The chip on your shoulder got the better of you;-). I made no statement that a private health insurance company would behave any better. I also stated that the behaviour is in the nature of this government, not any government. This government has existed in an idealistic and practical sense since the '80s.
The NHS of Bevan, for example, was not in the business of cutting back and selling off.
It's been during the transitional phase that parents have had the chance to spend a decent amount of quality time with their kids. For traditionally the kids went from live-in nanny to boarding school. Today the parents must both work.
But I enjoyed that in-between where my mother could stay at home but not afford a live-in nanny. Though my grandmother did live with us, her role was more in house care. We also had a regular gardener and cleaner. I miss the gardener. He kept ducks and taught me about fish care. He had a son with learning difficulties and my family hired him too. And this is just enough backstory for a Radio 4 play.
just because a technology is available, it does not automatically make us more evil.
Just because air is available, it doesn't automatically make us more alive. But it's in our nature to breathe, so it's gonna happen.
These sorts of "enabling" technologies are routinely abused by social services in England because it is in the nature of this government to take as much as possible and give as little as possible, where the "giving" is by mutual back-scratching with private vendors of unnecessary crap.
The alternative is an archaic system of elder care called "families".
Right, where to begin...
(1) Yes, families do have the option to look after older members to a certain degree, and it's sad that parents in some societies are encouraged to separate themselves from their children and vice versa;
(2) But not everyone has children. Recall also that children are a huge unearnt burden to the state, while older people have already paid their national insurance / social security / whatever contributions and are just getting the care they paid for. We are all better off because we do not breed out of concern about our frailties;
(3) There are certain classes of illnesses better tackled by a staff of trained physical and mental health shift workers. For example, someone who is senile but mobile can be a great danger to themselves. They will keep you up all night. When do you propose to sleep?
There are lots of poor alternatives to a good system of social welfare, and assuming that everyone has a loving able family of infinite resources produces one of them.
Now social services in England will have another excuse not to help people who need human attendance. "This equipment works just as well!" No, some GPS/accelerometer/camera/button is no substitute for the supervision, companionship and observational skill of humans.
Patric Stewart is in deed a fine actor, but far less creative than the person who wrote his roles.
Shakespeare was exceptionally creative with English and his plays can be admired even on paper (still much better with good actors, though). But TNG's writing was symbiotic with Stewart's panache, and TNG would have been shit if you or I had played Picard.
If a machine could do his job, and allow him to be even more creative, why not?
But a machine cannot do his job - to interpret a character and respond to a live audience as effectively as a human requires a human (or something sufficiently close to a human that it should enjoy the rights of a human). And it does not follow that a machine doing his job would "allow him to be" something else - he may have neither the interest nor strength of ability in writing that he possesses in acting. The guy's been honing only one of these skills for decades.
You don't think he would like to be able to create virtual partrics that could go out and perform works while he did whatever he liked?
Creating little humans somewhat like you and with the ability to perform as well as you do is having children. Children are not your slaves.
Perhaps even performing a work he particularly enjoyed while they make him money or perform other useful work?
I have no indication that Stewart's bottleneck in life is his lack of money.
Acting and playing music require creativity (as creativity requires work). For example, Patrick Stewart enables Shakespeare, Scrooge and Star Trek. This is not because he understands how robots work but because he understands how humans work.
If you think that acting is for robotic simpletons, you are welcome to upload to Youtube a video of yourself reprising any of Stewart's roles. For Youtube is full of fools who think they are stars, but few so pompous as to regard a live performance as nothing but a subroutine executed.
And this is why the web has become a mess of eye-candy. I wish IE6's lack of modern shiny had forced producers to focus more on content, but no, it causes them to spend months figuring every hack possible to get things looking pointlessly pixel-perfect.
I still am caught several times a day by a broken back button because some dolt has decided it's okay to implement navigation by only reloading part of the page. And then there's the sites where parts appear in random order over the course of a minute, often not completing entirely, because some hipster decided it would be all Web 2.0 to make 50 small requests. And does that menu really need to animate itself into place over the text I'm reading? Oh, and I want to know when a link is a link so stop disguising them and making me guess.
If you want to inform my mind of how to view your content, just make an interactive PDF. It'll then be easier for me to know to ignore your site. I hate Facebook but I've learnt that Facebook is popular because it's fairly predictable and uniform - once you've browsed one person's page you can browse a hundred million pages without spending time re-learning navigation.
It's sometimes useful to think of China as two countries; a somewhat-developed country of about 400 million, mostly in the coastal provinces, plus another 900 million rural peasants.
Am I the only human in the world who has reverted to CRTs on the desktop and in the living room?
Cheap to buy. Colour looks right from all angles. Nice range of dark to bright. And built to last for decades - every LCD I've had to use is so fucking flimsy by comparison. Backlights fade and power supplies seem to be built with a self-destruct.
Hell, on a larger non-HDTV screen (btw I want better writing, not more eye candy) the softness of an older set is much nicer than the blockiness of a new LCD.
But then when I'm on the move it's with a Psion Series 3a and a 7-year-old mobile, wondering how the hell anyone does any real work on an iPhone thumbpad.
I said it was the more capable, more portable, less locked-in choice for implementing workflow management, when compared to Google Apps Script, for Google Apps users.
And how, exactly, do you intend to justify a restrictive barebones cluster storage platform for productively implementing typical business workflow management?
If an open-source alternative that supports the same APIs is availabe so that you are not dependent on the original vendor for continued support of the platform on which your custom code runs, you aren't in any meaningful sense "locked-in" to anything.
Meanwhile, in the real world, the OSS reimplementation ends up thoroughly incomplete, lagging and displaying quirks which means you either have to write to a crippled subset or give up and do what MS expects you'll do and move to their fully featured platform.
And that's just when some of the platform has the stamp of a vaguely independent standards body. Google's platform, meanwhile, is open in the same way Flash is open.
In theory, lock-in never exists because you could always reimplement the API as well as the original. In practice, to prevent lock-in you need a clear divide between standard and implementation. Even W3C does it wrong with HTML by giving way too much weight to the wishes of Apple.
That's the opportunity to run your Java bytecode or Python on their boxes with a set of APIs for Google's raw cluster services. It's hardly the first port of call for building typical small business glue code on existing software.
since independent implementations of the APIs exist, isn't lock in
This is as specious as ".NET isn't lock-in because Mono".
Apps Script is essentially "macros on steroids"
Apps Script is far more limited than, say, MS Office macros. Office macros are just a special case of use of the general Windows scripting framework, with all sorts of software exposing.NET/COM objects at different levels.
Hard to see what a "highly competent" IT department would do differently.
You lack imagination. Every business has different workflows from every other. The job of IT is to configure available software and write glue code to ensure as much as possible is automated and anything requiring human interaction is quickly accessible.
Let's say for example that the business handles some subscription process. IT's job would be to write code to handle the various possible subscribe states, transitioning automatically with time events. Where human intervention is required, entering a name should immediately provide a screen with subscriber state, history, and the option to transition between states - all database updates, reminders, update of accounting databases etc are done automatically.
You will, having thought a bit and found out that even Google agrees, be itching to point out the glorious lock-in that is Google Apps Script which has been gradually coming out of experimental over the last year. Hell, some of it is even available to non-Premier customers. But that's the point. Who wants to be at the mercy of one provider's limited programming environment? Mail services: (1) sendEmail; (2) getRemainingDailyQuota. Uhuh.
(At least they're using Mathematica-style notation for optional arguments.)
IT is also there to ensure the fundamentals of computing security are followed such as the principle of least privilege. Google Docs immediately fails on this because Google has the ability to analyse rather than merely store your data.
Are you the geek mocked by bullies at school for sounding smart who scours the web looking to do to others what is done to you?
Protip for adulthood:
Applying full assortment of language to express ideas clearly and concisely = good. Unnecessary appendages and other verbosity (e.g. "forsooth") = bad. Acting like the bully who taunted you at school = embarrassing.
I'm not sure it's possible to have a resonable conversation with someone who uses "therefrom" in a sentence, but let's try.
Hm *reads post* did "lain" also worry you?
I grew up with a fairly smart friend. He was the typical engineering type while I was more of a theoretical geek. He suffered from horrible dyslexia. But he took regular lessons throughout his teenage years to help him cope with it and ended up a much more confident and capable writer.
Perhaps you should follow his example and deal with your issues with English rather than lashing out at others?
What's your suggestion then? Governments save money by using contractors. They can't hire experts in everything.
This only applies when demand/supply is such that it would cost way too much to have your own infrastructure and/or experts. This might apply, say, for building aircraft. It doesn't apply for hiring computer janitors(*).
Likely your option to for the government to stop collecting information at all, which I'm sure will be a great comfort when some kid puts his car through your living room window because "driver's licenses are oppression, man"
The job of processing driver's licences (which afaik doesn't fall on the City of LA, but maybe it does) does not require complex computation or innovation. It would be cheaper to pay a group of competent men a reasonable wage to run the system rather than contracting out to a for-profit firm.
(*) The health service in the UK, for example, often decides to pay agencies twice what it would cost to simply hire a worker. The agencies provide nursing, cleaning etc staff who lack familiarity with where they work, also reducing productivity. There are many people who benefit from this corruption, but service users are not among them.
So, it's flamebait to suggest that I find it unreasonable that a government which already forces me to give it various amounts of private data will also pass that private data on to private corporations? Especially private corporations which make a business of data mining?
No problem there at all then? All going to bend over and take it? Thought so.
A "datacentre"/is/ an oversized server room - no need to get all elite-penis-comparison. And a small, highly competent IT department will tailor its systems precisely for business needs, saving money and time over the one-size-fits-all Google approach. I don't know what kind of incompetent IT staff cost so much that people think they need to hand their work over to Google - perhaps I just don't meet enough incompetent IT staff.
(Of course, we know what's really happening: It looks like a money-saving item in the short term, and this will give the manager an appropriate bonus.)
Regardless, Google simply isn't an acceptable option for privacy reasons. Just as it is unacceptable that the British government contract out data handling to BT - though occasionally you can opt out.
Slashdot Mirror
The chip on your shoulder got the better of you ;-). I made no statement that a private health insurance company would behave any better. I also stated that the behaviour is in the nature of this government, not any government. This government has existed in an idealistic and practical sense since the '80s.
The NHS of Bevan, for example, was not in the business of cutting back and selling off.
It's been during the transitional phase that parents have had the chance to spend a decent amount of quality time with their kids. For traditionally the kids went from live-in nanny to boarding school. Today the parents must both work.
But I enjoyed that in-between where my mother could stay at home but not afford a live-in nanny. Though my grandmother did live with us, her role was more in house care. We also had a regular gardener and cleaner. I miss the gardener. He kept ducks and taught me about fish care. He had a son with learning difficulties and my family hired him too. And this is just enough backstory for a Radio 4 play.
just because a technology is available, it does not automatically make us more evil.
Just because air is available, it doesn't automatically make us more alive. But it's in our nature to breathe, so it's gonna happen.
These sorts of "enabling" technologies are routinely abused by social services in England because it is in the nature of this government to take as much as possible and give as little as possible, where the "giving" is by mutual back-scratching with private vendors of unnecessary crap.
The alternative is an archaic system of elder care called "families".
Right, where to begin...
(1) Yes, families do have the option to look after older members to a certain degree, and it's sad that parents in some societies are encouraged to separate themselves from their children and vice versa;
(2) But not everyone has children. Recall also that children are a huge unearnt burden to the state, while older people have already paid their national insurance / social security / whatever contributions and are just getting the care they paid for. We are all better off because we do not breed out of concern about our frailties;
(3) There are certain classes of illnesses better tackled by a staff of trained physical and mental health shift workers. For example, someone who is senile but mobile can be a great danger to themselves. They will keep you up all night. When do you propose to sleep?
There are lots of poor alternatives to a good system of social welfare, and assuming that everyone has a loving able family of infinite resources produces one of them.
Now social services in England will have another excuse not to help people who need human attendance. "This equipment works just as well!" No, some GPS/accelerometer/camera/button is no substitute for the supervision, companionship and observational skill of humans.
Patric Stewart is in deed a fine actor, but far less creative than the person who wrote his roles.
Shakespeare was exceptionally creative with English and his plays can be admired even on paper (still much better with good actors, though). But TNG's writing was symbiotic with Stewart's panache, and TNG would have been shit if you or I had played Picard.
If a machine could do his job, and allow him to be even more creative, why not?
But a machine cannot do his job - to interpret a character and respond to a live audience as effectively as a human requires a human (or something sufficiently close to a human that it should enjoy the rights of a human). And it does not follow that a machine doing his job would "allow him to be" something else - he may have neither the interest nor strength of ability in writing that he possesses in acting. The guy's been honing only one of these skills for decades.
You don't think he would like to be able to create virtual partrics that could go out and perform works while he did whatever he liked?
Creating little humans somewhat like you and with the ability to perform as well as you do is having children. Children are not your slaves.
Perhaps even performing a work he particularly enjoyed while they make him money or perform other useful work?
I have no indication that Stewart's bottleneck in life is his lack of money.
Acting and playing music require creativity (as creativity requires work). For example, Patrick Stewart enables Shakespeare, Scrooge and Star Trek. This is not because he understands how robots work but because he understands how humans work.
If you think that acting is for robotic simpletons, you are welcome to upload to Youtube a video of yourself reprising any of Stewart's roles. For Youtube is full of fools who think they are stars, but few so pompous as to regard a live performance as nothing but a subroutine executed.
On an average popular torrent, are these companies also listed?
anything interesting. Like round corners
And this is why the web has become a mess of eye-candy. I wish IE6's lack of modern shiny had forced producers to focus more on content, but no, it causes them to spend months figuring every hack possible to get things looking pointlessly pixel-perfect.
I still am caught several times a day by a broken back button because some dolt has decided it's okay to implement navigation by only reloading part of the page. And then there's the sites where parts appear in random order over the course of a minute, often not completing entirely, because some hipster decided it would be all Web 2.0 to make 50 small requests. And does that menu really need to animate itself into place over the text I'm reading? Oh, and I want to know when a link is a link so stop disguising them and making me guess.
If you want to inform my mind of how to view your content, just make an interactive PDF. It'll then be easier for me to know to ignore your site. I hate Facebook but I've learnt that Facebook is popular because it's fairly predictable and uniform - once you've browsed one person's page you can browse a hundred million pages without spending time re-learning navigation.
Then offer to work minimum wage.
Otherwise, consider the extra pay gratitude.
It's sometimes useful to think of China as two countries; a somewhat-developed country of about 400 million, mostly in the coastal provinces, plus another 900 million rural peasants.
And then there's the United States.
Am I the only human in the world who has reverted to CRTs on the desktop and in the living room?
Cheap to buy. Colour looks right from all angles. Nice range of dark to bright. And built to last for decades - every LCD I've had to use is so fucking flimsy by comparison. Backlights fade and power supplies seem to be built with a self-destruct.
Hell, on a larger non-HDTV screen (btw I want better writing, not more eye candy) the softness of an older set is much nicer than the blockiness of a new LCD.
But then when I'm on the move it's with a Psion Series 3a and a 7-year-old mobile, wondering how the hell anyone does any real work on an iPhone thumbpad.
The purpose of capitalism is to make you think you wanted something you never wanted, then to sell it to you.
I said it was the more capable, more portable, less locked-in choice for implementing workflow management, when compared to Google Apps Script, for Google Apps users.
And how, exactly, do you intend to justify a restrictive barebones cluster storage platform for productively implementing typical business workflow management?
If an open-source alternative that supports the same APIs is availabe so that you are not dependent on the original vendor for continued support of the platform on which your custom code runs, you aren't in any meaningful sense "locked-in" to anything.
Meanwhile, in the real world, the OSS reimplementation ends up thoroughly incomplete, lagging and displaying quirks which means you either have to write to a crippled subset or give up and do what MS expects you'll do and move to their fully featured platform.
And that's just when some of the platform has the stamp of a vaguely independent standards body. Google's platform, meanwhile, is open in the same way Flash is open.
In theory, lock-in never exists because you could always reimplement the API as well as the original. In practice, to prevent lock-in you need a clear divide between standard and implementation. Even W3C does it wrong with HTML by giving way too much weight to the wishes of Apple.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
A catawampus squint reveals an implication that NYC lawyers chew wang.
Well, a fight with RIAA is never clean...
what I would point out is Google App Engine
That's the opportunity to run your Java bytecode or Python on their boxes with a set of APIs for Google's raw cluster services. It's hardly the first port of call for building typical small business glue code on existing software.
since independent implementations of the APIs exist, isn't lock in
This is as specious as ".NET isn't lock-in because Mono".
Apps Script is essentially "macros on steroids"
Apps Script is far more limited than, say, MS Office macros. Office macros are just a special case of use of the general Windows scripting framework, with all sorts of software exposing .NET/COM objects at different levels.
Yup.
Correct. An ad hominem attacks the person to bolster another argument.
Hard to see what a "highly competent" IT department would do differently.
You lack imagination. Every business has different workflows from every other. The job of IT is to configure available software and write glue code to ensure as much as possible is automated and anything requiring human interaction is quickly accessible.
Let's say for example that the business handles some subscription process. IT's job would be to write code to handle the various possible subscribe states, transitioning automatically with time events. Where human intervention is required, entering a name should immediately provide a screen with subscriber state, history, and the option to transition between states - all database updates, reminders, update of accounting databases etc are done automatically.
You will, having thought a bit and found out that even Google agrees, be itching to point out the glorious lock-in that is Google Apps Script which has been gradually coming out of experimental over the last year. Hell, some of it is even available to non-Premier customers. But that's the point. Who wants to be at the mercy of one provider's limited programming environment? Mail services: (1) sendEmail; (2) getRemainingDailyQuota. Uhuh.
(At least they're using Mathematica-style notation for optional arguments.)
IT is also there to ensure the fundamentals of computing security are followed such as the principle of least privilege. Google Docs immediately fails on this because Google has the ability to analyse rather than merely store your data.
Are you the geek mocked by bullies at school for sounding smart who scours the web looking to do to others what is done to you?
Protip for adulthood:
Applying full assortment of language to express ideas clearly and concisely = good.
Unnecessary appendages and other verbosity (e.g. "forsooth") = bad.
Acting like the bully who taunted you at school = embarrassing.
I'm not sure it's possible to have a resonable conversation with someone who uses "therefrom" in a sentence, but let's try.
Hm *reads post* did "lain" also worry you?
I grew up with a fairly smart friend. He was the typical engineering type while I was more of a theoretical geek. He suffered from horrible dyslexia. But he took regular lessons throughout his teenage years to help him cope with it and ended up a much more confident and capable writer.
Perhaps you should follow his example and deal with your issues with English rather than lashing out at others?
What's your suggestion then? Governments save money by using contractors. They can't hire experts in everything.
This only applies when demand/supply is such that it would cost way too much to have your own infrastructure and/or experts. This might apply, say, for building aircraft. It doesn't apply for hiring computer janitors(*).
Likely your option to for the government to stop collecting information at all, which I'm sure will be a great comfort when some kid puts his car through your living room window because "driver's licenses are oppression, man"
The job of processing driver's licences (which afaik doesn't fall on the City of LA, but maybe it does) does not require complex computation or innovation. It would be cheaper to pay a group of competent men a reasonable wage to run the system rather than contracting out to a for-profit firm.
(*) The health service in the UK, for example, often decides to pay agencies twice what it would cost to simply hire a worker. The agencies provide nursing, cleaning etc staff who lack familiarity with where they work, also reducing productivity. There are many people who benefit from this corruption, but service users are not among them.
So what you're saying is that previous generations have lain back and taken it, so you shall too?
Especially when data is outsourced to the worst possible choice, one whose central business is examining your data to see how it can profit therefrom?
So, it's flamebait to suggest that I find it unreasonable that a government which already forces me to give it various amounts of private data will also pass that private data on to private corporations? Especially private corporations which make a business of data mining?
No problem there at all then? All going to bend over and take it? Thought so.
A "datacentre" /is/ an oversized server room - no need to get all elite-penis-comparison. And a small, highly competent IT department will tailor its systems precisely for business needs, saving money and time over the one-size-fits-all Google approach. I don't know what kind of incompetent IT staff cost so much that people think they need to hand their work over to Google - perhaps I just don't meet enough incompetent IT staff.
(Of course, we know what's really happening: It looks like a money-saving item in the short term, and this will give the manager an appropriate bonus.)
Regardless, Google simply isn't an acceptable option for privacy reasons. Just as it is unacceptable that the British government contract out data handling to BT - though occasionally you can opt out.