Today, we've secretly replaced your friend's Monster Cable with Folger's crystals. Let's see if he notices!
Just choose the right visual representation
on
True Visual Programming
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Visual representations work better than textual representations for most technical things, but only if you choose the right visual representation.
Example of a good visual representation: music composition software with virtual modules/machines/synthesizer that you graphically plug together into a virtual "rack" of equipment for your song. Software like BuzzTracker or Psycle, which take this visual approach, are far more efficient to work in than the old textual interfaces provided by programs like ScreamTracker3 or Impulse Tracker.
Example of a pretty good, but still imperfect, visual representation: the desktop GUI. From within the GUI, you can accomplish just about everything you could possibly ever need to do with your computer. It's almost never necessary to pull up a command prompt to get something done, because the GUI provides an equivalent, more-understandable, typically more-efficient way to do it. Of course, there are still cases where the GUI provides a shitty, inefficient visual representation (or worse yet, no visual representation at all) and you do still have to resort to the command line to get something done, or to do it more efficiently. This just illustrates how choosing the right/optimal visual representation is the real challenge, and it also illustrates how it's an ongoing work-in-progress to pick the "optimal" visual representation.
Example of a bad visual representation: most visual programming models developed thus far. As others have pointed out, most visual programming models put together so far are too high-level to be realistic programming environments for real-world purposes. This doesn't mean that visual programming will never work. It just means that no one has offered up a decent enough visual representation of programming yet.
Another thing worth noting is that when you try to develop a high-level "wrapper" layer which rides on top of a lower-level "intermediate" layer, which in turn rides on top of a lowest-level "base" layer, that the layering prevents the top layer from being as elegant and usable as it otherwise could/should be.
Classic examples of this phenomennon:
GNOME/KDE/front-ends (wrapper layer) on top of Linux CLI tools/textual config files/X11/subsystems (intermediate layer) on top of the OS kernel (base layer), instead of integrating the desktop GUI model in a standardized way throughout the entire system
Visual programming model which attempts to translate pictures (wrapper layer) into equivalent common C/C++/Java/C# programming ideas (intermediate layer) and then into machine code (base layer)
In other words, layering forces higher layers to have to be designed to accomodate the design of the layers underneath it, which goes directly against the idea of designing the user-facing (top-most) layer for optimal usability and human understanding.
I think one of the biggest reasons visual programming has not really succeeded so far is because all the approaches to it have been attempts to "visualize" existing programming models as set forth by C/C++/Java/C#/Basic-type languages. That won't work because those programming models were never designed to be visual in the first place. This approach forces the top-most layer (the visual stuff) to be designed in a way that accomodates the intermediate layer, rather than permitting it to be designed in the most human-intuitive way.
Instead of trying to create a visual representation of those existing programming models, the right approach (whatever it is) will ultimately prove to involve an entirely new programming model constructed specifically for it, rather than reusing all the same constructs and ideas established by existing textual languages.
It's also worth noting that this gives rise to the (also obvious) way to go about solving the problem of women shying away from technical fields.
Education in these fields needs to be based from the start around teamwork. Not only would that make the fields more appealing to women, but it's a more realistic representation of and preparation for the working world.
I went to Rice University during 1995-1999, just around the time they were phasing in a genuine BSCS degree. I actually had to get my degree in BSECE (Electrical & Computer Engineering) to get out in four years flat (all my family could afford), but I got about a 50/50 mix of CS and EE classes. And I can say that in both the CS and EE curriculum at Rice, there was almost zero emphasis on teamwork or the team aspects of engineering or software development. At most, I had 1 or two senior-level courses in each field in which I had to work with 1 or 2 other classmates cooperatively on a project, and we were given no guidance involving the teamwork aspects.
I actually graduated from Rice and came to work for Microsoft having never really used CVS or any other collaborative source repository system, and my first couple years at Microsoft went pretty rough because the way I was used to working (as an individual coder with complete control over all choices involved in a development project) was totally different and in direct conflict with a team development setting. It took me quite a while to learn how to fit into the team and use all the teamwork practices and tools properly and effectively.
It's obvious (to me, anyway) why most women shy away from extremely logical/mathematical/technical fields.
It's not because women are incapable. In fact, many women who switch away from these areas of study partway through are getting excellent grades.
It's because most women don't naturally like isolated, focused activities. Many women are mentally capable (moreso than most men) of excelling at the field, but most women don't enjoy that kind of work. Most men see it as an appealing, complex world of obsessive-compulsive challenges, whereas most women see it as boring, lonely, and lacking in human value/interaction.
Or, to summarize -- most men derive enjoyment from focusing on things and logical problems, whereas most women derive enjoyment from focusing on people and relationships.
It's the same reason most auto mechanics are men, and it's the same reason you find far more women majoring in psychology and sociology than in engineering or computer science.
It's also a model that requires you to find companies that art stupid enough to pay you to write software and then give it away to everyone else free, including their competitors.
It's not a matter of a company being "stupid". If a company needs a piece of software to fill a particular need, and no such software exists anywhere in the world yet, then under my proposed model they will either (1) pay the development house to write it for them, (2) write it themselves, or (3) sit around and wait for some other company to pay the development house to write it.
Since most companies aren't going to develop their own software in-house, that rules out option 2. Between (1) and (3), you're left with a situation that is entirely a matter of competitive advantage: the first company to pay to have the software written will get the software written to *their* specific needs, while any other company who tries to adopt the software will either have to modify it or bend their own internal operations or structure to work with it. So in effect the first company to pay gets an immediate leg up on their competition even though the software is released to others simultaneously as F/OSS.
This is called compression
on
Normalizing Music?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The audio processing algorithm being requested here is called "compression", and it's a standard feature of most audio editing package such as SoundForge. You can also buy hardware compressors for under $100 (dbx and Alesis make stereo compressors) that are good for hooking into a home stereo/theater system.
I keep an Alesis digital stereo compressor hooked into my home stereo system so that when loud spots (commercials, action scenece, etc) come on it doesn't suddenly get orders of magnitude louder and drive my apartment neighbors nuts.
Some DVD players have audio compression built-in as a feature. Some newer TV sets have it built-in also.
The problem with a support-based model is that it creates disincentive to make the software easy to use and trouble-free.
The only open-source model I've been able to dream up which would actually be long-term sustainable and which would actually align business incentives with the humanitarian goal of producing better-quality free software is the "contract programming" model. In other words, you pay me to write some particular software you need, and when the "final" version is delivered to you per contract, it's simultaneously released to the world as F/OSS.
Under this model, big corporate customers of my software development house foot the bill to get their needs met, and then everyday people and other businesses get access to it for free. I get paid honestly for my work, the customer pays honestly to get a real need met, and everyone else who happens to find the software useful gets it for free. Everyone's happy. And it's the most healthy model from an economic perspective, since I'm getting paid for the actual work of writing the software, rather than getting paid for the legal privilege of licensing the software to someone.
Unfortunately, this is a model in which to keep making money, you have to keep writing more software. Contrast this against the business model of companies like Microsoft who "write once, sell a billion times over" and thus generate money magically out of thin air. This is why big rich companies are so big on "intellectual property" protection -- it's the artifice that gives rise to their "Magic Money Generator" business model.
You, as the engineer, have a responsibility to cater to the user's intent in your design. Nothing wrong with doing that. So yes, you should choose defaults that cater to the widest possible audience, for example.
But the thing you create (some interactive gadget or computer program) should not at usage-time attempt to figure out or challenge the user's intent. Things like "Are you sure you want to do X?" dialogs, or Word's auto-correction feature, are at best just obnoxious, and at worst just train people to habitually dismiss dialogs or memorize some other action to undo the flawed guessing done by the program.
You might claim that "most people want auto-correct". Even if this were true, it's not an excuse for making auto-correct mode the default behavior of the application. Wherever the engineer's responsibility to cater to the most people and the tool's responsibility to not guess or question people's intent come into conflict, the latter responsibility should win.
I think what this all boils down to is the mistaken but common belief among programmers that users don't know what they want to do. Users DO know what they want to do, they just don't always know how to do it. Make it obvious how to do something, and they will always accomplish what they want.
The real problem with most FOSS is that it is too complex and inconsistent architecturally. No matter how pretty or usable a GUI you slap on top of it, if the underlying system is too complex and inconsistent, it won't be accessible to normal people.
Example: someone writes a niffty GUI wizard for Linux for setting up a printer. The wizard itself follows all the usability guidelines and is quite nice. But the problem is that the wizard is just a front-end for CUPS or some other nastily-complicated printer driver system. When the back-end chokes in some unexpected way the front-end isn't expecting, the user has to comletely sidestep the wizard, go the command line, and whip out Linux-fu magic to fix the problem. The problem here isn't the front-end GUI wizard; the problem is that the architecture of the underlying printer driver system is overly complicated and completely blows, and there's no tight integration between the back-end and the front-end so that the user can use the wizard to easily fix any possible problem that may arise.
You see this over and over again in the Linux/BSD worlds. Slapping a pretty GUI on top of a shit architecture does not make thing easier to use.
People don't seem to be willing to pay a premium for gadgets and alternative systems, and primarily in the corporate market customers prefer to buy from the same suppliers as for their corporate hardware.
How is this news? Consumers always choose the path of least resistance. It's basic economics.
To protect the rights of minorities, and to protect our natural rights, this country desperately needs the following constitutional ammendments:
DEFINITION: For purposes of legal interpretation, race, ethnicity, physical appearance, gender, physical disability, and mental disability are all considered physical characteristics.
DEFINITION: For purposes of legal interpretation, religious beliefs, political position, sexual orientation, and lifestyle are all to be considered matters of individual opinion.
AMMENDMENT: A person's lack of religious or spiritual beliefs constitutes a set of beliefs, and those beliefs are to be treated equally under the law alongside any other set of religious beliefs.
AMMENDMENT: The Government, and no state government, shall enact any law or issue any verdict that either explicitly or consequentially grants or denies rights exclusively to a subset of citizens based on matters of individual opinion or physical characteristics.
AMMENDMENT: No branch of Government, and no state government, shall enact any law or issue any verdict that infriniges upon the natural rights of a person to terminate or protect his or her own life, or to assist in terminating or protecting the life of another person at that person's request.
The real problem with our public educational system is that the mini-society naturally formed by students within a school is in direct opposition to the learning process. The only meaningful educational reform I have seen in my lifetime is the recent nation-wide trend toward anti-bullying programs, but even this does not go far enough. If elected, exactly what would you do to dismantle the natural social ecosystems present today in our public schools and replace them with an enforced social structure conducive to education? And because the absence of chaos is still not enough to motivate students to learn material they see as irrelevant, would you be willing to reform our public school system so that students are paid by the school for academic achievement? After all, most adults only get up and go to work at jobs they dislike because they are paid to do it, so why should we expect any different from children?
From gay marriage and abortion to school prayer and stem cell research, there are numerous issues that boil down to an issue of fairness, equality, and justice. Mr. Bush, you actually want to explicitly encode discrimination and your own personal religious views into the US Constitution. And Mr. Kerry, you are too afraid of appearing unpopular to stand up and fight for those who are being denied (or are about to lose) their equal rights. Why won't either of you stand up and fight (on all issues in all cases) for equality, fairness, and justice? As president, don't you think it's your job to do that, even when you personality disagree with or dislike the minority groups you are obligated to protect?
As everyone knows, our country is run by rich special interests, not by an equal and democratic voicing of the citizenry's wishes. This is due to actions such as lobbying and campaign financing. I believe there should be a complete separation of money and state, akin to the separate of church and state. Money should be absolutely excluded from all parts of the campaigning or legislative processes. Do you promise that if you were elected, you would immediately move to make lobbying and campaign contributions federal crimes, and in their place establish an equal and fair system of campaign opportunity via federally-mandated media broadcast time for all candidates, etc?
In my opinion, minimum wage should be high enough such that in a family of four (two adults and two children) in which only one adult works full time (40 hours/week), the family is able to afford all of its basic health care, food, clothing, shelter, and transportation needs within the locale in which they live. But today minimum wage is so low that even if both adults work more than 40 hours a week at minimum wage jobs, they still cannot afford these basic needs in their locale -- plus, their children are then neglected and the parents must seek out other (often expensive) arragments such as day-care. Do you promise that if you were elected, you would fight to at least quadruple minimum wage, and to then push for legislation requiring it to grow proportionately from that point forth with the overall growth of the economy?
According to CNN Money, the Supreme Court has rejected the appeal of telemarketing companies, which were claiming that the do-not-call list violated their free speech rights.
There is a basic human right that is missing from the U.S. constitution: my right to be left alone if I tell you to leave me alone. This right should trump all other rights. Sure, you may have the constitutional right to say whatever you want, but if I tell you to keep it away from me and my private property, you should have to honor that, period.
How can you live with yourself? Specifically, how can you even pretened to be an ethical person when your software is all about manipulating people (in the most insidious ways possible) into signing up for shit they don't really want?
For specifics, see this site, in particular the following tidbit:
The "flashes" page is especially deceptive: all checkboxes at first appear cleared already, but when scrolling down, more checkboxes are revealed that are not cleared by default! Be sure to clear these "hidden" checkboxes as well.
The PS2 network adaptor isn't just a network adaptor. It's also an IDE hard drive adaptor, allowing you to plug in an IDE hard drive and copy most games to it.
This speeds up load times, allows you to take your game library over to a friend's place without lugging along all the CDs, and allows you to more easily copy/pirate games if you have a mod chip.
I'd say that if sales of the network adaptor are far beyond the number of online users, that would be a big sign that a lot of people are buying the adaptor just to get the hard drive capability.
Slashdot Mirror
Today, we've secretly replaced your friend's Monster Cable with Folger's crystals. Let's see if he notices!
Visual representations work better than textual representations for most technical things, but only if you choose the right visual representation.
Example of a good visual representation: music composition software with virtual modules/machines/synthesizer that you graphically plug together into a virtual "rack" of equipment for your song. Software like BuzzTracker or Psycle, which take this visual approach, are far more efficient to work in than the old textual interfaces provided by programs like ScreamTracker3 or Impulse Tracker.
Example of a pretty good, but still imperfect, visual representation: the desktop GUI. From within the GUI, you can accomplish just about everything you could possibly ever need to do with your computer. It's almost never necessary to pull up a command prompt to get something done, because the GUI provides an equivalent, more-understandable, typically more-efficient way to do it. Of course, there are still cases where the GUI provides a shitty, inefficient visual representation (or worse yet, no visual representation at all) and you do still have to resort to the command line to get something done, or to do it more efficiently. This just illustrates how choosing the right/optimal visual representation is the real challenge, and it also illustrates how it's an ongoing work-in-progress to pick the "optimal" visual representation.
Example of a bad visual representation: most visual programming models developed thus far. As others have pointed out, most visual programming models put together so far are too high-level to be realistic programming environments for real-world purposes. This doesn't mean that visual programming will never work. It just means that no one has offered up a decent enough visual representation of programming yet.
Another thing worth noting is that when you try to develop a high-level "wrapper" layer which rides on top of a lower-level "intermediate" layer, which in turn rides on top of a lowest-level "base" layer, that the layering prevents the top layer from being as elegant and usable as it otherwise could/should be.
Classic examples of this phenomennon:
In other words, layering forces higher layers to have to be designed to accomodate the design of the layers underneath it, which goes directly against the idea of designing the user-facing (top-most) layer for optimal usability and human understanding.
I think one of the biggest reasons visual programming has not really succeeded so far is because all the approaches to it have been attempts to "visualize" existing programming models as set forth by C/C++/Java/C#/Basic-type languages. That won't work because those programming models were never designed to be visual in the first place. This approach forces the top-most layer (the visual stuff) to be designed in a way that accomodates the intermediate layer, rather than permitting it to be designed in the most human-intuitive way.
Instead of trying to create a visual representation of those existing programming models, the right approach (whatever it is) will ultimately prove to involve an entirely new programming model constructed specifically for it, rather than reusing all the same constructs and ideas established by existing textual languages.
This isn't Flamebait, it's Insightful. Someone please mod it up.
It's also worth noting that this gives rise to the (also obvious) way to go about solving the problem of women shying away from technical fields.
Education in these fields needs to be based from the start around teamwork. Not only would that make the fields more appealing to women, but it's a more realistic representation of and preparation for the working world.
I went to Rice University during 1995-1999, just around the time they were phasing in a genuine BSCS degree. I actually had to get my degree in BSECE (Electrical & Computer Engineering) to get out in four years flat (all my family could afford), but I got about a 50/50 mix of CS and EE classes. And I can say that in both the CS and EE curriculum at Rice, there was almost zero emphasis on teamwork or the team aspects of engineering or software development. At most, I had 1 or two senior-level courses in each field in which I had to work with 1 or 2 other classmates cooperatively on a project, and we were given no guidance involving the teamwork aspects.
I actually graduated from Rice and came to work for Microsoft having never really used CVS or any other collaborative source repository system, and my first couple years at Microsoft went pretty rough because the way I was used to working (as an individual coder with complete control over all choices involved in a development project) was totally different and in direct conflict with a team development setting. It took me quite a while to learn how to fit into the team and use all the teamwork practices and tools properly and effectively.
It's obvious (to me, anyway) why most women shy away from extremely logical/mathematical/technical fields.
It's not because women are incapable. In fact, many women who switch away from these areas of study partway through are getting excellent grades.
It's because most women don't naturally like isolated, focused activities. Many women are mentally capable (moreso than most men) of excelling at the field, but most women don't enjoy that kind of work. Most men see it as an appealing, complex world of obsessive-compulsive challenges, whereas most women see it as boring, lonely, and lacking in human value/interaction.
Or, to summarize -- most men derive enjoyment from focusing on things and logical problems, whereas most women derive enjoyment from focusing on people and relationships.
It's the same reason most auto mechanics are men, and it's the same reason you find far more women majoring in psychology and sociology than in engineering or computer science.
It's also a model that requires you to find companies that art stupid enough to pay you to write software and then give it away to everyone else free, including their competitors.
It's not a matter of a company being "stupid". If a company needs a piece of software to fill a particular need, and no such software exists anywhere in the world yet, then under my proposed model they will either (1) pay the development house to write it for them, (2) write it themselves, or (3) sit around and wait for some other company to pay the development house to write it.
Since most companies aren't going to develop their own software in-house, that rules out option 2. Between (1) and (3), you're left with a situation that is entirely a matter of competitive advantage: the first company to pay to have the software written will get the software written to *their* specific needs, while any other company who tries to adopt the software will either have to modify it or bend their own internal operations or structure to work with it. So in effect the first company to pay gets an immediate leg up on their competition even though the software is released to others simultaneously as F/OSS.
The audio processing algorithm being requested here is called "compression", and it's a standard feature of most audio editing package such as SoundForge. You can also buy hardware compressors for under $100 (dbx and Alesis make stereo compressors) that are good for hooking into a home stereo/theater system.
I keep an Alesis digital stereo compressor hooked into my home stereo system so that when loud spots (commercials, action scenece, etc) come on it doesn't suddenly get orders of magnitude louder and drive my apartment neighbors nuts.
Some DVD players have audio compression built-in as a feature. Some newer TV sets have it built-in also.
The problem with a support-based model is that it creates disincentive to make the software easy to use and trouble-free.
The only open-source model I've been able to dream up which would actually be long-term sustainable and which would actually align business incentives with the humanitarian goal of producing better-quality free software is the "contract programming" model. In other words, you pay me to write some particular software you need, and when the "final" version is delivered to you per contract, it's simultaneously released to the world as F/OSS.
Under this model, big corporate customers of my software development house foot the bill to get their needs met, and then everyday people and other businesses get access to it for free. I get paid honestly for my work, the customer pays honestly to get a real need met, and everyone else who happens to find the software useful gets it for free. Everyone's happy. And it's the most healthy model from an economic perspective, since I'm getting paid for the actual work of writing the software, rather than getting paid for the legal privilege of licensing the software to someone.
Unfortunately, this is a model in which to keep making money, you have to keep writing more software. Contrast this against the business model of companies like Microsoft who "write once, sell a billion times over" and thus generate money magically out of thin air. This is why big rich companies are so big on "intellectual property" protection -- it's the artifice that gives rise to their "Magic Money Generator" business model.
I should have stated #5 more clearly.
You, as the engineer, have a responsibility to cater to the user's intent in your design. Nothing wrong with doing that. So yes, you should choose defaults that cater to the widest possible audience, for example.
But the thing you create (some interactive gadget or computer program) should not at usage-time attempt to figure out or challenge the user's intent. Things like "Are you sure you want to do X?" dialogs, or Word's auto-correction feature, are at best just obnoxious, and at worst just train people to habitually dismiss dialogs or memorize some other action to undo the flawed guessing done by the program.
You might claim that "most people want auto-correct". Even if this were true, it's not an excuse for making auto-correct mode the default behavior of the application. Wherever the engineer's responsibility to cater to the most people and the tool's responsibility to not guess or question people's intent come into conflict, the latter responsibility should win.
I think what this all boils down to is the mistaken but common belief among programmers that users don't know what they want to do. Users DO know what they want to do, they just don't always know how to do it. Make it obvious how to do something, and they will always accomplish what they want.
I'm sure parents are just itching to buy their kids something that encourages the kid to practice making obnoxious mouth noises.
And I'm sure teenagers are just itching to walk around in public with a portable game system making stupid mouth noises into it.
1. Engineering a solution that is more complex and problematic than the original problem it was intended to solve.
2. Expecting that users will (or should have to) read anything.
3. Expecting that users will (or should have to) possess technical expertise or jargon.
4. Expecting that users will (or should have to) configure it before using it.
5. Guessing or questioning the user's intent.
6. Neglecting to handle all possible failure cases gracefully.
7. Neglecting to save state frequently enough or at all.
8. Pointless rearchitectures (if it ain't broke, don't fix it).
9. Avoiding necessary rearchitectures (you have to break a few eggs to make an omelette).
10. Designing based on your own motives (in-product advertising, etc) rather than on the user's needs.
The real problem with most FOSS is that it is too complex and inconsistent architecturally. No matter how pretty or usable a GUI you slap on top of it, if the underlying system is too complex and inconsistent, it won't be accessible to normal people.
Example: someone writes a niffty GUI wizard for Linux for setting up a printer. The wizard itself follows all the usability guidelines and is quite nice. But the problem is that the wizard is just a front-end for CUPS or some other nastily-complicated printer driver system. When the back-end chokes in some unexpected way the front-end isn't expecting, the user has to comletely sidestep the wizard, go the command line, and whip out Linux-fu magic to fix the problem. The problem here isn't the front-end GUI wizard; the problem is that the architecture of the underlying printer driver system is overly complicated and completely blows, and there's no tight integration between the back-end and the front-end so that the user can use the wizard to easily fix any possible problem that may arise.
You see this over and over again in the Linux/BSD worlds. Slapping a pretty GUI on top of a shit architecture does not make thing easier to use.
It's not Rooster Teeth, it's Cock Bite!
People don't seem to be willing to pay a premium for gadgets and alternative systems, and primarily in the corporate market customers prefer to buy from the same suppliers as for their corporate hardware.
How is this news? Consumers always choose the path of least resistance. It's basic economics.
Nonsense. Being a serial killer is not a lifestyle -- it is committing a series of illegal acts.
To protect the rights of minorities, and to protect our natural rights, this country desperately needs the following constitutional ammendments:
The real problem with our public educational system is that the mini-society naturally formed by students within a school is in direct opposition to the learning process. The only meaningful educational reform I have seen in my lifetime is the recent nation-wide trend toward anti-bullying programs, but even this does not go far enough. If elected, exactly what would you do to dismantle the natural social ecosystems present today in our public schools and replace them with an enforced social structure conducive to education? And because the absence of chaos is still not enough to motivate students to learn material they see as irrelevant, would you be willing to reform our public school system so that students are paid by the school for academic achievement? After all, most adults only get up and go to work at jobs they dislike because they are paid to do it, so why should we expect any different from children?
From gay marriage and abortion to school prayer and stem cell research, there are numerous issues that boil down to an issue of fairness, equality, and justice. Mr. Bush, you actually want to explicitly encode discrimination and your own personal religious views into the US Constitution. And Mr. Kerry, you are too afraid of appearing unpopular to stand up and fight for those who are being denied (or are about to lose) their equal rights. Why won't either of you stand up and fight (on all issues in all cases) for equality, fairness, and justice? As president, don't you think it's your job to do that, even when you personality disagree with or dislike the minority groups you are obligated to protect?
As everyone knows, our country is run by rich special interests, not by an equal and democratic voicing of the citizenry's wishes. This is due to actions such as lobbying and campaign financing. I believe there should be a complete separation of money and state, akin to the separate of church and state. Money should be absolutely excluded from all parts of the campaigning or legislative processes. Do you promise that if you were elected, you would immediately move to make lobbying and campaign contributions federal crimes, and in their place establish an equal and fair system of campaign opportunity via federally-mandated media broadcast time for all candidates, etc?
In my opinion, minimum wage should be high enough such that in a family of four (two adults and two children) in which only one adult works full time (40 hours/week), the family is able to afford all of its basic health care, food, clothing, shelter, and transportation needs within the locale in which they live. But today minimum wage is so low that even if both adults work more than 40 hours a week at minimum wage jobs, they still cannot afford these basic needs in their locale -- plus, their children are then neglected and the parents must seek out other (often expensive) arragments such as day-care. Do you promise that if you were elected, you would fight to at least quadruple minimum wage, and to then push for legislation requiring it to grow proportionately from that point forth with the overall growth of the economy?
According to CNN Money, the Supreme Court has rejected the appeal of telemarketing companies, which were claiming that the do-not-call list violated their free speech rights.
There is a basic human right that is missing from the U.S. constitution: my right to be left alone if I tell you to leave me alone. This right should trump all other rights. Sure, you may have the constitutional right to say whatever you want, but if I tell you to keep it away from me and my private property, you should have to honor that, period.
And yet they still haven't fixed this.
How can you live with yourself? Specifically, how can you even pretened to be an ethical person when your software is all about manipulating people (in the most insidious ways possible) into signing up for shit they don't really want?
For specifics, see this site, in particular the following tidbit:
Karma envy, eh?
The PS2 network adaptor isn't just a network adaptor. It's also an IDE hard drive adaptor, allowing you to plug in an IDE hard drive and copy most games to it.
This speeds up load times, allows you to take your game library over to a friend's place without lugging along all the CDs, and allows you to more easily copy/pirate games if you have a mod chip.
I'd say that if sales of the network adaptor are far beyond the number of online users, that would be a big sign that a lot of people are buying the adaptor just to get the hard drive capability.