"70.8% of all active Android devices are on a version that we support with patches," - perhaps, but what percentage of those patches are supported and distributed by the carriers? Maybe 30%... so maybe that's where that number came from.
Thanks for that out of context quote. You can read the entire speech here, which includes the following:
True democracy demands that citizens cannot be thrown in jail because of what they believe, and that businesses can be opened without paying a bribe. It depends on the freedom of citizens to speak their minds and assemble without fear, and on the rule of law and due process that guarantees the rights of all people.
And passage that has you concerned...
The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam. But to be credible, those who condemn that slander must also condemn the hate we see in the images of Jesus Christ that are desecrated, or churches that are destroyed, or the Holocaust that is denied.
Doesn't quite read like the call for the worldwide caliphate you imply.
This makes a lot of sense. Think of a site like Politico. You would think the country is filled with people who think that either Obama is a Muslim communist, or that George W was a warmongering moron trying to bring about the second coming. Most discussion boards end up devolving into a giant troll pit almost immediately. No matter what the topic, the Fox News and John Stewart crowds go for each others' jugulars, very often with no context to the article they are "commenting" upon.
One of the promises of the Internet was that it could be a town hall, a place where people from a broad swath of geographies and backgrounds could hold discourse in a public forum. Clearly, it hasn't worked out as well as it should have. We have a bunch of morons who aren't looking to debate, but to diatribe. A little nudge here, a little nudge there, and a clever trolling operative could make sure that any serious venue for political discourse quickly descends into rubbish. Troll-fed apathy develops, informed democratic involvement nosedives, which contributes to grid-locked government and a country in decline.
Are all, or even most, of the USA's problems because of foreign trolls? Of course not (plenty of home-grown corruption, poor education, etc.). Nonetheless, it seems like a cost-effective way to undermine democracy, taking advantage of free speech to encourage peoples' worse tendencies.
The complexity of medical bills is only part of the story. Hospitals and surgical centers pretty much have to do this based upon the way insurance companies and Medicare allow or disallow coverage in a very granular manner. Just as big of a problem, at least from my experience over the last few months of having to get my wife through three surgeries, is that what you see on your initial bill you get can be very different than you actually owe, especially from surgery centers. And everybody bills separately -- the facility, the doctors and anesthesiologists, radiologists, pathology labs, etc. all send separate bills at different times.
Calls about details often went to outsourced billing providers, who immediately send you an invoice so they can begin collections. Numerous times this happened before the insurance company fully reviewed and paid on the bill. And even afterward, there were a few instances where the bill I received was hundreds of dollars more than what was submitted to the insurance company. Most of these billing providers have websites that you can use to pay a bill, but they are little more than credit merchant portals, they are not a view for billing details or any submitted payment. Any communication of documents with these billing providers often times had to happen via FAX because they did not have a secure mechanism to send information back and forth. It's like being trapped in the '80's.
This could all be much simpler.
For a surgery, everybody involved should bill the hospital or surgical center, and then the hospital should send me a single bill. When I get a car serviced, I don't get a bill from the car shop, the parts manufacturer and any mechanic that touched my car.
Any bill should not be sent to me until fully reviewed from the insurance company
When getting ten+ unreviewed bills for a single surgery, all of which demand payment pretty much immediately, I am not going rush to run up my credit cards. I am pretty sure hospitals do not pay their suppliers on a COD or Net 14 basis, I can't either. Give me at least thirty days to set up financing, extract retirement money, sell a kidney, whatever, to pay for $50 ibuprofen.
None of these changes involve socialism, single-payer, etc. However, the complexity of our billing, and the administrative costs associated with it, compared to other industrial countries, leads ammo to those that want to get rid of the kludge that is "Obamacare" (which really was "Baucascare") and just go to single-payer.
Also, your point that Bain was mostly preoccupied with Bain's success and survival is very valid. It was a bit of a misstatement on my part to say Bain was concerned with the survival of companies, other their own.
Totally agree. For better or for worse, the horrible business model you describe was not uncommon for Bain. I'm not saying Bain was not a company based upon evil, it is just that Romney happened to be good at it. In contrast, during Fiorina tenure at HP, about her only success was to maintain her own brand.
She was a regular on Meet the Press for a while, and she could always be counted on to parrot whatever talking points the American Enterprise Institute was distributing at the time. She always came across as an opportunist, trying to build her brand, with nary a thought of her own construction.
People criticized Romney because he ran on his business record, and that record included the elimination of many American job. In fairness to Romney, though, his job at Bain was to save companies, not jobs, and in this he was successful. In Fiorina's case, she presided over a disastrous merger of Compaq, basically destroying that brand, as well as seriously damaging HP's; and in the process, opened the door for lesser players, like Dell, to successfully infiltrate the enterprise. Her utter failure as a business leader, coupled with a near lack of independent political philosophy, are easy pickings for her primary competitors. If she somehow does make it to a VP candidate, she will serve only to galvanize the liberal voting base to organize against a failed corporate wolf in false feminist sheep's clothing.
We are unable to convince citizens in the USA to convert from imperial to metric measurements, despite the numerous benefits including easier conversion, scalability, etc. If you cannot convince a populace that it's easier to divide by 10 than 12, then there is little hope you can convince them to switch languages so they can avoid using irregular verbs.
Yeah, that was my first thought, followed by involuntary cringing. It's sad how something that was supposed to bring hope to developers buckling under the yoke of waterfall development has instead become associated with every unreasonable request made by every airline-magazine reading executive.
one could claim that science is by nature self-correcting
That is rather the point, isn't it? Take gravity, for example. From Galileo's models of uniform acceleration, to Newton's Universal Gravitation, to Einstein's Relativity theories, etc. each of these guys knew that their models for gravity were incomplete. Yet, each of them served as increasingly accurate tools to observe the universe and make predictions about its behavior. Someday, somebody will figure out how to make a model that ties gravity out between quantum and classical mechanics, which will be more accurate still, but almost certainly will not be absolutely complete.
When you say "science" do you mean the Scientific Method? The scientific method remains one of the most reliable methods for verifying truth. Intelligent design, astrology and alchemy may have adherents that consider them "science" but that doesn't mean they are. Science is the Scientific Method. Period. Full Stop.
You brought up the example of cholesterol. Based upon the science of the time, an increase of LDL cholesterol corresponded with an increased risk of heart problems. That is still true. They simply said "eat less of this bad stuff" which seems intuitive. If science research mirrored religion, that would be the end of it, and maybe the rest of western civilization would have followed the Jewish and Islamic faiths into the abyss of bacon deprivation. Thankfully, that is not the end of the story, scientific work continued (yes, that science) and now we know that dietary consumption of cholesterol is not the primary contributor to LDL levels. Will there be another study that shows that eating certain foods, perhaps in combination, do, in fact, contribute to high LDL levels? It wouldn't surprise or distress me if there was. I would not want to wait until there could be absolute certainty that eating mayonnaise in combination with french fries somehow appeared to skyrocket LDL levels. I would like to know soon enough that I can do something about it, even if that information gets refined later on.
You could make an argument that there is a "scientific community" that is increasingly accommodating shoddy science. But that isn't a failure of science, any more than a nut job driving a car bomb screaming "Allahu Akbar" is a failure of religion.
My parents found out I was allergic to peanuts when I was a little over one year old, I had some peanuts and I almost croaked (anaphylaxis). I'm still allergic to them today; eating anything with peanuts means an epi-pen, a few Benadryl and a trip to the emergency room for high-octane versions of the same.
I lived over in the Philippines for a few years and came into some contact with peanuts there. The interesting thing is that my reactions were nowhere near as severe as they are at home in the US, almost to the point where I believed I could have shaken them off without a trip to the emergency room (still went though). It may have been my imagination, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was something with the nuts themselves.
Anecdotally, I heard from people there that Australians and Americans were the people they countered most with peanut allergies.
This idea that all speech must be viewed by all people is a little odd. When I go onto Facebook once in a blue boon to check on friends I used to work with in the Philippines, I am not bombarded by explicit sexual content. No, nobody in my group of friends are going to post about a rimjob, but given the random crap that does come up, I'm pretty sure there is a lot of energy at Facebook to keep the pr0n noise down.
There are Muslims who consider pictures of their prophet as offensive as a picture of bukkake. The vast majority of them are not crazy Islamists that like to blow things up and slaughter innocent people (which is good for the rest of us non-Muslims). Rather than centralized, blanket, censorship, though, I'd rather see something like this...
1. Facebook and other social networking services put their resources into tagging content (religiously offensive, sexually explicit, drug use and other types of content that users often find unpleasant)
When a user registers for these services, a default list of tagged content to block is set up, based upon their region, gender, religious affiliation, etc. which the user can modify
I like this. It reinforces the importance of the underlying algorithms, logic and data; de-emphasizing language-specific syntax, formatting, idioms, etc.. It also makes it easier to explain and demonstrate things like the difference between static and dynamic typing.
This is so simple yet so much more effective than many of the wearables coming out today. It is impressive, to me, because it fits in his workflow seamlessly. He doesn't have to change the way he works. The tactile keys and buttons not only give feedback (which haptic does poorly), but it makes it easy to hit them exactly the number of times you want (which mobile touchscreens do very poorly).
Technology like mainstream 3D printing will enable the creation of DIY peripherals like this. It's a great opportunity to enhance productivity for repetitive, laborious work.
Sony, you can't release this thing in theaters, and the same will probably be of brick-and-mortar retail. Your reputation is going in the crapper because of the awful things your executives say in email. Release the movie on a torrent. Let people watch it online. For free. It's not like these idiots aren't going to eventually distribute all of your dirty laundry anyway. Show us you at least have some dignity, if not class.
Clean(er) coal is still mostly an idea, not yet commercially implemented (at least when talking about carbon sequestration in the US). A pretty good article is at National Geographic. It mentions that there is a plant under construction in Kemper County, Mississippi, that should capture more than half of its CO2 emissions and redirect them to an oil field. The project has suffered from cost overruns and delays (new tech, not horribly surprising). Besides sequestration, there is work being done on "gassification" (turning coal into a gas and cleaning it before burning it) and improving the combustion process itself.
Even as we are trying to sequester half of the carbon we generate when generating power from coal, the permafrost is melting, and according to that article, this could release about 190 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere.
So, yeah, we can use coal better, but it will cost a lot of money, which probably isn't going to happen without regulation and, subsequently, the recovery of any investment via higher prices for energy. Higher energy prices will doubtless generating much gnashing of teeth during an economy that, at least in the US, seems stuck in a slow, very slow, recovery. With the US Congress very likely to go to a Republican majority next month, the chances of any kind of CO2 regulation are slim.
You set up a background image for elements in CSS, with the appropriate media queries. What do we need another new tag for? If you are building responsive sites, you should be managing it in CSS anyway. Embedding CSS type media queries into a document tag is about the same as including embedded styles instead of classes. It makes for ugly and redundant HTML (okay, HTML itself is redundant, but stating that would be redundant... er...).
In the B2B space, a lot of code gets written to wire up databases to front-ends of some time, and most of the time it involves an RDBMS. Unfortunately, with all the reliance upon ORM frameworks, developers often can't write or diagnose decent SQL to save their lives. We have a good chunk of Oracle code written by a large integrator, and there are innumerable cursors, one after the other, where a simple SQL join would have done the job much more easily. In Microsoft land, people are leaning way too much on LINQ, with transaction integrity and locking effects as distant afterthoughts.
On the front-end, things are even more chaotic. Whatever Javascript or UI framework you are using, there is always something newer, more "efficient" and inevitably more buggy if you don't take the time to learn to use it properly. Something like Angular is very cool, but very different, and there is a lot of front-end time to learn to use it properly in a production site. Unfortunately, in B2B space, we don't always get the time we would like to learn how to use the latest "hotness".
Abstraction for abstraction's sake is a killer too. Templates, abstraction and such re-use techniques get way overused. Yeah, it might be nice if every single block of code was reusable, and we could arbitrarily stub in test data for every possible call, but the complexity isn't always worth it. Setting up three levels of abstraction to make a class library call that was already abstracted accomplishes nothing. People that code this way never had to worry about stack or heap.
Maybe I'm old, maybe I'm yelling "get off my lawn", but I truly believe that, for especially internal, B2B applications, a focus on fundamentals would make life a little easier to manage.
Slashdot Mirror
Yah, that number seems just a tad low.
"70.8% of all active Android devices are on a version that we support with patches," - perhaps, but what percentage of those patches are supported and distributed by the carriers? Maybe 30%... so maybe that's where that number came from.
Just kidding! Props to you guys for being responsive. It is making a significant difference.
Thanks for that out of context quote. You can read the entire speech here, which includes the following:
And passage that has you concerned...
Doesn't quite read like the call for the worldwide caliphate you imply.
This makes a lot of sense. Think of a site like Politico. You would think the country is filled with people who think that either Obama is a Muslim communist, or that George W was a warmongering moron trying to bring about the second coming. Most discussion boards end up devolving into a giant troll pit almost immediately. No matter what the topic, the Fox News and John Stewart crowds go for each others' jugulars, very often with no context to the article they are "commenting" upon.
One of the promises of the Internet was that it could be a town hall, a place where people from a broad swath of geographies and backgrounds could hold discourse in a public forum. Clearly, it hasn't worked out as well as it should have. We have a bunch of morons who aren't looking to debate, but to diatribe. A little nudge here, a little nudge there, and a clever trolling operative could make sure that any serious venue for political discourse quickly descends into rubbish. Troll-fed apathy develops, informed democratic involvement nosedives, which contributes to grid-locked government and a country in decline.
Are all, or even most, of the USA's problems because of foreign trolls? Of course not (plenty of home-grown corruption, poor education, etc.). Nonetheless, it seems like a cost-effective way to undermine democracy, taking advantage of free speech to encourage peoples' worse tendencies.
Microsoft will be pre-installing Candy Crush Saga to help people, well, focus... I guess...
The complexity of medical bills is only part of the story. Hospitals and surgical centers pretty much have to do this based upon the way insurance companies and Medicare allow or disallow coverage in a very granular manner. Just as big of a problem, at least from my experience over the last few months of having to get my wife through three surgeries, is that what you see on your initial bill you get can be very different than you actually owe, especially from surgery centers. And everybody bills separately -- the facility, the doctors and anesthesiologists, radiologists, pathology labs, etc. all send separate bills at different times.
Calls about details often went to outsourced billing providers, who immediately send you an invoice so they can begin collections. Numerous times this happened before the insurance company fully reviewed and paid on the bill. And even afterward, there were a few instances where the bill I received was hundreds of dollars more than what was submitted to the insurance company. Most of these billing providers have websites that you can use to pay a bill, but they are little more than credit merchant portals, they are not a view for billing details or any submitted payment. Any communication of documents with these billing providers often times had to happen via FAX because they did not have a secure mechanism to send information back and forth. It's like being trapped in the '80's.
This could all be much simpler.
None of these changes involve socialism, single-payer, etc. However, the complexity of our billing, and the administrative costs associated with it, compared to other industrial countries, leads ammo to those that want to get rid of the kludge that is "Obamacare" (which really was "Baucascare") and just go to single-payer.
Also, your point that Bain was mostly preoccupied with Bain's success and survival is very valid. It was a bit of a misstatement on my part to say Bain was concerned with the survival of companies, other their own.
Totally agree. For better or for worse, the horrible business model you describe was not uncommon for Bain. I'm not saying Bain was not a company based upon evil, it is just that Romney happened to be good at it. In contrast, during Fiorina tenure at HP, about her only success was to maintain her own brand.
She was a regular on Meet the Press for a while, and she could always be counted on to parrot whatever talking points the American Enterprise Institute was distributing at the time. She always came across as an opportunist, trying to build her brand, with nary a thought of her own construction.
People criticized Romney because he ran on his business record, and that record included the elimination of many American job. In fairness to Romney, though, his job at Bain was to save companies, not jobs, and in this he was successful. In Fiorina's case, she presided over a disastrous merger of Compaq, basically destroying that brand, as well as seriously damaging HP's; and in the process, opened the door for lesser players, like Dell, to successfully infiltrate the enterprise. Her utter failure as a business leader, coupled with a near lack of independent political philosophy, are easy pickings for her primary competitors. If she somehow does make it to a VP candidate, she will serve only to galvanize the liberal voting base to organize against a failed corporate wolf in false feminist sheep's clothing.
We are unable to convince citizens in the USA to convert from imperial to metric measurements, despite the numerous benefits including easier conversion, scalability, etc. If you cannot convince a populace that it's easier to divide by 10 than 12, then there is little hope you can convince them to switch languages so they can avoid using irregular verbs.
Yeah, that was my first thought, followed by involuntary cringing. It's sad how something that was supposed to bring hope to developers buckling under the yoke of waterfall development has instead become associated with every unreasonable request made by every airline-magazine reading executive.
one could claim that science is by nature self-correcting
That is rather the point, isn't it? Take gravity, for example. From Galileo's models of uniform acceleration, to Newton's Universal Gravitation, to Einstein's Relativity theories, etc. each of these guys knew that their models for gravity were incomplete. Yet, each of them served as increasingly accurate tools to observe the universe and make predictions about its behavior. Someday, somebody will figure out how to make a model that ties gravity out between quantum and classical mechanics, which will be more accurate still, but almost certainly will not be absolutely complete.
When you say "science" do you mean the Scientific Method? The scientific method remains one of the most reliable methods for verifying truth. Intelligent design, astrology and alchemy may have adherents that consider them "science" but that doesn't mean they are. Science is the Scientific Method. Period. Full Stop.
You brought up the example of cholesterol. Based upon the science of the time, an increase of LDL cholesterol corresponded with an increased risk of heart problems. That is still true. They simply said "eat less of this bad stuff" which seems intuitive. If science research mirrored religion, that would be the end of it, and maybe the rest of western civilization would have followed the Jewish and Islamic faiths into the abyss of bacon deprivation. Thankfully, that is not the end of the story, scientific work continued (yes, that science) and now we know that dietary consumption of cholesterol is not the primary contributor to LDL levels. Will there be another study that shows that eating certain foods, perhaps in combination, do, in fact, contribute to high LDL levels? It wouldn't surprise or distress me if there was. I would not want to wait until there could be absolute certainty that eating mayonnaise in combination with french fries somehow appeared to skyrocket LDL levels. I would like to know soon enough that I can do something about it, even if that information gets refined later on.
You could make an argument that there is a "scientific community" that is increasingly accommodating shoddy science. But that isn't a failure of science, any more than a nut job driving a car bomb screaming "Allahu Akbar" is a failure of religion.
Nice! ;)
My parents found out I was allergic to peanuts when I was a little over one year old, I had some peanuts and I almost croaked (anaphylaxis). I'm still allergic to them today; eating anything with peanuts means an epi-pen, a few Benadryl and a trip to the emergency room for high-octane versions of the same.
I lived over in the Philippines for a few years and came into some contact with peanuts there. The interesting thing is that my reactions were nowhere near as severe as they are at home in the US, almost to the point where I believed I could have shaken them off without a trip to the emergency room (still went though). It may have been my imagination, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was something with the nuts themselves.
Anecdotally, I heard from people there that Australians and Americans were the people they countered most with peanut allergies.
perhaps a binary data format, representing data in a database. This should be the next step.
And then we replace Javascript with Swift.
I'm hoping you forgot the /s
So what? This is not news for nerds.
I'm sure there are some nerds in Greece...
Doh! Accidentally clicked submit during preview, last line should have "2. " in front of it. "blue boon" should be "blue moon"
This idea that all speech must be viewed by all people is a little odd. When I go onto Facebook once in a blue boon to check on friends I used to work with in the Philippines, I am not bombarded by explicit sexual content. No, nobody in my group of friends are going to post about a rimjob, but given the random crap that does come up, I'm pretty sure there is a lot of energy at Facebook to keep the pr0n noise down.
There are Muslims who consider pictures of their prophet as offensive as a picture of bukkake. The vast majority of them are not crazy Islamists that like to blow things up and slaughter innocent people (which is good for the rest of us non-Muslims). Rather than centralized, blanket, censorship, though, I'd rather see something like this...
1. Facebook and other social networking services put their resources into tagging content (religiously offensive, sexually explicit, drug use and other types of content that users often find unpleasant)
When a user registers for these services, a default list of tagged content to block is set up, based upon their region, gender, religious affiliation, etc. which the user can modify
I like this. It reinforces the importance of the underlying algorithms, logic and data; de-emphasizing language-specific syntax, formatting, idioms, etc.. It also makes it easier to explain and demonstrate things like the difference between static and dynamic typing.
This is so simple yet so much more effective than many of the wearables coming out today. It is impressive, to me, because it fits in his workflow seamlessly. He doesn't have to change the way he works. The tactile keys and buttons not only give feedback (which haptic does poorly), but it makes it easy to hit them exactly the number of times you want (which mobile touchscreens do very poorly).
Technology like mainstream 3D printing will enable the creation of DIY peripherals like this. It's a great opportunity to enhance productivity for repetitive, laborious work.
Sony, you can't release this thing in theaters, and the same will probably be of brick-and-mortar retail. Your reputation is going in the crapper because of the awful things your executives say in email. Release the movie on a torrent. Let people watch it online. For free. It's not like these idiots aren't going to eventually distribute all of your dirty laundry anyway. Show us you at least have some dignity, if not class.
Clean(er) coal is still mostly an idea, not yet commercially implemented (at least when talking about carbon sequestration in the US). A pretty good article is at National Geographic. It mentions that there is a plant under construction in Kemper County, Mississippi, that should capture more than half of its CO2 emissions and redirect them to an oil field. The project has suffered from cost overruns and delays (new tech, not horribly surprising). Besides sequestration, there is work being done on "gassification" (turning coal into a gas and cleaning it before burning it) and improving the combustion process itself.
Of course, you still have to get the coal, which can be nasty (see mountaintop mining and this article about environment impacts of coal mining).
Even as we are trying to sequester half of the carbon we generate when generating power from coal, the permafrost is melting, and according to that article, this could release about 190 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere.
So, yeah, we can use coal better, but it will cost a lot of money, which probably isn't going to happen without regulation and, subsequently, the recovery of any investment via higher prices for energy. Higher energy prices will doubtless generating much gnashing of teeth during an economy that, at least in the US, seems stuck in a slow, very slow, recovery. With the US Congress very likely to go to a Republican majority next month, the chances of any kind of CO2 regulation are slim.
You set up a background image for elements in CSS, with the appropriate media queries. What do we need another new tag for? If you are building responsive sites, you should be managing it in CSS anyway. Embedding CSS type media queries into a document tag is about the same as including embedded styles instead of classes. It makes for ugly and redundant HTML (okay, HTML itself is redundant, but stating that would be redundant... er...).
Here is a 419 (Nigerian scam) back-and-forth. It is quite a bit funnier...
In the B2B space, a lot of code gets written to wire up databases to front-ends of some time, and most of the time it involves an RDBMS. Unfortunately, with all the reliance upon ORM frameworks, developers often can't write or diagnose decent SQL to save their lives. We have a good chunk of Oracle code written by a large integrator, and there are innumerable cursors, one after the other, where a simple SQL join would have done the job much more easily. In Microsoft land, people are leaning way too much on LINQ, with transaction integrity and locking effects as distant afterthoughts.
On the front-end, things are even more chaotic. Whatever Javascript or UI framework you are using, there is always something newer, more "efficient" and inevitably more buggy if you don't take the time to learn to use it properly. Something like Angular is very cool, but very different, and there is a lot of front-end time to learn to use it properly in a production site. Unfortunately, in B2B space, we don't always get the time we would like to learn how to use the latest "hotness".
Abstraction for abstraction's sake is a killer too. Templates, abstraction and such re-use techniques get way overused. Yeah, it might be nice if every single block of code was reusable, and we could arbitrarily stub in test data for every possible call, but the complexity isn't always worth it. Setting up three levels of abstraction to make a class library call that was already abstracted accomplishes nothing. People that code this way never had to worry about stack or heap.
Maybe I'm old, maybe I'm yelling "get off my lawn", but I truly believe that, for especially internal, B2B applications, a focus on fundamentals would make life a little easier to manage.