The only way Microsoft can threaten Linux is to put out a product so great that people will be willing to pay for it rather than get something free.
Although I admire the insight you show in your post, I disagree with this statement, because Microsoft has already demonstrated another way: they can coerce people into buying their product, by bundling it, and by using their market dominance to interfere with the establishment of competitive products, mostly using old Railroad Trust trick of creating gratuitous incompatibilities every now and then for no reason than to make competitors update and users upgrade. The Ralroad Trust, by the way, was the primary target of America's first antrtrust legislation.
Although I hate words like this, what Windows and Office have on the desktop is synergy. The business market could give a damn what OS is on the desktop, so long as supports Office, which, although it runs on two platforms, only guarantees interoperability among instances running on (surprise!) Windows. MS didn't kill OS/2 with its Windows juggernaut; it killed it by withdrawing Office support.
So as long as MS can say "if you want one, you gotta have the other," it's going to continue to sell both.
Fortunately for us, the server side of the equation is dominated by pragmatists who--although we usually do have passion for our favorite products--insist on solutions that work, reliably by necessity and cheaply by preference.
So we're safe, for now. But remember that MS has quitely taken over the Web browser market, and now that there's only one meaningful browser to access the web, they can start making sure said brower interacts better with one type of server, such as IIS on Win2k, than another, such as Apache or Netscape on anything. When this happens, the surviving e-commerce sites will ask a very pragmatic question: whether they want to give everyone in the world unreliable, half-assed access to their site, or give ninety percent of the world excellent service. When they choose option two, we will have lost the server market as well.
The article really hyped the idea of table-oriented programming. I've seen both brilliant and horrible example of T.O.P. since I started programming. The horrible examples were, of course, the ones where the developers insisted on absolute purism in every corner of the system. This is true in just about any development environment--the difference between reality and a model of reality is that reality usually doesn't fit into models very well, because it is a inherently a superset of any model.
And I've seen at least one OOP project go down the tubes because the designers, among the smartest people I've ever met, treated data persistence as just another implementation detail--they had been seduced by the model of a computer that never fails and has unlimited memory.
But one of the most successful projects I've seen is one where an object-oriented framework provided a transportation and communications infrastructure on which table-oriented applications could be developed. OOP gave us just right level of hierarchical abstraction to make platform-specific issues irrelevant to higher layers; at those higher-layers, the mind-boggling flexibility of table-driven rule sets provided a potent way to model business processes without trying to put everything in exactly one box.
I do believe we are heading for a convergence of sorts. The tables in question are going to be XML, with Java (or pick another OO language) providing the framework in which (and with which) to parse it.
I had been putting off a trip to a waypoint in eastern NC for a while now, but now that this story's out, I fully expect to arrive there only to find seventy-five geeks milling about with their Magellan sets waiting patiently to stand at a Slashdotted geographical location to get their picture taken. Crud!
We already have a thirteen-month calendar. In addition to January through December, we have Checkuary, which starts on January 1 of the new year and ends when we stop writing last year's date on personal cheques.
And it's very human---it lasts as long as an individual person needs it to last. This year had the shortest Checkuary on record, but in 1999 I was writing 1998 on checks as late as mid-February.
After going through prototype after prototype, and fixing glitch after glitch, after long hours and late nights and nearly endless frustrations, I have a feeling that the first successful message transmitted via any medium is, "Is this goddamned thing working yet? Hello? Hello? Fuck!"
At the official unveiling, however, the press hears you say "This miraculous new device will transform mankind" or some other PR-department hooey.
You're right that dynamite has no military application. But Nobel's invention saved more lives in the mining industry than he ended. Dynamite is a wonder explosive because it was far more stable than anything else available, like mercury fulminate, nitroglycerin, or picric acid, and as a "low" explosive, it is still far more predictable than TNT and the like.
Nobel's sudden philanthropy came in part because of someone else's journalistic cluelessness. A Swedish newspaper wrongly reported that Nobel had died. In the article, a reporter excoriated Nobel as a wholesale death merchant and claimed that his invention was used in military weapons of mass destruction--or what passed for them at the time. The journalist was wrong, of course, and Nobel knew it. But he did establish the Prize fund. Whether he did this out of guilt, I do not know. But it is for certain that his reputation had been badly damaged by the newspaper's libelous claims.
The problem would be that you would have to come up with a different unusual punishiment every time you wanted to be cruel. So while pounding seven pounds of SPAM up this schlub's butt with a jackhammer would be fun, you couldn't do it to the next one.
Put him in a nice, normal, jail cell, with someone who never got the e-mail from the pardons board, because his mailbox was clogged with spam.
A lot of the argument seems to be that not only does the industry own the data, it gets to decide how it is represented.
So my question is, what happens when DVD becomes obsolete? If the consumer has a license for the data, he can convert the data on the DVD to a new format and end of story. However, if the industry decides five years from now to:
start manufacturing players and "disks" in the new media, and
stop manufacturing DVD players,
the consumer has no choice but to repurchase their entire DVD library.
A real-world example? Well, the closest I could come to a real-world example would be if the only people who could legally manufacture a record player, a CD player, a cassette tape player, or a DAT player, was a licensee of the RIAA itself, and that the licensee agreed to stop manufacturing the old technology as soon as the new technology was announced.
I think Kotkin has completely missed the point of what the Net is doing to rural and small-town America. Cities have attracted people away from the farm ever since civilization started. The Romans even had a term for it: "Bread and Circuses". City life attracted so many people that most of them had little or nothing to do. So the government essentially decided to keep them fed and entertained, in order to keep them from becoming restless and rioting. There is absolutely nothing new here.
But here's what the technology revolution has done: it has brought the entire world to every doorstep, no matter where it is. My uncle lives in a small north Georgia town with a population of 30,000. He has 120 channels via directTV and instant Internet access via 2B+D ISDN. His kids can log into AOL just the same as any kid in Chicago. And if Wal-Mart doesn't have the gas grill he wants, the right one is just a click and a UPS truck away.
If anything, the quality of life in Podunk is improving, and far more rapidly than it is in the big city. As soon as my office finishes installing its VPN, I could move out to my father-in-law's farm. For the chance to trade a daily commute for a twice-monthly drive into town, it just might be worth it.
The only concern I have about such universally available communications is the homologation of societies worldwide. Local character is being replaced with Generica, because everybody everywhere is being exposed to the same thing. But, as the French say in their rapidly disappearing language, c'est la vie.
There is. When you walk into the polling place and identify yourself, they look up your name and addresss in a book and put a checkmark next to it. That's a physical record.
It's easy to alter digital records if you know how, but to falsify 10,000 paper ballots is another story.
Falsifying ten thousand paper ballots is trivial. You take the ones that indicate the candidate you don't want and throw them away. In a precinct that is statistically heavy on the opposing candidate, you can bias the election towards you by throwing ballots away without taking the time to read them. If you want to be extra sneaky, you can double punch the ones you don't like, invalidating them.
You can also invalidate them by making up new counting rules every time the count comes up in a way you don't like.
OTOH, there are lots and lots of ways to make pretty thoroughly unalterable digital records, using write-once media (CD-ROM, anyone?) and a "signing" hash like MD5. If you want a physical record you could dump the ones and zeros out as big, scannable dots on paper.
From a CS perspective, this problem is almost trivial. Applied Cryptography discusses it specifically. But even if you do come up with a 100% effective solution, there are still some much more difficult wetware problems to resolve, like people voting in more than one district. In North Carolina, for example, the courts decided you cannot be asked for positive ID when you vote. See, if a state ID costs US$15, and you need one to vote, you've effectively created a US$15 poll tax, and poll taxes are illegal. Give away IDs for free? Sure, but this is still a wetware problem, far beyond the scope of the simple, well documented, doable task of making unalterable, non-refutable digital records.
I think we should *always* have a physical record of a vote or any important action/transaction (like major bank transfers, pay stubs, credit card bills, etc.
I don't know what you consider a "major" bank transfer, but the ones the banks themselves consider major are done electronically, billions of dollars worth every hour.
Show me a laser printer and a piece of paper, and I'll show you a falsifiable physical record. They even have a name for the act of falsifying a physical record. It's called forgery, and it's a crime that's been around ever since about two weeks after the first physical records of things were made.
why the hell did those dinosaurs have long necks in the first place?
A theory I heard (but am not qualified to defend or dismiss) is that some of the big'uns like brachiosauri spend lots of time in lakes and deep swamps. The water helped support their body weight and their long necks gave them eating mobility that compensated for the difficulty of offsetting such a large volume of water in order to move. Also they could plunge their heads underwater to chew on underwater food as well.
My inner 13-year-old also suggests their necks are long so they can suck themselves off. Compared to the hassles of finding and wooing a potential mate, this is probably why they became extinct.
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Re:Irrelevant to most of us
on
Death March
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· Score: 5
Fair enough. And in fair exchange I can probably say I'm not going to work for you, either, because if you expect me to stay enthusiastic when every single bit of my work is going to get thrown away not on its own merits but because they are being poured down the black hole of death march projects, you're as deluded as the upper management that causes them.
On some projects, the only thing that kept me coming back every Monday was the paycheck at the end of the week. That, and naive hope that eventually somebody would clue in and let us do our jobs in a meaningful way. A death march project is one that is being sabotaged by management in such a way that no amount of developer effort, passion, or enthusiasm will save it. The only thing that will save it is a dramatic change in management's understanding of the project's goals.
I don't know many programmers that are only in it for the money. The ones that are, I don't trust. As for the rest of us, yes, the rarity of our skills allows us to garner huge paychecks, but we're in it for the programming.
Give a sculptor a hundred bucks and a bucket of clay to work with and he'll be happy; give him a thousand bucks and a bucket of moist shit, and he'll usually walk. In analogous circumstances, most self-respecting programmers will, too.
So if you give me a project that's doomed, don't accuse me of cynicism when I act like I know it. And if you think the troops are responsible for their own low morale, your project's collapse is inevitable.
When I moved to Atlanta, back in the days when you had to look in a book to find information, I went to the library and got myself a library card. When I told the librarian I had just moved to the area, she handed me a voter registration card, which I filled out, making me a registered voter in Fulton County, Georgia.
It was so nice that they did that at the library.
Now they do it at the driver's licence office, too. You get your license and they register you right there. This bothers me. Although I am a fan of democracy, I am also a fan of informed democracy; after all, would you rather have a government elected by people who know how to drive, or who know how to read?
OTOH, Arandir, there are an awful lot of people who live in deplorable conditions, and they take it for granted that since the rest of society ignores them, screws them, mistrusts them, and otherwise puts them down, they pretty much take for granted that they are not just figuratively disenfranchised.
Some of them are amazingly dumb, true, but most of them are at least as smart as the middle class soccer moms who keep shoving their SUVs into my lane while driving home to watch Oprah. The main difference is that these disenfranchised citizens don't know what they can do and what rights they have, because nobody bothered to tell them. To explain it away with some glib statement that "the franchise should only be given to those who actually want it" assumes they even know that their franchise exists, let alone how to use it.
The degree of isolation and segregation--both economic and social--that creates these circumstances is amazing. The schools given to these people offer them no hope, and no education: a third drop out, and a third of those who stick around are still functionally illiterate.
Nobody tells them not to get drunk while they're pregnant.
Nobody tells them not to mix bleach with ammonia.
Nobody tells them how to write well enough to fill out a job application.
Nobody tells them how they could change their lives if they voted.
The the gap between us and them is like an Antarctic crevasse. Over on our side, we have a sustainable economy, one that can exist with or without them. If we can ignore them, we will, because our lives are already too goddamned busy to worry whether somebody who will never play a role in our lives is being fucked so badly by their own government and society that they're going to starve. I'm not talking about random Ethiopian refugees; I'm talking about people who live within fifty miles of you, or ten.
So before you go saying things like "if they don't know, they don't deserve to know", remember just how incredibly easy it is for you to find out just about anything with your thousand dollar computer and your $20/month 'Net access. Then remember there are millions of people, right there in your own "developed" nation, for whom twenty dollars not spent on food is two days they and their children don't eat.
A lot of things you haven't been taught are non-obvious. It's not obvious to separate light and dark colors in laundry; it's not obvious it is that AB+AC=A(B+C). It's not obvious that you should wash your hands before you handle food or that you should vaccinate your babies. And when you've been told since birth that your sole purpose in life is eventually to die, it's not obvious you have the right to vote.
Ever since I got here, just about all Slashdot has done is linked to stories reported elsewhere. Scoops and exclusives are rare, except for the occasional interview.
As Slashdot is not a primary source, I hesitate to say it must be held to any sort of journalistic "standard".
OTOH, I observe two things: first, Slashdot should make a little more effort to verify a submission's claims. Take for example the story about Compaq violating the GPL. Once somebody bothered to read the licence agreement for the package in question, it was observed that Compaq wrote it and that it was under no obligation to GPL it, and so what?
Second, Slashdot does update a story with a correction/retraction once it understands that one is necessary. Just over six hours after the above story broke, an update appeared:
Update: 09/13 05:16 PM by CT: we screwed this one up. The link is somewhat misleading since it says its a link to Linux Source, but its not actually the linux source, its just some code that runs on linux. Stop flaming please. Move along. Nothing to see here.
Also to its credit, unlike some places, Slashdot keeps the updated story out there, warts, corrections and all.
Ultimately, the marketplace will determine Slashdot's viability as a place to do something more than shoot the shit. its journalistic integrity, not its journalistic ethics, is what makes us decide whether the "News for Nerds" is news at all. If every third story is incorrect, then Slashdot is just another messaging board where owners and posters alike are spouting random nonsense of random validity.
Perhaps we need a kuro5hin-style submission queue, where stories get voted onto the main page by a team of moderators/bullshit detectors. If enough submission moderators decide a story has enough karma, it gets published. That way, we can have a cabal! Whee!
Potentially as much as Deep Throat, but anonymous tipsters have to bring more to the table if they wish to be taken seriously. That's why Slashdot gives your posts an extra point just for signing your name, but everybody caps out at five.
Some of us have said enough credible stuff in the past that credibility is taken for granted, so we get two extra points to start with. And we get to waive all points by electing to remain anonymous, or waive one point when we're speaking in a less "important" context.
Personally, I think anonymity is critical. There are far too circumstances under which retailiation or harassment is the inevitable consequence of "going public".
Say you work at a factory and find out the owners are dumping mercury straight into the groundwater. If you threaten to blow the whistle, the first thing they'll do is fire you for gross incompetence the next time your shoe laces come undone. So instead, you go to a reporter and say "this is who I am; this is what's going on", and the reporter uses you as a credible but anonymous source for his story. Your anonymity has been Constitutionally protected in case after case after case.
But if the factory can just file a lawsuit against John Doe and find out your identity even before the lawsuit proceeds, you're completely screwed, and so is the public's hope of ever finding out about corporate misdeeds through the actions of a free press relying on anonymous inside sources. And that's what this appelate finding is saying: if you call the reporter, you're protected. If you send him a letter, you're protected. If you meet the reporter at midnight in a parking garage, you're protected. But if you e-mail him, or if you eliminate the middleman of a free press and take your knowledge public via e-mail, you're no longer protected. I'm still trying to figure out how or why this makes sense, and am unable to do so.
The police force have innocent bystanders pop up, which you aren't supposed to shoot. The Army have no bystanders, you shoot everyone.
So you're the sort who goes into combat without the rest of his unit? Even if there are no innocent bystanders, there are sure as hell people on your side. You don't shoot at everybody--you shoot at everybody who's wearing the wrong uniform. That's a bit of a mis-statement, actually. You always aim, but you only shoot when you've decided what you're aiming at is a viable target. Viable targets include:
things in the wrong uniform,
things that are trying to shoot you, and
things you were told to shoot.
The people in command dont want members of the Army to think, just follow their commands.
Uh huh. Which Marine boot camp fantasy movie did you get that one from? The military sure as hell wants you to think. They want you to think military.
Coincidentally enough, that's exactly what their demo animation looks like, only inoffensively, like how they always use blue liquid in diaper commercials. If any blue liquid ever emits from me or my loved ones we're going straight to the hospital, diaper or no diaper.
It's not that they don't want me to die; they just don't want me to die of anything expensive. Hell, they'd shit for joy if I decided that instead of burning through $100k on chemotherapy with a 20% success rate I'd just go ahead and spend $40 on a single injection of valium, morphine and sodium pentathol. The last buzz.
I have a family history of cancer, heart disease, ADD and depression. My fiancee has a family history of heart disease, cancer and depression. Will our insurance company allow us to breed? If so, will they allow us to insure our offspring or will they merely segregate us into a high risk insurance group?
Think carefully: I carry a gene that makes me much more likely to contract melanoma than the general world population. Not directly--what the gene causes is very fair skin that sunburns easily, which is pretty close to the ideal melanoma profile. I'll pay different rates based on the color of my skin.
What if, as they say, homosexuality in males has a genetic component? If a child test positive for this gene, will insurance companies only cover him if his parents sign an AIDS waiver?
This opens up a lot of extremely ugly scenarios, and I can't help but think how incredibly dangerous a combination is eugenics and economic interests, be they socialized medicine or paid health insurance.
Slashdot Mirror
Although I admire the insight you show in your post, I disagree with this statement, because Microsoft has already demonstrated another way: they can coerce people into buying their product, by bundling it, and by using their market dominance to interfere with the establishment of competitive products, mostly using old Railroad Trust trick of creating gratuitous incompatibilities every now and then for no reason than to make competitors update and users upgrade. The Ralroad Trust, by the way, was the primary target of America's first antrtrust legislation.
Although I hate words like this, what Windows and Office have on the desktop is synergy. The business market could give a damn what OS is on the desktop, so long as supports Office, which, although it runs on two platforms, only guarantees interoperability among instances running on (surprise!) Windows. MS didn't kill OS/2 with its Windows juggernaut; it killed it by withdrawing Office support.
So as long as MS can say "if you want one, you gotta have the other," it's going to continue to sell both.
Fortunately for us, the server side of the equation is dominated by pragmatists who--although we usually do have passion for our favorite products--insist on solutions that work, reliably by necessity and cheaply by preference.
So we're safe, for now. But remember that MS has quitely taken over the Web browser market, and now that there's only one meaningful browser to access the web, they can start making sure said brower interacts better with one type of server, such as IIS on Win2k, than another, such as Apache or Netscape on anything. When this happens, the surviving e-commerce sites will ask a very pragmatic question: whether they want to give everyone in the world unreliable, half-assed access to their site, or give ninety percent of the world excellent service. When they choose option two, we will have lost the server market as well.
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And I've seen at least one OOP project go down the tubes because the designers, among the smartest people I've ever met, treated data persistence as just another implementation detail--they had been seduced by the model of a computer that never fails and has unlimited memory.
But one of the most successful projects I've seen is one where an object-oriented framework provided a transportation and communications infrastructure on which table-oriented applications could be developed. OOP gave us just right level of hierarchical abstraction to make platform-specific issues irrelevant to higher layers; at those higher-layers, the mind-boggling flexibility of table-driven rule sets provided a potent way to model business processes without trying to put everything in exactly one box.
I do believe we are heading for a convergence of sorts. The tables in question are going to be XML, with Java (or pick another OO language) providing the framework in which (and with which) to parse it.
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I had been putting off a trip to a waypoint in eastern NC for a while now, but now that this story's out, I fully expect to arrive there only to find seventy-five geeks milling about with their Magellan sets waiting patiently to stand at a Slashdotted geographical location to get their picture taken. Crud!
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And it's very human---it lasts as long as an individual person needs it to last. This year had the shortest Checkuary on record, but in 1999 I was writing 1998 on checks as late as mid-February.
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After going through prototype after prototype, and fixing glitch after glitch, after long hours and late nights and nearly endless frustrations, I have a feeling that the first successful message transmitted via any medium is, "Is this goddamned thing working yet? Hello? Hello? Fuck!"
At the official unveiling, however, the press hears you say "This miraculous new device will transform mankind" or some other PR-department hooey.
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You're right that dynamite has no military application. But Nobel's invention saved more lives in the mining industry than he ended. Dynamite is a wonder explosive because it was far more stable than anything else available, like mercury fulminate, nitroglycerin, or picric acid, and as a "low" explosive, it is still far more predictable than TNT and the like.
Nobel's sudden philanthropy came in part because of someone else's journalistic cluelessness. A Swedish newspaper wrongly reported that Nobel had died. In the article, a reporter excoriated Nobel as a wholesale death merchant and claimed that his invention was used in military weapons of mass destruction--or what passed for them at the time. The journalist was wrong, of course, and Nobel knew it. But he did establish the Prize fund. Whether he did this out of guilt, I do not know. But it is for certain that his reputation had been badly damaged by the newspaper's libelous claims.
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Real shame, too.
The problem would be that you would have to come up with a different unusual punishiment every time you wanted to be cruel. So while pounding seven pounds of SPAM up this schlub's butt with a jackhammer would be fun, you couldn't do it to the next one.
Put him in a nice, normal, jail cell, with someone who never got the e-mail from the pardons board, because his mailbox was clogged with spam.
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So my question is, what happens when DVD becomes obsolete? If the consumer has a license for the data, he can convert the data on the DVD to a new format and end of story. However, if the industry decides five years from now to:
- start manufacturing players and "disks" in the new media, and
- stop manufacturing DVD players,
the consumer has no choice but to repurchase their entire DVD library.A real-world example? Well, the closest I could come to a real-world example would be if the only people who could legally manufacture a record player, a CD player, a cassette tape player, or a DAT player, was a licensee of the RIAA itself, and that the licensee agreed to stop manufacturing the old technology as soon as the new technology was announced.
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But here's what the technology revolution has done: it has brought the entire world to every doorstep, no matter where it is. My uncle lives in a small north Georgia town with a population of 30,000. He has 120 channels via directTV and instant Internet access via 2B+D ISDN. His kids can log into AOL just the same as any kid in Chicago. And if Wal-Mart doesn't have the gas grill he wants, the right one is just a click and a UPS truck away.
If anything, the quality of life in Podunk is improving, and far more rapidly than it is in the big city. As soon as my office finishes installing its VPN, I could move out to my father-in-law's farm. For the chance to trade a daily commute for a twice-monthly drive into town, it just might be worth it.
The only concern I have about such universally available communications is the homologation of societies worldwide. Local character is being replaced with Generica, because everybody everywhere is being exposed to the same thing. But, as the French say in their rapidly disappearing language, c'est la vie.
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You can also invalidate them by making up new counting rules every time the count comes up in a way you don't like.
OTOH, there are lots and lots of ways to make pretty thoroughly unalterable digital records, using write-once media (CD-ROM, anyone?) and a "signing" hash like MD5. If you want a physical record you could dump the ones and zeros out as big, scannable dots on paper.
From a CS perspective, this problem is almost trivial. Applied Cryptography discusses it specifically. But even if you do come up with a 100% effective solution, there are still some much more difficult wetware problems to resolve, like people voting in more than one district. In North Carolina, for example, the courts decided you cannot be asked for positive ID when you vote. See, if a state ID costs US$15, and you need one to vote, you've effectively created a US$15 poll tax, and poll taxes are illegal. Give away IDs for free? Sure, but this is still a wetware problem, far beyond the scope of the simple, well documented, doable task of making unalterable, non-refutable digital records.
I don't know what you consider a "major" bank transfer, but the ones the banks themselves consider major are done electronically, billions of dollars worth every hour.Show me a laser printer and a piece of paper, and I'll show you a falsifiable physical record. They even have a name for the act of falsifying a physical record. It's called forgery, and it's a crime that's been around ever since about two weeks after the first physical records of things were made.
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A theory I heard (but am not qualified to defend or dismiss) is that some of the big'uns like brachiosauri spend lots of time in lakes and deep swamps. The water helped support their body weight and their long necks gave them eating mobility that compensated for the difficulty of offsetting such a large volume of water in order to move. Also they could plunge their heads underwater to chew on underwater food as well.
My inner 13-year-old also suggests their necks are long so they can suck themselves off. Compared to the hassles of finding and wooing a potential mate, this is probably why they became extinct.
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On some projects, the only thing that kept me coming back every Monday was the paycheck at the end of the week. That, and naive hope that eventually somebody would clue in and let us do our jobs in a meaningful way. A death march project is one that is being sabotaged by management in such a way that no amount of developer effort, passion, or enthusiasm will save it. The only thing that will save it is a dramatic change in management's understanding of the project's goals.
I don't know many programmers that are only in it for the money. The ones that are, I don't trust. As for the rest of us, yes, the rarity of our skills allows us to garner huge paychecks, but we're in it for the programming.
Give a sculptor a hundred bucks and a bucket of clay to work with and he'll be happy; give him a thousand bucks and a bucket of moist shit, and he'll usually walk. In analogous circumstances, most self-respecting programmers will, too.
So if you give me a project that's doomed, don't accuse me of cynicism when I act like I know it. And if you think the troops are responsible for their own low morale, your project's collapse is inevitable.
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Looks more like a pig's snout to me...
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It was so nice that they did that at the library.
Now they do it at the driver's licence office, too. You get your license and they register you right there. This bothers me. Although I am a fan of democracy, I am also a fan of informed democracy; after all, would you rather have a government elected by people who know how to drive, or who know how to read?
OTOH, Arandir, there are an awful lot of people who live in deplorable conditions, and they take it for granted that since the rest of society ignores them, screws them, mistrusts them, and otherwise puts them down, they pretty much take for granted that they are not just figuratively disenfranchised.
Some of them are amazingly dumb, true, but most of them are at least as smart as the middle class soccer moms who keep shoving their SUVs into my lane while driving home to watch Oprah. The main difference is that these disenfranchised citizens don't know what they can do and what rights they have, because nobody bothered to tell them. To explain it away with some glib statement that "the franchise should only be given to those who actually want it" assumes they even know that their franchise exists, let alone how to use it.
The degree of isolation and segregation--both economic and social--that creates these circumstances is amazing. The schools given to these people offer them no hope, and no education: a third drop out, and a third of those who stick around are still functionally illiterate.
The the gap between us and them is like an Antarctic crevasse. Over on our side, we have a sustainable economy, one that can exist with or without them. If we can ignore them, we will, because our lives are already too goddamned busy to worry whether somebody who will never play a role in our lives is being fucked so badly by their own government and society that they're going to starve. I'm not talking about random Ethiopian refugees; I'm talking about people who live within fifty miles of you, or ten.
So before you go saying things like "if they don't know, they don't deserve to know", remember just how incredibly easy it is for you to find out just about anything with your thousand dollar computer and your $20/month 'Net access. Then remember there are millions of people, right there in your own "developed" nation, for whom twenty dollars not spent on food is two days they and their children don't eat.
A lot of things you haven't been taught are non-obvious. It's not obvious to separate light and dark colors in laundry; it's not obvious it is that AB+AC=A(B+C). It's not obvious that you should wash your hands before you handle food or that you should vaccinate your babies. And when you've been told since birth that your sole purpose in life is eventually to die, it's not obvious you have the right to vote.
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Which would explain Mr. Burns's endorsement...
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As Slashdot is not a primary source, I hesitate to say it must be held to any sort of journalistic "standard".
OTOH, I observe two things: first, Slashdot should make a little more effort to verify a submission's claims. Take for example the story about Compaq violating the GPL. Once somebody bothered to read the licence agreement for the package in question, it was observed that Compaq wrote it and that it was under no obligation to GPL it, and so what?
Second, Slashdot does update a story with a correction/retraction once it understands that one is necessary. Just over six hours after the above story broke, an update appeared:
Also to its credit, unlike some places, Slashdot keeps the updated story out there, warts, corrections and all.
Ultimately, the marketplace will determine Slashdot's viability as a place to do something more than shoot the shit. its journalistic integrity, not its journalistic ethics, is what makes us decide whether the "News for Nerds" is news at all. If every third story is incorrect, then Slashdot is just another messaging board where owners and posters alike are spouting random nonsense of random validity.
Perhaps we need a kuro5hin-style submission queue, where stories get voted onto the main page by a team of moderators/bullshit detectors. If enough submission moderators decide a story has enough karma, it gets published. That way, we can have a cabal! Whee!
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Some of us have said enough credible stuff in the past that credibility is taken for granted, so we get two extra points to start with. And we get to waive all points by electing to remain anonymous, or waive one point when we're speaking in a less "important" context.
Personally, I think anonymity is critical. There are far too circumstances under which retailiation or harassment is the inevitable consequence of "going public".
Say you work at a factory and find out the owners are dumping mercury straight into the groundwater. If you threaten to blow the whistle, the first thing they'll do is fire you for gross incompetence the next time your shoe laces come undone. So instead, you go to a reporter and say "this is who I am; this is what's going on", and the reporter uses you as a credible but anonymous source for his story. Your anonymity has been Constitutionally protected in case after case after case.
But if the factory can just file a lawsuit against John Doe and find out your identity even before the lawsuit proceeds, you're completely screwed, and so is the public's hope of ever finding out about corporate misdeeds through the actions of a free press relying on anonymous inside sources. And that's what this appelate finding is saying: if you call the reporter, you're protected. If you send him a letter, you're protected. If you meet the reporter at midnight in a parking garage, you're protected. But if you e-mail him, or if you eliminate the middleman of a free press and take your knowledge public via e-mail, you're no longer protected. I'm still trying to figure out how or why this makes sense, and am unable to do so.
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- things in the wrong uniform,
- things that are trying to shoot you, and
- things you were told to shoot.
Uh huh. Which Marine boot camp fantasy movie did you get that one from? The military sure as hell wants you to think. They want you to think military.--
Gonna get me some Glasers for my home defense rounds, or at least for the next drunken family reunion. That looked fun!
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I wonder if OSHA has a standard for this...
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Coincidentally enough, that's exactly what their demo animation looks like, only inoffensively, like how they always use blue liquid in diaper commercials. If any blue liquid ever emits from me or my loved ones we're going straight to the hospital, diaper or no diaper.
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It's not that they don't want me to die; they just don't want me to die of anything expensive. Hell, they'd shit for joy if I decided that instead of burning through $100k on chemotherapy with a 20% success rate I'd just go ahead and spend $40 on a single injection of valium, morphine and sodium pentathol. The last buzz.
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I think they mean "Bic lighting"--for the bong. Then your laptop will glow purple for free!
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I have a family history of cancer, heart disease, ADD and depression. My fiancee has a family history of heart disease, cancer and depression. Will our insurance company allow us to breed? If so, will they allow us to insure our offspring or will they merely segregate us into a high risk insurance group? Think carefully: I carry a gene that makes me much more likely to contract melanoma than the general world population. Not directly--what the gene causes is very fair skin that sunburns easily, which is pretty close to the ideal melanoma profile. I'll pay different rates based on the color of my skin. What if, as they say, homosexuality in males has a genetic component? If a child test positive for this gene, will insurance companies only cover him if his parents sign an AIDS waiver? This opens up a lot of extremely ugly scenarios, and I can't help but think how incredibly dangerous a combination is eugenics and economic interests, be they socialized medicine or paid health insurance.
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