On the flip side though, 33% of the time there's a fatal accident and some of the occupants wore seatbelts and some didn't, those that did were the one's that died. Everything is the same, except wearing of the seat belt.
Citation, please.
I'll be impressed if you can find one that matches your statement. Car accidents aren't exactly controlled situations, and so it will be rather difficult for anyone to state conclusively that "everything is the same, except wearing of the seat belt" in any given case, let alone a statistically significant sample.
But, hey, I could be wrong. Cite a credible source, and I'll change my tune.
The anonymity of the Internet, combined with the speed of activity on the Web, seems to lead in many cases to an amplification of our baser instincts.
Anonymity and speed-to-conclusion are limits of current systems are are not necessarily endemic to the Internet as a vehicle for communication.
Do we want our political leaders receiving input from commercial Web sites, with no means of identifying who or what is promoting certain causes?
I agree completely. However, what you're missing is that public participation in democracy via the Internet is inevitable. Even if there is no direct authority granted to public opinion this way, you can rest assured that, if a million people take a position on a certain issue, politicians will pay attention, and if they don't that it might affect them in the next election. The tools for doing this do not exist right now, but you can be certain that somebody is working on them as we speak. Probably several somebodys, and all it takes is one to catch fire and become popular.
Therefore, rather than railing against Digg and ranting against Facebook, we need to figure out what characteristics are required in public online opinion collection, so we can try to hold whatever arises to that standard. Anonymity is one facet of these characteristics that would need to be debated.
Debates on sites such as Daily Kos revert on a daily base to name calling, ad hominen attacks, and sheer bloody-mindedness. Is this how we want our leaders to be influenced?
Probably not. However, DailyKos wasn't established with the goal of creating dispassionate debate, so it's tough to fault them for the outcome. You want this to stop? Start a forum where the social norms are to limit that sort of junk.
Social Media sites dramatically lower the costs of individual citizens involvement in the political process. That's a Good Thing. Yet if we don't anticipate and accept the manipulation of those sites by external agencies and those with far too much time on their hands, we're bloody damn fools.
Agreed. The answer, though, is not for us to stick our head in the proverbial sand, but to come up with the principles and social norms to make this all work better, then try to make those principles and social norms popular.
I was under the impression that oncologists were in the habit of doing just that--giving "doctor's notes" to patients with outpatient implanted brachytherapy seeds or devices.
That may be true, but oncology treatments are not the only source of medical radiation.
Case in point: I had a "stress test" performed about 15 months ago due to feeling some chest pains. In this, you get injected with a radioactive dye of some sort, the courses through your bloodstream. They take scans of you at rest, then after a fair amount of exertion (e.g., increasing incline on a treadmill until your blood pressure reaches a certain level). The intent is to see if you have some sort of blockage needing bypass surgery, or the like.
When I was being prepped for the test, I was asked if I worked at a nuclear power plant or was planning on flying within the next three days, as I would be "glowing" enough to set off some warnings.
And I didn't get a note.
Now, would I have been able to set off a radiation detector 80 feet away while traveling at...ummm...the posted speed limit? Dunno. I imagine that detectors at nuclear plants are probably more sensitive, if for not other reason than I normally don't walk at highway speeds (not even after being injected with radioactive materials, natch).
Would it also bother you that you might well set off radiation alarms at nuclear power plants, if you happened to work at one, while being treated for your cancer?
For the general population, the percentage of people working at nuclear power plants is a wee bit lower than the percentage of people who drive on highways.
If you set off a nuclear power plant detector, I would think that the inclination of those running the scanner is for your safety and the safety of those at the plant — in other words, does your setting off the scanner indicate a problem at the plant? If you set off a highway detector due to a medical procedure, the inclination of those running the scanner may not be so kind and generous.
You know where the nuclear power plant detectors are, I imagine — I was under the impression they were something you walk through, akin to airport metal detectors. So, at the point of where you might trigger something, you can talk to somebody to figure out the appropriate procedure for dealing with your case. You don't know where the highway detectors are and therefore have no means of briefing those operating the scanners and, therefore, trigger a false positive.
If you work at a nuclear power plant, you presumably were informed of these scans and agreed to have them administered as part of your employment. I certainly wasn't briefed about radiological scans of highways.
Firefox shouldn't come bundled with any Google software
It doesn't. Leastways, it hasn't in the 100+ times I've installed it over the past few years, on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Can you provide evidence to the contrary?
set home page to Google without giving a choice of other search providers
If you install Firefox on Windows, and you choose to import settings from IE, you are given the option of keeping your current home page (imported from IE) or using the Firefox start page.
or popup "set me as a default browser dialog?" unless the user explicitly goes to preferences menu and does so
This was to counteract IE doing the same thing. I believe the thinking is that Joe or Jane Q. SixPack isn't going to wade through a bunch of preferences (in Firefox or in Windows) to figure out how to set their default browser.
Neither the article nor the criticism refer to the TSA, either by abbreviation or fully-spelled-out
Neither the article nor the criticism refer to the Terrorist Surveillance Act of 2006
The Terrorist Surveillance Act of 2006 doesn't appear to have been passed (it passed the House, but I don't think the Senate passed it), so it is rather unlikely that "most people know you are talking about the Terrorist Surveillance Act"
You failed to provide any demonstrable proof that the polls are slanted (e.g., linking to poll questions that might demonstrate a slant)
You failed to provide any demonstrable proof that the polls used the phrase "domestic spying program"
These "flaws" in the iPhone are obscure enough that I don't think most regular people would even understand them.
As written, yes, those flaws aren't going to make sense to Joe or Jane Six-Pack.
For example, "won't let you do multiprocessing/won't allow running in background", near as I can tell, means "your IM chat session goes kaput if a call comes in", as your application will be shut down, causing your sockets to close, causing the IM provider to assume you've gone bye-bye. Likewise, multiprocessing will be key for any alternative music players (vs. the built-in stuff) or anything else that needs to be at least partly running when other applications come to the foreground. Android has the same freeze-and-kill-the-app logic, but only invokes it when memory is low, and you can set up independent services (think daemons) that won't be subject to those effects.
It's interesting to note that iPhone doesn't allow interpreted code... while Android doesn't allow native code. Which one of these is more "open"?
Android, in that it allows more handset makers to adopt Android without forcing as many dependencies on the underlying hardware. Phone vendors can choose from multiple Android-ready chipsets, or assist in porting Android's Dalvik VM and APIs to yet another chipset if they so choose. To Mr. and Mrs. Six-Pack, this means more phone options and, hopefully, lower prices.
How do you propose that a universal healthcare system would be any better?
For starters, by getting more people to pay into insurance. Remember: universal health care does not mean free health care, at least in the Clinton and Obama plans. In their lingo, "universal health care" means everybody has options to pay into insurance plans, even outside of employers (something you seem to be advocating). In Clinton's plan, people are required to buy health insurance; Obama's plan only mandates insurance for children. However, both plans should increase the number of people paying into the insurance system.
The money has to come from somewhere
The question is: how much money is it, and what will happen to insurance premiums and taxes as a result?
It's not as simple as "more health coverage for others = more cost to me". If more people are paying their way (vs. relying on ER-as-primary-care and similar schemes), that increases the available money. If, by being covered, ailments and conditions can be treated less expensively than if they fester, that decreases costs. By getting more people covered, we may be able to force down the per-person cost of prescription drugs, because the R&D costs remain fixed while the number of purchased doses increases.
Hop over to factcheck.org sometime and read their analyses of the candidates' health care plans. The biggest thing to take away from there is that lots of economists are still debating the overall financial impact of these plans. Saying you disagree with these plans because of a libertarian philosophy is one thing, saying you disagree with these plans because they'll cost you more is premature.
The only difference is that one of those is forced upon you and violates your fundamental rights.
You mean auto insurance, right? That's forced upon you if you choose to own a car.
In other words, taxes aren't the only things "forced upon you".
The lack of access to healthcare is due only to the lack of competition among insurance companies and healthcare providers.
Citation, please.
You're welcome to say something like "IMHO, the lack of access...". But if you're going to claim this as an indisputable fact, you need to provide some degree of proof. I actually agree with parts of what you say; however, it's those parts (e.g., more incentive to shop around) that seem to be addressed by the Democrats' universal health care programs, which you seem to despise.
Why do you feel the need to violate the rights of your neighbors and fellow citizens by telling them that, if they want to live in this country, they have to support your chosen cause.
Let's assume for the moment that the GP is correct, and that the MMR trio could be eradicated given government involvement (personally, I'm skeptical). Let's further assume that the projected cost of such an eradication effort is significantly lower than our current costs for vaccination and treatment, given that the eradication effort is a one-time campaign, whereas vaccination and treatment is ongoing and indefinite.
This is where I and knee-jerk libertarians part ways, I think.
The classic libertarian response to this would appear to be "who the cares? it infringes my rights, therefore it is evil incarnate".
This pragmatist's response to this is "damn! we can save money and improve quality of life in one shot? go for it!"
I appreciate the libertarian philosophy, if for no other reason than it's logically consistent (as opposed to the claptrap that passes for philosophies in the Democratic and Republican parties). However, libertarianism seems, often times, to boil down to "f*ck 'em all", and I think we can do better than that. Maybe the Internet will allow more people to collaborate and solve these kinds of problems outside the scope of government, and we can achieve the libertarian ideal of "few laws, lotsa volunteering".
OpenStreetMap is building a, well, open street map. My town in eastern Pennsylvania seems pretty up-to-date as far as I can tell. And they're working on aerials too.
Not to mention that when you try and "limit the influence of money" you will run into First Amendment problems.
The First Amendment offers freedom of speech. That would cover political advertising (e.g., Swift Boat Veterans for Something-Or-Another), and Prof. Lessig's three-point Change Congress proposal doesn't impact that for non-candidates. Even his call for purely publicly-financed campaigns is only an incremental shift from what we have today (e.g., McCain has said he'll go with public financing for the general election if his Democratic challenger will; Lessig would just make it a requirement).
The First Amendment doesn't offer freedom of bribes (a.k.a., campaign contributions from lobbyists). Even if it did, Change Congress is seeking candidates who will voluntarily forgo bribes, and the First Amendment definitely doesn't say that taking bribes is mandatory.
A much better approach is to force the student to work through lower-level programming before ever reaching a modern layer that abstracts everything away.
C/C++ are a modern layer that abstracts everything away. Heck, assembler is a modern layer that abstracts everything away. By your rationale, if you're not hand-coding opcodes straight into system memory and executing them, you're too far from the bare metal.
Generations of programming languages are simply a modern layer that abstracts everything away from the preceding generation. I can imagine a similar complaint lodged once upon a time against C/C++ as a teaching language, because it means students are reliant upon the "magic" of compilers to create the machine code, and everybody does device drivers in assembly language anyway.
insert obligatory "get off my lawn" reference here
With regards to students, not having built data structures by hand, therefore not knowing when to use them...I own a Toyota Prius. Before that, I owned a Ford Explorer. I know that the Prius gets significantly better fuel economy than the Explorer. I know the Explorer has much better handling in the snow than the Prius. All this despite not having built the Explorer or the Prius from parts by hand. All I've done is drive them. And maybe I'm smarter than the average bear, because I was able to figure those out just from specifications and, in the case of snow-handling, just looking at them. Telling me that the current crop of college students are lazy and won't read docs is one thing; telling me that having them build data structures is the solution only makes sense if building data structures is used as punishment for not reading the docs. Just as C/C++ students don't need to hand-compile their source to machine opcodes in order to learn the benefits of loop unrolling and such.
I'd argue that students with a CS degree should be proficient in at least three programming languages, if not four or more. I don't really care which ones. Anybody doing computer programming is going to need to learn a new language every few years, so a skill we need them to have is how to learn a new language and learn how to use it effectively (e.g., which data structures work well in that language vs. others).
The original purpose of trademarks was for consumer protection. Specifically, it was to prevent consumers from being confused when buying products and services, so when they see a "Ford" branded car that they know it came from the Ford Motor Company.
That's why, for example, there is still a Domino's Pizza and a Domino's Sugar. Two firms independently have trademarks on "Domino's", but they're on two separate products (pizza and sugar). Consumers are unlikely to mistake a large pepperoni pizza for a pound of sugar, and vice versa.
If this club were making its own cars and trying to brand those as Ford using the Ford logo, or if the club were making its own cars and constructing them in the likeness of a Ford model, then trademark protection has merit — we don't want consumers mistaking Fords and pseudo-Fords. However, in this case, the club is selling a calendar. Ford is not in the calendar-making business, and it is difficult to imagine that a consumer will somehow mistake a calendar and a car.
Just to clarify, Irfanview is free only for personal use. There's a $12 fee for commercial use. It is an excellent program; I've paid for a couple licenses.
Corporations are pretty much _supposed_ to do that.
"Supposed to" is somewhat overstating the position — firms need to weigh lots of criteria when making strategic decisions, and near-term financial gain is only one such criterion, albeit an important one.
That being said, you're missing the point when you say:
But in the meantime it's naive of Negroponte to expect that if Intel does some business with him, then Intel is his faithful and loyal serf for eternity. _If_ he actually expects that.
No, it's naive of Intel to think that Negroponte isn't going to come out guns a-blazin' when Intel "quits" OLPC over the Classmate issue. From several articles on this subject, it's clear that Negroponte was pissed as hell at Intel for quite some time. Heck, I remember him lambasting them and Microsoft on _60 Minutes_, and that was a month or two ago, and I seem to recall a presentation he gave at MIT talking trash at them back in late summer 2007. There probably wasn't an expedient means of kicking Intel out of OLPC, so he had to put up with them and their double-talk. Now that they've quit, he's probably happier, except for this short-term negative buzz.
After all, based on your analysis, it's not like Intel was going to be holding back any on the Classmate when they were in OLPC. So why should Negroponte be feeding Intel key...ummm...intel as an OLPC insider if they're going to use that information against OLPC?
And, going back the post I originally replied to, smacking down Intel doesn't mean Negroponte thinks he's supposed to have a monopoly, just that he's doesn't want to put up with a partner competing against him. Now he doesn't have to.
Besides, even if his claims against Intel are unfounded, making unfounded claims against competitors is what businesses are "supposed to do", right?
And Negroponte apparently believes, from everything I've read, that he and the OLPC deserve a monopoly on low cost laptops for por countries.
No, I suspect Negroponte believes that business partners shouldn't screw each other. If Intel is pitching their own designed/developed notebook, particularly trying to get countries to renege on commitments to OLPC, that would constitute "screwing".
This is not to say that there couldn't be OLPC competitors that use Intel chips, just not ones that an OLPC partner designs, markets, and sells. If Red Hat decided to make an OLPC-killer, he'd probably be pissed at them, too.
Negroponte, however, appears to be trying to limit consumer choices and stifle competition.
Only to the extent such choices/competition are coming direct from OLPC partners. I haven't seen where he's laid into Asus for their Eee PC, even though it would have to be at least considered as a possible OLPC replacement (greater power in exchange for being less rugged, shorter battery life, probably more expensive, etc.).
Negroponte seems to have become sidetracked from the original goal.
And you have determined this...how, exactly? Just because he's not interested in partners who cheat on him?
(an edited rendition of my response to the Techdirt article on this same topic)
One citizen's relationship to another, and the rules by which that relationship (and its details) are made available to some subset of the world, must exist outside any specific social network, tool, or other Web site.
Social network sites should offer "individually calibrated privacy controls", which should encompass who should see what information, and not just within a single social network/tool/site. Compliant sites should, therefore, only block exports of information that are themselves blocked by the privacy controls and overall standards/rules for social graph data exchange, not a blanket "you can't export anything" or "you can't export email addresses" or "we own your data, so go suck eggs" or some such.
Both the Techdirt and eWeek articles have an inappropriate focus — exclusively on Facebook. PR notwithstanding, Facebook is not a social network — it is a tool that facilitates the publicizing of the real-world social network. Facebook is merely a window on the world — it is not the world. Or, to put it another way, Facebook is not a social graph -- it is a tool that helps people describe the real-world social graph. The fact that "portability" even has to be raised as an issue is a matter of greed among tool-makers like Facebook, who labor under the naive supposition that they somehow own everybody's relationships with everyone else. I liken it to firms who try to copyright facts.
We need standards, rules, and watchdogs for adherence to the rules for this information, so privacy is truly up to the individuals, not based on some set of meta-rules unique to some site (e.g., can't export email addresses). And, we need the tool-makers to follow the standards and rules, plus respect the watchdogs. IMHO, tool-makers that are venture-backed will need to be beaten soundly over the head repeatedly in order for them to make those agreements...which is why the Scoble incident is useful. Criticizing Facebook for cases like this is going to be necessary to force change.
In the few instances where there is a consensus, a Tyranny of the Masses can often create worse conditions for some individuals. Effectively, you have no real justice.
There is no form of government that prohibits tyranny. Tyranny of the majority is simply the manifestation of tyranny in a direct democracy. What I haven't seen demonstrated is that tyranny is more probable with direct democracy than other current forms of government.
By electing someone to represent their views, the majority is able to have their viewpoints expressed but with their competing interests solved at the level of the representative.
Your statement demonstrates one of the key problems with representative systems: does the representative represent her constituents, or is the representative supposed to represent all interests (and is just one set of constituents' person involved in those discussions)? In other words, is the representative a proxy for the will of the constituents, or a free agent that is supposed to take the whole nation (or state or county or whatever) into account?
The direct control of military assets in the U.S. are divided among individual states.
Ummmmm...only the modern equivalent of the "local militia" (National Guard). For all practical purposes, the US Federal Government controls the national military assets. In other words, if Army General A says "shoot" to an active military unit and Governor B says "don't shoot", my money says bullets will fly, because the military will honor the general over the governor, even if the military unit in question is from the governor's state. Similarly, if the US President authorizes a nuclear strike, the governors of the states with the ICBM launchers don't get a vote, AFAIK. The biggest question is what happens with inactive military units...which is why a state of perpetual war (e.g., the current literal manifestation of the War on Terror) is such a scary proposition, no matter what political party is in charge..
What I'm getting at is that the design for modern governments has been well thought through.
That being said, it was well though through in a time when bandwidth was severely limited. A world of near-instantaneous communication among all interested and affected parties was inconceivable at the time of our Founding Fathers. Therefore, while I agree that the historical lessons need to be learned and applied to the modern era, that does not mean we need to be stuck with "politics as usual" just because some new ideas weren't referenced in the Federalist Papers, for example. What I suspect we'll wind up with, at least in the next phase of the evolution of American governance, is closer to direct democracy — there will be enough online expression of opinion and coordinated recall efforts that elected officials will feel greater pressure to follow the will of their constituents. But, that's just me.
Paper books have to be printed, they have to be printed before you buy them and this costs lots of money. The publisher has to take a gamble on how many books can be sold, he will then put in an order for that amount at a printer, who wants his money NOW thank you very much. He will then have to stock those books before sending them to the various retailers. Those retailers will have to stock the books as well, until the customer hopefully end up buying them, eventually. In the meantime a lot of the books will get damaged and be less desirable to buy.
Print-on-demand (POD) eliminates most of what you describe here. With POD, books mostly are printed when needed for purchase. Many of the books you buy on Amazon are POD, including those from Lulu.com. Even if Amazon.com elects to inventory some of a title, they'll only hang onto a small handful of copies, not the hundreds or thousands normally associated with a traditional print run. POD printing isn't ridiculously more expensive than traditional printing, and you make it up on not having money tied up in inventory.
Yet we still got a price of $9.99 for an ebook when all that is really left is to pay the author, a bit of hardware and software and electricity?
If the author self-publishes, you still need to factor in the discounts given to the retailer to cover their cost of selling the book. If the author uses a traditional publisher, they too get their cut. Even if the author self-publishes, don't forget a small slice for the payment processor (PayPal, credit card authorizing service, etc.). Plus the cost of hiring an editor, book cover designer, and indexer, if the author isn't taking on those roles herself. Olus Web site design, marketing expenses (books don't always sell themselves), etc.
What you will likely see is more authors self-publishing, and those who intend to write regularly charging an annual subscription fee rather than a per-title price. The authors get some semblance of recurring revenue, readers get a continuous stream of material (updates to existing books plus new books) at a lot lower price point per ebook than $10. Here, you can use POD not only for a revenue stream, but as a promotional vehicle to sell one's ebook subscriptions, plus cater to the audience that prefers printed books.
Blame Sun for this. With a few small additions, ODF could have supported Office formats as well, but Sun would not allow this. Their policy is that ODF will support what is needed for StarOffice, and nothing more. They control the ODF technical committee, and their patent license allows them to stop the ODF TC if the ODF TC goes in a direction Sun does not like.
Citations, please. If you're going to lob grenades like this, you owe it to your readers to offer proof of these accusations. I'm not saying you're wrong — I can see some factions within Sun taking this approach — but it'd be nice if you offered some proof.
Here is Chris Messina's blog entry on his inclusion in the NY Times piece.
In a nutshell, he doesn't like the NY Times' headline.
So, to put it simply, there are no "new" privacy issues raised by Google's acquisition of Jaiku; it's simply the same old ones over and over again that we seem unable to deal with in any kind of open dialogue in the mainstream press.
When I attended the 2007 Personal Democracy Forum's "Bar Camp"-style event, there was a session that touched on Net Neutrality. Early on, we were discussing a definition of "net neutrality", and I espoused a position akin to yours. One of the other session attendees — one even more fervent about Net Neutrality than I — did not agree, considered QoS to be anti-neutrality, and was of the opinion that there was a significant portion of the pro-neutrality crowd that agreed with his view.
Like any complex topic, there's going to be shades of gray, even among people on the same side. While I still feel protocol-based QoS, like you describe, is perfectly fine, others advocating Net Neutrality may disagree.
Yes, but most I've read tend to have restrictions that are solely there to protect the intellectual property of the software maker. So you get terms that prevent reverse engineering and whatnot. Those typically don't bother me, as I have no intention of violating their intellectual property rights. Once you get to the level where clauses creep in that, say, prevent publishing performance test results, I try to avoid using that technology. Adobe's clauses I quoted above are just plain brazen.
All that being said, I try to go open source wherever possible, to avoid these sorts of legal shenanigans...
For core changes to the OpenOffice.org code base, Sun requires joint copyright assignment (JCA), whereby both the original author(s) and Sun jointly hold copyright. This allows Sun to relicense the OpenOffice.org code as needed (e.g., GPLv3).
IANAL, but with the JCA, nothing would prevent Kohei from making his code available under LGPL or any license he chooses outside of OpenOffice.org. However, by not signing the JCA, Kohei is preventing his code from being part of the core Oo.org code base. For whatever reason, the Oo.org team must want a solver that is part of the Oo.org code base, so if Kohei won't sign the JCA, there are few available options.
What would be interesting is if there were a way to basically split Kohei's solver component into three pieces. One is the GUI layer (there's menu choices, presumably leading to solver-specific dialog boxes), one is the bridge to communicate with the underlying spreadsheet data, and one implements the solver logic proper. Packaging that last piece as a LGPL third-party component, reusable among other projects (e.g., Gnumeric), might be acceptable to the Oo.org team, provided that the Oo.org-specific UI and data access bridges were part of the core project. I have no idea if this kind of code split makes any sense, since I've never written a solver, though Kohei references lp-solve, suggesting that part of his code might be able to be split into an nlp-solve...
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For what it's worth, the University of Chicago disagrees with you:
Citation, please.
I'll be impressed if you can find one that matches your statement. Car accidents aren't exactly controlled situations, and so it will be rather difficult for anyone to state conclusively that "everything is the same, except wearing of the seat belt" in any given case, let alone a statistically significant sample.
But, hey, I could be wrong. Cite a credible source, and I'll change my tune.
Anonymity and speed-to-conclusion are limits of current systems are are not necessarily endemic to the Internet as a vehicle for communication.
I agree completely. However, what you're missing is that public participation in democracy via the Internet is inevitable. Even if there is no direct authority granted to public opinion this way, you can rest assured that, if a million people take a position on a certain issue, politicians will pay attention, and if they don't that it might affect them in the next election. The tools for doing this do not exist right now, but you can be certain that somebody is working on them as we speak. Probably several somebodys, and all it takes is one to catch fire and become popular.
Therefore, rather than railing against Digg and ranting against Facebook, we need to figure out what characteristics are required in public online opinion collection, so we can try to hold whatever arises to that standard. Anonymity is one facet of these characteristics that would need to be debated.
Probably not. However, DailyKos wasn't established with the goal of creating dispassionate debate, so it's tough to fault them for the outcome. You want this to stop? Start a forum where the social norms are to limit that sort of junk.
Agreed. The answer, though, is not for us to stick our head in the proverbial sand, but to come up with the principles and social norms to make this all work better, then try to make those principles and social norms popular.
That may be true, but oncology treatments are not the only source of medical radiation.
Case in point: I had a "stress test" performed about 15 months ago due to feeling some chest pains. In this, you get injected with a radioactive dye of some sort, the courses through your bloodstream. They take scans of you at rest, then after a fair amount of exertion (e.g., increasing incline on a treadmill until your blood pressure reaches a certain level). The intent is to see if you have some sort of blockage needing bypass surgery, or the like.
When I was being prepped for the test, I was asked if I worked at a nuclear power plant or was planning on flying within the next three days, as I would be "glowing" enough to set off some warnings.
And I didn't get a note.
Now, would I have been able to set off a radiation detector 80 feet away while traveling at...ummm...the posted speed limit? Dunno. I imagine that detectors at nuclear plants are probably more sensitive, if for not other reason than I normally don't walk at highway speeds (not even after being injected with radioactive materials, natch).
It doesn't. Leastways, it hasn't in the 100+ times I've installed it over the past few years, on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Can you provide evidence to the contrary?
If you install Firefox on Windows, and you choose to import settings from IE, you are given the option of keeping your current home page (imported from IE) or using the Firefox start page.
This was to counteract IE doing the same thing. I believe the thinking is that Joe or Jane Q. SixPack isn't going to wade through a bunch of preferences (in Firefox or in Windows) to figure out how to set their default browser.
As written, yes, those flaws aren't going to make sense to Joe or Jane Six-Pack.
For example, "won't let you do multiprocessing/won't allow running in background", near as I can tell, means "your IM chat session goes kaput if a call comes in", as your application will be shut down, causing your sockets to close, causing the IM provider to assume you've gone bye-bye. Likewise, multiprocessing will be key for any alternative music players (vs. the built-in stuff) or anything else that needs to be at least partly running when other applications come to the foreground. Android has the same freeze-and-kill-the-app logic, but only invokes it when memory is low, and you can set up independent services (think daemons) that won't be subject to those effects.
Android, in that it allows more handset makers to adopt Android without forcing as many dependencies on the underlying hardware. Phone vendors can choose from multiple Android-ready chipsets, or assist in porting Android's Dalvik VM and APIs to yet another chipset if they so choose. To Mr. and Mrs. Six-Pack, this means more phone options and, hopefully, lower prices.
Yes.
For starters, by getting more people to pay into insurance. Remember: universal health care does not mean free health care, at least in the Clinton and Obama plans. In their lingo, "universal health care" means everybody has options to pay into insurance plans, even outside of employers (something you seem to be advocating). In Clinton's plan, people are required to buy health insurance; Obama's plan only mandates insurance for children. However, both plans should increase the number of people paying into the insurance system.
The question is: how much money is it, and what will happen to insurance premiums and taxes as a result?
It's not as simple as "more health coverage for others = more cost to me". If more people are paying their way (vs. relying on ER-as-primary-care and similar schemes), that increases the available money. If, by being covered, ailments and conditions can be treated less expensively than if they fester, that decreases costs. By getting more people covered, we may be able to force down the per-person cost of prescription drugs, because the R&D costs remain fixed while the number of purchased doses increases.
Hop over to factcheck.org sometime and read their analyses of the candidates' health care plans. The biggest thing to take away from there is that lots of economists are still debating the overall financial impact of these plans. Saying you disagree with these plans because of a libertarian philosophy is one thing, saying you disagree with these plans because they'll cost you more is premature.
You mean auto insurance, right? That's forced upon you if you choose to own a car.
In other words, taxes aren't the only things "forced upon you".
Citation, please.
You're welcome to say something like "IMHO, the lack of access...". But if you're going to claim this as an indisputable fact, you need to provide some degree of proof. I actually agree with parts of what you say; however, it's those parts (e.g., more incentive to shop around) that seem to be addressed by the Democrats' universal health care programs, which you seem to despise.
Let's assume for the moment that the GP is correct, and that the MMR trio could be eradicated given government involvement (personally, I'm skeptical). Let's further assume that the projected cost of such an eradication effort is significantly lower than our current costs for vaccination and treatment, given that the eradication effort is a one-time campaign, whereas vaccination and treatment is ongoing and indefinite.
This is where I and knee-jerk libertarians part ways, I think.
The classic libertarian response to this would appear to be "who the cares? it infringes my rights, therefore it is evil incarnate".
This pragmatist's response to this is "damn! we can save money and improve quality of life in one shot? go for it!"
I appreciate the libertarian philosophy, if for no other reason than it's logically consistent (as opposed to the claptrap that passes for philosophies in the Democratic and Republican parties). However, libertarianism seems, often times, to boil down to "f*ck 'em all", and I think we can do better than that. Maybe the Internet will allow more people to collaborate and solve these kinds of problems outside the scope of government, and we can achieve the libertarian ideal of "few laws, lotsa volunteering".
OpenStreetMap is building a, well, open street map. My town in eastern Pennsylvania seems pretty up-to-date as far as I can tell. And they're working on aerials too.
The First Amendment offers freedom of speech. That would cover political advertising (e.g., Swift Boat Veterans for Something-Or-Another), and Prof. Lessig's three-point Change Congress proposal doesn't impact that for non-candidates. Even his call for purely publicly-financed campaigns is only an incremental shift from what we have today (e.g., McCain has said he'll go with public financing for the general election if his Democratic challenger will; Lessig would just make it a requirement).
The First Amendment doesn't offer freedom of bribes (a.k.a., campaign contributions from lobbyists). Even if it did, Change Congress is seeking candidates who will voluntarily forgo bribes, and the First Amendment definitely doesn't say that taking bribes is mandatory.
Not only have they been making some progress, but Karl Auerbach — yes, that Karl Auerbach — is on the board.
Suffice it to say, I don't think ICANN has donated money to their cause... ;-)
C/C++ are a modern layer that abstracts everything away. Heck, assembler is a modern layer that abstracts everything away. By your rationale, if you're not hand-coding opcodes straight into system memory and executing them, you're too far from the bare metal.
Generations of programming languages are simply a modern layer that abstracts everything away from the preceding generation. I can imagine a similar complaint lodged once upon a time against C/C++ as a teaching language, because it means students are reliant upon the "magic" of compilers to create the machine code, and everybody does device drivers in assembly language anyway.
insert obligatory "get off my lawn" reference here
With regards to students, not having built data structures by hand, therefore not knowing when to use them...I own a Toyota Prius. Before that, I owned a Ford Explorer. I know that the Prius gets significantly better fuel economy than the Explorer. I know the Explorer has much better handling in the snow than the Prius. All this despite not having built the Explorer or the Prius from parts by hand. All I've done is drive them. And maybe I'm smarter than the average bear, because I was able to figure those out just from specifications and, in the case of snow-handling, just looking at them. Telling me that the current crop of college students are lazy and won't read docs is one thing; telling me that having them build data structures is the solution only makes sense if building data structures is used as punishment for not reading the docs. Just as C/C++ students don't need to hand-compile their source to machine opcodes in order to learn the benefits of loop unrolling and such.
I'd argue that students with a CS degree should be proficient in at least three programming languages, if not four or more. I don't really care which ones. Anybody doing computer programming is going to need to learn a new language every few years, so a skill we need them to have is how to learn a new language and learn how to use it effectively (e.g., which data structures work well in that language vs. others).
Ah, good point.
The original purpose of trademarks was for consumer protection. Specifically, it was to prevent consumers from being confused when buying products and services, so when they see a "Ford" branded car that they know it came from the Ford Motor Company.
That's why, for example, there is still a Domino's Pizza and a Domino's Sugar. Two firms independently have trademarks on "Domino's", but they're on two separate products (pizza and sugar). Consumers are unlikely to mistake a large pepperoni pizza for a pound of sugar, and vice versa.
If this club were making its own cars and trying to brand those as Ford using the Ford logo, or if the club were making its own cars and constructing them in the likeness of a Ford model, then trademark protection has merit — we don't want consumers mistaking Fords and pseudo-Fords. However, in this case, the club is selling a calendar. Ford is not in the calendar-making business, and it is difficult to imagine that a consumer will somehow mistake a calendar and a car.
Just to clarify, Irfanview is free only for personal use. There's a $12 fee for commercial use. It is an excellent program; I've paid for a couple licenses.
"Supposed to" is somewhat overstating the position — firms need to weigh lots of criteria when making strategic decisions, and near-term financial gain is only one such criterion, albeit an important one.
That being said, you're missing the point when you say:
No, it's naive of Intel to think that Negroponte isn't going to come out guns a-blazin' when Intel "quits" OLPC over the Classmate issue. From several articles on this subject, it's clear that Negroponte was pissed as hell at Intel for quite some time. Heck, I remember him lambasting them and Microsoft on _60 Minutes_, and that was a month or two ago, and I seem to recall a presentation he gave at MIT talking trash at them back in late summer 2007. There probably wasn't an expedient means of kicking Intel out of OLPC, so he had to put up with them and their double-talk. Now that they've quit, he's probably happier, except for this short-term negative buzz.
After all, based on your analysis, it's not like Intel was going to be holding back any on the Classmate when they were in OLPC. So why should Negroponte be feeding Intel key...ummm...intel as an OLPC insider if they're going to use that information against OLPC?
And, going back the post I originally replied to, smacking down Intel doesn't mean Negroponte thinks he's supposed to have a monopoly, just that he's doesn't want to put up with a partner competing against him. Now he doesn't have to.
Besides, even if his claims against Intel are unfounded, making unfounded claims against competitors is what businesses are "supposed to do", right?
No, I suspect Negroponte believes that business partners shouldn't screw each other. If Intel is pitching their own designed/developed notebook, particularly trying to get countries to renege on commitments to OLPC, that would constitute "screwing".
This is not to say that there couldn't be OLPC competitors that use Intel chips, just not ones that an OLPC partner designs, markets, and sells. If Red Hat decided to make an OLPC-killer, he'd probably be pissed at them, too.
Only to the extent such choices/competition are coming direct from OLPC partners. I haven't seen where he's laid into Asus for their Eee PC, even though it would have to be at least considered as a possible OLPC replacement (greater power in exchange for being less rugged, shorter battery life, probably more expensive, etc.).
And you have determined this...how, exactly? Just because he's not interested in partners who cheat on him?
(an edited rendition of my response to the Techdirt article on this same topic)
One citizen's relationship to another, and the rules by which that relationship (and its details) are made available to some subset of the world, must exist outside any specific social network, tool, or other Web site.
Social network sites should offer "individually calibrated privacy controls", which should encompass who should see what information, and not just within a single social network/tool/site. Compliant sites should, therefore, only block exports of information that are themselves blocked by the privacy controls and overall standards/rules for social graph data exchange, not a blanket "you can't export anything" or "you can't export email addresses" or "we own your data, so go suck eggs" or some such.
Both the Techdirt and eWeek articles have an inappropriate focus — exclusively on Facebook. PR notwithstanding, Facebook is not a social network — it is a tool that facilitates the publicizing of the real-world social network. Facebook is merely a window on the world — it is not the world. Or, to put it another way, Facebook is not a social graph -- it is a tool that helps people describe the real-world social graph. The fact that "portability" even has to be raised as an issue is a matter of greed among tool-makers like Facebook, who labor under the naive supposition that they somehow own everybody's relationships with everyone else. I liken it to firms who try to copyright facts.
We need standards, rules, and watchdogs for adherence to the rules for this information, so privacy is truly up to the individuals, not based on some set of meta-rules unique to some site (e.g., can't export email addresses). And, we need the tool-makers to follow the standards and rules, plus respect the watchdogs. IMHO, tool-makers that are venture-backed will need to be beaten soundly over the head repeatedly in order for them to make those agreements...which is why the Scoble incident is useful. Criticizing Facebook for cases like this is going to be necessary to force change.
There is no form of government that prohibits tyranny. Tyranny of the majority is simply the manifestation of tyranny in a direct democracy. What I haven't seen demonstrated is that tyranny is more probable with direct democracy than other current forms of government.
Your statement demonstrates one of the key problems with representative systems: does the representative represent her constituents, or is the representative supposed to represent all interests (and is just one set of constituents' person involved in those discussions)? In other words, is the representative a proxy for the will of the constituents, or a free agent that is supposed to take the whole nation (or state or county or whatever) into account?
Ummmmm...only the modern equivalent of the "local militia" (National Guard). For all practical purposes, the US Federal Government controls the national military assets. In other words, if Army General A says "shoot" to an active military unit and Governor B says "don't shoot", my money says bullets will fly, because the military will honor the general over the governor, even if the military unit in question is from the governor's state. Similarly, if the US President authorizes a nuclear strike, the governors of the states with the ICBM launchers don't get a vote, AFAIK. The biggest question is what happens with inactive military units...which is why a state of perpetual war (e.g., the current literal manifestation of the War on Terror) is such a scary proposition, no matter what political party is in charge..
That being said, it was well though through in a time when bandwidth was severely limited. A world of near-instantaneous communication among all interested and affected parties was inconceivable at the time of our Founding Fathers. Therefore, while I agree that the historical lessons need to be learned and applied to the modern era, that does not mean we need to be stuck with "politics as usual" just because some new ideas weren't referenced in the Federalist Papers, for example. What I suspect we'll wind up with, at least in the next phase of the evolution of American governance, is closer to direct democracy — there will be enough online expression of opinion and coordinated recall efforts that elected officials will feel greater pressure to follow the will of their constituents. But, that's just me.
Print-on-demand (POD) eliminates most of what you describe here. With POD, books mostly are printed when needed for purchase. Many of the books you buy on Amazon are POD, including those from Lulu.com. Even if Amazon.com elects to inventory some of a title, they'll only hang onto a small handful of copies, not the hundreds or thousands normally associated with a traditional print run. POD printing isn't ridiculously more expensive than traditional printing, and you make it up on not having money tied up in inventory.
If the author self-publishes, you still need to factor in the discounts given to the retailer to cover their cost of selling the book. If the author uses a traditional publisher, they too get their cut. Even if the author self-publishes, don't forget a small slice for the payment processor (PayPal, credit card authorizing service, etc.). Plus the cost of hiring an editor, book cover designer, and indexer, if the author isn't taking on those roles herself. Olus Web site design, marketing expenses (books don't always sell themselves), etc.
What you will likely see is more authors self-publishing, and those who intend to write regularly charging an annual subscription fee rather than a per-title price. The authors get some semblance of recurring revenue, readers get a continuous stream of material (updates to existing books plus new books) at a lot lower price point per ebook than $10. Here, you can use POD not only for a revenue stream, but as a promotional vehicle to sell one's ebook subscriptions, plus cater to the audience that prefers printed books.
Citations, please. If you're going to lob grenades like this, you owe it to your readers to offer proof of these accusations. I'm not saying you're wrong — I can see some factions within Sun taking this approach — but it'd be nice if you offered some proof.
Here is Chris Messina's blog entry on his inclusion in the NY Times piece.
In a nutshell, he doesn't like the NY Times' headline.
When I attended the 2007 Personal Democracy Forum's "Bar Camp"-style event, there was a session that touched on Net Neutrality. Early on, we were discussing a definition of "net neutrality", and I espoused a position akin to yours. One of the other session attendees — one even more fervent about Net Neutrality than I — did not agree, considered QoS to be anti-neutrality, and was of the opinion that there was a significant portion of the pro-neutrality crowd that agreed with his view.
Like any complex topic, there's going to be shades of gray, even among people on the same side. While I still feel protocol-based QoS, like you describe, is perfectly fine, others advocating Net Neutrality may disagree.
Yes, but most I've read tend to have restrictions that are solely there to protect the intellectual property of the software maker. So you get terms that prevent reverse engineering and whatnot. Those typically don't bother me, as I have no intention of violating their intellectual property rights. Once you get to the level where clauses creep in that, say, prevent publishing performance test results, I try to avoid using that technology. Adobe's clauses I quoted above are just plain brazen.
All that being said, I try to go open source wherever possible, to avoid these sorts of legal shenanigans...
For core changes to the OpenOffice.org code base, Sun requires joint copyright assignment (JCA), whereby both the original author(s) and Sun jointly hold copyright. This allows Sun to relicense the OpenOffice.org code as needed (e.g., GPLv3).
IANAL, but with the JCA, nothing would prevent Kohei from making his code available under LGPL or any license he chooses outside of OpenOffice.org. However, by not signing the JCA, Kohei is preventing his code from being part of the core Oo.org code base. For whatever reason, the Oo.org team must want a solver that is part of the Oo.org code base, so if Kohei won't sign the JCA, there are few available options.
What would be interesting is if there were a way to basically split Kohei's solver component into three pieces. One is the GUI layer (there's menu choices, presumably leading to solver-specific dialog boxes), one is the bridge to communicate with the underlying spreadsheet data, and one implements the solver logic proper. Packaging that last piece as a LGPL third-party component, reusable among other projects (e.g., Gnumeric), might be acceptable to the Oo.org team, provided that the Oo.org-specific UI and data access bridges were part of the core project. I have no idea if this kind of code split makes any sense, since I've never written a solver, though Kohei references lp-solve, suggesting that part of his code might be able to be split into an nlp-solve...