"Our new approach is to integrate research teams directly into our product teams in order to produce innovation that will drive excellence in those product areas"
This corporate marketing speak is an indicator of the problem. The clones in the marketing dept and administration are great at mimicking what they see as hip talk, not so good at original thinking. Unfortunately, the only way to move up the corporate ladder in a stagnant organization is to kiss ass and be politically correct. Instead of cutting scientists and engineers, they should cut out these clones. Anyone who uses 'hip talk' should immediately be fired.
Beyond hiring aging PhD scientists, they should be considering younger people who have shown creativity in a variety of disciplines- songwriters, artists, poets, makers, hackers, dissidents, chess masters . . .
'The Great Race' was a 1965 movie and also an American tradition. Competitors race from one side of the country to the other in various vehicles with various rules.
Self driving cars will surely do the same. They will be judged on safety and speed and technicalities like choosing the best route and handling obstacles. Car buyers will want this information and car makers will struggle to optimize their software to win the next race.
Do I still pay for insurance or can the cost of incidents be charged to the software maker?
Will the cost of my insurance vary depending upon the safety record of the software provider?
Will I be unable to use my vehicle if flaws are discovered in the software? This assumes that Big Brother can disable any vehicle or class of vehicles from a central control location. Which also assumes that Small Hacker can also disable vehicles. Which also assumes that forced updates will be required and that end user modifications will be illegal and detectable.
We may soon have adequate technology to make self driving cars, but the legislative and legal ramifications will take decades to work out. What software provider is big enough to survive the lawsuits that will grow from a deadly flaw? How will the software flaw be argued and proven/dis-proven before jurors in a courtroom? How many lawyers will get rich?
Goddammit this is important shit. Fundamental research can sometimes be even more important than an update to your linux software or the Kardashian news of the day....Or not...
- look at this headline: "Ask Slashdot: How Can We Improve Slashdot?"
How many of these words need to be capitalized? Headlines have always been this way in/. Sometimes it is difficult to tell when a word is a proper noun or just a word. It's embarrassing to have that on my screen when someone walks by and assumes I'm reading some tabloid trash.
If you go to news.google.com you will find headlines from the world's best news sources and some also rans. Some are like this but many use caps only when necessary. Which are more meaningful to you? Which are aimed at mature readers? Which are aimed at morons?
The days of massive bold newspaper headlines is gone. "Extra extra, read all about it!" sounds childish in this century. Let's have headlines that are functional, less hype. BTW, I like the clarity of this particular headline and whipslash's recent interactions.
So we agree that farm laborers might not need to know how to program computers. Most people don't need that information, and it doesn't apply well to any other area of interest.
But there is something that can benefit everyone including future programmers.
Logic. Real logic, not that soft stuff mentioned to high school or jr college students. Real logic is a form of algebra and uses algebra type symbols to analyze constructs of language and reasoning. It may be offered as a class for philosophy majors in better universities, but there is no reason that a fifth grade boy or girl wouldn't love discovering things with it.
I have enjoyed it all my life as a means to confuse and devastate my enemies with statements of exquisite illogic against which there is no argument for the uninformed. Likewise it is good training for politicians who wish to appear to say things that voters want to hear. Logic is the only protection against manipulation by them or other evangelists. Which is probably why politicians want us to learn programming instead.
It might be best to weigh the relative cost in time and money:
1 Of buying the blocks you want
- vs - 2 Of buying, tuning, programming, material cost etc of printing the same blocks.
You don't explain your desire to print blocks. Are you planning to compete with Lego by pirating their designs? Is there some configuration you must have that they don't offer? These considerations are part of the economic equation too. Of course if you are just an adult playing with commercial toys, maybe you don't value time very highly and you have more money then you can sensibly spend.
Using v12.x from last year: I have direct access to 1000+ radio stations worldwide, sorted by genre in iTunes. Real radio stations, not made up music lists (although Apple offers that too in iTunes). Additionally I have access to 100,000+ worldwide radio broadcasts by plugging the internet address into iTunes (when I can find that information).
Beyond that I have access to uncountable podcasts, both audio and video on any imaginable topic. Then there is iTunes U which offers educational material from universities around the world. iTunes offers to organize all this on my hard drive, to sync it with other devices, to back everything up in the 'cloud', and even to filter content for children who might use the computer. Despite all that it does, iTunes is remarkably user friendly and attractive to look at. All this costs nothing. I can choose paid content very conveniently if desired.
I spend around 6 hrs/day with various iTunes content including TEDtalks; obscure podcasts related to my work; blues, jazz classical & zydeco radio and much more. If you know a program that offers more for less, tell us about it. I'm very sorry for the loss of radio stations in future versions, but I expect that they will still be accessible in the My Music folder by entering the broadcast address.
Either he can or he can't. You say he can't. The only possible conclusion is that he is NOT omnipotent. Twist your thinking all you want, that won't change anything. You can't choose logic only when it is convenient to your bias.
You have chosen a very difficult math problem as your example. Anyone highly trained in some specialty field can do the same and befuddle outsiders. The challenge here is to state a simple question that anyone can understand, which is impossible to answer.
example: Can God make a chili pepper so hot that He cannot eat it ?
This thought line reminds of two things that keep it in perspective:
1 The TED podcast of January 4 "Have we reached the end of physics?" by Harry Cliff. He points out that there are some things that we can never know (or prove with any foreseeable technology.) Big surprise!
2 Charles H. Duell was the Commissioner of US patent office in 1899. Mr. Deull's most famous attributed utterance is that "everything that can be invented has been invented." Whether this is a correct attribution is irrelevant to this discussion.
It is possible that at some point the rate of new discoveries and ideas will diminish, but history has shown the opposite- a snowballing increase in human knowledge in almost every area. Of course we will never know it all, never be able to prove all that we do know, but we will keep on striving.
Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky, Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone, Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die, One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie. One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
Quite right according to http://www.apple.com/ibooks-au... Only available for iOS & Mac at the moment. Sorry to have assumed that, like iTunes, Apple would open the platform.
Contract terms are worth a close look. I've heard vague suggestions that both Apple and Amazon want exclusive access to your work; also that they want to dictate prices on their platform and elsewhere. (You can't sell elsewhere at a lower price...) But again, that is rumor and I can't find time to dig in for actual facts. OTOH, an open textbook such as the OP proposes might be free so price is not a concern.
Other concerns involve updates. There are indications that newer versions of iOS and Mac OS are not working well with iBooks and iBooks Author. The book Yellow Submarine (from 2010) is no longer listed at the iBook store. Another concern, if you are using a 16GB iDevice, is that something fancy like Yellow Submarine can take 370MB of space.
iBooks seem to be the best example of what is becoming possible with living, interactive books. They are in the same 'bleeding edge' category with wearable VR devices and 3D 4K video. If you can't afford the equipment (the Apple tax), you're out of luck.
In the end however, if you want your book to have magical properties, to be able to sing and dance in 17 dimensions, your only choice is iBooks. The Yellow Submarine book was an example of what is possible when creative people care about the user experience.
I have an iBook from several years ago of 'Yellow Submarine' (a variation of the movie featuring music of the Beatles). Pretty much every page has sound, animation, text, images... and I can't remember if it includes extensive reader interaction. These Apple format books probably work on all devices where Kindle works (with the likely exception of proprietary, exclusionary devices).
Assuming that things have improved in 2016, it's probably a better platform now. I hear from creators that iBooks are easy to assemble.
You can wait a few more years/decades for other authoring systems to catch up. Or you can beat yourself up trying to hack something together. Do you want to publish or do you want to fiddle?
If the CIO knows that he will lose his job when he lets security be lax... if he knows that he will be disgraced and banned from a similar job forever... if he is subject to criminal charges... Then the company will take a serious look at privacy and not collecting information that isn't urgently needed.
Now let's look around after millions of peoples' privacy has been sacrificed due to government and corporate mismanagement -- how many CIOs lost their jobs? Has any responsible person ever faced serious consequences?
Where is the incentive to invest in security or avoid collecting unnecessary data? In the US, a corporation has only one responsibility- to provide maximum return for their investors. Don't believe the sweet talk about how the customer is their highest priority. One government employee in the history of the US had a sign on his desk declaring "the buck stops here" (President Truman), that person is long gone and everyone in government is passing the buck regarding responsible action. Until the personal and corporate cost of data leaks is greater than the cost of prevention, the status quo will continue.
Ah yes, 'Psychological Science'... that's akin to 'Military Intelligence' and 'Astrological Science'.
When I studied psickology in 1959, and then again in 1969, I couldn't help noticing that the field had changed about as much as the runways of Paris fashion. Since then many more dynamic changes; each generation displacing the previous and 'outing' their theories.
Sorry to demean them, and in fact I believe there is some truth in this observation. I also assume that as their peers and others review this work we will see different conclusions drawn from the same data.
Advertising exists primarily for one and only one reason. Commodities.
When a vendor offers a product or service indistinguishable from that of other vendors, he must find a way to make it *seem* special and to justify your purchasing it from him.
Apple, Tesla, Prada, Google, Rolex, Nordstrom, Nike, Facebook, and the Red Cross / Red Crescent offer relatively unique products / services and are themselves respected for that. The burden is on competitors to identify some way that their product is superior. Thus advertising, branding, intellectual property and often irresponsible claims. These famous companies continue to advertise in an inoffensive way not so much to sell you a product but to promote their reputation and the pride you'll have as an owner of their product.
Those are all premium brands & products. When you sell consumer level products at a low price point the problem escalates. How can Dell compete with HP selling nearly identical China made computers? Primarily advertising and hype. How does Chevy compete with Ford? Hype. There used to be a quasi-religious fervor among consumers who favored one or the other. Look at those industries who advertise the most and you will see commodity products and services that are difficult to distinguish. Mattresses. Insurance. Dental services. Investment advisers. Fast food...
The solution could be an informed consumer. If everyone subscribed to something like 'Consumer Reports', where they could get honest, researched comparisons of products and services, then that would immensely deflate the hype benefit for advertisers. They would be compelled to offer factual information about how their product compares to competitors'--something the consumer advocate overlooked, new features, etc.
Currently there are ways to be informed about most commitments- whether for products, housing, schools, investments, or underwear for the kids. Not everyone has easy access to this information. Not everyone is motivated to seek it. But if and when they do, advertising will change dramatically for the better.
They collect data about ISPs worldwide from people like me and you and report to governments and other interested parties. I get a monthly report with graphs that show my up/down speed, my latency, my lost packet percentage for each day of the month. Helpful for me, helpful for others.
For the NY AG, they will tell him the claimed vs actual performance of each ISP with lovely charts, graphs and great detail.
This costs me nothing. They sent me a 'whitebox' from the UK which is connected to my router. I'm pretty sure they aren't spying on my pron sessions, but don't really care. You can join the 440,000 of us in the program too.
Additionally, http://www.dslreports.com/ collects a great deal of information about ISPs. Mostly anecdotal, voluntarily submitted by site users. You may find this site useful too.
Kennedy sent us to the moon for prestige. "Look at America, aren't we wonderful!"
Where's the incentive now. It's a huge expense for little reward. Any mistakes cost billions, lives and... prestige. Compare the costs and benefits and there is no logical reason to go. Some country more desperate for prestige will go next.
"Electronic flea markets and surplus stores are a nexus point of talented and interesting people."
Interesting? A polite way to suggest 'eccentric' at best and more likely 'anti social' or possibly criminally insane. The 'talent' is most likely used for planting spy devices at the house of the girl next door, blowing up his high school or electrocuting cats. Bathing and brushing not spoken here.
So I'm an old guy. Older than you. I had my fun and still visit a couple surplus stores. The nearest one is run by a mean old fart who doesn't really want to sell his stuff. But you can have the nostalgia. I like what's happening now in electronics, communication and bioengineering. I look forward to the future and don't dwell on the past. Let's create new stuff that will captivate the 'talented and interesting people' of the future.
. . . Others have tried to explain this in complicated terms. Let me simplify:
Candidate A, who you don't like, and Candidate B, who you hate both have ~10M votes.
You write in a candidate that you like and don't vote for either A or B.
Candidate B wins the election because you (and others) took your vote away from Candidate A.
That's what you want? It's happened many times in US history. Even now, disagreement among Republican voters weakens all their candidates. Better to have the lesser evil than chance the alternative. And what point is there in writing in a name that cannot possibly win? If you're thinking "That will show them!", think again- no human will ever see your vote.
example: In 2000, Ralph Nader ran as a candidate of the Green party. This election ended in a virtual tie between George Bush and Al Gore. If Nader's 2,882,995 votes had gone to Gore, we would never have had the Bush era. There is no question that Nader is well-meaning and might have been a good president, but his intrusion into the election took important votes from Gore. We all knew Nader could not win, but some of us wasted an important vote that cost many lives, many freedoms.
Slashdot Mirror
Wiley library
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...
"Our new approach is to integrate research teams directly into our product teams in order to produce innovation that will drive excellence in those product areas"
This corporate marketing speak is an indicator of the problem. The clones in the marketing dept and administration are great at mimicking what they see as hip talk, not so good at original thinking. Unfortunately, the only way to move up the corporate ladder in a stagnant organization is to kiss ass and be politically correct. Instead of cutting scientists and engineers, they should cut out these clones. Anyone who uses 'hip talk' should immediately be fired.
Beyond hiring aging PhD scientists, they should be considering younger people who have shown creativity in a variety of disciplines- songwriters, artists, poets, makers, hackers, dissidents, chess masters . . .
'The Great Race' was a 1965 movie and also an American tradition. Competitors race from one side of the country to the other in various vehicles with various rules.
Self driving cars will surely do the same. They will be judged on safety and speed and technicalities like choosing the best route and handling obstacles. Car buyers will want this information and car makers will struggle to optimize their software to win the next race.
Do I still pay for insurance or can the cost of incidents be charged to the software maker?
Will the cost of my insurance vary depending upon the safety record of the software provider?
Will I be unable to use my vehicle if flaws are discovered in the software? This assumes that Big Brother can disable any vehicle or class of vehicles from a central control location. Which also assumes that Small Hacker can also disable vehicles. Which also assumes that forced updates will be required and that end user modifications will be illegal and detectable.
We may soon have adequate technology to make self driving cars, but the legislative and legal ramifications will take decades to work out. What software provider is big enough to survive the lawsuits that will grow from a deadly flaw? How will the software flaw be argued and proven/dis-proven before jurors in a courtroom? How many lawyers will get rich?
Goddammit this is important shit. Fundamental research can sometimes be even more important than an update to your linux software or the Kardashian news of the day. ...Or not...
- look at this headline: "Ask Slashdot: How Can We Improve Slashdot?"
How many of these words need to be capitalized? Headlines have always been this way in /. Sometimes it is difficult to tell when a word is a proper noun or just a word. It's embarrassing to have that on my screen when someone walks by and assumes I'm reading some tabloid trash.
If you go to news.google.com you will find headlines from the world's best news sources and some also rans. Some are like this but many use caps only when necessary. Which are more meaningful to you? Which are aimed at mature readers? Which are aimed at morons?
The days of massive bold newspaper headlines is gone. "Extra extra, read all about it!" sounds childish in this century. Let's have headlines that are functional, less hype. BTW, I like the clarity of this particular headline and whipslash's recent interactions.
So we agree that farm laborers might not need to know how to program computers. Most people don't need that information, and it doesn't apply well to any other area of interest.
But there is something that can benefit everyone including future programmers.
Logic. Real logic, not that soft stuff mentioned to high school or jr college students. Real logic is a form of algebra and uses algebra type symbols to analyze constructs of language and reasoning. It may be offered as a class for philosophy majors in better universities, but there is no reason that a fifth grade boy or girl wouldn't love discovering things with it.
I have enjoyed it all my life as a means to confuse and devastate my enemies with statements of exquisite illogic against which there is no argument for the uninformed. Likewise it is good training for politicians who wish to appear to say things that voters want to hear. Logic is the only protection against manipulation by them or other evangelists. Which is probably why politicians want us to learn programming instead.
It might be best to weigh the relative cost in time and money:
1 Of buying the blocks you want
- vs -
2 Of buying, tuning, programming, material cost etc of printing the same blocks.
You don't explain your desire to print blocks. Are you planning to compete with Lego by pirating their designs? Is there some configuration you must have that they don't offer? These considerations are part of the economic equation too. Of course if you are just an adult playing with commercial toys, maybe you don't value time very highly and you have more money then you can sensibly spend.
Using v12.x from last year: I have direct access to 1000+ radio stations worldwide, sorted by genre in iTunes. Real radio stations, not made up music lists (although Apple offers that too in iTunes). Additionally I have access to 100,000+ worldwide radio broadcasts by plugging the internet address into iTunes (when I can find that information).
Beyond that I have access to uncountable podcasts, both audio and video on any imaginable topic. Then there is iTunes U which offers educational material from universities around the world. iTunes offers to organize all this on my hard drive, to sync it with other devices, to back everything up in the 'cloud', and even to filter content for children who might use the computer. Despite all that it does, iTunes is remarkably user friendly and attractive to look at. All this costs nothing. I can choose paid content very conveniently if desired.
I spend around 6 hrs/day with various iTunes content including TEDtalks; obscure podcasts related to my work; blues, jazz classical & zydeco radio and much more. If you know a program that offers more for less, tell us about it. I'm very sorry for the loss of radio stations in future versions, but I expect that they will still be accessible in the My Music folder by entering the broadcast address.
Either he can or he can't. You say he can't. The only possible conclusion is that he is NOT omnipotent. Twist your thinking all you want, that won't change anything. You can't choose logic only when it is convenient to your bias.
You have chosen a very difficult math problem as your example. Anyone highly trained in some specialty field can do the same and befuddle outsiders. The challenge here is to state a simple question that anyone can understand, which is impossible to answer.
example: Can God make a chili pepper so hot that He cannot eat it ?
This thought line reminds of two things that keep it in perspective:
1 The TED podcast of January 4 "Have we reached the end of physics?" by Harry Cliff. He points out that there are some things that we can never know (or prove with any foreseeable technology.) Big surprise!
2 Charles H. Duell was the Commissioner of US patent office in 1899. Mr. Deull's most famous attributed utterance is that "everything that can be invented has been invented." Whether this is a correct attribution is irrelevant to this discussion.
It is possible that at some point the rate of new discoveries and ideas will diminish, but history has shown the opposite- a snowballing increase in human knowledge in almost every area. Of course we will never know it all, never be able to prove all that we do know, but we will keep on striving.
Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
"working on new disks that will hold a terabyte of data"
I know you were just about to ask 'Why don't we already have TB optical disks?'
I don't have a clue. You will just have to go to Disney, the MPAA, the RIAA and all the other copyright hoarders for the answer.
Quite right according to http://www.apple.com/ibooks-au...
Only available for iOS & Mac at the moment.
Sorry to have assumed that, like iTunes, Apple would open the platform.
Contract terms are worth a close look. I've heard vague suggestions that both Apple and Amazon want exclusive access to your work; also that they want to dictate prices on their platform and elsewhere. (You can't sell elsewhere at a lower price...) But again, that is rumor and I can't find time to dig in for actual facts. OTOH, an open textbook such as the OP proposes might be free so price is not a concern.
Other concerns involve updates. There are indications that newer versions of iOS and Mac OS are not working well with iBooks and iBooks Author. The book Yellow Submarine (from 2010) is no longer listed at the iBook store. Another concern, if you are using a 16GB iDevice, is that something fancy like Yellow Submarine can take 370MB of space.
iBooks seem to be the best example of what is becoming possible with living, interactive books. They are in the same 'bleeding edge' category with wearable VR devices and 3D 4K video. If you can't afford the equipment (the Apple tax), you're out of luck.
In the end however, if you want your book to have magical properties, to be able to sing and dance in 17 dimensions, your only choice is iBooks. The Yellow Submarine book was an example of what is possible when creative people care about the user experience.
I have an iBook from several years ago of 'Yellow Submarine' (a variation of the movie featuring music of the Beatles). Pretty much every page has sound, animation, text, images ... and I can't remember if it includes extensive reader interaction. These Apple format books probably work on all devices where Kindle works (with the likely exception of proprietary, exclusionary devices).
Assuming that things have improved in 2016, it's probably a better platform now. I hear from creators that iBooks are easy to assemble.
You can wait a few more years/decades for other authoring systems to catch up. Or you can beat yourself up trying to hack something together. Do you want to publish or do you want to fiddle?
If the CIO knows that he will lose his job when he lets security be lax ... if he knows that he will be disgraced and banned from a similar job forever ... if he is subject to criminal charges ... Then the company will take a serious look at privacy and not collecting information that isn't urgently needed.
Now let's look around after millions of peoples' privacy has been sacrificed due to government and corporate mismanagement -- how many CIOs lost their jobs? Has any responsible person ever faced serious consequences?
Where is the incentive to invest in security or avoid collecting unnecessary data? In the US, a corporation has only one responsibility- to provide maximum return for their investors. Don't believe the sweet talk about how the customer is their highest priority. One government employee in the history of the US had a sign on his desk declaring "the buck stops here" (President Truman), that person is long gone and everyone in government is passing the buck regarding responsible action. Until the personal and corporate cost of data leaks is greater than the cost of prevention, the status quo will continue.
Ah yes, 'Psychological Science' ... that's akin to 'Military Intelligence' and 'Astrological Science'.
When I studied psickology in 1959, and then again in 1969, I couldn't help noticing that the field had changed about as much as the runways of Paris fashion. Since then many more dynamic changes; each generation displacing the previous and 'outing' their theories.
Sorry to demean them, and in fact I believe there is some truth in this observation. I also assume that as their peers and others review this work we will see different conclusions drawn from the same data.
Advertising exists primarily for one and only one reason. Commodities.
When a vendor offers a product or service indistinguishable from that of other vendors, he must find a way to make it *seem* special and to justify your purchasing it from him.
Apple, Tesla, Prada, Google, Rolex, Nordstrom, Nike, Facebook, and the Red Cross / Red Crescent offer relatively unique products / services and are themselves respected for that. The burden is on competitors to identify some way that their product is superior. Thus advertising, branding, intellectual property and often irresponsible claims. These famous companies continue to advertise in an inoffensive way not so much to sell you a product but to promote their reputation and the pride you'll have as an owner of their product.
Those are all premium brands & products. When you sell consumer level products at a low price point the problem escalates. How can Dell compete with HP selling nearly identical China made computers? Primarily advertising and hype. How does Chevy compete with Ford? Hype. There used to be a quasi-religious fervor among consumers who favored one or the other. Look at those industries who advertise the most and you will see commodity products and services that are difficult to distinguish. Mattresses. Insurance. Dental services. Investment advisers. Fast food ...
The solution could be an informed consumer. If everyone subscribed to something like 'Consumer Reports', where they could get honest, researched comparisons of products and services, then that would immensely deflate the hype benefit for advertisers. They would be compelled to offer factual information about how their product compares to competitors'--something the consumer advocate overlooked, new features, etc.
Currently there are ways to be informed about most commitments- whether for products, housing, schools, investments, or underwear for the kids. Not everyone has easy access to this information. Not everyone is motivated to seek it. But if and when they do, advertising will change dramatically for the better.
"... ate 55% more of the candy offered to them than children who had played a game with an embedded toy advertisement."
But how many ate the toys?
All the good AG has to do is go to https://www.samknows.com/
They collect data about ISPs worldwide from people like me and you and report to governments and other interested parties. I get a monthly report with graphs that show my up/down speed, my latency, my lost packet percentage for each day of the month. Helpful for me, helpful for others.
For the NY AG, they will tell him the claimed vs actual performance of each ISP with lovely charts, graphs and great detail.
This costs me nothing. They sent me a 'whitebox' from the UK which is connected to my router. I'm pretty sure they aren't spying on my pron sessions, but don't really care. You can join the 440,000 of us in the program too.
Additionally, http://www.dslreports.com/ collects a great deal of information about ISPs. Mostly anecdotal, voluntarily submitted by site users. You may find this site useful too.
"What you are about to see is a true story. Only the names and faces and backgrounds and timelines have been changed to protect the innocent..."
Kennedy sent us to the moon for prestige. "Look at America, aren't we wonderful!"
Where's the incentive now. It's a huge expense for little reward. Any mistakes cost billions, lives and ... prestige. Compare the costs and benefits and there is no logical reason to go. Some country more desperate for prestige will go next.
"Electronic flea markets and surplus stores are a nexus point of talented and interesting people."
Interesting? A polite way to suggest 'eccentric' at best and more likely 'anti social' or possibly criminally insane. The 'talent' is most likely used for planting spy devices at the house of the girl next door, blowing up his high school or electrocuting cats. Bathing and brushing not spoken here.
So I'm an old guy. Older than you. I had my fun and still visit a couple surplus stores. The nearest one is run by a mean old fart who doesn't really want to sell his stuff. But you can have the nostalgia. I like what's happening now in electronics, communication and bioengineering. I look forward to the future and don't dwell on the past. Let's create new stuff that will captivate the 'talented and interesting people' of the future.
. . . Others have tried to explain this in complicated terms. Let me simplify:
Candidate A, who you don't like, and Candidate B, who you hate both have ~10M votes.
You write in a candidate that you like and don't vote for either A or B.
Candidate B wins the election because you (and others) took your vote away from Candidate A.
That's what you want? It's happened many times in US history. Even now, disagreement among Republican voters weakens all their candidates. Better to have the lesser evil than chance the alternative. And what point is there in writing in a name that cannot possibly win? If you're thinking "That will show them!", think again- no human will ever see your vote.
example: In 2000, Ralph Nader ran as a candidate of the Green party. This election ended in a virtual tie between George Bush and Al Gore. If Nader's 2,882,995 votes had gone to Gore, we would never have had the Bush era. There is no question that Nader is well-meaning and might have been a good president, but his intrusion into the election took important votes from Gore. We all knew Nader could not win, but some of us wasted an important vote that cost many lives, many freedoms.