It seems reasonable to me that IF drugs are going to be illegal (a whole 'nother can of worms), possetion should be illegal, and you iff drugs are found on your property in a restricted access area, you should have to prove someone put it there without your knowledge. It is really not that different from any other crime. A sufficient body of evidence linking you to the crime will put the burden on you to prove that it might have been your identical twin (or whateveer).
Possetion of burglary tools, on the other hand is an entirely different animal, since burglary tools can include many common tools (screwdrivers, crowbar, pocket knife). I am told that at least in some states if I am seen to be walking near a store that gets robbed and I have a pocket knife on me, I could be convicted of possention of burglary tools even if I can prove that I was not involved in the crime at all. I assume that most prosecuters only try to press those charges on people "they know" are guilty but can't prove, which is to say, many of them are innocent.
Also, in order to win at blackjack, you have to radically change your betting in an obvious way -- basically, bet the minimum most of the time, and raise your bet when the cards in the shoe are in your favor., or repeatedly hit on high numbers or stand on low numbers. You can get around this with collusion (ala the MIT kids), but in roulette it is less obvious that you aren't just playing randomly.
The part I find most amusing, however, is that both of these instances are really easy for the casino to stop. They can shuffle the deck after every hand and require all bets on the table when the ball is released. However, they want to maximize the appearance of the ability to "cheat" (card counting isn't cheating, whatever the casinos say, it is beating them at their own game). Vegas makes lots of money on people playing at higher stakes, small deck blackjack tables who think they can count cards but are not very good at it. It isn't actually "cheating" that they are against, it is winning.
That isn't necessarily true. It all depends on what bargining chips each side has. It isn't like an employer is giving you a job out of the kindness of their heart, they actually want someone to do a job. If they make rules that alienate potential employees yet don't actually result in increased productivity, they have lost by giving incentive for the most talented people to take other jobs, they may be left to feed off the bottom, and end up with only the slackers who they were most concerned about surfing/. during work and who will likely find away around the block anyway.
I don't actually know the details of how internet blocking affects hiring, but this sort of thing does happen in real life. Recently, I saw that even in this age of pervasive drug testing (which is bullshit, BTW) the FBI was considering relaxing their drug use policy because they weren't getting enough qualified applicants. Among other things, they couldn't compete with the CIA, which has a significantly laxer drug policy.
I doubt this will happen. There is not a lot of technical reason to charge per processor or core -- after all, why not charge per issue slot? What should we do with hyperthreading? However, there is a strong business reason to do so == it allows them to segment the market and charge more money to people who can afford it. Dual core CPUs are targeted at desktop use, while multi-socket hardware is usually much more expensive and used in high-performance workstatiosn and servers by people who can afford to pay a lot more. I wouldn't be surprised if we see people try to charge per core for multi-socket systems or a flat rate for any number of cores on a single processor.
Oracle, as pointed out elsewhere, *does* charge per core, because almost all of their clients are able to pay their exorbitant licensing fees. Also, last time I was party to negotiations with Oracle (>5 years ago), they allowed us unlimited use on development systems, and only charged for "in production" servers.
It doesn't make it any better, but in some (most? all?) states you you are not required to have insurance if you can prove you can pay the minimum liability insurance. So, if you have $100k in liquid assets on hand, you don't need insurance -- rich people don't have to get screwed:/
I will say, in principle I support manditory insurance for drivers. If you accept that A) accidents happen and B) we can (and should) assign fault to a driver involved in an accident, you must ensure that said party is likely to be able to pay the liability they have incurred, and it is unreasonable to repossess someones house if they don't have insurance. I don't, however, know how to prevent them from being evil. I am sure the libertarian hate the governemnt crowd on/. will disagree, but it seems insurance is one of the things that the government currently does better than the majority of private industries. As near as I can tell, medicare is more efficient and better at actually helping sick people than most insurance companies. Of course, that is not a particularly high bar to set, but it ain't nothing.
A 100% idle system is not merely 122% as responsive as an 82% idle system.
This can go both ways. A 0% idle system can be nearly as responsive as a 100% idle system. A purely CPU bound task (such as SETI) will not interfere with an interupt driven task (such as IO) (neglecting cache flushing effects).
Regardless, for most non-desktop uses, the latency caused by scheduling overhead is a negligible contribution to total system performance. The important factors are CPU throughput and IO latency. 18% parity overhead reduces throughput 18% (or requires a 22% faster CPU to maintain throughput) and the IO latency and bandwidth requirements of RAID5 are independent of whether the pairity is done on a controller or by the system CPU, though they *do* depend on where the cache is.
Personally, I use software raid5, raid1 and single disk systems which rsync cross-backup each other to provide tolerable limits on downtime due to disk failure as well as backup for data corruption/deletion failures. I have considered getting 3ware cards on occasion, but for the uses I have it just didn't make sense. Plus, software raid has the advantage of being independent of controller type.
This isn't really reasonable. Software RAID can be as good as many hardware RAID configurations. Modern CPUs are very, very fast, and in many cases can calculate parity faster than dedicated controllers, at the cost of some CPU overhead. However, the cost of the CPU can be much less than the controller. Also, large disk cache helps reduce the read-pairty-write overhead from RAID 5, but most systems have more cache than the drive controller you would pair them with. Finally, if my computer has a UPS, the value of battery backed cache is limited.
Obviously there are many cases where hardware raid is desirable, but to say that any "real" system must use the most expensive hardware possible is just wrong.
Well, in this case I am thinking the desired ruling (by KSR) would be to indicate that the patent office and the lower courts were not adhering to the laws already passed by congress. Therefore, it wouldn't necessarily go back to congress (though they might choose to pass a law clarifying what they meant by obvious). If that were so, I don't think it is unreasonable to imagine that it would change the standard practices in the USPTO.
I don't imagine this will fix all the problems either.
I am not sure how this might work in this instance, but when laws are delclared unconstitutional, it is in a lawsuit targeting the executive branch, enjoining them from enforcing a law. While on paper it looks like such a ruling only affect the individual case at hand, precedent dictates that withing the guilelines of the verdict, it applies to all infractions of the struck down law. Presumably, something similar would happen if the verdict of a patent infringment declared that the criteria used by the patent office in accepting a patent were not harmonious with the constitutional mandate to protect IP and/or the patent laws passed by the legislature, the effect would be to change the way the USPTO issues patents. This is possible even if the ruling if relatively narrow.
I believe (without much in the way of of evidence to back this up) that the costs of running the patent office are greater than the application fees -- therefore might be to their financial advantage to have fewer applications. Given the current backlog, any reduction in applications will take 5-10 years to show up in reduced personel, so likely would not require firing people, but merely not replacing examiners who retire or quit over that time frame.
It really is disgraceful the way the patent office is forced to operate -- they are given too little time to examine patents, the cost of rejecting them is even more time that they don't have, and they are unable to turn applications around in a timely fashion. I don't know how to calculate the cost to our economy of this, but I suspect it is high.
The problem with computers in classrooms is when the distract from the non-computer related learning. I think computers in the home, and particularly internet in the home are excellent educational tools.
I have had access to computers nearly my whole life (since at least 1985) and I believe I have learned more, mostly of my own initiative, via computers than in 18 years of classroom education -- and I had a fantastic classroom education.
One thing about computer access is that it is a hugely unbalanced educator: the most motivated and intelligent people will learn orders of magnitude more than the average. But if 2 kids in a village of 200 can learn to use their computers effectively, and can pass on the benefits of their gained knowledge to the rest of their community, the potential benefits are essentially incalculable, and probably for far less than the cost of sending a pair of aid workers their for 3 years .
Maybe it won't work, or maybe the laptops will be designed poorly and break, or the software will be underdeveloped and not be useful, or they won't be able to get the costs low enough. I can't really judge those things (and I suspect you can't, either) but the potential is there, and I trust that there are smart people working on this project who have done their best to address these issues.
This is one of the things that amazes me. Despite this widely held belief, it is just not true. According to the Pork Report, in the 2006 fiscal year the US government earmarks $29 billion for pork projects. That 5.6% of the $521 billion deficit for FY04, and only 1.3% of the federal budget of ~ 2.2 trillion. Even if we call that all waste, it is an astonishingly low fraction of the total government expendatures, and not a sizable impact on the budget deficit. It also average out to about $100 per person, with most serious violation totalling $30/person. I bet a lot of people lose that much money under the couch every year, and I certainly spend $100 on dumb shit that nets me a lot less that my tax dollars. Now, I earned it, so it is my $100 to waste, but still it is a relatively small amount.
The first amazing thing about this is that to qualify for the list, a budget item must only fulful one of the following seven criteria:
Requested by only one chamber of Congress;
Not specifically authorized;
Not competitively awarded;
Not requested by the President;
Greatly exceeds the President's budget request or the previous year's funding;
Not the subject of congressional hearings; or
Serves only a local or special interest.
The second point to keep in mind is that in many cases the funded initiatives are not bad ideas -- the same project funded through the NSF rather than direct appropriations would not count as pork. Now, certainly funding through the NSF would be better as it allows better prioritization of funding. However, it is also unfair to report this as 100% wasteful spending.
Take an examples held up by the pork report aa particularly egregious violations: $1 million for the Waterfree Urinal Conservation Initiative in Michigan. Waterfree urinals sound frivolous, and you get to make all sorts of jokes about flushing money down the toilet, but they have the potential to save billions of gallons / year of water -- much in public buildings. Currently many juristictions do not allow them in their health codes, but if they are shown to be as sanitary as traditional urinals the potential benefits are huge. I don't know if this particular initiative is any good (and this is the problem with pork spending), but it isn't like the idea isn't sound.
Now, consider your personal representative. Running for most offices in the US costs between $1 and $2 per constituent, per term (I have found this to be roughly true all the way from city council to the president), so he must raise somewhere around $.75-$1.5 million / two years for an average representative. If he can make raising that a little easier by adding a few million dollars of earmarks for projects that are likely a good idea anyway, and might get funded by the competative grant process anyway, is it so surprising that he would like to get credit for it with his constituents? And yet we manage to keep this down to a little over 1% of the budget.
After reading all of the articles about this, I have come to the conclusion that we likely have one of the most effficient and least corrupt governments in the world, in history.
Lets give kids laptops, so then the kids that didn't get one can feel shafted and kill the first kid for their laptop.
What part of One Laptop per Child don't you understand?
While certainly giving laptops to children is not going to magically solve every problem in the world, it just might help people learn about sustainable agriculture, sanitation practices, disease prevention and treatment, and so forth. In all of these cases, I suspect this is worse than sending aid workers to help teach people about these practices, but has the potentialy to be a lot cheaper since laptops can be manufactured in factories. Efforts to clone aid workers have been so far relatively unsuccesful.
In many areas, it is essentially the only way to get to the police. I recently attempted to call the police to report a malfunctioning rail crossing guard. Not wanting to call 911 for something that was not an emergency, I called information, who proceded to connect me to the emergency dispatcher for the PD, and didn't give me a different number to call. So, next time I guess I will just call 911.
Well, your bicycle analgoy is somewhat flawed. I would, for example, assume that a bench on the public sidewalk is free for me to use -- but not to take (or spray paint). Likewise, using an open access point by itself seems to me like it should be OK, as long as my use is not onerous to business in question (downloading iso torrents 24/7). However, when the owner has taken reasonable precautions to let me know that my use is not welcome, it is at least questionable. I certainly would not use a wireless node the owner had asked me not to, encryption or no, though I can see the argument that it should not be illegal. For instance, it causes a small, if not significant impediment to me running my own wirless network on the same public property. If wireless zones were to ever become as crowded as the FM radio band, enough that I could not set up my own network, I would be opposed to allowing private, access restricted networks to use unlicensed spectrum in the commons.
I personally have an open access point in my house, and while I doubt it reaches many people, I hope anyone who receives the signal feels free to use it. If it ever were to become problematic, I would implement bandwidth throttling, restricted access, or change the ESSID to say "Private WLAN," depending on how much time I was willing to put into it at the moment.
Also, we should remember that the laws of man are not like the laws of nature. They are allowed (sometimes required) to be ambigious. It is a perfectly reasonable law to say that you can use access points unless the owner has taken reasonable steps to prevent it, with reasonable up to the minds of a court if it ever becomes an issue.
Well, contacts and even glasses have their own health risks, plus the use of prosthetics for vision correction limits activities you can participate in somewhat.
I got LASIK when I did because contact lenses were abrading my eye. I had mostly switched back to glasses and my doctor said I probably wouldn't be able to wear contacts regularly. Perhaps that is no longer true: soft lenses have improved since I used them (though not as much as LASIK).
But I would have eventually gotten the surgery anyway. Not only it is way better than having to use corrective lenses with a relatively tiny chance of catastrophic failure, but it is something I could do "for science". I don't want to go blind any more than the next guy, but if everyone waits until the procedure has been done millions of times, it would never progress beyond the stage of animal testing. Honesstly, having someone reshape my eye with a UV laser seems a whole lot absurd than the first person who put tiny slivers of glass in their eye must have.
This is a seductive but ridiculous proposition. Certainly evolutionary factors have changed, but to say that he have stopped (or even slowed) natural selection is just preposterous. We are continuing to evolve to be faster/better/stronger, but we get to choose what world we live in, too.
BIOS isn't a very good example -- open BIOS would be fantastic for a number of reasons. This is especially frustrating because it does a relatively trivial task of initializing enough hardware to load the bootloader and providing tables of hardware data to the OS. Sadly few MB manufacturers are willing to provide enough information to write a free BIOS replacement.
Well, I use both fedora and debian (but not yet Ubuntu) and I can say that while yum has made great strides since FC1 (when it was essentially unusable), debian kicks the shit out of fedora in this respect. Primarily this is the advantage of having what amounts to a HUGE core -- almost any free package I ever looked for was available from the standard debian repositories. Even counting extras fedora has a relatively small base of pakcages, and they have consistently abandonded older packages that some of us still use. Thus a fedora user must add a number of alternate repositories, which can frequently have package name conflicts with each other and from one release of core to the next.
Even within core+extras I have had to manually resolve conflicts with rpm when upgrading from one release to the next. It has been a long time since I have come up against an upgrade that couldn't be resolved by apt with no help, or at most using "dist-upgrade" instead of "upgrade".
Again, I haven't used Ubuntu, so I don't know how much of this applies to that comparison, but I would say it is definately possible to soundly beat fedora on package management.
Also, apt-get continues to be way faster and use way less memory. When I recently upgraded a system to FC5 and upgraded 100+ packages from extras the transaction check thrashed the machine to death (with 512 MB RAM) and still took over and hour after upgrading to 1 GB RAM (On a dual Athlon MP). apt-get has never done than even on much less powerful systems.
I just hope they don't make thunderbird suck in the process. All I really want is a program that does mail that doesn't suck, and thunderbird is currently the closest I can find.
I have no end of trouble with the wireless managers in both Windows and Linux, while OSX has always worked right. The windows management is slightly better (and I don't use encrypted networks, so I believe that network manager could be just broken there), but on the other hand when Network Manager breaks I can always kill it and run iwlist/iwconfig/dhclient by hand (which is ugly and dumb, but works). When then Windows network applet doesn't work, I have been unable to force it to work, either.
I can think of no good reason why wireless connectivity should be hard, but I don't really think anyone by Apple has done it well.
It is possible, and has happened before, it seems unlikely. That sort of things are hard to get away with for long and you end up spending a long time in a federal pound me in the ass prison.
The news here is that AMD has a laptop processor that is competitive with Intel's offering, which I think is great. Inte's Pentium M chips are very good, and for AMD to have something that is even close is promising for the future.
Yes, indirectly. Various flavors of Christians interpret this slightly differently, but that is the idea behind original sin. Humanity was created in a state of paradise, but given free will. When we choose to sin, we were expelled from paradise and became subject to death, disease, injury, and all of those other things.
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It seems reasonable to me that IF drugs are going to be illegal (a whole 'nother can of worms), possetion should be illegal, and you iff drugs are found on your property in a restricted access area, you should have to prove someone put it there without your knowledge. It is really not that different from any other crime. A sufficient body of evidence linking you to the crime will put the burden on you to prove that it might have been your identical twin (or whateveer).
Possetion of burglary tools, on the other hand is an entirely different animal, since burglary tools can include many common tools (screwdrivers, crowbar, pocket knife). I am told that at least in some states if I am seen to be walking near a store that gets robbed and I have a pocket knife on me, I could be convicted of possention of burglary tools even if I can prove that I was not involved in the crime at all. I assume that most prosecuters only try to press those charges on people "they know" are guilty but can't prove, which is to say, many of them are innocent.
Also, in order to win at blackjack, you have to radically change your betting in an obvious way -- basically, bet the minimum most of the time, and raise your bet when the cards in the shoe are in your favor., or repeatedly hit on high numbers or stand on low numbers. You can get around this with collusion (ala the MIT kids), but in roulette it is less obvious that you aren't just playing randomly.
The part I find most amusing, however, is that both of these instances are really easy for the casino to stop. They can shuffle the deck after every hand and require all bets on the table when the ball is released. However, they want to maximize the appearance of the ability to "cheat" (card counting isn't cheating, whatever the casinos say, it is beating them at their own game). Vegas makes lots of money on people playing at higher stakes, small deck blackjack tables who think they can count cards but are not very good at it. It isn't actually "cheating" that they are against, it is winning.
That isn't necessarily true. It all depends on what bargining chips each side has. It isn't like an employer is giving you a job out of the kindness of their heart, they actually want someone to do a job. If they make rules that alienate potential employees yet don't actually result in increased productivity, they have lost by giving incentive for the most talented people to take other jobs, they may be left to feed off the bottom, and end up with only the slackers who they were most concerned about surfing /. during work and who will likely find away around the block anyway.
I don't actually know the details of how internet blocking affects hiring, but this sort of thing does happen in real life. Recently, I saw that even in this age of pervasive drug testing (which is bullshit, BTW) the FBI was considering relaxing their drug use policy because they weren't getting enough qualified applicants. Among other things, they couldn't compete with the CIA, which has a significantly laxer drug policy.
I doubt this will happen. There is not a lot of technical reason to charge per processor or core -- after all, why not charge per issue slot? What should we do with hyperthreading? However, there is a strong business reason to do so == it allows them to segment the market and charge more money to people who can afford it. Dual core CPUs are targeted at desktop use, while multi-socket hardware is usually much more expensive and used in high-performance workstatiosn and servers by people who can afford to pay a lot more. I wouldn't be surprised if we see people try to charge per core for multi-socket systems or a flat rate for any number of cores on a single processor.
Oracle, as pointed out elsewhere, *does* charge per core, because almost all of their clients are able to pay their exorbitant licensing fees. Also, last time I was party to negotiations with Oracle (>5 years ago), they allowed us unlimited use on development systems, and only charged for "in production" servers.
It doesn't make it any better, but in some (most? all?) states you you are not required to have insurance if you can prove you can pay the minimum liability insurance. So, if you have $100k in liquid assets on hand, you don't need insurance -- rich people don't have to get screwed :/
/. will disagree, but it seems insurance is one of the things that the government currently does better than the majority of private industries. As near as I can tell, medicare is more efficient and better at actually helping sick people than most insurance companies. Of course, that is not a particularly high bar to set, but it ain't nothing.
I will say, in principle I support manditory insurance for drivers. If you accept that A) accidents happen and B) we can (and should) assign fault to a driver involved in an accident, you must ensure that said party is likely to be able to pay the liability they have incurred, and it is unreasonable to repossess someones house if they don't have insurance. I don't, however, know how to prevent them from being evil. I am sure the libertarian hate the governemnt crowd on
This can go both ways. A 0% idle system can be nearly as responsive as a 100% idle system. A purely CPU bound task (such as SETI) will not interfere with an interupt driven task (such as IO) (neglecting cache flushing effects).
Regardless, for most non-desktop uses, the latency caused by scheduling overhead is a negligible contribution to total system performance. The important factors are CPU throughput and IO latency. 18% parity overhead reduces throughput 18% (or requires a 22% faster CPU to maintain throughput) and the IO latency and bandwidth requirements of RAID5 are independent of whether the pairity is done on a controller or by the system CPU, though they *do* depend on where the cache is.
Personally, I use software raid5, raid1 and single disk systems which rsync cross-backup each other to provide tolerable limits on downtime due to disk failure as well as backup for data corruption/deletion failures. I have considered getting 3ware cards on occasion, but for the uses I have it just didn't make sense. Plus, software raid has the advantage of being independent of controller type.
This isn't really reasonable. Software RAID can be as good as many hardware RAID configurations. Modern CPUs are very, very fast, and in many cases can calculate parity faster than dedicated controllers, at the cost of some CPU overhead. However, the cost of the CPU can be much less than the controller. Also, large disk cache helps reduce the read-pairty-write overhead from RAID 5, but most systems have more cache than the drive controller you would pair them with. Finally, if my computer has a UPS, the value of battery backed cache is limited.
Obviously there are many cases where hardware raid is desirable, but to say that any "real" system must use the most expensive hardware possible is just wrong.
Well, in this case I am thinking the desired ruling (by KSR) would be to indicate that the patent office and the lower courts were not adhering to the laws already passed by congress. Therefore, it wouldn't necessarily go back to congress (though they might choose to pass a law clarifying what they meant by obvious). If that were so, I don't think it is unreasonable to imagine that it would change the standard practices in the USPTO.
I don't imagine this will fix all the problems either.
I am not sure how this might work in this instance, but when laws are delclared unconstitutional, it is in a lawsuit targeting the executive branch, enjoining them from enforcing a law. While on paper it looks like such a ruling only affect the individual case at hand, precedent dictates that withing the guilelines of the verdict, it applies to all infractions of the struck down law. Presumably, something similar would happen if the verdict of a patent infringment declared that the criteria used by the patent office in accepting a patent were not harmonious with the constitutional mandate to protect IP and/or the patent laws passed by the legislature, the effect would be to change the way the USPTO issues patents. This is possible even if the ruling if relatively narrow.
I believe (without much in the way of of evidence to back this up) that the costs of running the patent office are greater than the application fees -- therefore might be to their financial advantage to have fewer applications. Given the current backlog, any reduction in applications will take 5-10 years to show up in reduced personel, so likely would not require firing people, but merely not replacing examiners who retire or quit over that time frame.
It really is disgraceful the way the patent office is forced to operate -- they are given too little time to examine patents, the cost of rejecting them is even more time that they don't have, and they are unable to turn applications around in a timely fashion. I don't know how to calculate the cost to our economy of this, but I suspect it is high.
The problem with computers in classrooms is when the distract from the non-computer related learning. I think computers in the home, and particularly internet in the home are excellent educational tools.
I have had access to computers nearly my whole life (since at least 1985) and I believe I have learned more, mostly of my own initiative, via computers than in 18 years of classroom education -- and I had a fantastic classroom education.
One thing about computer access is that it is a hugely unbalanced educator: the most motivated and intelligent people will learn orders of magnitude more than the average. But if 2 kids in a village of 200 can learn to use their computers effectively, and can pass on the benefits of their gained knowledge to the rest of their community, the potential benefits are essentially incalculable, and probably for far less than the cost of sending a pair of aid workers their for 3 years .
Maybe it won't work, or maybe the laptops will be designed poorly and break, or the software will be underdeveloped and not be useful, or they won't be able to get the costs low enough. I can't really judge those things (and I suspect you can't, either) but the potential is there, and I trust that there are smart people working on this project who have done their best to address these issues.
This is one of the things that amazes me. Despite this widely held belief, it is just not true. According to the Pork Report, in the 2006 fiscal year the US government earmarks $29 billion for pork projects. That 5.6% of the $521 billion deficit for FY04, and only 1.3% of the federal budget of ~ 2.2 trillion. Even if we call that all waste, it is an astonishingly low fraction of the total government expendatures, and not a sizable impact on the budget deficit. It also average out to about $100 per person, with most serious violation totalling $30/person. I bet a lot of people lose that much money under the couch every year, and I certainly spend $100 on dumb shit that nets me a lot less that my tax dollars. Now, I earned it, so it is my $100 to waste, but still it is a relatively small amount.
The first amazing thing about this is that to qualify for the list, a budget item must only fulful one of the following seven criteria:
The second point to keep in mind is that in many cases the funded initiatives are not bad ideas -- the same project funded through the NSF rather than direct appropriations would not count as pork. Now, certainly funding through the NSF would be better as it allows better prioritization of funding. However, it is also unfair to report this as 100% wasteful spending.
Take an examples held up by the pork report aa particularly egregious violations:
$1 million for the Waterfree Urinal Conservation Initiative in Michigan.
Waterfree urinals sound frivolous, and you get to make all sorts of jokes about flushing money down the toilet, but they have the potential to save billions of gallons / year of water -- much in public buildings. Currently many juristictions do not allow them in their health codes, but if they are shown to be as sanitary as traditional urinals the potential benefits are huge. I don't know if this particular initiative is any good (and this is the problem with pork spending), but it isn't like the idea isn't sound.
Now, consider your personal representative. Running for most offices in the US costs between $1 and $2 per constituent, per term (I have found this to be roughly true all the way from city council to the president), so he must raise somewhere around $.75-$1.5 million / two years for an average representative. If he can make raising that a little easier by adding a few million dollars of earmarks for projects that are likely a good idea anyway, and might get funded by the competative grant process anyway, is it so surprising that he would like to get credit for it with his constituents? And yet we manage to keep this down to a little over 1% of the budget.
After reading all of the articles about this, I have come to the conclusion that we likely have one of the most effficient and least corrupt governments in the world, in history.
What part of One Laptop per Child don't you understand?
While certainly giving laptops to children is not going to magically solve every problem in the world, it just might help people learn about sustainable agriculture, sanitation practices, disease prevention and treatment, and so forth. In all of these cases, I suspect this is worse than sending aid workers to help teach people about these practices, but has the potentialy to be a lot cheaper since laptops can be manufactured in factories. Efforts to clone aid workers have been so far relatively unsuccesful.
In many areas, it is essentially the only way to get to the police. I recently attempted to call the police to report a malfunctioning rail crossing guard. Not wanting to call 911 for something that was not an emergency, I called information, who proceded to connect me to the emergency dispatcher for the PD, and didn't give me a different number to call. So, next time I guess I will just call 911.
Well, your bicycle analgoy is somewhat flawed. I would, for example, assume that a bench on the public sidewalk is free for me to use -- but not to take (or spray paint). Likewise, using an open access point by itself seems to me like it should be OK, as long as my use is not onerous to business in question (downloading iso torrents 24/7). However, when the owner has taken reasonable precautions to let me know that my use is not welcome, it is at least questionable. I certainly would not use a wireless node the owner had asked me not to, encryption or no, though I can see the argument that it should not be illegal. For instance, it causes a small, if not significant impediment to me running my own wirless network on the same public property. If wireless zones were to ever become as crowded as the FM radio band, enough that I could not set up my own network, I would be opposed to allowing private, access restricted networks to use unlicensed spectrum in the commons.
I personally have an open access point in my house, and while I doubt it reaches many people, I hope anyone who receives the signal feels free to use it. If it ever were to become problematic, I would implement bandwidth throttling, restricted access, or change the ESSID to say "Private WLAN," depending on how much time I was willing to put into it at the moment.
Also, we should remember that the laws of man are not like the laws of nature. They are allowed (sometimes required) to be ambigious. It is a perfectly reasonable law to say that you can use access points unless the owner has taken reasonable steps to prevent it, with reasonable up to the minds of a court if it ever becomes an issue.
Well, contacts and even glasses have their own health risks, plus the use of prosthetics for vision correction limits activities you can participate in somewhat.
I got LASIK when I did because contact lenses were abrading my eye. I had mostly switched back to glasses and my doctor said I probably wouldn't be able to wear contacts regularly. Perhaps that is no longer true: soft lenses have improved since I used them (though not as much as LASIK).
But I would have eventually gotten the surgery anyway. Not only it is way better than having to use corrective lenses with a relatively tiny chance of catastrophic failure, but it is something I could do "for science". I don't want to go blind any more than the next guy, but if everyone waits until the procedure has been done millions of times, it would never progress beyond the stage of animal testing. Honesstly, having someone reshape my eye with a UV laser seems a whole lot absurd than the first person who put tiny slivers of glass in their eye must have.
This is a seductive but ridiculous proposition. Certainly evolutionary factors have changed, but to say that he have stopped (or even slowed) natural selection is just preposterous. We are continuing to evolve to be faster/better/stronger, but we get to choose what world we live in, too.
BIOS isn't a very good example -- open BIOS would be fantastic for a number of reasons. This is especially frustrating because it does a relatively trivial task of initializing enough hardware to load the bootloader and providing tables of hardware data to the OS. Sadly few MB manufacturers are willing to provide enough information to write a free BIOS replacement.
Well, I use both fedora and debian (but not yet Ubuntu) and I can say that while yum has made great strides since FC1 (when it was essentially unusable), debian kicks the shit out of fedora in this respect. Primarily this is the advantage of having what amounts to a HUGE core -- almost any free package I ever looked for was available from the standard debian repositories. Even counting extras fedora has a relatively small base of pakcages, and they have consistently abandonded older packages that some of us still use. Thus a fedora user must add a number of alternate repositories, which can frequently have package name conflicts with each other and from one release of core to the next.
Even within core+extras I have had to manually resolve conflicts with rpm when upgrading from one release to the next. It has been a long time since I have come up against an upgrade that couldn't be resolved by apt with no help, or at most using "dist-upgrade" instead of "upgrade".
Again, I haven't used Ubuntu, so I don't know how much of this applies to that comparison, but I would say it is definately possible to soundly beat fedora on package management.
Also, apt-get continues to be way faster and use way less memory. When I recently upgraded a system to FC5 and upgraded 100+ packages from extras the transaction check thrashed the machine to death (with 512 MB RAM) and still took over and hour after upgrading to 1 GB RAM (On a dual Athlon MP). apt-get has never done than even on much less powerful systems.
The line is "You were the chosen one" and it is one of the best lines in the moive.
I just hope they don't make thunderbird suck in the process. All I really want is a program that does mail that doesn't suck, and thunderbird is currently the closest I can find.
I have no end of trouble with the wireless managers in both Windows and Linux, while OSX has always worked right. The windows management is slightly better (and I don't use encrypted networks, so I believe that network manager could be just broken there), but on the other hand when Network Manager breaks I can always kill it and run iwlist/iwconfig/dhclient by hand (which is ugly and dumb, but works). When then Windows network applet doesn't work, I have been unable to force it to work, either.
I can think of no good reason why wireless connectivity should be hard, but I don't really think anyone by Apple has done it well.
It is possible, and has happened before, it seems unlikely. That sort of things are hard to get away with for long and you end up spending a long time in a federal pound me in the ass prison.
The news here is that AMD has a laptop processor that is competitive with Intel's offering, which I think is great. Inte's Pentium M chips are very good, and for AMD to have something that is even close is promising for the future.
Yes, indirectly. Various flavors of Christians interpret this slightly differently, but that is the idea behind original sin. Humanity was created in a state of paradise, but given free will. When we choose to sin, we were expelled from paradise and became subject to death, disease, injury, and all of those other things.