Microsoft is always bad, and always will be... that they occasionally (and largely by accident) do something good doesn't make the organization any less bad.
That said, you have to understand that Gates is far from stupid. His public comments about open source have, historically, been just what you'd expect the CEO of Microsoft to make. That doesn't mean that he doesn't privately understand the issues perfectly, and now that his role at Microsoft has changed, now that he's an ex-CEO, he may feel free to speak more honestly.
Well, you're not crazy (well, I don't think you are anyway) but this isn't like SCO. Once SCO ran out of money the show was over, because SCO was a stock scam, not an old-line organization with multiple official funding sources. Funding to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars: as it happens, the RIAA is being paid to do just what it is doing. Now, how long that will continue is the real question. Probably for a good while, there's a lot of inertia here, and the studios learn veerrry sloooowwwwlllly. I mean, they've had how many years since the RIAA shut down Napster to figure out that the world has changed around them? This is going to take even longer than SCO to reach a conclusion, I think.
Not really, these are just lawyers hired to do a job... win or lose, they get paid. The only thing that probably makes the RIAA's upper management nervous is when the studios (who, after all, are the outfits that fund the RIAA and sister organizations around the world to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year) finally start to see the RIAA as being irrelevant. Or worse, as a liability. That's already happening: one of the big boys already announced that it would cut its share of funding to the RIAA. Hopefully the rest will follow suit.
I wouldn't say they're cornered, exactly, but there does appear to be a rising tide of awareness among the judiciary of the RIAA's tactics. Doesn't seem like they're getting rubberstamped as often as they use to be.
On the other hand, if they succeed in making music actually dangerous to possess (I mean, let's face it, even if you bought those tracks on your hard disk, if you can't prove it what are you going to do?) people are just going to stop listening to it. Frankly, that's something we were already doing even before Napster came along. Big studio music sales peaked a long time ago, and they just aren't willing to admit it and do what it takes to become part of the 21st century.
Yes, I understand the concept, but we aren't talking wiggling here... we're talking about a steady increase over the past few years. In 1999 I was paying about 79c a gallon. Now I'm paying $3.20. That's the point you're missing. What most people believe is that, well, since we're soooo dependent upon the Middle East for our petroleum supplies, it must be those evil Arabs that are keeping the price of gasoline so high, and Wall Street would like us to keep believing that. There's some truth to it, of course, but that three bucks a gallon you're paying is in large part a result of domestic profiteering. Add to that the fact that several of our major oil companies are now under foreign ownership now (can you say, "BP"? And let's not for get Venezuela's buyout of Citgo) and we're pretty much screwed.
I'm not a financial expert by any means, but the company I work for is in the petroleum business, and I have regular contact with people at a number of refineries, pipeline terminals and other facilities. Here's what I've been told:
Suppose a trader buys 10,000 barrels of oil. The next day he hears some bad news from the Middle East, so he sells it. For a profit, of course. The next guy holds on to it for a while, hears another bit of scary news, and sells it... for a profit. In that way, the price keeps getting jacked up until by the time the product is actually sold to a refinery or pipeline company it is significantly more expensive. So while the Middle East is not directly causing the problem, the general instability there is effectively causing traders to up the cost to the refineries. At least, that's how it was explained to me by someone who trades oil and petroleum products on the NYSE. Now, I have no problem admitting that a lot of what he said went completely over my head (it's complicated and I'm just a software guy) but that was what I took away from the conversation.
Thank you. I haven't bought an album (vinyl or CD) since 1981 or 1982 or thereabouts. Well, okay, I did buy the Orleans "Still the One" CD in 1991 or so but that was for a gift so it doesn't count. Originally for me, it wasn't so much the music (back 70's stuff wasn't considered to be "classic") but purely a matter of money. $16-$20 a pop just seemed completely unreasonable, so I began to frequent used music stores and, like you say, I always enjoyed classical music so that saved a bundle there anyway.
Invasion and occupation is a hideously expensive proposition, at least for us, but genocide need not be. There are many ways for a truly advanced (advanced technologically I mean) civilization to wipe us out completely and cheaply. There've been hundreds of good science-fiction novels written on that subject, so it's a popular one. See, invasion only matters if you need the people around to be useful: if all you want is a free hand to extract whatever mineral wealth you need, and have a strong stomach (or whatever it is that they use to process their nutrients) just murder us, bump us off. Don't even need expensive nukes, or have to invent a complicated bioweapon. Just pick a domestic pathogen (say, ebola virus or something equally virulent and deadly) and seed it around the planet. Hell, spread a mix of deadly diseases all over the place, ebola, anthrax, flesh-eating bacteria, you name it. We'd never know what hit us.
You're also assuming that the technology required for interstellar travel would require enormous amounts of energy. Probably it will, but if you're that advanced you'll probably be using antimatter for power, so fuel won't be a problem. It's also possible that there may be a way to translate matter through higher-order dimensions (rubber-sheet universe and all that) in which case you open a temporary rift between two points in space and walk across. Or open a bunch of them high up in our atmosphere and start dumping pathogens through.
Either way, once we achieve interstellar flight (even relative slowboats like a Bussard ramjet or other non-FTL technology) we'd be wise to pussyfoot it around our neighborhood until we have some idea who or what is out there.
That's a perfectly reasonable attitude to take: eminently logical. However, you're making the possibly fatal assumption that they are a. sane by our standards and/or b. reason in the same way that we do. And not all humans think alike. I mean, how much do you have in common with any of the human monsters that have caused so much grief down through the ages? Did Stalin kill millions just because he wanted resources? Did the Nazis? The fact is, entire civilizations can be drawn into the insanity of their leaders, and if such a culture happens to have interstellar travel, a bad attitude, and the means to make something of it... well. To paraphrase Heinlein, never depend upon another man's (or alien being's) better nature, because he, she or it might not have one.
Sure, but suppose we got it mostly right with relativity, and there's no faster-than-light travel nor communication?
Sure, but suppose we didn't? Like I said, interstellar distances are a perfect defense... if nobody knows how to get around them. We're nowhere near advanced enough to claim, to a sufficient degree of certainty, if that's true. Ask yourself this: were I Love Lucy and the five o'clock news really worth it? I'd hate to get wiped out because Lucille Ball resembled some alien version of the Antichrist. Of course, odds are nobody out there will receive anything just because of the distances involved. On the other hand, if some race has spacecraft or interstellar probes in the area, they might notice us.
Orrin Hatch should be decapitated, with his head stuck on the end of a pike as a warning to any other Congressmen that might feel tempted to behave as badly. Congressmen Berman and Hollings' heads should also be on pikes to either side of Mr. Hatch's.
Granted, but my point is that the prices we're suffering from now are self-inflicted, not a direct artifact of any external influence, or any relation to the actual availability of crude. There's sufficient petroleum available, and sufficient domestic refining (actually were in the middle of a glut, supply-wise.) Wall Street, however, is doing a bit of profiteering at our expense while simultaneously pointing the finger elsewhere to deflect the blame.
Even more notably, L. Ron (schmientologist) Hubbard's "Battlefield Earth", where a Psychlo reconnaissance probe picked up one of the Voyagers (in its own way a feeble attempt at communication) and backtracked the machine's course to Earth and... that was that. After wiping us out with an invulnerable gas drone they simply moved in and began exploiting Earth's mineral resources. Conquest is easy if genocide is on the table.
By broadcasting the way we are, we're making a couple of assumptions: a. that there are no alien civilizations out there to worry about or b. if there are, they're not actively hostile and capable of making something of it. Neither is a safe assumption. Granted, interstellar distances are a perfect defense against anyone near technological parity with us, but why would we assume that an alien civilization has advanced no further than that?
Furthermore, some people maintain the (preposterous) belief that any race that is substantially more technically advanced than us would, somehow, have to be peaceful and beneficient. However, if they followed a developmental path anything at all like ours, they got that advanced by being anything but peaceable! Where did many of the historical discontinuities in our scientific and technical knowledge come from? Why, from the tremendous R&D investment the world's militaries command in times of war. I see no reason to assume that an alien race would necessarily be any different in that regard.
Consider this: how many times in our own history has a culture been damaged or destroyed after encountering a more advanced one? Take our Native American friends, for example. The more capable society doesn't even have to be warlike either.
It's not that simple. Oil prices in the U.S. today have less to do with the Middle East or OPEC or any of the other usual suspects, and more to do with Wall Street.
Who decides what's of interest? Unless you give me a Web page where I can select the specific messages I'm interested in, there will be problems.
Anyway, you'd be right, in a truly competitive environment... but there are millions upon millions of users subject to a single drain-bamaged ISP with no hope of ever switching. Those are the people that will get shafted by techniques like this. It's power, and it means more money, and it's just too tempting. People like me who are fortunate enough to live in a broadband-competitive area could jump to another provider (unless they all start doing it, that's what worries me about this sort of abuse.)
Remember how cable TV was advertised as the commercial free alternative to broadcast television? Well, it was... but that didn't last long once advertisers started waving big money under cable programmers collective noses. You have to understand, these guys want revenue, and they'll run the numbers and decide how many customers they can afford to lose and still make a profit by shoving ads down our throats.
Then you don't have Comcast or SBC... believe me, they will not be able to resist the advertising dollars (which can more than offset the loss of some customers), and because such ads would be ISP-generated and pretty much unavoidable for most people, they'd be worth a hell of a lot more money than just another click-through. Annoying and driving away users has no meaning in a situation where users need the service (lame as it might be), and have few if any alternatives. Hell, if annoying users was such a big deal why hasn't cable TV cleaned up its act? The answer is: they don't have to care because we have little choice in the matter, and they make plenty of money from advertisers. That should be considered some kind of a conflict of interest, really.
Here you go, from the horse's mouth to yours... "Get your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape!". And if you expect me to apologize for that, you little know your man. I haven't seen that movie in damn near thirty years.
True... but how long do you think it will before other things, things much less useful to the customer, begin showing up there instead?
Personally, I'd say that if the information they need to present is so damned important, it would be better to just do a redirect to another page (like Comcast does if you don't pay your bill) as opposed to modifying content on the fly. That would be more akin to a television show being interrupted for an important public service announcement. Modifying the HTML is like a TV show where the local station overlays graphics and text over the program you're watching in order to advertise products or other shows. That irritates the hell out of me, especially when it's on a cable channel that I happen to be paying for.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft is always bad, and always will be ... that they occasionally (and largely by accident) do something good doesn't make the organization any less bad.
That said, you have to understand that Gates is far from stupid. His public comments about open source have, historically, been just what you'd expect the CEO of Microsoft to make. That doesn't mean that he doesn't privately understand the issues perfectly, and now that his role at Microsoft has changed, now that he's an ex-CEO, he may feel free to speak more honestly.
Well, you're not crazy (well, I don't think you are anyway) but this isn't like SCO. Once SCO ran out of money the show was over, because SCO was a stock scam, not an old-line organization with multiple official funding sources. Funding to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars: as it happens, the RIAA is being paid to do just what it is doing. Now, how long that will continue is the real question. Probably for a good while, there's a lot of inertia here, and the studios learn veerrry sloooowwwwlllly. I mean, they've had how many years since the RIAA shut down Napster to figure out that the world has changed around them? This is going to take even longer than SCO to reach a conclusion, I think.
Not really, these are just lawyers hired to do a job ... win or lose, they get paid. The only thing that probably makes the RIAA's upper management nervous is when the studios (who, after all, are the outfits that fund the RIAA and sister organizations around the world to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year) finally start to see the RIAA as being irrelevant. Or worse, as a liability. That's already happening: one of the big boys already announced that it would cut its share of funding to the RIAA. Hopefully the rest will follow suit.
I wouldn't say they're cornered, exactly, but there does appear to be a rising tide of awareness among the judiciary of the RIAA's tactics. Doesn't seem like they're getting rubberstamped as often as they use to be.
No, but sur-real replies are apparently acceptable.
Will The Next Generation of Spacecraft Land In the Water?
You mean like the first generation did?
Yeah ... he's quacker who once worked for Stacker, but now he's just a slacker cracker with no backer.
"It's the smell ... don't you agree, Mr. Anderson?"
On the other hand, if they succeed in making music actually dangerous to possess (I mean, let's face it, even if you bought those tracks on your hard disk, if you can't prove it what are you going to do?) people are just going to stop listening to it. Frankly, that's something we were already doing even before Napster came along. Big studio music sales peaked a long time ago, and they just aren't willing to admit it and do what it takes to become part of the 21st century.
I think Ms. Gabor might have something to say about that. I hear her lawyers are very well paid.
Yes, I understand the concept, but we aren't talking wiggling here ... we're talking about a steady increase over the past few years. In 1999 I was paying about 79c a gallon. Now I'm paying $3.20. That's the point you're missing. What most people believe is that, well, since we're soooo dependent upon the Middle East for our petroleum supplies, it must be those evil Arabs that are keeping the price of gasoline so high, and Wall Street would like us to keep believing that. There's some truth to it, of course, but that three bucks a gallon you're paying is in large part a result of domestic profiteering. Add to that the fact that several of our major oil companies are now under foreign ownership now (can you say, "BP"? And let's not for get Venezuela's buyout of Citgo) and we're pretty much screwed.
I'm not a financial expert by any means, but the company I work for is in the petroleum business, and I have regular contact with people at a number of refineries, pipeline terminals and other facilities. Here's what I've been told:
... for a profit. In that way, the price keeps getting jacked up until by the time the product is actually sold to a refinery or pipeline company it is significantly more expensive. So while the Middle East is not directly causing the problem, the general instability there is effectively causing traders to up the cost to the refineries. At least, that's how it was explained to me by someone who trades oil and petroleum products on the NYSE. Now, I have no problem admitting that a lot of what he said went completely over my head (it's complicated and I'm just a software guy) but that was what I took away from the conversation.
Suppose a trader buys 10,000 barrels of oil. The next day he hears some bad news from the Middle East, so he sells it. For a profit, of course. The next guy holds on to it for a while, hears another bit of scary news, and sells it
Thank you. I haven't bought an album (vinyl or CD) since 1981 or 1982 or thereabouts. Well, okay, I did buy the Orleans "Still the One" CD in 1991 or so but that was for a gift so it doesn't count. Originally for me, it wasn't so much the music (back 70's stuff wasn't considered to be "classic") but purely a matter of money. $16-$20 a pop just seemed completely unreasonable, so I began to frequent used music stores and, like you say, I always enjoyed classical music so that saved a bundle there anyway.
Invasion and occupation is a hideously expensive proposition, at least for us, but genocide need not be. There are many ways for a truly advanced (advanced technologically I mean) civilization to wipe us out completely and cheaply. There've been hundreds of good science-fiction novels written on that subject, so it's a popular one. See, invasion only matters if you need the people around to be useful: if all you want is a free hand to extract whatever mineral wealth you need, and have a strong stomach (or whatever it is that they use to process their nutrients) just murder us, bump us off. Don't even need expensive nukes, or have to invent a complicated bioweapon. Just pick a domestic pathogen (say, ebola virus or something equally virulent and deadly) and seed it around the planet. Hell, spread a mix of deadly diseases all over the place, ebola, anthrax, flesh-eating bacteria, you name it. We'd never know what hit us.
You're also assuming that the technology required for interstellar travel would require enormous amounts of energy. Probably it will, but if you're that advanced you'll probably be using antimatter for power, so fuel won't be a problem. It's also possible that there may be a way to translate matter through higher-order dimensions (rubber-sheet universe and all that) in which case you open a temporary rift between two points in space and walk across. Or open a bunch of them high up in our atmosphere and start dumping pathogens through.
Either way, once we achieve interstellar flight (even relative slowboats like a Bussard ramjet or other non-FTL technology) we'd be wise to pussyfoot it around our neighborhood until we have some idea who or what is out there.
That's a perfectly reasonable attitude to take: eminently logical. However, you're making the possibly fatal assumption that they are a. sane by our standards and/or b. reason in the same way that we do. And not all humans think alike. I mean, how much do you have in common with any of the human monsters that have caused so much grief down through the ages? Did Stalin kill millions just because he wanted resources? Did the Nazis? The fact is, entire civilizations can be drawn into the insanity of their leaders, and if such a culture happens to have interstellar travel, a bad attitude, and the means to make something of it ... well. To paraphrase Heinlein, never depend upon another man's (or alien being's) better nature, because he, she or it might not have one.
Me, I'm holding out for the T1000.
Sure, but suppose we got it mostly right with relativity, and there's no faster-than-light travel nor communication?
... if nobody knows how to get around them. We're nowhere near advanced enough to claim, to a sufficient degree of certainty, if that's true. Ask yourself this: were I Love Lucy and the five o'clock news really worth it? I'd hate to get wiped out because Lucille Ball resembled some alien version of the Antichrist. Of course, odds are nobody out there will receive anything just because of the distances involved. On the other hand, if some race has spacecraft or interstellar probes in the area, they might notice us.
Sure, but suppose we didn't? Like I said, interstellar distances are a perfect defense
Orrin Hatch should be decapitated, with his head stuck on the end of a pike as a warning to any other Congressmen that might feel tempted to behave as badly. Congressmen Berman and Hollings' heads should also be on pikes to either side of Mr. Hatch's.
Granted, but my point is that the prices we're suffering from now are self-inflicted, not a direct artifact of any external influence, or any relation to the actual availability of crude. There's sufficient petroleum available, and sufficient domestic refining (actually were in the middle of a glut, supply-wise.) Wall Street, however, is doing a bit of profiteering at our expense while simultaneously pointing the finger elsewhere to deflect the blame.
Even more notably, L. Ron (schmientologist) Hubbard's "Battlefield Earth", where a Psychlo reconnaissance probe picked up one of the Voyagers (in its own way a feeble attempt at communication) and backtracked the machine's course to Earth and ... that was that. After wiping us out with an invulnerable gas drone they simply moved in and began exploiting Earth's mineral resources. Conquest is easy if genocide is on the table.
By broadcasting the way we are, we're making a couple of assumptions: a. that there are no alien civilizations out there to worry about or b. if there are, they're not actively hostile and capable of making something of it. Neither is a safe assumption. Granted, interstellar distances are a perfect defense against anyone near technological parity with us, but why would we assume that an alien civilization has advanced no further than that?
Furthermore, some people maintain the (preposterous) belief that any race that is substantially more technically advanced than us would, somehow, have to be peaceful and beneficient. However, if they followed a developmental path anything at all like ours, they got that advanced by being anything but peaceable! Where did many of the historical discontinuities in our scientific and technical knowledge come from? Why, from the tremendous R&D investment the world's militaries command in times of war. I see no reason to assume that an alien race would necessarily be any different in that regard.
Consider this: how many times in our own history has a culture been damaged or destroyed after encountering a more advanced one? Take our Native American friends, for example. The more capable society doesn't even have to be warlike either.
It's not that simple. Oil prices in the U.S. today have less to do with the Middle East or OPEC or any of the other usual suspects, and more to do with Wall Street.
Who decides what's of interest? Unless you give me a Web page where I can select the specific messages I'm interested in, there will be problems.
... but there are millions upon millions of users subject to a single drain-bamaged ISP with no hope of ever switching. Those are the people that will get shafted by techniques like this. It's power, and it means more money, and it's just too tempting. People like me who are fortunate enough to live in a broadband-competitive area could jump to another provider (unless they all start doing it, that's what worries me about this sort of abuse.)
... but that didn't last long once advertisers started waving big money under cable programmers collective noses. You have to understand, these guys want revenue, and they'll run the numbers and decide how many customers they can afford to lose and still make a profit by shoving ads down our throats.
Anyway, you'd be right, in a truly competitive environment
Remember how cable TV was advertised as the commercial free alternative to broadcast television? Well, it was
Then you don't have Comcast or SBC ... believe me, they will not be able to resist the advertising dollars (which can more than offset the loss of some customers), and because such ads would be ISP-generated and pretty much unavoidable for most people, they'd be worth a hell of a lot more money than just another click-through. Annoying and driving away users has no meaning in a situation where users need the service (lame as it might be), and have few if any alternatives. Hell, if annoying users was such a big deal why hasn't cable TV cleaned up its act? The answer is: they don't have to care because we have little choice in the matter, and they make plenty of money from advertisers. That should be considered some kind of a conflict of interest, really.
Here you go, from the horse's mouth to yours ... "Get your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape!". And if you expect me to apologize for that, you little know your man. I haven't seen that movie in damn near thirty years.
True ... but how long do you think it will before other things, things much less useful to the customer, begin showing up there instead?
Personally, I'd say that if the information they need to present is so damned important, it would be better to just do a redirect to another page (like Comcast does if you don't pay your bill) as opposed to modifying content on the fly. That would be more akin to a television show being interrupted for an important public service announcement. Modifying the HTML is like a TV show where the local station overlays graphics and text over the program you're watching in order to advertise products or other shows. That irritates the hell out of me, especially when it's on a cable channel that I happen to be paying for.