So if the major urban areas constitute a majority of the people in the country, what the hell is wrong with their votes counting as the majority of the votes for President? The Electoral College system fails DISMALLY at doing what you suggesting - in fact, it explicitly _CAUSES_ candidates to ignore large urban areas. Bush and Kerry only come to New York and Boston for one reason: fundraising. Nobody bothers campaigning in the northeast. We barely get to see those nifty attack ads you guys in the midwest see all the time, we don't hear the local stump speeches, basically we are ignored.
You're ignored because you're state is going to Kerry -- because there's no contest there. Believe me, if you were a swing state, you'd be courted so heavily you'd be begging for the political ads and polls to stop for the love of pete.
Similarly, I live in Utah, where to my chagrin, it is a foregone conclusion that Bush will win, quite possibly by a greater margin than in any other state. And guess what, we're thoroughly ignored. There's no courting whatsoever here.
Even if the electoral college was eliminated today, nothing would change the regional courting habits except a close split in a given region.
But finally, yes, the parent is right, the problem with doing said elimination would be that the smaller states would essentially become resource colonies for more populous regions (hey, we already send most of our water and energy here in Utah to California). And New York already has 30 times the representation that Wyoming does in the House -- and so I'm supposed to feel bad that it only has 10 times the representation that WY does in the Presidential election, and they're even in the Senate? Checks and balances, my friend, and even then NY comes out far, far ahead in 2/3 of those cases.
What has happened in the past when this exact same situation came up is that the smart people who lost there jobs became available to do other things. The same thing will happen this time around. The nerds who are no longer programming will be free to spend their brain power on something else.
They're able to do this only if they've got the financial resources to do so. Otherwise, they'll be essentially free to fall into the trap that other passed-by skills-based workers do: your time sells for so much less than it used to that you have to sell all of it that you can to survive. Not only is there not enough of it to invest in a new business idea, there's not enough of it to retrain to the new hot skills...
You could argue that the truly smart were putting money away for the day that the gravy train ended, and I'd have to agree with you. But even the smartests geeks are not necessarily the most pragmatic.
The public always has a choice. People can refuse to buy a sub-standard product. Industry greed drives this silliness, let them kill themselves.
So... when the FCC declares analog broadcast waves dead, and every digital receiver legally manufactured has a broadcast flag, where's the choice then?
Sure, *I'll* be exercising the choice not to watch, as I already do, and perhaps you will as well. But for the millions who can't do without the real opiate of the masses....
Why is it Bush's fault when salaries go down, but a magical coincidence when they go up?
For the same reason that when nice things happen, the Bush campaign proclaims that their plans are working, but when bad things happen, it's because we're just in tough times.
Yes, people who don't like Bush see more reasons to dislike Bush in the information they encounter. But this isn't unique to his critics, nor make him a particularly uniquely beleagured president.
My mistake was focusing on the web after I got out of school.
I have a B.S. in Mathematics, for a good foundation in theoretical stuff. Everything from C to Java and the scripting languages that start with P, and by 2002 I had 8 solid years of experience. And I still spent a year and a half unemployed (and I didn't find a job as a programmer -- I'm managing artwork projects for a graphic design company).
Though there probably are better programmers in the world, I'm probably a litte more qualified than average to do software development... and certainly far beyond a cabdriver who learned Dreamweaver. But it's still a nightmare to try to get a job.
Having spent the last year working as a project manager for a graphic design firm, coming from a development background, I think I now understand why: you must be task oriented, not system oriented, and you must have no aversion to telling someone (not something) else to do something, rather than doing it yourself, and finally, keeping schedules and budgets is not immersive work, it's work that requires lots of shallow and responsive handling.
Programmers are inherently system oriented. When there's a problem to fix, they want to build something that solves it, or enables someone else to solve it. The old saw about the programmer who will spend hours to write a script that could do something (perhaps tedious) that he could have done in 30 minutes is what's at work here.
Most of the programmers I know also have no problem telling a machine to do something -- or even talking about how an organization should run. But when it comes down to telling someone what they should be doing and when it needs to be done by -- that's a whole different thing.
Most programmers I know like immersive tasks... something you can sit down, focus on, mull over, work deeply in, and then deliver. PM is about turning lots of shallow details fast. There's a lot more task switching (which is why if you try to do some of the work yourself, you're doomed to failure, because immersive tasks and having a large volume of shallow details to take care of don't mix at all).
These are problems I share, and it didn't take me long to realize what they were, but it took me months to get over them (and also, to get the organization to stop thinking of me as a person they could *also* give web dev work to as well). I've gotten much better, but it was a hard haul the first six months, and sometimes I'd rather be back making cool things rather than dealing with this.
But: the good thing is that most programmers are skilled at breaking a problem down into smaller, more easily solvable problems. Their systems thinking can be a great strength if the project allows enough slack to let them set the system. They're introspective enough they can self-improve. And if they've got deft enough social skills to get people to do what they're supposed to, they can become quite succesful.
The Canopy Group has a set of office buildings in Lindon that has great connectivity. SCO occupies one of them, and some Canopy companies occupy others, but the rest are rented out to other companies, one of which I work for, which have nothing to do with SCO, and are happy about that.
The university may not be able to ban wireless devices outright -- however, they're probably well within their rights to say what can and cannot be connected on their network.
Some people have said *300*. Except, of course, it appears that at least three of those signatures are from vets who were contacted, asked to sign the affadavit, said they didn't want to be involved, but then had their signatures added anyway.
Many of the rest of them don't even know Kerry except by reputation.
An economist. Lovely. International economist, actually. Have those people *ever* been right about anything?
The amazing thing is that people think they can be right about anything but the most basic. Economics is at least as complex as the weather, which we know we get wrong much of the time, except with all the added predictability of being a social science...
Based on my experience with insurance companies, I don't really expect to see them use this to lower premiums, just to raise them and have excuses to terminate policies.
No kidding. For *years* I waited, with ridiculous premiums and no claims, with the guarantee that my premiums would drop dramatically when I turned 25, because of statistics and risk groups blah blah.
Two weeks after I turned 25, my premiums went up $20. I didn't even bother to ask why, I simply switched to another company, who took $100 of my rates. Then I switched to another, which took another $100 off my rates.
In fact, switching companies is the only thing that's ever taken down my rates. After that switch, my carrier's business got taken over by Progressive, and rates slowly rose for me until they're nearly twice what I was paying before. Keep in mind that I've made a single glass claim in this time, nothing else.
I see another switch in my future.
Of course, the insurance companies don't care. If you pay them a premium, and then leave without making a claim, they win. If it were allowed by law, I'd be strongly tempted to go without. Irresponsible as it might be, I'm very nearly convinced that it's actually immoral to let my money go to premiums which support these kinds of businesses.
I think an economic argument in support of free software would carry more weight coming from someone other than "OSNews publisher, ex-Red Hat employee David Adams."
Who better to argue the point than someone who's personally profited from the model? Not only does Red Hat do so, but Adams made a fair chunk of change from Open Source software by leading the team that developed Tallyman (later folded into Interchange) and getting the company bought by Red Hat. In the meanwhile, they made their money by selling services based around the package, which was open source.
In short, Adams has made the model work for him, which probably has a good deal to say about his qualifications regarding and enthusiasm for it.
So... T-Mobile's speed is still limited to 56k with latency that makes one wish for the responsiveness of dialup. 14k dialup. I really like the idea of having an ssh client with me all the time, but not one that reminds me of a 300 baud modem.
Any hints about when they might at least bump up to 2.5 G speeds, like the 100+k and reasonably responsive CDMA data connections have?
It's not possible to create totally objective reports on the news. All reports are colored, in one degree or another, by the concerns and interests of the people who created those reports.
There's a big difference between the kind of bias inherent in one's point of view -- that is, the sum of ones experience, culture, personality (or programming if you happen to be an automated aggregator) etc -- and the kind of bias inherent in promoting a specific agenda. The former allows for change with better emerging information or argument. The latter allows only for change as it suits the agenda.
Which kind of "bias" is better in the context of news reporting?
Even Google's allegedly objective news site is biased by the choices the developers made, by the choices made about which sources are included and which are not, etc.
A comparison of Google's news site vs MSN's is probably actually a perfect demonstration of a latent undirected bias vs an agenda driven bias. Sure, on any single dimensional continuum representing degrees of bias one way or another, Google will not hit dead center unless they've very improbably happened on perfection. But I challenge you to find a bias that favors the particular ideological, political, or economic interests of, well, just about anybody -- especially a bias as clear as Microsoft's.
This came up for me today. I'm looking into buying some digital audio equipment for a small home project studio, and the salesman I talked to at Sweetwater stressed the importance of not just going with the 48GB internal 5400RPM drive I've got for my laptop... and recommended Glyph drives. I said I'd think about it, and started to look them up on usenet... some folks say that Glyph's quality and support are worth it. Others say that a screwdriver and some backup drives are just as good. I'm still trying to learn enough about the differences between hard drives to make a judgement.
That's an excellent point -- no point in opening the throttle outside of the motherboard if there's still a pipe into the machine that can't handle the flood.
I understand that they're struggling somewhat and they've taken bailout loan guarantees from the feds and there was talk of Chapter 11 filing. And yes, from their sec filings you can see they're putting greater pressure on their fleet/staff. But I figure they are the second largest low-fare carrier, next to Southwest, which is really the only airline kicking butt and taking names at this point, and they don't appear to be hiring for the kind of job I want (pricing/yield/revenue management), while America West does. And also, lean times at a company can present a real opportunity to distinguish yourself by merit.
But feel free to email me further if you've got more inside scoop. If I'd be walking into not just a challenge but a really adverse environment, I'd definitely be interested to hear about it (I would have emailed you already, but you don't have an address listed, so...)
It think what is happening is that it is getting very hard to charge premium prices for software that implements old solutions.
Precisely. I think we are indeed going to see an explosion of software, especially niche software -- and this is possible exactly because platform software is becoming commoditized.
Nope, it's not new wisdom. It's covered by Eric Raymond in his essays and it's all over the place... but for some reason, only a few people seem to understand this.
This measure is supported by the RIAA but opposed by the tech industry at large. Why does Congress let the tail wag the dog when it comes to copyright legislation? Does Intel just not give enough money to politicians?
This especially considering Utah has a thriving hi-tech industry, but is in no way a media powerhouse.
However, it would take a serious miracle to get Hatch out of his Senate seat in Utah. Not only does the majority of the population votes Republican automatically, but Hatch's campaign is usually run on the idea of how helpful it is to Utah to have a senior, well-connected Senator fighting for our interests in Congress. This is particularly ironic considering Hatch ran 30 years ago on the concept that the incumbent had become a Washington insider.
The bad thing is that while CSS has given us a good (and sometimes more powerful) set of tools, there really is something good about tables. They're easy to grasp, a grid is a natural fit for layout tasks, and that's why people keep using them.
Sure, there are table quirks across browsers, and CSS makes some things much, much cleaner. But sometimes, tables do to, and the only real sin involved in using them comes from the fact that it ruins the semanticity of tabular markup.
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So if the major urban areas constitute a majority of the people in the country, what the hell is wrong with their votes counting as the majority of the votes for President? The Electoral College system fails DISMALLY at doing what you suggesting - in fact, it explicitly _CAUSES_ candidates to ignore large urban areas. Bush and Kerry only come to New York and Boston for one reason: fundraising. Nobody bothers campaigning in the northeast. We barely get to see those nifty attack ads you guys in the midwest see all the time, we don't hear the local stump speeches, basically we are ignored.
You're ignored because you're state is going to Kerry -- because there's no contest there. Believe me, if you were a swing state, you'd be courted so heavily you'd be begging for the political ads and polls to stop for the love of pete.
Similarly, I live in Utah, where to my chagrin, it is a foregone conclusion that Bush will win, quite possibly by a greater margin than in any other state. And guess what, we're thoroughly ignored. There's no courting whatsoever here.
Even if the electoral college was eliminated today, nothing would change the regional courting habits except a close split in a given region.
But finally, yes, the parent is right, the problem with doing said elimination would be that the smaller states would essentially become resource colonies for more populous regions (hey, we already send most of our water and energy here in Utah to California). And New York already has 30 times the representation that Wyoming does in the House -- and so I'm supposed to feel bad that it only has 10 times the representation that WY does in the Presidential election, and they're even in the Senate? Checks and balances, my friend, and even then NY comes out far, far ahead in 2/3 of those cases.
What has happened in the past when this exact same situation came up is that the smart people who lost there jobs became available to do other things. The same thing will happen this time around. The nerds who are no longer programming will be free to spend their brain power on something else.
They're able to do this only if they've got the financial resources to do so. Otherwise, they'll be essentially free to fall into the trap that other passed-by skills-based workers do: your time sells for so much less than it used to that you have to sell all of it that you can to survive. Not only is there not enough of it to invest in a new business idea, there's not enough of it to retrain to the new hot skills...
You could argue that the truly smart were putting money away for the day that the gravy train ended, and I'd have to agree with you. But even the smartests geeks are not necessarily the most pragmatic.
The public always has a choice. People can refuse to buy a sub-standard product. Industry greed drives this silliness, let them kill themselves.
So... when the FCC declares analog broadcast waves dead, and every digital receiver legally manufactured has a broadcast flag, where's the choice then?
Sure, *I'll* be exercising the choice not to watch, as I already do, and perhaps you will as well. But for the millions who can't do without the real opiate of the masses....
Why is it Bush's fault when salaries go down, but a magical coincidence when they go up?
For the same reason that when nice things happen, the Bush campaign proclaims that their plans are working, but when bad things happen, it's because we're just in tough times.
Yes, people who don't like Bush see more reasons to dislike Bush in the information they encounter. But this isn't unique to his critics, nor make him a particularly uniquely beleagured president.
My mistake was focusing on the web after I got out of school.
I have a B.S. in Mathematics, for a good foundation in theoretical stuff. Everything from C to Java and the scripting languages that start with P, and by 2002 I had 8 solid years of experience. And I still spent a year and a half unemployed (and I didn't find a job as a programmer -- I'm managing artwork projects for a graphic design company).
Though there probably are better programmers in the world, I'm probably a litte more qualified than average to do software development... and certainly far beyond a cabdriver who learned Dreamweaver. But it's still a nightmare to try to get a job.
Having spent the last year working as a project manager for a graphic design firm, coming from a development background, I think I now understand why: you must be task oriented, not system oriented, and you must have no aversion to telling someone (not something) else to do something, rather than doing it yourself, and finally, keeping schedules and budgets is not immersive work, it's work that requires lots of shallow and responsive handling.
Programmers are inherently system oriented. When there's a problem to fix, they want to build something that solves it, or enables someone else to solve it. The old saw about the programmer who will spend hours to write a script that could do something (perhaps tedious) that he could have done in 30 minutes is what's at work here.
Most of the programmers I know also have no problem telling a machine to do something -- or even talking about how an organization should run. But when it comes down to telling someone what they should be doing and when it needs to be done by -- that's a whole different thing.
Most programmers I know like immersive tasks... something you can sit down, focus on, mull over, work deeply in, and then deliver. PM is about turning lots of shallow details fast. There's a lot more task switching (which is why if you try to do some of the work yourself, you're doomed to failure, because immersive tasks and having a large volume of shallow details to take care of don't mix at all).
These are problems I share, and it didn't take me long to realize what they were, but it took me months to get over them (and also, to get the organization to stop thinking of me as a person they could *also* give web dev work to as well). I've gotten much better, but it was a hard haul the first six months, and sometimes I'd rather be back making cool things rather than dealing with this.
But: the good thing is that most programmers are skilled at breaking a problem down into smaller, more easily solvable problems. Their systems thinking can be a great strength if the project allows enough slack to let them set the system. They're introspective enough they can self-improve. And if they've got deft enough social skills to get people to do what they're supposed to, they can become quite succesful.
The Canopy Group has a set of office buildings in Lindon that has great connectivity. SCO occupies one of them, and some Canopy companies occupy others, but the rest are rented out to other companies, one of which I work for, which have nothing to do with SCO, and are happy about that.
The university may not be able to ban wireless devices outright -- however, they're probably well within their rights to say what can and cannot be connected on their network.
"Out the Yin-Yang" indeed. It's hard to put a price on playing fast and loose with American democracy.
For as much as modern pundits seem to throw around the term "treason" these days, I'm surprised the term hasn't been applied to Diebold.
Some people have said *300*. Except, of course, it appears that at least three of those signatures are from vets who were contacted, asked to sign the affadavit, said they didn't want to be involved, but then had their signatures added anyway.
Many of the rest of them don't even know Kerry except by reputation.
An economist. Lovely. International economist, actually. Have those people *ever* been right about anything?
The amazing thing is that people think they can be right about anything but the most basic. Economics is at least as complex as the weather, which we know we get wrong much of the time, except with all the added predictability of being a social science...
Based on my experience with insurance companies, I don't really expect to see them use this to lower premiums, just to raise them and have excuses to terminate policies.
No kidding. For *years* I waited, with ridiculous premiums and no claims, with the guarantee that my premiums would drop dramatically when I turned 25, because of statistics and risk groups blah blah.
Two weeks after I turned 25, my premiums went up $20. I didn't even bother to ask why, I simply switched to another company, who took $100 of my rates. Then I switched to another, which took another $100 off my rates.
In fact, switching companies is the only thing that's ever taken down my rates. After that switch, my carrier's business got taken over by Progressive, and rates slowly rose for me until they're nearly twice what I was paying before. Keep in mind that I've made a single glass claim in this time, nothing else.
I see another switch in my future.
Of course, the insurance companies don't care. If you pay them a premium, and then leave without making a claim, they win. If it were allowed by law, I'd be strongly tempted to go without. Irresponsible as it might be, I'm very nearly convinced that it's actually immoral to let my money go to premiums which support these kinds of businesses.
I think an economic argument in support of free software would carry more weight coming from someone other than "OSNews publisher, ex-Red Hat employee David Adams."
Who better to argue the point than someone who's personally profited from the model? Not only does Red Hat do so, but Adams made a fair chunk of change from Open Source software by leading the team that developed Tallyman (later folded into Interchange) and getting the company bought by Red Hat. In the meanwhile, they made their money by selling services based around the package, which was open source.
In short, Adams has made the model work for him, which probably has a good deal to say about his qualifications regarding and enthusiasm for it.
While it's powered by solar wind, it will slow down and reverse as it gets farther from the original star and closer to the destination star.
No, see, that's where Jeff Bridges comes in.
So... T-Mobile's speed is still limited to 56k with latency that makes one wish for the responsiveness of dialup. 14k dialup. I really like the idea of having an ssh client with me all the time, but not one that reminds me of a 300 baud modem.
Any hints about when they might at least bump up to 2.5 G speeds, like the 100+k and reasonably responsive CDMA data connections have?
It's not possible to create totally objective reports on the news. All reports are colored, in one degree or another, by the concerns and interests of the people who created those reports.
There's a big difference between the kind of bias inherent in one's point of view -- that is, the sum of ones experience, culture, personality (or programming if you happen to be an automated aggregator) etc -- and the kind of bias inherent in promoting a specific agenda. The former allows for change with better emerging information or argument. The latter allows only for change as it suits the agenda.
Which kind of "bias" is better in the context of news reporting?
Even Google's allegedly objective news site is biased by the choices the developers made, by the choices made about which sources are included and which are not, etc.
A comparison of Google's news site vs MSN's is probably actually a perfect demonstration of a latent undirected bias vs an agenda driven bias. Sure, on any single dimensional continuum representing degrees of bias one way or another, Google will not hit dead center unless they've very improbably happened on perfection. But I challenge you to find a bias that favors the particular ideological, political, or economic interests of, well, just about anybody -- especially a bias as clear as Microsoft's.
This came up for me today. I'm looking into buying some digital audio equipment for a small home project studio, and the salesman I talked to at Sweetwater stressed the importance of not just going with the 48GB internal 5400RPM drive I've got for my laptop... and recommended Glyph drives. I said I'd think about it, and started to look them up on usenet... some folks say that Glyph's quality and support are worth it. Others say that a screwdriver and some backup drives are just as good. I'm still trying to learn enough about the differences between hard drives to make a judgement.
Behold, the Cidco iPhone... circa 1998 technology... a phone with a web browser and email client included.
That's an excellent point -- no point in opening the throttle outside of the motherboard if there's still a pipe into the machine that can't handle the flood.
I understand that they're struggling somewhat and they've taken bailout loan guarantees from the feds and there was talk of Chapter 11 filing. And yes, from their sec filings you can see they're putting greater pressure on their fleet/staff. But I figure they are the second largest low-fare carrier, next to Southwest, which is really the only airline kicking butt and taking names at this point, and they don't appear to be hiring for the kind of job I want (pricing/yield/revenue management), while America West does. And also, lean times at a company can present a real opportunity to distinguish yourself by merit.
But feel free to email me further if you've got more inside scoop. If I'd be walking into not just a challenge but a really adverse environment, I'd definitely be interested to hear about it (I would have emailed you already, but you don't have an address listed, so...)
But just how much data can a person consume?
If I was going under the knife remotely, I'd want the surgeon to have as much bandwidth as possible (and very, very, very low latency).
It think what is happening is that it is getting very hard to charge premium prices for software that implements old solutions.
Precisely. I think we are indeed going to see an explosion of software, especially niche software -- and this is possible exactly because platform software is becoming commoditized.
Nope, it's not new wisdom. It's covered by Eric Raymond in his essays and it's all over the place... but for some reason, only a few people seem to understand this.
This measure is supported by the RIAA but opposed by the tech industry at large. Why does Congress let the tail wag the dog when it comes to copyright legislation? Does Intel just not give enough money to politicians?
This especially considering Utah has a thriving hi-tech industry, but is in no way a media powerhouse.
However, it would take a serious miracle to get Hatch out of his Senate seat in Utah. Not only does the majority of the population votes Republican automatically, but Hatch's campaign is usually run on the idea of how helpful it is to Utah to have a senior, well-connected Senator fighting for our interests in Congress. This is particularly ironic considering Hatch ran 30 years ago on the concept that the incumbent had become a Washington insider.
The bad thing is that while CSS has given us a good (and sometimes more powerful) set of tools, there really is something good about tables. They're easy to grasp, a grid is a natural fit for layout tasks, and that's why people keep using them.
Sure, there are table quirks across browsers, and CSS makes some things much, much cleaner. But sometimes, tables do to, and the only real sin involved in using them comes from the fact that it ruins the semanticity of tabular markup.
See this Metafilter thread or this one for more discussion.... or some of my comments.
Let me guess: you read Pitchfork Media.