What we have here is an official who's been shown to have the *means* to commit a crime. Not evidence that he *has* committed a crime. It's like owning a gun. It doesn't make you a criminal. The fact you own a gun may be significant if there's evidence you used it in a crime, but the ownership of the gun itself proves nothing.
This doesn't compare to the RNC email scandal. There was no question that Bush administration officials were within their rights to have separate email accounts for running the political campaign. The problem was that they used those accounts for official business like discussing Executive Branch appointments and firings. That's illegal.
I hate the phrase "false equivalence" because it's so vague. This is really more of a "begging the question" situation. It simply makes no sense to compare this to the RNC fiasco where the problem was a violation of the Presidential Records Act. When a violation of that law comes up, we can then ask whether the Obama administration is being held to a lower standard than the Bush administration.
Apple's model will always compromise developer flexibility when user experience is at stake. Google's model will always compromise user experience when developer flexibility is at stake.
I wouldn't put it that way.
Apple's model is to ensure you have the experience Apple wants you to have. Naturally they want you to have a good experience.
Google's model is to provide an open system with maximum connectivity to data sources and services.
Microsoft's model is to cater to decision makers higher up on the food chain than the user: IT managers, cell carriers, and developers. They get lots of criticism for their product design, but in fact it's not as incompetent as users think. Users aren't the audience and Microsoft typically does just enough to give it credibility with its real target markets.
In a nutshell: Apple provides the user a deal in which they give up control over their iPods and iPhones but in return get a reliable, high quality experience. Google gives you a decent experience out of the box but doesn't limit what you do with it.
There are sound business justifications for both approaches, and good reasons for users to favor either of them. In Apple's favor, they do a great job on the iPhone experience, they provide a very good content store that sells things at reasonable prices, and they give you a reasonable amount of flexibility in space shifting the stuff you bought. The price is you have to use the Apple store and accept Apple control. Since they do a great job and can attract developers, chances are you're happy with your iPhone.
In Google's favor, if you want something they don't forbid you from having it. Apple forbids Flash on the iPhone because it undermines their control. Google would not stand in the way of Adobe porting Flash, or somebody porting Gnash. The barriers are technical, not policy. As a user or an administrator you could customize your phones all you like.
What experience shows is that most people are better off letting someone else manage their stuff.
I have both a Motorola Droid and an iPod touch Gen 1. Despite being a couple years older, the iPod is far snappier and very smooth to use. If I was only thinking about the next six months, no question I'd go for the iPhone as the better device. But Android is good enough now and meets my long term needs better because I don't want to be locked in. I don't want to invest in something controlled by someone else, and I'm delighted that Google has finally broken through Verizon's closed platform mentality.
Or not... as the case may be. Computer Science has convinced me that a theory of everything might not be a practical development even if we knew all the relevant fundamental laws.
Let's say that in principle we learn something that allows us to calculate a formula to unify gravitation and electromagnetism. We don't know whether that formula is decidable, whether its membership in the set of correct formulae can be computed. Even if it is decidable, it might belong to a complexity class like EXPTIME-COMPLETE. Even if we built a quantum computer that could give us the formula, we might not be able to conform the correctness of that formula except by appealing to that same computer.
Well, this being Australia, this might under the notion of common law copyright, which is a very different animal than statutory copyright.
The notion that authors have a natural right to control their published works in common law is a matter long settled: they don't. However in some jurisdictions (the United States for example), authors have a right to control the use of their unpublished works. So if Wikileaks gets a hold of J.K. Rowling's next novel and puts it on-line, in the US they are considered to have violated a fundamental right of the author to control her unpublished works. Once the works are published, her rights are very different.
The problem with a copyright claim when it comes to something like ACTA is that it's not really about protecting the author's expression. It's an attempt to parlay an acknowledged legal right over expression into an extra-legal power to limit news coverage of government activities. If there is any party whose interests ought to be protected in a case such as this, it is the public who employs the officials drafting this thing. The public's interest is not in revenues from sales of this law's text or possible derivative works from this law. It is in the nature and extent of obligations and restrictions that are going to be placed on them by the law -- something that is not in any sense intrinsically copyrightable.
The status quo ante here is that anyone who gets wind of what's going on with something like this can blow the whistle, if they're willing to take the risk. The rest of society is not obligated to help government officials squelch the leak. Officials are allowed to work without the public scrutinizing every jot as it is written, but if anyone in the process is alarmed enough, they can blow the whistle and the officials have to give an accounting of what they are up to. That's a reasonable compromise.
Spoken like somebody who has no idea the power that moving water has.
Water takes material from some places and piles it up in others, and it's incredibly hard to dispute with it. You might look at a sandbar that has been stable for decades, and think maybe I could shift it a bit to suit myself, or make it a little higher and have an island. Forget it. That sandbar is the result of self-organized criticality. It *looks* stable, but the individual sand grains in that sandbar are constantly changing.
My wife grew up near the ocean, and there was this semi circular reef extending from two points on the shore that comes out of the water on spring tides, when you can walk the whole thing. Many times I've surfed my kayak over that reef into the deep water inside. The reef consists of cobbles ranging from the size of a grapefruit to the size of a soccer ball. One day one of the neighborhood kids had an idea: if we breech the reef at one point, we'll be able to anchor our boats inside the reef and not have to pay for a slip or launch fees. Next low tide he had the entire neighborhood carrying rocks away from the selected point, until they'd converted the reef into a pair of breakwaters creating an artificial harbor. It was an impressive feat, but the first storm -- not even a *big* storm mind you, and you couldn't tell the spot they excavated from any other spot. There literally was no trace left of their labors.
What you'd have to do with this sunken island is create a new, artificial island using huge granite boulders like they use in breakwaters; or maybe you could set up coffer dams and build a reinforced concrete sea wall. But you have to admit that you're creating an artificial island.
The reason that India and Bangladesh are fighting over this is to establish Law of the Sea rights to the surrounding water. They are trying to evade negotiations over resource disputes by appealing to a "natural" right in artificial law. Using an uninhabited island to establish territorial sovereignty is dicey enough. Using an *artificial* island is clearly absurd.
They should just resolve the underlying dispute, instead of using legal flim-flammery.
China's version of capitalism is the caricature of capitalism they painted in the pre-Deng era; capitalism as unrestrained rapacity. There's an element of truth in that, but capitalism can't be unrestrained in a democratic country with a free press. American capitalism would be everything China said it was, except for business ethics, which would not exist if it were not for fear of shame and public retaliation.
The Novell vice-president was quoted as saying: "Unlike the Java world that is blossoming with dozens of vibrant Java Virtual Machine implementations, the.NET world has suffered by this meme spread by [Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer] that they would come after people that do not license patents from them."
OK, the Java world is blossoming. So that means Sun is doing great, does it?
Microsoft's relationship toward the.NET world is not driven by altruism. It's driven by the need to lock the.NET users into as much of Microsoft's product stack as possible.
Microsoft wanted to do to Java what it did to Netscape. Microsoft created a whole "Internet Explorer ecosystem" and as soon as it had most of the world locked in it stopped investing and bled that ecosystem dry. It only started moving again when users began to jump ship.
Microsoft's product strategy has always amounted to this: make it is to buy in, and hard to get out. That somebody working for Novell of all places doesn't understand that is a bit shocking. Microsoft took away Novell's bread and butter in the late 80s and early 90s essentially by making the case that you could have clerks run your servers rather than highly trained sysadmins.
This is not a "Microsoft is evil" rant. Microsoft does what most businesses try to do: maximize profits by evading competition.
Even easier. Start with a pool table, strip out the bits you don't want, and trim the table with whatever geegaws you want. That appears to be what this company did.
The big advantage over building from scratch: the boring generic "table" part is already done for you, and you can concentrate on the gaming part. In fact, if you made a kind of arrangement that sat in the pockets of the pool table, you could remove the whole thing and still play pool if you wanted to.
This is pretty much what it means to be a geek. To the average person, the "constructed" part of his environment, the things he lives with, that is something fixed. He can buy new stuff or throw old stuff away. If you are geek, no thing's form has to be regarded as fixed.
Practically everything I own has been modified in some way. When I got my Kindle, my first thought was that the metal back was too slippery. I considered covering it with rubberized paint, but settled instead by putting a couple of strips of two inch velcro loop tape to it which makes it easier to hold. I applied velcro hook tape to the slip cover so the two pieces could be handled as one unit. I have a leatherette (vinyl) zip portfolio that I carry paper, writing implements and my kindle in, and I slapped velcro loop on the inside to give the kindle (inside its slipcover) crush space. Since I had velcro hook left over I slapped that on the outside and now I can stand the portfolio with it's spine up and it is a reading stand.
People see that and say, "isn't that clever." But it's not. Once you realize you can turn any surface you aren't otherwise using into a reading stand by slapping some velcro tape on it, it's obvious.
I remember Martin Luther King's assassination, although granted I as *only* seven. I was walking down the street with my mom, and I read a hand lettered sign tacked to a telephone pole calling for revenge against white people. My mom explained that when something bad happens, somebody is bound to get mad and make things worse for everyone.
It made a big impression on me, and I certainly recalled that moment three decades later when I turned on my radio on the morning of September 11, 2001.
This reminds me of back when I was in the environmental non-profit world about fifteen years ago. Greenpeace was on the warpath about chlorine and was making noises about demanding that chlorine be banned. Some of the young paladins on staff mention it one day to the boss, who happened to have a PhD in engineering. The boss pointed out that industry uses chlorine because it's chemically reactive. If we banned chlorine, they'd find something else that was reactive to take its place. In all probability that thing would have all the drawbacks of chlorine. It might even be worse.
"Never," the boss says, "talk about banning anything until you know what's going to replace it."
That's how I feel about a national ID card. If we *don't* have a national ID card, what will the government obtain to do the things it wants a national ID card for?
I'll give you one suggestion: biometrics. Instead of "papers please" it's "thumb please," or "iris please." Worse yet, consider the possibilities of face scanning. It can be integrated with moderate success with surveillance cameras. Now nobody is asking you for anything. Your ID is being taken without your consent or perhaps without your knowledge, and filed away in a database. Furthermore once the government relies upon this system they will believe in it. That means if the system has a false positive ID match near the next terrorist bombing, they'll put you on the watch list and there may be nothing you can do to get yourself off it, because you don't know *why* you were put on the list.
Conservatives focus on the indignity of "papers please", and maybe that is an indignity, but is it less of an indignity if you don't know it's going on? Isn't it more of an indignity that you've lost the ability to detect when government is demanding your ID? Your movements could be tracked through a network of surveillance cameras. It's not quite the same as having the secret police follow you; it's worse. They don't have to follow you, they can just piece it all together from your cell phone signal and biometrics then pull a transcript of your activities from a database, correlating it with the activities of your associates or persons of interest to the security apparatus.
No need, China baby. You see, you can't get in trouble the first you do it; the seed of democracy won't be planted the first time. After the first time, we'll have to pull out. That is unless we do it standing up.
It's a little hard to tell, but one of the advantages listed is that aircraft outside areas with radar coverage will be able to transmit position information. So reading between the lines they expect to continue using radar, but replacing its role in the system with more up to date data broadcast by the aircraft.
I'm guessing that they will not throw out radar entirely for primary surveillance. They'll need it to track things that don't transmit their position, like aircraft with failed electronics.
My thoughts exactly. Google has just raised the stakes in the "one country, two systems game."
Google is probably technically right, but I can't see China allowing firms to evade censorship by moving to Hong Kong. The stakes are huge when you factor in Taiwan. If China cracks down on Hong Kong, it could give new impetus to the Taiwan independence question, potentially destabilizing the region.
On the other hand, if nobody calls the Chinese bluff, people will eventually begin to forget the promise of "one country two systems".
I think it's probably a good thing that it is being phased in... although it probably wasn't done for the right reasons.
I live in Massachusetts. MItt Romney proposed a similar Republican style health insurance reform several years ago, and it passed.
Now news about the success of the system is somewhat mixed. Our reform included a subsidized private health insurance exchange anyone could buy into, and the cost of that program was way higher than anticipated. Why? Because it was a lot more popular than anyone imagined it was going to be. This has been characterized as a "budget buster", but a recent editorial in JAMA points out that this is only true if offsetting savings in the state budget. The reimbursement to hospitals for uncompensated care has been cut dramatically. Still, reform has cost more than anticipated, but it's got a lot more people uninsured.
Here's the real problem that the Massachusetts experience fortells for the US. Enabling a lot more people to pay for health care has increased wait times. It's happened in my own family, where my daughter is going to have to wait for six months for a certain procedure where prior to health reform that might have been two months. It's frustrating, but I tell myself this is not a life threatening situation and that prior to health insurance reform there were a lot of parents in my position who would never get their kid the help she needed. It's a tough moral bargain, but she'll be fine eventually.
Now in 2006 when this got started, Massachusetts had something like 6% of its population covered. Nationwide the average is over twice that. Our state was and is a major medical training center, and we have the highest per capita number of doctors: 462 per 100,000 residents. Now imagine twice the influx of new patients on a median state which has 245 doctors per 100,000 residents.
What we ought to be doing now is recruiting and training armies of physician's assistants and nurse practitioners A lot of the routine care can be done by them and they can be trained a lot faster.
The Chinese government *wants* American values, but cafeteria style. They want free exchange of information so long as it is information leaving America and entering China. They don't want information leaving China or worse yet circulating within China. The Chinese government wants America to be open and pursue classical liberal trade policy while it remains closed and pursues mercantilist policies. It wants America to be true to its respect of sovereign nations, but to forget about every individual's sovereignty over his own opinions. It demands the American not interfere in free markets while the Peoples Liberation Army operates businesses and party official parlay their connections into business wealth.
China has rejected the extreme form of socialism it was founded on, but it has not adopted the enlightened capitalism of Europe and America. It has recreatd the caricature of American capitalism portrayed in its own propaganda: a system in which corrupt wealthy men pull the strings of corrupt government.
It's no wonder they don't want American values: those values empower the working class.
What makes you think you are so much better than anyone else then?
Yes?
What makes you think everyone is as despicable as you?
There's all kinds of people in the world, and there will always be a few who game the system practically for the sake of getting something they don't deserve. It's seldom worth the effort.
Exactly. That's why this law says you must buy insurance. If you're within 150% of the federal poverty line you can opt into Medicaid or take a subsidy to buy private insurance, but you can't shift your risks onto the insured.
It's not surprising that this bill is 2000 pages long. Most provisions have unintended consequences that have to be addressed by other provisions, and so on. No denial for pre-existing conditions means a mandate to buy insurance. That means expanding Medicaid and providing subsidies for hardship cases.
The big problem with the Senate version of the bill is that it stops here. The House bill attempted to shield consumers who would be forced to buy insurance in states where one or two companies hold a monopoly on insurance. The Senate bill stripped that out.
In my experience coders who try to write fast code fail.
I recently delivered a small pro-bono update to a piece of software for some field biologists. They were amazed that one of the processes that had formerly taken forty five minutes now took about fifteen seconds. They asked me what I did, and I said, "I removed the optimizations."
That wasn't entirely true. What I did was I through out an unmaintainable mess of code and replaced it with something simple. But the mess came about because the original developer had been paranoid about speed. He organized the entire code around one avoiding several performance issues that he feared without any empirical evidence they would be measurable problems. The result was so complex that he was unable to consolidate a handful of heavyweight operations that were performed thousands and thousands of times. He tried object pooling, which added complexity and bugs while only obtaining marginal speed improvements. What he needed was a simple algorithmic improvement that was impossible without ripping the whole mess apart.
A programmer's first priority should be to write a solution that is clear and correct, and then if there is a problem you do one of two things. You tweak the inevitable 5% of the code that takes 95% of the time, and if that doesn't work you create an entirely new clear, correct abstraction for the problem that algorithmically tackles the worst case. You try to trade off space for time and that sort of thing. If that doesn't work, you look at some kind of dynamic programming or, I suppose, parallel programming. Anything that can utilize slack computational resources.
But it all comes down to clarity. The reason to write simple, effective code is that it is more likely to be correct and it is more likely to be maintainable. It's also very commonly easy to make faster. The key is abstraction. You "search a list", not "initialize an index variable to an array and loop over increasing values of the array until the termination conditions are obtained." The abstraction is not only easier to read and understand, it gives you a wall behind which you can make speed improvements in the unlikely case that is necessary. Such unlikely cases occur all the time; it's that proverbial 5% of the code. That means you get nearly all the possible speed improvements for 1/20 of the cost.
Let's start with the most basic question: who contacts who? Given our ability ability to be the contacter, it's almost certain to be the aliens. So lets grant them technology that is superior to ours at the very least. It seems to me that technology such as we have is not possible for lifeforms with lower intelligence than we, so at the very least the aliens are as intelligent than we, and quite possibly far more intelligent.
Also, if the alien is the contacter, it may well be more experienced at this.
If you put that all together, the obvious answer is that the logical party to manage the encounter would the aliens. At first they might talking to human scientists and mathematicians, in order to speed the development of a common basis for communication. Since your chances of encountering a scientist after landing in a cornfield is small, that entails some involvement with government, but once that basis is established the aliens will undoubtedly have their own agenda.
Alternatively they could circumvent government by passively observing us, then nabbing a few isolated specimens here and there for examination. The first formal contact might well be with a human participant who is specifically chosen by the aliens. That's what I'd do. I'd study the society I was making contact with and pick out who I wanted to talk to.
When I was developing mobile apps and involved in product development, I very quickly came to the conclusion that for serious mobile apps, battery was king. It's one thing if the battery runs out on your video player or fart noise generator. It's another thing if the battery runs out on a device that is being used to record mission critical field data.
For years after real laptops became available, reporters hung onto their primitive Radio Shack Model 100s, because they ran on AA batteries. When Palm switched from AAA batteries to integrated Li-ion, we dropped developing for them because our users would not accept a device whose battery couldn't be swapped in the field.
Another issue the article raises are "tablet apps". My experience in mobile UI design is that it took me years to undo the ways of thinking I'd developed from working with keyboard/mouse/monitor apps. That kind of thinking was pervasive in the Windows Mobile world, because the big marketing point of Windows Mobile was that it worked *just like Windows*. This was sort of true for users (although why the start menu was at the top of the screen was a mystery to me) and sort of true for developers (who could use the same IDE).
It's only after I'd done a couple serious mobile apps and had a few really demanding mobile UI designs under my belt that I began to see the differences between a small touch screen device and a traditional desktop as a matter of new UI opportunities, not just constraints.
You *can* overlay an on-screen keyboard on a traditional desktop app and get something that is usable, but you aren't going to provide the kind of experience the user is looking for. You've got to design, not only around the limitations of the platform, but to its strengths. To my mind that's the direct manipulation through a single input mechanism; that's not just limiting, it's freeing; it allows you to put the user much more in a direct manipulation mindset and to create an interface that feels responsive and controllable.
Like all IT administrators who've actually worked with server hardware, I have a heightened sense of smell, but only specifically for the smell of burning plastic. It's not a mere warning, it's an instant alarm that'll have every IT person in the room sniffing the power supplies.
Great! Now all we need is a way to turn that mutation into some kind of reproductive advantage. Or maybe we should segregate sever admins into a separate breeding population, and after a few dozen generations we'll have a new subspecies: H. sapiens resinanasus.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you've got it right.
What we have here is an official who's been shown to have the *means* to commit a crime. Not evidence that he *has* committed a crime. It's like owning a gun. It doesn't make you a criminal. The fact you own a gun may be significant if there's evidence you used it in a crime, but the ownership of the gun itself proves nothing.
This doesn't compare to the RNC email scandal. There was no question that Bush administration officials were within their rights to have separate email accounts for running the political campaign. The problem was that they used those accounts for official business like discussing Executive Branch appointments and firings. That's illegal.
I hate the phrase "false equivalence" because it's so vague. This is really more of a "begging the question" situation. It simply makes no sense to compare this to the RNC fiasco where the problem was a violation of the Presidential Records Act. When a violation of that law comes up, we can then ask whether the Obama administration is being held to a lower standard than the Bush administration.
Apple's model will always compromise developer flexibility when user experience is at stake. Google's model will always compromise user experience when developer flexibility is at stake.
I wouldn't put it that way.
Apple's model is to ensure you have the experience Apple wants you to have. Naturally they want you to have a good experience.
Google's model is to provide an open system with maximum connectivity to data sources and services.
Microsoft's model is to cater to decision makers higher up on the food chain than the user: IT managers, cell carriers, and developers. They get lots of criticism for their product design, but in fact it's not as incompetent as users think. Users aren't the audience and Microsoft typically does just enough to give it credibility with its real target markets.
In a nutshell: Apple provides the user a deal in which they give up control over their iPods and iPhones but in return get a reliable, high quality experience. Google gives you a decent experience out of the box but doesn't limit what you do with it.
There are sound business justifications for both approaches, and good reasons for users to favor either of them. In Apple's favor, they do a great job on the iPhone experience, they provide a very good content store that sells things at reasonable prices, and they give you a reasonable amount of flexibility in space shifting the stuff you bought. The price is you have to use the Apple store and accept Apple control. Since they do a great job and can attract developers, chances are you're happy with your iPhone.
In Google's favor, if you want something they don't forbid you from having it. Apple forbids Flash on the iPhone because it undermines their control. Google would not stand in the way of Adobe porting Flash, or somebody porting Gnash. The barriers are technical, not policy. As a user or an administrator you could customize your phones all you like.
What experience shows is that most people are better off letting someone else manage their stuff.
I have both a Motorola Droid and an iPod touch Gen 1. Despite being a couple years older, the iPod is far snappier and very smooth to use. If I was only thinking about the next six months, no question I'd go for the iPhone as the better device. But Android is good enough now and meets my long term needs better because I don't want to be locked in. I don't want to invest in something controlled by someone else, and I'm delighted that Google has finally broken through Verizon's closed platform mentality.
Or not ... as the case may be. Computer Science has convinced me that a theory of everything might not be a practical development even if we knew all the relevant fundamental laws.
Let's say that in principle we learn something that allows us to calculate a formula to unify gravitation and electromagnetism. We don't know whether that formula is decidable, whether its membership in the set of correct formulae can be computed. Even if it is decidable, it might belong to a complexity class like EXPTIME-COMPLETE. Even if we built a quantum computer that could give us the formula, we might not be able to conform the correctness of that formula except by appealing to that same computer.
Well, this being Australia, this might under the notion of common law copyright, which is a very different animal than statutory copyright.
The notion that authors have a natural right to control their published works in common law is a matter long settled: they don't. However in some jurisdictions (the United States for example), authors have a right to control the use of their unpublished works. So if Wikileaks gets a hold of J.K. Rowling's next novel and puts it on-line, in the US they are considered to have violated a fundamental right of the author to control her unpublished works. Once the works are published, her rights are very different.
The problem with a copyright claim when it comes to something like ACTA is that it's not really about protecting the author's expression. It's an attempt to parlay an acknowledged legal right over expression into an extra-legal power to limit news coverage of government activities. If there is any party whose interests ought to be protected in a case such as this, it is the public who employs the officials drafting this thing. The public's interest is not in revenues from sales of this law's text or possible derivative works from this law. It is in the nature and extent of obligations and restrictions that are going to be placed on them by the law -- something that is not in any sense intrinsically copyrightable.
The status quo ante here is that anyone who gets wind of what's going on with something like this can blow the whistle, if they're willing to take the risk. The rest of society is not obligated to help government officials squelch the leak. Officials are allowed to work without the public scrutinizing every jot as it is written, but if anyone in the process is alarmed enough, they can blow the whistle and the officials have to give an accounting of what they are up to. That's a reasonable compromise.
Spoken like somebody who has no idea the power that moving water has.
Water takes material from some places and piles it up in others, and it's incredibly hard to dispute with it. You might look at a sandbar that has been stable for decades, and think maybe I could shift it a bit to suit myself, or make it a little higher and have an island. Forget it. That sandbar is the result of self-organized criticality. It *looks* stable, but the individual sand grains in that sandbar are constantly changing.
My wife grew up near the ocean, and there was this semi circular reef extending from two points on the shore that comes out of the water on spring tides, when you can walk the whole thing. Many times I've surfed my kayak over that reef into the deep water inside. The reef consists of cobbles ranging from the size of a grapefruit to the size of a soccer ball. One day one of the neighborhood kids had an idea: if we breech the reef at one point, we'll be able to anchor our boats inside the reef and not have to pay for a slip or launch fees. Next low tide he had the entire neighborhood carrying rocks away from the selected point, until they'd converted the reef into a pair of breakwaters creating an artificial harbor. It was an impressive feat, but the first storm -- not even a *big* storm mind you, and you couldn't tell the spot they excavated from any other spot. There literally was no trace left of their labors.
What you'd have to do with this sunken island is create a new, artificial island using huge granite boulders like they use in breakwaters; or maybe you could set up coffer dams and build a reinforced concrete sea wall. But you have to admit that you're creating an artificial island.
The reason that India and Bangladesh are fighting over this is to establish Law of the Sea rights to the surrounding water. They are trying to evade negotiations over resource disputes by appealing to a "natural" right in artificial law. Using an uninhabited island to establish territorial sovereignty is dicey enough. Using an *artificial* island is clearly absurd.
They should just resolve the underlying dispute, instead of using legal flim-flammery.
China's version of capitalism is the caricature of capitalism they painted in the pre-Deng era; capitalism as unrestrained rapacity. There's an element of truth in that, but capitalism can't be unrestrained in a democratic country with a free press. American capitalism would be everything China said it was, except for business ethics, which would not exist if it were not for fear of shame and public retaliation.
still be so clueless?
OK, the Java world is blossoming. So that means Sun is doing great, does it?
Microsoft's relationship toward the .NET world is not driven by altruism. It's driven by the need to lock the .NET users into as much of Microsoft's product stack as possible.
Microsoft wanted to do to Java what it did to Netscape. Microsoft created a whole "Internet Explorer ecosystem" and as soon as it had most of the world locked in it stopped investing and bled that ecosystem dry. It only started moving again when users began to jump ship.
Microsoft's product strategy has always amounted to this: make it is to buy in, and hard to get out. That somebody working for Novell of all places doesn't understand that is a bit shocking. Microsoft took away Novell's bread and butter in the late 80s and early 90s essentially by making the case that you could have clerks run your servers rather than highly trained sysadmins.
This is not a "Microsoft is evil" rant. Microsoft does what most businesses try to do: maximize profits by evading competition.
The UK is the nation that gave us Benny Hill. The US is the nation where the Benny Hill show could only be seen on educational television.
Question:
Can anyone give any insight behind how they perform upgrades like this?
Dr. Zen's Answer: No.
Even easier. Start with a pool table, strip out the bits you don't want, and trim the table with whatever geegaws you want. That appears to be what this company did.
The big advantage over building from scratch: the boring generic "table" part is already done for you, and you can concentrate on the gaming part. In fact, if you made a kind of arrangement that sat in the pockets of the pool table, you could remove the whole thing and still play pool if you wanted to.
This is pretty much what it means to be a geek. To the average person, the "constructed" part of his environment, the things he lives with, that is something fixed. He can buy new stuff or throw old stuff away. If you are geek, no thing's form has to be regarded as fixed.
Practically everything I own has been modified in some way. When I got my Kindle, my first thought was that the metal back was too slippery. I considered covering it with rubberized paint, but settled instead by putting a couple of strips of two inch velcro loop tape to it which makes it easier to hold. I applied velcro hook tape to the slip cover so the two pieces could be handled as one unit. I have a leatherette (vinyl) zip portfolio that I carry paper, writing implements and my kindle in, and I slapped velcro loop on the inside to give the kindle (inside its slipcover) crush space. Since I had velcro hook left over I slapped that on the outside and now I can stand the portfolio with it's spine up and it is a reading stand.
People see that and say, "isn't that clever." But it's not. Once you realize you can turn any surface you aren't otherwise using into a reading stand by slapping some velcro tape on it, it's obvious.
I remember Martin Luther King's assassination, although granted I as *only* seven. I was walking down the street with my mom, and I read a hand lettered sign tacked to a telephone pole calling for revenge against white people. My mom explained that when something bad happens, somebody is bound to get mad and make things worse for everyone.
It made a big impression on me, and I certainly recalled that moment three decades later when I turned on my radio on the morning of September 11, 2001.
This reminds me of back when I was in the environmental non-profit world about fifteen years ago. Greenpeace was on the warpath about chlorine and was making noises about demanding that chlorine be banned. Some of the young paladins on staff mention it one day to the boss, who happened to have a PhD in engineering. The boss pointed out that industry uses chlorine because it's chemically reactive. If we banned chlorine, they'd find something else that was reactive to take its place. In all probability that thing would have all the drawbacks of chlorine. It might even be worse.
"Never," the boss says, "talk about banning anything until you know what's going to replace it."
That's how I feel about a national ID card. If we *don't* have a national ID card, what will the government obtain to do the things it wants a national ID card for?
I'll give you one suggestion: biometrics. Instead of "papers please" it's "thumb please," or "iris please." Worse yet, consider the possibilities of face scanning. It can be integrated with moderate success with surveillance cameras. Now nobody is asking you for anything. Your ID is being taken without your consent or perhaps without your knowledge, and filed away in a database. Furthermore once the government relies upon this system they will believe in it. That means if the system has a false positive ID match near the next terrorist bombing, they'll put you on the watch list and there may be nothing you can do to get yourself off it, because you don't know *why* you were put on the list.
Conservatives focus on the indignity of "papers please", and maybe that is an indignity, but is it less of an indignity if you don't know it's going on? Isn't it more of an indignity that you've lost the ability to detect when government is demanding your ID? Your movements could be tracked through a network of surveillance cameras. It's not quite the same as having the secret police follow you; it's worse. They don't have to follow you, they can just piece it all together from your cell phone signal and biometrics then pull a transcript of your activities from a database, correlating it with the activities of your associates or persons of interest to the security apparatus.
Pull out?
No need, China baby. You see, you can't get in trouble the first you do it; the seed of democracy won't be planted the first time. After the first time, we'll have to pull out. That is unless we do it standing up.
Cathars? Oh, it gets worse. The actual last supper was a seder.
It's a little hard to tell, but one of the advantages listed is that aircraft outside areas with radar coverage will be able to transmit position information. So reading between the lines they expect to continue using radar, but replacing its role in the system with more up to date data broadcast by the aircraft.
I'm guessing that they will not throw out radar entirely for primary surveillance. They'll need it to track things that don't transmit their position, like aircraft with failed electronics.
My thoughts exactly. Google has just raised the stakes in the "one country, two systems game."
Google is probably technically right, but I can't see China allowing firms to evade censorship by moving to Hong Kong. The stakes are huge when you factor in Taiwan. If China cracks down on Hong Kong, it could give new impetus to the Taiwan independence question, potentially destabilizing the region.
On the other hand, if nobody calls the Chinese bluff, people will eventually begin to forget the promise of "one country two systems".
I think it's probably a good thing that it is being phased in ... although it probably wasn't done for the right reasons.
I live in Massachusetts. MItt Romney proposed a similar Republican style health insurance reform several years ago, and it passed.
Now news about the success of the system is somewhat mixed. Our reform included a subsidized private health insurance exchange anyone could buy into, and the cost of that program was way higher than anticipated. Why? Because it was a lot more popular than anyone imagined it was going to be. This has been characterized as a "budget buster", but a recent editorial in JAMA points out that this is only true if offsetting savings in the state budget. The reimbursement to hospitals for uncompensated care has been cut dramatically. Still, reform has cost more than anticipated, but it's got a lot more people uninsured.
Here's the real problem that the Massachusetts experience fortells for the US. Enabling a lot more people to pay for health care has increased wait times. It's happened in my own family, where my daughter is going to have to wait for six months for a certain procedure where prior to health reform that might have been two months. It's frustrating, but I tell myself this is not a life threatening situation and that prior to health insurance reform there were a lot of parents in my position who would never get their kid the help she needed. It's a tough moral bargain, but she'll be fine eventually.
Now in 2006 when this got started, Massachusetts had something like 6% of its population covered. Nationwide the average is over twice that. Our state was and is a major medical training center, and we have the highest per capita number of doctors: 462 per 100,000 residents. Now imagine twice the influx of new patients on a median state which has 245 doctors per 100,000 residents.
What we ought to be doing now is recruiting and training armies of physician's assistants and nurse practitioners A lot of the routine care can be done by them and they can be trained a lot faster.
You mean like free trade?
The Chinese government *wants* American values, but cafeteria style. They want free exchange of information so long as it is information leaving America and entering China. They don't want information leaving China or worse yet circulating within China. The Chinese government wants America to be open and pursue classical liberal trade policy while it remains closed and pursues mercantilist policies. It wants America to be true to its respect of sovereign nations, but to forget about every individual's sovereignty over his own opinions. It demands the American not interfere in free markets while the Peoples Liberation Army operates businesses and party official parlay their connections into business wealth.
China has rejected the extreme form of socialism it was founded on, but it has not adopted the enlightened capitalism of Europe and America. It has recreatd the caricature of American capitalism portrayed in its own propaganda: a system in which corrupt wealthy men pull the strings of corrupt government.
It's no wonder they don't want American values: those values empower the working class.
OK, is that what *you* would do?
No?
What makes you think you are so much better than anyone else then?
Yes?
What makes you think everyone is as despicable as you?
There's all kinds of people in the world, and there will always be a few who game the system practically for the sake of getting something they don't deserve. It's seldom worth the effort.
Exactly. That's why this law says you must buy insurance. If you're within 150% of the federal poverty line you can opt into Medicaid or take a subsidy to buy private insurance, but you can't shift your risks onto the insured.
It's not surprising that this bill is 2000 pages long. Most provisions have unintended consequences that have to be addressed by other provisions, and so on. No denial for pre-existing conditions means a mandate to buy insurance. That means expanding Medicaid and providing subsidies for hardship cases.
The big problem with the Senate version of the bill is that it stops here. The House bill attempted to shield consumers who would be forced to buy insurance in states where one or two companies hold a monopoly on insurance. The Senate bill stripped that out.
In my experience coders who try to write fast code fail.
I recently delivered a small pro-bono update to a piece of software for some field biologists. They were amazed that one of the processes that had formerly taken forty five minutes now took about fifteen seconds. They asked me what I did, and I said, "I removed the optimizations."
That wasn't entirely true. What I did was I through out an unmaintainable mess of code and replaced it with something simple. But the mess came about because the original developer had been paranoid about speed. He organized the entire code around one avoiding several performance issues that he feared without any empirical evidence they would be measurable problems. The result was so complex that he was unable to consolidate a handful of heavyweight operations that were performed thousands and thousands of times. He tried object pooling, which added complexity and bugs while only obtaining marginal speed improvements. What he needed was a simple algorithmic improvement that was impossible without ripping the whole mess apart.
A programmer's first priority should be to write a solution that is clear and correct, and then if there is a problem you do one of two things. You tweak the inevitable 5% of the code that takes 95% of the time, and if that doesn't work you create an entirely new clear, correct abstraction for the problem that algorithmically tackles the worst case. You try to trade off space for time and that sort of thing. If that doesn't work, you look at some kind of dynamic programming or, I suppose, parallel programming. Anything that can utilize slack computational resources.
But it all comes down to clarity. The reason to write simple, effective code is that it is more likely to be correct and it is more likely to be maintainable. It's also very commonly easy to make faster. The key is abstraction. You "search a list", not "initialize an index variable to an array and loop over increasing values of the array until the termination conditions are obtained." The abstraction is not only easier to read and understand, it gives you a wall behind which you can make speed improvements in the unlikely case that is necessary. Such unlikely cases occur all the time; it's that proverbial 5% of the code. That means you get nearly all the possible speed improvements for 1/20 of the cost.
That's a completely unrealistic view of matters.
Let's start with the most basic question: who contacts who? Given our ability ability to be the contacter, it's almost certain to be the aliens. So lets grant them technology that is superior to ours at the very least. It seems to me that technology such as we have is not possible for lifeforms with lower intelligence than we, so at the very least the aliens are as intelligent than we, and quite possibly far more intelligent.
Also, if the alien is the contacter, it may well be more experienced at this.
If you put that all together, the obvious answer is that the logical party to manage the encounter would the aliens. At first they might talking to human scientists and mathematicians, in order to speed the development of a common basis for communication. Since your chances of encountering a scientist after landing in a cornfield is small, that entails some involvement with government, but once that basis is established the aliens will undoubtedly have their own agenda.
Alternatively they could circumvent government by passively observing us, then nabbing a few isolated specimens here and there for examination. The first formal contact might well be with a human participant who is specifically chosen by the aliens. That's what I'd do. I'd study the society I was making contact with and pick out who I wanted to talk to.
There is no natural scarcity of anything in nature. Everything is sufficient for what will be.
What there is, is a superabundance of human desire. No matter how much of anything nature provides us with, we will never consider it "enough".
When I was developing mobile apps and involved in product development, I very quickly came to the conclusion that for serious mobile apps, battery was king. It's one thing if the battery runs out on your video player or fart noise generator. It's another thing if the battery runs out on a device that is being used to record mission critical field data.
For years after real laptops became available, reporters hung onto their primitive Radio Shack Model 100s, because they ran on AA batteries. When Palm switched from AAA batteries to integrated Li-ion, we dropped developing for them because our users would not accept a device whose battery couldn't be swapped in the field.
Another issue the article raises are "tablet apps". My experience in mobile UI design is that it took me years to undo the ways of thinking I'd developed from working with keyboard/mouse/monitor apps. That kind of thinking was pervasive in the Windows Mobile world, because the big marketing point of Windows Mobile was that it worked *just like Windows*. This was sort of true for users (although why the start menu was at the top of the screen was a mystery to me) and sort of true for developers (who could use the same IDE).
It's only after I'd done a couple serious mobile apps and had a few really demanding mobile UI designs under my belt that I began to see the differences between a small touch screen device and a traditional desktop as a matter of new UI opportunities, not just constraints.
You *can* overlay an on-screen keyboard on a traditional desktop app and get something that is usable, but you aren't going to provide the kind of experience the user is looking for. You've got to design, not only around the limitations of the platform, but to its strengths. To my mind that's the direct manipulation through a single input mechanism; that's not just limiting, it's freeing; it allows you to put the user much more in a direct manipulation mindset and to create an interface that feels responsive and controllable.
Like all IT administrators who've actually worked with server hardware, I have a heightened sense of smell, but only specifically for the smell of burning plastic. It's not a mere warning, it's an instant alarm that'll have every IT person in the room sniffing the power supplies.
Great! Now all we need is a way to turn that mutation into some kind of reproductive advantage. Or maybe we should segregate sever admins into a separate breeding population, and after a few dozen generations we'll have a new subspecies: H. sapiens resinanasus.