ajmoir

What's that got to do with the price of butter?

Woosh

Educated/erudite citizens know the law is rotten to the core with not one redeeming feature. That's not to say all people working in the law are rotten but a good many are damaged in one way or another.

The populous see the law as some sort of high point of civilization. Somehow vital to life. Impossible to conceive of a system of justice that does not involve in some combination the law/judiciary/enforcers/punishment.

'Compulsory schooling is, at least in theory, for the students' own good.'

Rubbish. Schooling is for the good of society. Schooling != Education. Nothing in school benefits the student. Everything is about preparing the student for the workforce. The main subject taught in school is obedience.

You should probably read John Gatto to get a clearer picture how and why schools came about. It most certainly was not to educate the working class.

How much time did you spend in Europe to get the idea that the health care systems are good?

Having lived there for 25+ years and now 10+ in the US I can discern no difference. Both systems are broken with a capital F.

I consider myself a libertarian so I would love to see a simple health care option e.g. provides low level emergency care, low level preventative measures.

So you get a busted bone set, colds/infections treated, child birth and pre/post natal, annual check up etc.

But major stuff is not covered e.g. you have a heart attack you're on your own, you need a lifetime of expensive drugs no chance, hip replacement nope.

The idea being that costs are minimized and a clear directive can be written. Like all things you want better treatment you need to put your hand in your pocket.

The US is going to be in a world of hurt. With Europe not far behind in the pain stakes. As always the countries with the most open markets will recover first.

Un-fettered markets are not the end solution but they are far better than the current politically controlled markets.

The handouts are damaging on two fronts. Firstly, it rewards poor businesses and stops better firms entering the market. Secondly, Joe Public who made dumb financial decisions are not punished but instead everything is done to allow them to make more damaging decisions later on.

The current debt loading of the US currency is not sustainable at the current levels of productivity. The US looks more and more like the USSR of the late 80s, running as fast as it knows and still sliding into bankruptcy.

I rather think we are looking at the end of the US as a going concern.

I'm hopeful that a short civil war will ensue and that out of that there might be the chance for a small Capitalist/Anarchist state to be founded.

Feudalism, Democracy, Fascism, Socialism and Communism have all failed the acid test. What other forms of government do we have? It would seem that Karl Marx was the last political thinker to offer a new idea for governmental organization.

Look around you. It's the people. Dumb and ignorant.

Feckless bastards

Because time and time again people with a formal education in computer science have turned out to be useless in the commercial arena.

Let's face facts most programming is not rocket science and could easily be automated. The reason it has not been automated is that programmers by and large are Luddites. They can admire new gadgets but not seismic changes in their work environment.

Anybody who has had the where with all to study for a BSc/MSc/PhD then most work in a commercial setting is going to be far far beneath their intellectual capabilities.

In short Compu Sci is best for a research role and commercial dev experience is best for producing a product. The two are widely different beasts.

Personally, I have BSc in CompuSci and work in the commercial sector. I think both Academia and Commercial use of computers is abysmal. The last big step forward was in the 1960s for Academia and 1980s for business. Since then it's all been downhill.

I have recent compu sci grads who cannot design a simple 8 bit cpu, what's an ALU. This is just plain wrong. I also have witnessed commercial developers who don't know how to treat clients. In both cases why are these people even bothering to work in computing?

Most devs still think inheritance is more important than interface. Just how far forward can we move with these fools slowing us down.

I think what it will take to move forward is a company saying if we do IT better we can rule the market. Then finding some devs and ops with long experience and fresh ideas.

When a billion dollar company shows it can run it's IT with 20 people then we have progressed. Not when some dweeb says he has a new programming language that goes to 11.

The freedom to develop code I want to in the manner I wish to. Enough of the usual crappy corporate tools/procedures/apathy.

To be judged on what I produce not how many hours I'm in the office.

Rewards equal to my contribution, this is where corporations fall down completely. If I'm ten times more productive than my team mates why am I not rewarded in such a manner OR to be more truthful I will not put in any more effort than is needed to secure my position in the corporate hierarchy. So I dutifully do what I consider a mediocre amount of work and yet am rewarded in the top 10%

I couldn't care less for the crappy soda and chips or a paid lunch. Pay me the money and I'll decide how I wish to spend it.

SFO International is pretty cool. Very open and light with decent A/C.

Potter! Stop bragging, ten points from Gryffindor.

How do you reduce weight? Reduce your intake or increase your metabolism.

How do you keep weight off? Understand there is no short cuts. Basically, follow a steady diet that maintains your weight.

In short cut out manufactured foods e.g. chocolate, soda, cakes, breads, pasta, pizza, burgers etc. Eat simple foods for the most part with water.

Most fat people do not know how to eat/exercise.

Great minds etc.

I was also looking at ERP after working in the field for a number of years. I was planning on coming from a very different angle. Hosting a very configurable system that required little or no manual intervention. Aiming at small business for a $20 per month per user fee.

Then I discovered I hate running a business, not just dis-like but hate so much I never want to do it again :-(

I think your idea could take off but the software has to be malleable, this is in contrast to nearly every piece of software written to this day which is brittle. I was looking at this as just a way to predict how software will be written in the future.

First off read a couple of books to understand better where I'm coming from :-

    Necessary But Not Sufficient by Eliyahu M. Goldratt
    Naked Objects by Richard Pawson

The above would give you a group of objects that you can model the business with and forget about technical details.

Then the underlying system could be built e.g. fully temporal, fully redundant etc. etc.

The idea being that you could focus on business processes without thinking about implementation details. In true naked object style the UI would be automatically generated from the business action/process classes.

To make what you are thinking about work _ALL_ design has to be KISS and DRY. Also, the more you can generate the better you'd be.

I was thinking of using Lisp or SmallTalk to gain an advantage, must use a VM to be able to separate business from technical. I want to my software running 24/7 with zero downtime including during upgrades, automatic rudundancy, load balancing etc.

If you are thinking of something along these lines then drop me a line and I'd love to help.

If you just want to re-implement the current paradigm don't bother contacting me. The current paradigm is so broken it's not even funny.

The animated film is a classic :-)

I grew up in the UK and now live in the US. In both countries a college education has gone from being something of value to waste of time due to lowering of standards.

Leaving no child behind will probably destroy what little respect anybody has left for a college degree.

Low quality is 300dpi old laser printer used to do fine at it.

I have the Sony reader and love it, but this thing is fugly.

There is different types of eink I think the phone screens are not bit mapped.

On the whole I think this is going to flop. Most people do not want to carry around a tablet when a paperback is what they want. All the gizmos are a waste.

Also, why add dumb features like wireless? Simplify, the ebook has a built in mp3 player, guess how many people use it?

The sony could be improved by upping it's resolution to 300dpi, make the screen a little bigger. Keep the same cool form factor and remove some useless buttons. Put a front light on it. And remove the DRM, DRM will keep killing ebooks until publishers get a clue.

I also think there is room for an ereader with a 300dpi letter sized display, panasonic had really cool looking prototype. Give me that in a sony style package with a pdf reader and I'll gladly fork over $1K for it.

Currently working through Guttenberg, amazing how Mickey Mouse has totally corrupted the idea of public domain.

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/133/396296975_1f2e6f41a6_b.jp...

Linux running Xfce.

Couple of VMs a Xnest and DVD player. And I say again the current way we layout apps is broken. I have a wide screen monitor and most apps do not resize. I anybody working on something to fix this so that an app designed for 640x480 renders a reasonable size on my screen.

All that time spent in school you'd be better off sticking it out,

39 + B.Sc.(Hons) CompuSci

Then write a code generator.

There are more crimes committed than the police can ever keep up with. So they prioritize crimes of varying types.

Why have they prioritised ticketing members of the public on the freeways for minor speed offenses?

The freeways are the safest roads by an order of magnitude when measured by accidents per mile traveled.

Going 10mph over in a 60 mph compared to ten over in a 25 is a trivial increase in speed and danger.

The freeway speed limits were set due to a temporary economic condition, why do we still have them?

A blanket speed limit is madness when taking into account differing vehicles and differing driver abilities. A trained police pursuit driver with ten years of high speed escort duty, driving a modern porsche on a day off is limited to the same speed as a new driver in a 20 year old POS.

So in answer to your question, yes the police should not use cameras or speed traps on the freeways and rural roads. A marked highly visible patrol car is a much better solution.

Instead the police cars should be in town controlling speed where it is most likely to be fatal, should be concentrating on tail gating, should be prosecuting inattentive drivers, ticketing drivers with no lane control etc etc.

Ticketing drivers on freeways for speeding can only be for one of two reasons either it's $$$ or it's bumping up the arrest/prosecution figures.

If you are happy with the posted speed limits and see the police as only law enforcement then nothing I have to say will make a difference.

Arguable how?

To my mind they are nothing but revenue generation.

A visible speed trap is far more defensible. Not vague warnings but highly visible specific identification.

Even better put these speed traps where they are most likely to save lives not in locations were they are most likely to catch excess speed. e.g. put them outside schools not on the freeway, put them at the entrance to towns not a mile outside.

The speed trap should ticket everyone in excess of the limit. Currently the police use them and discard enormous amount of minor infringements concentrating on the relatively few high speed infringements. This is masking the true nature of the data i.e. the speed limit is too low. Teh correct course of action is to raise the speed limits in certain areas e.g. freeways and rural.

Lastly, tickets by camera should not be part of a police forces performance reviews, they should be noted but not used to justify or discredit anything about the forces performance.

Find a co-contributor. Carigslist etc. Put out an ad on the gigs forum. As a dev coming at it from the other angle. I have the skills but not many business ideas. But I also have clear ideas what I'm willing to work on.

If it's just a copy of something existing then don't expect many replies. But an exciting new idea would have many responses.

I just inc'd in CA, I looked at LLC but that's a partnership and I'm doing this alone.

I went for the quick and easy route. I'm looking to build a good product not a big corporation. The less time I spend having to futz with the lawyer/Accountants and Tax man the happier I'll be.

I follow LtU not always able to comprehend the points made after all I program in a language worse than blub, I kid you not.

But nothing on there has ever come across as radical more of an evolution and sometimes it's just plain ego stroking.

As for Haskell, it's in danger of losing it's chance for wide spread acceptance. The further they take it away from being a good language for multi-processor machines the further away it is from being useful.

With the death of Von Neumann in sight, at last, Haskell is galloping away from it's biggest selling point to the average pgmr. I'm starting to think Erlang might become a mainstream language instead of Haskell. Would sort of prove the need for a language to have a single designer.

The sort of things I'd hoped to see in research are :- Genetic design of machines with 1000+ simple cpus with multi level communication and storage. Proof that the brain works on a quantum level. Cyc tied into machine learning so that it auto updates it's rules. Rules for understanding complexity from simple components.

Basically, I want to see the big problems that are just within grasp tackled.

That would be a good thing.

The only issue I see is that YC seems to be entirely focused on success in the Web 2.0 and software arenas. PARC had a much broader remit.

It appears to me that nobody is doing blue sky research in the computing field. Rather, it has all become a case of building a better mouse trap.