And I am a Mexican. I simply cannot understand how dental care is not part of the health coverage system everywhere in the world - It's part of your body, tooth problems can easily lead to lost productivity, lots of pain, and... well, I don't think I have to explain to you how important dental care given you are willing to fly ~3000Km to get it!
FWIW, I always get my dental care as part of the state healthcare, with no fees to add to it (and including the needed drugs, if it's the case). People who prefer private medicine usually get it at ~US$40-80 per regular session (of course, more for surgeries). I have to repeat i'm amazed it's not like that in "advanced" countries.
The density of humans per car is already too low. I live in Mexico City, a 25 million people city. There has long been a campain to reduce the use of single-driver cars, but the campain is never strong enough.
Our public transport systems are, yes, very comprehensive (they reach every corner of the city) and efficient (it's really seldom that it takes you more than five minutes to get the bus/train you need), but too crowded and uncomfortable, so for many people, the first sign of ascending from a lower social class is the magic moment where they finally own a car — and are no longer part of the pariahs who suffer crowded buses... Until you realize they suffer, in their nice cars, from crowded roads.
Encouraging driverless cars will make the occupancy rate even lower. There is a program that's just started in Mexico that would alleviate part of what you describe ("send the car home"): cheap, public, short term private car rentals. Just as in many cities (including this one) there are public bicycles programs, this one has just started. I am somewhat skeptical on it overall, but still, if your problem is to "send the car home", probably the best answer would be not to own any specific car, but to use one from the common car pool — And, yes, possibly make those cars computer-driven to keep them as crash-safe as possible.
In Mexico, the two banks I use use two-factor authentication — A password (with some non-obviousness requirements, but yes, in the end they put stupid hard limits on the entropy, such as a maximum of 8 characters) and a security token. I have had one for over six years (lost the second one, but it lasted ~5 years on me) without a hiccup.
They are now telling me it's safer to kill the tokens and use a SMS to my cell phone as the second factor. Right, as if there is phone coverage always, everywhere. As if SMS messages are always instantaneous. As if I always have my phone on me. As if I never travel overseas (and avoid using the phone because of the roaming costs).
So, by the end of the month, one of the banks will stop accepting a perfectly safe security practice.
Got out of the pool, wrapped in a towel, went to the desk. – Oh, ma'am, I'm sorry, I guess I forgot my key in the room. Can somebody open the room for me? It's 104 – Don't worry, click-click-swipe. Here is a new key for you. Cheers!
If you have the secret random number proving you voted for Mr. X, then you can show it for Mr. X's party, so they give you the "support" pack they bribed you for your vote with. Or your boss, who is a Mr. Y supporter, can ask for the number showing you voted for Mr. Y - And you are fired! The vote must be secret.
You can explain to anybody with the most basic literacy level how to count the votes at his booth. They will do it once, twice or thirty times â" The results will match. Anybody can understand this happens at every booth, and they can audit it. And everybody will understand that you ad up the results of tens of booths to get a result for the district/electoral college/whatever. And that gets repeated nationwide. And that's it. My 85 year old aunt can act as one of the auditors. Try to get her to audit the code for an electronic booth. I won't even start to describe how impossible that is. That's the reason that led to Germany's Supreme Court to mandate that e-voting is against the constitution in 2009.
A very important factor in a democracy is the secret of the vote. If I can prove my vote was cast for a given option, then the gate is open for parties buying it â" Or punishing me for voting according to my will.
I have less imagination for distressed, poor people than you do. The setting you pictured us would belong in my imagination to a post-earthquake Haiti — and quite probably I'm being too discriminatory anway. Yes, I live in Mexico City. A city known for people having to cross 40Km in 2hr to get to work (because there's so much people and so many cars that traffic is just so slow downtown).
We so far have had nothing we have not seen over and over for the last hundreds of years. It's not gratuitous that this volcano is named "Popocatépetl" — The smoking mountain. It always has some smoke getting out. We are just seeing an increase in its strength, as we are used to, in ~10 year cycles.
I live in Mexico City. The Popocatepetl is a very well known and well studied volcano. And no, although it's 35Km away from the city's South Eastern outskirts, Mexico City is by far not at risk. The eruption –in case it happens– would most likely not be a violent one (i.e. as with St. Helen or with Chichonal). This volcano has been passively active for thousands of years. Volcanic activity did increase, yes, but it happens every few years — I'm not sure if it was in 2000 or 2004, but we even saw some lava being spilled out of the crater. Of course, that washed away the glaciar that had been in place for hundreds of years (at the very least).
Oh, and while our country's security situation is VERY far from "quiet" (specially in the last five years where the current president has taken all the wrong decisions), the country is by far not in the face of a civil war or an uprising. The criminal groups that –yes– have created panic in many areas of the country are not after the political control. The violence is linked with the routes for drug transit to the USA, but those groups do not (openly) seek political power. And, even with our elections drawing near (July 1st), it's very far from a real threat nowadays.
Well... As a Mexican living in Mexico City, I beg to differ. And have some first-hand information.
Our air is not as clear and clean as it (c|sh)ould be, of course. But neither is the air of any ~20 million people city. Starting in 1989, very important programs to improve the air have been implemented. Some ideas –some bad, some good– were also scrapped in the process. The main points:
The most polluting industries have been moved farther away from the city (or relocated to other places in the country)
There is a mandatory emmissions control for all vehicles carried out twice a year for each car, strictly followed.
As a result of the previous point: If your car is less than ten years old and has low enough emissions, no restrictions are placed on it. Older cars, or cars that don't meet the threshold, have to "sleep" one day a week, and one weekend a month.
The biggest open-air dump yards and sewage systems have slowly been closed and converted. This is an ongoing process, and very hard to get right, but it is moving in the right direction.
And yes, our city is still big and polluted — But when I've travelled to several South American countries, I have been astonished at how older cars leave a stench of bad combustion... That does not happen here any more. And that's indicative on why our air was in such a critical level 20 years ago.
Oh, but you have no idea how easy and productive it is for me to have one easy-to-edit source, regardless of whether I'm on a text terminal on the other side of the planet or on my main desktop. Or how great it is to have one source produce the finished article, the HTML-friendly (and clean!) version, and the PDF presentation. Or how convenient it is to be able to 'git blame' a file and see exactly who did what and when.
If other people find it sad, I find their workflow sad. No, I don't claim I'm in the majority use-case. But the tools work best for me — And I'm sure some learning can be of large benefit to anybody.
I have been writing LaTeX for well over 25 years already. Well, while true (I learnt at my father's research center being 8 year old), lets brag a little less: I have been writing LaTeX for over 10 years already, and only once I have used own document classes and custom macro sets: To fine-typeset the only book I have published. My thesis, simple documents, articles, presentations, etc. required basically no changes, and the result is surely superior to what I'd have achieved in the same time had I used any "regular" word processor.
I was recently introduced to Emacs' org-mode. It is really GREAT. I never looked into it before, as I thought it was basically a to-do list manager â" But no. I am currently using it mostly as a word processor (well, for semi-complex documents, as it makes little sense if your documents have no structure at all) and for presentations. And I'm still only beginning to love it (and am sure I'm truly underutilizing it). True to the WYSIWYM mode, you work with a regular plain text file. There is a good deal of markup, but quite easy to learn (i.e./italics/, *boldface*, =code=, nested/itemized lists with hyphens, etc.), and with three keystrokes, you export to your favorite format. C-c C-e b shows the document as a (inter-linked) HTML page, C-c C-e d compiles it with LaTeX into a PDF, etc.
Is that whoever is most stubborn always wins. It's not even about convincing the others, it's about boring them.
My University had a ten month long student strike in 1999-2000. While at the beginning it *did* have majority support among the students and workers, it didn't take too long for the support to fade away. An over-ideologized group took the power, by just staying in the (six-to-eight hour long) assemblies the longest. In the end, there were two main groups fighting for control of the "movement": The "Ultras" and the "Mega-ultras". Their favorite insult for the rest of us was to call us "moderates".
So, yes, I lost faith in an assembly as a governance system.
No, of course, not the majority of people will be interested in this. But I know many non-techy people interested in keeping their data as secure and un-snooped as possible. What mechanisms do they have? Well, to prefer encrypted channels, to avoid storing any meaningful data on well-known big-brand providers as Google, Yahoo and the such. My friends are somewhat naÃve, I know â" But, using Tor for accessing some sensitive information (even with its limitations), handling their mail at a more "trustable" (for some definition of trust) organization such as Riseup, and having an introductory working knowledge of GPG... Shows their concern. Maybe not a concern deep enough to learn how to self-host, and maybe some of their attempts only get halfway there. If such an ISP were to open in my country, I am sure many people would use it. In the USA, I know many privacy-minded people. Lets see what impact they manage to achieve - But many people will be happy to pay, if only, for the principle that they are doing the Right Thing. Think about it, that's the reason many of us (with our time) to learn and produce Free Software.
The job of a university is to create and disseminate knowledge. And yes, teaching undergrads is an important part of it - But the university cannot be devoted to that. Universities is where leading research is conducted.
In my country, there are many universities, public and private. The (public) university I work at is singlehandedly responsible for over 50% of the academic research in the country. Most universities are only teaching houses (specially most private ones). I refuse to call them universities — They work for knowledge dissemination only. They are schools.
PDF is a page layout document. When I read an ebook in my 6" screen (Kindle) and the file was prepared expecting a 13" screen (letter/A4), the result is way less than great. The content should be able to flow according to the medium.
Of course, it will always upset typographers, as they want precise control on how text is laid out – And the very fine craft of avoiding widows and orphans, cancelling rivers (I'm sorry, that might not be the proper English words), etc. is basically unattainable if the user determines the format he likes reading. And yes, with a decent ebook reader, the user will *always* determine the format.
We published a book in paper and PDF formats last November. It took quite a bit of work to get there. We also wanted to make an MOBI/EPUB version available... But translating from a somewhat tweaked LaTeX source file to those formats... has not yet been successful:(
So my opinion is clearly irrelevant. If I understand correctly, there is no *formal* felony between two underage (and thus not habilitated to formally consent) people. A more interesting case would be 16 and 19, 17 and 20. I guess it would be up to valuation by a psychologist - but this is just an uninformed opinion
Between a 13-year-old having consentual sex with a 14- or 15-year old and having sex with a 18-year old. Yes, during adolescence, many behavioral structures change deeply. 13-year-old children can just be stupid or horny and get sex with somebody with a similar maturity level than theirs, and that's not a crime. However, a five year gap *is* too much at that time, and yes, 18-year-old people (regardless of their gender) should know they should not seek sex with a person unable to do that judgement that five years of maturity gave them.
18-and-13 is clearly illegal. I would *not* see 18-and-16 in the same scale.
1. Release a strict GPL-licensed virus (along with source offer and all) 2. Make it infect your target's executables 3. Sue them for license breach! 4. Profit!
Slashdot Mirror
And I am a Mexican. I simply cannot understand how dental care is not part of the health coverage system everywhere in the world - It's part of your body, tooth problems can easily lead to lost productivity, lots of pain, and... well, I don't think I have to explain to you how important dental care given you are willing to fly ~3000Km to get it!
FWIW, I always get my dental care as part of the state healthcare, with no fees to add to it (and including the needed drugs, if it's the case). People who prefer private medicine usually get it at ~US$40-80 per regular session (of course, more for surgeries). I have to repeat i'm amazed it's not like that in "advanced" countries.
If the cheerleader has a gun, why don't the three rapists have one too?
So, three armed serial rapists and an one armed cheerleader. I fail to see how this situation leads to a freer cheerleader.
The density of humans per car is already too low. I live in Mexico City, a 25 million people city. There has long been a campain to reduce the use of single-driver cars, but the campain is never strong enough.
Our public transport systems are, yes, very comprehensive (they reach every corner of the city) and efficient (it's really seldom that it takes you more than five minutes to get the bus/train you need), but too crowded and uncomfortable, so for many people, the first sign of ascending from a lower social class is the magic moment where they finally own a car — and are no longer part of the pariahs who suffer crowded buses... Until you realize they suffer, in their nice cars, from crowded roads.
Encouraging driverless cars will make the occupancy rate even lower. There is a program that's just started in Mexico that would alleviate part of what you describe ("send the car home"): cheap, public, short term private car rentals. Just as in many cities (including this one) there are public bicycles programs, this one has just started. I am somewhat skeptical on it overall, but still, if your problem is to "send the car home", probably the best answer would be not to own any specific car, but to use one from the common car pool — And, yes, possibly make those cars computer-driven to keep them as crash-safe as possible.
very much born in the USA or Europe?
FWIW I make ~US$15K a year, and I am nowhere near the bottom curve of the salary level.
In Mexico, the two banks I use use two-factor authentication — A password (with some non-obviousness requirements, but yes, in the end they put stupid hard limits on the entropy, such as a maximum of 8 characters) and a security token. I have had one for over six years (lost the second one, but it lasted ~5 years on me) without a hiccup.
They are now telling me it's safer to kill the tokens and use a SMS to my cell phone as the second factor. Right, as if there is phone coverage always, everywhere. As if SMS messages are always instantaneous. As if I always have my phone on me. As if I never travel overseas (and avoid using the phone because of the roaming costs).
So, by the end of the month, one of the banks will stop accepting a perfectly safe security practice.
My experience in the last hotel where I stayed:
Got out of the pool, wrapped in a towel, went to the desk.
– Oh, ma'am, I'm sorry, I guess I forgot my key in the room. Can somebody open the room for me? It's 104
– Don't worry, click-click-swipe. Here is a new key for you. Cheers!
How hard is this system to abuse?
If you have the secret random number proving you voted for Mr. X, then you can show it for Mr. X's party, so they give you the "support" pack they bribed you for your vote with.
Or your boss, who is a Mr. Y supporter, can ask for the number showing you voted for Mr. Y - And you are fired!
The vote must be secret.
You can explain to anybody with the most basic literacy level how to count the votes at his booth. They will do it once, twice or thirty times â" The results will match. Anybody can understand this happens at every booth, and they can audit it. And everybody will understand that you ad up the results of tens of booths to get a result for the district/electoral college/whatever. And that gets repeated nationwide. And that's it. My 85 year old aunt can act as one of the auditors.
Try to get her to audit the code for an electronic booth. I won't even start to describe how impossible that is.
That's the reason that led to Germany's Supreme Court to mandate that e-voting is against the constitution in 2009.
A very important factor in a democracy is the secret of the vote. If I can prove my vote was cast for a given option, then the gate is open for parties buying it â" Or punishing me for voting according to my will.
I have less imagination for distressed, poor people than you do. The setting you pictured us would belong in my imagination to a post-earthquake Haiti — and quite probably I'm being too discriminatory anway. Yes, I live in Mexico City. A city known for people having to cross 40Km in 2hr to get to work (because there's so much people and so many cars that traffic is just so slow downtown).
We so far have had nothing we have not seen over and over for the last hundreds of years. It's not gratuitous that this volcano is named "Popocatépetl" — The smoking mountain. It always has some smoke getting out. We are just seeing an increase in its strength, as we are used to, in ~10 year cycles.
Nothing to worry about.
I live in Mexico City. The Popocatepetl is a very well known and well studied volcano. And no, although it's 35Km away from the city's South Eastern outskirts, Mexico City is by far not at risk. The eruption –in case it happens– would most likely not be a violent one (i.e. as with St. Helen or with Chichonal). This volcano has been passively active for thousands of years. Volcanic activity did increase, yes, but it happens every few years — I'm not sure if it was in 2000 or 2004, but we even saw some lava being spilled out of the crater. Of course, that washed away the glaciar that had been in place for hundreds of years (at the very least).
Oh, and while our country's security situation is VERY far from "quiet" (specially in the last five years where the current president has taken all the wrong decisions), the country is by far not in the face of a civil war or an uprising. The criminal groups that –yes– have created panic in many areas of the country are not after the political control. The violence is linked with the routes for drug transit to the USA, but those groups do not (openly) seek political power. And, even with our elections drawing near (July 1st), it's very far from a real threat nowadays.
Well... As a Mexican living in Mexico City, I beg to differ. And have some first-hand information.
Our air is not as clear and clean as it (c|sh)ould be, of course. But neither is the air of any ~20 million people city. Starting in 1989, very important programs to improve the air have been implemented. Some ideas –some bad, some good– were also scrapped in the process. The main points:
The most polluting industries have been moved farther away from the city (or relocated to other places in the country)
There is a mandatory emmissions control for all vehicles carried out twice a year for each car, strictly followed.
As a result of the previous point: If your car is less than ten years old and has low enough emissions, no restrictions are placed on it. Older cars, or cars that don't meet the threshold, have to "sleep" one day a week, and one weekend a month.
The biggest open-air dump yards and sewage systems have slowly been closed and converted. This is an ongoing process, and very hard to get right, but it is moving in the right direction.
And yes, our city is still big and polluted — But when I've travelled to several South American countries, I have been astonished at how older cars leave a stench of bad combustion... That does not happen here any more. And that's indicative on why our air was in such a critical level 20 years ago.
Oh, but you have no idea how easy and productive it is for me to have one easy-to-edit source, regardless of whether I'm on a text terminal on the other side of the planet or on my main desktop. Or how great it is to have one source produce the finished article, the HTML-friendly (and clean!) version, and the PDF presentation. Or how convenient it is to be able to 'git blame' a file and see exactly who did what and when.
If other people find it sad, I find their workflow sad. No, I don't claim I'm in the majority use-case. But the tools work best for me — And I'm sure some learning can be of large benefit to anybody.
I have been writing LaTeX for well over 25 years already. Well, while true (I learnt at my father's research center being 8 year old), lets brag a little less: I have been writing LaTeX for over 10 years already, and only once I have used own document classes and custom macro sets: To fine-typeset the only book I have published. My thesis, simple documents, articles, presentations, etc. required basically no changes, and the result is surely superior to what I'd have achieved in the same time had I used any "regular" word processor.
I was recently introduced to Emacs' org-mode. It is really GREAT. I never looked into it before, as I thought it was basically a to-do list manager â" But no. I am currently using it mostly as a word processor (well, for semi-complex documents, as it makes little sense if your documents have no structure at all) and for presentations. And I'm still only beginning to love it (and am sure I'm truly underutilizing it). /italics/, *boldface*, =code=, nested/itemized lists with hyphens, etc.), and with three keystrokes, you export to your favorite format. C-c C-e b shows the document as a (inter-linked) HTML page, C-c C-e d compiles it with LaTeX into a PDF, etc.
True to the WYSIWYM mode, you work with a regular plain text file. There is a good deal of markup, but quite easy to learn (i.e.
Is that whoever is most stubborn always wins. It's not even about convincing the others, it's about boring them.
My University had a ten month long student strike in 1999-2000. While at the beginning it *did* have majority support among the students and workers, it didn't take too long for the support to fade away. An over-ideologized group took the power, by just staying in the (six-to-eight hour long) assemblies the longest. In the end, there were two main groups fighting for control of the "movement": The "Ultras" and the "Mega-ultras". Their favorite insult for the rest of us was to call us "moderates".
So, yes, I lost faith in an assembly as a governance system.
No, of course, not the majority of people will be interested in this. But I know many non-techy people interested in keeping their data as secure and un-snooped as possible. What mechanisms do they have? Well, to prefer encrypted channels, to avoid storing any meaningful data on well-known big-brand providers as Google, Yahoo and the such. My friends are somewhat naÃve, I know â" But, using Tor for accessing some sensitive information (even with its limitations), handling their mail at a more "trustable" (for some definition of trust) organization such as Riseup, and having an introductory working knowledge of GPG... Shows their concern. Maybe not a concern deep enough to learn how to self-host, and maybe some of their attempts only get halfway there.
If such an ISP were to open in my country, I am sure many people would use it. In the USA, I know many privacy-minded people. Lets see what impact they manage to achieve - But many people will be happy to pay, if only, for the principle that they are doing the Right Thing. Think about it, that's the reason many of us (with our time) to learn and produce Free Software.
Is that they required a wheel to be invented and attached in order to function.
I usually get a cup of coffee every 60-90 minutes. Do I get to be an astronaut?
Not primarly, I mean.
The job of a university is to create and disseminate knowledge. And yes, teaching undergrads is an important part of it - But the university cannot be devoted to that. Universities is where leading research is conducted.
In my country, there are many universities, public and private. The (public) university I work at is singlehandedly responsible for over 50% of the academic research in the country. Most universities are only teaching houses (specially most private ones). I refuse to call them universities — They work for knowledge dissemination only. They are schools.
PDF is a page layout document. When I read an ebook in my 6" screen (Kindle) and the file was prepared expecting a 13" screen (letter/A4), the result is way less than great. The content should be able to flow according to the medium.
Of course, it will always upset typographers, as they want precise control on how text is laid out – And the very fine craft of avoiding widows and orphans, cancelling rivers (I'm sorry, that might not be the proper English words), etc. is basically unattainable if the user determines the format he likes reading. And yes, with a decent ebook reader, the user will *always* determine the format.
We published a book in paper and PDF formats last November. It took quite a bit of work to get there. We also wanted to make an MOBI/EPUB version available... But translating from a somewhat tweaked LaTeX source file to those formats... has not yet been successful :(
So my opinion is clearly irrelevant. If I understand correctly, there is no *formal* felony between two underage (and thus not habilitated to formally consent) people. A more interesting case would be 16 and 19, 17 and 20. I guess it would be up to valuation by a psychologist - but this is just an uninformed opinion
Between a 13-year-old having consentual sex with a 14- or 15-year old and having sex with a 18-year old. Yes, during adolescence, many behavioral structures change deeply. 13-year-old children can just be stupid or horny and get sex with somebody with a similar maturity level than theirs, and that's not a crime. However, a five year gap *is* too much at that time, and yes, 18-year-old people (regardless of their gender) should know they should not seek sex with a person unable to do that judgement that five years of maturity gave them.
18-and-13 is clearly illegal. I would *not* see 18-and-16 in the same scale.
1. Release a strict GPL-licensed virus (along with source offer and all)
2. Make it infect your target's executables
3. Sue them for license breach!
4. Profit!
See? I did away with those pesky '???' bits!