That is the trend right now. The issue is that when one is actually trying to effect change, people like her really screw it up. For instance Sarah Palin came to Houston to speak at a forced birther conference. The conference happened to be held just before the gubernatorial race between the socially conservative Republican incumbent and the fiscally conservative Democratic contender. Now people in Texas are pretty conservative, and while many people don't believe in forcing birth, many are capable of discussing it, even those who do not vote republican. So what did Sarah Palin do: she started with a pitch for the Governor and pretty much insulted everyone that was not going to vote for him. Now remember, Texas is conservative. Many people who voted against the Governor, Perry, did so because he is fiscal liberal(his policies of hiding fiscal incompetence resulted in 25% budget shortfall for the coming budget) while knowing full well that the legislature would remain very socially conservative. While this would mean that no laws would be passed allowed doctors to assist in the suicide of the mother so that the child might live, neither would we have an increase in the number of 12 years girls who sell themselves for lottery tickets knowing they can get a easily available and safe termination. There was not reason for Sarah Palin to promote Perry in such a venue. It did not help the plight of the unborn child. It only helped Sarah Palin the prostitute sell herself.
And this is why mixing entertainment and politics is wrongs. Entertainment is there to encourage people to pay to here you talk. Politics is there so people can have fair representatives to protect their interests as much as possible. Sarah Palin, as an entertainer, did not protect the interest of the unborn child. She used the unborn child to line her pocket as an entertainer, and in the process reduced the possibility that we as a country can come together and discuss the issue rationally. Now, I don't want to pick on Sarah Palin. There are entertainers on all sides of all issues that are willing to harm the democratic debate to personally promote their earning potential. These people we do not need.
Cell phones are a symptom. The problem is the belief that security can be affected in highly sensitive areas using unskilled laborers. The employees are well paid for being unskilled labor, but they are with people who have all day to think about how to get around the rules. Likewise, the lack of professionalism means there is often no long term consequences for smuggling in a contraband, or more to the point, vigilantly insuring that such things are not smuggled in. After all if the inmates have a few generally harmless toys it makes them eiser to control. Certainly our rising prison population, along with unwillingness of tax payers to fund the population, while asking that more and more basically innocuous acts be criminalized, means that expecting any reasonable security is delusional.
We see this same thing in the TSA. Low skilled labor, relatively high wages, yet what can be done is limited. We can collect water bottles, but we can't issue tickets that would minimize the possibility of repeated attempts. While more people would be OK with frisking by a professional police force, frisking by the equivalent of a meter reader seems unreasonable. One might wonder why we depend on semi-skilled labor for the safety of our airports? It is simply a jobs program, meant to keep unemployment down and win the 2004 election.
There is also an analogy to public schools. Some people believe that a school can function with semi-skilled college graduates. But kids, like inmates, when combined with an unskilled teacher, have nothing to do but growing angry about having to follow orders all day and come up with ideas to disrupt the school, get the teachers fired, figure our how to get drugs and sex, and generally not learn. An experienced professional teaching force, though expensive, is much more likely to engage the kids in more meaningful activities.
iPhone went on sale today with unlimited data and tethering. A few hours late we learn that Verizon will be throttling bandwidth. If this is not bait and switch, unethical advertising, and intent to deceive the consumer I don't know what it.
Look at this way. Verizon is already giving the user a slower data rate than iPhone users have come to expect. Now they are saying if you use 'too much' as defined by them, you may be effectively cut off. After all, the definition of 'too much' and 'throttling' is defined completely by Verizon. Previously 'too much' was 150 MB, and who knows what throttling is. Maybe Edge?
This reinforces my previous expectation that though Verizon has the best network in the US, they will never give the average customer a square deal or straight answer.
App, as it is used know, pretty much refers to the way the software is delivered. Applications are often delivered on physical media and explicitly installed by the user. Apps, as the word is used now, are delivered exclusively through a network and installed and updated seamlessly. Applet are like this but usually do not reside on the users machines.
All this is silly and pedantic. What is going on is simple. Google is playing a numbers game like it did with versions number on Chrome. If every bookmark becomes an App, then Google will not seem so anemic when compared to Firefox and Apple. After all, when one has no quality, quantity is the key.
According to the charts, IE declined 10 points in 2009. has been stable in 2010, and is showing a blip which may or may not be a trend.
Firefox has been suck a 20-something percent for 2 years.
Chrome has been growing for until spring of 2010, when it took a nosedive to low even negative growth. This correlates to IE market loss, so it is reasonable to suggest that chrome users are abandoning IE. The numbers also suggest that users are unsatisfied with Chrome.
The growth numbers also suggest that Safari has a steady growth indicating a satisfied user base that continues to use Safari. In fact the negative growth numbers of Chrome, and positive growth numbers of Safari means that the recent growth numbers for both are about the same, and Safari growth could exceed Chrome. This while other browsers growth is averaging 0.
From this is seems likely that MS can kill Chrome simply by delivering a competitive browser, without the tricks and subterfuge used to kill Navigator. Safari, Firefox, and Opera, OTOH, have clearly held their own and show sustained genuine growth over the long term, and therefore will likely continue o do so into the future.
This is along the line I was thinking, but again, such writing is likely used somewhere. For instance, I use a glass dip pen for certain work. The fact that they can easily cleaned of ink allow for multiple inks to be used without the need for multiple pens. While I used dip pens in high school for draftings, I did not learn about glass varieties until after college.
In this way I think that saying tools never go out of use is a bit of a grand statement. While the concept of a tool may still be in use, a particular implementation may not be. We still use have various things to write on, not all made of wood pulp, but some forms are clearly no longer made. We still have manual hand drills, but I would wager there forms that only exist in sketch form in old books. As far as floppy disks are concerned, maybe they can be bought, but I doubt they meet the specification of the originals. The originals had to endure some stress for daily use. Even by the late 80's floppy I noticed that floppies were not as durable as they once were.
Back in the day I used to say this about 64K and PPC Mac applications. The mac has 90% of what I needed. What was missing were games and some vertical software, the later had dedicated PC.
Yet most said they had to have a PC because is had all the software. Most of it, evidently similar to the Google, was made by MS. For general use there was never any need for a PC, except a cheap business machine. But it was a numbers game, so the platform with he big number won.
Science has to start with data. We put data into models. These models make predictions, and we construct experiments to test those predictions. The best case scenario is when we see some novel authentic phenomena that is explained by the theory.
When I was reading cosmology many years ago, it struck me as philosophy. It still does. But philosophy is not bad, and not necessarily not science. Remember that science began as natural philosophy that threw out the all the previous assumptions of how the universe worked. The best science still throws out previous assumption. Assumptions like wave require a media, that we can produce an arbitrary energy, that things can be cut into arbitrarily small sizes, that we can measure things to arbitrary precision. It is also know that when scientist try to invalidate these treasured assumptions, the scientists that have built their careers on these assumptions will revolt.
Take General Relativity. It is a theory that makes some predictions, is getting increasing support, but is not as testable as the photoelectric effect which has many practical applications. These practical applications are key because such routine use of theory tends to validate it. Any theory that remains in the lab is simply going to be that, a theory. General Relativity is supported, it describes the way the universe might be, and is the simplest explanation, but it certainly does not explain how the universe has to be. This unlike QM, which due to the practical applications seems to describe how the universe works, at least within the domain.
So what we have in the book are a series of scenarios. IMHO the valid question to ask is does the data support these scenarios, do these scenarios fall out the math, and is there any chance that any of them can be tested. If the first two are true then, to me, they have some interest. If the data has to be cherry picked and the math is severely obtuse, that is an issue. Otherwise it is like the theory that there is one electron in the universe. It may be true, but it may not be useful or testable. That does not mean anyone should be outraged because someone brings it up.
Science, and teaching science, is hard because it is often difficult to determine which are the truly salient facts, and what background is necessary.
In this case the background is that the standard for mass, unlike time or distance, cannot independently be constructed in the lab. This means that science and industry are susceptible to two issues. The first is degradation of a physical standard, in this case a hunk of metal in France. The second is that one is dependent on other to create proxies of the standard, and as a result have no true assurance of the accuracy of the standard. A suitable lab with suitable personal can masure time and distance without the need of a proxy manufactured by others, and no dependence on a fixed physical object.. There is a desire for the same to be true for mass.
Second, no one knows if the hunk of metal is shrinking, and if it is how much it is shrinking by. If the experts knew it was shrinking, then they could figure out how to at least partially correct it. The hunk of metal might not be charging at all, or it could be accreating matter. Without an independent standard, which does not apparently exists, as everything is based on the hunk of metal, all there is is guesswork.
The third is the idea that Planck's Constant is being used to create the standard. In fact Planck's constant is one two approaches. The other is to create a sphere from a silicon and use Avagadro's Constant to define the mass. The problem is that these two approaches do no lead to consistant results, with an error about an order of magnitude large than the expected error.
The issue with averaging is that while one does average within a result, and even results that are taken from similar procedures, it is unclear that averages in this case is suitable. It seems to me that the results point to an interesting area of research, and rather than just averaging, more work should be done understanding the inconsistency. If it is not random error, and not an artifact, then something really fascinating might be going on.
If it is put into every car, and mandated for use, then it is an invasion of privacy. It is prior restraint which is frowned upon by liberals except in the case of those sad little excuse for weapons the conservatives are always ranting about, and by conservatives except in the case of publishing embarrassing facts about other conservatives.
But if one is convicted of drunk driving, then it is not so much a invasion of privacy as much as security theater. The appropriate penalty for drunk driving is temporary revocation of the privilege to drive.If this does not work permanent revocation and prison. Ideally, drunk driving, like other drug abuse would be a felony, thereby giving more negativite incentive.
The big reason this is not done, and unnecessarily complex technology is used instead, is because the convenience of these criminals is given more importance than the population they wish to murder. The other reason is that a lot of important people think it is their god given right to drive drunk, and no one wants to risk the child of some really important politician to end up with a felony for what could at most result in the death of some nobody.
This would really be very good because it would reduce the negative aspects of the recent elections. Take 2008. Obama received 52.9% of the popular vote and 67% of he electoral votes. This level of popularity has been reached very few times by a non-incumbent presidential candidate in a postwar era, yet claim he has no mandate. As a sitting president, in the previous presidential cycle Bush received 50.7 of the popular vote, but because he was liked here was a mandate. The Tea Party could not pull of a simple Senate Coup, yet they have a mandate.
So my point is this. If we can choose who we like, then certain people will vote for most or all choices, and some will still stay home. If we can vote a dislike, then more people would vote and we could quantify this mandate thing. If Bush had low disapprovals with respect to approvals, then he would have the mandate. If Obama had high disapprovals with respect to approvals, then he would not.
We could even quantify this into the count. Take a fraction of a point off for every negative point. Doing a whole point would render he process moot. It might be interesting to model a systems of partitioning a vote depending on how many people are voted and not voted for.
This is nothing new. ATT has made no effort to move me from my unlimited plan to a limited plan when I bought my last phone Why would they? I am probably seldom over the 2GB limit, and they get $5 more than if I went to the max plan, and $15 more than if I went to the lower plan, which honestly is enough. The only thing this has to do with Verizon is that if one has an unlimited plan with ATT, it is unclear that one will be able to get the same deal with Verizon, at least long term. Verizon has says it is a limited time offer, and it is not clear what that means.
Even so if one includes tethering Verizon may still be a good deal. As far as I can tell ATT wants $75 a month for phone data and tethering, and limits tethering to 2GB. I have been told that with the 2GB phone plan the costs drops to $45, but is that for 2GB total, or 2GB per device. Still it is not a lot of data for the kind of stuff I do, like transfer video files up and down from my websites.
What made the iPhone deal with Verizon notable was the unlimited tethering, something we never had with ATT. Now it looks like Verizon is not even going to match ATT on unlimited data for legacy customers, which for a company that is supposed to have the best network in the US is simply pathetic.
They will may hate having to name 'friends' but they will love having the ability to spend the day on facebook at school. I suspect the real reason the HTTPS was implemented was to keep kids off facebook at school. I have no problem with kids spending some time in school on social networks, but if we are honest we will admit that most kids, even teens, do not have maturity to make a choice between immediate gratification and hard work. Even adults have this problem, which is why saw that Facebook was often blocked site by business in 2010.
What I find is that login records, like phone records, are accesible to parents. A student might be doing bad in school, and rather than checking the phone and facebook records and seeing that the kid is sending a 20 texts an hour during school hours and logging into facebook 10 times a day, rather than reprimanding the student we call the school for allowing the student to fail.
Arguably education has two purposes higher than this. One is to give kids a common sets of experiences so that they have the skills to interact in the particular society in which they live. For some kids this means high end private schools in which they can be trained along with their peers to live what many would call the extremely successful life. For others this means a public school education in which many of us learn to interact with people of different genders, cultures, and economic situations. As such things are, for most of us, going to be requirements in our work life, learning these skills early and developing them probably should be a stated and funded goal.
As second higher, though perhaps crass, purpose is to keep workers who would otherwise be low wage earners out fo the workforce. One implication of the never ended need for education is that full time employment may not begin until a person is 20 years old, even if they do not go to college. Welfare programs, which no one seems willing to cut, might mean a person is retired by 60, and perhaps only spend 30 of those years working. Through promotion of individual participating in the free market rather than being given a job by pseudo-governmental corporations we might increase the number of the persons who are unwillingly stuck at school and increase useful productivity, this would require a rethink of the educational process. One idea to graduate people at 17 instead of 18. If we had a robust market that promoted the sole proprietorship this might work.
While I do not like competition, it is incorrect to say that education is not competitive. It has to be. Ideally education will give equal opportunity to all kids, and those with the skills and merit, not just proper parents and money, will excel. We have to do this. It is not possible to just select the white boys from the most agreeable parents and educate then to be the future leaders. We know that while this works, it has huge opportunity costs in terms of wasted potential productivity, and puts the US at an economic disadvantage. So we must have competitive in which the best rise to the top where they receive special educational opportunities. Is this process fair? Of course not. Certain students will have advantages no based on personal merit. But that is the way the world works. if an effort is made to make the process equitable, we wil have a few innovators and leaders we would not ordinarily have harnessed.
So the pressure, money and focus is to insure that opportunities are given to all kids so that, if they have merit, they will have the opportunity to grow, innovate, and hopefully make the world a better place. In this sense the competition is not about tests or growth, but about building creative innovative minds that can be the next Lisa Meitner.
It is more likely that as an employee he decided that is was impossible to maintain the official stated core values while producing the cash flow required by the founders.
China boils down to the future of the company as a cash sown. China is acknowledged as the greatest emerging market. Those who are not interested in playing ball with government get to honor core US values, but also are prevented from enjoying the profits that will come from China. Those who do play will be portrayed as evil, but get to grow fat and happy.
Google does not have to be China. Engagement is not going to change China's vision of human rights. In the US those rights include freedom of speech, freedom to own toy guns, freedom to criticize authority. In China human rights means freedom from starvation, freedom to walk the streets without threats, freedom to live. All engagement is going to do is increase Googles profit, and insure it is profitable for a long time.
Some might say that Google founders are more interested in the image of the company than profits. Such statements are not supported by Larry Page paying nearly 50 million for a yacht. In this economy the market for such luxuries is in decline due to companies unsure what the free market is up to. However, if one is depending on a command economy, such issues are not relevent.
As silly as this sounds, I can attest to how difficult it is to teach science to those who have no incentive to leave magical thinking behind. Fact patterns, sets with no internal contradictions, humble thoughts, mean nothing to them.
But I see such influence going beyond just lack of evidence based logical thought. There is a desire to promote the kind of absolute fact based consistency that leads to little minds. This is the kind of things that leads to standardized tests and statements that assert the US is a failing position not because of education that tries to stifle innovation, but rather that we do spend enough time in school or test enough.
Really if we are to innovate we must educate, but also must let those innovative minds wander. We cannot say a person is less than another just because they cannot do well on a test. Rather we must look to the innovative students and let them create. In the US testing leads us to professionals that cannot innovate because all we have educated them to do is fil in a bubble. For the religious fanatics filling in a bubble is education. What we must do not let dogma decide what we do. Thirty or fifty years ago education was about exposing students to ideas and processes, and there was noting wrong with it. We are in decline because there is no room for the innovative student.
Let's take this one step further. Most people do not need a land line phone. There are some advantages to having it, mostly a feeling of security, both real and imagined. Most of us have grown up with a land line, so not having one seems a false economy.
I know people who still pay huge amounts for calling on land lines, or use phone cards, when Skype give superior call quality to many countries at a fraction of the cost. Why, that is what they learned to do. People have been trained to go home and watch cable TV, so they are OK with paying for an internet connection and TV when they only really need the internet connection.
So AOL may be a useless service, or it may be serving a niche need that allows internet access to those that might not otherwise take the time to relearn a new tool. It is like when I tell people they can do email and surf on a tablet instead of their virus infect slow PC. It would make sense to to use 15 watts instead of 100 watts to do this work, and not give the power company profit merely because these people are misinformed, but hey they won't do it. It is arguable that most money is mae simply through knowledge arbitrage.
To me the devices are separate from the software stack. As of now, the only company that has 'bet the farm' on android is HTC and Google. Consider also that though Android is gaining rapid market share, and Apple is seen as a carrier friendly firm, Verizon still wanted the iPhone. Also consider that Google and OHC does require significant compliance with OHC rules, and consumers expect closed Google apps, which has allowed Google to attack those who tried to build a phone without it's consent.
Which is simply to say that it is unclear whether anyone other than HTC is 100% committed to Android as the primary stack. I think it is also instructive to note that HTC at one time was a developer of MS phones. It may be that the best way for MS to gain market share is to scare phone makes into not using Android.
It is a complicated relationship. Apple is being sued because it is not part of the club, and entered successfully into a market it is not wanted. The lack of phone experience meant it likely did step on some patents. Google is being sued because in it's arrogance it tried to do OSS independently, not using existing tech and experience. In the search market, which was immature, that was fine. But in the mature phone market, with an old incumbency, MS included, Google and Apple as upstarts are trouble.
Blockbuster's success was due to fact that maintaining a huge network of stores was not so expensive. Buy the movies wholesale, rent them out, make money pretty quick. The storage never seemed to be a major issue. Netflix is essentially killing them by killing the late fees.
It is clear that streaming is a pay per view situation rather than buy once and earn money after a certain number of rentals. This however is not a bad thing as Blockbuster did the same thing. At some point, for some movies, rather than buying the movies they entered into some sort of revenue sharing agreement with certain studios. This let them take out the smaller video rental stores, but did not protect them against Netflix.
One thing that is true with streaming is that while a person on a $10 plan might get 100 CDs a year, it would be easy for a person who to stream 5 or 10X that number. In fact there is no information on average shipping costs, which could be dramatically lower the $1 maximum value. But if we take the 5 cent number as fact, a year streaming could easily cost revenue from three months of subscription, with licensing fees eclipsing that cost.
However we know that Netflix has raised prices for DVD subscribers, apparently to encourage streaming, so either streaming costs are not so dramatic, DVD costs are more than we think, or people are not streaming significantly more than they were receiving media.
I will take issue with the training costs. Right now training for popular proprietary software is funded in three ways. One is that software is pirated by people who want to use the software, they use it, learn it, and then are available for employers. We know that software piracy costs software firms at least 34 billion dollars a year, and those costs are not tolerated by the firms. They are passed on through higher prices to customers. Therefore, training through piracy results in higher prices to customers using the software, and so the customers are indirectly paying for training. It is just that they are paying to train the employees of competing firms.
Third, people are trained through what are often for profit adult education programs. These programs are often funded through student loans. The default rate at for profit schools can be twice as high as public non-profit schools and three times as high as private non-profit schools. All these defaults are covered by taxpayer money. Again, the tax payer is funding the training of proprietary programs when often free OSS programs are available to teach the concepts. Firms are being taxed into bankruptcy to pay for training and buy licenses so their competitors can save on training costs. What is the point in that?
To be sure this report is a classic case of externalizing costs to make a product seem cheaper. Sure blowing up a mountaintop is the cheap way to get coal because it is the taxpayer, not the firm, that is going to be funding the health care costs of the townships below the mountain. Sure it is cheaper to run up debt to fund a ten year war intended to make war mongers rich because the debt will be paid by the next generation of middle class tax payers, not the war mongers kids.
OSS software is not useful for everything, but it does seem to work for much of the web infrastructure. Sure when I use OSS on my website there is a learning curve and the resources are not widely available. OTOH, when I want a feature I do not have to beg MS to include it, I can just pay one of the army of PHP, Python, of Ruby developers to do it. Even better, I am not a slave to an external upgrade cycle intended to maximize profits for a firm that has no regard to my needs and will demand upgrade fees even if I do not need the new software. This is another indication that OSS will sooner rather than later destroy the MS business model.
I can't really see the need for encryption of a data on my phone. I encrypt the hardisk of my computer I carry around because I am not willing to lose that data at a whim. There is nothing on my phone that is not redundant. There are any number of way to wipe the phone, and I suspect that anyone who plays with the phone will wipe the data. That is fine with me. If I do it accidentally, it is a simple restore.
And the foreclosure market would have been so screwed up it would not be likely that any bank could get enough coherent records togethers to foreclose.
So now, after millions of dollars in bonuses for executives who bankrupted the company, and hardly any money to normalize loans so that we would not neighborhood destroyed by foreclosed home, they spend money on this but lock out the people who paid for the bailout.
It could be that Facebook is at the point of Myspace, where the company is trying to cash in while it can. Goldman Sachs is trying to create a novel structure, much like the mortgage back security, in whih the real risks of the investment are hidden from the investor. This instruments sole purpose is to hide the innards of Facebook from investors. Because the money for Facebook is from the taxpayer, Goldman Sachs has almost no risk, just potential for commisions.
The computer is a general purpose tool which is specialized through the software. Teach the kids the basics. Have them practice the basics in class, then as quickly as possible design and implement products. The biggest mistake that I have seen is teaching the tools outside of context.
This may mean allowing different student to persure different products. Some can build a web server, some can write an online application, so can write security utilities. I recall one class that taught fortran through the calculation of the radius of the Bohr atom.
We need to be aware of the security risk of the instruments we use. That said more advance and abstract instruments are not necessarily more risky. For instance in a barter system we might use goods, but have the risk of those goods losing value due to decay or market forces. We might say a objective measure such as gold could be secured, but not against inflation. Gold has not kept up with inflation for most fo the past 35 years.
So maybe we have currency which can also be lost, stolen, and has no protection against inflation. So we use bank accounts and saving accounts with can secure money against loss due theft and inflation. But we use checks to get the money, and check can be stolen and used. We can stop checks, but that is no guarantee, and it is our money we are spending.
Credit cards then come, in which we spend others money. We can let our assets gain interest, and spend other assets. We pay more for product, but do not risk our money. Even if we lose the card, and charges get made, it is not our money.
So what does this have to with the telephone. Telephones hava an added bit of security with an access code. Telephones can be remote wiped, unlike credit cards or checks. Around the world telephones are being linked to store valued accounts which allows user to more securely use and transfer monies.
I do not use my phone for money, and I do not use any of RFID technologies, but I was raised on credit. This is the same as some people who were raised on checks not using credit cards. But to say that phones will inherently lead to less secure behavior or less responsible behavior is not supported by facts. It all has to do with education and custom.
I think it goes a bit beyond this. Amazon is a sales site, so makes money from directly selling product. It is not like Apple and Google where the money can be made off some products, and other products just need to cover costs. Sure Amazon can have loss leaders, but there is not reason to make an entire catagory a loss leader, especially if there is not expectation of profit on the back end.
So what Amazon is doing, IMHO, is to make sure they never sell at a loss. I don't suppose this is any different from what they do with any other product. There is the cost of the product from the manufacturer, the costs associated with the sale, the profit, which leads to the final price. The final price, as we all knows, varies and is set by Amazon. So a developer wants a dollar, so sets the MSRP at five. As long as Amazon sells it for more than a $1.42 the developers get more, so it is win win. If I were an Android eveloper, I would prefer this model where sales are actively managed rather than a site where Apps were just plunked down.
I think this is a reasonable mode for a private App store that is not subsidized by the hardware the Apps. Developers are guaranteed a certain amount per sale, and Amazon is free to adjust the price to meet market conditions. Amazon is not cheating developers out of profits from the sale. It does allow them to sell free Apps, but, as mentioned, Amazon is not doing this to promote other products, so it makes little sense to offer free apps the way they offer free books for the Kindle.
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And this is why mixing entertainment and politics is wrongs. Entertainment is there to encourage people to pay to here you talk. Politics is there so people can have fair representatives to protect their interests as much as possible. Sarah Palin, as an entertainer, did not protect the interest of the unborn child. She used the unborn child to line her pocket as an entertainer, and in the process reduced the possibility that we as a country can come together and discuss the issue rationally. Now, I don't want to pick on Sarah Palin. There are entertainers on all sides of all issues that are willing to harm the democratic debate to personally promote their earning potential. These people we do not need.
We see this same thing in the TSA. Low skilled labor, relatively high wages, yet what can be done is limited. We can collect water bottles, but we can't issue tickets that would minimize the possibility of repeated attempts. While more people would be OK with frisking by a professional police force, frisking by the equivalent of a meter reader seems unreasonable. One might wonder why we depend on semi-skilled labor for the safety of our airports? It is simply a jobs program, meant to keep unemployment down and win the 2004 election.
There is also an analogy to public schools. Some people believe that a school can function with semi-skilled college graduates. But kids, like inmates, when combined with an unskilled teacher, have nothing to do but growing angry about having to follow orders all day and come up with ideas to disrupt the school, get the teachers fired, figure our how to get drugs and sex, and generally not learn. An experienced professional teaching force, though expensive, is much more likely to engage the kids in more meaningful activities.
Look at this way. Verizon is already giving the user a slower data rate than iPhone users have come to expect. Now they are saying if you use 'too much' as defined by them, you may be effectively cut off. After all, the definition of 'too much' and 'throttling' is defined completely by Verizon. Previously 'too much' was 150 MB, and who knows what throttling is. Maybe Edge?
This reinforces my previous expectation that though Verizon has the best network in the US, they will never give the average customer a square deal or straight answer.
All this is silly and pedantic. What is going on is simple. Google is playing a numbers game like it did with versions number on Chrome. If every bookmark becomes an App, then Google will not seem so anemic when compared to Firefox and Apple. After all, when one has no quality, quantity is the key.
Firefox has been suck a 20-something percent for 2 years.
Chrome has been growing for until spring of 2010, when it took a nosedive to low even negative growth. This correlates to IE market loss, so it is reasonable to suggest that chrome users are abandoning IE. The numbers also suggest that users are unsatisfied with Chrome.
The growth numbers also suggest that Safari has a steady growth indicating a satisfied user base that continues to use Safari. In fact the negative growth numbers of Chrome, and positive growth numbers of Safari means that the recent growth numbers for both are about the same, and Safari growth could exceed Chrome. This while other browsers growth is averaging 0.
From this is seems likely that MS can kill Chrome simply by delivering a competitive browser, without the tricks and subterfuge used to kill Navigator. Safari, Firefox, and Opera, OTOH, have clearly held their own and show sustained genuine growth over the long term, and therefore will likely continue o do so into the future.
In this way I think that saying tools never go out of use is a bit of a grand statement. While the concept of a tool may still be in use, a particular implementation may not be. We still use have various things to write on, not all made of wood pulp, but some forms are clearly no longer made. We still have manual hand drills, but I would wager there forms that only exist in sketch form in old books. As far as floppy disks are concerned, maybe they can be bought, but I doubt they meet the specification of the originals. The originals had to endure some stress for daily use. Even by the late 80's floppy I noticed that floppies were not as durable as they once were.
Yet most said they had to have a PC because is had all the software. Most of it, evidently similar to the Google, was made by MS. For general use there was never any need for a PC, except a cheap business machine. But it was a numbers game, so the platform with he big number won.
When I was reading cosmology many years ago, it struck me as philosophy. It still does. But philosophy is not bad, and not necessarily not science. Remember that science began as natural philosophy that threw out the all the previous assumptions of how the universe worked. The best science still throws out previous assumption. Assumptions like wave require a media, that we can produce an arbitrary energy, that things can be cut into arbitrarily small sizes, that we can measure things to arbitrary precision. It is also know that when scientist try to invalidate these treasured assumptions, the scientists that have built their careers on these assumptions will revolt.
Take General Relativity. It is a theory that makes some predictions, is getting increasing support, but is not as testable as the photoelectric effect which has many practical applications. These practical applications are key because such routine use of theory tends to validate it. Any theory that remains in the lab is simply going to be that, a theory. General Relativity is supported, it describes the way the universe might be, and is the simplest explanation, but it certainly does not explain how the universe has to be. This unlike QM, which due to the practical applications seems to describe how the universe works, at least within the domain.
So what we have in the book are a series of scenarios. IMHO the valid question to ask is does the data support these scenarios, do these scenarios fall out the math, and is there any chance that any of them can be tested. If the first two are true then, to me, they have some interest. If the data has to be cherry picked and the math is severely obtuse, that is an issue. Otherwise it is like the theory that there is one electron in the universe. It may be true, but it may not be useful or testable. That does not mean anyone should be outraged because someone brings it up.
In this case the background is that the standard for mass, unlike time or distance, cannot independently be constructed in the lab. This means that science and industry are susceptible to two issues. The first is degradation of a physical standard, in this case a hunk of metal in France. The second is that one is dependent on other to create proxies of the standard, and as a result have no true assurance of the accuracy of the standard. A suitable lab with suitable personal can masure time and distance without the need of a proxy manufactured by others, and no dependence on a fixed physical object.. There is a desire for the same to be true for mass.
Second, no one knows if the hunk of metal is shrinking, and if it is how much it is shrinking by. If the experts knew it was shrinking, then they could figure out how to at least partially correct it. The hunk of metal might not be charging at all, or it could be accreating matter. Without an independent standard, which does not apparently exists, as everything is based on the hunk of metal, all there is is guesswork.
The third is the idea that Planck's Constant is being used to create the standard. In fact Planck's constant is one two approaches. The other is to create a sphere from a silicon and use Avagadro's Constant to define the mass. The problem is that these two approaches do no lead to consistant results, with an error about an order of magnitude large than the expected error.
The issue with averaging is that while one does average within a result, and even results that are taken from similar procedures, it is unclear that averages in this case is suitable. It seems to me that the results point to an interesting area of research, and rather than just averaging, more work should be done understanding the inconsistency. If it is not random error, and not an artifact, then something really fascinating might be going on.
But if one is convicted of drunk driving, then it is not so much a invasion of privacy as much as security theater. The appropriate penalty for drunk driving is temporary revocation of the privilege to drive.If this does not work permanent revocation and prison. Ideally, drunk driving, like other drug abuse would be a felony, thereby giving more negativite incentive.
The big reason this is not done, and unnecessarily complex technology is used instead, is because the convenience of these criminals is given more importance than the population they wish to murder. The other reason is that a lot of important people think it is their god given right to drive drunk, and no one wants to risk the child of some really important politician to end up with a felony for what could at most result in the death of some nobody.
So my point is this. If we can choose who we like, then certain people will vote for most or all choices, and some will still stay home. If we can vote a dislike, then more people would vote and we could quantify this mandate thing. If Bush had low disapprovals with respect to approvals, then he would have the mandate. If Obama had high disapprovals with respect to approvals, then he would not.
We could even quantify this into the count. Take a fraction of a point off for every negative point. Doing a whole point would render he process moot. It might be interesting to model a systems of partitioning a vote depending on how many people are voted and not voted for.
Even so if one includes tethering Verizon may still be a good deal. As far as I can tell ATT wants $75 a month for phone data and tethering, and limits tethering to 2GB. I have been told that with the 2GB phone plan the costs drops to $45, but is that for 2GB total, or 2GB per device. Still it is not a lot of data for the kind of stuff I do, like transfer video files up and down from my websites.
What made the iPhone deal with Verizon notable was the unlimited tethering, something we never had with ATT. Now it looks like Verizon is not even going to match ATT on unlimited data for legacy customers, which for a company that is supposed to have the best network in the US is simply pathetic.
What I find is that login records, like phone records, are accesible to parents. A student might be doing bad in school, and rather than checking the phone and facebook records and seeing that the kid is sending a 20 texts an hour during school hours and logging into facebook 10 times a day, rather than reprimanding the student we call the school for allowing the student to fail.
As second higher, though perhaps crass, purpose is to keep workers who would otherwise be low wage earners out fo the workforce. One implication of the never ended need for education is that full time employment may not begin until a person is 20 years old, even if they do not go to college. Welfare programs, which no one seems willing to cut, might mean a person is retired by 60, and perhaps only spend 30 of those years working. Through promotion of individual participating in the free market rather than being given a job by pseudo-governmental corporations we might increase the number of the persons who are unwillingly stuck at school and increase useful productivity, this would require a rethink of the educational process. One idea to graduate people at 17 instead of 18. If we had a robust market that promoted the sole proprietorship this might work.
While I do not like competition, it is incorrect to say that education is not competitive. It has to be. Ideally education will give equal opportunity to all kids, and those with the skills and merit, not just proper parents and money, will excel. We have to do this. It is not possible to just select the white boys from the most agreeable parents and educate then to be the future leaders. We know that while this works, it has huge opportunity costs in terms of wasted potential productivity, and puts the US at an economic disadvantage. So we must have competitive in which the best rise to the top where they receive special educational opportunities. Is this process fair? Of course not. Certain students will have advantages no based on personal merit. But that is the way the world works. if an effort is made to make the process equitable, we wil have a few innovators and leaders we would not ordinarily have harnessed.
So the pressure, money and focus is to insure that opportunities are given to all kids so that, if they have merit, they will have the opportunity to grow, innovate, and hopefully make the world a better place. In this sense the competition is not about tests or growth, but about building creative innovative minds that can be the next Lisa Meitner.
China boils down to the future of the company as a cash sown. China is acknowledged as the greatest emerging market. Those who are not interested in playing ball with government get to honor core US values, but also are prevented from enjoying the profits that will come from China. Those who do play will be portrayed as evil, but get to grow fat and happy.
Google does not have to be China. Engagement is not going to change China's vision of human rights. In the US those rights include freedom of speech, freedom to own toy guns, freedom to criticize authority. In China human rights means freedom from starvation, freedom to walk the streets without threats, freedom to live. All engagement is going to do is increase Googles profit, and insure it is profitable for a long time.
Some might say that Google founders are more interested in the image of the company than profits. Such statements are not supported by Larry Page paying nearly 50 million for a yacht. In this economy the market for such luxuries is in decline due to companies unsure what the free market is up to. However, if one is depending on a command economy, such issues are not relevent.
But I see such influence going beyond just lack of evidence based logical thought. There is a desire to promote the kind of absolute fact based consistency that leads to little minds. This is the kind of things that leads to standardized tests and statements that assert the US is a failing position not because of education that tries to stifle innovation, but rather that we do spend enough time in school or test enough.
Really if we are to innovate we must educate, but also must let those innovative minds wander. We cannot say a person is less than another just because they cannot do well on a test. Rather we must look to the innovative students and let them create. In the US testing leads us to professionals that cannot innovate because all we have educated them to do is fil in a bubble. For the religious fanatics filling in a bubble is education. What we must do not let dogma decide what we do. Thirty or fifty years ago education was about exposing students to ideas and processes, and there was noting wrong with it. We are in decline because there is no room for the innovative student.
I know people who still pay huge amounts for calling on land lines, or use phone cards, when Skype give superior call quality to many countries at a fraction of the cost. Why, that is what they learned to do. People have been trained to go home and watch cable TV, so they are OK with paying for an internet connection and TV when they only really need the internet connection.
So AOL may be a useless service, or it may be serving a niche need that allows internet access to those that might not otherwise take the time to relearn a new tool. It is like when I tell people they can do email and surf on a tablet instead of their virus infect slow PC. It would make sense to to use 15 watts instead of 100 watts to do this work, and not give the power company profit merely because these people are misinformed, but hey they won't do it. It is arguable that most money is mae simply through knowledge arbitrage.
Which is simply to say that it is unclear whether anyone other than HTC is 100% committed to Android as the primary stack. I think it is also instructive to note that HTC at one time was a developer of MS phones. It may be that the best way for MS to gain market share is to scare phone makes into not using Android.
It is a complicated relationship. Apple is being sued because it is not part of the club, and entered successfully into a market it is not wanted. The lack of phone experience meant it likely did step on some patents. Google is being sued because in it's arrogance it tried to do OSS independently, not using existing tech and experience. In the search market, which was immature, that was fine. But in the mature phone market, with an old incumbency, MS included, Google and Apple as upstarts are trouble.
It is clear that streaming is a pay per view situation rather than buy once and earn money after a certain number of rentals. This however is not a bad thing as Blockbuster did the same thing. At some point, for some movies, rather than buying the movies they entered into some sort of revenue sharing agreement with certain studios. This let them take out the smaller video rental stores, but did not protect them against Netflix.
One thing that is true with streaming is that while a person on a $10 plan might get 100 CDs a year, it would be easy for a person who to stream 5 or 10X that number. In fact there is no information on average shipping costs, which could be dramatically lower the $1 maximum value. But if we take the 5 cent number as fact, a year streaming could easily cost revenue from three months of subscription, with licensing fees eclipsing that cost.
However we know that Netflix has raised prices for DVD subscribers, apparently to encourage streaming, so either streaming costs are not so dramatic, DVD costs are more than we think, or people are not streaming significantly more than they were receiving media.
Third, people are trained through what are often for profit adult education programs. These programs are often funded through student loans. The default rate at for profit schools can be twice as high as public non-profit schools and three times as high as private non-profit schools. All these defaults are covered by taxpayer money. Again, the tax payer is funding the training of proprietary programs when often free OSS programs are available to teach the concepts. Firms are being taxed into bankruptcy to pay for training and buy licenses so their competitors can save on training costs. What is the point in that?
To be sure this report is a classic case of externalizing costs to make a product seem cheaper. Sure blowing up a mountaintop is the cheap way to get coal because it is the taxpayer, not the firm, that is going to be funding the health care costs of the townships below the mountain. Sure it is cheaper to run up debt to fund a ten year war intended to make war mongers rich because the debt will be paid by the next generation of middle class tax payers, not the war mongers kids.
OSS software is not useful for everything, but it does seem to work for much of the web infrastructure. Sure when I use OSS on my website there is a learning curve and the resources are not widely available. OTOH, when I want a feature I do not have to beg MS to include it, I can just pay one of the army of PHP, Python, of Ruby developers to do it. Even better, I am not a slave to an external upgrade cycle intended to maximize profits for a firm that has no regard to my needs and will demand upgrade fees even if I do not need the new software. This is another indication that OSS will sooner rather than later destroy the MS business model.
I can't really see the need for encryption of a data on my phone. I encrypt the hardisk of my computer I carry around because I am not willing to lose that data at a whim. There is nothing on my phone that is not redundant. There are any number of way to wipe the phone, and I suspect that anyone who plays with the phone will wipe the data. That is fine with me. If I do it accidentally, it is a simple restore.
So now, after millions of dollars in bonuses for executives who bankrupted the company, and hardly any money to normalize loans so that we would not neighborhood destroyed by foreclosed home, they spend money on this but lock out the people who paid for the bailout.
It could be that Facebook is at the point of Myspace, where the company is trying to cash in while it can. Goldman Sachs is trying to create a novel structure, much like the mortgage back security, in whih the real risks of the investment are hidden from the investor. This instruments sole purpose is to hide the innards of Facebook from investors. Because the money for Facebook is from the taxpayer, Goldman Sachs has almost no risk, just potential for commisions.
This may mean allowing different student to persure different products. Some can build a web server, some can write an online application, so can write security utilities. I recall one class that taught fortran through the calculation of the radius of the Bohr atom.
So maybe we have currency which can also be lost, stolen, and has no protection against inflation. So we use bank accounts and saving accounts with can secure money against loss due theft and inflation. But we use checks to get the money, and check can be stolen and used. We can stop checks, but that is no guarantee, and it is our money we are spending.
Credit cards then come, in which we spend others money. We can let our assets gain interest, and spend other assets. We pay more for product, but do not risk our money. Even if we lose the card, and charges get made, it is not our money.
So what does this have to with the telephone. Telephones hava an added bit of security with an access code. Telephones can be remote wiped, unlike credit cards or checks. Around the world telephones are being linked to store valued accounts which allows user to more securely use and transfer monies.
I do not use my phone for money, and I do not use any of RFID technologies, but I was raised on credit. This is the same as some people who were raised on checks not using credit cards. But to say that phones will inherently lead to less secure behavior or less responsible behavior is not supported by facts. It all has to do with education and custom.
So what Amazon is doing, IMHO, is to make sure they never sell at a loss. I don't suppose this is any different from what they do with any other product. There is the cost of the product from the manufacturer, the costs associated with the sale, the profit, which leads to the final price. The final price, as we all knows, varies and is set by Amazon. So a developer wants a dollar, so sets the MSRP at five. As long as Amazon sells it for more than a $1.42 the developers get more, so it is win win. If I were an Android eveloper, I would prefer this model where sales are actively managed rather than a site where Apps were just plunked down.
I think this is a reasonable mode for a private App store that is not subsidized by the hardware the Apps. Developers are guaranteed a certain amount per sale, and Amazon is free to adjust the price to meet market conditions. Amazon is not cheating developers out of profits from the sale. It does allow them to sell free Apps, but, as mentioned, Amazon is not doing this to promote other products, so it makes little sense to offer free apps the way they offer free books for the Kindle.