fdupoo's comments

Oil price stabilization? War in the area seems to have caused the opposite effect for the better part of the last 2 decades.

Im mostly talking out of my ass here, but here goes: Stop trend following with UI paradigms. Being smaller and accept that you're smaller; Stop worrying about converting people and new user adoption. Is it /really/ a priority for the target market of new and current users to have as low a learning curve as possible for UI layout and functionality patterns? It seems to me most Ububtu users are A) at /least/ slightly more sophisticated than the average user B) /actually/ looking for an alternative, as in a new paradigm.

Why not??

I personally love the convenience of the CLI, but remembering all of those commands takes up a lot of mental space. Some sort of visual guide, or better, a way to make the CLI experience mesh with the GUI experience would be totally be the cat's meow.

Again, don't try to be the next mac or windows (at least not by mostly copying their paradigms). Doing so can easily damage a niche product's ability to fully serve its core users.

It's a better idea, rather, to look at the size and profiles (5 is a good number) of Ubuntu users as a source of users who are probably willing to experiment and even actively contribute to experimental UI, navigation, and command input design models.

This type of active and collaborative participation at a higher level of abstraction (at the design and use level) is great for allowing active users to contribute more than a few lines of code in a network driver. I would definitely reconsider using Ubuntu if I this sort of activity started. That would open your user base to a whole new class of technical users, process and user-interface designers.

Who knows, maybe you guys will stumble upon something interesting! If the user-touching design innovations catch on and increase visibility for Ubuntu or better, if they are adopter by maimsteam players, then you would further cement Ubuntu's position in the OS ecosystem, but with meaningful connectivity to major players-- as a place where reallty cool things happen in terms of design innovation. Big companies like windows can't make these kinds of changes very easily, almost any amount of testing is too little for a company with such a large user base, most of whom are less tech sophisticated and solidified in their usage patterns and expectations. Large companies are by nature more calcified. Small companies like Ubuntu can try new usage patterns (like what windows tries and inevitably always fails at), see what works, then, furthermore, can help establish those design patterns in a reasonable number of mainstream users (there are strategies for that) and after a critical mass had been reached in terms of familiarity and proper market-fit, the larger players will put those ideas at the top of the list when it comes time to think about modernization.

No Unity. I dunno if that's a stilo thing but that turned me off from ubuntu, probably forever.

Yes, if wilt spends the money he made on things that don't further concentrate his money-making ability then it will cascade and circulate, helping create the imbalances necessary for activity (economy).

The effects of spending your money can have three types of impact: 1) you spend money in ways that don't directly offer you further capacity to concentrate wealth (food, drugs, entertainment, (clothes, cars, and houses are arguably marks of status which in many societies is a tool for further wealth concentration). 2) you spend money in a way that reduces other's capacity to concentrate wealth (you spend money to abolish the school board in the liberal capital of a rural state in the bible belt, like the Waltons and Stephens just teamed up to accomplish in Little Rock, Arkansas. (thanks guys!)) 3) you spend money in ways that can directly benefit your competitive advantage in making money. In the business world we call this Capex, or capital expenditure. Spending money on things that help you make more money.

I think it's important to say:

What is money? Money is a store of value, which is used to peacefully coerce others to do what you want them to to. It can be used to convince others to do your bidding, or in the case of a well established (specified) civilizatiobn, people have already done the work they expect you to want, and are ready to make the exchange. Changes to the product or process happen over time, with the consumer communicating to the providers what and how he or she wants a specific thing, and will guide businesses with the placement of his or her own dollars. This is why these guys spend more on 2 and 3 of this list: money is a form of power, where you can dictate not only what but the way products and services are rendered. And as a member of the elite class of producers and financiers, it is further advantageous to impede any one unit or subgroup of consumers from having enough money to coerce the elite into business practices that favor consumers

ERRATA: *maybe the banking systems will be MORE democratic

I was going to chime in, but you nailed it here.

Absorbing losses until your competition goes out of business is called price gouging. It's considered unethical and in many current cases is actively punished worldwide. Advantageous access to funding is usually (but not always) the enabler.

In the early 20th century US Industry invaded Brazil with much lower interest rates and absolutely decimated Brazil's budding manufacturing sector, to which it has never recovered. Then there's Wal-mart in the US -- Amazon's strategy is not unlike Wal-mart's was (ream the competition in a price war with lower prices and ginormous investments in logistics technology, which bring competitive cost-savings). It's impossible to beat that triad (low prices, being flush with outside capital, huge investments in cost-savings). Other businesses without all that money can't keep prices low and invest heavily at the same time. Another advantage:You hardly need to advertise. You make a name for yourself with the good deals you give everyone.

I don't think it's fair. I don't shop at a wal-mart, I don't use amazon, and I don't use uber(never have). That's about the only solution I can see: don't patronize scumbags.

Maybe one day the banking system will be less democratic. For now, the bankers pick favorites and those favorites become ever more favorable, because the goal of these schmucks is the centralization of wealth-- so why not get to centralizing it?

Boston public schools recently announced that they will shift to using world maps based on the Peters projection,

Why not teach them both maps, or, rather, teach them that it's hard to represent the world in 2D space. O.o get them looking at maps from all angles and configurations.

Thanks, I'll be checking this book out ASAP

I was really interested in learning math. Was. i continue to be interested in math, I'm discouraged by the total lack of good and available instructional material on something as basic and essential as notation and set theory notation. There is a ton of great material out there for total beginners and people who have recieved formal instruction of advanced math. The in-betweeners get a bit shafted.

I dunno if things have changed since I last pursued this, but 5 years ago it was absurd.

CS, on the other hand, has a lot more material readily available for self-study. I find the subject itself also lends itself to being more accessible. Furthermore, unlike math, the practitioners of CS related fields seem to be concerned with readable notation.

So, mathematicians: acessibility is key! Math is fascinating, but inaccessible even to a large part of the intelligensia.

Asset Valuation is not income generated unless you liquidate or rent it out.

Why does ms have it's own version of all these languages?

U should modify your language to sound like less of an apologist. Apologists are less effective when they are easily spotted as such. ;-)

>Redistributing wealth more and more creates less opportunity for the free market to lift people out of poverty.

What? No it doesnt? How do you even

Is this satire?

Like tears In the rain

Brazuca! Kkkkk. Uau!

Your english is very good! Congratulations!

But you have a domain bias.

Monsanto is deeply involved in the learning side of academia as well.

There are plenty of agricultural techniques that work better than the current system.

The current system has low productivity per acre. It is very input intensive, inefficient, and is subject to volatile price swings. It's only advantage is that it's highly mechanized, so you get economy of scale with high output per worker and per asset, but that mechanization in it's current form is a system that destroys arability(soil health) over time. So your returns over time degrade, but input costs are on a 40 year uptrend... It's a broken system.

There are food systems that are more labor intensive (less return per human and per asset) but you can produce more food more predictably at lower margins for the producers and higher prices for consumers, but the with more stable input and end-user costs. The three added (and in my opinion most important) side-effects of this system are higher quality food, more jobs, and IMPROVED fertility over time. These new systems use science as well. They were developed by ecologists, systems theorists, and soil microbiologists.

Credentials: (i'm the first son of a 6th generation land-owning family in the Mississippi Delta region of Arkansas.)

I have to say that you seem to be uninformed about their practices. You do realize the implications of this very article that you are commenting on, right? Monsanto is no uber, is a misomer. Uber IS a Monsanto is a better characterization. Monsanto is obviously a very evil company. Look at this headline! They did the exaxt same thing with rGBH growth hormone.

There are cases of rebelious scientists who have lost their job in the FDA when rGBH was being 'evaluated'

They have since then become activists. And that's really not a bad job. You can have a lower-middle class lifestyle as a consumer advocate.

The movie 'the world according to monsanto' is a fine piece of journalism that goes into the stories of these fellas.

Sorry dude, don't see the connection.

I am a predator. Predators kill prey animals, including (and sometimes especially) the babies. Cheese is delicious. Im anti-GMO and have been killing animals for food since I was 3.

GMO and monsanto practices are health issues. The pesticides are a problem in terms of chemical pollution.

As for gene editing, it's a question of polluting the gene pool of a life system. Releasing Gene-mod into a complex dynamic self-regulating self-propagating system is like modifying diseases them and releasing them into human society. It may not be a problem, but we can't know if it will be a problem till it's done, and once it's done, it's done. You can't remove or erase your mistakes.

We cant know what any particular gene-mod will do in the wild, if it will be harmful or not, but we do know that monsanto and their cronies at the FDA and EPA don't give a flying fuck about systemic consequences of new technologies.

We do know that the technology is potentially catastrophic, and there are a lot of disincentives to be responsible baked into the system of those holding the keys to this tech.