I love the Segway. I will get one someday, probably late next year, or so. I think everyone that can ride one and lives in an urban environment should get one, eventually (when they become cheap enough).
I agree with part of the point you're trying to make. But who is going to pay for 'free' Segways? There is no free lunch; when "the government" pays for something, that money is taken from you and I. You did not explicitly say that the government should do it, but what other organization could do something like that?
And I know I'm being pedantic, but according to this US DOE page, the average American car weighs 3,409 pounds, which is much more than the figure you wrote. And no, I don't think the DOE should exist (after all, the only thing I've ever wanted from them is this obvious statistic). But other government agencies should go away first (like the FDA).
It's wrong to use a phrase like "economic gain" to describe the money stolen through criminal actions like fraud and extortion. People who do this are destroyers of economic value, not creators of it.
It is wrong to punish people for being successful.
America is still a country where absolutely anyone with a functioning mind can become wealthy if they are honest with themselves, and work hard enough. Due dilligence is important, but if this is absent, it's just another case of laziness.
I'm not being paid money to write this. My payment is a freer, richer, more just society, built under the only system that can provide those ends: capitalism.
Two years ago, I bought a shirt from Microsoft (the "Freedom to Innovate" shirt), which I wear proudly on occasion.
I'm not a Microsoft employee, nor have I ever been one. The limit of my association with them is that I buy and use their software. Articles such as these attempt to minimize actual grassroots people like me. But I exist!
And what right do they have to attack people for this funding friendly groups, anyway? Other corporations are not attacked when they give money to the Sierra Club, SaveOurEnvironment.org, and "Rock The Vote", or to thousands of other politically-tainted groups. It's only "astroturfing" when the author of the article disagrees with the viewpoint being promoted.
Microsoft should fund the Ayn Rand Institute. They have the philosophy that could properly defend them, but I think Microsoft is afraid of appearing too radical or offensive to some people. And that, I think, is going to hurt them in the long run.
Headline should read, US Spammers using services of Chinese ISPs, Russian mob. The Spam originates here, and ends up here. The vast majority of Spam is in English, and targeting an American audience.
> Linford also told the conference that some 70 percent of spam is sent
> from China by American spam outfits who are hosting their servers with
> Chinese ISPs.
That should say: "70% of spam advertises URLs hosted in China" (not "is
sent from").
...
> Unless things change drastically, we predict that 80 percent of
> email will be spam by December this year, and it's very likely to go
> to 90 percent by this summer," Linford warned.
I used Linux exclusively (starting with Slackware, running kernel 1.2.3) over a five year period from 1996 until 2000.
The quality/stability of Windows 2000 won me over.
I switched to Windows 2000, and never looked back. Gone are the installation headaches, poor user interfaces, lack of integrated features, poor documentation, and politics of free software. I'm more productive with Visual Studio, SQL Server,.NET, and Windows Server than I ever was with Linux, MySQL, vi, and gdb. I don't have to waste time worrying about which toolkit to code for, or how to hack around some mind-numbingly bad design (like X).
The cost of software licenses is not something I care about: even Microsoft's retail prices add up to far less than 1% of revenue at my company. And if I didn't have their software, I'd be much less productive than I am now. So their stuff pays for itself.
There was nothing wrong with Microsoft's use of those agreements. They involved neither force nor fraud.
For that to happen, Microsoft would have had to lie to the PC makers or threaten them in some physical, non-economic way.
And by the way, the lawsuit you're talking about was made by Caldera (now known as SCO)! They bought the rights to a defunct OS just so they could sue Microsoft on bogus anti-trust charges. Oddly, there was no giant public outcry about this (like there is with the extremely similar SCO/Linux case right now). Hipocracy and short-sightedness, that.
The example you cite actually illustrates the point I made:
People who live in a cave and grow their own lentils are not exempt from paying taxes. Such a person would eventually face government men carrying rifles if he didn't pay his taxes. Corporations don't do this.
I certainly hope that Windows becomes more pervasive. What's the problem with that if everyone that pays for the product is apathetic or explicitly wants it? For those particularly opposed, alternative/marginal products will exist so long as there are enough paying customers to make it profitable to continue. Failing that, you can always "roll your own".
All of the above situations involve no actual or threatened physical coercion. However, what is likely to be your intended 'solution' is one that does involve force.
It is immoral support government intervention that would discourage others from buying any particular product or service, including Windows.
Let Microsoft have both and we may as well add a line to our tax forms for them.
This is absolutely false: you have made the terrible mistake of confusing economic and political power.
Microsoft does not have the ability to force you to use or pay for their products. Since the government has a legal monopoly on the use of force, they can force you to pay taxes.
I would suggest that you read Rand's Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal for a better understanding of how things should work.
If the volumes we're talking about are low, it doesn't say much to say that "Linux sales for servers are up 27%"!
Someone who sold a single orange last summer can turn around this year and sell six oranges to his friends and say, "Wow! My market share went up 600%!". However, this means very little.
Without real numbers, all one can correctly say is that Linux is gaining market share. And judging from everyday experience, it has a long road ahead of it.
Few will agree with me, but I think that Disney came out ahead when they dumped Pixar.
Disney holds the copyrights to "Toy Story", "Toy Story 2", "Monsters, Inc.", and "A Bug's Life", and will still make revenue from those properties (think disney-created sequels, toy merchandising, new media releases), all the while Pixar is contractually obligated to make more movies.
The movie business is all about hits, which are inherently unpredicible. Jobs wouldn't even talk to Disney because they refused to sell the rights back to the existing movies. They would have been insane if they had done this, because those properties are worth billions of dollars over the next few years. It's not a wise idea to trade existing hits for only the expectation of new ones.
Their previous attempts at encryption were usually bad. PPTP had a few major problems (related to the handling of passwords and inconsistent applications of a basic rule at Microsoft when using RC4: Don't encrypt the same thing with the same key more than once!).
Algorithms that do encryption are difficult to design properly. However, if you have a good algorithm and know the proper conditions under which you should use it, almost anyone's code will do. Most people understand the need to use code that's been tested by universities, and not just some untested and unverified garbage written over the weekend. Packaging and writing protocols for the encryption algorithms is often as difficult as writing the code that's encapsulated within. Microsoft database programs are very popular, and that's the kind of thing that they excel at.
The problem is more difficult than the credit card/SSL stuff, which is all about letting someone with a browser input some numbers on an unsecure Windows machine connected to the Internet, then packing them in an encrypted package, and shipping them to a well-publicized (but poorly protected) server. Validation is done optionally at either end, which amounts to having NetSol report back on whether or not they are who they say they are. That problem has been solved, but it was some time before all of the design issues and other bugs were worked out. Which is some indication of how the solutions to the remaining database security issues will be solved.
(John McCarthy is known for being the man responsible for Lisp, and some AI research, among other things. I'm surprised that the pages I'm pointing to haven't been mentioned yet in this article.)
There's a worse case that hasn't been encountered yet. If the consumer marketplace ends up with genetically modified apples that aren't intentionally seedless, then who knows where those apple seeds might wind up. If that modification turns up to be dominant, then non-modified apple trees are going to have a fight with the force of evolution.
Perhaps I'm missing something, but how are modified apple trees going to continue to crowd out the other varieties of apple trees after the first generation of trees grow? It seems to me that a seedless tree would have trouble reproducing...
Since corporations are ultimately owned and operated by people, you would have to limit the first amendment rights of said individuals to make your assertion true.
No, but they can destroy it. Let's say that a government can choose between two otherwise equal alternatives for a service, one free, one not free. Which should they choose? A free one would allow them to reduce spending or spend more on other vital services.
If you meant Windows vs. Linux, or even a blanket statement about commercial vs. open or "free" software, the answer is no.
Windows and Linux are not equal, interchangeable products.
But this is all beside the point: even if we were to agree that using open or "free" software would save tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in a country like India, it wouldn't matter! Raising the income of every citizen by even a dollar every year totally pales in comparison with the hundreds of dollars in wealth people can make for themselves if capitalism is allowed to flourish.
It sure could, if governments stop using tax revenues to pay Microsoft, and instead invested in agriculture, farming, and the like. (I realize those are two big "ifs" and I also realize that world hunger is now a political problem, not a logistics problem).
Total bullshit. Where are your figures? Do you have any real numbers to substantiate your claim?
Poverty/hunger result from a lack of economic development. Meaningful economic development can only happen under capitalism.
Governments do not create wealth, even when they try. Twentieth-century history, anyone?
2.) Bring world peace.
No, but nothing will do that.
Global capitalism, increasing popularity of secular beliefs, and assertion of individual rights will do it.
Instead, they simply should have thrown out Windows 3.11 and took the Mac OS X approach, keeping the new system virgin-pure while providing a "classic Windows" mode for old apps.
They couldn't do this because most of the PCs of the day just didn't have enough RAM. Do you remember what it would have cost in 1995 to equip a PC with 128MB? It obvously didn't happen because it was way too expensive when compared to the alternatives (non-MS systems, and Windows 9x).
Capitalism is the only moral social system because it is the only system that respects the freedom of the producers to think and the right of the individual to set his own goals and pursue his own happiness.
Whoops, my bad. You're right about emancipation not being an American first. I was unintentionally mangling the (true) fact that western civilization was first in the history of cultures in abolishing slavery.
But you're parroting what some very poorly written textbooks have to say about the great depression...
America *ceased* being a true capitalist society with the passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890.
The great depression was the final, catastrophic result of increasing government intervention in the economy (by which I mean the establishment of the Federal reserve, the income tax, and non-objective laws like the Antitrust Act).
Corporations do not arbitrarily decide how much to pay anyone.
There is a market for CEO talent, just like there's a market for every other position at any given company. Ever heard of supply and demand?
Public companies can't just increase dividends, either. There are formal processes, and shareholders to please. A dividend payment must be balanced against the outlook for the future.
I object to your use of the slur "wage-slaving". An employee is free to leave their job at any time in a capitalist society (which we do not yet live in - ours is a mixed socialist/capitalist economy), and is therefore NOT a slave. You should be ashamed of your equivocation, because real slaves (of which America was the first to emancipate) would have given (and would still give, in other parts of the world where slavery still exists) anything to be as free the people you call "wage slaves"!
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with part of the point you're trying to make. But who is going to pay for 'free' Segways? There is no free lunch; when "the government" pays for something, that money is taken from you and I. You did not explicitly say that the government should do it, but what other organization could do something like that?
And I know I'm being pedantic, but according to this US DOE page, the average American car weighs 3,409 pounds, which is much more than the figure you wrote. And no, I don't think the DOE should exist (after all, the only thing I've ever wanted from them is this obvious statistic). But other government agencies should go away first (like the FDA).
It's wrong to use a phrase like "economic gain" to describe the money stolen through criminal actions like fraud and extortion. People who do this are destroyers of economic value, not creators of it.
It is wrong to punish people for being successful.
America is still a country where absolutely anyone with a functioning mind can become wealthy if they are honest with themselves, and work hard enough. Due dilligence is important, but if this is absent, it's just another case of laziness.
I'm not being paid money to write this. My payment is a freer, richer, more just society, built under the only system that can provide those ends: capitalism.
Two years ago, I bought a shirt from Microsoft (the "Freedom to Innovate" shirt), which I wear proudly on occasion.
I'm not a Microsoft employee, nor have I ever been one. The limit of my association with them is that I buy and use their software. Articles such as these attempt to minimize actual grassroots people like me. But I exist!
And what right do they have to attack people for this funding friendly groups, anyway? Other corporations are not attacked when they give money to the Sierra Club, SaveOurEnvironment.org, and "Rock The Vote", or to thousands of other politically-tainted groups. It's only "astroturfing" when the author of the article disagrees with the viewpoint being promoted.
Microsoft should fund the Ayn Rand Institute. They have the philosophy that could properly defend them, but I think Microsoft is afraid of appearing too radical or offensive to some people. And that, I think, is going to hurt them in the long run.
Headline should read, US Spammers using services of Chinese ISPs, Russian mob. The Spam originates here, and ends up here. The vast majority of Spam is in English, and targeting an American audience.
and from comment #9384576:
> Linford also told the conference that some 70 percent of spam is sent
> from China by American spam outfits who are hosting their servers with
> Chinese ISPs.
That should say: "70% of spam advertises URLs hosted in China" (not "is sent from").
...
> Unless things change drastically, we predict that 80 percent of
> email will be spam by December this year, and it's very likely to go
> to 90 percent by this summer," Linford warned.
That should of course say "next summer".
Really? That contradicts this story posted just two days ago:
The Register is reporting a study by Sandvine.com that blames Microsoft Zombies for 80% of all spam.
So which is it, then?
Wrong.
.NET, and Windows Server than I ever was with Linux, MySQL, vi, and gdb. I don't have to waste time worrying about which toolkit to code for, or how to hack around some mind-numbingly bad design (like X).
I used Linux exclusively (starting with Slackware, running kernel 1.2.3) over a five year period from 1996 until 2000.
The quality/stability of Windows 2000 won me over.
I switched to Windows 2000, and never looked back. Gone are the installation headaches, poor user interfaces, lack of integrated features, poor documentation, and politics of free software. I'm more productive with Visual Studio, SQL Server,
The cost of software licenses is not something I care about: even Microsoft's retail prices add up to far less than 1% of revenue at my company. And if I didn't have their software, I'd be much less productive than I am now. So their stuff pays for itself.
There was nothing wrong with Microsoft's use of those agreements. They involved neither force nor fraud.
For that to happen, Microsoft would have had to lie to the PC makers or threaten them in some physical, non-economic way.
And by the way, the lawsuit you're talking about was made by Caldera (now known as SCO)! They bought the rights to a defunct OS just so they could sue Microsoft on bogus anti-trust charges. Oddly, there was no giant public outcry about this (like there is with the extremely similar SCO/Linux case right now). Hipocracy and short-sightedness, that.
(See this article at the Ayn Rand Institute for more information.)
The example you cite actually illustrates the point I made:
People who live in a cave and grow their own lentils are not exempt from paying taxes. Such a person would eventually face government men carrying rifles if he didn't pay his taxes. Corporations don't do this.
I certainly hope that Windows becomes more pervasive. What's the problem with that if everyone that pays for the product is apathetic or explicitly wants it? For those particularly opposed, alternative/marginal products will exist so long as there are enough paying customers to make it profitable to continue. Failing that, you can always "roll your own".
All of the above situations involve no actual or threatened physical coercion. However, what is likely to be your intended 'solution' is one that does involve force.
It is immoral support government intervention that would discourage others from buying any particular product or service, including Windows.
This is absolutely false: you have made the terrible mistake of confusing economic and political power.
Microsoft does not have the ability to force you to use or pay for their products. Since the government has a legal monopoly on the use of force, they can force you to pay taxes.
I would suggest that you read Rand's Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal for a better understanding of how things should work.
Doh! I didn't mean "market share went up". The correct phrase was "sales increased". That's what I get for posting so hastily...
If the volumes we're talking about are low, it doesn't say much to say that "Linux sales for servers are up 27%"!
Someone who sold a single orange last summer can turn around this year and sell six oranges to his friends and say, "Wow! My market share went up 600%!". However, this means very little.
Without real numbers, all one can correctly say is that Linux is gaining market share. And judging from everyday experience, it has a long road ahead of it.
Few will agree with me, but I think that Disney came out ahead when they dumped Pixar.
Disney holds the copyrights to "Toy Story", "Toy Story 2", "Monsters, Inc.", and "A Bug's Life", and will still make revenue from those properties (think disney-created sequels, toy merchandising, new media releases), all the while Pixar is contractually obligated to make more movies.
The movie business is all about hits, which are inherently unpredicible. Jobs wouldn't even talk to Disney because they refused to sell the rights back to the existing movies. They would have been insane if they had done this, because those properties are worth billions of dollars over the next few years. It's not a wise idea to trade existing hits for only the expectation of new ones.
Their previous attempts at encryption were usually bad. PPTP had a few major problems (related to the handling of passwords and inconsistent applications of a basic rule at Microsoft when using RC4: Don't encrypt the same thing with the same key more than once!).
Algorithms that do encryption are difficult to design properly. However, if you have a good algorithm and know the proper conditions under which you should use it, almost anyone's code will do. Most people understand the need to use code that's been tested by universities, and not just some untested and unverified garbage written over the weekend. Packaging and writing protocols for the encryption algorithms is often as difficult as writing the code that's encapsulated within. Microsoft database programs are very popular, and that's the kind of thing that they excel at.
The problem is more difficult than the credit card/SSL stuff, which is all about letting someone with a browser input some numbers on an unsecure Windows machine connected to the Internet, then packing them in an encrypted package, and shipping them to a well-publicized (but poorly protected) server. Validation is done optionally at either end, which amounts to having NetSol report back on whether or not they are who they say they are. That problem has been solved, but it was some time before all of the design issues and other bugs were worked out. Which is some indication of how the solutions to the remaining database security issues will be solved.
(John McCarthy is known for being the man responsible for Lisp, and some AI research, among other things. I'm surprised that the pages I'm pointing to haven't been mentioned yet in this article.)
Also, you may be interested in his take on progress and sustainability.
Perhaps I'm missing something, but how are modified apple trees going to continue to crowd out the other varieties of apple trees after the first generation of trees grow? It seems to me that a seedless tree would have trouble reproducing...
Since corporations are ultimately owned and operated by people, you would have to limit the first amendment rights of said individuals to make your assertion true.
If you meant Windows vs. Linux, or even a blanket statement about commercial vs. open or "free" software, the answer is no.
Windows and Linux are not equal, interchangeable products.
But this is all beside the point: even if we were to agree that using open or "free" software would save tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in a country like India, it wouldn't matter! Raising the income of every citizen by even a dollar every year totally pales in comparison with the hundreds of dollars in wealth people can make for themselves if capitalism is allowed to flourish.
It sure could, if governments stop using tax revenues to pay Microsoft, and instead invested in agriculture, farming, and the like. (I realize those are two big "ifs" and I also realize that world hunger is now a political problem, not a logistics problem).
Total bullshit. Where are your figures? Do you have any real numbers to substantiate your claim?
Poverty/hunger result from a lack of economic development. Meaningful economic development can only happen under capitalism.
Governments do not create wealth, even when they try. Twentieth-century history, anyone?
2.) Bring world peace.
No, but nothing will do that.
Global capitalism, increasing popularity of secular beliefs, and assertion of individual rights will do it.
See Andrew Bernstein's talk, "Global Capitalism: The Solution To World Poverty and Oppression"
They couldn't do this because most of the PCs of the day just didn't have enough RAM. Do you remember what it would have cost in 1995 to equip a PC with 128MB? It obvously didn't happen because it was way too expensive when compared to the alternatives (non-MS systems, and Windows 9x).
Capitalism is the only moral social system because it is the only system that respects the freedom of the producers to think and the right of the individual to set his own goals and pursue his own happiness.
http://www.moraldefense.com/Philosophy/Essays/The_ Moral_Basis_of_Capitalism.htm
Open Source's Pandora's Box: http://www.optimizemag.com/article/showArticle.jht ml;jsessionid=SCOLMXYKK3XVSQSNDBCCKHQ?articleId=17 701039
I was not able to identify any "distortions and half-truths" (Perhaps I'm not as knowledgeable as you). Can you point them out to me?
What is your legal (professional) background? The author is a practicing lawyer - where did you get your law degree?
But you're parroting what some very poorly written textbooks have to say about the great depression...
America *ceased* being a true capitalist society with the passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890.
The great depression was the final, catastrophic result of increasing government intervention in the economy (by which I mean the establishment of the Federal reserve, the income tax, and non-objective laws like the Antitrust Act).
Corporations do not arbitrarily decide how much to pay anyone.
There is a market for CEO talent, just like there's a market for every other position at any given company. Ever heard of supply and demand?
Public companies can't just increase dividends, either. There are formal processes, and shareholders to please. A dividend payment must be balanced against the outlook for the future.
I object to your use of the slur "wage-slaving". An employee is free to leave their job at any time in a capitalist society (which we do not yet live in - ours is a mixed socialist/capitalist economy), and is therefore NOT a slave. You should be ashamed of your equivocation, because real slaves (of which America was the first to emancipate) would have given (and would still give, in other parts of the world where slavery still exists) anything to be as free the people you call "wage slaves"!