You've missed the point. Enforcement of just laws is (3+): a National / Social benefit. Enforcement of unjust laws is (3-): a Negative consequence of an ideal ID system. We can argue about whether immigration and employment laws are just or not, but it doesn't change my underlying point.
FWIW, I probably know more about the immigration system and all its ups and downs than you do, as my wife is an immigrant and I went through the whole process with her.
If it was a rational world, the drinking age would be the same as the age at which you can sign up for the army to fight and die for your country. It seems pretty ridiculous that you could drive a tank at 19, but not have a beer afterwards. That said, you have brought up a good point: the negative consequences of accurate, reliable ID.
There are really three things people are worried about here: 1 - The possibility of fraud inherent in even an ideal ID system. 2 - The possibility of fraud in a real-world system implemented by the US government (i.e., one that will probably be poorly designed). 3 - The negative consequences of an accurate ID system.
There are positives, too. I'll classify them as follows: 1 + Personal benefits of an ideal ID system. 2 + Benefits to companies from an ideal ID system. 3 + National / social benefits.
Before I get into details, what do I mean by an ideal system? One in which you can prove to anyone you wish any of the following information, or some subset thereof: name, age, eligibility to work, driving license, professional certifications, credit "card" account, etc. For instance, you might want to prove to a bar's bouncer that you're of legal age, but not reveal your name, credit card number, or even your exact age. How could this work? As soon as you reach legal age, the government sends you a digitally signed "certificate" that includes your photo and a statement that you can drink. When you go to a bar, you can upload the certificate to the bouncer's PDA or whatever, and he checks to see the picture is you. If it is, you're in. To break this, you'd need to break public key cryptography, which you can probably only do with a quantum computer.
Now, let's get into details.
1 - Fraud in an ideal ID system Even in an ideal system, the card will only be as good as the information used to create it. While such a system is being adopted, there's a window of opportunity for people to forge old-style IDs, then use them to get a new "official" ID with the forged information. This is commonly done with birth certificates now. This is the main issue.
2 - Fraud in a real-world system Even compared to other governments, the US seems particularly bad at large-scale IT projects. It's surprising, considering all the IT talent in the country. A system designed by the US government would probably start with bad specs, have a bad design, and be poorly implemented. A disaster, in short. I suspect radical changes in the process might help here. Put NIST in charge of designing open standards, with the NSA consulting. Get Bruce Schneier, the EFF, and others involved. Maybe try something like the AES challenge.
3 - Negative consequences of an ideal system This is the most insidious of all the negatives. An accurate, effective, ubiquitous ID card will be used for more and more things, and will become a method for tracking and controlling people. We'd need some really good privacy laws to prevent this, as well as a smart design that puts people in charge of their own information and how much they reveal.
1 + Personal benefits Wouldn't it be great to ditch all those cards in your wallet and just have one thing to carry? I know I'd like that. It would also be great to not have to worry about ID theft (at least, not in an ideal system). Depending on how the backend worked, a unified ID could also mean not having to change your address in a gazillion databases every time you move (for instance, did you know the California DMV driver license database is independent of the California vehicle registration database, and you have to change your address separately in both?) Really, this category boils down to convenience and reduced vulnerability to ID theft, IF the system is well-designed.
2 + Benefits to companies This one's pretty simple--reduced fraud leads to reduced expenses, for banks, credit card companies, and merchants. It probably also simplifies a lot of transactions, which wo
Disclaimer: IAAQIR (I Am A Quantum Information Researcher).
Worse, they talk about "repeaters" to extend the range past 120km - which is scary, because it implies they are decrypting/recrypting at the repeater.
Not necessarily. It's possible in principle to build a "quantum repeater", which receives, "purifies", stores, and retransmits qubits without measuring them. By purification, I mean using either quantum error correction, or quantum entanglement distillation in conjunction with quantum teleportation. Such a scheme was proposed by Duan, et al, in Nature 414 413 (2001).
Duan's scheme gives polynomial scaling of resources with distance, which is good news. The bad news is that building a quantum repeater requires reliable quantum memory, which is experimentally difficult.
The lower tech alternative is "cascading" or simple chaining of QKD transceivers. The catch here is that if one of the intermediate transceivers is tampered with and compromised, you lose.
Damn, that's exactly what I thought of as soon as I saw the headline. I was going to go searching for that picture, but you saved me the time. I wish I had mod points.
More seriously, that's probably a good characterization of what will come out of the process: a futuristic, high performance car that gets great gas milage but looks ugly as hell. It will have all sorts of "flashy" features like alpha transparency--err, tailfins, but they won't be integrated into a coherent, consistent design. Until Apple makes the iCar, which will basically be an OScar frame and engine with a sweet-as-hell body.:-)
Further down in the comments, someone mentions that the detector is actually a two-slit apparatus. So what is meant is that if the first particle is acting as a wave, there will be an interference pattern, but if it's acting as a particle, there will just be a single point of impact.
You don't get an interference pattern with a single event. If you repeat the two-slit experiment many times with a moveable detector, you find a statistical pattern of single-photon detections that is identical to the interference pattern. The photons are distributed in a wave-like interference pattern, but are detected as individual photons. A two-slit apparatus is generally not useful in testing Bell's Theorem, so I think what probably happened is that Cramer tried to explain what was happening by analogy to the two-slit experiment, and the journalist got confused.
It seems to me to be just a more overly-complicated version of the variation on the two-slit experiment where you put detectors in the slits to try and see which one the particle passed through, and in so doing destroy the quantum effect and don't get an interference pattern.
No, the two-slit experiment only requires a single particle, and thus there is no entanglement. Cramer's experiment involves two entangled photons (generated by parametric downconversion using the "special crystal" mentioned in the article), so it's conceptually quite different.
The bottom line is this: 1) the article is horribly written, 2) Cramer's theories are not mainstream, and 3) it is almost certain that nothing interesting will come of this experiment (many, many tests of Bell's Theorem have already been done, so it's unlikely this one will be any different).
As a general rule, US / UK science journalism, particularly that relating to quantum mechanics, is so bad that you will know less for having read the article. Discover and Scientific American used to be OK, but are no longer any good. New Scientist is awful, and Popular Science doesn't even try to cover this stuff, focusing more on technology. It's a shame...
I am a physicist, specifically one who specializes in quantum information.
The write-up is total garbage. Sadly, I've read enough mangled pop-sci descriptions of quantum mechanics that I can translate most of it into non-gibberish--in true Slashdot fashion--without even reading the article (which is probably even more full of gibberish, and thus capable of rotting your brain). I did have to look at the article to figure out whether it's the journalist or the scientist that bears responsibility for this mess. Here's my translation:
The U of W physicists want to do a test of Bell's Theorem in such a way as to close one of the "loopholes" in previous tests (the possibility of signaling between particles).
Some background: Bell's Theorem is at the heart of what makes quantum mechanics so shocking. If you want to understand one of the greatest accomplishments of modern science, you owe it to yourself to learn about the famous EPR criticism of quantum mechanics (Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen, Physical Review47, 777), Bell's Theorem, and the Aspect experiment. The EPR elegantly lays out what so many people find weird and shocking about quantum mechanics (and what Einstein et al took to be evidence of its incompleteness), while Bell's Theorem and Aspect's experiment show that yes, the world really is this weird, and the EPR paper is wrong.
The link I've provided to the EPR paper will unfortunately only get you the abstract, unless you're at a university, in which case your institution almost certainly has a subscription to Physical Review. To learn about Bell's Theorem, try the appendix in "Introduction to Quantum Mechanics" by David Griffiths. AFAIK, the derivation of Bell's Inequality is only a few pages, and requires only basic calculus. The derivation is accessible to non-physicists who either know or are willing to learn basic calculus.
The above reading is not an easy project for a layman, but it is doable. It will give you a better understanding of modern physics than any number of "popular science"-type books you could read. Without the math, all that's left of quantum mechanics is people BSing about their favorite "interpretation". If you want to know enough to make up your own mind, learn about the EPR paper and Bell's Theorem.
The U of W experiment: So, if Bell's Theorem has already been tested by Aspect, what's left for the U of W team? Bell's Theorem allows one to disprove all local hidden-variable theories. Aspect's original experiment didn't quite satisfy all the conditions for such a test, in that there were "loopholes" through which a very contrived theory with bizarre features might escape. Many people have since done experiments to close some of these loopholes.
Initially, just based on the Slashdot write-up, I thought the experiment was designed to close the locality loophole: if the two particles are not spacelike separated, a subluminal signal could in principle be sent from one to the other to tell it how to "respond" to a measurement. The way to close the loophole is to make sure the measurements of the two particles are spacelike separated events. This would be a reasonable experiment to do, although I think may already have been done.
Having read the abysmal Seattle PI article linked in the write-up, it looks like that's not what's planned. Cramer is the inventor of a somewhat less-popular interpretation of quantum mechanics, the transactional interpretation, in which particles send signals forward and backward in time. This isn't quite as crazy as it sounds, since there's time-reversal and other symmetries inherent in quantum mechanics, but I wouldn't call it well-accepted. What's more concerning
Since posting the above, I went and read the detailed calculations in the supplementary material supplied by Monckton. It turns out the problem is more complicated. It sounds like the "conventional" definition of lambda is such that it should arguably include not only the direct response to a forcing, but also the indirect response occuring due to feedback from the original response (e.g., increased CO2 increases temperatures, which increase evaporation, which increases airborne H2O, which further increases the greenhouse effect).
Monckton argues that his value of lambda, when combined with the standard estimates of greenhouse gas forcing, best explains the data from the past century, and that a high value of lambda results in double-counting of feedback effects. According to him, the conventional approach yields "retrodiction" of a temperature increase about three times larger than actually occurred, which is then explained away by most climatologists by claiming the ocean acts as a heat sink. I checked whether this is feasible, and it does seem to be; 100 years of 1 W / m^2 extra forcing would cause only about a 0.06 K increase in mean ocean temperature, which might well go undetected (anyone in oceanography have good data on this?). In short, I can't confirm or deny either hypothesis, although Monckton's is simpler.
I am also a physicist. Lambda is dT/dP, evaluated at some temperature approximately equal to the earth's mean surface temperature. Taking the derivative and inverting, you get dT/dP = 1 / (4 sigma epsilon T^3). For epsilon = 1 and T=280 K, this gives lambda ~= 0.2. Wikipedia claims the average albedo of earth is about 30%, which very roughly implies the emissivity epsilon = 0.7 (since a blackbody is 0% albedo, and perfect reflectivity is 100% albedo). I'm ignoring frequency dependence and other effects, but this is a first order calculation. With that value for epsilon, I get lambda = 0.29 for the aforementioned parameters. So far, things look good for Monckton.
Now, let's try to refine our estimate of epsilon to account for frequency dependence. The 30% albedo given by Wikipedia is based on reflection of sunlight, and is thus probably heavily weighted to the visible spectrum, which is where the sun's radiated power peaks. Earth's thermal radiation, on the other hand, peaks in the infrared, since earth is much cooler. Due to the natural greenhouse effect, the 30% albedo may not be accurate at infrared frequencies. Thus, we want to calculate epsilon', the emissivity of the earth at infrared frequencies. The natural greenhouse effect provides an excellent mechanism for us to do this. Let s be the solar constant, 1366 W / m^2. Multiplying by (1-0.3) to account for the albedo of earth, and dividing by 4 to account for the ratio of the earth's cross-section to its surface area, we obtain an average absorbed power flux of 240 W / m^2. We then solve the Stefan Boltzmann Law to determine the value of epsilon' necessary to achieve equilibrium, substituting Earth's mean surface temperature for T: 240 W / m^2 = sigma epsilon' T^4 ==> epsilon' ~= 0.7. Thus, it looks like our first estimate was good.
To recap, we use the Stefan-Boltzmann Law, the (measured) albedo of earth, the approximate mean temperature of earth, and the solar constant to estimate the effective emissivity of earth for infrared. We find it agrees with Earth's mean albedo. Using this value of the emissivity and the Stefan-Boltzmann Law, we estimate lambda as 0.29 K / (W / m^2), in good agreement with Monckton, and poor agreement with the other estimates he mentioned.
Sorry, the grandparent post is spot-on. The Seattle WTO riots may have put "globalization" on the table and increased awareness, but it also created the perception that the anti-globalization movement is just a bunch of dirty hippies and bored college students. I know the guy who has the "i" from the Niketown sign, and he was both a bored college student and a hippy (not actually dirty, though). Guess how that influenced my perception of the anti-globalization movement?
It's really completely irrelevant how organized the anarchists were or how much union support they had at the time--the g.p. poster's point was that the consequence of the riots was that people now view it as a "dirty hippy" cause.
I suggest you stop watching so much MSM and so some research before you just spout off.
I'm not a big fan of the MSM, but it is exactly where you should look if you want to learn about how things are perceived by the general public. Get out of your bubble-world, talk to some normal people, and find out what they think about the anti-globalization movement. The anti-globalization movement needs to seriously change gears if it wants to have traction with the US general public.
... we reach a point where the health care services the population reasonably wants exceed the ability of the population as a whole to pay? What if this is happening now? The article hints at this--it is pointed out that the US trade deficit might be viewed as us borrowing foreign money to fund our collective health care. Perhaps some of this spending is currently just due to low efficiency of the health care system, but it's quite possible we could fix that, and, in 10 years, increases in costs would put us back where we are now.
Factors contributing to rising demand for health care:
1) Aging population. Even in the US, which has one of the highest birth rates of any western country, the population as a whole is getting older. With the baby boomers about to retire, this is going to hit us hard and fast.
2) Obesity and other dietary/behavioral risk factors. There's been a bit of evidence that the negative consequences of obesity were overblown, but it's still bad news.
3) The most subtle and nefarious of all: advances in medicine. There's not really any demand for drugs that haven't been discovered yet, or surgeries that can't yet be performed successfully.
This last point is the scariest of all. Suppose we developed a way to give people an extra 10 years of life, but it cost a million dollar per person. We simply couldn't afford to provide it for everyone. What do we do? The American solution is to offer the procedure to anyone who can pay for it. The Canadian way would be to have a 90-year wait list so most people died before they could get the procedure. Other countries would perhaps find other ways of rationing health care, but the point is that the inevitable consequence would be rationed health care. Maybe the market would do the rationing, maybe the government would, maybe the Grim Reaper would, but rationing there would be.
So, what do people think? Obviously, we should try to make health care more efficient, but, if it's too expensive to give everyone full access, how do we sort things out?
Something about a trick where they hijack the ISP's DSN reference for the bank. So you can type http://mylocal.bank.com/ into your browser...and end up at a site that looks just like your bank's site, and can do man-in=the-middle interfacing with your bank account, so it can act properly.
That's why you type https://www.mybank.com into the browser window--the "s" means use SSL, and you'll see a dialog about bad certificates or whatever if somebody tries a man-in-the-middle attack. Now, some banks don't use https for their login page (they use a different method to encrypt just the login info), but the good ones do.
Personally, I avoid doing ANY banking over the net.
So what if some thugs make you withdraw money from the ATM at gunpoint? Did you shred your ATM card, too? Come on, there's a balance between risk and convenience, and saying "no" to online banking because of the very small risk of some new advanced attack is kind of silly.
have a right to NOT have nazi order followers dressed as civvies doing agent provocateur work, but they have been doing it for a long long time. I should know, I have busted two of them before.
Oh, come off it you AC nutjob. I know the guy who got the "i" from the Niketown store sign in the Seattle WTO riots in 1999, and he's definitely not an agent provocateur--just a standard-issue leftie/geek/hippie. He's one of the many, many protestors who thinks some random political cause justifies their personal acts of vandalism, trespass, theft, and destruction of property.
Nothing protects you against lawuits. Someone can sue you because the sky is green and they think you are sending radio waves through their cat.
It's pretty easy to get that kind of crap dismissed. An ADA lawsuit on the grounds that your website doesn't work with some screen reader has a real chance of getting to court now, because of this ruling. Somewhere, a lawyer is salivating.
I really don't know how much more simply anyone can say the words "if you serve text, then it will be accessible." It might not be optimal, but it is not your responsibility to personally fix bugs in screen readers if they can't handle simple text that validates according to accepted standards.
Nowhere is it written that serving valid HTML and avoiding flash/Java nonsense protects you from lawsuits. An unscrupulous lawyer can still sue--and perhaps even win--if your site doesn't work with any screen reader out there because of bugs in screenreaders. Hell, even following the entire WCAG does not protect you from ADA lawsuits. Making your website really and truly accessible is hard, and likely also expensive for anyone who doesn't have the time to learn the ins and outs of the W3C WCAG.
As an example of why accessibility is hard, let's look at a image-replacement techniques. There are a number of common image-replacement techniques that are perfectly valid CSS, and *should* work in screen readers, but don't in most of them. The only way to find that out is to test in screen readers. This is why W3C's WCAG specify that you should do testing.
You just like to make it sound incredibly complex and onerous because then you can feel justified in doing nothing or blaming the guv'mint for imposing such terrible burdens on you. Serve plain text. Have links built with anchor tags instead of some crazy flash/javascript monster. You are done.
How about this--I make sure the site serves valid HTML, with no flash/java BS, proper alt tags, and real text links for site navigation (it already does all this). I pay you $10 for your time in running the site through W3C's validator, and then you give me a written promise to indemnify the site against all ADA-related lawsuits. If it's really that simple, you've got nothing to lose. I'll get peace of mind for $10. We both win. Ready to put your money where your mouth is?
Because it's easier to make a law that applies to everyone equally than to allow people to unilaterally declare that they should be exempt based on nothing other than their intuition that a disabled person has no interest in the goods they sell.
This law should never have been applied to websites. I occasionally run into sites that don't work on any Mac browsers. I'll sometimes let them know about the problem, but I don't go suing people about it. Non-compliant, incompatible site design is annoying, but making it a crime is a bit over the top.
You really need to read the article before you go off on such a rant. Nowehere in the courts, in the ADA, or in my earlier posting has anyone suggested that the entire visual universe should be somehow translated into sound, or that the entire aural universe should be translated into sight.
It's only a slight exaggeration of the W3C's WCAG 1.0, section 14, which requires audio or captioned alternatives for any multimedia content. Images probably don't count as multimedia, but I could see some braindead lawyer arguing that they do.
It is possible to address more than one act of discrimination at a time in a country our size.
There's a balance. If we covered all the streets with nerf foam, it might be safe for blind people to drive. That doesn't mean we should do it, because it would be ridiculously expensive. Similarly, expecting every last website out there that sells something to be accessible is nuts. A lot of State of California websites aren't accessible--if the state doesn't follow its own laws, why should anyone else have to?
Ignoring the fact that this case has essentially nothing to do with your wife's web site unless she runs a physical store as well
Not true--read up on the case. Any online website in the US that sells stuff is subject to the ruling.
why isn't it possible to test yourself?
If I wanted to test whether the site works in screen readers like JAWS, I'd have to buy one, and they're damn expensive. I already explained that.
You made a web site and it works, making it accessible is no more difficult. Go to the W3C and follow their guidelines. Cost is $0, they have dozens of free tools in multiple languages for evaluating accessibility and lists of issues to look out.
You clearly haven't spent much time looking at the guidelines. section 10. 3 tells you to test your site with self-voicing browsers, screen readers, etc. Screen readers are expensive, which means the cost for doing this is going to run pretty damn high for a small business. You also haven't addressed my original point, which is that the probability of a visually-impaired person wanting to buy visual art is about zero, making all of this an exercise in futility.
If the essential information is available in Lynx, you're peachy, though going beyond the minimum will result in a more compatible site overall that is easier to update.
Lynx is a good start, but it's no guarantee that your site will work the same in a screen reader. The screen readers have known bugs, and it's not at all clear from the ruling whether it's enough to design to the first parts of WCAG, or whether you also have to test with screen readers.
Considering this only deals with information about physical stores on the website, yeah, I think it's a great idea. Adding three lines of text to your website is far less onerous than building wheelchair ramps and wider doorways, and stores deal with those requirements.
No, the suit also concerns the fact that blind people can't complete a transaction on target.com, as it requires mouse clicks in specific places. The information about physical stores is just part of the complaint.
How is the web an inherently visual medium? It's based entirely on textual data, with support for graphics bolted on to make it prettier. The important things at the Target website are lists of store locations, operating hours, phone numbers, and that's what they were sued over. You don't need a picture to tell someone the address of your store. You don't need a picture to tell someone which brands of irons you carry and how much each model costs. You *should* add pictures of items to increase sales, since people generally like to see what they're buying, but blind people accept that limitation.
My wife runs an online business selling paintings. The graphics are not "bolted on to make it prettier"--they are the only possible representation of the product. What the hell else is she supposed to do? Have audio recordings telling people how exquisite each painting is?
This is, quite frankly, a perfectly sensible ruling and something web developers have been warning companies about for nearly a decade. This is not some crazy fringe group out to cause trouble,
I have to disagree. A good friend of my wife's is disabled, and knows what real discrimination is like. She recently had to threaten to sue the local transit company because their drivers repeatedly refused to let her on the bus with her service dog. That is discrimination, and that is what the ADA is supposed to stop. Sueing because a commercial website is inaccessible is just ridiculous. What if the site is inaccessible from Mac browsers? Can I sue on the grounds that being a Mac user is a disability? Should I have to buy a new computer just to view some website? No? So when did viewing websites become a right for anyone, disabled or not?
this is a problem we've all known about for years and years but too many people ignored because it was cheaper or easier to cross your fingers than follow sound advice (although ironically enough, a well-designed (and therefore accessible) site will be cheaper and easier in the long run because of easier maintenance and adaptability).
Do you know how much the web design budget is for my wife's business, and for many, many other small businesses? Zero dollars. We did it all ourselves. It's all valid HTML 4.01 with CSS, looks good on a wide range of browsers. It probably works with screen readers, but we haven't tested and, up until now, haven't cared because nobody who is visually impaired would be using the site. Any reasonable person would agree there's little point to making accessibility modifications to a visual art website.
The problem is that now, because of this ruling, my wife will be faced with two options:
1) Keep running the business in potential violation of the ADA and hope she doesn't get sued. 2) Close the business because she can't afford to pay for an accessibility audit of the website.
Testing the site ourselves isn't possible. Just buying one copy of JAWS (a popular screen reader) for testing purposes would cost $1500. A quick check suggests paying a consultant to do the audit would cost around the same.
Do you still think this ruling was a good idea, NMerriam? Should all mom-and-pop online businesses be closed down because of the ADA? Just think of the killing some unscrupulous lawyers could make off this. Just build a webcrawler that finds "unaccessible" websites, then sue the owners. Free money!
The practical upshot of this was that companies such as Enron were able to stop spending money on some power plants and reap a much higher profit off of the others. For the consumers this meant that even as they faced surging utility bills (as much as 300% increases) they also were forced to deal with "rolling blackouts". The Government of California meanwhile felt its hands were tied and could do nothing to ensure that power was available to its citizens and thus that the essential infrastructure of the economy was running.
I'm with you so far, although it's worth pointing out that the rates utilities were allowed to charge residential customers were still heavily regulated.
Firstly the cost of getting into competition is extreme. Nuclear power plants don't grow on trees and neither do millions of miles of electrical lines. Infrastructural utilities are, in many ways, immune to competition because of the immense cost of investement and the infeasability of running multiple parallel infrastructure.
Your infrastructure comment is true for electricity distribution, but it need not be true for electricity generation. For as little as a couple thousand bucks, Joe Sixpack can put some solar panels on his roof and sell power back to the grid. Throw in smart meters with real-time pricing and anyone can get in the power generation game.
Secondly, it was the free market that made that gouging possible. By having a free market on KwH pricing and opening up all aspects to competition and thus making the little intentional blackout scheme profitable.
The problem was not deregulation of electricity generation, it was half-assed deregulation. It's pretty obvious that if you deregulate demand, but don't deregulate supply, your market blows up in your face. The vast number of regulatory hurdles to power plant construction means that the market cannot respond quickly to supply deficits through construction of new power plants. We could solve this with a streamlined approval process, measures to allow for more "microplants", and a good system to allow people to sell their surplus solar power back to the grid at realtime pricing. There are market solutions to electricity generation oligopolies, but they require a little more foresight in the deregulation process.
What security do you have when your elected officials can't guarantee the flow of water?
Ask the people of Walkerton. Are you sure your elected officials are any better? Elections really only provide meaningful oversight for a small handful of the most transparent, most "in the news" subjects. Things like the Walkerton water supply only become election issues after the fact. Public utilities are boring until there's a crisis, so they get mismanaged by politicians. The best we can hope for in the case of utilities where competition is possible is to set up a market with the minimal level of regulation needed to internalize most of the externalities, then leave it alone. Unfortunately, this works for power generation, phone service, and TV, but not water or power distribution.
I'd like to add one more thing: difficulty of disposal. Properly disposing of CFLs is very difficult in many places, and acts as a disincentive to their use.
With the exception of halogen track lighting in one room, my apartment is entirely lit by CFLs. (As a side note, I've been using CFLs for three years now, and I've had several burn out, so I tend to think the "lasts ten times as long" statistics are a bit overstated, but whatever.) Local laws recently changed to prohibit disposal of CFLs in the trash, while it is still OK to throw out regular light bulbs.
How can I get rid of my dead CFLs? I have to take them to a special recycling site several miles away. I don't have a car, and there's poor bus service to the area, so it would basically require a special trip taking an hour or two just to get rid of a bulb. I now have to choose between wasting hours of my time, or breaking the law, or switching back to incandescent. Guess which option is most attractive? I understand the mercury issue, but as others have pointed out, more mercury is released into the environment by the extra power generation to run an incandescent bulb.
This is so because terrorist organizations are not military ones. They neither operate according to the laws of war, nor do they pursue the normal strategic objectives of war, nor do they use the typical means of war. The only thing that they have in common with a military organization is that they employ violence; the resemblence to a military organization ends there.
Hezbollah, recognized by many Western nations as a terrorist organization, has quite a lot in common with more conventional military organizations. It has a chain of command, "civilian" oversight of its military wing (i.e. Nasrallah and the Hezbollah members of Lebanon's parliament), substantial military training, and the arms necessary to hold its own when going up against a powerful Western military (I'm thinking in particular of the advanced anti-tank missiles Hezbollah has). Israel has probably failed to do so, but it seems likely it is possible to severely wound Hezbollah with conventional "war". (Whether that's the best course of action is a different matter.) If we're talking about Hezbollah, "war" is an apt word; the same held true for Al Qaeda when they had control of Afghanistan.
I know "War on Terrorism" is only an analogy, but it is a very poor one. It's not that the struggle against terrorism has no parallels with war; but it parallels war only to the degree terrorism parallels warfare. Taking this loose analogy too seriously and literally means you end up fighting in the wrong places with the wrong equipment and the wrong strategy. It's like declaring you want to beat the Yankees, then showing up at the Meadowlands in your football gear. Chances are you're going to have a football game against the Jets instead of a baseball game against the Yankees.
I think you're mostly right, but this is largely about PR and semantics. "War on Terror" is shorthand for "Military action against some who support Islamist terror, and the struggle to prevent terrorism through a broad spectrum of means". The latter just doesn't have the same ring to it, is all.
English, does not have an adequate word for this kind of struggle, but ironically Arabic does: jihad.
"War" does seem to be getting tired. Perhaps "The Jihad against Jihad". But then, English does have an equivalent word: "Crusade". Once things get to the point where names can't make it any worse, why not have some fun? One side can be "The Crusade against Jihad", while the other side is "Jihad against the Infidel Crusaders". It reminds me of the Judean People's Front and People's Front of Judea from Monty Python's Life of Brian, which is surely a good starting point for understanding the Middle East.
After all, Taiwan is a perfect example of a country famous for its electronics industry, yet there's no way in hell they have any interest in pushing mainland China's interests.
You'd be surprised. The latest trend is for US companies to outsource manufacturing to Taiwanese companies, who in turn have moved their actual factories to mainland China (cheaper labor). Having lots of trade between Taiwan and the mainland is definitely in Taiwan's interest, as it reduces the chance of war.
Suppose I was an encyclopedia salesman (for those with the seven-digit user IDs, encyclopedias are like dead-tree versions of Wikipedia), and Iran objected to the encyclopedia I wanted to sell there. I then went and created a second version of the encyclopedia, in which the Holocaust didn't happen. Maybe my censored version even says "abridged" or "some entries censored" on it somewhere, but it doesn't say what got removed. I then offer both for sale in Iran, knowing full well the Iranian government will block the sale of the uncensored version. Would that be evil? Hell yes.
This is exactly what Google is doing (except replace the Holocaust with the Tiananmen Square Massacre).
I mean that a UMTS-only phone can't roam on a GSM-only network. Cell service providers cope with the transition by making dual-mode phones and simultaneously running a GSM and a UMTS network, but these things add cost and waste bandwidth. The upgrade path for CDMA2000 is much more elegant.
While it's critical that a student understands the concept of multiplication it is just as important to memorize their times tables. Calculating in your head that 6x7=42 wastes time and risks error and the only way to 'know' that 6x7=42 is to drill, repeatedly.
I had to actually think about it for half a second--I remembered that 5x7=35, then added 7 to get 6x7=42. Currently, I'm about two years away from a PhD in physics from a top-ten university, and the fact that I never bothered to completely memorize the times tables hasn't been a problem. Drill is less important than understanding.
Well, SMS is easy: the EU (or rather its predecessor) funded the development of GSM, which is the technology that enables you to send SMS.
Funny, because I can send SMS with my CDMA phone. Maybe GSM was first to have SMS support, but that's like having a Xerox tax on all PCs because Xerox was first with the mouse or whatever.
Also, should we really be thanking the EU for mandating a technologically inferior cell phone standard with a horrible non-backward compatible upgrade path? GSM uses a TDMA over-the-air protocol, which is inherently less efficient that CDMA (super-short explanation--TDMA uses the same amount of bandwidth whether you're talking or not, whereas CDMA uses only what it needs). The upgrade path for GSM is wCDMA, which is not backward-compatible, whereas the upgrade path for CDMA2000 has really nice backward-compatibility.
Slashdot Mirror
You've missed the point. Enforcement of just laws is (3+): a National / Social benefit. Enforcement of unjust laws is (3-): a Negative consequence of an ideal ID system. We can argue about whether immigration and employment laws are just or not, but it doesn't change my underlying point.
FWIW, I probably know more about the immigration system and all its ups and downs than you do, as my wife is an immigrant and I went through the whole process with her.
If it was a rational world, the drinking age would be the same as the age at which you can sign up for the army to fight and die for your country. It seems pretty ridiculous that you could drive a tank at 19, but not have a beer afterwards. That said, you have brought up a good point: the negative consequences of accurate, reliable ID.
There are really three things people are worried about here:
1 - The possibility of fraud inherent in even an ideal ID system.
2 - The possibility of fraud in a real-world system implemented by the US government (i.e., one that will probably be poorly designed).
3 - The negative consequences of an accurate ID system.
There are positives, too. I'll classify them as follows:
1 + Personal benefits of an ideal ID system.
2 + Benefits to companies from an ideal ID system.
3 + National / social benefits.
Before I get into details, what do I mean by an ideal system? One in which you can prove to anyone you wish any of the following information, or some subset thereof: name, age, eligibility to work, driving license, professional certifications, credit "card" account, etc. For instance, you might want to prove to a bar's bouncer that you're of legal age, but not reveal your name, credit card number, or even your exact age. How could this work? As soon as you reach legal age, the government sends you a digitally signed "certificate" that includes your photo and a statement that you can drink. When you go to a bar, you can upload the certificate to the bouncer's PDA or whatever, and he checks to see the picture is you. If it is, you're in. To break this, you'd need to break public key cryptography, which you can probably only do with a quantum computer.
Now, let's get into details.
1 - Fraud in an ideal ID system
Even in an ideal system, the card will only be as good as the information used to create it. While such a system is being adopted, there's a window of opportunity for people to forge old-style IDs, then use them to get a new "official" ID with the forged information. This is commonly done with birth certificates now. This is the main issue.
2 - Fraud in a real-world system
Even compared to other governments, the US seems particularly bad at large-scale IT projects. It's surprising, considering all the IT talent in the country. A system designed by the US government would probably start with bad specs, have a bad design, and be poorly implemented. A disaster, in short. I suspect radical changes in the process might help here. Put NIST in charge of designing open standards, with the NSA consulting. Get Bruce Schneier, the EFF, and others involved. Maybe try something like the AES challenge.
3 - Negative consequences of an ideal system
This is the most insidious of all the negatives. An accurate, effective, ubiquitous ID card will be used for more and more things, and will become a method for tracking and controlling people. We'd need some really good privacy laws to prevent this, as well as a smart design that puts people in charge of their own information and how much they reveal.
1 + Personal benefits
Wouldn't it be great to ditch all those cards in your wallet and just have one thing to carry? I know I'd like that. It would also be great to not have to worry about ID theft (at least, not in an ideal system). Depending on how the backend worked, a unified ID could also mean not having to change your address in a gazillion databases every time you move (for instance, did you know the California DMV driver license database is independent of the California vehicle registration database, and you have to change your address separately in both?) Really, this category boils down to convenience and reduced vulnerability to ID theft, IF the system is well-designed.
2 + Benefits to companies
This one's pretty simple--reduced fraud leads to reduced expenses, for banks, credit card companies, and merchants. It probably also simplifies a lot of transactions, which wo
Disclaimer: IAAQIR (I Am A Quantum Information Researcher).
Worse, they talk about "repeaters" to extend the range past 120km - which is scary, because it implies they are decrypting/recrypting at the repeater.
Not necessarily. It's possible in principle to build a "quantum repeater", which receives, "purifies", stores, and retransmits qubits without measuring them. By purification, I mean using either quantum error correction, or quantum entanglement distillation in conjunction with quantum teleportation. Such a scheme was proposed by Duan, et al, in Nature 414 413 (2001).
Duan's scheme gives polynomial scaling of resources with distance, which is good news. The bad news is that building a quantum repeater requires reliable quantum memory, which is experimentally difficult.
The lower tech alternative is "cascading" or simple chaining of QKD transceivers. The catch here is that if one of the intermediate transceivers is tampered with and compromised, you lose.
Damn, that's exactly what I thought of as soon as I saw the headline. I was going to go searching for that picture, but you saved me the time. I wish I had mod points.
:-)
More seriously, that's probably a good characterization of what will come out of the process: a futuristic, high performance car that gets great gas milage but looks ugly as hell. It will have all sorts of "flashy" features like alpha transparency--err, tailfins, but they won't be integrated into a coherent, consistent design. Until Apple makes the iCar, which will basically be an OScar frame and engine with a sweet-as-hell body.
Correction: No, the two-slit experiment only requires a single particle at a time, and thus there is no entanglement.
Further down in the comments, someone mentions that the detector is actually a two-slit apparatus. So what is meant is that if the first particle is acting as a wave, there will be an interference pattern, but if it's acting as a particle, there will just be a single point of impact.
You don't get an interference pattern with a single event. If you repeat the two-slit experiment many times with a moveable detector, you find a statistical pattern of single-photon detections that is identical to the interference pattern. The photons are distributed in a wave-like interference pattern, but are detected as individual photons. A two-slit apparatus is generally not useful in testing Bell's Theorem, so I think what probably happened is that Cramer tried to explain what was happening by analogy to the two-slit experiment, and the journalist got confused.
It seems to me to be just a more overly-complicated version of the variation on the two-slit experiment where you put detectors in the slits to try and see which one the particle passed through, and in so doing destroy the quantum effect and don't get an interference pattern.
No, the two-slit experiment only requires a single particle, and thus there is no entanglement. Cramer's experiment involves two entangled photons (generated by parametric downconversion using the "special crystal" mentioned in the article), so it's conceptually quite different.
The bottom line is this: 1) the article is horribly written, 2) Cramer's theories are not mainstream, and 3) it is almost certain that nothing interesting will come of this experiment (many, many tests of Bell's Theorem have already been done, so it's unlikely this one will be any different).
As a general rule, US / UK science journalism, particularly that relating to quantum mechanics, is so bad that you will know less for having read the article. Discover and Scientific American used to be OK, but are no longer any good. New Scientist is awful, and Popular Science doesn't even try to cover this stuff, focusing more on technology. It's a shame...
I am a physicist, specifically one who specializes in quantum information.
The write-up is total garbage. Sadly, I've read enough mangled pop-sci descriptions of quantum mechanics that I can translate most of it into non-gibberish--in true Slashdot fashion--without even reading the article (which is probably even more full of gibberish, and thus capable of rotting your brain). I did have to look at the article to figure out whether it's the journalist or the scientist that bears responsibility for this mess. Here's my translation:
The U of W physicists want to do a test of Bell's Theorem in such a way as to close one of the "loopholes" in previous tests (the possibility of signaling between particles).
Some background:
Bell's Theorem is at the heart of what makes quantum mechanics so shocking. If you want to understand one of the greatest accomplishments of modern science, you owe it to yourself to learn about the famous EPR criticism of quantum mechanics (Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen, Physical Review 47, 777), Bell's Theorem, and the Aspect experiment. The EPR elegantly lays out what so many people find weird and shocking about quantum mechanics (and what Einstein et al took to be evidence of its incompleteness), while Bell's Theorem and Aspect's experiment show that yes, the world really is this weird, and the EPR paper is wrong.
The link I've provided to the EPR paper will unfortunately only get you the abstract, unless you're at a university, in which case your institution almost certainly has a subscription to Physical Review. To learn about Bell's Theorem, try the appendix in "Introduction to Quantum Mechanics" by David Griffiths. AFAIK, the derivation of Bell's Inequality is only a few pages, and requires only basic calculus. The derivation is accessible to non-physicists who either know or are willing to learn basic calculus.
The above reading is not an easy project for a layman, but it is doable. It will give you a better understanding of modern physics than any number of "popular science"-type books you could read. Without the math, all that's left of quantum mechanics is people BSing about their favorite "interpretation". If you want to know enough to make up your own mind, learn about the EPR paper and Bell's Theorem.
The U of W experiment:
So, if Bell's Theorem has already been tested by Aspect, what's left for the U of W team? Bell's Theorem allows one to disprove all local hidden-variable theories. Aspect's original experiment didn't quite satisfy all the conditions for such a test, in that there were "loopholes" through which a very contrived theory with bizarre features might escape. Many people have since done experiments to close some of these loopholes.
Initially, just based on the Slashdot write-up, I thought the experiment was designed to close the locality loophole: if the two particles are not spacelike separated, a subluminal signal could in principle be sent from one to the other to tell it how to "respond" to a measurement. The way to close the loophole is to make sure the measurements of the two particles are spacelike separated events. This would be a reasonable experiment to do, although I think may already have been done.
Having read the abysmal Seattle PI article linked in the write-up, it looks like that's not what's planned. Cramer is the inventor of a somewhat less-popular interpretation of quantum mechanics, the transactional interpretation, in which particles send signals forward and backward in time. This isn't quite as crazy as it sounds, since there's time-reversal and other symmetries inherent in quantum mechanics, but I wouldn't call it well-accepted. What's more concerning
Since posting the above, I went and read the detailed calculations in the supplementary material supplied by Monckton. It turns out the problem is more complicated. It sounds like the "conventional" definition of lambda is such that it should arguably include not only the direct response to a forcing, but also the indirect response occuring due to feedback from the original response (e.g., increased CO2 increases temperatures, which increase evaporation, which increases airborne H2O, which further increases the greenhouse effect).
Monckton argues that his value of lambda, when combined with the standard estimates of greenhouse gas forcing, best explains the data from the past century, and that a high value of lambda results in double-counting of feedback effects. According to him, the conventional approach yields "retrodiction" of a temperature increase about three times larger than actually occurred, which is then explained away by most climatologists by claiming the ocean acts as a heat sink. I checked whether this is feasible, and it does seem to be; 100 years of 1 W / m^2 extra forcing would cause only about a 0.06 K increase in mean ocean temperature, which might well go undetected (anyone in oceanography have good data on this?). In short, I can't confirm or deny either hypothesis, although Monckton's is simpler.
I am also a physicist. Lambda is dT/dP, evaluated at some temperature approximately equal to the earth's mean surface temperature. Taking the derivative and inverting, you get dT/dP = 1 / (4 sigma epsilon T^3). For epsilon = 1 and T=280 K, this gives lambda ~= 0.2. Wikipedia claims the average albedo of earth is about 30%, which very roughly implies the emissivity epsilon = 0.7 (since a blackbody is 0% albedo, and perfect reflectivity is 100% albedo). I'm ignoring frequency dependence and other effects, but this is a first order calculation. With that value for epsilon, I get lambda = 0.29 for the aforementioned parameters. So far, things look good for Monckton.
Now, let's try to refine our estimate of epsilon to account for frequency dependence. The 30% albedo given by Wikipedia is based on reflection of sunlight, and is thus probably heavily weighted to the visible spectrum, which is where the sun's radiated power peaks. Earth's thermal radiation, on the other hand, peaks in the infrared, since earth is much cooler. Due to the natural greenhouse effect, the 30% albedo may not be accurate at infrared frequencies. Thus, we want to calculate epsilon', the emissivity of the earth at infrared frequencies. The natural greenhouse effect provides an excellent mechanism for us to do this. Let s be the solar constant, 1366 W / m^2. Multiplying by (1-0.3) to account for the albedo of earth, and dividing by 4 to account for the ratio of the earth's cross-section to its surface area, we obtain an average absorbed power flux of 240 W / m^2. We then solve the Stefan Boltzmann Law to determine the value of epsilon' necessary to achieve equilibrium, substituting Earth's mean surface temperature for T: 240 W / m^2 = sigma epsilon' T^4 ==> epsilon' ~= 0.7. Thus, it looks like our first estimate was good.
To recap, we use the Stefan-Boltzmann Law, the (measured) albedo of earth, the approximate mean temperature of earth, and the solar constant to estimate the effective emissivity of earth for infrared. We find it agrees with Earth's mean albedo. Using this value of the emissivity and the Stefan-Boltzmann Law, we estimate lambda as 0.29 K / (W / m^2), in good agreement with Monckton, and poor agreement with the other estimates he mentioned.
Sorry, the grandparent post is spot-on. The Seattle WTO riots may have put "globalization" on the table and increased awareness, but it also created the perception that the anti-globalization movement is just a bunch of dirty hippies and bored college students. I know the guy who has the "i" from the Niketown sign, and he was both a bored college student and a hippy (not actually dirty, though). Guess how that influenced my perception of the anti-globalization movement?
It's really completely irrelevant how organized the anarchists were or how much union support they had at the time--the g.p. poster's point was that the consequence of the riots was that people now view it as a "dirty hippy" cause.
I suggest you stop watching so much MSM and so some research before you just spout off.
I'm not a big fan of the MSM, but it is exactly where you should look if you want to learn about how things are perceived by the general public. Get out of your bubble-world, talk to some normal people, and find out what they think about the anti-globalization movement. The anti-globalization movement needs to seriously change gears if it wants to have traction with the US general public.
... we reach a point where the health care services the population reasonably wants exceed the ability of the population as a whole to pay? What if this is happening now? The article hints at this--it is pointed out that the US trade deficit might be viewed as us borrowing foreign money to fund our collective health care. Perhaps some of this spending is currently just due to low efficiency of the health care system, but it's quite possible we could fix that, and, in 10 years, increases in costs would put us back where we are now.
Factors contributing to rising demand for health care:
1) Aging population. Even in the US, which has one of the highest birth rates of any western country, the population as a whole is getting older. With the baby boomers about to retire, this is going to hit us hard and fast.
2) Obesity and other dietary/behavioral risk factors. There's been a bit of evidence that the negative consequences of obesity were overblown, but it's still bad news.
3) The most subtle and nefarious of all: advances in medicine. There's not really any demand for drugs that haven't been discovered yet, or surgeries that can't yet be performed successfully.
This last point is the scariest of all. Suppose we developed a way to give people an extra 10 years of life, but it cost a million dollar per person. We simply couldn't afford to provide it for everyone. What do we do? The American solution is to offer the procedure to anyone who can pay for it. The Canadian way would be to have a 90-year wait list so most people died before they could get the procedure. Other countries would perhaps find other ways of rationing health care, but the point is that the inevitable consequence would be rationed health care. Maybe the market would do the rationing, maybe the government would, maybe the Grim Reaper would, but rationing there would be.
So, what do people think? Obviously, we should try to make health care more efficient, but, if it's too expensive to give everyone full access, how do we sort things out?
Something about a trick where they hijack the ISP's DSN reference for the bank. So you can type http://mylocal.bank.com/ into your browser...and end up at a site that looks just like your bank's site, and can do man-in=the-middle interfacing with your bank account, so it can act properly.
That's why you type https://www.mybank.com into the browser window--the "s" means use SSL, and you'll see a dialog about bad certificates or whatever if somebody tries a man-in-the-middle attack. Now, some banks don't use https for their login page (they use a different method to encrypt just the login info), but the good ones do.
Personally, I avoid doing ANY banking over the net.
So what if some thugs make you withdraw money from the ATM at gunpoint? Did you shred your ATM card, too? Come on, there's a balance between risk and convenience, and saying "no" to online banking because of the very small risk of some new advanced attack is kind of silly.
have a right to NOT have nazi order followers dressed as civvies doing agent provocateur work, but they have been doing it for a long long time. I should know, I have busted two of them before.
Oh, come off it you AC nutjob. I know the guy who got the "i" from the Niketown store sign in the Seattle WTO riots in 1999, and he's definitely not an agent provocateur--just a standard-issue leftie/geek/hippie. He's one of the many, many protestors who thinks some random political cause justifies their personal acts of vandalism, trespass, theft, and destruction of property.
Nothing protects you against lawuits. Someone can sue you because the sky is green and they think you are sending radio waves through their cat.
It's pretty easy to get that kind of crap dismissed. An ADA lawsuit on the grounds that your website doesn't work with some screen reader has a real chance of getting to court now, because of this ruling. Somewhere, a lawyer is salivating.
I really don't know how much more simply anyone can say the words "if you serve text, then it will be accessible." It might not be optimal, but it is not your responsibility to personally fix bugs in screen readers if they can't handle simple text that validates according to accepted standards.
Nowhere is it written that serving valid HTML and avoiding flash/Java nonsense protects you from lawsuits. An unscrupulous lawyer can still sue--and perhaps even win--if your site doesn't work with any screen reader out there because of bugs in screenreaders. Hell, even following the entire WCAG does not protect you from ADA lawsuits. Making your website really and truly accessible is hard, and likely also expensive for anyone who doesn't have the time to learn the ins and outs of the W3C WCAG.
As an example of why accessibility is hard, let's look at a image-replacement techniques. There are a number of common image-replacement techniques that are perfectly valid CSS, and *should* work in screen readers, but don't in most of them. The only way to find that out is to test in screen readers. This is why W3C's WCAG specify that you should do testing.
You just like to make it sound incredibly complex and onerous because then you can feel justified in doing nothing or blaming the guv'mint for imposing such terrible burdens on you. Serve plain text. Have links built with anchor tags instead of some crazy flash/javascript monster. You are done.
How about this--I make sure the site serves valid HTML, with no flash/java BS, proper alt tags, and real text links for site navigation (it already does all this). I pay you $10 for your time in running the site through W3C's validator, and then you give me a written promise to indemnify the site against all ADA-related lawsuits. If it's really that simple, you've got nothing to lose. I'll get peace of mind for $10. We both win. Ready to put your money where your mouth is?
Because it's easier to make a law that applies to everyone equally than to allow people to unilaterally declare that they should be exempt based on nothing other than their intuition that a disabled person has no interest in the goods they sell.
This law should never have been applied to websites. I occasionally run into sites that don't work on any Mac browsers. I'll sometimes let them know about the problem, but I don't go suing people about it. Non-compliant, incompatible site design is annoying, but making it a crime is a bit over the top.
You really need to read the article before you go off on such a rant. Nowehere in the courts, in the ADA, or in my earlier posting has anyone suggested that the entire visual universe should be somehow translated into sound, or that the entire aural universe should be translated into sight.
It's only a slight exaggeration of the W3C's WCAG 1.0, section 14, which requires audio or captioned alternatives for any multimedia content. Images probably don't count as multimedia, but I could see some braindead lawyer arguing that they do.
It is possible to address more than one act of discrimination at a time in a country our size.
There's a balance. If we covered all the streets with nerf foam, it might be safe for blind people to drive. That doesn't mean we should do it, because it would be ridiculously expensive. Similarly, expecting every last website out there that sells something to be accessible is nuts. A lot of State of California websites aren't accessible--if the state doesn't follow its own laws, why should anyone else have to?
Ignoring the fact that this case has essentially nothing to do with your wife's web site unless she runs a physical store as well
Not true--read up on the case. Any online website in the US that sells stuff is subject to the ruling.
why isn't it possible to test yourself?
If I wanted to test whether the site works in screen readers like JAWS, I'd have to buy one, and they're damn expensive. I already explained that.
You made a web site and it works, making it accessible is no more difficult. Go to the W3C and follow their guidelines. Cost is $0, they have dozens of free tools in multiple languages for evaluating accessibility and lists of issues to look out.
You clearly haven't spent much time looking at the guidelines. section 10. 3 tells you to test your site with self-voicing browsers, screen readers, etc. Screen readers are expensive, which means the cost for doing this is going to run pretty damn high for a small business. You also haven't addressed my original point, which is that the probability of a visually-impaired person wanting to buy visual art is about zero, making all of this an exercise in futility.
If the essential information is available in Lynx, you're peachy, though going beyond the minimum will result in a more compatible site overall that is easier to update.
Lynx is a good start, but it's no guarantee that your site will work the same in a screen reader. The screen readers have known bugs, and it's not at all clear from the ruling whether it's enough to design to the first parts of WCAG, or whether you also have to test with screen readers.
Considering this only deals with information about physical stores on the website, yeah, I think it's a great idea. Adding three lines of text to your website is far less onerous than building wheelchair ramps and wider doorways, and stores deal with those requirements.
No, the suit also concerns the fact that blind people can't complete a transaction on target.com, as it requires mouse clicks in specific places. The information about physical stores is just part of the complaint.
How is the web an inherently visual medium? It's based entirely on textual data, with support for graphics bolted on to make it prettier. The important things at the Target website are lists of store locations, operating hours, phone numbers, and that's what they were sued over. You don't need a picture to tell someone the address of your store. You don't need a picture to tell someone which brands of irons you carry and how much each model costs. You *should* add pictures of items to increase sales, since people generally like to see what they're buying, but blind people accept that limitation.
My wife runs an online business selling paintings. The graphics are not "bolted on to make it prettier"--they are the only possible representation of the product. What the hell else is she supposed to do? Have audio recordings telling people how exquisite each painting is?
This is, quite frankly, a perfectly sensible ruling and something web developers have been warning companies about for nearly a decade. This is not some crazy fringe group out to cause trouble,
I have to disagree. A good friend of my wife's is disabled, and knows what real discrimination is like. She recently had to threaten to sue the local transit company because their drivers repeatedly refused to let her on the bus with her service dog. That is discrimination, and that is what the ADA is supposed to stop. Sueing because a commercial website is inaccessible is just ridiculous. What if the site is inaccessible from Mac browsers? Can I sue on the grounds that being a Mac user is a disability? Should I have to buy a new computer just to view some website? No? So when did viewing websites become a right for anyone, disabled or not?
this is a problem we've all known about for years and years but too many people ignored because it was cheaper or easier to cross your fingers than follow sound advice (although ironically enough, a well-designed (and therefore accessible) site will be cheaper and easier in the long run because of easier maintenance and adaptability).
Do you know how much the web design budget is for my wife's business, and for many, many other small businesses? Zero dollars. We did it all ourselves. It's all valid HTML 4.01 with CSS, looks good on a wide range of browsers. It probably works with screen readers, but we haven't tested and, up until now, haven't cared because nobody who is visually impaired would be using the site. Any reasonable person would agree there's little point to making accessibility modifications to a visual art website.
The problem is that now, because of this ruling, my wife will be faced with two options:
1) Keep running the business in potential violation of the ADA and hope she doesn't get sued.
2) Close the business because she can't afford to pay for an accessibility audit of the website.
Testing the site ourselves isn't possible. Just buying one copy of JAWS (a popular screen reader) for testing purposes would cost $1500. A quick check suggests paying a consultant to do the audit would cost around the same.
Do you still think this ruling was a good idea, NMerriam? Should all mom-and-pop online businesses be closed down because of the ADA? Just think of the killing some unscrupulous lawyers could make off this. Just build a webcrawler that finds "unaccessible" websites, then sue the owners. Free money!
The practical upshot of this was that companies such as Enron were able to stop spending money on some power plants and reap a much higher profit off of the others. For the consumers this meant that even as they faced surging utility bills (as much as 300% increases) they also were forced to deal with "rolling blackouts". The Government of California meanwhile felt its hands were tied and could do nothing to ensure that power was available to its citizens and thus that the essential infrastructure of the economy was running.
I'm with you so far, although it's worth pointing out that the rates utilities were allowed to charge residential customers were still heavily regulated.
Firstly the cost of getting into competition is extreme. Nuclear power plants don't grow on trees and neither do millions of miles of electrical lines. Infrastructural utilities are, in many ways, immune to competition because of the immense cost of investement and the infeasability of running multiple parallel infrastructure.
Your infrastructure comment is true for electricity distribution, but it need not be true for electricity generation. For as little as a couple thousand bucks, Joe Sixpack can put some solar panels on his roof and sell power back to the grid. Throw in smart meters with real-time pricing and anyone can get in the power generation game.
Secondly, it was the free market that made that gouging possible. By having a free market on KwH pricing and opening up all aspects to competition and thus making the little intentional blackout scheme profitable.
The problem was not deregulation of electricity generation, it was half-assed deregulation. It's pretty obvious that if you deregulate demand, but don't deregulate supply, your market blows up in your face. The vast number of regulatory hurdles to power plant construction means that the market cannot respond quickly to supply deficits through construction of new power plants. We could solve this with a streamlined approval process, measures to allow for more "microplants", and a good system to allow people to sell their surplus solar power back to the grid at realtime pricing. There are market solutions to electricity generation oligopolies, but they require a little more foresight in the deregulation process.
What security do you have when your elected officials can't guarantee the flow of water?
Ask the people of Walkerton. Are you sure your elected officials are any better? Elections really only provide meaningful oversight for a small handful of the most transparent, most "in the news" subjects. Things like the Walkerton water supply only become election issues after the fact. Public utilities are boring until there's a crisis, so they get mismanaged by politicians. The best we can hope for in the case of utilities where competition is possible is to set up a market with the minimal level of regulation needed to internalize most of the externalities, then leave it alone. Unfortunately, this works for power generation, phone service, and TV, but not water or power distribution.
Why not?
I'd like to add one more thing: difficulty of disposal. Properly disposing of CFLs is very difficult in many places, and acts as a disincentive to their use.
With the exception of halogen track lighting in one room, my apartment is entirely lit by CFLs. (As a side note, I've been using CFLs for three years now, and I've had several burn out, so I tend to think the "lasts ten times as long" statistics are a bit overstated, but whatever.) Local laws recently changed to prohibit disposal of CFLs in the trash, while it is still OK to throw out regular light bulbs.
How can I get rid of my dead CFLs? I have to take them to a special recycling site several miles away. I don't have a car, and there's poor bus service to the area, so it would basically require a special trip taking an hour or two just to get rid of a bulb. I now have to choose between wasting hours of my time, or breaking the law, or switching back to incandescent. Guess which option is most attractive? I understand the mercury issue, but as others have pointed out, more mercury is released into the environment by the extra power generation to run an incandescent bulb.
This is so because terrorist organizations are not military ones. They neither operate according to the laws of war, nor do they pursue the normal strategic objectives of war, nor do they use the typical means of war. The only thing that they have in common with a military organization is that they employ violence; the resemblence to a military organization ends there.
Hezbollah, recognized by many Western nations as a terrorist organization, has quite a lot in common with more conventional military organizations. It has a chain of command, "civilian" oversight of its military wing (i.e. Nasrallah and the Hezbollah members of Lebanon's parliament), substantial military training, and the arms necessary to hold its own when going up against a powerful Western military (I'm thinking in particular of the advanced anti-tank missiles Hezbollah has). Israel has probably failed to do so, but it seems likely it is possible to severely wound Hezbollah with conventional "war". (Whether that's the best course of action is a different matter.) If we're talking about Hezbollah, "war" is an apt word; the same held true for Al Qaeda when they had control of Afghanistan.
I know "War on Terrorism" is only an analogy, but it is a very poor one. It's not that the struggle against terrorism has no parallels with war; but it parallels war only to the degree terrorism parallels warfare. Taking this loose analogy too seriously and literally means you end up fighting in the wrong places with the wrong equipment and the wrong strategy. It's like declaring you want to beat the Yankees, then showing up at the Meadowlands in your football gear. Chances are you're going to have a football game against the Jets instead of a baseball game against the Yankees.
I think you're mostly right, but this is largely about PR and semantics. "War on Terror" is shorthand for "Military action against some who support Islamist terror, and the struggle to prevent terrorism through a broad spectrum of means". The latter just doesn't have the same ring to it, is all.
English, does not have an adequate word for this kind of struggle, but ironically Arabic does: jihad.
"War" does seem to be getting tired. Perhaps "The Jihad against Jihad". But then, English does have an equivalent word: "Crusade". Once things get to the point where names can't make it any worse, why not have some fun? One side can be "The Crusade against Jihad", while the other side is "Jihad against the Infidel Crusaders". It reminds me of the Judean People's Front and People's Front of Judea from Monty Python's Life of Brian, which is surely a good starting point for understanding the Middle East.
After all, Taiwan is a perfect example of a country famous for its electronics industry, yet there's no way in hell they have any interest in pushing mainland China's interests.
You'd be surprised. The latest trend is for US companies to outsource manufacturing to Taiwanese companies, who in turn have moved their actual factories to mainland China (cheaper labor). Having lots of trade between Taiwan and the mainland is definitely in Taiwan's interest, as it reduces the chance of war.
Suppose I was an encyclopedia salesman (for those with the seven-digit user IDs, encyclopedias are like dead-tree versions of Wikipedia), and Iran objected to the encyclopedia I wanted to sell there. I then went and created a second version of the encyclopedia, in which the Holocaust didn't happen. Maybe my censored version even says "abridged" or "some entries censored" on it somewhere, but it doesn't say what got removed. I then offer both for sale in Iran, knowing full well the Iranian government will block the sale of the uncensored version. Would that be evil? Hell yes.
This is exactly what Google is doing (except replace the Holocaust with the Tiananmen Square Massacre).
What do you mean with backward compatibility?
I mean that a UMTS-only phone can't roam on a GSM-only network. Cell service providers cope with the transition by making dual-mode phones and simultaneously running a GSM and a UMTS network, but these things add cost and waste bandwidth. The upgrade path for CDMA2000 is much more elegant.
While it's critical that a student understands the concept of multiplication it is just as important to memorize their times tables.
Calculating in your head that 6x7=42 wastes time and risks error and the only way to 'know' that 6x7=42 is to drill, repeatedly.
I had to actually think about it for half a second--I remembered that 5x7=35, then added 7 to get 6x7=42. Currently, I'm about two years away from a PhD in physics from a top-ten university, and the fact that I never bothered to completely memorize the times tables hasn't been a problem. Drill is less important than understanding.
Well, SMS is easy: the EU (or rather its predecessor) funded the development of GSM, which is the technology that enables you to send SMS.
Funny, because I can send SMS with my CDMA phone. Maybe GSM was first to have SMS support, but that's like having a Xerox tax on all PCs because Xerox was first with the mouse or whatever.
Also, should we really be thanking the EU for mandating a technologically inferior cell phone standard with a horrible non-backward compatible upgrade path? GSM uses a TDMA over-the-air protocol, which is inherently less efficient that CDMA (super-short explanation--TDMA uses the same amount of bandwidth whether you're talking or not, whereas CDMA uses only what it needs). The upgrade path for GSM is wCDMA, which is not backward-compatible, whereas the upgrade path for CDMA2000 has really nice backward-compatibility.