Oh, yeah. Noam Chomsky is just a bastion of rational and objective political thought. Look no further. (That's sarcasm, in case it didn't come across.)
Tyrants came into power just fine in the Middle East (and elsewhere) without any help from the West (or the East, for that matter.) They're not a bunch of noble savages being corrupted by our evil influence. Their leaders keep the people poor because they're greedy and corrupt bastards who don't really care about the citizens in their care, and because the people have no real control over who's in charge and no safeguards against abuse of power. Same as in the former Soviet Union, same as in most of Africa, same in India, and same as in any number of other civilzations throughout history. Corruption is like gravity; in the absence of effort to the contrary it always wins out.
(The following may sound harsh, but I want to make clear up front that this post is _not_ a personal attack of any kind. You sound like a thoughtful and honest individual and I do not intend to imply otherwise.)
I'm sure the policies you note above are a major part of the problem, but, frankly, I think they're ultimately an excuse used by lazy and/or incompentent patent examiners.
Misguided incentives offered in return for poor job performance are not a valid excuse. If my boss offered me a bonus to rush through my work and give poor results I would still not do so, because it would be ethically wrong, and, more pragmatically, because the consequences of doing so would ultimately outweigh the benefits.
Patent examiners are the most important part of a workable and smoothly functioning patent process. Without patent examiners you don't have a patent system. It's time for them to stop whining about how overworked and discouraged they are and start doing a better job, and changing things that prevent them from doing a better job, incentives to the contrary be damned. I know some are trying to do so, but the don't appear to be getting the word out very well.
Policy and management changes will take care of themselves, or not, but the quality of the patent process must improve with our without the cooperation of the people who created the problems it currently has.
"Frankly it would be nice for the city to be able to dictate certain reasonable conditions. And this would be negotiated when their contract expires in about a year."
Our local cable company does operate under an arrangement similar to the one you describe. I'm not sure how it's handled elsewhere.
Adelphia Communications took over the previous local cable provider (Prestige Cable) a while back. After getting lots and lots of complaints about poor customer service the county government began keeping closer tabs on them. There was even talk about terminating their contract at the next opportunity if they didn't address the problems.
The threat of fines imposed against the company by the county seems to have resulted in some improvement to the incredibly poor customer support that had been the norm, but Adelphia's Internet service still sucks. Now they claim they're experiencing "growing pains", whatever that means.
Re:You /. people really like the word "monopoly"
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Broadband Obstacles
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· Score: 1
In the short term almost any system can be made to work. A dedicated, intelligent, and honest dictator/king/emperor may well do a fine job of running a country. Unfortunately such systems rapidly degrade as the complexities mount and less suitable leaders gain power and influence. Dictatorships by nature have no internal checks-and-balances against abuse by those in power, and when it inevitably becomes abusive or unresponsibe the people who labor under them have no authority or means to change the system without destroying it altogether.
I have one of those too. I think I got mine from Amazon; it was about $80 four or five months ago.
The design of the headset is such that it doesn't actually place any pressure on your ears. Not only is this more comfortable (no sweaty ear syndrome during long calls), but it also means that you can clearly hear other things going on around you while on the phone or waiting for a call, without removing the headset.
I do wish they'd included a redial button on the headset, but that's mainly because I tend to forget to grab the dialer pendant. Overall I've been very pleased with it.
Re:I resent the underlying sexism of your comment.
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The Ultimate S.U.V.
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· Score: 1
Why a minivan? What makes a minivan inherently more appropriate than an SUV? They get about the same mileage, but don't have the higher ground clearance you may need if you live in a rural or snowy part of the country.
"I honestly believe that SUVs should require a separate license, and hefty registration fees. And automatic liability in any accident situation."
That's just silly. "SUV" is a marketing term, covering such a broad swath of vehicle designs as to be meaningless to everyone except the people who sell the things and the people who whine about them. If minivans were invented today, they'd probably be sold as SUV's too. And should pickup trucks also be licensed, etc? Why not? Especially as many SUV designs are essentially re-skinned trucks? What about SUV's based on cars and minivans?
Many digital cable systems, like Adelphia's here in Maryland, send out both an analog and a digital signal. The analog signal doesn't include the whole range of available channels, but it's usually pretty easy to find out which are exclusively digital. You can likely use a splitter and run seperate lines to different devices, and tune each seperately.
I've been trying to get this point across, too. Once you establish that we need legislation to control who can send what kind of email to whom, it's only a matter of time until that legal principle is distorted into something you don't like. It cuts both ways, and once you turn to legislation to solve what are basically technical problems, there's no turning back.
Re:A small but good example of personalisation
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Making It Personal
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· Score: 2, Insightful
"They aren't interested in you. They are interested in your money."
I'm not the original poster, but this does not shock me one bit. Of course they are interested in my money. British Airways isn't a social club, it's a business.
But to keep getting their money they have to keep their customers happy. Keeping customers as happy as possible is the duty of every successful business (though lots of them seem to forget that.) Enlightened self-interest is a very strong incentive to behave in ways that don't offend your source of income.
Tax deductions aren't subsidies. They're just allowing the corporation (or individual) to keep something they already have. Income does not belong to the government by default.
You're right. I've been using a 1GB Microdrive in my digital camera (Canon D30) for more than a year now, and they were out for quite some time before that. This isn't exactly breaking news at this point.
That's nonsense. Raises are almost always given reactively, seldom proactively. Any manager who fires people just because they speak up about wanting a raise is an incompetent fool. Obviously some tact is required if one expects favorable results, but if a company wants to keep good employees then they have to be willing to listen and accomodate when appropriate.
So, you're trying to convince schools to start using free software. Why, exactly?
What educational objective are you trying to achieve? How will free software bring you closer to this objective? Which free software in particular? How will this benefit the average student?
Who will train the faculty? Who will support the installations? Will this cost money? What are the advantages to the institution, aside from the lower initial cost?
These are the kinds of questions that any responsible educator should ask, and you have to be prepared with good answers if you expect to make any progress. If you don't have those answers, then maybe you need to rethink your goals. Free software may, in fact, be the solution, or part of the solution. But you can't start from that assumption and expect others to leap on your bandwagon without a second thought. Except on Slashdot, of course.
Interesting. Three-point turns are also part of the required driving test in Maryland, USA. Though the "three-point" part is pretty much moot; you can actually inch around as many times as you need, so long as you don't run into the curbs, vehicles, people, etc.
Driving with one hand on the stick is also frowned upon around here. I don't know if there are any laws about it, though. I drive an automatic, myself.
Driving tests vary widely by state. The one here in Maryland is somewhere between the two examples you note. Some states have tests on the open road, and others prefer a closed course of some kind with mandatory driving experience beforehand. MD has a closed course now for the final test, set up as kind of a driving microcosm.
So three-point-turns are illegal in Oregon? How does that work? What happens if you go aways down a dead-end street or something and don't have room to do a U-turn?
What difference does it make if it's a mom-and-pop shop? The CD is still defective. There's virtually no chance that the large chains could be convinced that they should refuse to carry faulty CD's, but the mom-and-pops might well do exactly that.
I certainly wish your daughter and your family the best. However, I think you might be too quick to see Aspergers (or any other medical condition) in yourself.
I realize you're paraphrasing, but if we use your list above, then a heckuva lot of people suddenly have Aspergers. Pretty much just about every introspective, quiet youngester who didn't quite fit in, but who eventually grew out of it. I suppose it's possible that all those kids (including myself) really do have a neurological problem, but it seems more likely that they're perfectly normal kids, and that the description of the alleged condition is too broad to be meaningful.
I don't have the expertise or knowledge to comment on the medical details, but I get skeptical when the lists of indicators and symptoms sound start to more like horoscopes than medical diagnoses. "LIBRA: You display great powers of concetration. You are an intelligent and thoughtful person with high standards. Others often don't appreciate you or your interests..."
Correct me if I'm wrong, but on a cable modem network all bandwidth is inherently shared and the same physical infrastructure serves both residential and business customers. If someone takes out a utility pole and knocks out my cable service it's not going to get fixed any faster than my neighbor's just because I'm a business customer. And if the cable company's DHCP server dies (all IP's are DHCP locally, tied to MAC addresses if you buy a static) then, again, we're all equally screwed.
What improved service, exactly, can they actually offer?
And if cable companies and phone service providers were in free competition I would have no objection to your argument. Unfortunately most cable providers (in the US, at least) operate under monopolisitic contracts granted to them by state and local governments.
My choice in purchasing has been curtailed. In return, the cable companies are supposed to adhere to the terms of whatever contractual agreement was reached, under the oversight of those same goverment entities. In practice, however, the only consequence for ignoring their obligations, presuming whoever's in charge even catches on, is an occasional fine or strongly worded letter. There are exceptions, but the whole arrangement pretty much sucks.
And from what I hear DSL service isn't much better. Outside of cities or in areas with older lines availability and service is spotty at best, and the local telcos are generally not anxious to assist the competition in competing with them.
One man's bloat is another man's essential feature. Everyone who uses mainstream office applications is not a mindless drone hypnotized by checklists of things they'll never use. I never use the mail-merge functionality of Word, and seldom need pivot-tables in Excel. Are those useless, bloatware features? Of course not. If certain developers would stop arguing with the users and start listening they might occasionally learn something.
I realize that you probably know this, but I feel compelled to note there's a heckuva lot more to GUI design than "making things look preaty."
Anyone with Photoshop and some downloaded actions can make shiny widgets and nifty toolbars, but making those bits and pieces into a consistent, stable, usable, and attractive GUI is something much more difficult. And, unfortunately, it's another area in which OS projects tend to lag badly.
In house developers? In some places that might work, but most small businesses are lucky if they can afford a couple good books or a single training class, let alone another employee. And if they're attracted to free software because they're short on cash then it's even less likely.
Employees cost a lot of money. Yeah, contractors can work, but then you're back to searching around for someone who can handle what you need when you need it (and, unless you're paying them under the table, someone who's also willing and able to meet whatever legalities are necessary.)
Either way someone's gonna want to get paid for their time and trouble. Seems like we're just pushing the problem farther away from the original developers and back toward the potential users.
"In truth, I don't find the support process to be that different for Microsoft and Linux..."
Well put. And I think you could substitute the name of almost any commercial software company for "Microsoft" and your statement would be equally true. Commercial one-on-one support is generally abysmal, and many companies seem inexplicably reluctant to dedicate even a single employee to answering questions on newsgroups or message boards. (Or, when they do let an employee respond on a public forum, it's a marketing drone who has to get approval from the legal department before he's allowed to actually answer a question.)
But, on the other hand, most commercial software comes with pretty good documentation, and most companies have invested in online help and Knowledge Base-like systems which are regularly updated and which are generally accurate and well-written. Google's indespensible, but you can often waste a lot of time searching for obscure issues, and sorting through false leads and incorrect/outdated information.
FAQs and release notes are great, but they don't substitute for real, comprehensive, cohesive documentation. Whether it's a paper manual or online help, good writing takes time and sustained effort. It's not an afterthought or something you get someone to do once and forget about.
This kind of stuff is the Achilles heel of Open Source and free software. There are exceptions, but not enough of them. It seems that most programmers just aren't fired up about writing documentation, and many of them aren't very good at it when they're willing to try. That's fine-writing is a skill just like coding, so it's not surprising or insulting to acknowledge that everyone isn't equally adept.
I know that this issue has been discussed lots of times and that the situation is slowly improving, at least for some projects. But, frankly, I don't think that Open Source advocates do a very good job of soliciting help from good writers, artists, designers, etc. Why? Um, I dunno.
Yup. The current method of calculating ratings is badly flawed. I'm really tired of shows I like and watch being cancelled, or used as sacrificial pawns against whatever the current ratings blockbuster on the competing network might be. If aggregate viewing statistics can improve the situation then I'll be happy to chip in.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, yeah. Noam Chomsky is just a bastion of rational and objective political thought. Look no further. (That's sarcasm, in case it didn't come across.)
Tyrants came into power just fine in the Middle East (and elsewhere) without any help from the West (or the East, for that matter.) They're not a bunch of noble savages being corrupted by our evil influence. Their leaders keep the people poor because they're greedy and corrupt bastards who don't really care about the citizens in their care, and because the people have no real control over who's in charge and no safeguards against abuse of power. Same as in the former Soviet Union, same as in most of Africa, same in India, and same as in any number of other civilzations throughout history. Corruption is like gravity; in the absence of effort to the contrary it always wins out.
(The following may sound harsh, but I want to make clear up front that this post is _not_ a personal attack of any kind. You sound like a thoughtful and honest individual and I do not intend to imply otherwise.)
I'm sure the policies you note above are a major part of the problem, but, frankly, I think they're ultimately an excuse used by lazy and/or incompentent patent examiners.
Misguided incentives offered in return for poor job performance are not a valid excuse. If my boss offered me a bonus to rush through my work and give poor results I would still not do so, because it would be ethically wrong, and, more pragmatically, because the consequences of doing so would ultimately outweigh the benefits.
Patent examiners are the most important part of a workable and smoothly functioning patent process. Without patent examiners you don't have a patent system. It's time for them to stop whining about how overworked and discouraged they are and start doing a better job, and changing things that prevent them from doing a better job, incentives to the contrary be damned. I know some are trying to do so, but the don't appear to be getting the word out very well.
Policy and management changes will take care of themselves, or not, but the quality of the patent process must improve with our without the cooperation of the people who created the problems it currently has.
"Frankly it would be nice for the city to be able to dictate certain reasonable conditions. And this would be negotiated when their contract expires in about a year."
Our local cable company does operate under an arrangement similar to the one you describe. I'm not sure how it's handled elsewhere.
Adelphia Communications took over the previous local cable provider (Prestige Cable) a while back. After getting lots and lots of complaints about poor customer service the county government began keeping closer tabs on them. There was even talk about terminating their contract at the next opportunity if they didn't address the problems.
The threat of fines imposed against the company by the county seems to have resulted in some improvement to the incredibly poor customer support that had been the norm, but Adelphia's Internet service still sucks. Now they claim they're experiencing "growing pains", whatever that means.
In the short term almost any system can be made to work. A dedicated, intelligent, and honest dictator/king/emperor may well do a fine job of running a country. Unfortunately such systems rapidly degrade as the complexities mount and less suitable leaders gain power and influence. Dictatorships by nature have no internal checks-and-balances against abuse by those in power, and when it inevitably becomes abusive or unresponsibe the people who labor under them have no authority or means to change the system without destroying it altogether.
I have one of those too. I think I got mine from Amazon; it was about $80 four or five months ago.
The design of the headset is such that it doesn't actually place any pressure on your ears. Not only is this more comfortable (no sweaty ear syndrome during long calls), but it also means that you can clearly hear other things going on around you while on the phone or waiting for a call, without removing the headset.
I do wish they'd included a redial button on the headset, but that's mainly because I tend to forget to grab the dialer pendant. Overall I've been very pleased with it.
Why a minivan? What makes a minivan inherently more appropriate than an SUV? They get about the same mileage, but don't have the higher ground clearance you may need if you live in a rural or snowy part of the country.
"I honestly believe that SUVs should require a separate license, and hefty registration fees. And automatic liability in any accident situation."
That's just silly. "SUV" is a marketing term, covering such a broad swath of vehicle designs as to be meaningless to everyone except the people who sell the things and the people who whine about them. If minivans were invented today, they'd probably be sold as SUV's too. And should pickup trucks also be licensed, etc? Why not? Especially as many SUV designs are essentially re-skinned trucks? What about SUV's based on cars and minivans?
"Not to mention that it's QWERTY keyboard prevents it from being used on the SATs and other standardized tests."
I've been out of high school a while. What is the QWERTY restriction supposed to accomplish?
Many digital cable systems, like Adelphia's here in Maryland, send out both an analog and a digital signal. The analog signal doesn't include the whole range of available channels, but it's usually pretty easy to find out which are exclusively digital. You can likely use a splitter and run seperate lines to different devices, and tune each seperately.
I've been trying to get this point across, too. Once you establish that we need legislation to control who can send what kind of email to whom, it's only a matter of time until that legal principle is distorted into something you don't like. It cuts both ways, and once you turn to legislation to solve what are basically technical problems, there's no turning back.
"They aren't interested in you. They are interested in your money."
I'm not the original poster, but this does not shock me one bit. Of course they are interested in my money. British Airways isn't a social club, it's a business.
But to keep getting their money they have to keep their customers happy. Keeping customers as happy as possible is the duty of every successful business (though lots of them seem to forget that.) Enlightened self-interest is a very strong incentive to behave in ways that don't offend your source of income.
Tax deductions aren't subsidies. They're just allowing the corporation (or individual) to keep something they already have. Income does not belong to the government by default.
You're right. I've been using a 1GB Microdrive in my digital camera (Canon D30) for more than a year now, and they were out for quite some time before that. This isn't exactly breaking news at this point.
That's nonsense. Raises are almost always given reactively, seldom proactively. Any manager who fires people just because they speak up about wanting a raise is an incompetent fool. Obviously some tact is required if one expects favorable results, but if a company wants to keep good employees then they have to be willing to listen and accomodate when appropriate.
So, you're trying to convince schools to start using free software. Why, exactly?
What educational objective are you trying to achieve? How will free software bring you closer to this objective? Which free software in particular? How will this benefit the average student?
Who will train the faculty? Who will support the installations? Will this cost money? What are the advantages to the institution, aside from the lower initial cost?
These are the kinds of questions that any responsible educator should ask, and you have to be prepared with good answers if you expect to make any progress. If you don't have those answers, then maybe you need to rethink your goals. Free software may, in fact, be the solution, or part of the solution. But you can't start from that assumption and expect others to leap on your bandwagon without a second thought. Except on Slashdot, of course.
Interesting. Three-point turns are also part of the required driving test in Maryland, USA. Though the "three-point" part is pretty much moot; you can actually inch around as many times as you need, so long as you don't run into the curbs, vehicles, people, etc.
Driving with one hand on the stick is also frowned upon around here. I don't know if there are any laws about it, though. I drive an automatic, myself.
Driving tests vary widely by state. The one here in Maryland is somewhere between the two examples you note. Some states have tests on the open road, and others prefer a closed course of some kind with mandatory driving experience beforehand. MD has a closed course now for the final test, set up as kind of a driving microcosm.
So three-point-turns are illegal in Oregon? How does that work? What happens if you go aways down a dead-end street or something and don't have room to do a U-turn?
What difference does it make if it's a mom-and-pop shop? The CD is still defective. There's virtually no chance that the large chains could be convinced that they should refuse to carry faulty CD's, but the mom-and-pops might well do exactly that.
I certainly wish your daughter and your family the best. However, I think you might be too quick to see Aspergers (or any other medical condition) in yourself.
I realize you're paraphrasing, but if we use your list above, then a heckuva lot of people suddenly have Aspergers. Pretty much just about every introspective, quiet youngester who didn't quite fit in, but who eventually grew out of it. I suppose it's possible that all those kids (including myself) really do have a neurological problem, but it seems more likely that they're perfectly normal kids, and that the description of the alleged condition is too broad to be meaningful.
I don't have the expertise or knowledge to comment on the medical details, but I get skeptical when the lists of indicators and symptoms sound start to more like horoscopes than medical diagnoses. "LIBRA: You display great powers of concetration. You are an intelligent and thoughtful person with high standards. Others often don't appreciate you or your interests..."
Correct me if I'm wrong, but on a cable modem network all bandwidth is inherently shared and the same physical infrastructure serves both residential and business customers. If someone takes out a utility pole and knocks out my cable service it's not going to get fixed any faster than my neighbor's just because I'm a business customer. And if the cable company's DHCP server dies (all IP's are DHCP locally, tied to MAC addresses if you buy a static) then, again, we're all equally screwed.
What improved service, exactly, can they actually offer?
And if cable companies and phone service providers were in free competition I would have no objection to your argument. Unfortunately most cable providers (in the US, at least) operate under monopolisitic contracts granted to them by state and local governments.
My choice in purchasing has been curtailed. In return, the cable companies are supposed to adhere to the terms of whatever contractual agreement was reached, under the oversight of those same goverment entities. In practice, however, the only consequence for ignoring their obligations, presuming whoever's in charge even catches on, is an occasional fine or strongly worded letter. There are exceptions, but the whole arrangement pretty much sucks.
And from what I hear DSL service isn't much better. Outside of cities or in areas with older lines availability and service is spotty at best, and the local telcos are generally not anxious to assist the competition in competing with them.
Geez. This is NOT a flame. He's absolutely right.
One man's bloat is another man's essential feature. Everyone who uses mainstream office applications is not a mindless drone hypnotized by checklists of things they'll never use. I never use the mail-merge functionality of Word, and seldom need pivot-tables in Excel. Are those useless, bloatware features? Of course not. If certain developers would stop arguing with the users and start listening they might occasionally learn something.
I realize that you probably know this, but I feel compelled to note there's a heckuva lot more to GUI design than "making things look preaty."
Anyone with Photoshop and some downloaded actions can make shiny widgets and nifty toolbars, but making those bits and pieces into a consistent, stable, usable, and attractive GUI is something much more difficult. And, unfortunately, it's another area in which OS projects tend to lag badly.
In house developers? In some places that might work, but most small businesses are lucky if they can afford a couple good books or a single training class, let alone another employee. And if they're attracted to free software because they're short on cash then it's even less likely.
Employees cost a lot of money. Yeah, contractors can work, but then you're back to searching around for someone who can handle what you need when you need it (and, unless you're paying them under the table, someone who's also willing and able to meet whatever legalities are necessary.)
Either way someone's gonna want to get paid for their time and trouble. Seems like we're just pushing the problem farther away from the original developers and back toward the potential users.
"In truth, I don't find the support process to be that different for Microsoft and Linux..."
Well put. And I think you could substitute the name of almost any commercial software company for "Microsoft" and your statement would be equally true. Commercial one-on-one support is generally abysmal, and many companies seem inexplicably reluctant to dedicate even a single employee to answering questions on newsgroups or message boards. (Or, when they do let an employee respond on a public forum, it's a marketing drone who has to get approval from the legal department before he's allowed to actually answer a question.)
But, on the other hand, most commercial software comes with pretty good documentation, and most companies have invested in online help and Knowledge Base-like systems which are regularly updated and which are generally accurate and well-written. Google's indespensible, but you can often waste a lot of time searching for obscure issues, and sorting through false leads and incorrect/outdated information.
FAQs and release notes are great, but they don't substitute for real, comprehensive, cohesive documentation. Whether it's a paper manual or online help, good writing takes time and sustained effort. It's not an afterthought or something you get someone to do once and forget about.
This kind of stuff is the Achilles heel of Open Source and free software. There are exceptions, but not enough of them. It seems that most programmers just aren't fired up about writing documentation, and many of them aren't very good at it when they're willing to try. That's fine-writing is a skill just like coding, so it's not surprising or insulting to acknowledge that everyone isn't equally adept.
I know that this issue has been discussed lots of times and that the situation is slowly improving, at least for some projects. But, frankly, I don't think that Open Source advocates do a very good job of soliciting help from good writers, artists, designers, etc. Why? Um, I dunno.
Yup. The current method of calculating ratings is badly flawed. I'm really tired of shows I like and watch being cancelled, or used as sacrificial pawns against whatever the current ratings blockbuster on the competing network might be. If aggregate viewing statistics can improve the situation then I'll be happy to chip in.