That first link was interesting to me, right till I read:
So how do we know when help is either selfish or unselfish? How can we be sure that Bono, Madonna, Al Gore and Bill Gates are just rich swindlers? If we're honestly interested in helping someone, we do this best by solving their problem. Pumping in more money from the West does not solve the poverty of the Third World. Bono Loves Himself. In fact, the Western aid actually serves to increase poverty, by keeping generations of starving children alive - children that natural selection otherwise would take care of. Thus the number of people growing up without food and water naturally increases, contributing to the chaos and infections that run wild in Africa right now.
Oh bravo! By saving the lives of children you contribute to the problem... so how to solve this? cull the population down to a more manageable size. Now there's a solution that's not been tried before!
Yes, it's called "lifeboat ethics". Google it and read the original essay. While I do find his conclusions distasteful, I can't find fault with his reasoning.
It's true that they have no advantage, but I'd argue that they do have greater name recognition among the general public over companies like Olympus or Nikon. It's too late for them now, but 10 years ago they could have leveraged that into a reasonable share of the market, maybe even as the dominant name in the low end.
No, you totally misinterpreted what I was saying: Poloroid should have started making digital cameras. Not some hybrid camera/printer or whatever, just normal digital cameras. Even if they had to rebrand someone else's, that would have at least kept them in the game long enough to get their own designs going, if they had any intentions of doing so.
I'm well aware of all the reasons digital is eating Poloroid's lunch, I didn't want a Poloroid long before there was a digital alternative.
I love my smart phone, but would never do document editing or coding on it, both of which I do on my netbook every day. Similarly, I wouldn't make phone calls on my netbook. So no, those are two different niches, filled by two different devices.
The utility companies are bad, but they only rape their customers. MS rapes their entire industry, so yeah, that's a whole different level of evil.
And by the way, you've so far managed to not mention a single thing that was innovated by MS. They're constantly being sued for "stupid things" like screwing over all of the actual innovators who are stupid enough to partner with MS, taking the tech for themselves, and leaving the actual innovators bleeding in the metaphorical ditch. It may be true that all multinationals that make money hand over fist engage in similar abusive behavior, but that doesn't make it non-evil.
Yes, MS is finally providing free dev tools, now that they've been in direct competition for several years with a platform that has always had free dev tools. Never mind that their free dev tools are limited (the competition's are not) and you don't have access to any of the important source code (the competition makes all source available, free of charge)...
Kodak has also been working with Technicolor on film scanning technology (almost all movies today have digital effects, and most are still shot on film). Film's days are numbered, and they know it, but at least they're smart enough to try and squeeze some profits out of the transition and maybe carve themselves out a position in the future.
If Poloroid was as smart, they would have jumped on the digital bandwagon as soon as it appeared. I've seen Poloroid branded SD cards, but I haven't heard of them as a camera manufacturer recently. I don't see how they'll survive in the long term rebranding PNY cards.
But they're still doing alright as a company, and they're my first choice for laptops and printers. I won't deny that they've fallen from their once lofty position, but they haven't gone to anywhere near the depths of some.
My ex-wife is a cop, and I don't find that surprising at all. We were married before she went through the academy, and I swear at some point they surgically removed the part of her brain that comprehends the value of civil liberties. Any time I mentioned them she looked at me like I was an alien speaking gibberish.
I think you've got it backwards. The kids who would kill themselves are the ones who are (a) smart enough to have read and understood the book, and (b) interested enough to ask "what happens if..."
In other words, you've killed off the ones most likely to push science and technology forward, and preserved the ones that are either too timid to take risks or too dumb to read.
Except that Swiss army knives are RAZOR SHARP, at least when new and genuine. I got my first one at 9 and nearly removed the end of my finger.
Any knife should be razor sharp, and not just when new. If it isn't, then either it's a crap blade or it has been poorly maintained. Either way, a dull knife is actually much more dangerous than a sharp one since you have to put so much more force behind it to make it cut.
My sister and I both got Swiss Army knives at age 5. I don't recall having any serious incidents with mine, but my sister cut herself pretty good the first day she had hers. It healed though. I haven't exactly given my daughter a knife, but she appropriated the utility knife out of my tool box for her crafts at age 7.
I'm not a big fan of the theory that kids should never get hurt. There are certain lessons that they need to learn, and yet lack the cognitive ability to do so without a certain amount of pain (physical or mental). Things like "fire is hot" and "knives are sharp" tend to go in one ear and out the other until they get burned or cut.
With a little bit of supervision in those first few hours, I see no problem giving a knife to a kid that young. You may be right about a locking blade, though. I've had Swiss Army knives try to close on me before.
The combustion of H and O2 yields H2O but I have yet to see the spectrum of the exhaust gases of H - Atmosphere - Oil Vapor combustion.
I suspect it is something quite different then what the public has been sold since our atmosphere is 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, 0.93% argon, 0.038% carbon dioxide, and small amounts of other gases.
Given that "combustion" is just a colloquial term for rapid oxidation -- as in "this thing here combining with oxygen" -- I think your concern is unwarranted.
Until we find a way to isolate H from available sources with an efficiency factor an order of magnitude better then what we have now the cost will stay prohibitive.
I can put a solar panel on my roof and crack water all day long. If I'm not getting enough I can put up another solar panel. Yeah, improved efficiency might mean I need fewer panels, which could save me some money, but even at current efficiency levels I'm pretty sure I'd be saving money compared to what I'm currently spending on gasoline.
Electric cars are mostly a shift of the pollution problem from individual grossly inefficient power generation ( the engine burning petroleum ) to the very very large and vastly more efficient, even when using the exact same fuel, new power plants that would have to be built to charge those batteries.
Fixed that for you.
Even if we're talking about fossil fuel power generation, those engines can be run at a constant RPM, usually in the optimal range for that engine design, giving a huge boost in efficiency. One of the reasons car engines are so inefficient is that they spend so much time out of their optimal range, simply as a consequence of the environment they're operating in. That's why there's a difference between city and highway MPG.
If speed matters it's cheaper, easier, and faster to buy more processing power.
Really? In lots of what size? Are you including the additional power requirements and other support structures this additional processing power requires into your calculations?
Way to display a fundamental ignorance of basic economics.
I rather doubt it, the timelines don't fit. "USL v. BSDi was a lawsuit brought in the United States in 1992 [...]. The case was settled out of court in 1993 [...]."
Meanwhile, Linux didn't hit version 1.0 until March, 1994. Yggdrasil, the first distro, was released in November, 1992, and Slackware in June, 1993, but they were strictly for hobbyists.
How does the timeline not fit? BSD was kneecapped by USL at the critical juncture when Linux was created and and released to the public. Doubts about the future of BSD drove many developers to Linux who would never have considered it otherwise. Not to mention the fact that Linus might not have even started it in the first place had BSDi's 386 port not been held up by the suit (the Wikipedia article is confusing, that suit was filed in April 1990).
If not for USL v BSDi, Linux likely wouldn't have received the developer attention it needed to become viable.
GPL code is more free, as in more likely to remain free in ways that are meaningful to the end user.
I don't begrudge the fact that Microsoft is able to use the BSD TCP/IP stack to save themselves a bit of work, but at the end of the day I can't fix any bugs I might find, nor can I extend it to support new technologies that Microsoft doesn't feel like supporting. And frankly, I don't see any reason why I as a programmer should care any more about the needs of purveyors of closed source software than they care about my needs as an end user.
Way to look at the numbers and not understand them. South Korean kids do well in school because South Korean culture places a high value on education and South Korean parents are closely involved in their children's education from early childhood. I recently had the pleasure of spending an evening in the home of a Korean family with school aged children. Every 40 minutes or so their mom called them into the kitchen to drill them on spelling or simple multiplication, or quiz them on questions from their social studies homework. Guess what? Those kids are performing very highly in school, and will likely score quite well on the tests the article you linked is based on, despite their "disadvantage" of going to an American public school.
In other words, children's academic performance has little to do with how much the government spends on education, but is very tightly correlated with parental involvement.
One problem with metrics like those used in the article though, is that they're only looking at one facet of education. Education in Asian countries tends to follow the traditional Confucian model, which focuses on rote memorization. Consequently, graduates of such systems do very well on math and reading comprehension tests (relative to their familiarity with the language of the test anyway), but are frequently at a loss when the test requires creative analysis, such as independent projects and essays. In my years as a college tutor I met many international students who easily tested into calculus, but had never written an essay in their life.
Another point you need to understand is that those after school academies exist for a reason: college entrance exams in developed Asian countries are brutally competitive. Most students who plan to go to university spend another two years after high school going to private "cram schools" to prepare for those exams. The ones that don't score high enough often come to the US to continue their education, assuming they have the money.
Anyway, the point is that there's no reason such academies can't exist in the US, and in fact they do. The more Asians, especially Koreans and Japanese, there are in a given community, the more of them you'll see. Look for them in the strip mall next to the Tae Kwon Do school. However, there simply isn't much demand for them in more general American culture. Again, that has nothing to do with government education spending, regardless of whether you think it's too high or too low. It has everything to do with the parents dedication to their children's education.
My daughter is in 4th grade, doing 5th grade math and reading 8th grade books. Of course, she's in one of the best public schools in California and has a great teacher. None of my teachers did that sort of thing for me, and that was long before No Child Left Behind. Part of the difference is that her school makes effective use of technology to help take some of the burden of giving each child work appropriate to their ability off of the teacher.
My point is, if all children in a class are being treated the same it's because of laziness in the teacher, not because of national or state level education policies.
The fact that it's now usable is the "new functionality."
... and I'm pretty sure that would be Microsoft's justification for this patent. I seriously doubt that MS is unaware of the existence of sudo, though they may be unaware of sudo guis that have this functionality (I certainly was unaware of them, but then it wasn't something I had any interest in either).
No, you are the one who has it backwards, and those who modded you Informative should be ashamed of themselves.
Patents cover the idea, which is why you can have a patent that does not describe a particular implementation.
In software, implementation is covered by copyright.
If you have a patent, I cannot implement the idea you patented regardless of how different my implementation is, even if you have no implementation at all. If you don't have a patent, I just have to make sure all the code I use I have legal rights to.
Your pants will be looser at the end of the day then they are when you first put them on. Not because you lost weight during the day, but because the fabric stretches a bit. Consequently, it's not a reliable measurement.
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That first link was interesting to me, right till I read:
Oh bravo! By saving the lives of children you contribute to the problem... so how to solve this? cull the population down to a more manageable size. Now there's a solution that's not been tried before!
Yes, it's called "lifeboat ethics". Google it and read the original essay. While I do find his conclusions distasteful, I can't find fault with his reasoning.
It's true that they have no advantage, but I'd argue that they do have greater name recognition among the general public over companies like Olympus or Nikon. It's too late for them now, but 10 years ago they could have leveraged that into a reasonable share of the market, maybe even as the dominant name in the low end.
No, you totally misinterpreted what I was saying: Poloroid should have started making digital cameras. Not some hybrid camera/printer or whatever, just normal digital cameras. Even if they had to rebrand someone else's, that would have at least kept them in the game long enough to get their own designs going, if they had any intentions of doing so.
I'm well aware of all the reasons digital is eating Poloroid's lunch, I didn't want a Poloroid long before there was a digital alternative.
Which would be doubly crappy for Zimbabweans, since they gave up on their own currency and switched to US dollars.
I love my smart phone, but would never do document editing or coding on it, both of which I do on my netbook every day. Similarly, I wouldn't make phone calls on my netbook. So no, those are two different niches, filled by two different devices.
You mean like that Vista Wi-Fi bug? Or does that not count because it was an OS bug, not a driver bug?
virus removal program writing, independent PC technicians removing said malware, and books helping users understand the problem.
You know, it suddenly occurs to me that this is the real world equivalent of "telephone sanitizers".
The utility companies are bad, but they only rape their customers. MS rapes their entire industry, so yeah, that's a whole different level of evil.
And by the way, you've so far managed to not mention a single thing that was innovated by MS. They're constantly being sued for "stupid things" like screwing over all of the actual innovators who are stupid enough to partner with MS, taking the tech for themselves, and leaving the actual innovators bleeding in the metaphorical ditch. It may be true that all multinationals that make money hand over fist engage in similar abusive behavior, but that doesn't make it non-evil.
Yes, MS is finally providing free dev tools, now that they've been in direct competition for several years with a platform that has always had free dev tools. Never mind that their free dev tools are limited (the competition's are not) and you don't have access to any of the important source code (the competition makes all source available, free of charge)...
Kodak has also been working with Technicolor on film scanning technology (almost all movies today have digital effects, and most are still shot on film). Film's days are numbered, and they know it, but at least they're smart enough to try and squeeze some profits out of the transition and maybe carve themselves out a position in the future.
If Poloroid was as smart, they would have jumped on the digital bandwagon as soon as it appeared. I've seen Poloroid branded SD cards, but I haven't heard of them as a camera manufacturer recently. I don't see how they'll survive in the long term rebranding PNY cards.
But they're still doing alright as a company, and they're my first choice for laptops and printers. I won't deny that they've fallen from their once lofty position, but they haven't gone to anywhere near the depths of some.
My ex-wife is a cop, and I don't find that surprising at all. We were married before she went through the academy, and I swear at some point they surgically removed the part of her brain that comprehends the value of civil liberties. Any time I mentioned them she looked at me like I was an alien speaking gibberish.
I think you've got it backwards. The kids who would kill themselves are the ones who are (a) smart enough to have read and understood the book, and (b) interested enough to ask "what happens if..."
In other words, you've killed off the ones most likely to push science and technology forward, and preserved the ones that are either too timid to take risks or too dumb to read.
Except that Swiss army knives are RAZOR SHARP, at least when new and genuine. I got my first one at 9 and nearly removed the end of my finger.
Any knife should be razor sharp, and not just when new. If it isn't, then either it's a crap blade or it has been poorly maintained. Either way, a dull knife is actually much more dangerous than a sharp one since you have to put so much more force behind it to make it cut.
My sister and I both got Swiss Army knives at age 5. I don't recall having any serious incidents with mine, but my sister cut herself pretty good the first day she had hers. It healed though. I haven't exactly given my daughter a knife, but she appropriated the utility knife out of my tool box for her crafts at age 7.
I'm not a big fan of the theory that kids should never get hurt. There are certain lessons that they need to learn, and yet lack the cognitive ability to do so without a certain amount of pain (physical or mental). Things like "fire is hot" and "knives are sharp" tend to go in one ear and out the other until they get burned or cut.
With a little bit of supervision in those first few hours, I see no problem giving a knife to a kid that young. You may be right about a locking blade, though. I've had Swiss Army knives try to close on me before.
It really is sad that they think influential people are so easily bought, basically for a handful of pretty beads.
But are they wrong?
The combustion of H and O2 yields H2O but I have yet to see the spectrum of the exhaust gases of H - Atmosphere - Oil Vapor combustion.
I suspect it is something quite different then what the public has been sold since our atmosphere is 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, 0.93% argon, 0.038% carbon dioxide, and small amounts of other gases.
Given that "combustion" is just a colloquial term for rapid oxidation -- as in "this thing here combining with oxygen" -- I think your concern is unwarranted.
Until we find a way to isolate H from available sources with an efficiency factor an order of magnitude better then what we have now the cost will stay prohibitive.
I can put a solar panel on my roof and crack water all day long. If I'm not getting enough I can put up another solar panel. Yeah, improved efficiency might mean I need fewer panels, which could save me some money, but even at current efficiency levels I'm pretty sure I'd be saving money compared to what I'm currently spending on gasoline.
Electric cars are mostly a shift of the pollution problem from individual grossly inefficient power generation ( the engine burning petroleum ) to the very very large and vastly more efficient, even when using the exact same fuel, new power plants that would have to be built to charge those batteries.
Fixed that for you.
Even if we're talking about fossil fuel power generation, those engines can be run at a constant RPM, usually in the optimal range for that engine design, giving a huge boost in efficiency. One of the reasons car engines are so inefficient is that they spend so much time out of their optimal range, simply as a consequence of the environment they're operating in. That's why there's a difference between city and highway MPG.
If speed matters it's cheaper, easier, and faster to buy more processing power.
Really? In lots of what size? Are you including the additional power requirements and other support structures this additional processing power requires into your calculations?
Way to display a fundamental ignorance of basic economics.
I rather doubt it, the timelines don't fit. "USL v. BSDi was a lawsuit brought in the United States in 1992 [...]. The case was settled out of court in 1993 [...]."
Meanwhile, Linux didn't hit version 1.0 until March, 1994. Yggdrasil, the first distro, was released in November, 1992, and Slackware in June, 1993, but they were strictly for hobbyists.
How does the timeline not fit? BSD was kneecapped by USL at the critical juncture when Linux was created and and released to the public. Doubts about the future of BSD drove many developers to Linux who would never have considered it otherwise. Not to mention the fact that Linus might not have even started it in the first place had BSDi's 386 port not been held up by the suit (the Wikipedia article is confusing, that suit was filed in April 1990).
If not for USL v BSDi, Linux likely wouldn't have received the developer attention it needed to become viable.
GPL code is more free, as in more likely to remain free in ways that are meaningful to the end user.
I don't begrudge the fact that Microsoft is able to use the BSD TCP/IP stack to save themselves a bit of work, but at the end of the day I can't fix any bugs I might find, nor can I extend it to support new technologies that Microsoft doesn't feel like supporting. And frankly, I don't see any reason why I as a programmer should care any more about the needs of purveyors of closed source software than they care about my needs as an end user.
Way to look at the numbers and not understand them. South Korean kids do well in school because South Korean culture places a high value on education and South Korean parents are closely involved in their children's education from early childhood. I recently had the pleasure of spending an evening in the home of a Korean family with school aged children. Every 40 minutes or so their mom called them into the kitchen to drill them on spelling or simple multiplication, or quiz them on questions from their social studies homework. Guess what? Those kids are performing very highly in school, and will likely score quite well on the tests the article you linked is based on, despite their "disadvantage" of going to an American public school.
In other words, children's academic performance has little to do with how much the government spends on education, but is very tightly correlated with parental involvement.
One problem with metrics like those used in the article though, is that they're only looking at one facet of education. Education in Asian countries tends to follow the traditional Confucian model, which focuses on rote memorization. Consequently, graduates of such systems do very well on math and reading comprehension tests (relative to their familiarity with the language of the test anyway), but are frequently at a loss when the test requires creative analysis, such as independent projects and essays. In my years as a college tutor I met many international students who easily tested into calculus, but had never written an essay in their life.
Another point you need to understand is that those after school academies exist for a reason: college entrance exams in developed Asian countries are brutally competitive. Most students who plan to go to university spend another two years after high school going to private "cram schools" to prepare for those exams. The ones that don't score high enough often come to the US to continue their education, assuming they have the money.
Anyway, the point is that there's no reason such academies can't exist in the US, and in fact they do. The more Asians, especially Koreans and Japanese, there are in a given community, the more of them you'll see. Look for them in the strip mall next to the Tae Kwon Do school. However, there simply isn't much demand for them in more general American culture. Again, that has nothing to do with government education spending, regardless of whether you think it's too high or too low. It has everything to do with the parents dedication to their children's education.
My daughter is in 4th grade, doing 5th grade math and reading 8th grade books. Of course, she's in one of the best public schools in California and has a great teacher. None of my teachers did that sort of thing for me, and that was long before No Child Left Behind. Part of the difference is that her school makes effective use of technology to help take some of the burden of giving each child work appropriate to their ability off of the teacher.
My point is, if all children in a class are being treated the same it's because of laziness in the teacher, not because of national or state level education policies.
The fact that it's now usable is the "new functionality."
... and I'm pretty sure that would be Microsoft's justification for this patent. I seriously doubt that MS is unaware of the existence of sudo, though they may be unaware of sudo guis that have this functionality (I certainly was unaware of them, but then it wasn't something I had any interest in either).
No, you are the one who has it backwards, and those who modded you Informative should be ashamed of themselves.
Patents cover the idea, which is why you can have a patent that does not describe a particular implementation.
In software, implementation is covered by copyright.
If you have a patent, I cannot implement the idea you patented regardless of how different my implementation is, even if you have no implementation at all. If you don't have a patent, I just have to make sure all the code I use I have legal rights to.
Coffee is acidic, which changes your pH balance, which affects the function of some of your organs which are key to losing fat (like your liver).
Your pants will be looser at the end of the day then they are when you first put them on. Not because you lost weight during the day, but because the fabric stretches a bit. Consequently, it's not a reliable measurement.