Business is built (and grows) from innovation on top of infrastructure.
This is the infrastructure part - by allowing companies to ration the resources and block new business models as they see fit, it allows them to put the brakes on growth.
This then reserves the "growth" for the carrier if, at some future time, they should decide to add new business models.
For a concrete example: by making the barrier to entry for streaming video very high it becomes impossible to start a streaming video company. The carrier wants to reserve that potential business opportunity for itself in the future.
Unfortunately, this sort of rationing stunts the growth of *all* new business which might make use of the resource - including new and innovative ideas which are untested and whose viability is unknown at launch. Big companies are risk-averse, and generally don't innovate. (For instance, this is why at launch it was nigh impossible to make a call with an iPhone in Manhattan - the new business model swamped the limited resources of the carrier.)
Just one piece of the US policy of investing in stagnation.
Assertion 1: Elections are won by the candidate who spends the most money
I can't prove this logically, only empirically. A PEW study of large number of elections found that over 90% were won by the candidate who spent the most money. Of the remaining 10%, the majority self-destructed by political scandal. The general rule holds very well: the candidate who spends the most money (and doesn't get caught in a scandal) will win the election. Lots of corroboration on the net, such as:
Assertion 2: A candidate who acts in his own interest rather than the interest of the general public is corrupt.
By definition. (Note that sometimes an action is in both the general interest *and* the self-interest of a politician.)
Now calculate the % likelihood that a politician is corrupt in our system.
Any politician with a sense of ethics will be out-competed by one with a lower sense of ethics. The ideal candidate will be the one who can sell his integrity the fastest and to the most people. This is why politicians always seem to be in the pocket of large corporations.
I say this not because I'm lazy, destructive and incorrect, but to shed light on the problem. With a model whose outcome we don't like, we can try to get a different outcome by changing the parameters or moving to a different model. We can work to make a system that doesn't have quite so much corruption.
But it starts by admitting that "government is populated exclusively by immoral criminal scum", which is no secret and is independently arrived at by just about everyone.
It's predicted by the math. It's real - get over it.
There was no physical evidence for Pontius Pilate for almost 2000 years, leading many biblical scholars to argue that he was a mythical character.
This changed in 1961, when the pilate stone was discovered.
(And Pontius Pilate was way more famous than Jesus in his time.)
Physical evidence for Buddha was not found until 1895.
I'm not sure what your point is. Are you saying that there is a probability of Jesus being a fictional character? That's fine, it's a fair point. There's a non-zero probability that Jesus was a fictional character.
As a scientist, I try not to make judgements except as indicated by evidence.
However, human beings have evolved to notice patterns and make inferences.
It doesn't matter whether a pattern holds true in all cases, it only matters whether it's more *likely* to be true as it influences my next decision.
Thus it may not be true that all crows are black, but this is not the important point. What matters is whether the *next* crow I see will be black, given all the crows that I have seen so far. I'll take that bet, because the likelihood is there.
I leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine whether an average politician being motivated by their own interests is the better bet.
(Hint: set it up as a game-theoretic problem, given that almost all elections are won by the candidate that spends the most money [which is empirically true]. Alternately, look at the voting history of the politician in question and see if you can determine the % which were in the public interest.)
That's a fair point. Geeks aren't intimidated by learning a completely new paradigm.
That's one reason that older folks have such a hard time with newer systems - they have to learn something new every time. It would be nice if there were some type of "conceptual consistency" across applications; so that, for instance, burning a CD-ROM would involve conceptually the same actions across all programs.
The poster specifically called out muscle memory, which has always been a big headache for me. My system has a rich environment of both free and closed-source tools, and it's impossible to get muscle memory for anything.
For example, I have to turn off the "electric indent" feature in everything. I can type quickly if I know what all the keys do, but electric indent is *different* for all languages and in all editors. If TAB goes in 4 spaces always, then it's much faster to type two tabs rather than try to keep straight what a single "electric" tab does.
This is the wrong question to ask geeks. They have no muscle or spatial memory, and don't care whether anyone else does.
Or haven't you noticed?
Across all of your free/OSS software:
1) What keys do you type to search for text? 2) What keys do you type to activate File->Save? 2a) Is File->Save greyed out if there are no changes? 3) When you hit shift-ctrl-end-del, does this take out the trailing CR/LF or not? 4) Where are the preferences - under "File", "Help", "Document", "Edit", "Tools"? 5) Are the preferences called "preferences", "options", "settings"? 6) Using the debugger - which F keys activate step-in/step-out/step-over? 7) When you click in a text box, does it insert the cursor or select the entire line?
Geeks care not one whit about compatibility. They make their interfaces by what "seems" right at the time, with no regard for the greater universe of programs in the world.
Good luck with your answer. Maybe you can create your own calculator online.
I shot a rocket into the air, It fell to earth, I knew not where Until next day, with rage profound, The man it fell on came around. In less time than it takes to tell, He showed me where that rocket fell; And now I do not greatly care To shoot more rockets in the air.
I'm waiting for someone to come up with a simple transport layer in JavaScript that does nothing but make the DOM visible to the other end. All you would need is
1) Interrogate the DOM, send back value 2) Set DOM variable to passed value 2) Pass back messages based on the user actions ("button X was clicked").
I'd *love* to see a python or perl interface for this. Making a GUI for something would be almost trivial.
I think many people are missing the point of Javascript.
The new spec includes the ability for Javascript to open sockets. Once that takes hold, you'll have the ability to completely control the browser window from the home server.
When that happens, it will be big. The browser is essentially a rendering machine which makes it trivially easy to show things and is largely machine independent. Instead of selling a huge monolithic program, companies can simply sell time on their servers to run their programs.
Imagine that you want to use a big engineering program - Orcad or Altium Designer, for example.
Instead of paying $10,000 for a copy of the program and taking a chance that it's as good as it's marketing claims, you can buy a month of usage for $100, and the executable will run on the company's servers while using your browser to paint the screens. Sort of like how World of Warcraft runs on servers, but paints the screens locally.
This has many advantages for the user: 1) You don't have to risk an enormous sum of money to try something out 2) You don't pay for the product more than you need it 3) You have NO installation issues 4) You are always using the most up-to-date version 5) The vendor can keep backups of your files for you 6) You can access your files and the application from anywhere on the net
And for the vendor: 1) The code is never given out (only runs on the server): no piracy! 2) You don't need multiple versions for different architectures (reduced engineering) 3) You don't have to push updates to the users all the time 4) You can tune the compilation/installation to make the best use of the server 5) Rendering is much easier - the bulk of the code is written for you by others (reduced engineering)
There are some disadvantages - the vendor has access to the document, which means that they can also sell the document to spammers (designs to China, for example). This can be dealt with by using a trust model; ie - the company will have an online reputation which will get quickly tarnished once this happens.
That's the promise of Javascript, and the real potential of the cloud. Companies supplying online services to compete for customers.
Why is the "calendar" feature of Mozilla named "lighting"?
I swear, this is one of the most obviously vexing aspects of open source, and the one that keeps it off the desktop for most people.
To use open source, everyone needs to learn a new language. A codebook is required to do something. If I install this on my dad's computer, he'll never use it because he won't be able to remember the name.
It's not as if there aren't words in the language which are related to calendar, from which to make a descriptive product name. How about "Mozailla Calendar"?
Conpare: InternetExplorer, PaintShopPro, MediaPlayer Compare to: Mozilla, Gimp, VLC
If even the high-end "best" open source projects are doing this, how can the lowly specialized open source project possibly hope to get a foothold on the desktop?
New Hampshire has one of the lowest overall tax burdens. Sometimes *the* lowest, depending on the year.
California has one of the highest overall tax burdens - 7th in the nation. (Varies, depending on the year and source)
We raise 3.2x as much money per person than California, while taxing each person much less.
Here's how we do it:
1) We have a hefty property tax. Unlike income and sales taxes, property tax is largely immune to economic swings. When the economy goes up, you pay X. When the economy goes down, you pay X. (Housing values are checked every 10 years or so.)
Basing your revenues on income, sales, and business taxes is a recipe for disaster. You'll always be in "feast or famine" mode, always be flush during the good years and in pain during the bad.
2) The property tax is simple: your house is worth this, you pay that. There is only one point of contention (the value of your house), so collection and enforcement is easy and straightforward. So is contesting the tax - there's only one point to argue: the value of the house.
Income, sales, and business taxes are complicated and require resources for collection and compliance. There are a ton of options, laws, and special rules that require coding, dissemination, interpretation, defense, and so on. All of this adds cost.
The added cost is mirrored in the public as well - the expenses you incur to force compliance are mirrored by similar expenses made by the public. If you audit someone because they took a bad deduction, they have to spend time, effort, and money defending themselves. That's time and money they don't spend productively - it drags down the economy.
The expense of collection and enforcement has a resonating effect as well. If the enforcement branch gets rid of a CPA paid $100,000, not only do they take an immediate $100,000 cost reduction, but the CPA will now pay taxes on wages earned in the private sector. Simple government gets you much more than the base cost comparison will show.
If you could simplify your taxes, the net gain to the state would be enormous.
3) We have one "per person" tax, you have three (income, sales, property).
Consider a tax which requires 40% of the income for collection and enforcement (ie - for every $100 taken in, $40 goes to the revenue department to pay for collection and enforcement). All else being equal, double the *number* of taxes and you double the income. Double the *rate* and you more than double the income.
In the previous example, if $40 is spent on collection you get $60 for revenue. If you double the taxes, you get $120 revenue. If you double the *rate*, you get $160 in revenue.
I could go on, but it's pretty simple from an economic point of view.
California revenue is a twisted tangle of expensive administrative policy which is inefficient and unproductive. They tax their citizens more, but get less revenue.
NH has a simpler system that is less burdensome, requires less government, and nets the state more income.
Taxing Amazon is unconstitutional on its face, and there is a supreme court decision which is on point that clarifies the issue.
Part of having integrity is supporting what's right even when it's not in your best interest. Yes, California is hurting, we get that. Yes, you need more money, we get that. No, it's not right, deal with it, and no, it's still not right even if you really, *really* need the money.
A better question is whether California really needs the money. Comparing CA with NH:
The CA budget is 9x the NH budget
CA has 28x the population to tax (income taxes) CA residents have higher income on average than NH residents (income taxes) CA has 17x the land area to tax (property taxes) CA has much greater tourist draw than NH (meals and room taxes) CA has a vast agricultural and industrial base (NAPA valley, Silicon valley) (business taxes) CA has an enormous coastline which attracts international trade and recreation
NH has... hiking.
If you can't get 9x the revenue from 28x the population, you're doing it wrong.
Here's a thought: How about California just ditch all government infrastructure and duplicate the one in NH, expanded per capita. You would have no income tax, no sales tax, and an operating budget 3x higher.
Population: 37M Population Density: 234/sq mi Area: 163,696 sq mi (770 miles from top to bottom) 2010-2011 Budget: 102 Billion Budget per capita: $2756
NH
Population: 1.3M Population Density: 146/sq mi Area: 9,304 sq mi ( 190 miles from top to bottom) 2010-2011 Budget: $11.5 billion Budget per capita: $8846
I've often wondered about the impact of robotics and AI in the economy.
Suppose we have a mild form of strong AI where machines can do simple human tasks. Not anything that requires insight or creativity, but enough to do mindless tasks such as is currently done by unskilled laborers. Such as parts assembly. Foxconn comes to mind.
The ubiquity of cheap Chinese labor has had a devastating effect on the US economy, as companies race to replace American workers.
Machines will eventually take over as laborers, leaving humans unemployed. And yet, unemployed people won't have the money to purchase the robot-built products.
This seems contradictory on it's face.
Can anyone make a prediction of future economy? What will it look like, and how do we get there?
Obama and everyone else in the government have it wrong.
Giving money to existing businesses will not create jobs. Existing businesses already have the employees they need to create their product, and if you give them money in a bad economy they will hoard it waiting for the economy to get better. (This is not 100% true in all cases, but as a general rule it works very well.)
You get jobs from new businesses. New businesses grow to accommodate production - once a business can meet demand for it's product or service, growth essentially stops.
New businesses come from innovation on top of infrastructure.
Most innovation is an incremental improvement in an existing product. Your company makes perfusion pumps. If you can make the same pump but 5% smaller, or 5% lighter, or 5% cheaper, or lasts 50% longer - that's generally good enough to start a business.
Innovation:
Patents are largely impossible for the small business right now. They are expensive and don't afford any sort of protection. Patent descriptions are so broadly written and subject to so much interpretation that it is likely that any innovation you make is covered by numerous patents. There are trolls out there ready to take everything away once you've done all the hard work.
Any similarities between your product and an existing product will net you a copyright violation.
Infrastructure:
The criminal laws are so broadly written and subject to so much interpretation that enforcement has become largely discretionary. Local prosecutors are not held responsible for bringing merit-less cases to court, so be sure not to piss anyone off in the government.
The regulatory laws are broadly written and subject to interpretation, and again enforcement has become largely discretionary (viz: Gibson and Martin)
The cell phone network only covers metropolitan areas, and is so unstable that Apple can come out with a popular product (IPhone 1.0) and overload the system, making it impossible to make calls. In Manhattan (!)
High speed internet is only available in metropolitan areas, and is so overloaded that the carriers are implementing rationing (aka data caps).
Our electric system is old and outdated - by some estimates 20% of the generated power is wasted because we can't route it efficiently.
Our postal system is expensive and somewhat unreliable, yet we can't let more efficient companies (UPS and FedEx) deliver mail.
Our air travel rules are so invasive and abhorrent that people refuse to use it. Good luck getting your sales people to other cities, or sending an engineer to work out problems with a vendor.
Our tax structure is so complicated that it requires expert advice and constant vigilance for compliance. With Amazon giving in to external states demands to collect sales tax, expect this to get a lot worse before it gets better. Every cash-strapped state, county, and local town will be all over the net looking for their cut.
About the only piece of infrastructure in the US that seems to be OK is the interstate highway system.
Any single one of these can be considered minor, or could be ignored or dealt with by accommodation. Allocate some funds to hire a CPA, or a lawyer, or patent searcher, or whatever.
Taken in concert, the whole package puts a severe chilling effect on business growth in the US. That's why we don't have jobs any more, that's why the economy is taking so long to turn around.
Everyone seems to be missing the larger point here, which is that Anonymous is effective in reversing the government's civil rights erosion.
As I understand it, BART is funded by the government. A government agency shutting off an otherwise publicly available channel of communication as a response to peaceful protests seems like an abridgement of civil rights. An analogy posted earlier likens it to the Post Office refusing to deliver [postage paid] organizational flyers for a protest.
For all the wailing and gnashing of teeth about vigilantes, can anyone form a good argument as to why this particular outcome in this particular situation doesn't at least *partially* validate the core idea that sometimes vigilantes are needed?
Or alternately, can anyone describe an alternate course of action that could be taken by the population to address this abridgement of rights *which has any chance of success*?
Suppose everyone knows roughly 50 other people. If you add together your family (all of them - even distant cousins), the people you know at work, church, through your hobbies, your neighbors, your mailman and so on... the total is around 50.
Every one of these 50 people knows 50 *other* people, and every one of those 2500 people again knows 50 *other* people, so that the circle expands exponentially in powers of 50.
Of course, this isn't a complete description since at every stage there is an increasing probability that people in the next stage are already accounted for in an earlier stage, but this is the essential flavor.
The world population is 6.7 billion. The 6th root of that number is about 44. So discounting the probability of overlap as mentioned, everyone would only need to know 44 people to link everyone in the world to within 6 "degrees of Kevin Bacon".
From the linked article: An instrument named ChemCam will use laser pulses to vaporize thin layers of material from Martian rocks or soil targets up to 7 meters (23 feet) away.
I have this mental image of thousands of tiny terrified martians fleeing their homes after the "heat ray" vaporizes the town square.
No-one would have believed, in the first years of the 21st century, that martian affairs were being watched from the timeless worlds of space. No one could have dreamed that we were being scrutinized as someone with a microscope studies creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. Few martians even considered the possibility of life on other planets. And yet, across the gulf of space, minds immeasurably superior to ours regarded this planet with envious eyes, and slowly, and surely, they drew their plans against us.
On the one hand, GM foods might pose a risk somewhere in the future, but lots of really smart people have been trying to quantify and identify what these risks might be, to no effect.
On the other hand, people are starving *now*. I'm all for safety, but can we eat first?
People are scared because in the past we've made mistakes. For example, DDT accumulates, and causes problems higher up in the food chain. On the other hand, DDT was not fatal, it was not an extinction-level event, we noticed the risks and stopped.
It's the future, we've learned a great deal, and we're being more careful. It's much less *likely* that we'll be making these types of mistakes overall. Mistakes will still be made, but that's inevitable whatever we do. When it happens, we'll identify the causes, change the conditions and move on.
I'm willing to allow the possibility that a percentage of the world's poor will have some as-yet-undiscovered problem (which may be an inconvenience or may be life-threatening) in exchange for reducing the immediate suffering of massive populations of people *now*.
It's a typical risk/reward tradeoff, something we make every day, such as driving a car. Take the path where the benefits outweigh the risks.
If the answer to question "Will you still use this product with no documentation and a non-intuitive interface?" is "Yes, because its technically superior to X", that product won't make a dime unless its a niche market.
That's a brilliant soundbite! I've been looking for something like that for awhile. I'll definitely pass that on.
Linux, and open source in general, will never be that popular, simply because of cognitive load. It's software designed by engineers, with no clear understanding of style or ergonomics.
To use a car example, it's like a car with high torque and excellent gas mileage, but ugly to look at and the instruments are labelled differently and in the back seat.
Many companies hire artists and usability experts to look at the final product and make tweaks and recommendations. Some even take the trouble to engage focus groups of customers to find out what features are confusing, what aspects are uncomfortable, what looks ugly. They take this information and change their product for the better.
For the most part, the success of Apple products is for this reason: the iPod was not the first MP3 player on the market, but it's usability and aesthetic appeal and robustness made it highly popular.
Open source, on the other hand, is usually done by a single engineer putting in most of the effort. The results usually have the following pattern:
1) Documentation: Writing documentation is boring. Put up a wiki and let the users fill in the details. 2) Aesthetic looks: This is not important. Give the user a panel to change the environment to suit their tastes. 3) Compatibility: Not important. "Search for text" is different in every application, it's impossible for your fingers to memorize the action. 4) Simplicity: More features is better! Try viewing the man page for "ls" some time. Or preferences in VLC. 5) Descriptives: Don't choose descriptive names for anything. Instead of "Internet Explorer", "Paint Shop Pro" and "Media Player", use terms like "Gimp, Firefox, and VLC".
This last is one reason why old folks have a tough time using the new technology. They have to learn a completely new language: Every random word that they *thought* they knew ("pidgin", "handbrake", "calibre") means something different in the new system.
Gimme a break.
The top five or so open source projects try to deal with these issues, but the overwhelming majority are robust, strong, functional, and totally enigmatic.
Where are the open source tech writers? The ones who take that part of the problem and work alongside the engineers to ensure quality documentation? Where are the open source ergonomic experts, the usability analysts, the aesthetic artists? Who ever does usability studies, or consistency between apps?
Until the engineers get a clue, open source projects will never be more than a closet of hobbyist projects.
Linux, and open source in general, will never be that popular, simply because of cognitive load. It's software designed by engineers, with no clear understanding of style or ergonomics.
To use a car example, it's like a car with high torque and excellent gas mileage, but ugly to look at and the instruments are labelled differently and in the back seat. I don't mean that the instruments are *different*, I mean that they are conceived and implemented in an inconvenient manner.
Many companies hire artists and usability experts to look at the final product and make tweaks and recommendations. Some even take the trouble to engage focus groups of customers to find out what features are confusing, what aspects are uncomfortable, what looks ugly. They take this information and change their product for the better.
For the most part, the success of Apple products is for this reason: the iPod was not the first MP3 player on the market, but it's usability and aesthetic appeal and robustness made it highly popular.
Open source, on the other hand, is usually done by a lead engineer putting in most of the effort. The results usually have the following pattern:
1) Documentation: Writing documentation is boring. Put up a wiki and let the users fill in the details. 2) Aesthetic looks: This is not important. Give the user a panel to change the environment to suit their tastes. 3) Compatibility: Not important. Our package has "close file" (alt-file-close), but we've assigned the function to a different key. 4) Simplicity: More features is better! Try viewing the man page for "ls" some time. Or gcc. Or just about anything. 5) Descriptives: Don't choose descriptive names for anything. Instead of "Internet Explorer", "Paint Shop Pro" and "Media Player", use terms like "Gimp, Firefox, and VLC".
This last is one reason why old folks have a tough time using the new technology. They have to learn a completely new language: Every random word that they *thought* they knew ("gimp", "apache") means something different in the new system.
Gimme a break.
The software engineers have done a good job making robust, strong, functional packages.
Where are the open source tech writers? The ones who take that part of the problem and work alongside the engineers to ensure quality documentation? Where are the open source ergonomic experts, the usability analysts, the aesthetic artists? Who ever does usability studies, or consistency between apps?
Until the engineers get a clue, linux and related open source projects will never be more than a closet of hobbyist projects.
Having never heard of Dr. Burzynski, I took the liberty of reviewing your posted links.
None of the posted information in the links discusses the therapy *or* the evidence, it only discusses the physician and in an uncomfortably bad light. They take the evidence of his credibility and dismiss it out of hand.
For instance, the 2nd link points out that he is an MD and a PHD. Rather than take the obvious stance of "this is a trained scientist, perhaps we should examine his claims", they state this:
"First, he really is a legitimate MD/PhD, proving beyond a doubt that having an MD/PhD double threat degree does not necessarily inoculate one from falling prey to pseudoscience."
That is not science, and this is not protecting me from snake oil salesman. This is protecting the status-quo of academia and mainstream research by using innuendo and ad-hominem attacks.
Maverick, innovative solutions DO occasionally crop up in science, as do the occasional genius theory which is discounted but later proven to be true. I would expect this to happen even more so in the highly structured and rigor-bound field of medicine.
Protect me from bad science, but leave the scientists out of it.
Slashdot Mirror
Business is built (and grows) from innovation on top of infrastructure.
This is the infrastructure part - by allowing companies to ration the resources and block new business models as they see fit, it allows them to put the brakes on growth.
This then reserves the "growth" for the carrier if, at some future time, they should decide to add new business models.
For a concrete example: by making the barrier to entry for streaming video very high it becomes impossible to start a streaming video company. The carrier wants to reserve that potential business opportunity for itself in the future.
Unfortunately, this sort of rationing stunts the growth of *all* new business which might make use of the resource - including new and innovative ideas which are untested and whose viability is unknown at launch. Big companies are risk-averse, and generally don't innovate. (For instance, this is why at launch it was nigh impossible to make a call with an iPhone in Manhattan - the new business model swamped the limited resources of the carrier.)
Just one piece of the US policy of investing in stagnation.
Your new pacemaker comes with 50 million free beats!
You can buy additional beats at pulsemore.com
(Close to home)
Assertion 1: Elections are won by the candidate who spends the most money
I can't prove this logically, only empirically. A PEW study of large number of elections found that over 90% were won by the candidate who spent the most money. Of the remaining 10%, the majority self-destructed by political scandal. The general rule holds very well: the candidate who spends the most money (and doesn't get caught in a scandal) will win the election. Lots of corroboration on the net, such as:
http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2008/11/money-wins-white-house-and.html
Assertion 2: A candidate who acts in his own interest rather than the interest of the general public is corrupt.
By definition. (Note that sometimes an action is in both the general interest *and* the self-interest of a politician.)
Now calculate the % likelihood that a politician is corrupt in our system.
Any politician with a sense of ethics will be out-competed by one with a lower sense of ethics. The ideal candidate will be the one who can sell his integrity the fastest and to the most people. This is why politicians always seem to be in the pocket of large corporations.
I say this not because I'm lazy, destructive and incorrect, but to shed light on the problem. With a model whose outcome we don't like, we can try to get a different outcome by changing the parameters or moving to a different model. We can work to make a system that doesn't have quite so much corruption.
But it starts by admitting that "government is populated exclusively by immoral criminal scum", which is no secret and is independently arrived at by just about everyone.
It's predicted by the math. It's real - get over it.
There was no physical evidence for Pontius Pilate for almost 2000 years, leading many biblical scholars to argue that he was a mythical character.
This changed in 1961, when the pilate stone was discovered.
(And Pontius Pilate was way more famous than Jesus in his time.)
Physical evidence for Buddha was not found until 1895.
I'm not sure what your point is. Are you saying that there is a probability of Jesus being a fictional character? That's fine, it's a fair point. There's a non-zero probability that Jesus was a fictional character.
But it's not the important part...
As a scientist, I try not to make judgements except as indicated by evidence.
However, human beings have evolved to notice patterns and make inferences.
It doesn't matter whether a pattern holds true in all cases, it only matters whether it's more *likely* to be true as it influences my next decision.
Thus it may not be true that all crows are black, but this is not the important point. What matters is whether the *next* crow I see will be black, given all the crows that I have seen so far. I'll take that bet, because the likelihood is there.
I leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine whether an average politician being motivated by their own interests is the better bet.
(Hint: set it up as a game-theoretic problem, given that almost all elections are won by the candidate that spends the most money [which is empirically true]. Alternately, look at the voting history of the politician in question and see if you can determine the % which were in the public interest.)
That's a fair point. Geeks aren't intimidated by learning a completely new paradigm.
That's one reason that older folks have such a hard time with newer systems - they have to learn something new every time. It would be nice if there were some type of "conceptual consistency" across applications; so that, for instance, burning a CD-ROM would involve conceptually the same actions across all programs.
The poster specifically called out muscle memory, which has always been a big headache for me. My system has a rich environment of both free and closed-source tools, and it's impossible to get muscle memory for anything.
For example, I have to turn off the "electric indent" feature in everything. I can type quickly if I know what all the keys do, but electric indent is *different* for all languages and in all editors. If TAB goes in 4 spaces always, then it's much faster to type two tabs rather than try to keep straight what a single "electric" tab does.
This is the wrong question to ask geeks. They have no muscle or spatial memory, and don't care whether anyone else does.
Or haven't you noticed?
Across all of your free/OSS software:
1) What keys do you type to search for text?
2) What keys do you type to activate File->Save?
2a) Is File->Save greyed out if there are no changes?
3) When you hit shift-ctrl-end-del, does this take out the trailing CR/LF or not?
4) Where are the preferences - under "File", "Help", "Document", "Edit", "Tools"?
5) Are the preferences called "preferences", "options", "settings"?
6) Using the debugger - which F keys activate step-in/step-out/step-over?
7) When you click in a text box, does it insert the cursor or select the entire line?
Geeks care not one whit about compatibility. They make their interfaces by what "seems" right at the time, with no regard for the greater universe of programs in the world.
Good luck with your answer. Maybe you can create your own calculator online.
I shot a rocket into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where
Until next day, with rage profound,
The man it fell on came around.
In less time than it takes to tell,
He showed me where that rocket fell;
And now I do not greatly care
To shoot more rockets in the air.
(Tom Masson, 1866-1943)
(Responding to my own comment)
I'm waiting for someone to come up with a simple transport layer in JavaScript that does nothing but make the DOM visible to the other end. All you would need is
1) Interrogate the DOM, send back value
2) Set DOM variable to passed value
2) Pass back messages based on the user actions ("button X was clicked").
I'd *love* to see a python or perl interface for this. Making a GUI for something would be almost trivial.
I think many people are missing the point of Javascript.
The new spec includes the ability for Javascript to open sockets. Once that takes hold, you'll have the ability to completely control the browser window from the home server.
When that happens, it will be big. The browser is essentially a rendering machine which makes it trivially easy to show things and is largely machine independent. Instead of selling a huge monolithic program, companies can simply sell time on their servers to run their programs.
Imagine that you want to use a big engineering program - Orcad or Altium Designer, for example.
Instead of paying $10,000 for a copy of the program and taking a chance that it's as good as it's marketing claims, you can buy a month of usage for $100, and the executable will run on the company's servers while using your browser to paint the screens. Sort of like how World of Warcraft runs on servers, but paints the screens locally.
This has many advantages for the user:
1) You don't have to risk an enormous sum of money to try something out
2) You don't pay for the product more than you need it
3) You have NO installation issues
4) You are always using the most up-to-date version
5) The vendor can keep backups of your files for you
6) You can access your files and the application from anywhere on the net
And for the vendor:
1) The code is never given out (only runs on the server): no piracy!
2) You don't need multiple versions for different architectures (reduced engineering)
3) You don't have to push updates to the users all the time
4) You can tune the compilation/installation to make the best use of the server
5) Rendering is much easier - the bulk of the code is written for you by others (reduced engineering)
There are some disadvantages - the vendor has access to the document, which means that they can also sell the document to spammers (designs to China, for example). This can be dealt with by using a trust model; ie - the company will have an online reputation which will get quickly tarnished once this happens.
That's the promise of Javascript, and the real potential of the cloud. Companies supplying online services to compete for customers.
The article header says "light_ing", and the linked article states "light_ing", not "light_ning" as you state.
Perhaps it's a typo, I was only reading [both] the articles.
Would you agree that "Thunderbird and light_ing" doesn't sound so good together?
Why is the "calendar" feature of Mozilla named "lighting"?
I swear, this is one of the most obviously vexing aspects of open source, and the one that keeps it off the desktop for most people.
To use open source, everyone needs to learn a new language. A codebook is required to do something. If I install this on my dad's computer, he'll never use it because he won't be able to remember the name.
It's not as if there aren't words in the language which are related to calendar, from which to make a descriptive product name. How about "Mozailla Calendar"?
Conpare: InternetExplorer, PaintShopPro, MediaPlayer
Compare to: Mozilla, Gimp, VLC
If even the high-end "best" open source projects are doing this, how can the lowly specialized open source project possibly hope to get a foothold on the desktop?
Get a clue. Then get off my lawn!
New Hampshire has one of the lowest overall tax burdens. Sometimes *the* lowest, depending on the year.
California has one of the highest overall tax burdens - 7th in the nation. (Varies, depending on the year and source)
We raise 3.2x as much money per person than California, while taxing each person much less.
Here's how we do it:
1) We have a hefty property tax. Unlike income and sales taxes, property tax is largely immune to economic swings. When the economy goes up, you pay X. When the economy goes down, you pay X. (Housing values are checked every 10 years or so.)
Basing your revenues on income, sales, and business taxes is a recipe for disaster. You'll always be in "feast or famine" mode, always be flush during the good years and in pain during the bad.
2) The property tax is simple: your house is worth this, you pay that. There is only one point of contention (the value of your house), so collection and enforcement is easy and straightforward. So is contesting the tax - there's only one point to argue: the value of the house.
Income, sales, and business taxes are complicated and require resources for collection and compliance. There are a ton of options, laws, and special rules that require coding, dissemination, interpretation, defense, and so on. All of this adds cost.
The added cost is mirrored in the public as well - the expenses you incur to force compliance are mirrored by similar expenses made by the public. If you audit someone because they took a bad deduction, they have to spend time, effort, and money defending themselves. That's time and money they don't spend productively - it drags down the economy.
The expense of collection and enforcement has a resonating effect as well. If the enforcement branch gets rid of a CPA paid $100,000, not only do they take an immediate $100,000 cost reduction, but the CPA will now pay taxes on wages earned in the private sector. Simple government gets you much more than the base cost comparison will show.
If you could simplify your taxes, the net gain to the state would be enormous.
3) We have one "per person" tax, you have three (income, sales, property).
Consider a tax which requires 40% of the income for collection and enforcement (ie - for every $100 taken in, $40 goes to the revenue department to pay for collection and enforcement). All else being equal, double the *number* of taxes and you double the income. Double the *rate* and you more than double the income.
In the previous example, if $40 is spent on collection you get $60 for revenue. If you double the taxes, you get $120 revenue. If you double the *rate*, you get $160 in revenue.
I could go on, but it's pretty simple from an economic point of view.
California revenue is a twisted tangle of expensive administrative policy which is inefficient and unproductive. They tax their citizens more, but get less revenue.
NH has a simpler system that is less burdensome, requires less government, and nets the state more income.
Look, it's really simple.
Taxing Amazon is unconstitutional on its face, and there is a supreme court decision which is on point that clarifies the issue.
Part of having integrity is supporting what's right even when it's not in your best interest. Yes, California is hurting, we get that. Yes, you need more money, we get that. No, it's not right, deal with it, and no, it's still not right even if you really, *really* need the money.
A better question is whether California really needs the money. Comparing CA with NH:
The CA budget is 9x the NH budget
CA has 28x the population to tax (income taxes)
CA residents have higher income on average than NH residents (income taxes)
CA has 17x the land area to tax (property taxes)
CA has much greater tourist draw than NH (meals and room taxes)
CA has a vast agricultural and industrial base (NAPA valley, Silicon valley) (business taxes)
CA has an enormous coastline which attracts international trade and recreation
NH has... hiking.
If you can't get 9x the revenue from 28x the population, you're doing it wrong.
Here's a thought: How about California just ditch all government infrastructure and duplicate the one in NH, expanded per capita. You would have no income tax, no sales tax, and an operating budget 3x higher.
Source:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2320930&cid=36754362
California
Population: 37M
Population Density: 234/sq mi
Area: 163,696 sq mi (770 miles from top to bottom)
2010-2011 Budget: 102 Billion
Budget per capita: $2756
NH
Population: 1.3M
Population Density: 146/sq mi
Area: 9,304 sq mi ( 190 miles from top to bottom)
2010-2011 Budget: $11.5 billion
Budget per capita: $8846
This is great! Lots and lots of cheap, usable housing for everyone!
Sounds like Terrafoam to me.
I've often wondered about the impact of robotics and AI in the economy.
Suppose we have a mild form of strong AI where machines can do simple human tasks. Not anything that requires insight or creativity, but enough to do mindless tasks such as is currently done by unskilled laborers. Such as parts assembly. Foxconn comes to mind.
The ubiquity of cheap Chinese labor has had a devastating effect on the US economy, as companies race to replace American workers.
Machines will eventually take over as laborers, leaving humans unemployed. And yet, unemployed people won't have the money to purchase the robot-built products.
This seems contradictory on it's face.
Can anyone make a prediction of future economy? What will it look like, and how do we get there?
Obama and everyone else in the government have it wrong.
Giving money to existing businesses will not create jobs. Existing businesses already have the employees they need to create their product, and if you give them money in a bad economy they will hoard it waiting for the economy to get better. (This is not 100% true in all cases, but as a general rule it works very well.)
You get jobs from new businesses. New businesses grow to accommodate production - once a business can meet demand for it's product or service, growth essentially stops.
New businesses come from innovation on top of infrastructure.
Most innovation is an incremental improvement in an existing product. Your company makes perfusion pumps. If you can make the same pump but 5% smaller, or 5% lighter, or 5% cheaper, or lasts 50% longer - that's generally good enough to start a business.
Innovation:
Patents are largely impossible for the small business right now. They are expensive and don't afford any sort of protection. Patent descriptions are so broadly written and subject to so much interpretation that it is likely that any innovation you make is covered by numerous patents. There are trolls out there ready to take everything away once you've done all the hard work.
Any similarities between your product and an existing product will net you a copyright violation.
Infrastructure:
The criminal laws are so broadly written and subject to so much interpretation that enforcement has become largely discretionary. Local prosecutors are not held responsible for bringing merit-less cases to court, so be sure not to piss anyone off in the government.
The regulatory laws are broadly written and subject to interpretation, and again enforcement has become largely discretionary (viz: Gibson and Martin)
The cell phone network only covers metropolitan areas, and is so unstable that Apple can come out with a popular product (IPhone 1.0) and overload the system, making it impossible to make calls. In Manhattan (!)
High speed internet is only available in metropolitan areas, and is so overloaded that the carriers are implementing rationing (aka data caps).
Our electric system is old and outdated - by some estimates 20% of the generated power is wasted because we can't route it efficiently.
Our postal system is expensive and somewhat unreliable, yet we can't let more efficient companies (UPS and FedEx) deliver mail.
Our air travel rules are so invasive and abhorrent that people refuse to use it. Good luck getting your sales people to other cities, or sending an engineer to work out problems with a vendor.
Our tax structure is so complicated that it requires expert advice and constant vigilance for compliance. With Amazon giving in to external states demands to collect sales tax, expect this to get a lot worse before it gets better. Every cash-strapped state, county, and local town will be all over the net looking for their cut.
About the only piece of infrastructure in the US that seems to be OK is the interstate highway system.
Any single one of these can be considered minor, or could be ignored or dealt with by accommodation. Allocate some funds to hire a CPA, or a lawyer, or patent searcher, or whatever.
Taken in concert, the whole package puts a severe chilling effect on business growth in the US. That's why we don't have jobs any more, that's why the economy is taking so long to turn around.
We just don't have it any more.
(I submitted the article)
Everyone seems to be missing the larger point here, which is that Anonymous is effective in reversing the government's civil rights erosion.
As I understand it, BART is funded by the government. A government agency shutting off an otherwise publicly available channel of communication as a response to peaceful protests seems like an abridgement of civil rights. An analogy posted earlier likens it to the Post Office refusing to deliver [postage paid] organizational flyers for a protest.
For all the wailing and gnashing of teeth about vigilantes, can anyone form a good argument as to why this particular outcome in this particular situation doesn't at least *partially* validate the core idea that sometimes vigilantes are needed?
Or alternately, can anyone describe an alternate course of action that could be taken by the population to address this abridgement of rights *which has any chance of success*?
This is how it works.
Suppose everyone knows roughly 50 other people. If you add together your family (all of them - even distant cousins), the people you know at work, church, through your hobbies, your neighbors, your mailman and so on... the total is around 50.
Every one of these 50 people knows 50 *other* people, and every one of those 2500 people again knows 50 *other* people, so that the circle expands exponentially in powers of 50.
Of course, this isn't a complete description since at every stage there is an increasing probability that people in the next stage are already accounted for in an earlier stage, but this is the essential flavor.
The world population is 6.7 billion. The 6th root of that number is about 44. So discounting the probability of overlap as mentioned, everyone would only need to know 44 people to link everyone in the world to within 6 "degrees of Kevin Bacon".
From the linked article: An instrument named ChemCam will use laser pulses to vaporize thin layers of material from Martian rocks or soil targets up to 7 meters (23 feet) away.
I have this mental image of thousands of tiny terrified martians fleeing their homes after the "heat ray" vaporizes the town square.
No-one would have believed, in the first years of the 21st century, that martian affairs were being watched from the timeless worlds of space. No one could have dreamed that we were being scrutinized as someone with a microscope studies creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. Few martians even considered the possibility of life on other planets. And yet, across the gulf of space, minds immeasurably superior to ours regarded this planet with envious eyes, and slowly, and surely, they drew their plans against us.
Yes, it's a dilemma.
On the one hand, GM foods might pose a risk somewhere in the future, but lots of really smart people have been trying to quantify and identify what these risks might be, to no effect.
On the other hand, people are starving *now*. I'm all for safety, but can we eat first?
People are scared because in the past we've made mistakes. For example, DDT accumulates, and causes problems higher up in the food chain. On the other hand, DDT was not fatal, it was not an extinction-level event, we noticed the risks and stopped.
It's the future, we've learned a great deal, and we're being more careful. It's much less *likely* that we'll be making these types of mistakes overall. Mistakes will still be made, but that's inevitable whatever we do. When it happens, we'll identify the causes, change the conditions and move on.
I'm willing to allow the possibility that a percentage of the world's poor will have some as-yet-undiscovered problem (which may be an inconvenience or may be life-threatening) in exchange for reducing the immediate suffering of massive populations of people *now*.
It's a typical risk/reward tradeoff, something we make every day, such as driving a car. Take the path where the benefits outweigh the risks.
Thank you for the response.
If the answer to question "Will you still use this product with no documentation and a non-intuitive interface?" is "Yes, because its technically superior to X", that product won't make a dime unless its a niche market.
That's a brilliant soundbite! I've been looking for something like that for awhile. I'll definitely pass that on.
Linux, and open source in general, will never be that popular, simply because of cognitive load. It's software designed by engineers, with no clear understanding of style or ergonomics.
To use a car example, it's like a car with high torque and excellent gas mileage, but ugly to look at and the instruments are labelled differently and in the back seat.
Many companies hire artists and usability experts to look at the final product and make tweaks and recommendations. Some even take the trouble to engage focus groups of customers to find out what features are confusing, what aspects are uncomfortable, what looks ugly. They take this information and change their product for the better.
For the most part, the success of Apple products is for this reason: the iPod was not the first MP3 player on the market, but it's usability and aesthetic appeal and robustness made it highly popular.
Open source, on the other hand, is usually done by a single engineer putting in most of the effort. The results usually have the following pattern:
1) Documentation: Writing documentation is boring. Put up a wiki and let the users fill in the details.
2) Aesthetic looks: This is not important. Give the user a panel to change the environment to suit their tastes.
3) Compatibility: Not important. "Search for text" is different in every application, it's impossible for your fingers to memorize the action.
4) Simplicity: More features is better! Try viewing the man page for "ls" some time. Or preferences in VLC.
5) Descriptives: Don't choose descriptive names for anything. Instead of "Internet Explorer", "Paint Shop Pro" and "Media Player", use terms like "Gimp, Firefox, and VLC".
This last is one reason why old folks have a tough time using the new technology. They have to learn a completely new language: Every random word that they *thought* they knew ("pidgin", "handbrake", "calibre") means something different in the new system.
Gimme a break.
The top five or so open source projects try to deal with these issues, but the overwhelming majority are robust, strong, functional, and totally enigmatic.
Where are the open source tech writers? The ones who take that part of the problem and work alongside the engineers to ensure quality documentation? Where are the open source ergonomic experts, the usability analysts, the aesthetic artists? Who ever does usability studies, or consistency between apps?
Until the engineers get a clue, open source projects will never be more than a closet of hobbyist projects.
Making good software is more than robust coding.
Linux, and open source in general, will never be that popular, simply because of cognitive load. It's software designed by engineers, with no clear understanding of style or ergonomics.
To use a car example, it's like a car with high torque and excellent gas mileage, but ugly to look at and the instruments are labelled differently and in the back seat. I don't mean that the instruments are *different*, I mean that they are conceived and implemented in an inconvenient manner.
Many companies hire artists and usability experts to look at the final product and make tweaks and recommendations. Some even take the trouble to engage focus groups of customers to find out what features are confusing, what aspects are uncomfortable, what looks ugly. They take this information and change their product for the better.
For the most part, the success of Apple products is for this reason: the iPod was not the first MP3 player on the market, but it's usability and aesthetic appeal and robustness made it highly popular.
Open source, on the other hand, is usually done by a lead engineer putting in most of the effort. The results usually have the following pattern:
1) Documentation: Writing documentation is boring. Put up a wiki and let the users fill in the details.
2) Aesthetic looks: This is not important. Give the user a panel to change the environment to suit their tastes.
3) Compatibility: Not important. Our package has "close file" (alt-file-close), but we've assigned the function to a different key.
4) Simplicity: More features is better! Try viewing the man page for "ls" some time. Or gcc. Or just about anything.
5) Descriptives: Don't choose descriptive names for anything. Instead of "Internet Explorer", "Paint Shop Pro" and "Media Player", use terms like "Gimp, Firefox, and VLC".
This last is one reason why old folks have a tough time using the new technology. They have to learn a completely new language: Every random word that they *thought* they knew ("gimp", "apache") means something different in the new system.
Gimme a break.
The software engineers have done a good job making robust, strong, functional packages.
Where are the open source tech writers? The ones who take that part of the problem and work alongside the engineers to ensure quality documentation? Where are the open source ergonomic experts, the usability analysts, the aesthetic artists? Who ever does usability studies, or consistency between apps?
Until the engineers get a clue, linux and related open source projects will never be more than a closet of hobbyist projects.
Making good software is more than robust coding.
Having never heard of Dr. Burzynski, I took the liberty of reviewing your posted links.
None of the posted information in the links discusses the therapy *or* the evidence, it only discusses the physician and in an uncomfortably bad light. They take the evidence of his credibility and dismiss it out of hand.
For instance, the 2nd link points out that he is an MD and a PHD. Rather than take the obvious stance of "this is a trained scientist, perhaps we should examine his claims", they state this:
"First, he really is a legitimate MD/PhD, proving beyond a doubt that having an MD/PhD double threat degree does not necessarily inoculate one from falling prey to pseudoscience."
That is not science, and this is not protecting me from snake oil salesman. This is protecting the status-quo of academia and mainstream research by using innuendo and ad-hominem attacks.
Maverick, innovative solutions DO occasionally crop up in science, as do the occasional genius theory which is discounted but later proven to be true. I would expect this to happen even more so in the highly structured and rigor-bound field of medicine.
Protect me from bad science, but leave the scientists out of it.