>a locality has advantages over a corporation in placing broadband.
And a large corporation has advantages over a small one. A smart one has advantages over a dumb one.
As a consumer, why should I want service from anybody except the provider with the most advantages?
Face it, there's some stuff that the public sphere does well.
Not everything; Wal-Mart has huge advantages over a municipal government in providing popular household purchases. Apple has huge advantages over a municipal government at inventing, manufacturing, and selling consumer electronics. Those advantages are reflected in who gets to do those jobs (not government).
I think you'd find that government has NO advantage over private companies at actually *running* an ISP. They might do well, or not. If not, it will be apparent from the price, and you'd find outraged consumers demanding the government contract out the maintenance and replacement of routers and so forth, or even sell off the wires. But if government can get the wires out there when the private firms were not getting the job done, consumers win.
Government is bad at the "agile" part of running a business; they're mostly good at doing stuff that never changes and where every customer gets the same service, and that's a feature. Policing and firefighting both used to be entirely private and society is better off (better served and more fairly served) by both going to the public sphere.
Water and Sewer utilities are mostly public, and where they are not, prices and service are not notably better (on the whole: worse as often as better), because again, those are very simple commodities. My Canadian province used to have public telephone, electric, and gas utilities, but sold those off as a wide variety of customer needs developed; telephone went soon after the Bell breakup in the States, and my city pushed the electric department out to arms-length, it now operates like a private company so as to be more agile.
If you're having trouble getting broadband in and government can do it, then do it that way - it's easy to put sunset provisions into the law so that putting it up for bid to private firms must occur after 10, or 5, or even 3 years.
Just sayin: it's worked for other utilities, and it's worked for Internet in other locations.
All I know is that it seems very likely to me that nothing in the cloud is private; that abrogation of privacy to chase terrorists (remember pre-9/11 when the excuse was always "child porn"? You don't hear it as much recently because they have the magic word "terrorist" to brut about now) has always been extended to snoop into other things, and that a site can be taken down on accusations alone, and for an indefinite time that may stretch into years, even if found innocent.
I just can't handle ANY cloud storage in that environment, unless the files are mere backup or otherwise not valuable. That still leaves a lot of business - at work, we store multiple Terabytes on a cloud service, because we have another copy and because they wouldn't be that "expensive" to lose. But anybody who imagines that "everything is moving to the cloud" feels to me like storing it at the NSA with a sign on the box saying "fishing expeditions encouraged!"
If my attitude bothers those who hope to be the next round of billionaires from the Great Move To The Clouds, they know where to lobby.
That's what we're reduced to, at this point - with no meaningful effect on political outcomes possible for individuals, we must plead for an industry lobby to be on our side.
I'd throw in a good work for PostgreSQL as well. But an additional question: is this the last question you'll be asked of this geographic data? Over the long run, if the questions keep coming, you'll want a stable base from which to work. "Stable" means "popular" to some extent. Can you keep finding developers to work on your problems with the base of data and software that you have to work with, or does it depend on a few people knowing all the not-so-popular products you're working with?
I'm a big open source, fan, but working in a big bureaucracy, I've reluctantly ceded the wisdom of the Microsoft/ESRI "shop" as offering the best chance of quickly replacing people who move on.
We have to stop this shopping around for the country with the loosest morals!
It starts here, but before you know it, they'll be migrating good jobs to countries with appalling labour and environmental practices because those low morals make manufacturing cheaper! Up to 40,000 factories in the US could be lost this way!
Oh, wait, my briefing paper says "1982" not "2012". Damn. What? It already happened?
Undoubtedly the most-read Keynesian on the continent would be Paul Krugman, with his NYT column twice a week.
And Krugman did the thing that is the crucial test of science: he *predicted* that the stimulus would "Not work" (more correctly, that it would work, but modestly and only for a year and a bit, softening the downturn and job-loss but not much) as soon as he had the numbers. He went on to predict that austerity measures taken 18 months later would have the same effect as the austerity in 1937, just when that economy was on the uptick - that it would send it back downhill again.
Since he made a prediction, he had every chance of losing, if his match of theory to reality were poor. But as conservative David Frum noted, you'd be better off reading Krugman columns the last few years than listening to speeches by conservatives on economics. Frum lost his job at the AEI for his apostasy.
On the other hand, Reagan predicted that cutting taxes would cause the deficit to fall, since the economy would take off to such an extent as to make up the % reduction that the government skimmed off the top. The debt rose by $4T, as Ross Perot went on to chart in his campaign 12 years later. The recent G.Bush tax cuts were also predicted to be good for the debt, for exactly the same reason. The debt then rose by another $1T from the cuts alone. (Another T or two from 9/11 and the war- but the two effects are separate; you cannot blame his whole debt-increase on 9/11, sorry).
Failure to predict reality = Failure of Theory. Basic Scientific Method.
A conservative should be against disruption, and a progressive should be in favour of, well, progress.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, Democratic politicians are not unlikely to be in the back pocket of Big Coal, Big Oil, and Big Content, where they try not to notice the Republicans in there with them. At least Republicans hate solar, we can at least distinguish the two on one tech issue.
Frankly, I think ALL the available politicians are "conservative" about disruptive technologies, since new companies are still poor and unable to bribe\\\\\\ contribute to their campaigns, and the existing Powers That Be are able to ensure that any disruptions are thwarted, or at least slowed down.
I think that Canada's NDP ("New Democratic Party" - based on the British Labour Party - no longer actual socialists, but as far as we go in that direction) does show what a genuinely progressive party would be like in the States. They don't take corporate contributions. And here's the most anti-DRM piece I've ever read from a national politician - from an NDP Member of Parliament, last month in the Huffington Post, protesting our Conservative Party's new "C11" bill:
"Most nations with modern copyright laws do not criminalize bypassing digital locks for non-commercial use. They allow people to burn a CD from music purchased on an iPod. They let you copy a new DVD to your laptop. They don't prevent someone who is visually impaired from using software to read ebooks aloud. They don't stop teachers from referencing other media to illustrate a lesson. Under Bill C-11, all of these acts are crimes."
If you think the fuel is running out, please actually look up "LFTR".
If you think that first-mover advantage of actually BUILDING something is no better than stealing the patents, then explain why the Chinese haven't put Boeing out of business. Building super-complicated, high-tech things requires thousands of specialists that each take 10+ years of EXPERIENCE (not just education, especially not in rote-teaching schools) to develop.
My comment was not to indicate Kenya should not pursue solar, however; they do live in a good latitude for it, and they have the absolutely requisite infrastructure: over half their power now is from hydro. You have to balance solar with hydro, preferably with more hydro than solar: when a cloud passes the sun, you suddenly need another gigawatt on the grid NOW, and only hydro can afford to sit idle half the time, and still have it power up in seconds when solar fails you. This is not without cost - you must modify all your hydro stations to put out twice as much power, so that they can put out the same total kWh per year in half as many hours of operation - just nights and cloudy days.
Well, the Chinese are building reactors like crazy, and working on new ones. I guess, for lack of American or European initiative, it will be the Chinese that build the first LFTR around 2020 or so; if those work as well as imagined, by 2030 everybody will be wondering why we thought of any other power source - and the Chinese will have locked up the market. And if not the LFTR, it'll be some other Generation IV design that takes off.
The technology, for all its faults, works. Ask the French. LFTRs and other GenIV ideas are evolutionary improvements, not revolutionary.
While we dither about the horrendous dangers of it, (as we die at the rate of 24,000/year from coal), others will simply move ahead without us.
Bummer to be out-tech'd by Kenya, though. (No offense, Kenya).
All that US prosecutors have to do now is torture the facts until they reveal that your unpopular opinions constitute "material support for terrorism":
http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/12/i-guess-posting-videos-online-can-make-you-terrorist...you can easily see the Bahrain prosecutors turning "activism" into "terrorism" with a stroke of the pen and a few sad stories of injured policemen at the protests, and the "value of the advertising" of the Facebook page turned into "material support", the way the Bostonian's "free translation for Al-Qaeda" became material support for them.
It's becoming really difficult to find anything these countries do, that we used to be able to look down upon, that they can't now throw into our face.
All movie *rentals*, on any medium, are also the same - and you can see the free market at work in charging you more for "New & Popular" rather than "Last Years and Older", so it's not because video store owners are unaware of the market.
Speaking of discs, the finest Springsteen album may actually be cheaper in your music store than deservedly-obscure indie bands doing death metal with accordions, because of the longer production run.
A paperback of The Da Vinci Code also sells for the same as a paperback of Lithuanian poetry.
Content just sells by different rules than physical objects. That's one of the reasons that applying physical-object valuation to the "costs of piracy" is sensed as "not right" by most people who hear the comically-high figures.
If you walk out of the rental store with a shoplifted CD or DVD, you're walking out with all the embedded value in it of the store's shipping costs, their total rent, salaries and other operating and capital costs divided by the number of discs in the store. (Which is the same whether the disc is Raiders or Norbit.) When you just take the content itself, that value is not lost.
Yeah, Dyer is all over that, too. Not so much the "we can blow up your oil industry" threat, as Iran's problem that they can't even stop selling the oil voluntarily for very long. This is true of the whole Arab world by this point as well; since the 70's oil embargo, their populations have doubled and they can no longer *afford* to stop selling oil. For the Gulf states, we're talking food money, they can't support their own populations. For Iran, it's more like the difference between their current economy and impoverished subsistence.
This is kind of missing from the whole argument about "we have to stop using oil altogether" in energy strategy: we do - but when we finally do, what happens to the middle east? No country is more than a few meals away from revolution, and all that...
All the warnings you need about attacking Iran can be had from geopolitical analyst Dr. Gwynne Dyer, who has to tiredly write another article warning about it being a Bad Idea every couple of years. From the most recent one:
"The Noor anti-ship missile is a locally built version of the Chinese YJ-82. It has a 200-km. (140-mile) range, enough to cover all the major choke points in the Gulf. It flies at twice the speed of sound just meters above the sea’s surface, and it has a tiny radar profile. Its single-shot kill probability has been put as high as 98 percent.
Iran’s mountainous coastline extends along the whole northern side of the Gulf, and these missiles have easily concealed mobile launchers. They would sink tankers with ease, and in a few days insurance rates for tankers planning to enter the Gulf would become prohibitive, effectively shutting down the region’s oil exports completely."
Do they sound a little less "asymmetric" now? Yes, you could bombard the coastline heavily, but some caves can go pretty deep, particularly if the cavers bring mining equipment - 25 years ago. And do you really want to get into a shootin' match with 98% kill probability when they lose a 5-man missile crew and you lose a carrier?
I also like the point about the "insurance costs". You don't think of wars being one by accountants, but that's the way it goes. The Iranians have absolutely zero need to engage with the mighty US Navy at all; they just have to sink a couple of very fat, very slow oil tankers, just a few, then wait for Lloyd's to react, while the probably-unharmed crew are being fished from the lifeboats. And Lloyd's says to itself, "Can even the US Navy check out every goddamn cave the size of a 2-car garage in 200km of coastline? When the 90% that do not contain actual missiles do contain dummies? No, they cannot. Not this week, month, or, probably, year." And so the price of oil sits there at $250/bbl until everybody calms down.
Re:What about their children?
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How Doctors Die
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I am the son of a lawyer, the grandson of a lawyer, and the brother of a lawyer, and dude, trust me: they should consider the family potential plaintiffs as well. It happens.
PS: Just kidding about my dad and granddad. But the brother is enough.
Funny coincidence, five minutes ago, the Wikipedia funding request hit my mailbox. Says they stop asking for funds every year once they hit a goal...but alas this year did not make it.
Really, it is a very impressive service to offer with, as the letter says, 679 servers and 95 staff. They keep it all very, very tight. I felt good donating this year, and that was BEFORE the SOPA thing.
This already sounds bad to me before it starts. IT departments shouldn't have their own goals any more than the Finance dept. should have their own, or the HR department. All of these are "internal service departments" - they do nothing directly for the corporation, as such, they only do so indirectly by providing internal services to the staff.
You may notice the odd phenomenon already happening in this slashdot topic, of a bunch of IT geeks making fun of, and heaping criticism on, IT departments. That's because internal service departments are almost completely incapable of distinguishing when they are serving the larger corporate need, and just serving themselves.
I have yet to find the IT department that did an honest and humble cost-benefit analysis or risk assessment, one that came up with the conclusion, of, say, (to pick a currently raging topic as an example) "Yeah, allowing people to use Smart Phones at will is going to cause us a lot of pain, but that pain is small compared to the good it will do for everybody else, so I guess we have to suck this one up for the team".
Never.
The whole last 30 years since the PC came in (indeed, one could go back to DEC "minicomputers" and "departmental computing") has been one of steady spread and democratization of IT tools. "IT people" (that would be us, the/. crowd) have jumped on this cultural shift with enthusiasm and indeed evangelism. But IT *departments* have always stood in the way, holding it back, demanding to control it all. They assert the larger good, but never do that cost/benefit figure, never do a post-analysis of productivity "improvements" after they took over something that was not formerly under their control, and cost them quite a lot of money to manage.
So get a security guy if the corporation can afford one and needs one. Get a central IT purchasing and contract-management guy, if that is cost-justified. Get IT-type staff, each as needed. But split them up, don't let them become their own department. Absolutely not one with their own goals.
When you talk about changing modern education, you first need to understand how unprecedented and cheap it is.
All education before it had a student:teacher ratio of at most 5:1, with the average under 2:1. The majority was 1:1 - parent-child and master-apprentice (Even Sith Lords understood the importance of the ratio!)
"Modern" education, with its 30:1 ratio, made it affordable to all by dropping the cost of teaching a remarkable order-of-magnitude, but at the cost of regimentation and a wide spectrum of outcomes, from the left-behind to the racing-ahead. Any teacher will tell you that it's all about the parents, ie the direct-contact with the child, encouraging and expecting learning. The teacher has about 200days * 5 hours/30 =33 hours per year per student; the parents, about 365*12 = 4380. Google "30 million word gap" for an especially depressing take on how handicapped some kids are by their parent's behaviour.
The mistake with e-learning is imagining it to be the 'electronic teacher' (as TV was called the "electronic babysitter" when I was little). But until we get AI - and computers allowed to *make* the kid mind with punishments or something, they will remain just a passive tool that requires MORE, not less, supervision. The teacher here *could* have made use of iPads, if they'd had another teacher assigned, well-prepped with iPad experience and software. But they had no more time to supervise iPad use that they would have had to supervise the kids being given their own LHC to help them learn physics.
The big deal when I was a kid (60's) was TV in the classroom. That was going to free up teacher time because we could just watch our education on TV. Alas, we required closer supervision with the TV on; kids werre more likely to talk and giggle than when watching a live person who kept making eye contact.
I suspect a majority of the population could qualify for the Ivy League if they were raised in homes full of stimulation and good example, then educated at a 5:1 ratio that gave the educators time to use and supervise the use of modern technology.
My parents, educated in the late 1920's and most of the 1930's, were the first generation to all get 12 years of 30-kid-room public education; my Mom's coal-miner Dad went to the mines at 12. If the overall rising wealth of society since those days had been expressed with shrinking class sizes rather than , say, an increase in home size from 500 to 2000 square feet, we'd have at least 8:1 classes by now - a return to old traditions, as it were, you'd think that would be popular with conservatives.
And then there'd be time to think of something to do with those iPads.
This is priceless. I nearly never went back to the article at all, and then when checking my profile, notice it's cranked up to 5, come here and there's this huge offtopic thread: free advice on my web design!
Yes, it's a 1993 home page (I thought that was my point?). No, I haven't put 30 minutes into revising it in design terms the whole time (save adding the new picture when friends started asking if it was a "younger relative"). And here's the whole deal on that: I HAVE NOTHING TO SELL.
Granted, that top part is based on your average 90's resume', and that's "selling yourself", but I'd been to my last job interview by then, save internal ones. The rest is literally an html list of links, all I use a home page for. It doesn't have to "present" in any way, doesn't have to sell, catch the eye, reach out. It just has to sit there and be readable and searchable. Entirely passive information.
Which brings me to the light-on-dark colour scheme. I do a lot of reading in dark rooms (here in Calgary, it's dark at 4:45 today) and black-on-white text is like reading while staring at the reading light. (I blame this on the original Mac trying to pretend the screen was paper; I still disagree.) I treasure the trick on my Linux Mint that reverses the colours on a window, letting me flip to white on black. (Just found out Windows can do this: Left-Alt, Left-Shift, PrtSc) My only terminal-emulator colours are green (or yellow) on black. The kindle app is never set any other way. Since I don't care if I get only my own hits or millions, I might as well not squint at my own home page.
Now back to our topic, which I believe was web page brevity and use of Flash blobs when HTML/JPG would probably do. If my web page pains you, don't read it.
I agree "Innovative" was the wrong word for the Transformer. "Awesome" would, however, be more the right nuance.
I bought the first netbook (also ASUS, of course, the Eee PC) because the form factor worked for me as something you didn't hesitate to carry everywhere - and lightened the load on vacation while still being able to keep up with E-mail and handle all my photo review / tossing-out / rotating / cropping / blogging.
I love the "pad" style touch interface (I'm having to hold back from touching other screens now), but I'm just not terse enough to do E-mail with a screen keypad. Only useful for typing in passwords and short URLs. No E-mail, no-take-on-vacation. End of story.
An iPad with a keyboard accessory could cure that, but the Transformer is much more - doubling the battery life (and the way it does it is very clever: plug a depleted pad into the keyboard and it will actually charge it up until the keyboard is nearly depleted, so a mid-day session of catching up E-mail can have you ready to go back out to the field again; I never bring the charger to work), and providing an SD port and two USB ports. That's "killer app" compared to an iPad right there. (Oh, and Transformers have a micro-SD slot right on the Pad, so you can either increase your storage with it, or even use one in your camera and be able to review photos on a 10" screen...)
YMMV, but in my location, the price of the Transformer with keyboard and 32GB was the same as the iPad2 with 32GB and no keyboard. Case closed.
You find human beings on every corner of this globe, subsisting for millenia on every possible local bit of biology from arctic seals to desert scorpions, and it turns out this doesn't kill us, either. Well, the food at certain southern restaurants does lead to a lot of heartburn, but other than that, we're good to go.
My home page remains where it has been since 1993 at the Calgary Unix Users Group: http://www.cuug.ab.ca/branderr...clocks in at 9.2K, plus a 15K GIF and a 9.1K JPG (if you "turn on images" in your browser - remember when it was a realistic option not to?)
I have held the line, while Viewing With Alarm (VWA) the growth of web pages for the entire 18 years since. I wrote Bob Metcalfe when he had a column at InfoWorld 15 years back, and he was Viewing With Alarm the exponential growth in Internet traffic and predicting the "collapse of the Internet" (had to eat those words - literally) because of it. My letter pointed out that his column constituted 2K of text - that was all the generated content that was bringing in the readers, (unless you count the 10K gif of Bob Metcalfe, and I don't), and the page had an additional 100K of framing and advertising-related image GIFs. His reply was somewhat defensive.
This last year, I had occasion to travel on the Queen Mary 2, where all internet is via satellite at a minimum of 34 cents per minute with their bulk plan. How quickly I grew to resent the giant Flash blobs that would be automatically downloaded with every page of a newspaper so I wouldn't miss the animated ads for the latest in car buys. At QM2 speeds, I'd have to wait about two minutes before I even had an "X" mark to click on to dismiss the ad. I was rather quickly cured of almost any interest in the Internet content at ALL, I did my E-mail, checked the google news headlines (fewest high-byte ads), and logged off.
My point: 90% of mail is spam. So are 90% of web page bytes. We just don't call it spam. We call it "the whole outside frame around the news page that we try not to see, but keeps jumping around into our field of view".
>50 cents per gigabyte... which I think is pretty fair.
Not remotely. Costs to run a network are partly fixed (same number of kilometres of line, count of humming boxes to buy and then maintain each month, however many bytes flow) and partly per-byte.
Once you've paid that fixed cost with Internet - clearly around $25-$40/month range almost everywhere - they can throw in the first 50GB free because that incremental cost has been established to be about 2 cents per GB in huge bulk. This was revealed by Netflix court filings that showed a movie costing them a nickel's bandwidth per download. So after you'd hit your cap, Netflix would pay a nickel to their ISP to send it, and you'd pay $1.25 to receive it.
The 50 cents/GB is over an order of magnitude high for even a conservative, high-profit "fair price". And remember, this is a regulated, licensed monopoly. Their rates are supposed to reflect service costs.
With all the scrutiny, polygraphs, no doubt surveillance, nobody there would dare do drugs.
Therefore, they aren't the type to come up with original ideas, therefore the place runs on old ideas forever, therefore it becomes a stultified bureaucracy.......therefore, they can take in $40B a year and STILL miss 9/11, still get WMDs wrong, and all the earlier stuff in Tim Weiner's "Legacy of Ashes" about never being able to successfully plant moles at any number at any depth into China, North Korea, or Russia.
THEREFORE we need to legalize drugs immediately...to save the CIA. This is to protect America, people!
Can't believe I'm defending Arnie, but he was a movie star who also made some potloads of money in real estate. That, at a minimum, indicates an ability to pick smart people and provide them with at least minimally-knowledgeable oversight. Other athletes and movie stars have all their money disappear through stupid spending of their own, or hiring predatory people with no oversight. N.Cage can act better with one eyebrow than Arnie can with that whole huge body, but I know which I'd pick to invest money with.
Speak for yourself. It's often just two possibilities. The construction people have only two templates they are willing to work from:
"Do we use 16" on-centre or 24" on-centre with these beams?" You only have to rough-in the calc after you see the dead load, room use, and wind-load on that side, to know which to pick. Calculator seldom necessary after the tenth design you do.
Hell, "House, MD" is often making a bet on which of two therapies to use, three at the most, and the statistical odds are obvious to everybody in the room once the symptoms have been added up.
Engineering (Medicine, even more) is sometimes about making HARD choices, but they are just choices.
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>a locality has advantages over a corporation in placing broadband.
And a large corporation has advantages over a small one. A smart one has advantages over a dumb one.
As a consumer, why should I want service from anybody except the provider with the most advantages?
Face it, there's some stuff that the public sphere does well.
Not everything; Wal-Mart has huge advantages over a municipal government in providing popular household purchases. Apple has huge advantages over a municipal government at inventing, manufacturing, and selling consumer electronics. Those advantages are reflected in who gets to do those jobs (not government).
I think you'd find that government has NO advantage over private companies at actually *running* an ISP. They might do well, or not. If not, it will be apparent from the price, and you'd find outraged consumers demanding the government contract out the maintenance and replacement of routers and so forth, or even sell off the wires. But if government can get the wires out there when the private firms were not getting the job done, consumers win.
Government is bad at the "agile" part of running a business; they're mostly good at doing stuff that never changes and where every customer gets the same service, and that's a feature. Policing and firefighting both used to be entirely private and society is better off (better served and more fairly served) by both going to the public sphere.
Water and Sewer utilities are mostly public, and where they are not, prices and service are not notably better (on the whole: worse as often as better), because again, those are very simple commodities. My Canadian province used to have public telephone, electric, and gas utilities, but sold those off as a wide variety of customer needs developed; telephone went soon after the Bell breakup in the States, and my city pushed the electric department out to arms-length, it now operates like a private company so as to be more agile.
If you're having trouble getting broadband in and government can do it, then do it that way - it's easy to put sunset provisions into the law so that putting it up for bid to private firms must occur after 10, or 5, or even 3 years.
Just sayin: it's worked for other utilities, and it's worked for Internet in other locations.
All I know is that it seems very likely to me that nothing in the cloud is private; that abrogation of privacy to chase terrorists (remember pre-9/11 when the excuse was always "child porn"? You don't hear it as much recently because they have the magic word "terrorist" to brut about now) has always been extended to snoop into other things, and that a site can be taken down on accusations alone, and for an indefinite time that may stretch into years, even if found innocent.
I just can't handle ANY cloud storage in that environment, unless the files are mere backup or otherwise not valuable. That still leaves a lot of business - at work, we store multiple Terabytes on a cloud service, because we have another copy and because they wouldn't be that "expensive" to lose. But anybody who imagines that "everything is moving to the cloud" feels to me like storing it at the NSA with a sign on the box saying "fishing expeditions encouraged!"
If my attitude bothers those who hope to be the next round of billionaires from the Great Move To The Clouds, they know where to lobby.
That's what we're reduced to, at this point - with no meaningful effect on political outcomes possible for individuals, we must plead for an industry lobby to be on our side.
I'd throw in a good work for PostgreSQL as well. But an additional question: is this the last question you'll be asked of this geographic data? Over the long run, if the questions keep coming, you'll want a stable base from which to work. "Stable" means "popular" to some extent. Can you keep finding developers to work on your problems with the base of data and software that you have to work with, or does it depend on a few people knowing all the not-so-popular products you're working with?
I'm a big open source, fan, but working in a big bureaucracy, I've reluctantly ceded the wisdom of the Microsoft/ESRI "shop" as offering the best chance of quickly replacing people who move on.
We have to stop this shopping around for the country with the loosest morals!
It starts here, but before you know it, they'll be migrating good jobs to countries with appalling labour and environmental practices because those low morals make manufacturing cheaper! Up to 40,000 factories in the US could be lost this way!
Oh, wait, my briefing paper says "1982" not "2012". Damn. What? It already happened?
Never mind...
Undoubtedly the most-read Keynesian on the continent would be Paul Krugman, with his NYT column twice a week.
And Krugman did the thing that is the crucial test of science: he *predicted* that the stimulus would "Not work" (more correctly, that it would work, but modestly and only for a year and a bit, softening the downturn and job-loss but not much) as soon as he had the numbers. He went on to predict that austerity measures taken 18 months later would have the same effect as the austerity in 1937, just when that economy was on the uptick - that it would send it back downhill again.
Since he made a prediction, he had every chance of losing, if his match of theory to reality were poor. But as conservative David Frum noted, you'd be better off reading Krugman columns the last few years than listening to speeches by conservatives on economics. Frum lost his job at the AEI for his apostasy.
On the other hand, Reagan predicted that cutting taxes would cause the deficit to fall, since the economy would take off to such an extent as to make up the % reduction that the government skimmed off the top. The debt rose by $4T, as Ross Perot went on to chart in his campaign 12 years later. The recent G.Bush tax cuts were also predicted to be good for the debt, for exactly the same reason. The debt then rose by another $1T from the cuts alone. (Another T or two from 9/11 and the war- but the two effects are separate; you cannot blame his whole debt-increase on 9/11, sorry).
Failure to predict reality = Failure of Theory. Basic Scientific Method.
A conservative should be against disruption, and a progressive should be in favour of, well, progress.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, Democratic politicians are not unlikely to be in the back pocket of Big Coal, Big Oil, and Big Content, where they try not to notice the Republicans in there with them. At least Republicans hate solar, we can at least distinguish the two on one tech issue.
Frankly, I think ALL the available politicians are "conservative" about disruptive technologies, since new companies are still poor and unable to bribe\\\\\\ contribute to their campaigns, and the existing Powers That Be are able to ensure that any disruptions are thwarted, or at least slowed down.
I think that Canada's NDP ("New Democratic Party" - based on the British Labour Party - no longer actual socialists, but as far as we go in that direction) does show what a genuinely progressive party would be like in the States. They don't take corporate contributions. And here's the most anti-DRM piece I've ever read from a national politician - from an NDP Member of Parliament, last month in the Huffington Post, protesting our Conservative Party's new "C11" bill:
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/romeo-saganash/copyright-canada-reform-bill-c-11_b_1143332.html
Excerpt:
"Most nations with modern copyright laws do not criminalize bypassing digital locks for non-commercial use. They allow people to burn a CD from music purchased on an iPod. They let you copy a new DVD to your laptop. They don't prevent someone who is visually impaired from using software to read ebooks aloud. They don't stop teachers from referencing other media to illustrate a lesson. Under Bill C-11, all of these acts are crimes."
If you think the fuel is running out, please actually look up "LFTR".
If you think that first-mover advantage of actually BUILDING something is no better than stealing the patents, then explain why the Chinese haven't put Boeing out of business. Building super-complicated, high-tech things requires thousands of specialists that each take 10+ years of EXPERIENCE (not just education, especially not in rote-teaching schools) to develop.
My comment was not to indicate Kenya should not pursue solar, however; they do live in a good latitude for it, and they have the absolutely requisite infrastructure: over half their power now is from hydro. You have to balance solar with hydro, preferably with more hydro than solar: when a cloud passes the sun, you suddenly need another gigawatt on the grid NOW, and only hydro can afford to sit idle half the time, and still have it power up in seconds when solar fails you. This is not without cost - you must modify all your hydro stations to put out twice as much power, so that they can put out the same total kWh per year in half as many hours of operation - just nights and cloudy days.
Well, the Chinese are building reactors like crazy, and working on new ones. I guess, for lack of American or European initiative, it will be the Chinese that build the first LFTR around 2020 or so; if those work as well as imagined, by 2030 everybody will be wondering why we thought of any other power source - and the Chinese will have locked up the market. And if not the LFTR, it'll be some other Generation IV design that takes off.
The technology, for all its faults, works. Ask the French. LFTRs and other GenIV ideas are evolutionary improvements, not revolutionary.
While we dither about the horrendous dangers of it, (as we die at the rate of 24,000/year from coal), others will simply move ahead without us.
Bummer to be out-tech'd by Kenya, though. (No offense, Kenya).
All that US prosecutors have to do now is torture the facts until they reveal that your unpopular opinions constitute "material support for terrorism":
http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/12/i-guess-posting-videos-online-can-make-you-terrorist ...you can easily see the Bahrain prosecutors turning "activism" into "terrorism" with a stroke of the pen and a few sad stories of injured policemen at the protests, and the "value of the advertising" of the Facebook page turned into "material support", the way the Bostonian's "free translation for Al-Qaeda" became material support for them.
It's becoming really difficult to find anything these countries do, that we used to be able to look down upon, that they can't now throw into our face.
All movie *rentals*, on any medium, are also the same - and you can see the free market at work in charging you more for "New & Popular" rather than "Last Years and Older", so it's not because video store owners are unaware of the market.
Speaking of discs, the finest Springsteen album may actually be cheaper in your music store than deservedly-obscure indie bands doing death metal with accordions, because of the longer production run.
A paperback of The Da Vinci Code also sells for the same as a paperback of Lithuanian poetry.
Content just sells by different rules than physical objects. That's one of the reasons that applying physical-object valuation to the "costs of piracy" is sensed as "not right" by most people who hear the comically-high figures.
If you walk out of the rental store with a shoplifted CD or DVD, you're walking out with all the embedded value in it of the store's shipping costs, their total rent, salaries and other operating and capital costs divided by the number of discs in the store. (Which is the same whether the disc is Raiders or Norbit.) When you just take the content itself, that value is not lost.
Yeah, Dyer is all over that, too. Not so much the "we can blow up your oil industry" threat, as Iran's problem that they can't even stop selling the oil voluntarily for very long. This is true of the whole Arab world by this point as well; since the 70's oil embargo, their populations have doubled and they can no longer *afford* to stop selling oil. For the Gulf states, we're talking food money, they can't support their own populations. For Iran, it's more like the difference between their current economy and impoverished subsistence.
This is kind of missing from the whole argument about "we have to stop using oil altogether" in energy strategy: we do - but when we finally do, what happens to the middle east? No country is more than a few meals away from revolution, and all that...
All the warnings you need about attacking Iran can be had from geopolitical analyst Dr. Gwynne Dyer, who has to tiredly write another article warning about it being a Bad Idea every couple of years. From the most recent one:
"The Noor anti-ship missile is a locally built version of the Chinese YJ-82. It has a 200-km. (140-mile) range, enough to cover all the major choke points in the Gulf. It flies at twice the speed of sound just meters above the sea’s surface, and it has a tiny radar profile. Its single-shot kill probability has been put as high as 98 percent.
Iran’s mountainous coastline extends along the whole northern side of the Gulf, and these missiles have easily concealed mobile launchers. They would sink tankers with ease, and in a few days insurance rates for tankers planning to enter the Gulf would become prohibitive, effectively shutting down the region’s oil exports completely."
Do they sound a little less "asymmetric" now? Yes, you could bombard the coastline heavily, but some caves can go pretty deep, particularly if the cavers bring mining equipment - 25 years ago. And do you really want to get into a shootin' match with 98% kill probability when they lose a 5-man missile crew and you lose a carrier?
I also like the point about the "insurance costs". You don't think of wars being one by accountants, but that's the way it goes. The Iranians have absolutely zero need to engage with the mighty US Navy at all; they just have to sink a couple of very fat, very slow oil tankers, just a few, then wait for Lloyd's to react, while the probably-unharmed crew are being fished from the lifeboats. And Lloyd's says to itself, "Can even the US Navy check out every goddamn cave the size of a 2-car garage in 200km of coastline? When the 90% that do not contain actual missiles do contain dummies? No, they cannot. Not this week, month, or, probably, year." And so the price of oil sits there at $250/bbl until everybody calms down.
I am the son of a lawyer, the grandson of a lawyer, and the brother of a lawyer, and dude, trust me: they should consider the family potential plaintiffs as well. It happens.
PS: Just kidding about my dad and granddad. But the brother is enough.
Funny coincidence, five minutes ago, the Wikipedia funding request hit my mailbox. Says they stop asking for funds every year once they hit a goal...but alas this year did not make it.
Really, it is a very impressive service to offer with, as the letter says, 679 servers and 95 staff. They keep it all very, very tight. I felt good donating this year, and that was BEFORE the SOPA thing.
This already sounds bad to me before it starts. IT departments shouldn't have their own goals any more than the Finance dept. should have their own, or the HR department. All of these are "internal service departments" - they do nothing directly for the corporation, as such, they only do so indirectly by providing internal services to the staff.
You may notice the odd phenomenon already happening in this slashdot topic, of a bunch of IT geeks making fun of, and heaping criticism on, IT departments. That's because internal service departments are almost completely incapable of distinguishing when they are serving the larger corporate need, and just serving themselves.
I have yet to find the IT department that did an honest and humble cost-benefit analysis or risk assessment, one that came up with the conclusion, of, say, (to pick a currently raging topic as an example) "Yeah, allowing people to use Smart Phones at will is going to cause us a lot of pain, but that pain is small compared to the good it will do for everybody else, so I guess we have to suck this one up for the team".
Never.
The whole last 30 years since the PC came in (indeed, one could go back to DEC "minicomputers" and "departmental computing") has been one of steady spread and democratization of IT tools. "IT people" (that would be us, the /. crowd) have jumped on this cultural shift with enthusiasm and indeed evangelism. But IT *departments* have always stood in the way, holding it back, demanding to control it all. They assert the larger good, but never do that cost/benefit figure, never do a post-analysis of productivity "improvements" after they took over something that was not formerly under their control, and cost them quite a lot of money to manage.
So get a security guy if the corporation can afford one and needs one. Get a central IT purchasing and contract-management guy, if that is cost-justified. Get IT-type staff, each as needed. But split them up, don't let them become their own department. Absolutely not one with their own goals.
When you talk about changing modern education, you first need to understand how unprecedented and cheap it is.
All education before it had a student:teacher ratio of at most 5:1, with the average under 2:1. The majority was 1:1 - parent-child and master-apprentice (Even Sith Lords understood the importance of the ratio!)
"Modern" education, with its 30:1 ratio, made it affordable to all by dropping the cost of teaching a remarkable order-of-magnitude, but at the cost of regimentation and a wide spectrum of outcomes, from the left-behind to the racing-ahead. Any teacher will tell you that it's all about the parents, ie the direct-contact with the child, encouraging and expecting learning. The teacher has about 200days * 5 hours/30 =33 hours per year per student; the parents, about 365*12 = 4380. Google "30 million word gap" for an especially depressing take on how handicapped some kids are by their parent's behaviour.
The mistake with e-learning is imagining it to be the 'electronic teacher' (as TV was called the "electronic babysitter" when I was little). But until we get AI - and computers allowed to *make* the kid mind with punishments or something, they will remain just a passive tool that requires MORE, not less, supervision. The teacher here *could* have made use of iPads, if they'd had another teacher assigned, well-prepped with iPad experience and software. But they had no more time to supervise iPad use that they would have had to supervise the kids being given their own LHC to help them learn physics.
The big deal when I was a kid (60's) was TV in the classroom. That was going to free up teacher time because we could just watch our education on TV. Alas, we required closer supervision with the TV on; kids werre more likely to talk and giggle than when watching a live person who kept making eye contact.
I suspect a majority of the population could qualify for the Ivy League if they were raised in homes full of stimulation and good example, then educated at a 5:1 ratio that gave the educators time to use and supervise the use of modern technology.
My parents, educated in the late 1920's and most of the 1930's, were the first generation to all get 12 years of 30-kid-room public education; my Mom's coal-miner Dad went to the mines at 12. If the overall rising wealth of society since those days had been expressed with shrinking class sizes rather than , say, an increase in home size from 500 to 2000 square feet, we'd have at least 8:1 classes by now - a return to old traditions, as it were, you'd think that would be popular with conservatives.
And then there'd be time to think of something to do with those iPads.
This is priceless. I nearly never went back to the article at all, and then when checking my profile, notice it's cranked up to 5, come here and there's this huge offtopic thread: free advice on my web design!
Yes, it's a 1993 home page (I thought that was my point?). No, I haven't put 30 minutes into revising it in design terms the whole time (save adding the new picture when friends started asking if it was a "younger relative"). And here's the whole deal on that:
I HAVE NOTHING TO SELL.
Granted, that top part is based on your average 90's resume', and that's "selling yourself", but I'd been to my last job interview by then, save internal ones. The rest is literally an html list of links, all I use a home page for. It doesn't have to "present" in any way, doesn't have to sell, catch the eye, reach out. It just has to sit there and be readable and searchable. Entirely passive information.
Which brings me to the light-on-dark colour scheme. I do a lot of reading in dark rooms (here in Calgary, it's dark at 4:45 today) and black-on-white text is like reading while staring at the reading light. (I blame this on the original Mac trying to pretend the screen was paper; I still disagree.) I treasure the trick on my Linux Mint that reverses the colours on a window, letting me flip to white on black. (Just found out Windows can do this: Left-Alt, Left-Shift, PrtSc) My only terminal-emulator colours are green (or yellow) on black. The kindle app is never set any other way. Since I don't care if I get only my own hits or millions, I might as well not squint at my own home page.
Now back to our topic, which I believe was web page brevity and use of Flash blobs when HTML/JPG would probably do. If my web page pains you, don't read it.
I agree "Innovative" was the wrong word for the Transformer. "Awesome" would, however, be more the right nuance.
I bought the first netbook (also ASUS, of course, the Eee PC) because the form factor worked for me as something you didn't hesitate to carry everywhere - and lightened the load on vacation while still being able to keep up with E-mail and handle all my photo review / tossing-out / rotating / cropping / blogging.
I love the "pad" style touch interface (I'm having to hold back from touching other screens now), but I'm just not terse enough to do E-mail with a screen keypad. Only useful for typing in passwords and short URLs. No E-mail, no-take-on-vacation. End of story.
An iPad with a keyboard accessory could cure that, but the Transformer is much more - doubling the battery life (and the way it does it is very clever: plug a depleted pad into the keyboard and it will actually charge it up until the keyboard is nearly depleted, so a mid-day session of catching up E-mail can have you ready to go back out to the field again; I never bring the charger to work), and providing an SD port and two USB ports. That's "killer app" compared to an iPad right there. (Oh, and Transformers have a micro-SD slot right on the Pad, so you can either increase your storage with it, or even use one in your camera and be able to review photos on a 10" screen...)
YMMV, but in my location, the price of the Transformer with keyboard and 32GB was the same as the iPad2 with 32GB and no keyboard. Case closed.
You find human beings on every corner of this globe, subsisting for millenia on every possible local bit of biology from arctic seals to desert scorpions, and it turns out this doesn't kill us, either. Well, the food at certain southern restaurants does lead to a lot of heartburn, but other than that, we're good to go.
My home page remains where it has been since 1993 at the Calgary Unix Users Group: http://www.cuug.ab.ca/branderr ...clocks in at 9.2K, plus a 15K GIF and a 9.1K JPG (if you "turn on images" in your browser - remember when it was a realistic option not to?)
I have held the line, while Viewing With Alarm (VWA) the growth of web pages for the entire 18 years since. I wrote Bob Metcalfe when he had a column at InfoWorld 15 years back, and he was Viewing With Alarm the exponential growth in Internet traffic and predicting the "collapse of the Internet" (had to eat those words - literally) because of it. My letter pointed out that his column constituted 2K of text - that was all the generated content that was bringing in the readers, (unless you count the 10K gif of Bob Metcalfe, and I don't), and the page had an additional 100K of framing and advertising-related image GIFs. His reply was somewhat defensive.
This last year, I had occasion to travel on the Queen Mary 2, where all internet is via satellite at a minimum of 34 cents per minute with their bulk plan. How quickly I grew to resent the giant Flash blobs that would be automatically downloaded with every page of a newspaper so I wouldn't miss the animated ads for the latest in car buys. At QM2 speeds, I'd have to wait about two minutes before I even had an "X" mark to click on to dismiss the ad. I was rather quickly cured of almost any interest in the Internet content at ALL, I did my E-mail, checked the google news headlines (fewest high-byte ads), and logged off.
My point: 90% of mail is spam. So are 90% of web page bytes. We just don't call it spam. We call it "the whole outside frame around the news page that we try not to see, but keeps jumping around into our field of view".
>50 cents per gigabyte... which I think is pretty fair.
Not remotely. Costs to run a network are partly fixed (same number of kilometres of line, count of humming boxes to buy and then maintain each month, however many bytes flow) and partly per-byte.
Once you've paid that fixed cost with Internet - clearly around $25-$40 /month range almost everywhere - they can throw in the first 50GB free because that incremental cost has been established to be about 2 cents per GB in huge bulk. This was revealed by Netflix court filings that showed a movie costing them a nickel's bandwidth per download. So after you'd hit your cap, Netflix would pay a nickel to their ISP to send it, and you'd pay $1.25 to receive it.
The 50 cents/GB is over an order of magnitude high for even a conservative, high-profit "fair price". And remember, this is a regulated, licensed monopoly. Their rates are supposed to reflect service costs.
...how do I get in on these scientific experiments to determine the best dessert?
With all the scrutiny, polygraphs, no doubt surveillance, nobody there would dare do drugs.
Therefore, they aren't the type to come up with original ideas, therefore the place runs on old ideas forever, therefore it becomes a stultified bureaucracy.... ...therefore, they can take in $40B a year and STILL miss 9/11, still get WMDs wrong, and all the earlier stuff in Tim Weiner's "Legacy of Ashes" about never being able to successfully plant moles at any number at any depth into China, North Korea, or Russia.
THEREFORE we need to legalize drugs immediately...to save the CIA. This is to protect America, people!
Can't believe I'm defending Arnie, but he was a movie star who also made some potloads of money in real estate. That, at a minimum, indicates an ability to pick smart people and provide them with at least minimally-knowledgeable oversight. Other athletes and movie stars have all their money disappear through stupid spending of their own, or hiring predatory people with no oversight. N.Cage can act better with one eyebrow than Arnie can with that whole huge body, but I know which I'd pick to invest money with.
Speak for yourself. It's often just two possibilities. The construction people have only two templates they are willing to work from:
"Do we use 16" on-centre or 24" on-centre with these beams?" You only have to rough-in the calc after you see the dead load, room use, and wind-load on that side, to know which to pick. Calculator seldom necessary after the tenth design you do.
Hell, "House, MD" is often making a bet on which of two therapies to use, three at the most, and the statistical odds are obvious to everybody in the room once the symptoms have been added up.
Engineering (Medicine, even more) is sometimes about making HARD choices, but they are just choices.