My pie-in-the-sky idea is a micromirror array, fed by three-colour lasers, that'll illuminate the eye's pupil with the correct pattern for each eye, with tracking of the pupil locations.
I hope not! Otherwise there goes my ability to anywhere outside without being bombarded with images in front of my face. Pretty soon we'll be selling glasses designed to block TV transmissions...
Ok, I'll agree with you at some level regarding the bailouts (not something I approve of), though in most cases those senior executives still kept the majority of that money.
Uh, another phone on a family plan is like $10 in most cases - or as little as $5 on T-Mo now. That also usually gets you unlimited calling between phones on the plan.
Well, uh, sure, but if the goal is to avoid having to pay a surprise charge of $700 or whatever, how does paying that plus maybe $800 in ETF help me? Sure, I can then switch companies, but the next one will just do the same thing to me some day...
I can't say that I've had this experience. Granted, I didn't threaten to leave, but no doubt if I did they would simply tell me "fine - we'll just lodge that on your credit history and charge you the $200/line ETF while we're at it."
That credit history black mark would cost me even more than the horrible rates they were gouging me for on text usage/etc. What is the cost when you don't qualify for a loan at 6%, but instead qualify at 7%?
I'll do one better - how about we let the consumer pick the max amount? Oh, and the consumer has to have the option of making that any number mentioned in an advertisement (so the service provider pays all the taxes if they neglected to include those in the ad).
I'd like my max to be the amount to be the amount in the ad. I get n minutes per month. I'm fine with them cutting me off mid-call when I hit n+1 (except for 911 calls), but I don't want to pay a dime more than I agreed to.
There is NO reason that we can't have this by law. Heck - they mandated that carriers be able to locate any phone within a few hundred feet for 911 service - why can't they have straightforward billing?
How about when you have a kid on a family line. I want them to have a cell phone. I'd like them to use maybe 30 mins per month. I don't want to pay $70 per line for unlimited plans. What are my options? None, short of prepaid, which is far more expensive per minute.
Sure, when I was happy and single and never traveled I never worried about getting burned. Now, I'm never quite sure when my smartphone might not be configured right and may rack up a $10k bill.
Actually, many carriers offer that option - for a fee.
Having to pay to NOT receive a service that you DON'T want to receive should be banned.
When I sign up for phone service, I should be able to set a limit on my monthly bill. If I consume services adding up to that much, they should block my service/etc, but I should not be able to accrue additional liability unless I call the provider and opt-in, setting a higher allowance for that month.
Uh, pride in a job well done won't get them anywhere. Trust me - pride in quality is no better in the federal government than in any major corporation. In the company I work for we'd still have data centers in every closet in every building and armies of shadow IT if business leaders didn't know that they'd be shown the door if they didn't comply with corporate directives.
Who wants to depend on some external server group to maintain their servers, when instead they could just have their own group doing the work for a mere $500k/yr or whatever. It isn't like the money comes out of their paycheck - in fact, the larger their budget, the more money they have for bonuses, and the higher their own position to justify the spending allowance.
In corporations this is tempered by the fact that if the company doesn't turn a profit then the investors will clean house. Plus, the salaries of the middle managers interfere with the ability of the senior executives to pay themselves bonuses, since the company can't just go to Congress and ask for more money. If a company wants money they have to earn it - no matter how important it is that they get it.
I don't think that people working in industry are any more or less virtuous than those working in government. However, government offers a different set of perverse incentives. Those tend to lead to massive bureaucracy and organizations that seemingly exist only to serve themselves.
Another example of this sort of thing is stopping to let somebody make a turn.
This kind of behavior, though altruistic, can on the whole cause EVERYBODY to lose a lot more time on their commute than was saved by the one person who didn't have to wait quite as long to make a left. Chances are that they'll get stuck in a jam two blocks down the road since somebody 10 cars ahead of them decided to let somebody else make a left.
Or, consider stop signs when people are "nice" and let somebody else go out of turn. The other person will only reluctantly proceed and usually will wait until various waves and nods are exchanged to ensure that they are really being waved on. The politeness slows down all traffic at the intersection, because convention is being violated.
Some systems really do work better when people just follow the rules and stick to the timetables.
I find it interesting that the whole mandatory insurance thing is coming up here - as if it is a payoff to the insurance industry.
It is more a result of the law of unintended consequences. Everybody wants to get rid of bans on pre-existing conditions. However, if you do that, you MUST have mandatory insurance. If you don't then nobody will carry insurance, but they'll sign up from their hospital bed. Insurance company is forced to take them as a customer. Insurers would go bankrupt overnight.
Countries with socialized medicine essentially have mandatory insurance, since people pay for it via taxes. If you don't pay for it that way, then you need to make people pay for it some other way. Or, you need to allow for bans on pre-existing conditions, which is even worse than mandatory insurance since they're used as excuses to ban all kinds of legitimate claims.
I don't really think this is a case of Obama being evil or whatever - it just reflects that healthcare is a lot harder than it looks. You can't have your cake and eat it too...
Uh, when somebody shows up in an ER, they are in a situation not unlike a contingent contract. The doctor treats them, then they send a bill, and the patient may or may not pay it. If they don't pay it, the doctor cannot repossess their stitches or whatever.
It isn't a perfect analogy, but doctors do have lots of risks involved in performing their services. There is also the performance-based threat of liability.
Nowhere in my post did I suggest that designers could use Linux - I only speculated that perhaps Wine would work. If it doesn't work, then it doesn't work.
I took objection to the statement that OSX contains technology not present in Linux. Nowhere has that statement been substantiated in this thread. Just because some vendor writes a piece of software that happens to run on a particular OS doesn't have any bearing on that OS's particular technical merits - only its popularity.
I think it has more to do with the rule of law, as opposed to the rule of morality.
The problem is that nobody can agree on what is morally right/wrong in any particular situation. So, instead we have set up a set of rules that define what is right and wrong, and we can usually determine in a more objective way whether these rules were broken or not.
The problem is that in our quest to have the rules reflect morality they get more and more complex, and so determining if they were violated becomes more and more of a specialized skill. Navigating the rules becomes a game, and we have those who specialize in it.
You could have a court system that required no lawyers at all. Each side would have a set number of hours based on the matter at issue to say or present anything they cared to. A randomly-selected jury (with minimal voir dire if any) would each vote on guilt/liability. If the vote exceeded some threshold (or perhaps we use the lock them into a room until they agree method) then the verdict is issued. There would be no rules of evidence, and no statues of any kind. Basically anybody could do anything that they thought they could convince 12 people that they were in the right regarding. Anybody could bring a charge against anybody else and drag them before 12 people, but of course if they do so frivolously they might find themselves standing before the jury at hand of those they confused.
We'd probably still have lawyers, just as politicians have campaign managers despite there not being any legal requirement for them. Lawyers would be people who are good at making a case for you. No doubt they'd take a chunk of the winnings. Maybe, on the other hand, some jurors would announce in advance that they would intend to vote against anybody who hired a lawyer if the other side did not do so (which would be fine - there are no rules here), and everybody would have to take that into account as well.
Most people would not like such a legal system - it would be VERY unpredictable. Predictability is one of the greatest virtues of the current system, and one of its greatest vices as well. For certain, if you end up in court one way or another I can safely predict that you're going to get screwed...
How exactly is CS5 dependent on OSX for CMYK support - which was the one feature that was mentioned? Clearly it works on Windows as well.
Does CS5 not run on linux because linux fails to provide some OS capability that it needs, or is it just because that it wasn't targeted to run on linux?
Yeah, and in the home consumer world people don't pay their brother or cousin or friend or whoever it is that they get to deworm their computer every six months.
If everybody made their cousin the mechanic give them oil changes every three months then car maintenance would be "free" too.
And just because somebody doesn't reply to the reply to the reply to the original message doesn't mean that they weren't annoyed by having to read all the "me toos..." It should be obvious that in a tree formed of tweets that it is going to be likely that there will be more leaf nodes than internal nodes unless you have really long branches.
Indeed - if somebody posted something on twitter, and 100 people responded to it, 99% of the tweets involved were "ignored" unless somebody responded to each of those 100 tweets, and so on.
I imagine the only way to get the ratio anywhere near 50% would be to write a worm that does meaningless replies to any tweets it finds (including its own and its cousins') and get it to propagate.
You mention that Apple has technologies that linux simply does not have. However, you do not mention what those are.
Certainly you're not suggesting that Adobe's support for CMYK is reliant on some kind of Apple technology or OS framework?
Adobe doesn't make a linux version of most of their products because the demand just isn't there. They only barely support flash on linux, and even then only 32-bit half the time.
You seem to be turning an Adobe vs Inkscape debate into an Apple vs Linux debate. They're really two different things, even if the one platform is often used to run the other software product. I have no idea how good wine support is for recent versions of photoshop/etc but it wouldn't surprise me if it worked at least reasonably well.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, where in law does it say that there can only be four nationwide cell phone network providers?
My pie-in-the-sky idea is a micromirror array, fed by three-colour lasers, that'll illuminate the eye's pupil with the correct pattern for each eye, with tracking of the pupil locations.
I hope not! Otherwise there goes my ability to anywhere outside without being bombarded with images in front of my face. Pretty soon we'll be selling glasses designed to block TV transmissions...
And, where did those laws come from? Once upon a time telecom giants were not so heavily regulated, and it wasn't pretty.
Ok, I'll agree with you at some level regarding the bailouts (not something I approve of), though in most cases those senior executives still kept the majority of that money.
Well, that explains all those companies offering me high-bandwidth internet service then! :)
Uh, another phone on a family plan is like $10 in most cases - or as little as $5 on T-Mo now. That also usually gets you unlimited calling between phones on the plan.
Well, uh, sure, but if the goal is to avoid having to pay a surprise charge of $700 or whatever, how does paying that plus maybe $800 in ETF help me? Sure, I can then switch companies, but the next one will just do the same thing to me some day...
I can't say that I've had this experience. Granted, I didn't threaten to leave, but no doubt if I did they would simply tell me "fine - we'll just lodge that on your credit history and charge you the $200/line ETF while we're at it."
That credit history black mark would cost me even more than the horrible rates they were gouging me for on text usage/etc. What is the cost when you don't qualify for a loan at 6%, but instead qualify at 7%?
I'll do one better - how about we let the consumer pick the max amount? Oh, and the consumer has to have the option of making that any number mentioned in an advertisement (so the service provider pays all the taxes if they neglected to include those in the ad).
I'd like my max to be the amount to be the amount in the ad. I get n minutes per month. I'm fine with them cutting me off mid-call when I hit n+1 (except for 911 calls), but I don't want to pay a dime more than I agreed to.
There is NO reason that we can't have this by law. Heck - they mandated that carriers be able to locate any phone within a few hundred feet for 911 service - why can't they have straightforward billing?
How about when you have a kid on a family line. I want them to have a cell phone. I'd like them to use maybe 30 mins per month. I don't want to pay $70 per line for unlimited plans. What are my options? None, short of prepaid, which is far more expensive per minute.
Sure, when I was happy and single and never traveled I never worried about getting burned. Now, I'm never quite sure when my smartphone might not be configured right and may rack up a $10k bill.
Telecom providers are natural monopolies (or an oligopoly in this case), so regulation is perfectly fine.
Suppose you went to the only doctor in town and they asked you to sign a contract selling your firstborn into slavery, or whatever?
The contract terms are unconscionable, and there is plenty of precedent in law for setting such terms aside.
Actually, many carriers offer that option - for a fee.
Having to pay to NOT receive a service that you DON'T want to receive should be banned.
When I sign up for phone service, I should be able to set a limit on my monthly bill. If I consume services adding up to that much, they should block my service/etc, but I should not be able to accrue additional liability unless I call the provider and opt-in, setting a higher allowance for that month.
Uh, pride in a job well done won't get them anywhere. Trust me - pride in quality is no better in the federal government than in any major corporation. In the company I work for we'd still have data centers in every closet in every building and armies of shadow IT if business leaders didn't know that they'd be shown the door if they didn't comply with corporate directives.
Who wants to depend on some external server group to maintain their servers, when instead they could just have their own group doing the work for a mere $500k/yr or whatever. It isn't like the money comes out of their paycheck - in fact, the larger their budget, the more money they have for bonuses, and the higher their own position to justify the spending allowance.
In corporations this is tempered by the fact that if the company doesn't turn a profit then the investors will clean house. Plus, the salaries of the middle managers interfere with the ability of the senior executives to pay themselves bonuses, since the company can't just go to Congress and ask for more money. If a company wants money they have to earn it - no matter how important it is that they get it.
I don't think that people working in industry are any more or less virtuous than those working in government. However, government offers a different set of perverse incentives. Those tend to lead to massive bureaucracy and organizations that seemingly exist only to serve themselves.
Another example of this sort of thing is stopping to let somebody make a turn.
This kind of behavior, though altruistic, can on the whole cause EVERYBODY to lose a lot more time on their commute than was saved by the one person who didn't have to wait quite as long to make a left. Chances are that they'll get stuck in a jam two blocks down the road since somebody 10 cars ahead of them decided to let somebody else make a left.
Or, consider stop signs when people are "nice" and let somebody else go out of turn. The other person will only reluctantly proceed and usually will wait until various waves and nods are exchanged to ensure that they are really being waved on. The politeness slows down all traffic at the intersection, because convention is being violated.
Some systems really do work better when people just follow the rules and stick to the timetables.
I find it interesting that the whole mandatory insurance thing is coming up here - as if it is a payoff to the insurance industry.
It is more a result of the law of unintended consequences. Everybody wants to get rid of bans on pre-existing conditions. However, if you do that, you MUST have mandatory insurance. If you don't then nobody will carry insurance, but they'll sign up from their hospital bed. Insurance company is forced to take them as a customer. Insurers would go bankrupt overnight.
Countries with socialized medicine essentially have mandatory insurance, since people pay for it via taxes. If you don't pay for it that way, then you need to make people pay for it some other way. Or, you need to allow for bans on pre-existing conditions, which is even worse than mandatory insurance since they're used as excuses to ban all kinds of legitimate claims.
I don't really think this is a case of Obama being evil or whatever - it just reflects that healthcare is a lot harder than it looks. You can't have your cake and eat it too...
Uh, when somebody shows up in an ER, they are in a situation not unlike a contingent contract. The doctor treats them, then they send a bill, and the patient may or may not pay it. If they don't pay it, the doctor cannot repossess their stitches or whatever.
It isn't a perfect analogy, but doctors do have lots of risks involved in performing their services. There is also the performance-based threat of liability.
Nowhere in my post did I suggest that designers could use Linux - I only speculated that perhaps Wine would work. If it doesn't work, then it doesn't work.
I took objection to the statement that OSX contains technology not present in Linux. Nowhere has that statement been substantiated in this thread. Just because some vendor writes a piece of software that happens to run on a particular OS doesn't have any bearing on that OS's particular technical merits - only its popularity.
Err...
s/statue/statue/
s/confused/accused/
I think it has more to do with the rule of law, as opposed to the rule of morality.
The problem is that nobody can agree on what is morally right/wrong in any particular situation. So, instead we have set up a set of rules that define what is right and wrong, and we can usually determine in a more objective way whether these rules were broken or not.
The problem is that in our quest to have the rules reflect morality they get more and more complex, and so determining if they were violated becomes more and more of a specialized skill. Navigating the rules becomes a game, and we have those who specialize in it.
You could have a court system that required no lawyers at all. Each side would have a set number of hours based on the matter at issue to say or present anything they cared to. A randomly-selected jury (with minimal voir dire if any) would each vote on guilt/liability. If the vote exceeded some threshold (or perhaps we use the lock them into a room until they agree method) then the verdict is issued. There would be no rules of evidence, and no statues of any kind. Basically anybody could do anything that they thought they could convince 12 people that they were in the right regarding. Anybody could bring a charge against anybody else and drag them before 12 people, but of course if they do so frivolously they might find themselves standing before the jury at hand of those they confused.
We'd probably still have lawyers, just as politicians have campaign managers despite there not being any legal requirement for them. Lawyers would be people who are good at making a case for you. No doubt they'd take a chunk of the winnings. Maybe, on the other hand, some jurors would announce in advance that they would intend to vote against anybody who hired a lawyer if the other side did not do so (which would be fine - there are no rules here), and everybody would have to take that into account as well.
Most people would not like such a legal system - it would be VERY unpredictable. Predictability is one of the greatest virtues of the current system, and one of its greatest vices as well. For certain, if you end up in court one way or another I can safely predict that you're going to get screwed...
How exactly is CS5 dependent on OSX for CMYK support - which was the one feature that was mentioned? Clearly it works on Windows as well.
Does CS5 not run on linux because linux fails to provide some OS capability that it needs, or is it just because that it wasn't targeted to run on linux?
Yeah, and in the home consumer world people don't pay their brother or cousin or friend or whoever it is that they get to deworm their computer every six months.
If everybody made their cousin the mechanic give them oil changes every three months then car maintenance would be "free" too.
As CIO!
And just because somebody doesn't reply to the reply to the reply to the original message doesn't mean that they weren't annoyed by having to read all the "me toos..." It should be obvious that in a tree formed of tweets that it is going to be likely that there will be more leaf nodes than internal nodes unless you have really long branches.
Indeed - if somebody posted something on twitter, and 100 people responded to it, 99% of the tweets involved were "ignored" unless somebody responded to each of those 100 tweets, and so on.
I imagine the only way to get the ratio anywhere near 50% would be to write a worm that does meaningless replies to any tweets it finds (including its own and its cousins') and get it to propagate.
You mention that Apple has technologies that linux simply does not have. However, you do not mention what those are.
Certainly you're not suggesting that Adobe's support for CMYK is reliant on some kind of Apple technology or OS framework?
Adobe doesn't make a linux version of most of their products because the demand just isn't there. They only barely support flash on linux, and even then only 32-bit half the time.
You seem to be turning an Adobe vs Inkscape debate into an Apple vs Linux debate. They're really two different things, even if the one platform is often used to run the other software product. I have no idea how good wine support is for recent versions of photoshop/etc but it wouldn't surprise me if it worked at least reasonably well.