I'm on my second Windows Phone — $400 for a Lumia 925 (a while ago). I'd rather like an iPhone instead but they are just too expensive for the marginal benefit.
Technology should make us more productive, e.g. able to respond to situations from a distance. (Consider how much easier it has become to discuss things with a colleagues, since the invention of the cellphone.)
Increased productivity should mean that people get time off and are able to do the things important to them. But it now also means that they're able to work very long hours. This correlates with a high unemployment rate, which suggests that the fear of being fired translates into working another person's job, for little or no pay.
The evidence is that the USA's relatively free market approach to employment practices is failing the workers. Is there a simple solution? Of course not. But some guaranteed conditions would be nice, like four weeks' annual leave.
It must be possible to make it uneconomical to penalise people for taking leave: if anyone loses or leaves their job when they are owed guaranteed leave (e.g. more than a few weeks' leave), or accumulates more than a certain amount of leave (e.g. two years'), then they receive a proportional payment e.g. triple time. You'd have to find a way to make sure this didn't just push people to become casuals and contractors. Not too hard: e.g. if you work more than 160 hours in a month for a given employer, you start accruing leave benefits. Yes, increased regulation would make it more expensive to hire people --- but only for employers who were expecting to exploit their employees.
My scheme is simplistic, but it aims to push a failing system in the right direction. There needs to be some momentum to help employees obtain a payoff from increased productivity, because at the moment they aren't getting it.
$200 million movies are too expensive and they contribute little of value to society. We don't need to reorganise our society (copyright, DRM) around the notion that people should be able make such movies and expect the government to protect their investment.
If the "work" and "effort" are so large that they can't be funded without specially designed laws being enacted, then society doesn't really need the product. Big budget movies aren't generally particularly good, and cheaply produced movies are often excellent. So, if you want a $200 million movie, pay for it out of your own pocket money. If you don't have that much money, make a movie with less special effects and more frigging acting--- just don't expect me to help you make money out of it.
As you note, the vast majority of movie profits are made very early, and people watch them in theatres for the experience, despite the fact that they are easily able to download them. That market should probably be protected, to encourage the creation of reasonably cheap, high quality movies.
Governments do go out of business. They lose elections, and the cronies they appoint end up working honest jobs. And they don't spend "other people's" money, they spend our money because we choose to give it to them to spend. You don't have to like democracy, but that's how it works. If you would rather live in e.g. some libertarian utopia, by all means go and set up your own.
In Australia it's illegal to drive through a yellow light. Nobody gets fined for it, but it's the way the law is and should be. Both red and yellow mean "stop", but red also means "you will likely kill someone if you don't stop". Don't be the asshole who thinks of yellow meaning "you have 3 seconds, maybe more, before things get lethal."
Please someone! write an app that can detect and remove the sound of me taking a shit (and the toilet flushing).
I will buy whatever phone it runs on. If you need motivation for this innovation, you can patent it--- when the revolution comes, I will make sure there's a special clause that means that your patent remains valid.
I find myself strangely happy that OBL is dead, and I don't much care that he didn't get a trial. If he was innocent he should have had the decency to come forward and tell his story even if it cost him his life. If he was guilty he should have repented and come forward, and asked for forgiveness --- again, even if it cost him his life. This guy was so bad that simply getting shot was the right outcome.
Given that his heart needs to maintain the same blood flow, it will need to generate higher pressures to get the blood through the less elastic aorta. That will increase the strain on his heart (W = PV, V is constant, P is increased), though presumably it will return it towards normal from a low level, rather than increase it to a dangerously high level.
I am not a doctor either (whimsical account name!)...
Sure. But if it were (properly) open source, the bug would have been patched long ago, and any user still inconvenienced by it would have themselves to blame (and could easily find instructions to fix it).
I have a 3G and it's time to upgrade. This --- very real example of the inconvenience created by closed source --- is the single biggest reason I have identified to switch away from iphone.
There is nothing immoral about taking someone else's work and using it without compensation, unless you've agreed to compensate them before accepting the work. If some content creator has an inflated sense of their self-worth, or their work's worth, then there might be an argument about what constitutes due compensation. Claiming moral outrage just because someone thinks you're less important than you do is pretty juvenile.
So while these people may be breaking the law, accusing them of immoral behaviour really is a bit silly. What is immoral is when people are deprived of their wages or pensions after a corporation collapses.
And put in in a format that I can have confidence that I will be able to use in 20 years' time, and don't complain if I share it with my friends. (My actual friends that is, not my 25,000 closest friends on the internet.)
Is this really necessary for a Windows 7 rollout with corporate desktops? Most machines are already overpowered for the average user using Office and what not.
Very true. Corporate desktops are often frustratingly insanely slow, but this is usually not related to the basic power of the machine (i.e. due to doing stupid things on inadequate networks or similar). Unfortunately it is probably easier to believe the logic that "your computer is slow, so you need a faster computer" than "I need $100k for a new network infrastructure".
Wrong. English language uses numbers in a logarithmic way. The conventions "teen" "dozen" "hundred" "thousand" "thirteen hundred" and a myriad others illustrate how deeply logarithmic approximations are embedded into our language of numbers. We automatically use an extra digit of precision for numbers starting with 1.
It is humbling to have a PhD in Engineering, and not be able to understand Grade 6 math homework. If I can't understand the lessons they are trying to teach with regards to digits and digit placement, then what chance do the Grade 6 kids have?
Knowing plenty of PhDs myself, and having one... indeed...
On another occasion, while in first year Algebra, I vividly remember suddenly understanding key concepts from Grade 7 math. For instance, why does one care that numbers have the distributive, associative, and commutative properties? that can be named and explained?
Perhaps you weren't very good at maths as a kid? When I was in grade four, I distinctly remember puzzling over questions like "how does long division actually work?" I found the answers in things like associativity, distributivity, etc., though I expressed them differently in my mind. And when I got to final year high school, I was the only person in the class (top class, academically selective school) who could still do long division. I bet that now, 12 years on, I am again the only member of that class who can still do a long division.
The point wasn't that I am very smart... but that I was no doubt absorbing some long-forgotten lesson on associativity. There are kids who really do get the point of these patterns very early, and remember them, and use them in their secondary and tertiary educations, and who use the same skills in the workplace.
I'm just not sure what is the point of introducing concepts to children, without the ability to explain the reasons for the concepts.
Nope. Many people can speak English well, and teach it, without understanding the first thing about linguistics. Nor do you need to learn grammar to learn a language---it may help but it is obviously not necessary for children. Maths is just another language, though it is possibly not a language everyone is capable of speaking.
Why focus so much on obscure terminology, to the point that no one understands why you are even asking a question? Math is about understanding why things happen. Not wrote answers to naming conventions.
Interestingly misconceived. Physics and engineering is about understanding why things happen. Maths is about refining abstract notions and identifying patterns among them. Naming and denoting abstract concepts is what a lot of maths is about. They are very different skills: you can be an excellent physicist or engineer without being good at maths, and you can be excellent at maths and just not get physics or engineering.
Well, I am a scientist. You give scientists too much credit. I have seen papers published in the British Journal of Cancer that did not satisfy the most basic considerations of epidemiology. It is very often the case that simple dumb objections to published work in high profile scientific journals are correct.
Is a 5-year-old's life worth more than an 85-year-old's life? What about a 45-year-old? This can get quite philosophical.
Yeah, especially if you think that utilitarianism is the only moral philosophy. Some of us think that the moral cost of removing a person's only functioning kidney is rather more than the economic cost associated with their death.
IMO the problem was that a very early case was a severe atypical pneumonia and was misdiagnosed as a coronavirus --- i.e. a possibly SARS relative. That would have been cause for panic, but when the misdiagnosis was revealed, it should have been wound back. Unfortunately the WHO (who were responsible for the misdiagnosis IIRC) were already too involved.
So allow the judge discretion --- when a person commits a crime that carries the possibility of life imprisonment, they should know that at every stage it is in their interests to co-operate because they can be shown lenience. Keep it going post-sentence too --- if someone is given a lenience sentence for whatever reason, and later on they show that lenience was not warranted, punish them more.
Suspended sentences, good behaviour bonds, ministerial pardons, etc.
My password creation method is to thump on the keyboard a bit and try to find a string of characters that vaguely tell a story. For example, "#", could refer to weed. The letter "u" might mean "you" hence "uIS5#" might mean "you smoke dope 5 times" or something equally pointless. I also select passwords that shortish (10 chars), are vaguely easy to type.
The space of such passwords must be pretty large... but I still wonder how much those criteria shrink the options. E.g. I would probably not think of a story for kek6<5zahg, or find it easy to type... There must be lots of identifiable patterns in "what is easy to type".
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I'm on my second Windows Phone — $400 for a Lumia 925 (a while ago). I'd rather like an iPhone instead but they are just too expensive for the marginal benefit.
If my kid drugged me? You bet your ass they would be. It's not just a dumb stunt. They could have done some serious damage.
Don't send your kids to jail to sort out your problems. Bad things happen to your kids---like murder: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Liam_Ashley
Technology should make us more productive, e.g. able to respond to situations from a distance. (Consider how much easier it has become to discuss things with a colleagues, since the invention of the cellphone.)
Increased productivity should mean that people get time off and are able to do the things important to them. But it now also means that they're able to work very long hours. This correlates with a high unemployment rate, which suggests that the fear of being fired translates into working another person's job, for little or no pay.
The evidence is that the USA's relatively free market approach to employment practices is failing the workers. Is there a simple solution? Of course not. But some guaranteed conditions would be nice, like four weeks' annual leave.
It must be possible to make it uneconomical to penalise people for taking leave: if anyone loses or leaves their job when they are owed guaranteed leave (e.g. more than a few weeks' leave), or accumulates more than a certain amount of leave (e.g. two years'), then they receive a proportional payment e.g. triple time. You'd have to find a way to make sure this didn't just push people to become casuals and contractors. Not too hard: e.g. if you work more than 160 hours in a month for a given employer, you start accruing leave benefits. Yes, increased regulation would make it more expensive to hire people --- but only for employers who were expecting to exploit their employees.
My scheme is simplistic, but it aims to push a failing system in the right direction. There needs to be some momentum to help employees obtain a payoff from increased productivity, because at the moment they aren't getting it.
$200 million movies are too expensive and they contribute little of value to society. We don't need to reorganise our society (copyright, DRM) around the notion that people should be able make such movies and expect the government to protect their investment.
If the "work" and "effort" are so large that they can't be funded without specially designed laws being enacted, then society doesn't really need the product. Big budget movies aren't generally particularly good, and cheaply produced movies are often excellent. So, if you want a $200 million movie, pay for it out of your own pocket money. If you don't have that much money, make a movie with less special effects and more frigging acting--- just don't expect me to help you make money out of it.
As you note, the vast majority of movie profits are made very early, and people watch them in theatres for the experience, despite the fact that they are easily able to download them. That market should probably be protected, to encourage the creation of reasonably cheap, high quality movies.
Governments do go out of business. They lose elections, and the cronies they appoint end up working honest jobs. And they don't spend "other people's" money, they spend our money because we choose to give it to them to spend. You don't have to like democracy, but that's how it works. If you would rather live in e.g. some libertarian utopia, by all means go and set up your own.
In Australia it's illegal to drive through a yellow light. Nobody gets fined for it, but it's the way the law is and should be. Both red and yellow mean "stop", but red also means "you will likely kill someone if you don't stop". Don't be the asshole who thinks of yellow meaning "you have 3 seconds, maybe more, before things get lethal."
I will buy whatever phone it runs on. If you need motivation for this innovation, you can patent it--- when the revolution comes, I will make sure there's a special clause that means that your patent remains valid.
I find myself strangely happy that OBL is dead, and I don't much care that he didn't get a trial. If he was innocent he should have had the decency to come forward and tell his story even if it cost him his life. If he was guilty he should have repented and come forward, and asked for forgiveness --- again, even if it cost him his life. This guy was so bad that simply getting shot was the right outcome.
Dude. You "won't allow" your wife to make purchase decisions? Stick with "suggesting" instead.
Given that his heart needs to maintain the same blood flow, it will need to generate higher pressures to get the blood through the less elastic aorta. That will increase the strain on his heart (W = PV, V is constant, P is increased), though presumably it will return it towards normal from a low level, rather than increase it to a dangerously high level. I am not a doctor either (whimsical account name!)...
Sure. But if it were (properly) open source, the bug would have been patched long ago, and any user still inconvenienced by it would have themselves to blame (and could easily find instructions to fix it).
I have a 3G and it's time to upgrade. This --- very real example of the inconvenience created by closed source --- is the single biggest reason I have identified to switch away from iphone.
Unfortunately, I may have to work longer than I want due to medical issues but only about 15% of the population has to deal with that.
(Obviously I don't know your medical condition but...) it's wrong that people least able to work are those who most need to.
And out of curiosity, do you have kids? From your budget, I assume not.
So while these people may be breaking the law, accusing them of immoral behaviour really is a bit silly. What is immoral is when people are deprived of their wages or pensions after a corporation collapses.
And put in in a format that I can have confidence that I will be able to use in 20 years' time, and don't complain if I share it with my friends. (My actual friends that is, not my 25,000 closest friends on the internet.)
Is this really necessary for a Windows 7 rollout with corporate desktops? Most machines are already overpowered for the average user using Office and what not.
Very true. Corporate desktops are often frustratingly insanely slow, but this is usually not related to the basic power of the machine (i.e. due to doing stupid things on inadequate networks or similar). Unfortunately it is probably easier to believe the logic that "your computer is slow, so you need a faster computer" than "I need $100k for a new network infrastructure".
Wrong. English language uses numbers in a logarithmic way. The conventions "teen" "dozen" "hundred" "thousand" "thirteen hundred" and a myriad others illustrate how deeply logarithmic approximations are embedded into our language of numbers. We automatically use an extra digit of precision for numbers starting with 1.
It is humbling to have a PhD in Engineering, and not be able to understand Grade 6 math homework. If I can't understand the lessons they are trying to teach with regards to digits and digit placement, then what chance do the Grade 6 kids have?
Knowing plenty of PhDs myself, and having one... indeed...
On another occasion, while in first year Algebra, I vividly remember suddenly understanding key concepts from Grade 7 math. For instance, why does one care that numbers have the distributive, associative, and commutative properties? that can be named and explained?
Perhaps you weren't very good at maths as a kid? When I was in grade four, I distinctly remember puzzling over questions like "how does long division actually work?" I found the answers in things like associativity, distributivity, etc., though I expressed them differently in my mind. And when I got to final year high school, I was the only person in the class (top class, academically selective school) who could still do long division. I bet that now, 12 years on, I am again the only member of that class who can still do a long division.
The point wasn't that I am very smart... but that I was no doubt absorbing some long-forgotten lesson on associativity. There are kids who really do get the point of these patterns very early, and remember them, and use them in their secondary and tertiary educations, and who use the same skills in the workplace.
I'm just not sure what is the point of introducing concepts to children, without the ability to explain the reasons for the concepts.
Nope. Many people can speak English well, and teach it, without understanding the first thing about linguistics. Nor do you need to learn grammar to learn a language---it may help but it is obviously not necessary for children. Maths is just another language, though it is possibly not a language everyone is capable of speaking.
Why focus so much on obscure terminology, to the point that no one understands why you are even asking a question? Math is about understanding why things happen. Not wrote answers to naming conventions.
Interestingly misconceived. Physics and engineering is about understanding why things happen. Maths is about refining abstract notions and identifying patterns among them. Naming and denoting abstract concepts is what a lot of maths is about. They are very different skills: you can be an excellent physicist or engineer without being good at maths, and you can be excellent at maths and just not get physics or engineering.
Well, I am a scientist. You give scientists too much credit. I have seen papers published in the British Journal of Cancer that did not satisfy the most basic considerations of epidemiology. It is very often the case that simple dumb objections to published work in high profile scientific journals are correct.
Me too. And I liked Crocodile Dundee.
Is a 5-year-old's life worth more than an 85-year-old's life? What about a 45-year-old? This can get quite philosophical.
Yeah, especially if you think that utilitarianism is the only moral philosophy. Some of us think that the moral cost of removing a person's only functioning kidney is rather more than the economic cost associated with their death.
Endolords.
IMO the problem was that a very early case was a severe atypical pneumonia and was misdiagnosed as a coronavirus --- i.e. a possibly SARS relative. That would have been cause for panic, but when the misdiagnosis was revealed, it should have been wound back. Unfortunately the WHO (who were responsible for the misdiagnosis IIRC) were already too involved.
there's no security (or at least none that would stop a luggage bomb) before you reach the checkpoint
There is if you travel through a country with serious security issues, like India or Israel.
So allow the judge discretion --- when a person commits a crime that carries the possibility of life imprisonment, they should know that at every stage it is in their interests to co-operate because they can be shown lenience. Keep it going post-sentence too --- if someone is given a lenience sentence for whatever reason, and later on they show that lenience was not warranted, punish them more.
Suspended sentences, good behaviour bonds, ministerial pardons, etc.
My password creation method is to thump on the keyboard a bit and try to find a string of characters that vaguely tell a story. For example, "#", could refer to weed. The letter "u" might mean "you" hence "uIS5#" might mean "you smoke dope 5 times" or something equally pointless. I also select passwords that shortish (10 chars), are vaguely easy to type.
The space of such passwords must be pretty large... but I still wonder how much those criteria shrink the options. E.g. I would probably not think of a story for kek6<5zahg, or find it easy to type... There must be lots of identifiable patterns in "what is easy to type".