I'm sorry but we don't allow "facts" here to get in the way of our government-sponsored hysteria and push towards a world socialist government^W^W^W^W enactment of treaty obligations restricting capitalism to help save the Earth.
This is smart but for a different reason than "gee, we get to play with the sources." What it means is that phone developers who are looking at putting Java on the phone now have a leg up. While having Java on the phone is pretty much a basic requirement for most cell phone manufacturers, it does mean that if you are a new entrant into the phone market you can get a basic Java environment up and running on your hardware with minimal costs over the development tools necessary to do hardware and software development.
Right now with the struggle between WinCE, Symbian and Linux/Qtopia, it gives developers the opportunity to work (under GPL) the possibility of creating a Linux/Java cell phone (one where Java, not Qt, is used to run the UI) and create a phone which runs jar files as the basic unit of deployment.
And by using the GPL, it means that Sun can negotiate a cut from each cell phone shipped--meaning that Sun doesn't hurt its revenue source.
Bet'cha that the first cell phone manufacturer which tries to pull what Linksys did with its wireless repeater (running Linux but not providing the sources or a means to reprogram the device in violation of the GPL) will get hammered by Sun's lawyers.
First, as the head of the Executive Branch of the government, the President has the power and the right to oversee the functioning of all departments of government. In a sense the President is the Chief Executive Officer of the United States Government. So there are no rights being trampled on here--no free speech implications--any more than if the CEO of your company asked for review of all published papers. Nothing is preventing the researchers at the USGS from taking jobs at a variety of other institutions, such as Caltech, which is doing similar work in the field.
Second, if you've interpreted the constant bitching about the Bush Administration as being "agreeable", I'd hate to think what you think is not "agreeable." I strongly suspect many foreigners looking into the United States thinks we are the most repressed, most totalitarian "democracy" in the world because everytime our government twitches a finger or some official somewhere says something about the 1st, 2nd or 14th amendments to our constitutions (guaranteeing fundamental rights that are only granted in most European countries by law rather than by constitutional restriction--law which can be as easily repealed as it was passed) that rubs someone the wrong way, we bitch, LOUDLY, and publically. How this constant criticism, bitching, and discourse is interpreted as our government failing--rather than that of a healthy democracy engaged in healthy self-criticism, is beyond me.
Third, I'm always amazed at foreigners who do look into this constant din of self-criticism and say "boy, you Americans are really fracked up"--who fail to engage in the same degree of healthy self-criticism in their own countries. Where are the protesters in France when the freedom to present illegal drugs in a positive light (a basic freedom of speech) was taken away and anyone who speaks about using illegal drugs in a positive way can be imprisoned for 5 years and fined up to 76,000 euros? Where were the protesters in Ireland complaining about their notion of freedom of speech, which prohibits using speech to upset the public order or the authority of the State? (Well, nevermind that one--anyone protesting that law would be upsetting the public order and questioning the authority of the State and thus subject to prison time.) source
Where are the protesters in the United Kingdom protesting either for--or against--Tony Martin? Or the protesters complaining or demanding that the right of self defense in England needs to be preserved? The guy is cause celebrity for self defense in the United States, where self defense is considered a fundamental human right rather than an "valid legal justification" to commit murder. (And if you don't know the difference between the two, then you have no business bitching about "civil liberties" or "rights.")
I'm not saying that these should be protested in their respective countries. What I'm saying is that these things would have been protested in the United States. (If you're an American, can you imagine the uproar if anyone even considered passing a law making it illegal to portray the use of illegal drugs in a positive light?) And while in their own respective countries they apparently were met with indifference, here in the United States they would have been strongly protested--and probably used by the citizens of France, the United Kingdom or Ireland as further evidence of American "agreeability."
Risking the obligatory down-moderation for being "off-topic", even a quick trip to Wikipedia would show that there are a few more folks out there who have stated their opposition to the current 'consensus' on Global Warming, including those who doubt there is a global rise in temperatures, those who believe that there may be a rise in temperature but the cause is not properly explained, and those who have a problem with the current governmental frameworks (such as the Kyoto accord) that have been proposed or enacted to combat Global Warming.
The biggest problem I personally have with the whole Global Warming thing is that the whole thing has been simplified to "Man's carelessness and wanton capitalist greed is destroying the Earth, and we must rebuild or remake all of society now before the fuzzy bunny rabbits and cute black and white penguins all die." Nothing good ever comes from reducing something this complicated to a political bumper sticker--and while this is just one bumper sticker, the whole popular approach to Global Warming has been reduced to a political bumper sticker mentality.
If a house is built to substandard specifications it's because the building inspectors in your municipality aren't doing their job. The standard job of a building inspector is to verify at each state of construction that the house is built properly and to specification; if the house is not built to spec, the building inspector has the power to demand that the house be torn down and rebuilt.
My parents are in the construction industry and I've seen a few times where building inspectors demanded a foundation be torn up and repoured, house framing demolished and rebuilt, and siding reapplied to a house so that it meets code.
Now in many areas of the country houses are not built to current code. But note the key word here: current. The Unform Building Code is regularly updated every two years or so, so it is possible a house built ten years ago isn't up to today's code--after five revisions to the code, eventually something is going to be considered "substandard" today that was up to code before. My house, for example, does not meet current code; today's building code in the Glendale area requires that all residental structures have an automatic sprinkler system in the house to meet today's code. But because my house was last remodeled in the 70's, there were no requirements then to install an automatic sprinkler system.
256 shapes X 512 color depths = 131072 bits per 'cell'
Bits don't multiply that way.
256 shapes = 8 bits, 512 color depths = 9 bits, since 8 bits and 9 bits encodes 2 ** 8 states and 2 ** 9 states, respectively. 256 shapes x 512 color depths = 131072 'states' or possible combinations, which represents 17 bits (8 + 9 bits) of information.
Using your assumption about the number of cells per square inch, you get 160,000 x 17 = 2,720,000 bits per square inch, not 20,971,520,000 bits per square inch as you state. On an 8.5 x 11 inch piece of paper, that means you would get 254 megabytes, not 245 gigabytes per page.
I've been using the technique in C of using two list pointers: one to keep my objects in a single-linked list, and another to store objects in a hash map, which uses a second series of singly-linked lists to track the objects in a hash bucket. And I've been using this technique since the 80's, easily.
The absurd part about this patent is that it is incredibly obvious, and unlike the one-click patent which is arguably obvious but also because of the age of the 'net possible that Amazon was the first ones to do it, multiply linked lists have undoubtedly been done since we've had pointers in computer architectures.
Couldn't we just ignite the methane gas over the arctic during summer, pushing the Earth out a hair from it's current orbit? I think I saw the idea on Futurama... We can even celebrate the extra week by declaring it as a robot party week!
Which is why the trees have to be chopped down and used to build houses, furnature and structures where the wood is chemically treated not to rot.
Ideally we would use some of the energy from some of the trees to blast other trees into orbit; that way that carbon can never be reclaimed--but I suspect environmentalists wouldn't be happy with the idea of stripping entire forests just to blast them into space...
Oh, look; an example of argumentum ad hominem! But that's okay; much of what passes for debate in Global Warming circles looks like a walk down all of Stephen's Guide to Logical Fallacies; I mean we have plenty of Fallacies of Distraction, lots of Appeals to Motive in Place of Support, and an almost endless supply of Changing the Subject in place of real debate. Hell; just roll down his entire logical fallacies table of contents and I'm sure you'll see at least a dozen of these fallacies used in support of Global Warming by the experts at the United Nations.
And nevermind that the entire Kyoto Accord is essentially based on an Appeal to Consequences: while we may not know for certain if and how much damage we're causing we must pass and enforce Kyoto: just think of the children...
No up side to telling Americans that dumping tons of pollutants into the atmosphere is going to have a bad effect?
There's plenty of up-side--from having a better chance of getting funding for research and having a bigger chance to getting your name in the paper as an expert (since you're not a "tool" of the oil companies), to having a hand in attempting to re-engineer our entire "energy-wasteful society" to be more "energy efficient" and "ecologically sound", which, for a politician or a civil engineer, is money in the bank and votes in the voting booth.
No up side? Please. There is plenty of upside; just witness Al Gore jetting across the country telling us how loathsome we are as a nation to waste gasoline driving to the grocery store.
Of course the biggest problem with being able to search every friggin' bill that Congress is working on is that our government is freakin' huge. On the other hand, you can do a text search on phrases such as "security", "Homeland Security" or "holiday"...
Provisions frequently get inserted at the last minute, for the express purpose of preventing anyone from reading it (or debating it) before voting.
Then write your congress critter demanding (a) the line-item veto so that omnibus bills can have sections vetoed that really belong in a separate bill, and (b) that the process of passing laws be reformed so as not to pull stunts like this in the future.
You know, congress critters do listen--and the process can be monitored. I can't help it if the process is complex and obscure--and requires effort rather than having select items spoonfed to us because we're too damned lazy to get involved.
Symantec and McAfee will find new lines of business or fade away because they are selling products that shouldn't exist at all.
Computer security is more than having a good ACL implementation and a defense against viruses and trojan horses. So even if we assume a perfect world where every single line of Microsoft's software worked correctly so that a virus couldn't infect a system and trojan horses were immediately detected and/or never permitted to install themselves (because, say, Microsoft requires all executables to be signed using an SSL certificate that is purchased, conveniently enough, from Microsoft), there are still going to be situations where you need to deal with new "threats"--including situations that are caused by user neglegance colliding with laws requiring a certain degree of information security.
Are you going to turn over all thinking about the entire broad array of topics that fall under the rubric of information security over to Microsoft?
WHY does the AV program NEED to hook into the OS kernel?
AFAIK you need to hook the kernel so you can know when a file is accessed, so you can scan the file and determine if it is infected (so you can block read access) and determine if it became infected after write access (so you can quarantine the file).
The funny thing is, ever since the Macintosh Finder v1.0 days I always wondered why you couldn't have some sort of user-mode file modification service--because getting an event when a file is opened, created and modified would be more useful than just AV scanning. It would also be useful for a Windows File Explorer or Macintosh Finder program--since the Finder or Explorer could subscribe to file modification events to the current directory window can be updated in real time, rather than having to constantly ping the disk or have a "refresh" icon.
Ideally you should also be able to block access to a file, so you can prevent an infected file from being loaded into memory and executed.
Now without kernel hooks you can still do AV scanning--you just don't get any sort of "auto-protection" which permits you to stop viruses that slip in between full or partial disk scans.
Although the headlines read Symantec and McAfee, you could easily substitute your personal favourite security vendor instead. The issues mentioned above affect almost all third-party security vendors. The reality is, most security vendors can't afford to mount a long, sustained fight against the giant that is Microsoft; McAfee and Symantec have those resources.
This covers Trend, Grisoft, Sophos and Avast as well.
Love the hardware and the design. Hate the idiot lawyers who fsck things up and the sales evangelists who couldn't sell an umbrella to a man standing in the pouring rain. And hate the management when it's run by anyone other than Steve Jobs.
Apple has always been a designer's company and an engineer's company--but their corporate sales team (I mean the guys out of Cupertino, not the guys at the Apple Store) have always been flaming idiots (I know; I've dealt with them), and when management was run by anyone other than Steve Jobs, management of Apple simply Didn't Get It.
Well, the study that was linked by this/. article stated that the United States spends twice as much per person than England's socialized medicine, so it's clear that our survival rates should be higher--and they are. So as much as the nanny state supporters and detracters would want to spin this as an issue of socialized medicine, it's not.
This is a lifestyle thing, not a medicine thing.
Personally I suspect our country's culture of individuality--including individual competition in the free market, and our puritan upbringing has created a more stressful environment here in the United States than in England. We keep longer hours, we don't take a break in the afternoon for tea, we get less sleep, and we eat an endless stream of junk food vended from vending machines inbetween fatty foods and a morning breakfast that was ideal for farm hands who worked back-breaking labor every day but is about a thousand calories too much for an office worker stuck in front of a desk.
What few of us are in good shape squeeze in a workout at a crowded gym or run in circles around a crowded track, and even when we relax we are constantly on the go, going somewhere, doing something, buying reminders of our trip. We've become a nation of ADDs, and the stress is killing us.
I heard that stress and a lack of sleep along with bad diet contributes to chronic health problems. This strikes me as more evidence that our collective nation-wide stress and lack of sleep is contributing to nation-wide chronic health problems.
The only thing we need now is a follow-up study to study lifestyle factors such as hours of sleep, relative stress, and quality of food eaten by both nations to see if this is in fact the problem.
The primary difference between the Caltech cannon and your car is that the Caltech cannon has been tacitly agreed to by all parties as a legitimate target of "pranksterism"--with the understanding that eventually either Caltech will be given the opportunity to get the cannon back through some sort of stealth, or the MIT students will pay to return the cannon in perfect shape. (Meaning that the MIT students are presumed to be willing to make Caltech "whole" by returning the cannon.)
This is different from your car, where the car is understood to belong to you, is your personal property, and is not tacitly understood by anyone to be a suitable target of prankerism.
The fact that the Canon was taken from Caltech means that it is being used in the manner which everyone invisioned it would be used.
Note, by the way, that Caltech demanded Harvey Mudd to return the cannon on threat of legal action only after Caltech students attempted to negotiate with Harvey Mudd's administration in good faith for a number of ways to recapture the cannon--including air-lifting it and moving it in the middle of the night. When Harvey Mudd declined all such negotations, it was clear that Harvey Mudd wasn't playing along, that the act of "prankerism" became an act of theft, and that's when the lawyers were called in.
We all here have this image of science as the absolute and impartial arbitor of truth. And when it comes to things like mechanical engineering, it does tend to give better answers than not doing the engineering.
But bridges in the real world still fall down, despite the answers provided by mechanical engineers.
When it comes to civil engineering, by the way, because there are so many ways to tackle the problem, the "science" has been modified by politically motivated legal code writers into a large collection of tables and formulas that have attempted to distill the science down to something the politicians can understand. This set of "Universal Building Codes" (or UBCs) essentially have reduced the science of mechanical engineering to a set of formula that is only remotely associated with the original applied physics.
So even here, politicians (in order to "simplify" mechanical engineering) have influenced the science. And this, in an area where the underlying assumptions about mechanical engineering are not in dispute.
To me, it's no wonder that in areas such as Global Warming, where the underlying assumptions are clearly political (because science is descriptive, not proscriptive--science describes what is happening, it does not demand specific solutions to those problems--yet the entire Global Warming debate is about how society is supposed to make major changes (a proscriptive solution) in order to avert a man-made disaster (hardly a descriptive description), it's no wonder that political forces have been attempting to heavily influence the science. From the Hockey Stick description of temperatures issued by the IPCC, based on admittedly bad science and pulled by the IPCC (but it still resurfaces periodically elsewhere) to the White House editing proscriptive "scientific" policy papers, everyone from both sides are battering around poor science like a rag doll between two bulls.
Simply put, there is just too much money on the table (Kyoto is talking about ultimately shifting around hundreds of billions, and other solutions are even more radical and expensive) for the politicians not to fuck around heavily with the science.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry but we don't allow "facts" here to get in the way of our government-sponsored hysteria and push towards a world socialist government^W^W^W^W enactment of treaty obligations restricting capitalism to help save the Earth.
This is smart but for a different reason than "gee, we get to play with the sources." What it means is that phone developers who are looking at putting Java on the phone now have a leg up. While having Java on the phone is pretty much a basic requirement for most cell phone manufacturers, it does mean that if you are a new entrant into the phone market you can get a basic Java environment up and running on your hardware with minimal costs over the development tools necessary to do hardware and software development.
Right now with the struggle between WinCE, Symbian and Linux/Qtopia, it gives developers the opportunity to work (under GPL) the possibility of creating a Linux/Java cell phone (one where Java, not Qt, is used to run the UI) and create a phone which runs jar files as the basic unit of deployment.
And by using the GPL, it means that Sun can negotiate a cut from each cell phone shipped--meaning that Sun doesn't hurt its revenue source.
Bet'cha that the first cell phone manufacturer which tries to pull what Linksys did with its wireless repeater (running Linux but not providing the sources or a means to reprogram the device in violation of the GPL) will get hammered by Sun's lawyers.
A few points.
First, as the head of the Executive Branch of the government, the President has the power and the right to oversee the functioning of all departments of government. In a sense the President is the Chief Executive Officer of the United States Government. So there are no rights being trampled on here--no free speech implications--any more than if the CEO of your company asked for review of all published papers. Nothing is preventing the researchers at the USGS from taking jobs at a variety of other institutions, such as Caltech, which is doing similar work in the field.
Second, if you've interpreted the constant bitching about the Bush Administration as being "agreeable", I'd hate to think what you think is not "agreeable." I strongly suspect many foreigners looking into the United States thinks we are the most repressed, most totalitarian "democracy" in the world because everytime our government twitches a finger or some official somewhere says something about the 1st, 2nd or 14th amendments to our constitutions (guaranteeing fundamental rights that are only granted in most European countries by law rather than by constitutional restriction--law which can be as easily repealed as it was passed) that rubs someone the wrong way, we bitch, LOUDLY, and publically. How this constant criticism, bitching, and discourse is interpreted as our government failing--rather than that of a healthy democracy engaged in healthy self-criticism, is beyond me.
Third, I'm always amazed at foreigners who do look into this constant din of self-criticism and say "boy, you Americans are really fracked up"--who fail to engage in the same degree of healthy self-criticism in their own countries. Where are the protesters in France when the freedom to present illegal drugs in a positive light (a basic freedom of speech) was taken away and anyone who speaks about using illegal drugs in a positive way can be imprisoned for 5 years and fined up to 76,000 euros? Where were the protesters in Ireland complaining about their notion of freedom of speech, which prohibits using speech to upset the public order or the authority of the State? (Well, nevermind that one--anyone protesting that law would be upsetting the public order and questioning the authority of the State and thus subject to prison time.) source
Where are the protesters in the United Kingdom protesting either for--or against--Tony Martin? Or the protesters complaining or demanding that the right of self defense in England needs to be preserved? The guy is cause celebrity for self defense in the United States, where self defense is considered a fundamental human right rather than an "valid legal justification" to commit murder. (And if you don't know the difference between the two, then you have no business bitching about "civil liberties" or "rights.")
I'm not saying that these should be protested in their respective countries. What I'm saying is that these things would have been protested in the United States. (If you're an American, can you imagine the uproar if anyone even considered passing a law making it illegal to portray the use of illegal drugs in a positive light?) And while in their own respective countries they apparently were met with indifference, here in the United States they would have been strongly protested--and probably used by the citizens of France, the United Kingdom or Ireland as further evidence of American "agreeability."
Ah. Constructing strawmen through the use of creative editing, I see.
Risking the obligatory down-moderation for being "off-topic", even a quick trip to Wikipedia would show that there are a few more folks out there who have stated their opposition to the current 'consensus' on Global Warming, including those who doubt there is a global rise in temperatures, those who believe that there may be a rise in temperature but the cause is not properly explained, and those who have a problem with the current governmental frameworks (such as the Kyoto accord) that have been proposed or enacted to combat Global Warming.
The biggest problem I personally have with the whole Global Warming thing is that the whole thing has been simplified to "Man's carelessness and wanton capitalist greed is destroying the Earth, and we must rebuild or remake all of society now before the fuzzy bunny rabbits and cute black and white penguins all die." Nothing good ever comes from reducing something this complicated to a political bumper sticker--and while this is just one bumper sticker, the whole popular approach to Global Warming has been reduced to a political bumper sticker mentality.
(a) I have no need to "karma whore."
(b) AFAIK, "Funny" does not increase karma.
"I for one welcome our new satellite overlords."
"I wonder what would happen if we created a beowulf cluster of them?"
If a house is built to substandard specifications it's because the building inspectors in your municipality aren't doing their job. The standard job of a building inspector is to verify at each state of construction that the house is built properly and to specification; if the house is not built to spec, the building inspector has the power to demand that the house be torn down and rebuilt.
My parents are in the construction industry and I've seen a few times where building inspectors demanded a foundation be torn up and repoured, house framing demolished and rebuilt, and siding reapplied to a house so that it meets code.
Now in many areas of the country houses are not built to current code. But note the key word here: current. The Unform Building Code is regularly updated every two years or so, so it is possible a house built ten years ago isn't up to today's code--after five revisions to the code, eventually something is going to be considered "substandard" today that was up to code before. My house, for example, does not meet current code; today's building code in the Glendale area requires that all residental structures have an automatic sprinkler system in the house to meet today's code. But because my house was last remodeled in the 70's, there were no requirements then to install an automatic sprinkler system.
Bits don't multiply that way.
256 shapes = 8 bits, 512 color depths = 9 bits, since 8 bits and 9 bits encodes 2 ** 8 states and 2 ** 9 states, respectively. 256 shapes x 512 color depths = 131072 'states' or possible combinations, which represents 17 bits (8 + 9 bits) of information.
Using your assumption about the number of cells per square inch, you get 160,000 x 17 = 2,720,000 bits per square inch, not 20,971,520,000 bits per square inch as you state. On an 8.5 x 11 inch piece of paper, that means you would get 254 megabytes, not 245 gigabytes per page.
I've been using the technique in C of using two list pointers: one to keep my objects in a single-linked list, and another to store objects in a hash map, which uses a second series of singly-linked lists to track the objects in a hash bucket. And I've been using this technique since the 80's, easily.
The absurd part about this patent is that it is incredibly obvious, and unlike the one-click patent which is arguably obvious but also because of the age of the 'net possible that Amazon was the first ones to do it, multiply linked lists have undoubtedly been done since we've had pointers in computer architectures.
Couldn't we just ignite the methane gas over the arctic during summer, pushing the Earth out a hair from it's current orbit? I think I saw the idea on Futurama... We can even celebrate the extra week by declaring it as a robot party week!
Which is why the trees have to be chopped down and used to build houses, furnature and structures where the wood is chemically treated not to rot.
Ideally we would use some of the energy from some of the trees to blast other trees into orbit; that way that carbon can never be reclaimed--but I suspect environmentalists wouldn't be happy with the idea of stripping entire forests just to blast them into space...
Oh, look; an example of argumentum ad hominem! But that's okay; much of what passes for debate in Global Warming circles looks like a walk down all of Stephen's Guide to Logical Fallacies; I mean we have plenty of Fallacies of Distraction, lots of Appeals to Motive in Place of Support, and an almost endless supply of Changing the Subject in place of real debate. Hell; just roll down his entire logical fallacies table of contents and I'm sure you'll see at least a dozen of these fallacies used in support of Global Warming by the experts at the United Nations.
And nevermind that the entire Kyoto Accord is essentially based on an Appeal to Consequences: while we may not know for certain if and how much damage we're causing we must pass and enforce Kyoto: just think of the children...
No up side to telling Americans that dumping tons of pollutants into the atmosphere is going to have a bad effect?
There's plenty of up-side--from having a better chance of getting funding for research and having a bigger chance to getting your name in the paper as an expert (since you're not a "tool" of the oil companies), to having a hand in attempting to re-engineer our entire "energy-wasteful society" to be more "energy efficient" and "ecologically sound", which, for a politician or a civil engineer, is money in the bank and votes in the voting booth.
No up side? Please. There is plenty of upside; just witness Al Gore jetting across the country telling us how loathsome we are as a nation to waste gasoline driving to the grocery store.
Here, let me help: Thomas, Library of Congress.
Of course the biggest problem with being able to search every friggin' bill that Congress is working on is that our government is freakin' huge. On the other hand, you can do a text search on phrases such as "security", "Homeland Security" or "holiday"...
Then write your congress critter demanding (a) the line-item veto so that omnibus bills can have sections vetoed that really belong in a separate bill, and (b) that the process of passing laws be reformed so as not to pull stunts like this in the future.
You know, congress critters do listen--and the process can be monitored. I can't help it if the process is complex and obscure--and requires effort rather than having select items spoonfed to us because we're too damned lazy to get involved.
Are you going to turn over all thinking about the entire broad array of topics that fall under the rubric of information security over to Microsoft?
The funny thing is, ever since the Macintosh Finder v1.0 days I always wondered why you couldn't have some sort of user-mode file modification service--because getting an event when a file is opened, created and modified would be more useful than just AV scanning. It would also be useful for a Windows File Explorer or Macintosh Finder program--since the Finder or Explorer could subscribe to file modification events to the current directory window can be updated in real time, rather than having to constantly ping the disk or have a "refresh" icon.
Ideally you should also be able to block access to a file, so you can prevent an infected file from being loaded into memory and executed.
Now without kernel hooks you can still do AV scanning--you just don't get any sort of "auto-protection" which permits you to stop viruses that slip in between full or partial disk scans.
This covers Trend, Grisoft, Sophos and Avast as well.
Love the hardware and the design. Hate the idiot lawyers who fsck things up and the sales evangelists who couldn't sell an umbrella to a man standing in the pouring rain. And hate the management when it's run by anyone other than Steve Jobs.
Apple has always been a designer's company and an engineer's company--but their corporate sales team (I mean the guys out of Cupertino, not the guys at the Apple Store) have always been flaming idiots (I know; I've dealt with them), and when management was run by anyone other than Steve Jobs, management of Apple simply Didn't Get It.
Well, the study that was linked by this /. article stated that the United States spends twice as much per person than England's socialized medicine, so it's clear that our survival rates should be higher--and they are. So as much as the nanny state supporters and detracters would want to spin this as an issue of socialized medicine, it's not.
This is a lifestyle thing, not a medicine thing.
Personally I suspect our country's culture of individuality--including individual competition in the free market, and our puritan upbringing has created a more stressful environment here in the United States than in England. We keep longer hours, we don't take a break in the afternoon for tea, we get less sleep, and we eat an endless stream of junk food vended from vending machines inbetween fatty foods and a morning breakfast that was ideal for farm hands who worked back-breaking labor every day but is about a thousand calories too much for an office worker stuck in front of a desk.
What few of us are in good shape squeeze in a workout at a crowded gym or run in circles around a crowded track, and even when we relax we are constantly on the go, going somewhere, doing something, buying reminders of our trip. We've become a nation of ADDs, and the stress is killing us.
I heard that stress and a lack of sleep along with bad diet contributes to chronic health problems. This strikes me as more evidence that our collective nation-wide stress and lack of sleep is contributing to nation-wide chronic health problems.
The only thing we need now is a follow-up study to study lifestyle factors such as hours of sleep, relative stress, and quality of food eaten by both nations to see if this is in fact the problem.
The primary difference between the Caltech cannon and your car is that the Caltech cannon has been tacitly agreed to by all parties as a legitimate target of "pranksterism"--with the understanding that eventually either Caltech will be given the opportunity to get the cannon back through some sort of stealth, or the MIT students will pay to return the cannon in perfect shape. (Meaning that the MIT students are presumed to be willing to make Caltech "whole" by returning the cannon.)
This is different from your car, where the car is understood to belong to you, is your personal property, and is not tacitly understood by anyone to be a suitable target of prankerism.
The fact that the Canon was taken from Caltech means that it is being used in the manner which everyone invisioned it would be used.
Note, by the way, that Caltech demanded Harvey Mudd to return the cannon on threat of legal action only after Caltech students attempted to negotiate with Harvey Mudd's administration in good faith for a number of ways to recapture the cannon--including air-lifting it and moving it in the middle of the night. When Harvey Mudd declined all such negotations, it was clear that Harvey Mudd wasn't playing along, that the act of "prankerism" became an act of theft, and that's when the lawyers were called in.
We all here have this image of science as the absolute and impartial arbitor of truth. And when it comes to things like mechanical engineering, it does tend to give better answers than not doing the engineering.
But bridges in the real world still fall down, despite the answers provided by mechanical engineers.
When it comes to civil engineering, by the way, because there are so many ways to tackle the problem, the "science" has been modified by politically motivated legal code writers into a large collection of tables and formulas that have attempted to distill the science down to something the politicians can understand. This set of "Universal Building Codes" (or UBCs) essentially have reduced the science of mechanical engineering to a set of formula that is only remotely associated with the original applied physics.
So even here, politicians (in order to "simplify" mechanical engineering) have influenced the science. And this, in an area where the underlying assumptions about mechanical engineering are not in dispute.
To me, it's no wonder that in areas such as Global Warming, where the underlying assumptions are clearly political (because science is descriptive, not proscriptive--science describes what is happening, it does not demand specific solutions to those problems--yet the entire Global Warming debate is about how society is supposed to make major changes (a proscriptive solution) in order to avert a man-made disaster (hardly a descriptive description), it's no wonder that political forces have been attempting to heavily influence the science. From the Hockey Stick description of temperatures issued by the IPCC, based on admittedly bad science and pulled by the IPCC (but it still resurfaces periodically elsewhere) to the White House editing proscriptive "scientific" policy papers, everyone from both sides are battering around poor science like a rag doll between two bulls.
Simply put, there is just too much money on the table (Kyoto is talking about ultimately shifting around hundreds of billions, and other solutions are even more radical and expensive) for the politicians not to fuck around heavily with the science.
As they used to say on Usenet, when a thread devolves into personal insults ("fucking douchebag", "clueless piece of shit"), then the thread is over.