That isn't what I said; I didn't say capitalism was inherently bad. Rather, you've spun my words the way you needed to hear them. Who's the spider now?
Regulations aren't the same thing as consensus. Regulations are often rammed down the throats of an unwilling and uncooperative populace by a self-interested minority seeking to use those regulations to benefit themselves a bit more than everyone else.
Take intellectual property law and DRM, for instance.
Regulation and yet more laws in a binder already full to bursting is not the solution. Trying to legislate socialistic values leads to something that history has already told us will fail: Communism.
So? What Pogue has observed is a SYMPTOM of the bigger problem, not the actual problem itself.
This is precisely how American capitalism works. It's utterly Darwinian: any tactic that enriches your survival prospects and doesn't get you drawn and quartered is perfectly fine. I hate to say it, but we made this bed for ourselves with our own particular brands of indoctrination and econo-political dogma. We mixed up a nasty batch of Koolaid and wound up drinking it ourselves. There are hidden costs to this sort of capitalism.
If you really want to put an end to this sort of behavior, we'll have to start by changing our actual collective values and ethics, and then change our messages of indoctrination that we whisper to our children and each other to reflect those new values. We need to get the population sipping a better mix of Koolaid; what we've been drinking for almost a century is pretty toxic. Violent games may not brainwash gamers to become violent, but the sort of subtle indoctrination that every American receives DOES lead to the sort of behavior that Pogue observed.
It will take a true collective effort and consensus in order to end it. Passing a few more kneejerk laws or whatever ain't gonna cure the underlying problem: Darwinian capitalism.
This is precisely why it's so great that so many of us live where these guys get elected as mayors or governors or Congressmen. Isn't at least a little brain damage a job requirement for elected offices? They're good to go after a stint in pro sports.
Jones makes an impassioned emotional argument for the space program, but fails to present any bald raw logical reasons why we can't stop and let it die. It's simple: the human race has NEVER before lacked a new frontier in which to expand its growing population.
Without a space program, we have no new frontiers to exploit (without further ecological backlash). The human race is not so disciplined and comfortable with itself that it can survive that absence of a frontier. We will grind civilization, if not the species entirely, into the dust if we stick our heads in the sand and try to stop expanding.
That's the simple logic of it that Jones fails to spell out.
Copyright is NOT socialistic: there's no benefit to the human collective at all, only to a minority. It exists as a tactic for concentrating wealth, not keeping it flowing around evenly. As a meteorologist might phrase it, it creates or strengthens economic high pressure zones. Copyright may be prescriptive after a fashion, but it is not socialistic.
It was the poor education and gullibility of our distant ancestors that got us "played" and manipulated into this mess; copyright law is the consequence, not the cause. The cause was ignorance, manipulation and mis-education of the human collective by a minority. I assume you've heard the cliche "the victors write the history"? Guess what: they also write the laws.
There's a social benefit, stupid. You just demonstrated the behavior I described. The social benefit incurs an economic cost. There might be some very, very long-term economic benefit, but it's harder to prove. The social benefit is obvious, at least to some of us.
This is NOT news. This is exactly why I've been rather obsessed with saving the actual content of anything online that has value to me. The Web is VOLATILE, period... there is no built-in version control system on the Internet. The Wayback Machine and such is great, but it's an isolated exception. Saving merely links to interesting things for future reference is a solution doomed to eventual failure.
What this article discusses, BTW, is something that the Free Market cannot solve. What we're discussing here requires prescriptive socialistic behavior to avoid (or solve belatedly); there is no economic benefit for doing this (that I can perceive). Descriptive capitalistic behavior can't create the consensus required to get jobs like this done. This requires cooperation, not competition.
Forcing people to buy things they don't need or want with no benefit to them won't stimulate the economy- it will force dollars away from useful purchases to useless ones. It harms the economy, not boosts it.
What a process like that actually does is concentrate wealth/resources. Whether that constitutes "harming" the economy depends entirely upon one's values, ethics, and "economic party" (Capitalist, Socialist, Libertarian, Anarchist, etc.). I would guess you must be a socialist of sorts, but I have to tell you, many people for better or worse don't see the behavior you described as "harmful" at all.
It's that ethical failure, possibly delusional, to see the harm it causes that is the real danger, especially here in the United States (thanks to our own peculiar brand of indoctrination over the last century). We can't even agree on what constitutes harm. We can't agree on that because a significant segment of the population is so utterly self-centric that if it doesn't harm them or their own close circle, then it's simply not harm to them. The apparent lack of empathy for strangers is so pervasive that you might think half the population is autistic or something.
Anyone who's been around a while knows what a first-rate hypester and arrogant bastard Steve Jobs has been. For him to make statements like that, in particular, is really meaningless. He's anything but an impartial observer looking out for the interests of the consumer. He's been looking out for Number One his entire career.
Now the orchard boys will commence modding me down for being truthy.
I did laugh... but the original Gawker rant and everyone else seemed to be doing more bitching than laughing or even mocking. They were offended by it. I'm not so easily offended. Now, rap/hip-hop music, OTOH... that offends me!
This SoundSmith tool will have value to some people; those to whom it won't need to respect the needs and rights of the former... unless of course they're willing to "open source" their vast musical talents and offer those inept folks some high quality background music for free. *ducks*
This doesn't preclude nor prevent creation of better music; it merely provides a simple tool to allow people, who aren't capable or inclined to create something more refined, to at least produce *some* kind of musical track. The people who *are* capable and inclined will certainly continue to produce more refined music. Why would anyone be so foolish as to suggest that those latter folks would "settle" for the output of this software if they know better and can do better? If they can, they will. Isn't that one of the same arguments we use to decry DRM and the MAFIAA tactics and the current industry economic model: that artists who can create and want to create will continue to do so regardless of anything else?
Get off your high horses and STFU, you elitist dirtbags.
Unless you store the thing in a vacuum, some things just aren't gonna last 50 years, and if it works at all when they fire it up it won't work very long. In particular, the grease in the drive's sealed bearing is going to oxidize and harden; the same would happen even quicker to the exposed grease in the DVD drive. You might solve the former problem with an SSD, but I doubt any obsolete school PCs are going to have those. You might be able to leave instructions how to disassemble and re-lube the optical drive, but the hard disk... fuggedaboudit.
Quarterdeck wasn't an invisible company at the time; I doubt whether others would have been reinventing in a vacuum. While independent innovation is possible, it's impossible when the jury has been tainted. You can't make a "motion to strike" in the real world.
You were: I worked for a company that produced one of the first commercial browsers for Windows, and which predated anything commercial for Macintosh AFAIK:
It was built on a license for Spyglass' Mosaic, just as was Internet Explorer, but preceded even that to market; it may have even beat Netscape to market, I can't recall for sure. Note that Quarterdeck's browser also had "tabbed browsing". I don't think the Macs got a commercial browser until later.
Quarterdeck also had the Sidebar product, a paradigm which has often been copied in the decade and a half since.
The false positives generated by GMail's spam filtering don't piss you off in the least? Not even the fact that you have no direct personal control over the process at all? Nor the fact that, unlike other services like Yahoo, you can't effectively disable it by passing it through, allowing you to use your own more tuned and effective local spam filtering solution (i.e. PopFile)? Nor the fact that GMail gives you no control over the auto-deletion process, and you are forced to check the folder for false positives at least once every 30 days or lose those false positives forever? Nor the fact that, in doing so, Google is very deliberately forcing you to be exposed to advertising within their Web interface? (This can be sidestepped to some degree now with the IMAP service.)
GMail routinely snags my freecycle (freecycle.org) Yahoo group e-mail forwards as spam, and it continues to do so regardless of any whitelisting attempts; since the "From:" of each message is actually modified to appear to be from the person who originally posted it to the group, and GMail is clueless of this process, there is no effective way to whitelist those messages (unless I want to manually whitelist thousands of people). This is just the tip of the iceberg, as GMail randomly flags mail as spam for no reasons apparent to me.
I'd MUCH rather use PopFile locally again, since I once had it tuned to 99.97% effectiveness before I started using a GMail account. There's no point in trying, however, since GMail won't allow bypassing or disabling their remote filtering.
This may not be "doing evil", but it's definitely not nice.
No doubt some observant customers actually did do that, but we don't hear about them, because the vast majority of The Herd didn't. The cable companies understood more about human psychology than their customers did. The customers got played. Happens all the time.
This is one example why "focus groups" and psychologists in the employ of Big Business scare the crap out of me. What pushable buttons will they uncover next, in Hari Seldon fashion?
No, it's not a myth. You're trying to mis-frame the discussion. Water COULD have a differing objective value in different places or circumstances, depending upon the actual difficulty in obtaining it. Contrast that with bakeries in California during the Gold Rush, who were charging the miners $2 a loaf for bread not because that in any way represented what it cost them to make it, rather because it represented abuse of what the prospectors could pay.
You're trying to defend Darwinian supply and demand with a non sequitur; did you learn that trick in school? Why would you defend supply and demand, unless you are in fact a selfish creature who actually wants to preserve its right to abuse and disadvantage other people to its benefit?
Objective valuation is not a "myth", it's PREscriptive. Supply and demand is DEscriptive. One is a statement of how things are, the other a statement of how we would like them to be. Well, some of us decent folks, anyway, you excepted.
Let me tell you a fictional bedtime story, kids. Once upon a time there were these cable TV services that were popular because they had no commercials! Then, like an evil virus, commercials started slowly creeping in, so slowly people didn't notice the prick of the blade at first....
Even though I reinvented the term entirely on my own, I understand that Marx and others used the same term themselves, so there should be tons of articulate references to it via Google. I might not do its description justice. The difference hinges on the emotional versus the rational, that much at least I can say.
Slashdot Mirror
That isn't what I said; I didn't say capitalism was inherently bad. Rather, you've spun my words the way you needed to hear them. Who's the spider now?
Regulations aren't the same thing as consensus. Regulations are often rammed down the throats of an unwilling and uncooperative populace by a self-interested minority seeking to use those regulations to benefit themselves a bit more than everyone else.
Take intellectual property law and DRM, for instance.
Regulation and yet more laws in a binder already full to bursting is not the solution. Trying to legislate socialistic values leads to something that history has already told us will fail: Communism.
So? What Pogue has observed is a SYMPTOM of the bigger problem, not the actual problem itself.
This is precisely how American capitalism works. It's utterly Darwinian: any tactic that enriches your survival prospects and doesn't get you drawn and quartered is perfectly fine. I hate to say it, but we made this bed for ourselves with our own particular brands of indoctrination and econo-political dogma. We mixed up a nasty batch of Koolaid and wound up drinking it ourselves. There are hidden costs to this sort of capitalism.
If you really want to put an end to this sort of behavior, we'll have to start by changing our actual collective values and ethics, and then change our messages of indoctrination that we whisper to our children and each other to reflect those new values. We need to get the population sipping a better mix of Koolaid; what we've been drinking for almost a century is pretty toxic. Violent games may not brainwash gamers to become violent, but the sort of subtle indoctrination that every American receives DOES lead to the sort of behavior that Pogue observed.
It will take a true collective effort and consensus in order to end it. Passing a few more kneejerk laws or whatever ain't gonna cure the underlying problem: Darwinian capitalism.
This is precisely why it's so great that so many of us live where these guys get elected as mayors or governors or Congressmen. Isn't at least a little brain damage a job requirement for elected offices? They're good to go after a stint in pro sports.
Ummm, I'm confused... do I Google my birth name or one of my too-numerous-to-mention split cyber-personalities?
Jones makes an impassioned emotional argument for the space program, but fails to present any bald raw logical reasons why we can't stop and let it die. It's simple: the human race has NEVER before lacked a new frontier in which to expand its growing population.
Without a space program, we have no new frontiers to exploit (without further ecological backlash). The human race is not so disciplined and comfortable with itself that it can survive that absence of a frontier. We will grind civilization, if not the species entirely, into the dust if we stick our heads in the sand and try to stop expanding.
That's the simple logic of it that Jones fails to spell out.
Copyright is NOT socialistic: there's no benefit to the human collective at all, only to a minority. It exists as a tactic for concentrating wealth, not keeping it flowing around evenly. As a meteorologist might phrase it, it creates or strengthens economic high pressure zones. Copyright may be prescriptive after a fashion, but it is not socialistic.
It was the poor education and gullibility of our distant ancestors that got us "played" and manipulated into this mess; copyright law is the consequence, not the cause. The cause was ignorance, manipulation and mis-education of the human collective by a minority. I assume you've heard the cliche "the victors write the history"? Guess what: they also write the laws.
There's a social benefit, stupid. You just demonstrated the behavior I described. The social benefit incurs an economic cost. There might be some very, very long-term economic benefit, but it's harder to prove. The social benefit is obvious, at least to some of us.
This is NOT news. This is exactly why I've been rather obsessed with saving the actual content of anything online that has value to me. The Web is VOLATILE, period... there is no built-in version control system on the Internet. The Wayback Machine and such is great, but it's an isolated exception. Saving merely links to interesting things for future reference is a solution doomed to eventual failure.
What this article discusses, BTW, is something that the Free Market cannot solve. What we're discussing here requires prescriptive socialistic behavior to avoid (or solve belatedly); there is no economic benefit for doing this (that I can perceive). Descriptive capitalistic behavior can't create the consensus required to get jobs like this done. This requires cooperation, not competition.
What a process like that actually does is concentrate wealth/resources. Whether that constitutes "harming" the economy depends entirely upon one's values, ethics, and "economic party" (Capitalist, Socialist, Libertarian, Anarchist, etc.). I would guess you must be a socialist of sorts, but I have to tell you, many people for better or worse don't see the behavior you described as "harmful" at all.
It's that ethical failure, possibly delusional, to see the harm it causes that is the real danger, especially here in the United States (thanks to our own peculiar brand of indoctrination over the last century). We can't even agree on what constitutes harm. We can't agree on that because a significant segment of the population is so utterly self-centric that if it doesn't harm them or their own close circle, then it's simply not harm to them. The apparent lack of empathy for strangers is so pervasive that you might think half the population is autistic or something.
... the stupid legislate?
Anyone who's been around a while knows what a first-rate hypester and arrogant bastard Steve Jobs has been. For him to make statements like that, in particular, is really meaningless. He's anything but an impartial observer looking out for the interests of the consumer. He's been looking out for Number One his entire career.
Now the orchard boys will commence modding me down for being truthy.
I did laugh... but the original Gawker rant and everyone else seemed to be doing more bitching than laughing or even mocking. They were offended by it. I'm not so easily offended. Now, rap/hip-hop music, OTOH... that offends me!
This SoundSmith tool will have value to some people; those to whom it won't need to respect the needs and rights of the former... unless of course they're willing to "open source" their vast musical talents and offer those inept folks some high quality background music for free. *ducks*
This doesn't preclude nor prevent creation of better music; it merely provides a simple tool to allow people, who aren't capable or inclined to create something more refined, to at least produce *some* kind of musical track. The people who *are* capable and inclined will certainly continue to produce more refined music. Why would anyone be so foolish as to suggest that those latter folks would "settle" for the output of this software if they know better and can do better? If they can, they will. Isn't that one of the same arguments we use to decry DRM and the MAFIAA tactics and the current industry economic model: that artists who can create and want to create will continue to do so regardless of anything else?
Get off your high horses and STFU, you elitist dirtbags.
Alrighty, then!
Unless you store the thing in a vacuum, some things just aren't gonna last 50 years, and if it works at all when they fire it up it won't work very long. In particular, the grease in the drive's sealed bearing is going to oxidize and harden; the same would happen even quicker to the exposed grease in the DVD drive. You might solve the former problem with an SSD, but I doubt any obsolete school PCs are going to have those. You might be able to leave instructions how to disassemble and re-lube the optical drive, but the hard disk... fuggedaboudit.
Quarterdeck wasn't an invisible company at the time; I doubt whether others would have been reinventing in a vacuum. While independent innovation is possible, it's impossible when the jury has been tainted. You can't make a "motion to strike" in the real world.
You were: I worked for a company that produced one of the first commercial browsers for Windows, and which predated anything commercial for Macintosh AFAIK:
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-17043026.html
http://skypejournal.com/blog/2005/12/skype_status_report_part_3_by.html
It was built on a license for Spyglass' Mosaic, just as was Internet Explorer, but preceded even that to market; it may have even beat Netscape to market, I can't recall for sure. Note that Quarterdeck's browser also had "tabbed browsing". I don't think the Macs got a commercial browser until later.
Quarterdeck also had the Sidebar product, a paradigm which has often been copied in the decade and a half since.
I'm embarrassed I didn't notice that possibility, since I have half a dozen filters I've created. Thanks for sharing that! Begone, false positives!
[Runs off to reinstall PopFile for first time in years...]
The false positives generated by GMail's spam filtering don't piss you off in the least? Not even the fact that you have no direct personal control over the process at all? Nor the fact that, unlike other services like Yahoo, you can't effectively disable it by passing it through, allowing you to use your own more tuned and effective local spam filtering solution (i.e. PopFile)? Nor the fact that GMail gives you no control over the auto-deletion process, and you are forced to check the folder for false positives at least once every 30 days or lose those false positives forever? Nor the fact that, in doing so, Google is very deliberately forcing you to be exposed to advertising within their Web interface? (This can be sidestepped to some degree now with the IMAP service.)
GMail routinely snags my freecycle (freecycle.org) Yahoo group e-mail forwards as spam, and it continues to do so regardless of any whitelisting attempts; since the "From:" of each message is actually modified to appear to be from the person who originally posted it to the group, and GMail is clueless of this process, there is no effective way to whitelist those messages (unless I want to manually whitelist thousands of people). This is just the tip of the iceberg, as GMail randomly flags mail as spam for no reasons apparent to me.
I'd MUCH rather use PopFile locally again, since I once had it tuned to 99.97% effectiveness before I started using a GMail account. There's no point in trying, however, since GMail won't allow bypassing or disabling their remote filtering.
This may not be "doing evil", but it's definitely not nice.
Try watching "24" instead. :-)
No doubt some observant customers actually did do that, but we don't hear about them, because the vast majority of The Herd didn't. The cable companies understood more about human psychology than their customers did. The customers got played. Happens all the time.
This is one example why "focus groups" and psychologists in the employ of Big Business scare the crap out of me. What pushable buttons will they uncover next, in Hari Seldon fashion?
No, it's not a myth. You're trying to mis-frame the discussion. Water COULD have a differing objective value in different places or circumstances, depending upon the actual difficulty in obtaining it. Contrast that with bakeries in California during the Gold Rush, who were charging the miners $2 a loaf for bread not because that in any way represented what it cost them to make it, rather because it represented abuse of what the prospectors could pay.
You're trying to defend Darwinian supply and demand with a non sequitur; did you learn that trick in school? Why would you defend supply and demand, unless you are in fact a selfish creature who actually wants to preserve its right to abuse and disadvantage other people to its benefit?
Objective valuation is not a "myth", it's PREscriptive. Supply and demand is DEscriptive. One is a statement of how things are, the other a statement of how we would like them to be. Well, some of us decent folks, anyway, you excepted.
Let me tell you a fictional bedtime story, kids. Once upon a time there were these cable TV services that were popular because they had no commercials! Then, like an evil virus, commercials started slowly creeping in, so slowly people didn't notice the prick of the blade at first....
Even though I reinvented the term entirely on my own, I understand that Marx and others used the same term themselves, so there should be tons of articulate references to it via Google. I might not do its description justice. The difference hinges on the emotional versus the rational, that much at least I can say.