> Regulate an industry, and innovation dies. Companies now make less money, spend more time tied up in red tape, and may even be profit capped. What's the incentive to innovate? Why bother with R&D?
Regulate an industry, and sometimes people don't die. That's my point. Letting companies go at it may slow them down and slow down our rate of inventing, but tends to lead to companies being forced to be more socially responsible, and inventing what they believe is the right thing, not the profitable thing.
BTW, your governments only do what they get paid to do by companies is part of the scam. It is free-market proponants who are the biggest fans of allowing unregulated mixtures of public and private business, including soft donation type deals. You can't have your cake and eat it to! Free-market economics and less governmental leverage in enforcing policies that are in their populations' best interest has resulted in the enormous amounts of influcence you lament. Pierre Trudeau (a Canadian PM in the 70s) was famous for being stubborn and unpressuable by big business, and the first thing that happened once his term was up, and a free-market fan was in (Brian Mulroony, who all Canadians now hate for reasons you might not understand:), was the beginnings of NAFTA and the beginnings of unprecedented corperate influence on the Canadian Government. So, you see, it was free-market politics that led to the problem you lament in the first place. Most economists and historians will point out that while political corruption has always existed, the 80s brought about a new kind of influcence, and a new kind of public 'acceptance' of a conned 'its always been like this' reality that governments were nothing but self-interested authorities likely to succumb to money over the fair representation of their people.
The WTO has the legal powers in place to enforce foreign investor state dispute judgements, (read: governements being sued by companies) and do so. A company can get their case heard and settled in under a year.
The UN can judge on human rights violations, but hasn't one single way of attempting to enforce their judgements. There are simply no international treaties in place to ensure the enforcement of human rights violations. They nailed Peru on wrongfully jailing a woman under terrible conditions for 10 years. They told Peru to let her out last year. She's still in jail.
>That's how the free market works: products that are ready for primetime, products that consumers wants, products that offer a price point, will sell.
Ahhh! You idiot!:) I asked you to prove that free-markets result in innovation, not just selling, and you reply by saying, in a free-market world, the thing that is best suited for selling sells. Well, DUH! My question is, justify that whatever sells is actually an innovation. My point was that, often, to get something to sell, companies must deinnovate. Pure innovation doesn't respect people's abilities to comprehend said thing as an innovation (can you imagine if Einstein wasn't discovered because in order for his research to be folded into the market place and community, he had to sell his theory of relativity?!), nor accept the reality that different things qualify as innovations to different people. Unfortunately, in a free-market world, everyone tends to research and develop things that are going to sell, not what they may (prophetically) perceive as an important to our existance or humanity as a whole. IE, I would say that free-market does not lead to innovation.. it leads to really high levels of selling, and the kind of blistering development that tends to lead to poor platforms, few standards, and populations spending their worth on technologies they dont understand or that ultimately do not improve their lives.
But that's just my take. My only frusteration is that very few people actually have an idea of how the international market has developed since WWII, and how trade agreements have reshaped the power dynamics between companies and governments over the last 20 years. This is a completely different landscape than it was 30 years ago, and I don't think too many people appreciate that. Much of the true changes in market dynamics has happened under the radar, while people have eaten up the idea of free-market tarriff-free trade as some sort of 'magical' potion to whatever challenge and purpose people perceive the human race exists to serve.
> ones where the government either mandated a private corporation
You display your ignorance here. You're not honouring the reality that since we, the people, have been more than happy to chip away at our goverments' ability and legal powers to mandate, regulate and punish (an idea that seems to make most rabid free-markerers piss thier pants in fear). Even a passing knowledge of the changes in trade laws and treaties over the past 40 years would allow you to comprehend that companies have more legal rights and powers on the international market scenes than governments themselves. It's real. People don't want to believe it, but it's real. Read up on NAFTA. Read up on any of the recent lawsuits being launched against governments world wide by private corperations, both domestic and abroad. The point is, it's harder than ever for a government to actually regulate the market or a company, due to the enormous size of corperations (and thus their economic leverage), and their successful con of the public at large in convincing Joe Blow that the government is a corrupt, antiquated insitution that does nothing but collects taxes and wastes money. In short, there is neither public support nor legal support for governments to control the markets much, even if they wanted to. The MS case is a good example of this. Another good example is of a Canadian company suing Santa Monica for 1.3 billion dollars in punative damanges, because Santa Monica was forced to buy 80 of their drinking water at a cost of 3 million dollars per year becuase this company's unsafe product contaminated dozens of free water wells. The State of California (along with 9 other states) has banned their product, and thus, is being sued for it. See? It's way beyond governments regulating anything right now.. in fact, it's pretty much the other way around. Companies are successfully changing the laws in our countries, with very little public knowedge.
> If this isn't proof that all "big businesses" can be affected by smaller ones, and to let consumers make and break businesses, rather than regulations, I don't know what is...
Wait. So Intel says, "/If/ smaller company is successful in gaining significant market share and our product doesn't sell, we'll compromise our own technology by slapping down our next generation technology on an already embedded platform that already has a near monopoly despite it being the more expensive, slower (in most benchmarks) choice." I'll give you that the Ps are more stable, but, in general, stability is more of a function of the time the product has spent in the market and its user base rather than pure off-the-factory-line stability.
How can you possibly claim this is proof of your incredibly sweeping statement that the free-market is the best way when this story is about compromising an innovation by saddling it over an aging platform because of market dynamics and perceptions? This ongoing confusion about what 'innovation' really is irks me. Hint: it's not successfully selling a product.. it's actually being innovative. Since free-market proponants tend to use the best selling product as an example of how the market picks the best product, it's a completely moot, self-reliant argument, and one I'm growing somewhat tired of.
Probably the funniest thing is that this whole story is about the LACK of success of the Itanium. If free-market economics is the best way, and drives 'innovation', why has the Itanium, having enjoyed an insanely large 1 billion dollar r&d budget, and 7 years of unfettered un-government-meddled un-regulated development turned out to be the kind of flop that has the potential to force Intel into going backwards technologically?!
>I>essentially translates into a higher possibility
er, I meant lower possibility of latent design flaws with a large user base. A smaller user base increases the likelihood of problems existing unnoticed for an unspecified amount of time.
What planet are you from? Lower costs (in the case of demonstrated similarity in performance) typically means lower demand and lower consumer valuation of the brand name, which means smaller user base, which means that it generally takes longer to run into compatibility flaws.
For instance, Nike is more expensive than Puma. Does that mean Nike shoes are better? Of course not, it means people are more willing to buy Nike, because they percieve that the brand gives them additional values. In the world of shoes, that value is the value of conformity and fashion.. in CPUs, it's the value of a larger consumer base, which essentially translates into a higher possibility of latent design flaws (ie, they exist in the costlier platform as well, but are found earlier because of the larger user base), and the value of being in the same boat as everyone else should a product fail in some fashion.
Thue funniest thing is you're talking about performance. Performance is how well something works when it works. When it/doesnt/ work, thats not performance; it's either compatibility with the outside world or a design flaw. Anyhow, I feel sorry for your view, because I guess you're paying alot of money for brand security.. but everyone in-the-know computer geek I know (I'm a C++ developer, so I'm not talking tech fanboys here) knows that you'd have to enjoy wasting money to justify buying Intel CPUs at this point in time.
Lest you cite this situation as a reason why I might be wrong.. it has already been fixed in Windows, and there is a known Linux workaround. So really, there's not much of an issue, and my AMD chip still cost me half the price of an Intel CPU, and benchmarks faster than the Intel, to boot! Keep buying your Nikes! I just want the shoe.:)
1) If the machine requires energy (my interpretation), then.. well, you need energy to set up winmills and to maintain them. That doesn't mean that they arn't able to collect more energy than it took to set up in the long run from a source that seems limitless (if inconsitant, in this case.) My point being, there's nothing in the laws of physics that says that this machine can't use energy to allow it to collect energy from other source (neutrinos? heat from the sun? i know, its a long shot.. ) that is so near being limitless that it might as well be, with such a small amount of energy required to get it going such that the energy required to maintain it or get it going is insignificant compared to the energy it creates due to it's ability to harness the yet-to-be-identified energy from an energy source that is 'outside the box' of conventional science.
2) Don't forget how many scientists/explorers were ridiculed in their day, unknown until years later, for thinking 'outside the box'. Gallileo, Columbus, yadda yadda. Some were jailed for their claims.
It's definately a long shot. Really long. The Segway was claimed, in its early days, to be an invention that 'revolutionizes' the world. Whatever. My only point is that society honours its live conformists (all the naysayers) and its dead troublemakers (Gallileo). I'm interested in knowing more. Calling it a hoax because you read a Reutors story (in which your whole issue is that Reutors knows nothing, so it's kind of a self-defeating judgement) only does a disservice and perhaps delays an important discovery in a world where we will only believe the crazy stories from institutions and people who've already gained our trust.
I'm only saying... we've alot to gain by saying "Well, I'm skeptical, but I'll hear you out", and very little to gain (other than an evening's chuckle) from rediculing it before we're filled in on the details. Cell phones were invented 30 years before they became insanely well ingrained in society. This is in part due to people's perceptions and lack of desire to believe in anything that has the potential to significantly alter their world in ways they cannot fathom.
In other words
, Junk Food news is the jounalistic equivilent of crack - sure, its fun and makes you feel great (superior, normal, well-adjusted, sane, whatever), but it distracts you from knowing whats actually going on in the world that affects you.
Yeah, I might be overreaching here, but most newspapers I read consistantly run news stories that are more entertainment oriented than news oriented. Compare this to newspapers from 80 years ago, where, due to the lack of corperate interests in keeping you well fed with junk, they relagated this kind of neato-but-useless reporting to the back pages. And if this story was run mostly in back pages, then it's slashdot who's guilty of promoting junk food news.
You people are just prooving that "Dog Bites Man" (which is real news, but happens often) does not make good news, while "Man Bites Dog" (the infrequent type of news that has no bearing on your life) is news.
Junk Food news is the weapon of the large media conglomerates. After all, if you're busy laughing at "Man Bites Dog", you're liable not to see the dog about to bite you, sneaking up, unreported, from behind.
Which is to say, if this story is so incredulous, why support and motivate the desire for the APs and Reuters of the world to print this kind of stuff? Do you think they are interested in bringing you news that affects your life, or more interested in bringing you news you lap up, laugh, argue over, and dis, and ultimately has no direct bearing on your life (until this thing hits mass production, of course).
> And I do see trolls face to face, I have to put up with them for about 5 hours every weekday. Thats what I get for attending a high school.
Ah, but its in your collective social interest to put up with it.. cause its high school and you're all in it together. Just wait till work. Trolls get punished. It's the OffTopic's that don't, damn it.;)
That was, perhaps, a little harshly worded. I am only frusterated by how many people are prepared to defend a view that affects many many people with a few examples from their own life and friends. It almost makes it feel useless to learn about things outside your own existance, if people will only exchange ideas that relate to their own, limited (no matter who you are) existance and makes it difficult to come to terms with ideologies and solutions that benifit everyone.
I disagree, because I don't consider face-to-face interactivity to be the only valid form of socializing.
Just once, I'd love to debate with someone who does not forward their own experiences and emotional opinions as points to support their argument. I am not talking about your happiness, or your wealth, or your ability to learn. I am including the overall level of happiness shared by the 6 billion people on this planet. You only furthur support my notion that technology has empowered us with the 'freedom' to not worry how our actions or how the ideas we propagate through society affect the people around us at an individual physical and emotional level.
Congrats to you for finding a social medium which caters to your (admittedly) anti-social nature, but understand that face-to-face socialization is a key part of being social. Face-to-face social behaviour is the only social interaction in which you are forced to consider the physical consequences of your communication. To that end, sure, you might have deeper conversations online, but the lack of consequence for fowarding a self-selving or self-affirming position only furthur entrenches the 'truth' of self-interest (or the interests of a finely grained community such as anime fans (no dis to anime.. I love it. Just saw Ninja Scroll yesterday, great movie.)). It is only in face to face communication, with physical consequences, in which you must consider your communication as being part of a greater social structure. This is why you don't see many trolls on the street.. cause people gotta think about what they say before they say it. Obviously, it's a two way street, but at least it forces the reality that, eventually, collective beliefs can and will be enforced at a physical level.
Point one is good, but can be claimed about anything. Most of what I've read about the higher levels of depression take this into account, although its a tough one to prove. The same arguments are forwarded when people claim that men do not get raped, etc.. yes, we have higher levels of reporting, but we also have fairly accurate statistical sciences to take these sorts of things into account.
Point two.. if people think they are unhappier, than they are.:) And it supports the notion that the pursuit of material gain and technological prowess are empty promises that ultimately make us feel unhappy.. thus, we are unhappy. I totally agree that ignoring or avoiding mass media is a healthy choice that will probably increase your chances of not feeling inadequate or unwealthy (in all meanings of the word, not just financially.) Advertising is definately about forwarding a fantasy world in which to live outside of it is to be unhappy. I totally agree with you.
> Do you think I give a rats ass if "anthropologists and psychologists" are alarmed if my behavior isn't to their liking?
Of course not. This doesn't change the matter tho. They can say it all they want.. they're not seeking your approval of their observations, in the same way that people who wish to ignore the doctor may do so. Just as long as if the shit hits the fan, they are comfortable holding themselves accountable for their situation. It's all good man, do what ya wanna!:)
> Technology increases freedom
Ah ah. Here's the big lie. Technology increases the freedom of those who have significant resources to aquire it. Technology actally introduces disparities in freedom. As soon as A exists, and only some people have access to A, you've limited the freedom of those who can't have it, if you claim that it increases your freedom. For all you've learned, you havn't learned that 'freedom' is not really freedom until everyone has it. Otherwise, I'd call it a priviledge. If you feel its worth increasing your array of priviledges at the cost of others (we won't go into that), hell, go for it. I'm an elitest, but I'm not about making other people do something they don't want to. I trust in social patters and evolution to make the right cheques and balances.
I just think that saying that saying that the world "Is what it is" is a vast oversimplification. The trends we are commenting on are relegated to a select percentage of the population of this planet. Your world may be what it is, but this doesn't change the fact that 'your world', ie the branch of social and technological changes that you actively participate in (as well as myself), is quite likely worse off for humanity than good. No use arguing that, as time will tell.:)
> Do you seriously think that the average peasant or artisan from 300 years ago cared about music and art?
Do you seriously think that the average peasant from 300 years ago cared about gaining as much money/material as possible over music? Art, music was in the form of performing artists.. in fact, allow me to play devil's advocate and point out that the high levels of literacy achieved in industrialized nations could be (not is) in part responsible for the relative demise of the socially benificial activity of storytelling? This is kind of what Katz' article was about. Our technology is allowing us to be more anti-social than ever.
> struggling against starvation and disease
Yeah, good thing we eliminated these things 200 years ago. Seriously.. you want to really convince me, I need global statistics for the levels of disease and starvation.
As for the life expectancy thing, thats you're value, bub. It's another example of technology empowering us to a degree that damages social patters (in this case, people who die of old age are doing so alone at a nursing home, in greater numbers than ever before. Good thing we can keep ourselves alive for so long!)
Exactly. I think MS doesn't really put too much vested interest into any of their 'growth' arms.. basically, they just try and get into anything that they can feasibly throw together. When something sticks, they just start pointing content in their entrenched products towards that.. hard to fail when the shit has stuck and you've got more dynamic 'billboards' on this planet than anyone else.
> Hell, my idea of hell is shopping in busy malls.
Actually, you're idea of hell would be for your world to be plunged into economic uncertainty and war. Katz point resonates particularly well with respect to your post.. if you think shopping is hell, technology and modes of communication has empowered you too much
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You're missing the point. Sure, you have more opportunities to meet different people, but you're completely ignoring the tendancy for people to seek out comfortable situations. In being able to have more control over who you meet, and when, and how, and being able to meet lots more people (no one is arguing that that isn't true) you're participating in a form of self-censorship that anthropologists and psychologists tend to point out is the mental equivilent of pigging out on chocolate.
When you have too much of what you want, and are not forced into social situations where you have to deal with social situations that you are not comfortable with or enjoy, you are unable to develop the neccessary skills to deal with adversity, diametric ideologies, different thinking, etc... You become ideologically fat and lazy, and when push comes to shove, will protect your ideologies to the very end, even if it turns out that they are not suitable or compatiable with the broader scope of the human condition.
I always thought it was kinda funny how, when I was a child, the worse the cough medicine tasted, the better it was for you. Now adays, people expect technology to make the medicine not only work, but taste better, store your contact information, and start your car on winter mornings. In other words, just because you enjoy or interpret the technology around you as 'good for you', doesn't mean that it is. Capiche?
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Meaningful conversations with random people at your local mall is a trite example.
Shopping is but one of the many (dubious) activities we participate in. Hell, the idea of shopping at the mall is an idea about, say, 60 years old. Humans have been around much longer than that. The perilous and totally out of proportion value of material gain aside (as it's really only been in the last 200 years that material gain has been valued over various other social activies such as family, music, art, etc), Katz' point (and one that is right on the money IMHO) is that technology allows us to place 'blinders' on. Think, the whole image that content providers are trying to sell us is: "Get what you want, when you want." Ironically, not having total control over your environment is what facilitates advertisy, the growth of social skills and values, etc. Essentially, the carrot of technology as it relates to communication is a poison carrot. Most anthropologists will agree that the western technology-driven culture is unique in the history of humanity, and the majority of those will purpot that it is unlikely to be a successful experiement in terms of humanity's social developments. Increasing levels of depression among westerners seems to tip us off to the fact that while we may have more of what we want, when we want, it may not be what's best for us.
Fortunately, time and evolution will vet these ideas. Whether or not we (consumers, those who buy into technology as progress, control over our environment and situation as progress) will be nailed to the wall by the billions of people in an evolutionary reality check (operating under the assumption that social parterns are simply manifestations of evolutional tendencies, there to facilitate, stop, start certain methods of interacting with our world) remains to be seen, but one thing is for sure: it is becoming increasingly difficult for people in this world to understand or comprehend that what seems 'true' in our worlds only flies until you hit another culture or ideology. Those who grasp to their own values as the inherent 'right' way of doing things will likely be first to the wall.
I've diverged a little from the topic, but I just wanted to point out that comparing shopping vs. IM in terms of their benifits to our existance as social animals is but a tiny, meaningless comparison. You may meet people who share your views over IM, but ultimately, you have too much control over your environment, and can cease communication at any time with anyone who might have new ways of thinking or new ideas that you have a hard time feeling comfortable with. IM isn't the only medium which facilitates self-censorship, but it's certainly one of them. Maybe if you're of an age where your person and opinions have already been formed, this isn't so dangerous. However, as a 23 year old who spends time with many demographics (my friends are the broke bohemian types, while I work in the advertising industry for fortune 500 companies), I can tell you that it is ideological suicide for still-forming minds.
> Why can't people that lost their domain names just fight their own battles?
Like, why can't people who got beat up just beat the other guy up? Duh.. I think the idea is, there is a reason they lost in the first place, and that would be lack of support, lack of ammunition, lack of fighting supplies ($$s and lawyers in today-speak.) Companies have been notorious for threatening legal action against small domain owners who have no choice but to fold, given the enormous financial risk that legal defence imposes.
You remind me of those rabid free-market capitalists who keep asking, "So those people in countries with no money and food.. why can't they just build some shit and make money for food?" You know, sometimes you're so focused on the next meal (or not losing your life's savings in the case of the domainname holders) that you couldn't concentrate on the bigger plan (being the champion, the hero, the company killer with respect to the domain holders) even if you wanted to.
And as an enthusiast, I like knowing the actual MHz
As an enthusiast, you should be able to find the MHz rating of your chip. Hrm, lets see.. on the 'net, on the box, in your BIOS. As an enthusiast, you arn't losing anything in their naming scheme. Are car enthusiasts fsck'd because the horse power rating of engines isn't included in the name of the model of the car?
As an enthusiast, you should know how little the MHz rating has to do with the actual performance of the chip with respect to cross-brand comparisons. Joe Consumer still clings to Intel's carrot (Mhz = performance), so AMD is just trying to give everyone a dose of reality. I think it's funny how people feel that they're being mislead, when really, the clock stat is just being moved to 'specs' page of the chip.. it's removal from the name is simply so that Joe Consumer can't keep saying, "The latest P4 runs at Y Ghz, and the latest AMD runs at (Y - X) Ghz, so I'd better buy the Intel." Whether the strategy pays off in the long run (and I think it will, as the clock rating becomes more and more meaningless when discussing home/office computing) is not clear yet, but they are doing you and your friends more of a favour than a disservice.
A High Ranking Navy Officer was scandalized here in Canada when it was found that he had used a Navy laptop to access porn. It wasn't quite email filtering, but they were monitoring the usage of the computer. I just want to point out that the people of China cannot choose their policies and laws. That we all know. So really, taking the two courses of action upon implementing email filtering, being upfront or not telling people, I think being upfront is cool.
You are merely complaining about what constitutes subversive material (our countries are notorious for turning away erotic lesbian and gay material if its high profile enough in the market, like an artsy book or whatnot) and the more restrictive morals set by the state. Like, sure, we all knew that! but between then government being upfront vs. the government letting 'subversives' get jailed with no warning, I think they did the right thing.
Sure man, Doom / Doom 2 are awesome games. If you like those, pick up serious sam EBWorld did a survey of all the big gaming sites and magazines, and Serious Sam walked away with best game of 2001. It's 20$. It's Doom (complete with funky sense of humour, 300 enemy battles on absolutely HUGE maps, 20 story tall final baddie) with 2001 level graphics. It's amazing; if you deem FPS's of today a little too involving, Serious Sam is non-stop heart-pouding action. No story, no dialog, no stupid NPCs, just shooting and shooting and ambushes and shooting and armies and shooting. If you think you like Doom over other FPS because of the awesome enemy spawning and item placement and non stop action, Serious Sam is your leap into the 2000s... and at 20$, you have no excuse not to give it a shot! Shit, I'd have spent 50$ on it.. it truely was one of the most enjoyable games I've played and completed in YEARS.
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> Regulate an industry, and innovation dies. Companies now make less money, spend more time tied up in red tape, and may even be profit capped. What's the incentive to innovate? Why bother with R&D?
:), was the beginnings of NAFTA and the beginnings of unprecedented corperate influence on the Canadian Government. So, you see, it was free-market politics that led to the problem you lament in the first place. Most economists and historians will point out that while political corruption has always existed, the 80s brought about a new kind of influcence, and a new kind of public 'acceptance' of a conned 'its always been like this' reality that governments were nothing but self-interested authorities likely to succumb to money over the fair representation of their people.
Regulate an industry, and sometimes people don't die. That's my point. Letting companies go at it may slow them down and slow down our rate of inventing, but tends to lead to companies being forced to be more socially responsible, and inventing what they believe is the right thing, not the profitable thing.
BTW, your governments only do what they get paid to do by companies is part of the scam. It is free-market proponants who are the biggest fans of allowing unregulated mixtures of public and private business, including soft donation type deals. You can't have your cake and eat it to! Free-market economics and less governmental leverage in enforcing policies that are in their populations' best interest has resulted in the enormous amounts of influcence you lament. Pierre Trudeau (a Canadian PM in the 70s) was famous for being stubborn and unpressuable by big business, and the first thing that happened once his term was up, and a free-market fan was in (Brian Mulroony, who all Canadians now hate for reasons you might not understand
Actually, this one might surprise people:
The WTO has the legal powers in place to enforce foreign investor state dispute judgements, (read: governements being sued by companies) and do so. A company can get their case heard and settled in under a year.
The UN can judge on human rights violations, but hasn't one single way of attempting to enforce their judgements. There are simply no international treaties in place to ensure the enforcement of human rights violations. They nailed Peru on wrongfully jailing a woman under terrible conditions for 10 years. They told Peru to let her out last year. She's still in jail.
>That's how the free market works: products that are ready for primetime, products that consumers wants, products that offer a price point, will sell.
:) I asked you to prove that free-markets result in innovation, not just selling, and you reply by saying, in a free-market world, the thing that is best suited for selling sells. Well, DUH! My question is, justify that whatever sells is actually an innovation. My point was that, often, to get something to sell, companies must deinnovate. Pure innovation doesn't respect people's abilities to comprehend said thing as an innovation (can you imagine if Einstein wasn't discovered because in order for his research to be folded into the market place and community, he had to sell his theory of relativity?!), nor accept the reality that different things qualify as innovations to different people. Unfortunately, in a free-market world, everyone tends to research and develop things that are going to sell, not what they may (prophetically) perceive as an important to our existance or humanity as a whole. IE, I would say that free-market does not lead to innovation .. it leads to really high levels of selling, and the kind of blistering development that tends to lead to poor platforms, few standards, and populations spending their worth on technologies they dont understand or that ultimately do not improve their lives.
Ahhh! You idiot!
But that's just my take. My only frusteration is that very few people actually have an idea of how the international market has developed since WWII, and how trade agreements have reshaped the power dynamics between companies and governments over the last 20 years. This is a completely different landscape than it was 30 years ago, and I don't think too many people appreciate that. Much of the true changes in market dynamics has happened under the radar, while people have eaten up the idea of free-market tarriff-free trade as some sort of 'magical' potion to whatever challenge and purpose people perceive the human race exists to serve.
> ones where the government either mandated a private corporation
.. in fact, it's pretty much the other way around. Companies are successfully changing the laws in our countries, with very little public knowedge.
You display your ignorance here. You're not honouring the reality that since we, the people, have been more than happy to chip away at our goverments' ability and legal powers to mandate, regulate and punish (an idea that seems to make most rabid free-markerers piss thier pants in fear). Even a passing knowledge of the changes in trade laws and treaties over the past 40 years would allow you to comprehend that companies have more legal rights and powers on the international market scenes than governments themselves. It's real. People don't want to believe it, but it's real. Read up on NAFTA. Read up on any of the recent lawsuits being launched against governments world wide by private corperations, both domestic and abroad. The point is, it's harder than ever for a government to actually regulate the market or a company, due to the enormous size of corperations (and thus their economic leverage), and their successful con of the public at large in convincing Joe Blow that the government is a corrupt, antiquated insitution that does nothing but collects taxes and wastes money. In short, there is neither public support nor legal support for governments to control the markets much, even if they wanted to. The MS case is a good example of this. Another good example is of a Canadian company suing Santa Monica for 1.3 billion dollars in punative damanges, because Santa Monica was forced to buy 80 of their drinking water at a cost of 3 million dollars per year becuase this company's unsafe product contaminated dozens of free water wells. The State of California (along with 9 other states) has banned their product, and thus, is being sued for it. See? It's way beyond governments regulating anything right now
> If this isn't proof that all "big businesses" can be affected by smaller ones, and to let consumers make and break businesses, rather than regulations, I don't know what is...
.. it's actually being innovative. Since free-market proponants tend to use the best selling product as an example of how the market picks the best product, it's a completely moot, self-reliant argument, and one I'm growing somewhat tired of.
Wait. So Intel says, "/If/ smaller company is successful in gaining significant market share and our product doesn't sell, we'll compromise our own technology by slapping down our next generation technology on an already embedded platform that already has a near monopoly despite it being the more expensive, slower (in most benchmarks) choice." I'll give you that the Ps are more stable, but, in general, stability is more of a function of the time the product has spent in the market and its user base rather than pure off-the-factory-line stability.
How can you possibly claim this is proof of your incredibly sweeping statement that the free-market is the best way when this story is about compromising an innovation by saddling it over an aging platform because of market dynamics and perceptions? This ongoing confusion about what 'innovation' really is irks me. Hint: it's not successfully selling a product
Probably the funniest thing is that this whole story is about the LACK of success of the Itanium. If free-market economics is the best way, and drives 'innovation', why has the Itanium, having enjoyed an insanely large 1 billion dollar r&d budget, and 7 years of unfettered un-government-meddled un-regulated development turned out to be the kind of flop that has the potential to force Intel into going backwards technologically?!
>I>essentially translates into a higher possibility
er, I meant lower possibility of latent design flaws with a large user base. A smaller user base increases the likelihood of problems existing unnoticed for an unspecified amount of time.
>Lower costs typically means lower perfomance
.. in CPUs, it's the value of a larger consumer base, which essentially translates into a higher possibility of latent design flaws (ie, they exist in the costlier platform as well, but are found earlier because of the larger user base), and the value of being in the same boat as everyone else should a product fail in some fashion.
/doesnt/ work, thats not performance; it's either compatibility with the outside world or a design flaw. Anyhow, I feel sorry for your view, because I guess you're paying alot of money for brand security .. but everyone in-the-know computer geek I know (I'm a C++ developer, so I'm not talking tech fanboys here) knows that you'd have to enjoy wasting money to justify buying Intel CPUs at this point in time.
.. it has already been fixed in Windows, and there is a known Linux workaround. So really, there's not much of an issue, and my AMD chip still cost me half the price of an Intel CPU, and benchmarks faster than the Intel, to boot! Keep buying your Nikes! I just want the shoe. :)
What planet are you from? Lower costs (in the case of demonstrated similarity in performance) typically means lower demand and lower consumer valuation of the brand name, which means smaller user base, which means that it generally takes longer to run into compatibility flaws.
For instance, Nike is more expensive than Puma. Does that mean Nike shoes are better? Of course not, it means people are more willing to buy Nike, because they percieve that the brand gives them additional values. In the world of shoes, that value is the value of conformity and fashion
Thue funniest thing is you're talking about performance. Performance is how well something works when it works. When it
Lest you cite this situation as a reason why I might be wrong
Two quick and probably easy-to-obliterate points:
.. well, you need energy to set up winmills and to maintain them. That doesn't mean that they arn't able to collect more energy than it took to set up in the long run from a source that seems limitless (if inconsitant, in this case.) My point being, there's nothing in the laws of physics that says that this machine can't use energy to allow it to collect energy from other source (neutrinos? heat from the sun? i know, its a long shot .. ) that is so near being limitless that it might as well be, with such a small amount of energy required to get it going such that the energy required to maintain it or get it going is insignificant compared to the energy it creates due to it's ability to harness the yet-to-be-identified energy from an energy source that is 'outside the box' of conventional science.
... we've alot to gain by saying "Well, I'm skeptical, but I'll hear you out", and very little to gain (other than an evening's chuckle) from rediculing it before we're filled in on the details. Cell phones were invented 30 years before they became insanely well ingrained in society. This is in part due to people's perceptions and lack of desire to believe in anything that has the potential to significantly alter their world in ways they cannot fathom.
1) If the machine requires energy (my interpretation), then
2) Don't forget how many scientists/explorers were ridiculed in their day, unknown until years later, for thinking 'outside the box'. Gallileo, Columbus, yadda yadda. Some were jailed for their claims.
It's definately a long shot. Really long. The Segway was claimed, in its early days, to be an invention that 'revolutionizes' the world. Whatever. My only point is that society honours its live conformists (all the naysayers) and its dead troublemakers (Gallileo). I'm interested in knowing more. Calling it a hoax because you read a Reutors story (in which your whole issue is that Reutors knows nothing, so it's kind of a self-defeating judgement) only does a disservice and perhaps delays an important discovery in a world where we will only believe the crazy stories from institutions and people who've already gained our trust.
I'm only saying
In other words
, Junk Food news is the jounalistic equivilent of crack - sure, its fun and makes you feel great (superior, normal, well-adjusted, sane, whatever), but it distracts you from knowing whats actually going on in the world that affects you.
Yeah, I might be overreaching here, but most newspapers I read consistantly run news stories that are more entertainment oriented than news oriented. Compare this to newspapers from 80 years ago, where, due to the lack of corperate interests in keeping you well fed with junk, they relagated this kind of neato-but-useless reporting to the back pages. And if this story was run mostly in back pages, then it's slashdot who's guilty of promoting junk food news.
You people are just prooving that "Dog Bites Man" (which is real news, but happens often) does not make good news, while "Man Bites Dog" (the infrequent type of news that has no bearing on your life) is news.
Junk Food news is the weapon of the large media conglomerates. After all, if you're busy laughing at "Man Bites Dog", you're liable not to see the dog about to bite you, sneaking up, unreported, from behind.
Which is to say, if this story is so incredulous, why support and motivate the desire for the APs and Reuters of the world to print this kind of stuff? Do you think they are interested in bringing you news that affects your life, or more interested in bringing you news you lap up, laugh, argue over, and dis, and ultimately has no direct bearing on your life (until this thing hits mass production, of course).
Love the .sig, especially the Pepsi kid. Keep the link ... I may add it to my sig in the future.
> And I do see trolls face to face, I have to put up with them for about 5 hours every weekday. Thats what I get for attending a high school.
.. cause its high school and you're all in it together. Just wait till work. Trolls get punished. It's the OffTopic's that don't, damn it. ;)
Ah, but its in your collective social interest to put up with it
That was, perhaps, a little harshly worded. I am only frusterated by how many people are prepared to defend a view that affects many many people with a few examples from their own life and friends. It almost makes it feel useless to learn about things outside your own existance, if people will only exchange ideas that relate to their own, limited (no matter who you are) existance and makes it difficult to come to terms with ideologies and solutions that benifit everyone.
Sorry if I came off a little snippity.
I disagree, because I don't consider face-to-face interactivity to be the only valid form of socializing.
.. I love it. Just saw Ninja Scroll yesterday, great movie.)). It is only in face to face communication, with physical consequences, in which you must consider your communication as being part of a greater social structure. This is why you don't see many trolls on the street .. cause people gotta think about what they say before they say it. Obviously, it's a two way street, but at least it forces the reality that, eventually, collective beliefs can and will be enforced at a physical level.
Just once, I'd love to debate with someone who does not forward their own experiences and emotional opinions as points to support their argument. I am not talking about your happiness, or your wealth, or your ability to learn. I am including the overall level of happiness shared by the 6 billion people on this planet. You only furthur support my notion that technology has empowered us with the 'freedom' to not worry how our actions or how the ideas we propagate through society affect the people around us at an individual physical and emotional level.
Congrats to you for finding a social medium which caters to your (admittedly) anti-social nature, but understand that face-to-face socialization is a key part of being social. Face-to-face social behaviour is the only social interaction in which you are forced to consider the physical consequences of your communication. To that end, sure, you might have deeper conversations online, but the lack of consequence for fowarding a self-selving or self-affirming position only furthur entrenches the 'truth' of self-interest (or the interests of a finely grained community such as anime fans (no dis to anime
Point one is good, but can be claimed about anything. Most of what I've read about the higher levels of depression take this into account, although its a tough one to prove. The same arguments are forwarded when people claim that men do not get raped, etc .. yes, we have higher levels of reporting, but we also have fairly accurate statistical sciences to take these sorts of things into account.
.. if people think they are unhappier, than they are. :) And it supports the notion that the pursuit of material gain and technological prowess are empty promises that ultimately make us feel unhappy .. thus, we are unhappy. I totally agree that ignoring or avoiding mass media is a healthy choice that will probably increase your chances of not feeling inadequate or unwealthy (in all meanings of the word, not just financially.) Advertising is definately about forwarding a fantasy world in which to live outside of it is to be unhappy. I totally agree with you.
Point two
> Do you think I give a rats ass if "anthropologists and psychologists" are alarmed if my behavior isn't to their liking?
.. they're not seeking your approval of their observations, in the same way that people who wish to ignore the doctor may do so. Just as long as if the shit hits the fan, they are comfortable holding themselves accountable for their situation. It's all good man, do what ya wanna! :)
:)
Of course not. This doesn't change the matter tho. They can say it all they want
> Technology increases freedom
Ah ah. Here's the big lie. Technology increases the freedom of those who have significant resources to aquire it. Technology actally introduces disparities in freedom. As soon as A exists, and only some people have access to A, you've limited the freedom of those who can't have it, if you claim that it increases your freedom. For all you've learned, you havn't learned that 'freedom' is not really freedom until everyone has it. Otherwise, I'd call it a priviledge. If you feel its worth increasing your array of priviledges at the cost of others (we won't go into that), hell, go for it. I'm an elitest, but I'm not about making other people do something they don't want to. I trust in social patters and evolution to make the right cheques and balances.
I just think that saying that saying that the world "Is what it is" is a vast oversimplification. The trends we are commenting on are relegated to a select percentage of the population of this planet. Your world may be what it is, but this doesn't change the fact that 'your world', ie the branch of social and technological changes that you actively participate in (as well as myself), is quite likely worse off for humanity than good. No use arguing that, as time will tell.
> Do you seriously think that the average peasant or artisan from 300 years ago cared about music and art?
.. in fact, allow me to play devil's advocate and point out that the high levels of literacy achieved in industrialized nations could be (not is) in part responsible for the relative demise of the socially benificial activity of storytelling? This is kind of what Katz' article was about. Our technology is allowing us to be more anti-social than ever.
.. you want to really convince me, I need global statistics for the levels of disease and starvation.
Do you seriously think that the average peasant from 300 years ago cared about gaining as much money/material as possible over music? Art, music was in the form of performing artists
> struggling against starvation and disease
Yeah, good thing we eliminated these things 200 years ago. Seriously
As for the life expectancy thing, thats you're value, bub. It's another example of technology empowering us to a degree that damages social patters (in this case, people who die of old age are doing so alone at a nursing home, in greater numbers than ever before. Good thing we can keep ourselves alive for so long!)
Exactly. I think MS doesn't really put too much vested interest into any of their 'growth' arms .. basically, they just try and get into anything that they can feasibly throw together. When something sticks, they just start pointing content in their entrenched products towards that .. hard to fail when the shit has stuck and you've got more dynamic 'billboards' on this planet than anyone else.
> Hell, my idea of hell is shopping in busy malls.
.. if you think shopping is hell, technology and modes of communication has empowered you too much
Actually, you're idea of hell would be for your world to be plunged into economic uncertainty and war. Katz point resonates particularly well with respect to your post
You're missing the point. Sure, you have more opportunities to meet different people, but you're completely ignoring the tendancy for people to seek out comfortable situations. In being able to have more control over who you meet, and when, and how, and being able to meet lots more people (no one is arguing that that isn't true) you're participating in a form of self-censorship that anthropologists and psychologists tend to point out is the mental equivilent of pigging out on chocolate.
... You become ideologically fat and lazy, and when push comes to shove, will protect your ideologies to the very end, even if it turns out that they are not suitable or compatiable with the broader scope of the human condition.
When you have too much of what you want, and are not forced into social situations where you have to deal with social situations that you are not comfortable with or enjoy, you are unable to develop the neccessary skills to deal with adversity, diametric ideologies, different thinking, etc
I always thought it was kinda funny how, when I was a child, the worse the cough medicine tasted, the better it was for you. Now adays, people expect technology to make the medicine not only work, but taste better, store your contact information, and start your car on winter mornings. In other words, just because you enjoy or interpret the technology around you as 'good for you', doesn't mean that it is. Capiche?
Meaningful conversations with random people at your local mall is a trite example.
Shopping is but one of the many (dubious) activities we participate in. Hell, the idea of shopping at the mall is an idea about, say, 60 years old. Humans have been around much longer than that. The perilous and totally out of proportion value of material gain aside (as it's really only been in the last 200 years that material gain has been valued over various other social activies such as family, music, art, etc), Katz' point (and one that is right on the money IMHO) is that technology allows us to place 'blinders' on. Think, the whole image that content providers are trying to sell us is: "Get what you want, when you want." Ironically, not having total control over your environment is what facilitates advertisy, the growth of social skills and values, etc. Essentially, the carrot of technology as it relates to communication is a poison carrot. Most anthropologists will agree that the western technology-driven culture is unique in the history of humanity, and the majority of those will purpot that it is unlikely to be a successful experiement in terms of humanity's social developments. Increasing levels of depression among westerners seems to tip us off to the fact that while we may have more of what we want, when we want, it may not be what's best for us.
Fortunately, time and evolution will vet these ideas. Whether or not we (consumers, those who buy into technology as progress, control over our environment and situation as progress) will be nailed to the wall by the billions of people in an evolutionary reality check (operating under the assumption that social parterns are simply manifestations of evolutional tendencies, there to facilitate, stop, start certain methods of interacting with our world) remains to be seen, but one thing is for sure: it is becoming increasingly difficult for people in this world to understand or comprehend that what seems 'true' in our worlds only flies until you hit another culture or ideology. Those who grasp to their own values as the inherent 'right' way of doing things will likely be first to the wall.
I've diverged a little from the topic, but I just wanted to point out that comparing shopping vs. IM in terms of their benifits to our existance as social animals is but a tiny, meaningless comparison. You may meet people who share your views over IM, but ultimately, you have too much control over your environment, and can cease communication at any time with anyone who might have new ways of thinking or new ideas that you have a hard time feeling comfortable with. IM isn't the only medium which facilitates self-censorship, but it's certainly one of them. Maybe if you're of an age where your person and opinions have already been formed, this isn't so dangerous. However, as a 23 year old who spends time with many demographics (my friends are the broke bohemian types, while I work in the advertising industry for fortune 500 companies), I can tell you that it is ideological suicide for still-forming minds.
> Why can't people that lost their domain names just fight their own battles?
.. I think the idea is, there is a reason they lost in the first place, and that would be lack of support, lack of ammunition, lack of fighting supplies ($$s and lawyers in today-speak.) Companies have been notorious for threatening legal action against small domain owners who have no choice but to fold, given the enormous financial risk that legal defence imposes.
.. why can't they just build some shit and make money for food?" You know, sometimes you're so focused on the next meal (or not losing your life's savings in the case of the domainname holders) that you couldn't concentrate on the bigger plan (being the champion, the hero, the company killer with respect to the domain holders) even if you wanted to.
Like, why can't people who got beat up just beat the other guy up? Duh
You remind me of those rabid free-market capitalists who keep asking, "So those people in countries with no money and food
And as an enthusiast, I like knowing the actual MHz
.. on the 'net, on the box, in your BIOS. As an enthusiast, you arn't losing anything in their naming scheme. Are car enthusiasts fsck'd because the horse power rating of engines isn't included in the name of the model of the car?
.. it's removal from the name is simply so that Joe Consumer can't keep saying, "The latest P4 runs at Y Ghz, and the latest AMD runs at (Y - X) Ghz, so I'd better buy the Intel." Whether the strategy pays off in the long run (and I think it will, as the clock rating becomes more and more meaningless when discussing home/office computing) is not clear yet, but they are doing you and your friends more of a favour than a disservice.
As an enthusiast, you should be able to find the MHz rating of your chip. Hrm, lets see
As an enthusiast, you should know how little the MHz rating has to do with the actual performance of the chip with respect to cross-brand comparisons. Joe Consumer still clings to Intel's carrot (Mhz = performance), so AMD is just trying to give everyone a dose of reality. I think it's funny how people feel that they're being mislead, when really, the clock stat is just being moved to 'specs' page of the chip
A High Ranking Navy Officer was scandalized here in Canada when it was found that he had used a Navy laptop to access porn. It wasn't quite email filtering, but they were monitoring the usage of the computer. I just want to point out that the people of China cannot choose their policies and laws. That we all know. So really, taking the two courses of action upon implementing email filtering, being upfront or not telling people, I think being upfront is cool.
You are merely complaining about what constitutes subversive material (our countries are notorious for turning away erotic lesbian and gay material if its high profile enough in the market, like an artsy book or whatnot) and the more restrictive morals set by the state. Like, sure, we all knew that! but between then government being upfront vs. the government letting 'subversives' get jailed with no warning, I think they did the right thing.
Sure man, Doom / Doom 2 are awesome games. If you like those, pick up serious sam EBWorld did a survey of all the big gaming sites and magazines, and Serious Sam walked away with best game of 2001. It's 20$. It's Doom (complete with funky sense of humour, 300 enemy battles on absolutely HUGE maps, 20 story tall final baddie) with 2001 level graphics. It's amazing; if you deem FPS's of today a little too involving, Serious Sam is non-stop heart-pouding action. No story, no dialog, no stupid NPCs, just shooting and shooting and ambushes and shooting and armies and shooting. If you think you like Doom over other FPS because of the awesome enemy spawning and item placement and non stop action, Serious Sam is your leap into the 2000s ... and at 20$, you have no excuse not to give it a shot! Shit, I'd have spent 50$ on it .. it truely was one of the most enjoyable games I've played and completed in YEARS.