what a load of bollox. of course aesthetic sense can be taught. just as writing and music and any other artistic endeavor can be taught. Of course there are some people who are born great at artistic things (just as there are born-great atheletes. But just as for every Micheal Jordan or Wayne Gretzky there are dozens of guys who worked hard, practiced for bajillion hours and had good coaches, the same is true for great artists). really to say that you can't teach it is complete rubbish and is, no doubt, a fiction that bad designers want you to believe so they don't have to work hard, and good designers want you to believe so that you'll pay them lots and not ask questions.
(and in case you wonder - or care - I'm a writer and I work with designers constantly).
Here's what we did in Toronto, and i think it is perfectly adequate. You get a bit of paper, and a pencil. you mark your X in the spot adjacent the guy/gal you like. you put the paper in a cardboard folder they gave you for privacy and hand it to teh clerk. the clerk feeds teh top of your ballot into a machine (s/he can't see your vote because of the foler). the machine sucks in your ballot out of hte folder. the machine then READS your vote and displays it on a small LCD only you can see. you verify and move on. If you got it wrong, you can re-do. if you f**ked up and voted in two spots or whatnot, the ballot is rejected.
at the moment the polls close the accumulated votes are downloaded and counted almost instantly. making for quick, painless votes.
could the machines get hacked? yah sure, but the humans involved in the process are just as hackable and always have been. so it won't solve corruption, but it at least doesn't make corruption EASY.
It seems hypocritcal and draconian to think that if you put some form of art out into the world for people to consume with their personal wealth, that they not be able to do what they want with it as long as citation and reference to the original creator is noted accordingly.
You don't get it. Copyright law has nothing to do with money - and everything to do with money. It is written to say that when an artist creates a work, and put it out for consumption, that's what we get to do - consume it. We don't get to use it as source material (other than through influence) for something else. It makes no difference if the kid in your example profits or not (or even if he CAN profit) because it is not about him or his profit. It is about the original artist. Because the little brat, even if he attributes correctly, is stealing from originators of that song. Not stealing money, but (ask an artist) something worse - his/her good name.
Proof of that is in the very reason you'd use someone else's song in your work of art, because it evokes a certain feeling, a sensation, makes people think or feel a way etc. In other words they've done the heavy lifting of creating a work of art that has an effect on people, and you're borrowing the effect and hoping some of it smears off on whatever you've created.
It's easy to say "oh that one-hit-wonder should shut up and enjoy the few extra iTMS downloads he's gettin' cos of this exposure." And yah maybe that's so. But should an artist shut up when some former KKK member is running for governor and uses his song as a campaign anthem? Of course not! The same laws that protect that artist and allow him to tell the nazi scumbag to cease and desist lest people thing the singer supports the nazi, allow the one-hit-wonder to tell your exemplar little Johnny to stoppit, and to tell youtube and google to pull that shit down.
you are making the same mistake that others do, collapsing two arguments: 1) what do the copyright laws work to protect? 2) what SHOULD artists do with their work to encourage people to continue to enjoy it. The first one is a legal question, the second a philosophical one.
I'm with you on this one. A constitutional provision that states the intended 'effect' of the law, as opposed to enumerating the specific outcomes, is a better way to go. Quite simply we can't foresee what maybe invented next year or next week and therefore will have to come back and re-write it. Whereas stating the effect we want (fair use as one example) means that every new tech and its uses can be measured against that yard stick and judged accordingly.
But of course ppl like the Bushies wouldn't want it (in this law or anywhere) given their aversion to 'activist judges writing laws' we hear so much about.
perhaps I'm an idiot (and that is MORE than likely) but is chasing IPs an accurate way to find p2p &.torrent users? The reason I ask is something that happened this week. Our DSL modem was not working properly and while waiting for the techs to fix it we used our neighbor's wifi (unsecured, bless their innocent little hearts) to surf the web. Thereby doing whatever we were doing, on an IP acquired in someone else's name.
So why wouldn't that be a good defense? If I can prove that my wifi is open most of the time, couldn't i simply say that yes someone on my network may have acquired that IP and while doing so pirated and whatnot, but you can't actually prove that I did the pirating.
It's the same reason speed cameras have failed in this jurisdiction, you can prove the car was speeding, but you can't prove who was driving it, ergo you can't prove WHO was breaking the law.
I'm not a laywer, but if i was on a jury, that'd convince me not to convict.
they did NOT buy "25%" of Apple. they invested $150 million. which is not anywhere CLOSE to a tenth of one per cent of the value of the company. And i doubt that anyone would sign an agreement to not compete with another company for such a paltry sum.(proof is the spat over IE & Safari - MS won't develop a new IE because they're snitty over Apple competing with them using safari.)
The fact is probably as an earlier poster suggested, that Apple can control their environment with their own hardware & software together. while selling an OS and allowing any schmuck to build a system. I swear half the problems people have with PCs is that you have 89 different vendors's stuff inside and no one company will take responsibility for it. With a Mac, you may have a million vendors (my Sony HD died in my ibook) but Apple is on the hook for it. You'll never get the "it's not our equipment" excuse.
It's my guess that that is the real reason Apple won't licence. because all of a sudden the vaunted "it just works, it's so elegant" feature of using the Mac OS is in danger of not being true.
friend of mine was vacationing in MExico and went swimming with his ipod clipped to his bathing suit. when it dried out it was crusty with salt and utterly destroyed.
at that point it was only 5 weeks old or so. He'd bought it from Best Buy and their return policy is pretty liberal (think Wal-Mart) so he returned it. "oh, it's not what i want after all." full refund.
Dude, read your own link. that's an FM TRANSMITTER. and I quote: "Play iPod on a car stereo or any FM radio".
an FM reciever is what I was askin' about.
FM tuner? I can buy one of those as an accessory add-on thanks to the burgeoning "iPod economy,"
where? I have been looking for an FM tuner for an iPod or Mini for ages and have yet to find one. Seriously, there are sometimes when you might want to listen to the news or a ballgame but you can't unless you have yet another thing in your pocket. The only FM things i've seen are transmitters to let you listen to your 'pod on the car radio. anyone? anyone?
fair enough. then I hope you're never caught in the web of the justice system. love to see if you feel the same way eating your steak and eggs the night before they fry you up crispy.
good point and in those cases, it does exactly that, yet when deterrent is used as an argument it's usually in terms of it being a deterrent for someone else. of course it deters the dead guy from killing.
here's a question for you, and a sticky moral one: how many people were jailed only to be exonerated later and realeased? With the advent of DNA testing, more than a few.
How many innocent people were gassed/shot/hung/electrocuted and later...? oh never mind. We had a few cases here in canada, but one was very famous of a guy getting the death pentaly for a killing. it was commuted when we got rid of the death penalty so he spent the next quarter century in jail. Eventually DNA got him out. We can't give him back his 25 years, but we at least don't have to face his parents and say 'ooopsie we killed your son for no good reason'. the blood of innocents my friend. and I don't want it on my head
And let's not even get into the fact that like many 'tough on crime' laws (manadatory minimums for ex.) the death penalty is disproportionately used against minorities.
Fact is it's an imperfect and irrevocable punishment.
I'm not saying a case can't be made for using it, but let's not pretend it's anything other than what it is.
Whatever it is PICK ONE. I mean come on. Old enough to be evil but not old enough to be horny? And let's also be clear that the death penalty is not, never was, never will be a deterrent. It's punishment, vengance, that's all. So can we have a moment of clarity and honesty and say that so-and-so did something horrible and we're gonna deliver the ultimate state sponsored spanking? No we can't because then we'll have to realise that of course killing someone for killing someone is downright retarded and just meant to sate the hurt feelings of the poeple related to the victim.
And before anyone says "but what if some guy killed your mom or sister..." yes I'd hunt him down and kill him painfully. BUT (and it's a big ol' but boys and girls) I would not for a moment pretend to myself or anyone else that I was doing anything other than exacting revenge. I couldn't give a rats behind if it was deterrent, or justice. F**k that noise. I'd just kill his ass.
but that's the difference between me and the vast number of Pro-death penalty types, i'm not a hypocrite.
Yes the crimes are serious. But I LOVE the hypocrisy of people who say "oh joey was 14 he's old enough to know murder is wrong so let's fry the little F**ker", and yet will also turn around and say "That 22 year old slept with a 14 year old CHILD, she's by definition not old enough to consent, so let's put the baby-rapist in jail." It's crap. utter complete total crap. either you're old enough to be treated like an adult, or you're not.
This cherry-picking B.S. is so you can look hard on whatever crime you're paying attention to at the moment.
Oh i fully agree that the closer they get to your job the more they should know. but theoriginal post was about CEOs i think. the guy above you should know fairly well what you do, not on any minute level, but enough to konw when he's talking out his own butt. or enough to tell his boss that HE is. and so on up the chain until you get to the head honcho who doesn't know what you do (or even THAT you do it), but has enough people around him to avoid the butt-talking aspect.
I'd respectfully suggest that what you describe has anything to do with technical capability.
Organizational Design theory, one version of it anyway, says that from the CEO down there are specific jobs or tasks that need to be accomplished. the CEO needs to see out 10 years or more, the layer below him 5 years, and so on, until you get down to first line folks whose projects last til friday.
the CEO has to see and understand, on a visionary level what the company is doing. this requires a competence and familiarity with the industry, the products, the strategy etc etc. so should he/she know the 'tech' stuff? of course. but at such a macro level that doesn't even require that they use it. but rather that the understand where/what/who/how of tech in people's lives.
some CEOs come up from the tech side, others from the sales, others from finance or marketing. What they need to be is visionary, big thinkers.
ever watch West Wing? Like the Prez on that show... he doesn't DO all the work, he surrounds himself with smart folks, listens to them, then applies their advice to his vision, his mandate, and then makes a decision. and then if he's a good leader, people line up behind him and get shit done.
I'm working at M$ now (and no, i'm not a M$ apologist, I use a mac, and am, if anything, an Apple apologist:) ) and let me say that the search engine is new. how good it is, and how big it becomes in terms of market share only time will tell. but let it not be said that they just slapped a new face on it. They were using Yahoo's guts before now theyhave their own thing that they built from scratch.
as for marketing budge and all that, don't discount the fact that MANY people only trust the brand they already use elsewhere, against a possibly better product from someone else, based on the idea that 'well at least i KNOW these guys'.
okay we've now fully descened into the bowels of pointless semantic arguing. I agree with you in your points, IF you substitute 'protect' for 'enforce'. I'm not disagreeing that we must guard our freedoms, that we must have laws to ensure our freedoms are kept. but we ENFORCE laws, which PROTECT freedom. you cannot enforce freedom. because freedom is the very ability to act as we see fit for ourselves. and if you FORCE me to act a certain way then I don't have freedom. that's all i'm saying. I'm NOT for anarchy, i'm NOT for a lack of laws. I'm simply saying that the original poster used a wrong word.
no, you've given two examples of time that freedom is protected, not enforced. maybe now we're degenerating into a semantic argument, but i would suggest that enforcing a freedom would be making people vote. and in the US and Canada and other places we don't do that. In Australia (i think??) you can't renew your driver's licence unless you vote. that is enforcing freedom. making sure people get to vote, that's protecting freedom. the idea of freedom is that you can choose or NOT to participate.
Hey bub, I ain't the one who brought up Bush & the US. You did. I'm not saying you can't open up a can of whup-ass on some dictator and free people. I took issue with the idea of 'enforcing' freedom. As in a long term kind of thing. you free a people and then let them be free.
But since you do bring up Bush and the US let's remember that there are lots of examples of very un-free places in the world that are left well enough alone by the US because of any number of reasons - not the least of which is that the regime in power are friends of the US government. And just for FULL disclosure here let me say that I am NOT any US. I love the US, it's quite frankly an amazing, beautiful, wonderful place filled with many fantastic people. I hate to trot out the old 'some of my best friends are..." cliché but well it's true. I AM absolutely, positively, categorically ANTI-BUSH. I think that he and his cronies have done more damage to the country than we have even begun to realise. When we're all dust and our great-great-grandkids are paying off debts that this 'fiscal conservative' ran up history will judge him.
But back to my original point. you can't 'enforce' freedom. you protect it, nurture it, and sometimes, yes, impose it by removing corrupt regimes. But you can't force a people to behave a certain way forever, because when you try, you're enforcing your view of how freedom should be enjoyed, and you are at that point as corrupt as the regime you replaced.
The reason that France and Germany are now free, is because the Allies kicked a little Nazi ass, provided the seeds of democracy and the money to set it up, and then got the hell out.
Freedom is something you protect from those who would want to destroy it or remove yours. Freedom is not something you ENFORCE. This is not a semantic argument. Those who would enforce freedom have a very specific view usually of what freedom looks like (their own) and would have everyone else do the same. Then it's not freedom, no matter how attractive it looks to you, if it's not what I want to do, but I'm forced to do it anyway, then I'm not free.
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what a load of bollox. of course aesthetic sense can be taught. just as writing and music and any other artistic endeavor can be taught. Of course there are some people who are born great at artistic things (just as there are born-great atheletes. But just as for every Micheal Jordan or Wayne Gretzky there are dozens of guys who worked hard, practiced for bajillion hours and had good coaches, the same is true for great artists). really to say that you can't teach it is complete rubbish and is, no doubt, a fiction that bad designers want you to believe so they don't have to work hard, and good designers want you to believe so that you'll pay them lots and not ask questions.
(and in case you wonder - or care - I'm a writer and I work with designers constantly).
Here's what we did in Toronto, and i think it is perfectly adequate. You get a bit of paper, and a pencil. you mark your X in the spot adjacent the guy/gal you like. you put the paper in a cardboard folder they gave you for privacy and hand it to teh clerk. the clerk feeds teh top of your ballot into a machine (s/he can't see your vote because of the foler). the machine sucks in your ballot out of hte folder. the machine then READS your vote and displays it on a small LCD only you can see. you verify and move on. If you got it wrong, you can re-do. if you f**ked up and voted in two spots or whatnot, the ballot is rejected. at the moment the polls close the accumulated votes are downloaded and counted almost instantly. making for quick, painless votes. could the machines get hacked? yah sure, but the humans involved in the process are just as hackable and always have been. so it won't solve corruption, but it at least doesn't make corruption EASY.
Crypto is legal up here.
I'm with you on this one. A constitutional provision that states the intended 'effect' of the law, as opposed to enumerating the specific outcomes, is a better way to go. Quite simply we can't foresee what maybe invented next year or next week and therefore will have to come back and re-write it. Whereas stating the effect we want (fair use as one example) means that every new tech and its uses can be measured against that yard stick and judged accordingly. But of course ppl like the Bushies wouldn't want it (in this law or anywhere) given their aversion to 'activist judges writing laws' we hear so much about.
hmm i feel strangely unfulfilled.
RTFA. the whole contraption doesn't last 20 years. the chips do.
So why wouldn't that be a good defense? If I can prove that my wifi is open most of the time, couldn't i simply say that yes someone on my network may have acquired that IP and while doing so pirated and whatnot, but you can't actually prove that I did the pirating.
It's the same reason speed cameras have failed in this jurisdiction, you can prove the car was speeding, but you can't prove who was driving it, ergo you can't prove WHO was breaking the law.
I'm not a laywer, but if i was on a jury, that'd convince me not to convict.
Just a thought.
they did NOT buy "25%" of Apple. they invested $150 million. which is not anywhere CLOSE to a tenth of one per cent of the value of the company. And i doubt that anyone would sign an agreement to not compete with another company for such a paltry sum.(proof is the spat over IE & Safari - MS won't develop a new IE because they're snitty over Apple competing with them using safari.) The fact is probably as an earlier poster suggested, that Apple can control their environment with their own hardware & software together. while selling an OS and allowing any schmuck to build a system. I swear half the problems people have with PCs is that you have 89 different vendors's stuff inside and no one company will take responsibility for it. With a Mac, you may have a million vendors (my Sony HD died in my ibook) but Apple is on the hook for it. You'll never get the "it's not our equipment" excuse. It's my guess that that is the real reason Apple won't licence. because all of a sudden the vaunted "it just works, it's so elegant" feature of using the Mac OS is in danger of not being true.
friend of mine was vacationing in MExico and went swimming with his ipod clipped to his bathing suit. when it dried out it was crusty with salt and utterly destroyed.
at that point it was only 5 weeks old or so. He'd bought it from Best Buy and their return policy is pretty liberal (think Wal-Mart) so he returned it. "oh, it's not what i want after all." full refund.
Dude, read your own link. that's an FM TRANSMITTER. and I quote: "Play iPod on a car stereo or any FM radio". an FM reciever is what I was askin' about.
FM tuner? I can buy one of those as an accessory add-on thanks to the burgeoning "iPod economy," where? I have been looking for an FM tuner for an iPod or Mini for ages and have yet to find one. Seriously, there are sometimes when you might want to listen to the news or a ballgame but you can't unless you have yet another thing in your pocket. The only FM things i've seen are transmitters to let you listen to your 'pod on the car radio. anyone? anyone?
fair enough. then I hope you're never caught in the web of the justice system. love to see if you feel the same way eating your steak and eggs the night before they fry you up crispy.
good point and in those cases, it does exactly that, yet when deterrent is used as an argument it's usually in terms of it being a deterrent for someone else. of course it deters the dead guy from killing. here's a question for you, and a sticky moral one: how many people were jailed only to be exonerated later and realeased? With the advent of DNA testing, more than a few. How many innocent people were gassed/shot/hung/electrocuted and later...? oh never mind. We had a few cases here in canada, but one was very famous of a guy getting the death pentaly for a killing. it was commuted when we got rid of the death penalty so he spent the next quarter century in jail. Eventually DNA got him out. We can't give him back his 25 years, but we at least don't have to face his parents and say 'ooopsie we killed your son for no good reason'. the blood of innocents my friend. and I don't want it on my head And let's not even get into the fact that like many 'tough on crime' laws (manadatory minimums for ex.) the death penalty is disproportionately used against minorities. Fact is it's an imperfect and irrevocable punishment. I'm not saying a case can't be made for using it, but let's not pretend it's anything other than what it is.
Whatever it is PICK ONE. I mean come on. Old enough to be evil but not old enough to be horny? And let's also be clear that the death penalty is not, never was, never will be a deterrent. It's punishment, vengance, that's all. So can we have a moment of clarity and honesty and say that so-and-so did something horrible and we're gonna deliver the ultimate state sponsored spanking? No we can't because then we'll have to realise that of course killing someone for killing someone is downright retarded and just meant to sate the hurt feelings of the poeple related to the victim. And before anyone says "but what if some guy killed your mom or sister..." yes I'd hunt him down and kill him painfully. BUT (and it's a big ol' but boys and girls) I would not for a moment pretend to myself or anyone else that I was doing anything other than exacting revenge. I couldn't give a rats behind if it was deterrent, or justice. F**k that noise. I'd just kill his ass. but that's the difference between me and the vast number of Pro-death penalty types, i'm not a hypocrite.
Yes the crimes are serious. But I LOVE the hypocrisy of people who say "oh joey was 14 he's old enough to know murder is wrong so let's fry the little F**ker", and yet will also turn around and say "That 22 year old slept with a 14 year old CHILD, she's by definition not old enough to consent, so let's put the baby-rapist in jail." It's crap. utter complete total crap. either you're old enough to be treated like an adult, or you're not. This cherry-picking B.S. is so you can look hard on whatever crime you're paying attention to at the moment.
Oh i fully agree that the closer they get to your job the more they should know. but theoriginal post was about CEOs i think. the guy above you should know fairly well what you do, not on any minute level, but enough to konw when he's talking out his own butt. or enough to tell his boss that HE is. and so on up the chain until you get to the head honcho who doesn't know what you do (or even THAT you do it), but has enough people around him to avoid the butt-talking aspect.
I'd respectfully suggest that what you describe has anything to do with technical capability.
Organizational Design theory, one version of it anyway, says that from the CEO down there are specific jobs or tasks that need to be accomplished. the CEO needs to see out 10 years or more, the layer below him 5 years, and so on, until you get down to first line folks whose projects last til friday.
the CEO has to see and understand, on a visionary level what the company is doing. this requires a competence and familiarity with the industry, the products, the strategy etc etc. so should he/she know the 'tech' stuff? of course. but at such a macro level that doesn't even require that they use it. but rather that the understand where/what/who/how of tech in people's lives.
some CEOs come up from the tech side, others from the sales, others from finance or marketing. What they need to be is visionary, big thinkers.
ever watch West Wing? Like the Prez on that show... he doesn't DO all the work, he surrounds himself with smart folks, listens to them, then applies their advice to his vision, his mandate, and then makes a decision. and then if he's a good leader, people line up behind him and get shit done.
I'm working at M$ now (and no, i'm not a M$ apologist, I use a mac, and am, if anything, an Apple apologist :) ) and let me say that the search engine is new. how good it is, and how big it becomes in terms of market share only time will tell. but let it not be said that they just slapped a new face on it. They were using Yahoo's guts before now theyhave their own thing that they built from scratch.
:)
as for marketing budge and all that, don't discount the fact that MANY people only trust the brand they already use elsewhere, against a possibly better product from someone else, based on the idea that 'well at least i KNOW these guys'.
so with their technology + $$$$ = ?? who knows
okay we've now fully descened into the bowels of pointless semantic arguing. I agree with you in your points, IF you substitute 'protect' for 'enforce'. I'm not disagreeing that we must guard our freedoms, that we must have laws to ensure our freedoms are kept. but we ENFORCE laws, which PROTECT freedom. you cannot enforce freedom. because freedom is the very ability to act as we see fit for ourselves. and if you FORCE me to act a certain way then I don't have freedom. that's all i'm saying. I'm NOT for anarchy, i'm NOT for a lack of laws. I'm simply saying that the original poster used a wrong word.
no, you've given two examples of time that freedom is protected, not enforced. maybe now we're degenerating into a semantic argument, but i would suggest that enforcing a freedom would be making people vote. and in the US and Canada and other places we don't do that. In Australia (i think??) you can't renew your driver's licence unless you vote. that is enforcing freedom. making sure people get to vote, that's protecting freedom. the idea of freedom is that you can choose or NOT to participate.
Wooo-hooooo. Mod this S**T UP!!. You My friend have hit the nail squarely on the head!
But since you do bring up Bush and the US let's remember that there are lots of examples of very un-free places in the world that are left well enough alone by the US because of any number of reasons - not the least of which is that the regime in power are friends of the US government. And just for FULL disclosure here let me say that I am NOT any US. I love the US, it's quite frankly an amazing, beautiful, wonderful place filled with many fantastic people. I hate to trot out the old 'some of my best friends are..." cliché but well it's true. I AM absolutely, positively, categorically ANTI-BUSH. I think that he and his cronies have done more damage to the country than we have even begun to realise. When we're all dust and our great-great-grandkids are paying off debts that this 'fiscal conservative' ran up history will judge him.
But back to my original point. you can't 'enforce' freedom. you protect it, nurture it, and sometimes, yes, impose it by removing corrupt regimes. But you can't force a people to behave a certain way forever, because when you try, you're enforcing your view of how freedom should be enjoyed, and you are at that point as corrupt as the regime you replaced.
The reason that France and Germany are now free, is because the Allies kicked a little Nazi ass, provided the seeds of democracy and the money to set it up, and then got the hell out.
Freedom is something you protect from those who would want to destroy it or remove yours. Freedom is not something you ENFORCE. This is not a semantic argument. Those who would enforce freedom have a very specific view usually of what freedom looks like (their own) and would have everyone else do the same. Then it's not freedom, no matter how attractive it looks to you, if it's not what I want to do, but I'm forced to do it anyway, then I'm not free.
er, "freedom" doesn't need to be enforced.