So then he's saying, "subsidise free hardware with the income from overpriced software" (but build the hardware so that it can only run BG's software)?
So what, his idea is to build computers that only run Windows+Office etc, give away the hardware to every child born, then each person "only" needs to buy the software? So will people think "hey cool, a free computer from that nice man Bill Gates, now all I need to do is buy the software for it"?
Reminds me a little of how they sell XBOXs at a loss, but keep subsidising those losses from the HUGE profits from Windows+Office, until XBOX is dominant and the competitors are dead.
You are so dumb you cannot see and extrapolate trends in data. We're all screwed because of idiots like you. Wake up, open your eyes, get your head out your ass, and do some research on what is going on. There is a problem here. Hello.... hello...
... man has had only a minor, if at all, noticeable effect on the extinction/survival of other species.
I suggest you start doing some serious reading up, because you are so way off the mark it's just not funny. Start by googling for "extinction rate". And this data isn't coming from tree-hugging-new-age-hippie-greenpeace-weirdo propaganda; these are facts.
The WWW for example, was invented by an Englishman
Another example on which much of the Internet is based, fiber(/fibre) optics, developed in England.
A lot of useful R&D is done in the US, though. But in most cases, you find the people 'breaking ground' actually doing the research have come to the US from all over world... the US has essentially created an environment that is "ideal" to researchers (e.g. in terms of funding, equipment, resources, etc) and thus attract the best minds from all over the world. Look at the average technology/physics etc PhD paper in the US, you'll often find the names on it are Chinese or Russian or Indian or South African or (etc etc etc).
(Subjective opinion follows: big companies in the USA are not generally known for quality products, preferring strategy based on existing dominant position, combined with marketing & spin. However, the US has an "entrepreneurial culture", so there are many small to medium size businesses that succeed in creating quality products for smaller markets, e.g. 'niche market' products like Source Offsite, but there are many examples. Also, companies like id software?)
I don't buy the assertion that a game is going to be successful just because it's a sequel. Game players are a notoriously fussy crowd - if the game isn't really good, they just won't play it.
A few might buy copies just because it "might be good because the previous one was good", but these sales will fizzle out quickly with word of mouth that a game sucks. Also in gaming most people are exposed to games either by watching someone they know play the game, or by piracy, or via game demos (e.g. I bought Q3A after playing the demo).
Most sales of a crappy game are probably from parents buying games for their kids, they don't know what's good so they go with names they recognize or names of major movies on which the game is based (e.g. Matrix), thinking "my kid will probably like this because he loved the movie".
Guaranteed, if Doom III sucks, it's not going to turn a profit for Id Software.
Admittedly I'm playing a pirated FarCry at the moment - but I fully plan to buy it, because I think it's really good.
You forget that as part of the armed struggle, the ANC sold itself to the USSR, and became a branch of the Soviet military
That was the version of the story as told to the SAn media by apartheid propaganda, I think you've been soaking up too much 80's NP SABC 'white media' propaganda. They used this propaganda to justify fighting what they basically called "commie terrorists", but it was mostly nonsense. The ANC was not a Soviet "proxy army", you'd do well to inform yourself with the other side of the story (e.g. the freedom fighters themselves, e.g. Letlapa Mphahlele, or better, the TRC hearings).
To believe that the armed struggle played no part in ending apartheid is just ridiculous. The armed struggle helped "tighten the noose" that was (amongst many other factors) slowly squeezing the apartheid government smaller and weaker. The armed struggle made it harder and harder and for the apartheid government to continue oppressing the people: at the height of apartheid, in the 80s, the armed struggle had become increasingly organized, and their ranks had continued to swell, and more and more people were willing to fight for the cause as the cycle of violence began to escalate (much as in Israel/Palestine).
Lack of an armed resistance would most certainly have helped the apartheid government to continue to oppress the people, without a doubt - they had no plans on ending apartheid voluntarily (at least not until FW de Klerk came along, and even that was touch and go for years, remember CODESA).
'Soviet proxy army'? That's the silliest version of SAn history I've ever heard. At best, there was some soviet funding and soviet training, but the evidence is that by and large the fighters were locally organized and most of the training was in rebel camps elsewhere in Africa, where they gained experience from soldiers in other countries who had fought (or were fighting) their own liberation wars.
Thousands of young blacks left SA since the Soweto uprisings to join the armed struggle, to fight for 'the cause', the resistance effectively became ever stronger and stronger, while local support for apartheid government was weakening and more people becoming afraid of increasing violence and civil war. The apartheid government was basically slowly losing control of the country.
The SAn liberation struggle against the apartheid government was not non-violent. In the beginning it was, but by the 1970s or so, even Nelson Mandela had realised that apartheid would never fall by peaceful means alone, and thus he OK'd the beginning of the "armed struggle" (part of which was the creation of an 'armed wing' of the ANC, Mkhonto we'Sizwe (MK = spear of the nation), as well as APLA (Azanian People's Liberation Army) under the PAC). These organizations, who mostly had to operate outside of SA borders, carried out a number of operations, e.g. terrorist bombings, St James Church massacre, etc. The armed struggle definitely played a part in ending apartheid, and I think if it weren't for the armed struggle, apartheid would still be around now.
I think that the problem is something else altogether. I think that most just don't care what shit is happening elsewhere in the world, they just want to feel happy all the time in their comfortable lives. So while we now theoretically have access to a huge wealth of information about what is going on in dictatorships & warzones all over the world, the majority of people quite frankly couldn't care less to read it (I mean, apart from the ridiculously stereotypical cliches that we all know, how much do any of us really know about what is going on in 'problem areas' such as Zimbabwe, Chechnia, China/Taiwan, Diamonds+Congo, Cuba, Ethiopia, Korea etc? And how many Americans really understand why there is much (and growing) anti-US sentiment worldwide? It still seems that all but a tiny percentage of the most intelligent still think they "hate our freedoms" or are "jealous of our freedoms" (urgh, grow up!"). So the existence of the Internet and all this information basically just serves to highlight just how little people in stable countries care; 100 years ago they could have feasibly pleaded lack of access to information as an excuse for ignorance, but they can no longer. So now we're just faced with a strange, mild and slightly discomforting sense of guilt, which for the large part we mostly ignore.
Also, it was two serbs and a Hungarian - so they're just plain simply much closer to the UK than to the US. So I can't see any reason why the US would seem a more obvious choice.
Remember, once you have a large enough amount of capital, any advantage over 50% is garaunteed to make you money
That's not strictly true, you could actually have a huge amount of capital and just get very unlucky many many times in a row on a particular day. That however becomes increasingly less likely as N increases (i.e. the more you play). Thus more accurately: as the amount of capital you have approaches infinity, the probability of profiting in a game where your average odds are greater than 50% tends towards 1.
Corporations are just a collection of people. They're no more fundamentally evil than other collections of people, like, say, governments. Or Greenpeace
I think the point was that corporations were the most likely group in the USA to create some sort of nuclear accident (because in the US they, of all groups, have the biggest motive to, i.e. organizations have OFTEN historically placed profits ahead of ethics, leading to e.g. industrial accidents). In this sense corporations ARE more "fundamentally evil" in that sense, because organizations like the government or greenpeace do not have the same financial incentives (or competitive forces) to lead them to misbehave. Hence there is nothing wrong (as you imply) with saying that the problem is that a corporation's stated purpose is to generate profit, as it is this primary motivation (to generate profit) that causes companies to take chances, especially when their survival is threatened by competition - hence there is a *natural* tendency for companies to "push the limits" and take chances, unlike, say, the government. But yes, it is quite possible for the government, and greenpeace, to *also* do stupid things. Cf. Times Beach, Seveso, Love Canal etc.
its just proof that a communistic system of government is a greater threat to its own people than any outside "enemy"
Believing that the human failures that resulted in Chernobyl are only present under communist governments, or that a capitalist system is somehow magically immune to such human failures of reasoning, is dangerous and quite frankly terrifying.
The US is not in any way immune to nuclear-related accidents (http://www.lutins.org/nukes.html), it is just plain lucky that it has not had one on the same scale as Chernobyl, many things might have happened differently that could have resulted in a terrible nuclear accident in the US.
This has nothing to do with communism, this is an essentially human problem that we all need to learn from and understand when designing any system. The first failure in any industrial accident is believing that something bad isn't going to happen to *you*; there are many reasons believe that, believing that these are "communist problems" is only one such reason.
(Note, I agree with the rest of your post, NP technologies today are not only much safer than ever in the past, but they are still in the process of becoming even safer, and compared to e.g. burning coal are far more environmentally friendly. Compared to all other currently viable energy solutions, NP is the only viable one in the human future.)
We have an Australian 'business partner' (of sorts), who moves around between SA, NZ and Australia a lot doing business. His latest e-mail informing us he is heading back to Australia has subject line "off to aussie", and he says things like "have to attend to business in aussie".
Hmm, not the only occasion where MS products are worse than everyone else at opening files in MS formats. There is a bug in the RTF importer in MS Word, for example, where the styles are lost for some Unicode characters, and the font is reset to Times New Roman. OpenOffice opens the files perfectly, WordPerfect opens the file perfectly, and even MS's own Wordpad opens the file perfectly - just Word is unable to. And this is correctly formed RTF, created in Wordpad itself.
I think a great many people end up asking technically literate people they know (friends, relatives) to help them solve MS software issues. So what we are basically doing is giving up our time to provide free support to help prop up crappy products. Don't do it! Just say no. Tell them, "Microsoft sold you the stuff, you paid them a lot for it, let them help you out".
Switch things around: when last did you hear about any OpenSource project waiting six months to fix a known major security flaw?
Taking a sample of size 1 doesn't prove anything unless you clearly want to try "lie with statistics". There are far better ways to draw accurate conclusions using statistics properly, e.g. plot bug severity against time taken to fix problem for a fairly large random sample of bugs.
How about just "it's none of their fucking business?"
I don't have to provide that much info to strangers, I don't want to provide that much info to strangers, I don't like providing that much info to strangers. In fact many people just plain don't like it, isn't that reason enough?
You are effectively saying that I should feel obliged to either provide a logical reason for not liking it, or shut up and put up with it. Screw you, I don't need to provide any logical reasons. It's my personal information, I don't like giving it to potentially thousands of strangers, and I don't have to give anyone my reasons (rational or not).
I wonder if they just look at filenames? So if you are sharing one of their own 'spoiled' files with random junk in it, would that count as infringement?:)
Surely they'd have to prove that the content you shared was copyrighted, they surely can't sue you based only on evidence that you merely had a file called "Brittney -.mp3" or something on your PC.. ?
Slashdot Mirror
So then he's saying, "subsidise free hardware with the income from overpriced software" (but build the hardware so that it can only run BG's software)?
So what, his idea is to build computers that only run Windows+Office etc, give away the hardware to every child born, then each person "only" needs to buy the software? So will people think "hey cool, a free computer from that nice man Bill Gates, now all I need to do is buy the software for it"?
Reminds me a little of how they sell XBOXs at a loss, but keep subsidising those losses from the HUGE profits from Windows+Office, until XBOX is dominant and the competitors are dead.
"Africa is a big country"
+3 insightful, WTF? Africa is NOT A COUNTRY! It's a continent larger than the US with dozens of countries on it.
You are so dumb you cannot see and extrapolate trends in data. We're all screwed because of idiots like you. Wake up, open your eyes, get your head out your ass, and do some research on what is going on. There is a problem here. Hello .... hello ...
I suggest you start doing some serious reading up, because you are so way off the mark it's just not funny. Start by googling for "extinction rate". And this data isn't coming from tree-hugging-new-age-hippie-greenpeace-weirdo propaganda; these are facts.
The WWW for example, was invented by an Englishman
Another example on which much of the Internet is based, fiber(/fibre) optics, developed in England.
A lot of useful R&D is done in the US, though. But in most cases, you find the people 'breaking ground' actually doing the research have come to the US from all over world ... the US has essentially created an environment that is "ideal" to researchers (e.g. in terms of funding, equipment, resources, etc) and thus attract the best minds from all over the world. Look at the average technology/physics etc PhD paper in the US, you'll often find the names on it are Chinese or Russian or Indian or South African or (etc etc etc).
Apple?
(Subjective opinion follows: big companies in the USA are not generally known for quality products, preferring strategy based on existing dominant position, combined with marketing & spin. However, the US has an "entrepreneurial culture", so there are many small to medium size businesses that succeed in creating quality products for smaller markets, e.g. 'niche market' products like Source Offsite, but there are many examples. Also, companies like id software?)
I don't buy the assertion that a game is going to be successful just because it's a sequel. Game players are a notoriously fussy crowd - if the game isn't really good, they just won't play it.
A few might buy copies just because it "might be good because the previous one was good", but these sales will fizzle out quickly with word of mouth that a game sucks. Also in gaming most people are exposed to games either by watching someone they know play the game, or by piracy, or via game demos (e.g. I bought Q3A after playing the demo).
Most sales of a crappy game are probably from parents buying games for their kids, they don't know what's good so they go with names they recognize or names of major movies on which the game is based (e.g. Matrix), thinking "my kid will probably like this because he loved the movie".
Guaranteed, if Doom III sucks, it's not going to turn a profit for Id Software.
Admittedly I'm playing a pirated FarCry at the moment - but I fully plan to buy it, because I think it's really good.
Started playing it Friday, and I'm hooked .. :) Incredible graphics ..
You forget that as part of the armed struggle, the ANC sold itself to the USSR, and became a branch of the Soviet military
That was the version of the story as told to the SAn media by apartheid propaganda, I think you've been soaking up too much 80's NP SABC 'white media' propaganda. They used this propaganda to justify fighting what they basically called "commie terrorists", but it was mostly nonsense. The ANC was not a Soviet "proxy army", you'd do well to inform yourself with the other side of the story (e.g. the freedom fighters themselves, e.g. Letlapa Mphahlele, or better, the TRC hearings).
To believe that the armed struggle played no part in ending apartheid is just ridiculous. The armed struggle helped "tighten the noose" that was (amongst many other factors) slowly squeezing the apartheid government smaller and weaker. The armed struggle made it harder and harder and for the apartheid government to continue oppressing the people: at the height of apartheid, in the 80s, the armed struggle had become increasingly organized, and their ranks had continued to swell, and more and more people were willing to fight for the cause as the cycle of violence began to escalate (much as in Israel/Palestine).
Lack of an armed resistance would most certainly have helped the apartheid government to continue to oppress the people, without a doubt - they had no plans on ending apartheid voluntarily (at least not until FW de Klerk came along, and even that was touch and go for years, remember CODESA).
'Soviet proxy army'? That's the silliest version of SAn history I've ever heard. At best, there was some soviet funding and soviet training, but the evidence is that by and large the fighters were locally organized and most of the training was in rebel camps elsewhere in Africa, where they gained experience from soldiers in other countries who had fought (or were fighting) their own liberation wars.
Thousands of young blacks left SA since the Soweto uprisings to join the armed struggle, to fight for 'the cause', the resistance effectively became ever stronger and stronger, while local support for apartheid government was weakening and more people becoming afraid of increasing violence and civil war. The apartheid government was basically slowly losing control of the country.
The SAn liberation struggle against the apartheid government was not non-violent. In the beginning it was, but by the 1970s or so, even Nelson Mandela had realised that apartheid would never fall by peaceful means alone, and thus he OK'd the beginning of the "armed struggle" (part of which was the creation of an 'armed wing' of the ANC, Mkhonto we'Sizwe (MK = spear of the nation), as well as APLA (Azanian People's Liberation Army) under the PAC). These organizations, who mostly had to operate outside of SA borders, carried out a number of operations, e.g. terrorist bombings, St James Church massacre, etc. The armed struggle definitely played a part in ending apartheid, and I think if it weren't for the armed struggle, apartheid would still be around now.
I think that the problem is something else altogether. I think that most just don't care what shit is happening elsewhere in the world, they just want to feel happy all the time in their comfortable lives. So while we now theoretically have access to a huge wealth of information about what is going on in dictatorships & warzones all over the world, the majority of people quite frankly couldn't care less to read it (I mean, apart from the ridiculously stereotypical cliches that we all know, how much do any of us really know about what is going on in 'problem areas' such as Zimbabwe, Chechnia, China/Taiwan, Diamonds+Congo, Cuba, Ethiopia, Korea etc? And how many Americans really understand why there is much (and growing) anti-US sentiment worldwide? It still seems that all but a tiny percentage of the most intelligent still think they "hate our freedoms" or are "jealous of our freedoms" (urgh, grow up!"). So the existence of the Internet and all this information basically just serves to highlight just how little people in stable countries care; 100 years ago they could have feasibly pleaded lack of access to information as an excuse for ignorance, but they can no longer. So now we're just faced with a strange, mild and slightly discomforting sense of guilt, which for the large part we mostly ignore.
Also, it was two serbs and a Hungarian - so they're just plain simply much closer to the UK than to the US. So I can't see any reason why the US would seem a more obvious choice.
Remember, once you have a large enough amount of capital, any advantage over 50% is garaunteed to make you money
That's not strictly true, you could actually have a huge amount of capital and just get very unlucky many many times in a row on a particular day. That however becomes increasingly less likely as N increases (i.e. the more you play). Thus more accurately: as the amount of capital you have approaches infinity, the probability of profiting in a game where your average odds are greater than 50% tends towards 1.
Corporations are just a collection of people. They're no more fundamentally evil than other collections of people, like, say, governments. Or Greenpeace
I think the point was that corporations were the most likely group in the USA to create some sort of nuclear accident (because in the US they, of all groups, have the biggest motive to, i.e. organizations have OFTEN historically placed profits ahead of ethics, leading to e.g. industrial accidents). In this sense corporations ARE more "fundamentally evil" in that sense, because organizations like the government or greenpeace do not have the same financial incentives (or competitive forces) to lead them to misbehave. Hence there is nothing wrong (as you imply) with saying that the problem is that a corporation's stated purpose is to generate profit, as it is this primary motivation (to generate profit) that causes companies to take chances, especially when their survival is threatened by competition - hence there is a *natural* tendency for companies to "push the limits" and take chances, unlike, say, the government. But yes, it is quite possible for the government, and greenpeace, to *also* do stupid things. Cf. Times Beach, Seveso, Love Canal etc.
its just proof that a communistic system of government is a greater threat to its own people than any outside "enemy"
Believing that the human failures that resulted in Chernobyl are only present under communist governments, or that a capitalist system is somehow magically immune to such human failures of reasoning, is dangerous and quite frankly terrifying.
The US is not in any way immune to nuclear-related accidents (http://www.lutins.org/nukes.html), it is just plain lucky that it has not had one on the same scale as Chernobyl, many things might have happened differently that could have resulted in a terrible nuclear accident in the US.
This has nothing to do with communism, this is an essentially human problem that we all need to learn from and understand when designing any system. The first failure in any industrial accident is believing that something bad isn't going to happen to *you*; there are many reasons believe that, believing that these are "communist problems" is only one such reason.
(Note, I agree with the rest of your post, NP technologies today are not only much safer than ever in the past, but they are still in the process of becoming even safer, and compared to e.g. burning coal are far more environmentally friendly. Compared to all other currently viable energy solutions, NP is the only viable one in the human future.)
We have an Australian 'business partner' (of sorts), who moves around between SA, NZ and Australia a lot doing business. His latest e-mail informing us he is heading back to Australia has subject line "off to aussie", and he says things like "have to attend to business in aussie".
Hmm, not the only occasion where MS products are worse than everyone else at opening files in MS formats. There is a bug in the RTF importer in MS Word, for example, where the styles are lost for some Unicode characters, and the font is reset to Times New Roman. OpenOffice opens the files perfectly, WordPerfect opens the file perfectly, and even MS's own Wordpad opens the file perfectly - just Word is unable to. And this is correctly formed RTF, created in Wordpad itself.
I think a great many people end up asking technically literate people they know (friends, relatives) to help them solve MS software issues. So what we are basically doing is giving up our time to provide free support to help prop up crappy products. Don't do it! Just say no. Tell them, "Microsoft sold you the stuff, you paid them a lot for it, let them help you out".
Switch things around: when last did you hear about any OpenSource project waiting six months to fix a known major security flaw?
Taking a sample of size 1 doesn't prove anything unless you clearly want to try "lie with statistics". There are far better ways to draw accurate conclusions using statistics properly, e.g. plot bug severity against time taken to fix problem for a fairly large random sample of bugs.
Think your HTML skills need some brushing up :)
How about just "it's none of their fucking business?"
I don't have to provide that much info to strangers, I don't want to provide that much info to strangers, I don't like providing that much info to strangers. In fact many people just plain don't like it, isn't that reason enough?
You are effectively saying that I should feel obliged to either provide a logical reason for not liking it, or shut up and put up with it. Screw you, I don't need to provide any logical reasons. It's my personal information, I don't like giving it to potentially thousands of strangers, and I don't have to give anyone my reasons (rational or not).
I wonder if they just look at filenames? So if you are sharing one of their own 'spoiled' files with random junk in it, would that count as infringement? :)
Surely they'd have to prove that the content you shared was copyrighted, they surely can't sue you based only on evidence that you merely had a file called "Brittney - .mp3" or something on your PC .. ?
Well, the announcement of the EU fine appears to have driven their stock up ...
That'd get the Linux ball rolling, and how!
And the Mac ball too! Macs are already very common in some (Northern) European countries.
Some more info on Bush's ideals and vision for 'world leadership': http://www.newamericancentury.org/.