In our 3D universe, what form does the curvature take?
A sphere that dissipates the further you get from the object in the center.
Or think of it as a matrix of cubes, representing space. Then shrink the cubes in a barycenter and imagine all of the cubes (anchored on the extremities) pulled towards this barycenter and distorted more by the pull the closer you get to it.
As for why the object "falls" into it, I'm not entirely sure. Newton apparently thought of gravity as a force, and then Einstein came along and said it wasn't. That the perceived "force" was inertia (from the big bang? I don't know) and that gravity was actually a bending of space-time. This apparently cleared up some things about Mercury's orbit.
In Korea, you are 1 year old the minute you are born. In most other countries you are considered 0 years old until your first birthday.
It's a different way of counting.
You can consider software (such as Linux) beginning as the first line of code is written, or when the idea was first conceived, or when it was first on the internet, etc. Most people consider version 1.0 to be more of the official "birth" of software.
It's a different way of counting.
Both are correct when thinking of them from different perspectives. To understand this requires mental flexibility in your ways of thinking.
As a further illustration:
The argument presented in both the article and summary:
there's generally little difference between version 0.99.14z, say, and version 1.0
There's generally little difference between a fetus the day before it's born and the day after it's born. But culture generally starts counting after it's born and not at conception. Computer culture often starts counting at v1.0
Now they can move onto more important things, like n-dimensional chess.
I postulate that with enough dimensions, my opponent's king will be in checkmate before I even make a move. If said number of dimensions are found to be within the confines of string theory, I would not owe my friend 20 bucks nor the sexual favors agreed upon in the rematch. Finally! A useful implication of string theory.
Different programmers have different strengths and weaknesses. That is why programming languages have things like type checking, and why software developers employ principles like encapsulation and data hiding. Your argument is that these practices are "restricting" clever programmers by making the software inflexible.
I'm sorry for the misunderstanding. This was not my intended point at all.
My argument was not that programmers never make mistakes, nor that there shouldn't be layers of checking, debugging, etc. The original post wanted people to work on slow MACHINES, and had nothing to do with the logical things you're mentioning.
My point was merely that forcing decent programmers to work on slow machines 'to remind them to write efficient code' is unnecessary, as decent programmers don't need to be reminded. Bad programmers, perhaps, but a decent programmer will keep things like efficiency and legacy support in their minds. They'll know what things are incompatible or slow on older machines, and they will also test their designs on lower-end machines. This does not mean that their working environment needs to be hindered by artificial limitations that may, in fact, actually lower productivity by slowing down compiling and other functions.
A similar argument was used in World War II to keep bolt action sniper rifles in use in some countries instead of 'upgrading' to 'auto-loading' rifles. With bolt action, after shooting, you had to physically lift the bolt, cock it in place, and push it down again before you could fire another shot.
The argument was, if the snipers knew they couldn't fire again immediately, they would be more careful lining up and aiming that first shot. With an 'auto-loading' rifle, you could keep your eye in the scope and fire off more rounds.
It seems quite obvious, that if you're in the field, the seconds after that first shot are very important. If you need to take your eye away from the scope, and spend the time reloading the chamber, the outcome could be completely different than if you were able to fire off a few rounds immediately.
A good sniper would have aimed that first shot up carefully no matter what rifle they were using, in the same way a good programmer will make efficient, elegant algorithms no matter what machine they're using. You'd only have to 'limit' your programmers if you think they're bad programmers. If a supervisor is thinking along these lines, they've already hired bad programmers and are setting both themselves and their team up for failure. The faster the machines, the less time wasted. You don't need forced limits reminding them about efficiency, because any decent programmer will already be thinking about it.
In all seriousness though, the goal should be to bring up the lower class to the higher level, not to lower the upper class to the lower level. They're not the same thing. While the overall value of money stays the same in economics, the actual, real-world worth is what we should focus on.
Think of the Jetsons, complaining that they're poor and can only afford that huge house and the older type robot housekeeper. Lowering the productivity of the upper class is not the same as raising the productivity of the lower class.
I don't mean connections as in 'ideas', I mean physical, neural connections in the brain. And you're right, this website doesn't help development. But neither do the worksheets. I wrote more about this here.
A number of inner-city public schools in Milwaukee that were in trouble have converted to the Montessori method. A study was published in Science magazine and gave promising results.
Maybe not in this century, but there are a number of Montessori schools all over the world, and it's growing.
I just wish it had a different name. Saying 'Montessori' to distinguish it from the traditional 'sit and listen to a lecture' style currently found in most public schools unfortunately makes it sound 'alternative' and not based on the empirical evidence as it is.
The point is, this kind of problem would never occur in a Montessori school, mainly because no homework is forced. The worksheet, fill-in-the-blank style homework, that this website circumvents, is extremely inefficient when thinking in terms of 'development'. And the low amount of brain activity while following the rigid instructions and mechanically filling in a few blanks is not at all conducive to long term memory either. Not when you compare it to anything like working with your hands, dealing with the real world, or working with autodidactic materials (educational materials that one learns with, can experiment with, and has a built in control of error so that nearly everything can be figured out without the help of an adult).
Yes, if you drill something over and over enough times, you may be able to spit it back out (with or without comprehension), but from a developmental perspective, the time would be better spent with just about any other activity (except maybe TV). Hopefully, with this website, children will get a little more time to work on other projects that they're truly interested in, or even working on social skills, or figuring out who they are as human beings.
I urge anyone that's reading this and has children to look into the 'Montessori Method' of education. It's "development" based, rather than "memory / regurgitation" based. It uses knowledge to build the connections in the brain, rather than having the focus be on rote memorization of the knowledge itself.
In their Ted lecture, the creators of Google mentioned that they incorporated Montessori's method into their company. If you study up on the method and how they run their company, you can see the similarities.
Also...
On the Barbara Walters ABC-TV Special "The 10 Most Fascinating People Of 2004" Larry Page and Sergey Brin, founders of the popular Internet search engine Google.com, credited their years as Montessori students as a major factor behind their success. When Barbara Walters asked if the fact that their parents were college professors was a factor behind their success, they said no, that it was their going to a Montessori school where they learned to be self-directed and self-starters. They said that Montessori education allowed them to learn to think for themselves and gave them freedom to pursue their own interests.
But be careful. The word 'Montessori' is not trademarked, and schools and certification programs have popped up that have very little to do with this development based approach. You as a parent would need to do a little homework on the method, the school, and the teachers, and find a good fit. I think our children are worth it though.
Keep the money out of it. The open source system is already working. Any additional legislation, no matter how well intended, has consequences. If nothing else, government officials have to spend their time administering that legislation. Only when the benefits outweigh the consequences should legislation be introduced.
This kind of legislation only has the potential to harm the open source movement.
Currently, the benefit of this extra legislation is a pittance, a mere $200. This is nothing more than a token gesture. It's intended as an extra incentive for individuals to contribute, but gives no real relief to any project large enough to make a difference.
So it has barely any benefit, and it has a chance to do a lot of harm.
The little harms: It can be abused too easily. There's very little way to keep proper track. The money would be diverted from other public benefit.
The big harms: 1) incentives have been shown to psychologically stifle altruistic endeavours and 2) possible large scale abuse later.
1) The incentive
This kind of incentive actually does a lot more harm than good. Barry Schwartz talks about it briefly in one of his TED talks. (at 10min 50sec).
"If you have a reason for doing something and I give you a second reason, it seems only logical that 2 reasons are better than one and you're more likely to do it. Right? Well, not always..." He gives an example of something I've heard about time and time again. If people are willing to do something based on principle for what they believe is right, they are less likely to do it if they are also offered an incentive of money. The introduction of the incentive switches the psychological focus from, 'How can I help?' to 'What can I get out of it?' Without the incentive we're willing to deal with difficulties for a community or a cause we think is right. With the incentive, we weigh the difficulties with what we're getting out of it.
2) Abuse
If legislation grabs hold in one place, that makes it easier for similar legislation to come about in other places. This can have a snowball effect until it gets rather large. So right now you'd have a few individuals abusing the system, but if more legislation gets passed and more money added, you'd get large corporations abusing the system. What happens when the the next OOXML (a product owned by a large company but passed off as being the same as any other OSS) comes into play? It'll just be another government kickback to be abused. Don't assume government legislation is going to be tech savvy as to what true FOSS is.
OSS is doing fine now. It's not broken. It doesn't need fixing. There is already legislation helping non-profit organizations. This kind of legislation does not provide any real benefit. It is too easy to abuse now and it psychologically harms the motivations of the OSS movement.
Let's leave the money in OSS to donations and deals with ordinary companies. Adding extra governmental layers of money is just a bad idea.
I find this all very interesting from a kind of "we're living through history" perspective. What we've been witnessing over the past few years is almost the complete devaluation of the record company's main 3 products, 'recording', 'promotion' and 'distribution'.
Artists needed record companies to make them nice recordings and to promote them (advertising and getting their records out). The record companies made most of their money off of record sales. The artists made most of their money off of concerts and appearances. With recording equipment fairly inexpensive in comparison to the recent past, and free or nearly free software that can professionally mix, recording now comes at a very low cost. The only real advantages of a studio now are the sound-proof room and the technician that knows what they're doing. If a musician spends the time to learn and experiment with acoustics, the trained technician becomes less valuable, and all you need is some equipment and a nice room.
It's obvious to anyone reading Slashdot that promotion and distribution can be handled through the Internet now for extremely little money.
It's amazing to think how these 3 things which were so valuable for such a long time became cheap so suddenly. The argument that file sharing is anti-capitalist is completely incorrect. It's capitalism at work. It's just that the value of the job that record companies do is no where near the value it had even a decade ago. Ironically, pretending it's still the same is anti-capitalism.
Re:Evidence based medicine is extremely frustratin
on
Why Doctors Hate Science
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I want to throw in my support and agreement with the way you practice medicine.
I'd much rather live in a society where ALL of the facts are on the table, even if it means some people take it the wrong way. This includes the facts of "We simply don't know. Some people think this, other people think this. The margin of error is so high that it really could go either way. So the answer is maybe, maybe not."
People HATE that.
It makes them feel like there's nothing tangible to hold onto and they're floating around in the unknown. So they cling onto the best guess. If a study has a 50% margin of error, many people take the results in the same way as a study with a 1% margin of error.
This is why politicians, doctors, computer technicians, etc, have learned to give only half of the story when recommending something. It's quick, and the person would probably come to the same decision if they had all the facts. But it leads to misinformation. And when 'exceptions' come into play, the person given the one-sided information has no tools to make an informed decision.
Just because 80+ pct are killed off by the fungus doesn't mean that they can't adapt and recover.
I thought the point was that, in this case, the people observing think they won't be able to adapt and recover. The summary says, "extinguishing some species entirely" meaning it's already killed off some species that didn't adapt (to this fungus carried from Africa by humans).
It was a human accident (not malice).
Now the question is, do we sit back and watch them die or do we try to save some of them. When you spill wine on your friend's carpet, do you watch the stain soak in or do you take some responsibility and try to clean it up?
You make it sound like postponing the inevitable is a bad thing. Maybe we'll learn a thing or two from these frogs or about these frogs if we keep them around just a little bit longer.
There would be a need for food, shelter, clothes, and, some may argue, medical care. So we need a source of those 4 things for our whole families.
We've come such a long way with efficiency recently that many, many people are supported by the few people that farm, build homes, make clothes, and make and administer health care. Everything above that is superfluous and simply adds variety to our lives.
The other things needed in a society I'd like to live in are a system that protects the personal freedoms of my family and friends, and also protects us from mentally deranged people that would physically harm us. Hence, something akin to police and basic laws.
Finally, as with the medical care argument, I wouldn't mind some disaster relief from fires, earthquakes, etc.
It would be nice to see a time when we become so efficient in these things that we'll only need a handful of volunteers (like a volunteer fire department) to run all of these. But that includes volunteers (or robots) to mine materials, repair & build machinery, transport things, make them accessible to everyone, etc. But there needs to be some way to ensure that these systems don't break down or stall due to some volunteer's whim.
As of right now, we live in a society where every individual can achieve these basic things with relatively little effort. The effort is so minimal that many people spend a lot of time and money (the extra value of their work) on things like TVs, computers, fancy (rather than basic) clothes, exotic foods, jewelry, and other things not necessary to survival. In fact, quite often, half or more of people's paychecks goes to things that are not basic survival, or they buy 'nicer' versions of these needs.
If you can easily provide those basic things for yourself and your family, you're living the utopian lifestyle now. However, commercials tell us how crappy our lives are, so we think we 'need' what they're selling. It's a bad part of capitalism, but if we simply don't pay attention and realize how much we really have, it's incredible! Almost all of you, looking at this from a computer, live the utopian life today.
It could also be interpreted as: many cancer victims in the US never become part of those statistics, because they never get diagnosed, because they can't afford to see a doctor in the first place.
This is a common misconception. 'Cause of Death' is always recorded by a doctor and we have very good statistics in this regard. If someone was undiagnosed with cancer because they didn't go to the doctor to check it out, they would be diagnosed when they died, and therefore would fall into the "not surviving cancer" category. In fact, this shows more strength in how good the cancer treatment in the US is. Because, even including the people that don't get diagnosed because they don't pay for it, the US still has the best cancer survival rates.
Surely you aren't suggesting that's an equally serious problem, are you?
In the case of many serious diseases, how soon you start treatment often determines your chance of survival. So there are many cases of people who may have had a much better chance of survival if they had gotten treatment earlier. As there's always the chance of death, we can never be sure if it's because there was a delay in the treatment or if the person would have died anyway.
It seems many people have this concept that cheap healthcare is not available in the US. It is. It's just not as good as other insurance plans also available in the US. Also, many people don't read up on their plans to see what they're covered for and what they aren't. Someone who does their homework can get covered for just about everything fairly cheaply. The real difference between more socialized countries is that the government takes your money and uses it to pay for cheap insurance. In the US, the government lets you keep your money, and you have to buy the cheap insurance yourself. The results are socialized countries have less competition and less innovation and slightly worse overall care, but everyone gets it, because the government held everyone's hand and did it for them. In the free market countries, not everyone spends the time to make sure they're covered properly, but there is much more choice about how you can be covered, and the overall quality is raised up by competing medical companies.
As for the lightning striking analogy, the best way to tell if people are getting the care that they desperately need in times of serious disease, is to look at the overall survival rates. So if someone was delayed treatment or not given the best treatment in a socialized system, or if someone was swamped with medical bills they couldn't pay in a free market system, the first outcome to look at is, are you dead or not. It seems in this case, Socialized = more people dead, but they have money after; Free Market = less people dead, but many have serious money problems after. Personally, I would rather be alive with money problems then dead without money problems.
It's not that hard. All you have to do is look at the financial stats: medical bills are the leading cause of bankruptcy in the US.
In the end, individuals in the US have more money than individuals in almost every socialized nation. So the overall finances of the individual are better, despite these medical disasters. Unfortunately, there is also a greater divide between rich and poor in the US.
So on one hand, with a more free market, it seems you have a place where most people's finances are very strong, but those people that don't prioritize, don't have a safety net, and go through financial difficulty. On the other hand, with a more socialized market, most people's finances are not as strong as they could be, but if someone doesn't prioritize, there is a safety net. Because we're talking about developed nations, most people fall into the 'middle class' category. The divide in the US is not anything near as big as many undeveloped nations (as some people would want you to believe). I heard someone quote recent
My father, who lives in the US, had a scare of prostate cancer recently. He's a retired scientist, and so promptly went to look up as much information as he could on the subject. He discovered that the US had the highest cancer survival rates in most types of cancers. Most other developed countries (especially in Europe, except for France) pale in comparison.
In fact, people complain about a huge divide in treatment and that minorities get much worse care. But the minorities in the US HAD BETTER CHANCES OF SURVIVING CANCER THEN WHITE PEOPLE IN THE UK. This could be interpreted as: US's cancer care at its worst still beat UK's cancer care at its best.
The reason?
It's most likely due to the fact that there's fierce competition between the drug companies in the US to get out the newest treatments and the most reliable ones that doctors will use before the other companies beat them too it. This causes the US to have the latest innovations in medical technology and treatment. This level of fierceness in competition doesn't occur in many countries that have more socialized medical practices.
Yes, there are bad aspects to the free market system as well. There are stories of individuals hit with a disaster and unable to pay for the best treatment. But there are also stories of Canadian grandmothers dying while on waiting lists to get the care they need. These incidents are heart wrenching, and they represent problems we must work towards solving. But bottom line, at least in terms of cancer, even if you're poor, the US is probably the best place to be.
From a personal experience: I know a pediatrician who was telling me a story of a woman that came in with her child who had strep. I don't remember if she had no health care, or minimal, but either way, the doctor set it up so she could get the antibiotics for around $10.
A week later, the child was back and was much worse. The doctor asked her if the child was taking the $10 medication she prescribed. The lady said she didn't think she should have to pay for it. Meanwhile, the pediatrician noticed the lady had her nails done. She (the doctor) was livid.
She said, "If your son doesn't get this medication he will die. If you can spend $40 to get your nails done you can spend $10 on your sons life."
The point being, that many people that are complaining about the health care are people like this lady. They have sob stories, and they get a lot of people's attention, but when examined closely they're people that can't get their priorities straight. It's hard to cut through all of that to see what's really happening.
Yes there are problems. There are problems in every system. But US's health care has gotten a worse reputation than it deserves. The reputation may even stem from a culture of blame that has been prevalent within the US recently, when people would rather blame someone then take responsibility. But this is rant for another time...
You're right. That part of the post had incorrect data (see the conversation below).
However, we weren't debating the 5% sales tax at this point. We were debating whether higher tax = higher standard of living.
The point of "citation needed" is that there was a sweeping generalization that the higher taxed countries have higher standards of living because they were taxed higher, without any kind of source to back it up. You posted 2 wikipedia articles that cite sources themselves to back up your point. Anyone can look at those sources and judge whether or not they're reliable for themselves. I did the same, and my source was found to be unreliable in tax numbers for Germany. This is how it should work. We included the criteria and sources.
To make such a broad statement as 'higher tax gives higher standard of living' without giving a scale as to how this was measured or even what 'standard of living' implies is simply meaningless. Anyone could agree or disagree and be correct because they're measuring different things.
Slashdot Mirror
In our 3D universe, what form does the curvature take?
A sphere that dissipates the further you get from the object in the center.
Or think of it as a matrix of cubes, representing space. Then shrink the cubes in a barycenter and imagine all of the cubes (anchored on the extremities) pulled towards this barycenter and distorted more by the pull the closer you get to it.
As for why the object "falls" into it, I'm not entirely sure. Newton apparently thought of gravity as a force, and then Einstein came along and said it wasn't. That the perceived "force" was inertia (from the big bang? I don't know) and that gravity was actually a bending of space-time. This apparently cleared up some things about Mercury's orbit.
I'm trying to wrap my head around it myself.
it's a big ball of fire in the sky"
That's not a lie, it's a simplification. Yet if Terry Pratchett calls such a simplification a lie, then ironically, he's lying =P
It's a different way of counting.
You can consider software (such as Linux) beginning as the first line of code is written, or when the idea was first conceived, or when it was first on the internet, etc. Most people consider version 1.0 to be more of the official "birth" of software.
It's a different way of counting.
Both are correct when thinking of them from different perspectives. To understand this requires mental flexibility in your ways of thinking.
As a further illustration:
The argument presented in both the article and summary:
there's generally little difference between version 0.99.14z, say, and version 1.0
There's generally little difference between a fetus the day before it's born and the day after it's born. But culture generally starts counting after it's born and not at conception. Computer culture often starts counting at v1.0
Now they can move onto more important things, like n-dimensional chess.
I postulate that with enough dimensions, my opponent's king will be in checkmate before I even make a move. If said number of dimensions are found to be within the confines of string theory, I would not owe my friend 20 bucks nor the sexual favors agreed upon in the rematch. Finally! A useful implication of string theory.
Bill Nye the Science Guy has decided to officially change his name to:
Bill NySyGy
Would it be irony if their book was copyrighted? ;)
i dont think this qualifies as irony
I have it, from a very good source, that some people constitute this as one form of irony. I'd quote my source but I'm afraid they'd sue.
Different programmers have different strengths and weaknesses. That is why programming languages have things like type checking, and why software developers employ principles like encapsulation and data hiding. Your argument is that these practices are "restricting" clever programmers by making the software inflexible.
I'm sorry for the misunderstanding. This was not my intended point at all.
My argument was not that programmers never make mistakes, nor that there shouldn't be layers of checking, debugging, etc. The original post wanted people to work on slow MACHINES, and had nothing to do with the logical things you're mentioning.
My point was merely that forcing decent programmers to work on slow machines 'to remind them to write efficient code' is unnecessary, as decent programmers don't need to be reminded. Bad programmers, perhaps, but a decent programmer will keep things like efficiency and legacy support in their minds. They'll know what things are incompatible or slow on older machines, and they will also test their designs on lower-end machines. This does not mean that their working environment needs to be hindered by artificial limitations that may, in fact, actually lower productivity by slowing down compiling and other functions.
A similar argument was used in World War II to keep bolt action sniper rifles in use in some countries instead of 'upgrading' to 'auto-loading' rifles. With bolt action, after shooting, you had to physically lift the bolt, cock it in place, and push it down again before you could fire another shot.
The argument was, if the snipers knew they couldn't fire again immediately, they would be more careful lining up and aiming that first shot. With an 'auto-loading' rifle, you could keep your eye in the scope and fire off more rounds.
It seems quite obvious, that if you're in the field, the seconds after that first shot are very important. If you need to take your eye away from the scope, and spend the time reloading the chamber, the outcome could be completely different than if you were able to fire off a few rounds immediately.
A good sniper would have aimed that first shot up carefully no matter what rifle they were using, in the same way a good programmer will make efficient, elegant algorithms no matter what machine they're using. You'd only have to 'limit' your programmers if you think they're bad programmers. If a supervisor is thinking along these lines, they've already hired bad programmers and are setting both themselves and their team up for failure. The faster the machines, the less time wasted. You don't need forced limits reminding them about efficiency, because any decent programmer will already be thinking about it.
I wish I had mod points to mark this funny.
In all seriousness though, the goal should be to bring up the lower class to the higher level, not to lower the upper class to the lower level. They're not the same thing. While the overall value of money stays the same in economics, the actual, real-world worth is what we should focus on.
Think of the Jetsons, complaining that they're poor and can only afford that huge house and the older type robot housekeeper. Lowering the productivity of the upper class is not the same as raising the productivity of the lower class.
I don't mean connections as in 'ideas', I mean physical, neural connections in the brain. And you're right, this website doesn't help development. But neither do the worksheets. I wrote more about this here.
A number of inner-city public schools in Milwaukee that were in trouble have converted to the Montessori method. A study was published in Science magazine and gave promising results.
Maybe not in this century, but there are a number of Montessori schools all over the world, and it's growing.
I just wish it had a different name. Saying 'Montessori' to distinguish it from the traditional 'sit and listen to a lecture' style currently found in most public schools unfortunately makes it sound 'alternative' and not based on the empirical evidence as it is.
I hit 'submit' too soon.
The point is, this kind of problem would never occur in a Montessori school, mainly because no homework is forced. The worksheet, fill-in-the-blank style homework, that this website circumvents, is extremely inefficient when thinking in terms of 'development'. And the low amount of brain activity while following the rigid instructions and mechanically filling in a few blanks is not at all conducive to long term memory either. Not when you compare it to anything like working with your hands, dealing with the real world, or working with autodidactic materials (educational materials that one learns with, can experiment with, and has a built in control of error so that nearly everything can be figured out without the help of an adult).
Yes, if you drill something over and over enough times, you may be able to spit it back out (with or without comprehension), but from a developmental perspective, the time would be better spent with just about any other activity (except maybe TV). Hopefully, with this website, children will get a little more time to work on other projects that they're truly interested in, or even working on social skills, or figuring out who they are as human beings.
In their Ted lecture, the creators of Google mentioned that they incorporated Montessori's method into their company. If you study up on the method and how they run their company, you can see the similarities.
Also...
On the Barbara Walters ABC-TV Special "The 10 Most Fascinating People Of 2004" Larry Page and Sergey Brin, founders of the popular Internet search engine Google.com, credited their years as Montessori students as a major factor behind their success. When Barbara Walters asked if the fact that their parents were college professors was a factor behind their success, they said no, that it was their going to a Montessori school where they learned to be self-directed and self-starters. They said that Montessori education allowed them to learn to think for themselves and gave them freedom to pursue their own interests.
But be careful. The word 'Montessori' is not trademarked, and schools and certification programs have popped up that have very little to do with this development based approach. You as a parent would need to do a little homework on the method, the school, and the teachers, and find a good fit. I think our children are worth it though.
Keep the money out of it. The open source system is already working. Any additional legislation, no matter how well intended, has consequences. If nothing else, government officials have to spend their time administering that legislation. Only when the benefits outweigh the consequences should legislation be introduced.
This kind of legislation only has the potential to harm the open source movement.
Currently, the benefit of this extra legislation is a pittance, a mere $200. This is nothing more than a token gesture. It's intended as an extra incentive for individuals to contribute, but gives no real relief to any project large enough to make a difference.
So it has barely any benefit, and it has a chance to do a lot of harm.
The little harms: It can be abused too easily. There's very little way to keep proper track. The money would be diverted from other public benefit.
The big harms: 1) incentives have been shown to psychologically stifle altruistic endeavours and 2) possible large scale abuse later.
1) The incentive
This kind of incentive actually does a lot more harm than good. Barry Schwartz talks about it briefly in one of his TED talks. (at 10min 50sec).
"If you have a reason for doing something and I give you a second reason, it seems only logical that 2 reasons are better than one and you're more likely to do it. Right? Well, not always..." He gives an example of something I've heard about time and time again. If people are willing to do something based on principle for what they believe is right, they are less likely to do it if they are also offered an incentive of money. The introduction of the incentive switches the psychological focus from, 'How can I help?' to 'What can I get out of it?' Without the incentive we're willing to deal with difficulties for a community or a cause we think is right. With the incentive, we weigh the difficulties with what we're getting out of it.
2) Abuse
If legislation grabs hold in one place, that makes it easier for similar legislation to come about in other places. This can have a snowball effect until it gets rather large. So right now you'd have a few individuals abusing the system, but if more legislation gets passed and more money added, you'd get large corporations abusing the system. What happens when the the next OOXML (a product owned by a large company but passed off as being the same as any other OSS) comes into play? It'll just be another government kickback to be abused. Don't assume government legislation is going to be tech savvy as to what true FOSS is.
OSS is doing fine now. It's not broken. It doesn't need fixing. There is already legislation helping non-profit organizations. This kind of legislation does not provide any real benefit. It is too easy to abuse now and it psychologically harms the motivations of the OSS movement.
Let's leave the money in OSS to donations and deals with ordinary companies. Adding extra governmental layers of money is just a bad idea.
I find this all very interesting from a kind of "we're living through history" perspective. What we've been witnessing over the past few years is almost the complete devaluation of the record company's main 3 products, 'recording', 'promotion' and 'distribution'.
Artists needed record companies to make them nice recordings and to promote them (advertising and getting their records out). The record companies made most of their money off of record sales. The artists made most of their money off of concerts and appearances. With recording equipment fairly inexpensive in comparison to the recent past, and free or nearly free software that can professionally mix, recording now comes at a very low cost. The only real advantages of a studio now are the sound-proof room and the technician that knows what they're doing. If a musician spends the time to learn and experiment with acoustics, the trained technician becomes less valuable, and all you need is some equipment and a nice room.
It's obvious to anyone reading Slashdot that promotion and distribution can be handled through the Internet now for extremely little money.
It's amazing to think how these 3 things which were so valuable for such a long time became cheap so suddenly. The argument that file sharing is anti-capitalist is completely incorrect. It's capitalism at work. It's just that the value of the job that record companies do is no where near the value it had even a decade ago. Ironically, pretending it's still the same is anti-capitalism.
I want to throw in my support and agreement with the way you practice medicine.
I'd much rather live in a society where ALL of the facts are on the table, even if it means some people take it the wrong way. This includes the facts of "We simply don't know. Some people think this, other people think this. The margin of error is so high that it really could go either way. So the answer is maybe, maybe not."
People HATE that.
It makes them feel like there's nothing tangible to hold onto and they're floating around in the unknown. So they cling onto the best guess. If a study has a 50% margin of error, many people take the results in the same way as a study with a 1% margin of error.
This is why politicians, doctors, computer technicians, etc, have learned to give only half of the story when recommending something. It's quick, and the person would probably come to the same decision if they had all the facts. But it leads to misinformation. And when 'exceptions' come into play, the person given the one-sided information has no tools to make an informed decision.
Just because 80+ pct are killed off by the fungus doesn't mean that they can't adapt and recover.
I thought the point was that, in this case, the people observing think they won't be able to adapt and recover. The summary says, "extinguishing some species entirely" meaning it's already killed off some species that didn't adapt (to this fungus carried from Africa by humans).
It was a human accident (not malice).
Now the question is, do we sit back and watch them die or do we try to save some of them. When you spill wine on your friend's carpet, do you watch the stain soak in or do you take some responsibility and try to clean it up?
we're just postponing the inevitable.
Which is why we go to the doctor.
You make it sound like postponing the inevitable is a bad thing. Maybe we'll learn a thing or two from these frogs or about these frogs if we keep them around just a little bit longer.
ideal forms of society
There would be a need for food, shelter, clothes, and, some may argue, medical care. So we need a source of those 4 things for our whole families.
We've come such a long way with efficiency recently that many, many people are supported by the few people that farm, build homes, make clothes, and make and administer health care. Everything above that is superfluous and simply adds variety to our lives.
The other things needed in a society I'd like to live in are a system that protects the personal freedoms of my family and friends, and also protects us from mentally deranged people that would physically harm us. Hence, something akin to police and basic laws.
Finally, as with the medical care argument, I wouldn't mind some disaster relief from fires, earthquakes, etc.
It would be nice to see a time when we become so efficient in these things that we'll only need a handful of volunteers (like a volunteer fire department) to run all of these. But that includes volunteers (or robots) to mine materials, repair & build machinery, transport things, make them accessible to everyone, etc. But there needs to be some way to ensure that these systems don't break down or stall due to some volunteer's whim.
As of right now, we live in a society where every individual can achieve these basic things with relatively little effort. The effort is so minimal that many people spend a lot of time and money (the extra value of their work) on things like TVs, computers, fancy (rather than basic) clothes, exotic foods, jewelry, and other things not necessary to survival. In fact, quite often, half or more of people's paychecks goes to things that are not basic survival, or they buy 'nicer' versions of these needs.
If you can easily provide those basic things for yourself and your family, you're living the utopian lifestyle now. However, commercials tell us how crappy our lives are, so we think we 'need' what they're selling. It's a bad part of capitalism, but if we simply don't pay attention and realize how much we really have, it's incredible! Almost all of you, looking at this from a computer, live the utopian life today.
One word: Sue.
As if she hasn't gone through enough trauma, now you give out her name?!
Oddly enough, these are exactly the same stages I went through when switching to Linux.
It could also be interpreted as: many cancer victims in the US never become part of those statistics, because they never get diagnosed, because they can't afford to see a doctor in the first place.
This is a common misconception. 'Cause of Death' is always recorded by a doctor and we have very good statistics in this regard. If someone was undiagnosed with cancer because they didn't go to the doctor to check it out, they would be diagnosed when they died, and therefore would fall into the "not surviving cancer" category. In fact, this shows more strength in how good the cancer treatment in the US is. Because, even including the people that don't get diagnosed because they don't pay for it, the US still has the best cancer survival rates.
Surely you aren't suggesting that's an equally serious problem, are you?
In the case of many serious diseases, how soon you start treatment often determines your chance of survival. So there are many cases of people who may have had a much better chance of survival if they had gotten treatment earlier. As there's always the chance of death, we can never be sure if it's because there was a delay in the treatment or if the person would have died anyway.
It seems many people have this concept that cheap healthcare is not available in the US. It is. It's just not as good as other insurance plans also available in the US. Also, many people don't read up on their plans to see what they're covered for and what they aren't. Someone who does their homework can get covered for just about everything fairly cheaply. The real difference between more socialized countries is that the government takes your money and uses it to pay for cheap insurance. In the US, the government lets you keep your money, and you have to buy the cheap insurance yourself. The results are socialized countries have less competition and less innovation and slightly worse overall care, but everyone gets it, because the government held everyone's hand and did it for them. In the free market countries, not everyone spends the time to make sure they're covered properly, but there is much more choice about how you can be covered, and the overall quality is raised up by competing medical companies.
As for the lightning striking analogy, the best way to tell if people are getting the care that they desperately need in times of serious disease, is to look at the overall survival rates. So if someone was delayed treatment or not given the best treatment in a socialized system, or if someone was swamped with medical bills they couldn't pay in a free market system, the first outcome to look at is, are you dead or not. It seems in this case, Socialized = more people dead, but they have money after; Free Market = less people dead, but many have serious money problems after. Personally, I would rather be alive with money problems then dead without money problems.
It's not that hard. All you have to do is look at the financial stats: medical bills are the leading cause of bankruptcy in the US.
In the end, individuals in the US have more money than individuals in almost every socialized nation. So the overall finances of the individual are better, despite these medical disasters. Unfortunately, there is also a greater divide between rich and poor in the US.
So on one hand, with a more free market, it seems you have a place where most people's finances are very strong, but those people that don't prioritize, don't have a safety net, and go through financial difficulty. On the other hand, with a more socialized market, most people's finances are not as strong as they could be, but if someone doesn't prioritize, there is a safety net. Because we're talking about developed nations, most people fall into the 'middle class' category. The divide in the US is not anything near as big as many undeveloped nations (as some people would want you to believe). I heard someone quote recent
Whoops, I responded but clicked the wrong reply button. Please see below your post.
I'd argue that living with higher taxes lets you avoid the horrors of the profiteering US health care industry.
It's interesting to Google cancer survival rates by country
My father, who lives in the US, had a scare of prostate cancer recently. He's a retired scientist, and so promptly went to look up as much information as he could on the subject. He discovered that the US had the highest cancer survival rates in most types of cancers. Most other developed countries (especially in Europe, except for France) pale in comparison.
In fact, people complain about a huge divide in treatment and that minorities get much worse care. But the minorities in the US HAD BETTER CHANCES OF SURVIVING CANCER THEN WHITE PEOPLE IN THE UK. This could be interpreted as: US's cancer care at its worst still beat UK's cancer care at its best.
The reason?
It's most likely due to the fact that there's fierce competition between the drug companies in the US to get out the newest treatments and the most reliable ones that doctors will use before the other companies beat them too it. This causes the US to have the latest innovations in medical technology and treatment. This level of fierceness in competition doesn't occur in many countries that have more socialized medical practices.
Yes, there are bad aspects to the free market system as well. There are stories of individuals hit with a disaster and unable to pay for the best treatment. But there are also stories of Canadian grandmothers dying while on waiting lists to get the care they need. These incidents are heart wrenching, and they represent problems we must work towards solving. But bottom line, at least in terms of cancer, even if you're poor, the US is probably the best place to be.
From a personal experience: I know a pediatrician who was telling me a story of a woman that came in with her child who had strep. I don't remember if she had no health care, or minimal, but either way, the doctor set it up so she could get the antibiotics for around $10.
A week later, the child was back and was much worse. The doctor asked her if the child was taking the $10 medication she prescribed. The lady said she didn't think she should have to pay for it. Meanwhile, the pediatrician noticed the lady had her nails done. She (the doctor) was livid.
She said, "If your son doesn't get this medication he will die. If you can spend $40 to get your nails done you can spend $10 on your sons life."
The point being, that many people that are complaining about the health care are people like this lady. They have sob stories, and they get a lot of people's attention, but when examined closely they're people that can't get their priorities straight. It's hard to cut through all of that to see what's really happening.
Yes there are problems. There are problems in every system. But US's health care has gotten a worse reputation than it deserves. The reputation may even stem from a culture of blame that has been prevalent within the US recently, when people would rather blame someone then take responsibility. But this is rant for another time...
You're right. That part of the post had incorrect data (see the conversation below).
However, we weren't debating the 5% sales tax at this point. We were debating whether higher tax = higher standard of living.
The point of "citation needed" is that there was a sweeping generalization that the higher taxed countries have higher standards of living because they were taxed higher, without any kind of source to back it up. You posted 2 wikipedia articles that cite sources themselves to back up your point. Anyone can look at those sources and judge whether or not they're reliable for themselves. I did the same, and my source was found to be unreliable in tax numbers for Germany. This is how it should work. We included the criteria and sources.
To make such a broad statement as 'higher tax gives higher standard of living' without giving a scale as to how this was measured or even what 'standard of living' implies is simply meaningless. Anyone could agree or disagree and be correct because they're measuring different things.