This a EU investigation, and its legal grounding is different. Among others: tying your hardware to your software *is* illegal in EU, as it constitutes a bundled sale. Also, monopolies and oligopoles are under tight surveillance, and the EU can fine them if their margins reach beyond a certain threshold. There are full teams of statisticians who study sales numbers of telcos in EU, and determine what is a "fair" margin they are entitled to make.
This is what we call a "market-driven social economy", where we have managed to insert some of the good ideas of socialism while still relying on the market to allow some form of competition between tightly controlled corporations.
The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years, radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then, as the technology became more sophisticated, the controls were made touch sensitive... now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure of course, but meant you had to stay infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same programme.
D. Adams, The hitch-hikers guide to the galaxy. Ch. 12.
The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years, radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then, as the technology became more sophisticated, the controls were made touch sensitive... now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure of course, but meant you had to stay infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same programme.
D. Adams, The hitch-hikers guide to the galaxy. Ch. 12.
How is this "Insightful"? The USA are really doomed if its educated population actually believes this shit.
And how exactly, do you want to increase "parental responsibility"?
You want to set up a mandatory adult "schooling" education program? With what funds and who do you put in charge of creating this program, which would, admitedly, be a world premiere?
Or perhaps, you have the idea of sanctioning the parents when their children don't do their homework or don't attend school? This has been tried: it merely results in even more children dropping out of schools and even poorer education. Notwithstanding the creation of ghettoized populations cut back from any chances of ever raising out of poverty and poor education.
Even though it's costly, pouring more money at schools, providing teachers with the means to do their job well is the only method that has a track record of actually raising the education levels.
Yes, maybe the CPS' bureaucracy is choking the attempts of the few remaining dedicated teachers to do their job properly. In any case, I doubt it is much worse than the US Army bureaucracy, which is completely sold to the military industry.
Throwing more money in the school system provides the ability to hire more talents (at the management and operational levels), motivate the education personnel and, ultimately, raise the education levels globally. As for the details, let the teachers and their administration, who are in daily contact with the population they have to deal with, decide how it's better done.
> WHAT FUCKING MEDICAL SCHOOL IS TEACHING HOMEOPATHY?! I
In France, Spain, Italy, Brasil and perhaps a few other countries, you can not call yourself homeopath if you're not a certified general practionner with an additional specialization, complete with a university diploma.
As for encouraging doctors/nurses to take more interest in their patients: If they're any good, conventional doctors/nurses certainly have a lot of interest in the well being of their patient. That still does not equip them with the proper interviewing techniques to keep the needed level of attention.
There are more urgent issues in healthcare than eliminating homeopathy and greater scandals in medecine than correcting a fringe of innocuous homeopathy believers.
The collusion between big laboratories, World Health Organisation and western governments on the orchestration of the AH1N1 flu vaccination campaign, and various other "big medecine" abuses are far more detrimental (and costly) to public healthcare.
Your hypotheses 1) is exactly the way it works if you keep the present system in place, where homeopathy is a specialization incorporated in the classical medecine curriculum. Homeopaths are classical, certified doctors. They know their limits and will always redirect to a specialist patients who need specific care. It turns out their screening is more efficient, and therefore their contribution to public healthcare is better than the regular practionners. At least that's part of the explanation given by the studies.
I know these views quite controversed. There are strong political fights in France between the Academy of Medecine, made of famous professors who have found cures for cancers or alike, who despise the non-scientific nature of homeopathy, and the public health authorities, who casually observe "hey, there's this whole population segment, the homeopathy believers, who have very low healthcare costs while being in better shape overall. We may not know why, but we surely want to keep it that way."
Ultimately, the Academy of Medicine will most likely prevail. I'm not sure this is for the better.
"you might assume"!?! . Sorry, it's not me assuming this. I report the conclusions of serious longitudinal public health studies, and they definitely watched for various kinds of possible biases before reaching these conclusions.
By the way, these conclusions have shaped much of the western public health policies lately, as most western countries keep homeopathy inside the public healthcare system.
The point the studies made is that it's easier for an homeopath to detect and enquire about subtle changes in the patient's physiology, because of the arcane classification of patient's physiological characteristics. All it costs is long conversations with your (homeopath) doctor that a regular doctor won't want to bother with when diagnosing a cold or the flu.
Medicine is not a Science, it's an Art, because the notion of "good health" is not objectifiable. Noone can produce a satisfying measure of "health".
While clearly evidence-based medicine and science have played and will continue to play a central role in improving our health and our life, there's more to medecine than just mechanistic interpretations of how the mind and body work.
About 10 years ago, I read a very nice sequence of papers in La Recherche (the French equivalent of "Scientific American").
The conclusions were very instructive: - there is no evidence of any kind of effect of homeopathic medicines by themselves - however, even after accounting sample biases, there was mild evidence that people followed by homeopaths were in better health overall, and this at a fraction of the cost of "scientific" medicine.
The papers suggested that to propose a homeopathic cure, the doctor has to take the time to inquire a lot about the patient's medical history, their mood and minor health issues (do you have gases? how often?...). As a result, the homeopath has a much more complete picture of the patient's symptoms. In most benign illnesses, traditional medicine is of very limited usefullness anyhow, not much more effective than placebo indeed, and most conditions cure themselves alone.
But when a serious condition occurs (early signs of cancers, hormonal imbalances...), the homeopath is much more inclined to detect the change and prescribe additional examinations, thus playing a major preventive role.
Adding to this that the actual costs of homeopathic cures is ridiculously low, the conclusion from La Recherche was that, even though the scientific basis for homeopathy was wrong, from a public health perspective, it was better to keep the system as is, keep teaching homeopathy in medical schools and refund homepathic cures.
Clearly, the disdain and lack of respect shown by Americans (here and even in the mainstream press) towards their political class shows there is something dysfunctional in the current state of affairs in DC.
Now, I could further elaborate, but since I'm a "troll", obviously I should stay quiet.
This plainly shows how poorly organized your unions are.
This is most likely due to the overall lack of care for the common good so prevalent in the US, under the guise of simplistic interpretations of freedom, free enterprise and self responsibility.
While the US constitution is a monument that has shone through the past centuries and has been an inspiring source of both social and economic progress, it is time to call for its retirement and a renewal of the American social contract.
The US constitution is doubtlessly the oldest constitution still in force. Can you believe it, a nation that has not once felt the need to deeply restructure their political system in over two centuries? This surely shows how inspired the founding fathers were. But let's not forget they were also slavers, valuing colored people at 3/5th of a white person.
Our societies evolve, and the aspirations of Peoples evolve too. Now most advanced nations (except the US) have moved forward into a "market-based, social-oriented economy".
Unfortunately, it will require a much greater downfall of the US might before Americans finally realize this and accept the need for such a profound renovation of their political and social system.
That's too bad, the US gave the rest of the world a lot, but the world can't help against such self-induced demise.
Well, 20 years ago, in my neural networks class, we were estimating the total memory capacity of a brain at 12GB. This was based on computing the memory capacity of a functioning 100B neurons simulated neural network designed after the best understanding we had at the time on how our brain works.
I trust my university professor more than a geocities page.
Mind you, with a reasonable compression scheme, I doubt there's much more that needs to be known and remembered.
Commenters seem very young today. Noone remembers the failures of Intel's and Motorola first attemps at addressing RISC designs? Both the Motorola 88000 and the Intel i860 were great designs that failed.
Back in the 90's, I did some work for the Ontario Telepresence Project. We did lots of studies on videoconferencing, shared mediaspaces...
What strikes me given the relative lack of outcome of the project, compared to the ubiquity of today's camera phones, is that the Telepresence project had it wrong when it wanted to have people *face* each other during conversations.
It turns out, this is not what we want. Staring at your interlocutor's face is not what you do in a usual conversation, it's even embarassing. You look at a shared point of interest. Turning the camera the opposite side of the screen was the way to go. First, you could use the cell phone as a camera, and second, in a phone conversation, it's much more useful to say "look at this", than to offer a nice view of you're hairy nose.
Or, to put it like St. Exupery: Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction...
Assuming a competitive, market-based economy, any software of sufficiently broad usage is bound to become free, as its marginal production cost is null. The free software movement is not much more than the social expression of this basic economical fact. Software distinguishes itself from other works of the mind, such as music, in that its originality is by no means a part of its value or utility. As a consequence, the software industry is bound to live on the margins generated by software innovation and specialization
But you have to carry the fuel from the port terminal (where the powerplants most likely are) to your home (through the shop). That should be in the ballpark of 7% transmission loss too...
There is a fundamental distinction between the minority report UI and the Johnny Mnemonic one: the first is "augmented reality": the user is not cut from the real world ; the real and virtual realities blend in to empower each-other. In Johnny Mnemonic's version, this is pure "virtual reality", with clumsy interaction techniques at best.
Still, the idea is far form perfect: -- The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years, radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then, as the technology became more sophisticated, the controls were made touch sensitive... now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure of course, but meant you had to stay infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same programme. D. Adams, The hitchhiker's guide to the Galaxy, Chap. 2. 1979.
Using datagloves, I did quite a bit of work in 1993 to see how the sort of UIs that we see in the Minority Report could work.
It turns out that there are 2 issues to overcome: - Fatigue: the gesture vocabulary had to consist only of short sequences. - "immersion syndrome": whatever I do can be interpreted against my will.
By designing the gesture vocabulary so that it would require alternating tense postures and relaxed aiming gestures, it was possible to overcome those issues in a pretty satisfactory way. Tension is particularly important, as it conveys intention: if you stress "Go There", people (and machines) can detect the fact that you want something to happen, as compared to using a monocord voice.
-- The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years, radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then, as the technology became more sophisticated, the controls were made touch sensitive... now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure of course, but meant you had to stay infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same programme. D. Adams, The hitchhiker's guide to the Galaxy, Chap. 2. 1979.
At the risk of being modded down to oblivion, [...]
Actually, I have mod points, but refutation seems more useful...
Anyways, it seems that if you don't tow the line on climate change, there is no room for you anywhere. [...]
Cheer up, there is room for you: go to the French Institute for Petroleum. If you have serious credentials, they'll pay good money and can even provide nice government positions (i.e. French Ministry of Research, then Education, n'est ce pas Claude Allegre...), which you'll use to spread FUD on climate change advocacy.
I only know the details of French Politics, but I'm sure Exxon, BP and the likes have their share of FUD spreading and anti-climate change lobbying.
Knowing that, on average, only 1 theft out of 10 gets caught (average resolution rate for reported petty crimes), that might make around 3000 people, or 8% of the workforce who commit occasional theft...
Slashdot Mirror
When the petition "formally acknowledge an extraterrestrial presence engaging the human race - Disclosure." reaches as many signatures (11,845) as actual pressing social issues.
Of course:
Q: how do you make a light shine in a blonde's eyes?
A: you point a flash light at her ear.
You're talking about US law.
This a EU investigation, and its legal grounding is different. Among others: tying your hardware to your software *is* illegal in EU, as it constitutes a bundled sale. Also, monopolies and oligopoles are under tight surveillance, and the EU can fine them if their margins reach beyond a certain threshold. There are full teams of statisticians who study sales numbers of telcos in EU, and determine what is a "fair" margin they are entitled to make.
This is what we call a "market-driven social economy", where we have managed to insert some of the good ideas of socialism while still relying on the market to allow some form of competition between tightly controlled corporations.
The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years, radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then, as the technology became more sophisticated, the controls were made touch sensitive ... now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure of course, but meant you had to stay infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same programme.
D. Adams, The hitch-hikers guide to the galaxy. Ch. 12.
BTW, a envisionment of natal in 1993, with datagloves: Charade, remote control of objects using free hand gestures published in Communications of the ACM. (Here for ps version)
The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years, radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then, as the technology became more sophisticated, the controls were made touch sensitive ... now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure of course, but meant you had to stay infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same programme.
D. Adams, The hitch-hikers guide to the galaxy. Ch. 12.
Is this what project natal will give us?
BTW, a envisionment of natal in 1993, with datagloves: Charade, remote control of objects using free hand gestures published in Communications of the ACM.
The most beautiful iconic language ever designed. Unfortunately, it didn't catch up. A quick intro. The official page (it's an authentic webpage from 1994, be indulgent with the formating!).
How is this "Insightful"? The USA are really doomed if its educated population actually believes this shit.
And how exactly, do you want to increase "parental responsibility"?
You want to set up a mandatory adult "schooling" education program? With what funds and who do you put in charge of creating this program, which would, admitedly, be a world premiere?
Or perhaps, you have the idea of sanctioning the parents when their children don't do their homework or don't attend school? This has been tried: it merely results in even more children dropping out of schools and even poorer education. Notwithstanding the creation of ghettoized populations cut back from any chances of ever raising out of poverty and poor education.
Even though it's costly, pouring more money at schools, providing teachers with the means to do their job well is the only method that has a track record of actually raising the education levels.
Yes, maybe the CPS' bureaucracy is choking the attempts of the few remaining dedicated teachers to do their job properly. In any case, I doubt it is much worse than the US Army bureaucracy, which is completely sold to the military industry.
Throwing more money in the school system provides the ability to hire more talents (at the management and operational levels), motivate the education personnel and, ultimately, raise the education levels globally. As for the details, let the teachers and their administration, who are in daily contact with the population they have to deal with, decide how it's better done.
> WHAT FUCKING MEDICAL SCHOOL IS TEACHING HOMEOPATHY?! I
In France, Spain, Italy, Brasil and perhaps a few other countries, you can not call yourself homeopath if you're not a certified general practionner with an additional specialization, complete with a university diploma.
As for encouraging doctors/nurses to take more interest in their patients: If they're any good, conventional doctors/nurses certainly have a lot of interest in the well being of their patient. That still does not equip them with the proper interviewing techniques to keep the needed level of attention.
There are more urgent issues in healthcare than eliminating homeopathy and greater scandals in medecine than correcting a fringe of innocuous homeopathy believers.
The collusion between big laboratories, World Health Organisation and western governments on the orchestration of the AH1N1 flu vaccination campaign, and various other "big medecine" abuses are far more detrimental (and costly) to public healthcare.
Your hypotheses 1) is exactly the way it works if you keep the present system in place, where homeopathy is a specialization incorporated in the classical medecine curriculum. Homeopaths are classical, certified doctors. They know their limits and will always redirect to a specialist patients who need specific care. It turns out their screening is more efficient, and therefore their contribution to public healthcare is better than the regular practionners. At least that's part of the explanation given by the studies.
I know these views quite controversed. There are strong political fights in France between the Academy of Medecine, made of famous professors who have found cures for cancers or alike, who despise the non-scientific nature of homeopathy, and the public health authorities, who casually observe "hey, there's this whole population segment, the homeopathy believers, who have very low healthcare costs while being in better shape overall. We may not know why, but we surely want to keep it that way."
Ultimately, the Academy of Medicine will most likely prevail. I'm not sure this is for the better.
"you might assume"!?! . Sorry, it's not me assuming this. I report the conclusions of serious longitudinal public health studies, and they definitely watched for various kinds of possible biases before reaching these conclusions.
By the way, these conclusions have shaped much of the western public health policies lately, as most western countries keep homeopathy inside the public healthcare system.
The point the studies made is that it's easier for an homeopath to detect and enquire about subtle changes in the patient's physiology, because of the arcane classification of patient's physiological characteristics. All it costs is long conversations with your (homeopath) doctor that a regular doctor won't want to bother with when diagnosing a cold or the flu.
Medicine is not a Science, it's an Art, because the notion of "good health" is not objectifiable. Noone can produce a satisfying measure of "health".
While clearly evidence-based medicine and science have played and will continue to play a central role in improving our health and our life, there's more to medecine than just mechanistic interpretations of how the mind and body work.
About 10 years ago, I read a very nice sequence of papers in La Recherche (the French equivalent of "Scientific American").
The conclusions were very instructive:
- there is no evidence of any kind of effect of homeopathic medicines by themselves
- however, even after accounting sample biases, there was mild evidence that people followed by homeopaths were in better health overall, and this at a fraction of the cost of "scientific" medicine.
The papers suggested that to propose a homeopathic cure, the doctor has to take the time to inquire a lot about the patient's medical history, their mood and minor health issues (do you have gases? how often? ...). As a result, the homeopath has a much more complete picture of the patient's symptoms. In most benign illnesses, traditional medicine is of very limited usefullness anyhow, not much more effective than placebo indeed, and most conditions cure themselves alone.
But when a serious condition occurs (early signs of cancers, hormonal imbalances...), the homeopath is much more inclined to detect the change and prescribe additional examinations, thus playing a major preventive role.
Adding to this that the actual costs of homeopathic cures is ridiculously low, the conclusion from La Recherche was that, even though the scientific basis for homeopathy was wrong, from a public health perspective, it was better to keep the system as is, keep teaching homeopathy in medical schools and refund homepathic cures.
Clearly, the disdain and lack of respect shown by Americans (here and even in the mainstream press) towards their political class shows there is something dysfunctional in the current state of affairs in DC.
Now, I could further elaborate, but since I'm a "troll", obviously I should stay quiet.
This plainly shows how poorly organized your unions are.
This is most likely due to the overall lack of care for the common good so prevalent in the US, under the guise of simplistic interpretations of freedom, free enterprise and self responsibility.
While the US constitution is a monument that has shone through the past centuries and has been an inspiring source of both social and economic progress, it is time to call for its retirement and a renewal of the American social contract.
The US constitution is doubtlessly the oldest constitution still in force. Can you believe it, a nation that has not once felt the need to deeply restructure their political system in over two centuries? This surely shows how inspired the founding fathers were. But let's not forget they were also slavers, valuing colored people at 3/5th of a white person.
Our societies evolve, and the aspirations of Peoples evolve too. Now most advanced nations (except the US) have moved forward into a "market-based, social-oriented economy".
Unfortunately, it will require a much greater downfall of the US might before Americans finally realize this and accept the need for such a profound renovation of their political and social system.
That's too bad, the US gave the rest of the world a lot, but the world can't help against such self-induced demise.
Any actual published material? If yes, please tell the w3c (public-web-plugins@w3.org).
See the W3C FAQ on the topic. It seems old, but they still need more convincing examples of prior art to fight the EOLAS case.
Well, 20 years ago, in my neural networks class, we were estimating the total memory capacity of a brain at 12GB. This was based on computing the memory capacity of a functioning 100B neurons simulated neural network designed after the best understanding we had at the time on how our brain works.
I trust my university professor more than a geocities page.
Mind you, with a reasonable compression scheme, I doubt there's much more that needs to be known and remembered.
Commenters seem very young today. Noone remembers the failures of Intel's and Motorola first attemps at addressing RISC designs? Both the Motorola 88000 and the Intel i860 were great designs that failed.
Back in the 90's, I did some work for the Ontario Telepresence Project. We did lots of studies on videoconferencing, shared mediaspaces...
What strikes me given the relative lack of outcome of the project, compared to the ubiquity of today's camera phones, is that the Telepresence project had it wrong when it wanted to have people *face* each other during conversations.
It turns out, this is not what we want. Staring at your interlocutor's face is not what you do in a usual conversation, it's even embarassing. You look at a shared point of interest. Turning the camera the opposite side of the screen was the way to go. First, you could use the cell phone as a camera, and second, in a phone conversation, it's much more useful to say "look at this", than to offer a nice view of you're hairy nose.
Or, to put it like St. Exupery:
Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction...
Software is meant to be free!
Assuming a competitive, market-based economy, any software of sufficiently broad usage is bound to become free, as its marginal production cost is null. The free software movement is not much more than the social expression of this basic economical fact. Software distinguishes itself from other works of the mind, such as music, in that its originality is by no means a part of its value or utility. As a consequence, the software industry is bound to live on the margins generated by software innovation and specialization
But you have to carry the fuel from the port terminal (where the powerplants most likely are) to your home (through the shop). That should be in the ballpark of 7% transmission loss too...
There is a fundamental distinction between the minority report UI and the Johnny Mnemonic one: the first is "augmented reality": the user is not cut from the real world ; the real and virtual realities blend in to empower each-other.
In Johnny Mnemonic's version, this is pure "virtual reality", with clumsy interaction techniques at best.
Still, the idea is far form perfect: ... now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure of course, but meant you had to stay infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same programme. D. Adams, The hitchhiker's guide to the Galaxy, Chap. 2. 1979.
--
The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years, radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then, as the technology became more sophisticated, the controls were made touch sensitive
Using datagloves, I did quite a bit of work in 1993 to see how the sort of UIs that we see in the Minority Report could work.
It turns out that there are 2 issues to overcome:
- Fatigue: the gesture vocabulary had to consist only of short sequences.
- "immersion syndrome": whatever I do can be interpreted against my will.
By designing the gesture vocabulary so that it would require alternating tense postures and relaxed aiming gestures, it was possible to overcome those issues in a pretty satisfactory way. Tension is particularly important, as it conveys intention: if you stress "Go There", people (and machines) can detect the fact that you want something to happen, as compared to using a monocord voice.
see Charade: Remote Control Of Objects Using Free-Hand Gestures published in Communications of the ACM in 1994 for more details.
-- ... now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure of course, but meant you had to stay infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same programme. D. Adams, The hitchhiker's guide to the Galaxy, Chap. 2. 1979.
The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years, radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then, as the technology became more sophisticated, the controls were made touch sensitive
At the risk of being modded down to oblivion, [...]
Actually, I have mod points, but refutation seems more useful...
Anyways, it seems that if you don't tow the line on climate change, there is no room for you anywhere. [...]
Cheer up, there is room for you: go to the French Institute for Petroleum. If you have serious credentials, they'll pay good money and can even provide nice government positions (i.e. French Ministry of Research, then Education, n'est ce pas Claude Allegre...), which you'll use to spread FUD on climate change advocacy.
I only know the details of French Politics, but I'm sure Exxon, BP and the likes have their share of FUD spreading and anti-climate change lobbying.
One could add:
Knowing that, on average, only 1 theft out of 10 gets caught (average resolution rate for reported petty crimes), that might make around 3000 people, or 8% of the workforce who commit occasional theft...
Sorry, this one's much better...
So don't hesitate and join The flat earth society.
We need your help!