How about this as a possible solution?(this is just an off-the-top-of-my-head idea, I'm not emotionally committed to these ideas if someone can argue them down.)
Critical treatment is always performed -- costs, if not covered by insurance or cash from the patient, become a debt to the federal government.
These debts are payed off with monthly payments not to exceed some limit based on income. Interest is not charged (ie it is covered by the tax-payer).
At the end of a patient's life, remaining debt is deducted from the patient's assets (pre-tax). If there are assets left, they are taxed according to the law, then distributed according to the will; if there are debts left they are canceled and covered by the taxpayers together.
That would solve your first and second point, but what about the third? It may be that because it's no longer a matter of life and death that this solution would also solve your third point. Maybe. Otherwise, some kind of price-fixing may be necessary to balance out the economic information-flow problem that your third point makes clear.
I pay 236.33 Euros per month for my German socialized health insurance. My employer pays the same for me -- so the total is 472.66 per month. I'm single and without dependents. In addition to that, I'm facing costs of 3500 Euros for a medical procedure which the socialized health insurance doesn't cover. I have pain which can only be relieved with this procedure.
I don't think the US is the paragon of health care, but I don't think socializing the health care system is the solution.
A few years ago, in Houston I saw a pale rainbow around the almost-full moon at night. It was a very cold night for Houston (below freezing), but since it was Houston, the humidity in the air was very high. Someone explained to me that the rainbow was because the humidity in the air was frozen into ice crystals which then had special refractory properties.
Based on this article, I have to ask: Could saltwater have been a better explanation for this beautiful phenomenon? Does anybody here know?
Brilliant. You do know that that exam was made illegal because it was being used to prevent black people from voting (back when black people were still being kept dumb through the use of a segregated school system and other measures), right?
You do know that such a test would either be too trivial to be meaningful, or would necessarily be biased towards one group of Americans, right?
That electronic voting would make the "test" for eligability to vote, whether or not someone is able to use a computer and the voting software, is for me sufficient reason to reject e-voting at this time.
And in other news, the US has realized that freedom of speech, freedom to assemble, and a number of other freedoms also support terrorism.
Since the Middle East is the hotbed of terrorism, we will be suspending the introduction of democracy into Iraq until we've educated the Iraqi's out of their terrorist tendencies.
And of course there's no energy used to mine petrol. And since we're talking here about used vegetable oil, it's obvious that the farmer wouldn't have used energy to produce his vegetables if there hadn't been a demand for bio-diesel.
Sarcasm aside, that farmer could use biodiesel, and the net energy production would still be positive. This together with the fact that not all of the plant can be used to produce oil shows that the net effect is that carbon is removed from the atmosphere. This in contrast to petrol, where we move carbon from a stable, deep in the earth buried state up into the atmosphere.
For a more complete analysis of biodiesel check out The Official Site of the National Biodiesel Board and in particular, their summary of a comparitive EPA report on Biodiesel Lifecycle. I have seen a better source, but I'm not finding it right now, so I'm hoping that will be enough argumentation to motivate you to do some research on your own.
I am also a woman and I have to say that we learned it differently in my Brains and Behavior class at Rice. It's not brain size that has a correlation to intelligence, it's brain to body mass ratio (BBMR to save me typing effort). If it were brain size, then elephants and whales would have a tremendous advantage over humans.
That being said men do have a very slightly larger BBMR then women, but certainly within the margin of error with which such things might effect actual intelligence. Just to give you an idea of how inaccurate a measure of intelligence this is: the list of top ten animals in average BBMR has humans at the top, dolphins at second place and octopus somewhere around number 7. Statistical correlation between BBMR and IQ (also a rather controversial measure of intelligence but you do have to start somewhere) in humans is about 10%, which is generally considered to be quite low.
Men do, statistically speaking, have better spatial skills. There is also some evidence that women with more testosterone also have better spatial skills than women with less. At the same time there are a number of things which women are significantly better at -- color recognition and many skills involving the use of language. Women for example have, on average, larger vocabularies than men.
Your white and gray matter explanation is not correct as far as I know -- instead, there are specific areas of the brain designated for certain task. For example the occipital lobe (at the back of your head) does the preliminary and probably some higher level processing on the input from your eyes. The hypocampus (about in the middle) has some not yet completely understood role in saving and/or retrieving memories. And etc... If you can find a modern scientific source to support your statement, though I could certainly be convinced otherwise.
For the most part though, your post was scientifically inaccurate. I doubt you're spreading FUD on purpose so I figured you'd appreciate the correction.
Thank you for the interesting link. I always appreciate people who do research to support their arguments.
I notice however that the article is 4 years old. Since then the German health insurance system has achieved billions in debt with no end in sight. This is because it is unable to adjust to the high levels of unemployment that the weak economy has caused. In an attempt to save this system, German politicians are currently discussing drastic reductions in the level of legally required coverage -- without reducing the price sticker on that coverage. My own health insurance rates increased at the beginning of 2002 from 13.2% of my salary to 13.7% and that represents a rather modest increase when compared with other public health insurance companies in Germany. The Aok for example charges 15% of its members salary -- that's the maximum it's allowed to charge and it's the public health insurance company racking up the most debt.
Assuming you're an American -- would you be able to afford to give up 15% of your salary? Would you be willing? And what if you had to buy additional coverage (which a lot of Germans do) to get the service that you get now -- would you still be willing?
I notice the article doesn't deny that Americans receive better health care but makes unsubstantiated claims that unnecessary treatments are performed but that they are not performed in foreign countries. I can say through anecdotal evidence (in other words also unsubstantiated claims;o) that unnecessary treatments are performed in Germany. I can definitely say that the system encourages it. Doctors in Germany have a quota of treatments which they get payed for in each quarter. If they for example perform x+20 blood tests where x is the number of 'allowed' blood tests then they don't get payed for the remaining blood tests. (That doesn't mean they don't perform them -- it just means they don't get payed for them.) If however they pay x-20, then they only get payed for the x-20. This system was set up in an attempt to reduce unnecessary treatments, but encourages doctors to try to use up their quotas, but no more.
Would you choose to go into any profession which had to work under such conditions?
That Americans have a shorter life expectancy results from many factors of which I do not believe the health care is one. Nor did the article try to do more than imply a connection. Americans are statistically more obese then the rest of the world citizens. They eat more red meat, and other unhealthy foods. They drive everywhere, rather than walking. Old people don't live with their families, but instead get carted off to nursing homes. In short, American wealth has moved us into living patterns which are unhealthy and which reduce our life expectancy. Those are however individual choices which changing a health care system won't effect.
So although I appreciate your posting a link to this article, I don't consider it a convincing argument against my previous post.
I was an intern at Microsoft for 4 months, and I have to admit that the temp issue wasn't the major issue on my radar screen. Also the economy was a lot better while I was there. Still here's my take anyways.
I was told by MS employees that temps get more in regular salary than full-time employees. MS makes up the difference for full-time employees with stock options. But people who prefer to be payed in cash were working for Microsoft as contractors solely for that reason.
Stock options are cheaper for the company than cash. Companies don't have to count their value in when releasing quarterly results to stock holders, but they can count their value in when doing their tax returns, meaning that they can use stock options to move themselves to the $0 tax bracket. So that would tend to indicate that contracters are noticeably more expensive for Microsoft then full-time employees.
Maybe Microsoft is treating contractors badly because they're trying to convince them that they should go full-time.
I'm probably an idiot for saying this on slashdot, but I use Yahoo's portal for e-mail, stock quotes, exchange rates, and customized headlines, and there are a lot of things I like about it. I've been looking for a replacement to Yahoo, because an incident with them a few months ago caused them to loose my trust, but I haven't been able to find one that had all of the above (Lycos has everything but the exchange rates and it's been my closest match up till now).
If a portal site had all that and a good search engine in a useable format I'd be there in a second. I probably shouldn't say this too loudly, but I'd even put up with obnoxious pop-everywhere advertisements to a certain degree. (I said "put up with" not "click on", just in case someone wants to use that statement as a business argument.)
Insurance companies should not have the right to raise rates or reject coverage of people with genetic weaknesses.
This is great in theory, but in practice it would make providing health insurance in a free market economically impossible. Consider the following theoretical case:
Joe Schmoe discovers through genetic screening that he is likely to develop altheimers around the age of 65. Joe knows that this will cause nursing home costs in the range of $600,000. Joe seeks out insurance for which the total costs are less than $600,000 rather than investing to to reach the $600,000 point. Jane discovers through genetic screening that she won't have altheimers so she doesn't insure for it. There is a law that the insurance can't deny anybody insurance based on the results of a genetic screening. As a result, the insurance company has to pay more than it has taken in on altheimers patients, or it has to raise it's price on said coverage until buying would be equivalent to investing that same money, thus turning themselves from an insurance company into an investment company. Repeat this ad infinium for every illness for which a genetic screening might be useful, and the insurance companies all go bankrupt or all change to investment companies. There is no longer such a thing as insurance.
The problem here is that the entire concept of insurance is that the customer pays the insurance company to take financial responsibility for a risk. This only works financially if both parties have the same knowledge about the risks involved.
I recently heard an insurance spokesperson say that insurance companies wouldn't have any problem with not taking into account the results of a genetic screening, as long as their customer's also didn't. One way to insure that would be that neither the customer, nor the insurance company has information from genetic screenings. Another way to insure that would be to force *everyone* to buy insurance.
While I do think genetic screening could in the future become a convincing argument for universal health care, I strongly disagree that it produces better health care.
Remember this little thing called Hotmail?
Remember when there were no pop up ads? No terms of service changes that require you to check your options 3 times daily to ensure you haven't automatically been requested to share your personal info, and where it was a reliable service?
Well I don't like MS much, but this certainly isn't Microsoft's fault alone. You could have said the same thing about numerous other free on-line mail services a few years ago. But most or all of them are doing various pop-up/whatever advertising schemes these days too. The business climate changed, and these services had to start making a profit. And non-paying customers only have limited economic power to change things. Take Yahoo as a case in point.
How about Charlie Chaplain's "The Great Dictator"? Or "Life is Beautiful"? I know they are not about *this* war, but that doesn't make them irrelevant.
I remember discussing "The Great Dictator" in my German class in the context of the question whether or not humor about awful things was okay. I take the position, that humor is among other things our way of dealing with awful things. As long as we don't trivialize things that shouldn't be trivialized, I think humor is a healthy and appropriate way of working through our pain.
I have heard other positions about it though that I have a hard time arguing against: That humor can't avoid trivializing its subject. Or that it's disrespectful to the victims to laugh about the thing or person which victimized them.
Anybody else have a different perspective on this?
Hmm... I would find the result that DNA is more compressable than random data to be a possibly more interesting result. After all, all (as of yet discovered, earth-based) life is based on some kind of DNA sequence which could be considered to be the compression of that life-form.
This is of course ignoring the effect of the environment which almost certainly reduces the symmetry (and thus the redundancy) produced by the genetics of a life-form.
But then again, maybe DNA would also have a high degree of repetition, at least in sexually reproducing life-forms, since DNA also has to be sensably combinable.
I'm an American living in Germany. I was listening to the radio on the way home from work the other day. The announcer was listing off the traffic jams and construction sites of the day and casually mentioned that they were defusing a bomb in a particular area, and that people who weren't directly involved should avoid the area.
This wasn't major news -- unexploded ordinance from WWII is still occasionally found and needs to be taken care of. With such ever present reminders of the horrors of war you begin to understand why the Germans are so utterly opposed to starting them these days.
Since I'm not actually in America, I have to rely on the knowledge of friends and family who are. This is also the reason I used the word "apparently".
Unless someone has further information however, I stand by the rest of my post.
I do consider the assertion that the Iraqi's will get individual liberty to be a questionable one.
Kurdish (that's the ethnic group in Northern Iraq) refugees in Germany have been holding massive anti-war demonstrations. That's right -- the oppressed people are against the war. It's not because they like Mr. Hussein -- nobody does. It's because they fear that they will have less freedoms after the war. One possible scenario, for example, is that Turkey will march into the Kurdish areas. There are already massive rumours (apparently unreported in American news) that Turkey has already started moving troops into the area "for humanitarian reasons". Given Turkey's history with it's own Kurdish minority, the Kurds in Iraq have good reasons to be afraid that the US will sell them to Turkey for fly-over and troop stationing rights.
The reason that Turkey wants them in the first place is because they fear that a Kurdish nation could be created in northern Iraq and strengthen the Kurds in southern Turkey's desire to seperate from Turkey.
The Shiite minorities in southern Iraq are equally unfriendly to US interests. A few years ago the US encouraged them to revolt against Saddam and then failed to provide the necessary support when they did. The revolt was brutally put down, and the Shiites felt betrayed by the US. This is why US soldiers haven't been getting the warm receptions that the US claimed they would get. Sure, there are a few non-representative happy people for US cameramen to film, but the overall response hasn't been anything like the American march into Germany at the end of WWII.
And then we can look at historical examples of US involvement in other countries. The most recent one would be Afghanistan. The US had barely reduced the little remaining infrastructure in the country to ruins before it decided to start the next war. Current aid to Afghanistan: $300 million. War cost in Iraq: est. $75 billion (The White House's estimation -- actual cost could be wide over that mark). Looking a little further back, I could start discussing Iran, various South American countries, Vietnam, and etc. But I would like for people to learn to do their own research. (Clue: your history teacher failed to inform you of just about every inappropriate act of the American government since the extermination of the American Indians.)
So in conclusion: Yes there is a chance that this could all end with a free Iraq. I certainly hope so, since there's no going back now. But I don't delude myself into thinking that it's likely.
I found a fairly good discussion of this in the sci.energy newsgroup. I had actually heard this before, but the explanation I had gotten was the carbon 14 explanation (all carbon mined on earth contains a certain fraction of carbon 14 which is radioactive). The discussion I linked above also explains that there are other trace radioactive elements released into the environment during the mining process.
> For those of you who have used all of them, I'm sorry.
What about us poor schmucks who have to keep our programs compatible to the 95/98/Me family, while still integrating a "modern XP look" (blech) for marketing? Don't we get some sympathy?
All in all, I agree with much of what he has to say, but there was one thing that bugged me.
He said that TCP/IP was a good example because the requirements, and specifications were already there and were the same for everyone. That may have made the example easier to analyze, but in my opinion it gives an incomplete picture. How good the requirements, specification, and design are effects how good the implementation is. In order to have a complete comparison of open source and closed source you need to compare how well each of these steps (or their equivalents) occurs in each.
I personally suspect that the "think it through first" part could also be better in open source (if less formal) because there's no deadline pressure involved. Also, the people programming had to convince themselves that it was a worthwhile endeavor somehow, which requires them to convince themselves that at least the requirements are better.
I was raised largely this way by my parents, and I don't think they could have done it better. When I asked questions they couldn't answer, my mother took me to the library to find the answer and learned with me. I never had a curfew but I rarely stayed out too late. My parents never punished or rewarded me for my grades, but I usually got good ones. They told me they were proud of me if I did well, and helped me learn if I asked for help and that was it.
I once had a substitute teacher who saw things a little differently. She was teaching an algebraic principle in my 8th grade math class, when I noticed another way to solve the same problem. I tried to tell the sub about it, but she told me to shut up. But my fellow students understood what I was saying and starting asking me about it. The reaction I got from the sub was punishment for disrupting the class (I guess she saw me as a sort of ring-leader against her).
Children *love* to learn -- more so than adults. Attempting to quench even a portion of that thirst, is one way of respecting them as people. It means taking their questions seriously. It also means pointing them to other questions which you think should interest them, and making an effort to explain why it should interest them. Once that's done, getting the kids to do the work that is also a necessary part of learning won't be difficult, because they will see the rewards involved in doing so.
This is not the same as cramming things down their throats -- with that approach your children may, if you're lucky, reach your level of competence. But if you feed and magnify a child's natural desire to learn, he will continue to seek knowledge well after you can no longer provide it yourself.
XML is a great idea. Of course it's not the right tool for every task, but it does have a lot of advantages (which other posters will gladly enumerate I'm sure).
Unfortunately XML alone doesn't guarantee data interchangeability between programs. And XML Schema doesn't do it either. Knowing whether or not Tag1 can be in Tag2 doesn't tell you what Tag1 or Tag2 mean or if they correspond to a data structure that you need or can use. For that you need data modeling.
For data modeling in XML I've looked at a huge number of languages: RDF, Iso step 28, and XMI were my favorites (though in my opinion XMI first starts getting interesting with ver. 2.0 which isn't even finished yet). Each has a few advantages and disadvantages. And of course there are lot more than just these. But the problem is that these are all very young standards and APIs which would make them useful are not abundant.
So maybe the author's right that XML is not yet good enough, but I think a lot of progress is being made.
Slashdot Mirror
How about this as a possible solution?(this is just an off-the-top-of-my-head idea, I'm not emotionally committed to these ideas if someone can argue them down.)
- Critical treatment is always performed -- costs, if not covered by insurance or cash from the patient, become a debt to the federal government.
- These debts are payed off with monthly payments not to exceed some limit based on income. Interest is not charged (ie it is covered by the tax-payer).
- At the end of a patient's life, remaining debt is deducted from the patient's assets (pre-tax). If there are assets left, they are taxed according to the law, then distributed according to the will; if there are debts left they are canceled and covered by the taxpayers together.
That would solve your first and second point, but what about the third? It may be that because it's no longer a matter of life and death that this solution would also solve your third point. Maybe. Otherwise, some kind of price-fixing may be necessary to balance out the economic information-flow problem that your third point makes clear.I don't think the US is the paragon of health care, but I don't think socializing the health care system is the solution.
(P.S. Dollars/Euro is currently 1.13)
Based on this article, I have to ask: Could saltwater have been a better explanation for this beautiful phenomenon? Does anybody here know?
You do know that such a test would either be too trivial to be meaningful, or would necessarily be biased towards one group of Americans, right?
That electronic voting would make the "test" for eligability to vote, whether or not someone is able to use a computer and the voting software, is for me sufficient reason to reject e-voting at this time.
Since the Middle East is the hotbed of terrorism, we will be suspending the introduction of democracy into Iraq until we've educated the Iraqi's out of their terrorist tendencies.
Sarcasm aside, that farmer could use biodiesel, and the net energy production would still be positive. This together with the fact that not all of the plant can be used to produce oil shows that the net effect is that carbon is removed from the atmosphere. This in contrast to petrol, where we move carbon from a stable, deep in the earth buried state up into the atmosphere.
For a more complete analysis of biodiesel check out The Official Site of the National Biodiesel Board and in particular, their summary of a comparitive EPA report on Biodiesel Lifecycle. I have seen a better source, but I'm not finding it right now, so I'm hoping that will be enough argumentation to motivate you to do some research on your own.
That being said men do have a very slightly larger BBMR then women, but certainly within the margin of error with which such things might effect actual intelligence. Just to give you an idea of how inaccurate a measure of intelligence this is: the list of top ten animals in average BBMR has humans at the top, dolphins at second place and octopus somewhere around number 7. Statistical correlation between BBMR and IQ (also a rather controversial measure of intelligence but you do have to start somewhere) in humans is about 10%, which is generally considered to be quite low.
Men do, statistically speaking, have better spatial skills. There is also some evidence that women with more testosterone also have better spatial skills than women with less. At the same time there are a number of things which women are significantly better at -- color recognition and many skills involving the use of language. Women for example have, on average, larger vocabularies than men.
Your white and gray matter explanation is not correct as far as I know -- instead, there are specific areas of the brain designated for certain task. For example the occipital lobe (at the back of your head) does the preliminary and probably some higher level processing on the input from your eyes. The hypocampus (about in the middle) has some not yet completely understood role in saving and/or retrieving memories. And etc... If you can find a modern scientific source to support your statement, though I could certainly be convinced otherwise.
For the most part though, your post was scientifically inaccurate. I doubt you're spreading FUD on purpose so I figured you'd appreciate the correction.
I notice however that the article is 4 years old. Since then the German health insurance system has achieved billions in debt with no end in sight. This is because it is unable to adjust to the high levels of unemployment that the weak economy has caused. In an attempt to save this system, German politicians are currently discussing drastic reductions in the level of legally required coverage -- without reducing the price sticker on that coverage. My own health insurance rates increased at the beginning of 2002 from 13.2% of my salary to 13.7% and that represents a rather modest increase when compared with other public health insurance companies in Germany. The Aok for example charges 15% of its members salary -- that's the maximum it's allowed to charge and it's the public health insurance company racking up the most debt.
Assuming you're an American -- would you be able to afford to give up 15% of your salary? Would you be willing? And what if you had to buy additional coverage (which a lot of Germans do) to get the service that you get now -- would you still be willing?
I notice the article doesn't deny that Americans receive better health care but makes unsubstantiated claims that unnecessary treatments are performed but that they are not performed in foreign countries. I can say through anecdotal evidence (in other words also unsubstantiated claims;o) that unnecessary treatments are performed in Germany. I can definitely say that the system encourages it. Doctors in Germany have a quota of treatments which they get payed for in each quarter. If they for example perform x+20 blood tests where x is the number of 'allowed' blood tests then they don't get payed for the remaining blood tests. (That doesn't mean they don't perform them -- it just means they don't get payed for them.) If however they pay x-20, then they only get payed for the x-20. This system was set up in an attempt to reduce unnecessary treatments, but encourages doctors to try to use up their quotas, but no more.
Would you choose to go into any profession which had to work under such conditions?
That Americans have a shorter life expectancy results from many factors of which I do not believe the health care is one. Nor did the article try to do more than imply a connection. Americans are statistically more obese then the rest of the world citizens. They eat more red meat, and other unhealthy foods. They drive everywhere, rather than walking. Old people don't live with their families, but instead get carted off to nursing homes. In short, American wealth has moved us into living patterns which are unhealthy and which reduce our life expectancy. Those are however individual choices which changing a health care system won't effect.
So although I appreciate your posting a link to this article, I don't consider it a convincing argument against my previous post.
I was told by MS employees that temps get more in regular salary than full-time employees. MS makes up the difference for full-time employees with stock options. But people who prefer to be payed in cash were working for Microsoft as contractors solely for that reason.
Stock options are cheaper for the company than cash. Companies don't have to count their value in when releasing quarterly results to stock holders, but they can count their value in when doing their tax returns, meaning that they can use stock options to move themselves to the $0 tax bracket. So that would tend to indicate that contracters are noticeably more expensive for Microsoft then full-time employees.
Maybe Microsoft is treating contractors badly because they're trying to convince them that they should go full-time.
If a portal site had all that and a good search engine in a useable format I'd be there in a second. I probably shouldn't say this too loudly, but I'd even put up with obnoxious pop-everywhere advertisements to a certain degree. (I said "put up with" not "click on", just in case someone wants to use that statement as a business argument.)
This is great in theory, but in practice it would make providing health insurance in a free market economically impossible. Consider the following theoretical case:
Joe Schmoe discovers through genetic screening that he is likely to develop altheimers around the age of 65. Joe knows that this will cause nursing home costs in the range of $600,000. Joe seeks out insurance for which the total costs are less than $600,000 rather than investing to to reach the $600,000 point. Jane discovers through genetic screening that she won't have altheimers so she doesn't insure for it. There is a law that the insurance can't deny anybody insurance based on the results of a genetic screening. As a result, the insurance company has to pay more than it has taken in on altheimers patients, or it has to raise it's price on said coverage until buying would be equivalent to investing that same money, thus turning themselves from an insurance company into an investment company. Repeat this ad infinium for every illness for which a genetic screening might be useful, and the insurance companies all go bankrupt or all change to investment companies. There is no longer such a thing as insurance.
The problem here is that the entire concept of insurance is that the customer pays the insurance company to take financial responsibility for a risk. This only works financially if both parties have the same knowledge about the risks involved.
I recently heard an insurance spokesperson say that insurance companies wouldn't have any problem with not taking into account the results of a genetic screening, as long as their customer's also didn't. One way to insure that would be that neither the customer, nor the insurance company has information from genetic screenings. Another way to insure that would be to force *everyone* to buy insurance.
Please see my comparison of the American and German health care systems for my contrary opinion.
Remember when there were no pop up ads? No terms of service changes that require you to check your options 3 times daily to ensure you haven't automatically been requested to share your personal info, and where it was a reliable service?
Well I don't like MS much, but this certainly isn't Microsoft's fault alone. You could have said the same thing about numerous other free on-line mail services a few years ago. But most or all of them are doing various pop-up/whatever advertising schemes these days too. The business climate changed, and these services had to start making a profit. And non-paying customers only have limited economic power to change things. Take Yahoo as a case in point.
I remember discussing "The Great Dictator" in my German class in the context of the question whether or not humor about awful things was okay. I take the position, that humor is among other things our way of dealing with awful things. As long as we don't trivialize things that shouldn't be trivialized, I think humor is a healthy and appropriate way of working through our pain.
I have heard other positions about it though that I have a hard time arguing against: That humor can't avoid trivializing its subject. Or that it's disrespectful to the victims to laugh about the thing or person which victimized them.
Anybody else have a different perspective on this?
This is of course ignoring the effect of the environment which almost certainly reduces the symmetry (and thus the redundancy) produced by the genetics of a life-form.
But then again, maybe DNA would also have a high degree of repetition, at least in sexually reproducing life-forms, since DNA also has to be sensably combinable.
I'm an American living in Germany. I was listening to the radio on the way home from work the other day. The announcer was listing off the traffic jams and construction sites of the day and casually mentioned that they were defusing a bomb in a particular area, and that people who weren't directly involved should avoid the area.
This wasn't major news -- unexploded ordinance from WWII is still occasionally found and needs to be taken care of. With such ever present reminders of the horrors of war you begin to understand why the Germans are so utterly opposed to starting them these days.
This is all aside from the wierd fashion it has become among some teens here in Germany.
That said, I don't think SMS will be terribly popular once real e-mail is more mobily accessible.
Since I'm not actually in America, I have to rely on the knowledge of friends and family who are. This is also the reason I used the word "apparently".
Unless someone has further information however, I stand by the rest of my post.
Kurdish (that's the ethnic group in Northern Iraq) refugees in Germany have been holding massive anti-war demonstrations. That's right -- the oppressed people are against the war. It's not because they like Mr. Hussein -- nobody does. It's because they fear that they will have less freedoms after the war. One possible scenario, for example, is that Turkey will march into the Kurdish areas. There are already massive rumours (apparently unreported in American news) that Turkey has already started moving troops into the area "for humanitarian reasons". Given Turkey's history with it's own Kurdish minority, the Kurds in Iraq have good reasons to be afraid that the US will sell them to Turkey for fly-over and troop stationing rights.
The reason that Turkey wants them in the first place is because they fear that a Kurdish nation could be created in northern Iraq and strengthen the Kurds in southern Turkey's desire to seperate from Turkey.
The Shiite minorities in southern Iraq are equally unfriendly to US interests. A few years ago the US encouraged them to revolt against Saddam and then failed to provide the necessary support when they did. The revolt was brutally put down, and the Shiites felt betrayed by the US. This is why US soldiers haven't been getting the warm receptions that the US claimed they would get. Sure, there are a few non-representative happy people for US cameramen to film, but the overall response hasn't been anything like the American march into Germany at the end of WWII.
And then we can look at historical examples of US involvement in other countries. The most recent one would be Afghanistan. The US had barely reduced the little remaining infrastructure in the country to ruins before it decided to start the next war. Current aid to Afghanistan: $300 million. War cost in Iraq: est. $75 billion (The White House's estimation -- actual cost could be wide over that mark). Looking a little further back, I could start discussing Iran, various South American countries, Vietnam, and etc. But I would like for people to learn to do their own research. (Clue: your history teacher failed to inform you of just about every inappropriate act of the American government since the extermination of the American Indians.)
So in conclusion: Yes there is a chance that this could all end with a free Iraq. I certainly hope so, since there's no going back now. But I don't delude myself into thinking that it's likely.
Go to the link -- it's good.
What about us poor schmucks who have to keep our programs compatible to the 95/98/Me family, while still integrating a "modern XP look" (blech) for marketing? Don't we get some sympathy?
Microsoft Layer for Unicode, here I come...
All in all, I agree with much of what he has to say, but there was one thing that bugged me.
He said that TCP/IP was a good example because the requirements, and specifications were already there and were the same for everyone. That may have made the example easier to analyze, but in my opinion it gives an incomplete picture. How good the requirements, specification, and design are effects how good the implementation is. In order to have a complete comparison of open source and closed source you need to compare how well each of these steps (or their equivalents) occurs in each.
I personally suspect that the "think it through first" part could also be better in open source (if less formal) because there's no deadline pressure involved. Also, the people programming had to convince themselves that it was a worthwhile endeavor somehow, which requires them to convince themselves that at least the requirements are better.
I also particularly recommend Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James W. Loewen (as I also posted yesterday or the day before.)
I was raised largely this way by my parents, and I don't think they could have done it better. When I asked questions they couldn't answer, my mother took me to the library to find the answer and learned with me. I never had a curfew but I rarely stayed out too late. My parents never punished or rewarded me for my grades, but I usually got good ones. They told me they were proud of me if I did well, and helped me learn if I asked for help and that was it.
I once had a substitute teacher who saw things a little differently. She was teaching an algebraic principle in my 8th grade math class, when I noticed another way to solve the same problem. I tried to tell the sub about it, but she told me to shut up. But my fellow students understood what I was saying and starting asking me about it. The reaction I got from the sub was punishment for disrupting the class (I guess she saw me as a sort of ring-leader against her).
Children *love* to learn -- more so than adults. Attempting to quench even a portion of that thirst, is one way of respecting them as people. It means taking their questions seriously. It also means pointing them to other questions which you think should interest them, and making an effort to explain why it should interest them. Once that's done, getting the kids to do the work that is also a necessary part of learning won't be difficult, because they will see the rewards involved in doing so.
This is not the same as cramming things down their throats -- with that approach your children may, if you're lucky, reach your level of competence. But if you feed and magnify a child's natural desire to learn, he will continue to seek knowledge well after you can no longer provide it yourself.
Unfortunately XML alone doesn't guarantee data interchangeability between programs. And XML Schema doesn't do it either. Knowing whether or not Tag1 can be in Tag2 doesn't tell you what Tag1 or Tag2 mean or if they correspond to a data structure that you need or can use. For that you need data modeling.
For data modeling in XML I've looked at a huge number of languages: RDF, Iso step 28, and XMI were my favorites (though in my opinion XMI first starts getting interesting with ver. 2.0 which isn't even finished yet). Each has a few advantages and disadvantages. And of course there are lot more than just these. But the problem is that these are all very young standards and APIs which would make them useful are not abundant.
So maybe the author's right that XML is not yet good enough, but I think a lot of progress is being made.