Consumer-grade shit is consumer-grade shit in every industry. But I think we can have some expectation that when we buy a router, even a cheap shitty one, that it makes a best effort to send the data we ask and not its own marketing message. To use a bad car analogy, I don't expect my car to corner like a race car, to tow a 16-wheel trailer, to be as comfortable as a Benz. But I do expect that it steers where I turn the wheel, and not to the nearest mall.
Lots of consumer-grade shit is ad-supported; we get cheaper shit in exchange for being coerced into buying more cheap shit. Maybe if a company is going to introduce an ad-supported business model to a class of products where it's generally unexpected they should be required to label it prominently.
And yet plenty of countries that do it socialist-style have lower costs than we do without any pretense of a free market. I apologize if you're not really a True Free Market Believer, but you sound a bit like one... if you believe that doctors and medical schools ought to be licensed/accredited by someone, and that body should be one that doesn't benefit from high barriers to entry, you might agree that some sort of governmental organization might fit well in the role.
1. Free markets (like freedom) aren't free. That is, markets with no outside intervention aren't always competitive. Sometimes it takes work and regulation to establish competitive and efficient markets.
2. Free markets aren't magic. Markets that are competitive and don't have overly restrictive barriers to entry (your post mostly addresses barriers to entry) will often come up with more optimized solutions than central planners. It doesn't mean that the optimized result is deemed satisfactory by the society, which might value something different than what gets optimized (often efficiency for a company means finding ways to internalize public resources and externalize costs; when, in the case of insurers, the customer base is the revenue source and the cost-center, market optimization may not even benefit customers, but only shareholders).
Bureaucrats decide treatment in the US, too. They're just corporate ones, not government ones. There are advantages and disadvantages to each. Typically people can vote out the government if they piss off everyone, but they can walk away individually from companies. Health insurance isn't like that. People practically can't walk away from their health insurers, don't have another option.
I don't think there's a perfect way to decide when treatments are as expensive as they often are today. But I do know the following things. Today's market for health insurance was created by government regulation. This market works as often as not against good health care. It has become very efficient: efficient at extracting the most money possible from everyone in the US into the industry while doing as little as possible. Isn't that what markets are best at? There are high barriers to entry in this market and regulations influenced by its biggest players. And so it isn't surprising that we spend a lot on health care and get pretty mediocre service.
I'm not fundamentally opposed to a system that uses money and markets, but we shouldn't construct a system, as we have, where market forces work against us rather than for us.
Passengers in a car can be distracting to drivers. However, passengers in a moving car are intuitively aware of the driver's need to focus on the road. It's communicated through the driver's body language with no effort or attention expended by the driver. It's also often obvious to passengers, who can see out the car, when a complicated situation is coming up.
In fact, by taking over radio and heater fiddling duties, helping with navigation, and reacting to dangerous conditions that the driver might miss, passengers can help drivers be safer. Which isn't to say that passengers are always good; sometimes they really are a distraction. But I'm pretty sure studies have been done on their effects, and they're nowhere near that of cell callers.
As far as the story goes, I think the device could be useful for some people, and terrible for others. I don't have a cell phone, rarely drive, and when I do, usually have passengers. Usually in cars I drive and ride in the passengers take calls for the driver, often helping to coordinate plans and give directions. Cutting passengers off from phone calls seems like a bad idea to me. The device would also stop calls on trains and buses. And it might not stop calls to people stopped, at stop-lights or otherwise, in city traffic, people who need to have their wits about them most (I don't think there's anything wrong with taking a call at on a lonely stretch of Nevada freeway during the day, but there's everything wrong with taking a call at night on 26th through Little Village in Chicago). The device could be useful for people with long, solo driving commutes, no self-control, and compulsive worriers for spouses or bosses. It wouldn't be useful for anyone I know, but that doesn't mean much.
Dear Fine Moderator (and m2 folk that might read this): Disagree does not equal Troll. If you think I'm wrong, that Mozilla's word should never be doubted, respond and tell me *why*.
Can you use very many common Perl modules or many of its built-in functions in a functional style? No. Modern Perl allows functional programming because it has many features considered necessary for it, but it's often not the most convenient and natural way to solve a problem. For example, list manipulations, where the quite-non-functional builtin splice is the easiest way by far.
So I'd say it allows functional programming but doesn't exemplify its ideas. The total set of its features doesn't encourage a functional style, and a functional style is very, very much not idiomatic to Perl. Similarly, I don't think Perl is an object-oriented language either, even though its object system is insanely flexible and most CPAN modules use classes and objects. In Perl you have to define so much basic class behavior yourself that classes are usually only written if the benefits of encapsulation are truly overwhelming.
What sort of language is Perl? Larry Wall has said Perl was not made to fit a philosophy. It draws inspiration and features from many different languages without trying to be conceptually unified as much as many other languages. He's called it a post-modern language for that reason. It's often called a glue language, which talks about how it's used rather than how it's designed; however, Perl has evolved around its uses. It glues together various languages, formats, computers, networks, and much of the code we write in Perl involves gluing together modules. Its flexible typing and syntax each facilitate this usage.
Ever hear of the "data" project? Mozilla is funded by the ad giants of the web and its grass-roots support comes mostly from webmasters that want browser technology to improve so they can take more and more control over how your computer displays their pages through scripting and Flash.
Mozilla isn't your friend just because it gives you free stuff. That's the bait. Web tracking-point-oh is the hook.
I hope you meant "functional" meaning "it works" rather than that it exemplifies functional programming ideas, because it doesn't do anything close to the latter.
The idea that it streamlines a lot of practical tasks makes it similar to BASIC, not different. As much as some elitists around here disparage any form of BASIC (probably mostly because Microsoft has a very popular version around right now), it was on many old computers an easy way to hack up quick prototypes, utilities, and games. Perl was written for a very different environment than old BASICs (memory protection, process isolation, and the abstraction of Unix's unified file system rather than the almost-bare-metal environs of DOS and older OSes), had different tasks in mind (data processing and no games, which would require graphical resources more complicated to obtain on the more modern system), and replaced different types of tools (C, awk, and shell rather than assembler).
Still, the approach at all times was to aggressively make things simple for the programmer. And the approach was practical and, I believe, willfully short-sighted. Just as spaghetti code in an early BASIC could be easier to digest in small doses than highly-structured stuff in a modern BASIC, for many small programs the ideas idiomatic to early Perl allow for quick and intuitive scripts. Dynamically scoped variables controlling behavior of standard functions, format and write, extensive use of the default variable, flags like -n and -p. As in BASIC, the limitations of these things are exposed and they become less used (i.e. $_ as different structures would try to use it for conflicting things) or they become dangerous and are de-fanged (i.e. $[). So Perl5 has come to look like a lot of other languages, just with lots of nice short-cuts to do common things (from declaring a hash to writing a man page) and some warts from the old days (inconsistent error handling across modules is an issue). Sort of like how Visual Basic 6 makes it trivial to add forms and dialog boxes to a GUI app, in the spirit of early BASICs' simple drawing commands, but has its share of kludges (the mushy distinction between form classes and instances, and the awful error handling).
Most browser vulnerabilities aren't as simple as vulnerabilities in common network server or client code. I think it would be pretty damn hard to declare a browser secure by examining its code.
Road construction has to be funded. Currently we're funding it by taxing fuel. Which hits... *drumroll*... truckers. Maybe the truckers will pay a little more as a group because their activity isn't being subsidized by diesel passenger cars, but I don't think their contribution to diesel usage is significant at this point. When did I suggest taxing truckers out of business? Yes, it would be disastrous to do so.
The same amount of money needs to be spent to fix the roads no matter who directly foots the bill. So if we charge closer to the actual source of the damage we encourage behavior that minimizes road damage. Products whose transport contributes most to road damage are affected most, those which contribute least are affected least. Similarly, we might tax fuel directly and appropriately for other reasons (funding research on oil exploration, pollution mitigation, etc.).
As far as carpooling goes, it's already encouraged by fuel costs and vehicle maintenance costs, which are less per-person among carpoolers. Highways and bridges with tolls also charge per-car. I'm pretty sure congestion charges are per-car. This gives a real, tangible cost saving associated with carpooling that allows people to make a rational decision about it; the difference in cost is proportional to the actual cost of putting another car on the road, whereas taxing non-carpoolers just because you think it's a sign of overprivledge doesn't. And people have decided it's not worth the loss of flexibility. Carpooling is like riding a bus with some trade-offs: it goes straight to your house, but you only get one per day, so there's not much schedule flexibility. Compare to living in a real city with a real transit system. Compare to living close enough to the office that you can walk or bike. Yeah, there are other benefits and other costs associated there, but a lot more people have decided on that than have decided on carpooling.
From TFA: "At least from this study, we cannot draw any conclusion that bisphenol A causes any health effect. As noted by the authors, further research will be needed to understand whether these statistical associations have any relevance at all for human health."
As noted by the authors. The authors, and the person TFA got a quote from, and TFA all make this concession, and you try to karma-whore by stating the obvious. Read. The. Fine. Article.
Honest question because I don't know: Do big trucks damage roads disproportionately to their fuel usage, compared to passenger cars?
And also, how do compare to a series of tubes in this regard?
Err, right, back on point, whether big trucks do or don't cause most road damage, we're still taxing the wrong thing. It isn't diesel fuel that causes road damage, it's weight, right? Off the top of my head I'd guess weight per axle; there's probably a formula out there that's pretty accurate. Tax truckers directly based on that. If you put the taxes as close to the costs as possible the behaviors they encourage are more beneficial!
1. Displaying a EULA is not sufficient to stop trademark infringement in practice. In fact, it makes no difference at all.
2. Displaying a EULA is not necessary to defend a trademark. At least according to other trademarked programs that defend their trademarks and don't display EULAs. What they need to do to defend their mark is sue others that try to use it improperly. They've sure as shit done that, protecting us all from those malicious bastards at Debian backporting security fixes.
3. It's important that Free Software projects act in ways that can be universalized. Especially big, important projects like Mozilla. You know what happened with the BSD license's advertising clause. It became untenable, as every contributor to the total system had to be mentioned in advertising, and eventually was removed from the license. Free Software is a big ecosystem and if every project started acting like Mozilla we'd have big problems.
Fortunately, there's a great equalizer: the source. XFree got forked, and Mozilla can be forked, too. It would take more effort because Mozilla has money and deals with Google and stuff (how long before we realize that was a mistake?). At the very least, it's always easy to keep up a cheap parallel version with no non-Free stuff until the marketing influence in Mozilla really drives it to Hell (not just their own marketing, but their deals with Google and the influence of web designers in general, whose interests, to say the least, only occasionally align with users').
Brilliant idea. Just fork everything. It's easy for the first couple years when you can just make superficial hacks to make it work on your narrow hardware selection.
Then eventually major changes have to be made. None of your programmers actually wrote this code or have a deep understanding of why it is how it is, and the people that did are actively hostile to you for trying to usurp their role in the project. A community with real responsibility and leadership isn't compatible with the kind of tight control you want. You'll be writing everything from here on out.
At this point you've either become Microsoft or Apple. Microsoft probably has the hardest job in software: making Windows run well on all those PCs. Without economies of scale and a stranglehold on the market that allows you to charge real money for licenses you won't be able to hire all the programmers you need to be Microsoft.
Apple only has to make their OS run on a few computers, but you can't really succeed doing that unless they're a few computers that really matter. To be Apple you need a buzz machine on the order of Steve Jobs, maybe even bigger because you're burdened by your company's existing stodgy reputation. This buzz machine can't just be the head of marketing, he needs to run the damn joint. Both because you need the buzz and mystique to pervade the company internally as well, and because a guy >= O(Steve Jobs) simply isn't going to accept being your sniveling underling.
And then what if you succeed at doing that? Either one of those things, take your pick. You've technically made a desktop success out of some of Linux's code. Who cares? There's nothing magical about the code that makes up the GNU/Linux desktop. Most of it has commercial counterparts with important advantages. The reason we care about F/OSS is because of the community processes that generate it. The people of Linux will carry on in the frustration of hacking their xorg.conf files. Not that it's a very enjoyable thing to do on a Friday night, or even that it's something that human beings running standard PC hardware should have to bother with in 2008, but because the software is documented, not marketed. Because there's a community there that's honest, open, and passionate (for all its flaws it surpasses what any corporation will ever put out in these quantities). Because they don't just want to consume, they want to understand. And because hacking the xorg.conf sure beats going out and talking to people. Ew.
The web is a great way for people to get information on anything. Information can generally be massaged into the great mixture of linear and hierarchical structure called HTML. People, meanwhile...
People have big screens and small screens. Some people have their monitors at eye height on their desks, others hunch over cell phones and laptops on crowded trains. Some people use fine resolutions and others coarse ones. Doesn't matter why, they just do, and they're generally unable or unwilling to change. Some people are alert and others are tired and have strained eyes. Oh, yeah, some of these people are blind and use screen readers, a lot are color-blind, some need or prefer high- or low-contrast color schemes that are grating for the rest of us.
Some people broke their fucking xorg.conf and are fishing for help in Lynx at 80x25. Some can't or won't use Flash, from GNU/Hippies to Plan 9 users to JesusPhone disciples. Meanwhile self-important asshole businesspeople everywhere don't even get color on their Crackberries (unless it's changed since I last saw one). Some people print web pages. Some people like their Emacs keybindings, dammit (and this includes a growing number of hipster Mac fanbois).
Make it "easier for everyone", just try.
You can make it really easy for everyone you care about and still usable for many of the ones you didn't even think of if you give up pixel perfection and do it the easy way.
2. It's a good thing if you like having no choice of client for what have traditionally been client-server apps. It's a good thing if you like UI decisions made on the basis of what will yield the most ad impressions. It's a good choice if you hate responsiveness. It's a good choice if you don't like having control of your damn data. And if you think it's great security policy to just let websites send you scripts and programs every time you want to read the news.
And have you ever really tried to use the web's variety of applications on many OSes? This isn't even about my weird Plan 9 fixation; tons of web sites rely on Flash or Silverlight, which give you pretty limited options. Those sites won't even work on the JesusPhone yet; think of what the odds are they'll ever work on less hyped devices and platforms. If your email is just IMAP you can get it anywhere anyone has bothered to write a client; ditto IRC, ditto NNTP. Many more OSes have programs to play back video in standard formats than can run Flash player for YouTube or *insert-web-site-with-unnecessary-custom-video-player-here*. In fact, if you write your web site to output simple HTML with Just The Facts, Ma'am, instead of some fancy-pants Web-2.0 shit, even the assholes that do run Plan 9 can probably use it.
The web's killer-app is the hyperlink. The ability to have links between different sites that just work (as long as they're maintained) is cool. I can't, however, think of any reason for full programming ability and full linking ability to be together that's more important than controlling the code that runs on my box, and controlling my own data.
I'm not very optimistic about Chrome for Linux being much more than a careless port. I haven't tried all of Google's Linux offerings but I've used Earth, and it's pretty clunky (and always way behind the Windows version for features; as I recall, like with Chrome, it was Windows-only at first and they took their sweet time porting it). Furthermore, Chrome (according to the gmail blog... I don't have a Windows installation to test on) doesn't even run on Vista or 64-bit Windows. If they cared about making it a cross-platform app that would have been part of the architecture from the beginning and it should have been downright trivial to get it running on different versions of Windows.
I'd be glad to have a browser keep its various tabs and windows separate. I'd be gladder if we hadn't turned the web into an application platform in the first place.
Hah. Totally off-topic, but Insight in Champaign-Urbana (University of Illinois area) are incompetent assholes (or at least were when I was in school there). They set up my apartment building with Internet service (after supposedly deceiving my landlord about the cost, which meant we paid three times what we had agreed to... although I think in reality the landlord probably misread the contract and blamed Insight to cover his ass) that put us all behind NAT. They accused me of being a pirate when I complained (I couldn't quit the contract without quitting my lease... lesson learned). Later they had some proxy software (!?!) running that prevented their users from accessing one of the common alternate HTTP ports (maybe 8080?); because most of the people complaining were trying to access one specific University site, they blamed the University for months, even as I repeatedly sent them examples of other broken sites and traceroute output demonstrating that this really was their problem.
I live in Chicago. I use public transit or my bike for most of my longer inter-city trips, and I can get almost everything I need within walking distance in my neighborhood. I could pretty easily limit my travel to within walking distance of my apartment for a long time. I'd say it's pretty self-sufficient from a personal perspective (although goods are shipped in from the outside, and waste dumped elsewhere, of course).
But I have friends and family currently located in such places as: Elmhurst (a suburb, 18 miles away as the bike flies), Woodstock (a farther-flung suburb, probably a 50-mile trip), Paxton (a small town in east-central Illinois, 120 miles away), the Quad Cities, Urbana, Kalamazoo, Ames, Sioux Falls, Syracuse, Washington DC, and Seattle, to name a few. And my network is substantially smaller and more centralized than many people's. I've seen all of them (some have come to visit me, and I've visited some of them) within the past year. Furthermore people frequently move, go to college out-of-state, travel on business, etc. And that's just for personal transportation. No city, even those much bigger than 1.1 million people, manufactures all of its goods. Even if it had the ability, its people would want imports from other places. Bell's Brewery, for example, recently resumed distributing in Illinois after a significant hiatus. There are more than 1.1 million people in Illinois, and plenty of them can and do make very good beer. But Illinoisans are still excited about the return of Bell's.
That's not to say that it couldn't be much more efficient than current cities. Just that you can't declare a place self-sufficient, wall it off, and say that the transportation solution is solved. Intra-arcology transit would still exist, just as intra-city transit exists today. Transportation takes space, limiting how close arcologies can be placed to each other, and takes time and energy, limiting travel between far-flung ones.
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Consumer-grade shit is consumer-grade shit in every industry. But I think we can have some expectation that when we buy a router, even a cheap shitty one, that it makes a best effort to send the data we ask and not its own marketing message. To use a bad car analogy, I don't expect my car to corner like a race car, to tow a 16-wheel trailer, to be as comfortable as a Benz. But I do expect that it steers where I turn the wheel, and not to the nearest mall.
Lots of consumer-grade shit is ad-supported; we get cheaper shit in exchange for being coerced into buying more cheap shit. Maybe if a company is going to introduce an ad-supported business model to a class of products where it's generally unexpected they should be required to label it prominently.
Actually that sounds more like the work of a corporation, externalizing the damages and costs of its operations to whomever and whatever it can.
And yet plenty of countries that do it socialist-style have lower costs than we do without any pretense of a free market. I apologize if you're not really a True Free Market Believer, but you sound a bit like one... if you believe that doctors and medical schools ought to be licensed/accredited by someone, and that body should be one that doesn't benefit from high barriers to entry, you might agree that some sort of governmental organization might fit well in the role.
1. Free markets (like freedom) aren't free. That is, markets with no outside intervention aren't always competitive. Sometimes it takes work and regulation to establish competitive and efficient markets.
2. Free markets aren't magic. Markets that are competitive and don't have overly restrictive barriers to entry (your post mostly addresses barriers to entry) will often come up with more optimized solutions than central planners. It doesn't mean that the optimized result is deemed satisfactory by the society, which might value something different than what gets optimized (often efficiency for a company means finding ways to internalize public resources and externalize costs; when, in the case of insurers, the customer base is the revenue source and the cost-center, market optimization may not even benefit customers, but only shareholders).
Bureaucrats decide treatment in the US, too. They're just corporate ones, not government ones. There are advantages and disadvantages to each. Typically people can vote out the government if they piss off everyone, but they can walk away individually from companies. Health insurance isn't like that. People practically can't walk away from their health insurers, don't have another option.
I don't think there's a perfect way to decide when treatments are as expensive as they often are today. But I do know the following things. Today's market for health insurance was created by government regulation. This market works as often as not against good health care. It has become very efficient: efficient at extracting the most money possible from everyone in the US into the industry while doing as little as possible. Isn't that what markets are best at? There are high barriers to entry in this market and regulations influenced by its biggest players. And so it isn't surprising that we spend a lot on health care and get pretty mediocre service.
I'm not fundamentally opposed to a system that uses money and markets, but we shouldn't construct a system, as we have, where market forces work against us rather than for us.
Passengers in a car can be distracting to drivers. However, passengers in a moving car are intuitively aware of the driver's need to focus on the road. It's communicated through the driver's body language with no effort or attention expended by the driver. It's also often obvious to passengers, who can see out the car, when a complicated situation is coming up.
In fact, by taking over radio and heater fiddling duties, helping with navigation, and reacting to dangerous conditions that the driver might miss, passengers can help drivers be safer. Which isn't to say that passengers are always good; sometimes they really are a distraction. But I'm pretty sure studies have been done on their effects, and they're nowhere near that of cell callers.
As far as the story goes, I think the device could be useful for some people, and terrible for others. I don't have a cell phone, rarely drive, and when I do, usually have passengers. Usually in cars I drive and ride in the passengers take calls for the driver, often helping to coordinate plans and give directions. Cutting passengers off from phone calls seems like a bad idea to me. The device would also stop calls on trains and buses. And it might not stop calls to people stopped, at stop-lights or otherwise, in city traffic, people who need to have their wits about them most (I don't think there's anything wrong with taking a call at on a lonely stretch of Nevada freeway during the day, but there's everything wrong with taking a call at night on 26th through Little Village in Chicago). The device could be useful for people with long, solo driving commutes, no self-control, and compulsive worriers for spouses or bosses. It wouldn't be useful for anyone I know, but that doesn't mean much.
Dear Fine Moderator (and m2 folk that might read this): Disagree does not equal Troll. If you think I'm wrong, that Mozilla's word should never be doubted, respond and tell me *why*.
Can you use very many common Perl modules or many of its built-in functions in a functional style? No. Modern Perl allows functional programming because it has many features considered necessary for it, but it's often not the most convenient and natural way to solve a problem. For example, list manipulations, where the quite-non-functional builtin splice is the easiest way by far.
So I'd say it allows functional programming but doesn't exemplify its ideas. The total set of its features doesn't encourage a functional style, and a functional style is very, very much not idiomatic to Perl. Similarly, I don't think Perl is an object-oriented language either, even though its object system is insanely flexible and most CPAN modules use classes and objects. In Perl you have to define so much basic class behavior yourself that classes are usually only written if the benefits of encapsulation are truly overwhelming.
What sort of language is Perl? Larry Wall has said Perl was not made to fit a philosophy. It draws inspiration and features from many different languages without trying to be conceptually unified as much as many other languages. He's called it a post-modern language for that reason. It's often called a glue language, which talks about how it's used rather than how it's designed; however, Perl has evolved around its uses. It glues together various languages, formats, computers, networks, and much of the code we write in Perl involves gluing together modules. Its flexible typing and syntax each facilitate this usage.
Ever hear of the "data" project? Mozilla is funded by the ad giants of the web and its grass-roots support comes mostly from webmasters that want browser technology to improve so they can take more and more control over how your computer displays their pages through scripting and Flash.
Mozilla isn't your friend just because it gives you free stuff. That's the bait. Web tracking-point-oh is the hook.
I hope you meant "functional" meaning "it works" rather than that it exemplifies functional programming ideas, because it doesn't do anything close to the latter.
The idea that it streamlines a lot of practical tasks makes it similar to BASIC, not different. As much as some elitists around here disparage any form of BASIC (probably mostly because Microsoft has a very popular version around right now), it was on many old computers an easy way to hack up quick prototypes, utilities, and games. Perl was written for a very different environment than old BASICs (memory protection, process isolation, and the abstraction of Unix's unified file system rather than the almost-bare-metal environs of DOS and older OSes), had different tasks in mind (data processing and no games, which would require graphical resources more complicated to obtain on the more modern system), and replaced different types of tools (C, awk, and shell rather than assembler).
Still, the approach at all times was to aggressively make things simple for the programmer. And the approach was practical and, I believe, willfully short-sighted. Just as spaghetti code in an early BASIC could be easier to digest in small doses than highly-structured stuff in a modern BASIC, for many small programs the ideas idiomatic to early Perl allow for quick and intuitive scripts. Dynamically scoped variables controlling behavior of standard functions, format and write, extensive use of the default variable, flags like -n and -p. As in BASIC, the limitations of these things are exposed and they become less used (i.e. $_ as different structures would try to use it for conflicting things) or they become dangerous and are de-fanged (i.e. $[). So Perl5 has come to look like a lot of other languages, just with lots of nice short-cuts to do common things (from declaring a hash to writing a man page) and some warts from the old days (inconsistent error handling across modules is an issue). Sort of like how Visual Basic 6 makes it trivial to add forms and dialog boxes to a GUI app, in the spirit of early BASICs' simple drawing commands, but has its share of kludges (the mushy distinction between form classes and instances, and the awful error handling).
I'll bite. What is it that you'd like to use it for? Just curious, not judgmental.
Most browser vulnerabilities aren't as simple as vulnerabilities in common network server or client code. I think it would be pretty damn hard to declare a browser secure by examining its code.
I would be surprised. Shit happens.
Skyrocket? You're high.
Road construction has to be funded. Currently we're funding it by taxing fuel. Which hits... *drumroll*... truckers. Maybe the truckers will pay a little more as a group because their activity isn't being subsidized by diesel passenger cars, but I don't think their contribution to diesel usage is significant at this point. When did I suggest taxing truckers out of business? Yes, it would be disastrous to do so.
The same amount of money needs to be spent to fix the roads no matter who directly foots the bill. So if we charge closer to the actual source of the damage we encourage behavior that minimizes road damage. Products whose transport contributes most to road damage are affected most, those which contribute least are affected least. Similarly, we might tax fuel directly and appropriately for other reasons (funding research on oil exploration, pollution mitigation, etc.).
As far as carpooling goes, it's already encouraged by fuel costs and vehicle maintenance costs, which are less per-person among carpoolers. Highways and bridges with tolls also charge per-car. I'm pretty sure congestion charges are per-car. This gives a real, tangible cost saving associated with carpooling that allows people to make a rational decision about it; the difference in cost is proportional to the actual cost of putting another car on the road, whereas taxing non-carpoolers just because you think it's a sign of overprivledge doesn't. And people have decided it's not worth the loss of flexibility. Carpooling is like riding a bus with some trade-offs: it goes straight to your house, but you only get one per day, so there's not much schedule flexibility. Compare to living in a real city with a real transit system. Compare to living close enough to the office that you can walk or bike. Yeah, there are other benefits and other costs associated there, but a lot more people have decided on that than have decided on carpooling.
From TFA: "At least from this study, we cannot draw any conclusion that bisphenol A causes any health effect. As noted by the authors, further research will be needed to understand whether these statistical associations have any relevance at all for human health."
As noted by the authors. The authors, and the person TFA got a quote from, and TFA all make this concession, and you try to karma-whore by stating the obvious. Read. The. Fine. Article.
Honest question because I don't know: Do big trucks damage roads disproportionately to their fuel usage, compared to passenger cars?
And also, how do compare to a series of tubes in this regard?
Err, right, back on point, whether big trucks do or don't cause most road damage, we're still taxing the wrong thing. It isn't diesel fuel that causes road damage, it's weight, right? Off the top of my head I'd guess weight per axle; there's probably a formula out there that's pretty accurate. Tax truckers directly based on that. If you put the taxes as close to the costs as possible the behaviors they encourage are more beneficial!
1. Displaying a EULA is not sufficient to stop trademark infringement in practice. In fact, it makes no difference at all.
2. Displaying a EULA is not necessary to defend a trademark. At least according to other trademarked programs that defend their trademarks and don't display EULAs. What they need to do to defend their mark is sue others that try to use it improperly. They've sure as shit done that, protecting us all from those malicious bastards at Debian backporting security fixes.
3. It's important that Free Software projects act in ways that can be universalized. Especially big, important projects like Mozilla. You know what happened with the BSD license's advertising clause. It became untenable, as every contributor to the total system had to be mentioned in advertising, and eventually was removed from the license. Free Software is a big ecosystem and if every project started acting like Mozilla we'd have big problems.
Fortunately, there's a great equalizer: the source. XFree got forked, and Mozilla can be forked, too. It would take more effort because Mozilla has money and deals with Google and stuff (how long before we realize that was a mistake?). At the very least, it's always easy to keep up a cheap parallel version with no non-Free stuff until the marketing influence in Mozilla really drives it to Hell (not just their own marketing, but their deals with Google and the influence of web designers in general, whose interests, to say the least, only occasionally align with users').
Brilliant idea. Just fork everything. It's easy for the first couple years when you can just make superficial hacks to make it work on your narrow hardware selection.
Then eventually major changes have to be made. None of your programmers actually wrote this code or have a deep understanding of why it is how it is, and the people that did are actively hostile to you for trying to usurp their role in the project. A community with real responsibility and leadership isn't compatible with the kind of tight control you want. You'll be writing everything from here on out.
At this point you've either become Microsoft or Apple. Microsoft probably has the hardest job in software: making Windows run well on all those PCs. Without economies of scale and a stranglehold on the market that allows you to charge real money for licenses you won't be able to hire all the programmers you need to be Microsoft.
Apple only has to make their OS run on a few computers, but you can't really succeed doing that unless they're a few computers that really matter. To be Apple you need a buzz machine on the order of Steve Jobs, maybe even bigger because you're burdened by your company's existing stodgy reputation. This buzz machine can't just be the head of marketing, he needs to run the damn joint. Both because you need the buzz and mystique to pervade the company internally as well, and because a guy >= O(Steve Jobs) simply isn't going to accept being your sniveling underling.
And then what if you succeed at doing that? Either one of those things, take your pick. You've technically made a desktop success out of some of Linux's code. Who cares? There's nothing magical about the code that makes up the GNU/Linux desktop. Most of it has commercial counterparts with important advantages. The reason we care about F/OSS is because of the community processes that generate it. The people of Linux will carry on in the frustration of hacking their xorg.conf files. Not that it's a very enjoyable thing to do on a Friday night, or even that it's something that human beings running standard PC hardware should have to bother with in 2008, but because the software is documented, not marketed. Because there's a community there that's honest, open, and passionate (for all its flaws it surpasses what any corporation will ever put out in these quantities). Because they don't just want to consume, they want to understand. And because hacking the xorg.conf sure beats going out and talking to people. Ew.
No partner. This is Slashdot, remember?
The web is a great way for people to get information on anything. Information can generally be massaged into the great mixture of linear and hierarchical structure called HTML. People, meanwhile...
People have big screens and small screens. Some people have their monitors at eye height on their desks, others hunch over cell phones and laptops on crowded trains. Some people use fine resolutions and others coarse ones. Doesn't matter why, they just do, and they're generally unable or unwilling to change. Some people are alert and others are tired and have strained eyes. Oh, yeah, some of these people are blind and use screen readers, a lot are color-blind, some need or prefer high- or low-contrast color schemes that are grating for the rest of us.
Some people broke their fucking xorg.conf and are fishing for help in Lynx at 80x25. Some can't or won't use Flash, from GNU/Hippies to Plan 9 users to JesusPhone disciples. Meanwhile self-important asshole businesspeople everywhere don't even get color on their Crackberries (unless it's changed since I last saw one). Some people print web pages. Some people like their Emacs keybindings, dammit (and this includes a growing number of hipster Mac fanbois).
Make it "easier for everyone", just try.
You can make it really easy for everyone you care about and still usable for many of the ones you didn't even think of if you give up pixel perfection and do it the easy way.
1. OK, I guess the gmail blog was wrong.
2. It's a good thing if you like having no choice of client for what have traditionally been client-server apps. It's a good thing if you like UI decisions made on the basis of what will yield the most ad impressions. It's a good choice if you hate responsiveness. It's a good choice if you don't like having control of your damn data. And if you think it's great security policy to just let websites send you scripts and programs every time you want to read the news.
And have you ever really tried to use the web's variety of applications on many OSes? This isn't even about my weird Plan 9 fixation; tons of web sites rely on Flash or Silverlight, which give you pretty limited options. Those sites won't even work on the JesusPhone yet; think of what the odds are they'll ever work on less hyped devices and platforms. If your email is just IMAP you can get it anywhere anyone has bothered to write a client; ditto IRC, ditto NNTP. Many more OSes have programs to play back video in standard formats than can run Flash player for YouTube or *insert-web-site-with-unnecessary-custom-video-player-here*. In fact, if you write your web site to output simple HTML with Just The Facts, Ma'am, instead of some fancy-pants Web-2.0 shit, even the assholes that do run Plan 9 can probably use it.
The web's killer-app is the hyperlink. The ability to have links between different sites that just work (as long as they're maintained) is cool. I can't, however, think of any reason for full programming ability and full linking ability to be together that's more important than controlling the code that runs on my box, and controlling my own data.
For fail and lose. pi/4 is greater than 1/2.
I'm not very optimistic about Chrome for Linux being much more than a careless port. I haven't tried all of Google's Linux offerings but I've used Earth, and it's pretty clunky (and always way behind the Windows version for features; as I recall, like with Chrome, it was Windows-only at first and they took their sweet time porting it). Furthermore, Chrome (according to the gmail blog... I don't have a Windows installation to test on) doesn't even run on Vista or 64-bit Windows. If they cared about making it a cross-platform app that would have been part of the architecture from the beginning and it should have been downright trivial to get it running on different versions of Windows.
I'd be glad to have a browser keep its various tabs and windows separate. I'd be gladder if we hadn't turned the web into an application platform in the first place.
Hah. Totally off-topic, but Insight in Champaign-Urbana (University of Illinois area) are incompetent assholes (or at least were when I was in school there). They set up my apartment building with Internet service (after supposedly deceiving my landlord about the cost, which meant we paid three times what we had agreed to... although I think in reality the landlord probably misread the contract and blamed Insight to cover his ass) that put us all behind NAT. They accused me of being a pirate when I complained (I couldn't quit the contract without quitting my lease... lesson learned). Later they had some proxy software (!?!) running that prevented their users from accessing one of the common alternate HTTP ports (maybe 8080?); because most of the people complaining were trying to access one specific University site, they blamed the University for months, even as I repeatedly sent them examples of other broken sites and traceroute output demonstrating that this really was their problem.
And I thought I had a shot at getting this in first...
Maybe he should make his new password "Lloyds security is pants"
I live in Chicago. I use public transit or my bike for most of my longer inter-city trips, and I can get almost everything I need within walking distance in my neighborhood. I could pretty easily limit my travel to within walking distance of my apartment for a long time. I'd say it's pretty self-sufficient from a personal perspective (although goods are shipped in from the outside, and waste dumped elsewhere, of course).
But I have friends and family currently located in such places as: Elmhurst (a suburb, 18 miles away as the bike flies), Woodstock (a farther-flung suburb, probably a 50-mile trip), Paxton (a small town in east-central Illinois, 120 miles away), the Quad Cities, Urbana, Kalamazoo, Ames, Sioux Falls, Syracuse, Washington DC, and Seattle, to name a few. And my network is substantially smaller and more centralized than many people's. I've seen all of them (some have come to visit me, and I've visited some of them) within the past year. Furthermore people frequently move, go to college out-of-state, travel on business, etc. And that's just for personal transportation. No city, even those much bigger than 1.1 million people, manufactures all of its goods. Even if it had the ability, its people would want imports from other places. Bell's Brewery, for example, recently resumed distributing in Illinois after a significant hiatus. There are more than 1.1 million people in Illinois, and plenty of them can and do make very good beer. But Illinoisans are still excited about the return of Bell's.
That's not to say that it couldn't be much more efficient than current cities. Just that you can't declare a place self-sufficient, wall it off, and say that the transportation solution is solved. Intra-arcology transit would still exist, just as intra-city transit exists today. Transportation takes space, limiting how close arcologies can be placed to each other, and takes time and energy, limiting travel between far-flung ones.