One of the biggest problems with rail is the very poor last-mile infrastructure to move people.
And why do we have shoddy last mile infrastructure? Because for the last century we've designed cities on the assumption that private cars made it unnecessary. Now our roadways are saturated, gas is no longer cheap, and we're stuck with a sprawl that can't be easily served by either private cars or public transit.
So, I should encrypt every single access to my website, just so a snoop doesn't know when a user is entering a password on credit card number? That's absurd. What's the risk of somebody knowing that the sensitive data is being transmitted? So they can focus their decryption resources? If the encryption algorithm is vulnerable in that way, it's useless anyway.
Sorry to say, your economy has already gone down the tubes, spent some time in the sewer, and is now resisting any attempt to scrub it clean by any means necessary.
I wish I disagreed with that.
You have a sizable population against bank reform,
That's not quite correct. I think most Americans agree that our banking system is totally screwed up. You might get the opposite impression by watching the news, where the Tea Party idiots dominate. But they're not a majority, they're a noisy minority. Consider that the person most of them would like to see in the White House is a lady widely regarded as the least competent politician in America.
The problem is that banking reform has to get approved by legislators who have to spend a lot of money to keep their jobs. And that gives the banking interests way too much clout, regardless of what the public at large believes. Note that the main proponent of banking reform is the President, and I think his views on the subject are closer to representing the popular will than anybody.
even more against providing basic health care,
We do provide basic health care. We just don't provide it very efficiently (our per-capita costs are three times anyone else, and still growing), and provide a criminally low level of care to maybe 1/3 of the population. Again, the main opposition is a minority and some well-financed interests. Here the majority has a vague notion that something's wrong, and that same President keeps trying to rally them for reform. I think the big problem here is that most people experience a health care system that's flawed but servicible, if you ignore its high cost — and the way we structure things, that's easy to do.
And in the general economic context, this is indeed a Very Bad Thing. High health care costs aren't the only reason U.S. manufacturing isn't competitive, but it's a big one.
Well... A train on high speed rail. Something that, as you pointed out, is also being resisted tooth and nail.
I don't see a huge resistance to high-speed rail as such. The main problem is cost and NIMBYism.
The cost comes from the fact that we've had an anti-rail bias in our transportation planning for about a century. Highways are more popular with with voters (you get a lot more freedom of movement with a personal vehicle) and various property interests (a gigantic amount of money has been made by developing land that wouldn't have any value if housing were concentrated around rail corridors, as it is in Europe). So now that people are beginning to realize that tearing up all those urban rail lines was a mistake, it's way too expensive to buy up the right of way to build them back.
(Incidentally, France faced the same cost issue some decades back, when they realized they didn't have nearly enough passenger rail capacity. Building more rail lines was not affordable. But, unlike the U.S., they did have established straight rail corridors that could be upgraded without buying more land. So they made the trains faster, increasing their carrying capacity. Being able to travel from the English channel to the Med in less than 8 hours is just gravy.)
The NIMBYism is simply because of the huge impact of high-speed rail on the local urban environment. Take the LA-SF project. Funding for that was approved by a popular vote, but now that it's moving forward, communities around the route are not happy about the impact. Of course the impact wouldn't be nearly as bad as that of existing freeways — but we've already accommodated ourselves to that. But the cities on the San Francisco peninsula have suddenly realized that this new system would have to go through their downtowns, and aren't happy about it.
So anyway, you're right, we're totally and completely screwed. But don't blame it entirely on current stupidity. That's a factor, but there's also an excess of self-interest by everybody and the sheer mind-boggling cost of fixing past mistake.
Don't other companies call that position 'Evangelist?'
Evangelists preach to developers, advocates listen to them. Since Google basically gives away most of its tools and platforms, it does make rather more sense to ask developers what they want, rather than tell them.
Just so nobody doubts my Google-skeptic creds: Google can afford to do this because they make so much money off their ad revenues they can afford to run almost every other business at a loss with profits postponed to an extremely hypothetical future. And even so, their stockholders would never stand for it — if they had any say in the matter.
That assumes that self-awareness and intelligence are the same thing. It used to be assumed that self-awareness was a uniquely human attribute, but animal behaviorists no longer buy it. You can find indications of self-awareness in flies.
Your comments about HTTPS overhead apply to your current config. As I've already pointed out, this will be more of an issue as you scale up. You really want to have a design that deals with this before it's an issue, so you don't end up coding in a lot of dependencies on the current design. Also, if your application ever moves into the cloud (and I'm convinced that this is going to be the standard practice for web applications very soon, if it isn't already) you can buy as much or as little CPU time as you need — and extra cycles mean extra cost.
I just don't see how HTTPS protects your users privacy. A snoop may not be able see the specific pages your user is looking at, but they can see they're on your site. A user that needs that level of privacy/security really needs to deal with it at the client level. It's certainly a good idea to use VPN connections for WiFi traffic, more to protect yourself from the malicious hacker sitting at the next table than from snoopers. (Though I have to admit I rarely bother.) As for snooping by ISPs, a user who's that paranoid really needs to invest in some major privacy infrastructure — HTTPS just doesn't cut it.
I'm still bemused by your personal attachment to text mode email, but I'm in no position to sneer. I still use vi/vim 30 years after I first discovered it and 20 years after I decided that modal user interface models were obsolete. Alas, migrating my aging brain to a modeless editor has always been more of a challenge than I was able to face. Even so, I'm ahead of a certain Bell Labs alumnus I know who still uses ed!
Well if you're going to play the Deep Time card, then you're going to have to deal with the Fermi Paradox, which points out that any aliens out there have had plenty of time to drop by for a visit.
I recently heard an interesting theory about pachyderm intelligence. They're the largest survivors of the early phase of the Holocene extinction event. Before this event, there were impressive megafauna on every major land mass outside Antarctica. There are various theories as to what happened to this megacritters, the most popular being that they their long reproduction cycles made it impossible for them to keep up with hunting by humans..
So why did elephants survive when their cousins the woolly mammoths and various superbirds (I particularly like giant grazing ducks) did not? The theory is that elephants co-evolved with humans. As our ancestors got smarter and better at hunting, elephants got smarter and better and not being hunted. It wasn't until humans left Africa and started hunting megafauna that had no experience with them that the extinctions began. All these other animals simply didn't have time to evolve the way elephants did.
Which is too bad, really. Think of all the friends we could have had. Once they forgave us for eating them, of course.
I was referring to the physics of hearing. Is that your specialty?
I've been considering getting a hearing aid myself, and recently downloaded this buyer's guide. Perhaps I'm getting snowed, but I really do see more here than a graphic equalizer.
I don't think you're a bizarro nutjob. I do think you need to start planning your projects in terms of what people want and need in the real world.
Now take that HTTPS thing. Why encrypt data when you don't care who reads it? Is that really a "nicety" or did you just find it too difficult to switch back and forth between HTTPS and HTTP as needed?
HTTPS adds extra overhead. It's not a big deal on a small hobby website, but modern web sites should be designed to scale up. If you ever start server a non-trivial number of users, you won't want the extra cost of encrypting pages that don't contain sensitive information.
As for text mode email clients: the only people who use them are hackers who don't like to deal with the complexities of rich text and software internationalization. If that's you, then I have no criticism of you — as a user. But as a developer, you're devoting time to a project that will only ever be used by a few people who share your prejudices, and ignoring 90% of the hacker community and almost 100% of everybody else.
Too many hackers assume the typical user is somebody who is exactly like them. That's a big reason the Linux community wastes so much effort on evangelizing to people who don't want what they have to sell.
Of course, I could be reading you wrong, and the reality is that you really only care about your own tiny community of fellow hackers. So you don't need web applications that scale and mail clients that interoperate with the ones most people use. If so, that's certainly your prerogative. But I think it's much more satisfying to create products that actually make a difference in people's lives.
I'm struck by two small things that make me wonder. First, you seem to be using HTTPS for pages that don't need it; not an optimal config. Second, the first project you discuss is a text mode email client!
That only leaves testing and regulation for attributing to the high cost.
Which leaves nothing. This is just something you stick in your ear. It's not a surgical device subject to massive regulation or expensive litigation. If it were you wouldn't see cheap, worthless hearing aids for sale like this one.
They do make hearing aids in that price range. And yet for some reason some people don't find these adequate. Could it be that treating hearing loss is a little more difficult than you think it is?
You're right on all counts. But you've overlooked the biggest reason people get into trouble: they're just plain out of their depth. Law is full of complicated principles and concepts that take years to master. Even if you know the basics--and many folks who think they do are just full of it--you're still not prepared for most legal issues.
It's like those people who learn a little math and decide they can prove that pi is a rational number. Except it seems to be a lot easier to get away with bogus law than bogus math.
Since your insurance company probably gets a steep discount, that's enough for some pretty fancy devices that should reasonably last more than 3 years.
I'm skeptical that your experience is typical, at least among those with decent insurance packages. I know the biggest providers in my state cover this sort of thing, and high prices are mainly a negotiating tactic against them. Correct me if I'm wrong, but probably any plans you had that didn't cover hearing aids was the kind of cheap plans people get stuck with when they belong to small risk pools or work for companies that can't/won't spend a lot on insurance. I assume you also had high deductibles and co-pays?
"Liability costs!" is the mantra of the medical profession, but it doesn't bear close examination, at least not in this case. There are dozens of medical devices on the market that are not only cheap, but are clearly made without much concern about getting sued. Consider sphygomanometers (love that word!). Most cheap electronic ones are grossly inaccurate — and bad data in this case can literally kill you. (Manual versions are cheap and reasonably accurate, but a pain to use.) Presumably the only legal precaution necessary is a "don't use without medical supervision" label.
It doesn't even bear out in hearing aids. You can get an analog hearing aid for for as little as $200. People like the digital ones because they don't just amplify, they selectively filter to you get the most useful frequencies. I don't know the physics, but I suspect it's far more advanced than a simple equalizer.
One big factor is insurance. In America's weird private-but-not-free-market health care system, anything that's covered by health insurance has a price that's totally disconnected from market economics. A list price isn't what most people pay, it's what the health care providers use as a starting point for negotiation with whoever pays the bills. If you're part of a big risk pool, such as insurance provided by big companies for its employees, the provider only pays a fraction of the full price. As your risk pool gets smaller, you lose negotiating leverage, and the discount shrinks. If you're an individual, you have little or no negotiating leverage, and pay full price, or close to it.
This brings a certain irony to the cries of "socialism!" by those who oppose health care reform. The current system is actually closer to socialized medicine than anything Obama is pushing. Or more precisely, it has the worst disadvantages of a socialist economy: prices set by a bureaucracy, inability to deliver goods and services in a timely manner, and so on. It's why we pay three times per-capita for our health care than the Swiss (not exactly rabid socialists!) for a somewhat inferior product.
And if it had been clear the guy was specifically asking for legal advice from a legal expert, you'd have a point. But, as often happens with Ask Slashdots, people ask what they think are general questions but are really requests for legal advice.
Anyway, the place to go for that sort of thing is a site like nolo.com, where people know what they're talking about. One or two actual lawyers on Slashdot tend to get drowned out by the dozens of people who don't understand the law nearly as well as they think they do.
One last comment: I'm rubber, you're glue, words bounce off me and stick to you. I know, a silly saying, but highly applicable in this case.
Slashdot Mirror
Scotty, I'm really tired of that cliché. You're fired.
And why do we have shoddy last mile infrastructure? Because for the last century we've designed cities on the assumption that private cars made it unnecessary. Now our roadways are saturated, gas is no longer cheap, and we're stuck with a sprawl that can't be easily served by either private cars or public transit.
So, I should encrypt every single access to my website, just so a snoop doesn't know when a user is entering a password on credit card number? That's absurd. What's the risk of somebody knowing that the sensitive data is being transmitted? So they can focus their decryption resources? If the encryption algorithm is vulnerable in that way, it's useless anyway.
Sorry to say, your economy has already gone down the tubes, spent some time in the sewer, and is now resisting any attempt to scrub it clean by any means necessary.
I wish I disagreed with that.
You have a sizable population against bank reform,
That's not quite correct. I think most Americans agree that our banking system is totally screwed up. You might get the opposite impression by watching the news, where the Tea Party idiots dominate. But they're not a majority, they're a noisy minority. Consider that the person most of them would like to see in the White House is a lady widely regarded as the least competent politician in America.
The problem is that banking reform has to get approved by legislators who have to spend a lot of money to keep their jobs. And that gives the banking interests way too much clout, regardless of what the public at large believes. Note that the main proponent of banking reform is the President, and I think his views on the subject are closer to representing the popular will than anybody.
even more against providing basic health care,
We do provide basic health care. We just don't provide it very efficiently (our per-capita costs are three times anyone else, and still growing), and provide a criminally low level of care to maybe 1/3 of the population. Again, the main opposition is a minority and some well-financed interests. Here the majority has a vague notion that something's wrong, and that same President keeps trying to rally them for reform. I think the big problem here is that most people experience a health care system that's flawed but servicible, if you ignore its high cost — and the way we structure things, that's easy to do.
And in the general economic context, this is indeed a Very Bad Thing. High health care costs aren't the only reason U.S. manufacturing isn't competitive, but it's a big one.
Well... A train on high speed rail. Something that, as you pointed out, is also being resisted tooth and nail.
I don't see a huge resistance to high-speed rail as such. The main problem is cost and NIMBYism.
The cost comes from the fact that we've had an anti-rail bias in our transportation planning for about a century. Highways are more popular with with voters (you get a lot more freedom of movement with a personal vehicle) and various property interests (a gigantic amount of money has been made by developing land that wouldn't have any value if housing were concentrated around rail corridors, as it is in Europe). So now that people are beginning to realize that tearing up all those urban rail lines was a mistake, it's way too expensive to buy up the right of way to build them back.
(Incidentally, France faced the same cost issue some decades back, when they realized they didn't have nearly enough passenger rail capacity. Building more rail lines was not affordable. But, unlike the U.S., they did have established straight rail corridors that could be upgraded without buying more land. So they made the trains faster, increasing their carrying capacity. Being able to travel from the English channel to the Med in less than 8 hours is just gravy.)
The NIMBYism is simply because of the huge impact of high-speed rail on the local urban environment. Take the LA-SF project. Funding for that was approved by a popular vote, but now that it's moving forward, communities around the route are not happy about the impact. Of course the impact wouldn't be nearly as bad as that of existing freeways — but we've already accommodated ourselves to that. But the cities on the San Francisco peninsula have suddenly realized that this new system would have to go through their downtowns, and aren't happy about it.
So anyway, you're right, we're totally and completely screwed. But don't blame it entirely on current stupidity. That's a factor, but there's also an excess of self-interest by everybody and the sheer mind-boggling cost of fixing past mistake.
Don't other companies call that position 'Evangelist?'
Evangelists preach to developers, advocates listen to them. Since Google basically gives away most of its tools and platforms, it does make rather more sense to ask developers what they want, rather than tell them.
Just so nobody doubts my Google-skeptic creds: Google can afford to do this because they make so much money off their ad revenues they can afford to run almost every other business at a loss with profits postponed to an extremely hypothetical future. And even so, their stockholders would never stand for it — if they had any say in the matter.
That assumes that self-awareness and intelligence are the same thing. It used to be assumed that self-awareness was a uniquely human attribute, but animal behaviorists no longer buy it. You can find indications of self-awareness in flies.
Sure, there are still large mammals, but not as many as there used to be. And some really impressive species died off just as humans arrived.
I'm not sure how Indian elephants are supposed to fit into this. The fact that they're useful domestic animals might be a factor.
You're oversimplifying. They survived because they got smarter. They got smarter because they had time to evolve.
Your comments about HTTPS overhead apply to your current config. As I've already pointed out, this will be more of an issue as you scale up. You really want to have a design that deals with this before it's an issue, so you don't end up coding in a lot of dependencies on the current design. Also, if your application ever moves into the cloud (and I'm convinced that this is going to be the standard practice for web applications very soon, if it isn't already) you can buy as much or as little CPU time as you need — and extra cycles mean extra cost.
I just don't see how HTTPS protects your users privacy. A snoop may not be able see the specific pages your user is looking at, but they can see they're on your site. A user that needs that level of privacy/security really needs to deal with it at the client level. It's certainly a good idea to use VPN connections for WiFi traffic, more to protect yourself from the malicious hacker sitting at the next table than from snoopers. (Though I have to admit I rarely bother.) As for snooping by ISPs, a user who's that paranoid really needs to invest in some major privacy infrastructure — HTTPS just doesn't cut it.
I'm still bemused by your personal attachment to text mode email, but I'm in no position to sneer. I still use vi/vim 30 years after I first discovered it and 20 years after I decided that modal user interface models were obsolete. Alas, migrating my aging brain to a modeless editor has always been more of a challenge than I was able to face. Even so, I'm ahead of a certain Bell Labs alumnus I know who still uses ed!
Too true.
Hey! Unemployed tech writer here! Anybody got something juicy for me to work on? I particularly enjoy API references and programming guides.
Well if you're going to play the Deep Time card, then you're going to have to deal with the Fermi Paradox, which points out that any aliens out there have had plenty of time to drop by for a visit.
I recently heard an interesting theory about pachyderm intelligence. They're the largest survivors of the early phase of the Holocene extinction event. Before this event, there were impressive megafauna on every major land mass outside Antarctica. There are various theories as to what happened to this megacritters, the most popular being that they their long reproduction cycles made it impossible for them to keep up with hunting by humans..
So why did elephants survive when their cousins the woolly mammoths and various superbirds (I particularly like giant grazing ducks) did not? The theory is that elephants co-evolved with humans. As our ancestors got smarter and better at hunting, elephants got smarter and better and not being hunted. It wasn't until humans left Africa and started hunting megafauna that had no experience with them that the extinctions began. All these other animals simply didn't have time to evolve the way elephants did.
Which is too bad, really. Think of all the friends we could have had. Once they forgave us for eating them, of course.
I was referring to the physics of hearing. Is that your specialty?
I've been considering getting a hearing aid myself, and recently downloaded this buyer's guide. Perhaps I'm getting snowed, but I really do see more here than a graphic equalizer.
I don't think you're a bizarro nutjob. I do think you need to start planning your projects in terms of what people want and need in the real world.
Now take that HTTPS thing. Why encrypt data when you don't care who reads it? Is that really a "nicety" or did you just find it too difficult to switch back and forth between HTTPS and HTTP as needed?
HTTPS adds extra overhead. It's not a big deal on a small hobby website, but modern web sites should be designed to scale up. If you ever start server a non-trivial number of users, you won't want the extra cost of encrypting pages that don't contain sensitive information.
As for text mode email clients: the only people who use them are hackers who don't like to deal with the complexities of rich text and software internationalization. If that's you, then I have no criticism of you — as a user. But as a developer, you're devoting time to a project that will only ever be used by a few people who share your prejudices, and ignoring 90% of the hacker community and almost 100% of everybody else.
Too many hackers assume the typical user is somebody who is exactly like them. That's a big reason the Linux community wastes so much effort on evangelizing to people who don't want what they have to sell.
Of course, I could be reading you wrong, and the reality is that you really only care about your own tiny community of fellow hackers. So you don't need web applications that scale and mail clients that interoperate with the ones most people use. If so, that's certainly your prerogative. But I think it's much more satisfying to create products that actually make a difference in people's lives.
I'm struck by two small things that make me wonder. First, you seem to be using HTTPS for pages that don't need it; not an optimal config. Second, the first project you discuss is a text mode email client!
That only leaves testing and regulation for attributing to the high cost.
Which leaves nothing. This is just something you stick in your ear. It's not a surgical device subject to massive regulation or expensive litigation. If it were you wouldn't see cheap, worthless hearing aids for sale like this one.
None taken. But dude, this is Slashdot!
If being spelling Nazi a sin on Slashdot, what does it mean to worry about the correct spelling of sphygmomanometer?
They do make hearing aids in that price range. And yet for some reason some people don't find these adequate. Could it be that treating hearing loss is a little more difficult than you think it is?
You're right on all counts. But you've overlooked the biggest reason people get into trouble: they're just plain out of their depth. Law is full of complicated principles and concepts that take years to master. Even if you know the basics--and many folks who think they do are just full of it--you're still not prepared for most legal issues.
It's like those people who learn a little math and decide they can prove that pi is a rational number. Except it seems to be a lot easier to get away with bogus law than bogus math.
Since your insurance company probably gets a steep discount, that's enough for some pretty fancy devices that should reasonably last more than 3 years.
I'm skeptical that your experience is typical, at least among those with decent insurance packages. I know the biggest providers in my state cover this sort of thing, and high prices are mainly a negotiating tactic against them. Correct me if I'm wrong, but probably any plans you had that didn't cover hearing aids was the kind of cheap plans people get stuck with when they belong to small risk pools or work for companies that can't/won't spend a lot on insurance. I assume you also had high deductibles and co-pays?
"Liability costs!" is the mantra of the medical profession, but it doesn't bear close examination, at least not in this case. There are dozens of medical devices on the market that are not only cheap, but are clearly made without much concern about getting sued. Consider sphygomanometers (love that word!). Most cheap electronic ones are grossly inaccurate — and bad data in this case can literally kill you. (Manual versions are cheap and reasonably accurate, but a pain to use.) Presumably the only legal precaution necessary is a "don't use without medical supervision" label.
It doesn't even bear out in hearing aids. You can get an analog hearing aid for for as little as $200. People like the digital ones because they don't just amplify, they selectively filter to you get the most useful frequencies. I don't know the physics, but I suspect it's far more advanced than a simple equalizer.
One big factor is insurance. In America's weird private-but-not-free-market health care system, anything that's covered by health insurance has a price that's totally disconnected from market economics. A list price isn't what most people pay, it's what the health care providers use as a starting point for negotiation with whoever pays the bills. If you're part of a big risk pool, such as insurance provided by big companies for its employees, the provider only pays a fraction of the full price. As your risk pool gets smaller, you lose negotiating leverage, and the discount shrinks. If you're an individual, you have little or no negotiating leverage, and pay full price, or close to it.
This brings a certain irony to the cries of "socialism!" by those who oppose health care reform. The current system is actually closer to socialized medicine than anything Obama is pushing. Or more precisely, it has the worst disadvantages of a socialist economy: prices set by a bureaucracy, inability to deliver goods and services in a timely manner, and so on. It's why we pay three times per-capita for our health care than the Swiss (not exactly rabid socialists!) for a somewhat inferior product.
Totally agree. Further proof: no only did Woolworth's get away with stealing Apple's logo, they even stole their own name!
And if it had been clear the guy was specifically asking for legal advice from a legal expert, you'd have a point. But, as often happens with Ask Slashdots, people ask what they think are general questions but are really requests for legal advice.
Anyway, the place to go for that sort of thing is a site like nolo.com, where people know what they're talking about. One or two actual lawyers on Slashdot tend to get drowned out by the dozens of people who don't understand the law nearly as well as they think they do.
One last comment: I'm rubber, you're glue, words bounce off me and stick to you. I know, a silly saying, but highly applicable in this case.
(Anyone who mods this as anything other than humour is a complete moron).
First you give us that delicious bit of irony, then you go and spoil it!