Amataeurs are more than welcome to try to fill the gap. But I think that (1)in many cases they won't bother
But there are a lot more of them, so it more than balances out.
(2)even if they do bother, they won't be given the same access as pros. Most news out there starts out as a report by a dead-tree journalist.
Do you think that access comes for free? Journalists given "special access" are expected to deliver, and they know it. I'd rather have no reporting on, say, a presidential candidate than have reporting from a journalist with special access, who knows that his livelihood depends on continuing to get special access.
Non-professionals are far less vulnerable to being manipulated. Bring your camera cell phone with you to political conventions and other places, and start snapping and recording away.
At which point any updates to the code become their maintenance headache.
Yes, for most companies, that's a valid reason not to create a proprietary version; but Microsoft is big enough not to have to worry about that sort of thing.
Well, you're already blocking ads, but there are additional extensions that let you change formatting permanently for a particular site. One of the simpler ones are little add-ons for GreaseMonkey that automatically show you the print version of any article, where available.
And nobody at Sony bothered to vet a piece of software that was destined to be shipped with millions of CDs?
They did--by putting it on one of their releases. Releasing a single CD just isn't a big deal to these people. And it's done by the music division, which probably has even less experience with software than the rest of the company.
It's beyond absurd that a company of Sony's size would allow a piece of software to appear on any of its products without Sony having tested the hell out of it first.
From your remark, we must conclude that you have never owned a Sony camera, laptop, or PDA.
Sounds like you mainly have a beef with California minimum wage laws, rather than outsourcing.
I don't really see a contradiction: if California decides that any job done in California must be paid a certain minimum wage and that wage is above what certain jobs can pay, then those jobs simply won't be carried out in California. Where's the problem? Seems like a sensible policy to me.
If that means that joblessness rises and companies move out of California, the cost of living in California will drop to the point where minimum wages will be lowered.
California minimum wages are so low anyway that they really do represent a minimum below which it is hard to exist in California.
Actually, OOo is coded in C/C++, but it needs to be recoded in something other than C/C++. A lot of the problems with OOo bloat and code (dis-) organization are due to trying to code around the limitations and difficulties imposed by using C++.
There are a billion Indians, many of which are as qualified or more qualified than Americans and most of which are willing to work at least as hard as your average Californian. They want jobs that go beyond carving wood figurines. Their cost of living is low, so they don't need California minimum wages. Of course, they are going to underbid American workers, and what the hell is wrong with that?
The US pushed for an open world economy, the US electorate consistently elected leaders that pursued those policies, and the US imposed this on other nations against a lot of resistance. Now that it's happening, people like you are whining and complaining about the consequences. What did you think was going to happen when you open borders for goods and services? Of course, the US standard of living is going to average out with that in other nations. And while that may actually mean a short term decline in US standards of living, in the long term, it's good for everybody, including the US, in terms of increased security.
OpenOffice is not self-sustaining. It only exists because people are being paid to work on it.
Almost all open source work is paid for. And there is nothing wrong with that: that's the way open source is supposed to work. The real problem is not that Google pays for OOo, but that not enough people have reason and cause to pay for other useful open source project development.
You are right that OOo's particular heritage and codebase discourages contributions and community development. That is a big problem. But I think if anybody knew how to fix that problem, they'd have found a silver bullet for software development. Once you decide to build a full-featured, integrated office suite in C++, an OOo-like mess follows. The Gimp, despite its community roots, is only slightly better (e.g., they have been unable to integrate 16/32 bit patches for many years now).
FOSS projects will only get more open and more hackable once people move to other languages and runtimes. C# and Objective C are modest improvements in opening up software, but we probably still need more than that.
At the moment, I'd be inclined to agree. I hope you don't also assert that the existence of such beings in impossible.
It's quite likely that there are intelligent beings somewhere else in the universe, but they won't have been tinkering with our genetic code. The existence of the kinds of intelligent beings that ID seem to have in mind, however, seems to violate physical laws; however, to determine that for certain, ID proponents would have to be more specific about what kind of "intelligent beings" they are postulating.
Also, before 1905 (and for several decades afterwards) there was incomplete evidence to support special and general relativity. Doesn't mean it wasn't (and isn't) a valid theory. So trying to argue against ID on those grounds is useless.
No, that analogy is wrong. GR was an untested theory until it was tested and its predictions were found to be in agreement with experimental results. In contrast, the predictions of ID have been thoroughly tested, and the result has always been the same: there is no evidence for the kinds of effects ID predicts.
Yeah, that will be great for those subjects that mandate that "all submissions will be in Microsoft Word 2003 format". I just love chucking marks away.
OpenOffice saves Microsoft Word 2003 just fine. And RTF and ASCII are also formats supported by Word 2003.
More people might prefer to read their news on the Internet, but with newspapers declining, there simply won't be as many stories to read.
Do you seriously believe that people all of a sudden lose interest in what's going on in the world and in their community just because some highly paid NYT reporter is laid off from his cushy job? Because photographs are made with $200 digicams by amateurs, instead of $8000 SLR cameras wielded by Pulitzer-prize hungry press photographers trying to find the artistically most compelling composition and most disturbing photograph? I don't think so.
What this will do is give a larger audience to non-traditional media and reporting, and I think that's a good thing. In the pre Internet days, the press was important and far better than nothing at all, but nowadays, newspapers and newspaper staff are an anachronism and should be abolished. The market is doing just that.
On-line, after reading self-aggrandizing, propagandistic, and trashy rags like the New York Times and the Washington Post, people at least have an opportunity they never have with paper: they may stumble upon real news.
For some diseases, finding a cure is a blessing. But malaria is not primarily a medical problem, it's a problem of population growth and population movement. Finding a cure to malaria will not benefit humanity.
Accessibility is important. Therefore, the State of Massachusetts should require that the state agencies move to a document format that is open and that is supported by some software that satisfies accessibility requirements. Both are sensible requirements, and they are technically compatible at no extra cost. Companies can decide whether they want to bid on that kind of contract or not, but they should not tell MA to change their requirements because it is convenient for them.
If people only bought things that were of high quality and good value for money that they actually needed, the world economy would grind to a halt.
No, it wouldn't. It's just that companies that make shoddy, mass-produced junk would be replaced by smaller outfits. I think it would be great if Coca Cola, Microsoft, Dell, and all those other corporate giants disappeared and were replaced with small companies that make distinctive and customized products. In fact, there is some chance that this will happen as the standard of living rises.
In the end, when consumers demand higher quality and better value, the economy ends up with more jobs, better jobs, and less outsourcing.
I know many of us have been bitten by out-sourcing to India, but we (as a society) have shown time and again that, despite all the lip-service, saving that few dollars on the cost of weekly tinned food bill is more important that local jobs.
In part, that's not because people don't want better quality, it's because they can't tell good from bad quality. Roughly, if you can't tell good from bad quality, you might as well buy the cheapest stuff.
Microsoft's software (and other software, like Matlab) is already too cheap for college students; students invest a boatload of time into learning the software, and when they graduate, they are faced with either spending another several years re-learning something else, or spending thousands of dollars for software every year. It's a colossal rip-off.
If companies want to offer "educational versions", they should be allowed to do so, but they should not be permitted to legally enforce the educational-only restrictions.
Right. So why did you try to define it later in your post? [...] And, besides, your definition is self serving. Saying intelligence is a trait of humans,
I made an informal statement about what people generally agree on intelligence means. For a formal definition, I would have had to be more precise about what I mean by "aspects" and "inanimate objects". That's why I didn't give a definition, and you shouldn't split hairs about whether my non-definition is mathematically precise.
So, the quest to create artificial intelligence is pointless, then? It would be composed of inanimate objects, you know.
Quite to the contrary: artificial intelligence has already delivered artificial systems that "share some aspects with human information processing not possessed by animals or [generic, natural] inanimate objects". Of course, that doesn't mean that AI is done, since those systems are still far away from human intelligence.
There is not a shred of evidence for the existence of intelligent entities other than humans or machines created by humans. Furthermore, there is no evidence for any influence on evolution that falls outside the standard biological processes that make up modern Darwinian theory, which makes the question of "intelligent design" irrelevant--there isn't even "dumb design" or any kind of "design".
Have a look at the DTV project, also covered on Slashdot.
Those new platforms integrate digital video with RSS and BitTorrent for widespread distribution. The DTV UI is also well-adapted for easy browsing and viewing. And Broadcastmachine provides simple creation and distribution of content.
DTV and Broadcastmachine are open source software (mostly Python and PHP). Right now, they have a preliminary Macintosh version and are working on Windows. They need help with Linux.
We don't need a definition of intelligence. We can reject ID for, say, the evolution of the eye because there is no evidence for any mechanisms influencing its evolution beyond those that make up evolutionary theory; arguing about whether nonexistent mechanisms are intelligent is pointless.
But while there is no complete agreement on what intelligence is, there is a common understanding that it must be an information processing system that shares some aspects with human information processing not possessed by animals or inanimate objects. There is no evidence for the existence of such entities, which is another reason why it is unreasonable to postulate that such entities have been responsible for tinkering with evolution.
Whether it's cars, cameras, furniture, bicycles, musical instruments, or tools, "modding" has always been going on. What has changed is that mass produced plastic products with embedded processors, and in some cases technological anti-modding features, have made it harder to adapt products to new uses; when devices were mechanical, made out of metal and wood, and used commonly available screws and components, it was easier to tinker with them. It's good to see that the old spirit isn't quite dead, but I expect corporate America to keep trying to kill it.
And if you got rid of government funding, you wouldn't have much left (or so the conventional knowlege goes). I'd actually agree that gov. funding should be eliminated,
Government funding mechanisms suck and a market solution would be great; trouble is: there is no market solution. Research is a public good; the attempts at establishing a market in it, like the patent system, have failed miserably.
Most scientific and technological breakthroughs have been government funded; of the remaining ones that were privately funded, most of them were funded by big monopolies like AT&T and IBM.
Until someone actually figures out a way of making it work, government funding must continue.
Well, it's not clear that it would have been prudent if they had tried to hush it up--someone would have found out sooner or later.
In any case, these things do happen, and a single incidence doesn't tell you much about the culture of an institution. However, the recent blatant incidences of scientific fraud are perhaps suggestive of cut-throat competition for funding and publications in science as a whole.
I mean, if you're going to test the predictions of ID, you have to know the nature of intelligence, right?
No, you don't always need a precise definition in order to demonstrate that something is not intelligent. We don't have any trouble, for example, agreeing that a piece of rock salt isn't intelligent. You need precise definitions only in the borderline cases, but the mechanisms that evidently produce biological diversity are so far removed from intelligence that there is no question.
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Amataeurs are more than welcome to try to fill the gap. But I think that (1)in many cases they won't bother
But there are a lot more of them, so it more than balances out.
(2)even if they do bother, they won't be given the same access as pros. Most news out there starts out as a report by a dead-tree journalist.
Do you think that access comes for free? Journalists given "special access" are expected to deliver, and they know it. I'd rather have no reporting on, say, a presidential candidate than have reporting from a journalist with special access, who knows that his livelihood depends on continuing to get special access.
Non-professionals are far less vulnerable to being manipulated. Bring your camera cell phone with you to political conventions and other places, and start snapping and recording away.
At which point any updates to the code become their maintenance headache.
Yes, for most companies, that's a valid reason not to create a proprietary version; but Microsoft is big enough not to have to worry about that sort of thing.
Well, you're already blocking ads, but there are additional extensions that let you change formatting permanently for a particular site. One of the simpler ones are little add-ons for GreaseMonkey that automatically show you the print version of any article, where available.
And nobody at Sony bothered to vet a piece of software that was destined to be shipped with millions of CDs?
They did--by putting it on one of their releases. Releasing a single CD just isn't a big deal to these people. And it's done by the music division, which probably has even less experience with software than the rest of the company.
It's beyond absurd that a company of Sony's size would allow a piece of software to appear on any of its products without Sony having tested the hell out of it first.
From your remark, we must conclude that you have never owned a Sony camera, laptop, or PDA.
Sounds like you mainly have a beef with California minimum wage laws, rather than outsourcing.
I don't really see a contradiction: if California decides that any job done in California must be paid a certain minimum wage and that wage is above what certain jobs can pay, then those jobs simply won't be carried out in California. Where's the problem? Seems like a sensible policy to me.
If that means that joblessness rises and companies move out of California, the cost of living in California will drop to the point where minimum wages will be lowered.
California minimum wages are so low anyway that they really do represent a minimum below which it is hard to exist in California.
The cure for both AIDS and world hunger already exists: condoms.
Actually, OOo is coded in C/C++, but it needs to be recoded in something other than C/C++. A lot of the problems with OOo bloat and code (dis-) organization are due to trying to code around the limitations and difficulties imposed by using C++.
There are a billion Indians, many of which are as qualified or more qualified than Americans and most of which are willing to work at least as hard as your average Californian. They want jobs that go beyond carving wood figurines. Their cost of living is low, so they don't need California minimum wages. Of course, they are going to underbid American workers, and what the hell is wrong with that?
The US pushed for an open world economy, the US electorate consistently elected leaders that pursued those policies, and the US imposed this on other nations against a lot of resistance. Now that it's happening, people like you are whining and complaining about the consequences. What did you think was going to happen when you open borders for goods and services? Of course, the US standard of living is going to average out with that in other nations. And while that may actually mean a short term decline in US standards of living, in the long term, it's good for everybody, including the US, in terms of increased security.
OpenOffice is not self-sustaining. It only exists because people are being paid to work on it.
Almost all open source work is paid for. And there is nothing wrong with that: that's the way open source is supposed to work. The real problem is not that Google pays for OOo, but that not enough people have reason and cause to pay for other useful open source project development.
You are right that OOo's particular heritage and codebase discourages contributions and community development. That is a big problem. But I think if anybody knew how to fix that problem, they'd have found a silver bullet for software development. Once you decide to build a full-featured, integrated office suite in C++, an OOo-like mess follows. The Gimp, despite its community roots, is only slightly better (e.g., they have been unable to integrate 16/32 bit patches for many years now).
FOSS projects will only get more open and more hackable once people move to other languages and runtimes. C# and Objective C are modest improvements in opening up software, but we probably still need more than that.
At the moment, I'd be inclined to agree. I hope you don't also assert that the existence of such beings in impossible.
It's quite likely that there are intelligent beings somewhere else in the universe, but they won't have been tinkering with our genetic code. The existence of the kinds of intelligent beings that ID seem to have in mind, however, seems to violate physical laws; however, to determine that for certain, ID proponents would have to be more specific about what kind of "intelligent beings" they are postulating.
Also, before 1905 (and for several decades afterwards) there was incomplete evidence to support special and general relativity. Doesn't mean it wasn't (and isn't) a valid theory. So trying to argue against ID on those grounds is useless.
No, that analogy is wrong. GR was an untested theory until it was tested and its predictions were found to be in agreement with experimental results. In contrast, the predictions of ID have been thoroughly tested, and the result has always been the same: there is no evidence for the kinds of effects ID predicts.
Yeah, that will be great for those subjects that mandate that "all submissions will be in Microsoft Word 2003 format". I just love chucking marks away.
OpenOffice saves Microsoft Word 2003 just fine. And RTF and ASCII are also formats supported by Word 2003.
More people might prefer to read their news on the Internet, but with newspapers declining, there simply won't be as many stories to read.
Do you seriously believe that people all of a sudden lose interest in what's going on in the world and in their community just because some highly paid NYT reporter is laid off from his cushy job? Because photographs are made with $200 digicams by amateurs, instead of $8000 SLR cameras wielded by Pulitzer-prize hungry press photographers trying to find the artistically most compelling composition and most disturbing photograph? I don't think so.
What this will do is give a larger audience to non-traditional media and reporting, and I think that's a good thing. In the pre Internet days, the press was important and far better than nothing at all, but nowadays, newspapers and newspaper staff are an anachronism and should be abolished. The market is doing just that.
On-line, after reading self-aggrandizing, propagandistic, and trashy rags like the New York Times and the Washington Post, people at least have an opportunity they never have with paper: they may stumble upon real news.
For some diseases, finding a cure is a blessing. But malaria is not primarily a medical problem, it's a problem of population growth and population movement. Finding a cure to malaria will not benefit humanity.
Accessibility is important. Therefore, the State of Massachusetts should require that the state agencies move to a document format that is open and that is supported by some software that satisfies accessibility requirements. Both are sensible requirements, and they are technically compatible at no extra cost. Companies can decide whether they want to bid on that kind of contract or not, but they should not tell MA to change their requirements because it is convenient for them.
If people only bought things that were of high quality and good value for money that they actually needed, the world economy would grind to a halt.
No, it wouldn't. It's just that companies that make shoddy, mass-produced junk would be replaced by smaller outfits. I think it would be great if Coca Cola, Microsoft, Dell, and all those other corporate giants disappeared and were replaced with small companies that make distinctive and customized products. In fact, there is some chance that this will happen as the standard of living rises.
In the end, when consumers demand higher quality and better value, the economy ends up with more jobs, better jobs, and less outsourcing.
I know many of us have been bitten by out-sourcing to India, but we (as a society) have shown time and again that, despite all the lip-service, saving that few dollars on the cost of weekly tinned food bill is more important that local jobs.
In part, that's not because people don't want better quality, it's because they can't tell good from bad quality. Roughly, if you can't tell good from bad quality, you might as well buy the cheapest stuff.
Microsoft does make signifigant student discounts, though they certain could make more, Office is still quite expensive for those of us who are broke.
And it will be really expensive once you graduate.
Do yourself a favor--don't get into the MS Office habit at all. Use KOffice, OpenOffice, iWork, Lotus, whatever.
Microsoft's software (and other software, like Matlab) is already too cheap for college students; students invest a boatload of time into learning the software, and when they graduate, they are faced with either spending another several years re-learning something else, or spending thousands of dollars for software every year. It's a colossal rip-off.
If companies want to offer "educational versions", they should be allowed to do so, but they should not be permitted to legally enforce the educational-only restrictions.
Right. So why did you try to define it later in your post? [...] And, besides, your definition is self serving. Saying intelligence is a trait of humans,
I made an informal statement about what people generally agree on intelligence means. For a formal definition, I would have had to be more precise about what I mean by "aspects" and "inanimate objects". That's why I didn't give a definition, and you shouldn't split hairs about whether my non-definition is mathematically precise.
So, the quest to create artificial intelligence is pointless, then? It would be composed of inanimate objects, you know.
Quite to the contrary: artificial intelligence has already delivered artificial systems that "share some aspects with human information processing not possessed by animals or [generic, natural] inanimate objects". Of course, that doesn't mean that AI is done, since those systems are still far away from human intelligence.
There is not a shred of evidence for the existence of intelligent entities other than humans or machines created by humans. Furthermore, there is no evidence for any influence on evolution that falls outside the standard biological processes that make up modern Darwinian theory, which makes the question of "intelligent design" irrelevant--there isn't even "dumb design" or any kind of "design".
Have a look at the DTV project, also covered on Slashdot.
Those new platforms integrate digital video with RSS and BitTorrent for widespread distribution. The DTV UI is also well-adapted for easy browsing and viewing. And Broadcastmachine provides simple creation and distribution of content.
DTV and Broadcastmachine are open source software (mostly Python and PHP). Right now, they have a preliminary Macintosh version and are working on Windows. They need help with Linux.
We don't need a definition of intelligence. We can reject ID for, say, the evolution of the eye because there is no evidence for any mechanisms influencing its evolution beyond those that make up evolutionary theory; arguing about whether nonexistent mechanisms are intelligent is pointless.
But while there is no complete agreement on what intelligence is, there is a common understanding that it must be an information processing system that shares some aspects with human information processing not possessed by animals or inanimate objects. There is no evidence for the existence of such entities, which is another reason why it is unreasonable to postulate that such entities have been responsible for tinkering with evolution.
Whether it's cars, cameras, furniture, bicycles, musical instruments, or tools, "modding" has always been going on. What has changed is that mass produced plastic products with embedded processors, and in some cases technological anti-modding features, have made it harder to adapt products to new uses; when devices were mechanical, made out of metal and wood, and used commonly available screws and components, it was easier to tinker with them. It's good to see that the old spirit isn't quite dead, but I expect corporate America to keep trying to kill it.
And if you got rid of government funding, you wouldn't have much left (or so the conventional knowlege goes). I'd actually agree that gov. funding should be eliminated,
Government funding mechanisms suck and a market solution would be great; trouble is: there is no market solution. Research is a public good; the attempts at establishing a market in it, like the patent system, have failed miserably.
Most scientific and technological breakthroughs have been government funded; of the remaining ones that were privately funded, most of them were funded by big monopolies like AT&T and IBM.
Until someone actually figures out a way of making it work, government funding must continue.
Well, it's not clear that it would have been prudent if they had tried to hush it up--someone would have found out sooner or later.
In any case, these things do happen, and a single incidence doesn't tell you much about the culture of an institution. However, the recent blatant incidences of scientific fraud are perhaps suggestive of cut-throat competition for funding and publications in science as a whole.
I mean, if you're going to test the predictions of ID, you have to know the nature of intelligence, right?
No, you don't always need a precise definition in order to demonstrate that something is not intelligent. We don't have any trouble, for example, agreeing that a piece of rock salt isn't intelligent. You need precise definitions only in the borderline cases, but the mechanisms that evidently produce biological diversity are so far removed from intelligence that there is no question.