Yes, that is what business leads to, captive markets, if it is allowed to create closed APIs. The risk is that even large businesses do not have large enough engineering departments to fix bugs that annoyed users can fix in short order when the API is mode pubic and free of selfish-interest. It isn't so much the proprietary developers are stupid, it is that that someone else sets priorities for them and that sometimes they ship broken APIs for business reasons. It is sometimes amazing how fast longstanding bugs are addressed once an open API exists.
I think that an in intermittent cursor positioning bug with Google Docs that onterferes with third party code editors may be a case. It is clearly a bug in Google's API since it appears in several independently maintained Google Store apps. The bug has to do with different combinations of platforms and fonts and with font size and zoomed fonts, so it is a low-level bit map problem. It has been reported on Google's forums since at least 2010 and Google's engineers haven't found a fix. I think it is a design flaw in Google's API that violates a low-level standard for rendering fonts. It may be an intentional breakage that discredits third-party code editor developers. It would probably be fixed in a week if the API were made public.
The idea that a corporation, a very powerful corporation, had as a motto "Do No Evil" is indication enough that evil is exactly what they are about.
First. consider the short-artention-span approach to products. How can we trust that this initative will be around long enough to feel safe in investing effort?
I recently re-examined the code editors that come from the Google Store that are supposed to work with Google Docs. Sometimes they do, but quite often they don't because of an odd cursor positioning bug that has been known since at least 2010 and which Google engineering has no consistent fix. And now they are talking about a Chrome IDE? How can they be trusted to providing a working product?
Google is an extreme example of the evil that exists in many Capitalist businesses. They want to create a captive market in which they control the user. That is why their API's are closed. Fortunately there is usually an answer for such control-freakism. It is eventual decline of the stock price and end of the business.
The cursor bug exists between several third-party code editor apps, It must be at the level of Google's own API, a problerm having to do with the way font bitmaps interfere with positioning on the bitmap that Google Docs uses in the browser. The bug is hard to repair because Google made a decision about low-level bit operations before or in spite of standards for glyph and font size generation. That is why cursors and fonts sometimes don't match up. If the API were public, people other than Google engineering would have determined the fix long ago, It may be, furthermore, that the problem is intentional, if it locks out third party success with Google's products.
So now they are announcing their own closed IDE? I smell a rat. What is more Google Writer seems to have been intentionally modeled after Microsoft Word 2000, yes 2000! The HTML editor seems no more powerful than Front Page 2000, which is crippled by today's standards. Since I know that Blogger had a working HTML editor, finally. I even suggested that they port that to Google Docs. I have got no reply.
All of this is really simple. Energy and computers have concentrated most of the wealth in the nation into the hands of very few. Much of that concentration is due to energy costs, the rest is due to the efficiency of the digital revolution which has disadvantaged most wage earners in the nation.
If you want to understand what drives political policy look at who is paying the campaign bills of the major parties, but especially the GOP. It is big carbon energy companies and interests like the Koch Brothers of Wichata Kansas, and it is that they are trying to buy resistance to creative destruction of the carbon energy economy by alternative energy. If some members of the GOP are realizing that solar is actually economically compettive, then that would be consistent with a pragmatic reality that carries with it much agreement across political boundaries, but if the policy of the GOP is driven by the entrenched interests that are fighting tooth and claw to preserve capital investment in what may really be a very toxic industry, and I know of no more ruthless bunch of businessmen than those who produce carbon fuels, then the GOP deserves to go down with them.
This is one case where partisan bickering is low hanging truit, and if one thinks that the audience on this forum is technical, maybe even dealt with load management of a web site, then most of you are not living up to your calling.
Were you to look at this problem as a team with an assigned task: "Get processes that do A, B,.... working. Serve the needs of Millions of users reliabilly", then you might take a different approach to the topic, and you might actually apply your expertise.
The video said that it was the culture of the interaction between the people involved that caused the failures, that the technology at the end-user wasn't that complicated. The local news made pains to point out that there had been a couple of teens in Silicon Valley who designed a better UI than the federal site. What they didn't tell you is that any design has to be served from sources that the end-user site can access and then communicate back to. It is at least a capacity problem for the web servers to talk to the data sources, and then after that there is a complexity problem of the processes being modeled. The problem could be either that the service doesn't scale up or what it models is too complex to manage economically. That is driven by management culture failures. There is either poor cooperation between the parties and there is no single point of responsibility.
This is quite separate from the political issues. People do processes to implement law they don't agree with because they have some respect for law. As technical and management people, that is where the expertise of many of the people that participate here should be focused, we should be concentrating on what the implementation failure teaches us, more.
Many of us have stories of failed projects we have been part of. Scientific American ran an article a decade ago which said that 60% of software projects fail, meaning that the stated objectives are not realized entirely. About 30 years ago I worked for a software project at a University to implement a Student Record database. The project eventually was abandoned. The reasons were pretty much similar to what is mentioned in the video. There were political factions in the Administration that were jockying for influence and the leadership was relatively weak. There were two main areas that had anyone really asked could have been identified as fatal flaws early on. One was that the software tools were poorly conceived and not known to scale to the size of the problem. A developer had oversold his expertese and had too much personal influence on decisions, the tools he developed were not efficient enough to implement the database both from the point of view of production performance or development.debugging. The second major failure, and this is very common and may be what plagues healthcare.gov and maybe what was built into ACA by the Congress and the political process, is that the thing being modeled is too complex to be able to be likely implemented correctly. In the case of the Student Record the Registarr's office burdened down the design with all the special exceptions they had implemented in their paper process over many years, and they were unaware or unwilling to give up all the dispensations for simplifying the process, or to reanalyze process to see if technology can streamline it.
I have been talking about historical purges of entrenched legal and beauracratic traditions as a way governments and economies get reformed. The idea is that some tyrant comes along, maybe some military leader, and cleans house, fires or kills off the entrenched interests, and like the Napoleonic Code, replaces an older weighted-down tradition of laws and traditions with a streamlined revamping of the system. From the point of view of implementation, the rewrite of a process is a chance to do just that, to revamp it. The only thing I would say about the politics of ACA is that both the Administration and Congress has an opportunity to make something simple, but that what the
Isn't the reality that the British Empire had less resistance elsewhere, and just stopped making a big effort against America? There are cultural reasons they might have not had a stomach for really putting it to America, when they has bigger targets in the rest of the World. Yes, technically the war of 1812 ended in a draw and don't forget that the British tried to drive a wedge in North America during the U.S. Civil War of 1861-5, but overall conflict with America got put at a lower priority.
You sound like you are projecting on everyone else from your own jaded reality and lack of ethics. Fortunately not everyone is like you, as much as you might hope them to be. There are honest people in the world and although public relations, spin, and propaganda seem to have the upper hand, their importance in your mind might be just a sign of how much their makers have control of your mind. Just like the idiots who post here about a kind of economic determinism, as though the right of some business man to exploit his employees, because he thinks he can, is unquestionable, when he suddenly finds himself on the wrong end of history.
Just remember that the French Monarchy, the Nobility and the Clergy of France in 1789 were as smug, they thought that they had it sown up, in total control, and a little trickle down had happened for the great majority, but when the price of wheat had doubled and the fisher women came up from Paris to Versailles, Marie Antionette had to run to her panic room and barely escaped their wrath, and that years later people who thought that they were doing what society deemed reasonable found themselves under the Giliotine during the Terror. Purges do happen and they can happen again and even here and the cruel fate of history is that people can be judged for things they did years before and under conditions they thought would support their choices for the rest of their lives. That can change too. So, my advice to you is to be moderate and aware of who can call you to account in the future. And to live beyond reproach. There is a pile of unjustice building, some of it is due to the digital revolution and anyone who is part of that could be subject to later review as a result.
Yeah, behaving like a troll doesn't involve intelligence. it involves bile. Trolls are usually male, and not able to reason all that much, which is why they resort to personal attack. You can eliminate trolls from your awareness by not reading posts less than 140 characters, or any post that does not have at least three complete sentences in at least two paragraphs with some logic connecting them.
It should be possible to filter off most trolls, and a good deal of other nonsense as weill, by coding a regular expression that will find two unique strings of length greater than a Tweet and separated by a Control-M. That should eliminate most trolls and most three-line mobile phone text messages as well, happy days!
A good deal of the steel we use in our modern civilization comes from ore produced by a singular event of some 2 billion years ago. The amount of oxygen in the atmosphere and ocean had increased to a level that all the Iron that had been in solution suddenly rusted out of sea water and settled out eventually becoming the worldwide distribution of ironstone deposits from that age.
In a few million years, our age will be marked by regions of very rusty deposits scattered about the continents. If you have seen the series on Discovery about what happens to human artifacts after Mankind is not maintaining them, it seems that steel structures are among the least able to survive for very long, at least in terms of geologic time. Some metal artifacts might survive by luck, but most of it will return to the rust that made the ironstones in the first place, but it won't be a orderly deposit. It will be localized where our population centers were, but the striking thing will be the unnatural concentration of Iron with anomalous associations of other metals not found together in natural deposits.
W-hy doesn't he use the element Tungsten for the name of the language? After all, his name was the original name of the element, and a new programming language for Mathematics is likely to be HARD, like the metal. This would follow in the tradition of naming software after substances and elements in nature, Carbon, Chromium, Ruby.
Yes, of course, canned PR response, if you don't mind me saying. You haven't said one thing in support of what they charge, not one word of justification. This sound's like the same problem I'd have if my doctor charged $4,000 for an office visit and out patient treatment and I wanted to know how he could charge so much for something that may have resulted in me wearing a Band Aid for a day. I am unconvinced of anything.
This is like chalk across the blackboard "....until your're cured." Not criticizing you for what you said. I might just be a typo. I commit lots of them because I don't see well, so if you didn't press the apostrophe, I will ignore. "Your" is a possessive, "You're" is the contraction for "You are". Just like "Don't" is a contraction for "Do not".
But to your content. I have lost the context of your reply and so I am not really sure what your point was. I was talking about how professions of all kinds aren't doing more than just pursuing their self-interest when they should be more concerned with the general welfare they take an oath to protect, and the purges happen periodically in history because of entrenched elites, and IT people, and software developers will find themselves in a targeted elite if they are not careful. That is why I advised to "Look in the Mirror". There is another topic on this site posted today about how insurers are able to cherry pick clients down to individuals because of the use, abuse, of Big Data. People may come to rebel against such collection and use of data, whether it is in insurance or in financial market speculation, which is the far worse abuse. Smart guys who design programs for Quants, may become high on the list of people to purge.
Actually, business people everywhere are killing the goose that taid the golden eqq by excessively gaming consumers. Cherry picking insurance clients is but one aspect of the misuse of Big Data to minimize risk by discriminating against smaller and smaller groups and down to individuals, and it is made possible by the misuse of computers and technology by business people who can't think beyond the next quarter.
We are seeing this is internet services, in banking and is short-term investing. This absurd micromanaging of tiny advantage or tiny margin. It is driven again by the abuse made possible by computers to manage tiny slices of time.
When people get tired of continually being gamed by speculation in markets, over gas and grocery prices, they are losing trust in those information sources and they will simply buy less and slow down the economy. They will resist the pressure to react now, and push back the rush to decide now. This is the latency needed in the economy for human consideration and deliberation, and it is driven by the abuse of data in the digital revolution. That will eventually be stopped.
Now, Now, Children, casting this in partisan rhetoric sidesteps the facts, and indeed it may be YOU who is the cause of the mess. Consider two things: Obamacare is a taxpayer subsidy of the Insurance system, whch in turn supports the current healthcare system. It is a short term fix to the problem that the Insurance Industry is failing because costs for treating people in the healthcare system has gotten too high, and the young, well, low-risk population does not buy insurance (Because they can't afford it, because they don't earn the kind of money in today's so-called Middle Class, that their parents did.) Obsmacare doesn't really address the cost side of the equation at all. It doesn't tell us how to get health care costs under control. It is simply a way to reduce the risk to Insurers by mandating the everybody buy insurance. And there are no assurances that premiums won't go up anyway, since rates are still tied to profit margins for the insurers and their investors.
The alternative to this was not entertained because it was politically unfeasible. That is to enroll everyone in Medicare, increase the tax and socialize medicine. As unpopular as that is now, unless there are major structural changes about we do healthcare here, and our spending per person is about twice what it is in the next most expensive economy, we will be forced to do exactly that to contain the rising costs, especially if insurers go out of business, which could also happen.
I said that you, yourselves, people in tech, may be the cause for these problems, not the Congress, not the professions, although they don't help matters much. What I meant by that is not only the attitude of the young that they don't need insurance and they aren't thereby going to spread the risk for the larger percentage of elderly who make the risk, but that the reason the income distribution is so skewed is mostly due to technology, energy costs, yes, but much of it is due to the unintended side-effects of the digital revolution, computers. The change eliminated Middle Class Jobs that were not really replaced in kind. The fortunes of most Americans are much less secure, either in having to work at wages below their training, or work part-time, because of the efficiencies and investment incentives created by the digital revolution. People are very bad at predicting the future and seeing unintended consequences. This will have explosive consequences, and I don't mean Luddism.
Well it is worse then that. Most Politicians were Lawyers, Every once in a while you may get a Businessman, a Professor or a MD. But most come from the Legal background.
And even worse, those few politicians who were businessmen or doctors are the ones most reviled during economic or healthcare related debates... I mean, we can't trust people who have actual experience in the issue being debated, that might show the rest of the politicians in a bad light!
Another way to think of this is that there is too much complexity in the acmmulated practices of managing things, and it is the professions who cause this, and that is why throughout history there have been purges of entrenched professional classes. I can actually take the point of view of both extremes, left and right on this because in truth they meet as in a circular continuum. In that sense had there been a hard cap on the debt limit and on the current budget, that disaster just averted, it would have had the effect of a purge, yes, recipiants of entitlements would have been hurt, but the professions both in an out of government hurt as well. This would have been politically untenable. You can look at the efforts of the tea party Republicans in the Congress as a way to do a purge, not unlike Mao's Cultural Revolution and other purges of the past. Of course those Republicans have probably committed political suicide, but the idea of looking at complexity was a reason for disasters like the Healthcare rollout. This is true regardless of what the fiscal future of the U.S. will be. Some are saying it is catastrophic by 2020.
We have all been down this road too many times before, not only with overzealous contractors who promise the moon, being led by People Pleasing salesman, but more significantly by the specification process not finding simplifying models of the process. This might have been the stealth bomb of the opposition in Congress to intentionally make the law so complex that it couldn't be implemented brfore the sun goes red giant. No matter, how many projects have failed just because the
spec. contained complexity left over from a beaucratic paper office tradition. I know of one project back in 1984 of the implementation of a student record database that failed for just that reason, to the tune of $1 Million, which by today's standards is nothing. Not only was the technology clumsy, but the designed was doomed from the start because the Registarr's Office had the political clout to impose its Byzantine practices on the design. So now we are faced with a design created by legislatoers, lawyers, politicians, doctors, etc. all professionals, that is too complex.
It may also be too ambitious for the computer resources the government has at its disposal. Having worked for Interior in the 1970's I know that the procurement process forces the government to use outmoded technology.. So I can imagine that the servers may not be current technology and so easy to overburden.
So, Simple, explain what justified those fees in some detail, please?
I would think that what plos.org gets to charge is because of assymetry of information in a market transaction, and because they have a captive market, rather than any justification they can give. I wouldn't surprise me at all, if the number is plucked out of the air, and no-one has bothered to challenge them on it.
This is much like the problem with single payer insurance and why it is so out of control, if it comes out of your institution's packet and not yours, you tend to let it slide, but as soon as you have to fork up the fee, that is a different matter. BTW, I think paywalls are going to die, and not because of public funding, but because researchers will need to self publish unreviewed versions of their work to get it noticed, and as a public service. If peer review is to be so valued, it has to be made available outside of journal paywalls. For some journals, you can't even read the abstract without paying.
The good news is that, once we're off this planet, most of those grand old sociopathic power dreams become impossible. There'll never be a Galactic Empire, because you can't boss people around when your orders take thousands of years to reach them. There will probably never even be a Solar Empire, because the odds are high that your 'private army' can't travel at more than 10% of the speed of light, and the Oort Cloud is far enough away for even that to be very hard to control.
Except of course sociopathy is a built-in human that is likely to appear in gatherings of maybe around 30 people. And some societies, such as America, produce the trait at a much higher rate than others, so putting a colony on Mars will only reveal that power needs an override. Isolating groups of humans further only brings out tribal instincts more. The structure of society is determined by communication and response, seeking to solve problems with current power structures by a diaspora only send people back in time WRT social institutions. SciFi should be full of which hunts, not Libertarian utopias.
Lest you think I take a dim view of human prospects, just consider that for 99% of the time Mankind has existed that his population density has been very low, which is why we have public hair, so we can be sniffed out miles away. Mankind cannot adapt fast enough to the present high density situation where cooperation and empathy matter far more than competition and personal power cult. Maybe a human diaspora could save Mankind but on Earth the species could easily go extinct.
I'm with you. I wish the regulators the world over would define a legally enforceable latency into wire transactions so that counting the microseconds of jump you have on the next trading site doesn't matter, levels the playing field. This kind of nonsense is why markets don't make any sense and why they don't serve people.
Most Americans rationalize it this way, "Well, I haven't done anything wrong. How can their snooping harm me?" They don't realize that facts about them taken out of context can be used to harm then later, having forgotten the history of the McCarthy Era in the 1950's. People living under one regime can find themselves to be targets in a replacement regime when their efforts to serve get scrutinized in a changed context. I am predicting that many member of the Republican Party are nervous right now as the finger pointing will start. Lets construct the following hypothetical situation. What if it comes to light that members of the Tea Parties in the House of Representarives were really Chinese agents working to undermine the dollar as an international standard currency by causing a debt default and a run on U.S. Treasuries? They would be labeled as traitors and would be hunted down and imprisoned, if not worse. If NSA knew that you were on a Tea Party web site or mailing list, you might be looked at in an entirely different light. What the NSA does is ultimately bad for democratic institutions. It is caused by the government giving too many high security levels to information that does not need to be as secure. It is abuse of power.
Better find a place that is likely to not be munged by plate tectonic cycles on average a quarter billion years, for the Earth. I would suggest planning the data repository to reside on the Moon or Mars, some place that doesn't change much in a billion years, I have thought about this off and on and realize that a safe thing to do is to put the archive somewhere in space.
So, a small amount of analysis does need to be done, A short list of common abuses might cover 95% of the cases. The first one that I see if that they ratio of response to reply has to be high. If what you cite is a significant abuse, then a script looking for a large percentage of repeated substring in the message would be rejected. I know this could get out of hand, but a modest check for common abuses could be economically done and discourage the most common abuses.
You need a replacement keyboard and to spill coffee on it.
At the risk of overgeneralizng:-) I'd say that the Chinese are so uncreative that stealing and copying is their main business. To whit,
The keyboard I am using right now was made in China and it is a disaster of design. I'd love to find the designer and stir fry him, BTW, I bought it at Fry's, which is my first mistake, since that chain is a master of selling ciunterfit and broken stuff.
This keyboard is very hard to use to type accurately. It is one of those mini keyboards with the number pad folded into the QWERTY keyboard, but that isn't all. The keytops labeling is very hard to see. It is light grey on black keys. Who decided to do it that way? Someone who dons't think. And what is worse, try and find a keyboard for Windows and Linux that has black characters on white keytops, very hard to. The Mac keyboards are usually that, but for some reason, due to people not thinking, maybe being Chinese, all the IBM keyboards have white characters on black keytops.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, that is what business leads to, captive markets, if it is allowed to create closed APIs. The risk is that even large businesses do not have large enough engineering departments to fix bugs that annoyed users can fix in short order when the API is mode pubic and free of selfish-interest. It isn't so much the proprietary developers are stupid, it is that that someone else sets priorities for them and that sometimes they ship broken APIs for business reasons. It is sometimes amazing how fast longstanding bugs are addressed once an open API exists.
I think that an in intermittent cursor positioning bug with Google Docs that onterferes with third party code editors may be a case. It is clearly a bug in Google's API since it appears in several independently maintained Google Store apps. The bug has to do with different combinations of platforms and fonts and with font size and zoomed fonts, so it is a low-level bit map problem. It has been reported on Google's forums since at least 2010 and Google's engineers haven't found a fix. I think it is a design flaw in Google's API that violates a low-level standard for rendering fonts. It may be an intentional breakage that discredits third-party code editor developers. It would probably be fixed in a week if the API were made public.
The idea that a corporation, a very powerful corporation, had as a motto "Do No Evil" is indication enough that evil is exactly what they are about.
First. consider the short-artention-span approach to products. How can we trust that this initative will be around long enough to feel safe in investing effort?
I recently re-examined the code editors that come from the Google Store that are supposed to work with Google Docs. Sometimes they do, but quite often they don't because of an odd cursor positioning bug that has been known since at least 2010 and which Google engineering has no consistent fix. And now they are talking about a Chrome IDE? How can they be trusted to providing a working product?
Google is an extreme example of the evil that exists in many Capitalist businesses. They want to create a captive market in which they control the user. That is why their API's are closed. Fortunately there is usually an answer for such control-freakism. It is eventual decline of the stock price and end of the business.
The cursor bug exists between several third-party code editor apps, It must be at the level of Google's own API, a problerm having to do with the way font bitmaps interfere with positioning on the bitmap that Google Docs uses in the browser. The bug is hard to repair because Google made a decision about low-level bit operations before or in spite of standards for glyph and font size generation. That is why cursors and fonts sometimes don't match up. If the API were public, people other than Google engineering would have determined the fix long ago, It may be, furthermore, that the problem is intentional, if it locks out third party success with Google's products.
So now they are announcing their own closed IDE? I smell a rat. What is more Google Writer seems to have been intentionally modeled after Microsoft Word 2000, yes 2000! The HTML editor seems no more powerful than Front Page 2000, which is crippled by today's standards. Since I know that Blogger had a working HTML editor, finally. I even suggested that they port that to Google Docs. I have got no reply.
All of this is really simple. Energy and computers have concentrated most of the wealth in the nation into the hands of very few. Much of that concentration is due to energy costs, the rest is due to the efficiency of the digital revolution which has disadvantaged most wage earners in the nation.
If you want to understand what drives political policy look at who is paying the campaign bills of the major parties, but especially the GOP. It is big carbon energy companies and interests like the Koch Brothers of Wichata Kansas, and it is that they are trying to buy resistance to creative destruction of the carbon energy economy by alternative energy. If some members of the GOP are realizing that solar is actually economically compettive, then that would be consistent with a pragmatic reality that carries with it much agreement across political boundaries, but if the policy of the GOP is driven by the entrenched interests that are fighting tooth and claw to preserve capital investment in what may really be a very toxic industry, and I know of no more ruthless bunch of businessmen than those who produce carbon fuels, then the GOP deserves to go down with them.
This is one case where partisan bickering is low hanging truit, and if one thinks that the audience on this forum is technical, maybe even dealt with load management of a web site, then most of you are not living up to your calling.
Were you to look at this problem as a team with an assigned task: "Get processes that do A, B, .... working. Serve the needs of Millions of users reliabilly", then you might take a different approach to the topic, and you might actually apply your expertise.
The video said that it was the culture of the interaction between the people involved that caused the failures, that the technology at the end-user wasn't that complicated. The local news made pains to point out that there had been a couple of teens in Silicon Valley who designed a better UI than the federal site. What they didn't tell you is that any design has to be served from sources that the end-user site can access and then communicate back to. It is at least a capacity problem for the web servers to talk to the data sources, and then after that there is a complexity problem of the processes being modeled. The problem could be either that the service doesn't scale up or what it models is too complex to manage economically. That is driven by management culture failures. There is either poor cooperation between the parties and there is no single point of responsibility.
This is quite separate from the political issues. People do processes to implement law they don't agree with because they have some respect for law. As technical and management people, that is where the expertise of many of the people that participate here should be focused, we should be concentrating on what the implementation failure teaches us, more.
Many of us have stories of failed projects we have been part of. Scientific American ran an article a decade ago which said that 60% of software projects fail, meaning that the stated objectives are not realized entirely. About 30 years ago I worked for a software project at a University to implement a Student Record database. The project eventually was abandoned. The reasons were pretty much similar to what is mentioned in the video. There were political factions in the Administration that were jockying for influence and the leadership was relatively weak. There were two main areas that had anyone really asked could have been identified as fatal flaws early on. One was that the software tools were poorly conceived and not known to scale to the size of the problem. A developer had oversold his expertese and had too much personal influence on decisions, the tools he developed were not efficient enough to implement the database both from the point of view of production performance or development.debugging. The second major failure, and this is very common and may be what plagues healthcare.gov and maybe what was built into ACA by the Congress and the political process, is that the thing being modeled is too complex to be able to be likely implemented correctly. In the case of the Student Record the Registarr's office burdened down the design with all the special exceptions they had implemented in their paper process over many years, and they were unaware or unwilling to give up all the dispensations for simplifying the process, or to reanalyze process to see if technology can streamline it.
I have been talking about historical purges of entrenched legal and beauracratic traditions as a way governments and economies get reformed. The idea is that some tyrant comes along, maybe some military leader, and cleans house, fires or kills off the entrenched interests, and like the Napoleonic Code, replaces an older weighted-down tradition of laws and traditions with a streamlined revamping of the system. From the point of view of implementation, the rewrite of a process is a chance to do just that, to revamp it. The only thing I would say about the politics of ACA is that both the Administration and Congress has an opportunity to make something simple, but that what the
Isn't the reality that the British Empire had less resistance elsewhere, and just stopped making a big effort against America? There are cultural reasons they might have not had a stomach for really putting it to America, when they has bigger targets in the rest of the World. Yes, technically the war of 1812 ended in a draw and don't forget that the British tried to drive a wedge in North America during the U.S. Civil War of 1861-5, but overall conflict with America got put at a lower priority.
You sound like you are projecting on everyone else from your own jaded reality and lack of ethics. Fortunately not everyone is like you, as much as you might hope them to be. There are honest people in the world and although public relations, spin, and propaganda seem to have the upper hand, their importance in your mind might be just a sign of how much their makers have control of your mind. Just like the idiots who post here about a kind of economic determinism, as though the right of some business man to exploit his employees, because he thinks he can, is unquestionable, when he suddenly finds himself on the wrong end of history.
Just remember that the French Monarchy, the Nobility and the Clergy of France in 1789 were as smug, they thought that they had it sown up, in total control, and a little trickle down had happened for the great majority, but when the price of wheat had doubled and the fisher women came up from Paris to Versailles, Marie Antionette had to run to her panic room and barely escaped their wrath, and that years later people who thought that they were doing what society deemed reasonable found themselves under the Giliotine during the Terror. Purges do happen and they can happen again and even here and the cruel fate of history is that people can be judged for things they did years before and under conditions they thought would support their choices for the rest of their lives. That can change too. So, my advice to you is to be moderate and aware of who can call you to account in the future. And to live beyond reproach. There is a pile of unjustice building, some of it is due to the digital revolution and anyone who is part of that could be subject to later review as a result.
Yeah, behaving like a troll doesn't involve intelligence. it involves bile. Trolls are usually male, and not able to reason all that much, which is why they resort to personal attack. You can eliminate trolls from your awareness by not reading posts less than 140 characters, or any post that does not have at least three complete sentences in at least two paragraphs with some logic connecting them.
It should be possible to filter off most trolls, and a good deal of other nonsense as weill, by coding a regular expression that will find two unique strings of length greater than a Tweet and separated by a Control-M. That should eliminate most trolls and most three-line mobile phone text messages as well, happy days!
Only if that have a bone to pick with you.
A good deal of the steel we use in our modern civilization comes from ore produced by a singular event of some 2 billion years ago. The amount of oxygen in the atmosphere and ocean had increased to a level that all the Iron that had been in solution suddenly rusted out of sea water and settled out eventually becoming the worldwide distribution of ironstone deposits from that age.
In a few million years, our age will be marked by regions of very rusty deposits scattered about the continents. If you have seen the series on Discovery about what happens to human artifacts after Mankind is not maintaining them, it seems that steel structures are among the least able to survive for very long, at least in terms of geologic time. Some metal artifacts might survive by luck, but most of it will return to the rust that made the ironstones in the first place, but it won't be a orderly deposit. It will be localized where our population centers were, but the striking thing will be the unnatural concentration of Iron with anomalous associations of other metals not found together in natural deposits.
W-hy doesn't he use the element Tungsten for the name of the language? After all, his name was the original name of the element, and a new programming language for Mathematics is likely to be HARD, like the metal. This would follow in the tradition of naming software after substances and elements in nature, Carbon, Chromium, Ruby.
Yes, of course, canned PR response, if you don't mind me saying. You haven't said one thing in support of what they charge, not one word of justification. This sound's like the same problem I'd have if my doctor charged $4,000 for an office visit and out patient treatment and I wanted to know how he could charge so much for something that may have resulted in me wearing a Band Aid for a day. I am unconvinced of anything.
This is like chalk across the blackboard "....until your're cured." Not criticizing you for what you said. I might just be a typo. I commit lots of them because I don't see well, so if you didn't press the apostrophe, I will ignore. "Your" is a possessive, "You're" is the contraction for "You are". Just like "Don't" is a contraction for "Do not".
But to your content. I have lost the context of your reply and so I am not really sure what your point was. I was talking about how professions of all kinds aren't doing more than just pursuing their self-interest when they should be more concerned with the general welfare they take an oath to protect, and the purges happen periodically in history because of entrenched elites, and IT people, and software developers will find themselves in a targeted elite if they are not careful. That is why I advised to "Look in the Mirror". There is another topic on this site posted today about how insurers are able to cherry pick clients down to individuals because of the use, abuse, of Big Data. People may come to rebel against such collection and use of data, whether it is in insurance or in financial market speculation, which is the far worse abuse. Smart guys who design programs for Quants, may become high on the list of people to purge.
Actually, business people everywhere are killing the goose that taid the golden eqq by excessively gaming consumers. Cherry picking insurance clients is but one aspect of the misuse of Big Data to minimize risk by discriminating against smaller and smaller groups and down to individuals, and it is made possible by the misuse of computers and technology by business people who can't think beyond the next quarter.
We are seeing this is internet services, in banking and is short-term investing. This absurd micromanaging of tiny advantage or tiny margin. It is driven again by the abuse made possible by computers to manage tiny slices of time.
When people get tired of continually being gamed by speculation in markets, over gas and grocery prices, they are losing trust in those information sources and they will simply buy less and slow down the economy. They will resist the pressure to react now, and push back the rush to decide now. This is the latency needed in the economy for human consideration and deliberation, and it is driven by the abuse of data in the digital revolution. That will eventually be stopped.
Now, Now, Children, casting this in partisan rhetoric sidesteps the facts, and indeed it may be YOU who is the cause of the mess. Consider two things: Obamacare is a taxpayer subsidy of the Insurance system, whch in turn supports the current healthcare system. It is a short term fix to the problem that the Insurance Industry is failing because costs for treating people in the healthcare system has gotten too high, and the young, well, low-risk population does not buy insurance (Because they can't afford it, because they don't earn the kind of money in today's so-called Middle Class, that their parents did.) Obsmacare doesn't really address the cost side of the equation at all. It doesn't tell us how to get health care costs under control. It is simply a way to reduce the risk to Insurers by mandating the everybody buy insurance. And there are no assurances that premiums won't go up anyway, since rates are still tied to profit margins for the insurers and their investors.
The alternative to this was not entertained because it was politically unfeasible. That is to enroll everyone in Medicare, increase the tax and socialize medicine. As unpopular as that is now, unless there are major structural changes about we do healthcare here, and our spending per person is about twice what it is in the next most expensive economy, we will be forced to do exactly that to contain the rising costs, especially if insurers go out of business, which could also happen.
I said that you, yourselves, people in tech, may be the cause for these problems, not the Congress, not the professions, although they don't help matters much. What I meant by that is not only the attitude of the young that they don't need insurance and they aren't thereby going to spread the risk for the larger percentage of elderly who make the risk, but that the reason the income distribution is so skewed is mostly due to technology, energy costs, yes, but much of it is due to the unintended side-effects of the digital revolution, computers. The change eliminated Middle Class Jobs that were not really replaced in kind. The fortunes of most Americans are much less secure, either in having to work at wages below their training, or work part-time, because of the efficiencies and investment incentives created by the digital revolution. People are very bad at predicting the future and seeing unintended consequences. This will have explosive consequences, and I don't mean Luddism.
Well it is worse then that. Most Politicians were Lawyers, Every once in a while you may get a Businessman, a Professor or a MD. But most come from the Legal background.
And even worse, those few politicians who were businessmen or doctors are the ones most reviled during economic or healthcare related debates... I mean, we can't trust people who have actual experience in the issue being debated, that might show the rest of the politicians in a bad light!
Another way to think of this is that there is too much complexity in the acmmulated practices of managing things, and it is the professions who cause this, and that is why throughout history there have been purges of entrenched professional classes. I can actually take the point of view of both extremes, left and right on this because in truth they meet as in a circular continuum. In that sense had there been a hard cap on the debt limit and on the current budget, that disaster just averted, it would have had the effect of a purge, yes, recipiants of entitlements would have been hurt, but the professions both in an out of government hurt as well. This would have been politically untenable. You can look at the efforts of the tea party Republicans in the Congress as a way to do a purge, not unlike Mao's Cultural Revolution and other purges of the past. Of course those Republicans have probably committed political suicide, but the idea of looking at complexity was a reason for disasters like the Healthcare rollout. This is true regardless of what the fiscal future of the U.S. will be. Some are saying it is catastrophic by 2020.
We have all been down this road too many times before, not only with overzealous contractors who promise the moon, being led by People Pleasing salesman, but more significantly by the specification process not finding simplifying models of the process. This might have been the stealth bomb of the opposition in Congress to intentionally make the law so complex that it couldn't be implemented brfore the sun goes red giant. No matter, how many projects have failed just because the spec. contained complexity left over from a beaucratic paper office tradition. I know of one project back in 1984 of the implementation of a student record database that failed for just that reason, to the tune of $1 Million, which by today's standards is nothing. Not only was the technology clumsy, but the designed was doomed from the start because the Registarr's Office had the political clout to impose its Byzantine practices on the design. So now we are faced with a design created by legislatoers, lawyers, politicians, doctors, etc. all professionals, that is too complex.
It may also be too ambitious for the computer resources the government has at its disposal. Having worked for Interior in the 1970's I know that the procurement process forces the government to use outmoded technology.. So I can imagine that the servers may not be current technology and so easy to overburden.
So, Simple, explain what justified those fees in some detail, please?
I would think that what plos.org gets to charge is because of assymetry of information in a market transaction, and because they have a captive market, rather than any justification they can give. I wouldn't surprise me at all, if the number is plucked out of the air, and no-one has bothered to challenge them on it.
This is much like the problem with single payer insurance and why it is so out of control, if it comes out of your institution's packet and not yours, you tend to let it slide, but as soon as you have to fork up the fee, that is a different matter. BTW, I think paywalls are going to die, and not because of public funding, but because researchers will need to self publish unreviewed versions of their work to get it noticed, and as a public service. If peer review is to be so valued, it has to be made available outside of journal paywalls. For some journals, you can't even read the abstract without paying.
So, do you own your own business?
agribuisnes, and are you worth millions?
Post your financial statement, or are you just a Tea Party Republican?
I hope you don't live in California.
I can help you leave and go to the Midwest, Jesusland, soon to be.
With California a new nation.
Pangloss?
The good news is that, once we're off this planet, most of those grand old sociopathic power dreams become impossible. There'll never be a Galactic Empire, because you can't boss people around when your orders take thousands of years to reach them. There will probably never even be a Solar Empire, because the odds are high that your 'private army' can't travel at more than 10% of the speed of light, and the Oort Cloud is far enough away for even that to be very hard to control.
Except of course sociopathy is a built-in human that is likely to appear in gatherings of maybe around 30 people. And some societies, such as America, produce the trait at a much higher rate than others, so putting a colony on Mars will only reveal that power needs an override. Isolating groups of humans further only brings out tribal instincts more. The structure of society is determined by communication and response, seeking to solve problems with current power structures by a diaspora only send people back in time WRT social institutions. SciFi should be full of which hunts, not Libertarian utopias.
Lest you think I take a dim view of human prospects, just consider that for 99% of the time Mankind has existed that his population density has been very low, which is why we have public hair, so we can be sniffed out miles away. Mankind cannot adapt fast enough to the present high density situation where cooperation and empathy matter far more than competition and personal power cult. Maybe a human diaspora could save Mankind but on Earth the species could easily go extinct.
Which introduces speculation and instability!
I'm with you. I wish the regulators the world over would define a legally enforceable latency into wire transactions so that counting the microseconds of jump you have on the next trading site doesn't matter, levels the playing field. This kind of nonsense is why markets don't make any sense and why they don't serve people.
Most Americans rationalize it this way, "Well, I haven't done anything wrong. How can their snooping harm me?" They don't realize that facts about them taken out of context can be used to harm then later, having forgotten the history of the McCarthy Era in the 1950's. People living under one regime can find themselves to be targets in a replacement regime when their efforts to serve get scrutinized in a changed context. I am predicting that many member of the Republican Party are nervous right now as the finger pointing will start. Lets construct the following hypothetical situation. What if it comes to light that members of the Tea Parties in the House of Representarives were really Chinese agents working to undermine the dollar as an international standard currency by causing a debt default and a run on U.S. Treasuries? They would be labeled as traitors and would be hunted down and imprisoned, if not worse. If NSA knew that you were on a Tea Party web site or mailing list, you might be looked at in an entirely different light. What the NSA does is ultimately bad for democratic institutions. It is caused by the government giving too many high security levels to information that does not need to be as secure. It is abuse of power.
Better find a place that is likely to not be munged by plate tectonic cycles on average a quarter billion years, for the Earth. I would suggest planning the data repository to reside on the Moon or Mars, some place that doesn't change much in a billion years, I have thought about this off and on and realize that a safe thing to do is to put the archive somewhere in space.
So, a small amount of analysis does need to be done, A short list of common abuses might cover 95% of the cases. The first one that I see if that they ratio of response to reply has to be high. If what you cite is a significant abuse, then a script looking for a large percentage of repeated substring in the message would be rejected. I know this could get out of hand, but a modest check for common abuses could be economically done and discourage the most common abuses.
You need a replacement keyboard and to spill coffee on it.
At the risk of overgeneralizng :-) I'd say that the Chinese are so uncreative that stealing and copying is their main business. To whit,
The keyboard I am using right now was made in China and it is a disaster of design. I'd love to find the designer and stir fry him, BTW, I bought it at Fry's, which is my first mistake, since that chain is a master of selling ciunterfit and broken stuff.
This keyboard is very hard to use to type accurately. It is one of those mini keyboards with the number pad folded into the QWERTY keyboard, but that isn't all. The keytops labeling is very hard to see. It is light grey on black keys. Who decided to do it that way? Someone who dons't think. And what is worse, try and find a keyboard for Windows and Linux that has black characters on white keytops, very hard to. The Mac keyboards are usually that, but for some reason, due to people not thinking, maybe being Chinese, all the IBM keyboards have white characters on black keytops.