The median price of a home sold in Detroit in December [2008] was $7,500, according to Realcomp, a listing service.
Their site doesn't make data public (some spreadsheets are available to registered agents,) so I can't tell if that was a really odd month (very few sales?) Checking Century 21 listings under $25k for Detroit shows very few entries for under $10k, making the likelihood of a median of $7500 rather low, even under their less-than-stellar market conditions. Maybe the county records can clarify, but I'm done fact-checking. I'll agree their housing is cheap though; and I'm in Oklahoma, so that's saying something.
As a small example: just recently I had Yahoo! inform me that their "briefcase" service was going away, and that I should download my stuff before it gets deleted. It was nice of them to inform me, at least. It was handier than (ab)using gmail to store stuff, though. I used to use Yahoo! notes, too -- and again, gmail just isn't quite right for that, nor are (that I can see) any of Google's other services. So it's sad, but I'll live. I don't have a good competitor to run to, but it's not the end of the world.
More so than just your processing living on someone else's servers, though, you should be worried about your data living there. How many of the services you give data to will let you re-export all of it? Can you easily take all that wisdom you posted to that forum site and save it offline, in case the forum goes belly-up from one day to the next? That was an issue when BrickShelf was teetering on the edge of disappearing -- did we have a good way to get all our stuff back out? What about all those product ratings you posted online? Sure, you were part of the mob, and the value comes from the mob -- but those were your product ratings. Did you keep a copy for your records? If Amazon goes away, do you have a backup of your "likes" and "dislikes" so you can easily shop elsewhere? All that time you spent updating that Wikipedia article -- did you keep a copy of your work in case some court decides you can no longer access the site in your country?
We don't, but we ought to, demand that services we use and trust also give us a way to leave -- or at least to keep a backup of our data. Wasn't it ma.gnolia.com, recently, that went down and didn't have a useful backup? Do you demand to know what the backup policies are from each service you use? Do you have a way of verifying this? Do you ask about security? Is their server in a rack, protected by a crack team of techies, biometric locks, with security cameras -- or is it sitting under a dingy old couch?
You're putting value into these social sites -- are you being treated as a value producer?
So... actively scanning the skies for signals, running them through algorithms, trying to show that the signals carry more meaning than could normally be expected from "background noise", then trying to find any other explanations for this apparent "design" (as I recall, SETI's biggest hits have actually been in the signal analysis of oddball stars?), and in the end only looking at it as "data from another lifeform" when nothing else fits the bill... you're right. That very last step may seem non-scientific -- but it's actually just a hypothesis that they then intend to test, if it ever happens, by beaming back signals and attempting verifiable, testable communication. This is different from just receiving the signal, analyzing it, deciding that it's from someone, interpreting it in one way or another (with no reproducible method to prove that it's the right interpretation) and then acting on the results and trying to force others to act on it too... that's religion.
Re:What about MySQL?
on
Oracle Buys Sun
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I expect these IDE's to converge in one way or other to a single winner, and some small hang-on-tight communities fervor's for their champ remaining intact.
Is this where we should put our vi/Emacs messages?
On a more serious note: the idea of a "single winner" had seemed true for a while of MySQL, but I wonder if this (on top of Oracle's previous acquisition of innoDB) might put a dent in that, and give the runner-ups (in terms of popularity) a chance to shine? PostgreSQL and Firebird (and others) have been waiting in MySQL's shadow for a while, quietly and effectively serving their particular markets. Was MySQL's position intrinsic, or the result of mob mentality -- and could a corporate purchase like this one shake that mentality, if that's the case? What other software would that apply to?
Yet we use the site. Is that because the reputation is perhaps not so much embedded in the top-down editorial process as in the bottom-up moderation process? I came to this story trusting that I would find, within the first few top-rated comments, something indicating whether this anecdote was factually verified, and then plenty of discussion on the usefulness of filters and somewhere below a meta-discussion about the place of authority (Microsoft) in filtering. I did not, however, open up slashdot expecting to see nothing but stories whose summaries I could read and trust to be factually correct at first glance, the way I might (incorrectly) with hard news sites.
Reminder: the different meanings of "is" were "is now" vs. "has ever been or is now". Clinton was claiming that by "there is no sex between us", he was merely stating that, at that exact moment, there was not -- not that there had never been any. The prosecution's position rested on the idea that such a statement is inane in that nobody cares about "right now", thus arguing that Clinton could not have meant what he said, and must have meant something different, which also was factually untrue.
Now, how does that apply in this situation? Fairly well. Microsoft says it *is* the safest. Not that it's always been. Or even was, five minutes ago. Nor will remain so for any predictable time period.
Have you worked with contractors? It's not about what country they're from -- it's about their contractor status. Of the ones I had, the foreigners were better coders, though poorer communicators. But in all cases, the lack of ownership in the product, of knowledge of the history, business purpose, and architecture of the product, the lack of sense of long-term commitment, of common goal, of responsibility for the outcome (in terms of ongoing maintenance, not just "going live")... all made my life a lot harder. It's difficult work to get good, solid work out of contractors, and not because they don't mean well. They do. They're great people, sometimes even great coders, but their "wanderer" status has its drawbacks and you have to learn special skills to manage them.
So the GP is correct to worry about the quality of outsourced code.
Erk? Now this is about protecting the children from viewing child porn? I guess that has to be considered too: when you find it, what's the purpose? a) Protect children from images that could scar them for life
In-home filters already exist; there's plenty of non-child-porn material adults want to protect children from, this is a more general solution.
b) Protect adults from images that could warp their minds
Two sides: some say that viewing images keeps some adults from acting on their existing impulses, others claim that the images create the impulses leading to later abuse. This debate went a particular direction for violent media: adults won't put up with censorship of violent media on the basis it might cause them to go out and buy a gun to shoot up the local mall with; when correlation is shown, the argument is generally that the people who are prone to such things may be attracted to violent media, but there's no direct causation.
Lolita is no longer banned; if the argument made sense, wouldn't it still be? Could other non-visual media be censored on this basis? Could the Bible be censored because Lot's daughters effectively rape him to impregnate themselves?
c) Find adults who want images and investigate possible abuse
If adults are known to seek out child porn, can we assume they may be liable to abuse children themselves? If we investigated everyone who watched a violent movie on the basis they might become violent gangsters, we'd just have to put our whole population in prison. Today, child porn investigations assume that even an accidental download, possession (event unknowingly) or transfer involves you in the black market, both as a supplier and a consumer. If you have three images that could be considered child porn out of a whole porn collection of 15000 images, you'll still be thought of on the same level as someone who has nothing but child porn. You might not even know, remember, or cared that they're there -- but investigators do. You could wind up having to prove that each item depicts an adult over the age of 18 -- and even then, that may not be enough if they're pretending to be under 18. Won't that be fun!
d) Prevent the trade of images, cutting off demand from supply, reducing the profit from supply, thus protecting children from harm
This assumes that the abuse suffered by those children is the result of child porn -- that is, they're abused (inasmuch as this is about actual abuse, not voyeurism or images taken out of context) for the benefit of viewers, like some sort of tv show. It also assumes that it's a supply/demand system in the first place; that is, the supply exists because of the demand. Reducing demand may reduce trade, but won't necessarily reduce supply.
e) Protecting children from embarrassment later in life
It's bad enough having been molested as a child. For images of you to be out there in the wild... yes, that's even worse (if such a thing is possible.) Pictures of you naked on the beach, with your family, are less of a problem -- kids like to run around naked, you were the same way. Would you be fine with posting that cute/funny/innocent picture of you on your website, up until the day you discover it's now circulating in a child-porn "ring", where it's now (because of the viewers, not the content) child-porn?
If adults are pretending to be children, is this relevant?
f) Protecting victims, in general
Should images of a child's rape be available? They're evidence in a court case against the rapist. The same would be true if there were video of adults being raped or molested. What of other videos of crimes being committed? Do we have the same problem with showing video footage of someone being murdered? No! The news media eat that up! Think of the video footage of JFK's as
100% of what? What exactly *is* "child porn"? Pictures of teens that they took themselves? Pictures of your kids in the yard spraying each other with hoses? Anime child porn? Anime child porn parodies? Adults pretending to be children? Adults who just look young? Teens over the local age of consent but under 18? Teens over their own age of consent, but under the age of consent in the viewer's area? Teens of indeterminate age? Teens having sex with each other in ways that are legal in their local area? If they took the pictures? If someone else took the pictures? Non-naked children in sexually-suggestive situations? Non-naked children in situations that are sexually-suggestive to certain viewers only? (Think of shoe fetishes. Seriously. Would we ban all pictures of shoes?)
It's not enough to say "it catches nothing but bad stuff" -- you have to clearly define "bad stuff", too. Not only are we not comfortable with that, we're quick on the trigger -- like the recent so-called "sexting" debacle.
I came across this article a while back; there's speculation that the correlation between rainfall and autism is caused by kids staying indoors most of the time; whether that meant a lack of exposure to something important outdoors or an exposure (constantly) to something dangerous indoors was an open question. This continues down that path, accidentally.
Firebird arguably has some branching issues (Interbase, Firebird, Fyracle, and Yaffil, at least) but it's not that bad -- Yaffil and Firebird are re-merging, after having explored different problem spaces and come up with different features, they decided it'd be even better to share the new code. I was pleased, for example, when Yaffil's function/expression-based indexing got merged back into the main tree. It wasn't about egos or brands, it was just about features.
The problem is that the the terms "left" and "right", which properly refer to labor and capital, have been misused to refer to social issues.
Indeed, thus the emerging two-dimensional view of (US, at least) politics, exemplified by the Political Compass. But across most sample charts, you'll note a very strong correlation between the two; it's fairly rare to see someone significantly deviate from the SW-NE line, associating free love with socialism and free markets with authoritarianism. I often find myself on the outside for being strongly anti-authoritarian yet economically centrist -- no major player represents my views.
We shouldn't forget that broadcast media need market share in order to sell ad space, or get donations; they'll tend to naturally stick to what we believe as a whole, regardless of what they personally believe. Small variations (inefficiencies, as it were,) as with any market, will work themselves out given enough time, and we'll have exactly the news we want, regardless of whether or not it's the news we need.
It will always come down to that, won't it? I implicitly dismiss as "kooky" claims of perpetual motion machines and of divine intervention. Sometimes most people agree with me, sometimes they don't. The editorial involvement of a news medium is a kind of spam filter you subscribe to; different people use different spam rules to more consistently receive what they want to receive. When we find the perfect spam filter, we'll also find the perfect news distribution system.
I don't think you can rate a piece on the basis of inclusion, omission, or bias. All will be detected by someone, no matter what you do, because you'll always manage to leave something out they felt should have been said, or include something they think is unfair (and you omitted their scathing reply!) -- and these sins are indicative of bias, as you should already know about your own personal prejudices and should be actively working to counter your own intuition when writing a piece by proactively pulling in points of view you disagree with, causing you to tailspin to flaming doom as you attempt to bring your piece into perfect, all-encompassing balance.
There's always an element of the (flawed) human when you move from what is pure data (which is what you tried to represent in your first example) to actual information (your second example.) What we really want is wisdom -- but that takes some doing.
How far should we go to get unbiased news coverage? - An arab terrorist killed an innocent baby. [Associates arabs with terrorists, indicates they're a terrorist rather than merely a murderer, implies intent when that hasn't been determined by a court yet, disarms our ability to think critically about the victim] - A child's death was caused by an adult. [Still leaves too much, because it plays on our automatic sense of innocence of children, a cultural product; the definition of child varies by culture, so aren't you biased in imposing your distinction?] - A human died because of another human. [Completely useless.]
Reject that model. It won't work. Until we find a way for collaborative journalism to give everyone a useful voice (while keeping the result small enough for digestion) we need to accept that multiple news sources will be needed. Critical thinking never goes out of style. Recognizing the probably prejudices of those we interact with will always be necessary -- not just with journalism.
As to NPR; what you consider condescending arrogance may, to other ears, simply be proper enunciation, a calm disposition, a lack of outrage with a hint of enthusiasm and boyish curiosity, and the professional courtesy and respect required to get answers to both easy and tough questions without raising tensions and closing doors. Or it might not. But I'll tell you that I get more context, more angles, more variety in positions, more thinking from NPR than I do from other broadcast media, with less emotion -- that last component is something I intend to determine on my own. I have other news sources for when I'm not driving, but for my daily commute, NPR is as good as I have available.
Alicia Shepard, ombudsman at NPR, has a lengthy article and attached PDF with charts over here. The main article is about NPR and campaign coverage, but they have something to say about the "general" news bias as well, and not just about themselves; an extract:
Timothy Groseclose is a political science professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who also studies media bias. He and another professor published a study in 2005 that concluded that 18 of the 20 major media outlets studied (including NPR) were left of center, as compared to the average U.S. voter. Only Fox News' Special Report with Brit Hume and The Washington Times scored to the right of the average U.S. voter. (Results are on P. 22 of PDF.)
"By our estimate, NPR hardly differs from the average mainstream news outlet," said Groseclose. "It had the same scores as Time, Newsweek and was slightly less liberal than the Washington Post and well to the right of the New York Times and CBS Evening News. One of the surprising findings is that NPR is not as left as everyone says it is."
NPR got a score of 66.3, with 50 being centrist and 100 being most liberal. The Wall Street Journal's news pages (not the well-known conservative editorial pages) got an 85.1 and The New York Times and CBS each got a 73.7.
Does this mean that news organizations are, on average, to the left of the general public, or does it mean that we've been sold the idea that they're lefties, and we see them through that lens, and this shows up when asked about bias? That's another matter.
Can we separate the concepts of coverage and quality? I would generally prefer to listen to something that sounds reasoned and equitable, though it may have a left-leaning bias, than listen to something clearly spewing, conspiratorial, and accusatory that has a balancing right-leaning bias. I care less about the bias than the approach to the news, to the guests, to the context.
Also, consider that the US government has already paid to develop several healthcare systems itself. VistA and RPMS (they're related) serve the VA and Indian Health Services. They're free to download, and local sites often create, apply, distribute, and support various patches independently of any central control. It's free and open-source, at least in a sense. Installation and support (and hardware) aren't free, but a FOIA request will get your the code for free, at least. There's at least one other piece of such software in use for active military personnel, I remember it being mentioned on/. within the last few weeks (but I'm too lazy to find the link.)
I'll respond to you point by point; as to off-topic, well, once a can of worms is opened...
Insightful: you're not required to be right to be insightful. You can be insightful to, even by bringing wrong points to the table, just so they can be squashed.
Consent: what makes you think anyone needs your consent to do business in your neighborhood? You don't own the whole neighborhood, do you? You're welcome to tell them to stay off your lawn; in fact, I'll gladly help you protect your private property.
Victimless: you conflate the crime with the environment. Is the sale of alcohol inherently violent? Before prohibition, some people thought alcohol itself was directly to blame for violence; during prohibition, they realized that the illegality of alcohol was far, far worse. If you are assaulted by someone, whether sober or drunk, and you are not at fault, I will support your position: either they decided to assault you while sober, or they decided to abdicate their ability to make sound decisions by taking their drug of choice -- either way, it's their fault. You must be careful in pinning the blame for crime directly on drugs / guns / video games / whatever else -- people commit crimes, period.
Family: you have a right to spend money senselessly, even at the detriment of your loved ones. You have a right to become a couch potato, even if it hurts others (indirectly.) You have a right to be a workaholic, too. You have a right to commit suicide, for that matter. You do not, however, have the god-given right to bring the full force of the law (jail, or worse) upon your friends and family because you don't like the side-effects of their vices upon you. Would you appreciate being jailed because your friends and family feel hurt that you're spending more time watching tv than talking to them? Would you consider that appropriate? What if you can't even understand why they feel hurt by it? It's none of their business, but they decide to use their majority (physical power) to act on their belief?
Sucked into: what does everyone believe these so-called crimes "suck" people in? Did we get "sucked into" the world of IT? Do workers get "sucked into" construction jobs? Did you get "sucked into" watching your favorite show on tv? Did your neighbor get "sucked into" liking anal sex? It's easy to portray something you don't personally like or understand as somehow vicious, underhanded, or exploitative. Then you can say it's not the person's "fault" (which it wasn't anyway, not in that sense) that they're involved, and "help" them get out of it.
If it were me: how do I even answer that? You've made it clear how you would feel if it were you. I'll let you know how I feel when it is me, in an environment where it's legal and things have stabilized, how about that? But yes, on a logical (not emotional) basis, I would support my daughter's *right* to make that decision for herself. Maybe I would encourage her not to -- but would I approve sending her to jail for it? Hell no. Would I support fining her? No. Would I support having her repeatedly arrested, held for the night, and released, to "teach her a lesson"? No.
These are our loved ones, our friends, our family -- as you've pointed out -- that we're doing this to. If you want to help them out of concern and love, then do so -- with love, not law.
Would cops bother you nearly as much if we fixed our laws to legalize what are currently consensual crimes (drugs, prostitution, etc.) and eliminate purely discretionary laws and arrest/contact quotas (which lead to cops only arresting public drunks if they annoy them, are someone they don't like, or would help fill that night's quota)? Would you regain your respect for our cops if they were employed protecting you from others, and had time to do that one job well? Would you regain your respect for our legal system if it weren't overburdened with those crap cases, and could take the time to really hear you out -- whichever side of the courtroom you're on?
From what I can tell, they're always talking about pure javascript performance -- which is great if you use a lot of "count to a million" javascript pages. In my experience, it doesn't really matter; with css/ajax-intensive pages most of the time is spent on layout/rendering DOM modifications (which becomes excruciatingly slow if you have many input fields involved!) That stuff is a lot faster in Opera and Safari, regardless of javascript speed. I downloaded FF3.1b (and enabled the JIT stuff) and Safari4b, to test some ajaxy webapps -- Safari blew FF out of the water when actually doing anything useful.
Even further: what does "what's the purpose of..." have to do with whether or not something should be allowed? There's no guarantee the GP would agree with whatever perfectly good reason we came up with for this -- it's easy to say "well, that doesn't make sense to me" and thus end the conversation, if you let them be the arbiter. Fine. Even things with no discernible purpose should be allowed by default. It's not a good basis for deciding the question.
Shouldn't I be allowed to take raw fish outside and hold it over my head for 5 minutes a day? It makes no sense to anyone else -- it doesn't make sense to me, either. But it's not causing harm to others, with the possible exception of haters of people who hold fish over their heads, and that's their own problem. Which is what this is.
The GP sees no purpose, and automatically jumps to the conclusion that it's a reasonable thing to ban -- which is exactly the logic we deal with every day in the US. Why are most consensual crimes, well, crimes? Why is it so hard to get people to agree with our constitution's guaranteed freedom of speech? It's like pulling teeth every time -- yes, I know, you see no good reason for this to be allowed, it could offend someone, someone could hurt themselves, it doesn't seem like it benefits anyone, that's not the direction I think our society should go, blah blah blah... it's always the same fight. We need to eradicate that meme entirely, for a better society.
There is a difference between saying that a company has no right to do something, and saying that it's stupid and unfair of them to do that same thing. I don't think anyone here is arguing the legality / contractual compliance of the action -- just that it's a stupid stipulation to put in the terms of service in the first place.
Note that this is very similar to our Intelligence agencies being motivated to put out strong (and dire) warnings of impending doom from terrorists. Importance = probability * cost. If you're worried the whole planet is going to melt, even a small probability is enough to be concerned about. If you're worried someone's going to bring in a nuclear dirty bomb and contaminate a whole downtown area, well, you're going to raise hell about that too. In both cases, we may overreact, but there's very little we can do to calm the situation down. And in both cases, there are personal and political incentives to exaggerate findings and to err on the side of caution, to get the public's attention.
Most of the time, fears about terrorists lead us to (wrongly) curtail our own civil freedoms. Similarly, worries about the environment cause new legislation on our economic freedoms. I'm at least pleased to see people working to resolve that conflict slightly, trying to make it to our economic benefit to also solve environmental issues -- I haven't seen anyone propose a method to solve the terrorist problem by giving us all back our full rights under the constitution. ("as long as we stay free, they lose" may be true, but doesn't solve anything.)
Slashdot Mirror
The median price of a home sold in Detroit in December [2008] was $7,500, according to Realcomp, a listing service.
Their site doesn't make data public (some spreadsheets are available to registered agents,) so I can't tell if that was a really odd month (very few sales?) Checking Century 21 listings under $25k for Detroit shows very few entries for under $10k, making the likelihood of a median of $7500 rather low, even under their less-than-stellar market conditions. Maybe the county records can clarify, but I'm done fact-checking. I'll agree their housing is cheap though; and I'm in Oklahoma, so that's saying something.
As a small example: just recently I had Yahoo! inform me that their "briefcase" service was going away, and that I should download my stuff before it gets deleted. It was nice of them to inform me, at least. It was handier than (ab)using gmail to store stuff, though. I used to use Yahoo! notes, too -- and again, gmail just isn't quite right for that, nor are (that I can see) any of Google's other services. So it's sad, but I'll live. I don't have a good competitor to run to, but it's not the end of the world.
More so than just your processing living on someone else's servers, though, you should be worried about your data living there. How many of the services you give data to will let you re-export all of it? Can you easily take all that wisdom you posted to that forum site and save it offline, in case the forum goes belly-up from one day to the next? That was an issue when BrickShelf was teetering on the edge of disappearing -- did we have a good way to get all our stuff back out? What about all those product ratings you posted online? Sure, you were part of the mob, and the value comes from the mob -- but those were your product ratings. Did you keep a copy for your records? If Amazon goes away, do you have a backup of your "likes" and "dislikes" so you can easily shop elsewhere? All that time you spent updating that Wikipedia article -- did you keep a copy of your work in case some court decides you can no longer access the site in your country?
We don't, but we ought to, demand that services we use and trust also give us a way to leave -- or at least to keep a backup of our data. Wasn't it ma.gnolia.com, recently, that went down and didn't have a useful backup? Do you demand to know what the backup policies are from each service you use? Do you have a way of verifying this? Do you ask about security? Is their server in a rack, protected by a crack team of techies, biometric locks, with security cameras -- or is it sitting under a dingy old couch?
You're putting value into these social sites -- are you being treated as a value producer?
So ... actively scanning the skies for signals, running them through algorithms, trying to show that the signals carry more meaning than could normally be expected from "background noise", then trying to find any other explanations for this apparent "design" (as I recall, SETI's biggest hits have actually been in the signal analysis of oddball stars?), and in the end only looking at it as "data from another lifeform" when nothing else fits the bill ... you're right. That very last step may seem non-scientific -- but it's actually just a hypothesis that they then intend to test, if it ever happens, by beaming back signals and attempting verifiable, testable communication. This is different from just receiving the signal, analyzing it, deciding that it's from someone, interpreting it in one way or another (with no reproducible method to prove that it's the right interpretation) and then acting on the results and trying to force others to act on it too ... that's religion.
I expect these IDE's to converge in one way or other to a single winner, and some small hang-on-tight communities fervor's for their champ remaining intact.
Is this where we should put our vi/Emacs messages?
On a more serious note: the idea of a "single winner" had seemed true for a while of MySQL, but I wonder if this (on top of Oracle's previous acquisition of innoDB) might put a dent in that, and give the runner-ups (in terms of popularity) a chance to shine? PostgreSQL and Firebird (and others) have been waiting in MySQL's shadow for a while, quietly and effectively serving their particular markets. Was MySQL's position intrinsic, or the result of mob mentality -- and could a corporate purchase like this one shake that mentality, if that's the case? What other software would that apply to?
Yet we use the site. Is that because the reputation is perhaps not so much embedded in the top-down editorial process as in the bottom-up moderation process? I came to this story trusting that I would find, within the first few top-rated comments, something indicating whether this anecdote was factually verified, and then plenty of discussion on the usefulness of filters and somewhere below a meta-discussion about the place of authority (Microsoft) in filtering. I did not, however, open up slashdot expecting to see nothing but stories whose summaries I could read and trust to be factually correct at first glance, the way I might (incorrectly) with hard news sites.
Reminder: the different meanings of "is" were "is now" vs. "has ever been or is now". Clinton was claiming that by "there is no sex between us", he was merely stating that, at that exact moment, there was not -- not that there had never been any. The prosecution's position rested on the idea that such a statement is inane in that nobody cares about "right now", thus arguing that Clinton could not have meant what he said, and must have meant something different, which also was factually untrue.
Now, how does that apply in this situation? Fairly well. Microsoft says it *is* the safest. Not that it's always been. Or even was, five minutes ago. Nor will remain so for any predictable time period.
Have you worked with contractors? It's not about what country they're from -- it's about their contractor status. Of the ones I had, the foreigners were better coders, though poorer communicators. But in all cases, the lack of ownership in the product, of knowledge of the history, business purpose, and architecture of the product, the lack of sense of long-term commitment, of common goal, of responsibility for the outcome (in terms of ongoing maintenance, not just "going live") ... all made my life a lot harder. It's difficult work to get good, solid work out of contractors, and not because they don't mean well. They do. They're great people, sometimes even great coders, but their "wanderer" status has its drawbacks and you have to learn special skills to manage them.
So the GP is correct to worry about the quality of outsourced code.
Please see the Patent Cooperation Treaty which covers this situation; China acceded in 1993, India in 1998.
Erk? Now this is about protecting the children from viewing child porn? I guess that has to be considered too: when you find it, what's the purpose?
a) Protect children from images that could scar them for life
In-home filters already exist; there's plenty of non-child-porn material adults want to protect children from, this is a more general solution.
b) Protect adults from images that could warp their minds
Two sides: some say that viewing images keeps some adults from acting on their existing impulses, others claim that the images create the impulses leading to later abuse. This debate went a particular direction for violent media: adults won't put up with censorship of violent media on the basis it might cause them to go out and buy a gun to shoot up the local mall with; when correlation is shown, the argument is generally that the people who are prone to such things may be attracted to violent media, but there's no direct causation.
Lolita is no longer banned; if the argument made sense, wouldn't it still be? Could other non-visual media be censored on this basis? Could the Bible be censored because Lot's daughters effectively rape him to impregnate themselves?
c) Find adults who want images and investigate possible abuse
If adults are known to seek out child porn, can we assume they may be liable to abuse children themselves? If we investigated everyone who watched a violent movie on the basis they might become violent gangsters, we'd just have to put our whole population in prison. Today, child porn investigations assume that even an accidental download, possession (event unknowingly) or transfer involves you in the black market, both as a supplier and a consumer. If you have three images that could be considered child porn out of a whole porn collection of 15000 images, you'll still be thought of on the same level as someone who has nothing but child porn. You might not even know, remember, or cared that they're there -- but investigators do. You could wind up having to prove that each item depicts an adult over the age of 18 -- and even then, that may not be enough if they're pretending to be under 18. Won't that be fun!
d) Prevent the trade of images, cutting off demand from supply, reducing the profit from supply, thus protecting children from harm
This assumes that the abuse suffered by those children is the result of child porn -- that is, they're abused (inasmuch as this is about actual abuse, not voyeurism or images taken out of context) for the benefit of viewers, like some sort of tv show. It also assumes that it's a supply/demand system in the first place; that is, the supply exists because of the demand. Reducing demand may reduce trade, but won't necessarily reduce supply.
e) Protecting children from embarrassment later in life ... yes, that's even worse (if such a thing is possible.) Pictures of you naked on the beach, with your family, are less of a problem -- kids like to run around naked, you were the same way. Would you be fine with posting that cute/funny/innocent picture of you on your website, up until the day you discover it's now circulating in a child-porn "ring", where it's now (because of the viewers, not the content) child-porn?
It's bad enough having been molested as a child. For images of you to be out there in the wild
If adults are pretending to be children, is this relevant?
f) Protecting victims, in general
Should images of a child's rape be available? They're evidence in a court case against the rapist. The same would be true if there were video of adults being raped or molested. What of other videos of crimes being committed? Do we have the same problem with showing video footage of someone being murdered? No! The news media eat that up! Think of the video footage of JFK's as
100% of what? What exactly *is* "child porn"? Pictures of teens that they took themselves? Pictures of your kids in the yard spraying each other with hoses? Anime child porn? Anime child porn parodies? Adults pretending to be children? Adults who just look young? Teens over the local age of consent but under 18? Teens over their own age of consent, but under the age of consent in the viewer's area? Teens of indeterminate age? Teens having sex with each other in ways that are legal in their local area? If they took the pictures? If someone else took the pictures? Non-naked children in sexually-suggestive situations? Non-naked children in situations that are sexually-suggestive to certain viewers only? (Think of shoe fetishes. Seriously. Would we ban all pictures of shoes?)
It's not enough to say "it catches nothing but bad stuff" -- you have to clearly define "bad stuff", too. Not only are we not comfortable with that, we're quick on the trigger -- like the recent so-called "sexting" debacle.
I came across this article a while back; there's speculation that the correlation between rainfall and autism is caused by kids staying indoors most of the time; whether that meant a lack of exposure to something important outdoors or an exposure (constantly) to something dangerous indoors was an open question. This continues down that path, accidentally.
Firebird arguably has some branching issues (Interbase, Firebird, Fyracle, and Yaffil, at least) but it's not that bad -- Yaffil and Firebird are re-merging, after having explored different problem spaces and come up with different features, they decided it'd be even better to share the new code. I was pleased, for example, when Yaffil's function/expression-based indexing got merged back into the main tree. It wasn't about egos or brands, it was just about features.
The problem is that the the terms "left" and "right", which properly refer to labor and capital, have been misused to refer to social issues.
Indeed, thus the emerging two-dimensional view of (US, at least) politics, exemplified by the Political Compass. But across most sample charts, you'll note a very strong correlation between the two; it's fairly rare to see someone significantly deviate from the SW-NE line, associating free love with socialism and free markets with authoritarianism. I often find myself on the outside for being strongly anti-authoritarian yet economically centrist -- no major player represents my views.
We shouldn't forget that broadcast media need market share in order to sell ad space, or get donations; they'll tend to naturally stick to what we believe as a whole, regardless of what they personally believe. Small variations (inefficiencies, as it were,) as with any market, will work themselves out given enough time, and we'll have exactly the news we want, regardless of whether or not it's the news we need.
It will always come down to that, won't it? I implicitly dismiss as "kooky" claims of perpetual motion machines and of divine intervention. Sometimes most people agree with me, sometimes they don't. The editorial involvement of a news medium is a kind of spam filter you subscribe to; different people use different spam rules to more consistently receive what they want to receive. When we find the perfect spam filter, we'll also find the perfect news distribution system.
I don't think you can rate a piece on the basis of inclusion, omission, or bias. All will be detected by someone, no matter what you do, because you'll always manage to leave something out they felt should have been said, or include something they think is unfair (and you omitted their scathing reply!) -- and these sins are indicative of bias, as you should already know about your own personal prejudices and should be actively working to counter your own intuition when writing a piece by proactively pulling in points of view you disagree with, causing you to tailspin to flaming doom as you attempt to bring your piece into perfect, all-encompassing balance.
There's always an element of the (flawed) human when you move from what is pure data (which is what you tried to represent in your first example) to actual information (your second example.) What we really want is wisdom -- but that takes some doing.
How far should we go to get unbiased news coverage?
- An arab terrorist killed an innocent baby. [Associates arabs with terrorists, indicates they're a terrorist rather than merely a murderer, implies intent when that hasn't been determined by a court yet, disarms our ability to think critically about the victim]
- A child's death was caused by an adult. [Still leaves too much, because it plays on our automatic sense of innocence of children, a cultural product; the definition of child varies by culture, so aren't you biased in imposing your distinction?]
- A human died because of another human. [Completely useless.]
Reject that model. It won't work. Until we find a way for collaborative journalism to give everyone a useful voice (while keeping the result small enough for digestion) we need to accept that multiple news sources will be needed. Critical thinking never goes out of style. Recognizing the probably prejudices of those we interact with will always be necessary -- not just with journalism.
As to NPR; what you consider condescending arrogance may, to other ears, simply be proper enunciation, a calm disposition, a lack of outrage with a hint of enthusiasm and boyish curiosity, and the professional courtesy and respect required to get answers to both easy and tough questions without raising tensions and closing doors. Or it might not. But I'll tell you that I get more context, more angles, more variety in positions, more thinking from NPR than I do from other broadcast media, with less emotion -- that last component is something I intend to determine on my own. I have other news sources for when I'm not driving, but for my daily commute, NPR is as good as I have available.
Alicia Shepard, ombudsman at NPR, has a lengthy article and attached PDF with charts over here. The main article is about NPR and campaign coverage, but they have something to say about the "general" news bias as well, and not just about themselves; an extract:
Timothy Groseclose is a political science professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who also studies media bias. He and another professor published a study in 2005 that concluded that 18 of the 20 major media outlets studied (including NPR) were left of center, as compared to the average U.S. voter. Only Fox News' Special Report with Brit Hume and The Washington Times scored to the right of the average U.S. voter. (Results are on P. 22 of PDF.)
"By our estimate, NPR hardly differs from the average mainstream news outlet," said Groseclose. "It had the same scores as Time, Newsweek and was slightly less liberal than the Washington Post and well to the right of the New York Times and CBS Evening News. One of the surprising findings is that NPR is not as left as everyone says it is."
NPR got a score of 66.3, with 50 being centrist and 100 being most liberal. The Wall Street Journal's news pages (not the well-known conservative editorial pages) got an 85.1 and The New York Times and CBS each got a 73.7.
Does this mean that news organizations are, on average, to the left of the general public, or does it mean that we've been sold the idea that they're lefties, and we see them through that lens, and this shows up when asked about bias? That's another matter.
Can we separate the concepts of coverage and quality? I would generally prefer to listen to something that sounds reasoned and equitable, though it may have a left-leaning bias, than listen to something clearly spewing, conspiratorial, and accusatory that has a balancing right-leaning bias. I care less about the bias than the approach to the news, to the guests, to the context.
Also, consider that the US government has already paid to develop several healthcare systems itself. VistA and RPMS (they're related) serve the VA and Indian Health Services. They're free to download, and local sites often create, apply, distribute, and support various patches independently of any central control. It's free and open-source, at least in a sense. Installation and support (and hardware) aren't free, but a FOIA request will get your the code for free, at least. There's at least one other piece of such software in use for active military personnel, I remember it being mentioned on /. within the last few weeks (but I'm too lazy to find the link.)
I'll respond to you point by point; as to off-topic, well, once a can of worms is opened ...
Insightful: you're not required to be right to be insightful. You can be insightful to, even by bringing wrong points to the table, just so they can be squashed.
Consent: what makes you think anyone needs your consent to do business in your neighborhood? You don't own the whole neighborhood, do you? You're welcome to tell them to stay off your lawn; in fact, I'll gladly help you protect your private property.
Victimless: you conflate the crime with the environment. Is the sale of alcohol inherently violent? Before prohibition, some people thought alcohol itself was directly to blame for violence; during prohibition, they realized that the illegality of alcohol was far, far worse. If you are assaulted by someone, whether sober or drunk, and you are not at fault, I will support your position: either they decided to assault you while sober, or they decided to abdicate their ability to make sound decisions by taking their drug of choice -- either way, it's their fault. You must be careful in pinning the blame for crime directly on drugs / guns / video games / whatever else -- people commit crimes, period.
Family: you have a right to spend money senselessly, even at the detriment of your loved ones. You have a right to become a couch potato, even if it hurts others (indirectly.) You have a right to be a workaholic, too. You have a right to commit suicide, for that matter. You do not, however, have the god-given right to bring the full force of the law (jail, or worse) upon your friends and family because you don't like the side-effects of their vices upon you. Would you appreciate being jailed because your friends and family feel hurt that you're spending more time watching tv than talking to them? Would you consider that appropriate? What if you can't even understand why they feel hurt by it? It's none of their business, but they decide to use their majority (physical power) to act on their belief?
Sucked into: what does everyone believe these so-called crimes "suck" people in? Did we get "sucked into" the world of IT? Do workers get "sucked into" construction jobs? Did you get "sucked into" watching your favorite show on tv? Did your neighbor get "sucked into" liking anal sex? It's easy to portray something you don't personally like or understand as somehow vicious, underhanded, or exploitative. Then you can say it's not the person's "fault" (which it wasn't anyway, not in that sense) that they're involved, and "help" them get out of it.
If it were me: how do I even answer that? You've made it clear how you would feel if it were you. I'll let you know how I feel when it is me, in an environment where it's legal and things have stabilized, how about that? But yes, on a logical (not emotional) basis, I would support my daughter's *right* to make that decision for herself. Maybe I would encourage her not to -- but would I approve sending her to jail for it? Hell no. Would I support fining her? No. Would I support having her repeatedly arrested, held for the night, and released, to "teach her a lesson"? No.
These are our loved ones, our friends, our family -- as you've pointed out -- that we're doing this to. If you want to help them out of concern and love, then do so -- with love, not law.
Would cops bother you nearly as much if we fixed our laws to legalize what are currently consensual crimes (drugs, prostitution, etc.) and eliminate purely discretionary laws and arrest/contact quotas (which lead to cops only arresting public drunks if they annoy them, are someone they don't like, or would help fill that night's quota)? Would you regain your respect for our cops if they were employed protecting you from others, and had time to do that one job well? Would you regain your respect for our legal system if it weren't overburdened with those crap cases, and could take the time to really hear you out -- whichever side of the courtroom you're on?
From what I can tell, they're always talking about pure javascript performance -- which is great if you use a lot of "count to a million" javascript pages. In my experience, it doesn't really matter; with css/ajax-intensive pages most of the time is spent on layout/rendering DOM modifications (which becomes excruciatingly slow if you have many input fields involved!) That stuff is a lot faster in Opera and Safari, regardless of javascript speed. I downloaded FF3.1b (and enabled the JIT stuff) and Safari4b, to test some ajaxy webapps -- Safari blew FF out of the water when actually doing anything useful.
Even further: what does "what's the purpose of ..." have to do with whether or not something should be allowed? There's no guarantee the GP would agree with whatever perfectly good reason we came up with for this -- it's easy to say "well, that doesn't make sense to me" and thus end the conversation, if you let them be the arbiter. Fine. Even things with no discernible purpose should be allowed by default. It's not a good basis for deciding the question.
Shouldn't I be allowed to take raw fish outside and hold it over my head for 5 minutes a day? It makes no sense to anyone else -- it doesn't make sense to me, either. But it's not causing harm to others, with the possible exception of haters of people who hold fish over their heads, and that's their own problem. Which is what this is.
The GP sees no purpose, and automatically jumps to the conclusion that it's a reasonable thing to ban -- which is exactly the logic we deal with every day in the US. Why are most consensual crimes, well, crimes? Why is it so hard to get people to agree with our constitution's guaranteed freedom of speech? It's like pulling teeth every time -- yes, I know, you see no good reason for this to be allowed, it could offend someone, someone could hurt themselves, it doesn't seem like it benefits anyone, that's not the direction I think our society should go, blah blah blah ... it's always the same fight. We need to eradicate that meme entirely, for a better society.
There is a difference between saying that a company has no right to do something, and saying that it's stupid and unfair of them to do that same thing. I don't think anyone here is arguing the legality / contractual compliance of the action -- just that it's a stupid stipulation to put in the terms of service in the first place.
As noted later in the same wikipedia entry The SS Condoleeza Rice was renamed the Altair Voyager. It's currently headed for Brisbane, it seems.
Note that this is very similar to our Intelligence agencies being motivated to put out strong (and dire) warnings of impending doom from terrorists. Importance = probability * cost. If you're worried the whole planet is going to melt, even a small probability is enough to be concerned about. If you're worried someone's going to bring in a nuclear dirty bomb and contaminate a whole downtown area, well, you're going to raise hell about that too. In both cases, we may overreact, but there's very little we can do to calm the situation down. And in both cases, there are personal and political incentives to exaggerate findings and to err on the side of caution, to get the public's attention.
Most of the time, fears about terrorists lead us to (wrongly) curtail our own civil freedoms. Similarly, worries about the environment cause new legislation on our economic freedoms. I'm at least pleased to see people working to resolve that conflict slightly, trying to make it to our economic benefit to also solve environmental issues -- I haven't seen anyone propose a method to solve the terrorist problem by giving us all back our full rights under the constitution. ("as long as we stay free, they lose" may be true, but doesn't solve anything.)
No, that's a DC-8 without fans.