The choices *are* there. The information *is* there. Proper labeling *is* there and has been required for years.
Well the choices are there... mostly. I bet you have a really great whole foods in your neighborhood with all kinds of wholesome food, but go into a poor-ish neighborhood and see what your options are. Or let's say you're at work and you need to take a quick lunch break. If you've packed a lunch in advance, what are your choices? Probably mostly fast food. Or if you pack a lunch, do you pack a sandwich? Most peanut butter, for example, is filled with transfats and hfcs, and almost all jelly has hfcs, so no PB&J. No sandwich meats either, since they have hfcs even if you can deal with the salt content. Unless your very picky and shop it out, you can't even pack a drink because of the hfcs.
So yes, there are choices, but it means weeding through 100 products to find one that has low sodium, no hfcs, and no transfats.
The information exists, but that doesn't mean that people know and understand the information. Meanwhile there are commercials put on TV by the corn industry saying hfcs is fine, making fun of people who try to avoid hfcs.
Labeling is there, but it's sometimes unclear and rarely prominent. Plus you're assuming that people are well enough informed to know to look.
And again, cooking usually does not take any more time than required to pick up some take-out or wait for a frozen dinner to cook.
Eh, well lets be clear about what you're saying. Depending on what exactly you're cooking, cooking doesn't necessarily take longer than waiting for frozen dinners to cook. However, there are many things which take all day to cook, and you can do other things while you're waiting for frozen dinners to cook. If my day is packed, then I can throw a frozen dinner in the oven and then do something else while it cooks. Even if it takes an hour to bake, it has only taken up 30 seconds of my time.
And how long fast food takes depends entirely on how far out of your way it is. I can pick up dinner for 5 at McDonalds in 2 minutes on my way home. I can't cook a full dinner for 5 in 2 minutes. What's more, McDonalds might even be cheaper (partially because of subsidies).
As far as access to a proper grocery store - potentially true, though I would say this is the exception rather than the rule. Meaning that for a very small portion of the population, they have less choice.
Do you know how small a portion of the population? What if you're underestimating the number of poor in this country. I mean, I don't know what portion of the population doesn't have a decent grocery store available, but I lived in a somewhat poor neighborhood for a couple of years, and it was eye-opening. Most of the grocery stores weren't real grocery stores; they were corner stores with a bunch of junk food and *some* groceries. Like they had bread, but it was Wonderbread. And it was expensive-- more expensive than comparable groceries in nicer neighborhoods. There were a couple real grocery stores farther away, but even there the selection was pretty bad and the produce wasn't very good. And then there were *tons* of cheap fast food restaurants all over the place.
That doesn't excuse the rest of us for being fat though...
I'm not extremely interested in placing blame and figuring out who has valid excuses. I'm much more interested in what the causes of the problems are and how the problems can be solved. I'd rather figure out how to stem and reverse the epidemic of obesity than sit around hating fat people for being fat.
Steam does a lot of things right, and Valve in general. In fact, Team Fortress 2 is a very good example of how "good graphics" and "realistic graphics" aren't necessarily the same thing. I don't think I've ever felt a game has earned my money so much as Portal has, Steam is basically DRM done right (as right as DRM can be done), and now they're bringing it all to OSX. I love these guys.
Not to go too off topic, but here's a good interview with Gabe Newell where he talks about his approach to development, steam, piracy, and some other stuff. I really like when he says, "When you look at our top ten issues on our list at any given point in time, piracy is almost never something that's on that list." He then goes on to explain his view that piracy is mostly the result of bad service. I think this man has his priorities straight.
Yeah, I feel like there are a few problems with the vision of running a terminal/mainframe model, first and most obvious being, as you said, it introduces a central point of failure for everyone. If the server goes down, everyone on that server is suddenly unable to work. People will counter by saying, "well you just distribute it across a bunch of servers so there's no more single point of failure." It's harder than it sounds. If you distribute across servers, how do you manage that distribution? What happens when your method for managing that distribution goes down?
I don't think it's insoluble, but for the time being it sounds like more trouble than it's worth. One of the things it's important to keep in mind is how cheap computing has gotten. We have more computing power in our cell phones than existed in the biggest computers a few decades ago, and we're putting hundreds of gigabytes into USB thumb drives. It's ultimately not going to save you much money to forgo internal storage and computing power for a thin client, so people are usually going to get a thicker client anyway. Once you have that internal storage and processing power, you may as well use it.
Honestly, I think someone needs to invest in making a really smart syncing technologies (possibly involving filesystem improvements and making applications more aware of file changes) to make it so that we can work locally and "in the cloud" at the same time. Imagine you could store all your data online so that it was encrypted and not even your host could access your data, but you could always access it seamlessly. Edit a word document on your laptop, it syncs to the server and back to your desktop automatically (similar to Dropbox). If you're working on someone else's PC it's also available via an online editor akin to Google Docs, and you could see each other editing similar to SubEthaEdit. Take a picture on your camera, and it's automatically uploaded to a service like Picasa, which then automatically syncs it to your "Pictures" folder on your laptop and desktop. It's also available to whatever social networking you're doing, bla bla bla. Your online storage is version controlled similar to Apple's time machine. Everything is stored online, but it's also cached on your local drives for quick and easy access.
We have an awful lot of the components lying around to build something like this, but not integrated together. And besides bandwidth/storage issues, whatever syncing software you use has to be smart enough to keep multiple devices in sync (files could be changed on one of any number of devices and the changes show up on all the rest). It also has to be smart enough to only sync the files that have been changed, or rather only the portions of files which have been changed, and to do it immediately upon write.
Yes, that's sort of what my sarcastic post was getting at. I do like to remind people that when they post something on Facebook, they're posting it in a public forum. It's like going to the town square and putting up a sign. It may not feel that way because you think you're just talking to your friends, but there's essentially a permanent public record of the things that you say. Even with your privacy settings set to their highest settings, you don't know who that information will eventually become available to.
Still, hiring someone to monitor your employees' social interactions online isn't too different from following them IRL. Yes, when friends talk on Facebook, they may be talking in a public area. However, if some friends are talking at a bar, that's also essentially a public area. The fact that they have no real expectation of privacy isn't an excuse for stalking.
The founding fathers never could have conceived of the world we live in today, nor of what would become hotly contested issues, and so never addressed it in the document.
Once, while I was advocating the government taking a greater role in regulating the Internet (in terms of infrastructure, i.e. Verizon, not in terms of content), a Republican relative of mine complained, "If the founding fathers wanted the federal government regulating the Internet, they would have put it in the Constitution!"
I literally face-palmed on that one. When I reminded him that they didn't really know about the Internet in the early 19th century, he said something like, "Well they didn't say anything about cars or telephones either!" Double face-palm.
Finally I pointed out that the most advanced technology that they would have had at the time was someone carrying a handwritten letter by horseback, and that the Constitution had specifically given the government the power to get involved in those kinds of communications. Essentially, the Constitution gave the government the power to build the most advanced communication and transportation infrastructure available at the time: to hire people to carry letters all over the country and even build a network of roads for them to travel over. He didn't believe me, and asked, "Ok smart guy. If the government was allowed to do that, why didn't they ever do it?" I would have tripple face-palmed if I had three hands.
I agree. Depending on the job, it might be a pretty complicated thing. For example, I read Slashdot quite a bit, but I'm an IT manager in a tech industry, and it is actually somewhat helpful for me to know about tech trends. It helps to know what technologies are attracting geeks, what's working and what's not. Obviously I am wasting time with some portion of my viewing/posting habits, but it's very unclear to me how much of it is truly wasted.
I've had a number of instances during my career where I found some good technical advice on Slashdot. There have been many times where I've encountered some problem and thought, "Oh, right, I remember someone talking about this sort of thing on Slashdot, and he said [whatever] is a good solution. I'll go check that out." I even found a vendor once from an ad on Slashdot for a company that I wouldn't otherwise have known about (that's right! an ad!).
Also, creative solutions have a habit of striking when you're not really thinking about it. I can spend all day on a problem and come up with a solution on my ride home from work. Sometimes people need to get their minds off of work for a few minutes in order to stay productive. Sometimes they need to spend some time thinking about something interesting to get their minds in gear.
It might sound really badass to some people to think, "Hey, I'm the boss. When you're on the clock and there are 5 minutes where you're not working hard on a specific task, you've effectively stolen money from me!" Yeah, well... whatever. The truth is much fuzzier than that.
Hey, can I get this company to hire a private detective to follow my employees around all day? How much would that cost?
I just want to know what they're saying about my company in their off time, and find out whether anyone is sharing sensitive company information. There's no problem with that, right?
I'm not saying that Flash has nothing going for it. As you said, people buy Photoshop even though Adobe doesn't control common graphics formats, and many people buy Dreamweaver even though Adobe doesn't have control over HTML or other web programming languages.
On the other hand, people also buy and use other graphics editors and other HTML editors, or even edit HTML in a plain text editor. I don' t know of a real competing Flash authoring tool, and I'd say at least part of the reason for that is the level of control Adobe has over the format.
So though it wouldn't be the end of Flash, it would certainly take away one of Adobe's competitive advantages. I'm sure some people at Adobe would be unhappy to see HTML+CSS+Javascript evolve to the point where Flash was considered a completely obsolete format.
So IMHO Adobe is saying that "Flash could be dead but we will still make boatloads of money with our authoring tools."
Well there is some truth to that idea, but on the other hand they lose some of their competitive advantage if their authoring tool is outputting to an open standard that they don't control. Right now, Adobe could release Flash 11 with some new improvements and features and say, "In order to take advantage of all these improvements, you must author your stuff using Flash CS5. Even if they immediately released all the specs for rendering Flash 11, it would take quite a long time for anyone else to figure it all out and design a competing authoring tool. Meanwhile, everyone has upgraded to Flash CS5 and Adobe has been readying Flash CS6.
That changes if they're outputting to HTML5 (or HTML6 or whatever). Adobe wouldn't have the same kind of head start on developing for improvements and new features. Someone else could actually compete.
We pay for corn through our taxes so that corn will be cheap, so that private companies can make a lot of money producing cheap but unhealthy food. As a result, most food on the store at your local grocery store is more unhealthy than it needs to be.
There shouldn't need to be a problem with store-bought bread. I have, in fact, seen frozen vegetable and frozen meat with HFCS, but there's no real reason why it needs to be there. If you want to take the free-market stance of "it's the consumer's own choice for buying this stuff", then I think before you can even make that argument, you have to first make the following changes:
Drop all government subsidies for the unhealthy products
Ensure that there are choices
Ensure that people are properly informed about the negative health impacts
Ensure that there is proper labeling of all food so that people can judge for themselves
And keep in mind that obesity is also a problem among poorer people who aren't as well informed, don't have as much time to cook, and often don't even have access to a proper grocery store.
THe problem here isn't HFCS. It's not fatty foods. If anything, part of the problem lies in looking for external factors to blame. It's eating too much food, too regularly, and most of us not getting any significant exercise*.
Wait, suggesting that we're eating bad foods is "looking to external factors to blame", but suggesting that we're eating too much food isn't? I don't see the difference.
I think you're right that a big part of the problem is that we often misunderstand when we should eat and how much we should eat. A good rule is: eat when you're hungry, eat until you're not hungry. Don't eat until you feel like you couldn't eat more.
Of course, part of the reason people eat so much *is* due to external factors. Eating habits are often cultural and situational. For example, go into a restaurant and look at the serving size. Understand that most people will get into the habit of eating as much as they're served. Most people won't ask for doggy bags, and many of us were raised with the idea that you shouldn't waste food. That often means force-feeding yourself if you're served too large of a portion.
Beyond that, *everything* has HFCS in it. If you go to the grocery store and buy bread and apple juice, each of those probably have corn syrup in them.
Yes, it's theoretically true that we could expect people to cook all their own meals from scratch, never go out to eat, bake their own bread and juice their own fruits. *Or* we could think about whether the people making billions of dollars from feeding us have some responsibility to provide healthy food, but I guess that's just expecting too much from people. Lets instead expect everyone to grow and butcher their own livestock and live off of what fruits and grains and vegetables they can grow in their own gardens, since we can't afford to trust the people providing our food.
It also has possible implications for for the culpability of others in the illness of the obese. With drugs, we might blame the addicts, but then we'd probably also blame the drug dealers and try to throw them in jail. Where does McDonalds stand?
In fairness, programmers co-opted and misused existing scientific terminology. It was an approximation. As long as you're talking about kilobytes and megabytes, the difference doesn't add up to much, so you can kind of go, "Meh, close enough." Now that terabyte storage is common for home use, it's a very sloppy approximation.
Unemployment benefits are nominal pretty much everywhere. Maybe they're exceptionally generous in California, but I find it just as likely that your teacher friend was making so little money that even nominal unemployment benefits were 2/3 of her salary.
But I personally appreciate the irony of someone who is working for the government continuing to collect a non-trivial portion of their salary from the same revenue stream.
What's ironic about that? Do you also find it ironic that government workers can get social security when they retire or become disabled? If you just mean that it's kind of a funny thing to think about, I might agree. Like it's kind of funny that people who work for the government pay income tax. It makes sense once you understand what's going on, but it seems strange at first blush.
In the case I mentioned, California is saving 1/3 of a teacher's salary by eliminating one whole teacher.
Well for one thing, the money comes from different places. IIRC employers pay into a special unemployment insurance fund in their payroll tax. Second, while they were only saving 1/3 the teacher's salary for some time they eventually saved 3/3 of your friend's salary as soon as she gets a job. If she doesn't get a job, the unemployment eventually runs out.
But all I have observed to this point is that, whatever the reason, governments waste a lot of money, and anyone who is surprised by the article hasn't been paying attention.
Private companies also waste lots of money too, as do private individuals. In fact, the people wasting the money in this case are private consultants that the government is paying to do a job. So what exactly is your point here?
Let me put it another way: The city is going to need a computerized payroll system. (or what's your alternative there, not paying city employees? Not having a government at all?) What this article suggests, if anything, is that paying private contractors doesn't work. Maybe the lesson to learn from all this is that they city should hire a salaried IT/MIS staff to handle this stuff instead of looking to the private sector?
Yeah, the idea that someone is making 2/3 of their normal salary under unemployment gives you two mathematical possibilities: either unemployment payouts are high or the person's original salary was low. It's most likely the latter. I think unemployment is usually only a couple hundred a week, so it means the teacher in question probably wasn't making much more than $30k. Hardly rolling in it.
If you think about it, it's all the more reason why that person probably needs the unemployment. In most places, it's not easy to save much money for a rainy day when you're making $30k.
It's kind of like when people complain about some statistic like "The 10% of people who make the most money pay 50% of the taxes in this country." If true, that leaves 2 mathematical possibilities: either we're placing heavy taxes on the richest people in this country, or the richest 10% are making *way* more money than the rest of us. It's most likely the latter.
She was laid off and promptly given 2/3rds her previous salary in unemployment benefits. Pretty good for keeping the same employer and just not working anymore. If I tried that it would result in a 100% pay cut.
Yeah, and there's not chance that you'd be able to get unemployment benefits, right? Or is it just that you object to the idea of unemployment benefits.
When I said, "Not there yet, but it's coming," I was talking about in my own personal phone. I meant something more like "I don't have it yet, but I'm probably going to get a Nexus One soon."
Actually the situation I'm describing was the result of a deal that I had with my boss. My boss was the person that I trusted not to abuse having my personal cell phone number, and I would have been less likely to trust HR. As far as I can recall, HR only had my home phone number, not my cell.
As far as I know there aren't really laws about that sort of thing in the US, but either way I wouldn't have minded in this case. I had a good boss who viewed "protecting his employees" as a major part of his job.
Yeah, it's somewhat minor, but the way I see it is, when you're on call at that level, you need every bit of separation you can get so that you can stay sane. There were times when I'd ignore my work phone or even turn it off. The idea was to allow clients/users a method to contact me when I was free, but one which I could turn off. In case of a real emergency, my boss had my real cell phone number.
It worked. It made sense. But these days it should be possible to accomplish the same thing without actually keeping two separate devices.
Slashdot Mirror
The choices *are* there. The information *is* there. Proper labeling *is* there and has been required for years.
Well the choices are there... mostly. I bet you have a really great whole foods in your neighborhood with all kinds of wholesome food, but go into a poor-ish neighborhood and see what your options are. Or let's say you're at work and you need to take a quick lunch break. If you've packed a lunch in advance, what are your choices? Probably mostly fast food. Or if you pack a lunch, do you pack a sandwich? Most peanut butter, for example, is filled with transfats and hfcs, and almost all jelly has hfcs, so no PB&J. No sandwich meats either, since they have hfcs even if you can deal with the salt content. Unless your very picky and shop it out, you can't even pack a drink because of the hfcs.
So yes, there are choices, but it means weeding through 100 products to find one that has low sodium, no hfcs, and no transfats.
The information exists, but that doesn't mean that people know and understand the information. Meanwhile there are commercials put on TV by the corn industry saying hfcs is fine, making fun of people who try to avoid hfcs.
Labeling is there, but it's sometimes unclear and rarely prominent. Plus you're assuming that people are well enough informed to know to look.
And again, cooking usually does not take any more time than required to pick up some take-out or wait for a frozen dinner to cook.
Eh, well lets be clear about what you're saying. Depending on what exactly you're cooking, cooking doesn't necessarily take longer than waiting for frozen dinners to cook. However, there are many things which take all day to cook, and you can do other things while you're waiting for frozen dinners to cook. If my day is packed, then I can throw a frozen dinner in the oven and then do something else while it cooks. Even if it takes an hour to bake, it has only taken up 30 seconds of my time.
And how long fast food takes depends entirely on how far out of your way it is. I can pick up dinner for 5 at McDonalds in 2 minutes on my way home. I can't cook a full dinner for 5 in 2 minutes. What's more, McDonalds might even be cheaper (partially because of subsidies).
As far as access to a proper grocery store - potentially true, though I would say this is the exception rather than the rule. Meaning that for a very small portion of the population, they have less choice.
Do you know how small a portion of the population? What if you're underestimating the number of poor in this country. I mean, I don't know what portion of the population doesn't have a decent grocery store available, but I lived in a somewhat poor neighborhood for a couple of years, and it was eye-opening. Most of the grocery stores weren't real grocery stores; they were corner stores with a bunch of junk food and *some* groceries. Like they had bread, but it was Wonderbread. And it was expensive-- more expensive than comparable groceries in nicer neighborhoods. There were a couple real grocery stores farther away, but even there the selection was pretty bad and the produce wasn't very good. And then there were *tons* of cheap fast food restaurants all over the place.
That doesn't excuse the rest of us for being fat though...
I'm not extremely interested in placing blame and figuring out who has valid excuses. I'm much more interested in what the causes of the problems are and how the problems can be solved. I'd rather figure out how to stem and reverse the epidemic of obesity than sit around hating fat people for being fat.
Steam does a lot of things right, and Valve in general. In fact, Team Fortress 2 is a very good example of how "good graphics" and "realistic graphics" aren't necessarily the same thing. I don't think I've ever felt a game has earned my money so much as Portal has, Steam is basically DRM done right (as right as DRM can be done), and now they're bringing it all to OSX. I love these guys.
Not to go too off topic, but here's a good interview with Gabe Newell where he talks about his approach to development, steam, piracy, and some other stuff. I really like when he says, "When you look at our top ten issues on our list at any given point in time, piracy is almost never something that's on that list." He then goes on to explain his view that piracy is mostly the result of bad service. I think this man has his priorities straight.
Yeah, I feel like there are a few problems with the vision of running a terminal/mainframe model, first and most obvious being, as you said, it introduces a central point of failure for everyone. If the server goes down, everyone on that server is suddenly unable to work. People will counter by saying, "well you just distribute it across a bunch of servers so there's no more single point of failure." It's harder than it sounds. If you distribute across servers, how do you manage that distribution? What happens when your method for managing that distribution goes down?
I don't think it's insoluble, but for the time being it sounds like more trouble than it's worth. One of the things it's important to keep in mind is how cheap computing has gotten. We have more computing power in our cell phones than existed in the biggest computers a few decades ago, and we're putting hundreds of gigabytes into USB thumb drives. It's ultimately not going to save you much money to forgo internal storage and computing power for a thin client, so people are usually going to get a thicker client anyway. Once you have that internal storage and processing power, you may as well use it.
Honestly, I think someone needs to invest in making a really smart syncing technologies (possibly involving filesystem improvements and making applications more aware of file changes) to make it so that we can work locally and "in the cloud" at the same time. Imagine you could store all your data online so that it was encrypted and not even your host could access your data, but you could always access it seamlessly. Edit a word document on your laptop, it syncs to the server and back to your desktop automatically (similar to Dropbox). If you're working on someone else's PC it's also available via an online editor akin to Google Docs, and you could see each other editing similar to SubEthaEdit. Take a picture on your camera, and it's automatically uploaded to a service like Picasa, which then automatically syncs it to your "Pictures" folder on your laptop and desktop. It's also available to whatever social networking you're doing, bla bla bla. Your online storage is version controlled similar to Apple's time machine. Everything is stored online, but it's also cached on your local drives for quick and easy access.
We have an awful lot of the components lying around to build something like this, but not integrated together. And besides bandwidth/storage issues, whatever syncing software you use has to be smart enough to keep multiple devices in sync (files could be changed on one of any number of devices and the changes show up on all the rest). It also has to be smart enough to only sync the files that have been changed, or rather only the portions of files which have been changed, and to do it immediately upon write.
Yes, my parents Mr. and Mrs. (778537) have some very strange ideas about names.
I always use my real, full legal name...
you:
...don't have a need to know that nine-times and whatever your legal name is...
woosh?
Yes, that's sort of what my sarcastic post was getting at. I do like to remind people that when they post something on Facebook, they're posting it in a public forum. It's like going to the town square and putting up a sign. It may not feel that way because you think you're just talking to your friends, but there's essentially a permanent public record of the things that you say. Even with your privacy settings set to their highest settings, you don't know who that information will eventually become available to.
Still, hiring someone to monitor your employees' social interactions online isn't too different from following them IRL. Yes, when friends talk on Facebook, they may be talking in a public area. However, if some friends are talking at a bar, that's also essentially a public area. The fact that they have no real expectation of privacy isn't an excuse for stalking.
The founding fathers never could have conceived of the world we live in today, nor of what would become hotly contested issues, and so never addressed it in the document.
Once, while I was advocating the government taking a greater role in regulating the Internet (in terms of infrastructure, i.e. Verizon, not in terms of content), a Republican relative of mine complained, "If the founding fathers wanted the federal government regulating the Internet, they would have put it in the Constitution!"
I literally face-palmed on that one. When I reminded him that they didn't really know about the Internet in the early 19th century, he said something like, "Well they didn't say anything about cars or telephones either!" Double face-palm.
Finally I pointed out that the most advanced technology that they would have had at the time was someone carrying a handwritten letter by horseback, and that the Constitution had specifically given the government the power to get involved in those kinds of communications. Essentially, the Constitution gave the government the power to build the most advanced communication and transportation infrastructure available at the time: to hire people to carry letters all over the country and even build a network of roads for them to travel over. He didn't believe me, and asked, "Ok smart guy. If the government was allowed to do that, why didn't they ever do it?" I would have tripple face-palmed if I had three hands.
I'd feel like I was deceiving people. I always use my real, full legal name when doing things online and writing posts on social websites.
I agree. Depending on the job, it might be a pretty complicated thing. For example, I read Slashdot quite a bit, but I'm an IT manager in a tech industry, and it is actually somewhat helpful for me to know about tech trends. It helps to know what technologies are attracting geeks, what's working and what's not. Obviously I am wasting time with some portion of my viewing/posting habits, but it's very unclear to me how much of it is truly wasted.
I've had a number of instances during my career where I found some good technical advice on Slashdot. There have been many times where I've encountered some problem and thought, "Oh, right, I remember someone talking about this sort of thing on Slashdot, and he said [whatever] is a good solution. I'll go check that out." I even found a vendor once from an ad on Slashdot for a company that I wouldn't otherwise have known about (that's right! an ad!).
Also, creative solutions have a habit of striking when you're not really thinking about it. I can spend all day on a problem and come up with a solution on my ride home from work. Sometimes people need to get their minds off of work for a few minutes in order to stay productive. Sometimes they need to spend some time thinking about something interesting to get their minds in gear.
It might sound really badass to some people to think, "Hey, I'm the boss. When you're on the clock and there are 5 minutes where you're not working hard on a specific task, you've effectively stolen money from me!" Yeah, well... whatever. The truth is much fuzzier than that.
Hey, can I get this company to hire a private detective to follow my employees around all day? How much would that cost?
I just want to know what they're saying about my company in their off time, and find out whether anyone is sharing sensitive company information. There's no problem with that, right?
I'm not saying that Flash has nothing going for it. As you said, people buy Photoshop even though Adobe doesn't control common graphics formats, and many people buy Dreamweaver even though Adobe doesn't have control over HTML or other web programming languages.
On the other hand, people also buy and use other graphics editors and other HTML editors, or even edit HTML in a plain text editor. I don' t know of a real competing Flash authoring tool, and I'd say at least part of the reason for that is the level of control Adobe has over the format.
So though it wouldn't be the end of Flash, it would certainly take away one of Adobe's competitive advantages. I'm sure some people at Adobe would be unhappy to see HTML+CSS+Javascript evolve to the point where Flash was considered a completely obsolete format.
So IMHO Adobe is saying that "Flash could be dead but we will still make boatloads of money with our authoring tools."
Well there is some truth to that idea, but on the other hand they lose some of their competitive advantage if their authoring tool is outputting to an open standard that they don't control. Right now, Adobe could release Flash 11 with some new improvements and features and say, "In order to take advantage of all these improvements, you must author your stuff using Flash CS5. Even if they immediately released all the specs for rendering Flash 11, it would take quite a long time for anyone else to figure it all out and design a competing authoring tool. Meanwhile, everyone has upgraded to Flash CS5 and Adobe has been readying Flash CS6.
That changes if they're outputting to HTML5 (or HTML6 or whatever). Adobe wouldn't have the same kind of head start on developing for improvements and new features. Someone else could actually compete.
We pay for corn through our taxes so that corn will be cheap, so that private companies can make a lot of money producing cheap but unhealthy food. As a result, most food on the store at your local grocery store is more unhealthy than it needs to be.
There shouldn't need to be a problem with store-bought bread. I have, in fact, seen frozen vegetable and frozen meat with HFCS, but there's no real reason why it needs to be there. If you want to take the free-market stance of "it's the consumer's own choice for buying this stuff", then I think before you can even make that argument, you have to first make the following changes:
And keep in mind that obesity is also a problem among poorer people who aren't as well informed, don't have as much time to cook, and often don't even have access to a proper grocery store.
THe problem here isn't HFCS. It's not fatty foods. If anything, part of the problem lies in looking for external factors to blame. It's eating too much food, too regularly, and most of us not getting any significant exercise*.
Wait, suggesting that we're eating bad foods is "looking to external factors to blame", but suggesting that we're eating too much food isn't? I don't see the difference.
I think you're right that a big part of the problem is that we often misunderstand when we should eat and how much we should eat. A good rule is: eat when you're hungry, eat until you're not hungry. Don't eat until you feel like you couldn't eat more.
Of course, part of the reason people eat so much *is* due to external factors. Eating habits are often cultural and situational. For example, go into a restaurant and look at the serving size. Understand that most people will get into the habit of eating as much as they're served. Most people won't ask for doggy bags, and many of us were raised with the idea that you shouldn't waste food. That often means force-feeding yourself if you're served too large of a portion.
Beyond that, *everything* has HFCS in it. If you go to the grocery store and buy bread and apple juice, each of those probably have corn syrup in them.
Yes, it's theoretically true that we could expect people to cook all their own meals from scratch, never go out to eat, bake their own bread and juice their own fruits. *Or* we could think about whether the people making billions of dollars from feeding us have some responsibility to provide healthy food, but I guess that's just expecting too much from people. Lets instead expect everyone to grow and butcher their own livestock and live off of what fruits and grains and vegetables they can grow in their own gardens, since we can't afford to trust the people providing our food.
It also has possible implications for for the culpability of others in the illness of the obese. With drugs, we might blame the addicts, but then we'd probably also blame the drug dealers and try to throw them in jail. Where does McDonalds stand?
I think the point is that Ubuntu wants people to use their OS, even in cases where those people have no place in IT.
In fairness, programmers co-opted and misused existing scientific terminology. It was an approximation. As long as you're talking about kilobytes and megabytes, the difference doesn't add up to much, so you can kind of go, "Meh, close enough." Now that terabyte storage is common for home use, it's a very sloppy approximation.
Unemployment benefits are nominal pretty much everywhere. Maybe they're exceptionally generous in California, but I find it just as likely that your teacher friend was making so little money that even nominal unemployment benefits were 2/3 of her salary.
But I personally appreciate the irony of someone who is working for the government continuing to collect a non-trivial portion of their salary from the same revenue stream.
What's ironic about that? Do you also find it ironic that government workers can get social security when they retire or become disabled? If you just mean that it's kind of a funny thing to think about, I might agree. Like it's kind of funny that people who work for the government pay income tax. It makes sense once you understand what's going on, but it seems strange at first blush.
In the case I mentioned, California is saving 1/3 of a teacher's salary by eliminating one whole teacher.
Well for one thing, the money comes from different places. IIRC employers pay into a special unemployment insurance fund in their payroll tax. Second, while they were only saving 1/3 the teacher's salary for some time they eventually saved 3/3 of your friend's salary as soon as she gets a job. If she doesn't get a job, the unemployment eventually runs out.
But all I have observed to this point is that, whatever the reason, governments waste a lot of money, and anyone who is surprised by the article hasn't been paying attention.
Private companies also waste lots of money too, as do private individuals. In fact, the people wasting the money in this case are private consultants that the government is paying to do a job. So what exactly is your point here?
Let me put it another way: The city is going to need a computerized payroll system. (or what's your alternative there, not paying city employees? Not having a government at all?) What this article suggests, if anything, is that paying private contractors doesn't work. Maybe the lesson to learn from all this is that they city should hire a salaried IT/MIS staff to handle this stuff instead of looking to the private sector?
If you think about it, it's all the more reason why that person probably needs the unemployment. In most places, it's not easy to save much money for a rainy day when you're making $30k.
It's kind of like when people complain about some statistic like "The 10% of people who make the most money pay 50% of the taxes in this country." If true, that leaves 2 mathematical possibilities: either we're placing heavy taxes on the richest people in this country, or the richest 10% are making *way* more money than the rest of us. It's most likely the latter.
She was laid off and promptly given 2/3rds her previous salary in unemployment benefits. Pretty good for keeping the same employer and just not working anymore. If I tried that it would result in a 100% pay cut.
Yeah, and there's not chance that you'd be able to get unemployment benefits, right? Or is it just that you object to the idea of unemployment benefits.
That people often shirk their moral obligations is an unfortunate fact of life. It doesn't lessen their moral obligations.
Yeah.... except I don't know anyone who really wants a walled garden for their computer. Do you? I sure don't.
When I said, "Not there yet, but it's coming," I was talking about in my own personal phone. I meant something more like "I don't have it yet, but I'm probably going to get a Nexus One soon."
Actually the situation I'm describing was the result of a deal that I had with my boss. My boss was the person that I trusted not to abuse having my personal cell phone number, and I would have been less likely to trust HR. As far as I can recall, HR only had my home phone number, not my cell.
As far as I know there aren't really laws about that sort of thing in the US, but either way I wouldn't have minded in this case. I had a good boss who viewed "protecting his employees" as a major part of his job.
Yeah, it's somewhat minor, but the way I see it is, when you're on call at that level, you need every bit of separation you can get so that you can stay sane. There were times when I'd ignore my work phone or even turn it off. The idea was to allow clients/users a method to contact me when I was free, but one which I could turn off. In case of a real emergency, my boss had my real cell phone number.
It worked. It made sense. But these days it should be possible to accomplish the same thing without actually keeping two separate devices.