Printouts are good for worksheets (which you throw away anyway), and books that you won't actually use, and maybe specialist topics (where 30 people in the world will read it), and for stuff that goes out of date the moment it's printed (like most economics, these days), but not Math and Science.
I take it you never had the pleasure of being the 5th or 6th student to use a particular hard-cover textbook issued by the school? If you did, you'd know how badly most kids treat the books and how they're often filled with markings, torn pages, stains (god knows what), and are generally unpleasant to use. Some in the worst shape were the math and science books.
(and a good friend of mine who was a professor also was denied tenure over this incident). Sadly IT at universities tends to be a little kingdom of people who think they are more important than everything else going on - in fact, this isn't just at universities...
The best thing you can do is go to the dean of the school you're planning to attend and say, "gee, I was really looking forward to attending your university, but I will not attend if I have to install this monitoring software to use the network.".
Deans care a whole lot about enrollment numbers and having good students and if they are going to lose good student due to a stupid policy, there will be pressure to alter the policy or at least grant an exception.
It's disturbed me greatly that the apparent preferred reaction to an attack by people "who hate us for our freedom" has been to give up that freedom and to live in fear. I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who feels that way.
The free market is perfect in the fact that everyone gets what they deserve*. If I feel like releasing a product no one wants, fine, but then I go broke. If I don't feel like doing anything but eating potato chips thats fine, I just will soon be making friends with Bob the three fingered hobo out on the street. If I make a groundbreaking invention I can sell it and make a bunch of money.
And if you feel like dumping your toxic waste in the next county's water supply "for free" instead of being required to dispose of it in a proper and safe way, the free market rewards you.
The "free market" works great on small scales (one local restaurant competing against another) but when industries grow to larger scales, there's a huge problem with publicizing the risk while privatizing the cost.
You only have to go to a third-world company where oil is extracted to see how these companies act with the lack of government regulations to control them (or a government that can stand up to the companies). They'll wantonly spill toxic waste all over the landscape and bring in mercenary armies to suppress the uppity locals. The free market, with the companies always seeking lowest costs and better numbers this quarter, actually encourages these behaviors. The only thing minimizing this "tragedy of the commons" in more developed countries are states with strong enough regulatory power to keep the greed in check.
And like it or not, Somalia is exactly what we get with the "libertarian paradise". They might claim that they don't actually mean lack of government, but what good is a government that doesn't enforce laws and regulations?
It's a common problem with the summaries on slashdot that less-common acronyms are not explained. The world of nerds is pretty vast and it's impossible for all of us to keep up with every possible acronym, system, software, etc.
It would have been trivial to add ", a proprietary protocol developed by Adobe Systems for streaming audio, video and data over the Internet," right after the first instance of RTMPE and it would have made the summary much more useful and informative.
There are those of us who have an innate ability to navigate in any environment with little or no aid. I joke with people, who are completely flumoxed as to where they are and in which direction they should go, that they shouldn't worry. My internal GPS knows where we're at. Spacial orientation has just been one of those things I have.
I have a pretty good sense for this as well. I'm always correcting people when they mention some building and point in the totally wrong direction.
What's interesting is that I can tell when it's not working because I get a kind of dizziness or fuzzy feeling. One instance I recall vividly was when I had recently moved to town and had parked in a parking garage and after coming down several flights of stairs onto the street corner, it was completely overcast I had no idea which way was which and I almost felt a sense of mild vertigo, as if the world were swirling around me, as I tried to work out what direction was which. Once I had it figured out, the feeling went away.
And if there was two, there's now one. Which any strategist knows is completely foolish.
Yeah, because nobody would have ever guessed that there's a safe-room with communications equipment and weapons under the house where the VP and his family sleep.
and if they did there's recourse like suing the department for violating Supreme Court rulings.
There are actually only very limited ways you can sue the police. Civil rights violations against the police pretty much have to be filed as a Section 1983 Action/Complaint, and these are notoriously difficult to carry out with any kind of success. People who have been clearly abused while in police custody (e.g. female strip-searched by male police, with them making sexual comments, captured on camera) rarely win these cases.
Pursuing a case because you get stopped "often" is going to be even harder because it's your word, "I'm being harassed by being stopped all the time", against theirs, "they were in the wrong part of town/driving a car type often used by criminals/driving erratically/appeared to have a missing tail light".
And you only get that far if they actually recorded the encounter. If they didn't, and you don't have it on tape, then there's no evidence that anything happened.
The "justice system" is stacked heavily in favor of the police, prosecutors, and judges. Police are assumed to never lie, and even with blatant evidence of it, an attorney is not permitted to say so. So, even with compelling and insurmountable evidence on your side you still have a slim chance of winning.
How much self-hate does someone need to actually want to punish themselves to save the planet? I guess we'll soon know.
I don't think it's self-hate that drives this thinking. Rather it's a desire to be aware of how one's day to day decisions have a broader impact on the planet as a whole - and choosing to limit that impact where possible.
The 19th and 20th centuries and the growth of industrialism and consumerism was based on the idea that resources are infinite and pollution negligible. Under those "constraints", there is no reason to constrain yourself - do what you want because there are not consequences. Sadly for us, those assumptions are not accurate. The resources are indeed finite, and the cumulative effect of the pollutants we produce are now measurable.
It IS indeed painful to shift from a "I can have and do whatever I want" mindset to one where you think about the impact of everything you do. The real problem is that it's impossible to track the impact of the behaviors of one person on the global system. _I_ can pee in the well and we all still have pretty safe drinking water. But if we all individually make that same choice, we all pretty soon have bad water.
As for this system, it sounds horrible and would most likely be abused in the worst way. The idea in one perspective sounds good... identify where resources are needed and increase them. But what you describe is more likely, particularly from a capitalist mindset - continue degrading the experience until it is just barely acceptable.
What makes much more sense is to make a little widget that can show how much energy is being used in a given state and let the user decide how much they might want to slow down the processor. If they care about saving energy, they can dial it down themselves to the level they can tolerate. If they want a faster experience (vital in number crunching and gaming), let them do that - and the widget can show the incremental cost.
In a similar way of thinking, they just installed a new "smart" electric meter on my house. I really hope I'm able to access the data from it. If I can get variable pricing based on peak load in the system, then I have a lot of incentive to time my dish washer, clothes washer, etc to do their work in the non-peak times. It saves me money and makes a more efficient load on the system. Everyone wins. Hopefully they don't screw it up.
I heard it on a Dr. Demento CD I once had. Here's a version of it (static picture) on youtube. Frantics - Tae Kwon Leep (Boot to the Head): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_Y6231uAmo
I know where the term came from, but it quite clearly does not fit here. What is the "source code" for a book?
Free, libre, free as in speech. All of those are better descriptions in this scenario than "open source."
Well, really, the text, graphics, and figures in the book ARE the "source". Think of it is uncompiled.
What makes it correct to call it "open source" is that you and I can take those source text, figures, and graphics, modify them, and re-release them as long as we keep it licensed the same way.
The idea of "open source[code]" has evolved to a more expansive idea of "open source [model]". This is perfectly in line with the philosophy that began as "open source[code]" - that others are free to take what's already been done and extend it to make it more than it was originally (or could have been conceived of by the original authors).
If you think of "source" as the "something from which something comes", then it makes it very natural to use "open source". Under traditional IP models, the source is not free/libre. Under this new model of textbook publishing, the "source" is open, as in free/libre.
Both language and ideas evolve and once you spread it to others, it's inevitable that they will change. A purist may stubbornly say, "Open Source can only be for software", but in the mean time, the rest of us are using the term in a more expansive way.
While population density is a problem, it is the result of effective mass transit, not the cause. How can you have density with giant parking lots everywhere?
Population density is the result of lots of people living in a small area and has little to do with public transit. Look at places like Mumbai or Cairo. These places have a rather high population density without lots of parking lots, and they're certainly not paragons of well-planned public transportation systems.
It probably has more to do with people living without cars.
Big pharma does not operate in a free market. They exist in a regulatory framework consisting of thousands of laws and regulations written primarily by their own lobbyists to raise barriers to competition.
So... the pharmas are just shopping in probably the purest free-market, the buying and selling of congressmen, in order to make their own market less free to their advantage?
Sounds like "free market" is not so free and very expensive to all but the richest of us.
I think our poseur of a president should watch those videos every morning as he eats breakfast. Then maybe he won't be so quick to call waterboarding "torture."
It has nothing to do with them... however evil, horrible, or unlike us they are... or even how much they deserve to have horrible things happen to them.
It's about US, our values, and what we stand for. It's about being willing to say we won't sacrifice our principles just because we're frightened of some bogeyman.
There is always some bogeyman and if you're going to give up your ideals just because you're afraid of the bogeyman-du-jour, then why bother having ideals and simply admit that you're a coward who can't face a dangerous world without giving up your principles.
As for waterboarding being torture, we have actually executed people for doing it. It's hard to really have principles when you're a hypocrite.
So what you're saying is that if you saw a bear in the middle of the city, well outside where you know the zoo to be located, you'd laugh at all the people running for their lives and would go about your business, because you see bears all the time in the city zoo?
If you watch the Colbert Report, you'd know that bears are a totally different thing!
However, I see airplanes when I'm inside and around buildings all the time, so I'd probably stay put. If I ran down the stairs every time I saw an airplane from my office, I'd spend all my time in the lobby. Airplanes are pretty common.
As for the bear, well, I've only seen an unconstrained bear once and that did make me a bit nervous. And I suppose if I saw one walking loose in a city, I'd be nervous too. But from a statistical point of view, "seeing a bear walking loose in the city" is a much different event than "seeing a bear in a cage". If a truck stopped at a light and there was a bear in a cage in the back, I'd probably stand there and watch. I wouldn't try to feed it though.
Back to the airplane, I suppose it's probably a lot like artillery... the one you can see and hear is not the one that's going to get you. As fast as planes go, you're not going to see or hear the one that's going to hit your building. So really, you'd be safer to run out of your building when you don't see or hear an airplane.
Funny you mention that. I was just saying the other day that I like to be out in the shade when the sun is out, but I don't like to be out in the sunlight itself.
I guess it gives me a feeling of reassurance to know that Old Sol is out there doing his thing. I just don't want to be out in it.
They're a coffin if there's a fire on the ground floor and you're on floor -50?
I wonder... if there was a fire on the ground floor, would you even care if you're on floor -50?
The smoke and hot air will go up and out. I suppose the fire could burn down to that level but that would probably take a long time and firewalls between floors could probably prevent most of the spread.
There might be a problem with water used to fight the fire, but then you probably would already have sump pumps to take care of ground water that is probably already seeping in.
I suppose if you had any number of these deep buildings that you'd interconnect them below ground level and have escape routes that don't require going straight up.
The only thing I wouldn't like would be the lack of sunlight.
Two people meet for the first time. Person A smiles and says hello. Person B punches Person A in the face and walks away.
They meet once again a week/month/year later...
Is Person A jumping at shadows if he anticipates Person B punching him in the face?
If we're going to speak in hypotheticals, let's use one that's more fitted to the situation.
Person A meets a thousand people for the first time. Person A smiles and says hello. Person B 999 times, says hello and walks away. 1 time B punches Person A in the face and walks away.
They meet once again a week/month/year later...
Is Person A jumping at shadows if he anticipates Person B punching him in the face?
Yes..
Most people see thousands of airplanes flying nearby in their lives. People in big cities see even more. Only once have they been used to fly into buildings as an attack... and their hitting buildings in an accident is rare as well. So, maybe it is a bit unreasonable to expect that every plane flying around a building is actually hijacked and intended to be a weapon.
It sounds like some people need to counseling... or maybe a dose of "get-real".
Maybe the FAA can have a number building managers can call if they think a plane is "bad" and only evacuate the building if the FAA agrees. Or better yet, maybe the FAA can do an emergency alert to tell people to get out of their buildings.
I'm sure the evil terrorists, watching CNN in their caves, are smugly laughing when they see the people of the "home of the brave" scurrying out of their buildings because the president's backup plane flies nearby.
It's interesting that you should bring that up. I went to a talk that studied this curve and the 1918 virus (from exhumed bodies) carefully. The U-curve makes sense because the youngest and oldest are less equiped to fight an infection. The unusual bump -- in the healthiest of people -- coincides with the ages of soldiers.
It could also be a simple matter than those in their 20's to 40's more often encounter other people. Little kids are more likely to be home-bound and encounter a limited number of people, as do older people. Yet if they encounter someone contagious, they're more likely to die from it.
People between 20 and 40 are out encountering many more different people while they work, shop, and go about the business of life. With more chances for infection it's possible that many more people in that middle group get infected. Even if a lower percentage of the infected die, there might be many more who were infected; so the overall mortality rate among the entire population in that age range appears higher.
That's just speculation. We'd need to see the infection rates broken down by age as well to see if this might explain the higher death rate.
As for Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security I think it would be better if they were privatized or opened to a free market.
When the Bush administration started just over 8 years ago, one of its major goals was to privatize social security... everyone would get their own account... in the stock market.
Now consider what has happened in the stock market since then. What happens to all the people who depend on that "fixed income" from social security when it would now be easily cut in half?
This analysis doesn't require any sympathy or consideration of the plights of individuals (some would argue that they should have provided for themselves). But what happens to the economy as a whole? A bunch of people lose their houses because they can no longer pay their mortgages and taxes. We already have a glut of houses on the market, adding more houses only makes the problem worse.
Then consider the hoards of homeless old people. Now, again, we don't need any compassion for this analysis... we don't have to care about the individuals and their suffering. But do need assess the impact of their homelessness on society as a whole. Some will turn to crime and some of those will be caught and we'll need to more spend money on trials and prisons.
This exercise in identifying systemic costs due to a lack of a functioning social security system can go on for a quite a while. But what you end up with (again, without taking into consideration compassion or emotional arguments) that no matter what choice you make as a society, there will be a cost to the decision. You can have the direct costs of a social security system or the many indirect costs of having hoards of criminal or sick grannies wreaking havoc on society.
Once you realize that every choice for a system has its own costs, then it's a matter of maximizing or minimizing the the things that are most important. THAT is a judgment based on the values and priorities of a society.
It's easy to say that everyone should provide for their own retirement, and it's a great "value system" and sentiment. But the fact is, not everyone can or will (there are plenty of ways even the most perfectly planned "life" can be derailed by life events). The hard reality that has to be faced then is "what do do about them". The world isn't so "neat" that they simply go away. Our society, as a system, will incur the costs of their lack of a retirement plan in one way or another.
Because of a disability and being turned down for health insurance I collect SSI and have Medicare and I don't believe hard working taxpayers should be paying my for disability or health care.
You're welcome. I work hard and pay taxes and I'm glad we have a safety net in place for people who need it. I do realize there are some people who abuse that safety net, but even then, I feel we are better off as a society with it, abuses and all, than without it.
You don't have to look very hard to find societies that are failing because they have no safety nets and people are driven into poverty and crime. Somalia with its pirates and Mexico dominated by drug cartels are easy examples. In fact, look at most places that are laissez-faire, low regulation, have minimal societal safety nets, and they're generally unpleasant places for a majority of the population to live in. The rich will be comfortable wherever they are, but since most of us won't be rich, I opt to live in a society that has some safety nets and regulation.
You and Martin are certainly correct. It's been 15 years since I was in the service and I hastily picked that aircraft from the fog of my memory.
I knew we had many different systems for finding and taking out sources of radio transmissions. Sometimes it's a guy in a humvee finding them and artillery somewhere else taking it out (that's more in my line of experience). I imagine the systems today are even more capable and interesting!
UAV's are awesome right up until your enemy decides that it is easier to just jam all available frequencies while launching their attacks. Frequency hopping will help but if you start losing even momentarily control your weapons start falling off target and aircraft can be dangerously uncontrollable.
The problem with jamming is it's really hard to hide a jammer (basically a broad-spectrum transmitter) from systems designed to locate transmitters. We already have aircraft designed to locate and take out radar systems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EF-111A_Raven. This shouldn't be too hard to adapt for jammers as well. Maybe those could still be flown by human pilots.
And as the AUVs become even more autonomous, the need for high bandwidth communication will diminish, making jamming even less of a problem.
But even if you do start losing AUVs fast, they're much easier to replace than planes with pilots.
Whats worst is that not only are books already cheap, but they're often CHEAPER in physical form than on the kindle. I was in the supermarket the other day and saw that they had Twilight as a mass market paperback. IIRC the price was $6.99 (cover - no store discount). The same darned book in eBook form, which is just a collection of bits costing many times less to reproduce than the book, is priced at $9.99.
What you're not getting is that the retail price of an item really has little to do with the cost of the item. The only thing the seller has to ensure is that over the long term the marginal cost less than or equal to marginal revenue. The actual retail price of the item is mostly determined by how much the market is willing to pay for it.
They can sell the ebook for $9.99 and even if they make fewer sales than the physical book, the costs, as you pointed out, are less, so they can still make the profit they want with the fewer sales.
And sure, they could sell the e-book for $6.99, but why do that when you can sell it for $9.99? They may not pick up enough additional buyers at the $6.99 price to make up for the lost profit.
They might sell more at $6.99, but will they sell "enough more" to cover the lower profit per sale?
As for the benefits of ebooks vs physical books, they each have trade-offs. I have hundreds of technical books on my bookshelf, but I find that I use the ones where I have PDF version more because it's easier to search. I can also carry a whole "pile" of them on a CD/memory stick/in my gmail account. On the other hand, a physical book is nicer to hold and flip through; and as you said, works when the power's out. There's a legitimate market for both.
As for a mad-max world, well, I don't suppose my "Excel programming with Macros" is going to be of much use in either format.
Slashdot Mirror
Printouts are good for worksheets (which you throw away anyway), and books that you won't actually use, and maybe specialist topics (where 30 people in the world will read it), and for stuff that goes out of date the moment it's printed (like most economics, these days), but not Math and Science.
I take it you never had the pleasure of being the 5th or 6th student to use a particular hard-cover textbook issued by the school? If you did, you'd know how badly most kids treat the books and how they're often filled with markings, torn pages, stains (god knows what), and are generally unpleasant to use. Some in the worst shape were the math and science books.
A technical solution that "gets around" it will most likely get you suspended; it's happened before:
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/27/203232
(and a good friend of mine who was a professor also was denied tenure over this incident). Sadly IT at universities tends to be a little kingdom of people who think they are more important than everything else going on - in fact, this isn't just at universities...
The best thing you can do is go to the dean of the school you're planning to attend and say, "gee, I was really looking forward to attending your university, but I will not attend if I have to install this monitoring software to use the network.".
Deans care a whole lot about enrollment numbers and having good students and if they are going to lose good student due to a stupid policy, there will be pressure to alter the policy or at least grant an exception.
Good luck.
I went to my son's room, and sure enough, there was the Loch Ness monster.
I said, "Dammit, monster, you stop buggin' my children now! We work for our money in this house and we don't give money away!"
Thank you!
It's disturbed me greatly that the apparent preferred reaction to an attack by people "who hate us for our freedom" has been to give up that freedom and to live in fear. I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who feels that way.
The free market is perfect in the fact that everyone gets what they deserve*. If I feel like releasing a product no one wants, fine, but then I go broke. If I don't feel like doing anything but eating potato chips thats fine, I just will soon be making friends with Bob the three fingered hobo out on the street. If I make a groundbreaking invention I can sell it and make a bunch of money.
And if you feel like dumping your toxic waste in the next county's water supply "for free" instead of being required to dispose of it in a proper and safe way, the free market rewards you.
The "free market" works great on small scales (one local restaurant competing against another) but when industries grow to larger scales, there's a huge problem with publicizing the risk while privatizing the cost.
You only have to go to a third-world company where oil is extracted to see how these companies act with the lack of government regulations to control them (or a government that can stand up to the companies). They'll wantonly spill toxic waste all over the landscape and bring in mercenary armies to suppress the uppity locals. The free market, with the companies always seeking lowest costs and better numbers this quarter, actually encourages these behaviors. The only thing minimizing this "tragedy of the commons" in more developed countries are states with strong enough regulatory power to keep the greed in check.
And like it or not, Somalia is exactly what we get with the "libertarian paradise". They might claim that they don't actually mean lack of government, but what good is a government that doesn't enforce laws and regulations?
It's a common problem with the summaries on slashdot that less-common acronyms are not explained. The world of nerds is pretty vast and it's impossible for all of us to keep up with every possible acronym, system, software, etc.
It would have been trivial to add ", a proprietary protocol developed by Adobe Systems for streaming audio, video and data over the Internet," right after the first instance of RTMPE and it would have made the summary much more useful and informative.
There are those of us who have an innate ability to navigate in any environment with little or no aid. I joke with people, who are completely flumoxed as to where they are and in which direction they should go, that they shouldn't worry. My internal GPS knows where we're at. Spacial orientation has just been one of those things I have.
I have a pretty good sense for this as well. I'm always correcting people when they mention some building and point in the totally wrong direction.
What's interesting is that I can tell when it's not working because I get a kind of dizziness or fuzzy feeling. One instance I recall vividly was when I had recently moved to town and had parked in a parking garage and after coming down several flights of stairs onto the street corner, it was completely overcast I had no idea which way was which and I almost felt a sense of mild vertigo, as if the world were swirling around me, as I tried to work out what direction was which. Once I had it figured out, the feeling went away.
And if there was two, there's now one. Which any strategist knows is completely foolish.
Yeah, because nobody would have ever guessed that there's a safe-room with communications equipment and weapons under the house where the VP and his family sleep.
and if they did there's recourse like suing the department for violating Supreme Court rulings.
There are actually only very limited ways you can sue the police. Civil rights violations against the police pretty much have to be filed as a Section 1983 Action/Complaint, and these are notoriously difficult to carry out with any kind of success. People who have been clearly abused while in police custody (e.g. female strip-searched by male police, with them making sexual comments, captured on camera) rarely win these cases.
Pursuing a case because you get stopped "often" is going to be even harder because it's your word, "I'm being harassed by being stopped all the time", against theirs, "they were in the wrong part of town/driving a car type often used by criminals/driving erratically/appeared to have a missing tail light".
And you only get that far if they actually recorded the encounter. If they didn't, and you don't have it on tape, then there's no evidence that anything happened.
The "justice system" is stacked heavily in favor of the police, prosecutors, and judges. Police are assumed to never lie, and even with blatant evidence of it, an attorney is not permitted to say so. So, even with compelling and insurmountable evidence on your side you still have a slim chance of winning.
I think you want to check out Facebook Purity:
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/44459
It's a greasemonkey script that makes Facebook almost bearable to use.
Facebook's been great for finding old friends, but I got so tired of all the insipid quizes and requests.
How much self-hate does someone need to actually want to punish themselves to save the planet? I guess we'll soon know.
I don't think it's self-hate that drives this thinking. Rather it's a desire to be aware of how one's day to day decisions have a broader impact on the planet as a whole - and choosing to limit that impact where possible.
The 19th and 20th centuries and the growth of industrialism and consumerism was based on the idea that resources are infinite and pollution negligible. Under those "constraints", there is no reason to constrain yourself - do what you want because there are not consequences. Sadly for us, those assumptions are not accurate. The resources are indeed finite, and the cumulative effect of the pollutants we produce are now measurable.
It IS indeed painful to shift from a "I can have and do whatever I want" mindset to one where you think about the impact of everything you do. The real problem is that it's impossible to track the impact of the behaviors of one person on the global system. _I_ can pee in the well and we all still have pretty safe drinking water. But if we all individually make that same choice, we all pretty soon have bad water.
As for this system, it sounds horrible and would most likely be abused in the worst way. The idea in one perspective sounds good... identify where resources are needed and increase them. But what you describe is more likely, particularly from a capitalist mindset - continue degrading the experience until it is just barely acceptable.
What makes much more sense is to make a little widget that can show how much energy is being used in a given state and let the user decide how much they might want to slow down the processor. If they care about saving energy, they can dial it down themselves to the level they can tolerate. If they want a faster experience (vital in number crunching and gaming), let them do that - and the widget can show the incremental cost.
In a similar way of thinking, they just installed a new "smart" electric meter on my house. I really hope I'm able to access the data from it. If I can get variable pricing based on peak load in the system, then I have a lot of incentive to time my dish washer, clothes washer, etc to do their work in the non-peak times. It saves me money and makes a more efficient load on the system. Everyone wins. Hopefully they don't screw it up.
I heard it on a Dr. Demento CD I once had. Here's a version of it (static picture) on youtube.
Frantics - Tae Kwon Leep (Boot to the Head): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_Y6231uAmo
I know where the term came from, but it quite clearly does not fit here. What is the "source code" for a book?
Free, libre, free as in speech. All of those are better descriptions in this scenario than "open source."
Well, really, the text, graphics, and figures in the book ARE the "source". Think of it is uncompiled.
What makes it correct to call it "open source" is that you and I can take those source text, figures, and graphics, modify them, and re-release them as long as we keep it licensed the same way.
The idea of "open source[code]" has evolved to a more expansive idea of "open source [model]". This is perfectly in line with the philosophy that began as "open source[code]" - that others are free to take what's already been done and extend it to make it more than it was originally (or could have been conceived of by the original authors).
If you think of "source" as the "something from which something comes", then it makes it very natural to use "open source". Under traditional IP models, the source is not free/libre. Under this new model of textbook publishing, the "source" is open, as in free/libre.
Both language and ideas evolve and once you spread it to others, it's inevitable that they will change. A purist may stubbornly say, "Open Source can only be for software", but in the mean time, the rest of us are using the term in a more expansive way.
While population density is a problem, it is the result of effective mass transit, not the cause. How can you have density with giant parking lots everywhere?
Population density is the result of lots of people living in a small area and has little to do with public transit. Look at places like Mumbai or Cairo. These places have a rather high population density without lots of parking lots, and they're certainly not paragons of well-planned public transportation systems.
It probably has more to do with people living without cars.
Big pharma does not operate in a free market. They exist in a regulatory framework consisting of thousands of laws and regulations written primarily by their own lobbyists to raise barriers to competition.
So... the pharmas are just shopping in probably the purest free-market, the buying and selling of congressmen, in order to make their own market less free to their advantage?
Sounds like "free market" is not so free and very expensive to all but the richest of us.
I think our poseur of a president should watch those videos every morning as he eats breakfast. Then maybe he won't be so quick to call waterboarding "torture."
It has nothing to do with them... however evil, horrible, or unlike us they are... or even how much they deserve to have horrible things happen to them.
It's about US, our values, and what we stand for. It's about being willing to say we won't sacrifice our principles just because we're frightened of some bogeyman.
There is always some bogeyman and if you're going to give up your ideals just because you're afraid of the bogeyman-du-jour, then why bother having ideals and simply admit that you're a coward who can't face a dangerous world without giving up your principles.
As for waterboarding being torture, we have actually executed people for doing it. It's hard to really have principles when you're a hypocrite.
So what you're saying is that if you saw a bear in the middle of the city, well outside where you know the zoo to be located, you'd laugh at all the people running for their lives and would go about your business, because you see bears all the time in the city zoo?
If you watch the Colbert Report, you'd know that bears are a totally different thing!
However, I see airplanes when I'm inside and around buildings all the time, so I'd probably stay put. If I ran down the stairs every time I saw an airplane from my office, I'd spend all my time in the lobby. Airplanes are pretty common.
As for the bear, well, I've only seen an unconstrained bear once and that did make me a bit nervous. And I suppose if I saw one walking loose in a city, I'd be nervous too. But from a statistical point of view, "seeing a bear walking loose in the city" is a much different event than "seeing a bear in a cage". If a truck stopped at a light and there was a bear in a cage in the back, I'd probably stand there and watch. I wouldn't try to feed it though.
Back to the airplane, I suppose it's probably a lot like artillery... the one you can see and hear is not the one that's going to get you. As fast as planes go, you're not going to see or hear the one that's going to hit your building. So really, you'd be safer to run out of your building when you don't see or hear an airplane.
You... like the sun? And you post on /.?
Funny you mention that. I was just saying the other day that I like to be out in the shade when the sun is out, but I don't like to be out in the sunlight itself.
I guess it gives me a feeling of reassurance to know that Old Sol is out there doing his thing. I just don't want to be out in it.
They're a coffin if there's a fire on the ground floor and you're on floor -50?
I wonder... if there was a fire on the ground floor, would you even care if you're on floor -50?
The smoke and hot air will go up and out. I suppose the fire could burn down to that level but that would probably take a long time and firewalls between floors could probably prevent most of the spread.
There might be a problem with water used to fight the fire, but then you probably would already have sump pumps to take care of ground water that is probably already seeping in.
I suppose if you had any number of these deep buildings that you'd interconnect them below ground level and have escape routes that don't require going straight up.
The only thing I wouldn't like would be the lack of sunlight.
Two people meet for the first time.
Person A smiles and says hello.
Person B punches Person A in the face and walks away.
They meet once again a week/month/year later...
Is Person A jumping at shadows if he anticipates Person B punching him in the face?
If we're going to speak in hypotheticals, let's use one that's more fitted to the situation.
Person A meets a thousand people for the first time.
Person A smiles and says hello.
Person B 999 times, says hello and walks away. 1 time B punches Person A in the face and walks away.
They meet once again a week/month/year later...
Is Person A jumping at shadows if he anticipates Person B punching him in the face?
Yes..
Most people see thousands of airplanes flying nearby in their lives. People in big cities see even more. Only once have they been used to fly into buildings as an attack... and their hitting buildings in an accident is rare as well. So, maybe it is a bit unreasonable to expect that every plane flying around a building is actually hijacked and intended to be a weapon.
It sounds like some people need to counseling... or maybe a dose of "get-real".
Maybe the FAA can have a number building managers can call if they think a plane is "bad" and only evacuate the building if the FAA agrees. Or better yet, maybe the FAA can do an emergency alert to tell people to get out of their buildings.
I'm sure the evil terrorists, watching CNN in their caves, are smugly laughing when they see the people of the "home of the brave" scurrying out of their buildings because the president's backup plane flies nearby.
It's interesting that you should bring that up. I went to a talk that studied this curve and the 1918 virus (from exhumed bodies) carefully. The U-curve makes sense because the youngest and oldest are less equiped to fight an infection. The unusual bump -- in the healthiest of people -- coincides with the ages of soldiers.
It could also be a simple matter than those in their 20's to 40's more often encounter other people. Little kids are more likely to be home-bound and encounter a limited number of people, as do older people. Yet if they encounter someone contagious, they're more likely to die from it.
People between 20 and 40 are out encountering many more different people while they work, shop, and go about the business of life. With more chances for infection it's possible that many more people in that middle group get infected. Even if a lower percentage of the infected die, there might be many more who were infected; so the overall mortality rate among the entire population in that age range appears higher.
That's just speculation. We'd need to see the infection rates broken down by age as well to see if this might explain the higher death rate.
As for Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security I think it would be better if they were privatized or opened to a free market.
When the Bush administration started just over 8 years ago, one of its major goals was to privatize social security... everyone would get their own account... in the stock market.
Now consider what has happened in the stock market since then. What happens to all the people who depend on that "fixed income" from social security when it would now be easily cut in half?
This analysis doesn't require any sympathy or consideration of the plights of individuals (some would argue that they should have provided for themselves). But what happens to the economy as a whole? A bunch of people lose their houses because they can no longer pay their mortgages and taxes. We already have a glut of houses on the market, adding more houses only makes the problem worse.
Then consider the hoards of homeless old people. Now, again, we don't need any compassion for this analysis... we don't have to care about the individuals and their suffering. But do need assess the impact of their homelessness on society as a whole. Some will turn to crime and some of those will be caught and we'll need to more spend money on trials and prisons.
This exercise in identifying systemic costs due to a lack of a functioning social security system can go on for a quite a while. But what you end up with (again, without taking into consideration compassion or emotional arguments) that no matter what choice you make as a society, there will be a cost to the decision. You can have the direct costs of a social security system or the many indirect costs of having hoards of criminal or sick grannies wreaking havoc on society.
Once you realize that every choice for a system has its own costs, then it's a matter of maximizing or minimizing the the things that are most important. THAT is a judgment based on the values and priorities of a society.
It's easy to say that everyone should provide for their own retirement, and it's a great "value system" and sentiment. But the fact is, not everyone can or will (there are plenty of ways even the most perfectly planned "life" can be derailed by life events). The hard reality that has to be faced then is "what do do about them". The world isn't so "neat" that they simply go away. Our society, as a system, will incur the costs of their lack of a retirement plan in one way or another.
Because of a disability and being turned down for health insurance I collect SSI and have Medicare and I don't believe hard working taxpayers should be paying my for disability or health care.
You're welcome. I work hard and pay taxes and I'm glad we have a safety net in place for people who need it. I do realize there are some people who abuse that safety net, but even then, I feel we are better off as a society with it, abuses and all, than without it.
You don't have to look very hard to find societies that are failing because they have no safety nets and people are driven into poverty and crime. Somalia with its pirates and Mexico dominated by drug cartels are easy examples. In fact, look at most places that are laissez-faire, low regulation, have minimal societal safety nets, and they're generally unpleasant places for a majority of the population to live in. The rich will be comfortable wherever they are, but since most of us won't be rich, I opt to live in a society that has some safety nets and regulation.
You and Martin are certainly correct. It's been 15 years since I was in the service and I hastily picked that aircraft from the fog of my memory.
I knew we had many different systems for finding and taking out sources of radio transmissions. Sometimes it's a guy in a humvee finding them and artillery somewhere else taking it out (that's more in my line of experience). I imagine the systems today are even more capable and interesting!
UAV's are awesome right up until your enemy decides that it is easier to just jam all available frequencies while launching their attacks. Frequency hopping will help but if you start losing even momentarily control your weapons start falling off target and aircraft can be dangerously uncontrollable.
The problem with jamming is it's really hard to hide a jammer (basically a broad-spectrum transmitter) from systems designed to locate transmitters. We already have aircraft designed to locate and take out radar systems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EF-111A_Raven. This shouldn't be too hard to adapt for jammers as well. Maybe those could still be flown by human pilots.
And as the AUVs become even more autonomous, the need for high bandwidth communication will diminish, making jamming even less of a problem.
But even if you do start losing AUVs fast, they're much easier to replace than planes with pilots.
Whats worst is that not only are books already cheap, but they're often CHEAPER in physical form than on the kindle. I was in the supermarket the other day and saw that they had Twilight as a mass market paperback. IIRC the price was $6.99 (cover - no store discount). The same darned book in eBook form, which is just a collection of bits costing many times less to reproduce than the book, is priced at $9.99.
What you're not getting is that the retail price of an item really has little to do with the cost of the item. The only thing the seller has to ensure is that over the long term the marginal cost less than or equal to marginal revenue. The actual retail price of the item is mostly determined by how much the market is willing to pay for it.
They can sell the ebook for $9.99 and even if they make fewer sales than the physical book, the costs, as you pointed out, are less, so they can still make the profit they want with the fewer sales.
And sure, they could sell the e-book for $6.99, but why do that when you can sell it for $9.99? They may not pick up enough additional buyers at the $6.99 price to make up for the lost profit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profit_maximization describes this pretty well.
They might sell more at $6.99, but will they sell "enough more" to cover the lower profit per sale?
As for the benefits of ebooks vs physical books, they each have trade-offs. I have hundreds of technical books on my bookshelf, but I find that I use the ones where I have PDF version more because it's easier to search. I can also carry a whole "pile" of them on a CD/memory stick/in my gmail account. On the other hand, a physical book is nicer to hold and flip through; and as you said, works when the power's out. There's a legitimate market for both.
As for a mad-max world, well, I don't suppose my "Excel programming with Macros" is going to be of much use in either format.