Re:anthrax--careful, John
on
Globalization
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· Score: 2
The Planned Parenthood attack was odd in that it had handwriting that was the same as the other attacks, but didn't actually have any spores with it.
Who could it be? It really could be anyone, from another foreign group to some lone disgruntled Tim McVeigh/unabomber type. I have heard that the Army of God recently made some threats before these letters were sent, and that's why they are on the suspect list. But a number of facts about the letters that were sent suggest that it was, in fact, an American who wrote them: see the post below us.
I have to agree with the above, and also note that most everywhere I've travelled most people have distinguished between Americans as individuals, American popular culture, the US government, and US multinational corporations. And have had different, often shaded and nuanced attitudes towards each.
Re:anthrax--careful, John
on
Globalization
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
In fact, there are a number of reasons to suspect that the primary perps behind the anthrax are American, including the way that the accompanying notes were written, and the fact that the targets included a planned parenthood, 2 democrats, media outlets, and the Supreme Court. The radical anti=abortion group The Army of God is on the suspect list. And it's completely homegrown American.
Stifling innovation is exactly what copyright and other intellectual property holders want: the legal wherewithal to stifle their competitor's innovation. When consumers, small business people, hackers, tinkerers, and artists show up at Congress with briefcases full of cash and limos full of interns, perhaps we can expect some change.
And I'm a little disappointed by the attitude that Sony should just be nice to its fans. Any law that relies on the kindness, or even the self interest, of the party that can enforce it to be a fair law, is one messed up law.
Brazil and Mexico look pretty good from that perspective. And the nice thing about Brazil is: it's Brazil.
But the US corporations will still send their lobbyists/graft goons in, like they tried to do during the Brazilian abrogation of monopoly rights to the AIDS drugs manufacturers, to quell any excess of freedom.
You know, there are some things that will someday seem obvious to any reasonably person as completely wrong and nuts, that at the times seemed completely rational. Racism, slavery, and the inferior status of women were all once taken mostly for granted by all except a few, but now are considered generally indefensible, at least in theory.
Someday, the true may be said of this idea: that corporate ownership of intellectual property takes priority over folk and grassroots enthusiasms (particularly nonfraudulent and not-for-profit ones); that the owners of popular culture enjoy the benefits of the ubiquity of that culture, a culture which has in some sense colonized our subconscious (I have dreams with Bugs Bunny and the Enterprise in it - but if I depicted one of my own dreams publicly, I'd risk a lawsuit) but refuse to allow that ubiquity when it doesn't serve them.
Unfortunate, there is no indication that the increasingly global plutocracy is going to become reasonable any time in the near future. But I still hold out hope. What would it take for that to happen?
I didn't make personal insults, I made observations. That you have demonstrated no knowledge of pedagogy, or the realities of the communities at hand. And even if I had included an insult, it would not have occluded my point, since my point relies on the reality of the situation and not a popularity contest with you as the personal judge.
Then you know nothing about the realities of gang membership, and the demographics involved, and how tied up they are with family and community relationships. They have felonized gang membership, but that legal detail is irrelevant to the day to day lives of the people in the gangs.
Somehow, I don't think sending messages to kids is something you're really well-educated about.
The worst message you can send to the thousands and thousands of kids who are making at this point relatively small mistakes is that they've crossed the line, they are irredeemable, and society doesn't give a fuck about them. Your attitude turns a one-time minor offender into a career criminal.
It depends on the ISP. The ISP for our home DSL connection works with us pretty well - we have root access to the router, have agreed on the root password with them (sometimes having them do config is handy when we don't have the time), but we had the option of actually locking them out, at the risk of being on our own should we not update a route or something in time; I've set up a TFTP server to store configs, firmware images etc. But we're paying for the small-business account, too, so YMMV.
Our ISP is Megapath, by the way.
Re:While interesting, the Salon article is very bi
on
Opposing Open Source?
·
· Score: 2
All that it means to say a work is "biased" is to say that it reaches a conclusion of some sort (and in almost every case, that conclusion motivated the work, rather than the reverse). The question is whether the data and other considerations which lead to that conclusion are valid, accurate, or insightful.
This is research, for this sort of work: asking other people for citations and references. The work is in synthesizing the references into a coherent paper and presenting it. Nothing wrong with it at all. And it's no different than getting a bunch of people together over coffee and talking about it.
If he had posted a math problem and asked for answers, that would be another story.
That would be true in any circumstances. No one is going to pay Alex to write a word processor now because MS Word and Word Perfect already exist. An absence of demand is an absence of demand under any circumstances.
I like LISP, but I have to agree with the above poster (and in the interests of having his question posed to Kent Pitman, advocate that he get modded up.)
The free implementations of LISP on Windows are usually crippled or limited, with limits in stack sizes or ability to save images, etc. And vital libraries are often missing from the free versions. CLISP is a nice try, but it's far from a fully useable implementation. GCL doesn't work with (any reasonable recent versions of) cygwin. The trial versions of Franz look promising, but it's hard to justify paying the prices for the Windows implementation when such good implentations are Free in *nix.
I think that this is a fixable lack, but it should be pointed out as a lack.
While the direction of your insight is accurate, the final claim - that some benefit eventually reaches "absolutely everybody" - is simply not true. There are millions of people without the very basic benefits of the medical innovations of the past century. The majority of people on the planet have never made a phone call. Global literacy is, if I remember correctly, under 20%. Television is the most ubiquitous of major technologies because it is frequently shared - a single television can serve a community - but its penetration is still far from universal.
And with the penetration of media technologies like television and the internet comes the concommitent loss of cultural variety, too. I don't think cultural diversity for its own sake is always a unmitigatedly good thing (cultural practices that, for example, abuse women are ones that I wouldn't miss after they're deprecated, and I wouldn't want to sentence anyone to malaria in the name of cultural diversity) but some technologies deteriorate cultures without equivalent benefit or generating compensating cultural institutions (TV topping the list, IMO.)
What if you had a little s-video cable you could attach to your phone, and then play out the video to a heads-up display in your glasses? Or pipe it into a single-purpose flat display screen that you can fold up?
Once the data is flowing around, you can do anything with it.
Speaking as someone who does IT projects throughout Latin America: the fact that it's taken over three years to get this project started in Mexico convinces me that it is true.
At least then it would be reinvested into a *productive* sector of the economy. Advertising money is just spent getting people to produce advertisement. Those cash savings would recirculate to hire people to do things like build housing, teach children, and make lattes.
I think of advertising as the junk-food of the economy. Empty calories, no nutritional value. Except it doesn't even taste good. Like 8 month old Skittles that you find in your sofa.
No. The value of advertising on radio relies on the number of listeners per dollar that they get. Because advertisers only advertise because their *competitors* advertise in a media - the threat of losing market share obliges them to do so. Advertising budgets aren't fixed - if producers don't have to forfend the competition for attention in a media, they'll invest those costs elsewhere (like lowering prices or developing new products.)
Somewhere, we or someone else is paying for the commercials - usually, in the price of products. And commercials don't add value (in advertising, the market is the product, the producer is the consumer. Weird, isn't it?)
Without commercials, we would have to pay for content - using the money that we have saved by not having to pay 20 to 40 percent more for products to cover the cost of their ad campaigns. I can live with that.
The advertising itself isn't what discouraging. What's discouraging is that the schools *have to resort to it* to pay for the costs of educating students. And it's so nickel-dime to sell advertising space: it suggests desperation.
Advertising is a lose/lose game all around, because it increases costs without increasing value, yet if a producer tries to opt out they lose market share. It's a cognitive-environmental turn on the tragedy of the commons.
By the way, has anyone considered that advertising isn't effective unless it's distracting? Insofar as much learning is subconscious, isn't there an inherent conflict of interest as the material being advertised competes for "mindshare" with the material being taught?
Slashdot Mirror
The Planned Parenthood attack was odd in that it had handwriting that was the same as the other attacks, but didn't actually have any spores with it.
Who could it be? It really could be anyone, from another foreign group to some lone disgruntled Tim McVeigh/unabomber type. I have heard that the Army of God recently made some threats before these letters were sent, and that's why they are on the suspect list. But a number of facts about the letters that were sent suggest that it was, in fact, an American who wrote them: see the post below us.
I have to agree with the above, and also note that most everywhere I've travelled most people have distinguished between Americans as individuals, American popular culture, the US government, and US multinational corporations. And have had different, often shaded and nuanced attitudes towards each.
In fact, there are a number of reasons to suspect that the primary perps behind the anthrax are American, including the way that the accompanying notes were written, and the fact that the targets included a planned parenthood, 2 democrats, media outlets, and the Supreme Court. The radical anti=abortion group The Army of God is on the suspect list. And it's completely homegrown American.
Have you run ispell on html lately?
Stifling innovation is exactly what copyright and other intellectual property holders want: the legal wherewithal to stifle their competitor's innovation. When consumers, small business people, hackers, tinkerers, and artists show up at Congress with briefcases full of cash and limos full of interns, perhaps we can expect some change.
And I'm a little disappointed by the attitude that Sony should just be nice to its fans. Any law that relies on the kindness, or even the self interest, of the party that can enforce it to be a fair law, is one messed up law.
Brazil and Mexico look pretty good from that perspective. And the nice thing about Brazil is: it's Brazil.
But the US corporations will still send their lobbyists/graft goons in, like they tried to do during the Brazilian abrogation of monopoly rights to the AIDS drugs manufacturers, to quell any excess of freedom.
You know, there are some things that will someday seem obvious to any reasonably person as completely wrong and nuts, that at the times seemed completely rational. Racism, slavery, and the inferior status of women were all once taken mostly for granted by all except a few, but now are considered generally indefensible, at least in theory.
Someday, the true may be said of this idea: that corporate ownership of intellectual property takes priority over folk and grassroots enthusiasms (particularly nonfraudulent and not-for-profit ones); that the owners of popular culture enjoy the benefits of the ubiquity of that culture, a culture which has in some sense colonized our subconscious (I have dreams with Bugs Bunny and the Enterprise in it - but if I depicted one of my own dreams publicly, I'd risk a lawsuit) but refuse to allow that ubiquity when it doesn't serve them.
Unfortunate, there is no indication that the increasingly global plutocracy is going to become reasonable any time in the near future. But I still hold out hope. What would it take for that to happen?
I didn't make personal insults, I made observations. That you have demonstrated no knowledge of pedagogy, or the realities of the communities at hand. And even if I had included an insult, it would not have occluded my point, since my point relies on the reality of the situation and not a popularity contest with you as the personal judge.
Then you know nothing about the realities of gang membership, and the demographics involved, and how tied up they are with family and community relationships. They have felonized gang membership, but that legal detail is irrelevant to the day to day lives of the people in the gangs.
Somehow, I don't think sending messages to kids is something you're really well-educated about.
The worst message you can send to the thousands and thousands of kids who are making at this point relatively small mistakes is that they've crossed the line, they are irredeemable, and society doesn't give a fuck about them. Your attitude turns a one-time minor offender into a career criminal.
Our ISP is Megapath, by the way.
All that it means to say a work is "biased" is to say that it reaches a conclusion of some sort (and in almost every case, that conclusion motivated the work, rather than the reverse). The question is whether the data and other considerations which lead to that conclusion are valid, accurate, or insightful.
If he had posted a math problem and asked for answers, that would be another story.
That would be true in any circumstances. No one is going to pay Alex to write a word processor now because MS Word and Word Perfect already exist. An absence of demand is an absence of demand under any circumstances.
The free implementations of LISP on Windows are usually crippled or limited, with limits in stack sizes or ability to save images, etc. And vital libraries are often missing from the free versions. CLISP is a nice try, but it's far from a fully useable implementation. GCL doesn't work with (any reasonable recent versions of) cygwin. The trial versions of Franz look promising, but it's hard to justify paying the prices for the Windows implementation when such good implentations are Free in *nix.
I think that this is a fixable lack, but it should be pointed out as a lack.
And with the penetration of media technologies like television and the internet comes the concommitent loss of cultural variety, too. I don't think cultural diversity for its own sake is always a unmitigatedly good thing (cultural practices that, for example, abuse women are ones that I wouldn't miss after they're deprecated, and I wouldn't want to sentence anyone to malaria in the name of cultural diversity) but some technologies deteriorate cultures without equivalent benefit or generating compensating cultural institutions (TV topping the list, IMO.)
This is sort of like saying that someone hits you over the head, it's because of a failure on your part to grow a protective carapace.
Once the data is flowing around, you can do anything with it.
Speaking as someone who does IT projects throughout Latin America: the fact that it's taken over three years to get this project started in Mexico convinces me that it is true.
Impressive, but I don't think it's desktop.
I think of advertising as the junk-food of the economy. Empty calories, no nutritional value. Except it doesn't even taste good. Like 8 month old Skittles that you find in your sofa.
No. The value of advertising on radio relies on the number of listeners per dollar that they get. Because advertisers only advertise because their *competitors* advertise in a media - the threat of losing market share obliges them to do so. Advertising budgets aren't fixed - if producers don't have to forfend the competition for attention in a media, they'll invest those costs elsewhere (like lowering prices or developing new products.)
Somewhere, we or someone else is paying for the commercials - usually, in the price of products. And commercials don't add value (in advertising, the market is the product, the producer is the consumer. Weird, isn't it?)
Without commercials, we would have to pay for content - using the money that we have saved by not having to pay 20 to 40 percent more for products to cover the cost of their ad campaigns. I can live with that.
I said the same thing about "Saved by the Bell."
Advertising is a lose/lose game all around, because it increases costs without increasing value, yet if a producer tries to opt out they lose market share. It's a cognitive-environmental turn on the tragedy of the commons.
By the way, has anyone considered that advertising isn't effective unless it's distracting? Insofar as much learning is subconscious, isn't there an inherent conflict of interest as the material being advertised competes for "mindshare" with the material being taught?