I did mean in the context of the market in which a particular application resides, like the browser software itself in Microsoft's case, but you do bring up an interesting point, that Microsoft has softened its stance in recent years as well.
We tended to scream because we were forced to pay for Microsoft's software when we bought computers, and despite non-Microsoft software being the preferred software for some types, Microsoft bundled their lesser-software with their OS and even when we changed to something else, made it prompt to try to become the preferred application again.
When I open my web browser, if it's Microsoft's, I default to Microsoft's Bing search engine. If I choose a different browser then I probably default to Google, but I can change it and it stays changed. I am also not required to use Google as my default start page, and I can visit any site on the Internet that I choose. I am not required to use a search engine if I know the URL that I want to go to, and even if I use Google to search for the name of another company that does something that Google also does, I get that company's result first, not after Google's own product. Funny enough, Bing's search for "maps" brings up Google's maps for me as the top link.
I don't think that Google takes away the consumer's choice in the way Microsoft's policies do. Microsoft doesn't provide links to competitors' software. Google may provide links to their own services first, but they don't provide only links to their own services.
Personally I think they'd have a much better argument, though still incomplete, arguing on Android instead in how it uses Google Mail and other Google services, but since Apple is so strong in phones and tablets that would be hard to support.
The input hopper is just where one places the ballot so that the machine pulls it in. It's not a multi-sheet hopper. One puts it in, hits the button on the machine, and watches it get drawn-in through the machine then deposited in the output hopper, which act as the ballot box.
The ballots are not printed on-site, they're printed in advance of the election. It's a lot less expensive to print en masse than to print in real-time, and so long as the polling place has enough ballots, it's not a problem.
The only way that I would think live-print would work is if the idea were made to revolutionize voting, in that when the voter arrives at any polling place in the state, scanning their voter ID would generate the appropriate ballot for their jurisdiction. This would allow voters to visit polling places that are near work or are not busy if their primary polling place is too busy or awkward to get to.
Unfortunately the current trend is to make it harder to vote, not easier, and even then, issuing voting credentials is already a problem in places that require some kinds of ID to vote, so for it to work, there'd have to be a public-interest push in getting ID to everyone that's registered, and in using the MVD process to also issue the voter ID cards to new registrants.
I guess the other thing that I like about it is, if the power goes out, or the machines all suddenly don't work, or if there aren't enough machines, or if a vulnerability in the machines is discovered and cannot be corrected, the voter can still vote in the same way. It becomes the election office's job to figure out how to count the votes in that set of circumstances, but it's still possible to have the election.
I wonder if a mixed-gender crew could really handle a long space mission without being set up to be intentionally polyamorous or hedonistic, assuming that sex in such an environment is possible. Let's face it, the people we'd send on a long-term mission need to be in the best shape of their lives when the leave and need to have the kind of physique that remains healthy and wiry without a whole lot of exercise, so it'll be filled with sexually-desirable people. If the crew factionalizes on sexual lines or finds members fighting or ostracized then it could fail in its mission.
The only solution that I see is to recruit people that will be polyamorous without developing excessive jealousy. Our society officially doesn't approve of such an arrangement, though popular culture fantasizes about it more than society wants to admit.
I vote we use the entire discographies of Tiffany, Yoko Ono, and Hansen. And by entire discographies, I mean all of the discs minted.
I don't mind listening to AC/DC from time to time, and power conversion aside, there are much worse acts whose work could be destroyed^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hused for this.
Yeah, I think that the answer is, "yes, we should go back to paper ballots."
I like optical-scan. You mark the paper ballot with a pen with indelible ink, connecting the two marks next to the candidate's name, then put the ballot into the input hopper and watch it go through the machine and get deposited in the locked output hopper. Granted, you don't get a display to confirm that your markings were read right, but if the system is designed right then a subset of polling stations at random is audited by hand, and if the results are too far out of line then the entire election is audited by hand. Plus, you can actually perform the audit without anything more complex than a desk with an inbox, an outbox, a pencil, and some paper. Some light might help so one can work at night.
Even optical-scan isn't foolproof; the ballot can be messed up if someone is an idiot or the machine that does the counting could malfunction or be tampered with, but at least there's a fairly easy way to recount if needed.
I think that now that the craziness that was building it so incredibly slowly is over, it's actually doing something useful in that it's teaching us what it takes to live in space, and giving us means by which to test living in space where the consequences of screwing up are relatively minor. We've already learned the full-Russian approach and gained insight from their moments, and ISS is allowing us to see if we've learned from those mistakes.
I look at it along similar lines to Biosphere II down near Tucson, Arizona. It was the first major attempt to build a self-sufficient (within the scope of allowing for the ambient conditions in the local climate to influence heat) habitat that was supposed to be independent of outside assistance. It failed, but why it failed is important and can be learned from. Unfortunately I don't think that those lessons are being applied to the original facility, so we're not continuing to learn in ways that we should, but hopefully all of the studies of what happened will inform future scientists and engineers of the pitfalls in their plans and designs.
I should add, I'm no fan of 3d printers for mass-market goods. Niche market products or niche markets themselves are an entirely different situation though.
it's that you can't stock Digikey on the space station, but can "print" all of the knobs, buttons, and switches you need when one breaks. It reduces the number of spare parts needed in inventory and might offer a solution for a broken part that was not anticipated for, or to make something new when otherwise macguyvering a temporary solution.
think of the cheese spacer from the pizza box scenario as the eggheads are prototyping a solution.
Oh, believe me, the smartphone has been an extremely useful tool. I've gone from pager and carrying a palm pilot (technically a USR Pilot 5000), to an alphapager and palm (a newer one), to a semi-dumb phone with a few capabilities (Moto Razr V3), to a T-Mobile G1 (HTC Dream), to a Samsung Galaxy SII. My wife has followed a similar path but without the pagers and with an analog cell phone in the mix. Neither of us would voluntarily give up our smartphones.
The crux of it is, we don't have our lives revolve around the smartphones. We use them as a means, not an end, and they're far from the only means at our disposal.
If someone took the time and effort needed to correspond in a meaningful way by way of personal letter then I'd probably consider them a friend, but I don't really expect that to ever be the case again.
Considering that companies have been abusing the H1B process for some time now, perhaps we're just seeing a correction in-part inspired by greater success in potential migrants' home countries.
Salary is a supply/demand characteristic. The more people capable of doing a job, generally the less it pays. This holds true across the entire spectrum of employment until one reaches those that control the market in which they are paid from (ie, corporate executives). Desirability of a job is often not much of a deciding factor in the worth of that job either; janitorial services employees have awful jobs sometimes, but nearly every able-bodied worker could do those jobs, so the wages are particularly low because no individual worker is much in-demand.
This applies to H1B skilled-worker visas since more techncial workers means less demand per-worker, so wages fall. It's further excerbated by the H1B worker not being as free to exercise the free-market due to a real risk of deportation, so they can be paid less than the market average, which further helps to pull down the market average.
I expect the situation isn't as dire as the article makes it out to be.
My friends are the ones I call and speak with in real-time or visit with. Do those that aren't willing to make the effort to communicate in real-time deserve to be called friends?
I'll have to give the Youtube link a try when I get home. Only time I saw the film it was on a multigeneration VHS tape, so who knows how awful it looked compared to its initial release...
There's a whole series of books starting with this one too, been meaning to read 'em.
At the time I was into seti@home. I had a 486 Microchannel box running it, it took a very, very long time to do packets. If there even was a seti@home client that could run on that IIci I wonder how long it would have taken to do a single packet...
So long as they're a talented artist, yes. If they're like me, it'd look like something drawn on a kids' menu at a sit-down restaurant with the provided four crayons.
And there are several business parks around here that are empty, with fully paved streets and services in the ground waiting for buildings to hook up to. They end up being places for informal 1/4-mile drags for a couple of passes before the driver bails so to avoid the cops.
There's a college and city partnership "Research Park", a full square-mile of business area, near me. They are used as a tech incubator, giving extremely reasonable rent to student and post-graduate business ventures and other tech ventures- significant E-ink research and the development of the screens for those old Motorola Razr V3 flip phones happened here.
I don't look at this spaceport as being really any different.
You do realize, that if they do any of this to the Moon Landing imagery, it'll just give the conspiracy theorists that much more ammunition to annoy us with...
Trouble is, data captured by the human eye cannot be shared in its original raw form with other viewers. The closest we've ever come has all of the foibles of the medium (ie, paint on canvas, carved stone, etc).
I didn't miss the point at all. The point is, New Mexico decided to play venture-capitalistsocialist after a fashion, and like lots of venture capital projects, this one hasn't panned-out. Now people are complaining over what's a fairly insignificant amount of money that might have paid-off had Virgin Galactic succeeded before now, and could have attracted more space-faring business. New Mexico wanted the American version of the Baikonur Cosmodrome to be in their state; they've got the land for it and for terrestrial recovery (as opposed to ocean splash-down), but some didn't account for the possibility of the project failing to meet its goals.
I think they should keep at it a bit longer. It's already built, now it just needs to be maintained.
You really have no idea how governments solicit corporations to their areas, do you?
Nowadays, corporations look for the most favorable places to operate. That could be a place that's desirable to live in, a place with a large population that's qualified to do the work, a place with favorable laws that make land-use or permitting easier, or a place with favorable tax laws that make it inexpensive.
New Mexico has some really beautiful places like Ruidoso, but it also has a lot of land that can't even be used for ranching, and short of mineral extraction there's no interest in economic development there. There's a reason why the Manhattan Project tested the first nuclear bomb there; it directly impacted only one family whose land and ranch house were taken from them during the project and couldn't be returned afterward due to the contamination.
On the flip side, Virgin Galactic needs someplace to play with their vehicles. There's a certain, higher than average risk associated with these vehicles. There's also the possibility that future vehicles might not be mothership-dropped and instead might launch from the ground, which would further increase the risk associated with them. This means that they need land, land far enough away from others that the risk to the population is low, land as a buffer in case of accidents. This is the same problem that modern air force and navy air bases face; they're built a distance from a supporting city to try to minimize the impact on the city, but the city grows to the base's edge then gets upset that the base is there. So the solution is to look for someplace to build the facility where it won't impact anyone.
Now, the downside, it's hard to attract talented people whose ability will let them write their own check to places that aren't terribly desirable to live. New Mexico has harsh climate, its cities aren't exactly known for being centers of modern popular culture, it lacks world-renowned education, and it doesn't even have major sports teams. That means staff need even more compensation to come there.
If New Mexico wants both the immediate business and wants the longer-term infrastructure that could make it a hub, that means they have to find a way to attract it. The only major means at their disposal are tax relief and easy permitting. That costs them and doesn't guarantee that it'll work, but the payoffs for the risks are generally pretty favorable.
Slashdot Mirror
I did mean in the context of the market in which a particular application resides, like the browser software itself in Microsoft's case, but you do bring up an interesting point, that Microsoft has softened its stance in recent years as well.
We tended to scream because we were forced to pay for Microsoft's software when we bought computers, and despite non-Microsoft software being the preferred software for some types, Microsoft bundled their lesser-software with their OS and even when we changed to something else, made it prompt to try to become the preferred application again.
When I open my web browser, if it's Microsoft's, I default to Microsoft's Bing search engine. If I choose a different browser then I probably default to Google, but I can change it and it stays changed. I am also not required to use Google as my default start page, and I can visit any site on the Internet that I choose. I am not required to use a search engine if I know the URL that I want to go to, and even if I use Google to search for the name of another company that does something that Google also does, I get that company's result first, not after Google's own product. Funny enough, Bing's search for "maps" brings up Google's maps for me as the top link.
I don't think that Google takes away the consumer's choice in the way Microsoft's policies do. Microsoft doesn't provide links to competitors' software. Google may provide links to their own services first, but they don't provide only links to their own services.
Personally I think they'd have a much better argument, though still incomplete, arguing on Android instead in how it uses Google Mail and other Google services, but since Apple is so strong in phones and tablets that would be hard to support.
The input hopper is just where one places the ballot so that the machine pulls it in. It's not a multi-sheet hopper. One puts it in, hits the button on the machine, and watches it get drawn-in through the machine then deposited in the output hopper, which act as the ballot box.
The ballots are not printed on-site, they're printed in advance of the election. It's a lot less expensive to print en masse than to print in real-time, and so long as the polling place has enough ballots, it's not a problem.
The only way that I would think live-print would work is if the idea were made to revolutionize voting, in that when the voter arrives at any polling place in the state, scanning their voter ID would generate the appropriate ballot for their jurisdiction. This would allow voters to visit polling places that are near work or are not busy if their primary polling place is too busy or awkward to get to.
Unfortunately the current trend is to make it harder to vote, not easier, and even then, issuing voting credentials is already a problem in places that require some kinds of ID to vote, so for it to work, there'd have to be a public-interest push in getting ID to everyone that's registered, and in using the MVD process to also issue the voter ID cards to new registrants.
I guess the other thing that I like about it is, if the power goes out, or the machines all suddenly don't work, or if there aren't enough machines, or if a vulnerability in the machines is discovered and cannot be corrected, the voter can still vote in the same way. It becomes the election office's job to figure out how to count the votes in that set of circumstances, but it's still possible to have the election.
I wonder if a mixed-gender crew could really handle a long space mission without being set up to be intentionally polyamorous or hedonistic, assuming that sex in such an environment is possible. Let's face it, the people we'd send on a long-term mission need to be in the best shape of their lives when the leave and need to have the kind of physique that remains healthy and wiry without a whole lot of exercise, so it'll be filled with sexually-desirable people. If the crew factionalizes on sexual lines or finds members fighting or ostracized then it could fail in its mission.
The only solution that I see is to recruit people that will be polyamorous without developing excessive jealousy. Our society officially doesn't approve of such an arrangement, though popular culture fantasizes about it more than society wants to admit.
I vote we use the entire discographies of Tiffany, Yoko Ono, and Hansen. And by entire discographies, I mean all of the discs minted.
I don't mind listening to AC/DC from time to time, and power conversion aside, there are much worse acts whose work could be destroyed^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hused for this.
Yeah, I think that the answer is, "yes, we should go back to paper ballots."
I like optical-scan. You mark the paper ballot with a pen with indelible ink, connecting the two marks next to the candidate's name, then put the ballot into the input hopper and watch it go through the machine and get deposited in the locked output hopper. Granted, you don't get a display to confirm that your markings were read right, but if the system is designed right then a subset of polling stations at random is audited by hand, and if the results are too far out of line then the entire election is audited by hand. Plus, you can actually perform the audit without anything more complex than a desk with an inbox, an outbox, a pencil, and some paper. Some light might help so one can work at night.
Even optical-scan isn't foolproof; the ballot can be messed up if someone is an idiot or the machine that does the counting could malfunction or be tampered with, but at least there's a fairly easy way to recount if needed.
I think that now that the craziness that was building it so incredibly slowly is over, it's actually doing something useful in that it's teaching us what it takes to live in space, and giving us means by which to test living in space where the consequences of screwing up are relatively minor. We've already learned the full-Russian approach and gained insight from their moments, and ISS is allowing us to see if we've learned from those mistakes.
I look at it along similar lines to Biosphere II down near Tucson, Arizona. It was the first major attempt to build a self-sufficient (within the scope of allowing for the ambient conditions in the local climate to influence heat) habitat that was supposed to be independent of outside assistance. It failed, but why it failed is important and can be learned from. Unfortunately I don't think that those lessons are being applied to the original facility, so we're not continuing to learn in ways that we should, but hopefully all of the studies of what happened will inform future scientists and engineers of the pitfalls in their plans and designs.
I should add, I'm no fan of 3d printers for mass-market goods. Niche market products or niche markets themselves are an entirely different situation though.
it's that you can't stock Digikey on the space station, but can "print" all of the knobs, buttons, and switches you need when one breaks. It reduces the number of spare parts needed in inventory and might offer a solution for a broken part that was not anticipated for, or to make something new when otherwise macguyvering a temporary solution.
think of the cheese spacer from the pizza box scenario as the eggheads are prototyping a solution.
bad choice of term. Sounds like the license is really unfavorable.
Gettin' jiggy w'it!
With apologies, however slight, to Will Smith.
Oh, believe me, the smartphone has been an extremely useful tool. I've gone from pager and carrying a palm pilot (technically a USR Pilot 5000), to an alphapager and palm (a newer one), to a semi-dumb phone with a few capabilities (Moto Razr V3), to a T-Mobile G1 (HTC Dream), to a Samsung Galaxy SII. My wife has followed a similar path but without the pagers and with an analog cell phone in the mix. Neither of us would voluntarily give up our smartphones.
The crux of it is, we don't have our lives revolve around the smartphones. We use them as a means, not an end, and they're far from the only means at our disposal.
If someone took the time and effort needed to correspond in a meaningful way by way of personal letter then I'd probably consider them a friend, but I don't really expect that to ever be the case again.
Considering that companies have been abusing the H1B process for some time now, perhaps we're just seeing a correction in-part inspired by greater success in potential migrants' home countries.
Salary is a supply/demand characteristic. The more people capable of doing a job, generally the less it pays. This holds true across the entire spectrum of employment until one reaches those that control the market in which they are paid from (ie, corporate executives). Desirability of a job is often not much of a deciding factor in the worth of that job either; janitorial services employees have awful jobs sometimes, but nearly every able-bodied worker could do those jobs, so the wages are particularly low because no individual worker is much in-demand.
This applies to H1B skilled-worker visas since more techncial workers means less demand per-worker, so wages fall. It's further excerbated by the H1B worker not being as free to exercise the free-market due to a real risk of deportation, so they can be paid less than the market average, which further helps to pull down the market average.
I expect the situation isn't as dire as the article makes it out to be.
I'm so sorry for you.
My friends are the ones I call and speak with in real-time or visit with. Do those that aren't willing to make the effort to communicate in real-time deserve to be called friends?
I'll have to give the Youtube link a try when I get home. Only time I saw the film it was on a multigeneration VHS tape, so who knows how awful it looked compared to its initial release...
There's a whole series of books starting with this one too, been meaning to read 'em.
Wow.
At the time I was into seti@home. I had a 486 Microchannel box running it, it took a very, very long time to do packets. If there even was a seti@home client that could run on that IIci I wonder how long it would have taken to do a single packet...
So long as they're a talented artist, yes. If they're like me, it'd look like something drawn on a kids' menu at a sit-down restaurant with the provided four crayons.
And there are several business parks around here that are empty, with fully paved streets and services in the ground waiting for buildings to hook up to. They end up being places for informal 1/4-mile drags for a couple of passes before the driver bails so to avoid the cops.
There's a college and city partnership "Research Park", a full square-mile of business area, near me. They are used as a tech incubator, giving extremely reasonable rent to student and post-graduate business ventures and other tech ventures- significant E-ink research and the development of the screens for those old Motorola Razr V3 flip phones happened here.
I don't look at this spaceport as being really any different.
You do realize, that if they do any of this to the Moon Landing imagery, it'll just give the conspiracy theorists that much more ammunition to annoy us with...
Trouble is, data captured by the human eye cannot be shared in its original raw form with other viewers. The closest we've ever come has all of the foibles of the medium (ie, paint on canvas, carved stone, etc).
I didn't miss the point at all. The point is, New Mexico decided to play venture-capitalistsocialist after a fashion, and like lots of venture capital projects, this one hasn't panned-out. Now people are complaining over what's a fairly insignificant amount of money that might have paid-off had Virgin Galactic succeeded before now, and could have attracted more space-faring business. New Mexico wanted the American version of the Baikonur Cosmodrome to be in their state; they've got the land for it and for terrestrial recovery (as opposed to ocean splash-down), but some didn't account for the possibility of the project failing to meet its goals.
I think they should keep at it a bit longer. It's already built, now it just needs to be maintained.
I prefer my coding at 80x25, or better, 132x44.
You really have no idea how governments solicit corporations to their areas, do you?
Nowadays, corporations look for the most favorable places to operate. That could be a place that's desirable to live in, a place with a large population that's qualified to do the work, a place with favorable laws that make land-use or permitting easier, or a place with favorable tax laws that make it inexpensive.
New Mexico has some really beautiful places like Ruidoso, but it also has a lot of land that can't even be used for ranching, and short of mineral extraction there's no interest in economic development there. There's a reason why the Manhattan Project tested the first nuclear bomb there; it directly impacted only one family whose land and ranch house were taken from them during the project and couldn't be returned afterward due to the contamination.
On the flip side, Virgin Galactic needs someplace to play with their vehicles. There's a certain, higher than average risk associated with these vehicles. There's also the possibility that future vehicles might not be mothership-dropped and instead might launch from the ground, which would further increase the risk associated with them. This means that they need land, land far enough away from others that the risk to the population is low, land as a buffer in case of accidents. This is the same problem that modern air force and navy air bases face; they're built a distance from a supporting city to try to minimize the impact on the city, but the city grows to the base's edge then gets upset that the base is there. So the solution is to look for someplace to build the facility where it won't impact anyone.
Now, the downside, it's hard to attract talented people whose ability will let them write their own check to places that aren't terribly desirable to live. New Mexico has harsh climate, its cities aren't exactly known for being centers of modern popular culture, it lacks world-renowned education, and it doesn't even have major sports teams. That means staff need even more compensation to come there.
If New Mexico wants both the immediate business and wants the longer-term infrastructure that could make it a hub, that means they have to find a way to attract it. The only major means at their disposal are tax relief and easy permitting. That costs them and doesn't guarantee that it'll work, but the payoffs for the risks are generally pretty favorable.