Oh god, can you really be serious? The same US economy that is currently wiping out the rest of the world as it explodes like the giant bubble it is?
unions are what have basically killed off our automakers here
Really. Fascinating. Unions.
Not, for example, your car industry being a bloated, oversubsidized dinosaur which has consistently ignored the obvious impending changes necessary to cope with rising oil prices and dramatically higher awareness about global warming?
Something run by the governement (any government) efficient? That I doubt, highly.
That is because you are a blinkered ideologue. You may like to look at Wall Street at present for an example of how efficient private industry can be at completely fucking things up if left to their own devices.
Some countries have realised that providing essential medical care cannot morally or financially be done in a "profitable" manner, if you believe "profitable" only refers to dollars.
I can only say that for some procedures, especially serious ones, you are better off in a public hospital than a private one in Australia.
Tyrell: The facts of life: To make an alteration in the evolvement of an organic life system is fatal. A coding sequence cannot be revised once its been established.
Roy: Why not?
Tyrell: Because by the second day of incubation, any cells that have undergone reversion mutations give rise to revertant colonies like rats leaving a sinking ship; then the ship sinks.
Roy: What about EMS recombination?
Tyrell: We've already tried it. Ethyl methane sulfonate is an alkylating agent and a potent mutagen. It created a virus so lethal the subject was dead before he left the table.
Roy: Then a repressor protein that blocks the operating cells.
Tyrell: Wouldn't obstruct replication, but it does give rise to an error in replication so that the newly formed DNA strand carries a mutation and you've got a virus again. But this - all of this is academic. You were made as well as we could make you.
While I agree that anything that appears socialist is automatically deemed bad by a significant portion of our population..
I just wanted to point out that we actually have a decent chunk of what you said on the list - and have for a while. 1) Minimum wage has been planned to make an increase for at least the last year, if not two or more. Personally I do not agree with it but whatever, off topic. 2) Unemployment benefits are out there, and they are nowhere near what your job was - but they are there. If things get really bad there's welfare. 3) Unions are popular, just depends on the industry and the area. IT isn't one of those - but things like elevator repair are. 4) Public Health - while there is currently no such thing as a Public healthcare system like Canada and Europe have, You won't be denied treatment because you can't pay for it. You might, however, have to quit your job if you don't make enough or the employment benefits are woefully inadequate... 5) There are plenty of grants and loans out there that most people qualify for. I don't think financing an education is really a problem.
By way of comparison with Australia, where I live:
1. As I understand minimum wage in the US, it is woefully inadequate and not generally enough for a single person to live on working a single full time job. This completely defeats the purpose of the thing. In Australia, with a few notable exceptions, minimum wage is at least sufficient to pay rent and food. Low income earners also pay virtually no tax.
2. We receive unemployment benefits for as long as we are looking for work. They are not exactly a huge amount, but are sufficient for people to live on frugally.
3. In the 1990s the US had around half the rate of unionisation of the rest of the industrialised world (see table 7 here).
4. In Australia, if you don't have private health cover you will receive free, unlimited public health. It is slower and can be of a lower standard, but on the whole it is readily accessible and reasonably efficient. Only about 50% of Australians have private health, and those who do not are by no means exclusively poorer or less well educated - many choose not to have it on principle.
5. Our Federal Government provides public loans to any Australian citizen who qualifies on academic merit for a university course. Free K12 schooling is universally available at the state level. There are also extensive trade-based tertiary education courses funded by the government.
I am sort of enjoying watching the United States have these epiphanies about protectionism, minimum wages, banking regulation etc. Not because I wish ill on you guys - I absolutely don't. If we must have a 900 pound gorilla of a country indirectly ruling the world, I'd prefer America to, say, China. Or just about anyone else.
But for years and years, the rest of the world has protested long and loud as the U.S. has rammed radical capitalist theories down our throats - no, you may not protect local IP, jobs, vulnerable industries, agriculture, culture, etc etc etc. Globalise everything, open your markets, participate in the race to the bottom. It has seemed crazy and backwards to you that any of us would even consider having high minimum wages, good unemployment benefits, strong unionised workforces, public health, free education and so on. Such things are apparently "socialist", which to many Americans (especially of the right wing bent) really means a combination of "communist" and "totalitarian".
Sure, globalisation has created a lot of growth. But it has also been unneccessarily destructive, and in many countries has wrought untold damage before any benefit has been seen.
So now, after forgetting all about the New Deal and after ignoring the post-WWII warnings your own leaders and intellectuals gave you about the corporatisation of your nation, you finally start to see what can happen to an economy and a society when you strip all of those terrible 'protectionist' policies away and then expose it to harsh conditions. Banks are hiring foreigners because (a) it's cheaper and (b) you have created a culture where the only "right" is corporations doing things as profitably as possible and the only "wrong" is putting anything ahead of money. You're a late entrant in the race to the bottom that you created.
But the measure of intelligence is not whether you make mistakes - it's whether you learn from the ones you do make. I hope you learn from all of this, I really do. Getting rid of the Republican Party and moving your idea of "centrist" away from what the rest of us regard as "far right" might be a good starting point.
Precisely. There should be 0% of votes 'lost' with an electronic system - where could they go? A computer is not like a physical system operated by humans, with pieces of paper going left, right and centre. It should be utterly trivial to ensure that the number of votes and voters matches precisely.
People are amazingly tolerant/ignorant about these things. Anyone who follows elections closely would be well aware that 2% is more than enough to swing an election in many situations.
For example, to pick US presidential elections:
2004: Bush beat Kerry by 2.5% 2000: Bush beat Gore with 0.5% less of the vote 1976: Carter beat Ford by 2% 1968: Nixon beat Humphrey by less than 1% 1960: Kennedy beat Nixon by 0.2%
Although the electoral college obviously affects the impact of the popular vote in those particular elections, 2% of the vote going "missing" would certainly have had the potential to change most of the results.
It has always worked on some ordinary PCs, but it has also had massive stability issues on others. On mine it crashed 100% of the time in the vault area as soon as you tried to kill the first radroach. Nothing you've described there sounds like it would cure that problem.
A very significant number of people appear to have crash-to-desktop issues with random parts of the game. AFAIK this still isn't resolved, despite one patch and now this additional content.
I have seen this myself on two different, up to date PCs which run everything else (Oblivion; Far Cry 2; STALKER; etc) completely fine.
I am a diehard PC gamer, and I wholeheartedly agree.
I now read reviews first and foremost to find out what manner of fucktard-inspired DRM and compulsory tracking/on-line registration is involved. I also return games which contain these things but do not say that they do on the box (e.g. I recently returned Company of Heroes because if it detects an Internet connection it phones home to Relic to let them know you're playing... no, not ok).
I only wish reviewers included specific and exhaustive details of the DRM and on-line 'features' of every game they reviewed. It is more important than whether they give it an 8.0 or an 8.5.
If you haven't already, check out Good Old Games: DRM-free PC classics, re-released with XP and Vista compatibility.
I like the way the special edition of T2 adds significantly to the 'self-realisation' elements of the story, i.e. the machine learning more about human emotion and human social interactions (like the scene where he's learning to smile, for example).
I also like how the T1000 gradually deteriorates towards the end, such as when his morphing ability starts becoming difficult to control - it's really adds something to the story that this 'invincible' machine is mortal too, and we even see the first signs of confusion as this dawns on him.
This is only true if you boil plots (or songs) down to a few basic elements. The same would apply in any area of life - oh, the automobile isn't new, it's just a fancy version of the horse and cart.
I would be intrigued to hear which previous works are the prototypes for:
- Blade Runner itself - The novels of Thomas Pynchon - The novels of Brett Easton Ellis - The (post-folk) music of Bob Dylan, say, 1963-70 - The music of the Beatles from Sergeant Pepper's onwards
Unless you boil Blade Runner, to pick one of the above, down to something as trite as "a cop chases a group of dangerous criminals and finds his job ethically challenging" then I don't think you can legitimately say it wasn't original to some degree.
Everything fictional incorporates some elements of reality, and is invariably influenced by what went before. But it is just wrong to say that everything has been done before.
T2 was an action movie. But it was a GREAT action movie, one of the best ever. It may not be an 'intelligent' as Blade Runner (the latter of which is one of my favourite movies of all time) but in terms of its genre it was largely unsurpassed until at least The Matrix.
Otherwise I agree with your post 100%. Although that To Kill a Mockingbird sequel sounds great, can I suggest Vin Diesel for the role of Atticus? I also have a title lined up for you: "2: Killa Mockingbird".
You're just playing semantics. There's a clear and logical distinction between animals living without the ability to develop and share technological methods for survival, and humans, who do have that.
From another thread where someone made a similar point (in that case it was that humans wiping out other species was 'natural' because we're animals too):
The problem with this type of reasoning is that we have evolved to a stage where we can "beat" any other species. Human-level intelligence has transformed evolutionary competition into a straight out massacre. We also have the ability to change the environment in ways which are effectively catacylsmic from the point of view of evolution - if you radically alter the environment over the course of a few decades or even centuries, then there is nowhere near enough time for a typical vertebrate to adapt via natural selection to a hostile environment.
If we are indeed affecting the climate, as seems likely, then I find it plausible to think that we could quite easily end up wiping out most species on earth, save for a few super-hardy ones. Unfortunately we will probably survive ourselves, which hardly seems fair. If you want to compete until the end, I hope you like the sound of a future filled with cockroaches, feral cats, rabbits, rats and flies because those are the types of animals which will thrive in a man made environmental apocalypse.
I would like to think that if we are intelligent enough to realise that we have the power to exterminate the other varieties of life on earth, then we are also intelligent enough to realise why we shouldn't (including both cold rational reasons and aesthetic/moral reasons).
Do you really believe that it is ok on any level if, say, every last tiger dies as a result of human impact on the environment? What if we go out and shoot them all? Because we could, and it sounds like you're saying that would be good and proper, or at least 'evolutionarily correct' in some way.
You are 'natural' in one sense. But when most people distinguish between 'nature' and what humans do, they mean it in the sense that, by reason of our intelligence, language and technology, humans have reached a point where they are no longer subject to the usual medium-term ecological forces which limit the effect animals have on their environment. We may still be subject to long-term ecological forces, but unfortunately that will probably involve all life on earth dying.
You should read Ishmael. At the very least it's a thought-provoking consideration of how humans differ from other animals.
You'd be right if the energy cost of a large TV was noticeable in end users' wallets. But it's not.
It's the usual thing about internalizing energy costs. Energy is way too cheap for the market to have much of an effect. Why else would the US need gas mileage standards?
Fair point. But I suppose as with other issues, there is the option of creating widespread awareness of the issue so that people at least have the ability to make the best choice. If you do that and find that the underlying problem is still there, maybe it's time to regulate.
I now return you to your anti-EU anti-regulation frothing-at-the-mouth posts.
I'm no free market radical, but this does seem like a good example of something that is best left to the market.
There is a direct and increasing incentive for consumers to buy lower energy use products. Therefore there is a direct incentive to reduce the energy use in these panels. Therefore the market is likely to either produce lower energy use plasmas, or LCDs or other similar technologies which have plasma-like quality.
The time and money no doubt involved in this regulatory process might be better spent on improving the level of mandatory information disclosed in relation to all electrical products so that consumers can (voluntarily) make an informed decision.
Thom Yorke: Do you take those... those intelligence drugs?
SG: I don't need intelligent drugs, Thom, because I don't know what they are. But I will put anything into my mouth that's offered to me, whether it's meant to go there or not! Because... I'm different.
...who lack unlimited funds, the best buy at the moment are the ATi HD 48x0 series cards, which have ridiculously good price/performance and will run any current or near-future game easily at high detail.
I have XP on my desktop, and I'd say I have a usable work environment in less than 20 seconds from the moment I hit the power button. That's on a Core2Duo with 2 gigs of RAM.
Please restore the ability to zoom out far enough to see more than 1-2 of your oversize novelty units and buildings at once on the one monitor. I will then consider purchasing your RTS games again.
You may like to take a look at Supreme Commander or Red Alert 2 running at a decent resolution to see what I am talking about. You will note that not only can I see my own super cool units, I can also see enemy units at the same time and visually gauge what the hell is going on. This has the bonus of actually allowing me to enjoy playing the game.
Could it possibly be that people like your good self are constantly ramming the Beatles down everyone's throat as 'important' and the 'greatest band of all time'?
I know when people walk around talking pompous, over the top crap about things, I prefer to call them out on it...
But I guess in your world view, only people who like the Beatles have a valid opinion. Interesting approach.
The Beatles didn't have anyone with the personal intensity of a Jim Morrison
Wow. I am not Beatles fan, but have you even seen any footage of John Lennon at his peak? If anything, his personal intensity is exactly what let them get away with 12 minute sitar solos on their mid-to-late period albums.
Nonsense. People always over-glorify that one period of music. Do you really think that the only great musicians in all of human history were born in a span of a hundred years?
Double nonsense. Or do you really think that it's impossible that prevailing social, technological and cultural conditions might give rise to relatively brief "golden ages" in which music (or other aspects of society) move forward in tremendous leaps? I mean, the Beatles themselves were smack bang in the middle of just such a leap forward, as amplification and rapid social change created a window for their art.
The very point the GP was making is that people DO still know who Mozart and Beethoven and the like were. Hell, any half educated kid would have at least heard OF them, if not (knowingly) listened to them. I doubt there are many people alive who haven't heard at least a few snatches of some of their more famous music in one form or another.
On the other hand, will the same be said of the Beatles in 200 years time? So far we know they were extremely popular, changed the conception of popular music in several very closely aligned countries, and made a lot of money. But I think it is a least arguable that when the dust settles from the mid-20th century music revolution (such as it was), that they may not be regarded quite as highly as you seem to be suggesting. In history's eyes they may come out as more of a Rachmaninoff than a Mozart - known to the discerning fan, but not universal.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh god, can you really be serious? The same US economy that is currently wiping out the rest of the world as it explodes like the giant bubble it is?
Really. Fascinating. Unions.
Not, for example, your car industry being a bloated, oversubsidized dinosaur which has consistently ignored the obvious impending changes necessary to cope with rising oil prices and dramatically higher awareness about global warming?
That is because you are a blinkered ideologue. You may like to look at Wall Street at present for an example of how efficient private industry can be at completely fucking things up if left to their own devices.
Some countries have realised that providing essential medical care cannot morally or financially be done in a "profitable" manner, if you believe "profitable" only refers to dollars.
I can only say that for some procedures, especially serious ones, you are better off in a public hospital than a private one in Australia.
And why shouldn't all people be paid for the work they do, not their other characteristics?
Tyrell: The facts of life: To make an alteration in the evolvement of an organic life system is fatal. A coding sequence cannot be revised once its been established.
Roy: Why not?
Tyrell: Because by the second day of incubation, any cells that have undergone reversion mutations give rise to revertant colonies like rats leaving a sinking ship; then the ship sinks.
Roy: What about EMS recombination?
Tyrell: We've already tried it. Ethyl methane sulfonate is an alkylating agent and a potent mutagen. It created a virus so lethal the subject was dead before he left the table.
Roy: Then a repressor protein that blocks the operating cells.
Tyrell: Wouldn't obstruct replication, but it does give rise to an error in replication so that the newly formed DNA strand carries a mutation and you've got a virus again. But this - all of this is academic. You were made as well as we could make you.
Roy: But not to last.
By way of comparison with Australia, where I live:
1. As I understand minimum wage in the US, it is woefully inadequate and not generally enough for a single person to live on working a single full time job. This completely defeats the purpose of the thing. In Australia, with a few notable exceptions, minimum wage is at least sufficient to pay rent and food. Low income earners also pay virtually no tax.
2. We receive unemployment benefits for as long as we are looking for work. They are not exactly a huge amount, but are sufficient for people to live on frugally.
3. In the 1990s the US had around half the rate of unionisation of the rest of the industrialised world (see table 7 here).
4. In Australia, if you don't have private health cover you will receive free, unlimited public health. It is slower and can be of a lower standard, but on the whole it is readily accessible and reasonably efficient. Only about 50% of Australians have private health, and those who do not are by no means exclusively poorer or less well educated - many choose not to have it on principle.
5. Our Federal Government provides public loans to any Australian citizen who qualifies on academic merit for a university course. Free K12 schooling is universally available at the state level. There are also extensive trade-based tertiary education courses funded by the government.
I am sort of enjoying watching the United States have these epiphanies about protectionism, minimum wages, banking regulation etc. Not because I wish ill on you guys - I absolutely don't. If we must have a 900 pound gorilla of a country indirectly ruling the world, I'd prefer America to, say, China. Or just about anyone else.
But for years and years, the rest of the world has protested long and loud as the U.S. has rammed radical capitalist theories down our throats - no, you may not protect local IP, jobs, vulnerable industries, agriculture, culture, etc etc etc. Globalise everything, open your markets, participate in the race to the bottom. It has seemed crazy and backwards to you that any of us would even consider having high minimum wages, good unemployment benefits, strong unionised workforces, public health, free education and so on. Such things are apparently "socialist", which to many Americans (especially of the right wing bent) really means a combination of "communist" and "totalitarian".
Sure, globalisation has created a lot of growth. But it has also been unneccessarily destructive, and in many countries has wrought untold damage before any benefit has been seen.
So now, after forgetting all about the New Deal and after ignoring the post-WWII warnings your own leaders and intellectuals gave you about the corporatisation of your nation, you finally start to see what can happen to an economy and a society when you strip all of those terrible 'protectionist' policies away and then expose it to harsh conditions. Banks are hiring foreigners because (a) it's cheaper and (b) you have created a culture where the only "right" is corporations doing things as profitably as possible and the only "wrong" is putting anything ahead of money. You're a late entrant in the race to the bottom that you created.
But the measure of intelligence is not whether you make mistakes - it's whether you learn from the ones you do make. I hope you learn from all of this, I really do. Getting rid of the Republican Party and moving your idea of "centrist" away from what the rest of us regard as "far right" might be a good starting point.
Precisely. There should be 0% of votes 'lost' with an electronic system - where could they go? A computer is not like a physical system operated by humans, with pieces of paper going left, right and centre. It should be utterly trivial to ensure that the number of votes and voters matches precisely.
People are amazingly tolerant/ignorant about these things. Anyone who follows elections closely would be well aware that 2% is more than enough to swing an election in many situations.
For example, to pick US presidential elections:
2004: Bush beat Kerry by 2.5%
2000: Bush beat Gore with 0.5% less of the vote
1976: Carter beat Ford by 2%
1968: Nixon beat Humphrey by less than 1%
1960: Kennedy beat Nixon by 0.2%
Although the electoral college obviously affects the impact of the popular vote in those particular elections, 2% of the vote going "missing" would certainly have had the potential to change most of the results.
Luckily the story isn't about the US, and US copyright law doesn't actually bind the entire rest of the world (yet, although you're trying hard).
In most of the rest of the world such a photograph would be subject to copyright.
This site has a good list of securom games - not sure about other forms of DRM though.
It has always worked on some ordinary PCs, but it has also had massive stability issues on others. On mine it crashed 100% of the time in the vault area as soon as you tried to kill the first radroach. Nothing you've described there sounds like it would cure that problem.
Does it actually work on normal PCs yet?
A very significant number of people appear to have crash-to-desktop issues with random parts of the game. AFAIK this still isn't resolved, despite one patch and now this additional content.
I have seen this myself on two different, up to date PCs which run everything else (Oblivion; Far Cry 2; STALKER; etc) completely fine.
I am a diehard PC gamer, and I wholeheartedly agree.
I now read reviews first and foremost to find out what manner of fucktard-inspired DRM and compulsory tracking/on-line registration is involved. I also return games which contain these things but do not say that they do on the box (e.g. I recently returned Company of Heroes because if it detects an Internet connection it phones home to Relic to let them know you're playing... no, not ok).
I only wish reviewers included specific and exhaustive details of the DRM and on-line 'features' of every game they reviewed. It is more important than whether they give it an 8.0 or an 8.5.
If you haven't already, check out Good Old Games: DRM-free PC classics, re-released with XP and Vista compatibility.
Understood.
I like the way the special edition of T2 adds significantly to the 'self-realisation' elements of the story, i.e. the machine learning more about human emotion and human social interactions (like the scene where he's learning to smile, for example).
I also like how the T1000 gradually deteriorates towards the end, such as when his morphing ability starts becoming difficult to control - it's really adds something to the story that this 'invincible' machine is mortal too, and we even see the first signs of confusion as this dawns on him.
This is only true if you boil plots (or songs) down to a few basic elements. The same would apply in any area of life - oh, the automobile isn't new, it's just a fancy version of the horse and cart.
I would be intrigued to hear which previous works are the prototypes for:
- Blade Runner itself
- The novels of Thomas Pynchon
- The novels of Brett Easton Ellis
- The (post-folk) music of Bob Dylan, say, 1963-70
- The music of the Beatles from Sergeant Pepper's onwards
Unless you boil Blade Runner, to pick one of the above, down to something as trite as "a cop chases a group of dangerous criminals and finds his job ethically challenging" then I don't think you can legitimately say it wasn't original to some degree.
Everything fictional incorporates some elements of reality, and is invariably influenced by what went before. But it is just wrong to say that everything has been done before.
Bzzzzt... movie snob alert.
T2 was an action movie. But it was a GREAT action movie, one of the best ever. It may not be an 'intelligent' as Blade Runner (the latter of which is one of my favourite movies of all time) but in terms of its genre it was largely unsurpassed until at least The Matrix.
Otherwise I agree with your post 100%. Although that To Kill a Mockingbird sequel sounds great, can I suggest Vin Diesel for the role of Atticus? I also have a title lined up for you: "2: Killa Mockingbird".
You're just playing semantics. There's a clear and logical distinction between animals living without the ability to develop and share technological methods for survival, and humans, who do have that.
From another thread where someone made a similar point (in that case it was that humans wiping out other species was 'natural' because we're animals too):
You are 'natural' in one sense. But when most people distinguish between 'nature' and what humans do, they mean it in the sense that, by reason of our intelligence, language and technology, humans have reached a point where they are no longer subject to the usual medium-term ecological forces which limit the effect animals have on their environment. We may still be subject to long-term ecological forces, but unfortunately that will probably involve all life on earth dying.
You should read Ishmael. At the very least it's a thought-provoking consideration of how humans differ from other animals.
Fair point. But I suppose as with other issues, there is the option of creating widespread awareness of the issue so that people at least have the ability to make the best choice. If you do that and find that the underlying problem is still there, maybe it's time to regulate.
I'm no free market radical, but this does seem like a good example of something that is best left to the market.
There is a direct and increasing incentive for consumers to buy lower energy use products. Therefore there is a direct incentive to reduce the energy use in these panels. Therefore the market is likely to either produce lower energy use plasmas, or LCDs or other similar technologies which have plasma-like quality.
The time and money no doubt involved in this regulatory process might be better spent on improving the level of mandatory information disclosed in relation to all electrical products so that consumers can (voluntarily) make an informed decision.
Thom Yorke: Do you take those... those intelligence drugs?
SG: I don't need intelligent drugs, Thom, because I don't know what they are. But I will put anything into my mouth that's offered to me, whether it's meant to go there or not! Because... I'm different.
Thom Yorke (laughing): It's because your weird!
...who lack unlimited funds, the best buy at the moment are the ATi HD 48x0 series cards, which have ridiculously good price/performance and will run any current or near-future game easily at high detail.
I have XP on my desktop, and I'd say I have a usable work environment in less than 20 seconds from the moment I hit the power button. That's on a Core2Duo with 2 gigs of RAM.
...and I'm still grappling with this concept of work days that have predefined start and finish times.
Sounds like paradise!
Dear EA
Please restore the ability to zoom out far enough to see more than 1-2 of your oversize novelty units and buildings at once on the one monitor. I will then consider purchasing your RTS games again.
You may like to take a look at Supreme Commander or Red Alert 2 running at a decent resolution to see what I am talking about. You will note that not only can I see my own super cool units, I can also see enemy units at the same time and visually gauge what the hell is going on. This has the bonus of actually allowing me to enjoy playing the game.
Regards
- a one-time Red Alert junkie
Could it possibly be that people like your good self are constantly ramming the Beatles down everyone's throat as 'important' and the 'greatest band of all time'?
I know when people walk around talking pompous, over the top crap about things, I prefer to call them out on it...
But I guess in your world view, only people who like the Beatles have a valid opinion. Interesting approach.
Wow. I am not Beatles fan, but have you even seen any footage of John Lennon at his peak? If anything, his personal intensity is exactly what let them get away with 12 minute sitar solos on their mid-to-late period albums.
Double nonsense. Or do you really think that it's impossible that prevailing social, technological and cultural conditions might give rise to relatively brief "golden ages" in which music (or other aspects of society) move forward in tremendous leaps? I mean, the Beatles themselves were smack bang in the middle of just such a leap forward, as amplification and rapid social change created a window for their art.
The very point the GP was making is that people DO still know who Mozart and Beethoven and the like were. Hell, any half educated kid would have at least heard OF them, if not (knowingly) listened to them. I doubt there are many people alive who haven't heard at least a few snatches of some of their more famous music in one form or another.
On the other hand, will the same be said of the Beatles in 200 years time? So far we know they were extremely popular, changed the conception of popular music in several very closely aligned countries, and made a lot of money. But I think it is a least arguable that when the dust settles from the mid-20th century music revolution (such as it was), that they may not be regarded quite as highly as you seem to be suggesting. In history's eyes they may come out as more of a Rachmaninoff than a Mozart - known to the discerning fan, but not universal.