Well yes, it is a bit of an oxymoron, but it's not quite nonsense. They can try to codify sensible conventions for the current state of the art and say, "this is our thinking, as of today, on how things should be done." Developers could then use it as a reference, even if it's not quite a stable standard they can rely on.
As new technology comes along and people are racing to make use of it, it probably makes sense to have somebody trying to set best practices ASAP, and hash out problems as they go. However, I think it's still important to trail along behind and develop a coherent and consistent standard that is more reliable.
It's impossible to be compliant to a "living standard" anyway. I don't see a problem with the two groups working in different ways. Let W3C work on a standard called "HTML 5"that people can meet and claim to be compliant on, and let WHATWG work on a standard called "HTML-current" or something and let them push ahead and develop standards as fast as they can.
Software developers have been doing this kind of thing for a long time, e.g. Debian's stable distribution and Debian's testing distribution.
I don't agree. Mass surveillance is working because most of us aren't very aware that it's going on. When people do notice it's going on and they have a problem with it, they don't have any way to do anything about it.
In my mind, I think the problem is more generalized than just being about facial recognition. When the United States was founded, they included the Bill or Rights to protect citizens from government intrusion, which I believe was a good idea. But with technology, the freedom against unreasonable searches becomes more complicated. Is wiretapping a search? Is it a search to put a tracker on someone to keep track of their whereabouts? If the government can include cameras and microphones and other sensors everywhere, and they can track everywhere you go, everything you say, and everything you do, is that a "search"?
I think the government should certainly regulate how they can collect this kind of information. It's not an issue of putting the genie back in the bottle. We have rules about when law enforcement uses wiretapping. That's technology too, it's just older and so you're used to there being rules. In the same way, we should have rules about when they can use facial recognition or GPS trackers.
I don't think Franken is a well-meaning fool. If there aren't already rules on how the government uses facial recognition tech, there should be.
Just to give a dystopian example, what if the government hooked up cameras everywhere (we already have traffic cameras, cameras in ATMs, security cameras in public buildings), and then tied them all into a computer system that recognized everyone's faces and kept track of your whereabouts?
Yeah, I think there are definitely good reasons to encourage restraint.
For one thing, even if we allow some things, it's important to ask "how far do we go?" What if we develop a procedure to allow someone to run even faster than is humanly possible, but it requires shaving off all unnecessary mass, removing genitals, removing limbs, and adding some kind of crazy prothesis? What if the results leave the person a monster, in constant pain, unable to lead a normal life, but able to run the 100 meter dash 3 seconds faster than a normal human?
So you go through all of this and you win a gold medal and the cyborg olympics. Now what? What do you do with yourself now that you're a monster? Who is responsible for your medical care afterwards?
And here's something that a lot of people wouldn't consider: what about all the kids who are going to undergo similar procedures, ruin their lives, and then *not* win the gold medal? What about the poor kid who comes in last place in the cyborg olympics, or some guy who gets his limbs chopped off and then doesn't manage to qualify?
So that's an extreme case, but it's what already happens with steroids in professional sports. Some poor kid does steroids to become a professional athlete, but even with steroids, it turns out he's just not good enough. So now he has lifelong health problems and broken dreams. There may not be any way to prevent that, be we definitely don't need to be actively encouraging young people to ruin their own lives.
It's certainly interesting to think about what we could do to improve human performance in various ways. In a similar way, I've wondered if there were no firearms and we were still fighting with swords, given our current engineering abilities, what would the best weapons and armor look like? It's a fun hypothetical, but I wouldn't want to start a sword-only war in order to find out.
First, you start of with something that's popular. Then you assume that Americans are too stupid to understand any culture other than the perfectly homogenised average of the USA as portrayed by Hollywood.
And I think that the crazy part of it is that they take something popular, and then they go, "Well American audiences would never go for that! We have to change it." No, American audiences *would* go for that. They did go for that. You know they did, because it was popular enough that you wanted to copy it.
I don't think the problem is necessarily that the producers think the American audience is dumb (though I'm sure it's part of it), but that the producers themselves are dumb. Their job is to make television shows that people want to watch, and they're not very good at it.
Especially on Ninja Warrior. Part of what I like about the show is that, goddamnit, I'm amazed people can do any of that stuff. It's not the same as kids getting a trophy for participating. It's giving someone credit for being a badass, even if they aren't the baddest ass in the room.
I don't think it's *just* that people aren't taking the time to learn new paradigms. I think part of the problem is that the "Start Screen" setup isn't very clear in its design. There are things like invisible menus that only show up when you put your mouse against the side of the screen in a specific place. So not only are the menus hidden and impossible for a brand new user to guess "which items will be in which menus", but the hotspots to trigger the menus are invisible, and it's not clear how to trigger which menus. It's not even clear from the outset how many different menus and hotspots there are.
Beyond that, my experience has been that these menus don't really work. Sometimes you go to the hotspot, and the menus don't trigger. I wasn't able to tell if it was because the menus appearance was contextual, or if the OS just didn't think I meant to open the menu for some reason. If you do get the menu to open, it might disappear if you move your mouse someplace else. If you drill down several levels through the menus, there isn't an obvious way to back out-- you instead need to close the menu and try again.
Now I was trying one of the previews, so maybe these were bugs that have since been fixed. However, they seemed like rather large design problems and not small bugs. Beside all of this, I have a general feeling that expanding the start menu to be a full-screen system has the effect of breaking context while I'm working whenever I want to launch something, and also has the effect of forcing me to move the mouse a lot more than I used to.
It may be an issue of Microsoft adjusting their strategy to account for past mistakes. It took them a very long time to get Windows Vista out the door, and even then it sucked. They might be thinking, "Oh, this OS sucks? Well lets just push it out now and be done with it. We'll fix it in Windows 9, which we'll release in a year and a half."
And I don't even think that Metro is bad. It seems like it could be ok for tablets. The problem is the Microsoft seems intent on forcing desktop users to use it.
Windows 8 would be greatly improved if they just brought the start menu back and made Metro completely optional for desktop users.
It depends on the size of your organization and what you're really trying to do. If the main purpose is to keep an inventory of a small amount of equipment, along with physical location, and you just want to keep the IP information along with it, then setting up software specific to that purpose can be overkill. Sure, you can tie stuff into DNS and DHCP to keep track of IP changes, but it may be that you're also keeping track of printers and peripherals, which won't show up on an IP scan. Maybe you have to install agents on clients to collect the information you want, and then suddenly there's a bug with that agent that interferes with some other piece of software. Even if it makes some things easier, you might also have to enter a bunch of information manually, train people to use it, develop the reports that you want, keep the software up-to-date, troubleshoot problems, bla bla bla.
Your suggestion is good, but it's also important to know what you're getting into. Sometimes low-tech, manual, inefficient, stupid ways of doing things are actually smarter and more efficient.
My theory has been for some time that we're generally going to have our iPhones as our main computers, but in a specific/particular way.
It comes down to this: In the near future, we'll have enough computing power in our pockets to do most of what we need to do on a daily basis. On the other hand, it still won't have enough power to do all the things we'll want to do, and we'll still want big screens, keyboards, and mice. It does not have to be an "either/or" sort of thing. You could create a docking station with a high-speed bus, allowing access to the keyboard, mouse, monitor, and even additional computing power.
So what I imagine happening in the next few years is that you'll carry something like an smartphone or small tablet, and while you're carrying it around, it will work very much like today's smartphones. You'll get to your office and drop your phone into a docking station, and you'll get a UI that is usable as a full desktop OS. It will still run on your phone, but the docking station will be able to hook to a network, peripherals, and multiple displays. The docking station itself can have an additional processor and graphics card, and the dock will provide fast enough access to these co-processors that you'll be able to do fairly high-end work.
The phone will hold your documents, applications, and settings, so you'll get roughly the same environment wherever you dock it. The applications will work both in mobile mode and desktop mode, perhaps with some UI changes for each mode, but the codebase between desktop and mobile operating systems (e.g. iOS and OSX) will be consolidated.
There will still be special cases where people need better performance or additional computing power, but this sort of setup should work well for most people.
If you want an excel file that can be edited simultaneously by multiple users, then maybe consider Google Docs? I'm not sure how well the offline syncing ends up working, but there is some support.
I think there's a lot of improvements that could be made to email, but they generally require server-side support. For example, I'd never bother with "tags" in Thunderbird because that stuff doesn't sync to the server, which means that it's all bound to the client-side. I *do* tag my Gmail messages, because that stuff is stored on the server, and therefore accessible from any client.
That's one example, but I think there's still a lot that could be done for email. I thought Google Wave was an interesting experiment, but the execution and the marketing left some things to be desired. Metadata tagging and attachment handling could be improved. Encryption could be made easier and more fool-proof. Someone could integrate instant messaging, calendars/contacts, SMS messages, and other communications better. Unfortunately, Microsoft seems to be the only company working on client software to do this, but they're able to do it better because they also control the server-side.
I think it only follows that some access to the Internet, and some freedom on the Internet, will need to be recognized as a basic right. It may sound silly, but think of it this way: If "freedom of speech" is a basic and inalienable human right, how divorced can that "free speech" be from communications infrastructure?
The internet is the way that people are communicating and organizing. It's where we share thoughts and ideas and artistic expression. Denying access to the Internet today would be roughly equivalent to denying colonial Americans access to roads and meeting places. You can't say that free speech is a basic human right, and yet still find it reasonable to deny people the means to communicate with each other.
First, think about the context for a second. I'm saying, "fuck shareholders," and your response is "I don't think shareholders will like that!" Well... fuck'em.
But ok, because the thing is I'm not totally serious about saying "fuck'em". It's more that people tend to go off on these rants about how the moral obligation of an officer of a company is to "maximize shareholder profit", and I'm going to an extreme in the other direction to make a point.
The reality is that current officers of companies are not really setting "maximizing shareholder profit" as their highest priority. Some of them really do try to do a good job. My impression is that Steve Jobs, for example, had so much of his ego wrapped up in Apple that he would refuse to release a product that he didn't think was good. I think you could have accountants show him that it would make shareholders a bazillion dollars, and he probably still wouldn't go for it. The end result is that Apple's stock does exceedingly well, but I don't think that was Jobs' primary focus.
Other CEOs are dead-set on collecting huge bonuses by pumping whatever performance numbers get them the bonus. It might mean manipulating the numbers and ruining the company, but they're out for themselves. If they can get 12 consecutive financial quarters where they get huge bonuses, and then the company completely falls apart, that's fine. They've got their golden parachute coming.
So this whole "maximizing shareholder value" is a fiction. It's a scam created by modern-day robber barons that preys on your hopes to get rich by playing the stock market. An investor may invest in order to maximize his own value, but it is not (and generally should not be) the primary goal of a company to maximize their shareholders' value. I believe that businesses would do better-- and therefore shareholders would ultimately do better-- if business leaders made "doing a good job" (in all the various ways that one can do a "good job") the highest priority.
I was sitting here thinking about the concept, and feeling uncomfortable with it for reasons I couldn't quite put my finger on. Your post cleared it up for me. If there's anything we should stop taking for granted, it's that people always act out of "rational self-interest". Or at the very least, we should stop assuming what another person's "rational self-interest" is-- someone may decide that their "rational self-interest" lies more in the eradication of their enemy than their own self-preservation.
Even beyond that, it's not unthinkable for people to get caught up in an escalating situation and to fail to find other options. Someone misjudges a situation, one person tries to call the other's bluff, and the next thing you know, things have spun out of control. You never know what someone is going to do when they feel helpless and trapped.
I don't know. When I saw the Courier Tablet, my first thought was, "Snore. Wake me up when it exists." It wreaked for vaporware.
You see these things all the time, where someone comes up with a general concept that looks cool, but the details of how it works are a little fuzzy. How is file management handled? How does it tell when you're trying to do this action or that action? What exactly is the hardware going to be capable of? What sacrifices are going to have to be made to the design to make it actually usable?
My guess is someone at Microsoft evaluated the design and realized it wasn't going to work. Or else they realized that it would cost $3,000 and no one would be willing to spend that amount. If they ever did bring it to market at a reasonable price, the features and capabilities would be so cut-down that nobody would buy it anyway.
A judge should check whether someone acts within the limits set by the law. A judge shouldn't be publicly trying to change the laws, just like a politician should not try to get involved in a court case to get someone convicted.
Were there laws written specific to allow software patents, or did some judge decide at some point that patent laws applied to software design? If it was decided in a prior case, what is the judge's obligation to follow precedent in this case?
A lot of US law is, in fact, set in precedent in courts. There is a protocol for when judges are supposed to follow precedents, but even so, they can find a way to challenge it if they need to. The real test is whether their challenge will stand up on appeal.
Yeah, I have mixed feelings on this. On the one hand, it sounds bad. It sounds like, in the guise of "helping", the Gates Foundation is actually propping up the system that keeps people stuck in poverty.
On the other hand, I'm sure things aren't that simple. As you say, the traditional model of charity, i.e. "we give you shit with no strings attached", often doesn't work out well. There's the whole idea of, "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." In order deal with the problems of poverty, you need to overhaul the system to create opportunities for people to provide for themselves. You have to build a new system, so you base it on the best system we have. Some would argue that our most successful economic system to date is one which empowers large corporations which exploits workers. Sure, it's a flawed system, but it does seem to generate wealth and provide stability.
On the third hand, I realize that the last paragraph sounds like the justification a super-villain gives for his actions.
On the fourth hand, I don't think Bill Gates deserves as much credit as he gets. People talk about him like he's a saint because he gives away billions of dollars, and sure, that's a good thing to do. It's worth recognizing, though, that it's not such a huge sacrifice on his part. If you gave me $100 billion, I'd happily give away $90 billion to charity. Hell, you could burn $99.9 billion, and I'd still be sitting pretty with no grounds for complaint. Even aside from that, I consider Bill Gates' fortunes to be, at least partially, ill-gotten gains. He ran a brutally manipulative and unethical company, and he ran it ruthlessly. I just can't talk about him as a saint for giving away a portion of his money to people, since I know damned well that the money was earned by exploiting other people.
Call me crazy, but I don't think business should be run like a for-profit business either. That is to say, I don't think people should generally be motivated by, "what's going to generate the most possible profit at the lowest investment over the course of the next quarter."
If you're making a computer OS, then focus on making a kickass computer OS. If you're building hardware, make awesome hardware. Build your business around your business, around doing a good job at the thing your company does, and not around generating short-term profit.
Sure, yes, obviously you need to make a profit. You need to at least break even, or you'll go out of business. But so long as a business is making enough profit to keep their doors open, then in my not-so-humble opinion, they should devote their attention to doing a better job at serving the clients/customers and providing good products, services, and support.
Oh, and yeah, I know. Shareholders, shareholders, bla bla bla. Fuck'em. If we can't run our businesses responsibly because everyone needs to constantly kowtow to the abstract idea of "maximizing investors' profits", then it's time to reevaluate our system of investment.
I would assume that, if it applies to "software" broadly, it also applies to games. I would wonder, though, whether it applies to all copyrighted material.
So if this is upheld, does that mean that Europeans can sell their iTunes purchases? Does that mean that Apple bears some responsibility for enabling those sales, even in cases where there is DRM present?
you can not "own" it in the sense of ownership you do to physical object...
For years, the argument from the content owners/suppliers has been, "You are purchasing a license." That license has terms, and if you agree to the terms-- which they argue you inherently do just by loading the software-- then you are bound by them. They include in the terms that you cannot resell the license.
Honestly, I think it's important to note how much luck plays a role in these success stories. Not necessarily in the sense of "There's nothing special about Zuckerberg-- he was just in the right place at the right time!" But more like, "However smart and talented Zuckerberg might be, he might be waiting tables right now if he weren't in the right place at the right time with the right people."
Certainly he had some strengths that enabled him to succeed when the right opportunities arose. There are also lots of other people with those same strengths who will never make a 6 figure salary.
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Well yes, it is a bit of an oxymoron, but it's not quite nonsense. They can try to codify sensible conventions for the current state of the art and say, "this is our thinking, as of today, on how things should be done." Developers could then use it as a reference, even if it's not quite a stable standard they can rely on.
As new technology comes along and people are racing to make use of it, it probably makes sense to have somebody trying to set best practices ASAP, and hash out problems as they go. However, I think it's still important to trail along behind and develop a coherent and consistent standard that is more reliable.
It's impossible to be compliant to a "living standard" anyway. I don't see a problem with the two groups working in different ways. Let W3C work on a standard called "HTML 5"that people can meet and claim to be compliant on, and let WHATWG work on a standard called "HTML-current" or something and let them push ahead and develop standards as fast as they can.
Software developers have been doing this kind of thing for a long time, e.g. Debian's stable distribution and Debian's testing distribution.
I don't agree. Mass surveillance is working because most of us aren't very aware that it's going on. When people do notice it's going on and they have a problem with it, they don't have any way to do anything about it.
In my mind, I think the problem is more generalized than just being about facial recognition. When the United States was founded, they included the Bill or Rights to protect citizens from government intrusion, which I believe was a good idea. But with technology, the freedom against unreasonable searches becomes more complicated. Is wiretapping a search? Is it a search to put a tracker on someone to keep track of their whereabouts? If the government can include cameras and microphones and other sensors everywhere, and they can track everywhere you go, everything you say, and everything you do, is that a "search"?
I think the government should certainly regulate how they can collect this kind of information. It's not an issue of putting the genie back in the bottle. We have rules about when law enforcement uses wiretapping. That's technology too, it's just older and so you're used to there being rules. In the same way, we should have rules about when they can use facial recognition or GPS trackers.
I don't think Franken is a well-meaning fool. If there aren't already rules on how the government uses facial recognition tech, there should be.
Just to give a dystopian example, what if the government hooked up cameras everywhere (we already have traffic cameras, cameras in ATMs, security cameras in public buildings), and then tied them all into a computer system that recognized everyone's faces and kept track of your whereabouts?
Yeah, I think there are definitely good reasons to encourage restraint.
For one thing, even if we allow some things, it's important to ask "how far do we go?" What if we develop a procedure to allow someone to run even faster than is humanly possible, but it requires shaving off all unnecessary mass, removing genitals, removing limbs, and adding some kind of crazy prothesis? What if the results leave the person a monster, in constant pain, unable to lead a normal life, but able to run the 100 meter dash 3 seconds faster than a normal human?
So you go through all of this and you win a gold medal and the cyborg olympics. Now what? What do you do with yourself now that you're a monster? Who is responsible for your medical care afterwards?
And here's something that a lot of people wouldn't consider: what about all the kids who are going to undergo similar procedures, ruin their lives, and then *not* win the gold medal? What about the poor kid who comes in last place in the cyborg olympics, or some guy who gets his limbs chopped off and then doesn't manage to qualify?
So that's an extreme case, but it's what already happens with steroids in professional sports. Some poor kid does steroids to become a professional athlete, but even with steroids, it turns out he's just not good enough. So now he has lifelong health problems and broken dreams. There may not be any way to prevent that, be we definitely don't need to be actively encouraging young people to ruin their own lives.
It's certainly interesting to think about what we could do to improve human performance in various ways. In a similar way, I've wondered if there were no firearms and we were still fighting with swords, given our current engineering abilities, what would the best weapons and armor look like? It's a fun hypothetical, but I wouldn't want to start a sword-only war in order to find out.
First, you start of with something that's popular. Then you assume that Americans are too stupid to understand any culture other than the perfectly homogenised average of the USA as portrayed by Hollywood.
And I think that the crazy part of it is that they take something popular, and then they go, "Well American audiences would never go for that! We have to change it." No, American audiences *would* go for that. They did go for that. You know they did, because it was popular enough that you wanted to copy it.
I don't think the problem is necessarily that the producers think the American audience is dumb (though I'm sure it's part of it), but that the producers themselves are dumb. Their job is to make television shows that people want to watch, and they're not very good at it.
Especially on Ninja Warrior. Part of what I like about the show is that, goddamnit, I'm amazed people can do any of that stuff. It's not the same as kids getting a trophy for participating. It's giving someone credit for being a badass, even if they aren't the baddest ass in the room.
I don't think it's *just* that people aren't taking the time to learn new paradigms. I think part of the problem is that the "Start Screen" setup isn't very clear in its design. There are things like invisible menus that only show up when you put your mouse against the side of the screen in a specific place. So not only are the menus hidden and impossible for a brand new user to guess "which items will be in which menus", but the hotspots to trigger the menus are invisible, and it's not clear how to trigger which menus. It's not even clear from the outset how many different menus and hotspots there are.
Beyond that, my experience has been that these menus don't really work. Sometimes you go to the hotspot, and the menus don't trigger. I wasn't able to tell if it was because the menus appearance was contextual, or if the OS just didn't think I meant to open the menu for some reason. If you do get the menu to open, it might disappear if you move your mouse someplace else. If you drill down several levels through the menus, there isn't an obvious way to back out-- you instead need to close the menu and try again.
Now I was trying one of the previews, so maybe these were bugs that have since been fixed. However, they seemed like rather large design problems and not small bugs. Beside all of this, I have a general feeling that expanding the start menu to be a full-screen system has the effect of breaking context while I'm working whenever I want to launch something, and also has the effect of forcing me to move the mouse a lot more than I used to.
It really doesn't feel like an improvement.
It may be an issue of Microsoft adjusting their strategy to account for past mistakes. It took them a very long time to get Windows Vista out the door, and even then it sucked. They might be thinking, "Oh, this OS sucks? Well lets just push it out now and be done with it. We'll fix it in Windows 9, which we'll release in a year and a half."
And I don't even think that Metro is bad. It seems like it could be ok for tablets. The problem is the Microsoft seems intent on forcing desktop users to use it.
Windows 8 would be greatly improved if they just brought the start menu back and made Metro completely optional for desktop users.
In writing the question, the OP answered it. He didn't write "Grammar Does Matter Anymore?" or "Matter grammar anymore does?"
It depends on the size of your organization and what you're really trying to do. If the main purpose is to keep an inventory of a small amount of equipment, along with physical location, and you just want to keep the IP information along with it, then setting up software specific to that purpose can be overkill. Sure, you can tie stuff into DNS and DHCP to keep track of IP changes, but it may be that you're also keeping track of printers and peripherals, which won't show up on an IP scan. Maybe you have to install agents on clients to collect the information you want, and then suddenly there's a bug with that agent that interferes with some other piece of software. Even if it makes some things easier, you might also have to enter a bunch of information manually, train people to use it, develop the reports that you want, keep the software up-to-date, troubleshoot problems, bla bla bla.
Your suggestion is good, but it's also important to know what you're getting into. Sometimes low-tech, manual, inefficient, stupid ways of doing things are actually smarter and more efficient.
My theory has been for some time that we're generally going to have our iPhones as our main computers, but in a specific/particular way.
It comes down to this: In the near future, we'll have enough computing power in our pockets to do most of what we need to do on a daily basis. On the other hand, it still won't have enough power to do all the things we'll want to do, and we'll still want big screens, keyboards, and mice. It does not have to be an "either/or" sort of thing. You could create a docking station with a high-speed bus, allowing access to the keyboard, mouse, monitor, and even additional computing power.
So what I imagine happening in the next few years is that you'll carry something like an smartphone or small tablet, and while you're carrying it around, it will work very much like today's smartphones. You'll get to your office and drop your phone into a docking station, and you'll get a UI that is usable as a full desktop OS. It will still run on your phone, but the docking station will be able to hook to a network, peripherals, and multiple displays. The docking station itself can have an additional processor and graphics card, and the dock will provide fast enough access to these co-processors that you'll be able to do fairly high-end work.
The phone will hold your documents, applications, and settings, so you'll get roughly the same environment wherever you dock it. The applications will work both in mobile mode and desktop mode, perhaps with some UI changes for each mode, but the codebase between desktop and mobile operating systems (e.g. iOS and OSX) will be consolidated.
There will still be special cases where people need better performance or additional computing power, but this sort of setup should work well for most people.
If you want an excel file that can be edited simultaneously by multiple users, then maybe consider Google Docs? I'm not sure how well the offline syncing ends up working, but there is some support.
I think there's a lot of improvements that could be made to email, but they generally require server-side support. For example, I'd never bother with "tags" in Thunderbird because that stuff doesn't sync to the server, which means that it's all bound to the client-side. I *do* tag my Gmail messages, because that stuff is stored on the server, and therefore accessible from any client.
That's one example, but I think there's still a lot that could be done for email. I thought Google Wave was an interesting experiment, but the execution and the marketing left some things to be desired. Metadata tagging and attachment handling could be improved. Encryption could be made easier and more fool-proof. Someone could integrate instant messaging, calendars/contacts, SMS messages, and other communications better. Unfortunately, Microsoft seems to be the only company working on client software to do this, but they're able to do it better because they also control the server-side.
I think it only follows that some access to the Internet, and some freedom on the Internet, will need to be recognized as a basic right. It may sound silly, but think of it this way: If "freedom of speech" is a basic and inalienable human right, how divorced can that "free speech" be from communications infrastructure?
The internet is the way that people are communicating and organizing. It's where we share thoughts and ideas and artistic expression. Denying access to the Internet today would be roughly equivalent to denying colonial Americans access to roads and meeting places. You can't say that free speech is a basic human right, and yet still find it reasonable to deny people the means to communicate with each other.
First, think about the context for a second. I'm saying, "fuck shareholders," and your response is "I don't think shareholders will like that!" Well... fuck'em.
But ok, because the thing is I'm not totally serious about saying "fuck'em". It's more that people tend to go off on these rants about how the moral obligation of an officer of a company is to "maximize shareholder profit", and I'm going to an extreme in the other direction to make a point.
The reality is that current officers of companies are not really setting "maximizing shareholder profit" as their highest priority. Some of them really do try to do a good job. My impression is that Steve Jobs, for example, had so much of his ego wrapped up in Apple that he would refuse to release a product that he didn't think was good. I think you could have accountants show him that it would make shareholders a bazillion dollars, and he probably still wouldn't go for it. The end result is that Apple's stock does exceedingly well, but I don't think that was Jobs' primary focus.
Other CEOs are dead-set on collecting huge bonuses by pumping whatever performance numbers get them the bonus. It might mean manipulating the numbers and ruining the company, but they're out for themselves. If they can get 12 consecutive financial quarters where they get huge bonuses, and then the company completely falls apart, that's fine. They've got their golden parachute coming.
So this whole "maximizing shareholder value" is a fiction. It's a scam created by modern-day robber barons that preys on your hopes to get rich by playing the stock market. An investor may invest in order to maximize his own value, but it is not (and generally should not be) the primary goal of a company to maximize their shareholders' value. I believe that businesses would do better-- and therefore shareholders would ultimately do better-- if business leaders made "doing a good job" (in all the various ways that one can do a "good job") the highest priority.
This is an excellent response. Thank you.
I was sitting here thinking about the concept, and feeling uncomfortable with it for reasons I couldn't quite put my finger on. Your post cleared it up for me. If there's anything we should stop taking for granted, it's that people always act out of "rational self-interest". Or at the very least, we should stop assuming what another person's "rational self-interest" is-- someone may decide that their "rational self-interest" lies more in the eradication of their enemy than their own self-preservation.
Even beyond that, it's not unthinkable for people to get caught up in an escalating situation and to fail to find other options. Someone misjudges a situation, one person tries to call the other's bluff, and the next thing you know, things have spun out of control. You never know what someone is going to do when they feel helpless and trapped.
I don't know. When I saw the Courier Tablet, my first thought was, "Snore. Wake me up when it exists." It wreaked for vaporware.
You see these things all the time, where someone comes up with a general concept that looks cool, but the details of how it works are a little fuzzy. How is file management handled? How does it tell when you're trying to do this action or that action? What exactly is the hardware going to be capable of? What sacrifices are going to have to be made to the design to make it actually usable?
My guess is someone at Microsoft evaluated the design and realized it wasn't going to work. Or else they realized that it would cost $3,000 and no one would be willing to spend that amount. If they ever did bring it to market at a reasonable price, the features and capabilities would be so cut-down that nobody would buy it anyway.
A judge should check whether someone acts within the limits set by the law. A judge shouldn't be publicly trying to change the laws, just like a politician should not try to get involved in a court case to get someone convicted.
Were there laws written specific to allow software patents, or did some judge decide at some point that patent laws applied to software design? If it was decided in a prior case, what is the judge's obligation to follow precedent in this case?
A lot of US law is, in fact, set in precedent in courts. There is a protocol for when judges are supposed to follow precedents, but even so, they can find a way to challenge it if they need to. The real test is whether their challenge will stand up on appeal.
Yeah, I have mixed feelings on this. On the one hand, it sounds bad. It sounds like, in the guise of "helping", the Gates Foundation is actually propping up the system that keeps people stuck in poverty.
On the other hand, I'm sure things aren't that simple. As you say, the traditional model of charity, i.e. "we give you shit with no strings attached", often doesn't work out well. There's the whole idea of, "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." In order deal with the problems of poverty, you need to overhaul the system to create opportunities for people to provide for themselves. You have to build a new system, so you base it on the best system we have. Some would argue that our most successful economic system to date is one which empowers large corporations which exploits workers. Sure, it's a flawed system, but it does seem to generate wealth and provide stability.
On the third hand, I realize that the last paragraph sounds like the justification a super-villain gives for his actions.
On the fourth hand, I don't think Bill Gates deserves as much credit as he gets. People talk about him like he's a saint because he gives away billions of dollars, and sure, that's a good thing to do. It's worth recognizing, though, that it's not such a huge sacrifice on his part. If you gave me $100 billion, I'd happily give away $90 billion to charity. Hell, you could burn $99.9 billion, and I'd still be sitting pretty with no grounds for complaint. Even aside from that, I consider Bill Gates' fortunes to be, at least partially, ill-gotten gains. He ran a brutally manipulative and unethical company, and he ran it ruthlessly. I just can't talk about him as a saint for giving away a portion of his money to people, since I know damned well that the money was earned by exploiting other people.
Call me crazy, but I don't think business should be run like a for-profit business either. That is to say, I don't think people should generally be motivated by, "what's going to generate the most possible profit at the lowest investment over the course of the next quarter."
If you're making a computer OS, then focus on making a kickass computer OS. If you're building hardware, make awesome hardware. Build your business around your business, around doing a good job at the thing your company does, and not around generating short-term profit.
Sure, yes, obviously you need to make a profit. You need to at least break even, or you'll go out of business. But so long as a business is making enough profit to keep their doors open, then in my not-so-humble opinion, they should devote their attention to doing a better job at serving the clients/customers and providing good products, services, and support.
Oh, and yeah, I know. Shareholders, shareholders, bla bla bla. Fuck'em. If we can't run our businesses responsibly because everyone needs to constantly kowtow to the abstract idea of "maximizing investors' profits", then it's time to reevaluate our system of investment.
I would assume that, if it applies to "software" broadly, it also applies to games. I would wonder, though, whether it applies to all copyrighted material.
So if this is upheld, does that mean that Europeans can sell their iTunes purchases? Does that mean that Apple bears some responsibility for enabling those sales, even in cases where there is DRM present?
you can not "own" it in the sense of ownership you do to physical object...
For years, the argument from the content owners/suppliers has been, "You are purchasing a license." That license has terms, and if you agree to the terms-- which they argue you inherently do just by loading the software-- then you are bound by them. They include in the terms that you cannot resell the license.
Honestly, I think it's important to note how much luck plays a role in these success stories. Not necessarily in the sense of "There's nothing special about Zuckerberg-- he was just in the right place at the right time!" But more like, "However smart and talented Zuckerberg might be, he might be waiting tables right now if he weren't in the right place at the right time with the right people."
Certainly he had some strengths that enabled him to succeed when the right opportunities arose. There are also lots of other people with those same strengths who will never make a 6 figure salary.