The entire methodology of wealth distribution we have created is predicated on infinite needs and limited production capacity. Once production capacity exceeds needs the whole system goes on the fritz.
The referenced article was vapid bullshit. There is some real meat to this topic. Unfortunately this margin is too narrow to contain my proof...
Parent misses grandparent's point. Yes, Coke branding overrides Pepsi flavor. But crude brain scans don't tell us why.
The article offers no evidence that the observed effect is not simply response to color.
No one is arguing against this experiment being a demonstration of the importance of branding. People are just expressing skepticism that the brain scans add any value to that result.
If you're willing to think big and think technical, there is potentially a feasible way out of fossil fuel dependency and greenhouse warming. See
this article . It's never cloudy or windy in space, so extraterrestrial solar power isn't clumsy or random. It's expensive to get started, but scales beautifully. Which basically means you can keep your suburban lifestyle (if you must) and lose your environmental, military and diplomatic, er, ramifications.
The debates on climate change on Slashdot are getting worse, not better, just as they did on sci.environment .
I think everyone agrees that there is organized propaganda being disseminated on this subject, but few people are willing to consider the possibility that both sides are issuing it. This may be wise, but it is also morally suspect.
The result is widespread confusion about forcings, time scales, natural variability, and risk, to the point where anyone who knows anything tries really hard to stay out of the debate, leaving it to the ignorant and self-deceived.
Let's try a simple point. Ice does not melt due to global warming just as you do not go bankrupt due to a failing economy. You go bankrupt because your income is less than your expenses, which is more likely in a failing economy, and ice melts because (duh) the temperature goes up where the ice happens to be, which is more likely when there is global warming, but is not "because of" it. You'd think this concept wouldn't be so hard for a fairly educated readership to grasp.
Let's try another one. Climate varies naturally, but the rate of warming now occuring is observed to be extremely high compared to natural variability and also to variability before 1900. Also, the interglacial peaked about 5000 years ago and the world had been gradually cooling in accordance with astronomical cycles until about 1900. This leaves those claiming that that the sudden warming overc the last century is natural variation with a peculiar explanatory gap.
OK, here's another one. Climate change since 1900 is certainly due at least in significant part to human activity. Humans are known to be emitting radiatively significant quantities of greenhouse gases which, all else equal, are known to have a warming effect. While all else may not be equal, this emission corresponds with a sudden, large, accelerating increase in global mean temperature.
Therefore a claim that the observed warming since is natural is equivalent to the two claims that for some reason the large radiative forcing due to increased greenhouse gas concentrations has had no effect AND that some other unidentified natural forcing or dynamics has suddenly kicked in.
Now draw some conclusions if you dare. I'm not allowed to, because that would be taking sides.
Calling linux communistic is like Sara Lee calling the local church ladies communist for holding a bake sale.
Bravo! Exactly! .
I'm considering adapting this as a.sig; "Proprietary software corporations calling open source 'communism' is like fast food chains calling neighborhood potlucks subversive and lobbying to make them illegal". Do you want credit for inspiring this?
Voluntary sharing is not evil! There is a real question about how much compelled sharing (taxation) is evil, but once the line moves to the point where I'm not ALLOWED to give anything away, clearly a new form of tyrrany is emerging.
Oh please, you could just post the Javascript, instead of inviting people to execute a script on a server that you control. I'm sure it will perform as advertised for awhile. What prevents you from changing this to something malicious later?
If you are well-intentioned, please reconsider that your behavior looks suspicious and accomplishes nothing that a less dubious approcach would not. If you are really planning to take advantage of people who think what they are including is code rather than a reference to untrusted code, well, go to hell.
The Mad-Magazine-style subtitle says something about what an odd business music redistribution is for a university. I strongly disagree.
Your tuition helps pay for libraries, photocopying, and bandwidth. Distributing information is a legitimate function of a university. Music is information. What possible argument is there that this particular sort of information should not be redistributed by the university using university funds?
If you reply that only music majors should pay for music, while all others should fend for themselves, you should consider the whole purpose of a university, which is to promote connections across disciplines. You don't want to be turned away at the mmusic library, do you?
If you reply that no one at a university should pay for music, you are free-riding on the university's facilities, basically redirecting tax-paid research and education moneys for non-essential functions. (I don't use the word "entertainment" because I don't care to distinguish between "entertainment" and "serious use" of information. My whole point is that the university cannot and should not make this distinction.)
If you reply that only music majors should pay for music, while all others should get it free, you are so logically inconsistent that your opinion shouldn't count for much in the discussion of what universities should do.
I think that about covers it.
Despite the excesses of the music industry, information doesn't want to be free. It just wants to be really, really cheap. Universities have always been critical nodes in redistributing information. That is exactly the business they have always been in, and they should stay in it.
First off, there is never a plateau in technology.
Well, maybe so, but there are limits to how effective any code base and methodology can be. There are reasons to suspect that the Microsoft approach will soon or has already reached a point of diminishing returns in terms of value added per unit effort. It can always be made better, of course, but that doesn't mean it can always be made better fast enough.
Even if true, this doesn't mean Stallmanesque pure open source will win either. I think a hybrid model (see OSX) may be the best. The point is less about morality or motivation, and more that Microsoft's high-pressure release-first fix-later approach has left it with a huge, bloated, unrepairable code base.
Look again at your analogy. You can add motors to your 18th century boat and make it faster, but it's not going to win a race head-to-head against a modern speedboat designed and built with modern methods and materials.
I can't believe you say you like Win2k better than WinXP.
I have seen my mother-in-law try to switch to XP from W98 to manage her photography hobby. The switch seems to have gratuitously confused her. In the end she is marginally less effective. As for me, when I get roped into support tasks for her, I have to deal with a smarmy and aesthetically revolting UI.
Even leaving aside the licensing and spyware aspects, I for one definitely strongly prefer older version of Windows to XP, and have no plans to move any of my Win9x boxes to any current Microsoft OS, nor to purchase any Intel boxes with any version on XP on them in future. I have occasion to run Win95, Win98, Red Hat, and Debian, but mostly I use OSX, sometimes with a Win98 VirtualPC.
By the way I have nothing against decent MS software. Excel is nice, and if it weren't a security risk Outlook, (which has some great features to outweigh its cluttered design) would be very appealing. I recommend MS Entourage on OSX + Palm as the best PIM combination at present, despite the many things I like about iCal. On the other hand I think MS Word is garbage and a curse on humankind. It cannot be repaired. The underlying data structures are too broken.
The Little Lisper is a wonderful book, but it's dramatically different in style and approach from the head-first stuff.
Those who find it brilliant rather than bizarre may also be interested in
also be interested in The little Schemer, The Little MLer and
A Little Java, A Few Patterns by the same authors, all MIT Press.
Subject pretty much says it. This looks to me like a typical marginally schizophrenic overvalued taxonomy (a.k.a. "crackpot theory"). It's worthy of notice ONLY because it proves that a crackpot with a lawyer can patent his idee fixe.
This is a sorry comment on the patent system, but since as an actual methodology it is utterly meaningless, it is inconsequential in the theory or practice of AI or software engineering or anything else.
I have to wonder about the ethics of an attorney who patents an ethical system, though. That's sort of ironic.
Native speakers publicly reviewing creative writing (as opposed to experts reviewing technical writing, where it doesn't matter nearly as much) should be advocates for the precision and power of the written language, and therefore shouldn't make such mistakes. It's hard to take a review like this seriously.
Of course, parent is funny because it violates its own advice. It's still good advice.
I may be in the minority, but I thought The Hulk was a wonderful movie, capturing the feel of the Marvel Silver Age perfectly and exploring interesting new comix inspired visualization techniques. I think this movie will be remembered long after the Spiderman and Batman movies are forgotten. I also think it's a work that understands and uses technology both as theme and as tool brilliantly.
Parent is exactly right. "Sentience" is not about having senses, it is about having a consciousness to receive those senses. This is an extremely important concept, core to the whole philosophical question of whether artificial consciousness is possible.
I can and do argue that the sentience of an artifact is an inherently undecideable question, and that therefore the strong AI program is futile. I can't make this argument, and you can't argue against me if you disagree, if my vocabulary is polluted with marketing drivel.
This isn't just Clippy writ large, which would be bad enough. It's also Newspeak (see G. Orwell's 1984), deliberately polluting language to make careful conversation difficult. Some words are important and need to be defended.
In summary, if you buy a two processor box with an amazing new bus architecture that is optimized for floating point operations from Apple, and you run single-processor integer non bus-intensive apps on it and avoid multitasking like the plague (never run background tasks), you may be getting slightly less performance per dollar.
Ok, ok, if you use both processors on an integer task, continuing to ignore floating point and bus performance, all you have to do is use a different benchmark on the Intel box to show the Intel box being a hair faster.
No comments on using the G5 on appropriate applications or application mixes.
Why rain on Apple's parade like that? They continue to do amazing work. The G5 appears to be dramatically faster than the competition in some perfectly realistic applications and at least comparable everywhere else.
The people giving this anti-Apple rant any credence seem not to have read it very carefully. It exemplifies exactly the sort of spin-doctoring that it claims to be offended by.
Obviously, digital distribution improves the artist's ability to create longer works, and absolutely does not limit it in any way.
Popular songs are usually between 2 and 6 minutes, partly because of techological limitations of the 78 and the 45 RPM disk, but also because that duration fits nicely with human attention span and has become part of the culture. Albums are typically a bit under an hour long, because of the limitations of the 33 RPM LP record, and the design of the audio CD which specifically was intended to replicate the LP. There is no fundamental artistic reason for that length at all, and the cultural influences for that duration are not strong. For myself, I usually find an hour listening to any artist a bit too long, even if the work is consistently interesting.
Nothing prevents anyone from creating tracks and albums of any other length using digital technology. This offers more, not less, room for artistic exprssion and integrity.
The fact that economies of scale allow very efficient distribution of 6 minute tunes (3 cheers for iTunes!!!) doesn't prevent you from using similar mechanisms to sell your 6 hour magnum opus. Of course, it doesn't force me to seek, pay for or listen to such a thing, but it certainly gives the artist the freedom to offer it. If artists think there is demand for these things, and the standard download sites don't support them, it will cost next to nothing to set up alternative distribution mechanisms.
I wonder if there isn't a more mercenary interest than artistic integrity behind these "artists" gripes. Obviously a lot of albums are mostly tedious filler. "Artists" who line up behind this complaint are apparently declaring themselves to be profiting from such filler. I would avoid any album by anyone supporting this argument on that basis alone.
iTunes does sell whole albums, by the way. I haven't bought any, though. I find the ability to buy individual songs vastly more appealing, and my music purchasing has rebounded from nearly zero as a result of the easy sample/easy download/easy pay features of iTunes.
People known to each other who are exchanging files need to find some other mechanism. This sort of usage breaks the whole advantage of email, which is that communication can be deferred and batched.
email is the wrong medium for interaction. Use instant messaging or ftp or your phone. The presumption of fast response kills the advantages of the medium.
Huh? Whether that's a worthwhile goal or not, WTF business does any government have imposing rules on private individuals designed to control who can speak to whom about what? That's a horrible proposition, and completely unnecessary.
No one is denying any right to speak, all that is proposed here is facilitating opposition by requiring an extra bit of speech: "Rant rant bitch bitch poison venom violent crap. Mr. Mandela registers a disagreement with this position _here_".
No one forces the reader to click on the contrary opinion. It is simply made available.
The general right to live in a civil society has to be weighed against the individual right to make inflammatory comments. I don't think the suggested solution is practical, but I think it is interesting. It would be efficient if it worked as envisioned - a very small cost in liberty for a very large increase in availability of discourse. It's hard to see how it would work in practice, though.
First and obviously, it will weaken the tendency for people to build isolated self-referential extremist commmunities of delusion, like fundamentalists, deconstructionists, ultralibertarians, etc., without linking to contrary evidence.
Secondly, it will of necessity force adoption of mechanisms to authoritate message sources, something long overdue and which we shouldn't wait much longer on, lest Microsoft declare itself the authority, as is clearly its intent.
I don't see the basic idea as a threat to free speech at all. On the other hand...
I see potential for enormous practical problems. How can we avoid this mechanism being spammed? Suppose scientology sets up a spider/bot to search for every instance of scientology words on the web and to demand a link to their propaganda?
This could be quite a hassle for many low-resource high-controvery sites and subject them to a coordinated denial of service attack by opponents demanding links that would need to be added manually.
It could also nicely defeat the whole Google algorithm. It's easy to get my site highly rated if I can force inbound links!
In other words, while imho the idea has some basic merit, a great deal of thought needs to go into protecting it from abuse.
In general, I support local businesses over corporations, but that presumes they are delivering similar products. In this case, the corporate service is so much better that I have moved on. It's a shame. My town has GREAT video stores, but they still don't hold a candle to Netflix.
Similarly, I no longer see the point of independent booksellers. Megastores and Amazon deliver so much better product that even if they aren't nicer people they get most of my business.
In the long run, something else has to emerge to hold together the local community besides retail. For the most part, local retail has become a buggy whip.
Usually I cringe at the "let's everybody" posts on Slashdot. Like "Let's everybody buy a few shares of SCO, take over, and fire everybody's ass who's involved in this ridiculous attempt to take over Posix". The trouble is of course that this sort of idea leaves you in bad shape when the critical mass doesn't emerge, so everybody sees that, so the critical mass doesn't emerge.
This case is different. Buying a cheap Lindows machine from Tiger leaves you with 1) a cheap, usable box you can play with or give to your aunt 2) a possible opportunity to get an XP license at below market rates which you can presumably resell to pay off the computer 3) a chance to support Lindows, Lindows retailers and open source desktops in general and 4) a chance to remove revenue from Microsoft by removing a full-priced XP sale. 2 and 4 may be speculative but 1 and 3 are a sure thing.
If you have a few bucks sitting around and have been thinking about playing with Lindows, now would be a good time.
Slashdot Mirror
Greenland, actually, but I don't see where anyone was distinguishing between Arctic and Antarctic warming in this thread.
Nobody said solar variability was irrelevant. It's merely swamped by the much larger anthropogenic greenhouse forcing.
The entire methodology of wealth distribution we have created is predicated on infinite needs and limited production capacity. Once production capacity exceeds needs the whole system goes on the fritz. The referenced article was vapid bullshit. There is some real meat to this topic. Unfortunately this margin is too narrow to contain my proof...
Parent misses grandparent's point. Yes, Coke branding overrides Pepsi flavor. But crude brain scans don't tell us why. The article offers no evidence that the observed effect is not simply response to color. No one is arguing against this experiment being a demonstration of the importance of branding. People are just expressing skepticism that the brain scans add any value to that result.
If you're willing to think big and think technical, there is potentially a feasible way out of fossil fuel dependency and greenhouse warming. See this article . It's never cloudy or windy in space, so extraterrestrial solar power isn't clumsy or random. It's expensive to get started, but scales beautifully. Which basically means you can keep your suburban lifestyle (if you must) and lose your environmental, military and diplomatic, er, ramifications.
Er, how about the law against spam?
(Someone mod that back down please.)
"That may be wise but is also morally suspect" should appear at the end of the third paragraph, not the second. Sorry.
I think everyone agrees that there is organized propaganda being disseminated on this subject, but few people are willing to consider the possibility that both sides are issuing it. This may be wise, but it is also morally suspect.
The result is widespread confusion about forcings, time scales, natural variability, and risk, to the point where anyone who knows anything tries really hard to stay out of the debate, leaving it to the ignorant and self-deceived.
Let's try a simple point. Ice does not melt due to global warming just as you do not go bankrupt due to a failing economy. You go bankrupt because your income is less than your expenses, which is more likely in a failing economy, and ice melts because (duh) the temperature goes up where the ice happens to be, which is more likely when there is global warming, but is not "because of" it. You'd think this concept wouldn't be so hard for a fairly educated readership to grasp.
Let's try another one. Climate varies naturally, but the rate of warming now occuring is observed to be extremely high compared to natural variability and also to variability before 1900. Also, the interglacial peaked about 5000 years ago and the world had been gradually cooling in accordance with astronomical cycles until about 1900. This leaves those claiming that that the sudden warming overc the last century is natural variation with a peculiar explanatory gap.
OK, here's another one. Climate change since 1900 is certainly due at least in significant part to human activity. Humans are known to be emitting radiatively significant quantities of greenhouse gases which, all else equal, are known to have a warming effect. While all else may not be equal, this emission corresponds with a sudden, large, accelerating increase in global mean temperature.
Therefore a claim that the observed warming since is natural is equivalent to the two claims that for some reason the large radiative forcing due to increased greenhouse gas concentrations has had no effect AND that some other unidentified natural forcing or dynamics has suddenly kicked in.
Now draw some conclusions if you dare. I'm not allowed to, because that would be taking sides.
Penguin shmenguin. I want more Calvin and Hobbes!
Bravo! Exactly! .
I'm considering adapting this as a .sig; "Proprietary software corporations calling open source 'communism' is like fast food chains calling neighborhood potlucks subversive and lobbying to make them illegal". Do you want credit for inspiring this?
Voluntary sharing is not evil! There is a real question about how much compelled sharing (taxation) is evil, but once the line moves to the point where I'm not ALLOWED to give anything away, clearly a new form of tyrrany is emerging.
Oh please, you could just post the Javascript, instead of inviting people to execute a script on a server that you control. I'm sure it will perform as advertised for awhile. What prevents you from changing this to something malicious later?
If you are well-intentioned, please reconsider that your behavior looks suspicious and accomplishes nothing that a less dubious approcach would not. If you are really planning to take advantage of people who think what they are including is code rather than a reference to untrusted code, well, go to hell.
Your tuition helps pay for libraries, photocopying, and bandwidth. Distributing information is a legitimate function of a university. Music is information. What possible argument is there that this particular sort of information should not be redistributed by the university using university funds?
If you reply that only music majors should pay for music, while all others should fend for themselves, you should consider the whole purpose of a university, which is to promote connections across disciplines. You don't want to be turned away at the mmusic library, do you?
If you reply that no one at a university should pay for music, you are free-riding on the university's facilities, basically redirecting tax-paid research and education moneys for non-essential functions. (I don't use the word "entertainment" because I don't care to distinguish between "entertainment" and "serious use" of information. My whole point is that the university cannot and should not make this distinction.)
If you reply that only music majors should pay for music, while all others should get it free, you are so logically inconsistent that your opinion shouldn't count for much in the discussion of what universities should do.
I think that about covers it.
Despite the excesses of the music industry, information doesn't want to be free. It just wants to be really, really cheap. Universities have always been critical nodes in redistributing information. That is exactly the business they have always been in, and they should stay in it.
Well, maybe so, but there are limits to how effective any code base and methodology can be. There are reasons to suspect that the Microsoft approach will soon or has already reached a point of diminishing returns in terms of value added per unit effort. It can always be made better, of course, but that doesn't mean it can always be made better fast enough.
Even if true, this doesn't mean Stallmanesque pure open source will win either. I think a hybrid model (see OSX) may be the best. The point is less about morality or motivation, and more that Microsoft's high-pressure release-first fix-later approach has left it with a huge, bloated, unrepairable code base.
Look again at your analogy. You can add motors to your 18th century boat and make it faster, but it's not going to win a race head-to-head against a modern speedboat designed and built with modern methods and materials.
I can't believe you say you like Win2k better than WinXP.
I have seen my mother-in-law try to switch to XP from W98 to manage her photography hobby. The switch seems to have gratuitously confused her. In the end she is marginally less effective. As for me, when I get roped into support tasks for her, I have to deal with a smarmy and aesthetically revolting UI.
Even leaving aside the licensing and spyware aspects, I for one definitely strongly prefer older version of Windows to XP, and have no plans to move any of my Win9x boxes to any current Microsoft OS, nor to purchase any Intel boxes with any version on XP on them in future. I have occasion to run Win95, Win98, Red Hat, and Debian, but mostly I use OSX, sometimes with a Win98 VirtualPC.
By the way I have nothing against decent MS software. Excel is nice, and if it weren't a security risk Outlook, (which has some great features to outweigh its cluttered design) would be very appealing. I recommend MS Entourage on OSX + Palm as the best PIM combination at present, despite the many things I like about iCal. On the other hand I think MS Word is garbage and a curse on humankind. It cannot be repaired. The underlying data structures are too broken.
Those who find it brilliant rather than bizarre may also be interested in also be interested in The little Schemer, The Little MLer and A Little Java, A Few Patterns by the same authors, all MIT Press.
This is a sorry comment on the patent system, but since as an actual methodology it is utterly meaningless, it is inconsequential in the theory or practice of AI or software engineering or anything else.
I have to wonder about the ethics of an attorney who patents an ethical system, though. That's sort of ironic.
Native speakers publicly reviewing creative writing (as opposed to experts reviewing technical writing, where it doesn't matter nearly as much) should be advocates for the precision and power of the written language, and therefore shouldn't make such mistakes. It's hard to take a review like this seriously.
Of course, parent is funny because it violates its own advice. It's still good advice.
Also, I haven't read this book, but "Mongolian"??
Not to say the NYT article wasn't interesting.
I can and do argue that the sentience of an artifact is an inherently undecideable question, and that therefore the strong AI program is futile. I can't make this argument, and you can't argue against me if you disagree, if my vocabulary is polluted with marketing drivel.
This isn't just Clippy writ large, which would be bad enough. It's also Newspeak (see G. Orwell's 1984), deliberately polluting language to make careful conversation difficult. Some words are important and need to be defended.
Ok, ok, if you use both processors on an integer task, continuing to ignore floating point and bus performance, all you have to do is use a different benchmark on the Intel box to show the Intel box being a hair faster.
No comments on using the G5 on appropriate applications or application mixes.
Why rain on Apple's parade like that? They continue to do amazing work. The G5 appears to be dramatically faster than the competition in some perfectly realistic applications and at least comparable everywhere else.
The people giving this anti-Apple rant any credence seem not to have read it very carefully. It exemplifies exactly the sort of spin-doctoring that it claims to be offended by.
Popular songs are usually between 2 and 6 minutes, partly because of techological limitations of the 78 and the 45 RPM disk, but also because that duration fits nicely with human attention span and has become part of the culture. Albums are typically a bit under an hour long, because of the limitations of the 33 RPM LP record, and the design of the audio CD which specifically was intended to replicate the LP. There is no fundamental artistic reason for that length at all, and the cultural influences for that duration are not strong. For myself, I usually find an hour listening to any artist a bit too long, even if the work is consistently interesting.
Nothing prevents anyone from creating tracks and albums of any other length using digital technology. This offers more, not less, room for artistic exprssion and integrity.
The fact that economies of scale allow very efficient distribution of 6 minute tunes (3 cheers for iTunes!!!) doesn't prevent you from using similar mechanisms to sell your 6 hour magnum opus. Of course, it doesn't force me to seek, pay for or listen to such a thing, but it certainly gives the artist the freedom to offer it. If artists think there is demand for these things, and the standard download sites don't support them, it will cost next to nothing to set up alternative distribution mechanisms.
I wonder if there isn't a more mercenary interest than artistic integrity behind these "artists" gripes. Obviously a lot of albums are mostly tedious filler. "Artists" who line up behind this complaint are apparently declaring themselves to be profiting from such filler. I would avoid any album by anyone supporting this argument on that basis alone.
iTunes does sell whole albums, by the way. I haven't bought any, though. I find the ability to buy individual songs vastly more appealing, and my music purchasing has rebounded from nearly zero as a result of the easy sample/easy download/easy pay features of iTunes.
email is the wrong medium for interaction. Use instant messaging or ftp or your phone. The presumption of fast response kills the advantages of the medium.
No one is denying any right to speak, all that is proposed here is facilitating opposition by requiring an extra bit of speech: "Rant rant bitch bitch poison venom violent crap. Mr. Mandela registers a disagreement with this position _here_".
No one forces the reader to click on the contrary opinion. It is simply made available.
The general right to live in a civil society has to be weighed against the individual right to make inflammatory comments. I don't think the suggested solution is practical, but I think it is interesting. It would be efficient if it worked as envisioned - a very small cost in liberty for a very large increase in availability of discourse. It's hard to see how it would work in practice, though.
Secondly, it will of necessity force adoption of mechanisms to authoritate message sources, something long overdue and which we shouldn't wait much longer on, lest Microsoft declare itself the authority, as is clearly its intent.
I don't see the basic idea as a threat to free speech at all. On the other hand...
I see potential for enormous practical problems. How can we avoid this mechanism being spammed? Suppose scientology sets up a spider/bot to search for every instance of scientology words on the web and to demand a link to their propaganda?
This could be quite a hassle for many low-resource high-controvery sites and subject them to a coordinated denial of service attack by opponents demanding links that would need to be added manually.
It could also nicely defeat the whole Google algorithm. It's easy to get my site highly rated if I can force inbound links!
In other words, while imho the idea has some basic merit, a great deal of thought needs to go into protecting it from abuse.
In general, I support local businesses over corporations, but that presumes they are delivering similar products. In this case, the corporate service is so much better that I have moved on. It's a shame. My town has GREAT video stores, but they still don't hold a candle to Netflix.
Similarly, I no longer see the point of independent booksellers. Megastores and Amazon deliver so much better product that even if they aren't nicer people they get most of my business.
In the long run, something else has to emerge to hold together the local community besides retail. For the most part, local retail has become a buggy whip.
This case is different. Buying a cheap Lindows machine from Tiger leaves you with 1) a cheap, usable box you can play with or give to your aunt 2) a possible opportunity to get an XP license at below market rates which you can presumably resell to pay off the computer 3) a chance to support Lindows, Lindows retailers and open source desktops in general and 4) a chance to remove revenue from Microsoft by removing a full-priced XP sale. 2 and 4 may be speculative but 1 and 3 are a sure thing.
If you have a few bucks sitting around and have been thinking about playing with Lindows, now would be a good time.