Most of the world's religions were started so very long ago that we really have no way of knowing if any of them were also started as a way of getting people to open their wallets. Given how useful religion is for convincing people to do things, that organized religion almost always involves the construction of a privileged class (the priesthood/clergy), and that guile is far from being a recent innovation, I would say that it's highly unlikely that every single one of them was started because someone took a dream too seriously or ate some moldy bread or whatever.
Since it's impossible to know for sure the details of the psychological profiles of the founders of any of these older religions, I don't believe the knowledge that L. Ron Hubbard was a cynical con-man (or Joseph Smith, for that matter - it'd be just mean to pile all the aspersions on LRH alone) is useful for distinguishing Scientology's origins from those of more established religions.
No, but real surgery is an actual science (Well, a medical process, which is based on actual science), which can be proven to be successful or unsuccessful.
This point really underlines the irony of Scientology's name.
One would expect, from the name, that Scientology would be open to scientific inquiry and attitudes. In particular, their claims that the whole Scientology auditing system will make people happier and more self-actualizing are, for the most part, falsifiable hypotheses. It wouldn't be hard at all to construct a study to see if there's a correlation between someone's e-meter readings and their mental well-being. One would think that they would be very actively conducting scientific investigations of this stuff, both so they can refine their methods and so they can show off how great Scientology really is. (And of course it's great - would we be Scientologists if it weren't?)
And yet the Church of Scientology is extremely hostile to such inquiry, to the point that members are required to sign a contract that includes an agreement to not submit to non-CoS psychological evaluation or treatment or any kind. This speaks volumes about how effective the Church of Scientology itself believes that its "self-improvement" methods really are.
At this point it's no secret that L. Ron Hubbard started the Church of Scientology as a sort of get rich quick scheme. There's plenty of documentation of this, and there is plenty of information on the CoS's internal workings that has made it into the public record thanks to a number of court cases. Red flags should start flying immediately once one realizes that you have to pay the CoS thousands and thousands of dollars before they will start telling you the religion's actual theology (the stuff in Dianetics is really only the tip of the iceberg, it isn't even enough that I would be willing to say that Dianetics alone could possibly qualify as the basis for a religion).
It's true that you've struck on an interesting semantic conundrum, though. The fact of the matter is that, as part of his scheme, LRH and his compatriots did have to construct a religion, and the fact of the matter is that anything can be a religion as long as people actually believe it. And there is a group of people, the Freezone Scientologists who have turned the official Church of Scientology and the incredible number of crimes it has committed. This group is obviously a legitimate religion as much as any religion can be according to any objective definition that I can come up with*.
*Since I can't personally determine the details of the beginnings of any religion, I don't feel it's reasonable to say one religion is legitimate and another isn't based on which ones I am guessing came from the imagination of one man and which ones are truly divinely inspired. Especially given that, as an atheist, I believe that all religions fall into the former group. So I won't call Scientology-the-religion illegitimate despite the fact that it was created as part of Scientology-the-pyramid-scheme.
One thing I've noticed in this debate is that "give me irrefutable proof" is code language for "I'm not listening nyah nyah nyah nyah!"
Let's face it, there is only one way that humans causing global warming could be proven irrefutably, and that's if God comes down from the heavens and personally tells all of us exactly what is going on in detail. Until then, we're going to just have to make do with the same technique that scientists have been using (with an astounding level of success, I might add) for thousands of years - educated guessing.
Might I also add that scientists are quite good at it, while the people who cling to things like "irrefutable proof" as a crutch for their own intellectual inflexibility continue believing that germs are caused by evil spirits and we were all poofed into existence a couple thousand years ago by some guy with a white beard. Always in the face of insurmountable piles of evidence to the contrary, I might add - but, of course, none of it is irrefutable, because some crackpot can always dream up a half-baked counter-theory like c-decay. (And, I might add, if you're looking for irrefutable, c-decay is much more irrefutable than more generally-accepted cosmological theories in that it's unfalsifiable.)
In other words, the great scientists never worked with irrefutable proof. The worked with Occam's Razor.
It's hard to say what issue tracking system you'll need without knowing what you'll be using it for.
If you're looking at using it for tech/customer support and sales issues, take a look at Cerberus Helpdesk. It's a commercial offering, but at work we decided on it because it has a number of features that we found convenient (great e-mail integration, bayesian spam filtering, built-in knowledgebase management, etc.) which I was unable to find matched in any [fF]ree offerings. A 3-seat commercial license is free, a 5-seat license is $400, so it doesn't have to save us too much time to pay for itself.
If you're looking for bug tracking, there are about a million decent offerings. I personally like Flyspray. It's not as feature-rich as some other systems like Bugzilla or Trac, but I found that half the candy in those doesn't really become useful until you're dealing with lots of developers and issues. I was using Flyspray to coordinate just a couple developers and 5 or 6 testers, and it was more than up to the task.
I seem to remember a similar thing being said about the latest version of Windows around about 1995.
It's not going to happen. Windows and the gaming industry rely on each other far too heavily for either to allow this to happen. Much of what continues to prop up Windows's dominance of the home market is the one home computing activity for which Windows is still undeniably the better choice - gaming. Meanwhile, I seriously doubt that the gaming industry wants to return to the days of market segmentation when they couldn't write games for only one platform while maintaining access to 95% of the market.
But if the Feds didn't print worthless fiat currency, people would go back to using currency with intrinsic value, like gold. And a good thing too.
There's a reason why nobody uses the gold standard anymore. For one, the whole thing fell apart under its own weight (yes pun intended). For two, in a modern economy a gold standard would be nothing but a cute little puff of smoke to hide the fact that it's all still a fiat economy.
If we continue to hold onto our credit cards, paper checks, electronic fund transfers, and the like, then under a fiat economy all monetary transfers are just shuffling around numbers that are theoretically tied to a value, but only because we all trust that the system will keep working.
If we do this under a gold standard, then since you can't shove gold through a copper wire, we'll have to leave the gold in a big pile somewhere and have monetary transfers be nothing but shuffling around numbers that are theoretically tied to a chunk of this pile, but since you never get to see the pile then it only works because we all trust that the system will keep working.
Add to that that there simply isn't enough gold in the USA to equal in value the amount of money in the USA, as well as the multitude of other reasons why the gold standard collapsed in the first place, and we're forced to conclude that a gold standard in modern times is nothing but a nostalgic farce that may look good on paper but doesn't stand a snowball's chance in hell of working in the real world.
Besides, if you really want some durable goods that will retain their value in the event of an economic crisis of sufficient magnitude to cause fiat money to collapse, I'd suggest you try canned food instead - it's actually useful, and it will probably appreciate in value if such an event were to occur. Gold - being useless to most people - won't be so useful for barter in such a situation, since even a block of metal is only as valuable as people are willing to agree it is, and you can't eat a block of metal any more than you can eat little green scraps of linen paper.
. . . I'm amazed Wikipedia isn't already covered under some sort of ban on citing any sort of encyclopedia in a term paper. I know when I was in college that wound never have flown with any of my professors. All it succeeds in showing is that you were too lazy to find some decent sources for your work. Citing Wikipedia is particularly egregious in that a decent Wikipedia article will cite sources (with those blue clicky things, no less), making it really easy to get to the good stuff.
Or maybe they should figure out that they'd find more customers if they would sell to the rabble.
I'd gladly re-join the ACM (I let my membership lapse after I graduated from college) if they offered an electronic-only membership with access to their digital archives for something a little bit less outlandish than $200. Other publishers might sell more PDFs to me if they didn't charge obscene (and insulting) a la carte rates.
They could attract new members by creating some sort of free service where they get access to anything more than 10 years old.
Until then, I'll just get PDF's of whatever I can grab off a professor's website and visit the library for everything else.
Of course, given the way information tycoons like to act, I wouldn't be surprised if instead they try to get photocopying for personal use banned as a form of piracy.
I think they're also aiming at the "jaded gamer." These are the folks who grew up with video games. A lot of them have an 8 or 16-bit era system plugged in while their Playstations gather dust. Many never did get around to buying a system from the last generation; if they did it's a GameCube which they use to play Super Smash Bros. They're bored with most of the popular fare on the market nowadays, or they have busy lives - maybe even families - and don't have enough free time to commit themselves to the games made for Sony and Microsoft's target markets.
But yeah, other than background story they're just like your "new gamer" category, except that if anything they'll be more willing to buy another game console because they already own four (NES, Genesis, PS1, and GBA).
I'd take that a step further and argue that the Dual Shock and the Dance Pad barely count, if at all.
Dual Shock was just the same old controller except that it vibrated, which meant that game designers could build in support without doing a thing to alienate people who didn't own a Dual Shock, and consumers could buy one instead of (rather than in addition to) a regular Playstation controller for just a few more bucks. Later on, Dual Shock got another boost when Sony started bundling one as the standard controller with every new system.
Quite a few Dance Pads have been sold, but it is only useful for one game franchise; it has never become a pervasive controller and, to be quite honest, I've never even seen one simply because none of my friends are into DDR.
This, from the guy using "polysemous" rather than "ambiguous" or even just "unclear"?
Sorry. Next time I'll say "word with multiple meanings" rather than "polysemous word." I was just banging out a quick post, not trying to show off. It happens to be a common jargon in my current field, so I encounter it daily and I don't always re-read my posts to make sure I don't use any jargon.
Doggedly insisting on using one sense of a polysemous word for no apparent reason (other, maybe, than the apparent desire to show off) and in the face of the obvious fact that the word is perfectly reasonable to use in the given context if we allow other senses to be used is pedantic.
I wouldn't call that junk science so much as failure to make a pedantic distinction.
If experiment can show that string theory makes predictions more accurately than current models, I'd say that proven is a good enough word to describe what has happened. Not in the sense that it's been shown to be an absolutely correct description of the machinations of the universe. Proven in the way that General Relativity was proven - decades before all of its predictions had been tested. Proven as in "it's been shown to be a better model," i.e., proven in about the same sense a person can "prove himself."
I was actually replying to the sentence after that, "Just don't force me to do it," and its implication that Apple is forcing its customers to buy music from iTMS. They aren't.
If you had taken things the other way around and talked about how Apple makes it hard for people to use music they buy on iTMS with other products, you'd be on firm ground.
My personal favorite solution is to sit back and let this all die out.
I figure in some random interval unit of time (5 years, maybe?) someone will come along and successfully dethrone the iPod as the default MP3 player. When this happens, consumers are going to be in for a bit of a shock when they realize that none of their AAC files will play (out-of-the-box, anyway) on their shiny new non-iPod player. The same will happen for people who buy Zunes.
And when that happens, the market is going to decide very strongly against DRM, either by switching to a non-encumbered or less boneheadedly-implemented service or, if none exists, by going back to buying everything on CD. (The music industry is not going to be able to kill the CD anytime soon.)
As far as I'm concerned, rulings like this one against Apple mostly serve to enshrine DRM as it's currently being handled, which I fear means that we'll end up stuck with this annoying control-freak DRM model.
In particular, I don't think you've ever actually used iTunes - either the store or the player. Or an iPod for that matter.
If you had, you'd know that Apple isn't forcing anyone to buy music from iTMS. Me, I've been using iTunes since the beginning of this century and I've somehow managed to never buy any music from iTMS.
Of course, I've had Apple goons break my legs a couple times, but they can pry the MP3's out of my cold, dead hands. (And they're trying. I've experienced a couple drive-by shootings in the past couple months.)
SPARCstation has been in trouble for years, and this is a smart first step to getting out of it. Their chips are no longer the powerhouses they once were, and we're truly moving to a commodity chip market anyway. I hope this marks the beginning of SPARCstation moving entirely to Pentium/x86 based chips, this way SPARCstation can focus on their other ailing businesses. SPARCstation (just like iPod) is not big enough to keep up with Opteron and Pentium on chip performance, so why spend Millions/Billions trying?
In other words, a company's name is not interchangeable with its products' names.
I don't do any "work" in the OS. It doesn't make me money. It doesn't (shouldn't) add anything. It is - and I'm going to get pedantic here - an Operating System. Can we just get over the whole OS as an application thing? Okay, I suppose in the era of GUIs, it's a windows manager, too. We, the "consumers" have apparently been duped in to thinking that the system that runs the basic computer system should also get us coffee and a handy when we're in the mood.
I don't think we've been duped into anything. For PC users, the OS started being more than a simple interface between the hardware and the software when Windows 95 came out. For the rest of the world, the OS has been more than that for decades longer.
Take when I'm working on a Unix system (and Unix has been around for about four decades now). Possibly I need to work on re-organizing a directory tree, and decide the quickest way to do that is with a bash script. Right there, bash is an example of the OS providing a service that is far more than a simple glue layer between the hardware and software. And as OSes have advanced and started doing more and more, they just keep getting further and further away from a simple middleman.
Or consider copy and paste. I suppose if you want to be pedantic you can say that is supplied by the desktop environment or window manager or whatever, but get this - nowadays, the distinction between the DE and the OS is one that isn't really useful for anyone but *nix folks who have to deal with choosing among GNOME, KDE, XFCE, etc. And even among them, one would hope that most everyone is hip enough to the modern way of thinking about things to recognize that while there is a distinction between the DE and the OS, for all but the most pedantic the DE is just a component of the OS, so that merits and demerits of the DE are also merits and demerits of the OS as a whole.
I'm less and less impressed with how efficient these things might make us, to the point that I think much of the OS is actually getting in the way of getting work done. This is really a great example of why you can compare how much different OSes help or hinder your productivity. Your experience with the OS getting in the way really has a lot to do with your OS being Windows. My experience has been that Windows is an OS that is very high-maintenance, in a "significant other" sort of way. It's constantly begging for my attention by flashing things on the screen, telling me things I don't need to know, forcing me to click on buttons to dismiss dialogs that are just in my way (The "Are you sure you want to delete this?" dialog being easily the worst offender.) Contrast with OS X, where the OS is admittedly still a more salient entity than DOS, but compared to Windows XP, OS X often feels like the OS that isn't really there. And that distinction is exactly why I feel that I'm a more productive worker when I'm using OS X.
Any company that calls their techs "geniuses" thrive in forums like this. They think they are "cool" and "hip," they don't care about the fact that they have to reset the permissions and turn on Appletalk every five minutes.
Since having switched to OS X and Linux (from Linux and Windows) as my desktop OSes six years ago, the thing that I've found the most amusing about my new life on the other side of the fence has been the multitude of comments like the above that I'm now noticing.
Starting with the "cool and hip" stereotype, I have to wonder why people make such a big deal of this. If I had to hazard a guess, it's that it really comes from discontent with the historical crappiness of the asthetic aspects of most PC manufacturers' industrial design. I'm pretty sure it doesn't come from Apple users themselves, most the ones I know (myself included) are pretty geeky - which makes sense, given that geeks, being more confident with computers, would naturally be more comfortable with switching platforms, and I'm sure that at this point a strong majority of Mac users are converts who switched over after Apple finally canned that accursed classic Mac OS. It certainly doesn't come from Apple users' chatter; almost the entirety of pro-Apple and anti-Microsoft comments that come from Mac users are made on technical grounds.
As for fixing permissions and restarting AppleTalk, well, I'll grant that they might have last used an old version of OS X where disk permissions did have to be repaired fairly often, but AppleTalk???? I didn't know there was anyone who even remembers AppleTalk anymore, let alone actually uses it. While we're at it, let's criticize Thinkpads based on the crappiness of token ring networking.
It's much of the reason why I stay out of the Mac vs. PC debates for the most part. What's the point of talking to someone who's surrounded by such a strong reality distortion field (yeah, I said it) that they think they're an expert on the merits of OS X when really they haven't spent more than an hour of their lives using it, and at the same time assume I don't know a damn thing about computers because I'm a Mac user, when really I'm a software engineer and spent a hefty amount of time programming native apps on both platforms.
I wish some of these folks would come back down to earth and admit that the only real reason they don't like Macs very much is that there isn't a version of Half-Life 2 for OS X.
I should also point out that in almost every case when something about global warming takes the climatological community by surprise, it's that they've discovered yet another way in which it looks like humans are accelerating it or another way in which the climate is changing *faster* than they thought it would. If you're really going to make any inferences from the inaccuracy of climate models, they should follow history and conclude that things are worse than we think, not better.
Are you aware that in the past 15 or 20 years there has not been a single peer-reviewed paper that calls the assertion that humans are contributing to global warming into question? All the flap about this being 100% natural
*Depends on ignoring any concept of scale or rate *Comes from politicians, people who have a vested interest in us not doing anything about the problem, or people gullible enough to believe them *Often relies on logical fallacies, with affirming the consequent being particularly popular.
As for your suggestion that we shouldn't be doing anything because the climate models haven't been perfected yet, I'd suggest that that's about as smart as ignoring a tsunami warning because the system isn't 100% accurate, or ignoring a fire alarm because it might be a drill.
Of course, Apple would need stringent hardware requirements at first, but things would loosen up as time passes. Remember, there were not drivers for Win95 in '95, no drivers for Win2000 in 2000, and there are few drivers for Vista now.
No offense, but your counter-example is extremely naive.
When new versions of Windows come out they include a compatibility layer that makes it possible to use drivers for older versions of Windows. Furthermore, lack of driver support isn't nearly as crippling for Windows because the vast majority of Windows sales comes from it being bundled with new hardware. It'd be much more apt to provide any other commercial PC OS out there - y'know, BeOS, OS/2, SuSE, stuff like that. There's a real example of how much of a barrier to adoption lack of drivers is.
Every successful OS manufacturer out there other than Microsoft gets around this by mostly only selling to businesses who are using it to build their own embedded systems anyway (QNX) or by bundling the OS with hardware (Apple, Sun, IBM, etc.), or by having incredibly low development costs so they don't really need to sell much of anything ot make a profit anyway (anything open source).
Every every company that has tried to sell a commercial desktop OS that runs on commodity PC hardware and was not Microsoft has failed. There is a reason for this. Apple is not a magical company. Nor are they stupid. History, as well as a cursory understanding of the issue, makes it obvious that a company would have to either have magic superpowers or be stupid to switch their OS to the general PC market out of anything but complete desperation.
Seriously, I'm sick of people talking about this asinine idea. And folks say Steve Jobs is surrounded by a relaity distortion field. Sheesh.
Releasing OSX for the PC would allow Apple to compete with MS on MS's own level without hampering the end user with Apples expensive hardware requirements.
That's true, but it's only a tiny, tiny little part of the truth. The full truth is that Apple is nowhere near being prepared for such a move and would have little to no chance of succeeding if they were to attempt to compete with Microsoft in the PC market. They could try, but it would be about as smart as me trying to best a lion in unarmed combat. Why is this?
Drivers Application support Microsoft's bundling deals with nearly every hardware manufacturer Microsoft already having a massive headstart on the PC market (essentially 100%)
As well as an unknown number of other compatibility issues. For example, Apple includes lots of libraries that are heavily optimized for specific hardware, such as VecLib. Right now VecLib works with G3's, G4's, G5's, Core Duo, and Core 2 Duo, and only certain chipsets for each of those CPUs. I have no idea if VecLib would work on a Pentium III or a Celeron. I do know that if it doesn't work, it will in turn break a whole lot of OS X applications, including a large number of the ones I've written.
Also keep in mind that the first four issues all support each other. For example, Microsoft doesn't have to write drivers for every random piece of hardware that comes out for the PC market, because hardware manufacturers do that for them. For Apple to jumpstart OS X on the PC market, they would have to spend time and money getting a whole lot of hardware working, and I wouldn't be surprised if the cost of doing so is greater than all the money in Apple's coffers.
So drivers alone most likely renders OS X for PCs as something that just can't possibly happen outside of Apple critics' wet dreams. Add all the other issues on top of that and it's easy to see why CNet pointed out that the idea is so silly that it's doubtful that Apple has ever even given a moment's serious consideration to the idea.
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I don't agree that your distinction is objective.
Most of the world's religions were started so very long ago that we really have no way of knowing if any of them were also started as a way of getting people to open their wallets. Given how useful religion is for convincing people to do things, that organized religion almost always involves the construction of a privileged class (the priesthood/clergy), and that guile is far from being a recent innovation, I would say that it's highly unlikely that every single one of them was started because someone took a dream too seriously or ate some moldy bread or whatever.
Since it's impossible to know for sure the details of the psychological profiles of the founders of any of these older religions, I don't believe the knowledge that L. Ron Hubbard was a cynical con-man (or Joseph Smith, for that matter - it'd be just mean to pile all the aspersions on LRH alone) is useful for distinguishing Scientology's origins from those of more established religions.
One would expect, from the name, that Scientology would be open to scientific inquiry and attitudes. In particular, their claims that the whole Scientology auditing system will make people happier and more self-actualizing are, for the most part, falsifiable hypotheses. It wouldn't be hard at all to construct a study to see if there's a correlation between someone's e-meter readings and their mental well-being. One would think that they would be very actively conducting scientific investigations of this stuff, both so they can refine their methods and so they can show off how great Scientology really is. (And of course it's great - would we be Scientologists if it weren't?)
And yet the Church of Scientology is extremely hostile to such inquiry, to the point that members are required to sign a contract that includes an agreement to not submit to non-CoS psychological evaluation or treatment or any kind. This speaks volumes about how effective the Church of Scientology itself believes that its "self-improvement" methods really are.
At this point it's no secret that L. Ron Hubbard started the Church of Scientology as a sort of get rich quick scheme. There's plenty of documentation of this, and there is plenty of information on the CoS's internal workings that has made it into the public record thanks to a number of court cases. Red flags should start flying immediately once one realizes that you have to pay the CoS thousands and thousands of dollars before they will start telling you the religion's actual theology (the stuff in Dianetics is really only the tip of the iceberg, it isn't even enough that I would be willing to say that Dianetics alone could possibly qualify as the basis for a religion).
It's true that you've struck on an interesting semantic conundrum, though. The fact of the matter is that, as part of his scheme, LRH and his compatriots did have to construct a religion, and the fact of the matter is that anything can be a religion as long as people actually believe it. And there is a group of people, the Freezone Scientologists who have turned the official Church of Scientology and the incredible number of crimes it has committed. This group is obviously a legitimate religion as much as any religion can be according to any objective definition that I can come up with*.
*Since I can't personally determine the details of the beginnings of any religion, I don't feel it's reasonable to say one religion is legitimate and another isn't based on which ones I am guessing came from the imagination of one man and which ones are truly divinely inspired. Especially given that, as an atheist, I believe that all religions fall into the former group. So I won't call Scientology-the-religion illegitimate despite the fact that it was created as part of Scientology-the-pyramid-scheme.
One thing I've noticed in this debate is that "give me irrefutable proof" is code language for "I'm not listening nyah nyah nyah nyah!"
Let's face it, there is only one way that humans causing global warming could be proven irrefutably, and that's if God comes down from the heavens and personally tells all of us exactly what is going on in detail. Until then, we're going to just have to make do with the same technique that scientists have been using (with an astounding level of success, I might add) for thousands of years - educated guessing.
Might I also add that scientists are quite good at it, while the people who cling to things like "irrefutable proof" as a crutch for their own intellectual inflexibility continue believing that germs are caused by evil spirits and we were all poofed into existence a couple thousand years ago by some guy with a white beard. Always in the face of insurmountable piles of evidence to the contrary, I might add - but, of course, none of it is irrefutable, because some crackpot can always dream up a half-baked counter-theory like c-decay. (And, I might add, if you're looking for irrefutable, c-decay is much more irrefutable than more generally-accepted cosmological theories in that it's unfalsifiable.)
In other words, the great scientists never worked with irrefutable proof. The worked with Occam's Razor.
It's hard to say what issue tracking system you'll need without knowing what you'll be using it for.
If you're looking at using it for tech/customer support and sales issues, take a look at Cerberus Helpdesk. It's a commercial offering, but at work we decided on it because it has a number of features that we found convenient (great e-mail integration, bayesian spam filtering, built-in knowledgebase management, etc.) which I was unable to find matched in any [fF]ree offerings. A 3-seat commercial license is free, a 5-seat license is $400, so it doesn't have to save us too much time to pay for itself.
If you're looking for bug tracking, there are about a million decent offerings. I personally like Flyspray. It's not as feature-rich as some other systems like Bugzilla or Trac, but I found that half the candy in those doesn't really become useful until you're dealing with lots of developers and issues. I was using Flyspray to coordinate just a couple developers and 5 or 6 testers, and it was more than up to the task.
I seem to remember a similar thing being said about the latest version of Windows around about 1995.
It's not going to happen. Windows and the gaming industry rely on each other far too heavily for either to allow this to happen. Much of what continues to prop up Windows's dominance of the home market is the one home computing activity for which Windows is still undeniably the better choice - gaming. Meanwhile, I seriously doubt that the gaming industry wants to return to the days of market segmentation when they couldn't write games for only one platform while maintaining access to 95% of the market.
But if the Feds didn't print worthless fiat currency, people would go back to using currency with intrinsic value, like gold. And a good thing too.
There's a reason why nobody uses the gold standard anymore. For one, the whole thing fell apart under its own weight (yes pun intended). For two, in a modern economy a gold standard would be nothing but a cute little puff of smoke to hide the fact that it's all still a fiat economy.
If we continue to hold onto our credit cards, paper checks, electronic fund transfers, and the like, then under a fiat economy all monetary transfers are just shuffling around numbers that are theoretically tied to a value, but only because we all trust that the system will keep working.
If we do this under a gold standard, then since you can't shove gold through a copper wire, we'll have to leave the gold in a big pile somewhere and have monetary transfers be nothing but shuffling around numbers that are theoretically tied to a chunk of this pile, but since you never get to see the pile then it only works because we all trust that the system will keep working.
Add to that that there simply isn't enough gold in the USA to equal in value the amount of money in the USA, as well as the multitude of other reasons why the gold standard collapsed in the first place, and we're forced to conclude that a gold standard in modern times is nothing but a nostalgic farce that may look good on paper but doesn't stand a snowball's chance in hell of working in the real world.
Besides, if you really want some durable goods that will retain their value in the event of an economic crisis of sufficient magnitude to cause fiat money to collapse, I'd suggest you try canned food instead - it's actually useful, and it will probably appreciate in value if such an event were to occur. Gold - being useless to most people - won't be so useful for barter in such a situation, since even a block of metal is only as valuable as people are willing to agree it is, and you can't eat a block of metal any more than you can eat little green scraps of linen paper.
. . . I'm amazed Wikipedia isn't already covered under some sort of ban on citing any sort of encyclopedia in a term paper. I know when I was in college that wound never have flown with any of my professors. All it succeeds in showing is that you were too lazy to find some decent sources for your work. Citing Wikipedia is particularly egregious in that a decent Wikipedia article will cite sources (with those blue clicky things, no less), making it really easy to get to the good stuff.
Or maybe they should figure out that they'd find more customers if they would sell to the rabble.
I'd gladly re-join the ACM (I let my membership lapse after I graduated from college) if they offered an electronic-only membership with access to their digital archives for something a little bit less outlandish than $200. Other publishers might sell more PDFs to me if they didn't charge obscene (and insulting) a la carte rates.
They could attract new members by creating some sort of free service where they get access to anything more than 10 years old.
Until then, I'll just get PDF's of whatever I can grab off a professor's website and visit the library for everything else.
Of course, given the way information tycoons like to act, I wouldn't be surprised if instead they try to get photocopying for personal use banned as a form of piracy.
I think they're also aiming at the "jaded gamer." These are the folks who grew up with video games. A lot of them have an 8 or 16-bit era system plugged in while their Playstations gather dust. Many never did get around to buying a system from the last generation; if they did it's a GameCube which they use to play Super Smash Bros. They're bored with most of the popular fare on the market nowadays, or they have busy lives - maybe even families - and don't have enough free time to commit themselves to the games made for Sony and Microsoft's target markets.
But yeah, other than background story they're just like your "new gamer" category, except that if anything they'll be more willing to buy another game console because they already own four (NES, Genesis, PS1, and GBA).
I'd take that a step further and argue that the Dual Shock and the Dance Pad barely count, if at all.
Dual Shock was just the same old controller except that it vibrated, which meant that game designers could build in support without doing a thing to alienate people who didn't own a Dual Shock, and consumers could buy one instead of (rather than in addition to) a regular Playstation controller for just a few more bucks. Later on, Dual Shock got another boost when Sony started bundling one as the standard controller with every new system.
Quite a few Dance Pads have been sold, but it is only useful for one game franchise; it has never become a pervasive controller and, to be quite honest, I've never even seen one simply because none of my friends are into DDR.
This, from the guy using "polysemous" rather than "ambiguous" or even just "unclear"?
Sorry. Next time I'll say "word with multiple meanings" rather than "polysemous word." I was just banging out a quick post, not trying to show off. It happens to be a common jargon in my current field, so I encounter it daily and I don't always re-read my posts to make sure I don't use any jargon.
No.
Doggedly insisting on using one sense of a polysemous word for no apparent reason (other, maybe, than the apparent desire to show off) and in the face of the obvious fact that the word is perfectly reasonable to use in the given context if we allow other senses to be used is pedantic.
I wouldn't call that junk science so much as failure to make a pedantic distinction.
If experiment can show that string theory makes predictions more accurately than current models, I'd say that proven is a good enough word to describe what has happened. Not in the sense that it's been shown to be an absolutely correct description of the machinations of the universe. Proven in the way that General Relativity was proven - decades before all of its predictions had been tested. Proven as in "it's been shown to be a better model," i.e., proven in about the same sense a person can "prove himself."
*My SO is another avatar in Second Life
I was actually replying to the sentence after that, "Just don't force me to do it," and its implication that Apple is forcing its customers to buy music from iTMS. They aren't.
If you had taken things the other way around and talked about how Apple makes it hard for people to use music they buy on iTMS with other products, you'd be on firm ground.
My personal favorite solution is to sit back and let this all die out.
I figure in some random interval unit of time (5 years, maybe?) someone will come along and successfully dethrone the iPod as the default MP3 player. When this happens, consumers are going to be in for a bit of a shock when they realize that none of their AAC files will play (out-of-the-box, anyway) on their shiny new non-iPod player. The same will happen for people who buy Zunes.
And when that happens, the market is going to decide very strongly against DRM, either by switching to a non-encumbered or less boneheadedly-implemented service or, if none exists, by going back to buying everything on CD. (The music industry is not going to be able to kill the CD anytime soon.)
As far as I'm concerned, rulings like this one against Apple mostly serve to enshrine DRM as it's currently being handled, which I fear means that we'll end up stuck with this annoying control-freak DRM model.
In particular, I don't think you've ever actually used iTunes - either the store or the player. Or an iPod for that matter.
If you had, you'd know that Apple isn't forcing anyone to buy music from iTMS. Me, I've been using iTunes since the beginning of this century and I've somehow managed to never buy any music from iTMS.
Of course, I've had Apple goons break my legs a couple times, but they can pry the MP3's out of my cold, dead hands. (And they're trying. I've experienced a couple drive-by shootings in the past couple months.)
SPARCstation has been in trouble for years, and this is a smart first step to getting out of it. Their chips are no longer the powerhouses they once were, and we're truly moving to a commodity chip market anyway. I hope this marks the beginning of SPARCstation moving entirely to Pentium/x86 based chips, this way SPARCstation can focus on their other ailing businesses. SPARCstation (just like iPod) is not big enough to keep up with Opteron and Pentium on chip performance, so why spend Millions/Billions trying?
/snarky
In other words, a company's name is not interchangeable with its products' names.
I don't do any "work" in the OS. It doesn't make me money. It doesn't (shouldn't) add anything. It is - and I'm going to get pedantic here - an Operating System. Can we just get over the whole OS as an application thing? Okay, I suppose in the era of GUIs, it's a windows manager, too. We, the "consumers" have apparently been duped in to thinking that the system that runs the basic computer system should also get us coffee and a handy when we're in the mood.
I don't think we've been duped into anything. For PC users, the OS started being more than a simple interface between the hardware and the software when Windows 95 came out. For the rest of the world, the OS has been more than that for decades longer.
Take when I'm working on a Unix system (and Unix has been around for about four decades now). Possibly I need to work on re-organizing a directory tree, and decide the quickest way to do that is with a bash script. Right there, bash is an example of the OS providing a service that is far more than a simple glue layer between the hardware and software. And as OSes have advanced and started doing more and more, they just keep getting further and further away from a simple middleman.
Or consider copy and paste. I suppose if you want to be pedantic you can say that is supplied by the desktop environment or window manager or whatever, but get this - nowadays, the distinction between the DE and the OS is one that isn't really useful for anyone but *nix folks who have to deal with choosing among GNOME, KDE, XFCE, etc. And even among them, one would hope that most everyone is hip enough to the modern way of thinking about things to recognize that while there is a distinction between the DE and the OS, for all but the most pedantic the DE is just a component of the OS, so that merits and demerits of the DE are also merits and demerits of the OS as a whole.
I'm less and less impressed with how efficient these things might make us, to the point that I think much of the OS is actually getting in the way of getting work done.
This is really a great example of why you can compare how much different OSes help or hinder your productivity. Your experience with the OS getting in the way really has a lot to do with your OS being Windows. My experience has been that Windows is an OS that is very high-maintenance, in a "significant other" sort of way. It's constantly begging for my attention by flashing things on the screen, telling me things I don't need to know, forcing me to click on buttons to dismiss dialogs that are just in my way (The "Are you sure you want to delete this?" dialog being easily the worst offender.) Contrast with OS X, where the OS is admittedly still a more salient entity than DOS, but compared to Windows XP, OS X often feels like the OS that isn't really there. And that distinction is exactly why I feel that I'm a more productive worker when I'm using OS X.
Any company that calls their techs "geniuses" thrive in forums like this. They think they are "cool" and "hip," they don't care about the fact that they have to reset the permissions and turn on Appletalk every five minutes.
Since having switched to OS X and Linux (from Linux and Windows) as my desktop OSes six years ago, the thing that I've found the most amusing about my new life on the other side of the fence has been the multitude of comments like the above that I'm now noticing.
Starting with the "cool and hip" stereotype, I have to wonder why people make such a big deal of this. If I had to hazard a guess, it's that it really comes from discontent with the historical crappiness of the asthetic aspects of most PC manufacturers' industrial design. I'm pretty sure it doesn't come from Apple users themselves, most the ones I know (myself included) are pretty geeky - which makes sense, given that geeks, being more confident with computers, would naturally be more comfortable with switching platforms, and I'm sure that at this point a strong majority of Mac users are converts who switched over after Apple finally canned that accursed classic Mac OS. It certainly doesn't come from Apple users' chatter; almost the entirety of pro-Apple and anti-Microsoft comments that come from Mac users are made on technical grounds.
As for fixing permissions and restarting AppleTalk, well, I'll grant that they might have last used an old version of OS X where disk permissions did have to be repaired fairly often, but AppleTalk???? I didn't know there was anyone who even remembers AppleTalk anymore, let alone actually uses it. While we're at it, let's criticize Thinkpads based on the crappiness of token ring networking.
It's much of the reason why I stay out of the Mac vs. PC debates for the most part. What's the point of talking to someone who's surrounded by such a strong reality distortion field (yeah, I said it) that they think they're an expert on the merits of OS X when really they haven't spent more than an hour of their lives using it, and at the same time assume I don't know a damn thing about computers because I'm a Mac user, when really I'm a software engineer and spent a hefty amount of time programming native apps on both platforms.
I wish some of these folks would come back down to earth and admit that the only real reason they don't like Macs very much is that there isn't a version of Half-Life 2 for OS X.
I should also point out that in almost every case when something about global warming takes the climatological community by surprise, it's that they've discovered yet another way in which it looks like humans are accelerating it or another way in which the climate is changing *faster* than they thought it would. If you're really going to make any inferences from the inaccuracy of climate models, they should follow history and conclude that things are worse than we think, not better.
Are you aware that in the past 15 or 20 years there has not been a single peer-reviewed paper that calls the assertion that humans are contributing to global warming into question? All the flap about this being 100% natural
*Depends on ignoring any concept of scale or rate
*Comes from politicians, people who have a vested interest in us not doing anything about the problem, or people gullible enough to believe them
*Often relies on logical fallacies, with affirming the consequent being particularly popular.
As for your suggestion that we shouldn't be doing anything because the climate models haven't been perfected yet, I'd suggest that that's about as smart as ignoring a tsunami warning because the system isn't 100% accurate, or ignoring a fire alarm because it might be a drill.
Of course, Apple would need stringent hardware requirements at first, but things would loosen up as time passes. Remember, there were not drivers for Win95 in '95, no drivers for Win2000 in 2000, and there are few drivers for Vista now.
No offense, but your counter-example is extremely naive.
When new versions of Windows come out they include a compatibility layer that makes it possible to use drivers for older versions of Windows. Furthermore, lack of driver support isn't nearly as crippling for Windows because the vast majority of Windows sales comes from it being bundled with new hardware. It'd be much more apt to provide any other commercial PC OS out there - y'know, BeOS, OS/2, SuSE, stuff like that. There's a real example of how much of a barrier to adoption lack of drivers is.
Every successful OS manufacturer out there other than Microsoft gets around this by mostly only selling to businesses who are using it to build their own embedded systems anyway (QNX) or by bundling the OS with hardware (Apple, Sun, IBM, etc.), or by having incredibly low development costs so they don't really need to sell much of anything ot make a profit anyway (anything open source).
Every every company that has tried to sell a commercial desktop OS that runs on commodity PC hardware and was not Microsoft has failed. There is a reason for this. Apple is not a magical company. Nor are they stupid. History, as well as a cursory understanding of the issue, makes it obvious that a company would have to either have magic superpowers or be stupid to switch their OS to the general PC market out of anything but complete desperation.
Seriously, I'm sick of people talking about this asinine idea. And folks say Steve Jobs is surrounded by a relaity distortion field. Sheesh.
Releasing OSX for the PC would allow Apple to compete with MS on MS's own level without hampering the end user with Apples expensive hardware requirements.
That's true, but it's only a tiny, tiny little part of the truth. The full truth is that Apple is nowhere near being prepared for such a move and would have little to no chance of succeeding if they were to attempt to compete with Microsoft in the PC market. They could try, but it would be about as smart as me trying to best a lion in unarmed combat. Why is this?
Drivers
Application support
Microsoft's bundling deals with nearly every hardware manufacturer
Microsoft already having a massive headstart on the PC market (essentially 100%)
As well as an unknown number of other compatibility issues. For example, Apple includes lots of libraries that are heavily optimized for specific hardware, such as VecLib. Right now VecLib works with G3's, G4's, G5's, Core Duo, and Core 2 Duo, and only certain chipsets for each of those CPUs. I have no idea if VecLib would work on a Pentium III or a Celeron. I do know that if it doesn't work, it will in turn break a whole lot of OS X applications, including a large number of the ones I've written.
Also keep in mind that the first four issues all support each other. For example, Microsoft doesn't have to write drivers for every random piece of hardware that comes out for the PC market, because hardware manufacturers do that for them. For Apple to jumpstart OS X on the PC market, they would have to spend time and money getting a whole lot of hardware working, and I wouldn't be surprised if the cost of doing so is greater than all the money in Apple's coffers.
So drivers alone most likely renders OS X for PCs as something that just can't possibly happen outside of Apple critics' wet dreams. Add all the other issues on top of that and it's easy to see why CNet pointed out that the idea is so silly that it's doubtful that Apple has ever even given a moment's serious consideration to the idea.