Yes, the terrorist should get caught in the first check, but any security plan that doesn't consider that humans will be humans is doomed to failure. A layered defense is far harder to penetrate, because there's no single weak point.
Look, the terrorists just have to kidnap the little daughter of the guy manning the first check, and you already cannot be sure that he'll do his job.
Which is not to defend ineffective security screening, just that your proposal is no solution either.
I disagree. I think China is simply undergoing a stage of development exactly like Japan, Hong Kong, and Taiwan before it had gone through. I'm fairly certain that China will outgrow this and begin to build its own world-class brands over the next few decades, and also fairly certain that another country will take up the world's demand for cheap knock-off products when that starts to happen. It's called "moving up the value chain."
the cables are a one-time expense and, are minuscule compared to the ongoing costs of human-hours
No, it's not. You need to look at it from the perspective of somebody who's trying to take some of Comcast's business in a given town. You can either pre-lay a lot of cables with no real sense of how many of those users you can get to switch, or find customers before you can get a cable to their house (and have to say, "sorry, your TV signals will arrive in two months"). The cabling is, in fact, the huge initial expenditure that any serious competitor must overcome.
Also, there's a significant environmental impact to your suggestion that goes beyond just dollar cost.
That's a violation of that company's (or, rather, its owners') freedom.
Tough. Monopolies - especially government-created ones - must play by different rules.
without their own interest in your service, what is their incentive in the quality of your picture?
Same as it is today: that we'd be so pissed off and cancel their monopoly control, or switch to satellite, etc.
Allow anyone to run their cables to any home, if they want to.
No, this makes no sense at all. It's a waste of expensive cables and they may have to dig up roads unnecessarily. Instead, the monopoly that owns the cable should be divested of its content arm, so that anybody can send me their content through the cable to my house.
Youtube proved the tech and bandwidth are there when they netcasted U2 live from the Rose Bowl to millions around the world.
YouTube proved that they could serve one video stream to an estimated 10 million viewers, which is a remarkable feat. However, there are an estimated 110 million households with a TV in the US alone, watching dozens or even hundreds of different shows, so let's not get ahead of ourselves.
Don't underestimate Cable. In the US, they are still the fattest pipe entering the most households, and will be for a while.
We need to understand when people seek documentation. Right after they install a new application, I expect most users to just go try it out to see if they can figure it out, and so as you say the "welcome" documentation are often unread. However, when they are faced with a specific task that isn't obvious (unavoidable, no matter how user-friendly the application tries to be), they would search for it.
Thus, a straightforward UI plus comprehensive task-oriented documentation is probably enough for most users. The rest of them need step-by-step tutorials that are a magnitude more work to produce.
Even in the most highly competitive marketplace, somebody will always invent something first. However, we don't want to grant patents just for being novel or new, and instead also require that the invention is truly innovative or non-obvious.
Obviously, anybody who invents something first did something "innovative". However, when discussing whether the invention should be protected by a patent monopoly, there's a higher bar for that word than just being the first. Put another way, you're saying that being first in a competitive market is by definition innovative enough for patent protection, which would be a Bad Idea.
yes, it *is* innovative or someone else would have already come up with the idea and patented it
Nonsense. You don't get a patent just for being the first person to encounter and solve a problem. Your solution has to be non-obvious to somebody else who is skilled in the art.
I can't think of any beef cattle in the world that have a natural toxin or are typically unfavorably digested.
Much of the US beef supply comes from cows that were fed corn, which is higher in protein and produces desirable "marbling" in the steak. Unfortunately, cows can't actually digest corn and get sick, so they are also fed antibiotics. Some cows are also fed growth hormones to further reduce their time-to-market. You'll be eating some of these with your hamburger.
Worse, the cows are slaughtered in a way that allows e-coli from fecal matter to contaminate the meat, and finally ground beef is also mixed beef, which makes the source of the contamination even harder to track. The reason why you need to cook your hamburger fully is not because raw beef itself is unsafe.
In other words, the cheapest way to get beef to you is to feed cows something they can't digest, pump them full of antibiotics and hormones, and slaughter them without completely avoiding contamination. There are over six billion of us, which is numerous enough that just about everything we do has serious unintended consequences. Once we all want something, the market takes a series of steps to let us have it, and some of these steps are really bad.
A quick search tells me that IDC projects 21.5 million netbooks will be sold in 2009. An additional failure rate of 1%, assuming that each netbook costs $100 in parts and $30 in shipping and customer service to replace, is $27.9 million in profit that you have to give back. Now, some of those returned products can be fixed (which costs still more money) and resold, but even $20 million is real money in what has to be a very low margin market.
The question is, how much will it cost to reduce failure rates by 1%, to match normal laptop rates? If the 1% is caused by cheap but unreliable parts, then there may well be no solution, but you don't run a business by dismissing the issue as trivial.
I've always subscribed to the theory that the code explains WHAT a program should do clearly enough that even a computer understands it.
I use those words in a different way. To me, the code explains HOW the programmer wanted the task completed in explicit detail, but not WHAT the programmer's intention was. Thus, I would always like a programmer to document WHAT he thinks he's trying to do, so that I can determine if the HOW is right or wrong by inspection. The WHY is doubtlessly a nice bonus, but IME most bugs are discrepancies between the WHAT and the HOW.
Also the Internet operates under the idea that all peers are that, peers. That means either everybody is an adult or everybody is a child. Considering that the Internet can take you faster than a car to places further than a passport can, it should be safe to assume every peer is an adult.
The Web is not one place, it's a lot of sites, each with its own stated and unstated norms of conduct that participants must follow. At a "newspaper website", why would you expect that every participant is an adult?
Also, is being gay something so horrible that entertaining the notion that you might be gay is a serious crime?
It's all in the context, just like any other word. If you mean it as a pejorative, then it is. I don't know what you mean precisely by "serious crime", though.
You do realize that's already the case in the legal profession, right? Rich people hire the best lawyers, and can afford more experts and tests to help their case. Yet most people can afford a (lesser?) lawyer for our pedestrian needs, and the poorest can get a free one appointed by court. Now, the public defender generally will not have the same resources (and perhaps even skill), but it's probably better than defending yourself.
The same way, you'll still have highly-paid doctors catering to the rich, and the nicest among them might spare some of their time doing pro bono work. But broadened coverage allows the people who otherwise can't afford to get sick to at least see a doctor.
Now, if you're talking about forcing the rich to have exactly the same medical options as the poor, who's the communist now?
Actually, it seems that education is much better when it's paid for with private funds.
Can you name a country where a large proportion of the population was educated privately?
I'm not, by the way, necessarily advocating a monopoly of the non-profit. I think public education is better with private education always threatening to take the best students who can afford it. However, that doesn't mean private education alone will give you the result you need. If you look back in history, you'll clearly see what happened when only the rich were educated.
Whether health care can be any good when no profit motive is involved remains to be seen.
Who says there's no profit motive involved? The drug companies still sell drugs, the doctors and nurses still get paid. The question is whether the profits can be controlled to a reasonable level of growth, and for-profits have proven time and again that they are too short-sighted to not kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.
I'll be okay with a for-profit that thinks in terms of decades and centuries. The problem is all we seem to have are those that think in quarters at best.
Thus we are now in what would be called "Put up or shut up," time. But they aren't.
The mistake you're making is thinking that party affiliations indicate a distinct and narrow spectrum of political stances. Many Democrats are rather Republican in their stance, and must answer to a right-leaning district. One of your "60%" Democrats in the Senate is Arlen Specter, who was a Republican for 44 years until this August.
Nonsense, capitalism is awful at things that don't make a profit and where value is not easily expressed in terms of money. This includes things like education, environmental protection, and health care. Quit spewing dumb soundbites.
Apple knows where the money is, and individually licensing the software isn't it.
To be more precise, individually licensing the software for $129 isn't it. If Apple could charge $400 for MacOS X, perhaps it'd be worthwhile. The problem is that the people who loudly proclaim they'll happily pay for a license will probably hide back into their basements, and pirate a copy instead, because the price they were willing to pay was the one subsidized by "vastly overpriced" hardware.
Many computers play DVDs and have TV tuners, but the DVD and television markets are still pretty strong too.
That's different. The TV is usually a living room thing, and the computer is usually a study/bedroom thing. People (who can afford it) buy the most appropriate (often a specialized) device for the activity they plan for each location. IOW, a combo DVD-DVR-cable box makes sense, because it cuts down on the number of boxes in the living room. Running Excel on TV, not nearly as interesting.
The phone and the MP3 player, OTOH, compete for pocket or purse space.
If I was somewhere where I needed to use a GPS device I wouldn't want its battery being drained by cell phone functions blasting out at full power trying to reach a non-existent tower.
As long as anything I do does not affect their chance of getting this compensation, I see no possible way in which it can be immoral.
But it does. Your actions do not occur in a vacuum, it affects the attitudes and behaviors of people around you. When so many people violate copyright that it becomes quaint or even stupid to obey the law, people will stop doing so. It strains the imagination to believe that just about every college and high school student independently considered the issue of copyright before violating it, instead of the simple explanation that they saw all their friends do it with impunity.
Back in the day, any random PC could be a competent cvs/build server for a small development team.
Did I not say "small size and quiet operation"? Since when did "any random PC" fulfill those requirements?
Smaller PCs are legion. Even cheap mini-sized systems are abundant now.
Did I say otherwise? I said there are primary reasons other than aesthetics to use a Mac Mini. For iPhone development in particular, which requires MacOS X, the other systems are not necessarily suitable. If you have different needs and different solutions, that's wonderful too, but quite irrelevant to my point.
Once you contemplate all the other possibilities, and consider that you may not need something terribly pretty, this thing isn't really that exciting.
Who said anything about "exciting"? This is just a server in a small box.
My point was simply to reject that choosing the Mac Mini must primarily be for aesthetics, I'm not sure what yours is.
Right, because its small size and quiet operation are purely aesthetic features. I hope you realize that this makes a competent source control and/or build server for a small development team, such as one that builds iPhone apps.
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Yes, the terrorist should get caught in the first check, but any security plan that doesn't consider that humans will be humans is doomed to failure. A layered defense is far harder to penetrate, because there's no single weak point.
Look, the terrorists just have to kidnap the little daughter of the guy manning the first check, and you already cannot be sure that he'll do his job.
Which is not to defend ineffective security screening, just that your proposal is no solution either.
I disagree. I think China is simply undergoing a stage of development exactly like Japan, Hong Kong, and Taiwan before it had gone through. I'm fairly certain that China will outgrow this and begin to build its own world-class brands over the next few decades, and also fairly certain that another country will take up the world's demand for cheap knock-off products when that starts to happen. It's called "moving up the value chain."
No, it's not. You need to look at it from the perspective of somebody who's trying to take some of Comcast's business in a given town. You can either pre-lay a lot of cables with no real sense of how many of those users you can get to switch, or find customers before you can get a cable to their house (and have to say, "sorry, your TV signals will arrive in two months"). The cabling is, in fact, the huge initial expenditure that any serious competitor must overcome.
Also, there's a significant environmental impact to your suggestion that goes beyond just dollar cost.
Tough. Monopolies - especially government-created ones - must play by different rules.
Same as it is today: that we'd be so pissed off and cancel their monopoly control, or switch to satellite, etc.
For now, physics. Small form factor means small battery, which means the CPU can't be too power hungry.
No, this makes no sense at all. It's a waste of expensive cables and they may have to dig up roads unnecessarily. Instead, the monopoly that owns the cable should be divested of its content arm, so that anybody can send me their content through the cable to my house.
YouTube proved that they could serve one video stream to an estimated 10 million viewers, which is a remarkable feat. However, there are an estimated 110 million households with a TV in the US alone, watching dozens or even hundreds of different shows, so let's not get ahead of ourselves.
Don't underestimate Cable. In the US, they are still the fattest pipe entering the most households, and will be for a while.
We need to understand when people seek documentation. Right after they install a new application, I expect most users to just go try it out to see if they can figure it out, and so as you say the "welcome" documentation are often unread. However, when they are faced with a specific task that isn't obvious (unavoidable, no matter how user-friendly the application tries to be), they would search for it.
Thus, a straightforward UI plus comprehensive task-oriented documentation is probably enough for most users. The rest of them need step-by-step tutorials that are a magnitude more work to produce.
Even in the most highly competitive marketplace, somebody will always invent something first. However, we don't want to grant patents just for being novel or new, and instead also require that the invention is truly innovative or non-obvious.
Obviously, anybody who invents something first did something "innovative". However, when discussing whether the invention should be protected by a patent monopoly, there's a higher bar for that word than just being the first. Put another way, you're saying that being first in a competitive market is by definition innovative enough for patent protection, which would be a Bad Idea.
Nonsense. You don't get a patent just for being the first person to encounter and solve a problem. Your solution has to be non-obvious to somebody else who is skilled in the art.
Much of the US beef supply comes from cows that were fed corn, which is higher in protein and produces desirable "marbling" in the steak. Unfortunately, cows can't actually digest corn and get sick, so they are also fed antibiotics. Some cows are also fed growth hormones to further reduce their time-to-market. You'll be eating some of these with your hamburger.
Worse, the cows are slaughtered in a way that allows e-coli from fecal matter to contaminate the meat, and finally ground beef is also mixed beef, which makes the source of the contamination even harder to track. The reason why you need to cook your hamburger fully is not because raw beef itself is unsafe.
In other words, the cheapest way to get beef to you is to feed cows something they can't digest, pump them full of antibiotics and hormones, and slaughter them without completely avoiding contamination. There are over six billion of us, which is numerous enough that just about everything we do has serious unintended consequences. Once we all want something, the market takes a series of steps to let us have it, and some of these steps are really bad.
A quick search tells me that IDC projects 21.5 million netbooks will be sold in 2009. An additional failure rate of 1%, assuming that each netbook costs $100 in parts and $30 in shipping and customer service to replace, is $27.9 million in profit that you have to give back. Now, some of those returned products can be fixed (which costs still more money) and resold, but even $20 million is real money in what has to be a very low margin market.
The question is, how much will it cost to reduce failure rates by 1%, to match normal laptop rates? If the 1% is caused by cheap but unreliable parts, then there may well be no solution, but you don't run a business by dismissing the issue as trivial.
I use those words in a different way. To me, the code explains HOW the programmer wanted the task completed in explicit detail, but not WHAT the programmer's intention was. Thus, I would always like a programmer to document WHAT he thinks he's trying to do, so that I can determine if the HOW is right or wrong by inspection. The WHY is doubtlessly a nice bonus, but IME most bugs are discrepancies between the WHAT and the HOW.
The Web is not one place, it's a lot of sites, each with its own stated and unstated norms of conduct that participants must follow. At a "newspaper website", why would you expect that every participant is an adult?
It's all in the context, just like any other word. If you mean it as a pejorative, then it is. I don't know what you mean precisely by "serious crime", though.
You do realize that's already the case in the legal profession, right? Rich people hire the best lawyers, and can afford more experts and tests to help their case. Yet most people can afford a (lesser?) lawyer for our pedestrian needs, and the poorest can get a free one appointed by court. Now, the public defender generally will not have the same resources (and perhaps even skill), but it's probably better than defending yourself.
The same way, you'll still have highly-paid doctors catering to the rich, and the nicest among them might spare some of their time doing pro bono work. But broadened coverage allows the people who otherwise can't afford to get sick to at least see a doctor.
Now, if you're talking about forcing the rich to have exactly the same medical options as the poor, who's the communist now?
Can you name a country where a large proportion of the population was educated privately?
I'm not, by the way, necessarily advocating a monopoly of the non-profit. I think public education is better with private education always threatening to take the best students who can afford it. However, that doesn't mean private education alone will give you the result you need. If you look back in history, you'll clearly see what happened when only the rich were educated.
Who says there's no profit motive involved? The drug companies still sell drugs, the doctors and nurses still get paid. The question is whether the profits can be controlled to a reasonable level of growth, and for-profits have proven time and again that they are too short-sighted to not kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.
I'll be okay with a for-profit that thinks in terms of decades and centuries. The problem is all we seem to have are those that think in quarters at best.
The mistake you're making is thinking that party affiliations indicate a distinct and narrow spectrum of political stances. Many Democrats are rather Republican in their stance, and must answer to a right-leaning district. One of your "60%" Democrats in the Senate is Arlen Specter, who was a Republican for 44 years until this August.
Try again. In general, societies that can afford it provide health care to its people, the US is actually the odd one here.
Nonsense, capitalism is awful at things that don't make a profit and where value is not easily expressed in terms of money. This includes things like education, environmental protection, and health care. Quit spewing dumb soundbites.
To be more precise, individually licensing the software for $129 isn't it. If Apple could charge $400 for MacOS X, perhaps it'd be worthwhile. The problem is that the people who loudly proclaim they'll happily pay for a license will probably hide back into their basements, and pirate a copy instead, because the price they were willing to pay was the one subsidized by "vastly overpriced" hardware.
That's different. The TV is usually a living room thing, and the computer is usually a study/bedroom thing. People (who can afford it) buy the most appropriate (often a specialized) device for the activity they plan for each location. IOW, a combo DVD-DVR-cable box makes sense, because it cuts down on the number of boxes in the living room. Running Excel on TV, not nearly as interesting.
The phone and the MP3 player, OTOH, compete for pocket or purse space.
So switch the phone to airplane mode.
My understanding is that much of the Maya glyphs have been decoded. Check out the rather fascinating PBS program Cracking the Maya Code for details.
But it does. Your actions do not occur in a vacuum, it affects the attitudes and behaviors of people around you. When so many people violate copyright that it becomes quaint or even stupid to obey the law, people will stop doing so. It strains the imagination to believe that just about every college and high school student independently considered the issue of copyright before violating it, instead of the simple explanation that they saw all their friends do it with impunity.
Did I not say "small size and quiet operation"? Since when did "any random PC" fulfill those requirements?
Did I say otherwise? I said there are primary reasons other than aesthetics to use a Mac Mini. For iPhone development in particular, which requires MacOS X, the other systems are not necessarily suitable. If you have different needs and different solutions, that's wonderful too, but quite irrelevant to my point.
Who said anything about "exciting"? This is just a server in a small box.
My point was simply to reject that choosing the Mac Mini must primarily be for aesthetics, I'm not sure what yours is.
Right, because its small size and quiet operation are purely aesthetic features. I hope you realize that this makes a competent source control and/or build server for a small development team, such as one that builds iPhone apps.