October 9, 2014 – DocuDharma

Oct 09 2014

Sometimes you need a bigger 2×4

By ek hornbeck

Centrists’ clueless obsession: Why do so many want to cut Social Security?

Jim Newell, Salon

Thursday, Oct 9, 2014 11:20 AM EST

Social Security is the most popular government program in history. And yet when politicians decide to move to the “center,” where the great majorities presumably are, they do so by talking about the need to cut the deficit. Cutting the deficit is superficially popular, because (a) big numbers look scary and (b) too many people falsely believe (and are enabled by those who know better) that items like foreign aid are the largest parts of the federal budget. When you poll specifically about support for cutting Medicare or Social Security, though, the numbers are grim.

A couple of Democratic Senators from red/purple states who are up for reelection this year, Kay Hagan of North Carolina and Mark Pryor of Arkansas, both find it politically rewarding to position themselves as centrists. They hugged the Simpsons-Bowles deficit reduction plan, which recommended both raising the Social Security retirement age and linking Social Security COLA increases to “chained CPI,” i.e. cutting Social Security benefits. In order to appeal to the “center,” Hagan and Pryor – who honestly probably hadn’t read the thing, but were told by stupid advisers that it was something they should align themselves with – ran arms-outstretched to a plan to cut Social Security benefits, an extraordinarily unpopular political position. Karl Rove’s outside groups pounced. Who could’ve predicted?

…

Perhaps someday, centrists, or those trying to appeal to the center, will realize that endorsing Social Security cuts is SPECIFICALLY NOT how to appeal to the center. It is a far-right position that even Republican politicians recognize would be an idiotic thing to run on, because rank-and-file Republican voters love Social Security.

Oct 09 2014

Cartnoon

By ek hornbeck

Oct 09 2014

The Breakfast Club (Trolling, trolling, trolling)

By ek hornbeck

breakfast beers photo breakfastbeers.jpg Science and Tech

Last week I was surfing my Tech sites when I ran across an article celebrating the demise of Windows 7 OEM pre-installation packages which HP and Dell (among others) buy in bulk and re-sell at a reasonable price to roll-your-own and custom builders.

The author’s expressed hope was that this would finally force consumers to adopt the “clearly superior in every way” Windows 8 OS and help out “poor beleaguered” Microsoft who shouldn’t be forced to support antiquated and obsolete systems,

Well, you know me. There were no replies yet and I wanted to show my appreciation of the writer’s effort, so I posted what I considered a rather mild response

Windows 8 (and 8.1 for that matter) is a failure on par with Vista, not because it’s inherently unstable the way Vista is, but because it’s useless in a business environment which is Microsoft’s meat and potatoes and they should never forget it.

Why should I waste a month or two to train all my users a new interface? Why should I switch to expensive touch screens that get greasy and smeary instantly, often require reconfiguring office space, fail incessantly, and are expensive to purchase and replace?

Windows 9 may have a chance if they find a easy way to configure for a simple (but fully featured) NT style desktop where workers see their document drafts and templates and the approved productivity applications that they require frequently and a Start Menu for those less used…

And that’s it!

Some applications benefit from touch screens (Point of Sale), some do not (document creation and processing, arguably spreadsheets). Tablets and phones are field toy substitutes useful for enterprise communication and navigation (phone) and client presentations (tablets). Otherwise they are huge black holes of productivity where your employees play games and update their personal social media (phones), and watch streaming video (tablets).

I will admit the Surface has the right idea with a real, though inferior, keyboard.

If Microsoft does not address those concerns I will continue to purchase Windows 7 as long as I can find an available copy and when I do switch my enterprise to a different Operating System it will be to Linux which provides my IT department with the necessary tools for easy installation, upgrade, maintenance, and control; and my workers with a consistent interface that requires minimal training to be productive.

Business computers need to be easy to use, not a colossal waste of time (which is money) and money (which is also money).

Alas, once a troll always a troll. To their credit the dialog was more polite (if less creative) than I have been trained to expect from my involvement with political sites. I wasn’t called a no-good Naderite more materially responsible for the demise of the Republic than corporately corrupt, moronically myopic, lesser evil legislators, but the attacks seemed faint-hearted and lacking in the glittering venom that the shills, toadies, and bullies bring. Oh, for a foe worthy of my rapier wit.

And of course 2 days later Microsoft announces Windows 10 which validates my every criticism. I’m sure they will apologize profusely.

Windows 10 is ‘Windows for the masses’

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, ZDNet

October 7, 2014 — 12:48 GMT (05:48 PDT)

Let’s get one thing straight. I’m convinced that the purpose of this Technical Preview is to convince all those Windows 7 enterprise users that Windows 10 puts behind it all that Windows 8 nonsense. Windows 8 put far too much focus on features that businesses saw at best as irrelevant because most of their PCs don’t have touch, and at worse expensive because it meant lots of costly retraining, downtime, and inefficiencies.

Mission accomplished. Windows 10 proves that Microsoft is brave enough to admit that the Windows 8 experiment was a failure and that it’s now time to get back to the serious business of building a platform that people want, not one that they are told they need.

Now I’m certain that there are going to be people who are distressed by Microsoft’s decision to resurrect the Start Menu and put it and the Windows Desktop back in the limelight. I don’t blame them. They’ve put a lot of effort into morphing their workflows to fit in around Windows 8, and then changed that again once to accommodate changes bought about by Windows 8.1. Some even went as far as evangelizing the changes, claiming that they represented the future, and that everyone is just going to have to get used to it.

Yeah, about that…

The important thing to appreciate about Windows 10 is that Microsoft isn’t building an operating system specifically for you or me. Microsoft is building it to cater for the billion or so people out there using PCs that aren’t touch-enabled. These are the people who have invested billions and billions of worker-days in creating effective workflows that utilize the Windows paradigms they have come to know (and perhaps love), and for Microsoft to come along and make drastic fundamental changes to this is a risky maneuver.

Windows 10 is a clear signal to all the uneasy enterprise customers that those crazy days are over. Windows 10 isn’t for those people who want to live on the cutting edge. Windows 10 is Windows for the masses.

Windows 8 was undoubtedly a brave move. I think Microsoft thought that if it made Windows a touch-first platform, it would revive flagging PC sales by fostering new PC form factors. But it didn’t work. Partly because people are getting out of the habit of buying new PCs every few years, partly because Windows 8 user interface was an incoherent muddle, and partly because Microsoft and the OEMs didn’t do a good job of communicating the benefits of the new platform.

And now it’s equally brave that Microsoft is moving on.

The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations – then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation – well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.

–Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1927)

Science Oriented Video!

Understanding the internet troll – Tech Weekly podcast, The Guardian
Under the blood moon: total lunar eclipse caught over China – video, The Guardian

Science News and Blogs

Microsoft unveils Windows 10: ten things to know, The Guardian
Cave paintings change ideas about the origin of art, BBC
35,000 year-old Indonesian cave paintings suggest art came out of Africa, The Guardian
Giant Blast of X-Rays Traced to Dead Star, National Geographic
When sea levels rise, high tides will spill into communities far more often, study says, Washington Post
Super-microscope earns trio Nobel chemistry prize, AFP
American and 2 Japanese Physicists Share Nobel for Work on LED Lights, The New York Times
Nobel Prize in Medicine Is Awarded to Three Who Discovered Brain’s ‘Inner GPS’, The New York Times
Our Understanding of Giraffes Does Not Measure Up, The New York Times
Meet the man who killed Pluto, Al Jazeera
Galaxy’s guardians make the case: upgrade Pluto back to planet-size!, The Guardian
Moral Panics Of 1878: NY Times Warns People About The Evils Of Thomas Edison’s Aerophone, TechDirt
When It Comes to Sleep, Timing Is Everything, The New York Times
Major study of teenage sleep patterns aims to assess impact on learning, The Guardian
Facebook Developing App That Allows Anonymity, The New York Times
Sharper Image From 4K TVs Is a Gimmick Worth Having, The New York Times
A Gulf in Ocean Knowledge, The New York Times
‘Siri, stop distracting me’: controlling smartphones while driving is dangerous, study finds, The Guardian
Cancer tumours destroyed by berry found in Queensland rainforest, The Guardian
Um or er: which do you, um, use more in, er, conversation?, The Guardian
In the Age of Extinction, which species can we least afford to lose?, The Guardian
Violence of volcanoes is helping scientists monitor Earth’s sensitive side, The Guardian
Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor review – a glorious knockout punch , The Guardian
If we want more women in tech, we need to sweat the small stuff, The Guardian

The Obligatories, News, and Blogs below.

Oct 09 2014

On This Day In History October 9

By TMC in News

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

October 9 is the 282nd day of the year (283rd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 83 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1967, socialist revolutionary and guerilla leader Che Guevara, age 39, is killed by the Bolivian army. The U.S.-military-backed Bolivian forces captured Guevara on October 8 while battling his band of guerillas in Bolivia and assassinated him the following day. His hands were cut off as proof of death and his body was buried in an unmarked grave. In 1997, Guevara’s remains were found and sent back to Cuba, where they were reburied in a ceremony attended by President Fidel Castro and thousands of Cubans.

Ernesto “Che” Guevara (June 14, 1928 – October 9, 1967), commonly known as El Che or simply Che, was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, intellectual, guerrilla leader, diplomat, military theorist, and major figure of the Cuban Revolution. Since his death, his stylized visage has become a ubiquitous countercultural symbol and global insignia within popular culture.

As a medical student, Guevara traveled throughout Latin America and was transformed by the endemic poverty he witnessed. His experiences and observations during these trips led him to conclude that the region’s ingrained economic inequalities were an intrinsic result of capitalism, monopolism, neocolonialism, and imperialism, with the only remedy being world revolution. This belief prompted his involvement in Guatemala’s social reforms under President Jacobo Arbenz, whose eventual CIA-assisted overthrow solidified Guevara’s radical ideology. Later, while living in Mexico City, he met Raul and Fidel Castro, joined their 26th of July Movement, and travelled to Cuba aboard the yacht, Granma, with the intention of overthrowing U.S.-backed Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. Guevara soon rose to prominence among the insurgents, was promoted to second-in-command, and played a pivotal role in the successful two year guerrilla campaign that deposed the Batista regime.

Following the Cuban Revolution, Guevara performed a number of key roles in the new government. These included instituting agrarian reform as minister of industries, serving as both national bank president and instructional director for Cuba’s armed forces, reviewing the appeals and firing squads for those convicted as war criminals during the revolutionary tribunals, and traversing the globe as a diplomat on behalf of Cuban socialism. Such positions allowed him to play a central role in training the militia forces who repelled the Bay of Pigs Invasion and bringing to Cuba the Soviet nuclear-armed ballistic missiles which precipitated the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Additionally, he was a prolific writer and diarist, composing a seminal manual on guerrilla warfare, along with a best-selling memoir about his youthful motorcycle journey across South America. Guevara left Cuba in 1965 to foment revolution abroad, first unsuccessfully in Congo-Kinshasa and later in Bolivia, where he was captured by CIA-assisted Bolivian forces and executed.

Guevara remains both a revered and reviled historical figure, polarized in the collective imagination in a multitude of biographies, memoirs, essays, documentaries, songs, and films. Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century, while an Alberto Korda photograph of him entitled “Guerrillero Heroico”, was declared “the most famous photograph in the world.”