It's not so much that the product is different or better, although oftentimes it is.
Plus, of course, you have more chance of the product improving if you deliver feedback.
If you send a letter to Kraft telling them that their new salad dressing tastes like Frenchman's Crotch instead of French, they'll probably just mail you back a money-off coupon for "Franch", and go back to concocting ways to make a product that is almost, but not entirely, unlike food, as cheaply as possible.
If you politely mention this to your local deli owner, he'll probably apologize. He might even suggest something else, gift you with a sample of it, and if enough people mention it, he'll change his recipe.
I see this problem with software projects as well ; when the developers are sufficiently removed from the users, insulated from them, the software turns out terrible. It might do exactly what the users said they wanted, but the problem is that users are no good at articulating exactly what they want - because that's a programming skill (whether you do it in English, Python, or C++). The most successful projects I've worked on have been the ones where the developers have to interact with the customers on a daily basis, and preferably sit amongst them.
In Europe, we all have health coverage. We don't have to decide between keeping a finger (that we got cut off through our own inattention in the manufacturing plant) and sending our kids to college, or eating this month.
And we spend less than half per capita what Americans spend on healthcare, partially because we have the bargaining power of an entire government, partially because we're not engaged in an all-out war between insurance providers (who make more money when they deny you care), healthcare providers (who raise their prices because they know they are going to get stiffed by the insurance company half the time) and the patients (who just hope that their treatment is covered on their plan).
Mandatory health insurance is the watered-down weenie policy. Single-payer is the way to go. Why the hell would you enter into a contract with ANY entity that has a vested interest in you dying as quickly as possible?
Hopefully the days of Windows as the sole viable platform for 3D gaming are coming to an end.
Speaking as someone on the Steam beta, TF2 is better on Linux than it is on Windows - I can seamlessly move my pointer from the game, to my browser on the other monitor, even when it's in fullscreen mode - no pointless pointer capture by the application (it still captures when actually playing, just not when browsing servers, etc), no black-screened pause when alt-tabbing out - it may be a psychological thing, but the perceived risk that the game will crash when you do this is much lower as a result.
The only downside is that now there are games on my productivity OS, I don't have a reboot cycle as a barrier to playing them.
I fail to see why this is a problem from the POV of the USA - they have no problems with contracts that enforce similar arrangements, or enjoin the contracted party to never use the skills he gained working for one employer for the benefit of another.
In Cuba, you get your education from the state, giving you a skillset that you then employ for the benefit of the state. If they want to be able to practice medicine elsewhere for higher gains, they should make the investment and pay for their own training, like you do in America, right? (sounds like we agree on this)
Economically, it's a no-brainer ; the USA could send patients to be treated in Cuba as "medical tourists", pay 1/2 of the price they usually would, the Cubans would make a profit (because they would be getting 5x their costs) which they could funnel back into their country. The travel costs are probably negligible compared to most medical procedure bills.
The real problem from the POV of the USA would be having to admit that Cuba was doing something right. They would have to repeal their current embargo on trading with Cuba, which would make them look "soft on Communism". And they would be drawing attention to the mess they have made of their own healthcare industry.
The power is for forced airflow, not for the membrane.
People already make third-world refrigerators using evaporative cooling - a large, porous, ceramic container, with another in the middle, the intermediate space filled with damp sand.
But this is a condenser, so you're harvesting both water and heat. You want to radiate that heat away, so you can continue to collect water. This is why the beetle is black - to radiate the maximum heat away from it's body in the night, so it's carapace is nice and cool for it's water collection in the morning.
The Dune novels include a similar device - thermoplastic orbs that are transparent in the day (to avoid heating up too much), and turn black at night, radiating their heat away so they can condense water to irrigate the plants rooted amongst them. Presumably, they are coated with Namib desert beetle coating (or something similar):-)
Hydrophobic coatings are already in use on self-cleaning glass - because the water rolls right off, water based things (like micro-organisms, algae, etc), and also dry dust, get washed off very quickly. It should be cleaner than a metallic condenser ; you might have to put a particle filter in if you can't tolerate a little dust in your water.
This is much more efficient than the fog net, principally because the arrangement of materials means that your collection surface is fouled with water less - the droplets roll straight off the hydrophobic surface, leaving the hydrophilic surface available to attract another droplet.
The same physical process is involved regardless of which air/water collection machine you use - it's all applied thermodynamics.
Like another poster said, it's like the difference between relays and transistors - they both perform the same job (being a switch) but one is a much smarter use of material science and much more efficient.
The power is to blow wind over the surface. So a windtrap doesn't need the battery.
Of course, a windtrap could have a wind-powered generator for running it's refrigeration coils. It seems that this is unnecessary with this stuff - the beetle gets by just with radiative cooling - but probably improves the efficiency of the collector surface for it to be cool.
The debate with Bush is a great example of the problem.
"Now, the difference in our plans is I want that 2,000 to go to you, and the vice president would like to be spending the 2,000 on your behalf."
And it is, of course, a completely accurate statement - Bush wants the $2,000 to go to the voter, because he knows that more of it will end up in the pockets of his campaign contributors. What it doesn't cover is the value for that money.
I'm mystified why the USA is not familiar in general with these numbers (it probably has something to do with media ownership). Here we go ( taken from 2006 WHO data) :
The USA spent $6,719 per capita on healthcare. The UK spent $2,815 per capita.
The UK and the USA have roughly equivalent health outcomes. The UK has universal coverage, and no-one goes bankrupt because of medical expenses. The USA has 50M people uninsured who would have to choose between losing a finger and sending their kids to college.
Incidentally, Cuba spent $674 per capita, has (per capita) more doctors, more hospital beds, equivalent life expectancy and better cancer mortality rates. If the USA were really proper capitalists, they'd outsource all their healthcare to Cuba, who can apparently provide a quality product at around a tenth the cost.
I worked on a system processing medical records that used a number of distinct methods of storing dates
* British 2-digit years : dd-MM-yy * British 4-digit years : dd-MM-yyyy * American 2-digit years : MM-dd-yy * ISO 8601 style : yyyy-MM-dd (this is the correct form for all cases where you have to store the date as text) * An integer offset in minutes from a custom epoch value
The rule I tried to adopt was to always store the date in an unambiguous format, and to present it to the user in whatever format was appropriate. Alas, the system in question only worked properly if you configured the server to be in the British locale, and a surprising number of clients leave their servers in the USA locale when they install the OS. Yes, the code could have been better...
There are some "special" problems with the date handling in the MS implementation VBScript - like the lovely little bug where if your system is configured for the British locale, the date parsing still thinks it's American, *until* you pass it a date that would be invalid, then it will suddenly consider itself British.
A brief test demonstrates that it STILL does this....
' Save as "test-date.vbs" and double click to run MsgBox(CDate("12-02-1999")) MsgBox(CDate("13-02-1999"))
Produces two popups proclaiming.... * "12/2/1999" (so far so good) * "2/13/1999" (D'oh!)
The popups are in the American format, MM/dd/yyyy - despite the British locale. But the String parsing will consider being British, but only if the American worldview doesn't prevail....
I'm sure a lot of it is profit, as with any new tech which you can only get from one supplier. These things must be the iPhone of the rocket defense system world.
I wouldn't be surprised to hear that the company making them is supplying Palestine with rockets under the table either. Rockets are probably a lot cheaper than the profit margin on these interceptors.
Tony Stark got it wrong:
"They say that the best weapon is the one you never have to fire. I respectfully disagree. I prefer the weapon you only have to fire once."
He was a defence contractor - the best weapon for him was the one you had to fire repeatedly and keep coming back for ammunition.
The answer is no ; DVD is a digital media. As bandwidth improves, delivering any kind of data on stamped plastic disks just isn't going to cut it. Even if you build a stock of DVDs that are rare, renting them out physically can be trumped by anyone else with a computer and an internet connection.
There's no way he'll get an agreement to stream rare DVDs to anyone - the major labels aren't going to allow it, and any minor label will just think "Hmm, that's a good idea" and do it themselves.
Indeed. He was supposed to be all cool and competent, but all I thought when he even powered up that laptop, let alone hooking it up, was "You utter, utter, numpty. You are about to have your balls handed to you on a plate."
MS Office doesn't save MOO-XML (Strict) yet either - and it may never do so. It only manages the "Transitional" format (aka - "a direct XML serialization of the binary structures of the DOC format that we slapped together to let governments who wanted 'open formats' to tick a box")
I see the same phenomenon when my wife is writing her academic papers - she uses Word, and spends ages fucking about with formatting instead of writing content, like all the formatting has to be perfect straight off, completely destroys productivity.
I keep meaning to learn LaTeX, but I don't do enough writing to justify it at the moment.
The first thing that was wrong with the Sun / Oracle project was that they required copyright assignment. This meant that they could choose to license the code however they wish
* Reassign the license of the code from LGPL to Apache 2.0 * Sell the code as a proprietary product (StarOffice) without providing source * Reassign the license of the code to commercial only
etc.
The downside to this is that it discourages contribution. Firstly, people willing to contribute to an LGPL project may be a little lairy of their code being rolled into a commercial product. Secondly, it's a hassle - you have to sign a contract. If your employee lays claim to your output, you have to ask their permission. There's been no sign so far that the Apache foundation have chosen to change this policy. LibreOffice lets you retain your copyright - the happy side effect of which is that the project can now never be "taken closed" like OpenOffice could still be.
Ironically, because of the Apache 2.0 license they have chosen for the code, LibreOffice can roll any good patches in OpenOffice into their project, because Apache 2.0 permits you to add the extra restrictions of LGPL (those permissive licenses, eh?). OpenOffice can't do the reverse. Even if all the core developers hadn't jumped ship (they have), LibreOffice can continue to stay ahead of OpenOffice because of this.
I would take it one further - the problem with wiki's is that they have a first-come, first served model, and the last edit wins.
What you really want is to load the text of the bill into a git repository. Each user interested in amending the bill does so, pushes their branch, and proposes it for merging (with Gerrit or something similar).
A web interface that permitted you to do the branching and editing would be great too.
This sort of thing has already been done with things like the law of Utah, but mostly for review, rather than proposing amendments.
They have disproportionate influence compared to their financial clout, because the media are the means of communication with the people, and politicians find this both enticing and threatening at the same time.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not so much that the product is different or better, although oftentimes it is.
Plus, of course, you have more chance of the product improving if you deliver feedback.
If you send a letter to Kraft telling them that their new salad dressing tastes like Frenchman's Crotch instead of French, they'll probably just mail you back a money-off coupon for "Franch", and go back to concocting ways to make a product that is almost, but not entirely, unlike food, as cheaply as possible.
If you politely mention this to your local deli owner, he'll probably apologize. He might even suggest something else, gift you with a sample of it, and if enough people mention it, he'll change his recipe.
I see this problem with software projects as well ; when the developers are sufficiently removed from the users, insulated from them, the software turns out terrible. It might do exactly what the users said they wanted, but the problem is that users are no good at articulating exactly what they want - because that's a programming skill (whether you do it in English, Python, or C++). The most successful projects I've worked on have been the ones where the developers have to interact with the customers on a daily basis, and preferably sit amongst them.
In Europe, we all have health coverage. We don't have to decide between keeping a finger (that we got cut off through our own inattention in the manufacturing plant) and sending our kids to college, or eating this month.
And we spend less than half per capita what Americans spend on healthcare, partially because we have the bargaining power of an entire government, partially because we're not engaged in an all-out war between insurance providers (who make more money when they deny you care), healthcare providers (who raise their prices because they know they are going to get stiffed by the insurance company half the time) and the patients (who just hope that their treatment is covered on their plan).
Mandatory health insurance is the watered-down weenie policy. Single-payer is the way to go. Why the hell would you enter into a contract with ANY entity that has a vested interest in you dying as quickly as possible?
Hopefully the days of Windows as the sole viable platform for 3D gaming are coming to an end.
Speaking as someone on the Steam beta, TF2 is better on Linux than it is on Windows - I can seamlessly move my pointer from the game, to my browser on the other monitor, even when it's in fullscreen mode - no pointless pointer capture by the application (it still captures when actually playing, just not when browsing servers, etc), no black-screened pause when alt-tabbing out - it may be a psychological thing, but the perceived risk that the game will crash when you do this is much lower as a result.
The only downside is that now there are games on my productivity OS, I don't have a reboot cycle as a barrier to playing them.
What you should be doing is giving each substantial unit of change a branch.
Personal branches become fiefdoms. Unless the developer concerned is disciplined, you are in effect creating a bunch of forks.
Make a branch for each feature, bugfix, etc. It helps that the most painful thing about SVN, merging, is so much easier in Git.
I fail to see why this is a problem from the POV of the USA - they have no problems with contracts that enforce similar arrangements, or enjoin the contracted party to never use the skills he gained working for one employer for the benefit of another.
In Cuba, you get your education from the state, giving you a skillset that you then employ for the benefit of the state. If they want to be able to practice medicine elsewhere for higher gains, they should make the investment and pay for their own training, like you do in America, right? (sounds like we agree on this)
Economically, it's a no-brainer ; the USA could send patients to be treated in Cuba as "medical tourists", pay 1/2 of the price they usually would, the Cubans would make a profit (because they would be getting 5x their costs) which they could funnel back into their country. The travel costs are probably negligible compared to most medical procedure bills.
The real problem from the POV of the USA would be having to admit that Cuba was doing something right. They would have to repeal their current embargo on trading with Cuba, which would make them look "soft on Communism". And they would be drawing attention to the mess they have made of their own healthcare industry.
Thimbleful of extra water.
They still have to drink their own recycled pee, sweat, and poopy-water all day.
The power is for forced airflow, not for the membrane.
People already make third-world refrigerators using evaporative cooling - a large, porous, ceramic container, with another in the middle, the intermediate space filled with damp sand.
But this is a condenser, so you're harvesting both water and heat. You want to radiate that heat away, so you can continue to collect water. This is why the beetle is black - to radiate the maximum heat away from it's body in the night, so it's carapace is nice and cool for it's water collection in the morning.
The Dune novels include a similar device - thermoplastic orbs that are transparent in the day (to avoid heating up too much), and turn black at night, radiating their heat away so they can condense water to irrigate the plants rooted amongst them. Presumably, they are coated with Namib desert beetle coating (or something similar) :-)
This ought to be easy enough to keep clean.
Hydrophobic coatings are already in use on self-cleaning glass - because the water rolls right off, water based things (like micro-organisms, algae, etc), and also dry dust, get washed off very quickly. It should be cleaner than a metallic condenser ; you might have to put a particle filter in if you can't tolerate a little dust in your water.
This is much more efficient than the fog net, principally because the arrangement of materials means that your collection surface is fouled with water less - the droplets roll straight off the hydrophobic surface, leaving the hydrophilic surface available to attract another droplet.
The same physical process is involved regardless of which air/water collection machine you use - it's all applied thermodynamics.
Like another poster said, it's like the difference between relays and transistors - they both perform the same job (being a switch) but one is a much smarter use of material science and much more efficient.
The power is to blow wind over the surface. So a windtrap doesn't need the battery.
Of course, a windtrap could have a wind-powered generator for running it's refrigeration coils. It seems that this is unnecessary with this stuff - the beetle gets by just with radiative cooling - but probably improves the efficiency of the collector surface for it to be cool.
Dilute vodka with 50% water???
In Soviet Russia, vodka dilutes YOU.
The debate with Bush is a great example of the problem.
"Now, the difference in our plans is I want that 2,000 to go to you, and the vice president would like to be spending the 2,000 on your behalf."
And it is, of course, a completely accurate statement - Bush wants the $2,000 to go to the voter, because he knows that more of it will end up in the pockets of his campaign contributors. What it doesn't cover is the value for that money.
I'm mystified why the USA is not familiar in general with these numbers (it probably has something to do with media ownership). Here we go ( taken from 2006 WHO data) :
The USA spent $6,719 per capita on healthcare.
The UK spent $2,815 per capita.
The UK and the USA have roughly equivalent health outcomes. The UK has universal coverage, and no-one goes bankrupt because of medical expenses. The USA has 50M people uninsured who would have to choose between losing a finger and sending their kids to college.
Incidentally, Cuba spent $674 per capita, has (per capita) more doctors, more hospital beds, equivalent life expectancy and better cancer mortality rates. If the USA were really proper capitalists, they'd outsource all their healthcare to Cuba, who can apparently provide a quality product at around a tenth the cost.
I hereby dub this "Ark B inversion syndrome"
I worked on a system processing medical records that used a number of distinct methods of storing dates
* British 2-digit years : dd-MM-yy
* British 4-digit years : dd-MM-yyyy
* American 2-digit years : MM-dd-yy
* ISO 8601 style : yyyy-MM-dd (this is the correct form for all cases where you have to store the date as text)
* An integer offset in minutes from a custom epoch value
The rule I tried to adopt was to always store the date in an unambiguous format, and to present it to the user in whatever format was appropriate. Alas, the system in question only worked properly if you configured the server to be in the British locale, and a surprising number of clients leave their servers in the USA locale when they install the OS. Yes, the code could have been better...
There are some "special" problems with the date handling in the MS implementation VBScript - like the lovely little bug where if your system is configured for the British locale, the date parsing still thinks it's American, *until* you pass it a date that would be invalid, then it will suddenly consider itself British.
A brief test demonstrates that it STILL does this....
' Save as "test-date.vbs" and double click to run
MsgBox(CDate("12-02-1999"))
MsgBox(CDate("13-02-1999"))
Produces two popups proclaiming....
* "12/2/1999" (so far so good)
* "2/13/1999" (D'oh!)
The popups are in the American format, MM/dd/yyyy - despite the British locale. But the String parsing will consider being British, but only if the American worldview doesn't prevail....
It's all made of string.
I'm sure a lot of it is profit, as with any new tech which you can only get from one supplier. These things must be the iPhone of the rocket defense system world.
I wouldn't be surprised to hear that the company making them is supplying Palestine with rockets under the table either. Rockets are probably a lot cheaper than the profit margin on these interceptors.
Tony Stark got it wrong :
"They say that the best weapon is the one you never have to fire. I respectfully disagree. I prefer the weapon you only have to fire once."
He was a defence contractor - the best weapon for him was the one you had to fire repeatedly and keep coming back for ammunition.
The answer is no ; DVD is a digital media. As bandwidth improves, delivering any kind of data on stamped plastic disks just isn't going to cut it. Even if you build a stock of DVDs that are rare, renting them out physically can be trumped by anyone else with a computer and an internet connection.
There's no way he'll get an agreement to stream rare DVDs to anyone - the major labels aren't going to allow it, and any minor label will just think "Hmm, that's a good idea" and do it themselves.
Indeed. He was supposed to be all cool and competent, but all I thought when he even powered up that laptop, let alone hooking it up, was "You utter, utter, numpty. You are about to have your balls handed to you on a plate."
MS Office doesn't save MOO-XML (Strict) yet either - and it may never do so. It only manages the "Transitional" format (aka - "a direct XML serialization of the binary structures of the DOC format that we slapped together to let governments who wanted 'open formats' to tick a box")
Firefox was free. Opera used to charge money. Firefox won by being better than the incumbent and cheaper than the competition.
I see the same phenomenon when my wife is writing her academic papers - she uses Word, and spends ages fucking about with formatting instead of writing content, like all the formatting has to be perfect straight off, completely destroys productivity.
I keep meaning to learn LaTeX, but I don't do enough writing to justify it at the moment.
The first thing that was wrong with the Sun / Oracle project was that they required copyright assignment. This meant that they could choose to license the code however they wish
* Reassign the license of the code from LGPL to Apache 2.0
* Sell the code as a proprietary product (StarOffice) without providing source
* Reassign the license of the code to commercial only
etc.
The downside to this is that it discourages contribution. Firstly, people willing to contribute to an LGPL project may be a little lairy of their code being rolled into a commercial product. Secondly, it's a hassle - you have to sign a contract. If your employee lays claim to your output, you have to ask their permission. There's been no sign so far that the Apache foundation have chosen to change this policy. LibreOffice lets you retain your copyright - the happy side effect of which is that the project can now never be "taken closed" like OpenOffice could still be.
Ironically, because of the Apache 2.0 license they have chosen for the code, LibreOffice can roll any good patches in OpenOffice into their project, because Apache 2.0 permits you to add the extra restrictions of LGPL (those permissive licenses, eh?). OpenOffice can't do the reverse. Even if all the core developers hadn't jumped ship (they have), LibreOffice can continue to stay ahead of OpenOffice because of this.
Obligatory Parking Lot is Full
I would take it one further - the problem with wiki's is that they have a first-come, first served model, and the last edit wins.
What you really want is to load the text of the bill into a git repository. Each user interested in amending the bill does so, pushes their branch, and proposes it for merging (with Gerrit or something similar).
A web interface that permitted you to do the branching and editing would be great too.
This sort of thing has already been done with things like the law of Utah, but mostly for review, rather than proposing amendments.
They have disproportionate influence compared to their financial clout, because the media are the means of communication with the people, and politicians find this both enticing and threatening at the same time.