Given that when I pay for a CD, I'm paying for the music, not the plastic and mylar
So says you, but the seller might think differently. I know you can argue that it's the music that is the actual thing of value, but in a seller/buyer transaction the opinions of both parties should be equal. If that cannot be agreed with then, as they say, there's other buyers/sellers in the sea... such is how the free market system works.
We need to start demanding more from our journalists, and stop allowing people like Bill O'Idiot of Fox News to have air time.
But O'Reilly is not a journalist, he just hosts a commentary show with entertaiment-type goals. In the rodeo of news media, not all its players are cowboys. Some are clowns... some are bulls.... some are PETA people laying down in the middle to protest the use of bulls... some are paramedics rescuing the protestors with 1st degree hoof injuries... the object is to get your news from some sources, and just laugh and be entertained from others.
Why when the press was being stomped before, did governments-- those people in *charge* of protecting rights-- never do this?
Governments can barely manage to keep the basic civic tasks withing budget (if they can complete them all) much less produce educational handbooks. Not only is that the least of their responsibilities, if it even should be one, but if you need the government to give you tips on clever anonymous blogging then, chances are, you're not going to pen anything more than the usual blarbage to clutter google with.
...because we all know that no self-respecting hacker would attack a friend of open-source such as FireFox. These exploit discoveries are being secretly funded by Microsoft!
Yes, I play on WoW. And while the game, in itself, is quite awesome (though not, by any stretch of imagination, flawless or perfect), I am increasingly annoyed and dissapointed by the kind of feedback players receive for Blizzard representatives on all levels of game - from in-game issues and assistance requests sent to GMs, through many querries directed to Bliz Forums CMs, all the way to requests for assistance regarding account and payment issues.
Slip out your elf costume and be realistic for a second... their forums have tons of complaints and questions, most bordering on immature rants or dupes from people unwilling to read FAQs. This is typical of game forums where the majority of members are kids. I'm willing to give Blizzard the benifit of the doubt that they try to address as many complaints/questions as possible. It wouldn't be in their economic best interest to completely ignore their costumers. But the size of the customer-relations department required to meet the expectations you have of them would certainly bankrupt Blizzard.
In my opinion, this article is a bit biased against those that want to limit cursing. I don't say this because I champion their cause.. I'm rather indifferent to curse words having grown up in the age of today's media... but rather because it seems like a correct observation on my part so I wish to explain myself (fully acknowledging that I might be wrong).
The article mostly explains the study's view that cursing has been around since the beginning of human language. The premise is that cursing is a natural aspect of human communication. Yet no where does the article attempt to explain why some might want to curb it. In fact, the article seems to portray those people as oppressive and uninformed somehow, which I believe is unfortunate as far as promoting a healthy discussion on the issue is concerned.
If I can capture that unrepresented side here... cursing is the expression of (usually high) emotionally-charged thought. Often, the objective of cursing is to bring the other party into the same emotional state as the curser (otherwise the curse word would be considered ineffective to begin with). Like in animals, a stage like this is always the precursor for physical confrontantions. So, in some ways, those against public cursing are trying to sway our animalistic confrontational/emotional nature so as to mantain societal order and promote more logical communication strategies. I think any reader on this forum would appreciate this almost Vulcan type of philosophy.
So cursing, in some people's opinion, is an approach to communication that stiffles logical discussions/debates. This is an opinion that this article seemed to prefer to mock rather than explaining in a balanced way and letting their viewers decide themselves about.
I predict that 15 years from now on, Microsoft will either be sweeping their own ashes, or haved moved completely to the gaming business. The reason? In about 10 years, OpenOffice (or another clone) will kick MS-Office's arse, taking away Microsoft's main revenue.
Your prediction is wishful thinking at best, because I don't see any realistic logic being applied in your post. Like in game theory, to find the most winning path you have to assume your opponent (Microsoft in this case) will be making the best moves it can in its favor. Microsoft is not going to sit around for 10+ years while others out-compete it. This, of course, will be good for consumers because as open-source solutions become better alternatives, Microsoft will have to provide even better solutions, which open-source solutions will have to improve on, so on and so on.
ReactOS will have replaced windows in the same way FreeDOS can replace MS-DOS today
Ugh, that's a terrible selling point for your theory. Basically you're saying that FreeDOS can compete today with a product that was, for all purposes, shelved and not much developed on since 1995 (when Win95 came out as a standalone OS).
I believe you drastically over-estimate the reliability and objectivity of traditional encyclopedias.
Accepting anything that you can't verify yourself as being 100% reliable is always unwise. And even if you can verify something yourself, there's still a chance your verification process is wrong. Bottom line, documented information can never be 100% reliable, and objectivity is a matter of opinion.
But traditional encyclopedias do have a stronger incentive to be reliable/objective than online collaborative ones. With a price tag of usually several hundred dollars, an encyclopedia set would hurt its market share if it became too unreliable or biased.
So what's the difference between a paying audience and a non-paying online audience as far as keeping an encyclopedia honest? Both audiences are democratically guiding the quality of the encyclopedia in some way, but money will always be the stronger incetive because its part of core of how our societies run.
While others will suggest the more popular ones, all great of course, I'd recomend "My Neighbors The Yamadas" as well. It might not have a polished look like the rest do, but it's a wonderful look into the dynamics of a modern Japanese family... with plenty of funny and tender moments too.
the truth is that virtually any PC (PC including Apple) these days is overpowered for the uses that the average user tasks them with
True if most of your day involves handling cow teets... but other "average users" play 3D games, use Microsoft hogware, edit video, download N things at the same time as they run IM, email, browse... not to mention the tons of stuff that loads up... and don't get me started on how much development platform soaks up resources...
I much prefer webobjects or even ruby on rails. ASP.NET is a pile.
I think anyone that's done commerce-quality network programming for a while can see the real "pile" in your opinion.
From my own experience, RoR scales horribly both traffic-wise and when attempting to incorporate existing infrastructres with it, i.e. the "plays well with others" factor.
This is not meant to criticize the ruby community, for I do believe they're developing something powerful and cheer them on (like I cheer other great oss initiatives). I especially loved how fast you can prototype something. It's just not there yet for commercial purposes, and anyone not honest about that isn't helping its cause.
With Bush set to drop $200 billion on Katrina, finding money for going to the moon is going to be difficult
No. The Katrina rebuilding phase will bring about a fairly large economic boom. The increase of both construction jobs and money being exchanged for goods/services will translate into more tax revenues. This is in addition to an already strong economy, which showed little signs of weaking after Katrina. Plus, as the need to support the Iraq conflict slows down (and it is on average despite the constant sensational reporting) there will be more revenue available for spending too. All in all, the U.S. government is not about to run out on money any time soon...
We won WWII, but yet, much of what we fought against, seems like it is coming into being anyways.
Societies, and the responsibilities individuals want to take on in them, have changed substantially since 60 years ago.
100,000+ people didn't have the sense to travel 20 miles inland to save their own life... millions justify bombing health clinics or civilian buses under the name of out-dated mythological figures... "dont open attachments" might as well be latin for many people...
bottom line, don't expect these societies of today to create leaders that have much respect for their fellow man's individuallity/freedom/privacy.
Although good in theory, the use of organic remains has no practical mass application. The cost of feeding animals long enough to provide a decent organic mass would be far more than fossil fuels or even nuclear energy. Plus, at a mass scale, rotting organic material would be a major health threat... not to mention that in accidents, serious injuries would be compounded if the victims were covered in this "fuel"...
The second is more valuable than money; you have the possibility of possibly hundreds or thousands of developers looking at your code, offering patches and extensions to it.
This statement pretty much illustrates the fairy-taleish nature of the rest your post. Most projects are small and specific in function (compared to an OS or browser) that they don't generate such an large active development community. These projects mainly depend on a small group of dedicated coders, and good luck if you have an opinion about the direction of the project which the others don't share...
Tobacco companies still kill a third of their customers, and they do it with impunity in most of the world
What a pile of shit.
For decades tobacco products have carried warning labels, and for just as long (if not longer) the health hazards of smoking have been known. Nowadays, anyone dying from smoking-related complications do so at your own choice and/or stupidity. As an ex-smoker myself, I was fully aware of what I was getting into when I first started and I knew I would eventually kill myself if I didn't stop. Fortunately I have the backbone to hold myself responsible for my own problems rather than blame nebulous entities like "evil tobacco companies".
I figure it is going to take maybe 2-3 more years to make it happen.
I figure that a well orchistrated migration of a large organization will take at least 3-5 years to complete assuming all goes well.
So basically, despite trying to sound like you know what you're talking about, you don't know enough about large scale human-office-computer dynamics to closely estimate the completion time.
Munich, as one of the pioneers at converting at such large a scale, is trying to figure this out. It'll be a process of continous timeline refinements, which will not only result in eventual success, but also provide a map for other organizations to better ease into open source.
Yet they keep making these movies because they don't need to put a lot of thought into them; their designers already put their hearts into it and spent their life drawing these characters out in the comic books.
Huh? There's no need to get complicated in analyzing things.
Hollywood keeps making these movies because they make money. When you count the world-wide ticket sales and dvd/merchandise revenues, even the "bad" ones pay for themselves and then some. It's as simple as that.
It's true, though, that movie studios aren't always able to translate the "good stuff" from a comic book on to the screen. But, to be fair, it's not usually because of incompotence or lazyness.
As with any reading material, the writer/artist can only go so far to convey a story given the limited paper medium, so the readers must fill in the rest with their imaginations. Forcing the audience to use their imagination produces a more powerful story because, by virtue of them imagining, the audience immerses itself into the story... enhancing its realism. That doesn't mean the storyline can be weak,
A movie, with its real-time sound and imagery, leaves fewer blanks that need to be filled in by its viewers. This means that a movie has to work harder to immerse its audience into its story...
One thing I find amazing is that many of these catasptophes are worstened because technology WAS NOT APPLIED. At least not modern technology.
Well duh, modern technology is expensive. Especially at the large scales which you want it applied to. Real advancements will come when someone finds a way to make it affordable to governments, without sacrifing the budget for the plethera of other services that people demmand of government nowadays.
On the other hand, when was the last time you heard anyone talking about a Microsoft product in anything but a lament?
When was the last time you heard anyone talk about how well their refrigerator cools food?
To most people, a computer is just another gadget. A gadget that works and not thought much else about, like a phone or a tv.
This perception is best illustrated when a computer is crippled by viruses or spyware. To a techy, it's like a puppy is dying... but others just see the computer as "broken".
Now, they just need to buy/merge with Real, and you'd have a real powerhouse competitor to Microsoft.
You can't be serious. Whether good or not, Microsoft still dominates the OS, browser, and office application markets... markets that no merger you describe can touch. Plus, with the continous push for more open standards, a lasting future for PDF and Flash is questionable. This merger was more out necessity than an attempt to compete with Microsoft.
Slashdot Mirror
Given that when I pay for a CD, I'm paying for the music, not the plastic and mylar
So says you, but the seller might think differently. I know you can argue that it's the music that is the actual thing of value, but in a seller/buyer transaction the opinions of both parties should be equal. If that cannot be agreed with then, as they say, there's other buyers/sellers in the sea... such is how the free market system works.
We need to start demanding more from our journalists, and stop allowing people like Bill O'Idiot of Fox News to have air time.
But O'Reilly is not a journalist, he just hosts a commentary show with entertaiment-type goals. In the rodeo of news media, not all its players are cowboys. Some are clowns... some are bulls.... some are PETA people laying down in the middle to protest the use of bulls... some are paramedics rescuing the protestors with 1st degree hoof injuries... the object is to get your news from some sources, and just laugh and be entertained from others.
and pardon my above post's spelling. I can't seem to find my government-issued dictionary atm...
Why when the press was being stomped before, did governments-- those people in *charge* of protecting rights-- never do this?
Governments can barely manage to keep the basic civic tasks withing budget (if they can complete them all) much less produce educational handbooks. Not only is that the least of their responsibilities, if it even should be one, but if you need the government to give you tips on clever anonymous blogging then, chances are, you're not going to pen anything more than the usual blarbage to clutter google with.
...because we all know that no self-respecting hacker would attack a friend of open-source such as FireFox. These exploit discoveries are being secretly funded by Microsoft!
Yes, I play on WoW. And while the game, in itself, is quite awesome (though not, by any stretch of imagination, flawless or perfect), I am increasingly annoyed and dissapointed by the kind of feedback players receive for Blizzard representatives on all levels of game - from in-game issues and assistance requests sent to GMs, through many querries directed to Bliz Forums CMs, all the way to requests for assistance regarding account and payment issues.
Slip out your elf costume and be realistic for a second... their forums have tons of complaints and questions, most bordering on immature rants or dupes from people unwilling to read FAQs. This is typical of game forums where the majority of members are kids. I'm willing to give Blizzard the benifit of the doubt that they try to address as many complaints/questions as possible. It wouldn't be in their economic best interest to completely ignore their costumers. But the size of the customer-relations department required to meet the expectations you have of them would certainly bankrupt Blizzard.
In my opinion, this article is a bit biased against those that want to limit cursing. I don't say this because I champion their cause.. I'm rather indifferent to curse words having grown up in the age of today's media... but rather because it seems like a correct observation on my part so I wish to explain myself (fully acknowledging that I might be wrong).
The article mostly explains the study's view that cursing has been around since the beginning of human language. The premise is that cursing is a natural aspect of human communication. Yet no where does the article attempt to explain why some might want to curb it. In fact, the article seems to portray those people as oppressive and uninformed somehow, which I believe is unfortunate as far as promoting a healthy discussion on the issue is concerned.
If I can capture that unrepresented side here... cursing is the expression of (usually high) emotionally-charged thought. Often, the objective of cursing is to bring the other party into the same emotional state as the curser (otherwise the curse word would be considered ineffective to begin with). Like in animals, a stage like this is always the precursor for physical confrontantions. So, in some ways, those against public cursing are trying to sway our animalistic confrontational/emotional nature so as to mantain societal order and promote more logical communication strategies. I think any reader on this forum would appreciate this almost Vulcan type of philosophy.
So cursing, in some people's opinion, is an approach to communication that stiffles logical discussions/debates. This is an opinion that this article seemed to prefer to mock rather than explaining in a balanced way and letting their viewers decide themselves about.
No punk on the radio?!
what about Greenday, No Doubt, and Avril Lavigne?
If your examples pass as proof for punk, metal is still on the radio thanks to artists like Pat Boone.
I predict that 15 years from now on, Microsoft will either be sweeping their own ashes, or haved moved completely to the gaming business. The reason? In about 10 years, OpenOffice (or another clone) will kick MS-Office's arse, taking away Microsoft's main revenue.
Your prediction is wishful thinking at best, because I don't see any realistic logic being applied in your post. Like in game theory, to find the most winning path you have to assume your opponent (Microsoft in this case) will be making the best moves it can in its favor. Microsoft is not going to sit around for 10+ years while others out-compete it. This, of course, will be good for consumers because as open-source solutions become better alternatives, Microsoft will have to provide even better solutions, which open-source solutions will have to improve on, so on and so on.
ReactOS will have replaced windows in the same way FreeDOS can replace MS-DOS today
Ugh, that's a terrible selling point for your theory. Basically you're saying that FreeDOS can compete today with a product that was, for all purposes, shelved and not much developed on since 1995 (when Win95 came out as a standalone OS).
I believe you drastically over-estimate the reliability and objectivity of traditional encyclopedias.
Accepting anything that you can't verify yourself as being 100% reliable is always unwise. And even if you can verify something yourself, there's still a chance your verification process is wrong. Bottom line, documented information can never be 100% reliable, and objectivity is a matter of opinion.
But traditional encyclopedias do have a stronger incentive to be reliable/objective than online collaborative ones. With a price tag of usually several hundred dollars, an encyclopedia set would hurt its market share if it became too unreliable or biased.
So what's the difference between a paying audience and a non-paying online audience as far as keeping an encyclopedia honest? Both audiences are democratically guiding the quality of the encyclopedia in some way, but money will always be the stronger incetive because its part of core of how our societies run.
While others will suggest the more popular ones, all great of course, I'd recomend "My Neighbors The Yamadas" as well. It might not have a polished look like the rest do, but it's a wonderful look into the dynamics of a modern Japanese family... with plenty of funny and tender moments too.
the truth is that virtually any PC (PC including Apple) these days is overpowered for the uses that the average user tasks them with
True if most of your day involves handling cow teets... but other "average users" play 3D games, use Microsoft hogware, edit video, download N things at the same time as they run IM, email, browse... not to mention the tons of stuff that loads up... and don't get me started on how much development platform soaks up resources...
I much prefer webobjects or even ruby on rails. ASP.NET is a pile.
I think anyone that's done commerce-quality network programming for a while can see the real "pile" in your opinion.
From my own experience, RoR scales horribly both traffic-wise and when attempting to incorporate existing infrastructres with it, i.e. the "plays well with others" factor.
This is not meant to criticize the ruby community, for I do believe they're developing something powerful and cheer them on (like I cheer other great oss initiatives). I especially loved how fast you can prototype something. It's just not there yet for commercial purposes, and anyone not honest about that isn't helping its cause.
With Bush set to drop $200 billion on Katrina, finding money for going to the moon is going to be difficult
No. The Katrina rebuilding phase will bring about a fairly large economic boom. The increase of both construction jobs and money being exchanged for goods/services will translate into more tax revenues. This is in addition to an already strong economy, which showed little signs of weaking after Katrina. Plus, as the need to support the Iraq conflict slows down (and it is on average despite the constant sensational reporting) there will be more revenue available for spending too. All in all, the U.S. government is not about to run out on money any time soon...
We won WWII, but yet, much of what we fought against, seems like it is coming into being anyways.
Societies, and the responsibilities individuals want to take on in them, have changed substantially since 60 years ago.
100,000+ people didn't have the sense to travel 20 miles inland to save their own life... millions justify bombing health clinics or civilian buses under the name of out-dated mythological figures... "dont open attachments" might as well be latin for many people...
bottom line, don't expect these societies of today to create leaders that have much respect for their fellow man's individuallity/freedom/privacy.
Although good in theory, the use of organic remains has no practical mass application. The cost of feeding animals long enough to provide a decent organic mass would be far more than fossil fuels or even nuclear energy. Plus, at a mass scale, rotting organic material would be a major health threat... not to mention that in accidents, serious injuries would be compounded if the victims were covered in this "fuel"...
The second is more valuable than money; you have the possibility of possibly hundreds or thousands of developers looking at your code, offering patches and extensions to it.
This statement pretty much illustrates the fairy-taleish nature of the rest your post. Most projects are small and specific in function (compared to an OS or browser) that they don't generate such an large active development community. These projects mainly depend on a small group of dedicated coders, and good luck if you have an opinion about the direction of the project which the others don't share...
How does Joe Sixpack back up 500Gb?
He doesn't. Backing up data is for nerds.
Tobacco companies still kill a third of their customers, and they do it with impunity in most of the world
What a pile of shit.
For decades tobacco products have carried warning labels, and for just as long (if not longer) the health hazards of smoking have been known. Nowadays, anyone dying from smoking-related complications do so at your own choice and/or stupidity. As an ex-smoker myself, I was fully aware of what I was getting into when I first started and I knew I would eventually kill myself if I didn't stop. Fortunately I have the backbone to hold myself responsible for my own problems rather than blame nebulous entities like "evil tobacco companies".
I figure it is going to take maybe 2-3 more years to make it happen.
I figure that a well orchistrated migration of a large organization will take at least 3-5 years to complete assuming all goes well.
So basically, despite trying to sound like you know what you're talking about, you don't know enough about large scale human-office-computer dynamics to closely estimate the completion time.
Munich, as one of the pioneers at converting at such large a scale, is trying to figure this out. It'll be a process of continous timeline refinements, which will not only result in eventual success, but also provide a map for other organizations to better ease into open source.
Yet they keep making these movies because they don't need to put a lot of thought into them; their designers already put their hearts into it and spent their life drawing these characters out in the comic books.
Huh? There's no need to get complicated in analyzing things.
Hollywood keeps making these movies because they make money. When you count the world-wide ticket sales and dvd/merchandise revenues, even the "bad" ones pay for themselves and then some. It's as simple as that.
It's true, though, that movie studios aren't always able to translate the "good stuff" from a comic book on to the screen. But, to be fair, it's not usually because of incompotence or lazyness.
As with any reading material, the writer/artist can only go so far to convey a story given the limited paper medium, so the readers must fill in the rest with their imaginations. Forcing the audience to use their imagination produces a more powerful story because, by virtue of them imagining, the audience immerses itself into the story... enhancing its realism. That doesn't mean the storyline can be weak,
A movie, with its real-time sound and imagery, leaves fewer blanks that need to be filled in by its viewers. This means that a movie has to work harder to immerse its audience into its story...
(need to stop this thought, pizza's here!)
One thing I find amazing is that many of these catasptophes are worstened because technology WAS NOT APPLIED. At least not modern technology.
Well duh, modern technology is expensive. Especially at the large scales which you want it applied to. Real advancements will come when someone finds a way to make it affordable to governments, without sacrifing the budget for the plethera of other services that people demmand of government nowadays.
On the other hand, when was the last time you heard anyone talking about a Microsoft product in anything but a lament?
When was the last time you heard anyone talk about how well their refrigerator cools food?
To most people, a computer is just another gadget. A gadget that works and not thought much else about, like a phone or a tv.
This perception is best illustrated when a computer is crippled by viruses or spyware. To a techy, it's like a puppy is dying... but others just see the computer as "broken".
I've used solaris, AIX, Windows 9x/NT4/2000/XPpro, various Linux distros, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and OS 10.1/.2/.3/.4
Might I recommend you try the latest ParagraphOS.
Now, they just need to buy/merge with Real, and you'd have a real powerhouse competitor to Microsoft.
You can't be serious. Whether good or not, Microsoft still dominates the OS, browser, and office application markets... markets that no merger you describe can touch. Plus, with the continous push for more open standards, a lasting future for PDF and Flash is questionable. This merger was more out necessity than an attempt to compete with Microsoft.