I too loved the reveal codes feature, but was forced away from WordPerfect because it crashed so often causing me to lose work again, and again, and again. Word was far more stable, at least with the large documents I was working with. So, if less crashing means technically superior, then I'd have to disagree with you. In the '94 time frame, Word was technically superior.
I think that part of the problem is that they don't have to approach 50/50 and actually have not done so. Rather, they've found ways to approach 20/20 by just driving voters away by never addressing real problems.
I'm also not sure more candidates would help. Maybe they would if you could somehow get Hollywood and the shallower media outlets out of the game so that there is some chance of getting the public focused on more than sound bites.
I could go for some weightings though. Perhaps we could weight the votes on the inverse of how much the voters in the region watch TV or in direct proportion to how much time they spend outside:o)
A friend pointed out that a lot of those that aren't voting are in fact people who believe that none of the candidates should be put in office. If you take this to be true, then you could achieve the effect that I desire by requiring that any official be elected by at least 50% of eligible voters as opposed to a simple majority of those that come to vote. The more I think about it, the more I believe this would be even more effective in forcing the parties back to reality.
Actually, one of my points was that issue based voting is not a good thing. Especially in the Federal government, the people we elect vote on many complex bills with thousands of items (another one of the problems in my opinion). When you elect on the basis of issues, you're electing someone for a very small percentage of their job. We need to get back to electing on principles, but with some means of scoring how they adhere to the principles in office.
Seems like there needs to be an independent system that rates candidates according to various principles, not just liberal or conservative principles, but many different ones. Then, you could tell the system how you rate various principles and see the people ranked according to your world view. It would take a large effort though. Maybe it could be done by a web site with a lot of public participation.
One big problem with doing it though is the complexity of the legislation being passed. Perhaps you could divide it up into little pieces, rate each piece as to how it relates to various principles, and then figure out an overall balance for the law being reviewed from the ratings of the pieces. But I'm afraid that we'd find that most laws serve most interests, even opposing ones, equally.
So, once again, I'm feeling that another area really can't be fixed by outside bolt-ons. Changes need to happen in the government structure. Long, complex laws shouldn't be around. Laws should be short and simple. It should be up to juries to handle the complexity of deciding each case rather than up to the law to spell out what to do in every situation. It seems that the more they spell it out, the less clear it gets anyway.
No, I don't really think so, but I think that one of the others could easily reduce us to the point that we will no longer significantly contribute to global warming. I think various biohazards are our biggest threat. They may even naturally evolve just because there are so many more billions of incubators evolving them. I also don't think that it is true that a hazard has to develop quickly in order to overcome our response to it. Global warming is an example of this. Another would be the greatly ignored reduction in fertility of men. And yet another is the gradual reduction in age of maturity, especially in females. That one in particular has very dangerous effects because it causes sexual feelings in women further and further before the ages at which they or their parents are prepared in any way to handle them. It may in fact be the true underlying reason for all of our social shift in that area without us really knowing or understanding it. Many many things are happening today that we are barely even aware of that are effecting us in ways that we can't begin to predict. We've unleashed many technologies on a society, planet, and physiology none of which we really have much of a clue as to how they work. Global warming is really just a minor player because there are many other more stealthy players that have shorter term effects.
An inaccuracy of as much as a few percentage points is not going to result in better/worse government. Once you're within a few percentage points, the only clear thing is that a clear decision has not been made. We desperately need to start asking "why"? Are the two sides really that close in appeal or is something being rigged (whether intentionally or as a side effect of the system is not really relevant)?
Candidates that win by a few percentage points haven't really won, they've just survived the election process. They still have a huge portion of their constituency unrepresented... No, actually unrepresented isn't right because in many cases today, those the vast majority of those that didn't vote for the candidate that won are in fact diametrically opposed to the candidates views. So, they aren't unrepresented. Instead they are actively misrepresented or, even attacked by their representative.
What our system is missing is a means to force a progression beyond this 50/50 stage.
One of the problems is accountability. It is hard to progress when someone can represent themselves one way during the election process and then act another way when in office. I think the primary problem with this is that the platform they run on is never proven or disproven. So, it can be brought up again and argued about again without being able to point back at facts.
Another major issue is that the platforms are incomplete. Candidates are running on the basis of what they will do about a couple dozen problems and then going off and making decisions on 1000s of problems. Their decisions on the side issues frequently don't match up to what you would think. Basically, I believe the issue here is that the debate is over issues instead of principles. If you could elect on the basis of a detailed knowledge of a candidate's principles and then have some means of holding them accountable to those principles at least in a broad sense, you'd be doing much better.
So, my hypothesis is that as long as there are no candidates (and no means in the system to force those candidates to come about) that can present a clear belief system and be trusted to follow that in their governing regardless of pressures placed on them by supposed constituents that often really don't have any real care about the principles of government, the system for electing them is irrelevant because we can't have a stable and progressing debate and discovery of who is right and who is wrong. Real progress will be elusive.
I'd like to see a "another choice please" option added to the ballots. If "another choice please" wins, I think the position should be left open with no provision to temporarily fill it. At least the representatives left after the initial fallout are the clear choices of SOMEBODY!!! I believe that most people would rather not be represented at all than be misrepresented to the degree that they are today.
Simply adding this option to the ballot and handling it in the specified way would likely force a major change very quickly. I think that we'd find the majority of the country unrepresented in the first election. But, that would be good, because it is already the truth, just one that the current system glosses over. Bringing it out would show the naked truth, our system of government has departed from representing the people to such an extent that our government has in fact failed.
An interesting side question to ask is "who is running our government"?. Ultimately, the answer is "whoever chose the representatives" because they are who the representatives answer to. Some think that the choice is by the people. They are wrong as long as the choice is from a rigged pool of candidates. My answer is "whoever is rigging the pool of candidates", because the fundamental differences in what the candidates from the supposedly different sides are doing in Washington has mostly disappeared. From a long term view, all of the candidates are taking power and money away from the people and cent
This isn't a global warming problem though it is another effect of the root problem. The root problem in the Western world is our short sightedness. If buildings were built to last a few hundred years instead of a few decades, they would probably think more seriously about building in a 500 or 1000 year flood plain.
In any case, 20 billion pounds a year is meaningless in relation to the infrastructure cost of avoiding global warming without changing lifestyles (good luck if you think you can change lifestyles in any direction other than towards increased decadence). So, this study, even if taken seriously, still does not demonstrate the cost effectiveness of avoiding global warming. Until a solution to global warming is identified that is provably cheaper in the short term than our short term economic losses demonstrably caused by global warming, it won't fly. Jumping up and down and screaming about fears for the possible future won't change that fact, especially since there are at least a dozen ways we're likely to wipe ourselves out before that future.
that is based on the simple premise of limiting the impact that any attack can possibly have instead of trying to do the impossible and prevent all attacks. So, how do they do it? Simple really. In fact, its so simple that is even be accidental. Their systems are so diverse, numerous, both antiquated and modern at the same time, that even they don't know what they have. Much of the time, there are several completely separate systems based on different technologies from different decades that can be chosen at will by a commander to do any particular task. And even if the systems are up and using some common basis for attack such as MS Windows, the chances of any given system being available on a network at any point in time are probably less than 50/50 because their networks SUCK. So, the attack would have great difficulty spreading before detection. Once detected, they tend to just shut down all of the links. So, as long as they don't get stupid and standardize, fix and catalog everything, any concentrated attack can only have limited effects.
Hmmm. But it looks like that may be just what they are thinking about doing...:o)
Our system fails long before the university level. Many of the "bad kids" that fail out early on are actually gifted kids that are bored out of their skulls because they aren't being challenged and moving them ahead would be unfair. Better to hold them back so that they can have a normal social life. You know,,, drugs, sex, and rock and roll sort of thing.
I was darn near one of them. Was so bored the summer after 5th grade that I picked up my father's college algebra book and learned it cover to cover. In seventh grade, I skipped school a lot and was failing math even though they had me in a lower track. They tested me thinking I might be mentally retarded and I blew the test away. They moved me into 9th grade math later that month. In 9th grade, I was in another school and once again in the dropout track. They apparently didn't get the message from the previous school that my grades didn't really reflect anything. I snuck a form from the counselor's office and took the ACT for the heck of it and qualified for college scholarships. Eventually, I did go to college and graduated with a low end GPA (refused to do homework and was usually penalized for it even though I usually had the highest test average). After I escaped the education system, my career has been a completely different story. I didn't miss a single day of work for the first 17 years, averaged around 85 hours a week, and have now led 4 different 1.5 million line level coding efforts, all to successful completion on time and on budget.
My point is somewhere along the lines that I am a very highly rated employee, but a lousy student who almost failed out because the system was more about conformance then excellence. Furthermore, as a researcher, I probably would have made huge advances in whatever industry I went into (I used to go into Calculus tests "cold", having skipped all the classes and kept my books closed just to create a challenge), but the education system has destroyed the research system by promoting a conformant kind of thinking and favoring those who can memorize and kiss up. And those who think that way rarely even understand people like me, much less show any interest in working with them. I'm a relic of a bygone era.
There really aren't too many jobs left that haven't to some degree been offshored. Even the "consumer" position is well on its way with many companies trying hard to penetrate what will soon be the ultimate consumer market, China. They are up to 70 million low middle-class type consumers already and are projected to pass the US in consumption around 15 years from now.
Essentially, I think we've lost the game. It is time to figure out why we lost and see if we can't rebuild. Personally, I believe it is because we commoditized education. By turning our education system into a mass production system aimed mostly toward rote learning of technical skills and largely suppressing the thinking and critical problem solving side of education, we created something that isn't special and is easy to copy. Just send your people over and have at least some of them come back with the knowledge and the textbooks and in a few decades, you can steal almost everything we have. In essence, we have destroyed the diversity and concentrated the methods used within the system. Thus, what was a wonderfully diverse thing that couldn't be copied, became a defined system that can.
My answer will never happen without some major upheaval. I would want the system to be transformed back to one that focuses on the individual and targets the studies towards expanding that individual's potential in whatever fashion is appropriate to their inate capabilities and desires in life. Instead of imposing a template of what each and every person should learn and become, encourage and develop individuality not in social beliefs, but in knowledge and skills. Build craftsmen, not robots.
The idea that all people are just as suited for testing drugs is very incorrect. For a drug trial to truly translate to an American population, it would have to be performed on a population with roughly the same ethnic mix and environment. It is not at all unusual for drugs and poisons to effect various populations differently.
An example of this is PCBs. The original tests on PCBs back in the 50s and 60s were performed on an Indian (as in from India) population. They found a fairly high risk of cancer and that is why we started working to reduce and eventually nearly eliminate PCB usage in America. Interestingly, later tests on other ethnic groups found that ethnic groups of European and African descendency demonstrated virtually no cancer response to PCBs. Indians were the worst with other Oriental groups showing decreased, but still present cancer responses. The cancer response amongst the Japanese was the least of the Oriental groups, though still present. This in no way says that we shouldn't have reduced our usage of PCBs since there are people of Oriental descendency in our society, but it does demonstrate that medical tests do not always translate even at a gross level from one group to another. If we had never tested PCBs on people of Oriental origin, we wouldn't have banned them.
In many ways, there is a more disconcerting flip side to this that has been largely ignored by the so-called "medical science" (I put that in quotes because they ignore so many factors, it is hard to say that they are a legitimate science). The flip side is that because we ignore ethnic origin and many "how they live their life" type factors of the people involved in tests and we don't work hard to identify the factors that cause failure in a drug for the typically small percentage that do have adverse effects with many otherwise beneficial drugs, we are very likely missing out on many drugs that might be very beneficial. Biology is not blind to these factors and we shouldn't be either if we truly want to call it or make it a science.
The genetic sciences are probably the answer. Eventually, we should see a process evolve of prescribing drugs according to genetic tests that determine precisely how a particular individual will respond. At that point in time, they can hide the ethnic factor by talking about the gene that interferes with the test instead of the ethnic groups that typically have that gene.
But Apple's music service is working hard to be one according to Steve's own words. He's first, so far out in front that second doesn't matter, and willing to use his size advantage to keep others out of the game. That's a monopoly in the making.
they'd be out $25 billion or so, not just a measly few 100 million. How is it that Apple, Oracle, and others all get away with in your face crap like this (half the people above laughed at Real for it) and Microsoft catches crap for largely behind the scenes and at least publicly polite arm pulling? Heck, if you're nice to them, they'll even buy you out on their way to smushing you. Apple is the epitomy of what happens when you don't open up your business. Microsoft didn't take it, Apple gave it up or maybe even actively threw it away. Bill Gates didn't make Microsoft, Apple did. So why why why do people actually like Apple?
than the others I've seen here is that, since it is localized instead of distributed, getting to the point of injecting signals into this cache and thus effecting one's view of immediate reality may be much easier than thought before. Say, 30-40 years away instead of over 100.
Actually though, I'm not sure why they would have thought this was spread about. Neural pathways are very slow in general. It seems like localization of highly related data such as the components of an image would be necessary due to that fact alone.
As any southerner can tell you, the yank's ideas about when a war has been won are pretty screwed up. We killed twice as many of them as we lost and they still ain't welcome. They think its over, but we'll send those carpetbaggers home yet.
Probably over half of the programs that I run on my Windows machines are GNU or open source programs (Perl, Python, PHP, MySQL, GIMP, grep, awk, sed, and even things like Bash). There are very few major GNU/Linux programs that don't run fine under windows these days either because they were written to be portable in the first place or because CYGWIN does a pretty decent job of emulating the unix libraries.
You seem to be confused. I have personally programmed in C#, VB, Perl, and J# under the DotNet environment. Many more languages are available. I have only programmed in Java and Ada under the Java environment and don't know that the Ada front end is still around.
DotNet, by providing a strong language independent platform for all syntaxes to be built on opens the door for me to use exactly the right syntax for the problem at hand at a fine grained level and have the classes produced in solving each problem all contribute to a single large scale program. Java can't (or more accurately, won't) touch that.
You may be thinking that all syntaxes become equal under DotNet, but I haven't found that to be the case. It is still vastly easier, for example, to utilize regular expressions from Perl than from C#. So, C# is not even close to threatening Perl for the text processing applications that Perl shines on.
Of course, everyone here probably recognizes the ulterior motive of this design. DotNet isn't a language and it isn't a development studio. It is plain and simply the new windows API that will finally allow Win32 to be replaced. When Longhorn comes around, the underlying windows calls will be reduced from over 56,000 to under 8,000. Those 8,000 remaining calls will be geared to very closely match the needs of the DotNet runtime. The Win32 compatibility will be supplied via a conversion layer. So, even if Mono succeeds, they will only end up expanding a market for software that will run best on a Microsoft OS because the OS was designed from the ground up to run it.
.Net obsoletes the syntax argument by forcing all syntaxes to comply with the platform. Java is all about syntax. From that perspective, which after years of hearing stupid religious arguments about syntax,.Net blows Java to !@#$ and back.
Neither offers anything worth watching, with the possible exception of the sci fi channel which I wish would switch to the Internet. Its getting harder and harder to justify paying for TV.
Consumers don't agree on what "simple" is
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The problem is that one man's simple includes a bluetooth feature and another man's simple includes 802.11b, and another man's simple... The fact is that it is far cheaper to market and distribute one device that does everything than a bunch of variations on "simple". Production cost is practically irrelevant these days, but part of the reason it is practically irrelevant is the economy of mass. Divide that mass into 10 different ideas of "simple" and suddenly production will bite you too.
I know many people in the field who started off in other fields and trained themselves to write software. These people tend to be amongst the best and most successful in the software field, frequently leveraging the skills of their original field to create unique value.
IMO, the technical aspect of how to create software is something that isn't complex enough to warrant a degree. Rather, it should be a required part of every other type of degree just like English composition.
My degree, Computer Engineering, was somewhat like this because I took every one of the normal computer science courses and almost every electronics course that an Electrical Engineer would take (2 short) and I did that in a standard 4 year program. In general, the electronics courses were vastly more difficult than the software courses. So, I see my education as being an electronics education that I improved by taking a lot of software composition courses. Its actually disturbing that the more simplistic field is where I make my money.
Your true success in the field won't depend very much on the education you receive in those technical aspects. The talent of creating good software architectures is one that really can't be taught. You either have the mental ability to refactor abstract processes and resist paradigm traps at will until you've reached a near optimum solution or you don't.
The chances that you have those talents aren't necessarily higher because you've succeeded in the medical field. In fact, success in medicine may indicate a lower level of creativity. Due to lawsuits and insurance issues, medical practitioners aren't allowed to be very creative in either of their primary jobs of diagnosing or treating. Medical education has adjusted to that reality over the last century and selects more for ability to memorize than good instincts or creativity.
If I were you, I'd examine myself and the way I think before taking this path. Some good indicators might be in your hobby areas. Do you or could you see yourself working with creative hobbies such as furniture making, painting, hotrods, playing an instrument, etc? If so, do you see yourself as someone who would just follow existing plans or someone who does it their own way? When you do things your way, do they usually work out better or worse than if you had followed the plans?
without military involvement, there would be no space program. And that's not just in the past. If the military backed their expertise and funds out of NASA today, NASA would quickly collapse. The military is still developing many technologies that are benefiting the research and development efforts at NASA. We just don't hear about it explicitly.
You've identified the problem well, but I think that getting to the root of the problem is the issue. The root of the problem is that we commoditized education. In an effort to increase the numbers graduating, we turned the mass of our universities into glorified tech schools where students memorize instead of think. So, we knocked down the 10% of our society who were able to think in trade for making 40% able to repeat.
Their are three big problems with that. The first is that once a few from some third world country come to our country and learn how to repeat and take the books back with them, they can set up a university that is just as effective because the universities of the masses are no longer dependent on great minds that can't be copied. The second is that we're not training as many of the great minds to truly think. And the third is that, in order to be able to teach a more average mind, we had to specialize our educational process so much that we've almost eliminated cross discipline feeding with the exception that computing is still feeding across many disciplines because they all need to compute (you might gather from this that offshoring other disciplines will in fact be easier than offshoring computing,,, and I think that to be the case).
The result is that our technological lead has been greatly cut and will likely disappear in many vital areas. Essentially, we've commoditized our very selves.
Can we undo it? Maybe, but I doubt it. I've been noting a steady drop in the ability of new college graduates to "architect" since the late '80s. This has been going on for quite some time. We couldn't turn back the higher education system we have now. There would be too much general public backlash. For the last 15-20 years, the public has "benefited" and become accustomed to the much higher passing rate and the change from it being the student's responsibility to learn to it being the teacher's responsibility to indoctrinate whether or not the student even tries. I think what we'd have to do is create a "new" class of university that refuses to march to the current drumbeat from day one, not just as a token effort in PHD level courses. Their would need to be new degrees and a new certification system too so that the graduates of these universities would be clearly distinguished from the assembly line produced masses. And it would have to be developed in isolation from the current education elite so that they don't again poison it with mass education methodologies.
Will the commodotizing of "educated" people work for the world? No. For great advances to continue to occur at pace, there has to be large intense concentrations of intermixing, cross disciplined, thinking people, concentrations the size of the United States. These islands of narrowly focused groups are not showing themselves to be able to make the grand breakthroughs, only to perform the process they've been taught. Cranking out the same old same old more and more efficiently (these people do incrementally improve their processes, they just can't make paradigm leaps very well) is not advancement when looked at from the point of view of its effect on society. Rather, its a recipe for mass unemployment.
A typical legal strategy for a battle like this is for the side in SCO's position to tackle a bunch of little guys first to build up precedents without actually having to prove their case against an oponent equipped with a like legal force. IBM and Intel are simply serving notice to SCO that that isn't going to fly here. They will put on their defense wherever SCO goes instead of waiting for SCO to come to them.
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I too loved the reveal codes feature, but was forced away from WordPerfect because it crashed so often causing me to lose work again, and again, and again. Word was far more stable, at least with the large documents I was working with. So, if less crashing means technically superior, then I'd have to disagree with you. In the '94 time frame, Word was technically superior.
I think that part of the problem is that they don't have to approach 50/50 and actually have not done so. Rather, they've found ways to approach 20/20 by just driving voters away by never addressing real problems.
I'm also not sure more candidates would help. Maybe they would if you could somehow get Hollywood and the shallower media outlets out of the game so that there is some chance of getting the public focused on more than sound bites.
I could go for some weightings though. Perhaps we could weight the votes on the inverse of how much the voters in the region watch TV or in direct proportion to how much time they spend outside :o)
A friend pointed out that a lot of those that aren't voting are in fact people who believe that none of the candidates should be put in office. If you take this to be true, then you could achieve the effect that I desire by requiring that any official be elected by at least 50% of eligible voters as opposed to a simple majority of those that come to vote. The more I think about it, the more I believe this would be even more effective in forcing the parties back to reality.
Better late than never.
Actually, one of my points was that issue based voting is not a good thing. Especially in the Federal government, the people we elect vote on many complex bills with thousands of items (another one of the problems in my opinion). When you elect on the basis of issues, you're electing someone for a very small percentage of their job. We need to get back to electing on principles, but with some means of scoring how they adhere to the principles in office.
Seems like there needs to be an independent system that rates candidates according to various principles, not just liberal or conservative principles, but many different ones. Then, you could tell the system how you rate various principles and see the people ranked according to your world view. It would take a large effort though. Maybe it could be done by a web site with a lot of public participation.
One big problem with doing it though is the complexity of the legislation being passed. Perhaps you could divide it up into little pieces, rate each piece as to how it relates to various principles, and then figure out an overall balance for the law being reviewed from the ratings of the pieces. But I'm afraid that we'd find that most laws serve most interests, even opposing ones, equally.
So, once again, I'm feeling that another area really can't be fixed by outside bolt-ons. Changes need to happen in the government structure. Long, complex laws shouldn't be around. Laws should be short and simple. It should be up to juries to handle the complexity of deciding each case rather than up to the law to spell out what to do in every situation. It seems that the more they spell it out, the less clear it gets anyway.
No, I don't really think so, but I think that one of the others could easily reduce us to the point that we will no longer significantly contribute to global warming. I think various biohazards are our biggest threat. They may even naturally evolve just because there are so many more billions of incubators evolving them. I also don't think that it is true that a hazard has to develop quickly in order to overcome our response to it. Global warming is an example of this. Another would be the greatly ignored reduction in fertility of men. And yet another is the gradual reduction in age of maturity, especially in females. That one in particular has very dangerous effects because it causes sexual feelings in women further and further before the ages at which they or their parents are prepared in any way to handle them. It may in fact be the true underlying reason for all of our social shift in that area without us really knowing or understanding it. Many many things are happening today that we are barely even aware of that are effecting us in ways that we can't begin to predict. We've unleashed many technologies on a society, planet, and physiology none of which we really have much of a clue as to how they work. Global warming is really just a minor player because there are many other more stealthy players that have shorter term effects.
An inaccuracy of as much as a few percentage points is not going to result in better/worse government. Once you're within a few percentage points, the only clear thing is that a clear decision has not been made. We desperately need to start asking "why"? Are the two sides really that close in appeal or is something being rigged (whether intentionally or as a side effect of the system is not really relevant)?
Candidates that win by a few percentage points haven't really won, they've just survived the election process. They still have a huge portion of their constituency unrepresented... No, actually unrepresented isn't right because in many cases today, those the vast majority of those that didn't vote for the candidate that won are in fact diametrically opposed to the candidates views. So, they aren't unrepresented. Instead they are actively misrepresented or, even attacked by their representative.
What our system is missing is a means to force a progression beyond this 50/50 stage.
One of the problems is accountability. It is hard to progress when someone can represent themselves one way during the election process and then act another way when in office. I think the primary problem with this is that the platform they run on is never proven or disproven. So, it can be brought up again and argued about again without being able to point back at facts.
Another major issue is that the platforms are incomplete. Candidates are running on the basis of what they will do about a couple dozen problems and then going off and making decisions on 1000s of problems. Their decisions on the side issues frequently don't match up to what you would think. Basically, I believe the issue here is that the debate is over issues instead of principles. If you could elect on the basis of a detailed knowledge of a candidate's principles and then have some means of holding them accountable to those principles at least in a broad sense, you'd be doing much better.
So, my hypothesis is that as long as there are no candidates (and no means in the system to force those candidates to come about) that can present a clear belief system and be trusted to follow that in their governing regardless of pressures placed on them by supposed constituents that often really don't have any real care about the principles of government, the system for electing them is irrelevant because we can't have a stable and progressing debate and discovery of who is right and who is wrong. Real progress will be elusive.
I'd like to see a "another choice please" option added to the ballots. If "another choice please" wins, I think the position should be left open with no provision to temporarily fill it. At least the representatives left after the initial fallout are the clear choices of SOMEBODY!!! I believe that most people would rather not be represented at all than be misrepresented to the degree that they are today.
Simply adding this option to the ballot and handling it in the specified way would likely force a major change very quickly. I think that we'd find the majority of the country unrepresented in the first election. But, that would be good, because it is already the truth, just one that the current system glosses over. Bringing it out would show the naked truth, our system of government has departed from representing the people to such an extent that our government has in fact failed.
An interesting side question to ask is "who is running our government"?. Ultimately, the answer is "whoever chose the representatives" because they are who the representatives answer to. Some think that the choice is by the people. They are wrong as long as the choice is from a rigged pool of candidates. My answer is "whoever is rigging the pool of candidates", because the fundamental differences in what the candidates from the supposedly different sides are doing in Washington has mostly disappeared. From a long term view, all of the candidates are taking power and money away from the people and cent
This isn't a global warming problem though it is another effect of the root problem. The root problem in the Western world is our short sightedness. If buildings were built to last a few hundred years instead of a few decades, they would probably think more seriously about building in a 500 or 1000 year flood plain.
In any case, 20 billion pounds a year is meaningless in relation to the infrastructure cost of avoiding global warming without changing lifestyles (good luck if you think you can change lifestyles in any direction other than towards increased decadence). So, this study, even if taken seriously, still does not demonstrate the cost effectiveness of avoiding global warming. Until a solution to global warming is identified that is provably cheaper in the short term than our short term economic losses demonstrably caused by global warming, it won't fly. Jumping up and down and screaming about fears for the possible future won't change that fact, especially since there are at least a dozen ways we're likely to wipe ourselves out before that future.
that is based on the simple premise of limiting the impact that any attack can possibly have instead of trying to do the impossible and prevent all attacks. So, how do they do it? Simple really. In fact, its so simple that is even be accidental. Their systems are so diverse, numerous, both antiquated and modern at the same time, that even they don't know what they have. Much of the time, there are several completely separate systems based on different technologies from different decades that can be chosen at will by a commander to do any particular task. And even if the systems are up and using some common basis for attack such as MS Windows, the chances of any given system being available on a network at any point in time are probably less than 50/50 because their networks SUCK. So, the attack would have great difficulty spreading before detection. Once detected, they tend to just shut down all of the links. So, as long as they don't get stupid and standardize, fix and catalog everything, any concentrated attack can only have limited effects.
Hmmm. But it looks like that may be just what they are thinking about doing... :o)
Our system fails long before the university level. Many of the "bad kids" that fail out early on are actually gifted kids that are bored out of their skulls because they aren't being challenged and moving them ahead would be unfair. Better to hold them back so that they can have a normal social life. You know,,, drugs, sex, and rock and roll sort of thing.
I was darn near one of them. Was so bored the summer after 5th grade that I picked up my father's college algebra book and learned it cover to cover. In seventh grade, I skipped school a lot and was failing math even though they had me in a lower track. They tested me thinking I might be mentally retarded and I blew the test away. They moved me into 9th grade math later that month. In 9th grade, I was in another school and once again in the dropout track. They apparently didn't get the message from the previous school that my grades didn't really reflect anything. I snuck a form from the counselor's office and took the ACT for the heck of it and qualified for college scholarships. Eventually, I did go to college and graduated with a low end GPA (refused to do homework and was usually penalized for it even though I usually had the highest test average). After I escaped the education system, my career has been a completely different story. I didn't miss a single day of work for the first 17 years, averaged around 85 hours a week, and have now led 4 different 1.5 million line level coding efforts, all to successful completion on time and on budget.
My point is somewhere along the lines that I am a very highly rated employee, but a lousy student who almost failed out because the system was more about conformance then excellence. Furthermore, as a researcher, I probably would have made huge advances in whatever industry I went into (I used to go into Calculus tests "cold", having skipped all the classes and kept my books closed just to create a challenge), but the education system has destroyed the research system by promoting a conformant kind of thinking and favoring those who can memorize and kiss up. And those who think that way rarely even understand people like me, much less show any interest in working with them. I'm a relic of a bygone era.
There really aren't too many jobs left that haven't to some degree been offshored. Even the "consumer" position is well on its way with many companies trying hard to penetrate what will soon be the ultimate consumer market, China. They are up to 70 million low middle-class type consumers already and are projected to pass the US in consumption around 15 years from now.
Essentially, I think we've lost the game. It is time to figure out why we lost and see if we can't rebuild. Personally, I believe it is because we commoditized education. By turning our education system into a mass production system aimed mostly toward rote learning of technical skills and largely suppressing the thinking and critical problem solving side of education, we created something that isn't special and is easy to copy. Just send your people over and have at least some of them come back with the knowledge and the textbooks and in a few decades, you can steal almost everything we have. In essence, we have destroyed the diversity and concentrated the methods used within the system. Thus, what was a wonderfully diverse thing that couldn't be copied, became a defined system that can.
My answer will never happen without some major upheaval. I would want the system to be transformed back to one that focuses on the individual and targets the studies towards expanding that individual's potential in whatever fashion is appropriate to their inate capabilities and desires in life. Instead of imposing a template of what each and every person should learn and become, encourage and develop individuality not in social beliefs, but in knowledge and skills. Build craftsmen, not robots.
The idea that all people are just as suited for testing drugs is very incorrect. For a drug trial to truly translate to an American population, it would have to be performed on a population with roughly the same ethnic mix and environment. It is not at all unusual for drugs and poisons to effect various populations differently.
An example of this is PCBs. The original tests on PCBs back in the 50s and 60s were performed on an Indian (as in from India) population. They found a fairly high risk of cancer and that is why we started working to reduce and eventually nearly eliminate PCB usage in America. Interestingly, later tests on other ethnic groups found that ethnic groups of European and African descendency demonstrated virtually no cancer response to PCBs. Indians were the worst with other Oriental groups showing decreased, but still present cancer responses. The cancer response amongst the Japanese was the least of the Oriental groups, though still present. This in no way says that we shouldn't have reduced our usage of PCBs since there are people of Oriental descendency in our society, but it does demonstrate that medical tests do not always translate even at a gross level from one group to another. If we had never tested PCBs on people of Oriental origin, we wouldn't have banned them.
In many ways, there is a more disconcerting flip side to this that has been largely ignored by the so-called "medical science" (I put that in quotes because they ignore so many factors, it is hard to say that they are a legitimate science). The flip side is that because we ignore ethnic origin and many "how they live their life" type factors of the people involved in tests and we don't work hard to identify the factors that cause failure in a drug for the typically small percentage that do have adverse effects with many otherwise beneficial drugs, we are very likely missing out on many drugs that might be very beneficial. Biology is not blind to these factors and we shouldn't be either if we truly want to call it or make it a science.
The genetic sciences are probably the answer. Eventually, we should see a process evolve of prescribing drugs according to genetic tests that determine precisely how a particular individual will respond. At that point in time, they can hide the ethnic factor by talking about the gene that interferes with the test instead of the ethnic groups that typically have that gene.
But Apple's music service is working hard to be one according to Steve's own words. He's first, so far out in front that second doesn't matter, and willing to use his size advantage to keep others out of the game. That's a monopoly in the making.
they'd be out $25 billion or so, not just a measly few 100 million. How is it that Apple, Oracle, and others all get away with in your face crap like this (half the people above laughed at Real for it) and Microsoft catches crap for largely behind the scenes and at least publicly polite arm pulling? Heck, if you're nice to them, they'll even buy you out on their way to smushing you. Apple is the epitomy of what happens when you don't open up your business. Microsoft didn't take it, Apple gave it up or maybe even actively threw it away. Bill Gates didn't make Microsoft, Apple did. So why why why do people actually like Apple?
than the others I've seen here is that, since it is localized instead of distributed, getting to the point of injecting signals into this cache and thus effecting one's view of immediate reality may be much easier than thought before. Say, 30-40 years away instead of over 100.
Actually though, I'm not sure why they would have thought this was spread about. Neural pathways are very slow in general. It seems like localization of highly related data such as the components of an image would be necessary due to that fact alone.
As any southerner can tell you, the yank's ideas about when a war has been won are pretty screwed up. We killed twice as many of them as we lost and they still ain't welcome. They think its over, but we'll send those carpetbaggers home yet.
Probably over half of the programs that I run on my Windows machines are GNU or open source programs (Perl, Python, PHP, MySQL, GIMP, grep, awk, sed, and even things like Bash). There are very few major GNU/Linux programs that don't run fine under windows these days either because they were written to be portable in the first place or because CYGWIN does a pretty decent job of emulating the unix libraries.
You seem to be confused. I have personally programmed in C#, VB, Perl, and J# under the DotNet environment. Many more languages are available. I have only programmed in Java and Ada under the Java environment and don't know that the Ada front end is still around.
DotNet, by providing a strong language independent platform for all syntaxes to be built on opens the door for me to use exactly the right syntax for the problem at hand at a fine grained level and have the classes produced in solving each problem all contribute to a single large scale program. Java can't (or more accurately, won't) touch that.
You may be thinking that all syntaxes become equal under DotNet, but I haven't found that to be the case. It is still vastly easier, for example, to utilize regular expressions from Perl than from C#. So, C# is not even close to threatening Perl for the text processing applications that Perl shines on.
Of course, everyone here probably recognizes the ulterior motive of this design. DotNet isn't a language and it isn't a development studio. It is plain and simply the new windows API that will finally allow Win32 to be replaced. When Longhorn comes around, the underlying windows calls will be reduced from over 56,000 to under 8,000. Those 8,000 remaining calls will be geared to very closely match the needs of the DotNet runtime. The Win32 compatibility will be supplied via a conversion layer. So, even if Mono succeeds, they will only end up expanding a market for software that will run best on a Microsoft OS because the OS was designed from the ground up to run it.
.Net obsoletes the syntax argument by forcing all syntaxes to comply with the platform. Java is all about syntax. From that perspective, which after years of hearing stupid religious arguments about syntax, .Net blows Java to !@#$ and back.
Neither offers anything worth watching, with the possible exception of the sci fi channel which I wish would switch to the Internet. Its getting harder and harder to justify paying for TV.
The problem is that one man's simple includes a bluetooth feature and another man's simple includes 802.11b, and another man's simple... The fact is that it is far cheaper to market and distribute one device that does everything than a bunch of variations on "simple". Production cost is practically irrelevant these days, but part of the reason it is practically irrelevant is the economy of mass. Divide that mass into 10 different ideas of "simple" and suddenly production will bite you too.
I know many people in the field who started off in other fields and trained themselves to write software. These people tend to be amongst the best and most successful in the software field, frequently leveraging the skills of their original field to create unique value.
IMO, the technical aspect of how to create software is something that isn't complex enough to warrant a degree. Rather, it should be a required part of every other type of degree just like English composition.
My degree, Computer Engineering, was somewhat like this because I took every one of the normal computer science courses and almost every electronics course that an Electrical Engineer would take (2 short) and I did that in a standard 4 year program. In general, the electronics courses were vastly more difficult than the software courses. So, I see my education as being an electronics education that I improved by taking a lot of software composition courses. Its actually disturbing that the more simplistic field is where I make my money.
Your true success in the field won't depend very much on the education you receive in those technical aspects. The talent of creating good software architectures is one that really can't be taught. You either have the mental ability to refactor abstract processes and resist paradigm traps at will until you've reached a near optimum solution or you don't.
The chances that you have those talents aren't necessarily higher because you've succeeded in the medical field. In fact, success in medicine may indicate a lower level of creativity. Due to lawsuits and insurance issues, medical practitioners aren't allowed to be very creative in either of their primary jobs of diagnosing or treating. Medical education has adjusted to that reality over the last century and selects more for ability to memorize than good instincts or creativity.
If I were you, I'd examine myself and the way I think before taking this path. Some good indicators might be in your hobby areas. Do you or could you see yourself working with creative hobbies such as furniture making, painting, hotrods, playing an instrument, etc? If so, do you see yourself as someone who would just follow existing plans or someone who does it their own way? When you do things your way, do they usually work out better or worse than if you had followed the plans?
without military involvement, there would be no space program. And that's not just in the past. If the military backed their expertise and funds out of NASA today, NASA would quickly collapse. The military is still developing many technologies that are benefiting the research and development efforts at NASA. We just don't hear about it explicitly.
a wife translator :o)
You've identified the problem well, but I think that getting to the root of the problem is the issue. The root of the problem is that we commoditized education. In an effort to increase the numbers graduating, we turned the mass of our universities into glorified tech schools where students memorize instead of think. So, we knocked down the 10% of our society who were able to think in trade for making 40% able to repeat.
Their are three big problems with that. The first is that once a few from some third world country come to our country and learn how to repeat and take the books back with them, they can set up a university that is just as effective because the universities of the masses are no longer dependent on great minds that can't be copied. The second is that we're not training as many of the great minds to truly think. And the third is that, in order to be able to teach a more average mind, we had to specialize our educational process so much that we've almost eliminated cross discipline feeding with the exception that computing is still feeding across many disciplines because they all need to compute (you might gather from this that offshoring other disciplines will in fact be easier than offshoring computing,,, and I think that to be the case).
The result is that our technological lead has been greatly cut and will likely disappear in many vital areas. Essentially, we've commoditized our very selves.
Can we undo it? Maybe, but I doubt it. I've been noting a steady drop in the ability of new college graduates to "architect" since the late '80s. This has been going on for quite some time. We couldn't turn back the higher education system we have now. There would be too much general public backlash. For the last 15-20 years, the public has "benefited" and become accustomed to the much higher passing rate and the change from it being the student's responsibility to learn to it being the teacher's responsibility to indoctrinate whether or not the student even tries. I think what we'd have to do is create a "new" class of university that refuses to march to the current drumbeat from day one, not just as a token effort in PHD level courses. Their would need to be new degrees and a new certification system too so that the graduates of these universities would be clearly distinguished from the assembly line produced masses. And it would have to be developed in isolation from the current education elite so that they don't again poison it with mass education methodologies.
Will the commodotizing of "educated" people work for the world? No. For great advances to continue to occur at pace, there has to be large intense concentrations of intermixing, cross disciplined, thinking people, concentrations the size of the United States. These islands of narrowly focused groups are not showing themselves to be able to make the grand breakthroughs, only to perform the process they've been taught. Cranking out the same old same old more and more efficiently (these people do incrementally improve their processes, they just can't make paradigm leaps very well) is not advancement when looked at from the point of view of its effect on society. Rather, its a recipe for mass unemployment.
A typical legal strategy for a battle like this is for the side in SCO's position to tackle a bunch of little guys first to build up precedents without actually having to prove their case against an oponent equipped with a like legal force. IBM and Intel are simply serving notice to SCO that that isn't going to fly here. They will put on their defense wherever SCO goes instead of waiting for SCO to come to them.