It's one thing to hire people that have great hand-to-eye coordination from hours of Gameboy play, but it's quite another to seek out good liars:
"After all, in many workplace situations the ability to get away with white lies, to save face or be diplomatic, or to smooth over or disguise mistakes and errors, is a big advantage."
Hire enough compulsive liars, and the people that are promoted will be the slickest players of the bunch. How long does it take those people to rise to the top? 10, 15 years? You can bet we'll have another wave of Enrons just about then.
on a search for "MILF" by putting the Moro Islamic Liberation Front in one category, and separating the more "mature" content in others.
It's not perfect, but it's a good start. I'm sure/.'ers can think of other ambiguous search words where clustering helps. The UI could use some simplification, but otherwise I'm impressed.
One neat consequence for web marketers will be more targetted traffic. With Google, you have to hope searchers will be savvy enough to use 3-4 keywords to search for exactly what they want- if they can click on two more KWs that refine their search, we'll see the inventory of cheaper 3 KW terms go up significantly.
Both Republicans and Democrats, if given the opportunity to target certain assets will do so- even if only by mistake.
What will be the long term consequences, for example if you down a weather sat? Well, for many countries that depend in large part on agriculture for both survival and balance of trade, not having a reliable weather info could be catastrophic. Besides the loss of human life, is it too outlandish to think that a bunch of people that have had their standard of living suddenly diminished could blame the US?
<background> Clinton had a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan bombed to the ground on suspicion of producing WMDs. It was a mistake they later apologized for.
Consequences? A lot of people without access to cheap anti-malaria drugs and affordable veterinary drugs. In other words, a lot of people die, although not right away or in a "sexy" way for western media. I'm afraid people won't get the point of how dangerous it is to disable key infrastructure like weather sats or pharm plants. </background>
An other near-term consequence of this will be to piss off some Canadian moderates that are uneasy with the idea of supporting the US on ballistic missile defense (another component of space weaponization).
Modern windmills are very safe for birds. Moving objects might never be 100% safe, but today they are much bigger and slower. A cage against them would make a lot of noise.
Of course, it's relative. Smokestacks kill birds, and their emissions kill many more. Most important is that wind turbines will kill fewer birds overall. (Sometimes it's hard to directly account for the dead birds- e.g. acid rain resulting in softer egg shells can harm entire populations)
Not to mention every outdoor cat in the US probably kills more birds per year than one of the new turbines -even assuming 1 bird kill per year for a 1MW turbine and only 1 bird kill per cat, we're still a couple orders of magnitude. Some of the birds might be different- I fear more for bald eagles than for blue jays, so we should still be a bit careful where we put the windmills.
Does any one know how much they spend researching, designing, and building this?
I've seen amounts of about $1 million/MW. Adjust the currencies, and these twosites give roughly similar estimates.
Design costs go down with economies of scale, just as research and financing. For more background info, I suggest the Earth Institute's briefing. Their data sheet is quite interesting- it really illustrates how fast costs have been going down.
There should be no doubt that this will be an important source of energy in the future.
It wouldn't have to be very big. I saw some 20 years ago, but they tended to spin very fast, so it makes lots of noise and is more harmful for birds. The economies of scale also work against you.
If you want to be off grid or just more eco-friendly, your best return on investment is in efficiency. CFL/LED lighting, passive solar heating, solar hot water heating... anything that avoids investing too much in PV modules and batteries is probably a good bet.
There are more challenges for creative geeks in reducing our energy needs than just throwing money at the problem to buy more generation and storage. Best of luck!:)
I think there are some people that are incapable of admitting that we might do something to harm our environment. Whether they can not handle the psychological stress or need to cling to some odd metaphysical beliefs, no amount of scientific evidence will cause them to reassess their worldview.
Hell, there are still people that believe the earth is flat, and even some people on/. that believe the Bible is true word for word- that evolution is a crock and we've been here for only ~4k years.
Thanks for taking the time to answer my question. You are right that we disagree, but you seem to have a thoughtful argument behind it.
The main disagreement I see is I don't think there is a limit to the number of people that can get recruited: violence is a spiral, just as you see with Israel/Palestine. Most of the people in Iraq were unfortunately not very militant- in fact despite US-backed (UN-enforced) sanctions, Iraqis still gave Americans a good reception when they visited.
We won't be able to please the leaders and extremists on either side. Because the US has maintained a doctrine that it has the right to intervene in other countries' internal affairs, including getting rid of democratic regimes, it has made a lot of enemies. In fact, I put the genesis of the modern Islamic fundamentalist movement at the CIA's operations in Iran in 1953. US support for Israel (biggest recipient of foreign aid, and beneficiary of a LOT of UNSC vetoes by the USA), and occupation of Saudi Arabia are obviously the proximate causes.
I'm cynical enough to think that leaders on both sides benefit from this conflict and/or might be mentally ill. Fukuyama keeps spouting nonsense about wars of civilizations, and Osama and his lieutenants go on about our evil culture. Support in the US for Bush is up, and support in the Islamic world for Osama is up as well. As I see it, their immediate objective is not winning the cultural war, it's to maintain and extend their power.
I don't think it's backing down to say the US should get out of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, or that it should stop intervening in countries' internal affairs and overthrowing democractic regimes. Almost every conflict that has degenerated (Basque & Corse separatists, IRA, etc) gave extremists support and recruits from constituencies that often had legitimate grievances. We have to deal with those to cut off sources of power for the terrorist leaders, and do the long and painful detective work necessary to infiltrate and disable their networks. This approach seems obvious to many Spaniards, and is one of the reasons that even in the face of terrorist attacks they wanted to condemn them and get out of Iraq. They've tried and failed at using violence, they know where that led them (something like 96% of the population was opposed to the war in the first place).
On the other side of our cultural divide, there are some trying to deligitimate fundamentalists. We don't hear them in our media, but they are there.
10 out of 10 Terrorists agree - Anybody but Bush in 2004
If you weren't marked as a friend-of-a-friend, I'd assume you were a troll. Just about everyone I know that has studied terrorists thinks they either don't mind or even like Bush. After all, he's done more to swell their ranks than any other president before him.
So your statement is quite surprising. Please tell me why you think terrorists prefer anyone but Bush.
Here's an article on wind power ; it links to a 2001 list of levelized costs for different energy sources.
Check out the Earth Policy Institute's article and data on wind energy growth and falling prices. Nuclear energy is growing 2.2% a year, vs. 30% for wind from 1995-2002. With increased production, wind turbines are going down in price- look at that last graph.
If you are not happy with those numbers, I suggest you produce your own.
The arguments you offer against wind are a lot of FUD. Noise pollution and bird deaths are much lower with new turbines- and aesthetics are not something I like to make absolute statements about. Wind won't solve all our problems outright, but it does solve some problems well, without expensive, toxic waste. The problem of regional production is not that big a deal since wind is actually quite close to the demand side for electricity- when it produces only 10% of the power, a grid with a good mix can handle fluctuations without a problem. By the time we are ready to move beyond that level, hydrogen will likely be cost-effective as a short-term storage medium.
One last nitpick: nuclear can not reduce our impact NOW. Nuclear plants are net energy negative for a long time- it takes a lot of time and energy to get them up, so they're only net producers months after they start producing electricity. The first order of business is conservation: it's orders of magnitude cheaper than nukes, or other forms of energy production.
Take lighting: compact fluorescents -I prefer LEDs- cost much less per saved megawatt, at a much lower capital cost than a nuclear plant. They're also much, much easier and faster to deploy.
If you understand compound growth, and economies of scale, you'll be able to see from the stats I linked that it is inevitable that the future will be powered by wind and/or solar. The nuclear lobby is trying hard to use climatic change to justify a new lease on life, but we shouldn't be fooled by their arguments when we have cleaner, cheaper power already available.
So if we put a US base in Newfoundland, Canadians shouldn't think that you really have a base in our country, because we didn't always own NF? No more than a military base in Germany or Northern Italy would be seen as French territory.
What matters is present boundaries. Some half-assed historical answers are only going to piss off people that are already angry.
"kill... Americans... IN ORDER TO LIBERATE THE AL-AQSA MOSQUE AND THE HOLY MOSQUE." Did you purposefully miss that part?
I think I also recall a few statements by the American "leadership" that boiled to the same thing- that they're willing to kill "terrorists" in order to defend freedom.
Both sides have sociopaths leading the bloodbath, and people willing to finance their leaders to achieve objectives that are arguably legitimate. Of course, that would require people understanding why muslims could be upset that a foreign power is occupying the land of their holiest shrine.
To separate the objectives of their supporters and the methods of the "leadership" opens the way for a political solution. The policies advocated by GWB and Co. are instead reinforcing support for fundamentalists.
And how vocal have they been in protesting what happend in Russia, Spain and the USA?
Are you asking why your racist, war-mongering media did not report the Imams' pleas for peace?
Locally -Halifax, NS, Canada-, Dr Badawi (Imam, professor of business and religious studies at St Mary's University, Halifax) has been extremely vocal, even tireless in his advocacy. You'll see him occasionally on CBC or Vision, but I haven't seen many of his ilk on CNN or other American media.
There are a lot of Imams that are doing a lot to denounce terrorism on all sides. If they don't seem vocal enough, it's almost certainly not their fault.
1- Chechen rebels are responsible for killing kids in Russia. They don't really qualify as "arabs"
2- "Radical" (rather, extremist) muslim arabs such as OBL are not intent on killing as many people as possible. Ignorant comments such as you make guarantee you'll never find political actions that could undercut their popular support.
Since you're posting on/., I'll assume you are simply ignorant and not an idiot (although you might be a troll...). You should study what OBL really wants, why his supporters are upset enough to support him, and last but not least, you should read up on what an Arab is.
God damnit, nuclear energy is NOT the cheapest source of energy out there. Natural gas, oil, coal, wind are all cheaper, 1/2 or 1/3 the price.
Like wind, nuclear power is cheap to produce once you've spent insane amounts of capital building a plant. And it takes a long while to start producing energy, never mind producing more than it actually cost to get the plant up and extract its fuel.
Oh, and did I mention that before you actually build the first plant, you need socialism to pay for the R&D for the big corporations? Slashdotters are all going on about new types of plants that will be safe, cheap, etc... but those also need massive subsidies.
Wind only needs subsidies right now to create a level playing field with other subsidized forms of energy- but when the production tax credit is in place, they're already a good investment, with growth rates around 30% year over year. And that means economies of scale and prices that keep falling- soon wind will be cheaper than natural gas.
If non-US citizens could vote, they would select the candidate that emasculates American military
The choice of word is particularly interesting since the rest of the world thinks the US is a macho, violent country.
I'd also like to point out that you'll find complete idiots in the US, so you would have to compare educated people on both sides. Similarly, contrast US foreign reporting to what you find in French papers and it's fair to say that they have you beat- or for that matter, Canadian or British media.
You are right that most of the world would not vote for Bush. This is not to emasculate your country so much as the fact that on almost any issue mentionned in the article, Bush seems to be against the world majority.
(Ok, so my karma is already excellent, it's a joke. sheesh.)
Here's what I make out of this. I am French, but some of the phrases and jargon were difficult to translate.
------ Microsoft and Acadys monitored 1,285,500 european workers in seven european countries for one month.
The average user spends 28% of their time, or 2 hours and 15 minutes, on the net and IM. The rest of the time is spent using the office suite (17%), work-specific software (14%) and windows explorer (9%). The 17% in the office suite is composed of 15% word-processing and 2% Excel.
Ten software titles account for 67% of computer use, as high as 89% in the industrial sector and only 42% in services.
The survey also collected crash data. Windows crashed 8% of sessions, with win2k at 4%, NT4 at 3%, XP at 12%.
Average users also print 10 pages of paper per day. 3-4 prints are made on a local printer, with the rest on a networked printer.
95% of boxes were running Windows, with win2k installed on 42% of desktops. NT4 is at 16%, and XP is in use in 2% of desktops.
The study concludes by suggesting thin-clients, using open-source and rationalizing licensing arrangements, and increasing the length between upgrades both for hardware and software.
Well, seeing how they calculated crashes per session, your crashed session rate would be about 20% (1 crash per month, 50 work weeks in a year). It is odd to calculate it that way, since with more reliable machines you might leave them on until they crash or you power down, leading to higher numbers. The most reliable system could have a 100% rate of crashed sessions.
It might be more appropriate to keep track of how often people need to reboot.
No tabs? You have a point that it's confusing to add new stuff for people, but in this case there's a clear benefit to using tabs.
Explain that you can be reading a page and continue reading while the next link loads in another tab. Reference/background articles, picture galleries... tailor the example for the person - I used a google image search of a good-looking singer for a woman who had a crush on him. Worked like a charm!
Well, not what you might expect, but it seems to me being a geek is also questionning the conventional way people solve problems.
You alluded to the context- your neighbourhood's crime rates are rising. I haven't looked at criminology data in an organized way, and not recently, but I encourage you to do so. There are a few things I have heard about that seemed quite promising- e.g. community gardens encourage people to be out and about where they would be more likely to notice suspect activity (not sure if that's necessarily accurate, but it seems like a good deterrent, especially as most small B&Es are made by people within a short distance of their residence). Traffic calming also sounds intriguing, as they also make for more active neighbourhoods and slower getaways. Leaving only 1 or 2 exits out of a suburban area also increases the psychological pressure on intruders.
You might also have immediate causes to the crime wave that aren't being dealt with by the police- gangs and/or increased drug use. These can be sometimes addressed by neighbourhoods and congregations in a more tactful way than police can- although requesting more visible presence can do wonders.
All this of course doesn't negate the need for a good alarm system and/or a dog. I would however steer clear of guns- if it's a young gang member trying to get quick money for his next hit, they're more likely to escalate if they see their victim has a gun. No amount of stuff is worth risking life and limb.
And why don't you look at the stats that show those with a gun in their hand are more likely to be shot? Three times more likely IIRC. Escalating a conflict with someone that is high on adrenaline (if not something illegal, or jonesing) is NOT a smart move.
A dog is a good idea because it's a great deterrent, and a good alarm. Then call 911.
I am glad other people are having the same idea- and I'm glad your comment got modded +5 Interesting, perhaps a sign that people are willing to consider unusual tactics. Here's how I have been thinking about it.
It might not be necessary to GPL everything. At its simplest, we could require any company wanting to use a patent to not use theirs aggressively, and support a political solution to this madness by lobbying for an end to patents.
No matter how many licenses we have for defensive use, we may still be faced with publicly traded lawsuits of companies without products. Whether companies facing bankruptcy or as proxies for anti-OSS efforts, these are a risk. The only permanent solution is to dismantle the software patent system.
A more assertive foundation could also require a company hand over all its patents in exchange for the right to use any that are already in its portofolio. An aggressive one would be seeking out companies that are in violation of patents being held, asking them to join the campaign against patents or face prosecution.
When only the SCO's (and MS?) of the world are lobbying for more patent protection, while the rest want the whole system dismantled, things should unravel very fast.
Slashdot Mirror
Hire enough compulsive liars, and the people that are promoted will be the slickest players of the bunch. How long does it take those people to rise to the top? 10, 15 years? You can bet we'll have another wave of Enrons just about then.
on a search for "MILF" by putting the Moro Islamic Liberation Front in one category, and separating the more "mature" content in others.
/.'ers can think of other ambiguous search words where clustering helps. The UI could use some simplification, but otherwise I'm impressed.
It's not perfect, but it's a good start. I'm sure
One neat consequence for web marketers will be more targetted traffic. With Google, you have to hope searchers will be savvy enough to use 3-4 keywords to search for exactly what they want- if they can click on two more KWs that refine their search, we'll see the inventory of cheaper 3 KW terms go up significantly.
Both Republicans and Democrats, if given the opportunity to target certain assets will do so- even if only by mistake.
What will be the long term consequences, for example if you down a weather sat? Well, for many countries that depend in large part on agriculture for both survival and balance of trade, not having a reliable weather info could be catastrophic. Besides the loss of human life, is it too outlandish to think that a bunch of people that have had their standard of living suddenly diminished could blame the US?
<background>
Clinton had a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan bombed to the ground on suspicion of producing WMDs. It was a mistake they later apologized for.
Consequences? A lot of people without access to cheap anti-malaria drugs and affordable veterinary drugs. In other words, a lot of people die, although not right away or in a "sexy" way for western media. I'm afraid people won't get the point of how dangerous it is to disable key infrastructure like weather sats or pharm plants.
</background>
An other near-term consequence of this will be to piss off some Canadian moderates that are uneasy with the idea of supporting the US on ballistic missile defense (another component of space weaponization).
Modern windmills are very safe for birds. Moving objects might never be 100% safe, but today they are much bigger and slower. A cage against them would make a lot of noise.
Of course, it's relative. Smokestacks kill birds, and their emissions kill many more. Most important is that wind turbines will kill fewer birds overall. (Sometimes it's hard to directly account for the dead birds- e.g. acid rain resulting in softer egg shells can harm entire populations)
Not to mention every outdoor cat in the US probably kills more birds per year than one of the new turbines -even assuming 1 bird kill per year for a 1MW turbine and only 1 bird kill per cat, we're still a couple orders of magnitude. Some of the birds might be different- I fear more for bald eagles than for blue jays, so we should still be a bit careful where we put the windmills.
Design costs go down with economies of scale, just as research and financing. For more background info, I suggest the Earth Institute's briefing. Their data sheet is quite interesting- it really illustrates how fast costs have been going down.
There should be no doubt that this will be an important source of energy in the future.
It wouldn't have to be very big. I saw some 20 years ago, but they tended to spin very fast, so it makes lots of noise and is more harmful for birds. The economies of scale also work against you.
:)
If you want to be off grid or just more eco-friendly, your best return on investment is in efficiency. CFL/LED lighting, passive solar heating, solar hot water heating... anything that avoids investing too much in PV modules and batteries is probably a good bet.
There are more challenges for creative geeks in reducing our energy needs than just throwing money at the problem to buy more generation and storage. Best of luck!
I think there are some people that are incapable of admitting that we might do something to harm our environment. Whether they can not handle the psychological stress or need to cling to some odd metaphysical beliefs, no amount of scientific evidence will cause them to reassess their worldview.
/. that believe the Bible is true word for word- that evolution is a crock and we've been here for only ~4k years.
Hell, there are still people that believe the earth is flat, and even some people on
I figure it's a lost cause.
Thanks for taking the time to answer my question. You are right that we disagree, but you seem to have a thoughtful argument behind it.
:)
The main disagreement I see is I don't think there is a limit to the number of people that can get recruited: violence is a spiral, just as you see with Israel/Palestine. Most of the people in Iraq were unfortunately not very militant- in fact despite US-backed (UN-enforced) sanctions, Iraqis still gave Americans a good reception when they visited.
We won't be able to please the leaders and extremists on either side. Because the US has maintained a doctrine that it has the right to intervene in other countries' internal affairs, including getting rid of democratic regimes, it has made a lot of enemies. In fact, I put the genesis of the modern Islamic fundamentalist movement at the CIA's operations in Iran in 1953. US support for Israel (biggest recipient of foreign aid, and beneficiary of a LOT of UNSC vetoes by the USA), and occupation of Saudi Arabia are obviously the proximate causes.
I'm cynical enough to think that leaders on both sides benefit from this conflict and/or might be mentally ill. Fukuyama keeps spouting nonsense about wars of civilizations, and Osama and his lieutenants go on about our evil culture. Support in the US for Bush is up, and support in the Islamic world for Osama is up as well. As I see it, their immediate objective is not winning the cultural war, it's to maintain and extend their power.
I don't think it's backing down to say the US should get out of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, or that it should stop intervening in countries' internal affairs and overthrowing democractic regimes. Almost every conflict that has degenerated (Basque & Corse separatists, IRA, etc) gave extremists support and recruits from constituencies that often had legitimate grievances. We have to deal with those to cut off sources of power for the terrorist leaders, and do the long and painful detective work necessary to infiltrate and disable their networks. This approach seems obvious to many Spaniards, and is one of the reasons that even in the face of terrorist attacks they wanted to condemn them and get out of Iraq. They've tried and failed at using violence, they know where that led them (something like 96% of the population was opposed to the war in the first place).
On the other side of our cultural divide, there are some trying to deligitimate fundamentalists. We don't hear them in our media, but they are there.
Meh, this is a bit of a rant...
Here's an article on wind power ; it links to a 2001 list of levelized costs for different energy sources.
Check out the Earth Policy Institute's article and data on wind energy growth and falling prices. Nuclear energy is growing 2.2% a year, vs. 30% for wind from 1995-2002. With increased production, wind turbines are going down in price- look at that last graph.
If you are not happy with those numbers, I suggest you produce your own.
The arguments you offer against wind are a lot of FUD. Noise pollution and bird deaths are much lower with new turbines- and aesthetics are not something I like to make absolute statements about. Wind won't solve all our problems outright, but it does solve some problems well, without expensive, toxic waste. The problem of regional production is not that big a deal since wind is actually quite close to the demand side for electricity- when it produces only 10% of the power, a grid with a good mix can handle fluctuations without a problem. By the time we are ready to move beyond that level, hydrogen will likely be cost-effective as a short-term storage medium.
One last nitpick: nuclear can not reduce our impact NOW. Nuclear plants are net energy negative for a long time- it takes a lot of time and energy to get them up, so they're only net producers months after they start producing electricity. The first order of business is conservation: it's orders of magnitude cheaper than nukes, or other forms of energy production.
Take lighting: compact fluorescents -I prefer LEDs- cost much less per saved megawatt, at a much lower capital cost than a nuclear plant. They're also much, much easier and faster to deploy.
If you understand compound growth, and economies of scale, you'll be able to see from the stats I linked that it is inevitable that the future will be powered by wind and/or solar. The nuclear lobby is trying hard to use climatic change to justify a new lease on life, but we shouldn't be fooled by their arguments when we have cleaner, cheaper power already available.
To fight keyword stuffing, I believe keeping track of the word use distribution in an email would help us judge the spam potential.
So if we put a US base in Newfoundland, Canadians shouldn't think that you really have a base in our country, because we didn't always own NF? No more than a military base in Germany or Northern Italy would be seen as French territory.
What matters is present boundaries. Some half-assed historical answers are only going to piss off people that are already angry.
"kill... Americans... IN ORDER TO LIBERATE THE AL-AQSA MOSQUE AND THE HOLY MOSQUE." Did you purposefully miss that part?
I think I also recall a few statements by the American "leadership" that boiled to the same thing- that they're willing to kill "terrorists" in order to defend freedom.
Both sides have sociopaths leading the bloodbath, and people willing to finance their leaders to achieve objectives that are arguably legitimate. Of course, that would require people understanding why muslims could be upset that a foreign power is occupying the land of their holiest shrine.
To separate the objectives of their supporters and the methods of the "leadership" opens the way for a political solution. The policies advocated by GWB and Co. are instead reinforcing support for fundamentalists.
Locally -Halifax, NS, Canada-, Dr Badawi (Imam, professor of business and religious studies at St Mary's University, Halifax) has been extremely vocal, even tireless in his advocacy. You'll see him occasionally on CBC or Vision, but I haven't seen many of his ilk on CNN or other American media.
There are a lot of Imams that are doing a lot to denounce terrorism on all sides. If they don't seem vocal enough, it's almost certainly not their fault.
1- Chechen rebels are responsible for killing kids in Russia. They don't really qualify as "arabs"
/., I'll assume you are simply ignorant and not an idiot (although you might be a troll...). You should study what OBL really wants, why his supporters are upset enough to support him, and last but not least, you should read up on what an Arab is.
2- "Radical" (rather, extremist) muslim arabs such as OBL are not intent on killing as many people as possible. Ignorant comments such as you make guarantee you'll never find political actions that could undercut their popular support.
Since you're posting on
God damnit, nuclear energy is NOT the cheapest source of energy out there. Natural gas, oil, coal, wind are all cheaper, 1/2 or 1/3 the price.
Like wind, nuclear power is cheap to produce once you've spent insane amounts of capital building a plant. And it takes a long while to start producing energy, never mind producing more than it actually cost to get the plant up and extract its fuel.
Oh, and did I mention that before you actually build the first plant, you need socialism to pay for the R&D for the big corporations? Slashdotters are all going on about new types of plants that will be safe, cheap, etc... but those also need massive subsidies.
Wind only needs subsidies right now to create a level playing field with other subsidized forms of energy- but when the production tax credit is in place, they're already a good investment, with growth rates around 30% year over year. And that means economies of scale and prices that keep falling- soon wind will be cheaper than natural gas.
http://update.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php? id=193&vid=701
I'd also like to point out that you'll find complete idiots in the US, so you would have to compare educated people on both sides. Similarly, contrast US foreign reporting to what you find in French papers and it's fair to say that they have you beat- or for that matter, Canadian or British media.
You are right that most of the world would not vote for Bush. This is not to emasculate your country so much as the fact that on almost any issue mentionned in the article, Bush seems to be against the world majority.
(Ok, so my karma is already excellent, it's a joke. sheesh.)
Here's what I make out of this. I am French, but some of the phrases and jargon were difficult to translate.
------
Microsoft and Acadys monitored 1,285,500 european workers in seven european countries for one month.
The average user spends 28% of their time, or 2 hours and 15 minutes, on the net and IM. The rest of the time is spent using the office suite (17%), work-specific software (14%) and windows explorer (9%). The 17% in the office suite is composed of 15% word-processing and 2% Excel.
Ten software titles account for 67% of computer use, as high as 89% in the industrial sector and only 42% in services.
The survey also collected crash data. Windows crashed 8% of sessions, with win2k at 4%, NT4 at 3%, XP at 12%.
Average users also print 10 pages of paper per day. 3-4 prints are made on a local printer, with the rest on a networked printer.
95% of boxes were running Windows, with win2k installed on 42% of desktops. NT4 is at 16%, and XP is in use in 2% of desktops.
The study concludes by suggesting thin-clients, using open-source and rationalizing licensing arrangements, and increasing the length between upgrades both for hardware and software.
Well, seeing how they calculated crashes per session, your crashed session rate would be about 20% (1 crash per month, 50 work weeks in a year). It is odd to calculate it that way, since with more reliable machines you might leave them on until they crash or you power down, leading to higher numbers. The most reliable system could have a 100% rate of crashed sessions.
It might be more appropriate to keep track of how often people need to reboot.
No tabs? You have a point that it's confusing to add new stuff for people, but in this case there's a clear benefit to using tabs.
Explain that you can be reading a page and continue reading while the next link loads in another tab. Reference/background articles, picture galleries... tailor the example for the person - I used a google image search of a good-looking singer for a woman who had a crush on him. Worked like a charm!
Well, not what you might expect, but it seems to me being a geek is also questionning the conventional way people solve problems.
You alluded to the context- your neighbourhood's crime rates are rising. I haven't looked at criminology data in an organized way, and not recently, but I encourage you to do so. There are a few things I have heard about that seemed quite promising- e.g. community gardens encourage people to be out and about where they would be more likely to notice suspect activity (not sure if that's necessarily accurate, but it seems like a good deterrent, especially as most small B&Es are made by people within a short distance of their residence). Traffic calming also sounds intriguing, as they also make for more active neighbourhoods and slower getaways. Leaving only 1 or 2 exits out of a suburban area also increases the psychological pressure on intruders.
You might also have immediate causes to the crime wave that aren't being dealt with by the police- gangs and/or increased drug use. These can be sometimes addressed by neighbourhoods and congregations in a more tactful way than police can- although requesting more visible presence can do wonders.
All this of course doesn't negate the need for a good alarm system and/or a dog. I would however steer clear of guns- if it's a young gang member trying to get quick money for his next hit, they're more likely to escalate if they see their victim has a gun. No amount of stuff is worth risking life and limb.
Where the heck did you get those stats?
And why don't you look at the stats that show those with a gun in their hand are more likely to be shot? Three times more likely IIRC. Escalating a conflict with someone that is high on adrenaline (if not something illegal, or jonesing) is NOT a smart move.
A dog is a good idea because it's a great deterrent, and a good alarm. Then call 911.
I am glad other people are having the same idea- and I'm glad your comment got modded +5 Interesting, perhaps a sign that people are willing to consider unusual tactics. Here's how I have been thinking about it.
It might not be necessary to GPL everything. At its simplest, we could require any company wanting to use a patent to not use theirs aggressively, and support a political solution to this madness by lobbying for an end to patents.
No matter how many licenses we have for defensive use, we may still be faced with publicly traded lawsuits of companies without products. Whether companies facing bankruptcy or as proxies for anti-OSS efforts, these are a risk. The only permanent solution is to dismantle the software patent system.
A more assertive foundation could also require a company hand over all its patents in exchange for the right to use any that are already in its portofolio. An aggressive one would be seeking out companies that are in violation of patents being held, asking them to join the campaign against patents or face prosecution.
When only the SCO's (and MS?) of the world are lobbying for more patent protection, while the rest want the whole system dismantled, things should unravel very fast.