I will add to this that Jim Heson was a pioneer, not only in puppetry, but in industrials. We only wish the commercials we see know were as interesting as the what he made. I have the privilege of seeing films of these narrated by, I believe his daughter, as part of a presentation by the Jim Henson foundation.
Part of this is that the commercials were character driven, which we know is a workable formula. It worked for Charmin and Wendy's. I think they are difficult to make, and I think it is one reason why the brand carry's so little power.
I see this as teaching a man to fish, rather than giving the man a fish. If we teach intelligent design, then we have an adult that preach on the street for change, or manipulate facts so they can otherwise con people out of money. Generally speaking, an unproductive member of society that will forever be asking for the handout a fish.
However if we teach science, that fact patterns do not have to fit what is already known, that new things can be created, then we have a person who can create real product, not only catch the fix, but add value, so that we may all benefit with new big flat screen TVs and fancy cars.
Of course I know religious folks have no need for fancy cars or big TVs, as their lord given them all the comfort they need, so they have no need for science.
I think about this every time I hear some state or local government spending huge amounts of tax payer money to promote a 18th century christian point of view. For instance, all the money spent to promote the idea that 18th century condoms don't work, even though 21 century condoms do. How much money is spent on internet filtering software that prevents a teenager from accessing information(preteens should not have unfettered access to computers). I am scared because I know the power of the church and how they let people die rather than risk going to hell by believing in empirical fact. Absolute truth is the greatest threat to humanity. That they continue let people die to protect their beliefs is obvious to any objective observer. That they will kill to protect the so-called innocent souls from hell is seen every day.
So here are the options. Either christians stop wasting tax payer money to support their superstitions, and stop killing people who disagree with them, or they slowly drive the United States and other countries into bankruptcy. Ten years of state sponsored killing of muslims has put us on the brink, with no results. Osama Bin Laden is still free to encourage everyone, even the Taliban, to kill Americans. Now we see christians doing every thing they can to undermine America in a temper tantrum reminiscent of a three year old when he does not get a ballon. I understand that most christians have so little faith that any bit of external doubt can turn them to the devil, but is it really worth destroying a country over?
Oil is a commodity and commodities are the freest market in the world, largely devoid of government control. Their costs tend to based on what the market will bear, not what the government mandates. For instance ADM was able to fix prices on food commodities, charging what the market would bear. The majority of these costs were passed on to consumers. It was only when the US government came in and killed the free market that the price fixing ceased and prices fell, not because consumers demanded it.
Oil is a much more transparent market that food commodities, but it still charges what the market will bear. For instance, prices right now are around $70 and that is a magical number, a number that has little to do with what the product is worth. In Saudi Arabia, for example, I have heard it costs much less than $10 a barrel for exploration, drilling, transport, administration, everything. That could be $20, but the point is that it is the lowest int he world.
Oil is a commodity, it costs the same no matter where it comes from, pretty much. A refinery is going to buy oil from whoever it needs to. The US only has 1-3% of the worlds reserves, so US refinaries are going to buy from whomever. The fact that it cost 5X as much to produce oil in the gulf is not going to raise the oil to $350 a barrel.
And here is the problem. Gulf oil producers have to compete with essentially free. This means that they are going to always be corners cut and safety compromised. If oil were $150 a barrel and we paid $4.50 a gallon at the pump, then life would be different. But offshore oil rigs are competing with free. Half the oil reserves are likely on easily drilled land based properties, just waited to be drilled for $20 a barrels or so. The rest of us have to compete with it. We are either going to live with the risk, or change our outlook.
The US produces at most 2% of the worlds oil, we don' have to. It would make many people poor if we don't, it would make me poor, so I hope we don't, but this crocodile tears outrage, and blaming the government, it pathetic. Energy is running in a free market. The only government control is Saudi Arabia trying to keep prices low enough so developing alternatives are not cost effective. The only thing that the US government could do is subsidize shale oil so it is cost effective at $70 a barrel instead of $100, cut drilling in sensitive locations, pull out of the middle east and develop peaceful ties with central and south america, and promote efficiency and short and long term alternatives to crude oil. Otherwise they can leave the free market alone and cry with the citizens when something goes wrong.
Right, at $60 a month. People buy Comcast because it cost $100 for cable, phone and internet. Then they complain that limits are put on bandwidth and service sucks. For those that do not need cable, $60 for unlimited internet and $120 for unlimited cell phone is not such a bad deal. Everyone else will have to try to get around the limits.
Certainly it seems like an issue with OSI, not with open source in general. In particular can someone explain this:
2) We will want the bod list archives open for any discussions of webm. We
are not comfortable with OSI being closed.
The CEO, like many CEOs in the US and around the world, have suspicious ties to the military and government. Typically this is why they make so muh money, they know the people who control the big contracts.
There is a structure that makes it appear that the workers own the company. Having worked for a US company controlled by Asian interests, I found the structure rather familiar. It is done to reward workers based on results, and retain good employees.
Other than that, there is no overwhelming evidence of government ties. Just a company with a management structure meant to maximize the appearance of employee control. The fact that the façade may not match reality does not mean the reality is a conspiracy.
The traditional MS model is to supply a limited set of software and depend on third parties to integrate and expand the selection to meet customers needs. While this has many advantages when customizing a general purpose computing device to serve a specific purpose, it does not work well when dealing with highly available and reliable embedded devices. We see this when HP abandons MS Windows 7 for tablets and when MS becomes a system integrator to deliver a video game console. MS did not deliver a set of tools to create a console, they create the console.
What is clear is the mobile phone industry does not support the concept of a closed software base on which hardware is hacked to make it work. Two of the major mobile phone OS, Symbian and WebOS were derived from code that was developed to support an integrated PDA device, and is now open so it can be customized to a device. iPhone OS of course is completely open to Apple who can do as they wish to create an completely integrated product.
If Google can gain real traction with Android then there might be a little hope for MS. Even though Android has the advantage of being open to manufacturers, it has the same disadvantage of being at least partly controlled by a company that does not count the end user as the primary customer. Both Google and MS are tried to jumpt start the market for it's products by creating a reference device(the nexus one and kin) but it is not clear that either attempt will work. In the Android case it might become so fragmented that Apps are not going to be compatible across the devices. For MS, there is frankly little reason for a manufacturer to use the mobile product. Such a phone would either directly compete with Blackberry or Android, with little differentiation, and, unlike xBox, the manufacturer will have little incentive to sell the phones for a loss.
Some magazines have gone insane over digital delivery. While sane popular magazines just deliver the magazine as a PDF, and journals allow you to download individual articles, some magazines are fighting the future as much as the music labels once did. One of the worst offenders is Make, and is why I don't really subscriber every year. They have the lamest online reader in existence, and it pretty much destroys any cred they have a DYI site.
What I learned to do after my undergrad degree with text books I had to buy but were not all that interested in was to buy the old edition online. For most purposes this seemed to work. Moronic profs can often be gotten around.
That said, a good set of textbooks in your profession can be useful. I used many of my books to look stuff up years after I left school. Also, some textbooks are not so useless. The problem set are often worth the cost of the textbook for students who really want to learn the material.
I often wonder what some of us are going to do between the time that ideas can no longer be sold at a reasonable profit and the brave new Star Trek universe makes money and all our current free market(nee capitalist) ideals irrelevant. I would say teaching, but increasingly people do not value and education, and the growth of charter schools means who you know will be more important to becoming a teacher than what you know or your ability to teach.
Kind of reminds me of IE. IE1-IE5 were released in a four year time period, mostly to play catchup to Netscape version 4. After that development all but stopped (relatively speaking) and 10 years later we only at IE 8.
One hope that in a year or so when Chrome is at 9.0, even with the new release of MS they will stop release a major version every time they fix a bug. I don't think any of us want to have to say Chrome version 10,257 every day. Of course at that point they will likely drop the other numbers and we will just cycle through version 0-9 every year.
An an up note, if they have flash and java and HTML 5 working, I will likely use it on Windows machines instead of IE. MS is so concerned with promoting their business structure that each update of IE becomes less useful.
Though most people have taken this negatively, I believe they are taking this out of context. All children do need to understand that the world is not going to protect them, and some will do negative things to get a thrill. Guys will try to seduce girls and then sell them to their friends. Older guys will try to get younger guys to fight, then sell tickets. Having a moral compass so that one can judge if fighting or having sex for money is appropriate is an important thing.
As far as CBS is concerned, making money from shock is the status quo. Why else would Fox promote clearly mentally ill Glen Beck so we can laugh at him like a carnival attraction. I think we can trace that back all the way to Lucy being married to the Cuban.
Of course, if you like a program and only watch downloading, then one can't really expect the programming to stay, unless we do eventually live in a socialist country in which the government steals money from us to produce the shows the liberal elite wants.
You know, all that has happened is that they have responded to public demand for cheaper prices. Years ago ink was affordable. Then it became $40 to print 100 pages of color and people revolted. Many bought laser printers for black and white. it was a bigger investment but after a year on the same cartridge it ended up being the same. If they needed color they would have an inkjet, but would use it sparingly. Of course they soon realized that the ink would dry after a few months.
So what could be done. Refills, color laser printer for those that did the volume to justify the costs. Now that they are losing the market battle they drop the price and say ink was never that expensive. When I had an inkject I never paid less than $25 for black ink, and now HP is selling for under 20? Give me a break. All they are doing is lowering prices and pretending they never overcharged.
I notice HP is doing this with toner. When I bought my Phaser printer I figured an comparable HP would cost about 50% as more per page in toner. About a year after the price dropped on toner and it was about the same. Kudos to HP for changing their tendency for usury, but clearly there was a period when they were overcharging simply because they could, as well as everyone else.
When dipping into my libertarian strand, I see the function of government is to create a fair court system, which keeps things as local as possible. For instance, every business that has lost should be allowed to go to court, in a timely manner, with a jury. The government should not be allowed to pass laws that limit damages or powerful people to use laws to keep less powerful people out of court. It is simple. My business has decreased 50% from last year, and every cancelation is citing the spill. I go to court, sue BP, and a jury awards me money. The only reason this does not work is because the federal government is biased against awarding average people money when rich people try to kill them. A libertarian view clearly solves this by allowing the local courts to award money. Activist federal judges should be warned not to mess with the system. For instance, the activist judge in the McDonald's coffee spill case should have been summarily removed for using his appointed position to usurp the power of the people.
Second, the government should insure that assets are not transfered prevent the people from gaining recompense. In a libertarian wold in which we each pay for our mistakes and compensate others who we injure, every asset of BP should be at stake. It should not be the governments concern to cap of define these injuries. Only the people can do that, and, as mentioned, we have a system that does this very well. The jury. There is no need for government experts to tell me that the coast is ruined. Any damn fool can see that. The only thing I want to know is how much a jury will award me because my summer vacations are going to be ruined for the next 10 years. Or how much I can get because I can no longer go bird-watching. I a jury says nothing, fine. But I don't want a bureaucrat telling me that.
But the biggest mistake the government has done is by creating the notion of a corporation. In the beginning, in the wisdom of our founding fathers, corporations had limited licenses that could be revoked if they violated the law. Owners were still responsible for criminals acts, and could not hide behind their own incompetence. These limitations have continously been reduced by an activist supreme court, most recently when the court said that god was not the only one would could create a person, but that governement, the equal of god, could create persons as well. This activist part of the court that fully supported the promotion to personhood of a non-human entity consisted of kennedy(appointed by reagan), acalia(appointed by reagan), Alito(appointed by Bush), Stevens(appointed by ford) Ginsberg(clinton) and beyer(clinton). Since most of the activist judges were appointed by republican adminstations, it seems the only hope for those of us that want to limited the power of big government is to not pu republicans in power. How are we, the people, to have any power when the Republican government says the arm chair has the same rights as a starving child?
The people are nothing if the rights of single person is held in less regard than the rights of copy machine. If the rights of an old women is held in less regard that rights of a laminated yellow table. And since the Paul family, the faceman of the libertarian movement, seem to think it is unamerican to take a tough stance with BP, I really don't think that mainstream libertarianism is going to do anything, as it seems, despite the claim to be christian, they believe that the rights of an oil well is greater than the rights of a human being.
So this is the brave new world of the $500 open source smart phone, where there is no walled garden keeping users from setting backgrounds and running apps depicting jiggly boobs? Waiting three weeks for a simple update of resorting to manual install, not even a yum. On a phone that was bought last week? Sign me up!
Of course this is no surprise as it appears that people bought phones after 2.0 was out already and could not upgrade. I am really looking like a fool for buying a smartphone that can be upgraded to the new OS a couple years later. Color me green with envy.
Just like the MS, the software may seem open, and there may be advantages to have random OEMs building random devices from parts that have fallen off the back of the truck, but when we get down to the nuts and bolts, the control is still there, and if the random company does not want to support the upgrades or functionality, it will not be supported.
So this is the new world of the $500 open source smart phone, where there is no walled garden keeping users from setting backgrounds and running apps depicting jiggly boobs? Waiting three weeks for a simple update? On a phone that was bought last week? Sign me up!
Of course this is no surprise as it appears that people bought phones after 2.0 was out already and could not upgrade. I am really looking like a fool for buying a smartphone that can be upgraded to the new OS a couple years later. Color me green with envy.
Just like the MS, the software may seem open, and there may be advantages to have random OEMs building random devices from parts that have fallen off the back of the truck, but when we get down to the nuts and bolts, the control is still there, and if the random company does not want to support the upgrades or functionality, it will not be supported.
This happens everywhere. No one wants to work the problem. They want to provide a solution and complain when you don't implement it. We see this in software all the time. So client comes in and says 'I want t a web site that looks like this and has these pages.' As responsible professionals we ask 'what is it you are trying to do', not to pad billable hours or because we don't want to do the work, but because we know that to often the client has been told the solution, independent of whether it is a reasonable solution for the problem at hand.
I can understand why people do this with doctors though. I have gone into exams for a particular problem, have sat through the exam thinking we were working the problem, and then be given so stock drug that may or may not solve the problem, never being told what the problem is. When ever diagnosis seems to be for the benefit of the pharmaceuticals...
I think for small projects with a existing fan/userbase this works well, and is really not new. I recall 20 years ago a local brother/sister rock duo sold t-shirts to raise money to make CDs. Chris Chandler, a folk singer, offered producer credit on his latest album in exchange for a smallish donation. I think the general populous is often willing to give money for small projects.
The problem comes in when the project get very successful and starts needed professional management. Now people are not paying to directly create product, but for support and management services. I may be willing to donate $20 so that some coder buy food while writing a device driver, or some artist can rent studio space to record and album, but I am willing to donate that money for an administrative assistant? I don't know.
I hate to keep bringing this up, but people don't want to fiddle with machines. They want them to work. Most people I know buy PCs because that is what they use at work and school. They get free software and often free support.
If the iPad can provide the functionality they need, and contrary to the false statement, free p0rn(who wants to pay for an app to pay for p0rn anyway) and let the kids write papers with a bluetooth keyboard and not have updates fail because MS cannot verify via WGA an accuse the user of theft, then why buy anything else?
I feel a little disturbed that I can't change batteries, add memory, or write my own programs like I can on my Mac, but then I don't fix my own car anymore either. The worlds moves on, and one either moves or gets run over. And just look at the unemployment rate in the US to see what happens to those that get run over. Sure you can hold rallies and complain about taxes and blame the immigrants, but you are still run over.
It really is quite amazing that vendor lock in would be the defense. I stopped using MS Word because it would not read my old files accurately. I see students failing papers because the Word on one machine does not read word files created on another machine in a different version. Rather than automatically updating MS Word from MS servers, there is a complex process on has to go through to read files from different versions. It would be nice if they had an online tool to switch versions. At least with Google you are never going to be in a case where you fail a class or lose a contract because you the software won't read the document. Sure they may be data loss, but what is worse. A few mangled graphs, or no product what so ever?
The unfortunate thing is that teachers and professors all see the student issues due to the failure of the MS products, yet continue to insist on their use, blaming it on the incompetency of the students rather than the incompetency of MS.
MS products are good in firms that have the resources to insure all machines are homogeneous and up to date, firms that require a high level of collaborations of complex non-technical documents(This does not include most educational places). Otherwise, at least for documents, OO.org, Google docs, or LaTeX should be the norm. For spreadsheets OO.org, and especially Google, has some stuff lacking. For presentations, I think everything but Keynote pretty much sucks.
My main problem with this is that BP and Transocean seem to be more conerned about limiting liability than solving the problem. BP doesn't seem to be interested in releasing video so the experts don't know if they are dealing with a situation that is 5 or 5 million barrels a day. For planning such a number is important. Transocean is in court trying to claim it is a cruise line so that it can cap liability to a few tens of million. Of course most of BP actions are intended to limit charges of negligence so they can limit liability to $75 million. Total exposure for both companies if all the effort succeed is $100 million.
So the oil still flows, and the government has to step in for what should be a problem solved by the private sector that has claimed they are more than capable of regulating themselves. The private businesses that are destroyed from Louisiana to Florida due to BP negligence will be limited to fighting over the $75 million dollars, hardly enough when all your memorial weekeend guests have cancelled.
Here is the thing. I am one of the few people not in the oil industry that will actively defend the high price of gasoline, and even say it go higher. Oil production is risky, and the rewards should be commiserate. What I find maddening is that when the risk does manifest, the executives claim they have no money to pay for liabiliy. BP has made a profit of 5.5 billion this quarter. It is only natural that all that is forfiet to pay for the accident. That is how the free market works. As long as one is efficient and keeps one nose clean, one can make a huge profit. On big mistake an put one out of business. We should not be making laws to protect incompetent firms, any more than we should have laws to protect incompetent employees.
And for those who think there is a greater competency issue in the Venezuela explosion, remember that BP is responsible for the death of 11 good people, while no one died in the Venezuela situation. If you think that killing people is competent, something is wrong.
This is on the same order as the amendment to deny viagra to sex offenders or to fire workers who download porn once. Besides the fat that no one should vote for these because they are overly broad and badly written laws, these are clearly junk amendments that waste our money. We pay these freaks, and when they act like freaks playing games, they waste our money.
In this case the harm is clear. We have people in Afghanistan and we have a much harder job to do with less money to do it because we wated 8 years in Iraq. The attack in times square shows the frivolity of spending a trillion dollars in Iraq while Laden was working with the Taliban to destroy America. But because Obama wants to fight a war for victory, instead of the Bush war for Haliburton profits, the republican guard all of the sudden can't support it.
What is even more silly is that the amendment is an attack on fiscal responsibility and the free market. We don't need a city of bureaucrats running the government mandated spae program. Yes it is going to hurt. Yes, some people, who have no skills and have been living the high life at the tax payers expense, are going to suffer. Yes, some government funded luxury neighborhoods will be in deep trouble. But I hardly think it is my responsibility to keep otherwise unskilled persons living in the style to which they have become accustomed.
Which is not to say I don't think we need a manned space program. A scaled down shuttle program, two launches a year, transitional to private launches to LEO and multinationally funded human spec launches to the solar system would be quite adequate.
I keep thinking the same thing. Kids don't buy these things, parents do. An iPod touch lasts for ever, I have already seen hand me downs. Sync off same account. And it can do so much more. For every Nintendo and Sony I see, I see 10 iPod touches or iPhones. I see some of the Nintendo units used by the under age 10 set, but Apple is gaining traction for mobile gaming.
As far as the buttons, Apple is not trying to get existing gamers. Apple is targeting the younger people, who want to game, who want to use facebook, who want to watch movies, and will not make a choice. They have hot spots at school. These are kids who can take a DSi to school, and guarantee that it will be confiscated, or an iPhone or Touch with they can defend as having a semi-legitimate value. The main problem most marketers make is seldom looking at the emerging market. The market that has not been trained with buttons.
This proves once again that when the customers are advertisers the best solution is Flash. It will be some time before another technology becomes this ad friendly. As the article notes, HTML is great at delivering content, but not DRM or advertising.
Slashdot Mirror
Part of this is that the commercials were character driven, which we know is a workable formula. It worked for Charmin and Wendy's. I think they are difficult to make, and I think it is one reason why the brand carry's so little power.
However if we teach science, that fact patterns do not have to fit what is already known, that new things can be created, then we have a person who can create real product, not only catch the fix, but add value, so that we may all benefit with new big flat screen TVs and fancy cars.
Of course I know religious folks have no need for fancy cars or big TVs, as their lord given them all the comfort they need, so they have no need for science.
So here are the options. Either christians stop wasting tax payer money to support their superstitions, and stop killing people who disagree with them, or they slowly drive the United States and other countries into bankruptcy. Ten years of state sponsored killing of muslims has put us on the brink, with no results. Osama Bin Laden is still free to encourage everyone, even the Taliban, to kill Americans. Now we see christians doing every thing they can to undermine America in a temper tantrum reminiscent of a three year old when he does not get a ballon. I understand that most christians have so little faith that any bit of external doubt can turn them to the devil, but is it really worth destroying a country over?
Oil is a much more transparent market that food commodities, but it still charges what the market will bear. For instance, prices right now are around $70 and that is a magical number, a number that has little to do with what the product is worth. In Saudi Arabia, for example, I have heard it costs much less than $10 a barrel for exploration, drilling, transport, administration, everything. That could be $20, but the point is that it is the lowest int he world.
Oil is a commodity, it costs the same no matter where it comes from, pretty much. A refinery is going to buy oil from whoever it needs to. The US only has 1-3% of the worlds reserves, so US refinaries are going to buy from whomever. The fact that it cost 5X as much to produce oil in the gulf is not going to raise the oil to $350 a barrel.
And here is the problem. Gulf oil producers have to compete with essentially free. This means that they are going to always be corners cut and safety compromised. If oil were $150 a barrel and we paid $4.50 a gallon at the pump, then life would be different. But offshore oil rigs are competing with free. Half the oil reserves are likely on easily drilled land based properties, just waited to be drilled for $20 a barrels or so. The rest of us have to compete with it. We are either going to live with the risk, or change our outlook.
The US produces at most 2% of the worlds oil, we don' have to. It would make many people poor if we don't, it would make me poor, so I hope we don't, but this crocodile tears outrage, and blaming the government, it pathetic. Energy is running in a free market. The only government control is Saudi Arabia trying to keep prices low enough so developing alternatives are not cost effective. The only thing that the US government could do is subsidize shale oil so it is cost effective at $70 a barrel instead of $100, cut drilling in sensitive locations, pull out of the middle east and develop peaceful ties with central and south america, and promote efficiency and short and long term alternatives to crude oil. Otherwise they can leave the free market alone and cry with the citizens when something goes wrong.
Right, at $60 a month. People buy Comcast because it cost $100 for cable, phone and internet. Then they complain that limits are put on bandwidth and service sucks. For those that do not need cable, $60 for unlimited internet and $120 for unlimited cell phone is not such a bad deal. Everyone else will have to try to get around the limits.
2) We will want the bod list archives open for any discussions of webm. We are not comfortable with OSI being closed.
Why would an open source firm lack transparency?
There is a structure that makes it appear that the workers own the company. Having worked for a US company controlled by Asian interests, I found the structure rather familiar. It is done to reward workers based on results, and retain good employees.
Other than that, there is no overwhelming evidence of government ties. Just a company with a management structure meant to maximize the appearance of employee control. The fact that the façade may not match reality does not mean the reality is a conspiracy.
What is clear is the mobile phone industry does not support the concept of a closed software base on which hardware is hacked to make it work. Two of the major mobile phone OS, Symbian and WebOS were derived from code that was developed to support an integrated PDA device, and is now open so it can be customized to a device. iPhone OS of course is completely open to Apple who can do as they wish to create an completely integrated product.
If Google can gain real traction with Android then there might be a little hope for MS. Even though Android has the advantage of being open to manufacturers, it has the same disadvantage of being at least partly controlled by a company that does not count the end user as the primary customer. Both Google and MS are tried to jumpt start the market for it's products by creating a reference device(the nexus one and kin) but it is not clear that either attempt will work. In the Android case it might become so fragmented that Apps are not going to be compatible across the devices. For MS, there is frankly little reason for a manufacturer to use the mobile product. Such a phone would either directly compete with Blackberry or Android, with little differentiation, and, unlike xBox, the manufacturer will have little incentive to sell the phones for a loss.
Some magazines have gone insane over digital delivery. While sane popular magazines just deliver the magazine as a PDF, and journals allow you to download individual articles, some magazines are fighting the future as much as the music labels once did. One of the worst offenders is Make, and is why I don't really subscriber every year. They have the lamest online reader in existence, and it pretty much destroys any cred they have a DYI site.
If the innocent cannot easily buy a phone, then only criminals will have phones and terrorists have won.
That said, a good set of textbooks in your profession can be useful. I used many of my books to look stuff up years after I left school. Also, some textbooks are not so useless. The problem set are often worth the cost of the textbook for students who really want to learn the material.
I often wonder what some of us are going to do between the time that ideas can no longer be sold at a reasonable profit and the brave new Star Trek universe makes money and all our current free market(nee capitalist) ideals irrelevant. I would say teaching, but increasingly people do not value and education, and the growth of charter schools means who you know will be more important to becoming a teacher than what you know or your ability to teach.
One hope that in a year or so when Chrome is at 9.0, even with the new release of MS they will stop release a major version every time they fix a bug. I don't think any of us want to have to say Chrome version 10,257 every day. Of course at that point they will likely drop the other numbers and we will just cycle through version 0-9 every year.
An an up note, if they have flash and java and HTML 5 working, I will likely use it on Windows machines instead of IE. MS is so concerned with promoting their business structure that each update of IE becomes less useful.
As far as CBS is concerned, making money from shock is the status quo. Why else would Fox promote clearly mentally ill Glen Beck so we can laugh at him like a carnival attraction. I think we can trace that back all the way to Lucy being married to the Cuban.
Of course, if you like a program and only watch downloading, then one can't really expect the programming to stay, unless we do eventually live in a socialist country in which the government steals money from us to produce the shows the liberal elite wants.
So what could be done. Refills, color laser printer for those that did the volume to justify the costs. Now that they are losing the market battle they drop the price and say ink was never that expensive. When I had an inkject I never paid less than $25 for black ink, and now HP is selling for under 20? Give me a break. All they are doing is lowering prices and pretending they never overcharged.
I notice HP is doing this with toner. When I bought my Phaser printer I figured an comparable HP would cost about 50% as more per page in toner. About a year after the price dropped on toner and it was about the same. Kudos to HP for changing their tendency for usury, but clearly there was a period when they were overcharging simply because they could, as well as everyone else.
Second, the government should insure that assets are not transfered prevent the people from gaining recompense. In a libertarian wold in which we each pay for our mistakes and compensate others who we injure, every asset of BP should be at stake. It should not be the governments concern to cap of define these injuries. Only the people can do that, and, as mentioned, we have a system that does this very well. The jury. There is no need for government experts to tell me that the coast is ruined. Any damn fool can see that. The only thing I want to know is how much a jury will award me because my summer vacations are going to be ruined for the next 10 years. Or how much I can get because I can no longer go bird-watching. I a jury says nothing, fine. But I don't want a bureaucrat telling me that.
But the biggest mistake the government has done is by creating the notion of a corporation. In the beginning, in the wisdom of our founding fathers, corporations had limited licenses that could be revoked if they violated the law. Owners were still responsible for criminals acts, and could not hide behind their own incompetence. These limitations have continously been reduced by an activist supreme court, most recently when the court said that god was not the only one would could create a person, but that governement, the equal of god, could create persons as well. This activist part of the court that fully supported the promotion to personhood of a non-human entity consisted of kennedy(appointed by reagan), acalia(appointed by reagan), Alito(appointed by Bush), Stevens(appointed by ford) Ginsberg(clinton) and beyer(clinton). Since most of the activist judges were appointed by republican adminstations, it seems the only hope for those of us that want to limited the power of big government is to not pu republicans in power. How are we, the people, to have any power when the Republican government says the arm chair has the same rights as a starving child?
The people are nothing if the rights of single person is held in less regard than the rights of copy machine. If the rights of an old women is held in less regard that rights of a laminated yellow table. And since the Paul family, the faceman of the libertarian movement, seem to think it is unamerican to take a tough stance with BP, I really don't think that mainstream libertarianism is going to do anything, as it seems, despite the claim to be christian, they believe that the rights of an oil well is greater than the rights of a human being.
Of course this is no surprise as it appears that people bought phones after 2.0 was out already and could not upgrade. I am really looking like a fool for buying a smartphone that can be upgraded to the new OS a couple years later. Color me green with envy.
Just like the MS, the software may seem open, and there may be advantages to have random OEMs building random devices from parts that have fallen off the back of the truck, but when we get down to the nuts and bolts, the control is still there, and if the random company does not want to support the upgrades or functionality, it will not be supported.
Of course this is no surprise as it appears that people bought phones after 2.0 was out already and could not upgrade. I am really looking like a fool for buying a smartphone that can be upgraded to the new OS a couple years later. Color me green with envy.
Just like the MS, the software may seem open, and there may be advantages to have random OEMs building random devices from parts that have fallen off the back of the truck, but when we get down to the nuts and bolts, the control is still there, and if the random company does not want to support the upgrades or functionality, it will not be supported.
I can understand why people do this with doctors though. I have gone into exams for a particular problem, have sat through the exam thinking we were working the problem, and then be given so stock drug that may or may not solve the problem, never being told what the problem is. When ever diagnosis seems to be for the benefit of the pharmaceuticals...
The problem comes in when the project get very successful and starts needed professional management. Now people are not paying to directly create product, but for support and management services. I may be willing to donate $20 so that some coder buy food while writing a device driver, or some artist can rent studio space to record and album, but I am willing to donate that money for an administrative assistant? I don't know.
If the iPad can provide the functionality they need, and contrary to the false statement, free p0rn(who wants to pay for an app to pay for p0rn anyway) and let the kids write papers with a bluetooth keyboard and not have updates fail because MS cannot verify via WGA an accuse the user of theft, then why buy anything else?
I feel a little disturbed that I can't change batteries, add memory, or write my own programs like I can on my Mac, but then I don't fix my own car anymore either. The worlds moves on, and one either moves or gets run over. And just look at the unemployment rate in the US to see what happens to those that get run over. Sure you can hold rallies and complain about taxes and blame the immigrants, but you are still run over.
The unfortunate thing is that teachers and professors all see the student issues due to the failure of the MS products, yet continue to insist on their use, blaming it on the incompetency of the students rather than the incompetency of MS.
MS products are good in firms that have the resources to insure all machines are homogeneous and up to date, firms that require a high level of collaborations of complex non-technical documents(This does not include most educational places). Otherwise, at least for documents, OO.org, Google docs, or LaTeX should be the norm. For spreadsheets OO.org, and especially Google, has some stuff lacking. For presentations, I think everything but Keynote pretty much sucks.
So the oil still flows, and the government has to step in for what should be a problem solved by the private sector that has claimed they are more than capable of regulating themselves. The private businesses that are destroyed from Louisiana to Florida due to BP negligence will be limited to fighting over the $75 million dollars, hardly enough when all your memorial weekeend guests have cancelled.
Here is the thing. I am one of the few people not in the oil industry that will actively defend the high price of gasoline, and even say it go higher. Oil production is risky, and the rewards should be commiserate. What I find maddening is that when the risk does manifest, the executives claim they have no money to pay for liabiliy. BP has made a profit of 5.5 billion this quarter. It is only natural that all that is forfiet to pay for the accident. That is how the free market works. As long as one is efficient and keeps one nose clean, one can make a huge profit. On big mistake an put one out of business. We should not be making laws to protect incompetent firms, any more than we should have laws to protect incompetent employees.
And for those who think there is a greater competency issue in the Venezuela explosion, remember that BP is responsible for the death of 11 good people, while no one died in the Venezuela situation. If you think that killing people is competent, something is wrong.
In this case the harm is clear. We have people in Afghanistan and we have a much harder job to do with less money to do it because we wated 8 years in Iraq. The attack in times square shows the frivolity of spending a trillion dollars in Iraq while Laden was working with the Taliban to destroy America. But because Obama wants to fight a war for victory, instead of the Bush war for Haliburton profits, the republican guard all of the sudden can't support it.
What is even more silly is that the amendment is an attack on fiscal responsibility and the free market. We don't need a city of bureaucrats running the government mandated spae program. Yes it is going to hurt. Yes, some people, who have no skills and have been living the high life at the tax payers expense, are going to suffer. Yes, some government funded luxury neighborhoods will be in deep trouble. But I hardly think it is my responsibility to keep otherwise unskilled persons living in the style to which they have become accustomed.
Which is not to say I don't think we need a manned space program. A scaled down shuttle program, two launches a year, transitional to private launches to LEO and multinationally funded human spec launches to the solar system would be quite adequate.
As far as the buttons, Apple is not trying to get existing gamers. Apple is targeting the younger people, who want to game, who want to use facebook, who want to watch movies, and will not make a choice. They have hot spots at school. These are kids who can take a DSi to school, and guarantee that it will be confiscated, or an iPhone or Touch with they can defend as having a semi-legitimate value. The main problem most marketers make is seldom looking at the emerging market. The market that has not been trained with buttons.
This proves once again that when the customers are advertisers the best solution is Flash. It will be some time before another technology becomes this ad friendly. As the article notes, HTML is great at delivering content, but not DRM or advertising.