Actually, I doubt you would actually beat one. Not meant as an insult, but I believe that you don't have what it takes. If you had, you'd already be either in jail, or a CEO, or chief of marketting or various other positions suited to people able to think "it's just business" when harming others. Or in his place making a good living sending spam and 419 mails.
See most people are quite able to speak/cheer about and for beating others up, killing others, war, etc, as long as it's just talking. They might even actually do it, if a fit of rage disables their sanity for long enough. But fits of rage aren't something you can plan and execute whenever you wish. And otherwise when you actually have to do it, there's this interlock against harming other humans. It's partially "what if it was me in his shoes" education (even if you logically know it would never be in his place spamming) and partially that interlock most animals have against harming their own more than strictly necessary. (Even when cats or dogs fight their own there is always a mechanism to signal "I give up" and the other _will_ cease.)
It's a strange world, really. The same people who could be shaking a fist and screaming for war against X at the top of their lungs, would actually have trouble looking one of X in the eyes and squeezing the trigger. A lot of PTSD cases in war aren't just people getting shocked by being shot at, but shocked by having shot other humans.
There is one cathegory that can cheerfully think "it's only business": the sociopaths. They live in a strange world in which the others are NPCs: the others don't matter, they're not the same, "it could be me in his shoes" doesn't apply, etc. They can lie, cheat, murder, torture, whatever, and be perfectly able to look themselves in the mirror after it. Because the other guy didn't matter.
And, sad to say, if you weren't born one, I doubt you could actually beat this guy up in cold blood. If anyone gave you a baseball bat and this guy tied to a chair, you just couldn't actually do it.
And it's probably better that way. I'm thinking we as a society would do better to just start recognizing sociopaths for what they are, and the damage they can do. This guy, for example, is a sociopath, plain and simple. He's not just "being smart", he's not "just doing business", he's not "just doing what's needed", or the other things these guys like to pose as. He's just someone who doesn't even see you as a human being, much less his equal.
Could Microsoft be sued for not offering it's products for sale in Europe?
Oh yes. By its shareholders. See, the EU is a market twice the size of the USA. Giving up on that market would send MS's shares into quite a bit of a dive.
But here's the funnier part: Not only it would make a lot of investors sell (thus speeding up the dive), but it would put quite a big dent into Bill Gates's personal fortune. See, his being such a rich guy isn't calculated just in money in the bank, but mostly in MS shares.
So between paying a couple hundred million of MS's money and losing a few _billion_ off your own worth, which would _you_ choose?;)
Plus, it's precisely that kind of thing that MS has worked hard to avoid. See a large part of the "secret sauce" in MS's monopoly of interlocking parts, is its products being ubiquitous. It's not just that you can't replace product X because product Y depends on it, it's also the mentality that product Y is the de-facto standard, everyone else has it, and you can't just give up on it without becoming the odd guy out of the loop.
MS has worked hard to maintain that illusion of ubiquity, world-wide. It has been known to offer massive price cuts and even prefer to overlook piracy than allow whole markets which are proof that you can jolly well live without both X and Y.
So forcing the whole of Europe standardize on something else than Windows and Office? Ooer. That would be the day when IBM', Sun' and the others' managers ejaculate in their pin-striped pants out of joy. It's not just the loss of the European market as such, but that would be the day when almost every single US corporation's executive starts hearing stuff like "sir, we can't send that document in Excel format, because they don't use Excel in Germany. No, sir, neither in France." It's the day when people start hearing that MS file formats aren't, in fact, the ubiquitous de-facto standard and can't be an ubiquitous de-facto standard.
So, heh, yeah, I'd _love_ to see MS do something _that_ stupid. Sadly it won't happen, because they're not stupid. But it would be comedy gold.
You know, it would be nice if all the "it's like some stupid kind of import tax" or "it's punishing US companies" people actually bothered to read the way it all went before posting crap.
First of all, MS was initially _not_ fined a single dime. They were ordered to release the docs for certain protocols needed for interoperability. (I.e., no, not to document all of Windows. Dunno what gave you _that_ idea.) It was even allowed to give a list of which independent experts are qualified to judge whether the docs are enough or not. And the commission picked one of them. Pay attention, because it's important: it was someone suggested by MS judging these docs all the time.
That's it. The original ruling had _no_ punitive aspect as such. It was aimed strictly at correcting the monopoly situation that made it possible to break the trade laws.
MS _only_ got finally fined when months after months went by, and it showed no intention to comply with the ruling. It engaged in anti-EU astroturfing wars, it tried lame threats, it did stuff that was at best mocking the court, etc. You try doing that as a private person and you'd probably get some time in jail for holding the court in contempt.
Even then the fine was (A) per day that they keep ignoring the court ruling (which is how it eventually got to be hundreds of millions), and (B) with various generous deadlines and in between, and the provision that if MS complies until the deadline, it doesn't pay a dime.
So how the heck does that support such assertions as "it's like some stupid kind of import tax"?
And if you want to talk about punishing US companies, have a look at the long list of EU-based companies which have been slapped with hundreds of millions in fines from day 1 for breaking the trade laws. If anything the EU is giving a US-based company an unfair advantage and preferential treatment there. Because, again, any EU-based company in a similar situation was _not_ given the kind of sweet deal that MS was given.
Unfortunately, MS has mis-interpreted this as weakness and tried to pretty much just defy the court. Well, it didn't quite work that way.
First of all, noone got taken to court for just being big. Maybe you don't make that confusion, but a lot of (other) people seem to think that anti-trust somehow means "punished for being big" or "punished for being successful." That's not the case. Coca-Cola is still perfectly on the safe side of the law, for example. And noone orders McDonald to give the recipe to its secret sauce.
The thing sorta goes like this:
1. It must be proven that you've actually abused your might in a non-lawful way, and there was an actual harm to the consumers. (Harm to competing companies actually doesn't matter.)
If you will, it's like taking the school bully to court. He's not tried or punished for being big, he's tried for punching people in the face. There's a not-so-subtle difference there.
2. It must be proven that you were in a monopoly position, in which it was artifficially unfeasible for someone else to undo the harm you did. I.e., that in that situation, the free market just didn't work.
Basically that's the reality check to your Ayn Rand-inspired musings. If it can be proven that the free market can neutralize the harm on its own, then the company _doesn't_ get the legal equivalent of a kick in the nuts.
E.g., if two pharmacies aggree to fix prices on vitamins, it's _not_ an anti-trust case. The market can work around such minor speedbumps. People will just go buy their vitamins at the super-market, or go to the other pharmacy down the road. Or maybe someone will open their own pharmacy across the road. But when (as has at least once happened) the major pharma companies fix prices, that may well be an anti-trust case.
Look... noone is against the notion of a free market. We quite like it in Europe too. We don't go asking companies for their secrets just for the heck of it, but only when there's no other recourse left to force an aberrant situation back to being a free market.
The free market is actually a lot less robust on its own than some libertarians seem to assume. The whole notion and theory is centred around some assumptions: there are many identical/interchangeable products, the buyers are perfectly informed, it's trivial for a new competitor to enter that market, etc. _That_ situation can balance itself all right. But the whole mechanism falls apart when those pre-conditions aren't true any more. There are some actions and some kinds of damage that it can't work around, and there are people who have the financial interest to try to do just that: destroy that ideal free market.
And that's the other thing: the assumption that it's in everyone's interest to play nice, is false. It's in society's interest that they play nice, but for the individual competitors it's most often the exact opposite: you make more money if you can get in a situation where you don't have to play nice.
E.g., as a simple example, if there are two smiths in the same medieval town, sure, it's in everyone else's interest that they start acting like in a free market and undercut each other's prices. But those two smiths can make more money if, say, they make a secret aggreement to fix prices. Then they're the only supplier in town and can fleece everyone else with impunity. Or maybe one of them will decide that instead of even that, he'll hire a couple of mercenaries to beat the other up. Or whatever.
So to make a long story short: expecting the free market to always just work on its own, is a bit like expecting a city to work without a police station. Sooner or later someone will have the means and the incentive to ruin all that for everyone else.
It still works like that nowadays, and you are on a crusade to destroy that view. Not that it will do any harm, but I wonder what is your agenda.
Heh. At the "everyone who isn't with us, is part of some evil conspiracy against us" stage? Don't worry. I went through that stage myself. But eventually growing up kind of sneaks upon you, you know? You start realizing that there are no knights in shining armour and no super-villains cackling manically over death-ray plans. And that you're not really the one who'll save the world from MS. That pretending that the problems don't exist is actually counter-productive and doesn't actually help anyone. In fact, it only does more harm than good. And a lot of other such common-sense, really.
And in a nutshell that's my only "agenda": not really as much of an agenda, as just realizing that the whole fanboy crusade is stupid and pointless. Acknowledging the Real World (TM) instead of living in some imaginary crusader-fanboy world.
At any rate, heh, feel free to believe whatever floats your boat. If imagining me as part of some evil MS-sponsored conspiracy makes you feel any better, by all means, go ahead.
Here comes the wrong example : OOo never was Bazaar style developed to begin with, and Sun makes all it can so that it doesn't.
Bingo. That was my whole point actually. The only one that's anywhere _near_ a usable state is a Cathedral-type product.
Like I said, it still works for things like KOffice and Gnome Office.
And they're still a sad joke that noone would mistake for a real substitute for or challenge to MS Office. They took _ages_ to get anywhere _near_ where the Cathedral products got in a fraction of that time. Star Office in the 90's, before the Sun purchase, was less of a joke than KOffice and Gnome Office still are. That's just my point: that's what complexity does to Bazaar-style projects.
An Asperger's Syndrome person would never "make fun of" himself, he would'nt know how, and this wouldn't have any purpose in his mind.
It may surprise you, but a lot of us eventually learn how to function in society in spite of AS. It's a bit like fighting blind, but you eventually learn to use logic and think in advance. Or at least, some of us do. There are, of course, also those who get stuck on acting like a retarded kid who wants a lollypop. But not everyone does.
You're far from what you say you are.
Heh. I'll take it as a compliment if I passed well enough for a neurotypical, then.
But again, feel free to think whatever you will. If you don't believe me, so be it. I'm not going to turn this into a psychoanalysis session to convince a random person on the Internet than I'm a bit deffective.
BS again. An Asperger's Syndrome don't get bored at what he does, he just find it completed or not.
Read some medicine books, lemming. AS is characterized by a very narrow focus of interest. Yes, an AS is pretty much tireless at doing the parts that interest him, but is also extremely quick to get bored by stuff that falls outside that focus or by stuff that looks more like routine uninteresting homework even _within_ his focus of interest. Someone could be tireless at hacking the interesting cool algorithms or optimizations in a program, but lose interest quickly when you make him polish the user interface. Or other such combinations of "I like A, but B is dumb, and A1 is too trivial to interest me".
What do you mean ? What is the connection with Asperger's Syndrome kind of coder ? Do you mean all FOSS people are these kind of people ?
I've never said "all", did I? There are a lot of those who are just paid to work on those project. Which was in fact my whole point.
But lot of those who do devote inordinate amounts of their own
You know what the funny thing is? That people are stuck on assuming a Bazaar model, and Bazaar methodologies (rangin from "someone else will volunteer to fix it for you" to your "I can pay one of the coder") when basically it doesn't work like that any more.
The bazaar model still worked when the pinnacle of software complexity were "cat" and "vi". That's it. It stopped working almost completely when complexity meant Open Office Org.
The Asperger's Syndrome kind of coder (and I'm one, so I can make fun of myself if I want to) which finds more joy in coding something cool instead of going out and flirting with a girl, also has a very narrow focus of attention and gets bored easily when he must deal with stuff either (A) outside that focus, or (B) which is basically homework instead of getting to the cool stuff. That's how we ended on the bad side of teachers in school, after all. Spending weeks understanding someone else's framework and code before you can even start on your cute "number paragraphs in Klingon" idea, is boring, and it's even more boring to understand and test all dependencies so you don't break something else.
So today in F/OSS the only ones making any progress nowadays are, sad to say, the Cathedrals.
Yes, everyone likes to use the Linux kernel and such as an example of why the Bazaar is strong, but have a look at the actual contributors some day. It's _not_ bored nerds like you and me working in their free time. Most of them are paid employees of Red Hat, IBM, etc. Linux as the work of bored nerds in their free time was a security shithole until Red Hat spent some real money doing a code and security review. And it was a joke in the enterprise arena until IBM started pumping some real money and formerly Cathedral-developped closed-source code into it. There's a reason why IBM looked like a believable target to SCO (as opposed to just a tempting target, by having deep pockets), and that's the sheer quantity of Aix code that IBM donated.
The same goes for OOo: practically all development is paid for by Sun, and it's bleeding Sun a ton of money. The same goes for Apache, which everyone uses as an example of why OSS is better than MS's software on a server: it, and most other Apache projects for that matter, is mostly IBM work. Go figure. IDE's? Both Eclipse and Netbeans are paid work by respectively IBM and Sun and a number of other corporate contributors. Compilers? You'd be surprised how much in GCC actually comes from Intel and the like. Browser? Mozilla was mostly paid work by Netscape, then AOL, and now it's mostly sponsored by Google. Etc.
So yes, as you aptly put it:
Yep, the boring stuff doesn't get done unless there's incentive to do.
A leader without the ability to fire someone or give them a pay raise isn't going to be able to provide much incentive.
And that's why most of F/OSS nowadays is nothing more than a way for various corporate Cathedrals to pool their resources against MS. Sure, it's a good goal and I have nothing against benefitting from it. But let's stop pretending that ESR's Bazaar is anywhere _near_ relevant any more. The actual "Bazaar" projects are the thousands of unfinishet things on Source Forge that noone gives a damn about, either to help develop/debug or to use seriously or to pay the developper for features.
I do not see it that way. If science is in such danger, what is it in danger from? You say skepticism. But isn't that what the scientific principle is founded on?
I never said it was in danger from skepticism. If more people were in an "I'll believe it when you show me the proof" state of mind, science would be stronger than ever before.
I'll tell you what the danger is: ignorance and gullibility. _That_ is the problem. And that is the thrust of the attack on science nowadays. Notions like "theory", "evidence", "burden of proof", etc, are deliberatelly blurred until the stupid and uneducated think that everyone is equally taking wild baseless guesses, and it's ok to pick the snake oil _without_ actual evidence.
Personally, I think intelligent design is a valid concept.
There is a massive difference between being a valid concept and actually having the evidence, or fitting that evidence. There are plenty of concepts which would be perfectly valid, e.g., the "ether" of last century, or the "center fire" and "counter-Earth" of the ancient philosophers, except they don't (or no longer) fit the actual data we have.
And then there's the issue of being a _useful_ theory. See, the whole purpose is to make predictions which then work that way. E.g., you have a computer or a monitor, because physics made some clear predictions: if you put an electron behind a potential barrier this high, it does that. Just saying "It was God's will" retroactively is freaking useless, as it doesn't give you any prediction. What will God's will be for another CPU design? How would God design a species for another environment? What is an experiment to prove or disprove something which doesn't even make a single verifiable prediction?
But everybody gets in a hissy fit when it is even mentioned once.
We don't get into a hissy fit about the concept, but about the insidious dishonest way in which it fights for mindshare. It never tried to stand on its merits, but it just tries to blur notions and undermine the actual science. We get in a hissy fit about it's using word-plays like "well, evolution is just a theory too", and thus trying to distract attention from what "theory" actually means in science, and the way ID actually _isn't_ a theory by any scientific standard. It's just a "hypothesis".
Basically it's like having a football match where one player comes on the field with a baseball bat and starts whacking at the opposite team. The question isn't whether he himself has a right to be on the field, but we can object to the fact that he isn't playing the same game as everyone else on that field. We expect him to compete on merit -- just like we expect scientific theories to compete on merit -- not on underhanded tactics.
But yet string theory is lauded and taught in many places, but yet it is equally unscientifically provable . Where is the aclu?
Actually even there String Theory actually matches the observed phenomena very well and makes predictions that actually work that way. In that, it's already head and shoulders over ID.
Where it "fails" is basically Occam's Razor. It doesn't explain or predict anything new, that the simpler theories don't already. But again, even getting there is already more achievement than ID ever had. String Theory may come second in the marathon of science, but ID is still just standing at the starting line and trying to discredit everyone else and redefine what the competition is.
And perhaps more importantly, again, ST plays honestly by the same rules as everyone else. Here is the theory, here is the evidence, here is what it explains, here is what we can't do (yet), and you're free to design an experiment which would disprove it. It may not be necessary, by Occam's Razor, but it still shows the expected intellectual honesty. It doesn't redefine words, it doesn't do sophistry, it doesn't use religion to sway people into overlooking its problems, etc. Wake me up when ID can make a similar claim.
However, the repurcussions for being wrong one way means you lived your life with a false assumption, then go into the ground to rot. Being wrong the other way means that when your body dies, something else occours to your soul. Fear of hell is a shitty reason to have faith, I'm not making that point.
You do however rehash the same fallacy that's been said over and over again through history. (Maybe just as an illustration, since you say you don't make that point.)
The problem, however, is that the same can be said for any other religion. Islam, Flying Spaghetti Monster, or my own favourite: the Great Game Designer In The Sky. If you're not with us and you're wrong, baaad things could happen to you. Better be one of us, even if we're wrong, than take that risk, right? So, come on, what do you have to lose?
And for that matter, if you fall for that line of reasoning, can I interest you in some tickets on the Vogo Space Fleet? When they come and destroy Earth to build a highway, do you want to be among those saved or be left down on an exploding planet? And, hey, if you're with us and you're wrong, you only lost some money. If you're not with us and you're wrong, I hope you can breathe vaccuum. Do you want to take that risk?
And for that matter, want to buy some cold-iron amulets against dark elf magic? Same reasoning: if you're with us and wrong, you just bought a useless iron amulet. But if you're not with us and you're wrong, weell, those dark elves are known to do very very nasty things to unprotected humans. Do you want to take that risk on the day the ancient Lords And Ladies return?
Etc.
It's not just a shitty reason, as you do say, it's really shitty logic too.
It is just the old point that you can't prove, and you can't disprove, so being completely dispassionate, what do you use to determine your stance? Risk vs reward? Gut feeling?
Occam's Razor. I'll believe something when it has the reproductible experimental data that can't be explained otherwise.
If someone claims their Flying Spaghetti Monster can perform miracles, let them show some reproductible and falsifiable way of invoking His Noodly Appendage. Dunno, make a coin levitate each time you draw that deity's symbol over it with your finger. I'm sure an omnipotent god could change reality to work that way. It's not just proof, but it's reproductible and it can't be easily explained away by just tweaking the laws of gravity and such. That one would pass Occam's Razor all right.
That's just one example, off the top of my head. I'm sure an omniscient and omnipresent deity can come up with better ideas than that, if it wanted to. It can do better than expecting me to believe because of such shitty "what if you're against us and you're wrong" reasoning.
Until then, I'll go with my gut feeling and put my faith in The Great Game Designer. Join us and be saved. In fact, auto-saved every 10 minutes and backed up to tape every Sunday;)
That's the sort of treatment that follows on to denial of a literal virgin birth, and of Jesus being the literal son of God, and being literally raised from the dead -- not on the basis of whether the text appears to be speaking literally, but because they are miraculous.
You know, the funny thing is, a lot of that stuff actually is a lot less miraculous than some people insist.
E.g., virgin birth happens very literally every week. Yet another girl discovers the hard way that, for example, anal sex isn't that reliable a contraceptive. Sperm can drip along the relatively narrow bridge to the vulva, and even a drop can be enough to cause a pregnancy. You don't really need to fill someone up with semen to get her pregnant, because spermatozoa swim and the vagina and uterus basically signal "swim this way". So even a drop can be enough.
An elastic hymen is another possibility. Again, it happens lots even nowadays.
Mary is not even the last and not the first to get pregnant while virgin, or to claim it was a miracle. E.g., Zeus also supposedly got Danae pregnant, by taking the form of a shower of gold, and the resulting offspring was Perseus. (Her father, Acrisius, however, didn't quite believe the story;)
So, anyway, picture that you live in a strict theocracy where anything sex-related is a sin and a crime, unless it's for the sole purpose of making more kids. The same theocracy where, for example, Onan was worth some righteous divine smiting for spilling his seed on the ground instead of getting a woman pregnant with it. Among other very narrow views of the world, marriage, and a woman's rights and role in it all.
So what would _you_ do, if you were a woman in that situation? Admit, basically, "Yes, guv'nor. We were horny, and Joseph just wouldn't cut it out with wanting some nookie, so had some sex before marriage. Only I took it up the ass, thinking I'd stay a virgin that way," and get stoned to death for it? Or pull a, "haleluia, it's a miracle"? Heh.
At any rate, asking me to believe that it _must_ be unique is essentially asking to ignore the thousands of cases where it happens to other women. Asking me to believe that a divine miracle is the _only_ possible explanation, is basically asking to ignore the very natural ways in which it happens again and again to this day.
It's, if you will, akin to asking me to believe that there's one single airplane, and that divine intervention is the only way in which it could possibly fly. Well, excuse me if I get distracted by all these other thousands of airplanes and the very non-miraculous ways they fly.
Ditto for Jesus's miraculous resurrection. There's no miracle in rising if one wasn't dead to start with.
The whole execution was highly non-standard, including scheduling it on a day when they knew they didn't have the required time. Crucifixion was a _very_ slow death, as the crucifixion itself does little more than create pain and discomfort. It took _days_ to die on the cross. It's also telling that the Romans had to develop a standard coup-de-grace, namely breaking the condemned's legs, to hasten death, if needed. You don't do that for quick executions. And unsurprisingly Jesus's two companions didn't die there and had to get just that standard coup de grace.
So basically before asking me to believe the miracle of the resurrection, one is basically asking me to believe the miracle of his being dead there in the first place. Contrary to all common sense, biology, historical evidence about crucifixion, and the various modern day re-enactments.
And the Romans, otherwise known for discipline and executing the orders to the letter... well, what do you know, supposedly a centurion decides unilaterally that this one is dead already and no point in obeying both direct orders, and the standard coup-de-grace procedure when a crucifixion had to be ended prematurely. Let's do it for those two, but not for the third.
Can it be that Pontius Pilate didn't actually want to execute Jesus? I guess we'll never know. But it doesn't take too much "denial" to at least consider the possibility that maybe, just maybe, there was no death and thus no resurrection.
Frankly, I haven't seen many posts saying they should be shut up.
What most of us _are_ saying is that:
1) it's stupid. Sorry, the same first ammendment says I _can_ say I find it bloody stupid. Same as if I read about someone spending that much money on a magic ring of levitation to jump off a cliff with. Or spending that much money on animatronics to "prove" to everyone that Lord Of The Rings is 100% fact. (Sure, you can animate hobbits and orcs all you want, but that doesn't make it a scientiffic proof.) Sure, I'm not going to stop them, but excuse me while I laugh my ass off at the stupidity of it all.
2. this, and the whole "young earth creationsm" and "intelligent design" bullshit are part of an insidious battle to destroy science as a whole, via a barrage of fallacies, flawed logic, and redefining words. It's not just a "well, I think that god exists" issue, but a battle for mindshare trying to effectively purge the very fundament of the scientific method or reasoning from as many minds as possible. There's a whole scaffold including stuff like "burden of proof", "Occam's razor", etc, that these people systematically try to pervert and destroy. Each and every single notion, word and definition is systematically corrupted, perverted, distorted, and outright presented as the very opposite of what it used to mean.
If you want an analogy, it's not just like creating a "museum of fascism", for historical reason. What these people do is akin to instead trying to systematically pervert and corrupt the very notions of "democracy", "freedom", "elections", etc- Until the whole edifice is pulled from under you and you find yourself in a fascist dictatorship just because everyone forgot how a democratic country was supposed to work or what the difference is.
That's essentially what these people are trying to do to science and reason: pervert and corrupt and undermine it all, until you find yourself in an Iran-style fundamentalist theocracy, just because noone knows any better any more. Just because everyone's mind has been warped to think that "evidence" means "what the preacher told me", and "burden of proof" means "well, you can't disprove what the preacher said", and "theory" means "just another unfounded opinion."
Sure, I'm still not going to shut them up by force, but they do earn my heartfelt disgust and contempt.
Most of what you mention are "growing pains" as the population increased exponentially and there wasn't enough infrastructure (food, transportation, dwelling) to keep up with it and all those that had the power to change things didn't because they were sitting comfortably.
Actually, it's not that simple. What pretty much triggered renaissance was actually a massive depopulation caused by epidemics such as the Black Death. Suddenly there just weren't enough people to keep migrating to town _and_ work the fields, which in turn allowed peasants to demand better pay and better treatment. See also the ensuing inflation, which is what predictably happens when unemployment is zero. (And the resulting price-fixing attempts, and the revolts _those_ led to.) That's in a nutshell what triggered renaissance, and why eastern europe (which wasn't that hard hit by the Black Death) didn't experience a renaissance.
At any rate, "growing pains" or not, what I'm trying to say is that the Renaissance and the transition between Middle Ages and Renainssance were a major pain. For the people actually living there and then it was a shithole that turned the whole European culture depressive and morbid for centuries. It was a time of plagues, death, destruction, poverty, revolts, wars, pillaging and raping, disilusionment, etc. The black death alone, even if you somehow managed to not get it at all (although occasionally an outbreak killed some 75-80% of the population) meant living in fear for your very life, in a town full of people screaming in pain and occasionally jumping off a house or a bridge just to end the horrible pain. And then a bit later the religious wars and persecutions came around too. And what a fun time _that_ was;)
I.e., what I'm trying to say is that it's, you know, mildly amusing to see Ren Faires enacting it as some fun period to live in, full of cheerful, prosperous and healthy merchants, peasants, craftsmen and so on. As I was saying, it's a bit like having a Hell Faire in which you pretend that Hell is a sunny summer resort.
Granted there have been numerous improvements thanks to what science discovered. I disagree with the medicine, however. I wouldn't trust a modern day doctor to treat me for anything. Surgery is a different matter, but for everyday illnesses and ailments I've witnessed and used homeopathic and holistic treatments that date well before Medieval times, but most people forget that, too.
While there have been _some_ things that people knew how to treat since antiquity, the fact still remains that:
1. It was for a very limited number of diseases.
E.g., as I was saying, dysentery was killing whole armies. There were more English longbowmen killed by it in the 100 years war than killed by the French. If some holistic and homoepathic cures actually worked against that, you get the idea, why didn't they use them? We're talking pretty much the difference between winning and losing a war. And, no, it wasn't just because of dogma or whatever: the English had no problem breaking any other laws of chivalry in war there, justifying it as needed to even the odds. (France was a _much_ bigger country.)
2. They had a lot of cures which are known to either not work, or be outright toxic.
E.g., I've mentioned mercury used in anything from treating diseases to imortality. (Ironically, Shi Huangdi managed to poison himself while trying to achieve immortality.) E.g., on the "merely useless" category, a lot of the cures for pretty much anything in the middle ages were just distilled alcohol. That managed to jump-start the distillation industry during the Black Death, but not actually do anything to actually cure the diseases. E.g., covering the whole spectrum, you have the ever popular doctrine of signatures, in which something was deemed to help with this or that just because of the way it looks. For example that red wine is somehow good for the blood, because both are red
I guess it's comforting that science and the media confirms something we Ren Faire geeks have known for years: ancient science is better, and modern science is only rediscovering what has been lost.
Uh, no, not really. It makes for a good (if bullshit) anti-science position, but in practice, ancient/medieval science was mostly a bunch of hocus-pocus, con-artistry and revisionist history.
E.g., if you're gonna make such broad claims as "ancient science is better", how about medicine? May I point out that, since you mention "ren faire", during renaissance the tendency for any city's population was to die off of disease and any city needed a steady supply of immigrants from the country side just to maintain its size? I don't just mean the recurring black death epidemics, but even in between them. The cities were that filthy, being overcrowded didn't help either, and "medicine" was that useless at the time.
You'd actually be more likely to die in a hospital than if left untreated. If they didn't bleed you to death, they'd give you fun stuff like mercury. See examples from Ivan The Terrible's treatment with mercury to the first chinese emperor, Shi Huangdi, accidentally posioned with a too high dose of mercury-based pills by his doctors. There are some two millenia or so between the two. That's medieval and ancient medical science at its finest, really.
E.g., it's easy to take nowadays' food controls and pasteurization and refrigeration for granted, but in the middle ages and renaissance what you'd eat wasn't quite the "bio" foods you have today. There are plenty of cases where the meat of cattle which died of anthrax was cheerfully sold to the cities... with the consequences you'd expect. (Hint: it starts with "de" and ends with "ath.";) And if that wouldn't get you, there are a ton of other diseases and parasites that were quite common in meat. (E.g., look up Trichinella. The larvae in meat are not reliably killed by curing, drying or smoking.)
Not to mention bacteria, since without refrigeration and never enough salt for the thousands of pigs slaughtered at christmas, a lot of the meat was eaten anywhere between slightly spoiled and practically rotten. (Fun bit of trivia: that's one reason why spice trade was as good as a licence to print money. Enough spices could make it less obvious that you're eating rotten meat. The bacteria could kill you anyway, though.)
E.g., if you're so keen on renaissance warfare and weapons, may I remind you that more soldiers died of dysentery than of all weapons combined? It was a major cause of mortality during, say, the 100 years war. Much as everyone remembers that one for the longbow, dysentery actually killed more soldiers in that war than actual battle did. Even kings died of it occasionally. E.g., in that period, Henry V.
E.g., using lead for anything from cups and dishes to hair dye? Yeah, that's a fun bit of ancient technology. (It's used all the way from ancient egyptians to renaissance and beyond.) Too bad its toxic.
Etc.
Even as sword technology goes, Wootz was something discovered accidentally and which they never understood. E.g., they didn't know _why_ only ore from one particular Indian mine works there. And when that mine ran out of ore, the whole process just up and died because noone actually understood the process enough to make it work with anything else. Yeah, science at its finest... NOT.
The modern science didn't just rediscover something that the ancients knew, it discovered what the ancients _didn't_ know to start with: why and how that works, and how to do it without the magical ore from India.
So, please... if you want to believe in some romanticized version of Renaissance, go ahead. But realize that that's a romanticized/idealized thing that conveniently ommits all the thousands of bad aspects of life back then. It's like having a Hell Faire where you pretend that Hell is just a warm sunny beach resort. That disconnected from reality.
Look, this isn't really a 'mad loot' or 'MASSIVE DAMAGE' moment
Actually, if you read a bit about Wootz, a.k.a. Damascus Steel, it was:
A) able to hold a very sharp edge. (In addition to being ductile, elastic, and generally not going to crack when you hit around with it in combat.) So in fact they were pretty much "MASSIVE DAMAGE" swords. Think a +5 Keen sword.
B) rare and uber-expensive. Among other things, because there were few people who could make one _and_ it only worked with imported ore from one particular mine in India. So if you managed to loot one of these, damn right it would count as Phat Lewt.
The thing about muslim swords and european armours is a different story altogether, and it's about the shape of the sword rather than the metal.
Let's focus on two aspects:
1. The edge. There are two basic moves for _cutting_ with a sword:
A) draw cut. No, it's not the Iai maneuver, but dragging the edge along as you cut. Sorta like what most people do when they cut a slice of bread or of salami with a knife. Curved swords are ideal for draw cuts, straight swords suck for it.
Draw cuts are deadly against unarmoured opponents, and can cut through flesh like a hot knife through butter. Draw cuts, on the other hand suck against metal armour. Even the cheapest chain hauberk makes a scimitar or katana completely useless.
B) hard square hits, much like with an axe or mace. Here you don't draw the edge to slice, but just hit hard and let the kinetic energy drive the edge into the opponent. Straight swords are perfect for it, curved swords much less so.
This hacking move is actually very nice against armour, especially chain. Even if it doesn't penetrate, you're being bludgeoned with a 3 pound steel bar with a very narrow edge. Even the maille and the padding under it can only spread it over so much surface. So even if it doesn't penetrate, it can break a rib or two, or crack a skull.
2. The tip. Here we actually have three cases, if we also include the katana.
a) straight sword, tappered tip. (I.e., the european swords.) A straight sword is ideal for piercing _accuracy_ and strength since it's basically a short spear. (See for example the later estoc which was basically more of a short spear than a sword by now.) You can aim pretty well and put all your strength behind that tip, because the force goes along the axis of that bar.
b) curved sword, tappered tip. (I.e., the muslim swords that you mentioned.) Again this becomes a lot less useful against armoured opponents, since you have neither the accuracy (e.g., for thrusting between two plates) nor as much strength in a strictly piercing hit.
c) curved tip. (E.g., the Japanese Katana or the Chinese Dao.) This is a special kind of tip that is outright useless at piercing against an armoured opponent, but great at cutting. The most fearsome cuts with a katana are done with the tip. It's a tip that emphasizes not only cutting power, but range. (Your outer range with the weapon is also the range at which you are the deadliest.) The range fits well with the Samurai techniques which emphasise, basically, striking first over defense. (By comparison, in european fencing _the_ focus was defense, and harming the opponent was second priority.)
Unfortunately this too is useless against metal armour, which is why the Katana became _the_ symbol of the Samurai only after firearms made armour obsolete. (Much like the Rapier and the Smallsword in Europe.) Prior to that, the bow and spear were the preferred weapons.
So to make a long story short: the reason the muslims had trouble against the crusaders was because the turkish/arabic curved swords sucked against heavily armoured opponents.
Basically, unrelated, this is why it gets on my nerves to hear so many manga fans repeat stuff like that the european swords were crap and only used because of some religious reasons. For the fighting style they were used in, and the reality of European warfare at the time, a straight sword was actually a great weapon.
And it's also worth remembering that it wasn't just the Europeans, but also, for example, the Chinese that favoured the longsword. While the curved-tip Dao (broadsword) was the weapon given to common troops, the nobles and elites used the Jian (straight longsword) as a more effective weapon in the hands of a highly trained elite. And as a status symbol.
And you are correct with some of the xenophobia. Basically, the EU nations do not want to be purely beholden for this type of thing to a US-based company.
Huh? There are plenty of EU-based companies which got harsher sentences than MS right from the start. MS initially got no fine, and was just ordered to document the protocol. MS got fined only after it ignored the ruling and the deadline. MS's fine only got so big by ignoring the daily fine for 2.5 years. (It's basically like ignoring a parking fine for 2.5 years straight, and continuing to park in front of a garage every day. Of course it gets to be big money after a long time.) _And_ it's been given a sweet deal in that if it finally releases those docs until the final deadline (in 8 days now), it gets to pay no fine at all.
EU-based corporations and cartels typically got slapped hundreds of millions of Euro fines right from the start.
I.e., whatever xenophobia might exist in the EU (and it exists), this judgment was the exact opposite. MS was given a much better deal than any European company that broke the anti-trust laws. I.e., if any discrimination is at work here, effectively the EU then discriminates against its own citizens and companies by giving MS a much better deal.
Now, we have various competitors that are locked out of a market because the State decided to give preferential treatment to certain companies (in this case, Microsoft). Copyright, patents, trademarks can all be used to keep other people out of a given market long enough for a company to grow to a size that makes it hard to defeat.
1. Neither copyright nor patents nor trademark had anything to do with the MS anti-trust lawsuits, nor with the predatory practices it was accused of. Neither Novell nor Netscape nor Sun nor all the other companies were attacked by MS via copyright (none of them were selling copies of Windows), nor trademark (none of them called their own product "MS Windows" or "MS Office"), nor patents.
2. MS was _not_ even tried for being a monopoly as such, but for abusing that position to break other trade laws. You _can't_ be tried for just having a big slice of the market. E.g., see Coca-Cola. Noone brings that one before a court of law. Do you understand? The issue isn't just that MS is too big to defeat, but that it abused that position to engage in predatory practices that ultimately hurt the consumer.
I.e., what you've been arguing for half that message is at best a complete non-sequitur. All that rhethoric about becoming too big to defeat is completely irrelevant to the issues that led to that huge fine. It's just not tried for being too big.
Sure, some will say that they violated anti-trust laws, but those laws have enough loopholes to let any big company get around them.
So then why didn't MS get around those? So your argument is... what? "The law has enough loopholes, so let's ignore that someone outright broke it instead of using the loopholes"? Or what?
At any rate, the fact that they broke the law _and_ then proceeded to show utter contempt to the court (both by non-compliance for over 2 years and the whole media war against the EU) is the _whole_ point there, not some secondary issue that can be summarily hand-waved out.
Let's look at reality here. The State wants these fines to pad their own accounts -- they same laws will exist, and the same problem will repeat itself. This is basically a legal form of asking for bribes, and Microsoft will be happy to comply.
Yes, let's look at reality here, and this time the real one:
1. What the "State" asked wasn't fine. It asked MS to offer everyone the documentation needed for interoperability. I.e., what it tries to do is break that monopoly. The original judgment against MS didn't ask for a single cent. So on WTF bullshit do you base such idiotic statements as "The State wants these fines to pad their own accounts"?
2. The fines are just punishment for refusing to comply with the court order, after it had been given ample time to. And even then MS has been given more than 2 years to comply with it, in which case it would have to pay no fine. Zero. Nada. Zilch.
3. MS had more than 2 years to comply, and it didn't. In fact, that's how the fine got so big: it's a daily fine until they comply. And ignoring it for more than 2 years eventually starts being big money. So on what _do_ you base such bullshit statements as "Microsoft will be happy to comply"? Because so far it showed no intention to comply. It just engaged in some smoke-and-mirrors media war against the EU instead of doing what it was asked to.
Any changes Microsoft makes will only be enough to make the State happy, and the next run against them will be strictly for income for those making new laws. That income helps provide for more loopholes and better preferential treatment for the companies that can afford it.
1. Being fined up to 30% of your yearly _sales_ (see, here) is hardly buying preferential treatment. It's something that would put most companies in
While I'll fully aggree with your points about the common user, I'd argue that IMHO it's not that much different for programmers and generally those in IT roles. Sure, for a programmer it's a lot less intimidating and a lot less "rocket science", but that doesn't mean he/she will automatically enjoy it.
Speaking as a programmer, the interesting and challenging part is the _programming_ part. The tweaking of algorithms, the thrill of learning some new technique, etc. That's the fun part. The compiling itself is _not_ the exciting part. Sitting and watching Joe's Own Toy Program (TM) compile is about as exciting and watching paint dry. Tracking down the dependencies for it is even less exciting.
In fact, I'll even go ahead and say that anyone whose great feat was compiling some 3rd party program, probably isn't really a programmer to start with. There are a ton of people who just like to pretend they're oh-so l33t because they can run someone else's build script. Maybe they even configured (through the nice supplied GUI) and compiled (by running the commands supplied in the readme) a _kernel_. Wow, that makes them sooo great computing gurus. Not. That's to programming what script-kiddies are to real security experts. A sad joke.
And even as programming goes, the fun is doing the things _I_ want to do, learning the things that _I_ find interesting at the moment. Maybe I'll toy with this great new algorithm or language I just heard about, or maybe I'll mod a game just for the sake of seeing if I can get to the ballistics code, or whatever. Whatever tempts me at the moment. But that's a personal, subjective and transient thing. What tempts me tonight might be (and usually _is_) a whole other thing than whatever program Tom couldn't be arsed to finish, or Dick couldn't be arsed to test, or Harry couldn't be arsed to port. I want to do _my_ stuff, not debug Tom, Dick and Harry's programs just because they happen to be OSS and on my computer.
Basically just like a literature buff might choose to spend the evening reading the novel of _his_ choosing instead of coming over to help the neighbour's kid finish a school essay about War And Peace. Sure, he certainly is qualified to help that kid, but it's not necessarily what he'd choose to spend the evening with.
In the end what I'm saying is that what I want from a computer is no different from what Jack Random and Jane Average want. I want it to just work. Whatever I choose to do with it, whether it's programming my own toy app or watching a DVD or playing a game, I _don't_ want to compile the IDE/media-player/game/whatever first, and that goes double for pointless track-the-dependencies games. If I chose to do X tonight, then anything else that gets in between me and X (like having to first compile some other stuff) is just a waste of my time.
There are companies who have based their entire business plan around their green reputation -- look at all the 'environmentally friendly' products at Whole Foods or what not that aren't getting sued by shareholders.
Well, in that case it's more like just providing the supply where a demand exists, than anything else. It's like offering pink "Hello Kitty" cell phones, when the market research said there's a market for pink "Hello Kitty" cell phones. And making a tidy profit by cattering to that demand. That's hardly acting against the interests of the shareholders for some ideal(ism.)
You could easily imagine a "green" construction company that differentiated themselves by building the most environmentally friendly buildings possible. Not hard to imagine since that kind of construction does already exist.
Oh, I can imagine lots of things, as my imaginary cat here and the easter bunny can testify. I've got quite an active imagination;)
The real question is really whether a market for such a company exists or not. I.e., you have to imagine not only one "green" building company, you'd have to also imagine a whole lot of other companies paying a hefty premium to be its customers. Do _those_ exist? TBH I have no idea.
And the law may not be much help here; I don't see much in the way of political momentum to force everyone to switch to pollution-absorbing concrete at 30% greater cost, it's just too big a hit to a basic cost of growth.
The law has helped with pretty much everything else. In fact, it's _the_ one reason for every single filter installed so far.
Must the law say everyone should use this concrete? Probably not. It can however offer incentives for any kind of pollution reducing-measures. This, or planting trees, or whatever. Or not.
In the end, we just have to decide what we, as a whole society want, and the law will have to say that. That's the idea behind democracy, after all. And from a more pragmatic point of view, that's the only thing that seemed to reliably work so far. Jus waiting for companies to just be nice and responsible on their own... well, as you seem to aggree, it's got a really really weak track record.
But anyway, my main point is: Do not allow the mantra "shareholder responsibility" to make the CEOs of irresponsible companies seem like helpless victims of the law. They are required to seek a return on investment. They are not required to be amoral in the process. They're already amoral, and 'shareholder responsibility' is their excuse which they use without blinking because, well, they're amoral.
Then my main point is: in that case we'll need to change the law. Because as it is, it's not only offering an excuse, it's actively asking them to be complete sociopaths.
I find it borderline absurd to basically make a law that says "thou shalt do X" and then expect people to be empathic and responsible enough to understand that they don't have to really do that. It's like having a law that says "it's your duty to kick the neighbour's dog", but expect people to be empathic and reasonable enough to understand that only assholes actually do that.
Plus, law that's not applied or is inconsistently and arbitrarily applied, is actually worse than no law at all. That's not what the rule of the law is supposed to mean.
Basically if we don't want people to act like that, then we shouldn't have a law that tells them to, really. If we want CEOs to be socially responsible, then we should have laws that define at least the bare minimum of what we expect as social responsibility.
E.g., if we find it unethical to have children working in sweatshops, we should have a law that says, "no, even if it's in China, we _don't_ find it ok. If you want to bring those products in this country, they better not be made by 12 year olds. And if we find out that you've lied about that, we'll hitch your customs taxes sky high _retroactively_ for every single unit coming from that factory." The same for pollution or whatever.
You'll notice that the very first paragraph of my message contained the phrase, "(Except maybe if their PR department says that that claim would improve the corporate image or something.)" Furthermore, the phrase that you quoted is, basically, "If doing it would cause 1% less profits, it's their legal _duty_ to _not_ do it", _not_ "it's their duty to be evil."
So, yes, basically if you manage to find a situation where being "good" is more profitable than being "evil", then it's your duty to the shareholders to do so.
About "black and white", well, depends on which part you mean. The duty to maximize shareholder value is pretty black-and-white. What's not black-and-white is (A) by what means (so, yes, be non-evil all you want if that produces more value), and (B) how it's enforced. Generally you'll be left with considerable room to maneuver, at least as long as you're turning up a profit. Do expect Wall Street to scream for a change of CEO the moment things go south.
What I do claim, though, is that (in a non-black-and-white way) _usually_ the evil version is more profitable than the good one. Especially more profitable in the short run, and the stock market lives by quarterly reports. There are exceptions, of course, but that's why I said "usually."
if you can improve your public image by being sane, responsible, ethical, then more people will buy your product.
Oh yes. The question, though, is how much more. Most people simply just care about bang-per-buck, as illustrated by the fact that they have no qualms with buying sports shoes made in inhuman sweat shop. (At least as long as those sweatshops are in Asia and not here.) So how many would actually prefer your ethically-made product instead of the competing one that's 1 dollar cheaper? Would that offset the extra costs? That's really the whole question. If you can make 1% more money with 5% more investment, then unless you sell the product for 5 times more than it costs to make it, it's a losing proposition. Most companies don't have that kind of margins.
Also there's a fine trick in there, in that what really matters is the public image, not what you actually do. A good PR campaign and a bit of hype and bullshit are a tempting alternative to actually being ethical, sane, responsible, etc, and quite often better bang per buck too. Quite often those "ethical policies" that your advisor mentioned are just PR bullshit.
By now the corporate idea of "ethics" has drifted from the original meaning, to mostly "how to cover your ass, not go on record saying anything that could be used against you, have a good excuse ready, and deny all knowledge if caught". So the fact that they post some ethical policy, can -- and often does -- mean nothing more than that they'll have a good excuse ready when things hit the fan.
My pension advisor asked me whether I wanted to invest into strictly ethical companies, it seemed to be a standard question; the implication then is that companies with ethical policies get some more investment.
That would work that way only if both kinds of companies had the exact same PE numbers and all. Then yes, unethical company A would get only the money of the X% who don't care, while ethical company B would get everyone's money. Obviously, then, company B "wins."
It stops being true when the two don't actually perform the same. When either company posts better results than the other then that X% group who just care about money will put their money there. And that quite often is company A. When company A announces that they've just opened a new sweatshop in China, moved the call centre to India, fired half the personnel and raped the pension fund, while B posts a loss because they've played paladin locally, that X% group will promptly sell their shares in B and buy shares in A.
Effectively now the situation becomes: A is more attractive for X%, B is more attractive for (100-X)%. Of course, there is som
I think so too, but let's nitpick at the details anyway;)
I was just pointing out that the entire building would not need to be constructed out of the expensive material - just the outside.
Very true and insightful that, but that outer layer might still be either (A) more expensive than leaving it as it is, or (B) more ugly than you'd want it to be.
They are already cladding buildings with expensive materials - far more expensive than 130% of concrete. [...]Not all corporate buildings are status-building headquarters... there are an awful lot of warehouses, substations, factories, etc.
I took the liberty of putting those two phrases next to each other, because, as I understand it (but I could be wrong), your position revolves around the assumption that both might be true at the same time for the same building. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
The problem is that while both of those two phrases are very true and insightful, they also apply to entirely different building.
The warehouses, substations, factories, etc, that you mention weren't covered in glass and marble to start with. Some may be just covered in cheap paint (once every 20 years or so, for that matter), or be bare brick or cement to start with. In which case removing the old paint and covering them in eco-friendly cement is just an extra expense. Some were covered in thermo-insulating panels, soundproofing panels, whatever pqanels. The eco-friendly cement would have to come on top of those, in that case, which is an extra expense.
Basically what I'm saying is that the companies have been penny-pinching as it is. You can't really say that it's cheaper to cover it this concrete instead of in marble or glass, because that kind of building wasn't covered in marble or glass to start with.
If that building really could work just as well as bare concrete (needed no insulation, etc) it is pretty much just that plus a thin layer of cheap paint already. And even that layer of paint is because of the community, as you do mention yourself:
I was putting forward a scenario where they could throw up a cheap ugly concrete building, and then when the community objects they can claim that it's good for the environment.
Call me a jaded old cynic, but I think that expecting them to understand that is an overly optimistic view for most communities. The NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) factor can -- and very often does -- override any other lip service they might pay to ecology, safety, local economy, etc. Plus, there's the other factor you mention below:
Me? I like pretty buildings. I like the Chrysler Building. I currently live in a big, ugly, concrete apartment building. Ugly buildings are not good for MY environment:)
Well, that's just the thing: 99% of the population thinks like you do. Nobody wants ugly buildings in their environment, so property values tend to go down everywhere around them.
Dunno about where you live, but here even those big ugly concrete apartment buildings are at least covered in a coat of paint. If you actually left one to look like bare concrete, you'd find that not only _you_ have to lower prices substantially to find people willing to live there, but the same would suddenly apply to every building around it. Good luck explaining to the other building's owner that he has to take a loss so you can be eco-friendly.
The same applies to a lot of the warehouses, substations, factories, etc. You try leaving those looking like bare concrete, and they'll lower the attractivity of anything that's on the same street or has line-of-sight to it. Judging by some big factories I've seen, that could mean pretty much half the city.
It might give a builder an excuse to have a bare concrete exterior without being accused of making an ugly building. "It fights pollution! Isn't that more important than being pretty?"
Heh. Sorry, I just can't see it happening like that. (Except maybe if their PR department says that that claim would improve the corporate image or something.)
Most of the corporations don't really give a fuck about the environment or social responsibility or even ethics. Their _only_ legal responsibility is to make more money for the shareholder. And they'll do just that. If doing the ecologically sane, socially responsible, or ethical thing would cause 1% less profits, it's their legal _duty_ to _not_ do it.
The industry (as a whole) has a long history of doing anything up to (and including) dumping poisons into rivers or into the atmosphere. It's been perfectly happy to cause health problems all the way to cancer and poisoning in the nearby towns (both mining and manufacturing did that), in its own workers (see the fact that they knew since the end of the 19'th century that asbestos tends to cause lung cancer), or even in its customers (see the tobacco industry.)
The only thing that _ever_ dragged it kicking and screaming into cleaning up its act was the law. At some point society decided, "no, sorry, we're not having _that_ shit dumped into our town's river and ground water. Put a filter on it or we'll make it even more expensive to ignore us." And even then invariably the industry has put up quite a fight, including astroturfing, lobbying, PR lies campaigns, threatening to fire everyone and move somewhere else, etc.
Sadly I just don't see it working any differently this time. Now you're asking them to pay extra (in most cases having an ugly building _is_ paying extra, in an indirect way: less rent, lost customers, public image, whatever) not just to clean their own act, but basically to clean everyone else's pollution too. Expect a heartfelt laugh in the face if you tried convincing someone to volunteer to do that. Either the law forces them to, or it just won't happen.
Even if you take the meteor hypothesis as absolute truth, the fact is: other species survived. Not only mammals, but also lizards. Heck, even some species of dinosaurs survived. (Birds _are_ technically dinosaurs.)
We're not talking just a massive shockwave killing anything squishy on the planet instantly. Even for the dinosaur there's no D-Day when everyone died. The disappearance of the dinosaurs is a very very very long and gradual period of their declining numbers into extinction. For most of the planet we're talking "just" a climate change. _That_ is what killed the dinosaurs, one way or another. Some species survived that, and in fact even thrived in the new conditions, some species didn't.
Note however there are more hypotheses about that event. The decline in oxygen content in the air in that period, for example, would also be perfectly enough on its own to make a very large beast non-viable. The change in the flora is another candidate. It's entirely possible that the new kinds of plants were either toxic or not nutrient-rich enough for the old lizards.
At any rate, what killed the dinosaurs was _change_. Something changed (take your pick what you think was the killer change there). And some species could deal with it, some species didn't. Dinosaurs (except birds) didn't cope well with the change and their numbers went downhill from there.
Yes, they were a capable species for the old environment, but then the environment changed. And the dinosaurs were suddenly very incapable in the new environment.
So, yes, the dinosaurs are the _perfect_ metaphor for someone or something who can't cope with a change and becomes obsolete.
Change happens. One day you have a nice business hammering scythes and sickles for a village, and the next day someone goes and buys a tractor and a combine harvester and everyone wants _those_. Or you have a nice job calculating tables of numbers by hand and then the CEO goes and buys one of those new "computers". Tough luck. Either you adapt or you're a dinosaur.
It happens with computers and programmers/admins/whatever every day. And some people adapt, some become relics trying to stop progress and return to the good old days. God knows half of the IT departments at big corporations have too many of _those_. Maybe they were once capable and competent. The dinosaurs were too at one point. Now they no longer are. And just like the dinosaurs, sadly it takes a long long time to gradually get rid of those relics. But just like the dinosaurs they _are_ on a slow painful path to extinction.
Duly noted, but still, I don't think that scenario is applicable directly to business.
1. the "game" isn't yet at a stage where anyone is locked in a losing configuration due to what the players already did. Search engines aren't yet an interlocking monopoly with insane entry barriers. If one strategy doesn't work -- because of social dynamics or anything else -- there's nothing to keep MS or Yahoo or anyone else from trying a different strategy.
2. Unlike Rail Baron, here the "game" is played over years or decades. It's not a case of one freak afternoon where everyone tried the same move by sheer coincidence, and that was that.
If there is some freak configuration where everyone's strategies conflict, these guys have _years_ to realize it and try something else. Yes, freak coincidences exist in the business world too, but the executives of big corporations certainly have the time, the funds and the business intelligence torecognize them and react to them. That's their job. If everyone is playing the mutually-destructive strategy A, it's the management's job -- and legal obligation to shareholders -- to recognize that and fix the problem. Maybe pick the odd-guy-doing-something-else strategy, maybe try to out-spend/out-advertise/whatever the others, maybe something else. But if they're still at it after half a decade, they just don't have the same freak-coincidence excuse any more.
If after all these years they still can't match Google, maybe, just maybe, it's not just some freak social-dynamics coincidence, but maybe Google is just playing a better strategy.
If you look at it, it's even pretty obvious what goes on.
On one hand you have a bunch of people who just, basically, can't get their heads out of their collective arse. Google's strategy of hiring the best of the best, doing the best thing, and _not_ placing the marketeers at the helm is just lost on them. Those just _can't_ exit the non-working strategy, because they just don't comprehend the alternatives.
And on the other hand, you have MS, who again and again proves that they aren't even in it to win as such, but to kill as many (preferrably big) competitors as possible. In your Rail Baron example, their primary goal isn't even to make more money, but to drive the other players bankrupt, even if in a way where they too take a loss. Winning the game or making money is more of a side-effect than the primary goal. And they can't and won't exit a deadlock situation like what you describe, or not until they've killed their intended target. Once chair-throwing Steve Balmer gets in his head, "Fucking Eric Schmidt is a fucking pussy. I'm going to fucking bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to fucking kill Google.", he just can't stop until he's done just that. That is the goal. He'd cheerfully let you get the rest of the board if in the process he gets to squeeze Google out of their zone.
After his first (embarrassing) loss to me, he took me seriously. I never beat him again.
Well, that _is_ one possibility right there. Maybe he just didn't take you seriously on the first try, and didn't bother thinking too much during the game.
Basically, to explain it better, my theory isn't that a master can't lose. My theory is that when he does lose, there'll be some other explanation involved than pure dumb luck. (Unless the game actually involves dice or some similar element of pure dumb luck.) It can be that the master just had a headache at the time, or had some other thing on his mind, or just didn't take the novice seriously and didn't bother thinking too much. But at the end of the day it's still a match where the "master" played worse than the "novice", and the "novice" won it fair and square. Not by a stroke of improbably luck of cosmic proportions.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I doubt you would actually beat one. Not meant as an insult, but I believe that you don't have what it takes. If you had, you'd already be either in jail, or a CEO, or chief of marketting or various other positions suited to people able to think "it's just business" when harming others. Or in his place making a good living sending spam and 419 mails.
See most people are quite able to speak/cheer about and for beating others up, killing others, war, etc, as long as it's just talking. They might even actually do it, if a fit of rage disables their sanity for long enough. But fits of rage aren't something you can plan and execute whenever you wish. And otherwise when you actually have to do it, there's this interlock against harming other humans. It's partially "what if it was me in his shoes" education (even if you logically know it would never be in his place spamming) and partially that interlock most animals have against harming their own more than strictly necessary. (Even when cats or dogs fight their own there is always a mechanism to signal "I give up" and the other _will_ cease.)
It's a strange world, really. The same people who could be shaking a fist and screaming for war against X at the top of their lungs, would actually have trouble looking one of X in the eyes and squeezing the trigger. A lot of PTSD cases in war aren't just people getting shocked by being shot at, but shocked by having shot other humans.
There is one cathegory that can cheerfully think "it's only business": the sociopaths. They live in a strange world in which the others are NPCs: the others don't matter, they're not the same, "it could be me in his shoes" doesn't apply, etc. They can lie, cheat, murder, torture, whatever, and be perfectly able to look themselves in the mirror after it. Because the other guy didn't matter.
And, sad to say, if you weren't born one, I doubt you could actually beat this guy up in cold blood. If anyone gave you a baseball bat and this guy tied to a chair, you just couldn't actually do it.
And it's probably better that way. I'm thinking we as a society would do better to just start recognizing sociopaths for what they are, and the damage they can do. This guy, for example, is a sociopath, plain and simple. He's not just "being smart", he's not "just doing business", he's not "just doing what's needed", or the other things these guys like to pose as. He's just someone who doesn't even see you as a human being, much less his equal.
Oh yes. By its shareholders. See, the EU is a market twice the size of the USA. Giving up on that market would send MS's shares into quite a bit of a dive.
But here's the funnier part: Not only it would make a lot of investors sell (thus speeding up the dive), but it would put quite a big dent into Bill Gates's personal fortune. See, his being such a rich guy isn't calculated just in money in the bank, but mostly in MS shares.
So between paying a couple hundred million of MS's money and losing a few _billion_ off your own worth, which would _you_ choose?
Plus, it's precisely that kind of thing that MS has worked hard to avoid. See a large part of the "secret sauce" in MS's monopoly of interlocking parts, is its products being ubiquitous. It's not just that you can't replace product X because product Y depends on it, it's also the mentality that product Y is the de-facto standard, everyone else has it, and you can't just give up on it without becoming the odd guy out of the loop.
MS has worked hard to maintain that illusion of ubiquity, world-wide. It has been known to offer massive price cuts and even prefer to overlook piracy than allow whole markets which are proof that you can jolly well live without both X and Y.
So forcing the whole of Europe standardize on something else than Windows and Office? Ooer. That would be the day when IBM', Sun' and the others' managers ejaculate in their pin-striped pants out of joy. It's not just the loss of the European market as such, but that would be the day when almost every single US corporation's executive starts hearing stuff like "sir, we can't send that document in Excel format, because they don't use Excel in Germany. No, sir, neither in France." It's the day when people start hearing that MS file formats aren't, in fact, the ubiquitous de-facto standard and can't be an ubiquitous de-facto standard.
So, heh, yeah, I'd _love_ to see MS do something _that_ stupid. Sadly it won't happen, because they're not stupid. But it would be comedy gold.
You know, it would be nice if all the "it's like some stupid kind of import tax" or "it's punishing US companies" people actually bothered to read the way it all went before posting crap.
First of all, MS was initially _not_ fined a single dime. They were ordered to release the docs for certain protocols needed for interoperability. (I.e., no, not to document all of Windows. Dunno what gave you _that_ idea.) It was even allowed to give a list of which independent experts are qualified to judge whether the docs are enough or not. And the commission picked one of them. Pay attention, because it's important: it was someone suggested by MS judging these docs all the time.
That's it. The original ruling had _no_ punitive aspect as such. It was aimed strictly at correcting the monopoly situation that made it possible to break the trade laws.
MS _only_ got finally fined when months after months went by, and it showed no intention to comply with the ruling. It engaged in anti-EU astroturfing wars, it tried lame threats, it did stuff that was at best mocking the court, etc. You try doing that as a private person and you'd probably get some time in jail for holding the court in contempt.
Even then the fine was (A) per day that they keep ignoring the court ruling (which is how it eventually got to be hundreds of millions), and (B) with various generous deadlines and in between, and the provision that if MS complies until the deadline, it doesn't pay a dime.
So how the heck does that support such assertions as "it's like some stupid kind of import tax"?
And if you want to talk about punishing US companies, have a look at the long list of EU-based companies which have been slapped with hundreds of millions in fines from day 1 for breaking the trade laws. If anything the EU is giving a US-based company an unfair advantage and preferential treatment there. Because, again, any EU-based company in a similar situation was _not_ given the kind of sweet deal that MS was given.
Unfortunately, MS has mis-interpreted this as weakness and tried to pretty much just defy the court. Well, it didn't quite work that way.
First of all, noone got taken to court for just being big. Maybe you don't make that confusion, but a lot of (other) people seem to think that anti-trust somehow means "punished for being big" or "punished for being successful." That's not the case. Coca-Cola is still perfectly on the safe side of the law, for example. And noone orders McDonald to give the recipe to its secret sauce.
The thing sorta goes like this:
1. It must be proven that you've actually abused your might in a non-lawful way, and there was an actual harm to the consumers. (Harm to competing companies actually doesn't matter.)
If you will, it's like taking the school bully to court. He's not tried or punished for being big, he's tried for punching people in the face. There's a not-so-subtle difference there.
2. It must be proven that you were in a monopoly position, in which it was artifficially unfeasible for someone else to undo the harm you did. I.e., that in that situation, the free market just didn't work.
Basically that's the reality check to your Ayn Rand-inspired musings. If it can be proven that the free market can neutralize the harm on its own, then the company _doesn't_ get the legal equivalent of a kick in the nuts.
E.g., if two pharmacies aggree to fix prices on vitamins, it's _not_ an anti-trust case. The market can work around such minor speedbumps. People will just go buy their vitamins at the super-market, or go to the other pharmacy down the road. Or maybe someone will open their own pharmacy across the road. But when (as has at least once happened) the major pharma companies fix prices, that may well be an anti-trust case.
Look... noone is against the notion of a free market. We quite like it in Europe too. We don't go asking companies for their secrets just for the heck of it, but only when there's no other recourse left to force an aberrant situation back to being a free market.
The free market is actually a lot less robust on its own than some libertarians seem to assume. The whole notion and theory is centred around some assumptions: there are many identical/interchangeable products, the buyers are perfectly informed, it's trivial for a new competitor to enter that market, etc. _That_ situation can balance itself all right. But the whole mechanism falls apart when those pre-conditions aren't true any more. There are some actions and some kinds of damage that it can't work around, and there are people who have the financial interest to try to do just that: destroy that ideal free market.
And that's the other thing: the assumption that it's in everyone's interest to play nice, is false. It's in society's interest that they play nice, but for the individual competitors it's most often the exact opposite: you make more money if you can get in a situation where you don't have to play nice.
E.g., as a simple example, if there are two smiths in the same medieval town, sure, it's in everyone else's interest that they start acting like in a free market and undercut each other's prices. But those two smiths can make more money if, say, they make a secret aggreement to fix prices. Then they're the only supplier in town and can fleece everyone else with impunity. Or maybe one of them will decide that instead of even that, he'll hire a couple of mercenaries to beat the other up. Or whatever.
So to make a long story short: expecting the free market to always just work on its own, is a bit like expecting a city to work without a police station. Sooner or later someone will have the means and the incentive to ruin all that for everyone else.
Heh. At the "everyone who isn't with us, is part of some evil conspiracy against us" stage? Don't worry. I went through that stage myself. But eventually growing up kind of sneaks upon you, you know? You start realizing that there are no knights in shining armour and no super-villains cackling manically over death-ray plans. And that you're not really the one who'll save the world from MS. That pretending that the problems don't exist is actually counter-productive and doesn't actually help anyone. In fact, it only does more harm than good. And a lot of other such common-sense, really.
And in a nutshell that's my only "agenda": not really as much of an agenda, as just realizing that the whole fanboy crusade is stupid and pointless. Acknowledging the Real World (TM) instead of living in some imaginary crusader-fanboy world.
At any rate, heh, feel free to believe whatever floats your boat. If imagining me as part of some evil MS-sponsored conspiracy makes you feel any better, by all means, go ahead.
Bingo. That was my whole point actually. The only one that's anywhere _near_ a usable state is a Cathedral-type product.
And they're still a sad joke that noone would mistake for a real substitute for or challenge to MS Office. They took _ages_ to get anywhere _near_ where the Cathedral products got in a fraction of that time. Star Office in the 90's, before the Sun purchase, was less of a joke than KOffice and Gnome Office still are. That's just my point: that's what complexity does to Bazaar-style projects.
It may surprise you, but a lot of us eventually learn how to function in society in spite of AS. It's a bit like fighting blind, but you eventually learn to use logic and think in advance. Or at least, some of us do. There are, of course, also those who get stuck on acting like a retarded kid who wants a lollypop. But not everyone does.
Heh. I'll take it as a compliment if I passed well enough for a neurotypical, then.
But again, feel free to think whatever you will. If you don't believe me, so be it. I'm not going to turn this into a psychoanalysis session to convince a random person on the Internet than I'm a bit deffective.
Read some medicine books, lemming. AS is characterized by a very narrow focus of interest. Yes, an AS is pretty much tireless at doing the parts that interest him, but is also extremely quick to get bored by stuff that falls outside that focus or by stuff that looks more like routine uninteresting homework even _within_ his focus of interest. Someone could be tireless at hacking the interesting cool algorithms or optimizations in a program, but lose interest quickly when you make him polish the user interface. Or other such combinations of "I like A, but B is dumb, and A1 is too trivial to interest me".
I've never said "all", did I? There are a lot of those who are just paid to work on those project. Which was in fact my whole point.
But lot of those who do devote inordinate amounts of their own
The bazaar model still worked when the pinnacle of software complexity were "cat" and "vi". That's it. It stopped working almost completely when complexity meant Open Office Org.
The Asperger's Syndrome kind of coder (and I'm one, so I can make fun of myself if I want to) which finds more joy in coding something cool instead of going out and flirting with a girl, also has a very narrow focus of attention and gets bored easily when he must deal with stuff either (A) outside that focus, or (B) which is basically homework instead of getting to the cool stuff. That's how we ended on the bad side of teachers in school, after all. Spending weeks understanding someone else's framework and code before you can even start on your cute "number paragraphs in Klingon" idea, is boring, and it's even more boring to understand and test all dependencies so you don't break something else.
So today in F/OSS the only ones making any progress nowadays are, sad to say, the Cathedrals.
Yes, everyone likes to use the Linux kernel and such as an example of why the Bazaar is strong, but have a look at the actual contributors some day. It's _not_ bored nerds like you and me working in their free time. Most of them are paid employees of Red Hat, IBM, etc. Linux as the work of bored nerds in their free time was a security shithole until Red Hat spent some real money doing a code and security review. And it was a joke in the enterprise arena until IBM started pumping some real money and formerly Cathedral-developped closed-source code into it. There's a reason why IBM looked like a believable target to SCO (as opposed to just a tempting target, by having deep pockets), and that's the sheer quantity of Aix code that IBM donated.
The same goes for OOo: practically all development is paid for by Sun, and it's bleeding Sun a ton of money. The same goes for Apache, which everyone uses as an example of why OSS is better than MS's software on a server: it, and most other Apache projects for that matter, is mostly IBM work. Go figure. IDE's? Both Eclipse and Netbeans are paid work by respectively IBM and Sun and a number of other corporate contributors. Compilers? You'd be surprised how much in GCC actually comes from Intel and the like. Browser? Mozilla was mostly paid work by Netscape, then AOL, and now it's mostly sponsored by Google. Etc.
So yes, as you aptly put it:
And that's why most of F/OSS nowadays is nothing more than a way for various corporate Cathedrals to pool their resources against MS. Sure, it's a good goal and I have nothing against benefitting from it. But let's stop pretending that ESR's Bazaar is anywhere _near_ relevant any more. The actual "Bazaar" projects are the thousands of unfinishet things on Source Forge that noone gives a damn about, either to help develop/debug or to use seriously or to pay the developper for features.
I never said it was in danger from skepticism. If more people were in an "I'll believe it when you show me the proof" state of mind, science would be stronger than ever before.
I'll tell you what the danger is: ignorance and gullibility. _That_ is the problem. And that is the thrust of the attack on science nowadays. Notions like "theory", "evidence", "burden of proof", etc, are deliberatelly blurred until the stupid and uneducated think that everyone is equally taking wild baseless guesses, and it's ok to pick the snake oil _without_ actual evidence.
There is a massive difference between being a valid concept and actually having the evidence, or fitting that evidence. There are plenty of concepts which would be perfectly valid, e.g., the "ether" of last century, or the "center fire" and "counter-Earth" of the ancient philosophers, except they don't (or no longer) fit the actual data we have.
And then there's the issue of being a _useful_ theory. See, the whole purpose is to make predictions which then work that way. E.g., you have a computer or a monitor, because physics made some clear predictions: if you put an electron behind a potential barrier this high, it does that. Just saying "It was God's will" retroactively is freaking useless, as it doesn't give you any prediction. What will God's will be for another CPU design? How would God design a species for another environment? What is an experiment to prove or disprove something which doesn't even make a single verifiable prediction?
We don't get into a hissy fit about the concept, but about the insidious dishonest way in which it fights for mindshare. It never tried to stand on its merits, but it just tries to blur notions and undermine the actual science. We get in a hissy fit about it's using word-plays like "well, evolution is just a theory too", and thus trying to distract attention from what "theory" actually means in science, and the way ID actually _isn't_ a theory by any scientific standard. It's just a "hypothesis".
Basically it's like having a football match where one player comes on the field with a baseball bat and starts whacking at the opposite team. The question isn't whether he himself has a right to be on the field, but we can object to the fact that he isn't playing the same game as everyone else on that field. We expect him to compete on merit -- just like we expect scientific theories to compete on merit -- not on underhanded tactics.
Actually even there String Theory actually matches the observed phenomena very well and makes predictions that actually work that way. In that, it's already head and shoulders over ID.
Where it "fails" is basically Occam's Razor. It doesn't explain or predict anything new, that the simpler theories don't already. But again, even getting there is already more achievement than ID ever had. String Theory may come second in the marathon of science, but ID is still just standing at the starting line and trying to discredit everyone else and redefine what the competition is.
And perhaps more importantly, again, ST plays honestly by the same rules as everyone else. Here is the theory, here is the evidence, here is what it explains, here is what we can't do (yet), and you're free to design an experiment which would disprove it. It may not be necessary, by Occam's Razor, but it still shows the expected intellectual honesty. It doesn't redefine words, it doesn't do sophistry, it doesn't use religion to sway people into overlooking its problems, etc. Wake me up when ID can make a similar claim.
You do however rehash the same fallacy that's been said over and over again through history. (Maybe just as an illustration, since you say you don't make that point.)
The problem, however, is that the same can be said for any other religion. Islam, Flying Spaghetti Monster, or my own favourite: the Great Game Designer In The Sky. If you're not with us and you're wrong, baaad things could happen to you. Better be one of us, even if we're wrong, than take that risk, right? So, come on, what do you have to lose?
And for that matter, if you fall for that line of reasoning, can I interest you in some tickets on the Vogo Space Fleet? When they come and destroy Earth to build a highway, do you want to be among those saved or be left down on an exploding planet? And, hey, if you're with us and you're wrong, you only lost some money. If you're not with us and you're wrong, I hope you can breathe vaccuum. Do you want to take that risk?
And for that matter, want to buy some cold-iron amulets against dark elf magic? Same reasoning: if you're with us and wrong, you just bought a useless iron amulet. But if you're not with us and you're wrong, weell, those dark elves are known to do very very nasty things to unprotected humans. Do you want to take that risk on the day the ancient Lords And Ladies return?
Etc.
It's not just a shitty reason, as you do say, it's really shitty logic too.
Occam's Razor. I'll believe something when it has the reproductible experimental data that can't be explained otherwise.
If someone claims their Flying Spaghetti Monster can perform miracles, let them show some reproductible and falsifiable way of invoking His Noodly Appendage. Dunno, make a coin levitate each time you draw that deity's symbol over it with your finger. I'm sure an omnipotent god could change reality to work that way. It's not just proof, but it's reproductible and it can't be easily explained away by just tweaking the laws of gravity and such. That one would pass Occam's Razor all right.
That's just one example, off the top of my head. I'm sure an omniscient and omnipresent deity can come up with better ideas than that, if it wanted to. It can do better than expecting me to believe because of such shitty "what if you're against us and you're wrong" reasoning.
Until then, I'll go with my gut feeling and put my faith in The Great Game Designer. Join us and be saved. In fact, auto-saved every 10 minutes and backed up to tape every Sunday
You know, the funny thing is, a lot of that stuff actually is a lot less miraculous than some people insist.
E.g., virgin birth happens very literally every week. Yet another girl discovers the hard way that, for example, anal sex isn't that reliable a contraceptive. Sperm can drip along the relatively narrow bridge to the vulva, and even a drop can be enough to cause a pregnancy. You don't really need to fill someone up with semen to get her pregnant, because spermatozoa swim and the vagina and uterus basically signal "swim this way". So even a drop can be enough.
An elastic hymen is another possibility. Again, it happens lots even nowadays.
Mary is not even the last and not the first to get pregnant while virgin, or to claim it was a miracle. E.g., Zeus also supposedly got Danae pregnant, by taking the form of a shower of gold, and the resulting offspring was Perseus. (Her father, Acrisius, however, didn't quite believe the story;)
So, anyway, picture that you live in a strict theocracy where anything sex-related is a sin and a crime, unless it's for the sole purpose of making more kids. The same theocracy where, for example, Onan was worth some righteous divine smiting for spilling his seed on the ground instead of getting a woman pregnant with it. Among other very narrow views of the world, marriage, and a woman's rights and role in it all.
So what would _you_ do, if you were a woman in that situation? Admit, basically, "Yes, guv'nor. We were horny, and Joseph just wouldn't cut it out with wanting some nookie, so had some sex before marriage. Only I took it up the ass, thinking I'd stay a virgin that way," and get stoned to death for it? Or pull a, "haleluia, it's a miracle"? Heh.
At any rate, asking me to believe that it _must_ be unique is essentially asking to ignore the thousands of cases where it happens to other women. Asking me to believe that a divine miracle is the _only_ possible explanation, is basically asking to ignore the very natural ways in which it happens again and again to this day.
It's, if you will, akin to asking me to believe that there's one single airplane, and that divine intervention is the only way in which it could possibly fly. Well, excuse me if I get distracted by all these other thousands of airplanes and the very non-miraculous ways they fly.
Ditto for Jesus's miraculous resurrection. There's no miracle in rising if one wasn't dead to start with.
The whole execution was highly non-standard, including scheduling it on a day when they knew they didn't have the required time. Crucifixion was a _very_ slow death, as the crucifixion itself does little more than create pain and discomfort. It took _days_ to die on the cross. It's also telling that the Romans had to develop a standard coup-de-grace, namely breaking the condemned's legs, to hasten death, if needed. You don't do that for quick executions. And unsurprisingly Jesus's two companions didn't die there and had to get just that standard coup de grace.
So basically before asking me to believe the miracle of the resurrection, one is basically asking me to believe the miracle of his being dead there in the first place. Contrary to all common sense, biology, historical evidence about crucifixion, and the various modern day re-enactments.
And the Romans, otherwise known for discipline and executing the orders to the letter... well, what do you know, supposedly a centurion decides unilaterally that this one is dead already and no point in obeying both direct orders, and the standard coup-de-grace procedure when a crucifixion had to be ended prematurely. Let's do it for those two, but not for the third.
Can it be that Pontius Pilate didn't actually want to execute Jesus? I guess we'll never know. But it doesn't take too much "denial" to at least consider the possibility that maybe, just maybe, there was no death and thus no resurrection.
It says in two _scientific_ disciplines. Keyword: scientific.
Being awarded a Nobel peace prize is no doubt an achievement, but it's hardly science-related in any way.
Frankly, I haven't seen many posts saying they should be shut up.
What most of us _are_ saying is that:
1) it's stupid. Sorry, the same first ammendment says I _can_ say I find it bloody stupid. Same as if I read about someone spending that much money on a magic ring of levitation to jump off a cliff with. Or spending that much money on animatronics to "prove" to everyone that Lord Of The Rings is 100% fact. (Sure, you can animate hobbits and orcs all you want, but that doesn't make it a scientiffic proof.) Sure, I'm not going to stop them, but excuse me while I laugh my ass off at the stupidity of it all.
2. this, and the whole "young earth creationsm" and "intelligent design" bullshit are part of an insidious battle to destroy science as a whole, via a barrage of fallacies, flawed logic, and redefining words. It's not just a "well, I think that god exists" issue, but a battle for mindshare trying to effectively purge the very fundament of the scientific method or reasoning from as many minds as possible. There's a whole scaffold including stuff like "burden of proof", "Occam's razor", etc, that these people systematically try to pervert and destroy. Each and every single notion, word and definition is systematically corrupted, perverted, distorted, and outright presented as the very opposite of what it used to mean.
If you want an analogy, it's not just like creating a "museum of fascism", for historical reason. What these people do is akin to instead trying to systematically pervert and corrupt the very notions of "democracy", "freedom", "elections", etc- Until the whole edifice is pulled from under you and you find yourself in a fascist dictatorship just because everyone forgot how a democratic country was supposed to work or what the difference is.
That's essentially what these people are trying to do to science and reason: pervert and corrupt and undermine it all, until you find yourself in an Iran-style fundamentalist theocracy, just because noone knows any better any more. Just because everyone's mind has been warped to think that "evidence" means "what the preacher told me", and "burden of proof" means "well, you can't disprove what the preacher said", and "theory" means "just another unfounded opinion."
Sure, I'm still not going to shut them up by force, but they do earn my heartfelt disgust and contempt.
Actually, it's not that simple. What pretty much triggered renaissance was actually a massive depopulation caused by epidemics such as the Black Death. Suddenly there just weren't enough people to keep migrating to town _and_ work the fields, which in turn allowed peasants to demand better pay and better treatment. See also the ensuing inflation, which is what predictably happens when unemployment is zero. (And the resulting price-fixing attempts, and the revolts _those_ led to.) That's in a nutshell what triggered renaissance, and why eastern europe (which wasn't that hard hit by the Black Death) didn't experience a renaissance.
;)
At any rate, "growing pains" or not, what I'm trying to say is that the Renaissance and the transition between Middle Ages and Renainssance were a major pain. For the people actually living there and then it was a shithole that turned the whole European culture depressive and morbid for centuries. It was a time of plagues, death, destruction, poverty, revolts, wars, pillaging and raping, disilusionment, etc. The black death alone, even if you somehow managed to not get it at all (although occasionally an outbreak killed some 75-80% of the population) meant living in fear for your very life, in a town full of people screaming in pain and occasionally jumping off a house or a bridge just to end the horrible pain. And then a bit later the religious wars and persecutions came around too. And what a fun time _that_ was
I.e., what I'm trying to say is that it's, you know, mildly amusing to see Ren Faires enacting it as some fun period to live in, full of cheerful, prosperous and healthy merchants, peasants, craftsmen and so on. As I was saying, it's a bit like having a Hell Faire in which you pretend that Hell is a sunny summer resort.
While there have been _some_ things that people knew how to treat since antiquity, the fact still remains that:
1. It was for a very limited number of diseases.
E.g., as I was saying, dysentery was killing whole armies. There were more English longbowmen killed by it in the 100 years war than killed by the French. If some holistic and homoepathic cures actually worked against that, you get the idea, why didn't they use them? We're talking pretty much the difference between winning and losing a war. And, no, it wasn't just because of dogma or whatever: the English had no problem breaking any other laws of chivalry in war there, justifying it as needed to even the odds. (France was a _much_ bigger country.)
2. They had a lot of cures which are known to either not work, or be outright toxic.
E.g., I've mentioned mercury used in anything from treating diseases to imortality. (Ironically, Shi Huangdi managed to poison himself while trying to achieve immortality.) E.g., on the "merely useless" category, a lot of the cures for pretty much anything in the middle ages were just distilled alcohol. That managed to jump-start the distillation industry during the Black Death, but not actually do anything to actually cure the diseases. E.g., covering the whole spectrum, you have the ever popular doctrine of signatures, in which something was deemed to help with this or that just because of the way it looks. For example that red wine is somehow good for the blood, because both are red
Uh, no, not really. It makes for a good (if bullshit) anti-science position, but in practice, ancient/medieval science was mostly a bunch of hocus-pocus, con-artistry and revisionist history.
E.g., if you're gonna make such broad claims as "ancient science is better", how about medicine? May I point out that, since you mention "ren faire", during renaissance the tendency for any city's population was to die off of disease and any city needed a steady supply of immigrants from the country side just to maintain its size? I don't just mean the recurring black death epidemics, but even in between them. The cities were that filthy, being overcrowded didn't help either, and "medicine" was that useless at the time.
You'd actually be more likely to die in a hospital than if left untreated. If they didn't bleed you to death, they'd give you fun stuff like mercury. See examples from Ivan The Terrible's treatment with mercury to the first chinese emperor, Shi Huangdi, accidentally posioned with a too high dose of mercury-based pills by his doctors. There are some two millenia or so between the two. That's medieval and ancient medical science at its finest, really.
E.g., it's easy to take nowadays' food controls and pasteurization and refrigeration for granted, but in the middle ages and renaissance what you'd eat wasn't quite the "bio" foods you have today. There are plenty of cases where the meat of cattle which died of anthrax was cheerfully sold to the cities... with the consequences you'd expect. (Hint: it starts with "de" and ends with "ath.";) And if that wouldn't get you, there are a ton of other diseases and parasites that were quite common in meat. (E.g., look up Trichinella. The larvae in meat are not reliably killed by curing, drying or smoking.)
Not to mention bacteria, since without refrigeration and never enough salt for the thousands of pigs slaughtered at christmas, a lot of the meat was eaten anywhere between slightly spoiled and practically rotten. (Fun bit of trivia: that's one reason why spice trade was as good as a licence to print money. Enough spices could make it less obvious that you're eating rotten meat. The bacteria could kill you anyway, though.)
E.g., if you're so keen on renaissance warfare and weapons, may I remind you that more soldiers died of dysentery than of all weapons combined? It was a major cause of mortality during, say, the 100 years war. Much as everyone remembers that one for the longbow, dysentery actually killed more soldiers in that war than actual battle did. Even kings died of it occasionally. E.g., in that period, Henry V.
E.g., using lead for anything from cups and dishes to hair dye? Yeah, that's a fun bit of ancient technology. (It's used all the way from ancient egyptians to renaissance and beyond.) Too bad its toxic.
Etc.
Even as sword technology goes, Wootz was something discovered accidentally and which they never understood. E.g., they didn't know _why_ only ore from one particular Indian mine works there. And when that mine ran out of ore, the whole process just up and died because noone actually understood the process enough to make it work with anything else. Yeah, science at its finest... NOT.
The modern science didn't just rediscover something that the ancients knew, it discovered what the ancients _didn't_ know to start with: why and how that works, and how to do it without the magical ore from India.
So, please... if you want to believe in some romanticized version of Renaissance, go ahead. But realize that that's a romanticized/idealized thing that conveniently ommits all the thousands of bad aspects of life back then. It's like having a Hell Faire where you pretend that Hell is just a warm sunny beach resort. That disconnected from reality.
Fair enough
Actually, if you read a bit about Wootz, a.k.a. Damascus Steel, it was:
A) able to hold a very sharp edge. (In addition to being ductile, elastic, and generally not going to crack when you hit around with it in combat.) So in fact they were pretty much "MASSIVE DAMAGE" swords. Think a +5 Keen sword.
B) rare and uber-expensive. Among other things, because there were few people who could make one _and_ it only worked with imported ore from one particular mine in India. So if you managed to loot one of these, damn right it would count as Phat Lewt.
The thing about muslim swords and european armours is a different story altogether, and it's about the shape of the sword rather than the metal.
Let's focus on two aspects:
1. The edge. There are two basic moves for _cutting_ with a sword:
A) draw cut. No, it's not the Iai maneuver, but dragging the edge along as you cut. Sorta like what most people do when they cut a slice of bread or of salami with a knife. Curved swords are ideal for draw cuts, straight swords suck for it.
Draw cuts are deadly against unarmoured opponents, and can cut through flesh like a hot knife through butter. Draw cuts, on the other hand suck against metal armour. Even the cheapest chain hauberk makes a scimitar or katana completely useless.
B) hard square hits, much like with an axe or mace. Here you don't draw the edge to slice, but just hit hard and let the kinetic energy drive the edge into the opponent. Straight swords are perfect for it, curved swords much less so.
This hacking move is actually very nice against armour, especially chain. Even if it doesn't penetrate, you're being bludgeoned with a 3 pound steel bar with a very narrow edge. Even the maille and the padding under it can only spread it over so much surface. So even if it doesn't penetrate, it can break a rib or two, or crack a skull.
2. The tip. Here we actually have three cases, if we also include the katana.
a) straight sword, tappered tip. (I.e., the european swords.) A straight sword is ideal for piercing _accuracy_ and strength since it's basically a short spear. (See for example the later estoc which was basically more of a short spear than a sword by now.) You can aim pretty well and put all your strength behind that tip, because the force goes along the axis of that bar.
b) curved sword, tappered tip. (I.e., the muslim swords that you mentioned.) Again this becomes a lot less useful against armoured opponents, since you have neither the accuracy (e.g., for thrusting between two plates) nor as much strength in a strictly piercing hit.
c) curved tip. (E.g., the Japanese Katana or the Chinese Dao.) This is a special kind of tip that is outright useless at piercing against an armoured opponent, but great at cutting. The most fearsome cuts with a katana are done with the tip. It's a tip that emphasizes not only cutting power, but range. (Your outer range with the weapon is also the range at which you are the deadliest.) The range fits well with the Samurai techniques which emphasise, basically, striking first over defense. (By comparison, in european fencing _the_ focus was defense, and harming the opponent was second priority.)
Unfortunately this too is useless against metal armour, which is why the Katana became _the_ symbol of the Samurai only after firearms made armour obsolete. (Much like the Rapier and the Smallsword in Europe.) Prior to that, the bow and spear were the preferred weapons.
So to make a long story short: the reason the muslims had trouble against the crusaders was because the turkish/arabic curved swords sucked against heavily armoured opponents.
Basically, unrelated, this is why it gets on my nerves to hear so many manga fans repeat stuff like that the european swords were crap and only used because of some religious reasons. For the fighting style they were used in, and the reality of European warfare at the time, a straight sword was actually a great weapon.
And it's also worth remembering that it wasn't just the Europeans, but also, for example, the Chinese that favoured the longsword. While the curved-tip Dao (broadsword) was the weapon given to common troops, the nobles and elites used the Jian (straight longsword) as a more effective weapon in the hands of a highly trained elite. And as a status symbol.
Huh? There are plenty of EU-based companies which got harsher sentences than MS right from the start. MS initially got no fine, and was just ordered to document the protocol. MS got fined only after it ignored the ruling and the deadline. MS's fine only got so big by ignoring the daily fine for 2.5 years. (It's basically like ignoring a parking fine for 2.5 years straight, and continuing to park in front of a garage every day. Of course it gets to be big money after a long time.) _And_ it's been given a sweet deal in that if it finally releases those docs until the final deadline (in 8 days now), it gets to pay no fine at all.
EU-based corporations and cartels typically got slapped hundreds of millions of Euro fines right from the start.
I.e., whatever xenophobia might exist in the EU (and it exists), this judgment was the exact opposite. MS was given a much better deal than any European company that broke the anti-trust laws. I.e., if any discrimination is at work here, effectively the EU then discriminates against its own citizens and companies by giving MS a much better deal.
1. Neither copyright nor patents nor trademark had anything to do with the MS anti-trust lawsuits, nor with the predatory practices it was accused of. Neither Novell nor Netscape nor Sun nor all the other companies were attacked by MS via copyright (none of them were selling copies of Windows), nor trademark (none of them called their own product "MS Windows" or "MS Office"), nor patents.
2. MS was _not_ even tried for being a monopoly as such, but for abusing that position to break other trade laws. You _can't_ be tried for just having a big slice of the market. E.g., see Coca-Cola. Noone brings that one before a court of law. Do you understand? The issue isn't just that MS is too big to defeat, but that it abused that position to engage in predatory practices that ultimately hurt the consumer.
I.e., what you've been arguing for half that message is at best a complete non-sequitur. All that rhethoric about becoming too big to defeat is completely irrelevant to the issues that led to that huge fine. It's just not tried for being too big.
So then why didn't MS get around those? So your argument is... what? "The law has enough loopholes, so let's ignore that someone outright broke it instead of using the loopholes"? Or what?
At any rate, the fact that they broke the law _and_ then proceeded to show utter contempt to the court (both by non-compliance for over 2 years and the whole media war against the EU) is the _whole_ point there, not some secondary issue that can be summarily hand-waved out.
Yes, let's look at reality here, and this time the real one:
1. What the "State" asked wasn't fine. It asked MS to offer everyone the documentation needed for interoperability. I.e., what it tries to do is break that monopoly. The original judgment against MS didn't ask for a single cent. So on WTF bullshit do you base such idiotic statements as "The State wants these fines to pad their own accounts"?
2. The fines are just punishment for refusing to comply with the court order, after it had been given ample time to. And even then MS has been given more than 2 years to comply with it, in which case it would have to pay no fine. Zero. Nada. Zilch.
3. MS had more than 2 years to comply, and it didn't. In fact, that's how the fine got so big: it's a daily fine until they comply. And ignoring it for more than 2 years eventually starts being big money. So on what _do_ you base such bullshit statements as "Microsoft will be happy to comply"? Because so far it showed no intention to comply. It just engaged in some smoke-and-mirrors media war against the EU instead of doing what it was asked to.
1. Being fined up to 30% of your yearly _sales_ (see, here) is hardly buying preferential treatment. It's something that would put most companies in
While I'll fully aggree with your points about the common user, I'd argue that IMHO it's not that much different for programmers and generally those in IT roles. Sure, for a programmer it's a lot less intimidating and a lot less "rocket science", but that doesn't mean he/she will automatically enjoy it.
Speaking as a programmer, the interesting and challenging part is the _programming_ part. The tweaking of algorithms, the thrill of learning some new technique, etc. That's the fun part. The compiling itself is _not_ the exciting part. Sitting and watching Joe's Own Toy Program (TM) compile is about as exciting and watching paint dry. Tracking down the dependencies for it is even less exciting.
In fact, I'll even go ahead and say that anyone whose great feat was compiling some 3rd party program, probably isn't really a programmer to start with. There are a ton of people who just like to pretend they're oh-so l33t because they can run someone else's build script. Maybe they even configured (through the nice supplied GUI) and compiled (by running the commands supplied in the readme) a _kernel_. Wow, that makes them sooo great computing gurus. Not. That's to programming what script-kiddies are to real security experts. A sad joke.
And even as programming goes, the fun is doing the things _I_ want to do, learning the things that _I_ find interesting at the moment. Maybe I'll toy with this great new algorithm or language I just heard about, or maybe I'll mod a game just for the sake of seeing if I can get to the ballistics code, or whatever. Whatever tempts me at the moment. But that's a personal, subjective and transient thing. What tempts me tonight might be (and usually _is_) a whole other thing than whatever program Tom couldn't be arsed to finish, or Dick couldn't be arsed to test, or Harry couldn't be arsed to port. I want to do _my_ stuff, not debug Tom, Dick and Harry's programs just because they happen to be OSS and on my computer.
Basically just like a literature buff might choose to spend the evening reading the novel of _his_ choosing instead of coming over to help the neighbour's kid finish a school essay about War And Peace. Sure, he certainly is qualified to help that kid, but it's not necessarily what he'd choose to spend the evening with.
In the end what I'm saying is that what I want from a computer is no different from what Jack Random and Jane Average want. I want it to just work. Whatever I choose to do with it, whether it's programming my own toy app or watching a DVD or playing a game, I _don't_ want to compile the IDE/media-player/game/whatever first, and that goes double for pointless track-the-dependencies games. If I chose to do X tonight, then anything else that gets in between me and X (like having to first compile some other stuff) is just a waste of my time.
Well, in that case it's more like just providing the supply where a demand exists, than anything else. It's like offering pink "Hello Kitty" cell phones, when the market research said there's a market for pink "Hello Kitty" cell phones. And making a tidy profit by cattering to that demand. That's hardly acting against the interests of the shareholders for some ideal(ism.)
Oh, I can imagine lots of things, as my imaginary cat here and the easter bunny can testify. I've got quite an active imagination
The real question is really whether a market for such a company exists or not. I.e., you have to imagine not only one "green" building company, you'd have to also imagine a whole lot of other companies paying a hefty premium to be its customers. Do _those_ exist? TBH I have no idea.
The law has helped with pretty much everything else. In fact, it's _the_ one reason for every single filter installed so far.
Must the law say everyone should use this concrete? Probably not. It can however offer incentives for any kind of pollution reducing-measures. This, or planting trees, or whatever. Or not.
In the end, we just have to decide what we, as a whole society want, and the law will have to say that. That's the idea behind democracy, after all. And from a more pragmatic point of view, that's the only thing that seemed to reliably work so far. Jus waiting for companies to just be nice and responsible on their own... well, as you seem to aggree, it's got a really really weak track record.
Then my main point is: in that case we'll need to change the law. Because as it is, it's not only offering an excuse, it's actively asking them to be complete sociopaths.
I find it borderline absurd to basically make a law that says "thou shalt do X" and then expect people to be empathic and responsible enough to understand that they don't have to really do that. It's like having a law that says "it's your duty to kick the neighbour's dog", but expect people to be empathic and reasonable enough to understand that only assholes actually do that.
Plus, law that's not applied or is inconsistently and arbitrarily applied, is actually worse than no law at all. That's not what the rule of the law is supposed to mean.
Basically if we don't want people to act like that, then we shouldn't have a law that tells them to, really. If we want CEOs to be socially responsible, then we should have laws that define at least the bare minimum of what we expect as social responsibility.
E.g., if we find it unethical to have children working in sweatshops, we should have a law that says, "no, even if it's in China, we _don't_ find it ok. If you want to bring those products in this country, they better not be made by 12 year olds. And if we find out that you've lied about that, we'll hitch your customs taxes sky high _retroactively_ for every single unit coming from that factory." The same for pollution or whatever.
So, yes, basically if you manage to find a situation where being "good" is more profitable than being "evil", then it's your duty to the shareholders to do so.
About "black and white", well, depends on which part you mean. The duty to maximize shareholder value is pretty black-and-white. What's not black-and-white is (A) by what means (so, yes, be non-evil all you want if that produces more value), and (B) how it's enforced. Generally you'll be left with considerable room to maneuver, at least as long as you're turning up a profit. Do expect Wall Street to scream for a change of CEO the moment things go south.
What I do claim, though, is that (in a non-black-and-white way) _usually_ the evil version is more profitable than the good one. Especially more profitable in the short run, and the stock market lives by quarterly reports. There are exceptions, of course, but that's why I said "usually."
Oh yes. The question, though, is how much more. Most people simply just care about bang-per-buck, as illustrated by the fact that they have no qualms with buying sports shoes made in inhuman sweat shop. (At least as long as those sweatshops are in Asia and not here.) So how many would actually prefer your ethically-made product instead of the competing one that's 1 dollar cheaper? Would that offset the extra costs? That's really the whole question. If you can make 1% more money with 5% more investment, then unless you sell the product for 5 times more than it costs to make it, it's a losing proposition. Most companies don't have that kind of margins.
Also there's a fine trick in there, in that what really matters is the public image, not what you actually do. A good PR campaign and a bit of hype and bullshit are a tempting alternative to actually being ethical, sane, responsible, etc, and quite often better bang per buck too. Quite often those "ethical policies" that your advisor mentioned are just PR bullshit.
By now the corporate idea of "ethics" has drifted from the original meaning, to mostly "how to cover your ass, not go on record saying anything that could be used against you, have a good excuse ready, and deny all knowledge if caught". So the fact that they post some ethical policy, can -- and often does -- mean nothing more than that they'll have a good excuse ready when things hit the fan.
That would work that way only if both kinds of companies had the exact same PE numbers and all. Then yes, unethical company A would get only the money of the X% who don't care, while ethical company B would get everyone's money. Obviously, then, company B "wins."
It stops being true when the two don't actually perform the same. When either company posts better results than the other then that X% group who just care about money will put their money there. And that quite often is company A. When company A announces that they've just opened a new sweatshop in China, moved the call centre to India, fired half the personnel and raped the pension fund, while B posts a loss because they've played paladin locally, that X% group will promptly sell their shares in B and buy shares in A.
Effectively now the situation becomes: A is more attractive for X%, B is more attractive for (100-X)%. Of course, there is som
I think so too, but let's nitpick at the details anyway
Very true and insightful that, but that outer layer might still be either (A) more expensive than leaving it as it is, or (B) more ugly than you'd want it to be.
I took the liberty of putting those two phrases next to each other, because, as I understand it (but I could be wrong), your position revolves around the assumption that both might be true at the same time for the same building. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
The problem is that while both of those two phrases are very true and insightful, they also apply to entirely different building.
The warehouses, substations, factories, etc, that you mention weren't covered in glass and marble to start with. Some may be just covered in cheap paint (once every 20 years or so, for that matter), or be bare brick or cement to start with. In which case removing the old paint and covering them in eco-friendly cement is just an extra expense. Some were covered in thermo-insulating panels, soundproofing panels, whatever pqanels. The eco-friendly cement would have to come on top of those, in that case, which is an extra expense.
Basically what I'm saying is that the companies have been penny-pinching as it is. You can't really say that it's cheaper to cover it this concrete instead of in marble or glass, because that kind of building wasn't covered in marble or glass to start with.
If that building really could work just as well as bare concrete (needed no insulation, etc) it is pretty much just that plus a thin layer of cheap paint already. And even that layer of paint is because of the community, as you do mention yourself:
Call me a jaded old cynic, but I think that expecting them to understand that is an overly optimistic view for most communities. The NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) factor can -- and very often does -- override any other lip service they might pay to ecology, safety, local economy, etc. Plus, there's the other factor you mention below:
Well, that's just the thing: 99% of the population thinks like you do. Nobody wants ugly buildings in their environment, so property values tend to go down everywhere around them.
Dunno about where you live, but here even those big ugly concrete apartment buildings are at least covered in a coat of paint. If you actually left one to look like bare concrete, you'd find that not only _you_ have to lower prices substantially to find people willing to live there, but the same would suddenly apply to every building around it. Good luck explaining to the other building's owner that he has to take a loss so you can be eco-friendly.
The same applies to a lot of the warehouses, substations, factories, etc. You try leaving those looking like bare concrete, and they'll lower the attractivity of anything that's on the same street or has line-of-sight to it. Judging by some big factories I've seen, that could mean pretty much half the city.
Heh. Sorry, I just can't see it happening like that. (Except maybe if their PR department says that that claim would improve the corporate image or something.)
Most of the corporations don't really give a fuck about the environment or social responsibility or even ethics. Their _only_ legal responsibility is to make more money for the shareholder. And they'll do just that. If doing the ecologically sane, socially responsible, or ethical thing would cause 1% less profits, it's their legal _duty_ to _not_ do it.
The industry (as a whole) has a long history of doing anything up to (and including) dumping poisons into rivers or into the atmosphere. It's been perfectly happy to cause health problems all the way to cancer and poisoning in the nearby towns (both mining and manufacturing did that), in its own workers (see the fact that they knew since the end of the 19'th century that asbestos tends to cause lung cancer), or even in its customers (see the tobacco industry.)
The only thing that _ever_ dragged it kicking and screaming into cleaning up its act was the law. At some point society decided, "no, sorry, we're not having _that_ shit dumped into our town's river and ground water. Put a filter on it or we'll make it even more expensive to ignore us." And even then invariably the industry has put up quite a fight, including astroturfing, lobbying, PR lies campaigns, threatening to fire everyone and move somewhere else, etc.
Sadly I just don't see it working any differently this time. Now you're asking them to pay extra (in most cases having an ugly building _is_ paying extra, in an indirect way: less rent, lost customers, public image, whatever) not just to clean their own act, but basically to clean everyone else's pollution too. Expect a heartfelt laugh in the face if you tried convincing someone to volunteer to do that. Either the law forces them to, or it just won't happen.
Even if you take the meteor hypothesis as absolute truth, the fact is: other species survived. Not only mammals, but also lizards. Heck, even some species of dinosaurs survived. (Birds _are_ technically dinosaurs.)
We're not talking just a massive shockwave killing anything squishy on the planet instantly. Even for the dinosaur there's no D-Day when everyone died. The disappearance of the dinosaurs is a very very very long and gradual period of their declining numbers into extinction. For most of the planet we're talking "just" a climate change. _That_ is what killed the dinosaurs, one way or another. Some species survived that, and in fact even thrived in the new conditions, some species didn't.
Note however there are more hypotheses about that event. The decline in oxygen content in the air in that period, for example, would also be perfectly enough on its own to make a very large beast non-viable. The change in the flora is another candidate. It's entirely possible that the new kinds of plants were either toxic or not nutrient-rich enough for the old lizards.
At any rate, what killed the dinosaurs was _change_. Something changed (take your pick what you think was the killer change there). And some species could deal with it, some species didn't. Dinosaurs (except birds) didn't cope well with the change and their numbers went downhill from there.
Yes, they were a capable species for the old environment, but then the environment changed. And the dinosaurs were suddenly very incapable in the new environment.
So, yes, the dinosaurs are the _perfect_ metaphor for someone or something who can't cope with a change and becomes obsolete.
Change happens. One day you have a nice business hammering scythes and sickles for a village, and the next day someone goes and buys a tractor and a combine harvester and everyone wants _those_. Or you have a nice job calculating tables of numbers by hand and then the CEO goes and buys one of those new "computers". Tough luck. Either you adapt or you're a dinosaur.
It happens with computers and programmers/admins/whatever every day. And some people adapt, some become relics trying to stop progress and return to the good old days. God knows half of the IT departments at big corporations have too many of _those_. Maybe they were once capable and competent. The dinosaurs were too at one point. Now they no longer are. And just like the dinosaurs, sadly it takes a long long time to gradually get rid of those relics. But just like the dinosaurs they _are_ on a slow painful path to extinction.
Duly noted, but still, I don't think that scenario is applicable directly to business.
1. the "game" isn't yet at a stage where anyone is locked in a losing configuration due to what the players already did. Search engines aren't yet an interlocking monopoly with insane entry barriers. If one strategy doesn't work -- because of social dynamics or anything else -- there's nothing to keep MS or Yahoo or anyone else from trying a different strategy.
2. Unlike Rail Baron, here the "game" is played over years or decades. It's not a case of one freak afternoon where everyone tried the same move by sheer coincidence, and that was that.
If there is some freak configuration where everyone's strategies conflict, these guys have _years_ to realize it and try something else. Yes, freak coincidences exist in the business world too, but the executives of big corporations certainly have the time, the funds and the business intelligence torecognize them and react to them. That's their job. If everyone is playing the mutually-destructive strategy A, it's the management's job -- and legal obligation to shareholders -- to recognize that and fix the problem. Maybe pick the odd-guy-doing-something-else strategy, maybe try to out-spend/out-advertise/whatever the others, maybe something else. But if they're still at it after half a decade, they just don't have the same freak-coincidence excuse any more.
If after all these years they still can't match Google, maybe, just maybe, it's not just some freak social-dynamics coincidence, but maybe Google is just playing a better strategy.
If you look at it, it's even pretty obvious what goes on.
On one hand you have a bunch of people who just, basically, can't get their heads out of their collective arse. Google's strategy of hiring the best of the best, doing the best thing, and _not_ placing the marketeers at the helm is just lost on them. Those just _can't_ exit the non-working strategy, because they just don't comprehend the alternatives.
And on the other hand, you have MS, who again and again proves that they aren't even in it to win as such, but to kill as many (preferrably big) competitors as possible. In your Rail Baron example, their primary goal isn't even to make more money, but to drive the other players bankrupt, even if in a way where they too take a loss. Winning the game or making money is more of a side-effect than the primary goal. And they can't and won't exit a deadlock situation like what you describe, or not until they've killed their intended target. Once chair-throwing Steve Balmer gets in his head, "Fucking Eric Schmidt is a fucking pussy. I'm going to fucking bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to fucking kill Google.", he just can't stop until he's done just that. That is the goal. He'd cheerfully let you get the rest of the board if in the process he gets to squeeze Google out of their zone.
Well, that _is_ one possibility right there. Maybe he just didn't take you seriously on the first try, and didn't bother thinking too much during the game.
Basically, to explain it better, my theory isn't that a master can't lose. My theory is that when he does lose, there'll be some other explanation involved than pure dumb luck. (Unless the game actually involves dice or some similar element of pure dumb luck.) It can be that the master just had a headache at the time, or had some other thing on his mind, or just didn't take the novice seriously and didn't bother thinking too much. But at the end of the day it's still a match where the "master" played worse than the "novice", and the "novice" won it fair and square. Not by a stroke of improbably luck of cosmic proportions.