Fascism. Remember that Hitler guy and that Mussolini guy?
The USSR wouldn't have failed from within if it hadn't been resisted from without.
The Internet was funded and put into place by the US government, regardless of who invented packet switching, which is only one aspect of the Internet. Tim Berners-Lee did invent the Web, but whether the Average Joe calls it the Internet or not, it's still just one component of a larger international network that was started by the United States.
The US did not intervene in Afghanistan until after it was invaded, which I showed as an example of American moral cowardice.
The US lost the war in Vietnam and withdrew from Somalia, an effort that started as a humanitarian mission. Remember all of those starving Somalis? I do.
The US did nothing about Rwanda, much to my shame as an American.
The US did try to overthrow Castro on many occasions. Let's not forget that the US was involved in the Cold War at the time, and American perceptions of Cuba were colored by it. The Bay of Pigs occurred but so did the Cuban Missile Crisis.
American training and support of nasty regimes in Central America was also colored by the Cold War, and was a colossal miscalculation designed to favor dictatorships over totalitarian states.
The Bush Administration has made incredibly stupid and dangerous civil rights limitations part of his "War on Terror" but it is a strength of American government that such overreaching can and will be fixed. Domestic freedoms have been curtailed before (Civil War, WW II, McCarthy Era), but our system is flexible enough to recover.
So yes, the US government has a mixed history. Is that an "overwhelming history of being evil?" I don't think so.
Is this the same government that helped stop Fascism, stopped Soviet Communism, and gave the world the Internet, or is it a wholly different government? Is it the government that sat by while the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan? Is it the same government that in the 1970s let inflation run rampant in the United States, causing the standard of living here and around the globe to stagnate, or is it the one that fostered a huge technology and economic boom through more open market policies?
My point is that a government is never wholly good or evil. I'd say that describing a government as "good" or "evil" plays right into the hands of absolutists like Bush, except in the most extreme cases (Nazi Germany and Pol Pot's Cambodia come to mind).
I'd say that even elected governments make mistakes, sometimes horrible ones. Talking about the US government desiring the enslavement of its own citizens is just bizarre. But putting a government like that of the United States in the same boat as one like Nazi Germany is absurd.
over and over again, most of them for their entire lives. It isn't surprising that some smart people therefore have overdeveloped egos, and underdeveloped self-critiquing capabilities.
If you're talking about an environment for professional programmers or other technically savvy people, there lots of places that also employ Macs and Linux. But most IT departments at large corporate or government entities (in my experience, YMMV) are extremely keen on standardization.
For example, a government agency I worked at back in the late 1990s actually went to the trouble of purging all instances of FileMaker on client machines because not only did they want to standardize on Windows, they adopted a policy that explictitly stated that not only the OS, but the desktop apps had to be purchased from Microsoft, and could only purchased from another software company if a special need could be demonstrated.
I literally had to go to the CFO and explain why an exception to the rule would be necessary, since I wanted to use a Mac to develop and maintain a large (1,200+ page) website, which I wanted to host on a Linux server. The head of IT, who wanted me to develop and host it on Windows, and I sat and argued in front of the CFO until the CFO finally decided to let me do it my way, provided that the IT department would not provide support for the Mac or for the Linux server. Of course, no support was ever required for either of them, as it was easy for me to take care of both on my own.
Admittedly this was "back in the day" and I haven't been in a corporate/government environment in some time. Your workplace sounds like a great example of how the engineers have routed around the sort of militant emphasis on standardization that ends up creating more problems than it solves.
Anyone who uses a Mac, or Linux, or any other OS that's not Windows, almost certainly has made an informed decision to do so based on harsh experience with Microsoft's crap.
So true! Another factor to consider is that there is a huge network effect working against Apple and Linux, and still they have made inroads. The fact that practically every company runs Windows, almost every big game comes out for Windows first, and there are zillions of vendors in the Windows world makes it that much more difficult for someone to buck the tide and choose a Mac or load Linux on their PC.
That to me says something about just how bad the computing experience has become in the Windows world. Several relatives have switched from Windows only after repeated horrible, costly Windows experiences. It's not that they wanted to go buy Macs; they wanted their Windows machines to make their lives easier. It's like the movie reviewer vs. the paying moviegoer. If I paid money for something, I'm prejudiced in favor of it working properly. Yet Windows pissed them off so much that they had to jump ship.
the only reason Mac and Linux fans can brag right now...
First, I don't know that many Mac users who "brag" about not having all the security problems that Windows users have to confront. As someone who uses Macs, Windows, and Linux, I'm happy when I don't have to screw around with security-related issues, and what I find is that occasionally I have to deal with a security issue on my Linux server. I have to deal with all manner of crap with Windows, and I simply periodically update OS X using software update.
So far in twenty years of using Macs, I've only had one security problem. An OS 8 machine I was using at work caught the Stoned virus. Come to think of it, over the years, I've also had one or two Word macro viruses that forced me to install Microsoft's macro-scanning software. That's it.
Bragging about using a computer that has fewer security problems would be like bragging about the off-the-showroom-floor car you just purchased. You didn't make it, you just bought it.
So I'm not bragging when I say that in my experience Macs allow me to focus on working with my computer, rather than on security problem after security problem. In general I have to spend more time dealing with security issues on the Linux server than with my Mac, but I still spend easily five times as many hours each year with Windows as with Linux.
... is that it's not controlled by any monolithic corporate entity telling you what to say and how to say it. The "free as in speech" part of Stallman's philosophical underpinnings for Open Source are ultimately more important than the "free as in beer" part. The moment you start mandating a "company line" in an Open Source project is the moment it becomes something other than truly Open Source.
I don't mean this as a troll, but in my area there is a serious dearth of anything resembling decent radio programming (according to my tastes, of course). Bubblegum pop, boot-scootin' country, and rehashed rock dominate the dial. I've given up on terrestrial radio a long time ago, and now I learn about and listen to music primarily through other means.
Maybe this has already been done as a poll, but I wonder how many geeks get their music through FM radio these days.
Very interesting explanation. Thanks for taking the time to spell it out for me. In particular the concept of humans possibly being capable of pushing beyond our current boundaries and taking responsibility for the ecosystems we inhabit is a rather fundamental underpinning of your beliefs, it seems.
I'm less sanguine about the chances that humans can push beyond our biological programming. To me the frontal lobe is a new and weak component of our brains, constantly being overruled by the reptilian brain stem. Politics and religion provide ample proof that those who appeal to the most basic human instincts almost always win out over those who appeal to more sophisticated arguments.
That said, perhaps population pressures will make us all realize that it is far more advantageous to eat the grains that are currently feeding all of those cattle. At that point questions of morality will fade away, rendered irrelevant by the pressing survival need to go vegetarian.
What other blog can you go to where you have such a wealth of well-formed opinions and jokes?
You make an excellent point there. Still, even when reading Slashdot you have to filter through comments that you don't think should have been modded up. You have to dig for some comments that aren't as highly modded, etc.
Comparing Slashdot to the blogosphere is a bit unfair, in that Slashdot is a many-to-many form of communication, and most blogs are one-to-many. Slashdot also has the good fortune of a rather unique readership. I've never found a community site that comes close to Slashdot.
In spite of the limitations of blogging's one-to-many approach, I have found a few that I really like, and more are popping up every day. They just take work to find.
And that will qualify me to go anywhere I damn well please and earn a good living
Sitting at an oak table? You might want to knock on that wood. A set of degrees is just one part of your resume. Once you take that first job after you get your fourth degree, you'll be on a career path, which will determine far more than your educational background after a few short years.
I'm also surprised that you are thinking of your future based solely on what you consider to be better job opportunities in Asia. The cultural differences are, as I'm sure you know, rather stark. I would also be very interested to see if all of those humanities degrees amount to anything in societies that seemingly value technical capabilities far more than humanities education.
Regardless, I hope your prediction is true, but I would look on the degrees as a foot in the door, not as a ticket to the good life.
What's the big draw? What do they accomplish for most people?
I think in many ways it is similar to Slashdot. People find out about news (and interpretations of news) that they wouldn't otherwise read. The liberating aspect of it is that anyone can do it, and millions of niches can be filled. You don't have to know anything about HTML to have your own blog that goes into extensive detail about whatever you want to discuss, whether that's of interest to 1 person or 1 million people.
In my opinion blogging has caught on because it has democratized the Web. Democratization leads to a cacaphony of voices, which makes the filtering much more difficult than when you're digesting mainstream media. But it also allows you to participate in a much more varied world of interests and opinions.
I don't think there's any way that Microsoft envisions AP articles saying "Linux, an operating system designed for obsolete computers" or anything like that.
Since this is pure conjecture, you may be right and I may be completely off-base. I wonder, though, why MS is doing this now. Is it just because customers are balking at the hefty hardware requirements of each new version of Windows? If that's the case, why didn't that cause them problems when they rolled out 95, 98, 2000, and XP?
Why are are they telegraphing their intention to create a lighter, leaner OS if not to hedge against people taking their older hardware and throwing Linux on it? They were caught unprepared the first time with Linux, and they've seen what's happening with Firefox. Imagine some strategist at MS having nightmares about desktop Linux actually taking off in a serious way. All it takes is a truly viable replacement for MS Office, and desktop Linux could gain traction very quickly.
All this talk about "connections" with victims I've heard in other places too: from assassins, murderers, spies, thieves, snipers, and rapists.
I understand what you're saying, but I also think that one of the fundamental differences of opinion between hunters and people who don't believe in killing animals is that hunters feel that killing is natural, while animal rights advocates feel that killing isn't natural. This is a complicated debate, but I'm curious about how you feel about the issue of killing animals for food.
Several of my friends are vegetarians, but they all have slightly different reasons for it. For example, one of them feels that if he couldn't bring himself to kill a creature, he shouldn't eat one that someone else killed for him. Another thinks that humans were never supposed to be meat eaters. A third believes that humans have essentially elevated ourselves out of the day to day struggle of life and death that other animals inhabit, so for us to intrude is wrong.
Personally I feel that if a hunter eats the animal he kills, he is not acting in an immoral fashion. To me, life is precious, but not all life has the same value. If I tread on a flower, or kill a fly, it's not the same as if I had snared a rabbit or shot a deer, and it's not even remotely close to killing another human being. Whether the hunter's life is at stake or not is immaterial in my view, because other predators frequently take in food they do not need (cats, for example).
I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on this, not because I want to bash on you, but because I get the feeling you've put a lot of thought into your opinions about hunting.
Is it that Microsoft is simply admitting XP has a load of unnecessary crap in it?
I see this as part of a long-term Microsoft strategy for taking on Linux. Since this is Microsoft we're talking about, the core of the strategy revolves around marketing. If they can get the mainstream media to buy into the notion that Linux is only valuable on older hardware, then they roll out a new "Windows Lite" OS for use on old hardware, they've taken a bite out of Linux mindshare.
Of course, this strategy won't work, because as you so well put it, Microsoft isn't exactly adroit at making lightweight operating systems. Plus, the Linux seed has already been planted, and it's too late for Microsoft to define the field of battle. They lost that one a long time ago.
if he can get the majority of people to see things from this particular viewpoint he wins
The question I have is, if he wins, will the rest of us see some benefit from it as well? Sometimes it's handy when big business interests compete with each other, because even though Interest A isn't necessarily fighting Interest B out of a desire to help humanity, the end result can be helpful for us lowly commoners.
"With Austin's voter-approved smoking ban coming into effect soon, people are asking how it will be enforced."
I'm not sure that you can really compare smoking bans to spyware bans, because smoking takes place in public, and social sanction is much easier to apply. Here in Northern California, if you were to attempt to light up a cigarette in a restaurant, you'd get enough nasty stares and comments that you'd likely get the hint and snub out the cigarette. Failing that, the proprietor would get involved.
Spyware is created by the same people who create spam and engage in phishing ploys. They hide out of public view, because they know that if their identities were known, it would be very difficult for them to have any sort of regular social life. That's why spammers protest so strenuously when their personal information is widely distributed by vigilantes.
I'd like to see more solutions that take advantage of social sanctioning, by shining really bright lights on the people who are behind this sort of repugnant behavior. I agree with your assessment that if Microsoft (or some other powerful entity) gets to decide who gets punished, we could be in for problems of another sort.
He's effectively repositioned the argument right under your noses..."
Cuban is no idiot. He knows that the way to change things is to control the structure of the argument. The music industry has managed to paint their struggle for continued control as a fight between them and "evil music thieves," and now Cuban is reframing the argument so it revolves around the music industry's pricing policies.
Anyone who forms their opinion about music filesharing's effect on the music industry and on creativity solely on the basis of Cuban's comments is a bit dim. But that doesn't diminish the worth of what he's doing by shifting the argument. He's using the broad reach of his blog to re-think the big picture.
There has been a whole spate of these "I bought a Mac Mini, found out it really was a cheap, low-end computer, and then spent additional money to bring it up to a barely usable level" articles recently.
True. My guess is that Apple figured the low cost of the Mac mini would bring out exactly this sort of experimentation. That's one of the big things they were looking for from the mini, as one route to growing marketshare is to grow geek mindshare first. To me it's somewhat analagous to the Honda Civic. For a long time Honda pretty much ignored the fact that tens of thousands of enthusiasts were tricking out their Civics, putting all kinds of time and money into cars that were purchased inexpensively. After a while, Honda embraced this and came out with the Civic Nation TV ad.
I'm not saying that taking cheap PCs and adding all kinds of capabilities to them is anything new. Apple isn't exactly going where no one has gone before here. But I wouldn't be suprised if the accessorizing we've seen with the iPod starts hitting overdrive with the Mac mini before long. For every one geek who wants to get into the innards of the computer, there are another nine who want to add capabilities without having to learn much about the inner workings.
Is it an IT issue or something from C-level executives?
It seems like it's an issue that has relevance to both, since executives can likely benefit over the long haul (tax incentives to go green, the PR value, lower power expendatures, etc.), while IT people will be intimately involved in any implementation of green measures that relate to computing.
One wonders if Hinsdale Central High now has a compelling reason.
My guess is that if you check in at Hinsdale in a year, they'll still be using SSNs for student identification. It's a compelling reason to you and I, but they'll likely try to beef up security before they'll switch to an alternate ID plan.
High schools are perfectly capable of assigning unique ID numbers of their own to students wherever they are necessary
From my experiences doing pro-bono work at four different high schools, I'd say that most of them barely have the capability to deal with the most rudimentary data management tasks. I'm not saying this to be dismissive of schools or the people who work there, but they are in many cases so short on human and technology resources that creating and managing unique IDs for each student isn't something that would even cross their minds.
The SSN is, as you mentioned, the knee-jerk instant universal ID number precisely because it requires no extra effort. This is not a good situation, but it has come about because there is no compelling reason (that many institutions can see) to devote extra time and effort to coming up with alternate ID schemes for schools.
Your opinion of who was the better captain was based on ARMY leadership manuals? The ones that say its OK to kill innocent bystanders? Or to kill POW's and wounded? Or rape POW's? Or rape female service members?
You obviously haven't seen Army leadership manuals. Read FM 22-100 (the core Army leadership manual) and SH 21-76 (the Ranger Handbook), then we can talk rationally about this.
Innocent bystanders always get killed in war, and sometimes it's deliberate. Some armies inculcate a wanton disregard for human life in their soldiers, while others try their best to impress upon soldiers the importance of safeguarding the lives of noncombatants. You would more than likely be amazed at the risks we took in Somalia so we could be sure that we were not putting civilians in danger. I'm not in Afghanistan or Iraq, but my guess is that the situation is not uniform for every unit, and that in some cases there are commanders and soldiers who are acting with wanton disregard for human life. Then again, if you took random group of people and put them in a situation where combatants and noncombatants were closely mixed, you might very well find that the majority of them made mistakes and killed civilians. The Bush Administration went into Iraq ludicrously unprepared for a long-term occupation, which has led to a situation in which soldiers are spread too thin and are under tremendous stress, fighting an enemy that is willing to kill its own people in order to kill Americans.
As to your statement about other crimes, rape and killing of POWs is not condoned in American military manuals. People in your town all know that murder is wrong, but some people do it. That doesn't mean that your town is teaching people to murder.
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Fascism. Remember that Hitler guy and that Mussolini guy?
The USSR wouldn't have failed from within if it hadn't been resisted from without.
The Internet was funded and put into place by the US government, regardless of who invented packet switching, which is only one aspect of the Internet. Tim Berners-Lee did invent the Web, but whether the Average Joe calls it the Internet or not, it's still just one component of a larger international network that was started by the United States.
The US did not intervene in Afghanistan until after it was invaded, which I showed as an example of American moral cowardice.
The US lost the war in Vietnam and withdrew from Somalia, an effort that started as a humanitarian mission. Remember all of those starving Somalis? I do.
The US did nothing about Rwanda, much to my shame as an American.
The US did try to overthrow Castro on many occasions. Let's not forget that the US was involved in the Cold War at the time, and American perceptions of Cuba were colored by it. The Bay of Pigs occurred but so did the Cuban Missile Crisis.
American training and support of nasty regimes in Central America was also colored by the Cold War, and was a colossal miscalculation designed to favor dictatorships over totalitarian states.
The Bush Administration has made incredibly stupid and dangerous civil rights limitations part of his "War on Terror" but it is a strength of American government that such overreaching can and will be fixed. Domestic freedoms have been curtailed before (Civil War, WW II, McCarthy Era), but our system is flexible enough to recover.
So yes, the US government has a mixed history. Is that an "overwhelming history of being evil?" I don't think so.
By the way, what government do you call your own?
Whew! THAT'S ALL!!
Is this the same government that helped stop Fascism, stopped Soviet Communism, and gave the world the Internet, or is it a wholly different government? Is it the government that sat by while the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan? Is it the same government that in the 1970s let inflation run rampant in the United States, causing the standard of living here and around the globe to stagnate, or is it the one that fostered a huge technology and economic boom through more open market policies?
My point is that a government is never wholly good or evil. I'd say that describing a government as "good" or "evil" plays right into the hands of absolutists like Bush, except in the most extreme cases (Nazi Germany and Pol Pot's Cambodia come to mind).
I'd say that even elected governments make mistakes, sometimes horrible ones. Talking about the US government desiring the enslavement of its own citizens is just bizarre. But putting a government like that of the United States in the same boat as one like Nazi Germany is absurd.
If you're talking about an environment for professional programmers or other technically savvy people, there lots of places that also employ Macs and Linux. But most IT departments at large corporate or government entities (in my experience, YMMV) are extremely keen on standardization.
For example, a government agency I worked at back in the late 1990s actually went to the trouble of purging all instances of FileMaker on client machines because not only did they want to standardize on Windows, they adopted a policy that explictitly stated that not only the OS, but the desktop apps had to be purchased from Microsoft, and could only purchased from another software company if a special need could be demonstrated.
I literally had to go to the CFO and explain why an exception to the rule would be necessary, since I wanted to use a Mac to develop and maintain a large (1,200+ page) website, which I wanted to host on a Linux server. The head of IT, who wanted me to develop and host it on Windows, and I sat and argued in front of the CFO until the CFO finally decided to let me do it my way, provided that the IT department would not provide support for the Mac or for the Linux server. Of course, no support was ever required for either of them, as it was easy for me to take care of both on my own.
Admittedly this was "back in the day" and I haven't been in a corporate/government environment in some time. Your workplace sounds like a great example of how the engineers have routed around the sort of militant emphasis on standardization that ends up creating more problems than it solves.
So true! Another factor to consider is that there is a huge network effect working against Apple and Linux, and still they have made inroads. The fact that practically every company runs Windows, almost every big game comes out for Windows first, and there are zillions of vendors in the Windows world makes it that much more difficult for someone to buck the tide and choose a Mac or load Linux on their PC.
That to me says something about just how bad the computing experience has become in the Windows world. Several relatives have switched from Windows only after repeated horrible, costly Windows experiences. It's not that they wanted to go buy Macs; they wanted their Windows machines to make their lives easier. It's like the movie reviewer vs. the paying moviegoer. If I paid money for something, I'm prejudiced in favor of it working properly. Yet Windows pissed them off so much that they had to jump ship.
First, I don't know that many Mac users who "brag" about not having all the security problems that Windows users have to confront. As someone who uses Macs, Windows, and Linux, I'm happy when I don't have to screw around with security-related issues, and what I find is that occasionally I have to deal with a security issue on my Linux server. I have to deal with all manner of crap with Windows, and I simply periodically update OS X using software update.
So far in twenty years of using Macs, I've only had one security problem. An OS 8 machine I was using at work caught the Stoned virus. Come to think of it, over the years, I've also had one or two Word macro viruses that forced me to install Microsoft's macro-scanning software. That's it.
Bragging about using a computer that has fewer security problems would be like bragging about the off-the-showroom-floor car you just purchased. You didn't make it, you just bought it.
So I'm not bragging when I say that in my experience Macs allow me to focus on working with my computer, rather than on security problem after security problem. In general I have to spend more time dealing with security issues on the Linux server than with my Mac, but I still spend easily five times as many hours each year with Windows as with Linux.
Maybe this has already been done as a poll, but I wonder how many geeks get their music through FM radio these days.
I'm less sanguine about the chances that humans can push beyond our biological programming. To me the frontal lobe is a new and weak component of our brains, constantly being overruled by the reptilian brain stem. Politics and religion provide ample proof that those who appeal to the most basic human instincts almost always win out over those who appeal to more sophisticated arguments.
That said, perhaps population pressures will make us all realize that it is far more advantageous to eat the grains that are currently feeding all of those cattle. At that point questions of morality will fade away, rendered irrelevant by the pressing survival need to go vegetarian.
You make an excellent point there. Still, even when reading Slashdot you have to filter through comments that you don't think should have been modded up. You have to dig for some comments that aren't as highly modded, etc.
Comparing Slashdot to the blogosphere is a bit unfair, in that Slashdot is a many-to-many form of communication, and most blogs are one-to-many. Slashdot also has the good fortune of a rather unique readership. I've never found a community site that comes close to Slashdot.
In spite of the limitations of blogging's one-to-many approach, I have found a few that I really like, and more are popping up every day. They just take work to find.
Sitting at an oak table? You might want to knock on that wood. A set of degrees is just one part of your resume. Once you take that first job after you get your fourth degree, you'll be on a career path, which will determine far more than your educational background after a few short years.
I'm also surprised that you are thinking of your future based solely on what you consider to be better job opportunities in Asia. The cultural differences are, as I'm sure you know, rather stark. I would also be very interested to see if all of those humanities degrees amount to anything in societies that seemingly value technical capabilities far more than humanities education.
Regardless, I hope your prediction is true, but I would look on the degrees as a foot in the door, not as a ticket to the good life.
I think in many ways it is similar to Slashdot. People find out about news (and interpretations of news) that they wouldn't otherwise read. The liberating aspect of it is that anyone can do it, and millions of niches can be filled. You don't have to know anything about HTML to have your own blog that goes into extensive detail about whatever you want to discuss, whether that's of interest to 1 person or 1 million people.
In my opinion blogging has caught on because it has democratized the Web. Democratization leads to a cacaphony of voices, which makes the filtering much more difficult than when you're digesting mainstream media. But it also allows you to participate in a much more varied world of interests and opinions.
Since this is pure conjecture, you may be right and I may be completely off-base. I wonder, though, why MS is doing this now. Is it just because customers are balking at the hefty hardware requirements of each new version of Windows? If that's the case, why didn't that cause them problems when they rolled out 95, 98, 2000, and XP?
Why are are they telegraphing their intention to create a lighter, leaner OS if not to hedge against people taking their older hardware and throwing Linux on it? They were caught unprepared the first time with Linux, and they've seen what's happening with Firefox. Imagine some strategist at MS having nightmares about desktop Linux actually taking off in a serious way. All it takes is a truly viable replacement for MS Office, and desktop Linux could gain traction very quickly.
I understand what you're saying, but I also think that one of the fundamental differences of opinion between hunters and people who don't believe in killing animals is that hunters feel that killing is natural, while animal rights advocates feel that killing isn't natural. This is a complicated debate, but I'm curious about how you feel about the issue of killing animals for food.
Several of my friends are vegetarians, but they all have slightly different reasons for it. For example, one of them feels that if he couldn't bring himself to kill a creature, he shouldn't eat one that someone else killed for him. Another thinks that humans were never supposed to be meat eaters. A third believes that humans have essentially elevated ourselves out of the day to day struggle of life and death that other animals inhabit, so for us to intrude is wrong.
Personally I feel that if a hunter eats the animal he kills, he is not acting in an immoral fashion. To me, life is precious, but not all life has the same value. If I tread on a flower, or kill a fly, it's not the same as if I had snared a rabbit or shot a deer, and it's not even remotely close to killing another human being. Whether the hunter's life is at stake or not is immaterial in my view, because other predators frequently take in food they do not need (cats, for example).
I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on this, not because I want to bash on you, but because I get the feeling you've put a lot of thought into your opinions about hunting.
I see this as part of a long-term Microsoft strategy for taking on Linux. Since this is Microsoft we're talking about, the core of the strategy revolves around marketing. If they can get the mainstream media to buy into the notion that Linux is only valuable on older hardware, then they roll out a new "Windows Lite" OS for use on old hardware, they've taken a bite out of Linux mindshare.
Of course, this strategy won't work, because as you so well put it, Microsoft isn't exactly adroit at making lightweight operating systems. Plus, the Linux seed has already been planted, and it's too late for Microsoft to define the field of battle. They lost that one a long time ago.
The question I have is, if he wins, will the rest of us see some benefit from it as well? Sometimes it's handy when big business interests compete with each other, because even though Interest A isn't necessarily fighting Interest B out of a desire to help humanity, the end result can be helpful for us lowly commoners.
I'm not sure that you can really compare smoking bans to spyware bans, because smoking takes place in public, and social sanction is much easier to apply. Here in Northern California, if you were to attempt to light up a cigarette in a restaurant, you'd get enough nasty stares and comments that you'd likely get the hint and snub out the cigarette. Failing that, the proprietor would get involved.
Spyware is created by the same people who create spam and engage in phishing ploys. They hide out of public view, because they know that if their identities were known, it would be very difficult for them to have any sort of regular social life. That's why spammers protest so strenuously when their personal information is widely distributed by vigilantes.
I'd like to see more solutions that take advantage of social sanctioning, by shining really bright lights on the people who are behind this sort of repugnant behavior. I agree with your assessment that if Microsoft (or some other powerful entity) gets to decide who gets punished, we could be in for problems of another sort.
Cuban is no idiot. He knows that the way to change things is to control the structure of the argument. The music industry has managed to paint their struggle for continued control as a fight between them and "evil music thieves," and now Cuban is reframing the argument so it revolves around the music industry's pricing policies.
Anyone who forms their opinion about music filesharing's effect on the music industry and on creativity solely on the basis of Cuban's comments is a bit dim. But that doesn't diminish the worth of what he's doing by shifting the argument. He's using the broad reach of his blog to re-think the big picture.
True. My guess is that Apple figured the low cost of the Mac mini would bring out exactly this sort of experimentation. That's one of the big things they were looking for from the mini, as one route to growing marketshare is to grow geek mindshare first. To me it's somewhat analagous to the Honda Civic. For a long time Honda pretty much ignored the fact that tens of thousands of enthusiasts were tricking out their Civics, putting all kinds of time and money into cars that were purchased inexpensively. After a while, Honda embraced this and came out with the Civic Nation TV ad.
I'm not saying that taking cheap PCs and adding all kinds of capabilities to them is anything new. Apple isn't exactly going where no one has gone before here. But I wouldn't be suprised if the accessorizing we've seen with the iPod starts hitting overdrive with the Mac mini before long. For every one geek who wants to get into the innards of the computer, there are another nine who want to add capabilities without having to learn much about the inner workings.
It seems like it's an issue that has relevance to both, since executives can likely benefit over the long haul (tax incentives to go green, the PR value, lower power expendatures, etc.), while IT people will be intimately involved in any implementation of green measures that relate to computing.
My guess is that if you check in at Hinsdale in a year, they'll still be using SSNs for student identification. It's a compelling reason to you and I, but they'll likely try to beef up security before they'll switch to an alternate ID plan.
From my experiences doing pro-bono work at four different high schools, I'd say that most of them barely have the capability to deal with the most rudimentary data management tasks. I'm not saying this to be dismissive of schools or the people who work there, but they are in many cases so short on human and technology resources that creating and managing unique IDs for each student isn't something that would even cross their minds.
The SSN is, as you mentioned, the knee-jerk instant universal ID number precisely because it requires no extra effort. This is not a good situation, but it has come about because there is no compelling reason (that many institutions can see) to devote extra time and effort to coming up with alternate ID schemes for schools.
You obviously haven't seen Army leadership manuals. Read FM 22-100 (the core Army leadership manual) and SH 21-76 (the Ranger Handbook), then we can talk rationally about this.
Innocent bystanders always get killed in war, and sometimes it's deliberate. Some armies inculcate a wanton disregard for human life in their soldiers, while others try their best to impress upon soldiers the importance of safeguarding the lives of noncombatants. You would more than likely be amazed at the risks we took in Somalia so we could be sure that we were not putting civilians in danger. I'm not in Afghanistan or Iraq, but my guess is that the situation is not uniform for every unit, and that in some cases there are commanders and soldiers who are acting with wanton disregard for human life. Then again, if you took random group of people and put them in a situation where combatants and noncombatants were closely mixed, you might very well find that the majority of them made mistakes and killed civilians. The Bush Administration went into Iraq ludicrously unprepared for a long-term occupation, which has led to a situation in which soldiers are spread too thin and are under tremendous stress, fighting an enemy that is willing to kill its own people in order to kill Americans.
As to your statement about other crimes, rape and killing of POWs is not condoned in American military manuals. People in your town all know that murder is wrong, but some people do it. That doesn't mean that your town is teaching people to murder.