No, the reason it doesn't work is that there is a huge cultural gap between the extremely poor and the rest of the classes in the United States. This doesn't really happen so much in other rich countries where there is more of a social safety net and the very poor have more respect for the public places and institutions of the country.
Financial crimes... not so much. We're squeamish about sending white collar criminals who really hurt their victims to prison for very, very long periods of time in prisons which are scary. I think part of it is the bias; they don't always look like scary malcontents who should be permanently removed from society even though they are predators.
I think the Chinese are actually a bit ahead of us on prosecuting white collar crimes.
This article felt like reading the numerous articles over the years about the imminent arrival of Strong AI written by people whose primary understanding of computer science comes from watching sci-fi movies. Now though the Strong AI god has been replaced by Google and the followers claim the Strong AI messiah is already here. Unfortunately for them they are mistaking mere information for knowledge and understanding.
I admit, there is a big leap of faith with GWT. Basically you have to trust that the Google knows what they are doing with regards to understanding Javascript, browser bugs, and all the little gotchas and puzzles that Microsoft has inserted into their browser and Javascript engine (intentionally or not) to thwart more complex cross-browser Javascript development.
In essence the same is true with Java. You have to trust that they have managed to sort out all the quirks with the win32, mac and linux apis to effectively handle cross platform development. It's a little easier to handle these cases, as Microsoft actually provides a good debugging environment for win32.
So I think code generation is fine as long as the target platform is sufficiently ugly to justify it and the tool authors know what they are doing.
I can't believe nobody brought up GWT (http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/) yet.
GWT is a system put out by Google whereby you write your code in a subset of Java and then it compiles the Java down to cross-browser compatible speed and size optimized Javascript.
The implementation of Java is pretty good and includes just about everything you would expect except for threads. It's absolutely effortless to program in compared to hand coded Javascript -- especially for large projects.
The other benefit is "hosted mode" whereby you run your webapp in a special runtime that lets one use Eclipse's modern interactive debugger to fix bugs in the Java code that gets turned into equivalent Javascript.
If you want to see a neat demo of what can be done with GWT check out :
The problem with women in the U.S is they are all taught that the most important thing in the world is that they are important players for team women.
Every point that they score is a point for everlasting victory of the female team and a tribute to women who struggled everywhere throughout the world throughout history for their rights.
So if you have to wash the dishes, you lose a point for "team women".
If you do something out of the ordinary nice for him you lose a point for "team women".
If you do something out of the ordinary nice for him and he doesn't appreciate it with absolutely overwhelming complements you scored an own goal and your team mates are going to be disappointed in you unless you earn 10 points back for "team women".
If he does something nice for you without you doing anything you get a point.
That's the American women mentality that is so wrong. The successful marriages I know are the ones in which the "team" the women and the man in the marriage are playing for is "the family".
The reason foreign women are a lot better mates is because they haven't been taught at a young age the whole "women team" thing from the mass media and their educational system and are more focused on the strength of the relationships with people they actually know and are related to instead of their relationship to these mythical collective mass media archetypes that American women are so obsessed with.
China's economic ideology is different from the west. Let me explain how:
U.S
* Banker makes loan to whoever they damn well please.
* Loan doesn't get re-paid
* Other bank takes over banks assets and screws depositors over 100k. China:
* Banker makes loan to favored state owned company or other entity.
* Loan doesn't get re-paid.
* Government recapitalizes bank.
U.S
* Banker makes a bunch of questionable bad loans
* Retires with golden parachute package China
* Banker makes a bunch of questionable bad loans
* Banker is executed by government
U.S
* Bankers en masse make loans to fund housing/stock bubble
* Government runs to see how they can loosen regulations to help the banks make exponentially more money and profit
* Bubble bursts, banks are bailed out by government discount window loans, TAF, TSLF,etc
China
* Bankers en masse make loans to fund housing/stock bubble
* About 1 year after it gets going government raises real estate transfer tax or stock trading taxes and bank reserve requirements to purpousefully punish the speculators.
* Bankers who make ridiculous corrupt loans are executed. Some banks who didn't get swept up in the bubble keep operating as usual
Long story short. In China, unlike in America, the politicians actually have far more control of the economic activity in their country than the bankers do.
The problem with audio is some multi-millionaire can't believe that he can't spend more than $2000 for a home audio setup even if he gets the absolute top of the line stuff. It's such a let down for them that they can't have stuff that's better than the average middle class audio nerd so scammers find a way to charge them more.
Microsoft was expecting Vista's increased hardware requirements to align with Moore's law. The only problem was that hardware performance is not increasing as quickly as it was in the 90s. Multi-core CPUs are coming out but CPU mhz are not really going anywhere. Thus Microsoft cannot add features like they used to and expect the reduced performance to be acceptable as it once was, due to continuous hardware improvements.
I've found the Sidekick 3's terminal app is pretty good because you get a pretty easy to type on keyboard. The font is readable and the terminal emulation is good. You also get a decently wide screen, not full 80 columns though. They also have good help for how to type in Ctrl-C, and other control sequences, etc,
Well they just released the British X-Files on the same day. Hmm... Let me get out my tinfoil hat here... Hang on just got to tune it a little...;)
Ahh.. I know! Maybe our globalist masters are frustrated that the global warming story didn't cause us to form a global government, so maybe a manufactured threat from aliens will!
This is how the whole malware crisis started. People double clicking on a single exe file and having their computer rootkitted because every damned executable in the whole world needs to be able to overwrite any file in the entire system without so much as a warning dialog.
At least with the Debian package system software gets into a system in a predictable fashion instead of the absolute free-for-all that is Windows.
If there are Aliens visiting us nothing is actually going to change. They are like naturalists going out into some remote jungle (our little corner of the solar system) to take pictures of monkeys (us). The monkeys see a pickup truck the naturalist is driving, something they could never possibly be able to explain. The naturalist comes up to them befriends them and then leaves. The other monkeys come back and say that the large white ape does not exist. Even if they all see the large white ape and the interesting craft she drives. So what? Maybe some of the religious monkey elders would get upset but that's about it. It's not like the monkeys are going to suddenly figure out how to turn sticks and branches into a car and drive out of the forest and start wearing suits and ties and drinking $4 lattes at Starbucks.
Why do "rogue nations" pursue boring 60 year old nuclear weapons technologies when they could instead have armies of super intelligent, pretzel proof, two-hearted, stroke proof, aids proof, super-metabolic super warriors?
Microsoft's problem is that Windows XP was good enough. That and computers have not improved in speed as much as they did during the 90s.
Microsoft needs everyone to upgrade their systems every few years in order to keep making money. If they ad more features though, the systems gets slower, especially if the hardware does not improve dramatically like it was doing 10 years ago. So they are in a dead end. So they have to cripple low-end systems which appeal to the "Happy with XP, just want a laptop to access the web" crowd who would otherwise never upgrade to vista.
Every web server that can handle more than one client simultaneously is basically multi-threaded. Its painfully clear that threads have been an enormously successful programming model and are here to stay. Concurrency is difficult to understand but that doesn't mean it's not necessary.
This tech will most likely be developed? Why? I mean there are 100s of other energy ideas blowing around out there.. Why would this one come to be the first significant major power source since nuclear power?
Please Google "North American Energy Policy" sometime.
The datastore doesn't support multi-table joins. That's kind of a 30 year setback as far as database technology goes. I have been hearing more and more from scalability experts that joins are hard to scale and one shouldn't even bother with them and instead do all the joining manually in the app tier as needed.
There are at least seven copies of the RepRap machine in the world that Olliver knows about. The 3D printer also allows for a new and fascinating way of communicating: Olliver can design something at home in New Zealand, which then appears on another researcherâ(TM)s desk, in Bath, in the UK, or the other way around.
So I'm going to double click an email attachment and wake up the next morning to find my house infested with little insect like robots wandering around my house looking for credit cards.
Seems there's a lot of people out there who think that this or that scientific discovery will make all the creationists wake up and finally abandon creationism. Not going to happen. You just can't reason somebody out of something they weren't reasoned into in the first place.
Yeah I'm a Linux user and I'd much rather use OpenOffice than Google Apps. Even AbiWord and Gnumeric are better. Google has to realize that browser based javascript is just not going to do it for full-blown office apps. Microsoft specifically broke the environment it so it wouldn't be able to do that. It's freakin' single threaded!
If they were smart they would switch to a SWT (e.g Eclipse IDE) rich client platform installed via java web start that contained strong web services integration with google for sharing, search and collaboration. Java 1.6 is damned fast now and and NetBeans and the Eclipse IDE have shown that Java can really shine on the desktop. Maybe with the newly released Java Micro-Kernel (Update N/Consumer JRE) they will move toward this direction. Update N is a few megabytes download and downloads the rest of the Java libs as needed.
Astrology is not a model, and can't be proven wrong as it is not evidence based, and makes no testable predictions. Speaking of theories that make no testable predictions and are not evidence based. I wonder if I should date someone who believes in String Theory.
Right now the hospitals want to nickel and dime the customers. The insurance companies want the patients to suffer without health care or the least amount of health care they can legally get away with providing and the customers have no good choices. The negotiations between the patient, hospital and insurance company require an enormous overhead of lawyers, it staff and so forth. So basically the incentive structure is setup to spend the most money possible on everything besides patient care, making things very expensive for the amount of health care coverage provided.
I think then that the best way to fix health care is to outlaw providing medical insurance unless one is going to give the care. Once the premium is paid, the care cannot be billed for on an individual incident basis. So basically I think hospitals should provide health insurance. This would line up the economic incentives perfectly. Hospitals would compete to provide the best care and to make sure their subscribers don't get sick because that way they'll make the most money (have the most subscribers) and spend the least (preventative care to reduce costs). This will also greatly reduce the number of people involved in the medical industry who are not providing medical care.
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No, the reason it doesn't work is that there is a huge cultural gap between the extremely poor and the rest of the classes in the United States. This doesn't really happen so much in other rich countries where there is more of a social safety net and the very poor have more respect for the public places and institutions of the country.
Financial crimes... not so much. We're squeamish about sending white collar criminals who really hurt their victims to prison for very, very long periods of time in prisons which are scary. I think part of it is the bias; they don't always look like scary malcontents who should be permanently removed from society even though they are predators.
I think the Chinese are actually a bit ahead of us on prosecuting white collar crimes.
Headline: Four executed in China for bank fraud.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/3657708.stm
Rhodium already went from $200 to $10,000 an ounce. Same thing might be happening there.
This article felt like reading the numerous articles over the years about the imminent arrival of Strong AI written by people whose primary understanding of computer science comes from watching sci-fi movies. Now though the Strong AI god has been replaced by Google and the followers claim the Strong AI messiah is already here. Unfortunately for them they are mistaking mere information for knowledge and understanding.
I admit, there is a big leap of faith with GWT. Basically you have to trust that the Google knows what they are doing with regards to understanding Javascript, browser bugs, and all the little gotchas and puzzles that Microsoft has inserted into their browser and Javascript engine (intentionally or not) to thwart more complex cross-browser Javascript development.
In essence the same is true with Java. You have to trust that they have managed to sort out all the quirks with the win32, mac and linux apis to effectively handle cross platform development. It's a little easier to handle these cases, as Microsoft actually provides a good debugging environment for win32.
So I think code generation is fine as long as the target platform is sufficiently ugly to justify it and the tool authors know what they are doing.
I can't believe nobody brought up GWT (http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/) yet.
GWT is a system put out by Google whereby you write your code in a subset of Java and then it compiles the Java down to cross-browser compatible speed and size optimized Javascript.
The implementation of Java is pretty good and includes just about everything you would expect except for threads. It's absolutely effortless to program in compared to hand coded Javascript -- especially for large projects.
The other benefit is "hosted mode" whereby you run your webapp in a special runtime that lets one use Eclipse's modern interactive debugger to fix bugs in the Java code that gets turned into equivalent Javascript.
If you want to see a neat demo of what can be done with GWT check out :
http://www.gpokr.com/
The problem with women in the U.S is they are all taught that the most important thing in the world is that they are important players for team women.
Every point that they score is a point for everlasting victory of the female team and a tribute to women who struggled everywhere throughout the world throughout history for their rights.
So if you have to wash the dishes, you lose a point for "team women".
If you do something out of the ordinary nice for him you lose a point for "team women".
If you do something out of the ordinary nice for him and he doesn't appreciate it with absolutely overwhelming complements you scored an own goal and your team mates are going to be disappointed in you unless you earn 10 points back for "team women".
If he does something nice for you without you doing anything you get a point.
That's the American women mentality that is so wrong. The successful marriages I know are the ones in which the "team" the women and the man in the marriage are playing for is "the family".
The reason foreign women are a lot better mates is because they haven't been taught at a young age the whole "women team" thing from the mass media and their educational system and are more focused on the strength of the relationships with people they actually know and are related to instead of their relationship to these mythical collective mass media archetypes that American women are so obsessed with.
U.S
* Banker makes loan to whoever they damn well please.
* Loan doesn't get re-paid
* Other bank takes over banks assets and screws depositors over 100k.
China:
* Banker makes loan to favored state owned company or other entity.
* Loan doesn't get re-paid.
* Government recapitalizes bank.
U.S
* Banker makes a bunch of questionable bad loans
* Retires with golden parachute package
China
* Banker makes a bunch of questionable bad loans
* Banker is executed by government
U.S
* Bankers en masse make loans to fund housing/stock bubble
* Government runs to see how they can loosen regulations to help the banks make exponentially more money and profit
* Bubble bursts, banks are bailed out by government discount window loans, TAF, TSLF,etc
China
* Bankers en masse make loans to fund housing/stock bubble
* About 1 year after it gets going government raises real estate transfer tax or stock trading taxes and bank reserve requirements to purpousefully punish the speculators.
* Bankers who make ridiculous corrupt loans are executed. Some banks who didn't get swept up in the bubble keep operating as usual
Long story short. In China, unlike in America, the politicians actually have far more control of the economic activity in their country than the bankers do.
The problem with audio is some multi-millionaire can't believe that he can't spend more than $2000 for a home audio setup even if he gets the absolute top of the line stuff. It's such a let down for them that they can't have stuff that's better than the average middle class audio nerd so scammers find a way to charge them more.
Microsoft was expecting Vista's increased hardware requirements to align with Moore's law. The only problem was that hardware performance is not increasing as quickly as it was in the 90s. Multi-core CPUs are coming out but CPU mhz are not really going anywhere. Thus Microsoft cannot add features like they used to and expect the reduced performance to be acceptable as it once was, due to continuous hardware improvements.
I've found the Sidekick 3's terminal app is pretty good because you get a pretty easy to type on keyboard. The font is readable and the terminal emulation is good. You also get a decently wide screen, not full 80 columns though. They also have good help for how to type in Ctrl-C, and other control sequences, etc,
Well they just released the British X-Files on the same day. Hmm... Let me get out my tinfoil hat here... Hang on just got to tune it a little... ;)
Ahh.. I know! Maybe our globalist masters are frustrated that the global warming story didn't cause us to form a global government, so maybe a manufactured threat from aliens will!
You are applying human categories of thought to life forms that evolved completely separately from us.
This is how the whole malware crisis started. People double clicking on a single exe file and having their computer rootkitted because every damned executable in the whole world needs to be able to overwrite any file in the entire system without so much as a warning dialog.
At least with the Debian package system software gets into a system in a predictable fashion instead of the absolute free-for-all that is Windows.
If there are Aliens visiting us nothing is actually going to change. They are like naturalists going out into some remote jungle (our little corner of the solar system) to take pictures of monkeys (us). The monkeys see a pickup truck the naturalist is driving, something they could never possibly be able to explain. The naturalist comes up to them befriends them and then leaves. The other monkeys come back and say that the large white ape does not exist. Even if they all see the large white ape and the interesting craft she drives. So what?
Maybe some of the religious monkey elders would get upset but that's about it. It's not like the monkeys are going to suddenly figure out how to turn sticks and branches into a car and drive out of the forest and start wearing suits and ties and drinking $4 lattes at Starbucks.
Why do "rogue nations" pursue boring 60 year old nuclear weapons technologies when they could instead have armies of super intelligent, pretzel proof, two-hearted, stroke proof, aids proof, super-metabolic super warriors?
Microsoft's problem is that Windows XP was good enough. That and computers have not improved in speed as much as they did during the 90s.
Microsoft needs everyone to upgrade their systems every few years in order to keep making money. If they ad more features though, the systems gets slower, especially if the hardware does not improve dramatically like it was doing 10 years ago. So they are in a dead end. So they have to cripple low-end systems which appeal to the "Happy with XP, just want a laptop to access the web" crowd who would otherwise never upgrade to vista.
Every web server that can handle more than one client simultaneously is basically multi-threaded. Its painfully clear that threads have been an enormously successful programming model and are here to stay. Concurrency is difficult to understand but that doesn't mean it's not necessary.
This tech will most likely be developed? Why? I mean there are 100s of other energy ideas blowing around out there.. Why would this one come to be the first significant major power source since nuclear power?
Please Google "North American Energy Policy" sometime.
The datastore doesn't support multi-table joins. That's kind of a 30 year setback as far as database technology goes. I have been hearing more and more from scalability experts that joins are hard to scale and one shouldn't even bother with them and instead do all the joining manually in the app tier as needed.
So I'm going to double click an email attachment and wake up the next morning to find my house infested with little insect like robots wandering around my house looking for credit cards.
Seems there's a lot of people out there who think that this or that scientific discovery will make all the creationists wake up and finally abandon creationism. Not going to happen. You just can't reason somebody out of something they weren't reasoned into in the first place.
Yeah I'm a Linux user and I'd much rather use OpenOffice than Google Apps. Even AbiWord and Gnumeric are better. Google has to realize that browser based javascript is just not going to do it for full-blown office apps. Microsoft specifically broke the environment it so it wouldn't be able to do that. It's freakin' single threaded!
If they were smart they would switch to a SWT (e.g Eclipse IDE) rich client platform installed via java web start that contained strong web services integration with google for sharing, search and collaboration. Java 1.6 is damned fast now and and NetBeans and the Eclipse IDE have shown that Java can really shine on the desktop. Maybe with the newly released Java Micro-Kernel (Update N/Consumer JRE) they will move toward this direction. Update N is a few megabytes download and downloads the rest of the Java libs as needed.
Astrology is not a model, and can't be proven wrong as it is not evidence based, and makes no testable predictions.
Speaking of theories that make no testable predictions and are not evidence based. I wonder if I should date someone who believes in String Theory.
Right now the hospitals want to nickel and dime the customers. The insurance companies want the patients to suffer without health care or the least amount of health care they can legally get away with providing and the customers have no good choices. The negotiations between the patient, hospital and insurance company require an enormous overhead of lawyers, it staff and so forth. So basically the incentive structure is setup to spend the most money possible on everything besides patient care, making things very expensive for the amount of health care coverage provided.
I think then that the best way to fix health care is to outlaw providing medical insurance unless one is going to give the care. Once the premium is paid, the care cannot be billed for on an individual incident basis. So basically I think hospitals should provide health insurance. This would line up the economic incentives perfectly. Hospitals would compete to provide the best care and to make sure their subscribers don't get sick because that way they'll make the most money (have the most subscribers) and spend the least (preventative care to reduce costs). This will also greatly reduce the number of people involved in the medical industry who are not providing medical care.