home. The exiles told us it'd be a cakewalk -- "The (bad guy) regime will topple like a house of cards" and so on. Does this sound familiar at all? When you look at the Kennedy cabinet before Bay of Pigs, it plays a lot like W. Bush's -- blindered by its rigid ideological view of the cold war, and unable to take in contrary viewpoints.
Bay of Pigs partly led to the missile crisis. The consequences of that sort of blindered, reckless behavior come down the road. And patriotic US citizens, having no apparent historical memory, laud Kennedy for defusing the situation he'd helped to create. At least by then he'd learned to have Bobby Kennedy playing Devil's advocate, which prevented the "bomb the missile sites" military advice from taking hold and saved our butts. (We see no signs of a similar realization from W. Bush, who still apparently considers loyalty the only real virtue in an advisor.)
The weird part is, people act like having paid you makes it safer. They'll take more risks, and listen to your advice maybe a little less, if they've given you a check. It's almost like they think paying innoculates them against trouble.
If you do this as a friend, they know they're still responsible and that you're a nice guy. If they pay you, they think they're nice people -- after all they paid you for something -- and that you're responsible.
It's hard to find the middle ground between those. Exchange of favors, maybe, but only with the right person.
it's getting old that you still have to jump through hoops to make PDFs open correctly in every version of IE from 4.0 to 6.
PDFs you can see them deliberately sabotaging.
How about the versions of IE in which opening any Office document gets you an IE window with some of the menu items from the original Office app, but also with a seemingly random set of those features disabled? If you right-click to Save As, you can open that doc in Word or whatever and do your mail merge; opening it with a normal click within IE gets you the right menu items, but they're invariably dimmed. Ack. Pfft. Sputter.
MS has waffled back and forth about how Office documents interact with their browsers just like they do with features within Office. In a way the result is an IE-compliant "standard" of "make it as clunky as the most idiotic IE version needs to be to give our users an out."
It's a shuffle -- they'll flip a coin
on
iPod Shuffle RAID
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· Score: 1
Naw, I was just joshing. What the RIAA would do is take the grandparent of one of the shuffle owners to court, as a way of keeping the rest of the local systems in line.
What I said was that Rosalind was an example of someone withholding information because revealing it would present her with a cost to her own career. Watson and Crick were poaching on her information -- which wouldn't be necessary in the "all information is free and we're all sharing" version of scientific knowledge being proposed here.
Truly classic "I didn't quite read that" response from an AC...
she has ended up getting credit, even if it was after her death.
That's about what I meant when I said the scientific method got past the human side -- it works to allay those problems, eventually.
But you have to admit that, for her and her "competing" people at Cambridge, the free sharing of information wasn't completely free and freaky and in the general public interest only. It's totally possible that, if she'd been freer sharing her information, the structure of DNA would have been known earlier because lots more people would have been involved, at Cambridge at elsewhere. Why do you think she wasn't freely passing all her research around? Because there was a potential cost to her career.
The people working on the Dead Sea Scrolls have been criticized a ton for withholding information. Scientists who sign up to work with certain NASA missions sign exclusivity agreements for publishing some of the results. There are lots of examples of this. There's a tension in scientific ranks over when to publish. It's plainly not "free as in beer."
Whether or not the guy had a stake in the towing company is of little consequence.
Heck, based on your boosterism here you should be touting his involvement. He's an experienced businessman, offering his leadership in a public forum. Right? And conflict of interest be damned! (Let's stack EPA regulatory agencies with energy company lobbyists, they really know the industry...)
The point being the government is now becoming directly in volved as a competitor to these towing companies at the tax payers expense.
Personally, if I ran a towing company I'd be wondering why I wasn't in a position to address this problem before the gov't got involved. I'd be kicking myself for creating the perceived need for those little trucks by providing such consistently bad service. It sure as heck doesn't seem like the tow truck industry has done jack squat to improve itself during my adult life, despite some very obvious problems with its services.
When you get a flat on the highway, the tow people require you to call them. (Please dial information and try to find a station near this exit. What exit is this? I hope that station has a truck...) You can't ever tell what the wait's going to be like for any one place you call. The whole thing's inefficient in a way that can be dangerous. (I live in Minneapolis, remember? Which means waiting around in 20-below temperatures can KILL YOU, leaving alone the busy highway traffic running by.)
By contrast, the government puts out a few small pickups that run around only during rush hour, giving people two gallons of gas or helping them fix a flat (or arrange tows -- gee, why is that necessary?) to get the road clear. The cost is minimal next to pothole fixing, the service is far more timely for the stranded motorist.
There are tradeoffs and "gotchas" to both public and private approaches to any problem. I've personally seen the effects of hard line regimes in both directions, and neither one of them impresses me much. Sorry not to be drinking the kool aid of one side or the other, but I think I'll stick with a balanced economy, thanks so much.
(And frankly, someone who says conflict of interest is meaningless in a legislator doesn't stand much chance of convincing me that we need more True Believers in the world.)
The Bush administration has admitted that 'evidence of global warming has begun to affect animal and plant populations in visible ways, and that rising temperatures in North America are due in part to human activity.' That's as of August 2004.
From the same Post article about the August report:
John H. Marburger, the president's science adviser, said the report has "no implications for policy."
Bush in 2001 was still repeating the conservative mantra on this topic: we don't know how much change is due to natural fluctuations, etc. Now the administration says that we've got evidence it's happening, and that we need to study it. Now THERE is the sort of moral courage that gets a man re-elected by turning on vulnerable minorities...
Nothing is inherently lost if you share your knowledge
Uh, there's always the potential "loss" of the credit for other discoveries based on that knowledge. Think Rosalind Franklin and the discovery of DNA; "competitors" saw her crucial photograph and some unpublished work, and she's never really gotten some credit she deserved. Even when you're formally releasing whatever information you have, by publishing it, there's a certain loss in that sense -- of control, or something close to it.
The scientific method transcends those petty human "losses" in a larger sense, but they sure do affect how people within the scientific world behave. People are very conscious of the tradeoffs between sharing information and withholding it.
Microsoft seems to make sure the current version of the.doc format won't work in older versions nearly every release... It's pretty sad when software can't even handle it's own proprietary format properly.
Near as we can tell, this is the only way they have to keep selling upgrades to their office products. Since 1993 or so there hasn't been a new feature in Word that would be a selling point for any sizeable minority, even, of users. That and the lock-stepped OS and Office upgrade thing -- installing W2k? you need Office 2k -- have sold bajillions of licenses on these products when otherwise nobody'd have bothered since Word 5.1a.
(It would have been interesting to see what a split-up MS would have done about the OS-to-office umbilical. Any OS developer tries to encourage backward compatibility -- except at MS, where they seem to do exactly the opposite as a deliberate business MO.)
Perhaps you Apple fan boys need to actually read before you flame... you gave me another reson not to get one, you guys are more snooty than us Linux boys.
Personally I didn't see the "flame" in that post at all, but yours got modded that way. And, looking back, I'm trying to figure out what was "snooty" about the response.
What he's saying is that Apple isn't targeting people who would otherwise be building their own machines for $150 using a set of old shoelaces to stitch the case together. And you're basically right; Apple doesn't see its profit coming from trying to compete with bare bones, build-it-at-home types whose satisfaction in patching Linux would outweigh any sense of satisfaction at the "it just works" thing. I mean no offense at all, I relate to those people -- but you don't sell a cheap minimalist system to them. Because they won't buy it.
Let's leave alone "street illumination" -- which you describe as essential to good clean infrastructure despite my (apparently blighted?) neighborhood not having any at all -- and sidewalks, which are another borderline case. How about the highways?
The Eisenhower interstate system was originally built as a defense measure -- fast transport -- and as an economic boon. Our government right now spends colossal amounts on highway maintenance, at the federal and state levels that money is enormous.
The "necessity" of those roads wasn't as apparent when they were built as it is now. Back then -- and I'm sure you can find local examples -- new roads really were a sort of lavish luxury as well as a way of planning -- God forbid -- economic development. (The "Lilac Way" highway that runs near by my house had a big parade when it opened and was, initially, largely used for picnics at [government-built] public BBQ parks. Now it's not a scenic Sunday drive any more; it's a big economic and traffic hub in suburbs that grew up around it.)
And for what it's worth, the fact that the government planned those highways led to some decisions we can still question. For example, our interstates all run right into and through the interior of our big cities. Neighborhoods that didn't have the political clout to resist having a freeway cut them in half got destroyed by those things. (The Rondo neighborhood in St. Paul died out, for an example local to me.) Talk about your social effects of government! So your objection to this wireless stuff, that it leads to gov't intrusion, does hold up.
Personally I don't think the line's that clear or clean, and I don't think it's stable over time. Airports are a legit thing for governments to be very involved in planning, yes? I know I don't want a new runway over my yard tomorrow. Would they have been in 1915? When voters think it's legit, the necessities we spend on change.
The one point I'll strongly agree on is the Government's oversight of communications technologies, though. The FCC is hardly being a good steward of broadcast "space" for television. I'm not sure wireless, which is a point to point model, is quite the same, but I see the objection.
One of our MN state legislators raised these basic objections about the yellow "highway helper" trucks that help people who get a flat or run out of gas during rush hour. (This was a Republican, so he phrased it all in terms of how the little trucks were a sort of socialism.)
Turned out the guy had a large financial interest in a towing company. Seriously.
What I said in my post was: in a different corporate culture, you wouldn't see that kind of petty stuff in the cafeteria. People would give each other a hard time for fun, and maybe there'd be people talking to each other a little bit. How exactly was that an endorsement of pettiness in the workplace, again?
So if someone cut you off in a lunch line, you'd walk away. Because clearly so you're so extremely mature... Except, in response to a message you didn't read right, you went off the deep end with a bunch of "This is crap! I'm above all that!" hoo-ey. You spewed attitude -- without actually reading what you were responding to.
Oh, no, you wouldn't be involved in office politics...
What you're so "uninterested" in is the reactions people have to your lack of social skills. You think when you alienate them -- "because you don't play those kind of games" -- that means you're a real straight talker. Good luck with that. Hope your job on the LAN team works out for you.
JAMA and the NEJM did meta-studies (based on aggregating other, smaller studies into a bigger sample) in the late 1990s. They concluded the same things: that cell phone use is equivalent to being legally drunk, that headsets don't significantly cut into the risk despite appearances, and so on.
Tons of people drive drunk based on exactly the same rationale you just used. Which isn't to say you couldn't be right for you -- but maybe you want to seriously consider whether you're being exactly like those drunks leaving the bar.
(Personally, and I'm honest about it -- I drive like crap when someone I don't know very well is in the passenger seat.)
Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot's put up items that linked across to Al Jazeera, too, for another example of a source some people would object to. (I think that link was to do with a space exploration story, and the Al Jazeera article was basically a re-cast Space.com page.)
The story does have the huge flaws you mention, and it's probably motivated by the "culture wars" mindset, okay. I'm with you on the nature of Fox's News division. They're somewhere between the old strictly-propaganda Pravda and the modern, tabloid version. But slashdot's just not that choosy.
Somehow so many right-wing arguments, in foreign, domestic, economic, and social policy, wind up comparing the US with the worst company. I wonder why that is.
Personally I'd rather aspire to try to find and follow the right course. I have reservations about Kyoto too, but in my world there's middle ground, and not every question of policy comes down to finding a corner that we can back ourselves into. Moral courage, when it comes to something like global warming, isn't about walking away from the table because China's not playing fair.
Or not in his world, anyway. Not that he's run a controlled experiment or anything...
Except i this case, given that it's Macrovision, the moment's advantage would be more like orange coloration that implies toxicity -- like butterflies that don't get eaten because they just look like they'd taste bad.
Who wants to place bets on this evolutionary race? Will it be the ponderous industry that still hasn't gotten its head around the whole point-to-point (as opposed to broadcast) distribution model? The one that's still occasionally claiming, for form's sake, that VCRs were bad for their business? Or will it be the nasty piratical p2p types who've proven so much, much more flexible in the past? Which one of these is going to take advantage of a faster rate of mutation?
My money's on the scurvy dogs. (Arrr.)
Dvorak's doing much the same thing for the tech industry that your paper's sports columnists do for the local teams. His role isn't "provide a balanced picture of such-and-so," it's more like "provoke a reaction by pushing every subject to distorted extremes."
Every sports section has at least one writer like that. Their job is to generate traffic, or responses, by staking out polemical opinions. Usually the one writer who pulls this duty paints a bleak picture of the local teams' moves, so as to get the loyalists to write in. It helps circulation. The same people work extra shifts on call-in shows, pretty often.
In this case, our sage has consistently been on the wrong side of basically every technology he's commented on in my book. He's a sort of gadfly to all things Apple, for example. (His reaction to the idea of the mouse was as spectacularly wrong as anything ever written on computers.)
I've voted across party lines for my entire life, based on which candidate I thought was the most responsible potential leader. I voted for W. Bush's dad. In this last election, I voted for a Republican for my state Senate and a Green for Secretary of State and a Dem for President. If your ideology requires that you marginalize me and this poster as "pinkos," the problem isn't with us.
You're every bit the craven, blinded partisan that the butt-kissing cronies of Brezhnev's Kremlin were. (And your boy W. has displayed every bit the same proccupation with loyalty over truth as Leonid's old inner circle, but that's another story.)
Kids are another obvious example of Nintendo's existing niche. I'm a single parent of two 11-year-olds. Nintendo has a huge advantage with pre-teen kids and their parents. You talk about "killer games," and Nintendo has several killer franchises -- Zelda for one -- that work for a family audience. XBox has exactly zero such games or franchises, unless you want to count sports titles which the PS2 is very comparable in anyway. For my money, the limited range of GC sports titles are more than enough to keep Nintendo on the list of choices, for us. PS2 would be second. XBox's selling points actually make me recoil. (Don't get me wrong, I thought Bungie was the best game company out there period before the MS buyout -- but Halo bores me asleep. One more of those? XBox, from my point of view, is pitching itself to a far nastier audience than I ever want to become part of.)
Their Xbox niche is 25+ year old people, which is a growth market. But even if they win that, and even if it gives them an overall win in the console market, that doesn't mean they've taken Nintendo's audience.
Let's see -- you think Howie Dean was "full of venom and hate" but you're a supporter of Zell Miller's. How do you ever live with that sort of cognitive dissonance?
Zell Miller gave a speech at the convention this year in which he contrasted unamerican "agitators" -- pronounced with glowering eyes, foaming mouth, and around 18 syllables -- with our shining clean-cut soldiers, saying in so many words that our nation is about our proud military and not about inconsequential stuff like, oh, freedom of speech. Watching that speech I was taken aback by how openly the Republicans have declared ruthless war on not just those who dissent with them, but on the actual idea of dissent within our political system.
Zell Miller's the dying gasp of the "Dixiecrats." The Republican party's so-called "southern strategy" since Nixon has been to alienate Southern voters from the Dems, who in the 1960s actually came to terms with race (God forbid) and have been dealing with the issue with a measure of moral courage since. The strategy has played very well to the fears of my Oklahoma relations, who are frankly scared to death of anyone who doesn't look like them. All the old "Solid South" political figures, like Miller, have slowly turned from one party to the other.
Personally I don't think this country's going to avoid a truly evil course unless the south somehow, miraculously, comes to terms with the actual history of the Civil War. Politicians like Miller represent the determined derangement of that history, an ongoing denial of it.
It was political terrorism that ended reconstruction, and since then Lincoln's party has steadily forsaken everything he stood for. At the end of that chain, you get crossover figures like Miller -- stepping from a past evil into a present one, with eyes glaring up from lowered brows like a Stanley Kubrick character's. And you think this is moral courage, or something like. Because he rants about "agitators."
In all seriousness, God help you.
Which should tell us there's a bigger problem here than whether Verisign is, in the fashion of the AKC, turning a blind eye to puppymillers who'll pay for registration papers.
If users have been conditioned to routinely say "yes" or "OK" to anything they see, it's partly because the APIs they deal with all day long encourage the writing of bad, unintelligible dialogs. Anyone who's ever waded through the "Yes No Help" dialog box when saving to a .csv file from Excel knows this problem. That one's unreal: they give us a bulleted list in the dialog that basically translates the buttons.
It's no accident that tons of the spyware pop-ups out there look like Windows dialog boxes. People are so used to clicking through horribly-written dialogs that they don't pay any attention. A better set of API default dialog types would nudge everyone, programmers and users, in the direction of actually readable dialogs that mean something.
The White House has several hilarious excerpts from his current Social Security tour, if you want to laugh and cry at the same time. Hey, W., how will your program help to make Social Security fiscally sound, again?
Bay of Pigs partly led to the missile crisis. The consequences of that sort of blindered, reckless behavior come down the road. And patriotic US citizens, having no apparent historical memory, laud Kennedy for defusing the situation he'd helped to create. At least by then he'd learned to have Bobby Kennedy playing Devil's advocate, which prevented the "bomb the missile sites" military advice from taking hold and saved our butts. (We see no signs of a similar realization from W. Bush, who still apparently considers loyalty the only real virtue in an advisor.)
The weird part is, people act like having paid you makes it safer. They'll take more risks, and listen to your advice maybe a little less, if they've given you a check. It's almost like they think paying innoculates them against trouble.
If you do this as a friend, they know they're still responsible and that you're a nice guy. If they pay you, they think they're nice people -- after all they paid you for something -- and that you're responsible.
It's hard to find the middle ground between those. Exchange of favors, maybe, but only with the right person.
PDFs you can see them deliberately sabotaging.
How about the versions of IE in which opening any Office document gets you an IE window with some of the menu items from the original Office app, but also with a seemingly random set of those features disabled? If you right-click to Save As, you can open that doc in Word or whatever and do your mail merge; opening it with a normal click within IE gets you the right menu items, but they're invariably dimmed. Ack. Pfft. Sputter.
MS has waffled back and forth about how Office documents interact with their browsers just like they do with features within Office. In a way the result is an IE-compliant "standard" of "make it as clunky as the most idiotic IE version needs to be to give our users an out."
Naw, I was just joshing. What the RIAA would do is take the grandparent of one of the shuffle owners to court, as a way of keeping the rest of the local systems in line.
Truly classic "I didn't quite read that" response from an AC...
That's about what I meant when I said the scientific method got past the human side -- it works to allay those problems, eventually.
But you have to admit that, for her and her "competing" people at Cambridge, the free sharing of information wasn't completely free and freaky and in the general public interest only. It's totally possible that, if she'd been freer sharing her information, the structure of DNA would have been known earlier because lots more people would have been involved, at Cambridge at elsewhere. Why do you think she wasn't freely passing all her research around? Because there was a potential cost to her career.
The people working on the Dead Sea Scrolls have been criticized a ton for withholding information. Scientists who sign up to work with certain NASA missions sign exclusivity agreements for publishing some of the results. There are lots of examples of this. There's a tension in scientific ranks over when to publish. It's plainly not "free as in beer."
Heck, based on your boosterism here you should be touting his involvement. He's an experienced businessman, offering his leadership in a public forum. Right? And conflict of interest be damned! (Let's stack EPA regulatory agencies with energy company lobbyists, they really know the industry...)
The point being the government is now becoming directly in volved as a competitor to these towing companies at the tax payers expense.
Personally, if I ran a towing company I'd be wondering why I wasn't in a position to address this problem before the gov't got involved. I'd be kicking myself for creating the perceived need for those little trucks by providing such consistently bad service. It sure as heck doesn't seem like the tow truck industry has done jack squat to improve itself during my adult life, despite some very obvious problems with its services.
When you get a flat on the highway, the tow people require you to call them. (Please dial information and try to find a station near this exit. What exit is this? I hope that station has a truck...) You can't ever tell what the wait's going to be like for any one place you call. The whole thing's inefficient in a way that can be dangerous. (I live in Minneapolis, remember? Which means waiting around in 20-below temperatures can KILL YOU, leaving alone the busy highway traffic running by.)
By contrast, the government puts out a few small pickups that run around only during rush hour, giving people two gallons of gas or helping them fix a flat (or arrange tows -- gee, why is that necessary?) to get the road clear. The cost is minimal next to pothole fixing, the service is far more timely for the stranded motorist.
There are tradeoffs and "gotchas" to both public and private approaches to any problem. I've personally seen the effects of hard line regimes in both directions, and neither one of them impresses me much. Sorry not to be drinking the kool aid of one side or the other, but I think I'll stick with a balanced economy, thanks so much.
(And frankly, someone who says conflict of interest is meaningless in a legislator doesn't stand much chance of convincing me that we need more True Believers in the world.)
From the same Post article about the August report:
Bush in 2001 was still repeating the conservative mantra on this topic: we don't know how much change is due to natural fluctuations, etc. Now the administration says that we've got evidence it's happening, and that we need to study it. Now THERE is the sort of moral courage that gets a man re-elected by turning on vulnerable minorities...
Uh, there's always the potential "loss" of the credit for other discoveries based on that knowledge. Think Rosalind Franklin and the discovery of DNA; "competitors" saw her crucial photograph and some unpublished work, and she's never really gotten some credit she deserved. Even when you're formally releasing whatever information you have, by publishing it, there's a certain loss in that sense -- of control, or something close to it.
The scientific method transcends those petty human "losses" in a larger sense, but they sure do affect how people within the scientific world behave. People are very conscious of the tradeoffs between sharing information and withholding it.
Near as we can tell, this is the only way they have to keep selling upgrades to their office products. Since 1993 or so there hasn't been a new feature in Word that would be a selling point for any sizeable minority, even, of users. That and the lock-stepped OS and Office upgrade thing -- installing W2k? you need Office 2k -- have sold bajillions of licenses on these products when otherwise nobody'd have bothered since Word 5.1a.
(It would have been interesting to see what a split-up MS would have done about the OS-to-office umbilical. Any OS developer tries to encourage backward compatibility -- except at MS, where they seem to do exactly the opposite as a deliberate business MO.)
Personally I didn't see the "flame" in that post at all, but yours got modded that way. And, looking back, I'm trying to figure out what was "snooty" about the response.
What he's saying is that Apple isn't targeting people who would otherwise be building their own machines for $150 using a set of old shoelaces to stitch the case together. And you're basically right; Apple doesn't see its profit coming from trying to compete with bare bones, build-it-at-home types whose satisfaction in patching Linux would outweigh any sense of satisfaction at the "it just works" thing. I mean no offense at all, I relate to those people -- but you don't sell a cheap minimalist system to them. Because they won't buy it.
The Eisenhower interstate system was originally built as a defense measure -- fast transport -- and as an economic boon. Our government right now spends colossal amounts on highway maintenance, at the federal and state levels that money is enormous.
The "necessity" of those roads wasn't as apparent when they were built as it is now. Back then -- and I'm sure you can find local examples -- new roads really were a sort of lavish luxury as well as a way of planning -- God forbid -- economic development. (The "Lilac Way" highway that runs near by my house had a big parade when it opened and was, initially, largely used for picnics at [government-built] public BBQ parks. Now it's not a scenic Sunday drive any more; it's a big economic and traffic hub in suburbs that grew up around it.)
And for what it's worth, the fact that the government planned those highways led to some decisions we can still question. For example, our interstates all run right into and through the interior of our big cities. Neighborhoods that didn't have the political clout to resist having a freeway cut them in half got destroyed by those things. (The Rondo neighborhood in St. Paul died out, for an example local to me.) Talk about your social effects of government! So your objection to this wireless stuff, that it leads to gov't intrusion, does hold up.
Personally I don't think the line's that clear or clean, and I don't think it's stable over time. Airports are a legit thing for governments to be very involved in planning, yes? I know I don't want a new runway over my yard tomorrow. Would they have been in 1915? When voters think it's legit, the necessities we spend on change.
The one point I'll strongly agree on is the Government's oversight of communications technologies, though. The FCC is hardly being a good steward of broadcast "space" for television. I'm not sure wireless, which is a point to point model, is quite the same, but I see the objection.
Turned out the guy had a large financial interest in a towing company. Seriously.
So if someone cut you off in a lunch line, you'd walk away. Because clearly so you're so extremely mature... Except, in response to a message you didn't read right, you went off the deep end with a bunch of "This is crap! I'm above all that!" hoo-ey. You spewed attitude -- without actually reading what you were responding to.
Oh, no, you wouldn't be involved in office politics...
What you're so "uninterested" in is the reactions people have to your lack of social skills. You think when you alienate them -- "because you don't play those kind of games" -- that means you're a real straight talker. Good luck with that. Hope your job on the LAN team works out for you.
Tons of people drive drunk based on exactly the same rationale you just used. Which isn't to say you couldn't be right for you -- but maybe you want to seriously consider whether you're being exactly like those drunks leaving the bar.
(Personally, and I'm honest about it -- I drive like crap when someone I don't know very well is in the passenger seat.)