The GOP was against any health bill that wasn't focused on 1) tort reform, and 2) interstate insurance sales. The party leadership elected go all in on killing the more expansive Democratic efforts, and hence opted out of significantly influencing what passed. As Matt Yglesias pointed out, most Congressional Democrats were willing to go forward with a lot less than what got passed. But, when it was clear that the GOP was in a take no prisoners mode, any willingness to compromise went down the crapper.
Addressing your two policy points: - tort reform is a non-starter until we address what drives the lawsuits. When someone gets physically fucked up, either out in the world or by a doctor, fixing it is often big bucks. If getting fucked up didn't fundamentally threaten a family's finances, the need to sue would fade. Going with tort reform first would greatly increase medical bankruptcies.
- interstate insurance is a non-starter unless there is a national standard for what's covered. Otherwise, there would almost certainly be a race to the floor for which state can pass the most pathetic standards, so that they could attract insurers. Much as virtually all large employers incorporate in Delaware, I suspect it would soon become next to impossible to get a policy not issued from [insert pathetic state here].
I understand the claim you're making, re economic trade-offs. There's a variable you may have missed...
Any single, healthy person that actually elects to play the odds and await some chronic condition before obtaining a policy is overlooking the other reason for holding a policy: an acute condition that lands one in the trauma ward. If an ER receptionist can't dig an insurance card out of Jon/Jane Doe's bloodstained wallet, the patient's odds of timely care drop precipitously.
Even if the GOP wins every open seat this November, and vote to repeal, they won't have enough votes to reverse a Presidential veto. Everyone in Congress knows that the majority party takes a hit at the midterm elections if the economy sucks. So, the Democrats who survive to serve in the next Congress are going to have zero incentive to help repeal a law they worked so hard at passing.
Delta and Atlas are reliable because the time/money have been put into anal retentive engineering. The 1950's/60's customer was in enough of a hurry that they were willing to push the schedule with money and man hours. They also realized that pushing the schedule on developing flaming tubes of fuel was a recipe for BOOM!, and gritted their teeth through the mistakes.
Hopefully, SpaceX has learned enough from Falcon 1 that they can minimize the boom factor on Falcon 9, but given the size of their engineering staff (CAD/CAM or no), I wouldn't count on it.
The easiest way is to get some Ethernet to coax bridges: eBay, Google.
If you elect to replace the coax with Cat5 or Cat6, DO NOT try to pull it yourself. If you fuck it up, you'll end up paying someone else a lot more than if you just had an electrician do it in the first place.
For my personal use, I don't have a problem with the suspicion of self-signed certs. I don't intend any visitors to my https service other than the ones I personally invite, and I can guide them through the security exception process. Obviously, I'm not running a business.
I disagree with the parent regarding the proliferation of CAs. It's true that added CAs add to the points of potential compromise. But, they're a drop in the bucket compared to the flood of self-signs we'd be dealing with. Then we'd really be talking compromise, to the point where if the site wasn't some heavy hitter brand, we'd have next to zero confidence in the value of the https connection overhead.
In direct reply to the parent, yes, private industry has been designing and building orbital rockets for years, which is somewhat like noting that an F-35 is the the product of private industry. If the Administration had elected to put Orion on one of the Ares alternatives, great. But, it looks like they're ditching the whole Constellation project.
In response to the Space Frontier Foundation's joy that Ares is dead:
For years, there've been no significant technical or political barriers stopping the private sector from getting beyond just lofting a few satellites.
So, what's the hold up? Capital, with a B. I don't care if we end up using cannons, rail guns, solar powered winged balloons, elevators, or exquisitely value-engineered tubes of fuel to get to promised land of $X/lbs to orbit. By whatever method, it is going to take vast sums of capital to get there, Boeing 7x7 development sized sums at least.
So, what's the hold up? ROI. There has been plenty of capital chasing investments out there, and not just in the US. But, out of that, all we see for space are some boutique investments, except the on-going satellite launch development, a good portion of it paid for by the USAF's mission requirements. If the people who'd bankroll private space activities saw profit in it, they'd likely have gotten off their asses and done it. IMO, much like the opening up of the American West for non-Indian settlers, nothing's going to happen unless/until (somebody's) government exploration does the prospecting that makes the risk of a private venture quantifiable.
God bless Virgin Galactic for pushing the envelope. But, for something more than a joy ride, the cancellation of the Ares means that man-into-space is spelled S-O-Y-U-Z, probably for the rest of the decade, and the goal no further than the ISS.
You've hit the nail on the head. With the appropriate s/w, travelers might love the pad. As it stands, my Gen1 Touch is usually a PDA at home/work, and a music/movie device while on travel.
In tight and/or unsteady confines, the iPad could be a reconfigurable magnetic game board, potentially with a very large virtual gaming surface. I'd like hex-based strategy games (ie. OGRE & G.E.V., I'm dating myself), which wouldn't necessarily require an AI. If Steve Jackson isn't listening, this might be the excuse to update my SDK.
mr_matticus closed by saying: But there is no way you can say with a straight face that on balance, these systems have not been wildly successful at encouraging investment in R&D, proliferation of art, and consumer access. At no other time in human history has so much been available to so many. Whining about the tiny fraction of extremely popular works that can afford to be highly selective about transactional terms is no way to suggest such an argument.
I'll agree that the parent post may have been going a bit over the top. So, I'll attempt to focus on some specific issues:
1) Getting a Patent: There's evidence that the USPTO isn't doing its job at examining patent applications. There are a slew of Federal regulatory services that have been suffering for years from inadequate staffing, the USPTO being one. This seems to be manifesting itself in the examiners not having time to spot a lot of obvious or non-original work. Hence, the icon for many of the/. patent-related stories.
2) Holding Patents: The original intent of the framers when setting up patent law was that inventors enjoy a limited window of time to enjoy the fruits of their inventions via a monopoly granted by the state. IANAL, but baring someone pointing out long established case law to the contrary, I'd bet money that the framers didn't foresee and would have legislated against "patent trolls".
Pray tell, what does it gain society to permit a business whose sole purpose is to quietly sit on patents in the hope that they don't turn up during a patent search, waiting to jump on the next goat who makes an actual product that might conceivably infringe? This business method is aided and abetted by 1).
What the parent said... if they won't follow the policy (and they don't have to). I don't know if the owners are straight shooters or not, so I don't know what happens if the SHTF. Will they pin the blame on IT? It'd sure be nice to have an email or written memo where they had signed off on the policy. It won't save you from getting fired if they're looking for scapegoats, but it might save your reputation while looking for another job.
Because they are blocking "the enemy" outside the borders of US. US law only works in the US... politicians do however forget this detail and try to expand US laws to other countries.
IMO, this is a simplistic view. "Extraterritorial" laws only work with the cooperation of other nations. As long as a good bilateral relationship with the US is considered important enough to acquiesce to US policies, then a US law can have effective reach. If not, then not.
Hoookay, assuming the NYTs is correct that only about 6.7% of touch screen Apple devices are jailbroken, out of some 37 million, this piracy figure is just bizarre. The actual economic losses are only the delta between what the jailbreakers would have bought, if they didn't have the "free-as-in-shoplifted" option.
In a buy-or-bust scenario, I find it very difficult to believe that these users would be in the market to buy much more or less than the median user, once their micro-economic motivations adjusted to the new reality.
Hell, back in the days when I bothered to jailbreak my Touch, it was only to use Cydia to install capabilities beyond what any AppStore app would be allowed to enable, all of it free-beer/speech. Given the cost of most apps compared to the cost of the platform, or to most PC/console shrink-wrapped products, why would I bother to pirate, unless for my BBS days rationale: collect 'em all, run 'em once.
Well, ok, you're not in the live-to-fight-another-day platoon, and that's your call. Your comments remind me of the pickle some guys get into, which starts when an officer decides to get into their face, and ends when the officer gets shot with his own gun. Ah, but it doesn't really end there, does it? The cop loses a couple feet of intestine, and the defender of freedom does 20 years of hard time.
I wasn't saying that we should assume the mating position whenever interacting with a cop. "Am I being detained officer? Am I free to go?" If the answer is no, I am saying that in a pissing contest, you're gonna lose. I bet you're a real hoot during traffic stops.
Re: "[insert race here]-boy"... Jesus, relax, you're reminding me of one of the reasons I moved to the islands. People out here nickname their kids things like Honey-girl or Junior-boy, I myself might smile or frown depending on the tone of voice when called haole-boy. It doesn't carry the baggage you're associating with it.
Yes, it bears striking resemblance, as you say. But, it hasn't really been any different for decades, well before the War on Drugs, or the PATRIOT Act. These things increased the odds that any one person would come under suspicion, but once in contact with law enforcement, my bullet points held as true in 1939 as in 2009. If anything, I think things have gotten better on average, as I believe a lower ratio of AAs and Latinos are eating a night stick 'jus cuz' now than then.
I personally wouldn't consider this being imprisoned by fear. It's just a recognition that even for a white male, certain actions are liable to lead to certain reactions.
This is apart from what happens when you get to court, where a number of practical rights that once flowed from the Bill of Rights have been trimmed back by - I'll contend without going into detail here - an increasingly conservative Supreme Court.
You're correct. You have rights, and a cop shouldn't beat you without due cause. However, rights are adjudicated in a court of law, and you've gotta survive long enough to make it there.
First up, I've witnessed and had described by retired police officers occasions when an officer elected to go medieval on a citizen who was being only mildly disagreeable, or didn't immediately understand what the officer wanted, so I can well imagine Mr. Watts was unreasonably roughed up, and hit with trumped up charges.
That said, based on the information in TFA's links, as a practical, like-to-avoid-getting-my-ass-handed-to-me matter, I might question Mr. Watts' evident lack of "street smarts". I'm just a mid-aged, college-educated white boy who for the most part stayed out of trouble. But, even I have heard and read enough to know that:
In a police-controlled traffic stop or checkpoint, I should stay in my car until asked to exit.
I should not act to touch an officer.
I should not give an officer lip.
I shouldn't get into small talk with an officer. Answers to questions, if I say anything at all, should be short. Admit nothing, deny nothing.
I shouldn't give permission for an officer to search me or my car. If he does it anyway, save my complaints for later.
If assaulted/battered by an officer, I should passively act to shield my face, jewels, etc, but take the lumps.
I have few, if any, rights at an international border crossing (besides the intra-EU borders), and should be mentally prepared for BS.
Unfortunately, Mr. Watts may not have had any previous experiences that would prep him for the possibility that getting out of the queue at a border crossing wasn't the best plan. I hope his only lasting consequences are a bruised body and ego.
White listing, black listing... the result is the same. It's easier for me, on my non-business, nothing special home web/mail server, to drop vast IP blocks. If someone sees something about my site they want to comment on, they can use my mail form. If there's someone in particular I want to correspond with, I can white list them. I seriously doubt there's anyone who's legitimate email is going to be affected by me being a dick admin.
Mr. Bee is correct to note that although Stallman, et al, are not libertarians, the F/OSS community is in substance a real-life expression of a libertarian ideal. Market competition is a destroyer of marketable value, down to the logical zero. Profit arises from something monopolized, be it an idea, a process, or a thing... like the only gas station for the next 100 miles. F/OSS theoretically zeros out the marketability of software, but unlocks other kinds of value for the consumer.
Getting back to the HI report, Mr. Moglen claims not to like network neutrality based on the language of F/OSS evangelists. The fact is, his paymasters in telecom - in a federal move to make telecom competitive - did compete for a time, until they decided they'd rather enjoy the monopolist's profit by merging, than continue to the nirvana of its creative destruction.
Now that the methodology has been worked out, sending a camera up to 100kft is becoming a pretty common university and ham club team project. Provided care is taken during assembly, the biggest gotchas are while inflating the balloon, and hoping the winds keep the payload over an area with suitable roads.
It'd be neat to see more teams collect additional science, with live TM for extra points. A few years back, a few college students in Beautiful B.C. designed their own UAV, which flew home after release a 60kft. Nowadays, it's possible to take a crack at that without CS/EE-level knowledge of control logic, but would still be a neat challenge. Too bad FAA regs make it of iffy legality in the US.
The parent used a poor choice of words. Startup Weekend in general isn't an MS program, only the BizSpark program that helped organize this particular event.
The Wired article makes good points. But, behind those points (in the US) has been essentially no growth in income for most wage earners since 2000. In these circumstances, crap is king, despite the observable truth that those who buy cheap, buy at least twice.
> for those of you who have seen it. Please give me a reason to see it other then the Special effects.
It pulls off the mockumentary look rather nicely, and the physical props and set (within a Soweto shanty town) provide a visceral sense of squalor. I wouldn't be surprised to find that it literally reeked, like a butcher's dumpster that hasn't been emptied all summer. In retrospect, it's true that the story plays out very conventionally, complete with the touching end. What sets it apart from - say - SST is that there are a great many scenes that feel like Michael Moore's film crew is out gathering footage that he's going to skewer the evil big corp. with in the forthcoming "Prawns On the Braai".
Plus, after an hour of witnessing the mortal fear of the protagonist, I *really* wanted a few of the characters to die a grisly death. However, I could just be easy to please. It wouldn't be the first time.
Slashdot Mirror
The GOP was against any health bill that wasn't focused on 1) tort reform, and 2) interstate insurance sales. The party leadership elected go all in on killing the more expansive Democratic efforts, and hence opted out of significantly influencing what passed. As Matt Yglesias pointed out, most Congressional Democrats were willing to go forward with a lot less than what got passed. But, when it was clear that the GOP was in a take no prisoners mode, any willingness to compromise went down the crapper.
Addressing your two policy points:
- tort reform is a non-starter until we address what drives the lawsuits. When someone gets physically fucked up, either out in the world or by a doctor, fixing it is often big bucks. If getting fucked up didn't fundamentally threaten a family's finances, the need to sue would fade. Going with tort reform first would greatly increase medical bankruptcies.
- interstate insurance is a non-starter unless there is a national standard for what's covered. Otherwise, there would almost certainly be a race to the floor for which state can pass the most pathetic standards, so that they could attract insurers. Much as virtually all large employers incorporate in Delaware, I suspect it would soon become next to impossible to get a policy not issued from [insert pathetic state here].
I understand the claim you're making, re economic trade-offs. There's a variable you may have missed...
Any single, healthy person that actually elects to play the odds and await some chronic condition before obtaining a policy is overlooking the other reason for holding a policy: an acute condition that lands one in the trauma ward. If an ER receptionist can't dig an insurance card out of Jon/Jane Doe's bloodstained wallet, the patient's odds of timely care drop precipitously.
Even if the GOP wins every open seat this November, and vote to repeal, they won't have enough votes to reverse a Presidential veto. Everyone in Congress knows that the majority party takes a hit at the midterm elections if the economy sucks. So, the Democrats who survive to serve in the next Congress are going to have zero incentive to help repeal a law they worked so hard at passing.
Delta and Atlas are reliable because the time/money have been put into anal retentive engineering. The 1950's/60's customer was in enough of a hurry that they were willing to push the schedule with money and man hours. They also realized that pushing the schedule on developing flaming tubes of fuel was a recipe for BOOM!, and gritted their teeth through the mistakes.
Hopefully, SpaceX has learned enough from Falcon 1 that they can minimize the boom factor on Falcon 9, but given the size of their engineering staff (CAD/CAM or no), I wouldn't count on it.
The easiest way is to get some Ethernet to coax bridges: eBay, Google.
If you elect to replace the coax with Cat5 or Cat6, DO NOT try to pull it yourself. If you fuck it up, you'll end up paying someone else a lot more than if you just had an electrician do it in the first place.
For my personal use, I don't have a problem with the suspicion of self-signed certs. I don't intend any visitors to my https service other than the ones I personally invite, and I can guide them through the security exception process. Obviously, I'm not running a business.
I disagree with the parent regarding the proliferation of CAs. It's true that added CAs add to the points of potential compromise. But, they're a drop in the bucket compared to the flood of self-signs we'd be dealing with. Then we'd really be talking compromise, to the point where if the site wasn't some heavy hitter brand, we'd have next to zero confidence in the value of the https connection overhead.
In direct reply to the parent, yes, private industry has been designing and building orbital rockets for years, which is somewhat like noting that an F-35 is the the product of private industry. If the Administration had elected to put Orion on one of the Ares alternatives, great. But, it looks like they're ditching the whole Constellation project.
In response to the Space Frontier Foundation's joy that Ares is dead:
For years, there've been no significant technical or political barriers stopping the private sector from getting beyond just lofting a few satellites.
So, what's the hold up? Capital, with a B. I don't care if we end up using cannons, rail guns, solar powered winged balloons, elevators, or exquisitely value-engineered tubes of fuel to get to promised land of $X/lbs to orbit. By whatever method, it is going to take vast sums of capital to get there, Boeing 7x7 development sized sums at least.
So, what's the hold up? ROI. There has been plenty of capital chasing investments out there, and not just in the US. But, out of that, all we see for space are some boutique investments, except the on-going satellite launch development, a good portion of it paid for by the USAF's mission requirements. If the people who'd bankroll private space activities saw profit in it, they'd likely have gotten off their asses and done it. IMO, much like the opening up of the American West for non-Indian settlers, nothing's going to happen unless/until (somebody's) government exploration does the prospecting that makes the risk of a private venture quantifiable.
God bless Virgin Galactic for pushing the envelope. But, for something more than a joy ride, the cancellation of the Ares means that man-into-space is spelled S-O-Y-U-Z, probably for the rest of the decade, and the goal no further than the ISS.
You've hit the nail on the head. With the appropriate s/w, travelers might love the pad. As it stands, my Gen1 Touch is usually a PDA at home/work, and a music/movie device while on travel.
In tight and/or unsteady confines, the iPad could be a reconfigurable magnetic game board, potentially with a very large virtual gaming surface. I'd like hex-based strategy games (ie. OGRE & G.E.V., I'm dating myself), which wouldn't necessarily require an AI. If Steve Jackson isn't listening, this might be the excuse to update my SDK.
mr_matticus closed by saying: But there is no way you can say with a straight face that on balance, these systems have not been wildly successful at encouraging investment in R&D, proliferation of art, and consumer access. At no other time in human history has so much been available to so many. Whining about the tiny fraction of extremely popular works that can afford to be highly selective about transactional terms is no way to suggest such an argument.
I'll agree that the parent post may have been going a bit over the top. So, I'll attempt to focus on some specific issues:
1) Getting a Patent: There's evidence that the USPTO isn't doing its job at examining patent applications. There are a slew of Federal regulatory services that have been suffering for years from inadequate staffing, the USPTO being one. This seems to be manifesting itself in the examiners not having time to spot a lot of obvious or non-original work. Hence, the icon for many of the /. patent-related stories.
2) Holding Patents: The original intent of the framers when setting up patent law was that inventors enjoy a limited window of time to enjoy the fruits of their inventions via a monopoly granted by the state. IANAL, but baring someone pointing out long established case law to the contrary, I'd bet money that the framers didn't foresee and would have legislated against "patent trolls".
Pray tell, what does it gain society to permit a business whose sole purpose is to quietly sit on patents in the hope that they don't turn up during a patent search, waiting to jump on the next goat who makes an actual product that might conceivably infringe? This business method is aided and abetted by 1).
What the parent said... if they won't follow the policy (and they don't have to). I don't know if the owners are straight shooters or not, so I don't know what happens if the SHTF. Will they pin the blame on IT? It'd sure be nice to have an email or written memo where they had signed off on the policy. It won't save you from getting fired if they're looking for scapegoats, but it might save your reputation while looking for another job.
Because they are blocking "the enemy" outside the borders of US. US law only works in the US... politicians do however forget this detail and try to expand US laws to other countries.
IMO, this is a simplistic view. "Extraterritorial" laws only work with the cooperation of other nations. As long as a good bilateral relationship with the US is considered important enough to acquiesce to US policies, then a US law can have effective reach. If not, then not.
Hoookay, assuming the NYTs is correct that only about 6.7% of touch screen Apple devices are jailbroken, out of some 37 million, this piracy figure is just bizarre. The actual economic losses are only the delta between what the jailbreakers would have bought, if they didn't have the "free-as-in-shoplifted" option.
In a buy-or-bust scenario, I find it very difficult to believe that these users would be in the market to buy much more or less than the median user, once their micro-economic motivations adjusted to the new reality.
Hell, back in the days when I bothered to jailbreak my Touch, it was only to use Cydia to install capabilities beyond what any AppStore app would be allowed to enable, all of it free-beer/speech. Given the cost of most apps compared to the cost of the platform, or to most PC/console shrink-wrapped products, why would I bother to pirate, unless for my BBS days rationale: collect 'em all, run 'em once.
Well, ok, you're not in the live-to-fight-another-day platoon, and that's your call. Your comments remind me of the pickle some guys get into, which starts when an officer decides to get into their face, and ends when the officer gets shot with his own gun. Ah, but it doesn't really end there, does it? The cop loses a couple feet of intestine, and the defender of freedom does 20 years of hard time.
I wasn't saying that we should assume the mating position whenever interacting with a cop. "Am I being detained officer? Am I free to go?" If the answer is no, I am saying that in a pissing contest, you're gonna lose. I bet you're a real hoot during traffic stops.
Re: "[insert race here]-boy"... Jesus, relax, you're reminding me of one of the reasons I moved to the islands. People out here nickname their kids things like Honey-girl or Junior-boy, I myself might smile or frown depending on the tone of voice when called haole-boy. It doesn't carry the baggage you're associating with it.
Yes, it bears striking resemblance, as you say. But, it hasn't really been any different for decades, well before the War on Drugs, or the PATRIOT Act. These things increased the odds that any one person would come under suspicion, but once in contact with law enforcement, my bullet points held as true in 1939 as in 2009. If anything, I think things have gotten better on average, as I believe a lower ratio of AAs and Latinos are eating a night stick 'jus cuz' now than then.
I personally wouldn't consider this being imprisoned by fear. It's just a recognition that even for a white male, certain actions are liable to lead to certain reactions.
This is apart from what happens when you get to court, where a number of practical rights that once flowed from the Bill of Rights have been trimmed back by - I'll contend without going into detail here - an increasingly conservative Supreme Court.
You're correct. You have rights, and a cop shouldn't beat you without due cause. However, rights are adjudicated in a court of law, and you've gotta survive long enough to make it there.
First up, I've witnessed and had described by retired police officers occasions when an officer elected to go medieval on a citizen who was being only mildly disagreeable, or didn't immediately understand what the officer wanted, so I can well imagine Mr. Watts was unreasonably roughed up, and hit with trumped up charges.
That said, based on the information in TFA's links, as a practical, like-to-avoid-getting-my-ass-handed-to-me matter, I might question Mr. Watts' evident lack of "street smarts". I'm just a mid-aged, college-educated white boy who for the most part stayed out of trouble. But, even I have heard and read enough to know that:
Unfortunately, Mr. Watts may not have had any previous experiences that would prep him for the possibility that getting out of the queue at a border crossing wasn't the best plan. I hope his only lasting consequences are a bruised body and ego.
White listing, black listing... the result is the same. It's easier for me, on my non-business, nothing special home web/mail server, to drop vast IP blocks. If someone sees something about my site they want to comment on, they can use my mail form. If there's someone in particular I want to correspond with, I can white list them. I seriously doubt there's anyone who's legitimate email is going to be affected by me being a dick admin.
Geez, I dropped the known .br IP blocks into a blackhole years ago. This may explain why my just-for-spam address receipts have been dropping.
Crap, didn't quite close off the footnoted references:
(1): http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Heartland_Institute
(2): http://timothyblee.com/?p=1360
The Heartland Institute uses libertarian concepts, but from its start has been a front for wealthy conservative industrialists(1). As TFA describes the HI's report, it's the kind of libertarianism that is only concerned with limiting the power of the state, and is mute over injustices perpetrated by parties other than the state(2).
Mr. Bee is correct to note that although Stallman, et al, are not libertarians, the F/OSS community is in substance a real-life expression of a libertarian ideal. Market competition is a destroyer of marketable value, down to the logical zero. Profit arises from something monopolized, be it an idea, a process, or a thing... like the only gas station for the next 100 miles. F/OSS theoretically zeros out the marketability of software, but unlocks other kinds of value for the consumer.
Getting back to the HI report, Mr. Moglen claims not to like network neutrality based on the language of F/OSS evangelists. The fact is, his paymasters in telecom - in a federal move to make telecom competitive - did compete for a time, until they decided they'd rather enjoy the monopolist's profit by merging, than continue to the nirvana of its creative destruction.
Now that the methodology has been worked out, sending a camera up to 100kft is becoming a pretty common university and ham club team project. Provided care is taken during assembly, the biggest gotchas are while inflating the balloon, and hoping the winds keep the payload over an area with suitable roads.
It'd be neat to see more teams collect additional science, with live TM for extra points. A few years back, a few college students in Beautiful B.C. designed their own UAV, which flew home after release a 60kft. Nowadays, it's possible to take a crack at that without CS/EE-level knowledge of control logic, but would still be a neat challenge. Too bad FAA regs make it of iffy legality in the US.
The parent used a poor choice of words. Startup Weekend in general isn't an MS program, only the BizSpark program that helped organize this particular event.
The Wired article makes good points. But, behind those points (in the US) has been essentially no growth in income for most wage earners since 2000. In these circumstances, crap is king, despite the observable truth that those who buy cheap, buy at least twice.
> for those of you who have seen it. Please give me a reason to see it other then the Special effects.
It pulls off the mockumentary look rather nicely, and the physical props and set (within a Soweto shanty town) provide a visceral sense of squalor. I wouldn't be surprised to find that it literally reeked, like a butcher's dumpster that hasn't been emptied all summer. In retrospect, it's true that the story plays out very conventionally, complete with the touching end. What sets it apart from - say - SST is that there are a great many scenes that feel like Michael Moore's film crew is out gathering footage that he's going to skewer the evil big corp. with in the forthcoming "Prawns On the Braai".
Plus, after an hour of witnessing the mortal fear of the protagonist, I *really* wanted a few of the characters to die a grisly death. However, I could just be easy to please. It wouldn't be the first time.