http://whitespaces.msresearch.us/api.html
Although just a research service, it answers a few questions raised in the comments thus far: 1) Does it support microphones? Yes; microphone broadcasters presumably will temporarily register their use of bandwidth via a service call. 2) Does it take into account geography? Yes; it supports several geolocation databases, and builds a predictive model of coverage based on the user's position.
Well, this certainly gives me pause about Rackspace, who has clearly taken a position on the content of this church's preaching, and decided that it constitutes "hate speech". I do some hosting of content for others myself, and I would never dream of deciding whether one of my clients is "hateful" or not -- who am I to judge on such a matter? I can (and do) judge my clients for actions which demonstrably harm and abuse others, such as spamming, etc. But there, the judgment is against the misuse of shared resources, not the content or subject matter itself.
Yes, I see your point; technically, the control would be only over priority.
However, I was persuaded by the EFF's argument the FCC is especially susceptible to "regulative captivity" -- that is, to becoming dominated by the industries they are supposed to regulate, and winding up regulating out the newcomers to the market, instead.
Ultimately, he who controls the priority decision can control the end-user experience to a very large degree. If I can make my data arrive first, wouldn't that be as effective a block on my competition as if I had locked them out altogether?
After reading the discussion on "additional services" from the EFF position paper, I came away convinced that we really do need two parallel networks: one funded by the public, like our interstate highway system, and one funded by private organizations:
There may be some services that need traffic prioritization, such as urgent medical services, but the approach in the proposal creates no real limits on what could be allowed as an “additional online service.” It would be much better if space for these services was addressed through waivers or other processes that put the burden on the company suggesting such services to prove that they are needed. And such processes must be fully transparent — not just consumers but the FCC must be in a position to know how these services work and what impact they are having. They must also be open to real debate and opposition. (Emphasis added)
The key point is, to whom would companies have to prove their service was worthy of a waiver? If it's the government, then basically that means the government would become the approver of all new internet businesses. Who in their right mind would want that? So, what if it was some other body, such as a standards body? Same problem. Is there any organization that we should trust to be the gatekeeper?
No. This whole notion eviscerates the very meaning of "free" in "free market".
What's unfair about the current situation is that some private businesses are trying to commander the public parts of the internet for their own purposes. The obvious answer to this situation is to have a fully-public network that is owned entirely by the people, and can be used by one and all, exactly as the interstate highway system is used today. Private businesses that want to build private infrastructure should absolutely be allowed to do so, but only in parallel with the public network.
Let there be interconnects between the public and private networks, just as private roads interconnect with public. But once a private business puts its data on the public network, public rules apply. Once the data is on it's own network, it's rules apply.
Trying to munge these very different access models together as the EFF recommends seems to me to be a hopeless cause. "Good fences make good neighbors." Better to have clean separation of concern.
Here's the full proposal of the deal. Cringley called it correctly; Google has found a cake-and-eat-it-too compromise: a parallel internet. One internet layer will run more or less openly, with data type prioritization allowed, but no sender prioritization. The other layer can be sender prioritized.
Actually, it's not a bad compromise. The immediate problem I see is how does one keep the Commercial Channel from taking bandwidth away from the Open Channel, so consumers are forced to buy the Commercial Channel just to get decent throughput? If it works like public television does now, with no diminution of the channel capacity or quality, then that would work just fine, I think.
Learning HTML, CSS, PHP, MySQL, C#, SQL Server, and all the rest is a complete waste of a small business owner's time. You didn't need to learn VBA to to make use of Excel, did you? Likewise with the web. You want to stand up a quick web site, then learn how to leverage a code-less tool, such as Google Sites or the dozens of web-based content managers out there with web user interfaces. 95% of the effort to maintain a solid web site is in the content, not the programming. The programming is just the tiny little part done up front, to enable the real work to take place.
Personally, I've become more and more impressed with just how much work can be done with Google Apps -- the combination of gmail, Google docs, Google calendar, and Google sites. You want to create a shared budget and display it on a web page? No problem: create the spreadsheet in Google docs, setup the sharing parameters, then insert the spreadsheet into a Sites page using the built-in spreadsheet widget. Easy as pie. The spreadsheet widget even lets people edit the spreadsheet right in the web page if you want. Perfect.
The thing to get over is obsessing over appearances. Unless you're programming a site your customers will be seeing (in which case, hire a professional designer to give you a template), don't give a second's thought to prettiness. Function is everything. Pretty can wait.
The other critical thing to learn besides programming is how to model requirements. If you learn the behavioral parts of UML -- especially business process modeling notation -- you will be able to intelligently and concisely communicate with programmers, when you need them.
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly in the Post's RIA
on
Top Secret America
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
The Washington Post decided to create an entire web site to publish all of the information in this expose. Beyond the usual articles, the site includes interactive maps, interactive infographics, a search engine and an online database. All of this material is delivered via a Flash-based applet, and serves as a good, real-world example of what a rich internet client can do when there is a lot of data to be conveyed, and not just multimedia.
Herewith The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly:
The Good The articles are properly paginated for the screen, which makes reading online so very much easier. Each page spans two columns, which are fitted in about 600px of vertical space, which eliminates the need for scroll bars. The sides of the columns have click regions to navigate forward and back through the poages, like on a mobile reader. Perfect.
The interactive maps and infographics are very polished, but not as useful as they could be. As Prof. Tufte taught us, every graphic is supposed to make a point and tell a story. The purpose of these graphics seem to be to help us visually sort the data. While sorting is useful, it's not really telling a story; I think they could have done better. A key point in the article, for example, was that no one really knows who's doing what, and there are surely massive areas of overlap. It'd be nice to have an infographic that really made that point in a visual way.
The Bad For some reason, many Flash developers insist on messing about with utterly standardized widgets such as the scroll bar. In this case, the UI designers chose to use a middling-grey rectangle for the scrollbar pointer, and a lighter-middling-grey line for the scrollbar background; very difficult to see, much less to click upon. Worse yet, the standard scrollbar behaviors were not supported, and the Page Down/Page Up keys were not active. The upshot is that one has to click and drag the small scrollbar pointer up and down just to move the page. Bad designer! Bad!
All in all, I think the Washington Post deserves an A+ for effort, and a B for execution. The only really sour note is the Comments interface. But delivering the entire expose as a web site shows just how fast and how far the Post has gone towards leveraging the web as an information resource.
What struck me is that kids gained nothing _but_ computer skills. This ought to challenge computer game designers: can you come up with a game that kids will want to play AND increases math and reading scores? I'm not talking about an "educational" game, per se, just a game whose side effect is better reasoning and comprehension. Even kids who read silly novels are learning something that is useful for school. Why not gamers?
I'm a small-time composer, and I think $4-5 for a single copy of sheet music is ridiculously over-priced. I have always believed that all this huffing and puffing over copyright law just clouds the basic business problem: the music industry is not giving its public the products it wants, in the forms that they want it, for a price they are willing to pay. Here are some things I think people are looking for:
- $5 for a single piece of sheet music that is downloaded is $4 too high. The cost of the sheet music shouldn't be five times (!) the price of the song itself. That feels like gouging. Which it is.
- When people buy more than one copy of something, they should get a bulk discount. That's the way they do it at Costco, and that's the way it should work for sheet music.
- When I buy something, I don't want any stupid restrictions such as trying to prevent me from printing more than one copy, or printing to a file, or anything else like that. I've got a $50 printer with a 1200 dpi scanner; you think I can't make a perfect copy? It's just insulting, and the user experience is horrible. Just give me the bleepin' file! I'm gonna convert it into a PDF anyway.
The push-back to all this will be "oh, but we'll lose all our money!" Not so. If something's only priced at 99 cents, it's not worth my time to steal it for my friends. It's the price of a small fries at Micky-D's. Get your own, cheapskate. Likewise, if you're going to give me 15% if I buy 5 copies for everyone in my band, I'm going to take the 15%. Duh. And lastly, if you make it drop-dead simple to buy something online (see: amazonmp3.com), I'm going to buy from your online store because it is easier and a heck of lot safer than trolling illegal sites.
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$275 for a DIY kit of a bleeding-edge technology is entirely reasonable. I've seen the OLPC 1 screen in action, and was very impressed; I'm sure this will be even better. For those wondering, the resolution is 1024x600; see Up Close and Personal with the Pixel Qi Display.
Let's assume, as a thought experiment, that the Chinese government has been very successful at penetrating whatever American enterprise they've targeted. What will China do with this intel?
According to the Economist, the "<a href="http://www.economist.com/world/asia/displaystory.cfm?story_id=16059990">china model</a>" is to embrace capitalism as a way of funding state control of key sectors of China's economy. As <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/13/AR2010051303551.html">James McGregor's op-ed</a> in the Washington Post points out, "[China has decided] that key sectors of the economy will remain "state dominated," including automotive, chemical, construction, electronic information, equipment manufacturing, iron and steel, non-ferrous metals, and science and technology. Others will stay "largely in state hands," including aviation, coal, defense, electric power and grid, oil and petrochemicals, shipping and telecommunications. State-owned companies in these industries are thriving in their protected home market. They have buckets of cash and easy access to state bank loans to carry out government directives to pursue overseas acquisitions and "go global."
So, one possibility is for China to replace all foreign-sourced technology with Chinese versions. They could massively de-couple themselves from the world market, and never be dependent on trade with anyone other than themselves.
My guess is this has little to do with Michael Mann or the University of Virginia. This has everything to do with the AG's petition to put the EPA's threatened regulation of carbon dioxide under review. The AG is seeking to undermine the EPA's grounds for action by showing that it is based on weak, missing, or faulty scientific evidence.
The law the AG is using is the Virginia Fraud Against Taxpayers Act, a relatively new "whistleblower" law. The kinds of fraud this law attempts to cover are:
* Submitting false service records or samples in order to show better-than-actual performance.
* Falsifying natural resource production records -- Pumping, mining or harvesting more natural resources from public lands that is actually reported to the government.
* Billing for research that was never conducted; falsifying research data that was paid for by the U.S. government.
Arguably, if the AG can show that the climate science was cooked, he could have a case. If he wins it, he may have established a legal precedent for throwing out the climate data in the EPA case.
This sounds like a pretty smart legal move, if you are a Republican and you control the governorship of Virginia.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the issue with email privacy in Rehberg v. Paulk had to do with voluntary delivery of emails to a third party (in which case no expectation of privacy is called for.) That is not the case here, where the accused has admitted to hacking into Gov. Palin's account and making the emails public without her consent.
are upheld in Court. Personal email really IS private, and people should be held accountable if they cross the line. Jail time sounds a bit extreme, given the youthful age of the accused, but I'm glad the legal precedents are being followed correctly.
Say what you will about the business case for the Courier (or lack thereof), you have to admit that the Courier was a genuinely new take on the concept of a hand-held computer without a keyboard.
To me, the biggest conceptual jump was the notion of a hardware-based personal journal. It married the aggregating utility of OneNote with a hardware device in the form-factor of a small paper notebook. The iPad may be for couch-potatoes (er, "media consumers"), but the Courier was for work: remembering things, finding things, sharing things, notating things, etc. These are the basic tasks of brain-storming and collaboration, which constitute 80%+ of what an information worker does all day long.
Apple doesn't really seem to get this notion. They tend to view iPhone/iPad users as only wanting to interact with content created by the experts, rather than using it to author content. (I know that's over-stated, but it feels true even if it isn't strictly true.)
My state, Virginia, has an at-will policy, and it works very well. Both employers and employees can come and go with minimal entanglement in the court system. This works to the benefit of both sides. If my employer makes what seems to me to be an improper requirement for employment (such as paying for my own certs), then I'm free to pick up and find greener pastures elsewhere. I don't have to worry about my employer suing me for breech of contract. Likewise, if my employer decides to restructure the company and that means my position is no longer needed, they don't have to worry about a lawsuit from me.
In the beneficent absence of involvement by the courts, employers rely on their reputation to attract good people. Local magazines publish annual ratings of the best places to work. Gain a reputation as a lousy employer that lays people off and throws them on the street with two weeks notice, and you'll be bottom-feeding in no time.
Posh. Clearly you've never used a UML modeling tool that knows how to handle metadata. The tool I use can read in a database schema and draw you a perfect visualization with everything included: attributes, data typing, triggers, keys, relations, you name it. And that's just the start. UML 2.x ain't your grandpappy's modeling language.
The problem with blocking content is that there is no way to deduce what someone intends to do with information merely from the fact that they have it. Am I reading that suicide website because I want to commit suicide, or because I'm gathering research on why not to do it?
Instead of blocking information, make it easier to hold the authors of information accountable for any bad usage. Provide streamlined ways for people to lodge complaints about specific mis-uses of information so the author has an opportunity to rewrite the material or put up better qualifiers and notices about proper use. If an author refuses to respond, provide an escalation path to legal action.
We need laws that are much closer to what's happening on Internet time. We need better legal definitions of culpability, more reasonable penalties, and different standards of evidence that will work for the Internet. An entire court system built just for Internet-related suits -- and which would be run itself on the Internet, of course -- would not be amiss.
At core, we need to be reactive, focusing on real harm done, rather than on harms only imagined. We must preserve the principle that people are presumed innocent, until proven otherwise. But we also need a way that will truly suppress the criminal use of information.
The ability to record an actual death experience is the centerpiece of Brainstorm, a classic science fiction movie from the 80s, starring Natalie Wood (in her last screen role, I believe) as the user experience designer, Christopher Walken and Louise Fletcher as the idealistic genius scientists, and Cliff Robertson as the entrepreneur. They invent a way to record brain activity, and then play back the experience so the user feels he or she has actually done it themselves. They make a "demo tape" of riding a roller coaster, hang-gliding, riding on horseback, eating great food, having sex, etc. When the chief scientist has a heart attack, she records her slow, agonizing death in an unforgettable scene. Whenever anyone plays it back, the shock starts to kill them, too.
Naturally, I didn't mean to imply you don't have the right to say what you want, which of course you do.
However, if you're going to say what it means to "act like Christ", don't you think your opinion would be more believable and persuasive if you backed it up with some evidence?
To just dismiss the Bible away -- "you can interpret pretty much anything you like" -- is a pretty weak line, if what you're trying to argue is based on the Bible!
In any event, the Bible is by no means open to just any old interpretation. If one simply takes the Bible at its word and follows common-sense interpretive principles, it is remarkably clear, and very approachable. And, I agree wholeheartedly that the lessons it teaches are absolutely as relevant for today's health care debate as they were at the time they were first written.
I'm no christian at all but that's pretty much the only good thing in this book: taking care for each other, without looking at the bank account every time.
It really bugs me when non-Christians take it on themselves to paraphrase the Bible. If you're not a believer, the LEAST you could do is find an actual passage to back yourself up, rather than just popping off what you yourself admit is, at best, an uninformed opinion.
Here's a wonderful essay by C.H. Spurgeon on what it means to be "my brother's keeper". The Bible teaches that there is a balance between individual responsibility ("If a man does not work, do not let him eat.") and individual compassion ("love your neighbor as yourself"). It does not teach that the government ought to be the primary carekeeper for those in need. The Bible's view of care is far, far more personal than that.
Removal of life-time spending caps, ban on discrimation for people with pre-existing conditions, hundreds of billions of dollars worth of subsidies paid for by taxes on the rich, and strict limits on the profitability of Insurance companies (85% of premiums must go to actual care, not administrative fees).
Sorry to burst your bubble, but there are a lot of fictional sources of funds in this bill:
They are relying on a future vote to cut Doctor's fees by 21% to pay for the bill. Not going to happen.
They are relying on a future Congress to cut $500,000,000,000 out of Medicare to pay for the bill. Not going to happen.
They are relying on a future Congress to force the unions to start paying taxes on their premium health care plans. SO not going to happen.
They are double-counting hundreds of billions in funds in other programs as income to health care.
They are collecting funds for 10 years, but only counting them against six years of expenses. The real bill is at least 2X higher. Where will we get an additional $1Trillion?
Not a pretty picture. I wouldn't get too excited about the benefits, just yet. They pushed all the truly hard decisions off to the future. The Republicans WILL be back in power. If the timing stinks, the HC bill may be on the books, but de-funded.
OK, then why doesn't the EU have universal care?
on
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· Score: 1
People are forever comparing the US to individual countries in Europe. But that is not an apples-to-apples comparison. France, for example, is demographically and economically the size of the state of Virginia. To get a fair comparison, you'd have to compare the entire US to the entire EU.
Surprisingly, the EU does not have universal health care. In fact, it has exactly the same plan as the US: each member country/state decides for itself. We have states such as Massachusetts and Tennessee that have plans as generous as those in Europe, and other states where there is very little centrally-planned health care.
What the Democrats are asking the US to do is something even the EU won't do.
China has a terrible reputation as a global citizen. At times, they've flooded the market with shoddy goods made of questionable, even dangerous, materials. Their wholesale destruction of the environment is shocking, even to non-environmentalists. They manipulate their currency to make it impossible for importers to compete on an even basis. They have instigated what amounts to a low-level cyber war against businesses and governments the world over. They routinely muzzle speech and dissent within their own borders, and force those who do business with them to do the same. They reportedly have thousands of political prisoners, and every time they want to "make nice" with the West they trot out one or two of them and let them go home to show how kind-hearted they are.
Personally, I've had just about all I care to take of such noxious behavior. I may not be able to completely avoid "Made in China", but there's no reason to encourage them. There are plenty of other people to buy goods from.
Slashdot Mirror
http://whitespaces.msresearch.us/api.html Although just a research service, it answers a few questions raised in the comments thus far: 1) Does it support microphones? Yes; microphone broadcasters presumably will temporarily register their use of bandwidth via a service call. 2) Does it take into account geography? Yes; it supports several geolocation databases, and builds a predictive model of coverage based on the user's position.
Well, this certainly gives me pause about Rackspace, who has clearly taken a position on the content of this church's preaching, and decided that it constitutes "hate speech". I do some hosting of content for others myself, and I would never dream of deciding whether one of my clients is "hateful" or not -- who am I to judge on such a matter? I can (and do) judge my clients for actions which demonstrably harm and abuse others, such as spamming, etc. But there, the judgment is against the misuse of shared resources, not the content or subject matter itself.
Yes, I see your point; technically, the control would be only over priority.
However, I was persuaded by the EFF's argument the FCC is especially susceptible to "regulative captivity" -- that is, to becoming dominated by the industries they are supposed to regulate, and winding up regulating out the newcomers to the market, instead.
Ultimately, he who controls the priority decision can control the end-user experience to a very large degree. If I can make my data arrive first, wouldn't that be as effective a block on my competition as if I had locked them out altogether?
The key point is, to whom would companies have to prove their service was worthy of a waiver? If it's the government, then basically that means the government would become the approver of all new internet businesses. Who in their right mind would want that? So, what if it was some other body, such as a standards body? Same problem. Is there any organization that we should trust to be the gatekeeper?
No. This whole notion eviscerates the very meaning of "free" in "free market".
What's unfair about the current situation is that some private businesses are trying to commander the public parts of the internet for their own purposes. The obvious answer to this situation is to have a fully-public network that is owned entirely by the people, and can be used by one and all, exactly as the interstate highway system is used today. Private businesses that want to build private infrastructure should absolutely be allowed to do so, but only in parallel with the public network.
Let there be interconnects between the public and private networks, just as private roads interconnect with public. But once a private business puts its data on the public network, public rules apply. Once the data is on it's own network, it's rules apply.
Trying to munge these very different access models together as the EFF recommends seems to me to be a hopeless cause. "Good fences make good neighbors." Better to have clean separation of concern.
Here's the full proposal of the deal. Cringley called it correctly; Google has found a cake-and-eat-it-too compromise: a parallel internet. One internet layer will run more or less openly, with data type prioritization allowed, but no sender prioritization. The other layer can be sender prioritized.
Actually, it's not a bad compromise. The immediate problem I see is how does one keep the Commercial Channel from taking bandwidth away from the Open Channel, so consumers are forced to buy the Commercial Channel just to get decent throughput? If it works like public television does now, with no diminution of the channel capacity or quality, then that would work just fine, I think.
Learning HTML, CSS, PHP, MySQL, C#, SQL Server, and all the rest is a complete waste of a small business owner's time. You didn't need to learn VBA to to make use of Excel, did you? Likewise with the web. You want to stand up a quick web site, then learn how to leverage a code-less tool, such as Google Sites or the dozens of web-based content managers out there with web user interfaces. 95% of the effort to maintain a solid web site is in the content, not the programming. The programming is just the tiny little part done up front, to enable the real work to take place.
Personally, I've become more and more impressed with just how much work can be done with Google Apps -- the combination of gmail, Google docs, Google calendar, and Google sites. You want to create a shared budget and display it on a web page? No problem: create the spreadsheet in Google docs, setup the sharing parameters, then insert the spreadsheet into a Sites page using the built-in spreadsheet widget. Easy as pie. The spreadsheet widget even lets people edit the spreadsheet right in the web page if you want. Perfect.
The thing to get over is obsessing over appearances. Unless you're programming a site your customers will be seeing (in which case, hire a professional designer to give you a template), don't give a second's thought to prettiness. Function is everything. Pretty can wait.
The other critical thing to learn besides programming is how to model requirements. If you learn the behavioral parts of UML -- especially business process modeling notation -- you will be able to intelligently and concisely communicate with programmers, when you need them.
The Washington Post decided to create an entire web site to publish all of the information in this expose. Beyond the usual articles, the site includes interactive maps, interactive infographics, a search engine and an online database. All of this material is delivered via a Flash-based applet, and serves as a good, real-world example of what a rich internet client can do when there is a lot of data to be conveyed, and not just multimedia.
Herewith The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly:
The Good
The articles are properly paginated for the screen, which makes reading online so very much easier. Each page spans two columns, which are fitted in about 600px of vertical space, which eliminates the need for scroll bars. The sides of the columns have click regions to navigate forward and back through the poages, like on a mobile reader. Perfect.
The interactive maps and infographics are very polished, but not as useful as they could be. As Prof. Tufte taught us, every graphic is supposed to make a point and tell a story. The purpose of these graphics seem to be to help us visually sort the data. While sorting is useful, it's not really telling a story; I think they could have done better. A key point in the article, for example, was that no one really knows who's doing what, and there are surely massive areas of overlap. It'd be nice to have an infographic that really made that point in a visual way.
The Bad
For some reason, many Flash developers insist on messing about with utterly standardized widgets such as the scroll bar. In this case, the UI designers chose to use a middling-grey rectangle for the scrollbar pointer, and a lighter-middling-grey line for the scrollbar background; very difficult to see, much less to click upon. Worse yet, the standard scrollbar behaviors were not supported, and the Page Down/Page Up keys were not active. The upshot is that one has to click and drag the small scrollbar pointer up and down just to move the page. Bad designer! Bad!
The Ugly
There are no words that can convey the ugliness that is the Comments interface. A complete UI failure. See it for yourself at
http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articles/COMMENTSLINK
All in all, I think the Washington Post deserves an A+ for effort, and a B for execution. The only really sour note is the Comments interface. But delivering the entire expose as a web site shows just how fast and how far the Post has gone towards leveraging the web as an information resource.
What struck me is that kids gained nothing _but_ computer skills. This ought to challenge computer game designers: can you come up with a game that kids will want to play AND increases math and reading scores? I'm not talking about an "educational" game, per se, just a game whose side effect is better reasoning and comprehension. Even kids who read silly novels are learning something that is useful for school. Why not gamers?
I'm a small-time composer, and I think $4-5 for a single copy of sheet music is ridiculously over-priced. I have always believed that all this huffing and puffing over copyright law just clouds the basic business problem: the music industry is not giving its public the products it wants, in the forms that they want it, for a price they are willing to pay. Here are some things I think people are looking for: - $5 for a single piece of sheet music that is downloaded is $4 too high. The cost of the sheet music shouldn't be five times (!) the price of the song itself. That feels like gouging. Which it is. - When people buy more than one copy of something, they should get a bulk discount. That's the way they do it at Costco, and that's the way it should work for sheet music. - When I buy something, I don't want any stupid restrictions such as trying to prevent me from printing more than one copy, or printing to a file, or anything else like that. I've got a $50 printer with a 1200 dpi scanner; you think I can't make a perfect copy? It's just insulting, and the user experience is horrible. Just give me the bleepin' file! I'm gonna convert it into a PDF anyway. The push-back to all this will be "oh, but we'll lose all our money!" Not so. If something's only priced at 99 cents, it's not worth my time to steal it for my friends. It's the price of a small fries at Micky-D's. Get your own, cheapskate. Likewise, if you're going to give me 15% if I buy 5 copies for everyone in my band, I'm going to take the 15%. Duh. And lastly, if you make it drop-dead simple to buy something online (see: amazonmp3.com), I'm going to buy from your online store because it is easier and a heck of lot safer than trolling illegal sites. -
$275 for a DIY kit of a bleeding-edge technology is entirely reasonable. I've seen the OLPC 1 screen in action, and was very impressed; I'm sure this will be even better. For those wondering, the resolution is 1024x600; see Up Close and Personal with the Pixel Qi Display.
Let's assume, as a thought experiment, that the Chinese government has been very successful at penetrating whatever American enterprise they've targeted. What will China do with this intel?
According to the Economist, the "<a href="http://www.economist.com/world/asia/displaystory.cfm?story_id=16059990">china model</a>" is to embrace capitalism as a way of funding state control of key sectors of China's economy. As <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/13/AR2010051303551.html">James McGregor's op-ed</a> in the Washington Post points out, "[China has decided] that key sectors of the economy will remain "state dominated," including automotive, chemical, construction, electronic information, equipment manufacturing, iron and steel, non-ferrous metals, and science and technology. Others will stay "largely in state hands," including aviation, coal, defense, electric power and grid, oil and petrochemicals, shipping and telecommunications. State-owned companies in these industries are thriving in their protected home market. They have buckets of cash and easy access to state bank loans to carry out government directives to pursue overseas acquisitions and "go global."
So, one possibility is for China to replace all foreign-sourced technology with Chinese versions. They could massively de-couple themselves from the world market, and never be dependent on trade with anyone other than themselves.
Doing business in China may be a fool's errand.
My guess is this has little to do with Michael Mann or the University of Virginia. This has everything to do with the AG's petition to put the EPA's threatened regulation of carbon dioxide under review. The AG is seeking to undermine the EPA's grounds for action by showing that it is based on weak, missing, or faulty scientific evidence.
The law the AG is using is the Virginia Fraud Against Taxpayers Act, a relatively new "whistleblower" law. The kinds of fraud this law attempts to cover are:
* Submitting false service records or samples in order to show better-than-actual performance.
* Falsifying natural resource production records -- Pumping, mining or harvesting more natural resources from public lands that is actually reported to the government.
* Billing for research that was never conducted; falsifying research data that was paid for by the U.S. government.
Arguably, if the AG can show that the climate science was cooked, he could have a case. If he wins it, he may have established a legal precedent for throwing out the climate data in the EPA case.
This sounds like a pretty smart legal move, if you are a Republican and you control the governorship of Virginia.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the issue with email privacy in Rehberg v. Paulk had to do with voluntary delivery of emails to a third party (in which case no expectation of privacy is called for.) That is not the case here, where the accused has admitted to hacking into Gov. Palin's account and making the emails public without her consent.
are upheld in Court. Personal email really IS private, and people should be held accountable if they cross the line. Jail time sounds a bit extreme, given the youthful age of the accused, but I'm glad the legal precedents are being followed correctly.
Say what you will about the business case for the Courier (or lack thereof), you have to admit that the Courier was a genuinely new take on the concept of a hand-held computer without a keyboard.
To me, the biggest conceptual jump was the notion of a hardware-based personal journal. It married the aggregating utility of OneNote with a hardware device in the form-factor of a small paper notebook. The iPad may be for couch-potatoes (er, "media consumers"), but the Courier was for work: remembering things, finding things, sharing things, notating things, etc. These are the basic tasks of brain-storming and collaboration, which constitute 80%+ of what an information worker does all day long.
Apple doesn't really seem to get this notion. They tend to view iPhone/iPad users as only wanting to interact with content created by the experts, rather than using it to author content. (I know that's over-stated, but it feels true even if it isn't strictly true.)
My state, Virginia, has an at-will policy, and it works very well. Both employers and employees can come and go with minimal entanglement in the court system. This works to the benefit of both sides. If my employer makes what seems to me to be an improper requirement for employment (such as paying for my own certs), then I'm free to pick up and find greener pastures elsewhere. I don't have to worry about my employer suing me for breech of contract. Likewise, if my employer decides to restructure the company and that means my position is no longer needed, they don't have to worry about a lawsuit from me.
In the beneficent absence of involvement by the courts, employers rely on their reputation to attract good people. Local magazines publish annual ratings of the best places to work. Gain a reputation as a lousy employer that lays people off and throws them on the street with two weeks notice, and you'll be bottom-feeding in no time.
Blueprints are just a bunch of pretty pictures. Forget 'em! Just call in all the contractors and tell 'em to start building...
Posh. Clearly you've never used a UML modeling tool that knows how to handle metadata. The tool I use can read in a database schema and draw you a perfect visualization with everything included: attributes, data typing, triggers, keys, relations, you name it. And that's just the start. UML 2.x ain't your grandpappy's modeling language.
The problem with blocking content is that there is no way to deduce what someone intends to do with information merely from the fact that they have it. Am I reading that suicide website because I want to commit suicide, or because I'm gathering research on why not to do it?
Instead of blocking information, make it easier to hold the authors of information accountable for any bad usage. Provide streamlined ways for people to lodge complaints about specific mis-uses of information so the author has an opportunity to rewrite the material or put up better qualifiers and notices about proper use. If an author refuses to respond, provide an escalation path to legal action.
We need laws that are much closer to what's happening on Internet time. We need better legal definitions of culpability, more reasonable penalties, and different standards of evidence that will work for the Internet. An entire court system built just for Internet-related suits -- and which would be run itself on the Internet, of course -- would not be amiss.
At core, we need to be reactive, focusing on real harm done, rather than on harms only imagined. We must preserve the principle that people are presumed innocent, until proven otherwise. But we also need a way that will truly suppress the criminal use of information.
The ability to record an actual death experience is the centerpiece of Brainstorm, a classic science fiction movie from the 80s, starring Natalie Wood (in her last screen role, I believe) as the user experience designer, Christopher Walken and Louise Fletcher as the idealistic genius scientists, and Cliff Robertson as the entrepreneur. They invent a way to record brain activity, and then play back the experience so the user feels he or she has actually done it themselves. They make a "demo tape" of riding a roller coaster, hang-gliding, riding on horseback, eating great food, having sex, etc. When the chief scientist has a heart attack, she records her slow, agonizing death in an unforgettable scene. Whenever anyone plays it back, the shock starts to kill them, too.
Naturally, I didn't mean to imply you don't have the right to say what you want, which of course you do.
However, if you're going to say what it means to "act like Christ", don't you think your opinion would be more believable and persuasive if you backed it up with some evidence?
To just dismiss the Bible away -- "you can interpret pretty much anything you like" -- is a pretty weak line, if what you're trying to argue is based on the Bible!
In any event, the Bible is by no means open to just any old interpretation. If one simply takes the Bible at its word and follows common-sense interpretive principles, it is remarkably clear, and very approachable. And, I agree wholeheartedly that the lessons it teaches are absolutely as relevant for today's health care debate as they were at the time they were first written.
It really bugs me when non-Christians take it on themselves to paraphrase the Bible. If you're not a believer, the LEAST you could do is find an actual passage to back yourself up, rather than just popping off what you yourself admit is, at best, an uninformed opinion.
Here's a wonderful essay by C.H. Spurgeon on what it means to be "my brother's keeper". The Bible teaches that there is a balance between individual responsibility ("If a man does not work, do not let him eat.") and individual compassion ("love your neighbor as yourself"). It does not teach that the government ought to be the primary carekeeper for those in need. The Bible's view of care is far, far more personal than that.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but there are a lot of fictional sources of funds in this bill:
Not a pretty picture. I wouldn't get too excited about the benefits, just yet. They pushed all the truly hard decisions off to the future. The Republicans WILL be back in power. If the timing stinks, the HC bill may be on the books, but de-funded.
People are forever comparing the US to individual countries in Europe. But that is not an apples-to-apples comparison. France, for example, is demographically and economically the size of the state of Virginia. To get a fair comparison, you'd have to compare the entire US to the entire EU.
Surprisingly, the EU does not have universal health care. In fact, it has exactly the same plan as the US: each member country/state decides for itself. We have states such as Massachusetts and Tennessee that have plans as generous as those in Europe, and other states where there is very little centrally-planned health care.
What the Democrats are asking the US to do is something even the EU won't do.
China has a terrible reputation as a global citizen. At times, they've flooded the market with shoddy goods made of questionable, even dangerous, materials. Their wholesale destruction of the environment is shocking, even to non-environmentalists. They manipulate their currency to make it impossible for importers to compete on an even basis. They have instigated what amounts to a low-level cyber war against businesses and governments the world over. They routinely muzzle speech and dissent within their own borders, and force those who do business with them to do the same. They reportedly have thousands of political prisoners, and every time they want to "make nice" with the West they trot out one or two of them and let them go home to show how kind-hearted they are.
Personally, I've had just about all I care to take of such noxious behavior. I may not be able to completely avoid "Made in China", but there's no reason to encourage them. There are plenty of other people to buy goods from.