Let's say you're an inventor. You're great at understanding mechanical problems from angles other haven't thought of. But you don't know anything about finance, managing suppliers, running a factory, marketing or selling. So what you do is you license your patents to people who do know those things. Because you do have common sense you form a corporation to handle the licensing in order to limit your liabilities.
Are you a patent troll because you don't *make* anything? No. You perform an important service to society, namely inventing, and you get paid for it.
So far you've taken all those tasks you don't know about and probably wouldn't be good at (e.g. marketing) off your plate so you can concentrate on what you are good at (inventing). Let's take that a step further. You're still mucking around with non-inventing stuff. You're running an invention company, which involves a lot of non-inventing nonsense that's not your cup of tea. So let's say you sell your patent to a company that will manage the licensing for you. After all, that's what you've done *legally* in the first scenario; the rights to the patent are transferred from one person (you) to another person (your corporation). The only difference is that you don't own or run the recipient.
Is the company you sell your patent do *necessarily* a patent troll? After all they are doing *you* the inventor a useful service by keeping you chained to your magical inventing anvil. Making something is enough to absolve a company of being a patent troll, but not making something isn't enough to convict it. So what is?
I believe that the essential condition for patent trolling is this: a patent troll's business model consists of ambushing companies that inadvertently and independently come up with things that infringe patents it holds. The problem with the patent troll business model is that it actually works best with relatively weak patents. Those are the techniques most likely to be independently arrived at, providing the patent troll with an involuntary "sale".
A true patent troll is a parasite that rather than promoting technological advancement, predates on it by attaching itself to hosts that are going about business as usual. Where the host is financially weak, the parasite drains it dry. Where the host is strong, the parasite does not attack unless the cost of the host defending itself and risking disruption to its profitable businesses exceeds a payoff that looks to the parasite like a good payday.
What I think is that a patent holder ought to be obligated not just to react to patent infringers, but to actually promote the adoption of of its IP, either by making something or marketing the invention to companies that do. If you don't at least market the invention, the patent expires. If you *do* market the invention, until you make one non-ambush sale your damages are limited to something like 5x your promotion costs. That's still a good ROI, just not enough of a pot of gold to start prospecting for crappy patents.
The interesting question that is begged is, what makes being focussed on self-interest and not valuing others "bad?" What makes being selfless and giving to others "good?"
This is kind of a strawman version of thousands of years of philosophical thinking about ethics. Objectivist ethics is not particularly well informed about the ideas it criticizes or is based upon. It is supposedly founded *axiomatically* on two propositions: (1) Existence exists and (2) selfishness is good. Proponents of this position simply assert that people who disagree with them about something like economic policy deny their own existence, without actually providing any justification for that assertion. Of course there is no such proof. There couldn't be any rigorous proof of anything interesting drawn from such a weak set of axioms. The credibility of the assertion comes from elsewhere.
We tend to agree that those are "good" and "bad" things in general, but what are the root criteria that we are basing that on?
Well, let's go back to the thinker who created the field of "Ethics", even coining the name. Aristotle. In Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle introduces the concept of "eudaimonia" -- literally "good spirit", often translated as "happiness" or "flourishing". What he means, I think, is a desirable, rewarding life; one that a thinking person can enjoy and feel satisfaction living. That's not simple ethical egoism, which says that morality is pursuing one's own happiness exclusively, because that *really* begs the question of whether such a program is feasible. Aristotle realizes that human nature and society are complex things, and that the pursuit of personal happiness requires a balance between satisfying personal desires and disciplining them.
Let's bring this back to the issue of CEOs and their philosophical views for a moment. One of the attractions of Nietzsche and Rand is that they give you a ready justification for your successes, to wit: I am a superman and deserve my wealth and status. They also provide you with an excuse for your failures: slave morality / collectivism is restraining my genius. This is not to say that really superior men are *never* held back by hordes of collectivists. Of course that happens. But for the vast majority of us, even CEOs, the question of whether collectivism is restraining our superhuman genius really does beg the question: are we really that much of a genius that this is the best explanation for our disappointments?
And that I think is the crux of any *practical* ethical philosophy: how to reconcile our desires and disappointments with our actions. Life is full of disappointments, no matter how superior you may be. If you're a CEO, eventually the company you run will fail. The splashy actions you take today will eventually spread out into an imperceptible ripple in economic history. Nobody really wins immortal glory, nor does anybody get to enjoy the slender slice of posthumous glory they might earn.
A satisfying life must be built in the here and now, with the tasks at hand, and most importantly the people around us. Finding satisfaction in the welfare of those around us may have no rigorously *formal* support in some axiomatic model of how the world should be. It just works. I have yet to see any philosophy which easily generates self-serving excuses for its adherents disappointments lead to any kind of life *I'd* want to lead, but your mileage may vary.
I agree. Take care of the basics, first. For example, I'd really appreciate a phone that reduces my sense of personal insignificance. That's a pretty fundamental problem, in my opinion.
After those kinds of problems are solved, then add some nifty features, like an attachment for resolving ontological disputes.
Sure you can buy a netbook/tablet for that price.... that runs *Windows*. Been there, done that. It's not that Windows 7 is a bad UI for a netbook, but adding tablet features to a mouse oriented UI doesn't work in almost the worst conceivable way: it works well enough that you're tempted to try it, but not well enough that you don't end up cursing it.
I've got a IdeaPad netbook/tablet convertible. Does it work as a tablet? Well that depends on what you mean by work. It certainly *functions*. For a couple of bundled apps that take over the screen and they work fine, but they aren't useful. For the large number of windows programs that are useful, it is sort of kind of possible to use them with Windows tablet features, but it's not the experience people are imagining when they think, "tablet". That starts right from the Windows shell, which of course is the regular old Windows shell except it's really hard to get at all those windows decorations when they're near a corner, or to read text that's popped under your fat finger.
GDP? Sure, but per capita of course. And we should look at GINI (generally the higher the GINI the higher the disparities between rich and poor).
Finland, topping the list at 30 days leave has a per capita GDP of 44, 650 and a GINI of 26.9 France also requires 30 days leave and has a per capita GDP of 42.747 and GINI of 32.7 Estonia requires 28 days leave and has a per capita GDP of 14,266and GINI of 34 Lithuania requires 28 days leave and has a per capita GDP of $16,542 and a GINI of 36 Sweden a little down on the list, gives 25 days of leave and as a per capita GDP of 36,502 and GINI of 23 Austria also gives 25 days of leave and has a per capita GDP of $39,454. and a GINI of 26
samples from the lower end of the pack, Pakistan: 14 d/$1067/31.2 Vietnam : 14 d/$1060/37 India : 12 d/$1124/36.8
The three lowest economically advanced countries comparable to the US: Australia: 20d/$45,285/30.5 Belgium: 20d/$43/794/28 Japan : 20d/$41,366/38.1 Netherlands: 20d/$48,233/30.9 New Zealand: 20d/$31,067/36.2 Canada : 12d/$45,657/32.1
The USA requires 0 days leave and has a per capita GDP of 46,381 and a GINI quotient of 45
Now in aggregate the data is all over the place, but there are obvious clusters (e.g. the Baltic states with their post co mmunist economies, high leave days, low GDP, moderately high GINI). In general, GINI seems to be a little better predictor of leave days than per capita GDP. About the only strong generalization you can make is that countries with low GINIs (that is to say relatively small income distribution disparity) tend to give lots of leave days.
The countries with the smallest income disparities in the world:
Sweden (23) Norway (25) : ? Austria (26) : 25 d Czech Republic (26):? Luxembourg (26) : 25 d Malta (26):? Serbia (26): ? Slovakia (26): 20d Albania (26.7) Germany (27): 24d
South Africa is an outlier, with a GINI of 65(!!!) and 21 days of leave, but of course history accounts for those figures. You have a population of economic elite that accumulated vast wealth under apartheid, and a transition to popular rule that left that wealth in their hands.
So, here's the conclusion I'd draw. Where people on the bottom of the economic scale are relatively powerful, either by commanding a large share of a nation's wealth or by historical events that make them influential beyond their economic means, countries tend to require companies give employees lots of leave. We *can't* draw the conclusion that lots of required paid leave impoverishes a country. We can find examples for that of course, but more counter-examples.
Honestly, I can't for the life of me see why theists think that religion brings peace and comfort. What is any amount of Earthly reassurance, in the face of the threat of infinite torture?
I don't like music. I listened to some once, and it didn't appeal to me, so I can't see how anybody would actually enjoy listening to music of any kind.;-)
The fire and brimstone business is symptomatic of the kind of thinking that produces zero tolerance policies. Can't think of what to do about students using drugs, so lets get something really harsh policies on paper. I don't have much faith, so I'd better make the little I have go as far as possible by making it harsh as possible. Since I'm afraid of dying, I'll believe in a literal afterlife where people who aren't like me are tortured for eternity, what's more they'll be tortured for no particular reason other than they don't have the same opinions I have. That'll make it easier for me to be confident in those opinions.
Sure, but it wasn't because the people who originally envisioned the Space Shuttle were too stupid to crunch the numbers. What happened is that the illogic of the program crept up on it step by step, often each step was bolstered by impeccable logic.
For example, your reasoning against repairing satellites is based on the cost of a shuttle flight being high; by the goal of the program was to make flying the shuttle cheap. The that waste to be done is to amortize the development costs and support infrastructure over lots and lots of flights.
Then the design was altered to lift the really big payloads the Air Force wanted, and to increase the shuttle's ability to maneuver in the atmosphere so it could return to Vandenberg after a single orbit. Well, the logic of that was impeccable, because (a) these were things NASA would have liked anyway, but were "nice to haves" and (b) the cost would be recouped by having a major user who would pay for lots of launches.
Before the fact, it all made sense. What happened was we cut back on manned space flight so that the planned frequency of space flights didn't happen. The changes needed to meet the Air Force requirements ended up hurting as much as they helped, adding cost and risk to the program.
So, if you'd *known* in advance that the volume wouldn't ever materialize, you'd never have considered a system that ambitious. If you built it at all, it would have been a simpler and therefore likely safer and cheaper system.
In short, having perfect knowledge of the future and how your choices will turn out would lead to better decision making.
True, but what was confusing was the bizarre air of smugness in the summary, as if the author of the summary had personally caught the Sierra Club with its fingers in the cookie jar, profiting from dumping eWaste in China.
The big story is that eWaste that cannot be disposed of in California is being exported, often to China where very sloppy, dangerous and polluting methods of recovering just a few of the most valuable materials. This is hardly news; anybody who has cared enough to look into what happens to eWaste knows that a lot of it is disposed this way.
The summary focused on a small part of the story, and by taking it out of context made it sound like the Basel Network was operating some kind of phony green certification program. What happened (according to the article) is that they got certain companies to pledge not to export eWaste, but when the companies actually found out how hard that would be they simply went ahead and exported the eWaste. They violated their pledge, but the pledge was not legally binding. The article does not imply that the Basel Network was running some kind of fraudulent green certification program.
The submitter (judging from his email) apparently works for a competitor who didn't take the pledge and felt burned by the bad publicity. That's a reasonable complaint, but it hardly justifies character assassination.
Well, look. We all know that Comcast would like to steer you towards *their* media offerings, which of course many of us have zero interest in., They'd love to be able to lock you into their content, to go back to the late 80s when you didn't have much choice about where you go programming other than to drive to the video store.
However, their having self-serving, nefarious motives doesn't mean they don't have any valid points here. Level 3 is getting cash from Netflix with which they can, if need be, beef up their infrastructure to handle a lot more time sensitive traffic. They then hand that traffic to Comcast, who in order to handle all that traffic has to add more infrastructure. But Level 3 proposes that Comcast invest almost as much money as it does to carry this traffic, but that Comcast (unlike Level 3) should get no additional compensation. Essentially, Level 3 has externalized half the marginal costs of carrying Netflix traffic while privatizing all of the marginal revenue. Is that fair?
Of course Comcast's customers are paying for Internet service, but Internet protocols weren't designed to handle very large streams of data where *consistent throughput is critical*. Statistical multiplexing is a critical assumption in making Internet service affordable for everyone. You don't size your bandwidth for the peak demand, you exploit the high variability of bandwidth demand to fit 100 customers on to a link that is maybe only 10x the peak demand of any of them.
Now you can mix a little low quality video streaming into the mix and not disturb the statistical assumptions of the network. But introduce a *lot* of *HD* content that is *streamed*, and suddenly we're in a world where maybe we'd have been better off going with ISDN than TCP/IP. A network provider should be able to throttle a connection periodically to assure that every user has fair access to the bandwidth available. That wouldn't be a problem for customers renting or buying movies from Apple, but Netflix users are going to scream bloody murder unless the playback software buffers enough content to play without skipping. And if it does buffer enough content, they might have to wait a few minutes to fill up the buffer. That would be fair, and it's not going to kill anyone to have to wait five minutes for a movie to buffer before playing, but they'll still complain.
Such throttling would not in my opinion be a violation of network neutrality if it were applied equally to every content source, including the network provider's own. Alternatively a system where regulation enforced reasonable fees for carrying high volumes of time sensitive traffic would also be fair, if politically impossible.
According to the TFA, it was cemented in. And common sense would tell you that doing this would be a malicious act.
As for the "terrorists already winning", that depends on your criteria for winning. If the criteria for winning is ignoring their existence, how could they not win? I think a reasonable criterion would be: do we allowing our liberty to be compromised in any meaningful way? Personally, I think the liberty to pull any kind of prank we can imagine is all that important, and I say that as somebody who's been a hacking student at MIT. Hacking has an ethic, which includes doing no harm, and not imposing an unreasonable amount of inconvenience on others.
Well, remember Ted Kaczynski? It only takes one man. As for somebody's kid leaving it there, really? Cemented to the top of an underpass pier?
The one thing that is nearly certain is that whoever left the thing there *knew* it would cause chaos and disruption. If it were somebody with Kaczynski's brains, he might well be dong what the GP suggests: testing the police response; possibly even *training* that response to ignore something a bit more powerful than would fit in an 8" robot. If I were an screwed up genius, that's what *I* would do. I'd and humiliate them over and over until they stopped paying attention. Then I'd teach society a lesson that was so terrible that life would never be the same.
Or this could be some college kid chaos monger having a lark. *Probably* it was a chaos monger with harmless intentions (other than tying up some traffic). But there's no way to tell, is there? That's what the chaos monger is exploiting, for whatever purpose he might have. It's like people who send cornstarch through the mail, tricking people into thinking "anthrax". The people who do that sort of thing are stupid enough to think that's harmless because it isn't *really* anthrax.
It's the cognitive equivalent of shouting because you have nothing to say worth listening to,or grabbing a bigger hammer when the small one won't drive the screw.
It's one rung on the ladder below the mentality that says things like "That's so crazy it might just work!" It confuses "drastic" with "vigorous ".
You can' even mock people who "think" this way because making of stupid people isn't politically correct. People feel sorry for them, like you're beating up an old lady in a wheelchair.
In entertainment, you pay in advance a fixed price named up front. In politics you pay an indeterminate amount later and even then you probably aren't told what you're giving up.
Yet America is still one of the few countries willing to honestly face its past and try to redress things it's done wrong.
That's news to me. It'd be more accurate to say is that America is a country where you're *allowed* to face its past, provided you don't try to teach that past in schools or run for office until at least 90% of the electorate agrees with you.
Well, sure. But notice: just because the CIO *wouldn't* doesn't mean he *shouldn't*.
Let's consider a hypothetical situation where you as new CIO walk into a company with a really dysfunctional IT environment. They paid peanuts, they got monkeys, and over the years the monkeys proliferated. Now you're competent and when you look into things you discover that the organization is a sitting duck; it's got security holes all over the place and nothing but monkeys to plug them with.
Why not call in Google? You put your security concerns in the RFP, and they come back with a proposal that addresses them. If you're not satisfied they can meet your needs, at least you've got an outsider's perspective on your problems for free. If you like the proposal, you look at the price tag. If it's too much, you go to management saying, "This is what it would cost to pay an outside group to fix our problems. Note how much cheaper hiring that in house team of human engineers would be." If the price is good, you take it to management and say, "Look at how much cheaper hiring Google would be than continuing to pay all these monkeys."
Alternatively, you can start down the long and lonely road of reforming corporate culture without even considering whether your firm might be better off trusting Google's engineers to secure its data, at least for part of the way. What have you gained from this?
Of course if you have a world class in-house IT team and it's doing great, that's a different kettle of fish. The bottom line is there are no panaceas.
Possibly, but they're talking about a rear touchscreen, not a click wheel.
If I recall, there was a paper on using rear touchscreens to deal with the "Fat finger" problem on very small touch controlled devices presented at ACM's April 2009 CHI conference. That's almost the same time this patent was filed, so obviously the researcher had been working on this previous to the filings. The earliest paper I can find mentioning "back-of-device interaction" in the HCI literature is from a 2002 issue of IEEE's "Pervasive Computing" journal (to wit doi:10.1109/MPRV.2002.993144).
I'd say the idea of a rear touch "screen" per se is probably not patentable, having been described in the literature at least seven years before the patent was filed. Of course, that doesn't mean that something necessary to actually producing a usable touchscreen couldn't be patented.
Hard it may be, but it has been solved, and all the necessary protocols and software exist to implement the solution. All you need is an alternative organization and the ability to convince the people you are interested in convincing to use the new servers.
As for the policy challenges you mention, Mr. Sunde doesn't *like* the way ICANN solved those problems. In fact he detests it so much he's willing (or thinks he's willing) to chuck the policy and organization that controls it out the window. Or perhaps he'll figure out a way to use his preferred servers and fall back to ICANN's DNS.
It's the same part of me that, were I holding a cigarette lighter and a stick of dynamite, would be tempted to light the stick and throw it like they do in the movies, just to see what an exploding stick of dynamite really looks like. There's been so much greed and stupidity around the DNS, and it would be so *feasible* for someone to set up an independent alternative, I'd sort of like to see what it would look like when the existing system is blown to kingdom come.
However -- were I ever to be holding an actual stick of dynamite in my hands, the part of me that tends to say things like "this is not the optimum time to make an impulsive decision" would become quite strident. It's not that I would never, under any circumstance light a stick of dynamite and throw it. It's just that it being a really cool idea wouldn't be enough to make me try it until I'd thought through the consequences very, very carefully.
And as it stands, the DNS system does me more good than it has ever harmed me, and likewise for the vast majority of people who use it. It might be that giving *serious consideration* to a competitive system would do a lot of good, but a competition between two systems in which both survived would almost certainly be a bad thing.
True, but I'd go further. Part of true genius is not being afraid of being wrong. A very intelligent person isn't necessarily a genius, but take that person and have him lavish his time and effort on something others think is a crock, and if he succeeds he's a genius.
So what happens when a recognized genius becomes, in effect, a *professional* genius? Even genius has its gradations. Not every genius can be a Mozart, an Einstein or a Ramanujian. Such individuals are in a different class. They needn't worry about being wrong because even their rare *mistakes* tend to be more interesting and valuable than the best ideas of mere ordinary geniuses. A lifetime is too short to contain all such persons have to say. Not so the ordinary genius.
Pity the run-of-the-mill genius who has reduced himself to an idea-cow; who has a decade of genuine brilliance to spread over an entire lifetime in the public eye.
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Permit me to play devil's advocate here.
Let's say you're an inventor. You're great at understanding mechanical problems from angles other haven't thought of. But you don't know anything about finance, managing suppliers, running a factory, marketing or selling. So what you do is you license your patents to people who do know those things. Because you do have common sense you form a corporation to handle the licensing in order to limit your liabilities.
Are you a patent troll because you don't *make* anything? No. You perform an important service to society, namely inventing, and you get paid for it.
So far you've taken all those tasks you don't know about and probably wouldn't be good at (e.g. marketing) off your plate so you can concentrate on what you are good at (inventing). Let's take that a step further. You're still mucking around with non-inventing stuff. You're running an invention company, which involves a lot of non-inventing nonsense that's not your cup of tea. So let's say you sell your patent to a company that will manage the licensing for you. After all, that's what you've done *legally* in the first scenario; the rights to the patent are transferred from one person (you) to another person (your corporation). The only difference is that you don't own or run the recipient.
Is the company you sell your patent do *necessarily* a patent troll? After all they are doing *you* the inventor a useful service by keeping you chained to your magical inventing anvil. Making something is enough to absolve a company of being a patent troll, but not making something isn't enough to convict it. So what is?
I believe that the essential condition for patent trolling is this: a patent troll's business model consists of ambushing companies that inadvertently and independently come up with things that infringe patents it holds. The problem with the patent troll business model is that it actually works best with relatively weak patents. Those are the techniques most likely to be independently arrived at, providing the patent troll with an involuntary "sale".
A true patent troll is a parasite that rather than promoting technological advancement, predates on it by attaching itself to hosts that are going about business as usual. Where the host is financially weak, the parasite drains it dry. Where the host is strong, the parasite does not attack unless the cost of the host defending itself and risking disruption to its profitable businesses exceeds a payoff that looks to the parasite like a good payday.
What I think is that a patent holder ought to be obligated not just to react to patent infringers, but to actually promote the adoption of of its IP, either by making something or marketing the invention to companies that do. If you don't at least market the invention, the patent expires. If you *do* market the invention, until you make one non-ambush sale your damages are limited to something like 5x your promotion costs. That's still a good ROI, just not enough of a pot of gold to start prospecting for crappy patents.
The interesting question that is begged is, what makes being focussed on self-interest and not valuing others "bad?" What makes being selfless and giving to others "good?"
This is kind of a strawman version of thousands of years of philosophical thinking about ethics. Objectivist ethics is not particularly well informed about the ideas it criticizes or is based upon. It is supposedly founded *axiomatically* on two propositions: (1) Existence exists and (2) selfishness is good. Proponents of this position simply assert that people who disagree with them about something like economic policy deny their own existence, without actually providing any justification for that assertion. Of course there is no such proof. There couldn't be any rigorous proof of anything interesting drawn from such a weak set of axioms. The credibility of the assertion comes from elsewhere.
We tend to agree that those are "good" and "bad" things in general, but what are the root criteria that we are basing that on?
Well, let's go back to the thinker who created the field of "Ethics", even coining the name. Aristotle. In Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle introduces the concept of "eudaimonia" -- literally "good spirit", often translated as "happiness" or "flourishing". What he means, I think, is a desirable, rewarding life; one that a thinking person can enjoy and feel satisfaction living. That's not simple ethical egoism, which says that morality is pursuing one's own happiness exclusively, because that *really* begs the question of whether such a program is feasible. Aristotle realizes that human nature and society are complex things, and that the pursuit of personal happiness requires a balance between satisfying personal desires and disciplining them.
Let's bring this back to the issue of CEOs and their philosophical views for a moment. One of the attractions of Nietzsche and Rand is that they give you a ready justification for your successes, to wit: I am a superman and deserve my wealth and status. They also provide you with an excuse for your failures: slave morality / collectivism is restraining my genius. This is not to say that really superior men are *never* held back by hordes of collectivists. Of course that happens. But for the vast majority of us, even CEOs, the question of whether collectivism is restraining our superhuman genius really does beg the question: are we really that much of a genius that this is the best explanation for our disappointments?
And that I think is the crux of any *practical* ethical philosophy: how to reconcile our desires and disappointments with our actions. Life is full of disappointments, no matter how superior you may be. If you're a CEO, eventually the company you run will fail. The splashy actions you take today will eventually spread out into an imperceptible ripple in economic history. Nobody really wins immortal glory, nor does anybody get to enjoy the slender slice of posthumous glory they might earn.
A satisfying life must be built in the here and now, with the tasks at hand, and most importantly the people around us. Finding satisfaction in the welfare of those around us may have no rigorously *formal* support in some axiomatic model of how the world should be. It just works. I have yet to see any philosophy which easily generates self-serving excuses for its adherents disappointments lead to any kind of life *I'd* want to lead, but your mileage may vary.
I agree. Take care of the basics, first. For example, I'd really appreciate a phone that reduces my sense of personal insignificance. That's a pretty fundamental problem, in my opinion.
After those kinds of problems are solved, then add some nifty features, like an attachment for resolving ontological disputes.
Sure you can buy a netbook/tablet for that price .... that runs *Windows*. Been there, done that. It's not that Windows 7 is a bad UI for a netbook, but adding tablet features to a mouse oriented UI doesn't work in almost the worst conceivable way: it works well enough that you're tempted to try it, but not well enough that you don't end up cursing it.
I've got a IdeaPad netbook/tablet convertible. Does it work as a tablet? Well that depends on what you mean by work. It certainly *functions*. For a couple of bundled apps that take over the screen and they work fine, but they aren't useful. For the large number of windows programs that are useful, it is sort of kind of possible to use them with Windows tablet features, but it's not the experience people are imagining when they think, "tablet". That starts right from the Windows shell, which of course is the regular old Windows shell except it's really hard to get at all those windows decorations when they're near a corner, or to read text that's popped under your fat finger.
Great minds think alike.
GDP? Sure, but per capita of course. And we should look at GINI (generally the higher the GINI the higher the disparities between rich and poor).
Finland, topping the list at 30 days leave has a per capita GDP of 44, 650 and a GINI of 26.9
France also requires 30 days leave and has a per capita GDP of 42.747 and GINI of 32.7
Estonia requires 28 days leave and has a per capita GDP of 14,266and GINI of 34
Lithuania requires 28 days leave and has a per capita GDP of $16,542 and a GINI of 36
Sweden a little down on the list, gives 25 days of leave and as a per capita GDP of 36,502 and GINI of 23
Austria also gives 25 days of leave and has a per capita GDP of $39,454. and a GINI of 26
samples from the lower end of the pack,
Pakistan: 14 d/$1067/31.2
Vietnam : 14 d/$1060/37
India : 12 d/$1124/36.8
The three lowest economically advanced countries comparable to the US:
Australia: 20d/$45,285/30.5
Belgium: 20d/$43/794/28
Japan : 20d/$41,366/38.1
Netherlands: 20d/$48,233/30.9
New Zealand: 20d/$31,067/36.2
Canada : 12d/$45,657/32.1
The USA requires 0 days leave and has a per capita GDP of 46,381 and a GINI quotient of 45
Now in aggregate the data is all over the place, but there are obvious clusters (e.g. the Baltic states with their post co mmunist economies, high leave days, low GDP, moderately high GINI). In general, GINI seems to be a little better predictor of leave days than per capita GDP. About the only strong generalization you can make is that countries with low GINIs (that is to say relatively small income distribution disparity) tend to give lots of leave days.
The countries with the smallest income disparities in the world:
Sweden (23) :? :?
Norway (25) : ?
Austria (26) : 25 d
Czech Republic (26)
Luxembourg (26) : 25 d
Malta (26)
Serbia (26): ?
Slovakia (26): 20d
Albania (26.7)
Germany (27): 24d
South Africa is an outlier, with a GINI of 65(!!!) and 21 days of leave, but of course history accounts for those figures. You have a population of economic elite that accumulated vast wealth under apartheid, and a transition to popular rule that left that wealth in their hands.
So, here's the conclusion I'd draw. Where people on the bottom of the economic scale are relatively powerful, either by commanding a large share of a nation's wealth or by historical events that make them influential beyond their economic means, countries tend to require companies give employees lots of leave. We *can't* draw the conclusion that lots of required paid leave impoverishes a country. We can find examples for that of course, but more counter-examples.
Because half an hour later they'd have to shoot it down again.
Honestly, I can't for the life of me see why theists think that religion brings peace and comfort. What is any amount of Earthly reassurance, in the face of the threat of infinite torture?
I don't like music. I listened to some once, and it didn't appeal to me, so I can't see how anybody would actually enjoy listening to music of any kind. ;-)
The fire and brimstone business is symptomatic of the kind of thinking that produces zero tolerance policies. Can't think of what to do about students using drugs, so lets get something really harsh policies on paper. I don't have much faith, so I'd better make the little I have go as far as possible by making it harsh as possible. Since I'm afraid of dying, I'll believe in a literal afterlife where people who aren't like me are tortured for eternity, what's more they'll be tortured for no particular reason other than they don't have the same opinions I have. That'll make it easier for me to be confident in those opinions.
And that's leaving out the part in which you actually die, which isn't going to be any fun either.
Have you ever considered the possibility of being shot in bed at age 90 by a jealous husband?
Sure, but it wasn't because the people who originally envisioned the Space Shuttle were too stupid to crunch the numbers. What happened is that the illogic of the program crept up on it step by step, often each step was bolstered by impeccable logic.
For example, your reasoning against repairing satellites is based on the cost of a shuttle flight being high; by the goal of the program was to make flying the shuttle cheap. The that waste to be done is to amortize the development costs and support infrastructure over lots and lots of flights.
Then the design was altered to lift the really big payloads the Air Force wanted, and to increase the shuttle's ability to maneuver in the atmosphere so it could return to Vandenberg after a single orbit. Well, the logic of that was impeccable, because (a) these were things NASA would have liked anyway, but were "nice to haves" and (b) the cost would be recouped by having a major user who would pay for lots of launches.
Before the fact, it all made sense. What happened was we cut back on manned space flight so that the planned frequency of space flights didn't happen. The changes needed to meet the Air Force requirements ended up hurting as much as they helped, adding cost and risk to the program.
So, if you'd *known* in advance that the volume wouldn't ever materialize, you'd never have considered a system that ambitious. If you built it at all, it would have been a simpler and therefore likely safer and cheaper system.
In short, having perfect knowledge of the future and how your choices will turn out would lead to better decision making.
Hardly. Those strawmen are recycled and burned over and over again.
True, but what was confusing was the bizarre air of smugness in the summary, as if the author of the summary had personally caught the Sierra Club with its fingers in the cookie jar, profiting from dumping eWaste in China.
The big story is that eWaste that cannot be disposed of in California is being exported, often to China where very sloppy, dangerous and polluting methods of recovering just a few of the most valuable materials. This is hardly news; anybody who has cared enough to look into what happens to eWaste knows that a lot of it is disposed this way.
The summary focused on a small part of the story, and by taking it out of context made it sound like the Basel Network was operating some kind of phony green certification program. What happened (according to the article) is that they got certain companies to pledge not to export eWaste, but when the companies actually found out how hard that would be they simply went ahead and exported the eWaste. They violated their pledge, but the pledge was not legally binding. The article does not imply that the Basel Network was running some kind of fraudulent green certification program.
The submitter (judging from his email) apparently works for a competitor who didn't take the pledge and felt burned by the bad publicity. That's a reasonable complaint, but it hardly justifies character assassination.
Well, look. We all know that Comcast would like to steer you towards *their* media offerings, which of course many of us have zero interest in., They'd love to be able to lock you into their content, to go back to the late 80s when you didn't have much choice about where you go programming other than to drive to the video store.
However, their having self-serving, nefarious motives doesn't mean they don't have any valid points here. Level 3 is getting cash from Netflix with which they can, if need be, beef up their infrastructure to handle a lot more time sensitive traffic. They then hand that traffic to Comcast, who in order to handle all that traffic has to add more infrastructure. But Level 3 proposes that Comcast invest almost as much money as it does to carry this traffic, but that Comcast (unlike Level 3) should get no additional compensation. Essentially, Level 3 has externalized half the marginal costs of carrying Netflix traffic while privatizing all of the marginal revenue. Is that fair?
Of course Comcast's customers are paying for Internet service, but Internet protocols weren't designed to handle very large streams of data where *consistent throughput is critical*. Statistical multiplexing is a critical assumption in making Internet service affordable for everyone. You don't size your bandwidth for the peak demand, you exploit the high variability of bandwidth demand to fit 100 customers on to a link that is maybe only 10x the peak demand of any of them.
Now you can mix a little low quality video streaming into the mix and not disturb the statistical assumptions of the network. But introduce a *lot* of *HD* content that is *streamed*, and suddenly we're in a world where maybe we'd have been better off going with ISDN than TCP/IP. A network provider should be able to throttle a connection periodically to assure that every user has fair access to the bandwidth available. That wouldn't be a problem for customers renting or buying movies from Apple, but Netflix users are going to scream bloody murder unless the playback software buffers enough content to play without skipping. And if it does buffer enough content, they might have to wait a few minutes to fill up the buffer. That would be fair, and it's not going to kill anyone to have to wait five minutes for a movie to buffer before playing, but they'll still complain.
Such throttling would not in my opinion be a violation of network neutrality if it were applied equally to every content source, including the network provider's own. Alternatively a system where regulation enforced reasonable fees for carrying high volumes of time sensitive traffic would also be fair, if politically impossible.
According to the TFA, it was cemented in. And common sense would tell you that doing this would be a malicious act.
As for the "terrorists already winning", that depends on your criteria for winning. If the criteria for winning is ignoring their existence, how could they not win? I think a reasonable criterion would be: do we allowing our liberty to be compromised in any meaningful way? Personally, I think the liberty to pull any kind of prank we can imagine is all that important, and I say that as somebody who's been a hacking student at MIT. Hacking has an ethic, which includes doing no harm, and not imposing an unreasonable amount of inconvenience on others.
Well, remember Ted Kaczynski? It only takes one man. As for somebody's kid leaving it there, really? Cemented to the top of an underpass pier?
The one thing that is nearly certain is that whoever left the thing there *knew* it would cause chaos and disruption. If it were somebody with Kaczynski's brains, he might well be dong what the GP suggests: testing the police response; possibly even *training* that response to ignore something a bit more powerful than would fit in an 8" robot. If I were an screwed up genius, that's what *I* would do. I'd and humiliate them over and over until they stopped paying attention. Then I'd teach society a lesson that was so terrible that life would never be the same.
Or this could be some college kid chaos monger having a lark. *Probably* it was a chaos monger with harmless intentions (other than tying up some traffic). But there's no way to tell, is there? That's what the chaos monger is exploiting, for whatever purpose he might have. It's like people who send cornstarch through the mail, tricking people into thinking "anthrax". The people who do that sort of thing are stupid enough to think that's harmless because it isn't *really* anthrax.
It's the cognitive equivalent of shouting because you have nothing to say worth listening to,or grabbing a bigger hammer when the small one won't drive the screw.
It's one rung on the ladder below the mentality that says things like "That's so crazy it might just work!" It confuses "drastic" with "vigorous ".
You can' even mock people who "think" this way because making of stupid people isn't politically correct. People feel sorry for them, like you're beating up an old lady in a wheelchair.
It's entertainment not politics.
There's a difference?
In entertainment, you pay in advance a fixed price named up front. In politics you pay an indeterminate amount later and even then you probably aren't told what you're giving up.
Aside from that there's not much difference.
Yet America is still one of the few countries willing to honestly face its past and try to redress things it's done wrong.
That's news to me. It'd be more accurate to say is that America is a country where you're *allowed* to face its past, provided you don't try to teach that past in schools or run for office until at least 90% of the electorate agrees with you.
Well, sure. But notice: just because the CIO *wouldn't* doesn't mean he *shouldn't*.
Let's consider a hypothetical situation where you as new CIO walk into a company with a really dysfunctional IT environment. They paid peanuts, they got monkeys, and over the years the monkeys proliferated. Now you're competent and when you look into things you discover that the organization is a sitting duck; it's got security holes all over the place and nothing but monkeys to plug them with.
Why not call in Google? You put your security concerns in the RFP, and they come back with a proposal that addresses them. If you're not satisfied they can meet your needs, at least you've got an outsider's perspective on your problems for free. If you like the proposal, you look at the price tag. If it's too much, you go to management saying, "This is what it would cost to pay an outside group to fix our problems. Note how much cheaper hiring that in house team of human engineers would be." If the price is good, you take it to management and say, "Look at how much cheaper hiring Google would be than continuing to pay all these monkeys."
Alternatively, you can start down the long and lonely road of reforming corporate culture without even considering whether your firm might be better off trusting Google's engineers to secure its data, at least for part of the way. What have you gained from this?
Of course if you have a world class in-house IT team and it's doing great, that's a different kettle of fish. The bottom line is there are no panaceas.
Decentralized doesn't mean there is no organization.
In a gift box along with a half-dozen 4" steel hat pins?
Possibly, but they're talking about a rear touchscreen, not a click wheel.
If I recall, there was a paper on using rear touchscreens to deal with the "Fat finger" problem on very small touch controlled devices presented at ACM's April 2009 CHI conference. That's almost the same time this patent was filed, so obviously the researcher had been working on this previous to the filings. The earliest paper I can find mentioning "back-of-device interaction" in the HCI literature is from a 2002 issue of IEEE's "Pervasive Computing" journal (to wit doi:10.1109/MPRV.2002.993144).
I'd say the idea of a rear touch "screen" per se is probably not patentable, having been described in the literature at least seven years before the patent was filed. Of course, that doesn't mean that something necessary to actually producing a usable touchscreen couldn't be patented.
Hard it may be, but it has been solved, and all the necessary protocols and software exist to implement the solution. All you need is an alternative organization and the ability to convince the people you are interested in convincing to use the new servers.
As for the policy challenges you mention, Mr. Sunde doesn't *like* the way ICANN solved those problems. In fact he detests it so much he's willing (or thinks he's willing) to chuck the policy and organization that controls it out the window. Or perhaps he'll figure out a way to use his preferred servers and fall back to ICANN's DNS.
It's the same part of me that, were I holding a cigarette lighter and a stick of dynamite, would be tempted to light the stick and throw it like they do in the movies, just to see what an exploding stick of dynamite really looks like. There's been so much greed and stupidity around the DNS, and it would be so *feasible* for someone to set up an independent alternative, I'd sort of like to see what it would look like when the existing system is blown to kingdom come.
However -- were I ever to be holding an actual stick of dynamite in my hands, the part of me that tends to say things like "this is not the optimum time to make an impulsive decision" would become quite strident. It's not that I would never, under any circumstance light a stick of dynamite and throw it. It's just that it being a really cool idea wouldn't be enough to make me try it until I'd thought through the consequences very, very carefully.
And as it stands, the DNS system does me more good than it has ever harmed me, and likewise for the vast majority of people who use it. It might be that giving *serious consideration* to a competitive system would do a lot of good, but a competition between two systems in which both survived would almost certainly be a bad thing.
True, but I'd go further. Part of true genius is not being afraid of being wrong. A very intelligent person isn't necessarily a genius, but take that person and have him lavish his time and effort on something others think is a crock, and if he succeeds he's a genius.
So what happens when a recognized genius becomes, in effect, a *professional* genius? Even genius has its gradations. Not every genius can be a Mozart, an Einstein or a Ramanujian. Such individuals are in a different class. They needn't worry about being wrong because even their rare *mistakes* tend to be more interesting and valuable than the best ideas of mere ordinary geniuses. A lifetime is too short to contain all such persons have to say. Not so the ordinary genius.
Pity the run-of-the-mill genius who has reduced himself to an idea-cow; who has a decade of genuine brilliance to spread over an entire lifetime in the public eye.