George VI fought at Jutland as an officer on HMS Collingwood. Some of the others had joke appointments, but no-one can complain that he didn't put his ass on the line.
Re:Klein's a Leftist with an agenda, not a journal
on
China's All-Seeing Eye
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Please use paragraphs.
You know, for all the accusations of communist wingnuttery that abound on the internet, the substance just isn't there. Apparently, Daily Kos is supposed to be a far left hate site, but when I go there, all I find are disaffected liberals and social democrats. I'd love to believe that there are authoritarian leftists just waiting to turn Western countries into police states, but I just can't find them.
Klein is a slightly cute Canadian lefty liberal. That's about it.
On the other hand, you cannot go anywhere on the internet without finding an endless supply of free market nutcases who are obvious fanatics, and who continue to pontificate on about Austrian Economics, an economic doctrine that no reputable economist endorses and which has never been shown to work. For all their problems, at least the communists managed to keep a society together for longer than ten minutes, and sometimes actually achieved stuff (like putting a guy in orbit).
The vast conspiracy of leftwing nutcases is in fact a conspiracy imagined by the vast actual conspiracy of rightwing market fundamentalist nutcases projecting their nuttiness on others.
You don't have to be a communist country to engage in collectively insane behaviour. They didn't do the sparrow thing because they were communists, but because they were human.
And before anyone says that capitalist countries don't suffer from collective stupidity, how about that housing bubble and banking crisis.
Poor countries (like China in 1950 or Cambodia) tend to suffer more from such nuttiness.
I can't think of anything intrinsically wrong with glossy magazines other than when you're reading one in the toilet and you notice you're out of lavatory paper. At that point, they are evil.
Do you actually read Rolling Stone? Sensationalist? More like soporific a lot of the time.
I think Ozzie is being slightly deceptive here (who'd a thunk it?). OSS is not the direct threat to Microsoft's business model. The threat to Microsoft's business model is "standards Microsoft doesn't control".
For example, Microsoft really wanted to control the formats of online music sales, but Apple beat them and so the future of online music is open formats without DRM (except poor old Apple, who some of the labels won't let go DRM free). Imagine the horror if Microsoft had succeeded in making WMA the replacement standard for mp3.
Open standards might lead to lesser sales for Microsoft, but that doesn't mean it will lead to lesser sales for anyone else or a worse deal for consumers. Ozzie can't tell the truth here, which is that open standards in many of the areas Microsoft has a virtual monopoly on would be better for everyone except Microsoft's vampiric monopoly. How are we supposed to believe him, when OSS is designed to kill companies like his. At least Ballmer was honest.
You forgot the oldest response to the Prisoner's Dilemma: make a social contract. Companies that need open standards, but don't want to take on the expense themselves can call up other companies in similar situations and make an agreement to fund the development of OSS.
This is a winning strategy when you and the other companies have a common enemy: in this case, someone who wants to establish a proprietary standard and then milk all of you for as much as they can. In this case, the someone is Microsoft. But it could be some other company trying to divide and conquer. The rational counter to divide and conquer is "unite and repel".
One can point to many other examples of voluntary co-operative behaviour in such situations - the most obvious one is the behaviour of people during war, when everyone is intensely aware of needing to work for a common good (this is why many communist societies have tried to establish the idea of a perpetual threat in their citizens).
It's made an even better strategy by the structure of the GPL. Anyone who decides that they don't want to abide by the agreement any more cannot take the work they've already contributed away from the others.
It shouldn't have to be said on this site, but under certain conditions, GPL like institutions have the capacity to profoundly change the way we organize ourselves. I don't think we've even touched the surface yet.
Regarding the Apple comment. Apple had a chance to really shoot forward in the OS wars, but they seem to have spread themselves a bit thin in the last two years. Leopard being delayed because of the iPhone was one, and the number of bugs in Leopard is another (I like it, but I've had more problems crop up with Leopard than any other OS X release, and I have run all of them).
Apple has a chance to beat Windows 7 to the market with an OS that would be absolutely superb. I hope they seize the chance. I fear that their rapid increase in marketshare and product range might make this difficult.
More people need to be aware that treating ideas as subject to absolute or near absolute property rights is implicitly totalitarian. The concept of intellectual property has lost its moorings as a means to promoting the public good by rewarding creators and has become the excuse for ever more authoritarian lawmaking.
I'm hoping that people who understand this will then realize that what is true of intellectual property is true of all other forms for much the same reason. Absolutist conceptions of property lead to hierarchy and authoritarianism. Anarcho-capitalism has this contradiction at its centre.
Here's to the submitter becoming a regular old anarchist. I've always liked them.
Re:No, it is the age of the farmer and miner
on
The Rise of Geekdom
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Most of the engineers at my school weren't geeks. They were empty headed people who just saw the dollar signs at the end of the degree (to be fair a portion of them were foreign students who were only interested in the money). Sure, they were smart in the sense that they could do the math and pass the exams, but few of them had ever had an original thought or understood that some things require a different kind of answer. Most regarded D&D with distaste.
The point is that being an engineer doesn't equal being a geek. Many engineers are boring salary counters.
The geeks I knew were in departments like film, art and philosophy. These people cared about computers and comics the way that the others cared about their salaries, cars or social status.
It probably has to do more with Mac developers taking the HIG seriously (more seriously than Apple sometimes does, truth be told). Perhaps also the number of designers who use the platform has something to do with it (good design is a selling point for them to a greater degree than us ordinary folk)
For example, the quality of Mac shareware is generally excellent. There are many Mac shareware developers (and long term Mac users don't need names to know who I am talking about) whose software is a joy to use simply because they cared enough to produce a superbly polished design.
When they don't, it is obvious. A good example is Firefox, which still isn't really up to par on the Mac (the new version does seem better). When I want a Gecko based browser, I use Camino, because it works just like a Mac app should. Frankly, Mac shareware developers are often better at this than large commercial developers.
Google also needs a kick in the pants. Google Earth on the Mac is horrible, but this is from the same company that distributes Picasa for Windows, which I consider an interface disaster.
It's going to be interesting to see whether, with the influx of iPhone developers (WWDC sold out for the first time ever this year), the standard stays the same.
We don't have the money to compete with them. But I don't think it matters. I'm guessing that most politicians who take money from organizations like the MPAA understand that trying to stop people from sharing files over the internet is like trying to stop them watching porn, except a lot harder.
It's been evident for a long time that it can't be stopped. Any attempt to lock stuff down that people don't like immediately produces workarounds. I'd argue the opposite: I think the public interest is served by the availability of information. Whether or not people have to engage in one to one market transactions to fund its creation is a secondary issue. No matter how many times the contrary is repeated, information is not property in the same way that a car is. Making the rules for it the same ignores this obvious fact.
My guess is that a lot of politicians welcome the money because they know that they'll never be able to do anything about it, so they'll stay cool with the public. Look at how many politicians take money from anti-abortion groups in full knowledge that they can rant and rave about abortion, but the law is unlikely to change.
Anything that's popular, or anything that's attractive must just be an empty fashion thing. True nerds choose things that are ugly and unpopular! Depressingly, this is often true. We need to band together to expel this terrible affliction from nerddom. Else the day will come when Linux rules the desktop (and that day will come brothers!) and this place will be full of people complaining that only sheep use it and that real men use proprietary software.
I see decisions like this as reasons for everyone to pirate harder and force such a solution on "them" on the public's terms. I've had enough of their crap.
I believe this, but I am ashamed to report that I am too lazy to pirate media these days.
If Jack Thompson was right about GTA turning kids into gun crazed psychopaths, then he'd be too shit-scared to speak out about it, since he'd be the number one target of said kids who'd love to pop a cap in his ass for trying to take their game away.
As for MADD, someone needs to pimp those skanky bitches out! (Urmmm.... maybe I've been playing GTA too much... oh well... )
That's all well and good, but overlooks the obvious flaw. The Blackberry is primarily a phone that can be extended to other capabilities. But it is still a phone with a phone UI.
The iPhone is really a Newton with a phone in it. It's designed primarily as a mobile computing platform. The iPhone UI gives developers greater freedom. It's quite likely that the killer app for iPhones/iTouches hasn't even been thought of yet.
If as rumoured, the 3G iPhone with GPS is released in June, the blackberry market will be limited to Apple haters and luddite companies until RIM can produce a multitouch BB.
As someone said above, it's the UI. Every other phone or mobile device might as well be steam powered in comparison.
I don't think any of them are anywhere close. The "Tolkien trick" is to be able to create the illusion of another world by layering the languages and pseudo history so much that it leaves the reader hanging. That's essentially the function of all the places in the books that are named, but where we never get to go, or the people we hear about in outline, but whose story is never told in full. It's an old fashioned scholar's book, and it is no surprise it is the work of a Professor of Old English (the joy of subjects like that is the fragmentary nature of history and language that we get to fill in for ourselves).
Tolkien is underrated as an author because he, by his own admission, set out to write a book in defiance of modern literature. That it accidentally became wildly popular earned him the enmity of the literary establishment. This is a shame, because the LOTR certainly deserves scholarly attention. It's just that most qualified scholars are put off by its popularity or have been trained to dislike it.
And there you have the answer. The smaller iPods will remain, but the real money is in the new convergence wireless touch devices. Once those hit $250-300 in decent sizes (and that will probably happen in the next iteration - the 8 gig is already $300), and the SDK means that there will be games and apps and allsorts, who wouldn't want one? There have been promises of such devices from companies like Nokia, and the PSP is probably the closest, but the iPod Touch and iPhone look like the first real winners.
(FD: I bought a 16 gig, but gave it to my wife so I had an excuse to buy a 32gig - it's enough for the essentials. I'll have to find someone else that needs a gift when the 64gig comes out)
Then it is in Apple's interest to work with companies like Paypal to improve security. This is a case where market incentives can provide a solution. Of course it ought to be done in such a way that doesn't prevent people from jailbreaking their units if they want to.
They can't afford to block Safari, not because of the Macintosh or Windows version, but because of the iPhone/iPod Touch version. The latter is rapidly becoming the standard for mobile browsing (or at least has such a large share that it cannot be ignored).
The increasing popularity of mobile browsing is an opportunity for Paypal to act as a mobile digital wallet. There's certainly no point in carrying a debit card if you can just use your phone. I'm guessing that is Paypal's aim. Whether or not they can beat the banks to direct money transfer is debatable though.
I don't agree. This has been said before, but it needs to be repeated, and perhaps projected onto the surface of the moon in big red letters. The problem is that the authorities and producers are just dumb and can't accept that technology has changed. The internet is in some respects simply a giant TiVO. That's all. It's simply a public or semi public co-operative mass storage device with multiple backups.
TV companies can either adapt or die, and there are plenty of ways they can adapt. These are people who write and produce shows about the future of humanity, so they should be able to think of something. Get the Star Trek writers on it, if no-one else.
This whole debate strikes me as similar to the historical accounts of the authorities trying to ban printing presses or keep them out of the hands of the "wrong" people. Sure, that seems immoral and pointless to us now, but it seemed reasonable to many people at the time (people haven't always believed in free expression). A hundred years from now people may well look back at the MPAA and our current clowns in charge with similar amazement and disgust.
Capitalists seem to be all for change making industries obsolete, until it is their industry, at which point they howl for welfare payments. They seem to forget that going into business is taking a risk, and one of the risks is that some invention may make your whole business model pointless.
No. There is a real problem here. Our ordinary conception of personal decision making is that it is conscious and occurs at the time the decider is aware of making the decision. This experiment goes a long way to proving that conscious experience of making a decision is epiphenomenal.
Let's conduct a simple thought experiment. We'll hook you up to a machine that replicates the experiment and which predicts pretty much everything you choose before you are aware of it. How long is it going to take you, personally, to become convinced that you, as a conscious being, have no free will? Not long, I'd wager.
The only reason people believe in free will is that much of religion makes no sense without it, and some people believe that libertarian politics makes no sense without it. The first is true, the latter is not, since political freedom and metaphysical freedom are distinct.
This is another in the series of nails being driven into the coffin of the religious conception of humanity. Evolution was the first major one. Brain science threatens to complete the project.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for that. A very moving video and a credit to the humanity of everyone involved.
George VI fought at Jutland as an officer on HMS Collingwood. Some of the others had joke appointments, but no-one can complain that he didn't put his ass on the line.
Please use paragraphs.
You know, for all the accusations of communist wingnuttery that abound on the internet, the substance just isn't there. Apparently, Daily Kos is supposed to be a far left hate site, but when I go there, all I find are disaffected liberals and social democrats. I'd love to believe that there are authoritarian leftists just waiting to turn Western countries into police states, but I just can't find them.
Klein is a slightly cute Canadian lefty liberal. That's about it.
On the other hand, you cannot go anywhere on the internet without finding an endless supply of free market nutcases who are obvious fanatics, and who continue to pontificate on about Austrian Economics, an economic doctrine that no reputable economist endorses and which has never been shown to work. For all their problems, at least the communists managed to keep a society together for longer than ten minutes, and sometimes actually achieved stuff (like putting a guy in orbit).
The vast conspiracy of leftwing nutcases is in fact a conspiracy imagined by the vast actual conspiracy of rightwing market fundamentalist nutcases projecting their nuttiness on others.
You don't have to be a communist country to engage in collectively insane behaviour. They didn't do the sparrow thing because they were communists, but because they were human.
And before anyone says that capitalist countries don't suffer from collective stupidity, how about that housing bubble and banking crisis.
Poor countries (like China in 1950 or Cambodia) tend to suffer more from such nuttiness.
I can't think of anything intrinsically wrong with glossy magazines other than when you're reading one in the toilet and you notice you're out of lavatory paper. At that point, they are evil.
Do you actually read Rolling Stone? Sensationalist? More like soporific a lot of the time.
I think Ozzie is being slightly deceptive here (who'd a thunk it?). OSS is not the direct threat to Microsoft's business model. The threat to Microsoft's business model is "standards Microsoft doesn't control".
For example, Microsoft really wanted to control the formats of online music sales, but Apple beat them and so the future of online music is open formats without DRM (except poor old Apple, who some of the labels won't let go DRM free). Imagine the horror if Microsoft had succeeded in making WMA the replacement standard for mp3.
Open standards might lead to lesser sales for Microsoft, but that doesn't mean it will lead to lesser sales for anyone else or a worse deal for consumers. Ozzie can't tell the truth here, which is that open standards in many of the areas Microsoft has a virtual monopoly on would be better for everyone except Microsoft's vampiric monopoly. How are we supposed to believe him, when OSS is designed to kill companies like his. At least Ballmer was honest.
You forgot the oldest response to the Prisoner's Dilemma: make a social contract. Companies that need open standards, but don't want to take on the expense themselves can call up other companies in similar situations and make an agreement to fund the development of OSS.
This is a winning strategy when you and the other companies have a common enemy: in this case, someone who wants to establish a proprietary standard and then milk all of you for as much as they can. In this case, the someone is Microsoft. But it could be some other company trying to divide and conquer. The rational counter to divide and conquer is "unite and repel".
One can point to many other examples of voluntary co-operative behaviour in such situations - the most obvious one is the behaviour of people during war, when everyone is intensely aware of needing to work for a common good (this is why many communist societies have tried to establish the idea of a perpetual threat in their citizens).
It's made an even better strategy by the structure of the GPL. Anyone who decides that they don't want to abide by the agreement any more cannot take the work they've already contributed away from the others.
It shouldn't have to be said on this site, but under certain conditions, GPL like institutions have the capacity to profoundly change the way we organize ourselves. I don't think we've even touched the surface yet.
Regarding the Apple comment. Apple had a chance to really shoot forward in the OS wars, but they seem to have spread themselves a bit thin in the last two years. Leopard being delayed because of the iPhone was one, and the number of bugs in Leopard is another (I like it, but I've had more problems crop up with Leopard than any other OS X release, and I have run all of them).
Apple has a chance to beat Windows 7 to the market with an OS that would be absolutely superb. I hope they seize the chance. I fear that their rapid increase in marketshare and product range might make this difficult.
Mod parent up.
More people need to be aware that treating ideas as subject to absolute or near absolute property rights is implicitly totalitarian. The concept of intellectual property has lost its moorings as a means to promoting the public good by rewarding creators and has become the excuse for ever more authoritarian lawmaking.
I'm hoping that people who understand this will then realize that what is true of intellectual property is true of all other forms for much the same reason. Absolutist conceptions of property lead to hierarchy and authoritarianism. Anarcho-capitalism has this contradiction at its centre.
Here's to the submitter becoming a regular old anarchist. I've always liked them.
Most of the engineers at my school weren't geeks. They were empty headed people who just saw the dollar signs at the end of the degree (to be fair a portion of them were foreign students who were only interested in the money). Sure, they were smart in the sense that they could do the math and pass the exams, but few of them had ever had an original thought or understood that some things require a different kind of answer. Most regarded D&D with distaste.
The point is that being an engineer doesn't equal being a geek. Many engineers are boring salary counters.
The geeks I knew were in departments like film, art and philosophy. These people cared about computers and comics the way that the others cared about their salaries, cars or social status.
It probably has to do more with Mac developers taking the HIG seriously (more seriously than Apple sometimes does, truth be told). Perhaps also the number of designers who use the platform has something to do with it (good design is a selling point for them to a greater degree than us ordinary folk)
For example, the quality of Mac shareware is generally excellent. There are many Mac shareware developers (and long term Mac users don't need names to know who I am talking about) whose software is a joy to use simply because they cared enough to produce a superbly polished design.
When they don't, it is obvious. A good example is Firefox, which still isn't really up to par on the Mac (the new version does seem better). When I want a Gecko based browser, I use Camino, because it works just like a Mac app should. Frankly, Mac shareware developers are often better at this than large commercial developers.
Google also needs a kick in the pants. Google Earth on the Mac is horrible, but this is from the same company that distributes Picasa for Windows, which I consider an interface disaster.
It's going to be interesting to see whether, with the influx of iPhone developers (WWDC sold out for the first time ever this year), the standard stays the same.
We don't have the money to compete with them. But I don't think it matters. I'm guessing that most politicians who take money from organizations like the MPAA understand that trying to stop people from sharing files over the internet is like trying to stop them watching porn, except a lot harder.
It's been evident for a long time that it can't be stopped. Any attempt to lock stuff down that people don't like immediately produces workarounds. I'd argue the opposite: I think the public interest is served by the availability of information. Whether or not people have to engage in one to one market transactions to fund its creation is a secondary issue. No matter how many times the contrary is repeated, information is not property in the same way that a car is. Making the rules for it the same ignores this obvious fact.
My guess is that a lot of politicians welcome the money because they know that they'll never be able to do anything about it, so they'll stay cool with the public. Look at how many politicians take money from anti-abortion groups in full knowledge that they can rant and rave about abortion, but the law is unlikely to change.
Amen to that.
I see decisions like this as reasons for everyone to pirate harder and force such a solution on "them" on the public's terms. I've had enough of their crap.
I believe this, but I am ashamed to report that I am too lazy to pirate media these days.
If Jack Thompson was right about GTA turning kids into gun crazed psychopaths, then he'd be too shit-scared to speak out about it, since he'd be the number one target of said kids who'd love to pop a cap in his ass for trying to take their game away.
As for MADD, someone needs to pimp those skanky bitches out! (Urmmm.... maybe I've been playing GTA too much... oh well... )
That's all well and good, but overlooks the obvious flaw. The Blackberry is primarily a phone that can be extended to other capabilities. But it is still a phone with a phone UI.
The iPhone is really a Newton with a phone in it. It's designed primarily as a mobile computing platform. The iPhone UI gives developers greater freedom. It's quite likely that the killer app for iPhones/iTouches hasn't even been thought of yet.
If as rumoured, the 3G iPhone with GPS is released in June, the blackberry market will be limited to Apple haters and luddite companies until RIM can produce a multitouch BB.
As someone said above, it's the UI. Every other phone or mobile device might as well be steam powered in comparison.
I don't think any of them are anywhere close. The "Tolkien trick" is to be able to create the illusion of another world by layering the languages and pseudo history so much that it leaves the reader hanging. That's essentially the function of all the places in the books that are named, but where we never get to go, or the people we hear about in outline, but whose story is never told in full. It's an old fashioned scholar's book, and it is no surprise it is the work of a Professor of Old English (the joy of subjects like that is the fragmentary nature of history and language that we get to fill in for ourselves).
Tolkien is underrated as an author because he, by his own admission, set out to write a book in defiance of modern literature. That it accidentally became wildly popular earned him the enmity of the literary establishment. This is a shame, because the LOTR certainly deserves scholarly attention. It's just that most qualified scholars are put off by its popularity or have been trained to dislike it.
You must be kidding. I spent 3 hours continuously surfing yesterday, and I didn't even get half way on the battery meter.
And there you have the answer. The smaller iPods will remain, but the real money is in the new convergence wireless touch devices. Once those hit $250-300 in decent sizes (and that will probably happen in the next iteration - the 8 gig is already $300), and the SDK means that there will be games and apps and allsorts, who wouldn't want one? There have been promises of such devices from companies like Nokia, and the PSP is probably the closest, but the iPod Touch and iPhone look like the first real winners.
(FD: I bought a 16 gig, but gave it to my wife so I had an excuse to buy a 32gig - it's enough for the essentials. I'll have to find someone else that needs a gift when the 64gig comes out)
Then it is in Apple's interest to work with companies like Paypal to improve security. This is a case where market incentives can provide a solution. Of course it ought to be done in such a way that doesn't prevent people from jailbreaking their units if they want to.
They can't afford to block Safari, not because of the Macintosh or Windows version, but because of the iPhone/iPod Touch version. The latter is rapidly becoming the standard for mobile browsing (or at least has such a large share that it cannot be ignored).
The increasing popularity of mobile browsing is an opportunity for Paypal to act as a mobile digital wallet. There's certainly no point in carrying a debit card if you can just use your phone. I'm guessing that is Paypal's aim. Whether or not they can beat the banks to direct money transfer is debatable though.
I don't agree. This has been said before, but it needs to be repeated, and perhaps projected onto the surface of the moon in big red letters. The problem is that the authorities and producers are just dumb and can't accept that technology has changed. The internet is in some respects simply a giant TiVO. That's all. It's simply a public or semi public co-operative mass storage device with multiple backups.
TV companies can either adapt or die, and there are plenty of ways they can adapt. These are people who write and produce shows about the future of humanity, so they should be able to think of something. Get the Star Trek writers on it, if no-one else.
This whole debate strikes me as similar to the historical accounts of the authorities trying to ban printing presses or keep them out of the hands of the "wrong" people. Sure, that seems immoral and pointless to us now, but it seemed reasonable to many people at the time (people haven't always believed in free expression). A hundred years from now people may well look back at the MPAA and our current clowns in charge with similar amazement and disgust.
Capitalists seem to be all for change making industries obsolete, until it is their industry, at which point they howl for welfare payments. They seem to forget that going into business is taking a risk, and one of the risks is that some invention may make your whole business model pointless.
Alas I have no mod points to +funny this outstanding witticism.
Still chuckling
Thanks
Aristotle is a compatibilist you lemon. At least in the Nichomachean Ethics, where he discusses responsibility.
Compatibilist does not = libertarian w/regard to free will.
No. There is a real problem here. Our ordinary conception of personal decision making is that it is conscious and occurs at the time the decider is aware of making the decision. This experiment goes a long way to proving that conscious experience of making a decision is epiphenomenal.
Let's conduct a simple thought experiment. We'll hook you up to a machine that replicates the experiment and which predicts pretty much everything you choose before you are aware of it. How long is it going to take you, personally, to become convinced that you, as a conscious being, have no free will? Not long, I'd wager.
The only reason people believe in free will is that much of religion makes no sense without it, and some people believe that libertarian politics makes no sense without it. The first is true, the latter is not, since political freedom and metaphysical freedom are distinct.
This is another in the series of nails being driven into the coffin of the religious conception of humanity. Evolution was the first major one. Brain science threatens to complete the project.