"...if Wal-Mart, McDonalds, UPS, GM, and Ford, the five companies that Fortune lists as having the most employees, all offered a similar incentive"
Most Wal-Mart employees are limited to fewer than 32 hours of work per week simply to avoid giving them any benefits, so I doubt they'll offer up any enviromentally friendly car benefits soon, not that most Wal-Mart employees could afford a new car on their salaries in the first place. McDonald's is even less likely to hand out benefits - especially since a large number of McDonald's employees work at franchises, and doesn't pay well enough for most of it's employees to afford a car at all. GM is on the verge of bankruptcy and slashing benefits, while Ford isn't too far behind, as they're about to announce plant closings and thousands of job cuts. UPS pays pretty well and has great benefits, but their employees generally work long hours as drivers, so UPS would do better by just using greener delivery trucks.
This one isn't going to happen any time in the near future, and between rising health care costs and the continuing demise of American manufacturing, corporate America isn't too likely to jump on this one in the near future. What's really going to drive adoption of green products is Chinese production of them for use in China as they start dealing with the environmental impact of their population. Once China starts pumping out mass quantities of hybrid car batteries, solar cells, and fuel cells, all at dirt cheap prices, humans can enter a new age of green living.
"That other solutions is a simple, centralized place, like a wiki (maybe even a wiki), where people post publicly, and contribute "inventions" to the public domain."
That's a terrible idea. Companies would spring up to do nothing but patent those ideas, and then sue others for using them, on the assumption that if the original poster could afford a decent patent attorney, he wouldn't have put the ideas into the public domain.
"For example, why isn't it equally ethical for a country to ignore patent laws for cancer drugs? Why hasn't this already been done for AIDS drugs?"
The are no ethics here, just follow the money.
In the long run, nobody's going to make a legitimate international legal mess over flu vaccines because the drug companies rarely, if ever, turn a profit from manufacturing them. That's one of the reasons this is an issue to begin with - drug companies are sick of grandstanding politicians demanding production of huge quantities of vaccines that end up in incinerators. Cancer drugs, on the other hand, make the drug companies a ton of money because unlike the flu pandemics that are mostly myths created by cable news, they are always in high demand because human beings are generally genetically programmed to end up with some sort of cancer in our lifetimes. HIV/AIDS medications are even more profitable, because the drug companies long ago stopped worrying about curing or vaccinating against HIV/AIDS in favor of long-term treatment. By indefinately prolonging the life of HIV/AIDS patients, drug companies guarantee themselves a huge revenue stream, assuming that they can constantly create new drugs that are more effective than old ones that are being produced as cheap generics.
Of course, the politicians who decided to ignore the patent laws need to make a big deal about it to the press. It keeps the media happy, because it feeds their bullshit stories of looming plagues, which is important now that hurrican season is dying down. It keeps the drug companies happy, because it gets politicians to publicly state that drug patents are so inviolate that only a pandemic justifies ignoring them. And it gives the politicians something to put on their resumes.
There are no ethical decisions being made here. Just financial and political ones.
Have the relevant industries even settled on digital television standards yet? The most common reason I hear from most people for wanting HDTV but not buying a capable television is that they're afraid of having it obsoleted when a new or incompatible signal comes out on top.
That's why I stopped playing those games. I'm sick of reloading because game developers think it's clever to screw the player with an action that seems legitimately good, but turns out to be bad simply for the sake of slowing down gameplay. It seems like Planescape Torment got the formula right, and most games since have tried to extend the concept, and done a lame job of it.
"...and Apple has interesting things to write about."
Not only are Apple's stories more interesting, most PC manufacturers product launches are just new knockoffs of Apple designs. Who would care about stories like: - PC manufacturer launches new line of shiny metal laptop computers. - PC manufacturer creates another portable music player that tries to compete with the iPod but doesn't have the scroll wheel. - Microsoft released another version of Windows that looks more like OS X today... ?
This sort of idea seems to turn up a lot in Africa - too many people making the wrong gestures instead of worrying about more serious problems like malnutrition, AIDS, and genocide. It's a shame we can't get some of the great business leaders of the tech world to focus on African relief. If we could get leaders like Bill Gates and Larry Ellison in there working on things they might be able to do a much better job than all the whiny bureacrats who won't stop genocide in Sudan because they're afraid of offending Chinese arms dealers.
Using the phrase "tilts at windmills" isn't even a good indicator of learnedness, it's just being pretentious. Dictionaries label such meanings as historic for a reason - so people posessing even a marginal intellect will know better to attept to use them.
"I couldn't agree more, and kudos to ABC for being one of the first TV media companies to break ranks and try and embrace the inevitable future as well."
I was thinking about it... and to me it seems like ABC isn't so much embracing the future as sucking up to Steve Jobs. Disney's new CEO has made it a big priority to get a new distribution deal with Pixar, so I'm guessing that Desperate Housewives on ABC is mostly an attempt to make good with Steve Jobs.
The time has come for broadcast TV to die. It requires too many annoying regulatory boondoggles, and said regulations lead to government censorship of content. Satellite, cable, and the internet are all excellent replacements for broadcast television that free us from much of the mess, and getting rid of local stations means no more whiny local stations in moralist backwaters like Kansas and most of the USA south of the Mason-Dixon Line griping about what their bible-thumping freak viewers don't want to see on television. Get rid of all this broadcast TV nonsense, so we can move on to the next step - elimination the networks themselves, so that all content is simply served up on demand, direct from its creators, without worries over competing timeslots, or network execs killing shows that are only mildly profitable in hopes that a replacement will do better.
"why dosn't the psp have some sort of tv out anyway?"
Because then Sony Picture wouldn't be able to sell people the same movie twice - one for the family to watch on the TV, and one to keep the kid quiet in the car.
"Funny that you Apple nitwits ignore it, because it does't have a little fruit logo on it."
I don't think anyone is ignoring Palm deliberately, I think Palm just has crappy marketing. One of the biggest reasons the iPod succeeded when so many other mp3 players weren't selling worth a damn, and then went into explosive sales growth, is Apple's kick-ass marketing campaigns. Apple made nerdy tech toys something for everyone. Palm's Treo phones, OTOH, are still the realm of workaholic business types and kooky sysadmins. If after years of making great handheld devices Palm is still not getting much consumer recognition, it's time for Palm to wake up and hire a better ad agency.
Sanctions are just another BS tool politicians use to look tough. They get to stand up in front of the voters and talk about how they're using sanctions to be tough on the turrists and commies, all the while taking campaign contributions from American companies which operate foreign subsidiaries and move product through third party resellers to avoid the sanctions.
Well, at this rate in another ten years Republicans will acknowledge global warming. Of course, they'll just write it off as another sign that the rapture is imminent, and push us all to accept intelligent design before it's too late.
"Let them all start their own DNS systems, breaking the Internet into segments. Let their own stupidity be their punishment. First, they will legislate that ISPs operating in their countries will no be allowed to use root DNS servers other than their own..."
My sentiments exactly. I can't wait to watch the French arguing that the entire EUinternet should be built around their language, the rest of Europe bickering about that, and the UK unable to decide if it even wants in on the whole deal.
"Are there also requirements for CMM or (gawdhelpus) ISO9000 certs?"
Not to my knowledge, but it certainly wouldn't surprise me if there were. There are a lot of funky standards out there tied to aerospace, defense, and intelligence work.
They didn't do this because they thought the open-source community needs or deserves Rational, they did it because a lot of US Government Agencies require Rational procedures (Or at least write documentation claiming they will) for any project with a budget above a few million dollars. IMHO, IBM did this to put a positive spin on OSS in the minds of those important people, since there are still a lot of them that assume OSS is crappy shareware, a communist plot, etc..
That sounds like the same bullshit open-source zealots have been spouting about The GIMP and Blender for years, and in that time, neither one has been able to displace their competitors in their respective industries. If this software was really good, it would be selling enough units that it wouldn't be getting released for free to try and get some publicity. And if it isn't that good now, there's no reason to think that a bunch of OSS coders are going to make it any better.
I use Firefox with the Adblock plugin, and I enable automatic downloads of the latest precompiled block lists. On top of that, I block all files with the.swf extension. I block ads because:
1. They're annoying. Most ads are ugly, poorly-designed things vomited up by bad designers who use the most gharish ideas possible to attract attention. This is particularly the case of popups/unders and even worse, flash ads.
2. They try to hijack my browser. I finally started blocking ads because I got sick of javascripts exploiting browser flaws to popup even with popups disabled, or resize windows, or other such nonsense. The same goes for flash ads that would suddenly start blaring some awful noises at the loudest possible volume.
3. Image based internet advertising is 99.9% irrelevant. Unless looking at Slashdot or similar nerdy sites, I never saw ads for anything I gave a damn about. I can say the exact opposite about Google's text based advertising - in fact, I often buy things by searching for what I need to buy and picking out of the Google advertisements.
4. Privacy, privacy, privacy. Given that 99.9% of web advertising seems to be sent out with no thoughts of demographics, why the hell are so many companies trying to track me down and keep tabs on everything I do online?
5. Most web ads insult the intelligence of the viewer, and yes mister "Punch the Monkey and Win...," I'm talking about you, asshole. The same goes for all the people who assume that titties == sales.
Before I started using adblock, I made ONE positive buying decision based on one of the hundreds of thousands of ads I've seen - and it was a simple, non-annoying ad for a Google web search appliance I saw on Slashdot. In that time I have also made thousands of negative buying decisions, that is to say, I have not bought products and services specifically because of annoying advertising. I'm hoping that more adblocking software appears, and that the entire advertising-based revenue model crumbles, returning the internet to its glory days.
"Doing it will probably mean that commercially-available code is more expensive and cause major problems for free and open source software developers."
If commercial software was well-coded, a lot of open-source software would never have been developed.
"...you could examine documentation on the hardware looking for a weakness (although why would anyone include any documentation on the copy protection?)."
That's what I'm expecting. I'm pretty sure that some information about the copy protection will be in there, because it just seems like something developers might need to know about. Of course, I might be completely wrong...
I'm sure that at least one of these will end up in the hands of a mod-chip manufacturer, and give them a nice head start on cracking the copy protection of the 360.
Slashdot Mirror
"...if Wal-Mart, McDonalds, UPS, GM, and Ford, the five companies that Fortune lists as having the most employees, all offered a similar incentive"
Most Wal-Mart employees are limited to fewer than 32 hours of work per week simply to avoid giving them any benefits, so I doubt they'll offer up any enviromentally friendly car benefits soon, not that most Wal-Mart employees could afford a new car on their salaries in the first place. McDonald's is even less likely to hand out benefits - especially since a large number of McDonald's employees work at franchises, and doesn't pay well enough for most of it's employees to afford a car at all. GM is on the verge of bankruptcy and slashing benefits, while Ford isn't too far behind, as they're about to announce plant closings and thousands of job cuts. UPS pays pretty well and has great benefits, but their employees generally work long hours as drivers, so UPS would do better by just using greener delivery trucks.
This one isn't going to happen any time in the near future, and between rising health care costs and the continuing demise of American manufacturing, corporate America isn't too likely to jump on this one in the near future. What's really going to drive adoption of green products is Chinese production of them for use in China as they start dealing with the environmental impact of their population. Once China starts pumping out mass quantities of hybrid car batteries, solar cells, and fuel cells, all at dirt cheap prices, humans can enter a new age of green living.
From the article:
"The PWRficient actually won't come out for two years, so it's hard to predict exactly how it will stack up against the competition."
In two years a 2 GHZ dual core will probably be a good option for a high-end embedded CPU.
"That other solutions is a simple, centralized place, like a wiki (maybe even a wiki), where people post publicly, and contribute "inventions" to the public domain."
That's a terrible idea. Companies would spring up to do nothing but patent those ideas, and then sue others for using them, on the assumption that if the original poster could afford a decent patent attorney, he wouldn't have put the ideas into the public domain.
"For example, why isn't it equally ethical for a country to ignore patent laws for cancer drugs? Why hasn't this already been done for AIDS drugs?"
The are no ethics here, just follow the money.
In the long run, nobody's going to make a legitimate international legal mess over flu vaccines because the drug companies rarely, if ever, turn a profit from manufacturing them. That's one of the reasons this is an issue to begin with - drug companies are sick of grandstanding politicians demanding production of huge quantities of vaccines that end up in incinerators. Cancer drugs, on the other hand, make the drug companies a ton of money because unlike the flu pandemics that are mostly myths created by cable news, they are always in high demand because human beings are generally genetically programmed to end up with some sort of cancer in our lifetimes. HIV/AIDS medications are even more profitable, because the drug companies long ago stopped worrying about curing or vaccinating against HIV/AIDS in favor of long-term treatment. By indefinately prolonging the life of HIV/AIDS patients, drug companies guarantee themselves a huge revenue stream, assuming that they can constantly create new drugs that are more effective than old ones that are being produced as cheap generics.
Of course, the politicians who decided to ignore the patent laws need to make a big deal about it to the press. It keeps the media happy, because it feeds their bullshit stories of looming plagues, which is important now that hurrican season is dying down. It keeps the drug companies happy, because it gets politicians to publicly state that drug patents are so inviolate that only a pandemic justifies ignoring them. And it gives the politicians something to put on their resumes.
There are no ethical decisions being made here. Just financial and political ones.
Have the relevant industries even settled on digital television standards yet? The most common reason I hear from most people for wanting HDTV but not buying a capable television is that they're afraid of having it obsoleted when a new or incompatible signal comes out on top.
That's why I stopped playing those games. I'm sick of reloading because game developers think it's clever to screw the player with an action that seems legitimately good, but turns out to be bad simply for the sake of slowing down gameplay. It seems like Planescape Torment got the formula right, and most games since have tried to extend the concept, and done a lame job of it.
"...and Apple has interesting things to write about."
Not only are Apple's stories more interesting, most PC manufacturers product launches are just new knockoffs of Apple designs. Who would care about stories like:
- PC manufacturer launches new line of shiny metal laptop computers.
- PC manufacturer creates another portable music player that tries to compete with the iPod but doesn't have the scroll wheel.
- Microsoft released another version of Windows that looks more like OS X today...
?
This sort of idea seems to turn up a lot in Africa - too many people making the wrong gestures instead of worrying about more serious problems like malnutrition, AIDS, and genocide. It's a shame we can't get some of the great business leaders of the tech world to focus on African relief. If we could get leaders like Bill Gates and Larry Ellison in there working on things they might be able to do a much better job than all the whiny bureacrats who won't stop genocide in Sudan because they're afraid of offending Chinese arms dealers.
Using the phrase "tilts at windmills" isn't even a good indicator of learnedness, it's just being pretentious. Dictionaries label such meanings as historic for a reason - so people posessing even a marginal intellect will know better to attept to use them.
Anyone interested in contacting Jack Thompson might want to try the following address and phone number:
John B & Patricia H Thompson
5721 Riviera Dr
Coral Gables, FL 33146-2750
(305) 666-4366
"I couldn't agree more, and kudos to ABC for being one of the first TV media companies to break ranks and try and embrace the inevitable future as well."
I was thinking about it... and to me it seems like ABC isn't so much embracing the future as sucking up to Steve Jobs. Disney's new CEO has made it a big priority to get a new distribution deal with Pixar, so I'm guessing that Desperate Housewives on ABC is mostly an attempt to make good with Steve Jobs.
The time has come for broadcast TV to die. It requires too many annoying regulatory boondoggles, and said regulations lead to government censorship of content. Satellite, cable, and the internet are all excellent replacements for broadcast television that free us from much of the mess, and getting rid of local stations means no more whiny local stations in moralist backwaters like Kansas and most of the USA south of the Mason-Dixon Line griping about what their bible-thumping freak viewers don't want to see on television. Get rid of all this broadcast TV nonsense, so we can move on to the next step - elimination the networks themselves, so that all content is simply served up on demand, direct from its creators, without worries over competing timeslots, or network execs killing shows that are only mildly profitable in hopes that a replacement will do better.
"why dosn't the psp have some sort of tv out anyway?"
Because then Sony Picture wouldn't be able to sell people the same movie twice - one for the family to watch on the TV, and one to keep the kid quiet in the car.
"Funny that you Apple nitwits ignore it, because it does't have a little fruit logo on it."
I don't think anyone is ignoring Palm deliberately, I think Palm just has crappy marketing. One of the biggest reasons the iPod succeeded when so many other mp3 players weren't selling worth a damn, and then went into explosive sales growth, is Apple's kick-ass marketing campaigns. Apple made nerdy tech toys something for everyone. Palm's Treo phones, OTOH, are still the realm of workaholic business types and kooky sysadmins. If after years of making great handheld devices Palm is still not getting much consumer recognition, it's time for Palm to wake up and hire a better ad agency.
Sanctions are just another BS tool politicians use to look tough. They get to stand up in front of the voters and talk about how they're using sanctions to be tough on the turrists and commies, all the while taking campaign contributions from American companies which operate foreign subsidiaries and move product through third party resellers to avoid the sanctions.
Well, at this rate in another ten years Republicans will acknowledge global warming. Of course, they'll just write it off as another sign that the rapture is imminent, and push us all to accept intelligent design before it's too late.
"Let them all start their own DNS systems, breaking the Internet into segments. Let their own stupidity be their punishment. First, they will legislate that ISPs operating in their countries will no be allowed to use root DNS servers other than their own..."
My sentiments exactly. I can't wait to watch the French arguing that the entire EUinternet should be built around their language, the rest of Europe bickering about that, and the UK unable to decide if it even wants in on the whole deal.
"Are there also requirements for CMM or (gawdhelpus) ISO9000 certs?"
Not to my knowledge, but it certainly wouldn't surprise me if there were. There are a lot of funky standards out there tied to aerospace, defense, and intelligence work.
They didn't do this because they thought the open-source community needs or deserves Rational, they did it because a lot of US Government Agencies require Rational procedures (Or at least write documentation claiming they will) for any project with a budget above a few million dollars. IMHO, IBM did this to put a positive spin on OSS in the minds of those important people, since there are still a lot of them that assume OSS is crappy shareware, a communist plot, etc..
Does anyone else hear the crying of all the morons who dumped their Apple stock yesterday because earnings only quadrupled?
That sounds like the same bullshit open-source zealots have been spouting about The GIMP and Blender for years, and in that time, neither one has been able to displace their competitors in their respective industries. If this software was really good, it would be selling enough units that it wouldn't be getting released for free to try and get some publicity. And if it isn't that good now, there's no reason to think that a bunch of OSS coders are going to make it any better.
I use Firefox with the Adblock plugin, and I enable automatic downloads of the latest precompiled block lists. On top of that, I block all files with the .swf extension. I block ads because:
1. They're annoying. Most ads are ugly, poorly-designed things vomited up by bad designers who use the most gharish ideas possible to attract attention. This is particularly the case of popups/unders and even worse, flash ads.
2. They try to hijack my browser. I finally started blocking ads because I got sick of javascripts exploiting browser flaws to popup even with popups disabled, or resize windows, or other such nonsense. The same goes for flash ads that would suddenly start blaring some awful noises at the loudest possible volume.
3. Image based internet advertising is 99.9% irrelevant. Unless looking at Slashdot or similar nerdy sites, I never saw ads for anything I gave a damn about. I can say the exact opposite about Google's text based advertising - in fact, I often buy things by searching for what I need to buy and picking out of the Google advertisements.
4. Privacy, privacy, privacy. Given that 99.9% of web advertising seems to be sent out with no thoughts of demographics, why the hell are so many companies trying to track me down and keep tabs on everything I do online?
5. Most web ads insult the intelligence of the viewer, and yes mister "Punch the Monkey and Win...," I'm talking about you, asshole. The same goes for all the people who assume that titties == sales.
Before I started using adblock, I made ONE positive buying decision based on one of the hundreds of thousands of ads I've seen - and it was a simple, non-annoying ad for a Google web search appliance I saw on Slashdot. In that time I have also made thousands of negative buying decisions, that is to say, I have not bought products and services specifically because of annoying advertising. I'm hoping that more adblocking software appears, and that the entire advertising-based revenue model crumbles, returning the internet to its glory days.
"Doing it will probably mean that commercially-available code is more expensive and cause major problems for free and open source software developers."
If commercial software was well-coded, a lot of open-source software would never have been developed.
"...you could examine documentation on the hardware looking for a weakness (although why would anyone include any documentation on the copy protection?)."
That's what I'm expecting. I'm pretty sure that some information about the copy protection will be in there, because it just seems like something developers might need to know about. Of course, I might be completely wrong...
I'm sure that at least one of these will end up in the hands of a mod-chip manufacturer, and give them a nice head start on cracking the copy protection of the 360.