Not that slashdot is an island of perfection it has a pretty good BS filter, one of the best troll filters, and potentially one of the best off-topic filters. So if there is an article on black holes and someone starts ranting about 911 conspiracies they end up with a -1 pretty damn quick. If someone posts their slightly strange theory on black holes they may or may not survive but probably won't get a 5 and if someone goes half off-topic but against the grain of slashdotters and says blackholes are just a theory and the bible has a better answer they too will get badly spanked.
Where self moderating groups like slashdot and reddit can go wrong is when you violate a cultural taboo. Saying valid good things about Microsoft or valid bad things about Linux will get you a karmic black eye and on reddit not being racist will get you in trouble in many sub sections. Yet reddit is pretty good at sorting out fact from fiction (compared to many news organizations' comments sections).
The quality of many news organizations' comments moderation is best shown by the number of spam/completely bonkers comments that they let survive.
On a side note I am not happy with the number of organizations using Discus (I have hosts blocked them). I had an experience with one of their people and man o man do they seem to gather data.
While at our regional team's hockey games I regularly observe around 1/3rd of the audience on their various smartphones. This isn't just during intermissions or even slow parts of the games, but during fights, people smashing into the boards in front of them, etc. I think they look up when the crowd goes mad for a goal; I think.
I don't understand as these tickets aren't exactly cheap but unless these people are somehow interacting with the game (say voting on who goes on the ice next or if the last call was a good one) then I would be willing to bet that these people are going to wake up one day and say, "For this year the budget says Season's tickets are out and awesome data plan is in."
Next time I go I plan on bringing binoculars, not to watch the game, but to peek over people's shoulders to see what fascinates them so.
1) Chattanooga, Tennessee
The city of Chattanooga was forced refund $8800 in red light cameras tickets issued to motorists trapped by an illegally short yellow time. The refund only occurred after a motorist challenged his citation by insisting that the yellow light time of 3.0 seconds was too short. LaserCraft, the private vendor that runs the camera program in return for a cut of the profits, provided the judge with a computer database that asserted the yellow was 3.8 seconds at that location.
The judge then personally checked the intersection in question was timed at three seconds while other nearby locations had about four seconds of yellow warning. City traffic engineer John Van Winkle told Bean that “a mix up with the turn arrow” was responsible and that the bare minimum for the light should be 3.9 seconds.
2) Dallas, Texas
An investigation by KDFW-TV, a local TV station, found that of the ten cameras that issued the greatest number of tickets in the city, seven were located at intersections where the yellow duration is shorter than the bare minimum recommended by the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT).
The city’s second highest revenue producing camera, for example, was located at the intersection of Greenville Avenue and Mockingbird Lane. It issued 9407 tickets worth $705,525 between January 1 and August 31, 2007. At the intersections on Greenville Avenue leading up to the camera intersection, however, yellows are at least 3.5 or 4.0 seconds in duration, but the ticket-producing intersection’s yellow stands at just 3.15 seconds. That is 0.35 seconds shorter than TxDOT’s recommended bare minimum. Dallas likewise installed the cameras at locations with existing short yellow times. A total of twenty-one camera intersections in Dallas had yellow times below TxDOT’s bare minimum recommended amount.
The ticket camera program in Dallas made the news recently for shutting down some of its cameras because they were no longer profitable.
3) Springfield, Missouri
The city of Springfield, Missouri prepared for the installation of a red light camera system in 2007 by slashing the yellow warning time by one second at 105 state-owned intersection signals across the city.
The city defended its effort to the Springfield News-Leader by claiming it was “standardizing” and had increased the yellow time at 136 city-operated lights to meet national standards. During the city council meeting last October where the red light camera ordinance was approved, however, Assistant Director of Public Works Earl Newman gave a different explanation for the reduction. Newman said he was, “concerned that many individuals run the light if the light remained yellow too long.”
4) Lubbock, Texas
KBCD, a local television station, exposed the city’s short timing of yellow lights at eight of the twelve intersections where the devices were to be installed.
Prior to the news investigation, Lubbock City Engineer Jere Hart assured city council members that he would not increase yellow times. According to the city council’s traffic commission minutes of September 19, 2006, Jere said, “if [the red light camera program is] implemented, the public would prefer to have an increased amber cycle,” but he stated that, “the program will not adjust the amber/yellow time.”
Shortly after the investigation became public, red-light cameras were installed in Lubbock. However, after they proved to be both unprofitable (due in part to a new state law giving 50% of the ticket camera profit to the state) and unsafe (accidents increased where the cameras were installed), they were taken down.
5)Nashville, Tennessee
Even without red light cameras, police in Nashville, Tennessee have been earning hundreds of thousands in revenue by trapping motorists in conventional ticket traps at city intersections with the shortest yellow warning time.
I read in one place where the company that did a similar deal over red light cameras recommended to the city to shorten the yellow light time thus increasing the chances you would get burned having proceeded on a green and still been in the intersection when it turned red. The result apparently was that people would massively slam on their brakes if the light turned yellow just as they were about to pass through.
The key problem here is simple; when you have a company that can make profits backed by laws they will make sure that there are as many law breakers as possible. Since you can't sell people on breaking the law the next best step is to basically set them up to fail. In my shitty city Halifax they switched to a private company doing parking tickets. They are relentless. If your meter runs out they will get you. Plus the parasites know where the best meters are such as those near the emergency rooms of Hospitals where people are not thinking about things such as putting change in the meters.
No private company should have almost anything to do with the legal system. Running prisons, enforcing laws, scanning our emails, Nothing. Not only will they not use common sense but they will use the worse common sense possible and that is to make as much money as possible and at any cost.
Why do we need robots that even vaguely look like people? We have people for that, lots of people, people who are quite good at looking like people. A Roomba zipping around on the floor with a cute face and some over sized eyes would just be creepy. Let form follow function and let the various robots look like what they do. If it is a farm robot my guess is that it will look like a tractor, fire fighting robot would be sort of like a fire truck, lawn mowing robot would look like a lawn mower.
So if you want me to trust your robot then don't have it stuck in the corner unable to find its destination.
Where people will soon interact with robots and need to trust them will be robotic cars. My concern is that even after statistically the robot cars have proven themselves to be huge life savers there will always be the one in a million story of the robot driving off the cliff or into the side of a train. People will think, "I'd never do something that stupid." When in fact they would be statistically much more likely to drive themselves off a cliff after they fall asleep at the wheel. So if you are looking for a trust issue the robot car PR people will have to continually remind people how many loved ones are not dead because of how trustworthy the robot car really is.
The BC government has done such a horrible PR job that I don't like them from the opposite side of the country. I detest the government here yet I can make a bigger list of reasons to hate the outgoing BC government starting with the Chinese miners.
This just confirms a pet theory that government needs to be wide open to the people. The internet is helping yet the BC government has thought that they could do what they want and somehow retain power by creating their own reality. This is becoming harder and harder to do but backroom deals still abound in most governments. Quite simply governments should not be able to hide almost any information. When I mention this to government people they say No No No that would prevent us from doing what needs to be done; to which I reply it would prevent you from doing what people don't want you doing.
I have been taking some excellent coursera courses which are probably somewhat typical in overall bandwidth needs. The only real bandwidth hog would be the videos which I usually download to my iPad. So short of a 56k Modem I might have to wait for these videos but with only minor delays almost any crappy bandwidth would allow me to take these courses. Also keep in mind that determined people also have sneakernets. That is someone in my group of friends will grab the data and then using USB memory sticks will distribute the goods around. I remember in the early days of the Internet one friend would grab something and then burn the amazing hundreds of megs to CD. And before that one person would grab 3 or more floppies from a BBS and then we would all faithfully copy them. Before that it was pure floppy to floppy movement of data. So saying that you are on the wrong side of a bandwidth margin is just bizarre.
So unless all the MOOCs suddenly change their model to highly interactive 3D environments I suspect that most learners with the most moderate internet access will be just fine.
Only the caveat of some kind of skype type live learning would demand goodish bandwidth but I don't see much education heading that way except for those services that are determined to maintain their tutoring per hour business models which really wouldn't apply to the same people who are supposedly on the wrong side of the digital divide.
And on top of all that my experience in poorer countries is that internet access is really cheap by our standards and their infrastructure is leapfrogging ours. In Jamaica for instance for $40 a month you get unlimited 3G data access nearly everywhere along the coast and as for tethering they sell cool d-link wi-fi routers that you put a SIM card into to have home internet.
If you are a kid in a poor place a bit of industriousness in obtaining a crap old pentium(or raspberry pi), a CRT, a USB stick, and occasional internet access and you will be able to fill your brain with all you ever wanted. Add in an NGO with the goal of making this easier and whole communities will be just fine.
I would think that the bossless structure would work until some sort of feedback loop kicked in driving everyone into something stupid. A simple example of this would be the recent sub-prime property bubble. Each of the various parties were successfully working toward profitable goals, you had real-estate sales, mortgage companies, wall street, the Fed, the buyers, the people getting home equity loans, the developers, the contractors, even the people making "flip this house" TV shows. All these players could justify what they were doing by simply pulling out the bottom line and saying "What, you want to destroy this? You are a fool." Yet nearly all the companies involved have since imploded or, if they were lucky, taken serious damage.
So none of those parties were willing to say, "Whoa just a minute, this party bus is heading straight for a cliff." So you not only needed someone watching out for the cliff you needed someone who could be a royal party pooper when needed, you also needed this person to somewhat not be a party to the party, hence a boss and a boss with potential dictatorial powers. If you look back to say 2003 when the property party was enroute to the cliff but there may have been time to change course with far less pain than 2008 any "boss" who changed course at that point would have been reviled and since people wouldn't ever believe that 2008 had been averted they would have been out for blood.
I love Valve's model but a sign that all is not perfect is definitely HL3. I am willing to bet that employees are adverse to working on that project for one reason or another so it just never gets moving. So a possible solution to a "bossless" company avoiding being a directionless company would be to have at least the ability for an individual leader or sort of supreme court of leaders to be able to provide extra incentives for employees to do certain things. So you might say, "You work on HL3 and your pay goes up 30% or you get more vacations, or even just way better parking." Then if something disastrous like all the employees start working on Blackberry apps then you have to pull out the big guns and say, "You are risking the company on what we believe is a really stupid idea. We won't say no to what you are doing but while you take these huge risks we are cutting your pay 50%. If it pays off great but we believe that we are cutting our losses." So if the developers are correct and the Blackberry becomes the gaming platform of the century and they are sure they are right then they can continue. But the market inside of Valve would have then at least changed the math of potential stupidity."
The key here is game theory. In GT you often have what are called Nash Equilibriums. These result when all the players do what will benefit them the most while also avoiding pain. The result is often that a Nash Equilibrium can be predicted by asking "What would a bunch of assholes do?" The problem is when a few assholes start doing it then the remaining players may be forced to do the same asshole thing just to stay alive. There are two solutions to prevent nasty Nash Equilibriums. One is that every single player is kind hearted and cooperates. The other solution is to change the math making being an asshole too costly. So the ideal boss in a bossless company would be able to change the math when they see it becoming a problem. I suspect that it wouldn't take much math changing to effect huge changes. In the case of valve I suspect that something as small as preferred parking spaces or nicer chairs for preferred projects could change the output to something desired. It probably would only show up statistically. Most people would ignore the directive but a tiny number would begin heading in the desired direction resulting in an increase in desired output. If you had a bag of incentives you could apply them one after another like a throttle until you achieved the desired thrust. Ideally this person would be using zero incentives most of the time and also would not be asked to use those powers for this pet project or that. But the person would need to be able to act without interference once they felt they needed to act.
I don't know why you have been modded down. I would put one caveat on the consumer grade modem. They key is to avoid too much of a mish-mash. So a consumer grade modem/routers that you will then deploy over and over in all small locations that can also be remotely maintained. So you buy $20,000 worth of good routers and hand them out like candy. The key is ease of troubleshooting. As long as the library phone up and say, "The internet is not working" and have you solve it without having to go on a road trip would be the key.
Where this could get cool is if you then use DD-WRT or OpenWRT as then you could even have health monitoring, etc. That way when the library calls you would answer, "Yes we have been working on that for the last 2 hours as our pulse taking system noted all kinds of routers vanish. We think it is a local area problem as the fire-hall is out as is the community police station down the block."
I remember around 2000 when I was fighting with SysAdmins deploying Linux servers. I would say, "For your 1 Sun server I can buy 10 Linux servers with money to spare and each individual Linux server will handle the load just as well." The Sun guy would blah blah about how once a Sun Tech showed up at midnight with a new motherboard in hand to which I reply, "That is what the other 9 Linux servers will do but automatically as 2 of them will be on and waiting while still using less electricity." I would say we haven't hit the year 2000 with routers yet so the big routers are still critical if you are running an insane amount of data but your tiered deployment would be much cheaper.
One other bit about the Earl Muntz building is that by deploying an expensive centralized network is that you don't have much room to experiment. So you have this overpriced pile of great (in 2013) stuff that will have to work for the next decade or two as nobody in the institution will ever think the word router again. Whereas with a more tiered system you can try out a new fiber service in one spot, and maybe a cellular wireless system in another. If everything is a bit diverse already you will fell comfortable doing so. If everything is perfect then people will yell, "Don't jiggle the Jello!!!"
I am rephrasing the OP's question to the better and the eternal: What is the ideal monitor / hardware setup for programming?
First you want more than one monitor. But you don't want those monitors to be too big. Personally I don't like going over 24" as my head feels like it is going to swivel off looking at two 27" monitors. Plus if you develop for 27" it will look crappy on most people's little screens. Next you want as much memory as possible. Often when programming many elements of your development environment will not only each demand much memory but with leaks and whatnot you will demand more and more memory as the day wears on and thus extra memory will keep you from either rebooting or strategically turning things off. For me one of the biggest memory pigs are the VMs and they can be complete pigs. So 24Gigs is a good start for a development machine. Your primary work and IDE/compiler should be on an SSD. This will speed things like compilation time way up. Also the number of cores you have becomes quite important as this is great for most compilers and a must for any VMs. It is nice if you can dedicate 2 or more cores to a VM while still having 2 or more cores for your primary machine.
Needless to say all of the above implies a desktop. But a laptop can be a great adjunct to the primary development desktop as developing in new and interesting varied locations invigorates your code. A good coding setup should allow your code to move freely between the laptop and the desktop. Ideally you can check out your code onto the laptop and be gone in minutes. Beyond that everything on a laptop is compromising your work so the minimums would be 15" and as much memory as you can afford.
But the best setup that I have seen for server development was where each developer had a little blade machine running in a drawer instead of as a VM on their primary machine. Nothing beats being able to push a button to reboot or plug in a USB for a quick and dirty OS reinstall.
I would love to hear from people who have tried 3 monitors and those who have tried the vertical monitors.
A good salesman will get all the tech people convinced that they need his cool stuff that will work well for a good price. A great salesman goes right to the top and convinces the top(non technical) people (with white papers like this week's pole) A truly great salesman will even eliminate the tech people and replace them with his own so that the new tech people will not only support every suggestion but will become a sales force in their own right.
I am willing to bet that no serious tech person had anything to do with this and if they did that they are Cisco certified up the ying yang. Just a guess but that the decision to purchase these came from very near the very top and the person was totally chuffed to be running a multi-million dollar project and was convinced that their tech wienies would be way out of their "depth" on this one.
Assuming some tech guy did protest they were probably told that their suggested routers were mere toys and that to play with the big boys that you needed serious hardware.
One of the greatly overlooked solutions is that your networking demands are so small that quite old solutions can be very effective. As long as the system can be remotely administrated you would be hard pressed to buy old hardware that didn't meet the rest of the system's requirements. 100,000 users you need the big guns. 100 users you probably need one step up from a home router.
Keep in mind that for many people a smartphone will be their only computer. Personally (like many slashdotters) I have a dual monitored desktop, a 15" laptop, an iPad, an e-ink bookreader, and an iPhone. So I can pick the exact screen size I want to match my needs exactly; thus I want my smart phone to stay fairly small. But if I only had one screen and it were to be my smart phone I would want that screen to be bordering on the absurd. I wouldn't want to hold an iPad mini to my ear but pretty close. Plus get a bluetooth headset and you won't look like a dumbass with this brick up against your ear.
So it makes total sense for people to get huge smartphones. People blah blah about the post PC era, which for joe non-technical is rapidly approaching. This post PC world will probably make larger screens quite logical.
One other market is the Baby Boomer: With failing eyesight the bigger the better when it comes to screen/font sizes. "Oh I don't have the coolest phone? Don't care because I can read the screen."
I haven't even seen one in any store that I have been in; or if I did I had no idea.
The first Wii with all its movement and potential for interaction had me (and my kids) drooling for one when they came out. But I don't think it has been on in 2013 and only a few times in 2012. No game has made me want to use it and none of my friends have said, "Hey have you seen this Wii game X?" Nor have my kids have not asked for any Wii games. I have no idea about what the Wii U and know noone who does know what it can do but I doubt it can be that interesting as I haven't read anything about any hackers (people doing cool things not the thieves) doing anything with it like people were with the WiiMotes when they first came out.
So did Nintendo make a crappy console or did they fail to market a good console? The answer is one or both of those options.
Personally I think that where Nintendo failed was that their first Wii fit into a market for fun simple games. So people didn't complain about the low specs. But now smart phones and tablets have eaten the market for fun simple games. Thus if you are going to make a console the lesson seems to be that you'd better make it nearly a super computer.
I read about this at least 10 years ago when some Japanese ATMs were going with fingerprints. They looked at the blood flowing through the skin to make sure they were looking at a live finger and also not just a faked fingerprint on a live finger.
Do they realize that 99% of theses rules that corporations want will hurt artists, creators, etc. The record companies want to bring back the days where they can sell a million records and the band hardly gets enough money to buy a new van.
A great but typical example of this would be the guy who wrote the book, "Nature of Code"(great book) he now gives people the option of buying his book online for a price you choose ranging from 0-10 dollars. Other than the transaction fee he gets 100% of the money resulting in his getting up to triple as much as he did when his previous book sold through a traditional publisher while the consumer gets it for 1/5th as much.
I don't see any need to protect the traditional publisher one iota. If any new laws are needed they should be there to protect the little guy from the traditional publisher. But in this day of big money politics politicians aren't there anymore for the voter. If anything they seem annoyed when voters get their own act together and boot them out.
In my Canon I have to put a pretty fast card in to take more than about 10-20 seconds of video. I don't need the fastest but a 10 is pretty well the minimum. I would say that this test would be best if they had some older model cameras. Older being pretty common because if you bought a good camera even 5 years ago there is a pretty good chance that it still meets your needs and is still going strong.
My personal suggestion is for everyone with a halfway serious camera to not only get fast enough SD cards but to go on ebay and buy a spare battery and charger. When you suddenly need them it is too late to get them cheap on ebay and paying full retail price can really sting.
But what about bandwidth charges? With my present service if I get slashdotted the server will be overwhelmed but I have no expanding charges with bandwidth. On Amazon more bandwidth = more money, way more bandwidth=way more money.
So maybe the instance falters but the bandwidth keeps being used.
And I agree setting up a server on Amazon was at first confusing but once I figured it out quite easy. With my present system the easiest and fastest way to set up a new server is to phone them. But as I say, my bill this month is X and next month will be X and if I add another server it will be X+1 server. With amazon I couldn't figure out if even the free trial was going to be free.
I am sufficiently freaked out by Amazon pricing that I just can't use it. I have two simple fears. One is that I screw up with my code and do a bazillion transactions per second that result in either a ridiculous bill or exhausting my budget resulting in my service having to shut down. Secondly I am scared that some kind of DDOS would blow through my life savings. I much prefer the control of having my own dedicated servers with extremely fixed costs. It might not be the most efficient scheme but with the service I use they can throw extra servers on pretty quickly and I can set them up in a flash. So yes I am potentially hosed if Opera or Slashdot feature my work but I sleep like a baby knowing that amazon won't be billing me a house tomorrow. I even tried out their free service and while loving it was deathly afraid of getting billed.
If my sites really grew I would even contemplate going a step further and running my own physical servers. The joy of being able to reach out and jam USB sticks into them would be pretty good.
I don't care how good your information is I won't interact with an add that you have forced upon me. I'd even give up slashdot if tomorrow I went to log in and an ad-captcha popped up. This is exactly the sort of MBA type crap that is ruining so many companies. Some douche does a spreadsheet showing how they will make x cents per user logging in with the ad-captcha. First the spreadsheet doesn't show how many customers will soon flee and second you suddenly have a new incentive to start ad-captcha'ing all over the place. First you just log people out more (a great way to lose customers because they can't be bothered to retrieve their login) and then you start putting ad-captchas between the user and just about everything. At first this will look great on the bottom line as you will probably triple your ad revenue overnight but 2 years later you are laying off 90% of your staff because you only have 10% of your readers.
The equivalent logic would apply to a grocery store putting all their prices up 20%. In the first week they would be rolling in profits due to customer inertia but by week 52 they are closed as there are so many other stores roughly 20% less.
But the worst logic is that an ad-capcha takes less time. Again MBA logic; the user is taking less time but seething the for that time and for a while after. Also keep in mind that most people (we aren't most people) don't have a clue what captchas are about but it must be something technical. But an ad everybody can understand.
So my prediction is that the best that ad-captcha sites can hope for will be that their growth will slow down; but my thinking is that most ad-captcha implementing sites will be taking it down and publicly saying that it was one of the worst decisions in the site's history.
And don't tell me that you have to. There is no case of someone being forced to do so in Canada (as it is basically the contents of your mind and you don't have to self incriminate). The police regularly have to cut open safes because the owner won't give them the combination.
Most smart phones are pretty secure right now so if the police go fishing you are probably safe. But in some big case the phone will probably sit in evidence for a long time resulting in a hack for that (now old) version of the OS becoming available. Then the police will be able to get in.
But for most of us it is just a good idea to password your phone because of thieves. I doubt that too many slashdotters are running a secret drug empire.
When I sign up for a physical bricks and mortar course I will typically be paying for it, consider which course I want very carefully, and then set time aside in my week. But when I sign up for say a Coursera (Love them) course I will click enroll willy-nilly. I am perfectly happy to dip my toe in the water and see if the course is for me or if the person doing the course has any idea what they are doing. For example, I recently took a Cryptography course. The professor knew how to run the tutorials. The workload was about right and the quiz / exam questions were on material somewhat covered by the course. My daughter signed up for a Coursera Pre-calculus math course and withrew after attempting the first week. The course was a mess of dog crap. They had nearly zero idea how to properly use the coursera system and the tutorials were odd. Then worst of all when she went to enter the answers it was rejecting answers that were simple and correct.
At the present time the simple problem is one of editorial and production. I would say that few of the people creating these moocs have any real experience; nor do they seem to be getting much direction. If you compare the videos to say those in the great courses there is no comparison. Also there are the fundamentals such as workload; it is too easy to have an assignment where you ask the students to do things that will require way too much work. Or like a recent Game Theory course I have been taking does: ask questions on material they didn't really cover.
But time should take care of this. If the people running the courses are getting good feedback from the questions then they will slowly iterate their courses into something great.
What I do agree on is that there is going to be a sea change in those who are able to thrive in modern education. In the past, as an employer you can look at a collage grad and know that they showed up every day and did their time. But with online courses you will basically know that the student has done the work (ignore cheating for the moment) but did they binge and do the course in a caffeine fueled weekend in the last minute? Did they do it slowly or are they a god and pounded out a whole degree in a summer? This isn't necessarily better or worse but it will be different.
But there are two areas where it will get far better and far worse. First the better will be that an amazing opportunity will now be available for people to better themselves who would never have been able to. This applies to both people in distant countries with few educational opportunities and people who are trapped in situations here in the western world such as dropping out of school to provide for a family. Online education will be like a night school GED on mega steroids. The area where it will be far worse will be that you can now get an education without any of the hidden benefits such as social interaction, social interaction, and meeting amazing people socially. Meeting people with similar interests is one of the great things about a physical school as beyond the satisfaction it provides it also provides future networking, and present development of ideas and businesses. It is possible to interact with people in a forum but something is usually missing.
I am not sure that it is the greatest loss if undisciplined and unfocused people end up dropping out. I have met too many programmers who did have that piece of paper but were unable to contribute squato.
There is a pretty good looking editor for Latex called Bakoma. What I have never understood with latex is that it is hard to find an editor that does exactly what this website does. You type on the left and it appears on the right. But I want one step further. You also can edit on the right. To me this would be the best of both worlds. You can go all hard core for formulas and other complicated formatting but then you can go all WYSIWYG if you want. Oh and I want a spell check in both the the latex and WYSIWYG panes along with code completion in the latex pane.
I would love to see limits to what data companies can collect, store, and share. I would also love to see greater disclosure laws for companies, especially as they get larger. The best parts of big lawsuits like those against big tobacco were when many of their dirty little secrets came out. But with lobbying as it is now that's never going to happen.
As a public good I can't think of many situations where forcing large companies to disclose much of what they do would be harmful. If a company has to disclose how and where it makes money then other companies will discover opportunities from that and drive down prices. If one client can negotiate a better deal than other clients would see that and negotiate accordingly. Corporate profits would drop along with gouging. I don't see any magical reason that corporations have a special right to huge profits.
Slashdot Mirror
Not that slashdot is an island of perfection it has a pretty good BS filter, one of the best troll filters, and potentially one of the best off-topic filters. So if there is an article on black holes and someone starts ranting about 911 conspiracies they end up with a -1 pretty damn quick. If someone posts their slightly strange theory on black holes they may or may not survive but probably won't get a 5 and if someone goes half off-topic but against the grain of slashdotters and says blackholes are just a theory and the bible has a better answer they too will get badly spanked.
Where self moderating groups like slashdot and reddit can go wrong is when you violate a cultural taboo. Saying valid good things about Microsoft or valid bad things about Linux will get you a karmic black eye and on reddit not being racist will get you in trouble in many sub sections. Yet reddit is pretty good at sorting out fact from fiction (compared to many news organizations' comments sections).
The quality of many news organizations' comments moderation is best shown by the number of spam/completely bonkers comments that they let survive.
On a side note I am not happy with the number of organizations using Discus (I have hosts blocked them). I had an experience with one of their people and man o man do they seem to gather data.
While at our regional team's hockey games I regularly observe around 1/3rd of the audience on their various smartphones. This isn't just during intermissions or even slow parts of the games, but during fights, people smashing into the boards in front of them, etc. I think they look up when the crowd goes mad for a goal; I think.
I don't understand as these tickets aren't exactly cheap but unless these people are somehow interacting with the game (say voting on who goes on the ice next or if the last call was a good one) then I would be willing to bet that these people are going to wake up one day and say, "For this year the budget says Season's tickets are out and awesome data plan is in."
Next time I go I plan on bringing binoculars, not to watch the game, but to peek over people's shoulders to see what fascinates them so.
1) Chattanooga, Tennessee
The city of Chattanooga was forced refund $8800 in red light cameras tickets issued to motorists trapped by an illegally short yellow time. The refund only occurred after a motorist challenged his citation by insisting that the yellow light time of 3.0 seconds was too short. LaserCraft, the private vendor that runs the camera program in return for a cut of the profits, provided the judge with a computer database that asserted the yellow was 3.8 seconds at that location.
The judge then personally checked the intersection in question was timed at three seconds while other nearby locations had about four seconds of yellow warning. City traffic engineer John Van Winkle told Bean that “a mix up with the turn arrow” was responsible and that the bare minimum for the light should be 3.9 seconds.
2) Dallas, Texas
An investigation by KDFW-TV, a local TV station, found that of the ten cameras that issued the greatest number of tickets in the city, seven were located at intersections where the yellow duration is shorter than the bare minimum recommended by the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT).
The city’s second highest revenue producing camera, for example, was located at the intersection of Greenville Avenue and Mockingbird Lane. It issued 9407 tickets worth $705,525 between January 1 and August 31, 2007. At the intersections on Greenville Avenue leading up to the camera intersection, however, yellows are at least 3.5 or 4.0 seconds in duration, but the ticket-producing intersection’s yellow stands at just 3.15 seconds. That is 0.35 seconds shorter than TxDOT’s recommended bare minimum. Dallas likewise installed the cameras at locations with existing short yellow times. A total of twenty-one camera intersections in Dallas had yellow times below TxDOT’s bare minimum recommended amount.
The ticket camera program in Dallas made the news recently for shutting down some of its cameras because they were no longer profitable.
3) Springfield, Missouri
The city of Springfield, Missouri prepared for the installation of a red light camera system in 2007 by slashing the yellow warning time by one second at 105 state-owned intersection signals across the city.
The city defended its effort to the Springfield News-Leader by claiming it was “standardizing” and had increased the yellow time at 136 city-operated lights to meet national standards. During the city council meeting last October where the red light camera ordinance was approved, however, Assistant Director of Public Works Earl Newman gave a different explanation for the reduction. Newman said he was, “concerned that many individuals run the light if the light remained yellow too long.”
4) Lubbock, Texas
KBCD, a local television station, exposed the city’s short timing of yellow lights at eight of the twelve intersections where the devices were to be installed.
Prior to the news investigation, Lubbock City Engineer Jere Hart assured city council members that he would not increase yellow times. According to the city council’s traffic commission minutes of September 19, 2006, Jere said, “if [the red light camera program is] implemented, the public would prefer to have an increased amber cycle,” but he stated that, “the program will not adjust the amber/yellow time.”
Shortly after the investigation became public, red-light cameras were installed in Lubbock. However, after they proved to be both unprofitable (due in part to a new state law giving 50% of the ticket camera profit to the state) and unsafe (accidents increased where the cameras were installed), they were taken down.
5)Nashville, Tennessee
Even without red light cameras, police in Nashville, Tennessee have been earning hundreds of thousands in revenue by trapping motorists in conventional ticket traps at city intersections with the shortest yellow warning time.
In 2006, N
I just don't want rat kidneys then growing in my mouth.
I read in one place where the company that did a similar deal over red light cameras recommended to the city to shorten the yellow light time thus increasing the chances you would get burned having proceeded on a green and still been in the intersection when it turned red. The result apparently was that people would massively slam on their brakes if the light turned yellow just as they were about to pass through.
The key problem here is simple; when you have a company that can make profits backed by laws they will make sure that there are as many law breakers as possible. Since you can't sell people on breaking the law the next best step is to basically set them up to fail. In my shitty city Halifax they switched to a private company doing parking tickets. They are relentless. If your meter runs out they will get you. Plus the parasites know where the best meters are such as those near the emergency rooms of Hospitals where people are not thinking about things such as putting change in the meters.
No private company should have almost anything to do with the legal system. Running prisons, enforcing laws, scanning our emails, Nothing. Not only will they not use common sense but they will use the worse common sense possible and that is to make as much money as possible and at any cost.
Why do we need robots that even vaguely look like people? We have people for that, lots of people, people who are quite good at looking like people. A Roomba zipping around on the floor with a cute face and some over sized eyes would just be creepy. Let form follow function and let the various robots look like what they do. If it is a farm robot my guess is that it will look like a tractor, fire fighting robot would be sort of like a fire truck, lawn mowing robot would look like a lawn mower.
So if you want me to trust your robot then don't have it stuck in the corner unable to find its destination.
Where people will soon interact with robots and need to trust them will be robotic cars. My concern is that even after statistically the robot cars have proven themselves to be huge life savers there will always be the one in a million story of the robot driving off the cliff or into the side of a train. People will think, "I'd never do something that stupid." When in fact they would be statistically much more likely to drive themselves off a cliff after they fall asleep at the wheel. So if you are looking for a trust issue the robot car PR people will have to continually remind people how many loved ones are not dead because of how trustworthy the robot car really is.
The BC government has done such a horrible PR job that I don't like them from the opposite side of the country. I detest the government here yet I can make a bigger list of reasons to hate the outgoing BC government starting with the Chinese miners.
This just confirms a pet theory that government needs to be wide open to the people. The internet is helping yet the BC government has thought that they could do what they want and somehow retain power by creating their own reality. This is becoming harder and harder to do but backroom deals still abound in most governments. Quite simply governments should not be able to hide almost any information. When I mention this to government people they say No No No that would prevent us from doing what needs to be done; to which I reply it would prevent you from doing what people don't want you doing.
I have been taking some excellent coursera courses which are probably somewhat typical in overall bandwidth needs. The only real bandwidth hog would be the videos which I usually download to my iPad. So short of a 56k Modem I might have to wait for these videos but with only minor delays almost any crappy bandwidth would allow me to take these courses. Also keep in mind that determined people also have sneakernets. That is someone in my group of friends will grab the data and then using USB memory sticks will distribute the goods around. I remember in the early days of the Internet one friend would grab something and then burn the amazing hundreds of megs to CD. And before that one person would grab 3 or more floppies from a BBS and then we would all faithfully copy them. Before that it was pure floppy to floppy movement of data. So saying that you are on the wrong side of a bandwidth margin is just bizarre.
So unless all the MOOCs suddenly change their model to highly interactive 3D environments I suspect that most learners with the most moderate internet access will be just fine.
Only the caveat of some kind of skype type live learning would demand goodish bandwidth but I don't see much education heading that way except for those services that are determined to maintain their tutoring per hour business models which really wouldn't apply to the same people who are supposedly on the wrong side of the digital divide.
And on top of all that my experience in poorer countries is that internet access is really cheap by our standards and their infrastructure is leapfrogging ours. In Jamaica for instance for $40 a month you get unlimited 3G data access nearly everywhere along the coast and as for tethering they sell cool d-link wi-fi routers that you put a SIM card into to have home internet.
If you are a kid in a poor place a bit of industriousness in obtaining a crap old pentium(or raspberry pi), a CRT, a USB stick, and occasional internet access and you will be able to fill your brain with all you ever wanted. Add in an NGO with the goal of making this easier and whole communities will be just fine.
I would think that the bossless structure would work until some sort of feedback loop kicked in driving everyone into something stupid. A simple example of this would be the recent sub-prime property bubble. Each of the various parties were successfully working toward profitable goals, you had real-estate sales, mortgage companies, wall street, the Fed, the buyers, the people getting home equity loans, the developers, the contractors, even the people making "flip this house" TV shows. All these players could justify what they were doing by simply pulling out the bottom line and saying "What, you want to destroy this? You are a fool." Yet nearly all the companies involved have since imploded or, if they were lucky, taken serious damage. So none of those parties were willing to say, "Whoa just a minute, this party bus is heading straight for a cliff." So you not only needed someone watching out for the cliff you needed someone who could be a royal party pooper when needed, you also needed this person to somewhat not be a party to the party, hence a boss and a boss with potential dictatorial powers. If you look back to say 2003 when the property party was enroute to the cliff but there may have been time to change course with far less pain than 2008 any "boss" who changed course at that point would have been reviled and since people wouldn't ever believe that 2008 had been averted they would have been out for blood.
I love Valve's model but a sign that all is not perfect is definitely HL3. I am willing to bet that employees are adverse to working on that project for one reason or another so it just never gets moving. So a possible solution to a "bossless" company avoiding being a directionless company would be to have at least the ability for an individual leader or sort of supreme court of leaders to be able to provide extra incentives for employees to do certain things. So you might say, "You work on HL3 and your pay goes up 30% or you get more vacations, or even just way better parking." Then if something disastrous like all the employees start working on Blackberry apps then you have to pull out the big guns and say, "You are risking the company on what we believe is a really stupid idea. We won't say no to what you are doing but while you take these huge risks we are cutting your pay 50%. If it pays off great but we believe that we are cutting our losses." So if the developers are correct and the Blackberry becomes the gaming platform of the century and they are sure they are right then they can continue. But the market inside of Valve would have then at least changed the math of potential stupidity."
The key here is game theory. In GT you often have what are called Nash Equilibriums. These result when all the players do what will benefit them the most while also avoiding pain. The result is often that a Nash Equilibrium can be predicted by asking "What would a bunch of assholes do?" The problem is when a few assholes start doing it then the remaining players may be forced to do the same asshole thing just to stay alive. There are two solutions to prevent nasty Nash Equilibriums. One is that every single player is kind hearted and cooperates. The other solution is to change the math making being an asshole too costly. So the ideal boss in a bossless company would be able to change the math when they see it becoming a problem. I suspect that it wouldn't take much math changing to effect huge changes. In the case of valve I suspect that something as small as preferred parking spaces or nicer chairs for preferred projects could change the output to something desired. It probably would only show up statistically. Most people would ignore the directive but a tiny number would begin heading in the desired direction resulting in an increase in desired output. If you had a bag of incentives you could apply them one after another like a throttle until you achieved the desired thrust. Ideally this person would be using zero incentives most of the time and also would not be asked to use those powers for this pet project or that. But the person would need to be able to act without interference once they felt they needed to act.
I don't know why you have been modded down. I would put one caveat on the consumer grade modem. They key is to avoid too much of a mish-mash. So a consumer grade modem/routers that you will then deploy over and over in all small locations that can also be remotely maintained. So you buy $20,000 worth of good routers and hand them out like candy. The key is ease of troubleshooting. As long as the library phone up and say, "The internet is not working" and have you solve it without having to go on a road trip would be the key.
Where this could get cool is if you then use DD-WRT or OpenWRT as then you could even have health monitoring, etc. That way when the library calls you would answer, "Yes we have been working on that for the last 2 hours as our pulse taking system noted all kinds of routers vanish. We think it is a local area problem as the fire-hall is out as is the community police station down the block."
I remember around 2000 when I was fighting with SysAdmins deploying Linux servers. I would say, "For your 1 Sun server I can buy 10 Linux servers with money to spare and each individual Linux server will handle the load just as well." The Sun guy would blah blah about how once a Sun Tech showed up at midnight with a new motherboard in hand to which I reply, "That is what the other 9 Linux servers will do but automatically as 2 of them will be on and waiting while still using less electricity." I would say we haven't hit the year 2000 with routers yet so the big routers are still critical if you are running an insane amount of data but your tiered deployment would be much cheaper.
One other bit about the Earl Muntz building is that by deploying an expensive centralized network is that you don't have much room to experiment. So you have this overpriced pile of great (in 2013) stuff that will have to work for the next decade or two as nobody in the institution will ever think the word router again. Whereas with a more tiered system you can try out a new fiber service in one spot, and maybe a cellular wireless system in another. If everything is a bit diverse already you will fell comfortable doing so. If everything is perfect then people will yell, "Don't jiggle the Jello!!!"
I am rephrasing the OP's question to the better and the eternal: What is the ideal monitor / hardware setup for programming?
First you want more than one monitor. But you don't want those monitors to be too big. Personally I don't like going over 24" as my head feels like it is going to swivel off looking at two 27" monitors. Plus if you develop for 27" it will look crappy on most people's little screens. Next you want as much memory as possible. Often when programming many elements of your development environment will not only each demand much memory but with leaks and whatnot you will demand more and more memory as the day wears on and thus extra memory will keep you from either rebooting or strategically turning things off. For me one of the biggest memory pigs are the VMs and they can be complete pigs. So 24Gigs is a good start for a development machine. Your primary work and IDE/compiler should be on an SSD. This will speed things like compilation time way up. Also the number of cores you have becomes quite important as this is great for most compilers and a must for any VMs. It is nice if you can dedicate 2 or more cores to a VM while still having 2 or more cores for your primary machine.
Needless to say all of the above implies a desktop. But a laptop can be a great adjunct to the primary development desktop as developing in new and interesting varied locations invigorates your code. A good coding setup should allow your code to move freely between the laptop and the desktop. Ideally you can check out your code onto the laptop and be gone in minutes. Beyond that everything on a laptop is compromising your work so the minimums would be 15" and as much memory as you can afford.
But the best setup that I have seen for server development was where each developer had a little blade machine running in a drawer instead of as a VM on their primary machine. Nothing beats being able to push a button to reboot or plug in a USB for a quick and dirty OS reinstall.
I would love to hear from people who have tried 3 monitors and those who have tried the vertical monitors.
A good salesman will get all the tech people convinced that they need his cool stuff that will work well for a good price. A great salesman goes right to the top and convinces the top(non technical) people (with white papers like this week's pole) A truly great salesman will even eliminate the tech people and replace them with his own so that the new tech people will not only support every suggestion but will become a sales force in their own right.
I am willing to bet that no serious tech person had anything to do with this and if they did that they are Cisco certified up the ying yang. Just a guess but that the decision to purchase these came from very near the very top and the person was totally chuffed to be running a multi-million dollar project and was convinced that their tech wienies would be way out of their "depth" on this one.
Assuming some tech guy did protest they were probably told that their suggested routers were mere toys and that to play with the big boys that you needed serious hardware.
One of the greatly overlooked solutions is that your networking demands are so small that quite old solutions can be very effective. As long as the system can be remotely administrated you would be hard pressed to buy old hardware that didn't meet the rest of the system's requirements. 100,000 users you need the big guns. 100 users you probably need one step up from a home router.
I love that they have singled out patent trolls as opposed to making it hard for some basement inventor to defend himself. Bravo!
Keep in mind that for many people a smartphone will be their only computer. Personally (like many slashdotters) I have a dual monitored desktop, a 15" laptop, an iPad, an e-ink bookreader, and an iPhone. So I can pick the exact screen size I want to match my needs exactly; thus I want my smart phone to stay fairly small. But if I only had one screen and it were to be my smart phone I would want that screen to be bordering on the absurd. I wouldn't want to hold an iPad mini to my ear but pretty close. Plus get a bluetooth headset and you won't look like a dumbass with this brick up against your ear.
So it makes total sense for people to get huge smartphones. People blah blah about the post PC era, which for joe non-technical is rapidly approaching. This post PC world will probably make larger screens quite logical.
One other market is the Baby Boomer: With failing eyesight the bigger the better when it comes to screen/font sizes. "Oh I don't have the coolest phone? Don't care because I can read the screen."
I haven't even seen one in any store that I have been in; or if I did I had no idea.
The first Wii with all its movement and potential for interaction had me (and my kids) drooling for one when they came out. But I don't think it has been on in 2013 and only a few times in 2012. No game has made me want to use it and none of my friends have said, "Hey have you seen this Wii game X?" Nor have my kids have not asked for any Wii games. I have no idea about what the Wii U and know noone who does know what it can do but I doubt it can be that interesting as I haven't read anything about any hackers (people doing cool things not the thieves) doing anything with it like people were with the WiiMotes when they first came out.
So did Nintendo make a crappy console or did they fail to market a good console? The answer is one or both of those options.
Personally I think that where Nintendo failed was that their first Wii fit into a market for fun simple games. So people didn't complain about the low specs. But now smart phones and tablets have eaten the market for fun simple games. Thus if you are going to make a console the lesson seems to be that you'd better make it nearly a super computer.
I read about this at least 10 years ago when some Japanese ATMs were going with fingerprints. They looked at the blood flowing through the skin to make sure they were looking at a live finger and also not just a faked fingerprint on a live finger.
Do they realize that 99% of theses rules that corporations want will hurt artists, creators, etc. The record companies want to bring back the days where they can sell a million records and the band hardly gets enough money to buy a new van.
A great but typical example of this would be the guy who wrote the book, "Nature of Code"(great book) he now gives people the option of buying his book online for a price you choose ranging from 0-10 dollars. Other than the transaction fee he gets 100% of the money resulting in his getting up to triple as much as he did when his previous book sold through a traditional publisher while the consumer gets it for 1/5th as much.
I don't see any need to protect the traditional publisher one iota. If any new laws are needed they should be there to protect the little guy from the traditional publisher. But in this day of big money politics politicians aren't there anymore for the voter. If anything they seem annoyed when voters get their own act together and boot them out.
In my Canon I have to put a pretty fast card in to take more than about 10-20 seconds of video. I don't need the fastest but a 10 is pretty well the minimum. I would say that this test would be best if they had some older model cameras. Older being pretty common because if you bought a good camera even 5 years ago there is a pretty good chance that it still meets your needs and is still going strong.
My personal suggestion is for everyone with a halfway serious camera to not only get fast enough SD cards but to go on ebay and buy a spare battery and charger. When you suddenly need them it is too late to get them cheap on ebay and paying full retail price can really sting.
But what about bandwidth charges? With my present service if I get slashdotted the server will be overwhelmed but I have no expanding charges with bandwidth. On Amazon more bandwidth = more money, way more bandwidth=way more money.
So maybe the instance falters but the bandwidth keeps being used.
And I agree setting up a server on Amazon was at first confusing but once I figured it out quite easy. With my present system the easiest and fastest way to set up a new server is to phone them. But as I say, my bill this month is X and next month will be X and if I add another server it will be X+1 server. With amazon I couldn't figure out if even the free trial was going to be free.
I am sufficiently freaked out by Amazon pricing that I just can't use it. I have two simple fears. One is that I screw up with my code and do a bazillion transactions per second that result in either a ridiculous bill or exhausting my budget resulting in my service having to shut down. Secondly I am scared that some kind of DDOS would blow through my life savings. I much prefer the control of having my own dedicated servers with extremely fixed costs. It might not be the most efficient scheme but with the service I use they can throw extra servers on pretty quickly and I can set them up in a flash. So yes I am potentially hosed if Opera or Slashdot feature my work but I sleep like a baby knowing that amazon won't be billing me a house tomorrow. I even tried out their free service and while loving it was deathly afraid of getting billed.
If my sites really grew I would even contemplate going a step further and running my own physical servers. The joy of being able to reach out and jam USB sticks into them would be pretty good.
I don't care how good your information is I won't interact with an add that you have forced upon me. I'd even give up slashdot if tomorrow I went to log in and an ad-captcha popped up. This is exactly the sort of MBA type crap that is ruining so many companies. Some douche does a spreadsheet showing how they will make x cents per user logging in with the ad-captcha. First the spreadsheet doesn't show how many customers will soon flee and second you suddenly have a new incentive to start ad-captcha'ing all over the place. First you just log people out more (a great way to lose customers because they can't be bothered to retrieve their login) and then you start putting ad-captchas between the user and just about everything. At first this will look great on the bottom line as you will probably triple your ad revenue overnight but 2 years later you are laying off 90% of your staff because you only have 10% of your readers.
The equivalent logic would apply to a grocery store putting all their prices up 20%. In the first week they would be rolling in profits due to customer inertia but by week 52 they are closed as there are so many other stores roughly 20% less.
But the worst logic is that an ad-capcha takes less time. Again MBA logic; the user is taking less time but seething the for that time and for a while after. Also keep in mind that most people (we aren't most people) don't have a clue what captchas are about but it must be something technical. But an ad everybody can understand.
So my prediction is that the best that ad-captcha sites can hope for will be that their growth will slow down; but my thinking is that most ad-captcha implementing sites will be taking it down and publicly saying that it was one of the worst decisions in the site's history.
And don't tell me that you have to. There is no case of someone being forced to do so in Canada (as it is basically the contents of your mind and you don't have to self incriminate). The police regularly have to cut open safes because the owner won't give them the combination.
Most smart phones are pretty secure right now so if the police go fishing you are probably safe. But in some big case the phone will probably sit in evidence for a long time resulting in a hack for that (now old) version of the OS becoming available. Then the police will be able to get in.
But for most of us it is just a good idea to password your phone because of thieves. I doubt that too many slashdotters are running a secret drug empire.
When I sign up for a physical bricks and mortar course I will typically be paying for it, consider which course I want very carefully, and then set time aside in my week. But when I sign up for say a Coursera (Love them) course I will click enroll willy-nilly. I am perfectly happy to dip my toe in the water and see if the course is for me or if the person doing the course has any idea what they are doing. For example, I recently took a Cryptography course. The professor knew how to run the tutorials. The workload was about right and the quiz / exam questions were on material somewhat covered by the course. My daughter signed up for a Coursera Pre-calculus math course and withrew after attempting the first week. The course was a mess of dog crap. They had nearly zero idea how to properly use the coursera system and the tutorials were odd. Then worst of all when she went to enter the answers it was rejecting answers that were simple and correct.
At the present time the simple problem is one of editorial and production. I would say that few of the people creating these moocs have any real experience; nor do they seem to be getting much direction. If you compare the videos to say those in the great courses there is no comparison. Also there are the fundamentals such as workload; it is too easy to have an assignment where you ask the students to do things that will require way too much work. Or like a recent Game Theory course I have been taking does: ask questions on material they didn't really cover.
But time should take care of this. If the people running the courses are getting good feedback from the questions then they will slowly iterate their courses into something great.
What I do agree on is that there is going to be a sea change in those who are able to thrive in modern education. In the past, as an employer you can look at a collage grad and know that they showed up every day and did their time. But with online courses you will basically know that the student has done the work (ignore cheating for the moment) but did they binge and do the course in a caffeine fueled weekend in the last minute? Did they do it slowly or are they a god and pounded out a whole degree in a summer? This isn't necessarily better or worse but it will be different.
But there are two areas where it will get far better and far worse. First the better will be that an amazing opportunity will now be available for people to better themselves who would never have been able to. This applies to both people in distant countries with few educational opportunities and people who are trapped in situations here in the western world such as dropping out of school to provide for a family. Online education will be like a night school GED on mega steroids. The area where it will be far worse will be that you can now get an education without any of the hidden benefits such as social interaction, social interaction, and meeting amazing people socially. Meeting people with similar interests is one of the great things about a physical school as beyond the satisfaction it provides it also provides future networking, and present development of ideas and businesses. It is possible to interact with people in a forum but something is usually missing.
I am not sure that it is the greatest loss if undisciplined and unfocused people end up dropping out. I have met too many programmers who did have that piece of paper but were unable to contribute squato.
There is a pretty good looking editor for Latex called Bakoma. What I have never understood with latex is that it is hard to find an editor that does exactly what this website does. You type on the left and it appears on the right. But I want one step further. You also can edit on the right. To me this would be the best of both worlds. You can go all hard core for formulas and other complicated formatting but then you can go all WYSIWYG if you want. Oh and I want a spell check in both the the latex and WYSIWYG panes along with code completion in the latex pane.
I would love to see limits to what data companies can collect, store, and share. I would also love to see greater disclosure laws for companies, especially as they get larger. The best parts of big lawsuits like those against big tobacco were when many of their dirty little secrets came out. But with lobbying as it is now that's never going to happen.
As a public good I can't think of many situations where forcing large companies to disclose much of what they do would be harmful. If a company has to disclose how and where it makes money then other companies will discover opportunities from that and drive down prices. If one client can negotiate a better deal than other clients would see that and negotiate accordingly. Corporate profits would drop along with gouging. I don't see any magical reason that corporations have a special right to huge profits.