So some company is violating GPL v3, who is going to do anything about it? Who's going to hire the lawyer(s) to take them to court to get settlement money - the vast majority of which will likely to go the lawyers? Or do you report them to "the authorities" and some government funded lawyer chases them down?
Even if you do go to court and get a judgement against the company, then what? Hamstersoft doesn't sound like a company with deep pockets. So they declare bankruptcy, and the officers open another company doing the same thing with a different name.
Perhaps I'm overly cynical or naive, but I see the effort of enforcing the GPL to be greater than the harm done by violating it. Yes, perhaps the company deserves to be driven out of business for flagrantly violating GPL and stealing other peoples' work. But it will take a lot of effort & money to make that happen.
Revelation 16:8 The fourth angel poured out his bowl on the sun, and the sun was given power to scorch people with fire. 9 They were seared by the intense heat and they cursed the name of God, who had control over these plagues, but they refused to repent and glorify him.
Reading all the ways scientists anticipate we are screwing up the planet sounds like a refresher on Revelation.
There's a lot of different questions and concepts going on here.
Has the level of abstraction in computer systems reached a point where beginners can't just code something quick without a huge amount of back-story?
No. But that's not learning to be a programmer. Yes, you can point a beginner at any number of languages with a bit of a reference book or online dictionary and they can hack out something that works. But that is only the most rudimentary lesson in programming.
I find this to be the case now; scripting languages are good, but limited in what you can do...
Which sounds perfect for a beginner language. You start with basic concepts like flow control, variables, data structures, and other rudimentary things. If they "get it" and are excited by the potential for doing more, then they are on their way to being programmers. If not, they have been exposed some basic computer science concepts which will do them good in today's world.
Think of English or History or Art or Mathematics. Most people take classes in those subjects, but few are enthralled to the point of making a career out of any of them. An introductory programming course using Python may help someone hack together some tool later in life, but it does not make them a professional programmer.
and GUI creation requires students to be familiar with a lot of concepts (event handling, etc.) that aren't intuitive for beginners.
And is there something wrong with that? GUIs are advanced topics. They require understanding of advanced topics.
What would you show a beginner first â" JavaScript? Python? How do you get the instant gratification we oldies got when sitting down in front of the early-80s home computers?"
There are many languages available today that would work fine as introductory languages. And many students will check off the requirement box and move on. A few will "get the instant gratification" regardless of the language used and move on to more advanced learning.
You seem to have the implied assumption that if you can make the results of coding "exciting" - flashy graphics, sounds, 3D animations, explosions - then students will be more interested in coding. I doubt that is true. At the end of the day you still sit in front of a computer and push buttons over and over.
In the now "civilized world" death used to be much more common and intimate - the above poster provided several examples. Children got diseases and died, women died in child birth. Moving down the hierarchy a bit, people used to kill and eat their own animals. Death was an integral part of life.
Recently we have pushed death away. Our food comes wrapped in plastic packages. Death happens in hospitals or nursing homes. Child mortality rates have fallen. We consider dealing with death "barbaric" or "primitive" or something for doctors or some such.
Medical treatment has advanced to the point where we can keep people alive far beyond what would generally be called a worthwhile life; our brains and bodies wear out and degrade, but we can keep alive through drugs & treatments.
The problem with suicide is that people often make the choice to take their own life when things are bad but may generally be expected to improve - jilted by a lover, bankruptcy, some other traumatic experience. Society has some obligation to keep people from making permanent decisions "in the heat of the moment".
I fall in the camp of if a person's situation cannot be reasonably expected to improve - incurable disease that will turn agonizing or incapacitating, then let them choose to check out before they become too miserable. When that point is is hard to determine. If you are diagnosed with Alzheimer's or AIDs should society allow you to check out immediately?
DNRTFA. How much does it cost for packaging, shipping, retail store space, etc. for a $60 game? There's a lot of middle-men involved with manufacturing a product and shipping it to a brick and mortar store.
Contrast that with an App Store game. You set up a web site with all your documentation and marketing info. Apple or Google or Amazon take a straight cut of the retail price and provide all the distribution and payment infrastructure. It costs very little to host & sell 1000 units vs 10000 units.
And then you get into working the number of units sold formula. How many people will buy your game for $1, $5, $10? Will the number of units sold offset the lower price? Because in the digital world, once you make one copy, you can make a million at almost no additional cost (which is not true of DVDs or any other physical delivery medium). So cost to sell a million at $1 is the same as selling 100,000 at $10.
Take out the physical delivery medium and the cost-to-profit structure takes on a whole new shape.
My wife substitute teaches at a local elementary school and this is my "cool story bro'" anecdotal evidence.
Schools CAN NOT fail students who are performing poorly. Failing an unruly, constant behavioral problem student, who refuses to do work and whose parents refuse to take any action at home, will only make the school's No Child Left Behind score go down and hurt their $$$. So the schools push these troublemakers on up the line.
"Specialists" do everything except fill in the bubble on the standardized tests to ensure that EVERY student passes. It is not about ensuring kids have learned what they're supposed to, or that they can perform at grade appropriate levels, it's all about making sure they PASS.
We're planning on switching over to home schooling next year or possibly the year after - or move to a different district. The local public school system is a sad, cruel joke.
Tens of thousands of people have disappeared. Entire towns have been scrubbed off the earth. Japan has WAY more things to warrant its attention besides one nuclear power plant. The power plant is important, but there's only so many hours in a day. And 23 1/2 of them may be better spent focusing on immediate humanitarian relief and rebuilding. TEPCO is mostly on their own to work through this issue.
As a U.S. citizen who is looking forward to the Supreme Court striking down a law that forces citizens to buy over priced insurance policies from corrupt scum bag corporations I can also see that a single payer system would be good for the welfare of the entire nation, from individual citizens to all corporations excluding the scum bags currently ripping off citizens.
That all may very well be true. a federal level, single payer healthcare system could be GREAT for the USA. It just happens to be unconstitutional at the moment. The Constitution was designed to be amended and has been many times. Let's just amend it to say "Health care is a really important thing and we all now think the Federal government should offer it." Boom. Done. Problem solved.
If healthcare is really that important, where's the movement to amend the Constitution to allow the Feds to supply it? Why weren't the Democrats saying something like, "we want to pass some legislation now to improve things, but also want to amend the Constitution because that's what needs to be done to really take care of this issue."
My cynical opinion is that both the Democrats and Republicans want to ignore the Constitution's limits on what the Federal government is allowed to do*. They want to lob anything they want to do into the commerce and general welfare clauses so the Federal government has limitless power.
* Unless the other guys are trying to do something they don't like. Then they'll trot out the Constitution to keep the other guys from doing anything.
Oh. And documentation. Real, full blown, accurate documentation. Yes, some (many?) commercial products have sucky documentation, but open source software is terrible in my experience.
Programmers won't help. What's needed are UI designers, usability experts, and people with the power to veto non-compliant contributions. UI consistency is what the Average Joe needs.
As others have pointed out "public" != "Federal". The States may be able to impose net neutrality on the carriers since it is State land that the easements use, but the Feds can take a hike. I'd much prefer net-neutrality, but this really does raise issues of Federal authority creep. (Not that that's stopped the Feds before, but it is another instance of Federal overreach.)
And in a "free-market", libertarian modeled world, BP would be sued out of existence. Every fisherman, hotel owner, casino owner, Gulf Coast resident & Gulf Coast tourist would line up to take a bite out of BP for damages sustained. BP would be nibbled to death. Of course, there's several obstacles to that happening: 1) The vast majority of the plaintiffs are too small to fund the legal challenge necessary. It'd be interesting if the States affected could/would go after BP on behalf of their citizens. 2) BP has the resources to keep any lawsuits tied up in court indefinitely. By the time any payout judgement did come through, most of the claimants would be dead and buried. 3) BP is important to the British economy. That raises the politics to the international level. Even the individual US States can't play there.
BP is too big to be punished significantly. The people of the USA have had their environment degraded measurably for who knows how long, and the residents of the Gulf Coast have had their lives changed permanently. My one hope is that the USA will learn the lesson that not all regulation is bad like the Tea Party is chanting.
I've decided, it's not the language, it's the libraries. I write very little code that does the "real" work any more. Need to process XML? Find a library. Need web services? Find a library. Need to process Excel documents? Write a GUI? Talk to a database? etc., etc. My coding is far more about wiring up libraries of functionality than it is about taking advantage of whatever cool feature the language I'm using may have.
Unless the Republicans take control of the Senate in a few days, the Senate is unlikely to question the President's authority. He can call it an Executive Agreement, or whatever he wants; a Senate controlled by his political party will most likely let him do what he likes. Then these law professors and whoever can file a law suit of some sort, it can wend its way through the court system for several years until the current players are out of office, and eventually 5-10 years (or more) from now the Supreme Court can decide if ACTA is really a Treaty that requires Senate approval or not.
We are not a nation of laws, but a nation of political parties. Whichever party is in charge will pass whatever laws they want regardless of Constitutionality.
I'm also not liking the political drama on SGU. It seemed to me they have plenty to work with trying to figure out the ship, explore new areas, stop at interesting planets along the way. But they've dropped that for "ooo, let's have some bad guys drop in and create TENSION." Yawn.
I also only watched Caprica for a few episodes. Never hooked me. Not sure why not.
No amount of money can buy happiness because only God can and does give blessings to anyone who believes Him and because of that belief does the will of God.
Actually, God blesses both those who believe and those who don't believe.
Psalm 49
16 Do not be overawed when a man grows rich, when the splendor of his house increases; 17 for he will take nothing with him when he dies, his splendor will not descend with him.
And many other verses I don't have at my fingertips.
The primary difference between those who believe & trust in God and those who don't is that those who do receive eternal life. The unbeliever has their reward here on earth and then perishes.
Ecclesiastes 5:10-20
10 Whoever loves money never has money enough; whoever loves wealth is never satisfied with his income. This too is meaningless. 11 As goods increase, so do those who consume them. And what benefit are they to the owner except to feast his eyes on them? 12 The sleep of a laborer is sweet, whether he eats little or much, but the abundance of a rich man permits him no sleep. 13 I have seen a grievous evil under the sun: wealth hoarded to the harm of its owner, 14 or wealth lost through some misfortune, so that when he has a son there is nothing left for him. 15 Naked a man comes from his mother's womb, and as he comes, so he departs. He takes nothing from his labor that he can carry in his hand. 16 This too is a grievous evil: As a man comes, so he departs, and what does he gain, since he toils for the wind? 17 All his days he eats in darkness, with great frustration, affliction and anger. 18 Then I realized that it is good and proper for a man to eat and drink, and to find satisfaction in his toilsome labor under the sun during the few days of life God has given him--for this is his lot. 19 Moreover, when God gives any man wealth and possessions, and enables him to enjoy them, to accept his lot and be happy in his work--this is a gift of God. 20 He seldom reflects on the days of his life, because God keeps him occupied with gladness of heart.
FTA: "When faced with dangerously incompetent management, it's best to just look for another job."
I found this a very telling statement. If your management are bozos, don't try to change them or point out their bozo-ness. Just pack up and move on. They hold all the cards. You will be punished for trying to fix anything that makes them look bad.
The iPad is successful, in part, due to the App Store and the large set of touch based applications already proven on other iPhone OS devices. I'm not familiar with the Palm Pre to know what kind of app selection it has and how well-done the UI is on them. Windows based touch devices have never taken off because it is Windows (a desktop, full PC based OS) with a thin touch veneer on top rather than a touch-based, thin client OS.
I wish HP well expanding Web OS and developing it into a viable competitor to iPhone OS and Android.
- Jasen.
P.S. I also think they could end up ignoring the consumer space and develop Web OS devices for their "vertical enterprise markets" like hospitals, etc.
They look like a great acquisition target for GE, Shell, BP, or any of the other energy giants. Who could then lock these guys up in a lab forever doing "feasibility tests" and further research.
Diffusing governmental authority in the hands of as many people as is possible and pushing that authority down to the lowest possible level to where those impacted by those decisions can have a direct role in the decision making process.
One problem is that this is highly inefficient to the point of being unworkable in modern world. Who imposes data standards, or how wide roads should be, or the width of train tracks, or health standards in goods shipped across hundreds or thousands of miles? Local control falls apart when societal infrastructure spans multiple localities (and nations). Also, if a large majority of the population are expected to be born, live & die within a 50 mile radius it doesn't much matter how much variation there is across a nation the size of the USA (or the world). But with the population being far more mobile and travel across great distances being so easy, common standards & laws across wider distances make sense.
It is not a far jump from realizing that if locality X pumps arsenic into the groundwater and it flows into locality Y killing people that a higher level government needs to impose rules on X for the benefit of Y, to realizing that if country A pumps sulfur dioxide into the air to the detriment of country B that a higher authority needs to be established to protect B from A's actions.
Centralized authority makes things more efficient.
A downside to this efficiency is the rise of mono-culture. I believe (I don't have any actual numbers or research, but it's something I remember hearing once at a party, so it must be true) that the rise of national television has lessened the prominence of regional dialects. I think the same holds true for anything from language to clothing styles to moral norms: the larger the centralized authority controls/influences the fewer variations there will be within the area.
Slashdot Mirror
So some company is violating GPL v3, who is going to do anything about it? Who's going to hire the lawyer(s) to take them to court to get settlement money - the vast majority of which will likely to go the lawyers? Or do you report them to "the authorities" and some government funded lawyer chases them down?
Even if you do go to court and get a judgement against the company, then what? Hamstersoft doesn't sound like a company with deep pockets. So they declare bankruptcy, and the officers open another company doing the same thing with a different name.
Perhaps I'm overly cynical or naive, but I see the effort of enforcing the GPL to be greater than the harm done by violating it. Yes, perhaps the company deserves to be driven out of business for flagrantly violating GPL and stealing other peoples' work. But it will take a lot of effort & money to make that happen.
Revelation 16:8 The fourth angel poured out his bowl on the sun, and the sun was given power to scorch people with fire. 9 They were seared by the intense heat and they cursed the name of God, who had control over these plagues, but they refused to repent and glorify him.
Reading all the ways scientists anticipate we are screwing up the planet sounds like a refresher on Revelation.
- Jasen.
There's a lot of different questions and concepts going on here.
Has the level of abstraction in computer systems reached a point where beginners can't just code something quick without a huge amount of back-story?
No. But that's not learning to be a programmer. Yes, you can point a beginner at any number of languages with a bit of a reference book or online dictionary and they can hack out something that works. But that is only the most rudimentary lesson in programming.
I find this to be the case now; scripting languages are good, but limited in what you can do...
Which sounds perfect for a beginner language. You start with basic concepts like flow control, variables, data structures, and other rudimentary things. If they "get it" and are excited by the potential for doing more, then they are on their way to being programmers. If not, they have been exposed some basic computer science concepts which will do them good in today's world.
Think of English or History or Art or Mathematics. Most people take classes in those subjects, but few are enthralled to the point of making a career out of any of them. An introductory programming course using Python may help someone hack together some tool later in life, but it does not make them a professional programmer.
and GUI creation requires students to be familiar with a lot of concepts (event handling, etc.) that aren't intuitive for beginners.
And is there something wrong with that? GUIs are advanced topics. They require understanding of advanced topics.
What would you show a beginner first â" JavaScript? Python? How do you get the instant gratification we oldies got when sitting down in front of the early-80s home computers?"
There are many languages available today that would work fine as introductory languages. And many students will check off the requirement box and move on. A few will "get the instant gratification" regardless of the language used and move on to more advanced learning.
You seem to have the implied assumption that if you can make the results of coding "exciting" - flashy graphics, sounds, 3D animations, explosions - then students will be more interested in coding. I doubt that is true. At the end of the day you still sit in front of a computer and push buttons over and over.
- Jasen.
In the now "civilized world" death used to be much more common and intimate - the above poster provided several examples. Children got diseases and died, women died in child birth. Moving down the hierarchy a bit, people used to kill and eat their own animals. Death was an integral part of life.
Recently we have pushed death away. Our food comes wrapped in plastic packages. Death happens in hospitals or nursing homes. Child mortality rates have fallen. We consider dealing with death "barbaric" or "primitive" or something for doctors or some such.
Medical treatment has advanced to the point where we can keep people alive far beyond what would generally be called a worthwhile life; our brains and bodies wear out and degrade, but we can keep alive through drugs & treatments.
The problem with suicide is that people often make the choice to take their own life when things are bad but may generally be expected to improve - jilted by a lover, bankruptcy, some other traumatic experience. Society has some obligation to keep people from making permanent decisions "in the heat of the moment".
I fall in the camp of if a person's situation cannot be reasonably expected to improve - incurable disease that will turn agonizing or incapacitating, then let them choose to check out before they become too miserable. When that point is is hard to determine. If you are diagnosed with Alzheimer's or AIDs should society allow you to check out immediately?
Tough questions. I wish Mr. Pratchett well.
DNRTFA.
How much does it cost for packaging, shipping, retail store space, etc. for a $60 game? There's a lot of middle-men involved with manufacturing a product and shipping it to a brick and mortar store.
Contrast that with an App Store game. You set up a web site with all your documentation and marketing info. Apple or Google or Amazon take a straight cut of the retail price and provide all the distribution and payment infrastructure. It costs very little to host & sell 1000 units vs 10000 units.
And then you get into working the number of units sold formula. How many people will buy your game for $1, $5, $10? Will the number of units sold offset the lower price? Because in the digital world, once you make one copy, you can make a million at almost no additional cost (which is not true of DVDs or any other physical delivery medium). So cost to sell a million at $1 is the same as selling 100,000 at $10.
Take out the physical delivery medium and the cost-to-profit structure takes on a whole new shape.
- Jasen.
My wife substitute teaches at a local elementary school and this is my "cool story bro'" anecdotal evidence.
Schools CAN NOT fail students who are performing poorly. Failing an unruly, constant behavioral problem student, who refuses to do work and whose parents refuse to take any action at home, will only make the school's No Child Left Behind score go down and hurt their $$$. So the schools push these troublemakers on up the line.
"Specialists" do everything except fill in the bubble on the standardized tests to ensure that EVERY student passes. It is not about ensuring kids have learned what they're supposed to, or that they can perform at grade appropriate levels, it's all about making sure they PASS.
We're planning on switching over to home schooling next year or possibly the year after - or move to a different district. The local public school system is a sad, cruel joke.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bx4pN-aiofw
Neither of which seem to be happening.
Neither of which is being reported by US media.
Tens of thousands of people have disappeared. Entire towns have been scrubbed off the earth. Japan has WAY more things to warrant its attention besides one nuclear power plant. The power plant is important, but there's only so many hours in a day. And 23 1/2 of them may be better spent focusing on immediate humanitarian relief and rebuilding. TEPCO is mostly on their own to work through this issue.
I would be concerned with where all that water went and what its state is?
One would assume the containment ponds are leaking into the ground. How radioactive is the water? How long lived is its radioactivity?
So cable channels are only viable when targeted at people too dumb or poor to use a PVR?
That explains a lot.
- Jasen.
That all may very well be true. a federal level, single payer healthcare system could be GREAT for the USA. It just happens to be unconstitutional at the moment. The Constitution was designed to be amended and has been many times. Let's just amend it to say "Health care is a really important thing and we all now think the Federal government should offer it." Boom. Done. Problem solved.
If healthcare is really that important, where's the movement to amend the Constitution to allow the Feds to supply it? Why weren't the Democrats saying something like, "we want to pass some legislation now to improve things, but also want to amend the Constitution because that's what needs to be done to really take care of this issue."
My cynical opinion is that both the Democrats and Republicans want to ignore the Constitution's limits on what the Federal government is allowed to do*. They want to lob anything they want to do into the commerce and general welfare clauses so the Federal government has limitless power.
* Unless the other guys are trying to do something they don't like. Then they'll trot out the Constitution to keep the other guys from doing anything.
Oh. And documentation. Real, full blown, accurate documentation. Yes, some (many?) commercial products have sucky documentation, but open source software is terrible in my experience.
Get a horde of tech writers to contribute to OSS.
Programmers won't help. What's needed are UI designers, usability experts, and people with the power to veto non-compliant contributions. UI consistency is what the Average Joe needs.
As others have pointed out "public" != "Federal". The States may be able to impose net neutrality on the carriers since it is State land that the easements use, but the Feds can take a hike. I'd much prefer net-neutrality, but this really does raise issues of Federal authority creep. (Not that that's stopped the Feds before, but it is another instance of Federal overreach.)
- Jasen.
I prefer Apple's aluminum keyboard. You can slice your rivals' heads off with one fell swoop.
- Jasen.
And in a "free-market", libertarian modeled world, BP would be sued out of existence. Every fisherman, hotel owner, casino owner, Gulf Coast resident & Gulf Coast tourist would line up to take a bite out of BP for damages sustained. BP would be nibbled to death.
Of course, there's several obstacles to that happening:
1) The vast majority of the plaintiffs are too small to fund the legal challenge necessary. It'd be interesting if the States affected could/would go after BP on behalf of their citizens.
2) BP has the resources to keep any lawsuits tied up in court indefinitely. By the time any payout judgement did come through, most of the claimants would be dead and buried.
3) BP is important to the British economy. That raises the politics to the international level. Even the individual US States can't play there.
BP is too big to be punished significantly. The people of the USA have had their environment degraded measurably for who knows how long, and the residents of the Gulf Coast have had their lives changed permanently. My one hope is that the USA will learn the lesson that not all regulation is bad like the Tea Party is chanting.
I've decided, it's not the language, it's the libraries. I write very little code that does the "real" work any more. Need to process XML? Find a library. Need web services? Find a library. Need to process Excel documents? Write a GUI? Talk to a database? etc., etc. My coding is far more about wiring up libraries of functionality than it is about taking advantage of whatever cool feature the language I'm using may have.
- Jasen.
Unless the Republicans take control of the Senate in a few days, the Senate is unlikely to question the President's authority. He can call it an Executive Agreement, or whatever he wants; a Senate controlled by his political party will most likely let him do what he likes. Then these law professors and whoever can file a law suit of some sort, it can wend its way through the court system for several years until the current players are out of office, and eventually 5-10 years (or more) from now the Supreme Court can decide if ACTA is really a Treaty that requires Senate approval or not.
We are not a nation of laws, but a nation of political parties. Whichever party is in charge will pass whatever laws they want regardless of Constitutionality.
Cynical? Just a bit.
- Jasen.
I'm also not liking the political drama on SGU. It seemed to me they have plenty to work with trying to figure out the ship, explore new areas, stop at interesting planets along the way. But they've dropped that for "ooo, let's have some bad guys drop in and create TENSION." Yawn.
I also only watched Caprica for a few episodes. Never hooked me. Not sure why not.
No amount of money can buy happiness because only God can and does give blessings to anyone who believes Him and because of that belief does the will of God.
Actually, God blesses both those who believe and those who don't believe.
Psalm 49 16 Do not be overawed when a man grows rich, when the splendor of his house increases; 17 for he will take nothing with him when he dies, his splendor will not descend with him.
And many other verses I don't have at my fingertips. The primary difference between those who believe & trust in God and those who don't is that those who do receive eternal life. The unbeliever has their reward here on earth and then perishes.
- Jasen.
Ecclesiastes 5:10-20
10 Whoever loves money never has money enough; whoever loves wealth is never satisfied with his income. This too is meaningless. 11 As goods increase, so do those who consume them. And what benefit are they to the owner except to feast his eyes on them? 12 The sleep of a laborer is sweet, whether he eats little or much, but the abundance of a rich man permits him no sleep. 13 I have seen a grievous evil under the sun: wealth hoarded to the harm of its owner, 14 or wealth lost through some misfortune, so that when he has a son there is nothing left for him. 15 Naked a man comes from his mother's womb, and as he comes, so he departs. He takes nothing from his labor that he can carry in his hand. 16 This too is a grievous evil: As a man comes, so he departs, and what does he gain, since he toils for the wind? 17 All his days he eats in darkness, with great frustration, affliction and anger. 18 Then I realized that it is good and proper for a man to eat and drink, and to find satisfaction in his toilsome labor under the sun during the few days of life God has given him--for this is his lot. 19 Moreover, when God gives any man wealth and possessions, and enables him to enjoy them, to accept his lot and be happy in his work--this is a gift of God. 20 He seldom reflects on the days of his life, because God keeps him occupied with gladness of heart.
FTA: "When faced with dangerously incompetent management, it's best to just look for another job."
I found this a very telling statement. If your management are bozos, don't try to change them or point out their bozo-ness. Just pack up and move on. They hold all the cards. You will be punished for trying to fix anything that makes them look bad.
How very sad and defeatist.
- Jasen.
What!? No mention of Dr. Dobb's? /. is slipping.
- Jasen.
The iPad is successful, in part, due to the App Store and the large set of touch based applications already proven on other iPhone OS devices. I'm not familiar with the Palm Pre to know what kind of app selection it has and how well-done the UI is on them. Windows based touch devices have never taken off because it is Windows (a desktop, full PC based OS) with a thin touch veneer on top rather than a touch-based, thin client OS.
I wish HP well expanding Web OS and developing it into a viable competitor to iPhone OS and Android.
- Jasen.
P.S. I also think they could end up ignoring the consumer space and develop Web OS devices for their "vertical enterprise markets" like hospitals, etc.
They look like a great acquisition target for GE, Shell, BP, or any of the other energy giants. Who could then lock these guys up in a lab forever doing "feasibility tests" and further research.
- Jasen.
Diffusing governmental authority in the hands of as many people as is possible and pushing that authority down to the lowest possible level to where those impacted by those decisions can have a direct role in the decision making process.
One problem is that this is highly inefficient to the point of being unworkable in modern world. Who imposes data standards, or how wide roads should be, or the width of train tracks, or health standards in goods shipped across hundreds or thousands of miles? Local control falls apart when societal infrastructure spans multiple localities (and nations). Also, if a large majority of the population are expected to be born, live & die within a 50 mile radius it doesn't much matter how much variation there is across a nation the size of the USA (or the world). But with the population being far more mobile and travel across great distances being so easy, common standards & laws across wider distances make sense.
It is not a far jump from realizing that if locality X pumps arsenic into the groundwater and it flows into locality Y killing people that a higher level government needs to impose rules on X for the benefit of Y, to realizing that if country A pumps sulfur dioxide into the air to the detriment of country B that a higher authority needs to be established to protect B from A's actions.
Centralized authority makes things more efficient.
A downside to this efficiency is the rise of mono-culture. I believe (I don't have any actual numbers or research, but it's something I remember hearing once at a party, so it must be true) that the rise of national television has lessened the prominence of regional dialects. I think the same holds true for anything from language to clothing styles to moral norms: the larger the centralized authority controls/influences the fewer variations there will be within the area.