Honestly this is my point of view. I do not think we necessarily need more scientist, or need to make science more attractive. What I do think is we need to do a better job ushering students with the skills and interests into opportunties that will let them explore those interests and desires. I do not think the problem is that everyone from MIT goes into finance. Frankly, I do not see MIT in the forefront of basic science. The problem is that every elementary, middle and hight school is not equipped to provide curious students with the ability to explore the world scientifically. We have people who read books and talk about the theoretical wonderfulness of the world,perhaps even get them to pass an AP test, but few who actually know who to scientifically explore the world.
Suppose every high school, no matter their socio-economic makeup, graduated a few students who were honestly prepared and wanted to engage in a PhD track science path of study. That would be great. But what we have is are school that educate kids, some of which would be excellent scientist, but are training them to other equally valuable professions. They do this not because they of what the kids interest are, but the assumption that kid can't afford to go to school for 8 years and needs a job where they can make good money now. As rich as the US is, and as much of the GDP has been due to tech, I think this is a poor reason to lose a potentially valuable scienctist.
Add to this Pete Olson whose district spans an area that has seen little innovation over the past 30 years, and is much made of of old company towns. To the south we have large pockets of unemployment because the residents thought the that Dow chemical would take care of them forever, so many never seriously tried to gain an education of a trade, just assumed that corporations and governments would always pay them for work, even when there was no value in the work. Now we trying to rationalize government, push some technology into the private sector, and the conservatives are saying we must continue government programs that support certain favored constituencies, while killing other programs that support unfavored constituency. I am all for the space program, but frankly it is being used to provide government jobs to people who live in mansions. I am not kidding, The other day I saw sign that said "stop obama, save nasa" in front of a million dollar house. It boogles my mind why we are trying to save jobs that support million dollar mansions, while firing teachers and emergency crews, many who work for $30 or $40K a year.
This is not about space. It is about high paying technical civil service jobs. If space travel is to be privatized, we must free up the human and physical resources to make it happen. A conservative like Olsen can't, while crying about budget deficits, keep up costly programs just so an employee can work another 10 years and then get 30 years of government pension. Yes these decisions are hard, but that is why conservatives put Olsen in congress. To cut the size of government, and encourage private innovation, which will lead to private jobs, and increased taxes.
Remember, part of the employment problem of the last two years is that the size of the federal government has decreased. We are now to the point that the unemployment is only out of control for those without a high school diploma. For college educated people the unemployment rate is back to pre recessions levels. It is often reported in the conservative media that the federal workers make above national averages in wages, mostly because the federal government needs college educated individuals. This means that the private sector is taking up the skilled labor freed by the feds, and the expansion is leading to jobs for those who have fewer skills. In Texas it was reported that there were jobs fairs that hired thousands of unskilled workes last week. It would be sad if Olson was to reverse this reduction in the size of government and expansion in the private sector just becasue a few of his buddies were going to lose thier Hummers and mansions.
Actually it is all a load of bupkis. MS has always been, to some degree, a disruptive busines model. How disruptive it depends on the time and the market. It provides often cheap alternative to necessary technology. In the phone market this has not worked so well because there are already cheap alternatives, often provided by premier brands. In this way, Google and Android is about as disruptive as Openoffice.org and Sun. It is simply expanding and existing market, not really taking sales from anyone.
As far as Apple is concerned, it does provide disruptive technology, like Compaq used to. RIM sales did go down in response to the iPhone. A smart phone market for the masses was created, and the feature phone slaes declined. The iPhone provided a real alternative to those who did not want the technology controlled by the mobile phone companies because then the technology was never developed or optimized for the end user.
All google has done is put control of the phone back in the hands of the mobile phone provider. Google tried to do what Apple was doing, with the nexus one, but they failed. So the fight right now is who is going to control the smart phone. Is it going to be companies that cater to the consumer, i.e. Apple; Companies that cater to corporate end users, i.e. RIM; or companies that cater to the mobile phone providers, i.e. Google. MS is somewhere in between these, but is using large cash reserves to fortify the position.
Note that Google, like MS, is paying mobile phone OEMs to use the software. Googles is sharing revenue and funding development of the software. Google, like MS, is limiting who favored partners are, and limiting what can be done with Android. Ultimately, the Android phone, like the Windows 7 phone will be developed to maximize after market profits for MS and Google. With MS this will be done by extending the MS brand. With Google this will be done by search and tracking and analytics. Apple works on a straight revenue sharing agreement, and has not incentive to cripple phones to upmarket features. Apple makes money by making the consumer happy, with iTunes, not making the mobile phone companies happy.
So what are these lawsuits about. They are to delay the implementations of certain features that Apple considers critical to the market of the iPhone. Of course Apple is going to lose, but if Apple can keep the copy cat OEMs two generation back then Apple can remain the market leader.
The idea to sell every iPhone and iPad the can be built, and sold at a high profit, and let the others have the rest. This is different from MS and Google who depend on very large number of sales to drive their secondary markets. I am not hugely concerned with these suits. the technology is out there, and is being driven by consumer demand. The suits do not appear to limiting availability, except in the tablet market where google seems to purposefully be preventing OEMs from innovating using Android, and MS seems unintersted in pushing their tablet assets.
I wonder if people complained about talkies. You that the well made one often had intense action sequences, followed by cards that had to be read. This, IMHO, let the audience process without the need of artificial filler like we see in talkies. I mean the gratuitous panoramic or fake banter.
Same thing with black and white. Color was not needed in these flicks. All good movies present a selected slice of the world, and this slice was simply without color. Color in many moves provides a crutch for filmmakers who are incompetent. Put in some vibrant color and no one notices that the movie sucks.
To me there are two things that people have to realize. The first is that in good art, the medium and the product are fused. In other words, the way the art is going to be presented in an integral part of the process. Sometimes the product can be adjusted, but very often that adjustment will degrade the product. At the very least the new product will be a disappointment to those who have seen it before and are expecting a similar experience.
The second is that consumers get accustomed to a certain presentation style. Someone who has only seen Toy Story in 3D may be disappointed with the original version even though it may be inferior. A person who is used the minimimal instrumentation of Rap may not tolerate the over production of classical. A person who like the production value of Hip Hop may not like the old school Rap. People who are used to the immersive experience of video games may not tolerate the relative flatness and lack of interactivity of movies.
The hysterics might go away a bit if Apple would tell us what it is for, and why it is plaintext. My concern is that if the data is being collected just because it can be, like when google stole everyones email using their cameras car, that is a pretty silly thing to do. If it is just a collection of access points, the tell us. My fear is that Apple is not telling because it is a basis for some sort of scary experimental feature that they want to keep secret for the time being.
If one can afford that kind of redundancy, then sure. Two independent lines coming in from two independent providers that individually will adequately handle all traffic for an extended period of time. Independent arrays of pc computers hooked to independent load balancers that will not fall over if something happens to one line or a large numer of computers. One could also have big iron with a 6 nine reliability hooked to redundant lines. In any case backup power to keep all the equipment up for a long period of time is critical. I knew companies that did these kind of things back in the day. It was expensive and had to fund.
If this is one day out of the year that EC2 is offline, then that is probably better reliability than a home spun server. It is better reliability than I have ever gotten with any of the shared hosting companies I have dealt with. For affordable, or ad sponsored, high profile internet services 3 nines is probably all we are going to get. it is probably good enough. The services that were down were not critical. Real quality of life was not meaningfully effects for significantly large group of people. What this means to the common person is that one should have a redundant service. Use Gowalla and Foursquare. You may not be able to get to a dashboard, but maybe can get to the services. It was not like google was down.
I can't say that ATT ever tried to install secret software in the iPad. Some dongle type solutions do require suspicious software, but mos reputable places use a mobile router. Vendor lockin is an issue. I agree buying a smart phone, or a tablet, or any computing device and expecting it to be supported by a mobile phone company is a truly silly thing to do. They will strip end user friendly features and have no incentive to keep the phone up to date on patches as this is a expensive process and brings in no revenue. Much better to let the phone be out of date in a month and force the customer to buy a new phone every six months. This, however, does not preclude buying a device linked to a mobil carrier but supported by a third party.
The lack of 3G, like low memory capacities, is simply a means to meet a price point. It would be good for innovative tablets to have add on 3G and 4g modules like they have add on memory. A USB port would do in a pinch, which many tablets do not have.
Collecting data like this for no apparent reason is a concern. Many security issue come about when someone decides to do something just for fun. For instance, at some point someone decided to just run active content from untrusted servers because it made the user experience more transparent. Bad idea. Someone decides to keep email forever just because they can, not having a program to destroy old email that could be actionable. Bad idea.
For a properly protected computer, meaning that the user account is encrypted, this is likely not a huge issue. It is a good idea to encrypt the iPhone backup. For most of us when out computers or phones get stolen they will be wiped to insure that any tracking software we have on them will be erased. This is especially true for the iPhone. For those who are running around on someone, text messages, browsers histories, and call logs are likely going to be more incriminating. Anyone who runs around and does not have a throwaway cell phone for discrete communications has issues beyond what is the log.
Without seeing a log it is hard to know what the actual security implications are. The FAQ says that it is cell tower, not gps, so that does not give a precise location. There is no mention of how the data is logged. It is periodic or only when on uses the phone. If it only when the phone is used, then it would be reasonable to assume this is a diagnostic file to help with call quality. Even so, Apple should not have exposed users to such a privacy leak, and there is not reason to keep long term information, though there is not indication of how long data is kept.
Twitter does allow one to break down barriers, and the internet has in general. Flame wars develop because people who ordinarily run in separate camps are put together and they have discussions. I don't think these are unhealthy, it is just that most people don't want the discussions to occur because they don't want to risk that their point of view is wrong. Try to argue with a so-called skeptic something that they believe is wrong. No matter what evidence, they will no change their mind.
In this case we have a person who thinks he knows how things should work. Extreme ideas are bad. Rational ideas, which are the ideas the speaker agrees with, are good. The purpose of debate is to change other peoples minds to meet my expectations. This was the purpose of media through much of written history.
It is not more. A radical person who controls the press can no longer control the ideas. A person who owns radio can still allow people to get on the radio or TV and say that people deserved the natural disaster, say an earthquake or tornado, because they angered god. They can allow a person to say that such disaster victims do not need help because we all pay taxes. They can allow such things to be said, and should be allowed to do such, but then we can tweet, with links to the recording so their can be no claim of 'context', and offer alternative views. And maybe only like minded people hear these views, but that is improvement from the days when all that were heard were the radical view of the elite.
Every time I read something like this I wonder why are they afraid of what people say. The problem has always been that free speech in the press has always been limited to what a few people wanted everyone else to think. If an 11 year old girl got raped by a high school sports star, all the people would hear is how she dressed sexy and was asking for it. Now that message is diluted, if only slightly, by radicals tweeting the radical idea that is never the responsibility of an 11 year old girl to seduce, or not, a 17 year old male twice her size. Such radical ideas lead to unfortunate situations where college boys can no longer get high school girls drunk and rape them, but hey, life is tough, and we all have to give up some perks.
Add to this that there is no indication that there is value in a Bluray to compensate for the added price. We were sold a bill of goods of DVD when we were told all these wonderful features that would be included. While some of these features were included, such as commentary, many of the features were never implemented. Likewise bluray has much potential, but I suspect most of it will never be used.
In reality the DVD was not hugely better than the VHS tape, so why did many of us buy it? VHS tape was cumbersome in comparison to the simplicity of the DVD. VHS machines broke easily and were expensive to replace. VHS tapes took huge amounts of storage space. DVDs would play on the computer. DVDs, after not much time, were easy to transfer to the computer. These are values that do not exist in a bluray. Bluray just gives a consumer look and feel, a since of having the best. Some want that, many don't. It is interesting to note that DVD won in spite fo the fact that through incompetent menu implementation and anti-piracy fanatism it became harder in many way to deal with than the VHS. Unfortunately Bluray has the same issue, with none fo the advantages.
The DVD had the market in about 4 years. 4 years ago bluray apparently wond the format war. I think that various online video formats in fact won the format war, largely due the fact that Bluray was primarily developed to prevent users from format shifting. Video files can be backed up. Bluray cannot.
Pretty much everything has gone to glorified fan fiction. Nothing wrong with that. It employs people, it makes money,
But that is not originality that makes long lasting art. That is the adaptation of originality to create something that is currently accesible to the masses. That is rewriting KJV into contemporary language and believing on has done something great. For a while yes, but we will alway back to the KJV.
It kind of reminds me of good tv and bad tv. Bad tv is where we have the same characters, all the time, with no growth. Good TV, like the stuff that Whedon does, has a base set of characters, but also a good background of characters that come and go. This is why MI-5 is good. The regulars tend to be in the background positions, while the primary characters are always recreated and there is no fear of having one go.
everything toxic in large quantities
on
Is Sugar Toxic?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Any refined chemical is likely toxic as it is taken out of natural proportions, with natural protections, and concentrated to unhealthy dosages. An 8 ounce coke, for instance has 100 calories, all from refined sugar, and no fiber. Orange juice has the same calories, but also fiber which can regulate the sugar intake. Also most people cannot just drink orange juice all day.
take an apple, 50 calories sugar, 2 g fiber. Healthy food. Horrible fruit stipes, almost twice calories of an apple, less than half he fiber, and can be eaten endlessly.
A few bottles of coke, or fruit punch, several fuit strip snacks, basically what people think is an ok diet, and one has 2000 calories with no nutrition, and hundreds of grams of refined and concentrated sugar, much more than is healthy.
I don't normally say this, but one must really ask why the parents need to buy kids these things or why parents need to let kids buy things in games. If a parent is responsible enough to get the money to buy an iToy, then makes a decision to buy an iGame, then makes the decision to provide the kids to the credit cards to buy iJunk, Why is it Apple fault that the parents then get a huge iBill. You don't see McDonald's getting sued because parents take their kids to the store and buy them McPoison. The kids were induced by propaganda just like in the case of Apple.
It was like the uproar over Beavis and Butthead many years ago. Even though parents were evidently responsible enough to get a tv, pay the electricity and the cable bill, they were not deemed responsible enough to monitor what the kids watched. Therefor MTV got in trouble when Beavis and Butthead tortured animals of set them afire. Evidently the kids would do the same and it was TV, not the parents fault.
So yes children are impressionable. Parents have to set limits on what kids are and are not able to do. But when parent make an explicitly decision to allow kids access to something, either by driving them there, or ordering a product, or giving access to a credit card, or whatever, it is no longer the companies fault. We saw this when kids were racking up huge phone and texting bills. I don't know what the issue was. If the kid can't use the phone, they don't get one, or have a prepaid.
I think oracle deserves some credit for this decision. They looked at their core mission, they looked at their resources, and discovered they had a product that was not a good fit. In the case of Sun, openoffice.org was a small part of a solution for the desktop. For Oracle it was not. It was an asset that may or may not be worth something. It could have helped out the Java asset. It did not. So they let it go. They could have made an attempt to make money off it, and let the brand flounder and die. They did not. I think Oracle, unlike some tech companies, does not just randomly try things and let's products die, to customer detriment, when something does not work. They are pros. They have customers that us openoffice.org, that use the brand to give them some protection, and this gift was for them.
Commercial energy prices will be much lower, especially in places where these things are manufactured. Still, this provides an interesting counterexample. If 70% of the energy in in manufacture, then the manufacturing process would be about 2000kWh per machine, or at a nickel per kWh would be $100, or a huge percentage of the build costs. It might be that all lifecylce costs up to the consumer purchasing the machines accounts for this amount of energy. In this case the question would be where are the power drains and how can optimize these. Like programming, there is no sense in optimizing everything. Find the stuff that eats energy and fix it. I suspect the chip fab plant.
As far as not caring about power usage on the computer, power saved is power saved. We might called this huge thing called manufacturing' the biggest target, but as mentioned this is a mythical object. The largest real single user of power is likely the end user, and this is where the saving will be most significant. For example, an HP power adapter is 135W, while the comparable power adaptor for a comparable Apple is 85 watts. That is 48% less. It is hard to saw what the actual power consumption is, but even if is 20% less, then that is 20% less stress on the residential grid when everyone gets home at night at the same time and turns on the computer. And in reality this is where the cost in energy production is. Not building for constant known load like manfuacturing, but buidling to provide power for peak commercial and residential loads.
It seems to me that flash is primarily driven by the commercial side of the web. This is not necessarily bad, and there are some critical things I cannot do on a flashless device, but it does beg the question of is flash really critical. On devices where work has to get done I would say no. On personal device bought by kids and young adults, probably. I suppose anyone born after 1990 is used to having 24 hour portable entertainment, and much of that is flash games. OTOH, I see kids using the flash games only when there is nothing better to do. If there are native games, angry birds, simple physics, that is what they will play. Which leads me to believe it is really about the ads and the possibility that if android did not run Flash, Flash as an advertising platform could be quickly depreciated.
In one of the books I read as a young person, self gratification was depreciated as a viable form of expression because if overused it could prevent the development of reasonable normal form of social interaction. It is important for most people to go and learn to play, communicate, get rejected, make compromises, and actually have real friends and lovers, at least for portions of their lives.
So my issue with this is it is another step in the isolationism that really is not healthy. While some might say this is good as one can go to parties and text and receive texts from your long distance relationship, so not to be embarrassed. Some people might find you more attractive because you are in a relationship, but at some point the truth will emerge. That users of this service are losers who can't participate in a valid relationship. And dating is not expensive. Hiring prostitutes is expensive. Looking for people who meet pre existiing expectations is expensive. But dating is just going out and having fun. Not Expensvie.
We must have taxes. We must have taxes to cover the cost that citizens want to incur. If we want to cut expenditures, and enough people complain so we cannot, then we must pay taxes to cover those expenditures. It makes little sense to cut only what others want, if we want to cut taxes, we must make a personal sacrifice. If not we have to pay taxes to generate revenue
The question is where the revenue comes from. Sales tax is popular because it kind of effects everyone. It is a like a flat consumption tax. The problem is that one state cannot really force a person in another state to comply with laws. So it makes no sense to force a business in another state, even if it has agent in the original state, to comply with that state laws. It would be like california telling me that I had to comply with their emission standards. That would be crazy.
What can happen is for states to file charges against their residents who don't pay use tax. This is within current laws and doesn't require a congressional act. What we don't need in new federal agencies forcing independents businesses to comply with complex and arcane state laws. What is some little shop in kentucky selling one a kind bluegrass collage going to do when it has to comply with all the laws of all the other 49 states. It is going to go out business. How is this going to help anyone?
Unfortunately we can't just blame the liberal democrats who want to kill business but imposing a unruly tax burden. It is the republicans, at least in my state, that are imposing the sales tax dogma. The sales tax imposes in huge burden on small business, and encourages all rational people to buy out of state. It is no longer a rational revenue source for the 21st century, but the conservative demand we have a sales tax. In fact a flat income tax would generate much more money and would likely impact the middle class less. It would impact the upper class more, make them pay their share, which is why conservatives do not want it. It would encourage people to visit small business, and give them a competitive advantage. This, some think, is bad because it would reduce the power of the corporation.
So it is well within the rights of congress to regulate interstate commerce. Republican lawmaker love sales tax so they would love to have a law to reach into another state and extract taxes from third parties. But it is stupid, and both parties need to find other ways of generating revenue.
It is sad that the right wing wacko lobby has come full out to prove that Houston and the surrounding are a bunch of gun crazed paranoid conspiracy theorists, but it is not true. True Clear Lake, the are that houses NASA, pretty much depends on government handouts for it's livelihood, and out politicians do sometime puts faith over common sense, I would like to assert that it does not reflect the general population.
There were many possible locations, and a few shuttles to go around. We need to put these machines where they are going to be seen, not just where we feel they are deserved. This is why the US is so messed up. We think certain people deserve the money, so they get, while people who can put it to good use, like food, are told they don't deserve it. Like the congressman who said $175K is salary is not that much because he had several kids. Somehow he deserved the money, while his constituents did not.
I have been to Space Center Houston several time over the years, since the year it was built. It is a joke. Cape Canaveral is not a joke. I don't the shuttle sitting at space center houston where no one sees it. I don't want some faith based arguments saying if we had the shuttle people would come by and see it. We have artifacts in houston. We have a saturn rocket. We have a capsule. The capsule is hidden where no one can see it. The rocket is hidden where few can see it. We do not leverage what we have, just complain when someone is not going to give us cookies.
I am sad the shuttle is not going to be houston, but am happy they will where many people will see. Many of these people have never seen it before. Being in the area I have seen it launch(closeup) in Florida. I have seen it on transport in wellington. I have seen the astronauts in transit in ellingotn. I have been in the training centers. I am lucky to live where I get ot see all these things.
I know am happy because people who have not been able to see what I have seen can at least see the artifacts. let the rest of country enjoy them in the retirement. I don't even like that Florida has one. Why can't one go the midwest? Let the rest of country see why we live in wonder at the wonderful piece of machinery.
It really has nothing to do with poor/rich and smartphones. It has to do with those want a recurring known bill, and those who want to minimize costs. A person of means who does not use a phone a lot might very well decide to use a pay as you go plan. If you don't use a phone every day, it could be cheaper than the basic plan.
People of limited means may indeed have a smart phone, but it is unlikely they have a smart phone from ATT. ATT, or Verizon for that matter, are simply not the value carriers. When looking at prepaid plans people complain about the relative hight cost, but do they actually look at how that cost will affect them? Honest on this plan I would not be worse off than I am now. As I use few minutes, and the average plan charges for a huge fee for minutes and not much more for data, I would break even. So though this reduction might seem trivial, it might open up the possibility for someone who wants to use a smartphone but does not have $70 a month to pay for the contract plan. If most data and calls are over WiFi, if should be easy to data over the air to 100 MB a month, or $50. To some that might seem extreme, but is might a significant cost savings to some.
Which is why they are doing this. By including games, they increase they increase the chance that a person who never watched the Grammy awards might watch. The Grammy awards are irrelevent to the gamer generation. This is just a way to make it a little less irrelevant.
For general use, dedicated calculators have gone the way of dedicated mp3 players or feaure phones. I have an HP emulator on my iPhone as well as Wolfram!Alpha. Unless on loves he keyboard, which is not all ha easy o use, these to applications take the place of my huge HP 49 or TI-89 or whatever.
That said one can't use a smarphone on a test. That is why over the past 10 years calculators have no been designed for he professional, but for the testing companies. Pro features are removed to make it acceptable for the standardized test. Ad copy basically focuses on this. I believe the TI nspire even has an interchanabled keyboard that limit functionality so it can be used on tests.
I don't see any reason to teach the calculator other than it is a necessary test taking skill. As long as the public gives credence to the AP exam, as long as states believe calculators are more important than basic skills, as long as calculator manufactures pay politicians to require calculators in the classroom, we will have them. OTOH, it is much more likely to get a kid o use a calculator to do work, rather than a computer where they go off and play WOW.
I got a bit annoyed at Amazon because it would not let me download my content from the clouddisk thingy. This effectively means that I am buying content for a personal streaming radio station. Compare this to netflix wher for $10 a month I access to all sorts of movie streaming, and many more on physical disk. I don't know where the value is. I pay for retail music, but cannot put it where I want. For those who say that content ownership is not in jeopardy, this is clearly an attempt to get users to pay huge amounts to license content without any real ownership rights. Additionally, I can't get streaming to work. Netflix is no problem, Hulu has few problems, Amazon is bust.
It would make more sense, if we are not going to be able to download music to any device, to just have a streaming service of everything in the Amazon collection.
My pages load plenty fast. What I notice is that when the page goes to google analytics that load process stops while waiting for the server. There was a time when pages would load partial content, and then go for the ads. Now, many pull the ads and analytics first. This would be good if the ad servers were fast, but the seem to be getting slower. Since google serves so many ads, it seems within it's power to make the web faster by making the ads faster. Perhaps, like MS, they want the web slow for all other browser, so Chrome seems so much faster.
Slashdot Mirror
Suppose every high school, no matter their socio-economic makeup, graduated a few students who were honestly prepared and wanted to engage in a PhD track science path of study. That would be great. But what we have is are school that educate kids, some of which would be excellent scientist, but are training them to other equally valuable professions. They do this not because they of what the kids interest are, but the assumption that kid can't afford to go to school for 8 years and needs a job where they can make good money now. As rich as the US is, and as much of the GDP has been due to tech, I think this is a poor reason to lose a potentially valuable scienctist.
This is not about space. It is about high paying technical civil service jobs. If space travel is to be privatized, we must free up the human and physical resources to make it happen. A conservative like Olsen can't, while crying about budget deficits, keep up costly programs just so an employee can work another 10 years and then get 30 years of government pension. Yes these decisions are hard, but that is why conservatives put Olsen in congress. To cut the size of government, and encourage private innovation, which will lead to private jobs, and increased taxes.
Remember, part of the employment problem of the last two years is that the size of the federal government has decreased. We are now to the point that the unemployment is only out of control for those without a high school diploma. For college educated people the unemployment rate is back to pre recessions levels. It is often reported in the conservative media that the federal workers make above national averages in wages, mostly because the federal government needs college educated individuals. This means that the private sector is taking up the skilled labor freed by the feds, and the expansion is leading to jobs for those who have fewer skills. In Texas it was reported that there were jobs fairs that hired thousands of unskilled workes last week. It would be sad if Olson was to reverse this reduction in the size of government and expansion in the private sector just becasue a few of his buddies were going to lose thier Hummers and mansions.
As far as Apple is concerned, it does provide disruptive technology, like Compaq used to. RIM sales did go down in response to the iPhone. A smart phone market for the masses was created, and the feature phone slaes declined. The iPhone provided a real alternative to those who did not want the technology controlled by the mobile phone companies because then the technology was never developed or optimized for the end user.
All google has done is put control of the phone back in the hands of the mobile phone provider. Google tried to do what Apple was doing, with the nexus one, but they failed. So the fight right now is who is going to control the smart phone. Is it going to be companies that cater to the consumer, i.e. Apple; Companies that cater to corporate end users, i.e. RIM; or companies that cater to the mobile phone providers, i.e. Google. MS is somewhere in between these, but is using large cash reserves to fortify the position.
Note that Google, like MS, is paying mobile phone OEMs to use the software. Googles is sharing revenue and funding development of the software. Google, like MS, is limiting who favored partners are, and limiting what can be done with Android. Ultimately, the Android phone, like the Windows 7 phone will be developed to maximize after market profits for MS and Google. With MS this will be done by extending the MS brand. With Google this will be done by search and tracking and analytics. Apple works on a straight revenue sharing agreement, and has not incentive to cripple phones to upmarket features. Apple makes money by making the consumer happy, with iTunes, not making the mobile phone companies happy.
So what are these lawsuits about. They are to delay the implementations of certain features that Apple considers critical to the market of the iPhone. Of course Apple is going to lose, but if Apple can keep the copy cat OEMs two generation back then Apple can remain the market leader.
The idea to sell every iPhone and iPad the can be built, and sold at a high profit, and let the others have the rest. This is different from MS and Google who depend on very large number of sales to drive their secondary markets. I am not hugely concerned with these suits. the technology is out there, and is being driven by consumer demand. The suits do not appear to limiting availability, except in the tablet market where google seems to purposefully be preventing OEMs from innovating using Android, and MS seems unintersted in pushing their tablet assets.
Same thing with black and white. Color was not needed in these flicks. All good movies present a selected slice of the world, and this slice was simply without color. Color in many moves provides a crutch for filmmakers who are incompetent. Put in some vibrant color and no one notices that the movie sucks.
To me there are two things that people have to realize. The first is that in good art, the medium and the product are fused. In other words, the way the art is going to be presented in an integral part of the process. Sometimes the product can be adjusted, but very often that adjustment will degrade the product. At the very least the new product will be a disappointment to those who have seen it before and are expecting a similar experience.
The second is that consumers get accustomed to a certain presentation style. Someone who has only seen Toy Story in 3D may be disappointed with the original version even though it may be inferior. A person who is used the minimimal instrumentation of Rap may not tolerate the over production of classical. A person who like the production value of Hip Hop may not like the old school Rap. People who are used to the immersive experience of video games may not tolerate the relative flatness and lack of interactivity of movies.
The hysterics might go away a bit if Apple would tell us what it is for, and why it is plaintext. My concern is that if the data is being collected just because it can be, like when google stole everyones email using their cameras car, that is a pretty silly thing to do. If it is just a collection of access points, the tell us. My fear is that Apple is not telling because it is a basis for some sort of scary experimental feature that they want to keep secret for the time being.
If this is one day out of the year that EC2 is offline, then that is probably better reliability than a home spun server. It is better reliability than I have ever gotten with any of the shared hosting companies I have dealt with. For affordable, or ad sponsored, high profile internet services 3 nines is probably all we are going to get. it is probably good enough. The services that were down were not critical. Real quality of life was not meaningfully effects for significantly large group of people. What this means to the common person is that one should have a redundant service. Use Gowalla and Foursquare. You may not be able to get to a dashboard, but maybe can get to the services. It was not like google was down.
The lack of 3G, like low memory capacities, is simply a means to meet a price point. It would be good for innovative tablets to have add on 3G and 4g modules like they have add on memory. A USB port would do in a pinch, which many tablets do not have.
For a properly protected computer, meaning that the user account is encrypted, this is likely not a huge issue. It is a good idea to encrypt the iPhone backup. For most of us when out computers or phones get stolen they will be wiped to insure that any tracking software we have on them will be erased. This is especially true for the iPhone. For those who are running around on someone, text messages, browsers histories, and call logs are likely going to be more incriminating. Anyone who runs around and does not have a throwaway cell phone for discrete communications has issues beyond what is the log.
Without seeing a log it is hard to know what the actual security implications are. The FAQ says that it is cell tower, not gps, so that does not give a precise location. There is no mention of how the data is logged. It is periodic or only when on uses the phone. If it only when the phone is used, then it would be reasonable to assume this is a diagnostic file to help with call quality. Even so, Apple should not have exposed users to such a privacy leak, and there is not reason to keep long term information, though there is not indication of how long data is kept.
In this case we have a person who thinks he knows how things should work. Extreme ideas are bad. Rational ideas, which are the ideas the speaker agrees with, are good. The purpose of debate is to change other peoples minds to meet my expectations. This was the purpose of media through much of written history.
It is not more. A radical person who controls the press can no longer control the ideas. A person who owns radio can still allow people to get on the radio or TV and say that people deserved the natural disaster, say an earthquake or tornado, because they angered god. They can allow a person to say that such disaster victims do not need help because we all pay taxes. They can allow such things to be said, and should be allowed to do such, but then we can tweet, with links to the recording so their can be no claim of 'context', and offer alternative views. And maybe only like minded people hear these views, but that is improvement from the days when all that were heard were the radical view of the elite.
Every time I read something like this I wonder why are they afraid of what people say. The problem has always been that free speech in the press has always been limited to what a few people wanted everyone else to think. If an 11 year old girl got raped by a high school sports star, all the people would hear is how she dressed sexy and was asking for it. Now that message is diluted, if only slightly, by radicals tweeting the radical idea that is never the responsibility of an 11 year old girl to seduce, or not, a 17 year old male twice her size. Such radical ideas lead to unfortunate situations where college boys can no longer get high school girls drunk and rape them, but hey, life is tough, and we all have to give up some perks.
In reality the DVD was not hugely better than the VHS tape, so why did many of us buy it? VHS tape was cumbersome in comparison to the simplicity of the DVD. VHS machines broke easily and were expensive to replace. VHS tapes took huge amounts of storage space. DVDs would play on the computer. DVDs, after not much time, were easy to transfer to the computer. These are values that do not exist in a bluray. Bluray just gives a consumer look and feel, a since of having the best. Some want that, many don't. It is interesting to note that DVD won in spite fo the fact that through incompetent menu implementation and anti-piracy fanatism it became harder in many way to deal with than the VHS. Unfortunately Bluray has the same issue, with none fo the advantages.
The DVD had the market in about 4 years. 4 years ago bluray apparently wond the format war. I think that various online video formats in fact won the format war, largely due the fact that Bluray was primarily developed to prevent users from format shifting. Video files can be backed up. Bluray cannot.
But that is not originality that makes long lasting art. That is the adaptation of originality to create something that is currently accesible to the masses. That is rewriting KJV into contemporary language and believing on has done something great. For a while yes, but we will alway back to the KJV.
It kind of reminds me of good tv and bad tv. Bad tv is where we have the same characters, all the time, with no growth. Good TV, like the stuff that Whedon does, has a base set of characters, but also a good background of characters that come and go. This is why MI-5 is good. The regulars tend to be in the background positions, while the primary characters are always recreated and there is no fear of having one go.
take an apple, 50 calories sugar, 2 g fiber. Healthy food. Horrible fruit stipes, almost twice calories of an apple, less than half he fiber, and can be eaten endlessly.
A few bottles of coke, or fruit punch, several fuit strip snacks, basically what people think is an ok diet, and one has 2000 calories with no nutrition, and hundreds of grams of refined and concentrated sugar, much more than is healthy.
this skit obviously encapsulates all technical support situations.
It was like the uproar over Beavis and Butthead many years ago. Even though parents were evidently responsible enough to get a tv, pay the electricity and the cable bill, they were not deemed responsible enough to monitor what the kids watched. Therefor MTV got in trouble when Beavis and Butthead tortured animals of set them afire. Evidently the kids would do the same and it was TV, not the parents fault.
So yes children are impressionable. Parents have to set limits on what kids are and are not able to do. But when parent make an explicitly decision to allow kids access to something, either by driving them there, or ordering a product, or giving access to a credit card, or whatever, it is no longer the companies fault. We saw this when kids were racking up huge phone and texting bills. I don't know what the issue was. If the kid can't use the phone, they don't get one, or have a prepaid.
I think oracle deserves some credit for this decision. They looked at their core mission, they looked at their resources, and discovered they had a product that was not a good fit. In the case of Sun, openoffice.org was a small part of a solution for the desktop. For Oracle it was not. It was an asset that may or may not be worth something. It could have helped out the Java asset. It did not. So they let it go. They could have made an attempt to make money off it, and let the brand flounder and die. They did not. I think Oracle, unlike some tech companies, does not just randomly try things and let's products die, to customer detriment, when something does not work. They are pros. They have customers that us openoffice.org, that use the brand to give them some protection, and this gift was for them.
As far as not caring about power usage on the computer, power saved is power saved. We might called this huge thing called manufacturing' the biggest target, but as mentioned this is a mythical object. The largest real single user of power is likely the end user, and this is where the saving will be most significant. For example, an HP power adapter is 135W, while the comparable power adaptor for a comparable Apple is 85 watts. That is 48% less. It is hard to saw what the actual power consumption is, but even if is 20% less, then that is 20% less stress on the residential grid when everyone gets home at night at the same time and turns on the computer. And in reality this is where the cost in energy production is. Not building for constant known load like manfuacturing, but buidling to provide power for peak commercial and residential loads.
It seems to me that flash is primarily driven by the commercial side of the web. This is not necessarily bad, and there are some critical things I cannot do on a flashless device, but it does beg the question of is flash really critical. On devices where work has to get done I would say no. On personal device bought by kids and young adults, probably. I suppose anyone born after 1990 is used to having 24 hour portable entertainment, and much of that is flash games. OTOH, I see kids using the flash games only when there is nothing better to do. If there are native games, angry birds, simple physics, that is what they will play. Which leads me to believe it is really about the ads and the possibility that if android did not run Flash, Flash as an advertising platform could be quickly depreciated.
So my issue with this is it is another step in the isolationism that really is not healthy. While some might say this is good as one can go to parties and text and receive texts from your long distance relationship, so not to be embarrassed. Some people might find you more attractive because you are in a relationship, but at some point the truth will emerge. That users of this service are losers who can't participate in a valid relationship. And dating is not expensive. Hiring prostitutes is expensive. Looking for people who meet pre existiing expectations is expensive. But dating is just going out and having fun. Not Expensvie.
The question is where the revenue comes from. Sales tax is popular because it kind of effects everyone. It is a like a flat consumption tax. The problem is that one state cannot really force a person in another state to comply with laws. So it makes no sense to force a business in another state, even if it has agent in the original state, to comply with that state laws. It would be like california telling me that I had to comply with their emission standards. That would be crazy.
What can happen is for states to file charges against their residents who don't pay use tax. This is within current laws and doesn't require a congressional act. What we don't need in new federal agencies forcing independents businesses to comply with complex and arcane state laws. What is some little shop in kentucky selling one a kind bluegrass collage going to do when it has to comply with all the laws of all the other 49 states. It is going to go out business. How is this going to help anyone?
Unfortunately we can't just blame the liberal democrats who want to kill business but imposing a unruly tax burden. It is the republicans, at least in my state, that are imposing the sales tax dogma. The sales tax imposes in huge burden on small business, and encourages all rational people to buy out of state. It is no longer a rational revenue source for the 21st century, but the conservative demand we have a sales tax. In fact a flat income tax would generate much more money and would likely impact the middle class less. It would impact the upper class more, make them pay their share, which is why conservatives do not want it. It would encourage people to visit small business, and give them a competitive advantage. This, some think, is bad because it would reduce the power of the corporation.
So it is well within the rights of congress to regulate interstate commerce. Republican lawmaker love sales tax so they would love to have a law to reach into another state and extract taxes from third parties. But it is stupid, and both parties need to find other ways of generating revenue.
There were many possible locations, and a few shuttles to go around. We need to put these machines where they are going to be seen, not just where we feel they are deserved. This is why the US is so messed up. We think certain people deserve the money, so they get, while people who can put it to good use, like food, are told they don't deserve it. Like the congressman who said $175K is salary is not that much because he had several kids. Somehow he deserved the money, while his constituents did not.
I have been to Space Center Houston several time over the years, since the year it was built. It is a joke. Cape Canaveral is not a joke. I don't the shuttle sitting at space center houston where no one sees it. I don't want some faith based arguments saying if we had the shuttle people would come by and see it. We have artifacts in houston. We have a saturn rocket. We have a capsule. The capsule is hidden where no one can see it. The rocket is hidden where few can see it. We do not leverage what we have, just complain when someone is not going to give us cookies.
I am sad the shuttle is not going to be houston, but am happy they will where many people will see. Many of these people have never seen it before. Being in the area I have seen it launch(closeup) in Florida. I have seen it on transport in wellington. I have seen the astronauts in transit in ellingotn. I have been in the training centers. I am lucky to live where I get ot see all these things.
I know am happy because people who have not been able to see what I have seen can at least see the artifacts. let the rest of country enjoy them in the retirement. I don't even like that Florida has one. Why can't one go the midwest? Let the rest of country see why we live in wonder at the wonderful piece of machinery.
People of limited means may indeed have a smart phone, but it is unlikely they have a smart phone from ATT. ATT, or Verizon for that matter, are simply not the value carriers. When looking at prepaid plans people complain about the relative hight cost, but do they actually look at how that cost will affect them? Honest on this plan I would not be worse off than I am now. As I use few minutes, and the average plan charges for a huge fee for minutes and not much more for data, I would break even. So though this reduction might seem trivial, it might open up the possibility for someone who wants to use a smartphone but does not have $70 a month to pay for the contract plan. If most data and calls are over WiFi, if should be easy to data over the air to 100 MB a month, or $50. To some that might seem extreme, but is might a significant cost savings to some.
Which is why they are doing this. By including games, they increase they increase the chance that a person who never watched the Grammy awards might watch. The Grammy awards are irrelevent to the gamer generation. This is just a way to make it a little less irrelevant.
That said one can't use a smarphone on a test. That is why over the past 10 years calculators have no been designed for he professional, but for the testing companies. Pro features are removed to make it acceptable for the standardized test. Ad copy basically focuses on this. I believe the TI nspire even has an interchanabled keyboard that limit functionality so it can be used on tests.
I don't see any reason to teach the calculator other than it is a necessary test taking skill. As long as the public gives credence to the AP exam, as long as states believe calculators are more important than basic skills, as long as calculator manufactures pay politicians to require calculators in the classroom, we will have them. OTOH, it is much more likely to get a kid o use a calculator to do work, rather than a computer where they go off and play WOW.
It would make more sense, if we are not going to be able to download music to any device, to just have a streaming service of everything in the Amazon collection.
My pages load plenty fast. What I notice is that when the page goes to google analytics that load process stops while waiting for the server. There was a time when pages would load partial content, and then go for the ads. Now, many pull the ads and analytics first. This would be good if the ad servers were fast, but the seem to be getting slower. Since google serves so many ads, it seems within it's power to make the web faster by making the ads faster. Perhaps, like MS, they want the web slow for all other browser, so Chrome seems so much faster.