I think Gibson is over-romanticizing what goes on in Japan. Yes, like many Asian cultures, they are very receptive to fads influenced by the "latest thing" and they are something that is very rare in the West nowadays: technophilic.
I suspect, however, that, in their 140-year leap from virtual feudalism to modernity, not all has progressed at the same rate, and the technological effects on society are playing out in ways that have already shaped Western society.
It's only been in the past 30 years that Japan has been a truly affluent society. So the concerns of a society that has grown comfortable with widespread wealth are just beginning--there's a feeling, reinforced by the collapse of the Bubble Economy, that without hard work to maintain it, prosperity could vanish as quickly as it arrived. So the Western concerns with social equality, environmental protection, the extremely marginal dangers of new technology haven't set in yet.
In short, there's still a lot of the 1950's-era Europe and America in Japan. The benefits of technology are still much clearer than their downsides, and a workaholic, traditional culture still lingers. If, in the 50's or even the 20's, America had the same level of technology the Japanese do today there would undoubtedly be Mobil Girls, robot bars, and the like.
But don't forget the downside to this progress: Japan is not a tranquil, natural place for reflection that NPR and yuppie magazines sell to Americans: it is a chaotic place where almost all buildable land has been built upon and parks are sadly rare but extremely welcome escapes from the unrelieved concrete and cacophony of the city. Women have a distinctly second-class place: female CEO's aren't a rarity, they just don't happen. Cutting off land from business development is similarly rare, and the salaryman still comes to work at 7 or 8 and leaves at 10 to drink with the boss until 1 and expects to do this for one company his entire life.
So yes, consumer technology is a few minutes into the future, but Japanese society isn't necessarily "ahead", if such a concept even applies. But Western society would be better off for examining the Japanese to see what we've lost: the confidence that technology can still improve your life and is sometimes worth the cost.
My time to put it all together (assume I'm fast, using my company's billable rate):
$360
Making it $876, slower, considerably uglier, and much more likely to break than the low-end iMac. Plus it only runs Linux and Win95 at acceptable speeds. Woo. Hoo.
Only for people with more stock options than salary:-).
Seriously, it's not that much more expensive. Certainly you couldn't get an x86 multimedia system capable of running the latest stuff (and let's face it, this still means running Windoze until Apple ports Quicktime to FreeBSD (gotcha!)) for much than $100 less than an equivalent Apple system (caveat to x86 zealots, I use both daily so I know whereof I speak).
Take one of your current monitors and get a used Smurf (blue and white G3) on eBay if the $100 premium over an equivalent x86 system is that dear. You'll still get a speedy system (in os 9.1) with the cool case design and you won't spend that much.
How many residents of third world countries can afford a $500 computer and the $1200 in replacement parts that will be required in the first year? Or have a good internet connection to get Linux help? Or can afford the Microsoft Tax?
Again, if it's a private school, you can go elsewhere. If it's a public school, and the dean is cozy enough with the local law community to be able to screw you no matter the legalities (as it was in my public school), you have no choice, unless you have the money to go to private school.
With vouchers, even lower-middle and genuinely poor children can afford the lower rung of private schools. Yes, many of them will have flaws. But also remember, if that private school dean kicks you out, that's tuition money they don't get. If the public school dean gets you suspended, they still get money for you--unless there are vouchers.
Personally, I'm against them, as they'll make private schools jump through the same regulatory hoops that have made U.S. public schools the world-wide beacon of success they are.
> On the very slim chance this isn't a troll, I offer the following
It's not a troll; it's sarcasm. Deep, dark, hard sarcasm.
The point is, none of the questions Paul, who should stick to movie reviews, is asking are new. They haven't been new in the Media since Dolly, and science fiction has been dealing with this stuff since those stories you mention, before, and a lot more since. And the questions it asks (because it's gotten past the army-of-soulless-clones crap) are far more insightful. If these "bioethicist" (I must have missed that major at my school, who the hell died and made them god?) critics would just take a 1 hour trip down to their local library, 90% of these articles wouldn't be written, or might at least ask some intelligent questions.
If only there were a literature of speculative fiction to consider this in a thoughtful, entertaining, and imaginative fashion. That would be great. Maybe stories set not now, when cloning's future is uncertain, but hypothetically projecting it into the future to see what, given certain assumptions, things might be like. It would be even better if there were a history of such fiction to guide us.
Unfortunately, no one has ever asked these questions. Thank god people are doing so now. If only they had a history of serious speculation to guide them.
When playing non-zero sum games, kids will often still try to see who gets "more." So effectively turning in a non-zero sum game into a zero sum game.
As Stan Freberg once said, "is all how you look at it." That's only zero-sum if the sum you're worried about is "ranking" or "winning". If the sum is whatever the game's about, such as building paper cranes, it's still quite positive-sum.
What depresses me is when adults, usually left-wingers, insist on looking at life this way. They don't care that they have riches beyond the dreams of your average third-worlder or caveman, only that Jones across the street has "more", so therefore they feel "disadvantaged" and it's "unfair".
The only time someone else doing better than me bothers me is when they do it at my expense (*cough*spammers*cough*billgates*cough*).
Actually, before Imation, Apple had a "SuperDrive" that was a (Apple-led and then-) standard 1.44 MB floppy drive which could read both PC and Mac format floppies.
We're not only going to keep you from exercising your rights under copyright law, we're going to do it insidiously, by slowly buying legislation that takes away rights you had."
Er, yes, but that wouldn't happen if Government hadn't inserted itself in the process to "protect the consumer", much as this guy is proposing.
I really wish people who criticize capitalism would actually read Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations instead of reading paragraph-length summaries of it. The whole thrust of the book is not "pro-business" but in fact warns that when government and business get together, the consumer, the individual, the little guy gets screwed.
Yes, the RIAA is bad, but it's bad because it uses the government to secure what it can't get through the marketplace.
His best model for regulation is, of all things, the FCC. The FCC is a well-known corporate whore--keeping out microbroadcasters (local radicals, churches, hobbyists, i.e., people that he claims to favor) to ensure the profits of the very very few companies that run the broadcast companies.
How did there get to be so few companies controlling these outlets? None other than the very government regulation he claims is the better deal. Government regulation creates something called "regulatory barriers to entry" which are theoretically there to maintain standards and provide accountability.
In reality, as small business owners and entrepreneurs have found, regulations frequently enshrine current players and current practices at the expense of competition and innovation.
Witness that he's not getting huge play on TV: he's on...gasp...the Internet! This allegedly corporate-controlled place with no dissenting voices is his only home.
What we need is to regulate broadcast TV and radio like the Internet, not vice versa.
> The world finally begins to appreciate French film
We'll appreciate that most of it is long, windy, boring, and full of French people. Then we'll return to Canadian Sci-Fi Channel made-for-tv movies starring washed out American actors, and, worse, Canadians, and then we'll suddenly realize that reading is goooooood.
The point is all of those things existed in 1950 in their earlier forms--CDs and such did not. Their use remains largely the same--less convenient, of lower quality, but the fundamental experience is the same.
A man from the 1900's would read, because he couldn't listen to music (without going, by horse and buggy, to a concert). The idea of going to a city 30 miles away for the day would be very radical unless there was a railroad between the two. The maintenance of what he had (horses, houses without vacuum cleaners, etc.) would take up much of his day. You couldn't go to the store and buy a replacement for most things because standardized parts and assembly-line production were either not widespread or not invented yet.
So I'd say in 1950 you could watch TV, listen to the radio, drive a car, use the phone, use a vacuum cleaner, take a bath with hot water or use the bathroom without leaving the house, were you middle class. In 1900 you could do NONE of those things.
Yes, it's a matter of perspective, but that doesn't mean all experiences are equal, or that all changes are as visible to everyday life.
First, these inventions were either confined to prototypes or reserved for the very tiny elites of the 1800s if they were available at all. Mass sanitation is purely a 20th century phenomenon.
Second, life without the IC and lasers would be far less jarring (hey, I lived it, briefly, and I even remember bits of it) than life without lightbulbs. Go ahead. Try to live two days without electricity. Or the internal combustion engine.
Then spend a day without using a CD or a microchip. Listen to some audio tape, read a book, watch TV, talk on the telephone, drive a car. All of those, though many of them now include lasers and ICs, existed before 1950--only TV became popular shortly after 1950.
People wondered in the 1980s what the US was doing wrong compared to Japan and the Asian tigers. After all, even Red China had 10% or better per year growth, while we had a piddly 2-5%. Well, when you're at the bottom, it's easier to make progress.
For an education on this, I urge you to watch the PBS series (I think a BBC creation) "1900 House", which unlike Survivor or Real World, actually teaches you something. Just see how tough they had it compared to Leave It To Beaver. A Hoover is a wonderful thing.
People have already hacked the iMac for processor upgrades, video cards, etc.
Of course, I own a desktop machine, which uses nonstandard things like SDRAM, PCI, AGP, and IDE. So I couldn't put any pc hardware in there, no.
Of course, if I do, the SCSI card will in fact work, something that doesn't happen on Windoze. Sure, you've got tons of peripherals, they just all have IRQ conflicts. And you've got lots of software, just all of it's viruses.
And, unlike Linux, there's probably a driver for it.
Yeah, I mean, why should Richard Stallman be able to tell me I can't close my source and sell it proprietary? I mean, that's violating my rights to copy anything, claim it's mine, and sell it. Clearly, the GNU license is the work of pro-IP corporate shills.
It's always so nice to hear from people whose last experience with a Mac was during the Reagan presidency.
A lot has happened since then, pal, and it's a heck of a lot easier to muck about, extend, and control your user environment in today's Macs (even the non-Unix-ish ones) than it is in Windows. Is it as open as Open Source? Of course not. But then, it's not a network or a device developer's platform, either. OS X in fact is as easy to extend, with lots and lots of hooks for customization and...yes, whiny people, a command line.
However, no computers today are as easy to mess around with as Apple ][s were. They are much more complicated...the OS no longer fits in 20K, if you hadn't noticed. The "My C-64 was 133T and the XXX is lame" argument has gotten pretty silly, and it's sillier than ever now.
Using a Mac is not like fingerpainting. It's a bit more like acrylics--not as hard as oils, but with some practice and learning, you can do pretty amazing stuff. But yes, you do have to go read a little developer documentation first.
Actually, a flat amount is regressive, but a flat percent is truly flat--neither progressive nor regressive. A progressive system increases the actual cost to people in middle and higher classes (in theory). In actuality, a progressive system becomes regressive as wealthy people have the resources to lobby for loopholes.
Ever heard of Alexander Graham Bell (Bell as in Bell Telephone), the guy who invented the phone? He was Canadian.
He was Scottish. He moved to Ontario and left for Boston (a U.S. city, last time I looked). Invented and patented the telephone IN AMERICA.
He moved back to Nova Scotia late in life.
Canadian? Only if the U.S. can claim Karel Husa, Stravinski, and Hindemith (Czech, Russian, and German, in case Canadian schools resemble American public schools).
Re:Crippled for a reason
on
Golden Rice
·
· Score: 2
I'm curious if any of our neo-luddite friends out there are aware of the approval process any food must go through before being labeled fit for human consumption, both in Europe and the U.S.
Biafrans act as if it were software going from the first development build that ran to a final release in one step. News flash for those who would prefer to be scared than informed: If Microsoft went through a software development process similar to the food-approval process, we'd be bitching about the fact that, while Windows 2001 is supremely stable, it would be nice not to have to be limited to the 8.3 filename limitation. It's actually quite slow but with an emphasis on safety.
Any food, GM or not, has to go through an arduous, expensive, long approval process that addresses the very concerns the Know-Nothings bleat about. In fact, it checks for things they have never publicly considered.
Maybe we should make sure this stuff isn't going to kill millions before we unload tons of it on a third world country?
No matter how a new crop is created--using traditional methods or biotechnology tools--breeders are required by our colleagues at the U.S. Department of Agriculture to conduct field testing for several seasons to make sure only desirable changes have been made. They must check to make sure the plant looks right, grows right, and produces food that tastes right. They also must perform analytical tests to see whether the levels of nutrients have changed and whether the food is still safe to eat.
There are areas where they could be improved in terms of safety (but Biafrans choke at additional animal testing), and other areas where they could improve time-to-market and affordability of the process to increase the number of innovations made, make them cheaper (and thus available to people other than First World consumers). I'd be the last to say that governments are immune to criticism. But for Pete's sake please RTFM and get informed to what the real issues are instead of reading a headline and spewing off based on something you saw in a 1950's Sci-Fi flick whose science was written by English Lit majors.
Uh, my mom gets cable modem access for USD50 per month here, in the third poorest state in the US. The entire county surrouding has maybe 12,000 people, and most of it is farmland.
I would point out that there is no national license for broadband in the US.
Standard Oil, US Steel and a multitude of other exampes of a 'free market'
Yes, what examples of the 'free market' do you have? The ones you mention were granted subsidies or negotiated special licenses with the U.S. government. They had special protective laws passed. The government has a nasty history of subsidizing businesses until they get to monopoly size, then looking at their Frankenstein market and saying "the free market doesn't work! Look at that evil thing it created! Clearly, we have to intervene."
If government wouldn't interfere in the first place, few of the oft-cited monopolies (ALCOA - created by government fiat during WWII, the rail barons - again created by subsidy and licensing, etc.) would have arisen. In fact, the only monopoly that I can think of that doesn't have government help is Microsoft.
The reason wireless is so prominent in Europe is that the government-provided telephone service is unreliable, expensive, hard-to-get, and inflexible. Yet these telcos were created with the same reasoning that Canada is using for broadband.
Let's face it, if you didn't have the US on your border driving down prices through ruthless competition, you'd still be going ga-ga over the pushbutton phone.
I, too was working in a classic dot.com in May, just as the bubble burst. No problem, I thought, this company actually has a workable idea that could be profitable within two years, and they aren't just another portal or shopping site.
What I hadn't realized was that everyone except the CTO were part of the idiots that think the internet is a magic money machine where the rules of good business don't apply. You had an exec from a failed department store who was nominally a CFO acting as a COO, a COO acting as a CEO, a sales staff who would simply tell the customer anything they wanted to hear (and charge them a tenth of the cost, literally), whether or not ANY company could do it, let alone ours, and no one other than the CTO had ever been in a tech company, even peripherally.
As many people here know, a good tech department does not a well-run company make. Soon the tech staff became the scapegoat ("Well, if they would just work harder," said the marketroid, as she left at 5pm on Friday not to be seen till 9:30 Monday), people were fired right and left to make up for the investor shortfall, and the workload didn't decrease.
Somehow I'd remained quiet enough that I was deemed "safe" because I wasn't in my early 20's and therefore sympathetic to management (wrong). I got a nice promotion and pay raise which enabled me to find a company that was self-financed (that's a good thing) and more along with what I wanted to do to advance my career.
The silly politics at the dot.com had started long before the bubble burst, and this simply forced the issue. So it got me out of a bad situation in record time while putting me in a higher tax bracket and a nice spot on the resume. Oh, and now I'm the one who goes home at 5 (well, 6 or 7, but not 1 or 2). The new company has no marketroids, and everyone comes from both a tech and a substantive background in the field we're in.
Yes, I benefitted from the reality check. The bubble is dead, long live the tech sector!
Especially if the election official involved had been Republican, as this one is a Democrat. Fraud gets me worked up (*cough*Kennedy*cough*), but honest mistakes (*cough*JimmyCarter*cough*) don't bother me that much.
The only reason I actually voted for Bush was because of Gore's cozy relationship with the RIAA in support of his right-wing wife. Were it not for that, I would have voted Libertarian for the fourth time in a row. These two don't have enough difference between them to get excited about. Neither one will be the savior of mankind, and neither one will cause its doom.
However, the predictable silliness is highly entertaining, especially since I've voted on those sorts of ballots before. Maybe now they'll realize that Ron Paul really won South Carolina in 1988...
Slashdot Mirror
I think Gibson is over-romanticizing what goes on in Japan. Yes, like many Asian cultures, they are very receptive to fads influenced by the "latest thing" and they are something that is very rare in the West nowadays: technophilic.
I suspect, however, that, in their 140-year leap from virtual feudalism to modernity, not all has progressed at the same rate, and the technological effects on society are playing out in ways that have already shaped Western society.
It's only been in the past 30 years that Japan has been a truly affluent society. So the concerns of a society that has grown comfortable with widespread wealth are just beginning--there's a feeling, reinforced by the collapse of the Bubble Economy, that without hard work to maintain it, prosperity could vanish as quickly as it arrived. So the Western concerns with social equality, environmental protection, the extremely marginal dangers of new technology haven't set in yet.
In short, there's still a lot of the 1950's-era Europe and America in Japan. The benefits of technology are still much clearer than their downsides, and a workaholic, traditional culture still lingers. If, in the 50's or even the 20's, America had the same level of technology the Japanese do today there would undoubtedly be Mobil Girls, robot bars, and the like.
But don't forget the downside to this progress: Japan is not a tranquil, natural place for reflection that NPR and yuppie magazines sell to Americans: it is a chaotic place where almost all buildable land has been built upon and parks are sadly rare but extremely welcome escapes from the unrelieved concrete and cacophony of the city. Women have a distinctly second-class place: female CEO's aren't a rarity, they just don't happen. Cutting off land from business development is similarly rare, and the salaryman still comes to work at 7 or 8 and leaves at 10 to drink with the boss until 1 and expects to do this for one company his entire life.
So yes, consumer technology is a few minutes into the future, but Japanese society isn't necessarily "ahead", if such a concept even applies. But Western society would be better off for examining the Japanese to see what we've lost: the confidence that technology can still improve your life and is sometimes worth the cost.
My time to put it all together (assume I'm fast, using my company's billable rate):
$360
Making it $876, slower, considerably uglier, and much more likely to break than the low-end iMac. Plus it only runs Linux and Win95 at acceptable speeds. Woo. Hoo.
Only for people with more stock options than salary :-).
Seriously, it's not that much more expensive. Certainly you couldn't get an x86 multimedia system capable of running the latest stuff (and let's face it, this still means running Windoze until Apple ports Quicktime to FreeBSD (gotcha!)) for much than $100 less than an equivalent Apple system (caveat to x86 zealots, I use both daily so I know whereof I speak).
Take one of your current monitors and get a used Smurf (blue and white G3) on eBay if the $100 premium over an equivalent x86 system is that dear. You'll still get a speedy system (in os 9.1) with the cool case design and you won't spend that much.
How many residents of third world countries can afford a $500 computer and the $1200 in replacement parts that will be required in the first year? Or have a good internet connection to get Linux help? Or can afford the Microsoft Tax?
Again, if it's a private school, you can go elsewhere. If it's a public school, and the dean is cozy enough with the local law community to be able to screw you no matter the legalities (as it was in my public school), you have no choice, unless you have the money to go to private school.
With vouchers, even lower-middle and genuinely poor children can afford the lower rung of private schools. Yes, many of them will have flaws. But also remember, if that private school dean kicks you out, that's tuition money they don't get. If the public school dean gets you suspended, they still get money for you--unless there are vouchers.
Personally, I'm against them, as they'll make private schools jump through the same regulatory hoops that have made U.S. public schools the world-wide beacon of success they are.
> On the very slim chance this isn't a troll, I offer the following
It's not a troll; it's sarcasm. Deep, dark, hard sarcasm.
The point is, none of the questions Paul, who should stick to movie reviews, is asking are new. They haven't been new in the Media since Dolly, and science fiction has been dealing with this stuff since those stories you mention, before, and a lot more since. And the questions it asks (because it's gotten past the army-of-soulless-clones crap) are far more insightful. If these "bioethicist" (I must have missed that major at my school, who the hell died and made them god?) critics would just take a 1 hour trip down to their local library, 90% of these articles wouldn't be written, or might at least ask some intelligent questions.
If only there were a literature of speculative fiction to consider this in a thoughtful, entertaining, and imaginative fashion. That would be great. Maybe stories set not now, when cloning's future is uncertain, but hypothetically projecting it into the future to see what, given certain assumptions, things might be like. It would be even better if there were a history of such fiction to guide us.
Unfortunately, no one has ever asked these questions. Thank god people are doing so now. If only they had a history of serious speculation to guide them.
When playing non-zero sum games, kids will often still try to see who gets "more." So effectively turning in a non-zero sum game into a zero sum game.
As Stan Freberg once said, "is all how you look at it." That's only zero-sum if the sum you're worried about is "ranking" or "winning". If the sum is whatever the game's about, such as building paper cranes, it's still quite positive-sum.
What depresses me is when adults, usually left-wingers, insist on looking at life this way. They don't care that they have riches beyond the dreams of your average third-worlder or caveman, only that Jones across the street has "more", so therefore they feel "disadvantaged" and it's "unfair".
The only time someone else doing better than me bothers me is when they do it at my expense (*cough*spammers*cough*billgates*cough*).
Actually, before Imation, Apple had a "SuperDrive" that was a (Apple-led and then-) standard 1.44 MB floppy drive which could read both PC and Mac format floppies.
"The wheel turns, does it not, Ambassador?"
We're not only going to keep you from exercising your rights under copyright law, we're going to do it insidiously, by slowly buying legislation that takes away rights you had."
Er, yes, but that wouldn't happen if Government hadn't inserted itself in the process to "protect the consumer", much as this guy is proposing.
I really wish people who criticize capitalism would actually read Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations instead of reading paragraph-length summaries of it. The whole thrust of the book is not "pro-business" but in fact warns that when government and business get together, the consumer, the individual, the little guy gets screwed.
Yes, the RIAA is bad, but it's bad because it uses the government to secure what it can't get through the marketplace.
Hell Frickin' Yeah!
His best model for regulation is, of all things, the FCC. The FCC is a well-known corporate whore--keeping out microbroadcasters (local radicals, churches, hobbyists, i.e., people that he claims to favor) to ensure the profits of the very very few companies that run the broadcast companies.
How did there get to be so few companies controlling these outlets? None other than the very government regulation he claims is the better deal. Government regulation creates something called "regulatory barriers to entry" which are theoretically there to maintain standards and provide accountability.
In reality, as small business owners and entrepreneurs have found, regulations frequently enshrine current players and current practices at the expense of competition and innovation.
Witness that he's not getting huge play on TV: he's on...gasp...the Internet! This allegedly corporate-controlled place with no dissenting voices is his only home.
What we need is to regulate broadcast TV and radio like the Internet, not vice versa.
Harrison Ford already proved the mechanism for interplanar travel in Air Force One! Just use a rope and slide from one plane to the other.
> The world finally begins to appreciate French film
We'll appreciate that most of it is long, windy, boring, and full of French people. Then we'll return to Canadian Sci-Fi Channel made-for-tv movies starring washed out American actors, and, worse, Canadians, and then we'll suddenly realize that reading is goooooood.
The point is all of those things existed in 1950 in their earlier forms--CDs and such did not. Their use remains largely the same--less convenient, of lower quality, but the fundamental experience is the same.
A man from the 1900's would read, because he couldn't listen to music (without going, by horse and buggy, to a concert). The idea of going to a city 30 miles away for the day would be very radical unless there was a railroad between the two. The maintenance of what he had (horses, houses without vacuum cleaners, etc.) would take up much of his day. You couldn't go to the store and buy a replacement for most things because standardized parts and assembly-line production were either not widespread or not invented yet.
So I'd say in 1950 you could watch TV, listen to the radio, drive a car, use the phone, use a vacuum cleaner, take a bath with hot water or use the bathroom without leaving the house, were you middle class. In 1900 you could do NONE of those things.
Yes, it's a matter of perspective, but that doesn't mean all experiences are equal, or that all changes are as visible to everyday life.
Oof, you're a bit harsh.
First, these inventions were either confined to prototypes or reserved for the very tiny elites of the 1800s if they were available at all. Mass sanitation is purely a 20th century phenomenon.
Second, life without the IC and lasers would be far less jarring (hey, I lived it, briefly, and I even remember bits of it) than life without lightbulbs. Go ahead. Try to live two days without electricity. Or the internal combustion engine.
Then spend a day without using a CD or a microchip. Listen to some audio tape, read a book, watch TV, talk on the telephone, drive a car. All of those, though many of them now include lasers and ICs, existed before 1950--only TV became popular shortly after 1950.
People wondered in the 1980s what the US was doing wrong compared to Japan and the Asian tigers. After all, even Red China had 10% or better per year growth, while we had a piddly 2-5%. Well, when you're at the bottom, it's easier to make progress.
For an education on this, I urge you to watch the PBS series (I think a BBC creation) "1900 House", which unlike Survivor or Real World, actually teaches you something. Just see how tough they had it compared to Leave It To Beaver. A Hoover is a wonderful thing.
People have already hacked the iMac for processor upgrades, video cards, etc.
Of course, I own a desktop machine, which uses nonstandard things like SDRAM, PCI, AGP, and IDE. So I couldn't put any pc hardware in there, no.
Of course, if I do, the SCSI card will in fact work, something that doesn't happen on Windoze. Sure, you've got tons of peripherals, they just all have IRQ conflicts. And you've got lots of software, just all of it's viruses.
And, unlike Linux, there's probably a driver for it.
Please.
Yeah, I mean, why should Richard Stallman be able to tell me I can't close my source and sell it proprietary? I mean, that's violating my rights to copy anything, claim it's mine, and sell it. Clearly, the GNU license is the work of pro-IP corporate shills.
It's always so nice to hear from people whose last experience with a Mac was during the Reagan presidency.
A lot has happened since then, pal, and it's a heck of a lot easier to muck about, extend, and control your user environment in today's Macs (even the non-Unix-ish ones) than it is in Windows. Is it as open as Open Source? Of course not. But then, it's not a network or a device developer's platform, either. OS X in fact is as easy to extend, with lots and lots of hooks for customization and...yes, whiny people, a command line.
However, no computers today are as easy to mess around with as Apple ][s were. They are much more complicated...the OS no longer fits in 20K, if you hadn't noticed. The "My C-64 was 133T and the XXX is lame" argument has gotten pretty silly, and it's sillier than ever now.
Using a Mac is not like fingerpainting. It's a bit more like acrylics--not as hard as oils, but with some practice and learning, you can do pretty amazing stuff. But yes, you do have to go read a little developer documentation first.
Actually, a flat amount is regressive, but a flat percent is truly flat--neither progressive nor regressive. A progressive system increases the actual cost to people in middle and higher classes (in theory). In actuality, a progressive system becomes regressive as wealthy people have the resources to lobby for loopholes.
Ever heard of Alexander Graham Bell (Bell as in Bell Telephone), the guy who invented the phone? He was Canadian.
He was Scottish. He moved to Ontario and left for Boston (a U.S. city, last time I looked). Invented and patented the telephone IN AMERICA.
He moved back to Nova Scotia late in life.
Canadian? Only if the U.S. can claim Karel Husa, Stravinski, and Hindemith (Czech, Russian, and German, in case Canadian schools resemble American public schools).
I'm curious if any of our neo-luddite friends out there are aware of the approval process any food must go through before being labeled fit for human consumption, both in Europe and the U.S.
Biafrans act as if it were software going from the first development build that ran to a final release in one step. News flash for those who would prefer to be scared than informed: If Microsoft went through a software development process similar to the food-approval process, we'd be bitching about the fact that, while Windows 2001 is supremely stable, it would be nice not to have to be limited to the 8.3 filename limitation. It's actually quite slow but with an emphasis on safety.
Any food, GM or not, has to go through an arduous, expensive, long approval process that addresses the very concerns the Know-Nothings bleat about. In fact, it checks for things they have never publicly considered.
Maybe we should make sure this stuff isn't going to kill millions before we unload tons of it on a third world country?
Maybe you should actually read what happens before whimpering in fear. From Are Bioengineered Foods Safe? from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration:
No matter how a new crop is created--using traditional methods or biotechnology tools--breeders are required by our colleagues at the U.S. Department of Agriculture to conduct field testing for several seasons to make sure only desirable changes have been made. They must check to make sure the plant looks right, grows right, and produces food that tastes right. They also must perform analytical tests to see whether the levels of nutrients have changed and whether the food is still safe to eat.
There are areas where they could be improved in terms of safety (but Biafrans choke at additional animal testing), and other areas where they could improve time-to-market and affordability of the process to increase the number of innovations made, make them cheaper (and thus available to people other than First World consumers). I'd be the last to say that governments are immune to criticism. But for Pete's sake please RTFM and get informed to what the real issues are instead of reading a headline and spewing off based on something you saw in a 1950's Sci-Fi flick whose science was written by English Lit majors.
Uh, my mom gets cable modem access for USD50 per month here, in the third poorest state in the US. The entire county surrouding has maybe 12,000 people, and most of it is farmland.
I would point out that there is no national license for broadband in the US.
Standard Oil, US Steel and a multitude of other exampes of a 'free market'
Yes, what examples of the 'free market' do you have? The ones you mention were granted subsidies or negotiated special licenses with the U.S. government. They had special protective laws passed. The government has a nasty history of subsidizing businesses until they get to monopoly size, then looking at their Frankenstein market and saying "the free market doesn't work! Look at that evil thing it created! Clearly, we have to intervene."
If government wouldn't interfere in the first place, few of the oft-cited monopolies (ALCOA - created by government fiat during WWII, the rail barons - again created by subsidy and licensing, etc.) would have arisen. In fact, the only monopoly that I can think of that doesn't have government help is Microsoft.
The reason wireless is so prominent in Europe is that the government-provided telephone service is unreliable, expensive, hard-to-get, and inflexible. Yet these telcos were created with the same reasoning that Canada is using for broadband.
Let's face it, if you didn't have the US on your border driving down prices through ruthless competition, you'd still be going ga-ga over the pushbutton phone.
I, too was working in a classic dot.com in May, just as the bubble burst. No problem, I thought, this company actually has a workable idea that could be profitable within two years, and they aren't just another portal or shopping site.
What I hadn't realized was that everyone except the CTO were part of the idiots that think the internet is a magic money machine where the rules of good business don't apply. You had an exec from a failed department store who was nominally a CFO acting as a COO, a COO acting as a CEO, a sales staff who would simply tell the customer anything they wanted to hear (and charge them a tenth of the cost, literally), whether or not ANY company could do it, let alone ours, and no one other than the CTO had ever been in a tech company, even peripherally.
As many people here know, a good tech department does not a well-run company make. Soon the tech staff became the scapegoat ("Well, if they would just work harder," said the marketroid, as she left at 5pm on Friday not to be seen till 9:30 Monday), people were fired right and left to make up for the investor shortfall, and the workload didn't decrease.
Somehow I'd remained quiet enough that I was deemed "safe" because I wasn't in my early 20's and therefore sympathetic to management (wrong). I got a nice promotion and pay raise which enabled me to find a company that was self-financed (that's a good thing) and more along with what I wanted to do to advance my career.
The silly politics at the dot.com had started long before the bubble burst, and this simply forced the issue. So it got me out of a bad situation in record time while putting me in a higher tax bracket and a nice spot on the resume. Oh, and now I'm the one who goes home at 5 (well, 6 or 7, but not 1 or 2). The new company has no marketroids, and everyone comes from both a tech and a substantive background in the field we're in.
Yes, I benefitted from the reality check. The bubble is dead, long live the tech sector!
Yes. I would. Really.
Especially if the election official involved had been Republican, as this one is a Democrat. Fraud gets me worked up (*cough*Kennedy*cough*), but honest mistakes (*cough*JimmyCarter*cough*) don't bother me that much.
The only reason I actually voted for Bush was because of Gore's cozy relationship with the RIAA in support of his right-wing wife. Were it not for that, I would have voted Libertarian for the fourth time in a row. These two don't have enough difference between them to get excited about. Neither one will be the savior of mankind, and neither one will cause its doom.
However, the predictable silliness is highly entertaining, especially since I've voted on those sorts of ballots before. Maybe now they'll realize that Ron Paul really won South Carolina in 1988...