I don't follow the conspiracy-theory part of the/. posting -- if you give up $250K in salary to save paying $100K in taxes, how are you ending up ahead financially?
They'd be getting the capital-gains deductions on their stock and options either way, unless there's some secret twist in U.S. tax law.
Unless they're established in a court of law, wouldn't they just be alleged patent violations? Until a court rules otherwise, all patents are valid and all software is free of patent violations -- we have a right to the same process that they do.
It is possible to control an aircraft in FlightGear using a mouse. So, as long as your headmouse looks like a two- or three-button mouse to Linux (and you have some way to activate buttons), you should be good to fly.
At first glance, hitting a plane with a laser pointer from that far away seems unlikely -- trying looking at an airplane cockpit through a handheld telescope and you'll see what I mean. Still, I guess enough people are trying it that some are getting (un)lucky. For example, in September the first officer on a Delta 737 on approach into Salt Lake City suffered retina damage from a laser:
I am an instrument rated private pilot myself, and I can attest that night vision is a very fragile thing -- even on a coupled instrument approach (ILS), pilots nearly always have to do the last 200 feet and touchdown manually. Just flashing a camera in the cockpit within a few minutes of touchdown would be very dangerous. Most of the laser problems so far are probably accidental, from laser light shows, etc. Rightly or wrongly, those may be banned within the next couple of years.
I'm tired of seeing this kind of thing get so much more media attention.
People's lives are and always have been exactly as complex as they can handle -- there was a time that something as simple as washing and drying clothes required years of experience and a small cabinet full of different treatments for different materials and colours, as well as hard work spread over three or four days. A cast iron stove has very few moving parts, but the ability to actually bake a cake in one -- getting and maintaining the right temperature and even heat distribution -- requires harder-to-learn skills than many programming languages, much less simply sending e-mail.
Today, when washing and drying a load of laundry takes only an hour, and you can dial a temperature in digitally for your oven, you have a bit of time free to make a call on your cell phone or read a blog, and will continue to do things like that until once again your life is at its complexity limit.
I remember reading about similar problems between JBoss and Apache Geronimo -- in that case, it was not so much a fork as Geronimo's using some JBoss code to fill in parts of Geronimo that hadn't been written yet.
Reusing Open Source code is not only legal and ethical, but it's the whole point of Open Source. My only problem is that I prefer to put my own stuff in the Public Domain, but if I borrow any code (rather than just referencing a library), then I have to follow that code's license. Sometimes that leads me to write my own simple modules instead of reusing existing ones.
That's just pathetic -- so-called scientists passing on the rubbish about Choctaw. That's about on par with the Eskimo words for snow thingy (besides, as other posters have suggested, they didn't even get the Choctaw part right).
Every language I've seen so far has some way to indicate doubt or lack of authority about what you're saying. For example, many Indo-European languages use the subjunctive mood (also called "conjunctive") rather than a separate tense for that purpose, and even English still uses the past subjunctive to indicate a condition that is contrary to fact: "if I *were* god" (but I'm not). We also use the subjunctive for something that someone else wants to happen: "I insist that he *go*" (the indicative would be "goes").
Perhaps those scientists could find something more useful to do with their time, such as encouraging people to send postcards to a dying boy.
I promoted RDF a fair bit back in the late 1990s and even wrote one of the first libraries for it. I think that the idea of machine-readable data on the web is a very good one (and probably more scalable than the whole Web Services thing), but six or so years later, I don't think that RDF is it.
The trouble is that RDF (and OWL) try to do too much, getting all tangled up in the arcana of knowledge representation, and the Semantic Web thing has only muddied the waters further -- the screenshot is a stunning graphic representation of the mess that RDF has gotten itself into (I'll assume that it's serious, since it's a long time until 1 April).
All we really need for a data web is a bunch of XML files online that make references to each other for machines to follow, the same way that web pages make links -- in other words, a data web would be a distributed database, the same way that the document web is a distributed hypertext system. RDF reminds me more of the complex pre-HTML hypertext systems of the late 1980s than of the successful, simple formats and protocols that drive the Web.
The original poster's argument would apply if, say, the price of music CDs went up by $5 because people were stealing them; in that case, you could still choose not to buy CDs and avoid paying the extra $5. That wasn't the case with the fee on blank media -- you had to pay that *to private companies* just for the right to back up data on your computer.
What the entertainment industry originally got away with was an outrage (see, stupid things happen in Canada, too), and it's good to see that in the end the courts can be fair to the consumers as well. If you're paying money in a commercial transaction, you have the right to get something of value in exchange -- in our case, it's the right to share music and movies for non-commercial purposes.
Remember that the court decision happened for a very good reason: in Canada, the entertainment industry had managed to collect a tax on all recording media for years, whether used for music or not. Every time I bought a CD-ROM to back up Java or C++ code on my computer, I paid a mandatory royalty.
I have very little sympathy now that the tables are turned and it ends up that the money the industry forced from us actually gives us some rights in return. Note that the same would not apply in the U.S., since they do not tax blank media on the entertainment industry's behalf.
Remember than in Canada its also legal to share music and movies (as long as you don't sell them). Several provinces now allow gay marriage, and most politicians favour decriminalizing (though not legalizing) marijuana.
On the other hand, while many Canadians own rifles and shotguns, most of us are not allowed to carry concealed weapons; also, provinces are starting to ban smoking in all public places, and the federal government regulates how much foreign content radio and TV stations are allowed to show.
So, in brief, if you're an MP3-sharing, pot-smoking, gay privacy freak, c'mon up and join us; if you're a gun-toting, tobacco-smoking, Baywatch-watchin' law-and-order freak, you might be happier staying down in the U.S.
In October 1970, early in his tenure as Prime Minister, Pierre Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act in Montreal after a series of terrorist bombings and kidnappings (one ending in murder) -- Habeas Corpus was suspended, I think curfews were imposed, and armored personnel carriers rolled through the streets of Montreal. Even as early as the mid 1970s, we were learning about that in grade school as one of the major mistakes in Canadian history, and the country still suffers from it today (many French Canadians saw it as an attack on them by the English majority).
When Trudeau helped bring in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms more than a decade later, near the end of his tenure, he may have been trying to undo some of the damage he caused -- certainly, he seems to have learned from his mistake.
There is never a good reason to suspend basic human rights. Period. In the U.S., Democrats (Japanese internment) and Republicans (Guantanamo Bay) have both been more than happy to flush Habeas Corpus down the toilet when the voters let them get away with it, so keep your eyes open, guys.
Both of the candidates will say whatever they have to to win, so it's better to look at their actions rather than their words. There has been one case so far where Senator Kerry had to decide about security vs. freedom, and he came out on the right side: when offered by the secret service, he refused temporary flight restrictions around his campaign stops, so that private aviation is not disrupted or shut down the way it is when the president or vice-president visit a town.
Since he's not likely to win any votes that way (I mean, how many of you really care?), the choice suggests a real personal preference for freedom over security. Perhaps that preference will carry through to the DMCA, though that may depend more on the cabinet than the president.
Until now, light sport plane pilots were fully
licensed. The new license is easier to obtain,
meaning that "casual" pilots won't need to
demonstrate that they're medically capable of
flying a passenger- or commercial-aircraft.
Not exactly. Both Canada and the U.S. have different classes of medicals for different kinds of flying: a private pilot does not need to meet anywhere near the medical requirements of an airline pilot. In Canada (and I think, in the U.S.), there is also a Recreational Pilot Permit that requires only a note from the family doctor. The U.S. sport pilot license will take that one step further, requiring only that a person be medically qualified to hold a driver's license.
It's hard to say whether this new license will really matter much. People can already fly ultralights without a formal medical, so it will all come down to the people who want to fly something a bit bigger than an ultralight, but not much bigger, and who are medically fit to drive, but not medically fit to get a note from their family doctor for the Recreational Pilot Permit.
Yes, the lack of free geodata outside of the U.S. is a major problem for us at the FlightGear project. This is one area where the rest of the world (I'm Canadian) needs to emulate the U.S. rather than making fun of it.
In fact, not only does the U.S. make its own geodata available for free, but it provides nearly all of the available free geodata for the rest of the world as well, though at a lower resolution. We use the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) 3 arcsecond for worldwide elevations, the 1:1,000,000 vmap0 data for landcover, roads, railroads, lakes, etc., the GSHHS for coastline data, and the DAFIF for airport and navigation data, all courtesy of the U.S. taxpayers.
Every piece of communication is biased, but I would worry much less in the Wikipedia than in a traditional closed encyclopedia for a couple of reasons:
articles tend to reach an equilibrium as people with different views edit and reedit; and
every past version of each article is still available, so I can *see* how people have changed the article over time.
In other words, many authors make for more balanced articles, the same way that many eyes make for more robust software.
There is also a large core of volunteer editors who copyedit new submissions and remove vandalism -- yesterday, some of my new articles were edited (up to professional standards) within minutes of my posting them, and then improved with additional links and information.
I had a client who needed a Word document, so I created it in OpenOffice -- it was almost OK, but there were a few minor formatting problems.
I decided that it wasn't fair to inflict problems on my customer just because of my personal OSS beliefs, so I booted into Windows, dusted off the virtual cobwebs (I sometimes go six months without choosing Windows in LILO), and recreated the same document using MS Word.
This time, the formatting problems were worse on my customer's computer, even though the document was fine in MS Word on my box. I decided to stick with the OO version, since it was more compatible with Word.
Ultimately, free trade works out well; I think
one of the issues is that white collar jobs are
just beginning to feel the pinch, and are acting
like manufacturers did in the 1970s and 1980s.
That's right -- in fact, any kind of protectionism functions just like a tax. If American consumers can buy equivalent goods and services cheaper from other countries but are not allowed to, then the difference in price is effectively a sales tax that the government is collecting on behalf of the protected industries.
For example, Canada applies protectionist policies against cheaper American milk, so a poor single parent with three young kids is paying what amounts to a 30% sales tax (or more) to Canadian dairy farmers every time she or he buys milk.
According to the story, here are the major problems, aside from some resistence among city hall staffers:
1. Munich insists on a whole bunch of studies into topics like Open Source security, desktop ergonomics, and software component stability and compatibility as part of the transition, but wants someone else (i.e. IBM and SuSE) to pay for them.
2. Local custom software contractors don't know how to write Linux apps.
Obviously, the first problem has more to do with politics than technology (to paraphrase Ballmer). You can always raise costs by wrapping something in red tape.
The second is a real technical problem, but it also occurs trying to move older Windows apps (i.e. 95, 98) to newer Windows versions. Solution: write Web apps, bozos (that way, if they ever want to go to yet another OS on the desktop, their apps will still work). The real problem is that they still think writing custom client-side apps in *any* OS is a good idea.
Speaking as a former assistant professor, I have no patience at all with past colleagues who complain about their students cheating. It is an easy matter to have students do their assignments incrementally, starting with bibliographical reports and oral presentations (with questions), where cheating is much more difficult, before handing in the written paper on the same topic.
If professors keep on assigning the same trite, tired topics year after year instead of taking the time to develop new ones, and simply rubber-stamp grades onto half-read papers instead of monitoring each student's progress, they are cheating as much as the students (and yes, I've taught classes with more than 100 students).
Checking a blacklist is not good enough -- the humans reviewing the spam quickly cannot know if a URL points to a spammer's site or a lesser-known legitimate Web site that the spammer happens to want to shut down.
This suggestion may be well intentioned, but it would make it possible to trick *all* mail software into launching DOS attacks.
I used to be a university professor -- you might (or might not) be surprised to hear that I had the same problem as my students. If you think it's discouraging looking at a blank screen when you have to write a 10-page paper, imagine staring at a pile of several hundred ungraded exams or essays.
I recommend that you buy a cheap, digital kitchen timer, then set very simple goals. If you don't feel like working, set the timer for just ten minutes and then work (no Web or anything else) straight until it stops. Goof around for a while, then do another ten-minute stretch. When ten minutes gets too easy, bump it up to fifteen, thirty, or whatever, but *never* make it so long that you cannot get through without being distracted. It's OK to keep working after the timer runs out, but it's never OK to do anything else while it's running.
The other advice on this list is also excellent -- exercise always helps me work -- but the kitchen timer gives you a fallback when all else fails. Best of luck.
Tariffs are usually a net loss to the country that imposes them. They bring a temporary benefit to the industry they're trying to protect, but that usually turns sour as the protected industry becomes less and less competitive. In the meantime, they are a form of taxation on everyone else in the country, who is denied the opportunity to buy less expensive, imported goods.
The worst kind of tariffs are the ones that fall heavily on the poor. For example, let's say that a country imposes tariffs on imported milk to protect its dairy industry, and the result is that milk is 25% more expensive. That is nothing other than a 25% sales tax on milk, and the single mother with three children will be paying a disproportionately large share of it.
Why send aid to third-world countries to help them develop, then prevent them from selling what they make by imposing import tariffs? It sounds like a terrible waste of money.
Or, to take another perspective, compare the industries in the U.S. that do have tariff protection (such as steel and agriculture) with the ones that do not (such as software and entertainment). In which ones does the U.S. lead the rest of the world?
Slashdot Mirror
I don't follow the conspiracy-theory part of the /. posting -- if you give up $250K in salary to save paying $100K in taxes, how are you ending up ahead financially?
They'd be getting the capital-gains deductions on their stock and options either way, unless there's some secret twist in U.S. tax law.
Unless they're established in a court of law, wouldn't they just be alleged patent violations? Until a court rules otherwise, all patents are valid and all software is free of patent violations -- we have a right to the same process that they do.
It is possible to control an aircraft in FlightGear using a mouse. So, as long as your headmouse looks like a two- or three-button mouse to Linux (and you have some way to activate buttons), you should be good to fly.
At first glance, hitting a plane with a laser pointer from that far away seems unlikely -- trying looking at an airplane cockpit through a handheld telescope and you'll see what I mean. Still, I guess enough people are trying it that some are getting (un)lucky. For example, in September the first officer on a Delta 737 on approach into Salt Lake City suffered retina damage from a laser:
1 35 6-3924r.htm
http://washingtontimes.com/national/20040928-11
I am an instrument rated private pilot myself, and I can attest that night vision is a very fragile thing -- even on a coupled instrument approach (ILS), pilots nearly always have to do the last 200 feet and touchdown manually. Just flashing a camera in the cockpit within a few minutes of touchdown would be very dangerous. Most of the laser problems so far are probably accidental, from laser light shows, etc. Rightly or wrongly, those may be banned within the next couple of years.
I'm tired of seeing this kind of thing get so much more media attention.
People's lives are and always have been exactly as complex as they can handle -- there was a time that something as simple as washing and drying clothes required years of experience and a small cabinet full of different treatments for different materials and colours, as well as hard work spread over three or four days. A cast iron stove has very few moving parts, but the ability to actually bake a cake in one -- getting and maintaining the right temperature and even heat distribution -- requires harder-to-learn skills than many programming languages, much less simply sending e-mail.
Today, when washing and drying a load of laundry takes only an hour, and you can dial a temperature in digitally for your oven, you have a bit of time free to make a call on your cell phone or read a blog, and will continue to do things like that until once again your life is at its complexity limit.
I remember reading about similar problems between JBoss and Apache Geronimo -- in that case, it was not so much a fork as Geronimo's using some JBoss code to fill in parts of Geronimo that hadn't been written yet.
Reusing Open Source code is not only legal and ethical, but it's the whole point of Open Source. My only problem is that I prefer to put my own stuff in the Public Domain, but if I borrow any code (rather than just referencing a library), then I have to follow that code's license. Sometimes that leads me to write my own simple modules instead of reusing existing ones.
That's just pathetic -- so-called scientists passing on the rubbish about Choctaw. That's about on par with the Eskimo words for snow thingy (besides, as other posters have suggested, they didn't even get the Choctaw part right).
Every language I've seen so far has some way to indicate doubt or lack of authority about what you're saying. For example, many Indo-European languages use the subjunctive mood (also called "conjunctive") rather than a separate tense for that purpose, and even English still uses the past subjunctive to indicate a condition that is contrary to fact: "if I *were* god" (but I'm not). We also use the subjunctive for something that someone else wants to happen: "I insist that he *go*" (the indicative would be "goes").
Perhaps those scientists could find something more useful to do with their time, such as encouraging people to send postcards to a dying boy.
I promoted RDF a fair bit back in the late 1990s and even wrote one of the first libraries for it. I think that the idea of machine-readable data on the web is a very good one (and probably more scalable than the whole Web Services thing), but six or so years later, I don't think that RDF is it.
The trouble is that RDF (and OWL) try to do too much, getting all tangled up in the arcana of knowledge representation, and the Semantic Web thing has only muddied the waters further -- the screenshot is a stunning graphic representation of the mess that RDF has gotten itself into (I'll assume that it's serious, since it's a long time until 1 April).
All we really need for a data web is a bunch of XML files online that make references to each other for machines to follow, the same way that web pages make links -- in other words, a data web would be a distributed database, the same way that the document web is a distributed hypertext system. RDF reminds me more of the complex pre-HTML hypertext systems of the late 1980s than of the successful, simple formats and protocols that drive the Web.
The original poster's argument would apply if, say, the price of music CDs went up by $5 because people were stealing them; in that case, you could still choose not to buy CDs and avoid paying the extra $5. That wasn't the case with the fee on blank media -- you had to pay that *to private companies* just for the right to back up data on your computer.
What the entertainment industry originally got away with was an outrage (see, stupid things happen in Canada, too), and it's good to see that in the end the courts can be fair to the consumers as well. If you're paying money in a commercial transaction, you have the right to get something of value in exchange -- in our case, it's the right to share music and movies for non-commercial purposes.
Remember that the court decision happened for a very good reason: in Canada, the entertainment industry had managed to collect a tax on all recording media for years, whether used for music or not. Every time I bought a CD-ROM to back up Java or C++ code on my computer, I paid a mandatory royalty.
I have very little sympathy now that the tables are turned and it ends up that the money the industry forced from us actually gives us some rights in return. Note that the same would not apply in the U.S., since they do not tax blank media on the entertainment industry's behalf.
Remember than in Canada its also legal to share music and movies (as long as you don't sell them). Several provinces now allow gay marriage, and most politicians favour decriminalizing (though not legalizing) marijuana.
On the other hand, while many Canadians own rifles and shotguns, most of us are not allowed to carry concealed weapons; also, provinces are starting to ban smoking in all public places, and the federal government regulates how much foreign content radio and TV stations are allowed to show.
So, in brief, if you're an MP3-sharing, pot-smoking, gay privacy freak, c'mon up and join us; if you're a gun-toting, tobacco-smoking, Baywatch-watchin' law-and-order freak, you might be happier staying down in the U.S.
In October 1970, early in his tenure as Prime Minister, Pierre Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act in Montreal after a series of terrorist bombings and kidnappings (one ending in murder) -- Habeas Corpus was suspended, I think curfews were imposed, and armored personnel carriers rolled through the streets of Montreal. Even as early as the mid 1970s, we were learning about that in grade school as one of the major mistakes in Canadian history, and the country still suffers from it today (many French Canadians saw it as an attack on them by the English majority).
When Trudeau helped bring in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms more than a decade later, near the end of his tenure, he may have been trying to undo some of the damage he caused -- certainly, he seems to have learned from his mistake.
There is never a good reason to suspend basic human rights. Period. In the U.S., Democrats (Japanese internment) and Republicans (Guantanamo Bay) have both been more than happy to flush Habeas Corpus down the toilet when the voters let them get away with it, so keep your eyes open, guys.
Both of the candidates will say whatever they have to to win, so it's better to look at their actions rather than their words. There has been one case so far where Senator Kerry had to decide about security vs. freedom, and he came out on the right side: when offered by the secret service, he refused temporary flight restrictions around his campaign stops, so that private aviation is not disrupted or shut down the way it is when the president or vice-president visit a town.
Since he's not likely to win any votes that way (I mean, how many of you really care?), the choice suggests a real personal preference for freedom over security. Perhaps that preference will carry through to the DMCA, though that may depend more on the cabinet than the president.
Not exactly. Both Canada and the U.S. have different classes of medicals for different kinds of flying: a private pilot does not need to meet anywhere near the medical requirements of an airline pilot. In Canada (and I think, in the U.S.), there is also a Recreational Pilot Permit that requires only a note from the family doctor. The U.S. sport pilot license will take that one step further, requiring only that a person be medically qualified to hold a driver's license.
It's hard to say whether this new license will really matter much. People can already fly ultralights without a formal medical, so it will all come down to the people who want to fly something a bit bigger than an ultralight, but not much bigger, and who are medically fit to drive, but not medically fit to get a note from their family doctor for the Recreational Pilot Permit.
Yes, the lack of free geodata outside of the U.S. is a major problem for us at the FlightGear project. This is one area where the rest of the world (I'm Canadian) needs to emulate the U.S. rather than making fun of it.
In fact, not only does the U.S. make its own geodata available for free, but it provides nearly all of the available free geodata for the rest of the world as well, though at a lower resolution. We use the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) 3 arcsecond for worldwide elevations, the 1:1,000,000 vmap0 data for landcover, roads, railroads, lakes, etc., the GSHHS for coastline data, and the DAFIF for airport and navigation data, all courtesy of the U.S. taxpayers.
Every piece of communication is biased, but I would worry much less in the Wikipedia than in a traditional closed encyclopedia for a couple of reasons:
In other words, many authors make for more balanced articles, the same way that many eyes make for more robust software.
There is also a large core of volunteer editors who copyedit new submissions and remove vandalism -- yesterday, some of my new articles were edited (up to professional standards) within minutes of my posting them, and then improved with additional links and information.
I had a client who needed a Word document, so I created it in OpenOffice -- it was almost OK, but there were a few minor formatting problems.
I decided that it wasn't fair to inflict problems on my customer just because of my personal OSS beliefs, so I booted into Windows, dusted off the virtual cobwebs (I sometimes go six months without choosing Windows in LILO), and recreated the same document using MS Word.
This time, the formatting problems were worse on my customer's computer, even though the document was fine in MS Word on my box. I decided to stick with the OO version, since it was more compatible with Word.
What's that? Oh, yeah -- it's something I do when I buy a new computer.
That's right -- in fact, any kind of protectionism functions just like a tax. If American consumers can buy equivalent goods and services cheaper from other countries but are not allowed to, then the difference in price is effectively a sales tax that the government is collecting on behalf of the protected industries.
For example, Canada applies protectionist policies against cheaper American milk, so a poor single parent with three young kids is paying what amounts to a 30% sales tax (or more) to Canadian dairy farmers every time she or he buys milk.
Wired has an English summary of the information in the German press:
6 22 36,00.html
http://www.wired.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,
According to the story, here are the major problems, aside from some resistence among city hall staffers:
1. Munich insists on a whole bunch of studies into topics like Open Source security, desktop ergonomics, and software component stability and compatibility as part of the transition, but wants someone else (i.e. IBM and SuSE) to pay for them.
2. Local custom software contractors don't know how to write Linux apps.
Obviously, the first problem has more to do with politics than technology (to paraphrase Ballmer). You can always raise costs by wrapping something in red tape.
The second is a real technical problem, but it also occurs trying to move older Windows apps (i.e. 95, 98) to newer Windows versions. Solution: write Web apps, bozos (that way, if they ever want to go to yet another OS on the desktop, their apps will still work). The real problem is that they still think writing custom client-side apps in *any* OS is a good idea.
Speaking as a former assistant professor, I have no patience at all with past colleagues who complain about their students cheating. It is an easy matter to have students do their assignments incrementally, starting with bibliographical reports and oral presentations (with questions), where cheating is much more difficult, before handing in the written paper on the same topic.
If professors keep on assigning the same trite, tired topics year after year instead of taking the time to develop new ones, and simply rubber-stamp grades onto half-read papers instead of monitoring each student's progress, they are cheating as much as the students (and yes, I've taught classes with more than 100 students).
Checking a blacklist is not good enough -- the humans reviewing the spam quickly cannot know if a URL points to a spammer's site or a lesser-known legitimate Web site that the spammer happens to want to shut down.
This suggestion may be well intentioned, but it would make it possible to trick *all* mail software into launching DOS attacks.
I used to be a university professor -- you might (or might not) be surprised to hear that I had the same problem as my students. If you think it's discouraging looking at a blank screen when you have to write a 10-page paper, imagine staring at a pile of several hundred ungraded exams or essays.
I recommend that you buy a cheap, digital kitchen timer, then set very simple goals. If you don't feel like working, set the timer for just ten minutes and then work (no Web or anything else) straight until it stops. Goof around for a while, then do another ten-minute stretch. When ten minutes gets too easy, bump it up to fifteen, thirty, or whatever, but *never* make it so long that you cannot get through without being distracted. It's OK to keep working after the timer runs out, but it's never OK to do anything else while it's running.
The other advice on this list is also excellent -- exercise always helps me work -- but the kitchen timer gives you a fallback when all else fails. Best of luck.
Tariffs are usually a net loss to the country that imposes them. They bring a temporary benefit to the industry they're trying to protect, but that usually turns sour as the protected industry becomes less and less competitive. In the meantime, they are a form of taxation on everyone else in the country, who is denied the opportunity to buy less expensive, imported goods.
The worst kind of tariffs are the ones that fall heavily on the poor. For example, let's say that a country imposes tariffs on imported milk to protect its dairy industry, and the result is that milk is 25% more expensive. That is nothing other than a 25% sales tax on milk, and the single mother with three children will be paying a disproportionately large share of it.
Why send aid to third-world countries to help them develop, then prevent them from selling what they make by imposing import tariffs? It sounds like a terrible waste of money.
Or, to take another perspective, compare the industries in the U.S. that do have tariff protection (such as steel and agriculture) with the ones that do not (such as software and entertainment). In which ones does the U.S. lead the rest of the world?