Businesses don't locate their plant facilities as a matter of social conscience. Businesses locate their plant facilities to make an after-tax rate of return for their shareholders. And taxes do matter. They matter a lot. California and Arizona both prove that point.
So, let me get this straight: It's perfectly fine that my mom is paying only 0.08% of the market value of her home in annual property taxes, and that millions of other homeowners are paying similar rates, because it "brings business into the state."
Well, what about the big-box retail revolution? Do you know what that's about? I do. It so happens that, now that jurisdictions cannot count on any inflation-adjusted revenue from residential property, they all fight over big retail outfits that will bring in tons of sales taxes. *Fight* over them, because there's not enough of them to go around. They offer them huge concessions *on top of* the tax breaks they already get. The cities end up cutting off their noses to spite their face, paying huge amounts of non-monetary costs in increased traffic, pollution, noise, and safety issues, so that they can get enough sales taxes to pay for their schools. Oh, guess what? Those stores aren't the ones paying the sales tax. The consumers are.
It doesn't matter how much business you bring into a place if it doesn't pay its way. In case you haven't noticed, employment is down, it's getting lower, and that's happening EVERYWHERE no matter what the tax laws are. The aerospace industry packed up and moved to Texas regardless of Proposition 13. The proposition has destroyed our social infrastructure, and I don't need a newspaper to tell me that... I've *experienced* it growing up in California.
You need to remember, the state's answer to the energy scam was to raise consumer rates to pay the bloated expenses over the next decade or two. This is on top of a nearly 10% state sales tax and over 10% state income tax -- and NOT including the proposed income tax for county and city. How much can a state take away from it's citizins?
- We've managed to reduce our electricity bill by 1/3 over the past year. Rates haven't gone up a whole lot if we can do that just by turning off our computers during the day and while we sleep. Oh, yeah, and that's in Edison territory (LADWP didn't have any rolling blackouts or rate hikes... but then again, they're a *non-profit* government agency).
- State sales tax is nowhere near 10%. In Los Angeles County it's 8.25% and I think ours is the highest. At least 1.5% of that is county tax. State sales tax is 6.something percent. That's closer to 5% than 10%.
- If state income tax was 10%, I would have owed another $6370.70 last year when I sold a house. I paid 7.77% in the highest possible tax bracket.
- The state of California has, in the last several decades, taken many things from its citizens. I would include a decent public education, the possibility of staying off the street if you really tried, mental institutions for those who can't care for themselves and have no family, and a whole lot of other things. In 1978, California had among the very best public educational systems in the country. After 25 years of proposition 13, we have a slightly better system than Mississippi. I went to public school in California from 1978-1991, and by high school graduation I felt like I was in an Indiana Jones movie... the system was collapsing behind me as I raced out.
Guess what? Society costs money. You don't want to pay, go live on an island all alone somewhere. Us Californians don't pay nearly enough to drive, or to own property, and so we raise sales taxes so that we can have frivolities like public transit. New homeowners are paying 5 times the property taxes of their next-door neighbors, and it's still not enough to pay the bills. Gas taxes cover less than 2/3rds of our road maintenance and building expenses and the gulf grows as the tax stagnates (as a specific tax, it doesn't automatically adjust for inflation) and fuel efficiency gets better. If people weren't such greedy bastards, we could all just pay "our fair share" of what we need (btw, *everyone* needs public education, because without it, there's a whole bunch of kids who have no choice but to steal *your* stuff to get by). But there's this thing that economists call the "Free Rider Problem." I hope the technical jargon doesn't scare you, but all it means is, if people can get something for nothing, they will. Taxes are the only way we've come up with to fix that. If you actually have a better idea, that doesn't turn the poor and working class into slaves for us to stand on the backs of, let's hear it.
Here (.txt file; download if your browser doesn't like it) are the complete text and headers for the one and only email I have yet received from the Dean campaign. I have been waiting for it; I responded on the MoveOn primary that they could forward my email address to the candidate I voted for, and then a couple of weeks later, MoveOn sent me a confirmation email saying that, if I had changed my mind, I could reply within 48 hours to prevent them from passing it along, but otherwise they would go ahead and do so as I previously requested. (Now *that's* opt-in.) I haven't received even a second copy of this email even though I signed up with the local DeanForAmerica campaign at a festival last month.
Now, I get spam. Lots. Not like some of you spam-magnets, but a bunch. I also get snail-mail political spam out the wazoo because I joined the ACLU. I actually *asked* for email from the Dean campaign more than a month ago, and have gotten just a single missive.
Yeah, I'm sure that his whole campaign is built on spam. You've convinced me!
Also, it costs me money, directly or not, to receive tons of spam. It's not free speech when I have to pay for it.
And who has gotten "tons of spam" from the Dean campaign, or any other political organization?
I think someone in one of those links in the story got two different unsolicited emails from the Dean campaign. I get three different ads for penis pills every frickin' day. We're far from a crisis point here. If the campaign is responding on the issue (and they are, according to more recent posts on spamvertized) we probably won't have a problem in the near future.
What might be a problem is that apparently now a couple of people (or maybe just one) have been "joe-jobbing" the Dean campaign. That could turn into a whole lot of spam. But what is Dean supposed to do about it? Heh, that might make a heck of a campaign promise... "If elected, I'll ensure that we fund development of SMTP2, so that we can all live spam-free!"
This just completely ignores the whole point of the original posting:
If everyone's so net savvy, why are they spamming people?
This may be the very first candidate to be taken down via an anti-spam backlash.
Well, only if others don't read all the info, like you.
Dean may be net-savvy, or may have hired sufficient net-savvy staff, we don't know. In either case, he has demonstrated an understanding of the power of the internet as a tool.
It is absolutely a given that Dean has hired *many* people for his campaign, and it is unlikely that he has personally approved every decision that each of those people has made. Someone, perhaps several someones, made a very bad decision when they picked an email outsourcer. That's their fault. But once the campaign found that out (from complaints from victims, which apparently a human read and reacted to), they took action immediately, and apologized.
There's also stuff in the links about a guy in Texas who spammed people for the Dean campaign. The campaign came down hard on him, and he posted a public apology which amounted to "Damn, I thought I was doing a good thing, but it turns out I'm an idiot; I'm sorry." Nothing posted anywhere by the actual Deaners has been anything like defensive about what has happened.
They also haven't publicly stated what lawsuits they're filing, what redress they've demanded from the marketers, or who got fired. That doesn't mean none of those things have happened. It may just mean they've been professional about it.
Term limits make sense to folks used to working on projects who have an entire life cycle of less than 10 years, and a dev cycle that is often measured in months. But they've wreaked havoc with local politics, because infrastructure projects frequently take decades to complete. And contrary to popular belief, it's not "government inefficiency" that takes that long. It's the huge amount of preparative work needed to get the project out there, which is all due to legislation fought for by citizens.
Los Angeles is trying to develop a rail system. It's a lot better than it was ten years ago, when the Metro Blue Line first opened up, but it's far from comprehensive. The entire project was originally outlined in the late 1970s - early 1980s, but not a single mile of track opened until 1993. Our current subway was built in three stages, as funding became available... and some of it never got built due to political opposition. As a result, the heavily populated Westside, which contains many job centers, has no rail service at all.
There's a whole lot of things that cause this. The environmental review process is a huge one, especially in California where the requirements are stricter than the federal government's. No matter how quickly you could get the work done (and that is delayed because you can't just close a street in the middle of rush hour to take a soil sample... though you can for a movie premiere) it has to take a certain amount of time so that the public can comment on it. You have to hold not just one public hearing, but several meetings to give people information and get feedback. You have to revise based on this feedback, and try it again. And in the final EIR you have to include and address every single comment you got (there are over 5000 on the Exposition Light Rail Project so far). Sure, there's a lot of duplication which has the same response, but notice that it doesn't even say *valid* comment... there are no judgement calls. Everyone has to be taken with the same degree of seriousness, whether a well-respected and highly educated community leader or a skinny guy in a tinfoil hat who gets all his news from/.
Then there's the delays. Right now I'm sorting through thousands of pages of invoices tracking how much our contractor billed us each month for a certain project. I have to track the 10 subcontractors separately. And I have to do all of this because the contractor has produced almost no work and keeps raising the cost estimate with no explanation. Guess what? They were on suspension for 45 days. And, depending on what I find here, they may be again. That's time that work grinds to a halt.
What does this have to do with term limits? Well, since the limits went into effect, these long-term projects have suffered a great deal from a lack of continuity. Say you're about to finish preliminary engineering on a project that has a mixed public reception, and a particular official's 8 years is up. The new guy gets elected because he's going to "stop the project." You've spent eight years working with a particular representative to address public concerns, convey the benefits of the project, and get buy-in from the powers that be. Get ready to start all over again, and possibly have years and millions of dollars' worth of work wasted. Now *that's* inefficient.
The other thing term limits do is scare off or use up people with minor political ambition. Only the people who want to keep climbing the power ladder are motivated to get into public office. Those who want to actually *do* something with a local governmental position are discouraged, because they realize they won't have the time to do it. Either that, or they get in anyway, but they still don't have the time to get anything done. So you get city council reps who are young, idealistic, and preoccupied with their presidential campaign. They couldn't care less about your new bikepath.
Now, there are certain politicians in this city I feel have been in the same pl
I get into rant-fests with people from time to time about, "The Government is corrupt! Get these bums out of there!", and I can only reply, "the Government is YOU. It starts with YOU, and ENDS WITH YOU."
An incredibly important point.
It's a point I have tried to make in arguing with people about our response to 9/11. We had 3,000 innocent people die. So what did we do? Killed other innocent people. Who was more innocent? The other guys. Why? Simply because an overwhelming majority of the people killed in the WTC were US citizens, and therefore have the right to vote for our government (and it's our government that has pissed people off enough that they'll fly jet planes into skyscrapers to get our attention). The people of Afghanistan and Iraq, on the other hand, have no say in what their leaders do, unless they force it with a violent revolution. So we kill them because they're not willing to die to change things.
these groups will be sounded out _before_ the policy is drafted.
A good day indeed. Probably 5 - 10 years away unless some event occurs to precipitate the problem.
You mean, an event like the formation of the Total Information Awareness project?
The one that, according to the Senate Appropriations Committee (as cited in this article), was halted in large part because congressional testimony from the EFF convinced them to pull the funding?
Yeah, 5-10 years... 5-10 years ago, maybe. Keep your eyes open, or you might miss it.
...discusses a compelling trend: techies are making their collective voice heard in politics.
Yes, a little bit here, a little bit there, perhaps. Most techies don't talk directly about politics--they speak in code.
I really wish people would actually read the article. It's about geeks who made money in the technology boom putting it to political use in highly visible and surprisingly successful ways. It seems to be a growing trend. And, most importantly, the geeks they're talking about are not simply targeting other geeks... they're reaching across all sorts of demographics and getting the ear of Congress. It's precisely *not* about what you're referring to.
Maybe it's time for techies to compile a list of good candidates that would be compatible with their viewpoints.
Did you hear about the MoveOn.org primary? Basically, a giant PAC that was formed entirely via the Internet decided to find out whether its membership was ready to get behind a presidential candidate for 2004. Thousands of people voted, and while no candidate of the nine listed got more than 50% of the vote (required to get MoveOn's official endorsement) one of them (Dean) got 43% and 86% of those who voted checked him off as someone they would "enthusiastically support" if he got the nomination. I find that fairly convincing.
No, it's not just geeks involved in MoveOn. But it's geeks who started it, who run it, and who keep it moving (pardon the pun). It took a techie to finally really use the Internet for something like this. Now that they've proven it can be done, it's time to prove it's not a fluke, I think.
Re:I hope this will span out to other branches
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I don't mean lobbying the judicial branch, per se, I mean electing judicial officials who express technological knowledge. You are aware that they are elected, aren't you?
Judges in the County and State courts are elected, but IP is usually a federal case, and all federal judges are appointed by the Executive Office.
I'd say that the fight against spammers is still hot, and that the current efforts are making some progress. This is based on the coverage in *main-stream* media, which is starting to take notice of this problem, and based on efforts by large ISPs that have noticed finally just how much money spam is costing them. But geeks have been a big part of putting the spotlight on spammers.
Turbotax was a victory. Mostly because all their faithful customers switched to other products when they had trouble making the program work.
The Patriot Act is the big failure, but/. is far from the only group disappointed about that. My question, though, is... how did/. mobilize on that one? Was it an effort that made any attempt to reach *outside* the group, or was it mostly just people within the discussion saying "Yeah, this is bad, email your congresscritter!" Because, that's not exactly mobilization.
A successful special-interest group is one that can make the right people believe that their special interest is in everyone's interest. Geeks are not known for taking this tack. Usually, the assumption is, the rest of the world (1) cannot understand and (2) does not care what we believe is important.
It doesn't go far: the site only reaches hardcore Democrats.
Remember, this is the site that started out at a project of the Democratic Party to help make sure that President Clinton escaped justice for his crimes. It has a reputation such that it will never be mainstream.
Gee, don't let all the Libertarians, Greens, and others who are completely fed up with *both* major parties hear you say that... they'll be forced to unsubscribe.
The impeachment trial had nothing whatsoever to do with justice. I thought that Larry Flynt demonstrated that pretty clearly by turning up stuff that was at least as bad on the guys holding that circus. It had to do with wasting everyone's time, money, and patience so that they could try to humiliate our president, his wife, his daughter, the family cat, and anyone else who cared. If it was about "serving justice" then why wasn't he removed from office?
MoveOn originally called for the *censure* of Clinton. Official, public, and all that. They just wanted the Republicans to stop holding a total stage show. How much did that cost us, in actual tax dollars? And the Democrats are the ones who waste money?
Me, I'm totally fed up with the Democratic party. I registered as Green before the 2002 election, because Gore and Leiberman's campaign seriously insulted my sensibilities. I've written several letters in the last year to my "Democratic" senators, who seem to be all too happy to let folks turn this country into a theocratic dictatorship. But MoveOn is calling on the Democratic party to return to progressive politics, or asking someone else to step up instead. It's a progressive movement, and fairly far-left, but it doesn't neatly fit any of the currently delineated parties. It's certainly not everyone, but it's a heck of a lot more people than you would think based on how the major parties campaign.
It's fine that it doesn't fit *your* politics, but that doesn't mean it's irrelevant. Just stop trying to argue it out of existence because you don't agree with what they say.
You need old moneyed-illuminati with your interests in mind who are already in power, of course, one interested in YOUR interests doesn't exist but thanks for playing American (and therefore, world) Politics. Game Over, Insert Coin.
basically nothing will ever change as lnog as the same people keep getting re-elected,
Thanks for my daily dose of unhealthy cynicism. Did you actually read the article?
This is *not* about a LAN party marching on Washington. It's about people with plentiful (although new, not old) money and a head for technology turning their mental and fiscal resources to political causes. It's about a guy who made millions selling screensavers starting the fastest-growing grassroots movement anywhere, which is jump-starting several political campaigns aimed at changing the face of politics. It's about software millionaires turned privacy advocates changing policy by testifying before Congress. It's about someone finally stepping up to challenge the status quo.
Things still suck, but they can change with less than a miracle. They cannot change, however, if people just stick their heads in the sand and ignore every opportunity because they're too depressed about the way things are.
I must have missed it. I only saw, "half of all crashes in Windows are caused not by Microsoft code, but third-party code".
Ahh A Troll, I should have known. Well, if half of the crashes are 3rd party code, where do the other half come from? "Acts of God"? Maybe it should be: "Acts of g0d"
Wasting your time responding to this, for several reasons:
- Poster is, as you noted, a troll. He quoted the third place where the article mentions crashes, and ignored the first two that you had referred to.
- If, in fact, they're counting *all* crashes and not just OS crashes, the statistic is far more damning than exonerating to Microsoft. If half of all times there is an OS *or* application crash it's due to MS code, that means that only 50% of the crashes out there in the world are caused by the other 99.99% of software developers and all the hardware vendors. MS is digging their own grave by trying to claim this statistic is a good thing. So your troll is actually an anti-MS zealot.
In all fairness to Microsoft, I am fairly certain that Microsoft employs more
test engineers directly then Red Hat employees engineers total. It is not completely logically rigorous to therefore conclude Microsoft necessarily does more testing in terms of man-hours (need a few more statements), but it's a fairly safe conclusion.
Excellent observation, but, how many man-hours of testing do they each do...
- Per line of code? - Per feature?
Microsoft could spend twice as much time testing Windows as IBM and RedHat together spend testing their Linux distributions, but still actually put each component of the OS through less testing, simply because Windows is a lot more bulky^H^H^H^H^Hfeature-rich at the OS level. And then there's the aspect of shared testing that you mentioned, which makes man-hours very difficult to compare. I'm just pointing out that even if you can directly compare aggregate man-hours of testing, that does not necessarily give an accurate picture of how thoroughly the OS has been tested.
Unfortunatley for Microsoft, they allow 3rd party drivers into kernel space, even if that driver has never been seen by a Microsoft employee. That is likely what he's saying - "We provide the means to have your code not fuck up our OS, and half of you don't do it!"
I usually download my GeForce drivers from guru3d. Sometimes they're WHQL certified, sometimes they're not. In more than one case, I've had stability issues with the WHQL driver that were resolved by a non-MS-certified version... either a newer driver or a rollback to a previous one.
If that MS "stamp of approval" were any good at actually weeding out driver stability problems, your observation would be wise indeed. Unfortunately it seems that it means little more than the MCSE tag means about the quality of a sysadmin.;-)
One of my pet peves about reviews of the latest video hardware is that the quality of the drivers seems to receive only scant attention.
Not in my experience. Maybe my exposure to video card reviews is limited, but in the last few Radeon 9*00 vs. GeForce FX 5*00 rounds, a good deal of attention was paid to drivers. The most recent review I read on Tom's Hardware actually compared the FX cards to two versions of the Radeon's Catalyst driver, since ATI was billing the 3.5 version with significant performance improvements. They also spent at least a couple of paragraphs talking about the quality improvements with the 44.03 Detonator driver, since the previous major issue with the FX cards was the hideous quality of the ansiotropic filtering (which turned out to be a driver problem, not a hardware problem).
IMHO, anyone who isn't paying attention to drivers in comparing video cards is missing 75% of the picture. It's like comparing CPUs and completely ignoring the motherboard chipset. (Oh, wait, people do that too, huh?)
When espn.com crashed the first time, I reported it via Watson and it told me Flash died. For the other 4 times Flash killed IE, I force-killed the program and DIDN'T report the problem because I knew what it was.
So my statistics for the month are: a handful of app crashes (1 reported) and 1 os crash (1 reported). So I'm right on par with their data, that 50% of my REPORTED crashes were OS crashes (Microsoft's fault) and the other crash was IE going down (not Microsoft's fault).
Hmmmm... ok, let me see if I understand this:
- You had five OS crashes; all but one were attributable to an application. (If this is not the case, then the example isn't relevant to the article.)
- You reported two crashes; one was directly in the OS and one was in the MS browser IE.
- The four application crashes were in IE, a Microsoft product, but were due to Flash code.
- This third-party Flash code that crashed your browser was badly formed and would crash any web browser under the same circumstances.
- The resulting crash in another browser would bring down the OS in the same circumstances.
I'm thinking that, possibly:
- Your four application crashes did not actually take down the OS, so are not relevant to the statistics cited. Of your actual OS crashes, 100% were MS's fault.
- The four IE crashes attributed to Flash may be because IE did not handle Flash properly, rather than that Flash did something naughty.
- If the IE crashes did bring down the OS (which would be relevant to the 50% statistic), they only did so because of how IE is integrated with Windows, and in another browser, the crash would have been restricted to the application.
MoveOn.org is significantly more obscure among techno-activists than is the EFF, and I believe this reversal of importance is an example of media bias driven by the political message of the two groups and how well they line up with the agenda of the LA Times.
Ah, I'm glad you understand exactly why the article is interesting. Even though you seem to have missed the point.
The importance of this story is NOT that certain political issues are important to techies, but that certain techies have figured out how to communicate politically. MoveOn is more important in this context than the EFF, because MoveOn is more successful at bringing a message to the world outside of geeks and/.ers. And, in case you hadn't noticed, as intelligent as we are, we don't generally make the decisions about the world in general.
Re:Makes me feel important
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Nothing like being patronised by the mainstream media to make people feel relevant.
Particularly when portrayed as anti-war, stick-it-to-the-man, leftist hippies. My phone calls, although duly placed to idiots like Bill O'Reilly and Orrin Hatch, have also melted the phone banks of people like Berman. Furthermore, and most emphatically, MoveOn.org is not the nexus of my political thought.
Sounds like you read the first half of the article and gave up before you got to the parts about DigitalConsumer.org and the EFF. But MoveOn.org is significant no matter whether you agree with them or not, because it's arguably the fastest-growing grassroots movement in history, and completely internet-based. It's a new application of new technology. Don't like it? Start a new one. Figure out what's important to you, like Wes Boyd did, and start an organization that in five years has 1.3 million active members. *That's* the power of the internet: you don't have to wait for someone with lots of resources to say what you want to hear. You can say it yourself, and find people who agree.
Or you can sit here and feel sorry for yourself because the people who have bothered aren't speaking for you. That's your choice, it's (sort of) a free country.
First, you need your tourist side. Very simple stuff. Web browsing, email, a scanner for photos, a color printer for stuff they get from home. This can be on any OS, and might as well be on something robust (*nix) if you can get the right drivers. If you can afford credit-card reader setups, do that... if people can walk in, stick in a card, do their thing, get their total, and click ok and walk out without ever talking to you, they'll be very happy. (Just make sure there's someone easily available to talk to if something comes up... don't *rely* on the no-interaction setup.)
But your locals need something very different. I've done a lot of support and teaching in some pretty wacky environments, and I have a pretty different idea of how it should be done. So these are the kinds of classes I'd offer:
- What is the Internet? This is not a class on how to use Outlook to check your email. This class, if someone's paying attention and taking notes, will after several hours allow someone to get on the phone with their ISP and actually get their internet connection fixed. Learn the general topography of the Internet, insofar as data turns into packets and hops from server to server. Learn how to do and read a traceroute. What a DNS server does. Why email and web are not the same thing. Why they might be able to get to one website, but not another. People use the internet hours and hours a day without having the slightest idea what's going on... and when there's inevitably a problem, they are completely at the mercy of a $9/hr tech in Texas who has a script, but no brain. (Not a comment on Texas... that just seems to be where companies go for cheap tech labor. We have the same brainless idiots here in Los Angeles, but they cost $11/hr.)
- Computer structure. Open up the case. Here's your memory... this is what it does. This is the hard drive, and this is how it's different from memory. That over there is your processor, and it performs this function. People won't necessarily come out knowing how to build a computer, but they'll be able to buy one without being dizzied by the gigahertz and gigabytes. The difference between RAM and drive space is crucial, and very difficult, mostly because it's measured in the same units. Actually showing them the parts may help to make the distinction. It will also help with a surprising number of error messages... I can't tell you how many people I've talked to who were very dissapointed that the "low memory, close programs" message didn't go away after they deleted a bunch of documents.
- Databases. Sure, teach SQL, Filemaker Pro, or even *retch* MS Access. But offer a class on what a database *is* and how it works. One-to-many relationships. Fields and records. Just try to get across the three-dimensional nature of database information. That way, once they learn a database program, whether it's Postgre SQL with PHP or MS Access with VBA, they'll actually be able to *use* it as more than a glorified spreadsheet.
- Microsoft Word productivity. Lots of people have been using Word for years, but they will spend hours and hours trying to make a somewhat complex document print out correctly because they don't really know how to use tabs, tab leaders, tables, etc. A couple hours of the "tips and tricks" can save people cumulative days on typing up their simple-seeming menus, brochures, flyers, and resumes.
Teach them what they ask you to. Listen to the questions they have. Maybe offer "office hours" where people can just come in with their questions and others can sit in and (hopefully) learn from them. Make it a community thing. You've got a heck of an opportunity to empower people (yes, I used that word... but it's appropriate here) with technology, and you can do a lot with it. Make it your goal to put yourself half out of business, because when people know the fundamentals of computers, they won't need your expertise nearly so much anymore.
The link you posted (here) is a great study for anyone interested in the effects of speed limits. My transportation engineering professor sent that one around to the class when it came out.
This doesn't mean that speed limits aren't a great analogy for P2P file sharing. Perhaps an even better one, since the RIAA's campaign against downloading has if anything made it more likely, by causing the only people who are paying any attention to boycott CDs from major labels. In essence, this is the case with most law: if people feel that the law is reasonable, and it is not too difficult to comply with it, they will. If it becomes more difficult to comply, they will be less likely to. So, when the speed limit is 50, a lot of people drive 70... but when it's 60, many of those folks slow down a bit because it's not too different from what they want to drive. If the RIAA figured out their own way to let us download music and pay appropriate royalties, they wouldn't have a problem.
A little more on the speed limit issue, btw:
- "The most effective method of reducing speed is a visible patrol car." I suppose that depends on what you mean by "effective." The most effective of the relatively inexpensive methods is a speed trailer. You know, the digital sign that displays your speed right below the speed limit? Occasionally, kids will use the sign to see how fast they can go, but because of that they usually hard-code them not to display over 55 when used on surface streets. Somewhere recently I saw a permanent sign pole with a solar panel and a "your speed" sign. It does work.
- Speed limits are usually not just arbitrary "we want people to go no faster than this" numbers. There are some "statutory" limits, such as 25 in school zones, or 35 on residential streets. But for a lot of streets, the speed limit is based on the 85th percentile speed. Before they can change the speed limit, they have to do a speed study... which means they sit out there and record speeds for 24 hours (or have a speed trailer do it for them) and then find out what the 85th percentile is. The speed limit cannot be *lower* than that.
Cost should be at most a secondary consideration for such a potentially far reaching problem.
It should be, shouldn't it? But it's not. We *demand* that the government be more efficient... you know, like private enterprise. Private enterprise, however, is motivated completely by the "bottom line," i.e. cost and revenue. We're incensed when government insists on doing things the "inefficient" and "expensive" way just because it's 5% better or something.
BTW, "we" in this case is middle- and upper-class Americans who are convinced that radioactive waste, contaminated groundwater, air pollution, and other such menaces are things that happen to other, less deserving people than themselves. All those people in Colorado or wherever should know better than to live near a uranium mine. It's their own fault, and their own problem, and "my" tax dollars shouldn't pay for it.
Private sector: More productivity with less money input over time (higher efficiency, higher ROI), government sector: less productivity with more money input over time.
It's true that private enterprise, in most cases, spends less money to fill the same function. Sometimes, they also get a better product. Sometimes they yield a worse product.
But when people talk about "efficiency" and "government waste" they often quote impressive aggregate figures, without any actual information about where the differences lie. I work in a government agency, a big one... the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, and I'll tell you where some of it comes from.
On average, 66% of the operating cost of a bus system (and Los Angeles transit is primarily bus) is labor. Unlike smaller, privately-operated transit properties, MTA cannot fill its driver and mechanic positions relying on non-union labor. So their drivers make more money (a whole $10.93 an hour to start... to drive through South Central Los Angeles at midnight) and have better benefits. They have frivolities like tuition reimbursement, pension plans, and so forth. Some of these are union mandates, some are state law, and some are agency policy for other reasons.
One place where I thoroughly agree that a goverment agency should act more like a private company is in how they work with vendors. It is astonishing how blatantly contractors will take advantage of the "deep pockets" of a government contract. I've seen consultants flat-out ignore contract specifications to make numbers look better, and I've spent hours and hours analyzing invoices for months in which almost no work was done, but plenty was billed... and the cost estimate kept going up and up and up.
Government is blamed when large projects go over budget and are finished late, but the problem is that they are not in a position to put their foot down. Unlike a private company, a large government agency cannot say "I don't like doing business with you. You haven't made a good-faith effort to fulfill this contract. We'll take our business elsewhere." For one thing, they are more likely to be sued... I'm not sure exactly why that is, but people love taking government agencies to court (those "deep pockets" again I guess). For another thing, there are all kinds of legal requirements on how they have to solicit and accept bids, to limit the reach of corruption. That makes the process of "taking ones business elsewhere" a bit more complicated. There's a contractor in this area that has been involved in every major infrastructure scandal in the last two decades and is still getting government contracts (they're building something on our campus right now), even though their business model seems to be to cheat taxpayers out of their money.
What it all comes down to is that government costs more to run than private enterprise because we pay for accountability. A publicly-held firm can be held legally responsible for taking actions that are contrary to the interests of its shareholders. Government is the same... except that EVERYONE is a shareholder. There is no one to take advantage of. There are no interests that it doesn't have to protect. It isn't free from competition... we have that as often as twice a year at the polling place. It has *more* competition than any private company. If you don't like the way McDonald's does business, you don't walk into the next board meeting and give them a piece of your mind. The most leverage that consumers can wield against a private company is a boycott, and that happens a lot less often than political campaigning.
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Businesses don't locate their plant facilities as a matter of social conscience. Businesses locate their plant facilities to make an after-tax rate of return for their shareholders. And taxes do matter. They matter a lot. California and Arizona both prove that point.
So, let me get this straight: It's perfectly fine that my mom is paying only 0.08% of the market value of her home in annual property taxes, and that millions of other homeowners are paying similar rates, because it "brings business into the state."
Well, what about the big-box retail revolution? Do you know what that's about? I do. It so happens that, now that jurisdictions cannot count on any inflation-adjusted revenue from residential property, they all fight over big retail outfits that will bring in tons of sales taxes. *Fight* over them, because there's not enough of them to go around. They offer them huge concessions *on top of* the tax breaks they already get. The cities end up cutting off their noses to spite their face, paying huge amounts of non-monetary costs in increased traffic, pollution, noise, and safety issues, so that they can get enough sales taxes to pay for their schools. Oh, guess what? Those stores aren't the ones paying the sales tax. The consumers are.
It doesn't matter how much business you bring into a place if it doesn't pay its way. In case you haven't noticed, employment is down, it's getting lower, and that's happening EVERYWHERE no matter what the tax laws are. The aerospace industry packed up and moved to Texas regardless of Proposition 13. The proposition has destroyed our social infrastructure, and I don't need a newspaper to tell me that... I've *experienced* it growing up in California.
You need to remember, the state's answer to the energy scam was to raise consumer rates to pay the bloated expenses over the next decade or two. This is on top of a nearly 10% state sales tax and over 10% state income tax -- and NOT including the proposed income tax for county and city. How much can a state take away from it's citizins?
- We've managed to reduce our electricity bill by 1/3 over the past year. Rates haven't gone up a whole lot if we can do that just by turning off our computers during the day and while we sleep. Oh, yeah, and that's in Edison territory (LADWP didn't have any rolling blackouts or rate hikes... but then again, they're a *non-profit* government agency).
- State sales tax is nowhere near 10%. In Los Angeles County it's 8.25% and I think ours is the highest. At least 1.5% of that is county tax. State sales tax is 6.something percent. That's closer to 5% than 10%.
- If state income tax was 10%, I would have owed another $6370.70 last year when I sold a house. I paid 7.77% in the highest possible tax bracket.
- The state of California has, in the last several decades, taken many things from its citizens. I would include a decent public education, the possibility of staying off the street if you really tried, mental institutions for those who can't care for themselves and have no family, and a whole lot of other things. In 1978, California had among the very best public educational systems in the country. After 25 years of proposition 13, we have a slightly better system than Mississippi. I went to public school in California from 1978-1991, and by high school graduation I felt like I was in an Indiana Jones movie... the system was collapsing behind me as I raced out.
Guess what? Society costs money. You don't want to pay, go live on an island all alone somewhere. Us Californians don't pay nearly enough to drive, or to own property, and so we raise sales taxes so that we can have frivolities like public transit. New homeowners are paying 5 times the property taxes of their next-door neighbors, and it's still not enough to pay the bills. Gas taxes cover less than 2/3rds of our road maintenance and building expenses and the gulf grows as the tax stagnates (as a specific tax, it doesn't automatically adjust for inflation) and fuel efficiency gets better. If people weren't such greedy bastards, we could all just pay "our fair share" of what we need (btw, *everyone* needs public education, because without it, there's a whole bunch of kids who have no choice but to steal *your* stuff to get by). But there's this thing that economists call the "Free Rider Problem." I hope the technical jargon doesn't scare you, but all it means is, if people can get something for nothing, they will. Taxes are the only way we've come up with to fix that. If you actually have a better idea, that doesn't turn the poor and working class into slaves for us to stand on the backs of, let's hear it.
Here (.txt file; download if your browser doesn't like it) are the complete text and headers for the one and only email I have yet received from the Dean campaign. I have been waiting for it; I responded on the MoveOn primary that they could forward my email address to the candidate I voted for, and then a couple of weeks later, MoveOn sent me a confirmation email saying that, if I had changed my mind, I could reply within 48 hours to prevent them from passing it along, but otherwise they would go ahead and do so as I previously requested. (Now *that's* opt-in.) I haven't received even a second copy of this email even though I signed up with the local DeanForAmerica campaign at a festival last month.
Now, I get spam. Lots. Not like some of you spam-magnets, but a bunch. I also get snail-mail political spam out the wazoo because I joined the ACLU. I actually *asked* for email from the Dean campaign more than a month ago, and have gotten just a single missive.
Yeah, I'm sure that his whole campaign is built on spam. You've convinced me!
Also, it costs me money, directly or not, to receive tons of spam. It's not free speech when I have to pay for it.
And who has gotten "tons of spam" from the Dean campaign, or any other political organization?
I think someone in one of those links in the story got two different unsolicited emails from the Dean campaign. I get three different ads for penis pills every frickin' day. We're far from a crisis point here. If the campaign is responding on the issue (and they are, according to more recent posts on spamvertized) we probably won't have a problem in the near future.
What might be a problem is that apparently now a couple of people (or maybe just one) have been "joe-jobbing" the Dean campaign. That could turn into a whole lot of spam. But what is Dean supposed to do about it? Heh, that might make a heck of a campaign promise... "If elected, I'll ensure that we fund development of SMTP2, so that we can all live spam-free!"
This just completely ignores the whole point of the original posting:
If everyone's so net savvy, why are they spamming people?
This may be the very first candidate to be taken down via an anti-spam backlash.
Well, only if others don't read all the info, like you.
Dean may be net-savvy, or may have hired sufficient net-savvy staff, we don't know. In either case, he has demonstrated an understanding of the power of the internet as a tool.
It is absolutely a given that Dean has hired *many* people for his campaign, and it is unlikely that he has personally approved every decision that each of those people has made. Someone, perhaps several someones, made a very bad decision when they picked an email outsourcer. That's their fault. But once the campaign found that out (from complaints from victims, which apparently a human read and reacted to), they took action immediately, and apologized.
There's also stuff in the links about a guy in Texas who spammed people for the Dean campaign. The campaign came down hard on him, and he posted a public apology which amounted to "Damn, I thought I was doing a good thing, but it turns out I'm an idiot; I'm sorry." Nothing posted anywhere by the actual Deaners has been anything like defensive about what has happened.
They also haven't publicly stated what lawsuits they're filing, what redress they've demanded from the marketers, or who got fired. That doesn't mean none of those things have happened. It may just mean they've been professional about it.
Term limits make sense to folks used to working on projects who have an entire life cycle of less than 10 years, and a dev cycle that is often measured in months. But they've wreaked havoc with local politics, because infrastructure projects frequently take decades to complete. And contrary to popular belief, it's not "government inefficiency" that takes that long. It's the huge amount of preparative work needed to get the project out there, which is all due to legislation fought for by citizens.
/.
Los Angeles is trying to develop a rail system. It's a lot better than it was ten years ago, when the Metro Blue Line first opened up, but it's far from comprehensive. The entire project was originally outlined in the late 1970s - early 1980s, but not a single mile of track opened until 1993. Our current subway was built in three stages, as funding became available... and some of it never got built due to political opposition. As a result, the heavily populated Westside, which contains many job centers, has no rail service at all.
There's a whole lot of things that cause this. The environmental review process is a huge one, especially in California where the requirements are stricter than the federal government's. No matter how quickly you could get the work done (and that is delayed because you can't just close a street in the middle of rush hour to take a soil sample... though you can for a movie premiere) it has to take a certain amount of time so that the public can comment on it. You have to hold not just one public hearing, but several meetings to give people information and get feedback. You have to revise based on this feedback, and try it again. And in the final EIR you have to include and address every single comment you got (there are over 5000 on the Exposition Light Rail Project so far). Sure, there's a lot of duplication which has the same response, but notice that it doesn't even say *valid* comment... there are no judgement calls. Everyone has to be taken with the same degree of seriousness, whether a well-respected and highly educated community leader or a skinny guy in a tinfoil hat who gets all his news from
Then there's the delays. Right now I'm sorting through thousands of pages of invoices tracking how much our contractor billed us each month for a certain project. I have to track the 10 subcontractors separately. And I have to do all of this because the contractor has produced almost no work and keeps raising the cost estimate with no explanation. Guess what? They were on suspension for 45 days. And, depending on what I find here, they may be again. That's time that work grinds to a halt.
What does this have to do with term limits? Well, since the limits went into effect, these long-term projects have suffered a great deal from a lack of continuity. Say you're about to finish preliminary engineering on a project that has a mixed public reception, and a particular official's 8 years is up. The new guy gets elected because he's going to "stop the project." You've spent eight years working with a particular representative to address public concerns, convey the benefits of the project, and get buy-in from the powers that be. Get ready to start all over again, and possibly have years and millions of dollars' worth of work wasted. Now *that's* inefficient.
The other thing term limits do is scare off or use up people with minor political ambition. Only the people who want to keep climbing the power ladder are motivated to get into public office. Those who want to actually *do* something with a local governmental position are discouraged, because they realize they won't have the time to do it. Either that, or they get in anyway, but they still don't have the time to get anything done. So you get city council reps who are young, idealistic, and preoccupied with their presidential campaign. They couldn't care less about your new bikepath.
Now, there are certain politicians in this city I feel have been in the same pl
I get into rant-fests with people from time to time about, "The Government is corrupt! Get these bums out of there!", and I can only reply, "the Government is YOU. It starts with YOU, and ENDS WITH YOU."
An incredibly important point.
It's a point I have tried to make in arguing with people about our response to 9/11. We had 3,000 innocent people die. So what did we do? Killed other innocent people. Who was more innocent? The other guys. Why? Simply because an overwhelming majority of the people killed in the WTC were US citizens, and therefore have the right to vote for our government (and it's our government that has pissed people off enough that they'll fly jet planes into skyscrapers to get our attention). The people of Afghanistan and Iraq, on the other hand, have no say in what their leaders do, unless they force it with a violent revolution. So we kill them because they're not willing to die to change things.
these groups will be sounded out _before_ the policy is drafted.
A good day indeed. Probably 5 - 10 years away unless some event occurs to precipitate the problem.
You mean, an event like the formation of the Total Information Awareness project?
The one that, according to the Senate Appropriations Committee (as cited in this article), was halted in large part because congressional testimony from the EFF convinced them to pull the funding?
Yeah, 5-10 years... 5-10 years ago, maybe. Keep your eyes open, or you might miss it.
Yes, a little bit here, a little bit there, perhaps. Most techies don't talk directly about politics--they speak in code.
I really wish people would actually read the article. It's about geeks who made money in the technology boom putting it to political use in highly visible and surprisingly successful ways. It seems to be a growing trend. And, most importantly, the geeks they're talking about are not simply targeting other geeks... they're reaching across all sorts of demographics and getting the ear of Congress. It's precisely *not* about what you're referring to.
Maybe it's time for techies to compile a list of good candidates that would be compatible with their viewpoints.
Did you hear about the MoveOn.org primary? Basically, a giant PAC that was formed entirely via the Internet decided to find out whether its membership was ready to get behind a presidential candidate for 2004. Thousands of people voted, and while no candidate of the nine listed got more than 50% of the vote (required to get MoveOn's official endorsement) one of them (Dean) got 43% and 86% of those who voted checked him off as someone they would "enthusiastically support" if he got the nomination. I find that fairly convincing.
No, it's not just geeks involved in MoveOn. But it's geeks who started it, who run it, and who keep it moving (pardon the pun). It took a techie to finally really use the Internet for something like this. Now that they've proven it can be done, it's time to prove it's not a fluke, I think.
I don't mean lobbying the judicial branch, per se, I mean electing judicial officials who express technological knowledge. You are aware that they are elected, aren't you?
Judges in the County and State courts are elected, but IP is usually a federal case, and all federal judges are appointed by the Executive Office.
I'd say that the fight against spammers is still hot, and that the current efforts are making some progress. This is based on the coverage in *main-stream* media, which is starting to take notice of this problem, and based on efforts by large ISPs that have noticed finally just how much money spam is costing them. But geeks have been a big part of putting the spotlight on spammers.
/. is far from the only group disappointed about that. My question, though, is... how did /. mobilize on that one? Was it an effort that made any attempt to reach *outside* the group, or was it mostly just people within the discussion saying "Yeah, this is bad, email your congresscritter!" Because, that's not exactly mobilization.
Turbotax was a victory. Mostly because all their faithful customers switched to other products when they had trouble making the program work.
The Patriot Act is the big failure, but
A successful special-interest group is one that can make the right people believe that their special interest is in everyone's interest. Geeks are not known for taking this tack. Usually, the assumption is, the rest of the world (1) cannot understand and (2) does not care what we believe is important.
It doesn't go far: the site only reaches hardcore Democrats.
Remember, this is the site that started out at a project of the Democratic Party to help make sure that President Clinton escaped justice for his crimes. It has a reputation such that it will never be mainstream.
Gee, don't let all the Libertarians, Greens, and others who are completely fed up with *both* major parties hear you say that... they'll be forced to unsubscribe.
The impeachment trial had nothing whatsoever to do with justice. I thought that Larry Flynt demonstrated that pretty clearly by turning up stuff that was at least as bad on the guys holding that circus. It had to do with wasting everyone's time, money, and patience so that they could try to humiliate our president, his wife, his daughter, the family cat, and anyone else who cared. If it was about "serving justice" then why wasn't he removed from office?
MoveOn originally called for the *censure* of Clinton. Official, public, and all that. They just wanted the Republicans to stop holding a total stage show. How much did that cost us, in actual tax dollars? And the Democrats are the ones who waste money?
Me, I'm totally fed up with the Democratic party. I registered as Green before the 2002 election, because Gore and Leiberman's campaign seriously insulted my sensibilities. I've written several letters in the last year to my "Democratic" senators, who seem to be all too happy to let folks turn this country into a theocratic dictatorship. But MoveOn is calling on the Democratic party to return to progressive politics, or asking someone else to step up instead. It's a progressive movement, and fairly far-left, but it doesn't neatly fit any of the currently delineated parties. It's certainly not everyone, but it's a heck of a lot more people than you would think based on how the major parties campaign.
It's fine that it doesn't fit *your* politics, but that doesn't mean it's irrelevant. Just stop trying to argue it out of existence because you don't agree with what they say.
You need old moneyed-illuminati with your interests in mind who are already in power, of course, one interested in YOUR interests doesn't exist but thanks for playing American (and therefore, world) Politics. Game Over, Insert Coin.
basically nothing will ever change as lnog as the same people keep getting re-elected,
Thanks for my daily dose of unhealthy cynicism. Did you actually read the article?
This is *not* about a LAN party marching on Washington. It's about people with plentiful (although new, not old) money and a head for technology turning their mental and fiscal resources to political causes. It's about a guy who made millions selling screensavers starting the fastest-growing grassroots movement anywhere, which is jump-starting several political campaigns aimed at changing the face of politics. It's about software millionaires turned privacy advocates changing policy by testifying before Congress. It's about someone finally stepping up to challenge the status quo.
Things still suck, but they can change with less than a miracle. They cannot change, however, if people just stick their heads in the sand and ignore every opportunity because they're too depressed about the way things are.
Ahh A Troll, I should have known. Well, if half of the crashes are 3rd party code, where do the other half come from? "Acts of God"? Maybe it should be: "Acts of g0d"
Wasting your time responding to this, for several reasons:
- Poster is, as you noted, a troll. He quoted the third place where the article mentions crashes, and ignored the first two that you had referred to.
- If, in fact, they're counting *all* crashes and not just OS crashes, the statistic is far more damning than exonerating to Microsoft. If half of all times there is an OS *or* application crash it's due to MS code, that means that only 50% of the crashes out there in the world are caused by the other 99.99% of software developers and all the hardware vendors. MS is digging their own grave by trying to claim this statistic is a good thing. So your troll is actually an anti-MS zealot.
Excellent observation, but, how many man-hours of testing do they each do...
- Per line of code?
- Per feature?
Microsoft could spend twice as much time testing Windows as IBM and RedHat together spend testing their Linux distributions, but still actually put each component of the OS through less testing, simply because Windows is a lot more bulky^H^H^H^H^Hfeature-rich at the OS level. And then there's the aspect of shared testing that you mentioned, which makes man-hours very difficult to compare. I'm just pointing out that even if you can directly compare aggregate man-hours of testing, that does not necessarily give an accurate picture of how thoroughly the OS has been tested.
Unfortunatley for Microsoft, they allow 3rd party drivers into kernel space, even if that driver has never been seen by a Microsoft employee. That is likely what he's saying - "We provide the means to have your code not fuck up our OS, and half of you don't do it!"
;-)
I usually download my GeForce drivers from guru3d. Sometimes they're WHQL certified, sometimes they're not. In more than one case, I've had stability issues with the WHQL driver that were resolved by a non-MS-certified version... either a newer driver or a rollback to a previous one.
If that MS "stamp of approval" were any good at actually weeding out driver stability problems, your observation would be wise indeed. Unfortunately it seems that it means little more than the MCSE tag means about the quality of a sysadmin.
One of my pet peves about reviews of the latest video hardware is that the quality of the drivers seems to receive only scant attention.
Not in my experience. Maybe my exposure to video card reviews is limited, but in the last few Radeon 9*00 vs. GeForce FX 5*00 rounds, a good deal of attention was paid to drivers. The most recent review I read on Tom's Hardware actually compared the FX cards to two versions of the Radeon's Catalyst driver, since ATI was billing the 3.5 version with significant performance improvements. They also spent at least a couple of paragraphs talking about the quality improvements with the 44.03 Detonator driver, since the previous major issue with the FX cards was the hideous quality of the ansiotropic filtering (which turned out to be a driver problem, not a hardware problem).
IMHO, anyone who isn't paying attention to drivers in comparing video cards is missing 75% of the picture. It's like comparing CPUs and completely ignoring the motherboard chipset. (Oh, wait, people do that too, huh?)
When espn.com crashed the first time, I reported it via Watson and it told me Flash died. For the other 4 times Flash killed IE, I force-killed the program and DIDN'T report the problem because I knew what it was.
So my statistics for the month are: a handful of app crashes (1 reported) and 1 os crash (1 reported). So I'm right on par with their data, that 50% of my REPORTED crashes were OS crashes (Microsoft's fault) and the other crash was IE going down (not Microsoft's fault).
Hmmmm... ok, let me see if I understand this:
- You had five OS crashes; all but one were attributable to an application. (If this is not the case, then the example isn't relevant to the article.)
- You reported two crashes; one was directly in the OS and one was in the MS browser IE.
- The four application crashes were in IE, a Microsoft product, but were due to Flash code.
- This third-party Flash code that crashed your browser was badly formed and would crash any web browser under the same circumstances.
- The resulting crash in another browser would bring down the OS in the same circumstances.
I'm thinking that, possibly:
- Your four application crashes did not actually take down the OS, so are not relevant to the statistics cited. Of your actual OS crashes, 100% were MS's fault.
- The four IE crashes attributed to Flash may be because IE did not handle Flash properly, rather than that Flash did something naughty.
- If the IE crashes did bring down the OS (which would be relevant to the 50% statistic), they only did so because of how IE is integrated with Windows, and in another browser, the crash would have been restricted to the application.
Can you clarify which scenario is correct?
MoveOn.org is significantly more obscure among techno-activists than is the EFF, and I believe this reversal of importance is an example of media bias driven by the political message of the two groups and how well they line up with the agenda of the LA Times.
/.ers. And, in case you hadn't noticed, as intelligent as we are, we don't generally make the decisions about the world in general.
Ah, I'm glad you understand exactly why the article is interesting. Even though you seem to have missed the point.
The importance of this story is NOT that certain political issues are important to techies, but that certain techies have figured out how to communicate politically. MoveOn is more important in this context than the EFF, because MoveOn is more successful at bringing a message to the world outside of geeks and
kids trying to look k33l
Did you mean l33t or k3wl?
- from the leetspeak grammar police
Particularly when portrayed as anti-war, stick-it-to-the-man, leftist hippies. My phone calls, although duly placed to idiots like Bill O'Reilly and Orrin Hatch, have also melted the phone banks of people like Berman. Furthermore, and most emphatically, MoveOn.org is not the nexus of my political thought.
Sounds like you read the first half of the article and gave up before you got to the parts about DigitalConsumer.org and the EFF. But MoveOn.org is significant no matter whether you agree with them or not, because it's arguably the fastest-growing grassroots movement in history, and completely internet-based. It's a new application of new technology. Don't like it? Start a new one. Figure out what's important to you, like Wes Boyd did, and start an organization that in five years has 1.3 million active members. *That's* the power of the internet: you don't have to wait for someone with lots of resources to say what you want to hear. You can say it yourself, and find people who agree.
Or you can sit here and feel sorry for yourself because the people who have bothered aren't speaking for you. That's your choice, it's (sort of) a free country.
...because you have two audiences.
First, you need your tourist side. Very simple stuff. Web browsing, email, a scanner for photos, a color printer for stuff they get from home. This can be on any OS, and might as well be on something robust (*nix) if you can get the right drivers. If you can afford credit-card reader setups, do that... if people can walk in, stick in a card, do their thing, get their total, and click ok and walk out without ever talking to you, they'll be very happy. (Just make sure there's someone easily available to talk to if something comes up... don't *rely* on the no-interaction setup.)
But your locals need something very different. I've done a lot of support and teaching in some pretty wacky environments, and I have a pretty different idea of how it should be done. So these are the kinds of classes I'd offer:
- What is the Internet? This is not a class on how to use Outlook to check your email. This class, if someone's paying attention and taking notes, will after several hours allow someone to get on the phone with their ISP and actually get their internet connection fixed. Learn the general topography of the Internet, insofar as data turns into packets and hops from server to server. Learn how to do and read a traceroute. What a DNS server does. Why email and web are not the same thing. Why they might be able to get to one website, but not another. People use the internet hours and hours a day without having the slightest idea what's going on... and when there's inevitably a problem, they are completely at the mercy of a $9/hr tech in Texas who has a script, but no brain. (Not a comment on Texas... that just seems to be where companies go for cheap tech labor. We have the same brainless idiots here in Los Angeles, but they cost $11/hr.)
- Computer structure. Open up the case. Here's your memory... this is what it does. This is the hard drive, and this is how it's different from memory. That over there is your processor, and it performs this function. People won't necessarily come out knowing how to build a computer, but they'll be able to buy one without being dizzied by the gigahertz and gigabytes. The difference between RAM and drive space is crucial, and very difficult, mostly because it's measured in the same units. Actually showing them the parts may help to make the distinction. It will also help with a surprising number of error messages... I can't tell you how many people I've talked to who were very dissapointed that the "low memory, close programs" message didn't go away after they deleted a bunch of documents.
- Databases. Sure, teach SQL, Filemaker Pro, or even *retch* MS Access. But offer a class on what a database *is* and how it works. One-to-many relationships. Fields and records. Just try to get across the three-dimensional nature of database information. That way, once they learn a database program, whether it's Postgre SQL with PHP or MS Access with VBA, they'll actually be able to *use* it as more than a glorified spreadsheet.
- Microsoft Word productivity. Lots of people have been using Word for years, but they will spend hours and hours trying to make a somewhat complex document print out correctly because they don't really know how to use tabs, tab leaders, tables, etc. A couple hours of the "tips and tricks" can save people cumulative days on typing up their simple-seeming menus, brochures, flyers, and resumes.
Teach them what they ask you to. Listen to the questions they have. Maybe offer "office hours" where people can just come in with their questions and others can sit in and (hopefully) learn from them. Make it a community thing. You've got a heck of an opportunity to empower people (yes, I used that word... but it's appropriate here) with technology, and you can do a lot with it. Make it your goal to put yourself half out of business, because when people know the fundamentals of computers, they won't need your expertise nearly so much anymore.
The link you posted (here) is a great study for anyone interested in the effects of speed limits. My transportation engineering professor sent that one around to the class when it came out.
This doesn't mean that speed limits aren't a great analogy for P2P file sharing. Perhaps an even better one, since the RIAA's campaign against downloading has if anything made it more likely, by causing the only people who are paying any attention to boycott CDs from major labels. In essence, this is the case with most law: if people feel that the law is reasonable, and it is not too difficult to comply with it, they will. If it becomes more difficult to comply, they will be less likely to. So, when the speed limit is 50, a lot of people drive 70... but when it's 60, many of those folks slow down a bit because it's not too different from what they want to drive. If the RIAA figured out their own way to let us download music and pay appropriate royalties, they wouldn't have a problem.
A little more on the speed limit issue, btw:
- "The most effective method of reducing speed is a visible patrol car." I suppose that depends on what you mean by "effective." The most effective of the relatively inexpensive methods is a speed trailer. You know, the digital sign that displays your speed right below the speed limit? Occasionally, kids will use the sign to see how fast they can go, but because of that they usually hard-code them not to display over 55 when used on surface streets. Somewhere recently I saw a permanent sign pole with a solar panel and a "your speed" sign. It does work.
- Speed limits are usually not just arbitrary "we want people to go no faster than this" numbers. There are some "statutory" limits, such as 25 in school zones, or 35 on residential streets. But for a lot of streets, the speed limit is based on the 85th percentile speed. Before they can change the speed limit, they have to do a speed study... which means they sit out there and record speeds for 24 hours (or have a speed trailer do it for them) and then find out what the 85th percentile is. The speed limit cannot be *lower* than that.
Cost should be at most a secondary consideration for such a potentially far reaching problem.
It should be, shouldn't it? But it's not. We *demand* that the government be more efficient... you know, like private enterprise. Private enterprise, however, is motivated completely by the "bottom line," i.e. cost and revenue. We're incensed when government insists on doing things the "inefficient" and "expensive" way just because it's 5% better or something.
BTW, "we" in this case is middle- and upper-class Americans who are convinced that radioactive waste, contaminated groundwater, air pollution, and other such menaces are things that happen to other, less deserving people than themselves. All those people in Colorado or wherever should know better than to live near a uranium mine. It's their own fault, and their own problem, and "my" tax dollars shouldn't pay for it.
Private sector: More productivity with less money input over time (higher efficiency, higher ROI), government sector: less productivity with more money input over time.
It's true that private enterprise, in most cases, spends less money to fill the same function. Sometimes, they also get a better product. Sometimes they yield a worse product.
But when people talk about "efficiency" and "government waste" they often quote impressive aggregate figures, without any actual information about where the differences lie. I work in a government agency, a big one... the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, and I'll tell you where some of it comes from.
On average, 66% of the operating cost of a bus system (and Los Angeles transit is primarily bus) is labor. Unlike smaller, privately-operated transit properties, MTA cannot fill its driver and mechanic positions relying on non-union labor. So their drivers make more money (a whole $10.93 an hour to start... to drive through South Central Los Angeles at midnight) and have better benefits. They have frivolities like tuition reimbursement, pension plans, and so forth. Some of these are union mandates, some are state law, and some are agency policy for other reasons.
One place where I thoroughly agree that a goverment agency should act more like a private company is in how they work with vendors. It is astonishing how blatantly contractors will take advantage of the "deep pockets" of a government contract. I've seen consultants flat-out ignore contract specifications to make numbers look better, and I've spent hours and hours analyzing invoices for months in which almost no work was done, but plenty was billed... and the cost estimate kept going up and up and up.
Government is blamed when large projects go over budget and are finished late, but the problem is that they are not in a position to put their foot down. Unlike a private company, a large government agency cannot say "I don't like doing business with you. You haven't made a good-faith effort to fulfill this contract. We'll take our business elsewhere." For one thing, they are more likely to be sued... I'm not sure exactly why that is, but people love taking government agencies to court (those "deep pockets" again I guess). For another thing, there are all kinds of legal requirements on how they have to solicit and accept bids, to limit the reach of corruption. That makes the process of "taking ones business elsewhere" a bit more complicated. There's a contractor in this area that has been involved in every major infrastructure scandal in the last two decades and is still getting government contracts (they're building something on our campus right now), even though their business model seems to be to cheat taxpayers out of their money.
What it all comes down to is that government costs more to run than private enterprise because we pay for accountability. A publicly-held firm can be held legally responsible for taking actions that are contrary to the interests of its shareholders. Government is the same... except that EVERYONE is a shareholder. There is no one to take advantage of. There are no interests that it doesn't have to protect. It isn't free from competition... we have that as often as twice a year at the polling place. It has *more* competition than any private company. If you don't like the way McDonald's does business, you don't walk into the next board meeting and give them a piece of your mind. The most leverage that consumers can wield against a private company is a boycott, and that happens a lot less often than political campaigning.