Legalize it, then it can be taxed and regulated. We should strongly consider doing the same thing with other drugs, too. If drugs were legally available, there would be no profit in the illicit drug trade, we would see a reduction in crime at all levels, and the medical costs associated with overdoses and adulterated drugs would also decrease. Legalizing marajuana would be an excellent test case.
Also, if marajuana was legalized, then hemp would be legalized, and the USA would again have a valuable cash crop to grow on marginal lands. It is stupid that hemp is an illegal crop... the only reason for it being illegal is that it seemed easier to pass a law against hemp than to train law enforcement personnel in the simple botany needed to make the distinction. I, for one, think that our cops are smart enough to learn how to do a simple field test.
Of course, legalizing any of the highly profitable black market drugs would mean bucking the lobbying efforts of one of the USA's major industries, and one of the very few that enjoys freedom from paying any taxes on its profits. So I don't expect this to happen soon or without great effort.
I've been using Gnome on Ubuntu nearly exclusively for about 18 months. I have used, sold, customized, and taught users how to work with Win3.0, Win3.11 (good for its time), Win98 (very good for its time), and WinXP. I have also used and taught the use of every MS Office suite that has come along.
IMHO, Gnome on Ubuntu is equivalent to the WinXP experience. Some aspects of customization could definitely be improved but none are as bad as Windows Registry edits. Ubuntu security is vastly better than WinXP but WinXP has, um,...I'll get back to you on that one. Ubuntu documentation about configuration issues could definitely be expanded. But OTOH, Windows "help" files have always been consistently bad, inspiring the joke about the Seattle heliocopter pilot who was lost over a thick blanket of fog:
He hovered beside a tall office building and asked his passenger to make and hold up a sign: "Where am I?"
The passenger complied, and the people in the building who were watching went into a flurry of wild activity, and after a delay, held up a sign in reply:
"You are in a helicopter."
Where upon the pilot smiled, turned purposefully in the correct direction and was soon on the ground at the airport. His passenger asked:
"How the heck were you able to find your way here from that useless answer?"
And the pilot replied: "Yes, the answer was totally useless, but it was also completely accurate. So I knew we were in Redmond, at the Microsoft building."
Now when I'm talking about configuration and interface usage, I'm talking about function, not about translucent windows or slow roll-downs or rounded corners or other eye candy whose primary effect is to steal resources from the apps that are actually doing what the user is getting paid to do. Here's a car-like analogy: if you are into judging the quality of a pickup truck by its paint job, what I have to say does not apply. But if your idea of quality in a pickup truck has to do with load capacity, efficiency, and MPG, then listen up. On the whole, the Gnome on Ubuntu experience is equivalent to the WinXP experience (though in the details they have different strengths and weaknesses.)
No. That is, I think parent post is wrong, to the extent that it is addressing the wrong issues.
Basically we cannot know what the typical user wants in an interface until we put it in his hands, he has a chance to play with it, and he begins to make choices about how he's going to use it. Those choices often involve things the designers and coders could never have anticipated: it is in user interaction that "unintended consequences" and the like begin to emerge.
Try looking at interface improvements as one of those optimizations that should not be attempted too early in the process.
Parent post makes some excellent points. I don't think that HIE is the only way to do what's needed, but there absolutely has to be some way to evaluate the user's interaction with the interface and re-model that for improvement. I think that can be done by using a longer public beta or RC period, with a phase that is entirely focused on user interaction improvements (possibly to run concurrently with the usual bug identification / squashing stuff).
Another post has argued that the interface work should be done during the design phase, before coding begins. I mostly disagree. While obviously the user interface needs some attention early in the process, it is only after the software is finished that users can begin to explore the new things that they can do with it-- and it is during that exploration that the community learns what needs to be done to get the thing to work right. When you build new work flows, people will find new kinds of work to put through those flows, and it is then that the community learns what it needs to know to fix the user - to - software - to - user interface.
I regard user interface improvements as a very important category of optimization, and like most optimization, it is a mistake to attempt to do it too early. Doing this without having an HIE staff on payroll is going to take longer, but Google has shown us that beta can go on and on...
The US has the highest cancer survival rates in the world, and by a pretty large margin. That has to be worth something in your metrics of "better".
Well, duh! That's where the money is.
The overwhelming majority of health care expense in the USA is in the last 6 months of life, often after there is little question that no matter what is done, the patient is gonna die. Patients are typically guided into increasingly expensive treatments without any meaningful discussion about the quality of life of those final few months. It is not as bad as all the doctors consulting with each other over how to wring a few dollars more out extending Joe Smoker's life another 3 weeks. But it is much closer to that extreme than telling Joe "Hey you don't have much longer, and in 3 months your going to feel really bad no matter what we do, so now is your last good opportunity to take that Summer-long fishing vacation you've been promising yourself the last thirty years. When you get back, we'll see what we can do to make the last few weeks as comfortable as we can."
No, USA health professionals don't know how to have that conversation with a patient as a general rule. The general attitude is that it is much better for the patient to keep him hopeful that this treatment or the next can keep him going for a good long time. That this is also more lucrative for the doctors and the health care institutions is purely a side effect (according to the doctors and the health care institutions, and they do say we should trust them about this kind of thing).
I have not RTFA and in this case I don't think I need to.
Netbook manufacturers are going to skim the cream. That's been the pattern for all high tech innovations for more than 20 years. It means that that you first work the most profitable price points, then as those markets get saturated, you aim at the lower price points.
People willing to pay $500 - $900 for a netbook expect to get MS Office and probably MS Outlook on it. They may well add a dual boot with Linux after purchase, and they might end up spending most of their time in Linux, but for that price a Windows OS and the ability to handle Excel and PowerPoint files perfectly are an expectation. Failure to meet that expectation is a deal breaker.
So long as there is good profit to be made in selling these high end machines, the less expensive netbooks in a manufacturer's line-up are going to be positioned to encourage consumers to buy the more expensive ones. They will have fewer features, of course, but more important to this discussion is that they ABSOLUTELY CANNOT CAUSE THE CONSUMER TO DOUBT that the top of the line netbook is the best product available. Manufacturers certainly don't want showroom discussions that compare their $750 wonder with all the MS bells and whistles with a $250 Linux with FOSS machine. That would be cutting their own throats.
Savvy sales persons are willing to talk up how Ubuntu could be easily installed as a dual boot on this $999 machine since its got the big hard drive, and that yeah, you might see more battery life, and yeah, it would probably be more secure when you are surfing on the wifi of your favorite coffee shop. Don't expect them to volunteer that info, but a good salesperson will spout on that if asked.
But that's as far as Linux penetration of the showroom is going to go, until the high end market is saturated and the $200 - $300 price point becomes the most profitable for manufacturers. Then things are likely to change, because then the license fees to Microsoft cut too deeply into the smaller margins.
There is no conspiracy here; simply the same market dynamics that have been at work in computer sales since the mid 1980s. Linux is undoubtedly being installed on a lot of netbooks after purchase. But until showing your overpriced netbook in the Golf Club's lounge is no longer a status symbol for the PHBs, Linux on a netbook is detrimental to the health of the manufacturers. Our turn will come.
From horses to zebras... sheesh! That's killed the analogy.
We need to stop beating this dead horse. Where is the car analogy? What's wrong with PJ that she didn't use a car analogy? Has she lost her inner geek?
If done in a proper green mode, there would be no demolition workers. Instead, there would be deconstruction teams, trained in the art of safely taking apart a building and recovering as much re-usable or recyclable material as possible. Check out Portland's Rebuilding Center, a place worth wandering through just to see the craftsmanship that used to be put into old buildings, that no one can afford to do any more.
Any effort to demolish old neighborhoods should be tied into a nationwide effort to build infrastructure for re-use of building material, from paving stones to the CSG (clear straight grain) lumber that used to be the norm in housing construction but which hasn't been affordable for decades. Shoving all these old buildings into a landfill would be an abominable waste.
But saying that the placebo effect is due to "fooling your brain" is just wrong. No one knows what the mechanism of the placebo effect is. It is outside the frameworks of any of the currently established sciences: it cannot be approached as physics, chemistry, or psychology even though it has strong effects in all of these realms.
Just accept that the placebo effect exists and we don't have a clue about how it works, or even how to investigate it. Using imagination to supply an acceptable mechanism for something we don't understand is an abuse of the powers of imagination and oh so very pre-scientific. Science can only advance when persons are willing to say "I don't know".
I read TFA, for what little info it provided. I've read many of the comments, too. More smoke and heat than light in them.
So is this energy generation parasitic? In practice (not in theory), is it increasing the fuel consumption of the cars? Many of the comments tacitly assume that it is.
Or is this energy being recovered from what would otherwise be wasted as heat in braking? If the plates are positioned in places where cars would have to slow down anyway, the system is not only recovering energy, it is also reducing wear on brake pads: a direct benefit to the driver. This is especially the case if the plates are installed on downward ramps, where the car is converting potential to kinetic energy that has to be shed somehow.
An interesting example of recoverable energy is the transport of grain from the intermountain plateau of Eastern Washington and Eastern Oregon to Portland, Oregon, where it is loaded on ships. There is an average drop of elevation of at least 2,000 feet, most of the transport is done by trains with diesel electric locomotives. Each grain car weighs 125 tons or more when loaded; there are at least 100 cars in a train. So that is dropping more than 12,500 tons off a small mountain with every train coming into Portland.
Here's what's neat: diesel electric locomotives use regenerative braking to slow these trains. Currently the electricity recovered is sent to resistance heaters and disposed as hot air. But it could be sent to flywheel storage units mounted on gimbals on special rail cars behind the engines (typically at least 4 engines, not needed to pull, but necessary for applying sufficient braking).
So here's a question for the reader to consider: assuming a perfect (non loss) system for transferring braking energy from the wheels to the flywheel batteries, how much energy could one of these trains deliver to the Portland power grid? This isn't a piece of blue sky by the way: New York City subways have been using flywheel batteries as load balancers for many years now.
For bonus points: Coal is mined in the Rocky Mountains and shipped by rail to Chicago. If the electricity now wasted as heat by the locomotives' regenerative braking could be stored in flywheel batteries, how much additional power would be extracted from each ton of coal as it is moved down hill?
If the logs aren't there, the subpoena doesn't hurt anything.
Not true; even though this kind of subpoena may be technically impossible to comply with, it still stifles free speech, so it definitely hurts.
The DoJ needs to take a long, hard look at the way these Federal Prosecutors are abusing the Grand Jury system and the other tools they have been entrusted with. Some housecleaning is long over due. It is a statistical certainty that there are now a countable number of Federal Prosecutors who should be fired (and maybe prosecuted for crimes in office).
The feds are going after everyone who posted anonymously, not just anonymous posters who made comments that might be threatening (or might only be juvenile hyperbole).
A much more targeted subpoena could have been easily drafted, demanding information on only on a list of the anonymous posts that could be construed in some way as threatening. That was not done; the subpoena is not properly focused. The only obvious reason for constructing the subpoena this way is to use it as a threat to silent public discussions that the prosecution does not like.
In addition, those that did actually RTFA know that the subpoena is demanding data that is technically absurd and would require the newspaper to do the investigative work of law enforcement: in addition to names and IP addresses of all the anonymous posters, the subpoena calls for their street address, age, and gender.
The subpoena was initiated at least in part by the prosecutor in the tax evasion case, and on its face it looks like an attempt by that prosecutor to use the Grand Jury system to manipulate public expressions that could affect his political aspirations. That is definitely in violation of professional ethics, and almost certainly in violation of the prosecutor's legally binding limitations as an officer of the Court.
I'm glad to see the ACLU is proactively involving itself in this. And I would hope the Federal Justice Department is taking a look at whether its employee is mishandling his responsibilities. This looks like a Damm mess.
Um, no, astrology as I know it has nothing to say one way or the other about this. It is, after all, only a study of the potentials of a any given moment in time, that just happens to use the celestial sphere as a big, accurate, clock.
Frankly, for anything of immediate concern, I find that casting the runes or consulting the tarot deck are better than astrology: you get your answer quicker, and with a lot less fuss and bother about the arithmetic.
TFA does suggest an interesting new-to-us relationship between a manifestation of Air (electromagnetic forces) and Water. Or maybe it is between Water and Fire-- electromagnetism is frequently considered a thing of the Fire element rather than Air.
Oh dear. Now I've confused myself again. How very human of me.
It would be interesting to look for correlations between magnetic reversals or similar anomalies, and geologic events that must have had a major impact on ocean currents. Such as the formation of the Isthmus of Panama roughly 3 million to 10 million years ago (I don't know enough geology to understand why different articles use different figures), and the separation of South America from Antarctica about 40 million years ago.
I bicycle 2,500 - 3,500 miles per year. And I own a 1994 minivan. And I'm looking for something like this 700 lb 2 person car in addition to what I've got, to make my life a lot greener.
Commuting to work on the bike is a no-go. There are weather concerns, the lack of a shower and changing room at work, and often the need to carry more books, etc, back and forth than I am willing to haul around on a bike. But I don't need the minivan for commuting; this 700 pound wonder would work well for me.
Shopping on the bike is a no-go. I'm not going to haul 30 lbs of groceries in my panniers or try to race home from the store before the frozen goods melt into a puddle. But I don't need the minivan for shopping, either. Again, this 700 pound wonder would meet my needs: the groceries would ride in the passenger seat.
I would keep the minivan, but probably put less than 2000 miles a year on it. I would still need it to haul the kayak to the lake (about 3 miles), move bulky stuff around town, take friends on outings, and do the occasional long trip. With that kind of reduced usage, I'd be able to keep it running for another 20 years, or until I outgrow my current life style and no longer need it, whichever comes first.
YMMV. But my life style is representative of a lot of city folk, and I think this kind of small car will meet a lot of people's needs.
I'm not saying this sarcastically or implying any irony. This really is a perfectly cromulent phrase and I am going to use it in my work, as appropriate.
I have worked with a number of teachers in several institutions over the last 25 years. I am not a teacher myself; I have been involved in designing and implementing computer based curricular materials for several types of classes, mostly in health care training.
There are good teachers and there are bad teachers. But that isn't important.
What IS important is that there are good institutions whose policies attract good teachers and discourage bad teachers from hanging around. And there are some very bad institutions whose policies (think tenure, teaching contracts, and so on) attract bad teachers and allow them to create a very bad institutional culture that coddles and protects them.
One major difference between good institutions and bad ones is in the realm of performance measures.
Good institutions will be willing to talk about the policies they have wrt teaching performance, and show the procedures they use, and the procedures will involve some form of quantification that approximates what is in essence an unmeasurable quality. The majority of professional staff at the Really, Really Good institutions will invite discussions on ways to select better performance indicators or to process the raw results into the stuff that will lead to informed payroll and contract decisions.
In contrast, bad institutions will have either no performance measure policy, or will pay the concept lip service only: the "procedures" used to implement the "policy" will be so subjective as to be meaningless. There will also be a wall of resistance to discussing this topic across all of the professional staff who would be involved in meaningful performance measures.
BTW, the "publish or perish" approach is not a useful performance measure. A useful one might be tracking how many students of Teacher A's Tagalog 101 course got passing grades in Tagalog 201 the next year (indirectly using decisions by later teachers to judge the quality of Teacher A's performance).
Something I would really like to see tried in my state would be to require all teachers of K-12 students to produce one offer of employment from a private sector business every couple of years. While this might lead to losing a few good teachers who got offers they couldn't refuse, it would eliminate the deadwood teachers who truly fit the "them that can't, teach" clause. It would also motivate the lazy bastards who think they can slide by to retirement because they once developed a curriculum 10 years ago, and if it was good enough before the high speed Internet, it should be good enough forever.
One last caveat: All that a teacher ever does, no matter how good, is to teach; it is always up to to the student to learn. But this is slashdot, where we all spend one weekend a month teaching ourselves some new-to-us programming language, and sometimes actually learning from those weekends. So I'm preaching to the choir.
It seems to me that the logical extrapolation of the judge's ruling would parallel the international laws regarding consulates. Within the fence surrounding a foreign consulate, the laws of the host nation do not apply. By extension of the judge's ruling, there is an area, that might be virtual but definitely exists, within every computer in Minnesota where the laws of Minnesota do not apply. In Jammie's specific case, that area includes the mechanisms and programming that enabled Kazaa to send out files on request.
I'm having a great deal of difficulty in understanding this. Especially since if the requester was also in Minnesota, there would be no question at all that the transaction occurred within Minnesota's jurisdiction. How could it be that a consulate-like non-Minnesota space could be triggered into existence in a computer in Minnesota by a request that originated outside of Minnesota? Do all Minnesota businesses enjoy immunity from Minnesota laws with regard to their handling of transactions that were initiated by out of state phone calls? My mind, it is boggled!
Any likelihood that Defense will challenge the Judge's ruling on this at this level of the proceedings?
You're still thinking inside the box of a CS person here.
No, I don't think so. I'm more of an engineering-technician type; I have no more understanding of CompSci guys than I do of other theoretical knowledge workers like mathematicians and cosmologists. Or musicians. I work with nuts and bolts. I don't care why this algorithm is better than the others for a given application; I just want to know how to measure its fitness for purpose and how to implement it in code. Since I'm currently focused on web development, it's all rather simple. Compared to the problems in accuracy, reliability, and transparency that Fortran is designed to handle.
The overwhelming concern in engineering or the sciences is GETTING IT RIGHT. Not making money, nor paying off debts.
All that attitude gets you is exploited by others who make money off your hard work and don't share any of it with you.
Within the context of parent post's value system, this is absolutely, perfectly true. Good science and good engineering are not profit-oriented occupations.
Because of that, author of parent post should look elsewhere than the sciences or engineering for a rewarding career. Physician or dentist might be a good choice for someone who is technically inclined and profit oriented. You get to apply the techniques developed by others in very demanding settings which can really exercise your problem-solving capabilities, you get paid a lot to do so, and sometimes you get incidental rewards too, like being regarded as some kind of hero.
There are a lot of highly technical professions that are neither engineering nor science, although they usually depend strongly on both. As an added benefit, you would not need to learn Fortran for these, either. But Fortran is still an excellent basis for an undergrad program for science or engineering majors.
There is a significant difference in orientation between Comp Sci majors and those who major in engineering or hard sciences.
I'm inclined to think that the difference starts to show up in grade school. Here's a thought experiment:
Give each of a bunch of eight year olds access to a Wikipedia article about time, a screwdriver, and a wind-up alarm clock and observe their behavior. Fast-forward ten years, and see which college track they choose.
The future CompSci kids will look at the alarm clock, then start reading up about time. At some point they will wind up the clock and set the alarm, and so on. At some point they will tell you all about the escapement, and why digital time pieces are inherently more accurate, and they will tell you this whether you care or not.
The future Science Majors will take the clock apart and play with the gears.
The future Engineering Majors will also take the clock apart, but they will lay out all the pieces in order. Then some will attempt to put the thing back together again. Others will incorporate pieces of the clockwork into their Legos sets.
I would not expect CompSci majors to be particularly interested in computer languages: their focus should be on how computing in a more general sense works. They are neither technically oriented like engineers nor driven by the "how does it work" curiosity of scientists; they are like musicians who seek beauty in the melodies and harmonies of pure algorithms. I don't pretend to understand them.
Remember, to an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.
Things are changing pretty rapidly now. Please try to keep up.
Most high school students interested in science or engineering careers learn a bit of some programming language in the same way they learn a bit about sex: from each other, Typically in a guy's basement on his family's old Win98 or WinXP computer, rather than in the back seat of Mom's car... but the kind of fooling around is the similar.
The scripting languages are easy to come by. Firefox with Firebug and a foss text editor like Notepad++ make an excellent Javascript development environment. Heck, for the cost of a dozen good condoms and a visit to Portable Apps a geek-thinking high schooler can put an entire development package, complete with web server and database, on a 2 GB stick and have huge amounts of room for code monkey play. How could any kid interested in science or engineering resist this? And it is SO much easier than finding someone who would be interested in exploring the intended use of the condoms...
So no, I'm pretty sure parent post is wrong. That is, I doubt very much that most of the college freshmen in any of the technical schools today are programming virgins. The majority of high school students may still be virgins wrt programming experience... but those are not the ones who apply to, and get accepted into, technical schools.
What drives pharmaceutical research is profit. On the face of it, this has led to marvelous advances in western medicine.
The seamy underside is that research into common diseases that does not look profitable is not done. We know, for instance, that aspirin is effective in slowing the loss of function for victims of arthritis, And we've known that for decades. As prevalent as arthritis is, one might think that the use of aspirin in its treatment would be heavily researched by now-- but that isn't the case, since there is no likelihood of making money off of any findings, it makes business sense to put the research facilities to other work. Similarly, studies on how to manage the USA obesity crisis are not being funded, despite the severe impact of obesity-related diseases on individuals and on society.
As if that is not bad enough, there is a flip side to this. Any breakthrough in managing obesity or arthritis will definitely decrease the revenues that the health care sector now enjoys from palliative products. With their for-profit orientation, they will resist any research that might lead in those directions.
Okay, that sounds like conspiracy theory crap. Unfortunately I don't know how to write it any better. In a sense, it is a tacit conspiracy, in the same way that the overt and covert racism that subjugated blacks in the USA prior to the civil rights movement in the 1960s was a conspiracy by the dominant whites, both north and south.
I don't think you can expect any meaningful breakthroughs in medical research in the USA until the complex of health care deliverers, academia, insurance companies, and health care institutions is reformed. And that will take something akin to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (and the resulting chaos in a multitude of institutions, all off them full of people who think they are Doing Good Works).
Please don't go into engineering or any of the hard sciences. Don't take this as an insult, but you don't have the right mind set for the work.
The overwhelming concern in engineering or the sciences is GETTING IT RIGHT. Not making money, nor paying off debts. To be sure, a number of persons who should have done something else with their schooling get various engineering or science credentials every year. But that leads to things like the placement of the fuel tank in the Ford Pinto-- several not-so-good engineers signed off on that mistake long before the first fireball.
Relevant to this discussion: in the narrow field of handling complex mathematical expressions, Fortran excels in accuracy, reliability, and transparency to critiques and audits. It was designed from the first to meet these needs, and it has been consistently improved toward that end. It is an essential engineering and scientific tool. Not because it is "better" than any other computer language (though it does have certain strengths). But because it is safer. By design.
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Legalize it, then it can be taxed and regulated. We should strongly consider doing the same thing with other drugs, too. If drugs were legally available, there would be no profit in the illicit drug trade, we would see a reduction in crime at all levels, and the medical costs associated with overdoses and adulterated drugs would also decrease. Legalizing marajuana would be an excellent test case.
Also, if marajuana was legalized, then hemp would be legalized, and the USA would again have a valuable cash crop to grow on marginal lands. It is stupid that hemp is an illegal crop... the only reason for it being illegal is that it seemed easier to pass a law against hemp than to train law enforcement personnel in the simple botany needed to make the distinction. I, for one, think that our cops are smart enough to learn how to do a simple field test.
Of course, legalizing any of the highly profitable black market drugs would mean bucking the lobbying efforts of one of the USA's major industries, and one of the very few that enjoys freedom from paying any taxes on its profits. So I don't expect this to happen soon or without great effort.
I've been using Gnome on Ubuntu nearly exclusively for about 18 months. I have used, sold, customized, and taught users how to work with Win3.0, Win3.11 (good for its time), Win98 (very good for its time), and WinXP. I have also used and taught the use of every MS Office suite that has come along.
IMHO, Gnome on Ubuntu is equivalent to the WinXP experience. Some aspects of customization could definitely be improved but none are as bad as Windows Registry edits. Ubuntu security is vastly better than WinXP but WinXP has, um, ...I'll get back to you on that one. Ubuntu documentation about configuration issues could definitely be expanded. But OTOH, Windows "help" files have always been consistently bad, inspiring the joke about the Seattle heliocopter pilot who was lost over a thick blanket of fog:
He hovered beside a tall office building and asked his passenger to make and hold up a sign: "Where am I?"
The passenger complied, and the people in the building who were watching went into a flurry of wild activity, and after a delay, held up a sign in reply:
"You are in a helicopter."
Where upon the pilot smiled, turned purposefully in the correct direction and was soon on the ground at the airport. His passenger asked:
"How the heck were you able to find your way here from that useless answer?"
And the pilot replied: "Yes, the answer was totally useless, but it was also completely accurate. So I knew we were in Redmond, at the Microsoft building."
Now when I'm talking about configuration and interface usage, I'm talking about function, not about translucent windows or slow roll-downs or rounded corners or other eye candy whose primary effect is to steal resources from the apps that are actually doing what the user is getting paid to do. Here's a car-like analogy: if you are into judging the quality of a pickup truck by its paint job, what I have to say does not apply. But if your idea of quality in a pickup truck has to do with load capacity, efficiency, and MPG, then listen up. On the whole, the Gnome on Ubuntu experience is equivalent to the WinXP experience (though in the details they have different strengths and weaknesses.)
No. That is, I think parent post is wrong, to the extent that it is addressing the wrong issues.
Basically we cannot know what the typical user wants in an interface until we put it in his hands, he has a chance to play with it, and he begins to make choices about how he's going to use it. Those choices often involve things the designers and coders could never have anticipated: it is in user interaction that "unintended consequences" and the like begin to emerge.
Try looking at interface improvements as one of those optimizations that should not be attempted too early in the process.
Parent post makes some excellent points. I don't think that HIE is the only way to do what's needed, but there absolutely has to be some way to evaluate the user's interaction with the interface and re-model that for improvement. I think that can be done by using a longer public beta or RC period, with a phase that is entirely focused on user interaction improvements (possibly to run concurrently with the usual bug identification / squashing stuff).
Another post has argued that the interface work should be done during the design phase, before coding begins. I mostly disagree. While obviously the user interface needs some attention early in the process, it is only after the software is finished that users can begin to explore the new things that they can do with it-- and it is during that exploration that the community learns what needs to be done to get the thing to work right. When you build new work flows, people will find new kinds of work to put through those flows, and it is then that the community learns what it needs to know to fix the user - to - software - to - user interface.
I regard user interface improvements as a very important category of optimization, and like most optimization, it is a mistake to attempt to do it too early. Doing this without having an HIE staff on payroll is going to take longer, but Google has shown us that beta can go on and on...
The US has the highest cancer survival rates in the world, and by a pretty large margin. That has to be worth something in your metrics of "better".
Well, duh! That's where the money is.
The overwhelming majority of health care expense in the USA is in the last 6 months of life, often after there is little question that no matter what is done, the patient is gonna die. Patients are typically guided into increasingly expensive treatments without any meaningful discussion about the quality of life of those final few months. It is not as bad as all the doctors consulting with each other over how to wring a few dollars more out extending Joe Smoker's life another 3 weeks. But it is much closer to that extreme than telling Joe "Hey you don't have much longer, and in 3 months your going to feel really bad no matter what we do, so now is your last good opportunity to take that Summer-long fishing vacation you've been promising yourself the last thirty years. When you get back, we'll see what we can do to make the last few weeks as comfortable as we can."
No, USA health professionals don't know how to have that conversation with a patient as a general rule. The general attitude is that it is much better for the patient to keep him hopeful that this treatment or the next can keep him going for a good long time. That this is also more lucrative for the doctors and the health care institutions is purely a side effect (according to the doctors and the health care institutions, and they do say we should trust them about this kind of thing).
I have not RTFA and in this case I don't think I need to.
Netbook manufacturers are going to skim the cream. That's been the pattern for all high tech innovations for more than 20 years. It means that that you first work the most profitable price points, then as those markets get saturated, you aim at the lower price points.
People willing to pay $500 - $900 for a netbook expect to get MS Office and probably MS Outlook on it. They may well add a dual boot with Linux after purchase, and they might end up spending most of their time in Linux, but for that price a Windows OS and the ability to handle Excel and PowerPoint files perfectly are an expectation. Failure to meet that expectation is a deal breaker.
So long as there is good profit to be made in selling these high end machines, the less expensive netbooks in a manufacturer's line-up are going to be positioned to encourage consumers to buy the more expensive ones. They will have fewer features, of course, but more important to this discussion is that they ABSOLUTELY CANNOT CAUSE THE CONSUMER TO DOUBT that the top of the line netbook is the best product available. Manufacturers certainly don't want showroom discussions that compare their $750 wonder with all the MS bells and whistles with a $250 Linux with FOSS machine. That would be cutting their own throats.
Savvy sales persons are willing to talk up how Ubuntu could be easily installed as a dual boot on this $999 machine since its got the big hard drive, and that yeah, you might see more battery life, and yeah, it would probably be more secure when you are surfing on the wifi of your favorite coffee shop. Don't expect them to volunteer that info, but a good salesperson will spout on that if asked.
But that's as far as Linux penetration of the showroom is going to go, until the high end market is saturated and the $200 - $300 price point becomes the most profitable for manufacturers. Then things are likely to change, because then the license fees to Microsoft cut too deeply into the smaller margins.
There is no conspiracy here; simply the same market dynamics that have been at work in computer sales since the mid 1980s. Linux is undoubtedly being installed on a lot of netbooks after purchase. But until showing your overpriced netbook in the Golf Club's lounge is no longer a status symbol for the PHBs, Linux on a netbook is detrimental to the health of the manufacturers. Our turn will come.
From horses to zebras... sheesh! That's killed the analogy.
We need to stop beating this dead horse. Where is the car analogy? What's wrong with PJ that she didn't use a car analogy? Has she lost her inner geek?
If done in a proper green mode, there would be no demolition workers. Instead, there would be deconstruction teams, trained in the art of safely taking apart a building and recovering as much re-usable or recyclable material as possible. Check out Portland's Rebuilding Center, a place worth wandering through just to see the craftsmanship that used to be put into old buildings, that no one can afford to do any more.
Any effort to demolish old neighborhoods should be tied into a nationwide effort to build infrastructure for re-use of building material, from paving stones to the CSG (clear straight grain) lumber that used to be the norm in housing construction but which hasn't been affordable for decades. Shoving all these old buildings into a landfill would be an abominable waste.
I agree with almost all points of parent post.
But saying that the placebo effect is due to "fooling your brain" is just wrong. No one knows what the mechanism of the placebo effect is. It is outside the frameworks of any of the currently established sciences: it cannot be approached as physics, chemistry, or psychology even though it has strong effects in all of these realms.
Just accept that the placebo effect exists and we don't have a clue about how it works, or even how to investigate it. Using imagination to supply an acceptable mechanism for something we don't understand is an abuse of the powers of imagination and oh so very pre-scientific. Science can only advance when persons are willing to say "I don't know".
I read TFA, for what little info it provided. I've read many of the comments, too. More smoke and heat than light in them.
So is this energy generation parasitic? In practice (not in theory), is it increasing the fuel consumption of the cars? Many of the comments tacitly assume that it is.
Or is this energy being recovered from what would otherwise be wasted as heat in braking? If the plates are positioned in places where cars would have to slow down anyway, the system is not only recovering energy, it is also reducing wear on brake pads: a direct benefit to the driver. This is especially the case if the plates are installed on downward ramps, where the car is converting potential to kinetic energy that has to be shed somehow.
An interesting example of recoverable energy is the transport of grain from the intermountain plateau of Eastern Washington and Eastern Oregon to Portland, Oregon, where it is loaded on ships. There is an average drop of elevation of at least 2,000 feet, most of the transport is done by trains with diesel electric locomotives. Each grain car weighs 125 tons or more when loaded; there are at least 100 cars in a train. So that is dropping more than 12,500 tons off a small mountain with every train coming into Portland.
Here's what's neat: diesel electric locomotives use regenerative braking to slow these trains. Currently the electricity recovered is sent to resistance heaters and disposed as hot air. But it could be sent to flywheel storage units mounted on gimbals on special rail cars behind the engines (typically at least 4 engines, not needed to pull, but necessary for applying sufficient braking).
So here's a question for the reader to consider: assuming a perfect (non loss) system for transferring braking energy from the wheels to the flywheel batteries, how much energy could one of these trains deliver to the Portland power grid? This isn't a piece of blue sky by the way: New York City subways have been using flywheel batteries as load balancers for many years now.
For bonus points: Coal is mined in the Rocky Mountains and shipped by rail to Chicago. If the electricity now wasted as heat by the locomotives' regenerative braking could be stored in flywheel batteries, how much additional power would be extracted from each ton of coal as it is moved down hill?
If the logs aren't there, the subpoena doesn't hurt anything.
Not true; even though this kind of subpoena may be technically impossible to comply with, it still stifles free speech, so it definitely hurts.
The DoJ needs to take a long, hard look at the way these Federal Prosecutors are abusing the Grand Jury system and the other tools they have been entrusted with. Some housecleaning is long over due. It is a statistical certainty that there are now a countable number of Federal Prosecutors who should be fired (and maybe prosecuted for crimes in office).
RTFA.
The feds are going after everyone who posted anonymously, not just anonymous posters who made comments that might be threatening (or might only be juvenile hyperbole).
A much more targeted subpoena could have been easily drafted, demanding information on only on a list of the anonymous posts that could be construed in some way as threatening. That was not done; the subpoena is not properly focused. The only obvious reason for constructing the subpoena this way is to use it as a threat to silent public discussions that the prosecution does not like.
In addition, those that did actually RTFA know that the subpoena is demanding data that is technically absurd and would require the newspaper to do the investigative work of law enforcement: in addition to names and IP addresses of all the anonymous posters, the subpoena calls for their street address, age, and gender.
The subpoena was initiated at least in part by the prosecutor in the tax evasion case, and on its face it looks like an attempt by that prosecutor to use the Grand Jury system to manipulate public expressions that could affect his political aspirations. That is definitely in violation of professional ethics, and almost certainly in violation of the prosecutor's legally binding limitations as an officer of the Court.
I'm glad to see the ACLU is proactively involving itself in this. And I would hope the Federal Justice Department is taking a look at whether its employee is mishandling his responsibilities. This looks like a Damm mess.
Um, no, astrology as I know it has nothing to say one way or the other about this. It is, after all, only a study of the potentials of a any given moment in time, that just happens to use the celestial sphere as a big, accurate, clock.
Frankly, for anything of immediate concern, I find that casting the runes or consulting the tarot deck are better than astrology: you get your answer quicker, and with a lot less fuss and bother about the arithmetic.
TFA does suggest an interesting new-to-us relationship between a manifestation of Air (electromagnetic forces) and Water. Or maybe it is between Water and Fire-- electromagnetism is frequently considered a thing of the Fire element rather than Air.
Oh dear. Now I've confused myself again. How very human of me.
It would be interesting to look for correlations between magnetic reversals or similar anomalies, and geologic events that must have had a major impact on ocean currents. Such as the formation of the Isthmus of Panama roughly 3 million to 10 million years ago (I don't know enough geology to understand why different articles use different figures), and the separation of South America from Antarctica about 40 million years ago.
The abject failure to do sound urban planning since the 1959s is no excuse for the absurdly wasteful dependence of automobiles in the western USA.
I bicycle 2,500 - 3,500 miles per year. And I own a 1994 minivan. And I'm looking for something like this 700 lb 2 person car in addition to what I've got, to make my life a lot greener.
Commuting to work on the bike is a no-go. There are weather concerns, the lack of a shower and changing room at work, and often the need to carry more books, etc, back and forth than I am willing to haul around on a bike. But I don't need the minivan for commuting; this 700 pound wonder would work well for me.
Shopping on the bike is a no-go. I'm not going to haul 30 lbs of groceries in my panniers or try to race home from the store before the frozen goods melt into a puddle. But I don't need the minivan for shopping, either. Again, this 700 pound wonder would meet my needs: the groceries would ride in the passenger seat.
I would keep the minivan, but probably put less than 2000 miles a year on it. I would still need it to haul the kayak to the lake (about 3 miles), move bulky stuff around town, take friends on outings, and do the occasional long trip. With that kind of reduced usage, I'd be able to keep it running for another 20 years, or until I outgrow my current life style and no longer need it, whichever comes first.
YMMV. But my life style is representative of a lot of city folk, and I think this kind of small car will meet a lot of people's needs.
...unwittingly insightful...
Wow, what a fabulous oxymoron!
I'm not saying this sarcastically or implying any irony. This really is a perfectly cromulent phrase and I am going to use it in my work, as appropriate.
I have worked with a number of teachers in several institutions over the last 25 years. I am not a teacher myself; I have been involved in designing and implementing computer based curricular materials for several types of classes, mostly in health care training.
There are good teachers and there are bad teachers. But that isn't important.
What IS important is that there are good institutions whose policies attract good teachers and discourage bad teachers from hanging around. And there are some very bad institutions whose policies (think tenure, teaching contracts, and so on) attract bad teachers and allow them to create a very bad institutional culture that coddles and protects them.
One major difference between good institutions and bad ones is in the realm of performance measures.
Good institutions will be willing to talk about the policies they have wrt teaching performance, and show the procedures they use, and the procedures will involve some form of quantification that approximates what is in essence an unmeasurable quality. The majority of professional staff at the Really, Really Good institutions will invite discussions on ways to select better performance indicators or to process the raw results into the stuff that will lead to informed payroll and contract decisions.
In contrast, bad institutions will have either no performance measure policy, or will pay the concept lip service only: the "procedures" used to implement the "policy" will be so subjective as to be meaningless. There will also be a wall of resistance to discussing this topic across all of the professional staff who would be involved in meaningful performance measures.
BTW, the "publish or perish" approach is not a useful performance measure. A useful one might be tracking how many students of Teacher A's Tagalog 101 course got passing grades in Tagalog 201 the next year (indirectly using decisions by later teachers to judge the quality of Teacher A's performance).
Something I would really like to see tried in my state would be to require all teachers of K-12 students to produce one offer of employment from a private sector business every couple of years. While this might lead to losing a few good teachers who got offers they couldn't refuse, it would eliminate the deadwood teachers who truly fit the "them that can't, teach" clause. It would also motivate the lazy bastards who think they can slide by to retirement because they once developed a curriculum 10 years ago, and if it was good enough before the high speed Internet, it should be good enough forever.
One last caveat: All that a teacher ever does, no matter how good, is to teach; it is always up to to the student to learn. But this is slashdot, where we all spend one weekend a month teaching ourselves some new-to-us programming language, and sometimes actually learning from those weekends. So I'm preaching to the choir.
It seems to me that the logical extrapolation of the judge's ruling would parallel the international laws regarding consulates. Within the fence surrounding a foreign consulate, the laws of the host nation do not apply. By extension of the judge's ruling, there is an area, that might be virtual but definitely exists, within every computer in Minnesota where the laws of Minnesota do not apply. In Jammie's specific case, that area includes the mechanisms and programming that enabled Kazaa to send out files on request.
I'm having a great deal of difficulty in understanding this. Especially since if the requester was also in Minnesota, there would be no question at all that the transaction occurred within Minnesota's jurisdiction. How could it be that a consulate-like non-Minnesota space could be triggered into existence in a computer in Minnesota by a request that originated outside of Minnesota? Do all Minnesota businesses enjoy immunity from Minnesota laws with regard to their handling of transactions that were initiated by out of state phone calls? My mind, it is boggled!
Any likelihood that Defense will challenge the Judge's ruling on this at this level of the proceedings?
You're still thinking inside the box of a CS person here.
No, I don't think so. I'm more of an engineering-technician type; I have no more understanding of CompSci guys than I do of other theoretical knowledge workers like mathematicians and cosmologists. Or musicians. I work with nuts and bolts. I don't care why this algorithm is better than the others for a given application; I just want to know how to measure its fitness for purpose and how to implement it in code. Since I'm currently focused on web development, it's all rather simple. Compared to the problems in accuracy, reliability, and transparency that Fortran is designed to handle.
The overwhelming concern in engineering or the sciences is GETTING IT RIGHT. Not making money, nor paying off debts.
All that attitude gets you is exploited by others who make money off your hard work and don't share any of it with you.
Within the context of parent post's value system, this is absolutely, perfectly true. Good science and good engineering are not profit-oriented occupations.
Because of that, author of parent post should look elsewhere than the sciences or engineering for a rewarding career. Physician or dentist might be a good choice for someone who is technically inclined and profit oriented. You get to apply the techniques developed by others in very demanding settings which can really exercise your problem-solving capabilities, you get paid a lot to do so, and sometimes you get incidental rewards too, like being regarded as some kind of hero.
There are a lot of highly technical professions that are neither engineering nor science, although they usually depend strongly on both. As an added benefit, you would not need to learn Fortran for these, either. But Fortran is still an excellent basis for an undergrad program for science or engineering majors.
There is a significant difference in orientation between Comp Sci majors and those who major in engineering or hard sciences.
I'm inclined to think that the difference starts to show up in grade school. Here's a thought experiment:
Give each of a bunch of eight year olds access to a Wikipedia article about time, a screwdriver, and a wind-up alarm clock and observe their behavior. Fast-forward ten years, and see which college track they choose.
I would not expect CompSci majors to be particularly interested in computer languages: their focus should be on how computing in a more general sense works. They are neither technically oriented like engineers nor driven by the "how does it work" curiosity of scientists; they are like musicians who seek beauty in the melodies and harmonies of pure algorithms. I don't pretend to understand them.
Remember, to an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.
Amusing post.
Things are changing pretty rapidly now. Please try to keep up.
Most high school students interested in science or engineering careers learn a bit of some programming language in the same way they learn a bit about sex: from each other, Typically in a guy's basement on his family's old Win98 or WinXP computer, rather than in the back seat of Mom's car... but the kind of fooling around is the similar.
The scripting languages are easy to come by. Firefox with Firebug and a foss text editor like Notepad++ make an excellent Javascript development environment. Heck, for the cost of a dozen good condoms and a visit to Portable Apps a geek-thinking high schooler can put an entire development package, complete with web server and database, on a 2 GB stick and have huge amounts of room for code monkey play. How could any kid interested in science or engineering resist this? And it is SO much easier than finding someone who would be interested in exploring the intended use of the condoms...
So no, I'm pretty sure parent post is wrong. That is, I doubt very much that most of the college freshmen in any of the technical schools today are programming virgins. The majority of high school students may still be virgins wrt programming experience... but those are not the ones who apply to, and get accepted into, technical schools.
What drives pharmaceutical research is profit. On the face of it, this has led to marvelous advances in western medicine.
The seamy underside is that research into common diseases that does not look profitable is not done. We know, for instance, that aspirin is effective in slowing the loss of function for victims of arthritis, And we've known that for decades. As prevalent as arthritis is, one might think that the use of aspirin in its treatment would be heavily researched by now-- but that isn't the case, since there is no likelihood of making money off of any findings, it makes business sense to put the research facilities to other work. Similarly, studies on how to manage the USA obesity crisis are not being funded, despite the severe impact of obesity-related diseases on individuals and on society.
As if that is not bad enough, there is a flip side to this. Any breakthrough in managing obesity or arthritis will definitely decrease the revenues that the health care sector now enjoys from palliative products. With their for-profit orientation, they will resist any research that might lead in those directions.
Okay, that sounds like conspiracy theory crap. Unfortunately I don't know how to write it any better. In a sense, it is a tacit conspiracy, in the same way that the overt and covert racism that subjugated blacks in the USA prior to the civil rights movement in the 1960s was a conspiracy by the dominant whites, both north and south.
I don't think you can expect any meaningful breakthroughs in medical research in the USA until the complex of health care deliverers, academia, insurance companies, and health care institutions is reformed. And that will take something akin to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (and the resulting chaos in a multitude of institutions, all off them full of people who think they are Doing Good Works).
Please don't go into engineering or any of the hard sciences. Don't take this as an insult, but you don't have the right mind set for the work.
The overwhelming concern in engineering or the sciences is GETTING IT RIGHT. Not making money, nor paying off debts. To be sure, a number of persons who should have done something else with their schooling get various engineering or science credentials every year. But that leads to things like the placement of the fuel tank in the Ford Pinto-- several not-so-good engineers signed off on that mistake long before the first fireball.
Relevant to this discussion: in the narrow field of handling complex mathematical expressions, Fortran excels in accuracy, reliability, and transparency to critiques and audits. It was designed from the first to meet these needs, and it has been consistently improved toward that end. It is an essential engineering and scientific tool. Not because it is "better" than any other computer language (though it does have certain strengths). But because it is safer. By design.