Any time anyone mentions making health care (let alone mental health care) more accessible in this country for people who need it everyone starts screaming; "SOCIALISM IS EVIL! HOTDOGS AND APPLE PIE! COMMUNISTS ARE GOING TO TAKE OUR FORD TRUCK! FIREWORKS!", and other random capricious propaganda.
Then a school shooting happens and people start screaming we need to make health care more accessible for people who need it.

You just can't win either way.

I can see how this is frustrating.

However, what I'm talking about here is more that we don't view mental health care as something that can occur outside a casual context or a criminal context.

The casual context is having $200/hour to spend on your psychologist for what's basically mediated discussion.

The criminal context is that the only other option is to declare someone a threat to society and basically imprison them.

I don't know how the funding works out, but there needs to be something that's more like a hospital stay, but without the stigma of being called crazy and without the possibility of law enforcement involvement.

As far as how to pay for health care, it seems complicated: the more we regulate and socialize, the more expensive it gets. One solution is to regulate much less and see if we can simply lower the cost to the point where people can pay for this. Another is to encourage pharmaceutical companies to continue providing low-cost generic versions of their own drugs to people with less than buckets of money. Something tells me that this one is a "think outside the box" type issue.

People don't know the cause of school shootings, so they're trying to chip away at the methods used to achieve them. Banning guns, video games, heavy metal, etc. all fit into this in that people perceive these as being contributing factors to why people shoot up schools.

But what makes them want to shoot up schools? I'd say there are two issues here:

1. Mental health, especially undiagnosed mental health issues. In this society, all you can do if someone has issues is either pay for them to get treatment, or start a process that's going to get them confined in mental institutions.

2. Media coverage, because if you shoot up a school and get a high enough kill count, you're going to be on the front page of CNN etc. for weeks.

In this society we have an ugly tendency to assume that methods and not inner motivations, including ability and mental health, are important. We think that memorizing facts is more important than having mental ability; we look at whether people are obedient to social norms rather than whether what they're doing is right.

These types of situations suggest our society has some pathological need to avoid looking at our motivations. Perhaps we're afraid we'll find nothing but making money, watching TV, and eating Taco Bell.

I hope not.

I don't know what the truth of the situation is in Syria, but I know that:

(a) Western media seems to present a similar point of view no matter which source you're watching/reading

(b) Western governments seem to agree with the media

(c) There are few opposing voices in government or media

For this reason, it means that anyone with a contrary viewpoint is facing a giant media bloc composed of the most powerful governments and media producers in history.

Hacking is an equalizer. With relatively few people, and relatively low investment, it allows hackers to use the notoriety of the hack to present their point of view.

It seems to me that this company hopes to make money off of this project, and in part as a result, wants to maintain control over the project and its vision.

What use is inventing something if someone will immediately fork it into another project that will both be more popular, and avoid what makes it different from the other projects out there.

I think it's a new maxim of the internet that over time, all projects eventually devolve to being social media. I wouldn't want that to happen to my open document project...

You're on a per-hour, right?

You're going to walk him through the code; answer questions; answer the phone; bill a minimum for each. This is just good consultant practice. After that, you're on a per-hour basis to fix what he can't. No problem there, because these are the conditions under which you formed the contract.

However, you might want to pitch the writing of some documentation so he has a roadmap to your code and a description of how each (major) function/routine works. That's more hours for you, and less helplessness for him; this is important because when you're on another contract, you really don't want to take a couple hours out to put out fires at a dead-end gig (for you).

My favorite Google project was the idea that a company built brand loyalty by refusing to do evil, manipulative and underhanded things.

Ten years later, Google is doing those things. They're getting more aggressive with ads and invading personal information; they're cutting out useful projects that don't immediately monetize; they're trying to manipulate us into being better cash cows by signing up with our cell phones and handing over more ad-friendly information through Google+.

I don't begrudge them the right to make a profit. They were doing that, and continue to do so, without any of these manipulative activities. I just want the "do no evil" project to come back because that was a Google, Inc. I could believe in.

They've already put the pressure on China to sanction North Korea.

Wherever The Pirate Bay goes next, watch out! They might just invade!

Such methods can't tell the difference between a criminal, a social critic or someone who's just having a bad day.

Giving them credibility is a mistake, as it will influence people to treat possible hits as probable ones.

A company cannot refuse to hire women, black people, or gays. One can't form a club and refuse to allow women in. Hell, you can't even have a simple pass/fail test for capability (ie a fire department) without special 'easy mode' parts for women. So why do we tolerate the hypocrisy?

This is the direction our society has been leaning for a couple centuries, and since it identifies itself as "good," it's hard to oppose it.

What can we say? To identify with the opposite of "good" is to by definition be "evil."

This is why that Nietzsche guy wrote books like Beyond Good and Evil and The Antichrist.

The hive mind, which is based on socialization and not science, wants you to see the world in a Boolean measurement: what We approve of, and what We don't.

This is mind control of the oldest type, namely peer pressure and social coercion. There's no reason to pay attention to because it's unscientific and as history shows us, usually wrong.

However, a lot of people are afraid of those who don't follow the hive mind. They fear these people who are not controlled, 'civilized' and neutered by hive mind morality.

Stay free, stay independent, stay clear: avoid the hive mind.

The value of anonymity is in the ability to express ideas that are not necessarily socially acceptable, but are contributions to our ongoing resolution of social questions.

When Google starts trying to "civilize" the internet by requiring real names, it's forcing us to associate our free speech with our jobs, families and others who may face retaliation if our ideas are not socially acceptable.

This seems to be part of this software-as-a-subscription trend that's sweeping the OS world.

In general, this means software will be more frequently patched.

I trust that our corporate overlords will find some way to spin it into a cost roughly commensurate to that of car insurance, however...

It's nice to know that KDE/Linux will be an option.

A bullet to the base of the skull won't do it.

Most likely, China just wants control of the OS used on phones within its Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.