It's something that you can do with any cheapo netbook and any cheapo phone (not even smartphone).
While it's true that you can do it with a lot of phones (I've done it through two Nokia Series 40 phones), it's important to note that you CAN'T do it with any phone via bluetooth. And finding out which phones you can do it is even murkier since almost nobody labels their products with the specific bluetooth profiles a device supports. And most of the carriers seem interested in obfuscating or even crippling the DUN profile on hardware that has it.
The Democratic party however, has been very unified... since the days of JFK.
Yeah. Right.
Look, if you're far enough to the Right, it's not hard to see why this might be an easy mistake to make. Kind of like that old New Yorker cover. Funny because it's partly true, but don't point too much while you laugh, because everybody does something like this, even though it's wrong. Do a little bit of reading about the drama around the 1964 and 1968 Democratic national conventions. Or on the heavy tension between the DLC and traditional Democrats over the last two decades. When you finally get to the point where you realize the Clinton was arguably right of Eisenhower or Nixon on economic matters, you'll be ready to comment on this.
The Republican party lost it's spine a long time ago and have splintered into many factions. Effectively, the party was dead even before the 2000 elections and since then has been without leadership.
The Republican party of the last 30-40 years has certainly had some schisms, and party leadership was therefore necessarily not governing as all its voting constituency might have wanted it to. But it was pretty effectively executing its (again, leadership's) political plans up through the K Street scandals 3-5 years ago, and possibly through the end of 2008 (a Norquist Republican might find the most practical way to shrink the government is to bankrupt it).
Javascript might be better than most languages
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What To Expect From HTML5
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· Score: 2, Interesting
JavaScript needs a complete overhaul in a capital way. Capital as in capital offence. It needs to be shot in the head and replaced by something that isn't an offence to software development practices everywhere.
Pray tell, what are these offenses? What, exactly, would you overhaul?
Because after I learned a bit about functional techniques and the prototype model, I'm pretty much convinced that traditional "enterprise" application languages like Java and C++ are by comparison nightmares almost designed largely to multiply hierarchies, bloat code with boilerplate like no tomorrow.
There's a few JS language features I don't like much... having IEEE 754 Double Precision be the sole numeric type, for example, can be a real pain, not much fond of semicolon insertion, it'd be nice if there was a shorter expression for lambdas, and a language-specified construct for loading modules and importing packages. But if you know the language well enough, you can navigate around or manage away *all* those problems effectively and often smoothly. And I'd sure rather have ECMAScript 5 than 4 (heck, 3 would be better).
It's probably the most widely deployed language that's a step above Blub, that's for sure.
Now, if you've got a problem with the browser APIs, complain away. They've been sloppy and inefficient since day one, and they're not improving very rapidly. But that's not really a language issue.
Did we just sink to the level of Apple antipathy/analysis where someone actually states that a Microsoft vaporware project is way ahead of an Apple product that's going to hit the streets in three weeks?
(I'm making these remarks somewhat tongue-in-cheek... I'm not particularly zealous about animal rights. There's certain ones I like to eat, and I don't feel too horrible about animals food with humane handling while they're alive. But I do think that systemically perpetrated suffering while the animals are alive presents a moral problem, and realize we have a system that, well, presents it.)
I can state that horses, swine, cattle, chariots, iron swords, silk, and Jews did not exist in America before it's colonization by Europeans in the 16th Century. Can your colleagues at BYU agree with those statements?
I can't speak specifically to those statements, as most of the acquaintances I have aren't in that field. I haven't really cared enough to dig into related questions or Mormon apologia. Most of the Mormon academics I'm acquainted with seem to either feel there exist justifications/answers for challenges like this, or believe their experiences with the faith are as epistemologically trustworthy as modern statements about pre-colonial Americas. Others disagree. That's fine with me; I'm not here to prove that Mormons are correct. I'm here to tell you that if you generally classify research done by Mormons as unintelligent and lacking then you're wrong.
The answer is, yes of course! As long as it doesn't clash with the beliefs of a certain church.
Apparently this happens less often than you might expect. If the reports of my acquaintances are correct, academic freedom isn't a particular problem except in certain political/sociological areas. There's a general understanding that BYU is definitely not the place to be if your field is, say, postmodern literature with an emphasis on feminist theory, or if you want to explore darkly violent theater, or focus on sociology of homosexuality, so, I wouldn't go to BYU to work on these things. I don't think anyone is really surprised. Similarly, I wouldn't go to the University of Chicago to study certain kinds of economics. The university politics are apparently generally not worse, just different.
Headline: Blanket assumption based more on stereotype than actual familiarity turns out to be untrue. Film at 11.
A lot of people seem to think that theology/cosmology is inherently constraining when it comes to serious scientific work, and I suppose the output those like the Intelligent Design crowd does a lot to reinforce that, but my experience suggests that there's no shortage of religious people who excel in scientific and technical fields, who accept the standards of those fields whether or not they seem to conflict with religious beliefs on some point, and do solid work -- even groundbreaking work.
Some of that experience is directly with BYU, where I've found that most of the science faculty is inline with broader scientific views... for example, by and large they conclude that evolution is the best framework for studying biology and believe that's how most of life on earth came to be in its given state. And that even if you like to think of yourself as a smart person and come complete with various metrics outside of two standard deviations to prove it, there are probably Mormons who are in fact as smart or smarter than you by those metrics. It's certainly true for me. And they take the idea of scholarship and professionalism pretty seriously.
There are certainly counterexamples; I've met people with a certain kind of view-rigidity characterized by a general literalism and intolerance for ambiguity who I believe are blinded by their cosmology/theology. But then again, my observation is that this isn't a problem limited to the religious or religion, and based on the shallowly dismissive attitude in the parent poster's post, it seems likely he's amongst the afflicted.
So the lack of civic participation is the problem, and the recent spate of Tea Parties and similar movements aren't civic participation? This sounds like a weird sort of oxymoron.
Not at all. I respect the political enthusiasm of the Tea Partiers as half the necessary action, but it seems largely directed against the idea of public power or its exercise.
Though this is nitpicking, I have to object. Despite some serious erosion of privacy protections on the civil front over the last few decades, we're not really there: the State doesn't yet have the apparatus for mass-tracking for even telecom. They know they're technically forbidden to have a lot of this stuff, which is why they largely rely on large powerful private entities or agreements with foreign states for the go-to.
But this:
We're losing our privacy because because both of those entities have been sleeping together.
Is true enough indeed. And it gets worse over time because the amount of power in private hands keeps growing. And there's no other way to check private power other than with public power driven by large-scale civic participation. And we don't really do that anymore, or, if a lot of the recent anti-government populism is any indication, really believe at all in the idea of public power checking private power anymore. So it's down the path we go.
Not only are the incentives to collect and sell this information already present in the system, arguments such as yours will be convincing to a significant portion of the population and in the framework of the existing legal system. People might *say* they want privacy, but a lot of them aren't willing to pull on the other end of policy/rights/philosophy which are tension with it.
That's why I say this *will* happen. The only alternative is significant and nuanced new laws accompanied with public oversight. And there's simply no coherent philosophy, party, or leadership that's willing to push a robust public agenda in the United States. Even in the name of privacy.
Driving's not a right, but a certain amount of privacy should be, and unless you want a database of where you drive for sale whether you make your automobile payments or not, you should probably be on the side of people who are interested in oversight.
I've long said that we'll lose our privacy to business before we lose it to a totalitarian state. It's pretty obvious that under a laissez-faire system some parties will happily sell information about anyone to other parties public and private who are interested in being Big Brother for reasons of power or profit.
This is happening now with license plates. It's starting to happen with human image recognition, and will likely be pervasive in our lifetimes. It'll start with systems like this, it'll grow through systems in retail establishments -- some enterprising business will pitch them on the idea "Wouldn't it be great if you knew *who* was coming into your store? Let us set you up with a system that not only records and manages your video, but actually cross-references it with an image/identity database." They'll sell it to consumers, too: "Wouldn't it be great if you knew who was coming to your door? Who secondhand guests at your party are?" And now that we have social networks, it'll be even *easier* to bootstrap with a corpus of social tagged photos which are available to, say, anybody who sings up for the Facebook development platform. And of course, they'll eventually make a deal to share data with local, state, and federal governments. Or if that's technically illegal, with the contractors said government outsource photo surveillance functions to.
And you'll need one hell of a disguise something like a Philip Dick's scramble suit in order to move around society anonymously... if such a thing can actually disguise your identifying gesture and movement habits successfully. If you can come up with something that isn't clearly a disguise that would make people suspicious. If such a thing is even allowed by retailers and citizens who *like* knowing who's coming to their door. If they're not illegal in some way, whether by statute or sheer fact that even wearing one looks like probable cause for suspicion to the police.
Medicare and Social Security are NOT Mentioned in the Constitution, yet the national defense is.
National defense may be mentioned, but there's not a lot that's mentioned with regard to implementation. If we chose to, we could probably get away with a Swiss-type national militia option.
Similarly, medicare and social security may not be mentioned in the constitution, because they're implementation details. It is, however, clear that part of the raison d'être for the Constitution is to "promote the general welfare", and there's clauses that yield powers to various arms of government that enable this. Is this implementation ideal? Probably not. Is it any less germane to the Constitution than our current defense complex? Not really.
Profanity often can nudge interaction towards less restrained and thoughtful expression. The budget didn't spiral out of control by itself; it broke down because of (a) the laws surrounding how budgeting is to be done (b) the fact that the two parties couldn't work with each other.
Discouraging profanity won't fix problem (a), but it might make problem (b) somewhat more tractable.
And you also mean the porting of thousands and thousands of x86 apps as well?
I suppose there's probably a market for that; there's certainly some subset of the population that's attached to specific desktop applications.
But I'd bet a larger subset of the market just wants to write documents, send/receive email, and browse the web. Ubuntu or some equivalently friendly Linux distribution will do the job nicely there.
It's already running Linux out of the box, and the hacks getting everything a unix geek might want on it really don't sound like they're about bypassing DRM so much as they are getting tools onto the system that Amazon just left out.
Static link cross compile a telnetd and toolchain and get 'em both on there and you're set to go.
The only reason I haven't bought in on that action yet is that as far as I know there's no decent third party full size portable keyboard. If it did bluetooth, I'd be totally sold. As it is, I'm almost sold.
It's *generally* in favor of the status quo, not just small business, but even large-investment startups.
A socialized insurance system covered by taxes falls generally more heavily (like any non-regressive tax) on economic winners. You'll probably pay as much or more on the back end once you're profitable. Plus, as you pointed out, you lose a barrier to market entry: your potential competitors don't have to come up with the funding to cover health care costs before they're profitable.
Innovators/Disruptors and other startups, on the other hand... even if your expected payoff on success is big, you're carrying a moderate to big risk of failure. Now, if you're an investor in such an enterprise, and you have a chance to essentially defray a significant payroll cost up front in return for more taxes taken out if you succeed... well, that's generally a favorable deal.
The question "Where will the next Microsoft come from?" is shorthand for "where will the next giant software innovator come from?" in the parlance of people who aren't familiar with the industry, which may or may not include the person who said it (he's probably aware that his audience is unfamiliar with the industry).
But I'm not sure that the next software innovator is really going to come from somebody doing independent contracting. The part that doesn't make sense to me is that most contractors I'm aware of sell the bulk of their time to clients rather than investing it in innovating/creating/selling a product.
Although I guess it's possible that once independent contractors smell a need, they've potentially go more flexibility to turn their attention towards building a product/service/business around that specifically.... but I'd guess the ability to get venture capital of one kind or another would be a stronger plus.
I'm thinking of some past conversations I've had with people in banking and payment systems. I have a suspicion based off of some of those conversations and what we actually see. Banking has two related security problems:
1) They think they don't need to care (and might be somewhat right) 2) Leadership in the industry largely just doesn't have the ability to tell who's good at security.
As an industry bankers have long naturally had an awful lot of clout legally and politically, and so they're very used to dealing with problems that way. It might not be particularly more expensive to hire some good security professionals and developers to get their systems right than it would be to do some lobbying for harder penalties, more attention from specialized law enforcement, some kind of public insurance against this kind of theft and fraud, and most importantly, laws that push the liability onto other parties (remember, being a banker means *never* having to take any responsibility!), but I suspect they're a lot more practiced at the latter approach than the former. And this is *before* you get into some of the darker corners of banking. There are no small number of people who will tell you a little bit of looseness in the system is a feature, not a bug, because it makes it a lot easier to handle money for, shall we say, extralegal enterprises.
And while it might not be more *expensive* to hire good security professionals, it's probably harder. As the old saying goes, it takes one to know one. The banking community knows good lawyers and lobbyists. They don't really know what computer security looks like.
Although maybe I'm doing it wrong. The next time I'm in a restaurant and I see someone at another table with broccoli, I'm going to turn beat red and throw a hissy fit about how horrible broccoli is and how terrible it is that I have to see the stuff in public because of those damned broccoli lovers who think it's some miracle cancer curing vegetable or something.
Don't forget to rail against the groupthink of "Broccoli Fanbois" and talk about how the CVM (Cruciferous Vegetable Megacorp) has blinded everybody with their PR, marketing, and lobbying. All while better vegetables like onions and collard greens end up playing second fiddle. I mean, you might be modded/shouted down but somebody has to say it.
... unless you know you're going to be using them to operate a website that isn't ever going to see real traffic and will never have critical uptime needs.
Here's why: DreamHost accounts have two sets of rules: the ones they sell you on, and the other ones they're counting on you adhering to. That's right, they oversell. On purpose. They know it, and they admit it, and they have their little rationale as to why it isn't a problem, but it is.
Here's an example: their "unlimited" storage offer. They make this kind of offer betting that most people can't even come up with a use for half that (or, more accurate, courting the segment of the market that won't). They're right in that the vast majority of websites will never have more than tens of gigabytes of contents, and they *say* they're willing to put up with the hassle of the few that do.
But the problem is, if you offer a service, eventually, some significant number of people will find a way to use it. I noticed, for example, that their storage offer (a mere 200GB three years ago) essentially made them the cheapest game in town for backing up a lot of data to a remote location, as well as being a pretty good web hosting deal, so I decided to move some of my hosting over, and take advantage of the space for backup. Gradually other people noticed this to, and so over time, people were actually starting to use what DreamHost sold them. When you oversell, this obviously becomes a problem.
So, what did they do? They imposed new rules: you had to pay extra (3-4 times extra) to use that amount of space if the files stored weren't part of a website. That's right: different prices for different bits on the same disk.
Since I found the distinction pretty arbitrary and annoying, I decided to see what would happen if I did a bit of coding and essentially produced a simple web interface for what became a personal backup website. I'd pretty clearly met the letter of the law. DreamHost didn't agree, and said it didn't matter whether or not I had because my intent was clearly just to get around their restriction. They didn't back down; I paid their additional fees, but after a few months, found it irksome enough that I left.
I'm fairly lucky, because I had plenty of time to take my ball and go home. There are some people out there who have found their accounts suspended and even deactivated because of spiking demand -- not even demand that actually saturates a pipe or otherwise exceeds any of the limits they tell you about when they're selling, mostly just enough demand on shared boxes that causes Apache to crash or lock up. These people have essentially had to suddenly migrate under conditions where their access had been cut off.
And this is all before you get to general uptime and systems health. I don't know what it is, but they had a lot of hiccups in the time that I was with them. Some of the explanations really did sound like things beyond their control, and if I hadn't experienced better, I would assume that this just happens sometimes. Their connectivity got cut off, their email servers fail, they change their subdomain host naming system without telling you... no, uptime and predictability were not their strong points.
But the bottom line for me comes back to the first thing I said. Because they oversell, DreamHost accounts have two sets of rules: the ones they sell you on, and the other ones they're counting on you adhering to. If you cross the later line -- even well before you get to the former -- it's pretty clear they will not only accept your departure but in some cases they will actively throw you over the side of the boat. This is an annoying but possibly acceptable state of affairs for a limited hobby website, but if you count on someone like this for a business or client website, I think it's likely that you or the client will eventually regret it rather strongly.
If you want someone rock solid reliable, I've had an account with Hurricane Electric for 12 years. They e
Lets talk again when group policies are present in Firefox/Chrome
I came in to say this myself. I can't believe the article didn't even really hit this point. It's a huge issue once your organization scales past a few dozen machines.
I think it's kindof a systemic open source blind spot, actually, a product of the fact that most open source developers are (a) unlikely to have an itch involving centralized administration and (b) probably not keen on the principle of centralized administration in general, since software freedom in the end means control of your own machine.
Of course, at work, it's not your *own* machine, and it serves the purpose of software freedom if free software can circulate more broadly. Plus, Firefox is just a better too. So people have been talking about this very point for years. And amazingly, nobody at Mozilla seems to get it. I'd bet Firefox could have another 10-15% of browsershare if they did.
There is at least one project out there which is aiming to change this, but I think it's going to take more than one isolated and barely known project to get around this issue.
As you've noticed, there's plenty of people who'd like to ban films, books, and music. But films, books, and music have a lot more defenders because the idea that "Great Works" (including great works with violence) can be done in those media is pretty well solidified.
Games don't have that kind of cultural credibility yet. They're seen as trivial pursuits, escapist entertainment that generally doesn't carry enough artistic skill to press the syntax of violence into larger more meaningful semantics. And while there are *some* really interesting works out there that have begun to transcend this, the generalization is unfortunately apt for much if not most of what's out there.
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The Nokia 1006 I've got right now is an S40. No bluetooth DUN for me, tho'....
It's something that you can do with any cheapo netbook and any cheapo phone (not even smartphone).
While it's true that you can do it with a lot of phones (I've done it through two Nokia Series 40 phones), it's important to note that you CAN'T do it with any phone via bluetooth. And finding out which phones you can do it is even murkier since almost nobody labels their products with the specific bluetooth profiles a device supports. And most of the carriers seem interested in obfuscating or even crippling the DUN profile on hardware that has it.
Wish I knew what to do about the problem.
The Democratic party however, has been very unified... since the days of JFK.
Yeah. Right.
Look, if you're far enough to the Right, it's not hard to see why this might be an easy mistake to make. Kind of like that old New Yorker cover. Funny because it's partly true, but don't point too much while you laugh, because everybody does something like this, even though it's wrong. Do a little bit of reading about the drama around the 1964 and 1968 Democratic national conventions. Or on the heavy tension between the DLC and traditional Democrats over the last two decades. When you finally get to the point where you realize the Clinton was arguably right of Eisenhower or Nixon on economic matters, you'll be ready to comment on this.
The Republican party lost it's spine a long time ago and have splintered into many factions. Effectively, the party was dead even before the 2000 elections and since then has been without leadership.
The Republican party of the last 30-40 years has certainly had some schisms, and party leadership was therefore necessarily not governing as all its voting constituency might have wanted it to. But it was pretty effectively executing its (again, leadership's) political plans up through the K Street scandals 3-5 years ago, and possibly through the end of 2008 (a Norquist Republican might find the most practical way to shrink the government is to bankrupt it).
JavaScript needs a complete overhaul in a capital way. Capital as in capital offence. It needs to be shot in the head and replaced by something that isn't an offence to software development practices everywhere.
Pray tell, what are these offenses? What, exactly, would you overhaul?
Because after I learned a bit about functional techniques and the prototype model, I'm pretty much convinced that traditional "enterprise" application languages like Java and C++ are by comparison nightmares almost designed largely to multiply hierarchies, bloat code with boilerplate like no tomorrow.
There's a few JS language features I don't like much... having IEEE 754 Double Precision be the sole numeric type, for example, can be a real pain, not much fond of semicolon insertion, it'd be nice if there was a shorter expression for lambdas, and a language-specified construct for loading modules and importing packages. But if you know the language well enough, you can navigate around or manage away *all* those problems effectively and often smoothly. And I'd sure rather have ECMAScript 5 than 4 (heck, 3 would be better).
It's probably the most widely deployed language that's a step above Blub, that's for sure.
Now, if you've got a problem with the browser APIs, complain away. They've been sloppy and inefficient since day one, and they're not improving very rapidly. But that's not really a language issue.
Did we just sink to the level of Apple antipathy/analysis where someone actually states that a Microsoft vaporware project is way ahead of an Apple product that's going to hit the streets in three weeks?
Because you often have no idea what profiles a given multipurpose bluetooth device supports from looking at its manufacturer specs or packaging.
Particularly phones.
on if they torture it to death to make it taste better. Or cut its throat and let it bleed to death. Or maybe just forced to live in the livestock equivalent of cube farm 24/7.
(I'm making these remarks somewhat tongue-in-cheek... I'm not particularly zealous about animal rights. There's certain ones I like to eat, and I don't feel too horrible about animals food with humane handling while they're alive. But I do think that systemically perpetrated suffering while the animals are alive presents a moral problem, and realize we have a system that, well, presents it.)
I can state that horses, swine, cattle, chariots, iron swords, silk, and Jews did not exist in America before it's colonization by Europeans in the 16th Century. Can your colleagues at BYU agree with those statements?
I can't speak specifically to those statements, as most of the acquaintances I have aren't in that field. I haven't really cared enough to dig into related questions or Mormon apologia. Most of the Mormon academics I'm acquainted with seem to either feel there exist justifications/answers for challenges like this, or believe their experiences with the faith are as epistemologically trustworthy as modern statements about pre-colonial Americas. Others disagree. That's fine with me; I'm not here to prove that Mormons are correct. I'm here to tell you that if you generally classify research done by Mormons as unintelligent and lacking then you're wrong.
The answer is, yes of course! As long as it doesn't clash with the beliefs of a certain church.
Apparently this happens less often than you might expect. If the reports of my acquaintances are correct, academic freedom isn't a particular problem except in certain political/sociological areas. There's a general understanding that BYU is definitely not the place to be if your field is, say, postmodern literature with an emphasis on feminist theory, or if you want to explore darkly violent theater, or focus on sociology of homosexuality, so, I wouldn't go to BYU to work on these things. I don't think anyone is really surprised. Similarly, I wouldn't go to the University of Chicago to study certain kinds of economics. The university politics are apparently generally not worse, just different.
Headline: Blanket assumption based more on stereotype than actual familiarity turns out to be untrue. Film at 11.
A lot of people seem to think that theology/cosmology is inherently constraining when it comes to serious scientific work, and I suppose the output those like the Intelligent Design crowd does a lot to reinforce that, but my experience suggests that there's no shortage of religious people who excel in scientific and technical fields, who accept the standards of those fields whether or not they seem to conflict with religious beliefs on some point, and do solid work -- even groundbreaking work.
Some of that experience is directly with BYU, where I've found that most of the science faculty is inline with broader scientific views... for example, by and large they conclude that evolution is the best framework for studying biology and believe that's how most of life on earth came to be in its given state. And that even if you like to think of yourself as a smart person and come complete with various metrics outside of two standard deviations to prove it, there are probably Mormons who are in fact as smart or smarter than you by those metrics. It's certainly true for me. And they take the idea of scholarship and professionalism pretty seriously.
There are certainly counterexamples; I've met people with a certain kind of view-rigidity characterized by a general literalism and intolerance for ambiguity who I believe are blinded by their cosmology/theology. But then again, my observation is that this isn't a problem limited to the religious or religion, and based on the shallowly dismissive attitude in the parent poster's post, it seems likely he's amongst the afflicted.
So the lack of civic participation is the problem, and the recent spate of Tea Parties and similar movements aren't civic participation? This sounds like a weird sort of oxymoron.
Not at all. I respect the political enthusiasm of the Tea Partiers as half the necessary action, but it seems largely directed against the idea of public power or its exercise.
And you'd be wrong, but not by much.
Though this is nitpicking, I have to object. Despite some serious erosion of privacy protections on the civil front over the last few decades, we're not really there: the State doesn't yet have the apparatus for mass-tracking for even telecom. They know they're technically forbidden to have a lot of this stuff, which is why they largely rely on large powerful private entities or agreements with foreign states for the go-to.
But this:
We're losing our privacy because because both of those entities have been sleeping together.
Is true enough indeed. And it gets worse over time because the amount of power in private hands keeps growing. And there's no other way to check private power other than with public power driven by large-scale civic participation. And we don't really do that anymore, or, if a lot of the recent anti-government populism is any indication, really believe at all in the idea of public power checking private power anymore. So it's down the path we go.
Not only are the incentives to collect and sell this information already present in the system, arguments such as yours will be convincing to a significant portion of the population and in the framework of the existing legal system. People might *say* they want privacy, but a lot of them aren't willing to pull on the other end of policy/rights/philosophy which are tension with it.
That's why I say this *will* happen. The only alternative is significant and nuanced new laws accompanied with public oversight. And there's simply no coherent philosophy, party, or leadership that's willing to push a robust public agenda in the United States. Even in the name of privacy.
Driving's not a right, but a certain amount of privacy should be, and unless you want a database of where you drive for sale whether you make your automobile payments or not, you should probably be on the side of people who are interested in oversight.
I've long said that we'll lose our privacy to business before we lose it to a totalitarian state. It's pretty obvious that under a laissez-faire system some parties will happily sell information about anyone to other parties public and private who are interested in being Big Brother for reasons of power or profit.
This is happening now with license plates. It's starting to happen with human image recognition, and will likely be pervasive in our lifetimes. It'll start with systems like this, it'll grow through systems in retail establishments -- some enterprising business will pitch them on the idea "Wouldn't it be great if you knew *who* was coming into your store? Let us set you up with a system that not only records and manages your video, but actually cross-references it with an image/identity database." They'll sell it to consumers, too: "Wouldn't it be great if you knew who was coming to your door? Who secondhand guests at your party are?" And now that we have social networks, it'll be even *easier* to bootstrap with a corpus of social tagged photos which are available to, say, anybody who sings up for the Facebook development platform. And of course, they'll eventually make a deal to share data with local, state, and federal governments. Or if that's technically illegal, with the contractors said government outsource photo surveillance functions to.
And you'll need one hell of a disguise something like a Philip Dick's scramble suit in order to move around society anonymously... if such a thing can actually disguise your identifying gesture and movement habits successfully. If you can come up with something that isn't clearly a disguise that would make people suspicious. If such a thing is even allowed by retailers and citizens who *like* knowing who's coming to their door. If they're not illegal in some way, whether by statute or sheer fact that even wearing one looks like probable cause for suspicion to the police.
Medicare and Social Security are NOT Mentioned in the Constitution, yet the national defense is.
National defense may be mentioned, but there's not a lot that's mentioned with regard to implementation. If we chose to, we could probably get away with a Swiss-type national militia option.
Similarly, medicare and social security may not be mentioned in the constitution, because they're implementation details. It is, however, clear that part of the raison d'être for the Constitution is to "promote the general welfare", and there's clauses that yield powers to various arms of government that enable this. Is this implementation ideal? Probably not. Is it any less germane to the Constitution than our current defense complex? Not really.
Profanity often can nudge interaction towards less restrained and thoughtful expression. The budget didn't spiral out of control by itself; it broke down because of (a) the laws surrounding how budgeting is to be done (b) the fact that the two parties couldn't work with each other.
Discouraging profanity won't fix problem (a), but it might make problem (b) somewhat more tractable.
And you also mean the porting of thousands and thousands of x86 apps as well?
I suppose there's probably a market for that; there's certainly some subset of the population that's attached to specific desktop applications.
But I'd bet a larger subset of the market just wants to write documents, send/receive email, and browse the web. Ubuntu or some equivalently friendly Linux distribution will do the job nicely there.
It's already running Linux out of the box, and the hacks getting everything a unix geek might want on it really don't sound like they're about bypassing DRM so much as they are getting tools onto the system that Amazon just left out.
Static link cross compile a telnetd and toolchain and get 'em both on there and you're set to go.
The only reason I haven't bought in on that action yet is that as far as I know there's no decent third party full size portable keyboard. If it did bluetooth, I'd be totally sold. As it is, I'm almost sold.
It's *generally* in favor of the status quo, not just small business, but even large-investment startups.
A socialized insurance system covered by taxes falls generally more heavily (like any non-regressive tax) on economic winners. You'll probably pay as much or more on the back end once you're profitable. Plus, as you pointed out, you lose a barrier to market entry: your potential competitors don't have to come up with the funding to cover health care costs before they're profitable.
Innovators/Disruptors and other startups, on the other hand... even if your expected payoff on success is big, you're carrying a moderate to big risk of failure. Now, if you're an investor in such an enterprise, and you have a chance to essentially defray a significant payroll cost up front in return for more taxes taken out if you succeed... well, that's generally a favorable deal.
Socialized insurance favors entrepreneurship.
Which might be why even an Austrian School economist like Hayek would support the basic idea.
Nowhere, hopefully.
The question "Where will the next Microsoft come from?" is shorthand for "where will the next giant software innovator come from?" in the parlance of people who aren't familiar with the industry, which may or may not include the person who said it (he's probably aware that his audience is unfamiliar with the industry).
But I'm not sure that the next software innovator is really going to come from somebody doing independent contracting. The part that doesn't make sense to me is that most contractors I'm aware of sell the bulk of their time to clients rather than investing it in innovating/creating/selling a product.
Although I guess it's possible that once independent contractors smell a need, they've potentially go more flexibility to turn their attention towards building a product/service/business around that specifically.... but I'd guess the ability to get venture capital of one kind or another would be a stronger plus.
I'm thinking of some past conversations I've had with people in banking and payment systems. I have a suspicion based off of some of those conversations and what we actually see. Banking has two related security problems:
1) They think they don't need to care (and might be somewhat right)
2) Leadership in the industry largely just doesn't have the ability to tell who's good at security.
As an industry bankers have long naturally had an awful lot of clout legally and politically, and so they're very used to dealing with problems that way. It might not be particularly more expensive to hire some good security professionals and developers to get their systems right than it would be to do some lobbying for harder penalties, more attention from specialized law enforcement, some kind of public insurance against this kind of theft and fraud, and most importantly, laws that push the liability onto other parties (remember, being a banker means *never* having to take any responsibility!), but I suspect they're a lot more practiced at the latter approach than the former. And this is *before* you get into some of the darker corners of banking. There are no small number of people who will tell you a little bit of looseness in the system is a feature, not a bug, because it makes it a lot easier to handle money for, shall we say, extralegal enterprises.
And while it might not be more *expensive* to hire good security professionals, it's probably harder. As the old saying goes, it takes one to know one. The banking community knows good lawyers and lobbyists. They don't really know what computer security looks like.
Although maybe I'm doing it wrong. The next time I'm in a restaurant and I see someone at another table with broccoli, I'm going to turn beat red and throw a hissy fit about how horrible broccoli is and how terrible it is that I have to see the stuff in public because of those damned broccoli lovers who think it's some miracle cancer curing vegetable or something.
Don't forget to rail against the groupthink of "Broccoli Fanbois" and talk about how the CVM (Cruciferous Vegetable Megacorp) has blinded everybody with their PR, marketing, and lobbying. All while better vegetables like onions and collard greens end up playing second fiddle. I mean, you might be modded/shouted down but somebody has to say it.
... unless you know you're going to be using them to operate a website that isn't ever going to see real traffic and will never have critical uptime needs.
Here's why: DreamHost accounts have two sets of rules: the ones they sell you on, and the other ones they're counting on you adhering to. That's right, they oversell. On purpose. They know it, and they admit it, and they have their little rationale as to why it isn't a problem, but it is.
Here's an example: their "unlimited" storage offer. They make this kind of offer betting that most people can't even come up with a use for half that (or, more accurate, courting the segment of the market that won't). They're right in that the vast majority of websites will never have more than tens of gigabytes of contents, and they *say* they're willing to put up with the hassle of the few that do.
But the problem is, if you offer a service, eventually, some significant number of people will find a way to use it. I noticed, for example, that their storage offer (a mere 200GB three years ago) essentially made them the cheapest game in town for backing up a lot of data to a remote location, as well as being a pretty good web hosting deal, so I decided to move some of my hosting over, and take advantage of the space for backup. Gradually other people noticed this to, and so over time, people were actually starting to use what DreamHost sold them. When you oversell, this obviously becomes a problem.
So, what did they do? They imposed new rules: you had to pay extra (3-4 times extra) to use that amount of space if the files stored weren't part of a website. That's right: different prices for different bits on the same disk.
Since I found the distinction pretty arbitrary and annoying, I decided to see what would happen if I did a bit of coding and essentially produced a simple web interface for what became a personal backup website. I'd pretty clearly met the letter of the law. DreamHost didn't agree, and said it didn't matter whether or not I had because my intent was clearly just to get around their restriction. They didn't back down; I paid their additional fees, but after a few months, found it irksome enough that I left.
I'm fairly lucky, because I had plenty of time to take my ball and go home. There are some people out there who have found their accounts suspended and even deactivated because of spiking demand -- not even demand that actually saturates a pipe or otherwise exceeds any of the limits they tell you about when they're selling, mostly just enough demand on shared boxes that causes Apache to crash or lock up. These people have essentially had to suddenly migrate under conditions where their access had been cut off.
And this is all before you get to general uptime and systems health. I don't know what it is, but they had a lot of hiccups in the time that I was with them. Some of the explanations really did sound like things beyond their control, and if I hadn't experienced better, I would assume that this just happens sometimes. Their connectivity got cut off, their email servers fail, they change their subdomain host naming system without telling you... no, uptime and predictability were not their strong points.
But the bottom line for me comes back to the first thing I said. Because they oversell, DreamHost accounts have two sets of rules: the ones they sell you on, and the other ones they're counting on you adhering to. If you cross the later line -- even well before you get to the former -- it's pretty clear they will not only accept your departure but in some cases they will actively throw you over the side of the boat. This is an annoying but possibly acceptable state of affairs for a limited hobby website, but if you count on someone like this for a business or client website, I think it's likely that you or the client will eventually regret it rather strongly.
If you want someone rock solid reliable, I've had an account with Hurricane Electric for 12 years. They e
Lets talk again when group policies are present in Firefox/Chrome
I came in to say this myself. I can't believe the article didn't even really hit this point. It's a huge issue once your organization scales past a few dozen machines.
I think it's kindof a systemic open source blind spot, actually, a product of the fact that most open source developers are (a) unlikely to have an itch involving centralized administration and (b) probably not keen on the principle of centralized administration in general, since software freedom in the end means control of your own machine.
Of course, at work, it's not your *own* machine, and it serves the purpose of software freedom if free software can circulate more broadly. Plus, Firefox is just a better too. So people have been talking about this very point for years. And amazingly, nobody at Mozilla seems to get it. I'd bet Firefox could have another 10-15% of browsershare if they did.
There is at least one project out there which is aiming to change this, but I think it's going to take more than one isolated and barely known project to get around this issue.
Why do they not ban all films, books, and CDs
As you've noticed, there's plenty of people who'd like to ban films, books, and music. But films, books, and music have a lot more defenders because the idea that "Great Works" (including great works with violence) can be done in those media is pretty well solidified.
Games don't have that kind of cultural credibility yet. They're seen as trivial pursuits, escapist entertainment that generally doesn't carry enough artistic skill to press the syntax of violence into larger more meaningful semantics. And while there are *some* really interesting works out there that have begun to transcend this, the generalization is unfortunately apt for much if not most of what's out there.