Spotlight's not really the same thing, I don't think, but to the extent that it's similar, it's got some fairly good hooks for third-party developers and it's pretty customizable:
Clearly, Prince gets it. Digital Content is no longer an object to sell itself, as it has no value anymore, but is merely an attraction to attract consumers to purchase other things.
The question is which other things, really. It's a legitimate question, despite the fact that some of the people who are asking it (the labels) are asking it for the wrong reasons and coming to some dubious conclusions.
See, it's *always* been the case that you had to give away some music. Broadcasting is the only way to create a large market for recordings. Give away some music... to create the desire to purchase more music. That's always how it's worked.
The advantage the labels had before is that they were the only ones who could distribute recordings. So, when you wanted what you heard, you had to go to them. So, there's no guarantee that when the desire to get more music kicks in, they'll be the ones people turn to. People have other choices now. The big labels have lost control. What are they selling now? And why will people buy from them?
The entire industry simply isn't used to asking that question, and many of them think they're entitled not to have to think about it, and that's the basic problem.
Second, we live in a competitive country and world. Paying twice as much as other countries for medical care doesn't surprise me in the least, since we typically pay more than that for just about everything else. Do you think people in Cuba all buy $200,000 houses? I don't think so. Yet that's common here.
I think normalizing prices for services against cost of living is an interesting idea, but I don't think that's what the GP meant when he said we pay twice as much. I think he meant the anual per capita spending of *our government* is twice that of any other nation's. If this is the same figure I've seen before, the actual fees for services and insurance premiums paid by consumers aren't even figured in.
It ain't perfect, and in fact, in some cases, it's a pain, but your points don't seem like the reasons why.
CSS seems to be nothing more than a way of making life easier for Webmasters, while making life suck for the actual consumers of web content.
Actually, sometimes it makes life *harder* for webmasters, especially if they've drunk the table-free layout kool-aid.
If the ISP's spotty (maybe the setup of that HTTP transaction fails 5% of the time), then one out of 20 times you don't get any HTML to render. So you reload and all's well. New: Download a hunk of HTML. Download a separate.css file, or two, or three, or four, sometimes from the same server, other times from some other server. If the ISP flakes out on you 5% of the time, and you have 5 different files to download, then (.95^5 = 0.76) about one time out of four, you get nothing, and have to reload.
Don't know which ISP you're using, of course, but I'm not even sure I see anything like this even 1% of the time for CSS. And seeing css files loaded from other servers? Also rare. And you get the advantage that layout/styling code put in the css file only has to be loaded once.
New: Javashit is still a security risk, but we'll make damn sure that none of our content renders correctly unless you turn it on, because how else are we going to run our browser-detection script that determines which of the half-dozen stylesheets (see above) we want your browser to use.
Are people really using Javascript detection? Most of the discussion and practice I'm familiar with focuses on:
(a) Using filter hacks to target browser specific CSS (sparingly) (b) Making sure the actual content of the page is viewable/readable even if the stylesheet isn't used for some reason.
New: Any font you like, as long as you're running the same DPI on your monitor as the web designer was running on his screen. If not, it'll look about two sizes too small, or two sizes too large. But it'll never look like the "right" default font that the pre-CSS browser would default to.
CSS can be used to fix fonts at the wrong size. It also has all the tools for picking font sizes the old method had and a few new ones with relative sizing merits.
Now, I think CSS is a pain for layouts. For some reason, the observation that there's a use for semantic tabular markup seems to have blinded the w3c and others involved to the fact that tables are a great tool/concept for layout. The differences IE has from the spec are a royal pain (though I have to say that IE6's box model actually makes more sense than the CSS 2.1 spec's, so much so that I'm glad they didn't use follow spec there, and the day I can actually choose it via CSS 3 won't be a moment too soon). The fact there's no easy CSS way to center an item in a container element sucks (and please don't point me to the hacks that require knowing the height of either element or javascript stuff). Waiting until css 3 to allow multiple background images on an element was shortsighted. I could go on.
However, I'd rather have all of this than go back to HTML 3.2. The markup is cleaner and easier to edit, it's genuinely smaller, it's easier to make global changes, and some layout and decoration tasks are just, plain and simple, easier because of it. Remember the days where if you wanted a bordered box you had to barf out a 9-celled table?
<div style="border: 1px solid gray"> content here </div>
My experience with EDGE suggests that while the bandwidth might be just barely there, by and large the latency isn't going to be low enough, maybe even in the best of areas.
On the other hand, if someone develops a VOIP client for the iPhone (and I think it's likely someone will, one way or another), then that'd be quite usable when in WiFi range...
Generally, it means "kinda, sortof, sometimes works, until we get tired of supporting it and/or it's to our advantage not to."
See also: Windows Media, Internet Explorer.
(Yeah, Office OS X is actually pretty great, but I think a good deal of that has to do with the fact that they can pull in cash AND perpetuate file-format hegemony.)
And if you truly believe in the free market, you believe that such businesses would come to exist.
Actually, I think in order to believe that business would come to exist, you have to believe in several other things besides markets:
(1) A significant demand among customers (preferably in conditions where they consequences of their choices regarding privacy are clear and aren't to decisions about something more essential) (2) Either:
(a) That it's possible to make more money off of not selling your customers out than selling them out.
(b) Companies that inherently value privacy over money to be made off of selling the customer out.
If #1's not there in sufficient quantity, obviously a market isn't going to move toward privacy. And if #2a isn't true, then whether or not things move towards privacy has nothing to do with markets and everything to do with #2b: the existence of business owners and officers who value individual privacy so highly they're willing to give up a profit on it.
Right now, it seems that many businesses prefer to operate under conditions very different from my parenthetical qualification for #1. And also that by and large they seem to behave as if #2a isn't true.
I have two theories about why:
I. They're right. #2a isn't true. II. They're wrong, but the payoff from following #2a is either:
a - distant enough the local maxima is hard to resist
b - far enough outside training and cultural conception that even though it's there, most officers and owners can't see it
c - diffused enough among other returns that it's hard to measure
So, yes, I do believe markets can do a lot of cool things. But, no. I don't think it's safe to say they'll inevitably produce businesses that genuinely value privacy.
Why bother with the law? Seems to me all you need to do is *let* businesses do the tracking (which of course they're going to want to do, because data mining is especially useful for marketeers), and government just needs to occasionally ask nicely for copies?
Better yet if you've also got a unitary executive to go along with it.
One difference is that in the West, you can pull maneuvers like this and sometimes they actually make a difference. China probably wouldn't have cared much at all if Google had gotten petulant, and it certainly wouldn't have mattered to them whether or not their citizens lost access to something valuable. In Germany, who knows?
And cynical types can always note that China is a much bigger market than Germany.
gives some specifics on some of the nations largest counties as of a year and a half ago. There's certainly some counties where real wages are increasing... and others where it's clear workers aren't winning against inflation.
Comcast is a business, that wants to make money. In Slashdot mythology, that is a defining characteristic of evil,
Nope. Making money is just fine. In fact, I'd be happy to make some myself by wagering $100 that if you took a genuine poll of slashdot readers, most of them -- probably even well over 90% -- would say so.
If you'd said something a little more sophisticated, like "In Slashdot mythology, making money off of craptacular service is considered evil", now that might be accurate. It's not the profit that's objectionable. It's when the value of providing a quality service or product is so obviously well below coequal with the profit motive.
The author of the article was somebody paying over $2000 a year for cable service. Nobody pays that amount for an optional service to a business they object to having profits. Her complaint isn't even necessarily the cash, though the price raise certainly adds injury to insult. It's the shenanigans, the lying, the phone tree navigation hell, the reps who don't know what they're doing, the bullshit policies that make no sense. And author's experience aside, look around throughout this thread there's all kinds of stories about the actual technical quality of service that are pretty awful.
And often there's really no better competitor to go to.
And you know, it really isn't just the cable companies, or the phone companies, or the banks, or any single industry. Every time somebody goes on about how single-payer insurance schemes would result in the nightmare of "healthcare run like the DMV" I wonder what kind of blinders they've got on. It's already here for a good chunk of America, as I find out every time I have to deal with the inefficient health care bureacracy that in theory the market forces of competition should be conspiring to eliminate (and I've been through four different insurance companies to try and get something better). Or there's the fact that I genuinely, no kidding, have received customer service orders of magnitude better than official phone support for my Hawking wireless router from volunteers on random message boards. Increasingly it seems that *many* business of more than 1-2 dozen people have this problem.
I think one of these days, somebody is going to make a pretty winning thesis out of Why Customer Service Usually Sucks in our economy.
"What's that, T-Mobile won't let you talk to VOIP users? Come to OUR phone service. We don't cripple our phones. You can talk to anybody."
"What's that? T-Mobile won't let you sign up without a two year contract? Come to OUR phone service. We don't have them. You can start and stop anytime you like."
Of course, there's no point in being pessimistic about it. The providers might not choose to collude on this particular point.
It sounds like you're saying a simple market doesn't solve the problem of providing bandwidth supply to meet demand.
This might be the case, but I'm skeptical of the reasoning. I have yet to be convinced that telco ISPs really don't have the money to invest in their infrastructure -- are they really spending all their revenues on maintenance? I think they're just hoping to get away without providing additional service or have someone else subsidize this so they don't have to give up their margins.
Not to mention that approach #3 on your list (anti-net-neutrality) suffers from essentially the same problems that #1 and #2 do from the ISPs perspective -- if one ISP does it and consumers hate it, those that don't do it will gain customers.
Of course, that would be the market at work. Which is why some ISPs are looking to skirt the issue via collusion and legislation. In places where there even IS a market with more than 1-2 providers, which is the real reason I think markets won't solve this problem.
If there *IS* any place where the problem is legitimate and can be solved, I think it's either with option #1, where the ISPs suck it up and do what it takes to invest in keeping current.... or it's in the peering agreements between ISPs. I mean, hell... why should Google/YouTube be involved in this? As everyone and their dog points out, Google already pays their ISP (let's call them GISP), and probably quite handsomly. The mismatch comes between the balance of traffic flowing between the GISP and the rest of the ISPs between GISP and the consumer. If that peering agreement presents a problem for the other ISPs, then they ought to work it out with GISP. Google has nothing to do with it -- they already bought their bandwidth.
# Allow drilling in ANOIR # Allow drilling off the continental shelf in the gulf
Not a good idea.
Oil pulled out of there now would probably simply go on the global market. Since it's not a particularly huge amount in comparison to what's out there, it probably wouldn't depress prices significantly. Especially since competition for industrial resources is getting steeper as China, India, and some third-world countries enter the game.
At some point, it seems likely the peak oil shinola really will splatter upon the fan. Or resource competition will get really intense. Maybe so intense that we'll see military challenges for control of resources on the other side of the globe. All while most modern militaries run, essentially, on oil.
Against that possibility, which option places us in a stronger strategic position -- if we tap all our domestically available resources, or if we leave some significant ones untapped while using those from around the world while we (more or less) have a dominant position?
Government can hardly deliver my mail intact (USPS), competently educate my children (public schools), take care of my grandparent's health (Medicare), ensure my retirement (the ridiculous failure that is Social Security).
I'm as down as the next guy about the state of health care coverage in the U.S., the problems both public and private pension systems are facing, and I probably have a better understanding than most about the problems of education having actually been in the classroom as a teacher. Every one of these institutions could use significant improvement.
But first off -- c'mon, USPS? How often *does* the gubmint lose or mangle your mail? I've had more negative encounters on that front with the private shippers (UPS and FedEx, I'm looking at you), and the number of things I've sent or received by US Mail is orders of magnitude larger.
And second of all, I think the standard "Government Can't Do Nothin' Right" rant is actually one of the most dangerous ideas floating around our society today. It is, plain and simple, completely corrosive to the ability to build effective public institutions. Somehow, we the people have gotten to the point where we *accept* the argument that it's OK for the Feds to turn in a D- performance when it comes to disaster relief -- because hey, government's never effective, so it's never their job. And we readily elect people who loudly vocalize the idea that there's no such thing as an effective public solution.
Why are we surprised that we don't have them? We're hiring vegetarian butchers to package and deliver the meat, folks.
You don't have to accept the idea that public institutions are the answer to everything. Markets are great tools, if you understand them rather than treating them as a panacea. Private non-profits can do a significant amount of good. Churches do too. And in general, healthy social communities just make everything better.
But everything in its place. Sometimes the right tool for the job is, in fact, a public institution. Sometimes, if you actually want to stablish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty, what you're looking for is a government.
We need to stop assuming government can't do anything. We need to start asking how it can do better -- what can make public institutions run effectively.
The Mac OS X Mail.app ate four months of my mail once. Poof. Gone. I've never had a single app actually do so much damage before or since.
But it reinforced the lesson that any data that you don't have in at least two places is likely to disappear. Doesn't matter if it's on Google's hosted apps, or on your own machine.
I've always been partial to statement #2 from the Searls & Weinberger piece World of Ends:
When we look at utility poles, we see networks as wires. And we see those wires as parts of systems: The phone system, the electric power system, the cable TV system.
When we listen to radio or watch TV, we're told during every break that networks are sources of programming being beamed through the air or through cables.
But the Internet is different. It isn't wiring. It isn't a system. And it isn't a source of programming.
The Internet is a way for all the things that call themselves networks to coexist and work together. It's an inter-network. Literally.
What makes the Net inter is the fact that it's just a protocol -- the Internet Protocol, to be exact. A protocol is an agreement about how things work together.
This protocol doesn't specify what people can do with the network, what they can build on its edges, what they can say, who gets to talk. The protocol simply says: If you want to swap bits with others, here's how. If you want to put a computer -- or a cell phone or a refrigerator -- on the network, you have to agree to the agreement that is the Internet.
The Internet is no single piece of technology. It is an agreement about how to have different networks and technologies talk to each other and work together.
It's a bit heady, maybe even a bit airy-fairy, but the essay captures some of the essence of why the Internet is different and proves to be so valuable.
I also think it's a good lead in for discussing why net neutrality is essential. A non-neutral policy essentially throws away the agreement, likely fracturing the network into pieces between which there'd be ongoing maybe-we'll-talk-maybe-we-won't negotiations. Pieces get balkanized, even walled off, and resources that used to go to developing services that anyone who was part of the agreement could use now have to be devoted to the negotiation.
With the Internet agreement, you don't have to concentrate on that. Just follow the guidelines on how to talk to one edge of the net, and you can talk to the whole world. That's the revolution.
I think that this guy is overlooking a few things to make an anti-male statement.
The article isn't really about male inferiority. It's a rhetorical device to highlight the economics of sci/tech career choices. See this other comment I just made for a fuller explanation.
Therefore, it's understandable why men would stick to a field they like, even if it is inferior, where women would go to something else just because it pays more and expects less. They already don't care what they do.
Greenspun has something to say about these people:
"Some scientists are like kids who never grow up. They love what they do, are excited by the possibilities of their research, and wear a big smile most days. Although these people are, by Boston standards, ridiculously poor and they will never be able to afford a house (within a one-hour drive of their job) or support a family, I don't feel sorry for them."
This has absolutely nothing to do with who is "smarter" than the other, and I am so sick of seeing this tripe about women's superiority to men that it makes me sick
Easy there, Tiger. Take the casting that "Women are Smarter than Men" with a grain of salt -- it's not Greenspun's real point. His point is to highlight that because the economic incentives are mostly bare to modest, choosing something else other than a technical/scientific career is a very intelligent choice, unless you already know you're going to love your work so much that the other stuff isn't going to matter. If you do it, it should be more like the decision to become a writer, or a guitar player, or an artist -- it's tough to make it, but people do and find that rewarding, too. Some people literally can't choose anything else. Nothing wrong with that.
It's on topic with the fine article because it says the same thing: lifestyle pressures are moving women out of IT. Well, duh. This is observing the canary when the coal mine's falling in. Lifestyle pressures are moving lots of people who weren't in IT for the love of it out. And even some who were, but find they can enjoy it more as a hobby. Because in most cases, the economic incentives are bare to modest, and the demands are high.
"Pursuing science as a career seems so irrational that one wonders why any young American would do it. Yet we do find some young Americans starting out in the sciences and they are mostly men... A lot more men than women choose to do seemingly irrational things such as become petty criminals, fly homebuilt helicopters, play video games, and keep tropical fish as pets (98 percent of the attendees at the American Cichlid Association convention that I last attended were male). Should we be surprised that it is mostly men who spend 10 years banging their heads against an equation-filled blackboard in hopes of landing a $35,000/year post-doc job?
Having been both a student and teacher at MIT, my personal explanation for men going into science is the following:
1. young men strive to achieve high status among their peer group
2. men tend to lack perspective and are unable to step back and ask the question "is this peer group worth impressing?"
It is the guys with the poorest social skills who are least likely to talk to adults and find out what the salary and working conditions are like in different occupations. It is mostly guys with rather poor social skills whom one meets in the university science halls...
What about women? Don't they want to impress their peers? Yes, but they are more discriminating about choosing those peers. I've taught a fair number of women students in electrical engineering and computer science classes over the years. I can give you a list of the ones who had the best heads on their shoulders and were the most thoughtful about planning out the rest of their lives. Their names are on files in my "medical school recommendations" directory."
And as a final note: which do you think is easier to collect and recycle? Mercury in bulbs, or mercury nicely mixed into our atmosphere?
Well, coal plants present a smaller number of points of emission, at any rate, so rather than having to encourage/mandate behavior of 300 million, you only have to control the behavior of a few thousand coal plants.
(Though the challenge of reckoning with the political influence of coal plant owners might be an issue.)
Slashdot Mirror
Spotlight's not really the same thing, I don't think, but to the extent that it's similar, it's got some fairly good hooks for third-party developers and it's pretty customizable:
o ogleimporter.html
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/spotlight/
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/spotlight/g
Does Microsoft offer something similar?
Clearly, Prince gets it. Digital Content is no longer an object to sell itself, as it has no value anymore, but is merely an attraction to attract consumers to purchase other things.
The question is which other things, really. It's a legitimate question, despite the fact that some of the people who are asking it (the labels) are asking it for the wrong reasons and coming to some dubious conclusions.
See, it's *always* been the case that you had to give away some music. Broadcasting is the only way to create a large market for recordings. Give away some music... to create the desire to purchase more music. That's always how it's worked.
The advantage the labels had before is that they were the only ones who could distribute recordings. So, when you wanted what you heard, you had to go to them. So, there's no guarantee that when the desire to get more music kicks in, they'll be the ones people turn to. People have other choices now. The big labels have lost control. What are they selling now? And why will people buy from them?
The entire industry simply isn't used to asking that question, and many of them think they're entitled not to have to think about it, and that's the basic problem.
But I think it's a legitimate question.
Second, we live in a competitive country and world. Paying twice as much as other countries for medical care doesn't surprise me in the least, since we typically pay more than that for just about everything else. Do you think people in Cuba all buy $200,000 houses? I don't think so. Yet that's common here.
I think normalizing prices for services against cost of living is an interesting idea, but I don't think that's what the GP meant when he said we pay twice as much. I think he meant the anual per capita spending of *our government* is twice that of any other nation's. If this is the same figure I've seen before, the actual fees for services and insurance premiums paid by consumers aren't even figured in.
It ain't perfect, and in fact, in some cases, it's a pain, but your points don't seem like the reasons why.
.css file, or two, or three, or four, sometimes from the same server, other times from some other server. If the ISP flakes out on you 5% of the time, and you have 5 different files to download, then (.95^5 = 0.76) about one time out of four, you get nothing, and have to reload.
CSS seems to be nothing more than a way of making life easier for Webmasters, while making life suck for the actual consumers of web content.
Actually, sometimes it makes life *harder* for webmasters, especially if they've drunk the table-free layout kool-aid.
If the ISP's spotty (maybe the setup of that HTTP transaction fails 5% of the time), then one out of 20 times you don't get any HTML to render. So you reload and all's well. New: Download a hunk of HTML. Download a separate
Don't know which ISP you're using, of course, but I'm not even sure I see anything like this even 1% of the time for CSS. And seeing css files loaded from other servers? Also rare. And you get the advantage that layout/styling code put in the css file only has to be loaded once.
New: Javashit is still a security risk, but we'll make damn sure that none of our content renders correctly unless you turn it on, because how else are we going to run our browser-detection script that determines which of the half-dozen stylesheets (see above) we want your browser to use.
Are people really using Javascript detection? Most of the discussion and practice I'm familiar with focuses on:
(a) Using filter hacks to target browser specific CSS (sparingly)
(b) Making sure the actual content of the page is viewable/readable even if the stylesheet isn't used for some reason.
New: Any font you like, as long as you're running the same DPI on your monitor as the web designer was running on his screen. If not, it'll look about two sizes too small, or two sizes too large. But it'll never look like the "right" default font that the pre-CSS browser would default to.
CSS can be used to fix fonts at the wrong size. It also has all the tools for picking font sizes the old method had and a few new ones with relative sizing merits.
Now, I think CSS is a pain for layouts. For some reason, the observation that there's a use for semantic tabular markup seems to have blinded the w3c and others involved to the fact that tables are a great tool/concept for layout. The differences IE has from the spec are a royal pain (though I have to say that IE6's box model actually makes more sense than the CSS 2.1 spec's, so much so that I'm glad they didn't use follow spec there, and the day I can actually choose it via CSS 3 won't be a moment too soon). The fact there's no easy CSS way to center an item in a container element sucks (and please don't point me to the hacks that require knowing the height of either element or javascript stuff). Waiting until css 3 to allow multiple background images on an element was shortsighted. I could go on.
However, I'd rather have all of this than go back to HTML 3.2. The markup is cleaner and easier to edit, it's genuinely smaller, it's easier to make global changes, and some layout and decoration tasks are just, plain and simple, easier because of it. Remember the days where if you wanted a bordered box you had to barf out a 9-celled table?
<div style="border: 1px solid gray"> content here </div>
over:
<table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
<tr><td bgcolor="gray"> </td> <td bgcolor="gray" height="1"> </td> <td bgcolor="gray"> </td></tr>
<tr><td bgcolor="gray" width="1"> </td> <td> content here </td> <td bgcolor="gray"> </td></tr>
<tr><td bgcolor="gray"> </td> <td bgcolor="gray"
My experience with EDGE suggests that while the bandwidth might be just barely there, by and large the latency isn't going to be low enough, maybe even in the best of areas.
On the other hand, if someone develops a VOIP client for the iPhone (and I think it's likely someone will, one way or another), then that'd be quite usable when in WiFi range...
Generally, it means "kinda, sortof, sometimes works, until we get tired of supporting it and/or it's to our advantage not to."
See also: Windows Media, Internet Explorer.
(Yeah, Office OS X is actually pretty great, but I think a good deal of that has to do with the fact that they can pull in cash AND perpetuate file-format hegemony.)
And if you truly believe in the free market, you believe that such businesses would come to exist.
Actually, I think in order to believe that business would come to exist, you have to believe in several other things besides markets:
(1) A significant demand among customers (preferably in conditions where they consequences of their choices regarding privacy are clear and aren't to decisions about something more essential)
(2) Either:
(a) That it's possible to make more money off of not selling your customers out than selling them out.
(b) Companies that inherently value privacy over money to be made off of selling the customer out.
If #1's not there in sufficient quantity, obviously a market isn't going to move toward privacy. And if #2a isn't true, then whether or not things move towards privacy has nothing to do with markets and everything to do with #2b: the existence of business owners and officers who value individual privacy so highly they're willing to give up a profit on it.
Right now, it seems that many businesses prefer to operate under conditions very different from my parenthetical qualification for #1. And also that by and large they seem to behave as if #2a isn't true.
I have two theories about why:
I. They're right. #2a isn't true.
II. They're wrong, but the payoff from following #2a is either:
a - distant enough the local maxima is hard to resist
b - far enough outside training and cultural conception that even though it's there, most officers and owners can't see it
c - diffused enough among other returns that it's hard to measure
So, yes, I do believe markets can do a lot of cool things. But, no. I don't think it's safe to say they'll inevitably produce businesses that genuinely value privacy.
Why bother with the law? Seems to me all you need to do is *let* businesses do the tracking (which of course they're going to want to do, because data mining is especially useful for marketeers), and government just needs to occasionally ask nicely for copies?
Better yet if you've also got a unitary executive to go along with it.
One difference is that in the West, you can pull maneuvers like this and sometimes they actually make a difference. China probably wouldn't have cared much at all if Google had gotten petulant, and it certainly wouldn't have mattered to them whether or not their citizens lost access to something valuable. In Germany, who knows?
And cynical types can always note that China is a much bigger market than Germany.
microchip-controlled Tickle Me Elmos will be transformed into unstoppable killing machines
t ty-jason/
They didn't start that way, they were just programmed to fight effectively against Hello Kitty Jason:
http://www.hellokittyhell.com/2007/06/19/hello-ki
but to quote Jurassic Park "Life.... finds a way."
especially with the costs of domestic labor skyrocketing through the roof.
t h_slow/index.htm
I'd been given to understand average and median wages were more or less stable and/or falling relative to inflation.
Not true?
This article:
http://money.cnn.com/2006/01/30/pf/real_wage_grow
gives some specifics on some of the nations largest counties as of a year and a half ago. There's certainly some counties where real wages are increasing... and others where it's clear workers aren't winning against inflation.
President Bush said he had the Beatles on his iPod, when there was no legal way to get them on there.
"Well, when the president does it that means that it is not illegal."
http://www.landmarkcases.org/nixon/nixonview.html
Shouldn't the inbuilt browser be able to view YouTube anyways?
Rumor has it that the iPhone will not include Flash, and it's my understanding that YouTube relies on a Flash video player.
Comcast is a business, that wants to make money. In Slashdot mythology, that is a defining characteristic of evil,
Nope. Making money is just fine. In fact, I'd be happy to make some myself by wagering $100 that if you took a genuine poll of slashdot readers, most of them -- probably even well over 90% -- would say so.
If you'd said something a little more sophisticated, like "In Slashdot mythology, making money off of craptacular service is considered evil", now that might be accurate. It's not the profit that's objectionable. It's when the value of providing a quality service or product is so obviously well below coequal with the profit motive.
The author of the article was somebody paying over $2000 a year for cable service. Nobody pays that amount for an optional service to a business they object to having profits. Her complaint isn't even necessarily the cash, though the price raise certainly adds injury to insult. It's the shenanigans, the lying, the phone tree navigation hell, the reps who don't know what they're doing, the bullshit policies that make no sense. And author's experience aside, look around throughout this thread there's all kinds of stories about the actual technical quality of service that are pretty awful.
And often there's really no better competitor to go to.
And you know, it really isn't just the cable companies, or the phone companies, or the banks, or any single industry. Every time somebody goes on about how single-payer insurance schemes would result in the nightmare of "healthcare run like the DMV" I wonder what kind of blinders they've got on. It's already here for a good chunk of America, as I find out every time I have to deal with the inefficient health care bureacracy that in theory the market forces of competition should be conspiring to eliminate (and I've been through four different insurance companies to try and get something better). Or there's the fact that I genuinely, no kidding, have received customer service orders of magnitude better than official phone support for my Hawking wireless router from volunteers on random message boards. Increasingly it seems that *many* business of more than 1-2 dozen people have this problem.
I think one of these days, somebody is going to make a pretty winning thesis out of Why Customer Service Usually Sucks in our economy.
"What's that, T-Mobile won't let you talk to VOIP users? Come to OUR phone service. We don't cripple our phones. You can talk to anybody."
"What's that? T-Mobile won't let you sign up without a two year contract? Come to OUR phone service. We don't have them. You can start and stop anytime you like."
Of course, there's no point in being pessimistic about it. The providers might not choose to collude on this particular point.
It sounds like you're saying a simple market doesn't solve the problem of providing bandwidth supply to meet demand.
This might be the case, but I'm skeptical of the reasoning. I have yet to be convinced that telco ISPs really don't have the money to invest in their infrastructure -- are they really spending all their revenues on maintenance? I think they're just hoping to get away without providing additional service or have someone else subsidize this so they don't have to give up their margins.
Not to mention that approach #3 on your list (anti-net-neutrality) suffers from essentially the same problems that #1 and #2 do from the ISPs perspective -- if one ISP does it and consumers hate it, those that don't do it will gain customers.
Of course, that would be the market at work. Which is why some ISPs are looking to skirt the issue via collusion and legislation. In places where there even IS a market with more than 1-2 providers, which is the real reason I think markets won't solve this problem.
If there *IS* any place where the problem is legitimate and can be solved, I think it's either with option #1, where the ISPs suck it up and do what it takes to invest in keeping current.... or it's in the peering agreements between ISPs. I mean, hell... why should Google/YouTube be involved in this? As everyone and their dog points out, Google already pays their ISP (let's call them GISP), and probably quite handsomly. The mismatch comes between the balance of traffic flowing between the GISP and the rest of the ISPs between GISP and the consumer. If that peering agreement presents a problem for the other ISPs, then they ought to work it out with GISP. Google has nothing to do with it -- they already bought their bandwidth.
# Allow drilling in ANOIR
# Allow drilling off the continental shelf in the gulf
Not a good idea.
Oil pulled out of there now would probably simply go on the global market. Since it's not a particularly huge amount in comparison to what's out there, it probably wouldn't depress prices significantly. Especially since competition for industrial resources is getting steeper as China, India, and some third-world countries enter the game.
At some point, it seems likely the peak oil shinola really will splatter upon the fan. Or resource competition will get really intense. Maybe so intense that we'll see military challenges for control of resources on the other side of the globe. All while most modern militaries run, essentially, on oil.
Against that possibility, which option places us in a stronger strategic position -- if we tap all our domestically available resources, or if we leave some significant ones untapped while using those from around the world while we (more or less) have a dominant position?
Government can hardly deliver my mail intact (USPS), competently educate my children (public schools), take care of my grandparent's health (Medicare), ensure my retirement (the ridiculous failure that is Social Security).
I'm as down as the next guy about the state of health care coverage in the U.S., the problems both public and private pension systems are facing, and I probably have a better understanding than most about the problems of education having actually been in the classroom as a teacher. Every one of these institutions could use significant improvement.
But first off -- c'mon, USPS? How often *does* the gubmint lose or mangle your mail? I've had more negative encounters on that front with the private shippers (UPS and FedEx, I'm looking at you), and the number of things I've sent or received by US Mail is orders of magnitude larger.
And second of all, I think the standard "Government Can't Do Nothin' Right" rant is actually one of the most dangerous ideas floating around our society today. It is, plain and simple, completely corrosive to the ability to build effective public institutions. Somehow, we the people have gotten to the point where we *accept* the argument that it's OK for the Feds to turn in a D- performance when it comes to disaster relief -- because hey, government's never effective, so it's never their job. And we readily elect people who loudly vocalize the idea that there's no such thing as an effective public solution.
Why are we surprised that we don't have them? We're hiring vegetarian butchers to package and deliver the meat, folks.
You don't have to accept the idea that public institutions are the answer to everything. Markets are great tools, if you understand them rather than treating them as a panacea. Private non-profits can do a significant amount of good. Churches do too. And in general, healthy social communities just make everything better.
But everything in its place. Sometimes the right tool for the job is, in fact, a public institution. Sometimes, if you actually want to stablish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty, what you're looking for is a government.
We need to stop assuming government can't do anything. We need to start asking how it can do better -- what can make public institutions run effectively.
The Mac OS X Mail.app ate four months of my mail once. Poof. Gone. I've never had a single app actually do so much damage before or since.
But it reinforced the lesson that any data that you don't have in at least two places is likely to disappear. Doesn't matter if it's on Google's hosted apps, or on your own machine.
The Internet is no single piece of technology. It is an agreement about how to have different networks and technologies talk to each other and work together.
It's a bit heady, maybe even a bit airy-fairy, but the essay captures some of the essence of why the Internet is different and proves to be so valuable.
I also think it's a good lead in for discussing why net neutrality is essential. A non-neutral policy essentially throws away the agreement, likely fracturing the network into pieces between which there'd be ongoing maybe-we'll-talk-maybe-we-won't negotiations. Pieces get balkanized, even walled off, and resources that used to go to developing services that anyone who was part of the agreement could use now have to be devoted to the negotiation.
With the Internet agreement, you don't have to concentrate on that. Just follow the guidelines on how to talk to one edge of the net, and you can talk to the whole world. That's the revolution.
I think that this guy is overlooking a few things to make an anti-male statement.
The article isn't really about male inferiority. It's a rhetorical device to highlight the economics of sci/tech career choices. See this other comment I just made for a fuller explanation.
Therefore, it's understandable why men would stick to a field they like, even if it is inferior, where women would go to something else just because it pays more and expects less. They already don't care what they do.
Greenspun has something to say about these people:
"Some scientists are like kids who never grow up. They love what they do, are excited by the possibilities of their research, and wear a big smile most days. Although these people are, by Boston standards, ridiculously poor and they will never be able to afford a house (within a one-hour drive of their job) or support a family, I don't feel sorry for them."
Nothing wrong with doin' it for the love.
This has absolutely nothing to do with who is "smarter" than the other, and I am so sick of seeing this tripe about women's superiority to men that it makes me sick
Easy there, Tiger. Take the casting that "Women are Smarter than Men" with a grain of salt -- it's not Greenspun's real point. His point is to highlight that because the economic incentives are mostly bare to modest, choosing something else other than a technical/scientific career is a very intelligent choice, unless you already know you're going to love your work so much that the other stuff isn't going to matter. If you do it, it should be more like the decision to become a writer, or a guitar player, or an artist -- it's tough to make it, but people do and find that rewarding, too. Some people literally can't choose anything else. Nothing wrong with that.
It's on topic with the fine article because it says the same thing: lifestyle pressures are moving women out of IT. Well, duh. This is observing the canary when the coal mine's falling in. Lifestyle pressures are moving lots of people who weren't in IT for the love of it out. And even some who were, but find they can enjoy it more as a hobby. Because in most cases, the economic incentives are bare to modest, and the demands are high.
To quote Philip Greenspun:
"Pursuing science as a career seems so irrational that one wonders why any young American would do it. Yet we do find some young Americans starting out in the sciences and they are mostly men... A lot more men than women choose to do seemingly irrational things such as become petty criminals, fly homebuilt helicopters, play video games, and keep tropical fish as pets (98 percent of the attendees at the American Cichlid Association convention that I last attended were male). Should we be surprised that it is mostly men who spend 10 years banging their heads against an equation-filled blackboard in hopes of landing a $35,000/year post-doc job?
Having been both a student and teacher at MIT, my personal explanation for men going into science is the following:
1. young men strive to achieve high status among their peer group
2. men tend to lack perspective and are unable to step back and ask the question "is this peer group worth impressing?"
It is the guys with the poorest social skills who are least likely to talk to adults and find out what the salary and working conditions are like in different occupations. It is mostly guys with rather poor social skills whom one meets in the university science halls...
What about women? Don't they want to impress their peers? Yes, but they are more discriminating about choosing those peers. I've taught a fair number of women students in electrical engineering and computer science classes over the years. I can give you a list of the ones who had the best heads on their shoulders and were the most thoughtful about planning out the rest of their lives. Their names are on files in my "medical school recommendations" directory."
- Women in Science
And as a final note: which do you think is easier to collect and recycle? Mercury in bulbs, or mercury nicely mixed into our atmosphere?
Well, coal plants present a smaller number of points of emission, at any rate, so rather than having to encourage/mandate behavior of 300 million, you only have to control the behavior of a few thousand coal plants.
(Though the challenge of reckoning with the political influence of coal plant owners might be an issue.)
Isn't that a HUGE issue? The chemical is CONCENTRATING itself in the food chain.
So this shouldn't be a problem unless, like Dick Cheney, you're eating the affected children, right?