Athletes excel at using their body, so brainpower wise I'd expect them to be sub-average because they could have chosen to work on that instead.
There is a HUGE difference between training a skillset and being of "sub-average brainpower". (your words not mine) You are correct that all other things being equal (which they never are), someone who specializes in a given activity should progress further in that activity than someone who did not focus on the same activity. But the same thing holds true for focusing on english instead of math, or medicine instead of economics. To use your example, focusing on athletics doesn't make you better at interviews but neither does earning a PhD in mathematics. Those are specific skills that require development.
Knowing more about a subject doesn't make you smarter, it just makes you more educated on that subject. Besides I don't have to be absolutely better than you at something to make training in it a worthwhile use of my time. Have you ever heard of comparative advantage? I've chosen a specific set of skills professionally. Just because I didn't choose the same set as you doesn't make me stupid. I'm just interested in different things. I can introduce you to people who competed at the highest levels of athletics and have also earned doctoral degrees. Will you seriously argue that they are stupid because they happened to play sports very successfully as a pastime?
Furthermore you are neglecting a lot of important factors. Almost no one, not even the best athletes, spends their entire day doing athletics just like no math student spends every spare moment solving equations. It's quite possible to learn more than one thing and do it well. I competed at the top level in college athletics and we only trained 2-3 hours a day with the occasional special training day, meet or travel day. The sport was too demanding physically do do more even if you wanted to. Not to say it didn't take up a lot of my time but I certainly wasn't kept away from my studies either. My "spare time" was spent training instead of playing on my computer. Also being more fit has a demonstrably beneficial effect on anyone's ability to focus their mind. There are countless medical studies establishing a positive causative relationship between exercise and academic performance. Not saying sports makes you smarter but it definitely can help one to maximize potential.
Everyone specializes in some way and people who are at the top in any activity will inevitably be specialists. But specializing for an activity doesn't make you smarter it just makes you better at that activity. There also is no reason a person can't master more than one skill. Find me someone who is only good at one thing and I'll show you a very dysfunctional individual.
what happens when Google owns DoubleClick, when one of Firefox's most popular add-ons--AdBlock--works to help us ignore DoubleClick ads? Will we see any sort of friction?
I doubt it will be a serious problem in the near future. Long term though we can hope!
Ok, given that it is a business. Still, why is PUBLIC time and money being wasted on trying to police this?
I agree that the Senate hearings were grandstanding at its best. After all, who is actually for illegal cheating? Way to take a tough stand there Senators.
As far as public money goes, if laws are being broken it is the responsibility of the government to police that. If the leagues are complicit in distribution and illegal use of drugs (like MLB clearly is if you asked me) or not taking appropriate and prudent measures to combat their use, then those leagues should be liable as well as the individuals involved. People who have violated the law to cheat in sport should be turned over to the appropriate authorities and charged with a crime as appropriate. Enforcing the laws however is as far as the government should be involved.
If you would prefer someone else police the distribution and use of doping products you'll get no argument from me. I would simply want to know who is responsible, how the testing is governed and where the funding comes from. The system we have doesn't work especially well, that's for sure. Unfortunately it's a challenging, maybe impossible problem to solve.
As far as doping methods that aren't illegal but are against the bylaws of the sport in question (such as autologous blood doping for sports like cycling and running) that's the responsibility of the sport's governing body. Most professional/high-level sports do an ok job of policing this given the financial and technical constraints. (the dopers are always one step ahead technologically and testing is quite expensive unfortunately) Some governing bodies clearly aren't interested in enforcing their rules and I'm not sure that is a problem that will ever be solved.
Personally? I'm for a one strike and out system with a very high standard of proof. If I used (or worse distributed) cocaine at my job and it can be proven to a high standard of proof, I should be fired and/or prosecuted. Athletes, regardless of their talent, should not receive treatment better or worse than anyone else.
I don't care that much about sports, but, I do know many people enjoy them, but, c'mon, it is JUST A GAME.....ENTERTAINMENT.
You're right, it is entertainment but professional sports also is a big business as well as, like it or not, a public stage. Cheating in sports has a lot of negative effects which can and do affect the society at large.
From a business perspective there are demonstrable negative effects to that business if it is perceived by the customers (i.e. the sports watching public) as being corrupt or fixed. Sponsors bail out because they don't want to be associated with illegal activity. Since illegal drugs are in the equation law enforcement gets involved which no business ever wants. The athletes themselves are put at very significant health risk. (For example, some blood doping techniques can pack your system so full of red cells that your blood gets too thick to move efficiently) Fans (read customers) lose interest because, let's face it, an unfair sporting event just isn't very interesting to watch. And there is the fact that how we approach the ethics of cheating in sports says a lot about us as a society. If it's ok to cheat in sport, why not in business or on your taxes?
I won't get into the whole role model debate other than to say that there is nothing inherently wrong with looking up to an athlete who shows good character. We all pick different professions. The people I respect are probably not the same people you respect and that is ok. What's important is that we respect those people not just because they happen to be in the public eye but because they stand for something worth respecting. The fact that they might happen to be athletes, teachers, scientists or whatever is not the important bit.
Nice way of implying that athletes are stupid. Not true of course. Athletes have a range of intelligence just like any other large group and I'll wager you would have a hard time proving that range to be any different than the population at large. Some athletes are extremely bright, some are morons, and most are somewhere in the middle. Some are really nice people, some are jack-asses and most fall somewhere in the middle. Being interested in sport as a pastime doesn't make you smart or dumb. It's just something fun to do with a lot of health benefits on the side.
Perhaps you are confusing brainpower with population overlap? Relatively few people are very bright and relatively few people are very good athletes. Simple statistics will tell you that the population size of people who are both smart and good athletes is necessarily smaller just like the population of people who are both smart and, say, talented artistically to pick a random example.
This tracking "proposal" is stupid and should rightly be ignored because it is stupid. But let's not take the stupidity a step further and use that to imply that all athletes are stupid shall we?
Disclosure: I was a division 1 college athlete as well as an engineering major at a top tier university which actually takes the notion of a student athlete quite seriously. (see Patriot League) I'll be happy to introduce you to some very bright current/former college athletes. I'll also be happy to discuss how completely hypocritical the NCAA is when it comes to promoting the concept of a student athlete as well as the problems, challenges, and shortcomings of groups like the World Anti Doping Agency.
Mostly this is because most users are clueless and don't understand 3 things about inkjet printers:
1) Using plain (uncoated) paper is a bad idea. The paper dust gets in the print heads and clogs them. 2) If your printer has sat along time without being used, it probably has some dried ink stuck in the print nozzles. You need to clean the nozzles in order to get the best print results after it's sat for more than 2-3 days without being used. Even after cleaning, if image quality problems don't go away, you need to throw away the ink cart, no matter how much ink is in it. 3) Old ink carts (there's an expiry date on the box, usually) should be thrown away and not used.
So your solution is that we should all buy grossly overpriced ink with great regularity to compensate for the shortcomings of inkjet technology? Super!
Look, inkjets as they are sold today just aren't the best printing technology in a lot of ways. No sensible user is going to buy special paper for their everyday printing needs. The fact that inkjets clog if left alone is not a problem anyone should have to worry about. If HP and the rest can't make inkjets work for everyday use, that isn't and shouldn't be a user's problem. Heaven forbid we go 3 days (your words) without having to print anything so that our inkjet doesn't malfunction. That's not a user problem, that is just a poor technology and/or a poor product.
There are very good reasons I use a laser printer for most of my printing. I can print 15,000 pages at 600dpi on a single $200 toner cartridge. That's about $0.04 a page at very good quality. No worries about ink drying out, print heads becoming mis-aligned, paper feed mechanisms not working, flimsy parts breaking, ridiculously expensive ink, or small paper tray capacities. There isn't an inkjet made that will beat my laser printer on black & white performance per $ spent. My laser printer will still be going strong in five to ten years. Most inkjets are made as cheaply as possible and just don't last. Sure inkjets have their advantages (color photos come to mind) but for most printing they are overpriced and unreliable. That's isn't user ignorance, that's just a bad product.
crimp all their assorted lengths of wire themselves?
Ooh, ooh, pick me!
Takes practice I'll admit, but if you do a lot of cabling (I have/do) it's completely worth it to get the spool and roll your own, so to speak. With a little practice (ok, a lot) it takes about a minute or maybe two to crimp one end of a Cat5e cable with quality as good as most commercially sold cable. Cost is about $0.08/foot + maybe $0.25 per connector, without even shopping around much. Plus it saves me a 30-45 minute trip to the local mega-mart to get the cable where I'll have the "privilege" of spending 20X as much for the same product. Plus my cables are cut exactly to the size I need, reducing waste and rat's nests. (I hate messy cabling - personal pet peeve) Same with phone cables. Basically break-even on rolling your own is about 15 cables. Once you own/need more than that, it's worth it to just make 'em yourself.
We installed an Asterisk based solution at a company I owned. All open source stuff. The features and performance per $ were amazing. We loved how it could be customized to our needs and it saved a bundle. Or so we thought. Problem was, our "control" only lasted to our door. We had a great system but our ISP (Charter Cable in this instance) would drop packets, had misbehaving routers, and generally didn't give a crap that half our customers couldn't hear us or could old hear every other word we said. We just could not get a phone system that worked because we couldn't get reliable bandwidth. (yes we had uptime "guarantees" which were worth the paper they were written on since we lacked the resources to sue) Of course we could have bought their solution for about 10X the cost and were almost forced to.
IP telephony is the wave of the future and I'm very positive on the open source stuff. But unless you have copious and reliable bandwidth, beware that you may not have the control you think you do.
Why exactly is Corn Ethanol a good thing? Haven't we caused enough food riots and inflation worldwide with this policy?
It's not. You are absolutely correct. The main useful effect of subsidizing corn/maize derived ethanol is to drive up food prices. Much/most of the food eaten here in the US has some corn/maize component in it. It does not in any substantial way reduce our oil dependency, it uses valuable arable land, and it is basically a handout to farmers who are already subsidized quite heavily. Like steel tariffs it benefits a few at the expense of the rest of society.
I have no beef with ethanol being a part of our energy supply, particularly from bio-waste. Diversity in energy sources is a good thing. But corn derived ethanol is just a terrible product to subsidize.
I actually couldn't find a modern jet fighter that COULDN'T exceed 1.6 (at least within my aforementioned 2 seconds of research)
The AV-8 Harrier II is subsonic and still widely used by the UK and US armed forces.
The A10 is also subsonic. Of course it's not really a fighter, but a ground attack aircraft if you are going to pick nits. You also can argue whether it is "modern" but it's still in use as far as I know since it is arguable the best close air support aircraft out there.
That said, you are correct that most jet fighters used by modern military forces are capable of flight at or near mach 2, even if only for short periods of time.
Me: Here is your registration code: Alpha One Five...
User: Alpha? Where's the alpha key? I don't see that...
I learned the hard way that using military alphabet abbreviations over the phone just confuses most folks who aren't current/ex military or pilots. You end up having to say "A as in Alpha" instead otherwise they can't cope. It's even worse if they are a foreign national whose English language skills aren't so strong.
Of course most folks here can't deal with metric either so I shouldn't be surprised. (yes I'm an American slamming other Americans on this topic) There are a lot of things people could do to make their lives easier that they don't bother to learn. Sad but true.
But then once Windows actually boots, I have to wait a half-age for the IT installed update software and the anti-virus software and the firewall software and the IT policy checker to finish loading before I can actually use the machine. And once that's done, it's time for even more loading to start up the email client and IDE so I can actually, you know, work.
I hear ya and sympathize. Just be glad you don't work for a certain accounting firm where booting your laptop takes literally 10-20 minutes due to necessary but poorly implemented security measures and other crappy software.
Is there any category of commercial software that can't be challenged by free software?
Theoretically no, but in reality probably yes.
There are some applications that are simply very difficult to make work in an open source or free software model. CAD software comes to mind immediately. Creating a CAD system is highly specialized, requires serious math skillz, and the end application is large and complicated (on par with operating systems or top tier database software) so a good team is required. There also are likely to be patent issues to work around as well. From a user's perspective changing CAD systems has VERY VERY high switching costs, require a LOT of training, and the user bases are quite small. Sure there are a few free/open-source CAD packages out there but they are toys compared with CATIA or ProEngineer or even AutoCAD. Don't get me wrong, lots of firms would love to not have to spend huge $ on an expensive 3D modeling package like CATIA. It costs a bloody fortune. But there just aren't enough programmers out there with the right skills and the itch to create a CAD package that will replace the commercial stuff any time soon.
Games seem to be another area where free software struggles to challenge commercial offerings. High development costs, small group of available programmers, requires artistic/creative skills not widely possessed by programmers, and other reasons besides.
Basically, the more specialized the software or the more artistic content required, the more difficult it seems to be to develop under a free model. Not impossible mind you, just more difficult; sometimes to the point where it is not practical even if it is theoretically possible.
Isn't it the students that are paying for the research, and often times DOING the research which allows for these discoveries to begin with?
Generally speaking no, students do not pay for much/most research, at least not directly. There are of course lots of exceptions but research is typically paid for by grants (government and/or corporate) or various wealthy benefactors. A surprisingly large part of being a successful university researcher is being able to bring in the money to conduct your research. Certainly some tuition money ends up going towards research but it is a surprisingly small percentage, often nothing at all. My alma matter gets literally billions a year from the NIH and other sources other than students tuition. Some of the professors barely see the inside of a classroom. That said, without the students the universities would not exist and universities have a tendency to forget this fact when it comes time get out of the lab and to teach said students. It's not right but unlikely to change either.
As for whether research at public universities should be public domain, ethically you can make a strong case for putting it out there for everyone but legally it does not work that way right now. (see Bayh-Dole act) Universities now have very large patent portfolios and regularly spin off companies, technologies and licensing. Often creates some significant conflict of interest issues.
You are right, publicly financed research isn't as good economically as privately financed research. It is, in fact, far better...
If you are seriously arguing that governments are efficient at allocating capital then we'll just have to disagree. Publicly funded research has an extremely important place in the mix but eliminating private drug R&D is hardly the solution to all our woes. We have a mixed public/private model right now and for all its problems, it works. Yes, for profit companies make a lot of money which is obviously inefficient from the perspective of helping patients. Governments arguably waste even more money. Pick your poison. I actually agree with you in principle about publicly funded research remaining public domain. Where your arguments are falling down is that you haven't explained why any of your proposals would result in more/better drugs or medical devices actually coming to market. To my mind you are merely trading one set of problematic incentives for another without clearly better results.
If a (carefully regulated) company makes a lot of money while helping lots of people with injury and disease I'm ok with that. Is it perfect? Of course not. There are lots of problems, not the least of which is the conflict of interest a profit motive can provide. But that does not automatically mean governments will do a better job because governments have their own incentive problems. I'm open to being convinced but I simply do not see a logical argument why a purely taxpayer funded model of drug development is clearly better than the mixed public/private model we have today. I'll ignore the fact that a pure public model is politically impossible so we are discussing purely hypothetical scenarios anyway.
And you ignore the other 14 points he made. Convenient, that.
I'm not going to waste my time arguing with an Anonymous Coward who invokes Nazi Germany as a good example of efficient government. That is a troll (not to mention an empty argument) and you should know that.
Public research does not solve the economic incentives problem. There are finite financial resources and an effectively infinite number of possible diseases to research. How to prioritize where the money goes and who takes the legal risk? Not an easy question to answer. We already have world class public research in the US via academic institutions and the NIH among others. But there is a HUGE gap between public research and drug development and it's not an easy gap to cross.
It is extremely difficult to have effective publicly funded drug development. Drug trials are very expensive (sometimes into the billions of dollars) and most fail. Would you rather pay for drugs via tax dollars or via higher drug prices? You're going to pay either way, and the drug trials don't get cheaper just because the government picks up the tab. Just the opposite if anything. Not to mention that public institutions tend to be notoriously inefficient with money that isn't theirs. Betting that the government can allocate capital efficiently is mostly what caused the Soviet Union to collapse. I've yet to see a government that is better at it than private companies.
Even if a drug gets to market there are still significant financial risks, especially litigation. Just because someone does the research does not automatically make it profitable to produce a drug based on that research. Vaccines are a good example. There is a lot of legal risk (no vaccine is 100% safe) and little/no recurring revenues. Even if someone else picks up the tab for the very high R&D costs, they still are generally only borderline profitable. Even countries with explicitly socialist health care systems haven't solved this problem.
Please don't get me wrong, some public research is vital. Some drugs would never come to market without it. But it's not an easy problem. Just waiving our hands and saying "public research" will not solve the problems of the economics of drug development. If it were that easy someone, somewhere would already be doing it.
Many people believe that patenting drugs shouldn't be allowed, what should be allowed are patents on the method of making the drug.
This is what they did in India for decades. Until recently patents were only available on rather specific processes for making drugs, not for the drugs themselves. Results? Lots of cheap knockoff drugs, not a lot of innovative new drugs. India's pharma industry has been a supplier for low income people around the world (which is good) but almost entirely for knock-offs of drugs developed elsewhere. (mostly the US and Europe) Few new drugs have been developed in India over the last 50 years under their process focused patent laws. From a purely economic standpoint there is far less incentive to commit the immense financial resources needed to research and develop new drugs under process focused patent laws because there is usually more than one way to produce a given drug.
There is no free lunch. Eliminate product patents in favor of process patents and many drugs will be cheaper but you will slow drug research and fewer new drugs will come to market. I am not here to tell anyone what the correct course of action might be. There are strong ethical arguments on both sides of the problem. I am simply pointing out that there are consequences, both good and bad, to changing the patent regulations.
the genius database that is going to let no small-time criminal get away has caught her. This is just sad.
So basically you are saying murder is OK. Wow. Innocent until proven guilty but that takes some really... interesting thinking to claim that murder is somehow forgivable.
Sheesh, when will people understand that EMAIL was *not* concieved for large binary attachements...
They won't. Not trying to be snide but that battle was lost long ago. It does not matter that FTP is technically more efficient and better designed for file transfer. Attaching a file is simple and, like it or not, using an ftp server involves more steps, additional software, additional security, and additional training. FTP fails the mom test. It's harder than attaching a file for NO additional benefit to the user in 99.999999% of cases. Furthermore, most people do not have or know about ftp servers, they have email accounts. So they use the tool they have and know how to use.
Does this cause problems for the network admins? Sure. Doesn't matter though. Ease of use/learning for the user wins here. If you want ftp to be used, make it easier to use than attaching a file and people will flock to it. Until then, it's going to be used only by nerds like me in the few special cases where ftp is the only alternative.
Mighty nice of you. Does your policy include family and close friends? (kidding)
Look, I agree that sending out random Plaxo spams to anyone you meet is more than a little rude. However, there are lots of features of the service that are very useful. I have a lot of contacts who use Plaxo and their information is automatically updated without me having to do any data entry (or spam them) which saves me a LOT of time. Plaxo also keeps keeps my address book available from anywhere in the world, synchronizes said address book with Thunderbird, Outlook, LinkedIn (if you use it), Yahoo mail, and several others. Plus it acts as an off site backup in case my address book gets wiped out by accident, say by a computer crash, or if I just need to port my address book to a new computer. The service isn't perfect by any means, (no exporting contact to Gmail, some of the newer features are still getting the bugs worked out, and some other issues I could mention) but it's useful to me without being a problem for others. Your mileage may vary.
Now the only feature I really want is a way for it to integrate the contacts and calendar with my addressbook and iCal.
Can't really help with the address book (gmail is too primitive here) but Plaxo works nicely to keep my calendar and address books synchronized. Depends on exactly which application you use but it works great for Outlook, Thunderbird, and a few others.
Being able to open a web browser or download songs from itunes doesn't make one "fluent with technology". Being able to do some basic productivity tasks just doesn't count either. There's nothing wrong with having that level of ability but it's not going to keep anyone at the forefront of the technology curve.
Kids aren't going into technology fields because: A) There is a (wrong) perception that all the jobs are going to China/India B) There has always been a finite talent pool of people genuinely interested in technology C) Schools (in the US) do a piss poor job in general of educating students about technology D) There are easier ways to get through school.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a HUGE difference between training a skillset and being of "sub-average brainpower". (your words not mine) You are correct that all other things being equal (which they never are), someone who specializes in a given activity should progress further in that activity than someone who did not focus on the same activity. But the same thing holds true for focusing on english instead of math, or medicine instead of economics. To use your example, focusing on athletics doesn't make you better at interviews but neither does earning a PhD in mathematics. Those are specific skills that require development.
Knowing more about a subject doesn't make you smarter, it just makes you more educated on that subject. Besides I don't have to be absolutely better than you at something to make training in it a worthwhile use of my time. Have you ever heard of comparative advantage? I've chosen a specific set of skills professionally. Just because I didn't choose the same set as you doesn't make me stupid. I'm just interested in different things. I can introduce you to people who competed at the highest levels of athletics and have also earned doctoral degrees. Will you seriously argue that they are stupid because they happened to play sports very successfully as a pastime?
Furthermore you are neglecting a lot of important factors. Almost no one, not even the best athletes, spends their entire day doing athletics just like no math student spends every spare moment solving equations. It's quite possible to learn more than one thing and do it well. I competed at the top level in college athletics and we only trained 2-3 hours a day with the occasional special training day, meet or travel day. The sport was too demanding physically do do more even if you wanted to. Not to say it didn't take up a lot of my time but I certainly wasn't kept away from my studies either. My "spare time" was spent training instead of playing on my computer. Also being more fit has a demonstrably beneficial effect on anyone's ability to focus their mind. There are countless medical studies establishing a positive causative relationship between exercise and academic performance. Not saying sports makes you smarter but it definitely can help one to maximize potential.
Everyone specializes in some way and people who are at the top in any activity will inevitably be specialists. But specializing for an activity doesn't make you smarter it just makes you better at that activity. There also is no reason a person can't master more than one skill. Find me someone who is only good at one thing and I'll show you a very dysfunctional individual.
I doubt it will be a serious problem in the near future. Long term though we can hope!
I agree that the Senate hearings were grandstanding at its best. After all, who is actually for illegal cheating? Way to take a tough stand there Senators.
As far as public money goes, if laws are being broken it is the responsibility of the government to police that. If the leagues are complicit in distribution and illegal use of drugs (like MLB clearly is if you asked me) or not taking appropriate and prudent measures to combat their use, then those leagues should be liable as well as the individuals involved. People who have violated the law to cheat in sport should be turned over to the appropriate authorities and charged with a crime as appropriate. Enforcing the laws however is as far as the government should be involved.
If you would prefer someone else police the distribution and use of doping products you'll get no argument from me. I would simply want to know who is responsible, how the testing is governed and where the funding comes from. The system we have doesn't work especially well, that's for sure. Unfortunately it's a challenging, maybe impossible problem to solve.
As far as doping methods that aren't illegal but are against the bylaws of the sport in question (such as autologous blood doping for sports like cycling and running) that's the responsibility of the sport's governing body. Most professional/high-level sports do an ok job of policing this given the financial and technical constraints. (the dopers are always one step ahead technologically and testing is quite expensive unfortunately) Some governing bodies clearly aren't interested in enforcing their rules and I'm not sure that is a problem that will ever be solved.
Personally? I'm for a one strike and out system with a very high standard of proof. If I used (or worse distributed) cocaine at my job and it can be proven to a high standard of proof, I should be fired and/or prosecuted. Athletes, regardless of their talent, should not receive treatment better or worse than anyone else.
You're right, it is entertainment but professional sports also is a big business as well as, like it or not, a public stage. Cheating in sports has a lot of negative effects which can and do affect the society at large.
From a business perspective there are demonstrable negative effects to that business if it is perceived by the customers (i.e. the sports watching public) as being corrupt or fixed. Sponsors bail out because they don't want to be associated with illegal activity. Since illegal drugs are in the equation law enforcement gets involved which no business ever wants. The athletes themselves are put at very significant health risk. (For example, some blood doping techniques can pack your system so full of red cells that your blood gets too thick to move efficiently) Fans (read customers) lose interest because, let's face it, an unfair sporting event just isn't very interesting to watch. And there is the fact that how we approach the ethics of cheating in sports says a lot about us as a society. If it's ok to cheat in sport, why not in business or on your taxes?
I won't get into the whole role model debate other than to say that there is nothing inherently wrong with looking up to an athlete who shows good character. We all pick different professions. The people I respect are probably not the same people you respect and that is ok. What's important is that we respect those people not just because they happen to be in the public eye but because they stand for something worth respecting. The fact that they might happen to be athletes, teachers, scientists or whatever is not the important bit.
Nice way of implying that athletes are stupid. Not true of course. Athletes have a range of intelligence just like any other large group and I'll wager you would have a hard time proving that range to be any different than the population at large. Some athletes are extremely bright, some are morons, and most are somewhere in the middle. Some are really nice people, some are jack-asses and most fall somewhere in the middle. Being interested in sport as a pastime doesn't make you smart or dumb. It's just something fun to do with a lot of health benefits on the side.
Perhaps you are confusing brainpower with population overlap? Relatively few people are very bright and relatively few people are very good athletes. Simple statistics will tell you that the population size of people who are both smart and good athletes is necessarily smaller just like the population of people who are both smart and, say, talented artistically to pick a random example.
This tracking "proposal" is stupid and should rightly be ignored because it is stupid. But let's not take the stupidity a step further and use that to imply that all athletes are stupid shall we?
Disclosure: I was a division 1 college athlete as well as an engineering major at a top tier university which actually takes the notion of a student athlete quite seriously. (see Patriot League) I'll be happy to introduce you to some very bright current/former college athletes. I'll also be happy to discuss how completely hypocritical the NCAA is when it comes to promoting the concept of a student athlete as well as the problems, challenges, and shortcomings of groups like the World Anti Doping Agency.
So your solution is that we should all buy grossly overpriced ink with great regularity to compensate for the shortcomings of inkjet technology? Super!
Look, inkjets as they are sold today just aren't the best printing technology in a lot of ways. No sensible user is going to buy special paper for their everyday printing needs. The fact that inkjets clog if left alone is not a problem anyone should have to worry about. If HP and the rest can't make inkjets work for everyday use, that isn't and shouldn't be a user's problem. Heaven forbid we go 3 days (your words) without having to print anything so that our inkjet doesn't malfunction. That's not a user problem, that is just a poor technology and/or a poor product.
There are very good reasons I use a laser printer for most of my printing. I can print 15,000 pages at 600dpi on a single $200 toner cartridge. That's about $0.04 a page at very good quality. No worries about ink drying out, print heads becoming mis-aligned, paper feed mechanisms not working, flimsy parts breaking, ridiculously expensive ink, or small paper tray capacities. There isn't an inkjet made that will beat my laser printer on black & white performance per $ spent. My laser printer will still be going strong in five to ten years. Most inkjets are made as cheaply as possible and just don't last. Sure inkjets have their advantages (color photos come to mind) but for most printing they are overpriced and unreliable. That's isn't user ignorance, that's just a bad product.
Ooh, ooh, pick me!
Takes practice I'll admit, but if you do a lot of cabling (I have/do) it's completely worth it to get the spool and roll your own, so to speak. With a little practice (ok, a lot) it takes about a minute or maybe two to crimp one end of a Cat5e cable with quality as good as most commercially sold cable. Cost is about $0.08/foot + maybe $0.25 per connector, without even shopping around much. Plus it saves me a 30-45 minute trip to the local mega-mart to get the cable where I'll have the "privilege" of spending 20X as much for the same product. Plus my cables are cut exactly to the size I need, reducing waste and rat's nests. (I hate messy cabling - personal pet peeve) Same with phone cables. Basically break-even on rolling your own is about 15 cables. Once you own/need more than that, it's worth it to just make 'em yourself.
We installed an Asterisk based solution at a company I owned. All open source stuff. The features and performance per $ were amazing. We loved how it could be customized to our needs and it saved a bundle. Or so we thought. Problem was, our "control" only lasted to our door. We had a great system but our ISP (Charter Cable in this instance) would drop packets, had misbehaving routers, and generally didn't give a crap that half our customers couldn't hear us or could old hear every other word we said. We just could not get a phone system that worked because we couldn't get reliable bandwidth. (yes we had uptime "guarantees" which were worth the paper they were written on since we lacked the resources to sue) Of course we could have bought their solution for about 10X the cost and were almost forced to.
IP telephony is the wave of the future and I'm very positive on the open source stuff. But unless you have copious and reliable bandwidth, beware that you may not have the control you think you do.
It's not. You are absolutely correct. The main useful effect of subsidizing corn/maize derived ethanol is to drive up food prices. Much/most of the food eaten here in the US has some corn/maize component in it. It does not in any substantial way reduce our oil dependency, it uses valuable arable land, and it is basically a handout to farmers who are already subsidized quite heavily. Like steel tariffs it benefits a few at the expense of the rest of society.
I have no beef with ethanol being a part of our energy supply, particularly from bio-waste. Diversity in energy sources is a good thing. But corn derived ethanol is just a terrible product to subsidize.
The AV-8 Harrier II is subsonic and still widely used by the UK and US armed forces.
The A10 is also subsonic. Of course it's not really a fighter, but a ground attack aircraft if you are going to pick nits. You also can argue whether it is "modern" but it's still in use as far as I know since it is arguable the best close air support aircraft out there.
That said, you are correct that most jet fighters used by modern military forces are capable of flight at or near mach 2, even if only for short periods of time.
I learned the hard way that using military alphabet abbreviations over the phone just confuses most folks who aren't current/ex military or pilots. You end up having to say "A as in Alpha" instead otherwise they can't cope. It's even worse if they are a foreign national whose English language skills aren't so strong.
Of course most folks here can't deal with metric either so I shouldn't be surprised. (yes I'm an American slamming other Americans on this topic) There are a lot of things people could do to make their lives easier that they don't bother to learn. Sad but true.
I hear ya and sympathize. Just be glad you don't work for a certain accounting firm where booting your laptop takes literally 10-20 minutes due to necessary but poorly implemented security measures and other crappy software.
(Re)booting sucks...
Theoretically no, but in reality probably yes.
There are some applications that are simply very difficult to make work in an open source or free software model. CAD software comes to mind immediately. Creating a CAD system is highly specialized, requires serious math skillz, and the end application is large and complicated (on par with operating systems or top tier database software) so a good team is required. There also are likely to be patent issues to work around as well. From a user's perspective changing CAD systems has VERY VERY high switching costs, require a LOT of training, and the user bases are quite small. Sure there are a few free/open-source CAD packages out there but they are toys compared with CATIA or ProEngineer or even AutoCAD. Don't get me wrong, lots of firms would love to not have to spend huge $ on an expensive 3D modeling package like CATIA. It costs a bloody fortune. But there just aren't enough programmers out there with the right skills and the itch to create a CAD package that will replace the commercial stuff any time soon.
Games seem to be another area where free software struggles to challenge commercial offerings. High development costs, small group of available programmers, requires artistic/creative skills not widely possessed by programmers, and other reasons besides.
Basically, the more specialized the software or the more artistic content required, the more difficult it seems to be to develop under a free model. Not impossible mind you, just more difficult; sometimes to the point where it is not practical even if it is theoretically possible.
Generally speaking no, students do not pay for much/most research, at least not directly. There are of course lots of exceptions but research is typically paid for by grants (government and/or corporate) or various wealthy benefactors. A surprisingly large part of being a successful university researcher is being able to bring in the money to conduct your research. Certainly some tuition money ends up going towards research but it is a surprisingly small percentage, often nothing at all. My alma matter gets literally billions a year from the NIH and other sources other than students tuition. Some of the professors barely see the inside of a classroom. That said, without the students the universities would not exist and universities have a tendency to forget this fact when it comes time get out of the lab and to teach said students. It's not right but unlikely to change either.
As for whether research at public universities should be public domain, ethically you can make a strong case for putting it out there for everyone but legally it does not work that way right now. (see Bayh-Dole act) Universities now have very large patent portfolios and regularly spin off companies, technologies and licensing. Often creates some significant conflict of interest issues.
If you are seriously arguing that governments are efficient at allocating capital then we'll just have to disagree. Publicly funded research has an extremely important place in the mix but eliminating private drug R&D is hardly the solution to all our woes. We have a mixed public/private model right now and for all its problems, it works. Yes, for profit companies make a lot of money which is obviously inefficient from the perspective of helping patients. Governments arguably waste even more money. Pick your poison. I actually agree with you in principle about publicly funded research remaining public domain. Where your arguments are falling down is that you haven't explained why any of your proposals would result in more/better drugs or medical devices actually coming to market. To my mind you are merely trading one set of problematic incentives for another without clearly better results.
If a (carefully regulated) company makes a lot of money while helping lots of people with injury and disease I'm ok with that. Is it perfect? Of course not. There are lots of problems, not the least of which is the conflict of interest a profit motive can provide. But that does not automatically mean governments will do a better job because governments have their own incentive problems. I'm open to being convinced but I simply do not see a logical argument why a purely taxpayer funded model of drug development is clearly better than the mixed public/private model we have today. I'll ignore the fact that a pure public model is politically impossible so we are discussing purely hypothetical scenarios anyway.
I'm not going to waste my time arguing with an Anonymous Coward who invokes Nazi Germany as a good example of efficient government. That is a troll (not to mention an empty argument) and you should know that.
Nice troll there Captain Flamebait. Godwin's law is hereby invoked.
Public research does not solve the economic incentives problem. There are finite financial resources and an effectively infinite number of possible diseases to research. How to prioritize where the money goes and who takes the legal risk? Not an easy question to answer. We already have world class public research in the US via academic institutions and the NIH among others. But there is a HUGE gap between public research and drug development and it's not an easy gap to cross.
It is extremely difficult to have effective publicly funded drug development. Drug trials are very expensive (sometimes into the billions of dollars) and most fail. Would you rather pay for drugs via tax dollars or via higher drug prices? You're going to pay either way, and the drug trials don't get cheaper just because the government picks up the tab. Just the opposite if anything. Not to mention that public institutions tend to be notoriously inefficient with money that isn't theirs. Betting that the government can allocate capital efficiently is mostly what caused the Soviet Union to collapse. I've yet to see a government that is better at it than private companies.
Even if a drug gets to market there are still significant financial risks, especially litigation. Just because someone does the research does not automatically make it profitable to produce a drug based on that research. Vaccines are a good example. There is a lot of legal risk (no vaccine is 100% safe) and little/no recurring revenues. Even if someone else picks up the tab for the very high R&D costs, they still are generally only borderline profitable. Even countries with explicitly socialist health care systems haven't solved this problem.
Please don't get me wrong, some public research is vital. Some drugs would never come to market without it. But it's not an easy problem. Just waiving our hands and saying "public research" will not solve the problems of the economics of drug development. If it were that easy someone, somewhere would already be doing it.
This is what they did in India for decades. Until recently patents were only available on rather specific processes for making drugs, not for the drugs themselves. Results? Lots of cheap knockoff drugs, not a lot of innovative new drugs. India's pharma industry has been a supplier for low income people around the world (which is good) but almost entirely for knock-offs of drugs developed elsewhere. (mostly the US and Europe) Few new drugs have been developed in India over the last 50 years under their process focused patent laws. From a purely economic standpoint there is far less incentive to commit the immense financial resources needed to research and develop new drugs under process focused patent laws because there is usually more than one way to produce a given drug.
There is no free lunch. Eliminate product patents in favor of process patents and many drugs will be cheaper but you will slow drug research and fewer new drugs will come to market. I am not here to tell anyone what the correct course of action might be. There are strong ethical arguments on both sides of the problem. I am simply pointing out that there are consequences, both good and bad, to changing the patent regulations.
So basically you are saying murder is OK. Wow. Innocent until proven guilty but that takes some really... interesting thinking to claim that murder is somehow forgivable.
You mean just like instant messaging?
They won't. Not trying to be snide but that battle was lost long ago. It does not matter that FTP is technically more efficient and better designed for file transfer. Attaching a file is simple and, like it or not, using an ftp server involves more steps, additional software, additional security, and additional training. FTP fails the mom test. It's harder than attaching a file for NO additional benefit to the user in 99.999999% of cases. Furthermore, most people do not have or know about ftp servers, they have email accounts. So they use the tool they have and know how to use.
Does this cause problems for the network admins? Sure. Doesn't matter though. Ease of use/learning for the user wins here. If you want ftp to be used, make it easier to use than attaching a file and people will flock to it. Until then, it's going to be used only by nerds like me in the few special cases where ftp is the only alternative.
So download OpenOffice twice in an hour and you are busted. Nice! Glad I don't use Verizon.
Mighty nice of you. Does your policy include family and close friends? (kidding)
Look, I agree that sending out random Plaxo spams to anyone you meet is more than a little rude. However, there are lots of features of the service that are very useful. I have a lot of contacts who use Plaxo and their information is automatically updated without me having to do any data entry (or spam them) which saves me a LOT of time. Plaxo also keeps keeps my address book available from anywhere in the world, synchronizes said address book with Thunderbird, Outlook, LinkedIn (if you use it), Yahoo mail, and several others. Plus it acts as an off site backup in case my address book gets wiped out by accident, say by a computer crash, or if I just need to port my address book to a new computer. The service isn't perfect by any means, (no exporting contact to Gmail, some of the newer features are still getting the bugs worked out, and some other issues I could mention) but it's useful to me without being a problem for others. Your mileage may vary.
Can't really help with the address book (gmail is too primitive here) but Plaxo works nicely to keep my calendar and address books synchronized. Depends on exactly which application you use but it works great for Outlook, Thunderbird, and a few others.
Being able to open a web browser or download songs from itunes doesn't make one "fluent with technology". Being able to do some basic productivity tasks just doesn't count either. There's nothing wrong with having that level of ability but it's not going to keep anyone at the forefront of the technology curve.
Kids aren't going into technology fields because:
A) There is a (wrong) perception that all the jobs are going to China/India
B) There has always been a finite talent pool of people genuinely interested in technology
C) Schools (in the US) do a piss poor job in general of educating students about technology
D) There are easier ways to get through school.