Not to mention that eBooks are great for older people who need a larger font size than they'd find in a physical book. I got my mom an original Kindle when they first came out for that exact reason. She'd been a voracious reader her entire life, but when her eyesight started to go, she had to start using a magnifying glass which made reading take a lot longer. With the Kindle, she's back to her old reading speed. All eBook readers should give this feature, but the Kindle is the only one I know of that integrates so closely with a source for buying eBooks, which saved me from having to teach her how to load eBooks onto the device.
And, most importantly for me, the Kindle is, so far, the only electronic device she's ever had that I have yet to receive a support call about.
I am also glad to see that the new one fixed the stupid next page button that took up almost the entire side of the original Kindle...made it damn near unusable for me since I'd always accidentally hit it. That was the one thing that kept me from getting one too. Now that that's changed, I may get one.
From what I read, these "objects" are nothing but a fancy new name for files.
The difference, as I see it, is that these objects can do things when you call methods on them and can also have methods that tell you about the data they contain. Imagine if your.doc file had a countWords() method rather than you having to open the file with Microsoft Word and then choose that option from the appropriate menu.
As I see it, this guy is basically objecting to the notion that OO principles and a rich domain model need to end at the point where programs interact with the OS. And he's trying to build an OS that embodies those principles as well.
The problem, of course, is the "this guy" part. A single individual could have an idea for the greatest OS ever, but if he's not part of a larger effort, the resulting OS will be a concept OS that receives no adoption...and that's the best case scenario. And before anyone brings up Linus, ask yourself the same question RMS has been asking you to ask yourself...where would Linux be without the GNU tools that already existed for the proprietary Unix operating systems? The answer is a concept OS that wouldn't have received any adoption.
It's not about whether some service is a necessity that could save your life. It's about when having competing services is counterproductive. There was a time in this country where firefighters were privatized. People paid one of the various providers to come and put their house out if it caught on fire. But this is wildly inefficient. It would lead to firefighters sitting idly by as one house burned to the ground because that house was not one of their customers. And when they were dealing with one of their customers, their concern was not for the surrounding houses, at least not the ones that weren't also customers of theirs.
In short, it was insanity and it makes far more sense to have one fire department that protects against everything. There's no need for firefighters to worry about what action they should take in any situation...they just put out every fire that's reported to them. The same goes for police officers...it makes no sense to have any competition in this area. And the same goes for communications infrastructure (not service, just infrastructure). Municipal ownership of fiber or copper infrastructure makes a lot of sense. It allows full competition from any service provider without the insanity that would come from any of the multitudes of communications providers constantly digging up streets or stringing wires on the telephone poles.
If I couldn't afford service anymore, well hey, a library card is free.
Heh...ironic that you see no problem with public libraries. You know, a service that does not protect your life and is probably unused by most people. The argument for having private libraries makes a lot more sense than the argument for having privatized local internet infrastructure. Not that I agree with either argument, since I think libraries serve a definite purpose in providing at least the opportunity for poorer people in society to educate themselves given the poor quality of public schools. But hey, if we're pushing the let's make everything private agenda, why should schools get a pass either?
People in the US are so afraid of the word Socialism that they're completely blind to all the ways in which our society is already Socialist. Full-scale communism may not be the answer, but we really need to learn that we should look at everything on a case-by-case basis to determine whether it makes sense to use a socialized or privatized system. Absolutist thinking is almost always wrong. A more nuanced approach will always be better.
No, you don't. You are arguing from a position of ignorance.
Wow, you're presumptuous. You don't even know me and yet you've concluded from my reasonable opinion that Javascript is an unworkable mess that I don't have the experience to see what a blissful experience you seem to think it is. You could not be any more wrong. I know the language and have written a ton of code in it. I even wrote a custom linker/compressor that we used to take our well-organized, commented and readable Javascript and turn it into code that was optimized and could be delivered to the client in one HTTP request. That code required me to heavily modify the available ECMAScript ANTLR grammar to accept all the Javascript our app used. I learned more about Javascript variable scoping and language requirements than I ever wanted to. I know the language.
The part I readily admit I don't know is all the browser quirks, so that's why I say that I don't know Javascript. That's the part that takes a lot of experience to learn and that's the part that you absolutely need to know if you're going to write complex UIs in the language. And I'd bet my last dollar that you don't know all the quirks either. It takes years of experience using it to learn everything. Most of those quirks are not covered in any blog, article or tutorial. They're things you have to figure out by running into the problem only to figure out that it's some idiotic browser limitation that you have to code around. If you've ever tried to get something working in IE 6, you'd know this. It's hell.
Add to that that there isn't a workable unit testing framework for Javascript...and sorry, jsunit is a horrible kludge that, among other things, makes testing anything that involves setTimeout or setInterval require a lot more effort than it should. Hell, even the developers of many of the major Javascript frameworks write tests that use Rhino instead of running inside an actual browser. As of about 6 months ago, when we switched to GWT, there was just no good way to automatically test for regressions in UI code.
And I hate to break it to you, but you're going to have to deal with the JS eventually. GWT breaks down in a lot of complex situations.
Now who's talking from a position of ignorance. Just because you couldn't make GWT work doesn't mean that others can't. Sure, we had to write a lot of supporting code to work around GWT's shortcomings, but at no time have we had to write jsni. You statement that GWT breaks down eventually is utter bullshit. If you learn to use it and learn ways around its limitations, you can do anything with it. Our app is proprietary, so unfortunately I can't show it to you, but it's well beyond the kinds of stuff that you see in other GWT apps like Lombardi's BluePrint. I highly doubt you're tackling anything that's even close to our level of complexity. At the rate we're going, we'll have over 10,000 unit tests for our UI alone once we've finished the GWT version (using our own testing harness, since GWT's idea of a unit test isn't really a unit test). All of them run through JUnit and all of them run in all of the versions of the big 3 browsers that we support (IE 6/7, Safari and FF 2/3).
In short, we've replaced a custom Javscript solution (since none of the Javascript frameworks could handle the complexity of our application...and we tested them all) with GWT and the number of regressions that make it to QA has dropped dramatically. And the amount of time we spend making our app performant in the browser has also decreased substantially. It required 3 months of 10 engineers working full time building out all that infrastructure we felt was missing from GWT, but once everything was in place, the actual coding of the application became much easier.
Also, on a side note, Javascript gets used as a UI language and yet has no support for threading...how insane is that? It's been accepted practice in the non-webapp realm for quite some time that
And I'd like to emphasize learn Javascript. Don't assume you already know it. Because chances are you probably don't.
I know I don't know it and I see no reason to change that. I'm sure I know more than many people who do say that they know it, but I know enough to know they're wrong. Javascript is a horrible mess of implementation-specific gotchas that take years to figure out. Someone I worked with was one of those people who knew it as well as anyone. He knows every way to get IE to say "Feature not implemented" and every way that it is possible to leak memory in each browser (and there are many.) Just listening to him talk on the subject made me realize that there was no way that I could get to a point where I was proficient in the language without devoting years of my life to it as he had done.
But thankfully Java is one of the languages that I know well and there are multiple frameworks that let you write Java code to run in all the places where you're normally limited to Javascript. Since migrating our UI code to GWT, our development times are faster, we have less bugs and our application actually performs better than it did when the code was in Javascript. GWT is full of truly bizarre design decisions that you have to work around, but when you get to the actual programming of a dynamic UI, the experience blissful by comparison.
As I see it, there's simply no reason why anyone should consider writing a dynamic web UI in Javascript these days. Javascript is the web equivalent of assembly...we've reached the point where a compiler for a higher-level language can use it as an intermediary language to compile to. And that compiler can produce code that performs better than the code that written by 99% of humans. And for those rare instances where you need to hand tune a small bit of code, the frameworks give you the ability to write your own Javascript, though we've yet to need that ability.
So I'd offer the exact opposite advice. Don't learn Javascript. Learn one of the Javascript frameworks that allows you to write code in a language that's less prone to bizarre errors and has better tooling support. I can speak from experience when I say that life becomes a lot easier when you go this route.
And besides, guess what? The single most distracting element of using cell phones -- dialing -- is STILL LEGAL!
Regardless of what's legal and what's not, the effect of the law has been noticeable. Sure, people can do some things without breaking the law, but the net result is that many people have just written off using their cell phones in the car because doing so while following the law is just too complicated. There will always be people who push the boundaries of the law and even those that break the law, but it's not necessary for a law to be 100% effective for it to help. And there will always be other behaviors that could be legislated against that would make us safer, but it's not necessary (nor possible) to ban 100% of the things that cause accidents.
The bottom line for me is that the number of near-miss driving incidents for me has gone down. Could it be coincidence, sure. Before the law went into effect, it seemed to happen to me about once per month where someone using a cell phone would attempt to change lanes without checking that there wasn't someone there first. Since the law went into effect, it hasn't happened to me yet. I'll grant that I'm too small a sample size to be meaningful, but Automobile fatalities are down in California, so it might not be fair to write off the new law as being entirely ineffective.
But the security theater question is an interesting one because it's almost a "chicken and egg" problem. We have irrational fears about rare occurrences and the things that government does to address those fears are almost completely for show. Whether the fears are irrational because the government puts on the security theater or whether the government puts on the security theater to appear to be addressing people's irrational fears is somewhat irrelevant, because together they become self-fulfilling. The more exaggerated the security policy, the more irrational the fear of what it's meant to protect us from becomes. And the more irrational our fears, the more we demand that government protect us (or the more protection we tolerate.) This is the exact phenomenon that makes terrorism an effective strategy.
I challenge anyone to show that we are actually safer now than we were 8 years ago.
This probably supports your theory more than refuting it, but I feel safer now than I did 8 years ago. But it has nothing to do with terrorism or government protection and everything to do with the fact that my state, California, has banned cell phone use without a hands-free device. I'm fairly confident in stating that that one law will save more lives than any of the anti-terrorist policies of the Bush administration.
But humans are particularly bad at estimating the probability of something happening and the value, either positive or negative of something should it actually happen. There's a great Ted talk about this very subject. And I think that's basically the point you're trying to make...that the policies that we're being told are making us safer are actually designed to address the irrational fears we have rather than any realistic threat to our safety.
But I sill maintain that due to that relatively-unheralded piece of legislation in my state, I'm safer now than I was 8 years ago.
To be fair, the way that he handled it did leave it open to interpretation as to whether he flubbed it or not. As someone taking such an important oath, I would hope that Obama would have memorized the entire thing, not just for today but for the next (here's hoping) 8 years. Especially after 8 years of having a President who so clearly forgot the oath almost as soon as he'd said it.
If he had memorized it, he could have paused and then continued with the correct version of the oath. It would appear a bit weird to observers not familiar with the oath, but it would show that he both knew the correct version and had internalized exactly what he was swearing to do rather than just repeating back what he was hearing.
But regardless, history will judge the incident based on his performance in office. If he's a disaster, it will be remembered as the "first clue" moment. If he's an outstanding president, it will either be remembered as a funny anecdote or as a mistake on Roberts' part. If he's an average president, it will likely be entirely forgotten.
I hate to post an "I agree" response, but this messiah shit it getting out of hand.
I don't necessarily see it as a messiah perception, but more as one of offering hope. It was the same thing when Kennedy was elected. There was a feeling, however valid, that his election marked the beginning of the world changing in a positive way. And when times are tough, people need a positive outlook on the world and their place in that world in order to not get scared and despondent.
When people buy lottery tickets, the research has shown that they predominantly know that they're going to lose and that they're essentially throwing their money in the garbage. But they continue to buy tickets because the hope that they feel that maybe something miraculous will happen to them and they'll win is worth something to them. And that hope allows them to, up until the drawing, enjoy their unrealistic dreams of an outcome that isn't likely to come to pass.
Barack Obama is, in some ways, like a lottery ticket. For many people in this country, we've purchased a lottery ticket where the payout is a better future. And that ticket is one that we feel that we actively chose, rather than being forced to accept a lottery ticket where the payout turned out to be a move towards shredding the bill of rights, oppressing the world and the outright transfer of a bulk of this countries assets to wealthy private interests.
So let the people enjoy their pre-drawing hope and fantasy. And while there's probably little chance that we'll hit the jackpot, I remain hopeful that we'll hit 4 or 5 numbers and our lottery ticket will have been worth the purchase price.
The even sadder truth is that when faced with the choice of the two apps you describe and a third buggy application with a tiny set of features, users will choose the most visually appealing app, regardless of lack of features or the app being buggy.
The under-the-covers stuff is important, but finding a good designer to make it pretty is the single most important thing you can do to make people choose your product. If it's pretty, people will put up with a lot of hassle and give you the time necessary to make it work reliably and have all the necessary features.
Form autocomplete? It's about time. Not that I like the feature anyway, it's too dumb. 90% of the time it doesn't offer any suggestion (wild guess, if a web site asks for my name, maybe my browser might know the answer). The rest of the time (10%), it has a fifty-fifty chance of guessing right.
Beyond the difficulty of the browser being able to pair up the information that it collects about you with the name of the form input, implementing autocomplete as you suggest would introduce a huge privacy hole. Using javascript, it's pretty trivial to have a hidden iframe with some form elements that gets automatically submitted via XmlHttpRequest. If browsers happily tried to pre-populate form elements based on their best guess as to what piece of information it thought belonged there, it would be way too simple for sites to gather all that information without your knowledge. As it is now, if you've typed something in a form element and begin to type the same thing, most browsers will use the previous entry as a suggestion, so that's about as much as you'd want them to do without you explicitly saying "Remember the values in this form" (like the you have to when it remembers a password for you.)
I just hope Chrome is smarter about recognizing opportunities to use autocomplete. As it is now, browsers will only identify autocomplete-eligible inputs if they are hard-coded into the HTML that's delivered to them. They ignore elements that are added to the DOM dynamically. This means that JavaScript frameworks that do this sort of thing look and feel like normal HTML pages to the user, but autocomplete just doesn't work. One would hope that Google would try to make it work based on the DOM, since GWT is particularly susceptible to the issue and the work-around is a pretty nasty hack.
Language is a means of expressing ideas. Using it is an art and those who are more skilled at that art can express themselves better than those who are less skilled. And it doesn't matter how many people misuse a language construct, word or phrase, those who use it correctly will always be more skilled than those who don't. So in one sense, the fight is over. Using "begging the question" incorrectly does convey the meaning that the user intended. But it also conveys a lesser understanding of the English language that is likely to manifest itself in other ways.
Personally, when I see people mispronouncing words and misusing phrases like the one in question, I use them as subtle queues that the person using them is less intelligent and adjust my behavior accordingly. It may be that their misuse is the only area in which they lack intelligence and the impact of their misuse is almost entirely mitigated. But that's very infrequent and the misuse is much more commonly a good indicator of their lack of aptitude in other areas. And correct usage of commonly-misused constructs is an even better indicator of the opposite. When I hear someone talk about someone's forte and pronounce the word correctly (the 'e' is silent, not accented), it's almost always an indicator that the person is well-read and deserving of my attention to whatever they say. And I can generally observe their speech patterns for areas in which I may be making mistakes in my own speech.
I suppose it all depends on how you view language. If it's just a tool that you use to accomplish the tasks in your everyday life, then don't worry about all the complexities. But if you see virtue in mastering it and feel that it can help you more fully express the person you truly are, then learning the subtleties of languages is vital.
Some of us like not having bookmarks fall out of our books, or being able to carry several books with us in less space than one physical book.
And some people have eyesight that's not what it used to be, especially those people who were voracious readers for most of their lives. For those people, reading is an integral part of their life and losing it can be quite a blow. For them, eBook readers are a godsend since they can increase the font size to be large enough to read comfortably. It seems like such a small feature, but for some people the fixed size of the letters in printed books can mean the difference between being or not being able to read the book.
And since many of the people that fall into this category are older and less technically savvy, the Kindle is a great choice since it avoids the complexity of needing to download to a computer and transfer the download to the eBook reader. I got a Kindle for my mother last Xmas. Reading has always been an important part of her life and without it, she'd started to get somewhat depressed. But the Kindle fixed all that and yet it's still the only techno gadget she's ever had that I've yet to get a support call about.
It may not be for everyone, but it's perfect for a certain target demographic. I will say that there are some idiotic UI decisions that were made on it. I can barely hold it without accidentally turning the page since the "next page" button takes up nearly the entire right-hand side of the device...stupid. But the overall experience is makes up for the few drawbacks.
It is therefore possible for faithless electors to mix and match parties. The could elect an Obama/Palin administration, or a McCain/Biden one.
If they can mix and match parties, then there's actually two options that you've forgotten that I would think would be much more likely. I would think Obama/McCain and McCain/Obama would be the more likely options since both could be cast by electors trying to more accurately represent the interests of the people from their state if the popular vote in that state was within a couple percentage points.
Especially since the rules for the electoral college, as originally written in the constitution, stipulated that the vice president would be the person who finished second in the electoral college balloting. That didn't change until 1803 with the 12th amendment. In this case, McCain would almost certainly have finished second in the balloting, so he would now be our VP-Elect instead of Biden.
Anyone who still thinks that drug-related problems are caused by their prohibition is an idiot.
Caused, no. Exacerbated, definitely.
Some drugs do cause problems in people's lives, but prohibition hasn't kept these drugs from being available to anyone that wants them. Like it or not, drugs are here in our society, and no law is going to change that.
Pop quiz time, what's harder to obtain, heroin or morphine? Here's a hint, one of them is schedule 1 and is not allowed to be used medically. The other one isn't and is manufactured legally by a large corporations who adhere to strict quality controls. And while there is a black market to actually purchase both drugs, since the legal one is classified as a controlled substance, there are no black market producers of the controlled substance since the profit margins are too small to make it worthwhile...it's simply easier to obtain the legally produced variety through some other channel.
It's time for us to start treating drug use as a medical problem rather than a criminal problem. If we decriminalize drugs, we can start to control them based on their addictiveness and overall danger to people's health. The mildly dangerous ones, like Marijuana, can be treated like cigarettes and their sale limited to people over the age of consent. We get the added benefit of being able to tax the hell out of them. The more dangerous ones can require a doctor's prescription so that they can be used in treatment facilities to carefully wean addicts from their addiction.
This plan fully acknowledges that there will be uncontrolled use and that drugs produced legally will find their way onto the streets. But even this situation improves upon our current one. For one, the profit margins for producers will fall through the floor. No longer will terrorist organizations or drug cartels be able to use drugs as a means to fund violence and oppression of people overseas (and this includes our own government, who has used drugs as an easy source for funding covert operations that they didn't want to be subject to the bean counters who dole out the US budget).
However the largest benefit will be to addicts who will no longer be subject to the poor quality control standards of the black market producers (which is mostly due to the middle men that "cut" the drugs potency along the way to increase profits). The biggest reason that so many heroin users OD isn't inherently due to heroin, though drugs that have a lower effective dose to lethal dose ratio do not suffer from it. The most common OD situation happens when they get a particularly weak dose and then try to adjust their dosage the next time when they've purchased a much stronger dose. With legitimate production that is subject to strict quality controls, even the drugs sold on the street will be of much higher quality.
And lastly, the most compelling argument is a financial one. We're simply wasting a ton of resources incarcerating people who could otherwise be production members of society. We lose what they'd produce for our society (at a minimum, they'd buy crap from Walmart and the like) and we pay billions of dollars to house them. Simply releasing all the non-violent drug offenders would quickly pull us out of this economic downturn.
It's easy for an American to visit South America, live and travel amongst the upper 10%, and think that it's more or less like the US. But the thing is, what we consider middle-class in the US is wealthy.
For what it's worth, only part of my experience in South America would fall into that category. My first experience in South America was in high school as part of an amazing program called Amigos de las Americas. That was just 2 months, but I was living with a family in a rural part of Paraguay where the only people we (my partner and I...they always put people in groups of at least 2) saw were the two Mormon missionaries that were stationed there. The family we stayed with was very well off for the area, but our project involved venturing out into the countryside to give immunizations to children who's parents wouldn't normally bring them into the health center to be immunized, so I saw a lot of the poorer side of the country...to the point where we often ran into problems when we encountered families that only spoke Guaraní (the local indigenous language) and not Spanish.
My later experiences living in South America were in much more urban settings where I'll readily admit that I was not interacting with the poorest people on a day-to-day basis, but my first experience has stuck with me, so when I traveled around the continent, I was always looking for chances to venture off the beaten path and meet people who weren't accustomed to meeting Americans. It's always much more enjoyable to break down pre-conceived notions about Americans by showing people who only know the sterotype that there are some Americans that speak fluent Spanish, respect their culture and are genuinely interested in getting to know them. Some of the most amazing experiences of my life have come as a result of extended conversations on bus rides that end up with me being welcomed into peoples homes and being shown incredible hospitality and being pointed towards many of South America's hidden gems (the kind of stuff you don't often find in guidebooks.) So I feel confident in saying that I've seen a pretty good cross-section of South America, though I've spent very little time in Brazil, so there's a huge part that I'm still planning on exploring.
On the other matter of what led to the US moving from being poor to one of the wealthiest nations in the world, I'm not sure you can attribute it to any one thing. It's probably some measure of the founding principles on which it was based. It probably also has a lot to do with the pretty remarkable tradition we've had to peaceful transitions between governments, which cuts down on corruption since leaders know they can't simply ignore elections that their party loses. And I think some of it can be attributed to us being the escape valve for people who were looking for a better life than they could hope for in Europe. Then there's also slavery which was, while morally-reprehensible, an enabler of growing a very powerful agricultural economy. So I guess what I'm getting at is that I think there's a combination of quite a few fairly unique occurrences that led to the US becoming wealthier than almost all of the other American countries. And as far as Libertarianism goes, I do believe that an entirely-Libertarian government would probably be a total disaster, but trying to move our current system in a Libertarian direction would be very helpful, if only to reduce government spending and remove what I believe to be the single biggest problem in this country...the "War on Drugs." The resources that could be freed up by reducing the prison population, increasing the workforce and increasing revenues by legalizing and taxing the less harmful drugs is simply staggering.
Nothing gets done in a socialist country? Why, turn off Fox News and visit a socialist country.
I'm not sure if you noticed, but I was actually advocating the switch to either a socialist or libertarian mindset in this country. I just tossed in the nothing gets done bit to make it appear a bit more balanced (unlike the Faux News that you assume I watch). I've spent plenty of time in countries that are more socialist than the US, though I've never made it to any of the scandanavian countries (which I gather take it further than the western European countries do).
And, FWIW, I use a mac whenever I'm not being forced by my employer to use something else.
I've been to South American countries, which I regard to be libertarian paradises. There are no rules, nobody pays their taxes. Politicians siphon of all the money anyways. The streets are unpaved, with raw sewers in them. Whole families, mom, dad, and kids, live on the streets. You can buy anything you want in the market -- anything. The whole place is a shithole, but the people really are free.
Wow...hypocritical much? I actually lived in South America for a couple of years and I've been all over the continent and your blanket generalization is completely unfair. Yes, people are poor...but in what 3rd world country is that not the case? And stuff sucks everywhere, but that's a pretty universal condition as well, especially in the 3rd world. But calling it a shithole is completely unfair.
You jest, but Government really is a legacy system, written ~230 years ago by developers who have long since moved on. The people who came after them have been generally fearful of making any substantive changes, opting instead for minor revisions and, when new features became necessary, generally attempting to follow the techniques in the original framework without really understanding why those development strategies were used in the first place.
So what we have now is a maintenance nightmare. It was bad in 2000, but over the last 8 years, the government has relied almost entirely on contractors who have generally ignored any existing infrastructure and have re-written many things from scratch in languages that they've basically made up as they've felt the needed to. They've done this without any regard for stability, performance or maintenance going forward. They knew they'd be gone by 2009 and the problems they were leaving behind would have to be solved by other developers. As a result, we have one of the most resource hungry governments in the world, and the performance is pretty crappy. For example, there's a job that's been running for 6 years and still hasn't completed yet. No one is really sure what the job is supposed to do, but so far it seems that the only thing it's done is used a ton of resources to hack into another system and try to install another copy of our system in its place. The newly hired lead developer has indicated that he's planning to kill that job, albeit without the necessary '-9' flag, so that's hopefully going to free up some much needed resources.
It's at this point that the managers in charge should start looking at best-of-breed solutions from the rest of the world and trying to implement them. There are much more efficient ways to get things done that what we currently have, and we should begin by choosing a much more proven, stable and performant platform on which to build our government. And we should shift our security focus partially away from the external threats that have so far been our main focus. Instead, we should look at trying to eliminate at least some of the viruses running in our current system.
We need to face the fact that we've got the Windows Vista of governments. We had the Windows XP of governments before the last administration tried to entirely re-build our systems. They placed a priority on DRM and the appearance of security and generally built a system that requires more resources to run than we have. They've made cosmetic changes to distract people from realizing that the underlying infrastructure is pretty crappy. It may look current and modern, but at its core, it was written for an entirely different time and for an entirely different target audience. And its fundamentally unable to deal with the viruses that exist today (*cough*lobbyists*cough*).
We should be looking at ways to run Socialism (the OS X of governments...very user-centric, less gets done but people are generally happier, though it's hard to figure out exactly why that is considering how much they're paying for it) or Libertarianism (the Linux of governments...almost nothing is done for you, but if you're determined enough, you can make it exactly what you'd like and have a lot more resources left over for doing the things you want to do). Both of those platforms hold more promise going forward.
Perhaps a book on algorithms or the fundamentals of electronics.
I would go even more fundamental than that. There is nothing that's applicable to computers that is as timeless as math. Books on statistics, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, calculus and boolean algebra and subjects like that will never become outdated and will make any book on specific computer technologies easier to understand. And the knowledge is applicable outside of the computer industry as well.
Statistics could even be applicable prior to leaving prison. Part of the plot of the show "The Wire" involves one of the teachers making math more accessible to inter-city kids by teaching them the odds in the dice games that are prevalent in "thug" culture, which is no doubt part of prison culture as well. In short, Math concepts don't change, they just progress. And they're widely applicable to many higher-paying positions that inmates could pursue once released.
But in your way, there's only 2 dots. The GPs URL would be abbreviated/... so as to form an ellipsis which, as most readers would probably agree, is somewhat appropriate given the content of the site.
Alternatively, if/. purchased the slash TLD, then the site URL could be slash., which would even prevent accidental search domain appending in the case that the site goes down.
if they extended the length of the yellow light at troublesome intersections, that the number of people running red lights almost dropped to near zero.
While extending the length of the yellow is, no doubt, a good thing, it's far more important to have the count-down timers on the corresponding crosswalks to indicate when the green will end. When people know that there is a red-light camera at an intersection, they'll often react very poorly when the light turns to yellow (as in slamming on their brakes). Without that indication of when the light will turn yellow, you get people getting rear-ended because they stop more quickly than the car behind them can.
The true problem is that, in true techie style, the concepts covered by HTTPS aren't properly separated and this results in confusion for people that don't understand what's going on technically. For better or for worse, HTTPS is a leaky abstraction.
HTTPS solves two distinct problems and yet it's depicted as a single problem. Because the need for an encrypted transport layer is obvious, people forget that the other purpose of HTTPS is to verify the identity of the server you're communicating with. It can even be used for the server to identify the client that's making the request, but that feature is seldom used. But it's still two distinct (though related) problems being solved, the encrypted transport layer and the identity verification mechanism.
I'm not sure if there's a better way to convey the difference between these two concepts to non-technical users, but it would be good to try since there's value in utilizing one of the two without using both. Besides the obvious applications of unverified and encrypted connections, verified but unencrypted connections could also be useful for situations where encryption isn't needed but it's important to know that the information you're seeing is coming from a trusted source (i.e. stock listings or other public information that you really need to know is genuine).
You're lucky. I had two DVDs that I got notified would arrive on Tuesday (sent on Monday). They still haven't come, but I did have the next DVD in my queue arrive yesterday with no notice whatsoever.
The one part of this article that seems a bit off to me...they use the terms home-grown and proprietary to describe the inventory management application as if they're pejorative, but I would be very surprised if there was a commercial product that could meet their specific needs well enough to work for them. I would expect their solution to be home-grown and proprietary. Just imagine if they were having this issue and their inventory management software wasn't home-grown. Right now, they'd be working feverishly with their vendor to fix the issue, but they'd be subject to their vendor's limitations and ability to fix the problem quickly. But given the current situation, they have full access to the code that's running and probably have many employees who originally built the system. And if there are key employees who have since left and still have specific expertise in the details of the current system, they have the ability to expedite the fix by luring those employees back for limited contracting gigs (if you're losing $2m - $3m per day, you can afford to make very generous offers if it will mean getting the app back up even one day sooner).
Anyways, Kudos to Netflix for being very upfront about the problem and offering automatic refunds. It would have been easy to try to keep it secret. Most people would have done what I would have done...wait a few days for the DVDs to get there and then submit feedback that they never arrived. By that time, they would have likely identified the problem and sent the queue items. And to users, it would appear that those items were re-sent and that the originals had either been lost by the post office or stolen out of our mailboxes. But they didn't, the fessed up, which was the right thing to do from the customer standpoint even if it wasn't the right thing to do from an investor standpoint.
So Japanese and German companies can make cars in the US
I had a chance to tour the (Toyota) factory in Toyota City, Japan a couple of years ago and asked whether the factory workers there were unionized, and was told that they were paid fairly enough and had enough opportunity for advancement that they hadn't felt the need to unionize despite having been offered the option by Toyota. So unless I was lied to, many of the automotive factory workers in Japan aren't unionized.
The reason Japanese car makers make cars in the US is likely more due to import regulations (tarriffs, limits, etc), PR (remember those commercials urging consumers to buy things "Made in the USA" in the late 80s and early 90s?) and the ability to shorten the time between when a car is produced and when it is delivered to the dealer. The last rationale likely saved those automakers a ton of money when demand for SUVs in the US dropped like a ton of bricks in response to rising gas prices. If those vehicles were produced in Japan, the ability to adjust production to match the demands of the market would have lagged by the couple of months it takes to import those vehicles into the US. Though I think Toyota did take somewhat of a hit since the rep indicated that the Prius was only produced in Japan, which would explain why they haven't been able to keep up with the demand for that model.
The other reason, as indicated in the luncheon with Toyota's president that was also part of that visit, was that Toyota felt that it was important to have a presence in each market they sold to so that they could adjust their products to meet the local need. The example he cited was how they worked with the Brazilian government to plan the introduction of cars that ran on sugar ethanol.
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Not to mention that eBooks are great for older people who need a larger font size than they'd find in a physical book. I got my mom an original Kindle when they first came out for that exact reason. She'd been a voracious reader her entire life, but when her eyesight started to go, she had to start using a magnifying glass which made reading take a lot longer. With the Kindle, she's back to her old reading speed. All eBook readers should give this feature, but the Kindle is the only one I know of that integrates so closely with a source for buying eBooks, which saved me from having to teach her how to load eBooks onto the device.
And, most importantly for me, the Kindle is, so far, the only electronic device she's ever had that I have yet to receive a support call about.
I am also glad to see that the new one fixed the stupid next page button that took up almost the entire side of the original Kindle...made it damn near unusable for me since I'd always accidentally hit it. That was the one thing that kept me from getting one too. Now that that's changed, I may get one.
The difference, as I see it, is that these objects can do things when you call methods on them and can also have methods that tell you about the data they contain. Imagine if your .doc file had a countWords() method rather than you having to open the file with Microsoft Word and then choose that option from the appropriate menu.
As I see it, this guy is basically objecting to the notion that OO principles and a rich domain model need to end at the point where programs interact with the OS. And he's trying to build an OS that embodies those principles as well.
The problem, of course, is the "this guy" part. A single individual could have an idea for the greatest OS ever, but if he's not part of a larger effort, the resulting OS will be a concept OS that receives no adoption...and that's the best case scenario. And before anyone brings up Linus, ask yourself the same question RMS has been asking you to ask yourself...where would Linux be without the GNU tools that already existed for the proprietary Unix operating systems? The answer is a concept OS that wouldn't have received any adoption.
It's not about whether some service is a necessity that could save your life. It's about when having competing services is counterproductive. There was a time in this country where firefighters were privatized. People paid one of the various providers to come and put their house out if it caught on fire. But this is wildly inefficient. It would lead to firefighters sitting idly by as one house burned to the ground because that house was not one of their customers. And when they were dealing with one of their customers, their concern was not for the surrounding houses, at least not the ones that weren't also customers of theirs.
In short, it was insanity and it makes far more sense to have one fire department that protects against everything. There's no need for firefighters to worry about what action they should take in any situation...they just put out every fire that's reported to them. The same goes for police officers...it makes no sense to have any competition in this area. And the same goes for communications infrastructure (not service, just infrastructure). Municipal ownership of fiber or copper infrastructure makes a lot of sense. It allows full competition from any service provider without the insanity that would come from any of the multitudes of communications providers constantly digging up streets or stringing wires on the telephone poles.
Heh...ironic that you see no problem with public libraries. You know, a service that does not protect your life and is probably unused by most people. The argument for having private libraries makes a lot more sense than the argument for having privatized local internet infrastructure. Not that I agree with either argument, since I think libraries serve a definite purpose in providing at least the opportunity for poorer people in society to educate themselves given the poor quality of public schools. But hey, if we're pushing the let's make everything private agenda, why should schools get a pass either?
People in the US are so afraid of the word Socialism that they're completely blind to all the ways in which our society is already Socialist. Full-scale communism may not be the answer, but we really need to learn that we should look at everything on a case-by-case basis to determine whether it makes sense to use a socialized or privatized system. Absolutist thinking is almost always wrong. A more nuanced approach will always be better.
Wow, you're presumptuous. You don't even know me and yet you've concluded from my reasonable opinion that Javascript is an unworkable mess that I don't have the experience to see what a blissful experience you seem to think it is. You could not be any more wrong. I know the language and have written a ton of code in it. I even wrote a custom linker/compressor that we used to take our well-organized, commented and readable Javascript and turn it into code that was optimized and could be delivered to the client in one HTTP request. That code required me to heavily modify the available ECMAScript ANTLR grammar to accept all the Javascript our app used. I learned more about Javascript variable scoping and language requirements than I ever wanted to. I know the language.
The part I readily admit I don't know is all the browser quirks, so that's why I say that I don't know Javascript. That's the part that takes a lot of experience to learn and that's the part that you absolutely need to know if you're going to write complex UIs in the language. And I'd bet my last dollar that you don't know all the quirks either. It takes years of experience using it to learn everything. Most of those quirks are not covered in any blog, article or tutorial. They're things you have to figure out by running into the problem only to figure out that it's some idiotic browser limitation that you have to code around. If you've ever tried to get something working in IE 6, you'd know this. It's hell.
Add to that that there isn't a workable unit testing framework for Javascript...and sorry, jsunit is a horrible kludge that, among other things, makes testing anything that involves setTimeout or setInterval require a lot more effort than it should. Hell, even the developers of many of the major Javascript frameworks write tests that use Rhino instead of running inside an actual browser. As of about 6 months ago, when we switched to GWT, there was just no good way to automatically test for regressions in UI code.
Now who's talking from a position of ignorance. Just because you couldn't make GWT work doesn't mean that others can't. Sure, we had to write a lot of supporting code to work around GWT's shortcomings, but at no time have we had to write jsni. You statement that GWT breaks down eventually is utter bullshit. If you learn to use it and learn ways around its limitations, you can do anything with it. Our app is proprietary, so unfortunately I can't show it to you, but it's well beyond the kinds of stuff that you see in other GWT apps like Lombardi's BluePrint. I highly doubt you're tackling anything that's even close to our level of complexity. At the rate we're going, we'll have over 10,000 unit tests for our UI alone once we've finished the GWT version (using our own testing harness, since GWT's idea of a unit test isn't really a unit test). All of them run through JUnit and all of them run in all of the versions of the big 3 browsers that we support (IE 6/7, Safari and FF 2/3).
In short, we've replaced a custom Javscript solution (since none of the Javascript frameworks could handle the complexity of our application...and we tested them all) with GWT and the number of regressions that make it to QA has dropped dramatically. And the amount of time we spend making our app performant in the browser has also decreased substantially. It required 3 months of 10 engineers working full time building out all that infrastructure we felt was missing from GWT, but once everything was in place, the actual coding of the application became much easier.
Also, on a side note, Javascript gets used as a UI language and yet has no support for threading...how insane is that? It's been accepted practice in the non-webapp realm for quite some time that
I know I don't know it and I see no reason to change that. I'm sure I know more than many people who do say that they know it, but I know enough to know they're wrong. Javascript is a horrible mess of implementation-specific gotchas that take years to figure out. Someone I worked with was one of those people who knew it as well as anyone. He knows every way to get IE to say "Feature not implemented" and every way that it is possible to leak memory in each browser (and there are many.) Just listening to him talk on the subject made me realize that there was no way that I could get to a point where I was proficient in the language without devoting years of my life to it as he had done.
But thankfully Java is one of the languages that I know well and there are multiple frameworks that let you write Java code to run in all the places where you're normally limited to Javascript. Since migrating our UI code to GWT, our development times are faster, we have less bugs and our application actually performs better than it did when the code was in Javascript. GWT is full of truly bizarre design decisions that you have to work around, but when you get to the actual programming of a dynamic UI, the experience blissful by comparison.
As I see it, there's simply no reason why anyone should consider writing a dynamic web UI in Javascript these days. Javascript is the web equivalent of assembly...we've reached the point where a compiler for a higher-level language can use it as an intermediary language to compile to. And that compiler can produce code that performs better than the code that written by 99% of humans. And for those rare instances where you need to hand tune a small bit of code, the frameworks give you the ability to write your own Javascript, though we've yet to need that ability.
So I'd offer the exact opposite advice. Don't learn Javascript. Learn one of the Javascript frameworks that allows you to write code in a language that's less prone to bizarre errors and has better tooling support. I can speak from experience when I say that life becomes a lot easier when you go this route.
Regardless of what's legal and what's not, the effect of the law has been noticeable. Sure, people can do some things without breaking the law, but the net result is that many people have just written off using their cell phones in the car because doing so while following the law is just too complicated. There will always be people who push the boundaries of the law and even those that break the law, but it's not necessary for a law to be 100% effective for it to help. And there will always be other behaviors that could be legislated against that would make us safer, but it's not necessary (nor possible) to ban 100% of the things that cause accidents.
The bottom line for me is that the number of near-miss driving incidents for me has gone down. Could it be coincidence, sure. Before the law went into effect, it seemed to happen to me about once per month where someone using a cell phone would attempt to change lanes without checking that there wasn't someone there first. Since the law went into effect, it hasn't happened to me yet. I'll grant that I'm too small a sample size to be meaningful, but Automobile fatalities are down in California, so it might not be fair to write off the new law as being entirely ineffective.
But the security theater question is an interesting one because it's almost a "chicken and egg" problem. We have irrational fears about rare occurrences and the things that government does to address those fears are almost completely for show. Whether the fears are irrational because the government puts on the security theater or whether the government puts on the security theater to appear to be addressing people's irrational fears is somewhat irrelevant, because together they become self-fulfilling. The more exaggerated the security policy, the more irrational the fear of what it's meant to protect us from becomes. And the more irrational our fears, the more we demand that government protect us (or the more protection we tolerate.) This is the exact phenomenon that makes terrorism an effective strategy.
This probably supports your theory more than refuting it, but I feel safer now than I did 8 years ago. But it has nothing to do with terrorism or government protection and everything to do with the fact that my state, California, has banned cell phone use without a hands-free device. I'm fairly confident in stating that that one law will save more lives than any of the anti-terrorist policies of the Bush administration.
But humans are particularly bad at estimating the probability of something happening and the value, either positive or negative of something should it actually happen. There's a great Ted talk about this very subject. And I think that's basically the point you're trying to make...that the policies that we're being told are making us safer are actually designed to address the irrational fears we have rather than any realistic threat to our safety.
But I sill maintain that due to that relatively-unheralded piece of legislation in my state, I'm safer now than I was 8 years ago.
To be fair, the way that he handled it did leave it open to interpretation as to whether he flubbed it or not. As someone taking such an important oath, I would hope that Obama would have memorized the entire thing, not just for today but for the next (here's hoping) 8 years. Especially after 8 years of having a President who so clearly forgot the oath almost as soon as he'd said it.
If he had memorized it, he could have paused and then continued with the correct version of the oath. It would appear a bit weird to observers not familiar with the oath, but it would show that he both knew the correct version and had internalized exactly what he was swearing to do rather than just repeating back what he was hearing.
But regardless, history will judge the incident based on his performance in office. If he's a disaster, it will be remembered as the "first clue" moment. If he's an outstanding president, it will either be remembered as a funny anecdote or as a mistake on Roberts' part. If he's an average president, it will likely be entirely forgotten.
I don't necessarily see it as a messiah perception, but more as one of offering hope. It was the same thing when Kennedy was elected. There was a feeling, however valid, that his election marked the beginning of the world changing in a positive way. And when times are tough, people need a positive outlook on the world and their place in that world in order to not get scared and despondent.
When people buy lottery tickets, the research has shown that they predominantly know that they're going to lose and that they're essentially throwing their money in the garbage. But they continue to buy tickets because the hope that they feel that maybe something miraculous will happen to them and they'll win is worth something to them. And that hope allows them to, up until the drawing, enjoy their unrealistic dreams of an outcome that isn't likely to come to pass.
Barack Obama is, in some ways, like a lottery ticket. For many people in this country, we've purchased a lottery ticket where the payout is a better future. And that ticket is one that we feel that we actively chose, rather than being forced to accept a lottery ticket where the payout turned out to be a move towards shredding the bill of rights, oppressing the world and the outright transfer of a bulk of this countries assets to wealthy private interests.
So let the people enjoy their pre-drawing hope and fantasy. And while there's probably little chance that we'll hit the jackpot, I remain hopeful that we'll hit 4 or 5 numbers and our lottery ticket will have been worth the purchase price.
It might be of interest to you that Voltaire came up with your conclusion 245 years ago, and a bit more eloquently as well:
The even sadder truth is that when faced with the choice of the two apps you describe and a third buggy application with a tiny set of features, users will choose the most visually appealing app, regardless of lack of features or the app being buggy.
The under-the-covers stuff is important, but finding a good designer to make it pretty is the single most important thing you can do to make people choose your product. If it's pretty, people will put up with a lot of hassle and give you the time necessary to make it work reliably and have all the necessary features.
Beyond the difficulty of the browser being able to pair up the information that it collects about you with the name of the form input, implementing autocomplete as you suggest would introduce a huge privacy hole. Using javascript, it's pretty trivial to have a hidden iframe with some form elements that gets automatically submitted via XmlHttpRequest. If browsers happily tried to pre-populate form elements based on their best guess as to what piece of information it thought belonged there, it would be way too simple for sites to gather all that information without your knowledge. As it is now, if you've typed something in a form element and begin to type the same thing, most browsers will use the previous entry as a suggestion, so that's about as much as you'd want them to do without you explicitly saying "Remember the values in this form" (like the you have to when it remembers a password for you.)
I just hope Chrome is smarter about recognizing opportunities to use autocomplete. As it is now, browsers will only identify autocomplete-eligible inputs if they are hard-coded into the HTML that's delivered to them. They ignore elements that are added to the DOM dynamically. This means that JavaScript frameworks that do this sort of thing look and feel like normal HTML pages to the user, but autocomplete just doesn't work. One would hope that Google would try to make it work based on the DOM, since GWT is particularly susceptible to the issue and the work-around is a pretty nasty hack.
Language is a means of expressing ideas. Using it is an art and those who are more skilled at that art can express themselves better than those who are less skilled. And it doesn't matter how many people misuse a language construct, word or phrase, those who use it correctly will always be more skilled than those who don't. So in one sense, the fight is over. Using "begging the question" incorrectly does convey the meaning that the user intended. But it also conveys a lesser understanding of the English language that is likely to manifest itself in other ways.
Personally, when I see people mispronouncing words and misusing phrases like the one in question, I use them as subtle queues that the person using them is less intelligent and adjust my behavior accordingly. It may be that their misuse is the only area in which they lack intelligence and the impact of their misuse is almost entirely mitigated. But that's very infrequent and the misuse is much more commonly a good indicator of their lack of aptitude in other areas. And correct usage of commonly-misused constructs is an even better indicator of the opposite. When I hear someone talk about someone's forte and pronounce the word correctly (the 'e' is silent, not accented), it's almost always an indicator that the person is well-read and deserving of my attention to whatever they say. And I can generally observe their speech patterns for areas in which I may be making mistakes in my own speech.
I suppose it all depends on how you view language. If it's just a tool that you use to accomplish the tasks in your everyday life, then don't worry about all the complexities. But if you see virtue in mastering it and feel that it can help you more fully express the person you truly are, then learning the subtleties of languages is vital.
And some people have eyesight that's not what it used to be, especially those people who were voracious readers for most of their lives. For those people, reading is an integral part of their life and losing it can be quite a blow. For them, eBook readers are a godsend since they can increase the font size to be large enough to read comfortably. It seems like such a small feature, but for some people the fixed size of the letters in printed books can mean the difference between being or not being able to read the book.
And since many of the people that fall into this category are older and less technically savvy, the Kindle is a great choice since it avoids the complexity of needing to download to a computer and transfer the download to the eBook reader. I got a Kindle for my mother last Xmas. Reading has always been an important part of her life and without it, she'd started to get somewhat depressed. But the Kindle fixed all that and yet it's still the only techno gadget she's ever had that I've yet to get a support call about.
It may not be for everyone, but it's perfect for a certain target demographic. I will say that there are some idiotic UI decisions that were made on it. I can barely hold it without accidentally turning the page since the "next page" button takes up nearly the entire right-hand side of the device...stupid. But the overall experience is makes up for the few drawbacks.
If they can mix and match parties, then there's actually two options that you've forgotten that I would think would be much more likely. I would think Obama/McCain and McCain/Obama would be the more likely options since both could be cast by electors trying to more accurately represent the interests of the people from their state if the popular vote in that state was within a couple percentage points.
Especially since the rules for the electoral college, as originally written in the constitution, stipulated that the vice president would be the person who finished second in the electoral college balloting. That didn't change until 1803 with the 12th amendment. In this case, McCain would almost certainly have finished second in the balloting, so he would now be our VP-Elect instead of Biden.
Caused, no. Exacerbated, definitely.
Some drugs do cause problems in people's lives, but prohibition hasn't kept these drugs from being available to anyone that wants them. Like it or not, drugs are here in our society, and no law is going to change that.
Pop quiz time, what's harder to obtain, heroin or morphine? Here's a hint, one of them is schedule 1 and is not allowed to be used medically. The other one isn't and is manufactured legally by a large corporations who adhere to strict quality controls. And while there is a black market to actually purchase both drugs, since the legal one is classified as a controlled substance, there are no black market producers of the controlled substance since the profit margins are too small to make it worthwhile...it's simply easier to obtain the legally produced variety through some other channel.
It's time for us to start treating drug use as a medical problem rather than a criminal problem. If we decriminalize drugs, we can start to control them based on their addictiveness and overall danger to people's health. The mildly dangerous ones, like Marijuana, can be treated like cigarettes and their sale limited to people over the age of consent. We get the added benefit of being able to tax the hell out of them. The more dangerous ones can require a doctor's prescription so that they can be used in treatment facilities to carefully wean addicts from their addiction.
This plan fully acknowledges that there will be uncontrolled use and that drugs produced legally will find their way onto the streets. But even this situation improves upon our current one. For one, the profit margins for producers will fall through the floor. No longer will terrorist organizations or drug cartels be able to use drugs as a means to fund violence and oppression of people overseas (and this includes our own government, who has used drugs as an easy source for funding covert operations that they didn't want to be subject to the bean counters who dole out the US budget).
However the largest benefit will be to addicts who will no longer be subject to the poor quality control standards of the black market producers (which is mostly due to the middle men that "cut" the drugs potency along the way to increase profits). The biggest reason that so many heroin users OD isn't inherently due to heroin, though drugs that have a lower effective dose to lethal dose ratio do not suffer from it. The most common OD situation happens when they get a particularly weak dose and then try to adjust their dosage the next time when they've purchased a much stronger dose. With legitimate production that is subject to strict quality controls, even the drugs sold on the street will be of much higher quality.
And lastly, the most compelling argument is a financial one. We're simply wasting a ton of resources incarcerating people who could otherwise be production members of society. We lose what they'd produce for our society (at a minimum, they'd buy crap from Walmart and the like) and we pay billions of dollars to house them. Simply releasing all the non-violent drug offenders would quickly pull us out of this economic downturn.
For what it's worth, only part of my experience in South America would fall into that category. My first experience in South America was in high school as part of an amazing program called Amigos de las Americas. That was just 2 months, but I was living with a family in a rural part of Paraguay where the only people we (my partner and I...they always put people in groups of at least 2) saw were the two Mormon missionaries that were stationed there. The family we stayed with was very well off for the area, but our project involved venturing out into the countryside to give immunizations to children who's parents wouldn't normally bring them into the health center to be immunized, so I saw a lot of the poorer side of the country...to the point where we often ran into problems when we encountered families that only spoke Guaraní (the local indigenous language) and not Spanish.
My later experiences living in South America were in much more urban settings where I'll readily admit that I was not interacting with the poorest people on a day-to-day basis, but my first experience has stuck with me, so when I traveled around the continent, I was always looking for chances to venture off the beaten path and meet people who weren't accustomed to meeting Americans. It's always much more enjoyable to break down pre-conceived notions about Americans by showing people who only know the sterotype that there are some Americans that speak fluent Spanish, respect their culture and are genuinely interested in getting to know them. Some of the most amazing experiences of my life have come as a result of extended conversations on bus rides that end up with me being welcomed into peoples homes and being shown incredible hospitality and being pointed towards many of South America's hidden gems (the kind of stuff you don't often find in guidebooks.) So I feel confident in saying that I've seen a pretty good cross-section of South America, though I've spent very little time in Brazil, so there's a huge part that I'm still planning on exploring.
On the other matter of what led to the US moving from being poor to one of the wealthiest nations in the world, I'm not sure you can attribute it to any one thing. It's probably some measure of the founding principles on which it was based. It probably also has a lot to do with the pretty remarkable tradition we've had to peaceful transitions between governments, which cuts down on corruption since leaders know they can't simply ignore elections that their party loses. And I think some of it can be attributed to us being the escape valve for people who were looking for a better life than they could hope for in Europe. Then there's also slavery which was, while morally-reprehensible, an enabler of growing a very powerful agricultural economy. So I guess what I'm getting at is that I think there's a combination of quite a few fairly unique occurrences that led to the US becoming wealthier than almost all of the other American countries. And as far as Libertarianism goes, I do believe that an entirely-Libertarian government would probably be a total disaster, but trying to move our current system in a Libertarian direction would be very helpful, if only to reduce government spending and remove what I believe to be the single biggest problem in this country...the "War on Drugs." The resources that could be freed up by reducing the prison population, increasing the workforce and increasing revenues by legalizing and taxing the less harmful drugs is simply staggering.
I'm not sure if you noticed, but I was actually advocating the switch to either a socialist or libertarian mindset in this country. I just tossed in the nothing gets done bit to make it appear a bit more balanced (unlike the Faux News that you assume I watch). I've spent plenty of time in countries that are more socialist than the US, though I've never made it to any of the scandanavian countries (which I gather take it further than the western European countries do).
And, FWIW, I use a mac whenever I'm not being forced by my employer to use something else.
Wow...hypocritical much? I actually lived in South America for a couple of years and I've been all over the continent and your blanket generalization is completely unfair. Yes, people are poor...but in what 3rd world country is that not the case? And stuff sucks everywhere, but that's a pretty universal condition as well, especially in the 3rd world. But calling it a shithole is completely unfair.
You jest, but Government really is a legacy system, written ~230 years ago by developers who have long since moved on. The people who came after them have been generally fearful of making any substantive changes, opting instead for minor revisions and, when new features became necessary, generally attempting to follow the techniques in the original framework without really understanding why those development strategies were used in the first place.
So what we have now is a maintenance nightmare. It was bad in 2000, but over the last 8 years, the government has relied almost entirely on contractors who have generally ignored any existing infrastructure and have re-written many things from scratch in languages that they've basically made up as they've felt the needed to. They've done this without any regard for stability, performance or maintenance going forward. They knew they'd be gone by 2009 and the problems they were leaving behind would have to be solved by other developers. As a result, we have one of the most resource hungry governments in the world, and the performance is pretty crappy. For example, there's a job that's been running for 6 years and still hasn't completed yet. No one is really sure what the job is supposed to do, but so far it seems that the only thing it's done is used a ton of resources to hack into another system and try to install another copy of our system in its place. The newly hired lead developer has indicated that he's planning to kill that job, albeit without the necessary '-9' flag, so that's hopefully going to free up some much needed resources.
It's at this point that the managers in charge should start looking at best-of-breed solutions from the rest of the world and trying to implement them. There are much more efficient ways to get things done that what we currently have, and we should begin by choosing a much more proven, stable and performant platform on which to build our government. And we should shift our security focus partially away from the external threats that have so far been our main focus. Instead, we should look at trying to eliminate at least some of the viruses running in our current system.
We need to face the fact that we've got the Windows Vista of governments. We had the Windows XP of governments before the last administration tried to entirely re-build our systems. They placed a priority on DRM and the appearance of security and generally built a system that requires more resources to run than we have. They've made cosmetic changes to distract people from realizing that the underlying infrastructure is pretty crappy. It may look current and modern, but at its core, it was written for an entirely different time and for an entirely different target audience. And its fundamentally unable to deal with the viruses that exist today (*cough*lobbyists*cough*).
We should be looking at ways to run Socialism (the OS X of governments...very user-centric, less gets done but people are generally happier, though it's hard to figure out exactly why that is considering how much they're paying for it) or Libertarianism (the Linux of governments...almost nothing is done for you, but if you're determined enough, you can make it exactly what you'd like and have a lot more resources left over for doing the things you want to do). Both of those platforms hold more promise going forward.
I would go even more fundamental than that. There is nothing that's applicable to computers that is as timeless as math. Books on statistics, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, calculus and boolean algebra and subjects like that will never become outdated and will make any book on specific computer technologies easier to understand. And the knowledge is applicable outside of the computer industry as well.
Statistics could even be applicable prior to leaving prison. Part of the plot of the show "The Wire" involves one of the teachers making math more accessible to inter-city kids by teaching them the odds in the dice games that are prevalent in "thug" culture, which is no doubt part of prison culture as well. In short, Math concepts don't change, they just progress. And they're widely applicable to many higher-paying positions that inmates could pursue once released.
But in your way, there's only 2 dots. The GPs URL would be abbreviated /... so as to form an ellipsis which, as most readers would probably agree, is somewhat appropriate given the content of the site.
Alternatively, if /. purchased the slash TLD, then the site URL could be slash., which would even prevent accidental search domain appending in the case that the site goes down.
While extending the length of the yellow is, no doubt, a good thing, it's far more important to have the count-down timers on the corresponding crosswalks to indicate when the green will end. When people know that there is a red-light camera at an intersection, they'll often react very poorly when the light turns to yellow (as in slamming on their brakes). Without that indication of when the light will turn yellow, you get people getting rear-ended because they stop more quickly than the car behind them can.
The true problem is that, in true techie style, the concepts covered by HTTPS aren't properly separated and this results in confusion for people that don't understand what's going on technically. For better or for worse, HTTPS is a leaky abstraction.
HTTPS solves two distinct problems and yet it's depicted as a single problem. Because the need for an encrypted transport layer is obvious, people forget that the other purpose of HTTPS is to verify the identity of the server you're communicating with. It can even be used for the server to identify the client that's making the request, but that feature is seldom used. But it's still two distinct (though related) problems being solved, the encrypted transport layer and the identity verification mechanism.
I'm not sure if there's a better way to convey the difference between these two concepts to non-technical users, but it would be good to try since there's value in utilizing one of the two without using both. Besides the obvious applications of unverified and encrypted connections, verified but unencrypted connections could also be useful for situations where encryption isn't needed but it's important to know that the information you're seeing is coming from a trusted source (i.e. stock listings or other public information that you really need to know is genuine).
You're lucky. I had two DVDs that I got notified would arrive on Tuesday (sent on Monday). They still haven't come, but I did have the next DVD in my queue arrive yesterday with no notice whatsoever.
The one part of this article that seems a bit off to me...they use the terms home-grown and proprietary to describe the inventory management application as if they're pejorative, but I would be very surprised if there was a commercial product that could meet their specific needs well enough to work for them. I would expect their solution to be home-grown and proprietary. Just imagine if they were having this issue and their inventory management software wasn't home-grown. Right now, they'd be working feverishly with their vendor to fix the issue, but they'd be subject to their vendor's limitations and ability to fix the problem quickly. But given the current situation, they have full access to the code that's running and probably have many employees who originally built the system. And if there are key employees who have since left and still have specific expertise in the details of the current system, they have the ability to expedite the fix by luring those employees back for limited contracting gigs (if you're losing $2m - $3m per day, you can afford to make very generous offers if it will mean getting the app back up even one day sooner).
Anyways, Kudos to Netflix for being very upfront about the problem and offering automatic refunds. It would have been easy to try to keep it secret. Most people would have done what I would have done...wait a few days for the DVDs to get there and then submit feedback that they never arrived. By that time, they would have likely identified the problem and sent the queue items. And to users, it would appear that those items were re-sent and that the originals had either been lost by the post office or stolen out of our mailboxes. But they didn't, the fessed up, which was the right thing to do from the customer standpoint even if it wasn't the right thing to do from an investor standpoint.
I had a chance to tour the (Toyota) factory in Toyota City, Japan a couple of years ago and asked whether the factory workers there were unionized, and was told that they were paid fairly enough and had enough opportunity for advancement that they hadn't felt the need to unionize despite having been offered the option by Toyota. So unless I was lied to, many of the automotive factory workers in Japan aren't unionized.
The reason Japanese car makers make cars in the US is likely more due to import regulations (tarriffs, limits, etc), PR (remember those commercials urging consumers to buy things "Made in the USA" in the late 80s and early 90s?) and the ability to shorten the time between when a car is produced and when it is delivered to the dealer. The last rationale likely saved those automakers a ton of money when demand for SUVs in the US dropped like a ton of bricks in response to rising gas prices. If those vehicles were produced in Japan, the ability to adjust production to match the demands of the market would have lagged by the couple of months it takes to import those vehicles into the US. Though I think Toyota did take somewhat of a hit since the rep indicated that the Prius was only produced in Japan, which would explain why they haven't been able to keep up with the demand for that model.
The other reason, as indicated in the luncheon with Toyota's president that was also part of that visit, was that Toyota felt that it was important to have a presence in each market they sold to so that they could adjust their products to meet the local need. The example he cited was how they worked with the Brazilian government to plan the introduction of cars that ran on sugar ethanol.