So you tax the externality, no? We should have had a carbon tax 20 years ago.
Government in general is *terrible* at direct regulation and congress is the worst. When the government dictates efficiency standards (e.g. auto mileage standards) you end up with outcomes like SUVs.
I'm a professor. I tell my students about Khan Academy and provide links to it. I'm teaching a relatively advanced course for which there's no good online substitute that I'm aware of. But someday there may be. And when there is, I'll hopefully be able to delegate to online learning the part that fits the online learning model, and concentrate on the part that doesn't.
And if everything is someday subsumed by online learning or its successor, well, things change. It's very hard on the people and institutions that get steamrollered. But the world changes.
I agree with you that this makes no sense, which makes me hope that the "nothing stored on the local computer" is a bit of an exaggeration. *Some* of the time, you are going to be without an internet connection and you may still want to work on that document or read/write e-mail.
We're a long way from people asking "Off-line? What does that mean?"
Unless I'm missing something, it's a highly misleading summary. In the TFA, the quoted figures are from a UK price comparison site. It's not sales, it's site visitors comparing phones.
There is a discussion of sales, but it's from an article dated Nov 9.
This is an embarrassing post, even by Slashdot standards.
This brilliant parody has been floating around for quite a while, author unknown (I found it at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraudenron.htm )
A take-off from the movies "A Few Good Men" (Some phrases are in the original script and some are altered.)
Tom Cruise: "Did you order the shredding?"
Jack Nicholson: "You want answers?"
Tom Cruise: "I think I'm entitled."
Jack Nicholson: "You want answers!!"
Tom Cruise: "I want the truth!"
Jack Nicholson: "You can't handle the truth!"
Jack Nicholson: "Son, we live in a world that has financial statements. And those financial statements have to be audited by men with calculators. Who's gonna do it? You? You, Dept. of Justice? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for Enron and you curse Andersen. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know: that Enron's death, while tragic, probably saved investors. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves investors. You don't want the truth. Because deep down, in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me on that audit. You need me on that audit! We use words like materiality, risk-based, special purpose entity...we use these words as the backbone to a life spent auditing something. You use 'em as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very assurance I provide, then questions the manner in which I provide it. I'd prefer you just said thank you and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a pencil and start ticking. Either way, I don't give a damn what you think you're entitled to!!"
It's easy to solve if customers demand clean implementations. I don't see that happening anytime soon. No one I know (apart from friends who are the type to read slashdot) even knows what android is, let alone the difference between "with google" and not.
One problem is that the phone makers insist on idiotic customizations of the android interface, so updates can take a long time because they have to update the customizations as well as the OS.
The other problem is that hardware becomes outdated and perhaps challenging to update. T-mobile just started updating the MyTouch 3G (which I have). This is a 15-month-old phone running stock android, and I think it took them a long time because the hardware is old.
I don't think this is as trivial a problem as some of the commenters would suggest.
The base system can be rock-solid, but the part exposed to users (and tweaked for the distro) can be broken. My experience is that the Ubuntu developers often break something (e.g., wireless) while trying to redesign the UI. A few releases back wireless stopped working for me. I found I could connect using barebones wpa_supplicant (a PITA to create the correct conf file, but it worked), but Network-manager was a mess. Slowly this got sorted out and NM now works for me.
Currently, on other machines with Debian and Ubuntu I'm having issues with grub2, while grub1 works great. It's the upgrade that that's the issue.
I suspect that that a bit more conservatism buys a lot more robustness and stability.
I use Ubuntu 10.04. I have mostly switched to chrome (not completely; there are still sites that don't work properly with it). My problem with firefox was memory usage. I tend to have *lots* of tabs open and I often don't reboot for weeks. Firefox memory usage creeps up over time and my laptop slows. I keep reading that this is no longer supposed to happen, but it happens to me. Chrome with a comparable number of open tabs does not slow everything else down.
If Firefox were better behaved I would stick with Firefox.
Being fired for porn is not news, even for nerds. Being fired for reading Slashdot at work -- now *that* would be news! (And it would set the community quaking in its boots...)
I had the same problem and discovered a number of others having the same problem. I think there are bug reports but don't recall for sure.
In any event, I fixed the problems by installing the 2.6.33 kernel from http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/ . No more freezes. I did this by downloading and using apt-get to install:
I'm running 9.10 (32-bit) on a Lenovo x200s. The recent Lenovos seem to have a lot of problems with ubuntu, but 2.6.33 has made hibernation more stable as well. I'm sure there are downsides to this strategy (probably things like security updates), but so far so good.
This would not have prevented the current financial crisis and it will not prevent the next. It's a small step in the right direction, however. The SEC has been one of the most incompetent agencies for some time and I think they're trying to turn themselves around. In this case the SEC is simply acting like a grown up overseeing a bunch of kids. You want to offer a complicated financial instrument to the public, you document it precisely. There's value in this: For example, you couldn't possibly have a third party clear and settle a financial instrument without some ability to do a valuation. A minimum requirement would for that be code describing the instrument's payoffs. This is just one small step towards a world of greater transparency and financial interoperability.
Openstreet map is terrific. What we need, however, is for municipalities to understand that it's in their interest to keep it up to date. If a city could update with information about construction, new developments, etc, it would make OSM at the least an important adjunct to the commercial mappers. Not a lot of work for any one city and a great benefit to all.
I don't see why businesses wouldn't want their location in all available databases, but that's for them to decide.
Thanks for posting and bringing some real world experience to the disussion. I'd like to bring a little economics into play.
There is a serious externality associated with widespread antibiotic use. Antibiotics are underpriced because the price does not take into account the systemic effects, which includes the creation of deadly antibiotic resistant bacteria. So we really need to raise the price of antibiotics. This includes antibiotics used to treat ear infections (which are probably overtreated) and those fed to cattle. We all need to be paying a price that incorporates our effect on others.
You're right that this raises the price of beef for everyone. But it should be higher. And the fact is that for better or worse we routinely impose taxes on the poor. We tax the hell out of cigarettes. The poor are disproportionately smokers. We tax alcohol heavily. Ditto with respect to drinking. If we raise the price of antibiotics we will reduce consumption of beef. You will be free to continue using expensive antibiotics on your farm and you will be able to sell your beef for a higher price. But in the aggregate there will be less beef produced and consumed. And maybe we'll avoid widespread deaths from killer bacteria.
Quality control in Ubuntu seems like a huge problem. Every release fixes something broken and breaks something that was working. Wifi used to be broken and now it works. Power management used to work and now it's broken. It's a huge waste of time and it makes it hard to recommend Ubuntu.
I'm curious: Could you elaborate on the comment that openoffice.org "integrates" with LaTeX? I know that OOo can export to LaTeX, but importing doesn't seem to work. Am I missing something?
I've always thought that the OOo folks (probably the Staroffice folks) missed a *huge* opportunity by not having their equation editor use LaTeX syntax, which would have simplified importing and exporting.
As an off-topic aside, it's great that Google Docs now uses LaTeX for equations. It's a very cool feature.
Some of the mistakes were just careless oversights, but the one that surprised me involved taking a childcare tax credit when I had already used the permitted childcare FBRA amount. Legally you can only use of the two. I don't recall the details but I seem to remember that their mistake reduced my taxes and it seemed to me like an obvious red flag for the IRS computers. Very irritating because I do *not* want to be audited.
I think all of their mistakes reduced my taxes.
In the end I decided that these guys were dopes (it was a medium-sized big city accounting firm and they were charging a good amount). I suspect an accountant posting on slashdot is definitely not a dope (call me biased).:-)
Well, for about 5 years I used an accountant to do my tax returns (the first time because I had non-trivial foreign income). EVERY YEAR THE ACCOUNTANT MADE A MISTAKE. His office was using tax prep software and there were some amazing mistakes that (it seemed to me) the software should have prevented. I told friends about this, and they started complaining about *their* accountants.
You have a point, but in my own experience accountants make more mistakes than the IRS.
Slashdot Mirror
So you tax the externality, no? We should have had a carbon tax 20 years ago.
Government in general is *terrible* at direct regulation and congress is the worst. When the government dictates efficiency standards (e.g. auto mileage standards) you end up with outcomes like SUVs.
I'm a professor. I tell my students about Khan Academy and provide links to it. I'm teaching a relatively advanced course for which there's no good online substitute that I'm aware of. But someday there may be. And when there is, I'll hopefully be able to delegate to online learning the part that fits the online learning model, and concentrate on the part that doesn't.
And if everything is someday subsumed by online learning or its successor, well, things change. It's very hard on the people and institutions that get steamrollered. But the world changes.
You're right about starring rather than spamming, but the attention had the intended effect. The priority is now marked critical.
I agree with you that this makes no sense, which makes me hope that the "nothing stored on the local computer" is a bit of an exaggeration. *Some* of the time, you are going to be without an internet connection and you may still want to work on that document or read/write e-mail.
We're a long way from people asking "Off-line? What does that mean?"
Unless I'm missing something, it's a highly misleading summary. In the TFA, the quoted figures are from a UK price comparison site. It's not sales, it's site visitors comparing phones.
There is a discussion of sales, but it's from an article dated Nov 9.
This is an embarrassing post, even by Slashdot standards.
Obvious retort: You can't handle the truth.
This brilliant parody has been floating around for quite a while, author unknown (I found it at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraudenron.htm )
A take-off from the movies "A Few Good Men" (Some phrases are in the original script and some are altered.)
Tom Cruise: "Did you order the shredding?"
Jack Nicholson: "You want answers?"
Tom Cruise: "I think I'm entitled."
Jack Nicholson: "You want answers!!"
Tom Cruise: "I want the truth!"
Jack Nicholson: "You can't handle the truth!"
Jack Nicholson: "Son, we live in a world that has financial statements. And those financial statements have to be audited by men with calculators. Who's gonna do it? You? You, Dept. of Justice? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for Enron and you curse Andersen. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know: that Enron's death, while tragic, probably saved investors. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves investors. You don't want the truth. Because deep down, in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me on that audit. You need me on that audit! We use words like materiality, risk-based, special purpose entity...we use these words as the backbone to a life spent auditing something. You use 'em as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very assurance I provide, then questions the manner in which I provide it. I'd prefer you just said thank you and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a pencil and start ticking. Either way, I don't give a damn what you think you're entitled to!!"
Tom Cruise: "Did you order the shredding???"
Jack Nicholson: "You're damn right I did!"
You're right, but ...
It's easy to solve if customers demand clean implementations. I don't see that happening anytime soon. No one I know (apart from friends who are the type to read slashdot) even knows what android is, let alone the difference between "with google" and not.
One problem is that the phone makers insist on idiotic customizations of the android interface, so updates can take a long time because they have to update the customizations as well as the OS.
The other problem is that hardware becomes outdated and perhaps challenging to update. T-mobile just started updating the MyTouch 3G (which I have). This is a 15-month-old phone running stock android, and I think it took them a long time because the hardware is old.
I don't think this is as trivial a problem as some of the commenters would suggest.
The market is ready for a Debian derivative that cares about stability and bugfixes.
Why a derivative? Why aren't you just using Debian?
Never heard of it, it seems to work great. Thanks!
The base system can be rock-solid, but the part exposed to users (and tweaked for the distro) can be broken. My experience is that the Ubuntu developers often break something (e.g., wireless) while trying to redesign the UI. A few releases back wireless stopped working for me. I found I could connect using barebones wpa_supplicant (a PITA to create the correct conf file, but it worked), but Network-manager was a mess. Slowly this got sorted out and NM now works for me.
Currently, on other machines with Debian and Ubuntu I'm having issues with grub2, while grub1 works great. It's the upgrade that that's the issue.
I suspect that that a bit more conservatism buys a lot more robustness and stability.
I use Ubuntu 10.04. I have mostly switched to chrome (not completely; there are still sites that don't work properly with it). My problem with firefox was memory usage. I tend to have *lots* of tabs open and I often don't reboot for weeks. Firefox memory usage creeps up over time and my laptop slows. I keep reading that this is no longer supposed to happen, but it happens to me. Chrome with a comparable number of open tabs does not slow everything else down.
If Firefox were better behaved I would stick with Firefox.
Being fired for porn is not news, even for nerds. Being fired for reading Slashdot at work -- now *that* would be news! (And it would set the community quaking in its boots...)
Congratulations on getting Acer to listen to you!
This is a little OT but where did you buy that you were able to get a windows refund?
I'm pretty sure that 10.04 has 2.6.32. I tried that first (with Karmic) and gnome misbehaved. For some reason 2.6.33 worked better.
Good luck with 2.6.33. Hope it works for you!
I had the same problem and discovered a number of others having the same problem. I think there are bug reports but don't recall for sure.
In any event, I fixed the problems by installing the 2.6.33 kernel from http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/ . No more freezes. I did this by downloading and using apt-get to install:
linux-headers-2.6.33-020633-generic_2.6.33-020633_i386.deb
linux-headers-2.6.33-020633_2.6.33-020633_all.deb
linux-image-2.6.33-020633-generic_2.6.33-020633_i386.deb
I'm running 9.10 (32-bit) on a Lenovo x200s. The recent Lenovos seem to have a lot of problems with ubuntu, but 2.6.33 has made hibernation more stable as well. I'm sure there are downsides to this strategy (probably things like security updates), but so far so good.
This would not have prevented the current financial crisis and it will not prevent the next. It's a small step in the right direction, however. The SEC has been one of the most incompetent agencies for some time and I think they're trying to turn themselves around. In this case the SEC is simply acting like a grown up overseeing a bunch of kids. You want to offer a complicated financial instrument to the public, you document it precisely. There's value in this: For example, you couldn't possibly have a third party clear and settle a financial instrument without some ability to do a valuation. A minimum requirement would for that be code describing the instrument's payoffs. This is just one small step towards a world of greater transparency and financial interoperability.
Openstreet map is terrific. What we need, however, is for municipalities to understand that it's in their interest to keep it up to date. If a city could update with information about construction, new developments, etc, it would make OSM at the least an important adjunct to the commercial mappers. Not a lot of work for any one city and a great benefit to all.
I don't see why businesses wouldn't want their location in all available databases, but that's for them to decide.
Ah, thanks for the correction. The OP confounded grain and antibiotics and I didn't get from your answer that you used one and not the other.
Then you're in great shape if we tax antibiotics! I'm sure we won't because the industrial producers must have Congress in their pocket.
Thanks for posting and bringing some real world experience to the disussion. I'd like to bring a little economics into play.
There is a serious externality associated with widespread antibiotic use. Antibiotics are underpriced because the price does not take into account the systemic effects, which includes the creation of deadly antibiotic resistant bacteria. So we really need to raise the price of antibiotics. This includes antibiotics used to treat ear infections (which are probably overtreated) and those fed to cattle. We all need to be paying a price that incorporates our effect on others.
You're right that this raises the price of beef for everyone. But it should be higher. And the fact is that for better or worse we routinely impose taxes on the poor. We tax the hell out of cigarettes. The poor are disproportionately smokers. We tax alcohol heavily. Ditto with respect to drinking. If we raise the price of antibiotics we will reduce consumption of beef. You will be free to continue using expensive antibiotics on your farm and you will be able to sell your beef for a higher price. But in the aggregate there will be less beef produced and consumed. And maybe we'll avoid widespread deaths from killer bacteria.
Quality control in Ubuntu seems like a huge problem. Every release fixes something broken and breaks something that was working. Wifi used to be broken and now it works. Power management used to work and now it's broken. It's a huge waste of time and it makes it hard to recommend Ubuntu.
I'm curious: Could you elaborate on the comment that openoffice.org "integrates" with LaTeX? I know that OOo can export to LaTeX, but importing doesn't seem to work. Am I missing something?
I've always thought that the OOo folks (probably the Staroffice folks) missed a *huge* opportunity by not having their equation editor use LaTeX syntax, which would have simplified importing and exporting.
As an off-topic aside, it's great that Google Docs now uses LaTeX for equations. It's a very cool feature.
Some of the mistakes were just careless oversights, but the one that surprised me involved taking a childcare tax credit when I had already used the permitted childcare FBRA amount. Legally you can only use of the two. I don't recall the details but I seem to remember that their mistake reduced my taxes and it seemed to me like an obvious red flag for the IRS computers. Very irritating because I do *not* want to be audited.
I think all of their mistakes reduced my taxes.
In the end I decided that these guys were dopes (it was a medium-sized big city accounting firm and they were charging a good amount). I suspect an accountant posting on slashdot is definitely not a dope (call me biased). :-)
Well, for about 5 years I used an accountant to do my tax returns (the first time because I had non-trivial foreign income). EVERY YEAR THE ACCOUNTANT MADE A MISTAKE. His office was using tax prep software and there were some amazing mistakes that (it seemed to me) the software should have prevented. I told friends about this, and they started complaining about *their* accountants.
You have a point, but in my own experience accountants make more mistakes than the IRS.
As always, YMMV.