I think real scientists should stay well away from this kinda crap,
No, they should finally wake up and go into all those areas that outdated, barbarian folk-lores want to mark "out of bounds". Those of us who've been interested in these things already have an intuitive understanding that the entire card house of religion will come crashing down once some real research has been done. Death, heaven, god - it all appears to not only be entirely non-supernatural, but also embarrassingly simple, when you look at it.
Sure, you'll not cure the really faithful, religion is like terminal cancer, you can ease the suffering, but you can't cure it. But the more you know about it, the less people need to get it.
The iPhone? Lame also, for anyone on the bleeding edge of smartphones (which includes a large portion of slashdotters).
You are forgetting those of us who are tired of the bleeding. The majority of the people I personally know who own Macs are tech people. Just that they're not 17 anymore, but in their early 30s. Yes, I could patch that driver because it doesn't support this new version of that hardware piece - but why the fuck should I? There's things I can do with my time, you know?
The iPhone wasn't lame at all for me, and the dozen or so other tech people I know who own one. It's the perfect device to actually get some work done with, and you can write your own apps if you absolutely must (in fact, I do. But a lot less often than I had thought I would).
Even geeks aren't a single demographic anymore. There are still the mom's-basement-kids and the students, but there are also the busy folks who run their own company or have a full job in someone else's, there are geeks with family, and despite all the dumb/. jokes, most geeks actually do have girlfriends, or wives.
I can point my vote toward some other person or organization.
And that's where your system will fail. We already have representative democracy, and it doesn't work. So you replace "party" with "voting block". Tell you what, it'll be two weeks before you see offers like "10% off if you give us your vote!".
The trick would be categorizing things in a concrete way, since many bills might touch on multiple subjects.
No, the trick would be in making it so the system can't be gamed. Creating a system, for anything, is the easy part. Creating a system with humans involved so that the system itself can't be gamed, that's the hard part.
Under my system, if your representative isn't going to vote your way, you can immediately nerf them.
And it would matter not one bit more than the current system, because 99% of the voters won't care, except maybe on issues that cut directly into their pocket. Which would lead you to an even worse system, because now a balance with necessary but unpopular/expensive measures becomes impossible.
You could argue that this will give too much power to those who are too lazy to get involved and study the issues.
No, it doesn't. It gives too much power to those who can get the lazy to sign up with them ("FREE blowjobs, if you give us your vote!"). You could argue that the lobbying/bribing money would at least be spent more equally, but I consider that a very weak argument.
we're left with a single world government. AKA, a global monopoly.
No, mixing buzzwords from different contexts does not create a new hypercause.
Government is, by definition, a monopoly. It's not as if you could choose your government. You can choose your place of living, but the government comes with it, whether you like it or not. On the contrary, government defines itself by the very fact that it is not just one, but the monopoly - on power.
I'm looking forward to your proposal on how to democratically solve the problem of 5 people in a boat that holds only 4.
This is a very serious problem of democracy in political theory. There are some issues where a democracy - ignoring issues of personal bias, say 4 of the 5 being white - will come to a stalemate and inability to solve the problem. In small democracies, these issues can be solved by moving to the meta level (e.g. by deciding upon a process of eliminating one that everyone can agree on, such as drawing sticks), but a) the solution itself is not democractic and b) it doesn't work with large groups.
According to Plato's "Republic", democracy is only sustainable if the masses are, in fact, educated.
When quoting ancient greek philosophers, one should not forget the environment they were living in, and the things that they - unless you can show them explicitly disvowing them - would have taken for granted.
Among other things, that means that in a political context, only male citizens "count". No women, no slaves, no members of the unpriviledged class.
I've long held that democracy actually only works in that context, when the voters are people with enough education and leisure time to care about the issues they're voting on.
And it may - I don't say it is, but it may - be the case that we will always have a wide spread in education, and always have a large mass of people who know so little about matters at hand that letting them vote does nothing but harm. At least as long as complexity of life increases, this will always be the case. Keep in mind that todays "uneducated masses" have more education than all but the intellectuals of ancient times. For one, they can usually read, write and do basic math. That alone would've made you an educated man throughout most of human history.
I'm an environmentalist, but I also know that if you put democracy "on hold" it's awfully hard to get it started again.
Very likely, yes.
But then again, if you throw the planet down the drain, it'll be quite a bit harder to get that whole "humanity" and "civilization" thing started again.
Remember that James isn't saying we have to do this, and do it now. He is saying that if we don't solve climate change, and if it turns catastrophic, then we'll have the choice between survival and freedom.
And, according to most studies of politician's actual abilities conducted to date, you have a very good probability of ending up with an equally (in)capable government.
If you added just a small bit of mandatory minimum education standards (say, being able to write one page of comprehensible, mostly gramatically correct, text) then your odds are extremely favourable. Of course, you'd also cut out about half the population.
If you take the full context, not a choice quote, he is right. His claim is essentially that, once the crisis is in full swing, democracy will be unable to solve it. So his argument is not "suspend democracy now", but "solve this crisis now, or we will lose democracy later".
And he's damn right. Democracy is incapable of rapid reactions and taking risks. And I say that after having headed a democratic institution for several years, having had to win several elections to get to that point. Democracy is great for consensus and forming solutions that take many points of view into account. Democracy sucks at reacting quickly and it sucks at acting fact-based.
This guy has lost the plot. First nuclear power as a way to save the planet. Now 'putting democracy on hold' to achieve the same goal.
Other than you, he has the background to back it up.
The actual operating problem with nuclear is that the attempt to get out of nuclear power was entirely botched, from the get-go, and very likely due to commercial lobbying. The plants that we have now are old plants. That means two things: One, they are dangerous and two they are incredibly profitable.
Getting out of nuclear by not allowing new plants to be built was an incredibly dumb idea, and leaves us in the situation we have now, where many countries are discussing keeping the existing plants online for even longer, while not allowing new ones to be built. We're talking about old plants that, according to their original design specs, should already have been shut down.
That is playing with fire a lot more than building a couple new and safer plants. The problem is that emotionally, people don't understand risk. The only risks we understand on an intuitive level are those our brains are wired up for, which largely means immediate physical threats.
Frankly, based on all the information I have gathered, I would gladly replace all the fossil power generation with nuclear right away, if it were my decision to make. Yes, there is risk involved. However, if you just do the math in your head, you'll have to agree that the risk of a nuclear meltdown in a modern reactor, not a Chernobyl one from the 70s, multiplied by the number of people affected, is considerably less than the risk of catastrophic climate change multiplied by the number of people affected.
just assumptions and guesses about what would happen if we forced companies to put the power usage on the product package.
Really? So, it's just assumptions, that they already fake the tests for energy consumption, by having specific "energy saving" modes that only activate under lab conditions? That store broke just a few days ago.
Regarding many, many other labeling laws, we've seen them stretch them as far as possible. When they had to list ingredients, the started inventing the E-number to obscure most of the interesting ones. Weird package sizes serve no other purpose but to make price comparisons more difficult. All this stuff is on the record. It's not especially far-fetched to assume the same attitude would be applied here.
The fact that such an obvious flaw was standard procedure from day one troubles me.
We don't know if it was. All we know is that it is current in the system now. Procedures deteriorate over time, this may be one such case, or it may not. Right now, we don't know.
Given the track record of the government, I would be nothing (substantial) will change.
As I said: Not much better or worse than any multinational corporation. Exxon changed their name, but not their business methods. Governments can't change their name, so the impressions stay longer.
Because you picked out one part of my argument and found that in reality what should happen, doesn't (and hey wait, it was discovered by the government) does a) not invalidate the entire argument and b) does not show that government doesn't work. At least they're able to find the flaws in their own system. I fail to see how corporations are any better or worse in this respect.
Why do we even have a government agency to put a damn energy star sticker on the side of an appliance? Simply make all manufacturers print the power draw of their item on the side of the package.
Because if you leave it to the "free market" you are actually leaving it not to a market, but to marketing, which means the customer will be fucked in two dozen ways, at least five of which you never thought possible before. Among other things they will hide it in unreadable script, invent new metrics to cover up the true meaning, of course the numbers themselves will come from rigged "tests" and have a very distant relationship to reality, if at all. You will probably find tiny-print "this appliance uses 18 gublinks per ortung of energy" under a huge, green "environmentally friendly certified (by our own in-house bullshit institute" sticker.
I'd rather have a government agency that fucks up, but at least it fucks up equally for everyone.
You mean you are not a simple ELIZA program that takes words out of context from the postings it replies to, and shuffles them around to create questions and remarks that create the illusion of an actual conversation?
After the last replies, the burden of proof on that one rests with you. A human would've understood the Turing Test reference, for starters.
You just failed the Turin test, thank you for playing.
Not only is your statement blatantly false, it doesn't even address the point. I was nowhere talking about the US government. The word "government", or even derivates such as "parliament", "president", etc. don't even appear in my posting. I was talking about US culture, which has very little to do with the government, and for what it has, the causal relationship is the other way around.
This isn't a complaint about big macs, it's an argument over whether or not citizens have a right to accurate information.
Then America, the land of Watergate, conspiracy theory capital of the world, the land of "Iraq has WMDs and we're invading it because they caused 9/11", the land of FOX news and Hollywood, should take a deep breath, sit down and shut the fuck up.
In some countries women are given little respect and are mutilated for not doing exactly as they are told. Is it wrong for us to insist on their dignity?
There is a difference between telling people "hey, you shouldn't abuse women" and "here is exactly how you have to live so that women's rights are respected".
Since when did the right to self-determination, freedom of expression and thought, freedom to not be oppressed by a fascist state, become wrong?
I don't know. Tell me, because it's you who's coming up with that nonsense idea.
But on a slightly different note, has it ever occured to you that while almost all human cultures share the same set of values, their priorities differ? Some cultures value individualism higher, some value society higher. No culture disregards either. But you have american culture which - I simplify here - says "me" is more important than "you" and you have asian culture, which mostly says "we and you" is more important than "I". So in asia, people don't value the individual rights quite so highly, even though they still hold them. But in many cases where an american would say "I have a right to..., so society has to let me be", the asian would say "society has these rights, so I have to respect that and not insist on my rights".
We're not really that different, us humans. But some of us prefer red and some of us prefer blue. And some groups of us say society has to make sacrifices so the individual can maximize his happiness, and some say the individual ought to make sacrifices to society at large can maximize its happiness.
The only evil and stupid people are the ones who think that their value system is the absolute one, the only correct one, the one that should dominate all others.
It's like complaining about Bic Macs. If you don't like them, and think they're crap, then just don't buy it. Why should they have to ask your permission to sell?
Where did I say the do?
The problem here is the dictatorship of the masses. Due to economy of scale and market power of big players, niches are rapidly disintegrating. When commerce was dominated by small companies, owner-run stores, etc. you had a lot of choice and more importantly, if nothing was to your satisfaction, it was easy to start up your own.
Try starting up your own supermarket when you compete against WalMart. Even if you try to satisfy a niche, you will find yourself facing the culture that WalMart has created, with suppliers not geared towards delivering smaller quantities anymore, for example.
Nobody forces me to buy a BigMac. I have noticed over the years, however, that it is becoming more and more difficult to find non-fastfood alternatives in major cities. Increasingly, you can have fast food, or an expensive restaurant, but nothing inbetween. I already vote with my wallet. But I only have control over where I put my vote/money, not over who is on the ballot/shopping-street.
Yes, we all love to hate the chinese. But there's some truth in there. The US is aggressively exporting its values and believes to the entire world, and it isn't asking if anyone wants it. Hollywood is the biggest propaganda machine ever, far more subtle and effective than any Nazi or Soviet Russian government efforts. And yes, Google is part of a culture as much as it is a company, and is bringing that culture to the world.
Most of the world is eating it up. A lot of people welcome it. Few of them made a conscious decision among alternatives on the matter of culture and spirit.
I'm not debating if the US culture is "good" or "bad" here, just stating the fact that the amount of culture that is in the american way of doing business is seldom reflected.
perhaps it's time to rethink the basic architecture of today's operating systems, suggested Dave Probert, a kernel architect within the Windows core operating systems division at Microsoft.
Well, perhaps it's time you stop to equate "Windows" with "today's operating systems".
Every other major OS on the planet has been moving towards multiple cores for several years, and is ready for the multi-core systems currently on and coming to the market in the coming years. All, except Windows.
Crazy? Why? On the business end, a patent license costs money. So, if you break it down, these people had forgone safety for profit. I don't see why they should not be sued?
And it's not that horrible, TFA says the price would be about $150 on top - and we're talking about machines costing from 2000 to 5000 bucks here, so that's a few percent. For not losing your hand.
Compared to early medieval church? Not so sure. Compared to todays islamic fundamentalists? Probably not. Compared to what todays christian fundamentalists would like to do if only the evil communist-satanic government would let them? Also not so sure.
Slashdot Mirror
I think real scientists should stay well away from this kinda crap,
No, they should finally wake up and go into all those areas that outdated, barbarian folk-lores want to mark "out of bounds". Those of us who've been interested in these things already have an intuitive understanding that the entire card house of religion will come crashing down once some real research has been done. Death, heaven, god - it all appears to not only be entirely non-supernatural, but also embarrassingly simple, when you look at it.
Sure, you'll not cure the really faithful, religion is like terminal cancer, you can ease the suffering, but you can't cure it. But the more you know about it, the less people need to get it.
The iPhone? Lame also, for anyone on the bleeding edge of smartphones (which includes a large portion of slashdotters).
You are forgetting those of us who are tired of the bleeding. The majority of the people I personally know who own Macs are tech people. Just that they're not 17 anymore, but in their early 30s. Yes, I could patch that driver because it doesn't support this new version of that hardware piece - but why the fuck should I? There's things I can do with my time, you know?
The iPhone wasn't lame at all for me, and the dozen or so other tech people I know who own one. It's the perfect device to actually get some work done with, and you can write your own apps if you absolutely must (in fact, I do. But a lot less often than I had thought I would).
Even geeks aren't a single demographic anymore. There are still the mom's-basement-kids and the students, but there are also the busy folks who run their own company or have a full job in someone else's, there are geeks with family, and despite all the dumb /. jokes, most geeks actually do have girlfriends, or wives.
In other news: Anyone who is the slightest bit surprised by this needs their head checked.
I can point my vote toward some other person or organization.
And that's where your system will fail. We already have representative democracy, and it doesn't work. So you replace "party" with "voting block". Tell you what, it'll be two weeks before you see offers like "10% off if you give us your vote!".
The trick would be categorizing things in a concrete way, since many bills might touch on multiple subjects.
No, the trick would be in making it so the system can't be gamed. Creating a system, for anything, is the easy part. Creating a system with humans involved so that the system itself can't be gamed, that's the hard part.
Under my system, if your representative isn't going to vote your way, you can immediately nerf them.
And it would matter not one bit more than the current system, because 99% of the voters won't care, except maybe on issues that cut directly into their pocket. Which would lead you to an even worse system, because now a balance with necessary but unpopular/expensive measures becomes impossible.
You could argue that this will give too much power to those who are too lazy to get involved and study the issues.
No, it doesn't. It gives too much power to those who can get the lazy to sign up with them ("FREE blowjobs, if you give us your vote!"). You could argue that the lobbying/bribing money would at least be spent more equally, but I consider that a very weak argument.
we're left with a single world government. AKA, a global monopoly.
No, mixing buzzwords from different contexts does not create a new hypercause.
Government is, by definition, a monopoly. It's not as if you could choose your government. You can choose your place of living, but the government comes with it, whether you like it or not. On the contrary, government defines itself by the very fact that it is not just one, but the monopoly - on power.
I'm looking forward to your proposal on how to democratically solve the problem of 5 people in a boat that holds only 4.
This is a very serious problem of democracy in political theory. There are some issues where a democracy - ignoring issues of personal bias, say 4 of the 5 being white - will come to a stalemate and inability to solve the problem. In small democracies, these issues can be solved by moving to the meta level (e.g. by deciding upon a process of eliminating one that everyone can agree on, such as drawing sticks), but a) the solution itself is not democractic and b) it doesn't work with large groups.
According to Plato's "Republic", democracy is only sustainable if the masses are, in fact, educated.
When quoting ancient greek philosophers, one should not forget the environment they were living in, and the things that they - unless you can show them explicitly disvowing them - would have taken for granted.
Among other things, that means that in a political context, only male citizens "count". No women, no slaves, no members of the unpriviledged class.
I've long held that democracy actually only works in that context, when the voters are people with enough education and leisure time to care about the issues they're voting on.
And it may - I don't say it is, but it may - be the case that we will always have a wide spread in education, and always have a large mass of people who know so little about matters at hand that letting them vote does nothing but harm. At least as long as complexity of life increases, this will always be the case. Keep in mind that todays "uneducated masses" have more education than all but the intellectuals of ancient times. For one, they can usually read, write and do basic math. That alone would've made you an educated man throughout most of human history.
I'm an environmentalist, but I also know that if you put democracy "on hold" it's awfully hard to get it started again.
Very likely, yes.
But then again, if you throw the planet down the drain, it'll be quite a bit harder to get that whole "humanity" and "civilization" thing started again.
Remember that James isn't saying we have to do this, and do it now. He is saying that if we don't solve climate change, and if it turns catastrophic, then we'll have the choice between survival and freedom.
A successful global effort to "put democracy on hold" for any reason would be proof enough to me that this planet is not worth saving.
Because democracy is the only thing humanity has ever produced that makes it all worth it?
I didn't know there are democracy fundamentalists. Thanks for teaching me I was wrong. One more kind of extremism to watch out for.
And, according to most studies of politician's actual abilities conducted to date, you have a very good probability of ending up with an equally (in)capable government.
If you added just a small bit of mandatory minimum education standards (say, being able to write one page of comprehensible, mostly gramatically correct, text) then your odds are extremely favourable. Of course, you'd also cut out about half the population.
If you take the full context, not a choice quote, he is right. His claim is essentially that, once the crisis is in full swing, democracy will be unable to solve it. So his argument is not "suspend democracy now", but "solve this crisis now, or we will lose democracy later".
And he's damn right. Democracy is incapable of rapid reactions and taking risks. And I say that after having headed a democratic institution for several years, having had to win several elections to get to that point. Democracy is great for consensus and forming solutions that take many points of view into account. Democracy sucks at reacting quickly and it sucks at acting fact-based.
This guy has lost the plot. First nuclear power as a way to save the planet. Now 'putting democracy on hold' to achieve the same goal.
Other than you, he has the background to back it up.
The actual operating problem with nuclear is that the attempt to get out of nuclear power was entirely botched, from the get-go, and very likely due to commercial lobbying. The plants that we have now are old plants. That means two things: One, they are dangerous and two they are incredibly profitable.
Getting out of nuclear by not allowing new plants to be built was an incredibly dumb idea, and leaves us in the situation we have now, where many countries are discussing keeping the existing plants online for even longer, while not allowing new ones to be built. We're talking about old plants that, according to their original design specs, should already have been shut down.
That is playing with fire a lot more than building a couple new and safer plants. The problem is that emotionally, people don't understand risk. The only risks we understand on an intuitive level are those our brains are wired up for, which largely means immediate physical threats.
Frankly, based on all the information I have gathered, I would gladly replace all the fossil power generation with nuclear right away, if it were my decision to make. Yes, there is risk involved. However, if you just do the math in your head, you'll have to agree that the risk of a nuclear meltdown in a modern reactor, not a Chernobyl one from the 70s, multiplied by the number of people affected, is considerably less than the risk of catastrophic climate change multiplied by the number of people affected.
just assumptions and guesses about what would happen if we forced companies to put the power usage on the product package.
Really? So, it's just assumptions, that they already fake the tests for energy consumption, by having specific "energy saving" modes that only activate under lab conditions? That store broke just a few days ago.
Regarding many, many other labeling laws, we've seen them stretch them as far as possible. When they had to list ingredients, the started inventing the E-number to obscure most of the interesting ones. Weird package sizes serve no other purpose but to make price comparisons more difficult. All this stuff is on the record. It's not especially far-fetched to assume the same attitude would be applied here.
The fact that such an obvious flaw was standard procedure from day one troubles me.
We don't know if it was. All we know is that it is current in the system now. Procedures deteriorate over time, this may be one such case, or it may not. Right now, we don't know.
Given the track record of the government, I would be nothing (substantial) will change.
As I said: Not much better or worse than any multinational corporation. Exxon changed their name, but not their business methods. Governments can't change their name, so the impressions stay longer.
Because you picked out one part of my argument and found that in reality what should happen, doesn't (and hey wait, it was discovered by the government) does a) not invalidate the entire argument and b) does not show that government doesn't work. At least they're able to find the flaws in their own system. I fail to see how corporations are any better or worse in this respect.
Why do we even have a government agency to put a damn energy star sticker on the side of an appliance? Simply make all manufacturers print the power draw of their item on the side of the package.
Because if you leave it to the "free market" you are actually leaving it not to a market, but to marketing, which means the customer will be fucked in two dozen ways, at least five of which you never thought possible before. Among other things they will hide it in unreadable script, invent new metrics to cover up the true meaning, of course the numbers themselves will come from rigged "tests" and have a very distant relationship to reality, if at all. You will probably find tiny-print "this appliance uses 18 gublinks per ortung of energy" under a huge, green "environmentally friendly certified (by our own in-house bullshit institute" sticker.
I'd rather have a government agency that fucks up, but at least it fucks up equally for everyone.
You mean you are not a simple ELIZA program that takes words out of context from the postings it replies to, and shuffles them around to create questions and remarks that create the illusion of an actual conversation?
After the last replies, the burden of proof on that one rests with you. A human would've understood the Turing Test reference, for starters.
You just failed the Turin test, thank you for playing.
Not only is your statement blatantly false, it doesn't even address the point. I was nowhere talking about the US government. The word "government", or even derivates such as "parliament", "president", etc. don't even appear in my posting. I was talking about US culture, which has very little to do with the government, and for what it has, the causal relationship is the other way around.
This isn't a complaint about big macs, it's an argument over whether or not citizens have a right to accurate information.
Then America, the land of Watergate, conspiracy theory capital of the world, the land of "Iraq has WMDs and we're invading it because they caused 9/11", the land of FOX news and Hollywood, should take a deep breath, sit down and shut the fuck up.
In some countries women are given little respect and are mutilated for not doing exactly as they are told. Is it wrong for us to insist on their dignity?
There is a difference between telling people "hey, you shouldn't abuse women" and "here is exactly how you have to live so that women's rights are respected".
Since when did the right to self-determination, freedom of expression and thought, freedom to not be oppressed by a fascist state, become wrong?
I don't know. Tell me, because it's you who's coming up with that nonsense idea.
But on a slightly different note, has it ever occured to you that while almost all human cultures share the same set of values, their priorities differ? Some cultures value individualism higher, some value society higher. No culture disregards either. But you have american culture which - I simplify here - says "me" is more important than "you" and you have asian culture, which mostly says "we and you" is more important than "I". So in asia, people don't value the individual rights quite so highly, even though they still hold them. But in many cases where an american would say "I have a right to..., so society has to let me be", the asian would say "society has these rights, so I have to respect that and not insist on my rights".
We're not really that different, us humans. But some of us prefer red and some of us prefer blue. And some groups of us say society has to make sacrifices so the individual can maximize his happiness, and some say the individual ought to make sacrifices to society at large can maximize its happiness.
The only evil and stupid people are the ones who think that their value system is the absolute one, the only correct one, the one that should dominate all others.
Please explain how Tim Burton and Kristen Stewart represent the US government.
Why should I explain something I didn't every say or claim?
It's like complaining about Bic Macs. If you don't like them, and think they're crap, then just don't buy it. Why should they have to ask your permission to sell?
Where did I say the do?
The problem here is the dictatorship of the masses. Due to economy of scale and market power of big players, niches are rapidly disintegrating. When commerce was dominated by small companies, owner-run stores, etc. you had a lot of choice and more importantly, if nothing was to your satisfaction, it was easy to start up your own.
Try starting up your own supermarket when you compete against WalMart. Even if you try to satisfy a niche, you will find yourself facing the culture that WalMart has created, with suppliers not geared towards delivering smaller quantities anymore, for example.
Nobody forces me to buy a BigMac. I have noticed over the years, however, that it is becoming more and more difficult to find non-fastfood alternatives in major cities. Increasingly, you can have fast food, or an expensive restaurant, but nothing inbetween. I already vote with my wallet. But I only have control over where I put my vote/money, not over who is on the ballot/shopping-street.
Yes, we all love to hate the chinese. But there's some truth in there. The US is aggressively exporting its values and believes to the entire world, and it isn't asking if anyone wants it. Hollywood is the biggest propaganda machine ever, far more subtle and effective than any Nazi or Soviet Russian government efforts. And yes, Google is part of a culture as much as it is a company, and is bringing that culture to the world.
Most of the world is eating it up. A lot of people welcome it. Few of them made a conscious decision among alternatives on the matter of culture and spirit.
I'm not debating if the US culture is "good" or "bad" here, just stating the fact that the amount of culture that is in the american way of doing business is seldom reflected.
perhaps it's time to rethink the basic architecture of today's operating systems, suggested Dave Probert, a kernel architect within the Windows core operating systems division at Microsoft.
Well, perhaps it's time you stop to equate "Windows" with "today's operating systems".
Every other major OS on the planet has been moving towards multiple cores for several years, and is ready for the multi-core systems currently on and coming to the market in the coming years. All, except Windows.
Crazy? Why? On the business end, a patent license costs money. So, if you break it down, these people had forgone safety for profit. I don't see why they should not be sued?
And it's not that horrible, TFA says the price would be about $150 on top - and we're talking about machines costing from 2000 to 5000 bucks here, so that's a few percent. For not losing your hand.
Again, compared to todays church, yes.
Compared to early medieval church? Not so sure.
Compared to todays islamic fundamentalists? Probably not.
Compared to what todays christian fundamentalists would like to do if only the evil communist-satanic government would let them? Also not so sure.