... that season one was pretty good. Writing was pretty clever, it was an interesting concept. By season two, at least the first couple of episodes I watched before I started hating it, the writing started to crater and it turned in to a classic case of writer trap due to time travel. I think the robot coming back in time to destroy the nuclear power plant episode completely lost me on the whole series. You can only do so much time travel before it starts become obvious its just a crutch for writers who can't think of anything better to do. It reaches a point absolutely nothing has consequences or resolution because in the next episode some time traveler can come in and completely undo everything that's gone before. Star Trek has pretty much had the same problem throughout its history.
Its also a problem with the terminator concept that as the terminators spend more and more time as humans and less and less as menacing robots the concept gets boring. The best parts of the first movie were when Arnold had all his skin burned off and he is a very menacing machine at the end. By movie two liquid terminator does some cool liquid effects but for some reason he is almost ALWAYS the same actor in the same police uniform and there is zero reason he wouldn't have morphed in to some other form except the director didn't want to hire another actor. By movie three the terminator is a hot chick, never changes form, there is no real sense she is a robot. She is just a hot chick the director wanted to milk and that movie just completely sucked. I'm hoping Salvation has lots of good ole menacing robots.
And the geek guy in me really starts hating all the soap opera love interest, especially John Conner's not very appealing love interest. I know they are trying to hook the female demographic but it is the aspect I hated most in Battlestar Galactica too. The series spent most of the time being soap opera and who is screwing who. Of course its cheap to film, good filler, and I guess people are really like that, but you spend half the show on it it stops being sci fi.
"videoconferencing isn't a replacement for the face-to-face interaction these people want. Personally, I have little interest in face-to-face interaction with my coworkers, but the people who write my paycheck aren't like that; they're extroverts, and that's why telecommuting hasn't really taken off that much."
I think those people are just dinosaurs. VoIP and video conferencing is a completely sufficient replacement for communicating everything that needs to be communicated in a business once you acclimate to it. I imagine the only thing you are losing is time wasting BS'ing at the "water cooler", eavesdropping on others BS'ing, office politics, getting drunk after work, and the hitting on your coworkers, all of which are probably a net negative to actual productivity.
I seriously don't know how people "think" in cube farms, with the constant noise, especially due to constant ringing phones and people talking on phones. Only way I could stand them was thanks to iTunes and internet radio. Having to listen to music all day isn't entirely healthy for productive thought either.
Offices, commuting and cube farms are entirely a product of an age when you pretty much had to force everyone in to one place because telecommunications technology sucked. Times have changed. With a large percentage of workers doing most of their work through computers, there is zero reason you couldn't switch to telecommuting in a big way for everything other than factory work. About the only challenge you have is managers have to be astute enough to figure out who is producing and who isn't. I wager anyone who doesn't produce telecommuting probably doesn't produce sitting in a cube either. They are probably just better at faking it when they are in a cube.
"Of course, the anti-car people usually tell me that I should simply go shopping at the corner market every day, or even better, just eat out all the time."
That is exactly what you should do and the "anti-car" people are right. If you shop every day or two for smaller quantities of groceries it means you can have more fresh bread, fruit, vegetables, meat, etc. Your food would taste better and be better for you than living off frozen food and out of cans.
Actually no, its the exact opposite of a mall. Malls are usually completely pedestrian hostile to get to. I think I'm talking about old fashioned corner grocery stores with lots of fresh produce out front. Malls also demand a huge population to support them meaning many of them travel long distances to get to it.... in cars.
Unless its a city without traffic, pollution, gangs, poverty and the homeless its going to look pretty much the same to me. Getting rid of cars, trucks, and sirens would be the biggest step to a Utopian city I can think of assuming you replace it with effective transit, kinder gentler taxis, an effective logistics mechanism to replace trucks and effective emergency services without sirens.
I recall reading recently there is a 2 mile square suburb in Germany which was designed to ban cars. They have communal garages on the edge for your cars. Rail service to commute to jobs in the city. Stores are designed to be walked to. Its bikes and pedestrians only in the interior. That is pretty close to Utopia for me.
If people in businesses like IT, finance, etc and can telecommute effectively that would also be a huge step. Commuting alone make urban/suburban design an unavoidable living hell.
Solving the homeless problem a lot harder. You can't just cage them, can't just ship them somewhere else, and you can't just wave a wand and solve the drug abuse, mental illness, criminal records, hatred for the man and hatred for 40 hour work weeks in factories and offices that made them the way they are.
Here is an interesting article on CounterPunch with Alex Rivera, an indie sci fi film producer from Peru about his dystopian film, Sleep Dealer. It raises some interesting issues. One of the premises is based on a future sealing of the border to illegal immigrants who will instead continue to work in the U.S. through virtual links, like driving Taxi's, assembly line work in factories through robots, mowing lawns, etc. Its the ultimate continuation to outsourcing and globalization.
Those "Infidels" have spent the last millennium in a series of genocidal crusades followed by colonial subjugation. There is a deep seated historical reason for them to dislike and distrust European and Christians. It doesn't help that the U.S. has taken Britain's place in meddling in the region.
I don't really think when you balance all the books Islam has proved particularly more or blood thirsty or intolerant than Christianity or Judaism. Fundamentalist Islam is pretty much as intolerant and predatory as fundamentalist Christianity and Judaism.
Christianity has been just as hard on Judaism, or maybe harder, over most of the last thousands years as Islam.
If you read the history of David you will find he came to power using one assassination after another, and frequently exterminated his adversaries wholesale.
As I recall recent reports from Israel there were T-shirt going around among Israeli sniper trainees with a picture of a pregnant Palestinian woman with the caption "One Shot Two Kills", and there is video of an Israeli soldier during the Gaza invasion who called the Palestinian "dirty people" and suggesting they needed to be cleaned out so its clear the teaching of intolerance and hatred goes both ways.
Me personally being an Atheist I would be happier if all three of the Monotheistic religions went away because they've caused nothing but misery and suffering as they've try to dominate their competitors. If they didn't all have sacred sites in that one little strip of the Middle East the world would be a more peaceful and happier place. The most basic teaching of all three religions runs somewhat counter to promotion of murder and genocide.
I'm not sure I would say the term "traitor" applies in this particular instance. But when U.S. citizens support other nations interests to the detriment of the U.S. that does border on the definition of traitor. In this particular case Harmon was seeking to obstruct justice in a case where people were spying on the U.S. Its not exactly right for a U.S. citizen to aid and abet spying on the U.S. The only out they have is Israel is a supposed ally, but the number of times Israel has spied on the U.S., fed the U.S. false information, manipulated the U.S. in to doing things bad for the U.S. but good for Israel they often act more like enemy than ally. And of course they did intentionally strafe a U.S. ship once, and killed Americans, a ship they knew was American because they didn't want the U.S. to hear things they were saying.
About all I can say is I think the U.S. would be a lot better off if Israel and AIPAC didn't have the massive influence they have over NEARLY ALL of our elected officials. It is political suicide for most U.S. politicians to say anything that isn't flagrantly slanted in Israel's favor, so they say what Israel wants to hear more than what should be said to reflect the best interests of the American people.
The Palestinian situation is one that has to be solved or it will continue to fester and destabilize the world for basically ever. It will probably never be solved as long as the U.S. consistently shows massive bias to the Israel position. As long as AIPAC continues with its massive influence on our elected representatives that bias will persist. Obama has said a few things that hinted at being fairer to the Palestinians but had to back paddle everytime due to outrage from the pro Israel contigent. When his Chief Of Staff served as a volunteer in the Israeli Defense Force in the 1991 Gulf War there seems to still be a world of bias in the favor of Israel in the White House.
Israel is at this point the worlds most vivid example of an apartheid state, something the world didn't tolerate in South Africa, so why do we tolerate it in Israel? They either need to let the Palestians in the West Bank and Gaza have an independent state, or let them vote in Israeli elections. Israel Jews knows if they let them vote they will eventually lose power.
I'm pretty sure Futurama made this discovery some years ago when Fry ate the sandwich from the vending machine in the intergalactic truck stop rest room.
There is a pretty good article on Atlantic from a former official at the IMF call The Quiet Coup. There isn't a lot that is news in it, but it does have a compelling idea, that the U.S. crash has a LOT in common with other crashes around the world in the last couple of decades, including in South Korea a while back.
The main theme is that Wall Street started growing in economy influence and power in the 80's, THANKS REAGAN, as it recovered from being boring and regulated in the wake of the Depression. As its power grew its control of Washington grew, and Washington started relaxing regulation like repealing Glass Steagel and allowing 30-1 leverage, thanks to Hank Paulson then Goldman Sachs CEO, and killing every attempt to regulate credit default swaps before they turned in to weapons of mass economic destruction.
Wall Street and Washington became so fused it became an oligopoly or a plutocracy. Worked great for a while because as regulation disappeared Wall Street made buckets of money and grew to be a completely disproportionate percentage of the economy which just made it even more powerful in Washington... until it crashed.
If it were any other company the U.S. would be begging the IMF for a bailout and the IMF would be forcing austerity measures that would seek to break the power of the plutocrats and those in government feeding them. South Korea is notorius few extremely powerful corporations which completely dominate the entire country, both economically and politically, so its not surprising they would lock up a blogger for criticizing their corporations.
Since the U.S. dollar is still the world's reserve currency the U.S. can just print money to bail itself out, and change the rules like "mark to market", a luxury no other country has. We just get to hope that in a couple of years there wont be hyperinflation that will wipe out the dollar and all those responsible people who saved instead of borrowed, squandered and gambled. If you are deep in debt inflation is great because it basically wipes out your debt.
Its no accident Rubin and Paulson went from Goldman Sachs to Treasury secretary, and Larry Summers spent the last couple years making $130K for one speech at Goldman and $5 million the last couple years working a day a week as a big hedge fund, D.B. Shaw. Wall Street does for all practical purposes run the financial parts of our government using a revolving door with people moving from Wall Street to the Reserve and Treasury and back again, plus campaign contributions to control Congressmen. They are using the Federal Reserve, the U.S. Treasury and its printing press to bail themselves out of the mess they made, while workers and tax payers get killed. They are for all practical purposes reinflating the same financial bubble that caused the problem in the first place.
The guy at the IMF rightly points out the U.S. is avoiding taking the medicine for its wrecklessness, or really fixing its plutocracy.
Nice shilling for Adobe. Just because Kevin Lynch and some marketing droid put "open" in the name doesn't mean it actually is. Have you tried to actually get source for it. Didn't think so. You can't. That open screen website you pointed to is mostly marketing videos. You probably never will be able to get source for even a majority of the player unless you are a big corporation and sign a scary contract.
Open Screen is mostly marketing BS and vaporware Adobe announced to stave off Silverlight. Congratulations, you fell for marketing BS from a big corporation. Adobe still has a complete stranglehold on the Flash player, unless you are going to try to clone it from the spec. Gnash is making a noble effort but its really hard, a lot of others have tried, no one can achieve full compatibility.
Its nearly a year since Adobe announced OSP, its still not available, and people are still forced to use crap FlashLite on anything not x86. FlashLite has no ActionScript 3 support and is two versions behind the current Flash standard. Adobe can't even put out an up to date player themselves for anything but the x86 desktop platforms.
"Open" aside I'd just be impressed if Adobe could put out Flash players for mobile phones, non x86 netbooks, etc. that don't suck and aren't years out of date. They have never delivered on that write once flash everywhere slogan on anything not x86.
That techcrunch article is a year old and the players its talking about are still not here.
"If that's the level of journalism we can expect from these outfits in the 21st century, then fuck 'em."
So you are advocating no journalism at all, or do think Huffington Post is the answer to our problem? Tyrants and despots will certainly like your point of view.
One problem main stream media had in the first term of the Bush administration was 9/11 and the frenzy that followed which pretty much muzzled all dissenting view points until the chinks started showing in their armor with Katrina and the wheels falling off in Iraq.
The Bush administration was given a gift on 9/11, they knew it, they milked it. It gave them a blank check for years to do whatever they wanted and anyone who opposed them could be shouted down with accusations they were unpatriotic or soft on terrorism. Some journalists did eventually regain their voice, and now they are being laid off.
Daniel Froomkin at the Washington Post has been a constant and useful watch dog on the Bush administration and now Obama's.
The only problem, in the unintended consequences category, is Craigslist is destroying one of the first bastions of democracy, newspapers and journalists whose full time job it was to root out corruption in government and business, and expose it. That is something we sure could be using more of now instead of less, and we are getting less as nearly every newspaper is cutting to the bone, for folding all together.
You could argue that bloggers and websites will fill the void but I'm skeptical. The main problem being bloggers mostly sit and surf the web and then write about what they read on the web. Maybe there are some that are actually sniffing around, cultivating sources, and doing detective work like old school journalists but I'm skeptical there are very many. I'm also skeptical they will survive in the face of retaliation from "the powers that be" if they ever do get to close to real corruption, like the blogger in Phoenix where the cops came in and took everything computer related out of his house. An integral part of big newspapers are the lawyers to insure the reporters are defended when they take on the power that be.
You could argue citizens will mass together in iReport and Twitter and fill the void but again I seriously doubt many average citizens will stand up the way the NY Times did in exposing the Bush administrations warrantless wire tapping, its very dangerous for a single citizen to do that much or often.
You could argue TV reporters will fill the void. HA.... HA. They don't seem to do any reporting, they just sit on the air regurgitating old news and running their mouths.
All I can say is I will dearly, dearly miss the Washington Post and NY Times if they go under or turn in to a eviscerated shadow of their former selves. Their web sites are AWESOME, they just haven't figured out a way to monetize them.
Craigslist is taking all the gravy out of the journalism business model, and not returning the priceless service journalism does for society. If you want some more and worse repetitions of the Bush administration in future years, just keep destroying Journalism, of course since they let the Bush administration happen in the first place, maybe Journalism is already dead.
If you like dictatorships and oligarchies, just wipe out Journalism.
"Within 20 years games may become a service like cable TV, not a product you buy and take home."
Multiplayer online games are already a service and probably should be. If its a game with persistence that people are going to play for a long period they almost have to be a subscription service like WoW. Two reasons:
A. It insures the developer has a financial incentive to continue to develop the game, fix bugs and run servers. When games have a burst of sales after they launch and then it tails off, the developer loses interest in supporting it, bugs go unfixed, game dies unless its really good and the developer moves on to some new big launch.
B. I am willing to PAY monthly fees for a good multiplayer online game if it means the company will run the servers and provide game admins that are paid for their work and have a least a chance at being fair and unbiased, and they will make a concerted effort to keep people from cheating.
As a concrete example the original BF2 is probably still one of my favorite multiplayer games. I still like it better than COD4, its not amazing graphics, its just fun PVP. But the BF2 business model is a disaster. EA/Dice have no incentive to fix bugs in it so they don't, and when you have the same bugs in a game for a couple years it drives you nuts. Instead they churn out bad knockoffs to get new retail sales. And they force people to band together to run their own servers which results in a hodgepodge of very badly run game servers. Admins are either biased or MIA, hackers often take over, teams are constantly stacked, rules and admin decisions are wildly variable and unpredictable.
I can't be sure it would fly, but my ideal game PVP game would be to build on classic BF2, run it like WOW with subscription service, and just hone the game they have, fixing bigs, insure balance, adding new features but preserving the important things, FUN PVP. I dearly wish it also had more persistence. Repetitive 10 minute rounds gets old. I'd like to see a PVP game that lasts indefinitely, moves over a large space, and where one side actually wins.
The other fatal problem with PC games is PC's are pretty much doomed as platform for multiplayer online games, piracy and cheating along are killing it, disparity in hardware insures the playing field isn't level. I just don't like consoles, I hope PC's survive, I just don't think they will.
"all I can say to Keir is that he needs to grow thicker skin"
I seriously don't know what you were reading but it wasn't Keir's blog posting. There was absolutely nothing in there about fanbois, or anything that called for you to call a "thicker skin", or get modded up for your post. You seem to mostly be proving the point of the submission. Keir posted some well reasoned comments that Firefox and Ubuntu seem to be kind of losing their way and losing sight of their core values. They were mostly constructive comments about specific features in Firefox he thought are bad, and lack of interesting new features at Open Office and Ubuntu.
You respond to a critic in classic Linux fanboy fashion and suggest the critic needs to grow a thicker skin with the implication that if the he doesn't like it, tough, and he should STFU.
Just to test how fast I get modded down, like the last time I criticized desktop Linux, lets run an experiment..... I am now being modded in to the -1 basement as you read this, if you even read -1.
The following things in Linux cause me deep concern, they never get fixed and they've pushed me, like a lot of hardcore Linux people to the Mac.... and I've had a Linux desktop for like 10 years, I first built it on I think it was a 80386 when XFree86 was the new new thing.
- The whole GNOME versus KDE thing is pretty much killing desktop Linux. Just the fact there are two completely different desktops fragmenting EVERYTHING. GNOME is too spartan, and GTK is a horrible toolkit to build anything on. I used to love KDE but it completely impaled itself with 4.0. I blame Trolltech for constantly changing their toolkit which trashed all the KDE code built on top of it, and KDE for shoving something out the door before it was ready. At this point I see no solution. The two will never join forces now. As long as you have two completely different desktops you are just fragmenting developer resources, frustrating application developers, and frustrating users who don't really want to have to pick one. On Ubuntu in particular KDE is a third class citizen, Kubuntu just doesn't get the attention Ubuntu do.
- Linux Audio in particular and multimedia in general is a train wreck. Linus completely made a mistake letting ALSA become the Linux audio standard. It is simply to complicated and confusing on the application developer side, and it must be a nightmare to write the driver for, which is why they are so often missing or screwed up. Linux should have learned from BeOS. They have a nice audio and multimedia API, elegant and really easy to use in apps, with power underneath if you need it for something special. The end result is Linux must now have like 10 audio API's most of which are there just to hide how bad ALSA is, just like ESD and ARTS hid how bad OSS was. Until Linux gets audio and multimedia straightened out it isn't making it on the desktop.
I owe a debt of gratitude to KDE 4.x. It caused me to finally switch to a Mac and its unlikely I'll ever go back to a Linux desktop again. I'll just run Linux under a VM. Now I have the best of both worlds, an awesome desktop that doesn't suck and I can hack in Linux.
I've been loyal to Linux and waiting for a Linux desktop to not suck for like 10 years. KDE 4.x was the last straw. I've reached the point I just want a desktop where everything works and I simply don't think the open source model will ever achieve it on the desktop. Open source seems to be awesome for kernels, servers and command line utilities. It just DOESN'T seem to work for GUI apps, at least that I've ever seen. GUI design is hard and it requires a lot of vision and discipline the open source model doesn't seem to have.
Apple makes sure their hardware and software work right out of the box, and they make sure the UI is consistent and reasonably well thought out as long as you can live with their UI conventions. I've reached the point in my life I will trade some proprietary lock in, and higher cost, just to get a desktop that always works, and always works well.
I am SO tired of having to spend days trying to find why something doesn't work right on Linux. ALSA and audio is probably the worst part of Linux. The whole audio situation on Linux is an EPIC FAIL, and if you can't do audio right you can't do a desktop right. How many fracking audio API's are there on Linux now and NONE of them work right. My last PC the audio levels are broken and you can't turn the audio up past audible, and maxed out its low enough to be annoying. Sure I could spend days sifting through hacks on the web, patch the kernel, tweak knobs, and probably eventually get it to work, but I just don't want to any more.
The Mac just works out of the box and the apps are awesome and consistent.
I'm not really one to judge why KDE 4.0 was so bad but I do have a few observations:
- It seems to be a consistent issue with Trolltech and Qt that they DON'T make enough effort to maintain backward compatibility. I have a relatively small Qt app I developed on Qt 3.x and it was a royal pain to move it to 4.x. It must have been a complete nightmare to migrate a huge body of code like KDE. Sure supporting old cruft sucks, but as soon as you have a bunch of people using your toolkit YOU DO IT, so you don't piss off all your developers and force them to spend all their time just keeping all their software working chasing your whims for how to do things better, instead of developing their application.
- The KDE team made some really bad design decisions. The decisions to redisng the desktop paradim with those little floating pallets alone made me completely hate KDE after being a loyal user for years, I just stopped using them. Maybe it is better now, but that deature should have NEVER been deployed until it worked right and even then only as an option.
- The decision to push KDE 4 out to the world when it completely sucked was a monumentally bad decision. Anyone foolish enough to switch to it at 4.0, which seems to include me and Linus, were so appalled we we switched to something else. People need their desktops to work, communicate and live in the digital age. When you screw that up as bad as KDE 4 did people won't soon forget. The whole point of this open source model is you aren't supposed to release stuff as anything but beta until its ready. Shoving crap out on a deadline is supposed to be the proprietary software way of doing things.
"but I want to thank/. for putting up a review on it in the first place."
Well you should have READ the entire review before thanking them because it was a really bad, biased review. I'm assuming Rothke is either Jewish or very sympathetic to Israel because his review was obsessed with a defense of Israel and downplaying Israeli centric conspiracies to the point you started to feel this review is part of a CONSPIRACY. Slashdot editors really need to consider actually reading reviews and not posting ones like this one that are pushing a personal agenda instead of reviewing the book.
"Users who bought all those RH CD's from the early days and wanted to stick with a RH distribution simply moved on to Fedora Core 1. And if you were paying for support as you say, then RHEL would be no different than what you were doing under RHL 9. I don't see what anyone is complaining about."
Because I bought support for Red Hat 8 and it was basically worthless about a week later because Red Hat completely DROPPED Red Hat 7-9 without warning.
Both you and Red Hat exhibit total cluelessness about the fact that not everyone WANTS to upgrade their systems, especially mission critical systems, just because its convenient for Red Hat. Microsoft and Apple go to some pretty great lengths to support their platforms and applications for a long and predictable time and it inspires customer loyalty. Once I have something setup and I know it works I just want critical security fixes or I will update specific applications when I decide its appropriate. I'm starting to think its a pretty critical failing of the Linux community that they have such low regard for backward compatibility and longevity of their software. As a long time KDE user KDE 4 proved to be a dismal failure so I went back to KDE 3 and Linus switched to GNOME. I wager much of it was TrollTech had such low regard for maintaining backward compatibility between Qt 3 and 4 that they totally messed up a nice desktop by not maintaining continuity in their toolkit. 20 year old apps on Windows mostly still run.
As someone who used RedHat on the desktop from 6 through 9 and actually had just bought "support" when they "left" just to show my support for them I assure you when they abandoned RH 7-9 it most definitely felt like they "left". Way back they were a company with a loyal customer base who bought their boxed distributions even when we didn't have to just to support them. Then they went "public" and suddenly the people that got them to where they were and helped them get rich when they IPO'ed were dirt, and the only people they cared about sat on Wall Street and in the Fortune 500. As we've all seen lately the people on Wall Street are a pack of thieves, their loyal customers were worth a lot more to them than they apparently thought.
I do appreciate all they've contributed to Linux over the years but I've never installed Red Hat or Fedora since they "left" and I never will again.
"Aside from that it has an enormous industry devoted to developing windows games."
Wouldn't count on that forever. Take for example EA not releasing Madden NFL on the PC this year.
Two reasons Windows may fail as a games platform:
- Piracy on PC's is more rampant than on consoles - Cheating on PC's is rampant in multiplayer games
I gate consoles for gaming but the fact is closed platforms are proving to be inherently better for online games.
Not sure of the economics of the piracy issue but if you are sinking tens or hundreds of millions in a game I can see why it would be an issue. WOW beats the issue with subscription servers but there isn't room in most people's budgets for multiple game subscriptions.
In, BF2 and COD4, in particular the cheating pretty much wrecks the platform for multiplayer PVP. WOW does a somewhat better job at suppressing it or maybe its just not quite as obvious because their combat system is so boring.
As for EVE dropping Linux because it wont do premium content... like who cares. The premium content adds nothing to the actual game play, no one should really care if the visuals look a little better. EVE's biggest problem is simply making their damn game more interesting to play. Their combat mechanics are awful, their economy is mostly annoying. EVE is a great concept for a game, and I wish it was better than it was, its just poorly executed. Its only real appeal seems to be if you are willing to sell your soul to big corps and alliances for big fleet action, along with a whole lot of back stabbing, drama, being used, etc.
"I'll give you some worthless goods in exchange (perhaps some brightly colored beads?"
If your beads are metallic gold, silver and platinum colored.... you've got yourself a deal.
The grandparent does have a point. If we do pull out of this recession/depression in a couple years, chances are high hyperinflation is going to destroy the dollar. You simply can't print and borrow trillions of dollars without the consequences coming home to roost some day. Only thing allowing it right now is the dollar is still considered the global reserve currency and its the safest place to be at the moment after the yen.
America simply can't continue to run huge current account deficits forever. It has to A) stop borrowing money B) stop buying more goods than it produces. dot.com, housing and banking bubbles have allowed us to put off the crash but I'm thinking we are pretty much out of bubbles at this point and we are soon going to start seeing how really destitute the U.S. economy really is. Its increasingly a bunch of service jobs that produce very little real economic value. The Obama plan to strengthen labor unions is going to make it even worse. Unionizing manufacturing jobs will just hasten their flight overseas. You can unionize service jobs that can't be moved but it will just make healthcare, teaching, civil service, fire and police and all the other heavily unionized service jobs more expensive and they will suck even more life out of the rest of the economy.
"So Freddy and Fanny went along and basically forced other banks to do the same thing because they would be out of business if they didn't"
As best I recall it was the other way around, CountryWide, Golden West, Ditech and WaMu are the ones that really pioneered sub prime lending. Fanny and Freddy didn't really get in to it until they saw everyone else doing it and their execs started to get get greedy for the profits the private mortgage companies were making on sub prime. I think your interpretation is revisionits. No one "forced" banks in to subprime lending. They all did it because it was very lucrative as long as housing prices always went up. The private brokers made a lot of money on sub prime lending, since they interest rates are inherently high, and they used a lot of unscrupulous teaser rates to sucker people in to taking ARM's that ballooned a couple years later. Those ballooning ARM's would have made the mortgage backed security holders very rich if only people could have afforded to pay them, and the housing market hadn't crashed.
I was pretty dismayed to see a week or two ago the number two man at CountryWide, along with some other CountryWide execs, have created a new company called PennyMac and are buying up toxic mortgages for like 30 cents on the dollarsm, pennys on the dollar... get it, I think from a failed bank, and the guy could barely contain his glee with his new business. There is irony that execs that were at the center of creating toxic mortgages and destroying our economy are going to profit again buying the toxic assets they created at distressed prices and selling them later when they recover.
Its a little sad to skim through the posts on this story and find pretty much all of them are lame.
Its a long article but its really a fascinating read and I'm guessing almost no one did. It makes a couple really insightful points:
A. All of the U.S. governments obsessive secrecy about nuclear bomb technology is pure security theater. The hard part is mastering the fuel cycle. If you can acquire the fuel or master the fuel cycle, making the bomb is pretty easy.
B. Much of what we read and take for authoritative is in fact garbage. There have apparently been a number of works on Fat Man and Little Boy, often by well educated and authoritative authors that were apparently complete nonsense. It just took an obsessive photographer/truck driver with no college degree to debunk one authoritative work after another. In particular apparently everyone thought the Uranium bomb was a female target shot with a male shaped projectile because thats the way people expected it to be, when in fact it appears it was the other way around.
One also wonders if the U.S. government intentionally propagated nonsense in these "authoritative" works thinking it would set back some aspiring bomb maker. For example, in one work it apparently said the barrel in the Uranium bomb was made of wood which was apparently pretty comical since it had to contain the explosion of several bags of cordite.
Slashdot Mirror
... that season one was pretty good. Writing was pretty clever, it was an interesting concept. By season two, at least the first couple of episodes I watched before I started hating it, the writing started to crater and it turned in to a classic case of writer trap due to time travel. I think the robot coming back in time to destroy the nuclear power plant episode completely lost me on the whole series. You can only do so much time travel before it starts become obvious its just a crutch for writers who can't think of anything better to do. It reaches a point absolutely nothing has consequences or resolution because in the next episode some time traveler can come in and completely undo everything that's gone before. Star Trek has pretty much had the same problem throughout its history.
Its also a problem with the terminator concept that as the terminators spend more and more time as humans and less and less as menacing robots the concept gets boring. The best parts of the first movie were when Arnold had all his skin burned off and he is a very menacing machine at the end. By movie two liquid terminator does some cool liquid effects but for some reason he is almost ALWAYS the same actor in the same police uniform and there is zero reason he wouldn't have morphed in to some other form except the director didn't want to hire another actor. By movie three the terminator is a hot chick, never changes form, there is no real sense she is a robot. She is just a hot chick the director wanted to milk and that movie just completely sucked. I'm hoping Salvation has lots of good ole menacing robots.
And the geek guy in me really starts hating all the soap opera love interest, especially John Conner's not very appealing love interest. I know they are trying to hook the female demographic but it is the aspect I hated most in Battlestar Galactica too. The series spent most of the time being soap opera and who is screwing who. Of course its cheap to film, good filler, and I guess people are really like that, but you spend half the show on it it stops being sci fi.
"videoconferencing isn't a replacement for the face-to-face interaction these people want. Personally, I have little interest in face-to-face interaction with my coworkers, but the people who write my paycheck aren't like that; they're extroverts, and that's why telecommuting hasn't really taken off that much."
I think those people are just dinosaurs. VoIP and video conferencing is a completely sufficient replacement for communicating everything that needs to be communicated in a business once you acclimate to it. I imagine the only thing you are losing is time wasting BS'ing at the "water cooler", eavesdropping on others BS'ing, office politics, getting drunk after work, and the hitting on your coworkers, all of which are probably a net negative to actual productivity.
I seriously don't know how people "think" in cube farms, with the constant noise, especially due to constant ringing phones and people talking on phones. Only way I could stand them was thanks to iTunes and internet radio. Having to listen to music all day isn't entirely healthy for productive thought either.
Offices, commuting and cube farms are entirely a product of an age when you pretty much had to force everyone in to one place because telecommunications technology sucked. Times have changed. With a large percentage of workers doing most of their work through computers, there is zero reason you couldn't switch to telecommuting in a big way for everything other than factory work. About the only challenge you have is managers have to be astute enough to figure out who is producing and who isn't. I wager anyone who doesn't produce telecommuting probably doesn't produce sitting in a cube either. They are probably just better at faking it when they are in a cube.
"Of course, the anti-car people usually tell me that I should simply go shopping at the corner market every day, or even better, just eat out all the time."
That is exactly what you should do and the "anti-car" people are right. If you shop every day or two for smaller quantities of groceries it means you can have more fresh bread, fruit, vegetables, meat, etc. Your food would taste better and be better for you than living off frozen food and out of cans.
Actually no, its the exact opposite of a mall. Malls are usually completely pedestrian hostile to get to. I think I'm talking about old fashioned corner grocery stores with lots of fresh produce out front. Malls also demand a huge population to support them meaning many of them travel long distances to get to it.... in cars.
Unless its a city without traffic, pollution, gangs, poverty and the homeless its going to look pretty much the same to me. Getting rid of cars, trucks, and sirens would be the biggest step to a Utopian city I can think of assuming you replace it with effective transit, kinder gentler taxis, an effective logistics mechanism to replace trucks and effective emergency services without sirens.
I recall reading recently there is a 2 mile square suburb in Germany which was designed to ban cars. They have communal garages on the edge for your cars. Rail service to commute to jobs in the city. Stores are designed to be walked to. Its bikes and pedestrians only in the interior. That is pretty close to Utopia for me.
If people in businesses like IT, finance, etc and can telecommute effectively that would also be a huge step. Commuting alone make urban/suburban design an unavoidable living hell.
Solving the homeless problem a lot harder. You can't just cage them, can't just ship them somewhere else, and you can't just wave a wand and solve the drug abuse, mental illness, criminal records, hatred for the man and hatred for 40 hour work weeks in factories and offices that made them the way they are.
Here is an interesting article on CounterPunch with Alex Rivera, an indie sci fi film producer from Peru about his dystopian film, Sleep Dealer. It raises some interesting issues. One of the premises is based on a future sealing of the border to illegal immigrants who will instead continue to work in the U.S. through virtual links, like driving Taxi's, assembly line work in factories through robots, mowing lawns, etc. Its the ultimate continuation to outsourcing and globalization.
Inquiring minds must know.... what does it say when you ask, "What is the meaning of life".
Those "Infidels" have spent the last millennium in a series of genocidal crusades followed by colonial subjugation. There is a deep seated historical reason for them to dislike and distrust European and Christians. It doesn't help that the U.S. has taken Britain's place in meddling in the region.
I don't really think when you balance all the books Islam has proved particularly more or blood thirsty or intolerant than Christianity or Judaism. Fundamentalist Islam is pretty much as intolerant and predatory as fundamentalist Christianity and Judaism.
Christianity has been just as hard on Judaism, or maybe harder, over most of the last thousands years as Islam.
If you read the history of David you will find he came to power using one assassination after another, and frequently exterminated his adversaries wholesale.
As I recall recent reports from Israel there were T-shirt going around among Israeli sniper trainees with a picture of a pregnant Palestinian woman with the caption "One Shot Two Kills", and there is video of an Israeli soldier during the Gaza invasion who called the Palestinian "dirty people" and suggesting they needed to be cleaned out so its clear the teaching of intolerance and hatred goes both ways.
Me personally being an Atheist I would be happier if all three of the Monotheistic religions went away because they've caused nothing but misery and suffering as they've try to dominate their competitors. If they didn't all have sacred sites in that one little strip of the Middle East the world would be a more peaceful and happier place. The most basic teaching of all three religions runs somewhat counter to promotion of murder and genocide.
I'm not sure I would say the term "traitor" applies in this particular instance. But when U.S. citizens support other nations interests to the detriment of the U.S. that does border on the definition of traitor. In this particular case Harmon was seeking to obstruct justice in a case where people were spying on the U.S. Its not exactly right for a U.S. citizen to aid and abet spying on the U.S. The only out they have is Israel is a supposed ally, but the number of times Israel has spied on the U.S., fed the U.S. false information, manipulated the U.S. in to doing things bad for the U.S. but good for Israel they often act more like enemy than ally. And of course they did intentionally strafe a U.S. ship once, and killed Americans, a ship they knew was American because they didn't want the U.S. to hear things they were saying.
About all I can say is I think the U.S. would be a lot better off if Israel and AIPAC didn't have the massive influence they have over NEARLY ALL of our elected officials. It is political suicide for most U.S. politicians to say anything that isn't flagrantly slanted in Israel's favor, so they say what Israel wants to hear more than what should be said to reflect the best interests of the American people.
The Palestinian situation is one that has to be solved or it will continue to fester and destabilize the world for basically ever. It will probably never be solved as long as the U.S. consistently shows massive bias to the Israel position. As long as AIPAC continues with its massive influence on our elected representatives that bias will persist. Obama has said a few things that hinted at being fairer to the Palestinians but had to back paddle everytime due to outrage from the pro Israel contigent. When his Chief Of Staff served as a volunteer in the Israeli Defense Force in the 1991 Gulf War there seems to still be a world of bias in the favor of Israel in the White House.
Israel is at this point the worlds most vivid example of an apartheid state, something the world didn't tolerate in South Africa, so why do we tolerate it in Israel? They either need to let the Palestians in the West Bank and Gaza have an independent state, or let them vote in Israeli elections. Israel Jews knows if they let them vote they will eventually lose power.
I'm pretty sure Futurama made this discovery some years ago when Fry ate the sandwich from the vending machine in the intergalactic truck stop rest room.
There is a pretty good article on Atlantic from a former official at the IMF call The Quiet Coup. There isn't a lot that is news in it, but it does have a compelling idea, that the U.S. crash has a LOT in common with other crashes around the world in the last couple of decades, including in South Korea a while back.
The main theme is that Wall Street started growing in economy influence and power in the 80's, THANKS REAGAN, as it recovered from being boring and regulated in the wake of the Depression. As its power grew its control of Washington grew, and Washington started relaxing regulation like repealing Glass Steagel and allowing 30-1 leverage, thanks to Hank Paulson then Goldman Sachs CEO, and killing every attempt to regulate credit default swaps before they turned in to weapons of mass economic destruction.
Wall Street and Washington became so fused it became an oligopoly or a plutocracy. Worked great for a while because as regulation disappeared Wall Street made buckets of money and grew to be a completely disproportionate percentage of the economy which just made it even more powerful in Washington... until it crashed.
If it were any other company the U.S. would be begging the IMF for a bailout and the IMF would be forcing austerity measures that would seek to break the power of the plutocrats and those in government feeding them. South Korea is notorius few extremely powerful corporations which completely dominate the entire country, both economically and politically, so its not surprising they would lock up a blogger for criticizing their corporations.
Since the U.S. dollar is still the world's reserve currency the U.S. can just print money to bail itself out, and change the rules like "mark to market", a luxury no other country has. We just get to hope that in a couple of years there wont be hyperinflation that will wipe out the dollar and all those responsible people who saved instead of borrowed, squandered and gambled. If you are deep in debt inflation is great because it basically wipes out your debt.
Its no accident Rubin and Paulson went from Goldman Sachs to Treasury secretary, and Larry Summers spent the last couple years making $130K for one speech at Goldman and $5 million the last couple years working a day a week as a big hedge fund, D.B. Shaw. Wall Street does for all practical purposes run the financial parts of our government using a revolving door with people moving from Wall Street to the Reserve and Treasury and back again, plus campaign contributions to control Congressmen. They are using the Federal Reserve, the U.S. Treasury and its printing press to bail themselves out of the mess they made, while workers and tax payers get killed. They are for all practical purposes reinflating the same financial bubble that caused the problem in the first place.
The guy at the IMF rightly points out the U.S. is avoiding taking the medicine for its wrecklessness, or really fixing its plutocracy.
Nice shilling for Adobe. Just because Kevin Lynch and some marketing droid put "open" in the name doesn't mean it actually is. Have you tried to actually get source for it. Didn't think so. You can't. That open screen website you pointed to is mostly marketing videos. You probably never will be able to get source for even a majority of the player unless you are a big corporation and sign a scary contract.
Open Screen is mostly marketing BS and vaporware Adobe announced to stave off Silverlight. Congratulations, you fell for marketing BS from a big corporation. Adobe still has a complete stranglehold on the Flash player, unless you are going to try to clone it from the spec. Gnash is making a noble effort but its really hard, a lot of others have tried, no one can achieve full compatibility.
Its nearly a year since Adobe announced OSP, its still not available, and people are still forced to use crap FlashLite on anything not x86. FlashLite has no ActionScript 3 support and is two versions behind the current Flash standard. Adobe can't even put out an up to date player themselves for anything but the x86 desktop platforms.
"Open" aside I'd just be impressed if Adobe could put out Flash players for mobile phones, non x86 netbooks, etc. that don't suck and aren't years out of date. They have never delivered on that write once flash everywhere slogan on anything not x86.
That techcrunch article is a year old and the players its talking about are still not here.
"If that's the level of journalism we can expect from these outfits in the 21st century, then fuck 'em."
So you are advocating no journalism at all, or do think Huffington Post is the answer to our problem? Tyrants and despots will certainly like your point of view.
One problem main stream media had in the first term of the Bush administration was 9/11 and the frenzy that followed which pretty much muzzled all dissenting view points until the chinks started showing in their armor with Katrina and the wheels falling off in Iraq.
The Bush administration was given a gift on 9/11, they knew it, they milked it. It gave them a blank check for years to do whatever they wanted and anyone who opposed them could be shouted down with accusations they were unpatriotic or soft on terrorism. Some journalists did eventually regain their voice, and now they are being laid off.
Daniel Froomkin at the Washington Post has been a constant and useful watch dog on the Bush administration and now Obama's.
The only problem, in the unintended consequences category, is Craigslist is destroying one of the first bastions of democracy, newspapers and journalists whose full time job it was to root out corruption in government and business, and expose it. That is something we sure could be using more of now instead of less, and we are getting less as nearly every newspaper is cutting to the bone, for folding all together.
You could argue that bloggers and websites will fill the void but I'm skeptical. The main problem being bloggers mostly sit and surf the web and then write about what they read on the web. Maybe there are some that are actually sniffing around, cultivating sources, and doing detective work like old school journalists but I'm skeptical there are very many. I'm also skeptical they will survive in the face of retaliation from "the powers that be" if they ever do get to close to real corruption, like the blogger in Phoenix where the cops came in and took everything computer related out of his house. An integral part of big newspapers are the lawyers to insure the reporters are defended when they take on the power that be.
You could argue citizens will mass together in iReport and Twitter and fill the void but again I seriously doubt many average citizens will stand up the way the NY Times did in exposing the Bush administrations warrantless wire tapping, its very dangerous for a single citizen to do that much or often.
You could argue TV reporters will fill the void. HA.... HA. They don't seem to do any reporting, they just sit on the air regurgitating old news and running their mouths.
All I can say is I will dearly, dearly miss the Washington Post and NY Times if they go under or turn in to a eviscerated shadow of their former selves. Their web sites are AWESOME, they just haven't figured out a way to monetize them.
Craigslist is taking all the gravy out of the journalism business model, and not returning the priceless service journalism does for society. If you want some more and worse repetitions of the Bush administration in future years, just keep destroying Journalism, of course since they let the Bush administration happen in the first place, maybe Journalism is already dead.
If you like dictatorships and oligarchies, just wipe out Journalism.
"Within 20 years games may become a service like cable TV, not a product you buy and take home."
Multiplayer online games are already a service and probably should be. If its a game with persistence that people are going to play for a long period they almost have to be a subscription service like WoW. Two reasons:
A. It insures the developer has a financial incentive to continue to develop the game, fix bugs and run servers. When games have a burst of sales after they launch and then it tails off, the developer loses interest in supporting it, bugs go unfixed, game dies unless its really good and the developer moves on to some new big launch.
B. I am willing to PAY monthly fees for a good multiplayer online game if it means the company will run the servers and provide game admins that are paid for their work and have a least a chance at being fair and unbiased, and they will make a concerted effort to keep people from cheating.
As a concrete example the original BF2 is probably still one of my favorite multiplayer games. I still like it better than COD4, its not amazing graphics, its just fun PVP. But the BF2 business model is a disaster. EA/Dice have no incentive to fix bugs in it so they don't, and when you have the same bugs in a game for a couple years it drives you nuts. Instead they churn out bad knockoffs to get new retail sales. And they force people to band together to run their own servers which results in a hodgepodge of very badly run game servers. Admins are either biased or MIA, hackers often take over, teams are constantly stacked, rules and admin decisions are wildly variable and unpredictable.
I can't be sure it would fly, but my ideal game PVP game would be to build on classic BF2, run it like WOW with subscription service, and just hone the game they have, fixing bigs, insure balance, adding new features but preserving the important things, FUN PVP. I dearly wish it also had more persistence. Repetitive 10 minute rounds gets old. I'd like to see a PVP game that lasts indefinitely, moves over a large space, and where one side actually wins.
The other fatal problem with PC games is PC's are pretty much doomed as platform for multiplayer online games, piracy and cheating along are killing it, disparity in hardware insures the playing field isn't level. I just don't like consoles, I hope PC's survive, I just don't think they will.
"all I can say to Keir is that he needs to grow thicker skin"
I seriously don't know what you were reading but it wasn't Keir's blog posting. There was absolutely nothing in there about fanbois, or anything that called for you to call a "thicker skin", or get modded up for your post. You seem to mostly be proving the point of the submission. Keir posted some well reasoned comments that Firefox and Ubuntu seem to be kind of losing their way and losing sight of their core values. They were mostly constructive comments about specific features in Firefox he thought are bad, and lack of interesting new features at Open Office and Ubuntu.
You respond to a critic in classic Linux fanboy fashion and suggest the critic needs to grow a thicker skin with the implication that if the he doesn't like it, tough, and he should STFU.
Just to test how fast I get modded down, like the last time I criticized desktop Linux, lets run an experiment..... I am now being modded in to the -1 basement as you read this, if you even read -1.
The following things in Linux cause me deep concern, they never get fixed and they've pushed me, like a lot of hardcore Linux people to the Mac.... and I've had a Linux desktop for like 10 years, I first built it on I think it was a 80386 when XFree86 was the new new thing.
- The whole GNOME versus KDE thing is pretty much killing desktop Linux. Just the fact there are two completely different desktops fragmenting EVERYTHING. GNOME is too spartan, and GTK is a horrible toolkit to build anything on. I used to love KDE but it completely impaled itself with 4.0. I blame Trolltech for constantly changing their toolkit which trashed all the KDE code built on top of it, and KDE for shoving something out the door before it was ready. At this point I see no solution. The two will never join forces now. As long as you have two completely different desktops you are just fragmenting developer resources, frustrating application developers, and frustrating users who don't really want to have to pick one. On Ubuntu in particular KDE is a third class citizen, Kubuntu just doesn't get the attention Ubuntu do.
- Linux Audio in particular and multimedia in general is a train wreck. Linus completely made a mistake letting ALSA become the Linux audio standard. It is simply to complicated and confusing on the application developer side, and it must be a nightmare to write the driver for, which is why they are so often missing or screwed up. Linux should have learned from BeOS. They have a nice audio and multimedia API, elegant and really easy to use in apps, with power underneath if you need it for something special. The end result is Linux must now have like 10 audio API's most of which are there just to hide how bad ALSA is, just like ESD and ARTS hid how bad OSS was. Until Linux gets audio and multimedia straightened out it isn't making it on the desktop.
I owe a debt of gratitude to KDE 4.x. It caused me to finally switch to a Mac and its unlikely I'll ever go back to a Linux desktop again. I'll just run Linux under a VM. Now I have the best of both worlds, an awesome desktop that doesn't suck and I can hack in Linux.
I've been loyal to Linux and waiting for a Linux desktop to not suck for like 10 years. KDE 4.x was the last straw. I've reached the point I just want a desktop where everything works and I simply don't think the open source model will ever achieve it on the desktop. Open source seems to be awesome for kernels, servers and command line utilities. It just DOESN'T seem to work for GUI apps, at least that I've ever seen. GUI design is hard and it requires a lot of vision and discipline the open source model doesn't seem to have.
Apple makes sure their hardware and software work right out of the box, and they make sure the UI is consistent and reasonably well thought out as long as you can live with their UI conventions. I've reached the point in my life I will trade some proprietary lock in, and higher cost, just to get a desktop that always works, and always works well.
I am SO tired of having to spend days trying to find why something doesn't work right on Linux. ALSA and audio is probably the worst part of Linux. The whole audio situation on Linux is an EPIC FAIL, and if you can't do audio right you can't do a desktop right. How many fracking audio API's are there on Linux now and NONE of them work right. My last PC the audio levels are broken and you can't turn the audio up past audible, and maxed out its low enough to be annoying. Sure I could spend days sifting through hacks on the web, patch the kernel, tweak knobs, and probably eventually get it to work, but I just don't want to any more.
The Mac just works out of the box and the apps are awesome and consistent.
I'm not really one to judge why KDE 4.0 was so bad but I do have a few observations:
- It seems to be a consistent issue with Trolltech and Qt that they DON'T make enough effort to maintain backward compatibility. I have a relatively small Qt app I developed on Qt 3.x and it was a royal pain to move it to 4.x. It must have been a complete nightmare to migrate a huge body of code like KDE. Sure supporting old cruft sucks, but as soon as you have a bunch of people using your toolkit YOU DO IT, so you don't piss off all your developers and force them to spend all their time just keeping all their software working chasing your whims for how to do things better, instead of developing their application.
- The KDE team made some really bad design decisions. The decisions to redisng the desktop paradim with those little floating pallets alone made me completely hate KDE after being a loyal user for years, I just stopped using them. Maybe it is better now, but that deature should have NEVER been deployed until it worked right and even then only as an option.
- The decision to push KDE 4 out to the world when it completely sucked was a monumentally bad decision. Anyone foolish enough to switch to it at 4.0, which seems to include me and Linus, were so appalled we we switched to something else. People need their desktops to work, communicate and live in the digital age. When you screw that up as bad as KDE 4 did people won't soon forget. The whole point of this open source model is you aren't supposed to release stuff as anything but beta until its ready. Shoving crap out on a deadline is supposed to be the proprietary software way of doing things.
KDE 4 was the Vista of the open source world.
"The West does not have continuous governments."
I'm sure it would have been really great for the U.S. if we could have had another 20 years of George W........
"but I want to thank /. for putting up a review on it in the first place."
Well you should have READ the entire review before thanking them because it was a really bad, biased review. I'm assuming Rothke is either Jewish or very sympathetic to Israel because his review was obsessed with a defense of Israel and downplaying Israeli centric conspiracies to the point you started to feel this review is part of a CONSPIRACY. Slashdot editors really need to consider actually reading reviews and not posting ones like this one that are pushing a personal agenda instead of reviewing the book.
"Users who bought all those RH CD's from the early days and wanted to stick with a RH distribution simply moved on to Fedora Core 1. And if you were paying for support as you say, then RHEL would be no different than what you were doing under RHL 9. I don't see what anyone is complaining about."
Because I bought support for Red Hat 8 and it was basically worthless about a week later because Red Hat completely DROPPED Red Hat 7-9 without warning.
Both you and Red Hat exhibit total cluelessness about the fact that not everyone WANTS to upgrade their systems, especially mission critical systems, just because its convenient for Red Hat. Microsoft and Apple go to some pretty great lengths to support their platforms and applications for a long and predictable time and it inspires customer loyalty. Once I have something setup and I know it works I just want critical security fixes or I will update specific applications when I decide its appropriate. I'm starting to think its a pretty critical failing of the Linux community that they have such low regard for backward compatibility and longevity of their software. As a long time KDE user KDE 4 proved to be a dismal failure so I went back to KDE 3 and Linus switched to GNOME. I wager much of it was TrollTech had such low regard for maintaining backward compatibility between Qt 3 and 4 that they totally messed up a nice desktop by not maintaining continuity in their toolkit. 20 year old apps on Windows mostly still run.
As someone who used RedHat on the desktop from 6 through 9 and actually had just bought "support" when they "left" just to show my support for them I assure you when they abandoned RH 7-9 it most definitely felt like they "left". Way back they were a company with a loyal customer base who bought their boxed distributions even when we didn't have to just to support them. Then they went "public" and suddenly the people that got them to where they were and helped them get rich when they IPO'ed were dirt, and the only people they cared about sat on Wall Street and in the Fortune 500. As we've all seen lately the people on Wall Street are a pack of thieves, their loyal customers were worth a lot more to them than they apparently thought.
I do appreciate all they've contributed to Linux over the years but I've never installed Red Hat or Fedora since they "left" and I never will again.
"Aside from that it has an enormous industry devoted to developing windows games."
Wouldn't count on that forever. Take for example EA not releasing Madden NFL on the PC this year.
Two reasons Windows may fail as a games platform:
- Piracy on PC's is more rampant than on consoles
- Cheating on PC's is rampant in multiplayer games
I gate consoles for gaming but the fact is closed platforms are proving to be inherently better for online games.
Not sure of the economics of the piracy issue but if you are sinking tens or hundreds of millions in a game I can see why it would be an issue. WOW beats the issue with subscription servers but there isn't room in most people's budgets for multiple game subscriptions.
In, BF2 and COD4, in particular the cheating pretty much wrecks the platform for multiplayer PVP. WOW does a somewhat better job at suppressing it or maybe its just not quite as obvious because their combat system is so boring.
As for EVE dropping Linux because it wont do premium content... like who cares. The premium content adds nothing to the actual game play, no one should really care if the visuals look a little better. EVE's biggest problem is simply making their damn game more interesting to play. Their combat mechanics are awful, their economy is mostly annoying. EVE is a great concept for a game, and I wish it was better than it was, its just poorly executed. Its only real appeal seems to be if you are willing to sell your soul to big corps and alliances for big fleet action, along with a whole lot of back stabbing, drama, being used, etc.
Feynman's Lectures on Physics are a little far afield from pure math but they do make math interesting by connecting it to the real world.
"I'll give you some worthless goods in exchange (perhaps some brightly colored beads?"
If your beads are metallic gold, silver and platinum colored.... you've got yourself a deal.
The grandparent does have a point. If we do pull out of this recession/depression in a couple years, chances are high hyperinflation is going to destroy the dollar. You simply can't print and borrow trillions of dollars without the consequences coming home to roost some day. Only thing allowing it right now is the dollar is still considered the global reserve currency and its the safest place to be at the moment after the yen.
America simply can't continue to run huge current account deficits forever. It has to A) stop borrowing money B) stop buying more goods than it produces. dot.com, housing and banking bubbles have allowed us to put off the crash but I'm thinking we are pretty much out of bubbles at this point and we are soon going to start seeing how really destitute the U.S. economy really is. Its increasingly a bunch of service jobs that produce very little real economic value. The Obama plan to strengthen labor unions is going to make it even worse. Unionizing manufacturing jobs will just hasten their flight overseas. You can unionize service jobs that can't be moved but it will just make healthcare, teaching, civil service, fire and police and all the other heavily unionized service jobs more expensive and they will suck even more life out of the rest of the economy.
"So Freddy and Fanny went along and basically forced other banks to do the same thing because they would be out of business if they didn't"
As best I recall it was the other way around, CountryWide, Golden West, Ditech and WaMu are the ones that really pioneered sub prime lending. Fanny and Freddy didn't really get in to it until they saw everyone else doing it and their execs started to get get greedy for the profits the private mortgage companies were making on sub prime. I think your interpretation is revisionits. No one "forced" banks in to subprime lending. They all did it because it was very lucrative as long as housing prices always went up. The private brokers made a lot of money on sub prime lending, since they interest rates are inherently high, and they used a lot of unscrupulous teaser rates to sucker people in to taking ARM's that ballooned a couple years later. Those ballooning ARM's would have made the mortgage backed security holders very rich if only people could have afforded to pay them, and the housing market hadn't crashed.
I was pretty dismayed to see a week or two ago the number two man at CountryWide, along with some other CountryWide execs, have created a new company called PennyMac and are buying up toxic mortgages for like 30 cents on the dollarsm, pennys on the dollar... get it, I think from a failed bank, and the guy could barely contain his glee with his new business. There is irony that execs that were at the center of creating toxic mortgages and destroying our economy are going to profit again buying the toxic assets they created at distressed prices and selling them later when they recover.
Its a little sad to skim through the posts on this story and find pretty much all of them are lame.
Its a long article but its really a fascinating read and I'm guessing almost no one did. It makes a couple really insightful points:
A. All of the U.S. governments obsessive secrecy about nuclear bomb technology is pure security theater. The hard part is mastering the fuel cycle. If you can acquire the fuel or master the fuel cycle, making the bomb is pretty easy.
B. Much of what we read and take for authoritative is in fact garbage. There have apparently been a number of works on Fat Man and Little Boy, often by well educated and authoritative authors that were apparently complete nonsense. It just took an obsessive photographer/truck driver with no college degree to debunk one authoritative work after another. In particular apparently everyone thought the Uranium bomb was a female target shot with a male shaped projectile because thats the way people expected it to be, when in fact it appears it was the other way around.
One also wonders if the U.S. government intentionally propagated nonsense in these "authoritative" works thinking it would set back some aspiring bomb maker. For example, in one work it apparently said the barrel in the Uranium bomb was made of wood which was apparently pretty comical since it had to contain the explosion of several bags of cordite.