During lots of shows the worst offenders are the commercials - mostly the trailers for the R-rated movies that are due out in the theaters. Will the v-chip block that?
I think you can get 99% of the functionality by just disabling channels and time slots. For my young kids, for example, I'd just turn *on* the 3 PBS stations, the CBC station (during most hours, anyway), and Disney before 3PM, when it changes from little kid drivel to teenager drivel. Everything else would be turned off.
Also, it would be great to have a timer so the box would go off after an hour or whatever the limit is. That would save a lot of arguing.
Every so many years, SciAm publishes an article about why America always has 2 strong parties. Here's my summary of the salient features.
First off, let's remember that US citizens vote directly for President, and as we know, the President has the most power in government. He (or maybe one day she) sets the agenda for Congress, stops most contrarian action using the veto, and indirectly helps determine how the Constitution is interpreted by nominiating Supreme Court judges. So, essentially, the citizens vote directly - and all at once - for the government once every 4 years by voting for 1 person.
It doesn't make any sense to talk about any other form of government, unless you're talking about changing the Constitution. Good luck.
Given that reality, the outcomes are as follows:
1. The 2 party system is the most "fair." By fair, I mean that you maximize the "intent function." Did you intend this outcome? If 51% of the voters choose Gore, and 49% choose Bush, and Gore wins, then you've satisfied 51% of the voters intent. On the other hand, if 46% of the voters choose Gore, 49% Bush, and 5% Nader, then Bush wins and you've satisfied 49% - so the intent function is lower by 4%. There's a well-known way to solve this: ask voters for they're 2nd choice. (You get n-1 choices for n candidates.) This is great, except that it's not reality, so we can ignore it.
2. The 2 party system is the most stable. Voters are pretty smart, and they realize that point (1) is true. So they work hard to make sure that they're on the winning side of the mathematics I just ran though. Every time somebody gets screwed by being on the losing side, they "re-invent the party" around some issue or another. Sometimes it takes 2 or 3 elections, but in the end the party that was almost dead somehow is magically revived.
3. New parties can be created, but you have to be willing lose a *lot*, maybe for as long as a generation. All the while you're trying to create the new party, the other parties are trying hard to bleed of some of the electoral "steam." Campaign finance reform? Global warming? I don't see any issues important enough to enough people to suffer through 20 years of losing bigtime. We might see such a divisive and wrenching issue in our lifetimes, but frankly I hope we don't.
Now, there are other reasons to have 3 or 10 parties - and that's to get new voices and ideas heard. Often the primaries serve this function (McCain, Bradley). Also, at the local level, where there aren't so many voters to convince, and the local issues can be pretty divisive, new parties can make a lot of hay. Go for it. Just maybe you'll get lucky on the state level. (Or just maybe you'll get Jesse for governer.)
But in terms of setting the national agenda, when you get to choose between TweedleDum and TweedleDee, my advice is to suck it up, mutter something about the paucity of choices, and pick the lesser of two evils. Under the American system of government, that's your job. Get to it.
If you count cancelled projects and endless proposals as wasted effort, then I bet 50% of the IT/engineering work in this country - at least at big companies - is wasted.
Small companies have it slightly better, but only because cancelled projects usually lead to layoffs or bankrupcy, rather than redeployment into another doomed project.
OK, so it's my job to protect my young kids from crap in the media (movies, tv, net), at least when they're at home. Am I a Luddite for asking for the tools to do my job? I can't possibly watch every movie or tv show or visit every web site before my kids do - so is it ok to trust a rating system, and employ filters? I know they suck, but have you ever seen what happens when a kid tries to find the whitehouse on the internet? Even the suckiest filter is better than nothing. We're talking 9 years old, not 19....
Lemme get this straight: kids listening to free music in the privacy of their dorm room is somehow comparable to marching for racial equality in the 60's?
Let's keep this in perspective: this is *not* about social justice. This is about effecting change in the balance of power between copyright holders and the general public. It's happened before, and will happen again. Cooler heads will prevail.....
Am I the only one uncomfortable about the open source / gun thing? While the issue of gun control isn't as divisive as the abortion debate, it just seems prudent to stay away from orthogonal political topics. The Wired article is a classic example: how does a reference to Mr. Raymond's after school activities help the cause?
The reason we're behind in the U.S. is 'cause we have too many darn companies playing this game. There are at least 6 carriers in Seattle (more if you count the re-sellers) and they all suck in terms of coverage and technology. They're all frantically building out their coverage, but since they have to cover every square mile 6 times it's going to take 6 times as long and/or cost 6 times as much. Where's the advantage? So that the prices stay low? The service sucks - the prices better stay low.
I wish we ran the cell companies the way we run the local phone and cable businesses - like a utility, licensed to serve the public interest. It would be even better if the licenses were handed out on a regional, or even national basis. I frankly can see little value in having 10 significant carriers burning billions of dollars duking it out over incompatible standards. Maybe in 5 or 10 years we'll find the value in this, but right now it sucks.
They won't settle 'cause the DoJ and MS disagree on the basic issue of tying: the DoJ thinks it's bad, and MS thinks it's good. MS has already agreed to restrictions on pricing and various other remedies, but it all comes down to tying and how to prevent it. (Oh, and by the way, Bill and MS are obnoxious and as arrogant as heck, but that doesn't seem to be a huge problem in this industry. Ask Larry or Scott.) So, the only relevant question is: should MS be allowed to add nifty features or utilities - hell, even whole apps - to the OS? Like, say, fonts, disk compression, a backup utility, screen savers, a web server, a web browser, a task scheduler, an ftp client, a tcp/ip stack, and various other things that they've already added? I would posit that bundling is clearly good for consumers in the short term, and unbundling is clearly good for competitors in the short term, but beyond that we have essentially no data. Lots of opinions and wishful thinking and monkey-wrenching, but no data. So, buck up and get used to this story - it'll be around for a *long* time. P.S. - imagine what would happen if MS decided to build a web site like Apple's, that's tied to specific Windows features. Why haven't they? Because it's a bad idea? Because they haven't done it yet? Because they're afraid of throwing 40 gallons of gasoline on the issue of tying during the appeal process?
Like most rumors, there's no basis in fact. A gov't official from BC (I forget the name) mentioned that _if_ MS would consider a move he would certainly work with them to make it happen (lower taxes, etc.). It got picked up the BC & CA press, but that's the end of the story. Needless to say, MS denied that they are considering such a move.
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During lots of shows the worst offenders are the commercials - mostly the trailers for the R-rated movies that are due out in the theaters. Will the v-chip block that?
I think you can get 99% of the functionality by just disabling channels and time slots. For my young kids, for example, I'd just turn *on* the 3 PBS stations, the CBC station (during most hours, anyway), and Disney before 3PM, when it changes from little kid drivel to teenager drivel. Everything else would be turned off.
Also, it would be great to have a timer so the box would go off after an hour or whatever the limit is. That would save a lot of arguing.
Every so many years, SciAm publishes an article about why America always has 2 strong parties. Here's my summary of the salient features.
First off, let's remember that US citizens vote directly for President, and as we know, the President has the most power in government. He (or maybe one day she) sets the agenda for Congress, stops most contrarian action using the veto, and indirectly helps determine how the Constitution is interpreted by nominiating Supreme Court judges. So, essentially, the citizens vote directly - and all at once - for the government once every 4 years by voting for 1 person.
It doesn't make any sense to talk about any other form of government, unless you're talking about changing the Constitution. Good luck.
Given that reality, the outcomes are as follows:
1. The 2 party system is the most "fair." By fair, I mean that you maximize the "intent function." Did you intend this outcome? If 51% of the voters choose Gore, and 49% choose Bush, and Gore wins, then you've satisfied 51% of the voters intent. On the other hand, if 46% of the voters choose Gore, 49% Bush, and 5% Nader, then Bush wins and you've satisfied 49% - so the intent function is lower by 4%. There's a well-known way to solve this: ask voters for they're 2nd choice. (You get n-1 choices for n candidates.) This is great, except that it's not reality, so we can ignore it.
2. The 2 party system is the most stable. Voters are pretty smart, and they realize that point (1) is true. So they work hard to make sure that they're on the winning side of the mathematics I just ran though. Every time somebody gets screwed by being on the losing side, they "re-invent the party" around some issue or another. Sometimes it takes 2 or 3 elections, but in the end the party that was almost dead somehow is magically revived.
3. New parties can be created, but you have to be willing lose a *lot*, maybe for as long as a generation. All the while you're trying to create the new party, the other parties are trying hard to bleed of some of the electoral "steam." Campaign finance reform? Global warming? I don't see any issues important enough to enough people to suffer through 20 years of losing bigtime. We might see such a divisive and wrenching issue in our lifetimes, but frankly I hope we don't.
Now, there are other reasons to have 3 or 10 parties - and that's to get new voices and ideas heard. Often the primaries serve this function (McCain, Bradley). Also, at the local level, where there aren't so many voters to convince, and the local issues can be pretty divisive, new parties can make a lot of hay. Go for it. Just maybe you'll get lucky on the state level. (Or just maybe you'll get Jesse for governer.)
But in terms of setting the national agenda, when you get to choose between TweedleDum and TweedleDee, my advice is to suck it up, mutter something about the paucity of choices, and pick the lesser of two evils. Under the American system of government, that's your job. Get to it.
If you count cancelled projects and endless proposals as wasted effort, then I bet 50% of the IT/engineering work in this country - at least at big companies - is wasted.
Small companies have it slightly better, but only because cancelled projects usually lead to layoffs or bankrupcy, rather than redeployment into another doomed project.
OK, so it's my job to protect my young kids from crap in the media (movies, tv, net), at least when they're at home. Am I a Luddite for asking for the tools to do my job? I can't possibly watch every movie or tv show or visit every web site before my kids do - so is it ok to trust a rating system, and employ filters? I know they suck, but have you ever seen what happens when a kid tries to find the whitehouse on the internet? Even the suckiest filter is better than nothing. We're talking 9 years old, not 19....
Lemme get this straight: kids listening to free music in the privacy of their dorm room is somehow comparable to marching for racial equality in the 60's?
Let's keep this in perspective: this is *not* about social justice. This is about effecting change in the balance of power between copyright holders and the general public. It's happened before, and will happen again. Cooler heads will prevail.....
Am I the only one uncomfortable about the open source / gun thing? While the issue of gun control isn't as divisive as the abortion debate, it just seems prudent to stay away from orthogonal political topics. The Wired article is a classic example: how does a reference to Mr. Raymond's after school activities help the cause?
Time to consider a change.
The reason we're behind in the U.S. is 'cause we have too many darn companies playing this game. There are at least 6 carriers in Seattle (more if you count the re-sellers) and they all suck in terms of coverage and technology. They're all frantically building out their coverage, but since they have to cover every square mile 6 times it's going to take 6 times as long and/or cost 6 times as much. Where's the advantage? So that the prices stay low? The service sucks - the prices better stay low.
I wish we ran the cell companies the way we run the local phone and cable businesses - like a utility, licensed to serve the public interest. It would be even better if the licenses were handed out on a regional, or even national basis. I frankly can see little value in having 10 significant carriers burning billions of dollars duking it out over incompatible standards. Maybe in 5 or 10 years we'll find the value in this, but right now it sucks.
What's with the gun thing? How could that possibly help promote Linux?
They won't settle 'cause the DoJ and MS disagree on the basic issue of tying: the DoJ thinks it's bad, and MS thinks it's good. MS has already agreed to restrictions on pricing and various other remedies, but it all comes down to tying and how to prevent it. (Oh, and by the way, Bill and MS are obnoxious and as arrogant as heck, but that doesn't seem to be a huge problem in this industry. Ask Larry or Scott.) So, the only relevant question is: should MS be allowed to add nifty features or utilities - hell, even whole apps - to the OS? Like, say, fonts, disk compression, a backup utility, screen savers, a web server, a web browser, a task scheduler, an ftp client, a tcp/ip stack, and various other things that they've already added? I would posit that bundling is clearly good for consumers in the short term, and unbundling is clearly good for competitors in the short term, but beyond that we have essentially no data. Lots of opinions and wishful thinking and monkey-wrenching, but no data. So, buck up and get used to this story - it'll be around for a *long* time. P.S. - imagine what would happen if MS decided to build a web site like Apple's, that's tied to specific Windows features. Why haven't they? Because it's a bad idea? Because they haven't done it yet? Because they're afraid of throwing 40 gallons of gasoline on the issue of tying during the appeal process?
Like most rumors, there's no basis in fact. A gov't official from BC (I forget the name) mentioned that _if_ MS would consider a move he would certainly work with them to make it happen (lower taxes, etc.). It got picked up the BC & CA press, but that's the end of the story. Needless to say, MS denied that they are considering such a move.