B. It's cheap, compared to expenses we have on Earth right now.
But
C. Overpopulation causing rain forest depletion is a great way of ending an argument so that nothing happens, but it's crap. The problem is that people are stupid -- no, not just Americans, everyone. They think in the short term. They don't get much education. They keep cultural tendencies that don't benefit them. The Malagasy people believe that every family should have 10 children. This is what's destroying Madagascar. I know, I've been there, I've talked to people. 10 children is the target. What's the reason for this? It's necessary to have many children in a poor society to protect the parents. It's not infant mortality (though that factors into it) it's that adults cannot make enough to live well without more workers under their control. The same thinking devalues girls (even though girls currently tend to make a little more money in a lifetime) in Asia since parents feel they need a son to take care of them when they're too old to work.
So what's the cure for this? Social safety nets, health care, propaganda and birth control. Economic incentives for not having more than 2 children. This would be cheap, compared to supporting all those kids. It would be paid for by the rich nations because we want that rainforest (or those lemurs) preserved. It's VERY, VERY CHEAP, and it benefits everyone.
D. We could never keep up with the population being born to send all the excess to Mars. If you sent a billion people to Mars, you need to send another billion in less than a decade just to keep the benefit. So you need C whether you have colonies or not.
Long ago, people used to do real studies. They timed people reading text, and they found that serifed fonts and proportional fonts were easiest to read, meaning people could read the texts faster.
All through the responses to this article I see people making assertions that coding isn't reading, that this won't speed things up, paper is different from screens, punctuation would be too hard to read, etc.
OK, where are your studies to back this up?
So many assumptions. It would be nice if someone here said instead "OK, I'll test this with my team and get back to you in a week."
when people believe what the telcos, who bought the data folks years ago, and which we now think of as the data guys.
If the telos tell you they can't make money on a simple data network, you should be busy looking under the other shells.
There is only one things you an be sure of with the telcos: They are not telling the truth. They never, ever do that.
They cannot support their bloated payroll and archaic systems on just data? OK, I'd buy that. Then the business model of hiring as many people as possible to influence politicians (and therefore spending as little as possible on systems which don't require humans) needs to change.
Your telco needs to adapt. Its failure to adapt is not an indication of an impossible situation -- It is just an indication of its lack of desire to adapt.
Note that none of the power tool makers standardize either. (At least not the ones I've seen/used.)
Ryobi batteries power Ryobi devices, and not all at that.
Black and Decker powers Black and Decker.
Skill powers...etc.
And it's all about the plastic housing. The batteries are basically the same inside, just piled up to make the voltage they want. I assume, anyhow.
I want the standardization in the laptop market, yes, but I REALLY want it in the power tool market.
In the laptop market, I'd settle for a standard DC power in connector with bumps on it to make it only work for matching voltage connectors. Then we could use a nice competitive external battery standard to keep things going in a pinch and cheaply.
This is true for everyone -- it's just that some people don't realize its impact. There is no such thing as a good multitasker. The more you pile on, the less well you do at the core task.
I was going to post at the top level about exactly this.
The boss is right to scrap the music as a continuous distraction. A little music now and then is fine as a mood alterer, but continuous music is costing him money and quality -- his coders, whether they believe or understand the brain functions or not, are tossing away parts of their brain that are needed for best work.
But now the boss has to act on it. He needs to "improve" the acoustics of the office. Working with muffs on is a distraction, too. He should put in walls.
Win/Win.
Buy the guy a copy of Peopleware, praise him for being right, then hold him to it.
I don't think there are many big companies with legal staffs making money -- in particular, I don't think there are many without ties to one of the dinosaurs. There are a few, but they're small and I'm not sure they could defend themselves against real money or power if there weren't other watchdogs with deeper pockets around.
Let's say the Huffington Post sees something controversial and reports it. The next day it's all over and there are lots of targets to sue/silence. Eliminate all but three news sources with legal staffs and suing them all very hard suddenly becomes affordable to someone/something with deep pockets, and silencing them via the law becomes doable, as well. We need lots of news sources who can defend themselves.
That said, the key needs to be to help the ones you describe which do exist and not fund the dinos, rather than simply letting the dinos die without watching carefully to make sure the raw product isn't incapable of supporting/defending itself.
We want journalism. We want people to inform the public and monitor the state. We need to make sure they have a business model which works a little, so they can continue to thrive.
That said, Murdock and the rest of the large holding media homogenizing companies ARE an industry and a manufacturer and the more they resemble buggy makers the better, certainly.
We need to find a solution to allow journalism to go on -- and especially journalism with a bank account and a legal staff, because little people journalism is way too easy for the state (and even corporations) to stifle. We should NOT (as you rightly say) be bailing out the corporations which want journalism to work exactly one way.
We just need to make sure we don't lose the journalism baby down the drain with the crap that's (thankfully) pouring out it's last profitable days.
Kids can afford to use different media because thier parents can afford it.
To some extent, wealth is correlated with education.
Certainly the most obvious causal factor for language skills is the amount of language skills their parents exhibit. Those are correlated with both education and wealth.
The telco regs are absurd. We're talking yards of bookshelf space of regs. They're mutually contradictory. I agree with you about code, most of the time, but when you discover that a programmer has been intentionally writing volumes of crappy code to make himself irreplaceable, it's time to recode.
On number 2, note that a lot of regulation that the ILECs claim to hate, they wrote themselves. Regulation makes things difficult and exists as a barrier to competition, which is important to keeping a monopoly.
We should throw out all the current regulations and come up with some simple ones which work to demand good coverage an truth in billing (rather than the insane spaghettiwork of laws we currently have) so as to make telcos behave as we want without making it difficult to become a telco.
This is a fun test of Klingon. Linguists use it as a test language, but it's synthetic. If the child develops facility with Klingon but shows problems with constructs within the language, we can postulate that those constructs are either not valid natural linguistic forms, or don't naturally exist coupled with other forms. This is great.
But on the other hand, we have a sample size of one, so while we can use the data, we'll only suspect things based on it -- we're never going to have much confidence.
Furthermore, I suspect that his dad his speaking Klingon to the kid, but when they take him to Walmart, he hears English, and his great aunt Suzie speaks only English to him. The kid is learning two languages today, not one, and that makes the data a little less pure.
As for the harm in speaking to a child in a synthetic language, unless they keep him in a Skinner box, I don't see how this could possibly hurt him. He's being inundated by natural languages around him -- his father's just giving him a second language feed. That's typically good for children.
To think that Klingon will destroy his mind or retard his development invests too much power in a stream of sound and reminds me of "Snow Crash" which was fun, but silly.
We're biologically programmed to react to the sexes. I know in a comment to an article on gay couples this seems like a counter assertion, but it's not. You can grow up het or grow up gay, but your relationships with women will be different from your relationships with men. It comes from not just the parents but all of society bombarding you with sex role differences. However, the very strongest influence is the one right there in the house.
Rather than go all PC on his ass, a more reasonable tack would be to point to single parents. Kids coming from single parent families can do just fine in the sex role area.
That said, in this case, they have an example (unless the parents break up, which gays do just like breeders) of a loving relationship between their parents, which is certainly a good thing, but certainly they'll have less of a straight-forward, societal norms compliant, sex/role match according to the common paradigm as one would if his or her mother and father were were Farah Fawcett and Vin Diesel.
On my 1967 vw bug, there were no teeth. This is why one checks the timing with a strobe light attached to a spark plug. You tension the timing belt and check the timing, then you twist the distributor cap to get the timing JUST RIGHT.
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A. I'm all for setting up colonies everywhere.
B. It's cheap, compared to expenses we have on Earth right now.
But
C. Overpopulation causing rain forest depletion is a great way of ending an argument so that nothing happens, but it's crap. The problem is that people are stupid -- no, not just Americans, everyone. They think in the short term. They don't get much education. They keep cultural tendencies that don't benefit them. The Malagasy people believe that every family should have 10 children. This is what's destroying Madagascar. I know, I've been there, I've talked to people. 10 children is the target. What's the reason for this? It's necessary to have many children in a poor society to protect the parents. It's not infant mortality (though that factors into it) it's that adults cannot make enough to live well without more workers under their control. The same thinking devalues girls (even though girls currently tend to make a little more money in a lifetime) in Asia since parents feel they need a son to take care of them when they're too old to work.
So what's the cure for this? Social safety nets, health care, propaganda and birth control. Economic incentives for not having more than 2 children. This would be cheap, compared to supporting all those kids. It would be paid for by the rich nations because we want that rainforest (or those lemurs) preserved. It's VERY, VERY CHEAP, and it benefits everyone.
D. We could never keep up with the population being born to send all the excess to Mars. If you sent a billion people to Mars, you need to send another billion in less than a decade just to keep the benefit. So you need C whether you have colonies or not.
Long ago, people used to do real studies. They timed people reading text, and they found that serifed fonts and proportional fonts were easiest to read, meaning people could read the texts faster.
All through the responses to this article I see people making assertions that coding isn't reading, that this won't speed things up, paper is different from screens, punctuation would be too hard to read, etc.
OK, where are your studies to back this up?
So many assumptions. It would be nice if someone here said instead "OK, I'll test this with my team and get back to you in a week."
I note that the web developers of InfraGaurd don't know how to change their favicon.ico from the sun logo.
Nice to see they're using Sun and Unix, I suppose, but who leaves the sun logo there?
Excellent link. Apex doesn't score very well. (Read as: "Scores VERY Badly.")
And buy him/her a robot.
when people believe what the telcos, who bought the data folks years ago, and which we now think of as the data guys.
If the telos tell you they can't make money on a simple data network, you should be busy looking under the other shells.
There is only one things you an be sure of with the telcos: They are not telling the truth. They never, ever do that.
They cannot support their bloated payroll and archaic systems on just data? OK, I'd buy that. Then the business model of hiring as many people as possible to influence politicians (and therefore spending as little as possible on systems which don't require humans) needs to change.
Your telco needs to adapt. Its failure to adapt is not an indication of an impossible situation -- It is just an indication of its lack of desire to adapt.
Oddly, I trust the power tool guys not on this more than I trust the laptop guys.
Note that none of the power tool makers standardize either. (At least not the ones I've seen/used.)
Ryobi batteries power Ryobi devices, and not all at that.
Black and Decker powers Black and Decker.
Skill powers...etc.
And it's all about the plastic housing. The batteries are basically the same inside, just piled up to make the voltage they want. I assume, anyhow.
I want the standardization in the laptop market, yes, but I REALLY want it in the power tool market.
In the laptop market, I'd settle for a standard DC power in connector with bumps on it to make it only work for matching voltage connectors. Then we could use a nice competitive external battery standard to keep things going in a pinch and cheaply.
... and many others, come to think of it.
This is true for everyone -- it's just that some people don't realize its impact. There is no such thing as a good multitasker. The more you pile on, the less well you do at the core task.
I was going to post at the top level about exactly this.
The boss is right to scrap the music as a continuous distraction. A little music now and then is fine as a mood alterer, but continuous music is costing him money and quality -- his coders, whether they believe or understand the brain functions or not, are tossing away parts of their brain that are needed for best work.
But now the boss has to act on it. He needs to "improve" the acoustics of the office. Working with muffs on is a distraction, too. He should put in walls.
Win/Win.
Buy the guy a copy of Peopleware, praise him for being right, then hold him to it.
I don't think there are many big companies with legal staffs making money -- in particular, I don't think there are many without ties to one of the dinosaurs. There are a few, but they're small and I'm not sure they could defend themselves against real money or power if there weren't other watchdogs with deeper pockets around.
Let's say the Huffington Post sees something controversial and reports it. The next day it's all over and there are lots of targets to sue/silence. Eliminate all but three news sources with legal staffs and suing them all very hard suddenly becomes affordable to someone/something with deep pockets, and silencing them via the law becomes doable, as well. We need lots of news sources who can defend themselves.
That said, the key needs to be to help the ones you describe which do exist and not fund the dinos, rather than simply letting the dinos die without watching carefully to make sure the raw product isn't incapable of supporting/defending itself.
Journalism isn't an industry, or a manufacturer.
We want journalism. We want people to inform the public and monitor the state. We need to make sure they have a business model which works a little, so they can continue to thrive.
That said, Murdock and the rest of the large holding media homogenizing companies ARE an industry and a manufacturer and the more they resemble buggy makers the better, certainly.
We need to find a solution to allow journalism to go on -- and especially journalism with a bank account and a legal staff, because little people journalism is way too easy for the state (and even corporations) to stifle. We should NOT (as you rightly say) be bailing out the corporations which want journalism to work exactly one way.
We just need to make sure we don't lose the journalism baby down the drain with the crap that's (thankfully) pouring out it's last profitable days.
While slightly amusing, Kara's translation really doesn't explain anything.
Not helpful at all.
Her insight into Google's secret plans is roughly "Google has secret plans." She adds "They're evil."
Thanks, Kara. That's helpful.
Where's Bob Cringley's analysis of Google's position? I know it must be somewhere...
Kids can afford to use different media because thier parents can afford it.
To some extent, wealth is correlated with education.
Certainly the most obvious causal factor for language skills is the amount of language skills their parents exhibit. Those are correlated with both education and wealth.
It may not be the toys, but the parents.
But yes, this is a another situation where I'd like our senators to SHUT UP.
If the EU wants to delay a decent company being swallowed by one that pisses me off daily, that's FINE.
Yes, I know it only delays the inevitable. But Sun becomes worth less to Oracle every day this gets delayed. AND I'M OK WITH THAT.
The telco regs are absurd. We're talking yards of bookshelf space of regs. They're mutually contradictory. I agree with you about code, most of the time, but when you discover that a programmer has been intentionally writing volumes of crappy code to make himself irreplaceable, it's time to recode.
On number 2, note that a lot of regulation that the ILECs claim to hate, they wrote themselves. Regulation makes things difficult and exists as a barrier to competition, which is important to keeping a monopoly.
We should throw out all the current regulations and come up with some simple ones which work to demand good coverage an truth in billing (rather than the insane spaghettiwork of laws we currently have) so as to make telcos behave as we want without making it difficult to become a telco.
I doubt they'd even bother to spin off the company. They'd just wait a few years and then demand that we move the goalpost.
But it's not the dad. So it's some random bozo.
I doubt his wife, the kid's grandparents, or the folks at the local grocery can be kept silent around the tyke.
It's gotta be just a second language.
This is a fun test of Klingon. Linguists use it as a test language, but it's synthetic. If the child develops facility with Klingon but shows problems with constructs within the language, we can postulate that those constructs are either not valid natural linguistic forms, or don't naturally exist coupled with other forms. This is great.
But on the other hand, we have a sample size of one, so while we can use the data, we'll only suspect things based on it -- we're never going to have much confidence.
Furthermore, I suspect that his dad his speaking Klingon to the kid, but when they take him to Walmart, he hears English, and his great aunt Suzie speaks only English to him. The kid is learning two languages today, not one, and that makes the data a little less pure.
As for the harm in speaking to a child in a synthetic language, unless they keep him in a Skinner box, I don't see how this could possibly hurt him. He's being inundated by natural languages around him -- his father's just giving him a second language feed. That's typically good for children.
To think that Klingon will destroy his mind or retard his development invests too much power in a stream of sound and reminds me of "Snow Crash" which was fun, but silly.
We're biologically programmed to react to the sexes. I know in a comment to an article on gay couples this seems like a counter assertion, but it's not. You can grow up het or grow up gay, but your relationships with women will be different from your relationships with men. It comes from not just the parents but all of society bombarding you with sex role differences. However, the very strongest influence is the one right there in the house.
Rather than go all PC on his ass, a more reasonable tack would be to point to single parents. Kids coming from single parent families can do just fine in the sex role area.
That said, in this case, they have an example (unless the parents break up, which gays do just like breeders) of a loving relationship between their parents, which is certainly a good thing, but certainly they'll have less of a straight-forward, societal norms compliant, sex/role match according to the common paradigm as one would if his or her mother and father were were Farah Fawcett and Vin Diesel.
They also give you a way to send people to places they would normally have the good sense not to.
Cool!
On my 1967 vw bug, there were no teeth. This is why one checks the timing with a strobe light attached to a spark plug. You tension the timing belt and check the timing, then you twist the distributor cap to get the timing JUST RIGHT.
You're ancient, but are you ancient enough?