Back in olden days, this went without saying. If your system was infected with a worm and you didn't take prompt action to clean it up, you were disconnected from the net. Likewise with other conduct unbecoming of a host on the internet, like forging Usenet cancels or sending spam. After all, access to the Internet was a privilege, not a right. A college with net access was expected to police its users, the university or cooperative that provided the college with access was expected to police them, and so on. There was a chain of responsibility all the way from the end-user to the backbone. That all changed over the course of the 1990s, as the Internet was opened to anyone with an adequate checking account, and the proliferation of commercial ISPs made it trivially easy for a cracker to move from one account to another, so the threat of being banished from the net lost its teeth.
"Hello, pharmaceutical manufacturing firm. I'm from the United Nations, and I would like to purchase a billion little pills from you over the next 10 years, at say, twice the cost of manufacturing them. Interested?"
That's not a risk; it's a windfall.
The one value that patents have in the pharmaceutical industry is to encourage private companies to invest the substantial money required to develop new drugs. Few drugs are really very expensive to manufacture; the high price on some drugs is justified (when/if it actually is justified) to pay off that investment. In this case we have a drug that has already been developed, and while human trials are no trivial matter in terms of cost, they aren't going to require the kind of huge investment that would make the drug too expensive to widely deploy.
In addition to your (probably racist) assumptions about the intelligence and self-restraint of people in sub-Saharan Africa, you apparently don't understand population dynamics. A large part of the reason people in poor countries produce as many children as they do is the high mortality rate. If there's a 1-in-8 chance of each of your children dying before the age of 5, and higher that they'll die before adulthood, you have an incentive to produce more children than you would if they were almost certain to survive. Children aren't just bundles of joy to bring meaning to their lives (like in the post-industrial West), they're also future workers to support the family and take care of them in their old age. Take away one of the leading causes of childhood death, and they'll produce fewer children.
There's one other "teensy weensy little hurdle": the cost. Or more precisely: the price. If this is something that WHO or other health agencies can purchase and dispense for a few cents per dose, it could revolutionize life in sub-Saharan Africa. If it's patent-protected and expensive... not so much.
Your encounters with seniors who are still eager to embrace new things don't negate the fact that so many do not. It's easy to be excited about the changing world around you when you're young, but not as easy as you age. Aside from the fact that adapting to change simply becomes more difficult with age, older people have more "past" to be attached to. Someone in their 20s doesn't mourn the world of 10 years ago because they weren't able to fully participate in it. But for someone in their 60s, the past represents a world they knew, were probably masters of, and contained things they both cherished and fully understood. That's not so easy to leave behind as simply putting away one's childhood. For example, I'm in my late 40s, and I know that first love, starting a career, and naively thinking that I can change the world are all in my past; those things will never come again.
Where are the breakthroughs that are delaying the onset of mental decline? Compared to the advances we've made in replacing joints and organs, and in fighting off illnesses such as cancers, anti-cognitive-aging medicine is getting nowhere.
The flip-side of the Boredom coin is Future Shock. A substantial number of people find in old age that the world has become alien to them, and don't wish to live in that Brave New World.
Einstein was actually pretty perceptive about metaphysics and morality as well. He may not have been a "philosophical genius" but he generally exemplified above-average wisdom about religion and politics.
It isn't enough to be physically healthy. Setting side the questions of cost and availability, with artificial and transplanted parts plus current biochemistry we could already keep a person mostly-healthy beyond 100. But until/unless we can delay the natural cognitive decline that begins in late middle-age - which can't be fixed with a transplant or implant, or any known medical procedure - what's the point? Who wants to be fit enough to walk a mile to the store, but unable to remember the way home?
The only lesson here is that creating chaos doesn't require any kind of organizational structure (which is almost tautological). Producing something orderly is a whole different question, and unless you happen to have an infinite number of monkeys at your disposal, the chance of that happening in a finite period of time is pretty damn improbable.
Potable water is easy. I've lived in the wilderness for a week and a half, hand-pumping water from streams and lakes through a filter. Maybe not practical if you're hiding out in Aridzona, but in fertile parts of the country it's not difficult at all.
Food is a little more difficult, but unless you're talking about long-term... it's really not that important. The typical American beer belly or large caboose can keep you alive and reasonably healthy for a few weeks, and much longer if you're getting some food along the way.
It was designed to be sealed. The fact that it could, in fact, be opened (like so many other consumer electronics... including the MacBooks that people are whining about here) doesn't change the intent.
{sigh} There were plenty of things one might want to upgrade or add: RAM, more storage, ethernet interface, external video, etc. Apple's position was that you shouldn't need to, or that any add-ons could be done using the system's built-in external ports (ADB and SCSI were added on the second Mac model). The Macintosh SE ("system expansion") and its sibling the Mac II were when Apple relented a bit, by including an open slot (several for the Mac II) on the system board for add-ins.
Actually the MacBook Air sold rather... let's say "slowly"... for the first year or so, to the point that a less... "committed" company would have discontinued it. It was unpopular, because it was so much more expensive than the rest of the MacBook line, for a machine with the least horsepower, no CD drive, etc.. When the price came down into the territory of the white MacBooks then costumers went for it.
This isn't exactly new. The original Macintosh was rather deliberately designed to be a sealed unit, with no user-upgradable/replaceable components inside.
Just like pretty much every other piece of consumer electronics. How easy is it to upgrade your Blu-Ray player, or replace components in your clock radio? Microcomputers have been the exception to this, beginning as kits and retaining some level of user-customization (most of the time). But as they get closer in size a pocket calculator than to a refrigerator, with the components getting smaller and closer together in the process, the notion that you can open up and tinker with your laptop becomes about as practical as suggesting that you do the same with your wrist watch.
Um... many schools have children in them. Like... most of them do. (If he meant he worked for a "college", he should've said "college". And demanded that their paid staff do this.)
Or put the dean on the whitelist that allows him to access whatever sites he deems appropriate, but are blocked for students. Typical residential-grade routers have this functionality.
You can't partially-filter Facebook, not in any meaningful or effective way. If you try, you'll fail. Either users have access to it, or they do not.
And for a school (assuming K-12), the hypothetical benefits are massively outweighed by the problems. Not just the content-filtering ones, but the waste-of-resources and distraction-from-task kind. Give kids easy access to Facebook at school, and your computer lab will become a Facebook lab. It serves no educational purpose, and just like the Gameboys, Walkmans, transistor radios, whatever toys earlier kids tried to play with at school that distracted from what they were there for, it's perfectly appropriate to say "not at school".
The whole GUI trend, the built-in-pointing-device trend, the keyboard-set-back-next-to-the-screen trend.... Apple has introduced a lot of design features (especially on laptops) which have since become standard and are now taken for granted. You may not like them all, but the notion that you don't like any of them is a bit preposterous.
The obvious goal is that it's a slick piece of hardware, with no equivalent gear from another source, and they want to run their preferred software on it. (I'd rather run OS X on it, but... diff'rent strokes for diff'rent folks.)
What I don't get is why the problems are such a surprise. The "no equivalent gear from another source" should've been the first clue: it's an exotic piece of hardware. I can name a whole host of specialized electronics that a typical Linux distro won't run properly on, due to hardware support issues. Especially if the hardware is new. You'll have the same kinds of problem if you try to install Windows on this hardware. Or install OS X on an MS Surface. Or Linux on an iPad. Or WebOS on a Playstation. Or any other mismatched hardware and OS. It's not as if Apple advertised this hardware as suitable for running the OS of your choice.
No, just the total dot-commercialization of the net. I'm old enough to remember when people still argued that the internet should not be used for commercial purposes (there was a popular myth that doing so was illegal, due to the NSF providing most of the funding for the backbone). And that wasn't always such a bad thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Back in olden days, this went without saying. If your system was infected with a worm and you didn't take prompt action to clean it up, you were disconnected from the net. Likewise with other conduct unbecoming of a host on the internet, like forging Usenet cancels or sending spam. After all, access to the Internet was a privilege, not a right. A college with net access was expected to police its users, the university or cooperative that provided the college with access was expected to police them, and so on. There was a chain of responsibility all the way from the end-user to the backbone. That all changed over the course of the 1990s, as the Internet was opened to anyone with an adequate checking account, and the proliferation of commercial ISPs made it trivially easy for a cracker to move from one account to another, so the threat of being banished from the net lost its teeth.
...or it suggests that mice with stronger immune systems are more inclined to be promiscuous.
Granted, the hypothesis suggested in TFA is more plausible, but it's not the only possible explanation.
"Hello, pharmaceutical manufacturing firm. I'm from the United Nations, and I would like to purchase a billion little pills from you over the next 10 years, at say, twice the cost of manufacturing them. Interested?"
That's not a risk; it's a windfall.
The one value that patents have in the pharmaceutical industry is to encourage private companies to invest the substantial money required to develop new drugs. Few drugs are really very expensive to manufacture; the high price on some drugs is justified (when/if it actually is justified) to pay off that investment. In this case we have a drug that has already been developed, and while human trials are no trivial matter in terms of cost, they aren't going to require the kind of huge investment that would make the drug too expensive to widely deploy.
In addition to your (probably racist) assumptions about the intelligence and self-restraint of people in sub-Saharan Africa, you apparently don't understand population dynamics. A large part of the reason people in poor countries produce as many children as they do is the high mortality rate. If there's a 1-in-8 chance of each of your children dying before the age of 5, and higher that they'll die before adulthood, you have an incentive to produce more children than you would if they were almost certain to survive. Children aren't just bundles of joy to bring meaning to their lives (like in the post-industrial West), they're also future workers to support the family and take care of them in their old age. Take away one of the leading causes of childhood death, and they'll produce fewer children.
There's one other "teensy weensy little hurdle": the cost. Or more precisely: the price. If this is something that WHO or other health agencies can purchase and dispense for a few cents per dose, it could revolutionize life in sub-Saharan Africa. If it's patent-protected and expensive... not so much.
Your encounters with seniors who are still eager to embrace new things don't negate the fact that so many do not. It's easy to be excited about the changing world around you when you're young, but not as easy as you age. Aside from the fact that adapting to change simply becomes more difficult with age, older people have more "past" to be attached to. Someone in their 20s doesn't mourn the world of 10 years ago because they weren't able to fully participate in it. But for someone in their 60s, the past represents a world they knew, were probably masters of, and contained things they both cherished and fully understood. That's not so easy to leave behind as simply putting away one's childhood. For example, I'm in my late 40s, and I know that first love, starting a career, and naively thinking that I can change the world are all in my past; those things will never come again.
Where are the breakthroughs that are delaying the onset of mental decline? Compared to the advances we've made in replacing joints and organs, and in fighting off illnesses such as cancers, anti-cognitive-aging medicine is getting nowhere.
The flip-side of the Boredom coin is Future Shock. A substantial number of people find in old age that the world has become alien to them, and don't wish to live in that Brave New World.
Einstein was actually pretty perceptive about metaphysics and morality as well. He may not have been a "philosophical genius" but he generally exemplified above-average wisdom about religion and politics.
It isn't enough to be physically healthy. Setting side the questions of cost and availability, with artificial and transplanted parts plus current biochemistry we could already keep a person mostly-healthy beyond 100. But until/unless we can delay the natural cognitive decline that begins in late middle-age - which can't be fixed with a transplant or implant, or any known medical procedure - what's the point? Who wants to be fit enough to walk a mile to the store, but unable to remember the way home?
The only lesson here is that creating chaos doesn't require any kind of organizational structure (which is almost tautological). Producing something orderly is a whole different question, and unless you happen to have an infinite number of monkeys at your disposal, the chance of that happening in a finite period of time is pretty damn improbable.
In today's housing market, you could finish your prison sentence before the house sells.
Potable water is easy. I've lived in the wilderness for a week and a half, hand-pumping water from streams and lakes through a filter. Maybe not practical if you're hiding out in Aridzona, but in fertile parts of the country it's not difficult at all.
Food is a little more difficult, but unless you're talking about long-term... it's really not that important. The typical American beer belly or large caboose can keep you alive and reasonably healthy for a few weeks, and much longer if you're getting some food along the way.
It was designed to be sealed. The fact that it could, in fact, be opened (like so many other consumer electronics... including the MacBooks that people are whining about here) doesn't change the intent.
Your reading comprehension is depressing.
{sigh} There were plenty of things one might want to upgrade or add: RAM, more storage, ethernet interface, external video, etc. Apple's position was that you shouldn't need to, or that any add-ons could be done using the system's built-in external ports (ADB and SCSI were added on the second Mac model). The Macintosh SE ("system expansion") and its sibling the Mac II were when Apple relented a bit, by including an open slot (several for the Mac II) on the system board for add-ins.
I was pointing out an error of fact. Infer what you will.
Actually the MacBook Air sold rather... let's say "slowly"... for the first year or so, to the point that a less... "committed" company would have discontinued it. It was unpopular, because it was so much more expensive than the rest of the MacBook line, for a machine with the least horsepower, no CD drive, etc.. When the price came down into the territory of the white MacBooks then costumers went for it.
This isn't exactly new. The original Macintosh was rather deliberately designed to be a sealed unit, with no user-upgradable/replaceable components inside.
Just like pretty much every other piece of consumer electronics. How easy is it to upgrade your Blu-Ray player, or replace components in your clock radio? Microcomputers have been the exception to this, beginning as kits and retaining some level of user-customization (most of the time). But as they get closer in size a pocket calculator than to a refrigerator, with the components getting smaller and closer together in the process, the notion that you can open up and tinker with your laptop becomes about as practical as suggesting that you do the same with your wrist watch.
That's all. Just "Yes." You should.
Get the one you like best.
Coming up on Ask Slashdot: "What movie should I go see?", "Which girl/boy should I ask out?", and "What should I major in?"
"Theoretically the students are all adults."
Um... many schools have children in them. Like... most of them do. (If he meant he worked for a "college", he should've said "college". And demanded that their paid staff do this.)
Or put the dean on the whitelist that allows him to access whatever sites he deems appropriate, but are blocked for students. Typical residential-grade routers have this functionality.
You can't partially-filter Facebook, not in any meaningful or effective way. If you try, you'll fail. Either users have access to it, or they do not.
And for a school (assuming K-12), the hypothetical benefits are massively outweighed by the problems. Not just the content-filtering ones, but the waste-of-resources and distraction-from-task kind. Give kids easy access to Facebook at school, and your computer lab will become a Facebook lab. It serves no educational purpose, and just like the Gameboys, Walkmans, transistor radios, whatever toys earlier kids tried to play with at school that distracted from what they were there for, it's perfectly appropriate to say "not at school".
The whole GUI trend, the built-in-pointing-device trend, the keyboard-set-back-next-to-the-screen trend.... Apple has introduced a lot of design features (especially on laptops) which have since become standard and are now taken for granted. You may not like them all, but the notion that you don't like any of them is a bit preposterous.
The obvious goal is that it's a slick piece of hardware, with no equivalent gear from another source, and they want to run their preferred software on it. (I'd rather run OS X on it, but... diff'rent strokes for diff'rent folks.)
What I don't get is why the problems are such a surprise. The "no equivalent gear from another source" should've been the first clue: it's an exotic piece of hardware. I can name a whole host of specialized electronics that a typical Linux distro won't run properly on, due to hardware support issues. Especially if the hardware is new. You'll have the same kinds of problem if you try to install Windows on this hardware. Or install OS X on an MS Surface. Or Linux on an iPad. Or WebOS on a Playstation. Or any other mismatched hardware and OS. It's not as if Apple advertised this hardware as suitable for running the OS of your choice.
No, just the total dot-commercialization of the net. I'm old enough to remember when people still argued that the internet should not be used for commercial purposes (there was a popular myth that doing so was illegal, due to the NSF providing most of the funding for the backbone). And that wasn't always such a bad thing.