Anyone attending a technology conference on issues like spectrum policy should be people who are experts in the field and are going to serve America's interests the best.... regardless of who they donated money to in the last election cycle. Unless you're saying that registered Democrats are somehow unable to represent the USA on these technology issues.
How about if the White House fires every single scientist at the NIH who donated to Kerry. Would that make sense to you as well?
I just wish I hadn't had to take 5+ quarters of Calc....
5+ quarters? You need Basic calc, multivariable calc, and differential equations. That takes 5+ quarters to teach?
That said, that knowledge is FUNDAMENTAL to engineering. We built computers BECAUSE of our understanding of calculus and differential equations and designed computer precisely for the purpose of solving those problems.
"Information Technology" is a vocation. I mean, it's fine if you want to run an auto-repair shop, and it's even better if you decided to get a degree in mechanical engineering before learning to be a mechanic and opening your own shop-- but no one would argue that you had to be a mechanical engineer to be a mechanic... that part is optional. So it is with studying Computer Science before going into "IT."
I'm convinced it is because the CS major has a lot of really irrelevant requirements that turn these people off. Statistics is one (but only one) example.
Statistics and other requirements might not be relevant to anyone who wants to do "MIS" sort of work or.net programming. However, statistics, probability, linear algebra, and combinatorics is fundamental to most scientific and graphical applications that a programmer will implement. Perhaps less so for a GUI specialist, but even that GUI specialist is going to have to understand statistical relevance of human-interface user evaluations.
... but mostly because of consumer stupidity. Basically, people pay the $50/month for basic cable for the 2 or 3 channels they're interested in. Over the past 25 years, enough channels have become available that almost everyone has their 2 or 3 favorite channels that they want to watch and are willing to pay $50 for.
A la carte pricing would have the effect that people would simply buy the 2 or 3 channels they want, pay the same $50 they always did -- because that's what they were always willing to pay -- and any additional channels, which they now get for free, they'd have to pay extra for if they wanted to watch. This pricing scheme would have made send 15-20 years ago when there was still an untapped market for cable television, but in this day and age, cable TV subscribers are so ubiquitous that there's no untapped market that would be willing to subscribe to cable TV because it costs less. Everyone who would subscribe has subscribed and is already ready and willing to pay $50/month for television, and that is what they will continue to pay, even if government regulations change.
Hondas, like other cars, need to be maintained to manage the upkeep of things that wear out-- eg, brakes, muffler, oil, fluids, etc.
The difference between a honda and other cars is that those little things that go wrong in other cars, like a sticky emergency break, clogged wiper fluid lines or mis-targeted wiper-fluid nozzles, a radio antenna that won't retract (or won't get reception), etc., just don't go wrong in Hondas. At least, in my experience of having owned a Honda vs. other cars, such as a Saab, that I have owned...
The little nuisances that we expect cars to develop with age simply don't develop on Hondas.
As a practicing physician, you are guaranteed a fresh supply of sick people that need to be treated, and hospitals and HMOs can't go and "outsource" their physicians abroad.
There's plenty of room for entrepeneurs that develop something truly original as well as professional researchers in the field. However, your post is akin to saying, "I'm a physician, and I'd like to pursue a career change into construction in 5-10 years." I just don't get the motivation or what you're hoping to get out of such a radical career change into a field that's not that great.
This is the political equivalent of an insider trading scandal or other form of corporate crime. Those who care about the law want it to be prosecuted to its full extent. However, everyday people look at corporate crooks or corrupt Republicans stealing Democratic memos off the network and think, "Damn! I wish I had gotten away with that!"
In this situation, the Republicans come away looking like the sly rogues who "got away with it," and the Democrats look like beleasguered victims... and at the end of the day, most people would rather be the victimizers than the victims, and thus will identify with the Republicans.
While the internet portion of the campaign may allow for a small control group, the actual work still has to be done by what is essentially a huge national corporation with a precense in every precint in America. That's a large group of people.
Absolutely true. However, Howard Dean's internet presence isn't just about raising cash. Internet organizing has allowed him to create a "boots on the ground" labor force on his own out of people who normally have nothing to do with the stalwarts of the shoe-leather army of the Democratic party.
What Dean has done is create a recruiting tool to field ground troops before the party apparatus got fully behind him. That's what allows Dean to have mass numbers of volunteers knocking on doors in NH and IA as well has writing tens of thousands of personal letters to supporters-- and these are people who have never been involved in such a thing before.
How will it help moderate, hum-drum politics and politicians (probably > 90%), or even interesting politicians without a drum to beat? It won't.
That's correct. Politicians who rose through the ranks based on their connections with party-elders and got into office due to the intertia of the voters are, in fact hurt by the internet. They will be vulnerable to politicians who are able to create networks of loyal rank-and-file supporters who "believe" in their candidacy.
The radical change is that politicians who depend on the inertia of voters are suddenly vulnerable.
The university system is one of the last havens of eccentricity. It's full of eccentrics. To claim otherwise bespeaks an ignorance of university culture.
"Normal" people end up in investment banking, consulting, or corporate law where there truly is no room for eccentrics.
You're correct. What the congressional bill is declaring is that the transport of bits is inherently interstate-commerce and not the province of any single state.
Not only that, but the last comic book shop I went to said that if you bought the preview comic, if you returned it after the book came out, they would give you a $2.99 discount on the book.
There are plenty of movies whose content is so vapid they should have perhaps never been made in the first place. What would the world be like without the existence of "Battlefield Earth"? No doubt, it would be a much better place. However, it's none of my business who John Travolta and Hollywood producers spend their time and money. It's _their_ business.
So if some idiot wants to make a "clean" version of of 1984 or A Clockwork Orange, that's his business, even though I might think it's stupid. The individual decides what to do with his DVD, not the company that sold him the DVD.
It was frankly stupid and insensitive for the makers of Matrix reloaded to use emotive words with years of history like Zion and Trinity. Wars have been fought over the definition of both of them.
You must be joking about about your objections. We can argue all we want about whether The Matrix is a good religious allegory (IMHO, the movie isn't as "deep" as the creators think it is), but the fact is that it is a religious allegory. The entire point of the movie was to be "emotive." If some censors in Egypt don't like the fact that words like "Zion" and "Trinity" were used, then that's not the problem of the Wachowski brothers. I don't see why changes should be made to make the whole thing as inoffensive as possible for hyper-sensitive viewer out there, even if it is the Egyptian censorship board.
The people who administer the national park system have become very territorial and don't really like the fact that other people visit there. In fact, a staffer of the park service in California removed the Mojave Desert Phone Booth because too many people were visiting it!
The message to visitors-- you are just a grudgingly accepted guest. Now get out as quickly as possible and don't you dare tell any of your friends about this place.
Anyone who's ever taken a class on networks knows that there is always a proposal out there to add "quality of service" guarantees that ISPs can theoretically charge more money for. However, no ISP we use in day-to-day life has ever actually implemented this, for various reasons relating to the structure of the internet to the billing issues involved.
However, what Telus has done has been to finally create an IP network that can deliver these QoS guarantees to themselves and anyone they sell their VoIP bandwidth to.
I can see the internet splitting into the "regular backbone" and the "bandwidth guaranteed network", and you (or your router) just decide which service you need to use when you route your traffic.
Re:Math? you want me to do math?
on
Making Change
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· Score: 1
I would think the implementation of the "Two Penny Lottery" would reduce the amount of change needed just nicely.
Why don't they make it a literal lottery? Every time you lose a few cents due to rounding, that credited to a pool of penny-lottery tickets. At the end of the week, a lucky winner gets to keep all the pennies.
No, capitalism would be an environment in which there were no restraints on trade and capital moved freely between markets. This is manipulating the legal system to impede free trade.
Unrestrained capitalism would also allow people to produce exact copies of GW's product so that GW would face more competition.
Look, if you're signing up for a 1-year contract with Microsoft, you're not doing it to be part of the "Microsoft community," you're doing it because you need a contract job. This policy probably helps in that it weeds out those who wish they had a permanent job at Microsoft but couldn't get one and attracts only those who "know what the deal is" when it comes to contracting.
The contractors win out because if they're really as useful to Microsoft as full-time employees, MSoft will be forced to hire them full-time, because otherwise Microsoft will have to do without the employee for 100 days out of every year.
Hm. Suddenly, the fact that Steve Forbes, of all people, supports more limited copyright laws makes me suspect that I might be wrong about my advocacy of Lessig's ideas.
Kind of like how knowing that Pat Buchanan is against the war in Iraq makes me wonder whether it might actually be a good idea, after all.:)
Re:For the success of any ad-hoc multi-hop network
on
Wireless Mesh Networks
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· Score: 1
There does not need to be some corporate god-on-high to declare what the viable 'economic model' is before ad-hoc multi-hop networks become commonplace.
More likely, people will just start deploying them and deploying the software and restrict access on their own personal machines accordingly until they have something that works. Just because your DVD scenario would be unacceptable simply means that this particular application won't be attractive to those interested in these mesh networks.
Hobbyists will deploy the software first and use it when it's convenient until critical mass gets achieved. We're not sure what the precise applications will be, but those will turn up as the technology gets more commonplace.
That's what the researchers seem to track. Not the commonality of a phrase, but the "burstiness" of a certain word or phrase... ie, the delta of the word use over time. High delta values indicate something is starting to take off, though it may not yet have become popular or mainstream. That's a decent metric of "coolness."
But it's not _interesting_ work. Yes, you _could_ keep up with fashions, you _could_ get the latest pop music, etc., but you wouldn't find it at all interesting or satisfying, and you'd get bored. On the other hand, people that aren't nerds find that sort of thing extremely satisfying and are willing to apply themselves to that decidedly unintellectual field. Nerds only pursue what they find stimulating, not because there's some sort of "popularity reward" of pursuing that field (that's what makes them a nerd).
Take the example of how much money one makes. One could make lots of money as a lawyer or investment banker. Why don't I do those things for a living? Because I would find them boring and uninteresting, despite the financial rewards. Some people are into that sort of stuff, however.
I know what you think. Unions are for trades workers. Not so, ask a school teacher.
Actually, IT workers are analagous to trade workers. They are trained in a specialized field or sub-field. Lots of coding projects can be seen as being much like assembly-line production.
For those who have an irrational aversion to unions, they're no different than if a company hires 100 employees by contract for a fixed amount of time. In this case, however, the "agency" is an employee-owned corporation that we call a union.
"Fire-at-will" does not apply to many employees who work on contracts (they have to wait until the contract expires to be fired or to quit). Noone seems to throw a fit about them. Where's the righteous indignation about people who have employment contracts that get renewed from year to year? The push for unionization is just a push for collective contract negotiation.
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Anyone attending a technology conference on issues like spectrum policy should be people who are experts in the field and are going to serve America's interests the best.... regardless of who they donated money to in the last election cycle. Unless you're saying that registered Democrats are somehow unable to represent the USA on these technology issues.
How about if the White House fires every single scientist at the NIH who donated to Kerry. Would that make sense to you as well?
Rather than taking our moral lessons from Steve Ballmer and the rest of the elitist business class, we should go to our local diners
Would these be the local diners that black people weren't allowed to eat in until relatively recently?
I just wish I hadn't had to take 5+ quarters of Calc....
5+ quarters? You need Basic calc, multivariable calc, and differential equations. That takes 5+ quarters to teach?
That said, that knowledge is FUNDAMENTAL to engineering. We built computers BECAUSE of our understanding of calculus and differential equations and designed computer precisely for the purpose of solving those problems.
"Information Technology" is a vocation. I mean, it's fine if you want to run an auto-repair shop, and it's even better if you decided to get a degree in mechanical engineering before learning to be a mechanic and opening your own shop-- but no one would argue that you had to be a mechanical engineer to be a mechanic... that part is optional. So it is with studying Computer Science before going into "IT."
I'm convinced it is because the CS major has a lot of really irrelevant requirements that turn these people off. Statistics is one (but only one) example.
.net programming. However, statistics, probability, linear algebra, and combinatorics is fundamental to most scientific and graphical applications that a programmer will implement. Perhaps less so for a GUI specialist, but even that GUI specialist is going to have to understand statistical relevance of human-interface user evaluations.
Statistics and other requirements might not be relevant to anyone who wants to do "MIS" sort of work or
... but mostly because of consumer stupidity. Basically, people pay the $50/month for basic cable for the 2 or 3 channels they're interested in. Over the past 25 years, enough channels have become available that almost everyone has their 2 or 3 favorite channels that they want to watch and are willing to pay $50 for.
A la carte pricing would have the effect that people would simply buy the 2 or 3 channels they want, pay the same $50 they always did -- because that's what they were always willing to pay -- and any additional channels, which they now get for free, they'd have to pay extra for if they wanted to watch. This pricing scheme would have made send 15-20 years ago when there was still an untapped market for cable television, but in this day and age, cable TV subscribers are so ubiquitous that there's no untapped market that would be willing to subscribe to cable TV because it costs less. Everyone who would subscribe has subscribed and is already ready and willing to pay $50/month for television, and that is what they will continue to pay, even if government regulations change.
Hondas, like other cars, need to be maintained to manage the upkeep of things that wear out-- eg, brakes, muffler, oil, fluids, etc.
The difference between a honda and other cars is that those little things that go wrong in other cars, like a sticky emergency break, clogged wiper fluid lines or mis-targeted wiper-fluid nozzles, a radio antenna that won't retract (or won't get reception), etc., just don't go wrong in Hondas. At least, in my experience of having owned a Honda vs. other cars, such as a Saab, that I have owned...
The little nuisances that we expect cars to develop with age simply don't develop on Hondas.
As a practicing physician, you are guaranteed a fresh supply of sick people that need to be treated, and hospitals and HMOs can't go and "outsource" their physicians abroad.
There's plenty of room for entrepeneurs that develop something truly original as well as professional researchers in the field. However, your post is akin to saying, "I'm a physician, and I'd like to pursue a career change into construction in 5-10 years." I just don't get the motivation or what you're hoping to get out of such a radical career change into a field that's not that great.
This is the political equivalent of an insider trading scandal or other form of corporate crime. Those who care about the law want it to be prosecuted to its full extent. However, everyday people look at corporate crooks or corrupt Republicans stealing Democratic memos off the network and think, "Damn! I wish I had gotten away with that!"
In this situation, the Republicans come away looking like the sly rogues who "got away with it," and the Democrats look like beleasguered victims... and at the end of the day, most people would rather be the victimizers than the victims, and thus will identify with the Republicans.
While the internet portion of the campaign may allow for a small control group, the actual work still has to be done by what is essentially a huge national corporation with a precense in every precint in America. That's a large group of people.
Absolutely true. However, Howard Dean's internet presence isn't just about raising cash. Internet organizing has allowed him to create a "boots on the ground" labor force on his own out of people who normally have nothing to do with the stalwarts of the shoe-leather army of the Democratic party.
What Dean has done is create a recruiting tool to field ground troops before the party apparatus got fully behind him. That's what allows Dean to have mass numbers of volunteers knocking on doors in NH and IA as well has writing tens of thousands of personal letters to supporters-- and these are people who have never been involved in such a thing before.
How will it help moderate, hum-drum politics and politicians (probably > 90%), or even interesting politicians without a drum to beat? It won't.
That's correct. Politicians who rose through the ranks based on their connections with party-elders and got into office due to the intertia of the voters are, in fact hurt by the internet. They will be vulnerable to politicians who are able to create networks of loyal rank-and-file supporters who "believe" in their candidacy.
The radical change is that politicians who depend on the inertia of voters are suddenly vulnerable.
The university system is one of the last havens of eccentricity. It's full of eccentrics. To claim otherwise bespeaks an ignorance of university culture.
"Normal" people end up in investment banking, consulting, or corporate law where there truly is no room for eccentrics.
You're correct. What the congressional bill is declaring is that the transport of bits is inherently interstate-commerce and not the province of any single state.
Not only that, but the last comic book shop I went to said that if you bought the preview comic, if you returned it after the book came out, they would give you a $2.99 discount on the book.
I resisted.
There are plenty of movies whose content is so vapid they should have perhaps never been made in the first place. What would the world be like without the existence of "Battlefield Earth"? No doubt, it would be a much better place. However, it's none of my business who John Travolta and Hollywood producers spend their time and money. It's _their_ business.
So if some idiot wants to make a "clean" version of of 1984 or A Clockwork Orange, that's his business, even though I might think it's stupid. The individual decides what to do with his DVD, not the company that sold him the DVD.
It was frankly stupid and insensitive for the makers of Matrix reloaded to use emotive words with years of history like Zion and Trinity. Wars have been fought over the definition of both of them.
You must be joking about about your objections. We can argue all we want about whether The Matrix is a good religious allegory (IMHO, the movie isn't as "deep" as the creators think it is), but the fact is that it is a religious allegory. The entire point of the movie was to be "emotive." If some censors in Egypt don't like the fact that words like "Zion" and "Trinity" were used, then that's not the problem of the Wachowski brothers. I don't see why changes should be made to make the whole thing as inoffensive as possible for hyper-sensitive viewer out there, even if it is the Egyptian censorship board.
The people who administer the national park system have become very territorial and don't really like the fact that other people visit there. In fact, a staffer of the park service in California removed the Mojave Desert Phone Booth because too many people were visiting it!
The message to visitors-- you are just a grudgingly accepted guest. Now get out as quickly as possible and don't you dare tell any of your friends about this place.
Anyone who's ever taken a class on networks knows that there is always a proposal out there to add "quality of service" guarantees that ISPs can theoretically charge more money for. However, no ISP we use in day-to-day life has ever actually implemented this, for various reasons relating to the structure of the internet to the billing issues involved.
However, what Telus has done has been to finally create an IP network that can deliver these QoS guarantees to themselves and anyone they sell their VoIP bandwidth to.
I can see the internet splitting into the "regular backbone" and the "bandwidth guaranteed network", and you (or your router) just decide which service you need to use when you route your traffic.
I would think the implementation of the "Two Penny Lottery" would reduce the amount of change needed just nicely.
Why don't they make it a literal lottery? Every time you lose a few cents due to rounding, that credited to a pool of penny-lottery tickets. At the end of the week, a lucky winner gets to keep all the pennies.
-Dean
No, capitalism would be an environment in which there were no restraints on trade and capital moved freely between markets. This is manipulating the legal system to impede free trade.
Unrestrained capitalism would also allow people to produce exact copies of GW's product so that GW would face more competition.
Look, if you're signing up for a 1-year contract with Microsoft, you're not doing it to be part of the "Microsoft community," you're doing it because you need a contract job. This policy probably helps in that it weeds out those who wish they had a permanent job at Microsoft but couldn't get one and attracts only those who "know what the deal is" when it comes to contracting.
The contractors win out because if they're really as useful to Microsoft as full-time employees, MSoft will be forced to hire them full-time, because otherwise Microsoft will have to do without the employee for 100 days out of every year.
Hm. Suddenly, the fact that Steve Forbes, of all people, supports more limited copyright laws makes me suspect that I might be wrong about my advocacy of Lessig's ideas.
:)
Kind of like how knowing that Pat Buchanan is against the war in Iraq makes me wonder whether it might actually be a good idea, after all.
There does not need to be some corporate god-on-high to declare what the viable 'economic model' is before ad-hoc multi-hop networks become commonplace.
More likely, people will just start deploying them and deploying the software and restrict access on their own personal machines accordingly until they have something that works. Just because your DVD scenario would be unacceptable simply means that this particular application won't be attractive to those interested in these mesh networks.
Hobbyists will deploy the software first and use it when it's convenient until critical mass gets achieved. We're not sure what the precise applications will be, but those will turn up as the technology gets more commonplace.
That's what the researchers seem to track. Not the commonality of a phrase, but the "burstiness" of a certain word or phrase... ie, the delta of the word use over time. High delta values indicate something is starting to take off, though it may not yet have become popular or mainstream. That's a decent metric of "coolness."
But it's not _interesting_ work. Yes, you _could_ keep up with fashions, you _could_ get the latest pop music, etc., but you wouldn't find it at all interesting or satisfying, and you'd get bored. On the other hand, people that aren't nerds find that sort of thing extremely satisfying and are willing to apply themselves to that decidedly unintellectual field. Nerds only pursue what they find stimulating, not because there's some sort of "popularity reward" of pursuing that field (that's what makes them a nerd).
Take the example of how much money one makes. One could make lots of money as a lawyer or investment banker. Why don't I do those things for a living? Because I would find them boring and uninteresting, despite the financial rewards. Some people are into that sort of stuff, however.
I know what you think. Unions are for trades workers. Not so, ask a school teacher.
Actually, IT workers are analagous to trade workers. They are trained in a specialized field or sub-field. Lots of coding projects can be seen as being much like assembly-line production.
For those who have an irrational aversion to unions, they're no different than if a company hires 100 employees by contract for a fixed amount of time. In this case, however, the "agency" is an employee-owned corporation that we call a union.
"Fire-at-will" does not apply to many employees who work on contracts (they have to wait until the contract expires to be fired or to quit). Noone seems to throw a fit about them. Where's the righteous indignation about people who have employment contracts that get renewed from year to year? The push for unionization is just a push for collective contract negotiation.