Worse than that. Someone is walking along a public street, waving a sign at passing cars. This person didn't dress properly before going out in public, and has no clothes on. He does not get to sue all the drivers for being peeping toms. He can't complain if someone takes a picture. Instead, the police can arrest him for indecent exposure.
Anyone who hooks a server up to the Internet is going out in public. Dress appropriately.
What would be news is if we did something about it. Boycott and sue, and send the police to their offices to confiscate property and arrest senior management. Also send the police to their homes to confiscate and arrest. Those among us who own shares should deal with WB management by meeting and voting to cut their pay, especially bonuses, and fire them. We should also ram new laws through our national legislatures to decriminalize copying, and rip up those parts of trade treaties to do with intellectual property.
But none of that will happen. Have to wait for generational change to slowly sweep away the misconception that giving the same legal treatment to ideas as to the material makes sense and is in the public interest.
No, Social Security is a bad example. It is actually not subsidized. It does not do much wealth redistribution. Yes there is some from rich to poor, but mostly it moves wealth from your present self to your future self. Since the money that it puts aside for the future is a huge amount, the government borrows it, paying some interest. It's a much safer deal for Social Security than all these schemes to privatize it by putting those savings into the stock markets.
If Social Security money is ever placed in the stock markets, we will see the biggest yet pump and dump scam in history. The last few times that calls to privatize Social Security grew loud were just before stock market crashes. We've all heard their noises. They whip up studies that claim Social Security is not solvent and will go bankrupt, and we must do something like cut benefits and lower payments, or raise the retirement age, or... privatize it! They call it an "entitlement", when it really is not, as it is fully funded from payroll taxes. They try to exploit the perception that government can't be trusted to do anything right and that the money could be better used in the markets. And that would be true, except that these market manipulators are even less worthy of trust than the government. The finance people weren't interested in helping retirees, they were scheming to save their own necks from their reckless gambling by raiding any source of cash they could find, and public pensions and retirement funds had a lot of cash. It would have kept them bubbling for another few years, that's all. Then the market would crash anyway, and where would all of Social Security's money be then?
Billionaires really have a poor track record on philanthropic investing. They simply cannot use the money as effectively as a swarm intelligence. Warren Buffett jumped on Bill Gates' bandwagon because he realized he couldn't donate effectively on his own, and thought a smart tech guy like Gates could do a better job. He was half right. We see that Gates is struggling to make his donations mean something. Finding cures for terrible diseases is certainly noble, especially if they pull it off. But can they? History suggests not. They're trying for too much and going for the glamorous rather than the practical. In the past, we've seen such white elephants as the Bass Brother's Biosphere 2, and largely useless stunts and entries for the Guinness Book of World Records like balloon flights around the world and skydiving from great heights. It's a lot like the desire to put a man on Mars. Very impressive if it can be done, but at what cost? Is it worth it? Look back at some of the things envisioned in the 19th century, a sort of steampunk colored view. And one of the big dreams of the mid 20th century was the flying car. How much effort was wasted trying to turn that idea into reality? Similarly, there was and still is the jetpack. The savvier, smarter billionaires invested in people, like the railroad tycoon Stanford did in the creation of Stanford U.
Now it seems likely we will see self driving cars and electric cars before flying cars. We will have flying cars, just as soon as our devices can approach birds' or insects' mental abilities to handle flight, and our materials improve even further on the strength to weight ratio, and we figure better ways to store and release energy.
This article needs to distinguish between education and college.
Education is worthwhile. But is college still the best way to get an education? I'm not too sure, not with the ever greater swing in thinking towards profiteering and monetizing. Was bad enough being vicitmized by the occasional parking ticket over a cheap technicality (your front bumper was hanging 1 cm over the line of the deliberately too short parking spot, etc.), taken for hundreds by textbook publishers, and finally, if you graduate, hounded for donations to help out your poor, poor alma mater. But now I hear tuition has rocketed up far faster than inflation, and many professors are the new victims of the relentless push to turn every job into a temporary position with no benefits and no security, and their research is being patented and locked behind paywalls more than ever.
College should be free, just like high school. Students pay for room and board, but not tuition or books. I'm hopeful that copylefted MOOCs and ebooks will break 2 of these rackets. For those who think students should pay tuition, should all things of value be paid for? Sunlight and air are quite valuable, should people pay for that?
The European Union has been far more effective than the Maginot Line. That was one of the first mistakes France made that lead to WWII: being too harsh to Germany at the end of WWI, so that the German people were ripe for radicalization. The French should never have needed to defend themselves at all. Diplomatically, it's terrible. Highly provocative, loud in announcing distrust of a neighbor, and it looks weak next to a robust military.
But since the French couldn't bring themselves to make a lasting peace with Germany then, they had to think of defense. The Line is still a bad idea. When Germany reoccupied the Ruhr, all France had to do was rattle some sabers and they would have pulled right out. Instead they cowered behind a wall. When the war at last broke out, suppose the French had figured out that the Ardennes Forest was passable and had to be covered, either by the Line or the army. The Germans in turn would know this, and could get past the Line in many other ways-- paratroops, or another front the Line does not guard like maybe Switzerland or even Spain, or possibly a surprise amphibious assault via u-boat. They could also assault the Line. It can't dodge artillery. Punch through at a few points, and ignore the rest.
There is the Limes Germanicus, which, while not a wall everywhere, was a fortified boundary. It was the Rhine and Danube rivers, with, at times, a palisade connecting the two.
The Maginot Line was not originally intended to reach the coast. Too costly. The French were counting on their British allies to stop any German advance near the coast. When Britain made it clear they could not or would not help the French enough with that idea, it was too late to extend the Maginot Line even if they discovered the political will to pay for it. They were also counting on various marshy areas being impassable to tanks, but tanks improved enough between the wars that marshes were no longer an effective barrier. Before the war started, the Line was already near worthless. The money that went into it could have been used elsewhere with much greater effect.
I've heard that explanation before, about the Great Wall of China. Even if the walls were fantastically successful at pinning and trapping escaping invaders, they failed to keep Rome secure. The barbarians kept coming past the walls, and ultimately Rome fell to them. Punishment doesn't deter invaders who are facing the worse problems of starvation or pressure at their own backs from invaders still further out. Rome needed to treat with the barbarians and understand what was driving them, then if possible address their problems, not wall them away and try to ignore them. It might not have been possible for Rome to solve the barbarians' problems, but the walls were definitely no solution. Nor was it a solution to declare that the barbarians' problems were not Rome's problems. Problems do not ask for permission before crossing national boundaries.
Walls are one of the most seductive non-solutions available. People persist in thinking that fences make their property more secure, when they often do just the opposite as they provide excellent cover for burglars! They keep dogs in and little kids out, but that's about all. One of the most infamously ineffective walls was the Maginot Line. It is as General Patton said: "Fixed fortifications are a monument to the stupidity of man."
Well, okay, the breakup helped. It could have helped more if competition had been maintained. Turns out the Internet helped much more. Introduced a whole new area of competition, and showed how packet networking vastly increases capacity over the old switched networking the phone system used to use.
Right you are, we no longer pay $3/minute for a long distance call. We don't have to use acoustic coupler modems with those handset cradles to get around Ma Bell's rules against plugging any device but theirs into the jack. We can have long cords for handsets, extensions in other rooms, and touch tone service, without having to pay an extra monthly fee for each of those. Not sure about Caller ID, think that still costs extra on a land line.
But a typical low end cell phone plan is still $40/month. An Internet connection is about the same, after haggling. If you sleep at the wheel, they'll crank your rate up to the $60/month level or higher. Seriously annoying having to beat down the provider every 6 or 12 months, demand their current special or just walk out on them. Even if successful, $40/month is too high. The breeakup and the Internet helped, but there's still lots of room for improvement.
I beat an auto repair shop on an extra fees scam some years ago. Got a quote for a muffler replacement, and used it. After the work, they tacked on this extra $15 fee for "shop materials". That shop materials fee seems to be a common scam in the DFW area. When I objected, they trotted out the tired old justification that everyone does it, it's standard practice, etc. Also tried to claim it was a government requirement. EPA, you know. I pointed out that they had not included this cost on the quote, and they should have. That backed them off, and they dropped that extra charge.
It's relentless. Just because a business is big and well-known is no assurance they won't stoop to outright theft and try to pass it off as necessary or customary. Once had AT&T try to charge me a fee for dropping long distance service while keeping local. A fee for dropping a service? Ridiculous! When I complained to them, they tried to tell me that a particular law said they were allowed to charge this fee, so tough. I told them I didn't give a rats ass what some miserable obscure law said, as they'd doubtless pushed it through with bribes and lobbying, and warned them I would complain to the FCC if they didn't back down. They didn't, so I did. Evidently the complaint worked. AT&T responded by refunding the fee in the interests of "customer relations" while in no way admitting any fault.
The problem of ripoffs and poor service always seems to crop up wherever competition is lacking, and telecomms companies in the US certainly do not have enough competition. Ma Bell was an evil monopolist until their forced breakup in 1984, which it turned out, didn't help much. Today, telecomms in the US are still uncompetitive, price gouging, regulatory capturing, sluggish, backwards scum.
Ting is decent, but it could be better. Trying to achieve zero data usage, I found that the smartphone came preloaded with crapware that insists on checking in daily. It's only a few bytes, but that's enough to bump the user into the next bucket. Only way I could stop it was by disabling data transmission entirely. Configuring the individual apps not to check for updates or otherwise exchange data did not work. Only takes one rogue app to wreck that plan.
I really don't need a smartphone's Internet surfing ability anyway. It's a terrible interface. Tiny screen, terrible tiny touch keyboard. At least the mouse action is decent. But I find using a somewhat bigger device on a WiFi connection is much better.
The text messaging is still a complete ripoff. That ought to be free, not hundreds of times the cost of voice, considering the quantitiy of data each requires.
There's a big problem with this vocational approach you advocate. History of the Roman Empire may not seem to be of any immediate use, but it is. "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it". The Romans made many mistakes. They did not understand that lead was toxic. They built walls to keep the barbarians out, just like today some in the US wish to wall off the border with Mexico. Walls didn't work for the Romans, and it's worth understanding that, and why they didn't work, lest some think that high tech will lead to a different outcome with any walls we may build. For a more recent example, the Berlin Wall didn't work either. The Romans first tried to suppress Christianity, then later totally flip-flopped and embraced Christianity as the state religion. It didn't work. It caused a great deal of harm and suffering, and the empire fell anyway. Today most people appreciate that church and state should stay separate.
When education leaves out everything not immediately related to the subject, you end up with graduates who know how to hack together a machine to do some specific task, but who are likely to miss the larger picture. For instance, what if, at the request of some employer, you whip up some cool robots for a display showing men and dinosaurs interacting with each other? Should you care that this is historically inaccurate, so long as they pay your rent? Maybe you even believe what they say about men and dinosaurs living together, because your education never covered biology or geology and you know no better. Does that matter? The only thing that matters is the paycheck?
It matters a lot. If the leaders of your employer are fools, they will steer the company wrong and wreck it. Then you don't get paid. You will likely be blamed, despite it being totally unfair to blame you thanks to your efforts to stay out of any politics, don't ask questions, and just shut up and follow orders. If you're unlucky, you may even be injured, or killed. When the Titanic sinks, it doesn't matter that you weren't the captain, you were just a good little flunky, you're going down with the ship anyway.
Email attachments are the bane of a smooth user experience for grandma.
She probably has a web mail account, and uses a browser to access it. She's going to receive all kinds of weird attachments from friends, and she will want them all to just work. There are Power Point slideshows, Word documents, spreadsheet files, movies, embedded images, links to images on mailing lists, flash animations, PDFs, MIDIs, and more. Any of these can be in several layers of forwarded messages, or stuffed into an.eml file. They can be messed up by a friend's email setup that does crap like "soft" line breaks-- breaking lines and indicating this by adding an '=' symbol to the ends of the breaks.
To get as much of that to work as possible, need lots of software. Libre Office to handle the Power Point, doc, and spreadsheet files. But that's not enough, need codecs so Libre Office can play whatever video or audio is embedded in the Power Point. Got to have Thunderbird for the.eml files (which still often do not open properly), and a PDF viewer.
Finally, a weak point of Firefox, and I think all browsers, is association. Firefox is quite poor at remembering which program to use to handle a particular file type. Often the user is forced to browse around in the file system. Grandma is not going to like having to slog through/usr/bin to find a suitable program, if she even gets that far.
It's a shame JPEG2000 debuted dead on arrival thanks to patent encumbrances. Creation of a superior open lossy image compression standard seems to have been left behind in favor of video. We have PNG and Theora, but nothing free that improves on jpeg.
Do you know that the quality isn't being reduced? An image manipulation program like the GIMP may not make it too clear that it's redoing the lossy part and further reducing quality even if asked to save at the same quality,
jpegtran is a command line tool that can recompress a jpeg image without changing the quality. If the original compression was poorly done, jpegtran will shrink the file. If jpegtran can shrink your camera's photos, then you know your old camera does a hasty job on the compression. Yes, it is a common issue. Lot of these compression improvers work by more deeply exploring more choices in the compression algorithm, which takes more computing. That's how 7zip improves on zip and gz files.
Why go for a fixed amount per gallon? With a fixed amount, inflation eats away at the revenue. The federal gas tax has been 18 cents per gallon since 1993. It should have been a percentage all along. Why we let the oil companies get away with that one, I don't know. No doubt Big Oil lobbied hard for it, but still. Sales tax is a percentage. So is income tax. But the gas tax was allowed to be a fixed amount.
We don't need people who know quicksort vs. bubble sort
Oh yes you do. If you don't have anyone who understands basic algorithmic complexity, then you will be constantly battling performance problems with even the simplest seeming software. Even software that seemed to be fast at first can have time bombs in them, things like routines that scan an entire log file that slowly grows over time, so that after a few months, the software has slowed to a crawl. And that's if you're lucky. If you're unlucky, the software won't be just slow, it will also be wrong once in a while. It will get wrong answers in a maddening way that shows up at seemingly random times at low enough frequency that your inadequate programmers cannot reliably reproduce it. They will decide it's too hard to find and fix, and will make a mess trying to hack around the problem.
There is another troll hiding under this bridge: the idea that the same people who see through the nonsense of Creationism are suckers for nonsense about foods. That's a extension of the idea that there is no real moral difference between the right and the left, both sides have just as many fanatics, nuts, and idiots, and use just as much propaganda. The assertion about equivalent levels of propaganda is founded on the notion that much science is just propaganda.
I've always viewed organic foods and Whole Foods with skepticism. So have many others who totally understand that Creationism is bunk. There's an awful lot of outright propaganda, exaggerated claims slight and gross, genuine ignorance, and fact to sort through. Consider the history of food science. For example, eggs were thought good for you, then bad because they are high in cholesterol, and now they're good again. An area I think badly neglected until fairly recently was the role of toxins and pollutants, for obvious political reasons. It is as the tobacco companies put it: "doubt is our product". As far back as the 1930s, it's been known that bisphenol A mimics estrogen, but they weren't sure if that mattered much. For decades, we've known lead is toxic, but we've continued to use it anyway. Leaded gas is gone, but lead is still used in plumbing. Too many industrialists prefer that these chemicals remain unstudied and go unremarked.
One big, deliberate blind spot in nearly every published work of Science Fiction that mentions the subject at all is Intellectual Property. These otherwise excellent works propose ridiculous scenarios in which economic activity has fundamentally changed, and maybe money itself is no longer used, but somehow copyright is still alive and strong.
An example of this is in Dan Simmon's Hyperion. One of the characters is an author. His struggles with publishing are very topical, and not at all futuristic. He fights with a corporate publisher who is interested in money and sales, not art. The one tiny bit of futuristic struggle is the response of AI to his writings. The intelligent computers buy one copy from the publisher, then freely distribute that copy among themselves, making the poor author next to nothing from royalties. The boss of the publishing business in the story comments "copyright doesn't mean shit when dealing with silicon".
Another example is Star Trek, especially the episode I, Mudd. Here and there in Star Trek, money is mentioned as something that technology has rendered obsolete, and is no longer used. But somehow intellectual property is still in force. In that episode, it comes out that Mudd has violated some patents, and perhaps copyrights as well, and has fled the world where this happened. And the penalty for these violations? Death! Yeah, rights holders wish!
It's pretty obvious that where the subject comes up and the authors have not injected such pro-copyright sentiments into their works, publishers have forced it in anyway, out of obvious self-interest and damn the integrity of the plot. It may well be impossible for the publishing and entertainment industries in their current form to produce a work that honestly explores this likely aspect of the future, a future without Intellectual Property.
RMS has essays on this subject. However, he does not advocate the elimination of copyright, but rather the use of it for copyleft, the turning of copyright on its head, to force more openness.
Give it some more thought. You are speaking from a viewpoint of classical economics, in which rationalism is defined as self-interest. But we didn't evolve to behave that way. Why? Why give to charity? Why take personal risks to help others in danger? Most of all, why have children? Because rational self-interest is not the optimal behavior for maximum survival. Selfishness is not, in fact, always rational for that reason. We invest in relationships because the payback is greater than the expenditure, and not in just an immediate sense. You don't just receive help from friends when you need help, you sometimes receive help from strangers who see that you are generous. This is true for individuals and groups, including corporations.
The business world is littered with failed businesses that stayed within the letter of the law yet ripped off customers and in general played hardball. Then there are the businesses that cheated and got away with a good deal of it. We've bailed out some of these businesses, thanks to them acheiving "too big to fail" status, but they can't count on it. GM could probably get another government bailout if it needed one. Could Bank of America?
Since you're so negative about public forms of transportation, would you care to go back to the conditions of the late 19th century? Rip up all our public highways, and go back to passenger rail on private railroads?
make it worth their while.... quit asking them to do things that are not in their best interest.
And that narrow view sums up the problem. Where is your sense of social responsibility? Or if not that, can you at least muster some enlightened self interest? You know, the thought that improving a neighborhood is in fact in your own interest, and that just moving into a neighborhood will improve it? That's assuming the business isn't one of those irresponsible sorts that sets a bad example by spewing pollution into the environment and then walking away from the mess they made, leaving it for the public or natural processes to clean up.
For years, anyone who tried to buy a music player that could play the Ogg Vorbis format would have no luck in the US, thanks to Microsoft trying to kill competition to their WMA format. The very same hardware, such as the Samsung Yepp YP-U2 music player, had different code in the ROM between Europe and the US, with the European version able to play Ogg Vorbis, and the US version not.
Another dirty stunt was Microsoft's support of SCO Unix when they tried to extort license fees from innocent users of Linux, which dragged on through 2008.
This article is in the Wall Street journal. That's suspicious right there. Of course they'd find a way to blame government regulation and interference for the problem, rather than abuse of government power to form and support monopolies.
I'm not saying their point is completely without merit. But I tend to think other factors exert more influence over why we have such relatively slow Internet service.
Slashdot Mirror
Worse than that. Someone is walking along a public street, waving a sign at passing cars. This person didn't dress properly before going out in public, and has no clothes on. He does not get to sue all the drivers for being peeping toms. He can't complain if someone takes a picture. Instead, the police can arrest him for indecent exposure.
Anyone who hooks a server up to the Internet is going out in public. Dress appropriately.
What would be news is if we did something about it. Boycott and sue, and send the police to their offices to confiscate property and arrest senior management. Also send the police to their homes to confiscate and arrest. Those among us who own shares should deal with WB management by meeting and voting to cut their pay, especially bonuses, and fire them. We should also ram new laws through our national legislatures to decriminalize copying, and rip up those parts of trade treaties to do with intellectual property.
But none of that will happen. Have to wait for generational change to slowly sweep away the misconception that giving the same legal treatment to ideas as to the material makes sense and is in the public interest.
No, Social Security is a bad example. It is actually not subsidized. It does not do much wealth redistribution. Yes there is some from rich to poor, but mostly it moves wealth from your present self to your future self. Since the money that it puts aside for the future is a huge amount, the government borrows it, paying some interest. It's a much safer deal for Social Security than all these schemes to privatize it by putting those savings into the stock markets.
If Social Security money is ever placed in the stock markets, we will see the biggest yet pump and dump scam in history. The last few times that calls to privatize Social Security grew loud were just before stock market crashes. We've all heard their noises. They whip up studies that claim Social Security is not solvent and will go bankrupt, and we must do something like cut benefits and lower payments, or raise the retirement age, or ... privatize it! They call it an "entitlement", when it really is not, as it is fully funded from payroll taxes. They try to exploit the perception that government can't be trusted to do anything right and that the money could be better used in the markets. And that would be true, except that these market manipulators are even less worthy of trust than the government. The finance people weren't interested in helping retirees, they were scheming to save their own necks from their reckless gambling by raiding any source of cash they could find, and public pensions and retirement funds had a lot of cash. It would have kept them bubbling for another few years, that's all. Then the market would crash anyway, and where would all of Social Security's money be then?
Billionaires really have a poor track record on philanthropic investing. They simply cannot use the money as effectively as a swarm intelligence. Warren Buffett jumped on Bill Gates' bandwagon because he realized he couldn't donate effectively on his own, and thought a smart tech guy like Gates could do a better job. He was half right. We see that Gates is struggling to make his donations mean something. Finding cures for terrible diseases is certainly noble, especially if they pull it off. But can they? History suggests not. They're trying for too much and going for the glamorous rather than the practical. In the past, we've seen such white elephants as the Bass Brother's Biosphere 2, and largely useless stunts and entries for the Guinness Book of World Records like balloon flights around the world and skydiving from great heights. It's a lot like the desire to put a man on Mars. Very impressive if it can be done, but at what cost? Is it worth it? Look back at some of the things envisioned in the 19th century, a sort of steampunk colored view. And one of the big dreams of the mid 20th century was the flying car. How much effort was wasted trying to turn that idea into reality? Similarly, there was and still is the jetpack. The savvier, smarter billionaires invested in people, like the railroad tycoon Stanford did in the creation of Stanford U.
Now it seems likely we will see self driving cars and electric cars before flying cars. We will have flying cars, just as soon as our devices can approach birds' or insects' mental abilities to handle flight, and our materials improve even further on the strength to weight ratio, and we figure better ways to store and release energy.
This article needs to distinguish between education and college.
Education is worthwhile. But is college still the best way to get an education? I'm not too sure, not with the ever greater swing in thinking towards profiteering and monetizing. Was bad enough being vicitmized by the occasional parking ticket over a cheap technicality (your front bumper was hanging 1 cm over the line of the deliberately too short parking spot, etc.), taken for hundreds by textbook publishers, and finally, if you graduate, hounded for donations to help out your poor, poor alma mater. But now I hear tuition has rocketed up far faster than inflation, and many professors are the new victims of the relentless push to turn every job into a temporary position with no benefits and no security, and their research is being patented and locked behind paywalls more than ever.
College should be free, just like high school. Students pay for room and board, but not tuition or books. I'm hopeful that copylefted MOOCs and ebooks will break 2 of these rackets. For those who think students should pay tuition, should all things of value be paid for? Sunlight and air are quite valuable, should people pay for that?
The European Union has been far more effective than the Maginot Line. That was one of the first mistakes France made that lead to WWII: being too harsh to Germany at the end of WWI, so that the German people were ripe for radicalization. The French should never have needed to defend themselves at all. Diplomatically, it's terrible. Highly provocative, loud in announcing distrust of a neighbor, and it looks weak next to a robust military.
But since the French couldn't bring themselves to make a lasting peace with Germany then, they had to think of defense. The Line is still a bad idea. When Germany reoccupied the Ruhr, all France had to do was rattle some sabers and they would have pulled right out. Instead they cowered behind a wall. When the war at last broke out, suppose the French had figured out that the Ardennes Forest was passable and had to be covered, either by the Line or the army. The Germans in turn would know this, and could get past the Line in many other ways-- paratroops, or another front the Line does not guard like maybe Switzerland or even Spain, or possibly a surprise amphibious assault via u-boat. They could also assault the Line. It can't dodge artillery. Punch through at a few points, and ignore the rest.
There is the Limes Germanicus, which, while not a wall everywhere, was a fortified boundary. It was the Rhine and Danube rivers, with, at times, a palisade connecting the two.
The Maginot Line was not originally intended to reach the coast. Too costly. The French were counting on their British allies to stop any German advance near the coast. When Britain made it clear they could not or would not help the French enough with that idea, it was too late to extend the Maginot Line even if they discovered the political will to pay for it. They were also counting on various marshy areas being impassable to tanks, but tanks improved enough between the wars that marshes were no longer an effective barrier. Before the war started, the Line was already near worthless. The money that went into it could have been used elsewhere with much greater effect.
I've heard that explanation before, about the Great Wall of China. Even if the walls were fantastically successful at pinning and trapping escaping invaders, they failed to keep Rome secure. The barbarians kept coming past the walls, and ultimately Rome fell to them. Punishment doesn't deter invaders who are facing the worse problems of starvation or pressure at their own backs from invaders still further out. Rome needed to treat with the barbarians and understand what was driving them, then if possible address their problems, not wall them away and try to ignore them. It might not have been possible for Rome to solve the barbarians' problems, but the walls were definitely no solution. Nor was it a solution to declare that the barbarians' problems were not Rome's problems. Problems do not ask for permission before crossing national boundaries.
Walls are one of the most seductive non-solutions available. People persist in thinking that fences make their property more secure, when they often do just the opposite as they provide excellent cover for burglars! They keep dogs in and little kids out, but that's about all. One of the most infamously ineffective walls was the Maginot Line. It is as General Patton said: "Fixed fortifications are a monument to the stupidity of man."
Well, okay, the breakup helped. It could have helped more if competition had been maintained. Turns out the Internet helped much more. Introduced a whole new area of competition, and showed how packet networking vastly increases capacity over the old switched networking the phone system used to use.
Right you are, we no longer pay $3/minute for a long distance call. We don't have to use acoustic coupler modems with those handset cradles to get around Ma Bell's rules against plugging any device but theirs into the jack. We can have long cords for handsets, extensions in other rooms, and touch tone service, without having to pay an extra monthly fee for each of those. Not sure about Caller ID, think that still costs extra on a land line.
But a typical low end cell phone plan is still $40/month. An Internet connection is about the same, after haggling. If you sleep at the wheel, they'll crank your rate up to the $60/month level or higher. Seriously annoying having to beat down the provider every 6 or 12 months, demand their current special or just walk out on them. Even if successful, $40/month is too high. The breeakup and the Internet helped, but there's still lots of room for improvement.
I beat an auto repair shop on an extra fees scam some years ago. Got a quote for a muffler replacement, and used it. After the work, they tacked on this extra $15 fee for "shop materials". That shop materials fee seems to be a common scam in the DFW area. When I objected, they trotted out the tired old justification that everyone does it, it's standard practice, etc. Also tried to claim it was a government requirement. EPA, you know. I pointed out that they had not included this cost on the quote, and they should have. That backed them off, and they dropped that extra charge.
It's relentless. Just because a business is big and well-known is no assurance they won't stoop to outright theft and try to pass it off as necessary or customary. Once had AT&T try to charge me a fee for dropping long distance service while keeping local. A fee for dropping a service? Ridiculous! When I complained to them, they tried to tell me that a particular law said they were allowed to charge this fee, so tough. I told them I didn't give a rats ass what some miserable obscure law said, as they'd doubtless pushed it through with bribes and lobbying, and warned them I would complain to the FCC if they didn't back down. They didn't, so I did. Evidently the complaint worked. AT&T responded by refunding the fee in the interests of "customer relations" while in no way admitting any fault.
The problem of ripoffs and poor service always seems to crop up wherever competition is lacking, and telecomms companies in the US certainly do not have enough competition. Ma Bell was an evil monopolist until their forced breakup in 1984, which it turned out, didn't help much. Today, telecomms in the US are still uncompetitive, price gouging, regulatory capturing, sluggish, backwards scum.
Ting is decent, but it could be better. Trying to achieve zero data usage, I found that the smartphone came preloaded with crapware that insists on checking in daily. It's only a few bytes, but that's enough to bump the user into the next bucket. Only way I could stop it was by disabling data transmission entirely. Configuring the individual apps not to check for updates or otherwise exchange data did not work. Only takes one rogue app to wreck that plan.
I really don't need a smartphone's Internet surfing ability anyway. It's a terrible interface. Tiny screen, terrible tiny touch keyboard. At least the mouse action is decent. But I find using a somewhat bigger device on a WiFi connection is much better.
The text messaging is still a complete ripoff. That ought to be free, not hundreds of times the cost of voice, considering the quantitiy of data each requires.
There's a big problem with this vocational approach you advocate. History of the Roman Empire may not seem to be of any immediate use, but it is. "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it". The Romans made many mistakes. They did not understand that lead was toxic. They built walls to keep the barbarians out, just like today some in the US wish to wall off the border with Mexico. Walls didn't work for the Romans, and it's worth understanding that, and why they didn't work, lest some think that high tech will lead to a different outcome with any walls we may build. For a more recent example, the Berlin Wall didn't work either. The Romans first tried to suppress Christianity, then later totally flip-flopped and embraced Christianity as the state religion. It didn't work. It caused a great deal of harm and suffering, and the empire fell anyway. Today most people appreciate that church and state should stay separate.
When education leaves out everything not immediately related to the subject, you end up with graduates who know how to hack together a machine to do some specific task, but who are likely to miss the larger picture. For instance, what if, at the request of some employer, you whip up some cool robots for a display showing men and dinosaurs interacting with each other? Should you care that this is historically inaccurate, so long as they pay your rent? Maybe you even believe what they say about men and dinosaurs living together, because your education never covered biology or geology and you know no better. Does that matter? The only thing that matters is the paycheck?
It matters a lot. If the leaders of your employer are fools, they will steer the company wrong and wreck it. Then you don't get paid. You will likely be blamed, despite it being totally unfair to blame you thanks to your efforts to stay out of any politics, don't ask questions, and just shut up and follow orders. If you're unlucky, you may even be injured, or killed. When the Titanic sinks, it doesn't matter that you weren't the captain, you were just a good little flunky, you're going down with the ship anyway.
Email attachments are the bane of a smooth user experience for grandma.
She probably has a web mail account, and uses a browser to access it. She's going to receive all kinds of weird attachments from friends, and she will want them all to just work. There are Power Point slideshows, Word documents, spreadsheet files, movies, embedded images, links to images on mailing lists, flash animations, PDFs, MIDIs, and more. Any of these can be in several layers of forwarded messages, or stuffed into an .eml file. They can be messed up by a friend's email setup that does crap like "soft" line breaks-- breaking lines and indicating this by adding an '=' symbol to the ends of the breaks.
To get as much of that to work as possible, need lots of software. Libre Office to handle the Power Point, doc, and spreadsheet files. But that's not enough, need codecs so Libre Office can play whatever video or audio is embedded in the Power Point. Got to have Thunderbird for the .eml files (which still often do not open properly), and a PDF viewer.
Finally, a weak point of Firefox, and I think all browsers, is association. Firefox is quite poor at remembering which program to use to handle a particular file type. Often the user is forced to browse around in the file system. Grandma is not going to like having to slog through /usr/bin to find a suitable program, if she even gets that far.
It's a shame JPEG2000 debuted dead on arrival thanks to patent encumbrances. Creation of a superior open lossy image compression standard seems to have been left behind in favor of video. We have PNG and Theora, but nothing free that improves on jpeg.
Do you know that the quality isn't being reduced? An image manipulation program like the GIMP may not make it too clear that it's redoing the lossy part and further reducing quality even if asked to save at the same quality,
jpegtran is a command line tool that can recompress a jpeg image without changing the quality. If the original compression was poorly done, jpegtran will shrink the file. If jpegtran can shrink your camera's photos, then you know your old camera does a hasty job on the compression. Yes, it is a common issue. Lot of these compression improvers work by more deeply exploring more choices in the compression algorithm, which takes more computing. That's how 7zip improves on zip and gz files.
Why go for a fixed amount per gallon? With a fixed amount, inflation eats away at the revenue. The federal gas tax has been 18 cents per gallon since 1993. It should have been a percentage all along. Why we let the oil companies get away with that one, I don't know. No doubt Big Oil lobbied hard for it, but still. Sales tax is a percentage. So is income tax. But the gas tax was allowed to be a fixed amount.
We don't need people who know quicksort vs. bubble sort
Oh yes you do. If you don't have anyone who understands basic algorithmic complexity, then you will be constantly battling performance problems with even the simplest seeming software. Even software that seemed to be fast at first can have time bombs in them, things like routines that scan an entire log file that slowly grows over time, so that after a few months, the software has slowed to a crawl. And that's if you're lucky. If you're unlucky, the software won't be just slow, it will also be wrong once in a while. It will get wrong answers in a maddening way that shows up at seemingly random times at low enough frequency that your inadequate programmers cannot reliably reproduce it. They will decide it's too hard to find and fix, and will make a mess trying to hack around the problem.
There is another troll hiding under this bridge: the idea that the same people who see through the nonsense of Creationism are suckers for nonsense about foods. That's a extension of the idea that there is no real moral difference between the right and the left, both sides have just as many fanatics, nuts, and idiots, and use just as much propaganda. The assertion about equivalent levels of propaganda is founded on the notion that much science is just propaganda.
I've always viewed organic foods and Whole Foods with skepticism. So have many others who totally understand that Creationism is bunk. There's an awful lot of outright propaganda, exaggerated claims slight and gross, genuine ignorance, and fact to sort through. Consider the history of food science. For example, eggs were thought good for you, then bad because they are high in cholesterol, and now they're good again. An area I think badly neglected until fairly recently was the role of toxins and pollutants, for obvious political reasons. It is as the tobacco companies put it: "doubt is our product". As far back as the 1930s, it's been known that bisphenol A mimics estrogen, but they weren't sure if that mattered much. For decades, we've known lead is toxic, but we've continued to use it anyway. Leaded gas is gone, but lead is still used in plumbing. Too many industrialists prefer that these chemicals remain unstudied and go unremarked.
Fast free video would be nice too. Hate having to choose between awful performance or proprietary binary drivers.
One big, deliberate blind spot in nearly every published work of Science Fiction that mentions the subject at all is Intellectual Property. These otherwise excellent works propose ridiculous scenarios in which economic activity has fundamentally changed, and maybe money itself is no longer used, but somehow copyright is still alive and strong.
An example of this is in Dan Simmon's Hyperion. One of the characters is an author. His struggles with publishing are very topical, and not at all futuristic. He fights with a corporate publisher who is interested in money and sales, not art. The one tiny bit of futuristic struggle is the response of AI to his writings. The intelligent computers buy one copy from the publisher, then freely distribute that copy among themselves, making the poor author next to nothing from royalties. The boss of the publishing business in the story comments "copyright doesn't mean shit when dealing with silicon".
Another example is Star Trek, especially the episode I, Mudd. Here and there in Star Trek, money is mentioned as something that technology has rendered obsolete, and is no longer used. But somehow intellectual property is still in force. In that episode, it comes out that Mudd has violated some patents, and perhaps copyrights as well, and has fled the world where this happened. And the penalty for these violations? Death! Yeah, rights holders wish!
It's pretty obvious that where the subject comes up and the authors have not injected such pro-copyright sentiments into their works, publishers have forced it in anyway, out of obvious self-interest and damn the integrity of the plot. It may well be impossible for the publishing and entertainment industries in their current form to produce a work that honestly explores this likely aspect of the future, a future without Intellectual Property.
RMS has essays on this subject. However, he does not advocate the elimination of copyright, but rather the use of it for copyleft, the turning of copyright on its head, to force more openness.
Give it some more thought. You are speaking from a viewpoint of classical economics, in which rationalism is defined as self-interest. But we didn't evolve to behave that way. Why? Why give to charity? Why take personal risks to help others in danger? Most of all, why have children? Because rational self-interest is not the optimal behavior for maximum survival. Selfishness is not, in fact, always rational for that reason. We invest in relationships because the payback is greater than the expenditure, and not in just an immediate sense. You don't just receive help from friends when you need help, you sometimes receive help from strangers who see that you are generous. This is true for individuals and groups, including corporations.
The business world is littered with failed businesses that stayed within the letter of the law yet ripped off customers and in general played hardball. Then there are the businesses that cheated and got away with a good deal of it. We've bailed out some of these businesses, thanks to them acheiving "too big to fail" status, but they can't count on it. GM could probably get another government bailout if it needed one. Could Bank of America?
Since you're so negative about public forms of transportation, would you care to go back to the conditions of the late 19th century? Rip up all our public highways, and go back to passenger rail on private railroads?
make it worth their while. ... quit asking them to do things that are not in their best interest.
And that narrow view sums up the problem. Where is your sense of social responsibility? Or if not that, can you at least muster some enlightened self interest? You know, the thought that improving a neighborhood is in fact in your own interest, and that just moving into a neighborhood will improve it? That's assuming the business isn't one of those irresponsible sorts that sets a bad example by spewing pollution into the environment and then walking away from the mess they made, leaving it for the public or natural processes to clean up.
No need for sudo fu when you can sudo su!
OOXML was inappropriately fast tracked, and MS leaned on members of the standards body to vote in favor of OOXML. MS is a convicted monopolist in both the US (United States vs. Microsoft Corp., 2001) and Europe (Microsoft Corp. v Commission of the European Communities, 2007). MS agreed to stop strongarming their users into using the Internet Explorer browser by offering choices, then due to a "technical error" in Windows 7 service pack 1, failed to fulfill that promise for 14 months starting in 2011. In March 2013, Microsoft was fined, again, for that failure.
For years, anyone who tried to buy a music player that could play the Ogg Vorbis format would have no luck in the US, thanks to Microsoft trying to kill competition to their WMA format. The very same hardware, such as the Samsung Yepp YP-U2 music player, had different code in the ROM between Europe and the US, with the European version able to play Ogg Vorbis, and the US version not.
Another dirty stunt was Microsoft's support of SCO Unix when they tried to extort license fees from innocent users of Linux, which dragged on through 2008.
This article is in the Wall Street journal. That's suspicious right there. Of course they'd find a way to blame government regulation and interference for the problem, rather than abuse of government power to form and support monopolies.
I'm not saying their point is completely without merit. But I tend to think other factors exert more influence over why we have such relatively slow Internet service.