Debt is indeed slavery. If everybody stayed out of debt, the world's banking system and economies would collapse. There was a civil war fought over slavery, but being a slave to a bank is not much better than being a slave to a plantation owner. At least in the USA they don't put people in prison for debt like they used to do in Europe and others places ages ago. I think they figured out that debt slaves in prison have no way to pay the debt, whereas if they can garnishee their wages or take other steps, there is a chance the debtors will repay their current debt and later get into debt again, even for more.
To make sure they can always find debtors, they want to institute the electronic big brother cashless systems. Doing business anonymously will be against the law entirely some day. Then everybody will be forced to be a slave of the system. Right now, the existence of cash still gives those that want to, a means to escape this at least to some extent by not being in debt, at least not above the immediate ability to re-pay. I have a credit card, but I pay it off every month before they can ding me with money rental fees.
....Our money governance system is far from perfect, but it's better than it was when it was defined by limits rather than capabilities.......
Like I said at the end of my post, what matters in the end is how long a person has to work for a given number of life's necessities. things like food, health care, housing, transportation etc. Some of these, such as transportation (even with high gas prices) and communications have decreased over time, but others such as health care and housing have risen dramatically, to the point that in the USA at least, health care bills are a major reason for personal bankruptcy. Taxes however take by far the biggest bite out of the working people, compared to what they used to pay before the money became an arbitrary value. It takes longer each and every year for the average worker to pay the taxes and finally get to keep the rest of the money for themselves. There is a nonlinear tax rate. This means that the government or whoever controls the money, can increase the tax load on the working people without incurring any consequences at the polls, simply by making each unit of money buy less.
Is having a cell phone or internet access really something that is needed? Nice yes, but essential? No! Where we live, there is no cell phone reception of any shape or form, not even the slightest whisper of a signal. When we get visitors, some of them are quite pushed out of shape by this fact. We also get no other broadcast signals, the signal quality might make them bearable. We get TV and Internet via satellite.
Whoever controls the money, in the end controls everything, no matter who votes for whom in any government. The people we vote for are controlled by those who control the money. When money was real, it was much harder for any one or one group to control money and thus people. The US economy operated just fine even when our money was backed by gold and silver. Right now I am visiting Germany. All of my friends here I've talked to tell me they got screwed by the change from the Deutsche Mark to the Euro. The wages dropped by half, but the prices did not.
....What's the "real intrinsic value" of a piece of shiny white or yellow metal?......
Maybe intrinsic is not the right term. Arbitrary value might be better. Unlike paper, plastic ot electronic bits, the shiny metals cannot be created out of essentially thin air by some arbitrary societal authority. It takes a lot of work to dig these out of the ground, refine them and finally make them into the shiny little disks called coins. Because of this, the money supply cannot be increased by fiat of someone with half a brain and make everybody's savings worthless. A dollar used to be defined as the weight of an ounce of silver. Now its definition is arbitrary. Check the dollars it takes to buy a given weight of silver of gold to get an idea what the value the money. Ultimately of course, what matters is how long you have to work for the neccessities of life.
....I'm pretty sure the "bandwidth" between my eyes and brain is a little faster than even the best ethernet connection......
The data sent to the brain by the eye is not nearly as large as assumed from the amount that actually enters the eye. The light sensitive cells of the retina are coupled to an underlying system of cells, richly provided with blood. Each cell has what amounts to a CPU and program which processes data locally. This concentrated data is collected and further processed by the connector cells at the beginning of the optic nerve, before it is actually sent onto the hugely parallel data path of the nerve to the brain.
.....Overall the human visual system is absolutely amazing, and we have a long way to go to catch up with it......
Even so, there most smart, intelligent scientists try to tell us that this amazing system came about without the application of a superb designer of great intelligence, but by some random statistical processes.
.......Therefore the largest image size would be 27.6 gb. This would be a compression ratio of 2765:1.......
The cells of the retina do a large amount of very complex signal processing before they pass the optical information onto the brain where it is interpreted. Thus the amount of data the optic nerve must carry is much less than what the visual acuity of the eye receives. Each retinal cell has a sophisticated biological CPU built into it. The compression is nowhere near the same as any digital compression we know about, since the computational power applied to each pixel, on the molecular level is astronomical. No needed information is lost, but the data sent to the brain is very dense. In addition, as pointed out below, the resolution of the image is not uniform, but more dense at the center. The eye also ahs a huge dynamic range, all the way from sensing a single photon to a sunlit snow scene.
.....With cash the problem becomes one of identification. You can still track someone around the system using their stored-value mag-stripe card, but identifying someone as they come into the system if they pay with cash is still a significant problem.....
The cashless brave new world will come. Almost 2000 years ago it was predicted.
Revelation 13:16 And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: 17 And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
No more unidentified and un-trackable means of doing business and commerce. All this time, until modern technology, scholars throughout the ages have speculated about this prophecy. Even fiat money, beginning with paper, was unknown at the time this was written. Back then, the medium of exchange (usually gold or silver) had real, intrinsic value.
While cash is still legal tender, you pointed out correctly, but payment in cash of certain things arouses suspicion and my get you on a "terrorist" data base. It is only a matter of time, before cash will be outlawed. The prophecy connects this time with a one world governmental system. It seems therefore that there is still a little time before such a cashless world will arrive.
.....can **AA show mine wasn't controlled at the time of the alleged violation?"......
How about running an open wireless router? Many people have these nowadays. Anybody can use a laptop within range of one of these and download all sorts of illegal files. How would the **AA show that such a router was used by the defendant, rather than some unknown wireless interloper? The only real information they can get is the IP address and then hope they can get the name associated with that from the ISP. If the defendants computers don't even have the alleged files on it, how can they hope to show it was the defendant, rather than some other unknown user on the network. It seems all these lawsuits are not based on any sort of provable evidence that the defendant actually violated the law.
...Except that would violate all number of international treaties and if the EU.....
Is it not ironic that the stupid laws and treaties big businesses bought from politicians everywhere are now biting them in the ass. Laws such as DMCA and treaties like that, are purely anti-customer and pro-business. If nobody protected by law these harebrained DRM schemes and other constructs to protect old business models, then everything WOULD inter-operate, because clever technical people would not have to worry about armies of lawyers being on their tails because they could make sure that different technologies DO work together. All IP protections that are used to thwart competition should be abolished. It is not technology, but laws that need to change to reflect the brave new digital world. Bits, by their very nature WANT to proliferate and be copied forever.
....Isn't the point that the closed protocols don't allow an open market to exist?......
Protocols are not closed by nature, only by current law protecting them as proprietary or patented information. The Lexmark printer case showed this very clearly. Change the laws to unprotect certain kinds of information for purposes of interoperability. By definition, DRM is not encryption, since the purpose of encryption is to prevent an outside unauthorized party from making sense of the information. In DRM you are trying to prevent the authorized recipient from passing on the cleartext information to an unauthorized party. This is by its very nature impossible to do without laws like the DMCA. So in all cases, the laws need to be changed to make it impossible for software or other IP monopolies, such as Microsoft or Apple iTunes/iPod to exist.
.... I have better things to do with my time then wait for Word to load.....
Wow, you must have an awfully slow computer! On my Mac Word documents come up in four seconds or less! Maybe you are just unusually impatient. I can't believe the Windows version of Word takes that much longer on a computer less than 5 years old or newer.
......because economies of scale can push the cost of producing software down much more than they can with hardware.......
Not true! There is a fundamental difference between physical things and intellectual products. The cost of producing the software is almost the same, whether this software will run on one or a million computers. Once the software is written and debugged, (more or less debugged anyway) it costs very little to duplicate it. It is only hardware that benefits from the greater scale of mass production. For all intellectual goods, (software, movies, music etc.) after the developing costs are paid off, each copy sold is almost pure profit.
.....Thanks EU for having some balls, which the US DoJ doesn't.....
I wonder if the issue really is the vaunted MS protocols. Are there no clever people in the EU or elsewhere who could reverse engineer these and make them available to anyone? The EU, or any government for that matter, could amend their laws such that copyrights or patents are not violated if done for the purpose of interoperability. Even if someone distilled or even outright copied the protocols for the SOLE purpose of ensuring interoperability, their laws could be changed to allow for this. France recently went after Apple and their music DRM protocol. Instead of forcing Apple to give that up, why did they not simply rescind DRM protection laws similar to our beloved DMCA? In short order someone like DVD Jon would come up with a way of stripping DRM protections and there would be no law protecting Apple's or any other DRM system.
Doing this of course would subject everybody, including their companies to the same rules. It appears that the EU is singling out the most successful American companies and punishing them because their own businesses are not managing to compete on the open market.
.....I once believed that objective morality existed, and spent quite a great amount of time attempting to discover such a morality......
Just as the physical laws are absolute in the sense that we did not make them and are subject to them, so too there are absolute moral laws. I believe that the Creator God who made everything is capable of also communicating to us what we need to know in order to fulfill His purposes. There is no way to either prove nor disprove His being. If we could, then we by our intellect would indeed be God. He communicates Himself to mankind in at least three ways. One, we study His awesome creation, which either created itself, has always existed, or has indeed come from Him who exists outside and apart from this universe. Two, He has placed within all humans a sense of right and wrong, fair and unfair. It is surprising how uniform this is in diverse cultures and ethnic groups. Three, He laid aside His divine prerogatives and entered our world, became as one of us so we could, if we so chose, be in fellowship with Him. We read about these things in the by far the most widely distributed human writing, the Holy Bible.
Most people who disbelieve what is written in this book have never really read it for themselves. They go by what OTHERS have said or written about it. Read and contemplate the four Gospels, the life of Jesus, Immanuel, God with us, chronicled therein for YOURSELF. Count how many times Jesus says:....truly truly I say unto you...". Was He speaking the truth or were the writers of these accounts just imagining the whole thing? After reading the story of His life, come to your own answer to "Who was Jesus"? Is He who he says He is? Did He indeed conquer death? Unlike the founders of all other religions, Jesus is alive. If not, then millions of people have lived and died throughout the centuries for a preposterous lie.
Even if most people did have such fast connections, as claimed to exist in other countries, what killer applications are there that would use all that fantastic speed. Video? People are content to watch the broadcast, cable or satellite drivel available now. Would video over the Internet improve the programming? Movies? Mostly the same as other video. Maybe downloading of movies might be a major use for the vast speed, but only if the copyright issues can be dealt with in some standard way. Has that been solved overseas? Games? Those that need or benefit from interaction of people over a network are few and work pretty well now, since the graphics data is local anyway. Software? Downloading a program is not done too often and so what if it takes 10 minutes or only two! Program downloading is risky anyway, since there is a not so small chance that rogue programs may come in over that big fat pipe. To really justify say ten times faster speeds than common now, a compelling reason has to be created first. Maybe some/.ers have some ideas for which ORDINARY users, not geeks, might want to pay to have higher speeds.
Ok, that's great! Now if (when) my notions of morality are different or even opposed to yours, then who decides? Is it the majority? Is it the one with the biggest gun? Is it, like some have posted here, God? If so, how can we know who of the many voices that claim to speak for God is the one to listen to?
It is for sure that no human can change or bend the laws of nature. They just are and we either obey them or suffer the consequences. Moral laws or codes are amazingly congruent in all humanity. Unlike physical laws, we can and more often than not, do go against what most of us innately know to be right and do what we know is wrong, because it is often seen to bring us short term advantages or appears get us out of trouble caused by previous decisions against our built in conscience. Thus one lie tends to generate further lies. Someone who desperately needs money knows it is both immoral and illegal to rob banks, yet still decides to rob one. Then, to avoid getting caught and punished, may resort to murdering the police and/or others perceived to be hindering the escape of deserved punishment for what the robber knew right from the start was bad.
It appears that the God who made all things, has made His physical laws inviolate, but has given us the freedom to obey or disobey the moral laws He placed within us. If this freedom to choose did NOT exist, then we'd be nothing more than pre-programmed robots and any notion of love would be ridiculous. If your computer screen suddenly displayed "I love you (your name) so very much", you'd know that someone was messing with it. On the other hand if your significant other expresses love for you, your reaction would ordinarily be quite different.
True love MUST include the choice NOT to love and be selfish instead......The answer is: you do......
Ok, that's great! Now if (when) my notions of morality are different or even opposed to yours, then who decides? Is it the majority? Is it the one with the biggest gun? Is it, like some have posted here, God? If so, how can we know who of the many voices that claim to speak for God is the one to listen to?
It is for sure that no human can change or bend the laws of nature. They just are and we either obey them or suffer the consequences. Moral laws or codes are amazingly congruent in all humanity. Unlike physical laws, we can and more often than not, do go against what most of us innately know to be right and do what we know is wrong, because it is often seen to bring us short term advantages or appears get us out of trouble caused by previous decisions against our built in conscience. Thus one lie tends to generate further lies. Someone who desperately needs money knows it is both immoral and illegal to rob banks, yet still decides to rob one. Then, to avoid getting caught and punished, may resort to murdering the police and/or others perceived to be hindering the escape of deserved punishment for what the robber knew right from the start was bad.
It appears that the God who made all things, has made His physical laws inviolate, but has given us the freedom to obey or disobey the moral laws He placed within us. If this freedom to choose did NOT exist, then we'd be nothing more than pre-programmed robots and any notion of love would be ridiculous. If your computer screen suddenly displayed "I love you (your name) so very much", you'd know that someone was messing with it. On the other hand if your significant other expresses love for you, your reaction would ordinarily be quite different.
True love MUST include the choice NOT to love and be selfish instead.
.....figuring out what happened at the so-called "Big Bang" (God created the universe, afterall).....
God doesn't seem to mind scientists trying to figure out how He did it. If He did object to His atoms being smashed, He'd have made them unbreakable. As it is, it appears they are pretty tough little buggers. I know, since I helped build what is still the most powerful electron accelerator. This new collider will however still be far short of the energies God imparts to cosmic rays. The beam current of cosmic rays is unfortunately very low, so doing physics with them is difficult and that's why this collider will likely offer new insights of how this physical world works at the smallest dimensions. Some "events" in particle physics are extremely rare. Thus trillions and trillions of particles are needed to create some of these rare interactions. Getting like charged particles, such as protons and electrons into the intense beams and high energies needed is quite an expensive technological challenge.
.....It is not impossible to start with very little and become wealthy, but it is so rare that it should not really be considered in practical models......
It takes a good idea and the perseverance and hard work to implement it. The problem is that truly good ideas that can be implemented with a relatively small amount of capital are quite rare. However, anyone who DOES have such an idea and works hard can get wealthy. Having a patent is more often than not a hindrance since a patent can only be defended in our screwed up legal system by those who already have a big pile of money. Money that gets used up to make payments on some lawyers BMW is not available to use for the enterprise.
This of course is true in general. However the amount is not always insurmountable for those of ordinary means. None of the companies I mentioned were started by people with large fortunes. David Packard and Bill Hewlett, as well The two Steves who began Apple started their business in garages with only a little money. The founders of Google and Yahoo were students. Students are generally rather poor. I personally know some builders who became quite wealthy by repairing and then selling one old shack and then repeating that process again and again. In the USA, more so than in other countries, someone with a good idea and some hard work still has a better chance of becoming wealthy than in most any other country.
.....if your opinions mattered the politicians would be meeting with you and asking you for your opinions.....
Actually, many do listen. At least my rep and senator do. One is a republican and the other a democrat. I have written letters (real paper) to both of them and now I get regular mail from them containing surveys on issues of concern to many Americans. The majority/. voter demographic is the group least likely to consistently vote in EVERY election, if they are even registered to vote at all. Maybe the administrators of this here site for stuff that matters to nerds could do a straw survey that would hopefully put the lie to my assertion.
I highly doubt that. To run a server, you have to also put some content thereon that others will want to access. It requires creativity and work to make content that others will want to look at, even for free. Most people are consumers of content, rather than creators, because that requires not more effort than to grab a beer, to plop down on the couch and push a button or two on the remote. Even if all Internet connection were symmetrical, both up and down, most users would still use only a very small fraction of the available upstream bandwidth, compared to downstream. Anyone who wants to have a server can share one at some ISP host for relatively little money. The server doesn't have to be in your house.
The constitution has some nice things in it about freedom of speech and the press. However, that freedom only belongs to the owner of said press. With the advent of the Internet, press ownership has gotten to the point where any citizens can afford a press. That of course is competition to the heretofore press owners and they are misusing the power of the Government to raise the price of press ownership above what most citizens can afford. Then they will once again be able tell the masses what they and the Government want them to know, regardless whether that is the truth or not.
Not always true. How about the founders of many modern companies? MS, Apple, Intel, Google, Yahoo. Hewlett-Packard and many others did not start and succeed with an inheritance, but with a good idea, luck and in some cases some not so nice business practices. It seems that someone who inherits a big pile of money has no incentive to do much of anything except to pursue their pleasures and often squanders the money or has others wrest it away from them in some clever or illicit but legal manner.
..... It is allowed to "phone home" once, and is then disconnected from the 'net.......
If you have a router on your network, just block the MAC of that computer from the Internet. That way you don't have to physically unplug the network cable and can still transmit the data on your local network.
You must use some rather complex formatting. Interchanging Word 2004 files with Windows users have not been a problem for us. However, even some Office 97 files sometimes look weird on the current office on Windows. Even within MS Office there can be some anomalies. We don't exchange any Excel or Powerpoint data, so that could be another issue.
If you already have one of the new Intel Macs, the virtualization route is one you might investigate. The XP VM can be connected and disconnected from the network by software commands to the virtualization engine. The advantage of having two computers for the space and powering of one is considerable. We here are still stuck with PPC Macs and the slow, but fast enough for now, virtual PC emulator.
Slashdot Mirror
....Loan fake money, get servants.....
Debt is indeed slavery. If everybody stayed out of debt, the world's banking system and economies would collapse. There was a civil war fought over slavery, but being a slave to a bank is not much better than being a slave to a plantation owner. At least in the USA they don't put people in prison for debt like they used to do in Europe and others places ages ago. I think they figured out that debt slaves in prison have no way to pay the debt, whereas if they can garnishee their wages or take other steps, there is a chance the debtors will repay their current debt and later get into debt again, even for more.
To make sure they can always find debtors, they want to institute the electronic big brother cashless systems. Doing business anonymously will be against the law entirely some day. Then everybody will be forced to be a slave of the system. Right now, the existence of cash still gives those that want to, a means to escape this at least to some extent by not being in debt, at least not above the immediate ability to re-pay. I have a credit card, but I pay it off every month before they can ding me with money rental fees.
....Our money governance system is far from perfect, but it's better than it was when it was defined by limits rather than capabilities.......
Like I said at the end of my post, what matters in the end is how long a person has to work for a given number of life's necessities. things like food, health care, housing, transportation etc. Some of these, such as transportation (even with high gas prices) and communications have decreased over time, but others such as health care and housing have risen dramatically, to the point that in the USA at least, health care bills are a major reason for personal bankruptcy. Taxes however take by far the biggest bite out of the working people, compared to what they used to pay before the money became an arbitrary value. It takes longer each and every year for the average worker to pay the taxes and finally get to keep the rest of the money for themselves. There is a nonlinear tax rate. This means that the government or whoever controls the money, can increase the tax load on the working people without incurring any consequences at the polls, simply by making each unit of money buy less.
Is having a cell phone or internet access really something that is needed? Nice yes, but essential? No! Where we live, there is no cell phone reception of any shape or form, not even the slightest whisper of a signal. When we get visitors, some of them are quite pushed out of shape by this fact. We also get no other broadcast signals, the signal quality might make them bearable. We get TV and Internet via satellite.
Whoever controls the money, in the end controls everything, no matter who votes for whom in any government. The people we vote for are controlled by those who control the money. When money was real, it was much harder for any one or one group to control money and thus people. The US economy operated just fine even when our money was backed by gold and silver. Right now I am visiting Germany. All of my friends here I've talked to tell me they got screwed by the change from the Deutsche Mark to the Euro. The wages dropped by half, but the prices did not.
....What's the "real intrinsic value" of a piece of shiny white or yellow metal?......
Maybe intrinsic is not the right term. Arbitrary value might be better. Unlike paper, plastic ot electronic bits, the shiny metals cannot be created out of essentially thin air by some arbitrary societal authority. It takes a lot of work to dig these out of the ground, refine them and finally make them into the shiny little disks called coins. Because of this, the money supply cannot be increased by fiat of someone with half a brain and make everybody's savings worthless. A dollar used to be defined as the weight of an ounce of silver. Now its definition is arbitrary. Check the dollars it takes to buy a given weight of silver of gold to get an idea what the value the money. Ultimately of course, what matters is how long you have to work for the neccessities of life.
....I'm pretty sure the "bandwidth" between my eyes and brain is a little faster than even the best ethernet connection......
The data sent to the brain by the eye is not nearly as large as assumed from the amount that actually enters the eye. The light sensitive cells of the retina are coupled to an underlying system of cells, richly provided with blood. Each cell has what amounts to a CPU and program which processes data locally. This concentrated data is collected and further processed by the connector cells at the beginning of the optic nerve, before it is actually sent onto the hugely parallel data path of the nerve to the brain.
.....Overall the human visual system is absolutely amazing, and we have a long way to go to catch up with it......
Even so, there most smart, intelligent scientists try to tell us that this amazing system came about without the application of a superb designer of great intelligence, but by some random statistical processes.
.......Therefore the largest image size would be 27.6 gb. This would be a compression ratio of 2765:1.......
The cells of the retina do a large amount of very complex signal processing before they pass the optical information onto the brain where it is interpreted. Thus the amount of data the optic nerve must carry is much less than what the visual acuity of the eye receives. Each retinal cell has a sophisticated biological CPU built into it. The compression is nowhere near the same as any digital compression we know about, since the computational power applied to each pixel, on the molecular level is astronomical. No needed information is lost, but the data sent to the brain is very dense. In addition, as pointed out below, the resolution of the image is not uniform, but more dense at the center. The eye also ahs a huge dynamic range, all the way from sensing a single photon to a sunlit snow scene.
.....With cash the problem becomes one of identification. You can still track someone around the system using their stored-value mag-stripe card, but identifying someone as they come into the system if they pay with cash is still a significant problem.....
The cashless brave new world will come. Almost 2000 years ago it was predicted.
Revelation 13:16 And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: 17 And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
No more unidentified and un-trackable means of doing business and commerce. All this time, until modern technology, scholars throughout the ages have speculated about this prophecy. Even fiat money, beginning with paper, was unknown at the time this was written. Back then, the medium of exchange (usually gold or silver) had real, intrinsic value.
While cash is still legal tender, you pointed out correctly, but payment in cash of certain things arouses suspicion and my get you on a "terrorist" data base. It is only a matter of time, before cash will be outlawed. The prophecy connects this time with a one world governmental system. It seems therefore that there is still a little time before such a cashless world will arrive.
.....can **AA show mine wasn't controlled at the time of the alleged violation?"......
How about running an open wireless router? Many people have these nowadays. Anybody can use a laptop within range of one of these and download all sorts of illegal files. How would the **AA show that such a router was used by the defendant, rather than some unknown wireless interloper? The only real information they can get is the IP address and then hope they can get the name associated with that from the ISP. If the defendants computers don't even have the alleged files on it, how can they hope to show it was the defendant, rather than some other unknown user on the network. It seems all these lawsuits are not based on any sort of provable evidence that the defendant actually violated the law.
...Except that would violate all number of international treaties and if the EU.....
Is it not ironic that the stupid laws and treaties big businesses bought from politicians everywhere are now biting them in the ass. Laws such as DMCA and treaties like that, are purely anti-customer and pro-business. If nobody protected by law these harebrained DRM schemes and other constructs to protect old business models, then everything WOULD inter-operate, because clever technical people would not have to worry about armies of lawyers being on their tails because they could make sure that different technologies DO work together. All IP protections that are used to thwart competition should be abolished. It is not technology, but laws that need to change to reflect the brave new digital world. Bits, by their very nature WANT to proliferate and be copied forever.
....Isn't the point that the closed protocols don't allow an open market to exist?......
Protocols are not closed by nature, only by current law protecting them as proprietary or patented information. The Lexmark printer case showed this very clearly. Change the laws to unprotect certain kinds of information for purposes of interoperability. By definition, DRM is not encryption, since the purpose of encryption is to prevent an outside unauthorized party from making sense of the information. In DRM you are trying to prevent the authorized recipient from passing on the cleartext information to an unauthorized party. This is by its very nature impossible to do without laws like the DMCA. So in all cases, the laws need to be changed to make it impossible for software or other IP monopolies, such as Microsoft or Apple iTunes/iPod to exist.
.... I have better things to do with my time then wait for Word to load.....
Wow, you must have an awfully slow computer! On my Mac Word documents come up in four seconds or less! Maybe you are just unusually impatient. I can't believe the Windows version of Word takes that much longer on a computer less than 5 years old or newer.
......because economies of scale can push the cost of producing software down much more than they can with hardware.......
Not true! There is a fundamental difference between physical things and intellectual products. The cost of producing the software is almost the same, whether this software will run on one or a million computers. Once the software is written and debugged, (more or less debugged anyway) it costs very little to duplicate it. It is only hardware that benefits from the greater scale of mass production. For all intellectual goods, (software, movies, music etc.) after the developing costs are paid off, each copy sold is almost pure profit.
.....Thanks EU for having some balls, which the US DoJ doesn't.....
I wonder if the issue really is the vaunted MS protocols. Are there no clever people in the EU or elsewhere who could reverse engineer these and make them available to anyone? The EU, or any government for that matter, could amend their laws such that copyrights or patents are not violated if done for the purpose of interoperability. Even if someone distilled or even outright copied the protocols for the SOLE purpose of ensuring interoperability, their laws could be changed to allow for this. France recently went after Apple and their music DRM protocol. Instead of forcing Apple to give that up, why did they not simply rescind DRM protection laws similar to our beloved DMCA? In short order someone like DVD Jon would come up with a way of stripping DRM protections and there would be no law protecting Apple's or any other DRM system.
Doing this of course would subject everybody, including their companies to the same rules. It appears that the EU is singling out the most successful American companies and punishing them because their own businesses are not managing to compete on the open market.
.....I once believed that objective morality existed, and spent quite a great amount of time attempting to discover such a morality......
....truly truly I say unto you...". Was He speaking the truth or were the writers of these accounts just imagining the whole thing? After reading the story of His life, come to your own answer to "Who was Jesus"? Is He who he says He is? Did He indeed conquer death? Unlike the founders of all other religions, Jesus is alive. If not, then millions of people have lived and died throughout the centuries for a preposterous lie.
Just as the physical laws are absolute in the sense that we did not make them and are subject to them, so too there are absolute moral laws. I believe that the Creator God who made everything is capable of also communicating to us what we need to know in order to fulfill His purposes. There is no way to either prove nor disprove His being. If we could, then we by our intellect would indeed be God. He communicates Himself to mankind in at least three ways. One, we study His awesome creation, which either created itself, has always existed, or has indeed come from Him who exists outside and apart from this universe. Two, He has placed within all humans a sense of right and wrong, fair and unfair. It is surprising how uniform this is in diverse cultures and ethnic groups. Three, He laid aside His divine prerogatives and entered our world, became as one of us so we could, if we so chose, be in fellowship with Him. We read about these things in the by far the most widely distributed human writing, the Holy Bible.
Most people who disbelieve what is written in this book have never really read it for themselves. They go by what OTHERS have said or written about it. Read and contemplate the four Gospels, the life of Jesus, Immanuel, God with us, chronicled therein for YOURSELF. Count how many times Jesus says:
.....we as a nation haven't moved to Gigapop.....
/.ers have some ideas for which ORDINARY users, not geeks, might want to pay to have higher speeds.
Even if most people did have such fast connections, as claimed to exist in other countries, what killer applications are there that would use all that fantastic speed. Video? People are content to watch the broadcast, cable or satellite drivel available now. Would video over the Internet improve the programming? Movies? Mostly the same as other video. Maybe downloading of movies might be a major use for the vast speed, but only if the copyright issues can be dealt with in some standard way. Has that been solved overseas? Games? Those that need or benefit from interaction of people over a network are few and work pretty well now, since the graphics data is local anyway. Software? Downloading a program is not done too often and so what if it takes 10 minutes or only two! Program downloading is risky anyway, since there is a not so small chance that rogue programs may come in over that big fat pipe. To really justify say ten times faster speeds than common now, a compelling reason has to be created first. Maybe some
.....The answer is: you do......
Ok, that's great! Now if (when) my notions of morality are different or even opposed to yours, then who decides? Is it the majority? Is it the one with the biggest gun? Is it, like some have posted here, God? If so, how can we know who of the many voices that claim to speak for God is the one to listen to?
It is for sure that no human can change or bend the laws of nature. They just are and we either obey them or suffer the consequences. Moral laws or codes are amazingly congruent in all humanity. Unlike physical laws, we can and more often than not, do go against what most of us innately know to be right and do what we know is wrong, because it is often seen to bring us short term advantages or appears get us out of trouble caused by previous decisions against our built in conscience. Thus one lie tends to generate further lies. Someone who desperately needs money knows it is both immoral and illegal to rob banks, yet still decides to rob one. Then, to avoid getting caught and punished, may resort to murdering the police and/or others perceived to be hindering the escape of deserved punishment for what the robber knew right from the start was bad.
It appears that the God who made all things, has made His physical laws inviolate, but has given us the freedom to obey or disobey the moral laws He placed within us. If this freedom to choose did NOT exist, then we'd be nothing more than pre-programmed robots and any notion of love would be ridiculous. If your computer screen suddenly displayed "I love you (your name) so very much", you'd know that someone was messing with it. On the other hand if your significant other expresses love for you, your reaction would ordinarily be quite different.
True love MUST include the choice NOT to love and be selfish instead......The answer is: you do......
Ok, that's great! Now if (when) my notions of morality are different or even opposed to yours, then who decides? Is it the majority? Is it the one with the biggest gun? Is it, like some have posted here, God? If so, how can we know who of the many voices that claim to speak for God is the one to listen to?
It is for sure that no human can change or bend the laws of nature. They just are and we either obey them or suffer the consequences. Moral laws or codes are amazingly congruent in all humanity. Unlike physical laws, we can and more often than not, do go against what most of us innately know to be right and do what we know is wrong, because it is often seen to bring us short term advantages or appears get us out of trouble caused by previous decisions against our built in conscience. Thus one lie tends to generate further lies. Someone who desperately needs money knows it is both immoral and illegal to rob banks, yet still decides to rob one. Then, to avoid getting caught and punished, may resort to murdering the police and/or others perceived to be hindering the escape of deserved punishment for what the robber knew right from the start was bad.
It appears that the God who made all things, has made His physical laws inviolate, but has given us the freedom to obey or disobey the moral laws He placed within us. If this freedom to choose did NOT exist, then we'd be nothing more than pre-programmed robots and any notion of love would be ridiculous. If your computer screen suddenly displayed "I love you (your name) so very much", you'd know that someone was messing with it. On the other hand if your significant other expresses love for you, your reaction would ordinarily be quite different.
True love MUST include the choice NOT to love and be selfish instead.
.....What is wrong is not always illegal, and what is illegal is not always wrong......
Legislators and courts decide what is illegal, but WHO decides what is wrong or immoral?
.....figuring out what happened at the so-called "Big Bang" (God created the universe, afterall).....
God doesn't seem to mind scientists trying to figure out how He did it. If He did object to His atoms being smashed, He'd have made them unbreakable. As it is, it appears they are pretty tough little buggers. I know, since I helped build what is still the most powerful electron accelerator. This new collider will however still be far short of the energies God imparts to cosmic rays. The beam current of cosmic rays is unfortunately very low, so doing physics with them is difficult and that's why this collider will likely offer new insights of how this physical world works at the smallest dimensions. Some "events" in particle physics are extremely rare. Thus trillions and trillions of particles are needed to create some of these rare interactions. Getting like charged particles, such as protons and electrons into the intense beams and high energies needed is quite an expensive technological challenge.
.....It is not impossible to start with very little and become wealthy, but it is so rare that it should not really be considered in practical models......
It takes a good idea and the perseverance and hard work to implement it. The problem is that truly good ideas that can be implemented with a relatively small amount of capital are quite rare. However, anyone who DOES have such an idea and works hard can get wealthy. Having a patent is more often than not a hindrance since a patent can only be defended in our screwed up legal system by those who already have a big pile of money. Money that gets used up to make payments on some lawyers BMW is not available to use for the enterprise.
...... It takes money to make money.......
This of course is true in general. However the amount is not always insurmountable for those of ordinary means. None of the companies I mentioned were started by people with large fortunes. David Packard and Bill Hewlett, as well The two Steves who began Apple started their business in garages with only a little money. The founders of Google and Yahoo were students. Students are generally rather poor. I personally know some builders who became quite wealthy by repairing and then selling one old shack and then repeating that process again and again. In the USA, more so than in other countries, someone with a good idea and some hard work still has a better chance of becoming wealthy than in most any other country.
.....if your opinions mattered the politicians would be meeting with you and asking you for your opinions.....
/. voter demographic is the group least likely to consistently vote in EVERY election, if they are even registered to vote at all. Maybe the administrators of this here site for stuff that matters to nerds could do a straw survey that would hopefully put the lie to my assertion.
Actually, many do listen. At least my rep and senator do. One is a republican and the other a democrat. I have written letters (real paper) to both of them and now I get regular mail from them containing surveys on issues of concern to many Americans. The majority
....will want to run their own server.....
I highly doubt that. To run a server, you have to also put some content thereon that others will want to access. It requires creativity and work to make content that others will want to look at, even for free. Most people are consumers of content, rather than creators, because that requires not more effort than to grab a beer, to plop down on the couch and push a button or two on the remote. Even if all Internet connection were symmetrical, both up and down, most users would still use only a very small fraction of the available upstream bandwidth, compared to downstream. Anyone who wants to have a server can share one at some ISP host for relatively little money. The server doesn't have to be in your house.
.....alternative to mass media.....
The constitution has some nice things in it about freedom of speech and the press. However, that freedom only belongs to the owner of said press. With the advent of the Internet, press ownership has gotten to the point where any citizens can afford a press. That of course is competition to the heretofore press owners and they are misusing the power of the Government to raise the price of press ownership above what most citizens can afford. Then they will once again be able tell the masses what they and the Government want them to know, regardless whether that is the truth or not.
....Nope. Most of them inherited it.....
Not always true. How about the founders of many modern companies? MS, Apple, Intel, Google, Yahoo. Hewlett-Packard and many others did not start and succeed with an inheritance, but with a good idea, luck and in some cases some not so nice business practices. It seems that someone who inherits a big pile of money has no incentive to do much of anything except to pursue their pleasures and often squanders the money or has others wrest it away from them in some clever or illicit but legal manner.
..... It is allowed to "phone home" once, and is then disconnected from the 'net.......
If you have a router on your network, just block the MAC of that computer from the Internet. That way you don't have to physically unplug the network cable and can still transmit the data on your local network.
You must use some rather complex formatting. Interchanging Word 2004 files with Windows users have not been a problem for us. However, even some Office 97 files sometimes look weird on the current office on Windows. Even within MS Office there can be some anomalies. We don't exchange any Excel or Powerpoint data, so that could be another issue.
If you already have one of the new Intel Macs, the virtualization route is one you might investigate. The XP VM can be connected and disconnected from the network by software commands to the virtualization engine. The advantage of having two computers for the space and powering of one is considerable. We here are still stuck with PPC Macs and the slow, but fast enough for now, virtual PC emulator.