Touching a philosophical issue, the question of censorship being evil or not, relies on which side of the line you are on; sure Western civilizations mosly despise its use (let alone its abuse), but being China a country with 1100 million people, I think that if they're political education supports censorship, even with actual opposition, it is not that evil.
Your argument seems to rest on two implicit premises that are, IMHO, rather questionable. First, that "X is popular" imples "X is not evil", and second and most importantly, that "X is imposed by the non-democratic government ruling over 1,100 million people" means that "X represents the values of the 1,100 million people subject to that non-democratic government".
There are some things in America that simply won't work in China. One, he claims, is all you can eat restaraunts. People will just move in until you kick them out.
ISTR reading, a long time ago, about a Hong Kong AYCE restaurant that solved this problem by charging for time. Actually, American ones will do this, too, from what I hear, though less formally -- they'll just through you out or exercise the "we reserve the right to refuse service..." clause if you abuse it.
This also came up when we were discussing selling a house. He was wondering why we clean the house when we leave. We don't have to clean the carpets or drapes, but you just do--often spending quite a bit of money that we don't have to.
Most of the times I've seen things, people in the US keep a house clean while its being listed for sale, unless they've already moved out before its sold, whether they clean house after they move out is rather hit or miss.
What I DON'T agree with is trying to impress your own beliefs on another society just because you think yours are better than theirs.
So, you don't agree with, e.g., trying to convince people not to impress their beliefs on other societies because they thin their idea is better than that societies, since supporting that would involve you trying to impress your values on their society because you think yours are better than theirs?
Because consultants, at least of the kind people want to become, are often independent business owners, and even when they aren't, are usually well-paid work in less stifling organizational environments.
Its often an alternative solution to the exact same problem that unionization aims to resolve.
My personal opinion is that unionization in any field is something of a blunt instrument -- but its, unfortunately, one of the few tools that labor -- and I mean that as opposed to capital, not in any particularly "blue collar" sense -- has available in most modern economies ( Mondragon-style labor-run cooperatives are, of course, a great solution when they are formed, but getting them formed except by starry-eyed idealists who are willing to sacrifice the chance to be the next break-out capitalist for a pro-labor organizational structure is hard outside of the kind of unique situation that spawned Mondragon itself, with entire depressed communities seeking to bootstrap their economy via cooperatives).
Still, there's no reason that the desire for mobility (if it is a genuine inherent feature of the tech industry and not just a superficial epiphenomenon of the bad working conditions in many corporate tech environments that are only tolerable for a limited time without a radical change) ought to work against unionization. Sure, its a different set of interests than some other unionized groups have, but if existing unions serve as diverse a group as public-sector analysts, migrant farmworkers, schoolteachers, and factoryworkers, then I don't see why they couldn't work for programmers, etc.
The particular contract elements they would seek would, indeed, be different.
Does this sound excessively boring to anyone else?
I'm sure it does to lots of people; that's why they make different kinds of games for different tastes. But games with similar profiles have been popular (most notably, of course, The Sims), so I don't see why this wouldn't be.
I know I'll be buying it when it comes out, and then fighting my wife for the computer to play it, even worse than with The Sims 2.
Maybe it'll justify keeping two good desktop systems.
I think that understates the case; the last I saw, The Sims was the best-selling computer game franchise of all time, not merely one of the best of recent years.
If real space were like that, humanity (at least the male half) would more likely have found the first of those planets and then suddenly discovered better things to do than space exploration.
Really, they'd like to do that; its a mechanism of mass communication where the content isn't controlled by a narrow elite. But if they can render it as inaccessible as possible as a mechanism of mass communications, but keep it useful as a way to to provide top-down commercially controlled information and a means for big business to sell you stuff, they'll settle for that.
All the "concern for the children" posturing is just pretext.
Why should he be tried in a country where the crime did not take place?
The locus of the crime is somewhat debatable. It may be a matter of legal construction that the crime, if any, took place where the server was located. But its just as viable to say that the crime, if any, took place where the alleged criminal was located when he allegedly committed the crime, which, best as I know, was the United Kingdom.
A house, even unlocked, is hardly parallel to a network-accessible, non-protected system. There is a longstanding tradition of an enhanced legal expectation of privacy in the home that is far older than the United States. An unsecured computer system is more analogous to an open field than a home.
Oooor, instead of throwing money out the window into a huge fire, they could do something useful with the money - like stopping the influx of illegal aliens through the southern border.
You do realize that's why the hospitals are closing, right?
No, actually, its not. Immigration has not taken a sharp rise in the last few years to trigger the recent wave of closures; what has risen is the proportion of the population uninsured, which is what has driven up ER costs and consequently closures.
Now, one might argue that the presence of a large, poor immigrant population (legal and illegal) has made Southern California particularly vulnerable to this, and you'd be right; but the trigger for the wave of ER closures is not a spike in immigration, illegal or otherwise, but the increase in the proportion of the population without insurance. And the problem is seen, to a lesser extent, beyond Southern California, and if the trend of insurance becoming less accessible continues, you are going to see it more and more, whatever happens on the immigration front.
They're required to provide healthcare to anyone who "needs" it - all the way from triage to birth to cancer treatment - regardless of whether or not the person can pay.
This is false. For the most part, only emergency stablization is required to be provided without reference to ability to pay, which is why ER's are particularly impacted. Of course, you have to provide triage to everyone who presents at the ER to determine whether they need emergency service, and the fact that the ER is the only access (because of the mandate) that many of the rising number of uninsured have to healthcare increases that burden.
They have to provide the services without screening for immigration status, but that does not prevent them from screening for ability to pay for non-emergency services.
The thing is, as I understand it, that with a microkernel, you can prove the correctness of each piece entirely independently. This isn't really a big boon the first time through, but it could be, in theory, a big difference in keeping it provably correct as you further develope the code.
Saying "oh, disabled people can just stick to Word" leaves the disabled community in practically the same situation as before, except that now there's a higher chance that they'll encounter machines with some word-processor other than MS Word installed on it.
Um, so?
The purpose of an open format is to allow every user access to the software best suited for their particular needs (whether those stem from personal disability, special business-domain-specific needs, or whatever), without being tied to one system by vendor lock-in.
Of course, in the short-term, it doesn't spread all the features attractive to particular users that are found in one piece of software to every other piece of software; OTOH, it also makes it more likely that software focussed on communities with special needs (business needs, disability, or otherwise) will be created which seemlessly exchanges information with users of different software. An open document format means that people with a particular disability can use the software with the best accessibility features for their particular condition, without limiting the software used by other people they work with, and vice versa.
The disabled community just want to be able to receive the same benefits from ODF as the rest of society. I mean, why should they be locked in to a single vendor? How can schools/public institutions switch over to free software by adopting ODF if non-MS packages don't have accessibility options for the disabled?
While ODF is used by some free, open source software, it is not the same thing as free or open source software, and the purpose of an open document format is distinct from (though complementary to) FOSS.
Open file formats promotes software choice at the customer level by eliminating vendor lock-in through proprietary file formats and allowing heterogenous software to communicate seemlessly.
FOSS promotes software choice by promoting customization from a common code base at the developer/vendor level without having to reinvent the wheel to adapt existing functionality to better fit a different set of needs. These are clearly complementary, in the long-term, but adopting an open file format isn't likely a basis for instant, organization-wide conversion to FOSS, thought it enables such a conversion (either to FOSS or different commercial software) later (either piecemeal or total, as fits the needs of the users in the organization) by providing the ability to use existing data once the conversion happens.
ain't going to cut it if you are an organisation planning a migration now.
If your planning the migration now, yes, in fact, the future availability of such a capability can be a critical component of the plan, and indeed acquiring that capability for your software of choice can be a part of the implementation. Big purchasers pay to have the features they need developed for major projects, after all. (And sometimes, they can just announce they want functionality, and it can happen for free.)
Sure, if you are already implementing it now without having planned for accessibility, there is an issue, but that's not the case with the Massachussetts ODF mandate.
Equivalently accessible functionality is going to have to be there right at the point you take a disabled employee's MS software away.
This would be true, but it is entirely irrelevant to the actual case at issue. The State of Massachussetts has announced no plans to take anyone's Microsoft software away; indeed, they have solicited information on plug-ins for Microsoft Office to use ODF, and that call resulted in the almost immediate announcement by the OpenDocument Fellowship that they had completed an ODF plug-in for any version of Office from '97 on which will be provided to the state for evaluation, comment, and further cooperative development before public release.
The idea that the conversion to the OpenDocument format in Massachussetts is somehow going to result in a conversion to non-accessible software is pure, unadulterated FUD which I would be surprised to find originated anywhere other than Redmond.
Otherwise what are you going to do ? Say "in the long run we'll have something that'll let you do your job again, meantime could you take a few years vacation" ?
I think what they are going to say is something like: "We're standardizing on OpenDocument Format for document retention; the appropriate plug-ins have been deployed to your desktop systems and the appropriate settings have been made by IT personnel to have your Microsoft Office programs default to saving in that format. You should continue to work as previously. If you have any questions, contact the IT Help Desk."
Their issue is that a government is mandating the use of a format for which no accessible software exists. Such a mandate is likely illegal under state and federal law.
Except that that isn't true. A government has issued as mandate, not yet in effect, for the use of a particular format, and has as part of its preparation for implementing that mandate, called for an adapter to allow the software suite that the complainers here point to as the gold standard to allow that software to fully use that format, and at least on such plug-in has already been announced that will be delivered to the State government involved for evaluation, feedback, and further work before being publicly released.
There is no rational reason to fear ODF based on accessibility concerns. There is a real reason to fear that wide adoption of it as a standard by large organizations like, say, US states might weaken the power of "lock-in" by proprietary format that Microsoft enjoys.
...in such a twisted way it makes me wonder if Microsoft money isn't behind it somehow (perhaps in a "we'll make a sizable donation to your organization as long as you speak out against OpenDocument for us" way); OpenDocument format has nothing to do with accessibility (which is an application issue almost entirely orthogonal to document format), and it seems odd that someone would even be aware enough of the OpenDocument standardization effort without recognizing that, especially someone active in the area of accessibility.
Smells like deliberate, faux consumer-interest, FUD.
That being said, given mandates like the ADA, if people want OSS to take an bigger role on the desktop, accessibility and cooperation with assistive technology is a big area where more needs to be done. Sure, it may not be as much interest to developers, but given mandates like the ADA, it may be essential for many large decision-makers in deciding whether or not to adopt a particular solution.
If it was actually organised in 3D it could be very useful. Have links appear just below the page, so you can see them without following them completely. Categorise wikipedia in 3D. However, I suspect it will just be used for gimmicky eyecandy, in which case, yes, it will suck.
No different, really, from the plain-old-2D-mostly-text web, where lots of potentially useful visual style capabilities that could be used to convey useful information are all-too-often used as information-free (or worse, information-obscuring -- particularly, styling non-link text as an alternate color, often blue, and underlined for emphasis) gimmicky eye-candy, which sucks.
But, nevertheless, out of this mass of largely-sucky usage, some good and useful design emerges, and sometimes even spreads and thrives. One would think 3-D would be the same.
Since when are our eyes 3D objects? They're not! They're 2D objects.
point of fact, our eyes are 3-D objects -- roughly spherical.
Now, they visual receptors in the back of them form what is, essentially, a two-dimensional array, and produce, in each eye, a two-dimensional image, which are combined to synthesize a sense of a three-dimensional space, but the eyes, themselves, are 3-D, not 2-D.
Your main point about how the eyes work is correct, its just your description of what they are that is wrong.
Boy, oh, boy are you wrong. First of all, two 2D images projected onto your eyes to simulate depth, are no more 3D than just one 2D image.
Two 2-D images captured your eyes and interpreted by your brain is how you see "3-D" in the first place, so two 2-D images projected to your eyes make pretty much as real a 3-D image as you see naturally.
The traffic both ways is already paid for, completely; Google pays on their end, the end-user on the other and both pay for everything in between. How? Part of the fee each end pays for their connection covers the cost to their provider of either bandwidth charges or peering agreements.
Essentially, in trying to abandon net neutrality, cable and telco companies are trying to selectively charge an extra fee to certain packet originators for bandwidth they are already paid for either directly by a customer or by in-kind exchange in a peering agreement.
And, mostly, the idea is to charge packet originators that compete with services that the cable/telco involved would like to provide itself, particularly streaming video, VoIP, or portal services.
Its simply a way to leverage the narrow control of the backbone to stifle competition on the internet, and its something that regulators should not tolerate.
And in the time periods represented by these fantasy themed games, would a strapless dress be considered decent?
Probably, though among the upper classes it would be rejected for reasons of fashion, and among the lower classes for reasons of impracticality.
The obsessive (outward, at least) moralism on the Victorian Age was hardly typical of times farther in the past.
But the remedy proposed is specifically unconstitutional, as it violates the Consitutional absolute immunity enjoyed by Members of Congress for official acts that has been found by the courts.
So you ask government officials (judges) to violate the Constitution to punish other government officials (lawmakers) for breaking the Constitution.
Question: Should the judges themselves then also be punished by other judges?
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Because consultants, at least of the kind people want to become, are often independent business owners, and even when they aren't, are usually well-paid work in less stifling organizational environments.
Its often an alternative solution to the exact same problem that unionization aims to resolve.
My personal opinion is that unionization in any field is something of a blunt instrument -- but its, unfortunately, one of the few tools that labor -- and I mean that as opposed to capital, not in any particularly "blue collar" sense -- has available in most modern economies ( Mondragon-style labor-run cooperatives are, of course, a great solution when they are formed, but getting them formed except by starry-eyed idealists who are willing to sacrifice the chance to be the next break-out capitalist for a pro-labor organizational structure is hard outside of the kind of unique situation that spawned Mondragon itself, with entire depressed communities seeking to bootstrap their economy via cooperatives).
Still, there's no reason that the desire for mobility (if it is a genuine inherent feature of the tech industry and not just a superficial epiphenomenon of the bad working conditions in many corporate tech environments that are only tolerable for a limited time without a radical change) ought to work against unionization. Sure, its a different set of interests than some other unionized groups have, but if existing unions serve as diverse a group as public-sector analysts, migrant farmworkers, schoolteachers, and factoryworkers, then I don't see why they couldn't work for programmers, etc.
The particular contract elements they would seek would, indeed, be different.
I'm sure it does to lots of people; that's why they make different kinds of games for different tastes. But games with similar profiles have been popular (most notably, of course, The Sims), so I don't see why this wouldn't be.
I know I'll be buying it when it comes out, and then fighting my wife for the computer to play it, even worse than with The Sims 2.
Maybe it'll justify keeping two good desktop systems.
I think that understates the case; the last I saw, The Sims was the best-selling computer game franchise of all time, not merely one of the best of recent years.
If real space were like that, humanity (at least the male half) would more likely have found the first of those planets and then suddenly discovered better things to do than space exploration.
Well, it depends what you mean by "Microsoft of Linux".
:: Microsoft:bar
Essentially, the problem with this is its an analogy with too many unspecified terms
foo:Linux
There is no way to know what "the Microsoft of Linux" is supposed to mean.
A house, even unlocked, is hardly parallel to a network-accessible, non-protected system. There is a longstanding tradition of an enhanced legal expectation of privacy in the home that is far older than the United States. An unsecured computer system is more analogous to an open field than a home.
The thing is, as I understand it, that with a microkernel, you can prove the correctness of each piece entirely independently. This isn't really a big boon the first time through, but it could be, in theory, a big difference in keeping it provably correct as you further develope the code.
Um, so?
The purpose of an open format is to allow every user access to the software best suited for their particular needs (whether those stem from personal disability, special business-domain-specific needs, or whatever), without being tied to one system by vendor lock-in.
Of course, in the short-term, it doesn't spread all the features attractive to particular users that are found in one piece of software to every other piece of software; OTOH, it also makes it more likely that software focussed on communities with special needs (business needs, disability, or otherwise) will be created which seemlessly exchanges information with users of different software. An open document format means that people with a particular disability can use the software with the best accessibility features for their particular condition, without limiting the software used by other people they work with, and vice versa.
While ODF is used by some free, open source software, it is not the same thing as free or open source software, and the purpose of an open document format is distinct from (though complementary to) FOSS.
Open file formats promotes software choice at the customer level by eliminating vendor lock-in through proprietary file formats and allowing heterogenous software to communicate seemlessly.
FOSS promotes software choice by promoting customization from a common code base at the developer/vendor level without having to reinvent the wheel to adapt existing functionality to better fit a different set of needs. These are clearly complementary, in the long-term, but adopting an open file format isn't likely a basis for instant, organization-wide conversion to FOSS, thought it enables such a conversion (either to FOSS or different commercial software) later (either piecemeal or total, as fits the needs of the users in the organization) by providing the ability to use existing data once the conversion happens.
Except that that isn't true. A government has issued as mandate, not yet in effect, for the use of a particular format, and has as part of its preparation for implementing that mandate, called for an adapter to allow the software suite that the complainers here point to as the gold standard to allow that software to fully use that format, and at least on such plug-in has already been announced that will be delivered to the State government involved for evaluation, feedback, and further work before being publicly released.
There is no rational reason to fear ODF based on accessibility concerns. There is a real reason to fear that wide adoption of it as a standard by large organizations like, say, US states might weaken the power of "lock-in" by proprietary format that Microsoft enjoys.
...in such a twisted way it makes me wonder if Microsoft money isn't behind it somehow (perhaps in a "we'll make a sizable donation to your organization as long as you speak out against OpenDocument for us" way); OpenDocument format has nothing to do with accessibility (which is an application issue almost entirely orthogonal to document format), and it seems odd that someone would even be aware enough of the OpenDocument standardization effort without recognizing that, especially someone active in the area of accessibility.
Smells like deliberate, faux consumer-interest, FUD.
That being said, given mandates like the ADA, if people want OSS to take an bigger role on the desktop, accessibility and cooperation with assistive technology is a big area where more needs to be done. Sure, it may not be as much interest to developers, but given mandates like the ADA, it may be essential for many large decision-makers in deciding whether or not to adopt a particular solution.
"The default is not what I'd prefer the default to be" is not a bug; nothing is broken, and there is, therefore, nothing to fix.
point of fact, our eyes are 3-D objects -- roughly spherical.
Now, they visual receptors in the back of them form what is, essentially, a two-dimensional array, and produce, in each eye, a two-dimensional image, which are combined to synthesize a sense of a three-dimensional space, but the eyes, themselves, are 3-D, not 2-D.
Your main point about how the eyes work is correct, its just your description of what they are that is wrong.
The traffic both ways is already paid for, completely; Google pays on their end, the end-user on the other and both pay for everything in between. How? Part of the fee each end pays for their connection covers the cost to their provider of either bandwidth charges or peering agreements. Essentially, in trying to abandon net neutrality, cable and telco companies are trying to selectively charge an extra fee to certain packet originators for bandwidth they are already paid for either directly by a customer or by in-kind exchange in a peering agreement. And, mostly, the idea is to charge packet originators that compete with services that the cable/telco involved would like to provide itself, particularly streaming video, VoIP, or portal services. Its simply a way to leverage the narrow control of the backbone to stifle competition on the internet, and its something that regulators should not tolerate.
But the remedy proposed is specifically unconstitutional, as it violates the Consitutional absolute immunity enjoyed by Members of Congress for official acts that has been found by the courts. So you ask government officials (judges) to violate the Constitution to punish other government officials (lawmakers) for breaking the Constitution. Question: Should the judges themselves then also be punished by other judges?