Give someone a sense of 'empowerment' or 'better than you' and it's amazing what their conscience will let them get away with.
I dunno. I think I'm smarter than most people, but that only makes me feel greater responsibility. For example, when a friend makes a mistake I feel it is my duty to explain his error to him a such length that he'll never make it again. Naturally this is humiliating for my friends, but fortunately, that has proved to be a self-limiting problem.
From that I have concluded that popular people are less ethical than unpopular ones.
You know what happens when you charge a guy with a hate crime for vandalizing the house of the black family? All the vandals now target my house because I'm white and there's no risk they might be charged with a hate crime.
That's an interesting perspective. "Hate crimes" have existed as a category of crimes for several decades now. How many times has that happened to you?
The funny thing is, all crimes against another person are hate crimes. Putting a special label on them is stupid and obtuse.
Actually, "hate crime" is a serious misnomer, and it leads to misunderstandings like this. "Hate crimes" aren't crimes of passion; they're more akin to *treason* because they're crimes against liberty.
Suppose you roll into town for the KKK meeting, and you pick out a black family's house at random for a cross burning. You have nothing in particular against the people living in that house. Although you're a racist, it doesn't even mean you can't have *cordial* relationships with individual blacks *as long as they stay in their place*. So the cross burning isn't particularly directed to the people living in the house. It's a message to *everyone*: *I* get to decide who lives where. *I* get to decide how you worship God. *I* get to decide what opinions you can express.
And anyone who doesn't play by *my* rules had better look out.
This gets complicated because these crimes often mixed with personal hatred; that's the reason for the misnomer. When you lynch a black guy for dating a white woman, you surely have *particular* hatred directed at that man. But you're also saying "*I* get to decide who sleeps with who," and *that's* the part of your act that's crime against liberty. The intention isn't just to hurt the man you hate, but to strike fear into anyone who doesn't live the way you think they should.
putting this at the feet of the Conservative Party of Canada is premature and possibly libellous. ... My personal bet (you saw it here first!) is that this was a botched operation by some union activitists....
What is the literary problem that hypertext is solving?
I actually see some interesting possibilities in the hypertext format.
Excluding attempts at avante garde experimentation, scenes in well written stories are told from a single character's point of view (POV in writer slang). The POV character may vary from scene to scene, but sometimes a writer deliberately breaks up a scene so he can show it from a different character's POV, but if he does it too often it becomes disconcerting. It's called "head hopping"; the author using his control of the narration to repeatedly jerk readers' consciousness out of one character's head and insert it into another. However if the *reader* were able to choose at will, he could switch POV when it seemed natural to him, or when he was sick of being in one of the characters' head.
This would have considerable comic utility. Imagine reading a scene where a wife is telling a husband what she wants him to do, and receiving what she thinks are affirmative responses. But our suspicions are aroused, and we switch POVs and find out what's he's actually hearing and what's really going through his head.
Stories are much more constrained than real life. For one thing they have a beginning, middle and end. Even non-linear stories simply use non-linear narration on linear events. It's the way that storytellers constrain the chaos of reality that makes stories satisfying to read. The problem with the few hypertext stories I've seen is that they're showcases for the *flexibility* of hypertext, but flexibility of the tool does not in itself make the result any better, because what's left out is a big part of making a story work.
Another possibility would be to abandon the idea of a story and create a totally different kind of literary artifact. Sunshine 69 seems to be an attempt along those lines to create an explorable web of text, images and sound. The problem with it is that the nodes themselves aren't that interesting.
So for them, there isn't much joy in pouring a significant amount of work into a target hypertext segment where 90% of the readers will miss it.
Actually, if something isn't pie-in-the-face obvious, 90% or readers will miss it anyway. Even *intelligent*, *attentive* readers. Extracting nuance from a story is a tricky and unreliable process. So you can either talk down to your readers, or you can try to make the story work on more than one level. The advantage of not talking down to your readers is that you're more likely to produce a story that readers can read over and over again.
Sometimes authors put in details that only a one-in-a-million reader will notice. Tolkien did that in the scene where Bilbo gives Frodo the sword Sting. He doesn't just hand the sword over, he drives the sword into a wooden beam in Eldrond's house and Frodo takes it out. Decades later Tom Shippey pointed out that this is almost certainly a deliberate echoing of Odin in the Völsunga saga driving his sword into the tree Barnstokkr which grows in the hall of King Völsung so that only Sigmund is able to draw it out again. Once your attention is drawn to that detail, what had previously seemed like a throw-away scene starts to open up different layers of meaning.
The GP actually has it right. He's not describing the Treasury Department or Stimulus Bill bailouts, he's just describing one of the mechanisms by which money is put into circulation. The problem with your analysis is that you are talking like debt can be conjured out of thin air. It can't be. Debt is the result of a *trans*action, which has two sides; if there is income on one end, there's expense on the other; if there's debt incurred on one side, there's assets acquired on the other. The Fed cannot add to the economy's *total* debt by the mechanism the GP describes because a debt and an equal asset are conjured into existence *together*.
The "growing debt" you are talking about simply reflects this intrinsic double-sidedness of transactions. Suppose the economy doubles in size. If you want stable prices, the amount of dollars in circulation has to double. Because of the double-sidedness of transactions, that means the amount of debt on the Fed's books has to double; logically it amounts to the very same thing. There's no way to get more money into circulation without creating a corresponding debt on the central bank's books, unless you want to *give* it away. If you simply give money away when you need the money supply to contract, you have no choice but to *take money away* from people. The system of loans is sensible in that the disbursement and collection of money are built-in.
So what about that interest paid back to the Fed? Is that a problem? Well it is true that the interest paid back to the Fed *does* take dollars out of the economy, but that's the easiest problem in the world for a central bank to fix. It simply lends them right out again. But the numbers keep getting bigger. Isn't that heading for disaster? No, because the numbers keep getting bigger only if the amount of money in circulation grows, and that should only be done when the economy grows. If dollars are only traded for things of value, then ultimately those dollars have to make their way into the hands of people who've created new value. So what if the economy contracts instead of expands? Even easier. That interest payment takes currency out of the economy, which is just what you want.
This all seems a bit "through the looking-glass, but keep in mind that money has no *intrinsic* value; it's just a token we use to making trading things with *real* value convenient and flexible. I was advising a friend recently to sell a small factory he owns but has no immediate use for. In fact tying up his capital in this asset is slowing down his business growth. "Put the extra 6000 sq ft of facility in a more productive investment; when you've grown the business enough to need it, take that space out again."
It makes no sense to talk about "under" or "over-valuing" goods in terms of *currency*; it only makes sense to value *one* kind of good against *another*. In other words it makes no difference if your magic sword costs ten rupees or a hundred so long as everything else in the game is proportionately scaled. The only reason you want stable prices so that *future* goods are not undervalued (inflation) or overvalued (deflation) relative to things you could buy today.
The only way to ensure stable prices is to manipulate the money supply to parallel economic growth. Is the process of manipulating the money supply subject to abuse and fraud? HELL YES. So is *every other* power we grant the government, from passing laws or maintaining national defense.
I agree that he had no business doing what he did, but that hardly justifies an eight month prison sentence when no harm was intended and it is highly questionable that any harm was done.
Some of the prosecution's and judge's justifications for this sentence are so vague or muddled that they're troubling. For example, the prosecutor claimed that Mangham had "stolen" "invaluable intellectual property" by downloading Facebook source code. It's hard to see how anything can be stolen if (a) the owner is not deprived of its use and (b) the possessor of an admittedly improper copy does nothing with that copy to infringe on the interests of the owner other than *possess* it. If that is not theft under UK law (which I'm pretty sure it isn't), the prosecutor has no business characterizing the crime as such. Furthermore the prosecutor seems to hold a very peculiar notion of what constitutes criminal intent:
He acted with determination, undoubted ingenuity and it was sophisticated, it was calculating.
The *criminal intent* here was the defendant desire to improperly accessing Facebook's computers. Whether he was determined or ingenious is neither here nor there, since the defendant never claimed he stumbled on Facebook's systems by *accident*. The prosecutor is attempting to emotionally *color* the defendant's actions as theft, without actually having to *prove* any theft occurred.
As for the $200,000 Facebook supposedly spent on this, it's questionable if that can be characterized as damage the defendant did to Facebook, especially if this figure represents some kind of internal expense accounting. Looking into hacking attempts is a routine function.
The probably don't have a lot of experience with this education thing. Change can be unsettling; they're probably uncertain what goes on in these new-fangled "classrooms". Under the circumstances it's quite understandable that they'd turn to the comfort of something more familiar to them, like broadcast television.
Well, Microsoft already *has* a tablet-ready operating system that will run desktop applications. It's called Windows 7. I happen to have a Lenovo S10-3t, a netbook that converts to a tablet. The bundled apps that take over the screen work ok -- except that the device itself is too fat and heavy to use as a tablet for long. The biggest problem with Windows 7 is that provides an approach for controlling desktop apps on a touchscreen that almost works, but which is throw-the-damn-thing-against-the-wall frustrating. I think *adding* UI features to run desktop UI apps on a tablet is inherently futile. App UIs have to be redesigned from the ground up for tablets.
What Microsoft has to do to make people sit up and take notice is produce a version of Microsoft Office with an appropriately tablet oriented UI. Since an office app is at best marginal without a keyboard, someone needs to manufacture a decently thin and light tablet with a an optional wireless keyboard. That should be an affordable addition. Bluetooth keyboards for iPads are dirt cheap; I bought my wife one that snaps over her iPad2 to double as a protective case for something like $35.
A typical word processing document has more content than will fit on the screen. Handling that efficiently and effortlessly presents a challenge to tablet UIs.I'd say tablets are the clear winner for content that readily fits on a screen (e.g. movies) and just as good as desktops for content in which navigation to distant parts of the document are infrequent (e.g. ebooks). But desktop UIs have a killer feature when it comes to navigating to distant parts of a document: the humble scrollbar. Scrollbars are going out of style because they don't work well on tablet UIs. The mechanisms for scrolling through content on tablet UIs work, but they're much less precise and convenient, unless there's a way to differentiate areas by content (e.g.. the scrolling mechanism in iOS for the contact list, which works impressively well for a solution that doesn't use a keyboard).
So a tablet version of office, running on a tablet with a wireless keyboard, would still be a little awkward. I think that could be fixed by having a scroll wheel type control on the keyboard, and some kind of on-screen feedback widget that would pop up in response to show you how far you are scrolling into a document.
So what you're telling me is, all I have to do is develop an easily identifiable genetic strain of a common farm plant, copyright it, then let it pollinate whatever and wherever it can, and then I can sue EVERYONE? Forever?
Sandra Postel is saying that grain-fed beef takes 5300 liters of water per pound (oh, the units! liters per pound?), as opposed to grass fed beef which just requires rainwater.
I'm glad you quoted TFA, because I actually know Sandra; it reminds me I need to drop her a line.
It's quite easy to imagine us using *much* less water in growing our food, and coincidentally spending a lot less money to produce it. It's just hard to do that without changing what we eat.
If we were faced with an agricultural water crisis in the US, we could easily fix it by eating less beef -- at least beef that wasn't grass-fed. So I think that this problem might be naturally self-limiting in North America. As we approached the limits of the water available, the price of the most water-intensive foods would go up, and demand would shift to more water-efficient foods.
The problem would solve itself, if we don't *try* to solve it. But the problem is that we *would* try to solve it. We'd invest public money to find ways of keeping the price of beef low, rather than letting the rising price of beef curb beef consumption. We might undertake massive public-works projects to divert water to the supply-chain of beef production. It's not that reducing the price of beef is an inherently bad thing to do, it's that costly beef isn't really a problem if there's enough capacity to produce food in general. Treating it like a problem is a waste of time, effort and money. Perhaps worse, most of the things we could do to fix the bogus "problem" would create real problems. Subsidizing beef will exacerbate the water shortage and strain public budgets. Diverting water will damage ecosystems and livelihoods dependent on them.
Fuck recyclable, give me government mandated, cut the testicles off the manufacturing executives, life time warranties.
Actually Paul Hawken, one of the founders of Smith and Hawken, had a somewhat similar idea, only it was a bit more self-regulating. He suggested that many things we buy then throw into the waste stream could instead be leased, ultimately from the manufacturer.
Take a laptop. A typical laptop lasts about three years, maybe five. But suppose you didn't buy the laptop, you leased it under an arrangement where the manufacturer is obligated to take the actual physical laptop back and pay for its disposal. This *internalizes* the cost of disposal for the manufacturer. It's no longer a cost somebody else has to worry about, so dealing with the cost of disposal becomes a concern in the design of the product.
As a result a manufacturer might choose to use an easily recyclable material for the laptop body, say aluminum instead of polycarbonate. The manufacturer would better be able to recycle polycarbonate too. Polycarbonate products are labelled with a "7" which means "other"; this makes it tricky to recycle in the waste stream because it's mixed in with other miscellaneous plastics; when returned to the manufacturer the materials would sort themselves.
We can add the warranty angle to this too. You wouldn't need a warranty; if a device became unusable because of a defect, you'd return it to the lessor who'd have to refund you the balance of your lease. Not having to deal with returns is a major incentive for making quality products. Back when telephones were leased, they were built like tanks.
Hawken's idea is one of those interesting one that *could* work in some conceivable world, but it's not clear how we'd go about transforming the current world in to one of those.
Well, look. The SLS program is projected to cost 18 billion in design costs through 2017, and an additional 23 billion to achieve four launches by 2025, with the full 130 metric ton capability coming some time after 2030.
Elon Musk says he can have a *150 MT* heavy launch vehicle ready in *five years* at *fixed price* of 2.5 billion, with a per-flight cost of around 300 million. And thus far SpaceX has shown it isn't just blowing smoke.
So why the heck are we taking only 175 million away from SLS? Why don't we give the private contractor *500 million a year* in return for a for a reasonable shot at getting the job done thirteen years sooner? Because this is not about getting job done. It's about keeping the spending on the program high for the indefinite future.
If SpaceX succeeded in building a heavy launch vehicle in five years for 2.5 billion, it's not going to be possible to even *pretend* to justify spending a couple of billion dollars per year over the next seven to twelve years on a system that will cost more to operate.
I never said that Webb won't be worth the money. What I said is that if we'd been realistic about the Webb's budget from the program's inception, it would *already* be launched, and *at less cost* than we'e already put into it.
We're in the classic "sunk costs" scenario now. I don't want to see the program cancelled, but in all fairness to the people who do want to cancel, the history of the project does not exactly inspire confidence in the project management's ability to deliver *anything*. In 2002 we were eight years away from launch; ten years later we're still six years from launch.
What I've heard seems to imply that we're over the hump; I hope that's so. But six years is a long time, and projects that are horribly late have a nasty habit of springing last-minute surprises. This program has put us in a high-risk, high-stakes situation. If the launch date slips again, or the price goes up again, it's going to be politically impossible *not* to cancel it. Then we won't have Webb *or* the other science that we've cut to feed Webb's out of control budget.
Didn't we just read a story yesterday that indicated some fairly substantial increases in overall research funding? It seems to me that this indicates a preference for certain research programs over others...
It's the James Webb telescope. The program was initiated in 1997 with an estimated budget of $0.5 billion and a launch date 10 years in the future. In 2002 when the telescope got its name, the program cost was estimated at $2.5 billion and launch date 8 years in the future. As of 2011 the cost estimate is $8.7 billion and launch date 7 years in the future. If we'd been able to hold the program costs at 2010 levels, that would be a lifetime cost difference of $2.2 billion. That could easily have funded all the programs that were cut.
So, does our commitment to this project prove our commitment to science? I don't think so. I believe the it shows we've been paying *lip service* to space exploration by undertaking big ticket projects on unrealistic budgets. That's like closing your eyes running off the end of high dive platform. Pretending it isn't so far down might help you get off the platform, but it sets you up for a nasty surprise.
Today if we could turn back the clock to 2008 on this program, when it was a "mere" $5.1 billion with launch date in 2014, we'd be delighted. If that had been the expectation back in 1997, the program would probably have been axed immediately. But the program might well have come in on time and on budget had the schedule and cost estimates been more realistic from the outset. Not catching a trivial problem early turns fixing it into a substantial project in its own right (e.g. the Hubble mirror repair).
Every project I've been on where costs are low-balled has gone pretty well up until we got to what according to plan should have been the 60%-80% done mark. That's when failures of those optimistic assumptions that got the project under the wire start piling up.
The hospital management is being treated well by the tablet manufacturer....
Hmm. Since that narrows the universe of possibilities down to a single vendor, you should probably tell us what OS the vendor uses on the tablet, otherwise people will waste their time giving you advice you can't use.
If you don't want to identify the vendor, and you can't tell us the OS without doing that, just say so. We'll pretend we don't know who you're talking about (although we will).
I agree with you. That said, one thing that ought to be noted is that everyone is assuming this guy signed a contract; it doesn't say that in the summary. It just says:
my employer has an IP policy that states that anything I do while under their employ is theirs, even when I'm off the clock.
Stating that something is their policy doesn't necessarily make it so. They can't unilaterally impose something like that, although if you are working on a competing product in your spare time they wouldn't have to. You'd be in the soup in any case.
If it's something really unrelated to work and it's non-commercial, I'd say the best bet is to ask your employer. Let's say your company does video encoding software and you want to set up your running club's website. What reasonable objection could they have to that? If they *do* object, then I definitely *would* look for different work, because I wouldn't trust anyone that greedy.
I'd say in order of preference the courses of action are: (1) get permission; (2) see a lawyer; (3) don't do it.
I wonder if the submitter's company is one of those ones that hires its employees as "consultants" to avoid paying taxes. If so this could get interesting.
Well, I think the problems with how people used HN are much more complicated than Hungarian Notation == Bad. They have to do with an inappropriate style of HN being adopted by C programmers for historical reasons.
Pointers are something the vast majority of non-C programmers never deal with these days. In the days of 16 bit Intel compatible software the most efficient pointer was a 16 bit integer(ish) value. Such a pointer could only address a 64K space, and so the programmer had to keep straight which pointers where "NEAR" pointers like these, which were 20 bit "FAR" pointers that could address half-again more than the 640K of RAM nobody would ever need, and "HUGE" pointers which could address the same address space as "FAR", but were *normalized so that you could do pointer arithmetic on them*. Clearly having a distinctive naming convention for FAR and HUGE pointers made a lot of sense, because you had to keep track of that to use the variable correctly.
Now set this stuff aside for a second and consider a programmer working in a much higher level language that abstracts all that implementation detail. Suppose he's working on a geographic information systems program where a city's geography is sometimes represented by a point (as it would in a nation-wide map), a polygon (as it would in a metro region map), and a polygon with topological information about its neighbors (as might be used in some sophisticated GIS analysis). If he chose a convention whereby the variables of each type were named "ptCity", "polyCity", and "topoCity", it wouldn't strike us as unreasonable. But if he chose the variable names "shpPtCity", "shpPolyCity", and "covPolyCity" to represent that the first two values come from a shapefile and the third comes from a coverage file (a format with topology), we'd probably say it's *stupid*. Unless this were something like a module that generated shapefiles from coverages, there'd be no reason to burden the maintainer with that detail, or to restrict the semantics of the data.
In this example, the stupid and sensible variable naming conventions are just different styles of "Hungarian Notation".
When you program "close to the iron", say writing device drivers, the *semantics* of a variable and the way it is stored and manipulated by the CPU are one and the same thing. But in the days of segmented memory in Windows those machine oriented details bled through into application programming. So programmers adopted the low-level HN style across the board, which was just dumb, instead of for just pointers, which was sensible. An OS or driver programmer might do some kinds of type casts, say from a pointer to byte array to a pointer to integer array, where remembering the exact type of the variable might remind him to deal with memory alignment and byte-order issues. If an app programmer does something like that you should send him back to his cave so he can bang the rocks together a little longer.
As for university CS professors back in the day insisting on a style of HN that simply regurgitates what the compiler already knows about a variable, that goes to show that most CS professors don't know all that much about programming.
He posits a hypothetical example that in the terms described, no reasonable person would disagree with:
Imagine this story: University scientists, working diligently in their lab, invent something world-changing. Several big corporations steal the invention for themselves, making billions of dollars in profits. The scientists receive nothing.
You don't have to be a professional folklorist or ethicist to conclude that the scientists are the good guys and the corporations are the bad guys.
Sure, because he's just told us the big corporations *stole* something. If we start from that characterization of what happened we'd have to agree, because stealing *by definition* is wrong. We never call rightful and proper uses of things "stealing". He then goes on to make a completely unsubstantiated claim:
In the 1990s, three University of California scientists allegedly developed and patented features that have become integral parts of what we today know as the "Interactive Web" -- including online video, image rotation, and search bar autocomplete.
What evidence does he present that these scientists "invented" anything? None. His characterization of this event is buttressed only by an ad hominem attack on people who disagree with him:
Technology pundits come from Bizarro Technology Punditry World, where up is down, black is white, and Google+ is the best thing ever.
So we aren't supposed to agree with *those* people on patents because he happens to think they're weird? Because they don't like the same things as us? He goes on to say, without any apparent sense of irony that these "bizarro technology pundits" are:
...ever fond of villainizing anyone [who disagrees with them on Internet patents]...
Next he gives us a spectacular display of weasel wording:
To be clear, I am not commenting on the actual results of the case. Not having seen all of the evidence or been in the courtroom, I do not attempt to second-guess the jury; they may well have made the legally correct decision.
So if he's not arguing about the "actual results" in this case, just what the heck is he talking about? We're supposed to feel pity toward the plaintiff,outrage at the defendants, and contempt toward the defendants' supporters -- on what basis? On the basis of something that *might* have happened but didn't? Because he thinks the defendants are greedy and rich, and their supporters are "bizarro pundits" who like Google+?
He's calibrated his imprecision very precisely here. He says has "not seen all the evidence", but does *not* tell us what evidence he *has* seen, or whether he has seen any evidence at all. This makes him hard to argue with -- we don't know which of his claims apply to what actually happened, and which apply to a purely hypothetical world of his own imagining.
Apparently he feels he can stand in the safety of that hypothetical world and lob his opinions at people in the real world:
What I do not understand is -- had the jury determined Eolas's patents valid -- why it would be A-OK for dozens of already megarich corporations to get even richer adopting technology they did not invent or have legal permission to use, but somehow immoral for the actual creators of the technology to likewise profit.
Note how he *predicates* his indictment of the defendants (aka the "megarich corporations") *on something that did not happen* ("had the jury..."). I started counting the logical fallacies in this statement and gave up when I hit six (straw man, begging the question, appeal to pity, appeal to spite, appeal to authority, and two different kinds of red herring).
Frankly, the reasoning in the article is so weak the only value I can see in discussing it is as an example of deceptive and faulty argumentation. I'd be interested in hearing a more robust argument, say from someone who wants to argue a natural property right to ideas.
Slashdot Mirror
Give someone a sense of 'empowerment' or 'better than you' and it's amazing what their conscience will let them get away with.
I dunno. I think I'm smarter than most people, but that only makes me feel greater responsibility. For example, when a friend makes a mistake I feel it is my duty to explain his error to him a such length that he'll never make it again. Naturally this is humiliating for my friends, but fortunately, that has proved to be a self-limiting problem.
From that I have concluded that popular people are less ethical than unpopular ones.
.. the IT world full of contrarians...
No it's not.
You know what happens when you charge a guy with a hate crime for vandalizing the house of the black family? All the vandals now target my house because I'm white and there's no risk they might be charged with a hate crime.
That's an interesting perspective. "Hate crimes" have existed as a category of crimes for several decades now. How many times has that happened to you?
Please don't be obtuse. I'm talking about *forcing* your will on other people, not just telling them what they *should* do.
The funny thing is, all crimes against another person are hate crimes. Putting a special label on them is stupid and obtuse.
Actually, "hate crime" is a serious misnomer, and it leads to misunderstandings like this. "Hate crimes" aren't crimes of passion; they're more akin to *treason* because they're crimes against liberty.
Suppose you roll into town for the KKK meeting, and you pick out a black family's house at random for a cross burning. You have nothing in particular against the people living in that house. Although you're a racist, it doesn't even mean you can't have *cordial* relationships with individual blacks *as long as they stay in their place*. So the cross burning isn't particularly directed to the people living in the house. It's a message to *everyone*: *I* get to decide who lives where. *I* get to decide how you worship God. *I* get to decide what opinions you can express.
And anyone who doesn't play by *my* rules had better look out.
This gets complicated because these crimes often mixed with personal hatred; that's the reason for the misnomer. When you lynch a black guy for dating a white woman, you surely have *particular* hatred directed at that man. But you're also saying "*I* get to decide who sleeps with who," and *that's* the part of your act that's crime against liberty. The intention isn't just to hurt the man you hate, but to strike fear into anyone who doesn't live the way you think they should.
putting this at the feet of the Conservative Party of Canada is premature and possibly libellous.
... ....
My personal bet (you saw it here first!) is that this was a botched operation by some union activitists
My personal bet is that you're a hypocrite.
What is the literary problem that hypertext is solving?
I actually see some interesting possibilities in the hypertext format.
Excluding attempts at avante garde experimentation, scenes in well written stories are told from a single character's point of view (POV in writer slang). The POV character may vary from scene to scene, but sometimes a writer deliberately breaks up a scene so he can show it from a different character's POV, but if he does it too often it becomes disconcerting. It's called "head hopping"; the author using his control of the narration to repeatedly jerk readers' consciousness out of one character's head and insert it into another. However if the *reader* were able to choose at will, he could switch POV when it seemed natural to him, or when he was sick of being in one of the characters' head.
This would have considerable comic utility. Imagine reading a scene where a wife is telling a husband what she wants him to do, and receiving what she thinks are affirmative responses. But our suspicions are aroused, and we switch POVs and find out what's he's actually hearing and what's really going through his head.
Stories are much more constrained than real life. For one thing they have a beginning, middle and end. Even non-linear stories simply use non-linear narration on linear events. It's the way that storytellers constrain the chaos of reality that makes stories satisfying to read. The problem with the few hypertext stories I've seen is that they're showcases for the *flexibility* of hypertext, but flexibility of the tool does not in itself make the result any better, because what's left out is a big part of making a story work.
Another possibility would be to abandon the idea of a story and create a totally different kind of literary artifact. Sunshine 69 seems to be an attempt along those lines to create an explorable web of text, images and sound. The problem with it is that the nodes themselves aren't that interesting.
So for them, there isn't much joy in pouring a significant amount of work into a target hypertext segment where 90% of the readers will miss it.
Actually, if something isn't pie-in-the-face obvious, 90% or readers will miss it anyway. Even *intelligent*, *attentive* readers. Extracting nuance from a story is a tricky and unreliable process. So you can either talk down to your readers, or you can try to make the story work on more than one level. The advantage of not talking down to your readers is that you're more likely to produce a story that readers can read over and over again.
Sometimes authors put in details that only a one-in-a-million reader will notice. Tolkien did that in the scene where Bilbo gives Frodo the sword Sting. He doesn't just hand the sword over, he drives the sword into a wooden beam in Eldrond's house and Frodo takes it out. Decades later Tom Shippey pointed out that this is almost certainly a deliberate echoing of Odin in the Völsunga saga driving his sword into the tree Barnstokkr which grows in the hall of King Völsung so that only Sigmund is able to draw it out again. Once your attention is drawn to that detail, what had previously seemed like a throw-away scene starts to open up different layers of meaning.
The GP actually has it right. He's not describing the Treasury Department or Stimulus Bill bailouts, he's just describing one of the mechanisms by which money is put into circulation. The problem with your analysis is that you are talking like debt can be conjured out of thin air. It can't be. Debt is the result of a *trans*action, which has two sides; if there is income on one end, there's expense on the other; if there's debt incurred on one side, there's assets acquired on the other. The Fed cannot add to the economy's *total* debt by the mechanism the GP describes because a debt and an equal asset are conjured into existence *together*.
The "growing debt" you are talking about simply reflects this intrinsic double-sidedness of transactions. Suppose the economy doubles in size. If you want stable prices, the amount of dollars in circulation has to double. Because of the double-sidedness of transactions, that means the amount of debt on the Fed's books has to double; logically it amounts to the very same thing. There's no way to get more money into circulation without creating a corresponding debt on the central bank's books, unless you want to *give* it away. If you simply give money away when you need the money supply to contract, you have no choice but to *take money away* from people. The system of loans is sensible in that the disbursement and collection of money are built-in.
So what about that interest paid back to the Fed? Is that a problem? Well it is true that the interest paid back to the Fed *does* take dollars out of the economy, but that's the easiest problem in the world for a central bank to fix. It simply lends them right out again. But the numbers keep getting bigger. Isn't that heading for disaster? No, because the numbers keep getting bigger only if the amount of money in circulation grows, and that should only be done when the economy grows. If dollars are only traded for things of value, then ultimately those dollars have to make their way into the hands of people who've created new value. So what if the economy contracts instead of expands? Even easier. That interest payment takes currency out of the economy, which is just what you want.
This all seems a bit "through the looking-glass, but keep in mind that money has no *intrinsic* value; it's just a token we use to making trading things with *real* value convenient and flexible. I was advising a friend recently to sell a small factory he owns but has no immediate use for. In fact tying up his capital in this asset is slowing down his business growth. "Put the extra 6000 sq ft of facility in a more productive investment; when you've grown the business enough to need it, take that space out again."
It makes no sense to talk about "under" or "over-valuing" goods in terms of *currency*; it only makes sense to value *one* kind of good against *another*. In other words it makes no difference if your magic sword costs ten rupees or a hundred so long as everything else in the game is proportionately scaled. The only reason you want stable prices so that *future* goods are not undervalued (inflation) or overvalued (deflation) relative to things you could buy today.
The only way to ensure stable prices is to manipulate the money supply to parallel economic growth. Is the process of manipulating the money supply subject to abuse and fraud? HELL YES. So is *every other* power we grant the government, from passing laws or maintaining national defense.
I agree that he had no business doing what he did, but that hardly justifies an eight month prison sentence when no harm was intended and it is highly questionable that any harm was done.
Some of the prosecution's and judge's justifications for this sentence are so vague or muddled that they're troubling. For example, the prosecutor claimed that Mangham had "stolen" "invaluable intellectual property" by downloading Facebook source code. It's hard to see how anything can be stolen if (a) the owner is not deprived of its use and (b) the possessor of an admittedly improper copy does nothing with that copy to infringe on the interests of the owner other than *possess* it. If that is not theft under UK law (which I'm pretty sure it isn't), the prosecutor has no business characterizing the crime as such. Furthermore the prosecutor seems to hold a very peculiar notion of what constitutes criminal intent:
He acted with determination, undoubted ingenuity and it was sophisticated, it was calculating.
The *criminal intent* here was the defendant desire to improperly accessing Facebook's computers. Whether he was determined or ingenious is neither here nor there, since the defendant never claimed he stumbled on Facebook's systems by *accident*. The prosecutor is attempting to emotionally *color* the defendant's actions as theft, without actually having to *prove* any theft occurred.
As for the $200,000 Facebook supposedly spent on this, it's questionable if that can be characterized as damage the defendant did to Facebook, especially if this figure represents some kind of internal expense accounting. Looking into hacking attempts is a routine function.
The probably don't have a lot of experience with this education thing. Change can be unsettling; they're probably uncertain what goes on in these new-fangled "classrooms". Under the circumstances it's quite understandable that they'd turn to the comfort of something more familiar to them, like broadcast television.
Well, Microsoft already *has* a tablet-ready operating system that will run desktop applications. It's called Windows 7. I happen to have a Lenovo S10-3t, a netbook that converts to a tablet. The bundled apps that take over the screen work ok -- except that the device itself is too fat and heavy to use as a tablet for long. The biggest problem with Windows 7 is that provides an approach for controlling desktop apps on a touchscreen that almost works, but which is throw-the-damn-thing-against-the-wall frustrating. I think *adding* UI features to run desktop UI apps on a tablet is inherently futile. App UIs have to be redesigned from the ground up for tablets.
What Microsoft has to do to make people sit up and take notice is produce a version of Microsoft Office with an appropriately tablet oriented UI. Since an office app is at best marginal without a keyboard, someone needs to manufacture a decently thin and light tablet with a an optional wireless keyboard. That should be an affordable addition. Bluetooth keyboards for iPads are dirt cheap; I bought my wife one that snaps over her iPad2 to double as a protective case for something like $35.
A typical word processing document has more content than will fit on the screen. Handling that efficiently and effortlessly presents a challenge to tablet UIs.I'd say tablets are the clear winner for content that readily fits on a screen (e.g. movies) and just as good as desktops for content in which navigation to distant parts of the document are infrequent (e.g. ebooks). But desktop UIs have a killer feature when it comes to navigating to distant parts of a document: the humble scrollbar. Scrollbars are going out of style because they don't work well on tablet UIs. The mechanisms for scrolling through content on tablet UIs work, but they're much less precise and convenient, unless there's a way to differentiate areas by content (e.g.. the scrolling mechanism in iOS for the contact list, which works impressively well for a solution that doesn't use a keyboard).
So a tablet version of office, running on a tablet with a wireless keyboard, would still be a little awkward. I think that could be fixed by having a scroll wheel type control on the keyboard, and some kind of on-screen feedback widget that would pop up in response to show you how far you are scrolling into a document.
As a society we need to start figuring out where the line is between what's good for the stockholder vs. what's good for society.
It's not that figuring the line is so hard. It's getting the law to reflect that knowledge.
So what you're telling me is, all I have to do is develop an easily identifiable genetic strain of a common farm plant, copyright it, then let it pollinate whatever and wherever it can, and then I can sue EVERYONE? Forever?
Where have you been for the last 20 years?
And can I move there?
Sandra Postel is saying that grain-fed beef takes 5300 liters of water per pound (oh, the units! liters per pound?), as opposed to grass fed beef which just requires rainwater.
I'm glad you quoted TFA, because I actually know Sandra; it reminds me I need to drop her a line.
It's quite easy to imagine us using *much* less water in growing our food, and coincidentally spending a lot less money to produce it. It's just hard to do that without changing what we eat.
If we were faced with an agricultural water crisis in the US, we could easily fix it by eating less beef -- at least beef that wasn't grass-fed. So I think that this problem might be naturally self-limiting in North America. As we approached the limits of the water available, the price of the most water-intensive foods would go up, and demand would shift to more water-efficient foods.
The problem would solve itself, if we don't *try* to solve it. But the problem is that we *would* try to solve it. We'd invest public money to find ways of keeping the price of beef low, rather than letting the rising price of beef curb beef consumption. We might undertake massive public-works projects to divert water to the supply-chain of beef production. It's not that reducing the price of beef is an inherently bad thing to do, it's that costly beef isn't really a problem if there's enough capacity to produce food in general. Treating it like a problem is a waste of time, effort and money. Perhaps worse, most of the things we could do to fix the bogus "problem" would create real problems. Subsidizing beef will exacerbate the water shortage and strain public budgets. Diverting water will damage ecosystems and livelihoods dependent on them.
Fuck recyclable, give me government mandated, cut the testicles off the manufacturing executives, life time warranties.
Actually Paul Hawken, one of the founders of Smith and Hawken, had a somewhat similar idea, only it was a bit more self-regulating. He suggested that many things we buy then throw into the waste stream could instead be leased, ultimately from the manufacturer.
Take a laptop. A typical laptop lasts about three years, maybe five. But suppose you didn't buy the laptop, you leased it under an arrangement where the manufacturer is obligated to take the actual physical laptop back and pay for its disposal. This *internalizes* the cost of disposal for the manufacturer. It's no longer a cost somebody else has to worry about, so dealing with the cost of disposal becomes a concern in the design of the product.
As a result a manufacturer might choose to use an easily recyclable material for the laptop body, say aluminum instead of polycarbonate. The manufacturer would better be able to recycle polycarbonate too. Polycarbonate products are labelled with a "7" which means "other"; this makes it tricky to recycle in the waste stream because it's mixed in with other miscellaneous plastics; when returned to the manufacturer the materials would sort themselves.
We can add the warranty angle to this too. You wouldn't need a warranty; if a device became unusable because of a defect, you'd return it to the lessor who'd have to refund you the balance of your lease. Not having to deal with returns is a major incentive for making quality products. Back when telephones were leased, they were built like tanks.
Hawken's idea is one of those interesting one that *could* work in some conceivable world, but it's not clear how we'd go about transforming the current world in to one of those.
Well, look. The SLS program is projected to cost 18 billion in design costs through 2017, and an additional 23 billion to achieve four launches by 2025, with the full 130 metric ton capability coming some time after 2030.
Elon Musk says he can have a *150 MT* heavy launch vehicle ready in *five years* at *fixed price* of 2.5 billion, with a per-flight cost of around 300 million. And thus far SpaceX has shown it isn't just blowing smoke.
So why the heck are we taking only 175 million away from SLS? Why don't we give the private contractor *500 million a year* in return for a for a reasonable shot at getting the job done thirteen years sooner? Because this is not about getting job done. It's about keeping the spending on the program high for the indefinite future.
If SpaceX succeeded in building a heavy launch vehicle in five years for 2.5 billion, it's not going to be possible to even *pretend* to justify spending a couple of billion dollars per year over the next seven to twelve years on a system that will cost more to operate.
I never said that Webb won't be worth the money. What I said is that if we'd been realistic about the Webb's budget from the program's inception, it would *already* be launched, and *at less cost* than we'e already put into it.
We're in the classic "sunk costs" scenario now. I don't want to see the program cancelled, but in all fairness to the people who do want to cancel, the history of the project does not exactly inspire confidence in the project management's ability to deliver *anything*. In 2002 we were eight years away from launch; ten years later we're still six years from launch.
What I've heard seems to imply that we're over the hump; I hope that's so. But six years is a long time, and projects that are horribly late have a nasty habit of springing last-minute surprises. This program has put us in a high-risk, high-stakes situation. If the launch date slips again, or the price goes up again, it's going to be politically impossible *not* to cancel it. Then we won't have Webb *or* the other science that we've cut to feed Webb's out of control budget.
Didn't we just read a story yesterday that indicated some fairly substantial increases in overall research funding? It seems to me that this indicates a preference for certain research programs over others...
It's the James Webb telescope. The program was initiated in 1997 with an estimated budget of $0.5 billion and a launch date 10 years in the future. In 2002 when the telescope got its name, the program cost was estimated at $2.5 billion and launch date 8 years in the future. As of 2011 the cost estimate is $8.7 billion and launch date 7 years in the future. If we'd been able to hold the program costs at 2010 levels, that would be a lifetime cost difference of $2.2 billion. That could easily have funded all the programs that were cut.
So, does our commitment to this project prove our commitment to science? I don't think so. I believe the it shows we've been paying *lip service* to space exploration by undertaking big ticket projects on unrealistic budgets. That's like closing your eyes running off the end of high dive platform. Pretending it isn't so far down might help you get off the platform, but it sets you up for a nasty surprise.
Today if we could turn back the clock to 2008 on this program, when it was a "mere" $5.1 billion with launch date in 2014, we'd be delighted. If that had been the expectation back in 1997, the program would probably have been axed immediately. But the program might well have come in on time and on budget had the schedule and cost estimates been more realistic from the outset. Not catching a trivial problem early turns fixing it into a substantial project in its own right (e.g. the Hubble mirror repair).
Every project I've been on where costs are low-balled has gone pretty well up until we got to what according to plan should have been the 60%-80% done mark. That's when failures of those optimistic assumptions that got the project under the wire start piling up.
Maybe it'll make the criminals Bach Orff.
There. Fixed that for you.
The hospital management is being treated well by the tablet manufacturer....
Hmm. Since that narrows the universe of possibilities down to a single vendor, you should probably tell us what OS the vendor uses on the tablet, otherwise people will waste their time giving you advice you can't use.
If you don't want to identify the vendor, and you can't tell us the OS without doing that, just say so. We'll pretend we don't know who you're talking about (although we will).
I agree with you. That said, one thing that ought to be noted is that everyone is assuming this guy signed a contract; it doesn't say that in the summary. It just says:
my employer has an IP policy that states that anything I do while under their employ is theirs, even when I'm off the clock.
Stating that something is their policy doesn't necessarily make it so. They can't unilaterally impose something like that, although if you are working on a competing product in your spare time they wouldn't have to. You'd be in the soup in any case.
If it's something really unrelated to work and it's non-commercial, I'd say the best bet is to ask your employer. Let's say your company does video encoding software and you want to set up your running club's website. What reasonable objection could they have to that? If they *do* object, then I definitely *would* look for different work, because I wouldn't trust anyone that greedy.
I'd say in order of preference the courses of action are: (1) get permission; (2) see a lawyer; (3) don't do it.
I wonder if the submitter's company is one of those ones that hires its employees as "consultants" to avoid paying taxes. If so this could get interesting.
Well, I think the problems with how people used HN are much more complicated than Hungarian Notation == Bad. They have to do with an inappropriate style of HN being adopted by C programmers for historical reasons.
Pointers are something the vast majority of non-C programmers never deal with these days. In the days of 16 bit Intel compatible software the most efficient pointer was a 16 bit integer(ish) value. Such a pointer could only address a 64K space, and so the programmer had to keep straight which pointers where "NEAR" pointers like these, which were 20 bit "FAR" pointers that could address half-again more than the 640K of RAM nobody would ever need, and "HUGE" pointers which could address the same address space as "FAR", but were *normalized so that you could do pointer arithmetic on them*. Clearly having a distinctive naming convention for FAR and HUGE pointers made a lot of sense, because you had to keep track of that to use the variable correctly.
Now set this stuff aside for a second and consider a programmer working in a much higher level language that abstracts all that implementation detail. Suppose he's working on a geographic information systems program where a city's geography is sometimes represented by a point (as it would in a nation-wide map), a polygon (as it would in a metro region map), and a polygon with topological information about its neighbors (as might be used in some sophisticated GIS analysis). If he chose a convention whereby the variables of each type were named "ptCity", "polyCity", and "topoCity", it wouldn't strike us as unreasonable. But if he chose the variable names "shpPtCity", "shpPolyCity", and "covPolyCity" to represent that the first two values come from a shapefile and the third comes from a coverage file (a format with topology), we'd probably say it's *stupid*. Unless this were something like a module that generated shapefiles from coverages, there'd be no reason to burden the maintainer with that detail, or to restrict the semantics of the data.
In this example, the stupid and sensible variable naming conventions are just different styles of "Hungarian Notation".
When you program "close to the iron", say writing device drivers, the *semantics* of a variable and the way it is stored and manipulated by the CPU are one and the same thing. But in the days of segmented memory in Windows those machine oriented details bled through into application programming. So programmers adopted the low-level HN style across the board, which was just dumb, instead of for just pointers, which was sensible. An OS or driver programmer might do some kinds of type casts, say from a pointer to byte array to a pointer to integer array, where remembering the exact type of the variable might remind him to deal with memory alignment and byte-order issues. If an app programmer does something like that you should send him back to his cave so he can bang the rocks together a little longer.
As for university CS professors back in the day insisting on a style of HN that simply regurgitates what the compiler already knows about a variable, that goes to show that most CS professors don't know all that much about programming.
He posits a hypothetical example that in the terms described, no reasonable person would disagree with:
Imagine this story: University scientists, working diligently in their lab, invent something world-changing. Several big corporations steal the invention for themselves, making billions of dollars in profits. The scientists receive nothing.
You don't have to be a professional folklorist or ethicist to conclude that the scientists are the good guys and the corporations are the bad guys.
Sure, because he's just told us the big corporations *stole* something. If we start from that characterization of what happened we'd have to agree, because stealing *by definition* is wrong. We never call rightful and proper uses of things "stealing". He then goes on to make a completely unsubstantiated claim:
In the 1990s, three University of California scientists allegedly developed and patented features that have become integral parts of what we today know as the "Interactive Web" -- including online video, image rotation, and search bar autocomplete.
What evidence does he present that these scientists "invented" anything? None. His characterization of this event is buttressed only by an ad hominem attack on people who disagree with him:
Technology pundits come from Bizarro Technology Punditry World, where up is down, black is white, and Google+ is the best thing ever.
So we aren't supposed to agree with *those* people on patents because he happens to think they're weird? Because they don't like the same things as us? He goes on to say, without any apparent sense of irony that these "bizarro technology pundits" are:
...ever fond of villainizing anyone [who disagrees with them on Internet patents]...
Next he gives us a spectacular display of weasel wording:
To be clear, I am not commenting on the actual results of the case. Not having seen all of the evidence or been in the courtroom, I do not attempt to second-guess the jury; they may well have made the legally correct decision.
So if he's not arguing about the "actual results" in this case, just what the heck is he talking about? We're supposed to feel pity toward the plaintiff,outrage at the defendants, and contempt toward the defendants' supporters -- on what basis? On the basis of something that *might* have happened but didn't? Because he thinks the defendants are greedy and rich, and their supporters are "bizarro pundits" who like Google+?
He's calibrated his imprecision very precisely here. He says has "not seen all the evidence", but does *not* tell us what evidence he *has* seen, or whether he has seen any evidence at all. This makes him hard to argue with -- we don't know which of his claims apply to what actually happened, and which apply to a purely hypothetical world of his own imagining.
Apparently he feels he can stand in the safety of that hypothetical world and lob his opinions at people in the real world :
What I do not understand is -- had the jury determined Eolas's patents valid -- why it would be A-OK for dozens of already megarich corporations to get even richer adopting technology they did not invent or have legal permission to use, but somehow immoral for the actual creators of the technology to likewise profit.
Note how he *predicates* his indictment of the defendants (aka the "megarich corporations") *on something that did not happen* ("had the jury ..."). I started counting the logical fallacies in this statement and gave up when I hit six (straw man, begging the question, appeal to pity, appeal to spite, appeal to authority, and two different kinds of red herring).
Frankly, the reasoning in the article is so weak the only value I can see in discussing it is as an example of deceptive and faulty argumentation. I'd be interested in hearing a more robust argument, say from someone who wants to argue a natural property right to ideas.