However, if the courts or laws are weak/corrupt and the penalties associated with data theft are laughable compared to the benefits, then you have a big problem.
The problem is how to stop these crimes, not punish people after they commit them. To this end we have to look at the motivation of the criminals. Having a lax criminal system may make them more likely to steal customer data and resell it, but it is by no means the primary factor. The main reason people don't steal is not out of threat of punishment. Most people put on an honor system and treated well, are honest. No the real problem comes when workers are treated unfairly in such a way that motivates them to steal because they do not find it to be unethical.
Many companies have been attracted to India and other countries by relatively cheap labor, but they really need to look at the rule and culture of law in any country they plan to do business in as well.
They need to look at the culture and the cultural differences, but not necessarily the legal culture. Do you want to find really high rates of crime? Don't look for the least punitive legal system. Look for the most unfairness. In particular, look for wage disparity. Whenever you have people who are not as smart and who don't work as hard making orders of magnitude more than others, you'll see high crime. People recognize the inherent unfairness in one not very nice person being born into excessive wealth while they are born poor, have little chance to advance and desperately need just a fraction of what the rich person wasted on clothes to feed their kids this month. So, many turn to crime, often not even those who are poorest.
With India and the US, you have several problems. One, the highest paid people in the "chain of command" are all Americans. Second, they don't work very hard and were born into relative wealth, in a rich country where they did not have to work all that hard. Third, not only do they not work hard and enjoy disproportionate luxury, they don't treat those they hire as people. American business treats workers dispassionately. You can be laid off from a job you need to feed your kids because of a decision by someone who does not even know you and they tell you "it's just business." At that point taking the customer database and selling it is "just business." The truth is, the cost of building worker loyalty, treating them well, and making sure they know the company will look after them is usually cheaper in the long run than the cost of having everyone in the company behave adversarially and having to try to monitor them all as potential threats. Unless American companies can look to the long term instead of net quarter, these problems will only become more common.
Thus, the people who know they are making a great deal less than people in the UK or US feel that they are doing this to equalize themselves. It is a psychological phenomenon.
You're completely correct, but this does not apply only to India. Wage disparity correlates more strongly with violent crime than pretty much any other social phenomenon. The way most modern cultures have evolved, the primary motivation to not steal is ethical. Punitive measures are very weak motivation by comparison. For all those arguing that this is prevalent because of lax security or a legal system that is less likely to punish, you're barking up the wrong tree. When one person starts with less resources and is rewarded with less despite being both smarter and a harder worker, that person often feels no ethical restriction from theft. When the poorer person is treated in a mercenary fashion in the first place and sees others treated the same (sorry about the layoff, it's just business) why would anyone expect them to consider selling customer data in a different light?
The Mac way sounds awful. Does it automatically select POP for you and clear out your mailbox the first time you connect? I would be PISSED if it did that.
No, it asks what type of account you are creating, POP, IMAP, or.mac. It actually works very well in that people who don't know what they're doing can easily create a working e-mail account and it will be as secure as possible. It is a little less nice if you know exactly what you're doing, but if that is the case, you'll figure it out pretty quickly.
Surely there has to be some threshold number of people to have read something or to be aware of it before anyone can claim it's "invaded our culture." I only ever meet "freaks and geeks" (and I don't use those terms disparagingly; I consider myself one) who have even heard of it, let alone read it.
Well, it was a bestseller, but I don't think the number of people who read it is as important as the observed influence. As I said, I've heard a number of people cite things Mr. Wilsons' books "informed" the user of as background info and which were spread by word of mouth. Some of it is true, some of it is fiction and much of it is wrongly depicted as the other by those who cite it as trivia or support. It influenced a lot of literature that came after it. And, as I said, I believe it had a much more subtle effect upon our culture than a normal work of literature. Most of the people who have bits of it wandering around their brain have never read the book and would have no idea that was the source of their mis-education through the grapevine.
The reason plenty of software fails is because of the tremendous number of people required to get it right... psychologists, interaction design experts, anthropologists, users (not customers), graphic designers, a pencil sharpener... it's just too much to expect small projects to have all this, much less expert Dilbertian-type managers to sign off the investment required for all these. The main reason I see for software sucking is simply that there aren't enough skills to get it right, and release-date-driven projects are going to suffer even more.
Rather than a lack or resources, I suspect it is more of a misallocation of resources. I've worked on small projects where a handful of people with a varied skill set put together something wonderful. I've worked on larger projects where vital elements of the design were completely ignored simply because the people running the show did not believe they were important. I think the point is, your product has to be designed to give your customers, whoever they are, what they want in a way they can use. If your design is not centered around those customers and it technically is capable of the tasks they want, but they aren't capable making it do what they want, you've failed. That is something a lot of project managers fail to understand. Sometimes a bullet point in the design is just that, a requirement no one will really use and can be impossible to actually use for the average user. Other times, the entire project might need to change to provide a user with a way to solve a problem, and some bolted on hack, that was easier to code, but which your customers will ignore as unusable is not sufficient.
I get the impression that is isn't addiction that is being tackled, but engaging in socially disapproved activites. Personal responsibility in the case of tacking marijuana consumption, for example, means recognising one's responsibility to conform, not one's ability to exercise sound judgement.
I was speaking of addiction, and thinking in terms of drugs with real, serious, documented addictive effects. Marijuana may be addictive, but if so very, very mildly. I was thinking more in terms of cocaine, opiates, heroin, and the like. In cultures with more bias towards centralized, government run solutions there are free clinics for treatment, and even programs to provide sterile paraphernalia and enough of the drug to keep people from becoming desperate and dangerous. The cost to society of such facilities is generally much smaller than the cost of letting each individual fend for themselves and dealing with the increasing rates of addiction and drug related/motivated violence.
Certainly drug use is disapproved of by pretty much all the cultures I'm describing, to one degree or another. In summary, I'm not sure marijuana clinics where users could go to get their fix without causing a danger to society is really a worthwhile use of tax dollars:)
Don't forget to look into a geothermal system for your heating/cooling needs.
Note, by this I assume the previous poster meant a ground heat pump. I've heard very good things about them as far as price, reliability, and return. The only reason I can think of that they are not in every new home is the up front cost for a purchase where people are usually looking for the highest price they can currently afford.
His major electricity usage is shop tools and clothes dryer.
This alludes to an important point. If you're off the grid, total power use is often less important than a system that can handle the maximum draw. Sometimes you can be a little smarter about how you use the power and wait till the dryer stops before cutting lumber for that new deck with power tools.
One quibble, isn't Americas stance on drugs the opposite of independence?
Our prohibition of them is in opposition to independence (same as most of Europe), but our treatment of addiction as a personal, legal responsibility, rather than a medical problem is indicative of our bias towards personal responsibility.
I was referring to the latter, but you make a valid point with regard to the former.
That's funny, I live in central Vermont and we get 80% of the sun that Florida gets. There are plenty of people up here comfortably living off-grid with solar systems.
Actually, New York state is significantly worse than Vermont, especially in the winter, if you look at solar energy charts. They get a lot of lake-effect snow from the west making parts of it pretty darn bad. It also gets a lot more snow accumulation. One good snow and your panels are inoperative until you clean them off, and in many cases the power needed to do so automatically is less than the power they generate. Solar power, off the grid, in New York state, or much of the US is just insane given the state of the art. It is fine for supplemental energy, but probably not as efficient as wind power in those same locations (lake effect snow correlates to prevailing winds from said lake).
As a financial investment, the return on solar panels for lowering your bills is pretty darn poor compared to dumping that capital in the stock market and spending the earnings on paying for your power. If you're going with solar, do so for ethical reasons, not financial unless you live in the desert.
Much more funding and research is going into solar than is going into wind. Wind power, of course, will always be around and improved upon, but solar has an edge. Solar will work in many more places than wind power, as well as being less of an eyesore.
I'm not really sure about this. In the northern states we get about 1/6 of a solar day worth of energy each day, because of weather and latitude. Most solar panels won't even generate enough electricity to keep the snow off of them to allow them to function for the winter. Also, for an off the grid solution, you need a really big storage array, most of which are negatively affected by the cold, so it has to be buried. Finally, panels break and last I heard none of them were all that recyclable and most contained significant amounts of poisons. AZ is ideal for solar power, but where I'm at it is a non-starter. We do, however, have significant prevailing winds.
My point is that, within a short period of time, solar energy will be affordable to buy and, just as importantly, maintain. These will provide an efficient source of energy for the cost of the panel while not being an eyesore at all.
My point is, that may be true in AZ and other desert areas, but I doubt it will be in the US in general.
The big problem with wind power is that on top of that price, you also have to invest in a huge (and very expensive) energy storage system that can supply your entire energy needs for at least a day when there is little/no wind.
I don't think he mentioned going off the grid, which would be a pretty bad idea. He just talked about putting in a windmill. If there is no wind, you just buy from the grid. If you generate surplus energy, you dump it on the grid (to the dismay of the power company). At least where I live the power company is required to pay me for the power I dump onto the grid, regardless of the spikiness or other undesirable aspects of it. Also, staying on the grid and having a generation system provides an emergency backup.
Exactly. The problem is when a group of people decide to form a "society" and then want to involuntarily include people who might not want to be part of it.
This is called a government. It simply is not possible to remove the benefits brought to you by the government if you want to opt out of some of them. In the case of socialized medicine, if everyone else is paying for it, but you don't want to, how exactly are we to remove the benefits from you. Sure the hospitals can refuse treatment if they know who you are, but how exactly do you pay back the other benefits, like greatly decreased rates of violent crime that the rest of us are ponying up for? And what guarantee do we have that if your funds are insufficient you won't act out of desperation and contribute to the violent crime, at our expense? Nope, if you don't like it, you've got to vote to change it or move.
Or you could work hard, live a fiscally responsible lifestyle, live below your means - instead of living on credit card debt like so many people - and save money for a rainy day.
Your views are simplistic and misguided. I make more money than most and have the good fortune to be in a job that provides me with some health insurance. If I were to become seriously ill, like 99% of the population I would not have the means to get the medical care I needed. Of the 1% who do, most of them got that money through inheritance. Why should they have the money to live extravagantly because of their birth while I die in the gutter? There is no reason in particular, it is just part of how life is not fair. So I might feel completely justified in going to one of those wealth people's homes, and robbing them. Maybe I kill them in self defense during the robbery. Or maybe I'm too sick, but my brother who is well and has years of military training does it on my behalf. Or maybe, he just robs you and a bunch of other people as well.
Socialized medicine benefits all of us through generally increasing standards of living, demotivating desperation and crime, and promoting equality that partially redresses the circumstantial wealth from inheritance. Anyone who looks at the numbers sees the benefits very clearly. It is one of about 3 major contributing factors for the US's violent crime being so much higher than western Europe.
I'm no expert, but I did take a macroeconomics class in college. I'm pretty sure that in this instance, some Africans need to get off their butts and find out what they're useful for in the global economy.
The world is not a free market. In order to get to a state of industrialization that allows people to compete instead of be exploited they need to build up. To do so they need a base economy and capital. Their base economy was agriculture until we destroyed it by selling at less than cost in many parts of Africa. We did this out of self-interest. We wanted to maintain our own agricultural base for security, even though it was no longer economically feasible since American labor was so expensive. So we subsidize and export.
Then they need to do it and quit bitching that they're being picked on by the rest of the world.
I agree, just as soon as we stop invading them and stop undermining their markets for our own profit, they should do that.
A call is supposed to behave as it is documented to behave. Any programs that rely on undocumented features are just asking to break.
So? I'm not the poster you were replying to but, how does this help me, the end user, run the software I want? I tried Crossover the other day and I'm not using it because the software I need to run does not install. I don't care if it should work, I care if it does. In Parallels, it does.
Do you run all your native Mac software in little OS X sandboxes as well, just in case they go all "rogue" on you?
I do run one or two in sandboxes, but in general I don't. That does not mean I would not prefer to do so if it were convenient. That does not mean I'm not even more motivated to run Windows applications in a sandbox, since they are more heavily targeted.
It was just crap (my opinion, obviously). So I was a little surprised to see so many people here who admired it.
If I recall it won quite a few awards and was very popular. Anyway, I loved his work because it went beyond being just a story and was truly a literary attack on our culture. When you stuff your work with that much obviously ludicrous conspiracy theories, but support them with an array of completely true, but unusual facts mixed with both outrageous and plausible fictions the reader simply does not know how to process it. I had to meticulously research everything in the books, simply to comprehend what he managed to put together and even now I occasionally hear some fiction from it presented as fact, or conversely some fact from it dismissed as fiction. 1984 painted a terrible fiction that has influenced our culture as an example. The Illuminatus trilogy, invaded our culture and subtly rearranged some of the furniture. Sorry you did not like it, it is one of my favorites.
The well off person who has millions in the bank to cover all medical eventalities has likely been fortunate enough to have been born with a skill that has enabled them to obtain that money.
Funny. Statistically speaking, the well off person was born into a family that is well off. The secret to wealth is to be born to rich parents, then, since you have money, the money condensation principal kicks in. You can just loan money to those who were born poorer and collect interest.
I've been in tears since this thread started and the thought that America can stand by at let its citizens die sends shivers down my spine.
While the stated goal of pretty much any government program, or lack thereof, is to make people's lives better, we all enter into that with a lot of preconceptions and principals. Americans are predisposed towards independence and each person taking care of themselves. This is reflected in our lack of socialism and in our stance on drugs and firearms. Much of Europe is more predisposed towards placing responsibility on a central authority as is reflected in their beliefs about those same topics. Neither is optimal for quality of life, but it is pretty obvious that overall, Western Europe is closer to the ideal.
If you want to hear some scary numbers take a look at the number of Americans that are financially ruined by medical expenses. I think the last time I heard it was something like 50% of all personal bankruptcies were due to a medical problem.
So have a brand new Intel-based MacBook work gave me, partly so I can consolidate my workstations. The number one Windows program I need to run is Adobe Framemaker. My options seem to be CrossOver and Parallels. Crossover, at first blush, looks ideal for me, since I don't want the overhead of a full Windows install, or the expense of another Windows license (sure it's the company's money, but I have stock options to think of). Also, Framemaker is on the very short list of programs actually supported on the mac version.
So I download both solutions as trials and set them up, or try to. You see, Crossover claims support for Framemaker 7.1, but Adobe only sells version 7.2 these days. Well, will that really make a difference? Apparently so. It fails to install in a bottle designed for Framemaker 7.1. It fails to install in generic bottle for either Win98 or WinXP. The support forums don't have any info and no one else seems to have tried this yet. I'd submit my own comment there, but who wants to make an account for software they aren't even going to use?
Option two was Parallels which seems to be working just fine, on the other hand. Maybe once Crossover is out of beta I'll give it another try, but my brief trial does not fill me with hope. Oh, and another thing, Crossover seems a bit too intrusive for me. Even after I quit it, a process was left running that brought up a dialogue whenever I inserted a Windows CDROM (until I killed it). For some reason that sort of thing really bugs me.
Would some one please explain what exactly it wrong with DRM? If you have a problem with concept of copyrights in general, then I can understand. But is there anyone out there that is cool with copyrights, but thinks DRM is bad?
Okay look, copyright is supposedly a two sided contract. Content creators get a limited monopoly for a limited time that lets them easily make money. Society gets more content, and content is not lost because the distribution was limited y those afraid it would be copied. So in this two sided contract are a whole series of clauses that define the rights each party has, what they can and can't do. Over time, this contract has changed and become very one sided in favor of content producers. That sucks, but is not the problem with DRM. The problem with DRM is it is another way, besides the law, to remove from the populace some of the few rights the contract still guarantees them.
For example, society has the right to use excerpts of copyrighted works in education to teach our young, free of charge. That way, just because someone is making money does not mean children can't still be taught about it. DRM, does not remove that right, it just makes it technologically difficult or impossible. The second thing to remember is that DRM is not always obvious to the purchaser. Often it is hidden and intentionally deceives the user. For example, you go to the store and buy a CD. The plan is to listen to it on your laptop while you fly to Europe. After you buy it yu find out it isn't really a CD. It is a disk that looks like a CD, pretends to be a CD, is sold with CDs, but in truth does not play in your computer. Or maybe it plays in your computer, right up until your plane leaves the uS, then it stops working. This is simply using technology to stop you from exercising your rights, to listen to what you bought where you want how you want. Technology has taken away rights granted to you by the law. That is what is wrong with DRM.
The way I see it is there is nothing wrong with the concept of DRM, only with the abuse of DRM.
I've never seen DRM that was not an abuse. Have you? Can you cite an example of DRM that in no way removes some of the rights copyright law has granted you?
Ready made? Ugh, like 50 cents a pound more for small patties? Hell no...
If you think that's bad, wait till you see the "microwave ready" potatoes. Individual potatoes, wrapped in shrink wrap, for $.80 each. For the price of two you can get a 10 pound bag of the same, minus the shrink wrap. When I first saw them I thought, "how absurd, who would buy that?" Now, years later, they are in all the stores in the area. My girlfriend gets angry every time she sees them.
I'm not sure this is true. Lots of home users want to be able to open documents that they might get emailed, or find on the web.
I have five different programs(including Word) that can read.doc files, but I've never bothered to specify one as a default for that file type. Thus, whenever I have to read one, it asks me what to use. Aside from work, I can think of one time I wanted to open a.doc file. Everything on the Web or in e-mail is text, rich text, PDF or HTML.
to limit a product to only people who don't care about any level of interoperability (besides producing printed output) is aiming for a very small market segment.
I suspect that market is a lot bigger than you think and i coincidentally matches up with Tesco's customers pretty well.
Not being able to open MS Word documents is going to be a major disadvantage of an alternative office suite.
The application they are selling does advertise.doc reading and writing among its feature set, so you can relax.
Aside from paper, and perhaps HTML and raw text, MS Word is probably the most common format for written documents out there.
Every Website I go to that offers something not in HTML, offers it in PDF. No really. Try to get a manual for your toaster, or a TV, or a medical report, or tax documents or nearly anything. It will almost invariably be PDF.
I think you underestimate the number of times "regular users" want to be able to put in a floppy disk and edit a document that they've worked on with another computer.
I've seen this kind of thing happen and you know what, people copy and paste into an e-mail or save as text, or if they are really clueless print it out and retype it. I know people who have done all three. Most people are shockingly accepting of stuff from their old computer no longer working. I don't think.doc compatibility is going to be used much by Tesco customers and I'm sure whatever rudimentary support they have will be fine for most users.
But for food, walmart has the highest quality produce and the largest selection of packaged goods of any store within 20 miles, and it's the closest non-gas-station food source to where I live.
What is interesting is that Walmart thrives on knocking down less competitive stores and becoming the only one in a twenty mile radius. They completely avoid more urban ares because they can't compete. I've been to the nearest Walmart. If their produce is of the same quality as the one near you, and that is your best option, I truly pity you. I'm partial to whole foods whose quality is leaps and bounds beyond Walmart, for a miniscule amount more.
Their lawn chairs (and such) are the highest quality I can buy within around 50 miles, excepting the high-end places I can't afford where they would cost more than ten times as much.
The Walmart business model is to partner with or buy people with medium quality products, or a well respected brand name. They order as much from that company as all their other customers combined, forcing that company to build or buy new production facilities, often overseas. Then, once that company has loans to pay off on those facilities, they demand they lower their prices, every year running. At this point manufacturers are trapped. They can take a huge loss and try to get rid of their new facilities, or lower quality. Almost all of them lower their quality and cut corners. Fire the guys who write the instructions, we can just ship instructions for a model we made 5 years ago. Buy cheaper parts and forget about quality assurance. In some cases Walmart has recommended to companies with profitable, respected brands that they should just slap their name on really cheap, low quality imports. In any case, the result is quality that drops constantly for each product until it is cheap crap.
I know. I had a summer job assembling lawn mowers and the like for them. It was not unusual to need three sets of parts for a single machine, simply to get enough parts properly machined enough to actually hold together. For the most part, everything they sell is junk, not just clothes. I don't shop their out of pure self-interest. Luckily, I now live somewhere where I have a number of reasonable alternatives
You want the free digital copy you had better find a way of paying for the original. A Pixar feature represents five years of work by four hundred people and an investment of $100 million dollars.
I see and how much money did they make selling trademarked toys based upon each movie? I bet it was more than the cost of the movie.
That is not to say that I am in favor of abolishing copyright. I'm all for reasonable copyright laws that balance the financial interests of the creators and the interests of the people. Our current implementation, however, is doing more harm than good. Pixar would still make movies if they were free to all, but Pixar could still trademark the characters and title and sell merchandise.
Fourteen years was judged enough time in the past, and that was laboriously printing with manual presses and distributing with boats and horse-drawn wagons. Now, with cheap, instant digital duplication and distribution via the internet and by plane I'd argue two years is plenty of time for copyrights to be profitable, after the initial publication. Whatever the compromise, the current system is broken so far that it would be better to have no copyright.
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However, if the courts or laws are weak/corrupt and the penalties associated with data theft are laughable compared to the benefits, then you have a big problem.
The problem is how to stop these crimes, not punish people after they commit them. To this end we have to look at the motivation of the criminals. Having a lax criminal system may make them more likely to steal customer data and resell it, but it is by no means the primary factor. The main reason people don't steal is not out of threat of punishment. Most people put on an honor system and treated well, are honest. No the real problem comes when workers are treated unfairly in such a way that motivates them to steal because they do not find it to be unethical.
Many companies have been attracted to India and other countries by relatively cheap labor, but they really need to look at the rule and culture of law in any country they plan to do business in as well.
They need to look at the culture and the cultural differences, but not necessarily the legal culture. Do you want to find really high rates of crime? Don't look for the least punitive legal system. Look for the most unfairness. In particular, look for wage disparity. Whenever you have people who are not as smart and who don't work as hard making orders of magnitude more than others, you'll see high crime. People recognize the inherent unfairness in one not very nice person being born into excessive wealth while they are born poor, have little chance to advance and desperately need just a fraction of what the rich person wasted on clothes to feed their kids this month. So, many turn to crime, often not even those who are poorest.
With India and the US, you have several problems. One, the highest paid people in the "chain of command" are all Americans. Second, they don't work very hard and were born into relative wealth, in a rich country where they did not have to work all that hard. Third, not only do they not work hard and enjoy disproportionate luxury, they don't treat those they hire as people. American business treats workers dispassionately. You can be laid off from a job you need to feed your kids because of a decision by someone who does not even know you and they tell you "it's just business." At that point taking the customer database and selling it is "just business." The truth is, the cost of building worker loyalty, treating them well, and making sure they know the company will look after them is usually cheaper in the long run than the cost of having everyone in the company behave adversarially and having to try to monitor them all as potential threats. Unless American companies can look to the long term instead of net quarter, these problems will only become more common.
Thus, the people who know they are making a great deal less than people in the UK or US feel that they are doing this to equalize themselves. It is a psychological phenomenon.
You're completely correct, but this does not apply only to India. Wage disparity correlates more strongly with violent crime than pretty much any other social phenomenon. The way most modern cultures have evolved, the primary motivation to not steal is ethical. Punitive measures are very weak motivation by comparison. For all those arguing that this is prevalent because of lax security or a legal system that is less likely to punish, you're barking up the wrong tree. When one person starts with less resources and is rewarded with less despite being both smarter and a harder worker, that person often feels no ethical restriction from theft. When the poorer person is treated in a mercenary fashion in the first place and sees others treated the same (sorry about the layoff, it's just business) why would anyone expect them to consider selling customer data in a different light?
The Mac way sounds awful. Does it automatically select POP for you and clear out your mailbox the first time you connect? I would be PISSED if it did that.
No, it asks what type of account you are creating, POP, IMAP, or .mac. It actually works very well in that people who don't know what they're doing can easily create a working e-mail account and it will be as secure as possible. It is a little less nice if you know exactly what you're doing, but if that is the case, you'll figure it out pretty quickly.
Surely there has to be some threshold number of people to have read something or to be aware of it before anyone can claim it's "invaded our culture." I only ever meet "freaks and geeks" (and I don't use those terms disparagingly; I consider myself one) who have even heard of it, let alone read it.
Well, it was a bestseller, but I don't think the number of people who read it is as important as the observed influence. As I said, I've heard a number of people cite things Mr. Wilsons' books "informed" the user of as background info and which were spread by word of mouth. Some of it is true, some of it is fiction and much of it is wrongly depicted as the other by those who cite it as trivia or support. It influenced a lot of literature that came after it. And, as I said, I believe it had a much more subtle effect upon our culture than a normal work of literature. Most of the people who have bits of it wandering around their brain have never read the book and would have no idea that was the source of their mis-education through the grapevine.
The reason plenty of software fails is because of the tremendous number of people required to get it right... psychologists, interaction design experts, anthropologists, users (not customers), graphic designers, a pencil sharpener... it's just too much to expect small projects to have all this, much less expert Dilbertian-type managers to sign off the investment required for all these. The main reason I see for software sucking is simply that there aren't enough skills to get it right, and release-date-driven projects are going to suffer even more.
Rather than a lack or resources, I suspect it is more of a misallocation of resources. I've worked on small projects where a handful of people with a varied skill set put together something wonderful. I've worked on larger projects where vital elements of the design were completely ignored simply because the people running the show did not believe they were important. I think the point is, your product has to be designed to give your customers, whoever they are, what they want in a way they can use. If your design is not centered around those customers and it technically is capable of the tasks they want, but they aren't capable making it do what they want, you've failed. That is something a lot of project managers fail to understand. Sometimes a bullet point in the design is just that, a requirement no one will really use and can be impossible to actually use for the average user. Other times, the entire project might need to change to provide a user with a way to solve a problem, and some bolted on hack, that was easier to code, but which your customers will ignore as unusable is not sufficient.
I get the impression that is isn't addiction that is being tackled, but engaging in socially disapproved activites. Personal responsibility in the case of tacking marijuana consumption, for example, means recognising one's responsibility to conform, not one's ability to exercise sound judgement.
I was speaking of addiction, and thinking in terms of drugs with real, serious, documented addictive effects. Marijuana may be addictive, but if so very, very mildly. I was thinking more in terms of cocaine, opiates, heroin, and the like. In cultures with more bias towards centralized, government run solutions there are free clinics for treatment, and even programs to provide sterile paraphernalia and enough of the drug to keep people from becoming desperate and dangerous. The cost to society of such facilities is generally much smaller than the cost of letting each individual fend for themselves and dealing with the increasing rates of addiction and drug related/motivated violence.
Certainly drug use is disapproved of by pretty much all the cultures I'm describing, to one degree or another. In summary, I'm not sure marijuana clinics where users could go to get their fix without causing a danger to society is really a worthwhile use of tax dollars :)
Don't forget to look into a geothermal system for your heating/cooling needs.
Note, by this I assume the previous poster meant a ground heat pump. I've heard very good things about them as far as price, reliability, and return. The only reason I can think of that they are not in every new home is the up front cost for a purchase where people are usually looking for the highest price they can currently afford.
His major electricity usage is shop tools and clothes dryer.
This alludes to an important point. If you're off the grid, total power use is often less important than a system that can handle the maximum draw. Sometimes you can be a little smarter about how you use the power and wait till the dryer stops before cutting lumber for that new deck with power tools.
One quibble, isn't Americas stance on drugs the opposite of independence?
Our prohibition of them is in opposition to independence (same as most of Europe), but our treatment of addiction as a personal, legal responsibility, rather than a medical problem is indicative of our bias towards personal responsibility.
I was referring to the latter, but you make a valid point with regard to the former.
That's funny, I live in central Vermont and we get 80% of the sun that Florida gets. There are plenty of people up here comfortably living off-grid with solar systems.
Actually, New York state is significantly worse than Vermont, especially in the winter, if you look at solar energy charts. They get a lot of lake-effect snow from the west making parts of it pretty darn bad. It also gets a lot more snow accumulation. One good snow and your panels are inoperative until you clean them off, and in many cases the power needed to do so automatically is less than the power they generate. Solar power, off the grid, in New York state, or much of the US is just insane given the state of the art. It is fine for supplemental energy, but probably not as efficient as wind power in those same locations (lake effect snow correlates to prevailing winds from said lake).
As a financial investment, the return on solar panels for lowering your bills is pretty darn poor compared to dumping that capital in the stock market and spending the earnings on paying for your power. If you're going with solar, do so for ethical reasons, not financial unless you live in the desert.
Much more funding and research is going into solar than is going into wind. Wind power, of course, will always be around and improved upon, but solar has an edge. Solar will work in many more places than wind power, as well as being less of an eyesore.
I'm not really sure about this. In the northern states we get about 1/6 of a solar day worth of energy each day, because of weather and latitude. Most solar panels won't even generate enough electricity to keep the snow off of them to allow them to function for the winter. Also, for an off the grid solution, you need a really big storage array, most of which are negatively affected by the cold, so it has to be buried. Finally, panels break and last I heard none of them were all that recyclable and most contained significant amounts of poisons. AZ is ideal for solar power, but where I'm at it is a non-starter. We do, however, have significant prevailing winds.
My point is that, within a short period of time, solar energy will be affordable to buy and, just as importantly, maintain. These will provide an efficient source of energy for the cost of the panel while not being an eyesore at all.
My point is, that may be true in AZ and other desert areas, but I doubt it will be in the US in general.
The big problem with wind power is that on top of that price, you also have to invest in a huge (and very expensive) energy storage system that can supply your entire energy needs for at least a day when there is little/no wind.
I don't think he mentioned going off the grid, which would be a pretty bad idea. He just talked about putting in a windmill. If there is no wind, you just buy from the grid. If you generate surplus energy, you dump it on the grid (to the dismay of the power company). At least where I live the power company is required to pay me for the power I dump onto the grid, regardless of the spikiness or other undesirable aspects of it. Also, staying on the grid and having a generation system provides an emergency backup.
Exactly. The problem is when a group of people decide to form a "society" and then want to involuntarily include people who might not want to be part of it.
This is called a government. It simply is not possible to remove the benefits brought to you by the government if you want to opt out of some of them. In the case of socialized medicine, if everyone else is paying for it, but you don't want to, how exactly are we to remove the benefits from you. Sure the hospitals can refuse treatment if they know who you are, but how exactly do you pay back the other benefits, like greatly decreased rates of violent crime that the rest of us are ponying up for? And what guarantee do we have that if your funds are insufficient you won't act out of desperation and contribute to the violent crime, at our expense? Nope, if you don't like it, you've got to vote to change it or move.
Or you could work hard, live a fiscally responsible lifestyle, live below your means - instead of living on credit card debt like so many people - and save money for a rainy day.
Your views are simplistic and misguided. I make more money than most and have the good fortune to be in a job that provides me with some health insurance. If I were to become seriously ill, like 99% of the population I would not have the means to get the medical care I needed. Of the 1% who do, most of them got that money through inheritance. Why should they have the money to live extravagantly because of their birth while I die in the gutter? There is no reason in particular, it is just part of how life is not fair. So I might feel completely justified in going to one of those wealth people's homes, and robbing them. Maybe I kill them in self defense during the robbery. Or maybe I'm too sick, but my brother who is well and has years of military training does it on my behalf. Or maybe, he just robs you and a bunch of other people as well.
Socialized medicine benefits all of us through generally increasing standards of living, demotivating desperation and crime, and promoting equality that partially redresses the circumstantial wealth from inheritance. Anyone who looks at the numbers sees the benefits very clearly. It is one of about 3 major contributing factors for the US's violent crime being so much higher than western Europe.
Why bother emulating the hardware when you can just emulate the API.
Sadly, because the former works reliably while the latter works sporadically.
Or had a big "What in God's Name is Grimace?" campaign.
One of the funniest things I've ever heard was someone talking about the hamburglar and the "grapist."
I'm no expert, but I did take a macroeconomics class in college. I'm pretty sure that in this instance, some Africans need to get off their butts and find out what they're useful for in the global economy.
The world is not a free market. In order to get to a state of industrialization that allows people to compete instead of be exploited they need to build up. To do so they need a base economy and capital. Their base economy was agriculture until we destroyed it by selling at less than cost in many parts of Africa. We did this out of self-interest. We wanted to maintain our own agricultural base for security, even though it was no longer economically feasible since American labor was so expensive. So we subsidize and export.
Then they need to do it and quit bitching that they're being picked on by the rest of the world.
I agree, just as soon as we stop invading them and stop undermining their markets for our own profit, they should do that.
A call is supposed to behave as it is documented to behave. Any programs that rely on undocumented features are just asking to break.
So? I'm not the poster you were replying to but, how does this help me, the end user, run the software I want? I tried Crossover the other day and I'm not using it because the software I need to run does not install. I don't care if it should work, I care if it does. In Parallels, it does.
Do you run all your native Mac software in little OS X sandboxes as well, just in case they go all "rogue" on you?
I do run one or two in sandboxes, but in general I don't. That does not mean I would not prefer to do so if it were convenient. That does not mean I'm not even more motivated to run Windows applications in a sandbox, since they are more heavily targeted.
It was just crap (my opinion, obviously). So I was a little surprised to see so many people here who admired it.
If I recall it won quite a few awards and was very popular. Anyway, I loved his work because it went beyond being just a story and was truly a literary attack on our culture. When you stuff your work with that much obviously ludicrous conspiracy theories, but support them with an array of completely true, but unusual facts mixed with both outrageous and plausible fictions the reader simply does not know how to process it. I had to meticulously research everything in the books, simply to comprehend what he managed to put together and even now I occasionally hear some fiction from it presented as fact, or conversely some fact from it dismissed as fiction. 1984 painted a terrible fiction that has influenced our culture as an example. The Illuminatus trilogy, invaded our culture and subtly rearranged some of the furniture. Sorry you did not like it, it is one of my favorites.
The well off person who has millions in the bank to cover all medical eventalities has likely been fortunate enough to have been born with a skill that has enabled them to obtain that money.
Funny. Statistically speaking, the well off person was born into a family that is well off. The secret to wealth is to be born to rich parents, then, since you have money, the money condensation principal kicks in. You can just loan money to those who were born poorer and collect interest.
I've been in tears since this thread started and the thought that America can stand by at let its citizens die sends shivers down my spine.
While the stated goal of pretty much any government program, or lack thereof, is to make people's lives better, we all enter into that with a lot of preconceptions and principals. Americans are predisposed towards independence and each person taking care of themselves. This is reflected in our lack of socialism and in our stance on drugs and firearms. Much of Europe is more predisposed towards placing responsibility on a central authority as is reflected in their beliefs about those same topics. Neither is optimal for quality of life, but it is pretty obvious that overall, Western Europe is closer to the ideal.
If you want to hear some scary numbers take a look at the number of Americans that are financially ruined by medical expenses. I think the last time I heard it was something like 50% of all personal bankruptcies were due to a medical problem.
So have a brand new Intel-based MacBook work gave me, partly so I can consolidate my workstations. The number one Windows program I need to run is Adobe Framemaker. My options seem to be CrossOver and Parallels. Crossover, at first blush, looks ideal for me, since I don't want the overhead of a full Windows install, or the expense of another Windows license (sure it's the company's money, but I have stock options to think of). Also, Framemaker is on the very short list of programs actually supported on the mac version.
So I download both solutions as trials and set them up, or try to. You see, Crossover claims support for Framemaker 7.1, but Adobe only sells version 7.2 these days. Well, will that really make a difference? Apparently so. It fails to install in a bottle designed for Framemaker 7.1. It fails to install in generic bottle for either Win98 or WinXP. The support forums don't have any info and no one else seems to have tried this yet. I'd submit my own comment there, but who wants to make an account for software they aren't even going to use?
Option two was Parallels which seems to be working just fine, on the other hand. Maybe once Crossover is out of beta I'll give it another try, but my brief trial does not fill me with hope. Oh, and another thing, Crossover seems a bit too intrusive for me. Even after I quit it, a process was left running that brought up a dialogue whenever I inserted a Windows CDROM (until I killed it). For some reason that sort of thing really bugs me.
Would some one please explain what exactly it wrong with DRM? If you have a problem with concept of copyrights in general, then I can understand. But is there anyone out there that is cool with copyrights, but thinks DRM is bad?
Okay look, copyright is supposedly a two sided contract. Content creators get a limited monopoly for a limited time that lets them easily make money. Society gets more content, and content is not lost because the distribution was limited y those afraid it would be copied. So in this two sided contract are a whole series of clauses that define the rights each party has, what they can and can't do. Over time, this contract has changed and become very one sided in favor of content producers. That sucks, but is not the problem with DRM. The problem with DRM is it is another way, besides the law, to remove from the populace some of the few rights the contract still guarantees them.
For example, society has the right to use excerpts of copyrighted works in education to teach our young, free of charge. That way, just because someone is making money does not mean children can't still be taught about it. DRM, does not remove that right, it just makes it technologically difficult or impossible. The second thing to remember is that DRM is not always obvious to the purchaser. Often it is hidden and intentionally deceives the user. For example, you go to the store and buy a CD. The plan is to listen to it on your laptop while you fly to Europe. After you buy it yu find out it isn't really a CD. It is a disk that looks like a CD, pretends to be a CD, is sold with CDs, but in truth does not play in your computer. Or maybe it plays in your computer, right up until your plane leaves the uS, then it stops working. This is simply using technology to stop you from exercising your rights, to listen to what you bought where you want how you want. Technology has taken away rights granted to you by the law. That is what is wrong with DRM.
The way I see it is there is nothing wrong with the concept of DRM, only with the abuse of DRM.
I've never seen DRM that was not an abuse. Have you? Can you cite an example of DRM that in no way removes some of the rights copyright law has granted you?
Ready made? Ugh, like 50 cents a pound more for small patties? Hell no...
If you think that's bad, wait till you see the "microwave ready" potatoes. Individual potatoes, wrapped in shrink wrap, for $.80 each. For the price of two you can get a 10 pound bag of the same, minus the shrink wrap. When I first saw them I thought, "how absurd, who would buy that?" Now, years later, they are in all the stores in the area. My girlfriend gets angry every time she sees them.
I'm not sure this is true. Lots of home users want to be able to open documents that they might get emailed, or find on the web.
I have five different programs(including Word) that can read .doc files, but I've never bothered to specify one as a default for that file type. Thus, whenever I have to read one, it asks me what to use. Aside from work, I can think of one time I wanted to open a .doc file. Everything on the Web or in e-mail is text, rich text, PDF or HTML.
to limit a product to only people who don't care about any level of interoperability (besides producing printed output) is aiming for a very small market segment.
I suspect that market is a lot bigger than you think and i coincidentally matches up with Tesco's customers pretty well.
Not being able to open MS Word documents is going to be a major disadvantage of an alternative office suite.
The application they are selling does advertise .doc reading and writing among its feature set, so you can relax.
Aside from paper, and perhaps HTML and raw text, MS Word is probably the most common format for written documents out there.
Every Website I go to that offers something not in HTML, offers it in PDF. No really. Try to get a manual for your toaster, or a TV, or a medical report, or tax documents or nearly anything. It will almost invariably be PDF.
I think you underestimate the number of times "regular users" want to be able to put in a floppy disk and edit a document that they've worked on with another computer.
I've seen this kind of thing happen and you know what, people copy and paste into an e-mail or save as text, or if they are really clueless print it out and retype it. I know people who have done all three. Most people are shockingly accepting of stuff from their old computer no longer working. I don't think .doc compatibility is going to be used much by Tesco customers and I'm sure whatever rudimentary support they have will be fine for most users.
But for food, walmart has the highest quality produce and the largest selection of packaged goods of any store within 20 miles, and it's the closest non-gas-station food source to where I live.
What is interesting is that Walmart thrives on knocking down less competitive stores and becoming the only one in a twenty mile radius. They completely avoid more urban ares because they can't compete. I've been to the nearest Walmart. If their produce is of the same quality as the one near you, and that is your best option, I truly pity you. I'm partial to whole foods whose quality is leaps and bounds beyond Walmart, for a miniscule amount more.
Their lawn chairs (and such) are the highest quality I can buy within around 50 miles, excepting the high-end places I can't afford where they would cost more than ten times as much.
The Walmart business model is to partner with or buy people with medium quality products, or a well respected brand name. They order as much from that company as all their other customers combined, forcing that company to build or buy new production facilities, often overseas. Then, once that company has loans to pay off on those facilities, they demand they lower their prices, every year running. At this point manufacturers are trapped. They can take a huge loss and try to get rid of their new facilities, or lower quality. Almost all of them lower their quality and cut corners. Fire the guys who write the instructions, we can just ship instructions for a model we made 5 years ago. Buy cheaper parts and forget about quality assurance. In some cases Walmart has recommended to companies with profitable, respected brands that they should just slap their name on really cheap, low quality imports. In any case, the result is quality that drops constantly for each product until it is cheap crap.
I know. I had a summer job assembling lawn mowers and the like for them. It was not unusual to need three sets of parts for a single machine, simply to get enough parts properly machined enough to actually hold together. For the most part, everything they sell is junk, not just clothes. I don't shop their out of pure self-interest. Luckily, I now live somewhere where I have a number of reasonable alternatives
You want the free digital copy you had better find a way of paying for the original. A Pixar feature represents five years of work by four hundred people and an investment of $100 million dollars.
I see and how much money did they make selling trademarked toys based upon each movie? I bet it was more than the cost of the movie.
That is not to say that I am in favor of abolishing copyright. I'm all for reasonable copyright laws that balance the financial interests of the creators and the interests of the people. Our current implementation, however, is doing more harm than good. Pixar would still make movies if they were free to all, but Pixar could still trademark the characters and title and sell merchandise.
Fourteen years was judged enough time in the past, and that was laboriously printing with manual presses and distributing with boats and horse-drawn wagons. Now, with cheap, instant digital duplication and distribution via the internet and by plane I'd argue two years is plenty of time for copyrights to be profitable, after the initial publication. Whatever the compromise, the current system is broken so far that it would be better to have no copyright.