Anyone who has gone through the pre late 90's upgrades of MS Office products have no faith in MS ability to maintain integrity between versions. The transition from.doc to.docx just reinforces their inability to maintain compatibility.
It was the inability of 2000+ versions of office to read my 97 version of office that finally drove me to OO.org. The transition from Macros to VBA in Excel almost did it, but there was nothing like Excel until the recent updates of OO.org.
In all honestly I understand why people stay with MS products. There is often some little thing that they need. It could be a font, or just a way of creating content. I might still have a copy of Office around if I were running on a Windows machine. The presentation creator in OO.org is just not all that great. Fortunately I have a mac, and Keynote, which is way better than anything else out there, at least for me.
It seems to me that this is issue right there. If the company has a dress code, and the test of question implied it does, and the IT department is responsible to that dress code, then it would seem a waste to mandate a separate dress code for six people.
Furthermore I think the hostility on this topic in other threads is extremely immature and does not speak to the issue at hand. Employees are to some extent at the whim of their employers, and have the option to leave if the employer is too whimish. OTOH, a rational employer is not going to want to overstress the employees. In this case, perhaps the company buys a set of uniforms for these workers if the company believe that it adds value. Certainly I think some of the hostility comes from the fact that the employees are going to have buy specific work clothes, as opposed to finding clothes that fits a budget.
I see some this in my current position, where an increase level of dress has recently been discussed. Suit and the like are really inappropriate for most of us, as it just gets torn up way too easily. Spending a couple hundred dollars for outfits that are going to have to be replaced every 6 months is really out of line for all but the highest paid employees. Some people do wear such clothes, and it is their choice to spend that money to promote their career. When all is said and done, if one is playing the appropriate part in an organization, then everything else is just inefficiency. Of course, it is the prerogative of the owner of the company to be inefficient, but if I was told I was going to have to spend hundreds of dollars of my own money to meet some arbitrary PHB mandate, I might look for another job. Or perhaps I am making so much money that the amount is not significant.
Most films, books, etc, of this type explore the ramifications of emerging technology. Some media sugar coats the future, i.e. star trek, and there is nothing wrong with that. Some is not so kind, i.e. Blade Runner and Soylent Green.
Just because one does not see a bubble gum future does not mean one is anti anything. This oversimplification is made everywhere, and is not very useful. In terms of resources running out, many for see and think about the issue for many reasons, some having nothing to do with technology. The living space on the earth is limited, and we will outgrow it. An asteroid will hit earth, so we may want to think about diversification to other real estate. Worst case is that in no more than 20,000 years the earth will no longer be warm enough for large number of humans to survive.
Thinking about these things does not make one anti-technology, or anti-human, or anti-progress, or a goth. In fact thinking about these things makes on more pro-technology, as one does not just take the technology for granted, but actually wants to push it forward. Take those that say climate change is false. They may be correct, and pro-tech, but they are not going push any new tech. They are not going to be the one's discovering and building new anything. They are happy with the status quo, they get rich off the status quo, and all they see with new tech is disruptive technology that might make then less rich.
In addition to the languages, it is also a question of what one wishes to teach. For instance, the current fad in programming is object oriented, so teaching these concepts can be very important. Alice out of carnegie mellon teaches kids to solve problems from such a perspective. It is actually quite similar to Visual Basic. In both cases, if a child can be taught to abstract physical concepts, for example that one can develop a basic leg that can be used for all animals with legs, then an important skill has been rendered. The thing with Alice is that the abstraction is age appropriate.
Another concept that is important when teaching the 12-14 year old to program is that of a variable. I saw my classmates in college struggle with this concept and I felt lucky to have learned it a young age through programming. For this more traditional languages, such as BASIC, C, and FORTRAN are useful. The control loop with variables are very instructive. Even simple a simple swap is can teach a person important skills
I think the assumption is that if all NASA TV looked like the current bastardized version of Transformers, then more kids would be encouraged to get into science and maths. The problem is that such TV watching does not prepare one for the drudgery of drawing free body diagrams, solving zero net force trusses, working out the proof of the quadratic formula, and the like. It is like the science classes where they do cool things like make carbon black penises out of carbon, but no one knows how to do collision problems.
Now, many would say, so what. At least they learned something in science class, at least if NASA TV is cool then they might support the funding. But I think there is something morally wrong with this intellectual bait and switch. If we are talking about actually educating kids to do this sort of work, then the sort of kids you want are those who are those who enjoy watching silent aircraft moving across a tundra, especially if they then are forced to create the dialog themselves. I would hate to see anyone who cannot create excitement out of nothing have to solve dozens of free body diagrams during thier first term of college, or hundreds of derivatives.
I don't really believe this is al queada. It is just that it is a label that people will believe and now this little guy is going to be treated as a Big Man. We see this often with the kids in the US, such as the columbine guys, the guy who bombed the Atlanta Olympics, the spokesperson for Focus on the Family that molested children. They all were little people who wanted to be taken seriously.
The thing is in those cases we don't automatically see them as a condemnation on everything they say or we infer them to say they represent. The Columbine incident did not shut down the militia movement. The Army of god is still free to use violence to protect their version of christianity. Focus on the family is still free exposed kids to intimidation and pornography,and evidently sometimes hire adults who like to have sex with those children, to save the unborn kids. But a fire cracker in a plane, we are all peeing out pants and saying we should strip search every muslim.
I am not saying that we should not take seriously terrorist events. I am saying that the world is a dangerous place and if we continue to let the hate mongers intimidate us so that at any tiny event we throw out the constitutions, then we are fucked. Those rights were pretty hard to get. The elite at the formation of the United states were so set against given the dirty masses any rights that the only way to get them in was as amendments. Think about that, and then think if those with rights ever really want to share them. No, because we all know the more who have rights, such as a right to health, the harder those rights, or entitlements, are to provide.
I have a right to free travel. We are not in a country we our right to travel is impeded. Although we have to show papers to travel, just like the communists, and some people even with papers cannot travel, and the reason is hidden, just like the communists, most of us do not have travel that is significantly impeded. I think that the elite would be very happy if they use this even to impede the right to travel just a little.
I happen to think the freedom to travel is an entitlement, so if there is a risk of a plane bomb every once is a great while, and if there is a risk that I might be on it, then so be it. I simply don't think we should live in a country where low level bureaucrats can get their jollies by looking at the outline of naked people on the airport scanner.It seems like wars were fought to protect us from that kind personal invasion of privacy by the government.
With a newspaper or magazine the content attracts readers to the ads. Manufacturers and merchants depend on the ads to drive business. The traditional media allowed ads to be the center of attention for at least a little while. It worked.
Google does not deliver the package of ads with gratuitous attractive content supplied by traditional media. While this has as much to do with online delivery as google, google has first go at ads, in the search results, which tends to decouple any matching that may be done on the article level.
In effect, google completely breaks the traditional mass advertising model. Traditional media realizes this, which is why they are rebelling. The problem is that some traditional media thinks it can replace the ad model with a fully paid subscriber model. I don't think it can. There has to be a way for traditional media to co-exist with search engines,and this is the challenge. The companies that can innovate the ad model will be the companies that get out in tact. The others that just complain about all the money that is being stolen by google will likely be on those lame shows where losers complain about the government taking their jobs,and how socialism is ruining the country.
The button fetish of the PC user is something that needs to be studied. It is like the cup holder fetish of the SUV buyer. I am sure both are symptoms of a previously unpublished metal issue in humans.
More frequent launches, cheaper better faster, reusable, and more reliable would be a nice place to get to. And it seems like it is being tried at NASA. The space shuttle was supposed to be something that launched frequently. The mars missions were cheaper better faster. Both showed NASA was not quite there yet.
NASA is not going to the be the guys for quick jaunts into space. For that to happen, the west is going to have to have a much higher tolerance to exploding spacecraft, and the economics is going to have to allow for profitable ventures to succeed even when the launch vehicle fails and the company gets sued because someone was woken up by the explosion.
Three other lessons learned from software development. One,doing more increase communications costs, and those communications costs can overwhelm a management structure. NASA does pretty ok with communications as launching a space craft requires a lot of high quality communication. Two, there is no silver bullet.Real problems are really hard to fix, and most of the time requires a novel solution, not just doing more of the same. Three, system can quickly become complex enough so that no one fully understand what is happening.Our machines do grow more complex and sometimes we don't know exactly what is happening.
Then, again, there is the issue of launch vehicles exploding in space. When google mail goes down, as it does, people are annoyed. When a launch vehicle does down, as happened two years ago with Sea Launch,the communication payload, launch platform, pretty everything goes kaput.
Speaking of Sea Lauch, I wonder if we don't have a launch a week from the various people who do this. Such a distributed system might be better as it prevent one company, such as google, from being the absolute arbiter or what is a good idea and what is a bad idea.
Or just unfortunate luck. I recall when a TV station in my area was off for months when an antennae fell over. As it is a day or two of outages is not unheard of.
But broadcast tv is not the best example, cable is. The primary reason that I do not have cable is that the reliability was crap, and all too often something happened on a holiday weekend. 99% reliability was not good enough.
I think that blackberry simply knows it has a captive market. There is nothing that offers the control freaks equal levels. It is a wonder that MS was never able to provide an equal solution, given they essentially did it on the desktop.
Pretty much I have to agree it is the pay. There was a time when a person could get paid to make something. I don't want to turn this into a debate about the declining manufacturing capability in America, but I do want to state some facts. Much of the debate of 2008 and 2009 centered around the failing car companies, and that American car companies paid their employees a livable wage, meaning their families could eat, have a house, and good medical care. In this debate, it was seldom mentioned that the managers negotiated contracts that traded short term payments to the employees in exchange for long term payments. That is, the employees would take less money now with the knowledge that the money they did not take now would be used to take care of the employee later on.
The problem is that he managers were not competent and those promises were never kept. Rather than admitting failure to keep a contract, the managers blamed health care costs. Incompetent managers were allowed to receive huge pay and workers were shafted out of their contracts.
I will ask this. If you were a rational, intelligent, and educated worker with choices, would you put yourself into a position where you could lied to and cheated, or would you try to get into a position where you can be an incompetant and still receive a million dollar bonus? In other words, would you be a person how made something, or pushed paper around. I think we all know the answer to that.
The average engineer can make a middle class income after college, but will be fired a drop of a hat. A competent software developer can make quite a bit of money, if the money if being invested in infrastructure instead or paying off foreign governments and mercenaries and flipping houses. If flipping houses and toppling government is a better investment that is where the money will go. If such things are structurally limited, them more money will go into infrastructure, and the people who make things will have well paying jobs.
For the past 8 years or so the best placed for semi-skilled worker to go is in the military or a prison guard. If that is not a communist government, I don't know what is. There simply has been no capital to do anything truly creative. Recall that Google was 1996.
Name calling is uncivilized and indicates that the person doing the name calling has no case and probably should not be listened to on any substantived matter. It, however, a matter of free speech.
It should be perfectly legal for me to say that Kay Bailey Hutchenson has all the attributes of a drug smuggler, if in fact she is not one. That Bush and Limbaugh are terrorists because they were,and probably continue to be part of the illegal drug trade(trade in prescription drugs without valid prescriptions is still part of that trade), and Bush has said that Drugs==Terroism. Or that Sentor Vitter supports slavery becuase he employs protetutes, and in many cases protitutes are effectively slaves.
The problem is, that as true as all these things may be, it does not actually forwarda rational dabate. So while guaranteed as a right, it isright we should learn to use wisely, and not one we waste friviously.
In Star Wars, the book, we learn, or at least it is much more fully alluded to, that Luke is a much more accomplished driver. One of the problems with Star wars is that this is not established, yet Luke magically knows how to fly a fighter. Admitadly there are differences between two and three dimension navigation, but at least we would have some experience.
In the phantom menace, most things could have solved by making Anikin a little older. I think some of the pod-racing was good, as it established the family as skilled in the trade. Developmentally putting a kid that young into a pod racer just seemed too fake, so the establishment seemed forced.
It is arguable that R2D2 had some knowledge of Anikin and the kids, as well as where Obi was hiding. This allowed him to deliver the message from Princess Leia. It seemed to be quite silly to have CP3O built by Anikin, and did go too far on the comic relief. The urge was likely to have some overlap between the movies, but this as a plot device failed.
An overall critic of the critics. I think many fans did not like the world painted by the second trilogy. It seemed too different. I found it was the one think that world. The empire of Anikin was the high point of civilization about to fall apart, but still visually perfect. The world of Luke was broken, not in the over the top manner of Road Warrior, but in a very natural manner where things are simply old and not much creation is going on.
I don't really think this is something one can blame on US stupidity. Mercedes yes, SAAB no. At least in the US, SAAB, like the BMW, were bought by those with money to burn, often as a second of third car. I know of one couple that currently own both a BMW and a SAAB and a roadster. From what I can tell, people buy these cars so they can say they own one, not because they are great cars. Because customers don't care about the quality, neither does the manufacturer. At least at the low end of the SAAB and BMW, the issue is producing a car that an upper middle class person might be able to afford as a status symbol.
That said, the high end Mercedes and BMW are still good cars. For people who do not car about the name plate, the japanese has taken luxury away from the Europeans, for the same reason that the US lost the market. Lack of innovative thinking.
So how is this different from AJAX? Does AJAX not have fancy IDE? WOuld this not let developers write applications that could run on all web standard phones? I recall a debate about how restrictive limiting apps to web apps is. Just asking.
Wasn't the point of android to give the carriers and users the freedom to have the phone they wanted, instead of having a single company push a phone down their throats? What is the difference between a google pjhone, and apple phone, or a RIM phone? The promise of an android phone is that one might have a application based smart phone that could be used between providers. That one might have a phone made for end users, with apps made for end users.
Even with fragmentation, it should be possible to write compatible apps for most phones. If, otoh, google makes a reference phone, then Apps are going to be for this phone, and no progress will be made.
The issue still seems to be carriers, at least in the US, wanting strict control over features. T-mobile seems to be the only US carrier that will allow tethering. Sprint seems to have said it will never happen, and ATT and Verizon both will do so only with additional fees. This seems to imply that additioanl features one might have with an android phone might only happen with additional fees.
So instead of hiding the numbers, they could have just stated the organizations they were not going to qualify. It is the lack of transparency that is the problem, not the winners and losers. This is true in banking as well. The recent problems in finance is that US banks are acting like corrupt fiefdoms.
Disqualifying some of these would be quite simple. For instance, pot is still illegal, and the bank should not support illegal activities. Other groups likes to display pornography around schools and other places where children are likely to frequent. This is also something a bank might frown upon.
It would seem better we had a compulsory license fee on book so that google, or whomever, could pay a fee for unit of book copied/scanned/duplicated. Then there would be a fee for each page served.
But this is not the case, and google is testing how far it can push the copyright laws to enhance it's business position. Many firms do this. MS did this. I don't like Google doing this because they are not trying to open information. Rather, they are trying to control information so that eyeballs have to view ads brokered by Google.
However, my like or dislike is not relevant. What is relevant is that google is the method many people use to find information. What is relevant is that France is a tiny little country with a language that diminishing number of people speak, and diminishing influence. Many schools in the US are more likely to teach Russian or German or Japanese rather than French. There was a time when France actively tried to fight this negative position by liberally distributing french material. It's seems that they have now given up and will become a country just go to for vacation, like Jamaica.
Mass drivers, as used to destroy planets in fiction such Babylon 5 is ideal. Proper use of the technology will insure victory, just like the atom bomb ended world war two.
If we are talking about some sort interplanetary war, the winner will be decided by the planet that has the technology of efficiently shifting the orbit of the solar detritus so that there is high probability of impacting the desired planet. It would be reasonable that planetary defenses could destroy several of these rocks before they impacted the planet, but could they destroy them all. If the attacking planet could set up an impact a month, even a few near missing would insure victory. While one planet sends their fancy rockets to destroy individual cities, thousands of rocks could be targeted to a planet, insuring destruction. Perhaps it takes a year for the rocks to arrive, and perhaps 90% of them are diverted or destroyed, but the 10% could destroy a planet.
On another note, any kinetic weapon fired from anything smaller than a large moon is, in my opinion, a losing proposition. The amount of fuel that would have be burned to counteract the force would be prohibitive. On earth we have friction and gravity which makes these weapons works. Independent missiles that fire after they leave the host, such as in current war plane designs, car work for close combat. Otherwise I see novel countermeasures that makes use of the fact that space is mostly empty. I have often though some exotic particle beam might work. An unstable particle that could penetrate shielding and wreak havoc with the electronics would be nice. The particles might have a life time of microseconds, but accelerated to relativistic velocities they might survive long enough to travel the distance between two ships, say several thousand miles.
I am sure that everyone is going to say how unfair this is, and I am not sure it is not, but let's look at the facts.
First, in most higher education setting, one is there at the pleasure of the faculty. Even though we pay tuition, we pay for the privilege or working with these people. I am sure many will say that we just pay for the hours so we can get a sheet of paper, but the fact is that the educational process and relationship with professors are still important.
Second, the other students at the University are also paying for the education, and, unlike high school, should not have to be distracted by these unstable personalities.
Third, this is not some teenager. This is a pretty much fully grown adult that expects to work in the delicate field of the end of life industry. Even if she is just going to working in basement of some country morgue, I would hope that such a person would at 29 years old have other coping strategies than threatening to kill someone who terminates a relationship. I mean really, if she goes postal when her boyfriend walks out, what will happen after her fourth autopsy of the day?
Not to speak of things I know nothing about, but maybe the facbook message was just a pretext. Maybe her profs have been pushing her away from the field for a while now.
ATT charges what is really huge amounts for the iPhone. They make the users buy a significant voice package, then add on the data. Even without many extras, these bills can approach $1000 per year.
Here is the thing with heavy data users. Some of them don't use a huge number of voice minutes, so it looks like we are paying the $1000 a year mostly for data. Additionally, many plans are unlimited minutes at off peak times, , sometimes with nominal charges. Given unlimited voice, unlimited data, especially at the less than 1/2 mb per second rates.
If they are saying the heavy users are the problem, and they want to move to limited data plan, then they should more honest about the basic plan. For instance, sell 100 minutes and 100 mb of data for the same price of the current low end plan. This will give an incentive for users to limit data usage in terms of a real savings. It is really disingenuous to charge for data usage, and then complain when users actually make use of the data. In the case of the iPhone, ATT could sell such a plan for $50, even throw in text messages, and probably solve all their problems. I would cut into revenue, but if ATT is not able to service the product, then they should not sell it.
Google is in the business of dominating online advertising. It is unclear whether the purpose of chrome is to create 'open' smartphones or to create a browsing experience that can compete with MS. We hear much talk about the number of chrome based phones we expect, but so far it is just talk. Chrome itself is not developed in an open manner, but is only released as a finished product, which means that person who want to develop with perhaps have a a more difficult situation developing timely than some closed source models.
We also have seen that Google will put experimental projects on the market just to see if any salutes. At one time, for instance, Google docs looked like a very good solution, but now it is not clear what the future of this software will be. It is possible that this may be a Chrome only software.
So the only thing that is possible is that Google thinks by dominating the mobile market with cheap phones they can dominate the paid ad business on mobile devices just like the desktop. This is not a problem for those who do not care if google knows the content of every text message, and therefore will be good for the market place.
While I understand that TV programming is supported by commercials, and the viewers exist only to watch those commercials, it is this sort of thing that makes me feel less guilty about skipping commercials. In fact, I hardly watch commercials because TV is kind of passé. Most good shows are on the net a day or two after the first run. Most TV seasons can be bought for $30. That is 30-40 shows a year for the cost of cable.
I would hope that advertisers would be considering how to keep TV relevant so that they can continue to have someone to watch the ads rather than continuing to alienate the few viewers they have left.
Which is just another case where MS does not use community standards. Community standards suggest that when one page is replaced with another, the first informs the user of the obsolete status, remind the user to change the bookmark, then redirect to the new page.
In MS customer service world, the old page is simply removed, and the user is left to wonder what to do.
Some of this is simply laziness. For example, Building a computer interface that allowing real time scaling of screen blocks so that people with visual impairments can read them is not that hard, yet we did not see that in all major OS until the past five years. Web pages that allow screen reading is not a hugely complex, but many have made no effort to use screen reader.
But some of this is manufactures trying to keep their inefficient subsided products from being made irrelevant. For instance, who needs a special TTY phone when every cell phone can text? Who needs a special large print books when any e-book can be set to use any size font? Who needs special books on tape when a computer can read a book. None of these may be as good as the specialized product, but the 'good enough' nature certainly appears to make the ingrained interests worried about their future.
This does not even take account of the fact that technology is allowing some people to work who previously could not, increase the competition in the job market.
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It was the inability of 2000+ versions of office to read my 97 version of office that finally drove me to OO.org. The transition from Macros to VBA in Excel almost did it, but there was nothing like Excel until the recent updates of OO.org.
In all honestly I understand why people stay with MS products. There is often some little thing that they need. It could be a font, or just a way of creating content. I might still have a copy of Office around if I were running on a Windows machine. The presentation creator in OO.org is just not all that great. Fortunately I have a mac, and Keynote, which is way better than anything else out there, at least for me.
Furthermore I think the hostility on this topic in other threads is extremely immature and does not speak to the issue at hand. Employees are to some extent at the whim of their employers, and have the option to leave if the employer is too whimish. OTOH, a rational employer is not going to want to overstress the employees. In this case, perhaps the company buys a set of uniforms for these workers if the company believe that it adds value. Certainly I think some of the hostility comes from the fact that the employees are going to have buy specific work clothes, as opposed to finding clothes that fits a budget.
I see some this in my current position, where an increase level of dress has recently been discussed. Suit and the like are really inappropriate for most of us, as it just gets torn up way too easily. Spending a couple hundred dollars for outfits that are going to have to be replaced every 6 months is really out of line for all but the highest paid employees. Some people do wear such clothes, and it is their choice to spend that money to promote their career. When all is said and done, if one is playing the appropriate part in an organization, then everything else is just inefficiency. Of course, it is the prerogative of the owner of the company to be inefficient, but if I was told I was going to have to spend hundreds of dollars of my own money to meet some arbitrary PHB mandate, I might look for another job. Or perhaps I am making so much money that the amount is not significant.
Just because one does not see a bubble gum future does not mean one is anti anything. This oversimplification is made everywhere, and is not very useful. In terms of resources running out, many for see and think about the issue for many reasons, some having nothing to do with technology. The living space on the earth is limited, and we will outgrow it. An asteroid will hit earth, so we may want to think about diversification to other real estate. Worst case is that in no more than 20,000 years the earth will no longer be warm enough for large number of humans to survive.
Thinking about these things does not make one anti-technology, or anti-human, or anti-progress, or a goth. In fact thinking about these things makes on more pro-technology, as one does not just take the technology for granted, but actually wants to push it forward. Take those that say climate change is false. They may be correct, and pro-tech, but they are not going push any new tech. They are not going to be the one's discovering and building new anything. They are happy with the status quo, they get rich off the status quo, and all they see with new tech is disruptive technology that might make then less rich.
Another concept that is important when teaching the 12-14 year old to program is that of a variable. I saw my classmates in college struggle with this concept and I felt lucky to have learned it a young age through programming. For this more traditional languages, such as BASIC, C, and FORTRAN are useful. The control loop with variables are very instructive. Even simple a simple swap is can teach a person important skills
Now, many would say, so what. At least they learned something in science class, at least if NASA TV is cool then they might support the funding. But I think there is something morally wrong with this intellectual bait and switch. If we are talking about actually educating kids to do this sort of work, then the sort of kids you want are those who are those who enjoy watching silent aircraft moving across a tundra, especially if they then are forced to create the dialog themselves. I would hate to see anyone who cannot create excitement out of nothing have to solve dozens of free body diagrams during thier first term of college, or hundreds of derivatives.
The thing is in those cases we don't automatically see them as a condemnation on everything they say or we infer them to say they represent. The Columbine incident did not shut down the militia movement. The Army of god is still free to use violence to protect their version of christianity. Focus on the family is still free exposed kids to intimidation and pornography,and evidently sometimes hire adults who like to have sex with those children, to save the unborn kids. But a fire cracker in a plane, we are all peeing out pants and saying we should strip search every muslim.
I am not saying that we should not take seriously terrorist events. I am saying that the world is a dangerous place and if we continue to let the hate mongers intimidate us so that at any tiny event we throw out the constitutions, then we are fucked. Those rights were pretty hard to get. The elite at the formation of the United states were so set against given the dirty masses any rights that the only way to get them in was as amendments. Think about that, and then think if those with rights ever really want to share them. No, because we all know the more who have rights, such as a right to health, the harder those rights, or entitlements, are to provide.
I have a right to free travel. We are not in a country we our right to travel is impeded. Although we have to show papers to travel, just like the communists, and some people even with papers cannot travel, and the reason is hidden, just like the communists, most of us do not have travel that is significantly impeded. I think that the elite would be very happy if they use this even to impede the right to travel just a little.
I happen to think the freedom to travel is an entitlement, so if there is a risk of a plane bomb every once is a great while, and if there is a risk that I might be on it, then so be it. I simply don't think we should live in a country where low level bureaucrats can get their jollies by looking at the outline of naked people on the airport scanner.It seems like wars were fought to protect us from that kind personal invasion of privacy by the government.
Google does not deliver the package of ads with gratuitous attractive content supplied by traditional media. While this has as much to do with online delivery as google, google has first go at ads, in the search results, which tends to decouple any matching that may be done on the article level.
In effect, google completely breaks the traditional mass advertising model. Traditional media realizes this, which is why they are rebelling. The problem is that some traditional media thinks it can replace the ad model with a fully paid subscriber model. I don't think it can. There has to be a way for traditional media to co-exist with search engines,and this is the challenge. The companies that can innovate the ad model will be the companies that get out in tact. The others that just complain about all the money that is being stolen by google will likely be on those lame shows where losers complain about the government taking their jobs,and how socialism is ruining the country.
The button fetish of the PC user is something that needs to be studied. It is like the cup holder fetish of the SUV buyer. I am sure both are symptoms of a previously unpublished metal issue in humans.
NASA is not going to the be the guys for quick jaunts into space. For that to happen, the west is going to have to have a much higher tolerance to exploding spacecraft, and the economics is going to have to allow for profitable ventures to succeed even when the launch vehicle fails and the company gets sued because someone was woken up by the explosion.
Three other lessons learned from software development. One,doing more increase communications costs, and those communications costs can overwhelm a management structure. NASA does pretty ok with communications as launching a space craft requires a lot of high quality communication. Two, there is no silver bullet.Real problems are really hard to fix, and most of the time requires a novel solution, not just doing more of the same. Three, system can quickly become complex enough so that no one fully understand what is happening.Our machines do grow more complex and sometimes we don't know exactly what is happening.
Then, again, there is the issue of launch vehicles exploding in space. When google mail goes down, as it does, people are annoyed. When a launch vehicle does down, as happened two years ago with Sea Launch,the communication payload, launch platform, pretty everything goes kaput.
Speaking of Sea Lauch, I wonder if we don't have a launch a week from the various people who do this. Such a distributed system might be better as it prevent one company, such as google, from being the absolute arbiter or what is a good idea and what is a bad idea.
But broadcast tv is not the best example, cable is. The primary reason that I do not have cable is that the reliability was crap, and all too often something happened on a holiday weekend. 99% reliability was not good enough.
I think that blackberry simply knows it has a captive market. There is nothing that offers the control freaks equal levels. It is a wonder that MS was never able to provide an equal solution, given they essentially did it on the desktop.
The problem is that he managers were not competent and those promises were never kept. Rather than admitting failure to keep a contract, the managers blamed health care costs. Incompetent managers were allowed to receive huge pay and workers were shafted out of their contracts.
I will ask this. If you were a rational, intelligent, and educated worker with choices, would you put yourself into a position where you could lied to and cheated, or would you try to get into a position where you can be an incompetant and still receive a million dollar bonus? In other words, would you be a person how made something, or pushed paper around. I think we all know the answer to that.
The average engineer can make a middle class income after college, but will be fired a drop of a hat. A competent software developer can make quite a bit of money, if the money if being invested in infrastructure instead or paying off foreign governments and mercenaries and flipping houses. If flipping houses and toppling government is a better investment that is where the money will go. If such things are structurally limited, them more money will go into infrastructure, and the people who make things will have well paying jobs.
For the past 8 years or so the best placed for semi-skilled worker to go is in the military or a prison guard. If that is not a communist government, I don't know what is. There simply has been no capital to do anything truly creative. Recall that Google was 1996.
Name calling is uncivilized and indicates that the person doing the name calling has no case and probably should not be listened to on any substantived matter. It, however, a matter of free speech.
It should be perfectly legal for me to say that Kay Bailey Hutchenson has all the attributes of a drug smuggler, if in fact she is not one. That Bush and Limbaugh are terrorists because they were,and probably continue to be part of the illegal drug trade(trade in prescription drugs without valid prescriptions is still part of that trade), and Bush has said that Drugs==Terroism. Or that Sentor Vitter supports slavery becuase he employs protetutes, and in many cases protitutes are effectively slaves.
The problem is, that as true as all these things may be, it does not actually forwarda rational dabate. So while guaranteed as a right, it isright we should learn to use wisely, and not one we waste friviously.
In the phantom menace, most things could have solved by making Anikin a little older. I think some of the pod-racing was good, as it established the family as skilled in the trade. Developmentally putting a kid that young into a pod racer just seemed too fake, so the establishment seemed forced.
It is arguable that R2D2 had some knowledge of Anikin and the kids, as well as where Obi was hiding. This allowed him to deliver the message from Princess Leia. It seemed to be quite silly to have CP3O built by Anikin, and did go too far on the comic relief. The urge was likely to have some overlap between the movies, but this as a plot device failed.
An overall critic of the critics. I think many fans did not like the world painted by the second trilogy. It seemed too different. I found it was the one think that world. The empire of Anikin was the high point of civilization about to fall apart, but still visually perfect. The world of Luke was broken, not in the over the top manner of Road Warrior, but in a very natural manner where things are simply old and not much creation is going on.
That said, the high end Mercedes and BMW are still good cars. For people who do not car about the name plate, the japanese has taken luxury away from the Europeans, for the same reason that the US lost the market. Lack of innovative thinking.
So how is this different from AJAX? Does AJAX not have fancy IDE? WOuld this not let developers write applications that could run on all web standard phones? I recall a debate about how restrictive limiting apps to web apps is. Just asking.
Even with fragmentation, it should be possible to write compatible apps for most phones. If, otoh, google makes a reference phone, then Apps are going to be for this phone, and no progress will be made.
The issue still seems to be carriers, at least in the US, wanting strict control over features. T-mobile seems to be the only US carrier that will allow tethering. Sprint seems to have said it will never happen, and ATT and Verizon both will do so only with additional fees. This seems to imply that additioanl features one might have with an android phone might only happen with additional fees.
Disqualifying some of these would be quite simple. For instance, pot is still illegal, and the bank should not support illegal activities. Other groups likes to display pornography around schools and other places where children are likely to frequent. This is also something a bank might frown upon.
But this is not the case, and google is testing how far it can push the copyright laws to enhance it's business position. Many firms do this. MS did this. I don't like Google doing this because they are not trying to open information. Rather, they are trying to control information so that eyeballs have to view ads brokered by Google.
However, my like or dislike is not relevant. What is relevant is that google is the method many people use to find information. What is relevant is that France is a tiny little country with a language that diminishing number of people speak, and diminishing influence. Many schools in the US are more likely to teach Russian or German or Japanese rather than French. There was a time when France actively tried to fight this negative position by liberally distributing french material. It's seems that they have now given up and will become a country just go to for vacation, like Jamaica.
If we are talking about some sort interplanetary war, the winner will be decided by the planet that has the technology of efficiently shifting the orbit of the solar detritus so that there is high probability of impacting the desired planet. It would be reasonable that planetary defenses could destroy several of these rocks before they impacted the planet, but could they destroy them all. If the attacking planet could set up an impact a month, even a few near missing would insure victory. While one planet sends their fancy rockets to destroy individual cities, thousands of rocks could be targeted to a planet, insuring destruction. Perhaps it takes a year for the rocks to arrive, and perhaps 90% of them are diverted or destroyed, but the 10% could destroy a planet.
On another note, any kinetic weapon fired from anything smaller than a large moon is, in my opinion, a losing proposition. The amount of fuel that would have be burned to counteract the force would be prohibitive. On earth we have friction and gravity which makes these weapons works. Independent missiles that fire after they leave the host, such as in current war plane designs, car work for close combat. Otherwise I see novel countermeasures that makes use of the fact that space is mostly empty. I have often though some exotic particle beam might work. An unstable particle that could penetrate shielding and wreak havoc with the electronics would be nice. The particles might have a life time of microseconds, but accelerated to relativistic velocities they might survive long enough to travel the distance between two ships, say several thousand miles.
First, in most higher education setting, one is there at the pleasure of the faculty. Even though we pay tuition, we pay for the privilege or working with these people. I am sure many will say that we just pay for the hours so we can get a sheet of paper, but the fact is that the educational process and relationship with professors are still important.
Second, the other students at the University are also paying for the education, and, unlike high school, should not have to be distracted by these unstable personalities.
Third, this is not some teenager. This is a pretty much fully grown adult that expects to work in the delicate field of the end of life industry. Even if she is just going to working in basement of some country morgue, I would hope that such a person would at 29 years old have other coping strategies than threatening to kill someone who terminates a relationship. I mean really, if she goes postal when her boyfriend walks out, what will happen after her fourth autopsy of the day?
Not to speak of things I know nothing about, but maybe the facbook message was just a pretext. Maybe her profs have been pushing her away from the field for a while now.
Here is the thing with heavy data users. Some of them don't use a huge number of voice minutes, so it looks like we are paying the $1000 a year mostly for data. Additionally, many plans are unlimited minutes at off peak times, , sometimes with nominal charges. Given unlimited voice, unlimited data, especially at the less than 1/2 mb per second rates.
If they are saying the heavy users are the problem, and they want to move to limited data plan, then they should more honest about the basic plan. For instance, sell 100 minutes and 100 mb of data for the same price of the current low end plan. This will give an incentive for users to limit data usage in terms of a real savings. It is really disingenuous to charge for data usage, and then complain when users actually make use of the data. In the case of the iPhone, ATT could sell such a plan for $50, even throw in text messages, and probably solve all their problems. I would cut into revenue, but if ATT is not able to service the product, then they should not sell it.
We also have seen that Google will put experimental projects on the market just to see if any salutes. At one time, for instance, Google docs looked like a very good solution, but now it is not clear what the future of this software will be. It is possible that this may be a Chrome only software.
So the only thing that is possible is that Google thinks by dominating the mobile market with cheap phones they can dominate the paid ad business on mobile devices just like the desktop. This is not a problem for those who do not care if google knows the content of every text message, and therefore will be good for the market place.
I would hope that advertisers would be considering how to keep TV relevant so that they can continue to have someone to watch the ads rather than continuing to alienate the few viewers they have left.
In MS customer service world, the old page is simply removed, and the user is left to wonder what to do.
But some of this is manufactures trying to keep their inefficient subsided products from being made irrelevant. For instance, who needs a special TTY phone when every cell phone can text? Who needs a special large print books when any e-book can be set to use any size font? Who needs special books on tape when a computer can read a book. None of these may be as good as the specialized product, but the 'good enough' nature certainly appears to make the ingrained interests worried about their future.
This does not even take account of the fact that technology is allowing some people to work who previously could not, increase the competition in the job market.