Accessibility, Crazy (Event Gripping) Ideas
Yesterday, USA elected the next President. Obama won the elections by clear cut margin. There was higher than usual turnout of voters.
Next Tuesday, on Nov. 11th, there will be municipal elections in Israel. In some cities, in particular Jerusalem, the elections will have critical importance.
I’d like to urge everyone eligible to vote – to vote in those elections.
The other day I stumbled upon the Website http://copyfree.org/, which advocates a software licensing model somewhat similar to LGPL.
See the Website for arguments in favor of this licensing model.
I would, however, stick with GPL/LGPL due to the following reasons:
I saw somewhere the following question and decided to share the results of some of the resulting firings of my neurons:
In your opinion, how would a perfect ad network look like?
This blog and my entire Web site is currently working with Google AdSense ad network. It appears to do pretty good job, but the following could improve it:
The current law in Israel is that women are not automatically entitled to have abortions. They must apply for approval by a committee. Unmarried women and women below and above certain range of ages get automatic approval. Married women are allowed to have abortion only if there is a medical or another legally recognized reason for this.
In the wake of the recent tragedies, in which 4 year old children were murdered by their mothers and/or grandfathers, the politicians are clamoring for something to be done. A plan was indeed put together to improve monitoring of families having children at those ages.
May I suggest another solution to the problem: allow any pregnant woman, regardless of her marital, health or sociological status, to have an abortion, no questions asked, if she does not feel like having the baby. Since the goal is that only women, who really want babies, would have them, there should be no stigma attached to having an abortion. At least not beyond the existing stigma of not wanting to have children.
Abortion is better than killing a child or raising him, like an unwanted child, to be a criminal.
The Slashdot question about this topic reminds me of the overwhelming array of 9 chargers and low voltage power supplies which power my equipment.
In the comments, it was mentioned that a connector manufacturer employs a lobbyist to foil any attempt to mandate standardization of the connectors and low voltage power supplies.
Another comment mentioned the 12V standard car cigarette lighters. This standard is currently usable only in cars, and most gadgets are not designed to be powered from them.
Solution?
Then, car cigarette lighter sockets will become the de-facto standard power supply for gadgets. Those three products will solve the chicken-and-egg problem of introducing a standard power supply for gadgets, which require DC power.
One of the constants in Israeli history is that Israel wins wars but loses in the post-war diplomatic front, so Israel doesn’t succeed in converting its war victories into everlasting peace with its neighbors.
Why is this so? Is it because the Israeli leaders are so preoccupied with the daily tasks of managing Israel, that they have no time to plan ahead? Is it because no one thought about the future?
About the value of planning ahead, Eliot A. Cohen wrote that two great war statesmen planned ahead and defined what are their war goals. They knew what kind of peace they want to have. One of them (Abraham Lincoln) achieved it, and the other’s (Winston Churchill) opinions stood the test of time.
Two other war statesmen won wars but did not win everlasting peace. One of them was David Ben-Gurion, who failed to define what he wants to accomplish in the 1948 War of Independence, and toward what kind of peace to strive. One of the consequences is that Israel did not have peace with any of its neighbors until the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty.
This pattern, of fighting and winning but without planning ahead the kind of desirable victory, continued in the Arab-Israeli wars since 1948, in spite of journalists having spent lots of ink writing about it and heavily criticizing the leaders for this shortcoming. The only exception, of which I am aware, is the 1982 Lebanon War (now known as the First Lebanon War), whose goals were defined. However, this exception proves the rule, because those goals were not consistently pursued due to political pressure from various leaders and other reasons.
Now I suspect that the consistent failure to define war goals was not an oversight by overwhelmed Israeli leaders, but part of a systematic problem. To define war goals and to get most of the Israelis to agree with them, one needs first to define what kind of Israel one wants and get this vision accepted by the overwhelming majority of the Israelis. If we want to emphasize territory annexion, we need one set of war goals. If we want to emphasize human rights, we need another set of war goals.
The systematic problem is that Israelis cannot agree what kind of Israel they want. There is a conflict between the secular (who want a state of the Jews) and the religious (who want a Jewish state). There is also a conflict between the Settlers (who want to annex as much land as the world will let them) and the Leftists, who care about the human rights of Palestinians living in land currently controlled by Israel.
A consequence of the internal conflicts is that it is impossible for any Israeli leader to define, articulate and consistently pursue any coherent set of war goals. At least if he does not want to commit political suicide (Ariel Sharon at 1982, anyone?) or reap lots of poisonous criticism from people who don’t agree with his vision of Israel and the war goals to be pursued.
One possible reason for the stupidity of Microsoft in handling MS-Vista, especially in its attempts to ram MS-Vista through its customers’ throats instead of MS-Windows XP, is as follows.
Shortly after SCO sued IBM and other companies due to violation of its Linux copyright, IBM and possibly other big companies decided upon two-pronged counter attack. First, they would fight SCO in court to the bitter end.
The conspiracy theory expoused below has to do with the second prong. The goal here is to cause Microsoft to bleed as much money and as quickly as possible, so that it’ll not have the financial means to continue to support SCO until its defendants wear out.
For this purpose, moles may have been installed in Microsoft (or maybe Microsoft employees were bribed) to deliberately make the wrong managerial decisions, to sap the morale of the working software developers, to entangle the projects in cobwebs, to bog the projects down in intricate dependencies and frivolous compatibilities with the past, to surrender too easily to Hollywood moguls when they ask for DRM measures to be built into MS-Vista.
Since Microsoft had the fatal combination of de-facto monopoly position and huge cash reserves, both had to be attacked. The monopoly position was attacked by making MS-Vista incompatible with MS-Windows XP, so that people would find it just as easy to switch to Linux or to Mac OS as it is to MS-Vista. The cash position was attacked by turning MS-Vista into huge cash drain.
WARNING: if the following can be made to work, several medical practitioners, mostly of the alternative medicine persuasion, will have to seek another employment to supplement their income.
The placebo effect is a well known phenomenon, which was scientifically confirmed to exist. It is said to happen when a sick person gets well even if the pill or treatment, which he gets, are known to be powerless by themselves to heal him. The placebo effect works by suggestion, which causes the patient’s brain to somehow command the body to heal itself. The exact mechanism has not been elucidated by science.
It would be good idea to develop methods to deliberately evoke the placebo effect. In other words, to train people to be able to auto-suggest that they are getting the appropriate treatment for whatever is ailing them – even without going to a medical practitioner or getting any medication.
One way in which this maybe could be done is to get the patient to remember a past incident, in which he got a medicine and felt that it is affecting him and he is getting well thanks to it – and to play back the incident in his mind.
According to 2 rules for better design teams, you need both Design Dictator (aka God) and Devil’s Advocate (aka Devil) in your design team.
In other words, design has entered Kabbalah territory!
At 1830 there were riots in England, which were caused by bad policies, which seem to have counterparts in today’s social and immigration practices.