I don't think he has a geek badge, considering he doesn't know enough about computer to know what exactly he's asking about.
Even then, it depends what exactly he wants the kid to do, I wouldn't really want a 7 year old trying to administer the hardware or software on a family machine. A 7 year old should be free to wreck it, and just reinstall and move on. Having other people (i.e. the family) relying on the 7 year old not screwing it up is likely to cause a huge pile of grief.
For just using software on it then sure, family machine, but if you want the kid playing with hardware, or installing god knows what tools wise etc. I'd be a bit more skeptical.
buying him a shitbox x86 and loading it with linux would work much better for all the things the rasp could teach him. with raspberry he'd be stuck with the apps there's on it,
For 300 bucks it doesn't even need to be that terrible. A used or on sale dual core AMD machine or the like would be 'good enough', I'd put linux and windows 7 on it probably. Find a semi tech savvy friend and offer a couple of hundred bucks for their old machine when they're getting rid of it.
Just be prepared to buy something better in a year or two, once he has some skills, or spends a lot of time on it, it becomes worth investing in a machine that can actually do a bit more (decent GPU, decent support for an SSD etc).
There's nothing wrong with Raspberry Pi, but it's a whole other market segment - it's so cheap you don't ever want to do anything to it, because it's cheaper to buy a new one than repair an old one. If you're poor (really really poor), then Raspberry pi is the way to go. If you can afford 300 bucks then you'd be better served with a proper, albeit older, PC and maybe a raspberry pi on the side. You never know what the kid will take to, but he the Rasp is really really cheap for a reason.
The best choices would be an old office computer from where the questioner works, or used machine from a friend, or a clearance sale/open box. Don't be afraid to spend 100 bucks on a 22 inch monitor, because that can last for 4 or 5 years if you treat it properly, and there aren't really user serviceable parts in a monitor (at least not for a 7 year old) anyway.
I think the point of the summary is that even the seedier side of the internet sees itself benefiting from new technology. That has policy implications (Faux News Headline: Is web 2.0 really just a way to hide Child Porn from police? Popular seedy site 4chan....), and whatever you may think of it, 4chan is certainly a fascinating exercise in community organization.
The fringe party thing is exactly why you want to avoid proportional representation.
Imagine a scenario of 100 seats total. 49 go to liberals and socialists,49 go to conservatives and reactionaries, and 2 go to truly crazy people (fascists, novelty independence parties, gold bugs, those sorts). Now since no one has a majority, and the lib-socials aren't going cooperate with the conservative - reactionaries the crazy people suddenly are the deciding factor between any piece of legislation being passed. And their support isn't free. They want concessions on whatever their issue is, even if 98% of the electorate think they're insane - they still could inflict massive damage on on the parliamentary process.
First past the post eliminates the fringe from the process. It still lets in crazies of course, but there have to be a lot of them coordinating for that to happen.
The other thing to keep in mind in that in my 100 seat example, the difference between one party having 51 seats, or 100 seats is irrelevant - they can pass whatever they want either way, so whichever election system you have that produces a 1 seat majority or a 50 seat majority is effectively the same.
Oh without a doubt. My general feeling is that most of the publishing model around paper journals works ok, but if you submit corrections or updates or the like it should actually end up attached to the article on the web. Some journals are starting to do that, but a lot of them don't.
Ya, it's not that wikipedia won't accept primary sources, it's that the primary source has to be statically referenceable.
A year from now there's no way to know if edits from some IP address were actually the primary source, someone claiming to be so or the like - but if you have a reference to a static source you can at least point to that and then you can have an argument over whether or not you believe him.
This does raise a longstanding question about static sources in academia - basically in the paper world keeping track of corrections and updates and so on was hard. In the internet era it should be easy, but we still cling to the structure of paper journals a lot of places.
The idea of something like this is to illustrate how different shifts would effect the result.
If you're a campaign for example, and you're trying to figure out how to win usually, tools like this will tell you which areas are still 'in play' and might be worth fighting in (spending your advertising dollars). The campaigns themselves almost certainly have huge amounts of data about what potential voters in each area care about, and how they're going to vote, but that analysis requires a large team of people to manage. This is more for people to play with relatively easily.
In that sense I'm not hugely fond of the tool, it's still a bit too complex for easy casual fiddling, and if I was a serious campaigner I'd likely have much more data to work from - the question becomes how easy is it to flip a particular state (the obvious ones from the charts are Iowa, Ohio, Florida, and Wisconsin ) rather than which would it be nice to flip. The democrats would like to pick up texas, the republicans California, but that doesn't seem likely.
I'm in canada, so it's a little different here, but in our last federal election the NDP managed to take themselves from 3rd party to official opposition essentially from one issue, in one province (French language stuff in quebec), in one stroke they pulled the rug out from one party (the bloc quebecois) - and picked up a lot of seats putting themselves ahead of one of our two big parties (the liberals). A real GOP strategist is looking at probably 4 -6 states and wondering if there's a major issue they can take a stance on an flip the whole state. The rest of us are just playing with sliders to wonder about what could happen.
I specifically point to the case of wealth disparity and health care outcomes in more socialist countries, and the less serious fall they suffered from the economic down turn. What I said was entirely evidence driven (or inherently meaningless, like china being where it is).
If the chinese governments rather draconian control of who lives where, what industries can be owned by who, what products can be sold in china if they aren't made in china etc. is news to you, then you're either young or have been living in a cave, or are young, and frankly, by the time you're old enough to know what's going on in china they may completely change course anyway. That's why they are, more or less as we speak organizing the next party congress to appoint new leadership for china for the next decade, and laying out just what policies china will have.
As to your point about religion: From their perspective they are right. If we just adopted sharia law we'd all be living in a muslims idea of paradise on earth sort of thing, because that's what they think should happen. The question becomes a matter of whether or not you can construct objective measures of 'better off' - on things like healthcare, wages, quality of education essentially you can, and on all of the objective measures the US is doing worse than more socialist countries. On the cultural issues, well sure, it depends on your perspective, if you think it's a great idea that blacks (or women, see Ann Coulter) shouldn't be allowed to vote, then sure, the confederate dream of an agrarian slave owning society is something the US is pulling further and further away from, and if that's the world you want, of less opportunity, less equality, less freedom etc. then we're not even having the same discussion, and we're rehashing multi century old debates on the so called 'rights of man' and all that. If we're talking about the best way to make society more equal, more free, more opportunity with better healthcare, education, wages for the working people etc. then we can have a useful discussion. If you're fat australian woman with 30 billion dollars of inherited wealth claiming that the $2 dollars a day she can pay african miners is something australia should look at as an aspiration we may as well not be living on the same planet or speaking the same language because there is no discussion to be had.
Talking about the US your rhetoric becomes polarized: "1%", "living in a fantasy land the like the republicans" [I HATE the GOP FWIW].
No seriously. Those are two actual and very legitimate points. For all the bluster of our conservatives being mini republicans, - and where the US has voter ID we've had robocalls, they aren't trying to ban abortion they are getting caught by the police for trying to manipulate the election, we don't have lobbyists buying off our country and so on. On each of those issues you can point to someone more socialist than canada doing better than we are (e.g. France and lobbysts), but we're all much better places to live if you're an everyday person than the US. Our conservatives haven't institutionally started living in a fantasy land about economics. We have political parties like that. (E.g. the wild rose party), but no one votes for them, sort of like the libertarians or the communist party in the US, they exist, every now and then they get press, but no one takes them seriously. The US has 40+ percent of looking looking to believe in complete nonsense. That isn't an environment anyone sane wants to live in.
Think about that. If you come to canada and ask how many people think Stephen Harper is actually a martian you'll probably get 1% who say they think so- everywhere has it's crazies. The US just has a lot of them.
the 1% thing isn't polarized rhetoric. I mean in terms of the actual data. Seriously. Look at wage disparity in canada versus the US, wages for the median factory worker so to speak. The US has flatlined average worker pay since 1970. Socialist countries haven't (Germany leading the charge on this one). If you're rich, the US is the place to be, if you aren't rich, and I mean the relative rich, not just living in the west kind of rich, but I mean 300K/year salary kind of rich, or the multi million dollar a year salary, the US is the place to be. That drags up the average income in the US, but if you aren't in the very limited portion of the population who benefits from it, you'd be better off somewhere else. That has come to be 'rhetoric' because it's a legitimate real problem. As some very talented economists will point out, it's more of a 0.1% than 1% problem, and that would be a more accurate reflection of the situation, but no one would understand the reference then.
FYI, you'll be fighting for healthcare just as surely as you will be fighting for breath when the strangler gets a hold of you. What you have is some minor assurance of not getting a huge-ass overinflated bill and - not needing much care - this relieves you. When you need something badly and it doesn't magically appear, you'll feel differently.
You have clearly never had a serious medical problem in a socialized medicine system. I'd suggest you try it sometime, but well, don't. Getting cancer a couple of times to see just how quickly our system responds to someone with a serious problem is illustrative but not necessarily a good plan. The downside is that there are people who abuse the system, and occasionally that means people slip through the cracks. But none of the healthcare system is magic, and when it fails the people in charge are held to account. In the US system a 'failure' is when an insurance company actually pays out a claim (which is the same here for our insurance companies when we have travel insurance for example, canadian healthcare doesn't do anything for you when you're in the US for example, and for that we buy insurance from the same bastards you have to).
Without a doubt, the oil industry has been a disaster for canada. We went from being a manufacturing economy producing almost 50% more cars per capita than the US, to a place where making cars is becoming too expensive.
It's economy is still based on oil and logging.
I realize the US perception of canada is out of date, but that's 100 years out of date. As I say though, oil causing us a lot of grief, it's good for newfoundland because there aren't a lot of them, but it's driving up the dollar.
It is silly to say that Canada is doing better than the USA when Canada is essentially completely dependent on it's proximity to the USA:
No, we aren't dependent. We're close, that means it's convenient to buy and sell from the US. We also recognize that this plan isn't working out, and it's time to move on. That's why we're building east west oil pipelines for example. If we weren't close to the US we'd be doing the same thing as Australia, who isn't near anyone, and trading with anyone.
even though Canada has vastly greater natural resources per capita than the USA.
In places no one lives. Not really a fair comparison.
In global rankings such as HDI we are about the same
On healthcare, wealth distribution we're doing better. On HDI we are in a statistical tie. If you are going to be in the wealthiest 1% so to speak you want to be in the US. If you want to be anyone else, you're better off in canada. By a long shot.
I may not like our conservatives, but we don't have a political party that has institutionalized living in a fantasy land the like the republicans, we've actually had healthcare for years. We no longer have groups of people fighting over basic issues, like access to abortion, or the right to vote, because we're all in this together, and we've moved on from that nonsense. We don't throw huge numbers of people in jail because we actually make decisions based on evidence, not based on some misguided notion of justice.
Money isn't everything, but even in that we're doing better - because we had more regulation, and more socialism than the US in 2008.
We have been undergoing creeping incrementally socialists for going on 50 years.
Yes, and if it was more than creeping you'd be much better off. See germany or France for example. Even the NHS in the UK. They have had the monumentally stupid swing towards austerity before it was appropriate, and that's hurting, a lot. But that happens.
My point was sort of obviously that you'd be doing better if you had much more socialism and regulation and a lot less free market. It hasn't served you all that well. I'm sure you disagree with that, you'd be wrong, but well, you have an entirely political party that institutionally believes in fantasies about economics and history, so you'll fit right in with them.
This is what I dispute. They have had little chance to learn otherwise.
I'm not sure you understand what you're saying. China is where it is. You can't disagree with that, because it's sort of a meaninglessly obvious statement. They have gotten there through strong collective effort. You could disagree with that, but anyone with a minimum of effort can tear you a new brain. With less collective effort they'd be somewhere else, quite possibly somewhere better, but definitely somewhere else. For the better part of 30 years their collective effort got them no where because the effort was badly misdirected, and then they changed gears, started listening to a bunch of experts on successful economies, and figured out how to start making progress. All of that has been very directly top driven in china.
You cannot ascribe collective motivation to individuals
Actually, you can. Different cultures approach shared sacrifice very differently. The japanese particularly are much much more about 'your role in society' than 'how you benefit from society' the way we are in north america. Quebec (the french speaking part of canada) is actually very collective relatively to the rest of north america because they view themselves, or at least the french within quebec, view themselves as this pocket of french culture resisting english encroachment. That has worked very well for them in gaining control of their language, culture and establishing rights for themselves in the same sense. But it hasn't worked out fantastically well economically.
I realize where you're coming from with game theory - but some countries have made a very long term very deliberate effort to overcome people behaving in their own interest at everyone else's expenses.
And how exactly is forced labor without pay not slavery again?
Well it is, but these people got paid.
Conscription to do work paid or not is slavery.
Close to, yes, that was my point.
I'm all for learning. I'm not for forced learning. Every kid should have a right to an education and no parental or legal authority should be able to take it away. However no legal / parental authority should be able to force it either.
If children could make their own choices they wouldn't be children. Unfortunately kids aren't able to know what they'll need in the future.
It's a communist regime, no matter how capitalistic they might seem, it's still the same, meaning, your statement is actually backwards, foxconn and every other chinese company is in fact an extension of the government. This isn't an assumption, but fact.
Try not to confuse the Republic of China (Taiwan), which is where foxconn is actually based, and the Peoples republic of China (communist/mainland china) which is where the factory we are talking about is.
Foxconn can, and has, essentially bought off various aspects of the chinese government for their own control of the factory towns, but they are in absolutely no way an extension of the communist government. Lots of companies are. But not foxconn.
Bullshit. No economic system has produced more wealth, more prosperity, lower rates of poverty than the free market.
And where did I proclaim china a free market? I said they are where they are, whatever you want to describe as the country they have is very much a product of collective effort. Considering they pay 250 dollars a month that's maybe not working out well for the average worker.
Here in the states we did just fine without collectivism for many many decades.
I'm in canada. We've done better with more collectivism than you have, and we're doing better than you currently because of it. Your system has a lot of wealth, in a lot of the wrong places. Your system got where it is by exploiting cheap labour, just like china, and you've put major collective effort into building your various armies for various purposes, building roads, dams, etc. The new deal which was a strong push for collective effort worked out pretty well. The chinese are, as I said, one step away from slavery, so about where you were in the 19th century.
Well this factory is new, but this might be routine for china, and if it happens once every 2 or 3 years then it happens on whatever cycle, it's only going to hit you once or twice in your academic career, if it hits you at all.
China isn't really like north america or europe in this regard. I wouldn't be surprised if the entire government in the area (district or even prefecture) is actually just an extension of foxconn (legally, officially), and if you're at their school you can be told to work at their factory, they pay for it after all. You can't take one of their products into their town, you can't set up a vegetable stall without their permission and in their town etc. This isn't some mom and pop little GM assembly plant with 6000 employees. This is a small factory with only 40 000 workers that they need to expand (http://www.tuaw.com/2012/05/21/foxconn-building-new-production-line-for-apple-products/ )
Conceptually it's much like factory towns elsewhere, with varying degrees of official backing, and institutionalizing who actually runs the show.
There is also, in china at least, some measure of communist collective effort and coercion still. This has to be done, so we all pitch in to do it, because it's for the good of the country, or else. And to some degree they're right - without a strong collective effort they wouldn't be where they are. Of course if they cared about their workers they'd be paying a lot more than 250 dollars a month, but lets not go crazy here, you need to keep costs down to stay competitive.
The government can always conscript you and and then send you to work digging trenches, fighting wars or building schools if they want. Normally rich countries don't resort to that in all but the most extreme circumstances, but for china a million iphones probably brings in 10 or 15 million dollars (http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2012/01/31/how-much-of-the-iphone-is-made-in-china/). That's a lot of money, especially since, if you look at the first link I had, they're talking about only a 56 million dollar factory. There is a strategic interest in doing whatever it takes to meet that demand rather than risk letting somewhere else pick up the sales - and that's only direct wages for the phone assembly, there's all of the components manufactured in china as well - and they want to be seen as doing whatever it takes to keep it that way. China is taking 'being accommodating to business' as far as you can take it without outright allowing slavery - and that is deliberate.
Windows 8 is technically fine. It's just a terrible design. The inconsistent UI makes is basically unusable.
These include consistency in the UI
You've clearly never had to evaluate accessibility professionally. Windows 8 is completely inconsistent in how it behaves. We've been running it through its paces here at work (where we have a lot of people who are experts on this sort of thing, including working with microsoft on office) and basically, don't use windows 8. Everything that's wrong with windows 8 can be summed up in 1 word: inconsistent. The UI doesn't behave predictably, and it's not consistent with previous behaviours for no apparent reason.
Also, you come across like an MS shill, most people here come across as linux shills. As i said, your point of view makes a lot of sense in the enterprise.
I'm sorry, I think you're being contradictory. If I'm understanding you correctly, you want some sort server type product you have at your home which hosts all your data and media with minimal configuration and talks to a variety of devices from a multitude of manufacturers to facilitates seamlessly sharing data across different standards of communication and data formats to all different devices. Sorry that's not happening. Ever.
No, that's not what i said, and I'm sorry you don't understand, but you'll get there. You actually have a good view of what an idealistic world should be, but of course we don't have that (full interoperability, which, as I say, is what those of us who live the lifestyle now have, linux servers, iphones, PS3s, home lighting, all talking to each other). As I said, how do we configure everything now (without skydrive)? Right, I have a windows 2008 file and webserver, windows 7 desktops, some home theatre PC for TV, etc. etc. etc. Small business and 'home' are merging. MS has, traditionally, been pretty good at realizing that. With Skydrive they are - they're just assuming they should be the server provider, which is a non starter.
I don't know how to make that clearer.
well for starters you're a student who managed to find dreamspark software for free. Good for you, if you're one of our students you'll encounter some of our professors (who have PhD's in comp sci or software engineering) who can't manage that. When you get caught up to the point of realizing that's the problem you'll figure out just how unclear this stuff is. Without a doubt the Xbox has been microsofts greatest push forward in usability and accessibility, that's why both your dad, and an 8 year old who can barely print letters properly (average grade 3) can both manage to use it.
Have a look at http://seattleorganicseo.com/sosblog/top-google-searches-in-2012-the-most-popular-keywords-study-version-3/ it's a bit off topic but it tells an enormous amount about how people understand the technology they use. The most searched for thing on google is facebook. Think about that. Let it sink in. People use google to find www.facebook.com. On average 4 or 5 times a month for every facebook user. Given that a lot of users probably don't use google to find facebook, some don't use google etc. you have an enormous collection of people, literally hundreds of millions, for whom the concept of typing in www.facebook.com, is too much and even need to type in google to google search to do a google search. And they do this repeatedly. That's the level that accessibility and usability live at. Windows 8 can't even decide whether it's 'metro' or traditional desktop.
they just don't work how you want them to: without a centralized data cloud service.
so you mean they don't work. If your home user service relies on uptime to a centralized data cloud service it's not a home user service. That's called an online backup service.
You asked what's the point of a centralized cloud service which maintains data
Uh... That's exactly what they're saying they do (they don't execute but that's another matter). They're focusing on games that have an online component. If you want to make a strategy game that's single player, or if you want to make a single player adventure game, they don't have the skills to market or test that, and they have no intention of acquiring that skillset. Which is why there are other publishers.
No, he's saying every game *EA* publishes should have multiplayer. Paradox does strategy and historical games, EA is all in on a 'multiplayer customer relationship' for want of a better way of putting it. If you want a single player game you don't have to publish it with EA, and if you don't like strategy games you don't have to ever buy anything from Paradox. Valve is pushing very hard for every new game to have achievements because that's part of what they think their customers want from the experience with them. Blizzard is pushing battle.net because they feel their customers want to all stay connected even if they're just playing a single player map in starcraft or running around alone at the moment in D3 or WoW. Everything from Atlus is some sort of emo and or RPG thing (though that wasn't always true it this is only last 6 or 7 years), Bethesda are all basically first person action FPS or RPG's etc.
Every company in this business is allowed to specialize into what they think their customers want. If it was Nintendo, Sony or Microsoft saying we won't allow single player games on their consoles we'd have a problem (and, admittedly, it might come to that), but EA saying we only do games with an online component is just making clear their particular niche.
There is for EA a strong business case that having an online component through EA will always get them some money per title, even from pirates, whereas other companies (GoG, paradox etc.) feel they can do very well without that online part precisely because they aren't EA.
Ubisoft, while they just announced they're ditching the always on DRM, has a much more complex relationship with it's customers because it has a very very diverse product line, as does Take 2.
Oh sure, I was talking about right now it requires skill.
Windows 8 is terrible, so no one is going to use it. So that's not helping. It doesn't matter what you *can* do with it, it won't be done because no one sane wants to use Windows 8.
You also tie yourself to your microsoft account - which is a big no no, and sort of invalidates the whole capability. You have to create a microsoft account (why do I need a microsoft account at all? What business is it of MS what I'm doing with my stuff? Why do I have to follow a MS TOS for my own data? What happens if MS revokes my account? No f'n way). It's the same basic problem with google services (or itunes), if I need to marry myself to a 'cloud' service for this it's not accessible to the average user, nor is it a good idea.
As I said, skydrive isn't ready for prime time, anything that has any capacity to revoke your access is not ready for prime time. Which sort of throws the whole thing out the window.
I realize you are sort of a MS shill, and I get where you're coming from. In the enterprise that makes sense - you stick with the MS family and licencing and everything plays nice together. But for a home users you cannot ever have a situation where you've handed over the functionality through a cloud service that can be revoked. Again, they have the pieces, but they don't work together. When you build a system like this on your own you run your own server, which everything talks to. The moment I can have my account banned by microsoft for having the word fuck in it, or I could have my account shut down for being in the wrong country I don't have a service I can use. It's a research project demo from MS, but it's not a consumer product.
Not a single "advanced configuration" option is required to enable the above.
And that, is why MS is still failing at this. When an MS shill doesn't understand what level their average user is at, you're never going to get the project where it needs to be. What happens when all of these devices are on a single unsecured access point? What happens when you have 3 xboxes and 3 phones and 3 laptops? What happens when I can't access my skydrive account? What about playing music on Windows 8 on anything other than the surprisingly terrible media player? What happens when your skydrive account gets hacked (and that depressingly, happens a lot)? 'advanced configuration' isn't configuring a DMZ on your router and managing QoS, it's how to even set a password, how to pick a password that's secure, how to manage a system that isn't secure, how to manage your own data hosted by someone else etc. etc. etc. You can read/., that probably puts in the top 1% of computer users. Try not to forget that when thinking about how a product 'works'.
Bullshit, it's gonna land with a resounding "thud"
Probably, but that doesn't mean the prospect of it all working isn't appealing.
They're betting the farm
I've wondered about this. I don't think they are. They'll bet he farm on windows 9, between now and then they're just shoveling a very expensive lab project at us.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think he has a geek badge, considering he doesn't know enough about computer to know what exactly he's asking about.
Even then, it depends what exactly he wants the kid to do, I wouldn't really want a 7 year old trying to administer the hardware or software on a family machine. A 7 year old should be free to wreck it, and just reinstall and move on. Having other people (i.e. the family) relying on the 7 year old not screwing it up is likely to cause a huge pile of grief.
For just using software on it then sure, family machine, but if you want the kid playing with hardware, or installing god knows what tools wise etc. I'd be a bit more skeptical.
buying him a shitbox x86 and loading it with linux would work much better for all the things the rasp could teach him. with raspberry he'd be stuck with the apps there's on it,
For 300 bucks it doesn't even need to be that terrible. A used or on sale dual core AMD machine or the like would be 'good enough', I'd put linux and windows 7 on it probably. Find a semi tech savvy friend and offer a couple of hundred bucks for their old machine when they're getting rid of it.
Just be prepared to buy something better in a year or two, once he has some skills, or spends a lot of time on it, it becomes worth investing in a machine that can actually do a bit more (decent GPU, decent support for an SSD etc).
There's nothing wrong with Raspberry Pi, but it's a whole other market segment - it's so cheap you don't ever want to do anything to it, because it's cheaper to buy a new one than repair an old one. If you're poor (really really poor), then Raspberry pi is the way to go. If you can afford 300 bucks then you'd be better served with a proper, albeit older, PC and maybe a raspberry pi on the side. You never know what the kid will take to, but he the Rasp is really really cheap for a reason.
The best choices would be an old office computer from where the questioner works, or used machine from a friend, or a clearance sale/open box. Don't be afraid to spend 100 bucks on a 22 inch monitor, because that can last for 4 or 5 years if you treat it properly, and there aren't really user serviceable parts in a monitor (at least not for a 7 year old) anyway.
new chips, new technology, new innovations...etc.
I think the point of the summary is that even the seedier side of the internet sees itself benefiting from new technology. That has policy implications (Faux News Headline: Is web 2.0 really just a way to hide Child Porn from police? Popular seedy site 4chan ....), and whatever you may think of it, 4chan is certainly a fascinating exercise in community organization.
The fringe party thing is exactly why you want to avoid proportional representation.
Imagine a scenario of 100 seats total. 49 go to liberals and socialists,49 go to conservatives and reactionaries, and 2 go to truly crazy people (fascists, novelty independence parties, gold bugs, those sorts). Now since no one has a majority, and the lib-socials aren't going cooperate with the conservative - reactionaries the crazy people suddenly are the deciding factor between any piece of legislation being passed. And their support isn't free. They want concessions on whatever their issue is, even if 98% of the electorate think they're insane - they still could inflict massive damage on on the parliamentary process.
First past the post eliminates the fringe from the process. It still lets in crazies of course, but there have to be a lot of them coordinating for that to happen.
The other thing to keep in mind in that in my 100 seat example, the difference between one party having 51 seats, or 100 seats is irrelevant - they can pass whatever they want either way, so whichever election system you have that produces a 1 seat majority or a 50 seat majority is effectively the same.
Oh without a doubt. My general feeling is that most of the publishing model around paper journals works ok, but if you submit corrections or updates or the like it should actually end up attached to the article on the web. Some journals are starting to do that, but a lot of them don't.
Ya, it's not that wikipedia won't accept primary sources, it's that the primary source has to be statically referenceable.
A year from now there's no way to know if edits from some IP address were actually the primary source, someone claiming to be so or the like - but if you have a reference to a static source you can at least point to that and then you can have an argument over whether or not you believe him.
This does raise a longstanding question about static sources in academia - basically in the paper world keeping track of corrections and updates and so on was hard. In the internet era it should be easy, but we still cling to the structure of paper journals a lot of places.
That would be the definitive poll.
The idea of something like this is to illustrate how different shifts would effect the result.
If you're a campaign for example, and you're trying to figure out how to win usually, tools like this will tell you which areas are still 'in play' and might be worth fighting in (spending your advertising dollars). The campaigns themselves almost certainly have huge amounts of data about what potential voters in each area care about, and how they're going to vote, but that analysis requires a large team of people to manage. This is more for people to play with relatively easily.
In that sense I'm not hugely fond of the tool, it's still a bit too complex for easy casual fiddling, and if I was a serious campaigner I'd likely have much more data to work from - the question becomes how easy is it to flip a particular state (the obvious ones from the charts are Iowa, Ohio, Florida, and Wisconsin ) rather than which would it be nice to flip. The democrats would like to pick up texas, the republicans California, but that doesn't seem likely.
I'm in canada, so it's a little different here, but in our last federal election the NDP managed to take themselves from 3rd party to official opposition essentially from one issue, in one province (French language stuff in quebec), in one stroke they pulled the rug out from one party (the bloc quebecois) - and picked up a lot of seats putting themselves ahead of one of our two big parties (the liberals). A real GOP strategist is looking at probably 4 -6 states and wondering if there's a major issue they can take a stance on an flip the whole state. The rest of us are just playing with sliders to wonder about what could happen.
Uh... evidence?
I specifically point to the case of wealth disparity and health care outcomes in more socialist countries, and the less serious fall they suffered from the economic down turn. What I said was entirely evidence driven (or inherently meaningless, like china being where it is).
If the chinese governments rather draconian control of who lives where, what industries can be owned by who, what products can be sold in china if they aren't made in china etc. is news to you, then you're either young or have been living in a cave, or are young, and frankly, by the time you're old enough to know what's going on in china they may completely change course anyway. That's why they are, more or less as we speak organizing the next party congress to appoint new leadership for china for the next decade, and laying out just what policies china will have.
As to your point about religion: From their perspective they are right. If we just adopted sharia law we'd all be living in a muslims idea of paradise on earth sort of thing, because that's what they think should happen. The question becomes a matter of whether or not you can construct objective measures of 'better off' - on things like healthcare, wages, quality of education essentially you can, and on all of the objective measures the US is doing worse than more socialist countries. On the cultural issues, well sure, it depends on your perspective, if you think it's a great idea that blacks (or women, see Ann Coulter) shouldn't be allowed to vote, then sure, the confederate dream of an agrarian slave owning society is something the US is pulling further and further away from, and if that's the world you want, of less opportunity, less equality, less freedom etc. then we're not even having the same discussion, and we're rehashing multi century old debates on the so called 'rights of man' and all that. If we're talking about the best way to make society more equal, more free, more opportunity with better healthcare, education, wages for the working people etc. then we can have a useful discussion. If you're fat australian woman with 30 billion dollars of inherited wealth claiming that the $2 dollars a day she can pay african miners is something australia should look at as an aspiration we may as well not be living on the same planet or speaking the same language because there is no discussion to be had.
Talking about the US your rhetoric becomes polarized: "1%", "living in a fantasy land the like the republicans" [I HATE the GOP FWIW].
No seriously. Those are two actual and very legitimate points. For all the bluster of our conservatives being mini republicans, - and where the US has voter ID we've had robocalls, they aren't trying to ban abortion they are getting caught by the police for trying to manipulate the election, we don't have lobbyists buying off our country and so on. On each of those issues you can point to someone more socialist than canada doing better than we are (e.g. France and lobbysts), but we're all much better places to live if you're an everyday person than the US. Our conservatives haven't institutionally started living in a fantasy land about economics. We have political parties like that. (E.g. the wild rose party), but no one votes for them, sort of like the libertarians or the communist party in the US, they exist, every now and then they get press, but no one takes them seriously. The US has 40+ percent of looking looking to believe in complete nonsense. That isn't an environment anyone sane wants to live in.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/26/obama-muslim_n_1706522.html
Think about that. If you come to canada and ask how many people think Stephen Harper is actually a martian you'll probably get 1% who say they think so- everywhere has it's crazies. The US just has a lot of them.
the 1% thing isn't polarized rhetoric. I mean in terms of the actual data. Seriously. Look at wage disparity in canada versus the US, wages for the median factory worker so to speak. The US has flatlined average worker pay since 1970. Socialist countries haven't (Germany leading the charge on this one). If you're rich, the US is the place to be, if you aren't rich, and I mean the relative rich, not just living in the west kind of rich, but I mean 300K/year salary kind of rich, or the multi million dollar a year salary, the US is the place to be. That drags up the average income in the US, but if you aren't in the very limited portion of the population who benefits from it, you'd be better off somewhere else. That has come to be 'rhetoric' because it's a legitimate real problem. As some very talented economists will point out, it's more of a 0.1% than 1% problem, and that would be a more accurate reflection of the situation, but no one would understand the reference then.
FYI, you'll be fighting for healthcare just as surely as you will be fighting for breath when the strangler gets a hold of you. What you have is some minor assurance of not getting a huge-ass overinflated bill and - not needing much care - this relieves you. When you need something badly and it doesn't magically appear, you'll feel differently.
You have clearly never had a serious medical problem in a socialized medicine system. I'd suggest you try it sometime, but well, don't. Getting cancer a couple of times to see just how quickly our system responds to someone with a serious problem is illustrative but not necessarily a good plan. The downside is that there are people who abuse the system, and occasionally that means people slip through the cracks. But none of the healthcare system is magic, and when it fails the people in charge are held to account. In the US system a 'failure' is when an insurance company actually pays out a claim (which is the same here for our insurance companies when we have travel insurance for example, canadian healthcare doesn't do anything for you when you're in the US for example, and for that we buy insurance from the same bastards you have to).
You mean RIM? BioWare? Bombardier? ATI?
Without a doubt, the oil industry has been a disaster for canada. We went from being a manufacturing economy producing almost 50% more cars per capita than the US, to a place where making cars is becoming too expensive.
It's economy is still based on oil and logging.
I realize the US perception of canada is out of date, but that's 100 years out of date. As I say though, oil causing us a lot of grief, it's good for newfoundland because there aren't a lot of them, but it's driving up the dollar.
It is silly to say that Canada is doing better than the USA when Canada is essentially completely dependent on it's proximity to the USA:
No, we aren't dependent. We're close, that means it's convenient to buy and sell from the US. We also recognize that this plan isn't working out, and it's time to move on. That's why we're building east west oil pipelines for example. If we weren't close to the US we'd be doing the same thing as Australia, who isn't near anyone, and trading with anyone.
even though Canada has vastly greater natural resources per capita than the USA.
In places no one lives. Not really a fair comparison.
In global rankings such as HDI we are about the same
On healthcare, wealth distribution we're doing better. On HDI we are in a statistical tie. If you are going to be in the wealthiest 1% so to speak you want to be in the US. If you want to be anyone else, you're better off in canada. By a long shot.
I may not like our conservatives, but we don't have a political party that has institutionalized living in a fantasy land the like the republicans, we've actually had healthcare for years. We no longer have groups of people fighting over basic issues, like access to abortion, or the right to vote, because we're all in this together, and we've moved on from that nonsense. We don't throw huge numbers of people in jail because we actually make decisions based on evidence, not based on some misguided notion of justice.
Money isn't everything, but even in that we're doing better - because we had more regulation, and more socialism than the US in 2008.
We have been undergoing creeping incrementally socialists for going on 50 years.
Yes, and if it was more than creeping you'd be much better off. See germany or France for example. Even the NHS in the UK. They have had the monumentally stupid swing towards austerity before it was appropriate, and that's hurting, a lot. But that happens.
My point was sort of obviously that you'd be doing better if you had much more socialism and regulation and a lot less free market. It hasn't served you all that well. I'm sure you disagree with that, you'd be wrong, but well, you have an entirely political party that institutionally believes in fantasies about economics and history, so you'll fit right in with them.
This is what I dispute. They have had little chance to learn otherwise.
I'm not sure you understand what you're saying. China is where it is. You can't disagree with that, because it's sort of a meaninglessly obvious statement. They have gotten there through strong collective effort. You could disagree with that, but anyone with a minimum of effort can tear you a new brain. With less collective effort they'd be somewhere else, quite possibly somewhere better, but definitely somewhere else. For the better part of 30 years their collective effort got them no where because the effort was badly misdirected, and then they changed gears, started listening to a bunch of experts on successful economies, and figured out how to start making progress. All of that has been very directly top driven in china.
You cannot ascribe collective motivation to individuals
Actually, you can. Different cultures approach shared sacrifice very differently. The japanese particularly are much much more about 'your role in society' than 'how you benefit from society' the way we are in north america. Quebec (the french speaking part of canada) is actually very collective relatively to the rest of north america because they view themselves, or at least the french within quebec, view themselves as this pocket of french culture resisting english encroachment. That has worked very well for them in gaining control of their language, culture and establishing rights for themselves in the same sense. But it hasn't worked out fantastically well economically.
I realize where you're coming from with game theory - but some countries have made a very long term very deliberate effort to overcome people behaving in their own interest at everyone else's expenses.
And how exactly is forced labor without pay not slavery again?
Well it is, but these people got paid.
Conscription to do work paid or not is slavery.
Close to, yes, that was my point.
I'm all for learning. I'm not for forced learning. Every kid should have a right to an education and no parental or legal authority should be able to take it away. However no legal / parental authority should be able to force it either.
If children could make their own choices they wouldn't be children. Unfortunately kids aren't able to know what they'll need in the future.
It's a communist regime, no matter how capitalistic they might seem, it's still the same, meaning, your statement is actually backwards, foxconn and every other chinese company is in fact an extension of the government. This isn't an assumption, but fact.
Try not to confuse the Republic of China (Taiwan), which is where foxconn is actually based, and the Peoples republic of China (communist/mainland china) which is where the factory we are talking about is.
Foxconn can, and has, essentially bought off various aspects of the chinese government for their own control of the factory towns, but they are in absolutely no way an extension of the communist government. Lots of companies are. But not foxconn.
Bullshit. No economic system has produced more wealth, more prosperity, lower rates of poverty than the free market.
And where did I proclaim china a free market? I said they are where they are, whatever you want to describe as the country they have is very much a product of collective effort. Considering they pay 250 dollars a month that's maybe not working out well for the average worker.
Here in the states we did just fine without collectivism for many many decades.
I'm in canada. We've done better with more collectivism than you have, and we're doing better than you currently because of it. Your system has a lot of wealth, in a lot of the wrong places. Your system got where it is by exploiting cheap labour, just like china, and you've put major collective effort into building your various armies for various purposes, building roads, dams, etc. The new deal which was a strong push for collective effort worked out pretty well. The chinese are, as I said, one step away from slavery, so about where you were in the 19th century.
Well this factory is new, but this might be routine for china, and if it happens once every 2 or 3 years then it happens on whatever cycle, it's only going to hit you once or twice in your academic career, if it hits you at all.
China isn't really like north america or europe in this regard. I wouldn't be surprised if the entire government in the area (district or even prefecture) is actually just an extension of foxconn (legally, officially), and if you're at their school you can be told to work at their factory, they pay for it after all. You can't take one of their products into their town, you can't set up a vegetable stall without their permission and in their town etc. This isn't some mom and pop little GM assembly plant with 6000 employees. This is a small factory with only 40 000 workers that they need to expand (http://www.tuaw.com/2012/05/21/foxconn-building-new-production-line-for-apple-products/ )
Conceptually it's much like factory towns elsewhere, with varying degrees of official backing, and institutionalizing who actually runs the show.
There is also, in china at least, some measure of communist collective effort and coercion still. This has to be done, so we all pitch in to do it, because it's for the good of the country, or else. And to some degree they're right - without a strong collective effort they wouldn't be where they are. Of course if they cared about their workers they'd be paying a lot more than 250 dollars a month, but lets not go crazy here, you need to keep costs down to stay competitive.
The government can always conscript you and and then send you to work digging trenches, fighting wars or building schools if they want. Normally rich countries don't resort to that in all but the most extreme circumstances, but for china a million iphones probably brings in 10 or 15 million dollars (http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2012/01/31/how-much-of-the-iphone-is-made-in-china/). That's a lot of money, especially since, if you look at the first link I had, they're talking about only a 56 million dollar factory. There is a strategic interest in doing whatever it takes to meet that demand rather than risk letting somewhere else pick up the sales - and that's only direct wages for the phone assembly, there's all of the components manufactured in china as well - and they want to be seen as doing whatever it takes to keep it that way. China is taking 'being accommodating to business' as far as you can take it without outright allowing slavery - and that is deliberate.
Or that the agent in question had the information from somewhere, and was just using an FBI supplied laptop for his own purposes.
This outline the bright logic of their explanation.
That sentence makes as much sense as the low end phone having a microSD slot, and the mid range phone not having one.
Windows 8 is technically fine. It's just a terrible design. The inconsistent UI makes is basically unusable.
These include consistency in the UI
You've clearly never had to evaluate accessibility professionally. Windows 8 is completely inconsistent in how it behaves. We've been running it through its paces here at work (where we have a lot of people who are experts on this sort of thing, including working with microsoft on office) and basically, don't use windows 8. Everything that's wrong with windows 8 can be summed up in 1 word: inconsistent. The UI doesn't behave predictably, and it's not consistent with previous behaviours for no apparent reason.
Also, you come across like an MS shill, most people here come across as linux shills. As i said, your point of view makes a lot of sense in the enterprise.
I'm sorry, I think you're being contradictory. If I'm understanding you correctly, you want some sort server type product you have at your home which hosts all your data and media with minimal configuration and talks to a variety of devices from a multitude of manufacturers to facilitates seamlessly sharing data across different standards of communication and data formats to all different devices. Sorry that's not happening. Ever.
No, that's not what i said, and I'm sorry you don't understand, but you'll get there. You actually have a good view of what an idealistic world should be, but of course we don't have that (full interoperability, which, as I say, is what those of us who live the lifestyle now have, linux servers, iphones, PS3s, home lighting, all talking to each other). As I said, how do we configure everything now (without skydrive)? Right, I have a windows 2008 file and webserver, windows 7 desktops, some home theatre PC for TV, etc. etc. etc. Small business and 'home' are merging. MS has, traditionally, been pretty good at realizing that. With Skydrive they are - they're just assuming they should be the server provider, which is a non starter.
I don't know how to make that clearer.
well for starters you're a student who managed to find dreamspark software for free. Good for you, if you're one of our students you'll encounter some of our professors (who have PhD's in comp sci or software engineering) who can't manage that. When you get caught up to the point of realizing that's the problem you'll figure out just how unclear this stuff is. Without a doubt the Xbox has been microsofts greatest push forward in usability and accessibility, that's why both your dad, and an 8 year old who can barely print letters properly (average grade 3) can both manage to use it.
Have a look at http://seattleorganicseo.com/sosblog/top-google-searches-in-2012-the-most-popular-keywords-study-version-3/ it's a bit off topic but it tells an enormous amount about how people understand the technology they use. The most searched for thing on google is facebook. Think about that. Let it sink in. People use google to find www.facebook.com. On average 4 or 5 times a month for every facebook user. Given that a lot of users probably don't use google to find facebook, some don't use google etc. you have an enormous collection of people, literally hundreds of millions, for whom the concept of typing in www.facebook.com, is too much and even need to type in google to google search to do a google search. And they do this repeatedly. That's the level that accessibility and usability live at. Windows 8 can't even decide whether it's 'metro' or traditional desktop.
they just don't work how you want them to: without a centralized data cloud service.
so you mean they don't work. If your home user service relies on uptime to a centralized data cloud service it's not a home user service. That's called an online backup service.
You asked what's the point of a centralized cloud service which maintains data
Uh... That's exactly what they're saying they do (they don't execute but that's another matter). They're focusing on games that have an online component. If you want to make a strategy game that's single player, or if you want to make a single player adventure game, they don't have the skills to market or test that, and they have no intention of acquiring that skillset. Which is why there are other publishers.
He's saying that every game
No, he's saying every game *EA* publishes should have multiplayer. Paradox does strategy and historical games, EA is all in on a 'multiplayer customer relationship' for want of a better way of putting it. If you want a single player game you don't have to publish it with EA, and if you don't like strategy games you don't have to ever buy anything from Paradox. Valve is pushing very hard for every new game to have achievements because that's part of what they think their customers want from the experience with them. Blizzard is pushing battle.net because they feel their customers want to all stay connected even if they're just playing a single player map in starcraft or running around alone at the moment in D3 or WoW. Everything from Atlus is some sort of emo and or RPG thing (though that wasn't always true it this is only last 6 or 7 years), Bethesda are all basically first person action FPS or RPG's etc.
Every company in this business is allowed to specialize into what they think their customers want. If it was Nintendo, Sony or Microsoft saying we won't allow single player games on their consoles we'd have a problem (and, admittedly, it might come to that), but EA saying we only do games with an online component is just making clear their particular niche.
There is for EA a strong business case that having an online component through EA will always get them some money per title, even from pirates, whereas other companies (GoG, paradox etc.) feel they can do very well without that online part precisely because they aren't EA.
Ubisoft, while they just announced they're ditching the always on DRM, has a much more complex relationship with it's customers because it has a very very diverse product line, as does Take 2.
Oh sure, I was talking about right now it requires skill.
Windows 8 is terrible, so no one is going to use it. So that's not helping. It doesn't matter what you *can* do with it, it won't be done because no one sane wants to use Windows 8.
You also tie yourself to your microsoft account - which is a big no no, and sort of invalidates the whole capability. You have to create a microsoft account (why do I need a microsoft account at all? What business is it of MS what I'm doing with my stuff? Why do I have to follow a MS TOS for my own data? What happens if MS revokes my account? No f'n way). It's the same basic problem with google services (or itunes), if I need to marry myself to a 'cloud' service for this it's not accessible to the average user, nor is it a good idea.
As I said, skydrive isn't ready for prime time, anything that has any capacity to revoke your access is not ready for prime time. Which sort of throws the whole thing out the window.
I realize you are sort of a MS shill, and I get where you're coming from. In the enterprise that makes sense - you stick with the MS family and licencing and everything plays nice together. But for a home users you cannot ever have a situation where you've handed over the functionality through a cloud service that can be revoked. Again, they have the pieces, but they don't work together. When you build a system like this on your own you run your own server, which everything talks to. The moment I can have my account banned by microsoft for having the word fuck in it, or I could have my account shut down for being in the wrong country I don't have a service I can use. It's a research project demo from MS, but it's not a consumer product.
Not a single "advanced configuration" option is required to enable the above.
And that, is why MS is still failing at this. When an MS shill doesn't understand what level their average user is at, you're never going to get the project where it needs to be. What happens when all of these devices are on a single unsecured access point? What happens when you have 3 xboxes and 3 phones and 3 laptops? What happens when I can't access my skydrive account? What about playing music on Windows 8 on anything other than the surprisingly terrible media player? What happens when your skydrive account gets hacked (and that depressingly, happens a lot)? 'advanced configuration' isn't configuring a DMZ on your router and managing QoS, it's how to even set a password, how to pick a password that's secure, how to manage a system that isn't secure, how to manage your own data hosted by someone else etc. etc. etc. You can read /., that probably puts in the top 1% of computer users. Try not to forget that when thinking about how a product 'works'.
I didn't say it was great to buy, it was great to try out. Somewhat different problem.
Bullshit, it's gonna land with a resounding "thud"
Probably, but that doesn't mean the prospect of it all working isn't appealing.
They're betting the farm
I've wondered about this. I don't think they are. They'll bet he farm on windows 9, between now and then they're just shoveling a very expensive lab project at us.