You forgot the other advantage of e-voting (the one lurking in the corner):
2) Possible voting over the Internet.
This could make voting extremely convenient. Of course this opens a whole new can of worms about security, one voter, one vote, etc etc, but the point remains that e-voting also has the advantage of removing the vote from time and place concerns - things which *do* effect actual voters on voting days (witness the long lines in Ohio in '04.)
In America, candidates can't buy votes, and voters can't sell their votes. Some guy recently tried this on eBay. It's not only a felony (ie can't vote any more in a lot of states), but it gets you up to 5 years in jail. Candidates can't even give out cigarettes to homeless people just to *go* to the voting booth (much less tell them how to vote.) Vote buying happens, no doubt, but it is illegal, and don't you think it'd be hard to reach out to any group larger than 1 without the FEC breathing down your neck?
Your boss can't fire you for refusing to disclose your VoterID number. This would be grounds for a great lawsuit. He can fire you for your political beliefs, but he has to show that they are related to the job at hand. So if you're a tax lawyer in favor of the estate tax - maybe. Otherwise...
The third scenario has an easy fix: give voters a deadline to complain. Just timestamp their vote, give them 12 hours to go home and verify their vote. If within 12 hours they haven't hit the "INCORRECT" button on the website (or called the voting office / did whatever is necessary to complain) they lose their right to complain.
I'm not necessarily in favor of the VoterID scenario (it has a lot of ambiguity.)
Well, there are, of course, a lot of different ways to approach this.
From the individual's standpoint, as pervasive as conglomerate media can be, it's fairly easy to just tune out and do your own thing. In fact, this path is so easy that it is, unsurprisingly, the most popular option. And it's easy because it's empowering - it often reveals the emperor has no clothes.
From the collective's standpoint, conglomerate media still kowtows to the almighty dollar, and it can be exploited as necessary. The major advantage to this is (verging on irony) is that many of the quote unquote liberal views of the day - the green economy and environmental sustainability, better education and better schools, and more federal support for programs like stem cell research and Medicare - are actually more econonomically viable than their alternatives. So when Google can push out a solar-powered campus and say, "This is good for the environment *and* the bottom line," then the money-focused mainstream media starts touting this as part of the central tenet: greed is good. If you can tie on socially desirable benefits to greed, so much the better.
So there really is no guiding the dollar, because it is entirely based on an economy of scale that can't really be guided by anything short of toppling 2 towers in New York City on a Tuesday. So the issue isn't that you have to convince the the other side that you're right - there's no Parliamentary function at hand in America's future (our levels of Congressional approval are more implicit signs of mistrust rather than the effects of recent scandals) - but you must in fact *be* right. And if you are right, the bottom line will bear you out.
This also explains a lot of America's success - the market intuitively and instinctively moves towards the best ideas for making money. This allows us to be more risk-takers, and our overall economic success is pretty much a function of the risks taken by all Americans throughout history. It's why Americans seem so cocky - there's a whole lineage of success behind us. And the price for that is, simply put, corporate hegemony - but when you're part of the corporation, you're less likely to complain.
I think one of the real challenges for both our countries over the next century is to figure out how to "do business" with Asia, South America, and the developing nations of the world. This is probably where are two disparate approaches will differentiate themselves most clearly - and I don't doubt for a second that America will come out on top. At what price?...
There's a fundamental difference between our countries.
Britain is dominated by state power. America is dominated by corporate power.
State power is at least somewhat grounded in the people, so varied opinions have their value, because the chief parties can acquire actual power through persuasion and viewpoints.
Corporate power is entirely guided by money. Acquiring more money means no varied opinions - it means one central opinion.
Because of this fundamentally different end goals (and thus the different means needed to acquire them) American news is simply incomparable to British news. They aren't even the same creature.
The flip side to this is that America as a whole is the more economically successful of our two countries. That's cold comfort for most Americans, but that's the guiding spirit of pretty much all of America.
When you say they represent "no one", you mean that doctors don't represent their patents? And that associations like the AMA, ADA, ACS, etc represent no one? And yes, they present data to Congress. There is no political legitimacy without expert advice - it's why we also have an executive branch. Administration is just as important as proclamation.
I don't really understand why you are trying to limit legitimacy to the government - there are certainly a large number of informal "governments" which we attribute legitimacy to without the need for Congress (or even state legislatures, or school boards, or city councils.) What exactly constitutes the difference between a homeowner's association and a Chamber of Commerce and the AMA? In today's society, the simple act of information is at least as valuable as the conveyance of authority.
There was a police academy in Connecticut (?) that administered an intelligent test to its prospective students. Obviously if you scored too low you wouldn't be admitted, but if you scored too high, you also were rejected - on the premise that smart people would get bored as cops, and either a) turn corrupt, or b) quit too quickly, thereby wasting the academy's time. Somebody sued them and actually lost the case, too.
Uhh, "transferred" doesn't mean "sold"/"explained." In this case, you apply your information to please the woman. That's just another form of transference. And if she is the least bit aware of what's going on, she'll learn your techniques and sell them herself.
You must make your information public - either the source or results must be made known to someone else - in order to profit from it (in this case sexually, but hey, that's better than money for the most part.) And by making it public, you expose it to the risk of being stolen.
Trade secrets will inevitably become traded secrets.
The only reason this "give it away" model works is because he isn't giving anything at all away. You can't give away information, you can only share it.
This same model wouldn't work with food, for example, because I can't give you an apple, let you eat it, and then let you decide if you want to pay for it or not. Everybody would simply say they didn't like the apple and wouldn't pay for it. And then I'd not only be out the money, but also the apple.
Certainly some companies have some sunk costs in promotional copies (a coupon for 1 free apple), but otherwise they're on the "reputation" model - you buy it based on reptuation of the seller and the product.
But yes, ultimately, anybody trying to peddle information out there is going to have to move to a "try it for free, pay me if you like it" model, because information is only valuable when its transferred, and limiting transferability will kill off the demand for information.
You step in the booth. Each election / issue is brought up on a page all by itself. Each candidate / position is presented, along with a uniquely colored dot next to it. You click the position. In front of you, you hear a slight whirring sound.
A small ping pong ball floats up inside a glass enclosure. A tiny mechanical vice grips it to hold it in place.
A tiny nozzle on an actuator moves out next to it, and out bursts a small amount of paint. The ping pong ball is now colored in the same color dot as your choice.
You made a mistake? You hit the back button, and the mechanical vice crushes the ball into tiny pieces.
You do it again, another ping pong ball, another blast of color, you confirm, they tiny nozzle shoots some air on the ball to dry it, and it gets whisked away into a box marked for that election.
Now you've got something that is anonymous, transparent and voter-verified, visually unambiguous, able to be counted electronically *and* manually, and not easily subjected to tampering.
Now where to find all those ping pong balls....
PS My serious position is that as long as there is a (voter-verified) paper trail, I have no problem with electronic voting. Count the votes, do some sample testing with the paper ballots, look for incongruity and if you find it, use the paper ballots as the final vote.
I realize Slashdot isn't the highest bastion of journalistic standards and professionalism, but I don't think it's too much to have the editors ask themselves:
"Would CNN run this headline on their front page?"
I mean, the whole point of appealing to any sort of authority is the admission that there are conglomerates of expertise out there greater than your own. Having a headline like this not only diminishes spelling capabilities everywhere, it more importantly diminishes any sense of authority Slashdot has.
Ultimately, I think Slashdot (and indeed, any site where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts) has a responsbility to avoid this kind of thing - especially in headlines. It really does just highlight the difference bewteen this site and other news sites. It's not that I've never said the word "Pwned" out loud (try it, it's fun!), but I would never put that word in an essay for school or on a job application. Different fora demand different standards.
It's hard to believe this is getting modded insightful. How exactly is "contributing to a problem" not the same as "being part of the problem"? How can a problem only be defined as the quantitative success or lack there of of a single interpersonal relationship? When the relationship *itself* is defined by external factors?
Are you kidding me?
Your relationship doesn't exist in some sort of ahistorical vacuum. Your job affects your relationship, your relationship affects your job. The same for your health, your mood, your ego, your kids, and your sanity. These are not one way streets.
"Everything starts with you." What the hell kind of pop psychology is that? You cannot separate the "you" from the aspects of your life like your job and your health. In fact, it is the totality of "you" that can be divided into the components that "contribute to problems." IE, your problems are the sum of the problems in the different aspects of your life. And they are so intertwined as to be impossible to sort out.
And more importantly, with OSS (or, indeed, any quote unquote free product), it is the "support" side that will entirely carry your business to success.
Listening to your customers, updating constantly, being flexible, being openminded, and never resting on your laurels - those things will generate "sales" and increased business revenue more than anything. Consider the converse: nothing is more frustrating than abandonware, because all of its limitations are frozen in place.
Just so we're clear, those classes are only for employment. For example, for federal housing laws, "family status", "marital status", and "avenue of income" are also protected classes - so you can't be denied housing because you're divorced, or because you have an annuity and don't work a job for a living.
With regards to this conversation, most states consider "sexual orientation" a protected class for housing. The few that don't are, needless to say, primarily the Western "cowboy states."
Hilarious. Your lack of children was made obvious when you started talking about "ideal worlds." Kids are not rational; they simply don't understand cause and effect like adults do (many adults don't, either.) So you can never say, "Oh, this is the appropriate level of responsibility," because the second you cross an imaginary line of trust, they will break it. Period.
Also, seriously, 90% of kids probably don't like their teachers. Making a MySpace site takes 20 minutes. They won't understand the consequences - they'll have some misguided view about "Free speech = no repercussions" (like half of Slashdot) - and the damage is done. Even the best kids will do this with a tiny dash of peer pressure.
But my question is: where is the intermediary step here? Where is the "threaten to sue"? Can't the teacher just call the parents, tell them what happened, and let them handle it? The problem with easy litigiousness is the 0-to-60 aspect of it. There's no gray area. And *that* is why you can sit there so smugly and talk about parental responsibility, instead of us having a real debate over what kind of punishment might be appropriate for this.
Consider the 1950s alternative: graffiti of the "stupid teacher" on the brick wall outside. Punishment? You clean it up. Not you lose $1.1 million.
At this point in time (2006) there is much, much more valuable content in "book" format than digital format. That is why your librarian friend is complaining about the Internet - in 10 years, that might not be the case. But at this moment in time, if you took the sum weight of all information contained in a digital format right now, it would be dwarfed by the amount of information contained in dead tree format. And *that* is why the library is not dead, and most likely will not die for quite some time. Even if eventually every piece of paper does get digitized, the librarian will be there to store it, organize it, and retrieve it on demand.
As a subset of this argument, I have an obvious bias towards printed books, too, but for a different reason: supply and demand.
Books are essentially driven by demand. Researchers and authors looked for fields that were in need of good research, did the research, and sold their results to the highest bidding publisher. On-demand printing has reduced this, but the model for books is essentially
1. Someone demands information. 2. An author provides it.
The Internet, on the other hand, is right now being driven by supply. And because of this, the content on the Internet has neither the sharp focus nor the strong background that most books do in terms of content.
Perhaps in the future this will change - I have the utmost confidence it will. But walk into any public library tomorrow, and you will have within your grasp a much higher quality set of information than the near whole of the Internet. You can't just say, "Well, we've invented digital, books are dead" and rest on your laurels. You have to also convert all the books into digital. That's a task that is still slow in the making (the copyright issues themselves are only just now taking fold.) Google has barely scratched the surface of digitizing available library material, and they've got billions of dollars.
In short: don't go fast-forwarding all of our digital accomplishments just yet.
If you mean competitors among OSes (ie Apple and Red Hat), then no, it's not.
But their competitors in other fields - antivirus (McAffee, Symantec, Norton), accounting (Quicken), PDF and presentation tools (Adobe) - greatly benefit from the limitations placed on Windows by antitrust settlements. Since Microsoft can't use their OS monopoly to further other monopolies, they have to compete on a much more level playing field with others to sell their software. So to those companies, MS's OS monopoly is actually a win-win: They have a dominant platform to build their own software towards, and they don't have to worry about competing with built-in software.
A lot of monitors go for the widescreen HD look (a very reasonable choice), but I have always wondered why nobody sells a good mounting system for 2 monitors on a vertical axis ("stacked" one atop the other.)
Vertical space is horribly underutilized. If I could stack 2 monitors on top of each other, I would use the space up top for viewing, and the space below for "working." I'm not sure how useful this would be to everybody in every market, but for me, it'd be great (doing web application development and support.)
Anyway, my two cents, I wonder if anybody else out there has this idea, or can tell me why this would be a bad idea.
Clearly by "created" he meant "made the term 'open source' what it is today." But you know, that's cool, be obtuse, be deliberately ignorant. That's awesome, you'll clearly be a hoot at parties.
Go get out a ruler and look at the distance 1mm. Now tell me how you're going to consistently get the RFID chip up to the receiver that close without constantly banging them against each other.
The original parent is right. Even a distance of 1cm would be okay (if a bit weird), but 1mm is just pointless *And* being wireless, less secure.
It is prudent to remember in the case of bookstores that they buy the copies wholesale from the publisher. At that point they are the bookstore's property to do with as they wish - obviously, most of them choose to let you browse the product.
But the publishers aren't selling them "in stores" a la consignment. They are selling them *to* the stores. They've already made their money, and are no longer part of the equation.
Libraries are a bit trickier, but for the most part they buy their books, too, and so again, what is their complaint? One particular copy can cycle itself through the system as much as possible.
The issue here is that Google has not bought these books, and even if they had, are they allowed to make a digital copy available (such that infinite copies can be made.) The first issue is easy - Google ought to pay these publishers either a licensing fee or some one-time fee to display their product freely. And Google ought to do that as goodwill, because they are essentially acting as a bookstore, but on consignment instead - which is where the legal ambiguity steps in. If Google acted more as your typical brick and mortar bookstore, this wouldn't be an issue at all.
The Guy Who Makes You Funny: Man, did you read that? The Guy Who Does Your Math: Yes, what terrible logic! Funny: Logic? Well, of course it's not logical, it's a j- Math: Shh! I am working out how to explain the logical flaw of "social networking" to this yokel. Funny: What? You're going to "explain" it. Dude, he knows it's a joke. That's the whole point of jokes, people do them on purpose. Math: Preposterous. He's not joking, he's clearly an imbecile who thinks that people's networks are exponential in nature, when really they're not. Funny: Wait, wait. I get it. You're joking with me. Math (having just hit submit): Yes. A joke. Funny (chuckling): Whew! You had me going there, I thought - you know - maybe you were really going to try to prove a point, and we just don't need to show we're unfun-HOLY SHIT YOU ACTUALLY SUBMITTED A POST HOW COULD YOU?
The ideal search engine would be just like Google, but have one more aspect: real-time fuzzy sliding algorithms.
These sliders could control all kinds of variables: whether you're shopping or not, whether you want local results or not, are you looking for more academic sites or more personal sites, more historical data or more current data, etc. And they need to work seamlessly and on the fly.
Google used to have something like this in their Labs, but I don't think they do anymore.
In any case, the grandparent's point is simple: query syntax is for chumps. Give me a search engine where I can do the same thing as query syntax, but without having to learn query syntax. Give me a search engine that can take what I search for, then ask me a quick question or two about what I want, then throw out the things that don't apply.
How hard would it be for Google to just keep a list of things people buy, and when you search for those, have a link at the top that says, "I am interested in buying digital cameras" or "I am not interested in buying digital cameras" and you click one and the results re-filter on the fly?
The answer: not hard. But Google is just a big ubiquitous monster of a search engine. They just don't try to help you out. Period. Someone else will, someday, and that'll be great. Google is great, too, but they're not the answer. Not yet.
Slashdot Mirror
You forgot the other advantage of e-voting (the one lurking in the corner):
2) Possible voting over the Internet.
This could make voting extremely convenient. Of course this opens a whole new can of worms about security, one voter, one vote, etc etc, but the point remains that e-voting also has the advantage of removing the vote from time and place concerns - things which *do* effect actual voters on voting days (witness the long lines in Ohio in '04.)
In America, candidates can't buy votes, and voters can't sell their votes. Some guy recently tried this on eBay. It's not only a felony (ie can't vote any more in a lot of states), but it gets you up to 5 years in jail. Candidates can't even give out cigarettes to homeless people just to *go* to the voting booth (much less tell them how to vote.) Vote buying happens, no doubt, but it is illegal, and don't you think it'd be hard to reach out to any group larger than 1 without the FEC breathing down your neck?
...
Your boss can't fire you for refusing to disclose your VoterID number. This would be grounds for a great lawsuit. He can fire you for your political beliefs, but he has to show that they are related to the job at hand. So if you're a tax lawyer in favor of the estate tax - maybe. Otherwise
The third scenario has an easy fix: give voters a deadline to complain. Just timestamp their vote, give them 12 hours to go home and verify their vote. If within 12 hours they haven't hit the "INCORRECT" button on the website (or called the voting office / did whatever is necessary to complain) they lose their right to complain.
I'm not necessarily in favor of the VoterID scenario (it has a lot of ambiguity.)
Well, there are, of course, a lot of different ways to approach this.
...
From the individual's standpoint, as pervasive as conglomerate media can be, it's fairly easy to just tune out and do your own thing. In fact, this path is so easy that it is, unsurprisingly, the most popular option. And it's easy because it's empowering - it often reveals the emperor has no clothes.
From the collective's standpoint, conglomerate media still kowtows to the almighty dollar, and it can be exploited as necessary. The major advantage to this is (verging on irony) is that many of the quote unquote liberal views of the day - the green economy and environmental sustainability, better education and better schools, and more federal support for programs like stem cell research and Medicare - are actually more econonomically viable than their alternatives. So when Google can push out a solar-powered campus and say, "This is good for the environment *and* the bottom line," then the money-focused mainstream media starts touting this as part of the central tenet: greed is good. If you can tie on socially desirable benefits to greed, so much the better.
So there really is no guiding the dollar, because it is entirely based on an economy of scale that can't really be guided by anything short of toppling 2 towers in New York City on a Tuesday. So the issue isn't that you have to convince the the other side that you're right - there's no Parliamentary function at hand in America's future (our levels of Congressional approval are more implicit signs of mistrust rather than the effects of recent scandals) - but you must in fact *be* right. And if you are right, the bottom line will bear you out.
This also explains a lot of America's success - the market intuitively and instinctively moves towards the best ideas for making money. This allows us to be more risk-takers, and our overall economic success is pretty much a function of the risks taken by all Americans throughout history. It's why Americans seem so cocky - there's a whole lineage of success behind us. And the price for that is, simply put, corporate hegemony - but when you're part of the corporation, you're less likely to complain.
I think one of the real challenges for both our countries over the next century is to figure out how to "do business" with Asia, South America, and the developing nations of the world. This is probably where are two disparate approaches will differentiate themselves most clearly - and I don't doubt for a second that America will come out on top. At what price?
There's a fundamental difference between our countries.
Britain is dominated by state power. America is dominated by corporate power.
State power is at least somewhat grounded in the people, so varied opinions have their value, because the chief parties can acquire actual power through persuasion and viewpoints.
Corporate power is entirely guided by money. Acquiring more money means no varied opinions - it means one central opinion.
Because of this fundamentally different end goals (and thus the different means needed to acquire them) American news is simply incomparable to British news. They aren't even the same creature.
The flip side to this is that America as a whole is the more economically successful of our two countries. That's cold comfort for most Americans, but that's the guiding spirit of pretty much all of America.
When you say they represent "no one", you mean that doctors don't represent their patents? And that associations like the AMA, ADA, ACS, etc represent no one? And yes, they present data to Congress. There is no political legitimacy without expert advice - it's why we also have an executive branch. Administration is just as important as proclamation.
I don't really understand why you are trying to limit legitimacy to the government - there are certainly a large number of informal "governments" which we attribute legitimacy to without the need for Congress (or even state legislatures, or school boards, or city councils.) What exactly constitutes the difference between a homeowner's association and a Chamber of Commerce and the AMA? In today's society, the simple act of information is at least as valuable as the conveyance of authority.
There was a police academy in Connecticut (?) that administered an intelligent test to its prospective students. Obviously if you scored too low you wouldn't be admitted, but if you scored too high, you also were rejected - on the premise that smart people would get bored as cops, and either a) turn corrupt, or b) quit too quickly, thereby wasting the academy's time. Somebody sued them and actually lost the case, too.
The moral: there are always other considerations.
And how exactly do you differentiate between the terms "creativity" and "intelligence"?
Hint: Any answer you give will expose a bias.
Uhh, "transferred" doesn't mean "sold"/"explained." In this case, you apply your information to please the woman. That's just another form of transference. And if she is the least bit aware of what's going on, she'll learn your techniques and sell them herself.
You must make your information public - either the source or results must be made known to someone else - in order to profit from it (in this case sexually, but hey, that's better than money for the most part.) And by making it public, you expose it to the risk of being stolen.
Trade secrets will inevitably become traded secrets.
The only reason this "give it away" model works is because he isn't giving anything at all away. You can't give away information, you can only share it.
This same model wouldn't work with food, for example, because I can't give you an apple, let you eat it, and then let you decide if you want to pay for it or not. Everybody would simply say they didn't like the apple and wouldn't pay for it. And then I'd not only be out the money, but also the apple.
Certainly some companies have some sunk costs in promotional copies (a coupon for 1 free apple), but otherwise they're on the "reputation" model - you buy it based on reptuation of the seller and the product.
But yes, ultimately, anybody trying to peddle information out there is going to have to move to a "try it for free, pay me if you like it" model, because information is only valuable when its transferred, and limiting transferability will kill off the demand for information.
You step in the booth. Each election / issue is brought up on a page all by itself. Each candidate / position is presented, along with a uniquely colored dot next to it. You click the position. In front of you, you hear a slight whirring sound.
....
A small ping pong ball floats up inside a glass enclosure. A tiny mechanical vice grips it to hold it in place.
A tiny nozzle on an actuator moves out next to it, and out bursts a small amount of paint. The ping pong ball is now colored in the same color dot as your choice.
You made a mistake? You hit the back button, and the mechanical vice crushes the ball into tiny pieces.
You do it again, another ping pong ball, another blast of color, you confirm, they tiny nozzle shoots some air on the ball to dry it, and it gets whisked away into a box marked for that election.
Now you've got something that is anonymous, transparent and voter-verified, visually unambiguous, able to be counted electronically *and* manually, and not easily subjected to tampering.
Now where to find all those ping pong balls
PS My serious position is that as long as there is a (voter-verified) paper trail, I have no problem with electronic voting. Count the votes, do some sample testing with the paper ballots, look for incongruity and if you find it, use the paper ballots as the final vote.
Define "get away with": EA has been posting reduced profits and slumping earnings reports since 2004.
6 6185.html
http://www.thestreet.com/tech/gamesandgadgets/102
I realize Slashdot isn't the highest bastion of journalistic standards and professionalism, but I don't think it's too much to have the editors ask themselves:
"Would CNN run this headline on their front page?"
I mean, the whole point of appealing to any sort of authority is the admission that there are conglomerates of expertise out there greater than your own. Having a headline like this not only diminishes spelling capabilities everywhere, it more importantly diminishes any sense of authority Slashdot has.
Ultimately, I think Slashdot (and indeed, any site where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts) has a responsbility to avoid this kind of thing - especially in headlines. It really does just highlight the difference bewteen this site and other news sites. It's not that I've never said the word "Pwned" out loud (try it, it's fun!), but I would never put that word in an essay for school or on a job application. Different fora demand different standards.
It's hard to believe this is getting modded insightful. How exactly is "contributing to a problem" not the same as "being part of the problem"? How can a problem only be defined as the quantitative success or lack there of of a single interpersonal relationship? When the relationship *itself* is defined by external factors?
Are you kidding me?
Your relationship doesn't exist in some sort of ahistorical vacuum. Your job affects your relationship, your relationship affects your job. The same for your health, your mood, your ego, your kids, and your sanity. These are not one way streets.
"Everything starts with you." What the hell kind of pop psychology is that? You cannot separate the "you" from the aspects of your life like your job and your health. In fact, it is the totality of "you" that can be divided into the components that "contribute to problems." IE, your problems are the sum of the problems in the different aspects of your life. And they are so intertwined as to be impossible to sort out.
And more importantly, with OSS (or, indeed, any quote unquote free product), it is the "support" side that will entirely carry your business to success.
Listening to your customers, updating constantly, being flexible, being openminded, and never resting on your laurels - those things will generate "sales" and increased business revenue more than anything. Consider the converse: nothing is more frustrating than abandonware, because all of its limitations are frozen in place.
Just so we're clear, those classes are only for employment. For example, for federal housing laws, "family status", "marital status", and "avenue of income" are also protected classes - so you can't be denied housing because you're divorced, or because you have an annuity and don't work a job for a living.
With regards to this conversation, most states consider "sexual orientation" a protected class for housing. The few that don't are, needless to say, primarily the Western "cowboy states."
Hilarious. Your lack of children was made obvious when you started talking about "ideal worlds." Kids are not rational; they simply don't understand cause and effect like adults do (many adults don't, either.) So you can never say, "Oh, this is the appropriate level of responsibility," because the second you cross an imaginary line of trust, they will break it. Period.
Also, seriously, 90% of kids probably don't like their teachers. Making a MySpace site takes 20 minutes. They won't understand the consequences - they'll have some misguided view about "Free speech = no repercussions" (like half of Slashdot) - and the damage is done. Even the best kids will do this with a tiny dash of peer pressure.
But my question is: where is the intermediary step here? Where is the "threaten to sue"? Can't the teacher just call the parents, tell them what happened, and let them handle it? The problem with easy litigiousness is the 0-to-60 aspect of it. There's no gray area. And *that* is why you can sit there so smugly and talk about parental responsibility, instead of us having a real debate over what kind of punishment might be appropriate for this.
Consider the 1950s alternative: graffiti of the "stupid teacher" on the brick wall outside. Punishment? You clean it up. Not you lose $1.1 million.
At this point in time (2006) there is much, much more valuable content in "book" format than digital format. That is why your librarian friend is complaining about the Internet - in 10 years, that might not be the case. But at this moment in time, if you took the sum weight of all information contained in a digital format right now, it would be dwarfed by the amount of information contained in dead tree format. And *that* is why the library is not dead, and most likely will not die for quite some time. Even if eventually every piece of paper does get digitized, the librarian will be there to store it, organize it, and retrieve it on demand.
As a subset of this argument, I have an obvious bias towards printed books, too, but for a different reason: supply and demand.
Books are essentially driven by demand. Researchers and authors looked for fields that were in need of good research, did the research, and sold their results to the highest bidding publisher. On-demand printing has reduced this, but the model for books is essentially
1. Someone demands information.
2. An author provides it.
The Internet, on the other hand, is right now being driven by supply. And because of this, the content on the Internet has neither the sharp focus nor the strong background that most books do in terms of content.
Perhaps in the future this will change - I have the utmost confidence it will. But walk into any public library tomorrow, and you will have within your grasp a much higher quality set of information than the near whole of the Internet. You can't just say, "Well, we've invented digital, books are dead" and rest on your laurels. You have to also convert all the books into digital. That's a task that is still slow in the making (the copyright issues themselves are only just now taking fold.) Google has barely scratched the surface of digitizing available library material, and they've got billions of dollars.
In short: don't go fast-forwarding all of our digital accomplishments just yet.
That depends on how you define competitors.
If you mean competitors among OSes (ie Apple and Red Hat), then no, it's not.
But their competitors in other fields - antivirus (McAffee, Symantec, Norton), accounting (Quicken), PDF and presentation tools (Adobe) - greatly benefit from the limitations placed on Windows by antitrust settlements. Since Microsoft can't use their OS monopoly to further other monopolies, they have to compete on a much more level playing field with others to sell their software. So to those companies, MS's OS monopoly is actually a win-win: They have a dominant platform to build their own software towards, and they don't have to worry about competing with built-in software.
A lot of monitors go for the widescreen HD look (a very reasonable choice), but I have always wondered why nobody sells a good mounting system for 2 monitors on a vertical axis ("stacked" one atop the other.)
Vertical space is horribly underutilized. If I could stack 2 monitors on top of each other, I would use the space up top for viewing, and the space below for "working." I'm not sure how useful this would be to everybody in every market, but for me, it'd be great (doing web application development and support.)
Anyway, my two cents, I wonder if anybody else out there has this idea, or can tell me why this would be a bad idea.
And just so we're clear, the issue is not with Microsoft providing a PDF creator / editor tool, it's with them bundling it with Office.
Clearly by "created" he meant "made the term 'open source' what it is today." But you know, that's cool, be obtuse, be deliberately ignorant. That's awesome, you'll clearly be a hoot at parties.
Go get out a ruler and look at the distance 1mm. Now tell me how you're going to consistently get the RFID chip up to the receiver that close without constantly banging them against each other.
The original parent is right. Even a distance of 1cm would be okay (if a bit weird), but 1mm is just pointless *And* being wireless, less secure.
It is prudent to remember in the case of bookstores that they buy the copies wholesale from the publisher. At that point they are the bookstore's property to do with as they wish - obviously, most of them choose to let you browse the product.
But the publishers aren't selling them "in stores" a la consignment. They are selling them *to* the stores. They've already made their money, and are no longer part of the equation.
Libraries are a bit trickier, but for the most part they buy their books, too, and so again, what is their complaint? One particular copy can cycle itself through the system as much as possible.
The issue here is that Google has not bought these books, and even if they had, are they allowed to make a digital copy available (such that infinite copies can be made.) The first issue is easy - Google ought to pay these publishers either a licensing fee or some one-time fee to display their product freely. And Google ought to do that as goodwill, because they are essentially acting as a bookstore, but on consignment instead - which is where the legal ambiguity steps in. If Google acted more as your typical brick and mortar bookstore, this wouldn't be an issue at all.
An Imagined Conversation Inside Your Head
The Guy Who Makes You Funny: Man, did you read that?
The Guy Who Does Your Math: Yes, what terrible logic!
Funny: Logic? Well, of course it's not logical, it's a j-
Math: Shh! I am working out how to explain the logical flaw of "social networking" to this yokel.
Funny: What? You're going to "explain" it. Dude, he knows it's a joke. That's the whole point of jokes, people do them on purpose.
Math: Preposterous. He's not joking, he's clearly an imbecile who thinks that people's networks are exponential in nature, when really they're not.
Funny: Wait, wait. I get it. You're joking with me.
Math (having just hit submit): Yes. A joke.
Funny (chuckling): Whew! You had me going there, I thought - you know - maybe you were really going to try to prove a point, and we just don't need to show we're unfun-HOLY SHIT YOU ACTUALLY SUBMITTED A POST HOW COULD YOU?
(Pause.)
Funny: We are *never* going to get laid.
The ideal search engine would be just like Google, but have one more aspect: real-time fuzzy sliding algorithms.
These sliders could control all kinds of variables: whether you're shopping or not, whether you want local results or not, are you looking for more academic sites or more personal sites, more historical data or more current data, etc. And they need to work seamlessly and on the fly.
Google used to have something like this in their Labs, but I don't think they do anymore.
In any case, the grandparent's point is simple: query syntax is for chumps. Give me a search engine where I can do the same thing as query syntax, but without having to learn query syntax. Give me a search engine that can take what I search for, then ask me a quick question or two about what I want, then throw out the things that don't apply.
How hard would it be for Google to just keep a list of things people buy, and when you search for those, have a link at the top that says, "I am interested in buying digital cameras" or "I am not interested in buying digital cameras" and you click one and the results re-filter on the fly?
The answer: not hard. But Google is just a big ubiquitous monster of a search engine. They just don't try to help you out. Period. Someone else will, someday, and that'll be great. Google is great, too, but they're not the answer. Not yet.