... that the relationship might be reversed, and that it's developmentally aggressive tendencies that DRAW PEOPLE TOWARD the violent games in the first place? The games aren't CAUSING the aggressiveness, they're a REFLECTION of it.
I was of course referring specifically to mass-market off-the-shelf software, not the vertical-market stuff for which licensing and pricing has always been different. There's no tinfoil hat involved, only a lack of specificity.
I might agree that renting use of software - whether local or remote - for infrequent purposes would be a potentially useful OPTION alongside one-time purchases, but NOT as a complete substitution. That complete substitution is what is trying to be sold as a bill of goods now, under the nickname of "Web apps"; the exact same bill of goods has been evangelized in the past under different names and forms, but always the goal has been that all-or-nothing subscription.
Do you recall Borland Software and their frequent for-a-small-fee "upgrade" schedule? That was an early precursor to this push for subscriptions. Borland and others found out, however, that people would often say no to the continual procession of upgrades; if the "old" version they had provided sufficient capability, there was no reason to pay for an unnecessary upgrade.
With Web apps and other forms of subscription software, there's no upgrade to which you can say no. It's all or nothing: you either pay the subscription fee or you don't get the use of the software AT ALL.
I'd frankly rather see all of it, mass-market or otherwise, evolve to be open source, collectively created, paid-for, and supported.
Why would Pinker choose not to know whether he has the Alzheimer's gene or not? It seems to me that knowing the answer to that implied question is a win-win: if he DOESN'T have the gene then attempting to divine the answer to the question out of thin air will no longer keep him awake at night, and if he HAS the gene he'll soon enough forget that fact and every other sodding thing that isn't relevant to breathing.
No, it's not; I've never read any writing of Karl Marx; I don't know anything about his "socialism" beyond the paragraph or two I read in a school textbook. I've simply observed, analyzed, noted problems, and made conclusions. If those conclusions just happen to be the same ones that some famous dead person made, well then that's just fine by me.
You really didn't fully read and comprehend what I wrote, did you? The system wants to equalize the pressure. Ergo, roughly same standard of living throughout the closed system (global economy). No behavior makes this more apparent than outsourcing, and outsourcing is a capitalist behavior, no?
Figures. See, most people thought that war had been won long ago. Perhaps it was, but now the Big Iron camp has a new ally: Big Software, who REALLY wants to do away with one-time licenses and purchases and substitute the far more lucrative "Web apps" and the subscription licensing and fees that paradigm will allow. They want to re-brand software as "content" and they want consumers to willingly buy into that. Their latest sneaky flanking maneuver is what you know as Web apps, but the objective is the same.
If you say yes to either one, centralized computing or software subscriptions, you're actually saying yes to BOTH.
Nancy Reagan had the better advice: Just Say No... to both.
Yeah, skilled CS graduates generally demand wages that would sorta defeat the goal of maximizing the "human resource" at minimum cost. That's why India is increasingly less in demand for outsourcing now. A decade or two from now, India will be doing its own outsourcing.
That saying was engendered more out of fear than respect, though: they were afraid the dead would exact some sort of supernatural revenge if they dared to libel them posthumously. Ghosts and spirits may not be able to sue you in court, but they're not bound by the laws of the living (or physics) any more, either.
So, Roland, if you're so inclined, you can finally exact some subtle payback from your detractors.
Your implication is that your "low spot" is somehow the aberration, but you have it kinda backwards: it's the economic high spots that are the aberration, and the rest of the system wants its share back!
Have you heard of high and low pressure systems? Nature abhors even a partial vacuum; systems like to equalize. Water, air, and even money will flow to where the low spots are. India was once a "low spot" not so long ago, but now it's equalized a bit and so the flow has shifted. Closer to home, Ireland was a low spot, too, but apparently now not low enough. Outsourcing is a natural descriptive phenomenon.
I'm rather surprised that Dell chose Poland rather than, say, Moldova, though.
I think the program is out of money because a lot of people who don't even need coupons are getting them....
Yep, it's true, there are some selfish greedy two-bit entrepreneurs who are getting two coupons, buying two boxes, keeping one (or none) and selling the other on eBay or Craiglist. I've seen the listings for them. Unless they're using the identities of dead people to get a truckload of them, though, I doubt if the few people who are doing this amount to much more than a drop in the bucket.
Guess what, Barney? I was only couple percentage points off, if that much. What I recall reading was back in the late Nineties, and below is the results of a PG&E study from 2003 (years later when things might have already improved); this is the e-mail reply I got from the energy commission fellow today:
I found the old PG&E case study that was used for a basis for our regulations. I have attached a copy to this e-mail. Page 9 estimates statewide energy usage for external power supplies. It looks like in 2003 they used to consume around 5,548 GWh per year (5,548,000,000 kilowatt hours). Lets assume that 5,000 GWh/year of that is consumed in a residential setting.
The EIA (Energy Information Administration) estimates California residential electricity demand to be 89,826 GWh/year in 2006. If we use these numbers (5,000/89,826) the result is that external power supplies were responsible for approximately 5.6% of residential energy consumption BEFORE regulation. The percentage of household use currently attributable to external power supplies would be difficult to estimate. I hope you find this information useful.
So there you have it: 5.6% of all state electricity usage in 2003, by an energy provider's own estimate. Over FIVE THOUSAND GIGAWATT-HOURS for just one state, dude!
The operant voltage required by a target device has NOTHING to do with it at all. Well, actually it does, because the lower the voltage the more it has to be stepped-down from line voltage, and that means even more wasted energy (and waste heat).
Further, if the transformer is BEHIND a switch, whether inside or outside, then it's a non-issue. It's the abuse of "standby" states and AC adapters that draw power even when a device isn't being used AT ALL that is at issue.
You don't seem to appreciate the nature of the problem. No matter, at least my state's energy commission does, and is taking steps to deal with precisely what you are convinced isn't a problem.
I know about the advantages (and I hinted at them in my comment), but you must recognize that those are selfish advantages; the net result of these things is a collective net disadvantage for our economy as a whole. That's why California, for one, is now regulating the critters and placing strict requirements on their "standby" consumption. It's another one of those hidden costs we like to talk about now. This might be the real value of discussions about global warming and "going green", I think: we're starting to think even more about the "We" and the hidden costs of individual human selfishness on the human collective. It may become a mental discipline for enough people that we can adopt even more elements of socialistic, collective, cooperative behavior. Maybe in the future there will be a collective discussion about the value of the next "wall wart" before it makes it into widespread use.
I was on the phone today (for hours, on tangents mostly:-/) with a guy from my state's energy commission "Electricity Analysis Office", and one of the things we discussed was these wall warts. This state actually has standards for their energy efficiency NOW, but he said that in the recent past the scenario wasn't a whole lot different than I described. Perhaps governments in the UK were more progressive or proactive in dealing with it. He's promised to dig up actual figures from the state and e-mail them to me.
(Another thing he mentioned was plans to cut energy consumption by outside and street lighting by no less than 25% in the next few years, which is a far bigger dent than even TVs. Personally I'd vote for just turning it all off, but then I have great night vision and hate the bright lights.)
You could always start one! They are only very loosely controlled by freecycle.org; those Yahoo Groups were all started by local individuals who had a desire to do it. There's only a few requirements they place on the group. Visit freecycle.org again and check out their details for starting a new group. Then you can advertise it to your neighbors, in the classifieds, and perhaps even the city council? Get your city or county involved, since keeping stuff out of landfills should be a goal they will eagerly get behind. In my county, for instance, the annual "neighborhood cleanup days" cost the county a lot of money, and freecycling could reduce the volume of still-useful things that the county has to haul off to the landfill.
So why aren't they considering regulating the excess of so-called wall warts? How many of the critters do you have in your house, continually sucking juice unless you make an executive decision to yank them off the hose?
Many years ago I read an estimate that AC adapters accounted for up to EIGHT PERCENT of the average household electricity bill. How much worse must that figure be now in 2009, given that so many manufacturers abuse them as a cop-out for better design? It's one thing to have an AC adapter for a device that MUST be as tiny as possible, can't dissipate heat, or is intended to be active all the time, like a router or cable modem... but does an HP or Lexmark printer or scanner need an AC adapter? Does a recharging station for a cordless Black and Decker hand vacuum need one? No!
How about someone who has firm well developed ethics but no ambition to cloud the ethics? It would take an electoral lottery system to get that person into the running, though.
... that Obama was not the Electoral Messiah and will not change anything significantly for the better. He's one of the same club of Good Old Boys as GWB and John McCain now, regardless of his skin color or where and how he grew up. He is part of the controlling power structure that wants to preserve its control, both for itself and the hands that feed it. Mark my words, there will be more disappointments like this for those people delusional enough to buy into campaign bullshit.
Go ahead, mod me down you Obama-lovers... you know you must to preserve the delusion a little bit longer.
(Disclaimer: I am not a Democrat. Unfortunately for the conspiracy nuts, neither am I a Republican nor a Libertarian (*puke*) nor a Green nor a Constitutionalist nor even an Independent... I'm an independent with a lower-case "i". Groupthink disgusts me and I'm immune to it because of a neurological "disorder". I do happen to be Caucasian, though.)
Even the stuff of science fiction is often theoretically possible, but that's why we have the two distinct words and definitions in the first place:
theory != fact theory == fact
The ONLY accurate statement you can make is that all facts were once theories. Not all theories become fact, except in the minds of certain delusional people (whom I won't embarrass with labels).
Any rational (and reasonably educated) person recognizes immediately that (a) this twit has no legitimate case against any of the three aforementioned parties and (b) the patent itself is probably illegitimate and invalid. If he persists, he'll probably find himself faced with a posse of IP vigilantes hunting down prior art and calling him out in the town square as a greedy unproductive "useless eater".
For better AND for worse, however, we have an impartial legal system that will be obliged to humor this person and waste much collective human effort just keeping him from unfairly concentrating more wealth in his direction and away from everyone else.
Slashdot Mirror
... that the relationship might be reversed, and that it's developmentally aggressive tendencies that DRAW PEOPLE TOWARD the violent games in the first place? The games aren't CAUSING the aggressiveness, they're a REFLECTION of it.
I was of course referring specifically to mass-market off-the-shelf software, not the vertical-market stuff for which licensing and pricing has always been different. There's no tinfoil hat involved, only a lack of specificity.
I might agree that renting use of software - whether local or remote - for infrequent purposes would be a potentially useful OPTION alongside one-time purchases, but NOT as a complete substitution. That complete substitution is what is trying to be sold as a bill of goods now, under the nickname of "Web apps"; the exact same bill of goods has been evangelized in the past under different names and forms, but always the goal has been that all-or-nothing subscription.
Do you recall Borland Software and their frequent for-a-small-fee "upgrade" schedule? That was an early precursor to this push for subscriptions. Borland and others found out, however, that people would often say no to the continual procession of upgrades; if the "old" version they had provided sufficient capability, there was no reason to pay for an unnecessary upgrade.
With Web apps and other forms of subscription software, there's no upgrade to which you can say no. It's all or nothing: you either pay the subscription fee or you don't get the use of the software AT ALL.
I'd frankly rather see all of it, mass-market or otherwise, evolve to be open source, collectively created, paid-for, and supported.
Why would Pinker choose not to know whether he has the Alzheimer's gene or not? It seems to me that knowing the answer to that implied question is a win-win: if he DOESN'T have the gene then attempting to divine the answer to the question out of thin air will no longer keep him awake at night, and if he HAS the gene he'll soon enough forget that fact and every other sodding thing that isn't relevant to breathing.
No, it's not; I've never read any writing of Karl Marx; I don't know anything about his "socialism" beyond the paragraph or two I read in a school textbook. I've simply observed, analyzed, noted problems, and made conclusions. If those conclusions just happen to be the same ones that some famous dead person made, well then that's just fine by me.
You really didn't fully read and comprehend what I wrote, did you? The system wants to equalize the pressure. Ergo, roughly same standard of living throughout the closed system (global economy). No behavior makes this more apparent than outsourcing, and outsourcing is a capitalist behavior, no?
Figures. See, most people thought that war had been won long ago. Perhaps it was, but now the Big Iron camp has a new ally: Big Software, who REALLY wants to do away with one-time licenses and purchases and substitute the far more lucrative "Web apps" and the subscription licensing and fees that paradigm will allow. They want to re-brand software as "content" and they want consumers to willingly buy into that. Their latest sneaky flanking maneuver is what you know as Web apps, but the objective is the same.
If you say yes to either one, centralized computing or software subscriptions, you're actually saying yes to BOTH.
Nancy Reagan had the better advice: Just Say No... to both.
Yeah, skilled CS graduates generally demand wages that would sorta defeat the goal of maximizing the "human resource" at minimum cost. That's why India is increasingly less in demand for outsourcing now. A decade or two from now, India will be doing its own outsourcing.
That saying was engendered more out of fear than respect, though: they were afraid the dead would exact some sort of supernatural revenge if they dared to libel them posthumously. Ghosts and spirits may not be able to sue you in court, but they're not bound by the laws of the living (or physics) any more, either.
So, Roland, if you're so inclined, you can finally exact some subtle payback from your detractors.
Your implication is that your "low spot" is somehow the aberration, but you have it kinda backwards: it's the economic high spots that are the aberration, and the rest of the system wants its share back!
Have you heard of high and low pressure systems? Nature abhors even a partial vacuum; systems like to equalize. Water, air, and even money will flow to where the low spots are. India was once a "low spot" not so long ago, but now it's equalized a bit and so the flow has shifted. Closer to home, Ireland was a low spot, too, but apparently now not low enough. Outsourcing is a natural descriptive phenomenon.
I'm rather surprised that Dell chose Poland rather than, say, Moldova, though.
Yep, it's true, there are some selfish greedy two-bit entrepreneurs who are getting two coupons, buying two boxes, keeping one (or none) and selling the other on eBay or Craiglist. I've seen the listings for them. Unless they're using the identities of dead people to get a truckload of them, though, I doubt if the few people who are doing this amount to much more than a drop in the bucket.
Guess what, Barney? I was only couple percentage points off, if that much. What I recall reading was back in the late Nineties, and below is the results of a PG&E study from 2003 (years later when things might have already improved); this is the e-mail reply I got from the energy commission fellow today:
So there you have it: 5.6% of all state electricity usage in 2003, by an energy provider's own estimate. Over FIVE THOUSAND GIGAWATT-HOURS for just one state, dude!
The operant voltage required by a target device has NOTHING to do with it at all. Well, actually it does, because the lower the voltage the more it has to be stepped-down from line voltage, and that means even more wasted energy (and waste heat).
Further, if the transformer is BEHIND a switch, whether inside or outside, then it's a non-issue. It's the abuse of "standby" states and AC adapters that draw power even when a device isn't being used AT ALL that is at issue.
You don't seem to appreciate the nature of the problem. No matter, at least my state's energy commission does, and is taking steps to deal with precisely what you are convinced isn't a problem.
I know about the advantages (and I hinted at them in my comment), but you must recognize that those are selfish advantages; the net result of these things is a collective net disadvantage for our economy as a whole. That's why California, for one, is now regulating the critters and placing strict requirements on their "standby" consumption. It's another one of those hidden costs we like to talk about now. This might be the real value of discussions about global warming and "going green", I think: we're starting to think even more about the "We" and the hidden costs of individual human selfishness on the human collective. It may become a mental discipline for enough people that we can adopt even more elements of socialistic, collective, cooperative behavior. Maybe in the future there will be a collective discussion about the value of the next "wall wart" before it makes it into widespread use.
I was on the phone today (for hours, on tangents mostly :-/) with a guy from my state's energy commission "Electricity Analysis Office", and one of the things we discussed was these wall warts. This state actually has standards for their energy efficiency NOW, but he said that in the recent past the scenario wasn't a whole lot different than I described. Perhaps governments in the UK were more progressive or proactive in dealing with it. He's promised to dig up actual figures from the state and e-mail them to me.
(Another thing he mentioned was plans to cut energy consumption by outside and street lighting by no less than 25% in the next few years, which is a far bigger dent than even TVs. Personally I'd vote for just turning it all off, but then I have great night vision and hate the bright lights.)
I think we all know how well that's turned out, eh? So it that the fault of the language or programmer error?
So the org will now be renamed to Half A Laptop Per Child? Sort of a King Solomon approach, eh?
You could always start one! They are only very loosely controlled by freecycle.org; those Yahoo Groups were all started by local individuals who had a desire to do it. There's only a few requirements they place on the group. Visit freecycle.org again and check out their details for starting a new group. Then you can advertise it to your neighbors, in the classifieds, and perhaps even the city council? Get your city or county involved, since keeping stuff out of landfills should be a goal they will eagerly get behind. In my county, for instance, the annual "neighborhood cleanup days" cost the county a lot of money, and freecycling could reduce the volume of still-useful things that the county has to haul off to the landfill.
So why aren't they considering regulating the excess of so-called wall warts? How many of the critters do you have in your house, continually sucking juice unless you make an executive decision to yank them off the hose?
Many years ago I read an estimate that AC adapters accounted for up to EIGHT PERCENT of the average household electricity bill. How much worse must that figure be now in 2009, given that so many manufacturers abuse them as a cop-out for better design? It's one thing to have an AC adapter for a device that MUST be as tiny as possible, can't dissipate heat, or is intended to be active all the time, like a router or cable modem... but does an HP or Lexmark printer or scanner need an AC adapter? Does a recharging station for a cordless Black and Decker hand vacuum need one? No!
I wasn't referring to those facts... I was referring to the other ones. You know, the truthy ones like the Law of Gravity, the Big Bang, Piltdown Man.
How about someone who has firm well developed ethics but no ambition to cloud the ethics? It would take an electoral lottery system to get that person into the running, though.
... that Obama was not the Electoral Messiah and will not change anything significantly for the better. He's one of the same club of Good Old Boys as GWB and John McCain now, regardless of his skin color or where and how he grew up. He is part of the controlling power structure that wants to preserve its control, both for itself and the hands that feed it. Mark my words, there will be more disappointments like this for those people delusional enough to buy into campaign bullshit.
Go ahead, mod me down you Obama-lovers... you know you must to preserve the delusion a little bit longer.
(Disclaimer: I am not a Democrat. Unfortunately for the conspiracy nuts, neither am I a Republican nor a Libertarian (*puke*) nor a Green nor a Constitutionalist nor even an Independent... I'm an independent with a lower-case "i". Groupthink disgusts me and I'm immune to it because of a neurological "disorder". I do happen to be Caucasian, though.)
Even the stuff of science fiction is often theoretically possible, but that's why we have the two distinct words and definitions in the first place:
theory != fact
theory == fact
The ONLY accurate statement you can make is that all facts were once theories. Not all theories become fact, except in the minds of certain delusional people (whom I won't embarrass with labels).
Any rational (and reasonably educated) person recognizes immediately that (a) this twit has no legitimate case against any of the three aforementioned parties and (b) the patent itself is probably illegitimate and invalid. If he persists, he'll probably find himself faced with a posse of IP vigilantes hunting down prior art and calling him out in the town square as a greedy unproductive "useless eater".
For better AND for worse, however, we have an impartial legal system that will be obliged to humor this person and waste much collective human effort just keeping him from unfairly concentrating more wealth in his direction and away from everyone else.
Or as Lou Gramm (or Mick Jones?) once penned: "You got a lion on your hands, boy, not a mouse!"
Nah... they just wanna demoralize the phishers so they'll give up and beg Microsoft to hire them for the $10 an hour they now know they're worth.
(1) freecycle.org
(2) find your local groups
(3) join
(4) give and get hand-me-downs
(5) keep useful stuff out of landfills