There are also countless books in the public domain that you can get for free.
and
You can borrow ebooks from the library,
That and the occasional free book from Amazon constitutes about 99% of the reading done on our Kindle. I don't know if other people are as cheap as me, but I sure can see how once you find Project Gutenberg you might purchase a lot less at $15/pop.
I thought that it was implied that I meant reading the wrong things. I was half-sort-of-joking, since there was that piracy as a felony story the other day.
Yes, but they didn't even allow "native" apps like.NET, java, etc. It's clear this was a marketing decision, and one that (so far) has not played out well.
A lot of people might not care about speed for their application - it rather depends on what it does. I'm sure huge bloated things like Office would suffer, but that wouldn't be a problem because MS would presumably recompile Office.
Those cheap laptops are totally unsuited to lap time on the couch. They are heavy, hot on your legs, and have a crappy battery. Many also have a loud fan if you dare to do something like play a game. In my experience, the durability is also bad and constant couch time is hard on things like cheap screen hinges. With an iPad, you can surf all night on the couch and still have enough juice to fall asleep in bed reading. (I have a Kindle - not quite as nice, but same argument applies).
I actually want more than that... why can't they make almost-full compatibility? Apple did it at a time when they were a much smaller company. Sure, higher-performance x86 apps would suck on ARM, but the UI wouldn't need to be emulated. Maybe they couldn't get Office to run well or something and decided against it. Maybe they were in a rush. Or maybe they just totally misread the market.
There is little reason to buy an RT tablet until the ecosystem improves, and now it looks like the partners are bailing before the ecosystem will have a chance to grow. Thing is, they could have had an instant ecosystem with emulation.
Another way to look at it is, let's say I have a rare blood disorder - it only affects a few hundred people. Some random billionaire decides to take up my cause and cures my rare blood disorder.... sure, it only helped a few hundred people, but it's not as if that undoes the act of charity. If everyone only took up the big AIDS or malaria causes, then the little blood disorders would never get any attention.
And life is not as predictable as Bill Gates pretends that it is. Who knows? Maybe some of the research done to cure the blood disorder will lead to an AIDS vaccine? Maybe Google's internet infrastructure will aid the Gates Foundation's efforts? Central planning has both positive and negative qualities - just look at how it pans out with economic systems. Some central planning seems to be good (currency), but too much seems inefficient (production planning). In theory, central planning should even out all the chaotic bumps in unorganized activity, but in practice the raw data just isn't that good. Chaos reigns in any system as large as Africa.
Who cares what their motivation is? Either way they end up in the ER. It doesn't matter whether you think the poor are at fault or if you think they are victims - I'm not trying to put an ideological spin on this. The fact is that we have a law that forces people to provide a service that is not paid for. They must compensate by either closing shop or charging paying customers more. It's socialized health care, but it is not very effective or affordable socialized health care.
I'll try to work through the obscenities here and address what I think is your point. I certainly do recognize that the priority of a given task is reflective of the values of the person who is putting the list together, and that is exactly my point. Just because Bill Gates has "internet access" low on the list does not mean that lack of internet access is not a problem worth addressing. It doesn't even really matter what the motivation is - at the end of the day someone is doing some good for free. They could do anything they like with that money, and they have decided to help people improve their lives.
Clearly we are stuck in a world with limited resources. But even with more resources, the marketers would just ship earlier because the high-priority bugs would get fixed faster. But would you criticize a developer on an open-source project who takes it upon himself to kill a bunch of priority-5 bugs on his own time? Some would, and I think that is silly. He could go spend his time on a project without such a negative attitude. The point is that he's still doing good, even if it doesn't exactly mesh with your own agenda.
Are there even any internet web pages in those student's native language?
No. And why would there be? They don't have internet. Chicken and egg. In any event, get them young enough and they will learn English (or Chinese...) just to use the Internet.
Electricity isn't even available and it's a horrible idea to assume we'll just fix that with highly toxic batteries.
Mobile phones are ubiquitous, and it's not fanciful to imagine that we will have even lower-powered devices than we have now, not to mention better/cheaper solar panels. Nokia sells the 105 for $20 retail. By smartphone standards it is crap, but by 2003 standards it is pretty respectable. I see no reason to expect that pace of progress not to continue. So what if they are surfing their new 2023 internet with 2013-era levels of sophistication? Even today, I can get a Kindle tablet for under $70 that lasts 2-3 weeks on a charge.
Why not give them a damn book before you turn them into internet addicts, maybe hire some teachers.
Because for the price of a few books I can provide them with a device that will let them access the Internet. If even a few use that power to get on their feet, perhaps they can start to afford things like teachers without relying on charity.
(The same argument can be made for clean water, health care, vaccinations, or books and teachers for that matter.)
The problem in the US is that we already had socialized health care, thanks to a Reagan-era law, but we refused to admit it. We passed a law in the 80s making it illegal to refuse emergency treatment. This of course means that uninsured people wait until they need emergency care, then get very expensive care that they cannot pay for. The rest of us are left picking up the tab, and hospitals and emergency facilities in poor areas either close or get subsidized by the state and local authorities. One ER doc, who may or may not have been exaggerating, claimed that it would be cheaper to ride a doctor to each person's house in a limo for house calls than to treat everyone without insurance in the ER.
I'm generally against "unfunded mandates" such as the emergency care rule, and I'm generally against the idea of refusing emergency care. That leaves me with no choice but to reluctantly admit that I support some form of socialized health care. I would have preferred less emphasis on Medicaid in the Obamacare system, but it's better than what we had.
If you approach all problems that way, nothing at the bottom of the pile ever gets fixed. I'm glad that there are eccentric people out there that want to help even the smaller numbers of people. It's like a big bug database with a whole bunch of level 5 bugs that never get addressed because everyone chases the higher priority stuff. Pretty soon you end up with thousands of unresolved "minor" bugs that make your software seem crappy even though most of the big bugs are fixed. Life is like that, too. You might wonder why your house looks like shit even though it is structurally sound, has a good roof, and all of the appliances work. Turns out it's because you haven't done any decorating in 20 years. Sure, it's trivial, but when you add up all the minor stuff, the minor stuff starts to look more important in aggregate.
I have no idea if internet access would be as helpful as clean drinking water. I mean, in the short term it is a no-brainier, but will the improvement stick around when the Gate Foundation leaves or will the people start dying again? I honestly don't know the answer, but I'm glad someone is trying to build up their lacking internet infrastructure with their own money that could have just gone to another party jet. It might not help as much as clean drinking water, but it certainly won't do any harm.
The Soviets tried that process. Look how well it worked for them.
That's not the approach that the Soviets took, they went with single provider (like the UK or the VA). Switzerland has the individual mandate, and they are 20 years in and spending 11% of their GDP where we spend 16% of ours.
Were you using a spinning disk now? Generally as soon as you say "game" it means you are probably not using "normal office computers" and can safely ignore spinning drives altogether.
You must be a big dude... I'm 6'3", and in my pair of Dickies jeans (not even remotely "skinny" jeans), the tablet sticks about 1/3 of the way out of the back pockets and about 1/5 of the way out of the front. In the front pocket, it is a very tight fit. In either event, there is not going to be much sitting! I've definitely "slipped it in my back pocket when I need to chase after my toddler", but to call it pocket-able is a bit much.
Well, I think he's right... whatever authority you use to force people to open up their code could just as easily be used to open up said code to audits without actually open sourcing it. You can use said authority to pick whatever third-party you would like.
A good sign that I've made my point is that you've focused on correcting a fact that is not really germane to the larger conversation, and even stooped to ad hominem attacks.
Pointing out that almost every single point you made was blatantly incorrect is considered pedantic? ok, that's a new one to me.
No, pointing out that things sort of technically EXISTED when they weren't in common use is pedantic.
To point 1: In 1974, if your knee was really, really bad, they could sort-of, kind-of replace it. The prognosis was bad, anesthesia was dangerous, and recovery times were horrendous. The result is the procedure was not very common. Now if you are a candidate for surgery, the procedure is routine, safe, and recovery times are short. Hell, usually you are walking on it (painfully) the next day, and out of the hospital in 3 days. It's gotten so common that over 4 million Americans have them, accounting for something like 5% of the population over 50. The fact is, in 1974 "comprehensive" health care would have paid for a few hundred or maybe thousand knee replacements. In 2013, comprehensive healthcare has to pay for hundreds of thousands.
To point 2: My point is, better healthcare has led to increased usage and costs. It was cheaper for Nixon to offer comprehensive health care than it would have been for Obama. In 1974 most people lived with a bum knee, if they lived long enough to develop one, and now you get it fixed.
It's definitely not a rational market. Even with all the regulation and safeguards in place, people opt for long-shot treatments or "alternative" treatments all the time. But the fact remains that Nixon's plan called for nationalizing perhaps 8% of the GDP. A modern version of his plan would nationalize more like 16% of the GDP. Much of this is due to things that simply weren't possible in 1974, at least not with any scale or success.
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There are also countless books in the public domain that you can get for free.
and
You can borrow ebooks from the library,
That and the occasional free book from Amazon constitutes about 99% of the reading done on our Kindle. I don't know if other people are as cheap as me, but I sure can see how once you find Project Gutenberg you might purchase a lot less at $15/pop.
I thought that it was implied that I meant reading the wrong things. I was half-sort-of-joking, since there was that piracy as a felony story the other day.
It's piracy! We need to make reading a felony!
Yes, but they didn't even allow "native" apps like .NET, java, etc. It's clear this was a marketing decision, and one that (so far) has not played out well.
A lot of people might not care about speed for their application - it rather depends on what it does. I'm sure huge bloated things like Office would suffer, but that wouldn't be a problem because MS would presumably recompile Office.
PowerPC -> x86. So they had a lot more power to do the emulation, but the problem is similar. Windows NT did it as well, x86 -> Alpha.
On the bright side, security is so poor on most devices that I don't think I've yet owned one that couldn't be rooted or jailbroken.
Those cheap laptops are totally unsuited to lap time on the couch. They are heavy, hot on your legs, and have a crappy battery. Many also have a loud fan if you dare to do something like play a game. In my experience, the durability is also bad and constant couch time is hard on things like cheap screen hinges. With an iPad, you can surf all night on the couch and still have enough juice to fall asleep in bed reading. (I have a Kindle - not quite as nice, but same argument applies).
some PC Compatibility for some legacy systems.
I actually want more than that... why can't they make almost-full compatibility? Apple did it at a time when they were a much smaller company. Sure, higher-performance x86 apps would suck on ARM, but the UI wouldn't need to be emulated. Maybe they couldn't get Office to run well or something and decided against it. Maybe they were in a rush. Or maybe they just totally misread the market.
There is little reason to buy an RT tablet until the ecosystem improves, and now it looks like the partners are bailing before the ecosystem will have a chance to grow. Thing is, they could have had an instant ecosystem with emulation.
Perhaps, but it was just an analogy.
You realize that a great number of hospitals are non-profit, right?
I'm not really criticizing the Reagan-era law, just pointing out that we've been "socialized" for 30 years. That battle has long been over.
Another way to look at it is, let's say I have a rare blood disorder - it only affects a few hundred people. Some random billionaire decides to take up my cause and cures my rare blood disorder.... sure, it only helped a few hundred people, but it's not as if that undoes the act of charity. If everyone only took up the big AIDS or malaria causes, then the little blood disorders would never get any attention.
And life is not as predictable as Bill Gates pretends that it is. Who knows? Maybe some of the research done to cure the blood disorder will lead to an AIDS vaccine? Maybe Google's internet infrastructure will aid the Gates Foundation's efforts? Central planning has both positive and negative qualities - just look at how it pans out with economic systems. Some central planning seems to be good (currency), but too much seems inefficient (production planning). In theory, central planning should even out all the chaotic bumps in unorganized activity, but in practice the raw data just isn't that good. Chaos reigns in any system as large as Africa.
Who cares what their motivation is? Either way they end up in the ER. It doesn't matter whether you think the poor are at fault or if you think they are victims - I'm not trying to put an ideological spin on this. The fact is that we have a law that forces people to provide a service that is not paid for. They must compensate by either closing shop or charging paying customers more. It's socialized health care, but it is not very effective or affordable socialized health care.
I'll try to work through the obscenities here and address what I think is your point. I certainly do recognize that the priority of a given task is reflective of the values of the person who is putting the list together, and that is exactly my point. Just because Bill Gates has "internet access" low on the list does not mean that lack of internet access is not a problem worth addressing. It doesn't even really matter what the motivation is - at the end of the day someone is doing some good for free. They could do anything they like with that money, and they have decided to help people improve their lives.
Clearly we are stuck in a world with limited resources. But even with more resources, the marketers would just ship earlier because the high-priority bugs would get fixed faster. But would you criticize a developer on an open-source project who takes it upon himself to kill a bunch of priority-5 bugs on his own time? Some would, and I think that is silly. He could go spend his time on a project without such a negative attitude. The point is that he's still doing good, even if it doesn't exactly mesh with your own agenda.
Are there even any internet web pages in those student's native language?
No. And why would there be? They don't have internet. Chicken and egg. In any event, get them young enough and they will learn English (or Chinese...) just to use the Internet.
Electricity isn't even available and it's a horrible idea to assume we'll just fix that with highly toxic batteries.
Mobile phones are ubiquitous, and it's not fanciful to imagine that we will have even lower-powered devices than we have now, not to mention better/cheaper solar panels. Nokia sells the 105 for $20 retail. By smartphone standards it is crap, but by 2003 standards it is pretty respectable. I see no reason to expect that pace of progress not to continue. So what if they are surfing their new 2023 internet with 2013-era levels of sophistication? Even today, I can get a Kindle tablet for under $70 that lasts 2-3 weeks on a charge.
Why not give them a damn book before you turn them into internet addicts, maybe hire some teachers.
Because for the price of a few books I can provide them with a device that will let them access the Internet. If even a few use that power to get on their feet, perhaps they can start to afford things like teachers without relying on charity.
(The same argument can be made for clean water, health care, vaccinations, or books and teachers for that matter.)
The problem in the US is that we already had socialized health care, thanks to a Reagan-era law, but we refused to admit it. We passed a law in the 80s making it illegal to refuse emergency treatment. This of course means that uninsured people wait until they need emergency care, then get very expensive care that they cannot pay for. The rest of us are left picking up the tab, and hospitals and emergency facilities in poor areas either close or get subsidized by the state and local authorities. One ER doc, who may or may not have been exaggerating, claimed that it would be cheaper to ride a doctor to each person's house in a limo for house calls than to treat everyone without insurance in the ER.
I'm generally against "unfunded mandates" such as the emergency care rule, and I'm generally against the idea of refusing emergency care. That leaves me with no choice but to reluctantly admit that I support some form of socialized health care. I would have preferred less emphasis on Medicaid in the Obamacare system, but it's better than what we had.
If you approach all problems that way, nothing at the bottom of the pile ever gets fixed. I'm glad that there are eccentric people out there that want to help even the smaller numbers of people. It's like a big bug database with a whole bunch of level 5 bugs that never get addressed because everyone chases the higher priority stuff. Pretty soon you end up with thousands of unresolved "minor" bugs that make your software seem crappy even though most of the big bugs are fixed. Life is like that, too. You might wonder why your house looks like shit even though it is structurally sound, has a good roof, and all of the appliances work. Turns out it's because you haven't done any decorating in 20 years. Sure, it's trivial, but when you add up all the minor stuff, the minor stuff starts to look more important in aggregate.
I have no idea if internet access would be as helpful as clean drinking water. I mean, in the short term it is a no-brainier, but will the improvement stick around when the Gate Foundation leaves or will the people start dying again? I honestly don't know the answer, but I'm glad someone is trying to build up their lacking internet infrastructure with their own money that could have just gone to another party jet. It might not help as much as clean drinking water, but it certainly won't do any harm.
The Soviets tried that process. Look how well it worked for them.
That's not the approach that the Soviets took, they went with single provider (like the UK or the VA). Switzerland has the individual mandate, and they are 20 years in and spending 11% of their GDP where we spend 16% of ours.
Were you using a spinning disk now? Generally as soon as you say "game" it means you are probably not using "normal office computers" and can safely ignore spinning drives altogether.
You must be a big dude... I'm 6'3", and in my pair of Dickies jeans (not even remotely "skinny" jeans), the tablet sticks about 1/3 of the way out of the back pockets and about 1/5 of the way out of the front. In the front pocket, it is a very tight fit. In either event, there is not going to be much sitting! I've definitely "slipped it in my back pocket when I need to chase after my toddler", but to call it pocket-able is a bit much.
Well, I think he's right... whatever authority you use to force people to open up their code could just as easily be used to open up said code to audits without actually open sourcing it. You can use said authority to pick whatever third-party you would like.
A good sign that I've made my point is that you've focused on correcting a fact that is not really germane to the larger conversation, and even stooped to ad hominem attacks.
Pointing out that almost every single point you made was blatantly incorrect is considered pedantic? ok, that's a new one to me.
No, pointing out that things sort of technically EXISTED when they weren't in common use is pedantic.
To point 1: In 1974, if your knee was really, really bad, they could sort-of, kind-of replace it. The prognosis was bad, anesthesia was dangerous, and recovery times were horrendous. The result is the procedure was not very common. Now if you are a candidate for surgery, the procedure is routine, safe, and recovery times are short. Hell, usually you are walking on it (painfully) the next day, and out of the hospital in 3 days. It's gotten so common that over 4 million Americans have them, accounting for something like 5% of the population over 50. The fact is, in 1974 "comprehensive" health care would have paid for a few hundred or maybe thousand knee replacements. In 2013, comprehensive healthcare has to pay for hundreds of thousands.
To point 2: My point is, better healthcare has led to increased usage and costs. It was cheaper for Nixon to offer comprehensive health care than it would have been for Obama. In 1974 most people lived with a bum knee, if they lived long enough to develop one, and now you get it fixed.
It's definitely not a rational market. Even with all the regulation and safeguards in place, people opt for long-shot treatments or "alternative" treatments all the time. But the fact remains that Nixon's plan called for nationalizing perhaps 8% of the GDP. A modern version of his plan would nationalize more like 16% of the GDP. Much of this is due to things that simply weren't possible in 1974, at least not with any scale or success.