Well, the fact that an economic solution exists doesn't keep governments from shooting themselves in the foot. If the farms had lots of money and there were a free market, then the farms would just buy lots of water, and there would be plenty of stuff growing.
Now, if the local government dictates that water shall remain cheap, but you're not allowed to buy it if you are a farm, then you've basically created a command economy with all the efficiency that brings...
You mean the way Android does it? By listing the permissions the application has asked for when you install it.
The android solution is pretty lousy. If you want to use Facebook, then you have to use their app. So, Android just tells you how much they're raping you before they go ahead and do it. If you want to be out of touch you always have that option.
The solution is to let users opt out of individual permissions, and for it not to be possible for an app to detect that this is happening. The only effective solution I've seen for this is LBE Privacy Guard. Cyanogenmod grudingly added a similar feature, but it causes apps to crash (probably because they generate errors instead of silently returning dummy data).
Well, per the story you linked, the final call had already been given for the flight, and then the final call for anybody who wished to be screened to present themselves. She wasn't at the security checkpoint in time, and they sent the female worker home. That didn't seem unreasonable - if they didn't have any future flights to check security on, then there was no need to operate a checkpoint. The fact that somebody showed up after the final boarding call doesn't obligate security to let her through. The lesson is that if your ticket says to be at the gate before 1:30, then you shouldn't arrive at the checkpoint at 1:33 - try leaving ten minutes earlier.
I'd have more sympathy if the reason for her delay was poor connection scheduling.
Allowing people to build huge databases of devices with unique IDs is not a good idea. This is just CPU ID all over again. It takes control over a user's privacy away from the user.
I'm fine with an API that assigns an app a unique ID on a particular phone, and which gives the user the ability to reset it to a new unique ID at any time, or force it to be a value of their own choosing. Oh, and two apps on the same phone get different IDs, and if you uninstall/reinstall the ID changes again. That makes the unique ID more like a session cookie, which I can see as having value for network-enabled apps.
Yup - I've been advocating the same thing. LBE Privacy Guard is the closest I've seen to it in implementation - I assume it actually works.
This was proposed as a feature for Cyanogenmod and shot down. CM now has the ability to revoke individual permissions, but it tends to lead to lots of force-close issues. Most likely they're just sending errors to applications, and not simply lying to them (which is less likely to cause a force-close - app designers already have to handle the case where a user has one contact named John Smith and they never leave Topeka with an IMEI of 12345678). When the app force closes CM tells the user it is their fault for revoking permissions and offers to let them unrevoke them.
Android puts far too much control in the hands of app developers. It is like Windows 3.1 - it works great until some app decides to misbehave. Users, and not app designers, should be the final word in whether an app can run a service all day, or use the GPS vs the network, or transmit x GB of data per day, or whatever. And that final word shouldn't simply be to use or not to use - that is a race for the bottom.
That makes sense. People build farms where stuff grows well on its own. Nobody picks a spot in the middle of Nevada and says, hmm, how can I engineer a farm here...
Since the biggest capital item in any farm is its land, farms also tend to be built in unpopulated areas. So, the rain that falls on them isn't really useful for any purpose other than farming unless you want to build 500 mile aqueducts.
Won't economics just solve this problem? If food becomes scarce then its price will rise. If its price rises, then farmers will get more money. If farmers get more money they'll be willing to pay for more expensive water. If demand on water goes up its price will rise. As the price of water rises, the farmers selling expensive food will keep buying it, and people taking expensive long showers will take shorter ones. If water prices rise to 50 cents a gallon then voters will scream and politicians will build more water supply projects.
By all means enforce food safety standards on imported foods, including inspections of where they are processed. Countries routinely inspect production of goods outside their borders - companies that don't comply aren't allowed to export their goods.
Usually grey-water is partially treated sewage - it doesn't meet drinking standards but it doesn't contain salt/etc that would kill plants.
Israel is the size of New Jersey - no farm is more than 50 miles from a city most likely.
In the US much of the agriculture happens in flyover country. These areas probably don't have that much sewage. Sure, they have it, but you need a LOT of water to irrigate a field.
Now, runoff/etc with less treatment could be an option. I wouldn't be surprised if farms already try to make better use of this - for no other reason than to lower their water bills.
However, is there some kind of water shortage problem that we actually need to resolve? Unless we plan to pipeline water from Kansas to Boston I doubt that use of water in the one area has much effect on availability of water in the other.
Yup, and if you want to have more than 15 GUI elements on screen at one time you get a lot farther with a mouse or a pen than your fat fingers.
Tablets are great for consuming stuff (media, email, etc). They're great for professionals who primarily consume data (managers, especially). However, if you're creating all that data that everybody else is consuming, they're pretty lousy most of the time.
... stop telling me how I should run my computer by trying to lock me in to their "vision."
Who is doing that? apt still works. Use a different desktop. Stop telling canonical I shouldn't be able to use their vision because YOU don't like it.
So, that's basically the whole point of the article. The whole environment will be a package deal, and you want some aspect of what is in the package you have to accept the whole thing. If you like Canonical's support, then you're going to be using Unity, period. If you like how systemd manages cgroups for services, then you're going to end up running Gnome. Everybody is pursuing vertical integration, which means that you can't swap out components easily. This is in contrast to current distros where even if there is unity there is still gnome-classic, and gnome still works with a classical sysvinit, and so on.
The trend is towards everything becoming like Android - the whole userspace, APIs, etc are vertically integrated to the point where apps written for "linux" don't run on Android. The only thing the various distros/environments will end up sharing will be the kernel, which isn't much.
You do realize that in order to allow a drug to be freely prescribed by doctors it needs to have undergone clinical trials, right? These trials usually cost about $150M (by the time you end up going through 5 drugs that didn't work out to get to the one that did). I've yet to see the government really fund these to completion - if they did then I'll be the first to agree that they shouldn't give away the patent rights.
Oh, and once on the market there is always the risk that it will turn out to cause heart attacks or whatever, and result in a $5B lawsuit.
The drug industry certainly needs reform, but it isn't because they're handed drugs ready-to-go by the government and then they just make loads of money selling them for $5/pill. The first reform I'd propose would be to have the government actually perform some end-to-end development and license the resulting drugs freely. Those would be very cheap innovative drugs, and would drive down the prices of competing drugs as well. We could then evaluate how well that model works and either expand it or abandon it, still having the status quo to fall back upon. You don't need to pass any fancy legislation to do it either - you just need to give the NIH a big pile of money and a mission.
Yup. We're getting to a point where to run a popular app you will need to run some crazy vertically-integrated environment devoid of choices. Want to run Gnome? Well, guess what, you're going to run systemd too. Want to run Firefox, well, there's an OS for that. Like Ubuntu's package selection? That's great - hope you like Unity.
I run Gentoo because it is desktop-environment-neutral and you can swap out just about anything (including linux - you can run Gentoo on FreeBSD if you want to - or even on Windows, OSX, or a number of Unix platforms). That might get harder to support if everybody starts breaking layers left and right so that you can't install anything without having constraints on the whole OS.
Oh, I don't think that smartphones are going to collapse in sales - they'll just stop growing. Just like PCs. That didn't cause Microsoft to collapse, but it did cause them to lose the huge multiples they previously enjoyed. The same is likely to happen to Apple. If people only replace one smartphone with another, then the market is not longer growing, unless they start replacing them more often.
Companies are only a safe bet at reasonable prices. A $100 bar of gold is a very safe bet. A $100M bar of gold the same size is not.
Now, AAPL is only trading at 14x earnings, so it isn't like it is going to completely collapse. It just won't keep going up.
Well, you can commission an orchestra to make a performance for you if you want. That could be the local high school depending on how difficult the work is. Since the music itself isn't exclusive it is easy to shop around. Also, since this is no-doubt going over some squaky PA system you could just dig up any record from before 1920 if you wanted to.
While I agree that those tools are workarounds, the big issue is that low-latency and anonymity are almost impossible to achieve in tandem. When latency is low enough it becomes MUCH easier to follow packets around, even if they are encrypted. To get something really anonymous you need a solution like mixmaster, which took days to deliver short email messages depending on settings - chopping up messages, pooling them, and reassembling them meant that it was pretty-much impossible to follow them around.
Tor is only useful for browsing the web at large if you have outproxies, and those are under potential attack by schemes like this.
Privacy networks are really best suited for completely in-network traffic (onion sites in tor, i2p, freenet, etc). The problem is that since nobody seems to care about privacy much you aren't browsing the internet, but something resembling compuserve in 1983.
How many politicians are pulled over every month in sobriety checkpoints? I'm sure the answer is a significant number - half of congress would probably be in prison if it led to prosecution. Online surveillance by the government isn't going to cause problems for politicians.
For how long can the smartphone market grow the way it is? At this point in the US it seems like everybody and their 2-year-old already has a cell phone, and I think the latest news is that about half of those are already smartphones. Unless people start buying 3 smartphones apiece I'd say the US market is nearing saturation. I'm sure Europe looks similar. Now, I'm sure there are growth opportunities in places like China and Africa, but I don't see people paying $300 plus a contract to get the latest Apple fashion there.
Other markets are of course a possibility, but those are a possibility for any company. Apple has the brand recognition that tends to get people to take notice, but I don't think they've had any product that has approached the iPhone, iTab, and iPod (which when you think of it are nearly the same product already). People don't seem to run out and buy Apple TVs just because they like their iPod...
Next time you need surgery, ask how much it would cost if you paid up front with cash. They'll drop thousands to avoid dealing with insurance.
They'll drop thousands off of a price that nobody actually pays. You'll probably pay more in cash than any insurance company would ever pay.
I've paid for some serious surgery bills. They usually read like this: Hospital bill - $100k. Insurance pays $9k, patient pays $1k, rest is written off.
If you wheel and deal on your own chances are the hospital will give you a "great deal" and you'll just pay $20k out of pocket, and then tell your friends about how much money everybody would save if there were no insurance.
My local blood testing lab has just started quoting an "estimated patient financial responsibility" and asking you if you want to pay that by credit card or check. The correct answer is "just bill me" - chances are that $100 that they'd bill you for up-front will turn into $27 paid by insurance and $3 paid by you. If you pay up-front good luck trying to get the other $97 back.
If I were running for president my first proposed reform (that I can't see ANYBODY that isn't a company arguing with) would be to require every healthcare provider to publish a catalog (which anybody can aggregate) listing their prices for every service/ICD/etc, and that EVERYBODY whether an individual or a company pays that same price. Overnight people without insurance gets charged a fair rate, and anybody looking for discretionary care can find the best price. US News can also publish their annual best hospital deals article or whatever. If you have three hospitals in your area you can keep track of who has the overall best rates so that you know which one to tell your ambulance driver to take you to. Oh, that wouldn't be the last reform I'd try to enact, but it is a complete no-brainer.
Pen-based windows tablets are already designed for the healthcare industry (cleanable, barcode scanning, impact-resistant, etc). We use some at work for accessing applications in labs where contamination issues are a concern.
I'd say that touchscreen would beat a pen for just presenting videos. However, for getting work done I'm not convinced that this is the case. Pens aren't as nice as keyboards but they're pretty close to a mouse which means your existing UIs work reasonably well and you don't have to write all new tablet-oriented apps. You can still customize those parts of your workflow that are high-volume on tablets (bigger buttons, etc). If "work" is nothing more than reading emails and viewing powerpoint slides (ie you're a senior manager) then a touchscreen-based tablet is right up your alley, which is why every senior executive out there is wondering why their favorite tablet hasn't taken over their company yet.
Yup. A customized version of chrome OS might be a good solution. Just have it auto-login as a guest and whitelist sites by IP. A hardened linux might also be a good choice - as somebody else suggested you don't need a window manager / desktop environment to run a browser.
Halflife and its sequels were essentially linear as well. However, the excellent storytelling and variety of gameplay made them classics. I still remember the boss fight with the big tentacle monster in the blast furnace as one of the most memorable ones I've seen. You didn't just run around shooting the thing - you had to use your brain.
I appreciate the amount of back-story as well. For an "FPS" it has elements that really would qualify as decent sci-fi, and the codex is impressive.
It tells the story without the need for 20-minute cut scenes. While I did like Metal Gear Solid back in the day at a few points I wondered if I should go to the kitchen to make some popcorn - especially towards the end.
Can't argue with most of your points, although I think you misjudge Pharma on your first point. It isn't that they're not serious about cutting costs (they clearly have incentive to do so). The problem is that having 3rd parties run the trials isn't entirely in their interest. They like running the trials, since it gives them a lot more control over the outcome (and they probably wouldn't trust a 3rd party anyway). They couldn't bury results they didn't like so easily and so on with 3rd parties running the trials. Having a 3rd party run the trials benefits the general public, which is why I advocate it. Plus, if imposed by government it would affect everybody equally and be fair. To really be effective the 3rd party would probably need to employ the doctors as well. That would work really well in a country that already has an NHS-like system.
I think that socialized medicine is inevitable. The problem is private insurance only works in the absence of knowledge. It is only a matter of time before you can accurately predict somebody's approximate healthcare costs at birth. Once that happens the insurance industry collapses unless it just becomes another word for a socialized system. Either insurance companies will refuse to insure people who are likely to be sick, or people who are likely to be healthy won't buy insurance. Either way the insurance companies go out of business. There is no way to legislate away a problem like that unless you force everybody to buy insurance, and that is just taxation under a different name and it basically is socialism.
I've seen similar things on a FOSS development mailing list. People who program computers by defining algorithms try to program people by doing the same thing. The result is:
1. Millions of crazy rules that are obvious. 2. Nobody can keep track of the rules and as a result they get broken a lot leading to flames. 3. Tons of effort gets diverted towards rule-maintenance and enforcing relatively unimportant rules. 4. When somebody does something dumb people flock to their defense if it didn't violate the rules.
The same problem creeps into organizations that are run by lawyers - the legal system is like one big computer that tries to churn through rules.
Small innovative companies survive by having strong founders who aren't afraid to ignore the rules. If somebody working for them messes up they get called for it or booted - and since they probably don't have deep pockets yet they can often get away with it.
So, if you wonder why MS has a rule about not using 4-letter-words in UI elements, chances are some idiot stuck one in, and then when their boss tried to ream them out for it they quoted the rulebook and pointed out that they didn't violate anything. So, now we have a rule.
No matter how much you idiot-proof a system, somebody will design a better idiot...
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the fact that an economic solution exists doesn't keep governments from shooting themselves in the foot. If the farms had lots of money and there were a free market, then the farms would just buy lots of water, and there would be plenty of stuff growing.
Now, if the local government dictates that water shall remain cheap, but you're not allowed to buy it if you are a farm, then you've basically created a command economy with all the efficiency that brings...
You mean the way Android does it? By listing the permissions the application has asked for when you install it.
The android solution is pretty lousy. If you want to use Facebook, then you have to use their app. So, Android just tells you how much they're raping you before they go ahead and do it. If you want to be out of touch you always have that option.
The solution is to let users opt out of individual permissions, and for it not to be possible for an app to detect that this is happening. The only effective solution I've seen for this is LBE Privacy Guard. Cyanogenmod grudingly added a similar feature, but it causes apps to crash (probably because they generate errors instead of silently returning dummy data).
Well, per the story you linked, the final call had already been given for the flight, and then the final call for anybody who wished to be screened to present themselves. She wasn't at the security checkpoint in time, and they sent the female worker home. That didn't seem unreasonable - if they didn't have any future flights to check security on, then there was no need to operate a checkpoint. The fact that somebody showed up after the final boarding call doesn't obligate security to let her through. The lesson is that if your ticket says to be at the gate before 1:30, then you shouldn't arrive at the checkpoint at 1:33 - try leaving ten minutes earlier.
I'd have more sympathy if the reason for her delay was poor connection scheduling.
Allowing people to build huge databases of devices with unique IDs is not a good idea. This is just CPU ID all over again. It takes control over a user's privacy away from the user.
I'm fine with an API that assigns an app a unique ID on a particular phone, and which gives the user the ability to reset it to a new unique ID at any time, or force it to be a value of their own choosing. Oh, and two apps on the same phone get different IDs, and if you uninstall/reinstall the ID changes again. That makes the unique ID more like a session cookie, which I can see as having value for network-enabled apps.
Yup - I've been advocating the same thing. LBE Privacy Guard is the closest I've seen to it in implementation - I assume it actually works.
This was proposed as a feature for Cyanogenmod and shot down. CM now has the ability to revoke individual permissions, but it tends to lead to lots of force-close issues. Most likely they're just sending errors to applications, and not simply lying to them (which is less likely to cause a force-close - app designers already have to handle the case where a user has one contact named John Smith and they never leave Topeka with an IMEI of 12345678). When the app force closes CM tells the user it is their fault for revoking permissions and offers to let them unrevoke them.
Android puts far too much control in the hands of app developers. It is like Windows 3.1 - it works great until some app decides to misbehave. Users, and not app designers, should be the final word in whether an app can run a service all day, or use the GPS vs the network, or transmit x GB of data per day, or whatever. And that final word shouldn't simply be to use or not to use - that is a race for the bottom.
That makes sense. People build farms where stuff grows well on its own. Nobody picks a spot in the middle of Nevada and says, hmm, how can I engineer a farm here...
Since the biggest capital item in any farm is its land, farms also tend to be built in unpopulated areas. So, the rain that falls on them isn't really useful for any purpose other than farming unless you want to build 500 mile aqueducts.
Won't economics just solve this problem? If food becomes scarce then its price will rise. If its price rises, then farmers will get more money. If farmers get more money they'll be willing to pay for more expensive water. If demand on water goes up its price will rise. As the price of water rises, the farmers selling expensive food will keep buying it, and people taking expensive long showers will take shorter ones. If water prices rise to 50 cents a gallon then voters will scream and politicians will build more water supply projects.
By all means enforce food safety standards on imported foods, including inspections of where they are processed. Countries routinely inspect production of goods outside their borders - companies that don't comply aren't allowed to export their goods.
Usually grey-water is partially treated sewage - it doesn't meet drinking standards but it doesn't contain salt/etc that would kill plants.
Israel is the size of New Jersey - no farm is more than 50 miles from a city most likely.
In the US much of the agriculture happens in flyover country. These areas probably don't have that much sewage. Sure, they have it, but you need a LOT of water to irrigate a field.
Now, runoff/etc with less treatment could be an option. I wouldn't be surprised if farms already try to make better use of this - for no other reason than to lower their water bills.
However, is there some kind of water shortage problem that we actually need to resolve? Unless we plan to pipeline water from Kansas to Boston I doubt that use of water in the one area has much effect on availability of water in the other.
Yup, and if you want to have more than 15 GUI elements on screen at one time you get a lot farther with a mouse or a pen than your fat fingers.
Tablets are great for consuming stuff (media, email, etc). They're great for professionals who primarily consume data (managers, especially). However, if you're creating all that data that everybody else is consuming, they're pretty lousy most of the time.
Who is doing that? apt still works. Use a different desktop. Stop telling canonical I shouldn't be able to use their vision because YOU don't like it.
So, that's basically the whole point of the article. The whole environment will be a package deal, and you want some aspect of what is in the package you have to accept the whole thing. If you like Canonical's support, then you're going to be using Unity, period. If you like how systemd manages cgroups for services, then you're going to end up running Gnome. Everybody is pursuing vertical integration, which means that you can't swap out components easily. This is in contrast to current distros where even if there is unity there is still gnome-classic, and gnome still works with a classical sysvinit, and so on.
The trend is towards everything becoming like Android - the whole userspace, APIs, etc are vertically integrated to the point where apps written for "linux" don't run on Android. The only thing the various distros/environments will end up sharing will be the kernel, which isn't much.
You do realize that in order to allow a drug to be freely prescribed by doctors it needs to have undergone clinical trials, right? These trials usually cost about $150M (by the time you end up going through 5 drugs that didn't work out to get to the one that did). I've yet to see the government really fund these to completion - if they did then I'll be the first to agree that they shouldn't give away the patent rights.
Oh, and once on the market there is always the risk that it will turn out to cause heart attacks or whatever, and result in a $5B lawsuit.
The drug industry certainly needs reform, but it isn't because they're handed drugs ready-to-go by the government and then they just make loads of money selling them for $5/pill. The first reform I'd propose would be to have the government actually perform some end-to-end development and license the resulting drugs freely. Those would be very cheap innovative drugs, and would drive down the prices of competing drugs as well. We could then evaluate how well that model works and either expand it or abandon it, still having the status quo to fall back upon. You don't need to pass any fancy legislation to do it either - you just need to give the NIH a big pile of money and a mission.
Yup. We're getting to a point where to run a popular app you will need to run some crazy vertically-integrated environment devoid of choices. Want to run Gnome? Well, guess what, you're going to run systemd too. Want to run Firefox, well, there's an OS for that. Like Ubuntu's package selection? That's great - hope you like Unity.
I run Gentoo because it is desktop-environment-neutral and you can swap out just about anything (including linux - you can run Gentoo on FreeBSD if you want to - or even on Windows, OSX, or a number of Unix platforms). That might get harder to support if everybody starts breaking layers left and right so that you can't install anything without having constraints on the whole OS.
Oh, I don't think that smartphones are going to collapse in sales - they'll just stop growing. Just like PCs. That didn't cause Microsoft to collapse, but it did cause them to lose the huge multiples they previously enjoyed. The same is likely to happen to Apple. If people only replace one smartphone with another, then the market is not longer growing, unless they start replacing them more often.
Companies are only a safe bet at reasonable prices. A $100 bar of gold is a very safe bet. A $100M bar of gold the same size is not.
Now, AAPL is only trading at 14x earnings, so it isn't like it is going to completely collapse. It just won't keep going up.
Well, you can commission an orchestra to make a performance for you if you want. That could be the local high school depending on how difficult the work is. Since the music itself isn't exclusive it is easy to shop around. Also, since this is no-doubt going over some squaky PA system you could just dig up any record from before 1920 if you wanted to.
While I agree that those tools are workarounds, the big issue is that low-latency and anonymity are almost impossible to achieve in tandem. When latency is low enough it becomes MUCH easier to follow packets around, even if they are encrypted. To get something really anonymous you need a solution like mixmaster, which took days to deliver short email messages depending on settings - chopping up messages, pooling them, and reassembling them meant that it was pretty-much impossible to follow them around.
Tor is only useful for browsing the web at large if you have outproxies, and those are under potential attack by schemes like this.
Privacy networks are really best suited for completely in-network traffic (onion sites in tor, i2p, freenet, etc). The problem is that since nobody seems to care about privacy much you aren't browsing the internet, but something resembling compuserve in 1983.
How many politicians are pulled over every month in sobriety checkpoints? I'm sure the answer is a significant number - half of congress would probably be in prison if it led to prosecution. Online surveillance by the government isn't going to cause problems for politicians.
For how long can the smartphone market grow the way it is? At this point in the US it seems like everybody and their 2-year-old already has a cell phone, and I think the latest news is that about half of those are already smartphones. Unless people start buying 3 smartphones apiece I'd say the US market is nearing saturation. I'm sure Europe looks similar. Now, I'm sure there are growth opportunities in places like China and Africa, but I don't see people paying $300 plus a contract to get the latest Apple fashion there.
Other markets are of course a possibility, but those are a possibility for any company. Apple has the brand recognition that tends to get people to take notice, but I don't think they've had any product that has approached the iPhone, iTab, and iPod (which when you think of it are nearly the same product already). People don't seem to run out and buy Apple TVs just because they like their iPod...
Next time you need surgery, ask how much it would cost if you paid up front with cash. They'll drop thousands to avoid dealing with insurance.
They'll drop thousands off of a price that nobody actually pays. You'll probably pay more in cash than any insurance company would ever pay.
I've paid for some serious surgery bills. They usually read like this:
Hospital bill - $100k. Insurance pays $9k, patient pays $1k, rest is written off.
If you wheel and deal on your own chances are the hospital will give you a "great deal" and you'll just pay $20k out of pocket, and then tell your friends about how much money everybody would save if there were no insurance.
My local blood testing lab has just started quoting an "estimated patient financial responsibility" and asking you if you want to pay that by credit card or check. The correct answer is "just bill me" - chances are that $100 that they'd bill you for up-front will turn into $27 paid by insurance and $3 paid by you. If you pay up-front good luck trying to get the other $97 back.
If I were running for president my first proposed reform (that I can't see ANYBODY that isn't a company arguing with) would be to require every healthcare provider to publish a catalog (which anybody can aggregate) listing their prices for every service/ICD/etc, and that EVERYBODY whether an individual or a company pays that same price. Overnight people without insurance gets charged a fair rate, and anybody looking for discretionary care can find the best price. US News can also publish their annual best hospital deals article or whatever. If you have three hospitals in your area you can keep track of who has the overall best rates so that you know which one to tell your ambulance driver to take you to. Oh, that wouldn't be the last reform I'd try to enact, but it is a complete no-brainer.
Pen-based windows tablets are already designed for the healthcare industry (cleanable, barcode scanning, impact-resistant, etc). We use some at work for accessing applications in labs where contamination issues are a concern.
I'd say that touchscreen would beat a pen for just presenting videos. However, for getting work done I'm not convinced that this is the case. Pens aren't as nice as keyboards but they're pretty close to a mouse which means your existing UIs work reasonably well and you don't have to write all new tablet-oriented apps. You can still customize those parts of your workflow that are high-volume on tablets (bigger buttons, etc). If "work" is nothing more than reading emails and viewing powerpoint slides (ie you're a senior manager) then a touchscreen-based tablet is right up your alley, which is why every senior executive out there is wondering why their favorite tablet hasn't taken over their company yet.
Yup. A customized version of chrome OS might be a good solution. Just have it auto-login as a guest and whitelist sites by IP. A hardened linux might also be a good choice - as somebody else suggested you don't need a window manager / desktop environment to run a browser.
Halflife and its sequels were essentially linear as well. However, the excellent storytelling and variety of gameplay made them classics. I still remember the boss fight with the big tentacle monster in the blast furnace as one of the most memorable ones I've seen. You didn't just run around shooting the thing - you had to use your brain.
I appreciate the amount of back-story as well. For an "FPS" it has elements that really would qualify as decent sci-fi, and the codex is impressive.
It tells the story without the need for 20-minute cut scenes. While I did like Metal Gear Solid back in the day at a few points I wondered if I should go to the kitchen to make some popcorn - especially towards the end.
True, but just working out the exact position of the probe and Pluto to that level of precision is a challenge.
Can't argue with most of your points, although I think you misjudge Pharma on your first point. It isn't that they're not serious about cutting costs (they clearly have incentive to do so). The problem is that having 3rd parties run the trials isn't entirely in their interest. They like running the trials, since it gives them a lot more control over the outcome (and they probably wouldn't trust a 3rd party anyway). They couldn't bury results they didn't like so easily and so on with 3rd parties running the trials. Having a 3rd party run the trials benefits the general public, which is why I advocate it. Plus, if imposed by government it would affect everybody equally and be fair. To really be effective the 3rd party would probably need to employ the doctors as well. That would work really well in a country that already has an NHS-like system.
I think that socialized medicine is inevitable. The problem is private insurance only works in the absence of knowledge. It is only a matter of time before you can accurately predict somebody's approximate healthcare costs at birth. Once that happens the insurance industry collapses unless it just becomes another word for a socialized system. Either insurance companies will refuse to insure people who are likely to be sick, or people who are likely to be healthy won't buy insurance. Either way the insurance companies go out of business. There is no way to legislate away a problem like that unless you force everybody to buy insurance, and that is just taxation under a different name and it basically is socialism.
I've seen similar things on a FOSS development mailing list. People who program computers by defining algorithms try to program people by doing the same thing. The result is:
1. Millions of crazy rules that are obvious.
2. Nobody can keep track of the rules and as a result they get broken a lot leading to flames.
3. Tons of effort gets diverted towards rule-maintenance and enforcing relatively unimportant rules.
4. When somebody does something dumb people flock to their defense if it didn't violate the rules.
The same problem creeps into organizations that are run by lawyers - the legal system is like one big computer that tries to churn through rules.
Small innovative companies survive by having strong founders who aren't afraid to ignore the rules. If somebody working for them messes up they get called for it or booted - and since they probably don't have deep pockets yet they can often get away with it.
So, if you wonder why MS has a rule about not using 4-letter-words in UI elements, chances are some idiot stuck one in, and then when their boss tried to ream them out for it they quoted the rulebook and pointed out that they didn't violate anything. So, now we have a rule.
No matter how much you idiot-proof a system, somebody will design a better idiot...