Hey Microsoft! We don't just hate you: fact is, your OpenXML spec is an appalling dump heap overflowing with the most disgraceful assortment of deplorable rubbish imaginable, mangled up in tangled up knots! I mean, we at IBM know a brain-damaged document format when we see one (heck, we invented plenty of them ourselves) and trust us, this one takes the cake. Ratification of this garbage could set the word processing industry back about twenty years. So don't give us the "customer's interest" line. We know what this is all about: this is about YOU.
Disclaimer: I don't work for IBM (anymore|yet) and these ain't IBM opinions. Well, not official opinions, anyway. ^^
If the whole Internet is truly choking on bandwidth issues, all those "high-bandwidth" things they complain about (YouTube) will be too slow to get at properly, and people will give up and go watch TV or something instead.
Did 9/11 choke the Internet? I'd say that was a heck of a lot more of an immediate go-to-your-computer-for-news crisis...
They have a new Lotus Notes interface. It's based on Eclipse. It's actually... well, umm, it's tractable, at least. Try some screenshots and some newer screenshots.
People also forget that Notes isn't really an email program. It's a distributed database access and replication suite, and email just happens to be the one sort of database that it's used for most.
No one disputes Global Warming... What is in dispute is cause and cure, if any.
The cause is academic, and only matters insofar as it affects the Cure.
But you're right. When Reason Magazine, the unofficial publication of Libertarian politics, "Free Minds and Free Markets", says "global warming is an issue", then... well, in my book, there's not much more sense to holding out on the issue.
Okay, first of all: I'm not a big OMG Global Warming guy. I think, now, that it's happening, but we'll deal with it, and it's not going to be the end-of-the-world issue certain people are painting it as. Now, that said...
For everyone having to spend a dollar to move there's someone else making a dollar. Encouraging spending is good for the economy.
People think up trillion dollar plans like putting up million of tiny umbrellas into geosynchronous orbit to deflect sunlight.... I've never owned a car, and I'm really not convinced that I ever want to.
Thoughts are cheap. Moving to an urban center where there's a grocery store a block away, and decent public transit, is much more expensive. (And there's probably less fresh clean air, fewer trees, less green space, more noise.) If you're already comfortably settled in NYC or Toronto or Los Angeles or something like that, good for you! Cities are neat. And if you're complaining about people who are already in a big city, that's one thing. But I live in a mid-sized city (200,000) and our bus service is... pretty marginal. You could probably use it to commute if you really had to (and were willing to walk a good distance to get there), but you really need to drive if you want to get to half the places worth getting to.
Myself, I drive a little old 1988 Volkswagen Fox that gets awesome gas mileage. Not that I've ever had to drive it very far, either.
I appreciate your concern. But consider: one of the main reasons that we need to presently be concerned about such exploitation of education is that schools, at present, are a government service. Public schools have a near-monopoly on education. They don't really have all that good of an incentive system which would encourage them to provide students with a good education. By and large, good teachers aren't rewarded for being good teachers; pay scales are, instead, mostly based on seniority.
Enter competition, school vouchers, charter schools, school choice, and the like. Yes, one will need to treat schools as "profitable" (at least the private ones). That's the "capitalism" solution - using a modicum of greed as a force for good. Now, I appreciate that it's not as simple as "just privatize it!" or anything like that; the matter is, in fact, very hard. But a well-implemented system would encourage these schools, both public and private, to better their pupils' education. If it makes our schools a better place, then it's worth it.
How is this any different than other forms of capitalistic market manipulation.
As far as the in-game world is concerned, this isn't really a market. A market is a place of voluntary exchange. This basically goes outside the market. Not everyone can get a developer to give them stuff. Can you say 'barrier to entry'?
This is why people are concerned about having a free market instead of just "capitalism". Heck, it's not as if those with power and resources didn't tend to stay in power and maintain control of resources during Communism or Feudalism or what-have-you throughout history. They certainly weren't any less cutthroat. The difference is that a really free market lets people go their own way, and choose their own fate, insofar as they are able; someone else can always come along with a better way of doing things.
So... you want sympathy from us because you tried to sell WoW gold and ended up shut out of the market? Tell you what. You and Mysterious Ebayer X can both die in a moonfire.
You know, I'm aware that Exxon-Mobil has done a variety of indisputably unethical things. Go ahead and impugn them for whatever like that.
And they have also earned a profit. Oh, horror!
Consider: They need to send surveyors to locate oil fields, procure the rights to these oil fields from the oft-recalcitrant local authorities, drill wells thousands of feet into the earth, build big pumps to raise the oil, build pipelines for hundreds or thousands of miles through inhospitable territories, construct truly enormous processing facilities (go watch the Discovery Channel sometime, their stuff about 'superstructures', those refineries are crazy!), refine the oil into gasoline (and other stuff), load and ship the oil over the oceans in massive tankers, unload them, and finally distribute it to service stations across the country. The scale of it all is staggering.
So do you think that anyone would try and expend so much effort, so much production, so much money (I wouldn't be surprised if they've spent over a trillion) investing in these various things to get billions of barrels of oil out of the ground each year and gasoline into a million cars.... just so they can break even? OF COURSE they're after a profit, for Christ's sake!
Exxon is NOT forcing crude oil down peoples' throats. The problem is that people like warm homes in the winter, and air conditioning in the summer, and a nice house out in the suburbs and maybe even a yard and nice things like trees (and that means they need to drive to get places). Imagine that- fresh air, peace and quiet, TREES. Not everyone wants to pay twice as much money to live in half the space in an area with noisy neighbors, higher crime rates, more smog, where everything is paved in some form of concrete, BUT you have practical public transportation. Of course people are going to go off to the suburbs!
So, I say, it's not a greed problem, unless maybe liking many of the things that environmentalists usually praise is "greed". (Are we permitted to like them only to be denied their actual realization) No one burns oil or gas out of greed. In fact, the most truly greedy would take every opportunity to be as frugal as possible and use as little energy as possible since it all costs money. And even if it is a greed problem, it's certainly not Exxon's greed that's damaging the planet. (And the car companies are glad to sell you more fuel-efficient cars! You'll be happier with them, and be more willing to buy them, and pay more!)
The blame for global warming is a distributed thing - like most problems of this nature, it is a problem the people who cause the damage are largely not the same people who worry about paying for it.
...[R]eform in India has focused on setting its inventive private sector free from the world's most fearsome bureaucracy. This has unleashed entrepreneurial talent, but more change is needed. Now is the time to tackle the public sector itself. Infrastructure, such as roads and power, and public services, such as education and drinking water, are woefully inadequate and limit growth. Even as the economy has been booming, many public services have worsened. It seems incongruous that somebody can own a mobile phone, yet has to waste hours queuing for drinking water.
Terrorism could cause a tiny handful of people to die. Warming could cause a mass extinction. Do you understand what I mean by mass extinction?
I appreciate that. But consider, from the text of the article itself:
... people "exaggerate risks that are spectacular, rare, beyond their control, talked about, international, man-made, immediate, directed against children or morally offensive," Schneier noted.
Okay. Mass extinction. Rare? Ehh, depends-how-you-define-it. Children? Eh, not so much ("our children will have to deal with it", but...) Man-made? Check. (Especially for The Environmentalists). International? Check. Morally offensive? Sometimes-check (greed/profit/industry/decadence topics). Talked about? Definitely-check. Spectacular? Oooh boy, helluva check.
Even the Libertarians are accepting global warming as pretty-much-fact these days. That's one thing. But to immediately bring up mass extinction as a topic of doom (presumably, imminent doom) is, I think, perhaps, maybe just a little bit of a display of the sort of irrationality the article discusses. Just a smidge.
Okay. I'll look to government. I'll even be bipartisan... or antibipartisan:)
We have two parties that have issues with threats to the world, after all. The Republicans have Terrorism, and the Democrats have Global Warming. Both are real and significant threats, but neither of them really gets addressed in the healthiest way possible. There's a lot of focus on OMG-deadly high-profile terrorist attacks, and on OMG-deadly consequences of global warming. Both parties have their people propose some ridiculously broad, sweeping changes to deal with the problem which would negatively impact everyday lives; fortunately, the more ridiculous ones are more likely to fail. And, of course, both parties are willing to throw money at people who claim to have some sort of solution to their problem, whether or not it's actually anything real, meaningful, or worthwhile (like the latest stupid XYZ antiterrorist technology rollout, or the latest bio-fuel legislation/subsidy).
No, they're not the same thing, but one can draw worthwhile parallels, and both parties would benefit by comparing themselves to the other, shaping their actions to avoid these excesses.
Besides, what is the point of freedom if you're not allowed to profit some way or another? "Freedom" means more than a little garage band of hippies writing anti-war songs and practicing "free love", as idyllic as that scene may seem. It also means that I get to go out and do something to better myself, better my family, get my kids a decent education, a nice home, a safe neighborhood, braces, and something nicer than beans and rice for dinner every night of the week. Maybe even some sort of music lessons. And all of that is profit. Lots of things are profit. Profit is good. It is, in fact, the lack of profit which we suffer when something takes away our freedoms, with icky DRM and lawsuits and things like that.
And, taking your post as some sort of anti-capitalist statement, it's not exactly as if those eeeeeevil capitalists are the first people to infringe upon freedoms in the pursuit of more profit or power for themselves (and less for others, and less overall). Why, I hear they've had kings and czars and feudal systems and wars and such going alllll the way back. All the way.
In the seventh conversation... the emperor touches on the theme of the holy war. The emperor must have known that surah 2, 256 reads: "There is no compulsion in religion"... Without descending to details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the "Book" and the "infidels", he addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness, a brusqueness that we find unacceptable, on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: "Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached."
The Pope's a professor at heart. He's talking to a bunch of students at a university. He's giving a lecture on Christian-Muslim relations. Historical context is exceedingly relevant, and this brings us to the heart of the matter. And the Pope criticizes the emperor's statement in the very sentence that he quotes it and he still gets flack. Hey, I'll take a rational criticism of the Catholic Church any day of the week, but this is just Pope-hating mixed with spin mixed with the ill-informed.
How dare you bring facts into this discussion? Nuke Nuke the Vatican!
In the seventh conversation ( - controversy) edited by Professor Khoury, the emperor touches on the theme of the holy war. The emperor must have known that surah 2, 256 reads: "There is no compulsion in religion". According to some of the experts, this is probably one of the suras of the early period, when Mohammed was still powerless and under threat. But naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Qur'an, concerning holy war. Without descending to details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the "Book" and the "infidels", he addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness, a brusqueness that we find unacceptable, on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: "Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached."[3] The emperor, after having expressed himself so forcefully, goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. "God", he says, "is not pleased by blood - and not acting reasonably ( ) is contrary to God's nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats... To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death...".[4]
This feature (enabled with CONFIG_RELOCATABLE) isn't very noticeable for end-users but it's quite interesting from a kernel POV. Until now, it was a requeriment that a i386 kernel was loaded at a fixed memory address in order to work, loading it in a different place wouldn't work. This feature allows to compile a kernel that can be loaded at different 4K-aligned addresses, but always below 1 GB, with no runtime overhead. Kdump users (a feature introduced in 2.6.13 that it triggers kexec in a kernel crash in order to boot a kernel that has been previously loaded at a 'empty' address, then runs that kernel, saves the memory where the crashed kernel was placed, dumps it in a file and continues booting the system) will benefit from this because until now the "rescue kernel" need to be compiled with different configuration options in order to make it bootable at a different address. With a relocatable kernel, the same kernel can be boot at different addresses.
From the looks of it, it's even more innocuous than that. It's not an anonymous hashed identity, it's aggregate statistics. Heck, I run aggregate statistics on my website! And if they were actually worth money, I'd probably sell them too.
I seem to recall that the German labor system features mandatory severance pay, in contrast to the purely "at will" employment arrangements common in the United States. It probably also has higher unemployment insurance. This is more "socialistic" than the United States, certainly, but I'd prefer to avoid quibbling about terminology like "socialist" and consider actual differences.
These differences, incidentally, are probably also the reason that Germany has an unemployment rate of ~11.7%, compared to the US rate of ~5.1% (Google stats for 2005), and why the average duration of unemployment in the United States is shorter: companies are more willing to hire, people are more motivated to look for jobs.
Yeah, well, it's a little microcontroller stamp, what did you expect? Assembly, perhaps? Eh... Well, yes, it's quite amusing to read through the manual and find that you are allowed to have calls up to four GOSUBs deep!:)
Anyway, it seems like a decent kit, as far as those go. We are using one of their kits (the BOEbot) in our AI class (Wake Forest University), and it is replacing the Lego Mindstorms this year for the first time here. Ultimately, I believe, we plan to attach it to a Bluetooth adapter and just use a BASIC program to communicate to and fro from that - then we can put the hard AI stuff on a laptop and operate it from there.
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Hey Microsoft! We don't just hate you: fact is, your OpenXML spec is an appalling dump heap overflowing with the most disgraceful assortment of deplorable rubbish imaginable, mangled up in tangled up knots! I mean, we at IBM know a brain-damaged document format when we see one (heck, we invented plenty of them ourselves) and trust us, this one takes the cake. Ratification of this garbage could set the word processing industry back about twenty years. So don't give us the "customer's interest" line. We know what this is all about: this is about YOU.
Disclaimer: I don't work for IBM (anymore|yet) and these ain't IBM opinions. Well, not official opinions, anyway. ^^
Did 9/11 choke the Internet? I'd say that was a heck of a lot more of an immediate go-to-your-computer-for-news crisis...
More importantly, rpm doesn't run as setuid root (at least not on any sane system...)
That's cute.
People also forget that Notes isn't really an email program. It's a distributed database access and replication suite, and email just happens to be the one sort of database that it's used for most.
But you're right. When Reason Magazine, the unofficial publication of Libertarian politics, "Free Minds and Free Markets", says "global warming is an issue", then... well, in my book, there's not much more sense to holding out on the issue.
Myself, I drive a little old 1988 Volkswagen Fox that gets awesome gas mileage. Not that I've ever had to drive it very far, either.
Enter competition, school vouchers, charter schools, school choice, and the like. Yes, one will need to treat schools as "profitable" (at least the private ones). That's the "capitalism" solution - using a modicum of greed as a force for good. Now, I appreciate that it's not as simple as "just privatize it!" or anything like that; the matter is, in fact, very hard. But a well-implemented system would encourage these schools, both public and private, to better their pupils' education. If it makes our schools a better place, then it's worth it.
This is why people are concerned about having a free market instead of just "capitalism". Heck, it's not as if those with power and resources didn't tend to stay in power and maintain control of resources during Communism or Feudalism or what-have-you throughout history. They certainly weren't any less cutthroat. The difference is that a really free market lets people go their own way, and choose their own fate, insofar as they are able; someone else can always come along with a better way of doing things.
So... you want sympathy from us because you tried to sell WoW gold and ended up shut out of the market? Tell you what. You and Mysterious Ebayer X can both die in a moonfire.
And they have also earned a profit. Oh, horror!
Consider: They need to send surveyors to locate oil fields, procure the rights to these oil fields from the oft-recalcitrant local authorities, drill wells thousands of feet into the earth, build big pumps to raise the oil, build pipelines for hundreds or thousands of miles through inhospitable territories, construct truly enormous processing facilities (go watch the Discovery Channel sometime, their stuff about 'superstructures', those refineries are crazy!), refine the oil into gasoline (and other stuff), load and ship the oil over the oceans in massive tankers, unload them, and finally distribute it to service stations across the country. The scale of it all is staggering.
So do you think that anyone would try and expend so much effort, so much production, so much money (I wouldn't be surprised if they've spent over a trillion) investing in these various things to get billions of barrels of oil out of the ground each year and gasoline into a million cars.... just so they can break even? OF COURSE they're after a profit, for Christ's sake!
Exxon is NOT forcing crude oil down peoples' throats. The problem is that people like warm homes in the winter, and air conditioning in the summer, and a nice house out in the suburbs and maybe even a yard and nice things like trees (and that means they need to drive to get places). Imagine that- fresh air, peace and quiet, TREES. Not everyone wants to pay twice as much money to live in half the space in an area with noisy neighbors, higher crime rates, more smog, where everything is paved in some form of concrete, BUT you have practical public transportation. Of course people are going to go off to the suburbs!
So, I say, it's not a greed problem, unless maybe liking many of the things that environmentalists usually praise is "greed". (Are we permitted to like them only to be denied their actual realization) No one burns oil or gas out of greed. In fact, the most truly greedy would take every opportunity to be as frugal as possible and use as little energy as possible since it all costs money. And even if it is a greed problem, it's certainly not Exxon's greed that's damaging the planet. (And the car companies are glad to sell you more fuel-efficient cars! You'll be happier with them, and be more willing to buy them, and pay more!)
The blame for global warming is a distributed thing - like most problems of this nature, it is a problem the people who cause the damage are largely not the same people who worry about paying for it.
... do you know how annoying it is to have someone looking over your shoulder offering advice you don't need or criticizing your every move? :)
Even the Libertarians are accepting global warming as pretty-much-fact these days. That's one thing. But to immediately bring up mass extinction as a topic of doom (presumably, imminent doom) is, I think, perhaps, maybe just a little bit of a display of the sort of irrationality the article discusses. Just a smidge.
We have two parties that have issues with threats to the world, after all. The Republicans have Terrorism, and the Democrats have Global Warming. Both are real and significant threats, but neither of them really gets addressed in the healthiest way possible. There's a lot of focus on OMG-deadly high-profile terrorist attacks, and on OMG-deadly consequences of global warming. Both parties have their people propose some ridiculously broad, sweeping changes to deal with the problem which would negatively impact everyday lives; fortunately, the more ridiculous ones are more likely to fail. And, of course, both parties are willing to throw money at people who claim to have some sort of solution to their problem, whether or not it's actually anything real, meaningful, or worthwhile (like the latest stupid XYZ antiterrorist technology rollout, or the latest bio-fuel legislation/subsidy).
No, they're not the same thing, but one can draw worthwhile parallels, and both parties would benefit by comparing themselves to the other, shaping their actions to avoid these excesses.
And, taking your post as some sort of anti-capitalist statement, it's not exactly as if those eeeeeevil capitalists are the first people to infringe upon freedoms in the pursuit of more profit or power for themselves (and less for others, and less overall). Why, I hear they've had kings and czars and feudal systems and wars and such going alllll the way back. All the way.
Agreed; this needs to be a #@$^%ing Supreme Court case.
From the looks of it, it's even more innocuous than that. It's not an anonymous hashed identity, it's aggregate statistics. Heck, I run aggregate statistics on my website! And if they were actually worth money, I'd probably sell them too.
These differences, incidentally, are probably also the reason that Germany has an unemployment rate of ~11.7%, compared to the US rate of ~5.1% (Google stats for 2005), and why the average duration of unemployment in the United States is shorter: companies are more willing to hire, people are more motivated to look for jobs.
Anyway, it seems like a decent kit, as far as those go. We are using one of their kits (the BOEbot) in our AI class (Wake Forest University), and it is replacing the Lego Mindstorms this year for the first time here. Ultimately, I believe, we plan to attach it to a Bluetooth adapter and just use a BASIC program to communicate to and fro from that - then we can put the hard AI stuff on a laptop and operate it from there.