I guess what I meant is not the code people write to conduct the research, but the actual results of that research. As in, you can't copyright a fact. You can't copyright a beaker or a flask. I know there's a lot of debate within the scientific community about commercialization, but I think there was a lot less of this in the '70s when Stallman was forming his ideas.
Uh, telling you that the way you make a living is unethical is not the same as wishing harm upon your children. You may not agree with his ethical system (lord knows I don't, it's bonkers) but everyone's economic activities are subject to ethical judgments, even if they're feeding children with their profits. Lots of people raise children in less financially comfortable circumstances than computer programmers, and most of them turn out fine.
Re: RMS's bonkers ethical system: I really don't think he ever moved past the mindset he had in academia, where he was essentially a researcher of how computers do and could work. To him, code should be shared freely just like research in biology and physics is. This has nothing to do with the real world as it exists today, but I do honestly belief that's the germ of his worldview.
The three ways it does that is that ... (b) you have a set of skills that makes you a valuable asset to the US ... You wouldn't find it insane if colleges or employers made the same decisions.
The problem is that there's a major disconnect with what the comfortable middle and upper-class people who make decisions about the immigration system think of as a "valuable asset to society" and the actual economic incentives for most people who want to immigrate to the United States. To use your corporate analogy, it's as if the hiring committee of a major corporation decided that there were so many applicants for jobs that everyone the company would hire should have the same skills and credentials that the people on the hiring committee have -- master's degrees and continuing education credits -- even though what the company needs to hire is janitors and security guards.
You don't think that people who come here illegally (or, best case scenario, who come here under agricultural visas that give them temporary residence and no stake in the country) to work in the fields or construction are contributing anything? Well, enjoy it when your food doubles in price, then. Or, more likely, enjoy your food staying the same price but the people who grew it don't have any labor protection laws or real roots in this country.
My point is not that we should just open the borders willy-nilly. But we need to have some kind of process for people who want to live here that doesn't result in decades of limbo, and doesn't cost tens of thousands of dollars to someone who's going to take up a minimum-wage agricultural job. And the process should help them become Americans. You know, like the process did for most of this country's history up until the 1930s or. That process did all right, as near as I can tell.
"Ideally, what I would like (and I think most people would like) is something of the form factor of a MacBook Air (thin and light), that has a detachable touch-screen that can run apps written for iOS or Android, and when the screen is connected to the main body, acts like a fully-functioning laptop."
What's the difference in practice between "a laptop with a detachable screen" and "a tablet that fits into a case that holds up the screen and provides a keyboard"? In terms of form factor, those two strike me as identical. Of course, if iOS doesn't do it for you in the laptop form factor, then it doesn't do it for you, but that's more a software than a hardware problem (and I'm willing to bet is a software problem not everybody has).
Psychologists actually have to recalibrate the scoring of IQ tests every few decades in order to keep the average at 100 -- and they need to do this because the scores are going up. I tried to get a psych friend of mine to explain this, because if you follow the implications it means that someone who scored an average IQ in the '20s would now be classified as mentally retarded, which strikes me as insane. But for whatever weight you want to give to this particular measure of intelligence, we're actually getting smarter.
This is a great piece, and it gets to the contradiction at the heart of the new trend/buzz around creative people using the Internet in various ways to make an end-run around traditional publishing infrastructure in all industries. It's the same with big-name authors ditching their publishers to self-publish on Amazon: Sure, they make a mint, more than they would have at a traditional publisher, but they wouldn't have been able to do it were it not for the fan base they built up with their traditionally published works.
Everyone loves to bash publisher/distributors in all areas of creative endevour, and often with good reason. But at their heart these companies are accumulations of capital and expertise that allow risky investment in creative works that might fail. Everyone who succeeds in the traditional world to the extent that they don't need the publishers anymore got there because that capital took a risk on them; now they don't want to let part of their profits go back into that capital pool. The question is, if the old system blows up, who takes that risk for unknowns?
I'm certainly not saying its impossible. Probably people will be ramping up creatively, writing/making music/what have you for nothing until they build up enough of a fan base to ask for something more. But crowdsourcing is definitely not just a free handout without huge accumulated goodwill.
Don't know about Denmark, but I believe in some countries with a similar situation by law they have to round to the nearest multiple of the smallest denomination coin, so it evens out.
Of course, if you pay via credit card or bank card other electronic means, as more and more people do even for small amounts, you pay the exact price.
I learned in high school on electric typewriters in '90 or '91. It was an elective then, but I certainly hope it would be a requirement today Still the only skill from high school that use every single day.
I was someone who had already done a lot of fiddling on the computer at that point so even as a high-school student I had a lot of self-trained semi-fast typing skills that I had to unlearn. I found the first month of the class really frustrating as a result, but eventually the new skills kicked in and I found myself typing much faster than I did before.
Touch-typing is a skill that involves muscle memory, and as such there's no real short cut to it and you'll find the process annoying and not engaging to your higher intellect. But stick with it. It's incredibly useful, I promise.
I don't disagree with you, but I wonder if this situation would be covered by the law as AFAIK dental coverage isn't part of the plan. It boggles my mind that medical conditions that arise your teeth and gums (which, as this anecdote illustrates, are fully capable of killing you) are treated as an entirely different thing as diseases that happen elsewhere in the body.
Median income in the West in 2010 was $53K, according to the Census Bureau (via Wikipedia), and since "the West" includes California I'm betting it's lower in Portland. Considering he says he's only working 25 hours a week, 1,000 a week is pretty darn good, even if he does have to pay for health insurance.
Every election cycle I think, this is the year that the big business/libertarian and social conservative/religious wings of the Republican parties finally break up, but it keeps not happening, though I think it's the dynamic behind the let's-find-a-not-Romney weird surges that have been happening throughout the GOP campaign so far this year. Bizarrely, Gingrich, who has a certain amount of cred in both camps, might be the compromise candidate of both wings, and if he goes down in flames in the general (as he almost certainly would) it could speed that divorce.
On the other hand, the US's first-past-the-post election system makes a multi-party system pretty difficult to maintain, so who knows.
Sooo ... how locked into Apple's ecosystem are books created in this way? The notes say:
• Submit your book to the iBookstore for sale or free download with a few simple steps*
• Export your book in iBooks format to share on iTunes U or to give to others
• Create a version of your book as a PDF file
That footnote is: "Books may only be sold through the iBookstore; additional terms and conditions apply."
So if you export the PDF, can you submit that PDF to, say, Amazon's print on demand service?
Um, no? Knowledgable editors make any sort of writing easier to read and use -- especially crucial if you're talking about textbook-style material, which is specifically about someone with subject matter knowledge communicating with people who don't (yet) have that knowledge. They also serve as a useful backstop of fact-checking and just plain "does this make sense?" checking.
But there won't be desktop Windows 8 ARM users, so you'll have to re-engineer it twice? Unless there's some quick and easy way to write code that compiles to both architectures without fuss. But even then you essentially have to build two UIs.
I wonder to what extent any under-the-covers code is shared between apps that run both on iOS and OS X (like Pages, for instance) and whether there's any economy of coding scale there.
I think there are some places where comments work great and some places where they descend into vitriol and nonsense. I totally respect decisions that go either way. It really depends on the subject matter, your own tone (which definitely sets the tone for the comments) and the amount of energy you're willing or able to put into policing and moderating the discussion.
Personally I'd be happy to never see another comment section on a local newspaper site ever again. They're the absolute worst.
