Except, if Moller's specs are even close to right, traveling with two or three people to some harder-to-get-to places will involve using much, much less fuel than you'd use in a road vehicle, and we'd spend way less money, fuel, equipment, etc., maintaining roads into certain areas. And at 200 or 300 mph, you're getting someplace much more quickly than in a car, but with car-like gas mileage. With that time savings, you're going to see a lot of otherwise unecessary (and way, way less fuel-economic) traditional commuter flights end.
It's not like this is the sort of thing that people would be taking to the grocery store.
Actually, I didn't say or mean any such thing. If you read my post, and the context in which it was written, you'll see that all I'm doing is pointing out why the audience here on slashdot is, as a slice of the wider society, perhaps more likely to take the news in the original post as an opportunity for some cracks/humor at the expense of the people who build entire belief systems around a selected crop of old documents.
The prospect of finding some new tidbits that might spin Christianity in a slightly different way is an opportunity to see how that movement handles it. Meaning, there's such a long history of using or ignoring, celebrating or suppressing this or that scrap of fable, fact, and wishful thinking that we can all assume that the appearance of some new grist for that mill will be interesting to watch. Interesting, in the sense that when millions of people agree to stick more or less to the same mystical tales, and various factions decide to internalize some (but not others), or just plain fabricate whole new pieces for the sake of cranking out a new sect or two - well, it makes for drama, and a little bit of comedy, too. Hence the tone among people who haven't personally decided to get onboard with that particular mythology. If you're not swimming in those waters, they look quite odd.
Bashing others just because they bash you is the reason our 21st century world is still mired in wars
You don't strike me a morally relativistic sort... so if you're a turn-the-other-cheek guy, why are you complaining about being "bashed" in the first place? Why are you not turning the other rhetorical cheek, and in your silent grace, converting the rational into your belief system? My guess is because just like everyone else, you recognize that when you think someone is wrong, and you think that having more not wrong people in the world will serve your interests, you make a fuss (like your post, for example).
But if turning the other cheek is appropriate, we'd have a Europe being run by either murderous fascists, or by murderous totalitarian Stalinists. Stopping people like that (or Stalin devotees like Saddam Hussein) is not "bashing." It's stopping people that do.
Consider for a moment that you're seeking excuses for this behavior
Not really. In fact, if you dig back through my posts, you'll find that I generally argue for a more refined discourse, a more thoughtful look at things, and a less shrill conversational environment. I'm not beyond a barbed comment when I think that such will succinctly drive home a point, or subtly jar someone's perspective enough to consider my point of view on something.
I'd say that the long tradition of scholarship within the Catholic church has happily spilled over some into science. They, as an institution (though not necessarily as a larger population of belivers), seem to be a little less willing to be painted into the "God of the gaps" corner that so many others do.
The Vatican's support for certain falvors of hard science strikes me more as a carefully crafted effort to disarm the more obviously damaging (to their credibility) critiques of the faith-based view of the universe. Obviously, as science approaches clear descriptions of what it means to be sentient, or deals with philosophically weighty issues of cognition, the church's structure tends to step in and draw a pretty hard dogmatic line, regardless of how much they spend on telescopes or how comfortable a given MIT grad is at finding God in a pile of rocks (no matter how interplanetary they may be).
Obviously, any organization that focuses its entire thought process (and basis for authority/reward/punishment etc) on what they say happens after you die, when the very stuff that makes "you" exist has stopped functioning - that's a way of conducting human affairs that doesn't truly embrace science. I'd say they (the Catholics, in particular) are perhaps more thoughtfully engaged in using technology towards an understanding of how the universe, in practical terms, works - but they're not necessarily ready to tackle what such research will ultimately demonstrate about the Why (which is to say, there will be an awkward moment at some point when the random, capricious nature of the universe's behavior, clearly absent any anthropomorphized bearded personality, just won't square with Sunday school Genesis lessons).
Now, all that being said, I'd much rather have the Catholic influence on culture and education than I would the fully creepy world view of the newer fundamentalist protestant crowd. Yikes, I say!
That was my post you responded to. Please re-read. You said:
reference to science's ability to describe actual reality
Whereas what I actually said, referring to science-types, was that they are "people who try to point out the actual reality of the universe"
Science is a process. People who use that process to examine the universe are scientists. I'm suggesting that the difference between them, and their religious detractors, is significant and emotional enough (on the part of the religious believers/mystical crowd) that the scientists tend to get tired of all the ducking and weaving that they have to do each time the scientists come up with an ever-more demonstrable explantion for How Things Work, or What Happened In The Past, etc.
When, as in the case of the original post/item, we have science uncovering some old writings that may or may not short-circuit a lot of after-the-fact myth making in organized religion, it's understandable if the science crowd essentially expects some of the usual ad hominem attacks from the I-know-all-I-need-to-know-because-God-wrote-it-dow n side of the tracks.
Well, you can imagine why people in the sciences might be a little snarky on this subject. A lot of the history of Christianity revolves around bashing people who try to point out the actual reality of the universe. Those people (scientists) do get a little tired of the unrelenting "seek to tear down" (to use your phrase) attitude from the religious side of the spectrum. So, must of the comments in that tone about this article are made in the context of a more-secular-than-usual audience, and presume a certain world-weariness on this subject.
And how many millions of songs have been purchased and downloaded so far
A pale shadow, I think, compared to the number of them that have gone not payed for. Likewise with DVD burns, etc. Of course there are decent people that will pay for their information and entertainment. It's a critical mass issue - the WSJ won't survive paying all of its reporters and analysts if they don't keep growing a base of paying users, especially as the print biz dies. Hence my point, about their need to keep paying customers happy, and freeloaders at bay. Luckily for them, they don't have a rabid audience of 12-year-old fans that feel entitled to free stock reports and merger news.
Welcome to the Georgenium! The one where people believe everything they see on TV and do no self-research into finding out what might be true and what might not be. Why should they form their own opinions? There are two sides to every story but the news media is fair and balanced right?
Careful, your rant-underpinnings are showing. The "Georgenium?" All of the things you're carping about - all of them - are the symptoms of one root problem: lack of critical thinking skills. This problem starts in elementary school (if not sooner), and is pretty much of a lost cause by the time a kid hits high school. Certainly by they time people vote (at the ballot box, or with their wallets), they are largely at the mercy of sleekly packaged entertainment that spins their expectations and perceptions of the world into a particularly clueless, though fairly productive while largely compliant nanny-state-citizen mode. That process has been in full swing since the Depression.
Implying that somehow, in the last 4 or 5 years, that Bush has magically robbed 25-to-45-year-olds (the engine of our economy) of their ability to think is rubbish. Those people, born in the 60s-80s, had those native skills largely squashed by the educations they (didn't) get. It's no mystery that the kids whose folks could afford to send them to rigorous private schools tend to turn out the kids that then wind up running things.
That being said, even the people who do think clearly aren't going to make too big a fuss over $20 vs $40 on their broadband bill. If I spent an hour a month being the "activist" you recommend, in order to find a way to strongarm enough competition into my local broadband market, I'd be losing the $100 I could have made during that hour helping out small businesses with their IT issues. It's just not that big a deal, and there aren't orders of magnitude (in the pricing) at stake.
WAPs everywhere that you can just hop on and surf from
You make it sound like these are trees that someone planted. They cost money! The backbone they're connected to has to be created and maintained by teams of people that can't make a living if they donate all of their time. On the other hand, if you were suggesting that muncipalities get into the communications game because somehow it's "competition" for existing players... why wouldn't you back that for government-owned telephone service? And newspapers? Excellent idea, comrade! No: better to let the market hash it out, and that includes lobbying for interests on all sides of the issue. The technology is going to continue to outpace the grasp that your average city council member will ever have on these issues, regardless.
free shit is still very American
Exactly, 100% wrong. Competitive shit is and always has been American. Having the government provide a communications service is opposite of that. Not to mention it's not free. I'm paying for it, you're paying for it. But if you're the only one using it, I'm the one getting screwed. But if it's pay-as-you-go, then the person consuming something gets to be the person paying for it: the most American idea ever.
OK. Doesn't change the tone of my response to the prior post. The implication was that because online operations (whether simple subscriptions to their site, or the other services you subscribe - doesn't matter) are 20 times more profitable than some other business unit, that it means that DJ is charging too much. My point is that they charge exactly what they can, and if their services stop being more useful to some people than Bloomberg, Reuters, or others, then the market will impact the price appropriately. That's a lot healthier than any urge to dictate what a company's prices or profits "should" be.
Jack up the price on the cover so people think they're getting an amazing deal on a subscription while you still bring in large profits
Ever run a retail business? When you buy a copy of Newsweek, etc., from the newstand at the airport, you're dealing with many, many more middlemen. That retailer has to involve another shipping/collections cycle through the publisher, has to deal with issues regarding unsold-copies, and has to pay rent for whatever spot they're doing business (and pay employees, taxes, and a jillion other things). That $5.00 magazine has probably been sold to the retailer for at or less than what the subscriber pays. The margin (and much of the risk) is going to the retailer, who have another large set of costs to offset.
A good lesson for the *AA: cut your prices by 10, sell your stuff online, and you'll make more profit than before
Though just like with music, that won't make it any cheaper for the WSJ to actually gather and edit what it is they sell. So the lesson should be the other way around: the WSJ should be watching how quickly a popular bit-based info-product can get turned into a pirated, not-payed-for file that's passed around between thousands or millions of anonymous "friends."
Obviously people have been e-mailing snippets of paid-for WJS online content to their business friends since the day they went online. Because of the half-life of the information, that probably did a lot to encourage new subscribers. But in the sense that people can use back-issues of WSJ for research, they're probably spending a lot of time thinking of how to keep their intellectual output paid for. I suppose the good news for them is that it's (so far) mostly text, and it's real easy for bots to find that stuff infringed-upon on blogs, rss feeds, etc. But the more that their business depends upon the online model, the more they're going to have to be ready to play hardball if everyone in Hong Kong is boning up for the next day-trading cycle on a free "shared feed" of what hundreds of expensive Dow Jones employees just spent the last 24 hours laboriously putting together.
subscribers are able to deduct the price from their taxes as a business expense
So? That doesn't make it free. It just offsets their income by a little bit, and they pay just a little bit less in taxes. It's still a net cost to the subscriber.
The reason people pay for it is because they find it directly (and often immediately - that day) useful to their business and investment decision making, and that pays back hugely in excess of the cost.
The real information gathered from the story is that consumers buying Wall Street Journal online are paying 20 times too much.
Never mind that the paper version is losing them money, so making more profit than the losing part of the operation isn't, by itself, necessarily all that fabuluous.
But the real news in your comment is that you don't think someone should make any more profit than you think they should. What is the correct profit margin for each type of business, taking into account seasonal variability, changing competition, evolving technology, company reputation, and all of the other variables that impact each business model? Do you have a table, or set of guidelines? How often do you update it, and based on what criteria?
I have an idea. How about: the WSJ has competition, and if any of it is as good or better, and charges less, then people will spend their money there, instead. Or, regardless of what the WSJ costs, if people don't think it's worth it, they can just stop subscribing. It's almost like the market adjusts the price! *sigh*
Old, lost protections that have been weeded out accidently, will return to the genomes and help shore up the genetic diversity of the present day
IANAB (I am not a biologist), but... doesn't it cut both ways? Meaning, isn't it possible that the current critters have protections against current threats, and that breeding with older versions might re-introduce vulnerabilities? I'm thinking this is like removing a service pack.:P
So, eating meat doesn't fall within your idea of civil rights? We'll have to see how many pepperoni pizzas are consumed at civil rights sit-ins this year.
If you don't like hunting because it involved the death of an animal, then you're really addressing the wrong subject. Hunting will go away just fine as soon as you persuade the population that they can't make use of animals for meat at all. Also, be sure to take the stand that no earthworms can be killed while tilling soybean fields to make tofu. They're just such cute, sophisticated little things, those earthworms, and to shorten one's life in order to make tofu is morally reprehensible.
The disturbing part is that some enjoy doing it with their hands (killing) and dare to call it a sport
No, the disturbing part is that a lot of people enjoy eating meat, and pay other people to kill it for them, and have no clue what it's all about. I don't kill animals I don't intend to eat. Except maybe mosquitos, and that sort of thing, or when an animal is destructive (say, groundhogs destroying crops), threatening, or suffering from injury or illness (say, a deer with broken legs on the side of the road, or gutted by another buck in a fight, etc).
So, what's worse: the "sport" (I don't use that word) of harvesting healthy organic meat in the wild, or sitting around a tailgate party eating mass-farmed burgers from a slaughterhouse while watching a "sport" like football?
Why is every business goal imagined as a ten-ton hairy mammoth?
Seems to depend on the goal, and whose it is. For example, my company wants to win customers, gain marketshare, etc. Some of our smaller competitors talk in terms of killing us. I think the larger question involves wondering why people get so resentful of success or status quo that they emotionalize their take on it to the degree that speaking in violent metaphors actually feels appropriate. To me, it sounds more like a lack of maturity. It's very common, which makes that seem even more likely. Most of our national discourse takes place within a completely adolescent context.
Side note: I don't think that "kill" even means "kill" for most people, because they've never been involved in any sort of killing. Believe me, most police, soldiers, doctors, or families of someone killed (or recently dead by any means) don't let slip with that word nearly so easily. For most people, the meat in their tasty burger or the fish in that bagel spread is just a grocery product. Despite what you might guess, most of the hunters and anglers that I know are a lot more reverential about life, and more thoughtful about their use of "kill"-related metaphors and sophistry than anyone one else. Something about doing it with your own hands makes it a lot more real, and makes using/hearing phrases like that out of context seem silly or even embarassing.
But you don't say why you think it is, seemingly making the assumption that everyone reading the original (and your) post will see it from your perspective, informed by your skills/limitations, epxeriences with/without both OSes. For all I know you're Linus. Or Bill. But you're not giving us anything to go on, and even if you've got a good point, you're just coming off as a flamer yourself - so what's the point? I come from a setting where lots of corporate consulting clients simply won't even talk about Linux, no matter what issues I put in front of them. They make the original post ring true. So, why is it flamebait, unless it's just hitting a nerve with certain slashdot users, and calling it flamebait is easier than actually constructing a pursuasive answer? Otherwise, you're just propping up those people that think that Linux supporters are just snarky, inarticulate haters-of-the-successful - and that's no way to win corporate and end user mindshare.
tax system has become like the legal system - a systematic exploitation of the American people to keep an elite in business, in this case IRS agents and retired IRS agents.
Except, all they do is function to collect what the tax code says they should. Don't like it? You have to change the law. Fix it in congress, thus treating the problem, not the symptom.
You can visit the Nielsen-NetRatings site and bone up a bit, and if you want, grab a a PDF of their corporate brochure which mentions that their techniques include the usual image tag bugs, but also techniques just like they use when they do TV ratings: interviews with "recall" information, journals, and other (for us web folks) seemingly unlikely approaches. It's all about doing sanity checking against traditional (and easily polluted) web stats. Big companies like to have their facts audited and tested by alternate methods, and Nielsen's been doing it for a long time with other hard-to-measure stuff.
You know a good Standard when you see one. Pretty hard to nail down, otherwise, because of the hugely varying contexts in which they're employed/evolved.
That said, my sense is: it's a standard when its wide acceptance makes things easier/cheaper/more-reliable. Of course, standards have a bad habit, over time, of turning into Orthodoxy or other dogmatic-thinking-type problems. For example, people constantly give me trouble for using Furlongs Per Fortnight when expressing velocity.
If that's how you're looking at it, then phone taps on mobsters, subpeonas for financial records having to do with suspected stock fraud by corrupt CEOs - all sorts of routinely used law enforcement tools are fundamentally wrong. That's a much larger constitutional issue that overlaps with both the Patriot Act and many, many other statutes.
Do I have an abiding mistrust of most anybody who wants to be in political power? Generally, yes. I'm one of those people that a lot of nanny-state type lefties think are way too dangerous to have around (I own dogs, drive a large vehicle, and eat meat that I kill with guns). My state has made a hobby out of chiseling away at my rights to do those things, and it's a constant fight. My voting, then, leans towards those that would minimalize my government (and thus the taxes that it collects), and minimize its inclination and ability to interfere with myh life. That includes, of course, a natural desire for privacy and the ability to conduct business (personal or otherwise) without having to think much about whether I'm being surveiled, etc.
So, how do I square that against my willingness to enable the FBI et al to check into the ebb and flow of funds collected by shady charities with ties to Hamas? Or against my government and certain key industries (like airlines) using every tool possible to cut down on would-be suicide passengers?
Because we have to. There are all sorts of compromises we make to purchase some expectation of security. I lock my doors. We license drivers. We take some people at their word when they join groups that loudly applaud the death of Americans. I don't want to heat the old saw about people who give up certain liberties deserving none. If that were true, then we'd have to be willing to live in a society with no laws, and you'd wind up with people banding together for protection, and we'd be right back to fuedalism.
This doesn't mean that every provision of every statute or law is ideal, or stands for long after being tested. Hell, there was a while when alcohol was illegal in the US. So, that was a really bad idea, and it's gone now. But minors can't buy it, and that just makes sense.
Do we have enough judges with adequate security clearances to review every possible line of inquiry into a fast-moving or immenently threatening terrorist action? Not even close. But because there have been virutally no practical applications of the new law, the precedents and practicalities of where its useful, overbearing, not far reaching enough, etc., are still being felt out. To address something you brought up: we've been able to wiretap people's phones for a long time (say, in pursuit of a child pornographer, to stick with that example). These days, bad guys who know better will just use a series of cell phones or other devices that (until recently) would have each required subsequent court orders to follow up on. In the case of a rapidly evolving crime (let alone something as awful as, say, coordinating cell-phone-enabled backpack bombs against trainloads of commuters, as in Madrid), that old way of dealing with the new-style info/tech components of organized crime/terror simply don't cut it.
I was suggesting that the Iraqis did it by force, as they would have done already if the US hadn't stopped them.
It's a shame we didn't help them more, because the Kurds, for example, might have been able to do at least some damage against Saddam's regime. But we didn't "stop" them - he used poison gas and troops to slaughter them. Likewise with Shiite tribes in the south. This is like saying that we "stopped" the French from liberating themselves from Germany. Nonsense! Without the US military, the German military control of France would have persisted until, perhaps, the Russians marched all the way there.
are, after all, the only people who have the right to install an Iraqi government.
Ahem, I think the US is more at risk from a loss of civil liberties than Eurpope at the moment
Obviously it's varied over the years, depending on which country you're talking about, but Europe has long had a history of more government involvement in private lives and businesses than in the US. It's fun for some to talk about the Patriot Act as if it represents some huge milestone in law enforcement powers, but more than anything else, it simply allows law enforcement to use against suspected terrorists the same tactics that it has long had available for combating organized domestic crime, child pornographers, and the like. Check in with, say, the UK to see how they've had to, over the years, adapt their legal system to decades of IRA bombings. Or see how Spain's wrestling with ETA has impacted the way they conduct searches. Or ask Greece how their native terrorists groups have been combatted over the last 30 years. The requirements for judicial oversight within the newer US procedures are extremely rigid.
But not necessarily US force.
Then by who? France said that it would use its UN Security Council veto power to veto any explicit call for armed forces no matter what, under any circumstances (of course, now we know why, but that's another conversation). So, with any prospect of a luke-warm UN blessing beyond the dozens already passed completely ruled out... what organization was going to act to deal with Saddam's regular shooting at no-fly-zone enforcement flights, cashflow to Hezbollah and Hamas, etc? Would have preferred that Israel do it? Or perhaps Iran? There is no other force capable of dealing with it. Just like there's no other force that can put up a credible deterrent against China simply steam-rolling Taiwan.
Anyway, who else did you see ready and able to deal with it? Or, are you suggesting that the US donate its men and material, but have them under the command of someone else? Why would the US want to do that? The UN has a miserable track record in places like the Balkans, Darfur, and elsewhere. So, I think it exactly was necessarily the US the did most of the heavy lifting.
if you are unfamiliar with akamai's distributed replication service
Actually, I put up content through Akamai, so I do know about it (and like it, when they aren't getting DNS DDOS attacks!). I'm comparing apparent post-Patch-Tuesday download rates today, as opposed to, say a couple months ago. It's anecdotal, but I'm just saying it feels a lot quicker than it has in the past. No biggee, just warm and fuzzy.
I bet you downloaded the 6 updates (7 MB on my machine) 15 times
Thanks for that vote of confidence in my admin skills. These were 15 machines on 15 different networks under 15 different security and access models, so it's a little academic. Did it all remotely, of course, so it's not like I could run around with a CD or do something on a network share. If this was a major SP, I'd have approached it differently.
FWIW, I do have to visit another datacenter tonight, and hit a dozen machines on the same LAN. Different situation, there, but for me more the exception than the rule.
Slashdot Mirror
can you imagine the waste of fossil fuels
Except, if Moller's specs are even close to right, traveling with two or three people to some harder-to-get-to places will involve using much, much less fuel than you'd use in a road vehicle, and we'd spend way less money, fuel, equipment, etc., maintaining roads into certain areas. And at 200 or 300 mph, you're getting someplace much more quickly than in a car, but with car-like gas mileage. With that time savings, you're going to see a lot of otherwise unecessary (and way, way less fuel-economic) traditional commuter flights end.
It's not like this is the sort of thing that people would be taking to the grocery store.
Do as I say, not as I do
Actually, I didn't say or mean any such thing. If you read my post, and the context in which it was written, you'll see that all I'm doing is pointing out why the audience here on slashdot is, as a slice of the wider society, perhaps more likely to take the news in the original post as an opportunity for some cracks/humor at the expense of the people who build entire belief systems around a selected crop of old documents.
The prospect of finding some new tidbits that might spin Christianity in a slightly different way is an opportunity to see how that movement handles it. Meaning, there's such a long history of using or ignoring, celebrating or suppressing this or that scrap of fable, fact, and wishful thinking that we can all assume that the appearance of some new grist for that mill will be interesting to watch. Interesting, in the sense that when millions of people agree to stick more or less to the same mystical tales, and various factions decide to internalize some (but not others), or just plain fabricate whole new pieces for the sake of cranking out a new sect or two - well, it makes for drama, and a little bit of comedy, too. Hence the tone among people who haven't personally decided to get onboard with that particular mythology. If you're not swimming in those waters, they look quite odd.
Bashing others just because they bash you is the reason our 21st century world is still mired in wars
You don't strike me a morally relativistic sort... so if you're a turn-the-other-cheek guy, why are you complaining about being "bashed" in the first place? Why are you not turning the other rhetorical cheek, and in your silent grace, converting the rational into your belief system? My guess is because just like everyone else, you recognize that when you think someone is wrong, and you think that having more not wrong people in the world will serve your interests, you make a fuss (like your post, for example).
But if turning the other cheek is appropriate, we'd have a Europe being run by either murderous fascists, or by murderous totalitarian Stalinists. Stopping people like that (or Stalin devotees like Saddam Hussein) is not "bashing." It's stopping people that do.
Consider for a moment that you're seeking excuses for this behavior
Not really. In fact, if you dig back through my posts, you'll find that I generally argue for a more refined discourse, a more thoughtful look at things, and a less shrill conversational environment. I'm not beyond a barbed comment when I think that such will succinctly drive home a point, or subtly jar someone's perspective enough to consider my point of view on something.
I'd say that the long tradition of scholarship within the Catholic church has happily spilled over some into science. They, as an institution (though not necessarily as a larger population of belivers), seem to be a little less willing to be painted into the "God of the gaps" corner that so many others do.
The Vatican's support for certain falvors of hard science strikes me more as a carefully crafted effort to disarm the more obviously damaging (to their credibility) critiques of the faith-based view of the universe. Obviously, as science approaches clear descriptions of what it means to be sentient, or deals with philosophically weighty issues of cognition, the church's structure tends to step in and draw a pretty hard dogmatic line, regardless of how much they spend on telescopes or how comfortable a given MIT grad is at finding God in a pile of rocks (no matter how interplanetary they may be).
Obviously, any organization that focuses its entire thought process (and basis for authority/reward/punishment etc) on what they say happens after you die, when the very stuff that makes "you" exist has stopped functioning - that's a way of conducting human affairs that doesn't truly embrace science. I'd say they (the Catholics, in particular) are perhaps more thoughtfully engaged in using technology towards an understanding of how the universe, in practical terms, works - but they're not necessarily ready to tackle what such research will ultimately demonstrate about the Why (which is to say, there will be an awkward moment at some point when the random, capricious nature of the universe's behavior, clearly absent any anthropomorphized bearded personality, just won't square with Sunday school Genesis lessons).
Now, all that being said, I'd much rather have the Catholic influence on culture and education than I would the fully creepy world view of the newer fundamentalist protestant crowd. Yikes, I say!
That was my post you responded to. Please re-read. You said:
w n side of the tracks.
reference to science's ability to describe actual reality
Whereas what I actually said, referring to science-types, was that they are "people who try to point out the actual reality of the universe"
Science is a process. People who use that process to examine the universe are scientists. I'm suggesting that the difference between them, and their religious detractors, is significant and emotional enough (on the part of the religious believers/mystical crowd) that the scientists tend to get tired of all the ducking and weaving that they have to do each time the scientists come up with an ever-more demonstrable explantion for How Things Work, or What Happened In The Past, etc.
When, as in the case of the original post/item, we have science uncovering some old writings that may or may not short-circuit a lot of after-the-fact myth making in organized religion, it's understandable if the science crowd essentially expects some of the usual ad hominem attacks from the I-know-all-I-need-to-know-because-God-wrote-it-do
mostly just bashes on Christians
Well, you can imagine why people in the sciences might be a little snarky on this subject. A lot of the history of Christianity revolves around bashing people who try to point out the actual reality of the universe. Those people (scientists) do get a little tired of the unrelenting "seek to tear down" (to use your phrase) attitude from the religious side of the spectrum. So, must of the comments in that tone about this article are made in the context of a more-secular-than-usual audience, and presume a certain world-weariness on this subject.
And how many millions of songs have been purchased and downloaded so far
A pale shadow, I think, compared to the number of them that have gone not payed for. Likewise with DVD burns, etc. Of course there are decent people that will pay for their information and entertainment. It's a critical mass issue - the WSJ won't survive paying all of its reporters and analysts if they don't keep growing a base of paying users, especially as the print biz dies. Hence my point, about their need to keep paying customers happy, and freeloaders at bay. Luckily for them, they don't have a rabid audience of 12-year-old fans that feel entitled to free stock reports and merger news.
Welcome to the Georgenium! The one where people believe everything they see on TV and do no self-research into finding out what might be true and what might not be. Why should they form their own opinions? There are two sides to every story but the news media is fair and balanced right?
Careful, your rant-underpinnings are showing. The "Georgenium?" All of the things you're carping about - all of them - are the symptoms of one root problem: lack of critical thinking skills. This problem starts in elementary school (if not sooner), and is pretty much of a lost cause by the time a kid hits high school. Certainly by they time people vote (at the ballot box, or with their wallets), they are largely at the mercy of sleekly packaged entertainment that spins their expectations and perceptions of the world into a particularly clueless, though fairly productive while largely compliant nanny-state-citizen mode. That process has been in full swing since the Depression.
Implying that somehow, in the last 4 or 5 years, that Bush has magically robbed 25-to-45-year-olds (the engine of our economy) of their ability to think is rubbish. Those people, born in the 60s-80s, had those native skills largely squashed by the educations they (didn't) get. It's no mystery that the kids whose folks could afford to send them to rigorous private schools tend to turn out the kids that then wind up running things.
That being said, even the people who do think clearly aren't going to make too big a fuss over $20 vs $40 on their broadband bill. If I spent an hour a month being the "activist" you recommend, in order to find a way to strongarm enough competition into my local broadband market, I'd be losing the $100 I could have made during that hour helping out small businesses with their IT issues. It's just not that big a deal, and there aren't orders of magnitude (in the pricing) at stake.
WAPs everywhere that you can just hop on and surf from
You make it sound like these are trees that someone planted. They cost money! The backbone they're connected to has to be created and maintained by teams of people that can't make a living if they donate all of their time. On the other hand, if you were suggesting that muncipalities get into the communications game because somehow it's "competition" for existing players... why wouldn't you back that for government-owned telephone service? And newspapers? Excellent idea, comrade! No: better to let the market hash it out, and that includes lobbying for interests on all sides of the issue. The technology is going to continue to outpace the grasp that your average city council member will ever have on these issues, regardless.
free shit is still very American
Exactly, 100% wrong. Competitive shit is and always has been American. Having the government provide a communications service is opposite of that. Not to mention it's not free. I'm paying for it, you're paying for it. But if you're the only one using it, I'm the one getting screwed. But if it's pay-as-you-go, then the person consuming something gets to be the person paying for it: the most American idea ever.
OK. Doesn't change the tone of my response to the prior post. The implication was that because online operations (whether simple subscriptions to their site, or the other services you subscribe - doesn't matter) are 20 times more profitable than some other business unit, that it means that DJ is charging too much. My point is that they charge exactly what they can, and if their services stop being more useful to some people than Bloomberg, Reuters, or others, then the market will impact the price appropriately. That's a lot healthier than any urge to dictate what a company's prices or profits "should" be.
Jack up the price on the cover so people think they're getting an amazing deal on a subscription while you still bring in large profits
Ever run a retail business? When you buy a copy of Newsweek, etc., from the newstand at the airport, you're dealing with many, many more middlemen. That retailer has to involve another shipping/collections cycle through the publisher, has to deal with issues regarding unsold-copies, and has to pay rent for whatever spot they're doing business (and pay employees, taxes, and a jillion other things). That $5.00 magazine has probably been sold to the retailer for at or less than what the subscriber pays. The margin (and much of the risk) is going to the retailer, who have another large set of costs to offset.
A good lesson for the *AA: cut your prices by 10, sell your stuff online, and you'll make more profit than before
Though just like with music, that won't make it any cheaper for the WSJ to actually gather and edit what it is they sell. So the lesson should be the other way around: the WSJ should be watching how quickly a popular bit-based info-product can get turned into a pirated, not-payed-for file that's passed around between thousands or millions of anonymous "friends."
Obviously people have been e-mailing snippets of paid-for WJS online content to their business friends since the day they went online. Because of the half-life of the information, that probably did a lot to encourage new subscribers. But in the sense that people can use back-issues of WSJ for research, they're probably spending a lot of time thinking of how to keep their intellectual output paid for. I suppose the good news for them is that it's (so far) mostly text, and it's real easy for bots to find that stuff infringed-upon on blogs, rss feeds, etc. But the more that their business depends upon the online model, the more they're going to have to be ready to play hardball if everyone in Hong Kong is boning up for the next day-trading cycle on a free "shared feed" of what hundreds of expensive Dow Jones employees just spent the last 24 hours laboriously putting together.
subscribers are able to deduct the price from their taxes as a business expense
So? That doesn't make it free. It just offsets their income by a little bit, and they pay just a little bit less in taxes. It's still a net cost to the subscriber.
The reason people pay for it is because they find it directly (and often immediately - that day) useful to their business and investment decision making, and that pays back hugely in excess of the cost.
The real information gathered from the story is that consumers buying Wall Street Journal online are paying 20 times too much.
Never mind that the paper version is losing them money, so making more profit than the losing part of the operation isn't, by itself, necessarily all that fabuluous.
But the real news in your comment is that you don't think someone should make any more profit than you think they should. What is the correct profit margin for each type of business, taking into account seasonal variability, changing competition, evolving technology, company reputation, and all of the other variables that impact each business model? Do you have a table, or set of guidelines? How often do you update it, and based on what criteria?
I have an idea. How about: the WSJ has competition, and if any of it is as good or better, and charges less, then people will spend their money there, instead. Or, regardless of what the WSJ costs, if people don't think it's worth it, they can just stop subscribing. It's almost like the market adjusts the price! *sigh*
Old, lost protections that have been weeded out accidently, will return to the genomes and help shore up the genetic diversity of the present day
:P
IANAB (I am not a biologist), but... doesn't it cut both ways? Meaning, isn't it possible that the current critters have protections against current threats, and that breeding with older versions might re-introduce vulnerabilities? I'm thinking this is like removing a service pack.
What's to stop the creation of another internet-specific regulation
Votes. Vote for the legislators that tend to back less regulation and government involvement in daily life, commerce, and election communications.
.. or worse.. a civil right.
So, eating meat doesn't fall within your idea of civil rights? We'll have to see how many pepperoni pizzas are consumed at civil rights sit-ins this year.
If you don't like hunting because it involved the death of an animal, then you're really addressing the wrong subject. Hunting will go away just fine as soon as you persuade the population that they can't make use of animals for meat at all. Also, be sure to take the stand that no earthworms can be killed while tilling soybean fields to make tofu. They're just such cute, sophisticated little things, those earthworms, and to shorten one's life in order to make tofu is morally reprehensible.
The disturbing part is that some enjoy doing it with their hands (killing) and dare to call it a sport
No, the disturbing part is that a lot of people enjoy eating meat, and pay other people to kill it for them, and have no clue what it's all about. I don't kill animals I don't intend to eat. Except maybe mosquitos, and that sort of thing, or when an animal is destructive (say, groundhogs destroying crops), threatening, or suffering from injury or illness (say, a deer with broken legs on the side of the road, or gutted by another buck in a fight, etc).
So, what's worse: the "sport" (I don't use that word) of harvesting healthy organic meat in the wild, or sitting around a tailgate party eating mass-farmed burgers from a slaughterhouse while watching a "sport" like football?
Why is every business goal imagined as a ten-ton hairy mammoth?
Seems to depend on the goal, and whose it is. For example, my company wants to win customers, gain marketshare, etc. Some of our smaller competitors talk in terms of killing us. I think the larger question involves wondering why people get so resentful of success or status quo that they emotionalize their take on it to the degree that speaking in violent metaphors actually feels appropriate. To me, it sounds more like a lack of maturity. It's very common, which makes that seem even more likely. Most of our national discourse takes place within a completely adolescent context.
Side note: I don't think that "kill" even means "kill" for most people, because they've never been involved in any sort of killing. Believe me, most police, soldiers, doctors, or families of someone killed (or recently dead by any means) don't let slip with that word nearly so easily. For most people, the meat in their tasty burger or the fish in that bagel spread is just a grocery product. Despite what you might guess, most of the hunters and anglers that I know are a lot more reverential about life, and more thoughtful about their use of "kill"-related metaphors and sophistry than anyone one else. Something about doing it with your own hands makes it a lot more real, and makes using/hearing phrases like that out of context seem silly or even embarassing.
This article is -1 flamebait
But you don't say why you think it is, seemingly making the assumption that everyone reading the original (and your) post will see it from your perspective, informed by your skills/limitations, epxeriences with/without both OSes. For all I know you're Linus. Or Bill. But you're not giving us anything to go on, and even if you've got a good point, you're just coming off as a flamer yourself - so what's the point? I come from a setting where lots of corporate consulting clients simply won't even talk about Linux, no matter what issues I put in front of them. They make the original post ring true. So, why is it flamebait, unless it's just hitting a nerve with certain slashdot users, and calling it flamebait is easier than actually constructing a pursuasive answer? Otherwise, you're just propping up those people that think that Linux supporters are just snarky, inarticulate haters-of-the-successful - and that's no way to win corporate and end user mindshare.
tax system has become like the legal system - a systematic exploitation of the American people to keep an elite in business, in this case IRS agents and retired IRS agents.
Except, all they do is function to collect what the tax code says they should. Don't like it? You have to change the law. Fix it in congress, thus treating the problem, not the symptom.
You can visit the Nielsen-NetRatings site and bone up a bit, and if you want, grab a a PDF of their corporate brochure which mentions that their techniques include the usual image tag bugs, but also techniques just like they use when they do TV ratings: interviews with "recall" information, journals, and other (for us web folks) seemingly unlikely approaches. It's all about doing sanity checking against traditional (and easily polluted) web stats. Big companies like to have their facts audited and tested by alternate methods, and Nielsen's been doing it for a long time with other hard-to-measure stuff.
You know a good Standard when you see one. Pretty hard to nail down, otherwise, because of the hugely varying contexts in which they're employed/evolved.
That said, my sense is: it's a standard when its wide acceptance makes things easier/cheaper/more-reliable. Of course, standards have a bad habit, over time, of turning into Orthodoxy or other dogmatic-thinking-type problems. For example, people constantly give me trouble for using Furlongs Per Fortnight when expressing velocity.
illegitimate uses of state power
If that's how you're looking at it, then phone taps on mobsters, subpeonas for financial records having to do with suspected stock fraud by corrupt CEOs - all sorts of routinely used law enforcement tools are fundamentally wrong. That's a much larger constitutional issue that overlaps with both the Patriot Act and many, many other statutes.
Do I have an abiding mistrust of most anybody who wants to be in political power? Generally, yes. I'm one of those people that a lot of nanny-state type lefties think are way too dangerous to have around (I own dogs, drive a large vehicle, and eat meat that I kill with guns). My state has made a hobby out of chiseling away at my rights to do those things, and it's a constant fight. My voting, then, leans towards those that would minimalize my government (and thus the taxes that it collects), and minimize its inclination and ability to interfere with myh life. That includes, of course, a natural desire for privacy and the ability to conduct business (personal or otherwise) without having to think much about whether I'm being surveiled, etc.
So, how do I square that against my willingness to enable the FBI et al to check into the ebb and flow of funds collected by shady charities with ties to Hamas? Or against my government and certain key industries (like airlines) using every tool possible to cut down on would-be suicide passengers?
Because we have to. There are all sorts of compromises we make to purchase some expectation of security. I lock my doors. We license drivers. We take some people at their word when they join groups that loudly applaud the death of Americans. I don't want to heat the old saw about people who give up certain liberties deserving none. If that were true, then we'd have to be willing to live in a society with no laws, and you'd wind up with people banding together for protection, and we'd be right back to fuedalism.
This doesn't mean that every provision of every statute or law is ideal, or stands for long after being tested. Hell, there was a while when alcohol was illegal in the US. So, that was a really bad idea, and it's gone now. But minors can't buy it, and that just makes sense.
Do we have enough judges with adequate security clearances to review every possible line of inquiry into a fast-moving or immenently threatening terrorist action? Not even close. But because there have been virutally no practical applications of the new law, the precedents and practicalities of where its useful, overbearing, not far reaching enough, etc., are still being felt out. To address something you brought up: we've been able to wiretap people's phones for a long time (say, in pursuit of a child pornographer, to stick with that example). These days, bad guys who know better will just use a series of cell phones or other devices that (until recently) would have each required subsequent court orders to follow up on. In the case of a rapidly evolving crime (let alone something as awful as, say, coordinating cell-phone-enabled backpack bombs against trainloads of commuters, as in Madrid), that old way of dealing with the new-style info/tech components of organized crime/terror simply don't cut it.
I was suggesting that the Iraqis did it by force, as they would have done already if the US hadn't stopped them.
It's a shame we didn't help them more, because the Kurds, for example, might have been able to do at least some damage against Saddam's regime. But we didn't "stop" them - he used poison gas and troops to slaughter them. Likewise with Shiite tribes in the south. This is like saying that we "stopped" the French from liberating themselves from Germany. Nonsense! Without the US military, the German military control of France would have persisted until, perhaps, the Russians marched all the way there.
are, after all, the only people who have the right to install an Iraqi government.
How convenient! That's exactly what
Ahem, I think the US is more at risk from a loss of civil liberties than Eurpope at the moment
Obviously it's varied over the years, depending on which country you're talking about, but Europe has long had a history of more government involvement in private lives and businesses than in the US. It's fun for some to talk about the Patriot Act as if it represents some huge milestone in law enforcement powers, but more than anything else, it simply allows law enforcement to use against suspected terrorists the same tactics that it has long had available for combating organized domestic crime, child pornographers, and the like. Check in with, say, the UK to see how they've had to, over the years, adapt their legal system to decades of IRA bombings. Or see how Spain's wrestling with ETA has impacted the way they conduct searches. Or ask Greece how their native terrorists groups have been combatted over the last 30 years. The requirements for judicial oversight within the newer US procedures are extremely rigid.
But not necessarily US force.
Then by who? France said that it would use its UN Security Council veto power to veto any explicit call for armed forces no matter what, under any circumstances (of course, now we know why, but that's another conversation). So, with any prospect of a luke-warm UN blessing beyond the dozens already passed completely ruled out... what organization was going to act to deal with Saddam's regular shooting at no-fly-zone enforcement flights, cashflow to Hezbollah and Hamas, etc? Would have preferred that Israel do it? Or perhaps Iran? There is no other force capable of dealing with it. Just like there's no other force that can put up a credible deterrent against China simply steam-rolling Taiwan.
Anyway, who else did you see ready and able to deal with it? Or, are you suggesting that the US donate its men and material, but have them under the command of someone else? Why would the US want to do that? The UN has a miserable track record in places like the Balkans, Darfur, and elsewhere. So, I think it exactly was necessarily the US the did most of the heavy lifting.
if you are unfamiliar with akamai's distributed replication service
Actually, I put up content through Akamai, so I do know about it (and like it, when they aren't getting DNS DDOS attacks!). I'm comparing apparent post-Patch-Tuesday download rates today, as opposed to, say a couple months ago. It's anecdotal, but I'm just saying it feels a lot quicker than it has in the past. No biggee, just warm and fuzzy.
I bet you downloaded the 6 updates (7 MB on my machine) 15 times
Thanks for that vote of confidence in my admin skills. These were 15 machines on 15 different networks under 15 different security and access models, so it's a little academic. Did it all remotely, of course, so it's not like I could run around with a CD or do something on a network share. If this was a major SP, I'd have approached it differently.
FWIW, I do have to visit another datacenter tonight, and hit a dozen machines on the same LAN. Different situation, there, but for me more the exception than the rule.