Or someone actually believing in the free market and
competition.
In a perfect market, competition will continuously push prices down as your competitors will keep undercutting you, and that is what his statement reflects. If you want to stay in business in a free market, you must indeed provide more and more for less and less. In addition you must actually manage to get a reasonable profit margin out of it.
Of course a certain American software company is a good demonstration of how a free market without proper oversight can easily create monopolies which screw up that model...
I'm completely disgusted that you don't give all your belongings away to the less fortunate. How come you have time and money to throw away on computers and access to the internet to read slashdot, while people are starving.
Ok. Enough of the sarcasm. I agree with you that more should be done to fight poverty. But instead of complaining about an experiment that included one PC being made available to poor kids, and the person doing the experiment pushing ahead to get funding for more access to technology for underprivileged illiterate kids, you might instead try to direct your complaints against people who do nothing.
Yes, he isn't giving them food or shelter, but he isn't solely responsible for stopping poverty in the world. However giving these kids knowledge is as important as a long term strategy to help people out of poverty as food and shelter is as a short term strategy. Both is needed. Without better education most of these kids will never get out of poverty.
Do you seriously prefer to make people stay dependent on charity?
Of course your complaint about "Western civilization" is quite amusing when the article is about an experiment being done in India, by an employee of an Indian company.
As was mentioned in the article, the kids did reach a plateau where they seemed to require some help to get further, and teaching them the proper words would certainly be an important part of that.
What the article pointed out was primarily that you can get a solid foundation without the help of a teacher, and that it is a waste of resources to spend a teachers time on teaching the kids things they can learn on their own in an environment where they don't have nearly enough teachers to cover the need.
In other words, giving kids gentle guidance by giving them access to a computer, and possibly give them some help or access to someone to ask questions of every now and then might be a lot more cost effective (and thus enable them to reach more kids) than having a teacher guide them through every little step.
I especially liked the example with MP3. All the guy had to do was show them the possibility - then the kids explored further on their own, finding sources of MP3s, downloading and installing players etc..
Keep in mind that kids also love showing each other "cool stuff" - this is learning where the kids themselves participate in the teaching process as well.
It would be interesting to see what somewhat more intervention would cause - if the kids got a chance to get some more "nudges" like the MP3 one,
and access to more tools (like installing educational games etc.).
I don't agree at all. The article points out for instance, that while these children doesn't know what the word "File" means, they know what the File menu does, which is what matters to them.
Sure, the threshold might be higher for CLIs, but it's by no means certain that children would be stopped by it.
As anecdotal evidence of that, I learned to program on the VIC 20 and C64 largely without assistance.
At the time I started showing an interest in the Vic 20 we had at home I was 5. I started writing "programs" on paper emulating what I saw my father writing.
When he noticed that, he let me use the computer instead, and gave me the manual to look at.
Even though the manual was in English, and I didn't know a word of English at the time, and
only knew the basics of reading, I was soon writing small Basic programs that actually did stuff.
All it took was examples, even though I had no idea what they would do.
I'm not claiming everyone would do what I did, but I don't have any illusions that I'm so special that I'd figure out stuff at the age of 5 that not a substantial amount of other kids would figure out as well in the same situation.
To 2) the goverment allowing its continued publication certainly does not pose a grave threat to national security when the information is already available to anyone who wants to via a simple web search, and when the government has not outlawed the paper version.
As for 3 I would consider the transfer of nuclear material everyone certainly should have a right to know. A lot of people are very concerned about the safety of such transports, and especially when it is likely that possible saboteurs will have the information anyway, it should be a right for members of the public to know so that they can make the decision for themselves on whether or not to be near the area where the transport happens.
And in fact, not that these movements are hardly easy to hide. The security around the movement of radioactive waste is so high in Germany due to the amount of protests it raises, that it is trivial to find out when and where it happens because the security precautions are highly visible.
According to at least one CNN report, at one point the German government had to use 15.000 police officers to protect ONE shipment of radioactive waste because of the massive amount of demonstrations.
May I point out that it was a US law (the DMCA) that was used by Scientology recently to get pages pulled out of Googles index?
And the same law has already chilled speech by making several people restrict access to various documents to people outside the US (including Alan Cox for a few Linux kernel changelog entries)?
So much for free speech guarantees in the US.
Yes, there are areas where you have more free speech rights in the US than in Germany, but the opposite is also true.
You conveniently didn't mention my point that the patent also has to be for something that isn't obvious to a practioner in the field of the application. I would claim that if you ask a group of kids to suggest different ways to swing, it would be blatantly obvious to them to try variation like in this patent application.
That in itself invalidates the application, and it is simple to test even after the fact: Find a group of people that are completely unaware of the patent, and do ask them about differents ways to swing.
In addition, a search for prior art on this would be relatively easy: How many parents have home videos of their kids on a swing, or could testify to the methods their kids use on a swing? I doubt you'd have to sit through too many hours of home videos before you'd have proof of prior art.
You are right that they aren't supposed to prevent people from clowning - it's not there decision to make. It however is their decision to make whether a patent application is for something that is obvious to someone well versed in the field of the patent, and that there is no prior art. Both of which seems to fail miserably in this case.
Actually, the 6502 is close enough to the 6510 that your C64 most likely will keep running if you exchange the two. The difference is primarily 8 extra IO lines on the 6510. On the C64 some of those were, I believe (but it's been about 15 years:-) used to access the tapedeck.
For an even more extreme example of extra CPU's (though not necessarily much more powerful, and two of them not in use:-), I at one point had an Amiga 2000 with a 68000 CPU. I got a used 68020
accelerator board for it. In addition it had one of those PC cards that let you run DOS in a window, with an 8086, and an 286 accelerator for it. To top it off my SCSI card had a Z80 on it.
But one CPU is missing....
Guess what is used as a keyboard controller on many of the Amigas? An embedded version of the 6510, running at 2MHz and with onboard RAM and ROM..
So to sum it up, the CPUs in use: 68020, 286, Z-80 and some chip with an 6510 core. Now that's multiprocessing:-)
It's a question of what conclusions you draw. I agree with you that drawing the conclusion that segregation has nothing to do with income distribution, access to jobs etc. would not be valid (that is not to say that it might not be true, but the conclusion can't validly be drawn from the experiment).
But it does demonstrate how unlikely it is that an integrated environment will be the result if a significant part of members of society is looking for an "integrated" neighborhood:
Everyone that moves to a neighborhood raises the chance that the neighborhood, or parts of it becomes becomes dominated enough by a particular race that fewer people consider it integrated. This causes a domino effect: Everyone looking for integration will keep on moving out of "ghettos", and will extend the ghettos that way.
As such it demonstrates that wanting to live in an integrated environment is not necessarily achieved by moving to the best integrated environment, but by moving into the proximity of a ghetto of predominantly people of another race.
That is unlikely to happen unless the "ghetto" has desirable factors. Such factor might be to be prestigeous, to have low crime rates, good schools etc. However those factors are closely related to the issues you bring up, and if people in the poor group wants to integrate they can't afford to, and if people in the "wealthy" group wants to help integration they have to move to the "bad part of town".
So even if the model is extremely simplistic, it does point at one possible contributing factor to the formation of ghettos: Everything else being equal, for integration to occur a significant amount of people need to be willing to either move to or stay in an area they perceive as a ghetto
with mostly people of another race.
Re:Robots being tested in hospitals?
on
Hospital Robots
·
· Score: 2
Did you even read the article? The robot delivers the drugs in a locked safe to each nursing station. It does not go around handing out drugs to anyone.
It's a transport mechanism that is "smart" enough to be able to traverse hospital corridors and elevators by itself, nothing more.
I think the issue that makes it worse for white people visiting Nigeria (or other African countries for that matter) is that a large part of the white people visiting will be from relatively wealthy countries compared to the country they are visiting, so a white guy visiting Nigeria will be relatively likely to have what to a local would be a lot of money. That incentive isn't as likely to be there for criminals in Scotland that see a Nigerian tourist.
But your point is well taken, any outsider is an easier target because they are less likely to know what places to avoid, where to get help, or how to act.
I certainly don't think Nigerians in general are
any worse than people elsewhere (I would certainly not be living with a Nigerian woman if they were).
Just that as you say there are some bad people everywhere, but more of them will be ready
to take the step from minor things to serious
crimes when their most likely alternative is
poverty, and even more so when there are easy,
tempting targets available...
Unfortunately it reflects badly on good people as well. In the case of developing countries like Nigeria that effect is perhaps even worse than the crime itself - being deprived of foreign investment and aid because of fear of being defrauded or otherwise becoming victims of crime likely costs developing countries billions.
Eh, no. Haven't kept up with "current" events? Zaire is now the Democratic republic of Congo. Don't confuse it with Congo, though as that is another country.
While my (Nigerian) girlfriend would likely agree with you, keep in mind that Sharia is "only" in use by the Islamic states in the North, and only for muslims, and has actually been declared illegal and a violation of the constitution by the federal government.
So while that might not stop them from carrying out sentences, it is certainly not something that affects all of Nigeria.
That aside though, my girlfriend has some quite horrifying stories about the level of crime in Nigeria, and for white people there's the added issue that we're practically signposts saying "tourists" and "easy targets" for criminals.
First of all, Nigeria only recently got an elected president. Yes they have tons of problems, but at least the present government seems to try to do something about it.
But it is hard to do so efficiently when the military is still incredibly strong, when heavy arms is easy to get hold of, and the country is split both along religious lines (christian and muslem) and along tribal lines
However, this is NOT about spamming. This is about fighting organized crime. Several people have met their death from following up on 419 letters and then trying to get their money back. This is about crime syndicates getting funding through fraud. They are a major part of the reason Nigeria is in as deep trouble as it is.
And they cause problems not only for people directly affected, but for Nigerians everywhere. In many places credit cards issued in Nigeria aren't accepted by some companies (British Airways is a recent case, don't know if they changed their policy again) because the amount of fraud done by the crime syndicates is too high for them to bear.
It also causes problems for legitimate Nigerian businesses, who are scrutinized extra, or even just not considered for business deals because of the risk of fraud.
Codeweavers is in the business of making Wine the best it can be. The Crossover products aren't small side projects for them, but central to their business. If anything I think Codeweavers know what Wine based products there is a market for. They may not sell millions of copies, but then Codeweavers is a small company and doesn't need to sell millions of copies to thrive.
Formal methodologies cause a huge overhead in small projects or for small teams. That does not mean they are bad for an organization that is large enough, but for a small team it is not a cost efficient use of resources.
I've done both done consulting and development jobs with various sized development teams, and headed development teams of various sizes for several years, and I've seen large teams fail miserably because of lack of methodologies and small teams fail miserably because they where spending time on formal design and documentation phases where their competitors were not (guess who
got to market first....), and the other way around.
It is all about setting the requirements based on the projects size and complexity, not about insisting on using formal methodologies whether the project requires it or not.
You may keep your illusions if you want, but if you truly believe that an organization spending time using formal methodologies for 2-3 month projects involving 2-4 developers or thereabouts
(face it, the majority of software development projects are hacks, not major pieces of software) would be competitive, then I know I wouldn't even consider hiring you for my team.
Once the team grows, formal methodologies isn't only a good thing, it is an absolute requirement for success, as it gets to difficult for even the good developers to keep track of all the interdependencies.
Somewhere along the line you reach a point from
where formal methodologies isn't overhead anymore, but a vital requirement.
But don't kid yourself, if the project is small enough it isn't about structure or methodologies, but the qualities of individual developers, and imposing stringent rules on them will often have the opposite effet of what you intended.
What do you prefer: Paying the taxes required to build and maintain a separate fiber network for the government to use during emergencies, or having routers reconfigured so that you'll get slightly higher latency during an emergency because government emergency communication is prioritized?
Phone systems have had systems to allow giving priority to emergency systems for ages. How often do you have problems getting through on the phone outside massive emergencies?
You're wrong about the smaller ISPs. Practically all traffic on the internet today go through a very small group of major backbone providers and major ISPs. The minor ISPs only control a very tiny fraction of traffic on to and off of the internet - it would simply not matter.
E911 is massively different, because it requires changes at endpoints, including terminals (peoples cellphones).
All that's needed to cover something like 90% of internet traffic is configuration changes at the major backbone providers and the top 10-20 ISPs. Bothering with the smaller ISPs wouldn't be worth the trouble, as support at the backbone providers and major ISPs would in effect make it possible to throttle the traffic from most smaller ISPs anyway.
During a major emergency you typically get congestion of any means of communication, because a large amount of people try to contact relatives, friends, co-workers, etc., and people looking for news. This is not about normal circumstances, where you are right - there's no need for special treatment, but for cases where the an emergency has already caused the network to get massively bogged down.
Did you see the network traffic generated around September 11th? The internet got unresponsive in large parts of the world due to just the sheer amount of people trying to get news.
This is not about shifting sensitive data in plain text, but about letting emergency services get a more efficient way to communicate.
Slashdot Mirror
In a perfect market, competition will continuously push prices down as your competitors will keep undercutting you, and that is what his statement reflects. If you want to stay in business in a free market, you must indeed provide more and more for less and less. In addition you must actually manage to get a reasonable profit margin out of it.
Of course a certain American software company is a good demonstration of how a free market without proper oversight can easily create monopolies which screw up that model...
Ok. Enough of the sarcasm. I agree with you that more should be done to fight poverty. But instead of complaining about an experiment that included one PC being made available to poor kids, and the person doing the experiment pushing ahead to get funding for more access to technology for underprivileged illiterate kids, you might instead try to direct your complaints against people who do nothing.
Yes, he isn't giving them food or shelter, but he isn't solely responsible for stopping poverty in the world. However giving these kids knowledge is as important as a long term strategy to help people out of poverty as food and shelter is as a short term strategy. Both is needed. Without better education most of these kids will never get out of poverty.
Do you seriously prefer to make people stay dependent on charity?
Of course your complaint about "Western civilization" is quite amusing when the article is about an experiment being done in India, by an employee of an Indian company.
What the article pointed out was primarily that you can get a solid foundation without the help of a teacher, and that it is a waste of resources to spend a teachers time on teaching the kids things they can learn on their own in an environment where they don't have nearly enough teachers to cover the need.
In other words, giving kids gentle guidance by giving them access to a computer, and possibly give them some help or access to someone to ask questions of every now and then might be a lot more cost effective (and thus enable them to reach more kids) than having a teacher guide them through every little step.
I especially liked the example with MP3. All the guy had to do was show them the possibility - then the kids explored further on their own, finding sources of MP3s, downloading and installing players etc..
Keep in mind that kids also love showing each other "cool stuff" - this is learning where the kids themselves participate in the teaching process as well.
It would be interesting to see what somewhat more intervention would cause - if the kids got a chance to get some more "nudges" like the MP3 one, and access to more tools (like installing educational games etc.).
Sure, the threshold might be higher for CLIs, but it's by no means certain that children would be stopped by it.
As anecdotal evidence of that, I learned to program on the VIC 20 and C64 largely without assistance.
At the time I started showing an interest in the Vic 20 we had at home I was 5. I started writing "programs" on paper emulating what I saw my father writing.
When he noticed that, he let me use the computer instead, and gave me the manual to look at.
Even though the manual was in English, and I didn't know a word of English at the time, and only knew the basics of reading, I was soon writing small Basic programs that actually did stuff.
All it took was examples, even though I had no idea what they would do.
I'm not claiming everyone would do what I did, but I don't have any illusions that I'm so special that I'd figure out stuff at the age of 5 that not a substantial amount of other kids would figure out as well in the same situation.
As for 3 I would consider the transfer of nuclear material everyone certainly should have a right to know. A lot of people are very concerned about the safety of such transports, and especially when it is likely that possible saboteurs will have the information anyway, it should be a right for members of the public to know so that they can make the decision for themselves on whether or not to be near the area where the transport happens.
And in fact, not that these movements are hardly easy to hide. The security around the movement of radioactive waste is so high in Germany due to the amount of protests it raises, that it is trivial to find out when and where it happens because the security precautions are highly visible.
According to at least one CNN report, at one point the German government had to use 15.000 police officers to protect ONE shipment of radioactive waste because of the massive amount of demonstrations.
And the same law has already chilled speech by making several people restrict access to various documents to people outside the US (including Alan Cox for a few Linux kernel changelog entries)?
So much for free speech guarantees in the US.
Yes, there are areas where you have more free speech rights in the US than in Germany, but the opposite is also true.
That in itself invalidates the application, and it is simple to test even after the fact: Find a group of people that are completely unaware of the patent, and do ask them about differents ways to swing.
In addition, a search for prior art on this would be relatively easy: How many parents have home videos of their kids on a swing, or could testify to the methods their kids use on a swing? I doubt you'd have to sit through too many hours of home videos before you'd have proof of prior art.
You are right that they aren't supposed to prevent people from clowning - it's not there decision to make. It however is their decision to make whether a patent application is for something that is obvious to someone well versed in the field of the patent, and that there is no prior art. Both of which seems to fail miserably in this case.
For an even more extreme example of extra CPU's (though not necessarily much more powerful, and two of them not in use :-), I at one point had an Amiga 2000 with a 68000 CPU. I got a used 68020
accelerator board for it. In addition it had one of those PC cards that let you run DOS in a window, with an 8086, and an 286 accelerator for it. To top it off my SCSI card had a Z80 on it.
But one CPU is missing....
Guess what is used as a keyboard controller on many of the Amigas? An embedded version of the 6510, running at 2MHz and with onboard RAM and ROM..
So to sum it up, the CPUs in use: 68020, 286, Z-80 and some chip with an 6510 core. Now that's multiprocessing :-)
But it does demonstrate how unlikely it is that an integrated environment will be the result if a significant part of members of society is looking for an "integrated" neighborhood:
Everyone that moves to a neighborhood raises the chance that the neighborhood, or parts of it becomes becomes dominated enough by a particular race that fewer people consider it integrated. This causes a domino effect: Everyone looking for integration will keep on moving out of "ghettos", and will extend the ghettos that way.
As such it demonstrates that wanting to live in an integrated environment is not necessarily achieved by moving to the best integrated environment, but by moving into the proximity of a ghetto of predominantly people of another race.
That is unlikely to happen unless the "ghetto" has desirable factors. Such factor might be to be prestigeous, to have low crime rates, good schools etc. However those factors are closely related to the issues you bring up, and if people in the poor group wants to integrate they can't afford to, and if people in the "wealthy" group wants to help integration they have to move to the "bad part of town".
So even if the model is extremely simplistic, it does point at one possible contributing factor to the formation of ghettos: Everything else being equal, for integration to occur a significant amount of people need to be willing to either move to or stay in an area they perceive as a ghetto with mostly people of another race.
Did you even read the article? The robot delivers the drugs in a locked safe to each nursing station. It does not go around handing out drugs to anyone. It's a transport mechanism that is "smart" enough to be able to traverse hospital corridors and elevators by itself, nothing more.
I think the issue that makes it worse for white people visiting Nigeria (or other African countries for that matter) is that a large part of the white people visiting will be from relatively wealthy countries compared to the country they are visiting, so a white guy visiting Nigeria will be relatively likely to have what to a local would be a lot of money. That incentive isn't as likely to be there for criminals in Scotland that see a Nigerian tourist.
But your point is well taken, any outsider is an easier target because they are less likely to know what places to avoid, where to get help, or how to act.
I certainly don't think Nigerians in general are any worse than people elsewhere (I would certainly not be living with a Nigerian woman if they were). Just that as you say there are some bad people everywhere, but more of them will be ready to take the step from minor things to serious crimes when their most likely alternative is poverty, and even more so when there are easy, tempting targets available...
Unfortunately it reflects badly on good people as well. In the case of developing countries like Nigeria that effect is perhaps even worse than the crime itself - being deprived of foreign investment and aid because of fear of being defrauded or otherwise becoming victims of crime likely costs developing countries billions.
Islamic law is only in force in the Islamic states in the north of Nigeria, and they are only applied to muslims.
Actually somewhere at the hosting provider of the Nigerian High Comission in London, UK... At least that's what the page itself says.
Eh, no. Haven't kept up with "current" events? Zaire is now the Democratic republic of Congo. Don't confuse it with Congo, though as that is another country.
So while that might not stop them from carrying out sentences, it is certainly not something that affects all of Nigeria.
That aside though, my girlfriend has some quite horrifying stories about the level of crime in Nigeria, and for white people there's the added issue that we're practically signposts saying "tourists" and "easy targets" for criminals.
But it is hard to do so efficiently when the military is still incredibly strong, when heavy arms is easy to get hold of, and the country is split both along religious lines (christian and muslem) and along tribal lines
However, this is NOT about spamming. This is about fighting organized crime. Several people have met their death from following up on 419 letters and then trying to get their money back. This is about crime syndicates getting funding through fraud. They are a major part of the reason Nigeria is in as deep trouble as it is.
And they cause problems not only for people directly affected, but for Nigerians everywhere. In many places credit cards issued in Nigeria aren't accepted by some companies (British Airways is a recent case, don't know if they changed their policy again) because the amount of fraud done by the crime syndicates is too high for them to bear.
It also causes problems for legitimate Nigerian businesses, who are scrutinized extra, or even just not considered for business deals because of the risk of fraud.
Codeweavers is in the business of making Wine the best it can be. The Crossover products aren't small side projects for them, but central to their business. If anything I think Codeweavers know what Wine based products there is a market for. They may not sell millions of copies, but then Codeweavers is a small company and doesn't need to sell millions of copies to thrive.
You might be thinking about Trailblazer, but there were quite a few others that fit the description as well.
I've done both done consulting and development jobs with various sized development teams, and headed development teams of various sizes for several years, and I've seen large teams fail miserably because of lack of methodologies and small teams fail miserably because they where spending time on formal design and documentation phases where their competitors were not (guess who got to market first....), and the other way around.
It is all about setting the requirements based on the projects size and complexity, not about insisting on using formal methodologies whether the project requires it or not.
You may keep your illusions if you want, but if you truly believe that an organization spending time using formal methodologies for 2-3 month projects involving 2-4 developers or thereabouts (face it, the majority of software development projects are hacks, not major pieces of software) would be competitive, then I know I wouldn't even consider hiring you for my team.
Once the team grows, formal methodologies isn't only a good thing, it is an absolute requirement for success, as it gets to difficult for even the good developers to keep track of all the interdependencies.
Somewhere along the line you reach a point from where formal methodologies isn't overhead anymore, but a vital requirement.
But don't kid yourself, if the project is small enough it isn't about structure or methodologies, but the qualities of individual developers, and imposing stringent rules on them will often have the opposite effet of what you intended.
Phone systems have had systems to allow giving priority to emergency systems for ages. How often do you have problems getting through on the phone outside massive emergencies?
E911 is massively different, because it requires changes at endpoints, including terminals (peoples cellphones).
All that's needed to cover something like 90% of internet traffic is configuration changes at the major backbone providers and the top 10-20 ISPs. Bothering with the smaller ISPs wouldn't be worth the trouble, as support at the backbone providers and major ISPs would in effect make it possible to throttle the traffic from most smaller ISPs anyway.
If you read the damn article, you'll see that this is not something that is specific to the US government.
Did you see the network traffic generated around September 11th? The internet got unresponsive in large parts of the world due to just the sheer amount of people trying to get news.
This is not about shifting sensitive data in plain text, but about letting emergency services get a more efficient way to communicate.
Try to read the article next time.