The reason Africa sucks is because of fraud, corruption, and lots and lots of ethnic wars.
The 3rd greatest source of income for Nigeria is from fraud. (the first is oil, I wonder what #2 is?)
Many countries have gone from backwater who-gives-a-fuck to industrial powerhouses.. Look at Japan or China. Japan, in barely 2 centuries, China will do it faster than that. Then there's south america.. Wow, that was under Europe's bootheel for centuries too, and they're getting better.. Not great, but improving.
If Africa has managed to remain a backwater for 5 centuries, unlike most other places.. Maybe there might be a reason? (A claim of 'racial inferiority' will be met with uproarious laughter.
If Africa wants to make money, let it turn into a place worth investing in.. Get rid of corruption, ethnic wars, and widespread fraud.
Hey... Here's something I found out a few days ago:
http://www.mailutilities.com/aee/
Elcomsoft, who are the makers of the Advanced Ebook processor (remember Skylarov?), also make various email utilities. Although some look like they might have legitimate uses, at least one looks to have *no* legitimate use. (When a tool is designed to scan web pages for email addy's, and DESIGNED to pull out real names&email from web forums...)
Read the above URL and the rest of the site yourself and draw your own conclusion.
Name me one thing in nature we fully understand. Name me one thing.
We don't know, *for sure* how atoms work or are built. We don't know if there is a 5th repulsive force in nature. There's lots we don't know..
But what we do know.... To our knowledge, this therapy may help a guy who's *never* had a chance to go out into real life. Maybe it'll give him cancer in 30 years. Maybe it won't.. But just because it might possibly be catastrophic doesn't mean that nothing should be done.
That way leads to stagnation and helplessness. We don't know and can't know. That is why this so-called 'precautionary principal', that something must be proved 'safe' before it can be used or sold is garbage. We can't know and won't know for *sure* anything.
Who says you're paying for any of the bandwidth you're supposedly going to use to their servers to download the games.
Because if I was implementing Steam, I'd make it peer-to-peer. IE, break it up into 256kb blocks, which individual users can download from each other.. Then the central server just says 'hey, download blocks 1,2,3,4 from foo and 5,6,7,8 from bar', then it passes out signed MD5's of the blocks (to detect corruption) and away things go.
Then they merely seed a few dozen users with a game and/or updates, and then pay for no bandwidth after that. If they're not idiots, they'll do this.
Anyone want to take a bet as to whether they're idiots or not?
Anyways, I don't think that the bandwidth argument really flies. This is just pay-for-play...
No.... I'm just disputing the claims that its costless.
If something *is* costless and leads to long-term advantage, sure, lets go for it.
But if it does have a cost, then the decision must be *JUDGED* based on the costs and benefits.
Most environmental nuts seem to think that their policies are costless. (Say, like banning DDT), when in truth they have incredible costs (DDT, properly applied, is safe and has saved over a *HALF BILLION* lives)
Another blatant example... What are the costs of using 'renewables'? Given average insolation, it is going to take several hundred square kilometers of solar cells, or a line of 100-meter wind turbines 500km long. To power *one* state (cali). Ignoring the costs of manufacturing the equipment and power-lines. Those are the costs.. Now what are the benefits? Well, you can be off-grid and independent. You can please greens. It'll be a lot more expensive and encourage conservation.
Now, for those who live in the middle of nowhere, the benefit of works off-grid is invaluable. For those who eant enforced conservation, it also works..
But for most people and places... The costs far outweigh the benefits.
Its only when one doesn't have their head in the sand and one looks at the costs and benefits that one can make an informed decision. Most econut theories are far from costless, and they seem to have an inability to see those costs.
If it is a problem, we shouldn't compound the problem.. But..
Changes aren't free or costless.. As an example, gov't could ban burning anything for energy tonight, but that policy obviously isn't costless.. (And the gov't would be overthrown tomorrow.)
Thats the problem.. If the choice to avoid burning stuff was costless, I'd agree with you; the only thing I'd agree was worth burning was charcol in a BBQ. But changes aren't costless.
One volcano affected climate by several degrees C over several centuries....
Humankind has (obviously) caused none of that, yet the earth still went up by several degrees.
Global warming over the past couple of decades appears real, but is likely to have a natural cause. (solar insolation increases).. Conjectured models that don't fit any of the observed data are not sufficient to predict that.
Buddy.. Humankind is *small change* in the world energy budget... Now in a century this may change, but not yet.
The difference between scumware and hackerware is whether its created by a 'trusted company' or evil hackers.
Contrast Microsoft's SMS and Back Orifice.. One is an evil trojan, the other is a valuable administration tool. The difference, a few hundred bux a seat and the authors name.
Same thing.. If you wrote as yourself, some program that installed New.Net as a hidden feature during the installation, you'd probably be called an evil hacker. If your program installed your own clone of new.net, then you'd probably be called a cracker.
This is just more 'the standards that apply to people don't apply to corps' type behaivor.
If an IPOD is the sexiest thing you've ever held in your hand, you *NEED* a life.. My god; I never thought I'd meet someone with less of a life than me!:)
I've heard that google takes a CD, that has something called 'linux' on it, and they install it on, like thousands of computers, without like paying any money..
If you are advocating Common Lisp, *please* tell me what compiler you're thinking of.. I've looked over them, and they are all inappropriate for a game. They may have late binding, but not always, and its the 'not always' part that bites you.
Only 50 years ago, it was a tens of cubic centimeters per tube. Now, you can have 100 million in something lightweight enough to put on a finger. You can fit a billion in your pocket. They're already talking about billion-transistor chips in 10 years.
Other 'impossible' things have happened. Humanity can marshall immense resources. The interstate highway system built tens of thousands of km of highway, moved mountains, built bridges, over a country with millions of square km.
In 50 years look at the communication system we've built. Its millions of times higher bandwidth.
And, with modern productivity, you can do orders of magnitude more stuff with less effort.
THings aren't geting faster and better.. THey're getting faster and better at an ever increasing rate. There has been more change in the last 60 years than all of history put together. Some would say 30 years.
Its sloppy, yes, if you keep up with the bleeding edge. But, the bleeding edge is always sloppy. Linux, because it has the number of developers and a well known mailing list exposes that slop to the public.
I wonder, how sloppy would freeBSD development be if you synced your kernel hourly with the dev kernels? How buggy would it be? What does the interdeveloper mail look like in the freebad world?
I run kernels over a year old. There's no slop. I'm (mostly) happy. In about 6 months, I'll switch to 2.4.
If you want less slop, stick with a distribution kernel. They've chosen and tested it out to be stable and reliable.
Its a lot easier to controll religious sheepeople than to control cats. If the typical religious person differed in perspective from the 'flock' as much as kernel developers differed from Linus, we'd have about 1000x more religions, or, at least a lot less religious thought. Both good things.
For me, I prefer cats.. They're so busy diagreeing with each other that they don't have time to fuck over my life.
The moment I'm under obligation to pay any other private entity money for a service I do not wish is the moment that I become a slave.
Just because someone expects their customers to behave in a particular way doesn't mean that they are obligated to, or it is wrong for them to behave differently.
THe whole reason for this is to prevent free trade.
If you can partitian a market, to the level of world regions, countries, states, cities, or even individuals, then you can always charge more.
These artificial price distinctions allow 'value based pricing', where the price paid for a good is the same as its percieved value. As there is (at least some) free trade, producers of goods cannot do that. They must sell at a uniform price, for otherwise, people will just ship the goods from where they are cheap to where they are artificially expensive. This makes economic sense, because it insures that goods will be sold closer to their marginal costs of production.
Thats the real reason for region coding, to artificially partitian the world market so-as to sell goods for inflated prices.
Its also the reason that manufactures don't liked used goods. Because used goods also threaten those artificially inflated prices. Because 'the new economy is different', they've managed to shut down used software.
Every mod chip that allows goods to cross these partitians is an attack on their artificially inflated prices. And thus they at least wish for that to be illegal.
What killed netscape was the fact that Microsoft installed IE on all machines, AND THEN FORBID ALL OEM's FROM THE OPTION OF INSTALLING NETSCAPE TOO.[*]
When your competetior is a monopoly, and contractually forbids all of their customers to not install their competetiors product....
.... you'd never guess how quickly the competetior can die.
How often have you ever seen a PC from an OEM preloaded with real nonMS software. (Things like AOL installers and cheezy games/demos don't count.) I'm talking about office suites, web browsers, word processors, web servers, etc.
[*] I am stating stuff I heard second hand, and have not researched personally. So this may be completely wrong.
You should *really REALLY* be careful about what you say, or you might get what you claim you want.
Look at past history. Do you want to be personally sued for bitching about a company?
Do you want to be potentially subject to hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines for installing, say, distributed.net on a cluster you administrate. (When there's nothing in the computing policy that says you cannot do that.)
Do you want to be held responsible if you write software that gets misused by someone else. Right now, they're going after napster/kazaa, but will they go after IRC? Have you ever coded an IRC robot, server, or client?
Ever worked on a packet sniffer? Ever downloaded DeCSS? Ever tried to reverse-engineer?
Be careful.. 'abuser' is frequently defined to be anything that a monied interest doesn't like. Or, it is defined as any random arbitrary thing that an ignorant person randomly chooses as bad.
Ebay is mostly for individuals buying stuff for themselves.
If I was thinking of buying a $700 16 port switch. Ebay is probably the last place I'd check. That looks to be a switch used by businesses and professionals. Not a switch used by individuals.
I'm guessing that the business world probably feels a little unconfortable about buying business products on someplace like ebay, and thats probably the people you want to buy it.
Its sorta like trying to sell managed business-class hosting, or a mainframe; I doubt either would sell on ebay unless they were an insane steal.
You would also have to have an enforced compulsary license.
IE, while that world could exist and be self-consistent, it won't be a dream world. Mainly because nobody has obligation to license 'their work' any way they see fit.
For example, you can kiss goodbye to parodies.
Kiss goodbye to research, especially research that the copyright owners don't like and are unwilling to license, if that research contains any excerpts that they don't like.
Kiss goodbye to reviews where one wishes to quote another book and the origional author doesn't wish to be quoted. (for whatever reason)
Kiss goodbye to historical research. Say, if *anyone* you quote doesn't like the conclusions of your manuscript, they can block that quote.
Kiss goodbye to reasonable prices. Cause you'll only find value-based pricing. (Charge the percieved value to each entity.) Three people buying the same product at the same time could pay 3 different prices, based on their past viewing history.
Overall, kiss goodbye to any sort of 'unauthorized derivative work'.
Sorry, I don't like it.
Now, in a world with compulsary licensing, kiss goodbye to any control over yoru artistic work, cause if someone does want to use it, you have no choice but to acquiece. (XXX rated mickey mouse porn anyone?)
Um. I don't like this.
There are good reasons for noninfringing uses of copyrighted material.
Slashdot Mirror
Would you rather have .5% of 10 trillion dollars, or .6% of 2 trillion dollars?
Sure..
The reason Africa sucks is because of fraud, corruption, and lots and lots of ethnic wars.
The 3rd greatest source of income for Nigeria is from fraud. (the first is oil, I wonder what #2 is?)
Many countries have gone from backwater who-gives-a-fuck to industrial powerhouses.. Look at Japan or China. Japan, in barely 2 centuries, China will do it faster than that. Then there's south america.. Wow, that was under Europe's bootheel for centuries too, and they're getting better.. Not great, but improving.
If Africa has managed to remain a backwater for 5 centuries, unlike most other places.. Maybe there might be a reason? (A claim of 'racial inferiority' will be met with uproarious laughter.
If Africa wants to make money, let it turn into a place worth investing in.. Get rid of corruption, ethnic wars, and widespread fraud.
Hey... Here's something I found out a few days ago:
http://www.mailutilities.com/aee/
Elcomsoft, who are the makers of the Advanced Ebook processor (remember Skylarov?), also make various email utilities. Although some look like they might have legitimate uses, at least one looks to have *no* legitimate use. (When a tool is designed to scan web pages for email addy's, and DESIGNED to pull out real names&email from web forums...)
Read the above URL and the rest of the site yourself and draw your own conclusion.
Name me one thing in nature we fully understand. Name me one thing.
We don't know, *for sure* how atoms work or are built. We don't know if there is a 5th repulsive force in nature. There's lots we don't know..
But what we do know.... To our knowledge, this therapy may help a guy who's *never* had a chance to go out into real life. Maybe it'll give him cancer in 30 years. Maybe it won't.. But just because it might possibly be catastrophic doesn't mean that nothing should be done.
That way leads to stagnation and helplessness. We don't know and can't know. That is why this so-called 'precautionary principal', that something must be proved 'safe' before it can be used or sold is garbage. We can't know and won't know for *sure* anything.
Who says you're paying for any of the bandwidth you're supposedly going to use to their servers to download the games.
Because if I was implementing Steam, I'd make it peer-to-peer. IE, break it up into 256kb blocks, which individual users can download from each other.. Then the central server just says 'hey, download blocks 1,2,3,4 from foo and 5,6,7,8 from bar', then it passes out signed MD5's of the blocks (to detect corruption) and away things go.
Then they merely seed a few dozen users with a game and/or updates, and then pay for no bandwidth after that. If they're not idiots, they'll do this.
Anyone want to take a bet as to whether they're idiots or not?
Anyways, I don't think that the bandwidth argument really flies. This is just pay-for-play...
Don't forget.. Scientiology fought against the IRS in teh 80's... AND WON!
Anyone who can fight against the IRS and win is something that *only* a large gov't wants to tackle with.
No.... I'm just disputing the claims that its costless.
If something *is* costless and leads to long-term advantage, sure, lets go for it.
But if it does have a cost, then the decision must be *JUDGED* based on the costs and benefits.
Most environmental nuts seem to think that their policies are costless. (Say, like banning DDT), when in truth they have incredible costs (DDT, properly applied, is safe and has saved over a *HALF BILLION* lives)
Another blatant example... What are the costs of using 'renewables'? Given average insolation, it is going to take several hundred square kilometers of solar cells, or a line of 100-meter wind turbines 500km long. To power *one* state (cali). Ignoring the costs of manufacturing the equipment and power-lines. Those are the costs.. Now what are the benefits? Well, you can be off-grid and independent. You can please greens. It'll be a lot more expensive and encourage conservation.
Now, for those who live in the middle of nowhere, the benefit of works off-grid is invaluable. For those who eant enforced conservation, it also works..
But for most people and places... The costs far outweigh the benefits.
Its only when one doesn't have their head in the sand and one looks at the costs and benefits that one can make an informed decision. Most econut theories are far from costless, and they seem to have an inability to see those costs.
If it is a problem, we shouldn't compound the problem.. But..
Changes aren't free or costless.. As an example, gov't could ban burning anything for energy tonight, but that policy obviously isn't costless.. (And the gov't would be overthrown tomorrow.)
Thats the problem.. If the choice to avoid burning stuff was costless, I'd agree with you; the only thing I'd agree was worth burning was charcol in a BBQ. But changes aren't costless.
One volcano affected climate by several degrees C over several centuries....
Humankind has (obviously) caused none of that, yet the earth still went up by several degrees.
Global warming over the past couple of decades appears real, but is likely to have a natural cause. (solar insolation increases).. Conjectured models that don't fit any of the observed data are not sufficient to predict that.
Buddy.. Humankind is *small change* in the world energy budget... Now in a century this may change, but not yet.
The difference between scumware and hackerware is whether its created by a 'trusted company' or evil hackers.
Contrast Microsoft's SMS and Back Orifice.. One is an evil trojan, the other is a valuable administration tool. The difference, a few hundred bux a seat and the authors name.
Same thing.. If you wrote as yourself, some program that installed New.Net as a hidden feature during the installation, you'd probably be called an evil hacker. If your program installed your own clone of new.net, then you'd probably be called a cracker.
This is just more 'the standards that apply to people don't apply to corps' type behaivor.
If an IPOD is the sexiest thing you've ever held in your hand, you *NEED* a life.. My god; I never thought I'd meet someone with less of a life than me! :)
Reference for that?
Sure, genetic diversity *within* a species is good. But we're talking about a different order of land-based life!
Actually, I believe it *is* microsoft leading the charge and coercing the OEM's to ship recovery disks instead of installation media.
Something about the ability to install the OS you paid for on a new machine after junking your current one without paying them?
I've heard that google takes a CD, that has something called 'linux' on it, and they install it on, like thousands of computers, without like paying any money..
So, whats my reward for this hot tip?
If you are advocating Common Lisp, *please* tell me what compiler you're thinking of.. I've looked over them, and they are all inappropriate for a game. They may have late binding, but not always, and its the 'not always' part that bites you.
Only 50 years ago, it was a tens of cubic centimeters per tube. Now, you can have 100 million in something lightweight enough to put on a finger. You can fit a billion in your pocket. They're already talking about billion-transistor chips in 10 years.
Other 'impossible' things have happened. Humanity can marshall immense resources. The interstate highway system built tens of thousands of km of highway, moved mountains, built bridges, over a country with millions of square km.
In 50 years look at the communication system we've built. Its millions of times higher bandwidth.
And, with modern productivity, you can do orders of magnitude more stuff with less effort.
THings aren't geting faster and better.. THey're getting faster and better at an ever increasing rate. There has been more change in the last 60 years than all of history put together. Some would say 30 years.
Its sloppy, yes, if you keep up with the bleeding edge. But, the bleeding edge is always sloppy. Linux, because it has the number of developers and a well known mailing list exposes that slop to the public.
I wonder, how sloppy would freeBSD development be if you synced your kernel hourly with the dev kernels? How buggy would it be? What does the interdeveloper mail look like in the freebad world?
I run kernels over a year old. There's no slop. I'm (mostly) happy. In about 6 months, I'll switch to 2.4.
If you want less slop, stick with a distribution kernel. They've chosen and tested it out to be stable and reliable.
Its a lot easier to controll religious sheepeople than to control cats. If the typical religious person differed in perspective from the 'flock' as much as kernel developers differed from Linus, we'd have about 1000x more religions, or, at least a lot less religious thought. Both good things.
For me, I prefer cats.. They're so busy diagreeing with each other that they don't have time to fuck over my life.
Because only a communist would deprive Nike of the revenue of a sneaker sale.
... is like stealing from Nike, right?
Or worse, buying used sneeakers is also stealing.
The moment I'm under obligation to pay any other private entity money for a service I do not wish is the moment that I become a slave.
Just because someone expects their customers to behave in a particular way doesn't mean that they are obligated to, or it is wrong for them to behave differently.
THe whole reason for this is to prevent free trade.
If you can partitian a market, to the level of world regions, countries, states, cities, or even individuals, then you can always charge more.
These artificial price distinctions allow 'value based pricing', where the price paid for a good is the same as its percieved value. As there is (at least some) free trade, producers of goods cannot do that. They must sell at a uniform price, for otherwise, people will just ship the goods from where they are cheap to where they are artificially expensive. This makes economic sense, because it insures that goods will be sold closer to their marginal costs of production.
Thats the real reason for region coding, to artificially partitian the world market so-as to sell goods for inflated prices.
Its also the reason that manufactures don't liked used goods. Because used goods also threaten those artificially inflated prices. Because 'the new economy is different', they've managed to shut down used software.
Every mod chip that allows goods to cross these partitians is an attack on their artificially inflated prices. And thus they at least wish for that to be illegal.
What killed netscape was the fact that Microsoft installed IE on all machines, AND THEN FORBID ALL OEM's FROM THE OPTION OF INSTALLING NETSCAPE TOO.[*]
When your competetior is a monopoly, and contractually forbids all of their customers to not install their competetiors product....
.... you'd never guess how quickly the competetior can die.
How often have you ever seen a PC from an OEM preloaded with real nonMS software. (Things like AOL installers and cheezy games/demos don't count.) I'm talking about office suites, web browsers, word processors, web servers, etc.
[*] I am stating stuff I heard second hand, and have not researched personally. So this may be completely wrong.
What is a bad thing?
You should *really REALLY* be careful about what you say, or you might get what you claim you want.
Look at past history. Do you want to be personally sued for bitching about a company?
Do you want to be potentially subject to hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines for installing, say, distributed.net on a cluster you administrate. (When there's nothing in the computing policy that says you cannot do that.)
Do you want to be held responsible if you write software that gets misused by someone else. Right now, they're going after napster/kazaa, but will they go after IRC? Have you ever coded an IRC robot, server, or client?
Ever worked on a packet sniffer? Ever downloaded DeCSS? Ever tried to reverse-engineer?
Be careful.. 'abuser' is frequently defined to be anything that a monied interest doesn't like. Or, it is defined as any random arbitrary thing that an ignorant person randomly chooses as bad.
Ebay is mostly for individuals buying stuff for themselves.
If I was thinking of buying a $700 16 port switch. Ebay is probably the last place I'd check. That looks to be a switch used by businesses and professionals. Not a switch used by individuals.
I'm guessing that the business world probably feels a little unconfortable about buying business products on someplace like ebay, and thats probably the people you want to buy it.
Its sorta like trying to sell managed business-class hosting, or a mainframe; I doubt either would sell on ebay unless they were an insane steal.
You would also have to have an enforced compulsary license.
IE, while that world could exist and be self-consistent, it won't be a dream world. Mainly because nobody has obligation to license 'their work' any way they see fit.
For example, you can kiss goodbye to parodies.
Kiss goodbye to research, especially research that the copyright owners don't like and are unwilling to license, if that research contains any excerpts that they don't like.
Kiss goodbye to reviews where one wishes to quote another book and the origional author doesn't wish to be quoted. (for whatever reason)
Kiss goodbye to historical research. Say, if *anyone* you quote doesn't like the conclusions of your manuscript, they can block that quote.
Kiss goodbye to reasonable prices. Cause you'll only find value-based pricing. (Charge the percieved value to each entity.) Three people buying the same product at the same time could pay 3 different prices, based on their past viewing history.
Overall, kiss goodbye to any sort of 'unauthorized derivative work'.
Sorry, I don't like it.
Now, in a world with compulsary licensing, kiss goodbye to any control over yoru artistic work, cause if someone does want to use it, you have no choice but to acquiece. (XXX rated mickey mouse porn anyone?)
Um. I don't like this.
There are good reasons for noninfringing uses of copyrighted material.