About Ayers influence: That's not a very bully pulpit that he's got. His current views and activities might possibly stir up a little discussion now and then in his classroom, but even that is doubtful: he teaches Education majors. As a group they have a reputation for quickly assimilating and regurgitating whatever dogma is prevalent in their current community, They are fully oriented toward getting jobs indoctrinating children into the ways of the mainstream; they crave that like a choirboy craves his hymnal and vestments.
After reading the entirety of the Wikipedia article cited in parent, Ayers has obviously become a well-shaped cog in the Chicago political machine-- hardly revolutionary. Working with Daley to obtain Federal funds-- a complete turnaround from the Weathermen positions of the 1960s.
On the other points:
Okay, so maybe capitalism did not win, despite the way the Soviet Union has blown apart, China has become the largest free market in the world (granted a lot of government interference, yet considering problems with milk, software piracy, etc, maybe not enough of that), and so on. I was thinking that it might be easier to transition from the mindset of capitalism to the thinking required by the post-capitalist world by recognizing and applauding capitalism's big wins, but whatever.
The salient point is that neither capitalism nor communism nor any of the other old ideologies have any relevance today. These are all models based on academic assumptions about economic activity that go back more than 100 years in one system and more than 300 years in another. During the last 20 years, as the world has changed to a global economy it has become painfully evident that the basic nature of economic transactions is not what those dead thinkers had thought and not what we had been taught, whether we were taught the capitalist or the communist model. None of those old systems were capable of forecasting the collapse of markets that we are now seeing. Even after the fact there is no way to adequately describe the Crash Of 2008 in terms of capitalism or of communism. It cannot be done; those models are as inadequate for our current needs as a flat Earth model is to lunar exploration.
The "free enterprise system" is not something we can return to; it was a model, a way of looking at economic activity, a fiction, that used to make sense in some contexts. Much as the fiction of centrifugal force makes sense in some contexts. But you cannot build physics on top of centrifugal force, and you cannot understand today's economy in terms of the simplifications Marx used 160 years ago, or the simplifications Locke used 318 years ago. It is time to give up old ways of looking at things.
Let go of the old capitalist (or communist) dogma and free your mind so you can participate in trying to find a better model for the realities of the economy as it actually works. The old metaphors are no longer useful; we need a new model.
And by the way, we really need to make some changes RIGHT NOW, or the global economic collapse is going to lead into famines and pandemics and real bad chaos. So we need to be prepared to manage this mess without any model whatsoever, until we are out of the crisis. Persons who are articulate enough to post messages on slashdot have a responsibility to their species to do some of the hard, original thinking that is going to be needed to get beyond this crash. Persons who are stuck in confusing ancient dogma with current realities are somewhat worse than useless. They tend to distract the problem solvers, you see.
*Orbital velocity varies; above is for circular LEO (about 150 miles (240 km) altitude)
Minimum orbital velocity is about 68% of escape velocity. Source: How Stuff Works
Points of this post:
It usually takes less than a minute to google a technical term that is not in your daily vocabulary, and this is usually a good idea even for/. posts, unless your long term strategy for earning money and influencing people includes looking stupid in front of a world wide forum.
The parent post's intended point is still valid even if it demonstrates an insulting lack of care in preparation: Iran now has demonstrated mastery of a major component of a worldwide delivery system.
When calculating astrological signs over timescales of millenia, don't forget that due to precession of the Earth's axis the signs all shift by about a month every 2,000 years. So today's Libra is the year 4000's Virgo.
Um, no. Not if you are talking astrological signs. They are pegged, by definition, to the vernal equinox. The Earth's precession affects the astronomical constellations and those have drifted, but that's a different thing.
Don't confuse the hands of the clock for the time. Astrologers work with time, not with an old clock.
Yes I am peripherally aware of what Ayers has been saying, which is all the attention anyone should give to him. I stand by what I wrote.
His words contribute little to the discussion, and aside from the accidental limelight of being very marginally associated with the President, he really has no significance today. He is effectively one of the senile Old Guard, still fighting the battles of the 1960s.
So he is about as relevant to today's arguments about what to do with a corrupted world economic system as those who continue to chase him around with a spotlight because he makes such a great straw man argument.
Get with the program and come to terms with how the pragmatics of this future-oriented economy have completely fucked up the assumptions of every economic ideology that is based on past-oriented economic systems. We need to be doing the things today that will create the tomorrow we would prefer to live in, and determining what those things are, and making them happen, is not going to be assisted by those who are hung up on capitalism, communism, or the other -isms that were derived from studies of past history and no longer have any relevance.
Here is an easy way for you to look at it:
Capitalism won the battle. Accept that you don't have to fight that one any more.
Capitalism has shown a serious internal flaw: the "invisible hand of the marketplace" works through feedback from activities in the recent past and cannot work when the market is primarily governed by feedback of concurrent activity and future activity. The capitalistic model is broken.
We need a new post-capitalist model, but before that, we need some gut-wrenching pragmatic activity to prop this mess up before it completes its current fall-on-its-face splatter.
So congratulate yourself on having one the battles and having burst open the dams of communism, etc, and letting capitalistic free markets flow all over the place
And now either start sandbagging, or STFU and get out of the way
Since copyright infringement is now routinely elevated to the violent robbery of "piracy", then it makes sense that we start calling the insertion of unwanted extensions into our applications "rape".
The charge is "You have inserted your extension into my application without my consent". Yeah, that's rape.
The design failure was to try improving the security by prompting even more dialogs which led to the phenomenon that even less of those dialogs were ever read.
Well, the design failed, but not for the reason stated above.
People, you have got to realize that Vista, like other Microsoft products, is not written to meet end user needs. It is written to meet salesman needs; he is the customer whose needs are addressed. Vista succeeds if it is good enough to close the deal in the sales room. Vista has failed since it has been hard to sell to users who already have better OSs (WinXP, even Win2000) on their current systems, but the UAC did not contribute to that. A good sales rep can demonstrate the advantages of the UAC to a PHB in charge of the IT budget very quickly and easily, so that really was not a problem.
That MS treats the sales reps as its real customers goes back to at least Win3.1 days. The infamous Calculator bug in Win3.0 was not fixed in Win3.1, since it was less expensive to tell sales reps to breeze over the problem than to fix the floating point arithmetic routines. Plus it gave the enterprising sales rep the opportunity to sell the user a third party calculator that actually could be used for basic money handling. The calculator provided with Win3.0 and Win3.1 that could not do basic arithmetic: it failed with subtraction involving 2 or more significant digits. Yet it was never repaired, nor the bug officially acknowledged, through the entire life of Win3.0 and Win3.1, since it had no impact on sales.
Those are the classic pillars of the 60's progressive, who wants to tax the holy fuck out of the rich and give it back to the exploited masses. It's communism lite.
Wow, what a blast from the past. It has been over thirty years since that rhetoric had any currency, and then it was already 25 years old and creaky. Your words come straight out of a time before the Internet, before personal computers, before even integrated circuits, back when there were less than 3 billion people. Now there are more than 6 billion people, the world's economies run on globe-spanning networks of communications supporting 'just in time' inventory and order systems, FOSS is critical to the operation of nearly all large institutions including government and military. Any more, no one is worrying about whether the freeze dried TV dinners in their fallout shelter have aged past their expiration dates. The world has changed.
There are no "60's progressives" out there any more. Or rather, the few that remain have no influence since they are so clearly senile. Discussion has turned from those old concerns to new ones that fit these times.
Please drop out of any further public discussions on the interwebs, until you have done some reading on current issues and can identify your opponents. Rather than pointing to what people were saying forty years ago, since those people are now either dead, senile, or have updated/upgraded their views.
I do not think that number of books in the house is related to disposable income.
Large numbers of people with significant disposable income spend it on ski lift tickets, fancy automobiles, DVDs, iPods, and other non-literary goodies. Large numbers of people who have little disposable income find their entertainment at the used book section of the local Goodwill store and at the local library. Turning the kids loose in the children's section of a library or used book store has always been, and still is, a common way to brighten a child's day.
...people with money generally have more books than people without.
Within the context established by previous posts (where 'people without money' == 'working class'), above quote is a bald-faced assertion and more than likely wrong.
From what I've seen of middle class life styles in America, most people in the USA who have significant disposable income have more space devoted to their collections of CDs, DVDs, and computer games than they do in bookshelves. And then there is the camper with the water ski boat on the trailer, the TV in every room, the gaming computer for each family member, and the multiple iPods. With all that to play with, there is not a whole lot of time left for reading, so of course a big home library is not that important to the lifestyle.
A single bookcase in the study does not a home library make. A working class home with boxes of used paperbacks stacked in the corners of the living room and the bedrooms, brought home from the Goodwill Store, is a more literate home.
There are an awful lot of people in the USA who are living close to the hand to mouth level who are more literate than most of the upper middle class. Books, especially used paperbacks, are cheaper and in many ways much more satisfying entertainment than the unaffordable toys of the middle class.
Yes, different developers use "beta" and "RC" in different ways. With Microsoft, these terms have always been defined by marketdroids, not by engineers.
If Microsoft is only planning one beta and one RC, the most likely reason is that the company feels a need to rush this product to market with barely any of the pre-release hype that was done from Win95 and WinNT onward, through the multiple reviews of betas and RCs that Microsoft so lovingly nurtured in those halcyon days when it could dictate a schedule to its markets.
Those days are over. Their image is being battered by the Vista fiasco. Linux, especially the *buntus, are beginning to upstage them on the desktop. Several alternatives to MS Office have now become viable and are already stealing some niche markets. And Exchange Server is beginning to look a little shaky: there are other alternatives now.
With Obama billions to be pumped into the economy in a very short time, there are a lot of businesses that will be looking at renovating their IT infrastructure in the next 12 -24 months, and if Microsoft has no viable products at the beginning of this period... Well, it would not be the first company that had a meteoric rise, and ballistic crash.
Microsoft marketing needs to have Win7 in place, ready for purchase, in probably less than 3 months. It would be nice if Win7 actually worked, but that is secondary. Microsoft has enough ready cash on hand to smother any noise about performance concerns. It just needs to get the thing out there.
Oh yeah! And let's be sure to add redundant links, just in case somebody doesn't recognize that they missed their first chance to contribute to the problem.
"The New York administration of the late 19th century" did popularize the issues and did a lot of direct work on solutions, which helped speed these innovations (implementation starting before the automobile was conceived, and a long time before the automobile became a significant factor):
Horse drawn trolleys, with routes that encouraged formation of residential commuting neighborhoods
Zoning ordinances in general
Taxi industry (remains highly dependent on local ordinances)
Short haul delivery and freight industries (remains highly dependent on local ordinances)
Bicycles (see below)
These and similar endeavors received support from city governments through ordinances, city brokered bond issues, changes in laws. Between 1897 and 1910, they significantly altered city transportation systems, and through that, all aspects of city life. So the changes were in place before the number of automobile drivers had reached significance.
The annals of the League of American Bicyclists (LAB) documents this with respect to bicycles. Known as the League of American Wheelmen (LAW) until updating its name in 1994, it was founded in 1880 and had become a major lobbying group for paved streets and sensible and consistent traffic laws by 1895. It is one of the very few organizations that had a political impact on urban affairs before 1900 that is still effective and relevant today. The LAW acronym was very deliberate: this group has had more impact on traffic law development than any one else, including the automotive industry, which mostly tweaked traffic laws that had been developed for safer bicycling. Wikipedia article on LAB gives a quick, highly glossed 3rd party description of the organization.
Parent post asserts that
The problem was solved by new technologies invented, developed, an popularised by private individuals looking to either make a buck or solve a problem that they faced personally. Not by any committee of busybodies trying to save the world.
This is false.
The changes were in fact brought about through local political processes like committees using mostly well established technologies like horse drawn trolleys and livery services in controlled ways. Wide area organizations like LAW provided input and attempted to shape the local processes. Arguably the most important innovation during this period was a change in pavement from cobblestones to brick, asphalt, and oiled surfaces-- to improve bicycling conditions.
This is kind of important stuff to know today, because in the city nearest you, there are definitely efforts to reshape the transportation system to something greener, and these efforts involve the same processes that were in extensive use 110 years ago, before the automobile.
Schools who are using Windows in the classrooms already have some form of "frozen" boot image on those machines. If they don't, they don't have any working classroom computers. No school can afford to pay the number of techs that would be needed to keep unprotected machines clean.
So the desktop image is protected.
There are solutions to protect and when necessary re-install the USB drive image. So that isn't a problem either.
It is possible that the USB might carry malware between students' home computers. But that is not a new avenue of risk. Students already need to be aware that if they don't practice digital abstinence with their friends, they need to make use of antimalware packages or there could be unpleasant surprises.
I have migrated to Linux at this point, and I have yet to really explore what is possible with portable apps on Linux. Probably not really an issue: it looks like the portable Windows apps will run very nicely in a virtual WinXP environment on a Linux host. Which might be anotther thing for schools to look at: my experience with VBox is minimal, but suggests that it does a very good job of sandboxing user applications.
Well, this is the other side of the coin. I call these arguments "ostrich think", since it is usually based on an assumption that if you stick your head in the sand and ignore what is going on the world, the problems you are responsible for handling will go away.
USB drives are here. High school students who have a broader and more solidly fundamental understanding of computers and communications than many of their teachers are here. Deal with it.
PS, when I say "deal with it", I mean get off your ass and learn what is going on and try to start directing the processes you are being paid to manage. Trying to create a fictional world where technological progress stopped at some point that was convenient for your comfort level is not "dealing with it".
I'm more than a little irate about IT administrators who go around sabotaging the hardware they are supposed to be stewards to by pouring epoxy into all the USB ports.
A relatively new option that should be looked at is providing each student with their own USB drive, at a cost of 10USD to 100USD each, depending on whether flash or spinning, and size. Load these with a standard image of portable FOSS software (assuming you are using Windows, look at the Portable Apps web site. There will be room enough for a full suite of portable applications plus storage for all text a student might author in the course of year. Plus, with the larger drives, enough room for libraries of whatever. Be worth the while to check what's now available through the Open CourseWare initiatives of MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and a host of other institutions. Some of it may be appropriate to the students in question, and you can't beat the price or accessibility.
A key to this approach is loading a portable image of Firefox that is preconfigured with the bookmarks and other features the school wants the students to have access to.
This showed a great deal of promise in an adult ed "Preparation For The WorkPlace" environment I was associated with until last July. The software was well received by students, especially Firefox with its bookmarks. They got very comfortable using it. These were on 1 GB thumb drives, which was more than adequate in size.
The portable OpenOffice.org component was not well received by those teachers who were already very defensive about their minimalist skill level with Microsoft Office, but that kind of resistance (of teachers being required to learn new software) is a separate issue that has to be faced no matter how software in the schools is updated.
Bullshit. The money that governments are currently spending on bail-outs and stimulus programs is not coming from any private parties. It is coming from the future.
It is coming from the future in the form of debt. It is based on the faith that eventually there will be enough wealth to cover the tremendous costs of yesterday's bad decisions and today's corrective actions. These debts are high risk since there is no collateral to back them. However, if these become bad debts, that means we're screwed anyway. We'll be back in the day when it is more valuable to know how to clean a pig sty than to know Python or even the Pythagorean theorem.
It isn't like we've got much choice in the matter. Marketplace decisions for the last few years have left us with trillions more dollars on paper than there is real wealth to back, and with all the risk management schemes, there is no way to attach the shortfall to any one region or segment. It's now a general system failure. We're screwed if we don't act, and we might be screwed no matter what we do.
It would be nice to see those who were responsible for watching the marketplace who should have raised the alarm about this five years ago hung screaming by their cojones in a Texas desert. That wouldn't help us out of the bind the world is now in, but I and others would feel a bit better if that were to happen. Which should count for a little something.
Economists like to pretend that economics is a science, but I'm not so sure.
By definition, any successful economic theory changes the nature of the marketplace as it is adopted. The only way a science of economics could exist is if it were capable of perceiving itself as a significant part of the phenomena it is attempting to model. Outside of quantum mechanics, we have very little experience with that kind of science.
QM is the only other field where we have any significant experience with the observer affecting the system being observed. And while QM is fantastically successful in its details, at the grand scale it is stuck in such assinities as string theory.
We can be even more explicit. Within QM's various cosmologies, there exists the possibility that we create the universal laws of physics as we "discover" them (one of the possibilities of the "Many Worlds" hypotheses). But in economics, that is not a possibility, it is an observable fact that the "discovery" of new economic "laws" alters the marketplace as these are adopted.
We need economists whose minds are as sharp as our best high energy physicists before we can begin to develop a solid base for a science of economics. Until that time, economics should be regarded as one of the black arts, like propaganda or crowd control, and not as a science.
I would wonder even HOW they plan to review changes. Aside from the sheer volume issue... there is also the question of exactly HOW they can practically review technical changes for accuracy, without a wide variety of specialists on staff.
Wikipedia. Cross check with Google. Jeesh, this kind of research isn't rocket surgery any more.
Yeah, and we STILL don't know how many Libraries of Congress or Volkswagen Beetles...
Is the amount of ice at the poles sufficient to account for the watermarked features of the planet? A simple 'yes', 'no', or 'maybe if' answer to THAT question would be interesting.
Let's see, every private hospital and clinic in the USA has developed its own normal values for each of its laboratory tests, based on which proprietary instrumentation they bought into, who they buy their standardized reagents from, and how their lab techs are trained to set up the equipment. A CPK result that raises concern in one hospital might well be within normal limits for the hospital two blocks down the street.
So standardizing all this in a way that would make medical records usable across the country is going to be a massive effort. You either replace all the existing procedures, equipment, and training with standard ones, or you find a way to assure that each clinic and hospital in the USA has a valid way of converting their proprietary results to a standard format.
And that's just one small part of the problem. There are major technical barriers related to bandwidth and storage and moving medical images around the
country without sacrificing critical detail. There are huge subjective in handling the written expert assessments of clinicians. The problems with encryption and security are orders of magnitude greater than anything that has yet been attempted,
This stuff is technically challenging. Yet it pales beside the political problems of dealing with the health care industry and the insurance industry.
Yeah, the VA has been unlucky in its choice of names for this software.
Originally this was the Decentralized Hospital Computer Program package, DHCP, back around 1982, before the internets. Then when they began migrating from the old dumb terminal / minicomputer model to an intranet model in the early 1990s they found they had a serious name collision with Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (a very different kind of DHCP). So in 1996 they changed the package name to Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture, or VisTA. That was years before Microsoft latched onto Vista as a name. I bet the VA will change the name of their software again soon.
In 1999, VisTA was the most advanced clinical management software anywhere on the planet. Because it was open source (public domain), no private companies in the USA would touch it, since it was much more profitable to develop proprietary solutions that would assure long term customer lock in. IIRC, Saudi Arabia was adopting VisTA for its national health care system, Israel was also looking closely at it, and there was some interest in it in Latin America.
Any nationwide attempt to standardize health care records needs to look hard at VisTA. But more importantly, it needs to be recognized that standardizing health care records in the USA means going up against the combined might of the private health care industry and the insurance industry who both prefer the status quo. Since the profits inherent in the current chaos are greater than the cost reductions they could realize if health care records were standardized, and in the boardrooms these dollar based pragmatic arguments trump idealistic concerns about providing better health care.
Good as far as it goes. Do you also turn away visitors who arrive with small children in tow? That is a necessary part of the strategy.
Another part is childproofing the perimeter: leave no doors open or in a state where a young child could open them; if you might be leaving hazards in the yard, put up a childproof fence, etc.
In short, either use childproof drawers and closets, or childproof the perimeter of your whole place-- but yeah you need to childproof. Cuz the little bastards don't know how to read "no trespassing" signs yet and are incredibly stupid in their curiosity about uncovered wells, vats of acid, and so on.
Those in agreement with parent post may want to look up "negligence" in the law books. In many jurisdictions, allowing the existence of a risky situation where the risk would be obvious to a reasonably prudent person and would cost nothing to fix constitutes a negligent situation.
These laws concerning negligence were written to protect the general public from the behaviors of assholes who think in ways similar to the parent post. Generally the idea is that if an asshole will not control potential risks out of respect for possible harm to others, then perhaps he will do so if the cost of being negligent is so damned high he'll pay attention to that. In short, lawsuits based on damages from gross negligence are easy to win and often involve huge punitive damages. Which is as it should be.
A trespasser who is injured due to the negligence of the homeowner can sue, and often win big bucks in punitive as well as compensatory damages. When the trespasser is a child, the situation is even worse for the homeowner.
Another thing: negligent behavior is not confined to one arena of life; it is part of a broad mind set. The asshole who is grossly negligent wrt child safety is almost certainly negligent in honoring license agreements, honoring NDAs, testing his code, and so forth. This kind of guy is too likely to cost an employer more than any value his continued employment would provide.
Re-read the grandparent post. It says "...when your child is 13".
Point being that it isn't only your own kids who need safeguarding; it is the tag along rug rats of visitors who need safeguarding.
<span class="GetOffMyLawn">
But when you consider that the average age of likely respondents on slashdot is not very much higher than 13, this is one of the more stupid slashdot discussions I've involved myself in.
</span>
Slashdot Mirror
About Ayers influence: That's not a very bully pulpit that he's got. His current views and activities might possibly stir up a little discussion now and then in his classroom, but even that is doubtful: he teaches Education majors. As a group they have a reputation for quickly assimilating and regurgitating whatever dogma is prevalent in their current community, They are fully oriented toward getting jobs indoctrinating children into the ways of the mainstream; they crave that like a choirboy craves his hymnal and vestments.
After reading the entirety of the Wikipedia article cited in parent, Ayers has obviously become a well-shaped cog in the Chicago political machine-- hardly revolutionary. Working with Daley to obtain Federal funds-- a complete turnaround from the Weathermen positions of the 1960s.
On the other points:
Okay, so maybe capitalism did not win, despite the way the Soviet Union has blown apart, China has become the largest free market in the world (granted a lot of government interference, yet considering problems with milk, software piracy, etc, maybe not enough of that), and so on. I was thinking that it might be easier to transition from the mindset of capitalism to the thinking required by the post-capitalist world by recognizing and applauding capitalism's big wins, but whatever.
The salient point is that neither capitalism nor communism nor any of the other old ideologies have any relevance today. These are all models based on academic assumptions about economic activity that go back more than 100 years in one system and more than 300 years in another. During the last 20 years, as the world has changed to a global economy it has become painfully evident that the basic nature of economic transactions is not what those dead thinkers had thought and not what we had been taught, whether we were taught the capitalist or the communist model. None of those old systems were capable of forecasting the collapse of markets that we are now seeing. Even after the fact there is no way to adequately describe the Crash Of 2008 in terms of capitalism or of communism. It cannot be done; those models are as inadequate for our current needs as a flat Earth model is to lunar exploration.
The "free enterprise system" is not something we can return to; it was a model, a way of looking at economic activity, a fiction, that used to make sense in some contexts. Much as the fiction of centrifugal force makes sense in some contexts. But you cannot build physics on top of centrifugal force, and you cannot understand today's economy in terms of the simplifications Marx used 160 years ago, or the simplifications Locke used 318 years ago. It is time to give up old ways of looking at things.
Let go of the old capitalist (or communist) dogma and free your mind so you can participate in trying to find a better model for the realities of the economy as it actually works. The old metaphors are no longer useful; we need a new model.
And by the way, we really need to make some changes RIGHT NOW, or the global economic collapse is going to lead into famines and pandemics and real bad chaos. So we need to be prepared to manage this mess without any model whatsoever, until we are out of the crisis. Persons who are articulate enough to post messages on slashdot have a responsibility to their species to do some of the hard, original thinking that is going to be needed to get beyond this crash. Persons who are stuck in confusing ancient dogma with current realities are somewhat worse than useless. They tend to distract the problem solvers, you see.
A correction of fact is called for.
*Orbital velocity varies; above is for circular LEO (about 150 miles (240 km) altitude)
Minimum orbital velocity is about 68% of escape velocity. Source: How Stuff Works
Points of this post:
When calculating astrological signs over timescales of millenia, don't forget that due to precession of the Earth's axis the signs all shift by about a month every 2,000 years. So today's Libra is the year 4000's Virgo.
Um, no. Not if you are talking astrological signs. They are pegged, by definition, to the vernal equinox. The Earth's precession affects the astronomical constellations and those have drifted, but that's a different thing.
Don't confuse the hands of the clock for the time. Astrologers work with time, not with an old clock.
Yes I am peripherally aware of what Ayers has been saying, which is all the attention anyone should give to him. I stand by what I wrote.
His words contribute little to the discussion, and aside from the accidental limelight of being very marginally associated with the President, he really has no significance today. He is effectively one of the senile Old Guard, still fighting the battles of the 1960s.
So he is about as relevant to today's arguments about what to do with a corrupted world economic system as those who continue to chase him around with a spotlight because he makes such a great straw man argument.
Get with the program and come to terms with how the pragmatics of this future-oriented economy have completely fucked up the assumptions of every economic ideology that is based on past-oriented economic systems. We need to be doing the things today that will create the tomorrow we would prefer to live in, and determining what those things are, and making them happen, is not going to be assisted by those who are hung up on capitalism, communism, or the other -isms that were derived from studies of past history and no longer have any relevance.
Here is an easy way for you to look at it:
This is a good point.
Since copyright infringement is now routinely elevated to the violent robbery of "piracy", then it makes sense that we start calling the insertion of unwanted extensions into our applications "rape".
The charge is "You have inserted your extension into my application without my consent". Yeah, that's rape.
The design failure was to try improving the security by prompting even more dialogs which led to the phenomenon that even less of those dialogs were ever read.
Well, the design failed, but not for the reason stated above.
People, you have got to realize that Vista, like other Microsoft products, is not written to meet end user needs. It is written to meet salesman needs; he is the customer whose needs are addressed. Vista succeeds if it is good enough to close the deal in the sales room. Vista has failed since it has been hard to sell to users who already have better OSs (WinXP, even Win2000) on their current systems, but the UAC did not contribute to that. A good sales rep can demonstrate the advantages of the UAC to a PHB in charge of the IT budget very quickly and easily, so that really was not a problem.
That MS treats the sales reps as its real customers goes back to at least Win3.1 days. The infamous Calculator bug in Win3.0 was not fixed in Win3.1, since it was less expensive to tell sales reps to breeze over the problem than to fix the floating point arithmetic routines. Plus it gave the enterprising sales rep the opportunity to sell the user a third party calculator that actually could be used for basic money handling. The calculator provided with Win3.0 and Win3.1 that could not do basic arithmetic: it failed with subtraction involving 2 or more significant digits. Yet it was never repaired, nor the bug officially acknowledged, through the entire life of Win3.0 and Win3.1, since it had no impact on sales.
Interesting that the current Wikipedia article on the Windows Calculator has dropped the section on Bugs. Earlier versions of the article mention this in a "Trivia" section or a "Bugs" section. These sections seem to come and go.
Those are the classic pillars of the 60's progressive, who wants to tax the holy fuck out of the rich and give it back to the exploited masses. It's communism lite.
Wow, what a blast from the past. It has been over thirty years since that rhetoric had any currency, and then it was already 25 years old and creaky. Your words come straight out of a time before the Internet, before personal computers, before even integrated circuits, back when there were less than 3 billion people. Now there are more than 6 billion people, the world's economies run on globe-spanning networks of communications supporting 'just in time' inventory and order systems, FOSS is critical to the operation of nearly all large institutions including government and military. Any more, no one is worrying about whether the freeze dried TV dinners in their fallout shelter have aged past their expiration dates. The world has changed.
There are no "60's progressives" out there any more. Or rather, the few that remain have no influence since they are so clearly senile. Discussion has turned from those old concerns to new ones that fit these times.
Please drop out of any further public discussions on the interwebs, until you have done some reading on current issues and can identify your opponents. Rather than pointing to what people were saying forty years ago, since those people are now either dead, senile, or have updated/upgraded their views.
I do not think that number of books in the house is related to disposable income.
Large numbers of people with significant disposable income spend it on ski lift tickets, fancy automobiles, DVDs, iPods, and other non-literary goodies. Large numbers of people who have little disposable income find their entertainment at the used book section of the local Goodwill store and at the local library. Turning the kids loose in the children's section of a library or used book store has always been, and still is, a common way to brighten a child's day.
...people with money generally have more books than people without.
Within the context established by previous posts (where 'people without money' == 'working class'), above quote is a bald-faced assertion and more than likely wrong.
From what I've seen of middle class life styles in America, most people in the USA who have significant disposable income have more space devoted to their collections of CDs, DVDs, and computer games than they do in bookshelves. And then there is the camper with the water ski boat on the trailer, the TV in every room, the gaming computer for each family member, and the multiple iPods. With all that to play with, there is not a whole lot of time left for reading, so of course a big home library is not that important to the lifestyle.
A single bookcase in the study does not a home library make. A working class home with boxes of used paperbacks stacked in the corners of the living room and the bedrooms, brought home from the Goodwill Store, is a more literate home.
There are an awful lot of people in the USA who are living close to the hand to mouth level who are more literate than most of the upper middle class. Books, especially used paperbacks, are cheaper and in many ways much more satisfying entertainment than the unaffordable toys of the middle class.
Yes, different developers use "beta" and "RC" in different ways. With Microsoft, these terms have always been defined by marketdroids, not by engineers.
If Microsoft is only planning one beta and one RC, the most likely reason is that the company feels a need to rush this product to market with barely any of the pre-release hype that was done from Win95 and WinNT onward, through the multiple reviews of betas and RCs that Microsoft so lovingly nurtured in those halcyon days when it could dictate a schedule to its markets.
Those days are over. Their image is being battered by the Vista fiasco. Linux, especially the *buntus, are beginning to upstage them on the desktop. Several alternatives to MS Office have now become viable and are already stealing some niche markets. And Exchange Server is beginning to look a little shaky: there are other alternatives now.
With Obama billions to be pumped into the economy in a very short time, there are a lot of businesses that will be looking at renovating their IT infrastructure in the next 12 -24 months, and if Microsoft has no viable products at the beginning of this period... Well, it would not be the first company that had a meteoric rise, and ballistic crash.
Microsoft marketing needs to have Win7 in place, ready for purchase, in probably less than 3 months. It would be nice if Win7 actually worked, but that is secondary. Microsoft has enough ready cash on hand to smother any noise about performance concerns. It just needs to get the thing out there.
I've got one word to say to whoever modded parent post as "troll":
Woosh!
Oh yeah! And let's be sure to add redundant links, just in case somebody doesn't recognize that they missed their first chance to contribute to the problem.
I'll help out too: Alaska Volcano Observatory
"The New York administration of the late 19th century" did popularize the issues and did a lot of direct work on solutions, which helped speed these innovations (implementation starting before the automobile was conceived, and a long time before the automobile became a significant factor):
These and similar endeavors received support from city governments through ordinances, city brokered bond issues, changes in laws. Between 1897 and 1910, they significantly altered city transportation systems, and through that, all aspects of city life. So the changes were in place before the number of automobile drivers had reached significance.
The annals of the League of American Bicyclists (LAB) documents this with respect to bicycles. Known as the League of American Wheelmen (LAW) until updating its name in 1994, it was founded in 1880 and had become a major lobbying group for paved streets and sensible and consistent traffic laws by 1895. It is one of the very few organizations that had a political impact on urban affairs before 1900 that is still effective and relevant today. The LAW acronym was very deliberate: this group has had more impact on traffic law development than any one else, including the automotive industry, which mostly tweaked traffic laws that had been developed for safer bicycling. Wikipedia article on LAB gives a quick, highly glossed 3rd party description of the organization.
Parent post asserts that
The problem was solved by new technologies invented, developed, an popularised by private individuals looking to either make a buck or solve a problem that they faced personally. Not by any committee of busybodies trying to save the world.
This is false.
The changes were in fact brought about through local political processes like committees using mostly well established technologies like horse drawn trolleys and livery services in controlled ways. Wide area organizations like LAW provided input and attempted to shape the local processes. Arguably the most important innovation during this period was a change in pavement from cobblestones to brick, asphalt, and oiled surfaces-- to improve bicycling conditions.
This is kind of important stuff to know today, because in the city nearest you, there are definitely efforts to reshape the transportation system to something greener, and these efforts involve the same processes that were in extensive use 110 years ago, before the automobile.
Schools who are using Windows in the classrooms already have some form of "frozen" boot image on those machines. If they don't, they don't have any working classroom computers. No school can afford to pay the number of techs that would be needed to keep unprotected machines clean.
So the desktop image is protected.
There are solutions to protect and when necessary re-install the USB drive image. So that isn't a problem either.
It is possible that the USB might carry malware between students' home computers. But that is not a new avenue of risk. Students already need to be aware that if they don't practice digital abstinence with their friends, they need to make use of antimalware packages or there could be unpleasant surprises.
I have migrated to Linux at this point, and I have yet to really explore what is possible with portable apps on Linux. Probably not really an issue: it looks like the portable Windows apps will run very nicely in a virtual WinXP environment on a Linux host. Which might be anotther thing for schools to look at: my experience with VBox is minimal, but suggests that it does a very good job of sandboxing user applications.
Well, this is the other side of the coin. I call these arguments "ostrich think", since it is usually based on an assumption that if you stick your head in the sand and ignore what is going on the world, the problems you are responsible for handling will go away.
USB drives are here. High school students who have a broader and more solidly fundamental understanding of computers and communications than many of their teachers are here. Deal with it.
PS, when I say "deal with it", I mean get off your ass and learn what is going on and try to start directing the processes you are being paid to manage. Trying to create a fictional world where technological progress stopped at some point that was convenient for your comfort level is not "dealing with it".
I'm more than a little irate about IT administrators who go around sabotaging the hardware they are supposed to be stewards to by pouring epoxy into all the USB ports.
</flame>
A relatively new option that should be looked at is providing each student with their own USB drive, at a cost of 10USD to 100USD each, depending on whether flash or spinning, and size. Load these with a standard image of portable FOSS software (assuming you are using Windows, look at the Portable Apps web site. There will be room enough for a full suite of portable applications plus storage for all text a student might author in the course of year. Plus, with the larger drives, enough room for libraries of whatever. Be worth the while to check what's now available through the Open CourseWare initiatives of MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and a host of other institutions. Some of it may be appropriate to the students in question, and you can't beat the price or accessibility.
A key to this approach is loading a portable image of Firefox that is preconfigured with the bookmarks and other features the school wants the students to have access to.
This showed a great deal of promise in an adult ed "Preparation For The WorkPlace" environment I was associated with until last July. The software was well received by students, especially Firefox with its bookmarks. They got very comfortable using it. These were on 1 GB thumb drives, which was more than adequate in size.
The portable OpenOffice.org component was not well received by those teachers who were already very defensive about their minimalist skill level with Microsoft Office, but that kind of resistance (of teachers being required to learn new software) is a separate issue that has to be faced no matter how software in the schools is updated.
Bullshit. The money that governments are currently spending on bail-outs and stimulus programs is not coming from any private parties. It is coming from the future.
It is coming from the future in the form of debt. It is based on the faith that eventually there will be enough wealth to cover the tremendous costs of yesterday's bad decisions and today's corrective actions. These debts are high risk since there is no collateral to back them. However, if these become bad debts, that means we're screwed anyway. We'll be back in the day when it is more valuable to know how to clean a pig sty than to know Python or even the Pythagorean theorem.
It isn't like we've got much choice in the matter. Marketplace decisions for the last few years have left us with trillions more dollars on paper than there is real wealth to back, and with all the risk management schemes, there is no way to attach the shortfall to any one region or segment. It's now a general system failure. We're screwed if we don't act, and we might be screwed no matter what we do.
It would be nice to see those who were responsible for watching the marketplace who should have raised the alarm about this five years ago hung screaming by their cojones in a Texas desert. That wouldn't help us out of the bind the world is now in, but I and others would feel a bit better if that were to happen. Which should count for a little something.
Economists like to pretend that economics is a science, but I'm not so sure.
By definition, any successful economic theory changes the nature of the marketplace as it is adopted. The only way a science of economics could exist is if it were capable of perceiving itself as a significant part of the phenomena it is attempting to model. Outside of quantum mechanics, we have very little experience with that kind of science.
QM is the only other field where we have any significant experience with the observer affecting the system being observed. And while QM is fantastically successful in its details, at the grand scale it is stuck in such assinities as string theory.
We can be even more explicit. Within QM's various cosmologies, there exists the possibility that we create the universal laws of physics as we "discover" them (one of the possibilities of the "Many Worlds" hypotheses). But in economics, that is not a possibility, it is an observable fact that the "discovery" of new economic "laws" alters the marketplace as these are adopted.
We need economists whose minds are as sharp as our best high energy physicists before we can begin to develop a solid base for a science of economics. Until that time, economics should be regarded as one of the black arts, like propaganda or crowd control, and not as a science.
I would wonder even HOW they plan to review changes. Aside from the sheer volume issue... there is also the question of exactly HOW they can practically review technical changes for accuracy, without a wide variety of specialists on staff.
Wikipedia. Cross check with Google. Jeesh, this kind of research isn't rocket surgery any more.
Yeah, and we STILL don't know how many Libraries of Congress or Volkswagen Beetles...
Is the amount of ice at the poles sufficient to account for the watermarked features of the planet? A simple 'yes', 'no', or 'maybe if' answer to THAT question would be interesting.
Let's see, every private hospital and clinic in the USA has developed its own normal values for each of its laboratory tests, based on which proprietary instrumentation they bought into, who they buy their standardized reagents from, and how their lab techs are trained to set up the equipment. A CPK result that raises concern in one hospital might well be within normal limits for the hospital two blocks down the street.
So standardizing all this in a way that would make medical records usable across the country is going to be a massive effort. You either replace all the existing procedures, equipment, and training with standard ones, or you find a way to assure that each clinic and hospital in the USA has a valid way of converting their proprietary results to a standard format.
And that's just one small part of the problem. There are major technical barriers related to bandwidth and storage and moving medical images around the country without sacrificing critical detail. There are huge subjective in handling the written expert assessments of clinicians. The problems with encryption and security are orders of magnitude greater than anything that has yet been attempted,
This stuff is technically challenging. Yet it pales beside the political problems of dealing with the health care industry and the insurance industry.
Worse than rocket surgery. Uh-huh.
Yeah, the VA has been unlucky in its choice of names for this software.
Originally this was the Decentralized Hospital Computer Program package, DHCP, back around 1982, before the internets. Then when they began migrating from the old dumb terminal / minicomputer model to an intranet model in the early 1990s they found they had a serious name collision with Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (a very different kind of DHCP). So in 1996 they changed the package name to Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture, or VisTA. That was years before Microsoft latched onto Vista as a name. I bet the VA will change the name of their software again soon.
In 1999, VisTA was the most advanced clinical management software anywhere on the planet. Because it was open source (public domain), no private companies in the USA would touch it, since it was much more profitable to develop proprietary solutions that would assure long term customer lock in. IIRC, Saudi Arabia was adopting VisTA for its national health care system, Israel was also looking closely at it, and there was some interest in it in Latin America.
Any nationwide attempt to standardize health care records needs to look hard at VisTA. But more importantly, it needs to be recognized that standardizing health care records in the USA means going up against the combined might of the private health care industry and the insurance industry who both prefer the status quo. Since the profits inherent in the current chaos are greater than the cost reductions they could realize if health care records were standardized, and in the boardrooms these dollar based pragmatic arguments trump idealistic concerns about providing better health care.
Good as far as it goes. Do you also turn away visitors who arrive with small children in tow? That is a necessary part of the strategy.
Another part is childproofing the perimeter: leave no doors open or in a state where a young child could open them; if you might be leaving hazards in the yard, put up a childproof fence, etc.
In short, either use childproof drawers and closets, or childproof the perimeter of your whole place-- but yeah you need to childproof. Cuz the little bastards don't know how to read "no trespassing" signs yet and are incredibly stupid in their curiosity about uncovered wells, vats of acid, and so on.
Those in agreement with parent post may want to look up "negligence" in the law books. In many jurisdictions, allowing the existence of a risky situation where the risk would be obvious to a reasonably prudent person and would cost nothing to fix constitutes a negligent situation.
These laws concerning negligence were written to protect the general public from the behaviors of assholes who think in ways similar to the parent post. Generally the idea is that if an asshole will not control potential risks out of respect for possible harm to others, then perhaps he will do so if the cost of being negligent is so damned high he'll pay attention to that. In short, lawsuits based on damages from gross negligence are easy to win and often involve huge punitive damages. Which is as it should be.
A trespasser who is injured due to the negligence of the homeowner can sue, and often win big bucks in punitive as well as compensatory damages. When the trespasser is a child, the situation is even worse for the homeowner.
Another thing: negligent behavior is not confined to one arena of life; it is part of a broad mind set. The asshole who is grossly negligent wrt child safety is almost certainly negligent in honoring license agreements, honoring NDAs, testing his code, and so forth. This kind of guy is too likely to cost an employer more than any value his continued employment would provide.
Re-read the grandparent post. It says "...when your child is 13".
Point being that it isn't only your own kids who need safeguarding; it is the tag along rug rats of visitors who need safeguarding.
<span class="GetOffMyLawn"> But when you consider that the average age of likely respondents on slashdot is not very much higher than 13, this is one of the more stupid slashdot discussions I've involved myself in. </span>