I'll write, but two out of my three reps (Chambliss and Isakson) regularly reply to my missives with form letters which make it abundantly clear that nobody in their office even bothered to read my letter.
For example, I write: "Please don't support Bush's end run around the Constitution."
I receive: "Thank you for writing. Bush is indeed the greatest leader in human history."
No Amiga version either. What the hell's the matter with those people? How do you explain a company making free software and not porting it to niche markets with little demand???
I don't know who these "most people" are that you are referring to, but most people I know just take their car to the mechanic every now and then, *at best.* I've never seen my mother, say, check her tire pressure. As for taking it to the shop when it starts pulling or listening for weird noises, well, that's not really maintenance, is it -- that's a response to a specific problem. Most Joe Publics will take their computer in if the screen flickers or the hard drive makes a high-pitched whine. That's not what we're talking about.
I'll repeat what the OP said: "On the one hand, unix geeks who run their own systems and software, spec their own hardware, believe in open source, try to make personal backups of media, won't buy DRM and want control of their own boxes. On the other, the average consumer who doesn't give a damn about anything aside from getting a system that just works with as little management and maintanence as possible."
I say, what's wrong with wanting a system that just works with as little management and maintenance as possible? Hell, I *am* a unix geek and that sounds like a dream to me.
Gee, I don't think you understand the purpose of analogies. When I say that "engine is to car as processor is to computer," I'm not saying that "car = computer," and if you can't see the analogous relationship, you're the one with a problem. Sometimes it seems that slashdotters won't accept an analogy unless it's a 1:1 relationship, as "engine is to car as engine is to car." There's no such thing as a perfect analogy, but we mustn't let that cause us to throw out the category altogether.
The point is that most folks don't want to be bothered with maintenance -- and there's nothing wrong with that. People have plenty to master in their own particular areas of expertise without having to learn how to "make a custom install of a lightweight linux OS on a flash drive." That's a ridiculous thing to expect of any average computer user.
I'm somewhat sympathetic to the notion that this is a bit overboard, but at the same time, in 1992 it could have been argued that the Internet was not a graphical system. And yet, there were people trying to "shoehorn" a graphical interface onto a system not designed for it. And if that weren't enough, it wasn't long before people started shoehorning complex design techniques into web pages, to the dismay of those who thought tables were for tabular data. Really, if everyone took your idea of appropriate uses to heart, we probably wouldn't be driving cars.
Look: many of these ideas will fail, and some may well succeed. These people are pushing the limits of what these technologies can do, and I for one applaud them for it. No one is forcing you to use these systems, so cut these guys some slack already.
Wow, it's just like the automobile divide. On the one hand, mechanic geeks who install their own water pumps. On the other, the average consumer who just wants to be able to drive to work. Imagine that!
but environazi standards are why I can't buy a 1968 Nova or a 1969 Charger at the store
Putting aside the fact that this is not 1968, this is total bullshit. There are no "environazi" standards preventing you from buying a beefy car. Buy one of these: http://modernmusclecars.net/
As for your other point, that's a really stupid argument you're putting forward, and you might recognize that fact if you weren't so intent on being a dick. I'm not talking about Mini Coopers vs. Excursions. I'm talking about Excursions vs. a slight turn. Top rated sedans are safer -- they survive impacts plenty well and they don't *turn over at the slightest provocation.* There's more to saftey than heavy = survivability, as any engineer will tell you. If there weren't, we'd just drive tanks.
You can have the last word, because it's plain you're going to have it in any case, whether it's total crap or not.
What the hell are you talking about? There's no such law. That's a bunch of horseshit.
Moreover, everyone who has been within the gravitational well of a single issue of Car and Driver knows that SUVs, on the whole, are considerably less safe than the average sedan.
Can we get past the baloney and construct actual, rational arguements here? Yeah, dumb question.
Moreover, Apple isn't necessarily in direct competition with Microsoft anymore given the existence of Boot Camp. The competition is Dell, HP, Panasonic, Sony, and other hardware manufacturers, against which Apple's supposedly minimal market share isn't quite so minimal.
but public expenditure to maintain the military is bad for the economy? Military spending has historically been a big positive for the economy, as long as debt is properly managed.
Actually, military spending has historically been a big positive for a few small sectors of the economy, and typically made a handful of people filthy rich while siphoning off a lot of dollars from the public trough. Face it: there's not nearly as much public payoff when you spend money researching and milling artillery tubes than when you, say, pay for new infrastructure.
That's not to say there aren't exceptions, like the Army Corps of Engineers or the U.S. highway system, but overall those are not the rule. Think of the countless trillions that are spent simply building weapons. Sure, the people making those weapons earn a paycheck, but the product of their labor typically winds up in a million small pieces in a desert somewhere. What kind of good would it do the U.S. economy if we took all the automobiles we built and blew them up in a faraway country rather than using them for... you know, transportation?
And that's not even counting the many insane boondoggles that get shoehorned into the budget every year -- the Crusader artillery piece, the SDI black hole, CVN-21, DDX destroyers, Virginia class subs, etc., etc., etc. This is *not* good economic activity, any more than if Ford started focusing on triple-decker trailer trucks with amphibious capabilities. They'd be out of business in a year, and we should hold our government equally accountable.
I'm all for the environment, but the cost of rail is not the way to solve it.
Guess you've never heard of economies of scale.
The reason it isn't available is because the geographical distance is just too large to cover with an effective public transport.
That's horseshit. Boston, New York, and Chicago -- all large cities -- have excellent public transport, and people use it. This includes outlying areas, which are served by commuter rail. Atlanta, where I live, has a suck-ass system that includes two measly rails that probably don't go where you want to go. Is it because Atlanta is too large? Well, it's not so large that I can't bike to work every day. Hey, Europe as a whole is about a million square kilometers *larger* than the U.S., yet their rail system is pervasive and very high quality (it's not really fair to compare, say, Luxembourg to the U.S. since their trains don't stop at the border).
The simple fact is that for public transit to be useful, it almost always requires some degree of public subsidy. Some cities are willing to do this and some aren't, because it seems like to the people like a cost (and to many it seems like white suburbanites subsidizing black urbanites, which definitely doesn't fly in the cracker south). Really, if you've spent any time risking your life on the Atlanta expressways, *and* ridden the T in Boston, you know that it's pure benefit, and I pity the citizens that aren't willing to let go of a few tax dollars to get it set up right (even though they are usually willing to shell out for a new ballpark for the local nine).
See here: Detroit once had an excellent trolley system, but many decades ago, the growing auto industry bought all the rails, ripped them up, and sold busses to the city. Now Detroit has a shitty public transit system (including the inexplicably useless People Mover). Was that because Detroit is too big? No, it's because of short-sighted stupidity.
By the way, you can go round trip from Albany to NYC for $87, not $150 (check the Amtrak website). Plus, you don't have to pay to park your car once you get to the city... *and* you can relax, read a book, and learn how to spell pedistal, rather than sitting and staring at the bumper of the car stuck in traffic in front of you.
I think I follow you. It seemed to me that you were trying to eliminate "unnatural" as a category altogether.
I don't think the OP's was implying that human behavior is de facto bad. Rather, I think he was trying to say that gigantic herds of cows are unsustainable, which may well be correct. He may have been imprecise, but it didn't seem to me that he was equating all human activity with bad.
Now, if you are saying that you are opposed to unnatural = human = bad, that's fine, I agree with you. One must be careful with equivalences.
No, I think you miss my point. It can definitely be argued that human action is not the same as natural action -- one may be a subset of the other, but they are different concepts and clouding them by pointing out that humans are animals too just gives one cause to have to dream up new words. "Caused by humans" and "not caused by humans" are the points the OP is trying to get at, and the difference is significant, because we fixing the problems caused by the former amounts to changing our own behavior -- not true of the latter.
Shifting the difference between natural and unnatural to the source of humans rather than human actions themselves, you're not generating any real insight, you're just nullifying the word "unnatural." There's no reason we shouldn't be able to distinguish between human agency and other agencies, and these are perfectly servicable words for that purpose. If cats and dogs want words of their own, to distinguish between cat agency or dog agency and other agencies, then maybe we can start working on new words. Otherwise, I so no reason not to keep these. There's nothing meaningless about them, and, unless you choose to take no viewpoint whatsoever, nothing arbitrary either -- no more arbitrary than when I refer to myself as "me."
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, both Google and P2P users already pay for bandwidth.
I'll write, but two out of my three reps (Chambliss and Isakson) regularly reply to my missives with form letters which make it abundantly clear that nobody in their office even bothered to read my letter.
For example, I write: "Please don't support Bush's end run around the Constitution."
I receive: "Thank you for writing. Bush is indeed the greatest leader in human history."
Fuckers.
No Amiga version either. What the hell's the matter with those people? How do you explain a company making free software and not porting it to niche markets with little demand???
I think anyone serious about 3D will give it a pass
Well, I don't think it's really meant to compete with, say, modo or Lightwave. But it makes a nifty pre-vis tool.Wings has a pretty low learning curve, but can be hectored into doing some neat stuff.
For the record, massive profits != "edge of total collapse."
I don't know who these "most people" are that you are referring to, but most people I know just take their car to the mechanic every now and then, *at best.* I've never seen my mother, say, check her tire pressure. As for taking it to the shop when it starts pulling or listening for weird noises, well, that's not really maintenance, is it -- that's a response to a specific problem. Most Joe Publics will take their computer in if the screen flickers or the hard drive makes a high-pitched whine. That's not what we're talking about.
I'll repeat what the OP said: "On the one hand, unix geeks who run their own systems and software, spec their own hardware, believe in open source, try to make personal backups of media, won't buy DRM and want control of their own boxes. On the other, the average consumer who doesn't give a damn about anything aside from getting a system that just works with as little management and maintanence as possible."
I say, what's wrong with wanting a system that just works with as little management and maintenance as possible? Hell, I *am* a unix geek and that sounds like a dream to me.
Gee, I don't think you understand the purpose of analogies. When I say that "engine is to car as processor is to computer," I'm not saying that "car = computer," and if you can't see the analogous relationship, you're the one with a problem. Sometimes it seems that slashdotters won't accept an analogy unless it's a 1:1 relationship, as "engine is to car as engine is to car." There's no such thing as a perfect analogy, but we mustn't let that cause us to throw out the category altogether.
The point is that most folks don't want to be bothered with maintenance -- and there's nothing wrong with that. People have plenty to master in their own particular areas of expertise without having to learn how to "make a custom install of a lightweight linux OS on a flash drive." That's a ridiculous thing to expect of any average computer user.
I'm somewhat sympathetic to the notion that this is a bit overboard, but at the same time, in 1992 it could have been argued that the Internet was not a graphical system. And yet, there were people trying to "shoehorn" a graphical interface onto a system not designed for it. And if that weren't enough, it wasn't long before people started shoehorning complex design techniques into web pages, to the dismay of those who thought tables were for tabular data. Really, if everyone took your idea of appropriate uses to heart, we probably wouldn't be driving cars.
Look: many of these ideas will fail, and some may well succeed. These people are pushing the limits of what these technologies can do, and I for one applaud them for it. No one is forcing you to use these systems, so cut these guys some slack already.
Wow, it's just like the automobile divide. On the one hand, mechanic geeks who install their own water pumps. On the other, the average consumer who just wants to be able to drive to work. Imagine that!
If, by "sense of humor" you mean he enjoys humiliating his staff, appointees, and friends in public, then yes, he has a sense of humor.
Main pages of what? Slashdot? Boing Boing? Or porn sites? I dunno, porn is sort of what I expect to find on porn sites...
but environazi standards are why I can't buy a 1968 Nova or a 1969 Charger at the store
Putting aside the fact that this is not 1968, this is total bullshit. There are no "environazi" standards preventing you from buying a beefy car. Buy one of these: http://modernmusclecars.net/
As for your other point, that's a really stupid argument you're putting forward, and you might recognize that fact if you weren't so intent on being a dick. I'm not talking about Mini Coopers vs. Excursions. I'm talking about Excursions vs. a slight turn. Top rated sedans are safer -- they survive impacts plenty well and they don't *turn over at the slightest provocation.* There's more to saftey than heavy = survivability, as any engineer will tell you. If there weren't, we'd just drive tanks.
You can have the last word, because it's plain you're going to have it in any case, whether it's total crap or not.
Dumbass.
What the hell are you talking about? There's no such law. That's a bunch of horseshit.
Moreover, everyone who has been within the gravitational well of a single issue of Car and Driver knows that SUVs, on the whole, are considerably less safe than the average sedan.
Can we get past the baloney and construct actual, rational arguements here? Yeah, dumb question.
Moreover, Apple isn't necessarily in direct competition with Microsoft anymore given the existence of Boot Camp. The competition is Dell, HP, Panasonic, Sony, and other hardware manufacturers, against which Apple's supposedly minimal market share isn't quite so minimal.
but public expenditure to maintain the military is bad for the economy? Military spending has historically been a big positive for the economy, as long as debt is properly managed.
Actually, military spending has historically been a big positive for a few small sectors of the economy, and typically made a handful of people filthy rich while siphoning off a lot of dollars from the public trough. Face it: there's not nearly as much public payoff when you spend money researching and milling artillery tubes than when you, say, pay for new infrastructure.
That's not to say there aren't exceptions, like the Army Corps of Engineers or the U.S. highway system, but overall those are not the rule. Think of the countless trillions that are spent simply building weapons. Sure, the people making those weapons earn a paycheck, but the product of their labor typically winds up in a million small pieces in a desert somewhere. What kind of good would it do the U.S. economy if we took all the automobiles we built and blew them up in a faraway country rather than using them for... you know, transportation?
And that's not even counting the many insane boondoggles that get shoehorned into the budget every year -- the Crusader artillery piece, the SDI black hole, CVN-21, DDX destroyers, Virginia class subs, etc., etc., etc. This is *not* good economic activity, any more than if Ford started focusing on triple-decker trailer trucks with amphibious capabilities. They'd be out of business in a year, and we should hold our government equally accountable.
It's funny how people didn't need SUVs twenty years ago, but now suddenly they do.
I'm all for the environment, but the cost of rail is not the way to solve it.
Guess you've never heard of economies of scale.The reason it isn't available is because the geographical distance is just too large to cover with an effective public transport.
That's horseshit. Boston, New York, and Chicago -- all large cities -- have excellent public transport, and people use it. This includes outlying areas, which are served by commuter rail. Atlanta, where I live, has a suck-ass system that includes two measly rails that probably don't go where you want to go. Is it because Atlanta is too large? Well, it's not so large that I can't bike to work every day. Hey, Europe as a whole is about a million square kilometers *larger* than the U.S., yet their rail system is pervasive and very high quality (it's not really fair to compare, say, Luxembourg to the U.S. since their trains don't stop at the border).
The simple fact is that for public transit to be useful, it almost always requires some degree of public subsidy. Some cities are willing to do this and some aren't, because it seems like to the people like a cost (and to many it seems like white suburbanites subsidizing black urbanites, which definitely doesn't fly in the cracker south). Really, if you've spent any time risking your life on the Atlanta expressways, *and* ridden the T in Boston, you know that it's pure benefit, and I pity the citizens that aren't willing to let go of a few tax dollars to get it set up right (even though they are usually willing to shell out for a new ballpark for the local nine).
See here: Detroit once had an excellent trolley system, but many decades ago, the growing auto industry bought all the rails, ripped them up, and sold busses to the city. Now Detroit has a shitty public transit system (including the inexplicably useless People Mover). Was that because Detroit is too big? No, it's because of short-sighted stupidity.
By the way, you can go round trip from Albany to NYC for $87, not $150 (check the Amtrak website). Plus, you don't have to pay to park your car once you get to the city... *and* you can relax, read a book, and learn how to spell pedistal, rather than sitting and staring at the bumper of the car stuck in traffic in front of you.
As long as you don't mind being packed in with your neighbors like sardines.
That depends. Are we talking sardines in oil? And how attractive are the neighbors?Duh. Naked teenagers.
I think you are misusing the word "useful." Anyone can trade ass for hits without much work -- that's what you meant.
Yeah, 'cause the content on MySpace is so kewl.
Yeah, 'cause the left has so much power these days.
I think I follow you. It seemed to me that you were trying to eliminate "unnatural" as a category altogether.
I don't think the OP's was implying that human behavior is de facto bad. Rather, I think he was trying to say that gigantic herds of cows are unsustainable, which may well be correct. He may have been imprecise, but it didn't seem to me that he was equating all human activity with bad.
Now, if you are saying that you are opposed to unnatural = human = bad, that's fine, I agree with you. One must be careful with equivalences.
No, I think you miss my point. It can definitely be argued that human action is not the same as natural action -- one may be a subset of the other, but they are different concepts and clouding them by pointing out that humans are animals too just gives one cause to have to dream up new words. "Caused by humans" and "not caused by humans" are the points the OP is trying to get at, and the difference is significant, because we fixing the problems caused by the former amounts to changing our own behavior -- not true of the latter.
Shifting the difference between natural and unnatural to the source of humans rather than human actions themselves, you're not generating any real insight, you're just nullifying the word "unnatural." There's no reason we shouldn't be able to distinguish between human agency and other agencies, and these are perfectly servicable words for that purpose. If cats and dogs want words of their own, to distinguish between cat agency or dog agency and other agencies, then maybe we can start working on new words. Otherwise, I so no reason not to keep these. There's nothing meaningless about them, and, unless you choose to take no viewpoint whatsoever, nothing arbitrary either -- no more arbitrary than when I refer to myself as "me."