Philosophyer Ludwig Wittgenstein used how the concept of "game" as a set category was not amenable to necessary and sufficient conditions - that there is no single thing that all games share, but rather there are what he called "family resemblences" shared by all things called games.
For example, Ring-Around-the-Roses is called a game by virtually everyone, yet there is no winning or losing. Some games are not fun for anyone involved, such as a wargame (or, in same ways, war itself) yet they are still considered games by virtue of their being simulated.
SimCity is a game. We call it a game, we buy it in the game section, we say "I am playing a game of SimCity." We try to optimize our performance in SimCity on a variety of metrics (avoiding riots, maximizing income, etc.)
This is true, but completely tangential to what we were talking about: none of the things you describe are remediated by the measure of rebuilding a bunch of desktop machines out of the belief that "unknown" damage can't be repaired by more straightforward mechanisms. All the things you describe are true, but if they happened they would be made obvious by looking at the payload.
The reason it is a boneheaded over-reaction as a response is that.vbs viruses are easily readable, and the exact nature and extent of their damage and the locations they are placed easily determined. VBS viruses are no more mysterious that a.sh 'virus' would be. Once you remove the responsible files and registry entries, there's no problem.
People have to eat, and have to feed families. In some situations, there are lots of different viable jobs to choose from. In many, there aren't, or at least not without significant upheaval.
It is facts like this, the fact that employer/employee relations (as well as insurer/insured relations) are between parties with very disproportionate power, options, and senses of urgency, that we regulate these spheres of our life. You may fantasize about a perfectly operating unregulated market, but for a thousand reasons that are frequently recounted but usually ignored, that unregulated market will not work without causing a lot of harm and creating a great deal of waste (remember, competitors have separate overhead, and competition has, in marketing and advertising, costs not related to production.)
The problem with this line of thinking is that, while there are many things that can be done somewhat better in Linux than in Windows, there really isn't much of anything that can be done in Linux that can't be done in Windows, and some things that can be done in Windows and not in Linux, and the extra hard-drive space and boot-time for a completely different operating system is usually not worth the trouble. I've been to dual-boot land, and after awhile, it gets easier to just use NTEmacs and the Cygwin suite than to reboot after open your Excel documents and watching a QuickTime file.
I can imagine some situations where dual-booting makes sense: testing different development environments, developing for a *nix target platform, training, etc. But for a lot of users, it just doesn't make sense.
I can't believe some of you Apple apologists. You live in some sort of reality-distortion zone previously occupied by Amiga fans. I thought people stopped eating that much acid in the eighties.
What you have just said is really not true. Or, it is no more true of Microsoft than it is of Apple. Asides from Xerox Parc, other researchers in Bell Labs, MIT and Stanford were working with the elements windowing systems long before the Mac. Like Apple, Microsoft worked with existing ideas, and has created a pretty good UI out of them (for actual functional multitasking, I much prefer the Windows and X ways of doing things far more than traditional Apple way; I've always thought that the unrestrained praise for the Mac interface has been overwrought and uninformed.) And the actual design elements on scroll bars is the issue, anyway - Apple isn't suing based on real "innovation" when it is a suit about color schemes and the shape of window borders. The bare fact of it is that Microsoft has chosen NOT to sue small companies that mimic its unique design elements for skinning purposes, and Apple again has.
There, it had to be said and I said it. Microsoft did *not* sue fvwm95 or any of the other Win-UI act-alikes for imitating the behaviour of the start bar/button/etc down to widget placement and structure, much less "look and feel" of windows and scroll-bars. Apple has consistently been more litigative about this sort of thing, burning all sorts of goodwill in the process. MS understood that imitation in this case was a form of flattery and left well enough alone.
Apple deserves every bit of the pain it is going to get. Microsoft seldom goes after the "little guy" like this, Apple only goes after them after having been beat up by Microsoft in its look-and-feel suit.
So, there is no 3. the doctrinal commitments of my faith are no longer teneble? You will always give your religion's dogma first-tier status over new discoveries?
"Urban existentialist?" (As distinct from what, the old rural variety of the Parisian left bank in the 50's? I'm trying to imagine Kojeve, Sartre, Jaspers and company in an episode of Green Acres, but it isn't working.) I suspect either a troll, or terminal pretentiousness. But I'll answer anyway:
Just because we understand how something is implemented, doesn't mean that it is any less authentic an experience. You probably had a sort of folk-theory about the mechanisms for conscious experience - that there was some non-material substance, a "soul" that somehow recieved material information. That model is pretty shopworn at this point. But just because these experiences are essentially implemented by neurological processes, rather than by effects on a little "homonculus of light," doesn't really change the experience.
For those of us who have studed neuroscience, the 'bunches of neurons firing' are, themselves, beautiful and awe-inspiring.
The irony of a bunch of techs and engineers blaming every failure on "bad marketing" is that, in most other contexts, they seem to view marketing departments as unnecessary parasites, filled with know-nothing boobs whose budgets drain corporate resources that should be going to, of course, techie things. But when a product fails, it's 'bad marketing.'
Sometimes, I think about how much money and time goes into advertising that is simply meant to cancel out the effects of a rival's advertising; I think about how much the cost of goods is inflated by these costs, and I get annoyed.
Greed motivated the colonization of Latin America (plus the desperation of poor soldiers and low-end nobility in Spain and Portugal), but North America was colonized also by religious refugees and debtors.
If you want to take a look at an unusual bit of the history of Colonial North America, check out the history of Acadia/Nova Scotia, in which the British essentially attack French settlers for the audacity of having "gone native" and befriending the aboriginal people.
You underestimate how extensive the public support of the arts in Europe actually is. Plenty of public money goes to the arts there, and with good results.
This has nothing to do with central planning - it has everything to do with poor planning.
Ever hear of contracts? If someone has a longterm contract to provide a resource, they remain locked into that contract even if the price of that resource increases. A contract - such as a lease - can act as a negotiated window of protection from market rates. Essentially, the power distributors in California negotiated what they thought was a good contract for them with the California energy consumers. Additionally, it should be noted that the power distributors actually own much of the power production within the state; they began buying facilities when dergulation impended.
Wrong. Seventy-five percent of the plants are online, and twenty-five are offline. This is a pretty high percent of offline plants.
Each of the plants that are offline are nominally offline for an individually valid reason (malfunction, maintenance, etc.) but the aggregate figure is suspiciously high. The P.U.C. here is starting to suspect that there may be some market manipulation going on.
I am afraid I am going to have to repeat this for a while now, because you are spreading the Big Lie that has become a laissez-faire mantra on this board and is being accepted without criticism.
The fact is that the temporary (until 2002) freeze on prices was mandated by the power producers themselves, because they were afraid that deregulation was going to cause a drop in prices as consumers would be able to choose cheaper providers. They wanted a a window of ensured profitability before margins got razor-thin. The fixed price was, at the time, above predicted market rates. Only in the San Diego area was the retail price unfrozen - it was there that the first signs of the reality of the situation (that deregulation would lead to higher, rather than lower, prices in the energy market) became apparent.
In fact, there are plenty of reasons to believe that deregulation will always lead to higher prices for energy, when it leads to redundancies in infrastructure that don't exist with a regulated monopoly.
Of course, this is no less true when we purchase media from the recording industry, is it?
Honestly, artists get a better deal (especially in Europe, but everywhere) from public agencies that can commission works. If the money from these taxes goes directly into an arts agency that is principally charged with funding music and art, then it's a better deal for artists and audiences alike than simply having Napster sued out of existence so that Columbia music can protect its revenue stream is.
I consider this strategy a lot more sensible and less limiting to freedom than the outright ban on technologies, or the attempts by corporations to push hardware standards that make copying impossible, or the wholesale lawsuits against Napster and the people who use it. Adding a small fee to products in order to compensate artists is a small price to pay for the freedom to be able to listen to, look at and share the content we want to.
Then you've been well-trained into the correct instincts by the corporate thought-police, for whom litigation is the only real effective means of stopping reprehensible (albeit profitable) behaviour.
So much of the "populism" of the recent era - including the knee-jerk hostility to remedy by litigation (which has spawned a whole slow of legislation meant to restrict litigation, which has generally made it harder for the poor to sue) is so in the corporate interest that it is difficult to see it as anything except constructed.
However, many defenders of the libertarian credo imply that either some optima will be achieved by market pressures, or that a viable alternative will always be created in the market. At its most basic, this overlooks network effects and entry barrier costs. Network effects are especially powerful in more technologically advanced markets - if 80 percent of your infrastructure already relies on a vendor, platform, or standard, producers which don't have access to those standards will not be able to offer a viable choice, and a consumer will not be reasonably able to avoid sourcing from those producers. Just like the only way to avoid taxes is to live a below-the-poverty-line Unabomber-like existence in the woods, the only way to completely step out of the emerging lock-in of proprietary systems, platforms, and protocols is to simply buy nothing: in terms of the practical demands of day to day life, it isn't really an option.
Ironically, you've mentioned an example for which real-life free-market analogs exist. Even if you don't use a microsoft product, you pay the "Microsoft tax" for systems from well over 95% of the vendors (the exceptions are out of the mainstream market, and due to economies of scale often not even any cheaper) because of the dynamics of contractual agreements between producers - no government involved. Unlike the public sector, where you can actually vote and even run for a seat on the school board 9and probably win,) there is virtually no chance of you being able to change the relationships between the Microsofts and Dells and Intels and Compaqs and IBMS and the like.
The reason that you hear a lot of that sort of "they just lost me!" grandstanding is two-fold:
For one thing, people, especially geeks, are extremely loath to admit their own powerlessness and inefficacy in a situation. Even the passing gesture of non-consumption, as inauthentic and short-lived as it is, seems like a response of some sort. The fact that most of us are essentially at the whim of the big players of the system in which we choose to participate is an uncomfortable one.
The second reason is political - the libertarian credo is that the market will resolve all such behaviors. Admitting that the market couldn't do so in any given situation would be a sort of sacrilige, and could lead to such horrors as the European privacy legislations, trade practice controls and other frightening instances of useful public policy.
It is not correct. All that a corporation has to do is to make a would-be consumer in their target market (i.e., someone with the income to spend) believe that they have more to gain from purchasing the product than from not purchasing it, or that they have more to lose from not purchasing it than from purchasing it. This may not have anything to do with pleasing the consumer at all. I have bought many things that do not please me, because I am afraid of the consequences of not buying them, rather than things that would please me. This includes insurance, some Microsoft products, and laundry detergent.
And Americans pay for it in the cost of their insurance bills. It's not free for anyone. And since hospitals will give the more expensive emergency service to anyone who asks for it, then creating often unpayable bills that ruin the credit of the poor, and subsidize their defaulting by increasing the cost of their services to the insured, rather than provide cheaper preventative care to those who need it but can't pay for it, we actually as a nation pay *more.*
TANSTAAFL goes further than you think. Americans in toto pay much more for their health care than do Canadians and Europeans.
Longevity is the next big technological horizon. When human lifespans, including their working lifespans, are significantly increased - and the manner and distribution of that increase - are really IMO the only technological issues that will at its core transform society the way that the telephone, telegraph, plumbing, electricity, the automobile, antibiotics, aviation and film did.
Slashdot Mirror
For example, Ring-Around-the-Roses is called a game by virtually everyone, yet there is no winning or losing. Some games are not fun for anyone involved, such as a wargame (or, in same ways, war itself) yet they are still considered games by virtue of their being simulated.
SimCity is a game. We call it a game, we buy it in the game section, we say "I am playing a game of SimCity." We try to optimize our performance in SimCity on a variety of metrics (avoiding riots, maximizing income, etc.)
This is true, but completely tangential to what we were talking about: none of the things you describe are remediated by the measure of rebuilding a bunch of desktop machines out of the belief that "unknown" damage can't be repaired by more straightforward mechanisms. All the things you describe are true, but if they happened they would be made obvious by looking at the payload.
The reason it is a boneheaded over-reaction as a response is that .vbs viruses are easily readable, and the exact nature and extent of their damage and the locations they are placed easily determined. VBS viruses are no more mysterious that a .sh 'virus' would be. Once you remove the responsible files and registry entries, there's no problem.
It is facts like this, the fact that employer/employee relations (as well as insurer/insured relations) are between parties with very disproportionate power, options, and senses of urgency, that we regulate these spheres of our life. You may fantasize about a perfectly operating unregulated market, but for a thousand reasons that are frequently recounted but usually ignored, that unregulated market will not work without causing a lot of harm and creating a great deal of waste (remember, competitors have separate overhead, and competition has, in marketing and advertising, costs not related to production.)
I can imagine some situations where dual-booting makes sense: testing different development environments, developing for a *nix target platform, training, etc. But for a lot of users, it just doesn't make sense.
What you have just said is really not true. Or, it is no more true of Microsoft than it is of Apple. Asides from Xerox Parc, other researchers in Bell Labs, MIT and Stanford were working with the elements windowing systems long before the Mac. Like Apple, Microsoft worked with existing ideas, and has created a pretty good UI out of them (for actual functional multitasking, I much prefer the Windows and X ways of doing things far more than traditional Apple way; I've always thought that the unrestrained praise for the Mac interface has been overwrought and uninformed.) And the actual design elements on scroll bars is the issue, anyway - Apple isn't suing based on real "innovation" when it is a suit about color schemes and the shape of window borders. The bare fact of it is that Microsoft has chosen NOT to sue small companies that mimic its unique design elements for skinning purposes, and Apple again has.
Apple deserves every bit of the pain it is going to get. Microsoft seldom goes after the "little guy" like this, Apple only goes after them after having been beat up by Microsoft in its look-and-feel suit.
So, there is no 3. the doctrinal commitments of my faith are no longer teneble? You will always give your religion's dogma first-tier status over new discoveries?
Just because we understand how something is implemented, doesn't mean that it is any less authentic an experience. You probably had a sort of folk-theory about the mechanisms for conscious experience - that there was some non-material substance, a "soul" that somehow recieved material information. That model is pretty shopworn at this point. But just because these experiences are essentially implemented by neurological processes, rather than by effects on a little "homonculus of light," doesn't really change the experience.
For those of us who have studed neuroscience, the 'bunches of neurons firing' are, themselves, beautiful and awe-inspiring.
Sometimes, I think about how much money and time goes into advertising that is simply meant to cancel out the effects of a rival's advertising; I think about how much the cost of goods is inflated by these costs, and I get annoyed.
If you want to take a look at an unusual bit of the history of Colonial North America, check out the history of Acadia/Nova Scotia, in which the British essentially attack French settlers for the audacity of having "gone native" and befriending the aboriginal people.
With the dancing bear, it's not so much how well the bear dances, it's that the bear can dance at all.
You underestimate how extensive the public support of the arts in Europe actually is. Plenty of public money goes to the arts there, and with good results.
Ever hear of contracts? If someone has a longterm contract to provide a resource, they remain locked into that contract even if the price of that resource increases. A contract - such as a lease - can act as a negotiated window of protection from market rates. Essentially, the power distributors in California negotiated what they thought was a good contract for them with the California energy consumers. Additionally, it should be noted that the power distributors actually own much of the power production within the state; they began buying facilities when dergulation impended.
Each of the plants that are offline are nominally offline for an individually valid reason (malfunction, maintenance, etc.) but the aggregate figure is suspiciously high. The P.U.C. here is starting to suspect that there may be some market manipulation going on.
The fact is that the temporary (until 2002) freeze on prices was mandated by the power producers themselves, because they were afraid that deregulation was going to cause a drop in prices as consumers would be able to choose cheaper providers. They wanted a a window of ensured profitability before margins got razor-thin. The fixed price was, at the time, above predicted market rates. Only in the San Diego area was the retail price unfrozen - it was there that the first signs of the reality of the situation (that deregulation would lead to higher, rather than lower, prices in the energy market) became apparent.
In fact, there are plenty of reasons to believe that deregulation will always lead to higher prices for energy, when it leads to redundancies in infrastructure that don't exist with a regulated monopoly.
Honestly, artists get a better deal (especially in Europe, but everywhere) from public agencies that can commission works. If the money from these taxes goes directly into an arts agency that is principally charged with funding music and art, then it's a better deal for artists and audiences alike than simply having Napster sued out of existence so that Columbia music can protect its revenue stream is.
I consider this strategy a lot more sensible and less limiting to freedom than the outright ban on technologies, or the attempts by corporations to push hardware standards that make copying impossible, or the wholesale lawsuits against Napster and the people who use it. Adding a small fee to products in order to compensate artists is a small price to pay for the freedom to be able to listen to, look at and share the content we want to.
Since Microsoft Exchange Server.
So much of the "populism" of the recent era - including the knee-jerk hostility to remedy by litigation (which has spawned a whole slow of legislation meant to restrict litigation, which has generally made it harder for the poor to sue) is so in the corporate interest that it is difficult to see it as anything except constructed.
Ironically, you've mentioned an example for which real-life free-market analogs exist. Even if you don't use a microsoft product, you pay the "Microsoft tax" for systems from well over 95% of the vendors (the exceptions are out of the mainstream market, and due to economies of scale often not even any cheaper) because of the dynamics of contractual agreements between producers - no government involved. Unlike the public sector, where you can actually vote and even run for a seat on the school board 9and probably win,) there is virtually no chance of you being able to change the relationships between the Microsofts and Dells and Intels and Compaqs and IBMS and the like.
For one thing, people, especially geeks, are extremely loath to admit their own powerlessness and inefficacy in a situation. Even the passing gesture of non-consumption, as inauthentic and short-lived as it is, seems like a response of some sort. The fact that most of us are essentially at the whim of the big players of the system in which we choose to participate is an uncomfortable one.
The second reason is political - the libertarian credo is that the market will resolve all such behaviors. Admitting that the market couldn't do so in any given situation would be a sort of sacrilige, and could lead to such horrors as the European privacy legislations, trade practice controls and other frightening instances of useful public policy.
It is not correct. All that a corporation has to do is to make a would-be consumer in their target market (i.e., someone with the income to spend) believe that they have more to gain from purchasing the product than from not purchasing it, or that they have more to lose from not purchasing it than from purchasing it. This may not have anything to do with pleasing the consumer at all. I have bought many things that do not please me, because I am afraid of the consequences of not buying them, rather than things that would please me. This includes insurance, some Microsoft products, and laundry detergent.
TANSTAAFL goes further than you think. Americans in toto pay much more for their health care than do Canadians and Europeans.
Longevity is the next big technological horizon. When human lifespans, including their working lifespans, are significantly increased - and the manner and distribution of that increase - are really IMO the only technological issues that will at its core transform society the way that the telephone, telegraph, plumbing, electricity, the automobile, antibiotics, aviation and film did.