Yea, I wish I could get fully behinde you post but M$ has done the impossible before. Xbox got a good pice of Nintendo's and Sony's action in the console world. I don't think most people expected that to happen prior to launch; and really it was sheer marketing that drove that and nothing else. I mean honestly who things Xbox was really a better product then PS2 or Gamecube; it isnt. Now Xbox360 has made some great strides and It truely does out class the last generation, but we have not see PS3 or Wii in their final forms yet it remains to be seen how they will stack up. 360 is a nice product and it will be hard to beat.
I would be worried if I was Apple because even if Zune is a still steeming pile; M$ will get the name out their and into the mindshare. Zune may flop because it won't offer any reason to leave Apple. but Zune[360] might be nice product and people will be more willing to buy Zune[360] just because they know its a follow on product and therfore is "refined" many will make this judgement haveing never held a Zune.
Actually dispite the popular feelings toward the subject prohibition worked wonders. Rates of Marrige partner abuse and child abuse declined by something like 50% durring the period. The poverty rate also trended down, although its harder to tie that directly to prohibition. Yes it did creat some oppertunities for criminals but I don't think its fair to say that organized crime would not have found other sources of income and gotten just as bad without prohibition; maybe maybe not.
If we had a temporary progibition every 20 years or so to break people of their addictions it might be a real good thing for this country.
Oil like all others is a rent seeking industry. Oil is cheap compared with alternative choices thats why its a better investment. Once upon a time it was insanely cheap now less so but still cheap compared with other things. What you say about all the money spend to stabilize the middle east or make it friendly over the years might be true. Its rent seeking basically the industry does impose upon the government to make it work, and its hard to factor that into prices. Because its hard and the market hates anything hard it simply does not factor that into prices and since the market as a whole does not you should not either or you are going to get crushed.
"Why did big oil get a tariff on ethanol being imported into the US" you think that was big oil hahaha thats rich. Its not politically correct to call the agriculture industry evil but they are by far the worst rent seekers of all. Not everything is oils fault. Ethanol can be made much more cheaply from sugar cane then corn. Just like another certain product can refined sugar. Its the corn growers in the middle section of this country that won you your ethanol tariff not big Oil. Oil might have helped and I am sure you can produce evidence that they did. I don't deny it its good for them too, but I follow the corn business as well and I can tell you they had a hand in it.
This fund is nice and all but its just not gonna fly. If the rent seeking nonsense came to an end and maize and oil had to compete in a free market this sorta thing might be the magic bullet that gets the problem solved but until you tell the oil companies to defend their fields with their own hired troops and to prop up friendly mideast administations with their own money and squeez unfriendly ones with their own investments, oil will remain cheap. The same is true in the agriculture world. If you won't let the big factory farms take over and make things efficent they never will be 100% as effiecent as they can be. Products like ethanol will always cost more then they should. If you don't stop protecting corn with tariffs on import products that can be produced with corn stuff that could be made more cheaply never will be.
If our good old Uncle Sam would but out you would be right. Since he won't no matter who is in office your wrong.
That is the wonderful thing about sitting up at the top of a public firm. Your only performance review is the stock price. As long as the company as a whole does well, you job is secure regardless of wether you can be bothered to do it all much less be expected to do it well.
As long as there are a handful of good people at the top of an organization like HP to keep things on course the rest have a free pass to be total ass-clowns.
Your a fool alternative energy investments have been major failure and will continue to be major faliures as long as oil is cheap. Oil is getting cheaper as I write this. You are not doing anyone any harm by investing in oil either. Stock is just paper or now days just ledger lines that has little if anything to do with the company its supposed to represent. Buying 300 shares of a large cap firm like Exon-Mobile won't have any meaningful impact on that companies vaule at all. Your little transaction is not going to bid up the market. The only person who maybe extracts some gain off your activity is your broker. Sitting out a good energy investment for emotional reasons is just missing a good oppertunity. Its not the same thing as buing a $10k chunck of some small cap firm, say LetsKillBabies Inc. Where your volume could move the price and the company might gain from your actions. Even in that instace emotions and morals have NO PLACE in the stock market. If you can't check them at the door you probably should stay in cash, otherwise you are going to loose.
Bush v Gore went all the way to the Supreme Court. Now you can argue that it was Bush that took it there if you like and that might be fair IIRC the Bush team did ask the court to shortcut the appeals process and hear directly after it left circuit court but I don't think Gore's people resisted. They both wanted a final showdown, they wanted to take it as far as could be taken and they got their wish. Kerry took waited through a number or law suits brought by his people and for the nearly a week before he conceded the election to Bush. Once again I am not sure how far all these clowns really could have taken it.
I have no doubt that BOTH parties in BOTH elections attempted to "illegally fix" the elections at various stages or that Republicans to this day would be busy inventing statistics and pointing at antidotes trying to prove Gore or Kerry stole the election had those battles gone the other way.
What really troubles me is I used to call myself a Republican, I know plenty of people who once called themsevels Democrats but both parties have abandon the people IMHO. All politics at least at the national level has given up long term benevolent stewardship of the nation in favor whatever it takes to keep their jobs. I don't care whether its rigging an election, or engaging in wasteful pork spending that runs counter to party conventions for the sake of buying votes, or creating deliberate grid lock its all the same thing.
The grid lock might be the worst because it has in effect reduced us to a one party system. Sure the major parties might do ONE thing differently, the war and neither will outline how they would handle it if it were up to them alone, but on every other issue they are effectively the same. Think about all the other issues(particularly domestic) that never seem to get resolved, energy, abortion, Social Security, budget balance, election reform, all of these are never really addressed by either party. The only difference is which insane and impossible extreme plan for resolution is used to give the pretense of action while insuring no action will actually occur.
The only legislation that does pass is stuff that is basically neutral on the issues the parties like to define themsevels with. Most of that happens to be solely for the good of large corporations since they have the money to pay for it one way or the other. Media corporations are especially powerful because in addition to money they have tools that get deliver all kinds of job securing votes. They can distribute or not distribute Moore's latest "documentary" for instance. People who think recent republican moves have been designed to help the rich get richer have missed the boat entirely. They might have that effect but thats not the point. The number of individuals with the power to influence a election is really quite small. The real driver was to produce investment in large public companies. Democrats would have made the same move. They just had to oppose to make it look like they are a different group.
If people were really paying the right kind of attention. We should all be pounding the doors of the capitol with pitch forks and burning brands. There should be a near zero chance of anyone in this Congress or Senate to win an election as an incumbent. That would send a real message that would generate real political change; but very few people are really paying that kind of attention.
I disagree and I think in general most areas of property law do as well. The law just has not quite established whats what in the DRM situation and in terms of digital media in general.
If I buy something from you: You no longer own it. You no longer have any right to dictate how I use it. This is the definition of buy. I give you something in exchange for something our agreement covers the transaction only after that its complete.
We need to stop mudding up the whole debate with out poor use of language.
I would argue most software/music/digital is not purchased but leased or rented for an indefinate period. Almost all typically come with restrictions on your use.
I personally think no information is better. At least people who can't get information know they are being denied information. That is information in and of itself. Most people there by now realize or have heared that things are very different other places. The more they feel like their governments policies are baring them from participation in the 21st century the more likely they are to work for change dangerous our not.
I think that might be a little unfair to the social conservative types. I don't personally feel its right to be gay nor do I think people are "born that way". I also think sites like often are used and even primarilly used to arrage socially inappropriate behavior. At the same time I don't think for a seccond that gives me any sorta license to mistreat these people in anyway.
I agree a transparent societ is a bad thing. People doing things I don't agree with in private is none of my business. I can advise and advocate against it in public but it does me no personal harm and therfore my rights end there. Just because others have different values then I do does not require in my mind they be labeled bad. Bad is someone who hurts others. Takeing this sort stuff out of private encouters and into the public may hurt others; so privacy is importand and people are people in the end regardless and should be treated in a dignified mannor and afforded their privacy. I think the vast majority of social conservatives will agree with me on this.
I think what the prankster did is sick. He lied to them with no intent other then to do them harm for his ammusement. Anybody capeable of doing such a thing is not someone I consider an like minded social conservative or even a Christian; I would say they are assholes. It might have been a bit foolish on the part of the people who got pranked but they did not have any reason to think they would be abused in this fashion. They responded to a personal ad in a location where personals are commonly posted. In this case there was no behavior beeing advertized out side the social norms nothing like kiddie porn or drugs where they might have expected a sting. This was simply reaching out to another person who seemed to be indicated they would like compainionship as well. That person then turned out to be someone else who used their response for abuse. Its not funny its mean.
Beyond that it harms peoples faith in each other and the communications system. Forgery is illegal not because its a means for fraud but because it "harms societies faith in documents". Now there is no crime here as far as I know but its the same kind of damage. This is why we have such laws. I think we have lots of stupid laws on the books that have all sorts of undesireable side effects. Laws in gerneral are bad. As a libertarian I think we have far to many. We keep needing more of them though because people are to selfish or to ignorant think about their actions and determine if they are going to violate someones "rights" first.
This is exactly how we get stuff like DMCA. You can only legisilate an action so you legislate away those most likely to do harm. There are lots of cases where I might reverse engineer a copy protection scheme an do no harm to the owners of the protected material, but because some people had to be abusive we all suffer under a crap law. Next we are going to have a yet another law governing who can talk to who on the Internet and when. Its going to runin the medium and its because of people like this prankster who insist on acting like selfish jerks instead of letting people use the thing to mind their own business; or to attempt make a constructive contribution in a public forum like I am doing here.
The US does infact use much much more in the way of fules that can release carbon when burned that is true, but we do so with the greatest effeciencies in the world. China alone and much of the third world if you group regionally release much more carbon the we do here. They are not going to stop because we asked them to, sign Kyoto or whatever. If they are not going to stop our stopping will only delay the inevitable. There is no vailid reason to destroy our economy because you liberal fruit-loops think your helping somehow. Pull your heads out of your asses and realize that we should be focusing our efforts on understanding what the results will be from an excelerated and unballanced carbon cycle and how we can adapted to those conditions or take other steps to mitigate them.
I have to agree with the parent. Its not good thinking to be blanketly apposed to terrorism. If you are apposed to these Islamic radicals come up with a few good reasons for that. The fact that they are "terrorists" means nothing its just a label, the same goes for the animal rites people in this article.
You might be apposed to the Islamic group because: A. You don't want a system of justice established where your hands get cut off for stealing. B. You don't want to see the wemon you care about stripped of what we view as pretty fundamental rites. C. You don't like their methods D - F192 (We could keep this up all day).
As to methods anyone who tryies to change the established system outside normal means is going to be labeled a terrorist. Anyone trying to chage the system through normal means is going to be labeled a supporter of terror. Why because the majority has been convinced that ALL terrorists are bad. A number of posters have pointed out that the founders of this country would have been labeled terrorists. I am sure thats true infact I think someplace I actually saw an article from the period that did use that term. Yes they did ocasionally kill civilians in mobs and the like, but for the most part they restrained themsevles to economic assets and militiary targets. The Boston Tea party for instance while it was an attact on civilians was not a murderous affair. I think we can say the tactics of the revolutionary colonists were markedly different for the group in this article and the Islamists yet they were still labeled terrorists.
You could be apposed to the group in this article because they: A. Are sloppy and possibly hurting people with no relation to their cause B. Claim to be about protecting life but go about it by trying to kill people; perhaps this strikes you as hipocritical C. You think their might be value in the research they seek to stop. D-A192 (come up with more)
My point is not all change is bad but those in power never want things to change. If all they have to do in order to insure you will take their side is call the other guys a terrorist they things will never ever change again. Now I feel we doing fine enough but their are things I wish were different; I don't want to shut the door to progress because we are "afraid of terror".
I was very much against embryonic stem cell research for ethical reasons. I still have real concerns over then entire set of processes around artifical conception and such but this is great news. These cells do have the potential to be of great help to some people. I think its wonderful that we might now know how to get them without having to do serious harm to someone else.
That said this is a clear case where more caution should have been observed. In the scheme of things this discovery did not take long to come about at all. Had we waited to better understand we might have avoided doing a great deal of harm and at the same time only lost a decade or so advanceing other areas of the science.
Lots of folks like me get dismissed here on Slashdot as fundies or luddites which is very unfair. I and those like me are as excited and interested in new advances as anyone here we just want to take time to look around were we are before plodding blindly forward in a mad rush to some unkown ends.
I have to agree I never had a cell phone until I was living on my own and decided that for about the same money I might as well have one instead of a land line. I never wanted a cell either because when I am out I really want to do what ever it is I am out doing without interuptions by people who are not their especially when I am out with others.
Kids do need a way to call home though. When I was about 7-14 years old. We went out on bikes from one friends house to the next. We often went to the local strip mall for candies or harware(we loved the surplus store) but back then their were pay phones around. So as long as your mom sewed that extra pocket into the side of your shoe and placed 25-35(depending on year) cents in there for emergencies you were covered. When was the last time you say a pay phone? In the last five years or so I think most have been removed. What happend if your pal bobby takes a spill now and you need move to come by with the min-van and rescue the two of you? It used to be you could just ride on down the street and make a call now what?
The thing that really makes me worry is I see lots of parents give their tweens and teens a phone and figer their perfectly safe to wonder around. My parents let me roam about town pretty much but only if friends were with me. Under the theory that two or three kids are pretty safe together. Somebody can go for help. I certainly would have gotten a good talking to if I ventured much beyond the neighborhood to grab one of my buddies alone. Now I see kids all the time walking alone at the mall without anyone directly with them. I think it is a mistake hold a cell phone affords the same security as having friends along.
You are ignoring the effect of cross subsidization. There are reasons an manufacturer might produce and sell something at a loss. The first reason is one line subsizes another. Lets say I am an electronics component manufacturer. I make a nice tidy margin selling CMOS based imaging chips for use in digital cameras. I also make LCD displays, the market is tight and I can hardly get any margin from them. Like all customers mine(some of which build cameras) like things easy they would like to buy most of the components form me and not somebody else. I did a little research and look back at some past numbers. I discover that the volume of imaging chips I can sell varies inversely with the amount I chare for the LCD screens. Apparently nobody wants my imageing chip who does not also want an LCD. I might very well decide to sell my LCDs at a small loss in large volume to my bigger customers if it will induce them to purchase my imageing chips which I make real money on in greater volumes.
Look many hear are going to argue that Microsoft is being anticompetitive, and maybe they are or maybe they are not, its not really the point. What is M$ supposed to do?
On the one hand they could make kernel hooks available to vendors and perhaps secure their use with code signing or something. Then the AV companies would be happy; but it would only be moments before some blackhats found away to expoloit the system and make their code look legit. Once it is exploited M$ is again accused (fairly) of producing software that really does not meet resonable security expectations for what it costs and they risk loosing market share.
The other option is lock down lowlevel access as much as possible and keep non M$ code out of kernel space lots of the biggest security problems become much easier to solve and M$ can produce a better product. Now they might sell some enhancements that would be M$ code could run where others can't and that might look unfair but we live with all sorts of other products that discorage after market parts as well. The next obvious question is if the black hats can by pass security why can't the security vendors who can at least count on the person installing the software having root level permissions on the system? Sure you might be playing a game of hide and go patch with M$ breaking stuff all the time but lots of people do that already.
The real story here folks is we don't live in a command economy. If you make something you had better be sure their is a need or want out there for your product. You also need to understand that MARKETS CHANGE if your organization has a single revenue streem you better be developing others or finding new markets for your one product.
If M$ actually succedes is producing a system with pretty good overall security then two things are true, one is that many users decide that additional security software offers too little utility to invest in at any price and two given the number of plays in the security market there would likely be so much supply that prices would have to drop until the less effice firms vacate the market.
Being upset with M$ securing their product as an security software developer would be a bit like a garage owner being upset that auto makers are putting cars out only need tune ups ever 5 years instead of every 5k miles. It might suck to be and security vendor or a garage owner but those are the breaks. Best stop crying and find a way to use your talent for something people will still want you would be better served.
True to an extent, and if we were talking about an interface or something I'd be with you. I mean your right cars don't all need pedals in the same place, not that I know what I would do differnt but.
Communications though and WEB is a communications are different in that their are multiple parties participating and thefore there must be some agreement on signaling(in other words a standard) otherwise we can't talk. If I decide to go off and invent my own language rules we could not have this discussion very well, It would be:
Its true that it did not bother people back then, but hey in 1995-7 and to a less extent into 98 with the "dynamic 4s" I think the average level of computer skills on the internet, even the web, was much higher then today. In fact I really don't know to many people who bothered with the internet prior to 1998 that were not for the most part tech savy. The few that did just thought they were going to the "weird part of AOL". Getting on the internet at that time required users at least understand that they required four things and that these things were separate and interchangeble, some computer platform, a browser, an isp, and some type of modem or ISDN thingy. They maybe knew no more then that or how any of that stuff worked but at least understood the highlevel function of each. If you told people then to go get some other browser they would have been able to recongnize one when they happed upon it, today there are plenty of people who think that IE is the internet.
There is a perfectly good reason not to bundle it. Firefox great as it is, does not come with support. That means if a user has trouble the OEM would have to support it, that costs money they would much rather M$ spend.
I imagine M$ has been doing exactly what they have been doing with IE ever since 4.0. Internet Explorer is not a web browser, it is a large collection of libraries M$ develops to aid in UI development for their other products such as windows and Office. The sooner you stop looking at IE as a browser and instead as a toolkit the product starts to make some sense. The last time IE was a web browser was like maybe 1997-98 ever since win98 IE has been a toolkit with an HTML library.
Becuase useing America's great geographic diversity would make sense, so as good American's we must fight her geographic diversity.
We don't need to grow rice in the southwest where conditions are mostly hot and arid, the aquafer is under the greatest stess and the loss of precious water to evaporation is greater then any place else in the nation. We could put the rice patties east of the Mississippi but we don't. We might build towns and cities near natural Lakes and rivers to use as transportaion and water resiovors but why when the Army Core of Engineers can make them. One look at my comment history will show I am no enviornmentalist wako, I like my air conditioned buildings and fast cars, but even I am shocked and discused at the wasteful way we approch lots of what we do.
I really think or problems are not in the activites but the methods. We don't all need to stop wareing shoes, dawn our himp pants, and find a good tree to live in. We could enjoy the life style we do today in a much more sustainable fashion if we would just, grow crops apporpriate for the region, build facilites like this NSA thing near natural sorces of heat differntial (lakes, caves), produce only what we can use or sell, ie stop growing crops so the big G can destroy them or dump them below cost in some other nation as aide. Food dumping is not aide at all in most cases in fact it often destroys local economies becuase it under cuts local farmers in this tiny nations, but this is a digretion. The biggest thing though is we need to cut the disposable crap and move back to durable goods. I know people that eat off paper plates at home every day rather then dishes talk about waste.
Either that or you are the idot. Think this through, security is going to show up, question you and guess you just turned the thing off and toss you out. Nobody is going care about your side of the story in the first place if you complain about the treatment you get, and they won't beleive you either that there was nothing display becuase the security tape WILL show otherwise. Now you could go on to explain your little prank to them but they hey what was the point again?
I think we might have it backwards. The less complex the higher the form of life, not the reverse the way we think of it today. If evolution were a recursive function you start out at the top of the tree with something simple. Then call evolution again with the current organism foreach possible change, the more branches you go the more complex and lower the life form becomes, perhaps the evolution function returns when either the branch fails or there are no more leaves.
No 90% is no place near good enough for dictation but it sure might be good enough for some applications.
Think "computer lights", if it gets it wrong you just try again. All those media PC would be good candidates as well. If I say "change to channel six" and thing swiches to sixty 1/10th of the time well I could repeat myself that often in that application anyway; and still be pretty satisfied.
Right but this is not new in Plan 9 either. IBM has been doing this with the SYSOUT concept, in the mainframe world for decades. In many respects the concepts and paradigms driving Plan 9 from my adminted limity reading about and playing with the live CD seem to be a cleaver collection of everything good about UNIX coupled with everything good about SYSTEM 390/OS390/MVS/ZOS(Whatever you are calling it this year). Its a pretty cool system, but like most things despite all the industry hype it is not really new.
AI will replace humans as the dominating force in science and technology
Why in the world would we let that happen. Suppose we could build something cabable of doing just that. We might make one every few years our so to satisfy our own curiosity but that would be about it. Sure we want AI machaines smart enough to correctly vacum our homes(ie not roomba), build cars, disarm bombs, what have you but we don't want them to become a force. We are a speicies that uses tools. We use these tools to survive and to answer our questions and to explor our creativity. If we start letting the machines both ask and answer the questions why would we bother to do anything?
Why get an education? Who cares the computer will take care of any thinking I need to do right?
Why think about physics, when I could just sit back and wait for the AI to post a paper on slashdot?
Lets face it folks humans are much more about asking how then why? How did the universe come to exist? How can I build a machine that could actually think? How could I express myself in a painting or literary work? More often then not the why comes later and frequently not at all. In the not at all cases we cease doing until someone becomes interested again or thinks they might do it different , in the latter it usualy becomes an enterprise. Sure sometimes we build stuff out of need but not really very often. Take even something like refrigeration for example. We had sailing ships that could bring ice down form the poles packed in saw dust that could keep your meat cold in the ice chest all through the summer. Somebody with a little physics backgound probably got to thinking about how energy gets absorbed or released from a system by a phase change. I wounder if I turned the idea of an engine around abit, if I might make a cooling machine. Then later after an experiment or too thought "hey you know people might like these". I really doubt someone started from the "I want to build a device to keep food cold" premise, why becuase they could already do that.
Slashdot Mirror
Yea, I wish I could get fully behinde you post but M$ has done the impossible before. Xbox got a good pice of Nintendo's and Sony's action in the console world. I don't think most people expected that to happen prior to launch; and really it was sheer marketing that drove that and nothing else. I mean honestly who things Xbox was really a better product then PS2 or Gamecube; it isnt. Now Xbox360 has made some great strides and It truely does out class the last generation, but we have not see PS3 or Wii in their final forms yet it remains to be seen how they will stack up. 360 is a nice product and it will be hard to beat.
I would be worried if I was Apple because even if Zune is a still steeming pile; M$ will get the name out their and into the mindshare. Zune may flop because it won't offer any reason to leave Apple. but Zune[360] might be nice product and people will be more willing to buy Zune[360] just because they know its a follow on product and therfore is "refined" many will make this judgement haveing never held a Zune.
Actually dispite the popular feelings toward the subject prohibition worked wonders. Rates of Marrige partner abuse and child abuse declined by something like 50% durring the period. The poverty rate also trended down, although its harder to tie that directly to prohibition. Yes it did creat some oppertunities for criminals but I don't think its fair to say that organized crime would not have found other sources of income and gotten just as bad without prohibition; maybe maybe not.
If we had a temporary progibition every 20 years or so to break people of their addictions it might be a real good thing for this country.
Oil like all others is a rent seeking industry. Oil is cheap compared with alternative choices thats why its a better investment. Once upon a time it was insanely cheap now less so but still cheap compared with other things. What you say about all the money spend to stabilize the middle east or make it friendly over the years might be true. Its rent seeking basically the industry does impose upon the government to make it work, and its hard to factor that into prices. Because its hard and the market hates anything hard it simply does not factor that into prices and since the market as a whole does not you should not either or you are going to get crushed.
"Why did big oil get a tariff on ethanol being imported into the US" you think that was big oil hahaha thats rich. Its not politically correct to call the agriculture industry evil but they are by far the worst rent seekers of all. Not everything is oils fault. Ethanol can be made much more cheaply from sugar cane then corn. Just like another certain product can refined sugar. Its the corn growers in the middle section of this country that won you your ethanol tariff not big Oil. Oil might have helped and I am sure you can produce evidence that they did. I don't deny it its good for them too, but I follow the corn business as well and I can tell you they had a hand in it.
This fund is nice and all but its just not gonna fly. If the rent seeking nonsense came to an end and maize and oil had to compete in a free market this sorta thing might be the magic bullet that gets the problem solved but until you tell the oil companies to defend their fields with their own hired troops and to prop up friendly mideast administations with their own money and squeez unfriendly ones with their own investments, oil will remain cheap. The same is true in the agriculture world. If you won't let the big factory farms take over and make things efficent they never will be 100% as effiecent as they can be. Products like ethanol will always cost more then they should. If you don't stop protecting corn with tariffs on import products that can be produced with corn stuff that could be made more cheaply never will be.
If our good old Uncle Sam would but out you would be right. Since he won't no matter who is in office your wrong.
That is the wonderful thing about sitting up at the top of a public firm. Your only performance review is the stock price. As long as the company as a whole does well, you job is secure regardless of wether you can be bothered to do it all much less be expected to do it well.
As long as there are a handful of good people at the top of an organization like HP to keep things on course the rest have a free pass to be total ass-clowns.
Your a fool alternative energy investments have been major failure and will continue to be major faliures as long as oil is cheap. Oil is getting cheaper as I write this. You are not doing anyone any harm by investing in oil either. Stock is just paper or now days just ledger lines that has little if anything to do with the company its supposed to represent. Buying 300 shares of a large cap firm like Exon-Mobile won't have any meaningful impact on that companies vaule at all. Your little transaction is not going to bid up the market. The only person who maybe extracts some gain off your activity is your broker. Sitting out a good energy investment for emotional reasons is just missing a good oppertunity. Its not the same thing as buing a $10k chunck of some small cap firm, say LetsKillBabies Inc. Where your volume could move the price and the company might gain from your actions. Even in that instace emotions and morals have NO PLACE in the stock market. If you can't check them at the door you probably should stay in cash, otherwise you are going to loose.
Bush v Gore went all the way to the Supreme Court. Now you can argue that it was Bush that took it there if you like and that might be fair IIRC the Bush team did ask the court to shortcut the appeals process and hear directly after it left circuit court but I don't think Gore's people resisted. They both wanted a final showdown, they wanted to take it as far as could be taken and they got their wish. Kerry took waited through a number or law suits brought by his people and for the nearly a week before he conceded the election to Bush. Once again I am not sure how far all these clowns really could have taken it.
I have no doubt that BOTH parties in BOTH elections attempted to "illegally fix" the elections at various stages or that Republicans to this day would be busy inventing statistics and pointing at antidotes trying to prove Gore or Kerry stole the election had those battles gone the other way.
What really troubles me is I used to call myself a Republican, I know plenty of people who once called themsevels Democrats but both parties have abandon the people IMHO. All politics at least at the national level has given up long term benevolent stewardship of the nation in favor whatever it takes to keep their jobs. I don't care whether its rigging an election, or engaging in wasteful pork spending that runs counter to party conventions for the sake of buying votes, or creating deliberate grid lock its all the same thing.
The grid lock might be the worst because it has in effect reduced us to a one party system. Sure the major parties might do ONE thing differently, the war and neither will outline how they would handle it if it were up to them alone, but on every other issue they are effectively the same. Think about all the other issues(particularly domestic) that never seem to get resolved, energy, abortion, Social Security, budget balance, election reform, all of these are never really addressed by either party. The only difference is which insane and impossible extreme plan for resolution is used to give the pretense of action while insuring no action will actually occur.
The only legislation that does pass is stuff that is basically neutral on the issues the parties like to define themsevels with. Most of that happens to be solely for the good of large corporations since they have the money to pay for it one way or the other. Media corporations are especially powerful because in addition to money they have tools that get deliver all kinds of job securing votes. They can distribute or not distribute Moore's latest "documentary" for instance. People who think recent republican moves have been designed to help the rich get richer have missed the boat entirely. They might have that effect but thats not the point. The number of individuals with the power to influence a election is really quite small. The real driver was to produce investment in large public companies. Democrats would have made the same move. They just had to oppose to make it look like they are a different group.
If people were really paying the right kind of attention. We should all be pounding the doors of the capitol with pitch forks and burning brands. There should be a near zero chance of anyone in this Congress or Senate to win an election as an incumbent. That would send a real message that would generate real political change; but very few people are really paying that kind of attention.
I disagree and I think in general most areas of property law do as well. The law just has not quite established whats what in the DRM situation and in terms of digital media in general.
If I buy something from you: You no longer own it. You no longer have any right to dictate how I use it. This is the definition of buy. I give you something in exchange for something our agreement covers the transaction only after that its complete.
We need to stop mudding up the whole debate with out poor use of language.
I would argue most software/music/digital is not purchased but leased or rented for an indefinate period. Almost all typically come with restrictions on your use.
I personally think no information is better. At least people who can't get information know they are being denied information. That is information in and of itself. Most people there by now realize or have heared that things are very different other places. The more they feel like their governments policies are baring them from participation in the 21st century the more likely they are to work for change dangerous our not.
I think that might be a little unfair to the social conservative types. I don't personally feel its right to be gay nor do I think people are "born that way". I also think sites like often are used and even primarilly used to arrage socially inappropriate behavior. At the same time I don't think for a seccond that gives me any sorta license to mistreat these people in anyway.
I agree a transparent societ is a bad thing. People doing things I don't agree with in private is none of my business. I can advise and advocate against it in public but it does me no personal harm and therfore my rights end there. Just because others have different values then I do does not require in my mind they be labeled bad. Bad is someone who hurts others. Takeing this sort stuff out of private encouters and into the public may hurt others; so privacy is importand and people are people in the end regardless and should be treated in a dignified mannor and afforded their privacy. I think the vast majority of social conservatives will agree with me on this.
I think what the prankster did is sick. He lied to them with no intent other then to do them harm for his ammusement. Anybody capeable of doing such a thing is not someone I consider an like minded social conservative or even a Christian; I would say they are assholes. It might have been a bit foolish on the part of the people who got pranked but they did not have any reason to think they would be abused in this fashion. They responded to a personal ad in a location where personals are commonly posted. In this case there was no behavior beeing advertized out side the social norms nothing like kiddie porn or drugs where they might have expected a sting. This was simply reaching out to another person who seemed to be indicated they would like compainionship as well. That person then turned out to be someone else who used their response for abuse. Its not funny its mean.
Beyond that it harms peoples faith in each other and the communications system. Forgery is illegal not because its a means for fraud but because it "harms societies faith in documents". Now there is no crime here as far as I know but its the same kind of damage. This is why we have such laws. I think we have lots of stupid laws on the books that have all sorts of undesireable side effects. Laws in gerneral are bad. As a libertarian I think we have far to many. We keep needing more of them though because people are to selfish or to ignorant think about their actions and determine if they are going to violate someones "rights" first.
This is exactly how we get stuff like DMCA. You can only legisilate an action so you legislate away those most likely to do harm. There are lots of cases where I might reverse engineer a copy protection scheme an do no harm to the owners of the protected material, but because some people had to be abusive we all suffer under a crap law. Next we are going to have a yet another law governing who can talk to who on the Internet and when. Its going to runin the medium and its because of people like this prankster who insist on acting like selfish jerks instead of letting people use the thing to mind their own business; or to attempt make a constructive contribution in a public forum like I am doing here.
The US does infact use much much more in the way of fules that can release carbon when burned that is true, but we do so with the greatest effeciencies in the world. China alone and much of the third world if you group regionally release much more carbon the we do here. They are not going to stop because we asked them to, sign Kyoto or whatever. If they are not going to stop our stopping will only delay the inevitable. There is no vailid reason to destroy our economy because you liberal fruit-loops think your helping somehow.
Pull your heads out of your asses and realize that we should be focusing our efforts on understanding what the results will be from an excelerated and unballanced carbon cycle and how we can adapted to those conditions or take other steps to mitigate them.
I have to agree with the parent. Its not good thinking to be blanketly apposed to terrorism. If you are apposed to these Islamic radicals come up with a few good reasons for that. The fact that they are "terrorists" means nothing its just a label, the same goes for the animal rites people in this article.
You might be apposed to the Islamic group because:
A. You don't want a system of justice established where your hands get cut off for stealing.
B. You don't want to see the wemon you care about stripped of what we view as pretty fundamental rites.
C. You don't like their methods
D - F192 (We could keep this up all day).
As to methods anyone who tryies to change the established system outside normal means is going to be labeled a terrorist. Anyone trying to chage the system through normal means is going to be labeled a supporter of terror. Why because the majority has been convinced that ALL terrorists are bad. A number of posters have pointed out that the founders of this country would have been labeled terrorists. I am sure thats true infact I think someplace I actually saw an article from the period that did use that term. Yes they did ocasionally kill civilians in mobs and the like, but for the most part they restrained themsevles to economic assets and militiary targets. The Boston Tea party for instance while it was an attact on civilians was not a murderous affair. I think we can say the tactics of the revolutionary colonists were markedly different for the group in this article and the Islamists yet they were still labeled terrorists.
You could be apposed to the group in this article because they:
A. Are sloppy and possibly hurting people with no relation to their cause
B. Claim to be about protecting life but go about it by trying to kill people; perhaps this strikes you as hipocritical
C. You think their might be value in the research they seek to stop.
D-A192 (come up with more)
My point is not all change is bad but those in power never want things to change. If all they have to do in order to insure you will take their side is call the other guys a terrorist they things will never ever change again. Now I feel we doing fine enough but their are things I wish were different; I don't want to shut the door to progress because we are "afraid of terror".
I was very much against embryonic stem cell research for ethical reasons. I still have real concerns over then entire set of processes around artifical conception and such but this is great news. These cells do have the potential to be of great help to some people. I think its wonderful that we might now know how to get them without having to do serious harm to someone else.
That said this is a clear case where more caution should have been observed. In the scheme of things this discovery did not take long to come about at all. Had we waited to better understand we might have avoided doing a great deal of harm and at the same time only lost a decade or so advanceing other areas of the science.
Lots of folks like me get dismissed here on Slashdot as fundies or luddites which is very unfair. I and those like me are as excited and interested in new advances as anyone here we just want to take time to look around were we are before plodding blindly forward in a mad rush to some unkown ends.
I have to agree I never had a cell phone until I was living on my own and decided that for about the same money I might as well have one instead of a land line. I never wanted a cell either because when I am out I really want to do what ever it is I am out doing without interuptions by people who are not their especially when I am out with others.
Kids do need a way to call home though. When I was about 7-14 years old. We went out on bikes from one friends house to the next. We often went to the local strip mall for candies or harware(we loved the surplus store) but back then their were pay phones around. So as long as your mom sewed that extra pocket into the side of your shoe and placed 25-35(depending on year) cents in there for emergencies you were covered. When was the last time you say a pay phone? In the last five years or so I think most have been removed. What happend if your pal bobby takes a spill now and you need move to come by with the min-van and rescue the two of you? It used to be you could just ride on down the street and make a call now what?
The thing that really makes me worry is I see lots of parents give their tweens and teens a phone and figer their perfectly safe to wonder around. My parents let me roam about town pretty much but only if friends were with me. Under the theory that two or three kids are pretty safe together. Somebody can go for help. I certainly would have gotten a good talking to if I ventured much beyond the neighborhood to grab one of my buddies alone. Now I see kids all the time walking alone at the mall without anyone directly with them. I think it is a mistake hold a cell phone affords the same security as having friends along.
You are ignoring the effect of cross subsidization. There are reasons an manufacturer might produce and sell something at a loss. The first reason is one line subsizes another. Lets say I am an electronics component manufacturer. I make a nice tidy margin selling CMOS based imaging chips for use in digital cameras. I also make LCD displays, the market is tight and I can hardly get any margin from them. Like all customers mine(some of which build cameras) like things easy they would like to buy most of the components form me and not somebody else. I did a little research and look back at some past numbers. I discover that the volume of imaging chips I can sell varies inversely with the amount I chare for the LCD screens. Apparently nobody wants my imageing chip who does not also want an LCD. I might very well decide to sell my LCDs at a small loss in large volume to my bigger customers if it will induce them to purchase my imageing chips which I make real money on in greater volumes.
Look many hear are going to argue that Microsoft is being anticompetitive, and maybe they are or maybe they are not, its not really the point. What is M$ supposed to do?
On the one hand they could make kernel hooks available to vendors and perhaps secure their use with code signing or something. Then the AV companies would be happy; but it would only be moments before some blackhats found away to expoloit the system and make their code look legit. Once it is exploited M$ is again accused (fairly) of producing software that really does not meet resonable security expectations for what it costs and they risk loosing market share.
The other option is lock down lowlevel access as much as possible and keep non M$ code out of kernel space lots of the biggest security problems become much easier to solve and M$ can produce a better product. Now they might sell some enhancements that would be M$ code could run where others can't and that might look unfair but we live with all sorts of other products that discorage after market parts as well. The next obvious question is if the black hats can by pass security why can't the security vendors who can at least count on the person installing the software having root level permissions on the system? Sure you might be playing a game of hide and go patch with M$ breaking stuff all the time but lots of people do that already.
The real story here folks is we don't live in a command economy. If you make something you had better be sure their is a need or want out there for your product. You also need to understand that MARKETS CHANGE if your organization has a single revenue streem you better be developing others or finding new markets for your one product.
If M$ actually succedes is producing a system with pretty good overall security then two things are true, one is that many users decide that additional security software offers too little utility to invest in at any price and two given the number of plays in the security market there would likely be so much supply that prices would have to drop until the less effice firms vacate the market.
Being upset with M$ securing their product as an security software developer would be a bit like a garage owner being upset that auto makers are putting cars out only need tune ups ever 5 years instead of every 5k miles. It might suck to be and security vendor or a garage owner but those are the breaks. Best stop crying and find a way to use your talent for something people will still want you would be better served.
True to an extent, and if we were talking about an interface or something I'd be with you. I mean your right cars don't all need pedals in the same place, not that I know what I would do differnt but.
Communications though and WEB is a communications are different in that their are multiple parties participating and thefore there must be some agreement on signaling(in other words a standard) otherwise we can't talk. If I decide to go off and invent my own language rules we could not have this discussion very well, It would be:
ture silly it
Its true that it did not bother people back then, but hey in 1995-7 and to a less extent into 98 with the "dynamic 4s" I think the average level of computer skills on the internet, even the web, was much higher then today. In fact I really don't know to many people who bothered with the internet prior to 1998 that were not for the most part tech savy. The few that did just thought they were going to the "weird part of AOL". Getting on the internet at that time required users at least understand that they required four things and that these things were separate and interchangeble, some computer platform, a browser, an isp, and some type of modem or ISDN thingy. They maybe knew no more then that or how any of that stuff worked but at least understood the highlevel function of each. If you told people then to go get some other browser they would have been able to recongnize one when they happed upon it, today there are plenty of people who think that IE is the internet.
There is a perfectly good reason not to bundle it. Firefox great as it is, does not come with support. That means if a user has trouble the OEM would have to support it, that costs money they would much rather M$ spend.
I imagine M$ has been doing exactly what they have been doing with IE ever since 4.0. Internet Explorer is not a web browser, it is a large collection of libraries M$ develops to aid in UI development for their other products such as windows and Office. The sooner you stop looking at IE as a browser and instead as a toolkit the product starts to make some sense. The last time IE was a web browser was like maybe 1997-98 ever since win98 IE has been a toolkit with an HTML library.
Becuase useing America's great geographic diversity would make sense, so as good American's we must fight her geographic diversity.
We don't need to grow rice in the southwest where conditions are mostly hot and arid, the aquafer is under the greatest stess and the loss of precious water to evaporation is greater then any place else in the nation. We could put the rice patties east of the Mississippi but we don't. We might build towns and cities near natural Lakes and rivers to use as transportaion and water resiovors but why when the Army Core of Engineers can make them. One look at my comment history will show I am no enviornmentalist wako, I like my air conditioned buildings and fast cars, but even I am shocked and discused at the wasteful way we approch lots of what we do.
I really think or problems are not in the activites but the methods. We don't all need to stop wareing shoes, dawn our himp pants, and find a good tree to live in. We could enjoy the life style we do today in a much more sustainable fashion if we would just, grow crops apporpriate for the region, build facilites like this NSA thing near natural sorces of heat differntial (lakes, caves), produce only what we can use or sell, ie stop growing crops so the big G can destroy them or dump them below cost in some other nation as aide. Food dumping is not aide at all in most cases in fact it often destroys local economies becuase it under cuts local farmers in this tiny nations, but this is a digretion. The biggest thing though is we need to cut the disposable crap and move back to durable goods. I know people that eat off paper plates at home every day rather then dishes talk about waste.
Either that or you are the idot. Think this through, security is going to show up, question you and guess you just turned the thing off and toss you out. Nobody is going care about your side of the story in the first place if you complain about the treatment you get, and they won't beleive you either that there was nothing display becuase the security tape WILL show otherwise. Now you could go on to explain your little prank to them but they hey what was the point again?
I think we might have it backwards. The less complex the higher the form of life, not the reverse the way we think of it today. If evolution were a recursive function you start out at the top of the tree with something simple. Then call evolution again with the current organism foreach possible change, the more branches you go the more complex and lower the life form becomes, perhaps the evolution function returns when either the branch fails or there are no more leaves.
No 90% is no place near good enough for dictation but it sure might be good enough for some applications.
Think "computer lights", if it gets it wrong you just try again. All those media PC would be good candidates as well. If I say "change to channel six" and thing swiches to sixty 1/10th of the time well I could repeat myself that often in that application anyway; and still be pretty satisfied.
Right but this is not new in Plan 9 either. IBM has been doing this with the SYSOUT concept, in the mainframe world for decades. In many respects the concepts and paradigms driving Plan 9 from my adminted limity reading about and playing with the live CD seem to be a cleaver collection of everything good about UNIX coupled with everything good about SYSTEM 390/OS390/MVS/ZOS(Whatever you are calling it this year). Its a pretty cool system, but like most things despite all the industry hype it is not really new.
Why in the world would we let that happen. Suppose we could build something cabable of doing just that. We might make one every few years our so to satisfy our own curiosity but that would be about it. Sure we want AI machaines smart enough to correctly vacum our homes(ie not roomba), build cars, disarm bombs, what have you but we don't want them to become a force. We are a speicies that uses tools. We use these tools to survive and to answer our questions and to explor our creativity. If we start letting the machines both ask and answer the questions why would we bother to do anything? Why get an education? Who cares the computer will take care of any thinking I need to do right? Why think about physics, when I could just sit back and wait for the AI to post a paper on slashdot? Lets face it folks humans are much more about asking how then why? How did the universe come to exist? How can I build a machine that could actually think? How could I express myself in a painting or literary work? More often then not the why comes later and frequently not at all. In the not at all cases we cease doing until someone becomes interested again or thinks they might do it different , in the latter it usualy becomes an enterprise. Sure sometimes we build stuff out of need but not really very often. Take even something like refrigeration for example. We had sailing ships that could bring ice down form the poles packed in saw dust that could keep your meat cold in the ice chest all through the summer. Somebody with a little physics backgound probably got to thinking about how energy gets absorbed or released from a system by a phase change. I wounder if I turned the idea of an engine around abit, if I might make a cooling machine. Then later after an experiment or too thought "hey you know people might like these". I really doubt someone started from the "I want to build a device to keep food cold" premise, why becuase they could already do that.