You mean it turns into a socialist country? No, that is not how it works. The thing is, the money that the rich have is their own money they worked for and earned.
No, it turns to into a facist country. Oh, right, next you'll be claiming that facist == socialist...
And also I'm sure the ancestors of middle age nobility also worked hard for their money. The thing is, wealth accumulates, and if things stay stable it accumulates so much that you have separate nobility. Last time it took the industrial revolution to overthrow the power of nobility of that time. If things stay stable in the right way, wealth will accumulate into very few corporate hands and similar situation will develop.
They should make cars to serve those who want to buy them, not government regulations that have nothing to do with anything. The poor car buyer, prevented by the government from getting the car they need.
And again you hit the nail in the head! Car industry should make cars like that. However, they don't want to, they want to make big cars they can sell for a lot of money and make more profits, while helping their friends in oil industry to sell more gas. So who's interestes the government is acting in when they make regulations that help car makers to make the kind of cars *they* want to make... Now that's a tough one! As a bonus, the government gets to boast how they have made the roads safer and act in public interests, and tell people that now they can get cars they want, "now go buy a new and safe car so you can show the car industry who's the boss!"
Yes, I am. He is ruling in the public interest, For another year anyway.
No, he (GWB) is ruling in the corporate interests as much as he believes he can get away with and still have a good chance to be re-elected. He's also ruling in his own interests (like wanting to be "a war hero") as they match corporate interestes quite nicely. Public interestes are purely secondary. Next president may be under less corporate influence if he doesn't get re-elected, but that won't undo the things GWB has done. The president after that may again be under more corporate influence and more things will go the corporate way. It's a slow process, and the corporate money has time to wait, as it is not a "single entity", it's what is built into the capitalistic system.
Yet, they do not decide. The voters do. The corporations can present a Steve Forbes all they want, but if the people do not want him, he gets no-where. In the United States, you pick the representative that represents your interests.
Ah, but the corporations present somebody like GWB, and he has a very good chance to get elected... Also, not sure how the senate or congress elections work, if there's more to chooce from in those, but at least in the presidental election you basically have 2 choices: democrats or republicians. If neither represents you, or even if both represent something you actively oppose, well, tough luck, no democracy for you.
A two-party system simply doesn't allow enough choice. It also gives too few routes to political power, so corporate money will easily rule both routes, allowing only the "right" people to make it to the political top, no matter which of the two parties they represent. Oh, there certainly are exceptions. But it's enough that most candidates end up being owned by corporate money, they don't need all, it's just better if
And it's not like it was in the communist system, there being a clear elite, their internal power struggles really internal and hidden. It's much more subtle, many corporations with slightly different interestes, some with more money==influence than others, and there's no clear line of where corporate rule begins and people's rule ends. So you can't just overthrow the system like happened in the Eastern Block at the end of the Cold War. On the other hand the corporate money doesn't have "absolute rule" since it competes with itself, and it still has to be able to cover up bad things so enough people stay happy enough to vote the same two parties every time. But that doesn't change the fact that corporate money rules the US, the people only have minor influence on the matter.
No, it isn't: capitalism is about letting the people control their own destinies. The countries with the most powerful and rich elites (relative to the population) happen to be socialist countries like North Korea. In capitalism, the rich have their power limited by the accountability of free market choices. Socialism does not have any such accountability.
Actually it does have accountability, since effectively world market is a free market, and we're seeing communism disappear just because of that.
Capitalism, as the name implies, is about increasing capital, ie getting richer. The more you have, the more you can get. The less you have, the harder it's to catch up. It works fine as long as the differences aren't too big, but as more and more money starts to gather in fewer and fewer hands, the worse it works, until finally the country is ruled by that money in few hands, not by the people. And suddenly you are in a situation where you have "nobility" that inherits their position by inheriting their parents money, and a working class that has very limited chances of making it big *no matter their personal ability*.
You may call that a fine system. I call it middle ages, the nobility inhering their position and all that. And please explain the free market mechanism that somehow slows down this separation?
They don't. The system is designed so that the corporations, through the direct democracy of the marketplace, act in the people's interest. If the corporations do not, they wither and die.
No. Corporations that don't make money wither and die. Sometimes it's working with people's interestes in mind, sometimes it's the opposite. Also, to those who have really understood the modern capitalism, a company going under or doing well is irrelevant, they just want money for themselves and move on to another company when the time is right.
In a socialist country, if you don't agree with the government you get shot.
Well, I assume you mean "extreme left communist country" when you say "socialist country", since to me it appears that you are much more likely to get shot in the countries that are more on the right than those that are more socialist...
"as long as they keep giving money to RIAA and buying bigger and bigger SUVs and all that,"
Since when does anyone GIVE money to the RIAA? As for SUV's, government regulations have made the regular car too small and unsafe, so the SUV is an opportunity to get a substantial, useful vehicle.
You give money to RIAA directly every time you buy a CD. Even if you avoid that, you indirectly give money to RIAA for example every time you buy a product that was advertised in the radio...
As to SUVs, you pretty much hit the nail in the head, though you probably don't realize it yourself. Hint: "government regulations"... Oh, the poor car industry, thay have to make "substantial" cars to meet the tough requirements.
In both cases, you see American democrazy at it's finest.
You forget that the visible government elite (the true elite) are at the very top, above the rich capitalists.
Nope, they're not. The true political elite is those who have enough money to stay on the top. And they are owned by those who give them that money. I mean, just look at your president, for Christ's sake!
Granted, it's not quite like in the communist countries where there was just the party. There are perhaps more conflicting interestes among corporations, and they manifest themselves differently. However, the process is only superficially democratic, because there's so little hope of getting elected without corporate money, that those few who manage are powerless to make a difference. In essence you are limited to choosing which corporate interests have more representatives. And no, corporate interestes and interestes of the people do not match exactl
Because socialism is all about improving the standard of living for government elites.
Look at USA politics right now. Think of Enron. Think of Microsoft and SCO (and their unknown but assumed link). Think where GWB got his campaign donations and correlate this with what is going on in Iraq. Then think of everything that must be going on in the background, unnoticed or at least unreported by major media.
So, to me it would very much appear that capitalism is very much about making "the elite" richer and richer at any cost. That it's the "invisible" corporate elite that is at the top, instead of the visible "government elite" in communism only makes it even more worrysome, but I guess it's the only way to do it in a country with freedom of speech... But fear the day when you notice your freedom of speech starts to be really restricted.
I mean, seriously, if you're American, think abou this...
Then be thankful that at least the interests of the corporate elite don't mostly conflict with interestes of average American (as long as they keep giving money to RIAA and buying bigger and bigger SUVs and all that, but that's a national duty of every patriotic american, isn't it?)...
They couldn't care less about the "Linux license" pocket money. And as it is, all SCO needs is a PR and law departments, so if other employees go away, that would only be convenient. And somehow I don't see him caring the slight bit about what his mom thinks of SCO business practices, either...
How do I get a "SW I-III" type of feeling about this whole SCO thing... Perhaps soon we'll have the "celebration at Naboo" at the end of Episode I, when SCO goes down... Or is this SCO fight part of the Clone Wars already? But who is Palpatine?
Logically one would assume there is *some* pretty strong negative feedback mechanism, since evidently during the last 4 billion years things haven't gotten out of hand very badly (considering that we're here).
However, I'd much rather *not* find out how much polar ice melting will happen before this negative feedback kicks in, or what kind of impressive weather effects (tornadoes etc) we can produce, or indeed if the mechanism still works or if it's fast enough to deal with speed of human "progress"...
Also I suspect the most important balancing mechansm is called "life", ie Earth ecosystem, and I'm not very comfortable with the idea of combined mass extinctions *and* massive greenhouse effect at the same time...
Why can't we buy this stuff off the shelf? Inertia and politics, I guess.
But won't somebody think of the children (of oil company executives and employees). They'll have to let go of their expensive imported sports cars if we don't *increase* consumpiton of oil!
Do your part, go get a new, bigger, safer, more comfortable SUV today!
The Grand plan of MS obiviously is that first they make current Windows boxes too dangerous to connect to the internet for normal non-techie people (all the worms, viruses, ad- and spyware etc).
Then they introduce Palladium, and any user who agrees to run only MS-signed code is safe, and any user who at least enables Palladium is safe from running non-signed code at any time (such as a virus trying to start automatically when the computer boots) without being prompted.
And it'll even work as long as they manage to keep their private signing key really private, and as long as there aren't an unpatchable hardware security hole that would allow the processor to run code that is unsigned or with invalid signature, things look good. Ok, there are still possibilities like a signed interpreter (like Visual Basic) running malicious code, unless that interpreter check that also all script code is signed.
But now if they make it all or nothing, either everything has to be signed or no signatures will be used for anything (or just make it a real confirmation dialog hell to run any unsigned code, like asking confirmation every time such software tries to write to disk etc). And then if they charge administrative fee of, say $10000 per software package for signing code. And suddenly you don't have any non-commercial software you can use if you want to enable security offered by Palladium, as I imagine most corporate customers of MS might do anyway.
and then you'll end up fixing computers of people you've never heard of before.
As long as they're young, beautiful, female and willing (not necessarily single), there's nothing wrong with fixing their computers. Just make sure it'll need more fixing later.;-)
2011... Well, I predict that by 2008 99% of all new TV set models will be digital, and if you need to receive analog, you'll have to buy a separate analog TV tuner box for it...
So I have no doubts about them "making it" by 2011.
Are you sure those 3 countries are actually working together on it? I get the impression it's actually a Dutch project, they're just going to use the area of the two other countries as well for the array.
If we covered entire surface (both land and sea) of Earth with this kind of array, what could we see (or "hear" maybe) with it?
Would that have (theoretically) enough resolution to for example get decent resolution radio-frequency images of surfaces of nearby stars?
Or could we use it as a radar, sweeping the solar system and locating every asteroid hurling about, and calculate their orbits for potential collision with Earth?
Now all we need is a couple of fusion reactors providing enough power to use such an array as active radar (and the array itself of course;-)
If it weren't for "crazy" people like this, we'd probably live in a very different world now. Consider for example Columbus, and then consider the entire "Great Voyages" that his example inspired. (Well, Asians and especially American Indians might disagree about that being a good thing...)
We've mostly run out of new places to explore without enormous cost of trying to do manned flights to other planets, so people like this are left with exploring the oceans and flying around the world in different contraptions.
But without people like this, "we" would still be living in caves in Africa or whatever...
Do you truly not see why developing solar energy technology to the level that makes this kind of plane possible is eco-friendly proejct, or are you just trying to troll?
And it's not just developing better solar cells to enhance current applications of solar energy.
Consider for example that if a lot of oribital satellites could be replaced with purely solar-powered autonomous planes that could stay up theoretically indefinitely. Just think how much "non-biodegradable junk" can this project produce to match the environmental impact of just a single space rocket launch...
Or imagine a hydrogen fuel-cell car that could partly refuel itself in a sunny parking lot during the workday, and could keep moving (slowly) even if you run out of fuel. Not much use in higher latitudes maybe, but imagine southern China, India and entire SE Asia with 2 billion cars like this instead of 2 billion cars using fossil fuels.
In the case of this example, I guess it depends on the job description. If job description is to write good software, then ADD shouldn't be a problem. If job description is to write software in a distractive, noisy environment, then it certainly is...
Uh. The picture does not have neither sexy-looking girls, nor "pretty" abstract computer graphics art, nor anything scifi/fantasy related. What kind of geek would want it as a wallpaper?
One would think that detecting (automatic) redirection would be fairly simple, even if it's hidden in javascript... If nothing else helps, run suspicious pages through a web browser engine to see what it does. And then just discard the page if it redirects (or tries to open multiple popups etc), and maybe spider to the the page being redirected to instead.
Next logical step is to make any music's copyright automatically go to RIAA so they can protect the artists rights against evil pirates.
And this eventually leads to you not being allowed to play your own music without paying RIAA, since they own the copyright...
Oh, and whistling is also music, so any whistler is liable for up to 5 years of prison and $25000000 fine if caught in the act without proper RIAA license...
Solution would be to just have two PINs and you ahve to use both them as much, you'd be randomly prompted for "PIN A" or "PIN B". Enter the wrong one, and it acts like a duress PIN.
And the links available certainly don't tell me that. Through them you get just a page telling exposity is a patch and a link to the patch, an FTP directory, and a screenshot. No links anywhere else. Even google can't help me, ironically it just refers me back to Slashdot...
So, could someone give some actual information to those of us who don't know what this is all about? What are Metacity and Expocity?
What kind of guarantee there is that it'll be around any longer than the page you'd want to archive there? I'd check what they say in their page, but the site does not respond to me.
And I did s/wew/www/ in the url, and even tried accessing it from 2 completely different domains, university and work... So everything else aside, it does not appear to be a very reliable site in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it turns to into a facist country. Oh, right, next you'll be claiming that facist == socialist...
And also I'm sure the ancestors of middle age nobility also worked hard for their money. The thing is, wealth accumulates, and if things stay stable it accumulates so much that you have separate nobility. Last time it took the industrial revolution to overthrow the power of nobility of that time. If things stay stable in the right way, wealth will accumulate into very few corporate hands and similar situation will develop.
And again you hit the nail in the head! Car industry should make cars like that. However, they don't want to, they want to make big cars they can sell for a lot of money and make more profits, while helping their friends in oil industry to sell more gas. So who's interestes the government is acting in when they make regulations that help car makers to make the kind of cars *they* want to make... Now that's a tough one! As a bonus, the government gets to boast how they have made the roads safer and act in public interests, and tell people that now they can get cars they want, "now go buy a new and safe car so you can show the car industry who's the boss!"
No, he (GWB) is ruling in the corporate interests as much as he believes he can get away with and still have a good chance to be re-elected. He's also ruling in his own interests (like wanting to be "a war hero") as they match corporate interestes quite nicely. Public interestes are purely secondary. Next president may be under less corporate influence if he doesn't get re-elected, but that won't undo the things GWB has done. The president after that may again be under more corporate influence and more things will go the corporate way. It's a slow process, and the corporate money has time to wait, as it is not a "single entity", it's what is built into the capitalistic system.
Ah, but the corporations present somebody like GWB, and he has a very good chance to get elected... Also, not sure how the senate or congress elections work, if there's more to chooce from in those, but at least in the presidental election you basically have 2 choices: democrats or republicians. If neither represents you, or even if both represent something you actively oppose, well, tough luck, no democracy for you.
A two-party system simply doesn't allow enough choice. It also gives too few routes to political power, so corporate money will easily rule both routes, allowing only the "right" people to make it to the political top, no matter which of the two parties they represent. Oh, there certainly are exceptions. But it's enough that most candidates end up being owned by corporate money, they don't need all, it's just better if
And it's not like it was in the communist system, there being a clear elite, their internal power struggles really internal and hidden. It's much more subtle, many corporations with slightly different interestes, some with more money==influence than others, and there's no clear line of where corporate rule begins and people's rule ends. So you can't just overthrow the system like happened in the Eastern Block at the end of the Cold War. On the other hand the corporate money doesn't have "absolute rule" since it competes with itself, and it still has to be able to cover up bad things so enough people stay happy enough to vote the same two parties every time. But that doesn't change the fact that corporate money rules the US, the people only have minor influence on the matter.
Actually it does have accountability, since effectively world market is a free market, and we're seeing communism disappear just because of that.
Capitalism, as the name implies, is about increasing capital, ie getting richer. The more you have, the more you can get. The less you have, the harder it's to catch up. It works fine as long as the differences aren't too big, but as more and more money starts to gather in fewer and fewer hands, the worse it works, until finally the country is ruled by that money in few hands, not by the people. And suddenly you are in a situation where you have "nobility" that inherits their position by inheriting their parents money, and a working class that has very limited chances of making it big *no matter their personal ability*.
You may call that a fine system. I call it middle ages, the nobility inhering their position and all that. And please explain the free market mechanism that somehow slows down this separation?
No. Corporations that don't make money wither and die. Sometimes it's working with people's interestes in mind, sometimes it's the opposite. Also, to those who have really understood the modern capitalism, a company going under or doing well is irrelevant, they just want money for themselves and move on to another company when the time is right.
Well, I assume you mean "extreme left communist country" when you say "socialist country", since to me it appears that you are much more likely to get shot in the countries that are more on the right than those that are more socialist...
Since when does anyone GIVE money to the RIAA? As for SUV's, government regulations have made the regular car too small and unsafe, so the SUV is an opportunity to get a substantial, useful vehicle.
You give money to RIAA directly every time you buy a CD. Even if you avoid that, you indirectly give money to RIAA for example every time you buy a product that was advertised in the radio...
As to SUVs, you pretty much hit the nail in the head, though you probably don't realize it yourself. Hint: "government regulations"... Oh, the poor car industry, thay have to make "substantial" cars to meet the tough requirements.
In both cases, you see American democrazy at it's finest.
Nope, they're not. The true political elite is those who have enough money to stay on the top. And they are owned by those who give them that money. I mean, just look at your president, for Christ's sake!
Granted, it's not quite like in the communist countries where there was just the party. There are perhaps more conflicting interestes among corporations, and they manifest themselves differently. However, the process is only superficially democratic, because there's so little hope of getting elected without corporate money, that those few who manage are powerless to make a difference. In essence you are limited to choosing which corporate interests have more representatives. And no, corporate interestes and interestes of the people do not match exactl
Look at USA politics right now. Think of Enron. Think of Microsoft and SCO (and their unknown but assumed link). Think where GWB got his campaign donations and correlate this with what is going on in Iraq. Then think of everything that must be going on in the background, unnoticed or at least unreported by major media.
So, to me it would very much appear that capitalism is very much about making "the elite" richer and richer at any cost. That it's the "invisible" corporate elite that is at the top, instead of the visible "government elite" in communism only makes it even more worrysome, but I guess it's the only way to do it in a country with freedom of speech... But fear the day when you notice your freedom of speech starts to be really restricted.
I mean, seriously, if you're American, think abou this...
Then be thankful that at least the interests of the corporate elite don't mostly conflict with interestes of average American (as long as they keep giving money to RIAA and buying bigger and bigger SUVs and all that, but that's a national duty of every patriotic american, isn't it?)...
No, it's only for investors.
They couldn't care less about the "Linux license" pocket money. And as it is, all SCO needs is a PR and law departments, so if other employees go away, that would only be convenient. And somehow I don't see him caring the slight bit about what his mom thinks of SCO business practices, either...
How do I get a "SW I-III" type of feeling about this whole SCO thing... Perhaps soon we'll have the "celebration at Naboo" at the end of Episode I, when SCO goes down... Or is this SCO fight part of the Clone Wars already? But who is Palpatine?
Logically one would assume there is *some* pretty strong negative feedback mechanism, since evidently during the last 4 billion years things haven't gotten out of hand very badly (considering that we're here).
However, I'd much rather *not* find out how much polar ice melting will happen before this negative feedback kicks in, or what kind of impressive weather effects (tornadoes etc) we can produce, or indeed if the mechanism still works or if it's fast enough to deal with speed of human "progress"...
Also I suspect the most important balancing mechansm is called "life", ie Earth ecosystem, and I'm not very comfortable with the idea of combined mass extinctions *and* massive greenhouse effect at the same time...
But won't somebody think of the children (of oil company executives and employees). They'll have to let go of their expensive imported sports cars if we don't *increase* consumpiton of oil!
Do your part, go get a new, bigger, safer, more comfortable SUV today!
The Grand plan of MS obiviously is that first they make current Windows boxes too dangerous to connect to the internet for normal non-techie people (all the worms, viruses, ad- and spyware etc).
Then they introduce Palladium, and any user who agrees to run only MS-signed code is safe, and any user who at least enables Palladium is safe from running non-signed code at any time (such as a virus trying to start automatically when the computer boots) without being prompted.
And it'll even work as long as they manage to keep their private signing key really private, and as long as there aren't an unpatchable hardware security hole that would allow the processor to run code that is unsigned or with invalid signature, things look good. Ok, there are still possibilities like a signed interpreter (like Visual Basic) running malicious code, unless that interpreter check that also all script code is signed.
But now if they make it all or nothing, either everything has to be signed or no signatures will be used for anything (or just make it a real confirmation dialog hell to run any unsigned code, like asking confirmation every time such software tries to write to disk etc). And then if they charge administrative fee of, say $10000 per software package for signing code. And suddenly you don't have any non-commercial software you can use if you want to enable security offered by Palladium, as I imagine most corporate customers of MS might do anyway.
As long as they're young, beautiful, female and willing (not necessarily single), there's nothing wrong with fixing their computers. Just make sure it'll need more fixing later.
I sure hope you also taught them the significance of byte order... :-)
2011... Well, I predict that by 2008 99% of all new TV set models will be digital, and if you need to receive analog, you'll have to buy a separate analog TV tuner box for it...
So I have no doubts about them "making it" by 2011.
Are you sure those 3 countries are actually working together on it? I get the impression it's actually a Dutch project, they're just going to use the area of the two other countries as well for the array.
I could be wrong though.
If we covered entire surface (both land and sea) of Earth with this kind of array, what could we see (or "hear" maybe) with it?
;-)
Would that have (theoretically) enough resolution to for example get decent resolution radio-frequency images of surfaces of nearby stars?
Or could we use it as a radar, sweeping the solar system and locating every asteroid hurling about, and calculate their orbits for potential collision with Earth?
Now all we need is a couple of fusion reactors providing enough power to use such an array as active radar (and the array itself of course
Hey, if your connection is not on 24/7/365, it's not a real internet connection ;-)
Though somehow I do miss the time when I had the then super-fast 1200bps modem and had no idea what "internet" is...
If it weren't for "crazy" people like this, we'd probably live in a very different world now. Consider for example Columbus, and then consider the entire "Great Voyages" that his example inspired. (Well, Asians and especially American Indians might disagree about that being a good thing...)
We've mostly run out of new places to explore without enormous cost of trying to do manned flights to other planets, so people like this are left with exploring the oceans and flying around the world in different contraptions.
But without people like this, "we" would still be living in caves in Africa or whatever...
Do you truly not see why developing solar energy technology to the level that makes this kind of plane possible is eco-friendly proejct, or are you just trying to troll?
And it's not just developing better solar cells to enhance current applications of solar energy.
Consider for example that if a lot of oribital satellites could be replaced with purely solar-powered autonomous planes that could stay up theoretically indefinitely. Just think how much "non-biodegradable junk" can this project produce to match the environmental impact of just a single space rocket launch...
Or imagine a hydrogen fuel-cell car that could partly refuel itself in a sunny parking lot during the workday, and could keep moving (slowly) even if you run out of fuel. Not much use in higher latitudes maybe, but imagine southern China, India and entire SE Asia with 2 billion cars like this instead of 2 billion cars using fossil fuels.
In the case of this example, I guess it depends on the job description. If job description is to write good software, then ADD shouldn't be a problem. If job description is to write software in a distractive, noisy environment, then it certainly is...
Uh. The picture does not have neither sexy-looking girls, nor "pretty" abstract computer graphics art, nor anything scifi/fantasy related. What kind of geek would want it as a wallpaper?
One would think that detecting (automatic) redirection would be fairly simple, even if it's hidden in javascript... If nothing else helps, run suspicious pages through a web browser engine to see what it does. And then just discard the page if it redirects (or tries to open multiple popups etc), and maybe spider to the the page being redirected to instead.
Next logical step is to make any music's copyright automatically go to RIAA so they can protect the artists rights against evil pirates.
And this eventually leads to you not being allowed to play your own music without paying RIAA, since they own the copyright...
Oh, and whistling is also music, so any whistler is liable for up to 5 years of prison and $25000000 fine if caught in the act without proper RIAA license...
What if it's the other way around, nutcases bringing religions into existense ;-)
Solution would be to just have two PINs and you ahve to use both them as much, you'd be randomly prompted for "PIN A" or "PIN B". Enter the wrong one, and it acts like a duress PIN.
Google -> "ozone hole" -> I'm feeling lucky -> Chapter III of the page that comes up
seems to bring up some good information about this.
Ok, I don't know what metacity or exposity are.
And the links available certainly don't tell me that. Through them you get just a page telling exposity is a patch and a link to the patch, an FTP directory, and a screenshot. No links anywhere else. Even google can't help me, ironically it just refers me back to Slashdot...
So, could someone give some actual information to those of us who don't know what this is all about? What are Metacity and Expocity?
What kind of guarantee there is that it'll be around any longer than the page you'd want to archive there? I'd check what they say in their page, but the site does not respond to me.
And I did s/wew/www/ in the url, and even tried accessing it from 2 completely different domains, university and work... So everything else aside, it does not appear to be a very reliable site in the first place.