It will be people in Africa who are able to use current technologies who will solve the problems of food distribution, housing and the like. And much of the reason for the problems of hunger and disease are due to problems of politics, infrastructure, logistics, and knowledge, anyway.
Should we stop supporting the arts in the US because there are still homeless people here? Should we stop helping the homeless people because there are victims of domestic violence in the US?
Technology doesn't solve everything, but people who are using technology usually solve more problems than people who aren't.
The whole Sims thing soured me on Transgaming. For one thing, it is only shipped with the Mandrake gaming edition - and it thus costs more than the Windows version of The Sims. I had signed up with Transgaming expecting to get support for running the windows Sims I had already bought - but no, it's a separate purchase. Also, the 'Linux version' of the Sims can't use the expansions (like Hot Date, Vacation and the like). I seriously doubt that it will be useful for the online version.
I don't think the Transgaming model is a very good one. By forging the business partnerships they did to make money, they disappointed me and other customers. With Transgaming, the CodeWeavers plug-in, and the open tree, all of Wine is horribly forked - I'm not religiously opposed to paying for software, but I don't like the idea of have 3 entire Wine installations on one system (and I prefer to have Debian manage my installations, thankyouverymuch.) I don't have any clever solutions on how it could work (I used to work in a Vespa repair shop, and the owner of the shop once told me "avoid people who say 'you could make a lot of money if.... ' - you need their advice like you need pernicious anemia") but the current approach towards Wine and Windows-based games in Linux isn't working.
The relationship between the market and the Right Thing is a complex one. Sometimes, the private sector would prefer a regulation that mandates that they and their competitors all do the Right Thing, when the Right Thing done unilaterally would mean a competitive disadvantage. This is why the initial laws against child labor were promoted in England by factory owners - they wanted to end the practice, but couldn't do so unilaterally (because their costs, vis-a-vis their competitors, would go up too much.)
No kidding. Add to the fact that just about *every other home owner* in the Bay Area can be defined as having a 500K net worth just based on the market price of their home - although that doesn't necessarily put them into the high-income range. A family whose $40,000-in-1980 home is now worth $500,000 would still have to pay for a play to live after selling.
Millionaires - especially if you include home equity as wealth - are a dime a dozen, and without liquidity the term is meaningless. It's the Inflation That Dares Not Speak Its Name.
The gist of Gould's dissatisfaction with this is that it is all too teleological. Genes don't want anything. It's true the genes are the primary medium of information about the structure of organisms, and after that, Selection (among other things, including meteors and the like) Happens. But too much of story of the 'ultras' - at least the somewhat-unfair caricature of the ultras, which is still useful for making the point - depends on attributing to genes a sort of goal, which is sort of like saying that shingles "want" to keep rain of our heads, or even that shingles keep rains off our heads because they "want" to get put on roofs. It's a bit anthropomorphic
Gould's legacy is a complex one. While he struggled against creationists on one hand, he had a lot of tolerance and openness to "non-scientific ways of knowing" and religious belief (as long as it didn't contradict scientific reason). He was an evolutionary pluralist, in that he refused to reduce evolution to a genetic level, and he also denied that evolution was progressive. In order to make these points more clearly, unfortunately, he sometimes characterized his opponents (the "ultras", who used evolutionary theory to support political conservatism and sociobiological determinism), most notably Richard Dawkins, as being more reductionist than they really were.
I disagree. Clockwork Orange addresses some classic science fiction issues: the question of free will in a technological age (hence a clockwork orange - a machine wrapped in an organic shell); the fragmentation of society into violence, intergenerational failures of communication, and the like. "Nadsat" alone is pretty cool and SF.
Most science fiction work says more about the times that create it than about the times they claim to be writing about - and in turn, can actually create the future as much as report it. Check out The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of by SF writer Thomas Disch for a funny and insightful take on the relationship between SF and society.
I'm surprised the Akira beat out Ghost in the Shell. Ghost in the Shell is a stronger film, and would rate more highly on all the component axes of futurism, plausibility and entertainment.
Obviously, Alphaville is a huge favorite for me. Solaris and Stalker should both be included on this list. And Star Wars isn't science fiction, it's space opera. Samuel Delany put it best: in science fiction, the episteme is the star.
No kidding. What if people judged operating systems based on mass popularity? For those of us who take film seriously, Lucas films and their ilk is the Windows ME of film making.
The John Birch Society is alive and well. To say that Chile becomes a capitalist success story - after the US did everything in its power to punish its socialist experiment and then everything in its power to reward its move to a market economy - is cynical at best.
The Sandinistas did not engage in any sort of mass murder or terror. They fought a revolution. You're getting your data from the flat earth society. Fidel Castro has some human rights violations to his name, but nothing like Pinochet's - or the Argentine and Brazilian juntas of the 70's, for that matter, who were also acting as our Bulwarks against Communism.
This is true, but should be considered part of the difference between end-user windows and end-user linux. The user shouldn't have to install anything. Period. Simple push-installs should handle it.
Well, for one reason or another, they didn't save enough. Perhaps they were laid off over a year ago, and their savings buffer is gone. Perhaps they had an emergency expense. Perhaps they were just foolish. In any case, berating them isn't going to help anyone. The question they were asking is how to handle a certain type of job-seeking circumstance.
That is not what soft skills mean, Mister Bitter. But it doesn't seem like you want to listen to that. If you have some form of autism, then I apologize - it's true, that you will simply be incapable of percieving the information that you will need to build those skills to begin with - you'd be like a blind man trying to become a photographer, and you'd fail.
But debate is a limited and usually unsuccessful way of communicating. It is oppositional. It creates a stake on Being Right that often eclipses the subject at hand. And just as social smoothness will often reward the undeserving, debate also has a skill set that is distinct from the value of the topic of debate. A good debater can successfully advocate for the wrong path.
Completely explicit discourses are rare and very time-consuming. Most cognition is pre-verbal, and "soft skills" are often about working with pre-verbal information.
The personal hygiene line wasn't meant as a dig - I've known and worked with developers who frankly had horrible personal hygiene and grooming habits, who were good individuals who were perplexed as to how to become more socially successful. But I think your problem is that you're lazy. You'd rather blame the world that try to improve yourself.
#3 Personal skills, as you describe them, aren't skills at all. This is something you learn at age 3 and 4, not at age 18-22.
This is categorically untrue, and I will hold my own life, those of many I know, and a good deal of research about skill acquisition, as evidence. There's a difference between become a smooth-talking wily extrovert (which really is temperment) and developing effective social and communication skills. Now, you may very well be utterly clueless socially, so that it feels insurmountable. You may have a grating life, no interest in your appearence, and the like. That's irrelevent. We aren't talking about becoming a prom-king, we're talking about just acting in such a way as to consider its effects on other people. You can learn that.
I'll tell you something: if a 5 year old crawls into my body for 9 months and starts living off of my metabolism, I very well may kill it.
Besides, what makes us human isn't being a zygote or having human DNA, it's a functioning, developed human brain. When the development of the fetal brain is at the level of a cat, as far as I'm concerned, destroying it is equivalent to killing a cat. A cat that is growing in an adult human's body.
Not all Nazis were German. Some with Czech, French, Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonion, Croatian, Ukranian, Hungarian and especially Austrian - including the main one. There were plenty of collaborators and party members from outside of Germany.
The PS/2, the Mac, and NT were very much disrupting technologies. Each has displaced entire industries, caused reorganizations, changted models, put new players into business and gotten rid of others. RedHat is a borderline case - it's also the leanest, but was well enough capitalized to survive its lean years.
MBA's aren't in that business. MBA's are mostly in the business of turning someone else's innovation (or even lack of innovation) into a viable business plan, and then turning a business plan into an organization and processes. Ideally. Often, MBA's are in the business of bilking customers, investors, and workers and bailing out before it all crashes in around them.
Off the very tip-top of my head, there's Amazon and RedHat. For some products, Apple (the Mac, after the disappointment of the Lisa), IBM (the PS/2 after some false starts) and Microsoft (NT).
The strongest insight in the article - and the best supported - is that well-managed companies that take care of their existing customers well are often not innovative, because processes and methods that are profitable are unlikely to be challenged, and because truly outre and novel ideas are too disruptive to be welcomed. The notion that innovation occurs in the context of and also creates disruption is a reasonable one. The rest of the article is questionable: his observations that lean projects are more adaptive than ones that have deep pockets which let them stick with a 'a bad strategy' begs the question of what a bad strategy is. It's the Right Thing To Say in a post-boom age (profits now! no vapor!) - but it omits the many successes that came of plodding along after initial disappointments. And, as soon as he used the word "leveraging" I know his article had run out of ideas.
From the article: "The score is now Adobe-1, Macromedia-1, customers-0," Rob Burgess, Macromedia's chairman and chief executive, said in a statement. The company declined further comment through a representative.
An excellent and sobering quote. Very good sense of perspective.
The irony is that they toilet seat is almost certainly the least germ-infested part of the entire bathroom. People who use the ass-gasket and then turn around and use their hands to jiggle the toilet handle or even open the door to the stall in the first place are really straining at a gnat.
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Should we stop supporting the arts in the US because there are still homeless people here? Should we stop helping the homeless people because there are victims of domestic violence in the US?
Technology doesn't solve everything, but people who are using technology usually solve more problems than people who aren't.
I don't think the Transgaming model is a very good one. By forging the business partnerships they did to make money, they disappointed me and other customers. With Transgaming, the CodeWeavers plug-in, and the open tree, all of Wine is horribly forked - I'm not religiously opposed to paying for software, but I don't like the idea of have 3 entire Wine installations on one system (and I prefer to have Debian manage my installations, thankyouverymuch.) I don't have any clever solutions on how it could work (I used to work in a Vespa repair shop, and the owner of the shop once told me "avoid people who say 'you could make a lot of money if.... ' - you need their advice like you need pernicious anemia") but the current approach towards Wine and Windows-based games in Linux isn't working.
The relationship between the market and the Right Thing is a complex one. Sometimes, the private sector would prefer a regulation that mandates that they and their competitors all do the Right Thing, when the Right Thing done unilaterally would mean a competitive disadvantage. This is why the initial laws against child labor were promoted in England by factory owners - they wanted to end the practice, but couldn't do so unilaterally (because their costs, vis-a-vis their competitors, would go up too much.)
Millionaires - especially if you include home equity as wealth - are a dime a dozen, and without liquidity the term is meaningless. It's the Inflation That Dares Not Speak Its Name.
The gist of Gould's dissatisfaction with this is that it is all too teleological. Genes don't want anything. It's true the genes are the primary medium of information about the structure of organisms, and after that, Selection (among other things, including meteors and the like) Happens. But too much of story of the 'ultras' - at least the somewhat-unfair caricature of the ultras, which is still useful for making the point - depends on attributing to genes a sort of goal, which is sort of like saying that shingles "want" to keep rain of our heads, or even that shingles keep rains off our heads because they "want" to get put on roofs. It's a bit anthropomorphic
Gould's legacy is a complex one. While he struggled against creationists on one hand, he had a lot of tolerance and openness to "non-scientific ways of knowing" and religious belief (as long as it didn't contradict scientific reason). He was an evolutionary pluralist, in that he refused to reduce evolution to a genetic level, and he also denied that evolution was progressive. In order to make these points more clearly, unfortunately, he sometimes characterized his opponents (the "ultras", who used evolutionary theory to support political conservatism and sociobiological determinism), most notably Richard Dawkins, as being more reductionist than they really were.
Most science fiction work says more about the times that create it than about the times they claim to be writing about - and in turn, can actually create the future as much as report it. Check out The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of by SF writer Thomas Disch for a funny and insightful take on the relationship between SF and society.
I'm surprised the Akira beat out Ghost in the Shell. Ghost in the Shell is a stronger film, and would rate more highly on all the component axes of futurism, plausibility and entertainment.
Obviously, Alphaville is a huge favorite for me. Solaris and Stalker should both be included on this list. And Star Wars isn't science fiction, it's space opera. Samuel Delany put it best: in science fiction, the episteme is the star.
No kidding. What if people judged operating systems based on mass popularity? For those of us who take film seriously, Lucas films and their ilk is the Windows ME of film making.
The Sandinistas did not engage in any sort of mass murder or terror. They fought a revolution. You're getting your data from the flat earth society. Fidel Castro has some human rights violations to his name, but nothing like Pinochet's - or the Argentine and Brazilian juntas of the 70's, for that matter, who were also acting as our Bulwarks against Communism.
BTW, have you ever been to Santiago? I doubt it.
This is true, but should be considered part of the difference between end-user windows and end-user linux. The user shouldn't have to install anything. Period. Simple push-installs should handle it.
Well, for one reason or another, they didn't save enough. Perhaps they were laid off over a year ago, and their savings buffer is gone. Perhaps they had an emergency expense. Perhaps they were just foolish. In any case, berating them isn't going to help anyone. The question they were asking is how to handle a certain type of job-seeking circumstance.
But debate is a limited and usually unsuccessful way of communicating. It is oppositional. It creates a stake on Being Right that often eclipses the subject at hand. And just as social smoothness will often reward the undeserving, debate also has a skill set that is distinct from the value of the topic of debate. A good debater can successfully advocate for the wrong path.
Completely explicit discourses are rare and very time-consuming. Most cognition is pre-verbal, and "soft skills" are often about working with pre-verbal information.
The personal hygiene line wasn't meant as a dig - I've known and worked with developers who frankly had horrible personal hygiene and grooming habits, who were good individuals who were perplexed as to how to become more socially successful. But I think your problem is that you're lazy. You'd rather blame the world that try to improve yourself.
This is categorically untrue, and I will hold my own life, those of many I know, and a good deal of research about skill acquisition, as evidence. There's a difference between become a smooth-talking wily extrovert (which really is temperment) and developing effective social and communication skills. Now, you may very well be utterly clueless socially, so that it feels insurmountable. You may have a grating life, no interest in your appearence, and the like. That's irrelevent. We aren't talking about becoming a prom-king, we're talking about just acting in such a way as to consider its effects on other people. You can learn that.
Besides, what makes us human isn't being a zygote or having human DNA, it's a functioning, developed human brain. When the development of the fetal brain is at the level of a cat, as far as I'm concerned, destroying it is equivalent to killing a cat. A cat that is growing in an adult human's body.
Not all Nazis were German. Some with Czech, French, Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonion, Croatian, Ukranian, Hungarian and especially Austrian - including the main one. There were plenty of collaborators and party members from outside of Germany.
The PS/2, the Mac, and NT were very much disrupting technologies. Each has displaced entire industries, caused reorganizations, changted models, put new players into business and gotten rid of others. RedHat is a borderline case - it's also the leanest, but was well enough capitalized to survive its lean years.
Hey, it could be a Trabant.
MBA's aren't in that business. MBA's are mostly in the business of turning someone else's innovation (or even lack of innovation) into a viable business plan, and then turning a business plan into an organization and processes. Ideally. Often, MBA's are in the business of bilking customers, investors, and workers and bailing out before it all crashes in around them.
Off the very tip-top of my head, there's Amazon and RedHat. For some products, Apple (the Mac, after the disappointment of the Lisa), IBM (the PS/2 after some false starts) and Microsoft (NT).
The strongest insight in the article - and the best supported - is that well-managed companies that take care of their existing customers well are often not innovative, because processes and methods that are profitable are unlikely to be challenged, and because truly outre and novel ideas are too disruptive to be welcomed. The notion that innovation occurs in the context of and also creates disruption is a reasonable one. The rest of the article is questionable: his observations that lean projects are more adaptive than ones that have deep pockets which let them stick with a 'a bad strategy' begs the question of what a bad strategy is. It's the Right Thing To Say in a post-boom age (profits now! no vapor!) - but it omits the many successes that came of plodding along after initial disappointments. And, as soon as he used the word "leveraging" I know his article had run out of ideas.
I was thinking the actual score is Adobe - 0 Macromedia - 1/2 Lawyers - 2 Customers - 0, but still the original point that I cited is well taken.
An excellent and sobering quote. Very good sense of perspective.
The irony is that they toilet seat is almost certainly the least germ-infested part of the entire bathroom. People who use the ass-gasket and then turn around and use their hands to jiggle the toilet handle or even open the door to the stall in the first place are really straining at a gnat.