So are you saying that with regard to relations between corporations and individuals, you'd keep roughly the laws we have today? If not, what do you mean?
I see. So there will be no banks, grocery stores or large employers. Is that what you're saying? Or will they exist, but be owned by very wealthy individuals because corporations are effectively banned? (When you deny corporations the right to sign contracts, you effectively ban them, don't you?) In the latter case, couldn't the wealthy individuals drive just as hard a bargain as corporations?
Let's watch Frank Freedom, who really values his freedom, as the Libertarian utopia takes effect.
The power company announces that only authorized appliances may be plugged into their power. Existing appliances are grandfathered in. So if Frank wants a new computer, he has to buy it from Dell and check the "Libertaria Power Company" checkbox, adding $50. Valuing his freedom, Frank goes off the grid and runs a generator. When the neighhbors complain, he switches to solar. It costs $10,000 (no more subsidies for solar) and puts out very little power. Frank does without refrigeration and AC. He puts a substantial amount of time and energy into managing his panels, batteries, chargers, and high-efficiency lights. But he is free!
The local grocery store announces a mandatory shopper card, with fingerprints and photo. Frank resents this intrusion into his freedom and switches to shopping at 7/11 and mail-ordering steaks. He drives 40 miles into the country to buy food from farmers. Sometimes he stands outside the grocery store and tries to pay people to buy food for him.
The bank that owns Frank's car loan demands that he install a little GPS package in his car so they can know its location at all times. They are the last bank to institute this requirement, which is why Frank got a car loan from them. Frank points out that he chose this bank precisely for its pro-freedom stance, but the loan officer is adamant. It appears the bank has attracted too many irresponsible drivers, and the insurance companies are balking at paying for their wreckes. Valuing his freedom, Frank refuses, and the bank seizes the car. Frank visits the used car lots and at each one he cuts through the salesman's pitch to ask if the GPS box is mandatory. The answer is always the same: "If you don't want the GPS, pay cash." He can't afford to pay cash. Finally, at the scummiest, most disreputable car lot, he is offered a deal. He must pay nearly new price on a 10 year old car that "runs great". He will pay 35% interest per annum. In exchange, no GPS. Frank is ecstatic! He is free.
Frank's employer asks him to sign a new employment agreement. He must promise eternal loyalty to the employer and agree never again to work anywhere without their permission. In exchange, they can fire him with no notice and bill him for any expenses they feel he has caused. Under the awful old statist regime, such a contract was illegal. But now in Libertarian utopia, any agreement between consenting adults is legal. Valuing his freedom, Frank naturally refuses to sign, and is soon jobless. Shopping around, Frank finds that nearly all employers demand such an agreement. He finally finds a very small business that apparently doesn't have a lawyer yet, and gets a job for half what he was previously making. Free and employed!
One winter day as Frank is driving to work his 10 year old "runs great" car breaks down. As he stands there with the hood open squinting at the engine, his breath coming in puffs, an enormous SUV rockets passed him, spattering him with mud. At the wheel is Sally Slave, a VP at Frank's own company. She was a college classmate of Frank - they graduated at the same time and have identical IQ's and test scores. She is just finishing the acqusition of Frank's current employer, after which she will fire everyone in the acquired company.
Sally Slave has pursued corporate advancement as doggedly as Frank Freedom has pursued freedom. While Frank was driving to a farm to get produce, Sally was studying for her MBA. While Frank was hunting for a car lot that wouldn't demand GPS, Sally was writing a proposal for restructuring her department. While Frank was deeply attuned to his Freedom, Sally was endlessly attentive to the needs of her employers.
Three cheers for Frank Freedom, who values his Freedom.
What is the commercial incentive that would make "encumbered" versions of products the norm ?
In a nutshell: consumers don't have enough time, intelligence, knowledge and energy to fully understand each trivial purchase. Therefore a clever seller can can trap the consumer, either by inducing him to sign an agreement or by selling encumbered technology which in the long term subjugates the consumer to the seller.
Selling you an encumbered product is much, much better than selling the unencumbered product. Now I can sell you a never-ending stream of upgrades and value-adds - see cell phone ringtones. They will be profitable because there will be no competition in my walled garden. Also, I can sell you to others. The higher the wall around the garden, the more valuable is the right to sell into the garden.
Look at inkjet printers and their cartridges; also cell phones and their batteries. The manufacturers are using crypto and the DMCA to make it terribly hard for anything to interoperate with their equipment. Badnarik opposes the DMCA but nothing in his platform would prevent the crypto interlock. And before the DMCA, manufacturers were stretching patent and copyright to attack reverse engineering for interop.
I can only think of intellectual property frenzy, and it's a consequence of a content distribution monopoly and of government intervention, which are both going against Libertarianism.
IP frenzy is a consequence of IP laws, which Badnarik does not oppose. The truth is IP frenzy is overdue. Patent laws have been immensely broad and dangerous for decades, but only lately have so many businesses woken up to how the system works.
As for content distribution monopolies, copyright law grants them. You cannot legally compete with the copyright holder in distributing his work (unless he approves).
Not that our current set of politicians is going to solve these problems.
If I want sell you a piece of pen and paper, will you buy it if I say "you can't write a political tract on it?"
If that's what's available at Staples and OfficeMax, yes. Nobody is going to go out of his way to find special "unencumbered" paper, probably at a higher price. Most people don't want to write political tracts and won't care.
Will you buy your Internet service from me if I prohibit you from pointing your web browser at Slashdot?
Yes, if you're the only one who can offer me high-speed access. I'm not switching to dialup to improve my freedom. The best-connected parts of the US have two options: cable and DSL. If the phone company exercised its private property rights to kick off all other DSL ISP's, and both cable and phone company imposed certain restrictions, the users would just have to accept them.
And if I do either of those things, do you think it unlikely that you'll be able to find someone else to sell you those things without those restrictions?
I think it unlikely that I'll find the unrestricted version at a reasonable price. Low prices come from economy of scale, which comes from serving the majority. Imposing restrictions doesn't bother the majority at all. A tiny minority that demands the unencumbered version will have to pay much higher prices, even in a Libertarian utopia where that unencumbered version is legal.
This is the same point Cringely made about Microsoft locking Linux out of future hardware.
I don't know about your magnet theory, but you seem to think old VOT's were the last professional speakers made. That is, you are changing two variables: past/present and consumer/professional. Professional speakers of today sound better and play louder than the old VOT's. Compression drivers have continued to evolve, resulting in lower distortion and extended top end. Todays pro woofers will often take 1000 watts continuous RMS power, and still have high sensitivity. And they generally use paper cones, still.
The biggest advantage today is DSP. Compression driver/horn combos offer great dynamics, sensitivity, even coverage and low distortion, at the price of peaky response which traditionally was fixed in a complex passive crossover. Now you can equalize digitally and much more effectively.
I took a look at this page, and while the plasma speakers are very cool, I'm not sure they make sense as speakers. Given that these units go down to 700 Hz or 1 kHz, they are in competition with a 2" horn/driver combo. The plasma is supposed to have high linearity, but it's max output is 107 dB. A 2" horn on a driver can have a sensitivity of 107. That means the horn, with 1 watt, would be as loud as the plasma, full blast. Which means the horn/driver will be pretty linear - nonlinear response occurs at higher power levels.
OK, looking at the JBL 2447 for example, I admit that it's frequency response is nowhere near as smooth as the plasma. But in practice it is usually electronically equalized, with great results. That's because frequency response can be fixed in DSP/electronics, but power limitations and distortion cannot. The horn/driver will have a lot more headroom to add punch to music.
And of course thin wire is not necessarily bad. It adds resistance, which consumes power - but it's typically a negligible loss. And it increases the Q of the speaker, making it boomier at resonance, which may be desirable if the speaker is overdamped or mostly played at low volumes. Generally, speaker wires in homes are too short to have any significant resistance even if very thin. So the summary is, use whatever's lying around.
To clarify, what you friend did with a shelf bracket wasn't picking. It was shimming. He probably inserted the bracket between door and jamb and used it to retract a latchbolt. This usually means the hardware is installed wrong. Most locksets have a trigger bolt which is depressed by the strike plate, thereby deadlocking the latch bolt. If the gap is too large, or the wrong strike is installed, the trigger bolt is not adequately depressed.
Picking means simulating the action of a key in the keyhole via instruments.
That lock is not resistant to forced entry, which limits it to niche applications. It's used on filing cabinets with a vertical locking bar. Anyone could bust open the cabinet in 30 seconds, but it would leave a trail, which is the point.
A more robust padlock for general applications is the 833. You can sometimes find these surplus. It may be the most mechanically tough padlock available, and with its Medeco cylinder it's reasonably pick-resistant.
I think in practice a court would be largely influenced by the innocent uses of the crack. If the trusted platform is used primarily for copyright DRM, I could see a court finding the cracker guilty. If, however, the trusted platform is needed to read work email and access online banking, and the crack enabled those applications, I think a court would be more likely to find the cracker not guilty. Especially if the crack contains some minor stumbling block to using it in an infringing manner. For example, xpdf by default respects the "do not print" flag in pdfs. You can change it, but it's clearly not a circumvention device as distributed.
Food-related rituals generally suck. Why do they have to involve crap you shouldn't eat? Never eat a donut. If you're willing to shorten your life by ingesting some big gobbet of sugar and fat that puts you into an insulin coma, eat good tiramisu or something.
You're directing me to the Civil Rights Act to learn how a conservative would put it? This thread started with someone writing "A Conservative would state it thusly...".
I didn't voice an opinion on what laws the US has, or should have. Rather I voiced an opinion on how conservatives generally see the issue of government intervening between employer and employee.
Conservatives generally don't believe that government should interfere with a company's hiring and firing. Even if you think, as conservatives do not, that government should force an "equal opportunity" policy on private employers, that does not imply that employers can't regulate their employees' actions while at work.
There's a difference between firing someone for who he is and for what he did at work.
A Conservative would state it thusly: "Welcome to my country. These are the rules. Play by them and there won't be any trouble. If you don't like the rules, go in peace."
How about:
Welcome to my company. These are the rules: no eating bacon. Play by them and there won't be any trouble. If you don't like the rules, go in peace."
Logically, the US has no case against Osama in connection with 9/11. His actions (funding and advocating terrorism) were probably legal under the Taliban government. This shouldn't be shocking - the US has funded and advocated terrorism in Central America, and these actions were legal.
The people who actually flew planes into buildings are dead, so the US wants to scapegoat someone else. But the responsibility rests with the people who a) were in US jurisdiction and b) committed crimes.
Not so with an IM client because the message is stored in RAM once it's been received, unlike email which is stored on-disk..
GAIM has logging. I've used it to find old facts, but I've never had a sudden crash of GAIM. If the network connection dies, the window doesn't vanish.
As for emails, when a non-programmer sends me an email requesting info/action on something in our systems, I usually have to write back with detailed questions. Some of these emails can be paraphrased as, "On an unknown day, an unknown bad thing happened to an unknown user when performing an unknown task via either our website, some partner's website, or some API. The unknown user says it's extremely urgent - please fix immediately!"
I do hope the account numbers your tech support people paste to you via AIM aren't important accounts, i.e. tied in any way to any money transactions (credit card, etc.)...
We don't send actual CC numbers, but there can be some mildly sensitive data. I complained about this policy of sending confidential info via AIM, but was overruled. The practice is firmly established. A while back, the IM vendors tried to market "corporate" versions that would keep corporate info inside the firewall. The idea failed - for some reason corporations don't take that risk seriously.
GAIM does support encryption - when I connect to another GAIM user, the link is encrypted. Unfortunately for that idea, not everyone uses GAIM.
We need to a have a period of public review before patents are issued.
Guess what? We do. All applications are published 18 months after filing, unless the inventor filed a Nonpublication Request, which he usually won't. Software patents take years from application to issue, so reading the application 18 months into the process gives you time to notify the examiner of prior art if you want.
Since the advent of the PAIR program, applications are made public sooner.
Have you seen the patent examiners' complaints about Image File Wrapper? The interesting thing is that examiners are more likely to complain about lost productivity because their productivity is very closely measured, which is unusual in white collar jobs.
Maybe as a research scientist you don't have to respond to anyone's problems. I'm a commercial programmer and I find IM quite useful. Tech support people can AIM me while on the phone with customers. They can paste account numbers and other data into AIM rather than reading to me (error prone and slow.) Most importantly, I can think better when I'm not distracted by dealing with the phone.
I hate supporting anyone via phone. It seems to take up 90% of my brain, and I don't always ask the right questions. Typically the caller introduces illogical ideas, and I have to regain my mental balance to address them. A 20 minute call from a Tech Support or QA person leaves me drained and exhausted, while a 20 minute AIM session has little effect - at least 50% of it was waiting for the other end to reply.
Email works if the sender is smart. But AIM gives me a chance to ask the obvious questions right away and clarify the picture.
I dont' use AIM for idle chatting, but occasionally to exchange cool or funny URLs.
Labor Day is meant to be a day of rest for workers, but hypertaskers will spend it bent over their laptops at Starbucks, waiting for their non-fat venti vanilla lattes while checking e-mail, reading newspapers and preparing for Tuesday morning meetings.
Is the article claiming that a typical "hypertasker" will simultaneously check email, read newspapers and prepare for meetings? Or that he will perform these activities sequentially? If the latter, how is that different from a worker in 1930 opening and reading a letter, reading the newspaper, and preparing documents for a meeting? What is "hyper" about it?
Or is the article claiming that working on a holiday is a defining characteristic of "hypertasking"? Lots of people work on holidays without attempting to do multiple things at once. Is there any alleged linkage between these two disparate ideas?
Mary Krause multitasks as she works in her home office while keeping an eye on son Erich, 7, and dog Zach.
Having a dog around definitely does not qualify as multitasking. I've worked with and without dogs, and did not find them to impose a cognitive burden. I'm less sure about the child, but wouldn't it be more accurate to say that he's distracting his Mom than to say she's "multitasking"?
"Hypertasking is excessiveness. It's overload in the sense of having your brain trying to respond to a number of stimuli at the same time, and that can really start to cost you."
How does this differ from "multitasking"? Is hypertasking merely excessive multitasking? Then what is its relation to Starbucks and 802.11? A person can spend hours in Starbucks immersed in a single task (such as reading Slashdot) via 802.11. The article fails to articulate this alleged link.
"We believe we live in an instantaneous world because our computers are faster and faster."
Really? Who believes that? It looks to me as if business continues to run on a scale of days and weeks, not microseconds or nanonseconds. If you want someone to review a document, for example, you always have to allow at least a week, usually more. Does that sound like an "instantaneous world"? There's actually an interesting point buried under this nonsense - the research of Yuhong Jiang corresponds to the experience of most programmers that distractions lower efficiency. But then we find this:
...you risk damaging the very part of your brain...
Damaging? Brain damage via distraction? That's quite a claim, and should have at least a quote.
I agree that the US invaded Iraq for strategic reasons, and to scare other Middle East rulers. I'm not sure if Bush knows this - he may actually believe some of the rationales he put forward. The papers at Project for a New American Century show that this strategic dimension was brewing long before Bush took any interest in it.
If the US keeps a long-term presence in Iraq, this also reduces US dependence on Israel and Saudi. Having US troops in Saudi was Osama's main grievance. Saudi is "holy"; Iraq is not.
I think the US is also deliberately using Iraq as a "roach motel" for Islamic militants. From what I've read, Saddam had very tight border security, which the US totally disabled, allowing foreign fighters to enter Iraq freely. It's a lot easier to kill these guys in Iraq than to catch them in terrorist actions. I don't know if that counts as "strategic" or "tactical".
I love the fact that this comment is at zero, while those ignorantly claiming the opposite are modded up to "+5 insightful". Attention slashdotters: pandering to your prejudices is not insightful, especially when it's incorrect.
When you amplify the voices that tell you what you want to hear, you end up in a deceptive coccoon of illusions. You are like toddlers wandering into the path of a freight train, immersed in your play and fantasy.
Slashdot Mirror
So are you saying that with regard to relations between corporations and individuals, you'd keep roughly the laws we have today? If not, what do you mean?
I see. So there will be no banks, grocery stores or large employers. Is that what you're saying? Or will they exist, but be owned by very wealthy individuals because corporations are effectively banned? (When you deny corporations the right to sign contracts, you effectively ban them, don't you?) In the latter case, couldn't the wealthy individuals drive just as hard a bargain as corporations?
Let's watch Frank Freedom, who really values his freedom, as the Libertarian utopia takes effect.
he stands outside the grocery store and tries to pay people to buy food for him.
One winter day as Frank is driving to work his 10 year old "runs great" car breaks down. As he stands there with the hood open squinting at the engine, his breath coming in puffs, an enormous SUV rockets passed him, spattering him with mud. At the wheel is Sally Slave, a VP at Frank's own company. She was a college classmate of Frank - they graduated at the same time and have identical IQ's and test scores. She is just finishing the acqusition of Frank's current employer, after which she will fire everyone in the acquired company.
Sally Slave has pursued corporate advancement as doggedly as Frank Freedom has pursued freedom. While Frank was driving to a farm to get produce, Sally was studying for her MBA. While Frank was hunting for a car lot that wouldn't demand GPS, Sally was writing a proposal for restructuring her department. While Frank was deeply attuned to his Freedom, Sally was endlessly attentive to the needs of her employers.
Three cheers for Frank Freedom, who values his Freedom.
In a nutshell: consumers don't have enough time, intelligence, knowledge and energy to fully understand each trivial purchase. Therefore a clever seller can can trap the consumer, either by inducing him to sign an agreement or by selling encumbered technology which in the long term subjugates the consumer to the seller.
Selling you an encumbered product is much, much better than selling the unencumbered product. Now I can sell you a never-ending stream of upgrades and value-adds - see cell phone ringtones. They will be profitable because there will be no competition in my walled garden. Also, I can sell you to others. The higher the wall around the garden, the more valuable is the right to sell into the garden.
Look at inkjet printers and their cartridges; also cell phones and their batteries. The manufacturers are using crypto and the DMCA to make it terribly hard for anything to interoperate with their equipment. Badnarik opposes the DMCA but nothing in his platform would prevent the crypto interlock. And before the DMCA, manufacturers were stretching patent and copyright to attack reverse engineering for interop.
IP frenzy is a consequence of IP laws, which Badnarik does not oppose. The truth is IP frenzy is overdue. Patent laws have been immensely broad and dangerous for decades, but only lately have so many businesses woken up to how the system works.
As for content distribution monopolies, copyright law grants them. You cannot legally compete with the copyright holder in distributing his work (unless he approves).
Not that our current set of politicians is going to solve these problems.
If that's what's available at Staples and OfficeMax, yes. Nobody is going to go out of his way to find special "unencumbered" paper, probably at a higher price. Most people don't want to write political tracts and won't care.
Yes, if you're the only one who can offer me high-speed access. I'm not switching to dialup to improve my freedom. The best-connected parts of the US have two options: cable and DSL. If the phone company exercised its private property rights to kick off all other DSL ISP's, and both cable and phone company imposed certain restrictions, the users would just have to accept them.
I think it unlikely that I'll find the unrestricted version at a reasonable price. Low prices come from economy of scale, which comes from serving the majority. Imposing restrictions doesn't bother the majority at all. A tiny minority that demands the unencumbered version will have to pay much higher prices, even in a Libertarian utopia where that unencumbered version is legal.
This is the same point Cringely made about Microsoft locking Linux out of future hardware.
I don't know about your magnet theory, but you seem to think old VOT's were the last professional speakers made. That is, you are changing two variables: past/present and consumer/professional. Professional speakers of today sound better and play louder than the old VOT's. Compression drivers have continued to evolve, resulting in lower distortion and extended top end. Todays pro woofers will often take 1000 watts continuous RMS power, and still have high sensitivity. And they generally use paper cones, still.
The biggest advantage today is DSP. Compression driver/horn combos offer great dynamics, sensitivity, even coverage and low distortion, at the price of peaky response which traditionally was fixed in a complex passive crossover. Now you can equalize digitally and much more effectively.
I took a look at this page, and while the plasma speakers are very cool, I'm not sure they make sense as speakers. Given that these units go down to 700 Hz or 1 kHz, they are in competition with a 2" horn/driver combo. The plasma is supposed to have high linearity, but it's max output is 107 dB. A 2" horn on a driver can have a sensitivity of 107. That means the horn, with 1 watt, would be as loud as the plasma, full blast. Which means the horn/driver will be pretty linear - nonlinear response occurs at higher power levels.
OK, looking at the JBL 2447 for example, I admit that it's frequency response is nowhere near as smooth as the plasma. But in practice it is usually electronically equalized, with great results. That's because frequency response can be fixed in DSP/electronics, but power limitations and distortion cannot. The horn/driver will have a lot more headroom to add punch to music.
Of course the plasma is super-cool.
And of course thin wire is not necessarily bad. It adds resistance, which consumes power - but it's typically a negligible loss. And it increases the Q of the speaker, making it boomier at resonance, which may be desirable if the speaker is overdamped or mostly played at low volumes. Generally, speaker wires in homes are too short to have any significant resistance even if very thin. So the summary is, use whatever's lying around.
Should have worn rubber gloves.
To clarify, what you friend did with a shelf bracket wasn't picking. It was shimming. He probably inserted the bracket between door and jamb and used it to retract a latchbolt. This usually means the hardware is installed wrong. Most locksets have a trigger bolt which is depressed by the strike plate, thereby deadlocking the latch bolt. If the gap is too large, or the wrong strike is installed, the trigger bolt is not adequately depressed.
Picking means simulating the action of a key in the keyhole via instruments.
That lock is not resistant to forced entry, which limits it to niche applications. It's used on filing cabinets with a vertical locking bar. Anyone could bust open the cabinet in 30 seconds, but it would leave a trail, which is the point.
A more robust padlock for general applications is the 833. You can sometimes find these surplus. It may be the most mechanically tough padlock available, and with its Medeco cylinder it's reasonably pick-resistant.
Microsoft wouldn't use its in-house lawyers for litigation. But I may have missed your point.
I think in practice a court would be largely influenced by the innocent uses of the crack. If the trusted platform is used primarily for copyright DRM, I could see a court finding the cracker guilty. If, however, the trusted platform is needed to read work email and access online banking, and the crack enabled those applications, I think a court would be more likely to find the cracker not guilty. Especially if the crack contains some minor stumbling block to using it in an infringing manner. For example, xpdf by default respects the "do not print" flag in pdfs. You can change it, but it's clearly not a circumvention device as distributed.
Food-related rituals generally suck. Why do they have to involve crap you shouldn't eat? Never eat a donut. If you're willing to shorten your life by ingesting some big gobbet of sugar and fat that puts you into an insulin coma, eat good tiramisu or something.
You're directing me to the Civil Rights Act to learn how a conservative would put it? This thread started with someone writing "A Conservative would state it thusly...".
I didn't voice an opinion on what laws the US has, or should have. Rather I voiced an opinion on how conservatives generally see the issue of government intervening between employer and employee.
Conservatives generally don't believe that government should interfere with a company's hiring and firing. Even if you think, as conservatives do not, that government should force an "equal opportunity" policy on private employers, that does not imply that employers can't regulate their employees' actions while at work.
There's a difference between firing someone for who he is and for what he did at work.
How about:
Logically, the US has no case against Osama in connection with 9/11. His actions (funding and advocating terrorism) were probably legal under the Taliban government. This shouldn't be shocking - the US has funded and advocated terrorism in Central America, and these actions were legal.
The people who actually flew planes into buildings are dead, so the US wants to scapegoat someone else. But the responsibility rests with the people who a) were in US jurisdiction and b) committed crimes.
As for emails, when a non-programmer sends me an email requesting info/action on something in our systems, I usually have to write back with detailed questions. Some of these emails can be paraphrased as, "On an unknown day, an unknown bad thing happened to an unknown user when performing an unknown task via either our website, some partner's website, or some API. The unknown user says it's extremely urgent - please fix immediately!"
We don't send actual CC numbers, but there can be some mildly sensitive data. I complained about this policy of sending confidential info via AIM, but was overruled. The practice is firmly established. A while back, the IM vendors tried to market "corporate" versions that would keep corporate info inside the firewall. The idea failed - for some reason corporations don't take that risk seriously.
GAIM does support encryption - when I connect to another GAIM user, the link is encrypted. Unfortunately for that idea, not everyone uses GAIM.
Since the advent of the PAIR program, applications are made public sooner.
Check out Microsoft's latest applications.
Have you seen the patent examiners' complaints about Image File Wrapper? The interesting thing is that examiners are more likely to complain about lost productivity because their productivity is very closely measured, which is unusual in white collar jobs.
Maybe as a research scientist you don't have to respond to anyone's problems. I'm a commercial programmer and I find IM quite useful. Tech support people can AIM me while on the phone with customers. They can paste account numbers and other data into AIM rather than reading to me (error prone and slow.) Most importantly, I can think better when I'm not distracted by dealing with the phone.
I hate supporting anyone via phone. It seems to take up 90% of my brain, and I don't always ask the right questions. Typically the caller introduces illogical ideas, and I have to regain my mental balance to address them. A 20 minute call from a Tech Support or QA person leaves me drained and exhausted, while a 20 minute AIM session has little effect - at least 50% of it was waiting for the other end to reply.
Email works if the sender is smart. But AIM gives me a chance to ask the obvious questions right away and clarify the picture.
I dont' use AIM for idle chatting, but occasionally to exchange cool or funny URLs.
Or is the article claiming that working on a holiday is a defining characteristic of "hypertasking"? Lots of people work on holidays without attempting to do multiple things at once. Is there any alleged linkage between these two disparate ideas?
Having a dog around definitely does not qualify as multitasking. I've worked with and without dogs, and did not find them to impose a cognitive burden. I'm less sure about the child, but wouldn't it be more accurate to say that he's distracting his Mom than to say she's "multitasking"?
How does this differ from "multitasking"? Is hypertasking merely excessive multitasking? Then what is its relation to Starbucks and 802.11? A person can spend hours in Starbucks immersed in a single task (such as reading Slashdot) via 802.11. The article fails to articulate this alleged link.
Really? Who believes that? It looks to me as if business continues to run on a scale of days and weeks, not microseconds or nanonseconds. If you want someone to review a document, for example, you always have to allow at least a week, usually more. Does that sound like an "instantaneous world"?
There's actually an interesting point buried under this nonsense - the research of Yuhong Jiang corresponds to the experience of most programmers that distractions lower efficiency. But then we find this:Damaging? Brain damage via distraction? That's quite a claim, and should have at least a quote.
I agree that the US invaded Iraq for strategic reasons, and to scare other Middle East rulers. I'm not sure if Bush knows this - he may actually believe some of the rationales he put forward. The papers at Project for a New American Century show that this strategic dimension was brewing long before Bush took any interest in it.
If the US keeps a long-term presence in Iraq, this also reduces US dependence on Israel and Saudi. Having US troops in Saudi was Osama's main grievance. Saudi is "holy"; Iraq is not.
I think the US is also deliberately using Iraq as a "roach motel" for Islamic militants. From what I've read, Saddam had very tight border security, which the US totally disabled, allowing foreign fighters to enter Iraq freely. It's a lot easier to kill these guys in Iraq than to catch them in terrorist actions. I don't know if that counts as "strategic" or "tactical".
I love the fact that this comment is at zero, while those ignorantly claiming the opposite are modded up to "+5 insightful". Attention slashdotters: pandering to your prejudices is not insightful, especially when it's incorrect.
When you amplify the voices that tell you what you want to hear, you end up in a deceptive coccoon of illusions. You are like toddlers wandering into the path of a freight train, immersed in your play and fantasy.