It's well established that most people don't actually check footnotes[1]. Thus you can construct an original argument, footnote a few contained facts [2], and the presence of the footnotes lends an air of support to the entire argument [3].
Without reading both books, I can't take sides on the merits. But I will say some of the stuff in TFA sets off my alarms--like spending a footnote on a WHO report just to cite the population of Europe.
Economics doesn't care about dads--from a strictly business perspective the GP's question is insightful. On the other hand, citizens obviously do care about each other. Thus we created Medicare.
But if everyone was forced to purchase health insurance, then private insurance companies could offset the costs of older people with the premiums of younger people, making the business model sustainable. This is why discussions of health reform today often include the concept of the individual mandate.
But prices are not determined by taxes
on
Our Low-Tech Tax Code
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The fact is, your real tax rate specifically determines what goods and services you get for your dollar. That means taxes applied to your purchases - no matter what they are called - reduce the ability of your dollar to function on your behalf.
You are implying that if that tax rate was lessened, I would somehow have had "more money" to spend on plumbing. But that is not necessarily true because prices are set by the market not by the tax rate. Even if the plumber had to pay $0 in taxes, he would still charge me the same $100 if the market would bear it. The taxes that businesses pay are simply a cost of doing business, which is only one input into price.
My hope for you is that someday you actually understand what is being done to you.
This seems really melodramatic. You said that maybe Stack could not have afforded his house if he had paid his taxes, but I pay my taxes every year and presumably so do most of the businesses where I spend my money. And yet, I have little problem affording my house and many businesses turn profits. Taxes are simply a cost to be managed. It's a very good idea to minimize them--yes--but IMO it's ridiculous the degree to which some people get emotionally involved in the concept of taxation.
I don't disagree with that actually, but there's more to open source than the code. The entire bug reporting system, and feature development processes, (and all related discussion) are open as well, which can be helpful to a pretty broad range of users.
Granted that there will always be a set of users for whom none of that makes any difference.
No original data has been lost. The Hadley Centre discarded some of their COPIES of the original data, keeping only the data set that they had corrected for sensor drift, time of day, etc. But the original uncorrected data is still available from each of the national weather services, which is where the Hadley Centre got it in the first place. Most of it is also available for free from the National Climate Data Center in the U.S.
The FOIA requests did not request data (I've read them). They requested internal communications like e-mails that documented internal discussions. The data itself is largely not the property of the US or UK governments and thus not subject to FOIA. You could not use FOIA to obtain the Windows source code, for example, even though the governments use millions of copies of it in their work.
When your "peers" appear to have been actively engaged in hiding their data from public scrutiny, actively engaged in quashing any dissenting papers from getting published (including threats to publishers), and have appeared to have outright lied about positions and movements of temp recording data, I'd say we need to ask "Who Watches the Watchers".
It makes absolutely no difference how scientists appear to have acted because their results can be objectively checked. If Greenpeace paid me to say that e=mc^2, it wouldn't change the correctness of the theory one bit.
If scientists falsified temperature data it would be trivially easy to check. The data is available from the national weather services to anyone willing to sign the agreements and pay the fees. Anyone can watch the watchers. Yet all we get are discussions of "appearances" and insinuations.
Now... this doesn't even address the insidious side effect of this behavior... that no new research in to theories which are counter to the current group think get funding.
There is absolutely no evidence that this is the case. In fact, if you read up the thread you'll find a petition that claims to represent 31,000 working (in other words, funded) scientists who run counter to the "group think." Can't have it both ways.
So these "end users" you speak of have special characteristics such that they can't be referred to as "Ordinary" or "Typical"?
Some of them can and some of them can't. You're welcome to choose to focus on the ones who fit your preconceptions of those labels, but that doesn't change the broad range of capabilities among users.
I use Drupal to build Web sites. I don't understand it well enough to actually submit bug fixes. But if I do experience a problem, I can view the code directly and try to identify where in the code the error originates. And, other people experiencing the same error can see my bug report, and vice versa.
"Typical" is way too vague a term. There's a huge range of capabilities between clueless noob user and expert coder, and an open source model eases collaboration across that full range.
One cannot deny the logic. In fact, it is a tautology. If you assume that all individuals have a non-zero probability of finding and fixing a bug, then all you need is "enough" individuals.
Emphasis added by me to show where I think his argument goes off the rails. "Linus' law" does not assumed that each eyeball is a bug fixer--it simply states that bugs are made shallow. Often the hardest part of fixing a bug is knowing about it, and finding it. The open source process makes it easier to do both, even if there are only a small group of coders actually fixing things.
This is not about how many software engineers you have reviewing your code. It's about how your end users can interact with the software engineers.
When they didn't announce the iPhone on Verizon at the Apple special event, I decided to get an iPod Touch. I've wanted an iPhone but I am NOT switching from Verizon to AT&T just to get one.
Shortly thereafter, Snowpocalypse 2010 descended (I live in DC) and I've basically been snowed in since last week. In that time I have barely touched my laptop (MacBook Pro) or my Blackberry (from employer). I've just gravitated toward the Touch. It's much faster and easier to pick it up and browse the news sites, Facebook, and check my e-mail than my laptop, and it's much easier to read and interact with than my Blackberry. My Blackberry buzzes with a new e-mail and I pick up the Touch to read and respond. I want to know the latest on the upcoming storm (yet another one due to start any minute), and I pick up the Touch and hit a couple of Web sites.
There's not a clear, cut-and-dry feature list that makes it so. But in a week it's become my primary way of going online and reading and interacting. The only thing it doesn't work well for is extended missives (like this, which I'm typing on my laptop). For short responses though the touch keyboard is ok.
The iPad seemed like an "eh" when I read up on it, but now, having used the Touch, it's much more interesting for me. It would be great to have the same ease of use but a bigger screen.
The years of attempts to get the authors to recant also casts doubt on the validity of follow-up studies and their failure to replicate the original, no?
No, not unless you can demonstrate causal connections between all the people involved, or demonstrate that the follow-up studies themselves were unethically performed using bad data. Just because lots of people disagree that Wakefield was a bad study, does not mean that they are all in cahoots with one another. Cahoots would need to actually be proven with evidence.
(Although - were you really asking or were you doing this?)
Install it on a Mac (pretty sure it only runs on a Mac).
If you're referring to the iPad, well, I doubt very much that anyone is going to be using that as their primary computer, anymore than anyone is using an iPod touch now as their primary computer. It's dependent on syncing with a real Mac or Windows computer to get pictures, music, movies, etc onto it, and probably to install software updates as well.
I'll reply to you and hope the others making similar comments read this too: read the grandparent, who claims that "1984 was the epitome of what Apple was about." 1984 was the release of the Macintosh, which I'm sure you'll agree was not an open platform the way the Apple II was. That said, you're right that I overstated things. I should have limited my statement to "since 1984." Now if you don't mind I'm going to get off your lawn before you fire that shotgun.:-)
Every Mac ships with a full development environment (X Code), and the SDKs for the iPhone and iPad are free to download. You can write and install whatever you want on your own machines...it's pretty tinkering friendly.
Apple, way back when, made it easy to get into the inner workings of its systems.
This strikes me as extremely selective memory. I had Macs and PCs available to me as a kid and found the PC WAY easier to tinker with because it ran DOS. The command line is a natural entry into the idea of programming and it was very easy to hack together pseudo-programs in the form of BAT files.
Until OS X, the Mac OS had no command line access at all! It had no text configuration files. It was the essence of a closed box. The Army even ran their Web servers on Macs specifically because there was no shell access built into the OS. The original Mac OS was supposed to be interacted with via the GUI and that's it. The iPad is no different in that regard.
When people complain about how Apple used to have a culture that was more open to tinkering, I have to wonder how long they've been using Apple products. OS X is BY FAR the most tinkering-friendly product they have ever produced. It has a good shell, uses mostly text configuration files, incorporates many open-source projects, and ships with full developer tools by default. The iPad is not as open, but no more so than the original Mac OS.
I doubt very much Apple is interested in killing the Mac as we know it. Rather, I think that they think that for most of what people use their Mac for, the machines are overkill. Most people use their computers now to communicate and to consume media, and they value stability and security over flexibility and power. iPhone and a tablet fit this "appliance" model of computing.
But for power users and creators, they will always need an open platform: the Mac. Anyone who works with audio, photos, or video much will need a real computer. An appliance won't cut it--not enough power, storage, or flexibility (which is much more important when creating than when consuming).
I just don't see see what's in it for Apple to kill the Mac. I see the economic value of the closed ecosystem of the iPhone + Tablet + App Store as an appliance play, but killing the Mac line would only lose them money. I therefore predict it will never happen. I won't be surprised if the volume of the appliances continues to overtake Mac sales though.
The specific mention of human rights activists is Google's way of telegraphing, without saying it directly, that they believe the hacking was done by or sponsored by the Chinese government itself. This is also reflected in the fact that they drew a statement from the U.S. Secretary of State--not the typical response to a business blog post.
Google is taking the side of business. Despite what you might read here Slashdot, businesses cannot win against government opposition. If the Chinese government itself is attacking Google, then Google has no certainty in any Chinese business dealings, since things like contracts and IP are (supposed to be) protected by the government. It would be like trying to walk forward when giant cracks in the ground are opening up all over the place. At some point you have to decide whether the prize you're walking toward is actually worth the risk you take with each step.
I would basically want it for anything I would want a netbook for. I don't tend to do a lot of just straight writing, and I'm definitely not designing in Photoshop or editing video on a netbook.
The biggest question would be text entry, but again--it's not like I'm entering much text when I'm Web surfing. I think I could easily type this comment on a virtual keyboard.
I can think of some cool productivity possibilities with a virtual keyboard. Think of something like coding a Web template--all the places where auto-complete is helpful, like HTML tags, attributes, standard script functions, etc. Instead of autocomplete you would have a constantly adapting "keyboard" of options. Start with a blank page, and your keyboard has "buttons" for the doctype, HTML tag, head tag, body tag, include tag, etc. Add the head tag, and the keyboard gives you buttons for the title tag, meta tags, link tag, script tag, style tag, etc. And every time you go inside a tag, the keyboard has buttons for all the attributes that tag supports. You'd only need to type in some values and placeholder text.
Other people could sell keyboard plug-ins. Buy a "Wordpress" keyboard to add the standard Wordpress API calls as context-dependent buttons. Buy a Jquery keyboard to get Jquery functions as buttons. Etc. Pretty much anything that can get auto-completed in an IDE can also be presented via soft button.
And on top of all that, it will almost certainly have very solid graphic and H.264 chips, meaning it will handle movies and games much better than most netbooks.
I agree that would be cool. Don't know why, but I have a funny feeling that if Apple intros a tablet, it might accept stylus input the way you describe. Stylus sold separately, I'm sure.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
It's well established that most people don't actually check footnotes[1]. Thus you can construct an original argument, footnote a few contained facts [2], and the presence of the footnotes lends an air of support to the entire argument [3].
Without reading both books, I can't take sides on the merits. But I will say some of the stuff in TFA sets off my alarms--like spending a footnote on a WHO report just to cite the population of Europe.
1
2
3
Economics doesn't care about dads--from a strictly business perspective the GP's question is insightful. On the other hand, citizens obviously do care about each other. Thus we created Medicare.
But if everyone was forced to purchase health insurance, then private insurance companies could offset the costs of older people with the premiums of younger people, making the business model sustainable. This is why discussions of health reform today often include the concept of the individual mandate.
The fact is, your real tax rate specifically determines what goods and services you get for your dollar. That means taxes applied to your purchases - no matter what they are called - reduce the ability of your dollar to function on your behalf.
You are implying that if that tax rate was lessened, I would somehow have had "more money" to spend on plumbing. But that is not necessarily true because prices are set by the market not by the tax rate. Even if the plumber had to pay $0 in taxes, he would still charge me the same $100 if the market would bear it. The taxes that businesses pay are simply a cost of doing business, which is only one input into price.
My hope for you is that someday you actually understand what is being done to you.
This seems really melodramatic. You said that maybe Stack could not have afforded his house if he had paid his taxes, but I pay my taxes every year and presumably so do most of the businesses where I spend my money. And yet, I have little problem affording my house and many businesses turn profits. Taxes are simply a cost to be managed. It's a very good idea to minimize them--yes--but IMO it's ridiculous the degree to which some people get emotionally involved in the concept of taxation.
I don't disagree with that actually, but there's more to open source than the code. The entire bug reporting system, and feature development processes, (and all related discussion) are open as well, which can be helpful to a pretty broad range of users.
Granted that there will always be a set of users for whom none of that makes any difference.
No original data has been lost. The Hadley Centre discarded some of their COPIES of the original data, keeping only the data set that they had corrected for sensor drift, time of day, etc. But the original uncorrected data is still available from each of the national weather services, which is where the Hadley Centre got it in the first place. Most of it is also available for free from the National Climate Data Center in the U.S.
The FOIA requests did not request data (I've read them). They requested internal communications like e-mails that documented internal discussions. The data itself is largely not the property of the US or UK governments and thus not subject to FOIA. You could not use FOIA to obtain the Windows source code, for example, even though the governments use millions of copies of it in their work.
When your "peers" appear to have been actively engaged in hiding their data from public scrutiny, actively engaged in quashing any dissenting papers from getting published (including threats to publishers), and have appeared to have outright lied about positions and movements of temp recording data, I'd say we need to ask "Who Watches the Watchers".
It makes absolutely no difference how scientists appear to have acted because their results can be objectively checked. If Greenpeace paid me to say that e=mc^2, it wouldn't change the correctness of the theory one bit.
If scientists falsified temperature data it would be trivially easy to check. The data is available from the national weather services to anyone willing to sign the agreements and pay the fees. Anyone can watch the watchers. Yet all we get are discussions of "appearances" and insinuations.
Now... this doesn't even address the insidious side effect of this behavior... that no new research in to theories which are counter to the current group think get funding.
There is absolutely no evidence that this is the case. In fact, if you read up the thread you'll find a petition that claims to represent 31,000 working (in other words, funded) scientists who run counter to the "group think." Can't have it both ways.
So these "end users" you speak of have special characteristics such that they can't be referred to as "Ordinary" or "Typical"?
Some of them can and some of them can't. You're welcome to choose to focus on the ones who fit your preconceptions of those labels, but that doesn't change the broad range of capabilities among users.
"Ordinary" is not a word I used in my post, and neither is "typical."
So your point is that people who never use a particular piece of software aren't much help in fixing bugs? Speaking of tautology...
I use Drupal to build Web sites. I don't understand it well enough to actually submit bug fixes. But if I do experience a problem, I can view the code directly and try to identify where in the code the error originates. And, other people experiencing the same error can see my bug report, and vice versa.
"Typical" is way too vague a term. There's a huge range of capabilities between clueless noob user and expert coder, and an open source model eases collaboration across that full range.
From the article:
One cannot deny the logic. In fact, it is a tautology. If you assume that all individuals have a non-zero probability of finding and fixing a bug, then all you need is "enough" individuals.
Emphasis added by me to show where I think his argument goes off the rails. "Linus' law" does not assumed that each eyeball is a bug fixer--it simply states that bugs are made shallow. Often the hardest part of fixing a bug is knowing about it, and finding it. The open source process makes it easier to do both, even if there are only a small group of coders actually fixing things.
This is not about how many software engineers you have reviewing your code. It's about how your end users can interact with the software engineers.
When they didn't announce the iPhone on Verizon at the Apple special event, I decided to get an iPod Touch. I've wanted an iPhone but I am NOT switching from Verizon to AT&T just to get one.
Shortly thereafter, Snowpocalypse 2010 descended (I live in DC) and I've basically been snowed in since last week. In that time I have barely touched my laptop (MacBook Pro) or my Blackberry (from employer). I've just gravitated toward the Touch. It's much faster and easier to pick it up and browse the news sites, Facebook, and check my e-mail than my laptop, and it's much easier to read and interact with than my Blackberry. My Blackberry buzzes with a new e-mail and I pick up the Touch to read and respond. I want to know the latest on the upcoming storm (yet another one due to start any minute), and I pick up the Touch and hit a couple of Web sites.
There's not a clear, cut-and-dry feature list that makes it so. But in a week it's become my primary way of going online and reading and interacting. The only thing it doesn't work well for is extended missives (like this, which I'm typing on my laptop). For short responses though the touch keyboard is ok.
The iPad seemed like an "eh" when I read up on it, but now, having used the Touch, it's much more interesting for me. It would be great to have the same ease of use but a bigger screen.
The years of attempts to get the authors to recant also casts doubt on the validity of follow-up studies and their failure to replicate the original, no?
No, not unless you can demonstrate causal connections between all the people involved, or demonstrate that the follow-up studies themselves were unethically performed using bad data. Just because lots of people disagree that Wakefield was a bad study, does not mean that they are all in cahoots with one another. Cahoots would need to actually be proven with evidence.
(Although - were you really asking or were you doing this?)
Install it on a Mac (pretty sure it only runs on a Mac).
If you're referring to the iPad, well, I doubt very much that anyone is going to be using that as their primary computer, anymore than anyone is using an iPod touch now as their primary computer. It's dependent on syncing with a real Mac or Windows computer to get pictures, music, movies, etc onto it, and probably to install software updates as well.
I'll reply to you and hope the others making similar comments read this too: read the grandparent, who claims that "1984 was the epitome of what Apple was about." 1984 was the release of the Macintosh, which I'm sure you'll agree was not an open platform the way the Apple II was. That said, you're right that I overstated things. I should have limited my statement to "since 1984." Now if you don't mind I'm going to get off your lawn before you fire that shotgun. :-)
Every Mac ships with a full development environment (X Code), and the SDKs for the iPhone and iPad are free to download. You can write and install whatever you want on your own machines...it's pretty tinkering friendly.
http://www.apple.com/macpro/design.html
And help them install X code and the SDK. Then they can hack on their iPad all they want.
Apple, way back when, made it easy to get into the inner workings of its systems.
This strikes me as extremely selective memory. I had Macs and PCs available to me as a kid and found the PC WAY easier to tinker with because it ran DOS. The command line is a natural entry into the idea of programming and it was very easy to hack together pseudo-programs in the form of BAT files.
Until OS X, the Mac OS had no command line access at all! It had no text configuration files. It was the essence of a closed box. The Army even ran their Web servers on Macs specifically because there was no shell access built into the OS. The original Mac OS was supposed to be interacted with via the GUI and that's it. The iPad is no different in that regard.
When people complain about how Apple used to have a culture that was more open to tinkering, I have to wonder how long they've been using Apple products. OS X is BY FAR the most tinkering-friendly product they have ever produced. It has a good shell, uses mostly text configuration files, incorporates many open-source projects, and ships with full developer tools by default. The iPad is not as open, but no more so than the original Mac OS.
This is the year of Linux on the lap.
I doubt very much Apple is interested in killing the Mac as we know it. Rather, I think that they think that for most of what people use their Mac for, the machines are overkill. Most people use their computers now to communicate and to consume media, and they value stability and security over flexibility and power. iPhone and a tablet fit this "appliance" model of computing.
But for power users and creators, they will always need an open platform: the Mac. Anyone who works with audio, photos, or video much will need a real computer. An appliance won't cut it--not enough power, storage, or flexibility (which is much more important when creating than when consuming).
I just don't see see what's in it for Apple to kill the Mac. I see the economic value of the closed ecosystem of the iPhone + Tablet + App Store as an appliance play, but killing the Mac line would only lose them money. I therefore predict it will never happen. I won't be surprised if the volume of the appliances continues to overtake Mac sales though.
The specific mention of human rights activists is Google's way of telegraphing, without saying it directly, that they believe the hacking was done by or sponsored by the Chinese government itself. This is also reflected in the fact that they drew a statement from the U.S. Secretary of State--not the typical response to a business blog post.
Google is taking the side of business. Despite what you might read here Slashdot, businesses cannot win against government opposition. If the Chinese government itself is attacking Google, then Google has no certainty in any Chinese business dealings, since things like contracts and IP are (supposed to be) protected by the government. It would be like trying to walk forward when giant cracks in the ground are opening up all over the place. At some point you have to decide whether the prize you're walking toward is actually worth the risk you take with each step.
http://xkcd.com/552/
I would basically want it for anything I would want a netbook for. I don't tend to do a lot of just straight writing, and I'm definitely not designing in Photoshop or editing video on a netbook.
The biggest question would be text entry, but again--it's not like I'm entering much text when I'm Web surfing. I think I could easily type this comment on a virtual keyboard.
I can think of some cool productivity possibilities with a virtual keyboard. Think of something like coding a Web template--all the places where auto-complete is helpful, like HTML tags, attributes, standard script functions, etc. Instead of autocomplete you would have a constantly adapting "keyboard" of options. Start with a blank page, and your keyboard has "buttons" for the doctype, HTML tag, head tag, body tag, include tag, etc. Add the head tag, and the keyboard gives you buttons for the title tag, meta tags, link tag, script tag, style tag, etc. And every time you go inside a tag, the keyboard has buttons for all the attributes that tag supports. You'd only need to type in some values and placeholder text.
Other people could sell keyboard plug-ins. Buy a "Wordpress" keyboard to add the standard Wordpress API calls as context-dependent buttons. Buy a Jquery keyboard to get Jquery functions as buttons. Etc. Pretty much anything that can get auto-completed in an IDE can also be presented via soft button.
And on top of all that, it will almost certainly have very solid graphic and H.264 chips, meaning it will handle movies and games much better than most netbooks.
I agree that would be cool. Don't know why, but I have a funny feeling that if Apple intros a tablet, it might accept stylus input the way you describe. Stylus sold separately, I'm sure. :-)