That much is actually obvious. You can't stall an army in the plains even if you're made of steel as one guy, because worst case scenario they just go around you. But still, you know, the odds were hideously against him anyway.
If you read your own link, although the Vikings were mostly without their armours, they had managed to assemble into a shield wall formation. That's quite a far cry from being slaughtered in their sleep.
At the Battle of Stamford Bridge, allegedly one single Berserker held the bridge and blocked Harold Godwinson's advance long enough for Harald Sigurdsson's army to assemble. Essentially denied Godwinson the element of surprise.
One guy. Vs the whole freaking Saxon army. What was _left_ of that Saxon army after the battle, was still enough to put up a battle at Hastings, so the original size must have been even more impressive.
I dunno, I'd vote that this is one of those cases where one should resist trying to improve what's perfectly good as it is. I'm not sure if the velociraptor genes wouldn't actually make it worse. And not in a good way.
Yes, they're peaceful _now_. Back then a "peaceful" tribe was one which didn't attack its neighbours more than once a year.
There was _no_ peaceful tribal society that we know of, other than the Khoisan, a.k.a., Bushmen. The Khoisan had an... interesting society and culture, but that's the weird exception, not the rule.
And even the Khoisan quickly discovered that those who don't believe in living by the sword, get slaughtered wholesale by those who do. They were essentially pushed by the Bantu (and later by the Dutch, British and German settlers) into the Kalahari desert, which noone else wanted. And not pushed into a reservation even USA style (brutal as that was too), but essentially by being slaughtered wholesale if caught on land anyone else wanted.
But that's it. Once you move out of the Kalahari, there is _no_ "Noble Savage" and in most places never was. Whoever else wanted to be all peaceful and non-aggressive, didn't have a similar refuge.
The Khoisan had the chance that their aggressors were into agriculture and animal husbandry, and didn't want Kalahari because it's useless for both. A tribe whose neighbours would be hunters-gatherers too (e.g., any in Nothern America) would not have the same chance. Any land a hypothetical peaceful tribe would have been able to live off, so would their neighbours, and they'd come fighting for it.
Alternately, I suspect that most humans would rather be left in peace, if they have a choice.
Think basically of the infamous Goering quote:
Göring: Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece?
Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship.
Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.
Göring: Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.
I think basically the same applies: Why would some poor hunter-gatherer slob want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his hunting in one piece?
Humanity for the most part has been subject to some pretty nasty cycles of overpopulation, famine, etc, which resulted war. Overpopulation has only been solved recently when, basically, it became a given that if you make 1-2 kids, chances good are they'll survive. So no need to make 10 to beat the odds. Women have better chances to survive too, so there goes another reason to attack the next tribe. Famine was another big motivation for war too: when the alternative is literally starvation, "better them than us" arguments are a lot easier to swallow. And hunter-gatherers were particularly vulnerable, due to the natural cycles of predator and prey, plus the nasty effect that overpopulation actually pushes the prey populations down, amplifying the effects of that. (To get an idea: Neanderthals actually managed to push themselves into extinction by over-hunting what they could hunt with their tech level.) Nowadays even if you live on a reservation, I'm guessing you can rely on the government or humanitarian organizations to pull you out of shit anyway, if it hits the fan. Etc.
Why _would_ you go to war with another tribe nowadays? What would you gain?
Culture and enculturation _may_ have slowed things down, mind you. After a few thousands of years of chest-thumping about being teh fearless and aggressive warrior, and one's standing in the community depending on that image, it doesn't go away easily. People will continue chest-thumping just so they don't lose face. Groupthink... err... enculturation works that way.
But after a couple of generations, people start to take it for a given that, wth, there's no _point_ in raiding the next tribe. And there's even less point in trying to raid the white man's towns, because the darned white man in the meantime has tanks and machineguns and other nasty stuff.
Basically I'm guessing there wasn't anything special, nor especially peaceful or spiritual about those who survived. They just turned out to be, well, humans. No better and no worse than the white guys and gals around them, and no better or worse than the tribes which didn't make it either. It was the conditions that changed, not the people that were any special. And the people changed as a result, same as everyone else would and did.
Well, primitive tribes _were_ extremely aggressive, and did fight all the time.
On the other hand "contributed to the ancestry of the native North Americans" implies interbreeding, rather than genocide. I.e., they fucked their way across two continents.
It's not exactly surprising, though. A staple of tribal warfare, and it even lasted well into Iron Age in Greece for example, was raiding for another tribe's women, not just their food.
Life expectancy for women was rather disproportionately lower than for men in primitive societieties, and for men it wasn't as high as to reach andropause first. So eventually a lot of still able men were left with the prospect of either finding another woman somehow, or playing with Miss Rosy Palm for the next 5 to 10 years. Meanwhile the next tribe had plenty of women. Are you thinking what I'm thinking, Pinky?
Of course then the next tribe had an acute shortage of women, so the cycle of violence continued.
So I'm saying that interbreeding would have been inevitable. When the newly arrived East Asians won a raid, they got some women from the previous populations, when they lost one, the opposite would happen.
Someone has to counteract the nonsense and lies and the descriptions of Linux that are 10 years out of date.
Well, yes, but that's still no excuse to counter them with lies that don't even work. If you have to counter a fallacy about linux, by all means do it. By pointing out the truth. Not by making up a counter-lie about Windows.
Even if you don't care about the moral high ground, Linux just isn't in a position to use the same monopolistic tactics that worked for MS. You tend to actually need a near-monopoly for those to work.
FUD is based on people's existing fear of change and unknown. It gives them more reason to not try what they don't already know. It doesn't work as a tactic to get them to ditch what they already know, because there is no Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt to play on.
They're tactics for walling people _in_ your garden, not for convincing them to join it.
_If_ Linux had 90% of the market, then maybe you could scare them out of considering Windows, with made up horror stories. But when the situation is reversed, making up shit about Windows just makes you that guy who's making up shit again.
And certainly not with an obnoxious attitude like, "Now it's your turn and you're whining like whipped bitches. Well suck it up. There's plenty more to come." Which is what irked me in the message I was answering to originally. Advocating doesn't work by blanket calling everyone an enemy, and getting them to dislike you. If they dislike you, they're less likely to listen to anything you have to say.
I'm not even saying anything new or which shouldn't be common sense. Check out, for example, the Paul L. Rogers's Linux Advocacy Mini-FAQ. I'm waiting to see if some fanboy feels a need to paint him in the MS shills camp for offering advice like, "Avoid hyperbole and unsubstantiated claims at all costs. It's unprofessional and will result in unproductive discussions." Or "Focus on what Linux has to offer. There is no need to bash the competition. Linux is a good, solid product that stands on its own."
No, you'll feel better if you stand on principle, especially if it only cost you a few bucks. Judas killed himself over twenty silver pieces, right?
Actually, it was thirty silver, and I think it was just because he was dumb.
I mean, come on, Jesus had to count as at least rare, if not epic. He definitely would have been worth more than thirty silver at the auction house. But nah, Judas just had to vendor him.
I bet he hanged himself when someone told him, "dude, you could have auctioned him for at least 350 gold, according to Thottbot." I mean, I know newbies who went depressive for having vendored Coarse Stone when you tell them they could have gotten gold for it. Vendoring Jesus? Damn, I'd probably hang myself too the next day.
Well, unless Jesus was already soulbound and couldn't be auctioned.
(Big WoW related joke, for whoever doesn't understand what I'm going on about.)
Alternately, think of it this was: Jesus is the healer and resser of that raid, and he goes and aggroes both the Romans and the Jewish leadership in one fell swoop. And he gets nailed for it. I mean, damn, didn't they have a _tank_? Did noone there know how to pull?
And what kind of a raid size was that? I can see 25 or 40 as a raid size, I could even imagine a 15 man instance, but thirteen? Gimme a break. You don't go after elite bosses like Pillat Pontius with just thirteen people, no matter how l33t your healer thinks he is.
Judas probably hanged himself after trying to get another healer and a proper defense tank for the next attempt at that instance, and having no success for the rest of the day.
I know some groups like that and days like that almost made _me_ want to hang myself;)
It was made by people like those from Asus, who actually made a Linux computer for the masses. Or by the guys at Ubuntu putting together that wonderful distro. Or by the lots of guys who set their eyes on a realistic goal, like, say, let's make a little config utility, and actually achieved it.
It was not made by the trolling fanboys posting FUD.
In fact, any progress has been made in _spite_ of the trolling faboys and their blatant attempts at FUD. Those just helped alienate the potential market. If you tell someone a blatant lie again, you just lost credibility. Anything else that you try to tell him, will be tainted by that. And the fanboy FUD just served to create an impression in some people that the whole Linux crowd is a bunch of pathological lying whiners.
People, it's not like telling shit about Elbonia. Everyone has a Windows computer, or knows someone who does. Telling him bullshit like that his machine does this and that, which he knows (or can quickly check) that it doesn't do, is just a way to lose his trust and attention.
Even MS FUD steered clear of blatant lies. Just something to think about.
1. it's just getting old. Yes, we know, you don't like MS. You may even imagine that it's your duty to save the world from it. Guess what? Noone else gives a fuck. Repeating the same wannabe-memes over and over again just makes one boring, nothing more.
2. Fighting FUD and disinformation with FUD and disinformation, does not a moral high ground make. Yes, MS has some nasty marketing and lacks ethics. Guess what? Being as big a lying prick doesn't make you better. It just makes you yet another lying prick.
If you have something useful to contribute (e.g., exactly what problems happen if one runs Vista on that machine, or on a similar configuration?), by all means, go ahead. But just rehashing "but does it run Vista" one-liners is just noise and literally FUD. It's, what? Saving the world from MS evil FUD, by filling it with your own? At the end then we'd still have a disinformed market, making purchases based on little more than uncertainty and _lack_ of knowledge, same as before. Big freakin' improvement. Not. It's like fighting against malaria by giving those people HIV instead.
3. If you want to talk about "inventing FUD", that term was first used about IBM. So, nope, MS didn't invent that either, just like they didn't invent the browser or personal computing.
4. "Now it's your turn and you're whining like whipped bitches" is a piss-poor ad-hominem. I know it probably doesn't fit your simplified view of the world, but not everyone who's tired of hearing you whine, bitch, and moan, is in any way connected to MS. Some of us are just tired of the endless noise from bleating fanboys, drowning the useful signal in threads that have nothing to do with their whine.
It has nothing to do with being pro or against MS. I can tell you that I have a BSD fanboy at work, trying to save me from Linux, and he's just as annoying.
5. "Well suck it up. There's plenty more to come." Well, that's what makes it annoying. You said it once, learn to take a break now and then. Repeating same tired fanboy whine again and again, is hardly going to make it either better or true than it was the first time around. It'll just add more noise to drown the useful signal. If your contribution to the world and claim to greatness is that you'll troll some more, heh... you could get some useful skill instead, and actually contribute something, ya know?
6. I'll even go one step further and say: "It is easier to be a "humanitarian" than to render your own country its proper due; it is easier to be a "patriot" than to make your community a better place to live in; it is easier to be a "civic leader" than to treat your own family with loving understanding; for the smaller the focus of attention, the harder the task." --Sydney J. Harris
I get the distinct impression that a lot of those who can't just shut up even for 5 minutes about saving the world from X (where X can be anything between the upcoming wrath of God, like in the Crusades, to more modern concerns like MS) are those who can't sort out their own lives, or show some backbone to the boss in person. It's _easy_ to fight for some nebulous global task that will never be done, and noone can fault you if you show no progress. So wake me up when you can claim some actual personal achievement, not just being a "me too" clone in the big cozy family of sheep bleating against MS.
It has long been a convention of warfare that explicitly targeting civilian populations violates the rules of warfare... in fact such a deliberate act is even considered a war crime... why then is it acceptable to drop bombs on a civilian center? Historically it's been done to eliminate targets of interest that the opposition has located there (weapon stockpiles, factories, etc). Do note that hiding behind civilians is also considered a war crime.
First of all, that's a bit convenient a definition.
But the fact is, the western world too has a long and funny history of targetting civilians explicitly. The terror bombings of WW2 (started, duly noted by Germany, but continued by the Allies just as well) were probably the best example, though more recent examples do exist. The theory was explictly to kill enough civilians, as to (A) cause a huge morale drop and make them beg their government for peace, and (B) cripple the economy by killing enough of the workforrce.
The industrial cities of Germany for example have not been colateral damage in trying to bomb the factories, they have been the targets themselves. That was the actual target: bombing the city and terrorizing the population. (But again, so did Germany with UK cities, so I'm not trying to make it sound like only one side was doing it.)
The whole doctrine and technique of firebombing them didn't even work against factories. How it worked was dropping a big bomb with an otherwise thin shell, so the blast would blow the shingles off house roofs, followed by lots of little fire bombs that would then fall in the house and set it ablaze. The houses of civilians were _the_ target.
Against factories that particular mix had little to no effect. Against troops or military targets that mix would have been outright stupid, and noone used it for that.
Again, the whole doctrine was to kill as many civilians as your can, and scare the seven shades of shit out of the survivors. That's a terror tactic by any other name.
Want another example: the USA has actively researched biological warfare and had stockpiles of nasty germs until the 70's. I do believe that the doctrine wasn't to drop them just on enemy troops.
The west only gave up on that shit, when we finally figured out that nukes are enough of a deterrent anyway, and killing 3% of a city's population with modified Brucellosis is peanuts compared to nuking it. And again, the doctrine of mutually assured destruction isn't about nuking enemy troops. If you look at any country with nukes, right as we write this, the nukes are aimed at the (potential) enemies' civilian cities. The threat is, very much, "if you dare attack us, we'll wipe out your population and turn your country into a radioactive wasteland."
The neutron bomb was developed for the explicit reason of killing or injuring as many humans as possible, while causing as little damage as possible to everything else. It's not a bomb you'd use to disable a military factory, it's a bomb which would kill its workers (and the whole city nearby) and at most blow the windows off that factory.
Etc.
So, you know, freakin' _please_. I'm even willing to swallow _some_ "us vs them" dehumanizing arguments, but "we wouldn't ever target civilians" is so much bullshit it could fertilize a few acres.
Well, in a sense, he did it to himself, because (willingly or not) he did try to correlate his techno-utopian ideas to money. His claim is that he looked at which sites survived the dot-com bubble, and indeed thrived, and the common factors that he saw were, well, the ones I've already listed: wikis, blogs, tags, collaboration, content hauled through P2P, etc. So you too can be a part of the next great thing, if only you build your site around those.
Kinda funny, because what the rest of us saw is: those who had a business plan survived. Google for example didn't survive and thrive just because it was connecting people, but because it was a better ad provider. And conversely 99% of the dot-coms were about just connecting people, and failed without a business plan.
In fact, that's why I sound kinda hostile to Web 2.0. He _is_ trying to create the second coming of dot-com, and steer it in his own techno-utopian directions by little more than handwaving and misinformation. (I'll choose to think that it's misinformation and not genuine stupidity, at least.)
So, yeah, it's not hard to see why marketers latched to a meme which already promised the keys to the land of milk and honey, and VC money growing on trees. It's also not entirely hard to see why noone applies it to its original techno-utopian sense: because it makes no sense, and is of little practical value in the real world.
Unfortunately, there is one single definition of "Web 2.0", and that is the one of the guy who registered that trademark: Tim O'Reilly.
Now I'm not usually one to make a big fuss over using a word wrong, but this one is actually a trademark. Deciding to use it in any other way, is a bit like deciding to call my Audigy 4 sound card a GeForce or an Audi. It just isn't one.
And the extent to which both tech "pundits" and PHBs use it wrong, while (at least the latter) proclaiming their undying love and commitment to it, just leaves the impression that they use it as yet another buzzword. You don't proclaim your commitment to a technology, unless you actually understand what it is, how it can help you, and preferably how it compares to other technologies to the same end. Just going with a buzzword because it's popular, and ending up pledging your company to the camp of such a buzzword, is as silly (and often has the same effects) as making it your strategy to use scramjets in bicycles. Just because everyone seems to love scramjets lately, and you wouldn't want your mountain bike company to be left behind.
To get back to the actual definition of that trademark, it's not even about technology as such. It's about people. It's not techno-fetishism, as in liking cool new technologies for their sake, it's techno-utopianism: the mis-guided belief that you only need to give more internet tools to a billion monkeys, to get a utopia like nothing imagined before. Although said monkeys never created anything worth reading with a keyboard, if it's keyboards connected to the Internet, now that's how you hit a gold mine.
O'Reilly's idea is sorta along the lines of:
- forget about publishing content (e.g., hiring expensive tech writers and marketers for your site), it's all about participation, baby. Let users write your content. Hust put in some wikis and forums, and a thousand bored monkeys will do the work faster, cheaper and more accurate. (People will just flock to offer you some free, quality work, just because they like donating to a corporation, I guess. And if instead you discover comments about how much your company sucks, the CEO's sexual orientation, and his mom's weight, well, I guess it must be true, 'cause collaborative efforts can't _possibly_ be wrong.)
- forget about setting up your own redundant servers or dealing with Akamai, use BitTorrent. (Ask a lot of people how they felt about Blizzard's going almost exclusively through BitTorrent at launch. Nowadays their own servers serve a lot more of the content, if not enough other users are stuffing your pipe. I wonder why.)
- forget selling media on the Internet, teh future is Napster letting people pirate it, like happened way back then. (No, literally, the "mp3.com --> Napster" line is part of his own page explaining Web 2.0. I guess good thing noone told Steve Jobs that.)
- forget content management systems, use wikis. (I wonder in which alternate reality the piss-poor search engines of wikis can be compared to the capabilities of those systems.)
- for that matter, forget about structuring information in any way, like through directories and portals, just let the users tag it. (I'm _sure_ that the tags "humor, theft, oldnews, !news, digg" will so help me find the story about a manager stealing the server from earlier. Never mind that search engines were already dumping searching for tags, in favour of full text search, even at the time when he came up with that idea.)
Etc.
Basically, if you have the patience to sift through his ramblings, and don't give up at the "well, Google started up as a web database" intro, the meat begins at "Harnessing Collective Intelligence". That's what's it about. It's not as much about what technology you use on the web, it's about connecting a billion clueless monkeys, and believing that the result is something a billion times more intelligent and informed. Anything that helps connect those monkeys is good, anything else is irrelevant. Even whether you us
The recent/. story of somebody taking off with a shared xbox Linux Webserver for their kids amusement is a fresh example of why we first need property delineation
I'll believe that you had something else in mind, because that particular example is a piss-poor example for needing new property delineation and laws. That one was plain, old-fashioned theft, nothing more, nothing less. Theft of the physical kind.
It had _nothing_ to do with IP. There was no copyright infringement of any kind, there was no patent infringement, and there was no trademark infringement.
Yes, he got caught because it incidentally was used as a web server. So what? The same can be said for the thief who stole a CCTV camera, and was filmed by it in the act.
At the end of the day, what remains is "dumb PHB steals X from work, thinking it was Y." Ok, "secretly borrows" over the weekend. In this case X was a piece of computing, but the act itself had been no different if X were, say, one of the company trucks to haul his own furniture with.
We don't need to invent new definitions of property for _that_. We already had all the concepts we need, since, oh, the Romans.
In fact, during the Dutch tulip bulb craze, hundreds of years ago, we had a case that was a verbatim clone of this same "dumb guy steals X thinking it's Y", only with different X and Y. The short story is: dumb sailor steals (and eats) an uber-expensive tulip bulb, thinking it was an onion. In our story X=server, Y=toy, while in the Dutch case it was X=tulip bulb worth a fortune, and Y=onion. It's the same story with different props.
_Why_ do we need new definitions of property to cover something that was already clear enough hundreds of years ago?
While I could even join you in lamenting some of the shortcomings of unchecked capitalism, I think that some things you pick on are more like human nature/culture than inherently capitalistic.
1. Demand for useless things, just for status symbol value and/or keeping up with the joneses: you'll find that it dated long before capitalism.
Purple in the ancient world, for example had the _only_ value of being a more expensive dye than gold. Demand for it was as high as to create massive fortunes for the phoenician traders. Whole colonies and mercenary armies (e.g., those that the Romans clashed with in the Carthage wars) were at least partially paid for by that trade. In Rome purple eventually became a synonim with power and rank, with the all-purple robe being reserved for the Emperor only.
Silk in Europe, wasn't that horribly practical a garment, or not to justify its horribly high price. It was an item of fashion, for rich women to show off their wealth. (And apparently at least in Rome for some of them to show their body through a semi-transparent silk dress.) We know not only how huge fortunes the Silk Road created for China and for the states through which it went, but we also know that at some point Rome was starting to get bothered by the huge quantities of gold it shipped as payment for silk.
Later the fortune of Byzantium and one reason (out of several) why it did so well when the rest of Europe was in a complete collapse, was that they had managed to steal a few silkworms, and built their own silk industry. You can also see a first example of artificial scarcity there: both China and Byzantium were outright paranoid about keeping it a secret, so others would have to buy from them instead of making their own silk.
2. War. This one goes all the way back to _stone_ age. As soon as people invented the bow and arrow, I don't know what changed there, but suddenly we have depictions of formations of archers shooting at each other. And mass graves with stone tips embedded in the bones.
Some of those tribes were as far from capitalism as it gets. Some hadn't even invented a proper barter economy yet, or not past the most primitive stages of it. (See ancient Egypt for how complex a barter economy can get.) But it didn't prevent them from fighting over hunting grounds. Or just to steal each other's food and women.
So blaming war on capitalism, seems, no offense, a bit silly.
3. Crisis. Again, we have plenty of historical evidence that crisis events existed long before capitalism. In fact, long before our era.
The most common one went like this: some city had grain, and some trader came and offered a high price for it. Said city then got greedy and sold so much grain, that they starved in the coming winter.
The (arguably premature) transition to Iron Age in Europe was caused by a massive crisis. The tin trade at some point simply collapsed, leaving most of Europe and the Middle East without access to weapon-grade metal. That's why everyone rushed to switch to iron.
Etc.
Again, I'm not saying capitalism is the best system imaginable, nor flawless. But methinks that the evils you ascribe to it, existed _millenia_ before capitalism.
In the west we already had a concept of, basically: you bought _a_ book, you didn't buy the rights to the novel. You bought _a_ record, you didn't buy the rights to that band's album. You bought _a_ (copy of the) newspaper, you didn't buy _the_ newspaper. Etc. It worked. Most people could already wrap their mind around that.
We had a first sale doctrine that worked perfectly well with that too. Yes, you didn't buy the rights to the novel, for example, but you bought a book and you can do almost whatever you want with it. Resell it, lend it to your friend, read it to your kid at bedtime, etc.
Then came for example software and tried to handwave in the fallacy that they need completely other constructs, for something that was already solved for everything else. See, you need to _license_ software, because, OMG, otherwise you'd think you bought the rights to that program as a whole! WTH? We already had the distinction between buying a book, and buying the ownership of a novel itself. You didn't need to "license" a book, or a vinyl record, or a newspaper.
Even after the loophole of, basically, "yeah, but you need to copy the program to memory, which is making a copy, and you need a license to make copies" was closed, we got stuck with the same stupidity as a before. Nah, see, it's _licensed_, not sold, 'cause if we sold it you might think you bought the rights to Vista as a whole!
Exactly wth is the fundamental difference between buying a copy of, say, Vista, and buying a copy of Huckleberry Finn? I'll go on a limb and say that people would have had no trouble using the pre-existing concept for software too.
And then based on the license stupidity, we had increasingly stupid stuff snuck in as licensing terms, that no consumer rights law would have allowed otherwise. E.g., you can't resell it. (See the recent AutoCAD lawsuit, but also all the software where you have to use up a serial number to use it, etc.) You can resell your old book, your old vinyl records, even your old copy of The New York times if you find someone interested in that particular issue, but you can't resell your old copy of AutoCAD. 'Cause it's licensed not sold. Some presume to unilaterally decide what else you can run on that computer. (E.g., it's quite common for game copy-protections to just quit or do this and that to you, if they think you have a CD emulator running on that computer.) Or what they can do to your computer. Or what you can use it for. Etc. Everything that consumer protection laws gave you for books, records, etc, the license took away for software.
And now unsurprisingly we see the guys from the other media, essentially go, "wait, wait, you mean we wouldn't have had to give customers all those rights, if we called it a license too? Damn, we want some of that too!" All the aberrations and stupidities built on that fallacy for software, we're now seeing trickling back to, say, movies and music. They too want a DRM scheme to prevent you from reselling it. They too want to unilaterally require your DVD player to phone home and spy on you, 'cause, hey, if software can do that, they want it too. They too want a say in what you can use the DVD for, and in which devices. (See copy protected CDs which actually play a reduced bit rate MP3 instead of the uncompressed music, if you play them on a computer.) Etc.
Heck, even Sony's infamous copy protection rootkit was, essentially, just trying to get the same control over that music as they have over software. In a misguided and flawed way, to be sure, but they didn't do anything much more underhanded than their copy protection already does for games.
And methinks it's about high time to say a collective, "WTF?" Or rather, a, "No, you don't. You software guys learn to live with what already worked for everything else, instead of everyone else copying your invented loopholes. Yes, you sold a copy, not the rights to the program. We know that. That already applied to everyone who bought a copy o
Dude, VCs funded companies for as little prospect of revenue as dumping the shares after they spike. That was the dot-com bubble. Banks in the USA have given loans to buy a house to people who _can't_ pay it back, so they'd get the house after the prices rise some more, and sell it to the next dolt. Or the same VCs fund some little patent troll who might -- or might not -- get a few million for his overly broad and vague claims from someone in the future, but I'm supposed to believe they wouldn't find someone with a patent that has a market the size of AIDS. Etc.
So you're telling me that none of that would fund someone with a patent that gives them near-monopoly on treating AIDS, for _20_ years?
This isn't to say cures never get funded - new anti-biotics are constantly being researched and these are cures. Again, there is the recurring revenue aspect.
I see you've supplied your own proof against the conspiracy theory. Cures _are_ being researched, and there _is_ a recurring revenue in those.
The recurring revenue aspect, which you mention is this: that people keep getting the disease again, or new people get it. It's not like there's a shortage of new people getting STDs, or cancer, or whatever.
It's also missing the aspect of how big that revenue is. Selling a patented cure is where the big money is. If you milked everyone with diabetes of, say, 1000$ profit for a patented cure, it beats treating a little slice of that market with insulin (because everyone produces it, not only you) at cents profit per shot (because the free market did drive the prices down, as it's supposed to.)
So, anyway, I guess I'm somehow supposed to believe that what applies to anti-biotics (kills bacteria) and anti-fungals (kills fungi), somehow doesn't apply to anti-virals (you guessed what it kills.) That there's a perfectly good financial incentive to fund finding a cure for some bacterial infection that would likely (though not always) go away on its own, but somehow not in curing a viral infection that kills. Something doesn't add up in that conspiracy.
Any company which discovers a cure gets a monopoly (patent) on it for 20 years. Which is a lot.
Now picture having this choice:
A. You get the existing anti-virals which tend to do a lot of damage. (There's a reason you don't get them for a cold or even a flu: they do more damage than the flu.) And they might or might not work. In fact, you'll probably just buy you some time. And everyone makes them, so while there's some money milking potential in the "but mine work better" factor, you're still just getting a slice of the pie.
B. You get the miracle cure from Company X, which actually works and presumably with a lot less side effects.
Choice B is a no-brainer. The company which would get a 20 year monopoly on B, is going to sit on a freaking huge fortune at the end of those 20 years. Not only they'd get the lion's share of the existing pie, they'd get a whole merry bunch of retards who'd rather buy the cure later than use a condom. Again.
So basically, you're telling me that a whole lot of CEOs, doctors, their investors, etc:
1. Would rather work for the general benefit of their competitors in preserving a status quo, instead of making a metric buttload of money for themselves.
2. A lot of rich and powerful people, and some of those same CEOs, doctors, etc, would rather die themselves or watch friends and family die a slow death, than just use that supposed miracle cure.
3. Thousands to millions of underlings, who otherwise can't seem to keep much else secret, just toe the line on this one. And again, would rather be loyal to some cartel than save themselves or their friends and family in some cases. And all the retards who lose laptops, or get internal corporate networks virused, etc, lose everything _except_ this apparently. They lose customer files, they leak that their network has blank admin passwords, etc, but somehow they never manage to leak _that_.
4. Somehow the Chinese, Russians, and a fucking buttload of other governments just itching for a pretext to one-up the West, and thumb their nose at the West, also toe that line peacefully. And, you know, all the retards like those in South Africa and various other countries, peddling sweet potato juice and other local snake oil as cures for HIV and as a substitute for paying to the big pharma for a cure, don't just go ahead and and make that miracle cure.
Remember: if it's secret, then it's also not patented. Patents tell everyone that it exists, so they don't work well for a conspiracy.
Etc, etc, etc.
And the same goes for diabetes, cancer, and all the other poster cases used by such conspiracy theories. In fact, for a lot of them half the points above go double. (E.g., insulin is out of patent, and it's a commodity produced by everyone, so profit margins are tiny. Plus you have local factories which don't pay big pharma a cent. So patenting a cure would make a lot of people very very rich. E.g., cancer doesn't really have as easy a defense as using a condom, and as other diseases go down and life expectancy rises, so does the chance that you'll live enough to get a cancer. So that one requires literally believing that the millions of doctors, researchers, pharma bigwigs, etc, would rather die of it and do something as brutal as radiotherapy or chemotherapy, instead of using the miracle cure. Etc.)
So here's an idea: noone understands that conspiracy theory, because it's fucking stupid even as conspiracy theories usually go. It doesn't require even just delusions and or building whole rationales on silly suppositions instead of facts. It requires genuine inability to follow even elementary logic.
Heh... I still remember first weekend in the previous town I've lived in. So it was a beautiful day of may, with sunshine, flowers and all. And I had to go through a park. Well, maybe not "have", but it was a bit of a detour to go via the other side. Anyway, so the birds were chirping, the sun was high, the breeze was warm, and you could see couples of teenagers everywhere.
But the couple that stuck to my mind were a boy and a girl having a picnic on a blanket on the grass. Well, when I say 'picnic', it was more like the girl was sitting there idle watching other couples go by, while the boy was typing furiously on his laptop.
Not sure if it would have been better with a policy to take his laptop, though. I had a feeling it would have been akin to taking the oxygen tank away from a scuba diver;)
Duude, don't discount WoW so fast. With how much my dwarf runs around hills and valleys and thickets, he's probably uber-creative. He's probably composing the next great symphony when I'm not around. Having herbalism as one of the jobs probably also helps, if you know what I mean.
Also, I remember trying one of the (back then) new MS Sidewinder force-feedback joysticks in some Star Wars game, waay back. It was like arm-wrestling an epileptic grizzly bear while he's having a seizure. The damn thing would shake, pull in random directions, and generally act like it had a will of its own. Or like it was possessed by the angry spirit of a spastic monkey who died of a drug overdose.
You want to accelerate? Have some random joystick shake. One of your team mates got too close to you? Let's shake, rattle and roll, baby. You passed by another ship? Arm wrestle this, nerd-boy. Laser fire narrowly missed you? Shake baby, shake. You're trying to carefully aim at a 2 pixel shield generator? Let's have some shaking that you'll be glad if you can keep it on your screen, much less in the crosshair. Etc.
'Cause you know, it's only _realistic_ to simulate turbulence. In space. In a vacuum. Caused by a laser beam. Ookaayy.
If that wasn't a bigger workout than waving your wiimote around, I don't know what is. More depressing too, and, hey, these guys say that being sad is good for your creativity;)
Well, maybe because the "Internet community" isn't even a community at all. It's just a bunch of unrelated people who use the same network. There is no single topic, interest, point of view, etc, which would be shared among all members of that supposed "community".
It's bit like claiming that USA by mid-1800's had complete double standards. "OMG, slavery is protected by the constitution and an integral part of our way of life." Then in the same day, "OMG, slavery is an abomination and the constitution doesn't really endorse it." Well, yes, because it was different people.
Actually, I'd also worry if I were you, if you've played cards or pingpong, or played guitar (if the guitar itself isn't lacquered with it, the guitar pick is made of the damn thing), or if you've held hands with your SO who uses nail polish, or a few other cases. That's for nitrocellulose alone, best known as guncotton and the primary component in cordite. (Modern gunpowder, sorta.) Also the primary component in celluloid, hence the above list.
IIRC the UK has a famous case where they threw 3 Irish guys in jail for having played cards on a long train trip. Had nitrates all over their hands.
So, well, while the Irish and Brits seem to have mostly learned to live with each other lately, I'd start worrying if you look like an Arab and travel to/in the USA.
Ah, I wouldn't know. There's a certain advantage to talking to yourself. For a start, you have more common topics than with anyone else, although that's somewhat offset by the fact that you're not going to hear anything you didn't know already. It also takes all the fun out of telling jokes, lemme tell you.
You're also almost guaranteed to have the same moods at the same time. When you're in a mood to go see a movie, for example, so are you. I mean it's not like you're in a mood to watch the game, while you would rather talk about moving the furniture instead. No need to nod absentmindedly and go "uh-huh". Which is just as well, because you'd know it anyway. And when you're depressed, you can always cry on your own shoulder. (Come to think of it, more of the people on the Internet should be encouraged to use their own shoulder for that;)
And if you want to call yourself to dinner, but you're still at the last boss in a MMO raid... well, chances are you'll find a way to accomodate and understand yourself.
You can also save yourself not just the phone bill, but also the internet bill. You can just use Notepad as IRC, IM and pretty much any other text chat medium rolled in one. And you know you can accept any files or attachments. Heck, even if you sent yourself a virus, you had it already anyway.
Buying gifts for yourself is fun too. It takes all the guesswork out, and it's not like you'll buy yourself a tie you'll secretly hate but pretend to like so you don't offend yourself. Downside, it ruins the whole surprise big time. Plus side again, it'll probably be something both you and you can use, and you won't get into ownership disputes about it.
That being said, this attitude that the Estonian government is somehow horribly evil for moving a statue I find to be utterly incomprehensible. If the United States government decided tomorrow to move the Vietnam wall across the Mall and plunk it down over somewhere else
No, actually, think about it more like: think that France decided to dismantle some monument to the WW2 American soldiers and send it back to America, together with a very loud and very melodramatic message, along the lines of, "fuck you very much, we didn't invite you here in the first place. Oh, and we liked the Nazis and Petain more."
I'm guessing there would be a _lot_ of fist shaking and bellicose declarations in the USA. Remember that USA is the country where a lot of people renamed "french fries" to "freedom fries", over a _much_ smaller offense. In fact, over little more than France refusing to toe the line in a war of aggression. There was a whole freaking tsunami of posts along the lines of, "fuck the french! we saved them! how _dare_ they show some free will when we say 'jump'??!"
Kids proposing a DDOS? There was at least a reverend who proposed to move an aircraft carrier next to a France port to scare them into submission, and that's off the top of my head. Now he may have been a woefully uninformed about the size of France and its military might, if he thought they're that easy to scare, but nevertheless, he was proposing an act of _war_.
And we still haven't seen the end of _that_ from various loud kids and shotgun-waving rednecks from the USA.
So I'd say that if all that happened from Russia was a bunch of disgruntled script-kiddies proposing a DDOS, then the Russians are quite peaceful.
you'd have a few thousand disgruntled veteran
Yes, you'd have a few _thousand_ disgruntled veterans. Now think that Russia has lost 50 times more lives in WW2 than the USA did. There'll be _lot_ of disgruntled veterans, plus the children and grandchildren of people who died in that stupid war. If you start dismantling their monuments, don't be surprised if you have some tens to hundreds of thousands of people who get pissed off.
Now I'm not trying to defend the act in any way, but it helps to see it in perspective.
You misunderstood my point. I'm not saying that Christianity itself was good or bad. And I'm certainly not saying you should believe in it.
I'm just saying that it changed history so massively, that we can't really know if 2000 years later we're better or worse off for it. I don't think anyone even knows all the events that were influenced by it, much else be able to honestly say what would 2000 years of history would have looked like without Christianity.
Look, let's put it like this: the plague outbursts were bad. Really bad. Freakin' horrible even. But their long term effects were good. We had a Renaissance and later an industrial revolution only because of the plague. It's what shook the status quo, and killed enough peasants kept at subsistence level, so the survivors could demand better conditions and get more land. And thus become able to have a surplus they could trade, invest in better tools, etc.
So basically even something horrible can have a good outcome.
So basically even if you think that Christianity is evil or bogus, what I'm talking about is about how it influenced history, since that was the kind of post I was answering to. And I'm just saying: nobody knows. Noone can simulate 2000 years without it, and say where we'd be in that alternate universe.
Or, if you will, take Van Gogh and lead poisoning as an analogy. Lead poisoning is a nasty thing. It may, however, have caused his paintings to be what they famously are. Would his paintings be better or worse without it? No idea. Noone can really simulate what his life would have been without lead-based paints. Maybe it even had a good effect on his style.
So basically if you were expecting a debate about the religion itself, well, it's not that.
Slashdot Mirror
That much is actually obvious. You can't stall an army in the plains even if you're made of steel as one guy, because worst case scenario they just go around you. But still, you know, the odds were hideously against him anyway.
If you read your own link, although the Vikings were mostly without their armours, they had managed to assemble into a shield wall formation. That's quite a far cry from being slaughtered in their sleep.
At the Battle of Stamford Bridge, allegedly one single Berserker held the bridge and blocked Harold Godwinson's advance long enough for Harald Sigurdsson's army to assemble. Essentially denied Godwinson the element of surprise.
One guy. Vs the whole freaking Saxon army. What was _left_ of that Saxon army after the battle, was still enough to put up a battle at Hastings, so the original size must have been even more impressive.
I dunno, I'd vote that this is one of those cases where one should resist trying to improve what's perfectly good as it is. I'm not sure if the velociraptor genes wouldn't actually make it worse. And not in a good way.
Yes, they're peaceful _now_. Back then a "peaceful" tribe was one which didn't attack its neighbours more than once a year.
There was _no_ peaceful tribal society that we know of, other than the Khoisan, a.k.a., Bushmen. The Khoisan had an... interesting society and culture, but that's the weird exception, not the rule.
And even the Khoisan quickly discovered that those who don't believe in living by the sword, get slaughtered wholesale by those who do. They were essentially pushed by the Bantu (and later by the Dutch, British and German settlers) into the Kalahari desert, which noone else wanted. And not pushed into a reservation even USA style (brutal as that was too), but essentially by being slaughtered wholesale if caught on land anyone else wanted.
But that's it. Once you move out of the Kalahari, there is _no_ "Noble Savage" and in most places never was. Whoever else wanted to be all peaceful and non-aggressive, didn't have a similar refuge.
The Khoisan had the chance that their aggressors were into agriculture and animal husbandry, and didn't want Kalahari because it's useless for both. A tribe whose neighbours would be hunters-gatherers too (e.g., any in Nothern America) would not have the same chance. Any land a hypothetical peaceful tribe would have been able to live off, so would their neighbours, and they'd come fighting for it.
Think basically of the infamous Goering quote:
I think basically the same applies: Why would some poor hunter-gatherer slob want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his hunting in one piece?
Humanity for the most part has been subject to some pretty nasty cycles of overpopulation, famine, etc, which resulted war. Overpopulation has only been solved recently when, basically, it became a given that if you make 1-2 kids, chances good are they'll survive. So no need to make 10 to beat the odds. Women have better chances to survive too, so there goes another reason to attack the next tribe. Famine was another big motivation for war too: when the alternative is literally starvation, "better them than us" arguments are a lot easier to swallow. And hunter-gatherers were particularly vulnerable, due to the natural cycles of predator and prey, plus the nasty effect that overpopulation actually pushes the prey populations down, amplifying the effects of that. (To get an idea: Neanderthals actually managed to push themselves into extinction by over-hunting what they could hunt with their tech level.) Nowadays even if you live on a reservation, I'm guessing you can rely on the government or humanitarian organizations to pull you out of shit anyway, if it hits the fan. Etc.
Why _would_ you go to war with another tribe nowadays? What would you gain?
Culture and enculturation _may_ have slowed things down, mind you. After a few thousands of years of chest-thumping about being teh fearless and aggressive warrior, and one's standing in the community depending on that image, it doesn't go away easily. People will continue chest-thumping just so they don't lose face. Groupthink... err... enculturation works that way.
But after a couple of generations, people start to take it for a given that, wth, there's no _point_ in raiding the next tribe. And there's even less point in trying to raid the white man's towns, because the darned white man in the meantime has tanks and machineguns and other nasty stuff.
Basically I'm guessing there wasn't anything special, nor especially peaceful or spiritual about those who survived. They just turned out to be, well, humans. No better and no worse than the white guys and gals around them, and no better or worse than the tribes which didn't make it either. It was the conditions that changed, not the people that were any special. And the people changed as a result, same as everyone else would and did.
Well, primitive tribes _were_ extremely aggressive, and did fight all the time.
On the other hand "contributed to the ancestry of the native North Americans" implies interbreeding, rather than genocide. I.e., they fucked their way across two continents.
It's not exactly surprising, though. A staple of tribal warfare, and it even lasted well into Iron Age in Greece for example, was raiding for another tribe's women, not just their food.
Life expectancy for women was rather disproportionately lower than for men in primitive societieties, and for men it wasn't as high as to reach andropause first. So eventually a lot of still able men were left with the prospect of either finding another woman somehow, or playing with Miss Rosy Palm for the next 5 to 10 years. Meanwhile the next tribe had plenty of women. Are you thinking what I'm thinking, Pinky?
Of course then the next tribe had an acute shortage of women, so the cycle of violence continued.
So I'm saying that interbreeding would have been inevitable. When the newly arrived East Asians won a raid, they got some women from the previous populations, when they lost one, the opposite would happen.
Well, yes, but that's still no excuse to counter them with lies that don't even work. If you have to counter a fallacy about linux, by all means do it. By pointing out the truth. Not by making up a counter-lie about Windows.
Even if you don't care about the moral high ground, Linux just isn't in a position to use the same monopolistic tactics that worked for MS. You tend to actually need a near-monopoly for those to work.
FUD is based on people's existing fear of change and unknown. It gives them more reason to not try what they don't already know. It doesn't work as a tactic to get them to ditch what they already know, because there is no Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt to play on.
They're tactics for walling people _in_ your garden, not for convincing them to join it.
_If_ Linux had 90% of the market, then maybe you could scare them out of considering Windows, with made up horror stories. But when the situation is reversed, making up shit about Windows just makes you that guy who's making up shit again.
And certainly not with an obnoxious attitude like, "Now it's your turn and you're whining like whipped bitches. Well suck it up. There's plenty more to come." Which is what irked me in the message I was answering to originally. Advocating doesn't work by blanket calling everyone an enemy, and getting them to dislike you. If they dislike you, they're less likely to listen to anything you have to say.
I'm not even saying anything new or which shouldn't be common sense. Check out, for example, the Paul L. Rogers's Linux Advocacy Mini-FAQ. I'm waiting to see if some fanboy feels a need to paint him in the MS shills camp for offering advice like, "Avoid hyperbole and unsubstantiated claims at all costs. It's unprofessional and will result in unproductive discussions." Or "Focus on what Linux has to offer. There is no need to bash the competition. Linux is a good, solid product that stands on its own."
Actually, it was thirty silver, and I think it was just because he was dumb.
I mean, come on, Jesus had to count as at least rare, if not epic. He definitely would have been worth more than thirty silver at the auction house. But nah, Judas just had to vendor him.
I bet he hanged himself when someone told him, "dude, you could have auctioned him for at least 350 gold, according to Thottbot." I mean, I know newbies who went depressive for having vendored Coarse Stone when you tell them they could have gotten gold for it. Vendoring Jesus? Damn, I'd probably hang myself too the next day.
Well, unless Jesus was already soulbound and couldn't be auctioned.
(Big WoW related joke, for whoever doesn't understand what I'm going on about.)
Alternately, think of it this was: Jesus is the healer and resser of that raid, and he goes and aggroes both the Romans and the Jewish leadership in one fell swoop. And he gets nailed for it. I mean, damn, didn't they have a _tank_? Did noone there know how to pull?
And what kind of a raid size was that? I can see 25 or 40 as a raid size, I could even imagine a 15 man instance, but thirteen? Gimme a break. You don't go after elite bosses like Pillat Pontius with just thirteen people, no matter how l33t your healer thinks he is.
Judas probably hanged himself after trying to get another healer and a proper defense tank for the next attempt at that instance, and having no success for the rest of the day.
I know some groups like that and days like that almost made _me_ want to hang myself
Let's talk about who made that progress then.
It was made by people like those from Asus, who actually made a Linux computer for the masses. Or by the guys at Ubuntu putting together that wonderful distro. Or by the lots of guys who set their eyes on a realistic goal, like, say, let's make a little config utility, and actually achieved it.
It was not made by the trolling fanboys posting FUD.
In fact, any progress has been made in _spite_ of the trolling faboys and their blatant attempts at FUD. Those just helped alienate the potential market. If you tell someone a blatant lie again, you just lost credibility. Anything else that you try to tell him, will be tainted by that. And the fanboy FUD just served to create an impression in some people that the whole Linux crowd is a bunch of pathological lying whiners.
People, it's not like telling shit about Elbonia. Everyone has a Windows computer, or knows someone who does. Telling him bullshit like that his machine does this and that, which he knows (or can quickly check) that it doesn't do, is just a way to lose his trust and attention.
Even MS FUD steered clear of blatant lies. Just something to think about.
Well,
1. it's just getting old. Yes, we know, you don't like MS. You may even imagine that it's your duty to save the world from it. Guess what? Noone else gives a fuck. Repeating the same wannabe-memes over and over again just makes one boring, nothing more.
2. Fighting FUD and disinformation with FUD and disinformation, does not a moral high ground make. Yes, MS has some nasty marketing and lacks ethics. Guess what? Being as big a lying prick doesn't make you better. It just makes you yet another lying prick.
If you have something useful to contribute (e.g., exactly what problems happen if one runs Vista on that machine, or on a similar configuration?), by all means, go ahead. But just rehashing "but does it run Vista" one-liners is just noise and literally FUD. It's, what? Saving the world from MS evil FUD, by filling it with your own? At the end then we'd still have a disinformed market, making purchases based on little more than uncertainty and _lack_ of knowledge, same as before. Big freakin' improvement. Not. It's like fighting against malaria by giving those people HIV instead.
3. If you want to talk about "inventing FUD", that term was first used about IBM. So, nope, MS didn't invent that either, just like they didn't invent the browser or personal computing.
4. "Now it's your turn and you're whining like whipped bitches" is a piss-poor ad-hominem. I know it probably doesn't fit your simplified view of the world, but not everyone who's tired of hearing you whine, bitch, and moan, is in any way connected to MS. Some of us are just tired of the endless noise from bleating fanboys, drowning the useful signal in threads that have nothing to do with their whine.
It has nothing to do with being pro or against MS. I can tell you that I have a BSD fanboy at work, trying to save me from Linux, and he's just as annoying.
5. "Well suck it up. There's plenty more to come." Well, that's what makes it annoying. You said it once, learn to take a break now and then. Repeating same tired fanboy whine again and again, is hardly going to make it either better or true than it was the first time around. It'll just add more noise to drown the useful signal. If your contribution to the world and claim to greatness is that you'll troll some more, heh... you could get some useful skill instead, and actually contribute something, ya know?
6. I'll even go one step further and say: "It is easier to be a "humanitarian" than to render your own country its proper due; it is easier to be a "patriot" than to make your community a better place to live in; it is easier to be a "civic leader" than to treat your own family with loving understanding; for the smaller the focus of attention, the harder the task." --Sydney J. Harris
I get the distinct impression that a lot of those who can't just shut up even for 5 minutes about saving the world from X (where X can be anything between the upcoming wrath of God, like in the Crusades, to more modern concerns like MS) are those who can't sort out their own lives, or show some backbone to the boss in person. It's _easy_ to fight for some nebulous global task that will never be done, and noone can fault you if you show no progress. So wake me up when you can claim some actual personal achievement, not just being a "me too" clone in the big cozy family of sheep bleating against MS.
Just a thought.
First of all, that's a bit convenient a definition.
But the fact is, the western world too has a long and funny history of targetting civilians explicitly. The terror bombings of WW2 (started, duly noted by Germany, but continued by the Allies just as well) were probably the best example, though more recent examples do exist. The theory was explictly to kill enough civilians, as to (A) cause a huge morale drop and make them beg their government for peace, and (B) cripple the economy by killing enough of the workforrce.
The industrial cities of Germany for example have not been colateral damage in trying to bomb the factories, they have been the targets themselves. That was the actual target: bombing the city and terrorizing the population. (But again, so did Germany with UK cities, so I'm not trying to make it sound like only one side was doing it.)
The whole doctrine and technique of firebombing them didn't even work against factories. How it worked was dropping a big bomb with an otherwise thin shell, so the blast would blow the shingles off house roofs, followed by lots of little fire bombs that would then fall in the house and set it ablaze. The houses of civilians were _the_ target.
Against factories that particular mix had little to no effect. Against troops or military targets that mix would have been outright stupid, and noone used it for that.
Again, the whole doctrine was to kill as many civilians as your can, and scare the seven shades of shit out of the survivors. That's a terror tactic by any other name.
Want another example: the USA has actively researched biological warfare and had stockpiles of nasty germs until the 70's. I do believe that the doctrine wasn't to drop them just on enemy troops.
The west only gave up on that shit, when we finally figured out that nukes are enough of a deterrent anyway, and killing 3% of a city's population with modified Brucellosis is peanuts compared to nuking it. And again, the doctrine of mutually assured destruction isn't about nuking enemy troops. If you look at any country with nukes, right as we write this, the nukes are aimed at the (potential) enemies' civilian cities. The threat is, very much, "if you dare attack us, we'll wipe out your population and turn your country into a radioactive wasteland."
The neutron bomb was developed for the explicit reason of killing or injuring as many humans as possible, while causing as little damage as possible to everything else. It's not a bomb you'd use to disable a military factory, it's a bomb which would kill its workers (and the whole city nearby) and at most blow the windows off that factory.
Etc.
So, you know, freakin' _please_. I'm even willing to swallow _some_ "us vs them" dehumanizing arguments, but "we wouldn't ever target civilians" is so much bullshit it could fertilize a few acres.
Well, in a sense, he did it to himself, because (willingly or not) he did try to correlate his techno-utopian ideas to money. His claim is that he looked at which sites survived the dot-com bubble, and indeed thrived, and the common factors that he saw were, well, the ones I've already listed: wikis, blogs, tags, collaboration, content hauled through P2P, etc. So you too can be a part of the next great thing, if only you build your site around those.
Kinda funny, because what the rest of us saw is: those who had a business plan survived. Google for example didn't survive and thrive just because it was connecting people, but because it was a better ad provider. And conversely 99% of the dot-coms were about just connecting people, and failed without a business plan.
In fact, that's why I sound kinda hostile to Web 2.0. He _is_ trying to create the second coming of dot-com, and steer it in his own techno-utopian directions by little more than handwaving and misinformation. (I'll choose to think that it's misinformation and not genuine stupidity, at least.)
So, yeah, it's not hard to see why marketers latched to a meme which already promised the keys to the land of milk and honey, and VC money growing on trees. It's also not entirely hard to see why noone applies it to its original techno-utopian sense: because it makes no sense, and is of little practical value in the real world.
Unfortunately, there is one single definition of "Web 2.0", and that is the one of the guy who registered that trademark: Tim O'Reilly.
Now I'm not usually one to make a big fuss over using a word wrong, but this one is actually a trademark. Deciding to use it in any other way, is a bit like deciding to call my Audigy 4 sound card a GeForce or an Audi. It just isn't one.
And the extent to which both tech "pundits" and PHBs use it wrong, while (at least the latter) proclaiming their undying love and commitment to it, just leaves the impression that they use it as yet another buzzword. You don't proclaim your commitment to a technology, unless you actually understand what it is, how it can help you, and preferably how it compares to other technologies to the same end. Just going with a buzzword because it's popular, and ending up pledging your company to the camp of such a buzzword, is as silly (and often has the same effects) as making it your strategy to use scramjets in bicycles. Just because everyone seems to love scramjets lately, and you wouldn't want your mountain bike company to be left behind.
To get back to the actual definition of that trademark, it's not even about technology as such. It's about people. It's not techno-fetishism, as in liking cool new technologies for their sake, it's techno-utopianism: the mis-guided belief that you only need to give more internet tools to a billion monkeys, to get a utopia like nothing imagined before. Although said monkeys never created anything worth reading with a keyboard, if it's keyboards connected to the Internet, now that's how you hit a gold mine.
O'Reilly's idea is sorta along the lines of:
- forget about publishing content (e.g., hiring expensive tech writers and marketers for your site), it's all about participation, baby. Let users write your content. Hust put in some wikis and forums, and a thousand bored monkeys will do the work faster, cheaper and more accurate. (People will just flock to offer you some free, quality work, just because they like donating to a corporation, I guess. And if instead you discover comments about how much your company sucks, the CEO's sexual orientation, and his mom's weight, well, I guess it must be true, 'cause collaborative efforts can't _possibly_ be wrong.)
- forget about setting up your own redundant servers or dealing with Akamai, use BitTorrent. (Ask a lot of people how they felt about Blizzard's going almost exclusively through BitTorrent at launch. Nowadays their own servers serve a lot more of the content, if not enough other users are stuffing your pipe. I wonder why.)
- forget selling media on the Internet, teh future is Napster letting people pirate it, like happened way back then. (No, literally, the "mp3.com --> Napster" line is part of his own page explaining Web 2.0. I guess good thing noone told Steve Jobs that.)
- forget content management systems, use wikis. (I wonder in which alternate reality the piss-poor search engines of wikis can be compared to the capabilities of those systems.)
- for that matter, forget about structuring information in any way, like through directories and portals, just let the users tag it. (I'm _sure_ that the tags "humor, theft, oldnews, !news, digg" will so help me find the story about a manager stealing the server from earlier. Never mind that search engines were already dumping searching for tags, in favour of full text search, even at the time when he came up with that idea.)
Etc.
Basically, if you have the patience to sift through his ramblings, and don't give up at the "well, Google started up as a web database" intro, the meat begins at "Harnessing Collective Intelligence". That's what's it about. It's not as much about what technology you use on the web, it's about connecting a billion clueless monkeys, and believing that the result is something a billion times more intelligent and informed. Anything that helps connect those monkeys is good, anything else is irrelevant. Even whether you us
I'll believe that you had something else in mind, because that particular example is a piss-poor example for needing new property delineation and laws. That one was plain, old-fashioned theft, nothing more, nothing less. Theft of the physical kind.
It had _nothing_ to do with IP. There was no copyright infringement of any kind, there was no patent infringement, and there was no trademark infringement.
Yes, he got caught because it incidentally was used as a web server. So what? The same can be said for the thief who stole a CCTV camera, and was filmed by it in the act.
At the end of the day, what remains is "dumb PHB steals X from work, thinking it was Y." Ok, "secretly borrows" over the weekend. In this case X was a piece of computing, but the act itself had been no different if X were, say, one of the company trucks to haul his own furniture with.
We don't need to invent new definitions of property for _that_. We already had all the concepts we need, since, oh, the Romans.
In fact, during the Dutch tulip bulb craze, hundreds of years ago, we had a case that was a verbatim clone of this same "dumb guy steals X thinking it's Y", only with different X and Y. The short story is: dumb sailor steals (and eats) an uber-expensive tulip bulb, thinking it was an onion. In our story X=server, Y=toy, while in the Dutch case it was X=tulip bulb worth a fortune, and Y=onion. It's the same story with different props.
_Why_ do we need new definitions of property to cover something that was already clear enough hundreds of years ago?
While I could even join you in lamenting some of the shortcomings of unchecked capitalism, I think that some things you pick on are more like human nature/culture than inherently capitalistic.
1. Demand for useless things, just for status symbol value and/or keeping up with the joneses: you'll find that it dated long before capitalism.
Purple in the ancient world, for example had the _only_ value of being a more expensive dye than gold. Demand for it was as high as to create massive fortunes for the phoenician traders. Whole colonies and mercenary armies (e.g., those that the Romans clashed with in the Carthage wars) were at least partially paid for by that trade. In Rome purple eventually became a synonim with power and rank, with the all-purple robe being reserved for the Emperor only.
Silk in Europe, wasn't that horribly practical a garment, or not to justify its horribly high price. It was an item of fashion, for rich women to show off their wealth. (And apparently at least in Rome for some of them to show their body through a semi-transparent silk dress.) We know not only how huge fortunes the Silk Road created for China and for the states through which it went, but we also know that at some point Rome was starting to get bothered by the huge quantities of gold it shipped as payment for silk.
Later the fortune of Byzantium and one reason (out of several) why it did so well when the rest of Europe was in a complete collapse, was that they had managed to steal a few silkworms, and built their own silk industry. You can also see a first example of artificial scarcity there: both China and Byzantium were outright paranoid about keeping it a secret, so others would have to buy from them instead of making their own silk.
2. War. This one goes all the way back to _stone_ age. As soon as people invented the bow and arrow, I don't know what changed there, but suddenly we have depictions of formations of archers shooting at each other. And mass graves with stone tips embedded in the bones.
Some of those tribes were as far from capitalism as it gets. Some hadn't even invented a proper barter economy yet, or not past the most primitive stages of it. (See ancient Egypt for how complex a barter economy can get.) But it didn't prevent them from fighting over hunting grounds. Or just to steal each other's food and women.
So blaming war on capitalism, seems, no offense, a bit silly.
3. Crisis. Again, we have plenty of historical evidence that crisis events existed long before capitalism. In fact, long before our era.
The most common one went like this: some city had grain, and some trader came and offered a high price for it. Said city then got greedy and sold so much grain, that they starved in the coming winter.
The (arguably premature) transition to Iron Age in Europe was caused by a massive crisis. The tin trade at some point simply collapsed, leaving most of Europe and the Middle East without access to weapon-grade metal. That's why everyone rushed to switch to iron.
Etc.
Again, I'm not saying capitalism is the best system imaginable, nor flawless. But methinks that the evils you ascribe to it, existed _millenia_ before capitalism.
That was sorta what I was already wondering.
In the west we already had a concept of, basically: you bought _a_ book, you didn't buy the rights to the novel. You bought _a_ record, you didn't buy the rights to that band's album. You bought _a_ (copy of the) newspaper, you didn't buy _the_ newspaper. Etc. It worked. Most people could already wrap their mind around that.
We had a first sale doctrine that worked perfectly well with that too. Yes, you didn't buy the rights to the novel, for example, but you bought a book and you can do almost whatever you want with it. Resell it, lend it to your friend, read it to your kid at bedtime, etc.
Then came for example software and tried to handwave in the fallacy that they need completely other constructs, for something that was already solved for everything else. See, you need to _license_ software, because, OMG, otherwise you'd think you bought the rights to that program as a whole! WTH? We already had the distinction between buying a book, and buying the ownership of a novel itself. You didn't need to "license" a book, or a vinyl record, or a newspaper.
Even after the loophole of, basically, "yeah, but you need to copy the program to memory, which is making a copy, and you need a license to make copies" was closed, we got stuck with the same stupidity as a before. Nah, see, it's _licensed_, not sold, 'cause if we sold it you might think you bought the rights to Vista as a whole!
Exactly wth is the fundamental difference between buying a copy of, say, Vista, and buying a copy of Huckleberry Finn? I'll go on a limb and say that people would have had no trouble using the pre-existing concept for software too.
And then based on the license stupidity, we had increasingly stupid stuff snuck in as licensing terms, that no consumer rights law would have allowed otherwise. E.g., you can't resell it. (See the recent AutoCAD lawsuit, but also all the software where you have to use up a serial number to use it, etc.) You can resell your old book, your old vinyl records, even your old copy of The New York times if you find someone interested in that particular issue, but you can't resell your old copy of AutoCAD. 'Cause it's licensed not sold. Some presume to unilaterally decide what else you can run on that computer. (E.g., it's quite common for game copy-protections to just quit or do this and that to you, if they think you have a CD emulator running on that computer.) Or what they can do to your computer. Or what you can use it for. Etc. Everything that consumer protection laws gave you for books, records, etc, the license took away for software.
And now unsurprisingly we see the guys from the other media, essentially go, "wait, wait, you mean we wouldn't have had to give customers all those rights, if we called it a license too? Damn, we want some of that too!" All the aberrations and stupidities built on that fallacy for software, we're now seeing trickling back to, say, movies and music. They too want a DRM scheme to prevent you from reselling it. They too want to unilaterally require your DVD player to phone home and spy on you, 'cause, hey, if software can do that, they want it too. They too want a say in what you can use the DVD for, and in which devices. (See copy protected CDs which actually play a reduced bit rate MP3 instead of the uncompressed music, if you play them on a computer.) Etc.
Heck, even Sony's infamous copy protection rootkit was, essentially, just trying to get the same control over that music as they have over software. In a misguided and flawed way, to be sure, but they didn't do anything much more underhanded than their copy protection already does for games.
And methinks it's about high time to say a collective, "WTF?" Or rather, a, "No, you don't. You software guys learn to live with what already worked for everything else, instead of everyone else copying your invented loopholes. Yes, you sold a copy, not the rights to the program. We know that. That already applied to everyone who bought a copy o
So you're telling me that none of that would fund someone with a patent that gives them near-monopoly on treating AIDS, for _20_ years?
I see you've supplied your own proof against the conspiracy theory. Cures _are_ being researched, and there _is_ a recurring revenue in those.
The recurring revenue aspect, which you mention is this: that people keep getting the disease again, or new people get it. It's not like there's a shortage of new people getting STDs, or cancer, or whatever.
It's also missing the aspect of how big that revenue is. Selling a patented cure is where the big money is. If you milked everyone with diabetes of, say, 1000$ profit for a patented cure, it beats treating a little slice of that market with insulin (because everyone produces it, not only you) at cents profit per shot (because the free market did drive the prices down, as it's supposed to.)
So, anyway, I guess I'm somehow supposed to believe that what applies to anti-biotics (kills bacteria) and anti-fungals (kills fungi), somehow doesn't apply to anti-virals (you guessed what it kills.) That there's a perfectly good financial incentive to fund finding a cure for some bacterial infection that would likely (though not always) go away on its own, but somehow not in curing a viral infection that kills. Something doesn't add up in that conspiracy.
Dude, let's put it like this:
Any company which discovers a cure gets a monopoly (patent) on it for 20 years. Which is a lot.
Now picture having this choice:
A. You get the existing anti-virals which tend to do a lot of damage. (There's a reason you don't get them for a cold or even a flu: they do more damage than the flu.) And they might or might not work. In fact, you'll probably just buy you some time. And everyone makes them, so while there's some money milking potential in the "but mine work better" factor, you're still just getting a slice of the pie.
B. You get the miracle cure from Company X, which actually works and presumably with a lot less side effects.
Choice B is a no-brainer. The company which would get a 20 year monopoly on B, is going to sit on a freaking huge fortune at the end of those 20 years. Not only they'd get the lion's share of the existing pie, they'd get a whole merry bunch of retards who'd rather buy the cure later than use a condom. Again.
So basically, you're telling me that a whole lot of CEOs, doctors, their investors, etc:
1. Would rather work for the general benefit of their competitors in preserving a status quo, instead of making a metric buttload of money for themselves.
2. A lot of rich and powerful people, and some of those same CEOs, doctors, etc, would rather die themselves or watch friends and family die a slow death, than just use that supposed miracle cure.
3. Thousands to millions of underlings, who otherwise can't seem to keep much else secret, just toe the line on this one. And again, would rather be loyal to some cartel than save themselves or their friends and family in some cases. And all the retards who lose laptops, or get internal corporate networks virused, etc, lose everything _except_ this apparently. They lose customer files, they leak that their network has blank admin passwords, etc, but somehow they never manage to leak _that_.
4. Somehow the Chinese, Russians, and a fucking buttload of other governments just itching for a pretext to one-up the West, and thumb their nose at the West, also toe that line peacefully. And, you know, all the retards like those in South Africa and various other countries, peddling sweet potato juice and other local snake oil as cures for HIV and as a substitute for paying to the big pharma for a cure, don't just go ahead and and make that miracle cure.
Remember: if it's secret, then it's also not patented. Patents tell everyone that it exists, so they don't work well for a conspiracy.
Etc, etc, etc.
And the same goes for diabetes, cancer, and all the other poster cases used by such conspiracy theories. In fact, for a lot of them half the points above go double. (E.g., insulin is out of patent, and it's a commodity produced by everyone, so profit margins are tiny. Plus you have local factories which don't pay big pharma a cent. So patenting a cure would make a lot of people very very rich. E.g., cancer doesn't really have as easy a defense as using a condom, and as other diseases go down and life expectancy rises, so does the chance that you'll live enough to get a cancer. So that one requires literally believing that the millions of doctors, researchers, pharma bigwigs, etc, would rather die of it and do something as brutal as radiotherapy or chemotherapy, instead of using the miracle cure. Etc.)
So here's an idea: noone understands that conspiracy theory, because it's fucking stupid even as conspiracy theories usually go. It doesn't require even just delusions and or building whole rationales on silly suppositions instead of facts. It requires genuine inability to follow even elementary logic.
Heh... I still remember first weekend in the previous town I've lived in. So it was a beautiful day of may, with sunshine, flowers and all. And I had to go through a park. Well, maybe not "have", but it was a bit of a detour to go via the other side. Anyway, so the birds were chirping, the sun was high, the breeze was warm, and you could see couples of teenagers everywhere.
;)
But the couple that stuck to my mind were a boy and a girl having a picnic on a blanket on the grass. Well, when I say 'picnic', it was more like the girl was sitting there idle watching other couples go by, while the boy was typing furiously on his laptop.
Not sure if it would have been better with a policy to take his laptop, though. I had a feeling it would have been akin to taking the oxygen tank away from a scuba diver
Duude, don't discount WoW so fast. With how much my dwarf runs around hills and valleys and thickets, he's probably uber-creative. He's probably composing the next great symphony when I'm not around. Having herbalism as one of the jobs probably also helps, if you know what I mean.
;)
Also, I remember trying one of the (back then) new MS Sidewinder force-feedback joysticks in some Star Wars game, waay back. It was like arm-wrestling an epileptic grizzly bear while he's having a seizure. The damn thing would shake, pull in random directions, and generally act like it had a will of its own. Or like it was possessed by the angry spirit of a spastic monkey who died of a drug overdose.
You want to accelerate? Have some random joystick shake. One of your team mates got too close to you? Let's shake, rattle and roll, baby. You passed by another ship? Arm wrestle this, nerd-boy. Laser fire narrowly missed you? Shake baby, shake. You're trying to carefully aim at a 2 pixel shield generator? Let's have some shaking that you'll be glad if you can keep it on your screen, much less in the crosshair. Etc.
'Cause you know, it's only _realistic_ to simulate turbulence. In space. In a vacuum. Caused by a laser beam. Ookaayy.
If that wasn't a bigger workout than waving your wiimote around, I don't know what is. More depressing too, and, hey, these guys say that being sad is good for your creativity
Well, maybe because the "Internet community" isn't even a community at all. It's just a bunch of unrelated people who use the same network. There is no single topic, interest, point of view, etc, which would be shared among all members of that supposed "community".
It's bit like claiming that USA by mid-1800's had complete double standards. "OMG, slavery is protected by the constitution and an integral part of our way of life." Then in the same day, "OMG, slavery is an abomination and the constitution doesn't really endorse it." Well, yes, because it was different people.
Actually, I'd also worry if I were you, if you've played cards or pingpong, or played guitar (if the guitar itself isn't lacquered with it, the guitar pick is made of the damn thing), or if you've held hands with your SO who uses nail polish, or a few other cases. That's for nitrocellulose alone, best known as guncotton and the primary component in cordite. (Modern gunpowder, sorta.) Also the primary component in celluloid, hence the above list.
IIRC the UK has a famous case where they threw 3 Irish guys in jail for having played cards on a long train trip. Had nitrates all over their hands.
So, well, while the Irish and Brits seem to have mostly learned to live with each other lately, I'd start worrying if you look like an Arab and travel to/in the USA.
Ah, I wouldn't know. There's a certain advantage to talking to yourself. For a start, you have more common topics than with anyone else, although that's somewhat offset by the fact that you're not going to hear anything you didn't know already. It also takes all the fun out of telling jokes, lemme tell you.
You're also almost guaranteed to have the same moods at the same time. When you're in a mood to go see a movie, for example, so are you. I mean it's not like you're in a mood to watch the game, while you would rather talk about moving the furniture instead. No need to nod absentmindedly and go "uh-huh". Which is just as well, because you'd know it anyway. And when you're depressed, you can always cry on your own shoulder. (Come to think of it, more of the people on the Internet should be encouraged to use their own shoulder for that;)
And if you want to call yourself to dinner, but you're still at the last boss in a MMO raid... well, chances are you'll find a way to accomodate and understand yourself.
You can also save yourself not just the phone bill, but also the internet bill. You can just use Notepad as IRC, IM and pretty much any other text chat medium rolled in one. And you know you can accept any files or attachments. Heck, even if you sent yourself a virus, you had it already anyway.
Buying gifts for yourself is fun too. It takes all the guesswork out, and it's not like you'll buy yourself a tie you'll secretly hate but pretend to like so you don't offend yourself. Downside, it ruins the whole surprise big time. Plus side again, it'll probably be something both you and you can use, and you won't get into ownership disputes about it.
Romance tends to not work too well, though.
No, actually, think about it more like: think that France decided to dismantle some monument to the WW2 American soldiers and send it back to America, together with a very loud and very melodramatic message, along the lines of, "fuck you very much, we didn't invite you here in the first place. Oh, and we liked the Nazis and Petain more."
I'm guessing there would be a _lot_ of fist shaking and bellicose declarations in the USA. Remember that USA is the country where a lot of people renamed "french fries" to "freedom fries", over a _much_ smaller offense. In fact, over little more than France refusing to toe the line in a war of aggression. There was a whole freaking tsunami of posts along the lines of, "fuck the french! we saved them! how _dare_ they show some free will when we say 'jump'??!"
Kids proposing a DDOS? There was at least a reverend who proposed to move an aircraft carrier next to a France port to scare them into submission, and that's off the top of my head. Now he may have been a woefully uninformed about the size of France and its military might, if he thought they're that easy to scare, but nevertheless, he was proposing an act of _war_.
And we still haven't seen the end of _that_ from various loud kids and shotgun-waving rednecks from the USA.
So I'd say that if all that happened from Russia was a bunch of disgruntled script-kiddies proposing a DDOS, then the Russians are quite peaceful.
Yes, you'd have a few _thousand_ disgruntled veterans. Now think that Russia has lost 50 times more lives in WW2 than the USA did. There'll be _lot_ of disgruntled veterans, plus the children and grandchildren of people who died in that stupid war. If you start dismantling their monuments, don't be surprised if you have some tens to hundreds of thousands of people who get pissed off.
Now I'm not trying to defend the act in any way, but it helps to see it in perspective.
You misunderstood my point. I'm not saying that Christianity itself was good or bad. And I'm certainly not saying you should believe in it.
I'm just saying that it changed history so massively, that we can't really know if 2000 years later we're better or worse off for it. I don't think anyone even knows all the events that were influenced by it, much else be able to honestly say what would 2000 years of history would have looked like without Christianity.
Look, let's put it like this: the plague outbursts were bad. Really bad. Freakin' horrible even. But their long term effects were good. We had a Renaissance and later an industrial revolution only because of the plague. It's what shook the status quo, and killed enough peasants kept at subsistence level, so the survivors could demand better conditions and get more land. And thus become able to have a surplus they could trade, invest in better tools, etc.
So basically even something horrible can have a good outcome.
So basically even if you think that Christianity is evil or bogus, what I'm talking about is about how it influenced history, since that was the kind of post I was answering to. And I'm just saying: nobody knows. Noone can simulate 2000 years without it, and say where we'd be in that alternate universe.
Or, if you will, take Van Gogh and lead poisoning as an analogy. Lead poisoning is a nasty thing. It may, however, have caused his paintings to be what they famously are. Would his paintings be better or worse without it? No idea. Noone can really simulate what his life would have been without lead-based paints. Maybe it even had a good effect on his style.
So basically if you were expecting a debate about the religion itself, well, it's not that.