No, I just don't watch TV anymore. Last time I regularly watched TV was during STNG, around 1990. They had a few awful episodes during the 7th season, and I tuned out and never came back. I have seen only a few DS9 and Voyager episodes. Meh.
There was this new thing called the Internet. You could actually participate instead of passively absorbing whatever messages they thought people wanted or needed to hear. Now I've done enough grinding in MMORPGs to have a full appreciation of how boring and tedious that can get. TV is worse than that, that's how bad TV is.
I don't have much of a movie collection either. Just a handful on DVD and VHS. No BluRays. Whenever I've tried to identify shows worth watching, I come up with so little that I don't bother. Last time I strolled through a Blockbuster, I didn't see a thing on the shelves that I thought worth watching. Don't subscribe to anything like Netflix either.
I also object to the MAFIAA's policies, and do not wish to patronize an industry that treats their customers so shabbily. There are plenty of other, better things to do.
What?! You don't know what we got out of the moon landings? Seriously?
The moon landings were propaganda first and science second. They demonstrated the superiority of capitalism over communism, thereby helping to perpetuate the economic system you apparently love so. We also got a few nice scientific advancements out of the affair, sort of as a side bonus. Don't go laying the expense of all that on science.
Makes me sick how conservatives' vision has withered to nothing. What grand projects and great achievements would you conservatives have us do next? Apparently nothing at all, because that would make it harder to balance the budget. You whine that we can't afford it. You'd kill the James Webb telescope if you could, despite the huge contributions the Hubble has made to astronomy and physics. You did kill the Supercollider, and now look what happened. We did NOT discover the Higgs boson, the Europeans did. When you can be persuaded to open the vaults, do you do something noble and great? No, you prefer to stomp around the world and shoot up a bunch of Muslims, Africans, Asians, and maybe a few Latin Americans and Europeans, carrying on as if kicking the butts of a bunch of poorly armed terrorists and drilling a few more oil wells is the height of our aspirations. The only thing you seem to respect is force and money. Sure showed those Iraqis, didn't you? Do you understand how much money Iraq cost us? More than all the bailouts we've done in the past 5 years! Are the only past accomplishments of the US you can relate to the elimination of slavery in the Civil War, and victory in WWI and WWII because they were wars? What about the transatlantic cable and the telegraph and telephone system? The transcontinental railroad? The light bulb? Electrification of the entire nation? Refrigeration? Radio and TV broadcasting? The Interstate highway system? The Internet?
The specific goals I'd like funded are orbiters to Uranus and Neptune. Those seem far and away the most obvious, valuable, and doable projects no one has yet tried.
Private capital has some big weaknesses. It isn't available for anything but the most immediate and sure returns. And it isn't enough for big projects.
As an example, you would have thought a transcontinental railroad was a no brainer. Took about 7 years to build and start earning a return. But that's too long and too much risk for the market. The companies could not find buyers for their stock. They had to rely on huge government land grants for the bulk of their costs, and that still wasn't enough. They resorted to financial trickery (which goes a long way in explaining the market's reluctance to invest in them), ludicrous levels of optimism, and plain old stiffing of creditors. Even on those matters in which they were dealing squarely, they had to fend off constant accusations that the whole thing was just a gigantic scam, that they meant to build only the easy part of the railroad, take their government loans and run. Didn't help that one of the builders thought the best way to make a profit was to build the track as long as possible in order to secure more government loans. The railroad was absolutely worth building, and as fast as possible even though that greatly increased costs, but it was a messy affair, with one of the companies, the UP, going bankrupt a few years after the rail was completed. Private enterprise was simply not up to the job, not by itself.
We have many very practical things we could do. For instance, the US could really use some high speed passenger rail lines. Yet we seem unable to build them. A bigger project is a tunnel under the Bering Strait, and rail connections to both ends. It stretches our capabilities, but we could do it if we had the will. It would be very valuable. Then there's projects like the space elevator. We do not know how to build that, assuming it can be done at all. It will take much research, an area in which private enterprise is weak.
There are many things for which private capital is unsuited.
My first thought was that if the Hobbit is worth 3 movies, why didn't he make 6 or more movies out of LotR?
I agree that his movies butchered LotR. Visually, they are fantastic. But the dialog and edits to the story make me cringe. It's LotR, not Bored of the Rings! I knew Bombadil would be cut, and wasn't too bothered by that. But to cut the Scouring of the Shire?! Big, big mistake! I heard there's a director's cut that has Scouring of the Shire, but I haven't seen it. Just as bad is that so much was cheapened and trivialized. Gimli is turned into the butt of a bunch of lame short jokes. The hobbits might as well be just simple, naughty children greedily thieving for food, with no thought for anything beyond their bellies. I didn't like Merry and Pippin getting into Gandalf's fireworks, or the Bree scene where Aragorn swings Frodo about by the arm as if he was a naughty child. Gollum frames Sam for stealing food, and Frodo is dumb enough to believe this?! Then there's the way Arwen greets Aragorn by rubbing in her elvish superiority and kissing his throat with a sword. And, can't anyone make a LotR film without hoking up a silly wizard's battle between Gandalf and Saruman? And the Ents being dumbed down and refusing to help, until Treebeard walks into a wasteland of fresh stumps, as if there were no strong hints beforehand of Saruman's treachery. And some elves showing up at Helm's Deep and announcing that they came to die. And the bit about Denethor being a lame, retarded, stubborn idiot in refusing to call for help but so easily bypassed when Gandalf has Pippin sneak up to the beacon and light it. And when the attack on Minas Tirith starts, a random orc officer drops the painfully cheesy line that now is the age of orcs as he stabs to death a soldier of Gondor.
At least you say "if". Do anti-piracy activities increase sales? Sadly, it's difficult to find studies on this question that aren't biased. That's not a big problem however. The question is not that important. It doesn't matter if sales drop to nothing.
Copying is good. The public benefits enormously. We save hugely on not having to stamp millions of plastic disks, ship them to all corners of the world, and store them. DRM is one of the purest wastes of money I've ever seen, as it is almost entirely ineffective, and known to be unworkable. That's the least of the benefits. This also wrests control away from the oligarchs, always a good thing. They could centralize and concentrate power under the old technologies of physical media and all the facilities that required, and used and abused that power to gain more control over both the artists and the public and to make sure they got nearly all the profits. They could afford to bury any artists who wouldn't submit to their absolute control. They've also tried to manipulate the public into accepting a small number of big hits, rather than allow the flowering of a much more diverse world of music, as the former is easier to milk for profits and takes less effort to produce and manage. Now they can't do any of that anymore. We know of Payola, Clear Channel, and the dull sort of radio station that plays nothing but the same few dozen big hits, sometimes 2 or 3 times in the same day. We are finally seeing the beginnings of the paperless office envisioned as the start of the Age of Information. We have a long way to go, a lot more to gain. Imagine the savings and greatly increased usefulness of a digital public library. Quick searches of the entire library for any combination of information imaginable! No more lost books, late returns with the associated fees, unavailability because all copies are currently checked out. Imagine no longer having to fool with paper receipts and all the problems of storing and organizing them. We should not deny ourselves these benefits to prop up a business model that the more intelligent among us have understood for decades is no longer at all practical. We can compensate artists by other means. Don't let the cartels sucker you into thinking copyright is necessary, good, or enforceable.
All that you say would be righteous except for one thing: cheating.
Morgan Stanley used selective disclosure. "Privileged clients" were informed that Facebook's revenue would not meet expectations. The rest of us were kept in the dark.
I didn't stay away from Facebook only because it was overvalued and overhyped. I stayed far, far away because I was sure there'd be fraud. These days, small investors maybe shouldn't be in the stock market at all. You do your homework, determine what stocks are good values based on the fundamentals, and then all that goes out the window when management swindles the investors through omission and with fat pay packages and consulting fees to buddies that come straight off the stock's value through options and the like. The markets have yet to earn back the credibility they lost over the subprime mortgage fiasco.
I have read that documentation, and edited those text files, and tried different themes. That only removes the "shade" (roll up/down) button from the titlebar. I want that "feature" gone, period. That means no shade button, no shade option in the menu, no shade action attached to the mouse wheel, no hotkey bound to the shade action. I can stop the mouse wheel from calling on shade, and I can remove the button. But what about the menu? You know, the menu that pops up when you click the left end of the title bar. Or right click anywhere on the titlebar. Or hit "alt-space". How do I remove "Roll up/down" from that menu? There isn't any configuration option for that. I should hack the Openbox source?
I have yet to find a Linux desktop environment that doesn't have issues.
I set my parents up with Arch Linux + LXDE. I cut the number of desktops down to 1. The default window manager is Openbox, which is okay, but could be better. Openbox can "roll up" a window, a feature I don't want, but there doesn't seem to be any easy way to remove it. Could do without "undecorate" as well.
Linux still can't handle certain peripherals gracefully. It's gotten better with the move away from hal. But there are still plenty of printers that do not work under Linux. CUPS may be configured badly so that if the printer was off when the user tried to print, the print job sits in the queue forever, blocking all future print attempts. It won't clear when the user turns the printer on, or even upon rebooting.
Another problem area is file association. Takes a while to set the environment up so it's pointing to appropriate apps for most any kind of file the user might encounter. At least I only have to set it up in the file manager. The browser uses the same settings. Maybe Mint comes with good settings by default?
I don't see lack of DirectX as that big a problem. There's OpenGL. The 2 were pretty much neck and neck until fairly recently, when DirectX 10 came out. Since then, OpenGL 4 has appeared, and I think evened the score again. I'm not sure which one is better.
I think a worse problem is the lack of decent support from hardware vendors. I hear that AMD's proprietary Catalyst driver for Linux is buggy. Nvidia's binary blob works well enough. But it's a poor idea. Hard to maintain. The open source drivers are decent as far as they go. Where they still don't go is 3D hardware acceleration. They support 3D, but in software, and so the performance is abysmal. Be great if this move finally breaks the impasse and pushes the vendors to release specs so the programmers of the open source drivers can finish their work. ATI/AMD has been promising this for years, and has never entirely delivered.
I hate having to crawl back to Windows to run tax software, but the alternatives are worse. I've tried Wine, but every time there's been some problem. I refuse to use web based tax preparation. I do NOT want my tax info sitting on some 3rd party web server.
Also hate having to use tax software from private vendors. They jerk you around with free but crippled versions you can upgrade. Tax should be simpler to figure out. I could do it by hand, but then the vendors have another gotcha: Can't use electronic filing.
The elderly members of the house refuse to go below 70F. They like it hot, wearing sweaters even at 75F. They also have many bad memories of wood stoves, so that's out. I agree with them that a wood stove is not a good idea, what with the dangers of fire and burns, the hassle of supplying wood and cleaning out ashes, and having to install a flue. Do a bad job on the flue and you may end up burning your house down. The house has a fireplace, but it's really an entertainment item, not a serious way to heat. We've never used it.
The nearest businesses are at an intersection about 1/4 mile away. Of course the ones I care about are on the opposite corner from me, and while one of the roads is a street, the other is an extremely busy highway. I sometimes cross them both on foot anyway. It's a typical strip mall with a solid wall all along the back side. I once suggested that the city make a tiny little change to their ordinances to allow these malls to have gaps in this wall so pedestrians wouldn't have to go all the way around. They would not be required, merely allowed. A shopkeeper heard this and went absolutely ballistic. Said at great length that this would force the mall owner to raise his rent to pay for cleaning up the back areas and taking on more liability because the back areas are dangerous and no place for people, it would increase his insurance rates (because pedestrians are more likely to be criminals as well as injury prone klutzes, you see), would drive away the good customers, and on and on. Wouldn't let anyone else get a word in.
I know electric cars can't yet do 500km on a 15 minute charge. No I was not thinking of getting a charge like that at home. I want to be able to take such a car on a long trip. I'd visit charging stations instead of gas stations. As long as the best that batteries can do is something like 30 minutes for sufficient charge to go only 100km, it won't do.
Here's an example of the kind of pains involved in trying to be greener. I hunted down how to set up automatic suspend to RAM in my particular Linux setup (Arch Linux + LXDE). It should have been much easier than it was, but evidently such things are not a priority for most people. There should have been some option in a GUI configuration tool, but no. A search through all the options in all such tools was in vain. Documentation is, as usual, poor. So here's what I did. pm-suspend is a command to order the computer to suspend to RAM, no need to hunt further on that. Then I needed a way to detect inactivity, and 'w' didn't cut it. Didn't want a screensaver, just an inactivity detector. Some threads suggested writing my own program for this. Also thought of crontab. But I found xautolock. Next problem was how to launch it. Do I edit X configuration files?/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc? Something in/etc/rc.d? Maybe inittab? bashrc?/etc/profile.d/xorg.sh? The window manager configuration files? chkconfig? Under LXDE, one place to launch X apps is/etc/xdg/lxsession/LXDE/autostart, but this doesn't work if root access is needed, and I didn't want to drag out sudo or hack pm-suspend's privileges. (I know LXDE can suspend to RAM from its logout menu, but am not sure how that works.) Can't run xautolock before X starts, so/etc/rc.d/ is out. Turns out/etc/lxdm/LoginReady runs scripts as root at the right time, but there is a bug. This script is never run if lxdm is configured for automatic login. Had to change to a timed login.
Never mind the trolls. And forget about our nominal leaders. They follow us, not the other way around. So, what are we going to do about climate change?
My house is a 70's era of about 2200 sq. ft., with a gas furnace, gas water heater (tank), and a 12 SEER A/C. The location is suburbia, and there's nothing I can do about that. It's be nice to be within walking distance of necessities, but that's just not happening. I've got us down to about $1500/year on energy costs. I understand that's very good. But I'd like to do more. I've already done most of the easy stuff. Most of the lights are CFLs. I set the thermostat at 82 in the summer and 70 in the winter. (I'd push that further, but the rest of the family whines too much when I do.) The house is well shaded by mature trees on the south side. But according to my calculations, half of our energy still goes towards heating and cooling. I have fuel efficient cars, and a plug in electric mower that I use as little as possible. I was very happy to bid farewell to the CRT.
I'm looking for paybacks of no more than 5 years, but that depends on price. I'll accept longer paybacks for cheap stuff. Ideas like putting in double pane windows filled with argon gas, roof vents, solar cells, solar water heaters, water recapture, and other expensive home remodeling notions simply aren't worth the cost. I heard that leaky ductwork can be a big waste of energy, but in this house, the ductwork is inside. The hallways have lower ceilings than the rooms. Anyway, it's a poor quality cookie cutter home. Hate to spend money on a piece of crap house. But if a bit of remodeling isn't worth doing, then knocking it down and starting over sure isn't worth doing. There are other things. I have a few 80%+ efficient computer power supplies, and some of those green power strips that automatically cut the power to peripherals when the main computer is off. For convenience I leave a computer running all the time, however it takes only 20 watts. It'd be better if I could get power management working in Linux. Even at only 20 watts, automatic suspend to disk could be a big saver if only it worked. Replaced a 40 watt fluorescent light fixture with the new 32 watt kind when the ballast went bad.
In any case, I have the feeling that's all "small ball". As a whole, our houses are poor and our cities are oblivious to all forms of transportation other than the almighty car. It's exasperating how much low hanging fruit we are ignoring. Automobile aerodynamics is a big one. Why isn't the underside of every car nice and smooth? Because no one looks at that part of the car. Why don't we have skirts on the wheels? Because they look "ugly"! A huge saver would be the electric car. I'm impatiently waiting for decent batteries. Would like to see at least 500 km capacity on a 15 minute charge, and able to last several thousand cycles.
I'm bothered by the extreme cynicism of this kind of advice, which the majority of comments here seem to express. We make the world we live in. Omerta ultimately only helps perpetuate a bad system. If you want the world to be a better place, speak out. The exit interview isn't the best place, perhaps, since it's not under your control. Despite that, I would not exit under a cloud of silence, no. What is everyone so afraid of? I said omerta, but this isn't the Mafia. Do you want to be thought a coward? You all seriously think your careers will be over for speaking up? Mention some representative incident, just the facts. Keep it brief. Leave out the conclusions and opinions.
Worst employment experience I ever had was chock full of every bad thing you can imagine. The goals, insofar as they were articulated and not being fought over, were extreme, and the manager didn't believe in us or himself, didn't believe we could do it. To be fair, I didn't think so either, but I wanted to try. So what did he do? Lie. Play politics. He never seriously tried to do any honest work. Whenever he interacted with customers, he tried to snow them. He sure wasn't on our side either. We peons were convenient scape goats. He'd frame and blame every time. He even went as far as sabotaging other's work out of fear it might make him look bad in comparison. The boss, a former military officer, was another bad character. He didn't want excuses, he wanted results! If results weren't forthcoming, his first thought was that we were lazy or incompetent, and his first reaction was to come storming in with accusations and chew ass and kick butt. Classic hard ass military style. Then without listening to anyone or anything, he'd issue marching orders. He had no sense of the difficulties of the job, and didn't care to inform himself either. And me? What should I have done? Realized sooner that this was an impossible situation and gotten the hell out. Don't believe that pop psychology about how you can work with anyone. No, no you can't. As you may imagine, it was quite a train wreck when it at last ended. We melted down in front of an audience of customers and competitors. The boss's presentation was the most unbelievably awful I'd ever heard. A few days after that disaster, the boss and manager "quitted" us all in a desperate effort to save their own hides, and it didn't work. They lost the contract anyway, and the manager's status changed to "no longer with the company". Curiously, the boss was promoted to VP.
When one of our employees left, he did what some of you are advocating. Not exactly silence, no, but a form of silence. In his exit interview, he gave everyone and everything top marks. Said the manager was great, and thereby probably saved the guy's job as the manager himself once speculated. That didn't do the rest of us any favors. In this case, it didn't matter really as everything else was so bad an honest exit interview wasn't going to make a crucial difference. Being a mere peon, I didn't get to see the exit interview myself, I only heard all this secondhand. But I remember that what that employee put in the exit interview wasn't honest. Real silence would have been better than that.
What about performance? I tried btrfs on an older machine (Pentium 3), a few kernels ago, before the recent big performance improvements. Firefox didn't do so well on a btrfs partition. It was the second biggest CPU hog, after the btrfs processes. Switching back to ext4 was a big improvement.
The WHOLE POINT of a patent is that you get to control the use of your invention
No, that's not the point of patents. To quote the relevant section of the US Constitution, the point is:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts
This notion that inventors get absolute control of everything to do with their inventions, which you repeat here at the start of a post that for the most part is spot on, is perhaps the biggest problem with the system. This poisonous thinking is the reason I'd prefer to see the system scrapped rather than reformed. The intellectual property extremists have really put one over us all, expanding the range of things that can be protected (software, business methods), the scope of the protection, lowering the standards required to receive such protection (Amazon's One Click patent), and abusing it to cover up problems, keep secrets, censor enemies, extort money (RIM vs NTP and IBM vs Sun), and harass (SCO vs Linux) and stifle fair competition. Another thing patents are supposed to be about is revealing secrets, not keeping them. It'd be one thing if we'd benefited from all this. Instead, we've been harmed. As long as the system exists, guarding against this kind of expansion will be a constant problem.
Pascal was once a popular programming language. I've always felt one of the reasons C beat out Pascal is English, but maybe not. In Pascal a block is delimited with BEGIN and END, in C it's { and }. Pascal uses IF THEN and ELSE, C uses "if" and "else" but not "then", and these can be avoided with the ? : operator. C uses "for", Pascal uses FOR and TO (or DOWNTO). Pascal unnecessarily adds two more keywords with this REPEAT UNTIL structure, C gets by with one more keyword with "do while". In Pascal, have to actually use the English words FUNCTION or PROCEDURE (and the distinction between the 2 is petty), in C it's all functions and all you do is add () to the end of an identifier. The C syntax is shorter, cleaner, and more neutral.
Most current languages borrow syntax heavily from C, and Javascript is no exception. Though, it seems the Javascript designers must have liked Pascal. Why else would they use "function" and "var"? Still, it's not that many English words, maybe about 20? I do not see that this Javascript translation effort is solving a real problem.
Yes, the cord is of course the big downside. I had to work out a strategy for dealing with it. I start near the outlet and work out from there. I keep the mower pointed the same direction, alternating between pushing and pulling rather than turning around. Others turn around, flipping the cord to the other side of the handle when they do. Also my yard is a typical suburban lot, maybe all of 50 ft x 50 ft. Only need 1 extension cord. If I had to mow an acre, I'd probably use a riding mower.
Good batteries aren't the only possible solution. For instance, electric passenger rail doesn't use batteries. It doesn't seem likely that we could extend the methods used for bumper cars to real highways, but it's not impossible. There's also solar power. Someday maybe we will have solar powered flying cars.
The way I put it, an electric motor is ten times better than a combustion engine. Having experienced the wonderfulness of a plug in electric lawn mower compared to a crappy gas powered kind, I can say gas power does not compare. The electric is lighter, quieter, simpler, safer, more durable and reliable, and has instant on/off.
But a gas tank is twenty times better than a battery. If we ever get that worked out, the electric car will sweep gas powered cars away. It'll be like the way LCDs vanquished CRTs in 2009.
Police the world over have several agendas that may not be entirely in accord with their purpose. I'm not talking corruption necessarily. In some cases, they want victims of petty crimes to just go away and stop bothering them. A petty crime means tearing themselves away from their coffee and donuts to do a lot of work for nothing as they know too well the courts will let the criminals go with a wrist slap, even in cases where the courts actually would not let the perps off so lightly. They have their prejudices too, and will be less willing to help foreigners, blacks, Muslims, Jews, you name it. Often they're hunting for revenue in the form of fines. Ticket quotas are illegal, but there are other ways to pressure the police into acting as surrogate tax men. Sometimes, they're looking to boost their crime fighting statistics, and they will try to read much bigger crimes into a situation. An example is an account I read of an insane woman who would turn mean and dangerous when off her meds, and do crazy things like set her own house on fire, and cut and beat herself and her children for no reason. Several times, the family called on police to restrain her. Big mistake. They booked her for arson, assault and battery, and so on, and imprisoned her when they should have packed her off to a mental institution.
Same logic by which governments exist. There have been many governments that have failed horribly at this, and seriously deluded themselves, thinking their purpose is to treat their inner circle to the good life on the backs of the 99%. Today, it is Syria. In the Middle Ages, it was the monarchies that became increasingly out of touch. Thought they were too good for the common people. Wise monarchs understood that majesty was just propaganda, their power was not absolute, they weren't really godlike beings and that peasants existed for more than serving the royal will, were more than cannon (or arrow) fodder, more than a nuisance that required frequent warring to check their numbers. When a monarch ascended who actually believed the propaganda, the result was usually disaster. Between the American Revolution, which showed the world we didn't have to live with bad monarchs, and WWI in which the last of the major ruling European monarchies self destructed and took their states with them, the entire system collapsed.
Today, we're much too apologetic over the antisocial behavior of our governments/corporations. "With great power comes great responsibility." Do you recall Tony Hayward's stunningly selfish, arrogant, and clumsy statement after the BP blowout in the Gulf of Mexico? "I'd like my life back." BP's acts affected the lives of millions. When the stakes are that high, they cannot behave as if their actions have no consequences. Through reckless disregard of safety and sanity, they ruined the fishing and tourism industries of the Gulf for years. It doesn't get much more irresponsible than that. Sadly, Hayward was not an exception. Lot of people have bought into the idea that corporations' first duties are to profits and shareholders, and the public interest be damned. They really believe that corporations are only doing what they are supposed to do. That attitude is fine when corporations are numerous, small, and not too powerful, and healthy competition and law enforcement keeps their worst impulses in check. But there are too many cozy oligopolies these days. Too much concentration of power. Lately, even shareholders don't count for much. We excuse rent seeking, tax evasion, externalizing of costs, media manipulation and coercion, regulatory capture, bribery, and even lawbreaking. We despair of enforcing laws, most recently against the wave of fraud that has engulfed Wall Street. It's amazing how many people still gas up at BP stations, still bank at the likes of Bank of America even after the mess they made with subprime mortgages, and if that doesn't make an impression, jerking them around personally with poor service, ridiculous fees, and gotchas in the fine print.
Companies exist to serve the public. The profit motive is only a guide.
Just because the social contract isn't written down does not mean it doesn't exist. Many people appear to have forgotten this. Not only are many big companies not serving the public well, they are marginalizing and robbing their own shareholders through huge executive compensation packages, and poor planning that spends their good reputations, their accumulated resources, and their very futures to boost immediate profits and executive bonuses. What kind of idiotic thinking leads to decisions to waste money on huge disinformation campaigns, as Big Oil did when trying to deny Climate Change, and Big Tobacco did when trying to claim nicotine was not addictive? There isn't a single big bank or telecoms company that has a good reputation. The biggest of the entertainment industry have thoroughly dirtied themselves by waging a highhanded, mean spirited, sanctimonious, bullying terror campaign against the entire world, calling us all evil thieving pirates. Many of these executives are parasites, psychopaths, and megalomaniacs, not leaders.
It was the automatic renewal that killed the deal for me. Of course automatic renewal is at full price. Can't dodge it by paying cash either. They'll just keep right on delivering, then surprise you with a bill, as I found out.
The paper (Dallas Morning News) would not offer any subscription plan that did not have an automatic renewal. Tried to claim that people wanted automatic renewal, it was for my convenience, and every paper and magazine was doing it. And I could cancel anytime. All I had to do was call.
So I canceled the paper. Got better and better offers after canceling. The day I canceled, I was offered 15% off if I would stay, and when I refused, they instantly upped the offer to 25%. Still with automatic renewal, so I refused. They called and called. (They hate to lose a customer who's been with them for 30 years.) How about only a few days per week? Just Sundays? Why wouldn't I renew? A month after canceling, they offered a whopping 50% off. As all those still came with automatic renewal, I didn't bite.
That was 2 years ago. Haven't looked at one since. Not even a copy from the newsstand. I don't need the paper. Yeah I understand papers are hurting. That's no justification for such pushiness.
Waay too many basic questions are being ignored. A big one is what to do about cosmic radiation. This is interplanetary space, not low Earth orbit. And this is months of exposure, not a few days as with the moon landings. Everyone could be dying of radiation poisoning by the time they reach Mars, and the problem doesn't end upon reaching the surface. Mars has no global magnetic field, no ozone layer, no thick atmosphere.
We ought to experiment with plants on Mars before sending people. Some future unmanned probe could do that. Even before that, we ought to succeed first with a Biosphere 2 type of experiment right here on Earth. These guys want to leapfrog all these boring preliminaries and go straight to the top. It's like proposing to climb Mt. Everest with 18th century tech, before discovering whether lesser, easier peaks can be summited at all.
Life would be extremely precarious. One tiny little mistake could kill a person, or even the whole colony. Even if no one makes a mistake, ignorance could still prove fatal.
I find the thoughts on video footage surreal. That's the least of the problems faced by any proposed manned Mars mission. Makes it hard to take their notions seriously.
I disagree with the exclusivity part of the system. That's a monopoly, and I have yet to hear of a monopoly that benefited the public more than fair competition. Everyone should be allowed to do it immediately.
The goal is to encourage innovation. Money is a powerful encouragement by itself, we don't need to hand out absolute control. Should an "owner" have the "right" to deny the entire world the use of an invention? Particularly in cases where the invention is not original and the patent should never have been granted? To dictate what licensees may or may not do even over activities that are only peripherally related? To unilaterally set the price beyond all reasonable expectation of value? Can't expect inventors to fairly value their own work. People seem to think such power is necessary to turn a profit, but it need not be and often isn't. Or that absolute control is somehow the best way of determining what an invention is worth, and that it could be unfair to inventors if they couldn't extract the maximum price the world is willing to pay. This thinking assumes they can figure out what price to charge, and most times, no one can. They ask too much, and end up selling only a few licenses, or none.
What's worse is that this power is too easily concentrated. Once large entities gain control of significant patent portfolios, they enter an exclusive club in which they may have occasional spats among themselves, but collectively, they could squash any and every small time inventor if courts were just a little more sympathetic. It's not possible to do anything without violating dozens of patents. It's like IBM told Sun: "OK," he said, "maybe you don't infringe these seven patents. But we have 10,000 U.S. patents. Do you really want us to go back to Armonk and find seven patents you do infringe?" At that time, Sun was not yet a member of the club. Microsoft got entirely too far in their attempts to harm Linux through their puppet, SCO. Fortunately, the public and the courts don't blindly support extreme positions on intellectual property matters, so much of their threats are bluster and bluff. SCO lost, but I wonder how things would have turned out if P. J. hadn't been helping us all. Even East Texas doesn't always decide in favor of the plaintiffs. But the threats are still too effective, as the mere expense and time of a lawsuit can be enough to bankrupt or fatally distract a fledgling business even if they win.
We ought to remove all basis for such threats. We can expand what we have in the way of patronage if it seems worthwhile to do so. We already have such things as the X Prizes and other contests and awards. Nice, but ought to do much more. I don't care for winner take all contests, another bad aspect of patents.
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No, I just don't watch TV anymore. Last time I regularly watched TV was during STNG, around 1990. They had a few awful episodes during the 7th season, and I tuned out and never came back. I have seen only a few DS9 and Voyager episodes. Meh.
There was this new thing called the Internet. You could actually participate instead of passively absorbing whatever messages they thought people wanted or needed to hear. Now I've done enough grinding in MMORPGs to have a full appreciation of how boring and tedious that can get. TV is worse than that, that's how bad TV is.
I don't have much of a movie collection either. Just a handful on DVD and VHS. No BluRays. Whenever I've tried to identify shows worth watching, I come up with so little that I don't bother. Last time I strolled through a Blockbuster, I didn't see a thing on the shelves that I thought worth watching. Don't subscribe to anything like Netflix either.
I also object to the MAFIAA's policies, and do not wish to patronize an industry that treats their customers so shabbily. There are plenty of other, better things to do.
What?! You don't know what we got out of the moon landings? Seriously?
The moon landings were propaganda first and science second. They demonstrated the superiority of capitalism over communism, thereby helping to perpetuate the economic system you apparently love so. We also got a few nice scientific advancements out of the affair, sort of as a side bonus. Don't go laying the expense of all that on science.
Makes me sick how conservatives' vision has withered to nothing. What grand projects and great achievements would you conservatives have us do next? Apparently nothing at all, because that would make it harder to balance the budget. You whine that we can't afford it. You'd kill the James Webb telescope if you could, despite the huge contributions the Hubble has made to astronomy and physics. You did kill the Supercollider, and now look what happened. We did NOT discover the Higgs boson, the Europeans did. When you can be persuaded to open the vaults, do you do something noble and great? No, you prefer to stomp around the world and shoot up a bunch of Muslims, Africans, Asians, and maybe a few Latin Americans and Europeans, carrying on as if kicking the butts of a bunch of poorly armed terrorists and drilling a few more oil wells is the height of our aspirations. The only thing you seem to respect is force and money. Sure showed those Iraqis, didn't you? Do you understand how much money Iraq cost us? More than all the bailouts we've done in the past 5 years! Are the only past accomplishments of the US you can relate to the elimination of slavery in the Civil War, and victory in WWI and WWII because they were wars? What about the transatlantic cable and the telegraph and telephone system? The transcontinental railroad? The light bulb? Electrification of the entire nation? Refrigeration? Radio and TV broadcasting? The Interstate highway system? The Internet?
Pooh-poohing the moon landings, Jesus H. Christ!
The specific goals I'd like funded are orbiters to Uranus and Neptune. Those seem far and away the most obvious, valuable, and doable projects no one has yet tried.
Private capital has some big weaknesses. It isn't available for anything but the most immediate and sure returns. And it isn't enough for big projects.
As an example, you would have thought a transcontinental railroad was a no brainer. Took about 7 years to build and start earning a return. But that's too long and too much risk for the market. The companies could not find buyers for their stock. They had to rely on huge government land grants for the bulk of their costs, and that still wasn't enough. They resorted to financial trickery (which goes a long way in explaining the market's reluctance to invest in them), ludicrous levels of optimism, and plain old stiffing of creditors. Even on those matters in which they were dealing squarely, they had to fend off constant accusations that the whole thing was just a gigantic scam, that they meant to build only the easy part of the railroad, take their government loans and run. Didn't help that one of the builders thought the best way to make a profit was to build the track as long as possible in order to secure more government loans. The railroad was absolutely worth building, and as fast as possible even though that greatly increased costs, but it was a messy affair, with one of the companies, the UP, going bankrupt a few years after the rail was completed. Private enterprise was simply not up to the job, not by itself.
We have many very practical things we could do. For instance, the US could really use some high speed passenger rail lines. Yet we seem unable to build them. A bigger project is a tunnel under the Bering Strait, and rail connections to both ends. It stretches our capabilities, but we could do it if we had the will. It would be very valuable. Then there's projects like the space elevator. We do not know how to build that, assuming it can be done at all. It will take much research, an area in which private enterprise is weak.
There are many things for which private capital is unsuited.
My first thought was that if the Hobbit is worth 3 movies, why didn't he make 6 or more movies out of LotR?
I agree that his movies butchered LotR. Visually, they are fantastic. But the dialog and edits to the story make me cringe. It's LotR, not Bored of the Rings! I knew Bombadil would be cut, and wasn't too bothered by that. But to cut the Scouring of the Shire?! Big, big mistake! I heard there's a director's cut that has Scouring of the Shire, but I haven't seen it. Just as bad is that so much was cheapened and trivialized. Gimli is turned into the butt of a bunch of lame short jokes. The hobbits might as well be just simple, naughty children greedily thieving for food, with no thought for anything beyond their bellies. I didn't like Merry and Pippin getting into Gandalf's fireworks, or the Bree scene where Aragorn swings Frodo about by the arm as if he was a naughty child. Gollum frames Sam for stealing food, and Frodo is dumb enough to believe this?! Then there's the way Arwen greets Aragorn by rubbing in her elvish superiority and kissing his throat with a sword. And, can't anyone make a LotR film without hoking up a silly wizard's battle between Gandalf and Saruman? And the Ents being dumbed down and refusing to help, until Treebeard walks into a wasteland of fresh stumps, as if there were no strong hints beforehand of Saruman's treachery. And some elves showing up at Helm's Deep and announcing that they came to die. And the bit about Denethor being a lame, retarded, stubborn idiot in refusing to call for help but so easily bypassed when Gandalf has Pippin sneak up to the beacon and light it. And when the attack on Minas Tirith starts, a random orc officer drops the painfully cheesy line that now is the age of orcs as he stabs to death a soldier of Gondor.
Ahh, the contrary opinion.
At least you say "if". Do anti-piracy activities increase sales? Sadly, it's difficult to find studies on this question that aren't biased. That's not a big problem however. The question is not that important. It doesn't matter if sales drop to nothing.
Copying is good. The public benefits enormously. We save hugely on not having to stamp millions of plastic disks, ship them to all corners of the world, and store them. DRM is one of the purest wastes of money I've ever seen, as it is almost entirely ineffective, and known to be unworkable. That's the least of the benefits. This also wrests control away from the oligarchs, always a good thing. They could centralize and concentrate power under the old technologies of physical media and all the facilities that required, and used and abused that power to gain more control over both the artists and the public and to make sure they got nearly all the profits. They could afford to bury any artists who wouldn't submit to their absolute control. They've also tried to manipulate the public into accepting a small number of big hits, rather than allow the flowering of a much more diverse world of music, as the former is easier to milk for profits and takes less effort to produce and manage. Now they can't do any of that anymore. We know of Payola, Clear Channel, and the dull sort of radio station that plays nothing but the same few dozen big hits, sometimes 2 or 3 times in the same day. We are finally seeing the beginnings of the paperless office envisioned as the start of the Age of Information. We have a long way to go, a lot more to gain. Imagine the savings and greatly increased usefulness of a digital public library. Quick searches of the entire library for any combination of information imaginable! No more lost books, late returns with the associated fees, unavailability because all copies are currently checked out. Imagine no longer having to fool with paper receipts and all the problems of storing and organizing them. We should not deny ourselves these benefits to prop up a business model that the more intelligent among us have understood for decades is no longer at all practical. We can compensate artists by other means. Don't let the cartels sucker you into thinking copyright is necessary, good, or enforceable.
All that you say would be righteous except for one thing: cheating.
Morgan Stanley used selective disclosure. "Privileged clients" were informed that Facebook's revenue would not meet expectations. The rest of us were kept in the dark.
I didn't stay away from Facebook only because it was overvalued and overhyped. I stayed far, far away because I was sure there'd be fraud. These days, small investors maybe shouldn't be in the stock market at all. You do your homework, determine what stocks are good values based on the fundamentals, and then all that goes out the window when management swindles the investors through omission and with fat pay packages and consulting fees to buddies that come straight off the stock's value through options and the like. The markets have yet to earn back the credibility they lost over the subprime mortgage fiasco.
I have read that documentation, and edited those text files, and tried different themes. That only removes the "shade" (roll up/down) button from the titlebar. I want that "feature" gone, period. That means no shade button, no shade option in the menu, no shade action attached to the mouse wheel, no hotkey bound to the shade action. I can stop the mouse wheel from calling on shade, and I can remove the button. But what about the menu? You know, the menu that pops up when you click the left end of the title bar. Or right click anywhere on the titlebar. Or hit "alt-space". How do I remove "Roll up/down" from that menu? There isn't any configuration option for that. I should hack the Openbox source?
I have yet to find a Linux desktop environment that doesn't have issues.
I set my parents up with Arch Linux + LXDE. I cut the number of desktops down to 1. The default window manager is Openbox, which is okay, but could be better. Openbox can "roll up" a window, a feature I don't want, but there doesn't seem to be any easy way to remove it. Could do without "undecorate" as well.
Linux still can't handle certain peripherals gracefully. It's gotten better with the move away from hal. But there are still plenty of printers that do not work under Linux. CUPS may be configured badly so that if the printer was off when the user tried to print, the print job sits in the queue forever, blocking all future print attempts. It won't clear when the user turns the printer on, or even upon rebooting.
Another problem area is file association. Takes a while to set the environment up so it's pointing to appropriate apps for most any kind of file the user might encounter. At least I only have to set it up in the file manager. The browser uses the same settings. Maybe Mint comes with good settings by default?
I don't see lack of DirectX as that big a problem. There's OpenGL. The 2 were pretty much neck and neck until fairly recently, when DirectX 10 came out. Since then, OpenGL 4 has appeared, and I think evened the score again. I'm not sure which one is better.
I think a worse problem is the lack of decent support from hardware vendors. I hear that AMD's proprietary Catalyst driver for Linux is buggy. Nvidia's binary blob works well enough. But it's a poor idea. Hard to maintain. The open source drivers are decent as far as they go. Where they still don't go is 3D hardware acceleration. They support 3D, but in software, and so the performance is abysmal. Be great if this move finally breaks the impasse and pushes the vendors to release specs so the programmers of the open source drivers can finish their work. ATI/AMD has been promising this for years, and has never entirely delivered.
I hate having to crawl back to Windows to run tax software, but the alternatives are worse. I've tried Wine, but every time there's been some problem. I refuse to use web based tax preparation. I do NOT want my tax info sitting on some 3rd party web server.
Also hate having to use tax software from private vendors. They jerk you around with free but crippled versions you can upgrade. Tax should be simpler to figure out. I could do it by hand, but then the vendors have another gotcha: Can't use electronic filing.
The elderly members of the house refuse to go below 70F. They like it hot, wearing sweaters even at 75F. They also have many bad memories of wood stoves, so that's out. I agree with them that a wood stove is not a good idea, what with the dangers of fire and burns, the hassle of supplying wood and cleaning out ashes, and having to install a flue. Do a bad job on the flue and you may end up burning your house down. The house has a fireplace, but it's really an entertainment item, not a serious way to heat. We've never used it.
The nearest businesses are at an intersection about 1/4 mile away. Of course the ones I care about are on the opposite corner from me, and while one of the roads is a street, the other is an extremely busy highway. I sometimes cross them both on foot anyway. It's a typical strip mall with a solid wall all along the back side. I once suggested that the city make a tiny little change to their ordinances to allow these malls to have gaps in this wall so pedestrians wouldn't have to go all the way around. They would not be required, merely allowed. A shopkeeper heard this and went absolutely ballistic. Said at great length that this would force the mall owner to raise his rent to pay for cleaning up the back areas and taking on more liability because the back areas are dangerous and no place for people, it would increase his insurance rates (because pedestrians are more likely to be criminals as well as injury prone klutzes, you see), would drive away the good customers, and on and on. Wouldn't let anyone else get a word in.
I know electric cars can't yet do 500km on a 15 minute charge. No I was not thinking of getting a charge like that at home. I want to be able to take such a car on a long trip. I'd visit charging stations instead of gas stations. As long as the best that batteries can do is something like 30 minutes for sufficient charge to go only 100km, it won't do.
Here's an example of the kind of pains involved in trying to be greener. I hunted down how to set up automatic suspend to RAM in my particular Linux setup (Arch Linux + LXDE). It should have been much easier than it was, but evidently such things are not a priority for most people. There should have been some option in a GUI configuration tool, but no. A search through all the options in all such tools was in vain. Documentation is, as usual, poor. So here's what I did. pm-suspend is a command to order the computer to suspend to RAM, no need to hunt further on that. Then I needed a way to detect inactivity, and 'w' didn't cut it. Didn't want a screensaver, just an inactivity detector. Some threads suggested writing my own program for this. Also thought of crontab. But I found xautolock. Next problem was how to launch it. Do I edit X configuration files? /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc? Something in /etc/rc.d? Maybe inittab? bashrc? /etc/profile.d/xorg.sh? The window manager configuration files? chkconfig? Under LXDE, one place to launch X apps is /etc/xdg/lxsession/LXDE/autostart, but this doesn't work if root access is needed, and I didn't want to drag out sudo or hack pm-suspend's privileges. (I know LXDE can suspend to RAM from its logout menu, but am not sure how that works.) Can't run xautolock before X starts, so /etc/rc.d/ is out. Turns out /etc/lxdm/LoginReady runs scripts as root at the right time, but there is a bug. This script is never run if lxdm is configured for automatic login. Had to change to a timed login.
Never mind the trolls. And forget about our nominal leaders. They follow us, not the other way around. So, what are we going to do about climate change?
My house is a 70's era of about 2200 sq. ft., with a gas furnace, gas water heater (tank), and a 12 SEER A/C. The location is suburbia, and there's nothing I can do about that. It's be nice to be within walking distance of necessities, but that's just not happening. I've got us down to about $1500/year on energy costs. I understand that's very good. But I'd like to do more. I've already done most of the easy stuff. Most of the lights are CFLs. I set the thermostat at 82 in the summer and 70 in the winter. (I'd push that further, but the rest of the family whines too much when I do.) The house is well shaded by mature trees on the south side. But according to my calculations, half of our energy still goes towards heating and cooling. I have fuel efficient cars, and a plug in electric mower that I use as little as possible. I was very happy to bid farewell to the CRT.
I'm looking for paybacks of no more than 5 years, but that depends on price. I'll accept longer paybacks for cheap stuff. Ideas like putting in double pane windows filled with argon gas, roof vents, solar cells, solar water heaters, water recapture, and other expensive home remodeling notions simply aren't worth the cost. I heard that leaky ductwork can be a big waste of energy, but in this house, the ductwork is inside. The hallways have lower ceilings than the rooms. Anyway, it's a poor quality cookie cutter home. Hate to spend money on a piece of crap house. But if a bit of remodeling isn't worth doing, then knocking it down and starting over sure isn't worth doing. There are other things. I have a few 80%+ efficient computer power supplies, and some of those green power strips that automatically cut the power to peripherals when the main computer is off. For convenience I leave a computer running all the time, however it takes only 20 watts. It'd be better if I could get power management working in Linux. Even at only 20 watts, automatic suspend to disk could be a big saver if only it worked. Replaced a 40 watt fluorescent light fixture with the new 32 watt kind when the ballast went bad.
In any case, I have the feeling that's all "small ball". As a whole, our houses are poor and our cities are oblivious to all forms of transportation other than the almighty car. It's exasperating how much low hanging fruit we are ignoring. Automobile aerodynamics is a big one. Why isn't the underside of every car nice and smooth? Because no one looks at that part of the car. Why don't we have skirts on the wheels? Because they look "ugly"! A huge saver would be the electric car. I'm impatiently waiting for decent batteries. Would like to see at least 500 km capacity on a 15 minute charge, and able to last several thousand cycles.
I'm bothered by the extreme cynicism of this kind of advice, which the majority of comments here seem to express. We make the world we live in. Omerta ultimately only helps perpetuate a bad system. If you want the world to be a better place, speak out. The exit interview isn't the best place, perhaps, since it's not under your control. Despite that, I would not exit under a cloud of silence, no. What is everyone so afraid of? I said omerta, but this isn't the Mafia. Do you want to be thought a coward? You all seriously think your careers will be over for speaking up? Mention some representative incident, just the facts. Keep it brief. Leave out the conclusions and opinions.
Worst employment experience I ever had was chock full of every bad thing you can imagine. The goals, insofar as they were articulated and not being fought over, were extreme, and the manager didn't believe in us or himself, didn't believe we could do it. To be fair, I didn't think so either, but I wanted to try. So what did he do? Lie. Play politics. He never seriously tried to do any honest work. Whenever he interacted with customers, he tried to snow them. He sure wasn't on our side either. We peons were convenient scape goats. He'd frame and blame every time. He even went as far as sabotaging other's work out of fear it might make him look bad in comparison. The boss, a former military officer, was another bad character. He didn't want excuses, he wanted results! If results weren't forthcoming, his first thought was that we were lazy or incompetent, and his first reaction was to come storming in with accusations and chew ass and kick butt. Classic hard ass military style. Then without listening to anyone or anything, he'd issue marching orders. He had no sense of the difficulties of the job, and didn't care to inform himself either. And me? What should I have done? Realized sooner that this was an impossible situation and gotten the hell out. Don't believe that pop psychology about how you can work with anyone. No, no you can't. As you may imagine, it was quite a train wreck when it at last ended. We melted down in front of an audience of customers and competitors. The boss's presentation was the most unbelievably awful I'd ever heard. A few days after that disaster, the boss and manager "quitted" us all in a desperate effort to save their own hides, and it didn't work. They lost the contract anyway, and the manager's status changed to "no longer with the company". Curiously, the boss was promoted to VP.
When one of our employees left, he did what some of you are advocating. Not exactly silence, no, but a form of silence. In his exit interview, he gave everyone and everything top marks. Said the manager was great, and thereby probably saved the guy's job as the manager himself once speculated. That didn't do the rest of us any favors. In this case, it didn't matter really as everything else was so bad an honest exit interview wasn't going to make a crucial difference. Being a mere peon, I didn't get to see the exit interview myself, I only heard all this secondhand. But I remember that what that employee put in the exit interview wasn't honest. Real silence would have been better than that.
What about performance? I tried btrfs on an older machine (Pentium 3), a few kernels ago, before the recent big performance improvements. Firefox didn't do so well on a btrfs partition. It was the second biggest CPU hog, after the btrfs processes. Switching back to ext4 was a big improvement.
The WHOLE POINT of a patent is that you get to control the use of your invention
No, that's not the point of patents. To quote the relevant section of the US Constitution, the point is:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts
This notion that inventors get absolute control of everything to do with their inventions, which you repeat here at the start of a post that for the most part is spot on, is perhaps the biggest problem with the system. This poisonous thinking is the reason I'd prefer to see the system scrapped rather than reformed. The intellectual property extremists have really put one over us all, expanding the range of things that can be protected (software, business methods), the scope of the protection, lowering the standards required to receive such protection (Amazon's One Click patent), and abusing it to cover up problems, keep secrets, censor enemies, extort money (RIM vs NTP and IBM vs Sun), and harass (SCO vs Linux) and stifle fair competition. Another thing patents are supposed to be about is revealing secrets, not keeping them. It'd be one thing if we'd benefited from all this. Instead, we've been harmed. As long as the system exists, guarding against this kind of expansion will be a constant problem.
Pascal was once a popular programming language. I've always felt one of the reasons C beat out Pascal is English, but maybe not. In Pascal a block is delimited with BEGIN and END, in C it's { and }. Pascal uses IF THEN and ELSE, C uses "if" and "else" but not "then", and these can be avoided with the ? : operator. C uses "for", Pascal uses FOR and TO (or DOWNTO). Pascal unnecessarily adds two more keywords with this REPEAT UNTIL structure, C gets by with one more keyword with "do while". In Pascal, have to actually use the English words FUNCTION or PROCEDURE (and the distinction between the 2 is petty), in C it's all functions and all you do is add () to the end of an identifier. The C syntax is shorter, cleaner, and more neutral.
Most current languages borrow syntax heavily from C, and Javascript is no exception. Though, it seems the Javascript designers must have liked Pascal. Why else would they use "function" and "var"? Still, it's not that many English words, maybe about 20? I do not see that this Javascript translation effort is solving a real problem.
Yes, the cord is of course the big downside. I had to work out a strategy for dealing with it. I start near the outlet and work out from there. I keep the mower pointed the same direction, alternating between pushing and pulling rather than turning around. Others turn around, flipping the cord to the other side of the handle when they do. Also my yard is a typical suburban lot, maybe all of 50 ft x 50 ft. Only need 1 extension cord. If I had to mow an acre, I'd probably use a riding mower.
Good batteries aren't the only possible solution. For instance, electric passenger rail doesn't use batteries. It doesn't seem likely that we could extend the methods used for bumper cars to real highways, but it's not impossible. There's also solar power. Someday maybe we will have solar powered flying cars.
The way I put it, an electric motor is ten times better than a combustion engine. Having experienced the wonderfulness of a plug in electric lawn mower compared to a crappy gas powered kind, I can say gas power does not compare. The electric is lighter, quieter, simpler, safer, more durable and reliable, and has instant on/off.
But a gas tank is twenty times better than a battery. If we ever get that worked out, the electric car will sweep gas powered cars away. It'll be like the way LCDs vanquished CRTs in 2009.
Police the world over have several agendas that may not be entirely in accord with their purpose. I'm not talking corruption necessarily. In some cases, they want victims of petty crimes to just go away and stop bothering them. A petty crime means tearing themselves away from their coffee and donuts to do a lot of work for nothing as they know too well the courts will let the criminals go with a wrist slap, even in cases where the courts actually would not let the perps off so lightly. They have their prejudices too, and will be less willing to help foreigners, blacks, Muslims, Jews, you name it. Often they're hunting for revenue in the form of fines. Ticket quotas are illegal, but there are other ways to pressure the police into acting as surrogate tax men. Sometimes, they're looking to boost their crime fighting statistics, and they will try to read much bigger crimes into a situation. An example is an account I read of an insane woman who would turn mean and dangerous when off her meds, and do crazy things like set her own house on fire, and cut and beat herself and her children for no reason. Several times, the family called on police to restrain her. Big mistake. They booked her for arson, assault and battery, and so on, and imprisoned her when they should have packed her off to a mental institution.
Same logic by which governments exist. There have been many governments that have failed horribly at this, and seriously deluded themselves, thinking their purpose is to treat their inner circle to the good life on the backs of the 99%. Today, it is Syria. In the Middle Ages, it was the monarchies that became increasingly out of touch. Thought they were too good for the common people. Wise monarchs understood that majesty was just propaganda, their power was not absolute, they weren't really godlike beings and that peasants existed for more than serving the royal will, were more than cannon (or arrow) fodder, more than a nuisance that required frequent warring to check their numbers. When a monarch ascended who actually believed the propaganda, the result was usually disaster. Between the American Revolution, which showed the world we didn't have to live with bad monarchs, and WWI in which the last of the major ruling European monarchies self destructed and took their states with them, the entire system collapsed.
Today, we're much too apologetic over the antisocial behavior of our governments/corporations. "With great power comes great responsibility." Do you recall Tony Hayward's stunningly selfish, arrogant, and clumsy statement after the BP blowout in the Gulf of Mexico? "I'd like my life back." BP's acts affected the lives of millions. When the stakes are that high, they cannot behave as if their actions have no consequences. Through reckless disregard of safety and sanity, they ruined the fishing and tourism industries of the Gulf for years. It doesn't get much more irresponsible than that. Sadly, Hayward was not an exception. Lot of people have bought into the idea that corporations' first duties are to profits and shareholders, and the public interest be damned. They really believe that corporations are only doing what they are supposed to do. That attitude is fine when corporations are numerous, small, and not too powerful, and healthy competition and law enforcement keeps their worst impulses in check. But there are too many cozy oligopolies these days. Too much concentration of power. Lately, even shareholders don't count for much. We excuse rent seeking, tax evasion, externalizing of costs, media manipulation and coercion, regulatory capture, bribery, and even lawbreaking. We despair of enforcing laws, most recently against the wave of fraud that has engulfed Wall Street. It's amazing how many people still gas up at BP stations, still bank at the likes of Bank of America even after the mess they made with subprime mortgages, and if that doesn't make an impression, jerking them around personally with poor service, ridiculous fees, and gotchas in the fine print.
Companies exist to serve the public. The profit motive is only a guide.
Just because the social contract isn't written down does not mean it doesn't exist. Many people appear to have forgotten this. Not only are many big companies not serving the public well, they are marginalizing and robbing their own shareholders through huge executive compensation packages, and poor planning that spends their good reputations, their accumulated resources, and their very futures to boost immediate profits and executive bonuses. What kind of idiotic thinking leads to decisions to waste money on huge disinformation campaigns, as Big Oil did when trying to deny Climate Change, and Big Tobacco did when trying to claim nicotine was not addictive? There isn't a single big bank or telecoms company that has a good reputation. The biggest of the entertainment industry have thoroughly dirtied themselves by waging a highhanded, mean spirited, sanctimonious, bullying terror campaign against the entire world, calling us all evil thieving pirates. Many of these executives are parasites, psychopaths, and megalomaniacs, not leaders.
It was the automatic renewal that killed the deal for me. Of course automatic renewal is at full price. Can't dodge it by paying cash either. They'll just keep right on delivering, then surprise you with a bill, as I found out.
The paper (Dallas Morning News) would not offer any subscription plan that did not have an automatic renewal. Tried to claim that people wanted automatic renewal, it was for my convenience, and every paper and magazine was doing it. And I could cancel anytime. All I had to do was call.
So I canceled the paper. Got better and better offers after canceling. The day I canceled, I was offered 15% off if I would stay, and when I refused, they instantly upped the offer to 25%. Still with automatic renewal, so I refused. They called and called. (They hate to lose a customer who's been with them for 30 years.) How about only a few days per week? Just Sundays? Why wouldn't I renew? A month after canceling, they offered a whopping 50% off. As all those still came with automatic renewal, I didn't bite.
That was 2 years ago. Haven't looked at one since. Not even a copy from the newsstand. I don't need the paper. Yeah I understand papers are hurting. That's no justification for such pushiness.
Waay too many basic questions are being ignored. A big one is what to do about cosmic radiation. This is interplanetary space, not low Earth orbit. And this is months of exposure, not a few days as with the moon landings. Everyone could be dying of radiation poisoning by the time they reach Mars, and the problem doesn't end upon reaching the surface. Mars has no global magnetic field, no ozone layer, no thick atmosphere.
We ought to experiment with plants on Mars before sending people. Some future unmanned probe could do that. Even before that, we ought to succeed first with a Biosphere 2 type of experiment right here on Earth. These guys want to leapfrog all these boring preliminaries and go straight to the top. It's like proposing to climb Mt. Everest with 18th century tech, before discovering whether lesser, easier peaks can be summited at all.
Life would be extremely precarious. One tiny little mistake could kill a person, or even the whole colony. Even if no one makes a mistake, ignorance could still prove fatal.
I find the thoughts on video footage surreal. That's the least of the problems faced by any proposed manned Mars mission. Makes it hard to take their notions seriously.
I disagree with the exclusivity part of the system. That's a monopoly, and I have yet to hear of a monopoly that benefited the public more than fair competition. Everyone should be allowed to do it immediately.
The goal is to encourage innovation. Money is a powerful encouragement by itself, we don't need to hand out absolute control. Should an "owner" have the "right" to deny the entire world the use of an invention? Particularly in cases where the invention is not original and the patent should never have been granted? To dictate what licensees may or may not do even over activities that are only peripherally related? To unilaterally set the price beyond all reasonable expectation of value? Can't expect inventors to fairly value their own work. People seem to think such power is necessary to turn a profit, but it need not be and often isn't. Or that absolute control is somehow the best way of determining what an invention is worth, and that it could be unfair to inventors if they couldn't extract the maximum price the world is willing to pay. This thinking assumes they can figure out what price to charge, and most times, no one can. They ask too much, and end up selling only a few licenses, or none.
What's worse is that this power is too easily concentrated. Once large entities gain control of significant patent portfolios, they enter an exclusive club in which they may have occasional spats among themselves, but collectively, they could squash any and every small time inventor if courts were just a little more sympathetic. It's not possible to do anything without violating dozens of patents. It's like IBM told Sun: "OK," he said, "maybe you don't infringe these seven patents. But we have 10,000 U.S. patents. Do you really want us to go back to Armonk and find seven patents you do infringe?" At that time, Sun was not yet a member of the club. Microsoft got entirely too far in their attempts to harm Linux through their puppet, SCO. Fortunately, the public and the courts don't blindly support extreme positions on intellectual property matters, so much of their threats are bluster and bluff. SCO lost, but I wonder how things would have turned out if P. J. hadn't been helping us all. Even East Texas doesn't always decide in favor of the plaintiffs. But the threats are still too effective, as the mere expense and time of a lawsuit can be enough to bankrupt or fatally distract a fledgling business even if they win.
We ought to remove all basis for such threats. We can expand what we have in the way of patronage if it seems worthwhile to do so. We already have such things as the X Prizes and other contests and awards. Nice, but ought to do much more. I don't care for winner take all contests, another bad aspect of patents.