I don't think that a direct vote is good any more. I used to think Democracy was obviously a good idea and the Founding Fathers were high, but after seeing more people I realized that, "people" can be SEVERLY wrong (note the last two elections).
Now I think the solution is to keep the power as low as possible. The problem is that the bulk of our tax $ (a direct representation of power) goes to the federal. The federal government uses it to increase their own power.
If the bulk of our money went to, say, the city level--then all the cities in a county could get together and vote on county needs (funding those needs as well). The counties could get together and vote on state needs (funding those needs) and the states could get together and vote on federal issues--so the only way the most distant part of the government is to pass it through all the other pieces.
This increases the problem of redistribution of wealth between high tax base and low tax base areas. Every child should have the same chance at schooling, so all schools should be funded equally--stuff like that.
No matter what you came up to patch the problems that such a system would cause, it can't be worse than it is now.
That was close to what struck me--wouldn't Micro-Sattelites or even Mini-Satellites be more appropriate? I mean, nano? What do they call the 1kg satellites of the future? Pico-Satellites? Then they are really screwed when they come out with the ones you measure in grams.. Nobody knows Femto... (Did I even spell it right? My computer doesn't think so.)
I could accept the process thing. My point wasn't that giving the poor money would make them rich, it was that injecting money back into the system would be more effective through the poor. You (and my original post) correctly assume it will end up in the hands of the rich one way or the other, so my point was--why not the other? Why not make the rich at least supply a product to get their money?
The poor are there anyway, they will probably remain there. What's the argument against making them more comfortable at no real expense and an actual gain to us (injecting the money back into the economy, helping the lower rank of neighborhood stores stay alive, improving public transportation and common services,...) as opposed to tax breaks that will not be as well invested and will put those neighborhood services into debt (loans to banks) rather than help them become more self-sufficient (sales)?
Honestly I think the reason for this is that the completely illogical fact that the concept of giving something to the poor just pisses some people off. No reason to be pissed, a homeless person didn't kill their dad or anything. They'd rather see rich people (or better yet, a corporation!) get charity any day regardless of how they use it.
I guess I don't see how trickle down helps the homeless or the large number of americans who don't pay taxes.
The more you make, the more you are likely to ignore any savings or put it into the bank, at this point although some goes down, most goes up. The higher up the money gets, the more it seems to flow up.
On the other hand, if you were to distribute the same amount of money to the poorest 10%, it would immediately flow back into the economy. Even if some goes to drug dealers (worst case), right after that most would flow into auto dealers and bling retailers and on up the chain.
So let's say that both tend to re-invigorate the economy equally (Even though I don't think they do), All things being equal, wouldn't it be better to give the money to people so that they can make free-market product choices than the bank (where the tax breaks end up I guess) who are more likely to serve those who already have influence and political pull? Sounds much less free-market to me. Not that I'm an absolute believer in free market, but it's better than handouts to banks.
Actually the whole idea of "Wealth" kinda hurts my mind.
The thief breaks a window, steps on a couch, drags mud all over the carpet, wrecks an end-table and steals a TV that cost the owner $500 and sells it for $35.
The homeowner buys a new window for $250 and has the carpets and apolstery cleaned for $100.
The window shop hires a new employee because of all the robberies in the area, the guy from the carpet cleaning company goes out and buys a round of beer for the guys because of the extra $ he's made this week.
The homeowner gets $700 from insurance ($150 deductible). He goes and buys a $1000 TV, pulling some money out of his credit card. He's actually happier overall because he's wanted HD for a while and hasn't been able to justify it to his wife.
Now, this is total fantasy, I'm just saying that it seems to me like there is nothing you can do with money that is in any way predictably bad for the economy EXCEPT for holding it and not spending it. (I think even putting it into the bank gets it back into circulation through loans and stuff).
And shouldn't even burning money reduce the amount of cash available and therefore reduce inflation by an imperceptible amount.
I've tried to figure this out for years now, to no avail. I'm seriously considering taking a class on economics but I don't really trust that anyone fully grasps what is going on...
The one thing I've figured out, it's easy for money to flow up to people who have it, and there it appears to be very bad for the economy (unless the rich person throws a lot of parties and hires caterers and hookers--at least that keeps the money moving). But it seems REALLY REALLY hard to get money to flow down to the lowest levels where it would most quickly be placed back into circulation and do the best for the economy.
In other words, trickle down is the most retarded financial concept in history, but trickle up would work fantastically, it can't help but work.
Damn, all this work and the story is so old nobody will read it.
Absolutely, but tell that to the guy who can either make an extra $5m by doing something questionable, or try to be fair...
I've found very few people that wouldn't make the choice to screw over others in my life, and those aren't the kind that would end up in the position to make such decisions.
So after thinking for 8 seconds (Should have hit preview), wouldn't it be easy to identify x similar packets to the same address within y seconds? Start out very loose then just tweak the variables as necessary..
Hmm, I think you're mistaking a problem that needs a distributed one for one that needs a centralized one.
If you had a monitor or 20 at each NOC with the ability to recognize the patterns and either filter or shut down completely, it should solve the problem.
Honestly if I was part of a botnet and didn't know it, I'd be happy if they would just shut my port off then tell me why...
I didn't know that about the port 80 thing, I thought most exploits used other protocols, but I should have known better because the targets would just shut down the other ports at the incoming router, so it would have to be 80.
It seems like their behavior can be pretty easily identified.
Why don't ISPs just block all ports but 80 and all traffic there except for standard HTTP--leave a little notice saying that they are restricted until they get their shit together? I'd even volunteer part-time to join a crew to help people fix their computer and get back online.
All you'd really have to do is find one machine under a DDOS and log as many unique IPs as possible, then start flicking switches.
I mean, they are already identifying bit torrent traffic and treating that differently, is this really reaching that much further?...
Yes, but your benefit from injustice is likely to be much greater.
A company distributing a significant amount of its profits to all its employees might double all their salaries and be fair, but the top few management people could no longer draw $10m salaries for screwing the company up....
Exactly! It's actually fairly inflammatory and unnatural to say that it costs the software industry $60b, you pretty much have to go out of your way NOT to say that it is "Saving businesses $60b a year which, of course, is passed on to consumers".
Not only that, but it is creating some fantastic zero-cost startups. How many small companies start with no investment at all on a few copies of eclipse, mySQL and a few other free products when their alternative is to either steal or pay licensing fees they can't afford?
It must be hard coming up for excuses for your stupid stagnant products when free Open Source products are beating them in every way.
I guess the only alternative is to start spreading some kind of FUD and try to get Open Source declared un-american or something. Maybe you could start out by buying a few articles in tech mags and somehow trying come up with some twisted view of it that might make it sound bad...
Solving the problem of internet security is amazingly trivial in the US. Offer bounties and encourage supervised (logged?) domestic attacks.
The only reason I can imagine for the US government to discourage or jail our millions of ambitious hackers instead of enlisting them is that they don't want the holes found. Either that or arrogance and stupidity on such a massive scale that I can't actually picture it.
Hmm, but then it is the US government we're talking about. Never mind.
First was not drugs. There is a continual cycle that probably started when the first 5 cavemen got together and started hogging the women.
Mankind has a nature to drift towards ruling and ruled classes, and the divide grows until someone freaks out and--well historically anyway--kills all the rulers.
These days it's not supposed to be so violent or absolute. You have governments that are supposed to control companies and it is supposed to keep the pendulum from swinging so far that it starts to cut off heads.
But many people differentiate between government and business, assuming that even though governments have acted horribly in the past, there is no way a business could do so.
Both are just collections of people. The only difference is that everyone is supposed to have an equal say in the government (even if it isn't true), but nobody even pretends that business can be controlled directly except through government.
As these two drift closer together, as government relaxes our only controls over business, we are completely and utterly screwed...
Also, don't copy your apps--remember any of your executables could propagate the problem and start the whole thing all over again.
--ps, I have zero experience with Vista, so none of this applies to that, but I have decades of dealing with every other microsoft OS.
When I used to run Windows, my procedure was this:
Every year or so--buy a brand new big fat hard drive and mount it as your primary.
Install windows and whatever apps you have source disks for.
Mount your old drive as your secondary, but never boot off it or run an executable off of it. copy data or leave the data and use it off the old drive, but delete your entire program files directory and anything else that is executable.
When you're pretty sure all the data on your old drive is relocated or stale, take it out and format it. Maybe you can stick it in an external raid enclosure now and use it for backups or something. You might want to ensure the MBR was re-written, viruii can hide in there too.
I always assume ANY windows machine is compromised with a rootkit and possibly a keylogger. I can usually find a rootkit on any machine I've used for more than a few months (AV software is NO HELP)--even though I use firewalls and NATs and watch my logs (I'm extremely paranoid as evidenced by the contents of this post).
I don't ever enter anything financial into a windows box. Many obviously aren't actually infected by a keylogger, but why risk the pain? Is it really worth having to deal with banks and credit card companies weekly for a year of your life?
It's not that Linux or Mac are Immune, but they are somewhat safer because: A) neither the mac nor Linux run in "Root" mode. This may help with vista as well, I believe it acts more like a user account than root now. B) more hackers are familiar with Windows. (This is changing and not a great defense any more). In my experience, I've yet to see a Mac/Linux box infected; or a windows box older than 6 months that wasn't! but then this is just one old engineers observations.
by the way, I think for most users it's even harder to tell if a Linux machine is infected. I don't think it does the same strange quirky things a windows box tends to when infected.
I really wish the makers of Ubuntu would start shipping with something like tripwire that can detect any executable changes and let you know...
I'm sure it's "Ink" (media) is something like a wax or a plastic.
I can't get to the article right now but I wonder how hard it would be to have the printer make a machine to create its own "ink" from common household items like sand/glass oil and animal fat, something bizarre like that.
It's kind of like you read my post with some pretty serious preconceived notions then responded to your own notions.
I said many companies can be good for quite a long time... I'm talking years, decades, lifetimes. They can also go through a "Restructuring" like IBM did and become better than they were.
But the only constant drive--superseding boards of trustees, CEOs and all employees--is making profit for shareholders.
Apple, by the way, sees profit in being seen as good, they are not in it to make peoples lives that much better. Look at some of the stuff google does if you want to see a company actually trying to be good. They have the biggest private bus line in the US for their employees in SF. They have some fantastic restaurants on campus. They force their employees to spend time working on programs that cannot benefit them. They are much more community-oriented than apple.
This comes from an iphone/iMac using PC hating engineer by the way...
And I could be wrong. Can you tell me what not-for-profit community oriented things Apple is spending money on? I haven't heard as much as I have about google's programs, so I could be missing a lot. I'm sure it won't compare to 20% of all their employees salaries (the cost of Google's 20% program), but it may be more significant than I'm giving Apple credit for.
For years I've been wondering what it is that is that tends to make people tend to fall into one of these categories.
On one hand you are right, but on the other, people still tend to fall pretty easily into one category or the other.
The closes I've come after pondering this question for maybe 20 years is empathy.
Note, conservative/liberal does not always correspond to republican/democrat.
A conservative tends to feel empathy for those closest to him--his family and friends and country. When they are hurt, he is hurt. He believes it is fair to sacrifice the rights of those further away say another country or a criminal to help someone in a smaller circle (family/friends/church). If they can't find a way to relate to someone, they often find it completely impossible to empathize with them (foreign immigrants, unwed mothers, gays, atheists). They often speak in terms of "Them" (evidence our recent spat of anti-gay conservatives found to be pro-gay personally. What they feel is personally acceptable doesn't always apply to others--others sometimes have different rules...
A liberal tends to feel empathy more broadly (and perhaps less intensely for those close to them). They would generally not sacrifice the well being of a foreigner for a citizen of his own country. He may sacrifice others for his own family or himself--but will feel that it is wrong. He tends to feel that if he wants to do something, others should have the same right.
A sciociopath (Just to be complete) is a person with no empathy for anyone--it's a medical condition I include here just to point out that empathy is actually a very significant part of what controls your brain.
This is the only pattern I've come up with that applies to all the conflicting tendencies of the left and right, if you've got a better root cause that explains the prevalence of the liberal/conservative grouping in humans, please enlighten me.
Or stated another way, niche markets that could have never drawn enough listeners to make it into traditional media channels suddenly have a channel through which to reach their considerably smaller audience.
Podcasts are no less valid than traditional media because of this--in fact, they could be more valid because of their ability to offer ANY content, popular or niche.
There are a couple really good Linux podcasts, Java Posse is fantastic and Distorted View has such a large audience that was courted by a satellite radio station sight unseen (sound unheard?)--until they actually bothered to listen to the content. My guess is that he has more listeners than most radio shows.
Another interesting aspect, Coverville is as good as most radio shows--better than many. It would have significant appeal to virtually anyone who actually enjoyed music. Yet there are some consumers who limit their choices simply because they have determined to discard the concept of podcasting, I guess because they don't want to change their patterns or they tried it and herd one or two podcasts they disliked and decided the whole Genre must be lame. I guess that's like the way I didn't like Radio when I was young because they were always just talking--then I learned to use The Knob when my parents weren't in control of it.
In part, though, the concept of both Twitter and Podcasting being "Sidlined" is interesting. They aren't, but they don't get much outside publicity either. Many people have simply incorporated them into their lives and don't really feel the need to discuss them outside the media itself--If you love Twitter, why would you go to a blog to discuss it? and Podcasting gets a lot of discussion on podcasts. We don't discuss newspapers or carpet or air all that much, does that make them sidelined or unimportant?
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think that a direct vote is good any more. I used to think Democracy was obviously a good idea and the Founding Fathers were high, but after seeing more people I realized that, "people" can be SEVERLY wrong (note the last two elections).
Now I think the solution is to keep the power as low as possible. The problem is that the bulk of our tax $ (a direct representation of power) goes to the federal. The federal government uses it to increase their own power.
If the bulk of our money went to, say, the city level--then all the cities in a county could get together and vote on county needs (funding those needs as well). The counties could get together and vote on state needs (funding those needs) and the states could get together and vote on federal issues--so the only way the most distant part of the government is to pass it through all the other pieces.
This increases the problem of redistribution of wealth between high tax base and low tax base areas. Every child should have the same chance at schooling, so all schools should be funded equally--stuff like that.
No matter what you came up to patch the problems that such a system would cause, it can't be worse than it is now.
I saw a really good post that applies to this entire thread (including File Vault)
If the NSA isn't freaking out about some kind of encryption trying to get it banned, it's because they can get into it.
Also, the more secure you think your files are, the more likely you'll put stuff there that might interest them.
You can't touch the "Puck", and you're given a little hooked 2ft stick and have to slap it through a hoop.
Also see basket racquetball.
That was close to what struck me--wouldn't Micro-Sattelites or even Mini-Satellites be more appropriate? I mean, nano? What do they call the 1kg satellites of the future? Pico-Satellites? Then they are really screwed when they come out with the ones you measure in grams.. Nobody knows Femto... (Did I even spell it right? My computer doesn't think so.)
I could accept the process thing. My point wasn't that giving the poor money would make them rich, it was that injecting money back into the system would be more effective through the poor. You (and my original post) correctly assume it will end up in the hands of the rich one way or the other, so my point was--why not the other? Why not make the rich at least supply a product to get their money?
...) as opposed to tax breaks that will not be as well invested and will put those neighborhood services into debt (loans to banks) rather than help them become more self-sufficient (sales)?
The poor are there anyway, they will probably remain there. What's the argument against making them more comfortable at no real expense and an actual gain to us (injecting the money back into the economy, helping the lower rank of neighborhood stores stay alive, improving public transportation and common services,
Honestly I think the reason for this is that the completely illogical fact that the concept of giving something to the poor just pisses some people off. No reason to be pissed, a homeless person didn't kill their dad or anything. They'd rather see rich people (or better yet, a corporation!) get charity any day regardless of how they use it.
I guess I don't see how trickle down helps the homeless or the large number of americans who don't pay taxes.
The more you make, the more you are likely to ignore any savings or put it into the bank, at this point although some goes down, most goes up. The higher up the money gets, the more it seems to flow up.
On the other hand, if you were to distribute the same amount of money to the poorest 10%, it would immediately flow back into the economy. Even if some goes to drug dealers (worst case), right after that most would flow into auto dealers and bling retailers and on up the chain.
So let's say that both tend to re-invigorate the economy equally (Even though I don't think they do), All things being equal, wouldn't it be better to give the money to people so that they can make free-market product choices than the bank (where the tax breaks end up I guess) who are more likely to serve those who already have influence and political pull? Sounds much less free-market to me. Not that I'm an absolute believer in free market, but it's better than handouts to banks.
Actually the whole idea of "Wealth" kinda hurts my mind.
The thief breaks a window, steps on a couch, drags mud all over the carpet, wrecks an end-table and steals a TV that cost the owner $500 and sells it for $35.
The homeowner buys a new window for $250 and has the carpets and apolstery cleaned for $100.
The window shop hires a new employee because of all the robberies in the area, the guy from the carpet cleaning company goes out and buys a round of beer for the guys because of the extra $ he's made this week.
The homeowner gets $700 from insurance ($150 deductible). He goes and buys a $1000 TV, pulling some money out of his credit card. He's actually happier overall because he's wanted HD for a while and hasn't been able to justify it to his wife.
Now, this is total fantasy, I'm just saying that it seems to me like there is nothing you can do with money that is in any way predictably bad for the economy EXCEPT for holding it and not spending it. (I think even putting it into the bank gets it back into circulation through loans and stuff).
And shouldn't even burning money reduce the amount of cash available and therefore reduce inflation by an imperceptible amount.
I've tried to figure this out for years now, to no avail. I'm seriously considering taking a class on economics but I don't really trust that anyone fully grasps what is going on...
The one thing I've figured out, it's easy for money to flow up to people who have it, and there it appears to be very bad for the economy (unless the rich person throws a lot of parties and hires caterers and hookers--at least that keeps the money moving). But it seems REALLY REALLY hard to get money to flow down to the lowest levels where it would most quickly be placed back into circulation and do the best for the economy.
In other words, trickle down is the most retarded financial concept in history, but trickle up would work fantastically, it can't help but work.
Damn, all this work and the story is so old nobody will read it.
Absolutely, but tell that to the guy who can either make an extra $5m by doing something questionable, or try to be fair...
I've found very few people that wouldn't make the choice to screw over others in my life, and those aren't the kind that would end up in the position to make such decisions.
So after thinking for 8 seconds (Should have hit preview), wouldn't it be easy to identify x similar packets to the same address within y seconds? Start out very loose then just tweak the variables as necessary..
Hmm, I think you're mistaking a problem that needs a distributed one for one that needs a centralized one.
If you had a monitor or 20 at each NOC with the ability to recognize the patterns and either filter or shut down completely, it should solve the problem.
Honestly if I was part of a botnet and didn't know it, I'd be happy if they would just shut my port off then tell me why...
I didn't know that about the port 80 thing, I thought most exploits used other protocols, but I should have known better because the targets would just shut down the other ports at the incoming router, so it would have to be 80.
As I understand it, to recharge an electric car in your garage costs you an equivalent of less than $.50/gal--so screw green.
But does anyone have validation of this?
It seems like their behavior can be pretty easily identified.
Why don't ISPs just block all ports but 80 and all traffic there except for standard HTTP--leave a little notice saying that they are restricted until they get their shit together? I'd even volunteer part-time to join a crew to help people fix their computer and get back online.
All you'd really have to do is find one machine under a DDOS and log as many unique IPs as possible, then start flicking switches.
I mean, they are already identifying bit torrent traffic and treating that differently, is this really reaching that much further?...
Yes, but your benefit from injustice is likely to be much greater.
A company distributing a significant amount of its profits to all its employees might double all their salaries and be fair, but the top few management people could no longer draw $10m salaries for screwing the company up....
I just bought a car that happens to take this E85 ethanol combo gas.
It dropped my mileage from city 22 to like 16, highway 30 to 22.
It was a little cheaper due to government subsidies ($2.77 vs $3.30 at the time), but it didn't come close to breaking even with the drop in mileage.
Overall very disappointed.
Where are the plug-in hybrids?
funny thing is I agree with you
When I wrote the parent I had some sarcasm around that statement but it got edited out in the read-thru
But seriously, even cynics such as ourselves must admit that open source lowers prices through both lowered costs and increased compitition.
Exactly! It's actually fairly inflammatory and unnatural to say that it costs the software industry $60b, you pretty much have to go out of your way NOT to say that it is "Saving businesses $60b a year which, of course, is passed on to consumers".
Not only that, but it is creating some fantastic zero-cost startups. How many small companies start with no investment at all on a few copies of eclipse, mySQL and a few other free products when their alternative is to either steal or pay licensing fees they can't afford?
It must be hard coming up for excuses for your stupid stagnant products when free Open Source products are beating them in every way.
I guess the only alternative is to start spreading some kind of FUD and try to get Open Source declared un-american or something. Maybe you could start out by buying a few articles in tech mags and somehow trying come up with some twisted view of it that might make it sound bad...
Solving the problem of internet security is amazingly trivial in the US. Offer bounties and encourage supervised (logged?) domestic attacks.
The only reason I can imagine for the US government to discourage or jail our millions of ambitious hackers instead of enlisting them is that they don't want the holes found. Either that or arrogance and stupidity on such a massive scale that I can't actually picture it.
Hmm, but then it is the US government we're talking about. Never mind.
This game sucks.
Actually when I've been involved interviewing people right out of college, the most important factor was where they interned.
Also a school local to where you want to work is good--people in the pacific northwest seem to have a preference for UW grads.
First was not drugs. There is a continual cycle that probably started when the first 5 cavemen got together and started hogging the women.
Mankind has a nature to drift towards ruling and ruled classes, and the divide grows until someone freaks out and--well historically anyway--kills all the rulers.
These days it's not supposed to be so violent or absolute. You have governments that are supposed to control companies and it is supposed to keep the pendulum from swinging so far that it starts to cut off heads.
But many people differentiate between government and business, assuming that even though governments have acted horribly in the past, there is no way a business could do so.
Both are just collections of people. The only difference is that everyone is supposed to have an equal say in the government (even if it isn't true), but nobody even pretends that business can be controlled directly except through government.
As these two drift closer together, as government relaxes our only controls over business, we are completely and utterly screwed...
Also, don't copy your apps--remember any of your executables could propagate the problem and start the whole thing all over again.
--ps, I have zero experience with Vista, so none of this applies to that, but I have decades of dealing with every other microsoft OS.
When I used to run Windows, my procedure was this:
Every year or so--buy a brand new big fat hard drive and mount it as your primary.
Install windows and whatever apps you have source disks for.
Mount your old drive as your secondary, but never boot off it or run an executable off of it. copy data or leave the data and use it off the old drive, but delete your entire program files directory and anything else that is executable.
When you're pretty sure all the data on your old drive is relocated or stale, take it out and format it. Maybe you can stick it in an external raid enclosure now and use it for backups or something. You might want to ensure the MBR was re-written, viruii can hide in there too.
I always assume ANY windows machine is compromised with a rootkit and possibly a keylogger. I can usually find a rootkit on any machine I've used for more than a few months (AV software is NO HELP)--even though I use firewalls and NATs and watch my logs (I'm extremely paranoid as evidenced by the contents of this post).
I don't ever enter anything financial into a windows box. Many obviously aren't actually infected by a keylogger, but why risk the pain? Is it really worth having to deal with banks and credit card companies weekly for a year of your life?
It's not that Linux or Mac are Immune, but they are somewhat safer because: A) neither the mac nor Linux run in "Root" mode. This may help with vista as well, I believe it acts more like a user account than root now. B) more hackers are familiar with Windows. (This is changing and not a great defense any more). In my experience, I've yet to see a Mac/Linux box infected; or a windows box older than 6 months that wasn't! but then this is just one old engineers observations.
by the way, I think for most users it's even harder to tell if a Linux machine is infected. I don't think it does the same strange quirky things a windows box tends to when infected.
I really wish the makers of Ubuntu would start shipping with something like tripwire that can detect any executable changes and let you know...
Cool!
..." joke in there somewhere.
Next step is to print a robot that can walk into a bar and obtain beer for ink.
There is a "... walks into a bar
I'm sure it's "Ink" (media) is something like a wax or a plastic.
I can't get to the article right now but I wonder how hard it would be to have the printer make a machine to create its own "ink" from common household items like sand/glass oil and animal fat, something bizarre like that.
It's kind of like you read my post with some pretty serious preconceived notions then responded to your own notions.
I said many companies can be good for quite a long time... I'm talking years, decades, lifetimes. They can also go through a "Restructuring" like IBM did and become better than they were.
But the only constant drive--superseding boards of trustees, CEOs and all employees--is making profit for shareholders.
Apple, by the way, sees profit in being seen as good, they are not in it to make peoples lives that much better. Look at some of the stuff google does if you want to see a company actually trying to be good. They have the biggest private bus line in the US for their employees in SF. They have some fantastic restaurants on campus. They force their employees to spend time working on programs that cannot benefit them. They are much more community-oriented than apple.
This comes from an iphone/iMac using PC hating engineer by the way...
And I could be wrong. Can you tell me what not-for-profit community oriented things Apple is spending money on? I haven't heard as much as I have about google's programs, so I could be missing a lot. I'm sure it won't compare to 20% of all their employees salaries (the cost of Google's 20% program), but it may be more significant than I'm giving Apple credit for.
For years I've been wondering what it is that is that tends to make people tend to fall into one of these categories.
On one hand you are right, but on the other, people still tend to fall pretty easily into one category or the other.
The closes I've come after pondering this question for maybe 20 years is empathy.
Note, conservative/liberal does not always correspond to republican/democrat.
A conservative tends to feel empathy for those closest to him--his family and friends and country. When they are hurt, he is hurt. He believes it is fair to sacrifice the rights of those further away say another country or a criminal to help someone in a smaller circle (family/friends/church). If they can't find a way to relate to someone, they often find it completely impossible to empathize with them (foreign immigrants, unwed mothers, gays, atheists). They often speak in terms of "Them" (evidence our recent spat of anti-gay conservatives found to be pro-gay personally. What they feel is personally acceptable doesn't always apply to others--others sometimes have different rules...
A liberal tends to feel empathy more broadly (and perhaps less intensely for those close to them). They would generally not sacrifice the well being of a foreigner for a citizen of his own country. He may sacrifice others for his own family or himself--but will feel that it is wrong. He tends to feel that if he wants to do something, others should have the same right.
A sciociopath (Just to be complete) is a person with no empathy for anyone--it's a medical condition I include here just to point out that empathy is actually a very significant part of what controls your brain.
This is the only pattern I've come up with that applies to all the conflicting tendencies of the left and right, if you've got a better root cause that explains the prevalence of the liberal/conservative grouping in humans, please enlighten me.
Or stated another way, niche markets that could have never drawn enough listeners to make it into traditional media channels suddenly have a channel through which to reach their considerably smaller audience.
Podcasts are no less valid than traditional media because of this--in fact, they could be more valid because of their ability to offer ANY content, popular or niche.
There are a couple really good Linux podcasts, Java Posse is fantastic and Distorted View has such a large audience that was courted by a satellite radio station sight unseen (sound unheard?)--until they actually bothered to listen to the content. My guess is that he has more listeners than most radio shows.
Another interesting aspect, Coverville is as good as most radio shows--better than many. It would have significant appeal to virtually anyone who actually enjoyed music. Yet there are some consumers who limit their choices simply because they have determined to discard the concept of podcasting, I guess because they don't want to change their patterns or they tried it and herd one or two podcasts they disliked and decided the whole Genre must be lame. I guess that's like the way I didn't like Radio when I was young because they were always just talking--then I learned to use The Knob when my parents weren't in control of it.
In part, though, the concept of both Twitter and Podcasting being "Sidlined" is interesting. They aren't, but they don't get much outside publicity either. Many people have simply incorporated them into their lives and don't really feel the need to discuss them outside the media itself--If you love Twitter, why would you go to a blog to discuss it? and Podcasting gets a lot of discussion on podcasts. We don't discuss newspapers or carpet or air all that much, does that make them sidelined or unimportant?