...if they go into it thinking it will lead to a fat paycheck and then they have to stay up all night writing a simple bubble sort?...if they get exposed to all sorts of curricula at University that they like better?...if they realize they just like coding (and can learn it for free) but don't have a similar passion for all the odds and ends that entail a CS degree?...because they expect one thing and find another?
Last time I checked, University is not the army. You are free to change your mind. In fact, it's encouraged.
You are describing poor system architecture. You said it yourself, "Flash is for Homestar Runner..."
That is to say, Flash has a use, it's just not being used correctly in many cases. You could say the same about java. I mean, applets...hello? A 200k download to display a scrolling news bar?
Everything you describe is a symptom of poor design, not of the Flash environment. Sorry to say, but a little motion gets people's attention, and can be used to illustrate information that would otherwise be one-dimensional.
Web sites are allowed to have a little sparkle. So yeah, go off on the bad implementations, but Flash itself can be irreplaceable when used appropriately.
Not excusing fixed viewports, inaccessible content, unnecessary load times, etc. but there's a mentality around here that says "Flash sux. It won't run on my linux watch." you're complaining about poor design and bad system architecture.
I manage a site that has a tiny bit of flash. By passing a couple parameters, it lets me: -select one of four subjects to highlight -select one of 13 languages to use -dynamically load one of 12 photos that can be changed without editing the.fla -select the appropriate set of copy -send the user to one of 52 possible destinations based on these variables -it moves a bit, and looks smooth -requires less of a download than a typical image -manage all these parameters with a text file -if you don't have the plug-in, you get a flat image and accessibility-friendly alt tag
If I did this in ruby or php, it would warrant a sourceforge fan page and would get props from the h4x0rs. Flash, like any other tool, can be wielded properly and well.
If I inherit a massive codebase and add a few standalone utility functions, it would be easy to track, but most software projects involve inserting code in numerous places.
Who's responsible? Whoever touched it last? It's not like when you buy a house and you know what responsibilities the plumber, electrician, and HVAC installers have.
You'd have programmers suing each other. "That's your code." "No, it's not, it's your code"...every organization would have to use a complex CSV tracking system forever just to be compliant with whatever law would enforce this. (Think SarbOx on steroids...SarbOx is only for systems that touch financial data. How about one that tracks access and changes to ALL CODE.) You'd probably have to hide the code itself (from everyone in the organization), and track who even looks at it, and why.
This is not news. Schnier knows what he's talking about, and he's advocated this for some time. What this schmoe (Howard Schmidt) said last week was really a politically-framed, pro-business-rights version of it.
Instead of saying "businesses should be responsible" (which would cost businesses time, money, and process...the same businesses who are big supporters of the party(s) that appoint cybersecurity czars)...he conveniently passes it on to the lowly developer, who are often tasked with 'just getting it to market,' among other pressures.
I bought a PhatBox that works well for me, on account of the fact that it can handle flac - Free Lossless Audio Codec. flac gives you the option of compressing like MP3 or OGG, but at best those are still lossy, that is, you lose some data. I ripped my entire CD collection to "full quality" which, the claim goes, gives you the identical information as the original WAV file, but it's only about 70% of the size.
A 20 GB media player gives me 800-900 songs, though some of those are MP3s, so a flac-only disc would be 750+ songs. You can also get up to 120GB of storage now.
The other draw for me was the fact that it took the place of my 6-disc changer, and I just had to plug it in; no head unit surgery was required. It took seconds to install it, though I also opted to rip the unit out of its 8 pound steel casement and jam it in where my 6-disc changer was. It works with your existing head unit, that is, you use the 6 CD buttons on the existing stereo to browse the songs by playlist, artist, genre, etc.
The downside is that they have a 'list' price of $800 (not sure about the Kenwood Music Keg). I happened to find one on a VW enthusiast site for $120. The firmware is written to particular type of car stereo, so the same piece of hardware will be $800 for a Porsche, $600 for a BMW (as my BMW-owning boss discovered to his irritation), $400 for a Toyota, or $120 if a VW dealer is trying to get rid of them, as in my case....and no telltale iPod wires hanging out of the dash, or proprietary closed formats.
You are incorrect in assuming that you the urban payer will be subsidizing access for the unfortunates far off the grid. While that might be true in some cases, the incumbent carriers have determined through demographic analysis that some people just won't pay $50/month for access.
Despite the fact that they could provide access to a slew of customers in an area at a lower price point (say $30 for 'mid-band'), they do not want to start down that path, because prices will *never* come back up and most people will probably make do with a speed > 56k and 384. Instead of installing some equipment to open up service to people that probably aren't willing to pay artificially high prices, they can drap an couple installations into the nearest corner of the ZIP code and fulfill their obligations. They do not expand their offerings, and they can conveniently blame it on the the cost to upgrade their infrastructure.
The equipment in the DSLAMs and COs required to make broadband happen have come down in price exponentially in the last 6-8 years, why haven't urban access prices followed suit? Not because they are expanding the infrastructure on the premiums payed by urbanites, but because they have convinced consumers that's just 'what broadband costs.'
Is it too hard to fathom that Canada exceeds the US in something?
I know, what with their backwoods ideas on socialized medicine, gay marriage, and their non-alarmist stance on medical marijuana, who could imagine such a thing?
In japan you can download an HD movie in 5 minutes. Just because you've had it for 6 with 'no problems' doesn't mean it can't be better, as in faster and cheaper.
I bet you're paying the same or higher prices as you were all those years ago. If you rented a brand new car and paid the same price for 6 years, you'd be a fool. If you rented the same computer for 6 years for the same price, wouldn't you expect the technology to improve, or at least for the economies of scale to make it cheaper? Why not expect more from your Internet provider?
You have been successfully groomed into a consumer with low expectations.
This particular commitment to 100% African debt relief that I was referring to took place in 1999.
The US was committed to canceling about 2/3rd of its African debt, and G-7 finance ministers were following their lead. Informally, they all agreed that if the US committed to 100%, they would as well. (NY Times 18 Sept 2005)
AFA 'percentage vs. dollar amount' - It's debt cancellation! It represents how much was loaned. So the US are bad global citizens because they don't loan out as much, percentagewise? What you're suggesting sounds a bit like a global flat tax, which is another debate altogether.
Right. Good thing that America isn't a nation comprised of autoworkers.
A decline in manufacturing is often a sign of a healthier economy. Goods are knowledge-based instead of manufacturing based. US manufacturing has been in decline for the better part of 30 years.
China has been good at making things for some time, and the US has been good at making higher value-added products. More knowledge is required to make complex products (iPods, games, movies, etc.) than in making plastic widgets. China excels, and for some time, has excelled in making spec items. America excels at producing more complex products. One tenet of manufacturing economics is that your strength should carry forward. That is, just because America can "make" iPods, doesn't mean we can kick ass at making the low-level parts that go in them (cheaply). Likewise, just because China has gone from making plastic molds to making spec chips, doesn't mean they are going to automatically leap up the manufacturing food chain and make iPods.
No argument on the automotive side, but that's not indicative of our economies as a whole. If most or all electronic components are produced in Japan, then why doesn't Sony, Toshiba, and Fujitsu put Intel, Microsoft, and Apple out of business? Because they have "perfected" the manufacturing side, not the design and development side.
Rubbish. All countries put their own interests ahead of the UN's. Notice that China and India did not voluntarily adhere to the more stringent terms of the Kyoto protocol.
Do you think Russia has the resources to put the UN's interests ahead of its own? Do you think China advances the UN agenda because they want the whole world to be a happy place?
It (the UN) is a great idea on paper, and it should be more relevant, but this idea that it would function better if the US started playing nice is absurd. All players try to maximize their positions, in almost all cases.
The US won't pay its bill! Boohoo! The US kicked in $6 Billion to African debt relief, dwarfing the amount kicked in by all other industrialized nations. Their commitment to 100% relief essentially guilted all of the other parties into doing so too. This notion that the US is somehow sabotaging the entire organization is foolish.
Of course our current administration is advancing its neo-evil world view, but please, nations like Iran want nuclear "power," Israel wants the right to defend itself from a variety of neighbors, and China wants a laundry list of things, both economic and social. Will the US playing nice change this? Not likely, but pressure might temper them in different directions.
As far as American hegemony being undermined by the rise of China, take two reality pills and step away from the edge. There has always been, and will always be, upending economic forces in the world. Economies respond in cycles accordingly.
Yes, there is cause for concern about the debt issue, but will it make America China's baggage-handler? Not likely. China will make stuff. America will buy it. America is not, and has not been, a manufacturing-based economy in many years, mostly we provide services and entertainment. Remember how Japan 'perfected' the manufacturing process in the 70's and 80's? How'd that turn out? Why didn't they put us out of business?
The Internet is of a growing importance, it shouldn't be held hostage by one single country just as no single country should have total control of anything which is used globally.
I'm no knee-jerk patriot, but your argument is weak on a number of points. The Internet is not being held "hostage." What we're talking about is a set of protocols. Think about that. Protocols. Agreed upon methods of communication. Not exporting and enforcing our vision of "peace," not "free market ideals," not "democracy," but freaking communications protocols.
Suppose we begin to run out of IP addresses, and ICANN decides to take a course with IPv6. If a number of other countries decide that's not wise, they are completely free to implement their own system, and if it makes sense, it will have willing participants. You want to turn that over to a UN committee? The Chinese could hold up adoption of a new standard until it includes some draconian censorship capabilities. I believe that the UN can and should be a relevant force in the world, but not in managing technical protocols.
<tangent> Long before they were conveniently hijacked by the religious right and other dark forces, Conservativism and its ugly stepsister Neoconservativism were simply schools of political thought. Believe it or not, some of the actual principles from way back in the day (I am not going to list them here) are worth further analysis. Not all, not blindly adopted, but just warrant further discussion. Just like lots of liberal ideals are worth debating. Unfortunately political discourse has been replaced by shrill harpies steamrolling their edicts, but anyway...ONE of the principles of conservativism (and other -isms, I'm sure) is that national self interests should outweigh détente. That is, the US should protect the US's interests ahead of creating a feel-good openness with other countries. (I'm neither conservative or liberal, but like to rationally discuss principles from multiple camps.) </tangent>
The extreme position of that is "Fuck you, we're making a war whether you like it or not" and I'm not advocating that in any event, but in this case, it's "this works as it is, it's in our best interests to keep it this way, and there's little tangible benefit and lots of risk associated with relinquishing control" so yeah, I see their point, arrogance notwithstanding. The simple fact that it's a global standard doesn't carry enough weight to turn over control to a global committee. Should we internationalize control of POTS or wireless protocols on those same grounds? Again, nothing is held hostage here, the world is free to develop and/or implement their own protocol, just don't expect the US to hand over the keys to the existing one.
I architected and mostly coded a system like what you're describing, but it didn't need gui-based editing capabilities, but I just put in the features I needed.
I created a template system where each page was passed a parameter, and the template would load plain-jane html from an appropriate file. This approach allowed us to create ftp accounts for different in-country managers. They could ftp in to add and edit their own versions of pages, and, most importantly for the webmasters, could not screw with the template, the master css file, the look and feel, etc. They could use something like dreamweaver to edit and reproduce the pages (making sure not to generate html/head/title tags) they were fine. All they really had to do was put them back in the right place. I
Creating new sections and master templates required intervention from the webmaster, but this was a plus since it kept site growth organized and not subject to the whims of 'section of the week' re-development.
It was fairly trivial to implement. A GUI-based editor would have made it more of a chore, but mostly on account of page locking or getting 'approvals' before making pages live, a couple features that were discussed, but not critical. In this case, it was easier for the in-country resources to request a 'push' from the webmasters to generate lots of new content at once, and the webmasters got a chance to verify that everything was playing nicely in its sandbox.
Mr. Wall, 25 years old, who runs an Internet marketing business from his home, said the suit "is so vague in nature that it's hard to know what I'm being sued for."
To use your own logic, there are well-traveled avenues that you could use to prevent your boss from lying about you. They are libel and slander laws, and if it happens with company compliance, you could set yourself up to never work again.
This guy is being served with a murky lawsuit, and the plantiff's counsel offered to drop the whole thing if he removed every bit of referring content to their company. If their counsel really did their homework, they would have documented each and every infraction on his site, included it in the suit, and asked for specific remedies (whether it be money, removal of content, etc.) Upon receiving it, he could get useful legal counsel, and either fight it or comply. Instead, they're trying to intimidate him into silence.
That would be like Microsoft suing slashdot over critical posts and offering to drop the whole thing if every reference to MS was removed from this site.
Maybe before you try the Uncle Ben defense (With great power comes great responsibility) you should RTFConstitution.
I have a daughter about that age. I say don't let them watch tv or use the computer....and when your daughter gets a BSOD, my daughter will fix it for her.
My daughter has been pushing a mouse around since she was 2, and here are the top hits in our house...
There were some decent kid-appropriate cartoons in the wired.com/animation section, which was a nice break from the DisneyWarner machine. They are gone, which is sad, since they still have that three-legged dog called Webmonkey limping around.
Goof ball is a shareware, non-violent, dexterity building game, and it teaches some simple rules about gravity and colliding spheres that are probably good to have ingrained at a young age. It's actually a set of 6-8 ball games, so there's a lot to learn, ever for a grown up kid.
I found that Mame is an excellent source, since a lot of the games are easy, non-violent, non-indoctrinating into the DisneyWarner ad machine, and, uh, free.
That being said, my kids also go to a couple games on the Disney.crap site, though only under strict supervision, and only to a fraction of the offerings. I try to minimize their exposure to it, but some of the games/puzzles/activities are ok.
Shockwave games are usually better, but you have to sort of pre-screen the pages to make sure you have all of the inappropriate ad servers blocked.
Outside of games, NASA has an excellent kids' section, with models to build, pictures, projects, etc.
Zoo and aquarium sites are ok too, plenty of educational material with enough pictures to keep them entertained.
...and you'll find an artifact from the early days, before the politics section, blind haughty sniping, and google/apple worship/flamewars.
The first clue is the relatively low userID. Not quite down in the 5 digit range, but well ahead of all the riffraff in the 800s.
The userID is just an indicator. The real proof is the content.
See, once upon a time, you could go to this space and the crowd posted about physics, astronomy, algorithm optimization, mechanical coefficients, Personal Homepage Preprocessor, the latest mersenne prime, and diversions like star wars via telnet.
Yep, the CS majors were paper millionaires, the English majors were making mid-five figures right out of school, and you could sit at your desk and learn all about pi bonds and tensile strength like you were in a 400-level lecture.
A quick scan today reveals a torrent of one-liners trolling for a funny mod if they're lucky. sigh.
I don't suggest cutting back on vaccinations over fear of autism, though because vaccinations can have unexpected effects.
The drug companies have not used it in child vaccines since 2002. In the US. As for other countries, most notably third world countries that are accepting "charitable donations" from drug companies, are stuck being guinea pigs until the true risks are discovered.
So you've got drug companies on the one hand saying "there's no risk" and on the other hand, removing the suspect chemical and lobbying congress to make it impossible to be found liable.
I don't think TFA would have such a sense of outrage and urgency if this hadn't been bubbling up for some time. It was on the cover of the NY Times magazine back in 2001 or so, and that article illustrated the possible risk and stated that more comprehensive studies were underway. Those studies have since been completed, and no matter how you cut it, suggest a risk. Maybe not the smoking gun that everyone needs to put this to bed, but enough of a risk that the drug companies themselves could no longer claim the lack of risk. So they removed it from the US supply, where the threat of litigation is great.
The outrageous part of it is that the former Director of the US Pediatric Vaccination program went on record (in 97 or so) stating that we since it's not a critical component of the vaccines (it makes it cheaper to produce), and it may be a risk, it should be removed while further studies are completed. The drug companies refused to consider that possibility, as that would be close to an admission of liability.
And I don't see how they can't be held liable if a link isn't found. After all, if a woman is a crackhead or drinks a lot, she can be held accountable for her child's defects (and negligence).
A crackhead can't get a rider written into the Patriot Act or an Omnibus spending bill, as the pharmaceutical industry has.
Most corporate internships can really suck. It takes time and/or connections to get one where you won't be doing the crappiest work, and the glacial pace at which they do their hiring/decision making can be a death blow if you're looking for a short term summer gig.
If I were in your shoes I would:
Think of anyone you know that has influence. I know someone who called his company's legal firm and asked for an internship for their hs-aged kid. Any firm that bills tens of thousands of dollars annually would do this; it's cheaper and more legal than kickbacks. It also helped the kid get a little more meaningful work.
Check out sourceforge and see if you can contribute to something that interests you. You may not have much experience, but a typical company won't invest much in educating you if they know you'll be gone in a couple months. You can contribute to or develop your own project in that time.
Start a cheap business. Again, I don't know what your goals are, but if it's experience, you don't need to go corporate. Start a cheap service oriented business with a low barrier to entry. i.e. invest in $100 worth of premium supplies and start a car detailing business. You can pull $50/hour doing that kind of thing, if you can find the market...plus you get hands-on experience with all sorts of business concepts that you won't get in a cube farm: targeted marketing/segmentation (find out where the porsches live), sales, viral marketing, calculating competitive price points, market distinguishers, etc. That's just an example. You could do the same with window washing, PC/networking repair, etc. Though those things are commoditized. I don't know about Austin, but in Chicagoland there are plenty of people spending $100 every other week for someone to wash, wax, and detail their car. (Hint: they are not the ones pulling through the $3 car wash twice a year.)
Of course you might be looking to shovel shit onto your resume for college applications, and if that's the case, you might prefer being a toilet scrubber at Widget Inc. rather than pushing a low-level service oriented entrepreneurship.
There are plenty of other things you can do. Lots of folks wait around for someone to hand them a shot, and sometimes you're better off making your own thing happen.
Slashdot Mirror
...if they go into it thinking it will lead to a fat paycheck and then they have to stay up all night writing a simple bubble sort? ...if they get exposed to all sorts of curricula at University that they like better? ...if they realize they just like coding (and can learn it for free) but don't have a similar passion for all the odds and ends that entail a CS degree? ...because they expect one thing and find another?
Last time I checked, University is not the army. You are free to change your mind. In fact, it's encouraged.
You are describing poor system architecture. You said it yourself, "Flash is for Homestar Runner..."
.fla
That is to say, Flash has a use, it's just not being used correctly in many cases. You could say the same about java. I mean, applets...hello? A 200k download to display a scrolling news bar?
Everything you describe is a symptom of poor design, not of the Flash environment. Sorry to say, but a little motion gets people's attention, and can be used to illustrate information that would otherwise be one-dimensional.
Web sites are allowed to have a little sparkle. So yeah, go off on the bad implementations, but Flash itself can be irreplaceable when used appropriately.
Not excusing fixed viewports, inaccessible content, unnecessary load times, etc. but there's a mentality around here that says "Flash sux. It won't run on my linux watch." you're complaining about poor design and bad system architecture.
I manage a site that has a tiny bit of flash. By passing a couple parameters, it lets me:
-select one of four subjects to highlight
-select one of 13 languages to use
-dynamically load one of 12 photos that can be changed without editing the
-select the appropriate set of copy
-send the user to one of 52 possible destinations based on these variables
-it moves a bit, and looks smooth
-requires less of a download than a typical image
-manage all these parameters with a text file
-if you don't have the plug-in, you get a flat image and accessibility-friendly alt tag
If I did this in ruby or php, it would warrant a sourceforge fan page and would get props from the h4x0rs. Flash, like any other tool, can be wielded properly and well.
Uh, because what does 'work on' mean?
If I inherit a massive codebase and add a few standalone utility functions, it would be easy to track, but most software projects involve inserting code in numerous places.
Who's responsible? Whoever touched it last? It's not like when you buy a house and you know what responsibilities the plumber, electrician, and HVAC installers have.
You'd have programmers suing each other. "That's your code." "No, it's not, it's your code"...every organization would have to use a complex CSV tracking system forever just to be compliant with whatever law would enforce this. (Think SarbOx on steroids...SarbOx is only for systems that touch financial data. How about one that tracks access and changes to ALL CODE.) You'd probably have to hide the code itself (from everyone in the organization), and track who even looks at it, and why.
This is not news. Schnier knows what he's talking about, and he's advocated this for some time. What this schmoe (Howard Schmidt) said last week was really a politically-framed, pro-business-rights version of it.
Instead of saying "businesses should be responsible" (which would cost businesses time, money, and process...the same businesses who are big supporters of the party(s) that appoint cybersecurity czars)...he conveniently passes it on to the lowly developer, who are often tasked with 'just getting it to market,' among other pressures.
...or maybe the 'Kenwood Music Keg' which seems to run the same firmware.
...and no telltale iPod wires hanging out of the dash, or proprietary closed formats.
The ogg question is addressed here.
I bought a PhatBox that works well for me, on account of the fact that it can handle flac - Free Lossless Audio Codec. flac gives you the option of compressing like MP3 or OGG, but at best those are still lossy, that is, you lose some data. I ripped my entire CD collection to "full quality" which, the claim goes, gives you the identical information as the original WAV file, but it's only about 70% of the size.
A 20 GB media player gives me 800-900 songs, though some of those are MP3s, so a flac-only disc would be 750+ songs. You can also get up to 120GB of storage now.
The other draw for me was the fact that it took the place of my 6-disc changer, and I just had to plug it in; no head unit surgery was required. It took seconds to install it, though I also opted to rip the unit out of its 8 pound steel casement and jam it in where my 6-disc changer was. It works with your existing head unit, that is, you use the 6 CD buttons on the existing stereo to browse the songs by playlist, artist, genre, etc.
The downside is that they have a 'list' price of $800 (not sure about the Kenwood Music Keg). I happened to find one on a VW enthusiast site for $120. The firmware is written to particular type of car stereo, so the same piece of hardware will be $800 for a Porsche, $600 for a BMW (as my BMW-owning boss discovered to his irritation), $400 for a Toyota, or $120 if a VW dealer is trying to get rid of them, as in my case.
You are incorrect in assuming that you the urban payer will be subsidizing access for the unfortunates far off the grid. While that might be true in some cases, the incumbent carriers have determined through demographic analysis that some people just won't pay $50/month for access.
Despite the fact that they could provide access to a slew of customers in an area at a lower price point (say $30 for 'mid-band'), they do not want to start down that path, because prices will *never* come back up and most people will probably make do with a speed > 56k and 384. Instead of installing some equipment to open up service to people that probably aren't willing to pay artificially high prices, they can drap an couple installations into the nearest corner of the ZIP code and fulfill their obligations. They do not expand their offerings, and they can conveniently blame it on the the cost to upgrade their infrastructure.
The equipment in the DSLAMs and COs required to make broadband happen have come down in price exponentially in the last 6-8 years, why haven't urban access prices followed suit? Not because they are expanding the infrastructure on the premiums payed by urbanites, but because they have convinced consumers that's just 'what broadband costs.'
Is it too hard to fathom that Canada exceeds the US in something?
I know, what with their backwoods ideas on socialized medicine, gay marriage, and their non-alarmist stance on medical marijuana, who could imagine such a thing?
In japan you can download an HD movie in 5 minutes. Just because you've had it for 6 with 'no problems' doesn't mean it can't be better, as in faster and cheaper.
I bet you're paying the same or higher prices as you were all those years ago. If you rented a brand new car and paid the same price for 6 years, you'd be a fool. If you rented the same computer for 6 years for the same price, wouldn't you expect the technology to improve, or at least for the economies of scale to make it cheaper? Why not expect more from your Internet provider?
You have been successfully groomed into a consumer with low expectations.
This particular commitment to 100% African debt relief that I was referring to took place in 1999.
The US was committed to canceling about 2/3rd of its African debt, and G-7 finance ministers were following their lead. Informally, they all agreed that if the US committed to 100%, they would as well. (NY Times 18 Sept 2005)
AFA 'percentage vs. dollar amount' - It's debt cancellation! It represents how much was loaned. So the US are bad global citizens because they don't loan out as much, percentagewise? What you're suggesting sounds a bit like a global flat tax, which is another debate altogether.
Right. Good thing that America isn't a nation comprised of autoworkers.
A decline in manufacturing is often a sign of a healthier economy. Goods are knowledge-based instead of manufacturing based. US manufacturing has been in decline for the better part of 30 years.
China has been good at making things for some time, and the US has been good at making higher value-added products. More knowledge is required to make complex products (iPods, games, movies, etc.) than in making plastic widgets. China excels, and for some time, has excelled in making spec items. America excels at producing more complex products. One tenet of manufacturing economics is that your strength should carry forward. That is, just because America can "make" iPods, doesn't mean we can kick ass at making the low-level parts that go in them (cheaply). Likewise, just because China has gone from making plastic molds to making spec chips, doesn't mean they are going to automatically leap up the manufacturing food chain and make iPods.
No argument on the automotive side, but that's not indicative of our economies as a whole. If most or all electronic components are produced in Japan, then why doesn't Sony, Toshiba, and Fujitsu put Intel, Microsoft, and Apple out of business? Because they have "perfected" the manufacturing side, not the design and development side.
Rubbish. All countries put their own interests ahead of the UN's. Notice that China and India did not voluntarily adhere to the more stringent terms of the Kyoto protocol.
Do you think Russia has the resources to put the UN's interests ahead of its own?
Do you think China advances the UN agenda because they want the whole world to be a happy place?
It (the UN) is a great idea on paper, and it should be more relevant, but this idea that it would function better if the US started playing nice is absurd. All players try to maximize their positions, in almost all cases.
The US won't pay its bill! Boohoo! The US kicked in $6 Billion to African debt relief, dwarfing the amount kicked in by all other industrialized nations. Their commitment to 100% relief essentially guilted all of the other parties into doing so too. This notion that the US is somehow sabotaging the entire organization is foolish.
Of course our current administration is advancing its neo-evil world view, but please, nations like Iran want nuclear "power," Israel wants the right to defend itself from a variety of neighbors, and China wants a laundry list of things, both economic and social. Will the US playing nice change this? Not likely, but pressure might temper them in different directions.
As far as American hegemony being undermined by the rise of China, take two reality pills and step away from the edge. There has always been, and will always be, upending economic forces in the world. Economies respond in cycles accordingly.
Yes, there is cause for concern about the debt issue, but will it make America China's baggage-handler? Not likely. China will make stuff. America will buy it. America is not, and has not been, a manufacturing-based economy in many years, mostly we provide services and entertainment. Remember how Japan 'perfected' the manufacturing process in the 70's and 80's? How'd that turn out? Why didn't they put us out of business?
The Internet is of a growing importance, it shouldn't be held hostage by one single country just as no single country should have total control of anything which is used globally.
I'm no knee-jerk patriot, but your argument is weak on a number of points. The Internet is not being held "hostage." What we're talking about is a set of protocols. Think about that. Protocols. Agreed upon methods of communication. Not exporting and enforcing our vision of "peace," not "free market ideals," not "democracy," but freaking communications protocols.
Suppose we begin to run out of IP addresses, and ICANN decides to take a course with IPv6. If a number of other countries decide that's not wise, they are completely free to implement their own system, and if it makes sense, it will have willing participants. You want to turn that over to a UN committee? The Chinese could hold up adoption of a new standard until it includes some draconian censorship capabilities. I believe that the UN can and should be a relevant force in the world, but not in managing technical protocols.
<tangent>
Long before they were conveniently hijacked by the religious right and other dark forces, Conservativism and its ugly stepsister Neoconservativism were simply schools of political thought. Believe it or not, some of the actual principles from way back in the day (I am not going to list them here) are worth further analysis. Not all, not blindly adopted, but just warrant further discussion. Just like lots of liberal ideals are worth debating. Unfortunately political discourse has been replaced by shrill harpies steamrolling their edicts, but anyway...ONE of the principles of conservativism (and other -isms, I'm sure) is that national self interests should outweigh détente. That is, the US should protect the US's interests ahead of creating a feel-good openness with other countries. (I'm neither conservative or liberal, but like to rationally discuss principles from multiple camps.)
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The extreme position of that is "Fuck you, we're making a war whether you like it or not" and I'm not advocating that in any event, but in this case, it's "this works as it is, it's in our best interests to keep it this way, and there's little tangible benefit and lots of risk associated with relinquishing control" so yeah, I see their point, arrogance notwithstanding. The simple fact that it's a global standard doesn't carry enough weight to turn over control to a global committee. Should we internationalize control of POTS or wireless protocols on those same grounds? Again, nothing is held hostage here, the world is free to develop and/or implement their own protocol, just don't expect the US to hand over the keys to the existing one.
I architected and mostly coded a system like what you're describing, but it didn't need gui-based editing capabilities, but I just put in the features I needed.
I created a template system where each page was passed a parameter, and the template would load plain-jane html from an appropriate file. This approach allowed us to create ftp accounts for different in-country managers. They could ftp in to add and edit their own versions of pages, and, most importantly for the webmasters, could not screw with the template, the master css file, the look and feel, etc. They could use something like dreamweaver to edit and reproduce the pages (making sure not to generate html/head/title tags) they were fine. All they really had to do was put them back in the right place. I
Creating new sections and master templates required intervention from the webmaster, but this was a plus since it kept site growth organized and not subject to the whims of 'section of the week' re-development.
It was fairly trivial to implement. A GUI-based editor would have made it more of a chore, but mostly on account of page locking or getting 'approvals' before making pages live, a couple features that were discussed, but not critical. In this case, it was easier for the in-country resources to request a 'push' from the webmasters to generate lots of new content at once, and the webmasters got a chance to verify that everything was playing nicely in its sandbox.
Mr. Wall, 25 years old, who runs an Internet marketing business from his home, said the suit "is so vague in nature that it's hard to know what I'm being sued for."
To use your own logic, there are well-traveled avenues that you could use to prevent your boss from lying about you. They are libel and slander laws, and if it happens with company compliance, you could set yourself up to never work again.
This guy is being served with a murky lawsuit, and the plantiff's counsel offered to drop the whole thing if he removed every bit of referring content to their company. If their counsel really did their homework, they would have documented each and every infraction on his site, included it in the suit, and asked for specific remedies (whether it be money, removal of content, etc.) Upon receiving it, he could get useful legal counsel, and either fight it or comply. Instead, they're trying to intimidate him into silence.
That would be like Microsoft suing slashdot over critical posts and offering to drop the whole thing if every reference to MS was removed from this site.
Maybe before you try the Uncle Ben defense (With great power comes great responsibility) you should RTFConstitution.
The Internet is not your personal stump to beat up people.
Because freedom of speech only applies if no one can hear you.
I have a daughter about that age. I say don't let them watch tv or use the computer. ...and when your daughter gets a BSOD, my daughter will fix it for her.
My daughter has been pushing a mouse around since she was 2, and here are the top hits in our house...
There were some decent kid-appropriate cartoons in the wired.com/animation section, which was a nice break from the DisneyWarner machine. They are gone, which is sad, since they still have that three-legged dog called Webmonkey limping around.
Goof ball is a shareware, non-violent, dexterity building game, and it teaches some simple rules about gravity and colliding spheres that are probably good to have ingrained at a young age. It's actually a set of 6-8 ball games, so there's a lot to learn, ever for a grown up kid.
I found that Mame is an excellent source, since a lot of the games are easy, non-violent, non-indoctrinating into the DisneyWarner ad machine, and, uh, free.
That being said, my kids also go to a couple games on the Disney.crap site, though only under strict supervision, and only to a fraction of the offerings. I try to minimize their exposure to it, but some of the games/puzzles/activities are ok.
Shockwave games are usually better, but you have to sort of pre-screen the pages to make sure you have all of the inappropriate ad servers blocked.
Outside of games, NASA has an excellent kids' section, with models to build, pictures, projects, etc.
Zoo and aquarium sites are ok too, plenty of educational material with enough pictures to keep them entertained.
Plans are underway to do away with all science books except for one.
virtual veal
...and you'll find an artifact from the early days, before the politics section, blind haughty sniping, and google/apple worship/flamewars.
The first clue is the relatively low userID. Not quite down in the 5 digit range, but well ahead of all the riffraff in the 800s.
The userID is just an indicator. The real proof is the content.
See, once upon a time, you could go to this space and the crowd posted about physics, astronomy, algorithm optimization, mechanical coefficients, Personal Homepage Preprocessor, the latest mersenne prime, and diversions like star wars via telnet.
Yep, the CS majors were paper millionaires, the English majors were making mid-five figures right out of school, and you could sit at your desk and learn all about pi bonds and tensile strength like you were in a 400-level lecture.
A quick scan today reveals a torrent of one-liners trolling for a funny mod if they're lucky. sigh.
I don't suggest cutting back on vaccinations over fear of autism, though because vaccinations can have unexpected effects.
The drug companies have not used it in child vaccines since 2002. In the US. As for other countries, most notably third world countries that are accepting "charitable donations" from drug companies, are stuck being guinea pigs until the true risks are discovered.
So you've got drug companies on the one hand saying "there's no risk" and on the other hand, removing the suspect chemical and lobbying congress to make it impossible to be found liable.
I don't think TFA would have such a sense of outrage and urgency if this hadn't been bubbling up for some time. It was on the cover of the NY Times magazine back in 2001 or so, and that article illustrated the possible risk and stated that more comprehensive studies were underway. Those studies have since been completed, and no matter how you cut it, suggest a risk. Maybe not the smoking gun that everyone needs to put this to bed, but enough of a risk that the drug companies themselves could no longer claim the lack of risk. So they removed it from the US supply, where the threat of litigation is great.
The outrageous part of it is that the former Director of the US Pediatric Vaccination program went on record (in 97 or so) stating that we since it's not a critical component of the vaccines (it makes it cheaper to produce), and it may be a risk, it should be removed while further studies are completed. The drug companies refused to consider that possibility, as that would be close to an admission of liability.
No tinfoil hats needed here.
And I don't see how they can't be held liable if a link isn't found. After all, if a woman is a crackhead or drinks a lot, she can be held accountable for her child's defects (and negligence).
A crackhead can't get a rider written into the Patriot Act or an Omnibus spending bill, as the pharmaceutical industry has.
...for their controversial and unproven theory about the star formation history of the universe.
They should just look this up in the Bible.
Most corporate internships can really suck. It takes time and/or connections to get one where you won't be doing the crappiest work, and the glacial pace at which they do their hiring/decision making can be a death blow if you're looking for a short term summer gig.
If I were in your shoes I would:
Think of anyone you know that has influence. I know someone who called his company's legal firm and asked for an internship for their hs-aged kid. Any firm that bills tens of thousands of dollars annually would do this; it's cheaper and more legal than kickbacks. It also helped the kid get a little more meaningful work.
Check out sourceforge and see if you can contribute to something that interests you. You may not have much experience, but a typical company won't invest much in educating you if they know you'll be gone in a couple months. You can contribute to or develop your own project in that time.
Start a cheap business. Again, I don't know what your goals are, but if it's experience, you don't need to go corporate. Start a cheap service oriented business with a low barrier to entry. i.e. invest in $100 worth of premium supplies and start a car detailing business. You can pull $50/hour doing that kind of thing, if you can find the market...plus you get hands-on experience with all sorts of business concepts that you won't get in a cube farm: targeted marketing/segmentation (find out where the porsches live), sales, viral marketing, calculating competitive price points, market distinguishers, etc. That's just an example. You could do the same with window washing, PC/networking repair, etc. Though those things are commoditized. I don't know about Austin, but in Chicagoland there are plenty of people spending $100 every other week for someone to wash, wax, and detail their car. (Hint: they are not the ones pulling through the $3 car wash twice a year.)
Of course you might be looking to shovel shit onto your resume for college applications, and if that's the case, you might prefer being a toilet scrubber at Widget Inc. rather than pushing a low-level service oriented entrepreneurship.
There are plenty of other things you can do. Lots of folks wait around for someone to hand them a shot, and sometimes you're better off making your own thing happen.
...serious overclocking!
um, does fragging at 200 fps count as 'off the grid' if you're not running a server?