After 18 months of flat-out wiki-madness involving an effort to organize and improve hundreds of articles, I quite working on the project last month following a dispute. My critics were a couple of people who had contributed next to nothing to the project, but they had an opinion ("You're violating the guidelines!") and they had a vote equal to mine. True, I was working mostly on my own and had developed a few unique solutions to some common problems, but no matter how hard I tried to explain, it was just no use. Eventually, it came to a vote that I won with the help of a few friends I had made, but by that time I could see the writing on the wall.
It's not the first time I had been frustrated with Wikipedia. Earlier, I had tried working at Citizendium, hoping to escape the endless vandalism and find some more reasonable people to deal with. At first things seemed promising, but then it was decided that all of the old Wikipedia articles would be deleted, which felt a lot like throwing out the baby with the bathwater (so much for being a fork), and then Larry Sanger turned out to be a little too much of a micro-manager for my taste. So, it was back to Wikipedia.
As I see it now, however, Wikipedia's main problem is not so much the vandalism, but that it is too much of a democracy. In such an environment, the average article can only be improved so far before it begins to degrade. It's not that too many cooks spoil the broth, but that's what happens when many (or most) of the cooks don't know what they're doing (or talking about). The problem becomes even more acute when hundreds of articles are involved that need to be organized into a coherent whole. You can see to it personally that the quality of one or more article is maintained, but as soon as you stop, then things start to slide downhill again.
If, on the other hand, Wikipedia were to become more of a meritocracy, then I have no doubt that things would improve considerably. I'm sure many Slashdotters can imagine ways to do that, but I think they would also agree that such measures would leave the project looking quite different. In fact, it would probably take all the fun out of it for most people. But then, what do we want Wikipedia to be: fun, or a place to find good articles with accurate information?
I've haven't played regularly in years either, but I can still beat anything the computer throws at me. From a programmer's point of view, however, it's a hopeless task. One of the things that makes it so difficult, is that, as opposed to chess, the 19x19 board starts empty. Being devoid of any stones, those potential 10^60 possibilities are then at their maximum, so performing any meaningful calculations at this point is futile. Yet, this also is the most critical part of the game. Among the top players, games are won and lost in only the first few moves ("move 2 lost the game"), with the rest being a forgone conclusion -- to be played out almost as a formality. Lesser players naturally take a few more moves to recognize the value of their position and always play on for longer (hoping to take advantage of the mistakes that they more regularly encounter). However, this is essentially why I have such a hard time imagining a computer program ever doing well in this game against a reasonably competent human opponent: by the time the computer starts to recognize the patterns and get a grip on things, it's already far too late.
Cosmologists are finding that it is impossible to square string theory with Einstein's theory of General Relativity after all. Some say this could even lead to the abandonment General Relativity...
... if only to ensure that string theorists
around the world do not lose their jobs.
Of course not: Bush and his buddies let M$ off the hook in 2001 and are still big friends with them. Was that supposed to have changed? No. If anything substantial is going to be done about the M$ monopoly, it'll have to wait until after the next administration takes over in 2009. The only danger is if M$ succeeds in once again stalling the judicial process long enough to last until the next Republican administration. But, since they've already been convicted of monopolistic practices once before, let's hope that won't be so easy to do the next time around. Remember, all "good" things must come to an end, even for M$.
I have a friend who once did exactly as you've done. He learned how to play Go only by playing against a program and could eventually beat it with a certain regularity. Even though I hadn't seen a board in years, he remembered that I used to play at a club and challenged me to a game. I suggested a smaller board, but he wanted 19x19 right away. I'm fairly sure I gave him at least 9 handicap stones, but still the result was that I wiped the floor with him. I tried to apologize, but he was crestfallen.
I'm not writing this to brag about my abilities. I was never that good: 2nd kyu at my best (in 1988). There were many amateur Dan players at the club that I was a member of, and they regularly wiped the floor with me. The most demoralizing experience I ever had was a game that I played against a 5th Dan with no handicap stones. His idea was that if it ever looked like he was starting to win, we would simply switch sides. Within about 50 moves, we had already switched sides some five times before I had had enough.
However, the point is that you become stronger much more quickly when you play against human players: they're far more inventive and resourceful. Plus, you can always ask a stronger player questions about the game regardless of its outcome. Against a computer you learn very little. Even learning from books can be dangerous: I remember dropping a few ranks for quite a while after reading one (I believe it was Strategy of Play, by Nagahara, 1972). Perhaps that was because I was imitating the book too much without really understanding how to play like that (apparently a common pitfall). Maybe a better strategy would have been for me to read more about small-scale theory instead, such as joseki.
Because chess is a relatively simple game with limited possibilities, chess computers (programs) have been able to challenge most people for a while now, and -- ten years ago -- even give Kasparov a hard time. However, if you take a game like Go, which is many orders of magnitude more complex, it takes more imagination and intuition to win than just plain brute force. Even relatively weak Go players are still able to beat the best Go programs.
For us to live off-planet is really, really difficult. Face it: we're perfectly adapted to living on Earth -- not in space. We may have been able to achieve the most amazing things with technology over the past 100 years, but let's be honest: it has its limits and one of them called cost. We've only got PCs and the Internet because the chip industry made mass-production and low prices possible. Not so with rockets and portable closed-ecosystem environments. And even if we do ever get the latter to work, living off-planet will still be too complex, too expensive and too dangerous.
Think of it this way: Wouldn't it be silly for a race of intelligent fish to try to colonize the land? Actually, that's exactly what they did, but only after they themselves adapted to the environment over millions of years of evolution. Similarly, I think that if we are ever going to colonize space on a large scale, we're going to have to adapt our bodies first. For example, resistance to vacuum, radiation, zero-g, and increased tolerance for heat and cold would be steps in the right direction. Will the results of such an engineering project still be human? I guess that will depend on what you define as human, but I figure that it's something we're going to have to do if we ever really want to leave this planet.
So, the good news is that there's reason to be optimistic: yes, we will eventually be able to colonize space! The bad news is that it'll likely take a couple of hundred years before we have that kind of capability, and once we have it we may not want to use it. Either way, we're going to have to figure out how to survive here on Earth for the time being.
Indeed. For a while now, I've been distributing my resume in plain text format to get around this (being careful to add the necessary DOS-style newline characters). I figured everyone would be familiar with that format, but I was wrong. Once, after sending my txt-style CV to a contracting agency, I received a reply that my document could not be red, so could I please resend it in an MS-Word.doc format instead (their database system accepts only MS Word documents). However, after explaining how Word was capable of "importing".txt files and other formats, it turned out they could read my CV after all.
... how cost effective can any such a solution be?
If it's not very efficient, the solution had better look something like a cheap and durable mat that converts footsteps directly into electric energy. If it's more complex, for example requiring a fancy hydraulic system, then it had better be a lot more efficient or else the cost will likely turn out to be prohibitive.
Not much competition either? Think local monopolies and perhaps cartels.
(Don't you just hate telcos?)
I've come to the conclusion that it's not only important services, such as education and healthcare, that are better off in public hands, but also important public infrastructure, such as electricity, water, sewage, roads and... telecommunications (public pipes, private services). Privatizing these things creates monopolies and nowhere else in the world has this gone as far as in the United States. So, no wonder...
For the last five or six years I've basically been using only one email account. The spammers know of it, but I don't care: I receive almost none of their crap thanks to spamassassin, razor, pyzor, clam, and a customized filter that checks stuff like the helo string, whether the sender's account exists, and also makes use of a few DNS blacklists. This does mean a few false positives every now and then, but I can live with that.
As for the 16-year-old girl (who didn't actually use the term SMTP), I suppose that she's just really good at posting her email address(es) in all the wrong places. Or, it's possible she was exaggerating and simply echoing other people's prejudices.
She was from Australia and had a yahoo.com.au account. I don't know if she signed for anything, but who knows what kids get themselves into these days; teenagers have long been easy prey for companies offering trendy products and services.
Earlier this year, I discussed this matter with a 16-year-old girl. She said she preferred IM (MSN) over SMTP, because any email account she used would quickly get overloaded with spam. Many of us have different ways of dealing with that problem, but her solution was simply to never use the same email account for too long if she had to use it, and preferably not to use it at all. I suspect that this is not the only reason why she and her friends don't like to use email, but by itself spam seems like a valid complaint.
While others continues to do their best to attract users away from Microsoft, Microsoft seems to be doing its damnedest to push it's own users towards other solutions. Their behavior reminds me of what Bush said after winning his next election: "I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it." The only difference is that Dubya knows his days are numbered, so he can afford to misbehave. Microsoft may outlast him, but at this rate it may not be by more than a few years.
Market shares for operating systems are usually measured by the number of licenses sold. It's therefore always going to be difficult to tell how many people are actually using Linux, or any other free OS for that matter. That's unfortunate, because even when the total number of Linux systems does actually become substantial, chances are no one will know for sure. Certainly the average consumer won't know it... maybe we won't even know it. That's why I think the number of Linux systems out there necessary for it to obtain "critical mass" (relative to Microsoft's numbers) will have to be larger than, say, Apple's numbers would have to be to achieve the same thing.
Health care only for those who deserve (can afford) it! Unfortunately, there is no black and white -- only gray. When it comes to health care, it's not just unfair, but downright unethical to discriminate against people based on their income, since there's all sorts of ways people can run into financial bad luck even though they've been working their butts off all their lives.
And what about all the people who do have health care, but are denied obvious treatments by their stingy and heartless HMOs? Are we supposed to blame them simply because they can't afford to pay for treatment on their own?
America has turned health care into a cash cow for the rich at the expense of its citizens: a despicable situation that is totally unheard of anywhere else in the western world.
I know how you feel. I certainly hope that matters won't eventually have to be solved through violence, but to me it does seem that the situation in America is thoroughly fscked. The world's greatest democracy? What a laugh! America has become an oligarchy, where the rich do as they please. Their lobbyists basically run Washington and this president and his administration are firmly in their pockets -- no lobbyist left behind indeed! As soon as Dubya and his team took over, their main priority was to help all their rich friends get richer. Well, to be honest, I suppose every administration has been guilty of that to some degree, but this one just takes the cake; they simply don't seem to care at all that it's so obvious what they're doing.
The situation has indeed been deteriorating for decades. Keep good education expensive and out-of-reach for most, so the majority are incapable of independent thought. Then get everybody to hate Big Government and taxes, asking them to vote for the party that promises to do away with that kind of thing... it's the American thing to do! (barf). Actually, removing Big Government is just an excuse to remove all kinds of rules that prevent big business from raping the environment, exploiting the work force, etc., and 90% of the taxes they do away with only affect the rich. Yet, the people are supposed to feel good about voting for them?? Unbelievably, about half of all Americans did feel good about re-electing this bastard and others like him after the last elections, when in actual fact they had all just been suckered in... again! In the mean time, people can rely on FOX to keep them all happy with more news on Paris Hilton's latest exploits.
Have you seen Michael Moore's "Sicko" yet? To me, that's one excellent and graphic example of how bad it is in the States. I know, because I currently live in Europe and pay less than $100/month for health-care that has virtually no-limits for anyone. I have a lot of friends in the US, and after seeing this movie I feel _sorry_ for them. But, the worst thing about this is: I don't believe any of the current candidates -- Democrat or Republican -- with a reasonable chance of getting elected are even thinking about doing anything about America's healthcare woes (except, perhaps, to make it even worse). It's yet another sign of how much power the corporations and the rich have in the United States and how little the electorate can do about it.
It's been several years since the last time I bought a new CD. I like to think that my taste in music is reasonably diverse, but these days when I walk into a music store, most of what's there seems to be formulaic and/or computer-generated crap. Plus, it's bloody expensive!
25 years ago, I remember that the first CDs were 50-100% more expensive than vinyl records. I complained about this to a store owner at the time, who responded with "Oh, don't worry. Once the production ramps up, the prices will come down." Well, they never did. To me, this seems like yet another indication of how long there's been a serious lack of competition within the industry. So, I guess the consumers are to blame: not only for buying those first CDs anyway, but also for continually voting people into office who's only significant interaction with the recording industry has been to accept campaign contributions from them.
Anyway, as a result, my CD collection is still only about a 10th the size of my old vinyl collection. These days, if something attracts my interest, I'll get it off the Internet. After that, I support the artists by going to their concerts.
Hey, I've always wanted to cruise the galaxy in a starship just as much as the next guy, but I'm also enough of a realist to have recognized immediately that Bush's Moon-Mars plan was a huge crock of political shit in the first place. His plan was always going to be hideously expensive*, but conveniently his own government was never going to have to pay for the really costly bits. That's right: he was just making promises that he new his successors were never going to be able to keep. And since they were going to have to do all the cancelling, the idealists out there were always going to blame them (and not good ol' Dubya) for the project's inevitable demise.
That's not even the worst part, though. What I really hate about the Moon-Mars plan is that it led to so many other interesting unmanned science programs being cancelled, like the JIMO mission. At least now maybe they will once again have a chance.
IIRC, the ultimate cost for the Moon-Mars mission was originally estimated to be something like $750 billion -- almost twice what Bush's war in Iraq has cost the American taxpayer so far.
... and Windows XP security updates won't cease until April 8th, 2014.
Well, not that a lot of PC hardware is going to last that long. Remember, unlike with Win98 and Win2k, you can't just replace the motherboard on a WinXP machine, reinstall and have a fully functioning machine: it'll want a new license. Therefore, most of the holdouts will be "switching" to Vista once their old PCs break down and they can no longer manage to obtain XP licenses that install properly.
On the other hand, I noticed a while back that a Windows XP Pro workstation license that has not been used for a year or two could be reinstalled on a new machine without a hitch.
Why, only about a month ago, we were being told that Vista licenses were selling like hotcakes, with an astounding 40 million being sold in the first 100 days -- the fastest launch in history!
... Others are looking to revolutionize the automobile's engine, not replace it.
As we necessarily strive to burn less fossil fuels in the future and as energy consequently becomes more expensive, we will no longer want to use internal combustion engines: there's just no way to make them anywhere near as efficient as electric motors.
... we'll have mobile phones that can do almost everything that a desktop machine can, except with different display options. However, this development will not have any real meaning unless broadband flat-rate data connections also become available for them. Unfortunately, whether such a magical future ever comes to be is up to the telecom industry, and knowing them I'm not holding my breath.
Slashdot Mirror
After 18 months of flat-out wiki-madness involving an effort to organize and improve hundreds of articles, I quite working on the project last month following a dispute. My critics were a couple of people who had contributed next to nothing to the project, but they had an opinion ("You're violating the guidelines!") and they had a vote equal to mine. True, I was working mostly on my own and had developed a few unique solutions to some common problems, but no matter how hard I tried to explain, it was just no use. Eventually, it came to a vote that I won with the help of a few friends I had made, but by that time I could see the writing on the wall.
It's not the first time I had been frustrated with Wikipedia. Earlier, I had tried working at Citizendium, hoping to escape the endless vandalism and find some more reasonable people to deal with. At first things seemed promising, but then it was decided that all of the old Wikipedia articles would be deleted, which felt a lot like throwing out the baby with the bathwater (so much for being a fork), and then Larry Sanger turned out to be a little too much of a micro-manager for my taste. So, it was back to Wikipedia.
As I see it now, however, Wikipedia's main problem is not so much the vandalism, but that it is too much of a democracy. In such an environment, the average article can only be improved so far before it begins to degrade. It's not that too many cooks spoil the broth, but that's what happens when many (or most) of the cooks don't know what they're doing (or talking about). The problem becomes even more acute when hundreds of articles are involved that need to be organized into a coherent whole. You can see to it personally that the quality of one or more article is maintained, but as soon as you stop, then things start to slide downhill again.
If, on the other hand, Wikipedia were to become more of a meritocracy, then I have no doubt that things would improve considerably. I'm sure many Slashdotters can imagine ways to do that, but I think they would also agree that such measures would leave the project looking quite different. In fact, it would probably take all the fun out of it for most people. But then, what do we want Wikipedia to be: fun, or a place to find good articles with accurate information?
I've haven't played regularly in years either, but I can still beat anything the computer throws at me. From a programmer's point of view, however, it's a hopeless task. One of the things that makes it so difficult, is that, as opposed to chess, the 19x19 board starts empty. Being devoid of any stones, those potential 10^60 possibilities are then at their maximum, so performing any meaningful calculations at this point is futile. Yet, this also is the most critical part of the game. Among the top players, games are won and lost in only the first few moves ("move 2 lost the game"), with the rest being a forgone conclusion -- to be played out almost as a formality. Lesser players naturally take a few more moves to recognize the value of their position and always play on for longer (hoping to take advantage of the mistakes that they more regularly encounter). However, this is essentially why I have such a hard time imagining a computer program ever doing well in this game against a reasonably competent human opponent: by the time the computer starts to recognize the patterns and get a grip on things, it's already far too late.
Cosmologists are finding that it is impossible to square string theory with Einstein's theory of General Relativity after all. Some say this could even lead to the abandonment General Relativity...
... if only to ensure that string theorists
around the world do not lose their jobs.
or am I the only person who is suddenly reminded of M$ Bob.
I have a friend who once did exactly as you've done. He learned how to play Go only by playing against a program and could eventually beat it with a certain regularity. Even though I hadn't seen a board in years, he remembered that I used to play at a club and challenged me to a game. I suggested a smaller board, but he wanted 19x19 right away. I'm fairly sure I gave him at least 9 handicap stones, but still the result was that I wiped the floor with him. I tried to apologize, but he was crestfallen.
I'm not writing this to brag about my abilities. I was never that good: 2nd kyu at my best (in 1988). There were many amateur Dan players at the club that I was a member of, and they regularly wiped the floor with me. The most demoralizing experience I ever had was a game that I played against a 5th Dan with no handicap stones. His idea was that if it ever looked like he was starting to win, we would simply switch sides. Within about 50 moves, we had already switched sides some five times before I had had enough.
However, the point is that you become stronger much more quickly when you play against human players: they're far more inventive and resourceful. Plus, you can always ask a stronger player questions about the game regardless of its outcome. Against a computer you learn very little. Even learning from books can be dangerous: I remember dropping a few ranks for quite a while after reading one (I believe it was Strategy of Play, by Nagahara, 1972). Perhaps that was because I was imitating the book too much without really understanding how to play like that (apparently a common pitfall). Maybe a better strategy would have been for me to read more about small-scale theory instead, such as joseki.
Because chess is a relatively simple game with limited possibilities, chess computers (programs) have been able to challenge most people for a while now, and -- ten years ago -- even give Kasparov a hard time. However, if you take a game like Go, which is many orders of magnitude more complex, it takes more imagination and intuition to win than just plain brute force. Even relatively weak Go players are still able to beat the best Go programs.
For us to live off-planet is really, really difficult. Face it: we're perfectly adapted to living on Earth -- not in space. We may have been able to achieve the most amazing things with technology over the past 100 years, but let's be honest: it has its limits and one of them called cost. We've only got PCs and the Internet because the chip industry made mass-production and low prices possible. Not so with rockets and portable closed-ecosystem environments. And even if we do ever get the latter to work, living off-planet will still be too complex, too expensive and too dangerous.
Think of it this way: Wouldn't it be silly for a race of intelligent fish to try to colonize the land? Actually, that's exactly what they did, but only after they themselves adapted to the environment over millions of years of evolution. Similarly, I think that if we are ever going to colonize space on a large scale, we're going to have to adapt our bodies first. For example, resistance to vacuum, radiation, zero-g, and increased tolerance for heat and cold would be steps in the right direction. Will the results of such an engineering project still be human? I guess that will depend on what you define as human, but I figure that it's something we're going to have to do if we ever really want to leave this planet.
So, the good news is that there's reason to be optimistic: yes, we will eventually be able to colonize space! The bad news is that it'll likely take a couple of hundred years before we have that kind of capability, and once we have it we may not want to use it. Either way, we're going to have to figure out how to survive here on Earth for the time being.
Indeed. For a while now, I've been distributing my resume in plain text format to get around this (being careful to add the necessary DOS-style newline characters). I figured everyone would be familiar with that format, but I was wrong. Once, after sending my txt-style CV to a contracting agency, I received a reply that my document could not be red, so could I please resend it in an MS-Word .doc format instead (their database system accepts only MS Word documents). However, after explaining how Word was capable of "importing" .txt files and other formats, it turned out they could read my CV after all.
... how cost effective can any such a solution be?
If it's not very efficient, the solution had better look something like a cheap and durable mat that converts footsteps directly into electric energy. If it's more complex, for example requiring a fancy hydraulic system, then it had better be a lot more efficient or else the cost will likely turn out to be prohibitive.
No new investments and high prices mean more...
... profit, profit, profit, profit, profit, profit, profit, profit, profit, ...
... for them while the rest of society suffers.
Not much competition either? Think local monopolies and perhaps cartels.
(Don't you just hate telcos?)
I've come to the conclusion that it's not only important services, such as education and healthcare, that are better off in public hands, but also important public infrastructure, such as electricity, water, sewage, roads and... telecommunications (public pipes, private services). Privatizing these things creates monopolies and nowhere else in the world has this gone as far as in the United States. So, no wonder...
For the last five or six years I've basically been using only one email account. The spammers know of it, but I don't care: I receive almost none of their crap thanks to spamassassin, razor, pyzor, clam, and a customized filter that checks stuff like the helo string, whether the sender's account exists, and also makes use of a few DNS blacklists. This does mean a few false positives every now and then, but I can live with that.
As for the 16-year-old girl (who didn't actually use the term SMTP), I suppose that she's just really good at posting her email address(es) in all the wrong places. Or, it's possible she was exaggerating and simply echoing other people's prejudices.
She was from Australia and had a yahoo.com.au account. I don't know if she signed for anything, but who knows what kids get themselves into these days; teenagers have long been easy prey for companies offering trendy products and services.
Earlier this year, I discussed this matter with a 16-year-old girl. She said she preferred IM (MSN) over SMTP, because any email account she used would quickly get overloaded with spam. Many of us have different ways of dealing with that problem, but her solution was simply to never use the same email account for too long if she had to use it, and preferably not to use it at all. I suspect that this is not the only reason why she and her friends don't like to use email, but by itself spam seems like a valid complaint.
While others continues to do their best to attract users away from Microsoft, Microsoft seems to be doing its damnedest to push it's own users towards other solutions. Their behavior reminds me of what Bush said after winning his next election: "I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it." The only difference is that Dubya knows his days are numbered, so he can afford to misbehave. Microsoft may outlast him, but at this rate it may not be by more than a few years.
Market shares for operating systems are usually measured by the number of licenses sold. It's therefore always going to be difficult to tell how many people are actually using Linux, or any other free OS for that matter. That's unfortunate, because even when the total number of Linux systems does actually become substantial, chances are no one will know for sure. Certainly the average consumer won't know it... maybe we won't even know it. That's why I think the number of Linux systems out there necessary for it to obtain "critical mass" (relative to Microsoft's numbers) will have to be larger than, say, Apple's numbers would have to be to achieve the same thing.
Health care only for those who deserve (can afford) it! Unfortunately, there is no black and white -- only gray. When it comes to health care, it's not just unfair, but downright unethical to discriminate against people based on their income, since there's all sorts of ways people can run into financial bad luck even though they've been working their butts off all their lives.
And what about all the people who do have health care, but are denied obvious treatments by their stingy and heartless HMOs? Are we supposed to blame them simply because they can't afford to pay for treatment on their own?
America has turned health care into a cash cow for the rich at the expense of its citizens: a despicable situation that is totally unheard of anywhere else in the western world.
I know how you feel. I certainly hope that matters won't eventually have to be solved through violence, but to me it does seem that the situation in America is thoroughly fscked. The world's greatest democracy? What a laugh! America has become an oligarchy, where the rich do as they please. Their lobbyists basically run Washington and this president and his administration are firmly in their pockets -- no lobbyist left behind indeed! As soon as Dubya and his team took over, their main priority was to help all their rich friends get richer. Well, to be honest, I suppose every administration has been guilty of that to some degree, but this one just takes the cake; they simply don't seem to care at all that it's so obvious what they're doing.
The situation has indeed been deteriorating for decades. Keep good education expensive and out-of-reach for most, so the majority are incapable of independent thought. Then get everybody to hate Big Government and taxes, asking them to vote for the party that promises to do away with that kind of thing... it's the American thing to do! (barf). Actually, removing Big Government is just an excuse to remove all kinds of rules that prevent big business from raping the environment, exploiting the work force, etc., and 90% of the taxes they do away with only affect the rich. Yet, the people are supposed to feel good about voting for them?? Unbelievably, about half of all Americans did feel good about re-electing this bastard and others like him after the last elections, when in actual fact they had all just been suckered in... again! In the mean time, people can rely on FOX to keep them all happy with more news on Paris Hilton's latest exploits.
Have you seen Michael Moore's "Sicko" yet? To me, that's one excellent and graphic example of how bad it is in the States. I know, because I currently live in Europe and pay less than $100/month for health-care that has virtually no-limits for anyone. I have a lot of friends in the US, and after seeing this movie I feel _sorry_ for them. But, the worst thing about this is: I don't believe any of the current candidates -- Democrat or Republican -- with a reasonable chance of getting elected are even thinking about doing anything about America's healthcare woes (except, perhaps, to make it even worse). It's yet another sign of how much power the corporations and the rich have in the United States and how little the electorate can do about it.
It's been several years since the last time I bought a new CD. I like to think that my taste in music is reasonably diverse, but these days when I walk into a music store, most of what's there seems to be formulaic and/or computer-generated crap. Plus, it's bloody expensive!
25 years ago, I remember that the first CDs were 50-100% more expensive than vinyl records. I complained about this to a store owner at the time, who responded with "Oh, don't worry. Once the production ramps up, the prices will come down." Well, they never did. To me, this seems like yet another indication of how long there's been a serious lack of competition within the industry. So, I guess the consumers are to blame: not only for buying those first CDs anyway, but also for continually voting people into office who's only significant interaction with the recording industry has been to accept campaign contributions from them.
Anyway, as a result, my CD collection is still only about a 10th the size of my old vinyl collection. These days, if something attracts my interest, I'll get it off the Internet. After that, I support the artists by going to their concerts.
Hey, I've always wanted to cruise the galaxy in a starship just as much as the next guy, but I'm also enough of a realist to have recognized immediately that Bush's Moon-Mars plan was a huge crock of political shit in the first place. His plan was always going to be hideously expensive*, but conveniently his own government was never going to have to pay for the really costly bits. That's right: he was just making promises that he new his successors were never going to be able to keep. And since they were going to have to do all the cancelling, the idealists out there were always going to blame them (and not good ol' Dubya) for the project's inevitable demise.
That's not even the worst part, though. What I really hate about the Moon-Mars plan is that it led to so many other interesting unmanned science programs being cancelled, like the JIMO mission. At least now maybe they will once again have a chance.
IIRC, the ultimate cost for the Moon-Mars mission was originally estimated to be something like $750 billion -- almost twice what Bush's war in Iraq has cost the American taxpayer so far.
On the other hand, I noticed a while back that a Windows XP Pro workstation license that has not been used for a year or two could be reinstalled on a new machine without a hitch.
Why, only about a month ago, we were being told that Vista licenses were selling like hotcakes, with an astounding 40 million being sold in the first 100 days -- the fastest launch in history!
... we'll have mobile phones that can do almost everything that a desktop machine can, except with different display options. However, this development will not have any real meaning unless broadband flat-rate data connections also become available for them. Unfortunately, whether such a magical future ever comes to be is up to the telecom industry, and knowing them I'm not holding my breath.