This is the way that software should be handled. If someone is not in compliance, work with them to get them in compliance.
Compare this to what the BSA is advocating. Essentially any disgruntled employee can put unlicensed commercial software on a computer and then report the violation to the BSA for a reward. Sure companies can put millions of dollars of safeguards to prevent harassment from inefficient employees, but why bother. Just make it a policy to only use free software, and when the BSA comes knocking, show them the policy and the minimal cost efforts that makes all other software the responsibility of the user.
This will also help long term interpretability, as OSS has minimal incentives to obstificate the data to force users to continue to pay the ransom to access said data.
I want my flying car, dammit, they promised me flying cars.
Which is to say VR is still a rather cool idea in search of an application. Flying cars are not going to make life easier given the takeoff and landing requirements. Small airplanes are essentially flying cars, and are efficient for moderate distances. Something like the iphone could be shrunk and put in a sunglass like package, but then where would the input be, as external keyboard that is just as cumbersome as the phone?
I think we will have to wait for direct neural implants.
The Wolfram terms of service says that Alpha is capable of generating content from several data sources,and sometimes Alpha considers the content sufficiently original that it will attribute the content to itself. Otherwise, it will attribute the content to the source where it was derived. What is interesting is that we have a machine generating what is essentially one time use content, and the machine then gains a copyright to the content that others, even humans, have to respect. It is no more crazy than assigning a copyright to a corporation, so we should not be surprised. In any case, Wolfram does have a point that content should always be attributed to a source, and that people have become quite lazy on this issue, as various accusations of high level plagiarism have shown. Since Google only indexes, it does not really know Providence and cannot claim copyright to anything in particular.
There are couple of really scary things in the terms of use. For instance, minors are not allowed to use the service without the permission of adults, and adults become fully responsible for the actions of the child. I am unsure of why they felt they had to put that in there. Then there is the first sentence "The Wolfram|Alpha service may be used only by a human being using a conventional web browser to manually enter queries one at a time". I hate to have to define what a conventional browser is. For may people it would be only IE.
More scare is the ambiguous policy to deep linking. To wit "It is not permitted to use Wolfram|Alpha indirectly through another website that has created a large number of deep links to Wolfram|Alpha, or that automatically constructs links based on input that you give on that site, rather than on Wolfram|Alpha. You may not in effect use Wolfram|Alpha through an alternate user interface presented by another website." Clearly they want to not have bots and third parties writing code to hijck the site. Disappointing given the wonderful work they did with Mathworld.
TeX is not only about publishing, it is also about reliability, stability, portability, and efficiency. MS Word is the best tool to create memos and in many cases collaborate. It allows non technical people to create documents that are quite stunning, or hideous. Depending on the task at hand, it can be the best tool, superior to OO.org or anything that is out there.
However, unless one is concerned about the lack of ability to use 10 different fonts in a documents, or wants to see the effects of the 30 different colors one uses to code the text on a page, MS is not going to produce something better than TeX. Not only because does MS require that one moves to a non portable, non reliable, non readable format, but also because doing simple things takes quite a bit more time in MS Word, for the user that has the skills to so do.
This is a good thing for MS Word users. It will allow them to create better looking documents. I don't know of many LaTex users that will move to Word due to this. OTOH, the WYSIWG ease is going to over take the markup language professionals at some point because the former will simply be good enough.
What has happened so far is that ATT charged for new featured. When it went to 3G, text messages were no longer included. What is the next feature users want? tethering. A laptop will use more bandwidth, so this is likely going to be another plan. Ideally there will be a cheaper plan for users who want a cheaper plan. Then there is the feature that many want, which in the US is availability through Verizon, which allegedly did not want Apple to control the platform. It seems reasonable that if Verizon gets an iphone like device, it will set the plan as it wishes.
Beyond this I do not see tiers. Most cell companies do not seem to be moving in this direction.
h.neanderthals are currently considered in the same family as h. sapien sapien , homo, but are not currently considered a subspecies. Therefore the comparison with eating primates, as primates are related to us by family,hominidae, not genus, is not so great.
The taboo against cannibalism, like the taboo against eating, say, pigs comes from the risk of cross infection. Any virus that infects a piece of meat of a prey can also infect a predator of the same species. To minimize this risk predators tend to eat outside of the species. OTOH, as we have seen, there can be across family, order, or even class, but the risk of infection does seem to decrease we move up the taxonomic classification. So we may have a specific taboo against eating within the family or genus, but that taboo is not cannibalism.
There are two major theories on UI. On is that the user develops muscle memory can find commands by simply allowing their muscles to move the proper place. That is, if the format menu is always in the same pale, and the paragraph selection is always in the same place, then the use can quickly select these items from memory. It is the reason why keyboards are laid out basically the same, and the reason why most of us do not have to look where things are in our car, but do have to relearn the interface when we move to other cars. Of course if you have a stick, you at least knows how that works.
MS has always been a student of the other school of thought, the school that says users do no memorize locations, but read through all the menus every time they use them. Therefore, the primary issue is minimizing the movement of the mouse so that the time saved can be used in comprehending and choosing menu commands. This philosophy was the basis of using dynamic menus in applications, that is hiding commands that have not been active in a while so the user, when reading through the commands, will not waste time reading the relatively unused options. This works for some people, either because they do very limited work on the PC and therefore only need a few commands, or do not in fact memorize menus and indeed to hunt for each command, just like some users hunt for each key on a keyboard.
Ribbons are an extension and re-visioning of this philosophy. Some of this is an improvement for some users.
Hurting the entitled elite is always going to be seen as bad. Do you think the drunken nobles of England welcomed the civil list? And any conservative must hate the taxing of the queen. What is next? 15% of real income instead of 30% of an artificially low adjusted income?
Here is a technology that absolutely redistributed wealth away from the lazy. Persons that can innovate today love it. People who are living off innovations two and three generations old will hate it. The hard working want to let it progress to revitalize the world. The entitled want to regulate it and make it benefit only those selected by the elite.
In one sense, this is part of the costs of using these sites. For facebook, which is largely used by younger people, articles such as this has some value as younger people are not as sophisticated when dealing with scams such as this and need to be educated. This and the fact that facebook does pose a danger as user put many personal details, and these details can be connected with the real user.
OTOH real age is directed at adults. The only link is an email address, which users can get from yahoo and anonymize if they wish. The question, to me, is then whether real age serves a legitimate entertainment purpose for which users pay through their use by looking at ads and generating data, and if such data is aggregate. It is like people who put movies and pictures on free web sites and then complain that they cannot be deleted.
Most of us have little probem with shopping at stores where we use a card for a discount in exchange for our consent to collect and sell our personal buying habits(inordinate amount of crisco?). It seems to me that facebook goes beyond this, but many other sites do not.
In The Structure of Scientific Revolution, Kuhn defines a paradigm as a widely held belief, and a necessary condition for the paradigm to shif is the replacement of the people who believe deeply in the paradigm by those who may believe less deeply or not at all. I mention this to define the term so that no thinks I am speaking market-ease.
When I was young the paradigm was big iron, as this is what everyone learned in college. For vertical applications there was some variance, for instance there might be an Apple ][ running visicalc. A generation later, around the early 90's, it was MS Windows because that is what everyone used in college, especially the marketing people, which meant that all the grunts and executives had MS Windows machines, the rack was mostly mS windows machines. Again, for special applications there might be a different type of machine.
MS Windows is not necessarily the cheapest simplest solution, and IE is not necessarily what people use. However, the paradigm of MS/IE is not going to change until the current generation of managers is replaced with a more up to date generation, and the paradigm is allow to shift, so to speak. Cost will likely not play a huge role. New managers and technicians familiar with Firefox and Linux will make the choice. Unfortunately schools are still teaching MS only, on the whole, and managers still tend to be of limited technical education.
Of course, it will change. A generation was born that did not automatically buy cares from Detroit, so Detroit fell when they had to compete. Same thing for MS.
At someplace like starbucks, where one has a reasonable chance of receiving $5 for $.20 of product, low overhead, few employees, WiFi makes sense. The same hold true for many other places where table turnover is closer to an hour than a few minutes.
I never understood what was the point of putting these things in places where turnover is a few minutes. It encourages loitering. It is not like customers pay for refills, or are otherwise likely to buy more product.
Of course the solution is simple. Do what other places are doing. Limit the time. If they want turnover in 10 minutes, make that the time limit. The point stands, though. WiFi in places like this just seems silly. OTOH, I know of places that have gone out of business after they got rid of the WiFi. They did not like hanging around in the afternoon drinking coffee, but those same people also stopped coming around for the evening meal.
One expects public finance,otherwise these guts would just do it. For example, the florida marlins ball park is expected to cost close to 3/4 of a billion dollars. One expects with cost overruns and added costs, that this might cost an even billion. Interest alone would might be 1 million a week. If they were to play an average of once a week, and if they could use $5 of ticket price to pay interest, and they had 20,0000 tickets sold for every event, i.e. more than 50% of seating, then they could pay the interest. At this point they could start looking at the principle. Of course they want the taxpayers to fund most of the cost because it will be so pretty and attract tourists.
Reasonable this is an infrastructure plan, and is likely timed to take advantage of any forthcoming stimulus money. There is some reasonable expectation for an inordinate amount of money to go to Arizona because Arizona ranks 21 out of 50 for being of the dole. One hopes that this money will be spent on long term public infrastructure rather than providing increasing expensive real estate to individuals.
if people do need to get from one place to another, and if the freeways are full, and if gas in are a is expensive, it might be better to build rail instead of freeway at 30 million per mile. I know people tend to be hostile to public transportation, but sometimes it makes sense. The reality we are living in is that we cannot afford everything we want. This may be a way of making a no so stressful sacrifice, and build some technology in the process.
There are huge conflicts in pedagogy and topics. Do we introduce topics on the board or with a hands on activity. Do we develop a topic following a precise sequence that builds process, or examples that help the student build his or her own process, or activities that convey the general idea of problem solving. Do we assess using multiple guess choices to known problems, the solution to an adapted real world problem, or with the ability to create a defensible solution to previously unseen problems. Some teachers are fundamentally opposed to all but one of these options. The problem with most textbooks and most district and state curriculum is that they tend to impose a pedagogy. Most reasonable people know that while the topics can be generally defined, the teacher should have the option to choose from a variety of methods.
Textbooks would have trouble supplying these various activities. This should be the strength of a digital state curriculum. A suggested lesson can be supplied. Alternative lessons and activities can be supplied on top of that. Adaptations can be chained, etc. This is the reasonable persons approach. I have seen very unreasonable people complain to top level administration when they disagree with a process.
Absolutely. The enabling technology for the netbook craze was not only small processors, but also widespread wireless internet connections with web and email. Given this, dating the netbook to 1996 is a bit early, as the wireless connections were not widely available until nearer to 2000. The idea of such computers is to provide relatively full range of functionality in a small device.
Prior to this we have other small computers, not all cheap. The newton had a PCMCIA slot that could connect it to a network, allowing it to do everything that an average computer user might do. In the previous time frame, Tandy owned the market, with the model 100 and 200. Since the internet did not exist yet in the current form, there was little need for networking on these machines. They provided full functionality for the average user. Even the Tandy pc-6 was a contender in this catagory.
The problem with most copyright arguments is that it tends to support downloading. If one is going to use the analog hole to break copyright, them one might as well download a copy from the internet. This accomplishing the same thing, that is make a fair use copy of the video without breaking the copy protection.
Realistically, given the increasing free market bias of the developed world, combined with the relaxed view of copyright in the developing world, companies either have to supply content in a user friendly form, or have someone else do it. There is a great deal of money spent to build demand for these things. The problem is that there the value placed on he product by the producers is often much more than the value to the consumer, especially when the producers wishes to place arbitrary restrictions on use.
Time travel is not a red flag as such. It can be an effective plot device given a good writer, as it was in city on the edge of forever. Most other uses are simply lazy writing, or efforts to get out situation that result from lazy writing. Unless it is the plot device that allows the story to move, as in Doctor Who or Back to the Future,it is something that should be avoided.
Abrams played with time travel between season 2 and 3 of alias. I think as a plot device it had potential, but failed. I can't imagine that it will be any more effective in Star Trek, given the track record of dismal failure. Given that this is supposed to be new, it would be nice if they moved from the stuff that didn't work.
Why does MS need a separate XP mode? Why are the two so different that one needs a separate product, virtual PC to run the code? Why do they want XP to run on a virtual machine at all? It this decision based on the way Windows work, or does MS just not want such an ability integrated into the OS.
The reason I am confused is because this would have been great for the Vista transition, and seems to be old technology. Over ten years ago Apple included this capability in OS X, allowing OS 9 application to run in the classic environment. Apple also included bundles to allow the transition from 68K to PPC, and later PPC to Intel. Why did MS not do the same, and why are the including a hack solution at the last minute.
For years, transport to and from work cost me $2 a day. At time standard milage costs were $.25 a mile, or for my trip 15 miles a day. It did not take me any longer to get to work on the bus. There was a saving for me at the time.
I know many people who do not have a place to park near the office for less than a few hundred dollars a month. They do better taking the bus in, rather than parking miles from the office and then still having to wait to get in.
The issue with most people is parking, secondary issue is gas. If the issue is parking, there often is no choice but to use public transport. With gas, which might be $4 in the near future, I have notice that some people are extremely wasteful, and will complain about gas rather than living within their means. Around here, people choose to live 20 or more miles from work so they can get a larger place for less money. Of course there are cost benefits issues, and one way to make such a deal work is to use public transport. It would help, and lower gas prices, and save many money, if the public transport system was better.
Recall that this is what lead to the demise of Arthur Anderson after nearly 90 years in business. It is arguable that they had no direct connection to the fraud related to Enron, and it quite conceivable that such a prestigious firm simply did not have the sophistication to see that they were being taken by the hicks from Texas, so there was no way to lay any blame on them. What was clear was that they destroyed evidence after the investigation began.
What would have saved them is following a policy of destruction. That is, as soon as data is expired, it should be destroyed. Every copy, backup, strip of it. What this might mean is hourly or daily automatic deletion of logs. Frequent writing of music to CD in track format, etc. If any of this is done after the fact, it is destruction of evidence, which is very bad. Before the fact it is housecleaning.
Everyone is going to give as example the WSJ or Financial Times. These are not consumer oriented newspapers. At least in the US they can be a tax write off, which the clever person will use to minimize the taxable profit, and perhaps even lower the tax bracket. This is the same as the Hummer. It might cost $800K, but the taxpayer probably has covered well over 50% of the cost, making it cheaper than a top of the line Toyota.
This is much more akin to the average car, which people are not buying in droves. In this in an environment where it is no longer possible to drain a house of equity to subsidize the life style, cars appear to sell for significantly less than they did 5 years ago. It has nothing to do with the value of a car or newspaper, simply the value of a dollar with has, due to the relative lack availability, or the perception of the lack of availability, to the common person has made the perceived value increase. This means that to get peoples money, you have to offer something extra.
In the US it looks like the only newspaper that will be affected is the New York Post. I don't many people paying if the NYT is still free. The other option is the Sun, which may rely on how much people will pay for page 3.
It is a good step, and almost enough to buy one. Native PDF means that I can load files. But it is still fundamentally flawed. It is created to read Amazon partner content. As mentioned it does not have WiFi that would let one browse the web. Even more critical, it does not allow browsing over the cell line.
Here is the problem. A lot of stuff that is pay for use on the kindle is already free, especially since the kindle content is static, and, in todays world, outdated. I am paying not for up to date content, but, in many cases, the privilege of reading it on the kindle. There is nothing wrong with this, it is just annoying that I either pay a monthly subscription or don't have access to it. This could be saying that one either pays a subscription or go to the library, but times have changed. The kindle has competition that will allow access to real time content, anywhere. for a cost that is as reasonable as the kindle.
The machine really needs a cell based wireless browser. Amazon would still make money on books. Some would still buy subscriptions to magazines. But I could also use it to read magazines that are not on Amazon. I could download books from Gutenber. It would be a true reader. I don't know how this would work, I suppose it could be a bluetooth tether to the phone, or the ability to interface with a separately acquired dongle. I don't know how much success Amazon is going to have with a basic book reader, or how many units the really need to sell.
I often wondered how it would be to grow up with page 3 of the sun. I don't think it would have hurt me. It might have meant I read a paper more often, even if it was only the Sun. Of course this is really tame content, and I suppose it is only really offensive to a few fundamentalist. I can see how it would be distracting to the average kid.
Of course, for most kids the iPhone is a tool of distraction, and that it why the kids have them. So they can be continuously entertained and never have to anything independently. It is a full circle. The Mac started of a tool that enabled many people to simply do things that they were not able to do before, like WYSWYG editing, a spreadsheet with references off sheet, and desktop publishing that would output to a pro printer. Now it is primarily used to look at boobies.
The best religions seem to have the simplest messages, messages that simple people can grasp and easily understand. So in this way short messages might be the ideal thing. And if a person sees that many of thier friends are having fun tweeting at church, they may want to go as well.
But church is also about creating a sacred space, where people are together in a single faith. I think it is this that is hurting the traditional church. If we broadcast the service, and make the TV or radio an extension of the sacred space, even though there is no real community, we degrade the value of the space. If we hold secular functions in the sacred space, and make it just another room or another clearing, we devalue the value of the space. If everyone is busy tweeting to entertain an outside secular world instead of helping to build the sacred space, then what is left. We might as well just be wherever we are, and have the minister or whatever tweet the service.
This reminds me of the move 'Back to school' where the classroom was increasing filled with tape recorders, and then the professor was replaced with a recorded lecture. There is an arrogance that somehow the church is so implicitly necessary that we can brazenly corrupt it with no fear of negative consequences. It is not that there is anything wrong with tweeting, except that it is a continuation of a path where the church is just another firm, with profits, losses, and bushiness plans, and while a few respond to such things, I think the decline in most church attendance show that many of the faithful are not amused.
The problem comes from not understanding that we are not talking about machines, but humans. It is the same thing that leads us to false economies. Expecting people to act like rational agents. Expecting children to act in their own best interest. Expecting parents to be responsible for their offspring. The arrogant administrators that believe their is a metric that can be used to judge any teacher. Foolishness.
Let's take three examples of schools. One is a college prep program where students are hand picked from a very large population. The second is a school where students are accepted on a first come first serve basis, but can be easily expelled if any of the teachers don't like them. The third is a comprehensive school. Each on of these requires a different type of teacher with differing level of skills in pedagogy and content knowledge. In the first school, a teacher without knowledge of calculus or physics, or the ability to write, would be totally inappropriate. In the third school a teacher without the ability to motivate children who see no purpose in education will have their room destroyed. In the first school, meeting no child left behind is not a issue. In the third school if a teacher is not intimately familiar with law, and data analysis, the teacher will never be able to do his or her job. In the middle, the teacher must have a mixture of skills, which is even more difficult to find.
And this it might get more complex. Let say you have a teacher in a low performing school that does not have good classroom management, does not want to teach a low level test, but has wonderful ideas that motivate some of the students to do creative work. Evaluation wise this teacher is going to score very low, and may well be in line to be fired, but is that right? Do the kids not deserve the opportunity to have a teacher like this, even if it causes some trouble in the school? Likewise, a teacher may not have mad skills when it comes to content, but may keep a very strict classroom and be very good with the kids. This teacher might have AP scores that suck, and therefore should be fired, as they are damaging the kids changes to get into college. But should this teacher be fired?
Here is the way I see it. In the private sector, we have a number of businesses run with a number of philosophies. A supervisor gets to choose how much to pay and then gets to select the applicants that best suit a personality. This can mean that a less qualified person is hired because they come in a suit. School is not that way. Principals do not control the fiefdom in the same way that a business owner or supervisor does. Teachers who are to be fired are generally fired from the top, for good cause, not just for personality. In general it takes several years for a teacher to get to a point that is 'unfireable' and by that point the teacher has at least proven a desire to teach.
Unions protect teacher from personality conflicts and arbitrary administrations that would rather fire the teacher than fix the problem. Problems like the have in private school where a teacher can be fired for giving a bad grade to the student of a major donor, or for displaying a tattoo at private functions, or being the wrong race, creed, or political affiliations. This allows teachers to teach without the fear that some student will respond to a bad grade by telling the parent the teacher is pervert. It will still happen, but the union will squash it. Without such protection, there would be no teaching going on in any comprehensive high school. Teacher would be too worried about their certificate, and any really qualified teacher would find something else to do. It is just like executive pay and bonuses. We may not like it, but it is reality.
Which is the final point here. very often teacher make at or above the local average, at least after a couple years. Even at that salary, there are few enough qualified candidates. There is not some pool that we can pull perfect teachers. That is another bit of ma
This is the question. If google begins charging, then youtube will not be the place it is now, where parents put senseless videos up with copyright violating music.
If google charges, and splits with right holder, then they compete with hulu and other services that are already entrenched, and of higher quality. The payments googles makes now are just formalities, and google is getting killed on these payments to be sure.
There is a solution. Charge for uploading. Sure most people will not pay, but I think many will, if the price is small, say $5 for a couple minutes, non refundable. This will keep the obvious copyright violators off, as it will be easy to trace the content back to a person. It will generate some cash, maybe enough to cover royalty payments.
The downside is that Google wants people data, presumable so they can mine and monotize it. Look at what they did with books. Not only did they not have to significantly pay for breaking copyright, but they also are trying to create a new and arbitrary systme that given them a monopoly on many books. They are willing to pay a great deal for this monopoly. Just like they are willing to pay a great deal for the video monopoly.
Slashdot Mirror
Compare this to what the BSA is advocating. Essentially any disgruntled employee can put unlicensed commercial software on a computer and then report the violation to the BSA for a reward. Sure companies can put millions of dollars of safeguards to prevent harassment from inefficient employees, but why bother. Just make it a policy to only use free software, and when the BSA comes knocking, show them the policy and the minimal cost efforts that makes all other software the responsibility of the user.
This will also help long term interpretability, as OSS has minimal incentives to obstificate the data to force users to continue to pay the ransom to access said data.
Which is to say VR is still a rather cool idea in search of an application. Flying cars are not going to make life easier given the takeoff and landing requirements. Small airplanes are essentially flying cars, and are efficient for moderate distances. Something like the iphone could be shrunk and put in a sunglass like package, but then where would the input be, as external keyboard that is just as cumbersome as the phone?
I think we will have to wait for direct neural implants.
There are couple of really scary things in the terms of use. For instance, minors are not allowed to use the service without the permission of adults, and adults become fully responsible for the actions of the child. I am unsure of why they felt they had to put that in there. Then there is the first sentence "The Wolfram|Alpha service may be used only by a human being using a conventional web browser to manually enter queries one at a time". I hate to have to define what a conventional browser is. For may people it would be only IE.
More scare is the ambiguous policy to deep linking. To wit "It is not permitted to use Wolfram|Alpha indirectly through another website that has created a large number of deep links to Wolfram|Alpha, or that automatically constructs links based on input that you give on that site, rather than on Wolfram|Alpha. You may not in effect use Wolfram|Alpha through an alternate user interface presented by another website." Clearly they want to not have bots and third parties writing code to hijck the site. Disappointing given the wonderful work they did with Mathworld.
However, unless one is concerned about the lack of ability to use 10 different fonts in a documents, or wants to see the effects of the 30 different colors one uses to code the text on a page, MS is not going to produce something better than TeX. Not only because does MS require that one moves to a non portable, non reliable, non readable format, but also because doing simple things takes quite a bit more time in MS Word, for the user that has the skills to so do.
This is a good thing for MS Word users. It will allow them to create better looking documents. I don't know of many LaTex users that will move to Word due to this. OTOH, the WYSIWG ease is going to over take the markup language professionals at some point because the former will simply be good enough.
Beyond this I do not see tiers. Most cell companies do not seem to be moving in this direction.
The taboo against cannibalism, like the taboo against eating, say, pigs comes from the risk of cross infection. Any virus that infects a piece of meat of a prey can also infect a predator of the same species. To minimize this risk predators tend to eat outside of the species. OTOH, as we have seen, there can be across family, order, or even class, but the risk of infection does seem to decrease we move up the taxonomic classification. So we may have a specific taboo against eating within the family or genus, but that taboo is not cannibalism.
MS has always been a student of the other school of thought, the school that says users do no memorize locations, but read through all the menus every time they use them. Therefore, the primary issue is minimizing the movement of the mouse so that the time saved can be used in comprehending and choosing menu commands. This philosophy was the basis of using dynamic menus in applications, that is hiding commands that have not been active in a while so the user, when reading through the commands, will not waste time reading the relatively unused options. This works for some people, either because they do very limited work on the PC and therefore only need a few commands, or do not in fact memorize menus and indeed to hunt for each command, just like some users hunt for each key on a keyboard.
Ribbons are an extension and re-visioning of this philosophy. Some of this is an improvement for some users.
Here is a technology that absolutely redistributed wealth away from the lazy. Persons that can innovate today love it. People who are living off innovations two and three generations old will hate it. The hard working want to let it progress to revitalize the world. The entitled want to regulate it and make it benefit only those selected by the elite.
OTOH real age is directed at adults. The only link is an email address, which users can get from yahoo and anonymize if they wish. The question, to me, is then whether real age serves a legitimate entertainment purpose for which users pay through their use by looking at ads and generating data, and if such data is aggregate. It is like people who put movies and pictures on free web sites and then complain that they cannot be deleted.
Most of us have little probem with shopping at stores where we use a card for a discount in exchange for our consent to collect and sell our personal buying habits(inordinate amount of crisco?). It seems to me that facebook goes beyond this, but many other sites do not.
When I was young the paradigm was big iron, as this is what everyone learned in college. For vertical applications there was some variance, for instance there might be an Apple ][ running visicalc. A generation later, around the early 90's, it was MS Windows because that is what everyone used in college, especially the marketing people, which meant that all the grunts and executives had MS Windows machines, the rack was mostly mS windows machines. Again, for special applications there might be a different type of machine.
MS Windows is not necessarily the cheapest simplest solution, and IE is not necessarily what people use. However, the paradigm of MS/IE is not going to change until the current generation of managers is replaced with a more up to date generation, and the paradigm is allow to shift, so to speak. Cost will likely not play a huge role. New managers and technicians familiar with Firefox and Linux will make the choice. Unfortunately schools are still teaching MS only, on the whole, and managers still tend to be of limited technical education.
Of course, it will change. A generation was born that did not automatically buy cares from Detroit, so Detroit fell when they had to compete. Same thing for MS.
I never understood what was the point of putting these things in places where turnover is a few minutes. It encourages loitering. It is not like customers pay for refills, or are otherwise likely to buy more product.
Of course the solution is simple. Do what other places are doing. Limit the time. If they want turnover in 10 minutes, make that the time limit. The point stands, though. WiFi in places like this just seems silly. OTOH, I know of places that have gone out of business after they got rid of the WiFi. They did not like hanging around in the afternoon drinking coffee, but those same people also stopped coming around for the evening meal.
Reasonable this is an infrastructure plan, and is likely timed to take advantage of any forthcoming stimulus money. There is some reasonable expectation for an inordinate amount of money to go to Arizona because Arizona ranks 21 out of 50 for being of the dole. One hopes that this money will be spent on long term public infrastructure rather than providing increasing expensive real estate to individuals.
if people do need to get from one place to another, and if the freeways are full, and if gas in are a is expensive, it might be better to build rail instead of freeway at 30 million per mile. I know people tend to be hostile to public transportation, but sometimes it makes sense. The reality we are living in is that we cannot afford everything we want. This may be a way of making a no so stressful sacrifice, and build some technology in the process.
Textbooks would have trouble supplying these various activities. This should be the strength of a digital state curriculum. A suggested lesson can be supplied. Alternative lessons and activities can be supplied on top of that. Adaptations can be chained, etc. This is the reasonable persons approach. I have seen very unreasonable people complain to top level administration when they disagree with a process.
Prior to this we have other small computers, not all cheap. The newton had a PCMCIA slot that could connect it to a network, allowing it to do everything that an average computer user might do. In the previous time frame, Tandy owned the market, with the model 100 and 200. Since the internet did not exist yet in the current form, there was little need for networking on these machines. They provided full functionality for the average user. Even the Tandy pc-6 was a contender in this catagory.
Realistically, given the increasing free market bias of the developed world, combined with the relaxed view of copyright in the developing world, companies either have to supply content in a user friendly form, or have someone else do it. There is a great deal of money spent to build demand for these things. The problem is that there the value placed on he product by the producers is often much more than the value to the consumer, especially when the producers wishes to place arbitrary restrictions on use.
Abrams played with time travel between season 2 and 3 of alias. I think as a plot device it had potential, but failed. I can't imagine that it will be any more effective in Star Trek, given the track record of dismal failure. Given that this is supposed to be new, it would be nice if they moved from the stuff that didn't work.
The reason I am confused is because this would have been great for the Vista transition, and seems to be old technology. Over ten years ago Apple included this capability in OS X, allowing OS 9 application to run in the classic environment. Apple also included bundles to allow the transition from 68K to PPC, and later PPC to Intel. Why did MS not do the same, and why are the including a hack solution at the last minute.
I know many people who do not have a place to park near the office for less than a few hundred dollars a month. They do better taking the bus in, rather than parking miles from the office and then still having to wait to get in.
The issue with most people is parking, secondary issue is gas. If the issue is parking, there often is no choice but to use public transport. With gas, which might be $4 in the near future, I have notice that some people are extremely wasteful, and will complain about gas rather than living within their means. Around here, people choose to live 20 or more miles from work so they can get a larger place for less money. Of course there are cost benefits issues, and one way to make such a deal work is to use public transport. It would help, and lower gas prices, and save many money, if the public transport system was better.
What would have saved them is following a policy of destruction. That is, as soon as data is expired, it should be destroyed. Every copy, backup, strip of it. What this might mean is hourly or daily automatic deletion of logs. Frequent writing of music to CD in track format, etc. If any of this is done after the fact, it is destruction of evidence, which is very bad. Before the fact it is housecleaning.
This is much more akin to the average car, which people are not buying in droves. In this in an environment where it is no longer possible to drain a house of equity to subsidize the life style, cars appear to sell for significantly less than they did 5 years ago. It has nothing to do with the value of a car or newspaper, simply the value of a dollar with has, due to the relative lack availability, or the perception of the lack of availability, to the common person has made the perceived value increase. This means that to get peoples money, you have to offer something extra.
In the US it looks like the only newspaper that will be affected is the New York Post. I don't many people paying if the NYT is still free. The other option is the Sun, which may rely on how much people will pay for page 3.
Here is the problem. A lot of stuff that is pay for use on the kindle is already free, especially since the kindle content is static, and, in todays world, outdated. I am paying not for up to date content, but, in many cases, the privilege of reading it on the kindle. There is nothing wrong with this, it is just annoying that I either pay a monthly subscription or don't have access to it. This could be saying that one either pays a subscription or go to the library, but times have changed. The kindle has competition that will allow access to real time content, anywhere. for a cost that is as reasonable as the kindle.
The machine really needs a cell based wireless browser. Amazon would still make money on books. Some would still buy subscriptions to magazines. But I could also use it to read magazines that are not on Amazon. I could download books from Gutenber. It would be a true reader. I don't know how this would work, I suppose it could be a bluetooth tether to the phone, or the ability to interface with a separately acquired dongle. I don't know how much success Amazon is going to have with a basic book reader, or how many units the really need to sell.
Of course, for most kids the iPhone is a tool of distraction, and that it why the kids have them. So they can be continuously entertained and never have to anything independently. It is a full circle. The Mac started of a tool that enabled many people to simply do things that they were not able to do before, like WYSWYG editing, a spreadsheet with references off sheet, and desktop publishing that would output to a pro printer. Now it is primarily used to look at boobies.
But church is also about creating a sacred space, where people are together in a single faith. I think it is this that is hurting the traditional church. If we broadcast the service, and make the TV or radio an extension of the sacred space, even though there is no real community, we degrade the value of the space. If we hold secular functions in the sacred space, and make it just another room or another clearing, we devalue the value of the space. If everyone is busy tweeting to entertain an outside secular world instead of helping to build the sacred space, then what is left. We might as well just be wherever we are, and have the minister or whatever tweet the service.
This reminds me of the move 'Back to school' where the classroom was increasing filled with tape recorders, and then the professor was replaced with a recorded lecture. There is an arrogance that somehow the church is so implicitly necessary that we can brazenly corrupt it with no fear of negative consequences. It is not that there is anything wrong with tweeting, except that it is a continuation of a path where the church is just another firm, with profits, losses, and bushiness plans, and while a few respond to such things, I think the decline in most church attendance show that many of the faithful are not amused.
Let's take three examples of schools. One is a college prep program where students are hand picked from a very large population. The second is a school where students are accepted on a first come first serve basis, but can be easily expelled if any of the teachers don't like them. The third is a comprehensive school. Each on of these requires a different type of teacher with differing level of skills in pedagogy and content knowledge. In the first school, a teacher without knowledge of calculus or physics, or the ability to write, would be totally inappropriate. In the third school a teacher without the ability to motivate children who see no purpose in education will have their room destroyed. In the first school, meeting no child left behind is not a issue. In the third school if a teacher is not intimately familiar with law, and data analysis, the teacher will never be able to do his or her job. In the middle, the teacher must have a mixture of skills, which is even more difficult to find.
And this it might get more complex. Let say you have a teacher in a low performing school that does not have good classroom management, does not want to teach a low level test, but has wonderful ideas that motivate some of the students to do creative work. Evaluation wise this teacher is going to score very low, and may well be in line to be fired, but is that right? Do the kids not deserve the opportunity to have a teacher like this, even if it causes some trouble in the school? Likewise, a teacher may not have mad skills when it comes to content, but may keep a very strict classroom and be very good with the kids. This teacher might have AP scores that suck, and therefore should be fired, as they are damaging the kids changes to get into college. But should this teacher be fired?
Here is the way I see it. In the private sector, we have a number of businesses run with a number of philosophies. A supervisor gets to choose how much to pay and then gets to select the applicants that best suit a personality. This can mean that a less qualified person is hired because they come in a suit. School is not that way. Principals do not control the fiefdom in the same way that a business owner or supervisor does. Teachers who are to be fired are generally fired from the top, for good cause, not just for personality. In general it takes several years for a teacher to get to a point that is 'unfireable' and by that point the teacher has at least proven a desire to teach. Unions protect teacher from personality conflicts and arbitrary administrations that would rather fire the teacher than fix the problem. Problems like the have in private school where a teacher can be fired for giving a bad grade to the student of a major donor, or for displaying a tattoo at private functions, or being the wrong race, creed, or political affiliations. This allows teachers to teach without the fear that some student will respond to a bad grade by telling the parent the teacher is pervert. It will still happen, but the union will squash it. Without such protection, there would be no teaching going on in any comprehensive high school. Teacher would be too worried about their certificate, and any really qualified teacher would find something else to do. It is just like executive pay and bonuses. We may not like it, but it is reality.
Which is the final point here. very often teacher make at or above the local average, at least after a couple years. Even at that salary, there are few enough qualified candidates. There is not some pool that we can pull perfect teachers. That is another bit of ma
If google charges, and splits with right holder, then they compete with hulu and other services that are already entrenched, and of higher quality. The payments googles makes now are just formalities, and google is getting killed on these payments to be sure.
There is a solution. Charge for uploading. Sure most people will not pay, but I think many will, if the price is small, say $5 for a couple minutes, non refundable. This will keep the obvious copyright violators off, as it will be easy to trace the content back to a person. It will generate some cash, maybe enough to cover royalty payments.
The downside is that Google wants people data, presumable so they can mine and monotize it. Look at what they did with books. Not only did they not have to significantly pay for breaking copyright, but they also are trying to create a new and arbitrary systme that given them a monopoly on many books. They are willing to pay a great deal for this monopoly. Just like they are willing to pay a great deal for the video monopoly.