Uh, actually I'm much more conservative than most of the Slashdot crowd and I'm not an Obama supporter. I did RTFA and I was agreeing with it - despite the administration's stated intent to increase granted requests under the FOIA by the mechanisms I described, it ain't happening (at least in the previous fiscal year). If you read carefully instead of freaking out when you see the word "Obama", you'll see that nothing in my statement that you quoted disagreed with the article. The changes proposed to the FOIA is one of the ONLY positive things I've seen so far from his administration and even that little something isn't working. I thought the previous policy was a little too closed minded and caused more trouble for FOIA officers and requesters.
I've done some work with federal agencies and how they process FOIA requests:
A request for information under the FOIA can be granted, partially denied, or denied. If the request is granted, the exact records requested are returned unedited. If the request is denied, one or more reasons (exceptions) must be stated from a list of allowed exemptions. If a request is partially denied, one or more exemptions must be stated and what the requester receives back will either be a subset of what was asked for or will be redacted to remove sensitive information. For example, PIA (personally identifiable information - like SSNs, birth dates, medical records, etc.) is an exemption and is grounds for a partial denial, but it usually only means that this information will be redacted from the requested records.
So if you are looking at statistics (annual FOIA reports are required by law from every government entity and the reports themselves are either published or available via FOIA request themselves), you need to know the total number of new requests, the total number of requests held over from the previous fiscal year, the number of requests granted, the number partially denied, and the number totally denied. There are also individual statistics for denials and partial denials broken down by exemptions. There isn't anything on the annual report about how many exemptions were applied to individual requests - that would just have to be averaged out.
The Obama administration did encourage more release of records under the FOIA and a relaxing of exemptions. The idea was to assume that any record could be released unless an exemption prevented it. The previous directive was to presume that any record could not released and then try to justify it. If they couldn't justify denying it, they would grudgingly release it. The other thing that has been encouraged is pre-emptive release. For any request that is granted (no exemptions) there is no reason to not put that record on the agency's public web site to avoid processing any future requests for it. Or if there are certain types of records that can be released and that get requested often, go ahead and publish them. Theoretically this will reduce the number of FOIA requests processed, but I think it's probably too early to see a difference based on this policy.
I like Wolfram|Alpha's capabilities much better when I'm not fighting their "natural language" parsing. The simplest way to get "What time is it?" on W|A isn't to type that question, just do:
now
More impressively, Wolfram|Alpha can do this:
airspeed of an unladen European swallow in furlongs per fortnight
Google also provides top-ranked sites where this is calculated, but W|A gives a definite answer along with assumptions.
and it will show and tell you (waxing crescent). Google would only do that if someone had written that down on a page somewhere with sufficient page rank to show up higher than semi-random occurrences of all of the words.
Of course, there is a simple answer to the Google vs. W|A controversy (and one that Wolfram should agree to) - license Google to provide a prominent link to W|A for search phrases that look like they might be appropriately solved by it.
While I see your point, I disagree with your conclusion. You do need a working class, but that working class does not have to be poor (or doesn't have to be poor forever). In order for it to work at its best, you need a working class that is educated and dynamic (willing to change) because as markets, society, and technology evolves, it is always going to leave some people out of work. Automobile jobs replace horse related jobs, large scale agriculture means fewer small family farms, and so on. There is also nothing inherent in capitalism that requires a permanent class or wealth based stratification of society - there will always be young, inexperienced, and uneducated people starting out looking for work. They don't have to stay that way for the rest of their lives as long as equal opportunities are made available for them to advance, get educated, and make more money. When you look at poverty statistic in America, you see a snapshot in time. Yes, there is too much disparity in my opinion between the highs and the lows, but there is a distribution. When you compare snapshots from different time periods, you can compare the change in the number of people in poverty, middle class, or "rich" categories. What you don't see in this analysis is the movement of individuals between these categories. A majority of young people just starting out make very little money. Some work minimum wage jobs while attending college, for example. During that time, they are "poor". Ten years later, they may be upper middle class while another young person just starting out takes their old statistical position.
Studies that I have seen show that very few people in America stay in the same income and wealth categories through their whole lives. This is not true in many other countries in the world. In heavily socialized democracies, there are more people in the middle-classes, but there is less overall mobility and higher unemployment.
To be perfectly realistic, there will always be a certain percentage of human beings in a society which are going to stay poor due to lack of ability, health and mental problems, or, to be blunt, just plain laziness. We have a moral and ethical duty to protect them to a certain extent and to help them as much as they are able to be helped. There will also be a certain percentage of people who will overcome pretty much any normally bad circumstance and succeed. The rest of us should know that we have the opportunity and protection that we need to succeed (and yes, profit) is we use those opportunities and work hard.
Payday lenders fall under the "Government should protect people from being screwed over" line. Predatory lenders do fill a market niche and their obscenely high interest rates function to make them a profit while making high-risk loans and preying on the economic stupidity of their governments. Then again, drug dealers fill a similar niche. As we have (or should have) learned from the "war on drugs", controlling the supply doesn't eliminate the demand. In fact, it simultaneously increases the supplier's risks and their profits. Also like the war on drugs, controlling the demand might work, but it may be more than we are willing to do.
What I mean regarding the drug war is that arresting dealers and importers looks great in the newspapers, but doesn't decrease the demand. Therefore the prices of the drugs go up as shipments are confiscated and the profit margins to also go up because of the higher risk in doing business. That, in turn, makes the prospect of a large profit attractive to people who's alternative may be a minimum wage job, or even hard work in school followed by a well paying job - why not just skip the school and job, take a risk selling drugs, and maybe make a lot of money? The odds are better than the lottery. There are only a few solutions, most of them unpalatable to a large number of the voting public: arrest all users and buyers and leave the dealers alone (attack the demand), but we don't have the resources in police, courts, and jails to do this and no one wants to do this anyway; legalize and/or control drug sales (opposed by a majority of voters); or provide treatment, prevention, and recovery plans for users and buyers (a great solution until you try to raise enough tax money to treat a problem that most people feel is a personality flaw to begin with).
Much of the same thing could be said about control of predatory lending. If you cap the interest rates on legal loans and the legal businesses can't afford to make loans at that rate, it means that the desperate (and stupid) customers have to borrow money from Guido at 400% interest and get their kneecaps broken if they don't pay. You could make such loans illegal, but the demand will still be there. Unfortunately, you can't make stupidity illegal (look at the mortgage crisis and the demand to bail out people who provided and took out high-risk loans). The real answer is to tell people to suck it up and manage their money better.
No one in a society as well off as America's should ever starve to death, have no sheltered place to sleep, or not have access to some degree of medical care. No system ever implemented or proposed, though, has described how this can be provided without the possibilities of waste, abuse, and fraud. If a person or family with a low paying job needs to borrow against their paycheck to pay for food, utilities, or rent, there is a problem. If they have to borrow to pay for those things and also for their cell phone, cable, internet, new car payment, video games, booze, and/or drugs then how do you balance that with an equitable system? And I'm not talking about hypothetical minority stereotypes, I've had family members borrow from me or ask for handouts to pay their house payment or to buy medicine or to keep their car from being repossessed, but they've never had their cable, internet service, or cell phone disconnected and have never missed a meal in their life. The same people gripe that they can't get medical insurance and none of them can hold down a steady, decent job (one of them is on permanent "disability", but I work every day with people with worse physical and medical problems).
I don't advocate going this far, but has anyone read "Child of Fortune" by Norman Spinrad? In the society in that book, there were government bunkhouses where anyone could sleep (with monitoring and police protection), free clothing was provided, and nourishing meals were provided by the government, so if you were destitute or homeless or just didn't want to work, the government made absolute sure that you had s
I think the government's role should be to protect people from being screwed, but NOT to make sure that everyone is "equal".
Personally, I think socialism and communism are wonderful ideals that have never been proven to be compatible with human nature and human society and are likely never to be. For example, no one would disagree with the statement "The world would be a better place if there were no violence", but there is no way the world would achieve that without fundamentally altering human nature. Likewise, saying that if all wealth was distributed more equally we would eliminate poverty and prevent rich people from controlling the world through the power of their money is a great ideal as well. What actually happens in real world attempts to do this? People cheat. Some people see now difference between working hard and not working at all, so they leech off the system. The only way to enforce this equality is by government control, but the government is composed of people who now have control of production and distribution, so the power base and all of the same (and worse) abuses are present. People with the talent and drive to excel are repressed. From my reading of history every attempt at establishment of societies based on these principles, from a commune of a few dozen people to the U.S.S.R. and China have failed and failed in ways that, in hindsight, are perfectly obvious based on human nature.
I also can't figure out why the open source, anti-corporation, "information should be free", crowd (98%+ of Slashdot readers) advocate so many ideas that would result in top heavy, bureaucratically-bloated, hierarchical government agencies. Sure, everyone should have access to health care. Do we trust the U.S. government to provide a cost efficient, dynamic, scientifically aware program and agency to control it? I don't.
The dangers and abuses of capitalism are obvious, but it's like the old saw about Democracy: capitalism is the worst economic system, except for all of the rest of them. People are competitive, they want and need to see rewards for their efforts. If one person or group does something better and/or cheaper than another, they are more successful. Prices are driven by supply and demand and no matter how much we would like to, they can't be controlled by government fiat. Government control of a single-side of the equation, supply or demand, is even worse. Property rights are essential for any system of modern banking. You can also attack the banking system as well, but overall it works and money economies are not zero sum, but closed economies and barter economies are zero sum (or less).
For example, why would a company, a bank, or a government loan you money (or borrow money from you in stocks or bonds) if there were no interest or dividends? Even if they did, how would any risks be mitigated without collateral? The most common collateral is property, so if you don't have legal property rights, you don't have any collateral. But interest rates are so unfair, they should be capped to prevent abuse. Fine, cap them. Then what happens when the risks exceed the expected return? No entity in their right mind would lend any money, so you have stagnation. Or, if they are able, people would go outside the legal systems to borrow money and these illegal (or external) money lenders would compete how? Capitalistic market forces. Check out your history books - the same pattern of mistakes and corrections have appeared many times. This is one reason why when I heard someone praise Hugo Chavez, I pretty much tune out anything else they have to say.
Capitalism is not fundamentally incompatible with ending poverty. As the parent poster (and others) have pointed out, a capitalist entity wants to grow its markets and poor and dying people make bad customers, but affluent, healthy, intelligent people make great customers. Over the years, altruism has also become a marketable asset and many people are more or less willing to buy products fro
Yeah, but if you are standing directly in front the projector, you wouldn't see what your hands and forearms were covering anyway, so the shadows aren't that big of a deal (except for in collaboration where the view would be temporarily shadowed for people viewing from either side.
The projector itself is very cool - finding a mounting spot for a projector is often a pain and ceiling mounts on high ceilings are unweildy. With this you can mount the projector on the wall above or below the screen and only have it protrude a little ways. Neat.
I could get myself a blowjob Deny it with a snowjob Or some story I invent F*** the interns that they send me then have my wife defend me If I was the president...
Oh they cant do nothing to me unless she says she blew me and knows my cock is bent I would orally debrief her Sit back and smoke some reefer If I was the president...
If Sanderson is that good at wrapping things up, maybe George R.R. Martin can pass along his notes for A Song of Ice and Fire and then just move on to something else...
Because, genetically, race doesn't have a genetic or even a biological basis - gender most obviously does (biological, that is). More specifically, variations in epigenetic expression are broader within a "race" (grouped as an ethnic group or by skin color) than the genetic differences between the "races", and these variances greatly overlap the "racial" groupings. Therefore it is perfectly correct to investigate evolutionary biological factors, even if they might exist in a higher concentration within an ethnic group, particularly if their mating choices were limited, but not to research differences between "black" and "white" people or "Europeans" vs. "Chinese" since those categories have no genetic basis other than a few shared morphological traits which are expressed by a handful of genetic sequences. On the other hand, genetic influences that might be tied to cultural co-evolution are necessarily tied to neural development which is controlled by thousands of genes - hence the wider variance in possible expression independent of any concept of "race".
An even better question is why the Creationists believe in variance in human nature (even though attribute it to original sin and free will rather than evolution) and believe that living in a "good" or "bad" environment also can affect your basic nature, but the modern social science movements accept the obvious facts of biological evolution, but deny that it has anything relevant to say about culture and behavior. It's probably the only think the Creationists might have right, even though their theory behind it is nonsense.
It is increasingly obvious that the academic culture surrounding psychology and sociology (and other "humanistic" sciences) is increasingly dogmatic and close-minded. If they stay locked away, I think the biologists, molecular biologists, and cognitive psychologists will rightful take over their fields of study and render them obsolete.
Quite simply, basic research does need to be done to test hypotheses about whether behaviors are based on biologically inheritable traits or cultural environment and to what extent each has a role. Both extremes, "culture has nothing to do with evolutionary biology" vs. "human behavior has nothing to do with culture", are, of course absurd. So why is this research in any way contentious? Why would anyone be afraid of the idea that, horrors!, some behavioral tendencies are either genetic, sex differentiated, or both? It has been shown time and time again in research that there are both cultural constants that correlated to evolutionary biology and that there are behavioral variations within a culture that correspond to genetic makeup and to differentiated development due to variations in sexual hormones during fetal development. Blinding yourself to avenues of research or labeling those who honestly pursue those avenues of research as bigots and Nazis is just sticking your head in the sand and pretending that goal oriented social engineering is going to change human nature. I don't see where anyone can extract a value judgment or a sustain a bigoted attitude based on these studies. Nobody is saying, "Girls like pink, therefore they are sissies" or even that "All girls like pink", just that within a population, there is a statistically significant predilection that tracks gender.
I'm one of those people who think that making permanent copies of material without paying for them is theft. On the other hand, I am one of those people who refuse to pay for the same (or inferior versions) of the same content for different machines/media players. Yes, if I want a BlueRay version of a movie I bought on DVD, I should have to buy it. If I want the extras and extended scenes on some super new special edition versions, I should have to pay for it. If I want to watch a DVD on my iPod (or read an eBook version of a book I have in paper), I have no compunction about making (or obtaining) a copy whoever I can.
As you say, though, the Watch It Now thing is a little different. I know people who get their Netflix movies, rip the DVD, put it on a shelf, and return it the next day for the next movie and, in doing so, amass a huge collection of pirated movies - most of them they never watch. That's kind of sad and stupid, but if they aren't selling them or uploading them on BitTorrent, it isn't hurting anyone. Doing the same thing for Watch It Now is even stupider for the reasons you outlined, but really should be less damaging to Netflix because who would want the versions that would be created? They may look OK on an iPod, but they are inferior to a DivX version of the DVD.
I really like the Watch It Now service and probably watch as much or more via it than I do via the DVD rentals (since my family regularly hijacks the queue and I suck at returning movies - Netflix probably loves me). My only gripe out it is having to dredge up Internet Explorer to use it - that really sucks.
That being said, it would be a shame if Netflix gets rid of it or limits the amount of good content for it because of hacks like this.
I thought this prediction wins the award for the most off the mark. Sure, the others missed things like search engines, but if I read it right, this guy said that people don't want to use the Internet for dating (wink wink nudge nudge), gambling, and video on demand.
Plus, I'll bet the violent frenzy over the woefully small PS3 availability probably helped the Wii sales. I don't think there would have been people camping out all night in front of Target to purchase a Wii if the PS3 feeding frenzy hadn't occurred two days before.
Our local Wal-Mart set up an XBox360 in their layaway department for the Wii campers to play until midnight. Unfortunately, the waiting room was full at noon on Saturday, so I didn't bother. Prior to the PS3 sales (for which the Wal-Marts had like 6), I was really expecting to be able to wander over to Wally World at around 8PM and stand around waiting for midnight.
Yeah, but they think they're going to scalp it on eBay for more like $3000 than $800, buy a Wii, buy other stuff, then pick up another PS3 after Christmas. What the reality will be we'll know in a few days if there are a lot of unbought PS3's on eBay (or if they're selling at right around MSRP + minimal markup).
I hate to put my conspiracy hat on, but how many people believe the low (~400,000) number of launch units was carefully calculated by Sony in order to produce exactly this kind of greedy frenzy? Suppose they released several million and anyone could walk into almost any retailer up until Dec 24th and walk out with one at MSRP.
I'm asking for a fair financial analysis here - is there a number they could have come up with for a launch that would maximize pre-Christmas sales AND generate enough hype for continued sales in 2007? Or, as I suspect, are the Sony execs sitting back and saying "Wow, people are sitting in freezing rain for 24 hours and it's on the news? People are getting shot over them? Cool!! We'll sell even more now!"
As you say, when the Amiga came out (I had one of the first Amiga 1000s) it was far and away the most impressive personal computer on the market - processing power, graphics, sound, multi-tasking OS, etc. Five years later (or maybe less) Apple and the PC market had caught up and passed it and the Amigas that were being sold were only marginally better (woo-hoo, now it has a hard drive and more memory). Putting everything into the custom chipsets was a fantastic way of squeezing out that performance when it premiered, but it locked the hardware (and the tightly coupled software) into a time warp outside of Moore's Law.
I do have many fond memories on my C-64 (and my Amiga). I've still got a mostly working SX-64 in my closet, but I'm not sure the disk drive is in good shape - the last time I tried, I couldn't read most of the floppies I have.
I did learn to program in BASIC and 6502 assembly language on my C-64 and we wore out many joysticks playing Summer Games and M.U.L.E. on it.
My personal personal computer experience went like this:
TRS-80 Model 1, 4K RAM, Level 1 Basic (eventually upgraded to 16K RAM, Level 2 Basic, but I never had a disk drive for it) C-64 (I skipped the Vic-20) with several 1541 disk drives SX-64 (bought used from a friend who bought a C-128) Amiga 1000 (started using Macs at my college job and a few PCs in school, but most schoolwork was done on a Vax and an IBM mainframe) Packard Bell 486 (my first PC) I've lost track of how many different PCs I've owned since then.
Back when I got my CS (actually CSE) degree from Auburn University (graduated in '89), we had to take Discrete Math from the math department, a discrete match course in the computer science department, and a computer logic/discrete math course from the EE department. There was about an 80% overlap between what was covered in these three courses. The terminology was different, but it was all boolean algebra and set theory.
I had a horrible professor for linear algebra - that would have been a useful thing to have learned more about.
We only covered graph theory in an algorithms class. I had to teach myself a lot of graph theory in my job later (while working on tracing algorithms for GIS).
I think the biggest problem (way back when I was in school) was that, as CS majors, we could have done much more from a computational/programming point of view even in our "pure" math classes. Maybe it's better now.
So far, it's worked out for to tell my kids that I am logging their IM chats and can read them at any time. They know I am a computer engineer and they're pretty tech saavy, but not quite saavy enough to find out if I'm lying or not.
I also require that they use the computers in the house in "public spaces". We don't read over their shoulder (much), but they know we might at any time and suspicious closing of windows or shutting down the computer is grounds for a discussion.
We recently received a spreadsheet (Excel) with tens of thousands of rows. Visually, all of the rows looked correct, so after spot checking, we imported the data into a database (SQL Server). Hundreds of the imported rows had NULLs in the database columns, in a fairly unpredictable pattern. The culprit? Some of the rows consisted of numbers where the leading zeros were important (essentially a text pattern, but only containing numbers). If the number didn't have leading zeroes, they entered it as a number. If it did have leading zeroes, they put a single quote to force it to a string. Short of scanning the column, it looks the same. The worst part is that selecting the column and applying a format (number or text) doesn't change the internal representation and the database import was looking for one data type and ignoring the ones of the different data type. The fix was easy, but weird - create a new sheet, define the datatypes of the columns correctly, then copy and paste the data from the bad sheet to the new sheet. Just doing this (and changing the database import to work with the new sheet) got us 100% of the fields imported.
This type of thing is what we see most commonly when accessing data from spreadsheets - the users concentrate on the screen or print presentation of the data instead of the constraints on the data (types, ranges, values, formulas). Sometimes, they'll hide columns (which is a good technique for hiding intermediate calculations that you don't want to print), but this screws up the database imports as well (or at least makes you go back and redo them several times wondering where the other data is coming from).
Bottom line is that spreadsheets have their uses, but they suck as databases.
Of course, there is one other major abuse of spreadsheets - using them as drawing programs or diagramming tools. I've even seen a user manual written in Excel!
Handwriting recognition on Tablet PCs is very good. Maybe not 99.5%, but good enough to collect solid data in field form collection. It's a bit too cumbersome to write a novel with (or a technical paper).
The electronic ink apps for it work pretty well though. You can take notes as fast as you want and then later do ink to text conversions on them for indexing.
Slashdot Mirror
How usefully open-source can it be with a commercial library requirement?
Uh, actually I'm much more conservative than most of the Slashdot crowd and I'm not an Obama supporter. I did RTFA and I was agreeing with it - despite the administration's stated intent to increase granted requests under the FOIA by the mechanisms I described, it ain't happening (at least in the previous fiscal year). If you read carefully instead of freaking out when you see the word "Obama", you'll see that nothing in my statement that you quoted disagreed with the article. The changes proposed to the FOIA is one of the ONLY positive things I've seen so far from his administration and even that little something isn't working. I thought the previous policy was a little too closed minded and caused more trouble for FOIA officers and requesters.
I've done some work with federal agencies and how they process FOIA requests:
A request for information under the FOIA can be granted, partially denied, or denied. If the request is granted, the exact records requested are returned unedited. If the request is denied, one or more reasons (exceptions) must be stated from a list of allowed exemptions. If a request is partially denied, one or more exemptions must be stated and what the requester receives back will either be a subset of what was asked for or will be redacted to remove sensitive information. For example, PIA (personally identifiable information - like SSNs, birth dates, medical records, etc.) is an exemption and is grounds for a partial denial, but it usually only means that this information will be redacted from the requested records.
So if you are looking at statistics (annual FOIA reports are required by law from every government entity and the reports themselves are either published or available via FOIA request themselves), you need to know the total number of new requests, the total number of requests held over from the previous fiscal year, the number of requests granted, the number partially denied, and the number totally denied. There are also individual statistics for denials and partial denials broken down by exemptions. There isn't anything on the annual report about how many exemptions were applied to individual requests - that would just have to be averaged out.
The Obama administration did encourage more release of records under the FOIA and a relaxing of exemptions. The idea was to assume that any record could be released unless an exemption prevented it. The previous directive was to presume that any record could not released and then try to justify it. If they couldn't justify denying it, they would grudgingly release it. The other thing that has been encouraged is pre-emptive release. For any request that is granted (no exemptions) there is no reason to not put that record on the agency's public web site to avoid processing any future requests for it. Or if there are certain types of records that can be released and that get requested often, go ahead and publish them. Theoretically this will reduce the number of FOIA requests processed, but I think it's probably too early to see a difference based on this policy.
Back in the early 80's, the Radio Shack store at the local mall had a fishbowl full of alligator clips marked "party favors" (roach clips).
I like Wolfram|Alpha's capabilities much better when I'm not fighting their "natural language" parsing. The simplest way to get "What time is it?" on W|A isn't to type that question, just do:
now
More impressively, Wolfram|Alpha can do this:
airspeed of an unladen European swallow in furlongs per fortnight
Google also provides top-ranked sites where this is calculated, but W|A gives a definite answer along with assumptions.
On the other hand, you can ask W|Q:
Phase of the moon on the day Elvis was born
and it will show and tell you (waxing crescent). Google would only do that if someone had written that down on a page somewhere with sufficient page rank to show up higher than semi-random occurrences of all of the words.
Of course, there is a simple answer to the Google vs. W|A controversy (and one that Wolfram should agree to) - license Google to provide a prominent link to W|A for search phrases that look like they might be appropriately solved by it.
While I see your point, I disagree with your conclusion. You do need a working class, but that working class does not have to be poor (or doesn't have to be poor forever). In order for it to work at its best, you need a working class that is educated and dynamic (willing to change) because as markets, society, and technology evolves, it is always going to leave some people out of work. Automobile jobs replace horse related jobs, large scale agriculture means fewer small family farms, and so on. There is also nothing inherent in capitalism that requires a permanent class or wealth based stratification of society - there will always be young, inexperienced, and uneducated people starting out looking for work. They don't have to stay that way for the rest of their lives as long as equal opportunities are made available for them to advance, get educated, and make more money. When you look at poverty statistic in America, you see a snapshot in time. Yes, there is too much disparity in my opinion between the highs and the lows, but there is a distribution. When you compare snapshots from different time periods, you can compare the change in the number of people in poverty, middle class, or "rich" categories. What you don't see in this analysis is the movement of individuals between these categories. A majority of young people just starting out make very little money. Some work minimum wage jobs while attending college, for example. During that time, they are "poor". Ten years later, they may be upper middle class while another young person just starting out takes their old statistical position.
Studies that I have seen show that very few people in America stay in the same income and wealth categories through their whole lives. This is not true in many other countries in the world. In heavily socialized democracies, there are more people in the middle-classes, but there is less overall mobility and higher unemployment.
To be perfectly realistic, there will always be a certain percentage of human beings in a society which are going to stay poor due to lack of ability, health and mental problems, or, to be blunt, just plain laziness. We have a moral and ethical duty to protect them to a certain extent and to help them as much as they are able to be helped. There will also be a certain percentage of people who will overcome pretty much any normally bad circumstance and succeed. The rest of us should know that we have the opportunity and protection that we need to succeed (and yes, profit) is we use those opportunities and work hard.
Payday lenders fall under the "Government should protect people from being screwed over" line. Predatory lenders do fill a market niche and their obscenely high interest rates function to make them a profit while making high-risk loans and preying on the economic stupidity of their governments. Then again, drug dealers fill a similar niche. As we have (or should have) learned from the "war on drugs", controlling the supply doesn't eliminate the demand. In fact, it simultaneously increases the supplier's risks and their profits. Also like the war on drugs, controlling the demand might work, but it may be more than we are willing to do.
What I mean regarding the drug war is that arresting dealers and importers looks great in the newspapers, but doesn't decrease the demand. Therefore the prices of the drugs go up as shipments are confiscated and the profit margins to also go up because of the higher risk in doing business. That, in turn, makes the prospect of a large profit attractive to people who's alternative may be a minimum wage job, or even hard work in school followed by a well paying job - why not just skip the school and job, take a risk selling drugs, and maybe make a lot of money? The odds are better than the lottery. There are only a few solutions, most of them unpalatable to a large number of the voting public: arrest all users and buyers and leave the dealers alone (attack the demand), but we don't have the resources in police, courts, and jails to do this and no one wants to do this anyway; legalize and/or control drug sales (opposed by a majority of voters); or provide treatment, prevention, and recovery plans for users and buyers (a great solution until you try to raise enough tax money to treat a problem that most people feel is a personality flaw to begin with).
Much of the same thing could be said about control of predatory lending. If you cap the interest rates on legal loans and the legal businesses can't afford to make loans at that rate, it means that the desperate (and stupid) customers have to borrow money from Guido at 400% interest and get their kneecaps broken if they don't pay. You could make such loans illegal, but the demand will still be there. Unfortunately, you can't make stupidity illegal (look at the mortgage crisis and the demand to bail out people who provided and took out high-risk loans). The real answer is to tell people to suck it up and manage their money better.
No one in a society as well off as America's should ever starve to death, have no sheltered place to sleep, or not have access to some degree of medical care. No system ever implemented or proposed, though, has described how this can be provided without the possibilities of waste, abuse, and fraud. If a person or family with a low paying job needs to borrow against their paycheck to pay for food, utilities, or rent, there is a problem. If they have to borrow to pay for those things and also for their cell phone, cable, internet, new car payment, video games, booze, and/or drugs then how do you balance that with an equitable system? And I'm not talking about hypothetical minority stereotypes, I've had family members borrow from me or ask for handouts to pay their house payment or to buy medicine or to keep their car from being repossessed, but they've never had their cable, internet service, or cell phone disconnected and have never missed a meal in their life. The same people gripe that they can't get medical insurance and none of them can hold down a steady, decent job (one of them is on permanent "disability", but I work every day with people with worse physical and medical problems).
I don't advocate going this far, but has anyone read "Child of Fortune" by Norman Spinrad? In the society in that book, there were government bunkhouses where anyone could sleep (with monitoring and police protection), free clothing was provided, and nourishing meals were provided by the government, so if you were destitute or homeless or just didn't want to work, the government made absolute sure that you had s
Well said. I wish I had moderation points.
I think the government's role should be to protect people from being screwed, but NOT to make sure that everyone is "equal".
Personally, I think socialism and communism are wonderful ideals that have never been proven to be compatible with human nature and human society and are likely never to be. For example, no one would disagree with the statement "The world would be a better place if there were no violence", but there is no way the world would achieve that without fundamentally altering human nature. Likewise, saying that if all wealth was distributed more equally we would eliminate poverty and prevent rich people from controlling the world through the power of their money is a great ideal as well. What actually happens in real world attempts to do this? People cheat. Some people see now difference between working hard and not working at all, so they leech off the system. The only way to enforce this equality is by government control, but the government is composed of people who now have control of production and distribution, so the power base and all of the same (and worse) abuses are present. People with the talent and drive to excel are repressed. From my reading of history every attempt at establishment of societies based on these principles, from a commune of a few dozen people to the U.S.S.R. and China have failed and failed in ways that, in hindsight, are perfectly obvious based on human nature.
I also can't figure out why the open source, anti-corporation, "information should be free", crowd (98%+ of Slashdot readers) advocate so many ideas that would result in top heavy, bureaucratically-bloated, hierarchical government agencies. Sure, everyone should have access to health care. Do we trust the U.S. government to provide a cost efficient, dynamic, scientifically aware program and agency to control it? I don't.
The dangers and abuses of capitalism are obvious, but it's like the old saw about Democracy: capitalism is the worst economic system, except for all of the rest of them. People are competitive, they want and need to see rewards for their efforts. If one person or group does something better and/or cheaper than another, they are more successful. Prices are driven by supply and demand and no matter how much we would like to, they can't be controlled by government fiat. Government control of a single-side of the equation, supply or demand, is even worse. Property rights are essential for any system of modern banking. You can also attack the banking system as well, but overall it works and money economies are not zero sum, but closed economies and barter economies are zero sum (or less).
For example, why would a company, a bank, or a government loan you money (or borrow money from you in stocks or bonds) if there were no interest or dividends? Even if they did, how would any risks be mitigated without collateral? The most common collateral is property, so if you don't have legal property rights, you don't have any collateral. But interest rates are so unfair, they should be capped to prevent abuse. Fine, cap them. Then what happens when the risks exceed the expected return? No entity in their right mind would lend any money, so you have stagnation. Or, if they are able, people would go outside the legal systems to borrow money and these illegal (or external) money lenders would compete how? Capitalistic market forces. Check out your history books - the same pattern of mistakes and corrections have appeared many times. This is one reason why when I heard someone praise Hugo Chavez, I pretty much tune out anything else they have to say.
Capitalism is not fundamentally incompatible with ending poverty. As the parent poster (and others) have pointed out, a capitalist entity wants to grow its markets and poor and dying people make bad customers, but affluent, healthy, intelligent people make great customers. Over the years, altruism has also become a marketable asset and many people are more or less willing to buy products fro
Yeah, but if you are standing directly in front the projector, you wouldn't see what your hands and forearms were covering anyway, so the shadows aren't that big of a deal (except for in collaboration where the view would be temporarily shadowed for people viewing from either side.
The projector itself is very cool - finding a mounting spot for a projector is often a pain and ceiling mounts on high ceilings are unweildy. With this you can mount the projector on the wall above or below the screen and only have it protrude a little ways. Neat.
To the tune of "If I Only Had A Brain"...
I could get myself a blowjob
Deny it with a snowjob
Or some story I invent
F*** the interns that they send me
then have my wife defend me
If I was the president...
Oh they cant do nothing to me
unless she says she blew me
and knows my cock is bent
I would orally debrief her
Sit back and smoke some reefer
If I was the president...
If Sanderson is that good at wrapping things up, maybe George R.R. Martin can pass along his notes for A Song of Ice and Fire and then just move on to something else...
Because, genetically, race doesn't have a genetic or even a biological basis - gender most obviously does (biological, that is). More specifically, variations in epigenetic expression are broader within a "race" (grouped as an ethnic group or by skin color) than the genetic differences between the "races", and these variances greatly overlap the "racial" groupings. Therefore it is perfectly correct to investigate evolutionary biological factors, even if they might exist in a higher concentration within an ethnic group, particularly if their mating choices were limited, but not to research differences between "black" and "white" people or "Europeans" vs. "Chinese" since those categories have no genetic basis other than a few shared morphological traits which are expressed by a handful of genetic sequences. On the other hand, genetic influences that might be tied to cultural co-evolution are necessarily tied to neural development which is controlled by thousands of genes - hence the wider variance in possible expression independent of any concept of "race".
An even better question is why the Creationists believe in variance in human nature (even though attribute it to original sin and free will rather than evolution) and believe that living in a "good" or "bad" environment also can affect your basic nature, but the modern social science movements accept the obvious facts of biological evolution, but deny that it has anything relevant to say about culture and behavior. It's probably the only think the Creationists might have right, even though their theory behind it is nonsense.
It is increasingly obvious that the academic culture surrounding psychology and sociology (and other "humanistic" sciences) is increasingly dogmatic and close-minded. If they stay locked away, I think the biologists, molecular biologists, and cognitive psychologists will rightful take over their fields of study and render them obsolete.
Quite simply, basic research does need to be done to test hypotheses about whether behaviors are based on biologically inheritable traits or cultural environment and to what extent each has a role. Both extremes, "culture has nothing to do with evolutionary biology" vs. "human behavior has nothing to do with culture", are, of course absurd. So why is this research in any way contentious? Why would anyone be afraid of the idea that, horrors!, some behavioral tendencies are either genetic, sex differentiated, or both? It has been shown time and time again in research that there are both cultural constants that correlated to evolutionary biology and that there are behavioral variations within a culture that correspond to genetic makeup and to differentiated development due to variations in sexual hormones during fetal development. Blinding yourself to avenues of research or labeling those who honestly pursue those avenues of research as bigots and Nazis is just sticking your head in the sand and pretending that goal oriented social engineering is going to change human nature. I don't see where anyone can extract a value judgment or a sustain a bigoted attitude based on these studies. Nobody is saying, "Girls like pink, therefore they are sissies" or even that "All girls like pink", just that within a population, there is a statistically significant predilection that tracks gender.
Excellent points all around.
I'm one of those people who think that making permanent copies of material without paying for them is theft. On the other hand, I am one of those people who refuse to pay for the same (or inferior versions) of the same content for different machines/media players. Yes, if I want a BlueRay version of a movie I bought on DVD, I should have to buy it. If I want the extras and extended scenes on some super new special edition versions, I should have to pay for it. If I want to watch a DVD on my iPod (or read an eBook version of a book I have in paper), I have no compunction about making (or obtaining) a copy whoever I can.
As you say, though, the Watch It Now thing is a little different. I know people who get their Netflix movies, rip the DVD, put it on a shelf, and return it the next day for the next movie and, in doing so, amass a huge collection of pirated movies - most of them they never watch. That's kind of sad and stupid, but if they aren't selling them or uploading them on BitTorrent, it isn't hurting anyone. Doing the same thing for Watch It Now is even stupider for the reasons you outlined, but really should be less damaging to Netflix because who would want the versions that would be created? They may look OK on an iPod, but they are inferior to a DivX version of the DVD.
I really like the Watch It Now service and probably watch as much or more via it than I do via the DVD rentals (since my family regularly hijacks the queue and I suck at returning movies - Netflix probably loves me). My only gripe out it is having to dredge up Internet Explorer to use it - that really sucks.
That being said, it would be a shame if Netflix gets rid of it or limits the amount of good content for it because of hacks like this.
I thought this prediction wins the award for the most off the mark. Sure, the others missed things like search engines, but if I read it right, this guy said that people don't want to use the Internet for dating (wink wink nudge nudge), gambling, and video on demand.
Plus, I'll bet the violent frenzy over the woefully small PS3 availability probably helped the Wii sales. I don't think there would have been people camping out all night in front of Target to purchase a Wii if the PS3 feeding frenzy hadn't occurred two days before.
Our local Wal-Mart set up an XBox360 in their layaway department for the Wii campers to play until midnight. Unfortunately, the waiting room was full at noon on Saturday, so I didn't bother. Prior to the PS3 sales (for which the Wal-Marts had like 6), I was really expecting to be able to wander over to Wally World at around 8PM and stand around waiting for midnight.
Yeah, but they think they're going to scalp it on eBay for more like $3000 than $800, buy a Wii, buy other stuff, then pick up another PS3 after Christmas. What the reality will be we'll know in a few days if there are a lot of unbought PS3's on eBay (or if they're selling at right around MSRP + minimal markup).
I hate to put my conspiracy hat on, but how many people believe the low (~400,000) number of launch units was carefully calculated by Sony in order to produce exactly this kind of greedy frenzy? Suppose they released several million and anyone could walk into almost any retailer up until Dec 24th and walk out with one at MSRP.
I'm asking for a fair financial analysis here - is there a number they could have come up with for a launch that would maximize pre-Christmas sales AND generate enough hype for continued sales in 2007? Or, as I suspect, are the Sony execs sitting back and saying "Wow, people are sitting in freezing rain for 24 hours and it's on the news? People are getting shot over them? Cool!! We'll sell even more now!"
As you say, when the Amiga came out (I had one of the first Amiga 1000s) it was far and away the most impressive personal computer on the market - processing power, graphics, sound, multi-tasking OS, etc. Five years later (or maybe less) Apple and the PC market had caught up and passed it and the Amigas that were being sold were only marginally better (woo-hoo, now it has a hard drive and more memory). Putting everything into the custom chipsets was a fantastic way of squeezing out that performance when it premiered, but it locked the hardware (and the tightly coupled software) into a time warp outside of Moore's Law.
I do have many fond memories on my C-64 (and my Amiga). I've still got a mostly working SX-64 in my closet, but I'm not sure the disk drive is in good shape - the last time I tried, I couldn't read most of the floppies I have.
I did learn to program in BASIC and 6502 assembly language on my C-64 and we wore out many joysticks playing Summer Games and M.U.L.E. on it.
My personal personal computer experience went like this:
TRS-80 Model 1, 4K RAM, Level 1 Basic (eventually upgraded to 16K RAM, Level 2 Basic, but I never had a disk drive for it)
C-64 (I skipped the Vic-20) with several 1541 disk drives
SX-64 (bought used from a friend who bought a C-128)
Amiga 1000
(started using Macs at my college job and a few PCs in school, but most schoolwork was done on a Vax and an IBM mainframe)
Packard Bell 486 (my first PC)
I've lost track of how many different PCs I've owned since then.
Back when I got my CS (actually CSE) degree from Auburn University (graduated in '89), we had to take Discrete Math from the math department, a discrete match course in the computer science department, and a computer logic/discrete math course from the EE department. There was about an 80% overlap between what was covered in these three courses. The terminology was different, but it was all boolean algebra and set theory.
I had a horrible professor for linear algebra - that would have been a useful thing to have learned more about.
We only covered graph theory in an algorithms class. I had to teach myself a lot of graph theory in my job later (while working on tracing algorithms for GIS).
I think the biggest problem (way back when I was in school) was that, as CS majors, we could have done much more from a computational/programming point of view even in our "pure" math classes. Maybe it's better now.
So far, it's worked out for to tell my kids that I am logging their IM chats and can read them at any time. They know I am a computer engineer and they're pretty tech saavy, but not quite saavy enough to find out if I'm lying or not.
I also require that they use the computers in the house in "public spaces". We don't read over their shoulder (much), but they know we might at any time and suspicious closing of windows or shutting down the computer is grounds for a discussion.
Who the hell locks babies in heavy steel cages at a daycare?
We recently received a spreadsheet (Excel) with tens of thousands of rows. Visually, all of the rows looked correct, so after spot checking, we imported the data into a database (SQL Server). Hundreds of the imported rows had NULLs in the database columns, in a fairly unpredictable pattern. The culprit? Some of the rows consisted of numbers where the leading zeros were important (essentially a text pattern, but only containing numbers). If the number didn't have leading zeroes, they entered it as a number. If it did have leading zeroes, they put a single quote to force it to a string. Short of scanning the column, it looks the same. The worst part is that selecting the column and applying a format (number or text) doesn't change the internal representation and the database import was looking for one data type and ignoring the ones of the different data type. The fix was easy, but weird - create a new sheet, define the datatypes of the columns correctly, then copy and paste the data from the bad sheet to the new sheet. Just doing this (and changing the database import to work with the new sheet) got us 100% of the fields imported.
This type of thing is what we see most commonly when accessing data from spreadsheets - the users concentrate on the screen or print presentation of the data instead of the constraints on the data (types, ranges, values, formulas). Sometimes, they'll hide columns (which is a good technique for hiding intermediate calculations that you don't want to print), but this screws up the database imports as well (or at least makes you go back and redo them several times wondering where the other data is coming from).
Bottom line is that spreadsheets have their uses, but they suck as databases.
Of course, there is one other major abuse of spreadsheets - using them as drawing programs or diagramming tools. I've even seen a user manual written in Excel!
Handwriting recognition on Tablet PCs is very good. Maybe not 99.5%, but good enough to collect solid data in field form collection. It's a bit too cumbersome to write a novel with (or a technical paper).
The electronic ink apps for it work pretty well though. You can take notes as fast as you want and then later do ink to text conversions on them for indexing.