Mainly because, if I follow this correctly, merely saying you are going to harm or kill somebody constitutes a crime.
Good thing you don't follow it correctly, then. The law was intended to illegalize inciting violence against people. There's already case law showing that there is not a free speech right to incite violence (e.g. inciting riot), so in theory nothing is lost through this law. Similarly, there is no law against making a casual claim about doing violence ("My coworkers make me so angry sometimes I want to kill them"), but making a credible threat of violence against somebody (shaking a fist and saying, "Shut up or I'll pound you") is alread illegal (assault). The issue in this case is whether simply listing peoples' names and what they've done wrong is actually inciting violence (not protected) or just expressing an opinion (protected). AFAIK the site carefully avoided explicit calls for any specific action against the listed doctors but did use various suggestive tactics like putting their faces on wanted posters. The defendants won on the narrow grounds that their site was not actually inciting violence but did not challenge the underlying constitutionality of the law.
Also agreed. Public blackmail for stadia isn't going to stop until we give teams the collective finger. It's a game of prisoners' dilemma on a grand scale. The optimum solution is all cities saying no, but each city will tend to get greedy and say yes because they think they'll be better of if their team has the nice facility. The result is that all of the cities build new facilities and everything is just as it was before.
Maybe if they paid Baseball players like real people instead of demi-Gods people wouldn't have to pay as much.
Fat chance. Sports ticket prices are set pretty much to maximize revenues, so changes in salary have essentially no impact. That's because the marginal cost of selling an additional seat is very close to 0; once their roster is set their costs are set, so their prices are set simply to bring in as much money as possible. The feedback between salary and ticket prices is a result of good players making fans more interested in coming to see the team, not (as owners claim) a result of ticket prices going up to support high salaries. If the players started playing for free tomorrow the owners would just pocket the extra money rather than reducing ticket prices. Haven't you noticed that ticket prices never go down when a team loses its expensive players?
I'm pretty sure most pro-sports will tank in the next 10 years if the trend of owners raise ticket prices, owners make more money, therefore players want bigger peice of pie, therefore owners raise prices line of insanity continues...
As far as rising ticket prices go, they're not happening in a vacum. Owners will stop raising ticket prices as soon as fans prove unwilling to pay for them. Prices keep going up precisely because the sports are nowhere near tanking. The actual situation is more like "Owners raise ticket prices because they can get away with it. Players ask for more money because it's there, and owners give it to them because they want to attract fans with the best team possible." Salaries and ticket prices will stop spiraling upward as soon as fans vote to stop it with their wallets, and not a day sooner.
It depends on how the system is structured. If you design it well, you may be able to set it up so that it doesn't pay porn sites to try getting listed higher than hotmail when searching for hotmail. You could do that, for instance, by charging the company for views rather than clickthroughs; that way it wouldn't make sense to try listing yourself on topics where you expect your clickthrough rate to be low. Of course if you're doing a straight pay for listing scheme you may also be able to afford to have a person screen the people trying to get a listing and denying those that don't make sense, like trying to get your porn listed pretty much anywhere except for the porn category.
Sure this is a problem, but it's more an example of applying the wrong tool. Google was never intended for comprehensively finding every scrap of information about a particular topic; it was designed to find the few most relevant and interesting sites discussing a particular topic. Using a general purpose tool for a highly specific task is a wonderful way of getting frustrated but not an efficient approach to solving your problems.
In fact, there are specialized search engines for dealing with specific topics. There are engines specifically for looking for images, ones for looking at specialized topics, and so on. There are also specialized, classified catalogues of information of exactly the kind you suggest are needed out there for people who need to know about them. If, for instance, I want to learn about a specific topic in biology, I might very well start out by looking at PubMed, a special purpose index of biological research articles. You just have to know where to look for the special purpose tools.
I guess that I have mixed feelings about this. Conrary to the implication of the article, it sounds as though part of the deal is that this is a move to centralize broadcast by MLB specifically so that they _can_ guarantee availability of feeds. Honestly $10 per season isn't that much to a true baseball junkie, considering that I already spend something like $50 a year on various baseball reference books and the like- and I'm nowhere near the worst in that department. $10 is OK, that is, provided that it guarantees access to any game I want on any computer I want to listen to it from.
I just have a terrible feeling that eliminating ads from the mix just isn't going to be part of the deal. That's particularly true because of the insidious way in which announcers will toss in a short advertizement between pitches, but I have a feeling that this is also going to be a pioneer in targeted advertizing. I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out that they're going to replace the radio ads with special internet ones, and possibly even target them specifically for particular listeners. You're already going to have to provide authentication just to get the feed, so targeted advertizing (and demographic profiling) is going to be part of the story.
Yes, free, independent sites ARE tough to find, even with Slashdot's favorite Google. Eveyr time you search for ANYTHING,
the first 1000 hits are always for a commercial site.
Except that this isn't true. If I look up, say, Ronald Reagan, none of the top 5 hits are big commercial sites. They include the Whitehouse pages on former presidents, a fan page, the Reagan Presidential Foundation, the Reagan Library, and the Official Reagan Web Site. If I look up Linux Kernel, the #1 site is the Kernel Archives page. Maybe you're looking for data where there just aren't many interesting independant web sites out there, which is not something that can be cured with a better search engine.
But you're still talking about a wireless local network, not wireless to your home. Your system covers a narrow enough area that you don't have to worry about sharing your 11 Mb/s with your neighbor. When you start talking about replacing the last mile, though, you're talking about sharing access for hundred or thousands of end users on a single wireless network, which means that you're going to need to expand the bandwidth quite a bit. Remember that you don't save much compared to running fiber to every house if you still need a separate wireless network on every block.
If a broadband network were entirely located within a single state, then Congress couldn't reach it.
The problem with this argument is that 'entirely located within a single state' is not enough. It's easy to make the case that your argument would only apply if the network couldn't talk to anyone outside of the state, which would make it pretty useless. There's an extremely solid case that any network capable of carrying interstate traffic is going to be subject to Federal regulation.
Wireless is wonderful for the ability to roam, but it really can't compete on the bandwidth side. Now it's possible that we'll be satisfied by the bandwidth that you can get from wireless, but I seriously doubt it. When you start talking about video on demand, wireless just isn't going to be able to cut it. As far as picking the right technology, it's pretty clear that fiber will do the job. You can get truly massive bandwidth through a fiber, and upgrading to truly obscene bandwidth only requires changing the equipment at the ends, not the actual carrier. There's every reason to think that fiber to the home would be capable of supplying all the bandwidth any home user will need for way longer than you'd need to justify the cost.
If someone decides to stay on at the place even when they have to wear a suit and come in 9 to 5 instead of having a food and soda filled, T-shirt and Nerf office, that means that they are really committed to the place and the product that the place is selling.
The folks who drop out in the buyout process are the ones who aren't committed to the product but to a certain lifestyle.
One could equally well argue that the people who insist that employees dress a particular way aren't committed to the product but rather to a certain lifestyle. After all, they seem to value a particular mode of dress and behavior over keeping the people who developed and understand the product. Equally, the employees who stayed on might not be the ones who value the product but rather the ones who are unable to find a job elsewhere. Dumping the top performers to keep the guys your competitors won't touch is hardly a way to improve the company.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I'm personally very happy that my employer doesn't demand formal dress. They're perfectly happy to allow employees who don't come into contact with outsiders to dress any way that complies with the needs of safety and modesty. I'd be very worried about management that cared more about the way I dress than the amount that I contribute to my projects, since it represents a focus on perception rather than reality.
Well, stability is relative. The Unix systems that you probably regard as incredibly stable would be considered dangerously unstable by mainframe people. Win2000 may not quite reach the level of stability found in *BSD or Linux, but it sure beats the hell out of the old DOS based systems. Going from "crashes for no obvious reason" to "crashes only when severely stressed" is a huge win.
I guess they could put all the binaries on the same CD, and
select which to install at install time, or even use shared libraries so the choice happens at run time.
I thought that a number of companies were already doing that with their x86 code, so extending it to IA64 isn't going to kill them. Certainly I know that various Linux vendors are already shipping multiple different libraries on their CDs so that the one that's optimized for the right x86 version gets installed. RedHat, for instance, includes processor optimized glibc and kernel versions in RH7. I'd assume that this wouldn't be too terribly hard to do for most companies, since the amount of really performance critical code is comparatively small. I've also heard about using userspace code morphing approaches to optimize binaries. IIRC, HP was able to get real world performance enhancements even after the added overhead when code morphing compiled code onto the same processor(!) because they could optimize behavior that couldn't be accounted for until runtime.
Intel's strategy for their upcoming CPU is to not make it backwards compatable. This is a *serious* flaw in their plans and I don't think we're going to see them succeed with this venture. There won't be apps for it! Users would bitch and complain and only a few vendors will
actually properly update their apps.
Actually, Intel's plan makes perfect sense. They're trying to market their chip first to the kinds of users who are willing to rewrite/recompile their software to take advantage of the new instruction set. Those people are the ones running Open Source code like Linux and Apache or homebuilt applications for special purpose applications. Note, for instance, that RedHat is already working on an Itanium version of their distro. That market will then give vendors like Microsoft a reason to develop versions of their software for the Itanium. You can be that if Linux + Apache + Perl on Itanium turns out to be a successful web serving environment that MS is going to want to produce a Windows + IIS + ASP competitor. Once the hard part of porting Windows is done, MS is going to want to move their other apps to the new architecture, too, and the whole market will move over. Intel is looking at it taking 5 years or so to move completely from x86 to IA64, but they've actually figured out a way of breaking backward compatibility and not dying for it. Of course they're also keeping an alternative around by keeping their x86 development, so if things blow up on them they'll still have chips to sell.
What IMO is even worse in the long run is that opening up new markets with internet appliances rather than PCs threatens the openness of the PC. One of the things that's really driven things like the OpenDVD process and Napster is the ability to add new features to your computer that may not be approved of by a centralized authority. The move to closed hardware in appliances also locks out the ability to add unapproved software. Open Source only matters if you can actually install modified software on the device. By selling people appliances that the producers still control, companies like AOL/TW can lock out technologies like Napster that threaten their core businesses like movies and music. If most of the world gets weaned on stripped down, single purpose devices, AOL/TW can strangle developments they don't want in their infancy.
Getting undergraduates might not be such a great idea, particularly if you're looking to hire them for only a little while. I make daily use of a software package that was developed that way and am in charge of mofifying it for our lab and it's a complete mess. It's made up of a whole bunch of complete spagetti code with no adequate modularization and features bolted in with no adequate thought. It's a nightmare to maintain and modify because it was built by aggregation rather than design. I've talked to the director of the lab where it was developed, and he says that the underlying problem is that it was designed by undergraduates who were only in the lab for a few months at a time. They never had a chance to go through and heavily rework sections that needed reworking, and in a lot of cases they took obvious approaches to problems that didn't scale well so that the system starts to collapse when it exceeds the load it was originally designed to handle.
Note that I'm not saying that the problem here is that the programmers were undergraduates, per se. The problem is that they were only around for long enough to solve one or two problems, so they didn't see how their solution was going to cause problems for the next guy to work on the problem. The difficulty is that the approach of hiring cheap undergraduate labor to do your programming naturally tends to wind up resulting in that kind of problem. If you can find a competent and reliable undergraduate to do it you're just fine, but grabbing a random guy who's going to stay for only 3 months is going to cause problems.
From what I understand, the Bonobo monkeys are filthy hairy monkeys that masturbate in public and have intercourse with whatever they find.. How does this relate to linux?
Bonobo is the name for the GNOME component architecture, which is intended to allow each compliant system to embed other compliant programs and gain their features. This is pretty similar to the way that you can embed any kind of MS Office document in any other kind of MS Office document. I guess that you could view it as allowing the programs to interact with each other promiscuously, although I'm not sure if that was exactly what the designers were thinking when they gave it that name.
FWIW, Bonobos are actually apes, not monkeys, are sometimes referred to as pygmy chimpanzees, and are believed to be the species most closely related to humans.
Actually the very purpose of legalese is to make ordinary people unable to understand it.
This is 100% wrong. If you try to write things in plain language, people can use the ambiguity of everyday speech to claim that the law means something other than what its authors thought it meant, which is exactly contrary to your stated goal- that laws' meanings should be absolutely clear. The goal of legalese is to make the meaning of the writing as specific as possible so that people can't weasel out of it. In this way it's like the jargon used by any other profession; it uses a large number of technical terms with extremely precise meanings that are not used in everyday speech. There was actually a wonderful comparison of legal jargon and computer language in one of the earlier briefs, although that was in the opposite direction. Unfortunately, there's a lot of inertia in jargon- as long as the concept doesn't change the word doesn't change- and law has been going for thousands of years. That means that some of the terms have been used exactly the same way since before the birth of Christ while the rest of language has mutated around them.
if i'm not gonna be running [server programs] why would i run *nix?
There are plenty of other reasons to run *nix. You might like the idea of a system that doesn't crash at the slightest provocation the way that Win9x does. You might like the fact that it comes with a whole development environment as standard equipment. You might have ethical objections to running a proprietary operating system. You might like the availablility of standard *nix administration tools like crond and real shell scripting. You might have learned to use *nix at school and not want to learn a new system. There are plenty of reasons.
It seems to me that there are two arguments here. One is the common one about censorware being evil and the other is that there is no censorware available for some (i.e. Free Software) operating systems that people want to sell. I don't have any solutions to the first other than to try to stop the legislation from passing, but I do have an idea about the second. Well just install Junkbuster and call it censorware.
If you think about it, Junkbuster is capable of doing everything that people expect from their censorware. It can block a whole list of sites based either on domain names (like whitehouse.com) or regexs (like domains including the word sex). With a bit of work you could make it look just like any other piece of censorware. Of course the big difference is that you'd also include the traditional anti-ad blocklist and a set of instructions- maybe even a shell script- to switch from blocking pr0n to blocking ads. This would allow you to dodge the law while providing something that your customers actually want. It's also easy as hell to disable if you decide to do so.
Find a local ISP willing to donate the bandwidth. It won't be that hard, really. Most will either give them a free port or a significant
discount. Find a local computer retailer who wants some good community will.
If you really want to convince them, you might consider including some kind of mild advertizement, like using their branded web browser and computers with an obvious logo. The provider for the local library is going to have a leg up with the people who are using the library for access if/when they decide to get their own computer and ISP. Make that clear to them and they'll take the idea of giving to the library much more seriously.
For the hardware you might also consider trying to get a local business to donate their old computers. Many businesses are constantly replacing older models that are perfectly satisfactory for web browsing, and they may get a tax deduction for donating them to a worthy cause.
Whitney did lose his rights to his patent due to problems with patent law at that time; perhaps if he had been a bit more gracious in his marketing of the invention he would have fared better!
It's important to point out that the conventional High School History picture of Whitney inventing the cotton gin from scratch is not really accurate. There were existing tools that did the same job, but they did it badly. Whitney developed an improved version of an existing device, not a totally new invention. As your source quotes Whitney from a letter to his father:
"One man and a horse will do more than fifty men with the old machines,"
Something like that which is an improved version of an older device is always much tougher to protect effectively by patent than something completely novel.
don't know that much about SimCity (I never could get into it),
but if the people can lobby against the fact that you are planning on building a sewage processing plant next to the largest
church in town, and inroing the wants of the people can make it sure that someone else is appointed as the city planner, then
it I'd say it is more like the American ideal.
Well there is lobbying- you'll get messages that businesses demand an airport or the public wants a baseball stadium- and you can track your approval rating, but you can't be deposed. SimCity is very much a "god" game in that you have much more power than any real mayor would. For instance, you're not just in charge of police, fire, roads, and planning, but also schools (which in most USA cities are handled by a separate government agency). Furthermore you have power to enact orninances without opposition, which is contrary to the typical USA practice. I think that the godlike aspect is part of what makes people like the game, and the idea of losing an election if you do a bad job is something that many players wouldn't like. In fact, many people seem to think that occasional episodes of deliberate mismanagement to destroy the city are a ton of fun.
One thing that really bothers me about the game is its treatment of emminent domain. In the real world, the government is required to pay a (nominally) fair market value for property taken for public use; when you want to build a freeway you have to pay the owners of the land you take. In SimCity, though, you just have to pay the cost of demolishing the buildings- not their value and not the value of the land under them. Putting in costs like that would make the game much more interesting, IMO. Of course that (and the possibility of being run out of office) could be made configurable game options that advocates of strict realism could use and people interested in playing god could disable.
"The special factor of the city's social geography is its low density of settlement, the ease and scope of movement of the overwhelming
proportion of its citizens, and its comparative lack of domination by a single downtown area. It has thus escaped the rigid core, sector,and ring structure of business and residential occupation that tyrannized the industrial metropolis..."
"The plan for a metropolis composed of single-family houses did not emerge from the drawing boards of freeway engineers; their constructions followed an already entrenched preference of the Angelenos."
The freeways were a later addition, but they followed the broad outline created by the eariler system of major streets. The earliest traffic plans used a series of major avenues that were freeway-like in their intended use as major routes for long-range traffic. The system of independent developments was not something that just happened; it was a result of deliberate planning. Now some of that probably did represent the desires of the inhabitants, but a lot of it was also deliberately set up by real estate developers. But when you look it's clear that many of the freeways parallel previously existing major traffic arteries. The Ventura, Santa Monica, and Century freeways all parallel and are named after the Boulevards that carried the same traffic before they were built.
"The 1939 plan called for limited-access express highways to be laid out in the form of a giant grid, which would be capable of carrying automobile traffic both into and out of the overcrowded Los Angeles central business district and would guide it across the city without the necessity of its going throught the downtown area."
The Board which decided on this plan was made up of representatives from all over the metro area, and they rejected a designed hub-and-wheel pattern because of how dispersed people already were.
I think that, to some extent, this reinforces my point. While it's true that there were many freeways that don't go into downtown, there was a deliberate effort to make it easy to get to downtown because it was so heavily developed. The plan may not have been pure hub and wheel, but anyone looking at a freeway map of LA can tell exactly where downtown is; it's the place where the grid is deliberately distorted to bring all of the traffic in. (It also looks as though the LA county freeways were made without reference to Orange county, as there's a serious dislocation right along the 605.) There may have been some effort to de-emphasize downtown relative to other major cities of the time, but the city was clearly designed with downtown as its economic and cultural heart.
The other thing, of course, is that this kind of planning is clever because it doesn't look like planning. Rather than telling people where they could and couldn't build, imposing a plan on people who didn't want one, the planners changed the cultural geography so that people would want to build where the planners wanted them to. Controlling the transportation system, particularly in an area that was deliberately set up to be diffuse by the standards of the day, allowed the planners to impose a long-term order on development without getting bogged down in constant defense of detailed planning documents.
Sad to say, but for the most part people haven't ever developed cures for diseases. Antibiotics are the only cure that's ever really worked. Every other really significant development has been in prevention, either in vaccination or public health measures like water purification that prevent the spread of diseases. Everything else is pretty much giving the body help in doing its own job fighting off disease.
If you want to know a new area of comparatively recent research, though, look at ulcers. Until very recently people thought that ulcers were an organic problem in which the body naturally produced too much stomach acid, so there was no cure- just long term treatment that happened to be very profitable for the drug companies. Then somebody discovered that the excess acid production was caused by a bacterial (Helicobacter pylori) infection that could be eliminated by a regimen of antibiotics, eliminating the need to be dependent on expensive drugs. Naturally the drug companies aren't happy with this. They've tried unsuccessfully to discredit the research, and they've also tried more successfully to keep it out of the public eye. The real reason that they're encouraging people to take Pepcid, Tagamet, etc. without consulting their doctors is so that they won't find out that their heartburn is caused by a curable ulcer. IMO it's disgusting.
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Good thing you don't follow it correctly, then. The law was intended to illegalize inciting violence against people. There's already case law showing that there is not a free speech right to incite violence (e.g. inciting riot), so in theory nothing is lost through this law. Similarly, there is no law against making a casual claim about doing violence ("My coworkers make me so angry sometimes I want to kill them"), but making a credible threat of violence against somebody (shaking a fist and saying, "Shut up or I'll pound you") is alread illegal (assault). The issue in this case is whether simply listing peoples' names and what they've done wrong is actually inciting violence (not protected) or just expressing an opinion (protected). AFAIK the site carefully avoided explicit calls for any specific action against the listed doctors but did use various suggestive tactics like putting their faces on wanted posters. The defendants won on the narrow grounds that their site was not actually inciting violence but did not challenge the underlying constitutionality of the law.
Also agreed. Public blackmail for stadia isn't going to stop until we give teams the collective finger. It's a game of prisoners' dilemma on a grand scale. The optimum solution is all cities saying no, but each city will tend to get greedy and say yes because they think they'll be better of if their team has the nice facility. The result is that all of the cities build new facilities and everything is just as it was before.
Fat chance. Sports ticket prices are set pretty much to maximize revenues, so changes in salary have essentially no impact. That's because the marginal cost of selling an additional seat is very close to 0; once their roster is set their costs are set, so their prices are set simply to bring in as much money as possible. The feedback between salary and ticket prices is a result of good players making fans more interested in coming to see the team, not (as owners claim) a result of ticket prices going up to support high salaries. If the players started playing for free tomorrow the owners would just pocket the extra money rather than reducing ticket prices. Haven't you noticed that ticket prices never go down when a team loses its expensive players?
As far as rising ticket prices go, they're not happening in a vacum. Owners will stop raising ticket prices as soon as fans prove unwilling to pay for them. Prices keep going up precisely because the sports are nowhere near tanking. The actual situation is more like "Owners raise ticket prices because they can get away with it. Players ask for more money because it's there, and owners give it to them because they want to attract fans with the best team possible." Salaries and ticket prices will stop spiraling upward as soon as fans vote to stop it with their wallets, and not a day sooner.
It depends on how the system is structured. If you design it well, you may be able to set it up so that it doesn't pay porn sites to try getting listed higher than hotmail when searching for hotmail. You could do that, for instance, by charging the company for views rather than clickthroughs; that way it wouldn't make sense to try listing yourself on topics where you expect your clickthrough rate to be low. Of course if you're doing a straight pay for listing scheme you may also be able to afford to have a person screen the people trying to get a listing and denying those that don't make sense, like trying to get your porn listed pretty much anywhere except for the porn category.
Sure this is a problem, but it's more an example of applying the wrong tool. Google was never intended for comprehensively finding every scrap of information about a particular topic; it was designed to find the few most relevant and interesting sites discussing a particular topic. Using a general purpose tool for a highly specific task is a wonderful way of getting frustrated but not an efficient approach to solving your problems.
In fact, there are specialized search engines for dealing with specific topics. There are engines specifically for looking for images, ones for looking at specialized topics, and so on. There are also specialized, classified catalogues of information of exactly the kind you suggest are needed out there for people who need to know about them. If, for instance, I want to learn about a specific topic in biology, I might very well start out by looking at PubMed, a special purpose index of biological research articles. You just have to know where to look for the special purpose tools.
I guess that I have mixed feelings about this. Conrary to the implication of the article, it sounds as though part of the deal is that this is a move to centralize broadcast by MLB specifically so that they _can_ guarantee availability of feeds. Honestly $10 per season isn't that much to a true baseball junkie, considering that I already spend something like $50 a year on various baseball reference books and the like- and I'm nowhere near the worst in that department. $10 is OK, that is, provided that it guarantees access to any game I want on any computer I want to listen to it from.
I just have a terrible feeling that eliminating ads from the mix just isn't going to be part of the deal. That's particularly true because of the insidious way in which announcers will toss in a short advertizement between pitches, but I have a feeling that this is also going to be a pioneer in targeted advertizing. I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out that they're going to replace the radio ads with special internet ones, and possibly even target them specifically for particular listeners. You're already going to have to provide authentication just to get the feed, so targeted advertizing (and demographic profiling) is going to be part of the story.
Except that this isn't true. If I look up, say, Ronald Reagan, none of the top 5 hits are big commercial sites. They include the Whitehouse pages on former presidents, a fan page, the Reagan Presidential Foundation, the Reagan Library, and the Official Reagan Web Site. If I look up Linux Kernel, the #1 site is the Kernel Archives page. Maybe you're looking for data where there just aren't many interesting independant web sites out there, which is not something that can be cured with a better search engine.
But you're still talking about a wireless local network, not wireless to your home. Your system covers a narrow enough area that you don't have to worry about sharing your 11 Mb/s with your neighbor. When you start talking about replacing the last mile, though, you're talking about sharing access for hundred or thousands of end users on a single wireless network, which means that you're going to need to expand the bandwidth quite a bit. Remember that you don't save much compared to running fiber to every house if you still need a separate wireless network on every block.
The problem with this argument is that 'entirely located within a single state' is not enough. It's easy to make the case that your argument would only apply if the network couldn't talk to anyone outside of the state, which would make it pretty useless. There's an extremely solid case that any network capable of carrying interstate traffic is going to be subject to Federal regulation.
Wireless is wonderful for the ability to roam, but it really can't compete on the bandwidth side. Now it's possible that we'll be satisfied by the bandwidth that you can get from wireless, but I seriously doubt it. When you start talking about video on demand, wireless just isn't going to be able to cut it. As far as picking the right technology, it's pretty clear that fiber will do the job. You can get truly massive bandwidth through a fiber, and upgrading to truly obscene bandwidth only requires changing the equipment at the ends, not the actual carrier. There's every reason to think that fiber to the home would be capable of supplying all the bandwidth any home user will need for way longer than you'd need to justify the cost.
One could equally well argue that the people who insist that employees dress a particular way aren't committed to the product but rather to a certain lifestyle. After all, they seem to value a particular mode of dress and behavior over keeping the people who developed and understand the product. Equally, the employees who stayed on might not be the ones who value the product but rather the ones who are unable to find a job elsewhere. Dumping the top performers to keep the guys your competitors won't touch is hardly a way to improve the company.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I'm personally very happy that my employer doesn't demand formal dress. They're perfectly happy to allow employees who don't come into contact with outsiders to dress any way that complies with the needs of safety and modesty. I'd be very worried about management that cared more about the way I dress than the amount that I contribute to my projects, since it represents a focus on perception rather than reality.
Well, stability is relative. The Unix systems that you probably regard as incredibly stable would be considered dangerously unstable by mainframe people. Win2000 may not quite reach the level of stability found in *BSD or Linux, but it sure beats the hell out of the old DOS based systems. Going from "crashes for no obvious reason" to "crashes only when severely stressed" is a huge win.
I thought that a number of companies were already doing that with their x86 code, so extending it to IA64 isn't going to kill them. Certainly I know that various Linux vendors are already shipping multiple different libraries on their CDs so that the one that's optimized for the right x86 version gets installed. RedHat, for instance, includes processor optimized glibc and kernel versions in RH7. I'd assume that this wouldn't be too terribly hard to do for most companies, since the amount of really performance critical code is comparatively small. I've also heard about using userspace code morphing approaches to optimize binaries. IIRC, HP was able to get real world performance enhancements even after the added overhead when code morphing compiled code onto the same processor(!) because they could optimize behavior that couldn't be accounted for until runtime.
Actually, Intel's plan makes perfect sense. They're trying to market their chip first to the kinds of users who are willing to rewrite/recompile their software to take advantage of the new instruction set. Those people are the ones running Open Source code like Linux and Apache or homebuilt applications for special purpose applications. Note, for instance, that RedHat is already working on an Itanium version of their distro. That market will then give vendors like Microsoft a reason to develop versions of their software for the Itanium. You can be that if Linux + Apache + Perl on Itanium turns out to be a successful web serving environment that MS is going to want to produce a Windows + IIS + ASP competitor. Once the hard part of porting Windows is done, MS is going to want to move their other apps to the new architecture, too, and the whole market will move over. Intel is looking at it taking 5 years or so to move completely from x86 to IA64, but they've actually figured out a way of breaking backward compatibility and not dying for it. Of course they're also keeping an alternative around by keeping their x86 development, so if things blow up on them they'll still have chips to sell.
What IMO is even worse in the long run is that opening up new markets with internet appliances rather than PCs threatens the openness of the PC. One of the things that's really driven things like the OpenDVD process and Napster is the ability to add new features to your computer that may not be approved of by a centralized authority. The move to closed hardware in appliances also locks out the ability to add unapproved software. Open Source only matters if you can actually install modified software on the device. By selling people appliances that the producers still control, companies like AOL/TW can lock out technologies like Napster that threaten their core businesses like movies and music. If most of the world gets weaned on stripped down, single purpose devices, AOL/TW can strangle developments they don't want in their infancy.
Getting undergraduates might not be such a great idea, particularly if you're looking to hire them for only a little while. I make daily use of a software package that was developed that way and am in charge of mofifying it for our lab and it's a complete mess. It's made up of a whole bunch of complete spagetti code with no adequate modularization and features bolted in with no adequate thought. It's a nightmare to maintain and modify because it was built by aggregation rather than design. I've talked to the director of the lab where it was developed, and he says that the underlying problem is that it was designed by undergraduates who were only in the lab for a few months at a time. They never had a chance to go through and heavily rework sections that needed reworking, and in a lot of cases they took obvious approaches to problems that didn't scale well so that the system starts to collapse when it exceeds the load it was originally designed to handle.
Note that I'm not saying that the problem here is that the programmers were undergraduates, per se. The problem is that they were only around for long enough to solve one or two problems, so they didn't see how their solution was going to cause problems for the next guy to work on the problem. The difficulty is that the approach of hiring cheap undergraduate labor to do your programming naturally tends to wind up resulting in that kind of problem. If you can find a competent and reliable undergraduate to do it you're just fine, but grabbing a random guy who's going to stay for only 3 months is going to cause problems.
Bonobo is the name for the GNOME component architecture, which is intended to allow each compliant system to embed other compliant programs and gain their features. This is pretty similar to the way that you can embed any kind of MS Office document in any other kind of MS Office document. I guess that you could view it as allowing the programs to interact with each other promiscuously, although I'm not sure if that was exactly what the designers were thinking when they gave it that name.
FWIW, Bonobos are actually apes, not monkeys, are sometimes referred to as pygmy chimpanzees, and are believed to be the species most closely related to humans.
This is 100% wrong. If you try to write things in plain language, people can use the ambiguity of everyday speech to claim that the law means something other than what its authors thought it meant, which is exactly contrary to your stated goal- that laws' meanings should be absolutely clear. The goal of legalese is to make the meaning of the writing as specific as possible so that people can't weasel out of it. In this way it's like the jargon used by any other profession; it uses a large number of technical terms with extremely precise meanings that are not used in everyday speech. There was actually a wonderful comparison of legal jargon and computer language in one of the earlier briefs, although that was in the opposite direction. Unfortunately, there's a lot of inertia in jargon- as long as the concept doesn't change the word doesn't change- and law has been going for thousands of years. That means that some of the terms have been used exactly the same way since before the birth of Christ while the rest of language has mutated around them.
There are plenty of other reasons to run *nix. You might like the idea of a system that doesn't crash at the slightest provocation the way that Win9x does. You might like the fact that it comes with a whole development environment as standard equipment. You might have ethical objections to running a proprietary operating system. You might like the availablility of standard *nix administration tools like crond and real shell scripting. You might have learned to use *nix at school and not want to learn a new system. There are plenty of reasons.
It seems to me that there are two arguments here. One is the common one about censorware being evil and the other is that there is no censorware available for some (i.e. Free Software) operating systems that people want to sell. I don't have any solutions to the first other than to try to stop the legislation from passing, but I do have an idea about the second. Well just install Junkbuster and call it censorware.
If you think about it, Junkbuster is capable of doing everything that people expect from their censorware. It can block a whole list of sites based either on domain names (like whitehouse.com) or regexs (like domains including the word sex). With a bit of work you could make it look just like any other piece of censorware. Of course the big difference is that you'd also include the traditional anti-ad blocklist and a set of instructions- maybe even a shell script- to switch from blocking pr0n to blocking ads. This would allow you to dodge the law while providing something that your customers actually want. It's also easy as hell to disable if you decide to do so.
If you really want to convince them, you might consider including some kind of mild advertizement, like using their branded web browser and computers with an obvious logo. The provider for the local library is going to have a leg up with the people who are using the library for access if/when they decide to get their own computer and ISP. Make that clear to them and they'll take the idea of giving to the library much more seriously.
For the hardware you might also consider trying to get a local business to donate their old computers. Many businesses are constantly replacing older models that are perfectly satisfactory for web browsing, and they may get a tax deduction for donating them to a worthy cause.
It's important to point out that the conventional High School History picture of Whitney inventing the cotton gin from scratch is not really accurate. There were existing tools that did the same job, but they did it badly. Whitney developed an improved version of an existing device, not a totally new invention. As your source quotes Whitney from a letter to his father:
Something like that which is an improved version of an older device is always much tougher to protect effectively by patent than something completely novel.
Well there is lobbying- you'll get messages that businesses demand an airport or the public wants a baseball stadium- and you can track your approval rating, but you can't be deposed. SimCity is very much a "god" game in that you have much more power than any real mayor would. For instance, you're not just in charge of police, fire, roads, and planning, but also schools (which in most USA cities are handled by a separate government agency). Furthermore you have power to enact orninances without opposition, which is contrary to the typical USA practice. I think that the godlike aspect is part of what makes people like the game, and the idea of losing an election if you do a bad job is something that many players wouldn't like. In fact, many people seem to think that occasional episodes of deliberate mismanagement to destroy the city are a ton of fun.
One thing that really bothers me about the game is its treatment of emminent domain. In the real world, the government is required to pay a (nominally) fair market value for property taken for public use; when you want to build a freeway you have to pay the owners of the land you take. In SimCity, though, you just have to pay the cost of demolishing the buildings- not their value and not the value of the land under them. Putting in costs like that would make the game much more interesting, IMO. Of course that (and the possibility of being run out of office) could be made configurable game options that advocates of strict realism could use and people interested in playing god could disable.
The freeways were a later addition, but they followed the broad outline created by the eariler system of major streets. The earliest traffic plans used a series of major avenues that were freeway-like in their intended use as major routes for long-range traffic. The system of independent developments was not something that just happened; it was a result of deliberate planning. Now some of that probably did represent the desires of the inhabitants, but a lot of it was also deliberately set up by real estate developers. But when you look it's clear that many of the freeways parallel previously existing major traffic arteries. The Ventura, Santa Monica, and Century freeways all parallel and are named after the Boulevards that carried the same traffic before they were built.
I think that, to some extent, this reinforces my point. While it's true that there were many freeways that don't go into downtown, there was a deliberate effort to make it easy to get to downtown because it was so heavily developed. The plan may not have been pure hub and wheel, but anyone looking at a freeway map of LA can tell exactly where downtown is; it's the place where the grid is deliberately distorted to bring all of the traffic in. (It also looks as though the LA county freeways were made without reference to Orange county, as there's a serious dislocation right along the 605.) There may have been some effort to de-emphasize downtown relative to other major cities of the time, but the city was clearly designed with downtown as its economic and cultural heart.
The other thing, of course, is that this kind of planning is clever because it doesn't look like planning. Rather than telling people where they could and couldn't build, imposing a plan on people who didn't want one, the planners changed the cultural geography so that people would want to build where the planners wanted them to. Controlling the transportation system, particularly in an area that was deliberately set up to be diffuse by the standards of the day, allowed the planners to impose a long-term order on development without getting bogged down in constant defense of detailed planning documents.
Sad to say, but for the most part people haven't ever developed cures for diseases. Antibiotics are the only cure that's ever really worked. Every other really significant development has been in prevention, either in vaccination or public health measures like water purification that prevent the spread of diseases. Everything else is pretty much giving the body help in doing its own job fighting off disease.
If you want to know a new area of comparatively recent research, though, look at ulcers. Until very recently people thought that ulcers were an organic problem in which the body naturally produced too much stomach acid, so there was no cure- just long term treatment that happened to be very profitable for the drug companies. Then somebody discovered that the excess acid production was caused by a bacterial (Helicobacter pylori) infection that could be eliminated by a regimen of antibiotics, eliminating the need to be dependent on expensive drugs. Naturally the drug companies aren't happy with this. They've tried unsuccessfully to discredit the research, and they've also tried more successfully to keep it out of the public eye. The real reason that they're encouraging people to take Pepcid, Tagamet, etc. without consulting their doctors is so that they won't find out that their heartburn is caused by a curable ulcer. IMO it's disgusting.