I agree. Many shows exist only to sell toys. Historically, the Transformers could be credited with cementing that trend in children shows. The show's main purpose was to model how to use the action figures while the simplistic plot and dialogue existed merely to support the sales pitch. Since then we have seen vile kid shows like MMPR and the complete commercialization of The Grinch. The issue is maximizing profit by cutting the cost of production to the minimum needed to sell the toy.
All is not lost, as we also have the legacy of Thundercats and Robotech. These shows were not blatant toy commercials, and I think lead to the sense that creativity and sales could coexist. We have seen such a happy medium in Animaniacs, Rugrats, and the pre-Disney episodes of Doug. Currently, Pokemon does an extremely good job of being a slave to the two masters, with massive toy sales and good storylines and dialogue. We also still have shows that just want to silly, like Dexter and Sheep in the Big City.
I whole-heartedly agree that computers are an important tool in education. More importantly, those familiar and comfortable with computers are going to be in a better position to get a job. Even if a kid does nothing but play RPG or FPS he or she will have an advantage over the kid that has never seen a computer.
That said, the issue is greater than money. Owning a computer is like owning many books. A personal priority must be set to acquire a computer. An understanding must be made that the machine has importance in itself, even if no useful work gets done. We cannot force computer use any more than we can force reading. I probably need to illustrate the point.
It is generally accepted that reading to a child and then encouraging a child to be a voracious reader is a great way to help a child reach their potential. Few people will dispute this. We have libraries everywhere. Books can be had for a dollar at used bookstores and newspapers can be had for little or no money. In spite of this, many kids are not read to and cannot read at an age appropriate level. We fund reading, we encourage reading, we even advertise reading, but reading does not occur.
I do understand that for very poor families reading takes a far back seat to food and shelter. I also notice homes with a television in every room, but not a subscription to the newspaper. Visitors to my apartment comment on the number of books and the small TV; it is just not cool to have books and a small TV.
So, if a family would rather have a second car, and what teenage wouldn't, than a computer and Internet access, there is little we can do. Internet access can be had for a cost of a few beers at the corner icehouse, but, frankly, many people will not give up the beer. The sad fact is we can put computers everywhere, but we cannot expect any better success than when we put books everywhere
The assertion that we have even reached the point of an 'eye for an eye' is optimistic. The concept, as I understand it, is to try to make the punishment commensurate to the crime. In other words, instead of declaring war on another village for the death of a horse, we, in a fit of mercy, might just accept a replacement horse along with an apology and perhaps inconvenience money.
I do not believe this relatively primitive concept is universally accepted. For example, under this code one might accept that a murderer deserves to die, but there is nothing that says we are allowed to watch and relish in that death. Likewise, most of our drug laws become suspect if we apply the principle faithfully.
An eye for an eye is something we are still, for the most part, trying to learn. Most people do not understand the it's limiting nature, and instead, ignorantly try to use it justify excessive forms of retribution.
This reminded me of an article in Scientific American from several years back, The Specter of Biological Weapons . It is a highly rational and informative article on the difficulties, both practical and psychological, or biological warfare. The high points is that most people find such acts repulsive, and therefore will not commit them. Also at issue is that the agents are often as lethal to the perpetrator as the victim, leading to major difficulties in production and delivery.
To wit, it is easy for a human to use a virus to kill all the mice in a lab if the human is not susceptible to the virus. On the other hand, we have seen how difficult it is for a human to use a virus to kill other humans due to similar susceptibilities. Even something as simple as nerve gas requires special gear.
The one most famous case in which Europeans killed the natives of North America with smallpox was successful because the Europeans had a much lower susceptibility to smallpox. This is not the case for sarin, anthrax, or possibly genetically engineered smallpox. To handle such items, a proper protective infrastructure must exist which can increases the visibility of the to be warrior.
I feel much more threatened by super viruses created by the abuse of antibiotics. These agents exist. They already cause suffering. They move easily through the exisiting food chain to unsuspecting victim.
The opening sentences, "OOP became popular primarily because of GUI interfaces" shows not only the myopia of the authors, but also their concern with perception over reality. OOP is important not because of GUIs, but because they allow large projects to happen quickly.
Furthermore, that people may perceive OOP to only happen in C++ and Java does mean that it cannot happen in Pascal or C. This is the same for structured programming in Pascal instead of Basic. It is harder to do structured programming in Basic, but not impossible. If we are going to talk about OOP, lets talk about facts, not perceptions.
It is also true that OOP can take more time. On the other hand, the same can be said for any project in which reuse and modularity is an issue. I believe time can be saved with OOP because the mechanism for reuse is part of the language. I completely agree that if reuse of code is not an issue, then OOP may not be your best choice. Likewise with objects, interfaces, etc.
When I read an article like this I wonder if the author has ever written anything over 3000 lines, or worked with a team greater than 2. The article may be useful to someone who has never coded more than 'Hello World', but no one else.
Blaming racism on cultural differences is not valid. Culture is a subjective tool that is used to justify racism, much like many of the drug laws. With the drug laws, police have much more access to the street corner than the yacht club or even the coffee house. That combined with unequal penalties for possession lead to a large percentage of 'minorities' in jail. I don't think 'minorities' use more drugs. I have few white friends who have not use significant quantities of illicit drugs. 'Minorities' are sometimes targeted and often easier to catch, and they are less likely to have powerful friends.
The same is true in the corporate world. For example, people are judged on the schools they went to. Prestigious schools are often easier to get into if a relative graduated from said school. In the past, few minorities were allowed to attend prestigious schools. One is also judged on ones clothing. As most of us know, this is an irrelevant and irrational requirement, but no one denies it exists. For those not immersed in the boring world of white man clothing, it is hard to make the transition to the pitiful ensembles that are acceptable corporate wear. And we will not even go to the racist rants against various forms of music. Lets just say that there is as much creativity in Jazz as in 18th century orchestral, but we know which get the bad rap.
It is easy to ask someone else to change their behavior to meet your needs. This is why racism exists and why it will persist.
I am sure the copy protection is great for the media company, but breaks the usability patterns of the many TV users. I know of few people, other than a few sports fans and other generally listless people, who actually plan to be home to watch certain programs. Most people I know record shows, even football games, to watch when it is convenient for them.
I have recently discovered that cable boxes break the user happiness rule. Instead of programming a VCR to records several shows for the week, the cable box forces an extreme amount of pain and tribulation on the innocent viewer. The cable box must be set to the proper channel, the VCR must be set to the proper channel, another show cannot be watched, and, the final nail in the users head, sequential shows on different channels cannot be recorded.
Why do we have to pay for the privilege to be brutalized by our machines? A show that cannot be recorded is useless to me. I understand the business model, and I understand the corporate pressures. On the other hand cable is already very difficult to use. Do they really think even more user hostility they will help them succeed?
[ob Microsoft rant] On the other hand, this is the Microsoft strategy, and it certainly seems to have worked.
More pedantics. Moore's law does relate to component density, and therefore we really do not expect to see a 2GHZ chip 18 months after the 1GHZ chip. On the other hand, I do think it is reasonable to expect that technology is advancing at least in a compound fashion, so going from 1 GHZ to 2GHZ should be no more difficult that going from 1MHZ to 2 MHZ.
Fist, the original post compared debit cards and credit cards. I do not see why it was rated as a zero while the off-topic reply was rated as a two.
Second, You are correct that debit cards often have the same protection against fraudulent transactions as credit cards. I am also glad to hear that you got your money back for a fraudulent charge, and I am sure that this is the rule and not the exception. I am also aware that there are significant advantages to using the debit card over cash, especially if the debit card is linked to an account with a small balance. But none of these address the original post.
Implicit in the original post is the age-old concept of the person with the cash is the person in control. When I make a charge, I remain in control of the transaction; none of my cash is involved until I have had a chance to confirm the transaction. If I dispute a transaction, it is up to the credit card company to prove that the transaction is valid. It is beneficial to them to invalidate any fraudulent charges as quickly as possible, and with as little evidence, as possible. This is hell for the retailer, but the customer is always right, right? Especially a customer with cash.
Contrast this to a debit card. Unlike checks, there is no persistent document to prove or disprove the validity of the transaction. Soon after the transaction is complete, the bank sends the cash to the retailer. Even in the case of online banking, the customer is not going to realize a bad transaction has occurred until after the money has been stolen. It is not beneficial to the bank to quickly solve the problem. We see this in the example from the reply. While I often get a response to my credit issue within a week, the bank took two weeks.
Just in case anyone is wondering, I speak from experience. Several years ago a bank debited a bad check from my account. The problem was that said check was never deposited into my account, nor was it even made out to me. It was clear from the records that the check had never been deposited to my account, and that it was not mine. The debit caused my part-time-because-I-was-in-school-funded bank account to become overdrawn. It took several phone calls and a trip to the bank to solve the problem. The bank never tried to minimize the imposition on my time. I was without funds for several days. It was good I was not a starving student, or I would have been dead.
I think we need to take heed from Bruce Schneier and understand that there is a difference, if I may freely adapt, between advertised protection and real protection.
When parts of Texas switched to 10 digit dialing, there was a only a small backlash. People seemed more concerned with keeping the "prestigious" area code and not having area code overlay. There was a memory issue, but we got used to it. Hopefully, technology will negate the need for us to use the antiquated dialing method.
It seems the real issue is long distance. In Texas we pay a lot more to call to the city next door than a city across the country, or, sometimes, even across the world. This is a scam. The benefit of 10 digit dialing, which we may or may not see, is the end of long distance. There is little economic reason to separate long distance and local calls. In Texas, the reason is orrupt state(yes Bush) and local government that allows the likes of SBC and Time Warner to bilk customers in exchange for gratuities to state and local officials.
If the FCC forces 10 digit dialing, and MCI or Sprint get it into their head that they can get a constant 50 or 60 dollars a month from people who wish to buy a block of time, we may in fact see real innovation in our phone usage.
While it is true that PalmOS is designed to be pen-based, it would be dishonest to claim that it is not adapted from a keyboard based UI. PalmOS essentially replaces the mouse with a pen and the keyboard with the 10 year old Graffiti technology. The limitations are nearly as bad as text-based data entry database, with the advantage of random access to the data entry points. The default interface still depends on "keying" in characters one at a time in one location and them appear in another specific location. The user still largely depends on cutting and pasting to move characters(rather than direcly moving), and drawing is not supported out of the box.
To be honest, I use a Palm and I like it. It is a good place to store facts and synchs well with other machines. On the other hand, the Newton was built from the ground up to have the look and feel of a pen and paper notebook. As it turned out, most people did not want to spend $1000 on a digital notebook. Those of us who did were, in general, quite pleased. It connected to my computer through a Ethernet card, had several megabytes of memory, and overall was a cool machine.
I hope we will one day once again have an OS written for a digital notebook. I am not holding my breath.
True Universal Suffrage
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eLection '04
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In an ideal world, the main goal of a new election methodology would be to maximize access and security, neither of which are well served by the current system. Admittedly, it is getting better. A black person actually has access to voting hall, usually, but may still be required to show multiple forms of identification to get a ballot. Ballots are put into lock boxes, but whether those exact lock boxes make it to the central office depends on the integrity of the precinct workers.
It is easy to envision another reality. We can open all schools and libraries, in which we have put computers and secure networks, to voting. A person can go to any school or library, show their voter registration card, and get a sealed envelope. Let's say the envelope has two large computer readable random unique numbers, one on the outside, one sealed. The precinct worker would activate the outside number and deactivate the voter registration number for that election, without linking the two. The voter could then use the two unique numbers to vote. The issue is making the system secure enough, and anonymous enough, to allow people to vote only once and vote secretly. Naturally, we would have to secure the data stream and the counting computer to make sure that the IT people cannot change or filter votes. Can it be done? I think we can match the current levels of security and surpass the levels of access.
Of course, the real benefit of computer voting will be the possibility of new voting methods. For instance, the limitation of being able to vote for only one candidate, which is the best we can do with paper voting, imposes the will of the elites on the masses. Our election system has clearly reacted to universal suffrage by limiting the official candidates. It was ordained from the beginning of the primaries that we would have either Bush or Gore for president. It was highly unlikely that in casting a single vote anyone could change that. If we could cast a set of choices things might be different. If Republicans could have said my first choice is McCain and my second choice is Bush, or the reverse, and then a weighted sum was created for all candidates, McCain might have won. Likewise, if in the general election the far left could vote for Nader first and Gore second, and the far right could vote for Buchanan first and Bush second, the will of the people might be better represented.
The system we have is not the only system there is. As anyone who does serious coding knows, there is more than one way to sort a list. The best way depends not only on the kind of list, but also the overall process, and, as in voting, if we want a certain result at the end.
1) The war on drugs has always been an effective method of controlling the undesirable elements. This has been shown best in Texas, where our lawman of the year arrested 10% of a small town's black population for possession of powder cocaine, Most of these arrests were made near parks and schools. These arrest stopped a process by which user were switching from crack to powder cocaine, as all users in the town has used only crack.
2) I am not sure what you mean by minority religions. Everyone in Texas is a god fearing Christian. These other so-called religions are just cults and I hope that through prayer in school and other social engineering we can show them the errors of their ways.
3) Currently the top 10 percent of earners in the population pay the vast majority of the taxes. This is unfair. I am compassionate, so I do not want to make poor people pay taxes. On the other hand, there is not reason for the top 10 percents to pay for busses that they do not even use.
4) This is a very complex issue. I am not in the business of making inside the beltway decisions for outside the beltway politics.
5) Companies spend an awful lot of money to research new products. These companies must have the freedom to patent their products and market them as they see fit. Interference from the EPA, FDA, and other like agencies creates a world in which innovation is stifled. Likewise, laws that strengthen the patent and trademarks on a product, and thus increase the revenue stream for a company, goes a long way to increase the incentive to innovate.
6) We must allow the government the ability to prosecute criminals. My father went to the bar to destroy Iraq, and one of our best weapons was out intelligence. If Iraq had strong encryptions, they may have been more able to kill even more babies in Kuwait.
7)t is important to separate protests into two groups. In the first group are the god-fearing protests, like those who kill the doctors that kill babies. The second group are bad and self serving protests, like the hippies who chain themselves to trees, thus denying job to loggers and many of my corporate contributors in Houston. Obviously, we should have laws to put the later group in jail. In Texas, we are building plenty of prison space for the second group.
8) I fully support all levels of missile defense. It is not only critical for our safety, but also to the well being of our aerospace industry.
9) We are going through a period of faithlessness. As I said, I am fighting this by supporting prayer in school, faith based health care, and other Christian initiatives. I do not know when Jesus is coming, but I plan to spend my administration making America ready for his arrival.
This, as I am sure many people will say, is not a revolutionary concept. People have been string pictures together in various ways for a very long time. Another collage or storyboard does not in itself make art.
What is interesting is the use of a palm to talk about writing. Writing or drawing on a piece of glass is a very different experience than writing on paper or parchment or plywood or whatever. The potentially artful part of this may be the progression of the pictures, as the artist grows comfortable with this new medium and the restrictive size. Even in the few squares we can see, there is much experimentation. For example we see the contrasts of various levels of white space, or various amounts of entropy. If nothing else, the palm allows the artist to express an emotion or thought immediately.
Of course, it looks simple and we all say we could do it; but how many of us do. We have to give the guy credit for trying.
I don't think this changes much. Email is generally plaintext, and is extremely vulnerable to sniffers. Everyone should assume that their unencrypted email is public, their encrypted email is somewhat less public, and not say anything that would get them in trouble. Not doing so has landed many people in very uncomfortable situations.
As far as employers reading email, this has been the de facto case in U.S. for a long time. As has been stated before, the servers are the employers, the software is the employer's, they have control over the all data that passes and is stored on those devices. It may suck, but I don't see the realities changing any time soon.
When I did personal email on a corporate machine outside of the corporate network (i.e. a laptop at home), I used my personal ISP. Not a free email account that one logs into through the corporate ISP, but a bon fide personal ISP. I don't think one can complain about being caught using the corporate ISP for net sex at home. It is also important to use an email client in which one can quickly change between email accounts. This is one of the main reasons I stick with Eudora. I get to choose the account I will use with each outgoing message. This may not seem important but with many ISP still not as secure as they should be on their outgoing mail, it is useful. I know many people who use Outlook and the corporate ISP in an effort to save a buck. This is certainly a false economy.
I believe that a core agenda of some members of government is to restrict information. It isn't exactly censorship, as the tools they use are necessarily blunt, as much as a general attitude that an excess if information is bad. The most recent example of this behavior is the debates; the candidates did not want to voters to 'get confused' about the core issues, so left out the other candidates for President. It is also instructive to remember that G.W. Bush would have been happier if there weren't any debates at all.
This concept of To Much Information relates to the Internet in schools. The worst thing about the Internet is not that kids can see naked people, but that kids have access to a huge amount of previously hard to obtain information. If it were about naked people, we would just place the monitors so that grownups can see the screen. But it is not. It is about what we will allow our kids to know. Many groups have spent millions of dollars trying to rid our schools of information that they do not agree with. All that money wasted if the kids can now download a copy of Sex: A Users Manual.
It gets even more insidious. This bill is an unfonded federal mandate, despite that fact that many members of congress ran on the opposition to this practice. Libraries are now going to have to spend money on Censorware and support personnel. This money will come out of the book budget. Some people will count this bill as a success if it does nothing more than prevent the library from buying the latest Harry Potter book.
This bill is the latest in a continuing fight between those would want free and clear paths for disseminating information, and those who fear it. It is not only about the funding of libraries, but also the funding or visual and performing art. We can fund a sports stadium with massive amounts of public financing, but just look at the fight that goes on with the National Endowment for the Arts, a pittance in comparison.
There has been much debate about computers in schools. Some say it is critical for kids to know how to read hardback philosophical treatise, write extended essays on the nature of Baroque art using a dip pen on parchment, and compute square roots using only a compass and straight edge. Other think all that stuff is an anachronism and the only useful tool in the New Economy is the Computer. Those who master it will win, those who don't will sit in run down coffee shops reading their tattered copies of Voltaire and Joyce, making a few dollars a day sweeping up the floors at the local internet company.
Frankly, I think both positions have their merit. It is important for students to understand the computer as a wonderful and not mysterious tool. It is also important for those students to know how to write complete sentences, get most of the words spelled correctly, and know when the pocket calculator is giving the unintended result. These goals may be best met by some computer time and some non-computer time.
With these points in mind, my two questions are:
1) What approach would you take to teach the use of computer as a tool without the loss of basic writing, calculating and general problem solving skills?
2) How do standardized fill-in-the-bubble tests help students in the new economy where is it often more important to understand the process of problem solving and approximation than the exact final answer.
While numbers are always suspect, these are consistent with several other reports, the most recent of which claims that murder rates are higher in states that have a death penalty . Whether the murder rates are higher because of the death penalty, or the death penalty causes people to murder is still unclear. The same question can be asked with respect to adolescents and violence. Are violent games making kids less violent, or are the tough penalties making them more behaved?
The silly part of this political argument, particularly from a republican gun wielding person from Texas, is that such a person would contend that the best way to raise a child is to give them a shot gun as early as possible and let them kill as many animals as they like. Now I understand that when you kill an animal it real, and such a person believes that the reality will teach the sanctity of life, while the animate violence trivializes the value of life. I do not think it is necessary to reject the possible benefits of teaching a child to kill animals, or allowing the state to kill people that the state says are guilty of a crime. I do think it is ridiculous for Bush and Cheney to blame all of societies ills on violent video games and the Internet when parent and state sponsored violence is happening practically on thier front stoop.
Ok people, let's look at this realistically. Everyone is freaked out about computer and Internet stocks. Microsoft, the company that has the vast majority of the computer market, is suffering from much closer to a two year low than Apple. Specifically, over the past two years Apple has appreciated in value over 20%, where Microsoft has only appreciated around 10%. Do we think people have had enough of Windows? No. Windows is here for a while and Microsoft will remain profitable.
In starker terms, if you bought stock in Microsoft a year ago, you have seen the value of your stock plummet nearly a third. Apple has only lost about 10% (so far) over the same time frame
I hope we do not see the dark days of Apple at $8 a share, but you never know. It was nice to see Apple and Microsoft at around the same price, even if was only for a month. The sotck fell today because people are afraid that Apple may become unprofitable again, even though that is not what announced today. You can see that same thing happen to much more traditional companies when they do not meet the so-called analyst forecasts.
The fundamental thing with statistics, and the reason that most people are so easily confused by them, is that statistics are meaningless without a strict context. Not only that, statistics can be harmful when used for purposes outside of that context. We can use these facts to look at the current example of Web Site hit counts.
First, suppose I am using a number of web sites to promote my online store, In this case, I may be most interested in the amount of sales each site produces from click through users. For this purpose, I can simply assign a sale to a certain site. For the purposes of this discussion, I will assume that all sales can be assigned to a certain web site. At certain intervals, I can find the percent profit attributable to each site, and create a statistic with the ratio of the % profit from a site to the cost of advertising on that site. This statistic will create a valid comparison between sites.
Second, suppose I am most interested in branding, as Verizon is of late. In this case, I might want to pay an external agency to monitor the sites on which I advertise. Such an agency would presumable use a consistent and statistically sound method to determine the number of eyes that has seen my brand. I can then set up a statistic with the ratio of # of eyes to the cost of advertising for each site. Again, this will create a valid comparison.
It is notable that in either case the web logs for particular sites are not clearly useful. Even if the information itself was not suspect, web logs would not be comparable between sites. It would be difficult to set up a useful statistic to compare the value of each site with respect to my product. To put it another way, the web log for a particular site are useful to that site for generating a number of site specific statistics, but few if any of those are going to be of interest to me as a paying advertiser.
The article implies that NASA is using widows for mission critical computing. I know that NASA has run DOS, Windows, MacOS and even NeXTStep in supporting roles, but I didn't think these were allowed to run the important stuff. Several years ago NASA installed DEC workstations to run the mission critical applications. I have heard that the DEC machines were replaced. I have not heard that Windows is stable enough to stay up during an entire mission, which is what be required to run the missiion critical apps. Inquiring minds want to know.
That said, there have been a number of portables flown in space. In particular, does anyone remember a time when a GRiD was the machine to have in space. Now that was a laptop. It seemed to be space-worthy right out of the box. Too bad it went away before I had the money to acquire one.
My father was adamant that not all people benefit from a standard education. In his later life he was a high school teacher with a few science and education degreed under his belt. He saw that some of his students did not benefit from the lessons he was trying to teach, and thought they might be better off in a technical course that would lead to a specific skill set. After spending a bit of time teaching myself, I tend to agree with him. Some people are wasting their time in school.
On the other hand, it is their right to waste that time. I frittered lot of time in school, and was very lucky to be able to do it. I was told to leave school. Education was important enough to me that I stayed and completed my degree. I also worked on the most challenging jobs I could find to compensate for the fact that my grades were bad.
That said, I think that it is a mistake for some IT people to skip college. The reason is that college, at it's best, teaches the techniques to master new material and fully integrate the new knowledge into life. I don't know how smart I am, but I have tested at high levels. College honed that natural ability into a functionality that allows me to perform well in a wide variety of jobs. As a result, I have not been limited to a certain field. I have done well in research, testing and calibration, process engineering, and now programming.
College has given me a flexibility that I do not see in some of my non-college graduate collogues. Admittedly, some people have a natural ability to master and integrate new information. For those who don't, college provides a unique opportunity to develop it.
It is good to have a core skill, and one is smart to develop a core skill during High School. I used my core computer skills for pocket money during college. But, much like the one trick pony, survival depends upon the ability to update ones repertoire.
As has been mentioned, dominance in the computer industry has been fleeting. I still remember the mantra 'No one ever got fired for buying IBM", but now everyone buy Microsoft. IBM took the lead from DEC by aggressively marketing function as opposed to technical superiority. Microsoft took the software market away from Lotus and everyone else by created an affordable office product. They then made the office product unaffordable.
Exactly what might replace Windows is unknown. Currently Linux is the main game in town, but who knows? What is known is that now is the time that Microsoft might lose it's lead. Most of the marking ploys Microsoft has used are now frowned upon, and therefore it may be harder for Microsoft to use it's advantage to crush competitors. Also, It is not clear that Microsoft can integrate Internet functionality into Windows quickly enough to make a difference. It took them 10 years to kludge a workable GUI into DOS. If it takes them that long to get the Internet strategy together, they will be left behind.
But, as always, it is about money. Windows 2000, though a useful product is extremely expensive; both in terms of cost and the equipment needed to run it. Windows 95 and NT 4.0 is still plenty good for most people and companies. Microsoft is using some strong-arm tactics to try to get users to upgrade. This is not making customers happy.
At some point, users are going to have to decide to pay Microsoft's price, or go to another vendor. Currently the only simple option requires the user to buy another machine, which is the same problem as with Windows 2000. If Linux had an office product that was capatible with the legacy MS Office product, users would then have an option that will run on their current machines. It is at this point that Microsoft will lose customers.
However, if the Linux people make the same mistake that DEC made, then all is lost.
It seems that most of the people writing are not doing so from experience, but from some idealized sense of the way the world should be or the way they believe the rules are or should be enforced. Although theory is useful, it can be overcome by the necessities of the moment.
A bit of theory first. The Supreme Court has pretty consistently ruled that a person must either be doing something illegal or there must a good witness saying that person has been doing something illegal before a search can be ordered. So, although a person may be (maybe) searched if the person flees from an officer, that same person is usually pretty safe if they are just minding their own business. An anonymous tipster or an overzealous officer cannot, in general, search a person who is not doing something wrong. For instance, I often wear a photographer jacket, which resembles a flak jacket. If I am walking from my downtown apartment to the bar, I do not expected to be stopped and searched by an officer. On the other hand, if I enter a federal building while wearing this jacket, I must allow a search in order to enter the building. There is a fine line between enforcement and harassment, and, as several recent cases have shown, the police force is not beyond harassment.
The practical side to this is that the police are sometimes as responsible for belligerent behavior as anyone else. I have spent a fair amount of time on street corners and in the street protesting various injustices. Most of the time these have been peaceful, not only because my cohorts and me were committed to peaceful action, but also because the local police were committed to peaceful action. There has been more than one case where a plain-clothes officer would come up to us, give us his card, and have a pleasant conversation. I have also been present when pro-life people stormed a women's clinic. Again, the officer did not beat the pro-life people with sticks, or spay them with tear gas, even though these pro-life people were doing their best to injure the people guarding the door. They used minimal force to do the job.
We must remember that protestors are usually angry and scared. The cops are sometimes angry and scared, and feel they have a duty to discourage future protests. As we heard in Philadelphia, the police office did not like the protestors invading his town, and felt that he had a right to do whatever was necessary to secure his town. The Philadelphia police largely behaved themselves, even in extremely trying circumstances, but legal observers have reported several beating.
People certainly have a right to congregate in a peaceful manner. Police have a duty to insure that everyone rights are protected to highest degree possible. This does not mean that no one is inconvenienced. In much the same way that we tolerate the occasional man being shot 42 times or innocent person's house being broken into during a botched drug bust, we should also tolerate the occasional mass congregations of peaceful people.
We will see more of the same at the Democratic Convention. I hope that everyone is respectful of the others needs, but I suspect we will see non-optimal behavior on all sides.
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All is not lost, as we also have the legacy of Thundercats and Robotech. These shows were not blatant toy commercials, and I think lead to the sense that creativity and sales could coexist. We have seen such a happy medium in Animaniacs, Rugrats, and the pre-Disney episodes of Doug. Currently, Pokemon does an extremely good job of being a slave to the two masters, with massive toy sales and good storylines and dialogue. We also still have shows that just want to silly, like Dexter and Sheep in the Big City.
That said, the issue is greater than money. Owning a computer is like owning many books. A personal priority must be set to acquire a computer. An understanding must be made that the machine has importance in itself, even if no useful work gets done. We cannot force computer use any more than we can force reading. I probably need to illustrate the point.
It is generally accepted that reading to a child and then encouraging a child to be a voracious reader is a great way to help a child reach their potential. Few people will dispute this. We have libraries everywhere. Books can be had for a dollar at used bookstores and newspapers can be had for little or no money. In spite of this, many kids are not read to and cannot read at an age appropriate level. We fund reading, we encourage reading, we even advertise reading, but reading does not occur.
I do understand that for very poor families reading takes a far back seat to food and shelter. I also notice homes with a television in every room, but not a subscription to the newspaper. Visitors to my apartment comment on the number of books and the small TV; it is just not cool to have books and a small TV.
So, if a family would rather have a second car, and what teenage wouldn't, than a computer and Internet access, there is little we can do. Internet access can be had for a cost of a few beers at the corner icehouse, but, frankly, many people will not give up the beer. The sad fact is we can put computers everywhere, but we cannot expect any better success than when we put books everywhere
I do not believe this relatively primitive concept is universally accepted. For example, under this code one might accept that a murderer deserves to die, but there is nothing that says we are allowed to watch and relish in that death. Likewise, most of our drug laws become suspect if we apply the principle faithfully.
An eye for an eye is something we are still, for the most part, trying to learn. Most people do not understand the it's limiting nature, and instead, ignorantly try to use it justify excessive forms of retribution.
To wit, it is easy for a human to use a virus to kill all the mice in a lab if the human is not susceptible to the virus. On the other hand, we have seen how difficult it is for a human to use a virus to kill other humans due to similar susceptibilities. Even something as simple as nerve gas requires special gear.
The one most famous case in which Europeans killed the natives of North America with smallpox was successful because the Europeans had a much lower susceptibility to smallpox. This is not the case for sarin, anthrax, or possibly genetically engineered smallpox. To handle such items, a proper protective infrastructure must exist which can increases the visibility of the to be warrior.
I feel much more threatened by super viruses created by the abuse of antibiotics. These agents exist. They already cause suffering. They move easily through the exisiting food chain to unsuspecting victim.
Furthermore, that people may perceive OOP to only happen in C++ and Java does mean that it cannot happen in Pascal or C. This is the same for structured programming in Pascal instead of Basic. It is harder to do structured programming in Basic, but not impossible. If we are going to talk about OOP, lets talk about facts, not perceptions.
It is also true that OOP can take more time. On the other hand, the same can be said for any project in which reuse and modularity is an issue. I believe time can be saved with OOP because the mechanism for reuse is part of the language. I completely agree that if reuse of code is not an issue, then OOP may not be your best choice. Likewise with objects, interfaces, etc.
When I read an article like this I wonder if the author has ever written anything over 3000 lines, or worked with a team greater than 2. The article may be useful to someone who has never coded more than 'Hello World', but no one else.
The same is true in the corporate world. For example, people are judged on the schools they went to. Prestigious schools are often easier to get into if a relative graduated from said school. In the past, few minorities were allowed to attend prestigious schools. One is also judged on ones clothing. As most of us know, this is an irrelevant and irrational requirement, but no one denies it exists. For those not immersed in the boring world of white man clothing, it is hard to make the transition to the pitiful ensembles that are acceptable corporate wear. And we will not even go to the racist rants against various forms of music. Lets just say that there is as much creativity in Jazz as in 18th century orchestral, but we know which get the bad rap.
It is easy to ask someone else to change their behavior to meet your needs. This is why racism exists and why it will persist.
I have recently discovered that cable boxes break the user happiness rule. Instead of programming a VCR to records several shows for the week, the cable box forces an extreme amount of pain and tribulation on the innocent viewer. The cable box must be set to the proper channel, the VCR must be set to the proper channel, another show cannot be watched, and, the final nail in the users head, sequential shows on different channels cannot be recorded.
Why do we have to pay for the privilege to be brutalized by our machines? A show that cannot be recorded is useless to me. I understand the business model, and I understand the corporate pressures. On the other hand cable is already very difficult to use. Do they really think even more user hostility they will help them succeed?
[ob Microsoft rant] On the other hand, this is the Microsoft strategy, and it certainly seems to have worked.
More pedantics. Moore's law does relate to component density, and therefore we really do not expect to see a 2GHZ chip 18 months after the 1GHZ chip. On the other hand, I do think it is reasonable to expect that technology is advancing at least in a compound fashion, so going from 1 GHZ to 2GHZ should be no more difficult that going from 1MHZ to 2 MHZ.
Second, You are correct that debit cards often have the same protection against fraudulent transactions as credit cards. I am also glad to hear that you got your money back for a fraudulent charge, and I am sure that this is the rule and not the exception. I am also aware that there are significant advantages to using the debit card over cash, especially if the debit card is linked to an account with a small balance. But none of these address the original post.
Implicit in the original post is the age-old concept of the person with the cash is the person in control. When I make a charge, I remain in control of the transaction; none of my cash is involved until I have had a chance to confirm the transaction. If I dispute a transaction, it is up to the credit card company to prove that the transaction is valid. It is beneficial to them to invalidate any fraudulent charges as quickly as possible, and with as little evidence, as possible. This is hell for the retailer, but the customer is always right, right? Especially a customer with cash.
Contrast this to a debit card. Unlike checks, there is no persistent document to prove or disprove the validity of the transaction. Soon after the transaction is complete, the bank sends the cash to the retailer. Even in the case of online banking, the customer is not going to realize a bad transaction has occurred until after the money has been stolen. It is not beneficial to the bank to quickly solve the problem. We see this in the example from the reply. While I often get a response to my credit issue within a week, the bank took two weeks.
Just in case anyone is wondering, I speak from experience. Several years ago a bank debited a bad check from my account. The problem was that said check was never deposited into my account, nor was it even made out to me. It was clear from the records that the check had never been deposited to my account, and that it was not mine. The debit caused my part-time-because-I-was-in-school-funded bank account to become overdrawn. It took several phone calls and a trip to the bank to solve the problem. The bank never tried to minimize the imposition on my time. I was without funds for several days. It was good I was not a starving student, or I would have been dead.
I think we need to take heed from Bruce Schneier and understand that there is a difference, if I may freely adapt, between advertised protection and real protection.
It seems the real issue is long distance. In Texas we pay a lot more to call to the city next door than a city across the country, or, sometimes, even across the world. This is a scam. The benefit of 10 digit dialing, which we may or may not see, is the end of long distance. There is little economic reason to separate long distance and local calls. In Texas, the reason is orrupt state(yes Bush) and local government that allows the likes of SBC and Time Warner to bilk customers in exchange for gratuities to state and local officials.
If the FCC forces 10 digit dialing, and MCI or Sprint get it into their head that they can get a constant 50 or 60 dollars a month from people who wish to buy a block of time, we may in fact see real innovation in our phone usage.
To be honest, I use a Palm and I like it. It is a good place to store facts and synchs well with other machines. On the other hand, the Newton was built from the ground up to have the look and feel of a pen and paper notebook. As it turned out, most people did not want to spend $1000 on a digital notebook. Those of us who did were, in general, quite pleased. It connected to my computer through a Ethernet card, had several megabytes of memory, and overall was a cool machine.
I hope we will one day once again have an OS written for a digital notebook. I am not holding my breath.
It is easy to envision another reality. We can open all schools and libraries, in which we have put computers and secure networks, to voting. A person can go to any school or library, show their voter registration card, and get a sealed envelope. Let's say the envelope has two large computer readable random unique numbers, one on the outside, one sealed. The precinct worker would activate the outside number and deactivate the voter registration number for that election, without linking the two. The voter could then use the two unique numbers to vote. The issue is making the system secure enough, and anonymous enough, to allow people to vote only once and vote secretly. Naturally, we would have to secure the data stream and the counting computer to make sure that the IT people cannot change or filter votes. Can it be done? I think we can match the current levels of security and surpass the levels of access.
Of course, the real benefit of computer voting will be the possibility of new voting methods. For instance, the limitation of being able to vote for only one candidate, which is the best we can do with paper voting, imposes the will of the elites on the masses. Our election system has clearly reacted to universal suffrage by limiting the official candidates. It was ordained from the beginning of the primaries that we would have either Bush or Gore for president. It was highly unlikely that in casting a single vote anyone could change that. If we could cast a set of choices things might be different. If Republicans could have said my first choice is McCain and my second choice is Bush, or the reverse, and then a weighted sum was created for all candidates, McCain might have won. Likewise, if in the general election the far left could vote for Nader first and Gore second, and the far right could vote for Buchanan first and Bush second, the will of the people might be better represented.
The system we have is not the only system there is. As anyone who does serious coding knows, there is more than one way to sort a list. The best way depends not only on the kind of list, but also the overall process, and, as in voting, if we want a certain result at the end.
2) I am not sure what you mean by minority religions. Everyone in Texas is a god fearing Christian. These other so-called religions are just cults and I hope that through prayer in school and other social engineering we can show them the errors of their ways.
3) Currently the top 10 percent of earners in the population pay the vast majority of the taxes. This is unfair. I am compassionate, so I do not want to make poor people pay taxes. On the other hand, there is not reason for the top 10 percents to pay for busses that they do not even use.
4) This is a very complex issue. I am not in the business of making inside the beltway decisions for outside the beltway politics.
5) Companies spend an awful lot of money to research new products. These companies must have the freedom to patent their products and market them as they see fit. Interference from the EPA, FDA, and other like agencies creates a world in which innovation is stifled. Likewise, laws that strengthen the patent and trademarks on a product, and thus increase the revenue stream for a company, goes a long way to increase the incentive to innovate.
6) We must allow the government the ability to prosecute criminals. My father went to the bar to destroy Iraq, and one of our best weapons was out intelligence. If Iraq had strong encryptions, they may have been more able to kill even more babies in Kuwait.
7)t is important to separate protests into two groups. In the first group are the god-fearing protests, like those who kill the doctors that kill babies. The second group are bad and self serving protests, like the hippies who chain themselves to trees, thus denying job to loggers and many of my corporate contributors in Houston. Obviously, we should have laws to put the later group in jail. In Texas, we are building plenty of prison space for the second group.
8) I fully support all levels of missile defense. It is not only critical for our safety, but also to the well being of our aerospace industry.
9) We are going through a period of faithlessness. As I said, I am fighting this by supporting prayer in school, faith based health care, and other Christian initiatives. I do not know when Jesus is coming, but I plan to spend my administration making America ready for his arrival.
What is interesting is the use of a palm to talk about writing. Writing or drawing on a piece of glass is a very different experience than writing on paper or parchment or plywood or whatever. The potentially artful part of this may be the progression of the pictures, as the artist grows comfortable with this new medium and the restrictive size. Even in the few squares we can see, there is much experimentation. For example we see the contrasts of various levels of white space, or various amounts of entropy. If nothing else, the palm allows the artist to express an emotion or thought immediately.
Of course, it looks simple and we all say we could do it; but how many of us do. We have to give the guy credit for trying.
As far as employers reading email, this has been the de facto case in U.S. for a long time. As has been stated before, the servers are the employers, the software is the employer's, they have control over the all data that passes and is stored on those devices. It may suck, but I don't see the realities changing any time soon.
When I did personal email on a corporate machine outside of the corporate network (i.e. a laptop at home), I used my personal ISP. Not a free email account that one logs into through the corporate ISP, but a bon fide personal ISP. I don't think one can complain about being caught using the corporate ISP for net sex at home. It is also important to use an email client in which one can quickly change between email accounts. This is one of the main reasons I stick with Eudora. I get to choose the account I will use with each outgoing message. This may not seem important but with many ISP still not as secure as they should be on their outgoing mail, it is useful. I know many people who use Outlook and the corporate ISP in an effort to save a buck. This is certainly a false economy.
This concept of To Much Information relates to the Internet in schools. The worst thing about the Internet is not that kids can see naked people, but that kids have access to a huge amount of previously hard to obtain information. If it were about naked people, we would just place the monitors so that grownups can see the screen. But it is not. It is about what we will allow our kids to know. Many groups have spent millions of dollars trying to rid our schools of information that they do not agree with. All that money wasted if the kids can now download a copy of Sex: A Users Manual.
It gets even more insidious. This bill is an unfonded federal mandate, despite that fact that many members of congress ran on the opposition to this practice. Libraries are now going to have to spend money on Censorware and support personnel. This money will come out of the book budget. Some people will count this bill as a success if it does nothing more than prevent the library from buying the latest Harry Potter book.
This bill is the latest in a continuing fight between those would want free and clear paths for disseminating information, and those who fear it. It is not only about the funding of libraries, but also the funding or visual and performing art. We can fund a sports stadium with massive amounts of public financing, but just look at the fight that goes on with the National Endowment for the Arts, a pittance in comparison.
Frankly, I think both positions have their merit. It is important for students to understand the computer as a wonderful and not mysterious tool. It is also important for those students to know how to write complete sentences, get most of the words spelled correctly, and know when the pocket calculator is giving the unintended result. These goals may be best met by some computer time and some non-computer time.
With these points in mind, my two questions are:
1) What approach would you take to teach the use of computer as a tool without the loss of basic writing, calculating and general problem solving skills?
2) How do standardized fill-in-the-bubble tests help students in the new economy where is it often more important to understand the process of problem solving and approximation than the exact final answer.
There is nothing worse than a depressed dog.
The silly part of this political argument, particularly from a republican gun wielding person from Texas, is that such a person would contend that the best way to raise a child is to give them a shot gun as early as possible and let them kill as many animals as they like. Now I understand that when you kill an animal it real, and such a person believes that the reality will teach the sanctity of life, while the animate violence trivializes the value of life. I do not think it is necessary to reject the possible benefits of teaching a child to kill animals, or allowing the state to kill people that the state says are guilty of a crime. I do think it is ridiculous for Bush and Cheney to blame all of societies ills on violent video games and the Internet when parent and state sponsored violence is happening practically on thier front stoop.
In starker terms, if you bought stock in Microsoft a year ago, you have seen the value of your stock plummet nearly a third. Apple has only lost about 10% (so far) over the same time frame
I hope we do not see the dark days of Apple at $8 a share, but you never know. It was nice to see Apple and Microsoft at around the same price, even if was only for a month. The sotck fell today because people are afraid that Apple may become unprofitable again, even though that is not what announced today. You can see that same thing happen to much more traditional companies when they do not meet the so-called analyst forecasts.
First, suppose I am using a number of web sites to promote my online store, In this case, I may be most interested in the amount of sales each site produces from click through users. For this purpose, I can simply assign a sale to a certain site. For the purposes of this discussion, I will assume that all sales can be assigned to a certain web site. At certain intervals, I can find the percent profit attributable to each site, and create a statistic with the ratio of the % profit from a site to the cost of advertising on that site. This statistic will create a valid comparison between sites.
Second, suppose I am most interested in branding, as Verizon is of late. In this case, I might want to pay an external agency to monitor the sites on which I advertise. Such an agency would presumable use a consistent and statistically sound method to determine the number of eyes that has seen my brand. I can then set up a statistic with the ratio of # of eyes to the cost of advertising for each site. Again, this will create a valid comparison.
It is notable that in either case the web logs for particular sites are not clearly useful. Even if the information itself was not suspect, web logs would not be comparable between sites. It would be difficult to set up a useful statistic to compare the value of each site with respect to my product. To put it another way, the web log for a particular site are useful to that site for generating a number of site specific statistics, but few if any of those are going to be of interest to me as a paying advertiser.
That said, there have been a number of portables flown in space. In particular, does anyone remember a time when a GRiD was the machine to have in space. Now that was a laptop. It seemed to be space-worthy right out of the box. Too bad it went away before I had the money to acquire one.
On the other hand, it is their right to waste that time. I frittered lot of time in school, and was very lucky to be able to do it. I was told to leave school. Education was important enough to me that I stayed and completed my degree. I also worked on the most challenging jobs I could find to compensate for the fact that my grades were bad.
That said, I think that it is a mistake for some IT people to skip college. The reason is that college, at it's best, teaches the techniques to master new material and fully integrate the new knowledge into life. I don't know how smart I am, but I have tested at high levels. College honed that natural ability into a functionality that allows me to perform well in a wide variety of jobs. As a result, I have not been limited to a certain field. I have done well in research, testing and calibration, process engineering, and now programming.
College has given me a flexibility that I do not see in some of my non-college graduate collogues. Admittedly, some people have a natural ability to master and integrate new information. For those who don't, college provides a unique opportunity to develop it.
It is good to have a core skill, and one is smart to develop a core skill during High School. I used my core computer skills for pocket money during college. But, much like the one trick pony, survival depends upon the ability to update ones repertoire.
Exactly what might replace Windows is unknown. Currently Linux is the main game in town, but who knows? What is known is that now is the time that Microsoft might lose it's lead. Most of the marking ploys Microsoft has used are now frowned upon, and therefore it may be harder for Microsoft to use it's advantage to crush competitors. Also, It is not clear that Microsoft can integrate Internet functionality into Windows quickly enough to make a difference. It took them 10 years to kludge a workable GUI into DOS. If it takes them that long to get the Internet strategy together, they will be left behind.
But, as always, it is about money. Windows 2000, though a useful product is extremely expensive; both in terms of cost and the equipment needed to run it. Windows 95 and NT 4.0 is still plenty good for most people and companies. Microsoft is using some strong-arm tactics to try to get users to upgrade. This is not making customers happy.
At some point, users are going to have to decide to pay Microsoft's price, or go to another vendor. Currently the only simple option requires the user to buy another machine, which is the same problem as with Windows 2000. If Linux had an office product that was capatible with the legacy MS Office product, users would then have an option that will run on their current machines. It is at this point that Microsoft will lose customers.
However, if the Linux people make the same mistake that DEC made, then all is lost.
A bit of theory first. The Supreme Court has pretty consistently ruled that a person must either be doing something illegal or there must a good witness saying that person has been doing something illegal before a search can be ordered. So, although a person may be (maybe) searched if the person flees from an officer, that same person is usually pretty safe if they are just minding their own business. An anonymous tipster or an overzealous officer cannot, in general, search a person who is not doing something wrong. For instance, I often wear a photographer jacket, which resembles a flak jacket. If I am walking from my downtown apartment to the bar, I do not expected to be stopped and searched by an officer. On the other hand, if I enter a federal building while wearing this jacket, I must allow a search in order to enter the building. There is a fine line between enforcement and harassment, and, as several recent cases have shown, the police force is not beyond harassment.
The practical side to this is that the police are sometimes as responsible for belligerent behavior as anyone else. I have spent a fair amount of time on street corners and in the street protesting various injustices. Most of the time these have been peaceful, not only because my cohorts and me were committed to peaceful action, but also because the local police were committed to peaceful action. There has been more than one case where a plain-clothes officer would come up to us, give us his card, and have a pleasant conversation. I have also been present when pro-life people stormed a women's clinic. Again, the officer did not beat the pro-life people with sticks, or spay them with tear gas, even though these pro-life people were doing their best to injure the people guarding the door. They used minimal force to do the job.
We must remember that protestors are usually angry and scared. The cops are sometimes angry and scared, and feel they have a duty to discourage future protests. As we heard in Philadelphia, the police office did not like the protestors invading his town, and felt that he had a right to do whatever was necessary to secure his town. The Philadelphia police largely behaved themselves, even in extremely trying circumstances, but legal observers have reported several beating.
People certainly have a right to congregate in a peaceful manner. Police have a duty to insure that everyone rights are protected to highest degree possible. This does not mean that no one is inconvenienced. In much the same way that we tolerate the occasional man being shot 42 times or innocent person's house being broken into during a botched drug bust, we should also tolerate the occasional mass congregations of peaceful people.
We will see more of the same at the Democratic Convention. I hope that everyone is respectful of the others needs, but I suspect we will see non-optimal behavior on all sides.