Less prepared for what? Sure, that kid probably won't be very good with technology, he will probably never go into IT though. Anyone who wants to be in IT would have diversified their skills (unless that kid really really wants to be a MS developer). The thing is, schools, particularly elementary and high schools cater to who needs the least amount of tech. Considering that Windows is A) Available on most computers (x86 at least) B) Has Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc that are all somewhat used in the business world, and C) Most every teacher already knows how to use them. Is why they choose to stick with Windows, and honestly, even though its not going to prepare a kid for any sort of IT career, it works great for people who are going to need secretary-level tech or below.
It depends though, what about the kid who uses Windows 95 in kindergarten in 1996, then moves up to using Windows 98 in 1999, uses XP in school in 2002 and Vista in 2007, by 2008 the kid is out of high school. All the while even with later upgrades, the kid never has much of a learning curve, you can even extend it to college where he can continue using Vista till at least graduation time.
Its not the 70s, and its not the 80s, computer UI interfaces are pretty standard, especially among OS families. About the last major change to an OS that totally redesigned it was OS X and that was back in 2002.
Its not that the OS won't be used (already people use Linux in just about everything, from their phones, to routers to their TiVo), but rather the fact that the UI is terrible. Even with GNOME or KDE you can learn them and figure out any OS from there, if you use Windows KDE and GNOME (especially the way some distros configure them) will be easy for you to grasp. OS X is a bit different, but you can generally figure out other DEs after using OS X. So really, they are learning an interface which reminds me of a dumbed-down version of any generic smartphone which kids won't see the UI any place else in their life.
What we are doing is taking a bunch of old machines that barely run Windows 2000, and turning them into something interesting and useful for essentially zero cost. It becomes a whole new computer running off the USB key; we can breathe new life into millions of decrepit old machines
The problem with that is that a lot of computers that old don't support booting off of a USB drive. Plus, some of the computers might only have USB 1.1 leading to slower transfer times. If this is your goal why not try to have it be "sugar on a disk" thats going to be infinitely easier than "sugar on a stick".
But with any non-infinite commodity, not everyone can get them, not everyone can afford them, and some people do have advantages. How exactly do you get someone who is dirt-poor who needs a new liver that lives in NYC across the country to a hospital in Seattle that has livers? They can't afford a plane, they can't afford to drive it, so they really can't get there. Such is the way with non-infinite commodities. We can't really "grow" livers quite yet, and they aren't like kidneys that someone can just donate one with little to no ill effects, nor do we have artificial livers that can be made in factories.
Oh heaven forbid that someone actually uses the money they created to get better faster. Heaven forbid that some people are going to be able to afford things that others cannot. Its the same thing with health care. Because there is not an infinite supply of livers, along with an infinite supply of doctors, its true that some people might not be able to afford a liver transplant. Sure, its sad, but such is life.
Oh yeah, and Apple lied to investors and the world: the man had cancer and a failing organ, and they claimed it was a "hormone imbalance." I hope the SEC is already working on this...
A few things A) You are not entitled to know everything about Steve Jobs B) The shareholders really only need to know that someone will take the place if Jobs dies C) Steve Jobs, or any other CEO could die of any random cause at any time and D) Perhaps thats all that was confirmed at the time? And I'd say that you would probably have a hormone imbalance if you had a failing organ.
Or... You know thanks to the fact that he can pretty much go anywhere for treatment. When you have access to a jet, and lots of cash means that just because your local hospital may take a year to get a liver that matches, Steve could effectively "shop around" for the shortest time.
...And theres no way that if you have something wrong with your liver you won't have a hormone imbalance? Plus really, considering that Apple has plans to appoint a new CEO if Jobs dies, they have done all they need to for their shareholders. Just because you are a CEO of a publicly traded company doesn't mean that your shareholders have to know every detail of your life.
But eventually they will lose enough cases and have no money to sue. If their organization wasn't half lawyers already, they wouldn't even be able to afford pursuing a decent case.
However, the RIAA was filthy rich to begin with. On the other hand, SCO is about as broke as a college student, with no way to get revenue. Really, unless you have a really, really, really, really solid case, you can't gamble with stuff like that unless you have money to burn like the RIAA does.
Exactly, and the ministry of truth can only work with print media (or uncrackable DRM) because within the next ~30 years it wold be reasonable to assume that an average hard drive could archive about half of the static content on the web.
But doesn't that leave you open to crisis when one dies?
Not really. About the only things that are really important are a few documents, contacts, and music. All the important documents are backed up on my e-mail and they aren't things that I need to access on a daily basis anyways. Contacts are effectively "backed up" on my e-mail, iPod and SIM card on my phone. Unless by some odd force Google's servers go down, my iPod manages to break and my SIM card gets snapped in two, I don't see me losing my contacts anytime soon. My music can easily be stored on both my 8 gig iPod touch and my cheap generic MP3 player that uses SD cards for storage, all this can be backed up on a computer when I want to listen to them on VLC. Honestly, theres not much valuable on my HDs, and I frequently wipe a lot of my HDs to install new distros, etc.
Myself I simply store contact info "in the cloud", use my MP3 player to hold all my music and occasionally sync it to all computers to have a copy, any needed documents are either somewhere on my e-mail or on a USB drive, same with code. I have different computers for different purposes and have different data on each one. I never really liked the idea of having the same everything on all computers, most of my computers have different OSes, distros and desktop environments.
I don't, and not because I like spam but because I really want more ISPs than AT&T, Comcast and Time Warner. They need all the competition they can get.
Really with the development of better OCR technologies and such comes the elimination of e-mail security by obscurity. If you don't want spam either A) have a decent spam filter (I don't think I've had a single piece of spam pass through G-mails filter and only one false positive) or B) don't share your e-mail address. Those are the only two ways to prevent spam that will continue to work.
Yes, my mistake I was getting the two confused what I really meant to say is that spam goes to a centralized server (although it does come from a centralized server from the user's point of view).
Heres a bit of perspective, movies and music can be easily published with P2P, that requires very very very little bandwidth on the server because everyone uploads from their own connections. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer-to-peer for more information. But spam is sent almost purely via e-mail which comes from a centralized server and is not P2P plus they are sent in massive amounts, enough to use up a chunk of bandwidth, even more so when they embed images and such in there.
It's nice to imagine things like that, but again, if it's as simple as you make it sound, why haven't third party regulators actually sprung up and done anything? No one stopped third party food and drug regulators from coming into existence before the FDA, so where were they? Where were the independent securities rating agencies during the recent banking fiasco? They were in the pockets of the very institutions they were supposed to be rating.
The reason why third party regulators didn't step in before the FDA is because people back before The Jungle was published were blissfully ignorant. There was no internet, newspapers had a tiny circulation (as in, news of such a thing wouldn't leave town), and a lot of Americans didn't use pre-packaged meat. Remember, this was in 1906, information didn't spread very fast.
For the investment firms, most Americans didn't really care how they were investing. Rather than doing research they decided to hire someone to put their money in a bunch of stocks that they didn't pick out. Thats what carelessness gets you.
Right. Because we all know that today no one smokes marijuana on a regular basis. I don't think that you would see an astronomical amount of new users if this was legalized similar to how even though tobacco is legal less than 20% of adults smoke. Current figures say that 6% of the US adult population uses marijuana (http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/FASTATS/druguse.htm), assuming a non-radical climb, you wouldn't have a societal level of use. Similarly, alcohol does a lot of that stuff, yet more people use it and its legal.
Don't kid yourself... for every cop job that is saved, 3 bureaucratic jobs each at 3 times a cops salary will be created in Washington to regulate this new industry you speak of.
Sure, but honestly if the government was sane (which, most of us know from experience it doesn't do anything logical) they would simply amend laws dealing with tobacco/alcohol and change it to be marijuana. (for example, no smoking would mean no smoking tobacco nor marijuana, along with driving while under the influence of marijuana would be the same as if you were drunk, the age limits and such would remain the same, etc).
The same could be said for the tobacco industry, but you not only have the growing of the marijuana but also the processing, packaging, shipping, etc. of it along with the accessories (pipes, bongs, etc).
Well, no, not quite. A ban on force and fraud is, itself, a restriction on your freedom: you aren't free to do whatever you want if what you want involves force or fraud. It's a perfectly justified restriction, but it's still a restriction.
Well, by design governments are meant to limit freedoms in some ways and the only way to function without a government is to have a sort of "spiritual anarchy" where people follow a code because they want to (usually because of a religious belief)
More importantly, a government that only protects against force and fraud is a government that doesn't regulate industry. We've seen where that leads, from healing tonics to meat packing to investment banking. There's plenty of deception and destruction that doesn't quite fall under the umbrella of "force and fraud".
Ok, if the healing tonics say that they work and they don't you can sue them for fraud. If the meat packing industries claim they are safe to eat (or insinuate it due to advertising or product placement) and they aren't you can sue them for fraud. If the investments aren't as secure as their ratings say they are, you can sue them for fraud. Eventually, businesses will regulate themselves especially in today's atmosphere of information, it only takes a few leaked photos of unhealthy conditions snapped by a disgruntled employee to make people second guess buying those products. I would imagine that if regulations of businesses by governments ceased, we would see a raise in third-party de-facto regulations. Just look at the ESRB ratings or the ones that came before that (if I remember correctly Sega had one) that regulated games that had no potential for any harm. Think about how much more third-party regulators would do for things that might actually cause illness.
And, I'm sure if you spent enough time creating moral panic over alcohol, tobacco and easy to find over-the-counter drugs, you would find that the results are the same if not worse.
The only way to have a truly free government is to have a government that protects only against force and fraud. That way you have freedom to do whatever you want to while being safe because of the government.
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Less prepared for what? Sure, that kid probably won't be very good with technology, he will probably never go into IT though. Anyone who wants to be in IT would have diversified their skills (unless that kid really really wants to be a MS developer). The thing is, schools, particularly elementary and high schools cater to who needs the least amount of tech. Considering that Windows is A) Available on most computers (x86 at least) B) Has Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc that are all somewhat used in the business world, and C) Most every teacher already knows how to use them. Is why they choose to stick with Windows, and honestly, even though its not going to prepare a kid for any sort of IT career, it works great for people who are going to need secretary-level tech or below.
It depends though, what about the kid who uses Windows 95 in kindergarten in 1996, then moves up to using Windows 98 in 1999, uses XP in school in 2002 and Vista in 2007, by 2008 the kid is out of high school. All the while even with later upgrades, the kid never has much of a learning curve, you can even extend it to college where he can continue using Vista till at least graduation time.
Its not the 70s, and its not the 80s, computer UI interfaces are pretty standard, especially among OS families. About the last major change to an OS that totally redesigned it was OS X and that was back in 2002.
Its not that the OS won't be used (already people use Linux in just about everything, from their phones, to routers to their TiVo), but rather the fact that the UI is terrible. Even with GNOME or KDE you can learn them and figure out any OS from there, if you use Windows KDE and GNOME (especially the way some distros configure them) will be easy for you to grasp. OS X is a bit different, but you can generally figure out other DEs after using OS X. So really, they are learning an interface which reminds me of a dumbed-down version of any generic smartphone which kids won't see the UI any place else in their life.
What we are doing is taking a bunch of old machines that barely run Windows 2000, and turning them into something interesting and useful for essentially zero cost. It becomes a whole new computer running off the USB key; we can breathe new life into millions of decrepit old machines
The problem with that is that a lot of computers that old don't support booting off of a USB drive. Plus, some of the computers might only have USB 1.1 leading to slower transfer times. If this is your goal why not try to have it be "sugar on a disk" thats going to be infinitely easier than "sugar on a stick".
But with any non-infinite commodity, not everyone can get them, not everyone can afford them, and some people do have advantages. How exactly do you get someone who is dirt-poor who needs a new liver that lives in NYC across the country to a hospital in Seattle that has livers? They can't afford a plane, they can't afford to drive it, so they really can't get there. Such is the way with non-infinite commodities. We can't really "grow" livers quite yet, and they aren't like kidneys that someone can just donate one with little to no ill effects, nor do we have artificial livers that can be made in factories.
Oh yeah, and Apple lied to investors and the world: the man had cancer and a failing organ, and they claimed it was a "hormone imbalance." I hope the SEC is already working on this...
A few things A) You are not entitled to know everything about Steve Jobs B) The shareholders really only need to know that someone will take the place if Jobs dies C) Steve Jobs, or any other CEO could die of any random cause at any time and D) Perhaps thats all that was confirmed at the time? And I'd say that you would probably have a hormone imbalance if you had a failing organ.
Or... You know thanks to the fact that he can pretty much go anywhere for treatment. When you have access to a jet, and lots of cash means that just because your local hospital may take a year to get a liver that matches, Steve could effectively "shop around" for the shortest time.
...And theres no way that if you have something wrong with your liver you won't have a hormone imbalance? Plus really, considering that Apple has plans to appoint a new CEO if Jobs dies, they have done all they need to for their shareholders. Just because you are a CEO of a publicly traded company doesn't mean that your shareholders have to know every detail of your life.
But eventually they will lose enough cases and have no money to sue. If their organization wasn't half lawyers already, they wouldn't even be able to afford pursuing a decent case.
However, the RIAA was filthy rich to begin with. On the other hand, SCO is about as broke as a college student, with no way to get revenue. Really, unless you have a really, really, really, really solid case, you can't gamble with stuff like that unless you have money to burn like the RIAA does.
So what does SCO have other than a few patents that may or may not be invalid, the name, and a whole lot of bad press?
Exactly, and the ministry of truth can only work with print media (or uncrackable DRM) because within the next ~30 years it wold be reasonable to assume that an average hard drive could archive about half of the static content on the web.
But doesn't that leave you open to crisis when one dies?
Not really. About the only things that are really important are a few documents, contacts, and music. All the important documents are backed up on my e-mail and they aren't things that I need to access on a daily basis anyways. Contacts are effectively "backed up" on my e-mail, iPod and SIM card on my phone. Unless by some odd force Google's servers go down, my iPod manages to break and my SIM card gets snapped in two, I don't see me losing my contacts anytime soon. My music can easily be stored on both my 8 gig iPod touch and my cheap generic MP3 player that uses SD cards for storage, all this can be backed up on a computer when I want to listen to them on VLC. Honestly, theres not much valuable on my HDs, and I frequently wipe a lot of my HDs to install new distros, etc.
Myself I simply store contact info "in the cloud", use my MP3 player to hold all my music and occasionally sync it to all computers to have a copy, any needed documents are either somewhere on my e-mail or on a USB drive, same with code. I have different computers for different purposes and have different data on each one. I never really liked the idea of having the same everything on all computers, most of my computers have different OSes, distros and desktop environments.
I don't, and not because I like spam but because I really want more ISPs than AT&T, Comcast and Time Warner. They need all the competition they can get.
Really with the development of better OCR technologies and such comes the elimination of e-mail security by obscurity. If you don't want spam either A) have a decent spam filter (I don't think I've had a single piece of spam pass through G-mails filter and only one false positive) or B) don't share your e-mail address. Those are the only two ways to prevent spam that will continue to work.
Yes, my mistake I was getting the two confused what I really meant to say is that spam goes to a centralized server (although it does come from a centralized server from the user's point of view).
Heres a bit of perspective, movies and music can be easily published with P2P, that requires very very very little bandwidth on the server because everyone uploads from their own connections. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer-to-peer for more information. But spam is sent almost purely via e-mail which comes from a centralized server and is not P2P plus they are sent in massive amounts, enough to use up a chunk of bandwidth, even more so when they embed images and such in there.
It's nice to imagine things like that, but again, if it's as simple as you make it sound, why haven't third party regulators actually sprung up and done anything? No one stopped third party food and drug regulators from coming into existence before the FDA, so where were they? Where were the independent securities rating agencies during the recent banking fiasco? They were in the pockets of the very institutions they were supposed to be rating.
The reason why third party regulators didn't step in before the FDA is because people back before The Jungle was published were blissfully ignorant. There was no internet, newspapers had a tiny circulation (as in, news of such a thing wouldn't leave town), and a lot of Americans didn't use pre-packaged meat. Remember, this was in 1906, information didn't spread very fast.
For the investment firms, most Americans didn't really care how they were investing. Rather than doing research they decided to hire someone to put their money in a bunch of stocks that they didn't pick out. Thats what carelessness gets you.
Right. Because we all know that today no one smokes marijuana on a regular basis. I don't think that you would see an astronomical amount of new users if this was legalized similar to how even though tobacco is legal less than 20% of adults smoke. Current figures say that 6% of the US adult population uses marijuana (http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/FASTATS/druguse.htm), assuming a non-radical climb, you wouldn't have a societal level of use. Similarly, alcohol does a lot of that stuff, yet more people use it and its legal.
Don't kid yourself... for every cop job that is saved, 3 bureaucratic jobs each at 3 times a cops salary will be created in Washington to regulate this new industry you speak of.
Sure, but honestly if the government was sane (which, most of us know from experience it doesn't do anything logical) they would simply amend laws dealing with tobacco/alcohol and change it to be marijuana. (for example, no smoking would mean no smoking tobacco nor marijuana, along with driving while under the influence of marijuana would be the same as if you were drunk, the age limits and such would remain the same, etc).
The same could be said for the tobacco industry, but you not only have the growing of the marijuana but also the processing, packaging, shipping, etc. of it along with the accessories (pipes, bongs, etc).
Well, no, not quite. A ban on force and fraud is, itself, a restriction on your freedom: you aren't free to do whatever you want if what you want involves force or fraud. It's a perfectly justified restriction, but it's still a restriction.
Well, by design governments are meant to limit freedoms in some ways and the only way to function without a government is to have a sort of "spiritual anarchy" where people follow a code because they want to (usually because of a religious belief)
More importantly, a government that only protects against force and fraud is a government that doesn't regulate industry. We've seen where that leads, from healing tonics to meat packing to investment banking. There's plenty of deception and destruction that doesn't quite fall under the umbrella of "force and fraud".
Ok, if the healing tonics say that they work and they don't you can sue them for fraud. If the meat packing industries claim they are safe to eat (or insinuate it due to advertising or product placement) and they aren't you can sue them for fraud. If the investments aren't as secure as their ratings say they are, you can sue them for fraud. Eventually, businesses will regulate themselves especially in today's atmosphere of information, it only takes a few leaked photos of unhealthy conditions snapped by a disgruntled employee to make people second guess buying those products. I would imagine that if regulations of businesses by governments ceased, we would see a raise in third-party de-facto regulations. Just look at the ESRB ratings or the ones that came before that (if I remember correctly Sega had one) that regulated games that had no potential for any harm. Think about how much more third-party regulators would do for things that might actually cause illness.
And, I'm sure if you spent enough time creating moral panic over alcohol, tobacco and easy to find over-the-counter drugs, you would find that the results are the same if not worse.
The only way to have a truly free government is to have a government that protects only against force and fraud. That way you have freedom to do whatever you want to while being safe because of the government.