Best investments for a college student: beer and chicks. Makes your studying time so much more pleasant!
Seriously though, you might want to look at some sufficiently diversified, reputable mutual funds. I put my money into one that is diversified between bonds and stocks, and it's doing better than my own stock picks... the important lesson is not to get cocky, as the stock market is a gamble even when you feel like you know your stuff, and you don't want to spend your time worrying about your portfolio.
Why did they ask me to imagine the biggest thing I can?? The lady next door may be no galactic structure but she's damn near the order of magnitude, and I don't have bubbles of gas mentioned either...
In the status quo Internet traffic is not very censored or controlled by the US and things just plain work. I think this is a very good arrangement.
Some things are matters of principle. Because the Internet is a major international information conduit, its neutrality and transparency need to be preserved at all costs. I am spooked just by the very demand of the US to maintain the upper hand "just in case"... what if someone pisses off the yanks in the future, and they choose to cause trouble? It's the same as in their military doctrine: we insist we have the right and means to kill you if we please, and you have no right for a deterrent.
A credible scenario might be, for example, the US hurting Latin America's Internet access until they elect right-wing governments. The rest of the world would be pretty powerless as they would fear reprisals from the US if they tried to interfere in any way with "America's Internet". At least if the net was governed by an international body, it would be more difficult to outright bully...
Your example on lightbulbs sounds like quite a nightmare. I don't know how things are over there, but at least in my home here in Europe I mostly use standardized lightbulbs -- they are not all the same of course, but can be broadly divided into categories, and it is VERY handy. Do not forget that the entire industrial revolution mostly got started because of standardized parts, which could be mass produced, were interchangeable and later on could be outsourced to the most efficient producer. Thus, the need for standards. They serve a purpose, and are not some evil Communist plot.
I feel that this entire thread has subtly moved away from the original claim -- that public standards are somehow worse than "private" ones, simply due to their virtue of being public. I am absolutely certain that you can produce a crap open standard, just as well as you can produce a crap private one. The question is, which process produces a more useful one?
You seem to commit the same fallacy as most dogmatic marketeers do when arguing against OSS and related things in general. You put the product of a single open/public process against the end result of a market process which has seen many failures and perhaps just one winner. Thus, a public process must have a perfect success rate while the failures in the proprietary side are simply brushed under the carpet. Trust me, companies have produced loads of crap.
Also, open standards are not mandatory (a flaw often found in Microsoft's loud complaining). Large open standards projects may be cumbersome as their goals tend to be lofty, but nevertheless, there is obviously a need for them, as people are putting in a lot of effort to create them in the first place. I believe that the existence of the Internet is a great testament to the power of open standards, considering that these open standards have been perfectly open to competition from proprietary vendors, which have subsequently went on to fail. It is telling that the only thing they have managed to do with those open standards is to try to corrupt them with their own "extensions" which have mostly caused grief to the public at large.
So the question becomes whether large standards that are designed openly are in general by neccessity inferior to whatever proprietary market activity (not just the final winner) might be an alternative. Certainly the standards design process needs to hear a very great deal of participants -- those people who have an interest in participating in using the standard -- and this can lead to what may be called "bloat", but it is not neccessarily a bad thing. If you seek to draw together expertise and capabilities from a broad range of parties who plan on participating on the large common market that is being created, you need to listen up and see what they need in that standard. It is a more systematic, long-view form of the "listen to the customer" approach. Doing things this way it is also easier to take into account needs the market will not provide for due to cost and small market share issues; consider accessibility requirements in web standards, for example.
I see nothing wrong with big goals. Achieving them is then a matter of implementation, which I believe is best achieved through an open process that accepts constant feedback. The design itself needs flexibility to stand the test of time -- the best specs allow for predefined extension points where needed.
Finally, if it is REALLY required, you CAN take the standard to some new direction if absolutely neccessary. Seems to me you're just being an ideologue again...
And when they do try to explain what the software is and does, it is explained in such a way that half of the text consists of abstract jargon and buzzwords. You really need to be in the loop already to even begin to understand what the supposedly helpful explanation is supposed to mean. In my experience, Apache's Jakarta projects are particularly guilty of not being able to explain their components in plain English.
Whoah, a blast from the past. Been there, done that, it looked ugly. Being one of those people who you would probably rather see being left to die instead of polluting the gene pool, I feel compelled to answer, as I increasingly see the same guys who would have been singing the praises of the T-4 programme in the 30s pushing the same agenda these days through economics...
Evolution hasn't stopped, it's just that evolutionary pressures are different, as we no longer live in caves. Advances in medicine are perfectly natural, and there is nothing unnatural in making use of them. Medically correctable problems simply become irrelevant, allowing the individual to contribute whatever skills he has, as he is no longer held back. Likewise, in the eugenics circles much-maligned "empathy" characteristic of humanity is actually one of our major survival strategies as a species. The Third Reich, for example, didn't last long.
One of the greatest examples of human arrogance has been the fantasy that Mother Nature somehow requires our meddling in things -- in particular, meddling that seems to advance a certain agenda by artificially favouring certain traits and arbitrarily suppressing others. The dysfunctionality of some dog breeds is a great example of what this can lead to.
That said, I personally have chosen not to have biological children (if the opportunity presents itself) as I don't want to inflict my illness on my offspring. It is manageable and I personally am living a decently good life, I am not arrogant enough to assume that someone else would be able to pull off the same stunt. This admission still doesn't make me like the idea of an individual being simply subjected to utilitarian statistics and being told that he is living a "life unworthy of life"...
I would go for an edge-detection method, like a Sobel mask. One might also try to reduce the bit depth to find continuous color areas before doing this, but it may also produce artifacts in the image as such an operation may create blocks that otherwise weren't there.
Edge-detection usually produces the edge areas in white and others in black, so you will want to negate that image, and perhaps do more bit-depth reduction to get away with the greys. Perhaps a sharpen?
So because OpenDocument can't help everyone, it shouldn't help anyone? What kind of moronic politician -- sorry, I repeat myself -- thinks this is an intelligent decision?
The difference here is of course that you're essentially taking accessibility away once it already has been achieved. I'm disabled myself and actually support ODF because of its long term benefits, but I can't buy into this kind of an argument. The ODF issue discussed in the article is valid, but only for as long as there is no compatibility, which there will be, eventually and fairly easily, I presume.
Your idea that politics in general is evil if it seeks to be inclusive is the nasty bit here.
Oh yeah, I forgot, government is supposed to reflect the will of the majority, not just the vocal minority. We all make sacrifices -- and in this case, a very small one -- for the good of society as a whole.
A rather dangerous argument if taken for a general rule. It may be a "small sacrifice" for you to start limiting disabled people's access to the outside world through forms of exclusion, but it is profoundly destructive for the disabled individual, in particular when it comes to employment. I know we've been the first to be "sacrificed" in this manner for the "general good" for most of history, and this is why we've become vocal -- I see no reason why we should just humbly shut up and stay at home. I'd rather die than do that (and a lot of people these days are suggesting we do just that, preferably before birth).
And no, don't give me the slippery slope Libertarian argument about why nothing and should be done because such evil Communism will eventually degenerate into everyone being forced to use wheelchairs. There is no reason why there should not exist a middle ground where at the very least vitally important functions in society and life are inclusive. This is so important because it helps the disabled person to help himself, instead of becoming a passive charity object. Not every support system leads to learned helplessness.
That said, there are jerks on both sides of the argument. I believe that a pragmatic approach to accessibility can be made to work so much better if it is defended within the larger projects without sabotaging them completely if everything isn't built to disability spec. The toilets are a good example... I don't give a damn if not EVERY toilet in a building isn't accessible, but am perfectly happy with a statistical approach, guaranteeing that I'm about as likely to get to pee as the next person..
Interesting you should choose to post this AC, though you seem to raise at least seemingly valid points.
you clearly don't have any programming experience in writing a screen reader. If it were so easy, IBM and RedHat would have pumped one out MONTHS ago, since they are the companies behind the ODF move. They are looking for state contracts, and if they could just dump out a screen reader and solve everything, they would have.
Correct, I don't. I don't see why you couldn't just read ODF into something like Emacspeak, though. Screen readers read web pages; ODF has way better structural information than your typical HTML page. It is, again, immaterial to me whether we have ODF-screenreading capacity NOW -- it will eventually appear, and in the long term, the disability community is shooting itself in the foot if, because of short term benefit, they accept a vendor lock-in.
Moreover, He isn't pandering; the Disabled community leaders in MA are the ones that brought this problem to the attention of Pacheco, not outside forces....
There are no applicable tools that give people the same capability to process.odf files like they can with.doc - that may change with time, but until those tools are available, you are making a blind person unemployable. And Pacheco understands the diff between format at application, the problem is, if you read the policy carefully (look at page 18), it essentally mandates which programs are acceptable to use.
Then the disabled community leaders themselves are bought and/or idiots, and Pacheco is still just trying to score points. If there is any real worry on the part of disabled, I can appreciate that they might want to cover their asses in the short term and are not neccessarily interested in doing what is right/good for them and everyone else in general. The employability by State government issue is best handled by dealing with whatever weird policies are in place saying that a disabled person is not employable by State government unless this disabled person works by using a Microsoft product:-) I suspect this has something to do with accessibility requirements and the litigious environment over there in the USA -- that is, a disabled person suing the hell out of government in the hope of a big payoff if there is any excuse... in that case, I am not really defending this kind of a person. Militancy out of principle was never my thing, as pragmatism and some goodwill goes a long way both ways.
And don't even think of pulling out the "gee, if Microsoft just supported ODF"... bag of flaming poo. Just take a look at what Adobe did. When Microsoft announced they would support Adobe's ISO approved pdf format, they threatened to sue!
Nothing stops them. The OSS community is not Adobe, and ODF is an open standard. Which part of that do you not understand? You're fear-mongering with an irrelevant example.
Yes, it may end up being worth it, but don't give weak platitiudes like "ohh, everything would be so rosy if we all used open formats and sang kumbahya".
... and although my own disability doesn't restrict my computer use in any way, I still find this kind of ideological abuse totally disgusting. Open standards are, in the end, beneficial for access by everybody using any chosen access means. This includes not only the disabled, but everyone else as well. It is immaterial that things like screen readers may not exist yet.. they can be produced, and will be, if the specs are available. Anybody with even slight programming experience will know that in this case existing software is probably easy to modify to just read the new format into the program's internal representation. Contrast this with whatever limited access proprietary formats' owners choose to grant -- and to whom -- in order to look good.
Not to mention these same guys at this end of the political spectrum in general typically won't give a shit about disabled people's rights in anything, as mostly, we're just "bad for the economy". Apparently we can still be "useful" in some situations.
They should just speak for themselves and not get all caring and compassionate all of a sudden when it serves their own interest.
Also it should be mentioned that the reason why people don't bother to resign from the state church is that it's not such a big deal -- yeah, it's a "State church" but it generally means that the church enjoys "special protection" by the State which these days means nothing more than the fact that the government pays lip service to it, like going to church at the beginning of Parliament once a year, and that some of society's functions are co-operative with the church, like this taxation issue.
It's not like there's some theocracy going on around here. You can't have a state church in these modern times and actually have it USE its special status for something, like religious indoctrination in schools in the spirit of intelligent design -- people would get pissed off. I would actually argue that Americans have much more of a de facto state church than we do, considering how much God is a real force in politics.
People here are rather secular, and they are members of the state church mostly out of habit, like I am. They like the fuzzy feeling they get out of a church wedding, and then there is the older generation that would get upset if their offspring resigned from the church. I know that my membership is mostly because I don't want to piss off grandparents...
You are very correct. Why is it that some people are seeking to dogmatize some other people's way of doing things to fit their own world view -- so it could serve some "purpose" according to their ideals -- is beyond me. One shouldn't always seek to see everything through some-color-coloured lenses...
On broader terms, this sort of developments in society worry me in general. Certainly the market is good at some things, and people are at least partly motivated by self-interest, and it's fine with me. However, I am getting the feeling that more and more we are being shoe-horned into mandatorily self-interested behavioural models, simply because some powerful people believe that this is the way things "should" work. This kind of thinking can eventually become a self-fulfilling prophecy -- people will eventually forget that alternative models of behaviour actually EXIST, even though they may be perfectly viable choices. Thus higher ideals like altruism and advancing the general good get edged out "just because" and because you have to play by their rules if you want to play at all. This is nicely demonstrated by all the ad hominem attacks against co-operatively behaving people branding them as "Communists" who seek to destroy Western civilization. Soon basic decency is going to be a thought-crime as it reduces the competitiveness of a society and "is bad for the economy".
OSS is, to me, similar to the way science is done through open discourse. It's a joint, open effort to create something cool. No amount of money would actually help me do any better at writing the hobby code I write, because I don't believe that my talents and abilities increase with pay -- in the world of work it tends to be the other way around. The point is that most OSS people are motivated by the project they are involved, not the peripheral benefits they may derive from its commercial success... of course, this is beyond the grasp of all-monetizing bean-counters.
I always was under the impression that governments are consumers like any other, and have a specific mandate to use tax units of currency in the most efficient way possible. You'd be tying the hands of government if you said that they CAN'T make a choice in procurement, should this choice be superior to others... a brilliant way to turn govt into a bunch of corporate whores, btw.
This exchange nicely illustrates the problems and inner conflicts with religious conservatives' ideas. Economically they support a system that systematically prunes out the weak, and I could appreciate them if they were openly Darwinist like their Libertarian brethren... but they don't have the guts.
Instead they make vague appeals to Christ and insist that somehow magically their secular politics will result in a distinctly illogical and contradictory consequence -- that by some Bible-waving things like keeping Schiavo alive will somehow become economically viable and profitable, while in day-to-day politics, still appealing to the very same economic argument but using its other side, it's "bad for the economy"...
Hear, hear. European public health care systems not only cover people comprehensively, they do so very efficiently as well -- check out Finland/Sweden for example, which have VERY efficient health care systems by purely bang for euro measures (although some specific improvements can of course always be made).
This of course doesn't stop our ideologically-driven, reality- and ethics-challenged Conservatives from trying to destroy the system by first creating bogeymen about it "being inefficient", then trying to starve it, and when it doesn't run on thin air it needs to be taken down because it's not delivering -- the typical "drown it in the bathtub" strategy.
To add insult to injury, while in opposition, they willingly support motions of no confidence teamed up with a left-fringe party that criticizes the lack of nurses in old people's homes -- a mostly funding issue at its core, and which would be the LAST thing they'd be interested in, should they be in power.
A comprehensive health-care system can be made efficient simply because of economies of scale, and because good care standards are, in my opinion, quite easy to agree upon. You may not get the bells and whistles if you are pragmatic, but the outcome of treatment on a person is objectively measurable so the argument on "choice" in care essentially boils down to one axis, saying that some people need to get better care than others, according to ability to pay.
The reason why American-style costs so much is, IMO, two-fold. In health-care the market is skewed because first of all, at extreme, it can be a choice between dying and getting care, so it's a seller's market (unless buyers organize in a big buying force such as a public non-drug-company-aligned health-care provider). Second, exposing one's health to competitive pressure encourages ignoring preventive care and thinking in the short term, making it ever more likely that when issues do become crippling enough to require intervetion, they are advanced and need expensive treatment. An example of this is diabetes, which is easily treatable by insulin, but can result in amputations othewise.
I tend to see health-care as a societal infrastructure issue like roads and utilities that can and should be planned for the long term, produced in bulk and managed objectively and transparently, as this just simply is a very efficient way of providing a good that nearly all people need during their lives and removes a lot of the shit from life that prematurely and unneccessarily destroys people and keeps them from doing more productive things than being sick and struggling with the consequences.
You didn't think Jesus was REALLY born out of a virgin and conceived by an angel/God/whatever, did you? I've got to give it to the guy who pulled off the stunt and concocted this greatest explanation ever for what happened, Joseph just had to swallow it as it's kind of tough to kick God's ass for having fun with your bride and knocking her up in the process...
One just simply has to admire the industriousness of Satan in seeking to deceive good Christians. If he had been even a bit lazy he wouldn't have bothered to place dinosaur fossils THAT deep. He certainly knows where we'll be looking.
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A recent PBF suggests an easier way to create ever-happy mice...
I thought it would be a great name for a heavy-duty condom...
Best investments for a college student: beer and chicks. Makes your studying time so much more pleasant!
Seriously though, you might want to look at some sufficiently diversified, reputable mutual funds. I put my money into one that is diversified between bonds and stocks, and it's doing better than my own stock picks... the important lesson is not to get cocky, as the stock market is a gamble even when you feel like you know your stuff, and you don't want to spend your time worrying about your portfolio.
Why did they ask me to imagine the biggest thing I can?? The lady next door may be no galactic structure but she's damn near the order of magnitude, and I don't have bubbles of gas mentioned either...
In the status quo Internet traffic is not very censored or controlled by the US and things just plain work. I think this is a very good arrangement.
Some things are matters of principle. Because the Internet is a major international information conduit, its neutrality and transparency need to be preserved at all costs. I am spooked just by the very demand of the US to maintain the upper hand "just in case"... what if someone pisses off the yanks in the future, and they choose to cause trouble? It's the same as in their military doctrine: we insist we have the right and means to kill you if we please, and you have no right for a deterrent.
A credible scenario might be, for example, the US hurting Latin America's Internet access until they elect right-wing governments. The rest of the world would be pretty powerless as they would fear reprisals from the US if they tried to interfere in any way with "America's Internet". At least if the net was governed by an international body, it would be more difficult to outright bully...
Your example on lightbulbs sounds like quite a nightmare. I don't know how things are over there, but at least in my home here in Europe I mostly use standardized lightbulbs -- they are not all the same of course, but can be broadly divided into categories, and it is VERY handy. Do not forget that the entire industrial revolution mostly got started because of standardized parts, which could be mass produced, were interchangeable and later on could be outsourced to the most efficient producer. Thus, the need for standards. They serve a purpose, and are not some evil Communist plot.
I feel that this entire thread has subtly moved away from the original claim -- that public standards are somehow worse than "private" ones, simply due to their virtue of being public. I am absolutely certain that you can produce a crap open standard, just as well as you can produce a crap private one. The question is, which process produces a more useful one?
You seem to commit the same fallacy as most dogmatic marketeers do when arguing against OSS and related things in general. You put the product of a single open/public process against the end result of a market process which has seen many failures and perhaps just one winner. Thus, a public process must have a perfect success rate while the failures in the proprietary side are simply brushed under the carpet. Trust me, companies have produced loads of crap.
Also, open standards are not mandatory (a flaw often found in Microsoft's loud complaining). Large open standards projects may be cumbersome as their goals tend to be lofty, but nevertheless, there is obviously a need for them, as people are putting in a lot of effort to create them in the first place. I believe that the existence of the Internet is a great testament to the power of open standards, considering that these open standards have been perfectly open to competition from proprietary vendors, which have subsequently went on to fail. It is telling that the only thing they have managed to do with those open standards is to try to corrupt them with their own "extensions" which have mostly caused grief to the public at large.
So the question becomes whether large standards that are designed openly are in general by neccessity inferior to whatever proprietary market activity (not just the final winner) might be an alternative. Certainly the standards design process needs to hear a very great deal of participants -- those people who have an interest in participating in using the standard -- and this can lead to what may be called "bloat", but it is not neccessarily a bad thing. If you seek to draw together expertise and capabilities from a broad range of parties who plan on participating on the large common market that is being created, you need to listen up and see what they need in that standard. It is a more systematic, long-view form of the "listen to the customer" approach. Doing things this way it is also easier to take into account needs the market will not provide for due to cost and small market share issues; consider accessibility requirements in web standards, for example.
I see nothing wrong with big goals. Achieving them is then a matter of implementation, which I believe is best achieved through an open process that accepts constant feedback. The design itself needs flexibility to stand the test of time -- the best specs allow for predefined extension points where needed.
Finally, if it is REALLY required, you CAN take the standard to some new direction if absolutely neccessary. Seems to me you're just being an ideologue again...
And when they do try to explain what the software is and does, it is explained in such a way that half of the text consists of abstract jargon and buzzwords. You really need to be in the loop already to even begin to understand what the supposedly helpful explanation is supposed to mean. In my experience, Apache's Jakarta projects are particularly guilty of not being able to explain their components in plain English.
Whoah, a blast from the past. Been there, done that, it looked ugly. Being one of those people who you would probably rather see being left to die instead of polluting the gene pool, I feel compelled to answer, as I increasingly see the same guys who would have been singing the praises of the T-4 programme in the 30s pushing the same agenda these days through economics...
Evolution hasn't stopped, it's just that evolutionary pressures are different, as we no longer live in caves. Advances in medicine are perfectly natural, and there is nothing unnatural in making use of them. Medically correctable problems simply become irrelevant, allowing the individual to contribute whatever skills he has, as he is no longer held back. Likewise, in the eugenics circles much-maligned "empathy" characteristic of humanity is actually one of our major survival strategies as a species. The Third Reich, for example, didn't last long.
One of the greatest examples of human arrogance has been the fantasy that Mother Nature somehow requires our meddling in things -- in particular, meddling that seems to advance a certain agenda by artificially favouring certain traits and arbitrarily suppressing others. The dysfunctionality of some dog breeds is a great example of what this can lead to.
That said, I personally have chosen not to have biological children (if the opportunity presents itself) as I don't want to inflict my illness on my offspring. It is manageable and I personally am living a decently good life, I am not arrogant enough to assume that someone else would be able to pull off the same stunt. This admission still doesn't make me like the idea of an individual being simply subjected to utilitarian statistics and being told that he is living a "life unworthy of life"...
I would go for an edge-detection method, like a Sobel mask. One might also try to reduce the bit depth to find continuous color areas before doing this, but it may also produce artifacts in the image as such an operation may create blocks that otherwise weren't there.
Edge-detection usually produces the edge areas in white and others in black, so you will want to negate that image, and perhaps do more bit-depth reduction to get away with the greys. Perhaps a sharpen?
So because OpenDocument can't help everyone, it shouldn't help anyone? What kind of moronic politician -- sorry, I repeat myself -- thinks this is an intelligent decision?
The difference here is of course that you're essentially taking accessibility away once it already has been achieved. I'm disabled myself and actually support ODF because of its long term benefits, but I can't buy into this kind of an argument. The ODF issue discussed in the article is valid, but only for as long as there is no compatibility, which there will be, eventually and fairly easily, I presume.
Your idea that politics in general is evil if it seeks to be inclusive is the nasty bit here.
Oh yeah, I forgot, government is supposed to reflect the will of the majority, not just the vocal minority. We all make sacrifices -- and in this case, a very small one -- for the good of society as a whole.
A rather dangerous argument if taken for a general rule. It may be a "small sacrifice" for you to start limiting disabled people's access to the outside world through forms of exclusion, but it is profoundly destructive for the disabled individual, in particular when it comes to employment. I know we've been the first to be "sacrificed" in this manner for the "general good" for most of history, and this is why we've become vocal -- I see no reason why we should just humbly shut up and stay at home. I'd rather die than do that (and a lot of people these days are suggesting we do just that, preferably before birth).
And no, don't give me the slippery slope Libertarian argument about why nothing and should be done because such evil Communism will eventually degenerate into everyone being forced to use wheelchairs. There is no reason why there should not exist a middle ground where at the very least vitally important functions in society and life are inclusive. This is so important because it helps the disabled person to help himself, instead of becoming a passive charity object. Not every support system leads to learned helplessness.
That said, there are jerks on both sides of the argument. I believe that a pragmatic approach to accessibility can be made to work so much better if it is defended within the larger projects without sabotaging them completely if everything isn't built to disability spec. The toilets are a good example... I don't give a damn if not EVERY toilet in a building isn't accessible, but am perfectly happy with a statistical approach, guaranteeing that I'm about as likely to get to pee as the next person..
Interesting you should choose to post this AC, though you seem to raise at least seemingly valid points.
you clearly don't have any programming experience in writing a screen reader. If it were so easy, IBM and RedHat would have pumped one out MONTHS ago, since they are the companies behind the ODF move. They are looking for state contracts, and if they could just dump out a screen reader and solve everything, they would have.
Correct, I don't. I don't see why you couldn't just read ODF into something like Emacspeak, though. Screen readers read web pages; ODF has way better structural information than your typical HTML page. It is, again, immaterial to me whether we have ODF-screenreading capacity NOW -- it will eventually appear, and in the long term, the disability community is shooting itself in the foot if, because of short term benefit, they accept a vendor lock-in.
Moreover, He isn't pandering; the Disabled community leaders in MA are the ones that brought this problem to the attention of Pacheco, not outside forces. ...
There are no applicable tools that give people the same capability to process .odf files like they can with .doc - that may change with time, but until those tools are available, you are making a blind person unemployable. And Pacheco understands the diff between format at application, the problem is, if you read the policy carefully (look at page 18), it essentally mandates which programs are acceptable to use.
Then the disabled community leaders themselves are bought and/or idiots, and Pacheco is still just trying to score points. If there is any real worry on the part of disabled, I can appreciate that they might want to cover their asses in the short term and are not neccessarily interested in doing what is right/good for them and everyone else in general. The employability by State government issue is best handled by dealing with whatever weird policies are in place saying that a disabled person is not employable by State government unless this disabled person works by using a Microsoft product :-) I suspect this has something to do with accessibility requirements and the litigious environment over there in the USA -- that is, a disabled person suing the hell out of government in the hope of a big payoff if there is any excuse... in that case, I am not really defending this kind of a person. Militancy out of principle was never my thing, as pragmatism and some goodwill goes a long way both ways.
And don't even think of pulling out the "gee, if Microsoft just supported ODF"... bag of flaming poo. Just take a look at what Adobe did. When Microsoft announced they would support Adobe's ISO approved pdf format, they threatened to sue!
Nothing stops them. The OSS community is not Adobe, and ODF is an open standard. Which part of that do you not understand? You're fear-mongering with an irrelevant example.
Yes, it may end up being worth it, but don't give weak platitiudes like "ohh, everything would be so rosy if we all used open formats and sang kumbahya".
No pain, no gain.
... and although my own disability doesn't restrict my computer use in any way, I still find this kind of ideological abuse totally disgusting. Open standards are, in the end, beneficial for access by everybody using any chosen access means. This includes not only the disabled, but everyone else as well. It is immaterial that things like screen readers may not exist yet.. they can be produced, and will be, if the specs are available. Anybody with even slight programming experience will know that in this case existing software is probably easy to modify to just read the new format into the program's internal representation. Contrast this with whatever limited access proprietary formats' owners choose to grant -- and to whom -- in order to look good.
Not to mention these same guys at this end of the political spectrum in general typically won't give a shit about disabled people's rights in anything, as mostly, we're just "bad for the economy". Apparently we can still be "useful" in some situations.
They should just speak for themselves and not get all caring and compassionate all of a sudden when it serves their own interest.
Also it should be mentioned that the reason why people don't bother to resign from the state church is that it's not such a big deal -- yeah, it's a "State church" but it generally means that the church enjoys "special protection" by the State which these days means nothing more than the fact that the government pays lip service to it, like going to church at the beginning of Parliament once a year, and that some of society's functions are co-operative with the church, like this taxation issue.
It's not like there's some theocracy going on around here. You can't have a state church in these modern times and actually have it USE its special status for something, like religious indoctrination in schools in the spirit of intelligent design -- people would get pissed off. I would actually argue that Americans have much more of a de facto state church than we do, considering how much God is a real force in politics.
People here are rather secular, and they are members of the state church mostly out of habit, like I am. They like the fuzzy feeling they get out of a church wedding, and then there is the older generation that would get upset if their offspring resigned from the church. I know that my membership is mostly because I don't want to piss off grandparents...
You are very correct. Why is it that some people are seeking to dogmatize some other people's way of doing things to fit their own world view -- so it could serve some "purpose" according to their ideals -- is beyond me. One shouldn't always seek to see everything through some-color-coloured lenses...
On broader terms, this sort of developments in society worry me in general. Certainly the market is good at some things, and people are at least partly motivated by self-interest, and it's fine with me. However, I am getting the feeling that more and more we are being shoe-horned into mandatorily self-interested behavioural models, simply because some powerful people believe that this is the way things "should" work. This kind of thinking can eventually become a self-fulfilling prophecy -- people will eventually forget that alternative models of behaviour actually EXIST, even though they may be perfectly viable choices. Thus higher ideals like altruism and advancing the general good get edged out "just because" and because you have to play by their rules if you want to play at all. This is nicely demonstrated by all the ad hominem attacks against co-operatively behaving people branding them as "Communists" who seek to destroy Western civilization. Soon basic decency is going to be a thought-crime as it reduces the competitiveness of a society and "is bad for the economy".
OSS is, to me, similar to the way science is done through open discourse. It's a joint, open effort to create something cool. No amount of money would actually help me do any better at writing the hobby code I write, because I don't believe that my talents and abilities increase with pay -- in the world of work it tends to be the other way around. The point is that most OSS people are motivated by the project they are involved, not the peripheral benefits they may derive from its commercial success... of course, this is beyond the grasp of all-monetizing bean-counters.
welcome our new sharp-sighted American naval overlords!
Considering I'm "overseas" from the US, I sort of wish this were more of a joke than it is.
I always was under the impression that governments are consumers like any other, and have a specific mandate to use tax units of currency in the most efficient way possible. You'd be tying the hands of government if you said that they CAN'T make a choice in procurement, should this choice be superior to others... a brilliant way to turn govt into a bunch of corporate whores, btw.
It's so archaic it's in Latin, stupid.
This exchange nicely illustrates the problems and inner conflicts with religious conservatives' ideas. Economically they support a system that systematically prunes out the weak, and I could appreciate them if they were openly Darwinist like their Libertarian brethren... but they don't have the guts.
Instead they make vague appeals to Christ and insist that somehow magically their secular politics will result in a distinctly illogical and contradictory consequence -- that by some Bible-waving things like keeping Schiavo alive will somehow become economically viable and profitable, while in day-to-day politics, still appealing to the very same economic argument but using its other side, it's "bad for the economy"...
I personally prefer "make it so" as it always sounded so much cooler and Shakespearean...
Why, that's the TLC you give your girlfriend's "evergreen shrub" in that strategic area...
Hear, hear. European public health care systems not only cover people comprehensively, they do so very efficiently as well -- check out Finland/Sweden for example, which have VERY efficient health care systems by purely bang for euro measures (although some specific improvements can of course always be made).
This of course doesn't stop our ideologically-driven, reality- and ethics-challenged Conservatives from trying to destroy the system by first creating bogeymen about it "being inefficient", then trying to starve it, and when it doesn't run on thin air it needs to be taken down because it's not delivering -- the typical "drown it in the bathtub" strategy.
To add insult to injury, while in opposition, they willingly support motions of no confidence teamed up with a left-fringe party that criticizes the lack of nurses in old people's homes -- a mostly funding issue at its core, and which would be the LAST thing they'd be interested in, should they be in power.
A comprehensive health-care system can be made efficient simply because of economies of scale, and because good care standards are, in my opinion, quite easy to agree upon. You may not get the bells and whistles if you are pragmatic, but the outcome of treatment on a person is objectively measurable so the argument on "choice" in care essentially boils down to one axis, saying that some people need to get better care than others, according to ability to pay.
The reason why American-style costs so much is, IMO, two-fold. In health-care the market is skewed because first of all, at extreme, it can be a choice between dying and getting care, so it's a seller's market (unless buyers organize in a big buying force such as a public non-drug-company-aligned health-care provider). Second, exposing one's health to competitive pressure encourages ignoring preventive care and thinking in the short term, making it ever more likely that when issues do become crippling enough to require intervetion, they are advanced and need expensive treatment. An example of this is diabetes, which is easily treatable by insulin, but can result in amputations othewise.
I tend to see health-care as a societal infrastructure issue like roads and utilities that can and should be planned for the long term, produced in bulk and managed objectively and transparently, as this just simply is a very efficient way of providing a good that nearly all people need during their lives and removes a lot of the shit from life that prematurely and unneccessarily destroys people and keeps them from doing more productive things than being sick and struggling with the consequences.
You didn't think Jesus was REALLY born out of a virgin and conceived by an angel/God/whatever, did you? I've got to give it to the guy who pulled off the stunt and concocted this greatest explanation ever for what happened, Joseph just had to swallow it as it's kind of tough to kick God's ass for having fun with your bride and knocking her up in the process...
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One just simply has to admire the industriousness of Satan in seeking to deceive good Christians. If he had been even a bit lazy he wouldn't have bothered to place dinosaur fossils THAT deep. He certainly knows where we'll be looking.
...radioactive animal overlords welcome YOU!