It has little to do with working better and more to do with people not having to pay for stuff and little chance of getting caught or punished. Copyright laws may be flawed, but they are not completely unjust. The people who use things without paying their fair share are the unjust ones...not rebels against an unfair law.
yeah right. piracy is always about getting shit for free. we are all a bunch of cheap bastards who steal things, end of discussion.
pirated copies are always a superior product because you can do whatever you want with them. the media market has failed consistently to deliver a product that is on par with that which is available on bit torrent. i never have to worry if a file will play in my media player. i never have to worry that i can't make a CD or DVD. i never have to worry that my backup copies will not work if they don't talk to the mothership on a regular basis. i never have to worry that my new laptop will take me over the arbitrary number of computers that are permitted to play/watch/listen to a given file.
also, pirated copies are more plentiful. i have torrented stuff that isn't available in a store, on itunes, or anywhere else. how in the world are you going to digitize everything that was ever made and make it easily searchable and quickly downloaded? there is no way a company could do that profitably even if the licensing and permissions problem was handled. it has to be done by volunteers who to donate time, bandwidth, and indexing effort because that is the only way that works.
I find it a bit ironic you trust pirates of all people to deliver you a product free of root kits and trojans.
you're goddamn right i trust pirates more than media conglomerates. piracy is a meritocracy. only the good stuff gets seeded and the bad stuff dies on the vine. viruses, rootkits, spam, and other bullshit just fades into oblivion because no one will seed it. there is plenty of transparency in piracy (just read the comments for the torrent before you download it) and there is no transparency at all with media corporations.
also, piracy has more longevity than anything else. how many people bought yahoo music and got screwed with yahoo shut down it's DRM servers? MS did the same thing. what happens when amazon pulls the plug on it's ebooks or apple terminates your itunes authorizations? on the piracy side, shutting down sites and services only makes the system more fault tolerant. the only way to be sure that your media files will always be available is to pirate them.
so you can waste your breath railing away against piracy, but it cannot be stopped. you can declare it wrong, or call it stealing, or say it funds terrorism or whatever but stopping it is impossible. all the DRM in the world can't stop it. all the laws in the world can't put an end to it. unless you are willing to go house to house and shoot people, there is no way to prevent it.
I always disliked the car analogy, because as you stated, cars have a single use.
yes the car does one thing, and it's had years to perfect doing it. any engineer will tell you that if you design a machine to do several things at once, it will be far more prone to malfunction and harder to maintain than a single purpose machine. this is not to say that the PC is a flawed design; it's to say that "mainstream users" don't understand that the PC is a machine with no clearly defined function or purpose and that it should be treated as such.
if i built a factory to make anything on a moment's notice, using the manufacturing equivalent of lego blocks, conventional wisdom would say that i had lost my mind. yet that is what the PC does... either with windows, or mac os, or linux. it does "anything" by using software, the computing equivalent of lego blocks.
though as Ubuntu touts the phrase "it just works" is that not the idea?
nothing "just works". compared to earlier v windows doesn't, macs don't, nothing does. it's up there with "the check is in the mail" and "i won't cum in your mouth" as some of the greatest lies ever told to unwitting suckers. we all know this because we all know computers, but for some reason linux gets held to a higher standard because it requires "ordinary" people to learn something new instead of tolerating something that's been wrong for years. some how, learning how to edit a text file or type a command in a window is heinous compared to removing (or pating someone to remove) spyware and viruses, or buying additional software to make your machine useful.
and when i say "edit a text file" or "type a command in a window" i really mean, "use google to find what you need and copy and paste it in the appropriate place" it's most heinous, egregious even. why would i do something so onerous when i can just reinstall windows every 6 months, or manually navigate the morass that is the windows registry, or just buy another suite of tools to protect me from the security flaws inherent in the first suite of tools i bought?
does more progress need to be made in linux? absolutely. but the unwashed computing masses need to step up and learn a thing or two as well. they need to learn that the "accepted way" of doing things is no longer acceptable, and that there are worse things in the world than the command line, like treacherous computing, loss of privacy, and data corruption from system failures.
or better yet, cars that work together to avoid gridlock, as in, all the cars within a mile or so of each other adjust speed and following distance and coordinate lane changes in advance of the obstruction. while overall speed may have to reduce, all the cars flow through the obstruction smoothly and with no fender benders.
if a car breaks down, it transmits the "obstruction" signal so that approaching cars know to move around it. like a radio frequency hazard light that you can "see" for a couple of miles.
People in the west die of crazy shit all the time.
well, for every asian that we hear about dying in a cafe, there are 5 rednecks in the US that die from doing something stupid while drinking (hunting, driving, setting shit on fire, running from the cops). in fact, doing something stupid and nearly killing yourself seems like the national past time.
most people don't know anything about their cars other than how to drive them. most people don't want to know anything about their cars, other than how to drive them. people shouldn't have to know anything about their cars, other than how to drive them. however people have reasonable expectations about their cars. they don't expect them to do anything more than drive. they accept that cars have spare tires because car tires go flat sometimes. when their cars get a flat, they either fix the flat, or call someone to come fix it. they accept that cars need oil changes. when the time comes, they either change the oil themselves or take it somewhere to be changed.
all too often, people expect too much from computers when it comes to care and operation. you need to back your stuff up because sometimes things break. you need to take steps to protect yourself because sometimes people break things.
that is not the case with computers. people often fear them or put far too much trust in them.
if ubuntu or any linux project else were to focus solely on ease of use, to the exclusion of all else, people would complain about it for the same reasons that they complain about windows. they would say it's too buggy, there are too many wizards that malfunction, or something went nuts somewhere in the mix and i can't force it back to a default configuration. they would say it's too expensive or that new releases don't come out often enough. quite a few BSD types are ex-linux types for some of these reasons.
so, ubuntu and linux in general are making progress down to the level of the basic user. they are closer now than they have ever been. but they do so while trying to remain true to the qualities that make it preferable to the alternatives: stability, security, and hardware efficiency.
some old guy that doesn't want to change his computing habits doesn't like a product that changes his computing habits, and doesn't recommend it for others who are also reluctant to change... just like every "tech" columnist has for the last 10 years. i was so surprised when i read this that you could have knocked me over with a feather... i mean, dell *never* ships crappy software... otherwise bill gates would have to admit what a hunk of crap windows is... since the founder is always help accountable for the vendor's mistakes.
take that linux community! all that you have done is for naugh! so sayeth some old newspaper guy.
seriously, if you are a columnist who is supposed to act as the gatekeeper to new technologies for mainstream america and you can't make ubuntu work... then mainstream america needs a new gatekeeper.
you can't tell me that the secretary had no idea what business they were in.
when i lived in seattle, i worked for a startup company in the same building as 180 solutions. our offices were right across the hall from theirs. at the time i had no idea what they did, and i would run into their people in the hall from time to time, usually it was their receptionist. she was really cute and very outgoing, far too nice to be working for such a despicable company. when i learned what they did and saw the collective internet angst directed at them, i wonder if she quit before word got out about them and she got her tires slashed or whatever.
i am glad that i haven't had to make any career decisions that put me in such a position. when the dotcoms in seattle all went under, i was worried i would have to take contract work for microsoft and listen to my wallet rather than my personal politics. fortunately, such a situation never arose.
racial stereotypes are only mostly about bad stuff. it would be nice if people assumed that i was an awesome athlete with a big dick that was good at math and was successful lawyer. i would gladly change my name to shaquille takamura-steinburg.
i think i could live with people assuming that i was a bad driver of stolen cars that doesn't tip.
that's just agriculture as we know it today. that's just industry as we know it today. huge centralized operations are the most cost effective way to produce things based on the availability of cheap energy, current costs to access the transportation system, and the freedom to move large amounts of stuff anywhere at any time. change all of that, and suddenly you have to find a new way to do things and reduce your costs. real change doesn't take place without making real changes.
i think the problem is that the "family car" is purchased with the intent of driving the whole family around, but most of its use is by one of the parents and one or fewer children. therefore, two "family cars" are purchased by the average american family, yet they are used to transport 50% of the family that they were purchased for. the typical american suburbanite house has a two car garage designed around the idea that a suburban family with 2.3 children will require two "family cars".
no family is going to buy three cars (one for mom, one for dad, and one for the family) since most family budgets are based around two cars and there is the problem of getting the family fleet stored at night.
a possible solution would be to invent a 2 or 3 seater plug-in electric or plug-in hybrid with minimal excess storage space (no back seat and no trunk, just room for a briefcase/schoolbag for each passenger) that gets 100 miles on a nightly charge, that fits in half the parking space of a typical min-van/SUV and that is half the cost of a typical family sedan or minivan. you would need to perfect not just battery and electric motor technology, but also light weight materials and aerodynamic design.
with the tiny electric, mom and dad have their efficient "rides" to work and can chauffeur a kid or two around town or run errands, plus there is room in the garage and the family budget for a more conventional hybrid/flex-fuel/bio-diesel car for more traditional family use (vacations, shopping trips, etc.) where you need to travel a long distance, transport lots of people, or transport lots of stuff.
there are tons of problems with such a small vehicle: safety, comfort, status, and feasibility to name just a few. if you are going to gut the car that badly you might as well just sell electric scooters and start a marketing campaign about how "cool" they are. maybe make a movie where will smith fights aliens on one.
while this sounds great, the problem with revolutionizing residential travel with electrics is that it won't make much impact on fossil fuel consumption. most fossil fuel gets used by industry to haul our crap around the country or in industrialized agriculture to work millions of acres. there will always be a market for fuels of one kind or another for this reason.
if you really want to make an impact on fuel consumption, change the way industry and agriculture work so that its less economical to make or grow everything somewhere else and transport it to the people who will buy it.
Whatever happened to the recognition that stereotypes are usually wrong?
stereotypes are wrong about as often as they are right, we usually feel bad about applying them in either case.
the question i have is this: does a stereotype come about because the target group often engages in one or more of those behaviors, or does the target group engage in one or more of those behaviors because of the stereotype?
I guess I agree with all of what you said with the possible exception that we have to "wait in line behind women and minorities."
gays, like the women and minorities before them, will get equal standing from the government *long* before they get it from society at large. today, some 50 years after the civil rights stuff from the 60's, minorities have full equality from a government standpoint, but are still not equal to whites from a society standpoint. the same could be said about women. they are further along in the "social acceptance process" than gays are by a significant margin.
Gay people have always been around, just like women and minorities.
of course they have... but their movement is a few decades behind the civil rights movement and the women's movement. therefore, social and governmental acceptance for gays is going to lag behind that of women and minorities. they got to the party before you guys did, so it stands to reason that they will get their equality before you guys get yours.
give middle america a little credit... they accepted minorities, and eventually they will accept you too. hopefully the lessons learned by society from previous movements will help your cause achieve equality faster.
However, none of that means that we don't deserve legal and social equality right now. For that reason, it is completely justified to tell off someone who doesn't want the fact that I am gay "shoved in his face" even to the extent that casual discussion about his opposite-sex spouse shoves the fact that he is straight in my face. And until we have at least legal equality, anyone who seriously objects to a non-obscene bumper sticker advocating it is at least to that extent a homophobic bigot.
you fully deserve equality, and you fully deserve it now, but there are a lot of people that haven't yet warmed up to the existence of gays, let alone their rights or their culture.
i have no idea where that other guy stands on all this, but to the average straight person, saying "just don't thow it in my face" feels pretty progressive... and from where most straight people are sitting, that *is* progressive. i know it sounds like bigotry to you, but it's really just straight people embracing you to the extent that they are capable. other people are more capable, some are significantly less capable. give them enough time and most of them will embrace you completely.
i'm not telling you to stop doing what you are doing. i'm merely suggesting that you slow down a bit, appreciate just how far you've come already, and give the straight people some time to catch up:-)
alright, let me try again: society at large was fairly hostile towards homosexuality 20-30 years ago, now the general attitude would be somewhere between "not hostile" and "only somewhat threatened". it's not yet equality, but it's no longer hostility, so i'd call that progress. in time there will be more progress and some day you will be equal, tho you are probably going to have to wait in line behind women and minorities. nothing personal, it's just that they were there first.
not all straight people feel threatened by homosexuality. not all straight people want homosexuals to be treated differently. personally, bumper stickers and public displays of affection are fine by me and are fine for my kids. i know a few people who feel the same way, and a couple who are still in the "hostile" category.
By the way, "equal rights" means among other things that I am allowed to mention my boyfriend/partner/husband as casually as straight men are allowed to mention their girlfriend/fiance/wife.
while the "i don't care that you're gay just don't throw it in my face" attitude is very common among us breeders, bear in mind that it represents a significant amount of progress compared to the general attitude of straight society in the 80's, and that not every straight person feels that way.
My guess is you got a call from some other organization and got confused.
they are called organ procurement organizations and there are tons in the US. they get paid to locate, secure, and transport organs.
tissue donation (skin, bone, tendons, even teeth) can be done with less immediacy and can be stored in different ways. i think you can store frozen skin for a couple of years. i don't think you have to refrigerate bone at all.
with all of that said, organ and tissue donation may be done by non-profits, but there is a lot of money that changes hands in the process. the tissue bank i used manage IT for for was seeing record profits in 2006 due to rising demand for skin that went for a couple of thousand dollars per square centimeter for burn centers. one of the big consumers of skin were army hospitals patching people up from iraq.
I think the GP meant something completely separate, like a citizen-run WLAN (or something more efficient) which would wrap the world in a global mesh network.
i own the copyright on the term "pirate internet":-)
if you have a development deal, send me an internet! do it now, i probably won't get it until friday.
The "Internet" is protocols and servers and routers. But the problems you've describes are about the wire - and you'll have to use that same wire to connect to any other network, unless you want to spend a lot of money, anyway.
excellent point. very well said. whatever rivals the internet may have to transcend wires.
Well, I think it would be a lot easier to censor, a lot more vulnerable to pharming attacks, less resistant to inter-ISP squabbles where one decides to drop the other's packets, and you'd still have the problem that the "last mile" would be in the hands of either your local phone company or cable TV co, with all the problems that implies.
it's sad, but probably true. the two possible research projects i mentioned (the optimistic internet and the pessimistic internet) are responses to the two basic dooms-day scenarios for the internet. the "descent into gridlock and chaos" scenario is the preferred scare tactic of the filtering/capping/throttling crowd. the "TV with a buy button" scenario is the preferred propaganda tool of the innovation/free speech/privacy crowd. if there were sufficient competition in the market, both scenarios would be laughable. unfortunately there is no such competition, and neither side will be happy until they get what they want.
that means that either the control crowd (AT&T) wins, the internet becomes just like TV or radio (owned and controlled by corps and the govt.) and one or more darknets appear in protest, OR the freedom crowd (google) wins, the net returns to the good old days of 2001, and one or more parallel networks appear to deliver sanctioned content at speeds the internet only dreams of (like cable telephone service today). either way, new parallel nets have to be built to appease both camps.
the only real questions then become which camp will keep the name "internet", who will build "zie darknets", and what will the control camp call its darknets if it loses control of the legacy internet?
the third scenario, the "imaginary third pipe" dream (powerlines, muni-fiber, muni-wifi, high-speed mobile data) is another possibility, but i am not confident that a third entrant will appear any time soon. building a competitor to the internet takes the kind of motivation that only the need for vengeance can provide.
Reinventing the infrastructure is not going to solve the anti competitive nature plans of some large carriers, and at best it will only provide a feature that we already have.
i'm certainly quite skeptical of any research project with such a lofty goal, and the point of my post was to clarify what i took to be the parent post's idea of vendor lock in, which you identified (correctly so, in my opinion) as a business/implementation problem rather than a technical one. i am certainly not a nascent-japanese-rival-to-the-internet fanboy.
i know absolutely nothing about the japanese project that the article is about, but the idea of another, different global inter-network is not immediately invalid. this specific project may very well prove to be invalid, but in the abstract, the idea of such a research project is (at least in my opinion) interesting.
research into another global inter-network, using the lessons learned from previous implementations and focusing on current and emerging technologies that may not have been available when the internet itself was initially designed (or re-designed) might deliver a faster, more efficient, and/or more reliable inter-network. it might. it might also prove that the design of the internet today is the best that is technologically possible. that's the beauty of research projects.
from my very limited understanding of TCP/IP, routing, and the internet itself, i have gathered that the internet was designed from a sort of "worst case scenario" point of view. it is meant to tolerate and work around slow, unreliable, and possibly hostile links first, and to deliver bits quickly second. what would it be like if we designed the internet today, but with a more "optimistic" approach? i don't know if it would change anything, or if it's even possible, but it would cool to find out.
we have established that the commercial implementation of the internet is not always true to the technological "intent" of it's creators. what would the net be like if the technology behind it "understood" the tendency (maybe even the inevitability) of businesses to put profits ahead of service? i don't know if it would change anything, or if it's even possible, but it would be cool to find out.
but how are you going to access it? Unless someone feels like laying dedicated fiber across the Pacific, surely you'd end up accessing it via the Internet anyway? In which case, look for your local ISPs to traffic-shape and/or surcharge it to death before they let it become a viable competitor.
i have no idea how one would access it, which is why i, being the myopically self centered creature that i am, would not be impressed with the idea of an internet competitor unless it was accessible to me in the US.
perhaps what is needed (if indeed anything is needed at all) is not a new and separate internet, but a kind of ad-hoc inter-network of peers that is isolated and possibly insulated from the internet, like some sort of giant darknet. as for how one makes those networks accessible on a global scale, i don't know how that would work, but i think it would be freakin' awesome.
please explain how can we have any meaningful lock in on the internet, and (assuming this to be possible), please also explain how this would be bad.
i think the parent post is referring vendor lock-in, specifically provider lock in.
if you have no real choice in who provides your internet access you have take what they give you or choose to live without internet access. with all of the shenanigans (filtering, capping, throttling, etc.) that american telcos and cablecos have threatened to pull (or are actively pulling) thanks to the lack of competition in the residential broadband market, perhaps a non-american competitor to the internet as most americans know it is just what the doctor ordered.
with that said, if they really wanted to impress me they would make such a network accessible from the US.
There's not much that can be done with #2 until a law gets passed saying that the person paying for the Internet connection is responsible for $X of clean-up charges. Then people will have a financial incentive to look at more secure systems.
people do not take responsibility for their anything that involves computers. evar. people don't take responsibility for their actions on the computer (i did not delete it! the computer just ate it!), they don't take responsibility for the computer itself (how does all of this crap get on my computer?) and therefore will never ever take responsibility for their computer's actions. evar.
uhh, no, that would be me. i married my wife because her name was molly and i require that she wear sunglasses whenever she is in my presence (it was a compromise since surgical implantation is not yet feasible). my computer is names wintermute, my dog's name is boomzilla, and my daughters are named 1jane, 2jane, and 3jane.
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yeah right. piracy is always about getting shit for free. we are all a bunch of cheap bastards who steal things, end of discussion.
pirated copies are always a superior product because you can do whatever you want with them. the media market has failed consistently to deliver a product that is on par with that which is available on bit torrent. i never have to worry if a file will play in my media player. i never have to worry that i can't make a CD or DVD. i never have to worry that my backup copies will not work if they don't talk to the mothership on a regular basis. i never have to worry that my new laptop will take me over the arbitrary number of computers that are permitted to play/watch/listen to a given file.
also, pirated copies are more plentiful. i have torrented stuff that isn't available in a store, on itunes, or anywhere else. how in the world are you going to digitize everything that was ever made and make it easily searchable and quickly downloaded? there is no way a company could do that profitably even if the licensing and permissions problem was handled. it has to be done by volunteers who to donate time, bandwidth, and indexing effort because that is the only way that works.
I find it a bit ironic you trust pirates of all people to deliver you a product free of root kits and trojans.
you're goddamn right i trust pirates more than media conglomerates. piracy is a meritocracy. only the good stuff gets seeded and the bad stuff dies on the vine. viruses, rootkits, spam, and other bullshit just fades into oblivion because no one will seed it. there is plenty of transparency in piracy (just read the comments for the torrent before you download it) and there is no transparency at all with media corporations.
also, piracy has more longevity than anything else. how many people bought yahoo music and got screwed with yahoo shut down it's DRM servers? MS did the same thing. what happens when amazon pulls the plug on it's ebooks or apple terminates your itunes authorizations? on the piracy side, shutting down sites and services only makes the system more fault tolerant. the only way to be sure that your media files will always be available is to pirate them.
so you can waste your breath railing away against piracy, but it cannot be stopped. you can declare it wrong, or call it stealing, or say it funds terrorism or whatever but stopping it is impossible. all the DRM in the world can't stop it. all the laws in the world can't put an end to it. unless you are willing to go house to house and shoot people, there is no way to prevent it.
yes the car does one thing, and it's had years to perfect doing it. any engineer will tell you that if you design a machine to do several things at once, it will be far more prone to malfunction and harder to maintain than a single purpose machine. this is not to say that the PC is a flawed design; it's to say that "mainstream users" don't understand that the PC is a machine with no clearly defined function or purpose and that it should be treated as such.
if i built a factory to make anything on a moment's notice, using the manufacturing equivalent of lego blocks, conventional wisdom would say that i had lost my mind. yet that is what the PC does... either with windows, or mac os, or linux. it does "anything" by using software, the computing equivalent of lego blocks.
nothing "just works". compared to earlier v windows doesn't, macs don't, nothing does. it's up there with "the check is in the mail" and "i won't cum in your mouth" as some of the greatest lies ever told to unwitting suckers. we all know this because we all know computers, but for some reason linux gets held to a higher standard because it requires "ordinary" people to learn something new instead of tolerating something that's been wrong for years. some how, learning how to edit a text file or type a command in a window is heinous compared to removing (or pating someone to remove) spyware and viruses, or buying additional software to make your machine useful.
and when i say "edit a text file" or "type a command in a window" i really mean, "use google to find what you need and copy and paste it in the appropriate place" it's most heinous, egregious even. why would i do something so onerous when i can just reinstall windows every 6 months, or manually navigate the morass that is the windows registry, or just buy another suite of tools to protect me from the security flaws inherent in the first suite of tools i bought?
does more progress need to be made in linux? absolutely. but the unwashed computing masses need to step up and learn a thing or two as well. they need to learn that the "accepted way" of doing things is no longer acceptable, and that there are worse things in the world than the command line, like treacherous computing, loss of privacy, and data corruption from system failures.
or better yet, cars that work together to avoid gridlock, as in, all the cars within a mile or so of each other adjust speed and following distance and coordinate lane changes in advance of the obstruction. while overall speed may have to reduce, all the cars flow through the obstruction smoothly and with no fender benders.
if a car breaks down, it transmits the "obstruction" signal so that approaching cars know to move around it. like a radio frequency hazard light that you can "see" for a couple of miles.
well, for every asian that we hear about dying in a cafe, there are 5 rednecks in the US that die from doing something stupid while drinking (hunting, driving, setting shit on fire, running from the cops). in fact, doing something stupid and nearly killing yourself seems like the national past time.
me too. i just don't want to.
bad car analogy time:
most people don't know anything about their cars other than how to drive them. most people don't want to know anything about their cars, other than how to drive them. people shouldn't have to know anything about their cars, other than how to drive them. however people have reasonable expectations about their cars. they don't expect them to do anything more than drive. they accept that cars have spare tires because car tires go flat sometimes. when their cars get a flat, they either fix the flat, or call someone to come fix it. they accept that cars need oil changes. when the time comes, they either change the oil themselves or take it somewhere to be changed.
all too often, people expect too much from computers when it comes to care and operation. you need to back your stuff up because sometimes things break. you need to take steps to protect yourself because sometimes people break things.
that is not the case with computers. people often fear them or put far too much trust in them.
if ubuntu or any linux project else were to focus solely on ease of use, to the exclusion of all else, people would complain about it for the same reasons that they complain about windows. they would say it's too buggy, there are too many wizards that malfunction, or something went nuts somewhere in the mix and i can't force it back to a default configuration. they would say it's too expensive or that new releases don't come out often enough. quite a few BSD types are ex-linux types for some of these reasons.
so, ubuntu and linux in general are making progress down to the level of the basic user. they are closer now than they have ever been. but they do so while trying to remain true to the qualities that make it preferable to the alternatives: stability, security, and hardware efficiency.
some old guy that doesn't want to change his computing habits doesn't like a product that changes his computing habits, and doesn't recommend it for others who are also reluctant to change... just like every "tech" columnist has for the last 10 years. i was so surprised when i read this that you could have knocked me over with a feather... i mean, dell *never* ships crappy software... otherwise bill gates would have to admit what a hunk of crap windows is... since the founder is always help accountable for the vendor's mistakes.
take that linux community! all that you have done is for naugh! so sayeth some old newspaper guy.
seriously, if you are a columnist who is supposed to act as the gatekeeper to new technologies for mainstream america and you can't make ubuntu work... then mainstream america needs a new gatekeeper.
when i lived in seattle, i worked for a startup company in the same building as 180 solutions. our offices were right across the hall from theirs. at the time i had no idea what they did, and i would run into their people in the hall from time to time, usually it was their receptionist. she was really cute and very outgoing, far too nice to be working for such a despicable company. when i learned what they did and saw the collective internet angst directed at them, i wonder if she quit before word got out about them and she got her tires slashed or whatever.
i am glad that i haven't had to make any career decisions that put me in such a position. when the dotcoms in seattle all went under, i was worried i would have to take contract work for microsoft and listen to my wallet rather than my personal politics. fortunately, such a situation never arose.
racial stereotypes are only mostly about bad stuff. it would be nice if people assumed that i was an awesome athlete with a big dick that was good at math and was successful lawyer. i would gladly change my name to shaquille takamura-steinburg.
i think i could live with people assuming that i was a bad driver of stolen cars that doesn't tip.
that's just agriculture as we know it today. that's just industry as we know it today. huge centralized operations are the most cost effective way to produce things based on the availability of cheap energy, current costs to access the transportation system, and the freedom to move large amounts of stuff anywhere at any time. change all of that, and suddenly you have to find a new way to do things and reduce your costs. real change doesn't take place without making real changes.
i think the problem is that the "family car" is purchased with the intent of driving the whole family around, but most of its use is by one of the parents and one or fewer children. therefore, two "family cars" are purchased by the average american family, yet they are used to transport 50% of the family that they were purchased for. the typical american suburbanite house has a two car garage designed around the idea that a suburban family with 2.3 children will require two "family cars".
no family is going to buy three cars (one for mom, one for dad, and one for the family) since most family budgets are based around two cars and there is the problem of getting the family fleet stored at night.
a possible solution would be to invent a 2 or 3 seater plug-in electric or plug-in hybrid with minimal excess storage space (no back seat and no trunk, just room for a briefcase/schoolbag for each passenger) that gets 100 miles on a nightly charge, that fits in half the parking space of a typical min-van/SUV and that is half the cost of a typical family sedan or minivan. you would need to perfect not just battery and electric motor technology, but also light weight materials and aerodynamic design.
with the tiny electric, mom and dad have their efficient "rides" to work and can chauffeur a kid or two around town or run errands, plus there is room in the garage and the family budget for a more conventional hybrid/flex-fuel/bio-diesel car for more traditional family use (vacations, shopping trips, etc.) where you need to travel a long distance, transport lots of people, or transport lots of stuff.
there are tons of problems with such a small vehicle: safety, comfort, status, and feasibility to name just a few. if you are going to gut the car that badly you might as well just sell electric scooters and start a marketing campaign about how "cool" they are. maybe make a movie where will smith fights aliens on one.
while this sounds great, the problem with revolutionizing residential travel with electrics is that it won't make much impact on fossil fuel consumption. most fossil fuel gets used by industry to haul our crap around the country or in industrialized agriculture to work millions of acres. there will always be a market for fuels of one kind or another for this reason.
if you really want to make an impact on fuel consumption, change the way industry and agriculture work so that its less economical to make or grow everything somewhere else and transport it to the people who will buy it.
stereotypes are wrong about as often as they are right, we usually feel bad about applying them in either case.
the question i have is this: does a stereotype come about because the target group often engages in one or more of those behaviors, or does the target group engage in one or more of those behaviors because of the stereotype?
it's a copy paste job:
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http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/2/13/8422/1665
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=159323&thresh
gays, like the women and minorities before them, will get equal standing from the government *long* before they get it from society at large. today, some 50 years after the civil rights stuff from the 60's, minorities have full equality from a government standpoint, but are still not equal to whites from a society standpoint. the same could be said about women. they are further along in the "social acceptance process" than gays are by a significant margin.
of course they have... but their movement is a few decades behind the civil rights movement and the women's movement. therefore, social and governmental acceptance for gays is going to lag behind that of women and minorities. they got to the party before you guys did, so it stands to reason that they will get their equality before you guys get yours.
give middle america a little credit... they accepted minorities, and eventually they will accept you too. hopefully the lessons learned by society from previous movements will help your cause achieve equality faster.
you fully deserve equality, and you fully deserve it now, but there are a lot of people that haven't yet warmed up to the existence of gays, let alone their rights or their culture.
i have no idea where that other guy stands on all this, but to the average straight person, saying "just don't thow it in my face" feels pretty progressive... and from where most straight people are sitting, that *is* progressive. i know it sounds like bigotry to you, but it's really just straight people embracing you to the extent that they are capable. other people are more capable, some are significantly less capable. give them enough time and most of them will embrace you completely.
i'm not telling you to stop doing what you are doing. i'm merely suggesting that you slow down a bit, appreciate just how far you've come already, and give the straight people some time to catch up :-)
alright, let me try again: society at large was fairly hostile towards homosexuality 20-30 years ago, now the general attitude would be somewhere between "not hostile" and "only somewhat threatened". it's not yet equality, but it's no longer hostility, so i'd call that progress. in time there will be more progress and some day you will be equal, tho you are probably going to have to wait in line behind women and minorities. nothing personal, it's just that they were there first.
not all straight people feel threatened by homosexuality. not all straight people want homosexuals to be treated differently. personally, bumper stickers and public displays of affection are fine by me and are fine for my kids. i know a few people who feel the same way, and a couple who are still in the "hostile" category.
while the "i don't care that you're gay just don't throw it in my face" attitude is very common among us breeders, bear in mind that it represents a significant amount of progress compared to the general attitude of straight society in the 80's, and that not every straight person feels that way.
they are called organ procurement organizations and there are tons in the US. they get paid to locate, secure, and transport organs.
tissue donation (skin, bone, tendons, even teeth) can be done with less immediacy and can be stored in different ways. i think you can store frozen skin for a couple of years. i don't think you have to refrigerate bone at all.
with all of that said, organ and tissue donation may be done by non-profits, but there is a lot of money that changes hands in the process. the tissue bank i used manage IT for for was seeing record profits in 2006 due to rising demand for skin that went for a couple of thousand dollars per square centimeter for burn centers. one of the big consumers of skin were army hospitals patching people up from iraq.
i own the copyright on the term "pirate internet" :-)
if you have a development deal, send me an internet! do it now, i probably won't get it until friday.
excellent point. very well said. whatever rivals the internet may have to transcend wires.
it's sad, but probably true. the two possible research projects i mentioned (the optimistic internet and the pessimistic internet) are responses to the two basic dooms-day scenarios for the internet. the "descent into gridlock and chaos" scenario is the preferred scare tactic of the filtering/capping/throttling crowd. the "TV with a buy button" scenario is the preferred propaganda tool of the innovation/free speech/privacy crowd. if there were sufficient competition in the market, both scenarios would be laughable. unfortunately there is no such competition, and neither side will be happy until they get what they want.
that means that either the control crowd (AT&T) wins, the internet becomes just like TV or radio (owned and controlled by corps and the govt.) and one or more darknets appear in protest, OR the freedom crowd (google) wins, the net returns to the good old days of 2001, and one or more parallel networks appear to deliver sanctioned content at speeds the internet only dreams of (like cable telephone service today). either way, new parallel nets have to be built to appease both camps.
the only real questions then become which camp will keep the name "internet", who will build "zie darknets", and what will the control camp call its darknets if it loses control of the legacy internet?
the third scenario, the "imaginary third pipe" dream (powerlines, muni-fiber, muni-wifi, high-speed mobile data) is another possibility, but i am not confident that a third entrant will appear any time soon. building a competitor to the internet takes the kind of motivation that only the need for vengeance can provide.
i'm certainly quite skeptical of any research project with such a lofty goal, and the point of my post was to clarify what i took to be the parent post's idea of vendor lock in, which you identified (correctly so, in my opinion) as a business/implementation problem rather than a technical one. i am certainly not a nascent-japanese-rival-to-the-internet fanboy.
i know absolutely nothing about the japanese project that the article is about, but the idea of another, different global inter-network is not immediately invalid. this specific project may very well prove to be invalid, but in the abstract, the idea of such a research project is (at least in my opinion) interesting.
research into another global inter-network, using the lessons learned from previous implementations and focusing on current and emerging technologies that may not have been available when the internet itself was initially designed (or re-designed) might deliver a faster, more efficient, and/or more reliable inter-network. it might. it might also prove that the design of the internet today is the best that is technologically possible. that's the beauty of research projects.
from my very limited understanding of TCP/IP, routing, and the internet itself, i have gathered that the internet was designed from a sort of "worst case scenario" point of view. it is meant to tolerate and work around slow, unreliable, and possibly hostile links first, and to deliver bits quickly second. what would it be like if we designed the internet today, but with a more "optimistic" approach? i don't know if it would change anything, or if it's even possible, but it would cool to find out.
we have established that the commercial implementation of the internet is not always true to the technological "intent" of it's creators. what would the net be like if the technology behind it "understood" the tendency (maybe even the inevitability) of businesses to put profits ahead of service? i don't know if it would change anything, or if it's even possible, but it would be cool to find out.
i have no idea how one would access it, which is why i, being the myopically self centered creature that i am, would not be impressed with the idea of an internet competitor unless it was accessible to me in the US.
perhaps what is needed (if indeed anything is needed at all) is not a new and separate internet, but a kind of ad-hoc inter-network of peers that is isolated and possibly insulated from the internet, like some sort of giant darknet. as for how one makes those networks accessible on a global scale, i don't know how that would work, but i think it would be freakin' awesome.
i think the parent post is referring vendor lock-in, specifically provider lock in.
if you have no real choice in who provides your internet access you have take what they give you or choose to live without internet access. with all of the shenanigans (filtering, capping, throttling, etc.) that american telcos and cablecos have threatened to pull (or are actively pulling) thanks to the lack of competition in the residential broadband market, perhaps a non-american competitor to the internet as most americans know it is just what the doctor ordered.
with that said, if they really wanted to impress me they would make such a network accessible from the US.
on the heels of an article about defcon that was almost fair. is it just me or does this seem like one of the horsemen of the apocalypse?
sco's stock price is shit now that the four people still stupid enough to own SCO stock are bailing.
hilarity ensues when they are delisted.
people do not take responsibility for their anything that involves computers. evar. people don't take responsibility for their actions on the computer (i did not delete it! the computer just ate it!), they don't take responsibility for the computer itself (how does all of this crap get on my computer?) and therefore will never ever take responsibility for their computer's actions. evar.
uhh, no, that would be me. i married my wife because her name was molly and i require that she wear sunglasses whenever she is in my presence (it was a compromise since surgical implantation is not yet feasible). my computer is names wintermute, my dog's name is boomzilla, and my daughters are named 1jane, 2jane, and 3jane.