Microsoft DOES want people to like their product, don't they?
No, Microsoft has never particularly cared if anyone likes their products. What they expect is that their effective monopoly will let them extract silly money from their locked-in customer base.
What's weird is that this is aimed at individual users, who have a great deal more flexibility when it comes to migrating to another platform -- Apple or Linux -- than large corporations who have built their infrastructure around Microsoft.
Not that it's beyond Microsoft to do something incredibly stupid, but I'd be surprised if this one actually saw the light of day.
If you're interested in doing this kind of thing -- and it sounds like you are -- a good resource are books written for RVers who spend a lot of time boondocking, i.e., out in the boonies on solar power and batteries. One thing you discover very quickly when you are cut off from unlimited electricity is that electrical appliances tend to be designed with the assumption that electricity will be cheap and plentiful where they're used, so they waste it profligately, often even when turned "off".
Cutting your monthly electric bill by almost 20% is a perfect illustration of why people who do live where electricity is relatively cheap and plentiful should care about this. That's almost $500 a year in your case, which is for most people nothing to sneeze at.
Well, sure... once you have a sufficiently large base of typists trained to use QWERTY, there are compelling economic reasons not to switch to Dvorak or any other arrangement -- the training costs are just too high, and people can type adequately fast with QWERTY. Even for personal use, unless you plan to haul your own keyboard (or key mappings, whatever) along with you, training oneself to be a Dvorak typist is a positive hindrance when you have to use the standard QWERTY keyboard.
The passion with which people fixate on one seemingly minor technical thing or another would probably make for a really fascinating study in psychology. I know I have a bunch of UI preferences that I have whose strengths are all out of proportion to their purely practical importance -- while I don't have a dog in the vi/emacs fight, I can get quite passionate about what features I like in a text editor (like lack of resemblance to either vi or emacs;) -- and pretty much everyone else I know, whether a technical user or not, has some similar UI feature fixation. It's definitely not rational, and it definitely influences buying decisions.
It's very much a pro-markets publication. While the arguments put forward rest on their own merits, it's safe to say that Reason Online -- whose masthead includes the slogan, "Free Minds and Free Markets" -- is certainly not going to publish articles that challenge the idea that the market is an efficient and rational actor, at least most of the time. Whether that inherent bias extends to cherry-picking the data used to reach conclusions, or whether the data is even unambiguous, are things one needs to consider in cases like this.
Probably everyone here can think of some examples of inferior products that have remained dominant despite the appearance of superior alternatives, and also examples of the reverse. For any of that to mean anything, one would have to survey a substantial sampling of such cases, determine which represented the majority and by what measure (total monetary value, units sold, etc.) and then look at all kinds of other factors (market segment, cost of switching products, and so on) before one could begin to draw useful and quite probably heavily qualified conclusions.
Then there's the inherent ambiguity involved in "superiority". Take Mac versus Windows versus Linux, for example. If, like most computer users, you have a preference, you can probably explain what drives that preference. But so can people who have different preferences. One might prefer Windows for reasons that are entirely irrelevant to a Mac aficionado, and vice versa. So which is superior? Obviously, there is no single, universal answer to this question -- and many others like it -- so we continue to see a market for Windows and a smaller, but quite healthy, market for Macs. Likewise, Harley-Davidson motorcycles continue to sell alongside everything from Vespa scooters to Honda racing bikes, and there are a dozen or more brands of sandwich bread at the average supermarket despite, what, more than six thousand years of not very exciting developments in bread technology.
The short version is that in any complex area of study riddled with exceptions and special cases, sweeping general conclusions are likely to be true, if at all, only within some arbitrary subset of cases that may be of very little predictive value, but that will seldom deter anyone with an article deadline and a point to "prove".
If Dvorak thinks that accounting and finance were bit players in the history of the world until the invention of the electronic spreadsheet, he's even more completely out of touch with reality than I thought. Maybe that's true in the parallel Dvorak universe where OS/2 took over the world and dialup BBSes became a multi-billion-dollar industry, but in this universe, accounting and finance has been a major player since, well, the invention of money and writing.
I actually like Dvorak, but having read him since the days when Computer Shopper was as large as an urban phone book, I have come to recognize that his predictions, while sometimes reflecting what ought to happen, seldom if ever reflect what actually does happen, and his analyses range from the silly to the outright bizarre.
being raised in a rural town, i suspect that I notice this effect much more strongly than urbanites. when i'm in the city, everything is fighting for my attention simultaneously, so i just tune everything out.
I've spent substantial periods of my life living in dense urban areas, suburban sprawl, and rural areas. There's something to be said both for and against all of them. Personally, I tend to prefer small towns, provided that I'm not more than an hour or so away from both a city and genuine wilderness. Of course, at least part of that is because I'm an introvert and more than slightly misanthropic. I can only imagine how miserable an extrovert who actually likes people would be living my life.
The point is that people are pretty diverse in their temperaments, and also pretty adaptable. An environment that is perfectly healthy for me might be very unhealthy for you, and vice versa. There is no "best" place for "people" to be. There can be a best place for a particular individual to be, but that's going to differ from individual to individual, and often even for the same individual at different times in his or her life.
About the only thing that is consistent about human beings is their insistence that humans are (or should be) consistent despite all evidence to the contrary.
Yet (and I guess this is my biggest point) it's very tough to get anyone to get over their squeamishness about the subject and fight for what's right....which reminds me of another area that suffers from a similar problem: the issue of prisoner's rights. We have a prison system -- the most populous in the world, in fact, with more than two million prisoners -- where forcible rape is a normal occurrence and is tacitly accepted as part of the punishment, even for trivial non-violent crimes like, say, passing a bad check. And thanks to HIV and hepatitis, being sentenced to serve time often becomes a de facto death penalty.
That this amounts, in effect, to the systematic extermination of a substantial number of people is most often met with a yawn, if the topic comes up at all. It wouldn't do to appear to be "soft on crime" -- even if, in this case, being "hard on crime" actually involves encouraging rape and murder.
I find that attitude sad, personally. I'm involved in FOSS because I want to help people; in fact, I believe I have a moral obligation to help people, and it happens that contributing to FOSS projects is a good way to leverage my professional skills to that end. I also donate to various charities and, when time permits, perform volunteer work.
While I certainly don't think there's anything wrong with seeking prestige, contributions from others, etc., the glaring hole in ESR's self-absorbed vision of FOSS is that for many FOSS programmers, what we are doing is just a natural extension of an essentially charitable urge to do nice and helpful things for other people. That our society has descended to the point that people are suspicious of someone who works hard for the benefit of others with no expectation of reward is very, very sad.
...the Forbes story makes the case that details of the recent Cogent vs. Sprint fight argue for exactly the opposite: keeping the Internet backbones free of government meddling.
It is, in fact, inconceivable that Forbes would make any other case. Ideology predetermines their arguments, and in this case, the ideology at work is a sort of economic anarchism that, quite frankly, has been completely discredited by the current state of affairs in the US economy. Not all regulation is "government meddling"; some of it is necessary to protect consumers -- and often even vendors -- from dishonesty and short-sighted greed that is often harmful in the long run to the miscreants themselves.
It is at least mildly ironic that the proponents of economic anarchism are often simultaneously proponents of a hardline law-and-order position in other areas of law.
I think it'll be great if they find a cure for baldness -- though I can certainly think of a few hundred actually serious medical problems that probably deserve more attention than what is, after all, a harmless cosmetic defect.
Of course, when the day comes that I can grow my hair back, that's only half the battle. Even with a full head of hair, the average 28-year-old woman is still going to think of me as a creepy old guy when I make a pass at her.;)
Hmm. Every time our knowledge of the universe expands, there is always a group of scientists who rush to say that the new evidence indicates that we are, in one way or another, the center of the universe. And when that conclusion is invalidated by still more new evidence, they go hunting for another reason to reinstate their conclusion. The "Rare Earth" faction is just the latest iteration of the same deep-seated emotional bias that gave us geocentrism.
We have exactly one stellar system that we have studied in detail and exactly one example of a living ecosystem, and all our knowledge of other stellar systems comes from techniques that exclusively detect stellar systems with a massive planet in a tight orbit around its star. It seems to me that our sample size is too small to reach any conclusions at all, and until we have better tools for observing other stellar systems in high detail, discussions about what constitutes a "normal" stellar system barely rise above the level of pure speculation.
It's no great accomplishment to trick people if they trust you. You can argue that people should be less trusting -- and I'd have to agree -- but for the hard-core troll, all trust is viewed as weakness, and the position they are taking is essentially that no one should trust anyone, ever. Obviously, society couldn't function in such a scenario.
At the end of the day, their "help" is not unlike shooting someone and then recommending that everyone start wearing ballistic armor. It's not an illogical suggestion, but it's more efficient to just apprehend the shooter than to supply everyone with armor.
Egyptian hieroglyphic writing was largely phonetic, contrary to what is surprisingly common belief here. Some signs were logographic or ideographic, but the majority of signs were phonetic. Hieratic came after hieroglyphic, and was largely just a cursive form of hieroglyphics, used to write quickly in informal contexts. In any case, Egyptian used a far smaller set of signs than modern Japanese, which is also a mixture of phonetic, logographic, and ideographic signs. Alphabetic writing probably originated in the Levant as a simplification of Egyptian monoconsonantal signs, culminating in the Phoenician alphabet, which formed the basis of virtually all modern scripts of non-Chinese origin.
Currency was simply unnecessary through most of Egyptian history. Ancient Egypt was a command economy and the overwhelming majority of its trade was internal. Under those circumstances, at least in a pre-industrial state, currency is a needless complication.
If it was dogma the priests of chemistry would be denying the evidence and punishing its discoverers.
That's the difference between science and religion. For science, new information enlarges our understanding of the world. For religion, new information only threatens sanctified prejudices.
"Depends on the cop" is right. Considering the disparity in power, you should think very carefully about the stakes before you make a cop aware that you are recording his or her actions. At the very least, it will piss them off, and pissed off cops are nothing you want to deal with. If you're just being pulled over for speeding (and you're white and sober), just being pleasant and respectful (read: kissing a little ass) will go a long way.
Mind you, I think it's a good thing for citizens to videotape police actions. But cops are dangerous and angry cops are even more dangerous, and you shouldn't play with that kind of danger. Bear in mind the number of occasions that cops have been videotaped beating the holy living hell out of somebody and then gotten off scot-free. If you're going to take on the system, don't do it casually. By all means, if you see injustice, take it on -- but do so with forethought and a careful consideration of the risks you expose yourself to. It's not a game, and the consequences can be pretty serious. Choose your battles wisely.
The short version: If your main motivation is to be an annoying wiseass, start a blog instead.
the market for involved puzzle games didn't shrink, it just didn't grow with the rest of the industry.
Sadly, that's exactly it. Back during Infocom's heyday, a title that sold 60,000 copies was a big hit. Of course, back then, practically everyone with a computer was into computing for its own sake and could at least write a simple BASIC program.
The simple fact of the matter is that there are vastly more people who want mindless entertainment than people who want intellectual challenges, so that's who the game companies target. It's not new, and it's not limited to computer games, games in general, or any other area of life. People attend more action movies than Shakespeare plays, too.
There are still plenty of puzzle games. There are even dozens of new text adventures every year, too. Some of them are quite good. They just come from small companies and individual shareware and freeware authors, and you have to go looking for them. The day when that market was significant enough to warrant full-page ads in computer magazines is over.
Apparently this guy had a lot worse going on inside than just spamming people. There are plenty of spammers that would never dream of killing anyone.
Nail, meet head. This guy obviously had serious issues. Left to roam free, he was essentially a sociopathic con-artist. Up the pressure by jamming him into a box, and he committed an even more sociopathic act. None of this excuses his crimes, mind you, but neither does it exonerate a society that basically ignores (and occasionally rewards) sociopaths until they finally do something sufficiently heinous to warrant imprisonment. And then our standard response is to make a great deal of empty noise about what a terrible person the sociopath is, mostly to reassure ourselves that we are not terrible like him, but nothing is really improved thereby.
What will probably not receive much attention, speaking of practical matters, is the lax security at the prison that made this whole sorry scene possible.
One important example is listed right in the summary: Google's PageRank patent. With that invalidated, other search engines can legally use PageRank, without giving Google a dime, which could give them the same searching power as Google.
Just because I could legally use PageRank -- leaving aside for the moment the fact that much of Google's actual search algorithm isn't patented, it's a trade secret -- doesn't mean that I can magically materialize data centers with tens or hundreds of thousands of servers and the money and personnel to run them. There are plenty of barriers to entry in the search market, and intellectual property isn't the most important of them.
One would think that, having observed Microsoft, among others, making billions of dollars from unoriginal and technically inferior products, people would begin to realize that neither the quality of one's technical ideas nor their originality are the main determiners of success in the marketplace. Ideas, even good ideas, are cheap and plentiful and therefore not worth very much. The world will not beat a path to your door if you build a better mousetrap. In fact, the idea that anyone is going to beat a path to your door for any reason is why so many brilliant people end up working for someone else.
Re:Only works if you have "taste"
on
Inside Steve's Brain
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
Personally, I don't care for Jobs' taste or the Apple style generally, but you're on to something there all the same. Apple's success in recent years is precisely because Jobs and the designers that work for him have made their products fashionable. It doesn't matter whether they're technically superior or not. Taking MP3 players for example, there really isn't much to distinguish one from another. The iPod's interface is well done, yes, but the price premium it commands has a lot more to do with how fashionable it is to own one than anything else. iPods are hip and trendy, and the competing brands are not.
Jobs' genius has a lot less to do with being "insanely great" than it does with having the same kind of sensibility that you find in successful fashion designers. He comes up with (or supervises the people who come up with) hot products and successfully creates the kind of buzz around them that normally goes with things like designer clothing and sports cars. Mind you, I'm not knocking the technical quality of Apple products; I'm just saying that as long as they are roughly comparable to competing products at a technical level, that's not what most people care about. They want to be seen with Apple products, and they're willing to pay a higher price for them the same way they'll pay an extra hundred bucks for a pair of shoes from a fashionable brand.
All that said, the attention to detail exhibited by Apple in recent years is something the rest of the industry could learn from, too.
I'll call bullshit on it. I can keep an open mind on all kinds of stuff and give the benefit of the doubt -- at least provisionally -- to claims that contradict established knowledge except when the claim involves a suspension of the laws of thermodynamics. Find an exception to those, and you've opened the door to perpetual motion and immortality, never mind auto fuel.
Oh whatever. If you want to do everything in the kludgy, poorly-crafted alphabet soup hodge-podge of W3C standards, be my guest. Silverlight is too new to say, but the success of Flash is evidence of the failure of the open standards process to meet the needs of developers (and the businesses that employ them) in a timely fashion. Frankly, I suspect it will always be this way. The normal course of events is for private parties to develop new technologies and for standards committees to enshrine them in formal standards after the fact. Take for example C and C++ (or practically every other standardized programming language), which were standardized after they were successful languages. Having standards committees drive the process is the tail wagging the dog, and it's no wonder web technology is so far behind the curve that people get excited every time some feature as trivial as AJAX is added to browsers.
The fact of the matter is that it is still much harder to build a complex client-server application in a web browser than it is to use traditional desktop GUI tools. And given the pace of prior developments, the W3C isn't likely to change that while it still matters.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft DOES want people to like their product, don't they?
No, Microsoft has never particularly cared if anyone likes their products. What they expect is that their effective monopoly will let them extract silly money from their locked-in customer base.
What's weird is that this is aimed at individual users, who have a great deal more flexibility when it comes to migrating to another platform -- Apple or Linux -- than large corporations who have built their infrastructure around Microsoft.
Not that it's beyond Microsoft to do something incredibly stupid, but I'd be surprised if this one actually saw the light of day.
If you're interested in doing this kind of thing -- and it sounds like you are -- a good resource are books written for RVers who spend a lot of time boondocking, i.e., out in the boonies on solar power and batteries. One thing you discover very quickly when you are cut off from unlimited electricity is that electrical appliances tend to be designed with the assumption that electricity will be cheap and plentiful where they're used, so they waste it profligately, often even when turned "off".
Cutting your monthly electric bill by almost 20% is a perfect illustration of why people who do live where electricity is relatively cheap and plentiful should care about this. That's almost $500 a year in your case, which is for most people nothing to sneeze at.
Yes, because everything that isn't done manually is inauthentic. And it's been getting worse almost every day since the end of the Bronze Age.
Finally, Trekkies are vindicated. You can reverse the polarity!
I'm sure they have other methods of extracting the information they want.
Waterboarding?
Well, sure... once you have a sufficiently large base of typists trained to use QWERTY, there are compelling economic reasons not to switch to Dvorak or any other arrangement -- the training costs are just too high, and people can type adequately fast with QWERTY. Even for personal use, unless you plan to haul your own keyboard (or key mappings, whatever) along with you, training oneself to be a Dvorak typist is a positive hindrance when you have to use the standard QWERTY keyboard.
The passion with which people fixate on one seemingly minor technical thing or another would probably make for a really fascinating study in psychology. I know I have a bunch of UI preferences that I have whose strengths are all out of proportion to their purely practical importance -- while I don't have a dog in the vi/emacs fight, I can get quite passionate about what features I like in a text editor (like lack of resemblance to either vi or emacs ;) -- and pretty much everyone else I know, whether a technical user or not, has some similar UI feature fixation. It's definitely not rational, and it definitely influences buying decisions.
It's very much a pro-markets piece.
It's very much a pro-markets publication. While the arguments put forward rest on their own merits, it's safe to say that Reason Online -- whose masthead includes the slogan, "Free Minds and Free Markets" -- is certainly not going to publish articles that challenge the idea that the market is an efficient and rational actor, at least most of the time. Whether that inherent bias extends to cherry-picking the data used to reach conclusions, or whether the data is even unambiguous, are things one needs to consider in cases like this.
Probably everyone here can think of some examples of inferior products that have remained dominant despite the appearance of superior alternatives, and also examples of the reverse. For any of that to mean anything, one would have to survey a substantial sampling of such cases, determine which represented the majority and by what measure (total monetary value, units sold, etc.) and then look at all kinds of other factors (market segment, cost of switching products, and so on) before one could begin to draw useful and quite probably heavily qualified conclusions.
Then there's the inherent ambiguity involved in "superiority". Take Mac versus Windows versus Linux, for example. If, like most computer users, you have a preference, you can probably explain what drives that preference. But so can people who have different preferences. One might prefer Windows for reasons that are entirely irrelevant to a Mac aficionado, and vice versa. So which is superior? Obviously, there is no single, universal answer to this question -- and many others like it -- so we continue to see a market for Windows and a smaller, but quite healthy, market for Macs. Likewise, Harley-Davidson motorcycles continue to sell alongside everything from Vespa scooters to Honda racing bikes, and there are a dozen or more brands of sandwich bread at the average supermarket despite, what, more than six thousand years of not very exciting developments in bread technology.
The short version is that in any complex area of study riddled with exceptions and special cases, sweeping general conclusions are likely to be true, if at all, only within some arbitrary subset of cases that may be of very little predictive value, but that will seldom deter anyone with an article deadline and a point to "prove".
If Dvorak thinks that accounting and finance were bit players in the history of the world until the invention of the electronic spreadsheet, he's even more completely out of touch with reality than I thought. Maybe that's true in the parallel Dvorak universe where OS/2 took over the world and dialup BBSes became a multi-billion-dollar industry, but in this universe, accounting and finance has been a major player since, well, the invention of money and writing.
I actually like Dvorak, but having read him since the days when Computer Shopper was as large as an urban phone book, I have come to recognize that his predictions, while sometimes reflecting what ought to happen, seldom if ever reflect what actually does happen, and his analyses range from the silly to the outright bizarre.
being raised in a rural town, i suspect that I notice this effect much more strongly than urbanites. when i'm in the city, everything is fighting for my attention simultaneously, so i just tune everything out.
I've spent substantial periods of my life living in dense urban areas, suburban sprawl, and rural areas. There's something to be said both for and against all of them. Personally, I tend to prefer small towns, provided that I'm not more than an hour or so away from both a city and genuine wilderness. Of course, at least part of that is because I'm an introvert and more than slightly misanthropic. I can only imagine how miserable an extrovert who actually likes people would be living my life.
The point is that people are pretty diverse in their temperaments, and also pretty adaptable. An environment that is perfectly healthy for me might be very unhealthy for you, and vice versa. There is no "best" place for "people" to be. There can be a best place for a particular individual to be, but that's going to differ from individual to individual, and often even for the same individual at different times in his or her life.
About the only thing that is consistent about human beings is their insistence that humans are (or should be) consistent despite all evidence to the contrary.
Ha! Thanks for the reminder!
Yet (and I guess this is my biggest point) it's very tough to get anyone to get over their squeamishness about the subject and fight for what's right. ...which reminds me of another area that suffers from a similar problem: the issue of prisoner's rights. We have a prison system -- the most populous in the world, in fact, with more than two million prisoners -- where forcible rape is a normal occurrence and is tacitly accepted as part of the punishment, even for trivial non-violent crimes like, say, passing a bad check. And thanks to HIV and hepatitis, being sentenced to serve time often becomes a de facto death penalty.
That this amounts, in effect, to the systematic extermination of a substantial number of people is most often met with a yawn, if the topic comes up at all. It wouldn't do to appear to be "soft on crime" -- even if, in this case, being "hard on crime" actually involves encouraging rape and murder.
I find that attitude sad, personally. I'm involved in FOSS because I want to help people; in fact, I believe I have a moral obligation to help people, and it happens that contributing to FOSS projects is a good way to leverage my professional skills to that end. I also donate to various charities and, when time permits, perform volunteer work.
While I certainly don't think there's anything wrong with seeking prestige, contributions from others, etc., the glaring hole in ESR's self-absorbed vision of FOSS is that for many FOSS programmers, what we are doing is just a natural extension of an essentially charitable urge to do nice and helpful things for other people. That our society has descended to the point that people are suspicious of someone who works hard for the benefit of others with no expectation of reward is very, very sad.
Pretty much.
...the Forbes story makes the case that details of the recent Cogent vs. Sprint fight argue for exactly the opposite: keeping the Internet backbones free of government meddling.
It is, in fact, inconceivable that Forbes would make any other case. Ideology predetermines their arguments, and in this case, the ideology at work is a sort of economic anarchism that, quite frankly, has been completely discredited by the current state of affairs in the US economy. Not all regulation is "government meddling"; some of it is necessary to protect consumers -- and often even vendors -- from dishonesty and short-sighted greed that is often harmful in the long run to the miscreants themselves.
It is at least mildly ironic that the proponents of economic anarchism are often simultaneously proponents of a hardline law-and-order position in other areas of law.
I think it'll be great if they find a cure for baldness -- though I can certainly think of a few hundred actually serious medical problems that probably deserve more attention than what is, after all, a harmless cosmetic defect.
Of course, when the day comes that I can grow my hair back, that's only half the battle. Even with a full head of hair, the average 28-year-old woman is still going to think of me as a creepy old guy when I make a pass at her. ;)
Hmm. Every time our knowledge of the universe expands, there is always a group of scientists who rush to say that the new evidence indicates that we are, in one way or another, the center of the universe. And when that conclusion is invalidated by still more new evidence, they go hunting for another reason to reinstate their conclusion. The "Rare Earth" faction is just the latest iteration of the same deep-seated emotional bias that gave us geocentrism.
We have exactly one stellar system that we have studied in detail and exactly one example of a living ecosystem, and all our knowledge of other stellar systems comes from techniques that exclusively detect stellar systems with a massive planet in a tight orbit around its star. It seems to me that our sample size is too small to reach any conclusions at all, and until we have better tools for observing other stellar systems in high detail, discussions about what constitutes a "normal" stellar system barely rise above the level of pure speculation.
Well, yes and no.
It's no great accomplishment to trick people if they trust you. You can argue that people should be less trusting -- and I'd have to agree -- but for the hard-core troll, all trust is viewed as weakness, and the position they are taking is essentially that no one should trust anyone, ever. Obviously, society couldn't function in such a scenario.
At the end of the day, their "help" is not unlike shooting someone and then recommending that everyone start wearing ballistic armor. It's not an illogical suggestion, but it's more efficient to just apprehend the shooter than to supply everyone with armor.
Egyptian hieroglyphic writing was largely phonetic, contrary to what is surprisingly common belief here. Some signs were logographic or ideographic, but the majority of signs were phonetic. Hieratic came after hieroglyphic, and was largely just a cursive form of hieroglyphics, used to write quickly in informal contexts. In any case, Egyptian used a far smaller set of signs than modern Japanese, which is also a mixture of phonetic, logographic, and ideographic signs. Alphabetic writing probably originated in the Levant as a simplification of Egyptian monoconsonantal signs, culminating in the Phoenician alphabet, which formed the basis of virtually all modern scripts of non-Chinese origin.
Currency was simply unnecessary through most of Egyptian history. Ancient Egypt was a command economy and the overwhelming majority of its trade was internal. Under those circumstances, at least in a pre-industrial state, currency is a needless complication.
Dogma?
If it was dogma the priests of chemistry would be denying the evidence and punishing its discoverers.
That's the difference between science and religion. For science, new information enlarges our understanding of the world. For religion, new information only threatens sanctified prejudices.
"Depends on the cop" is right. Considering the disparity in power, you should think very carefully about the stakes before you make a cop aware that you are recording his or her actions. At the very least, it will piss them off, and pissed off cops are nothing you want to deal with. If you're just being pulled over for speeding (and you're white and sober), just being pleasant and respectful (read: kissing a little ass) will go a long way.
Mind you, I think it's a good thing for citizens to videotape police actions. But cops are dangerous and angry cops are even more dangerous, and you shouldn't play with that kind of danger. Bear in mind the number of occasions that cops have been videotaped beating the holy living hell out of somebody and then gotten off scot-free. If you're going to take on the system, don't do it casually. By all means, if you see injustice, take it on -- but do so with forethought and a careful consideration of the risks you expose yourself to. It's not a game, and the consequences can be pretty serious. Choose your battles wisely.
The short version: If your main motivation is to be an annoying wiseass, start a blog instead.
the market for involved puzzle games didn't shrink, it just didn't grow with the rest of the industry.
Sadly, that's exactly it. Back during Infocom's heyday, a title that sold 60,000 copies was a big hit. Of course, back then, practically everyone with a computer was into computing for its own sake and could at least write a simple BASIC program.
The simple fact of the matter is that there are vastly more people who want mindless entertainment than people who want intellectual challenges, so that's who the game companies target. It's not new, and it's not limited to computer games, games in general, or any other area of life. People attend more action movies than Shakespeare plays, too.
There are still plenty of puzzle games. There are even dozens of new text adventures every year, too. Some of them are quite good. They just come from small companies and individual shareware and freeware authors, and you have to go looking for them. The day when that market was significant enough to warrant full-page ads in computer magazines is over.
Apparently this guy had a lot worse going on inside than just spamming people. There are plenty of spammers that would never dream of killing anyone.
Nail, meet head. This guy obviously had serious issues. Left to roam free, he was essentially a sociopathic con-artist. Up the pressure by jamming him into a box, and he committed an even more sociopathic act. None of this excuses his crimes, mind you, but neither does it exonerate a society that basically ignores (and occasionally rewards) sociopaths until they finally do something sufficiently heinous to warrant imprisonment. And then our standard response is to make a great deal of empty noise about what a terrible person the sociopath is, mostly to reassure ourselves that we are not terrible like him, but nothing is really improved thereby.
What will probably not receive much attention, speaking of practical matters, is the lax security at the prison that made this whole sorry scene possible.
One important example is listed right in the summary: Google's PageRank patent. With that invalidated, other search engines can legally use PageRank, without giving Google a dime, which could give them the same searching power as Google.
Just because I could legally use PageRank -- leaving aside for the moment the fact that much of Google's actual search algorithm isn't patented, it's a trade secret -- doesn't mean that I can magically materialize data centers with tens or hundreds of thousands of servers and the money and personnel to run them. There are plenty of barriers to entry in the search market, and intellectual property isn't the most important of them.
One would think that, having observed Microsoft, among others, making billions of dollars from unoriginal and technically inferior products, people would begin to realize that neither the quality of one's technical ideas nor their originality are the main determiners of success in the marketplace. Ideas, even good ideas, are cheap and plentiful and therefore not worth very much. The world will not beat a path to your door if you build a better mousetrap. In fact, the idea that anyone is going to beat a path to your door for any reason is why so many brilliant people end up working for someone else.
Personally, I don't care for Jobs' taste or the Apple style generally, but you're on to something there all the same. Apple's success in recent years is precisely because Jobs and the designers that work for him have made their products fashionable. It doesn't matter whether they're technically superior or not. Taking MP3 players for example, there really isn't much to distinguish one from another. The iPod's interface is well done, yes, but the price premium it commands has a lot more to do with how fashionable it is to own one than anything else. iPods are hip and trendy, and the competing brands are not.
Jobs' genius has a lot less to do with being "insanely great" than it does with having the same kind of sensibility that you find in successful fashion designers. He comes up with (or supervises the people who come up with) hot products and successfully creates the kind of buzz around them that normally goes with things like designer clothing and sports cars. Mind you, I'm not knocking the technical quality of Apple products; I'm just saying that as long as they are roughly comparable to competing products at a technical level, that's not what most people care about. They want to be seen with Apple products, and they're willing to pay a higher price for them the same way they'll pay an extra hundred bucks for a pair of shoes from a fashionable brand.
All that said, the attention to detail exhibited by Apple in recent years is something the rest of the industry could learn from, too.
I'll call bullshit on it. I can keep an open mind on all kinds of stuff and give the benefit of the doubt -- at least provisionally -- to claims that contradict established knowledge except when the claim involves a suspension of the laws of thermodynamics. Find an exception to those, and you've opened the door to perpetual motion and immortality, never mind auto fuel.
Oh whatever. If you want to do everything in the kludgy, poorly-crafted alphabet soup hodge-podge of W3C standards, be my guest. Silverlight is too new to say, but the success of Flash is evidence of the failure of the open standards process to meet the needs of developers (and the businesses that employ them) in a timely fashion. Frankly, I suspect it will always be this way. The normal course of events is for private parties to develop new technologies and for standards committees to enshrine them in formal standards after the fact. Take for example C and C++ (or practically every other standardized programming language), which were standardized after they were successful languages. Having standards committees drive the process is the tail wagging the dog, and it's no wonder web technology is so far behind the curve that people get excited every time some feature as trivial as AJAX is added to browsers.
The fact of the matter is that it is still much harder to build a complex client-server application in a web browser than it is to use traditional desktop GUI tools. And given the pace of prior developments, the W3C isn't likely to change that while it still matters.