Can you cite a source that says this? This contradicts everything I've heard about both Sony and Nintendo's arrangements (I understood gamecube was initially sold at a loss as well).
This rumor can't be true for the simplest and most basic reason - the money doesn't work.
You build consoles and sell them at a huge loss. It's a multi-billion dollar gamble only the largest players can attempt. If you win, you get a piece of the action for every product sold on your (dominant) platform, _and_ over time, your margin on the hardware comes back out of the red, and you make a profit selling that too. Sony has now been profitable on the PS2 hardware for some moderately short period of time.
In order to make the billions necessary to go it again in the next round, you have a nice, long run with each platform. This is one of the good things about the console business model. Rather than the upgrade race the PC software vendors and hardware manufacturers like to suck you into, the console vendors are incentivized to make each revision of their hardware go as long as possible, so as to maximize their profits.
While Sony may be concerned about Microsoft's growing marketshare, last I checked XBox wasn't even close to PS2's penetration. Trying to pre-empt xbox2 may be on Sony's mind, but given that sales of PS2 hardware and software are exceptionally strong (in fact, record breaking) right now, releasing a successor product will just kill their money factory. Yes, I'm sure prototype hardware will be floating around before long, and I'm sure the first games that will come out on the system have already begun. But Sony will wait as long as humanly possible before a retail release. Only lagging sales, or (much more likely) Microsoft and Nintendo will push them out of the gate, and it's way too soon for that.
Someone comes along and points out X's shortcommings and calls for its replacement. Someone else (who fancies themselves older and/or wiser) comes along and disagrees strenuously, and tries to make X11 out to be the greatest UI ever created. Look... it's "network transparent," it's "flexible," it's "fast," we can just extend it to give it whatever features it lacks, etc. etc.
Ugh. I don't buy it.
To put it in perspective, lots of Unix has a big organization problem. X is just emblematic. It's "lower-level" APIs are a big stinking mess. Ever tried to program against it without a super-high-level bit of middleware? Then let's talk about how nice it is. If you're not up on this, try reading JWZ's rants on it (many written as he was porting Netscape)? X is a 4 foot high sandwich of crap, layer after layer between you and the display, full of massive, sucking complexity, the bugs, inefficiency... even during this supposedly wonderful "network transparent" windowing this foul stew shows its colors, as no combination of two applications or X servers quite looks the same. It's a verifiability nightmare, too, of course (and for instance, disabling X's many attempts to listen and talk on the network are one of the first things you do to secure a machine properly - and for real security, you avoid installing X altogether).
The API design itself is atrocious. The much-touted "flexibility" is really code for laziness - it was a lot of work to do a proper GUI, so no one did it. The mishmash of X server extensions, window managers, font handling systems, etc. that's been cobbled together has led to a nightmare for both programers and users, as any given application doesn't just require "X", but a complex recipe of libraries and versions, and an end-user experience where no two applications look or act the same... or even remotely similar... Where cutting and pasting between windows is a pipe dream, and young geniuses still struggle to configure fonts properly for linux distributors.
Or to just put it plainly, as my friend (who from time to time would write X windows gadgets) would say, it's only about twice as hard as managing the video memory yourself.
"And thank god it's not all standardized, or we'd never have had all those wonderful experiments with different ways to do a GUI that never actually happened." In practice, no system is immune from its initial design choices, and it's been an endless series of awful MacOS knockoffs, multi-button madness, color-pallete spinning goofiness. Is X11 a "GUI experimenters toolbench?" Then I think it's time for something a little more grounded in everyday realities of computer use.
I'm not even warmed up yet. I mean, X is still peppering the filesystem with a hedge-maze of exotically formatted text files describing the hex colors of every pixel of the trim of every window for a variety of appliations and classes in a complex inheritance and assignment scheme that few X developers even understand. Check it out, your XDefaults are "human readable."
Shall we even discuss its security model?
Modern Linux has tried to make its peace with X through wrappers, and we write against Tcl/Tk, Qt, inside the Gnome or KDE framework, and yet still the focus groups come back crying... we try to blame overfamiliarity with windows, but the problems are bigger... all of Unix (and of course Linux) suffers from the same class of problems that X does; as, for instance, an application needs to prompt you to insert a series of CD's, but there is no "single, authoritiative, standard" place to go find out what CD drives are installed on the computer, and what their device names are (yes, we know what they _usually_ are), and finding out if any of the CDs are already inserted involves parsing the text output of a proc file or a mount command, and so on and so forth... And all of this is being done by a messy bash script... so it's no surprise this functionatlity is broken even in, for instance, RedHat's own v8 package manager... I hope you can grasp the metaphor.
It's a mess. Patches won't clean it up. Frankly, it's time we took the whole GUI back to the drawing board. But even if MacOS is the end-all/be-all, we can do it a hell of a lot better than we do in X.
Following are some choice quotes from Don Hopkins' essay:
X-Windows is the Iran-Contra of graphical user interfaces: a tragedy of political compromises, entangled alliances, marketing hype, and just plain greed. X-Windows is to memory as Ronald Reagan was to money. Years of "Voodoo Ergonomics" have resulted in an unprecedented memory deficit of gargantuan proportions. Divisive dependencies, distributed deadlocks, and partisan protocols have tightened gridlocks, aggravated race conditions, and promulgated double standards.
X has had its share of $5,000 toilet seats -- like Sun's Open Look clock tool, which gobbles up 1.4 megabytes of real memory! If you sacrificed all the RAM from 22 Commodore 64s to clock tool, it still wouldn't have enough to tell you the time. Even the vanilla X11R4 "xclock" utility consumed 656K to run. And X's memory usage is increasing.
...
X was designed to run three programs: xterm, xload, and xclock. (The idea of a window manager was added as an afterthought, and it shows.) For the first few years of its development at MIT, these were, in fact, the only programs that ran under the window system. Notice that none of these program have any semblance of a graphical user interface (except xclock), only one of these programs implements anything in the way of cut-and-paste (and then, only a single data type is supported), and none of them requires a particularly sophisticated approach to color management. Is it any wonder, then, that these are all areas in which modern X falls down?
...
As a result, one of the most amazing pieces of literature to come out of the X Consortium is the "Inter Client Communication Conventions Manual," more fondly known as the "ICCCM", "Ice Cubed," or "I39L" (short for "I, 39 letters, L"). It describes protocols that X clients ust use to communicate with each other via the X server, including diverse topics like window management, selections, keyboard and colormap focus, and session management. In short, it tries to cover everything the X designers forgot and tries to fix everything they got wrong. But it was too late -- by the time ICCCM was published, people were already writing window managers and toolkits, so each new version of the ICCCM was forced to bend over backwards to be backward compatible with the mistakes of the past.
The ICCCM is unbelievably dense, it must be followed to the last letter, and it still doesn't work. ICCCM compliance is one of the most complex ordeals of implementing X toolkits, window managers, and even simple applications. It's so difficult, that many of the benefits just aren't worth the hassle of compliance. And when one program doesn't comply, it screws up other programs. This is the reason cut-and-paste never works properly with X (unless you are cutting and pasting straight ASCII text), drag-and-drop locks up the system, colormaps flash wildly and are never installed at the right time, keyboard focus lags behind the cursor, keys go to the wrong window, and deleting a popup window can quit the whole application. If you want to write an interoperable ICCCM compliant application, you have to crossbar test it with every other application, and with all possible window managers, and then plead with the vendors to fix their problems in the next release.
In summary, ICCCM is a technological disaster: a toxic waste dump of broken protocols, backward compatibility nightmares, complex nonsolutions to obsolete nonproblems, a twisted mass of scabs and scar tissue intended to cover up the moral and intellectual depravity of the industry's standard naked emperor.
Using these toolkits is like trying to make a bookshelf out of mashed potatoes.
- Jamie Zawinski
...
The fundamental problem with X's notion of client/server is that the proper division of labor between the client and the server can only be decided on an application-by-application basis. Some applications (like a flight simulator) require that all mouse movement be sent to the application. Others need only mouse clicks. Still others need a sophisticated combination of the two, depending on the program's state or the region of the screen where the mouse happens to be. Some programs need to update meters or widgets on the screen every second. Other programs just want to display clocks; the server could just as well do the updating, provided that there was some way to tell it to do so.
...
What this means is that the smarter-than-the-average-bear user who actually managed to figure out that
snot.fucked.stupid.widget.fontList: micro
is the resource to change the font in his snot application, could be unable to figure out where to put it. Suzie sitting in the next cubicle will tell him, "just put it in your.Xdefaults", but if he happens to have copied Fred's.xsession, he does an xrdb.xresources, so.Xdefaults never gets read. Susie either doesn't xrdb, or was told by someone once to xrdb.Xdefaults. She wonders why when she edits.Xdefaults, the changes don't happen until she 'logs out', since she never reran xrdb to reload the resources. Oh, and when she uses the NCD from home, things act `different', and she doesn't know why. "It's just different sometimes."
Joe Smartass has figured out that XAPPLRESDIR is the way to go, as it allows him to have separate files for each application. But he doesn't know what the class name for this thing is. He knows his copy of the executable is called snot, but when he adds a file Snot or XSnot or Xsnot, nothing happens. He has a man page which forgot to mention the application class name, and always describes resources starting with '*', which is no help. He asks Gardner, who fires up emacs on the executable, and searches for (case insensitve) snot, and finds a few SNot strings, and suggests that. It works, hooray. He figures he can even use SNot*fontList: micro to change all the fonts in the application, but finds that a few widgets don't get that font for some reason. Someone points out that he has a line in his.xresources (or was it a file that was #included in.xresources) of the form *fucked*fontList: 10x22, which he copied from Steve who quit last year, and that of course that resources is 'more specific' than his, whatever the fuck that means, so it takes precedence. Sorry, guy. He can't even remember what application that resource was supposed to change anymore. Too bad.
...
On the whole, X extensions are a failure. The notable exception that proves the rule is the Shaped Window extension, which was specifically designed to implement round clocks and eyeballs. But most application writers just don't bother using proprietarty extensions like Display PostScript, because X terminals and MIT servers don't support them. Many find it too much of a hassle to use more ubiquitous extensions like shared memory, double buffering, or splines: they still don't work in many cases, so you have to be prepared to do without them. If you really don't need the extension, then why complicate your code with the special cases? And most applications that do use extensions just assume they're supported and bomb if they're not.
I like your way of thinking, but I have to raise two points, just playing devil's advocate.
First, how do you define educational purposes? Only accessing.edu? Only if it's related to class? Only if it doesn't involve any Hollywood actors? No mp3's?
I hope I won't have to belabor the point. You can't define it. It's undefinable. It's like if you went into a library and said "only educational books." Shakespeare read the pulp fiction and shoddy histories of his day and produced the greatest art of western civilization.
The hubris, the smashing stupidity of a school demanding to "limit" it's network to "educational purposes only" is simply breathtaking to me. Prevent abuse. Write clever rules on your Cisco. Heck, even enforce the law! But don't ever try to dress up some hamheaded censorship regime as "education."
The only other point I'd make is about the competition to provide internet service to campus dwellings that you mention. You have to think bigger. The campus dwellings themselves are a racket. Even in public universities it's common practice to force undergraduates to live in the dorms for at least a year, and if you live in the dorms you're required to buy into the meal plans, etc. All of which cost multiples of what you can pay on the free market for rental spaces, restaurants, etc.
Of course, you can pay more, too, if you want to live posh and eat fancy every night. But when you're poor and on financial aid that doesn't quite cover everything, it's infuriating that the schools perpetrate this racket - forcing you to pay $700 a month in rent when you could pay as little as $250 off campus, pay $11 a meal when you can cook for yourself for $2, or pay McD's $5...
So, fuck internet... force them to make _housing_ competititve.
It is black-letter fact, the arcade is dead. Has been dead, in fact, for a long time. From the article itself:
Eddie Adlum, publisher of arcade magazine RePlay, said arcades have been in decline ever since the rise of console gaming. About a decade ago, he estimates there were 10,000 arcades, but that number has since dropped to about 3,000. Hit games such as ``Ms. Pacman'' once sold 100,000 machines, but today, typical hits sell maybe 4,000 to 6,000 units, Adlum said.
However, there is something very similar to the arcade which is growing moderatealy well both in the U.S. and especially in Asia. It's a kind of mutation of the "internet cafe." It seems, while kids won't plunk down dollars to play conventional arcade games, they will go out and "rent" a PC to play Counterstrike or Starcraft for an hour or three. Multiplayer games, it seems, still have draw. And thus the article goes on...
Lately, the rise of online gaming, especially in Asia, has transformed many arcades from stand-alone machines to networks of connected computers where players can play against each other or anyone else over the Internet. That transition plays to the Xbox's strength, since it is primed for broadband gaming, and it also plays to Microsoft's strong relationship with Sega, which is a big supporter of online gaming.
So they think they will somehow tap into this growing phenomenon, instead of merely blowing 50 million or so producing expensive collectors items. I'm not holding my breath, but anything is possible, I guess.
Hmm... This calls for some TCP geekhood and some strong math. I am way too hung over for math. Let's just talk about it in broad strokes first.
If I'm tuning this package, I can make these delays REAL big. I mean, email is one of those systems where a false positive resulting in even a... let's say an **8 hour** delay to a legitimate message would still be considered perfectly fine for most purposes. There's fuzzy logic in play here; I'm thinking not all delays will be equal. But what if you were just really harsh on suspected spam? Not such a loss IMO. Of course... I haven't considered that you will have increased reliability problems trying to hold a stream open for 8 hours, but remember, a legitimate mailserver will keep resending, and as we go bayesian on servers, perhaps we will learn to resend for a little longer as well? Or perhaps there is another protocol solution (i.e. letting the sender know they're being delayed for spam... so perhaps giving them the option to reformulate their message and resend?) Let's just press on. The precise amount of the delay may not necessarily be important.
If I'm sending 50 million messages (a modest spammer's run, if I'm well enough informed) and each one holds me on the line for 8 hours that means 400 million hours if run serially. At the 8192 concurrent thread barrier that's still almost 50,000 hours (~5 years)... with mathematical convenience, to do this entire run in 8 hours you will require **50 million** concurrent threads? Or should I have just stayed in bed longer?
Now it's looking like the exact length of the delays, and the exact number of concurrent threads is not actually something worth too much niggling debate. We just have to get familiar with the orders of magnitude we're dealing with.
Consider the protocol-to-data ratio of an SMTP transaction over TCP alone. How much is data and how much is just protocol overhead in a given mail transaction? We can figure this out down to the last bit, but I'm going to just throw out the hypothetical notion that when you have to initiate a new SMTP transaction for every message you send, the bandwidth overhead for doing this millions of times is not inconsiderable.
And we have to think of the other end. Spammers may write themselves custom TCP/IP stacks, but receivers certainly will not. Consider AOL. AOL encompasses some significant percentage of your list of victims. What is AOL going to do with anywhere _near_ that many simultaneous connections... ***from just one spammer?*** Why, call the FBI, of course! It's a DOS attack!
I'll stop now. I wouldn't be surprised if there were other angles on this I haven't considered. But at first blush it doesn't seem nearly as easy to beat as you suggest.
Perversely I think the biggest danger in this technique is that it may become widespread and then force spammers to really confront Bayesian filtering head-on. Of course, just thinking aloud (and this probably is undoable for privacy reasons, but just to open a line of speculation) you can do some interesting things with these kinds of filters... retain lists of email addresses that you've received mail from (and/or replied to) more than once... they get a lower score (and a lower delay) than first-time senders... etc. etc. So it's not clear even with very well-designed spam (another cost increase for spammers!) that you could win against the filter.
I mean, yeah, it's amusing to catch the editors making a mistake, but by now I find the people snidely pointing this out to be only about 100x as annoying as the occasional duplication. In fact, I think the editors shouldn't change a thing about their process - occasional duplication can even be good... as for instance in this case, where I apparently missed the story the first time, and am glad I got a 2nd chance to learn about this.
This is big news, after all - I'm not totally informed about the field, but to me this sounds like the first anti-spam measure which has the potential to be very effective without any "false positive" loss. The more people who see this story, the more people that will (like me) suddenly decide it is a great idea to go check this project out for installation on all their mailservers.
I can explain it in a few sentences. A 12 year old can understand the concept.
Let's assume the patent office is staffed with an army of experts who are ceritifed geniuses with eidetic memories - they never grant a "frivolous," redundant or overbroad patent. This is already so absurd I can't write it without chuckling, but let's grant them that much. It doesn't matter.
If I want to write unencumbered code (you know, the only kind you can sell, as a software developer), I have to be able to memorize, or search (with 100% accurracy, heh) the entire database of software patents. I also have to keep up with every new patent as it is granted (and if I'm sharp, applied for). That's only... I dunno, a few thousand a day? Since this is impossible, every piece of code ever written in the past, present or future is a ticking time-bomb of patent litigation.
Dear sir,
We have discovered (by means we will not disclose) that your code violates our patent on commenting inside of curly braces. We deign to offer you the possibility of paying us for the privelege, at $50 per slash-mark.
Don't want to pay up? Think our patent is overbroad? Heh. We'll have a wonderful time listening to your arguments in the 15-year-long civil lawsuit that we'll slap on you, and anyone you ever did business with. I hope you won't have trouble coming up with the $5 million or so you'll need for legal fees!
I'm going to give you a mile-wide benefit of the doubt. I'm hoping that we can talk a bit more and you can explain what you and your colleagues at the school dug into.
What you're suggesting is radically incompatible with my understanding of the facts as presented by the news media. Are you saying there's a media trend, or conspiracy, to exaggerate Enron's scandal?
I read about some accounting fraud... big, massive accounting fraud. Maybe I'm just out of the loop... sounded bigger than 1 or 2 people alone could have accomplished at a public company of that nature.
We've got paper shredding... These same one or two people that did the fraud shredded the papers?
Then there were... let's see... improper loans, used to try to prolong the fraud? What did they call them... "prepays?" The latest revelations hitting the press indicate knowning involvement in the accounting coverup by several of Enron's banking partners (including J.P. Morgan Chase)... You know, the "shut up and delete this email" business. So... is this the same one or two guys? One of them also worked at Chase, too?
Then there's Arthur Andersen. Are you suggesting... one of these two guys was in addition an Andersen employee? And Andersen's team of auditors was... very small? Not much oversight?
I seem to remember talk about "improper" bonuses and compensation being paid to executives... Which executives? One of your two "fradulent intenters" paying off the other?
There was the electric utility deregulation scandal in Florida... when they turned out the lights. "Deathstar," does that sound familiar? Same guys?
There was the testimony of whisteblowers... did you read that? How do your ideas fit with their testimony?
And the government involvement... the thing that stuck in my mind was Enron's lobbying for... I think it was called an "exemption" from the "Investment Company Act of 1940"? I'm not an economist... I think I read somewhere that their offshore holdings were important for concealing their debt...
I'm really dying to hear your version of the story. Maybe I'm just not clear on your definition of "fradulent intent." Please, in as much detail as you can stand. If you weren't extremely forthcoming, like for instance, citing sources, addressing every point specifically, etc. it would be hard to convince me. Extraordinary allegations, extraordinary proof, etc.
You've read quite a bit too much into what I wrote. I'm not suggesting ex-post-facto prosecutions (though they do happen in this country); just making a point with a hypothetical example.
I would argue that, in addition to the very low conviction rate for these crimes, it's the very short sentences (leaving aside that they're often served in more "comfortable" federal facilities) that contribute to the condition you describe.
If there were, say, 80 or so convictions among former Enron employees, service providers (like banks), and government officials involved in Enron's activities, and those people spent the rest of their life behind bars, I think you will find awareness growing by leaps and bounds. After all, these folks keep up on the news a lot better than "blue collar" criminals.
Oligarchies and all-encompassing enlightenment? You just need to take a little more time and read more slowly, I think.
Boy, that Louis Rosetto... now whenever you have anything positive-sounding to say about the internet, people suddenly flash back to his dayglo wacko-rag and think you're trying to sell them scientology.
Good points, but do you not expect your traffic to be private because that's "Right"? Or because of the surveillance free-for-all that's been happening in this country?
If the same person (let's say) is trying strenuously to invade your privacy by every available means, largely succeeding, and then arguing for even more liberties with you on the grounds that "look - you already have so little privacy," it's OK to call foul.
I don't expect to be able to leave my doors unlocked and my windows open and not get robbed. But that doesn't mean it's not a crime.
Also, if you want a cheap, powerful way to encrypt your phone calls, consider PGPFone. I haven't looked at in a few years, but it looked rather serviceable at the time.
If the notion of privacy in our communications is going to be utterly discarded, I rather wish the school had elected to eavesdrop on every phone call made on campus to help catch thieves, domestic abusers and other violent criminals, etc.
There are plenty of people who say what goes on the internet shouldn't be private; that there's no expectation of privacy there. I guess we'll get into this issue a bit on this topic. Just please don't forget to have a little imagination. This is all new. We're making the rules as we go along. Sometimes I think if the phone had been invented last year there wouldn't be an expectation of privacy on phone calls either.
Remember this is a "private" institution doing this, i.e. not a law enforcement agency. Remember that just because they can write a fancy terms of service that authorizes them to do whatever they want with the network, it doesn't make their actions legitimate, let alone moral.
Finally, most interestingly, remember that Fasttrack (i.e. Kazaa, etc) is encrypted over the wire (see this link). There's nothing saying that the whole thing won't be reverse-engineered and cracked sooner or later, but to my knowledge, that hasn't happened yet... of course, that could just be last I checked.
The internet is dangerous to a lot of people. Traditional media companies don't like it because it provides "unwantedly democratic" alternatives to the traditional mass media. It allows free trade of digital media (i.e. P2P), threatening the publishing/retail trusts. Internet radio is nipping (ever so delicately, just now) at the heels of traditional radio. Heck, it even threatens the phone company's monopoly on voice calls (i.e. VoIP, which is growing exponentially).
Clearly it must be stopped.
Their goal is to reduce the ownership of all user-facing internet services to a managably small set of large owners. Coincidentally, these will be the big media and phone companies that are threatened by the internet in the first place. When all the independents and smaller players have been eliminated, and less than a dozen RBOCs and cable operators control all broadband (and thus almost all internet access) in the U.S., they will kill what threatens them by simply raising the price.
Some number of months from now, users will find that their ISP has suddenly renegotiated their deal. The new choices will be cheap but brutally capped broadband that is useless for P2P, streaming media, and VoIP... pay-per-K offerings that ensure these things are prohibitively expensive... and classic, "business class" $1,500+ T1-style service.
Surveillance of users will become not only more pervasive but more standardized, as the Internet trust announces trade groups and landmark deals that support both police and "private" law enforcement efforts.
Of course, in addition to prices going up, this guarantees that investments in new infrastructure (to provide better services) will now entirely cease. Without competition to threaten offering anything better, the bells and cable companies will do what they have always done (before TA96). Absolutely nothing.
Oh, you thought the cable companies and bells would compete with each other? This one really slays me. Why spend billions competing when you can just form a trust and price-fix instead? This is capitalism 101. And when the number of players is that small, it's virtually guaranteed to happen.
I know, I'm a paranoid lunatic. None of this could really happen here, right? I mean, just because it's already happening in Australia, Canada, and England... pure coincidence.
Of course, this tragedy will cause lots of collateral damage. The first victim that comes to mind is the video game industry, which has lots of innovative, "harmless" uses for massive, cheap bandwidth. There are many others as well.
But for all you folks watching in amusement as the big players stumbled trying to crush P2P, VoIP, etc. with lawsuits and bribed-legislation, this is the other shoe dropping.
On the bright side, the market for wireless technology might be looking up... that is, until the FCC turns out to be less than forthcoming with licenses, rules, and considerations necessary to allow wireless broadband alternatives. Watch for it.
First let me say that I really like VMWare. I think they did a fabulous job - it's one of the better-engineered pieces of software that I've ever seen. All the times that I've had the pleasure to use it, it's worked for me without a hitch, despite the subtle complexity required to do an application like that well.
Furthermore, I hope that one day we'll see a real, meaningful government reform at Microsoft that puts them out of the business of "innovating" away various application markets.
My needs for VMs have been sparse. Most often I'm testing something (like an installer) that sprays stuff all over Windows, and it's just simplest to roll it back using the Undoable disk when the test is over. Or maybe I've got some code I want to check out that I consider really dangerous. Once in a while, if I'm stuck running Windows, but I need a Unix service on the network for a little while, I can raise a virtual linux server and keep it running as long as I need it. Far more convenient than hauling out another box.
I can see the attraction in virtual machines. You have so much more control. Bluescreens don't hang everything - only the particular virtual CPU they happen on. And VMWare's code is so freaking efficient, I can play counterstrike with a few of these virtual servers running, answering queries in the background. But it seems silly for virtual machines to become institutionalized in that role. To me, that's evidence of failure in the OS design. You have a reliability problem? Fix it in the OS. You have a control problem - something you wanted a VM and Undoable disks to solve? Add a feature to the filesystem. You have a security problem? Definitely an OS issue.
VMWare et al are great for ad hoc stuff and I think sooner or later most developers would be glad to have it around, but if you plan on running it all the time, in a server environment for instance, then it's just a big kluge. Your OS wasn't _designed_ to run inside itself... it's a big resource waste. Fix the problems in the OS. Compartmentalize, if that's what the environment demands. But don't do it this way. It's just goofy.
You may be right, but I don't like your image
on
Should you Fear Google?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I think it's too general. I could use your image to justify bait-and-switch salesmanship, false advertising, predatory contracts, usury (i.e. knee-cap tingling interest rates), racism (no colored/irish/whatever allowed) or sexism (we only hire/allow men, don't ask don't tell?)... All of these are policies that in the laissez faire world our ancestors inherited, were allowed. Don't like the people using them? Then just switch.
And what our ancestors did was go further, and make laws. They decided that just switching doesn't do the job. It appears society isn't so healthy when "just switching" (even when it's possible) is your only redress for some problems.
I like google - and I think the complaints about caching, accountability for penalization, etc. are bunk. But I'll play devil's advocate. It's easy, since my tinfoil hat is already at hand. Google may be mining all that information it collects about your activities just to give you better results, but we don't know that. And since they're by far the biggest game in town, they get near-monopoly benefits for their information gathering scheme.
It's pretty much like if libraries refused to be accountable about their customer records. And if the library was suddenly practically the biggest clearinghouse for information on the planet.
They may not be selling or abusing the information, but they're refusing to say they aren't. You can say it's a private company, they can do what they want, but that's a lack of imagination. AT&T used to be "just a private company" too. Its descendants are _still_ trying to sell your phone usage records.
Of course, there are plenty of people who just don't understand what their privacy is for in the first place. To all these people, how about letting me come on over and hide in your house and watch what you do? I think for most of these folks, once they get a girlfriend/boyfriend... suddenly they're really against it. Well, I don't want to speak for everyone.
How do you want to feel if you say something and it turns out to be wrong? Praised? Rewarded? It's natural to feel hurt when someone points out a flaw in your "carefully rationalized" position. Well, debate (especially rebuttal you can't seem to answer) is not going to make you feel good. How much flattery did you want for "Legalized vote swapping is dumber. Two wrongs don't make a right"?
Try to stay on topic. The lengths of the posts is about as important as your spelling mistakes.
You wanted to pop in, and deliver a slogan. "Two wrongs do not make a right." You can't defend it because it's indefensible in this context. It's just not true - no, more than that. It doesn't even make sense.
Your claim that the "2WDMAW" principle somehow underlies our legal system is totally without merit. Our legal system works by reciprocity and punishment. It may compare favorably with vigilantism, but it still "punishes" criminals (and losers in civil court) - just in a more "civilized" way (note that quite a few people couldn't square execution with "civilized" even in quotes, but we'll let that go). Most distinctly it is meant to remove the violence from civil disagreement and the abuse of power in criminal prosecution.
Thus, your rebutal, actually, is what's dumb. Though I prefer "desperate" if I consider the adjectives more carefully.
"Vote swapping is wrong because it corrupts the system. Voting is not a commodity market. You have the right to vote if you want to, but you can't buy and sell votes or assign them to a proxy and you shouldn't be able to trade them either."
All you're doing is repeating yourself. Adding more slogans. How does it corrupt the system? How are votes not already a commodity market? I'm glad you can understand there is a difference between "buying, selling, assignment" and trading, though it almost doesn't matter.
I'm not even of a certain predisposition on the matter. I just honestly can't think of what harm can come as long as at the end of the day all it boils down to is consenting adults making their own free speech, and their own free, private decisions in the voting booth in which they are physically present.
If people are dumb enough to sell their votes (or not vote at all, as they do now), you have much bigger problems. Start working on our educational system, on reform in the mass media. Democracy only works as well as they do. As long as the big vacuum of counterargument from you continues, I'll tend to believe it's poor education and poor mass-media journalism which is corrupting the system. Vote swapping, especially inasmuch as it allows people to better express their political preferences, even appears as though it will help matters.
As for your ideas about human thought, I'll suggest you quit while you're behind. Maybe come back to it after you've addressed what's on topic.
So you're of the "accuse what you are" school of thought. It's your tone, since you raise the issue, which is brash and conceited - you lay down curt conclusions that don't make sense (and then, as you discuss analogies, you verge on the absurd) and still, I notice, refuse to back up your on-topic points. You'd rather pin labels and run off.
Convince yourself you accomplished something with that, but don't expect to convince me... and you probably won't do so well with others.
The line between analogy and straw men is clear; I judge your insistence on obfuscating the two as deliberate. Making a straw man would have been to lump you with some radical political movement further along from merely commenting negatively on vote swapping, in an attempt to stain you with their repugnance and/or extremism. If this "straw man" were different in substance enough from yourself it wouldn't even be that - merely misrepresentation. What you are doing now, in other words. I can see why you'd wish you could accuse me of it. It shifts the subject off your original points, if you're getting uncomfortable there, and you get to sound like a real debate team member, using a fancy term.
Perhaps you really don't understand this. Analogies are not "a form of argument." They're just tools in a toolbox. Mine is meant to show what I call a flaw in your line of thinking. It's much more productive simply to follow along, see what the point is, and try to refute it. But perhaps you can't.
Because some people misuse analogies sometimes does not give you much grounds for your campaign. It appears to me like little more than an excuse to complicate criticism of your ideas. The misused analogies you consider are your straw man. My advice, switch to something more productive, like fact checking. Everyone messes that up, and there you'd have a real campaign.
First you say "human thought works by rationalization." Explaining further (I think) you only say we're "great at rationalization." Then you talk about how humans aren't purely logical (not big news) and mention cognitive dissonance (I see you did indeed take Psych 101). It looks like your ideas about how people think are a moving target. I'm pointing out that symbolic thought - the ability to relate the specific to the general and back again that is the heart of analogy - is essential to human reasoning. You might as well campaign for people to stop bending their knees because someone kicked you.
You asserted vote swapping was wrong, and that two wrongs don't make a right. I claim both are specious... I made counterarguments. The more you avoid answering them, the more it appears as though you can't.
I'm sorry if I don't hold out much hope. If you follow form, you'll stay off topic. If you do come back to it, I predict you'll either declare you don't feel the need to share any explanations, or you'll offer something similarly poor and call it an explanation itself. But perhaps you could pleasantly surprise me?
OK, it looks like you won't get it without help. You've confused an analogy with a straw man. I will explain in detail. Straw man = tainting a position with extremes, legitimate or even exaggerated. Analogy = unrelated but structurally similar example.
You don't like how it challenges your idea, so you (I suppose rather audaciously) denounce analogies in general, and then radically "misunderstand." On purpose, I like to hope.
I can only find your explanation for human thought specious without further elaboration.
I'm not surprised you seem ready to bow out without supporting (or even really explaining) any of your ideas. Consider which is more "civilized" - your hitting and running with some quips and one liners and ducking and dodging when the questions get tough, or my calling your spade a spade.
I can see why you don't like analogies. You can't seem to understand them. But I caution you against imagining that no one else will. Human thought often works by analogy, and most people are passably good at it.
You get me thinking, though. I should put something in my sig that requires people to have a certain level of intelligence and background knowledge before posting. Or at least something about misapplying the "straw man" label. Do you really want a lecture on what a straw man is?
Let me spell it out for you. Vote swapping is not wrong, nor is any other strategy for deciding how to vote that occurs to rational, consenting adults, and furthermore, two wrongs often do make a right. As when we punish criminals, for instance.
What's appalling is that you imagine there are ever contributions that do not come with strings attached. The politician needs the contribution, because as you point out, campaigns aren't "free" - not even cheap! They have to think about what they did to get it in the past, and what they will do to get it again in the future, no matter how cynical everyone is or pretends not to be in between.
"Paying for speech" makes it "relevant." I don't even know if you know what you're talking about. Would you at least agree, if you could campaign for free, the system would work better?
But what I really want to hear is exactly how this "subversion" works. Please, in detail.
That man is beating and mugging that lady in the street. Let's stop him - throw him to the ground, put him in a jail cell!
No, you say! Harming that man is just as bad as harming that lady. Two wrongs don't make a right!
Bah. Your moral clarity is so murky it looks like it might give someone a disease.
Vote swapping is about as dangerous as crossing your eyes. But if you're so quick to want to censor political speech, I just hope you're as vocal about "campaign contributions."
Slashdot Mirror
Can you cite a source that says this? This contradicts everything I've heard about both Sony and Nintendo's arrangements (I understood gamecube was initially sold at a loss as well).
This rumor can't be true for the simplest and most basic reason - the money doesn't work.
You build consoles and sell them at a huge loss. It's a multi-billion dollar gamble only the largest players can attempt. If you win, you get a piece of the action for every product sold on your (dominant) platform, _and_ over time, your margin on the hardware comes back out of the red, and you make a profit selling that too. Sony has now been profitable on the PS2 hardware for some moderately short period of time.
In order to make the billions necessary to go it again in the next round, you have a nice, long run with each platform. This is one of the good things about the console business model. Rather than the upgrade race the PC software vendors and hardware manufacturers like to suck you into, the console vendors are incentivized to make each revision of their hardware go as long as possible, so as to maximize their profits.
While Sony may be concerned about Microsoft's growing marketshare, last I checked XBox wasn't even close to PS2's penetration. Trying to pre-empt xbox2 may be on Sony's mind, but given that sales of PS2 hardware and software are exceptionally strong (in fact, record breaking) right now, releasing a successor product will just kill their money factory. Yes, I'm sure prototype hardware will be floating around before long, and I'm sure the first games that will come out on the system have already begun. But Sony will wait as long as humanly possible before a retail release. Only lagging sales, or (much more likely) Microsoft and Nintendo will push them out of the gate, and it's way too soon for that.
Ugh. I don't buy it.
To put it in perspective, lots of Unix has a big organization problem. X is just emblematic. It's "lower-level" APIs are a big stinking mess. Ever tried to program against it without a super-high-level bit of middleware? Then let's talk about how nice it is. If you're not up on this, try reading JWZ's rants on it (many written as he was porting Netscape)? X is a 4 foot high sandwich of crap, layer after layer between you and the display, full of massive, sucking complexity, the bugs, inefficiency... even during this supposedly wonderful "network transparent" windowing this foul stew shows its colors, as no combination of two applications or X servers quite looks the same. It's a verifiability nightmare, too, of course (and for instance, disabling X's many attempts to listen and talk on the network are one of the first things you do to secure a machine properly - and for real security, you avoid installing X altogether).
The API design itself is atrocious. The much-touted "flexibility" is really code for laziness - it was a lot of work to do a proper GUI, so no one did it. The mishmash of X server extensions, window managers, font handling systems, etc. that's been cobbled together has led to a nightmare for both programers and users, as any given application doesn't just require "X", but a complex recipe of libraries and versions, and an end-user experience where no two applications look or act the same... or even remotely similar... Where cutting and pasting between windows is a pipe dream, and young geniuses still struggle to configure fonts properly for linux distributors.
Or to just put it plainly, as my friend (who from time to time would write X windows gadgets) would say, it's only about twice as hard as managing the video memory yourself.
"And thank god it's not all standardized, or we'd never have had all those wonderful experiments with different ways to do a GUI that never actually happened." In practice, no system is immune from its initial design choices, and it's been an endless series of awful MacOS knockoffs, multi-button madness, color-pallete spinning goofiness. Is X11 a "GUI experimenters toolbench?" Then I think it's time for something a little more grounded in everyday realities of computer use.
I'm not even warmed up yet. I mean, X is still peppering the filesystem with a hedge-maze of exotically formatted text files describing the hex colors of every pixel of the trim of every window for a variety of appliations and classes in a complex inheritance and assignment scheme that few X developers even understand. Check it out, your XDefaults are "human readable."
Shall we even discuss its security model?
Modern Linux has tried to make its peace with X through wrappers, and we write against Tcl/Tk, Qt, inside the Gnome or KDE framework, and yet still the focus groups come back crying... we try to blame overfamiliarity with windows, but the problems are bigger... all of Unix (and of course Linux) suffers from the same class of problems that X does; as, for instance, an application needs to prompt you to insert a series of CD's, but there is no "single, authoritiative, standard" place to go find out what CD drives are installed on the computer, and what their device names are (yes, we know what they _usually_ are), and finding out if any of the CDs are already inserted involves parsing the text output of a proc file or a mount command, and so on and so forth... And all of this is being done by a messy bash script... so it's no surprise this functionatlity is broken even in, for instance, RedHat's own v8 package manager... I hope you can grasp the metaphor.
It's a mess. Patches won't clean it up. Frankly, it's time we took the whole GUI back to the drawing board. But even if MacOS is the end-all/be-all, we can do it a hell of a lot better than we do in X.
Following are some choice quotes from Don Hopkins' essay:
X-Windows is the Iran-Contra of graphical user interfaces: a tragedy of political compromises, entangled alliances, marketing hype, and just plain greed. X-Windows is to memory as Ronald Reagan was to money. Years of "Voodoo Ergonomics" have resulted in an unprecedented memory deficit of gargantuan proportions. Divisive dependencies, distributed deadlocks, and partisan protocols have tightened gridlocks, aggravated race conditions, and promulgated double standards.
X has had its share of $5,000 toilet seats -- like Sun's Open Look clock tool, which gobbles up 1.4 megabytes of real memory! If you sacrificed all the RAM from 22 Commodore 64s to clock tool, it still wouldn't have enough to tell you the time. Even the vanilla X11R4 "xclock" utility consumed 656K to run. And X's memory usage is increasing.
...
X was designed to run three programs: xterm, xload, and xclock. (The idea of a window manager was added as an afterthought, and it shows.) For the first few years of its development at MIT, these were, in fact, the only programs that ran under the window system. Notice that none of these program have any semblance of a graphical user interface (except xclock), only one of these programs implements anything in the way of cut-and-paste (and then, only a single data type is supported), and none of them requires a particularly sophisticated approach to color management. Is it any wonder, then, that these are all areas in which modern X falls down?
...
As a result, one of the most amazing pieces of literature to come out of the X Consortium is the "Inter Client Communication Conventions Manual," more fondly known as the "ICCCM", "Ice Cubed," or "I39L" (short for "I, 39 letters, L"). It describes protocols that X clients ust use to communicate with each other via the X server, including diverse topics like window management, selections, keyboard and colormap focus, and session management. In short, it tries to cover everything the X designers forgot and tries to fix everything they got wrong. But it was too late -- by the time ICCCM was published, people were already writing window managers and toolkits, so each new version of the ICCCM was forced to bend over backwards to be backward compatible with the mistakes of the past.
The ICCCM is unbelievably dense, it must be followed to the last letter, and it still doesn't work. ICCCM compliance is one of the most complex ordeals of implementing X toolkits, window managers, and even simple applications. It's so difficult, that many of the benefits just aren't worth the hassle of compliance. And when one program doesn't comply, it screws up other programs. This is the reason cut-and-paste never works properly with X (unless you are cutting and pasting straight ASCII text), drag-and-drop locks up the system, colormaps flash wildly and are never installed at the right time, keyboard focus lags behind the cursor, keys go to the wrong window, and deleting a popup window can quit the whole application. If you want to write an interoperable ICCCM compliant application, you have to crossbar test it with every other application, and with all possible window managers, and then plead with the vendors to fix their problems in the next release.
In summary, ICCCM is a technological disaster: a toxic waste dump of broken protocols, backward compatibility nightmares, complex nonsolutions to obsolete nonproblems, a twisted mass of scabs and scar tissue intended to cover up the moral and intellectual depravity of the industry's standard naked emperor.
Using these toolkits is like trying to make a bookshelf out of mashed potatoes.
- Jamie Zawinski
...
The fundamental problem with X's notion of client/server is that the proper division of labor between the client and the server can only be decided on an application-by-application basis. Some applications (like a flight simulator) require that all mouse movement be sent to the application. Others need only mouse clicks. Still others need a sophisticated combination of the two, depending on the program's state or the region of the screen where the mouse happens to be. Some programs need to update meters or widgets on the screen every second. Other programs just want to display clocks; the server could just as well do the updating, provided that there was some way to tell it to do so.
...
.Xdefaults", but if he happens to have copied Fred's .xsession, he does an xrdb .xresources, so .Xdefaults never gets read. Susie either doesn't xrdb, or was told by someone once to xrdb .Xdefaults. She wonders why when she edits .Xdefaults, the changes don't happen until she 'logs out', since she never reran xrdb to reload the resources. Oh, and when she uses the NCD from home, things act `different', and she doesn't know why. "It's just different sometimes."
.xresources (or was it a file that was #included in .xresources) of the form *fucked*fontList: 10x22, which he copied from Steve who quit last year, and that of course that resources is 'more specific' than his, whatever the fuck that means, so it takes precedence. Sorry, guy. He can't even remember what application that resource was supposed to change anymore. Too bad.
What this means is that the smarter-than-the-average-bear user who actually managed to figure out that
snot.fucked.stupid.widget.fontList: micro
is the resource to change the font in his snot application, could be unable to figure out where to put it. Suzie sitting in the next cubicle will tell him, "just put it in your
Joe Smartass has figured out that XAPPLRESDIR is the way to go, as it allows him to have separate files for each application. But he doesn't know what the class name for this thing is. He knows his copy of the executable is called snot, but when he adds a file Snot or XSnot or Xsnot, nothing happens. He has a man page which forgot to mention the application class name, and always describes resources starting with '*', which is no help. He asks Gardner, who fires up emacs on the executable, and searches for (case insensitve) snot, and finds a few SNot strings, and suggests that. It works, hooray. He figures he can even use SNot*fontList: micro to change all the fonts in the application, but finds that a few widgets don't get that font for some reason. Someone points out that he has a line in his
...
On the whole, X extensions are a failure. The notable exception that proves the rule is the Shaped Window extension, which was specifically designed to implement round clocks and eyeballs. But most application writers just don't bother using proprietarty extensions like Display PostScript, because X terminals and MIT servers don't support them. Many find it too much of a hassle to use more ubiquitous extensions like shared memory, double buffering, or splines: they still don't work in many cases, so you have to be prepared to do without them. If you really don't need the extension, then why complicate your code with the special cases? And most applications that do use extensions just assume they're supported and bomb if they're not.
I like your way of thinking, but I have to raise two points, just playing devil's advocate.
.edu? Only if it's related to class? Only if it doesn't involve any Hollywood actors? No mp3's?
First, how do you define educational purposes? Only accessing
I hope I won't have to belabor the point. You can't define it. It's undefinable. It's like if you went into a library and said "only educational books." Shakespeare read the pulp fiction and shoddy histories of his day and produced the greatest art of western civilization.
The hubris, the smashing stupidity of a school demanding to "limit" it's network to "educational purposes only" is simply breathtaking to me. Prevent abuse. Write clever rules on your Cisco. Heck, even enforce the law! But don't ever try to dress up some hamheaded censorship regime as "education."
The only other point I'd make is about the competition to provide internet service to campus dwellings that you mention. You have to think bigger. The campus dwellings themselves are a racket. Even in public universities it's common practice to force undergraduates to live in the dorms for at least a year, and if you live in the dorms you're required to buy into the meal plans, etc. All of which cost multiples of what you can pay on the free market for rental spaces, restaurants, etc.
Of course, you can pay more, too, if you want to live posh and eat fancy every night. But when you're poor and on financial aid that doesn't quite cover everything, it's infuriating that the schools perpetrate this racket - forcing you to pay $700 a month in rent when you could pay as little as $250 off campus, pay $11 a meal when you can cook for yourself for $2, or pay McD's $5...
So, fuck internet... force them to make _housing_ competititve.
...I can see why they thought of it.
It is black-letter fact, the arcade is dead. Has been dead, in fact, for a long time. From the article itself:
Eddie Adlum, publisher of arcade magazine RePlay, said arcades have been in decline ever since the rise of console gaming. About a decade ago, he estimates there were 10,000 arcades, but that number has since dropped to about 3,000. Hit games such as ``Ms. Pacman'' once sold 100,000 machines, but today, typical hits sell maybe 4,000 to 6,000 units, Adlum said.
However, there is something very similar to the arcade which is growing moderatealy well both in the U.S. and especially in Asia. It's a kind of mutation of the "internet cafe." It seems, while kids won't plunk down dollars to play conventional arcade games, they will go out and "rent" a PC to play Counterstrike or Starcraft for an hour or three. Multiplayer games, it seems, still have draw. And thus the article goes on...
Lately, the rise of online gaming, especially in Asia, has transformed many arcades from stand-alone machines to networks of connected computers where players can play against each other or anyone else over the Internet. That transition plays to the Xbox's strength, since it is primed for broadband gaming, and it also plays to Microsoft's strong relationship with Sega, which is a big supporter of online gaming.
So they think they will somehow tap into this growing phenomenon, instead of merely blowing 50 million or so producing expensive collectors items. I'm not holding my breath, but anything is possible, I guess.
Hmm... This calls for some TCP geekhood and some strong math. I am way too hung over for math. Let's just talk about it in broad strokes first.
If I'm tuning this package, I can make these delays REAL big. I mean, email is one of those systems where a false positive resulting in even a... let's say an **8 hour** delay to a legitimate message would still be considered perfectly fine for most purposes. There's fuzzy logic in play here; I'm thinking not all delays will be equal. But what if you were just really harsh on suspected spam? Not such a loss IMO. Of course... I haven't considered that you will have increased reliability problems trying to hold a stream open for 8 hours, but remember, a legitimate mailserver will keep resending, and as we go bayesian on servers, perhaps we will learn to resend for a little longer as well? Or perhaps there is another protocol solution (i.e. letting the sender know they're being delayed for spam... so perhaps giving them the option to reformulate their message and resend?) Let's just press on. The precise amount of the delay may not necessarily be important.
If I'm sending 50 million messages (a modest spammer's run, if I'm well enough informed) and each one holds me on the line for 8 hours that means 400 million hours if run serially. At the 8192 concurrent thread barrier that's still almost 50,000 hours (~5 years)... with mathematical convenience, to do this entire run in 8 hours you will require **50 million** concurrent threads? Or should I have just stayed in bed longer?
Now it's looking like the exact length of the delays, and the exact number of concurrent threads is not actually something worth too much niggling debate. We just have to get familiar with the orders of magnitude we're dealing with.
Consider the protocol-to-data ratio of an SMTP transaction over TCP alone. How much is data and how much is just protocol overhead in a given mail transaction? We can figure this out down to the last bit, but I'm going to just throw out the hypothetical notion that when you have to initiate a new SMTP transaction for every message you send, the bandwidth overhead for doing this millions of times is not inconsiderable.
And we have to think of the other end. Spammers may write themselves custom TCP/IP stacks, but receivers certainly will not. Consider AOL. AOL encompasses some significant percentage of your list of victims. What is AOL going to do with anywhere _near_ that many simultaneous connections... ***from just one spammer?*** Why, call the FBI, of course! It's a DOS attack!
I'll stop now. I wouldn't be surprised if there were other angles on this I haven't considered. But at first blush it doesn't seem nearly as easy to beat as you suggest.
Perversely I think the biggest danger in this technique is that it may become widespread and then force spammers to really confront Bayesian filtering head-on. Of course, just thinking aloud (and this probably is undoable for privacy reasons, but just to open a line of speculation) you can do some interesting things with these kinds of filters... retain lists of email addresses that you've received mail from (and/or replied to) more than once... they get a lower score (and a lower delay) than first-time senders... etc. etc. So it's not clear even with very well-designed spam (another cost increase for spammers!) that you could win against the filter.
I mean, yeah, it's amusing to catch the editors making a mistake, but by now I find the people snidely pointing this out to be only about 100x as annoying as the occasional duplication. In fact, I think the editors shouldn't change a thing about their process - occasional duplication can even be good... as for instance in this case, where I apparently missed the story the first time, and am glad I got a 2nd chance to learn about this.
This is big news, after all - I'm not totally informed about the field, but to me this sounds like the first anti-spam measure which has the potential to be very effective without any "false positive" loss. The more people who see this story, the more people that will (like me) suddenly decide it is a great idea to go check this project out for installation on all their mailservers.
They are never good. Ever.
Period.
I can explain it in a few sentences. A 12 year old can understand the concept.
Let's assume the patent office is staffed with an army of experts who are ceritifed geniuses with eidetic memories - they never grant a "frivolous," redundant or overbroad patent. This is already so absurd I can't write it without chuckling, but let's grant them that much. It doesn't matter.
If I want to write unencumbered code (you know, the only kind you can sell, as a software developer), I have to be able to memorize, or search (with 100% accurracy, heh) the entire database of software patents. I also have to keep up with every new patent as it is granted (and if I'm sharp, applied for). That's only... I dunno, a few thousand a day? Since this is impossible, every piece of code ever written in the past, present or future is a ticking time-bomb of patent litigation.
Dear sir,
We have discovered (by means we will not disclose) that your code violates our patent on commenting inside of curly braces. We deign to offer you the possibility of paying us for the privelege, at $50 per slash-mark.
Don't want to pay up? Think our patent is overbroad? Heh. We'll have a wonderful time listening to your arguments in the 15-year-long civil lawsuit that we'll slap on you, and anyone you ever did business with. I hope you won't have trouble coming up with the $5 million or so you'll need for legal fees!
Have a nice day,
Joe Patentholder
I'm going to give you a mile-wide benefit of the doubt. I'm hoping that we can talk a bit more and you can explain what you and your colleagues at the school dug into.
What you're suggesting is radically incompatible with my understanding of the facts as presented by the news media. Are you saying there's a media trend, or conspiracy, to exaggerate Enron's scandal?
I read about some accounting fraud... big, massive accounting fraud. Maybe I'm just out of the loop... sounded bigger than 1 or 2 people alone could have accomplished at a public company of that nature.
We've got paper shredding... These same one or two people that did the fraud shredded the papers?
Then there were... let's see... improper loans, used to try to prolong the fraud? What did they call them... "prepays?" The latest revelations hitting the press indicate knowning involvement in the accounting coverup by several of Enron's banking partners (including J.P. Morgan Chase)... You know, the "shut up and delete this email" business. So... is this the same one or two guys? One of them also worked at Chase, too?
Then there's Arthur Andersen. Are you suggesting... one of these two guys was in addition an Andersen employee? And Andersen's team of auditors was... very small? Not much oversight?
I seem to remember talk about "improper" bonuses and compensation being paid to executives... Which executives? One of your two "fradulent intenters" paying off the other?
There was the electric utility deregulation scandal in Florida... when they turned out the lights. "Deathstar," does that sound familiar? Same guys?
There was the testimony of whisteblowers... did you read that? How do your ideas fit with their testimony?
And the government involvement... the thing that stuck in my mind was Enron's lobbying for... I think it was called an "exemption" from the "Investment Company Act of 1940"? I'm not an economist... I think I read somewhere that their offshore holdings were important for concealing their debt...
I'm really dying to hear your version of the story. Maybe I'm just not clear on your definition of "fradulent intent." Please, in as much detail as you can stand. If you weren't extremely forthcoming, like for instance, citing sources, addressing every point specifically, etc. it would be hard to convince me. Extraordinary allegations, extraordinary proof, etc.
By the way, what school? McCombs? A&M?
You've read quite a bit too much into what I wrote. I'm not suggesting ex-post-facto prosecutions (though they do happen in this country); just making a point with a hypothetical example.
I would argue that, in addition to the very low conviction rate for these crimes, it's the very short sentences (leaving aside that they're often served in more "comfortable" federal facilities) that contribute to the condition you describe.
If there were, say, 80 or so convictions among former Enron employees, service providers (like banks), and government officials involved in Enron's activities, and those people spent the rest of their life behind bars, I think you will find awareness growing by leaps and bounds. After all, these folks keep up on the news a lot better than "blue collar" criminals.
Oligarchies and all-encompassing enlightenment? You just need to take a little more time and read more slowly, I think.
Boy, that Louis Rosetto... now whenever you have anything positive-sounding to say about the internet, people suddenly flash back to his dayglo wacko-rag and think you're trying to sell them scientology.
Exactly.
Good points, but do you not expect your traffic to be private because that's "Right"? Or because of the surveillance free-for-all that's been happening in this country?
If the same person (let's say) is trying strenuously to invade your privacy by every available means, largely succeeding, and then arguing for even more liberties with you on the grounds that "look - you already have so little privacy," it's OK to call foul.
I don't expect to be able to leave my doors unlocked and my windows open and not get robbed. But that doesn't mean it's not a crime.
Also, if you want a cheap, powerful way to encrypt your phone calls, consider PGPFone. I haven't looked at in a few years, but it looked rather serviceable at the time.
This claim is interesting in a variety of ways.
If the notion of privacy in our communications is going to be utterly discarded, I rather wish the school had elected to eavesdrop on every phone call made on campus to help catch thieves, domestic abusers and other violent criminals, etc.
There are plenty of people who say what goes on the internet shouldn't be private; that there's no expectation of privacy there. I guess we'll get into this issue a bit on this topic. Just please don't forget to have a little imagination. This is all new. We're making the rules as we go along. Sometimes I think if the phone had been invented last year there wouldn't be an expectation of privacy on phone calls either.
Remember this is a "private" institution doing this, i.e. not a law enforcement agency. Remember that just because they can write a fancy terms of service that authorizes them to do whatever they want with the network, it doesn't make their actions legitimate, let alone moral.
Finally, most interestingly, remember that Fasttrack (i.e. Kazaa, etc) is encrypted over the wire (see this link). There's nothing saying that the whole thing won't be reverse-engineered and cracked sooner or later, but to my knowledge, that hasn't happened yet... of course, that could just be last I checked.
The internet is dangerous to a lot of people. Traditional media companies don't like it because it provides "unwantedly democratic" alternatives to the traditional mass media. It allows free trade of digital media (i.e. P2P), threatening the publishing/retail trusts. Internet radio is nipping (ever so delicately, just now) at the heels of traditional radio. Heck, it even threatens the phone company's monopoly on voice calls (i.e. VoIP, which is growing exponentially).
Clearly it must be stopped.
Their goal is to reduce the ownership of all user-facing internet services to a managably small set of large owners. Coincidentally, these will be the big media and phone companies that are threatened by the internet in the first place. When all the independents and smaller players have been eliminated, and less than a dozen RBOCs and cable operators control all broadband (and thus almost all internet access) in the U.S., they will kill what threatens them by simply raising the price.
Some number of months from now, users will find that their ISP has suddenly renegotiated their deal. The new choices will be cheap but brutally capped broadband that is useless for P2P, streaming media, and VoIP... pay-per-K offerings that ensure these things are prohibitively expensive... and classic, "business class" $1,500+ T1-style service.
Surveillance of users will become not only more pervasive but more standardized, as the Internet trust announces trade groups and landmark deals that support both police and "private" law enforcement efforts.
Of course, in addition to prices going up, this guarantees that investments in new infrastructure (to provide better services) will now entirely cease. Without competition to threaten offering anything better, the bells and cable companies will do what they have always done (before TA96). Absolutely nothing.
Oh, you thought the cable companies and bells would compete with each other? This one really slays me. Why spend billions competing when you can just form a trust and price-fix instead? This is capitalism 101. And when the number of players is that small, it's virtually guaranteed to happen.
I know, I'm a paranoid lunatic. None of this could really happen here, right? I mean, just because it's already happening in Australia, Canada, and England... pure coincidence.
Of course, this tragedy will cause lots of collateral damage. The first victim that comes to mind is the video game industry, which has lots of innovative, "harmless" uses for massive, cheap bandwidth. There are many others as well.
But for all you folks watching in amusement as the big players stumbled trying to crush P2P, VoIP, etc. with lawsuits and bribed-legislation, this is the other shoe dropping.
On the bright side, the market for wireless technology might be looking up... that is, until the FCC turns out to be less than forthcoming with licenses, rules, and considerations necessary to allow wireless broadband alternatives. Watch for it.
First let me say that I really like VMWare. I think they did a fabulous job - it's one of the better-engineered pieces of software that I've ever seen. All the times that I've had the pleasure to use it, it's worked for me without a hitch, despite the subtle complexity required to do an application like that well.
Furthermore, I hope that one day we'll see a real, meaningful government reform at Microsoft that puts them out of the business of "innovating" away various application markets.
My needs for VMs have been sparse. Most often I'm testing something (like an installer) that sprays stuff all over Windows, and it's just simplest to roll it back using the Undoable disk when the test is over. Or maybe I've got some code I want to check out that I consider really dangerous. Once in a while, if I'm stuck running Windows, but I need a Unix service on the network for a little while, I can raise a virtual linux server and keep it running as long as I need it. Far more convenient than hauling out another box.
I can see the attraction in virtual machines. You have so much more control. Bluescreens don't hang everything - only the particular virtual CPU they happen on. And VMWare's code is so freaking efficient, I can play counterstrike with a few of these virtual servers running, answering queries in the background. But it seems silly for virtual machines to become institutionalized in that role. To me, that's evidence of failure in the OS design. You have a reliability problem? Fix it in the OS. You have a control problem - something you wanted a VM and Undoable disks to solve? Add a feature to the filesystem. You have a security problem? Definitely an OS issue.
VMWare et al are great for ad hoc stuff and I think sooner or later most developers would be glad to have it around, but if you plan on running it all the time, in a server environment for instance, then it's just a big kluge. Your OS wasn't _designed_ to run inside itself... it's a big resource waste. Fix the problems in the OS. Compartmentalize, if that's what the environment demands. But don't do it this way. It's just goofy.
I think it's too general. I could use your image to justify bait-and-switch salesmanship, false advertising, predatory contracts, usury (i.e. knee-cap tingling interest rates), racism (no colored/irish/whatever allowed) or sexism (we only hire/allow men, don't ask don't tell?)... All of these are policies that in the laissez faire world our ancestors inherited, were allowed. Don't like the people using them? Then just switch.
And what our ancestors did was go further, and make laws. They decided that just switching doesn't do the job. It appears society isn't so healthy when "just switching" (even when it's possible) is your only redress for some problems.
I like google - and I think the complaints about caching, accountability for penalization, etc. are bunk. But I'll play devil's advocate. It's easy, since my tinfoil hat is already at hand. Google may be mining all that information it collects about your activities just to give you better results, but we don't know that. And since they're by far the biggest game in town, they get near-monopoly benefits for their information gathering scheme.
It's pretty much like if libraries refused to be accountable about their customer records. And if the library was suddenly practically the biggest clearinghouse for information on the planet.
They may not be selling or abusing the information, but they're refusing to say they aren't. You can say it's a private company, they can do what they want, but that's a lack of imagination. AT&T used to be "just a private company" too. Its descendants are _still_ trying to sell your phone usage records.
Of course, there are plenty of people who just don't understand what their privacy is for in the first place. To all these people, how about letting me come on over and hide in your house and watch what you do? I think for most of these folks, once they get a girlfriend/boyfriend... suddenly they're really against it. Well, I don't want to speak for everyone.
Heh. Did I say you were a hypocrite? I think I forgot to capitalize it.
Wow. You really know how to flatter criticism with insults. I wonder what I missed out on by not kissing your airheaded, hypocritical ass?
P.S. No, you "won." Really. Since you point out that's what mattered to you.
How do you want to feel if you say something and it turns out to be wrong? Praised? Rewarded? It's natural to feel hurt when someone points out a flaw in your "carefully rationalized" position. Well, debate (especially rebuttal you can't seem to answer) is not going to make you feel good. How much flattery did you want for "Legalized vote swapping is dumber. Two wrongs don't make a right"?
Try to stay on topic. The lengths of the posts is about as important as your spelling mistakes.
You wanted to pop in, and deliver a slogan. "Two wrongs do not make a right." You can't defend it because it's indefensible in this context. It's just not true - no, more than that. It doesn't even make sense.
Your claim that the "2WDMAW" principle somehow underlies our legal system is totally without merit. Our legal system works by reciprocity and punishment. It may compare favorably with vigilantism, but it still "punishes" criminals (and losers in civil court) - just in a more "civilized" way (note that quite a few people couldn't square execution with "civilized" even in quotes, but we'll let that go). Most distinctly it is meant to remove the violence from civil disagreement and the abuse of power in criminal prosecution.
Thus, your rebutal, actually, is what's dumb. Though I prefer "desperate" if I consider the adjectives more carefully.
"Vote swapping is wrong because it corrupts the system. Voting is not a commodity market. You have the right to vote if you want to, but you can't buy and sell votes or assign them to a proxy and you shouldn't be able to trade them either."
All you're doing is repeating yourself. Adding more slogans. How does it corrupt the system? How are votes not already a commodity market? I'm glad you can understand there is a difference between "buying, selling, assignment" and trading, though it almost doesn't matter.
I'm not even of a certain predisposition on the matter. I just honestly can't think of what harm can come as long as at the end of the day all it boils down to is consenting adults making their own free speech, and their own free, private decisions in the voting booth in which they are physically present.
If people are dumb enough to sell their votes (or not vote at all, as they do now), you have much bigger problems. Start working on our educational system, on reform in the mass media. Democracy only works as well as they do. As long as the big vacuum of counterargument from you continues, I'll tend to believe it's poor education and poor mass-media journalism which is corrupting the system. Vote swapping, especially inasmuch as it allows people to better express their political preferences, even appears as though it will help matters.
As for your ideas about human thought, I'll suggest you quit while you're behind. Maybe come back to it after you've addressed what's on topic.
So you're of the "accuse what you are" school of thought. It's your tone, since you raise the issue, which is brash and conceited - you lay down curt conclusions that don't make sense (and then, as you discuss analogies, you verge on the absurd) and still, I notice, refuse to back up your on-topic points. You'd rather pin labels and run off.
Convince yourself you accomplished something with that, but don't expect to convince me... and you probably won't do so well with others.
The line between analogy and straw men is clear; I judge your insistence on obfuscating the two as deliberate. Making a straw man would have been to lump you with some radical political movement further along from merely commenting negatively on vote swapping, in an attempt to stain you with their repugnance and/or extremism. If this "straw man" were different in substance enough from yourself it wouldn't even be that - merely misrepresentation. What you are doing now, in other words. I can see why you'd wish you could accuse me of it. It shifts the subject off your original points, if you're getting uncomfortable there, and you get to sound like a real debate team member, using a fancy term.
Perhaps you really don't understand this. Analogies are not "a form of argument." They're just tools in a toolbox. Mine is meant to show what I call a flaw in your line of thinking. It's much more productive simply to follow along, see what the point is, and try to refute it. But perhaps you can't.
Because some people misuse analogies sometimes does not give you much grounds for your campaign. It appears to me like little more than an excuse to complicate criticism of your ideas. The misused analogies you consider are your straw man. My advice, switch to something more productive, like fact checking. Everyone messes that up, and there you'd have a real campaign.
First you say "human thought works by rationalization." Explaining further (I think) you only say we're "great at rationalization." Then you talk about how humans aren't purely logical (not big news) and mention cognitive dissonance (I see you did indeed take Psych 101). It looks like your ideas about how people think are a moving target. I'm pointing out that symbolic thought - the ability to relate the specific to the general and back again that is the heart of analogy - is essential to human reasoning. You might as well campaign for people to stop bending their knees because someone kicked you.
You asserted vote swapping was wrong, and that two wrongs don't make a right. I claim both are specious... I made counterarguments. The more you avoid answering them, the more it appears as though you can't.
I'm sorry if I don't hold out much hope. If you follow form, you'll stay off topic. If you do come back to it, I predict you'll either declare you don't feel the need to share any explanations, or you'll offer something similarly poor and call it an explanation itself. But perhaps you could pleasantly surprise me?
OK, it looks like you won't get it without help. You've confused an analogy with a straw man. I will explain in detail. Straw man = tainting a position with extremes, legitimate or even exaggerated. Analogy = unrelated but structurally similar example.
You don't like how it challenges your idea, so you (I suppose rather audaciously) denounce analogies in general, and then radically "misunderstand." On purpose, I like to hope.
I can only find your explanation for human thought specious without further elaboration.
I'm not surprised you seem ready to bow out without supporting (or even really explaining) any of your ideas. Consider which is more "civilized" - your hitting and running with some quips and one liners and ducking and dodging when the questions get tough, or my calling your spade a spade.
I can see why you don't like analogies. You can't seem to understand them. But I caution you against imagining that no one else will. Human thought often works by analogy, and most people are passably good at it.
You get me thinking, though. I should put something in my sig that requires people to have a certain level of intelligence and background knowledge before posting. Or at least something about misapplying the "straw man" label. Do you really want a lecture on what a straw man is?
Let me spell it out for you. Vote swapping is not wrong, nor is any other strategy for deciding how to vote that occurs to rational, consenting adults, and furthermore, two wrongs often do make a right. As when we punish criminals, for instance.
What's appalling is that you imagine there are ever contributions that do not come with strings attached. The politician needs the contribution, because as you point out, campaigns aren't "free" - not even cheap! They have to think about what they did to get it in the past, and what they will do to get it again in the future, no matter how cynical everyone is or pretends not to be in between.
"Paying for speech" makes it "relevant." I don't even know if you know what you're talking about. Would you at least agree, if you could campaign for free, the system would work better?
But what I really want to hear is exactly how this "subversion" works. Please, in detail.
That man is beating and mugging that lady in the street. Let's stop him - throw him to the ground, put him in a jail cell!
No, you say! Harming that man is just as bad as harming that lady. Two wrongs don't make a right!
Bah. Your moral clarity is so murky it looks like it might give someone a disease.
Vote swapping is about as dangerous as crossing your eyes. But if you're so quick to want to censor political speech, I just hope you're as vocal about "campaign contributions."