Indeed. Bill Gates had a vision; A computer in every home, and his companies software running on them. Moreover, a major part of his vision was that people were going to pay for that software. Remember that letter?.
It sounds silly now, but back in 1976, the idea that people were going to pay for the software on their home PCs was not a settled issue. If GNU programs, warez, freeware, we applications, and the Linuz kernel have shown one thing, it's that this is still not a settled issue. Software is not viewed in the same way as hardware. When it's so cheap and easy to copy bits, its understandable that people pay so little heed to their supposed worth.
Nevertheless, Bill Gates built an empire, probably the largest and most influential company in history, entirely around the concept of selling numbers to people with computers. You may not like the way he did it, but the fact is that his long term goals and ambitions have shaped the computer industry and indeed the world for the last 30 years. We would not have had a usable, cheap and pervasive home desktop OS in the 90s without Microsoft. We paid the price in security woes and lock in, but we got our desktops.
People talk about the internet, but people needed computers in their homes before they could go online. And that's where Bill Gates and Microsoft came in. Unfortunately, that's not where they intend to bow out.
What about TB tapes? I assume those would still weigh less than their Hard drive equivalents. For that matter, what about high density optical media? Does a 2TB Hard drive still weigh less than 40 Blu-Rays? I have no idea, but I'm guessing tap at least might still weigh less.
I play games. A four hour session is a regular occurrence for me. Over the years, games have gotten more immersive and sophisticated, and even with a dozen or so buttons, analog sticks and analog sensitivity, many buttons have context sensitive actions or use "shift key" functions. Characters can perform a dozen action at any given moment, and indeed need to be able to do so at a moments notice. You need to be able to play the game with a speed as close to "thought" as possible.
Controllers are currently the best way we have of controlling all kinds of video games, in particular 2D and 3D third person titles, which comprise the largest segment of games. Dual analog sticks have cut the Gordian knot of 3D movement and camera control. Analog buttons allow "volume control" in issued commands. Even FPS titles, with their increasing roster of (needed) actions, are more ergonomically played on controllers.
This is no accident. The modern controller is the result of a slow, continuous, and at times retrograde, evolutionary process. The current incarnation: Left-Dpad/ Right main buttons/ Twin Analog Stick/ Center control buttons/ Shoulder buttons/ has not emerged from thin air. It is the end result of continuous refinment and feedback over thirty years. To throw all that out, especially given its huge success, is mad folly.
I cannot do everything I do with a controller using a motion control system. It's not possible now, and it never will be possible. I can play a gimmicky game or two, but when it comes to 3D movement and camera control, I need analog sticks. When it comes to jumping firing a weapon, I need a tactile button press. When it comes to pausing or main menus, I need dedicated function keys. I cannot make do with waving around dongles, lurching my arms about, or making a convoluted gesture if I want to do any of these things. Or at least, I can't do that for 4-6 hours straight.
Motion control is a gimmick. It can never, ever be the main way of controlling video games. Perhaps in time, our current methods will be replaced. But I see that happening in a gradual evolution process, not in a huge marketing driven push for accessibility at the expense of usability.
As a younger man I used to get very upset about the gap between rich and poor, pointing to this type of excess as an example.
What bothered me was never the gap, but the way that gap was both created and maintained. Over the last 30 years, that gap has widened considerably. And most of that gap is made from the rich getting a LOT richer under a system of rules stacked in their favour. There is very little chance of any poor person with talent and drive making it to the top, and there is almost no chance of someone with no talent, or skills, and little worth of falling from the top under any circumstances.
Witness golden parachutes for the people who brought the world economy to its knees, while people who actually work for a living get fired left and right. This is the logically inevitable conclusion of the system that has been promoted for the last three decades.
How do you play a FPS or a RTS (which account for most of the PC games) using a Wiimote?
Same way you play them with a mouse. Tense up, breath heavily, make swift twitching movements and press the left click/fire button eight times for every needed press. Then issue a stream of profanities, whether or not you're winning.
Seriously... What do you expect, if you look up an article on a martial arts weapon, if teenagers/kids/TMNT fans have the ability to edit it?
Edit? How about editorialise, revise, review and completely control all information on the page, and all access to page edits. The ability to twist the article to their own point of view, lock it down and keep it there for as long as they hold an interest. The ability to undo edits they disagree with and ban those who try to set things right.
That is how we should assess the quality of Wikipedia as a whole. Not by the information on it, but by the process through which that information is created. Right now the process is rotten and corrupt, and so is Wikipedia. As a whole.
Amen. Whatever features and complexity Nethack promised were completely lost on me as I spent:
- One hour trying to understand the controls. - Two hours floundering around the first few levels, trying to find an exit - Ten minutes actually fighting enemies and doing stuff - Five minutes unsuccessfully trying to find a way not to die of thirst.
Then the game wipes your save file and throws you back to the beginning. Fuck that. I'm off to play a game that doesn't deliberately try to waste my time. I'm not 14 years old any more, and even when I was I don't have that much spare time.
If all you want to do is "get in shape" you can do it in 30-45 minutes a day. The most important thing is to start out with stretching, and once you're stretched out, do some cardio (jogging, jumping rope, etc) for AT LEAST 20 minutes.
Jesus fucking christ. The attitude of some fitness nuts frightens me sometimes.
You do not, do not, do not need to waste 45 minutes of every day working up a sweat and sore muscles if you just want to stay "in shape". If you're looking to win some medal, then yes, but be prepared to deal with the after effects of such extreme exercise in later life.
If you want to stay in shape, you just have to cut down on junk food and get an outdoor hobby that keeps you mobile for an hour or so on the weekends. Swimming, soccer, cycling, jogging, gardening. That's all most people will ever need. These health nuts who spend who torture themselves daily, spend weekends doing yoga or karate and who subsist on treebark and goat's milk are not some physical ideal everyone should aspire to!
The hardest part about working out is getting started. It feels counter-intuitive. It hurts. There is pain associated with it. Your body will tell you to stop doing it. The lazy voice in the back of your head will talk you out of it.
What the fuck?! Going for a walk in the woods is actually fun in my experience. You get great views from the top of hills too. Sailing? Maybe you could try horse riding, I don't know. The point is, if exercise isn't fun, then no one in their right mind will keep it up. You have to find an activity that keeps you healthy, not a penance.
It's important to remember that a lot of people aren't yet focused on bluray.
DVD Jon and Co. cracked CSS in 1999, long before DVD hit its stride. The reality is that CSS was vastly easier to circumvent, virtually trivial, compared to the protections on HD media. AES encryption is not something that can be broken in a few minutes by a cracking program. We're talking about a fundamentally difficult encryption method.
The main issue here is that the content industry has built Blu-Ray distribution around devices which do not trust their owners. This is the first concrete deployment of "trusted computing" type system, and the reality is that it is working. Despite the best efforts of hackers everywhere, Blu-Ray has not been cracked and most likely never will be.
The content industry has won this round, and will continue to win with ever more secure encryption and a legion of untrusting, internet connected players in peoples living rooms. The genie is back in the bottle. Once DVD dies, or is executed, the age of high quality movie rips will be behind us.
Usenet is still being used? I didn't think anybody posted there anymore.
Yes! You are correct. Nobody is using Usenet. Nobody. I can definitely say with complete cromulence that Usenet is a ghost service of no great importance. Whatsoever. At all. Now or ever, in fact.
They depend upon the suggestions of Land Grant research institutions and the conclusions of the USDA and FDA when deciding which practices to implement on their farms to try and stay profitable while maintaining the health of their cows. Farmers were told that feeding rendered meat to cattle in small quantities was safe, and saved them money.
That's not a valid excuse. No one in their right mind would ever think that feeding pigs to pigs, sheep to sheep or cattle to cattle was a good idea. These research institutions probably conducted their research at the behest of the meat industry, lokking for a place to offload excessive offal, and factory farms jumped on it. Common sense was flat out ignored in the quest for profits.
Antibiotics are used against bacteria. the Flu is a Virus. Consequently, you are full of shit.
That was my error. I apologise if I mislead anyone. I misrepresented the effects of the anti-biotics dose on pigs. As you correctly say, anti-biotics cannot effect viruses.
But they did cause the Swine Flu virus to emerge via their application. Here's an article which discusses the conditions in factory pig farms which lead to the flu epidemic in North American pig farms. The relevant passages
The immobility, poisonous air and terror of confinement badly damage the pigs' immune systems. They become susceptible to infection, and in such dense quarters microbes or parasites or fungi, once established in one pig, will rush spritelike through the whole population. Accordingly, factory pigs are infused with a huge range of antibiotics and vaccines, and are doused with insecticides. Without these compounds -- oxytetracycline, draxxin, ceftiofur, tiamulin -- diseases would likely kill them.
These conditions lead to an enviornment in pig farms which was ripe for a pandemic. This article discusses how the conditions lead to the spread of the virulent pig flu which would evolve into Swine Flu. The relevant quote here is
"Industrial farms are super-incubators for viruses," said Bob Martin, former executive director of the Pew Commission on Industrial Animal Farm Production, and a long-time critic of the so-called "contained animal feeding operations."
The dosing of pigs with anti-biotics was one of the key elements which lead to the Swine Flu outbreak. It did not make the Swine Flu resistant to anti-biotics, but it did create the strain in the first place. Once again, I apologise for the unintentional misinformation.
Often a few pennies make the difference between losing money on every cow and making money on every cow.
Yes, but right now the pressures are on the cost to produce beef. They are what is being driven down, at the cost of our health and safety. Admittedly the consumer is a fault for not paying more for quality meat. But when organisations like the FDA label meat from pigs that have eaten pigs, pigs have been sick and kept alive only by powerful medication, pigs and cattle have died on the way to the slaugherhouse as being "quality" meat, what are consumers to do? Meat is treated as a commodity, and producers are in a race to the bottom, at our expense.
Basing our economy on something that may or may not have any actual long-term value (depending whether nations play nice and protect each others' IP) is actually quite momentous.
Forget long term. The real question facing is is whether intellectual property has any value whatsoever. While various arguments may have sufficed in bygone days, in the digital age it's hard to justify how something which has unlimited supply can still have a non zero price. As technology improves and it becomes trivial to copy and distribute movies and even vast databases, this question will only become more pointed.
Personally, I think that we will need to sacrifice the idea of copyright protection for profit in order to protect the idea of copyright protection for moral purposes.
To try and make a long story short, but not too short:
Malcolm Gladwell and Chris Anderson are, according to the Guardian newspaper, "Two of the world's leading thinkers". A title seemingly obtained from a long career of writing endless books about things no one really cares about, but everyone likes to have an opinion on.
Andeson is the author of a book called, "Free: The Future of a Radical Price", in which he argued that in an age where terabyte drives can be had for less than $100 , and megabytes of data can be whizzed around the tubes in seconds, a story or articles or other pieces of data only a few kilobytes in size can only be worth, well, nothing.
The spat began when , Gladwell, in his review of the book, became a bit, harsh, in his critques of Anderson, calling his arguments "pithy"(sic!) and "uncompromising", and generally regarded Anderson's arguments as lacking in substance(my word!).
Unfortunately, this rather vicious assault came at a time when Anderson was recently caught plagiarising material, and worse from Wikipedia, so he must have felt a need to defend his intellectual honor from Gladwell's slights. He therefore promptly responded with am open letter titled "Dear Malcom: Why so threatened?"
At this point everyone in the playground let out a collective "OOOUUUUHHHHHHHHH!!!" and someone was heard to yell "Fight!". Needless to say, this sort of hubbub is rarely seen in such great intellectual circles, and the social clubs are just brimming with gossip about the scandal.
The Guardian, ever the vigilant reporter of great matters of state, has dutifully brought the matter to the attention of the greater public. In addition, their great commentator Murad Ahmed, has already declared that Gladwell "wins this one on points", which is certain to stir things up a bit.
I say let it go down. Regulate them into the dust. (Full disclosure, I abhor the meat industry.)
While the meat industry, and food industry in general, is guilty of a swathe of scandals, it's important to remember that without that industry, few of us would eat as well as we do.
If we want to have cheap, (reasonably) nutritious food, then some policies of the food industry are going to have to be tolerated to a certain degree. This doesn't mean we should accept all of the repulsive practices that the industry has come up with. But it does mean that our meat is not always going to come to our table via paths we'd like it to take.
It 1) Improved public perception of the safety of meat, increasing sales,
Forget perception. It improved the safety, and quality, of meat full stop.
The reality is that the food industry as a whole needs these regulations. Left to their own devices, food producers will quite happily sell us sawdust and animal faeces to eat, feed dead cows to other cows, and buy, sell and slaughter sick, dying and dead animals that have been hauled across continents. All for a few pennies extra.
BSE would not have happened if their was regulation of the kind of practices the meat industry was using. The Gros Michel banana would still be on shelves if anyone had had the sense to put a stop to the homogenisation in the fruit industry. Swine Flu's resistance to medication is the direct result of feeding battery farmed pigs anti-biotics instead of reducing pig density.
The food industry cannot, will not and should not ever be allowed to regulate itself. While microchip tags seem frivolously sophisticated for a task that plastic ear tags have accomplished successfully for years, the concept of cattle IDs is an appropriate measure to control disease, improve meat safety and generally keep a tighter leash on an industry that should never be allowed to roam freerange.
Indeed, the party is over. The site has been defeated.
This is a massive victory for the *AA organisations. There is little doubt that the site is being sold to pay off the colossal fines incurred as a result of the Pirate bay trial. It's probably the case that the final straw was the appeal courts brazen exoneration of the original trial judge on charges of bias.
At this point, the Bay founders probably realise just how much the entire justice system was railed against them. With the media industries monetary, political and personal connections being able to exert such heavy influence on the Swedish justice system, they never had a ghost of a chance and now they know it. Remember how confident they were when the trial began. I think they've finally lost that enthusiasm.
This case has proven one great truth. Even those a bold, outspoken and idealistic as the Pirate Bay founders can and will be broken by the weight of legal and political forces that can be sent against them. Any centralised component in a P2P system is and forever will be a critical weakpoint. This includes search engines like Google.
The only possible way for P2P to succeed, and with it a free internet, is for the system to become totally and utterly decentralised. Nothing else will suffice. There can be no one site, no one client, no one port, no one encryption method that can remain to scuttle the entire project. It must be, like TCP or SMTP, an ideal which no one controls yet everyone can use. It must not be tied to a single person, or webhost, or legal system. If it is, then the weakest link in the chain will shatter under the weight it will be forced to bear.
Wikipedia cannot, ever be trusted. It's not the information that's the problem. In fact, it's not even the malicious editors. It's the process. The process of editing information on Wikipedia is set up to allow manipulation, censorship and propaganda by anyone willing to spend the effort.
The summary says it all:
The sanitizing was a team effort, led by Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, along with Wikipedia administrators and people at The Times.
This is the process of information control. If you want something on or off Wikipedia, the goal is to ingratiate yourself with, or outright become, one of the people with authority over the articles. Lock, delete, edit, undo and generally abuse every one of the hundreds of bureaucratic hurdles that have been created in order to mould pages to your worldview and no other. The obstacles to dealing with misinformation are far, far more numerous than putting up, and guarding, that misinformation in the first place.
My own experiences are many, but most recently, I have tried to undo an edit that turned a "religion" field in a scientist infobox into a "religious stance" field. The ensuing plastering of "atheist", "christian" and "deist" tags on scientist infoboxes left and right left little doubt that the pages were being commandeered into a larger "culture war" debate.
My efforts to undo this and return the tag to its original status were for nought. The template was locked down tight. When I argued for a reversion, I was stonewalled. They argued for "consensus", that revision could only take place once agreement was reached, that their existed "guidelines" on the page directing that the tag could be used in this way. All this despite the fact that no agreement had ever been reached on the change in the first place.
The purpose of all the rules and regulations and procedures was clear. Someone wanted that tag to stay the way it was, and was prepared to go to great lengths to make sure of that outcome. Wikipedia admins have elevated stonewalling to an artform.
People own Wikipedia pages. Entire topics have been purged. Consider the fate of Pidgey, purged from existance simply because certain people took exception to his presence and began a campaign to excise him. You may consider these issues trivial, but make no mistake; they show an systemic and fatal failure in the ability of Wikipedia to police itself.
Methods exist, and are defended, which allow persons of ill intent to control the flow and presentation of any page so long as they are willing to expend the effort. This state of affairs did not come about by chance. It is a status quo admired and supported from the very top, with Wales himself turning to it again and again. The rot has set in at the top in Wikipedia and the whole structure is now tainted.
Wikipedia cannot be trusted. For anything. Ever. There is no way whatsoever of knowing who controls the flow of information, or what their intent is, on any page. Wikipedia and its admins have no interest in the truth; only in their ability to control it.
The Reichstag fire occurred in a Germany that had seen years of continuous street battles, protests and political fracas between communist and fascist militias. Moreover, the Nazi's had preached for years about remaking Germany in a new fascist image. Top top it off, the crackdown following the fire was blunt and direct, and it would take the Nazi's years of gradual legislation to remould Germany completely.
By contrast, after September 11th, it took the US less than a month to invade another country. Within two months, the sweeping PATRIOT Act did more and lasting damage to US freedoms than any Reichstag decree. It took the Nazi's two months to open the Dachau concentration camp, but it only took the US 27 days to open Guantanamo.
The Reichstag fire took place in a time of political upheaval, economic depression, civil anarchy and with Germany utterly downtrodden after defeat in the first World War. September 11th took place in a climate of stable government, favorable economic climate, domestic calm and with the US in a historically unprecendented position of unipolar, worldwide supremacy. Yet the reaction of the US was faster, harsher and wider in scope than any of the early day Nazi crackdowns.
I stand by my point. Americans are tightly wound, and have and will embrace a mob mentality with a swiftness and zeal that is rarely, if ever, seen in other nations. Americans will of course be the first to deny this, but the irony is that their fervent belief in innate American freedom is exactly what has lead to their great complacency in the face of encroaching tyranny.
Perhaps amidst your studies, you came across the concept of a contextomy. Specifically how I was referring to how the speed and disproportion of American reaction to events as being what marks those reactions out.
Not only are you wrong now, but you are wrong in the past and almost certainly the future.
While I cannot speak for the future, I'm afraid I cannot point to a single event in history that has ever lead as quickly and sweepingly to the reactions seen in America after September 11th. But considering as you claim to have historical background, perhaps you would care to illuminate any other overreactions throughout history on the scale and speed of American ones? I await your reply with interest.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed. Bill Gates had a vision; A computer in every home, and his companies software running on them. Moreover, a major part of his vision was that people were going to pay for that software. Remember that letter?.
It sounds silly now, but back in 1976, the idea that people were going to pay for the software on their home PCs was not a settled issue. If GNU programs, warez, freeware, we applications, and the Linuz kernel have shown one thing, it's that this is still not a settled issue. Software is not viewed in the same way as hardware. When it's so cheap and easy to copy bits, its understandable that people pay so little heed to their supposed worth.
Nevertheless, Bill Gates built an empire, probably the largest and most influential company in history, entirely around the concept of selling numbers to people with computers. You may not like the way he did it, but the fact is that his long term goals and ambitions have shaped the computer industry and indeed the world for the last 30 years. We would not have had a usable, cheap and pervasive home desktop OS in the 90s without Microsoft. We paid the price in security woes and lock in, but we got our desktops.
People talk about the internet, but people needed computers in their homes before they could go online. And that's where Bill Gates and Microsoft came in. Unfortunately, that's not where they intend to bow out.
What about TB tapes? I assume those would still weigh less than their Hard drive equivalents. For that matter, what about high density optical media? Does a 2TB Hard drive still weigh less than 40 Blu-Rays? I have no idea, but I'm guessing tap at least might still weigh less.
Good idea, except they stopped monitoring when they found out your sites are all still under construction.
Or is it simply that you don't have the upper body strength to wave your arms about for 8 hours a day.
I play games. A four hour session is a regular occurrence for me. Over the years, games have gotten more immersive and sophisticated, and even with a dozen or so buttons, analog sticks and analog sensitivity, many buttons have context sensitive actions or use "shift key" functions. Characters can perform a dozen action at any given moment, and indeed need to be able to do so at a moments notice. You need to be able to play the game with a speed as close to "thought" as possible.
Controllers are currently the best way we have of controlling all kinds of video games, in particular 2D and 3D third person titles, which comprise the largest segment of games. Dual analog sticks have cut the Gordian knot of 3D movement and camera control. Analog buttons allow "volume control" in issued commands. Even FPS titles, with their increasing roster of (needed) actions, are more ergonomically played on controllers.
This is no accident. The modern controller is the result of a slow, continuous, and at times retrograde, evolutionary process. The current incarnation: Left-Dpad/ Right main buttons/ Twin Analog Stick/ Center control buttons/ Shoulder buttons/ has not emerged from thin air. It is the end result of continuous refinment and feedback over thirty years. To throw all that out, especially given its huge success, is mad folly.
I cannot do everything I do with a controller using a motion control system. It's not possible now, and it never will be possible. I can play a gimmicky game or two, but when it comes to 3D movement and camera control, I need analog sticks. When it comes to jumping firing a weapon, I need a tactile button press. When it comes to pausing or main menus, I need dedicated function keys. I cannot make do with waving around dongles, lurching my arms about, or making a convoluted gesture if I want to do any of these things. Or at least, I can't do that for 4-6 hours straight.
Motion control is a gimmick. It can never, ever be the main way of controlling video games. Perhaps in time, our current methods will be replaced. But I see that happening in a gradual evolution process, not in a huge marketing driven push for accessibility at the expense of usability.
I imagine if he had tried to pull that in the US he'd be colling his heels naked in a TSA holding cell by now.
And I thought only Hulu were anal about copyright restrictions.
What bothered me was never the gap, but the way that gap was both created and maintained. Over the last 30 years, that gap has widened considerably. And most of that gap is made from the rich getting a LOT richer under a system of rules stacked in their favour. There is very little chance of any poor person with talent and drive making it to the top, and there is almost no chance of someone with no talent, or skills, and little worth of falling from the top under any circumstances.
Witness golden parachutes for the people who brought the world economy to its knees, while people who actually work for a living get fired left and right. This is the logically inevitable conclusion of the system that has been promoted for the last three decades.
Same way you play them with a mouse. Tense up, breath heavily, make swift twitching movements and press the left click/fire button eight times for every needed press. Then issue a stream of profanities, whether or not you're winning.
Edit? How about editorialise, revise, review and completely control all information on the page, and all access to page edits. The ability to twist the article to their own point of view, lock it down and keep it there for as long as they hold an interest. The ability to undo edits they disagree with and ban those who try to set things right.
That is how we should assess the quality of Wikipedia as a whole. Not by the information on it, but by the process through which that information is created. Right now the process is rotten and corrupt, and so is Wikipedia. As a whole.
The 5th amendment saw nothing.
Amen. Whatever features and complexity Nethack promised were completely lost on me as I spent:
- One hour trying to understand the controls.
- Two hours floundering around the first few levels, trying to find an exit
- Ten minutes actually fighting enemies and doing stuff
- Five minutes unsuccessfully trying to find a way not to die of thirst.
Then the game wipes your save file and throws you back to the beginning. Fuck that. I'm off to play a game that doesn't deliberately try to waste my time. I'm not 14 years old any more, and even when I was I don't have that much spare time.
Finish Devil May Cry 4, or better yet 3, then come back to me.
Jesus fucking christ. The attitude of some fitness nuts frightens me sometimes.
You do not, do not, do not need to waste 45 minutes of every day working up a sweat and sore muscles if you just want to stay "in shape". If you're looking to win some medal, then yes, but be prepared to deal with the after effects of such extreme exercise in later life.
If you want to stay in shape, you just have to cut down on junk food and get an outdoor hobby that keeps you mobile for an hour or so on the weekends. Swimming, soccer, cycling, jogging, gardening. That's all most people will ever need. These health nuts who spend who torture themselves daily, spend weekends doing yoga or karate and who subsist on treebark and goat's milk are not some physical ideal everyone should aspire to!
What the fuck?! Going for a walk in the woods is actually fun in my experience. You get great views from the top of hills too. Sailing? Maybe you could try horse riding, I don't know. The point is, if exercise isn't fun, then no one in their right mind will keep it up. You have to find an activity that keeps you healthy, not a penance.
DVD Jon and Co. cracked CSS in 1999, long before DVD hit its stride. The reality is that CSS was vastly easier to circumvent, virtually trivial, compared to the protections on HD media. AES encryption is not something that can be broken in a few minutes by a cracking program. We're talking about a fundamentally difficult encryption method.
The main issue here is that the content industry has built Blu-Ray distribution around devices which do not trust their owners. This is the first concrete deployment of "trusted computing" type system, and the reality is that it is working. Despite the best efforts of hackers everywhere, Blu-Ray has not been cracked and most likely never will be.
The content industry has won this round, and will continue to win with ever more secure encryption and a legion of untrusting, internet connected players in peoples living rooms. The genie is back in the bottle. Once DVD dies, or is executed, the age of high quality movie rips will be behind us.
Yes! You are correct. Nobody is using Usenet. Nobody. I can definitely say with complete cromulence that Usenet is a ghost service of no great importance. Whatsoever. At all. Now or ever, in fact.
That's not a valid excuse. No one in their right mind would ever think that feeding pigs to pigs, sheep to sheep or cattle to cattle was a good idea. These research institutions probably conducted their research at the behest of the meat industry, lokking for a place to offload excessive offal, and factory farms jumped on it. Common sense was flat out ignored in the quest for profits.
That was my error. I apologise if I mislead anyone. I misrepresented the effects of the anti-biotics dose on pigs. As you correctly say, anti-biotics cannot effect viruses.
But they did cause the Swine Flu virus to emerge via their application. Here's an article which discusses the conditions in factory pig farms which lead to the flu epidemic in North American pig farms. The relevant passages
These conditions lead to an enviornment in pig farms which was ripe for a pandemic. This article discusses how the conditions lead to the spread of the virulent pig flu which would evolve into Swine Flu. The relevant quote here is
The dosing of pigs with anti-biotics was one of the key elements which lead to the Swine Flu outbreak. It did not make the Swine Flu resistant to anti-biotics, but it did create the strain in the first place. Once again, I apologise for the unintentional misinformation.
Yes, but right now the pressures are on the cost to produce beef. They are what is being driven down, at the cost of our health and safety. Admittedly the consumer is a fault for not paying more for quality meat. But when organisations like the FDA label meat from pigs that have eaten pigs, pigs have been sick and kept alive only by powerful medication, pigs and cattle have died on the way to the slaugherhouse as being "quality" meat, what are consumers to do? Meat is treated as a commodity, and producers are in a race to the bottom, at our expense.
Forget long term. The real question facing is is whether intellectual property has any value whatsoever. While various arguments may have sufficed in bygone days, in the digital age it's hard to justify how something which has unlimited supply can still have a non zero price. As technology improves and it becomes trivial to copy and distribute movies and even vast databases, this question will only become more pointed.
Personally, I think that we will need to sacrifice the idea of copyright protection for profit in order to protect the idea of copyright protection for moral purposes.
To try and make a long story short, but not too short:
Malcolm Gladwell and Chris Anderson are, according to the Guardian newspaper, "Two of the world's leading thinkers". A title seemingly obtained from a long career of writing endless books about things no one really cares about, but everyone likes to have an opinion on.
Andeson is the author of a book called, "Free: The Future of a Radical Price", in which he argued that in an age where terabyte drives can be had for less than $100 , and megabytes of data can be whizzed around the tubes in seconds, a story or articles or other pieces of data only a few kilobytes in size can only be worth, well, nothing.
The spat began when , Gladwell, in his review of the book, became a bit, harsh, in his critques of Anderson, calling his arguments "pithy"(sic!) and "uncompromising", and generally regarded Anderson's arguments as lacking in substance(my word!).
Unfortunately, this rather vicious assault came at a time when Anderson was recently caught plagiarising material, and worse from Wikipedia, so he must have felt a need to defend his intellectual honor from Gladwell's slights. He therefore promptly responded with am open letter titled "Dear Malcom: Why so threatened?"
At this point everyone in the playground let out a collective "OOOUUUUHHHHHHHHH!!!" and someone was heard to yell "Fight!". Needless to say, this sort of hubbub is rarely seen in such great intellectual circles, and the social clubs are just brimming with gossip about the scandal.
The Guardian, ever the vigilant reporter of great matters of state, has dutifully brought the matter to the attention of the greater public. In addition, their great commentator Murad Ahmed, has already declared that Gladwell "wins this one on points", which is certain to stir things up a bit.
It's all so exciting! Wouldn't you agree?!
While the meat industry, and food industry in general, is guilty of a swathe of scandals, it's important to remember that without that industry, few of us would eat as well as we do.
If we want to have cheap, (reasonably) nutritious food, then some policies of the food industry are going to have to be tolerated to a certain degree. This doesn't mean we should accept all of the repulsive practices that the industry has come up with. But it does mean that our meat is not always going to come to our table via paths we'd like it to take.
Forget perception. It improved the safety, and quality, of meat full stop.
The reality is that the food industry as a whole needs these regulations. Left to their own devices, food producers will quite happily sell us sawdust and animal faeces to eat, feed dead cows to other cows, and buy, sell and slaughter sick, dying and dead animals that have been hauled across continents. All for a few pennies extra.
BSE would not have happened if their was regulation of the kind of practices the meat industry was using. The Gros Michel banana would still be on shelves if anyone had had the sense to put a stop to the homogenisation in the fruit industry. Swine Flu's resistance to medication is the direct result of feeding battery farmed pigs anti-biotics instead of reducing pig density.
The food industry cannot, will not and should not ever be allowed to regulate itself. While microchip tags seem frivolously sophisticated for a task that plastic ear tags have accomplished successfully for years, the concept of cattle IDs is an appropriate measure to control disease, improve meat safety and generally keep a tighter leash on an industry that should never be allowed to roam freerange.
And will HTML 5 videos play if I don't have javascript enabled? Oops! Oh well. Back to flash then.
Indeed, the party is over. The site has been defeated.
This is a massive victory for the *AA organisations. There is little doubt that the site is being sold to pay off the colossal fines incurred as a result of the Pirate bay trial. It's probably the case that the final straw was the appeal courts brazen exoneration of the original trial judge on charges of bias.
At this point, the Bay founders probably realise just how much the entire justice system was railed against them. With the media industries monetary, political and personal connections being able to exert such heavy influence on the Swedish justice system, they never had a ghost of a chance and now they know it. Remember how confident they were when the trial began. I think they've finally lost that enthusiasm.
This case has proven one great truth. Even those a bold, outspoken and idealistic as the Pirate Bay founders can and will be broken by the weight of legal and political forces that can be sent against them. Any centralised component in a P2P system is and forever will be a critical weakpoint. This includes search engines like Google.
The only possible way for P2P to succeed, and with it a free internet, is for the system to become totally and utterly decentralised. Nothing else will suffice. There can be no one site, no one client, no one port, no one encryption method that can remain to scuttle the entire project. It must be, like TCP or SMTP, an ideal which no one controls yet everyone can use. It must not be tied to a single person, or webhost, or legal system. If it is, then the weakest link in the chain will shatter under the weight it will be forced to bear.
Wikipedia cannot, ever be trusted. It's not the information that's the problem. In fact, it's not even the malicious editors. It's the process. The process of editing information on Wikipedia is set up to allow manipulation, censorship and propaganda by anyone willing to spend the effort.
The summary says it all:
This is the process of information control. If you want something on or off Wikipedia, the goal is to ingratiate yourself with, or outright become, one of the people with authority over the articles. Lock, delete, edit, undo and generally abuse every one of the hundreds of bureaucratic hurdles that have been created in order to mould pages to your worldview and no other. The obstacles to dealing with misinformation are far, far more numerous than putting up, and guarding, that misinformation in the first place.
My own experiences are many, but most recently, I have tried to undo an edit that turned a "religion" field in a scientist infobox into a "religious stance" field. The ensuing plastering of "atheist", "christian" and "deist" tags on scientist infoboxes left and right left little doubt that the pages were being commandeered into a larger "culture war" debate.
My efforts to undo this and return the tag to its original status were for nought. The template was locked down tight. When I argued for a reversion, I was stonewalled. They argued for "consensus", that revision could only take place once agreement was reached, that their existed "guidelines" on the page directing that the tag could be used in this way. All this despite the fact that no agreement had ever been reached on the change in the first place.
The purpose of all the rules and regulations and procedures was clear. Someone wanted that tag to stay the way it was, and was prepared to go to great lengths to make sure of that outcome. Wikipedia admins have elevated stonewalling to an artform.
People own Wikipedia pages. Entire topics have been purged. Consider the fate of Pidgey, purged from existance simply because certain people took exception to his presence and began a campaign to excise him. You may consider these issues trivial, but make no mistake; they show an systemic and fatal failure in the ability of Wikipedia to police itself.
Methods exist, and are defended, which allow persons of ill intent to control the flow and presentation of any page so long as they are willing to expend the effort. This state of affairs did not come about by chance. It is a status quo admired and supported from the very top, with Wales himself turning to it again and again. The rot has set in at the top in Wikipedia and the whole structure is now tainted.
Wikipedia cannot be trusted. For anything. Ever. There is no way whatsoever of knowing who controls the flow of information, or what their intent is, on any page. Wikipedia and its admins have no interest in the truth; only in their ability to control it.
The Reichstag fire occurred in a Germany that had seen years of continuous street battles, protests and political fracas between communist and fascist militias. Moreover, the Nazi's had preached for years about remaking Germany in a new fascist image. Top top it off, the crackdown following the fire was blunt and direct, and it would take the Nazi's years of gradual legislation to remould Germany completely.
By contrast, after September 11th, it took the US less than a month to invade another country. Within two months, the sweeping PATRIOT Act did more and lasting damage to US freedoms than any Reichstag decree. It took the Nazi's two months to open the Dachau concentration camp, but it only took the US 27 days to open Guantanamo.
The Reichstag fire took place in a time of political upheaval, economic depression, civil anarchy and with Germany utterly downtrodden after defeat in the first World War. September 11th took place in a climate of stable government, favorable economic climate, domestic calm and with the US in a historically unprecendented position of unipolar, worldwide supremacy. Yet the reaction of the US was faster, harsher and wider in scope than any of the early day Nazi crackdowns.
I stand by my point. Americans are tightly wound, and have and will embrace a mob mentality with a swiftness and zeal that is rarely, if ever, seen in other nations. Americans will of course be the first to deny this, but the irony is that their fervent belief in innate American freedom is exactly what has lead to their great complacency in the face of encroaching tyranny.
Perhaps amidst your studies, you came across the concept of a contextomy. Specifically how I was referring to how the speed and disproportion of American reaction to events as being what marks those reactions out.
While I cannot speak for the future, I'm afraid I cannot point to a single event in history that has ever lead as quickly and sweepingly to the reactions seen in America after September 11th. But considering as you claim to have historical background, perhaps you would care to illuminate any other overreactions throughout history on the scale and speed of American ones? I await your reply with interest.