The problem is, that there are soooooo many theats that its impossible to take all of them seriously.
Do you have any evidence of this, or are you simply parroting back what the press claims with no supportive evidence? Don't we have a huge "intelligence" establishment? Isn't their job to filter and prioritize the threats? Isn't this memo evidence that they had successfully filtered and prioritized the threats in time to stop the attack? Doesn't this, in turn, contradict your premise?
What kind of logic is that? It shows that they knew of the possibility but in know what proves that they knew it would happen. If you knew it would happen and were going to let it happen why the hell would you have military excercises?
The parent is implying that the exercises were decoys to camouflage the true attackers and to drain resources from the real response.
Frankly, I have trouble believing that our government officials are so corrupt and morally bankrupt as to have supported or encouraged the events of 9/11. And yet, there are so many little inconsistencies and coincidences, that I have a powerful urge to run to my bedroom and hide under my covers.
You guys are all wrong. Here is the actual, still secret document read by the President:
Osama Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US
Osama bin Laden is a bad man with a rifle and a beard. Osama is not America's friend. Osama and his friends are bad men that want to hurt America.
Osama and his friend are saying bad things. They are saying very bad things. The things Osama and his friends are saying are bad, very bad.
Osama is trying to send bad people with bombs to America. He and his bad friends want to make the bombs explode near Americans, so that the bombs will hurt or kill Americans.
These are bad things to do. Somebody must stop them. The President of the United States of America may need to send people to stop Osama and his bad friends.
Americans will be happy when they find that Osama and his bad friends have been stopped. They would be very angry and very sad if Osama and his bad friends send bombs to America and explode them near Americans to hurt or kill them.
Some of Osama's bad friends say they will get on airplanes full of people in the United States and crash them into tall buildings. If this happens the people in the planes and in the buildings may be hurt or killed. The buildings may be damaged, or may even fall down. Big buildings like these are very expensive, and are often poorly insured. This would be very, very bad.
The President should probably give orders to people to make sure these things do not happen, for they are bad things. It may be worth doing things to avoid having Osama and his bad friends attack us in those bad ways. Even if many people have to do extra work, they might need to be asked to do this extra work.
In conclusion:
Osama and his bad friends are saying they will send people with bombs to America.
They plan on exploding the bombs near Americans to hurt or kill them.
They are also saying that they will crash airplanes into buildings in America. This would hurt or kill many people, and might damage the buildings or make them fall down.
The President should think about ordering some of his police and soldiers to stop Osama and his bad friends.
If Osama and his friends do these bad things, Americans will be very angry and very sad.
If the President takes too long to stop them, and Osama and his bad friends do these evil and terrible things, the President may need to send soldiers, spies, and airplanes to attack Osama and his friends. This may cause oil prices to go up, way up. The President may need to spend a lot of extra money on soldiers, airplanes, bombs and other war supplies. A lot more.
The people who buy and sell oil, or make, buy, or sell war supplies may need to make extra profits for a little while, but that is a sacrifice Americans will be glad to make in order to stop Osama and his bad friends. They will be even more glad, if other bad men in the general area where Osama and his bad friends are can also be attacked. At least one additional bad man should be found there and attacked, so that Americans can be even more glad. This will require even more profits for the oil and war supplies men, but they are good American Patriots, and Americans will be pleased to make even more sacrifices like that in order to attack the bad men.
Many American soldiers, spies, police, and firemen will be hurt or killed. Many others will also be hurt or killed by Osama and his bad friends, as well as by our spies and soldiers as they try to kill the bad men. These are also sacrifices Americans will be happy to make in order to attack the bad men.
If Americans are glad enough, they will reward the President and vote for him again, so that he will be President one more time. Americans will be gladdest when there is most excitement about the great deeds being done by their President.
This is the end of this very important warning about Osama and his bad friends. The President should think about all of words and ideas in it. He should think very carefully. He should decide very carefully. The President should think about what needs to be done, and then do it. Sometimes the obvious thing to do is not the best thing. Sometimes another thing might be better, in the end.
Why should teachers be motivated to switch? Because it is a moral obligation for non-profit organizations to use product that are more suitable for the common good and not just profitable for a monopoly.
Wrong.
If they are in California, their prime motivation is to save their school district money in order to avoid being laid off.
I don't know about the initial poster's school district, but in any district in California the decision would be very simple and very fast.
I've done exactly that several times with no major problems. By "major problems" I mean problems that are worse than those you have while working with MS Office. Funny you should mention figure placement. That has been a nightmare since I wrote my thesis using MS Word over 10 years ago. Don't pretend to tell me it works significantly better on MS Office than on Open Office.
I have Open Office on my laptop, which I have shared many times at meetings where PowerPoint presentations are projected. I have tricked people into using OO several times, and they don't even realize it until they go to a menu and see that it is different from what they are used to. Their slides show no such surprises.
BTW, I installed Office XP on it and it was never able to open any Word or PowerPoint documents for some bullshit reason, so I got rid of it.
It doesn't seem to work well. One machine says "Error while connecting to server responsible for smb://host/", but another works well with smb://user@host/". Well...
Of the stories you read in traditional media that aren't about politics, crimes, or disasters, more than half probably come from PR firms.
Scratch politics from that list. The Pentagon has its Office of Special Plans. I am suspicious about crimes and disasters as well, given the amount of money involved in dealing with them.
The problem I have is the reverse: print from linux to a windows-shared printer. I have managed to set it up successfully in the past, only to have it not work days later. It refuses to see a printer it had previously printed on perfectly well!
While we're all whining, it would be nice for konqueror to show windows shares when used in filesystem browsing mode.
It wouldn't hang if the sniffing was done on a separate thread from the GUI, so the GUI could repaint itself while the thread launched off all of the nmaps and whatever.
Alpha - Program compiles without errors, and can start.
Early Beta -Program can run for several minutes without crashing or doing something really bad.
Beta - Program can run for a while, and won't lock up the system if left running overnight.
RC1 - Program can be used to complete modest tasks, and save the data. Data can even be reloaded in another session.
RC2 - You have to know how to crash it. Otherwise it seems to be able to run for hours.
Version 1 - The program only crashes or screws up when you start pushing it to its limits, such as opening lots of files, using many of its features in a single session or using them repeatedly, or when you demo it to stockholders.
SP1 - Fixes most of the deluge of bugs that came in after Version 1
SP2 -Now only obscure and really difficult to resolve bugs exist. The damn thing actually works.
SP3 - You can actually get lots of work done, and user error far surpasses program error in frequency of screw-ups.
I've been starting to compare developing Eclipse RCP applications with C#/.NET, which I am finally starting to learn. To teach myself C#, I have been reading Professional C# (Programmer to Programmer), 3rd Ed. from Wrox. The book is fine, although learning about control loops and whatnot for yet another C-like language is not real exciting.
The interesting point is their constant hyping of.NET, especially in early chapters. Their religious zeal for.NET and C# is not matched by any clear superiority of those technologies over Java/Eclipse, although they try to convince you otherwise. It can't be long before significant numbers of developers simply start wandering away from the MS camp towards greener pastures, especially those that are 1) free, 2) really cross-platform (the book's authors make curiously equivocal remarks in this regard) and 3) provide a large ready-to-integrate framework like Eclipse.
Don't expect any earth-shaking change, just a gradual wearing away of the MS developer base and an increasingly desperate MS unable to evolve its business model.
In the long run, it's no different than pirate software or stealing extra copies of the NY Times from the newspaper box.
Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! You must pay for things from vending machines, otherwise it is theft. In the case of software there are copyright laws and licensing schemes that have been upheld by courts. Making unauthorizeed copies of copyrighted material is illegal. In the case of the NY Times there is a physical access method that forces you to pay, and the price is clearly marked.
This is not the case with freely available web sites. There are no laws and no access mechanisms that compel you to pay. You are comparing two entirely different things.
Whine all you want about advertising revenue as a business model, but consumers have no legal or moral obligation whatsoever to view your ads. You may charge a subscription price with a suitable authentication scheme, you may sell copyrighted copies of your content, but you cannot compel us to view ads on a freely accessible web site.
It is irritating that you present your personal opinion as something that obliges us to view ads. I challenge you to demonstrate that there is some credible legal compulsion for us to view them. In the end, if we are not compelled by law, we have no such obligation. Period.
You can always switch. BTW, at lunch I stopped by the mom and pop video and asked about their royalty payments. He said he pays a full $20 purchase price per video to the distributor, and an additional $4-5 for relatively recent releases. The latter surcharge is funnelled through the distributor to the copyright owners or licencees. Not so recent releases do not have the surcharge.
It doesn't sound like much, but I gather we needn't be too worried about the copyright owners' or licencees' profit margins.
Of course it is sustainable. Now, today, with what is on the market. I don't watch TV primarily because of the advertising. I don't mean I watch very little TV, I watch no TV.
However, I do watch TV shows. Currently, I am working my way through 24, commercial free. No expensive gizmos, I get the episodes on DVD from netflix or the local mom and pop (not corporate) video rental shop. I thus avoid 20 min of commercials per episode, with the added bonus of not having to wait a whole week between cliffhangers.
I get my commercial-free content, they get their DVD sales and royalties. Happy happy.
all these posters suggesting that web sites should find a different business model than banner ads are idiots.
Here's a rephrasing of your little gem:
All these posters suggesting that web sites should ensure that their business model has reliable revenue streams are idiots.
Or, more generally:
All these posters suggesting that businesses with recurring expenses should have something to sell to the consumer with sufficient margin to pay for expenses are idiots.
You are wrong. If the website is freely available, I have no legal or moral obligation to view the advertising. If the website conditions access on viewing advertising, that is their right and they will have to live with the consequences. But there is nothing whatsoever that complels me to view the advertising if I do not wish to.
There are no "social contracts." If you wish to abide by a policy that some may call a social contract, fine. I do it often myself. But do not confuse this with a legally binding contractual agreement. In modern USA society, if something is not proscribed by law, you are free to do it. Advertisers use the bogus term "social contract" to spin active rejection of advertising it in the direction of some sort of fraudulent activity. That is a preposterous stance.
Advertising has become a nearly intolerable bane of modern life. I certainly will continue to actively rid myself of it whenever I can.
Here are some of the core ideas that constantly come up in this sort of discussion:
Humanity can escape earthly cataclysms such as large asteroid impacts by going to outer space
It is economically attractive to obtain energy and mineral resources from other bodies in our solar system
Useful science gets done by astronauts during manned space missions
Mankind was somehow meant to expand beyond earth and populate the rest of the solar system, presumably the rest of our galaxy, and perhaps beyond
There are probably a few I have missed. These ideas are ludicrous. They are a modern day magical-religious cult that substitutes the ancient belief in a glorious afterlife on some spiritual plane with some hazy future in which mankind is travelling through space and setting up colonies in space itself and on other celestial bodies.
Oddly enough, I gather that most slashdotters would claim that it is up to me to demonstrate the fallacy of these ideas. It is not necessary to demonstrate that they are feasible, economically or even physically, or that there is any compelling objective reason to send humans to space, or that the "science" that is done during these missions has any value whatsoever. That is understood to be self-evident, an absolute truth. People such as myself are held to be backward-thinking naysayers of the sort that claimed that flight was impossible, or that electric lights, televison, automobiles and so on were also impossible, evil, unnatural, etc.
Think it through, folks. Grab a pencil and paper and calculate costs, masses, time intervals, available resources, and all of the many other issues involved. You won't get far unless you make some rather generous, if zany, assumptions, or assume that some radical new technology will soon appear that can overcome all serious obstacles.
These quasi-religious beliefs, in practice, serve the same purpose as traditional afterlife beliefs: they distract attention from our earthly problems and the wealthy tyrants who are responsible for them. Dream on, proles.
I agree. I'm not expecting to download movies-on-demand any time soon. We need a one or two order of magnitude increase in bandwith for it to start being practical. Just look at how long it takes to download a GNU/Linux distro. DVD content tends to be several times as large. I could walk back and forth to and from the video store numerous times in the time it would take to download the content. It would be healthier too, but I'm lazy and I drive there.
Far from agreeing with the "broadband kills DVD" premise, I await with bated breath DVD disks and burners with 20-50 Gb capacity. Those will last for several years before broadband becomes a significant threat to physical media.
I really have a hard time understanding the attraction that many people seem to feel towards commercial songs and movies.
That is a whole separate discussion, one which is probably as interminable as it is subtle, nuanced, and paradoxical. The gist, I think, is that human civilization occurred in concert with the dissemination of official, received culture. The core elements of that culture were 1) absolute authority of the keepers of the culture, 2) largely unquestioned acceptance of the cultural artefacts themselves, 3) ensuring that group practice and sharing of the artefacts was ingrained as a set of traditions that must be passed down generation to generation, and 4) associating the violation of the cultural practices with either divine punishment or severe punishment by the prevailing political regime. The cultural artefacts entailed absolute truths, and the purveyors of culture held absolute authority.
Sound like irrelevant babbling? Pop culture has replaced traditional religious and patriotic cultural artefacts with music, TV, movies, video games, porn, recreational mind-altering substance use, and the like. For a huge and ever-growing portion of society in the US and around the world, saints and deities, war heroes and great kings have been replaced by pop-media celebrities. The keepers of official culture have always exploited the general public, and have always fought to the death to defend their wealth and stranglehold on power.
To some extent, this is the price to be paid for a secular society that cherishes personal freedom and responsibility. There will always be suckers, however, and for them there is TV, iPods, gangsta culture, crappy pop music, etc. etc.
The alleged "clash of civilizations" some people believe is behind the "War on Terror" in part boils down to two cultural regimes that are incompatible with each other. Each regime perceives the other as a threat to its power, wealth, and influence, so they have both embarked on a vast campaign to destroy each other. As usual, we the exploitees on both sides of the fence are the losers.
A lone voice in the wilderness! How brash! How revolutionary! Charge a price that is proportional to the actual perceived value of a product! Mind-boggling!
A few months ago I had suggested a price of 25 US cents per song as being a good estimate of the "real" market value of CD tracks. 5 cents seems a bit low, but a dollar still seems outrageously high.
Now we will here the record companies cry out and rend their clothing at how unreasonable it is to actually abide by market forces.
I have just custom-built a computer based on the Pentium 4. I chose to build it myself in order to save quite a bit of money in comparison with similar commercial models. I planned to dual-boot Windows and Linux.
Fedora Core 3 Linux installed and worked just fine, but a test install of Windows 2000 showed that it could not deal with the 250 Gb hard disk, being able to only use 137 Gb. It failed to cooperate with the normal routine of installing Windows first, install linux second, and use grub as the boot manager.
I decided to purchase Windows XP to resolve the problem, with no certainty that it actually would, however. For some reason I had in my mind a price of $90, which I was only grudgingly willing to pay due to the lower cost of many commercial Linux distributions, to say nothing of my freely downloaded copy of Fedora. I was flabbergasted to find that Windows XP Professional costs $300, or $200 for an upgrade version. No compilers, no office suite, no multimedia suites, almost none of the many applications that come with Linux, for $300.
This seems to constitute a punitive measure against those who do not purchase pre-installed versions of Windows. It may also have the effect of pushing a certain segment of the market out of the Windows world. I am currently investigating means of running the commercial Windows programs I own under Cedega or Wine.
How does Microsoft justify charging more than $50 or $100 for this product?
Slashdot Mirror
Do you have any evidence of this, or are you simply parroting back what the press claims with no supportive evidence? Don't we have a huge "intelligence" establishment? Isn't their job to filter and prioritize the threats? Isn't this memo evidence that they had successfully filtered and prioritized the threats in time to stop the attack? Doesn't this, in turn, contradict your premise?
The parent is implying that the exercises were decoys to camouflage the true attackers and to drain resources from the real response.
Frankly, I have trouble believing that our government officials are so corrupt and morally bankrupt as to have supported or encouraged the events of 9/11. And yet, there are so many little inconsistencies and coincidences, that I have a powerful urge to run to my bedroom and hide under my covers.
Old mexican saying: El dinero es cabrón.
Osama Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US
Osama bin Laden is a bad man with a rifle and a beard. Osama is not America's friend. Osama and his friends are bad men that want to hurt America.
Osama and his friend are saying bad things. They are saying very bad things. The things Osama and his friends are saying are bad, very bad.
Osama is trying to send bad people with bombs to America. He and his bad friends want to make the bombs explode near Americans, so that the bombs will hurt or kill Americans.
These are bad things to do. Somebody must stop them. The President of the United States of America may need to send people to stop Osama and his bad friends.
Americans will be happy when they find that Osama and his bad friends have been stopped. They would be very angry and very sad if Osama and his bad friends send bombs to America and explode them near Americans to hurt or kill them.
Some of Osama's bad friends say they will get on airplanes full of people in the United States and crash them into tall buildings. If this happens the people in the planes and in the buildings may be hurt or killed. The buildings may be damaged, or may even fall down. Big buildings like these are very expensive, and are often poorly insured. This would be very, very bad.
The President should probably give orders to people to make sure these things do not happen, for they are bad things. It may be worth doing things to avoid having Osama and his bad friends attack us in those bad ways. Even if many people have to do extra work, they might need to be asked to do this extra work.
In conclusion:
If the President takes too long to stop them, and Osama and his bad friends do these evil and terrible things, the President may need to send soldiers, spies, and airplanes to attack Osama and his friends. This may cause oil prices to go up, way up. The President may need to spend a lot of extra money on soldiers, airplanes, bombs and other war supplies. A lot more.
The people who buy and sell oil, or make, buy, or sell war supplies may need to make extra profits for a little while, but that is a sacrifice Americans will be glad to make in order to stop Osama and his bad friends. They will be even more glad, if other bad men in the general area where Osama and his bad friends are can also be attacked. At least one additional bad man should be found there and attacked, so that Americans can be even more glad. This will require even more profits for the oil and war supplies men, but they are good American Patriots, and Americans will be pleased to make even more sacrifices like that in order to attack the bad men.
Many American soldiers, spies, police, and firemen will be hurt or killed. Many others will also be hurt or killed by Osama and his bad friends, as well as by our spies and soldiers as they try to kill the bad men. These are also sacrifices Americans will be happy to make in order to attack the bad men.
If Americans are glad enough, they will reward the President and vote for him again, so that he will be President one more time. Americans will be gladdest when there is most excitement about the great deeds being done by their President.
This is the end of this very important warning about Osama and his bad friends. The President should think about all of words and ideas in it. He should think very carefully. He should decide very carefully. The President should think about what needs to be done, and then do it. Sometimes the obvious thing to do is not the best thing. Sometimes another thing might be better, in the end.
Wrong.
If they are in California, their prime motivation is to save their school district money in order to avoid being laid off.
I don't know about the initial poster's school district, but in any district in California the decision would be very simple and very fast.
I have Open Office on my laptop, which I have shared many times at meetings where PowerPoint presentations are projected. I have tricked people into using OO several times, and they don't even realize it until they go to a menu and see that it is different from what they are used to. Their slides show no such surprises.
BTW, I installed Office XP on it and it was never able to open any Word or PowerPoint documents for some bullshit reason, so I got rid of it.
That alone would deserve an F for the course.
never. Sorry!
Scratch politics from that list. The Pentagon has its Office of Special Plans. I am suspicious about crimes and disasters as well, given the amount of money involved in dealing with them.
While we're all whining, it would be nice for konqueror to show windows shares when used in filesystem browsing mode.
Alpha - Program compiles without errors, and can start.
Early Beta -Program can run for several minutes without crashing or doing something really bad.
Beta - Program can run for a while, and won't lock up the system if left running overnight.
RC1 - Program can be used to complete modest tasks, and save the data. Data can even be reloaded in another session.
RC2 - You have to know how to crash it. Otherwise it seems to be able to run for hours.
Version 1 - The program only crashes or screws up when you start pushing it to its limits, such as opening lots of files, using many of its features in a single session or using them repeatedly, or when you demo it to stockholders.
SP1 - Fixes most of the deluge of bugs that came in after Version 1
SP2 -Now only obscure and really difficult to resolve bugs exist. The damn thing actually works.
SP3 - You can actually get lots of work done, and user error far surpasses program error in frequency of screw-ups.
What about version 3 of the beta?
The interesting point is their constant hyping of .NET, especially in early chapters. Their religious zeal for .NET and C# is not matched by any clear superiority of those technologies over Java/Eclipse, although they try to convince you otherwise. It can't be long before significant numbers of developers simply start wandering away from the MS camp towards greener pastures, especially those that are 1) free, 2) really cross-platform (the book's authors make curiously equivocal remarks in this regard) and 3) provide a large ready-to-integrate framework like Eclipse.
Don't expect any earth-shaking change, just a gradual wearing away of the MS developer base and an increasingly desperate MS unable to evolve its business model.
Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! You must pay for things from vending machines, otherwise it is theft. In the case of software there are copyright laws and licensing schemes that have been upheld by courts. Making unauthorizeed copies of copyrighted material is illegal. In the case of the NY Times there is a physical access method that forces you to pay, and the price is clearly marked.
This is not the case with freely available web sites. There are no laws and no access mechanisms that compel you to pay. You are comparing two entirely different things.
Whine all you want about advertising revenue as a business model, but consumers have no legal or moral obligation whatsoever to view your ads. You may charge a subscription price with a suitable authentication scheme, you may sell copyrighted copies of your content, but you cannot compel us to view ads on a freely accessible web site.
It is irritating that you present your personal opinion as something that obliges us to view ads. I challenge you to demonstrate that there is some credible legal compulsion for us to view them. In the end, if we are not compelled by law, we have no such obligation. Period.
It doesn't sound like much, but I gather we needn't be too worried about the copyright owners' or licencees' profit margins.
However, I do watch TV shows. Currently, I am working my way through 24, commercial free. No expensive gizmos, I get the episodes on DVD from netflix or the local mom and pop (not corporate) video rental shop. I thus avoid 20 min of commercials per episode, with the added bonus of not having to wait a whole week between cliffhangers.
I get my commercial-free content, they get their DVD sales and royalties. Happy happy.
Here's a rephrasing of your little gem:
All these posters suggesting that web sites should ensure that their business model has reliable revenue streams are idiots.
Or, more generally:
All these posters suggesting that businesses with recurring expenses should have something to sell to the consumer with sufficient margin to pay for expenses are idiots.
Call me an idiot, but that sure sounds idiotic.
You are wrong. If the website is freely available, I have no legal or moral obligation to view the advertising. If the website conditions access on viewing advertising, that is their right and they will have to live with the consequences. But there is nothing whatsoever that complels me to view the advertising if I do not wish to.
Advertising has become a nearly intolerable bane of modern life. I certainly will continue to actively rid myself of it whenever I can.
- Humanity can escape earthly cataclysms such as large asteroid impacts by going to outer space
- It is economically attractive to obtain energy and mineral resources from other bodies in our solar system
- Useful science gets done by astronauts during manned space missions
- Mankind was somehow meant to expand beyond earth and populate the rest of the solar system, presumably the rest of our galaxy, and perhaps beyond
There are probably a few I have missed. These ideas are ludicrous. They are a modern day magical-religious cult that substitutes the ancient belief in a glorious afterlife on some spiritual plane with some hazy future in which mankind is travelling through space and setting up colonies in space itself and on other celestial bodies.Oddly enough, I gather that most slashdotters would claim that it is up to me to demonstrate the fallacy of these ideas. It is not necessary to demonstrate that they are feasible, economically or even physically, or that there is any compelling objective reason to send humans to space, or that the "science" that is done during these missions has any value whatsoever. That is understood to be self-evident, an absolute truth. People such as myself are held to be backward-thinking naysayers of the sort that claimed that flight was impossible, or that electric lights, televison, automobiles and so on were also impossible, evil, unnatural, etc.
Think it through, folks. Grab a pencil and paper and calculate costs, masses, time intervals, available resources, and all of the many other issues involved. You won't get far unless you make some rather generous, if zany, assumptions, or assume that some radical new technology will soon appear that can overcome all serious obstacles.
These quasi-religious beliefs, in practice, serve the same purpose as traditional afterlife beliefs: they distract attention from our earthly problems and the wealthy tyrants who are responsible for them. Dream on, proles.
Far from agreeing with the "broadband kills DVD" premise, I await with bated breath DVD disks and burners with 20-50 Gb capacity. Those will last for several years before broadband becomes a significant threat to physical media.
That is a whole separate discussion, one which is probably as interminable as it is subtle, nuanced, and paradoxical. The gist, I think, is that human civilization occurred in concert with the dissemination of official, received culture. The core elements of that culture were 1) absolute authority of the keepers of the culture, 2) largely unquestioned acceptance of the cultural artefacts themselves, 3) ensuring that group practice and sharing of the artefacts was ingrained as a set of traditions that must be passed down generation to generation, and 4) associating the violation of the cultural practices with either divine punishment or severe punishment by the prevailing political regime. The cultural artefacts entailed absolute truths, and the purveyors of culture held absolute authority.
Sound like irrelevant babbling? Pop culture has replaced traditional religious and patriotic cultural artefacts with music, TV, movies, video games, porn, recreational mind-altering substance use, and the like. For a huge and ever-growing portion of society in the US and around the world, saints and deities, war heroes and great kings have been replaced by pop-media celebrities. The keepers of official culture have always exploited the general public, and have always fought to the death to defend their wealth and stranglehold on power.
To some extent, this is the price to be paid for a secular society that cherishes personal freedom and responsibility. There will always be suckers, however, and for them there is TV, iPods, gangsta culture, crappy pop music, etc. etc.
The alleged "clash of civilizations" some people believe is behind the "War on Terror" in part boils down to two cultural regimes that are incompatible with each other. Each regime perceives the other as a threat to its power, wealth, and influence, so they have both embarked on a vast campaign to destroy each other. As usual, we the exploitees on both sides of the fence are the losers.
The pr0n could stand some improvement, though...
A few months ago I had suggested a price of 25 US cents per song as being a good estimate of the "real" market value of CD tracks. 5 cents seems a bit low, but a dollar still seems outrageously high.
Now we will here the record companies cry out and rend their clothing at how unreasonable it is to actually abide by market forces.
Fedora Core 3 Linux installed and worked just fine, but a test install of Windows 2000 showed that it could not deal with the 250 Gb hard disk, being able to only use 137 Gb. It failed to cooperate with the normal routine of installing Windows first, install linux second, and use grub as the boot manager.
I decided to purchase Windows XP to resolve the problem, with no certainty that it actually would, however. For some reason I had in my mind a price of $90, which I was only grudgingly willing to pay due to the lower cost of many commercial Linux distributions, to say nothing of my freely downloaded copy of Fedora. I was flabbergasted to find that Windows XP Professional costs $300, or $200 for an upgrade version. No compilers, no office suite, no multimedia suites, almost none of the many applications that come with Linux, for $300.
This seems to constitute a punitive measure against those who do not purchase pre-installed versions of Windows. It may also have the effect of pushing a certain segment of the market out of the Windows world. I am currently investigating means of running the commercial Windows programs I own under Cedega or Wine.
How does Microsoft justify charging more than $50 or $100 for this product?