Today, unlike 20 years ago, everyone has access they need to sell an invention within a few days. Exposure is almost instant, and someone will do it better than you did in one year or less, anyway.
Inventions are different than creative works, but even then, with short terms of protection, there's the problem that any invention that will be bought will have to be valuable enough to the new owner that they can make more off of buying related patents in the near term than they could just waiting 10 years for the term to expire. A longer term makes greater investments possible. This isn't the only worthwhile consideration w/ respect to patent/copyright protection, and we've gotten to a bad place imagining that it is, but that doesn't mean that it isn't a worthwhile consideration.
Creative works... in order to really profit from them, you need time for them to reach a critical mass of popularity. Even though there are some artists who seemingly become famous inside of a year or two, it's a *lot* more common to take 5-10 years of work. Sometimes a *lifetime* isn't enough, though I don't think that means copyright should extend beyond it. The original terms of 14 years plus an additional 14 years if the author was still alive seem about right to me.
I think the larger point is that health care is so expensive that we cannot afford to pay for it ourselves, and that, if an insurance company cannot operate profitably, it means probably that health care is too expensive for society as a whole.
I think it's possible that just as rising home prices were driven by rising practice of purchasing on credit, medical care costs may be getting more expensive in no small part because insurance makes them that way. It means that it's possible to charge costs higher than a market without it would bear.
Not that health care is much of a "market" really. It's darn near impossible to find out how much anything beyond an office visit and very simple procedures even cost, much less make comparisons and estimates of quality of service. I'm not sure if this is again a function of insurance, or if it's that the demand for care greatly outstrips supply, but it doesn't seem health care providers actually compete for patients.
They don't pay for insurance coverage... it's just free medical care with highly prioritized and preferential treatment. That's one of the big problems with healthcare -- legislators never see the problem because they never experience it and those who have quickly forget it once they enter that arena
Which is why we if we want the health care problem solved, one essential step will probably be insisting legislators and their staff have no access to any kind of group health care policy.
Mind you some of them are probably well off enough this wouldn't be a particular inconvenience, but the staff thing ought to do it.
No honest educational professional would be behind many of the debates (evolution baiting anyone?) we see all over the US.
I think you're missing the nature and magnitude of the problem if you believe that's true. Indeed, I find it quite likely that education professionals could be behind a lot of the initiatives, and evolution baiting, annoying as it may be, is the least of our problems.
The biggest problem is that people think that education is something you can treat as a program, and everybody's got some set of beefs with the system, and they think that if you can *just* solve their particular issue, you'll get a quality (and maybe even ideologically correct!) education system for everyone.
There might be things we could do to improve the educational philosophy for our culture, but I have my doubts that we can make those improvements programatically.
The only thing that should be done nationally is a standardized curriculum
I'm not even sure this is true, although I can see it's useful to have a minimum bar that high school education represents.
and most of them can be traced to certain groups (*cough*fundamentalists*cough*) waging a 30 year war on public education
Depends on what you mean by fundamentalists. Honestly, I have my doubts you can trace all our problems back to creationists and prudes. You'd have to get the market fundamentalists, the "one curriculum to bind them all" fundamentalists, the Fabians, the Rothschilds, the Rockafellers, and probably more in there to get a really good idea of why we've ended up so mixed up.
That said: I got a fantastic high school education. I learned quite a bit and could have gotten a lot more out of it if I'd had the inclination.
AT&T actually discontinued its unlimited prepaid data plan in general back in November. I still have it, because I'm grandfathered in, but my understanding is that there's no new ones.
Still... half my reason for keeping it around has been in case the iPhone became more appealing to me. If they drop prepaid data for the iPhone, I think I'm done with them. I'd guess you can still make it work by unlocking, but if I'm going to have to unlock, there's nothing so compelling about their service that would keep me from using T-mobile prepaid instead.
the wait times, the incompetence, and the lack of service...the 'attitude' from the workers there alone would scare the hell out of me
This pretty much describes my experience at some hospitals, but that's really not the point I really care about, which is that it consistently describes my experience with insurance companies.
And this is something I think a lot of people don't get. There isn't single serious proposal making the rounds in the US that actually would lead to government run health care -- that is, we're still talking about private providers, for the most part, except for maybe the odd VA and research hospital and county clinic that all exist right now.
No, instead, every serious proposal focuses on getting the government into health insurance... an industry on which even the most recalcitrant obstructionist public bureaucrat has nothing.
Pretty much half my medical billing and claims end up with some hassle. Changing jobs is a hassle because of insurance. Buying insurance on your own if you choose to be a freelancer or entrepreneur is a hassle. It's been over a decade since I've had a bad experience at the DMV, across two different states. The last test I had over two years ago (a fairly routine liver biopsy) exploded into half a dozen pieces of billing shrapnel that I'm still trying to manage accountability for between my insurer at the time and a handful of providers.
I'm ready to give a DMV level service a shot. Half a day of time to resolve an issue is nothing in comparison.
We're going to trust the future of rich media/apps on the web to a company that studiedly ignored any progress on their basic web browser for over five years?
Seriously, the IE 6 fiasco seals it. It was a concrete and persistent demonstration that the company simply does not care about the quality of their products beyond their position in the market, a giant middle finger rising from Redmond to web developers everywhere for the better part of this decade. They sat on a nearly unmatched trove of resources and let said developers waste millions of man hours making things work on a broken if dominant platform for an eternity in the software industry -- essentially stealing time from those developers -- and I don't know if the most rabid reactionary Microsoft hater's hatred has actually reached the depth of contempt that the company deserves for that.
Part of me recognizes they've been making some awesome stuff, the.NET platform really is cool, Seadragon and Silverlight and Photosynth, all good stuff (especially together). I don't care. The fact is, they've spent a long time being the abusive jerk of the computing world, and all the flowers and chocolates and "honey, I can change!" talk in the world shouldn't woo anybody into trusting a Microsoft solution.
It's one of the things that has kept me from buying an iPhone so far, but really, it's a nicety. It was *particularly* nice to be able to tether through an old Nokia 6820 while I was on a four month road trip across the US a few years ago, and under those particular circumstance, convenient tethering might remain enough of a compelling feature by itself to outweigh anything else.
But the funny thing is... for most of what I use tethering for *now* (quick email checks, occasional directions, priceline purchases on short trips, spur-of-the-moment amazon purchases)... I can and would pretty much use a well-designed smart phone for anyway. In other words, the phones themselves (not the least of which is the iPhone) are getting good enough that they do what most people would likely use a tethered computer for most of the time.
This isn't to say another device might not be a better fit for you... personally, I'm still weighing the merits of an iPhone vs a Pre vs an E70 for my next phone. Tethering's a factor, but not a dealbreaker, at least unless I start living a completely mobile life again.
So apparently recording agencies are able to do anything except record good music.
This may be more or less true (the RIAA itself certainly can't/doesn't produce anything, and the record labels are more or less businesses that hire talent, not producers themselves), but it doesn't say anything about the relative merits of piracy-sniffing dogs.
Selling unauthorized reproductions of a given work is an action on a completely different order from passing a recording on to a friend or two, and there's even ready distinctions between it and sticking a recording out onto a filesharing network. I'm not particularly sympathetic to the RIAA and labels when it comes to the later, but I don't have any problem with them nailing mass pirates to the wall when they're essentially selling bootleg knock-offs of a real product on a large scale. It makes sense if you believe in copyright at all.
In other words, getting paid is more important than human lives.
It isn't more important, and not taking patients because of an IT problem is a massive failure that should be closely examined, but getting paid is important. Hospitals don't run on magic fairydust, they run on human labor and equipment and facilities... all of which cost money. Equipment and facilities might be sunk costs even if there's lapse in cash flow, but staff probably need income to make their lives work. In a sense, money *is* human time, because it represents time necessary to produce a good or service... and so even if we weren't considering the fact that the hospital itself will have to stop operating eventually if it doesn't have funding, getting paid would be important.
This isn't to say that we shouldn't be taking a long hard look at how medical care is paid for in the United States. And any hospital that has to shutdown because of an IT problem quite possibly shouldn't be operating anymore. Just that money isn't necessarily an afterthought.
Yes and no. There are economists who actually study why people make the choices they do (Smith, Von Mises, Von Hayek, etc.),
Have you actually *read* their stuff? The Austrian school is quite possibly the least empirical school of economics in existence, and to some extent, they're actually up front about it. Which is to say: they don't in ANY sense actually "study" why people make the choices they do, they simply make up stories about it, and decide they don't need to be tested as long as they're more or less "logical."
In fact, your next comment is actually a pretty good example of this kind of storytelling in action:
and there are professional obfuscators (Keynes, Krugman, and nearly any "economist" ever employed by our federal government) whose purpose is to invent absurd rationalizations for power-grabbing and counterfeiting.
Perhaps you're in possession of some kind of evidence regarding Keynes and Krugman's motivations, but what seems far more likely is that you simply don't actually have the intellectual firepower to argue the actual economics, so citing the people you happen to agree with for reasons you're never able to make clear with a bit of ad hominem storytelling works as a substitute.
Does it really seem like a status symbol somewhere?
To some extent, yeah; they turn heads and elicit curiosity and attention. They certainly don't confer anything resembling actual status outside of certain circles, though, and I think it's really interesting that thousands regular slashdot readers suddenly think they're experts on things that confer status.
My observation? This explanation comes from the kind of person who doesn't understand the iPhone's appeal. They've gone over and over the featureset of the iPhone relative to some other product they prefer, and conclude that because *they* prefer product X, anybody who doesn't *must* not be considering features or even utility at all. What other explanation is left for their choice? Some other factor... like appearance, fashionability, or social status associated with an item.
This is, of course, complete bollocks, but it's a natural chain of thought for an otherwise intelligent person who just happens to have a fairly common mental handicap...
I've *long* had my slashdot layout set to the minimal markup and styling. That's how I like it. I'm not even sure I can find that setting anymore, and it's not respected in my front page views anymore. Though strangely, it sometimes is when I'm viewing and replying to comments...
Ben Fry's Visualizing Data using the Processing environment seems like it's addressing a similar topic... wonder if Vaingast didn't know about it or if he found something unsuitable about it...
Through a screen reader, maybe? In which case your table layout will completely fail because screen readers expect the contents of TABLE tags to be, you know, tabular data.
You need to understand that blind and vision-impaired people will be among those "viewing" your page, and design accordingly.
I'd be pretty surprised if screen readers simply and universally fail when they encounter tables that are used for layout. Many of them have existed for a long time, certainly back into the 1990s, and not being able to handle table layouts would have rendered them useless for most of the web for a long time. And while making distinctions between data and layout uses for tables may not be purely deterministic, it's hardly an intractable problem. Something as simple as Lynx has been able to make some distinctions since 1999, well enough that most of the web turns out to accessible using it. I can't believe there aren't screen readers who can't do at least that well.
And if you can do that, what you mostly get without the layout table is generally a source-ordered linear reading of page sections corresponding to table cell... just like you'd get with any other document without repurposed table markup, albeit with sections determined by other tags. CSS gives you some flexibility in terms visual layouts you can create that aren't tied to the source order, which is nice, but it's hardly a disaster not to have this.
My own observation is that it's other things that present real obstacles to page accessibility/semantics: navigation that's only visible via flash or javascript, images or other media without fallback text, abuse of HTML entities, lack of access keys. Table layout? Not so much.
I'm going to preface this comment by saying that I'm more or less an iPhone fan. I think it's a great convergence device, that it deserves a lot of its hype, that Cocoa Touch is a pretty awesome development platform, and that anybody who pooh-poohs it (and in particular, says stupid things like "It's just a fashion accessory") may be mentally handicapped in some way (and there are a lot of people regularly posting on Slashdot whose handicap is more or less that they can't understand that a product may have real merit if it doesn't fit *their* priorities).
That said, when I first saw the Pre previews, I was pretty impressed about a number of things:
1) Built with multitasking as a core design element. Whether that turns out to have negative tradeoffs (say, with battery life) is an open question, but it's pretty interesting. iPhone OS 3 will have push notification, which sortof enables similar things, but it's looking like Palm will beat them to market.
2) Hard keyboard. It's pretty much a personal preference thing (some people like the touch-screen keyboard just fine, some people just don't care), but for those who really want physical buttons, it's potentially compelling.
3) Development platform. HTML/CSS + Javascript API? If you're a web developer -- and there's more than a handful of those -- you now have a platform pretty much made for you, minimal investment needed. This is the first concept I've seen that I think is going to really challenge Cocoa Touch in terms of popularity with developers, and it has potential to be huge. Oh, I suppose Android might be bigger, if for some reason this flops, but if I were betting, I'd put my money on Apple and Palm. Plus, it can run existing Palm apps, giving it a legacy application base from the get-go.
4) Sprint's Data Network. Arguably, it has broader coverage and performs better than AT&T's, which makes sense, given that Sprint's been serious about data for a long time now. Heck, EVDO-Rev A almost has low enough latency to support VOIP, but the bottom line is that smart phones also tend to be bought for data-centric uses, so a really strong data network is a big bonus.
5) Swappable battery. Not just useful when you decide two years down the road you don't want to send it in to the manufacturer or DIY hack. Also nice if you'd just like to have a little extra juice.
All of this might not add up to a decisive edge in the market against some other impressive products, including the iPhone. But a lot of people -- particularly here on slashdot -- make the mistake of becoming blind to the iPhone's merits because its feature set isn't precisely targeted to their preferences... especially if they've got some other product in mind which is more closely matched. That's exactly how you want to think about choices on a personal level, but when you're thinking about industry-level trends, it's a mistake, and it's pretty easy to see that the critics of the iPhone are pretty much wrong when it comes to the market success of the device. The Pre is not the iPhone, the iPhone has a lot going for it, you may even really love the iPhone. That doesn't mean the Pre's feature set might not be appealing to other people or make it a huge success. There is room enough in this town for more than one smartphone.
Why are people so resistant to simply admitting it's a fashion accessory?
Maybe before we actually discuss the issue, we could get some idea from you of why people seem to think they've shown some kind of deep insight when they say things like this.
Um, Internet Explorer loads google.com just fine. Chrome loads microsoft.com just fine.
Internet Explorer doesn't load a wide variety of sites using Canvas or SVG or other modern features. Heck, IE8 barely credibly implements features that were modern 5-10 years ago. And Chrome won't play with Silverlight and a variety of other MS specific client technologies. What either google.com or microsoft.com might look like without having to target a lowest common client denominator is an interesting question.
It doesn't matter what their market share is, Microsoft already lost. The web is now firmly based on open standards, not proprietary technology tied to a specific operating system.
The trend has certainly been that direction, but it's far from irreversible, and Microsoft still has control over default technologies for Windows PCs, and a lot of market clout. If they can succeed in getting Silverlight in the right places while dragging their feet in other areas, that'd make IE some advantages over other clients again...
There are some big obstacles. Web developers quite rightly don't trust them at all after their five year lazy coastfest with IE6 where they pushed all the work of dealing with that browser's bugs out onto the backs of developers themselves, and I hope this in itself is enough to make sensible devs spit on any Microsoft offering for a decade or so. But MS is getting increasingly good at producing some slick developer technology...
That would be like using PHP when Perl, Python, and Ruby are all just as quick, just as easy, far better designed, and far more conducive to writing robust and maintainable code...
Not quite, particularly Python and Ruby. There are several ways in which PHP tends to be convenient, and they're all about easy availability. Or as they say in the real estate business, location, location, location.
1) PHP is on very nearly *every* general Unix hosting package, and most Windows hosting packages. Python and Ruby interpreters may or may not be on the system... much less the popular frameworks. Perl's pretty much everywhere Unix as well, so there's a kind of parity for it, but...
2) You don't need your files in some particular layout or in some weird cgi-bin directory. If it's got a.php extension on it and is in the web server's document root, it gets run.
3) You can just sprinkle it on in with the HTML output it's part of, especially convenient if it's just a tiny, little bit of logic in a sea of markup, right?
None of this is to say anything about PHP's general suitability for web applications (hey, you know you've got it bad if *Perl* is beating you out for conducivity to writing robust and maintainable code;)... just to point out why it's often easily and sleazily convenient in a way the others aren't.
Whether the CRA was a good idea or not might be up for debate, but if "galactic insanity" implies that it was operating at a scale necessary to be a real driver of the crisis, there are significant indications you're wrong.
"Federal Reserve Board data show that: * More than 84 percent of the subprime mortgages in 2006 were issued by private lending institutions... * Only one of the top 25 subprime lenders in 2006 was directly subject to the housing law that's being lambasted by conservative critics."
There are a number of other relevant resources (such as those posted elsewhere in this discussion and in my comment history) which also examine the idea that the CRA was a significant cause of the current problems. The data seems to indicate that not only were CRA loans not any significant portion of problematic loans, they're actually turning out better than comparable private loans.
The idea that the Democratic party doesn't receive criticism on civil liberties issues is pretty ridiculous. The party gets a lot of criticism from within its own ranks: see the heat generated on Obama's FISA positions as a recent example. And that's before you start in on the *partisan* criticism.
If you're asking why their general reputation isn't as bad, it probably has a lot to do with (a) Democrats tend to at least give lip service to the idea that security issues should be balanced with concerns about civil liberties, whereas Republicans tend to accuse you of being weak, soft, and/or traiterous in response to such suggestions and (b) Republicans led the recent and concrete charge to scale back civil liberties post 9/11, whereas Democrats only more or less went along. These aren't absolute statements; there's variation, but as party-wide generalizations, they function more or less.
Anyway, this is all beside the point I'd really like to make, which is that I don't see this kind of legislation as a partisan problem. Personally, I think that the larger problem is that congress is largely made of lawyers. Cyber-bullying (and bullying in general) is certainly a problem, but it sounds like this is a solution only a lawyer could love. Not surprisingly, Rep Sanchez's background is.... law. Probably in no small part because this is the instrument she's familiar with for addressing social problems.
Of course, this is going to be a problem for anybody who ends up spending appreciable time as a legislator, given that's how legislators solve problems too. However, I sometimes wonder what would happen if more legislators had backgrounds and real domain knowledge outside of law. Would someone with a serious background in social psychology really support an idea like this? How someone with a more practical bent, like a plumber or even a teacher who gets to see these problems play out in our schools? They might face the same temptation all legislators and office holders face -- to do "something" -- but their background/perspective might inspire either restraint or policy that doesn't involve criminalization.
For that reason, I've considered changing my voting habits away from political alignment and policy positions and towards domain knowledge. The problem, however, is that it's very difficult to even find *candidates* who don't come from a legal background (and the majority of the rest who do often seem to be suits of some other kind who don't seem to present much domain knowledge outside of business management...)
Employees are "entitled" to a paycheck, they don't earn it.
I'd state with about 90% confidence that not only have you never been a teacher, you probably don't have what it takes to do well as one, in the private or public sector. Charging into a comment with a broad brush like that and not much to support it is a pretty good indicator you lack your own critical thinking skills, much less the ability to teach them to anybody else.
Education needs to be 100% private or we're going to continue to trail the rest of the world.
The rest of the world with their privately run education system?
Slashdot Mirror
Today, unlike 20 years ago, everyone has access they need to sell an invention within a few days. Exposure is almost instant, and someone will do it better than you did in one year or less, anyway.
Inventions are different than creative works, but even then, with short terms of protection, there's the problem that any invention that will be bought will have to be valuable enough to the new owner that they can make more off of buying related patents in the near term than they could just waiting 10 years for the term to expire. A longer term makes greater investments possible. This isn't the only worthwhile consideration w/ respect to patent/copyright protection, and we've gotten to a bad place imagining that it is, but that doesn't mean that it isn't a worthwhile consideration.
Creative works... in order to really profit from them, you need time for them to reach a critical mass of popularity. Even though there are some artists who seemingly become famous inside of a year or two, it's a *lot* more common to take 5-10 years of work. Sometimes a *lifetime* isn't enough, though I don't think that means copyright should extend beyond it. The original terms of 14 years plus an additional 14 years if the author was still alive seem about right to me.
I think the larger point is that health care is so expensive that we cannot afford to pay for it ourselves, and that, if an insurance company cannot operate profitably, it means probably that health care is too expensive for society as a whole.
I think it's possible that just as rising home prices were driven by rising practice of purchasing on credit, medical care costs may be getting more expensive in no small part because insurance makes them that way. It means that it's possible to charge costs higher than a market without it would bear.
Not that health care is much of a "market" really. It's darn near impossible to find out how much anything beyond an office visit and very simple procedures even cost, much less make comparisons and estimates of quality of service. I'm not sure if this is again a function of insurance, or if it's that the demand for care greatly outstrips supply, but it doesn't seem health care providers actually compete for patients.
They don't pay for insurance coverage... it's just free medical care with highly prioritized and preferential treatment. That's one of the big problems with healthcare -- legislators never see the problem because they never experience it and those who have quickly forget it once they enter that arena
Which is why we if we want the health care problem solved, one essential step will probably be insisting legislators and their staff have no access to any kind of group health care policy.
Mind you some of them are probably well off enough this wouldn't be a particular inconvenience, but the staff thing ought to do it.
No honest educational professional would be behind many of the debates (evolution baiting anyone?) we see all over the US.
I think you're missing the nature and magnitude of the problem if you believe that's true. Indeed, I find it quite likely that education professionals could be behind a lot of the initiatives, and evolution baiting, annoying as it may be, is the least of our problems.
The biggest problem is that people think that education is something you can treat as a program, and everybody's got some set of beefs with the system, and they think that if you can *just* solve their particular issue, you'll get a quality (and maybe even ideologically correct!) education system for everyone.
There might be things we could do to improve the educational philosophy for our culture, but I have my doubts that we can make those improvements programatically.
The only thing that should be done nationally is a standardized curriculum
I'm not even sure this is true, although I can see it's useful to have a minimum bar that high school education represents.
and most of them can be traced to certain groups (*cough*fundamentalists*cough*) waging a 30 year war on public education
Depends on what you mean by fundamentalists. Honestly, I have my doubts you can trace all our problems back to creationists and prudes. You'd have to get the market fundamentalists, the "one curriculum to bind them all" fundamentalists, the Fabians, the Rothschilds, the Rockafellers, and probably more in there to get a really good idea of why we've ended up so mixed up.
That said: I got a fantastic high school education. I learned quite a bit and could have gotten a lot more out of it if I'd had the inclination.
AT&T actually discontinued its unlimited prepaid data plan in general back in November. I still have it, because I'm grandfathered in, but my understanding is that there's no new ones.
Still... half my reason for keeping it around has been in case the iPhone became more appealing to me. If they drop prepaid data for the iPhone, I think I'm done with them. I'd guess you can still make it work by unlocking, but if I'm going to have to unlock, there's nothing so compelling about their service that would keep me from using T-mobile prepaid instead.
the wait times, the incompetence, and the lack of service...the 'attitude' from the workers there alone would scare the hell out of me
This pretty much describes my experience at some hospitals, but that's really not the point I really care about, which is that it consistently describes my experience with insurance companies.
And this is something I think a lot of people don't get. There isn't single serious proposal making the rounds in the US that actually would lead to government run health care -- that is, we're still talking about private providers, for the most part, except for maybe the odd VA and research hospital and county clinic that all exist right now.
No, instead, every serious proposal focuses on getting the government into health insurance... an industry on which even the most recalcitrant obstructionist public bureaucrat has nothing.
Pretty much half my medical billing and claims end up with some hassle. Changing jobs is a hassle because of insurance. Buying insurance on your own if you choose to be a freelancer or entrepreneur is a hassle. It's been over a decade since I've had a bad experience at the DMV, across two different states. The last test I had over two years ago (a fairly routine liver biopsy) exploded into half a dozen pieces of billing shrapnel that I'm still trying to manage accountability for between my insurer at the time and a handful of providers.
I'm ready to give a DMV level service a shot. Half a day of time to resolve an issue is nothing in comparison.
We're going to trust the future of rich media/apps on the web to a company that studiedly ignored any progress on their basic web browser for over five years?
Seriously, the IE 6 fiasco seals it. It was a concrete and persistent demonstration that the company simply does not care about the quality of their products beyond their position in the market, a giant middle finger rising from Redmond to web developers everywhere for the better part of this decade. They sat on a nearly unmatched trove of resources and let said developers waste millions of man hours making things work on a broken if dominant platform for an eternity in the software industry -- essentially stealing time from those developers -- and I don't know if the most rabid reactionary Microsoft hater's hatred has actually reached the depth of contempt that the company deserves for that.
Part of me recognizes they've been making some awesome stuff, the .NET platform really is cool, Seadragon and Silverlight and Photosynth, all good stuff (especially together). I don't care. The fact is, they've spent a long time being the abusive jerk of the computing world, and all the flowers and chocolates and "honey, I can change!" talk in the world shouldn't woo anybody into trusting a Microsoft solution.
Not everybody does.
It's one of the things that has kept me from buying an iPhone so far, but really, it's a nicety. It was *particularly* nice to be able to tether through an old Nokia 6820 while I was on a four month road trip across the US a few years ago, and under those particular circumstance, convenient tethering might remain enough of a compelling feature by itself to outweigh anything else.
But the funny thing is... for most of what I use tethering for *now* (quick email checks, occasional directions, priceline purchases on short trips, spur-of-the-moment amazon purchases)... I can and would pretty much use a well-designed smart phone for anyway. In other words, the phones themselves (not the least of which is the iPhone) are getting good enough that they do what most people would likely use a tethered computer for most of the time.
This isn't to say another device might not be a better fit for you... personally, I'm still weighing the merits of an iPhone vs a Pre vs an E70 for my next phone. Tethering's a factor, but not a dealbreaker, at least unless I start living a completely mobile life again.
Had never heard of Inmos before... and it's generally true that many problems in the computing world have been addressed before elsewhere...
So apparently recording agencies are able to do anything except record good music.
This may be more or less true (the RIAA itself certainly can't/doesn't produce anything, and the record labels are more or less businesses that hire talent, not producers themselves), but it doesn't say anything about the relative merits of piracy-sniffing dogs.
Selling unauthorized reproductions of a given work is an action on a completely different order from passing a recording on to a friend or two, and there's even ready distinctions between it and sticking a recording out onto a filesharing network. I'm not particularly sympathetic to the RIAA and labels when it comes to the later, but I don't have any problem with them nailing mass pirates to the wall when they're essentially selling bootleg knock-offs of a real product on a large scale. It makes sense if you believe in copyright at all.
In other words, getting paid is more important than human lives.
It isn't more important, and not taking patients because of an IT problem is a massive failure that should be closely examined, but getting paid is important. Hospitals don't run on magic fairydust, they run on human labor and equipment and facilities... all of which cost money. Equipment and facilities might be sunk costs even if there's lapse in cash flow, but staff probably need income to make their lives work. In a sense, money *is* human time, because it represents time necessary to produce a good or service... and so even if we weren't considering the fact that the hospital itself will have to stop operating eventually if it doesn't have funding, getting paid would be important.
This isn't to say that we shouldn't be taking a long hard look at how medical care is paid for in the United States. And any hospital that has to shutdown because of an IT problem quite possibly shouldn't be operating anymore. Just that money isn't necessarily an afterthought.
Yes and no. There are economists who actually study why people make the choices they do (Smith, Von Mises, Von Hayek, etc.),
Have you actually *read* their stuff? The Austrian school is quite possibly the least empirical school of economics in existence, and to some extent, they're actually up front about it. Which is to say: they don't in ANY sense actually "study" why people make the choices they do, they simply make up stories about it, and decide they don't need to be tested as long as they're more or less "logical."
In fact, your next comment is actually a pretty good example of this kind of storytelling in action:
and there are professional obfuscators (Keynes, Krugman, and nearly any "economist" ever employed by our federal government) whose purpose is to invent absurd rationalizations for power-grabbing and counterfeiting.
Perhaps you're in possession of some kind of evidence regarding Keynes and Krugman's motivations, but what seems far more likely is that you simply don't actually have the intellectual firepower to argue the actual economics, so citing the people you happen to agree with for reasons you're never able to make clear with a bit of ad hominem storytelling works as a substitute.
Does it really seem like a status symbol somewhere?
To some extent, yeah; they turn heads and elicit curiosity and attention. They certainly don't confer anything resembling actual status outside of certain circles, though, and I think it's really interesting that thousands regular slashdot readers suddenly think they're experts on things that confer status.
My observation? This explanation comes from the kind of person who doesn't understand the iPhone's appeal. They've gone over and over the featureset of the iPhone relative to some other product they prefer, and conclude that because *they* prefer product X, anybody who doesn't *must* not be considering features or even utility at all. What other explanation is left for their choice? Some other factor... like appearance, fashionability, or social status associated with an item.
This is, of course, complete bollocks, but it's a natural chain of thought for an otherwise intelligent person who just happens to have a fairly common mental handicap...
I've *long* had my slashdot layout set to the minimal markup and styling. That's how I like it. I'm not even sure I can find that setting anymore, and it's not respected in my front page views anymore. Though strangely, it sometimes is when I'm viewing and replying to comments...
Ben Fry's Visualizing Data using the Processing environment seems like it's addressing a similar topic... wonder if Vaingast didn't know about it or if he found something unsuitable about it...
Through a screen reader, maybe? In which case your table layout will completely fail because screen readers expect the contents of TABLE tags to be, you know, tabular data.
You need to understand that blind and vision-impaired people will be among those "viewing" your page, and design accordingly.
I'd be pretty surprised if screen readers simply and universally fail when they encounter tables that are used for layout. Many of them have existed for a long time, certainly back into the 1990s, and not being able to handle table layouts would have rendered them useless for most of the web for a long time. And while making distinctions between data and layout uses for tables may not be purely deterministic, it's hardly an intractable problem. Something as simple as Lynx has been able to make some distinctions since 1999, well enough that most of the web turns out to accessible using it. I can't believe there aren't screen readers who can't do at least that well.
And if you can do that, what you mostly get without the layout table is generally a source-ordered linear reading of page sections corresponding to table cell... just like you'd get with any other document without repurposed table markup, albeit with sections determined by other tags. CSS gives you some flexibility in terms visual layouts you can create that aren't tied to the source order, which is nice, but it's hardly a disaster not to have this.
My own observation is that it's other things that present real obstacles to page accessibility/semantics: navigation that's only visible via flash or javascript, images or other media without fallback text, abuse of HTML entities, lack of access keys. Table layout? Not so much.
I'm going to preface this comment by saying that I'm more or less an iPhone fan. I think it's a great convergence device, that it deserves a lot of its hype, that Cocoa Touch is a pretty awesome development platform, and that anybody who pooh-poohs it (and in particular, says stupid things like "It's just a fashion accessory") may be mentally handicapped in some way (and there are a lot of people regularly posting on Slashdot whose handicap is more or less that they can't understand that a product may have real merit if it doesn't fit *their* priorities).
That said, when I first saw the Pre previews, I was pretty impressed about a number of things:
1) Built with multitasking as a core design element. Whether that turns out to have negative tradeoffs (say, with battery life) is an open question, but it's pretty interesting. iPhone OS 3 will have push notification, which sortof enables similar things, but it's looking like Palm will beat them to market.
2) Hard keyboard. It's pretty much a personal preference thing (some people like the touch-screen keyboard just fine, some people just don't care), but for those who really want physical buttons, it's potentially compelling.
3) Development platform. HTML/CSS + Javascript API? If you're a web developer -- and there's more than a handful of those -- you now have a platform pretty much made for you, minimal investment needed. This is the first concept I've seen that I think is going to really challenge Cocoa Touch in terms of popularity with developers, and it has potential to be huge. Oh, I suppose Android might be bigger, if for some reason this flops, but if I were betting, I'd put my money on Apple and Palm. Plus, it can run existing Palm apps, giving it a legacy application base from the get-go.
4) Sprint's Data Network. Arguably, it has broader coverage and performs better than AT&T's, which makes sense, given that Sprint's been serious about data for a long time now. Heck, EVDO-Rev A almost has low enough latency to support VOIP, but the bottom line is that smart phones also tend to be bought for data-centric uses, so a really strong data network is a big bonus.
5) Swappable battery. Not just useful when you decide two years down the road you don't want to send it in to the manufacturer or DIY hack. Also nice if you'd just like to have a little extra juice.
All of this might not add up to a decisive edge in the market against some other impressive products, including the iPhone. But a lot of people -- particularly here on slashdot -- make the mistake of becoming blind to the iPhone's merits because its feature set isn't precisely targeted to their preferences... especially if they've got some other product in mind which is more closely matched. That's exactly how you want to think about choices on a personal level, but when you're thinking about industry-level trends, it's a mistake, and it's pretty easy to see that the critics of the iPhone are pretty much wrong when it comes to the market success of the device. The Pre is not the iPhone, the iPhone has a lot going for it, you may even really love the iPhone. That doesn't mean the Pre's feature set might not be appealing to other people or make it a huge success. There is room enough in this town for more than one smartphone.
Why are people so resistant to simply admitting it's a fashion accessory?
Maybe before we actually discuss the issue, we could get some idea from you of why people seem to think they've shown some kind of deep insight when they say things like this.
Um, Internet Explorer loads google.com just fine. Chrome loads microsoft.com just fine.
Internet Explorer doesn't load a wide variety of sites using Canvas or SVG or other modern features. Heck, IE8 barely credibly implements features that were modern 5-10 years ago. And Chrome won't play with Silverlight and a variety of other MS specific client technologies. What either google.com or microsoft.com might look like without having to target a lowest common client denominator is an interesting question.
It doesn't matter what their market share is, Microsoft already lost. The web is now firmly based on open standards, not proprietary technology tied to a specific operating system.
The trend has certainly been that direction, but it's far from irreversible, and Microsoft still has control over default technologies for Windows PCs, and a lot of market clout. If they can succeed in getting Silverlight in the right places while dragging their feet in other areas, that'd make IE some advantages over other clients again...
There are some big obstacles. Web developers quite rightly don't trust them at all after their five year lazy coastfest with IE6 where they pushed all the work of dealing with that browser's bugs out onto the backs of developers themselves, and I hope this in itself is enough to make sensible devs spit on any Microsoft offering for a decade or so. But MS is getting increasingly good at producing some slick developer technology...
That would be like using PHP when Perl, Python, and Ruby are all just as quick, just as easy, far better designed, and far more conducive to writing robust and maintainable code...
Not quite, particularly Python and Ruby. There are several ways in which PHP tends to be convenient, and they're all about easy availability. Or as they say in the real estate business, location, location, location.
1) PHP is on very nearly *every* general Unix hosting package, and most Windows hosting packages. Python and Ruby interpreters may or may not be on the system... much less the popular frameworks. Perl's pretty much everywhere Unix as well, so there's a kind of parity for it, but...
2) You don't need your files in some particular layout or in some weird cgi-bin directory. If it's got a .php extension on it and is in the web server's document root, it gets run.
3) You can just sprinkle it on in with the HTML output it's part of, especially convenient if it's just a tiny, little bit of logic in a sea of markup, right?
None of this is to say anything about PHP's general suitability for web applications (hey, you know you've got it bad if *Perl* is beating you out for conducivity to writing robust and maintainable code ;) ... just to point out why it's often easily and sleazily convenient in a way the others aren't.
the galactic insanity of the CRA
Whether the CRA was a good idea or not might be up for debate, but if "galactic insanity" implies that it was operating at a scale necessary to be a real driver of the crisis, there are significant indications you're wrong.
Consider, for starters, these statistics:
"Federal Reserve Board data show that:
* More than 84 percent of the subprime mortgages in 2006 were issued by private lending institutions...
* Only one of the top 25 subprime lenders in 2006 was directly subject to the housing law that's being lambasted by conservative critics."
There are a number of other relevant resources (such as those posted elsewhere in this discussion and in my comment history) which also examine the idea that the CRA was a significant cause of the current problems. The data seems to indicate that not only were CRA loans not any significant portion of problematic loans, they're actually turning out better than comparable private loans.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/251/story/53802.html
http://www.ptmortgage.com/blog/2008/10/01/pointing-fingers-was-it-cra-and-minority-lending-that-caused-the-mortgage-mess/
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=did_liberals_cause_the_subprime_crisis
http://www.frbsf.org/news/speeches/2008/0331.html
Finally, there's a summary at Wikipedia.
The idea that the Democratic party doesn't receive criticism on civil liberties issues is pretty ridiculous. The party gets a lot of criticism from within its own ranks: see the heat generated on Obama's FISA positions as a recent example. And that's before you start in on the *partisan* criticism.
If you're asking why their general reputation isn't as bad, it probably has a lot to do with (a) Democrats tend to at least give lip service to the idea that security issues should be balanced with concerns about civil liberties, whereas Republicans tend to accuse you of being weak, soft, and/or traiterous in response to such suggestions and (b) Republicans led the recent and concrete charge to scale back civil liberties post 9/11, whereas Democrats only more or less went along. These aren't absolute statements; there's variation, but as party-wide generalizations, they function more or less.
Anyway, this is all beside the point I'd really like to make, which is that I don't see this kind of legislation as a partisan problem. Personally, I think that the larger problem is that congress is largely made of lawyers. Cyber-bullying (and bullying in general) is certainly a problem, but it sounds like this is a solution only a lawyer could love. Not surprisingly, Rep Sanchez's background is.... law. Probably in no small part because this is the instrument she's familiar with for addressing social problems.
Of course, this is going to be a problem for anybody who ends up spending appreciable time as a legislator, given that's how legislators solve problems too. However, I sometimes wonder what would happen if more legislators had backgrounds and real domain knowledge outside of law. Would someone with a serious background in social psychology really support an idea like this? How someone with a more practical bent, like a plumber or even a teacher who gets to see these problems play out in our schools? They might face the same temptation all legislators and office holders face -- to do "something" -- but their background/perspective might inspire either restraint or policy that doesn't involve criminalization.
For that reason, I've considered changing my voting habits away from political alignment and policy positions and towards domain knowledge. The problem, however, is that it's very difficult to even find *candidates* who don't come from a legal background (and the majority of the rest who do often seem to be suits of some other kind who don't seem to present much domain knowledge outside of business management...)
Employees are "entitled" to a paycheck, they don't earn it.
I'd state with about 90% confidence that not only have you never been a teacher, you probably don't have what it takes to do well as one, in the private or public sector. Charging into a comment with a broad brush like that and not much to support it is a pretty good indicator you lack your own critical thinking skills, much less the ability to teach them to anybody else.
Education needs to be 100% private or we're going to continue to trail the rest of the world.
The rest of the world with their privately run education system?