As another post already said, Stevens will be in office until he's ready to leave. He's been stealing your tax dollars for us for many years, and has so much power that we couldn't afford to get rid of him, even if most of us wanted to.
Loosing our pork-barrel-power would decimate our economy. Worse than that, actually; I'm pretty sure that the Federal $s are more than 10% of the economy here. Stevens is always the first to point out that WHOEVER replaces him won't be able to bring home the bacon as effectively for many years.
He is also a master at appealing to Alaskan voters. He knows how to fool enough of the people enough of the time, and there are plenty of single issue voters whose buttons he can push reliably.
- Microsoft can pay the legal fees and out-of-court settlements - I cannot.
Microsoft can't do much of that either. They might have $10^12 in market capitalization, but that would melt like a snowball in Hell if they were held strictly liable for security breaches. Their cash reserves would melt pretty fast too, if they had to pay the reported damages for each virus they enabled.
I'll bet that any such legislation which actually gets passed will be weasle-worded enough that MS will have no real risk of ever shelling out, while Linus et al will be on the hook for everything.
To judge the true effect of such a bill, just watch MS's stock price: if it falls as the bill goes through, it might hold someone liable for something. If the stock price holds steady, the bill will have no effect at best, and eliminate Libre software at worst.
... the people who would be using the cheap open source software you tout so much actually need the uniformity and technical commonality that microsoft provides.
They certainly aren't in government service because they like or have any knowledge of computers!
I agree that government, perhaps more than most organizations, needs the ability to provide a uniform, easily administered desktop and applications, which are the same for everyone, everywhere. Unix lets you do this, via the X-term/compute server route. Windows doesn't. And that is pretty much that. Yes, I am aware that there are kludges you can use to accomplish something like this on windows, but it's difficult, expensive and non-standard (i.e., non-MS).
As you pointed out, the government employees really have no computer experience nor ability, so there is no question of them having extensive MS-centered knowledge. They are clueless, and you will have to train them on the specific buttons they will need to push for their specific jobs, whatever platform and applications you provide, be it Mac, Windows or *nix. By going with a *nix platform, you are really giving up nothing except the kickbacks from the salesmen, and I suspect that has far more to do with the original topic (Which was ``WHy Not Use Open Source'') than this sidetrack.
So go ahead, fingerprint everybody. Take a DNA sample. If it means that 20 years from now, my children will be growing up in a society free of random murders, pedophilia, assault, and all the rest, I'm for it. That's idealistic, but I'll take just 20%.
If we could do this kind of thing effectively, we would be able to ensure that only those favored by the government could rape, assault and murder your children, and that your children couldn't do anything about it, if they objected to these rapes, murders, and assaults. That's a great tradeoff, I think; give up all remnants of human dignity, and everything which makes life worth living, and get abused, enslaved, robbed and murdered by the very organization you gave this up to.
If we can learn anything from history, it's that Lord Acton was right: absolute power absolutely will corrupt.
Ironically, criminals have relatively little to fear from this kind of thing. They seem to be able to ply their trade without much difficulty under all circumstances. Some of the dumb ones get hung when a police state decides to get rid of the competition, but the bright criminals just join the gang with the badges. We need to make sure that the cops don't become the gang with the badges.
I am not a criminal either, and I therefore object to being treated as if I were a criminal. You might think that increasing your safety by twenty percent makes it all worth while, and you might think that these proposals will deliver that. Think about this: if treating us like criminals really slowed the criminals down, then you would feel quite safe as a prisoner in a U.S. jail. Do you really think that you would be safer in prison than in your home? The incidence of violent crime is quite high in prison, and the folks there are really treated like prisoners. We could strip search you every day before you leave the house, and afterwards too, and you won't be any safer. But, we will have made the cops into the gang with the badges.
They generalize the whole idea to one where all the objects are compact. That just means that the objects "surface" area is as small as it can get for a given internal volume.
I suppose that this is a trivial quibble, but my understanding was that a compact set was (in N-space, N\lt\infty) a closed, convex, bounded set. Thus, an egg is a compact set in R^3, despite not having minimum surface area. For spaces which are not vector spaces, or don't have topologies, it's more complex, but now I'm telling you what I don't know, instead of what I do.
Are you going to get fired for disregarding the suggestion on slashdot? Might a microserf get fired for disregarding a ``suggestion'' by his boss? Are you going to lie because Commander Taco asks you to? How about that hypothetical microsoftie? Might he lie if his boss suggests it would affect his next performance review? Still can't see any difference? I think that the slashdot example is simply advertising the poll, while MS was engaged in something really reprehensible.
The one difference that I see is that most of the microsofties who voted probably will get involved with a.net project, someday. Writing it, if nothing else. Most of the slashdot script kiddies are only dreaming.
Only average lightspeed changes. The speed of light (photons - same speed as all massless particles) is always c (about 300kk in m/s). However, the light can be delayed. When a photon hits an atom, it usually transfers its energy to an electron, which jumps to a higher orbital.
I think that there may be a problem with this idea. I vaguely remember from E&M (that's electricity and magnetism, for you non-EE's) class that the speed of light in a medium depends upon its dielectric constant. Vacuum had the ``fastest'' dielectric constant, thus c is the upper limit. It was the change of speed which caused the refraction when light moves from one medium to another.
I'm quite sure that I remember from antennas lab that the speed with which electric, magnetic and electro-magnetic waves propagated depended upon the sort of coax or wave guide you were running them in. There couldn't be any question of photon absorption there, could there?
Another post also says that the re-emitted photon has random direction, which seems an insurmountable difficulty.
Run Win98, SAS, Excel and Word for four hours. Crash, with lost work. Repeat.
Switch to Linux, R, Latex and emacs. No crashes and no lost work in two years. AND I get better results with less effort.
Linux is no closer to being a user-friendly, capable desktop app than it had been in the last 3 years. Try telling the 12 o'clock flashers about compiling a kernel and mounting hard drives and they will give you the "blank stare of doom".
In truth, MacOS X is what Linux needs to become if it ever wants to succed as a desktop OS for the average joe (i.e good apps, nice interface, seemless hardware support, and a good unix command line just in case).
I'm not really disagreeing with you, I think. The ``12 o'clock flashers'' can't handle Windows any better than they can Linux, and the Mac isn't a whole lot better.
The folks who have a fear of learning can be taught button sequences, but they can't be made to learn what it all means, and they'll sell the computer at the next garage sale if you tell them that they have to take that learning and reason with it. You have to reason to troubleshoot, or to secure a system, or do anything for the first time, whatever the system. The folks who find a vcr boring and intimidating just won't do that.
If you give that sort of user a preconfigured Windows box, you'll get a few support calls, which can be answered by an equally clueless tech support guy with a script. If you give him a preconfigured Linux box, you'll get the same calls about the same problems: ``the internet is broken'', `` I pushed the button and it doesn't come on'', and so on. These guys are very unlikely to want to change the hardware in their refridgerator, or their computer.
Kudzu and those install/configure wizards seem to work pretty well on Mandrake. I wouldn't bet that dealing with new hardware is a whole lot harder under Linux, though I haven't used Windows in a long time.
The first time I tried to reinstall Windows on my laptop, I spent a big chunk of three days on the line with Dell tech support. Installing Windows was HARD, and getting the right drivers installed was REALLY HARD. I was reinstalling because I had repartitioned to install Linux. Linux I was able to install (my first time ever, too) in about four hours, no support calls needed, and except for sound, everything just worked. Sound required finding and reading a page on the linux for laptops site, which took up about half of the four hours. That was Redhat6.0. It's gotten better since, despite the fancy graphical installers.
The point is that no OS is ready for the ``12 o'clock flashers'', and probably there never will be such a beast on a general purpose computer. Remember, these are the guys who electrocute themselves with toasters! I agree that Linux is quite unready for the masses; but so is Windows, Mac, VMS, DOS, CPM and everything else I've used.
I think that the right question isn't ``can grandma install, configure, and maintain it'': she can't, whatever ``it'' may be. The better question is: ``Once it's set up, will it keep working for grandma, even if she pushes the wrong button?". I'd be a bit more confident about saying yes for any of the unixes than for Windows.
Stealing means depriving someone else of something which is rightfully his. It is not at all clear to me that the act which we miscall piracy involves that in any fashion. After the copying, the ``victim'' still has his program, which he may continue to peddle.
The ONLY justification for calling copying theft is the idea that each copy represents a lost sale. That's rediculously implausible. Further, we have to postulate that the ``victim'' has a right to a monopoly on sales which is violated by the copier. There may be such a legal privilege under our current law, and the copying may (or may not) infringe that privilege, but there can be no such right. Rights pre-exisit government, and we all have a right to build upon and otherwise make use of the IDEAS of others. Not their irreplaceable physical property, but their ideas, whichwe may share without depriving them of their use.
It is just like in science, even after the closest scrutiny all you can say about a theory is: "Not YET disproven".
This is just a technical quibble: It is possible to disprove a theory which predicts an observable fact. Here is the counter-example to your statement:
On a clear day, theorize that the sun is up. Observe that it is indeed up. Theory proven.
This is a trivial and stupid example; the sun is easy to see. But if you were to theorize the existance of a planet, and some one found it where you said it should be (wasn't that the case with Pluto?), it wouldn't seem quite so trivial.
The idea was that in general, in order to be better, there have to be some differences! Otherwise, it's identical, and thus not better. I quite understand that this particular feature might not seem better to folks who don't like it. Tastes vary. I agree that putting the familiar (to folks who have suffered on MS systems) Properties box on the right click menu would seem to be a good idea.
Right-click-and-look-for-settings-tab-and... is the Microsoft way, and if you set someone who hasn't been trained in the MS way down in front of a computer, they are not going to find that intuitive! I've watched my parents try to find their way around the MS desktop, and it's just ugly to watch. Using a Mac for the first time wasn't very good either.
I really think that a command line and a good set of manuals is the best way to get someone USING a computer (as opposed to using an appliance, but that's another rant). Most folks find reading a printed book fairly intuitive; not because it comes naturally, but because they've been trained in it. The command line interface can seem pretty narrow and awkward, but that's good! It doesn't overwhelm the new user with lots of subtleties and choices. You have all the options to the command, but you don't have to use them, or even read about them, until you feel the need.
I've seen many strictly non-technical english and education majors teach themselves to use the email system on a Honeywell mainframe, and on a VMS system. They got very good at using those systems, far better than me. Of course, their majors left a lot more free time than electrical engineering left me. They learned all that with nothing but a quick reference card and a friend who told them ``look at this...''.
I really don't place much value on ``intuitive''. I use my machine enough that it seems worthwhile to learn things about it, and so easy-to-use seems far more important to me than easy-to-guess.
I believe it was irresponsible of them not to at least inform the government about this bug. Heck, I think they should have gone as far as tell the consumers.
Given that AOL can afford to stuff the mailboxes of the entire US with CD's, Microsoft ought to be able to afford a replacement CD for their paying customers. Instead, they expect you to risk further compromise by going online to get a patch.
They wouldn't even admit that there was a problem until the Washington Post held their feet to the fire. Must be nice to know Uncle Bill cares about his customers... It's even nicer not to be one of his customers.
Try control-alternate-plus to change desktop resolution. If you want ``better'', you have to accept SOME changes!
I find being able to scroll through several resolutions with a keypress more convenient than the right-click-the-desk-top-and-click-and-click... approach. If you have it set up so that the virtual desktop is bigger than the actual at the lower resolutions, then you will especially appreciate being able to switch with a key-chord. It seems that almost every thing is configurable, including what key-chords toggle between windows, desktops, et cetera.
As for the pop-up windows stealing focus, that happens to me all the time under KDE, and I detest it. If I figure out how to turn it off, I'll try to let you know how to turn it on.
There's no reason high school math students need graphing calculators. In fact, with the possible exception of Trig functions, they shouldn't need calculators at all. As a college level math tutor I think it's unfortunate that high school math teachers encourage the use of calculators. I've watched too many freshman flounder in Calculus because they never really understood Algebra. That's certainly not entirely because their high school teachers let them use calculators, but it's certainly a contributing factor. It's really sad to see someone who claimed to get A's in math all through high school who can't even multiply by 10's without picking up their calculator.
Amen! I've seen a student who claimed to have gotten straight A's in AP calc get a C followed by an F in first year calculus. He told me ``...if I could just use my calculator, I'd be fine...''. He was partly right; he did know what buttons to push for some familiar problems. But he had never learned calculus, and he had never learned how to learn math. All he knew was how to push buttons, and learn button sequences. He couldn't reason.
It runs something like this: You know your used car is a good one, worth $15,000. All I know is that about half the used cars for sale are lemons, worth nothing, and about half are good ones, worth $15,000. I have no way of knowing which is which. On average, if I buy a bunch of these cars, I'll be ok if I pay $7,500 each.
If you sell your good car for $7,500, you get screwed. If no-one will sell good cars for less than $15,000, then I know that there are no good cars for sale, and I don't buy at all.
Both these outcomes are market failure due to imperfect information. Neither version is likely to last for long in the real world: some third party will come along and sell inspections (i.e., information) for a big chunk of the profits we are loosing.
Of course, this is just the beginning. Take a look in Mas-Colell, Whinston and Green's Microeconomic Theory for more. I don't think Varian has it.
More worryingly, why does one of the recipients look exactly like Steve Martin?
Obviously, one of the economists who got the Nobel prize was wearing a Steve Martin mask, trying to pose as a celebrity. Some people will do anything to be noticed.
He said ---As for the economics award, the world has no use for a science dedicated to depriving people of freedom and controlling them.---
She said This is an extremely unfair assement of the field of economics.
Well, actually, the first guy wasn't so far off the mark. Economists do have a lot of incentive to accomodate meddling politicians when they are out to ``help'' us. The economist who mentions Hayek's and von Mises' work, and reminds us that interference in a market economy leads us inexorably towards socialist ruin, is not going to be popular with politicians or bureaucrats, and is not going to find it easy to get grants, fat government-affiliated jobs, and so on.
There are economists who tell the truth (I'm thinking of Friedman, but of course there are many others), but there are a lot who choose to see the truth the way brilliant and thoughtfull men like Joseph Stiglitz do: if supporting government meddling buggers things up in the long run, well, that's job security for us economists.
Then she said Indeed, the general thrust of academic economics is almost entirely the OPPOSITE of what you describe: it's normative goals are everywhere and always to maximize things like choice and social welfare.
Macro and general equilibrium theory are always about maximizing social welfare, choice simply isn't an issue. Indeed, I've never seen choice in the utility function in a macro model. The problem with maximizing ``social welfare'' is that it neglects individual welfare. It leads to depriving people of their freedom and controlling them, to keep the little bastards from maximizing their own welfare rather than society's. This leads, ultimately, to the cultural revolution, the killing fields of Cambodia, the current mess in Zimbabwe, the Nazi death camps, and so on.
No economist ever calls for such things (I hope), but if we start maximizing social welfare, that is the logical final step: if they won't do what we say is best for them, we'll make 'em... if they resist, we'll kill 'em. After all, we know so much more than they do.
One hundred years ago, this line of thinking was called ``the White man's burden''. Today, we call it social planning. ``The intellectual's burden'' would fit better. There is a tremendous lot of arrogance in this view of the world, whether we call it the ``Whiteman's burden'' or ``addressing market failure''.
If I read the author correctly, he suggested that there is a monetary incentive of some sort. If so, one would expect that for the few in places like mainland China, Zimbabwe, India and Taiwan who have both ability and internet access, there would be incredibly strong motivation to be noticed in, and an important part of, an open-source project. My reasoning is that this might be a ticket to a job at home ( it would say to employers: ``Look, I can collaborate in English!'') and far more motivational, it might be a ticket to a U.S. work visa. This would be the ultimate success for most of the folks in most of these countries.
It's hard to tell from his maps, but it looks as if folks in these places just aren't getting into these two visible-in-the-US opensource projects in a big way. I know that in Taiwan at least, there are quite a few who have the English and computer ability to do it, and internet connections are affordable for the middle class. This suggests to me that there IS a strong cultural component; it appears that folks there aren't very willing (yet, at least) to give away free samples.
The idea behind the green house must be to produce HOT air, to be swept up the chimney. Lots of lovely green stuff under the greenhouse would tend to cool the air, and would definitely add humidity. The cooling would definitely be bad. As someone else pointed out, there will be a condensation cloud at the top of the chimney. We wouldn't want that to be any bigger than necessary, as the cloud would further cool things, so the humidity might be bad too. By the way, that's a desert. Where is the water going to come from for these hypothetical plants?
Here's another problem with the ``plant stuff in the greenhouse idea'': you use green houses for plants which can't grow in the cold outside climate. These greenhouse/tower contraptions are going to be most feasible in HOT climates, where these heat-loving plants grow naturally. Finally, the green house will be sucking in cold outside air. The plants near the outer edge might get MORE chilled at night than they would without the greenhouse (though the wind would prevent radiant cooling; this could be a big plus in high deserts).
Probably the best idea would be to pave underneath the greenhouse, and periodically repaint the pavement black.
Ah... so this is probably the kind of thing that leaves some traces. I guess if we really cared, we'd dig up a recent geology book and see if there was indeed such an event in the last 6000 or so years in the vicinity of Cuba.
Probably the more interesting (and relevant) question will turn out to be: "What natural process made and arranged those blocks so neatly on the sea bottom?"
First, about the claim that this is old news, and Cdr. Taco screwed up, etc:
The BBC story specifically mentions that this is a followup on last year's discovery. The following quote is from the BBC story (second link in the original story):
The explorers first spotted the underwater city last year, when scanning equipment started to produce images of symmetrically organized stone structures reminiscent of an urban development.
In July, the researchers returned to the site with an explorative robot device capable of highly advanced underwater filming work.
The images the robot brought back confirmed the presence of huge, smooth blocks with the appearance of cut granite.
So, it's the images brought back by the robot which are the news.
On to the good stuff: In the Reuters story (first link in the original post), they address (sort of) the really interesting questions:
The explorers said they believed the mysterious structures, discovered at the astounding depth of around 2,100 feet and laid out like an urban area, could have been built at least 6,000 years ago. That would be about 1,500 years earlier than the great Giza pyramids of Egypt.
...snip...
Zelitsky said the structures may have been built by unknown people when the current sea-floor actually was above the surface. She said volcanic activity may explain how the site ended up at great depths below the Caribbean Sea.
Volcanic activity?? I'm no geologist, but I suspect that someone who is could shred that effectively. I've lived on rising and falling coastlines, and I've never seen volcanic action blamed for the rise/fall in either of the physical geology books I read. Subduction of the ocean floor can cause volcanic activity, but I find it hard to imagine it running the other way.
As for how to date it, a rough-and-ready way to establish a bound on the date would be via geology: when was that area last above water? In order to fall 2100 feet below sealevel in 6000 years, it would have to sink at an average of 0.35 feet per year. Four point two inches per year seems a bit fast to me. Is the Cuban coast actually sinking, even? Is there a geologist in the house?
You could also get a fairly good clue by checking the amount of coral growth on the blocks. Coral needs to be near the surface to grow, so they could only have accumulated coral in the initial centuries after their submersion. No coral would suggest either that the coral has somehow been eroded away, or that those blocks were never near the surface.
Re:Day late and a dollar short
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Lineo Frees CP/M
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· Score: 4, Informative
You might want to look into FreeDos, which is an MSDOS compatible, GPL'ed dos which works fairly well. It's beta, but it's there NOW.
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Loosing our pork-barrel-power would decimate our economy. Worse than that, actually; I'm pretty sure that the Federal $s are more than 10% of the economy here. Stevens is always the first to point out that WHOEVER replaces him won't be able to bring home the bacon as effectively for many years.
He is also a master at appealing to Alaskan voters. He knows how to fool enough of the people enough of the time, and there are plenty of single issue voters whose buttons he can push reliably.
Microsoft can't do much of that either. They might have $10^12 in market capitalization, but that would melt like a snowball in Hell if they were held strictly liable for security breaches. Their cash reserves would melt pretty fast too, if they had to pay the reported damages for each virus they enabled.
I'll bet that any such legislation which actually gets passed will be weasle-worded enough that MS will have no real risk of ever shelling out, while Linus et al will be on the hook for everything.
To judge the true effect of such a bill, just watch MS's stock price: if it falls as the bill goes through, it might hold someone liable for something. If the stock price holds steady, the bill will have no effect at best, and eliminate Libre software at worst.
They certainly aren't in government service because they like or have any knowledge of computers!
I agree that government, perhaps more than most organizations, needs the ability to provide a uniform, easily administered desktop and applications, which are the same for everyone, everywhere. Unix lets you do this, via the X-term/compute server route. Windows doesn't. And that is pretty much that. Yes, I am aware that there are kludges you can use to accomplish something like this on windows, but it's difficult, expensive and non-standard (i.e., non-MS).
As you pointed out, the government employees really have no computer experience nor ability, so there is no question of them having extensive MS-centered knowledge. They are clueless, and you will have to train them on the specific buttons they will need to push for their specific jobs, whatever platform and applications you provide, be it Mac, Windows or *nix. By going with a *nix platform, you are really giving up nothing except the kickbacks from the salesmen, and I suspect that has far more to do with the original topic (Which was ``WHy Not Use Open Source'') than this sidetrack.
Well, on AIX, both halves looked sort of crappy, and neither was decent. I suppose that could have been due to a crap window manager.
If we could do this kind of thing effectively, we would be able to ensure that only those favored by the government could rape, assault and murder your children, and that your children couldn't do anything about it, if they objected to these rapes, murders, and assaults. That's a great tradeoff, I think; give up all remnants of human dignity, and everything which makes life worth living, and get abused, enslaved, robbed and murdered by the very organization you gave this up to.
If we can learn anything from history, it's that Lord Acton was right: absolute power absolutely will corrupt.
Ironically, criminals have relatively little to fear from this kind of thing. They seem to be able to ply their trade without much difficulty under all circumstances. Some of the dumb ones get hung when a police state decides to get rid of the competition, but the bright criminals just join the gang with the badges. We need to make sure that the cops don't become the gang with the badges.
I am not a criminal either, and I therefore object to being treated as if I were a criminal. You might think that increasing your safety by twenty percent makes it all worth while, and you might think that these proposals will deliver that. Think about this: if treating us like criminals really slowed the criminals down, then you would feel quite safe as a prisoner in a U.S. jail. Do you really think that you would be safer in prison than in your home? The incidence of violent crime is quite high in prison, and the folks there are really treated like prisoners. We could strip search you every day before you leave the house, and afterwards too, and you won't be any safer. But, we will have made the cops into the gang with the badges.
I suppose that this is a trivial quibble, but my understanding was that a compact set was (in N-space, N\lt\infty) a closed, convex, bounded set. Thus, an egg is a compact set in R^3, despite not having minimum surface area. For spaces which are not vector spaces, or don't have topologies, it's more complex, but now I'm telling you what I don't know, instead of what I do.
The one difference that I see is that most of the microsofties who voted probably will get involved with a
I think that there may be a problem with this idea. I vaguely remember from E&M (that's electricity and magnetism, for you non-EE's) class that the speed of light in a medium depends upon its dielectric constant. Vacuum had the ``fastest'' dielectric constant, thus c is the upper limit. It was the change of speed which caused the refraction when light moves from one medium to another.
I'm quite sure that I remember from antennas lab that the speed with which electric, magnetic and electro-magnetic waves propagated depended upon the sort of coax or wave guide you were running them in. There couldn't be any question of photon absorption there, could there?
Another post also says that the re-emitted photon has random direction, which seems an insurmountable difficulty.
Switch to Linux, R, Latex and emacs. No crashes and no lost work in two years. AND I get better results with less effort.
I'm not really disagreeing with you, I think. The ``12 o'clock flashers'' can't handle Windows any better than they can Linux, and the Mac isn't a whole lot better.
The folks who have a fear of learning can be taught button sequences, but they can't be made to learn what it all means, and they'll sell the computer at the next garage sale if you tell them that they have to take that learning and reason with it. You have to reason to troubleshoot, or to secure a system, or do anything for the first time, whatever the system. The folks who find a vcr boring and intimidating just won't do that.
If you give that sort of user a preconfigured Windows box, you'll get a few support calls, which can be answered by an equally clueless tech support guy with a script. If you give him a preconfigured Linux box, you'll get the same calls about the same problems: ``the internet is broken'', `` I pushed the button and it doesn't come on'', and so on. These guys are very unlikely to want to change the hardware in their refridgerator, or their computer.
Kudzu and those install/configure wizards seem to work pretty well on Mandrake. I wouldn't bet that dealing with new hardware is a whole lot harder under Linux, though I haven't used Windows in a long time.
The first time I tried to reinstall Windows on my laptop, I spent a big chunk of three days on the line with Dell tech support. Installing Windows was HARD, and getting the right drivers installed was REALLY HARD. I was reinstalling because I had repartitioned to install Linux. Linux I was able to install (my first time ever, too) in about four hours, no support calls needed, and except for sound, everything just worked. Sound required finding and reading a page on the linux for laptops site, which took up about half of the four hours. That was Redhat6.0. It's gotten better since, despite the fancy graphical installers.
The point is that no OS is ready for the ``12 o'clock flashers'', and probably there never will be such a beast on a general purpose computer. Remember, these are the guys who electrocute themselves with toasters! I agree that Linux is quite unready for the masses; but so is Windows, Mac, VMS, DOS, CPM and everything else I've used.
I think that the right question isn't ``can grandma install, configure, and maintain it'': she can't, whatever ``it'' may be. The better question is: ``Once it's set up, will it keep working for grandma, even if she pushes the wrong button?". I'd be a bit more confident about saying yes for any of the unixes than for Windows.
Stealing means depriving someone else of something which is rightfully his. It is not at all clear to me that the act which we miscall piracy involves that in any fashion. After the copying, the ``victim'' still has his program, which he may continue to peddle.
The ONLY justification for calling copying theft is the idea that each copy represents a lost sale. That's rediculously implausible. Further, we have to postulate that the ``victim'' has a right to a monopoly on sales which is violated by the copier. There may be such a legal privilege under our current law, and the copying may (or may not) infringe that privilege, but there can be no such right. Rights pre-exisit government, and we all have a right to build upon and otherwise make use of the IDEAS of others. Not their irreplaceable physical property, but their ideas, whichwe may share without depriving them of their use.
This is just a technical quibble: It is possible to disprove a theory which predicts an observable fact. Here is the counter-example to your statement:
On a clear day, theorize that the sun is up. Observe that it is indeed up. Theory proven.
This is a trivial and stupid example; the sun is easy to see. But if you were to theorize the existance of a planet, and some one found it where you said it should be (wasn't that the case with Pluto?), it wouldn't seem quite so trivial.
Right-click-and-look-for-settings-tab-and... is the Microsoft way, and if you set someone who hasn't been trained in the MS way down in front of a computer, they are not going to find that intuitive! I've watched my parents try to find their way around the MS desktop, and it's just ugly to watch. Using a Mac for the first time wasn't very good either.
I really think that a command line and a good set of manuals is the best way to get someone USING a computer (as opposed to using an appliance, but that's another rant). Most folks find reading a printed book fairly intuitive; not because it comes naturally, but because they've been trained in it. The command line interface can seem pretty narrow and awkward, but that's good! It doesn't overwhelm the new user with lots of subtleties and choices. You have all the options to the command, but you don't have to use them, or even read about them, until you feel the need.
I've seen many strictly non-technical english and education majors teach themselves to use the email system on a Honeywell mainframe, and on a VMS system. They got very good at using those systems, far better than me. Of course, their majors left a lot more free time than electrical engineering left me. They learned all that with nothing but a quick reference card and a friend who told them ``look at this...''.
I really don't place much value on ``intuitive''. I use my machine enough that it seems worthwhile to learn things about it, and so easy-to-use seems far more important to me than easy-to-guess.
Given that AOL can afford to stuff the mailboxes of the entire US with CD's, Microsoft ought to be able to afford a replacement CD for their paying customers. Instead, they expect you to risk further compromise by going online to get a patch.
They wouldn't even admit that there was a problem until the Washington Post held their feet to the fire. Must be nice to know Uncle Bill cares about his customers
I find being able to scroll through several resolutions with a keypress more convenient than the right-click-the-desk-top-and-click-and-click... approach. If you have it set up so that the virtual desktop is bigger than the actual at the lower resolutions, then you will especially appreciate being able to switch with a key-chord. It seems that almost every thing is configurable, including what key-chords toggle between windows, desktops, et cetera.
As for the pop-up windows stealing focus, that happens to me all the time under KDE, and I detest it. If I figure out how to turn it off, I'll try to let you know how to turn it on.
Amen! I've seen a student who claimed to have gotten straight A's in AP calc get a C followed by an F in first year calculus. He told me ``...if I could just use my calculator, I'd be fine...''. He was partly right; he did know what buttons to push for some familiar problems. But he had never learned calculus, and he had never learned how to learn math. All he knew was how to push buttons, and learn button sequences. He couldn't reason.
Well, Purdue IS a state school, and there are cornfields everywhere, and we're only a state away.
Whatever, you've done nothing here but convince me that you're a crackpot who doesn't know the first thing about economics.
and vise versa
All I know is that about half the used cars for sale are lemons, worth nothing, and about half are good ones, worth $15,000. I have no way of knowing which is which. On average, if I buy a bunch of these cars, I'll be ok if I pay $7,500 each.
If you sell your good car for $7,500, you get screwed.
If no-one will sell good cars for less than $15,000, then I know that there are no good cars for sale, and I don't buy at all.
Both these outcomes are market failure due to imperfect information. Neither version is likely to last for long in the real world: some third party will come along and sell inspections (i.e., information) for a big chunk of the profits we are loosing.
Of course, this is just the beginning. Take a look in Mas-Colell, Whinston and Green's Microeconomic Theory for more. I don't think Varian has it.
More worryingly, why does one of the recipients look exactly like Steve Martin?
Obviously, one of the economists who got the Nobel prize was wearing a Steve Martin mask, trying to pose as a celebrity. Some people will do anything to be noticed.
Well, actually, the first guy wasn't so far off the mark. Economists do have a lot of incentive to accomodate meddling politicians when they are out to ``help'' us. The economist who mentions Hayek's and von Mises' work, and reminds us that interference in a market economy leads us inexorably towards socialist ruin, is not going to be popular with politicians or bureaucrats, and is not going to find it easy to get grants, fat government-affiliated jobs, and so on.
There are economists who tell the truth (I'm thinking of Friedman, but of course there are many others), but there are a lot who choose to see the truth the way brilliant and thoughtfull men like Joseph Stiglitz do: if supporting government meddling buggers things up in the long run, well, that's job security for us economists.
Macro and general equilibrium theory are always about maximizing social welfare, choice simply isn't an issue. Indeed, I've never seen choice in the utility function in a macro model. The problem with maximizing ``social welfare'' is that it neglects individual welfare. It leads to depriving people of their freedom and controlling them, to keep the little bastards from maximizing their own welfare rather than society's. This leads, ultimately, to the cultural revolution, the killing fields of Cambodia, the current mess in Zimbabwe, the Nazi death camps, and so on.No economist ever calls for such things (I hope), but if we start maximizing social welfare, that is the logical final step: if they won't do what we say is best for them, we'll make 'em ... if they resist, we'll kill 'em. After all, we know so much more than they do.
One hundred years ago, this line of thinking was called ``the White man's burden''. Today, we call it social planning. ``The intellectual's burden'' would fit better. There is a tremendous lot of arrogance in this view of the world, whether we call it the ``Whiteman's burden'' or ``addressing market failure''.
It's hard to tell from his maps, but it looks as if folks in these places just aren't getting into these two visible-in-the-US opensource projects in a big way. I know that in Taiwan at least, there are quite a few who have the English and computer ability to do it, and internet connections are affordable for the middle class. This suggests to me that there IS a strong cultural component; it appears that folks there aren't very willing (yet, at least) to give away free samples.
Here's another problem with the ``plant stuff in the greenhouse idea'': you use green houses for plants which can't grow in the cold outside climate. These greenhouse/tower contraptions are going to be most feasible in HOT climates, where these heat-loving plants grow naturally. Finally, the green house will be sucking in cold outside air. The plants near the outer edge might get MORE chilled at night than they would without the greenhouse (though the wind would prevent radiant cooling; this could be a big plus in high deserts).
Probably the best idea would be to pave underneath the greenhouse, and periodically repaint the pavement black.
Probably the more interesting (and relevant) question will turn out to be: "What natural process made and arranged those blocks so neatly on the sea bottom?"
The BBC story specifically mentions that this is a followup on last year's discovery. The following quote is from the BBC story (second link in the original story):
So, it's the images brought back by the robot which are the news.
On to the good stuff:
In the Reuters story (first link in the original post), they address (sort of) the really interesting questions:
Volcanic activity?? I'm no geologist, but I suspect that someone who is could shred that effectively. I've lived on rising and falling coastlines, and I've never seen volcanic action blamed for the rise/fall in either of the physical geology books I read. Subduction of the ocean floor can cause volcanic activity, but I find it hard to imagine it running the other way.
As for how to date it, a rough-and-ready way to establish a bound on the date would be via geology: when was that area last above water? In order to fall 2100 feet below sealevel in 6000 years, it would have to sink at an average of 0.35 feet per year. Four point two inches per year seems a bit fast to me. Is the Cuban coast actually sinking, even? Is there a geologist in the house?
You could also get a fairly good clue by checking the amount of coral growth on the blocks. Coral needs to be near the surface to grow, so they could only have accumulated coral in the initial centuries after their submersion. No coral would suggest either that the coral has somehow been eroded away, or that those blocks were never near the surface.