You're comparing apples to oranges. I never said I'd rather have a drooling idiot with management experience than a scientist, I said I'd rather have a good mangers with a fair understanding of the technical issues that a poor manager who happened to by very knowledgeable. The first would have the resources and ability to find out about the half-life of various fissionable materials and get good people to tell him what the long term repercussions of a given disposal method would be. He'd make a decision based on the knowledge and advice of people that know what they are talking about and his own basic knowledge of the overall picture. That's what mangers do. They collect large amounts of big picture info and combine it with some fine grained information where needed to make decisions. A poor manager, no matter what his subject matter expertise, may make a bad decision because he didn't have all of the information (no one is an expert in every facet of every problem) and didn't know it. He may not make a decision at all because he delegated critical responsibilities or was unaware a problem existed.
It's also worth pointing out that I'm not arguing against Chu. He seems, at first blush, to be more that competent both as a scientist and a manager. I'm not saying that the two can't coexist, just that in the absence of a choice that is both, the manager role is more important for the Energy Secretary than the scientist role. If we were talking about a job as science adviser to the Sec. of Energy, the opposite would be true.
Because at the highest levels it is more important to understand how to mange your technical people to get the job done that it is to know exactly what they are doing. That's not to say that some understanding to the technology involved shouldn't be a goal of a good manager. Clearly you can't make decisions about direction without know what you are directing; but at the highest level of an organization I rather see a brilliant manager with a good overview of the technology, than a brilliant technician who lacks the ability to properly motivate and direct people. The ideal, of course, is a brilliant technician and manager who understands the technology AND can motivate and direct people. Here's hoping Steven Chu is the last of these.
Computers already track the planes. Most airports past "decent" sized and even a lot of small ones have computer assistance for the air traffic controllers. Planes can be tracked based on transponders and even GPS in some cases. People are still necessary for everything else though. Not all planes (especially small personal planes) are equipped with transponders, and fairly few are equipped with GPS transponders. Radar at most airports is not sensitive enough for exact locations, so eye balls are still needed. Most of all while you're right that true "emergencies" of the "Oh my God we're all going die!" type are fairly rare, most large airports field several to several dozen small emergencies everyday. Some of those would become serious emergencies if not expeditiously dealt with by trained controllers.
Tracking planes is a fairly small (though doubtless critical) part of the job of the tower, you can possibly reduce some of that load with more computing power. I doubt you could reduce it all that much though, certainly not eliminating it.
"Great Nation" or "Superpower" power status is indeed cyclical, but it's fairly arguable as to whether the US has reached the end of its cycle yet. Most historical "superpowers" have held onto their status for a century or two at the least. The US has only held the status about 50 years. It's possible that the US will have an especially short run, or that the cycle is speeding up due to globalism and the increasing interconnection of the world; but it's equally possible that the US has another 50 years at least left in her shadow over international politics.
Even if have reached the "end of our rope" metaphorically it's hardly the end of the world. Rome was buried after her Fall, but no major power since then has been. Of the "Great Nations" of the last 5-6 hundred years England, France, and Germany are all still first world countries with strong economies and significant influence in the world; and Spain and the Netherlands (the two earliest of the "Modern Great Nations") remain first world countries with slightly less international influence. None of them is a "poor" country, all of them remain plenty strong enough to keep themselves protected and their economies going strong. I think claims of the US being destroyed in some "Sacking of Rome" like complete dissolution are pretty far fetched. In 20 years the US may or may not wield the kind of power it does now, but it is highly unlikely to be some kind of third world backwater or overrun by "Barbarians".
Well, we're talking about a law here, that will effect everyone out there, NOT just the people in higher level jobs, so we are indeed talking about CA and even larger, America in general.
Google's challenge to that law is based upon their desire to hire highly educated elites, therefore the GP's point is valid. Whether his point is true or not may be arguable, but if we accept that gays are not in the minority, or are a larger and significantly more important minority among the highly educated elite, then the GP's right. The law may apply equally, but Google's interest is only in how it applies to people they want to hire.
Now whether Gays are less of a minority among educated elites is a question that I can't answer. I also don't know whether Google has any standing to bring a lawsuit based on their hope to be a more desirable employer to potential gay employees. Personally I'm completely confused by the whole issue. Why would we NOT allow gay people to marry. It's a legal contract that allows two people to bond themselves for certain legal purposes, why can't any two (or for that matter, more than two) people enter into it? Religions are of course free to define their own marriage definitions for the purpose of performing the ceremony, but as a legal institution who cares? As a Pagan I know plenty of couples (gay and straight) that we religiously consider "married" who are not legally married, and I think we all know couples (all straight except in Mass, or Cali) who are legally married but have never been inside a church or other religious ceremony to confirm it.
Why should anyone except the people getting married, and in a religious context the person performing the marriage, care what sex the participants are?
Are you serious? You want one, crash prone, computer to manage all air traffic in the skies of the United States? You realize that this computer would be tracking millions of objects a second, in a three dimensional space, analyzing all of their current courses for collisions in the next say 5-10 minutes (you wouldn't want to cut it closer than that and honestly even more warning that that would be good), scheduling take-offs and landing from thousands of airstrips, accepting interrupts for emergency requests at ALL of those airstrips, processing voice inputs and outputs from thousands of (still human) pilots a second, and making judgment calls when conflicting requests come in (Do you let the plane with low fuel land first, or the one with engine trouble? How bad is the engine trouble, how low is the the fuel? etc.) I'm quite sure I haven't even scratched the surface of what air traffic control for the ENTIRE COUNTRY would involve, but that alone is more load than even the most powerful computers in the world could handle.
Ignoring the fact that you'd need at least two for redundancy (probably more, these are hundreds of thousands of lives an hour we're talking about, failure is NOT an option). Ignoring the fact that voice to data interfaces are only partially reliable, especially if the user has an accent ("Air Rus 13654, this is the tower, I did not understand your last transmission, please say again" - "Ai says, 'Ve have vuel leek. Reqvest immideet landing'" - "Air Rus 13654, this is the tower, I did not understand your last transmission, please say again" - "Ahhhhhh!" - "Air Rus 13654, this is the tower...."). Ignoring the fact that computers are terrible at judgment calls. Ignoring all of that you'd have to have a HUGE data pipe going into this mythical computer, capable of accepting data from EVERY radar station in the country, ALL of the tower control frequencies in the country, and transmitting back out to ALL of the traffic control frequencies, plus sending messages to various EMS and law enforcement agencies local to air ports (who do you think calls the cops when a flight attendant wants to eject a drunk passenger? The tower. Calls the ambulance for the lady who goes into birth or the guy who has a heart attack? The tower. Requests emergency services on site in the unlikely but occasional event of an incident? The tower.) It needs to talk to all of this stuff with little or no latency.
What do you think air traffic controller DO? Sit and watch their little radar screens hoping that no little dots cross each other? It's considered one of the most stressful jobs in the world. These guys are constantly making decisions that might result in or prevent any number of major and minor disasters.
I have serious doubts as to whether it would even be technically possible to implement the kind of system you envision at an acceptable level of safety, but if it were it would be more like hundreds of billions of dollars to put in not a couple of million. I don't think you even begin to comprehend what the requirements documentation for something like this would look like. Hell, I don't begin to comprehend such a thing, and I've already posted about a dozen problems you didn't even start to think of. Imagine if I were someone that actually knew something about this.
To be fair, while Microsoft's file sharing system doesn't have all of the weaknesses of NFS, it does have a fair few. Unless you are using AD you have to sync users in MS land as much as in NFS (and if you are using AD, then to be fair you should consider the *nix systems to be using LDAP or NIS to share user directory information, which alleviates the same problem as AD does). Lost Windows shares, while they don't hang the file system handle forever like hard NFS mounts, do take several minutes to time out and often take out ALL file system access while they wait. A broken NFS handle will take out the application trying to reach the remote file system, but a new shell or another program can get to the rest of the file system. Broken Windows pipes kill all instances of Explorer, My Computer, and any open file browsing windows for other apps, and hang any new attempts to open something else until they finally time out. There can be little doubt that Windows SMB sharing is more secure than NFS if properly configured though, which is a bit disheartening.
The first guy was wrong (I WISH my MacBook booted in 4 seconds), but you're being equally ridiculous in the other direction. I installed the Windows 7 Beta on my boot camp partition last night to check it out, and I feel pretty confident saying it took nothing like 3-4 minutes for systems to become usable in either Windows or OS X in any of the several boots I made in a short time. It took about 10 seconds to get to the Boot Camp OS choosers (Which is about twice as long as usual because I had a bootable DVD in the Drive. Without the DVD it's more like 5 seconds). Once the OS is chosen, I'd say it was may 20-30 seconds for a usable OS X desktop, and a tiny bit more for the Windows Desktop. It's no more than a 30 second, and maybe as little as 25 second process if I don't try to use the Boot Camp loader (For whatever reason it takes a bot longer to use Boot Camp).
I call BS. I wasn't on Prodigy, I was on AOL (actually it was Quantum Link at the time, but it became AOL), but same deal. I largely ignored the "teen" and "kids" areas, yet managed to be part of the communities and not get assaulted. My parents (both of whom are fairly net savey now) barely understood what my computer was, let alone how I could and did use it for social interactions. I didn't have monitored access, they didn't check my chat logs, They probably weren't even aware that the $5 monthly fee they paid for allowed me to talk to other real people.
The fact is that these services were not all that dangerous, and the Internet is not all that dangerous. Note I'm don't say "not dangerous at all", but generally speaking a mature kid who you would trust to walk to the store and back you can trust on the Internet. Part of the problem is that parent have an exaggerated view of Internet dangers, part of the problem is that a lot of parents no longer seem willing to let kids walk to the store and back either.
Do parents have a responsibility to protect their kids? Yes, definitely. They also have a responsibility to prepare their kids to be adults in the real world. This means that eventually you have to trust them to do thing on their own and maybe screw up a time or two. They'll find the places to hang out. they'll find the people that they trust. Some of those people won't be trustworthy, but in all likelihood neither were all the people in your Prodigy group. It was trivial enough to make QLink think I was an adult, I doubt an adult with an interest in doing so would have found it hard to convince Prodigy s/he was a a teenager.
Many, MANY more kids are still abused by family and family friends than are abused by "Internet Perverts", yet no one seems interested in tackling those problems. Largely because it's much easier to fear faceless strangers than people you know and like.
So I downloaded the app, and well, you're just wrong. There is no registration. The application works out of the box. My phone did ask me (and I permitted it) if the app could use my current location, but that's hardly "personal information" by any reasonable standard (and I could have said no). What other info is it going to send? My IP address? That's useless, a phone changes IPs constantly. Unless they have some deal with AT&T to match current DHCP settings at any given moment with IP addresses? And every other carrier? And all the Wifi hot-spots I might use? I suppose it could get my phone number out of the phones internal database (although I'm not sure that info is available to applications), but that's not really a all that useful as an identifier...
I think you're being paranoid, and I also think that this could be anything related to Microsoft and you wouldn't like it. Which is fine... but making stuff up because you assume they want to steal all of your personal data isn't helpful to your cause.
3. Data mining is not synonymous with privacy violation. "3 million new yorkers viewed your ad" is not the same as "IP address x.y.z.w viewed your ad"
And honestly how useful would even the IP address be in finding out personal data? My cell phone changes IPs dozens of times a day, Wifi hotspots, moving across tower boundaries... Even with an IP address they know nothing about me personally. My iPhone asked for permission to give the app my location when I tired it out, so IF I give it permission to, it knows where I was when I scanned the code, but nothing else about me. All MS is collecting is aggregate data. Useful to marketers, no harm to people.
Windows Mobile devices aren't quite ubiquitous, but they're a lot more prevalent than barcode reading PDAs.
And Microsoft isn't limiting themselves to WinMob. I just grabbed the iPhone version, and both TFA and TFS mention Blackberry, Symbian, and J2ME versions. I'm guessing the J2ME version covers most other smartphones that don't have native apps. Smart of them, WinMob isn't popular enough to drive adaption, but lots of people have some kind of smartphone by now. Since they're giving the clients away for free anyway, I wouldn't be surprised if they opened the client side API for outside developers to make more native versions to.
Hate to break it to you, but most marketers will be pretty happy to get this info, and since it's aggregate I don't really see an issue. It's not like they're going to be either harvesting or giving out info about "Bob's Cell Phone". They're just collecting information about how many "clicks" your posters or bar codes are getting, and which ones are in the best places and that sort of thing. Useful to customer and not harmful to the "clicker".
It took me a while to get used to that in MacOS, but now I'm glad to hear that Windows is getting a similar setup. The stuff I keep on my taskbar is either IN use, or something I'm very LIKELY to use. It works pretty well once you get used to it. I only rarely have to go into the Applications folder on my Mac (for stuff I don't use often), and I'll be pretty happy to say the same about the Start Menu on my PC.
I do systems administration for the Defense Industry. Trust me, it's the industry. I'm in the engineering team for a defense lab, lots of waiting around for people to figure out what they want to do, lots of waiting until all the necessary people are gathered before stuff can be done once the decision is made. Usually in order to make changes to our systems myself, a quality assurance person (who often has no idea what I am doing and would sign off on me typing "rm -rf *" if it was in the steps), and an equipment focal all have to be present; and often we need additional people besides. Days worth of paperwork can accompany ten minutes worth of work (Thankfully I don't usually have to do the paperwork). It's the least efficient system I've ever seen.
It is arguable, and is being argued by economists, that Roosevelt was simply too little too late. Had the same sort of reforms and programs been attempted years earlier it could have been significantly more effective. Remember that the Great Depression started in 1929 and Hoover did almost nothing for over a year. Then he tried some band aids for a couple of more years. Roosevelt inherited almost 3 years of minimal attempts to mitigate the effects. In contrast, the government wasted no more than 6 months, and arguably less this time around before attempting extraordinary measures. Only History will be able to see whether this was more effective or not, but it's different enough to be difficult to compare.
It's part of the government's job to take risks that private industry can't or won't. It has the resources of the entire GNP behind it and has no desire to make a profit. It has always been the ideal risk taker, which is why it often completes the most ambitious projects. The Moon landing, the Manhattan Project, D-Day, the national Interstate system... All very risky projects that no company could have or would have taken on. The government can and does. Often it succeeds, if only by pure ability to throw resources at a project.
It also produced 40-50% illiteracy. People who lived in cities and decent sized towns got great educations (or in some areas they could, if they were of the proper social class), but rural areas were often tremendously under-served. Also the majority of the founding fathers were educated by private tutors. They were, in the main, wealthy land holders. Public education has its downsides, but is has the advantage of educating EVERYBODY. Maybe not to the extent that we would like in some cases, but everyone has the opportunity to learn the basics at least. At any rate, schools are typically run at the city or county level anyway, which isn't to far above "town" level.
Really, why is this so difficult to understand. Obama is a human, worse, he's a human who is not me. The only way I am going to get a president whom I totally agree with is if I manage to land the job myself. This is one decision on one, fairly low level, appointment. I disagree with it, but I was pretty sure when I voted for the guy that he would make decisions I would disagree with. Remarkably, through the whole election process, no candidate made any promises to run all his or her decisions by me personally.
You're about the 10th person to post some variation on 'See, look, he did something you disagree with, you shouldn't have voted for him'. I absolutely guarantee that whoever I voted for they would have done thing I disagree with. I didn't vote for the man expecting perfect conformation to my ever whim, I voted for the guy whose policies most closely match what I thought was needed for the country to succeed. I had two choices (maybe 6 if we step outside of the two main parties, but regardless a very small number of choices), I picked the one I though most appropriate. He's not God, and he's not me. He's pretty damned unlikely to make all choices I agree with.
Really? I found that my performance increased significantly with the upgrade. I have a "Last Gen" white plastic Macbook (Not just the most recent generation, but also, literally, the last generation unless something changes) I bought about 6 month ago. WoW worked on it, but I often got strange graphics artifacts. Stuff would go blurry, letter would drop out of names, etc. It was still playable, but annoying. Searching online and talking to both Apple and Blizzard support convinced me that the problem was the cheap Intel video chipset and they'd get it fixed "someday". That day turned out to be Wrath of the Lich King release day. The game has been much smoother and nicer since release and I didn't change any settings. Granted I don't play at maximum everything, but I don't play at bare bottom settings either.
When I was younger and my parents poorer, my father built a sofa with hand-tools (he may have had a few hand held power tools, but nothing even as fancy as a table saw). It wasn't fancy, basically he built a rectangular frame with a piece of plywood across the top, and the legs attached on the inside of the bottom. The arms were attached to the outside of the frame. My mom made a single large cushion for the bottom, and another that lay on a slightly backward inclined back. It was ugly and not horribly comfortable, but it met all the requirements of "sofa". That was GP's point, you CAN make a sofa with hand-tools, but the ones you buy are generally much nicer.
I don't know what the law that governs the behavior is called, but you can be arrested and prosecuted for revealing classified information. I am annually informed of this fact as part of my security clearance briefing.
So what's the alternative? Small companies owned by families and individuals? Make a law that no company can ever have more than 25 employees? The large concentrations of resources that major companies represent are what enables research and development. No one is going to be mass producing Cars in a backyard operation. Personal computers are partially the result of garage engineers, but the wide spread use of them is the result of large companies making them useful and usable to the average person. Woz could make the Apple I in his basement, but only with the resources represented by the company "Apple" could he make the Macintosh happen. He needed the help, he needed the money for R&D equipment, specialized chips, etc.
In the software world, there is some argument that small projects and companies can in fact work. They can produce something on par with a major company, but that's because software is a scarcity free zone. All you need to make software is time, skill, and a reasonably new computer. Even then the most successful and competitive software projects eventually become companies of a reasonable size, or gather a group of people so large and complex as to be companies in all but name.
I'm not saying that large companies and corporations are necessarily a good thing, but I can't come up with another way to organize the numbers of people and resources required for doing big projects.
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You're comparing apples to oranges. I never said I'd rather have a drooling idiot with management experience than a scientist, I said I'd rather have a good mangers with a fair understanding of the technical issues that a poor manager who happened to by very knowledgeable. The first would have the resources and ability to find out about the half-life of various fissionable materials and get good people to tell him what the long term repercussions of a given disposal method would be. He'd make a decision based on the knowledge and advice of people that know what they are talking about and his own basic knowledge of the overall picture. That's what mangers do. They collect large amounts of big picture info and combine it with some fine grained information where needed to make decisions. A poor manager, no matter what his subject matter expertise, may make a bad decision because he didn't have all of the information (no one is an expert in every facet of every problem) and didn't know it. He may not make a decision at all because he delegated critical responsibilities or was unaware a problem existed.
It's also worth pointing out that I'm not arguing against Chu. He seems, at first blush, to be more that competent both as a scientist and a manager. I'm not saying that the two can't coexist, just that in the absence of a choice that is both, the manager role is more important for the Energy Secretary than the scientist role. If we were talking about a job as science adviser to the Sec. of Energy, the opposite would be true.
Because at the highest levels it is more important to understand how to mange your technical people to get the job done that it is to know exactly what they are doing. That's not to say that some understanding to the technology involved shouldn't be a goal of a good manager. Clearly you can't make decisions about direction without know what you are directing; but at the highest level of an organization I rather see a brilliant manager with a good overview of the technology, than a brilliant technician who lacks the ability to properly motivate and direct people. The ideal, of course, is a brilliant technician and manager who understands the technology AND can motivate and direct people. Here's hoping Steven Chu is the last of these.
I didn't. I was going to look it up, but I figured someone would explain it in the comments. Oh, look....
Computers already track the planes. Most airports past "decent" sized and even a lot of small ones have computer assistance for the air traffic controllers. Planes can be tracked based on transponders and even GPS in some cases. People are still necessary for everything else though. Not all planes (especially small personal planes) are equipped with transponders, and fairly few are equipped with GPS transponders. Radar at most airports is not sensitive enough for exact locations, so eye balls are still needed. Most of all while you're right that true "emergencies" of the "Oh my God we're all going die!" type are fairly rare, most large airports field several to several dozen small emergencies everyday. Some of those would become serious emergencies if not expeditiously dealt with by trained controllers.
Tracking planes is a fairly small (though doubtless critical) part of the job of the tower, you can possibly reduce some of that load with more computing power. I doubt you could reduce it all that much though, certainly not eliminating it.
"Great Nation" or "Superpower" power status is indeed cyclical, but it's fairly arguable as to whether the US has reached the end of its cycle yet. Most historical "superpowers" have held onto their status for a century or two at the least. The US has only held the status about 50 years. It's possible that the US will have an especially short run, or that the cycle is speeding up due to globalism and the increasing interconnection of the world; but it's equally possible that the US has another 50 years at least left in her shadow over international politics.
Even if have reached the "end of our rope" metaphorically it's hardly the end of the world. Rome was buried after her Fall, but no major power since then has been. Of the "Great Nations" of the last 5-6 hundred years England, France, and Germany are all still first world countries with strong economies and significant influence in the world; and Spain and the Netherlands (the two earliest of the "Modern Great Nations") remain first world countries with slightly less international influence. None of them is a "poor" country, all of them remain plenty strong enough to keep themselves protected and their economies going strong. I think claims of the US being destroyed in some "Sacking of Rome" like complete dissolution are pretty far fetched. In 20 years the US may or may not wield the kind of power it does now, but it is highly unlikely to be some kind of third world backwater or overrun by "Barbarians".
Well, we're talking about a law here, that will effect everyone out there, NOT just the people in higher level jobs, so we are indeed talking about CA and even larger, America in general.
Google's challenge to that law is based upon their desire to hire highly educated elites, therefore the GP's point is valid. Whether his point is true or not may be arguable, but if we accept that gays are not in the minority, or are a larger and significantly more important minority among the highly educated elite, then the GP's right. The law may apply equally, but Google's interest is only in how it applies to people they want to hire.
Now whether Gays are less of a minority among educated elites is a question that I can't answer. I also don't know whether Google has any standing to bring a lawsuit based on their hope to be a more desirable employer to potential gay employees. Personally I'm completely confused by the whole issue. Why would we NOT allow gay people to marry. It's a legal contract that allows two people to bond themselves for certain legal purposes, why can't any two (or for that matter, more than two) people enter into it? Religions are of course free to define their own marriage definitions for the purpose of performing the ceremony, but as a legal institution who cares? As a Pagan I know plenty of couples (gay and straight) that we religiously consider "married" who are not legally married, and I think we all know couples (all straight except in Mass, or Cali) who are legally married but have never been inside a church or other religious ceremony to confirm it.
Why should anyone except the people getting married, and in a religious context the person performing the marriage, care what sex the participants are?
Are you serious? You want one, crash prone, computer to manage all air traffic in the skies of the United States? You realize that this computer would be tracking millions of objects a second, in a three dimensional space, analyzing all of their current courses for collisions in the next say 5-10 minutes (you wouldn't want to cut it closer than that and honestly even more warning that that would be good), scheduling take-offs and landing from thousands of airstrips, accepting interrupts for emergency requests at ALL of those airstrips, processing voice inputs and outputs from thousands of (still human) pilots a second, and making judgment calls when conflicting requests come in (Do you let the plane with low fuel land first, or the one with engine trouble? How bad is the engine trouble, how low is the the fuel? etc.) I'm quite sure I haven't even scratched the surface of what air traffic control for the ENTIRE COUNTRY would involve, but that alone is more load than even the most powerful computers in the world could handle.
Ignoring the fact that you'd need at least two for redundancy (probably more, these are hundreds of thousands of lives an hour we're talking about, failure is NOT an option). Ignoring the fact that voice to data interfaces are only partially reliable, especially if the user has an accent ("Air Rus 13654, this is the tower, I did not understand your last transmission, please say again" - "Ai says, 'Ve have vuel leek. Reqvest immideet landing'" - "Air Rus 13654, this is the tower, I did not understand your last transmission, please say again" - "Ahhhhhh!" - "Air Rus 13654, this is the tower...."). Ignoring the fact that computers are terrible at judgment calls. Ignoring all of that you'd have to have a HUGE data pipe going into this mythical computer, capable of accepting data from EVERY radar station in the country, ALL of the tower control frequencies in the country, and transmitting back out to ALL of the traffic control frequencies, plus sending messages to various EMS and law enforcement agencies local to air ports (who do you think calls the cops when a flight attendant wants to eject a drunk passenger? The tower. Calls the ambulance for the lady who goes into birth or the guy who has a heart attack? The tower. Requests emergency services on site in the unlikely but occasional event of an incident? The tower.) It needs to talk to all of this stuff with little or no latency.
What do you think air traffic controller DO? Sit and watch their little radar screens hoping that no little dots cross each other? It's considered one of the most stressful jobs in the world. These guys are constantly making decisions that might result in or prevent any number of major and minor disasters.
I have serious doubts as to whether it would even be technically possible to implement the kind of system you envision at an acceptable level of safety, but if it were it would be more like hundreds of billions of dollars to put in not a couple of million. I don't think you even begin to comprehend what the requirements documentation for something like this would look like. Hell, I don't begin to comprehend such a thing, and I've already posted about a dozen problems you didn't even start to think of. Imagine if I were someone that actually knew something about this.
Yeah, but "Pool of Radiance" takes 5 minutes to load from floppy, and then you have change disks every 15 steps or so.
To be fair, while Microsoft's file sharing system doesn't have all of the weaknesses of NFS, it does have a fair few. Unless you are using AD you have to sync users in MS land as much as in NFS (and if you are using AD, then to be fair you should consider the *nix systems to be using LDAP or NIS to share user directory information, which alleviates the same problem as AD does). Lost Windows shares, while they don't hang the file system handle forever like hard NFS mounts, do take several minutes to time out and often take out ALL file system access while they wait. A broken NFS handle will take out the application trying to reach the remote file system, but a new shell or another program can get to the rest of the file system. Broken Windows pipes kill all instances of Explorer, My Computer, and any open file browsing windows for other apps, and hang any new attempts to open something else until they finally time out. There can be little doubt that Windows SMB sharing is more secure than NFS if properly configured though, which is a bit disheartening.
The first guy was wrong (I WISH my MacBook booted in 4 seconds), but you're being equally ridiculous in the other direction. I installed the Windows 7 Beta on my boot camp partition last night to check it out, and I feel pretty confident saying it took nothing like 3-4 minutes for systems to become usable in either Windows or OS X in any of the several boots I made in a short time. It took about 10 seconds to get to the Boot Camp OS choosers (Which is about twice as long as usual because I had a bootable DVD in the Drive. Without the DVD it's more like 5 seconds). Once the OS is chosen, I'd say it was may 20-30 seconds for a usable OS X desktop, and a tiny bit more for the Windows Desktop. It's no more than a 30 second, and maybe as little as 25 second process if I don't try to use the Boot Camp loader (For whatever reason it takes a bot longer to use Boot Camp).
I call BS. I wasn't on Prodigy, I was on AOL (actually it was Quantum Link at the time, but it became AOL), but same deal. I largely ignored the "teen" and "kids" areas, yet managed to be part of the communities and not get assaulted. My parents (both of whom are fairly net savey now) barely understood what my computer was, let alone how I could and did use it for social interactions. I didn't have monitored access, they didn't check my chat logs, They probably weren't even aware that the $5 monthly fee they paid for allowed me to talk to other real people.
The fact is that these services were not all that dangerous, and the Internet is not all that dangerous. Note I'm don't say "not dangerous at all", but generally speaking a mature kid who you would trust to walk to the store and back you can trust on the Internet. Part of the problem is that parent have an exaggerated view of Internet dangers, part of the problem is that a lot of parents no longer seem willing to let kids walk to the store and back either.
Do parents have a responsibility to protect their kids? Yes, definitely. They also have a responsibility to prepare their kids to be adults in the real world. This means that eventually you have to trust them to do thing on their own and maybe screw up a time or two. They'll find the places to hang out. they'll find the people that they trust. Some of those people won't be trustworthy, but in all likelihood neither were all the people in your Prodigy group. It was trivial enough to make QLink think I was an adult, I doubt an adult with an interest in doing so would have found it hard to convince Prodigy s/he was a a teenager.
Many, MANY more kids are still abused by family and family friends than are abused by "Internet Perverts", yet no one seems interested in tackling those problems. Largely because it's much easier to fear faceless strangers than people you know and like.
So I downloaded the app, and well, you're just wrong. There is no registration. The application works out of the box. My phone did ask me (and I permitted it) if the app could use my current location, but that's hardly "personal information" by any reasonable standard (and I could have said no). What other info is it going to send? My IP address? That's useless, a phone changes IPs constantly. Unless they have some deal with AT&T to match current DHCP settings at any given moment with IP addresses? And every other carrier? And all the Wifi hot-spots I might use? I suppose it could get my phone number out of the phones internal database (although I'm not sure that info is available to applications), but that's not really a all that useful as an identifier...
I think you're being paranoid, and I also think that this could be anything related to Microsoft and you wouldn't like it. Which is fine... but making stuff up because you assume they want to steal all of your personal data isn't helpful to your cause.
3. Data mining is not synonymous with privacy violation. "3 million new yorkers viewed your ad" is not the same as "IP address x.y.z.w viewed your ad"
And honestly how useful would even the IP address be in finding out personal data? My cell phone changes IPs dozens of times a day, Wifi hotspots, moving across tower boundaries... Even with an IP address they know nothing about me personally. My iPhone asked for permission to give the app my location when I tired it out, so IF I give it permission to, it knows where I was when I scanned the code, but nothing else about me. All MS is collecting is aggregate data. Useful to marketers, no harm to people.
Windows Mobile devices aren't quite ubiquitous, but they're a lot more prevalent than barcode reading PDAs.
And Microsoft isn't limiting themselves to WinMob. I just grabbed the iPhone version, and both TFA and TFS mention Blackberry, Symbian, and J2ME versions. I'm guessing the J2ME version covers most other smartphones that don't have native apps. Smart of them, WinMob isn't popular enough to drive adaption, but lots of people have some kind of smartphone by now. Since they're giving the clients away for free anyway, I wouldn't be surprised if they opened the client side API for outside developers to make more native versions to.
Hate to break it to you, but most marketers will be pretty happy to get this info, and since it's aggregate I don't really see an issue. It's not like they're going to be either harvesting or giving out info about "Bob's Cell Phone". They're just collecting information about how many "clicks" your posters or bar codes are getting, and which ones are in the best places and that sort of thing. Useful to customer and not harmful to the "clicker".
It took me a while to get used to that in MacOS, but now I'm glad to hear that Windows is getting a similar setup. The stuff I keep on my taskbar is either IN use, or something I'm very LIKELY to use. It works pretty well once you get used to it. I only rarely have to go into the Applications folder on my Mac (for stuff I don't use often), and I'll be pretty happy to say the same about the Start Menu on my PC.
I do systems administration for the Defense Industry. Trust me, it's the industry. I'm in the engineering team for a defense lab, lots of waiting around for people to figure out what they want to do, lots of waiting until all the necessary people are gathered before stuff can be done once the decision is made. Usually in order to make changes to our systems myself, a quality assurance person (who often has no idea what I am doing and would sign off on me typing "rm -rf *" if it was in the steps), and an equipment focal all have to be present; and often we need additional people besides. Days worth of paperwork can accompany ten minutes worth of work (Thankfully I don't usually have to do the paperwork). It's the least efficient system I've ever seen.
It is arguable, and is being argued by economists, that Roosevelt was simply too little too late. Had the same sort of reforms and programs been attempted years earlier it could have been significantly more effective. Remember that the Great Depression started in 1929 and Hoover did almost nothing for over a year. Then he tried some band aids for a couple of more years. Roosevelt inherited almost 3 years of minimal attempts to mitigate the effects. In contrast, the government wasted no more than 6 months, and arguably less this time around before attempting extraordinary measures. Only History will be able to see whether this was more effective or not, but it's different enough to be difficult to compare.
It's part of the government's job to take risks that private industry can't or won't. It has the resources of the entire GNP behind it and has no desire to make a profit. It has always been the ideal risk taker, which is why it often completes the most ambitious projects. The Moon landing, the Manhattan Project, D-Day, the national Interstate system... All very risky projects that no company could have or would have taken on. The government can and does. Often it succeeds, if only by pure ability to throw resources at a project.
It also produced 40-50% illiteracy. People who lived in cities and decent sized towns got great educations (or in some areas they could, if they were of the proper social class), but rural areas were often tremendously under-served. Also the majority of the founding fathers were educated by private tutors. They were, in the main, wealthy land holders. Public education has its downsides, but is has the advantage of educating EVERYBODY. Maybe not to the extent that we would like in some cases, but everyone has the opportunity to learn the basics at least. At any rate, schools are typically run at the city or county level anyway, which isn't to far above "town" level.
Really, why is this so difficult to understand. Obama is a human, worse, he's a human who is not me. The only way I am going to get a president whom I totally agree with is if I manage to land the job myself. This is one decision on one, fairly low level, appointment. I disagree with it, but I was pretty sure when I voted for the guy that he would make decisions I would disagree with. Remarkably, through the whole election process, no candidate made any promises to run all his or her decisions by me personally.
You're about the 10th person to post some variation on 'See, look, he did something you disagree with, you shouldn't have voted for him'. I absolutely guarantee that whoever I voted for they would have done thing I disagree with. I didn't vote for the man expecting perfect conformation to my ever whim, I voted for the guy whose policies most closely match what I thought was needed for the country to succeed. I had two choices (maybe 6 if we step outside of the two main parties, but regardless a very small number of choices), I picked the one I though most appropriate. He's not God, and he's not me. He's pretty damned unlikely to make all choices I agree with.
Really? I found that my performance increased significantly with the upgrade. I have a "Last Gen" white plastic Macbook (Not just the most recent generation, but also, literally, the last generation unless something changes) I bought about 6 month ago. WoW worked on it, but I often got strange graphics artifacts. Stuff would go blurry, letter would drop out of names, etc. It was still playable, but annoying. Searching online and talking to both Apple and Blizzard support convinced me that the problem was the cheap Intel video chipset and they'd get it fixed "someday". That day turned out to be Wrath of the Lich King release day. The game has been much smoother and nicer since release and I didn't change any settings. Granted I don't play at maximum everything, but I don't play at bare bottom settings either.
When I was younger and my parents poorer, my father built a sofa with hand-tools (he may have had a few hand held power tools, but nothing even as fancy as a table saw). It wasn't fancy, basically he built a rectangular frame with a piece of plywood across the top, and the legs attached on the inside of the bottom. The arms were attached to the outside of the frame. My mom made a single large cushion for the bottom, and another that lay on a slightly backward inclined back. It was ugly and not horribly comfortable, but it met all the requirements of "sofa". That was GP's point, you CAN make a sofa with hand-tools, but the ones you buy are generally much nicer.
I don't know what the law that governs the behavior is called, but you can be arrested and prosecuted for revealing classified information. I am annually informed of this fact as part of my security clearance briefing.
So what's the alternative? Small companies owned by families and individuals? Make a law that no company can ever have more than 25 employees? The large concentrations of resources that major companies represent are what enables research and development. No one is going to be mass producing Cars in a backyard operation. Personal computers are partially the result of garage engineers, but the wide spread use of them is the result of large companies making them useful and usable to the average person. Woz could make the Apple I in his basement, but only with the resources represented by the company "Apple" could he make the Macintosh happen. He needed the help, he needed the money for R&D equipment, specialized chips, etc.
In the software world, there is some argument that small projects and companies can in fact work. They can produce something on par with a major company, but that's because software is a scarcity free zone. All you need to make software is time, skill, and a reasonably new computer. Even then the most successful and competitive software projects eventually become companies of a reasonable size, or gather a group of people so large and complex as to be companies in all but name.
I'm not saying that large companies and corporations are necessarily a good thing, but I can't come up with another way to organize the numbers of people and resources required for doing big projects.